Wow, so I went to this super-rich woman's house the other day, because she holds these big art events and has speakers speaking, and she has about 8000 swimming pools and invites the art kids from the university... Anyway it was cray-zee. I didn't get any good photos of her house, unfortunately. In the toilet there were three light switches, one switch for the fan, and one switch that said "art". Wha??? An ART switch?? I didn't push it cos I was scared. Anyway here is a photo of my friends posing behind one of the bars at the house, in this weird dance party room with crazy lights.

And here are some of my school buddies. Deanna:


Fillipe:


(Everyone has their cameras out to take photos of the extravagent richie richness)
and Cathy:




Tonight, I went to see Dungen play at this bar called the Casbar. It is a neat bar, and Dungen were supercute and very Swedish. Here is the foxy lead singer, who played tambourine, flute (tres Jethro Tull) and guitar (EXACTLY the same guitar as Beverly).


Post-Dungen, we went to some other bar that was having a lamentable 80s night. This consisted of playing A Ha, The Bravery (inexplicably), The White Stripes (also inexplicably) and about 3 different mash-up versions of Love Will Tear Us Apart. Confusing. In this picture, Cathy looks scared because Tanner - who is in my class and is kind of drunken sloppy country-club style (look at his polo shirt!)- is being a fool.

SoCal trivia - San Diegans are OBSESSED with wearing jandels at all times. "Flip flops", they call them. Pffth.

I forgot to post this yesterday. Here is the beach that is 15 mins walk from campus. It's pretty nice.

Wow, it was crazy on campus today. All the undergrads are round, and they are pretty weird. There was this organic fruit and veg market around yesterday, and there was also this dude cooking about 5 feet of meat. Sweet.


FRATERNITY! Oh my god oh my god oh my god. They're recruiting at the moment, and there are these great stalls everywhere.

JEWISH FRATERNITY! America is great. I wanna join a fraternity.

Uum, yeah. More of the same.


This afternoon we went out to this epic art talk thing in old La Jolla village. It is pretty but unbelievably bourgeois. I took a photo of some cute biscuits. Then I bought an icecream, for $3.50. D'oh.


Actually, this curry is the best thing about America. We had dinner at this $6.99 all you can eat vegetarian indian buffet, and it was sooooo good. I got a bit crazy with the yoghurt, as you can see, but I had to take a photo of all this food cos it was such a thing of beauty. Wow that place was amazing.


Then I went to see Cocorosie and Antony and the Johnsons play. This is a shit photo of Cocorosie, which is pretty much here just to prove that I went. They were great, except one of the Cocorosie girls was doing this kind of hip-hop dancing near the end which disturbed me a bit. Antony and the Johnsons were impressive, but less my bag.

Ooh and today I bought a ticket to the Beck show. It's not for about a month but I am probably going to be puking with excitement by that time. I am going to try and get some kind of amnesia so I can forget that Beck is a scientologist.
People here can't understand me when I say "Beck". I tried to order a Becks (beer) at a loud bar the other day, and it was a disaster. I asked four times, the bartender was bewildered, and someone else had to order it for me. Now I have learnt to say "Bahk" but I feel dumb.

Oh yeah and I have a house. I will move in next week. It's pretty good. It's cheap. The lease is only till January. My days of loft-living are almost over before they even began. I'm obviously no boho.

Dear New Zealand, I am just writing to announce that, from an accurate sample of one show, I declare San Diego bands to be pretty much exactly the same as New Zealand ones. Just saw some boring experimental/drone band, all kneeling hunched over their laptops and anachronistic sound machines. Then a 5 piece shouty-folky-electro-y band who were like the Futurians, if the Futurians had 5 members and folk leanings. Then this guy Alasdair Roberts who is from Glasgow and is on Drag City I think. Anyway he was very nice and here is a (bad) picture of kids sitting round attentively like he is big-daddy storyteller. And then it rained again, and he said he was going to play "Weather With You" but he didn't.


And here is some of the graffiti in the toilets. Am I at Arc? Midnight? Nooo..... Different city, same graffiti. *sigh* And this place is even scody-er than any Arc or Freedom Shop ever. There was apparently a rat under the couch I was sitting on, and one guy spent about an hour trying to evict it by thumping on the couch and yelling at the offending rodent. Rattus rattus.

NEWSFLASH!!! It just rained! No kidding. I've only been here a week and it just rained. I was sitting in the courtyard, and then there was thunder. And then there was rain. I couldn't believe it. I took photos of the concrete outside the studio, as proof. And here it is.

So I'm really tired at the moment, and I would be going to sleep, except that there's some totally heinous freshman orientation dance going on about 20 metres from the studio. They are dancing in the courtyard to bad pop and hip-hop, and it's really really loud. If they don't stop before midnight I am gonna go over and bust some skulls.
Also, here is the loft, as you can see. It is pretty much done, except for a couple extra struts and stuff. We even have our own separate ladders. Cute! Mmmm loft.

The other day, when I was on the bus, I took this photo of the super-crazy Mormon temple thing. You can only see it in the distance, but nonetheless it's pretty amazing. It's the building with the white spires that look like a castle crossed with a spaceship, and one day I'm gonna walk around the grounds (even non-Mormons are allowed to do that) and take a brilliant close up photo of the insanity. For serious - it is the best and most weirdest thing eeeever.


More photos about buildings. No food (but hey! You know what's good about the food round here? You can get just about everything in jalapeno or cilantro flavour. At this very moment, I am eating jalapeno hummus), but look at this - it's my library! I don't know if the picture does it justice, but it is almost as super-weird as the Mormon thing. Weird. And as you walk up to it, you go between these two walls of mirrored windows, so you see yourself from every direction. Bad.


Ok, now some more photos of building. A loft. We're building a loft in our studio! Woot! Actually, I mostly hold stuff, and Elyse does the actual building, but it's still hard work and I'm still proud of my mad skills. So here's the loft part way through - the frame's up and we're putting in the 2 by 4 cross-beams.


And here it is an hour or two later. Now all the cross-beams are up, and it's looking pretty sweet. It's 8' by 12'! That's huge! Unless I just wrote 8 inches by 12 inches, in which case it's not huge at all, and I am still confused about the stupid imperial measurments. Stupid imperialists! uuh, yeah. We're gonna finish the loft tonight.

Uh oh! Kelly's found a wireless internet hotspot, and she's made her ooooown bloooooog. She doesn't know if this photo thing will work, but she does know she's gonna try (and keep talking about herself in the gracious 3rd person). Ummmm... here are my flatmates, sitting on the couch. Yep, they're out of focus, but what are you gonna do about it, huh?


Ok, here's another photo where I'm excited about having a digital camera and being all snappy (schnappi) happy. This one is called "I went to dinner with my sister and my dad and we ate burritos. Or I ate a burrito and the others ate other stuff. But it was good anyway". Evidently, my photo taking is still a bit shite.


And here's... another photo! Wholly Bagels, Batman! This one is eating arochip in aropark, for The Last Time (in a while). Oh joy. The chips were pretty good, and we got onion rings! Am I boring you to death yet? Well: no one's making you look! Sucker!


That night, we went to Indigo to see Die Die Die! They played for about 4 times longer than I've ever seen them play before. That's like 40 minutes! A girl called Bronwyn took some photos of me and Anna. Here is one in which I am posing like a poser and she is dozing like a dozer.


Now for lift-off! Just warning you, from here on in it's probably going to be a whole lot of me taking photos of myself. Because who else do I have to take photos of, huh! I guess there's always bums. I could be like that guy who paid bums to pull their pants down and stuff, and then photographed them. Actually I don't want to disparage the guy, he's a good photographer (not like me. I'm a great photographer!). So here's a photo of the moment I walked into the departure lounge in Auckland airport and instantly abandoned all hope of sitting by someone cool on the plane (sorry old people).


And here I am in San Diego. This is where I walked 25 blocks from one suburb to the next so I could go to this record store that had moved. I was in Hillcrest, I want to be in North Park, but at the moment I'm in some kind of taupe-coloured ridiculously-hot no man's land. I'm deFINITely going to take fewer photos of myself from now on.


Well, here's North Park. It's even got it's own huge sign (as the suburbs around here tend to). North Park is like Jurassic Park, except with dinosaurs instead of whales. Look how sunny it is! Apparently it's always this sunny, except for when it rains, which is about twice in all of history.