~ another beautiful los angeles saturday has been spent indoors, this time all we have to show for it is a new folio section. a couple of details are still demanding to be worked out, but that is not really news….

~ this week, we at the angry red planet have determined that anyone who takes a dog to a public place, such as a computer lab in an architectural school, is a jackass.

~ oh, the review is at 1pm, in sci-arc’s large lecture trailer, if you are interested…

~ alright, my first thesis review is in four hours, provided that the school successfully makes the transition to ‘permanent power’ for our trailers this morning. it preparation for this review, i updated the angry red

~ what are the freaking neighbors doing over there?

~ i must say that it takes a real whiner, a real crybaby, a real biznatch, to take one look at his students’ work, then postpone their first review for three weeks. perhaps an instructor like this is afraid that the critics will see that his students have done nothing, and they will attribute it to the fact that he can’t handle instructing ten thesis students and a vertical studio in the same semester. we at the angry red planet wonder why he and his students don’t take the review and ‘get on with their lives’, as he is so adamant about instructing others to do.

~ while you wait for 110^a to arrive at your local zine shop, see what the folks over at from the ground publications [w] have cooked up for volume seven, titled: a furnished room.

~ disconnected thoughts on the definition of a school: people are not resources; people are resourceful. they are resourceful enough to have invented a plethora of tools which have been engineered and refined with the intention of doing nothing but making life and work more simple. they have even devised a system of associating types of tools, such as scanners and table saws, and exchanging them with another tool, money. an extension of these tools is a system of education; such systems have arisen in which a student pays into an institution, and in return, the student a certain of those resources which are best suited for the task that the student wishes to learn. for example, an aspiring architect might enter into a contract in which he or she pays for the use of a wood or metal shop, or perhaps a library…
what is not acceptable is a school taking $40,000 from a student for a more than two years, promising to him or her the tools that they require, and then not delivering the resources which the have essentially purchased.
it is unacceptable for a school to take this money from them, and then when they demand a return on it or of it, to have a faculty member to tell them to ‘stop fucking whining’ or to ‘get on with their lives’.
it is unacceptable to expect one class or generation of a student body to finance, at the expense of a quality environment, an administration’s future reward.
only a fool would declare that a school, like sci-arc, doesn’t need a building or tools or classrooms, because it has ‘los angeles as a resource. if that is the case, and i am expected to go out and find my education someplace else in los angeles, then by sending money to the bungling administration, i am essentially just buying a degree. i wish i had been told this during the orientation; i could have sent the check in two years ago, and saved myself some time and quite a few folks some grief.

~ 110^a, the latest publication from the angry red planet, is almost ready for wide release. the test pressing is on the publisher’s desk this very minute. follow this news closely for updates!

~ it’s not always piss and vinegar; be sure to check the log archive for more flowery, literally and figuratively of los angeles, now with all links painstakingly restored to flawless operation…

~ this morning, i went to school. well, i tried. when i got there, at 10am, i was told: ‘the school’s closed’. me: ‘can i go to the computer lab?’ them: ‘the school’s closed.’ so, i left. now, this is the southern california institute of architecture we are talking about here: the ‘world’s most intense horizontal laboratory of urbanism’ or something like that. intense though they may be, the directors, guys like neil denari and gary paige, just can’t seem to get their shit together and to get this lab of ours (theirs?) permission to be occupied. i wonder what the national architectural accrediting board [w] would think about this?