magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

A wrap up of some of the things that I probably would have written about over the last two months if I had actually been writing. I did write a handful of things out on paper, the backs of crossword puzzles and such, on the train. But rather than transcribing those verbatim, or even actually reading through and summarising them, I'm just going to use the vague recollection of what I may have written as a basis for what I'll say here.

By far the largest block of my time over the past two months has been dedicated to designing the Bank of America corporate heritage museum. This is the last Bank of America account that Jack Morton, or any of IPG's other agencies, will be working on. Most of the Bank of America team has already been transitioned to other projects (or fired), leaving the actual task of creating this museum to an incredibly small number of people. There are two designers, two creatives (who are curating/directing the project), and three production/management people. Plus about five or so people working on the fabrication end of things. Of the two designers, there's the senior designer, Chris.W, who comes up with the overall design vision and handles some of the design coordination, and the junior designer, me, who does the work of producing the designs, of shoe-horning the content into the design vision or adapting (or scrapping) the design vision to fit the content, and generally preparing everything to the point where it can be turned over to fabrication. So it's a huge project, and I sometimes feel like I'm running the whole show. But since it's such a small team, most everyone else probably feels the same way, at least part of the time.

It's a headache, but also rewarding. Of all the Bank of America projects that I've worked on over the last two years, building a museum, even if it's a corporate museum, is certainly the most interesting. Democracy Plaza, which was also an incredible project in a lot of ways, and which I put a similar amount of effort towards, was only a temporary installation, and looses points as such. Plus, not having been offered a staff position over the last two years is working in my favour at the moment, as I am able to bill for every of the 50 or 60 hours that I've been putting in most weeks for the last couple of months. And next week I'm going to Charlotte for the install, the first time that Jack Morton has sent me anywhere that I couldn't get to with my own MetroCard. I'm going to be there to oversee the coming together of the whole project, the fruits of my labours, and I think it's going to come out pretty damn well. And make a great portfolio piece.

After those long days at work, I've mostly been coming home, watching a downloaded TV show or two, and going to bed. A few months ago, early into the fall TV season, I made my pronouncement about the best of the new sci-fi/supernatural/alien invasion shows. After one or two more episodes of each, I completely lost interest. Most of the new fall shows were a bust. I haven't yet deleted my downloaded but unwatched episodes of Prison Break, Commander In Chief, or Rome, but I very likely will. I wanted to like Rome, but I just didn't ever get into it. I did delete my unwatched episodes of Surface, Threshold, and Invasion, all of which had small redeeming factors, but ultimately left me cold. The remade Night Stalker, which I believe has already been canceled, wasn't bad, but owed way too big a debt to The X-Files. I'm pretty sure that The X-Files owed the same debt to the original Kolchak, the Night Stalker, but with a nearly 20 year gap between the two versus only a few years, leads to an entirely different audience with entirely different eyes.

The best new show of the season, the only new show that I've kept actively watching, and I'm as surprised to be saying this as anyone, is How I Met Your Mother. It's funny, it's smart, the characters are likable. And it's actually a fairly accurate account of what it's like to be in your late-twenties/early-thirties in New York. Some of the places that they go and people that they meet might be a little bit over the top, and their apartment might be a little bit too nice, but it is TV. Plus, there's three of them living in that two bedroom, one of them's a young architect (Did I mention that the main character is an architect?), one of them is soon to be a lawyer, and I don't think we've ever found out what Alyson Hannigan's (Did I mention that Alyson Hannigan is on the show? Did I mention that I've apparently got a thing for redheads?) character does, possibly a teacher. So yeah, the season's best new show is a sit-com with a premise that is undoubtedly going to get old, but for the time being it's thoroughly enjoyable.

The two best new shows of last season, Veronica Mars and Lost, both lost a bit of steam with the beginnings of the their sophomore outings, and have both picked up a little, but neither is quite at the point of having to rush home and watch the new episode that they were at the height of last season. The two shows that are at that level were both mid-season January replacements, that picked up again this fall, the US version of The Office, which I do have to say that I was initially skeptical of, the original having been so funny, and having ended on a high note after only two short British seasons, but which has totally come into its own, and Grey's Anatomy, which I might get some flack for liking, because it's a pretty girly show, but it's also very smart and real (at least as far as interpersonal relationships go) and it feels a lot like My So-Called Life (Did I mention that thing about redheads?) +10 years.

So yeah, what's the deal with redheads? A few weeks ago I was on the train home, and I was sitting directly across from a tall, thin, redhead for the whole trip, and I thought about a conversion that I had with Shannon sometime during out last year at RISD: top five celebrity crushes. My list was Alicia Witt, Claire Danes, Tori Amos circa 1992, Alyson Hannigan, and the girl from That '70s Show whose name I can never remember (Laura Prepon) but largely because she looks so much like Alicia Witt. And I don't think I realized until after I had come up with this whole list that they were all redheads. It might be some combination of celebrity and red hair though, as I seem to be pretty equal-opportunity in the hair colour of everyday people that I'm attracted to.

And lest you think that I spend all of the little free time that I have sitting in front of my computer watching TV shows, I have made it out to see a handful of concerts over the last couple of months. I paid quite a bit of money to see Death Cab for Cutie (and could not find anyone who wanted to go along) who, as much as I like them on tape, weren't anything special live. The opening band, Stars, the ur-band, at least in name as they haven't been around all that long, of all 'bands with "stars" in their name', were pretty good though. Enthusiastic, into their music, and apparently loving playing a medium-big venue in New York. (They formed in Brooklyn before moving to Canada.)

The next night, I went with Chris and Abi (the bass player in The Inoculist) to see Acid Mothers Temple. I had read something about the opening band The Occasion, and was intrigued enough that I had already thought about going to the show to see them. And I enjoyed them quite a bit, musically, and in part I have to admit because of the girl with cool glasses playing analogue tape loops.

Acid Mothers Temple are a bunch of middle-aged, Japanese hippies who play psychedelic punk. And they fucking rock. Easily the best band I've seen in a long time. And I think maybe the only time that I've actually first hand seen a guitar smashed on stage, which I've always took to be an incredibly wasteful, conceited, meaningless act, but seeing it so unselfconsciouisly done in an ecstatic fit of noise-making was nothing short of beautiful.

I also finally made it out to see Gold Streets again, after someone from the band found an earlier mention of them on my site and text-messaged me about an upcoming show. They were less shoegazery than the first time I saw them, they seemed more confident with their music, with working the crowd. They seem to be coming into their own as a band.

I missed the last Inoculist show in NYC, and hence probably the last show with Chris in the band. By all accounts it was their best show so far. I think that I was the only person who had been to all of their previous shows, so maybe it was my influence keeping them down. Or more likely, they were just starting to come into their own as a band as well, but now John and Heath are moving to Houston and will need to find a new rhythm section. I did catch their penultimate show at Galapagos, which I enjoyed, although it may have had something to do with the El Caminos (the bartender's concoction, basically a mimosa plus gin, it was a Saturday afternoon show) that I was drinking, as they all thought it went terribly. And truthfully, the only time that Chris didn't look bored was when he jumped up to tighten his snare drum so that the bass wasn't rattling it.

Kite Operations, the other band who played that show (a benefit for a pretty cool organization called Go Codon, by the way) was described as 'an all Asian ska band'. But they didn't have a horn section, and I don't think you can really be ska without one. Their instrumentation was typical rock band setup, guitar, guitar, bass, drums, and their sound was fairly Brit-poppy, think Bends-era Radiohead, but with MBV/Slowdive-esque effects pedal madness. In other words, I enjoyed them too.

Okay, all I really wrote about was work, TV, and concerts, but mostly, other than working a lot, things haven't really changed much in the last two months. I still have no furniture. I still don't keep more than two meals worth of food in my fridge. I'm still not using my studio for anything but storage. My only real exciting news is that I'm going to be playing the part of Doctor Bruce Banner (the Doctor Jekyll half of the Incredible Hulk for those who aren't up on their comic book trivia) in the forthcoming (although maybe not for another year or so) fully painted Marvel Mythos: The Hulk.

Oh, and the fact that I've lived in my attic apartment in Inwood for a full year now. It's only the third time that I've lived anywhere for a full year since the house I grew up in (the other two were 438, June 2000 to May 2001, and sort of technically the apartment above Pizza Pier, although I did take a month off and lived at home the first summer there). And it's the first time that I'm intending to stay beyond a year. To commemorate this, I'm throwing a party, this Saturday.