New week. New stuff. New stress levels. Actually, I have been way more stressed in my life, but this week was hard. The hardest one so far, but I made it through and did good work. Still love what I am doing. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Monday: showed a more final version of my pleather book. The layout didn’t work too well, but I have next week to fix that. Warren seemed pretty cool with it. Had some good suggestions. Need to figure out what my next project is. Have to do one more book. Was thinking about doing something with my grandmother. Don’t know though. Also felt sick all day.

Tuesday: worked on sagmeister cd. Did yoga. Feeling much better. Cold is going away. Or I am freaking out less. Mr. G showed us different boxes. Cigar, cereal, match boxes, cigarette boxes, etc. worked and finished the facade of the bluebird restaurant for milton’s class. It looks pretty good. Must send val a jpg of it. Think she might like it.

Wednesday: printed pieces of my sagmeister cd. Still have much to do though. Want to avoid staying up all night like I did last time. Showed my restaurant façade in milton’s class. He seemed happy with it. Now he wants to see what I am going to do with the inside of the restaurant. Cool. I have ideas for that. Fun stuff. I have more ideas for that then the outside. After class, I worked on sagmeister’s cd. I am doing 12 postcards that have a flexi-diss on the front of every postcard. The entire thing comes in a envelope thing with the cd. I was up to 8:30am making/designing it.

Thursday: went to bed at 9am to be woken up by the maintenance man wanting to change my battery in my smoke alarm. Then go woken up at 12:30 and 1:45 by phone calls. Got up at 2 to make it lecture at 3pm. Alex shear and tod lippy came to speak. Super good. Tod lippy runs a lovely magazine and alex shear is this crazy collector. He has 100,000 things in his collections that span everything from rip off of 7up bottles to guns to tollbooths to military stuff. Everything in away celebrates 20th century America. He is getting his own show on pbs and his own museum. Fucking amazing guy. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/egg/206/shear/

Presented my cd project. Sagmeister liked it. Called it lovely. Everyone’s projects were amazing. We blew him away with how well we did. Everyone was super stressed about this project and worked super hard on it. Every time someone finished we would applaud them. Nice bonding moment. I have a good class.

Went out and had a celebratory dinner and drinks with a group from the program. Went dancing later. Finished the night off with Natalie, chris and johnathan. We tried to get into a karaoke place, but it was closing. Didn’t stop Natalie. She sang giabaldi on the street as chris, johnathan and I ate our pizza.

Friday: made a flash movies about bunnies and meat. Learned more flash stuff.

Went out Williamsburg and had dinner with jeff. It was at this wonderful new thai place called chai. Super yummy! And they had this cool indoor pond. Then we went back to his place and watched a kirosawa film. Good. Not as good as yojimbo though. Then sat up talking until 1am. I like him, but not sure where it is going. Going to give it couple more weeks to see.

Saturday: ran all over manhattan. Had to go to the studio to get my drum boxes and then down to kim’s on st. marks place to get blank tapes. Then over to greenpoint Brooklyn. Today I am recording my cigar box instruments with my friend steve. Actually, steve is recording it and I am playing on it. Steve’s apartment is huge and nice. His friend mike is there when I get there. Mike has played in a bunch of bands. (ie- Hassan Chop, Den of Size) We sit around and talk and solve problems with the instruments. Kyle shows up. He will play the thumb piano. Turns out he is the guitarist from rainer maria who I saw a couple of weeks ago. I am a bit intimiated. Haven’t really played with people before and these guys are pros!!! I give up my fears and start to jam with them. We come up with some nice stuff. Just record large chunks of stuff. Steve and I will go through it later. Kyle leaves and we all switch instruments. Finish it all up around 5pm. Mike takes off and steve and I clean up. We go get polish food. (greenpoint is a polish neighborhood.) go to the studio and work in the library and eat a cupcake.

The recording was great. I am proud of what I played. I fit things together and was able to contribute and sound pretty good. I found the groove a couple times and I was surprised how I could hear what I need to do. Everyone was wonderfully nice. Mike wants me to meet his wife and maybe do some music with her. Cool. Basically, I realized I have within myself some natural ability to make good music and that I can be confident in that.

Today: slept 12 hours. Still fighting something. My body is tired from this past week. I took a break and watched spirited away. Came into the studio and finished most of my book.

This week was tough, but wonderful. I found out that I am stronger then I think. I can do and make great thing. I also find out that I want to make more music. That’s a nice feeling to have.

Good night my bunnies.

Late. Late. Late. Again. I am writing this in damn Microsoft word. It is capitalizing everything. Sucky. I like uncapitalizing. Arggg!!! I will live it with it. Typing on the internet is too god damn slow. Feel like I am treading though molasses on the intereweb so hence the evil use of this product that feels that it must correct and subtract my e.e. cumming-ness from my writing. I know bill gates hates me. Oooo…the satanic program didn’t capitalize it’s master’s name. Hehehehe.(man, I sound like I am insane or drunk. I am neither, right now.)

Okay enough bullshit.

I have a lot to catch up on. Two weeks of school and living here in NYC. (will do the first week first and then the next week in the next post.) Lots has gone on and gone down. Grab yourself a beer or juice and be prepared to sit for a while and read and read and read. And read.

Monday, nov. 3: Robbie Conal came for a visit. He is this great crazy poster artists from LA. Does lots of funny/sarcastic political posters. All over the palce in his speaking, but entertaining. Managed to make half the class hate him. I bought two of his posters. Didn’t upset me. Found him funny. www.robbieconal.com/

Showed sketches of my book in my book class.

Tuesday, nov. 4: showed mr. Steve g. my box project stuff. I finished the thumb piano and most of the guitar. He said that I should use the low end cigar boxes in my projects and building a box drum will have to be made of cigar boxes which makes making a box drum impossible so I’ll have to just use available cigar boxes as my drums.

Wednesday, nov. 5: Got up and go my hair cut. I now have a cute short bob. Stylish and neat.

Book cover project for Milton. I redid the cover of a great Russian lit book called WE. It was the book that influence Orwell and Huxley to do 1984 and Brave New World, respectively. He liked what I did. I just need to add one thing and it is pretty much there. He said that he like how well my concept fit the book. (I had people facing forward with black blocks over their eyes with numbers/letters over the blocks. All the people are b/w and are wearing the same clothes. They are laid out in a grid. The last picture in the grid the person is walking out of the frame. The name of the book and author is across the front of the book in a red field. Basically, I was showing how the individualism had left society and this one guy (the one leaving the photo) is braking out. Basically what the book is about. Trust me, it looks better then I described.)


Thursday, nov. 6: got more pieces for my guitar and drum stuff. Drum sales people were nice. Guitar guys were mean.

went to spot co. which is a design/advertising/marketing company that specializes in making and advertising for broadway shows. They have done tons. (ie. Chicago, Wit, Freak, Rent, etc. ) Drew Hodges who is the owner spoke to us. Super smart and together guy. Totally frank and honest. Good stuff.

Then we had mixer with the MFA illustraion department. Drank wine and listened to steven heller (our head) talk/argue with marshall arisman (head of illustration). Funny. Then the faculity left us to bond. We talked, drank, looked at artwork, smoked cigarettes. At one point, a dance party broke out and around 3 am we crashed a party upstairs. It was at this crazy hi-end production company. Ended up meeting one of the editors. I will bug him about his job since I want to maybe do what he does. End the night having hamburgers with Emre (one of the design students from turkey). We talked about Turkey, design, music, etc. All and all, one of my favorite night here. You know when you have a night that seems to come from someone else’s life? You swear it can’t be your life? Well, this night was like that.


Friday, nov. 7: webclass. We stared flash. Worked late at night on projects. Have too much to do next week. Getting stressed. Freaking about about sagmeisters cd project.

Saturday, nov. 8: got up early and went to jeff’s house. I need to do a photoshoot for sagmeister’s cd and he is making me waffles. So nice and cute. The waffles and the company was wonderful. His cats are sweet and the pictures seem okay. Got to see Williamsburg in the sunlight.

Trekked back to manhattan. Worked the design open house. (people looking at the program.) So funny. I came to this last year and now I am one of the people sitting up front answering questions. Weird how life works. Spoke about our show in the gallery. Forgot to talk about that in my past blogs. Was part of the committee to put up the show in the gallery of our free project. We made the gallery look like a store. It turned out great. Everyone was impressed with it. pictures will be up on the MFA design website soon!!

I was exhausted. Went home to eat and sleep. Got up and met jeff. We had drinks at a bar where we ran into friends of his. Then we went to the Dirtbombs show. Good fun dirty rock and roll. Loved it!! Danced my ass off!! Went and got pizza afterwards and then on to another bar with no heat. Talked until late and then went home.

Sunday, nov. 9: got up to work on stuff. Feel sick. Tired and drained. My sinus hate me. Argg!! Not good!! I am freaking out. I need to be well for this week!! Too much to do!! This is what they were talking about the first week. Where you freak and don’t think you can do it! Work though my cold and get most of my book done for class. Doing an imaginary band named pleather. Has interviews with all the members. drank tons of tea and complained alot.

that is it for this week.