Giant Robot Store and GR2 News
Here’s some video I shot at the event. Nara’s talk was fun and inspiring. I enjoyed how he intro’d himself by telling the tale of his youth. From being a latch key kid and having no neighbors and enjoying the company of animals, to then growing a bit older, getting a bike, and having friends. It’s a fun talk, and his work is always cool to see. The talk went well over an hour, and this is just some excerpts I took in with Flipcam. Luckily the translator enunciates well. My talk will eventually show on Princeton TV… I was told. Hope someone points that out to me when it’s up. This talk wasn’t streamed and I’m not sure if it’s going online at all.
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I was trying to help Yoshitomo Nara set up his computer with the system in the lecture room, McCormick 101. I had spoken the evening before without a hitch, and the system and his computer weren’t talking to each other the next day. It took a while, but we got it going. I was hoping Nara would do the presentation in English, but he opted to go with a highly over qualified translator – the Head Chair of East Asian Studies. David Howell. His katsu sweatshirt was too cool. Yabaton. They make their katsu with a miso sauce. It’s in Nagoya. This is more adjusting of the projection. I like how the light hits his face from the projection screen along with one of his paintings. It’s a cool shot. Nara points to the sleeping Tomio Koyama. After getting so excited by the Norman Rockwell painting in the Nassau Inn bar, he crashed out. Which one did Nara draw? The snow slowly melted away, and it actually wasn’t that cold out. This is dinner at a campus related place. Good food actually. The Too Cute! conference was coming to a close. The woman, Anne, who did a lot of the work to get the conference going is slightly pictured. I regretably didn’t get a photo of myself with her. She’s cool. The group of photos is done until there’s a food image. It was quite good.
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Hail Satan! This is an amazing detail from old art. All of the kids who are doing metal looking art, check this one out. Done hundreds of years ago. The guy who did this was probably possessed and now it’s all metal album covers and t-shirts. How many mouths does Satan have? That one near his crotch isn’t the one to be near. I see it. I’m bad with names sometimes, and this painting is evidence of that. Modigliani This one is awesome. Nara described one of his works in the same way as I’d describe this one. There’s a line that comes from that girl that goes through the painting. The Princeton University Chapel here’s a link. The building looks amazing, and when I walked in, someone was practicing the organ which resonated throughout the building. I was hoping to hear a Star Wars theme, but it didn’t happen. It’s an amazing building, but it’s from 1924. I thought it would be a couple of hundred years old.
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The plane ride was normal, until the white snow beneath. It’s probably nearly all melted, but NY had something like a foot of snow, but an hour away, they hardly got any. I’m at Princeton, NJ, and did my talk which was streaming on the net and went actually pretty well. It was a new talk and I worked it over many hours of image searching and more. This is a Rockwell painting that’s hanging at the bar at the Nassau Inn. It’s an original and was commissioned long ago, and sits where it’s supposed to be. It might be the most expensive piece of art hanging at a bar. Someone should make a list. Jimmy Stewart went to Princeton Michelle Obama Ralph Nader Brooke Shields Whoa! Patty and Karen, both of USC. They’ll all be mad that I took sneak photos. Joon Lee RISD, teaches English to art school kids. This is a closeup of a piece of stained glass at the museum on campus at Princeton. Dogs and deer, a great combination. The stained glass is hundreds of years old and it’s neat to see dogs depicted for some reason. Jimmy. Everywhere I go, he happens to be in town. Japan, LA, and now Princeton. He too is a grad student, so he had some interest in being there, but bailed me out on an anime question from a student at the very end. Jimmy writes occasional reviews for GR, but the coolest thing? He set up an anime club for his fellow soldiers in Iraq when he was deployed there.
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I’m speaking at a conference called Too Cute! at Princeton University. It’s going to explore Asian popular culture and more. I speak on Wednesday at 4:30pm and Yoshitomo Nara speaks on Thursday at 4:30pm. It’s supposedly all free and quite an honor. I’ve spoken so far at Harvard and Brown, so this will be Ivy school #3. This topic seems to come up annually in some form, and here it is for this year, but in a more academic setting. I hope I don’t disappoint, especially since myself and probably Yoshitomo Nara will be the lowest SAT scorers in the house. I’ll be working on my presentation over and over to get it decent. I’ve heard I get to do a Q and A as well, which is always fun. Here’s the schedule pdf link and here’s a link to a news release. Here’s a link to a previous blog post about a Nara art opening. I wish I had a larger flyer to show you, but this is all I got.
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