RIP, Jean Baudrillard.

1. What did you do in 2005 that you’d never done before?

Shot a gun. Went to India. Visited a slum.

2. Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I mumbled something about staying healthier I really didn't work on it much. For next year, yes: I'm making several. Finances will be in better order in a year. And I'm going to be a better email correspondent.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Ruth and Erez had their wonderful son, Liam. I got to see him in London in August.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Three weeks ago, I lost two friends. In unconnected events, Leslie Harpold and Allison Lange died the same weekend. It's terrible and very sad.

5. What countries did you visit?

Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, Belgium for a couple hours, India, Canada (Quebec). (And I took the Eurostar!)

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?

An acceptance from a Ph.D. program in architecture, a promise, better finances.

7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory?

July 3

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Reconnecting with Birke.

9. What was your biggest failure?

Probably still the money front.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

Aside from a couple of colds and the requisite stomach upsets one gets in India, nope.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

A sari I bought from Archana's mother and some clothing made especially for me in India.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Enrique. Birke. Abhishek. Archana. Udai. Asha. Paul. Carolyn. Jonathan and Caitlyn. Sean. Kentaro. Aditya. Gautam and Nimisha. Jenn. Rachel. Gaby. Thom. Meredith. My MED cohort. Enrique's family. My brothers. Their kids. My parents and step parents.

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

The Republican party. The friend I gave up on.

14. Where did most of your money go?

Rent, paying down debt, groceries.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Cedric Price, who I am researching. Bangalore. Finding Birke again.

16. What song/album will always remind you of 2005?

"If you come tomorrow," by Rajkumar. "If you come tomorrow, it's too early, if you come today, it's too late... you pick the time, a ticktickticktickticktick a ticktickticktickticktick... Darling!"

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

1. happier or sadder? as happy
2. thinner or fatter? yeah, fatter
3. richer or poorer? slightly more money

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing on Girlwonder. Being more daring with my writing.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Being scared to be a daring writer. Wasting time worrying about other people's opinions.

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

In Minneapolis with my family, and then new year with Enrique's family in Texas. Possibly going to Michigan to visit the architecture Ph.D. program.

21. Who did you spend the most time on the phone with?

Enrique.

22. Did you fall in love in 2005?

I stayed in love. Does that count?

23. How many one night stands in this last year?

None.

24. What was your favourite TV programme?

I actually watched TV! My favorites were Lost, Entourage, and Mythbusters (starring my old friend Adam).

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No, because I don't hate people. But I did give up on a friend after being disappointed one too many times.

26. What was the best book(s) you read?

For the first time, I'm having a terrible time answering this. I did read--lots--but it was connected to my thesis projects (and Cedric Price Works II is more a collection of drawings and articles). Most of these were articles, not books. The most illuminating thing I read was "Network Fever" by Mark Wigley. I also quite liked Hadas Steiner's dissertation, but she'll kill me for saying so. I'm working my way through Haruki Murakami's short story collection, Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman but I prefer his novels (and I loved Kafka on the Shore).

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Lady Sovereign. The Clientele. Grand National. But I'm more musically out of touch than I've ever been, and I should create a whole new set of musical resolutions.

28. What did you want and get?

I got a sister again! I found Birke, my German host sister. I lived with her family in 1990 for two weeks and stayed in touch with them till 1994. She was 7, her brother was 5. Then, they moved and the mother changed her last name. I googled Birke in May and not only found her, but discovered she had been an au pair for George Knight, a New Haven architect my friends work for and who teaches at Yale! Moreover, she was coming back to New Haven to care for the Knights' newest kid. So from October till last week, we got to hang out for the first time in 16 years. She is now 24, beautiful and very bright--it was a ton of fun to be able to spend a lot of time with her.

And a sister-in-law, too -- Carrie and my brother married in November. It's different, now that she's family.

And Bove (Jenn, that is) moved back to the US from London. I see her a lot more frequently.

29. What did you want and not get?

A chance to make it back to Italy before the Interaction Design Institute shut its doors. I'd never gotten to see the Milan incarnation and I'd never missed a graduation. Many of the students are dear friends and I wanted to be there for them and the professors... and to say a final goodbye to that chapter of my life. But I just couldn't do it.

30. What were your favourite films of this year?

Nothing knocked my socks off. Things were cute and fun to see, like Prairie Home Companion and Little Miss Sunshine. I kick myself for not seeing Krrish in India but everyone else had gone.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 35 (!) on November 26. We gathered at the Anchor in New Haven the evening of the 25th. Over the course of the evening, a bunch of people stopped by. Birke came with a beautiful cake, shaped as a castle and dusted in powered sugar, like snow! At midnight, she lit candles and everyone sang happy birthday. I wore the requisite birthday tiara. When I gave a guy sitting alone a piece of cake, he thanked me by biking home and giving me a robin's egg blue cashmere sweater that I wear.

On the day of my birthday, Birke and I dressed up as rockstars for a photo shoot. Her friend Chris shot us as Nagelack (German for nail polish) and we shouted, "Nagelack fuckin' rocks!" as we loudly sang Nena songs in German. Birke makes a badass rockstar. Me? I don't look as good in red leather pants as I did when I was thinner, but I did my best. When I got home, Enrique and I had steak and broccoli rabe for dinner.

I also discovered that when you turn 35, people say things like, "You don't look that old!" One person walking by at the Worldchanging book launch party overheard me telling someone I'd just turned 35. "You do NOT look like you are 35! You do NOT!" This is well and good--but there's a backhandedness to the comment, namely the perception that 35 is old. It's problem pregnancy time. It's why-aren't-you-married time? I don't have a problem with my age, I'm glad to look young, but the response to my age is weird.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Bringing Enrique with me to India. I wish he could've met my friends.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2005?

Introducing the kurta (long flowing Indian shirt) into my wardrobe.

34. What kept you sane?

Conversations with Enrique, my MED classmates, Jenn, Ali and Maggie.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Maybe Viggo Mortenson.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

I was stirred--and heartened--by the elections.

37. Who did you miss?

Enrique every day I was gone. San Francisco. Mike and Liz. Ben (aka Neb). John. Abhishek. Yashas. Archana. Now, Birke.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

There's not a single person, but a bunch. It's the people I met in India. First, I worked with a great crew: Jonathan, Carolyn, Kentaro, Udai, Nimmi, Prasad, Asha, Paul, Archana, Indrani, Aishwarya, Savita, and dozens of other people I'm not naming, were welcoming and smart. I love the work we did, the conversations we had. Then, Nimisha and Gautam, who worked with me as research assistants on the mobile sharing project. They opened up their worlds to me, introducing me to friends and family and many days of great conversations. Second, thanks to John Thackara, I met Aditya. Then, thanks to Aditya and Archana (who are more connected than anyone I've ever known), I met Yashas and Jasmine, Archana's lovely group of friends, Zack and Abhishek. Not surprisingly, some of these people knew each other. It was a rich and wonderful 8 weeks, filled with some of the best conversations I've had in many years.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2005.

There are several.

• From Peggy Deamer, who's departed Yale for New Zealand: always be able to state what's personally at stake for you and develop your argument from there. (After my final review, this was the conversation we had in the bathroom).
• A corollary to that, from my advisor, Emmanuel Petit: don't be afraid of criticism. It never stops.
• Ballsiness pays off. That's what I learned when I met Sean at the Microsoft Social Computing Symposium in May-- I asked what I'd have to do to spend a month or two in India. A proposal and a few phone calls later, I was on a plane.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year?

It's The The. I got the song "This is the Day" stuck in my head the week before I left India and listened to it nonstop.

"Well... you didn't wake up this morning
Because you didn't go to bed
You were watching the whites of your eyes
Turn red
The calendar, on your wall, is ticking the days off
The calendar on your wall is ticking
the days off
You've been reading some old letters
You smile and think how much you've changed
All the money in the world
Couldn't bring back those days.
You pull back the curtains, and the sun burns into your eyes,
You watch a plane flying across a clear blue sky.
This is the day -- Your life will surely change.
This is the day -- Your life will surely change.
You could've done anything -- if you'd wanted
And all your friends and family think that you're lucky.
But the side of you they'll never see
Is when you're left alone with the memories
That hold your life together like
Glue"

But. Think well of me at 1:30. This is the most exhausting presentation I do each semester. It's scary. I hope it goes well.

Update

It was okay but not great -- because right now, my thesis is at a not great point.

The good part of things were our critics: it was a great jury. As visitors, we had Hadas Steiner from SUNY-Buffalo, who works on architecture, technology and the neo-avant-garde (way relevant for me), and Spyros Papapetros, a Germanist from Princeton, who we had met during our visit there in November (he published a translation of Siegfried Ebeling's 1926 Raum als Membran -- Space as Membrane -- in a recent publication and I flipped out: I've been looking for it for a decade.) They were both terrific--very thoughtful and played off each other nicely. Also, our beloved chaired visitor, Kurt Forster (who chaired the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale) joined us, one of my favorite characters. He had many useful, thoughtful things to contribute. Overall, the other people on our committee were both supportive and appropriately challenging. I think the first year students got better feedback than we did a year ago, but they had prepared for weeks for the presentation.

It is obvious to me how much work I have to do. As he was leaving, Emmanuel (my advisor) told me and Federica, "Do not be afraid of criticism." He went on to say that the criticism would never stop. Maybe it was just a Luxemburgian moment of nihilism, but I appreciated his comments. The thing is, from the very first time Nick Tangborn tore my review of the "Tubular Bells" remix to shreds in 1992, I've not really been afraid of it. When you write it, it's no longer yours. If someone edits it or gives you criticism, your work gets better.

But. My work needs a lot of work. I need a heavy handed editor and some help finding direction for the rest of this project. I'm tired out right now and I don't know which way it should go. I had an illuminating conversation in the bathroom, of all places, with Peggy Deamer, the (departing) associate dean and the faculty's theory torchbearer. This afternoon, I'll talk to Emmanuel again and I hope to at least figure out what to focus on over the holidays.

Cedric Price was weary of what responsive architecture seemed it might become--long before blobs and wireless sensor nets. That's what a good soaking of cybernetics could do for old Cedric... and why Generator was such a fascinating project. Would that it could have been built... though I suppose it makes for a better story that it was not. Still...

I'm looking forward to posting my chapter in progress here next week, when it is complete. When I do, it will be one of the only descriptions of Generator available online and the only description of any length published since the early 80s. I wish there were something I could link to to tell you more about it in the meantime: you might look at the pictures in the catalogue for the 2002 MoMA exhibition Changing of the Avant-Garde or the images and project descriptions in Cedric Price Works II and Neil Spiller's Cyber_Reader.

In the meantime, back to writing.

In lieu of giving you something to read that I'm working on, I'll show you what I'm reading... the list now includes Alice in Wonderland, Nietzsche's Gay Science, Johan Huizinga's Homo Ludens, Karl Popper's Open Society and its Enemies, and a whole bunch of books on art and cybernetics from the 60s. These don't include the 1200 images I have of material from the Generator project in the Cedric Price Archives at the CCA in Montreal.

Sometime tonight, I hand my advisor a draft of my thesis submission for final review. The problem here isn't a lack of material or even a matter of me writing the pages. I've written much more than that-- it's deciding what to include in those 20 pages and hoping I get it right. It's going to be late tonight, I have a feeling.

This quote from Cedric Price Opera is in the Jude Kelly section on page 87. I'm not sure whether she said it but rather hope Cedric Price instead did.

Kind words for me, as I write about Cedric's GENERATOR project, the subject of my thesis...

I'm planning to be in New York for upcoming events surrounding the book. See you there?

First, on November 4, 2006, my brother Andy married his longtime girlfriend Carrie. Andy and Carrie are the parents of Jack (almost 7) and Maddie, aka Mamie (age 2) and have been together for close to nine years. It was a wonderful, touching ceremony. Everybody looked great and had a great time. The ceremony was in St. Paul, Minnesota, at the Fort Snelling Chapel. Enrique came with me and has now officially met almost my entire family.

On either side of that trip to Minneapolis, Enrique and I visited PhD programs. If it's not been clear already, that's what I hope comes next: starting a PhD program in architecture in the fall. Right before Halloween, we went to Cambridge to visit MIT and Harvard's Graduate School of Design. Right after my brother's wedding, we attended the Princeton Open House (and got to see our friends Joy and Sara, who graduated from our program in May 2006).

I'll talk more in the next post about what I've been doing the last two weeks: research at the Centre for Canadian Architecture in Montreal. It may have to wait, though: we're in downtown Montreal as I write this and we're about to hop in the car to drive back to New Haven for Thanksgiving.

... while Dems in the Senate rock it.

Today, I sent this note to Harvey Jacobs, the urban planning professor I had in 1994. He taught Green Politics.

Dear Professor Jacobs,

In 1994, I took your Green Politics class as a senior German major. I wouldn't expect you to remember me, but our final project was on the history of Madison's waste management and landfills.

But that's not why I write. Yours was the first class, the day after the election in 1994, when the Democrats lost so heavily to the Republicans. When you walked into class, you started our discussion with, "Are you depressed? I'm depressed." The one hopeful thing you mentioned was that eventually, the pendulum would have to swing back. I had to think of that last night as election returns came in--that maybe indeed, the pendulum is swinging back.

I have to wonder, what will you say to your class this week?

Best regards,
Molly Steenson

If I were teaching, I'd say I was hopeful for the first time in many, many years.

I'd had many discussions with Steve Portigal about his Bangalore experience in comparison to mine: his was rather negative; mine was overwhelmingly positive. He came to see my talk at Giant Ant and presented his notes on my talk on Core77. Thank you Steve!

As far as my research goes, it will be published in two papers. The first is with Jonathan Donner, Nimmi Rangaswamy and Carolyn Wei: we wrote about the mobile phone and middle class Indian domesticity. I'm the primary author of the second piece, with Jonathan as the secondary. It's more specifically on mobile phone sharing and its relationship with space in urban India. If things go as planned, both should be published in early 2007.

With the trace <Spur>, a new dimension accrues to "immediate experience." It is no longer tied to the expectation of "adventure"; the one who undergoes an experience can follow the trace that leads there.Whoever follows traces must not only pay attention; above all, he must have given heed already to a great many things.
--Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, page 801

Yesterday, I encountered this. Take note, those of you with interest in games and ludic behavior. It's the beautiful, fragile vellum poster for the 1957 an Exhibit, organized at London's ICA, the Institute for Contemporary Arts by Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, and Lawrence Alloway. Printed with blocks of black and blood red, rendered translucent on the vellum, the copy unfolding and the poster becoming more transparent as its viewer unfolds it.

Preplanning decided on the rules of a game, to be call an Exhibit

The preplanning consisted of choosing and ordering the elements to be used. Preparations were not concerned with the finished appearance of an Exhibit but with assembling the materials to make it possible. Although general effects were anticipated, care was taken not to rehearse the form.

A number of 'Perspex' panels were obtained, in different degrees of transparency. A standard size in which 'Perspex' sheets are available is 4 ft: thus, one dimension was fixed. 2 ft. 8 ins. was selected as convenient for the width because three 2 ft 8 ins. sides equal two 4 ft. sides. In this way various possible vertical and horizontal groupings were predicte: but decisions about their arrangements and whereabouts were postponed. The other elements in an Exhibit were subject to a similar procedure.

Once the rules were settled, a high number of moves was possible.

an Exhibit as it stands, records one set of possible moves.

The individuation of the structure was not achieved until work started on the site. Only then did it take form, wit a series of empirical decisions. Some improvisatory gestures were made, only to be abandoned; others were preserved, and made the basis for further decisions. All the moves, the visible actions of the players, were made up as they went along.

This stage follows certain rules, within which free action is possible, and it recognizes a terminus—the deadline of the public opening. Thus an area in time and space is marked out. The gallery resembles a tennis court or a hopscotch grid, a playground within which special rules operate.

Play is a form of order, an order that contains both standards and free improvisation.

an Exhibit could be assembled elsewhere to record other moves, equally valid, while continuing to observe the rules.