Charrette

Nothing like seeing the rock-star side of three A.M. pass by, celebrated by two aspirin washed down with the bottom third of a Venti—by now a vintage cup purchased at 10:30. I had the chainsaw-er's headphones on over the iPod earbuds in order to keep the focus on a growing pile of very small, very oddly shaped slivers of Strathmore art board and grey photo mounting board. Some Colombian mariachi rolled through on the shuffled playlist, and I was going strong.

A little over twenty-five minutes ago, the 100-hour ticked by. All the heavy lifting left in grad school needs to be done in that window. As much as I am ready for this to be over and for some real sleep, it adds a little frisson to the proceedings.

Zzzzzzz....

Awful Music Always Makes the Protestor More Protestant

You know, the red was looking nice against the spring leaves today.

Hu Jintao, prezzie of China, was on campus today, causing a traffic jam. I rode around on my bike taking photos and some video. Some comments later, but first I wanted to thow online some of the video, posted on a new discovery: Vimeo.



Lining the Street on Vimeo


Wear your headphones for this one: the takeaway has everything to do with the rousing symphonics being blasted from speakers so lound that they drowned out the wind noise in the mic of my little Canon.

The video quality is slightly better on the Vimeo site. Also, I have another clip there with even more tympanum-busting delights.

Health Watch - Or, How Badly Can I Tank In Three Years?

I do it because it feels good.

It's gotten to that point in the semester again when the words "caffeine free" read to me as "not fit for human consumption." If I don't take in a major dose of the stuff every few hours, things start going a little haywire. For instance, I made the mistake of having a bottle of root beer with dinner. Root beer has no caffeine. (Nor does it—as you know—have any beer, but I'm not getting the shakes on that front.) This means that I've been without a hook-up since about five this afternoon. The result: I can't concentrate, I wander around the place as if I'm having a lengthy cell phone conversation with a long lost friend, and my shoulders are doing a good job at keeping my earlobes from flapping.

The coffee count this fine day in April breaks down like this: one cup Illy homebrew at 7:45 when the store has opened for me to replenish the milk supply here in my palace; mug o' diner-swill at 11:35 after filing three tax extensions and going to my first class; one short Fivebucks latte at 12:10 while walking back from the diner to the studio; a post-studio meeting pick-me-up/calm-me-down dark roast ("room for milk this time, please") at five-ish, procured at the coffee shop whose front door I can monitor from my fourth-floor drafting table; and, now, at 10:20, a mug at home so I can keep working tonight, having forsaken the crazies in the studio for my own home.

Someone actually suggested I switch to tea instead.

Tax Man

So it's almost 2:30 in the morning, and I just rushed home from studio so I could load TurboTax onto the computer. Clearly this signals that I have not already finished, printed out, folded, stuffed, stamped, and posted my 2005 returns to the hungry coffers of Washington, Hartford, and Boston. Ahem. I was busy doing other things, these last few months.

Things like these: the grand total of today's stay in the studio comes to four of sheets of print-out on which I started working out the plans, a new floor division scheme (doodled in CAD), and two#&8212count 'em—two diagrams. One involved doing about two hours of computer modeling and rendering that I then threw out because it just made everything more confusing. The final result after this anti-render-edit looks like the packing divider to a case of wine. This isn't working out so well.

Now I need to (1) figure out what I need to do to file for an extension of my taxes, (2) read 32 pages in a foreign language that I am becoming increasingly confident I will never master, (3) sleep a little bit, and (4) finally finish drawing the fucking plans I promised, promised, PROMISED myself I would have done by Monday.

Is there any wonder why I am so good at self-loathing? Look at all the material I have to work with!

OK. The bouncing icon tells me that Turbo Tax has finished downloading all of the applicable forms and laws and associated tortures—I should probably turn my attention to that.

Wim

Chevy cowboy.

Three of us long-suffering students went out in the rain yesterday afternoon to see Don't Come Knocking. I'm a big Wim Wenders fan, although my taste runs to The American Friend over Wings of Desire. Here, we're back in the West, with a movie that looks more like his photography book, Written in the West. I really enjoyed this film—at least partly because shares a confounding of type with the American Friend. While the latter is a thriller without much espionage, this is a drama with a comic script. And while it goes in for some classic Wender's landscape shots and deep camera placements, it also mixes in a handful of highly conventionalized shots for relief. Anyway—it was worth trip to take some time off of studio.

Too bad when I made it home at two a.m. I decided it would be a good idea to pop in the day's Netflix arrival and watch The Birdcage for a full hour and a half. Not worth it. Not worth it at all.

Also, it was disappointing to find out that I've been quoting it wrong for years: it's not "Don't be afraid of my Guatemalan heat," it's "Are you afraid of my Guatemalan-ness. . . . My Guatemalan-ness, my natural heat." I guess I'm not so hot after all.


My heat, yes indeed.

After the fact: I dreamt last night that I was going for a hike with H (in tuxedos) before his wedding. The location was a jumble of real places I know of, but that's not important right now. At the base of the trail, we had to pass through a conference-resort center where all sorts of shady things seemed to be going on. In the end, Sutter, Tim Roth's character from "Don't Come Knocking," showed up and starting chasing us—although it was more of a Le Samourai-chase than a French Connection-chase. I seem to remember that H engineered some ingenious escape, but the details are fuzzy. Apparently writing this stuff down is cooking it together in my head. At least it's more interesting than dreams about architecture.

Spring Sling

Feeling good, looking good.

Last weekend I went to the wedding of the couple who—in their own little way—started me off on this rather unsuccessful little project. Not that the success business has been their responsibility; it's mine. But to go over to their now-archival wedding website, carefully coded by hand, makes me a little misty-eyed. Or maybe that's the whisky. Hard to tell.

Anyway, above is the man whose white jacket kicked off my sniping. Here you see him exhausted after leading the charge in the wedding weekend at every turn. Right now he's been taken out of commission by practically breaking his ankle on the next-to-last dance. Somewhere, somehow, an aircast and a bag of ice have made their way onto his foot. Soon, he had moved onto the bar in a wheelchair, but that's just because he was damned sure that other people weren't going to be left standing when he wasn't. I sense the outline of an inspirational movie here. Let's just all reflect for a moment what it's like commuting to work in Manhattan when on crutches.

Now I'm back on the other coast. Less than two weeks are left until the final design reviews, and the usual signs of spring are beginning to show: snowy flowers are sprouting from the dogwoods and students are signing out four-day chunks of time on the CNC mill, young love is in the air and architects are starting to fight with each other over how much plexiglass will be available over the weekend, mornings comes with a touch of fog in the air and midnight rolls by with a round of competitive complaining. It's hard to imagine why I'm ready to skip straight to summer.

In the meantime, I can think back to a couple of great days in California. They were spent with great friends—I know 'em when I see 'em, everytime.


Flying a flag.