photo from jennylewis.com

This past weekend I had the chance to see Jenny Lewis at the historic Apollo theater in Harlem. It was gorgeous. And this was the second time I’ve seen her this year, the first being when she performed with her band Rilo Kiley. Rilo Kiley/Jenny Lewis are totally the tops for me and I probably wouldn’t be bored seeing them perform every weekend if I could. Sarah Silverman was the surprise (to me) opener with her dirty little jokes. She had me laughing. But she most of the time kind of had me awkward. Jenny and boyfriend Jonathan Rice did a cover of “Love Hurts” as part of their encore which can be seen in part here. And if you love it just as much as I do, you can get the actual track here. I’m a sucker for cover songs. I’ve linked the youtube clip because she sounds absolutely amazing live and you can get a taste of that from the clip. It’s not from the same show that I was at and it’s not the entire song either but if you’re a fan it’s worth listening to. Video quality is not great but it was the best sounding of what live footage I could find.

Ashely was in town this weekend for the concert and we had the chance to spend a day at the MoMA and see the Van Gogh exhibit. It was amazing. Starry Night was the most inspirational iconic painting to me when I was younger, mostly because I had an odd affinity for stars and also because the painting is of course amazing and to able to see it in person was a little bit surreal. And it wasn’t as large as I thought it would be. I’ve seen it a hundred times in print or brochures, posters and mouse pads, and I’ve seen other real paintings and works of arts from other artists, but I spent a good amount of time staring at Starry Night and kind of thinking “so this is it.” Not in a disappointing way but in an introductory kind of way. During one of my trips to Vietnam I had purchased a replica of Starry Night that an artist had painted and as far as I knew from my art history books it looked pretty darn accurate. They had to take the canvas off the frame and roll it up so that I’d be able to bring it back to the states because it was fairly large and my dad promised that he’d “frame” it for me when we got back. Well, what he did instead of stretching the canvas over the wooden frame was he put the unstained wood on top of the canvas and cut off the excess that was around the painting where it should have been stretched and stapled. I was totally bummed. But it was a total rip off of Van Gogh anyway so it wasn’t meant to be.

Things that always interest me in exhibits are learning what inspired the artists. I love seeing hand written letters (and Van Gogh of course had lovely penmanship—by the way, he signed his paintings with just “Vincent” which when I saw, made me smile because it kind of made him more of a normal person and reminded me of a quote I saw in a photo of a piece of paper that’s taped on a wall in Yoshitomo Nara’s studio that reads “Never forget your beginner’s spirit.” And by reading Van Gogh as just “Vincent” to me, put him on a level of a guy who just loved to paint at one point and happened to become famous afterthefact).

An excerpt (translated) from a letter he wrote to his brother, Theo, with a description of a scene that inspired him:

November 2, 1883

When dusk fell — imagine the silence, the peace of that moment! Imagine, right then, an avenue of tall poplars with the autumn leaves, imagine a broad muddy road, all black mud with the endless heath on the right, the endless heath on the left, a few black, triangular silhouettes of sod huts, with the red glow of the fire shining through the tiny windows, with a few pools of dirty, yellowish water that reflect the sky, where bogwood trunks lie rotting… The day was over, and from dawn to dusk, or rather from one night to the other night, I had forgotten myself in that symphony.

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Yesterday we continued work for Madison Square Garden HDTV network but this time we were shooting the New York Knicks. It was a good time and everything went smoothly which is all you can ask for.