I also performed a solo piece based on video tracking, but that performance ended in disaster, and I believe the footage is lost, if it ever existed… I certainly never had a copy… I’ll ask around to see if I can dig it up.

By mid-day, New Jersey Art Director B, Connecticut Creative Director S, and I battle it out over the whiteboard, where we pore over my never-ending supply of diagrams and flow charts, printed fresh each day, discovering previously undisclosed nuances with every hour, debating each blot of ink until one of us submits to the other’s persistence.

S, who has final decision-making rights, stands an inch closer than comfort, eyes fixed unwaveringly on the target, my face, often seeming to not quite understanding exactly the details of B and my fervent discussions, but always making the correct high-level decision regardless.  S waits a bit too long with uncomfortable silence after I emit my usual delay tactic response to his asking me if I am interested in permanent employment.  He is not afraid of silence or proximity.  This ability to create uneasiness and action on the part of his minions (myself included) demands respect, and I am taking notes.

Meanwhile young chatterbox B waxes loquacious about social media, interactive design, usability, Toffte, and just about any other topic placed in range of his curly goldilox covered ears.  He, and the rest of the agency crew, maintain poise and courtesy throughout most of the 9+ hour workdays, finding joy and comfort in each others’ company.  Sometimes I think B is a genius just through the sheer level of his commitment to the otherwise inconsequential minutia of interactive media, his lack of anxiety, and what I perceive to be a certain level of premature wisdom.  But he is no doubt young and idealistic, and I have no doubts that the final product will be mediocre but nevertheless a flagship product for this interactive agency which has apparently never created anything quite so interactive before.  (Mind you, I’ve created a dozen of these things at a tenth of the budget with a twentieth of the people…. lessons to learn abound.)

Project Manager, W, a Kenyan seemingly by birth, once a day trots her stuff by and begins to talk about the status of the project in a deceptively offhand manner.  Like S and B (without the pickle soup of the true S&B in Williamsburg), W is also surprisingly intelligent and understands the impact of most design decisions without requiring a spoon feeding of soup.  Her observations are usually acute, and I admire her ability to maintain control while I repeatedly question her authority with my snide remarks, arrogance, and unintentional but conscious airs of nonchalance.  We are all in all getting along very well.

H, the Jewish senior designer of Romanian genetics, is soft-spoken but witty when spoken with a flat affect. She believes men should be men, and not sing mopey songs about unrequited love.  I feel that we share generally similar tastes, although our interaction is relatively limited.  It is due to her that I and you have now discovered her friends’ band, Tiger Flower, although she is by no means a metal-head.  H is a skilled designer and grasps conceptual matters with little effort.

At least once or twice a week, S, B, W, and I conference with R and H, the developers in England who will most likely actually build what we have designed.  The Brits do not restrict themselves to technical discussions and frequently question my design decisions without quite addressing them as such.  S, B, and W, seem somewhat unfamiliar with these aggressive tactics of programmers, so I take it upon myself to assuage the developers’ concerns while attempting to restrict their mental meanderings to only those areas in which they will be put to use. 

Nevertheless, the Brits are clearly positioning themselves to gain control over this project, its timing, and high level decision-making through the guise of technical issues, and my crew seem none-the-wiser.  Despite their being an internal group of the London sister office of the same agency, originally, the Brits were meant to be just one of many teams of developers who would bid on this project.  Without any bidding, they have de facto claimed status as the only developers in consideration.

Thursday 7:30pm, you can see my taking nosedives off of the diving board in the NYU pool, sometimes slipping and injuring myself as I try to impress the skinny young almost-but-not-quite asexual Chinese girls under the instruction of C, the flamboyant non-professional diver extraordinaire.

diving boards are dangerous

Friday morning, 8:30-9:30, I hit balls around on the tennis court with buxom instructor A, also of Romanian descent, and the busload of middle-aged Catholic women.

Saturday and Sunday 9am to 6pm are devoted to my hard-working students, health insurance, library rights, and a meager retirement plan. Somewhere there is time for banya, booze, and social networks, vegetarian meals and naturally caffeine-free tea.

As Trina says, “I’m gonna put that pussy on top.  I’m gonna ride you until that dick drop.  I’m gonna keep going non-stop until I hear you say, ‘Trina, god damn you a bad bitch.’”

Tennis is a different story.  A, the buxom young instructor, doesn’t mess around.  The 7 women and I run drills, returning balls, rallying with each other, and practicing volleys.  The two oldest women – a fiery 60-somethinger and a middle aged latina – joked about having to compete for me as a hitting partner.  An oversized and middle-aged administrator at the university stated matter-of-factly that I would hit with her since the two best hitters had already had me.  Later, the administrator questioned the integrity of my racquet, based on the sound made when hitting.  Towards the end, we practiced serves, with little guidance.

We start running, and I realize that we haven’t made any plan about what to do with thte car.  Chris carries on running, and I pull the car along to the curb, trying to find a place to leave it.

There is a short section of the curb that seems like a good place to leave the car, but a sign says something  about narrow cars only being allowed there.  It seems to me that my car is not the sort that is allowed to be left there, so I pull it back towards a parking lot (from which we came?).  People at the parking lot tell me that we are not likely to get a ticket before we get back to the car – this is Canada.

New scene: I am listening to a girl talk with two other guys about how she built her website:  She says she used flourless (i.e. codeless)  design with cake (i.e. CakePHP?), whch she found did the job very well.  I see the words flourless and cake as if they are links on a web page.  The guys are asking detailed questions…

…and that’s when the squirrel scratching outside my window woke me up.

Very little natural light makes it in from the two walls of windows.  The cubicles irregularly shaped and arranged in an ad-hoc abandoned honeycomb pattern.  I sit at one of several steel tables half a foot too high.  My neighbor, who’s name I immediately forgot, is a freelance front-end coder.  He is young and seems far too happy to be an HTML programmer.  Sometimes he can’t contain his excitement at how “neat” his own code is.  Planning his own obsolescence…  But he, being relatively neat, tall, good looking, personable, and clean, is not what I would usually imagine a programmer to be.  Based on this and my last office experience a few weeks ago, I am starting to detect that the breed of geek who works at these ad or interactive agencies is not at all the same as the antisocial, dirty, drug-obsessed geeks I am used to.

Behind me, in the dark cavernous space, full-time employees in the production division exchange the latest technology gossip.  They swear a good amount and talk in authoritative voices a few steps too deep for their natural range.  Today, my third (and second-to-last) day, I made my second presentation, this time to the accounts department.  The head account woman picked cucumbers out of her gourmet deli salad and alternated between twiddling her Blackberry and iPhone, interjecting occasionally with justifications for why the high-profile system I am designing should not do anything different from what has been done previously.  I agree entirely, but unfortunately, I must keep myself entertained.

On to the hamburger:

Five Leaves Burger

The beef is grass-fed, which calmed my own stomach considering my very recent screening of Food, Inc., in which an industrial cow researcher sticks his hand elbow-deep through a port drilled into the side of a fully-conscious cow, giving him access to the contents of one of its stomachs, where he mashes around and shows off the rotting corn (i.e. not grass) inside.

But for full disclosure, I am working on the assumption that, as I believe is necessary for gastronomical honesty and integrity, judgment lies mostly in the hamburger, not in the contents of the cow’s stomach (which is nowhere to be found at Five Leaves) at the moment of its murder.  And in this department, the Five Leaves Burger is a great mashup, regardless of whether the long dead, extruded and now medium-rare cooked cow of questionable upbringing had arugula or rubber tire as its last supper.

The bun at Five Leaves was very well educated, and had a crispiness to the outermost layer of refined white flour that did not seem to be the result of any significant toasting.  The innards of the top bun were doused in mayo mixed with red pepper powder.  Then came the perfectly cooked sunny-side up egg with no evidence of any frying visible on either top or bottom.  Beneath the egg was a solitary slice of beet, lying astride the meat patty itself.

The first bite released the unfertilized juices pregnant within the egg, which flowed through the home-made prophylactic of mixed salad I surreptitiously inserted directly beneath, and were eventually lapped up greedily by the soft absorptive inner lining nascent in the bottom bun, spilling out the overflow mixture of blood and amniotic fluid onto the fresh green side of salad.  The meat patty was crispily overcooked on a few rough outer edges, but soft and tender medium rare on the inside, exactly as requested.

Conclusion:  delicious burger, but the meat was oversalted such that I would be remiss in not mentioning it in this otherwise perfectly good review.

One thing which seems clear is that Kandinsky, like many people in postmodern culture, was focused on symbols and their meaning in shifting contexts.  Certain motifs consistently repeat themselves from his earliest works up until his final paintings, despite the drastic changes in style.  Certain hatch marks, marine forms, and what appear to be feet and toes appear again and again in the most unexpected places.  And it is this which gives the retrospective meaning.  Repetition turns “Kandinsky” into an emergent body of work amenable to discussion and analysis.  If every work was unique, how would you address it as a whole?

A late work

On of his works, unusual in its style even for such a varied artist, seems to serve as a legend to the symbols prevalent in all others:

Thirty (Trente), 1937. Oil on canvas

A "typical" Kandinsky composition

An early work

Bitter melon is indeed very bitter and swims in a sort of egg-drop soup goo – will take some more acclimatization.  The “ruffle fat” pig skin was a bit cardboard in texture, slightly bitter, and not as tasty as memories of my momma’s fried chicken skin – I think they need to be eaten straight out of the frier in order to truly appreciate their natural texture.  String beans are always delicious, and the Adobong Sitaw were a fine variety in a pleasant sauce.  The pig heart and intestines were very good, almost a staple, and I found myself returning to them between other dishes.  But it was the the Dinuguan, stewed pork in a pork blood gravy, that made the night.  This was nothing like Chinese pork blood jello, which I’m not crazy about, although it did share that metallic iron flavor which is inevitable when manging healthy animal blood.  In this case the sauce was thick and viscous, but perfectly complemented the tenderness of the cubes of pork.  The two whole suckling pig lechóns were impressive in presentation, and perfectly crispy skinned, buttery meated, and tasty, yet somehow unspectacular.   Engeline’s chefs have managed to cook them in an oven mimicking the result of an open fire spit, but the unevenness of a fire-roasted animal was missing.

A true spit-fired suckling pig at a Marlyand wedding

It was a little disappointing not to have a chance to retry balut, which was the first thing I ate with the Gastronauts group upon joining at Krystal’s Cafe on 2nd Ave.  At that time, years ago now, I had shown my mettle to the small group by being the first to crack open the egg and drink its amniotic fluid before crunching the bones of the innocent fetus inside with relish, picking soft feathers from between my teeth.  Courtney, one of the co-founders, ran out of the restaurant and threw up on the sidewalk.  Then we sang karaoke in Tagalog.

Gastronauts has changed a bit.