Site Night

I'm noticing that I'm starting to forget when my last postings are. The workload is just picking up to the point where we're pretty much working until we can no longer keep our heads upright and then crashing in bed.

Friday we had desk crits in studio. (Desk crits are where instructors come around to your desk and you talk about your work). After the critique, we all went down for a happy hour beer. We met Richard, a friend of ours from ASU, who is also a recent graduate from Wash U. He gave us a bunch of foam and basswood and acrylic since he's leaving town for Seattle tomorrow. We hauled it all upstairs and then we went to grab some Pho at a place near our home. Afterwards, it was still relatively early, so we browsed the E&J shoes across the street before going to Target to look at drafting chairs.

The school provides us with wood stools which are comfortable for about ten minutes, two if you've happened to be bicycling to school that day. So I picked up a $40 desk chair from Target that is unfortunately about 2-3 inches too low.

Saturday we went into studio as soon as woke up (sleeping in a bit I admit) and started working on our section of the site model, building tiny wooden buildings at 1/32" scale, and trying to make them fit into the CNC'd MDF base. The problem with the CNC machine is that it uses a router bit to cut, so you always get rounded corners in the indentations. We started chisling the corners out with a very tiny chisel, until one of the shop minders showed us a very small, unlikely tool- its basically a punch that does exactly what we needed- you hit the top with a hammer, and it punches a clean corner. So that sped things up. Tons of sawdust in the air though from all the people sanding roof pitches down though.

That took actually a lot of time. We didn't finish until about 3pm. Afterwards, I got a little bit of studio work done and then we decided it would be good to go home and read about the 60 pages of reading we have to do for monday morning and do some laundry. So we did that, not so much reading, not so much laundry, but definately some kitchen and house policing.

Around 8 o'clock at night, we went to pick up Chuck (aka ZhuLi) and we drove to the site to see what it was like at night. This may not have been the safest idea in the world considering that the larger area we are going to (CWE) has one of the highest crime rates in the city of St.Louis itself. But we left our valuables at home, took a stripped down wallet, no cameras, and with a group of three people, we were much more defensible than one person. We parked on Euclid, south of Delmar, and had trouble finding parking. This is a good sign because people definately come to the area at night for the upscale restaurants, bars, etc. We walked by a rental ballroom in an old mansion where the smokers and drinkers had spilled out into the port-cochere. My site, on the corner north of Delmar, was pretty dead and deserted. Badly lit, uninviting. Interestingly, the parking lot was still a quarter full. Up the street, in the northern Fountain Park neighborhood, which is the area with a lot of crime, there were some people having a loud conversation basically shouting at each other from the street to the porch.

Chuck's site next to Bowood Farms was pretty quiet, but felt a lot more safe. We were all amazed at the levels of site lighting in that neighborhood south of Delmar. At all time it was entirely well lit, even with thick tree canopies overhead. The streets could have been in Disneyland at night it was so bright. Not many people walking around through, more towards the Euclid street bars/restaurants, although there was some kind of Freemason event that was attracting people on Olive towards Taylor, and there was a live outdoor benefit concert on Taylor and another street I forget the name.

We could hear the music from a few blocks away and took an alley up to find out where it was coming from. The alley was about as well lit as the street, significantly. It turned out to be a blues concert put on by one of the local community groups who were raising money for children's education. There was a pretty decent turn out. The whole thing was taking place on a grassy lot outside of a large old brick building which might be a school of some kind. What was interesting was that by use of a spotlight, the side of the building was basically appropriated as a backdrop. It made me think about how my site in terms of using what is around it not as relational context of height or shape, but as a potential backdrop for my project.

Anyway, we ran into a few bike police as well. I was kind of intrigued since you don't see bike police much. They were patrolling the neighborhood. Apparently, they were off duty police officers employed by a private security firm which is paid by the neighborhood. They said that their 'beat' was an area bounded by Olive on the north, Taylor on the east, and a few streets beyond Euclid to the west. Essentially, they were patrolling the nicer, upscale area of CWE. I have a feeling that my site was not under anyone's patrol.

We did stop by a pretty cool bookstore, Left Bank Books, on the corner of MacPhereson and Euclid. Upstairs new books, downstairs used. I could see myself spending a lot of time there. We did actually spend about 30-40 minutes browsing the selection. Apparently its a spot on the book tour itenteraries too as they had a lot of autographed copies of books. Even though I've read it about a dozen times, I still couldn't resist picking up an autographed copy of William Gibson's Neuromancer, especially when it was on sale for the jacket price. My inner geek celebrated.

Afterwards, we went grocery shopping since Chuck doesn't have a car and then dropped him off and went home with our groceries. Got a little reading done before passing out.