nerdy: i've got days summer days folded and nudged in my back pockets, tattered jeans and inside out tees, my tan is an endangered specie in wurster computer labs, inhale some sunlight before diving in, spend bathroom breaks flexing guns in the mirror (muscles tighter than staplers, i'll bruise you bluer than blue books), my hair is lazy so my head's gotta pick up the slack.

bah, i'm tired.

weekends are no longer spent at parties, bars, or bar mitzvahs, but in strangely cozy apartments stacked with cards, board games, (poisonous?) pizza, and horror movies. texas hold em poker is the pogs of the collegiate and risk is the only game where you can colonize Europe (and talk smack while doing it.) cards, board games, horror movies, it's our excuse to see each other a little longer.

s tells me her band is sharing the bill with a south korean film called "save the green planet" and i (guiltily) think "oh, an enviromentalist flick. i might go grab a burrito when it hits." solder the alphabits a-s-s-h-o-l-e onto my lips, after some googlin the movie looks cool, as in looney tunes on speed cool (you know, on the takeshi miike tip.)

so:

Scrabbel, Goh Nakamura, and screening of "Save The Green Planet"
sunday August 1st - ICAN Gallery @ 7pm
http://www.icangallery.com
1310 Mission @ 9thFREE
about SAVE THE GREEN PLANET
directed by Jun-hwan JeongKorean w/ english subtitles
winner of the Grand Prize - Moscow Film Festival

a night of violins, love songs, and absurdist science fiction (chris chen, you hear?)

come through! we'll roll by bart, and grab some tacquiera cancun afterwards.

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yuri kochiyama's memoirs come out this friday, in the mean time, cheggout this interview with her.

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dude, didn't kerry sound dean-like? (i got a feeling: obama/richardson in 2012... and if you missed the speeches, you can catch em on video here.)

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man, i like beau sia's new website.

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http://www.starbuckscoffee.co.uk/ - grab some coffee, but don't forget your green sharpie.

fresh upcoming events

kid beyond (tourettes without regrets) 7/29/04 - oakland @ oakland metro
lyrics born (and CROWN CITY ROCKERS) 7/30/04 - sf @ the independent
scrabble show 8/1/04 - location?
ratatat 8/6/04 - oakland @ mile high club
battle of the bay 8/8/04 - sf @ the independent
golda supanova and odessa chen 8/14/04 - sf @ club lamia

callin out to you, which one we wanna go to?

ok back to my paper now.

john jacob dopenheimersmith, quadruple your mp3 collection, check out these audioblogs...

o-dub's soulsides
moistworks
music for robots
said the gramophone
suburbs are killing us
cocaine blunts
larged hearted boy, a boy, a girl, and his radio

dazzling.

(also, two must read blogs are junichi's pnuthouse and andinh's saigon express.)

oh, and stephen pointed me to www.idealist.org, if you're looking for a non-profit job, cheggit!

(you know you need to do laundry when you have nothing to wear except your theatre rice costumes...)

 
way cool photo montages.
 

heart sank like a tea bag - black, and breaking away into dusty flakes. my body is a cup, and there's something swirling inside about to break free. this room is so sweaty the wallpaper is melting into watercolors and i'm finger painting as i type (i don't quite know what i'm writing about... it's just hot today.)

reading a lot, though: bell hooks' "outlaw culture," a visual culture reader, a cultural resistance reader, mel's "rethinking borders," kathy's "unthinking eurocentrism," ellison's "invisible man," hemingway for english class, some paul virilio, an architecture "boogazine" (toyo ito, the foa, etc...), sandra cisneros, and a dirty graffiti art book my brother gave me.

favorite reading spot: the 51 bus, back and forth for no reason.

visual inspiration: www.designiskinky.com

i want to play the game of life (the board game, not the real thing.)

 
daily dose of jeff mufuggin soto.

fuck architecture! i wanna be a filmmaker. or a fairy poet.

ooooooooooh snap


t-rex wallpaper on the west wall, huge window frames grander than a green house, gigantic picture of jamie and a fake cat emblazoned on the helicopter landing pad (the only way to make an entrance.) best building ever built in the history of man. eat shit frank gehry! recognize.

don't be shy, there's no need to impress, put up your fugly bad art on your blog too!

shuffling through midterms and papers right now, i've got sheep jumping over supply-demand curves in my dreams, there's too much corona (yes, there's such a thing) in my fridge - leftovers from past birthdays (look at all the cancers.) they're good for my papers... i can't write academic papers sober anymore (and strange, i seem to get better grades this way too.)   
   
deflating, coming back to earth, head's spinning, so dizzy, keep quiet, i'll be back soon.  
 
(been at this desk so long i'm dreaming that my skin is made out of post-it notes, let me unpeel each square of skin and walk around wearing my muscles like a wrinkled pink blazer. i'll stick the post-it notes on you when you're not looking... shy little reminders of how my body felt next to yours.)

 
instruments are so over

"I just got really bored with instruments. I started doing everything with my voice. Then suddenly I didn't want to work with any musicians, which is a bit weird. I only wanted to work with vocalists. I wanted the record to be like muscle, blood, flesh! We could be in a cave somewhere and one person would start singing, and another person would sing a beat and then the next person sing a melody, and you could just kind of be really happy in your cave. It's quite rootsy," she adds, rolling the "r" for emphasis in her native fashion.
 
bjork's medulla: the pleasure is all mine drops in august! WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT! she's bringing some of her friends too, the roots' RAHZEL, japan's DOKAKA, inuit throat-singer tanya tagaq, mum's valgeir sigurdsson, matmos, and the mighty MIKE PATTON (LO LO LOOOOVAGE!)... 
  
(her song "where is the line" drop kicks me like bumble bees duking it out in coiled ropes of my nervous system...   waaaaaaaaaam!) 
   
 
shiit, since we're on the topic, in two weeks: kid beyond AND felonious' infinite, a pair of the most incredible beatboxers, are gonna be at oakland's vaudeville show extraordinaire "tourettes without regrets." go, go, go - no doubt, this promises to be one of the most insane nights ever. 

just like heaven - hung out with some c15 folk (c15: the studio 54 of berkeley) last night, very glad to see them, cheap wine and rich conversations (from gloria anzaldua to homestarr runner.) cristina asked me why i never hung out with any of them last semester and i bit my tongue, i was too busy i guess.

we were all going crazy back then, young and melodramatic, and the things keepins us alive were those weekends in april, those weekends where night and day cupped each other so close we couldn't tell the difference anymore, lost kids with one too many wrinkles or strands of white hair, we knew we couldn't change the world but we tried anyway, we spent the night spraypainting and read poems to each other to sleep, we knew what we lived for but we never could pronounce it, we just did it. those days i don't know how we did.

now it's july, always a time of flux.


14 de julio

Today, catorce de julio,
a man kissed a woman in the rain.
On the corner of Independencia y Cinco de Mayo.
A man kissed a woman.

Because it is Friday.
Because no one has to to go work tomorrow.
Because, in direct opposition to Church and State,
a man kissed a woman
oblivious to the consequence of sorrow.

A man kisses a woman unashamed,
within a universe of two I'm certain.
Beside the sea of taxicabs on Cinco de Mayo.
In front of an open-air statue.
On an intersection busy with tourists and children.
Every day little miracles like this occur.

A man kisses a woman in the rain
and I am envious of that simple affirmation.
I who timidly took and gave--
you who never admitted a public grace.
We of the half-dark who were unbrave.

sandra cisneros

a couple of lomos, circa 2002-2003, when i'm done moving i'll scan and upload some more. some really wonderful top ten tips for shooting lomos. the taping two rolls of 35mm together (70mm!!!) in your medium format holga is genius! 50 speed film rocks. flashlight tagging plus slow-exposure+color splash has been something i've been dying to try out (result: floating ghost drawings/words/grafs in your pictures.)

wanna wanna go wanna wanna go wanna wanna go go go

impulsive - finally growing a brain in this cardboard skull of mine, i have a checklist of people i should apologize to and my pencil will probably never scratch any of them out, fug "spontaneous" - my new middle name is now "diligence."

nights and days strung together by guitar strings, we swayed through san francisco today, got lost with the wide eyed, roamed rocking camcorders, we shot short films, and snapped every second we got in half.

tonight, beat and tired, feel as it i got sliced in half and somehow quickly stitched back together before anyone noticed. saggy, i've got a voltron house party on the inside of my skin but my body's calling the cops. maybe it's the dope dinner's fault: go to the "house of nanking" on kearny and jackson and tell the owner to "take care of you."

strange having all this free time, i'm not used to this, no job, no architecture studio, no theatre rice. missing the old life: the last night meetings in cesar chavez, the 8 am classes and 7 am bedtimes, the diet of nothing but quick chinese food, the ditching class to work on a project, the staple guns and flyers on sproul, the i'm sleeping on the futon because i'm too tired to make it to my bedroom, the bumrush to studio at dusk and build houses til dawn (with the same ol cd on repeat.)

those were the days, now i'm trying to bring up my gpa. (cough, sellout.)

summer dreams: sandblast the rust off my bones, assemble an architecture/design portfolio, storm through moffitt and rip all the free movies i can get, spend my 3 ams to 6 ams tipsy and typing the first draft of my senior thesis, fly a god damn kite, finish the poetry 4 the people website (sorry junichi!), hit up jimmy and edit "college national slam" and "til our chests burn" dvds, chicken and waffles in oakland, shoot more short films, write more poems, be there for my friends, do more push ups, eat less fried stuff, start a fight club with andinh (he's my tyler durden), learn how to bake a banana cream pie, paddleboat with s, take more lomographs, live like ghandi on crack, snatch every second i have, can't stop now, not now, not ever, it's my birthday and i'm gonna get it.

from their latest issue, secrets of giant robot

1. do what you believe in. people have bullshit detectors.
2. think small. work with a small group of friends who give a crap. with too many people, you'll get nothing done.
3. ends don't justify the means. the process should be as worthwhile as the results.
4. keep the pma. positive mental attitude.
5. eat well. no fast food allowed-among other things.
6. keep growing. what was good enough 10 years ago shouldn't be good enough now.
7. be a sponge. find inspiration from everything around you, and not just things with obvious connections.
8. keep improving yourself. when you're not training, your opponent is.
9. join the nfl. that means the no fun league. after you accomplish something, don't celebrate. get on to the next project.
10. have fun. if you don't like what you're doing, stop and find something else.

word, giant robot! nice to see them in the nytimes. i first picked up an issue in the dorms after overhearing jimmy and cyrus rap about one of their wong kar wai interview (i think i got into lomography, wong kar wai, atmosphere, and giant robot all in the span of one night.) it's always a nice read, anything that brags barry mcgee while rocking bruce made tapes tees will always have their backs got. (i used to hang out on their message boards when i couldn't sleep at night.)

today went by too swiftly, like a headbutt to my nose that left me blue black but breathless, gasping for more. it's your birthday and i suck at writing love poems. i open my mouth and it's already tomorrow. (happy birthday, dear s.)



i lost sandra cisneros' caramelo twice in the past 12 hours, once at blake's, a bar in south berkeley (perhaps sandra got tipsy and left with the bartender) and another time in the sweaty backseat of leigh anne's ride (nothing worse than being stuck in a vehicle on simmering afternoons.) caramelo - this is a book that's meant to be read outside, some place hot, where the air smells like a color and you can inhale it deeply.

fuggit! i wanna tear the fuggen roof off, rent's so expensive i'm paying enough to buy my own morsel of the sky.

tonight is made out of stickers, with the night sharpied in, gandhi was vietnamese, jimmy believes spiderman saved baby ishle park in the movie (why does spiderman read longfellow? bullshit! pick up some bao phi!) jose rocked a printer on his right shoulder as if it was a ghetto blaster from the movie beat street, tapes still lodged in with the cold crush brothers scotched back together, songs like they're strung into our veins, we rock hearts louder than tapedecks, our arms are speakers, raise a fist, strike a nerve, we'll always turn the volume up to level 11.

lazy afternoons with ~~~~. help, i lost my tongue in the thin cracks of a hardwood floor, my lips fell off outside a vietnamese restaurant on college avenue, falling lazily like wingless pigeons, you yanked out my teeth when i was sleeping and used them to scratch poems onto my chest, i've got something to say to you, but no mouth to say it with.

horchata on sunny sunday afternoons is the breast milk of angels. the breast milk of angels!