Learned about someone who decided listening to music created in 2010, realizing that he and most of us gravitate to what we are most comfortable with and avoid listening to anything that is new. Thought this was a good idea and understand that I don’t have the same commitment but still can venture out and listen to stuff I am not familiar with.
Someone posted this video recording of Janelle Monae on David Lettermen this year. Great performance, full of fun energy.
Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler has an exhibit on view, “Paintings 1961-1973” at the Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. She “introduced the technique of painting directly onto an unprepared canvas so that the material absorbs the colors. She heavily diluted the oil paint with turpentine so that the color would soak into the canvas. This technique, known as “soak stain” was used by Jackson Pollock and others…”
FYI: Abstract Expressionism was an American post-World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris. (per WikiPedia)
Helen Frankenthaler *“Paintings 1961-1973″
John Berggruen Gallery, 228 Grant Avenue, San Francisco, CA
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents a program celebrating the gifted, often bizarre, and controversial director of such movies as “Sweeney Todd”, “The Nightmare Before Christmas”, “Ed Wood” and “The Corpse Bride”. 
The exhibit is “Tim Burton, a major retrospective exploring the full range of Tim Burton’s creative work, both as a director of live-action and animated films, and as an artist, illustrator, photographer, and writer… the exhibition brings together over 700 drawings, paintings, photographs, moving-image works, storyboards, puppets, concept artworks, maquettes, costumes, and cinematic ephemera, including art from a number of unrealized and little-known personal projects.”
Tim Burton * Until October 31, 2011
LACMA/ Los Angeles County Museum of Art
5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles
Window Cleaning 1935 - Aaron Douglas
Currently at the Saint Louis Art Museum there is an exhibit of works by Aaron Douglas and feature three rarely exhibited gouaches from the collection of Anita White. Well celebrated and often referred to as a “Harlem Renaissance painter” and as “African American Modernist”, I’ve grown to love some of his early paintings, that have not received, in recent years , the same attention that his more famous graphic works have. Would love to see a complete retrospective of his work.
The exhibit at the Saint Louis Art Museum