B(l)anking out

Today was finally nice enough to bicycle, so I layered on my hoodie, scarf, and windbreaker and threw on my 20 pound backpack stuffed with my laptop, peripherals, and binders. First stop was the bank to make a deposit, which entailed biking up and down two hills. By the time I got to the bank, which is about a mile away, I was out of breath and drenched with sweat and most disconcerting, feeling dizzy and nauseous. I was also boiling inside of all my layers. I had to sit down outside on the sidewalk for about five minutes in front of my bike to catch my breath, and then I couldn't remember my own address. (but I could still recall my social). Had to sit down in the waiting room for about ten minutes while I drank the bottle of water the bank gave me. Biked very carefully to school, which was a long gradual downhill run.

Biked home very cautiously tonight, no problems. I think I'm just really out of shape, especially for strenuous activity. I thought my walking every day was good, but its clearly not keeping me ready to bike. So I'm going to keep biking (albeit with a much lighter load, avoid the hills, and watch what I'm wearing!).

Bike riding

Last weekend, I bicycled down to Tempe from my home in Phoenix, basically following the path I used to take to get to work when I was living in Tempe. Without an exercise regimen more strenuous than walking the ten minutes to work and back every day, the ride took a lot out of me. It should also be noted that I was wearing jeans and sandals and I was not carrying water. At the time, I hadn't planned to go to Tempe, I was just stir crazy and wanted to go for a ride, and then the idea occurred to me. That time, I took the light rail back from Mill Ave. It's about nine miles if you follow the canals from Mill avenue in Tempe to uptown Phoneix.

Today, with a little more preparation, I decided to venture a bit further and pursue a more ambitious route, a loop, to be specific, with the idea that if I got too tired, I could hop a bus back to the neighborhood. I ended up in a full loop.  Oak street across the midtown and over the 51, then a long path along one of the canals, which runs diagonally southwest to Tempe. In Tempe, I crossed under Priest dr and wound up back on the surface streets at Mill avenue just north of Tempe Town Canal. Following the north shore path, it brought me northwest, and then joined the Scottsdale greenbelt which took me farther north. At Indian school, I hopped off the Greenbelt and headed west on the surface streets, through the heart of old town Scottsdale. At Goldwater, I jumped back on the canal for an extreme long and boring stretch, against the wind I might add, all the way to 40th st where I picked up Camelback heading west. At 32nd st, I decided I'd earned a break and grabbed a small gelato. I continued to follow camelback all the way to central avenue, where I turned south and biked all the way past Thomas to get back to my apartment. Overall distance, 27 miles, in about four hours including my breaks. My new tires held up pretty well.

Here's the map of the route.

And now, for something completely different

Friday was a surreal day.
I began by going to bed at 3 and waking up at 6 for work. I left my house at 6:25 on my bike, and arrived at work at 7:15. I live less than a minute walk from a bus stop, and a ten minute walk from a bus stop on a line which goes directly to my destination. The distance between my house and my work is about ten miles. This was the fastest I've ever gotten to work without a car. I dare say there is something a bit off about this whole arrangement. I worked the morning, and then biked the ten miles back home. Actually going home was a lot better since I discovered I could bike along a trail along a canal which ran diagonally towards Tempe. The streets of Phoenix and its sidewalks are in terrible condition, occasionally not even fit for human use, let alone bikers. I try not to ride on the streets anyway as drivers in Phoenix pride themselves on being some of the worst in the country, and are about as observant and caring to bicyclists as a windshield is to flies on the autobahn. Especially in downtown phoenix, which is totally under construction at least until Sky Harbor Airport finishes buying all of it.

One of the studios in our semester went to New Orleans a few weeks ago. Saori's studio road tripped out to San Diego. Another studio went to LA to look at urban forms there.
Our studio took a trip across the parking lot to Gammage Auditorium.

In some strange tie-in to our studio, our professor wanted us to experience a show called "Guided Tour." This is put on by a British performance artist named Peter Reder in ASU's Gammage. From his website, it is described as

Guided Tour is a promenade performance sited in an historic building. It's a tourist experience for the disenchanted, a quiet interrogation of the notion of the authentic and our thirst for the original. Guided Tour was premiered at McEwan Hall at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2005, in association with the Traverse Theatre as part of the British Council Showcase, and has since been presented at the Tretyakov Gallery www.tretyakovgallery.ru/english/ Moscow and in Bucharest in 2006.

In this case, he was using Gammage. It was very surreal and pretty funny if you get British humor. He started the show by explaining that he played the role of the tour guide and asked us if there was anything in particular we wanted him to tell us, like if we wanted Gammage to be haunted, for example. There was a large group, about half of us students, and we followed him around. The first thing he pointed out was that his picture on the posters outside the box office was much bigger than Billy Crystal's and elaborated on the intense rivalry they had. We of course had been well warned that the facts on this tour were not necessarily true.

Then he led us outside up the ramp of the building to point out and discuss at length the significance of the Twin Palms hotel, and IHOP as its functioning breakfast room. The tour was a strange mix of guided tour of the spaces without really explaining them, and slides and video of people who "could have been" relatives and family members of his. My favorite moment of the 'tour' was when he brought us to the bust of Wright, and told us about the great and important works of Wright and how this wasn't one of them. He then said that since we were architecture student's he wouldn't talk about the design aspects which we already knew but would instead elaborate on the strange, lewd, and lurid personal life of FLW. We stopped in front of a glass case of old photos of women and he took on a guided tour of FLW's mistresses, wives, daughters, and other strange people in his life and the doom which seemed to follow all of them.

We finished the 'tour' watching a movie of his mother, very experiential absurdest non-speaking, non-explained piece, in the sub-basement workshop of the lyric opera theater, and getting let out from one of the loading bays. One of my friends from studio turned to me suddenly and asked "what the hell did I just do with the last hour and a half of my life?" I could only shrug. I got some of it, but the last ten minutes of video totally lost me.

Saturday Saori and I took the day off, mostly bicycling around Papago Park (I was surprisingly not sore from my 2o miles the day before) and taking photos of the canal system there for her studio. That night, we went to Janette's apartment for a reunion party with people from the Buenos Aires trip. We brought a bottle of Caxhaca 51, which Janette promptly hid from the other partygoers. There was sangria, there were tapas, and there were, miraculously, empanadas. I got the address of a store in Phoenix that has them and apparently they also have Mate and all of the good herb's paraphernalia.

Today was a work day. Lots of reading and sketching, and blogging.