building steam with a grain of salt.

Yay Chris!



The birthday boy and some yogurt soju.  Think of it as Pinkberry with vodka.




Fighting cultural theory/interior architecturing since 2006.




Sometimes, she can be a little overzealous about beer.




Ina dancing.  Sort of.




Jae, Jae, Jae!!!!!!!!!!!!!



Heart.

hidudesijustgotmynosepiercedtheend.

ps lets not tell mama and papa chen.



A little red, but to be honest, I'm a bit more concerned with the funny bruises left along my neck and chin from the wisdom teeth surgery.

I had my wisdom teeth removed recently and was nothing short of a huge pussy about it; I missed nearly the entire week of work and spent it doped up on percocet instead.  This also meant a variety of other things, namely watching my friends eat burgers and awesomeness on the Fourth of July while I nursed a shitty jello, and accumulating a large amount of guilt for doing absolutely nothing (read: facebook, gchat) when I should've been at the office kicking ass.  To remedy the latter, I took the hour-long commute to work today to catch up, only to realize that I didn't have access into the building on the weekends.  Bummer.  Instead, I sat in the lobby and had a two hour lunch with the weekend security guard, Johnson, talking about his past life in Haiti and his current one in Brooklyn, and hey little girl, doesn't that hurt to eat a sandwich with holes in your gums?

It's an irritating 95 degrees in NYC right now.  While Pinkberry helps, what's a better salve is that the apartment that I am staying at in Flushing has been completely empty in my two-week tenure, and I simply don't remember what its like to not wander around in my underwear.  I seem to have a lower tolerance for heat than most (there is suspicious correlation in the rise in temperature with how much of a cunt I can be).  At this point clothes indoors almost seems barbaric; I just don't know how you do it.      

It rained a lot during the Museum Mile Festival.  Like, a lot.




90th and 5th.  This is the face people make when they going to the Cooper Hewitt.




Serra, at Moma.  This is the face people make when they are a fan of oxidizing metal.




I like this photo a lot, even though its a fairly uninteresting capture of Serra's piece out in the courtyard.  It took me awhile to figure out which angle to set the photograph, and even now, I'm not certain if its still upsidedown or on its side.  There's a sense of displacement about his work that I've always ignored: that is, his work is completely different in almost every angle and more often than not, there's an element of vertigo attached to his larger pieces.  His work becomes less about intellectual enrichment--although paradoxically, there's so much theory behind Minimalism--and more about sensory experience.  Susan Sontag would be proud. 




Adoration.




Hey man.

.....Holy fuck?  Wow, that was very sweet.

And I dig the panda; a very nice Edward-Said-Orientalism-fuck-you is at hand, don't you think? 

:) 

An overwhelming number of NU kids have settled in nyc, although I never quite witnessed its enormity until last night at Karson's birthday.  Wow.  They be lots.

I managed to take some pictures from the night--half-drunkenly, then very drunkenly, coupling people together in various photographs.  The photos are fairly uninteresting, I found out, rumaging through them this morning.  Nevertheless, it was a good time, although a) Lower East Side to Queens is a terrible commute on the F train and b) I woke up this morning swearing that I will never (never!) drink again.  We'll see how long that lasts.  



The birthday boy.  Doesn't his head remind you of a very nice Roman bust?  Perhaps Peter Weller would know. 
  



Osato's seal of approval.  



Angela!  I haven't seen her in years.  We were art history together, and spent a good deal of time at NU smirking at the Park Avenue moms and trophy wives in our classes.  Fun fact: she applied for a position at my org once upon a time, and said she felt a "weird vibe from that korean chick curator there."  

"Oh, you mean the one that hates me," I said.  "Yeah, she sucks.  High five." 

In addition to the research grant, the folks at IIE are footing the bill for the semester in Harbin, which I recently found out costs well into the five digits alone.  Holy fuck?  

Thanks guys.  Lets go out for an Orange Julius.  On me.  

Bolton Hill.  Them classy MICA students.

Kickball v. frisbee.  Heart summer.




Glasses/cat city.




Brian made this wtf?

For my language training, I've been politely asked not to go to Beijing. The classes there, i'm told, are not exactly suitable for my "academic and linguistic goals," and I suspect the experience there vaguely translates to occasionally getting drunk with European students at Ho Hai in between sputtering out my broken Chinese.  Fair enough; after all, I chose Beijing based not on its academic merit, but because I would be within striking distance of 798 Arts District and the Central Academy of Fine Arts.  That and I had already hatched an intricate plan to meet up with Brian while he was still at Tsinghua.

Anyway, I will be placed in Harbin instead, at the Harbin Institute of Technology (哈爾濱工業大學 for all you romanization haters).  A tech school!  How terrific is it that I can now die knowing that I will have studied at an art school AND an engineering one as well.  The plan at Harbin is nothing shy of schooling my ass hard: I'm to take an independent study research course with a professor, Classical Chinese, and some composition classes.  English is not allowed, which makes me very nervous because my Chinese is very labored and structurally incorrect in that obviously-Americanized kind of way.  The kind where you speak to natives in Chinese and, confused, they speak back to you in English.  Nevertheless the intensity of Harbin is strangely alluring, although I think we are all hedging bets as to when I will break down and sob via skype about how Icantdothisiwanttogohommmmme!

Some fun facts about Harbin that I learned through Wiki:

* In December 1918, during the Russian Civil War, defeated Russian White Guards and refugees retreated to the city: it then became a major centre of White Russian émigrés. The city became the largest Russian enclave outside Russia. 

* After 1946 Harbin came under the contol of the Soviet Union, which occupied the region. Thousands of Russians who fled communism before the war were executed by Soviet troops, and many were forcibly moved to the Soviet Union. By 1988 the original Russian community numbered just thirty, all of them elderly.

* Called the Oriental St. Petersburg, Harbin is one of China's most beautiful cities. The city is well-known for its unique, Russian and European-influenced architecture.

* it's really cold in Harbin.  As in, we-bid-for-Winter-Olympics cold.  

The combination of all this--a history of Russian diaspora, a very prominent snow and ice culture, and an engineering school in the thick of it where I will be learning humanities in Chinese--is a bit weird to me.  

But awesome, no?