okay, that sounds dramatic, but i think it really is the end of an era… peter is leaving and bill is coming in to take over and while i am excited and optimistic about next year, i am also a little saddened that i wasn’t able to spend more time under the influence of peter…i guess i won’t get into this so much because i already feel like i’ve discussed it ad nauseum…

i’ve been wrapped up in finishing out the year… cleaning, purging, planning, plotting, scheming, thinking, wishing, evaluating, hoping, dreaming, listening… everything except writing… and now i don’t know exactly what to write… i should update some of my school work on that other blog and get to working on ‘the where’s eric project’ website and the possible coincident ‘the what to they know about eric project’… maybe soon…

there was also the relieving news that dad is doing well… i felt confident, but it’s always comforting to know… hopefully things will only get better from here on out. i’m still confident.

well, i don’t have much else to write now… should be cleaning, but with a space that barely tops 100 sq.ft. it doesn’t really seem that daunting… nevertheless, i am [pleasantly] distracted by the upcoming vacation… short and scattered and unplanned as it may be… maybe that is how i like things… well, we shall see…

the cel phone is dying… battery charge doesn’t last very long these days… reception is getting worse rather than better… buttons don’t work so well… i really need to call cingular and work out some deal on that nice siemens phone… ugh… i guess i’ll manage for a few more weeks…

okay, thoughts are not coming together here… le tigre is distracting me with ponderings on cassavettes… genius? perhaps… maybe i should watch shadows again… or the killing of a chinese bookie… or something i haven’t seen… or maybe i’ll just watch trainspotting… since i haven’t seen that for awhile and i did just rent it… and leave the cassavettes exploration for another time…

well… alot has happened in the last couple of days… the last week really, but i am not in the right frame of mind to get into it right now. the semester, the year, is coming to an abrupt end and i am just now in a position to stand back from it and reflect… i realize the things that have and have not happened… at least as i had it planned 10 months ago… without sounding too melancholy [quiet smile] i had a great year… just a couple notes from the past week… i made a 2 minute film for the CAA video festival in one long sleepless night, i created a hand crafted case for some laser cut cardboard tiles i had laying around for the student auction which i am very happy with, i tracked my movements driving and walking with a gps receiver and my laptop for my final review which was slightly underdeveloped and not [i don’t think] convincing as a project or an idea for a project, we took a tour of the masonic lodge in detroit this afternoon which was kind of freaky and disappointing at the same time it was intriguing for those reasons… and then we made it back to campus in time for the video festival which aired tonight only to find out that the organizers had forgotten to include my video… :-( oh well…. on the brighter side of today, i found out that i won a merit scholarship for next year… one of three people in my studio. that puts a smile on my face and gives me a little more confidence in the work that i am doing… maybe… anyways, here are a couple images of my ultimately futile attempt to keep my eyes open during the last day of critiques… i’ve decided that drawing on myself is less a result of boredom and more a way to maintain a focus and a concentration… i’ve also noticed that it feels good on my hand… not sure if i ever really payed attention to that before…

oh, and i slept for 18+ hours last night… much needed… now off to lounge for a real celebration!

trying to finish the semester with a successful [in my assessment] series of projects… the student auction is coming this weekend along with the CAA video festival and prior to that final reviews. i was successful in throwing together a quick 2 minute film for the festival and have made a significant [and sleep depriving] run at getting things into the auction… unfortunately i was unable to finish the main project for that, but was given a slight reprieve… which really only means i must get up now and finish it… hopefully i have left enough time. quick shower, shave… food. back to studio. here i go…

alright, i went to a movie while i should have been working… nyah…. i had forgot [well… maybe i was just putting it aside] the woes of the california energy crisis about 5 years back… when rolling black outs were affecting different parts of the state… well watching this new enron documentary brought it all back and just pissed me off to no end… if you go watch it you will really, really be angry with the insensitive, unethical, greedy culture of power brokers… ugh.. i can’t even talk about it. but go watch the movie… it’s interesting.

back to work… sunrise here i come… all by my lonesome here in studio… at least i think i am alone here… [pause to listen….] spooky.

okay… so it’s a quarter to 6am on saturday… just got out of lounge [after going to sleep at 6pm and waking up at 1am to the sounds of SRL] and finished talking to some old friends in SLO…. funny how seemingly distant parts of your life can crop up unexpectedly [tho welcome] at the most random moments… makes one think about the so called random events in life…

so, one of my friends is going back to grad school next year… didn’t see that coming, but it’s great… also found out that some friends are reading my random chicken scratchings here… that’s sort of a surprise… didn’t know that i might be discovered… but i welcome it. it’s a pleasant and comforting thing to know that what i say or think or write resonates with other people… well, i guess i don’t know if it really resonates, but at least it is there for the taking… for the contemplating… for posterity…

i feel like watching a movie… what to watch… what to watch… i wish i had something equivalent to listening to nomeansno… i’m listening to them now… they inspire me to resist stasis… the music, the attitude, the intelligent perspective on society… sometimes those canadians really have a unique and positive outlook…. well, okay,.,, maybe positive is the wrong word, but active… not complacent… 0+2=1… something to contemplate

maybe chunking express… haven’t watched that one yet… have to get ready for tomorrow… enron:the smartest guys in the room…. that will be great… maybe even kung fu hustle… well… we’ll see… goodnight… er, morning [argh, that word!!]

i’ve received a couple gifts in the last couple of days and haven’t taken the time to make note of them. first i received a care package from mom which always makes me smile. thanks mom! next i received an email from a friend in denmark who i haven’t heard from since she had her baby… now she’s sharing her world with curious young eyes for the very first time… it’s always nice to hear from old friends. third i got a nice little gift card for the bookstore down the street from one of the second year students as thanks for helping install some work. so i treated myself to Digital Ground by malcolm mccullough [a book i have had my eye on since before his lecture here a few weeks ago]…anyways… back to work… oh, one more little thing that i haven’t been doing that i said some time back that i would do… here’s a picture of a hand doodle… not very spectacular, but whatever it looks cool in person… kind of streamlines my wrist.

during a crit on one of my projects i was asked why i wanted to make an instruction manual for how to build it… it’s a good question and my answer was something along the lines of… well, initially i thought ‘i come from architecture… that’s what we do, make instruction manuals’ … but what i said was a poorly phrased, if even coherent elaboration of the idea that paul virilio expresses at the end of an interview

“Play at being a critic. Deconstruct the game in order to play with it. Instead of accepting the rules, challenge and modify them. Without the freedom to critique and reconstruct, there is no truly free game: we are addicts and nothing more.”

of course his comments are more about the social implications of technology on interpersonal relationship while i was more concerned with dismantling microphones from radioshack… but the spirit of the argument is the same… if you become complacent and un-critical of the way technology invades your life, insinuates itself into everything you do and are apart of… you will never be in control… you will always be addicted…

i’m not sure if i can fall outside of the grasping fingers of that addiction, but i strive to challenge and modify as much of it as i can…

thinking about ants… there was a scene in Oldboy [maybe this is kind of a SPOILER but i’ll try to keep it general] where Oh Dae-su, the main character, is describing a dream he had - we actually see this - where ants start coming out of his skin and crawling all over him as he is watching tv. Lee Woo-jin, the female lead, tells him that often times very lonely people report halucinating about ants [Oh Dae-su has been deprived of human interaction for the past 15 years], but that she never did… at the same time we see a flashback (?) of her alone on the train crying and looking over at a human-sized ant sitting at the other end of the train car from her… her dream is sad, but humorous while Oh Dae-su’s is horrifying… his reminded me of the ants crawling out of the hand in Un Chien Andalou while hers reminded me of something else i can’t quite put my finger on… something more recent… still surreal…

then i was reading something about open source and the possible solutions to complex social problems being found in a society where information is shared freely and openly… which brought me back to that great book Godel, Escher, Bach which uses ants to discuss the models of programming and complex networks that move toward self-awareness… i can’t put my finger on it, but there is something that doesn’t quite make sense here… maybe something to do with the critical mass [close to mob mentality] of ants and their colony mind being compared to humans and the open source idea… not sure i like that… also the fact that when people are lonely they begin to identify with ants and the colony mind… maybe that’s why there was fear… the uneasyness associated with the ant reference in most movies… fear of a loss of individuality, autonomy… not sure.

anyways, ants are kind of interesting… i think i posted some amplified ant sounds awhile ago… maybe i’ll have to dig that up and listen as i learn to program java…

came across this site today… seems worth looking into. been thinking about janet cardiff lately and her work… also saw this on the bbc site: seems like the swiss have taken things closer to the augmented reality that i’ve been working toward… check out lifeclipper for more…

well… it’s snowing here again… looks like winter isn’t quite over. after walking around outside the night of the graduate degree show [that would have been friday night] discussing the possibility of 6-9 inches of fresh snow the next day, which was forcast, and listening to the locals say that it was too warm for that to happen, i was convinced that it would just be cold… but the snow is sticking… not quite 6-9 inches, but maybe 3… and although it is cold, snow is slightly prettier than just wind and rain… the trees all have that [little seen in socal] duotone outline.. white on top, black on the bottom… it’s really pretty nice, but odd just a couple days after seeing white blossoms, green grass, and people walking around in shorts…

i’ve felt a little melancholy lately… thinking about ‘the future’ … short term, long term… and then, the other day, i got a purple envelope in the mail containing a note and this picture that will be forever renamed ‘melancholy’ in my mind… it’s strange to have something so explicitly un-cheerful bring a smile to one’s face, but it happened…

so… i also saw Oldboy at the landmark theatre in royal oak… if you get a chance to see it, go… it’s amazingly well shot, the soundtrack it excellent… the story is a little hard to swallow, but not so much that it gets in the way of anything… it’s kind of violent [but in a way that feeds off of your imagination] so be fore warned… anyways, it closed last thursday [when i saw it] here and fortunately i got to go… i met my ‘boss’ from the museum and his wife and except for maybe a handful of other people we were the only ones in the theatre… which was kind of strange and familiar… but i guess i just haven’t been to many movies since i’ve been back in school… i can remember going to many movies late at night that were just about to close… empty theatres are kind of comforting… i’ve also been to many movies on opening night and had to sit in the first row and watch through enormous distortion… i guess that’s it for now… going to try to plow through about 6-10 more jitter tutorials tonight and read all about the fulbright program… maybe i can figure out how to get paid to study next time… :-)