highlights of 2010

January was full of adventures - I went to the 2010 Rose Parade for the first time in my life, after years of watching it January 1st on TV and enjoyed watching all the floats in real time with my mom and sister. Went to San Jose to visit Tommy and his family and visited the Winchester Mystery Mansion and the San Jose Flea Market! Since I had the semester off I started tackling the gigantic mess that is my room and simultaneously went flea market/thrift store hopping with my mom every chance I got. Also - lots of art, mostly linoleum block print making that month.

February I started working as an intern at an architecture firm, finally getting some structure in my daily routine. Worked on a competition and outside of that frequented art museums with Dan, hung out with Tommy, helped my mom with art classes, took care of the poopies and cooked a lot!

In March after the usual with work, flea markets, etc. I went to San Jose again! We visited San Francisco, explored Golden Gate Park, the Aquarium, and ate lots of good food. This visit marked my Pizza My Heart obsession as well as my newfound love for artichokes!

In April I went to Chicago, en route from Kansas City and St. Louis by Amtrak. My first time in the Midwest! Saw lots of great architecture and saw Frank Gehry give a talk which made me like him! Back in L.A., got laid off of my interning duties, and soon after got a job at Trader Joe's. Started going on lots of hikes with Tommy and got a bike to start riding around.

As the weather continued to get better in May, hikes were more frequent as well as trips to the beach. Tommy graduated, and for a while we had more time to spend together before he headed down to San Diego to start his job. My friend Joe started gaining more exposure doing his music thing and I accompanied him at times to his gigs.

In June I went to lots of museums and this is the time I painted the most. I think I began to understand colors in a more profound sense and wanted to express that knowledge. Work, paint, boyfriend, eat, sleep.

July equaled lots of outdoor time, good food and the beach. And prime flea market time as Tommy my mom and I went looking for furniture for his new place, oftentimes quite successfully! Started my t-shirt quilt which is pretty much done now except for some major hemming.

August! Went to Mammoth and spent time with my pop fishing and enjoying nature. Went to Spokane shortly after with Tommy and had a great trip before the inevitable mental trudge back to school. For my birthday Tommy got me a beautiful typewriter, which I used to type him letters in San Diego.

September. I wasn't in love with school, and having a mini crisis in realizing most all of my friends had graduated and left. Readjusting was slow... I just threw myself into my work at school, work at Joe's, and got another work study job on campus.

October was a little more enjoyable - the calm before the storm before schoolwork began to explode. I enjoyed having to read for class though, had a bit of roommate trouble but that's over, and started really getting into my metal sculpture class. Visits to Tommy in between classes and work!

November, Thanksgiving, work, midterms. A crazy month. I started going home a lot, despite the high cost of rent...

December was a mixed bag. I was so burnt out from school that I didn't get into the Christmas spirit at all, until a day or two before when I prepared the secret santa gift I had to bring for a coworker... I only really got gifts for my family and boyfriend, which is all that really matters I think. I am just happy that I have one semester of school left, which also means I need to find a real job...

2010 was a great year. Lots of creative stimulation in the first part, the second part was different but still a good learning experience and I think I learned a lot about myself. Lots I can improve upon for the future, anyway.

rain! & hail!

It's raining again! Strangely it's nice, even after the weeklong gloom and damp we endured before Christmas this year. It's still too dark to watch the rain but it's loud enough to listen to... I can't fall back asleep! Maybe I can get some things done now. I leave you with some shots of the thunderstorm that brought hail exactly a week ago! Hail is delicious :).

Wings of Desire (1987)

'Wings of Desire' by Wim Wenders, set in Berlin towards the end of the Cold War, follows Damiel, an angel (played by Bruno Ganz) as he and fellow angel Cassiel (Otto Sander) observe humankind. Unseen by all except for children, the angels can hear peoples' thoughts, fears and desires but otherwise have no physical power in their one-sided interactions with humans. Damiel tires of his endless, immortal existence and upon becoming human marvels at his new experiences - he bleeds, sees colors, drinks coffee and warms his hands by rubbing them back and forth. As an angel he had fallen in love with a trapeze artist, Marion, and in his newfound experience as a mortal, seeks to find her. The film is also a series of ruminations on Berlin's past, its current state and what is in store for it in the future, which felt like what Andrezj Wajda did with Poland for Ashes and Diamonds . Said thoughts are profound and overall the film is dreamy and beautiful, and no surprise, for the director of photography was Henri Alekan (who was responsible for the groundbreaking camera work in Jean Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête). Peter Falk (The Princess Bride!) stars as himself, in a nice twist of a role which grounds the film in its fantasy land. The first 2/3 of the film feels mostly expository, as we move around the city and watch characters, whereas in the last part we see how Damiel deals with being human. An interesting film.

my day yesterday

I've been helping my mom watercolor-ify and outline a ton of kid's artwork for a big event at the elementary school. It had rained the night before, it's raining now and it's supposed to rain all the way to next Wednesday. Awesome/awful, depending on how rain makes you feel. I've drunk so much tea these days it's my main source of hydration (almost). I haven't started anything for Christmas and I am okay with that. I have a long day of work ahead of me today. Time to bring out my rain boots!

recent thrifting finds...!

These were from two weeks ago and in my stress leading up to the beginning of this week neglected to show. I got the ceramic Scottie dog at the PCC flea market. It's marked at $14, but when I picked it up the hilarious vendor said "Oh! You just picked that up so now it's $12." I smiled and put it down then picked it back up after saying something to my mom, and he said "Every time you pick it up the price goes down!" So for $10 it was mine, I couldn't resist his charms. Later on I fretted a little about impulsively buying it (even though as of late I've been fascinated with 1960s/70s kitschy American ceramics) but after hearing my aunt, my mom and sister note how the scottie resembles our girl dog BB when she was a pup made me not regret the decision anymore.

I found a copy of Meditations at a Goodwill for only $3! When I suffered a glare from the librarian at the local library at home for renewing Meditations 3 times (we're only allowed 2 renewals, which I forgot) I was saddened at realizing I could no longer read as quickly as I did when I was younger. But Greek philosophy versus Greek myths? Obviously a discrepancy there...

second to last, done

It feels good to be done with school. Though this semester went out with a whimper, sweet sweet winter break is here. (That is a giant ball of blue tape; we had to use SO much to keep our presentations up on the walls...)

I wish it would snow...

I would just stare at it in wonder for a few minutes and then...sleep.

lunching at the love cube

I don't know if it was architecture students or art students who assembled this funny little playground/gathering spot of a structure a month or so ago but it has been probably the most successful (and low budget) installation our school has seen. Deemed the 'love cube' - flyers around the building have welcomed people to sit there, make out, eat, talk, play, swing, and be creative - and the students have listened! I made a big point this year to not buy food on campus, but this is the third time all semester I buckled down and got Panda for lunch (guilty pleasure food...) which I gobbled up at the cube, and to work off my food coma I swinged on the swing and enjoyed the sunshine. I feel like I haven't felt the sun for days, which is clearly hyperbole, but it was nice to have half an hour to myself, reflecting on life and the semester.

foggy morning

L.A. fog... I woke up at 6 this morning to get ready for a packed morning. Our final presentations for studio were finally finished printing yesterday (when they would ideally have been completed by Wednesday) and after work last night I made a mad dash to studio to trim my boards & mount them on foam core, then hang them up in the designated space downtown... Took a couple hours with us waiting for another studio mate to finish his stuff, then looking for parking, then carrying 10+ boards up to the 50th floor of the National Bank Tower. Then I went with my sister back home-home where we helped my mom with a ton of art stuff and now I'm trying to get at least half of my portfolio done tonight so I can work and hang out with my boyfriend this weekend. More on my day later, as I try to complete my portfolio in 5 page installments!

excerpt - The Great Gatsby

'I began to like New York, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. I liked to walk up Fifth Avenue and pick out romantic women from the crowd and imagine that in a few minutes I was going to enter into their lives, and no one would ever know or disapprove. Sometimes, in my mind, I followed them to their apartments on the corners of hidden streets, and they turned and smiled back at me before they faded through a door into warm darkness. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others - poor young clerks who loitered in front of the windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner - young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.'

The above is an internal passage by Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald writes beautifully, and in my arrogant high school years I often failed to grasp much of the beauty in the words I read in my exasperation at having to overanalyze the literary allusions, metaphors, motifs, foreshadowing, etc. I just wanted to read the book without having to endure, chapter after chapter the brutal butchering and decomposition of the work. As beneficial as it ended up being, the means to getting there was awful. So much bullshit in class about the discussion of illumination in one or two points, dragging on and on and on. I really hated English class as much as it was simultaneously the only subject I excelled in. If only they had let us read through the book once on our own, discuss it in the span of a week and read it again. But even that is a terrible idea. Because it is only now, seven years after I first read and dismissed it, I finally see and appreciate the beauty in this story about childish, self-centered, disillusioned, irresponsible adults in their crazy lives, split dangerously between dream and reality, false hopes and expectations and dismay. I suppose it's a lesson in the perils of the American dream, a warning of the fickleness of human beings, the ever-present discrepancy between what is perceived and what actually is; and then there's a glimmer of hope in it, knowing that the only sane and level-headed person is the one recounting the tale.

I think I'll be re-reading all the books I read in high school now. Time to see them once again in a different light.

Fritz the Cat (1972)

Apologies in advance for the bewbs. Fritz the Cat was Ralph Bakshi's debut film, based on the comic strip Fritz the Cat by R. Crumb. As I'm unfamiliar with the original source material I can't reliably give a comparison or commentary on the content (I do know Crumb hated the film and said Bakshi misinterpreted his characters etc.) so all I can say is that this film offends and amuses on many levels. I think culturally, for its time it was significant because animation was dominated by Disney and geared towards family therefore squeaky clean and innocent, and Fritz the Cat is crude, depraved even, as it focuses on the hedonistic lifestyle of an idealistic 'cool cat' (pun not intended) and the satire of college students/revolutionaries/free thinkers and their views on racism, lifestyles and society. I mildly enjoyed the art - slightly experimental with the traditional animation juxtaposed with more Crumb-style images, and photo overlays and expressive watercolor (?) washes for transitional city scenes. Overall I wasn't crazy about the content of the film, but the message at the end was cool. I'm now just more interested in diving in to Crumb's original story, though I can't say I think I'll be prepared for it.

things that kept me going

This past week was rough; even with an average of 3 hours of sleep a night I managed to keep a level head but then everything seemed to go crazy at the 11th hour. It's over now, so forget about it, but I'm regretting not putting a little more effort into parts of my presentation. Again it's over, I really hate that lingering feeling of 'If only I'd done a little more, if only I hadn't taken that hour long nap.' It's too bad that my perfectionist tendencies are as fickle as the weather in southern California. (it's raining heavily at this moment, after a nice clear day). Anyway, the things that helped med out the most this week was my big old army coat, a hand-me-over beanie from my sister and burt's bees (which met its doom this morning). The second to last charrette of my undergraduate academic life, feels good to be done.

progress!

Hi. I just got really excited about reading up on/teaching myself how to make things glow in Photoshop. This newfound piece of knowledge will probably make my project 100x better. That is all. Plus, it is fun. Too excited to worry about getting sleep now!

tired...

This is exactly how I feel right now. Well to put it more accurately, how I felt when suddenly it was 3:00 AM after what felt like ten minutes after 2:00 AM. Time flies when there's not enough of it. Why am I up at this moment, you ask? I'm waiting for an email attachment to finish loading before I send it off. Actually I will be like the Westie in this picture probably 24 or 48 hours from now... if I'm feeling tired right now I haven't felt quite enough of it yet. Ugh, I'm hungry now, too.

source.

making progress...

Today was a good day so far. I discussed my final project with my instructor today and my goal is to finish designing it tonight (which probably means I'll be done with it midday tomorrow, but hopefully sooner). I have a list of items to produce for friday (everything's due at 6 pm then!) so a lot depends on tonight to make sure I get shit done. Leaving my chilly apartment to work at a friend's place where we will guzzle tea and scrounge up midnight snacks when we start slowing down. Tonight I'll need an extra pair of socks, or maybe my slippers wherever they are, my glasses, and I wish I still had a pair of fingerless gloves. My fingers get SO COLD when working away at a computer for 8+ hours at night, UGH. I wore a beanie today to ward off the cold wind that FREEZES my ears while biking home and my friend declared me 'hobo-chic.' Well now I am just complaining about the weather - Southern California is freezing over! Time to get work done now.

I want to snooze.

My sister caught me and BB snoozing after the first round of cooking on Thanksgiving!

Day 1 of final charrette and I'm already tired?! Working on my final design and I can't say I'm completely satisfied, but I'll have to give it more substance through the renderings and diagrams. AAAHH. Vibration collection, undulating lines and planes and mesh and flickering opacity all sounds cool but am I making it WORK? Drinking two huge mugs of vanilla and cinnamon black tea from Trader Joe's keeps me up with a subtle hint of nervous energy, but with the mess of rain yesterday and gusty winds today I want nothing more than to curl up in my now-warm bed (brought back a big thick blanket from home!) and sleep for a few hours to stave off the chill that sets in my bones from hours of working. I'm giving myself til 3 to finish this design, that's not much time!

bronze casting, part 7

All done! My finished dog BB in all her bronze glory. I need to photograph her on a black background to make the details really pop and I'll do that at the end of this week, when hell comes to its slow-burning end. (Stressed much?) All the little posts that extended from her ears and the gate on her back were sawed off with a chop saw (scary!) and then I buffed, grinded, scrubbed and broke off any extra metal I didn't want, using the bench grinder, angle grinder and a dremel. 3 hours flew by so quickly - I loved getting absorbed into the craft and I can see myself doing this all the time... I'm so glad I took this class this semester. Favorite and most fulfilling, hands down.