Xu Bing

Xu Bing (徐冰) is one contemporary Chinese artist that I am writing my paper on for my Contemporary Chinese Art course. Born in 1955, he lived through the Cultural Revolution. He created A Book from the Sky to express his mistrust and skepticism of language and words that developed during the Cultural Revolution. During the Cultural Revolution and under Totalitarianism, governments often manipulate and distort words and language to express their ideas and get people to believe in their ideology. Conceived over a number of years, Xu Bing fabricated words that resembles Chinese characters but have no meaning. He carved every single character by hand and printed this installation artwork. The result is a hauntingly beautiful, traditional yet avant-garde work of art.

SNOWMAGEDDON!

Alex Lai reporting live from Narnia. After 36 hours, the snow is still coming down furiously. The snow has turned from small pellets that hit you face like pricks of needles to large, soft snowflakes. The snow fall is so heavy that it was enough to cancel classes this morning. Sadly, this only benefited the 5-10 people who have classes at 8:40 am. Anyways, I am hoping that the snow will last till next week so maybe I can enjoy a snow day. Hit us, snowmageddon!

View from the safety of my basement home. The white bump in the middle ground is a car covered completely in snow.

Icicles! Weapon of choice in Narnia.

I am quite thankful that the sidewalk was cleared for the most part. Thank you to those who probably cleared the road at like 6 am and then again at 10 am.

Not many people are going to class.

Hopefully, my friends and I will go sledding down the Libe Slope later today. More updates to come!

Winter Madness!

All this snow came down in Ithaca pretty much overnight! I was really hoping for a snow day but it would never happen with like 6 inches of snow. It would take like 4 feet of snow for that to happen. While the snow makes walking, traveling inconvenient, it makes your clothes wet, I still love the snow. It's cold and dirty, but it's also magical and different from just having the sun all day.

In the middle ground is one of the two infamous gorges on Cornell campus. Sorry, you can't really see it from this picture.

Eddy Gate, the original gate going into Cornell campus.

This is the parking lot behind my house. I made it back without slipping. I was so deadly afraid of walking down the hill to my house. I took tiny baby steps to ensure that it would not happen. I slipped last Friday, and I was really scared of slipping again. Slipping on the hill is my worst fear of living at the house that I live at.

Pretty crazy eh?

Dirrrty New York Part I

I took the weekend to visit NYC because I did not have anything due for class the following week. This is what happened on the first day.

My friend's apartment. I felt like I was visiting an elder in Shanghai. The apartment is in Chinatown, and it smells and looks like old Shanghai.

Breakfast. I've been craving smoked salmon egg benedict at Clinton Street Baking Co &

Restaurant. It was good but the biscuit instead of English muffin was not quite what I was looking for. Sarabeth's smoked salmon egg benedict, on the other hand, is pretty good.
Hello Kitty from Opening Ceremony for Jenni.
Soho. I liked the doodling on the wall. It looked like it was painted from a giant crayon. Walking through Soho, we saw this building with all its windows shattered. We thought it was a gas explosion. The next day all the windows were covered with plywood.
Zucchini and potato focaccia from Balthazar's bakery. It was bad.
A building in Chelsea. I liked the little alien on that grey thing.

Baohaus. It was interesting.
We tried to go to a bar but it didn't work out. So we ended up back at the apartment and drank Veuve Clicquot. It gave me major stomach ache. I can't drink anything expensive.

For Sheryl

Alexander McQueen boutique, NYC, 2/19/10

Crazy, Messy Wednesday

In the morning, I had a presentation where I proposed a change to a policy. It went surprisingly well, but I was really tired from not getting enough sleep. Wednesday, however, is the day I look forward to the most during the week in addition to Tuesday. On Tuesdays, I have my Contemporary Chinese Art course in the morning. Wednesday afternoon, I have Introduction to Wines. So here I am in class.
We had French wines today. The red one was pretty bad. I got major, unbearable munchies after class so I got some food. After that, I went back to my room. And this is what I came back to--a crazy, out of control mess.
So I cleaned it up. One of the things that I love to do is the use the lint roller to clean my carpet. Since I don't have a good working vacuum cleaner, a lint roller is a pretty good alternative. It's kind of fun (and gross) to see what you can pick up with it.

It'll probably get really messy again in two days.

Fine Dining Friday

In light of our last semester at Cornell, my friends and I have begun what we call Fine Dining Friday. Until the end of the semester, we will be trying a different restaurant each Friday that we have yet to go. (Hopefully, we will have the time and money to do this till the end.)

This Friday we went to Zaza's Cucina, an Italian restaurant. I had heard many great things about Zaza's and was excited to finally try it out.

Between the five of us, we ordered a bottle of German Riesling and three appetizers to share. The appetizers we ordered were a crunchy walnut-crusted scallops with a light endive salad, savory wild mushrooms with polenta, and a large portion of mussels steamed in a white wine, herbs, and garlic. They were equally flavorful and good. The broth from the mussels was so good that I had to ask it to be boxed up. I made a good a pasta sauce the next day with it.

For the entree, I ordered raviolis stuffed with pumpkin puree in sage butter. Although the dish was a bit too sweet, it was still very good and a nice contrast to all the savory dishes we had earlier. My friend ordered a lobster and shrimp risotto that I would definitely recommend. Zaza's was a great start to our Fine Dining Friday. The food was delicious and the ambiance was nice. The evening turned out to be a great success and I can't wait till next week!