First Day of Classes (part IIIb)

I had production methods this morning, we went over our final from last semester (what??? I know. It's weird. there are many new people in the class. whatever.) Enough about that.

Design. It's in the studio, like last semester, only I'm in a different studio in a different building (our old one is now junior furniture-- so there are some repeats but not too many, and the rest of us are generally sad not to be in that room anymore). The room was a total disaster-- old projects and paper and stuff left over from ID view all over the place, nowhere obvious to claim any desks-- but I'll get to that later. My teacher, Lucia, seems very serious about work (and boy do we have lots of it, for the first day of class!) My general feeling is that while I'm going to have tons of work (infinitely more than studio last semester, in which we had virtually none more than one time, not to mention class was only twice a week) in the end it's going to be great both for my work ethic/concentration as well as my porfolio, which, at this point, needs all the help it can get so I can apply for an internship somewhere. Our project for the whole semester is, in a verbose nutshell, to pick a culture of food different from the one we grew up in (does that mean I can't pick Italian? I don't live in Italy??) and design six well-researched pieces (of tableware) for a theoretical restaurant on a hypothetical street corner in manhattan. We're going to be doing a ton of research into their culture and customs surrounding food, looking at culinary norms and folkways (is that the right word?) and designing flatware and silverware based on that. This is so different from any other design project, and it's so open to exploration (and we have no real deadlines other than the end of the semester) I'm very excited (but intimidated). Our homework, as I said, is a lot: we have to go to the met and look at several cultures or empires and their eating utensils, if they have it, and "fill up most of a sketch pad with beautiful drawings that portray the culture, and which you can use in class in explaining the connections you draw between the culture's aesthetic and their utensils". Whoa. A whole sketch pad?? I can only imagine how good I will be at quick ID sketching by May based on how much my teacher emphasized it in what we'll be doing throughout the semester. It seemed to be the only thing she was sure of, that we'd be doing a lot.

The highlight (and majority) of the class was when her son in law came in, who has degrees in both art and food (what's the noun form of the word 'culinary'?) and who has been on TV and radio and is "famous" (according to Lucia) and who has written books (hint hint) on the cultural history of food in different cultures around the world, Michael Krondl. This is mostly of what he talked, about chopsticks, the differences between them from culture to culture, cultures that only eat with their hands, how those people set their tables, the evolution of table settings and courses of food, the time we spend eating here vs. everywhere else, the reasons we eat (which, interestingly, he said are almost never with nutrition/consumption at the top of the hierarchy) the reasons we eat at home vs. in a restaurant, the cultural differences between both options, etc. He was funny and a very good speaker, and very interesting to listen to (except the girl behind me was kicking my stool and shaking her feet on it the entire time he was talking, including right after I asked her to stop, and it was very distracting). But I did take a page and a half of notes on what he was saying! He's the kind of person who if he taught a seminar, I'd sign up for it. All in all, I'm very excited about the work I'll have after this design class is over, it's like a giant design-based research project, only I don't have to write facts on notecards and arrange them into paragraphs and pretend like I didn't write them all the night before the paper was due.

But I digress. The desks. I went in the studio yesterday after finding out the doorcode from my friend Eddie, and since every desk was covered in projects and paper and junk and stuff I just claimed two (one for me, one for my long-time studio buddy Jenny). I came in today and this Korean girl promptly informed me that she had been using the desk all of last semester, and all her junk and stuff was on it, so my territorial notes were null. This forced Jenny and I, after class, as well as like 5 other kids to sort out the desks and remaining furniture for ourselves. One guy never moved his stuff out and had like 6 broken desks in the corner COMPLETELY covered with his stuff*. And these korean girls each had two desks, two sets of metal shelves, and even one extra desk all between the two of them. But Jenny and I found three extra desks, pushed ours face to face, with the extra one alongside both, and with a set of shelves which we cleaned off and claimed for ourselves (from elsewhere in the room) and even put up a piece of homasote along the side of the shelves facing us to make a pseudo-wall on which to pin stuff. It worked out pretty well, and we're even right next to the pole, which has like 8 electrical outlets on it, which is SUCH a change from last semester, because the room had exactly one outlet (with four plugs) for a total of 14 people in a rather large room. We're very excited about it.


*note: i would use a yiddish word for giant mess, but unfortunately I never learned one.