Dr Spaceman

Wow, I almost posted this to my HOA's blog....that wouldn't have been good...damn HOA president authorship permission.

He's a good character. I like that everyone except for Tracy Jordan pronounces the 'ce' in spaceman to sound like 'che', as one does in Italian. Thank goodness for credentials, otherwise how would we know to trust a doctor.

Since we architects work with a lot of consultants on a project, and often have to coordinate the ensemble of them and their systems, I think that that comedic concept would be fantastic applied to a consultant or consulting engineer. The comedy: this consultant has been hired to give their qualified(?) expertise on a very specific area of interest (acoustics, water fountains, adobe), but occasionally says things that seem very off. Things that make you think they don't know what the hell they're talking about. And you'd just build more comedic layers from there.

I also thought the other day that there's a small trend in television comedies that play off of common stereotypes regarding certain institutions and have an ensemble of silly people that play off of that: Community (i.e. community college), Parks and Recreation and of course The Office. So in the spirit of that trend, and in honor of the silliness I've been through lately, I offer this idea for stealing (come and get it all you TV producers):

The Board: Life and Times of Zilker Condominiums

More to come....

The Joy of Running

The joy of running is the day after you ran, when you get to just relax a little because you ran the day before, right?? Sure your legs are sore, but at least you don't have to run again or feel bad for not running.

That's Mary's bad attitude speaking. I don't know how I'll ever get myself in shape for a half marathon in November. Shear embarrassment would be one way that's more likely than others; you see, my b-friend has been telling people that I'm running a half marathon in November and now people are asking me how it's going. What am I supposed to say....'Well, let me tell you about the joy of running...'

Right now I don't quite say that I'm going to run the darn thing. I just say that I'm following a spreadsheet that, if I do what each cells says over 12 weeks, is supposed to hypothetically prepare me to run a half marathon.

Having one week of my worksheet almost completely done, the thing I clearly enjoy the most so far is the day after. I basically get to either rest, swim or do yoga on my 'off' days for stretching and cross training. Thus I've finally balanced my favorite varieties of exercise with the only one that tends to bring me results...and it only took me 29 years to figure it out. :)

It's true that when I was walking ladybird the other day, on on of my 'rest' days, I was just completely elated. There was a spring in my step. Also, a warm feeling came over me when I saw all the regulars, the other morning walkers in the neighborhood. The guy who always wears a snow cap and radio headphones with the little antenna sticking out. His buddy who's always really sweaty and lost a lot of weight over the last year. Ivan the Corgi who can walk without a leash, but makes his owner stop to sniff e v e r y t h i n g. Dead pigeon on our driveway, that didn't even bring me down.

Such is the joy of running.

Back to the 'Y'

I recently got myself a membership to the YMCA and, thinking I had forgotten my strokes, promptly signed myself up for adult swim classes. It's true that my brain had forgotten the details of the different strokes: kick from the hip (not the knee), alternate the arms and legs so you always have momentum from one or the other, make sure to breath with every stroke. Luckily I'm a muscle memory kind of person, so it was a bit like riding a bike. The hard part was finally getting myself back into the pool.

The unfortunate thing about this YMCA is that they seem to still be putting as much chlorine in the pool as they did back in 1986 at the YMCA in downtown Hazleton, PA.

I thought of that YMCA today as I was scrubbing myself silly trying to get rid of the chlorine smell. It was probably a beginners swim class that I was remembering and I would have been about six years old. My mom was washing and dressing us after class when we discovered that the bottle of electric green, Prell shampoo had leaked all over our bag. It had also leaked on the edge of the clean underwear that I was supposed to put on. I was six or seven at the time and was not wanting to be a baby or 'not normal' and go without my underwear.

By the end of the day the Prell shampoo residue left on those underwear gave me a rash all along the inside of my left left thigh. I remember the rash being vividly red and very painful. Not a pleasant thing to think about in a public shower where the warm wet air and puddle seems like a perfect breeding ground for a skin affliction.

It was that thought that I was thinking when both me and the woman directly across from me in the showers happened to throw open our shower curtains at the same time, fully naked and briskly trying to dry ourselves off, avoid eye contact and get the hell out of there.

In my last two weeks of showering at the 'Y' I've noticed some personality strategies people use for the locker room. There are the 'talkers' who seem to have the attitude that 'we're just two naked people gettin dressed together, might as well get to know eachother' and their opposite, the 'non talkers'. Similar to subway riders in NYC, 'Non talkers' prefer to avert their eyes and mostly pretend not to see the other naked people changing around them. The thought process for the 'non talkers', or at least this 'non talker', is that maybe if I pretend I can't see them and they pretend they can't see me then it's like there's nobody else there.....

That is until some lady throws her shower curtain open and you're stuck staring at her flip flops, which happen to be obnoxiously polk-a-doted just like your own shower flip flops. I wonder if she got them at the same CVS?

No matter. I'll never know and it really is better off that way.

Live Hot Veg

We've belonged to a CSA for several months now. We were on a waiting list for two months prior to the momentous weekend that we became full partners in the farm. You pay in advance for the what the harvest will bare--allowing the farmer to have a guaranteed market and we to have real, I mean very real, veggies.

So, every other Saturday I (or we, or Dubs) go to an old hippy's house a few blocks away, load one waxed box of fresh veggies and a half dozen fresh eggs into our burlap sacks and wander back home schlepping our fresh, locally grown, organic veggies.

It's really a joy to be a member, despite the washing one must do. The dirt is a little inevitable and since I know that it was in good hands I don't mind eating a little of it every once and awhile, when I just can't rinse those greens one more time.

Well, today's box was exceptionally interesting. There was a lot of variety, but mostly it was all very beautiful. As I unpacked it, I thought to myself that this was the first time I've ever held vegetables in my hands and felt that they had such a strong similarity to animals, or to the properties of living creatures anyway; growing on their own, unedited for supermarkets and each very different.

I photographed them to preserve the thought and share how strange and interesting they were. I especially like the spiraling lettuce, the blood-red looking scallions and the purple hue peeking through the cauliflower. When walking through whole foods, central market or HEB you can't really escape how exactly perfect and similar all of the produce tends to be and is grown to be. Our veggie boxes are always a meditation on difference and variety. I am very greatful for the CSA culture that has developed as of late, without it the options for getting local produce of this variety would be more limited.

In a way the CSA is a new thing -- invented to bring organic, local produce to people over the last 15-20 years. Small farms, which had been slowly driven out of business over the years, can find some lifeline in this type of business--though it's amazing and sad that they need to be reinvented in this way, having had no protection over the years. For a really interesting film on a small farm that survived to become one of the first CSA farms and is run by an eccentric, talented and lifelong farmer, please check out The Real Dirt on Farmer John

Joey R

This one goes out to a good friend. I found out tonight that Joey, an old and dear friend of mine from high school, passed away either Monday night or Tuesday morning -- I don't know. The obituary says Tuesday, but judging from the facebook postings it would have had to have been very early on Tuesday because people already knew at like 8:30 am.

My mom called and told me. After going through a few seconds of denial I ran to the computer. Facebook would show it right? Because didn't he just post something recently? He must have. Upon reading the postings you just knew instantly. Though having read all the postings, still I've got no clue what happened other than he 'died unexpectedly.'

We haven't been in touch in a long time, which is so weird to me and I always regret this about people I was close with in NEPA. There was just something about that place that's still in my head in a mostly negative way. Like a lot of small towns, it for sure wasn't gay friendly nor was it very ethnically diverse or sensitive. For anybody who didn't excel in a practical or accepted way or fit into some kind of life 'type' you just frequently felt on the outside. Left to kind of just create your little world and wait around until you can fly the coop off to a place where you have the opportunity and means to just live more freely and be happy and, for many, explore creative pursuits. Sure, no situation is this entirely perfect or free but small towns are typically limited by their own limited scope--lack of museums, lack of nationally know anything, lack of even architecture offices for someone interested in building design. They have poorer resolution on google earth (that one I've always thought is a little poetic). This is not a criticism, just facts. But ultimately when I go there I still have a strong nostalgia mostly because many people that I love came from there and ultimately I've got a real soft spot that is about the size of Luzerne County.

Well, Joe was so fun. He had a wonderfully sarcastic sense of humor, a love for Rupaul and Jack Kerouac and William S Burroughs. We probably went to Perkins over a thousand times over the years. We sat in the smoking section, which wasn't really separated at all from the rest of the restaurant except for being two feet higher than the main seating area, and talked about random shit for hours on end and smoked t o n s of cigarettes. Joe helped me setup my first ever e-mail account of my very own which was ophelia666@geocities.com (a little satanic, yeah I know). We'd also just drive around for hours on end..many, many times. There was always a healthy amount of boy drama in his life but not much acceptance of it from his parents. When I was really tense and angry after my father died he gave me pills one night to chill me the f&*$ out.

I hope I get to find out what happened soon, though I'm sure I will find out eventually. He had a lot to offer and whenever I see him again I hope we can pick right back up talking about clothes or books or art. Now I have to go look for Kleenex...damn

The Mammoth

I'm finally going to finish an art project I started a long time ago. I started it back in 2007. It's titled The Mammoth and it's a sewn depiction of a mammoth taken from a LIDAR survey.
LIDAR is amazing. It's technology that allows you to scan an object using a laser and generate a 3D model of what you scanned. We used this technology on an architecture project that I worked on. We scanned very complicated geometry in order to locate the exact location of Mammoth Bones. It was for our design of the Waco Mammoth Site Dig Shelter which is now under construction in Waco, TX.

We used a plan view of the LIDAR created topography model to locate the walls of the shelter and a suspended catwalk for visitor's to view the bones. Several mammoths died at this site, possibly all at once in some type of catastrophic event. It allowed us to know precisely where the visible bones of one mammoth were in relationship to one another.

I need to finish this by the 22nd so that I can show it in an event for Chris Riley (running for city council seat 1) at the US Art Authority. If you're in Austin and want to check it out here's the info. I am just happy that I am finally finishing and presenting this piece!!

Under the Bombs

I biked myself down to the Alamo South to take advantage of my Austin Film Society membership today. The movie was free for AFS members. I'm telling you, if you like film, there's just no better deal in town. Look it up and get yourself a membership.

This movie is a combination of documentary footage and narrative scenes, all shot during the 2006 war with Israel. Most of the movie making was done during a ceasefire, at great risk to the cast and crew. Their set is the recently bombed out countryside of Lebanon. It's hard to know how much of what goes on in the background of scenes is staged and how much is happenstance. It made me think of the Rossellini film Germania, Anno Zero, shot on the devestated streets of post war Germany. It's got a very Neorealist feel and ending.

In the trailer below they show the first few moments of the film, which are breathtaking. Lebanon is a very pretty country, a lot of hills and valleys. The first shot sits on a pictorial view of a hillside peppered with residential looking buildings. It's like a landscape painting until little explosions start happening all across your view and you realize it's war footage.



I enjoyed this film. There were moments when the woman's search for her son (that's the main storyline) gets a little tedious, but never for too long. It gets broken up by the antics of her improbable partner, a shady taxi driver from the south. The movie is actually lightly informative about Lebanon which was enjoyable. Some of the characters we are introduced to are Christians and you get a feel for the social dynamics at play in the country among its different religious groups. Seek it out if you can & thanks for reading.