Day 171

picture update

The Final Waltz

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NOTE:
PICTURES ARE COMING TONIGHT AFTER I GET HOME FROM WORK. I FIGURED I'D AT LEAST GIVE YOU SOMETHING FOR NOW.


What an epic day. It was similar to Day 37 in many ways, I feel.

Ally and I went to Lucile's and sat at the exact same table that we did on Day 37 (where Chocolove, pt. 1 was taken). Then I did a lot of character-building getting-lost driving in Denver.

We went there for Ally's birthday celebrations, more than a month after the fact. We went to DAM to be "cultured".

Now you're about to get some insight into my inner workings and turn-ons, so get ready. Or just skip the long rambling paragraph below. I wouldn't know, so I don't care.

I love construction. Not like hardhats and hammers, but the pragmatics and processes that go into making shit. When we look at art, I don't stand back and look at the whole picture and comment on the inner anguish the artist was going through and what sort of cultural imapsodiufpasoidjopg flfuasdl blah blah poop. I hate that shit. I don't care. I stand with my nose about 3 inches from the painting/sculpture and try to envision how the artist made it. I think about the tools, the painstakingly minute movements they had to have made, or the giant haphazard gestures. I stare at the larger installations and wonder how they brought them to the fourth floor (I did notice the large industrial elevator, so that was in part put to rest), and about how much of it had to have been done on-site. There was one piece where a porcelain doll was standing in a crib surrounded by shredded bits and pieces of stuffed animals and toys. I thought about the artist standing there with a box full of stuffing and decapitated Barbies, and whether she just turned it upside down, or if she took out each individual object and placed it EXACTLY where it was supposed to go, or if she stood behind the crib and threw them as if she were the doll. The exhibit was right next to a wall that joined the floor at approximately a 150° angle, and some toys were gathered there in the corner where they met, so I imagined the artist throwing them against the sloping wall and watching them slide down. There were urinals made out of lipstick. Did the artist make a cast then drip molten lipstick into it, or did she sculpt it out of a block, or does it have a frame that was then covered with a layer of lipstick? There was a large installation called Fox Games, and some of the fox were jumping from the tables and such, and I thought that it would have been much more effective if they were supported by the two hind legs that were still touching the table instead of being dangled from the ceiling.

Then I thought a lot about the badassiness of Libeskind. This building is bitchin', albeit a little similar to many of his other works. With all of the oblique angles of the walls and ceilings, there were often interesting meetings between the three. In one particular room, the ceiling slowly sloped towards the floor and wall, forming a sort of sideways negative triangular pyramid. It effectively made the farthest 10 feet of the room useless because there wasn't enough headroom for people to stand. I thought to myself, "I bet that's one of the least used corners of this whole building. I want to use it." I crawled as far back into as possible. I bet nothing except for the janitor's swiffer and myself has ever been in that corner. Niiiice.

A few years ago, when the building just started to go under construction, Libeskind's design team came to one of my architecture classes at CU and gave a presentation on their design process. It was lame. Libeskind, a busy world-renowned architect, came up with the original design concept and layout, then let his team do the rest. He would show up once every three weeks, they said, to make sure shit was looking tight, then leave a day later. He would say things like "play around with that staircase, it doesn't look right", then they would come up with their OWN designs, and he would pick which looked best to fit his "vision". Basically, what I learned from their lecture is that busy world-famous badass architects don't do shit. They fly around and tell their "teams" to make their shit for them.

Then there's architect-on-architect violence. Libeskind won the design competition for the World Trade Center rebuilding, but his centerpiece tower was deemed to have too little usable space, so they turned his plans over to another architect to do the redesign. This other architect is now listed as the official head-architect for the project, but he didn't even come up with the original design. They kind of just janked the project out from under Studio Libeskind and gave them a secondary roll in its completion. Lame. Lame-o.

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You know what else is lame-o? The Tattered Cover's selection. They've got a lot of places to sit, but very few books on the shelves. I was sufficiently disappointed.

After a few tummy-aches and a lot of farting, Ally and I went to the Last Comic Standing Tour at the Paramount. Good shit. Jokes about unicorns and vibrators are pretty funny whether told independent of one another or not.