The first Christmas I spent away from home was almost ten years ago. I decided to use some money I had saved to make a trip by myself to the US staying in the house of friends and family. The Christmas I spent it in the house of my aunt Ligia in Gothenburg, Nebraska, a place that I would rightly call home for all the nice days that I have spent there in different trips. The whole family of my uncle came to the house for the dinner and I got to see some of them after several years from my first visit to the US when I was about ten. One of the cousins of my cousins, I think it was Levi, received a banjo as a Christmas gift. That intriguing banjo. I was impressed with the instrument, with its shape and also with its meaning. I had seen Doug, a Nickelodeon character, owning the banjo in his “Ritmo Callejero” song when I was younger, but that was the first time I saw one in real life. When the banjo was played it sounded so familiar. The very first chord that Levi played automatically summoned an idea, probably shaped in me by the TV and my first visit, of a US as a place of farms, SUVs, interstates and football. I don’t remember well the circumstances but in the following moments, all the young people ended up in the basement of the house because someone had a guitar that I could use for playing along. Next thing I knew was that my cousin Erica took out her saxophone (was it a saxo or a clarinet?) and my cousin Michael his harmonic (or maybe a flute?), and someone started singing and playing another guitar (Archie maybe?) and despite the amateur I am with music we started jamming around so spontaneously that at some point we didn’t realize that they were already calling us upstairs for the turkey. Back to 2018 in Cambridge, having finished the work of Studio, today a friend brought us to a bar for a beer and some American music. And even though this past year the US has been for me everything but farms, SUVs, interstates or football, when the guitarist took out a banjo and started playing it, that remote Gothenburg came immediately to my mind along with the idea that many of my American friends and almost all of my international friends have not been lucky enough to experience that rural Midwest world I met that is such a considerable part of this country.
Many people came to see the review of the Studio of Patrik Schumacher. Understandable, since what he does best is to get himself into the people’s conversation. One of the reasons for it is eccentricity and that you could see it in his review. He celebrated that two of his students just disagreed with the instructions and ideology he gave to his Studio and diverted into their own explorations. Fun to watch but also disappointing. What is really challenging is to have some kind of constraint and work creatively around it. Not my idea, I heard it from Enrique Walker, architect from Columbia that explained some time ago here in GSD how critical is that point for his Studio. Anyway, I got to hear from an amazingly intelligent architect, the one in pink. I forgot his name.
Unaware of how cold it would be, I went today to Antigone, a play made by some people from the university in the stadium. Amazing actors the ones playing the soldiers. Unfortunately rain and cold made many people leave the play before the end. I tried to stay as much as possible but also had to leave.
