he passed his exam. told him "you're lucky already". lol.

omg. great big shock. i feel like entering a warm cosy hole in the earth to avoid the embarrassment. i've been duped!!

today was a learning day. in AR1221 lecture, there was this very well expressed point in the Rem Koolhaas interview. it was on the blurring of boundaries between outside and inside, between specificity and indeterminacy, which results in the outdoors being as constricting as the indoors. it is a very relevant issue, i think. in a sense because it makes you feel so small, like you, the individual, is just part of a determined system.

then in GEK tutorial, i realised that this module is going to be the one that will give me the artistic direction to pursue. not the design module. not the 1221 (Ideas and Approaches to Design). not structural systems. because through all the "past thoughts" of these "past architects" i learnt so much. and yet the thoughts and the architects are timeless. and today the one that struck me was what the term "modernity" in architecture means. it is an entire paradigm shift.

something real funny from da vinci's writings:

"Men born in hot countries love the night because it makes them cool, and they hate the sunlight because it causes them to grow hot again; and for this reason they are of the colour of the night, that is black; and in the cold countries everything is the opposite."

man.. but i just realised that maybe five hundred years ago that wasn't such a ridiculous idea. in fact, it might have been a rather smart comment. i dunno.

secondly, i'm carrying on with my second perusal of 'The Heart of Darkness' and it only occurred to me now that it's actually pretty funny at some parts and i didn't see it then!! i thought it was dark dark and dark. but now i see some lightness in it. wth that sounds quite stupid. nvm.

man.. i turned the alarm clock off. so woke up way late.

anyway the thing about research is, you get to find cool stuff, (which i can now share with everyone through this blog haha):

Warhol's comments on the appeal of Coke:

What's great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola, too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

– The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again), 1975, ISBN 0-15-671720-4

that is brilliant. really.

i'm staying over in studio again today. geez so tired. but i'm happy. today we did like 4 sight reading pieces and my sight-reading has improved by leaps and bounds (i think). compared to, say, 4 years ago. lol. i'm thinking, maybe it's to do with the brain.

happiness comes from being free. that's what i think. being free from having to be in the company of people whose company you don't enjoy. being free from caring about what other people think. being free from fear (which is obviously impossible, but we can try).

Firenze has been under my possession for a week now and it's flourishing, i'd say.

i just read the Bertrand Russell essay 'In Praise of Idleness', though it has been lying around in my computer for approximately two years (it's in the ki 2006 folder. lol).

some parts are notably funny:

"Broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd"

"I read recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean."

this is true though: "Peasant dances have died out except in remote rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."

honestly, i can't tell which parts are intended sarcasm and which are genuine propositions.

that speaks a lot of my reading and comprehension skills. lol. but ya maybe i should email mr thompson and ask what he thinks. i'm really quite curious.

our aerial screw doesn't fly!!!! i'm so disappointed. the two parts functioned so convincingly on their own, but when combined.. haiz. well. but in the process, we had fun.

a friend from another studio said: "this thing can't fly because.. there's gravity." LOL.

but anyway. if i can't make the human world less gender-oriented, i shall at least not bother giving plants genders. so Firenze shall be an "it". description: variated green-and-pale yellow leafy plant.

back from celebrating tammy and lyg's birthdays. it's crazy. i didn't do any work ytd. so today must slog. and if the new model doesn't work again...

i had a dream. i dreamt that our prototype for the aerial screw worked. lol.

i knew ytd was going to be a good day. i just knew it as i was walking down the stairs into the mrt. lol. except, tuition wasn't very good. God bless fabian for his monday exam. lol.

received a mail from tante inge and it's now Herbst and she attached a picture of the garden turning yellow. so pretty.


no cause for too much happiness. our aerial screw doesn't work! doesn't fly! we spent the entire day building this model based on the gasing principle. doesn't spin fast enough.

i thought Firenze sounds male too.

so the new design assignment is on da vinci's inventions. interesting idea, i'd say. but the problem is, most of his "inventions" either haven't been tested or do not work.

happy Hari Raya to all.