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Susan left her boyfriend in worst dispute. She called me from New York about a week ago, her last evening there before returning and when they separated, angry at each other, she couldn’t endure his reproaches anymore. She said they will separate. She moved to a hotel to avoid his presence, paid $600 for one week. We spend the week-end together with the flamenco event. I don’t have necessarily a problem with that since I always enjoyed being with her. And I feel sorry for her she has to go through all that. All her efforts to keep the relationship, her efforts in the apartment, she paid trips for him to New York and on Christmas, probably others, helped him financially…and had to undergo these insults. What troubles me is that again she has nothing else to do than return to him, until the next time, without anything learned from these unbearable conditions, as if nothing happened. I tried to call her tonight, she didn’t respond. Only a text message she returned that she was just tired. I guess it’s her boyfriend who doesn’t allow her to communicate. I feel bad, for her, for our friendship, and I feel bad myself. I did my job, helped her to overcome this and now I should continue stand still accepting how she’s patronized. It’s awful to think that we met to do something together only when he disgust her or when he’s away as it was the case too. Otherwise, there are endless disputes every time we meet. I am tired of it. I don’t see any sense whatsoever in this situation. Especially since I feel like an idiot who is on place when desired and has to leave otherwise. I feel more and more detached from Susan, I don’t understand her anymore, I don’t know what’s in her mind, I don’t understand how you can suffer through a relationship like that, how you can accept all the patronization, the little respect, ignorance towards our friendship. I thought many times about it, and I think at some point I just want to keep the biggest possible distance, just to protect our friendship. I know next time when she will call me in a situation like now, I probably won’t listen anymore since I know she will go back to him anyway. I don’t know how a macho like him deserves that, but I do know that it hurts our friendship.

This one bar on Friday, Beechwood in Venice, was one of these places you’ll never arrive. The design is specific in a way, carefully arranged so everything reflects some exclusivity. But nothing is determined. There is no conclusion. You realize it’s designed, but after you left you forget. It doesn’t really leave strong impressions. I guess that’s how you can see certain people as you would meet them at a location like this. They clearly think they deserve something more than average, but they are not able to trace strongly. They don’t have the character to step outside, they rather follow a common sense of some sort. They pretend. You don’t know who they are and it’s hard to find out. So is the space: Architecture that doesn’t know its expression, it’s stylish, but random.

Very different the dance performance this afternoon at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion I visited with Susan. A Flamenco Dance Company from Spain, Nuevo Ballet Espagnol. Susan is dancing flamenco, she’s very passionate about it. I like how determined this music and dance is, through expression, emotions, movements. It’s a very strong transience of a culture. You look in the faces of these dancers, you feel the rhythm, the music, you receive all these moments in very immediate, instant moments. I can’t imagine it doesn’t affect you, no matter what you think about it. No pretension.

I haven’t done anything today, just hang around get over the tiredness, fight against the head. I feel bad, unproductive. And I don’t know why. Going out in LA is not as close as intense as in New York. At least I can’t really remember a day like this one. Why is this so different here? Tomorrow is another day, it’s just passing by…

2 margaritas
1 tequila
2 mojito

…and I feel like totally out timed, hung over…

it’s really ugly, this new design…

Another documentary about troubled politics. This one from Bolivia. The President at that time, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, aka “Goni”, was running for reelection 2002 and hired the consulting firm GCS from Washington D.C. to manage, strategize and run his campaign. GCS is known as advisors of Bill Clintons presidential election campaign. Goni studied in the US. In his first term as President he followed a us-neoliberal political agenda for urgent reforms in one of the poorest South American Countries. But a population largely based on indigenous farmers couldn’t adopt this ideology and was reluctant towards his ties to the US. Nevertheless Goni used US advise for his election campaign. Although he won – by a fraction of votes against two other candidates – he was not able to find the base with his people and had to resign in February 2003, only a few month after the election and after growing violent protests against the government. Evo Morales, just recently elected president by a huge majority and hardly accepted by the US as a populist socialist, was Gonis opponent. The documentary followed GCS during the campaign in 2002. It revealed the difficulties of exporting a American driven understanding of democracy into a country with very different social, historical and economical structures. GCS was big in doing a great job pushing there concept to the limit up to the victorious election, but they couldn’t connect culturally to the people of Bolivia. That was the beginning of the end of Goni. After escaping the riots leading to his resignation he still lives in exile near Washington D.C.

On Friday, Tim and Wil had an argument about competences and responsibility. I don’t know the entire story with all background, but at least some ideas. Tim is in the office since it started. He and Michael were collaborators at Frank Gehry. The office should be called Maltzan & Williams or something. It’s called Michael Maltzan Architecture. Tim runs the office, he is the project manager with enormous dedication to bring design ideas to live as built projects. He knows what he’s doing for the office. Like a marriage one is depending on the other. Wil started about the same time as me. He worked there before, I don’t know how frequent exactly, at least occasionally for a longer time. Before he started three months ago he was working for NBBJ with Susan on a competition. That’s how I know him. Susan spoke very impressed and enthusiastic about his creativity and the way he’s approaching a project. Now he is a co-worker of mine. I learned that he is extremely self-determined convinced of himself. I think I rarely met someone like him. He is not only talking like so many others to put themselves in an interesting position, he has actually a lot to offer. But the balance is small and I think he takes it sometimes too far. So Wil has the position of a creative centre. He is generating ideas and therefore at the very beginning of every project. He promotes the ideas for potential projects and is responsible for public relation work. What caused the argument was that Wil makes sure his name is always prominently positioned in relation to projects he’s working on and within the office team. Tim on the otherside receives in these applications, statements etc. whatever is on the table through some office paper. Tim made a point that you’re starting a process dividing a team when you’re trying to use your position against others. Whereas in a successful project everybody’s contribution reflects the same importance. I don’t know if Wil fully understands that. I think sometimes he is too focused on himself. He prefers to be next to Michael rather than just part of a team. And there are people who have a problem with that. If you are playing competition within a team, you have to make sure the rest of the team understands the competition. For this office I assume Tim knows very well what it means. And I assume Wil probably not.

It’s this time of the year. I filed the return Saturday at 4pm. The message that it was received and accepted by the IRS was sent less than 8hrs later. Same message regarding the state the other morning. An example of American pragmatism. I think they didn’t even look at the return. Within my income range you can’t really do any damage to a federal tax revenue of the size of the USA. So why waste time. This is a wild guess, but I thought to illustrate how you can see it: The 100 wealthiest people and the 100 most important firms produce 80% of the tax revenue. My contribution is among the peanuts. It’s more or less irrelevant if your annual taxes are $5000 or $10000. I know the saying that they control hard exactly these little people. But if you think of a federal agency with hundreds of employees collecting every day tens of thousands of returns: a bureaucratic nightmare if you would audit every single one of them on accuracy in all details. That’s why they are happy if your return fits the average range and nobody needs to look at it any further. Maybe they draw a sample out of every 10.000 or so. But generally I would say everybody with a taxable income of less than $100.000 is scanned out. And that’s why it didn’t even take a day to process. Imagine they would print it out, put it on the pile, take it one day, go through it carefully…it would take them days, weeks, probably months…

I crossed the street with green light, opposite traffic a car, a women, left turn, and she just didn’t care. You drive, the car is not fast and obviously about to stop, but suddenly you realize the car just continues slowly driving on. If you approach a car crash, it’s a left turn, for sure. The problem is: once there was easy traffic and so you just had to wait a little for a gap and you turned left. These days traffic is so hard there is no gap. So the only chance is to rush behind the first car in front of you turning left with red light for opposite traffic (and so for yourself of course) after stopping in the middle of the street blocking half of the crossroad…Whenever there is an incident, i.e. a break downed car or a event with dozens of cars trying to drive on a parking lot at the same time, it’s the end and streets are jammed immediately. It’s like street network operating on the very top edge of their capacity and capability and only the smallest disturbance brings the balance to collapse.