studied. ate meatball banh mi. went to school. bombed the physics midterm (based on gossip, everyone did). did well on the chemistry midterm. met paulgina and sharwin at benny's. johnny stopped by and we all subwayed it to a busy thursday night at metro. took the l to 3rd and walked home.
plowed into my 5-lb box of quaker oatmeal quick oats. called joe and wished him a happy b-day. studied and went to chem, which was just one giant review session. cut out early and subwayed it down to madison square garden, where I FINALLY SAW GEORGE MICHAEL LIVE! texted jeff throughout the whole thing. loved 'flawless (go to the city)' but was sad he didn't do 'praying for time.' tons of the nyc gay elite was there, as were lots of foreigners who knew all the words to every song. i was sandwiched between two huge, fat long island husbands, one of whom was very chatty and fun and drunk and a former concert security guard who was okay with me being gay and studying during intermission. when i got home jeff called and we chatted for a long time for the first time in a long time. then i studied with 'project runway 5' (i'm happy bad-teeth wesley got booted) and 'big brother 10' (i'm happy boring-ass gay cowboy steven got booted) blasting in the background.
From Glasgow -- where we've been staying at Joe Howe's place near the Necropolis -- to Newcastle, where I play a show at the charming Star and Shadow cinema, run by an 80-year-old Geordie communist who used to take his didactic drama unit round the local mines and factories, raising class consciousness. My show takes the format of a Michael Parkinson interview programme -- Parky and I (he's a showroom dummy) sit on an Ikea sofa chatting about each of the songs I play. Sample dialogue: "This was from my Bataille / De Sade / Mishima period, Michael, I'm sure you went through one too -- around the time of your short-lived Channel 4 show, maybe."
The following day we leave Byker Wall, the award-winning 70s housing scheme where promoter Craig Wilson lives with Krista, his girlfriend (a Finn, Krista is the woman you see strapped naked to a trolley during "Trust Me, I'm A Doctor" in the Man of Letters DVD!) and head down to the Tyne, the Millenium Bridge, and Baltic Mills, the vast Tate-Modern-like arts centre perched on the Gateshead side of the river. The facade is dominated by one of Yoshitomo Nara's sulky toddlers. The shows inside are predominantly Japanese at the moment: Nara and Graf, Mariko Mori.
Mori I think has gone from being a 90s show-off to a 00s spiritual charlatan -- I don't have much time for her pseudo-spiritual dribs and drabs, and the 80 year-old Geordie communist in me can't forgive her for belonging to a rich family who own half of Roppongi. As for Nara, although I've been rather over-exposed to his work -- I've seen variants of this Graf show in Osaka and Berlin already, although it's localised each time -- I continue to find it interesting.
Yes, his little girls are twee as hell -- but they're spooky too. Yes, the puritan dollhouses Graf build around Nara's imagery turn the gallery into a theme park (the local element this time was a huge glitterball built into one of the facades, based on something Nara and Graf found in a local bar). But they give the encounter with Nara's imagery a whole new dimension, one which saves the whole project as far as I'm concerned. Nara and Graf continue to create magic -- contemplative spaces from an episode of Little House on the Prairie set on Mars. It would be a sour old man indeed who didn't find his inner child while negotiating the rickety walkways that connect one ramshackle hut, one disturbingly alien little girl, to another.
After the Nara show Hisae and I explored the relaxation / education centre on the first floor, a place of tactically mismatched chairs, plasma screen TVs showing interviews with the artists, toys and tiny tables for children. It felt really good to be there, and to watch the pedestrian bridge outside winched up and down for the ships to pass through. Sure, the dominant tone of Baltic at the moment is an infantilizing one, and the development smacks of a bid to use culture (friendly, reassuring, childish culture) as an engine for redevelopment. But at the same time, when you see the new electric buses with their organically-shaped windscreens dropping new visitors outside the impressive building, you can't stay cynical.
Talking of cynical, I picked up the latest edition of Modern Painters in the Baltic giftshop. The magazine has got even thinner -- fewer ads -- and sports a new look which might as well be a demonstration that style-mismatching as often leads to visual disaster as the distinguished eclecticism seen amongst the chairs upstairs. Diarist Matthew Collings seems more dyspeptic than ever, somewhat less enchanted by the contemporary art scene than even Brian Sewell.
Under the heading "Evil Zeitgeist", Collings (who's in New York) begins: "Art today is understood as a series of moves that you have to comprehend and absorb, in order to position and advance yourself in a game for a group of people whose creativity has become repellent without their realizing it. That is, if you're an artist. Your whole role in society has become weirdly hateful. What on earth happened? The shows roll by, feeding the art industry, not feeding anything else, just seeming like object versions of shouting, or someone reading familiar, acceptable meanings off a list, or idiotically droning or mumbling in a childish attempt to come across as a mystical genius or someone highly educated. It's very rare to see a contemporary art show that isn't like toys for children."
While I have to say that "childish attempts at mystical genius" and "toys for children" are absolutely perfect descriptions of what was on show at Baltic, I don't share Collings' despair. Sure, we read that kind of blanket statement and recognize something generally true -- there is a lot of toxic jockeying, especially in cities like New York where everything is all about money. But the encounter with art still takes us to places we can't reach any other way.
I'm not sure if the "evil" part of Collings' picture enters because artists are pretending to be childlike themselves, or treating their audiences like children, or whether it's the combination of that with the world of money, or the combination of all this with Modern Painters' decreasing advertising revenue. But being reconnected with your inner child isn't such a bad thing to have happen, in a huge post-industrial building full of tiny wooden huts, after a journey across a pedestrian bridge or via a blobby green electric bus.
I snagged this from someone on my stargate flist (don't cringe, it's cute!)
I about SQUEE'D in RL. No joke. Musical theatre... gotta love it ;-) Made me feel better.... but I'm still bumming around listening to music that probably isn't helping my mood =P
And tonight's show of So You Think You Can Dance made me angry. One of my favourite dancers got voted off. At least Katee is still there.
so not the best day at the office but it was just punctuated by a text message i received sent via livejournal. did you know it could do that? evidently i have that feature turned on. who knew?
what was the text message you ask? it reads: "you're a dirty dick hole. and EVERYONE knows it." now, whether or not this was random spam or just a pissed off person i know, it really doesn't matter seeing as how they sent it anonymously.
let me state this for the record: i have been an asshole in the past. actually, i have been an asshole in the not too distant past. i'm not particularly proud of my actions nor do i fault the offended parties for basically cutting off ties with me. am i sorry? yes. have i tried to make amends? yes. can i say that we'll all be on cordial terms? one can only hope.
i will continue to be cordial to those i've wronged. (and there are quite a few on that list since i've been lashing out for ... how long now??) i will attempt to mend fences where i can. but i know things don't happen overnight. i can only stand up and own up to my actions, realize they're wrong and apologize, and hope for the best. above and beyond that i'm at a loss of what to do...
estelle getty died in the morning, and all the gheys went crazy about it. threw myself into homework and subwayed it to school, where we dove deeper into vectors and modern atomic theory. met mike at pho for dinner. he gave me his ti-83 from high school, which he thought might have been broken, but when i got home i put batteries in it and it turned on! yay! studied and slept on the floor since it was so hot.
it was so hot that i didn't jog. a cute guy sketched me on the subway. i wasn't supposed to have noticed him doing so, but i did, and i didn't say anything about it. learned about modern atomic theory in chem. met johnny and darwin and shane and paulgina and paulgina's friend at pho. darwin came back to my place to watch the saved venus/serena match. he kept falling asleep and farting, so i kicked him out. people keep getting stabbed in williamsburg. got to sleep early.
Hisae and I are in Glasgow, staying with Joe Howe / Germlin. Here's a glimpse of the excellent Jim Lambie installation at GoMA; concrete wedges of vinyl albums and crosshatched floor tape filling the elegant Victorian hall.
We'll try and see the Harry Smith Anthology Remixed show at CCA tomorrow, and maybe Recoat Gallery, before heading off to Newcastle to play the Star Cinema... and maybe see Yoshitomo Nara and Mariko Mori at Baltic Mill. Details of the Momus shows in Newcastle (Wednesday) and Glasgow (Sunday) are on the LastFM Momus events page.
Here, from the NYLVI blog, is a video of King Solomon's Song and Mine and Violets from my Berlin show two nights ago.
Of course, anyone who reads my end of year music round up knew that the Burial album was stunning well before the Mercury nominations came out today. I'm very pleased Elbow got a nod too, as it's probably my favourite album of 2008 so far. Yes, I like it even more than the Basshunter album.
On Friday I went to visit a Stroke Club - a place where survivors of stroke get together and socialise. It was an odd experience. Everyone there was in good spirits, but it really made me realise how cruel stroke is. In one second your entire existence can be irrevocably worsened without any warning whatsoever. There were people there who couldn't walk, people who couldn't speak, people who found it impossible to even write a word on a piece of paper. The thing that really got to me was that one of them, a Scottish man in his 60s who was confined to a wheelchair, had some remarkable stories to tell about his life. Outlandish tales of how he dated twin girls at the same time with neither realising, or how he met his wife in a public toilet. There is a tendency, I suppose, to look at people who are struck down by disease as different; alien. I'm not like them and it won't happen to me. It's uncomfortable to be confronted with the fact that there is nothing different about them at all, and there is every chance it could happen to you. Uncomfortable, but potentially inspiring in that every time you are faced with that niggling doubt of whether you should do this or do that, you can think of the fact that one day you may be lucky to be able to do much of anything and think, 'fuck it'.
I had a brilliant weekend, and met a lovely boy. We spent the whole of Sunday together and did civilised things like outdoor coffee, a farm visit and a long walk. Then we got drunk. Damien is staying with Jody for the next few days as, living with 3 other people, I thought two weeks on my sofa was a bit excessive. It has been good having him around. Monica is coming this weekend and, since Damien should still be here and the boy is also Scottish and potentially coming out with us, it will be a Scottish FEST. Good times.
The Vice Guide to North Korea is a 14-episode account -- made at some risk to the journalists -- of a heavily-guarded journey through North Korea. I found it fascinating, but I did notice some dubious ideology creeping in, especially in Episode 12, A Schoolchildren's Palace, billed as "meeting the country's creepily over-talented future generation".
Here Shane Smith edged towards that journalistic-political cliché I call the "we don't like how they treat their women / children" school. Basically, the idea behind this move is that in any given culture, men are responsible for the ideology, and women and children are helpless victims and hostages. The implication is that, although the men are a lost cause, the women and children could be captured and brought to some other culture, where they'd be much happier.
This "much happier", in Smith's account of North Korean children, involves being a lot less motivated and talented. "One of the most fun-slash-sad times," Smith says in Episode 12, "was to see the best-of-the-best school in Pyongyang." After showing some child prodigies playing musical instruments larger than themselves, Smith decides that "it's so sad because these great kids are learning and learning for the state". But what's wrong with learning -- to exceptionally high standards -- for the state, and at the expense of the state? Are these children really to be pitied? Mightn't they be -- as well as "great kids" -- fervently ideological admirers of Kim Jong Il, believers in North Korea's superiority over South Korea, and convinced that their "creepy talents" could only have been advanced so far in the particular system they were born into?
And mightn't the show they're preparing for -- a show in a land of shows, some of the most spectacular in the world -- be the intense focus of their lives, and a source of enormous pride for them?
I'm certainly not claiming the North Korean system isn't deeply problematical, but I wonder why we insist on the universal innocence of women and children when we look at cultures which are very different from our own? And I wonder whether the implied transferability of these women and children to our own system (where they'd be "healthy and free", of course) isn't a relic of the unpleasant imperial practices of rape, pillage and plunder: the strategy of killing all the men in a conquered zone and capturing all the women and children.
ate curry chicken banh mi and then met johnny and hilary in union square to see the film version of 'mamma sia!' it was so happy and it made me smile and i loved its version of 'gimme! gimme! gimme! (a man after midnight).' walked to josh's where he and his joe and margherita were watching the first 'x-men' movie. subwayed it to williamsburg to the free bbq at metro. darwin and shane eventually came (they'd flown back earlier in the day) and we talked about their trip and how things were here and i ended up eating two free burgers and two free hot dogs. went back to darwin's to see his pics and then took the jmz home to do homework and study. paulgina got back late from his trip to london and paris and called on his cabride home from the airport to catch up. everyone's back in town.
For some reason -- partly because they're readers of this blog -- I've got friendly, over the last couple of years, with a bunch of students at UDK, the Berlin art college, and specifically from the Art in Context course there. This weekend the UDK opened its doors for its annual Rundgang, a degree show or "walkabout" so vast that one visitor we saw had opted to do it on rollerskates.
There was certainly enough on display to eat up, delightfully, an entire afternoon. Building after building, studio after studio, floor after floor was filled with new student art -- plus the obligatory paint-spattered stools, niched classical friezes with broken fingers, orange gaffertape signage, filthy fridges filled with beer, and other signifiers of eternal art school bohemia.
It almost felt like a biennial, but with a vaster range between the awful and the excellent.
Aus Dem Context, the Art in Context room, was undoubtedly the best thing in the whole school -- and I don't just say that because it's my friends' department! In contrast to the stale rooms of paintings and sculpture elsewhere, Art in Context's multi-disciplinary, meta-ish, museum-like, curatorial approach felt much better in tune with what's happening in the wider art world, as well as being much better connected with society.
There were displays devoted to "the flea as metaphor", Relational Aesthetics tables where "art advisors" guided aspiring artists through the likely pitfalls of their chosen careers, models of the monkey houses at Berlin Zoo, a section about experimental chairs, and a corner by Viola Thiele -- one half of a band called Mosh Mosh -- about the crossover between art and pop music which included big panels about Miss Le Bomb, David Bowie, Sun Ra and Goodiepal. This excited me because I've just written a song called "Goodiepal". Thiele spelled his name wrong in her presentation ("Goodypal"), but redeemed herself by offering this excellent picture of the reclusive Danish electronic music genius:
I think my favourite piece was a chart of elephant representations by Uli Westphal, Elephas Anthropogenus, a tree diagram showing the way humans have classified and represented elephants over the centuries. When we see such representations in museums, it's usually the elephant which is seen to evolve over the millenia, from mammoths to today's Indian and African species. In Uli's diagram (from her diploma Vom Elpendier zum Olifaunt) it's our own perceptions which change, from the ludicrously phantasmagorical to the banal.
It's also a piece about drawing, about hermeneutics, about the style of didactic design, and about a certain German pedagogy. I can't help relating it to my Click Opera piece The blind gaijin and the Japanese elephant, which was also about how we know what we claim to know, and how we draw what we see.
got up early. walked over the williamsburg bridge to feed and pet my wilde black pussy and picked up $2.50 mapo tofu on the way. studied and napped at darwin's. didn't eat with hilly jane and johnny at epistrophy, but johnny came over to watch 'project runway' before leaving tired so we didn't go out. i studied for my midterms next week.
There's a mathematics of desire, and both men and women are intuitively aware of the numbers. Take the so-called "hourglass figure", for instance. The formula is that you divide waist circumference by hip circumference. The "hourglass" ratio is around 0.7, which means that the waist is about 70% of the girth of the hips below it. To make a perfect "hourglass", the breasts should then match the hip width. That shape is "curvy" and "feminine", but only 8% of women actually have it.
Research into the hourglass figure has thrown some curveballs: women with large breasts and narrow waists have higher hormone levels, the BBC reported in 2004, and are more likely to get pregnant. Then some research in 2007 seemed to find that curvier women are smarter and live longer than other women.
Scientists also looked at when and where the preference for the hourglass figure emerges, and found that it's not shared outside Western cultures (developing cultures prefer fatter women, a sign of nutritional health) or amongst pre-pubescents. Whereas 10 and 11 year-olds of both sexes express a preference for hourglass-shaped women, 5 or 6 year-olds prefer thin figures "which probably closely mirror their own shape", according to one Queensland University study.
If you have an hour or so to waste (I almost wrote "waist"), Long Dong's collection of Akira Gomi's taxonomic photos of naked women, Chinese and American, makes for fascinating viewing. We instantly know how we feel about each image, and the cues are geometric and mathematical ones, a matter of shapes, dimensions and ratios.
Those pictures are still and inexpressive, though -- a whole different set of "semantic angles" emerge when a body goes into motion. The pictures above are from a yoga video by eccentric Japanese vlogger Naganonoteiou. What interests me here is how some of the poses she strikes -- specifically the angles her legs are held in -- are "normal", others become "lightly erotic", others again way too blatant and over-the-top (reading a book with her feet, bent over backwards) and blow the appeal. This suggests that my brain assigns specific sexual semantics to small differences of posture; that there's a "geometry of sex".
I reject the cultural determinism of the Queensland study, though; I don't think the age you are or the culture you come from determines how you respond to this sexual geometry. Despite being a Western male, for instance, I find little appeal in the classic Sophia Loren hourglass figure -- this may be because of some innate horror of reproduction, or it may be because of strong positive associations with less curvy Asian women. Osyama from the Tokyo Bopper store (whose staff members are celebrated daily on the Merry Daily blog) represents my current ideal figure; the particular geometric relationship that concerns me, when I see pictures of her, isn't her waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), but speculation on whether her super-thin legs really do stay parallel all the way up to the top.
Then again, tastes change; I used to prefer Yama-Sama.
got up late. met johnny and nate and hilary at union square to see 'the dork night' at 4:15pm. i was kinda confused? and bored? but yeah, it was still good? not your typical superhero movie; i wanted more shit to blow up and stuff at every other turn. met josh and margherita and niki at via della pace where we ate yummy but expensive food. then we walked to tom & jerry's and i drank vodka pineapples and more people kept coming to join our group and i got nervous cuz some of them were cute so i left. got home and watched a zillion youtube clips of amy sedaris on letterman and then passed out at 5am.
I decided to do a little slideshow for my Post-Materialist slot in the Times this week -- basically, these are all the chairs I photographed this year, crammed into a short YouTube video with a somewhat rushed commentary.
Judging by the comments, while some found 5000 Years of Chairs in 5 Minutes "very interesting", others were mystified. "What’s the point?" demanded Steve, apparently some kind of academic, "If I received this presentation from a student, I would fail him/her." Jared's jab was more sly: "The anticipation of a conclusion or insightful comment kept me on the edge of my seat the whole time!"
I figured people wouldn't want a ton of editorializing in a little slideshow of chairs, but for the record here's the thinking behind the piece.
1. Things are just as valid and interesting when they're in use out in the world as they are when they're new and standing in a showroom, and possibly more so.
2. This is what Rem Koolhaas called (in a recent edition of Domus D'Autore) "post-occupancy design" -- the stuff that happens to design after it's left the designer's workshop (and architecture after it's left the studio) is the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn't see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive.
3. You don't have to buy stuff to be smitten with it -- public furniture that we just see on our travels (and maybe photograph) is worth writing about too. That's one of the things The Post-Materialist is all about.
4. There's also the idea that things come full circle: the slideshow takes us from paleolithic stone benches on the island of Orkney to modern concrete benches in the same place. There's a "before industrial design" and an "after industrial design", and they look remarkably similar. That's something I think Jan Lindenberg's Sweatshop 2.0 project was about -- coming up with chair design that deconstructs the distinction between amateur and professional, between the past and the present, between new and secondhand... and between shelves and chairs!
5. One word: recycle!
Finally, though, the slideshow is a little tribute to the dizzying diversity of forms out there, and about the kind of beauty -- or ugliness, or oddness -- that compels you to turn your camera on an inanimate object. Do I get to graduate from your course now, Steve, whatever the hell it is?
called my mommy and wished her a happy anniversary. stressed out about all my homework but dove into it during classes. learned about vectors. realized i love everything on modular. was happy about my new beach towel from ming. got postcards from darwin and harold. was emailed by barkie about hercules & love affair. drank wine at home while eating my oatmeal concoction and watching 'batman forever' and 'batman & robin.'
Two things Click Opera is always banging on about -- how money doesn't equal happiness, and how life in the Anglosphere sucks (largely because money doesn't equal happiness) -- were underlined this week by two reports about the quality of life in Britain and America. First, on Wednesday, U-Switch released their European Quality of Life Index, a survey of life in ten European countries ranking them according to 19 variables, including income, tax, the cost of essential goods and services, and the weather. Despite having the highest household incomes in Europe, Britain and Ireland were ranked lowest for quality of life, at 9 and 10 respectively. France and Spain came highest.
Life in Europe's two English-speaking countries -- which both saw huge market-driven economic booms over the last decade -- was rendered miserable not just by poor weather (Britain gets 17% less sunshine than the European average) but by diesel prices 18% above average, Europe's second-highest unleaded fuel prices and its third highest gas (49% higher than the European average) and electricity prices, as well as by Europe's highest food and property prices. So although British families earned £35,730 (more than £10,000 above the European average of £25,404) per household per year, high prices ended up putting them way behind the lower-earners on the continent in terms of quality of life. Winning the money race, it seems, isn't at all the same thing as winning at life.
Of course, how you spend your money is key. Britain spends less on health and education than its European neighbours; just 8.1% of British GDP goes on health, compared with over 10% in France and Germany. As a result, Britain has only 2.5 doctors per 1000 residents, compared with 3.4 in France and 3.5 in Germany. As for education, Britain puts 5.5% of GDP towards that; the Danes, for instance, spend 8.6%. British people retire later than anyone else in Europe and get fewer holidays (just 28 days a year, compared with Spain's 36). They live shorter lives -- life expectancy in the UK is 78.9 years, compared with 80.9 in France and 80.7 in Spain.
So there it is. Britain and Ireland have the highest average incomes in Europe, but come bottom in terms of quality of life. British households earn £35,730 but are miserable. Spanish households earn on average just £16,800 a year, but low taxation and cheaper prices make that money go a lot further, and other factors -- sunshine and a whole different approach to priorities, let's call it l'art de vivre -- make life much better in the Latin countries. "Clearly, when it comes to the good life, income is less important than free time, sunshine and cheap commodities," concluded one report of the findings.
America also scored poorly this week, this time in a report entitled The Measure of America funded by Oxfam America, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Conrad Hilton Foundation. In a piece entitled US slips down development index, the BBC summarised the report: "Americans live shorter lives than citizens of almost every other developed nation... the US ranked 42nd in the world for life expectancy despite spending more on health care per person than any other country." The US has a life expectancy of 78 (the same as Britain's), but vast inequality between its richest and poorest groups. It has more children (15%) living in poverty than any other advanced nation, and the most people in prison. One in four Americans are now officially obese. They also underperform educationally: "25% of 15-year-old students performed at or below the lowest level in an international maths test -- worse than Canada, France, Germany and Japan".
"Some Americans are living anywhere from 30 to 50 years behind others when it comes to issues we all care about: health, education and standard of living," wrote Sarah Burd-Sharps, the report's author. Asian-American males have the best quality of life and black Americans the lowest. The place with the highest human development index in the US is Manhattan, the place with the lowest is Mississippi -- which also happens to be the state with the highest obesity levels.
The exact relationship of money to the problem is ambiguous. For American website ZDNet Healthcare "the bottom line is that in the U.S. your lifespan is closely correlated with your bank balance". For UK newspaper The Independent, "despite an almost cult-like devotion to the belief that unfettered free enterprise is the best way to lift Americans out of poverty, the report points to a rigged system that does little to lessen inequalities".
What the newspaper reports didn't go into is the wider question of how philosophy has shaped these results -- specifically the philosophy underpinning Anglo-Saxon capitalism. For that, you need to turn to Tristram Hunt's BBC Radio 3 Sunday Feature about Adam Smith, Ideas -- The British Version: The Free Market. Standing in front of Bank station and the Bank of England, Hunt describes "a landscape of commerce and enterprise -- high end restaurants, chic retail boutiques, corporate HQs, and the sense of money at work. What this landscape is about is the free market.... The wheels of commerce are at work; a de-regulated process of exchange and contract that's creating wealth all around me." It's also creating poverty, and not just the financial kind.
jogged. rocked my german lesbo chic summer '08 look to the max. subwayed it to feed my wilde blacke pussy and picked up a $3.50 (!) mapo-tofu-and-soda combo at the chinese hole-in-the-wall place on the way. $3.50!!!! went to school and laughed at how the chem sub kept pronouncing 'says' ('saeees') and 'metal' ('meh-tuhl'). met ming and roger back at my house to watch the premiere of 'project runway 5' and expensed domino's 7-7-7 pizza deal on roger's work's account. we also watched 'house hunters international' in buenos aires and drank beer and then they left. i fast forwarded all the late night talk shows straight to the interviews while doing massive amounts of homework.
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pass through. Sure, the dominant tone of Baltic at the moment is an infantilizing one, and the development smacks of a bid to use culture (friendly, reassuring, childish culture) as an engine for redevelopment. But at the same time, when you see the new electric buses with their organically-shaped windscreens dropping new visitors outside the impressive building, you can't stay cynical.
numb
depressed
anxious
For some reason -- partly because they're readers of this blog -- I've got friendly, over the last couple of years, with a bunch of students at 
Scientists also looked at when and where the preference for the hourglass figure emerges, and found that it's not shared outside Western cultures (developing cultures 
I reject the cultural determinism of the Queensland study, though; I don't think the age you are or the culture you come from determines how you respond to this sexual geometry. Despite being a Western male, for instance, I find little appeal in the classic Sophia Loren hourglass figure -- this may be because of some innate horror of reproduction, or it may be because of strong positive associations with less curvy Asian women. Osyama from the Tokyo Bopper store (whose staff members are celebrated daily on the 
2. This is what Rem Koolhaas called (in a recent edition of Domus D'Autore) "post-occupancy design" -- the stuff that happens to design after it's left the designer's workshop (and architecture after it's left the studio) is the real test of its quality and character. Occupancy and use shouldn't see the designer and the architect melting away. They should stick around, take notes, and take photos. The processes of time and decay can be beautiful. The way people use stuff and adapt it can be instructive.
