Floorplans for Everyone

O design people of the world, please invent me a garbage can that stays cold or at least makes an effort to avoid the fetid heat of rot. For the summer months. You could advertise in the Sharper Image catalogue. But all those jerks who buy Sharper Image crap have A/C up the ying yang, don't they.

I often think the true class divide in LA is on the road on a hot day: the people with their windows rolled up vs. the people with their windows rolled down.

At my dad's surprise birthday party, his friend Milt brought along a copy of Robert McKee's "Story" to give me. You all know this book, right? As seen shilled by Brian Cox (as McKee) in Adaptation? Called "one of the truly funny books ever written" by one of my writing teachers?

In fact it is a very funny book. The further in you get, the more odd little personal things McKee throws in: rewards for getting to page 154 kind of thing. Some of the intense specificity of the rules of structure were pretty funny to me when I read it back after applying to USC. Fresh from years of analysing novels, the idea that you could draw a bar graph and then write your story based around it seemed pretty ridiculous. That winter I sat in coffee shops a lot with a pencil and underlined and sidenoted my way through the pages.

Milt loved the book and gave it to me because he loved it so much. Milt is an architect, so this makes sense. McKee loves nothing better than an elegant structure- "both surprising and inevitable"- which I've come to closer to deciding is a pretty accurate description of things that happen in life as well. Death, for one example. As an architect, you've got to deal with certain amount of degradation of your objet d'art: what crap pictures will people put on the walls? What horrible furniture will they bring in? (Unless you are Frank Lloyd Wright, but he was, by many accounts, an asshole). So I can see the drive to make a space that will inspire people to live beautifully. Structure, structure, structure. Maybe writing a well-structured story will do the same from the movie that comes from it?

What I'm really trying to say is that architecture school is the new film school.