gary jules on michel gondry:

Michel was in Paris on a cell phone and has a very strong French accent, which along with the trucks and the Druid wind, made him very nearly impossible to understand as he tried to explain his idea for the video, which was, of course, surreal - brilliant, I'm sure - but very abstract . . . surreal. I just sat there and tried to listen - not knowing if what I thought I was hearing was actually what Michel was saying or what I was imagining after trying to piece together little bits of sentences that I wasn't sure I'd heard correctly anyway. Something about Mike and me, a rooftop in New York, something about kids and shapes . . . a leg? A chicken? A candle?? Finally, I heard Mike say 'Cool. What do you think Gary?'. No idea . . . certainly didn't want to be rude or sound like an idiot at this critical point, but I had no idea. 'Fuck it' thought, I. 'I'm in'.

watch the video here (thanks ronnie for the link)

currently building my summer reading list, i've got architect? a candid guide to the profession and my first movie: twenty celebrated directors talk about their first film sitting on my desk, delving through both at the same time, fun reads, the kind of books you could finish in an afternoon at a coffee shop, but i'm reading and reading and not seeing the things i hoped for (silly me to trust books to tell me how to live.)

i can't stop loving the fingerbangerz album vi-r-us, imagine david choe's paintings in audio, they've got that cursiv and dirty pop, robust, they braid breakbeats into your hair and let them grow jagged enough to juke the sky in two, this cd's got so much depth, don't be surprised to see crustaceans bumping it somewhere at the bottom of the ocean...

a dream "super group" band: san jose's dj sextet the fingerbangerz as backbone, kim deal will bring it with her basslines (from pixies to breeders, has she ever put out a bad album?), jonny greenwood (radiohead's mischief man) on guitar, xylophone, keyboard, or whatever he feels like playing this week, the mars volta's omar rodriguez lopez can get as wacky as he wants on the six strings, and, at the heart of this mess, the yeah yeah yeah's karen o and rilo kiley's jenny lewis will shriek and sing us beyond song and gregorian chant, chris cunningham and christopher doyle will collaborate on all their music videos, and, as an encore, what could top GLORIA ANZALDUA off the page with ELVIN JONES on the drums...

i was driving somewhere between torrance and rolling hills when i saw a peacock cross the road (things have changed since i left so cal.)

things i found while cleaning out the house: old 60s photographs of my grandparents in saigon, a porsche polizei hot wheel, greek mythology books, my dad's old polaroid land camera and flash gun (!), and kumon homework.

tomorrow she'll take a flight to new york, and i'll walk around my neighborhood stapling "missing person" posters (with crude stick figure drawings of a girl with bjork hair) on every street corner lamp pole i may see.

mutations a la lil kim




zaha hadid's guangzhou opera house, rem koolhaas' cctv headquarters, herzog and de meuron's 2008 olympic games stadium... china's shifting into sci-fi. dope or wack, spectacular or spectacle, it's probably both... isn't this sort of like celebrity plastic surgery on cities (orange county, las vegas, or brasilia anyone?)

discoteca biblioteca



the new seattle central library, by rem koolhaas and ramus of OMA (yes, the fancier the name, the more famous the architect.) nerdy engineering news-record finally busts out a pretty cool article on how this thing was built: hybrid structural steel/aluminum curtainwall skin that keeps it from toppling over, a crazy network of slanted columns, and a whole lot of ballsy investors with a couple hundred million dollars to spare.

bad brains bad brains



distracted and very burned out. now is not the time to monkey around but there's nothing that i'd love to do more. i've got an appetite for mutilation and my eyes are set on a pair of finals. almost there, almost there, we're so close, hold on...

sunday, may 23rd, at 2 pm, greek theatre - architecture graduation. kathy bach, jean guo, christine chang, myself, and plenty of other weird arch kids will be taking a walk. if you wanna come, that'd be dope. lemme know and i'll get you a ticket. or you can just hop the fence by foothill.

when i was a kid, and we lived in hong kong, we would sometimes take family vacations to thailand. my parents, jeremy, and i on a plane. i loved those flights - dad with his cards, mom in a novel, jeremy on the gameboy, and me with my feet dangled off my seat, trying to imagine the sky beneath a layer of cheap carpet and some aluminum.

my graduation ceremony is in a bit more than one week and i'm passing on the parties that night. my parents and jeremy are coming up. my parents are divorced now and hardly ever talk, and jeremy's going to college in the fall. i can't imagine any other time we'll be on the same plane together.

this is a flight that i can't miss.

may, and i got a pink feeling in my chest. said goodbye to some people tonight - "have a good graduation." i half-smile, and wish that i brought a camera. "one day i'll be in some cubicle and i'd like to have a picture of you taped on my wall, you'd be holding onto a sign that says 'escape.'"

i want to unpeel these days slowly, but i won't. never. let's be anything but cautious. let's gnaw on today, rip apart the sunlight with two front teeth, shred the wind apart with bare hands, savor each glint of moonlight with a tongue, devour everything, every spec of dust, every breath of air, everything, and please, no doggy bags, we're not saving anything for later.

yes, mad missing the motherland vietnam. i'd like to see her soon - perhaps in december, i have some family i need to meet for the first time.

diggin dinh q. le's book, from vietnam to hollywood, i hit it everytime i check out the bam bookstore. gorgeous, unsettling stuff. he weaves together shots from the vietnam war, news propaganda, hollywood movie stills, and old pictures. kathy hooked me up today with a book on wong kar wai's happy together, which, of course, made me real happy (especially since i was half-drunk when she gave it to me.) drunk at 3 pm? hooray, last day of class!

ok, back to my studying.

fug the vsa message board, you know where the real vietnamese love is at

JIMMY THONG TRAN AT SLAM FINALS!!!
The SF Adult Slam Finals are June 13 @ 8pm at
Studio Z (314 Eleventh Street @ Folsom, SF)

SF Adult Slam Finalists:
Emily Kagan, Karen Ladson, Jason Bayani, Jason Mateo, Geoff Trenchard, Nazelah Jamison, Daled, Jaylee Alde, Liz Green, Jimmy Tran, Jamie Kennedy, Kealoha, Caroline Harvey, Paul Flores, Mike McGee

DANDIGGITY SHOWS LOVE FOR HIS MOM!!!
Mother's Land: artists on the theme of motherhood

In honor of Mother's Day, an artists' showcase about moms and being moms. Locus Arts and the Asian American Women Artists Association celebrate the love and complexity of motherhood with an array of artists working in different disciplines. Featuring the audio documentary "Omma and Mamma" by Dutch Korean adoptee Eun-mi Postma, singer-songwriter Golda Supanova, poet and printmaker Nancy Hom, and spoken word fireball DanDiggity.

Bring your mom and get two admissions for the price of one.
May 12, 2004, 8pm
Galeria de la Raza 2857 24th Street (@ Bryant)
Admission: $6-8 sliding scale

ANDINH, KATHY, AND BRUCE ACT FANCY!!!
Hoa No/Bloom: our first breath
~ a spring multi-arts show featuring emerging Vietnamese American artists in the bay~

Friday, May 21st @ 7:30pm
Locus Arts / Galeria de la Raza
2857 24th St. (at Bryant) Mission District, SF Bart/Muni accessible.
sliding scale admission $7-15 (proceeds will benefit the Collective and LOCUS)

Featured Artists
Visual Thien Nguyen . Sylvia La . Richard Lam . Anne Nguyen
Film Kathy Minh Bach . Bruce Cheung . Andinh Ha . Vu T. Thu Ha
Poetry and Prose Claire Tran . Danny Thanh Nguyen . Ky-Phong Tran . Vanessa Phuong Cao . Anh-Hoa Thi Nguyen

i took the link down. sorry everybody.

unfocused - will fully delve into my senior thesis once finals are over. can't wait: it's a hybrid assignment, part exploratory research, part creative project. a mixtape of architecture, film, city development, anthropology, and a tinge of media theory. damn thankful i have the backing of professor on this - she's trusting me and i don't even trust me. but she's not enough, i will need the advice of some other educators along the way. got a dreamlist of mentors shyly scribbled on a crumpled piece of scrap somewhere, will unfold the paper when the time comes. your name is included, care for some coffee (or boxed wine) sometime?






kang je-gyu's shiri, hong sang-soo's the day a pig fell into the well, pen-ek ratanaruang's last life in the universe, tran anh hung's cyclo, wong kar wai's happy together, royston tan's 15, spencer nakasako's refugee, seung-wook moon's nabi, park chan-wook's sympathy for mr vengeance, bong joon-ho's memories of a murder, moon s kim's wonderful days, park chan-wook's joint security area

(on theatre rice - this is probably a petty read best skipped.)

forgive me if this comes off as possessive, or high maintenance, but jeez, c'mon, why was writer's block cut from the theatre rice committee? the only things that we have institutionalized in our program now are comedy and performance - nothing on writing, nothing on directing, nothing on the development and promotion of new voices. fuck that!

don't you dare give me the "we cut it because it didn't work this semester" argument - you're throwing something away without even trying to fix it. if writer's block is on committee, treat like it's on committee. you can incorporate elements of writer's block into the course curriculum, encourage writing and development stories a little bit harder, build an environment where everyone in theatre rice is 100% confident in executing their vision (in writing, directing, and performing.)

history: writer's block has been in theatre rice since the beginning. before comedy troupe. before mid-semester shows. before "whoa bundy!" people have always argued about whether or not it should be in committee (until it was approved into commiittee by a slight majority of theatre rice last semester.) and now writer's block has been removed once again mainly because we had a writer's block coordinator who failed to live up to his committee obligations. do we give up on comedy troupe if we have one bad show? hell no, we support it and push it harder next time.

(question for insiders: did writer's block have any set deadlines this semester? any duties? any plans incorporated into the curriculum? if not, then how was it incorporated into the committee then? or was it simply an empty title?)

bottom line is, the structure of writer's block might turn some people off (writing games, workshops with peers or guest "celebrity" playwrites, a lot of talk) but if it's on committee it can be so much more. we could incorporate elements of writing into the course curriculum (finish writing a play in 2 hours? free-write 10 minute quick scripts and improv'd them?) or the show layout (put up a quick round robin play written by the whole theatre rice, spend the fall developing a story and putting it up in the spring showcase)... or we could just take the idea of writer's block and just branch out even further (a director's block where we could all try directing?)

shit, promote writing, already. make us believe in our own words.


sorry to get like this up in here - thoughts from an old foggie who needs to effing move on. theatre rice tends to work in cycles. this is the next wave. congrats to the new committee and all the new members, the stage is all yours.

rupert estanislao, o-dub, mango mic, and william hung? apas taking over the east bay...

donnie darko. i hear he's changed quite a bit.

can you say 1984? damn, zimmermann over at sftt (soldiers for the truth) drops the bomb on media manipulation.

some numbers bush wouldn't want you to see.

first they drop his film. now they claim that the whole situation is a publicity stunt authored by a filmmaker desperate for attention. fuck that - michael punches back.

jimmy just wrote the best blog ever. i can have cigarette now.

when i was ten, shapeshift was my tongue's favorite word, used to (nerdly) roar "i'm a shapeshifter!" through british bulldog playgrounds, imagining myself slip in between the finger joints of the juking kids who were "it." now, shapeshift goes without saying - constantly moving, emptying every last drop in this ribcage, now i'm running real late for a meeting and i have to go peace

it's gorgeous how one good night's worth of sleep can get your chromosomes crunked up. heart is going tick tock like a bomb, fuck yeah, i'm back, tell your homegirls that you will send them a post card from 3000... HARD!!!

you know you're on to something if you're research paper sounds like a spoken word poem.

young, and full of rage. split and splinter my spine, rip out my fingernails one by one, battery ram your fist into my gut, wire my jaw shut, skin me alive, do whatever it takes. i hate you i hate you i hate you.

(that felt good to say.)

nearly daybreak and we just finished pouring our concrete (a weakass mix of: one part water to one part cement to one part agragate) into our silly needlessly complicated wood form. we're trying to go for a retro-sexy look: a curvy cement lap table that could pass for a tipsy version of the atari symbol. been indoors so long i started mistaking walls for night and the dusty crust of the ceiling for stars. made a wish on the fickling fluorescent studio lights: that i could poke open my skin and pour concrete into my veins, solidify my insides, and keep my organs pieced together no matter what.