Well hello, Dalí

First things first. To-do list, continued:

...

Roll down Rodeo
.. With shotgun
.. Without shotgun

And now on with the post.

LACMA has an exhibit on Dalí that I went to with some friends last weekend. Mostly, you know, so I can casually brag to people in conversation that I've seen the original Persistence of Memory and Metamorphosis of Narcissus ('cause, you know, that's just the kind of thing I like to do). (Did you know that PoM actually has a Dalí self-portrait hidden inside it? This was the first I'd realized of it...).

Among the exhibits were a number of short movies he directed, which are of a similar level of weirdness to his paintings. By and large, I love surrealist art, for reasons that I can't really articulate -- 'cause I don't want people to feel like I'm not in on the joke, I guess, For some reason, though, the movies left me entirely cold. Sure, there's weird imagery -- the man holding books that turn into guns, the closeups of a urin-stained pen, the jilted lover pulling a train of priests and pianos with horse carcasses on them up the stairs -- but the gratuitous weirdness just didn't seem all that interesting in movie form.

Which is particularly strange for me since generally, surrealist movies are my bread-and-butter: Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken have been staples of my TV-watching experience for years. Maybe it's just that Dalí seems to want his movies to mean something (read his scripts, sometime -- they're out of this world). ATHF and Robot Chicken are just surreal for the sake of humor, so I don't take them as seriously. Why does it work in painting form, though?

Any thoughts?

In completely unrelated news, parties in LA are very different from what I got used to back in Eugene.