top photo: Los Angeles River @ 110 freeway circa 1999. note the Amtrak car in the background

Haighter Monday morning I phoned Double to borrow the crane arm for a tripod. “Why do you need it so bad?” No questions. I race back along the mile stretch between our apartments off of Franklin Blvd Hollywood in under a minute. I set the tripod up so the camera is hanging off my bedroom balcony. I pause. The sky changes a different blue, a shade closer to clarity, a momentary head rush. I disassemble the camera and light a cigarette. The maniacal dragrace down Franklin and meticulous assembly of the camera rig served as a better catharsis than actually tossing all my worldly possessions out the window and filming the gathering tramps and transplants below, snatching them up to make it all their problem.

In Cahoots I grabbed the Kappe Monograph from the Kappe library. Eponymous and creepy. D spied the book I was checking out while stamping the due date. He postured the b-boy stance. “I had that for like a year. Every two weeks, restamp it, bring it home again, open it up.” Yup. Rather combatively, I flipped through it in D's presence, scanning for flaws, looking for details to hate on, all the while in the back of my mind knowing it was pretty futile. The damned work is, if only on first glace, depressingly flawless. Then I spy it, dead center on the back cover, square in the middle of the tease photo. I cringe. After a good breather, I posture the book upright on the checkout counter and point out the faux pas to D: The founder of SCIArc, my design instructor, Ray Kappe, is wearing Birkenstocks.

Jingled Up I came back inside and sat down. I hunched over the door I use for a “drafting” table. This active train depot won't stop bickering with this active riverfront. 4000 units. Good ol' Laughlin midair over Penn Station.

Kayopectatin' ”˜em The river studio project is heating up. Juried review this Friday. Design Development midreview model Monday. Short Films on Croquet at the Hollyhock and geriatric Bocce ballers due Tuesday. I always forget June brings overcast gloom to Socal. Indeed, so do the rest of the natives.
I shot myself in the foot the beginning of summer semester by not being more proactive about a better desk. Consequently, my allocated desk is square in the middle of every circulation path to every island of shantified desk apartments populating our bay. So residual is the space where my desk ended up that it leans against the studio's worktable. Apart from the scrapwork of studio colleagues, my desk in studio remains bare. During the largest chunk of this previous work hiatus from school, in order to function more efficiently as a marketing designer for Fornarina USA (I hear shoe whores gasping from the peanut gallery), I turned part of my apartment into a studio. In the process, I have become acclimated to working at home. I figured perhaps this would carry over with the return to SCIArc. Studio prep is packing up the laptop and whatever other accoutrements I need for the session, namely trace paper. In spite of a space tenfold the size required by the accreditation board and the new Common album as loud as I desire, transplanting my permanent workspace to the studio might keep me from periodically tossing all my worldly shit off the balcony. The site for the studio's riverfront project is across the street from SCIArc, directly outside the studio space's bay windows. Traintracks and fodder a mile long. Perhaps it would help to confront the problem head on.

Laces, Fat Laughlin over Penn Station. Why have we all ended up here? I'm stuck. This is when value judgements are suppressed, and I execute the opposite of the present M.O. Judgement suppressed. This is always an exciting time, because it opens the floodgates damning the absolutely absurd. I flip a Xerox scrap vertical in my site model and light a cigarette: the normative, “dumb”, New Urbanist train station village town plan just became my section. If I shifted directions like this in my office this close to a client meeting, I'd fire me. Thank heavens it's my dime and opportunity cost. This way I only get blank stares instead of a red slip. I have a lot of dancing to do on Friday.

Nostalgia Respect the paper. I hear the attorney Rosen in head, “Every dollar you make, ten people trying to take it.” So applicable these days, it frightens me he's been saying that since we were fifteen. Reynolds American up a padiddle.

Oeuvre I'm hitting Ebay the end of term. Kappe's getting some old school Adidas Jabaars with a custom Pelican case.