It's been a busy last few days. Tuesday I attempted to help mom and Tay to get a new cat from the humane society, (catch the full scoop on mom's blog), and Wednesday Saori and I went to Awhatukee to see the kitten at home.

Friday night, Saori and I went over to mom's house and ate Mexican talapia with grandma Loretta and great aunt Francis. Afterwards we all played cards for about three hours, which was a lot of fun. Really good margaritas and guac.

Saturday morning we met up with the gang again at Aunt Chilada's Mexican Restaurant for lunch, and from there we went to see some movies at Arizona Mills. The older ladies saw "Baby Lady" the older woman chick flick, and we youngsters went to see "Prince Caspian," the latest over-CG-ified classic novel adaptation. It was exactly what I expected it to be, and I went in with low expectations. After watching the movie which was a big budget battle and fanfare extravaganza, we went out into the mall to find the older women.

I was overstimulated from the movie, and thrust into a crowded mall, which made me feel nauseating trapped and stressed out. I hate Arizona Mills Mall. The stores are generally good, the prices are very good for a mall, but the overall experience leaves me feeling violated. There are huge masses of people slowly ambling through the mall's corridors, where you are trapped in a huge loop. Crushed along by the flow, you are vomited upon by the blaring music from each store you pass, and from the obnoxious, loud music they blast everywhere else in the mall. Normal conversation becomes impossible. Your eyes are grabbed, jarred, and yanked around in your head from flashing lights, garish colors and giant adverting signs and logos everywhere you look so there is no visual respite either. Arizona Mills is a thug assaulting all the senses.

We stopped by the Tempe Borders and I got an older Haruki Murakami novel, Dance Dance Dance, which is pretty good so far. We also swung by Zia's and the Japanese convienence store. Later saturday night, we watched a really good movie Sakuran about a Geisha, filmed and directed by a famous photographer. It was, as expected, a really visually compelling film.

Today I picked up coffee and donuts around 9 for a healthful and early start to our day. We relaxed at home for the rest of the morning until I went to go meet Chase and his family for lunch. That was good, and I took Chase back to the apartment where we picked up Saori and headed out to Wildlife World Park out in Glendale.

C- what do you do on a typical day?
A- well, today we were thinking about going to the zoo...
C- lets go to the zoo.
A- sounds good.

But first we stopped at Pink Spot Ice Cream on Thomas, a relatively new place, but one that offers Lapperts Ice Cream, which is pretty hard to beat. They even had Kauaii Pie, which is one my favorite flavors of ice cream. We took the I-10 to the loop 303, which is so far outside of town it's a two lane road with stop signs. We got to Wildlife World Zoo an hour before it closed for the day, so we decided to save the $18 admission cost and drive to the White Tanks.

It's strange out there. Raw desert filled with Saguaro cacti, interrupted with cheap Scottsdale Suburb photocopies. A two lane road through the desert suddenly becomes six lines wide with huge sidewalks and a bike lane, flanked on both sides by massively deep subdivisions of cookie cutter houses and huge American flags. This residential absurdity cointinues for a stretch of perhaps half a mile and just as suddenly reverts back to the two lane desert road on its way to the mountains.

I see suburbia filled with endless fields of identical beige houses, and I feel like the architectural profession has failed. Crude stucco and wood boxes with cheap tile roofs cost nothing and can be built in a day- but I can't hate them more because most Americans seem to like them. A huge segment of the population, the middle to upper class, see it as an Ideal, the huge house, the huge car, the bbq and pool out back, it has become the accepted symbol of arrival. Architecture is about the enrichment of the human experience through the definition of spaces. A typical suburban house out here is mass produced and made as cheap as physically and legally possible. These houses are Styrofoam clamshells, which degrades the families living in them to standardized McDonalds hamburgers. It's not about money. A well-designed house can be built for the same cost as a standardized one, especially if you take out the faked chimneys, redundant decorative columns, fake rock cladding, etc. The architecture industry has failed because people have come to see the developer stick and stucco "tuscan" ranch as the best if not only course to take. After Levittown, architects, instead of remaining in their white towers of abstraction and academia, should have said "how can we use this 'subdivision' and 'prefabrication' methods to make better houses which can be designed to suit each family?"

Anyway, white tanks was fun. Lots of photography at the ragged end of Phoenix. Ate Pho Bang for dinner, and dropped Chase off back at his grandma's house in Scottsdale.