it is almost midnight here on the east coast. i am listening to rainer maria's new disk and happily digging what i hear. saw them a couple of weeks ago and never really knew what they were about. listened to a couple of their earlier disks this week, but not so happy with them as i am with this one.

school has been crazy. last week and this past week were pretty intense, but i still dig it. doing lots of work that i am happy with and it's nice to lose yourself inside something that is bigger then you.

things that i worked on the past couple of weeks:

book class:
took five items and renamed them to be something else. i took five items from my purse and the entire book into a small black purse. it turned out way better then i expected. last week we had to write a couple of paragraphs and then do 10 type explorations of it. next week we will turn a 16 page book based on the type explorations.

design history:
steven heller is taking a break and we have a new teacher. he is much more grounded in dates and timelines, but still just as good. saw many amazing pieces. plus, he is so fun to listen too. he has an amazing british accent.

box class:
we have one big assignment to work on over the next two months. the only requirement is that it centers around the box. i am taking cigar boxes and other boxes and making into instruments (a thumb piano, guiatar and drums). then i am going to play/record them and make it into a small ep cd which i will package also. the past weeks we had a visit from david spade who is kate spade's husband. extremely cool talk. has an amazing view of what a company can do and brand as it's own. (ie-they support various indie films and then send them around to film festivals and say it is branding. also do really cool limited edition books.) also working on mounting a show of all the free things that we packaged.

milton's class:
we were supposed to make something that was a source of light. amazing to see what everyone brought in. from lights to really conceptual pieces. i did a fluorence light that i made light by static electricity. the entire point of the assignment was to see how we deal with ambiguity. good lesson. he also talked about how people get stuck at different points in the creative process and made us think about where we get hung up. this past week we were supposed to redesign a cd by finding an object or artist that reminded us of the music and the use the object or artist to influence the look of the cd. interesting a learning experiance.

cd class:
we turned in our cd for the final critic. mine went over pretty well. i have reshoot two photos and then redo a little bit of the inside. i stayed up to 7am in the morning getting it done. i have never worked so hard or paid so much attention to one project in my life. it was hard, but i love the way it turned out. my biggest problem was my type but after much work, i made something beautiful. learned a lot about type in this project. i can see my typography getting better. nice.

web class:
we are still working on our website. we did frames two weeks ago. i thought i wasn't going to get it, but it came pretty easily to me. i think that i am beginning to get dreamweaver. it is fun to work in web, but it isn't my favorite. it is a little too tiring.

had a wonderful studio visit last week. we went to louise fili's office. her work is wonderful and so inspiring. she had great advice and funny stories. i love the way she handles type and made me feel so excited about what i can do with type by seeing what she had done. need to find some old type specimen books.


my assignments this week:
book: we are doing more book binding.
box: showing roughs for our project.
milton: coming up with a magazine and doing the cover
cd: coming in with roughs for our next project. we are redesigning the same cd that we just did, but we are going to do a limited edition package or promo package. the sky is the limit.
web: present our web pages.


my non school life:
went to a bar on thursday night to see the red sox vs. the yankees. i was rooting for the red sox cuz being a cubs fan i always have to root for the underdog. the bar was packed with yuppy yahoo types. i forgot about those people since starting school. don't have much oppertunity to run into them now. we took over a portion of the bar and forced them out. the yankees won. super strange to be in the middle of all these estatic, yelling people and not feel a thing. just fun to watch them act crazy.

friday night i met up with fred. he work for a small advertising company so we talked about design and writing, marketing and advertising and chicago. good night. fred now has a beard. he looks like a cute little bear.

saturday i met up with steve to go over the box instrument project. he will record and play on the cd with me. i am excited. steve approaches things in a much more structured and techincal way then me which is good. he knows way too much about sound waves and science and other important things. we are a good match for this project. he is confident that we can come up with some good songs. i sure hope so.

at night, mr. dan rivkin was in town. we had some drinks and he told me about the girl, ohio and his job. he is freelancing for the major league baseball website. fun to hear how he puts up various teams websites in his underware. then we went and met up with more people from northwestern. we head up to mid-town to this annoying party where everyone was dressed like gansters and flapper girls. it wasn't my scene. (drunk socialite wanna-bes throwing their breasts and hair everywhere as their overpaid neanderthal boy friend talked about stocks and the game.) it was an amusing little microcosm. anyways, got to see greg (who i haven't seen in four years) and josh (who i haven't seen in 7 years). both are well and it was fun to see them. probably will see greg again in two weeks. ms. jen schueler is running the NYC marathon and the route goes right by greg's apartment. he has invited us over to hang out, have breakfast and blood mary's, and cheer jen on.

bed. time to snuggle and huttle in under the covers. it's getting to be winter here. yea!!

here is a bit of writting that i did for my book class. i am happy with this. thought i would post it.

I miss the huge old cemetery near my apartment in Chicago. I found it one day last summer while exploring my neighborhood and continued to visit it regularly until I left. Hundreds of graves from the past two centuries crowd into 2 miles of grassy knolls and oak-lined gravel roads. I spent hours wandering through the rows of graves, peering into mausoleum windows, and tracing my fingers over names and dates. I made-up memories for people I never met and filled in their lives with accomplishments, failures, pain and love. I wasn’t alone there. My stories of their lives kept me company.

Some of my favorite graves were the headstones that held little oval or round sealed picture frames. These framed tiny sun-bleached photographs of couples dressed in pantsuits from the 60s and 70s made me smile. Their inhabitants beamed at me with their bushy side burns, bouffant hairstyles and large coke bottle glasses trying to tell me about their children, the houses they lived in and what eventually killed them. It fascinated me that even after death someone through a simple picture could give me such a clear visual image of his or her lives. Or at least, what I thought their lives were like.

It bothered me that I was creating this alternative world for these people. I knew that what I held in my mind had nothing to do with the real person lying beneath my feet. But then I realized that eventually all stories and histories will be lost for most people. All that will remain will be the sparse summary of their lives told through words and images carved into their headstone. The only stories then left about their lives will be the ones that the casual wanderer in the graveyard makes up.