Kansas City Design Week -- part 1

A view from my hotel window.

Well, first I'd like to extend an apology to anyone who at previous times has enjoyed reading my musings or looking through the pictures on my blog. I have been writing a ton about a ton of things, but unfortunately, it has not been on this blog.

In recent days I have written ~20 pages of my book, two short stories, drunk roughly my body weight in cinnamon tea, read a number of amazing books, and -- (and here we come to the point of this post) -- volunteered to cover a few events of Kansas City Design Week for This Big City blog.

Mycenaean Holiday inspirations: Fun times were had by all

First things first; I have a design up on Threadless to be scored for the "Dysfunctional Families" design challenge. Rather mysteriously I decided the thing to do would be to make a Greek mythology joke -- not, I would argue, a particularly obscure one, but still, probably less accessible overall than a joke about, say, the Kardashians. Whatever.

Here is my design! And here is a link where you can go give it a nice score on Threadless! (You need a Threadless account to vote.)

Now, let me justify this business.

My roommate took a "Women in the Ancient World" or somesuch class when we were juniors or seniors, and she would come home positively crowing about the murders of Medea or Clytemnestra (not that we have macabre senses of humor or anything.) I always particularly enjoyed seeing Agamemnon get his comeuppance, because he always seemed particularly like an ass (particularly after that television miniseries we watched in high school World Lit with Rufus Sewell as Agamemnon, cough). Not only that, there were enough murders in that story to make a truly ridiculous graphic. (Agamemnon kills his daughter Iphigenia in a ritual sacrifice for favorable winds when he's taking his army to attack Troy; his wife, Clytemnestra, avenges her daughter by strangling/stabbing him in the bath; and finally, their son, Orestes, kills her to pay back his father's death.)

The idea of having all four pagan folk together murdering each other in a chain reaction, decked out in anachronistic holiday swag (though you'll notice that the tree has a lightning bolt on top and dolphins and bulls hung from the branches) struck me as quite humorous.

The nice thing about pulling a story from a culture with a strong tradition of graphic representation is that it makes deciding how to draw it much simpler. I wanted to mimic the sort of figures one sees drawn on large Greek vessels, of which the Boston MFA has a large and admirable (if occasionally risque) collection.

I started poking around in their online archives for ideas. (I used links to their websites for the images, so hopefully they don't break in the near future. :P) (Whoops -- editorial note -- the links on the MFA items lead back to the slideshow these pieces are found in, not the specific piece. It's not a very long slideshow though so you should be able to find them.)

This one is a bowl for mixing wine and water from Athens (called a bell krater, I think?), ca. 470 B.C. The figures represented are Diana and Achteon; the myth goes that he saw her bathing, so she turned him into a stag to be ripped apart by his own dogs. I more or less copied her dress for Iphigenia (minus the skin of a -- cat? -- around her neck.) Click through on this link to look at a bigger picture of Diana's hands -- they're very gracefully shaped, and I tried (and perhaps failed) to do justice to that in my design.

the 1840s fashionista

and a host (a small host) of other things vaguely to do with textiles and style.

So! Of late the Gochenour household (okay fine just this resident of the Gochenour household) has been All About watching Movies! In the last five days I've seen:

• Pride and Prejudice (the 2005 version with Kiera Knightley -- seen the 5 hour BBC one already)
• The Princess Bride ("You keep using that word. . . I do not think it means what you think it means. . .")
• Sleeping Beauty (the 1959 Disney version, which I saw last as a 12-year-old! yeah, it's REALLY BAD)
• Love in the Afternoon (in the genre of "Audrey Hepburn goes to Paris and falls in love with a much older man" movies, it's right up there)
• Kirikou et la sorcière (haven't formed an opinion as yet? French children's movies are not so much something I'm familiar with)
  

Those were all watched on my trusty Dell! (which, side note, I have just replaced! with an Asus. But it still works, so I am currently typing on the Dell.) BUT ALSO. My mom and I actually went to see a movie in a theater! The Ruth Sokolof Theater north of Old Market (which neighborhood is apparently called "NoDo," short for "North Downtown," by some foolish folks who apparently don't realize how moronic that sounds), to be precise. What did we see? Jane Eyre, the new remake staring Mia Wasikowska (Alice from Alice in Wonderland and one of the kids in The Kids Are Alright) and Michael Fassbender (known for having a name that sounds like it would a great brand for electric guitars or amplifiers. what. oops.)

I wore the new copper cuff bracelet I bought in the Souk in the Old Market, so I suppose I was in a stylish frame of mind. Or stylishly observant state of mind? In any case, I was in the mood to notice details.

this is what I'm doing

More or less. (I just typed "more of less," and I think it was a Freudian slip.)

All of these take direct inspiration from other pieces that I've found on the internet. . .

I spend a lot of time cursing AutoCAD and 3DS Max.

Finding the way

Finally, I have submitted my second Threadless design:

Finding the way.

The timing is somewhat inconvenient, as I will be gone without internet access for the next three days and unable to beleaguer all and sundry to go vote on it. However, I shall hope for the best and ask those who are kindly inclined toward me to check on the Threadless website again tomorrow.

Thanks muchly. . .

organizing my desktop/brain for some serious sketching

One lesson I forgot from yesterday: Do not believe you will be able to fry onions and a breaded fish fillet in the same pan and have both be tasty. It's awkward; the onions end up burnt and the fish fillet ends up soggy.

Went to a meeting thing for the organization which is funding my internship in Madrid, PromoMadrid. The meeting was entirely in Spanish; I would say I understood about half of it, and could have understood more had people spoken a bit more slowly. We were supposed to talk about our opinions and experiences in the PromoMadrid program. Most people said they were happy to work with MIT (please, shiny diploma, please help me convince people that I am good to work with) and that three months maybe wasn't long enough. (Hear, hear!)

now that my supply of underwear has been secured

i.e. I did laundry (successfully!) for the first time in the tiny washing machine in the kitchen. After examining the settings, I used "cashmere," because it had the lowest temperature and lowest spin rate. I need to buy some clothespins, though. . . I have the drying rack in my room, but I suspect them would dry more quickly on the line outside my window. (This actually happened last Thursday, but whatever.)

Last night I went on a small adventure to. . . ahem. . . McDonald's. I rationalized it to myself by saying that I was celebrating July 4 a few days late. I was distracted by a large grocery store next door to the golden arches -- Carrefour's. I think I am starting to map my neighborhood in supermarkets. This one had chicken (yay!) and tuna canned in water (yay!) but still no vanilla yogurt (boo!). (Caprabo's, the small grocery store closest to me, basically just stocks ten different kinds of ham and tuna canned in three kinds of oil -- olivia (olive), girasol (sunflower), and unspecified.) (Nowhere yet have I found vanilla yogurt. A multitude of fruit flavors, yes. Plantain flavor, yes. Coconut flavor, yes. Vanilla? No. I bought plain yogurt "con azucar" (with sugar). It is mediocre but filling.)

I purchased a hamburger Happy Meal with fries and a minisundae (? that's a new one. I don't think they include dessert in the U.S.) It came with two toys (intentional? maybe not.) The minisundae was okay, except for the MASHED BANANAS at the bottom. FOUL. I think the full-on joy of McDonald's I experienced last summer was seriously mitigated by the fact that I have been cooking food very similar to what I would eat in the U.S. for the last week. The main difference is a ready supply of mini-croissants at the grocery store. . . and the ham problem.

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Two things I have not really addressed yet in my blog are a) work and b) language issues.

um erk

Not sure precisely what's going to get a really positive reaction yet, but it's not any of this*.

Still in the deep and awkward throes of chair design.

* In case it's not clear, these are the four sorta interchangeable chairs I spent the last two days coming up with. :P

inserting page breaks

I feel like such a grown-up blogger, inserting page breaks and all.

Still trying to improve the readability of this blog. . .logistically if not content-wise.

I guess part of my problem is that some of the blogs I enjoy reading (such as this one) are not really in compliance with all the recommendations that are out there for blog design. What this blog has that other blogs don't is a compelling story of someone's life and what they are learning about being a human being in real time. (In the aforementioned blog, it helps that she is learning about life as an exchange student in New Delhi. Man, it would be cool to go to India. Or anywhere. Moving on.) That said, it's a little hard to translate from "what would I enjoy reading" to "what would other people enjoy reading."

ze mouse & ze spirits

I met with my thesis adviser on Wednesday. After telling her a little bit about my life right now, she told me this: When a mouse is confronted by a cat, it desperately wants to either run away or attack the cat. These are the only two options that make sense. However, the urge to do both is so powerful that instead of doing either, the mouse sits down and washes its face.

My thesis adviser is a very wise person.

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So yesterday I did exactly three.5 productive things:

I wrote three pages for a paper and finished preparing figures for said paper

(0.5 item) I turned in the paper

I reserved my cap and gown for graduation (HOLY SHIT I'M GRADUATING AAAAAH)

I embarked on my quest for movie enrichment, starting with Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away.

progress toward sanity

Well, that might be a bit of an optimistic overstatement, but let's just keep hoping for now.

It is 80 degrees outside, and it it nearly 10 PM. I am awed.

Two things:

One. I discovered the swiss miss design blog this weekend. I'm pretty far behind the curve for awesome design blogs, but it pretty much rocks my socks off.

Two. I have this one friend. He is kind of an ass. Sometimes I read things he posts on my (and other people's) Facebook wall and I think, How do ass genes like his get perpetuated in the general population? You would think that such genes would be bad for survival, since they encourage people to punch you in the face and do other things to you that have poor effects on your health.

Then I listen to the recordings he has posted of himself playing guitar and I think, Ah. Yes. This is how.

Moral of story: The arts were invented by jerkwads who otherwise could not reproduce. (Maybe.)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has also has really good taste in music. Woot.

thoughts of the week

In all honesty, this week hasn't brought too many thoughts besides the following: "UNNNNNNNGGGGHGHH AARRRRRRGGGGHHHH PANIC" and "I'm tired. enh. Why am I so tired. . . ? The fact that I am tired worries me."

But. . .

But this weekend. . . yesterday and today I wore a skirt or shorts; it was 70 degrees Fahrenheit and pretty damn gorgeous. Life seems better, even though nothing has changed. (I also took an 8.8 mile walk yesterday, which was the turning point between "I feel miserable" to "gee, I feel pretty good.") I have already walked four or five miles today, and I am planning on going out again.

Now I smell like sweat. This should be horrible. I should be embarrassed. But I realized that I smell different in warm weather than in cold weather, and I have not smelled like warm-weather sweat for seven months. It is novel, in fact. [EDIT: I forgot this is what I smell like when I burn, even slightly. Ain't life bizarre?]

[Edit #2: Walked a total of 24 miles this weekend. Boo-yah me. The longest portion walked consecutively of that -- 9.3 miles -- is pictured above. . . man I love Boston.]

Thanks to my blog binge on swissmiss this weekend, I found a number of things to think about, which perhaps will follow in a different blog post.

But from the week, sort of:

life as a space cadet

Shades of last term: Wandering the Internet, the sky dark through the hints of glass on the fourth floor in the main buildings, the windows and skylights reflecting the light of monitors and fluorescent fixtures back down on the startling number of students who are far from their beds at 1:00 AM on a Monday morning.

But they are doing their own work, and I am merely printing a poster for the Shakespeare Ensemble (which I am not technically involved in anymore, but given that 50% of Fenway still is, I decided to be friendly.) There is something weirdly liberating about being out at 1 AM when you don't have to be, as opposed to being out at 1 AM because you have work left to do. Last term I pretty much felt. . . trapped, every time I walked into studio. Staying up into the small hours of the night working is made that much more desolate when you are a mile from home.

argh

v. tired.

Still have a metric crapton of Japanese homework to do tonight, of course.

Spent the last 1.5 hours working on my mockup of the Gondoliers poster. It actually looks something like what I imagined. I am pleased. It needs a lot of cleanup, of course. And a lot of thought about what would go on the t-shirts. . .

Handed in a "version" of my thesis proposal. Ugh. Sometimes I am just . . . a rat. A stinky rat.

pottery land

Life is tiring right now.

I am trying to pound out the last bit of my revised thesis proposal -- surprise, the methodology section! (Also an extra paragraph on heating systems.) I'm definitely skipping 7.02 lecture.

I found this clever blod by way of an architecture friend: 1 design per day. She preferred the "cat hammock coffee table," but the entry that keep coming back to is this one, about kitchenware. I feel ambivalent about the design presented but excited about the possibilities (which maybe could be applied in pottery?) The home page of the designer is here. Interesting duck. I am a little put off by the sex toys (one appears to be attached to a mitten), but interested in the furniture and household objects.

just quick. . .

before I transition back into work, i.e. Japanese vocabulary. (偉い/えらい means "great, superior, distinguished." continuing from there. . .)

Things that are awesome: (These were all found by way of the Firefox add-on Stumble. If you want to see your productivity take a nose dive for a week until you've seen so many art-game-history-literature-random-gorgeous-application websites you're satiated and nauseated, add this. I kind of prefer following the links from people's blogs, because there is only a finite number of them.)

30 Fashion Illustrators. Fashion illustration is a whole different way of approaching the design and composition of drawings, one that I would love to learn.

Calligraphic art by Margaret Shepherd. These four pieces are unquestionably, spectacularly BRILLIANT. The rest of this site -- Omniglot -- is pretty awesome too; I found it in high school and spent hours cruising through alphabets from around the world. The Roman alphabet serves its purpose, but it sure hasn't got the market cornered on sheer gracefulness of form.

Textures library. This site has got a lot of the textures I use the most in Photoshop type work -- wood, stone, water, and fabric -- as well as some new (to me) ones that could be fun to play with -- such as doors. Yes, doors.

yes, three posts in one day is a bit much

But I actually wrote MOST of this post a couple days ago, so it's okay. Really.

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It turns out this whole site is worth visiting, not just for giant bunnies: VULGARE > Landscape. Landscape architecture favorites, sort of.

Mammoth. This feels like a blog that I need to get to know better before judging. It deals with architecture -- theoretical, infrastructural, fictional. It also looks to contain a lot on the marriage of architecture and building technology, a subject on which I am shamefully ignorant given my concentration. (I learned some of the technology, and I learned some of the design, but I never skilfully incorporated the two. . . ) I am a bit skeptical, but I feel that I could stand to learn a lot. . .

Hipster Puppies, also known as PUPSTERS! The only problem is that as I look at the pictures, I keep saying to myself, "But this is clearly a NICE puppy! This puppy would never say that!"

I first discovered this website when I was a senior in high school:

glum today.

Probably due to a poor choice of reading material upon awakening: Pictures for Sad Children.

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This is cool, though:

I wonder if I could make something this awesome in pottery class. . .