It's an awesome feeling knowing that through Christ our Lord and Savior we can be forgiven and live a new life. I just recently got baptized this afternoon, and it was a fun and exciting experience finally knowing and understanding the meaning behind the baptism. I would encourage everyone who calls them self a Christian to get baptized as well.

God Bless,

Home Sweet Home!

Finally, this semester is OVER! well not quite, I still have two finals tomorrow. As I venture off to new and brighter things, my departure from Fullerton College is well overdue. I have to say, when I first started at FC, it was a thrill and intimidating at the same time, however now that I matured and enlightened my conscience on the nature of our society, I am overwhelmed with humility. I have come to accomplish a lot in this spurt of my life and lessons I did learn, some the hard way and others not so much. Architecture has become my true passion, but more importantly, improving the conditions of our underprivileged parts of our communities. As for now, I will embark on a new adventure, hopefully at USC, "Fight On!" but really, I can't wait to stop making that early morning drive to the O.C., and look forward to making that drive west. LA is my home and I feel good about that. I am just amazed as to how many people I encountered while in the O.C. that really don't know what LA is all about, and frankly I'm a little tired of everyone saying LA is ghetto when they never even venture out that way anyway. Oh well, I know the true LA, its better that I keep my secret spots to myself anyway. Seriously though, LA is the best place to live, and this is evident by all the out of towner's thronging here from all over the nation after one visit. To each is his own, and I hope the best for all the friends and acquaintances that I made while in the O.C., BUT SEE YA!

Another Gehry Building

Frank Gehry's buildings can look unfinished or unruly, even a bit chaotic. But they often have surprisingly direct metaphorical stories to tell.Walt Disney Concert Hall is a joyously informal ship of state for a city keen to come together, if only for a few hours, in a collective experience. Gehry's own house in Santa Monica, a modest pink bungalow the architect wrapped in colliding layers of corrugated metal and chain link, is an unabashed affirmation of the workaday, un-pretty built landscape of Southern California.In the case of Gehry's newest project, the riotously sculptural $100-million Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, the story is about the depths, and ultimately the limits of the human mind.

It's the poignancy of that architectural narrative that ultimately helps the building, which will open officially with a gala celebration Saturday night, overcome its reliance on some of Gehry's most recognizable architectural gestures. For me, and I suspect for other critics and architects, some of these strategies, intentionally crude detailing, exposed structure and the casual juxtaposition of dramatic and banal spaces, to name just three — have lost more than a little freshness over the years, particularly as the size and budgets of Gehry's projects have soared.At the Ruvo Center, which rises from a wide-open intersection about a mile north of the big casinos lining the Las Vegas Strip, the familiarity of those elements is balanced by a deep, affecting humanism at the building's core. This is surely in large part because the Ruvo Center's mission the complex is dedicated to research on and treatment of Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, Huntington's and other neurological diseases, is one Gehry has fully embraced.

Yet with his new addition to his portfolio, Gehry continues to push the limits of Architecture, however, is it a bit too far. Some might say his style is drastically progressing as he ages, and others beg to differ. As a young aspiring Architecture student, my peers and I continue to see Gehry in a different light, Yes he's an innovator, but sometimes his new designs just strike me as him losing his knack for functionality and practicality. Its almost as if Gehry is just being lazy with his designs and trying to produce some hocky building until someone says something to him. I hope for continued success for Gehry, but I am awaiting the story when he is smashed by the client for producing something they really don't like.

Changing Face of Education

Nearly anywhere you drive nowadays you can cruise past a public school that’s recently been opened. You can’t miss them, from the High School of Visual and Performing Arts’ erector-set tower looming above the 101 freeway downtown to the six-story concrete-and-glass hulk of the Helen Bernstein High School at Sunset and Wilton to one of those purple or green or yellow or orange buildings that occupy prominent intersections in Pacoima, San Pedro, Huntington Park, and beyond. The schools are not just splashily spray-painted; they’re in-your-face urban. Often two or three stories high, they’re shoved right to the sidewalk, the opposite of the utopian, reassuringly spread-out archetypes of the 1950s and ’60s and the stately, graceful ones of the ’20s and ’30s. The crop of budget-conscious contemporary architecture attempts to fashion metal and glass and stucco into gritty evidence that public investment is paying off in the form of a good public school education. Three decades of neglect preceded the Los Angeles Unified School District’s current building boom. Enrollment climbed while schools declined. Broken windows, locked bathrooms, leaky roofs, shattered furniture, and shuttered libraries weren’t uncommon, nor were overcrowded classrooms. The district pleaded poverty and its critics cried foul, but the reality remained unchanged until 1997, when voters passed the first of nine local and statewide ballot measures to put up billions of dollars to construct new schools and revive old ones. The money is bankrolling the nation’s largest public works project, dubbed “Roy Romer’s Assembly Line” for the former district superintendent who initiated the vast undertaking. By the end of last year, 76 schools and 59 expansions had been completed to accommodate the district’s 900,000 students. By 2013, LAUSD will have spent $20.1 billion to christen 131 schools and 64 additions. These are big numbers.

For that kind of money LAUSD could have built 73 Disney Concert Halls. Not that the LAUSD has created comparable landmarks. Public school districts don’t have unlimited budgets, let alone the latitude of private developers to relentlessly push the boundaries of design—or anything else, for that matter. At LAUSD, architecture has had to fight for its existence and often has lost. The district’s campaign for new campuses has certainly led to its share of lousy results and many more that are, in the words of one prominent architect sitting on the district’s Design Advisory Council, just mediocre. What’s surprising is that in a school district perpetually uncertain of how children learn or what we ought to teach them and plagued by catastrophic budget shortages, a few good-looking schools have emerged.

Discouraging News for our future leaders!

What will it take for our state to get its act together? Stemming from the budget crisis and how it already hampered many after school programs and threatened to send many lower income families phoning their local legislators, the Governor is on attack once again. What happened to those days, when Schwarzenegger was campaigning on college campuses promising to lower tuition and help our inner city youth achieve a higher education? Today, just as some speculated during these tours, were False Promises. I dare to ask, How did we get in this mess anyway? Do our politicians have the general public's best interest at heart, or are they on a selfish pursuit to make a name for themselves and their families while climbing the political ladder? It is sad to say that the general public has no say in this, even if we head to the polls, solely because our pocketbooks and wallets don't have enough strength to stand and voice an opinion. Gone are the days when our leaders made an impact in our communities, so what should an aspiring politician look too? Corruption, Greed...I have no words of advice but our current gov. system has definitely left me scared and deterred from rising up and being that influential leader in our community.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger outlined a stark vision of a California that would sharply limit aid to some of its poorest and neediest citizens.His $83.4-billion plan would also freeze funding for local schools, further cut state workers' pay and take away 60% of state money for local mental health programs. State parks and higher education are among the few areas the governor's proposal would spare.The proposal, which would not raise taxes, also relies on $3.4 billion in help from Washington — roughly half of what the governor sought earlier this year — to help close a budget gap now estimated at $19.1 billion. Billions more would be saved through accounting moves and fund shifts.

Elimination of CalWorks, the state's main welfare program, would affect 1.3 million people, including about 1 million children. The program, which requires recipients to eventually have jobs, gives families an average $500 a month. Ending those payments would save the state $1.6 billion, the administration said. It would also make California the only state not to offer a welfare-to-work program for low-income families with children.Lawmakers rejected previous attempts by the governor to eliminate the program.Families would also lose state-subsidized day care under the governor's proposal; about 142,000 low-income children would be affected. That would save the state $1.2 billion. Preschool and after-school care would remain in place, as would some federally subsidized day care.Schwarzenegger's latest budget proposal is a starting point for negotiations that typically stretch well into the summer. His previous attempts to eliminate landmark state services have been upended by lawmakers who nevertheless agreed to substantial cuts last year. Their alternatives are limited, however; their tens of billions of dollars in temporary tax hikes and program cuts in recent years failed to end the state's chronic budget problems.

The governor blamed legislative inaction for the deep wound to state services. He said if controls on state spending that he has long sought were in place, the budget gap would be much smaller. He also accused the Legislature of failing to move quickly to rein in spending after he called an emergency session of the Assembly and Senate in January for that purpose.The Democrats who control the Legislature noted that Schwarzenegger vetoed measures they approved earlier this year to address a piece of the deficit. Voters twice rejected the spending controls the governor seeks.Democratic leaders immediately vowed to reject the governor's plans and craft alternatives, which they said could include new taxes on oil companies as well as the abolition of some corporate tax breaks.

Patriotism = $$$$

Michael Ovitz has one. David Geffen has another. Eli Broad has a couple. Just what is it about Jasper Johns's early "Flag" paintings that make some blue-chip collectors seem so, well, patriotic? It is clearly these aficionados are collecting for a more apparent reason $$$$, AND that is a very good reason to collect. Currently the Art market as it is now being called is spurring with well to do entrepreneurs who see lots of cash to be made from trades and exchanges. One must question though, whether these artworks are really being patronized through the manner of how they are being sold to be stored in some collectors basement only to be introduced to another. Furthermore, one must question what is the public to gain out of this? do we ever get to see the real thing, or will we keep being disassociated from such well known artwork if this keeps up?
You can hear Ovitz rhapsodizing about the painted stars and stripes for yourself. For along with the usual auction catalogue for Tuesday night's sale of the Michael Crichton estate, which includes a 1960-66 "Flag" (right) among other works. The cast of characters includes Christie's contemporary co-head Brett Gorvy, Crichton's fifth wife Sherri and master printmaker Ken Tyler. But the star turn belongs to Ovitz, who was Crichton's agent for 30 years.

“We both owned several works of Jasper over the years from different periods and always spoke of the dream of owning a Flag,” says Ovitz about half-way into the video, going on to describe how Johns's first "Flag" images broke from the then-dominant style of painting (i.e., Abstract Expressionism) and ushered in new experiments (i.e., Pop Art).Crichton bought his red-white-and-blue “Flag,” 1960-66, made of encaustic and paper on canvas, directly from the artist in 1973. Christie's is offering it Tuesday night with an estimate of $10 to $15 million.
Ovitz bought his highly textured "White Flag," 1955-58, at Christie’s in 1988 for about $7 million. He has given it pride of place in his home ever since. When I interviewed him once for an ARTnews "Top 200 Collectors" issue, he singled out "White Flag" as the centerpiece in his collection.
Unfortunately the best “Flag” paintings in Southern California cannot always be seen in person. In New York the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan both have great examples of these paintings, of which there are around 20 in existence. L.A. museums do not.
Rather, the best "Flags" out here are buried in private collections. David Geffen has one example, vertical in orientation. Eli Broad's foundation owns, along with a darker variation from 1994, two "Flags" from the 1960s. One is white like Ovitz’s. The other, colored like Crichton’s but significantly larger,went on display at the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA until Broad withdrew the bulk of his collection from the museum in late 2008.

Simply Water

The beauty of water if taken a closer look, and the vital functions that it possesses should throng individuals to more considerate of the brevity that our world is currently facing. Here in LA it is hard to relate this travesty of water deprivation, as one congressman and mayor address the issue of water conservation in LA, our residents really need to see the impact of our actions and photos might just suffice.

As the world faces the challenge of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, we have renewed cause to contemplate the role of water in our lives. A good place to start is at the Annenberg Space for Photography’s current exhibit, “Water: Our Thirsty World.”The exhibit is in partnership with National Geographic Magazine and features photos from a special issue of the magazine. It’s split into six themes, each of which explores the role of water in human life and its relationship to our survival and that of the planet. The documentary-style images are bright, bold and arresting and serve as vivid guideposts to the complicated social and ecological issues surrounding water resources and arid lands.

The Annenberg space is the photographic equivalent of theater in the round, with pictures arranged in an aperture-like circle around a multimedia presentation space. The “Water” exhibit begins its journey on one side of the sphere. with photos from a series called “The Big Melt,” which examines what’s called “the great melt of the Tibetan Plateau,” an endangered glacial source that reportedly supplies nearly 40% of the world’s water.

Some of the exhibit’s most breathtaking images come from the series “The Burden of Thirst,” in which photographer Lynn Johnson follows the daily journey of Kenyan women as they walk through miles of stark desert -- colorful skirts and headdresses flapping around their thin, dark legs -- with bright yellow containers of water on their backs. A drought in that country has made retrieving safe drinking water even more difficult, and as the caption points out, “If the millions of women who haul water long distances had a faucet by their door, whole societies could be transformed.”

More familiar is “California’s Pipe Dream," in which pictures by Edward Burtynsky show vast expanses of suburban land with cookie-cutter tract homes that have been abandoned, their once-verdant lawns returning to a natural, arid state. Other images show Los Angeles freeways and sprawl, a desert region fed by imported water. The exhibit comes full circle with touching pictures from the series “Sacred Waters,” which documents humanity’s communal, religious and ritualistic use of water. A giant print by John Stanmeyer depicting half-naked men and women rolling, bathing and dancing in the crisp, cold water of the Saut d'Eau waterfall in Ville Bonheur, Haiti, during the Festival of the Virgin of Miracles seems to embody the almighty, life-giving power of water.

www.annenbergspaceforphotography.org