An Inconvenient Truth

My studio showed the movie An Inconvenient Truth which I’d been longing to see. I think EVERYBODY should watch this movie. It is a well-made documentary: enlightening, funny, ironic and touching. It is a heartfelt lecture given by Al Core on global warming based on science. Maybe most of the facts revealed in the movie are not unfamiliar to many people, but what moves me most is seeing why he is so devoted to environmental protection from his own life experience and how he found out these facts through his own travel, research and participation.

Like he said, global warming is ultimately a MORAL issue rather than a political issue. He is never tired of giving this slide show around the world. He is doing it country by country, family by family, person by person, since he is a BELIEVER. As an individual, we really should think about what we can do in our daily routine to stop global warming!

http://climatecrisis.org/

Inspiration from BATHROOM

Saw this interesting design at MoCoLoco -

David Olschewski's Bathroom, "A seating group evinces a puzzling character that invites the viewer to experience it sensually and reflect on its origins. The forms are based on a Plexiglas bathtub and shower tray ensemble. The bathtub has been divided into three objects, with nothing lost in the process. All four pieces are set on stainless steel legs. The focus is on the alienation of bathroom furnishings from their customary surroundings and function."

This Bathroom idea reminds me of a scene in Luis Buñuel's materpiece The Phantom of Liberty, where public space/living room and private space/bathroom are reversed: people sit on toilets around a table chatting with each other, while one enters a tiny private room to get food thru. a small elevator. I enjoy this smart sense of humor which exists in the alienation and defamiliarization of our everyday living space.

greeting from India!

I got this new year card from Sandhya and Jay, an Indian couple who worked at NBBJ before. What a pleasant surprise to see the gorgeous Indian Bandhani! Have to go there someday!

SCAD

SCAD, Savannah College of Art & Design, was a place I had been longing to see. I was admitted by the school 7 yrs ago, but I chose to go to PSU. SCAD seems to be the only college in Savannah. It doesn't have its own campus. All the buildings are scattered in the city. Downtown Savannah is a pedestrian city par excellence. After walking a few blocks, you’ll find a SCAD building.

At the end, you realize they do have a campus – the city itself is their campus, a campus merged with the beautiful trees, the river, the stylish buildings, the lovely paving patterns and materials, the art galleries….a campus for strolling and contemplation, a campus where history, art, architecture and nature are in perfect harmony.

Foreground v.s. Background

In Charleston, architecture always catches your eye. Each street or alley displays a collage of styles: Georgian, Federal, Gothic and Greek Revival, Queen Anne… Architecture is the foreground, while trees step back as the background.

In Hilton Head Island, trees are everywhere and extremely lush. On the streets, all buildings, no matter public or residential, are grey-colored and hidden behind the trees. Thus, architecture becomes the background, while nature is on the stage. The huge live oaks often form an archway – in a sense, trees become the ‘architecture’.

In Savannah, architecture reminds you of Charleston, and trees remind you of Hilton Head Island. It is a city of squares where the surrounding architecture gets blurred by the lush trees in the middle. It is a merge of foreground and background.

Vida Unique Design

I got this cute Vida butt station from a art store in Savannah. Can't resist its sense of humor :) I went to Iconic Shop's website and found a lot more cool designs. They describe their Vida series as follows -

Naive & innocence, direct & mischievous, simple & indigenously natural...do you find some of these traits present in yourself, in people around you or rather, in somebody you have long been seeking for? Here we try to demonstrate these personalities in a small lovely character at different postures on various items of desktop accessories. We hope you would giggle, find yourself inspired or have some reflection of life discovered while fiddling with any of these items.

Yup, I'm giggling at my butt station right now :)

Bubba-Gump Shrimp Co.

Finally tried Bubba-Gump Shrimp Co. in Charleston. Last year we saw the restaurant in Maui, but it was too crowded. Yes, Bubba-Gump came from the movie Forrest Gump. You can find themes of the movie everywhere in the restaurant, from the movie photos hanging on the wall, to the ping-pong peddle shaped menu (Forrest Gump plays ping pong in the movie). The most interesting invention is the two iron plate signs on the table for you to switch: if you are doing OK, just leave the blue sign saying “RUN, FORREST RUN”; if you need service, switch to the red one saying “STOP, FORREST STOP”. It is said to be the first restaurant inspired by a movie. I found it hard to believe since the idea of a movie theme restaurant is not a hard one. Perhaps from the commercial point of view, it has to be a ‘successful’ Hollywood movie in order to take place in the market or global market.

Fascinated with Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo, my trip to San Francisco was actually a movie tour of most scene locations in the film. It turned out fantastic since the tour covered most charming places in the city, also adding a romantic and mysterious atmosphere. New York, as a dream city, has more potential to offer such movie tours. The Celluloid Skyline by James Sanders explores the dream dimension of New York through a good number of movies. He depicts two New Yorks in his book: The first is a real city, an urban agglomeration of millions. The second is a mythic city, so rich in memory and association and sense of place that to people everywhere it has come to seem real: the New York of such films such as 42nd Street, Rear Window, King Kong, Dead End, The Naked City, Ghostbusters, Annie Hall, Taxi Driver, and Do the Right Thing. A dream city of the imagination, born of that most pervasive of dream media, the movies.

There is already the Sex and the City tour featuring those high-end stores and fancy restaurants in New York. While it is about spending money to imitate the lifestyle pursued in the show, a fetishized materialism at bottom. Woody Allen's Manhattan presents the very charm of New York in a most subtle and complex way, the hybrid personality of New York: the romantic, the humorous, the sensual, the melancholy… A tour of Manhattan would be a more spiritually pleasant one for me.