so i got this letter from my old high school in the mail, with the letterhead and everything - very nice, to see that stuffy old logo again. it was for a "reception" cocktail hr ("ssa: celebrating the past, framing the future") in the city hosted by the founders of this award annicka and i got our senior yr, and the president/headmaster. why will they all be in ny? how did they get my address? i won't be able to go - it's a few days after i go home for spring break. but it made me happy, to know that somewhere out there someone at the switchboard is searching a database and printing out my name on that nice ivory stationary. i also wish i could have gone, just because i'd like to see the looks on their faces - that look that silently screams"we know you go here but jesus who let you in, that hair is barely passing for a 'natural shade'" after coming to slc i really haven't played that roll for years. i'm more on the other side of the mirror here - i have to say it's less anxious place to be, if less exciting.

i've really been on a koolhaas kick for the past day or so, if you haven't noticed. but now i may be passing into the far more tempting 'joshua prince ramus' realm which most of the world also seems to be enraptured with right now. koolhaas' protege, broken off from OMA to form REX architects. "prince josh," "so dreamy!" "so young!" "you try qualifying for the olympics in the middle of grad school!" geez. but then again, if you watch his TED talk from last month (here), he does sort of come off as awesome, especially in the second half of the presentation.
the two:

interestingly, ive heard rumors that he was able to rise so quickly through the OMA ranks because he provided some kind of monetary investment in it. sad and also logical? but just as likely, the envious mutterings of those moving more slowly upwards.

ive gotten into this habit of sitting in bed and watching 4-6 episodes of aqua teen hunger force before i go to bed. weirdly, i havent had any bad dreams since beginning this practice. which doesnt make any sense, considering that the last image i remember seeing last night before i fell asleep with the computer was of gigantic crabs that carl let loose when he tried to 'enlarge' himself using frylock's shrink machine. but i wont question it - it works.

louisville

we're in claudia's maya class right now, and she brought in the big daily news article on the rem koolhaas jersey city development. so then i wanted to show her the wyly theatre i just posted about, and then justin showed us all this video, a proposal video of the new louisville, kentucky. its kind of awesome, and it kind of looks like an mtv commercial. par for the course.

just woke up to gawker's linking to this nyt article on the notion of LEAVING NY here . very timely after all of these discussions we've been having about, "who stays and who goes." i'm counting myself out. i was looking at apartments in austin ysterday and they have beautiful floor to ceilinged window studios for about 400, three steps from the UTA shuttle and in a nice neighborhood. why, why? it's mark of true, unyeilding love that i'd actually consider living in some basement in queens for 1,200 a month just to be near my friends. true love. remember that my friends.

rem in dallas, foster ripping off larsen

since i'm going home in less than two weeks now, i'm getting excited to see the progress on the victory plaza/dallas center for the performing arts development about a mile from our house in dallas. basically, we're getting a rem koolhaas! call me a corny, chinzy plebian, but, i love rem. i'm an addict. it's everything that i want in architecture as well as everything i know is cheesy about it. his design for the wyly theatre basically adheres to his "cake-pan architecture" (or whatever its name was) concept published in content a few years ago: you take a cake pan, and you take many different articles (rooms, functions, etc.etc) and you just throw them in there and let the pan form them in its image.
the theatre is going to be eleven stories, and here's a facade rendering from the website.

paradoxically, this design is very dallas. something about the granite and the wide, open walkway. it definitely has a relationship to renzo piano's nearby Nasher Center , but it's also sort of following in the blandly colored new W building, also nearby. i feel that 'starchitects' who come to dallas to build end up bein boxed in by the 'beige,' or 'desert stone' aesthetic of many of the buildings, but conversely, i like a lot of these places and feel proud that there is some semblance of a 'local' architecture, even if it is controlled and created solely by oil billionaires. after coming to dallas i feel new respect for these oil magnates, since they all have given the most insane, extravagant gifts to the arts. it's strange - the place, and people, that most of liberal america villainizes, is actually one of the friendliest and most artistically-well-endowed places i've ever been.
the entranceway:
YEAH!!! this is why i love rem. this is exactly what he's good at. metallic textures, low-ceiling entranceways, de stijl lighting that make you feel like you're in the netherlands even if you're in texas.
moving on to the less render-genic shots, here's the 'lounge,' i.e. cafe:
yeuugh. this is exactly like his cafe for his rottedram kunsthal, minus the good parts. a big grey box, and what's with the weird viewing-room on the right? is that where the oil magnates get to look out over the crowd, reigning over their domain? it's like a scientist's one-way mirror wall. actually, this also reminds me of DIE ZOLLVEREIN, in germany, which is an old abandonded industrial site that koolhaas re-planned and is now a design center. it has all these big, empty concrete mixing chambers (right) you can walk around in, and this looks exactly like them. except that this one probably cost a thousand times what the german ones cost.
here's a rendering of a theatre:

yikes! this looks like russel crowe should be onstage wearing a blade runner costume. no one wants to see this. looks like a robot's lower intestine.

this is where i predict dallasites are going to begin to get pissed. they all expect a pretty luxurious show for their money, i feel, and by luxurious i mean good lighting, light wood if it's modern, lots of white laminate -- this seriously actually looks like a gladiator's ring from the future. brutal.

rem is a good fit for dallas in the sense that his showy-ness always produces great looking, glossy facades that you can really feel impressed by, even if you are a little weary of the starriness of it all. but these interiors, unless he really spices them up with some weird plastic laminates that are back lit with some crazy colors, or with some bruce mau graphics running along the ceiling or something...i fear he might start to loose the dallas crowd. then again, maybe i'm playing the eastern seabord stuffy closed minded asshole, and dallasites appreciate much more than i give them credit for.

another building in the complex, the norman foster opera house, is a BLATENT rip off of henning larsen's new copenhagen opera house. so much so that it actually kind of pisses me off. he took everything that was good about the opera house and made it plasticy and cheap looking.
take a look:

henning larsen, 2004.

sir norman foster, under construction 2007.
a cantilevered roof over a glass curtain wall and an spherical interior theatre shaped like an egg? with floating stairs and walkways into the egg? really? really norman foster? gee, i think ive seen this somewhere before!
(all images via google image)
"larsen inspired?"
oh, right. copenhagen. plus a bunch of tacky red plastic and minus the beautiful organic massing.

the people vs. frank gehry

i went through a bunch of the curbed posts on gehry's new chelsea building today (right, image via curber). as i read through the comments sections i realized just how ornery new yorkers and people in general are with mr. gehry - these posts have inspired some of the funniest commentary! i was sitting here in the lab just laughing out loud (or screaming OH SNAP!!!). people are so up in arms - most of the comment threads turn into big, flaming verbal wars between people ala livejournal. it's so weird. here are some of my favorites:

15. Someone told me over lunch at Swifty's that Frank G. hires sophomores from C level architectural schools to come up with concepts for new, exciting and unsustainable buildings. But at the same time he hires detailers from the mobile home and trailer industry in Elkart, Indiana to follow the concepts through the construction phase. Is this true?

7. Paging Mr. Gehry, your buildings are giant metallic turds.

6. goddamn, that building is ugly...not homely, but certainly chinsey.

02. It looks like two ugly, gigantic robots somehow managed to get drunk and have sex, then the female ugly gigantic robot got pregnant and had a ugly, gigantic robotic abortion in the middle of Brooklyn, and this is the ugly, gigantic unwanted discarded robot fetus.

6. There's something about those windows that look like ghetto tint jobs or Walgreens Christmas Window spray.

13. what the hell is this crap? it looks like something i saw under construction in Mumbai three years ago. (re: atlantic yards)

23. This is just the architectural equivalent of a logo handbag.

46. So after this is built, what project will you idiots bitch about next? Maybe you can stop the Calatrava transit center from being developed. Or perhaps you can endlessly complain about the Silvercup Studios project. It must be exciting to have so much progress to fight against!

61. shit someone put that thing too close to the radiator and it got all melted.

and one kicker:

14. Obviously, your demented mother dropped you on the floor (head first) when you were born. She was probably scared to death to see what an ugly troll you are and does not remember who's your actual daddy (what a whore).

HAHAHaaaaaa

i spent a lot of my shift today in the lab working on a digital painting for my mom for her birthday. it's of berthoud pass, in colorado, which we drove over this christmas to get to winter park. i thought it was a good memory to make reference to...

i wanted to keep it nice and simple. i need to think of a real thing to get her though, within the next two or three days.

research

oh god, i just had the funniest hour. i was researching the kaisersaal ruins that are part of the sony center in berlin now, because i want to use a similar process in my marshall field design. so i was kind of wikipedia surfing around, and i went to the article about sarah lawrence's campus. now, our campus is this sort of cliche of a cliche, quaint tudor wood adorableness. EXCEPT for the new dorms . the new dorms are a horror to most people on this campus, a concrete and glass box that houses tiny triple rooms for freshman. they stick out like a sore, grey, half-machine thumb, and so of course there are tons of legends about them (see: freshman painting a bullseye on the basement level and jumping from the top of the atrium). many people wonder: how did this shit get built? on every other side of the quad there's a neo-tudor house, except for this box of concrete. so of course there is also a legend to satisfy this bizarre incongruity. so the story goes, the college hired an architect to build a new building for administrative offices. but, they didn't tell him that they'd be used as dorms, so he designed a simple office block. when the buildings were built, and the architect realized what they were using his design for, he refused to be credited with the project because he objected to housing students in such tiny and poorly ventilated rooms. this story conveniently explains the insanity of the design, as well as the lack of any information about HOW this thing was put up. but today, on wikipedia, i saw the words:

Designed by world-renowned architect Phillip Johnson in the sparse modernist style of the time, the "New Dorms" were actually completed in 1960. The architectural style of the buildings is meant to be a modernist reflection of the three older dorms (Gilbert, Titsworth, and Dudley Lawrence) that stand on the opposite side of the North Lawn. The three buildings that comprise the New Dorms are connected by two glass atria in which the buildings' primary stairwells are found. With the exception of the large apartments in Rothschild, these dorms typically house first-year students.

wait, wtf?? philip johnson??? a quick call to justin confirmed my suspicion that this must be a wikipedia mistake. however, philip johnson's washington post obituary writes: "johnson designed buildings on the campuses of harvard, yale, brown, and sarah lawrence." holy shit. could this be true?
i ran upstairs to joe's office and interrupting a conference with one of his donnees, asked "philip johnson designed THE NEW DORMS??" he told me that he had designed them, of course, on a cocktail napkin, and sarah lawrence had accepted the design after it had been rejected by VASSAR. ahhaha, oh, sarah lawrence. joe also told me that when he first came to teach at sarah lawrence someone had SHOWN him the napkin, and that it might still be in the archives. so, of course justin and i are going over there tomorrow to take a look for ourselves. CAN'T WAIT!

this land is our land

five thirty. half an hour more until we can go to dinner. i had a great sleep last night. woke up this morning at 530 and watched the blue light come through the sides of the blinds in my room. it felt like berlin, or europe..an airport or something. my room with its colored string lights and then the blue snow light. very nice.
getting excited about my marshall field conference project, though the head of the music dept. hasn't emailed me back yet. i'll probably just have to go over there and find the guy. no doubt he's under a lot of stress right now. today was a conference with claudia in which we spoke of the concept. lots of good ideas were thrown around. basically right now im going with fragmenting several of the walls of the current building and somehow conciously parlaying them into a transitional element to connect a big, new concert hall with the current building. maybe theyll be encased in class, all messed up and ripped apart? also, the sound studios will be where the current basement is and will continue out eastwards on the site and then sort of 'grow' up like vegetables or something, a few yards away from the existing building. we talked a lot about postdamer platz/the einstein cafe and the 6th ave projects which i dont know much about. i will write more later since now class is over - got distracted. but heres a paint tool translation of one of the concepts that came out of the conference:

a commenter on gawker explains the phenomenon of...wanting to be an architect:
"I'm really smart, and I'd really like a job where I can express myself, but I don't really have any passion or direction in my life, so my innate defense against disappointment and disaster is to try to control as much as possible in my little corner of the world, so I've decided to become an architect."

the sweet summer of 1992

i bought my ticket home to dallas on march 8 - have i ever been so excited?? why do i like it in dallas so much? how can i change so quickly and drastically over a matter of years, and is it me changing or the circumstances around me? two years ago i would have been disgusted to even think of moving to texas. now, it feels like home. i was saying to amy the other night - there's something special about being in the middle of the country, in its...chest? she said, "nestled in?" and YES that was exactly what i meant. you feel home. like you'd imagine people on the frontier would feel when they were out hunting for days and then come over the last hill and saw their log cabin or whateverthefuck down on the plain below. the same sort of phenomenological feeling that we used to get at falk school, sitting up on the monkey bars that almost jutted out over falk hill. you could look over the whole medical complex and universities and parks, with the appalachian hills spreading out around it like a flower, but a green flower. all these circumstances share a basic set of visual and tactile similarities... its like they all boil down to the same feelings about what you're looking down into. in dallas it's the future, on the frontier it's your house, and at falk it was your whole life - mom's over there in the cathedral, dad's over at the hospital...
it's damn hard to explain... it has to do with the plains. i hate to throw the word 'mythology' around because it sounds so corny but it is a kind of phenomenological mythology that you develop as you grow, and as you move around the country. each major spatial experience is woven into this unconcious 'story' behind your mind about what land looks like and what kind of land feels right. maybe it's american? we're so obsessed with our land.

this weekend was kind of a let down, but its okay. theres been too much going on around here to keep the momentum going for any longer. we needed a few relaxing days. tonight lampoon is doing some kind of fundraiser thing so i guess id better head over to that... amy and justin and i went shopping at the cross county today and i got a dress and some awesome wrapping paper for my walls and some other stuff. it was cold today. the snow is half melted and frozen over.

curbed.com posted the following floorplan submission from a reader, who found it at work.

Curbed people.
Yes, it's very early in Chicago and I've already been at work for more than an hour. And I did drink a bit last night. But I don't think I'm seeing things when I tell you that the toilet in this listing's floorplan appears to be sporting an evil grin. I've looked at a lot of floorplans in my day and I'm not sure I've ever seen this particular brand of toilet before...

Am I making this up?

ahahaaaaaaaa

ha

gawker's take on the new banana republic 'architect' ads

never insult a redneck with a chainsaw

so it's been three days since the last time i posted. geez. what a weird few days. i guess i'll start at the beginning.
skiing was awesome - on the ride up to belleayre mountain it slowly began to dawn on me it was kind of a wash in terms of the people on the trip. like, not in terms of being mean, but just in terms of acting like losers. i skied with them for a while thinking, hey, maybe theyre not so bad! no. they were that bad. so after a while i broke off from the group and skied with some other people, and then for a while by myself. the big drama for me was falling on a double black diamond i was kind of forced into going down with the assistant AD of the sports center. i was okay for the first half, and then i stopped and froze up - it was so icy, the hill below me was CLEAR! i'm not kidding. so i went for it and fell for like 55 feet it was such an incline. it was pretty shameful. but i pulled it together and was on what they call 'my a-game' for the rest of the trip. the next day on the lift up, these two kids asked me why i left to ski alone - they were like "because they're so lame?" i thought i was the lone wolf on this trip. i clearly should have hung out with them, the last night they partied with the 45-year old firemen having a big birthday party downstairs.
we stayed in this old civil-war-era colonial inn, that had tons of bears and stags on the walls. the first night there, cool runnings was on the big screen tv in the lounge, so that got me all psyched up to ski the next day. that movie is a true classic.
it was cool to be on the road in the east again - after moving to dallas i havent seem much dreary eastern seaboard highway. before dallas, we were always driving back and forth from ny or to seven springs or somewhere. those drives were always very cozy, hangin out with mom and dad and annicka.
so we got back, and i got straight to work on the maya model for our big pondfield road show that was opening tuesday night. i woke up at 5am with my computer on my stomach and my hand on the mouse. was it ever hot. but we got it done - as rob and big might say we DO WORK. joe came by the lab and gave us all a hug when he saw the renderings. he said "four years ago! i can't believe it!" by the time we hung the show people were so excited - it turned out to be a Very Big Deal. i think joe was probably using it to rouse up excitement and interest for the new Design Studies concentration - we got the atrium gallery and a bunch of profs and people from the administration showed up to the opening. joe brought tons of food and about 10 bottles of wine, but still had to go make a liquor run at about 7pm. the opening turned out to incredible - lots of people, lots of nice things said, which of course was okay with us. here's our section of the wall, with amy looking on

it turned out very well, but the posters could have been spaced better. we just ran out of time.

and we got the chance to take another group picture with joe, to compliment the one we took of our first year studies.


something about the whole night was fantastically exciting for me. it was like our school was transformed into a different place - somewhere where i wanted to be? everyone was being normal, there was great work - work done together! everyone was equally happy and so excited. it really felt sincere, which for me is a rare feeling here. generally there's some element of bitterness or embarassment or the like when it comes to social/academic/art events here - people have too much self-loathing maybe. that night was some kind of alchemical concoction of people who were relaxed but also excited, sharing their credit with everyone else in their groups, all very understated - because you didn't NEED to overstate it, as corny as that sounds. usually openings are all about people making a big show of themselves to some how knit a mythology of 'brilliance' around their art/etc., but in this case people just showed up and had a good time. it was great. as naive as this sounds that's what i hope arch school will feel like. that's definitely what copenhagen studio felt like.
anyways later that night justin, jarett, amy, and i watched casino royale in jarett's room. so great and dissapointing at the same time. one of the first scenes is this badass fight that takes place on a construction site built with what we can assume is "dirty money." there's a shot in there of daniel craig busting through a sheet of DRYWALL haahhahaha running after this guy. at one point they're fighting each other on two huge crains above the site. hilarious. i think they were trying too hard to deviate from the classic bond plot, though - there was enough deviation from the gadget-ish stuff to make it a winner already. they didn't need to fuck with the model any more. but i liked it. the credits looked awesome.
we got some snow on wednesday - well six inches of sleet is more like it. it's still on the ground - but it's completely iced over now, so it's fun to walk on if you're wearing boots. last night we saw evan's new play, "lions," open - written by a grad student. evan played this good ol' boy peacekeeper in an unspecified african civil war situation who dies waving the UN flag over the raging battle below. he grew this molester moustache for the part - he was brilliant! i was so impressed. by far the best actor in the show. the play was actually really amazing - stayed away from a lot of the corny shit i hate about theatre, and made some good and important points about history and how we live and so on.
mr. lif of def jux records came to campus last night, which was AMAZING. an embarassingly small number of people showed up - so few that even WE were in the front row. but he was amazing. so great. we talked to him afterwards and he was the coolest guy. then we went to richard's party in ac9, which was okay at first but then ended up being kind of a bust because it was all freshman. so we drank a few of the beers and went and hung out in ac11. then i went to bed and woke up in a nightmare where this redneck guy had just cut through the skin that connected your thumb and your index finger with a chainsaw - because i had laughed at him when he was telling his girlfriend that they should put up a billboard outside their house that advertised her new job at bare elegance, a strip club in pittsburgh. wtf?? and annicka and caitlin were like michael scofield and link, and had been wrongfully imprisoned. i stumbled out with my hand all bloody and cut down towards the base of my thumb, and i found all of their electronics in the grass where i knew they had been arrested - which in my dream was now right outside of my house here at slc. i scooped all the ipods, slvr phones, and backup phones into my shirt i think. it was so weird. i began to panic because i couldn't feel my hand, and then pins and needles - i woke up and realized that i was laying on that hand and it was in fact asleep. it was still scary though. the goriness of it.
now here i am, fridays in the lab from 10-4. dang.

the predatory wasp of the palisades

geez i haven't been able to post for three days i've been so busy! what an intense week. it was bad and good.
the big news on wednesday was that we bought out tickets to the BAHAMAS!!! hahahah! i feel so bad for spending so much of my parents' money but i'm picking up more hours at the lab and have a pay-back schedule. the big drama was that justin booked my plane ticket to nassau in MY MOM'S NAME! i pretty much blew my stack. i had to cancel that ticket and buy a NEW one. goddamnit. i won't dwell on this event now, since it all got worked out, but i'll tell you what, i was PISSED. my pissiness has subsided, mostly because poor justin cant leave his room he's so sick, he'll puke everywhere.
so we're going to nassau for seven days. now it's all anyone can talk about - it's really only a month away. we're staying in some shitty hotel but it's on the beach, and has two pools, so wtf?
then thursday (yesterday) was weird, we had forte's class where we talked about the NY 1851 crystal palace and the 'handiwork' movement in america, as well as how emerson/thoreau/pugin/aj downing all relate to each other in their notions of individualism and consumerism as essentially similar and natural affects of the american ideology. i feel like we've been talking about 1850s NY for five weeks now, but this particular class was actually very interesting. we saw some slides of 1860s NY 'county houses' and a henry cole painting where he painted one of these weekend houses as a 'frontier home,' made of logs and inhabited by a lumberjack and his wife/kids.
i went to cross county, though the walk was so cold, because i had to change my PIN number for my bank of america account. luckily that was easy and the guy was very nice. i bought a pair of new leggings for the ski trip and a pair of flipflops for the spring break trip. geez i sound like a real jet setter here.
then last night was great - jarett's play 'the big funk,' opened, and let me tell you, it was FANTASTIC. if i wasnt going away this afternoon i'd see it again. i'd also encourage all people to read the play. i HATE theatre - and this thing really resonated with me. i think it's because it's similar in many ways to don delillo's white noise, in the sense that the focus of much of the dialogue is indirectly the state of our society in america and the deep fear of dying that many americans have. that sounds heavy, but it was also HILARIOUS. there were only four characters, jarett, starsha, owen, and a girl i didn't know. i guess the play is referred to as 'surrealist,' in the sense that some crazy shit happens - this girl gets slathered in vaseline and then gets bathed on stage, owen had to be completely naked for his last scene, etc.etc., but really it's sort of poetic realism. but the last scene was intense. they're all eating dinner and owen leaves, and then he comes back NAKED. i mean i was prepared for this - ive heard him talking a lot about whether he should try to uh, 'enhance' his performance before walking out onstage, but man, nothing can compare to seeing the real thing just inches away from the front row's face. mind you, the play was in downstage, so there aren't set seats, it's just a little black box with folding chairs. so i felt okay about seeing this guy naked, no big deal, but it was when he put his robes ON that i felt super embarassed - something about seeing him right AFTERwards was the most nervewracking part. mostly because he takes a china teacup and is supposed to be drinking from it, and his hands were shaking so hard it sounded like an alarm bell. oh god i couldnt even watch when this was happening. but it was really a fantastic play, and for someone like me to say that, i mean it really has to be amazing. plus, jarett is seriously a comedic/thearical genius. i have no doubt hes going to go very far with this. he had everyone in the audience hanging on his every facial expression. i felt very proud of him..
so then we headed out to the malthouse, it being thursday night, and tipped back a few long island iced teas. and a beer. played some darts - im actually pretty damn good at darts! the great thing about the bar last night was apparently they recently got busted for serving underage kids - so last night there were NO asshole freshman filling up the place. we could even sit down. it was great. i talked to this norweigan girl again, and we did a SKOAL. it was like being back in DK. so funny.
this morning i woke up so painfully - i had only gotten to bed at about four. now here i am in the lab - waiting until two when someone is going to come and take my last two hours so i can go get ready for the ski trip, for which we leave at four. im pretty excited about it - were staying at this civil war-era bed and breakfast and skiing saturday and sunday from 9-4. granted, i was nervous cuz both jiddy AND katie cancelled on me, but at the orientation meeting i met a few really cool people and me and this girl estelle agreed to room together - she seems so awesome. im excited. also, mom told me that upstate NY just got like 100 inches of snow, so maybe its heading for the catskills? im pretty foggy on NY geography to be honest. but i can hope. right now theres a 23' base - hah, imagine just a month ago i was skiing in four feet of powder! ah, like i care. i grew up skiing the anthills of the east and for that i am grateful. as i told the group at the meeting, if you grew up skiing on ice (in the east), you've got one thing going for you: you're not afraid of anything. you just go with it. of course there are a bunch of westerners on the trip who were getting their panties in a twist over the lack of base. dorks.
im panicking, because im nowhere near done with our pondfield model. but fuck it. im a second term senior. everyones just gonna have to deal with possibly not having a fly through. IM GOING SKIING

nassau

well, it's official - our pondield road exhibition opens on tuesday:

im actually pretty nervous, because the ski trip is this weekend so that's three days of work-time lost. i have to finish our poster and a fly-through animation of our 3D model. yikes. yikes especially because i'm only just learning how to animate in maya. oh shit.
plus, i have to re-do most of the model since i built it in october when i didn't really know how to model in maya. plus, the scale of the buildings is totally off. plus i need to go into bronxville and take pictures of all the storefronts so we can texture them to be realistic. plus i have to find a way to get 'poser,' a software that makes prefabricated scale model people to put into 3d models. no idea where ill find it.
i'm so unmotivated right now. it's like the scarier this deadline becomes, the less i want to work on it. not good.
in other news, i can't wait to go skiing!!!

strange days

what an eventful two days!
it all began on friday, when we decided to party in my room for a change. it was GREAT! we had so much fun. katie had bought a gigantic bottle of svedka and in true soph yr fashion, we mixed with either sprite, cranberry or orange juice. we listened to:
young love - find a new way
the knife - we share our mother's health
test-icicles - circle square triangle
annie - heartbeat
basement jaxx - good luck
and i put up new lights in my room so it looked great. after a while, we had to go over to the SLC lampoon party, in slonim 8, unfortch - but it was funny too. they said they needed my ipod, and to play some 80s, hahaha, so i did. this other person came over with a nano and put on babyface or something...everyone stopped dancing and was like, hey put the music back on. so i put my music back on and i think they got mad. not sure though. it was kinda fun, i felt bad for the weirdness. but it was okay. the embarassment peak level was reached when i poured a 22oz miller light all over myself by accident. i actually had to walk away from the conversation i was having with these two guys from nyu or somehwere. there was just nothing to say that could make it better. the lampoon crowd is pretty much hipsters. though amy and jarett are in charge and they're not, so who am i to judge? but it was a kind of funny party:

justin got sick and had to leave. when this kid julian was sitting in my lap and i couldn't see anyone i knew around me, i knew it was time to round up the group and get out. we went back to my room and danced. this guy ross was there, who's in lampoon, and we have this running joke - we don't know each other, but when we were introduced, he said "oh yah, we made out at the coming out dance freshman yr," which is a hilarious thing to say because for most people at slc, there's a real and tangible possibility that anyone to whom they're introduced to will say these words ( and be serious). so most of the time in my room was spent listening ross make up grosser, weirder things we 'did' at the coming out dance, while amy and jarett rolled around on the disgusting floor laughing. come on, i don't even know that guy. i was laughing so hard though, i felt sick. peoplg were rioting for taco bell, but clearly no one could drive. so we went to the pub. i don't know how. amy bought me a piece of pizza, because i couldn't find my card.
we said goodnight.
then saturday got weirder.

justin and i had to go into the city to see claudia's opening at PS 122, and so that was great. she's a genius. i hope she doesn't leave next yr, joe will be heartbroken i think..she's important. laura needed her nipple rings changed, and since looking at nipples makes justin sick, i was the only one left to sit in the room with her while the guy did it. he kept talking about when his nipple ring got ripped out while he was getting a tattoo. they made us wait because we were so vanilla, i think. but then we went over to broadway to go to UNIQLO, which BLOWS!!! it's this huge store, and everything is weird beige colors and really poorly made. very boring. they call it 'the japanese gap,' but it seemed more like the american gap, but taken DOWN three notches.
it was a great looking store though:


it was full of 20something urbanites looking lost. really dissapointing!
so laura and i went next door to h&m while we waited for justin and hunter at uniqlo. i got some loot. then we went over to justin's friend's new apartment, which was ON st. mark's place, wtf??? her dad bought this place for her, it was beautiful - awesome kitchen with rusted metal plate floors and then beautiful light wood for the rest of the floors, and a huge window looking out, not even on another wall. damn. right over the chipotle on that street. i can't imagine living on st. mark's. 'the times square of commodified boho culture' or whatever. the place reminds me of highschool.
it was such a weird few hours. we watched RIZE (the david lachapelle doc about krumping) and ordered in from moustache, this awesome middle eastern place. i had falafel and a spinache/cheese/filo dough role. oh god it was great. so then i started to freak out, so we left to get some green tea frozen yoghurt from the automat next door, but it was tooo full of people. so we went to the grocery store underneath her apt. it was so weird, god. we got back on the train. i had to immediately go to sleep when i got home and when i woke up this morning i was STILL freaking out.
its so cold here!

click

an exhibit opened in copenhagen - of helsinki street fashion.
these photos are great!!!
www.hel-looks.com

antelope

ugh what a morning. i slept in until i had to hurry to get to my lab monitor shift, where i am right now. plus, i have to go to this dumb mandatory training meeting at 1.30 and i can't find anyone to cover that hour of my shift. goddamnit. now what am i supposed to do?
on the other hand, fashionista.com continues to wow me. they posted on how to make the new louis vuitton spring necklace for like 10 dollars here,
so awesome. plus the proenza schouler line for target came out yesterday and i need to get some of that. i'm sure it will be like viktor and rolf for h&m though, gone to hoards of legginged maniacs within two hours.
katie and i played squash again last night, we played great. we're already making quick headway towards winning the championship end-all tournament on the 20th. actually the last time i checked it was just a tournament, but END ALL CHAMPIONSHIP sounds better. we're going to play again tonight before our soph-fest.
i walked over to academic computing to get the WACOM tablet to use, but when i got back i realized they hadn't given me the pen. WTF!!!!!!!!! also, during the first two hours of this shift forte's "archi/texts" first year studies class is going on... it's so nice to walk by outside and hear that class going on. i miss it so much. i still think i learned more in that first year studies than in all my other classes combined. it's the basis on which i do everything else now. i want to just stand outside and listen to it, but i'm worried joe or one of the freshman will walk outside and see me crouched down outside with an ipod recorder. it'd be embarassing for me.
today i'm wearing some tights, which i haven't worn in a while, but honestly my pants need to be washed. i felt kind of lame, but then i looked around and saw a rainbow spectrum of tight colors prancing all around me across campus. sarah lawrence, always a bastion of diversity and self expression. in fact now my gray tights feel a little matronly. maybe someone could lend me some tye-dye.
i talked to my parents last night - they were up at the bar at the top floor of the hilton anatole in dallas, where they were having a drink with anne because it was her birthday, and jim was out of town....when we went there for mom and dad's anniversary this summer, it was really good. i had roasted antelope with carmelized bananas and peanut sauce, and the best amuse bouche (hahahah that ones for you annicka) - it was like, some type of brie with crystalized apricot and carmelized onions. delish. also where i accidentally said "the texas book suppository" rather than "depository." the anatole (i forget the name of the actual restaurant - nana?) is one of those places where every time you get up to go to the bathroom, etc.etc., the guy comes back and re-places your napkin on your lap. kind of irrelvantly snooty, but the greatest views of dallas EVER. you get to watch all the planes coming down to love field airport (only a few miles from our house). i really began to love dallas this summer when my parents left me alone in the townhouse for a few days - i'd sit out on their 3rd floor balcony and watch the southwest airplanes come in - one every 3-4 minutes in the early evening. southwest planes are red and blue, they'd look so cool in that kind of texas light - red and orange and blue, with the tops of the trees turning that kind of amber green color and blowing around in the wind. and it was 105 degrees but beautiful. that's when i started thinking, hey, maybe this is a better place than i thought. maybe there's something to be said for living somewhere beautiful?

silent shout

just got back from health services. today was a weird day. it's not over yet. i had forte's class. we talked about new york, about the crystal palace, and about the relationship that emerson and carlyle had (and how it relates to consumerism in america). very interesting things, but i wish we had looked at more slides. more and more, our course is less about architecture and more about cultural philosophy. which i enjoy, but am less motivated to work for.
i went to lunch with justin and jiddy - jiddy was about to get a ride with forte into the city, she was going to the last day of this thai cowboy movie at film forum.
we have so much work coming up in the next two weeks - our pondfield road exhibition hangs on the 12th, claudia wants me to hang up my presentation from tuesday next week, i have to begin my marshall field conference project, group for design is apparently kicking into high gear, and i'm trying to organize a mult-disciplinary panel in the VAC theatre on the future of marshall field. i thought of that in the shower last night - it'd be great to have forte, an administrator, and chet biscardi (the music dept. head) up there having it out about the future of that whole site. i'm interested now. i'm gonna go buy an iTalk ipod recorder so i can start doing interviews with the faculty and music kids. also the archs. the biggest dilemma for me is the fantastic interior spaces in the existing building, and the problematic that would arise from either tearing them down or adding on, or recreating them. it's hard to know what the right thing to do is in this case.
last night was great, katie and i went to the gym and played squash for an hour, and then worked out. squash was awesome. there's a tournament on the 20th that we're joking about entering. today my wrist hurts from the POWER i was bringing from the game last night.
today is an important date in two ways for me: my ut austin application was officially due today, and one year ago today i arrived in berlin. how can that be?