Same Bat-Place, New Bat-Face

Welcome to 2011 and welcome to the new Pa(ren)thetic Life blog!!

For those of you who understood the reference of this post's title, I apologize the deliberate cheeky-ness.  For those who did not, learn some culture!  I may be four months or so early but my blog has been resurrected!  It has a new name (because my lovely beau insisted there was simply not enough HaHa to justify the blog's previous name) and corresponding title image, but the web address is still the same.  The direction of content will remain the same (since I was and still am the sole contributor) and hopefully touch on more varied subjects.  Though, it's been nearly a year since my last post so I'm just going to pick up where I left off. 

Seeing as its the tail end of the usual end-of-the-year Holiday Season, its time for my annual e-card via Photoshop:

This year, in addition to resolving to eat better and exercise more frequently (those resolutions could only be more untimely if made while eating pumpkin pie at the end of Thanksgiving Dinner), I also intend to post to my blog more regularly.


Happy 2011!!!  I'll be back here again soon.

Better Late Than Never?

Yikes! It's been about 3 weeks since my last post, so this might be about a week late.  Oops!  Life just happenned and got in the way of me and my laptop reaching into the blogo-verse.  Lets get on to the post.

The Christmas Season of 2007 was my first in DC and I wanted to make a Holiday Card that included an unmistakable reference to this nation's fabulous capital.  At the time, I was working alot of hours and kind of wound up doing a bit of a rush-job.  I pulled a picture of the Lincoln Memorial I had taken and a picture of me my mother had taken and slapped them together.  I did a quick drop of text and sent the thing out before I got on a plane to fly home for the holidays.  The next day, I'm on the phone with my girlfriend and she said, "did you misspell 'Christmas' on purpose?  Like, as a funny thing in the card?"  Freaking out, I opened the file and saw that I did, indeed, misspell 'Christmas'.  The thing is, I'm not the best of typists and I'm of the generation that grew up having MS Word automatically point out or correct our typing errors.  It was just a little unfortunate that my quirk manifested itself on one of my Holiday Cards.  But I decided it wouldn't really be a card from me unless it had something like a poorly typed word to really pass along a part of my personality.  Fun!

For the Holidays of 2009, I stepped up the DC-ness a bit and I stepped up the Leo-ness too.  Also I tried to incorporate Christmas and New Years festivities to make it a more general holiday card.  Though the colorization on the Santa sleigh wasn't exaclty to my liking (and still drives me bit coo-coo), I think the overall card was a success.

Which brings us to this past Holiday Season's card (though we're still liturgically in the season until tomorrow - Jan 6).  I took the original idea behind my Cards - mimicking families sending yearly cards - and kind of molded it to the way I live.  When I left my childhood home in Texas, one of the things my mother sent me off with was this flat-profile, roll-out, wall-hanging, cloth christmas tree (pictured here).

And that's me posing with it the night I put up my lights.  My mom has a tree just like it that she puts up at home, only she has more flat ornaments than I do.  Anyway, alot of family holiday cards people send out have a photo with them in front of their household Christmas Tree, so I adapted that concept to me.

So Happy New Years, Blog!!!  Welcome to 2010.  From Me, me, ME, and mE.

Next blog is about NPR and music.  How could that combination ever disappoint?

2006-2007 Holidays...When It All Started

During the Holiday Season of 2006, I realized it was the first one where I was in some sort of a household, apart from the one my parents created.  It was my 5th year of college (I was in a 5 year professional program, the 5th year was a requirement not a choice) and I was living in an apartment off-campus with one of my best friends, Zach.  the holiday season had come upon us and I was feeling the good cheer.  Though I was still preoccupied with finals and papers, I managed to stay in the season.

It was the first time I bought and decorated a (fake) Christmas Tree for a place I lived in.  It came out so well!

As Christmas neared, I realized that people were sending Christmas cards left, right, and center.  Since Zach and I were technically out in the world on our own, I decided that we too should have a Christmas card to send out.  So, with my fabulous Photoshop-ing skills, I modified a picture my roomie and I took that Halloween (we were Turk and J.D. from Scrubs), found a cheezy lookinng background somewhere on the internets, and tossed on some text.

The card was so much fun to make and it was received so warmly, I decided that I should do one every year.  This was just the first, but I've yet to do my best.

07-08 and 08-09 retrospectives are still coming, building up to the unveiling of this year's card!

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder...

...but when a building is fugly, it doesn't matter who beholds it, it's ugly.  Let's just take this little diddy here:

This structurally broad-shouldered guy is the J Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington DC.   It is a consensus uggo.  The only beholders who could possibly allow their eyes to see beauty in this are the guy who designed the thing (Hoover FBI Building), Stevie Wonder, the guy who designed this quintessential piece of Stalinist-era stereotypically oppressive Russian apartment block (which I found here),

or Noel McKinnell and Gerhard Kallmann who designed the East Coast landmark that is Boston's City Hall (photo from here).

So why am I on about ugly buildings?  Well, talking bad about ugly buildings is one of my favorite things to do.  Its almost automatic when you have an architectural education like I did; where often beauty was prized over function, reason, and practicality.  But really, I was inspired by an article that came up on my Yahoo! homepage a few days ago.

The article was Bunny Wong's "The World's Ugliest Buildings" for the October 2009 Travel+Leisure.  Its a good enough compilation of 15 ugly, stupid, and generally bad buildings (certainly no list of 78, but good enough), but I'd like to point out my favorites.  Let's start with the buildings that are really just a joke that took structural form.

We start with the Page 6 Building: the Longaberger Home Office in Newark, OH. (photo source)

The company is a woven basket company...get it?!

Lets look at what Bunny said:  "...it’s as if, in 1997, a giant-size Little Red Riding Hood set down her seven-story hamper on a flat section of Ohio. ... True, the company purveys handcrafted baskets. And founder Dave Longaberger’s dream headquarters was a replica of his favorite basket. But hey, Crate & Barrel employees don’t schedule meetings in a 10-story sofa."

Nicely said, though I might be interested in working for Crate & Barrel's corporate office if they did meet in a 10-story sofa.  As long as it's right across the street from the Vizio headquarters - which would of course be a 12-story flat panel HD screen.  Sweet.

I'd work late on Mondays during football season.  Clocking out coincidentally right after the Monday Night Football game (assuming the Vizio building gets cable).

I love what reader/commenter adriannakaden said: "I live about 10 minutes away from this building, and I'm sick of having to look at it whenever I go into Newark. Yeah, I know, I know, people are going to say 'Well you don't HAVE to look at it,' but come on guys, it's a huge basket right beside the highway, you can't miss it! It's rediculous looking"

Exactly!  I mean, when you go to the Zoo, you don't HAVE to look at the monkey playing with himself in the middle of the primate cage.  But really, its so ridiculous, you can't help but look.

The next little mistake we talk about is the Page 8 building: The Fang Yuan Building in Shenyang, China.  (photo source)

Bunny said:  "This 25-floor office building, finished in 2001 in the northeastern capital of Liaoning Province, is a weird mishmash of ideas. One is a reference to old Chinese coins, which have square cutouts—just like the structure’s square center. Other parts of the design are like a garden-variety corporate building, with a concrete base and, on the sides, steel rims with glass grooves...Princeton-educated Taiwanese architect C. Y. Lee...wanted to meld East and West. In this creation, urban concrete-and-steel commercial structure meets ancient Chinese currency."

While not exactly a stinging criticism, it gets the point across - this building's design really doesn't exist to make much of a point.  Designing things in the shape of money or monetary symbols is for the designers and creators of Richie Rich (the American-created comic character).

Its a silhouette of ancient Chinese currency, extruded and put on a clumsy (that's being charitable) base that's a split mastaba beneath a stubby skyscraper whose wide faces were designed by Michael Graves in the mid-80s and and whose narrow faces wanted to be like a split Boston Federal Reserve Bank.

The only time a professional building designer should ever be allowed to design a crass, miss-mashed edifice like this one is if the thing is going in Las Vegas

or Dubai

Both these places of obscene carelessness are home to awful built things that must have been conceived in an inebriated, snarky, or practically joking state of mind (maybe all of those).

Now, let me tell you about the 'beauty' of our Page 4 building:  The Harold Washington Library in Chicago, Illinois.

A few years ago, when I was a student visiting Chicago, I was riding the train on Chicago Downtown Loop with a classmate.  As we were passing this visually jarring, huge friggin' building, I turned to take a picture of it saying, "I just had to get a picture of that crazy thing."  In a surprise move, a sweet looking old lady sitting in the seat in front of us turns around and says something along the lines of, “why do you want a picture of that ugly ass thing. Here in Chicago, we hate that piece of shit.”  Wow, tough town.  I'm not sure whether that anecdote says more about the people of Chicago, but its sure as hell says something about the way this building is held in the minds of the people who have the unfortunate luck to live with it everyday.

I guess Chicago's Washington Library is a little like I.M. Pei's Louvre pyramids in that way.

The locals either LOVE it or HATE it.  Its the same, except that all the locals HATE the Washington Library. On this little (a full city-block) mistake of the bull market 90s, Bunny said: "If buildings came with footnotes, this one...would have pages worth of citations.  Neoclassical references collide with a glass-and-steel Mannerist roof; throw in some red brick, granite, and aluminum—and a bad sense of scale—and you’ve got way too much architecture class for one day...The Chicago public library has a helter-skelter application of motifs and styles that’s [unfortunately, completely postmodern.]"

What this means is that the building tries so hard NOT to be something like this:

that it just doesn't have enough time to try and be more like this (i.e. the roof):

not enough time or money to be more like this (i.e. the massing of the base and the lack of distinct ornamentation, imagine about 4 of these in a row and you'd have a nicer base for the library):

and not enough time or class or gonads to be more like this (i.e. the middle parts of both this and the library building are similar but not - and that's not good for the library building, showing lack of vision, ability, and scale).

To sum that up, the Harold Washington Library in Chicago is just, flat-out not good.

And this brings us to the last, and my 'favorite' ass-ugly building.  The Page 2 show stopper: The Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea.

A few months ago was when I first heard about this building.  I looked it up and I almost fell out of my seat at its bold, unapologetic ugliness.

This thing is like the ugly duckling that unwisely got out of the lake, got chewed up and spit out by a lawnmower, didn’t die because its guts and bones were just too damn strong, and hobbled around for a time while the other ugly ducks laughed and pecked at it.

Bunny said: "With its concrete sides sloping at sharp 75-degree angles, this stark 1,083-foot-tall, not-quite-finished hotel looks threatening and out of place on the Pyongyang skyline.  Its history is odd, too: the country ran out of money for the project in the early 1990s, and it was airbrushed from photos [for quite some] time. After a 16-year hiatus, construction began anew last year...Supposedly the 3,000-room hotel is an attempt to outdo South Korea when it comes to impressive skyscrapers. It’s undoubtedly emblematic of the ruling dictatorship’s hubris."

 



















Truly, only an egomaniaicle dictator (as if there is any other type) with his own personal waterslide in the pool of his vast estate could ever imagine, sanction, start, stop, and after almost two decades resume building of this thing.  And now that they’re facing most of it in glass (which really doesn't help the looks at all) and trying to finish it, I'm so excited to see this once-damaged ugly duckling transform into a grown up, butt-ugly, cluster-flub of junkiness.  Maybe one day in the future, when Kim Jong Crazy-Leader III decides to have an open and non-hostile dictatorship like China has, I could stay in that hotel and see what it feels like to live in one of the imaginings of a certified nutter.

Well, I guess that's it for that.  Thanks for taking this trans-continental and trans-chronological journey through unfortunate buildings.

In the next blog post, I'll talk about Thanksgiving and why its evidence in the case making America better than any other country on the face of this Earth.

Cheers!

P(L)'s note:  (Edit 11/31/2011) The desire for marginal historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity have precipitated an edit about the Russian apartment block.  Thanks to the blog's commentors for keeping us honest.