~ if you are in the los angeles area at 13:00 today, stop by the angry red planet thesis review. look for it in the ‘lecture trailer’?

~ november posts have been added to the archive.

~ a note to the ladies at sci-arc: everything that you say in the ladies’ trailer next to the mac lab can be can be heard by folks in the mens’ trailer next door. so maybe keep your voice low while conversating and opinionating on a boss that you just saw outside?

~ 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

~ 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.

~ 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!

~ 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?

~ frustration is paying $16,000 a year to attend a graduate school that you can’t enter because they don’t have a certificate of occupancy. to the folks on the east coast who are looking for graduate schools, you won’t find one at sci-arc.

~ i was *forced* to wait 1.5 hours to see ‘x-men’ and *had* to sit in the third row from the screen, but the movie was suprisingly worth it. having been an unabashed collector of marvel comics for the past 16 years, i have seen repeatedly the shameful adaptations into live action: ‘captain america’ (video), ‘nick fury – agent of s.h.i.e.l.d.’ (television miniseries), ‘fantastic four’ (to my knowledge only bootleg copies exist), ‘blade’ (starred wesley snipes). even a true-believer should be ready for the worst. however, apart from an initial impatience with the back story that had to be spelled out to the philistines who hadn’t picked up an ‘x-men’ comic in the past 35 years, i was more than pleased with both the personalities and the accurate relationships in the film. the good examples of the love-triangle between cyclops, jean grey, and wolverine or the personal respect/professional animosity between xavier and magneto both outweigh the tender footed portrayal of storm by the vapid halle berry. i happen to know that technology is capable of better effects than we are given, but logan’s claws looked totally righteous, even if it seems that the x-men never existed without him…

~ does this week’s news [npr.org] unfair to anyone else? if you live in florida, and are actually stupid enough to misunderstand (and stupid enough to admit it) the dangers of smoking, you now get a piece of $145 billion; on the other hand, if you were forced into slave labor during the holocaust, you have to make due with only splitting $4.8 billion…

~ are *still* you looking for the photos of the new home for the southern california institute of architecture? in seven weeks, this building (*link removed) will be converted into the most intense, ‘avant garde’ graduate and under-graduate architectural school in downtown l.a., if not the world….