settling into my new apartment, but i know it's time to move.

denizen kane :: patriot act
(galapagos 4, 2004)

yooooooo, new mp3 from the dude with tongues made out of butterflies and knives.

strange old stories: osaka

junior year of high school, my friend pia and i took a flight to osaka, japan, with a pair of nissei community college gals we met randomly at the mall (the daughters of a way cool kendo master.) it was impulsive: we decided to go at one of those haughty fast food stands independent from the food court. a strange decision, and i never really understood why we made it. in fact, i didn't tell most of my high school friends about it. i wasn't trying to keep it a secret, i just wasn't sure if they would believe me... and the opportunity to talk about it never causually opened during our conversations ("oh, have you seen High Fidelity? good movie. and, hey, i partied with some girls i met at the glendale galleria over the weekend. where at? in osaka, japan... it was cool... oh, and i was on television too.") i was a quiet high school kid, headphones and sketchbook routine, and i wasn't big on storytelling, so i let this one dissapear into my desk drawers as polaroids that i never really looked at after i shook them.

the story is a blur of half-conversations, communal showers, jive talking under blue street lights, coffee and cigarettes vending machines, war memorials, lucky trees, deer poo, toilet squats, long bus rides, and fish every meal of the day.

i carried a sketchbook and i went drawing with a blind high school girl i just met. i traced a mandala on a piece of paper with the blunt edge of a pen and pulled her finger to the page and guided her hand along these tiny circular canyons. draw yourself in the center circle, i asked her, and where you hope to be in the outer ones.

15 miliseconds of fame came when we were kicking it during a tour of a major television station. we were a big group - us and some japanese high school students on summer break. i was staring at a domu-kun poster on a wall when i overhead one of my new japanese friends hustling(?) a television producer. he convinved him that we were an international singing troupe for peace. i guess the producer was short of an act for his variety show so he pushed us backstage and told us that we'd be filmed in a few minutes. the only song that we all knew was lionel ritchie and michael jackson's legendary hit, "we are the world." a few minutes later we were directed on stage, in front of a studio audience. we smirked and just belted the chorus at the top of our lungs... WE ARE THE WORLD WE ARE THE CHILDREN WE ARE THE ONES WHO MAKE A BRIGHTER DAY SO LET'S START GIIIVVIIIIING.

apparently they played us during the variety show's end credits.

sometimes i think about going back, and looking for those few friends i made during that chance weekend in osaka. we were delirious kids and we stuck together well.

quick announcement: DAMN, cal heads, take this while you still can:

AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES 190AC P 001 LEC
Race, Racism and the Constitution
Course Title:
Advanced Seminar in African Diaspora Studies
Location:
TuTh 12-2P, 130 WHEELER
Instructor:
SEMITSU, J P
Course Control Number:
00638
Units:
4
Final Exam Group:
17
Restrictions: NONE
Note:
SATISFIES AMERICAN CULTURES REQ

why? because he's teaching it.

LAST LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE (pen-ek ratanaruang)! there's a muscle inside me that's stopped, i shhh'd it 20 minutes into the film and it hasn't moved sinced. what can i say, this movie puts that "lost in translation" to shame. welcome to thailand, meet kenji, a friendless neatfreak with a fetish for failed suicides, and noi, a thai hooker(?) with a rusty volkswagen and a constant cigarette. christopher doyle's camerawork swaaaays. the flick lingers, lingers, as if it's got a monday morning flight to catch but it just can't get itself off that couch.

shiiit, how many times did i sigh during that thing?

manhattan beach and half-moon two-steps, quarter dollar arcades, and dirty car stereos: the end of summer is a fine time to go nuts. tick, tick, boom, sings the bedrooms - each one torn apart by our dog (the punk rufio, i swear, we took a velociraptor dressed up in fur back from the pound.) every night is poker night in our corner of the suburbs... until the dog leaps up (he's got hops) and trots all over our hearts (the suit, i mean... sorry, corny metaphor.)

at night, though, it gets lonely: i get caught up watching the television's blue-static skinned shadows sumersault through my room. and it's so lazy - not even enough energy to blog.

lame blog shoutout

she's on the top 5 dopest gals in berkeley list (is that a sexist/arrogant compliment? probably.) hot fiyah in five and a half feet. she single handedly slapped me outta shyness. coming to a computer screen near you: kathy bach finally has a blog (a photoblog of hanoi.) fiiiiinaaaaally.

by-the-by, since she's no longer in town, she's forcing carina and i to update her insanely (and obsessively) thicky thick calendar of bay area events. all things hollerable, we'll put up. drops us an e-mail and we'll blow it up.

oppression olympics - beijing's 2008 olympic stadium (designed by herzog and de meuron.)

fuck that shit, the other side of china's architecture boom: peasants and workers are displaced by the millions as their homes are plowed down for hordes of developers thirsty to "beautify" and "clean up" the country. the displaced are now turning to suicide. (sfgate tells the story.)


news like this always reminds me of that scene from chasing amy...

Hooper: Now Vader, he's a spiritual brother, with the force and all that shit. Then this cracker Skywalker gets his hands on a light- saber, and the boy decides he's gonna run the fucking universe - gets a whole Klan of whites together, and they're gonna bust up Vader's hood the Death Star. Now what the fuck do you call that!

Banky: Intergalactic Civil War?

Hooper: GENTRIFICATION! They're gonna drive our the black element, to make the galaxy quote, unquote safe for white folks.

Holden: But Vader turns, out to be Luke's father. And in Jedi, they become friends.

Hooper: Don't make me bust a cap in your ass! Jedi's the most insulting installment, because Vader's beautiful, black visage is sullied when he pulls off his mask to reveal a feeble, crusty white man! They're trying to tell us that deep inside, we all want to be white!

(photo from jayjao and david huang)


scrabbel, oh scrabbel.

handsome boys modeling schooled

jean: boxing match. gainsbourg vs. nakamura. who would win?

bruce: serge'd kill the automator in a slugfest, frenchman'll fight dirtier than a wedgie laced with gravy. nakamura's got a mean ol posse to back him up, del and damon and mike patton and shiiiit, but let's face it: when it comes to baaaaaadasses, serge's is up there, budding heads next to richard roundtree and charles bronson from death wish 3.

jean: no, wait, actually ...which fella would you let your lady spend one night with ... (and say you HAD to choose) gainsbourg or nakamura???

bruce: the automator. why we always gotta emasculate the asian male? and who would you choose? SERGE OR DAN?

jean: dan.


*sigh* when is the sequel to handsome boy modeling school coming out?

cop this if you can



orgiastic: david ellis and the barnstormers's uber painting/short film letter to the president. two dozen arteests from new york and japan square dance with spray cans. this shit is crazy: the half-life of each piece is about a second and half, and it goes on again and again for what feels like a hundred times over. painting won't change the world, but it could mindfuck it a few times over.

we call it architorture.

architecture studio x-actos our hearts up, slices them into tiny models of mismatched homes, and fucking slams on em like godzilla rocking the electric slide. life as an architecture major leaves you perpetually lost, struggling to solidify dreams into cubic inches of cardboard and concrete (but always left with toy models too tiny to inhabit.)

we don't sleep so we forget how our eyelids work.

nightlives are spent with a hand saw and a glue gun (how sexy is that?) no one uses x-acto knives because they just can't cut things quick enough. superglue is for suckers, epoxy is the poison of choice. the gnaw of hand saws becomes the soundtrack to our lives. we brag at parties about how we can bend steel bar with our bear hands.

home for me used to be a studio desk lit by a dusty fluorescent light bulb, souls of mischief gently dangling out of a low-tuned radio.

you get crazy when you're tied down to one place for too long:

a gsi once told me to "SHUT UP" when I busted a spoken word poem during an architecture presentation (stuffy shindigs... but free cheese!) but someone yelled "KEEP GOING!" so I did (afterwards, someone came up to me and said "i never seen an asian rap before." i replied "you gotta get out more.")

one night, shaheen dared me to breakdance on an architecture desk so I said "sure" and got up and spun around like a dradle made out of a bell pepper (almost kick flipping my neighbor's model into a thousand bits.)

once, a hummingbird got caught on our floor and couldn't get out for four days, dan and i looked at each other and just nodded - "poor fucker," we thought. we made a bird's net out of failed sketch drawings, baited it, and chased it into the day (these studios are unfit for any bird or beast.)



but last year, i left studio with the sort of frustration that sour your bones yellow, my throat choked with curse words and i picked up a habit of punching walls. i screamed so loud one night the sun must have risen early to tell me to STFU!!! (when was the last time you let out a REALLY good scream?)

it was heartbreak, man, and i didn't want to go through it again.

but today, strolling through a corridor full of tiny models of buildings, the strangest thing: i missed it. sauder my lips shut, i really did.


(architecture grad school? ... naaaaaaah.)

jimmy diggin this, jimmy diggin that

he flipped the world a bird and taught the rest of us how to fly, jimmy tran: world's greatest breakdancer, you're the backbone we never knew we had. props to your moms for raising you like a martian. soul is a vietnamese american man rocking his nerves inside out. he's motherfucking beautiful, and we'd throw ourselves against a bullet train for him in a heartbeat.

happy birthday, jackass.

high on coffee and chocolate, serge and lovage, music to spend your whole night writing your paper to.

from Park Jin-pyo's "Tongue Tie" - a boy is forced by his parents to undergo surgery on his tongue so that he can pronounce his "R"s correctly. it's premiering at the sf asian film festival (August 12 - 23, sponsored by giant robot, damn they're invading everywhere!)


i'm a weeee bit tongue tied myself, 28 pages to write and i'm idle on page 2.

love like you've been hurt, says jaylee.

bummed - new york looks impossible now. partially it's the school's fault, partially it's my own for not saying "fuck y'all!" kids: quit thinking and keep moving. this is a lame post: i just wanted to vent.

sigh.

(damn, what should i do this weekend: nyc? sasc retreat in lake tahoe? or shoot a short film in sf?)