oh shit, threadless $10 sale!

(i wear guys-medium. what about you?)

so i finished bill clinton's "my life" at the bookstore next to my office today, so i feel a little bit more patriotic than usual, so here's a clip from a spur of the moment speech robert kennedy gave the night of martin luther king jr (yes, jimmy, one of the most overused words in our language)'s assassination, and 2 months before his own:

For there is another kind of violence, slower but just as deadly, destructive as the shot or the bomb in the night. This is the violence of institutions; indifference and inaction and slow decay. This is the violence that afflicts the poor, this poisons relations between men because their skin has different colors. This is the slow destruction of a child by hunger, and schools without books and homes without heat in the winter.

This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all. I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family , then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies---to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and mastered.

We learn, at the last, to look on our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community, men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear--only a common desire to retreat from each other--only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this there are no final answers. Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what program to enact. The question is whether we can find in our midst and in our own hearts that leadership of human purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.

We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of all. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be enobled or enriched by hatred or revenge. Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land.

(this goes out to racist co-workers.)

stolen from daily kos.

5 random booce facts

1. senior year prom king, homecoming king.
2. sang a song on a variety show in japan once.
3. middle name, thierry, named after grandfather, thi. first name, bruce, named after actor, bruce lee.
4. afraid of giant fish. aquariums give him the creeps.
5. used to be a long distance runner. now he loses his breath if he has to run after his bus.

your turn!

got sick again, and i tried everything to get better: the mysterious green french pills my aunt keeps in her drawer, cow heart and stomach soup from the pilipino restaurant down the street (it just closed down because of redevelopment today, rest in peace aida), salsa, chicken feet, and die hard on repeat.

finally fucking went to the doctor, got some cough syrup, and now i'm all better.

so much for creative solutions.

the end!

hey, go here and watch the end credits to lemony snickets' a series of unfortunate events.

it was a dope movie too, well the last half, at least, that was all i watched. i sometimes like starting a book at page 103, or a movie 45 minutes in, and trying to piece together what happened as i go along. i end up filling the blanks with silly back stories and b-movie calibre intrigue. it's like making up your own detective mysteries to solve, or visiting a new city without any maps or tour guides, just jumping onto a bicyle and pedaling through.

gosh, back on friendster and i just found the most urgent testimonial on jimmy's profile:

Christopher | Wednesday, August 25, 2004:

JIMMY. ME AND SOME FRIENDS
ARE TRAPPED IN A CABIN IN LAKE
TAHOE. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY I
COULD COMMUNICATE TO
SOMEBODY. PLEASE CALL FOR
HELP. THE NEAREST POLICE
NUMBER IS 526-258-9621. PLEASE
NOTIFY THEM TO SEARCH THE
NORTHEWEST SIDE OF THE LAKE.
THIS IS NOT A JOKE. THIS IS
SERIOUS. I'M COUNTING ON YOU
JIMMY.

i got out of work at midnight today, 15 hour work day, the only thing keeping me going were the al green songs an architect three cubicles down kept playing.

pleaaaase help me meeeeennnnnd my brokeennnnn heaaaaaart (or autocad dwg file)

what do you guys listen to at work?

can she bake a cherry pie?

sympathy for lady vengeance (chan wook park)

carve wings out of your shoulder blades, tickle your toes with a butcher knife, swallow your cigarette and speak in smoke, ask anyone you see, “what... would you do if... but... how...?!” but no words will come out, this movie is like getting lost in a tunnel built like a kiss, there’s no light at the end, no road out, but no reason to leave.

or maybe i just have a sick sense of humor.

(this movie is supposed to be the last chapter of the director's "revenge trilogy," which includes "sympathy for mr. vengeance" and "oldboy," and they're all ... fucking crazy...)

go get lost at pallalink.

ooh la la, naoya hatakeyama

i'm diggin' these:







catch them all at la galerie.

valery

i waltzed into a night club around 5 am on friday night, one of those alleyway bars you could pass by a hundred times and never notice that it was there. a man with half a face let us in, he told the bouncer he knew us, even though he didn’t. i crawled into the club, and it was playing some fantastic noise, pulsates, thrusts, but oh so quiet ones, very minimal sounds, each a gut punch. i danced with a girl i didn’t know, her back against a mirror, and i could see the whole crowd behind me twitching. all around i could hear whispers in french, and i started to wonder if i would see anyone i knew from when i was a kid. i made my way through the cloud, and i scanned each face. i was looking for one friend in particular: valery, my best friend the summer we were seven. when school started again in the fall, our teacher asked us to draw on a piece of paper the best moment of summer. valery drew us playing cowboys in my apartment. i drew myself watching back to the future part two. i still feel bad. i wanted to find him and tell him i was sorry. but, of course, he wasn’t there. no one was there.

”when i was writing this film, i cried a lot, it was this incredibly painful situation of a woman having a child and being present in his cycle of life and then watching him die in front of her eyes. the worst tragedy. for the death scene, i tried not to show everything but at the same time, i wanted to do something very strong. originally i was going to make it an action sequence with stuntmen and speciailists, etc… but at the last minute, i changed it because it was going to be too conventional and the conventional always makes me feel frustrated.

right after the accident, i could have gone to a scene with the mother crying, saying how it was his birthday but no, i cut to an empty hallway. the camera glides through the hallway and we get to the mother mute, her face swollen from crying. in fact, she doesn’t even let the doctors talk. all they get to say is ‘unfortunately’ and then we have this scream of pain. i always go to the most essential, the most simple, which is sometimes the most difficult and transparent but the most effective.”

pedro, on "all about my mother"

pedro has been keeping a journal about his latest movie, 'revolver.'

my mom is in town for a business trip. hi mom.

here comes...

2 am and i just finished reading haruki murakami's "south of the border, west of the sun." i couldn't put it down. i feel like i aged fifteen years tonight.

tilt your head




(community museum project)

this is lee tung street, in wan chai, hong kong. i work just across the road from that yellow/green shop at the very top of the picture. right near the top is a small drink stall that blends fruits into juice, any combo you’d like, kiwi-papaya, banana-mango, apple-orange. i walk this street every morning and evening, cross it to get to the subway and tram stations. at lunch hour, suits and ties line up outside the restaurants. food for any diet: a home cooked pilipino buffet, north-chinese steamed dumplings, and kentucky fried chicken. you will smell sweet potatos, egg tarts, and fried pig sausages when you get out of work at night. metal shops and hardware stores scattered throughout too, and all throughout the day you will hear jack-hammering.

this block is already disappearing, within the next year it will all be gone.

the store with all the white out and black t-shirts

cathy! what's going on - your shop at 188 wanchai closed down. i went to say what's up and draw some doodles all over your walls but your store closed up, just a metal fence and white walls where the place used to be...

cathy, i know you sold some ugly t-shirts but business was not that bad, was it?

if you somehow see this, let me know what's up: brucecheung (at) gmail (dot) com

the super mario brothers opera.

genius.

survive style 5+ / gen sekiguchi and taku tada

a peaceful night in hue, vietnam, was kick-flipped, topsy-turvied, spread, squared, and sub-divided into the fourth dimension this past summer when we put in this bootleg dvd into our television screen. my brother and i wee'd and glee'd all the way through.

i don't even know how to describe it. it's sort of what i imagine when i close my eyes and think of my friends back home: silly squeals, jackass jokes, breakfast at midnight, and leopard skin underpants.

mmm. leopard skin underpants.

dollar day

the pakistan earthquake… and not a murmur in the office all week. i don’t know what i was expecting: a lunchtime discussion about reconstruction, a motivational letter from the higher-ups on how we can help. but nothing. just "how are you"s and "nice tie"s in passing. this is the corporate life, i guess, and those construction documents aren’t getting stamped by themselves.

fucking horrific news all around this year: the tsunami. katrina. rita. the mudslide in guatemala… all this gives me blues. nina simone all night, and all.

of course, the least we can do is to donate.

but who else donates out there, i wonder.

as my homie cuetip points out in a sf chronicle poll: not all the bay area kids, as some are “taking a pass this time” and are too tired from all this “relief fatigue.”

but tristero over at hullabaloo drops deep thoughts on who might be a big donor in pakistan (osama bin laden, who has much much to gain from “philanthropy”) and who might be shortchanging (our “sensible” American government.) some jaded words:

But the US doesn't have the cash to spare for large-scale humanitarian efforts anymore. Why? Well, there's Katrina for one, Rita for another, and let's not forget all the money given to the tsunami victims. There's also been another huge money pit for the US recently, can't exactly remember what it could be...No, not the taxcuts for the rich, something else. Something sucking $200 billion out of our economy. Help me out here, folks: where are we spending all that money again? And exactly why, again?

(...)

And so it goes. And it is so pathetic. A great nation, the greatest ever in so many ways, unable to do something as relatively straightforward as earn the goodwill of an abject, demoralized people. A great nation whose leaders can't even understand why, in a battle for hearts and minds (which is precisely the kind of war bin Laden actually is waging) it is necessary to obtain that goodwill, the price of which is dirt cheap compared to the death of a single soldier or the rage caused by the death of a loved one due to American force.

our leaders got no spirit, no backbone, and no love for anything except their own skin. they blame the tsunami on the un-Christian victims, the hurricane on the non-white victims, promote war and greed in the name of military contractors and extraction, and dedicate themselves to the debt relief of the most impoverished nations in the world but skip out on the bill.

ok, enough whining. i know, we broke...

but as mos def sings, it's dollar day for... (you finish in the rest.)

(sou fujimoto's n house)

random nonsense before bed notes:

this living in hong kong, i think, is a like looking at pictures of yourself that you don’t remember having been taken. the face is familiar, but nothing else is, almost like you're peeking into someone else’s dream.

it’s on the mtr (subway), my train emptying itself at admiralty, a crowd juking out to transfer, where i catch sight of a girl with a green dress and a grocery bag, and i think "this feels familiar... oh wong kar wai filmmed it!" and it’s that city that he shot that i’ve been unconsciously looking out for. the next morning i walk into a tiny take-out restaurant and wonder when faye wong will jump out and sing "california dreaming."

on the bus ride home, there are tiny televisions everywhere. and i try not to watch, but i always do, all the advertisements all the way home.

kim ki duk’s the bow

i rode front row, and it was like being at sea, nothing in front of you except the big blue screen. this weekend, i was shipwrecked out there, left swaying in the cinema, moving, drifting, trying to stay afloat, but this movie wrapped me by the ankles and dragged me underwater.

the story: an old man has been raising a young girl for the past ten years with plans on marrying her on her 17th birthday. he keeps her on a boat in the ocean, and she never leaves, her only contact with the outside world are the fishermen he ferries back and forth.

what i love about kim ki duk are the worlds he builds. his stories take place in isolated places that live on its own peculiar sets of rules and beliefs … the floating temple in Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring, the floating village of the Isle, the school girl hangout spots of Samaritan Girl. we saw Spring, Summer at andinh's place together one night and i remember how we ooh'd and coo'd not at elaborate chase scenes or explosions, but at strange little details, a chicken used as an anchor, a mother's face mask... and how it all made sense, his movies, i think, are an exploration, an understanding of how these other imagined places may or may not work.

and the way he shoots, there isn’t a wasted scene, he tells stories with such economy, so rhythmically, without a wasted image, it’s almost like fresh air, like opening your eyes and just seeing.

(by jason jagel)

hong kong is dense, sweaty, every step is a dance, almost, it’s a moving mosh pit, you swivel through a group of high school girls, side-step out of the way of a grandmother, butt heads with a businessman on his cell phone, dodge taxis (car will not stop, they will run you over!), butchers with cleavers, australian tourists flashing pictures, and squeeze into any spare square inch in the elevator, all in one morning, on the way to work.

if you thought sproul plaza at noon was crowded...

no speed limits, no stop signs, just go, black hair swirling all around you, bao phi told a girl once that he wants to get lost in her blackhair, well this city is that desire carved to life, you are lost even while standing still, the streets move around you, teenagers in camo pants and short skirts, neon yellow hair curls, business people with purple ties, cats and cockroaches, glass towers and bamboo construction frames, dried fish, barbeque pork, and motorcycle exhaust, all the colors, all the lights...

bruce see friends an and brian in hong kong
bruce go meet friends in beijing
bruce e-mail from payphone
bruce see friends cyrus and diane
bruce ride the bus
bruce watch batman forever in mandarin
bruce drink too much and fall asleep
bruce get haircut too short
bruce go to mcdonalds
bruce take two showers
bruce eat duck fat
bruce read yao ming's autobiography at the airport

fresh

a pink stapler, and a photograph of korean farmers in snoop dogg hats, my desk is a messy kitchen, yellow tracing paper amok, inked up with dirty plans and elevations of potential apartments and restaurants. i have a shelf dedicated to thicky architecture books and magazines (colorful, crazy stuff), and another for the drawings that i do (black and white, corporate.) i am afraid of tuesdays, it’s the day we meet with our clients, and the day we discover another impossible wish they’d like to see done. i want an open kitchen! a grill room! a wine cellar! three elevators! a grand staircase made out of glass!

i guess my job is a lot like tetris, level 10.

i’m twenty-three now, and this architecture me wonders where the old me went. i feel like i need to catch up with life, so i go out and play less, dedicate more time to the office to prove myself, make-up for the insecurities i have about knowing so little in the face of so much. the theatre, the poetry, and the theory i was so fond of in america can’t keep me afloat here!

i’m winding my muscles, stretching my skin, all this that i love will stitch together soon, it will.

is a picture i have scotch-taped on my cubicle wall at work. it's from this book.

hey guys, recommend me some pictures, i'll print them out on my company's color printer and post them up.

HAROLDANDMAUDE



i love this movie.

it's, like, this picture, but better.

atchoo



my nose feels as swollen as freshly baked red bean bun, and my upper lip as red as a slice of char-siu.

when i sneeze, it’s like waging naval warfare, captain jack sparrow’s pirate ship and lord nelson entire napoleon hunting fleet are capsized with my "aaaaaaaaaaatchooooo!!!" my mucus a maelstrom, my snot a sea monster. sailors speak scary stories about me to their kids. don’t forget to wear your scuba-gear when you see me.

sick!

“to me, the venue where i perform is extremely important to me. and how i perform is definitely influenced by where i am placed. it’s definitely different for me to perform in, say, Shinjuku in Tokyo or near Mount Fuji in the forest. it’s a completely different context. what i believe is that there’s already music where i go, so it’s more like performing with that environment. what feels best for me is when my own music, my own vibration, becomes at harmony with the environment that i’m in. it’s not necessarily that way all the time – i have to perform where i have to perform. but when it’s most right for me is when my feeling and my vibration is connected to the environment that i’m placed in.”

– eye yamataka, of the boredoms

marmalade tram



went to a beach bbq with friends from work tonight, and then i rode the tram home, which feels a little like you’re tumbling through the stomach of someone stumbling home from a hookah bar on haight street.

eating might be the best form of transportation, tiny cities on the tip of your tongue that suddenly grow and build all around you at the spark of a certain taste or smell.

21 things i loved from the bay area, but damn, i'm bugging out, i'm leaving out on so much!

cinnamon brioche, lavender honey, marmalade, croissants – la note
teriyaki steak sandwiches – burger depot
sangria, jerk chicken, calamari – cha cha cha’s
cinnamon hookah – kan zaman
philo with spinach and feta, hummus – la med
fried chicken and mangoes – thai temple
bulgogi sandwich – expresso expressions
chocolate cookie with white chocolate chunks - café strada
carne asada torta, plus horchata – taquiera cancun
tri-tip sandwiches - brazil café
bockwurst, no ketchup – top dog, southside
anything at - cheeseboard pizza
chicken tiki masala – naan and curry
the samples at the cheese table – farmer’s market
tenshidon chicken – yokohama station
kalbi, and karaoke (singing is a meal) – koryo
caterpillar roll – alameda sushi house
crepes with cranberry sauce – crepes-a-go-go
carnitas taco – taco truck in oakland
cheese puffs – gregoire
ramen– my apartment

more later!

ask this city to dance



sometimes architecture is a seduction, and my job is like doing the tango, the breakdance, and the viennese waltz all at the same time, astor piazzolla, kool moe dee, and johann strauss blasting at full volume all around you, and you’re not wearing any pants.

(i think i like it.)

work is crazy! i spend so much time at the office i’m beginning to wonder if my boss will start charging me for rent. my projects are all over the place… large scale residential and commercial buildings in china, a small-scale restaurant in hong kong… and it’s so easy to get stuck in all of it, start thinking too much in 1:200 scale you start to forget the 1:1, the city climbing higher and higher just outside the window.

i hear that the meter and the gram are supposed to rebel against the imperial feet and pounds, and that these measurements are tiny acts of defiance, so i guess all these numbers i measure my life with are supposed to bite and bruise me. i'm just trying to complain. but this week has been long, and i gotta catch up with sleep.

(so i can out dancing, real dancing, this weekend!)

spider forest



this movie… was, i don’t know, a pop-up book that pulls you in, a fairy tale for grown-ups, amelie with a double murder. gentle and scary? is that too contradictory?

my gut is using my heart as a punching bag, and i’d be able to sleep this monday night except for the rumble of yellow school buses through a city, buildings and bricks, all toppled as if it was kissing the soaked ground; a woman, unconscious, in a dress of water; a grandmother underwater in the attic she grew up in; a youngest son shot by soldiers on a bridge in new orleans; families floating like oil on water; the blocks children grew up, the street lamps that told them when to go home, the kitchens they learned how to cook in, all gone, gone, gone…

fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck

kid oakland on race and racism
o-dub’s thought on new orleans and america
the two americas
mike davis on the poor, the black, and the left behind
salon on unheeded lessons from chicago

and

kiwi on the alternative red cross

oh, JEREMY, haPpY BiRThDay!!!!










man my brother: the hoppest hops, the kickest kicks, he's got, he's got!

(i am biting bay area love!)

cha-ching. i get my paycheck this week, and i’m thinking about taking a trip somewhere soon. maybe for mid-autumn festival weekend.

places to go:

angkor wat, and banteay srei, the temple of women
sci-fi cult city auroville in india
the egg café in hanoi
railroads of manchuria
japanese architecture tour
shanghai
see cyrus and diane in beijing
gotta go to thailand

and i’ll take the long way home, through tibet, the middle east, eastern europe, and germany, just in time for the world cup.

haha, yeah right!

one day, we’ll be telling each other, remember when we used to e-mail, the same way we say, remember when we used to write love letters, slam poems?

blogging is a lazy way of staying in touch, i think.

send me an e-mail, or just wait until i write to you. i will!

brucecheung (at) gmail (dot) com

why don’t i snail mail, or record a slam poem and send that to you? too lazy.

a photo by manik, 10, courtesy of kids with cameras, a non-prof that hooks kids all over the world up with cameras. more herre.



(all the internet neon hubbubs and look-sees are so hard to keep track of, so i nerded up and dolled myself up in del.icio.us and denim. if you’re bored enough to see what i see, check it out. i keep the porn and celebrity gossip under the sheets though. i got a reputation to maintain!)

somehow, i’m listening to “no woman, no cry” right now, and this song reminds me of sheng, and he’s asking us to give the nearest stranger a hug, and jimmy, cyrus, luca, brian and others are all around, and we like weezer, and i had just read a poem out loud for probably the first time in my life, and, whatever, this entry is cheesy!

"everybody runs but nobody ever leaves"

fugg!!! uggh!!! visionaries and typical cats!

same show the next day at the milk on haight street in sf!

these days i've been forgetting where my heart is!

fuggit, a few christopher doyle quotes to help me grow some chest hairs back.

"I went to France and tried to learn cinematography. Then I realized that I didn't care. So I came back to making films as I could. I think I started to know what I was doing in the middle of "Days of Being Wild." You can't learn how to make films. You gotta make mistakes and you have to appropriate the mistakes, and then you learn from those things. Then you have a voice.

I went to Taiwan to study Chinese and, as usual, I hung out in bars, and people in bars are usually musicians and artistic kinds of people. I had accumulated a little life experience so I could articulate things which were a little bit more complex than I could actually do and for some reason Edward Yang trusted me. And then we made this film that won all these awards and I didn't know what I was doing. I fluked it.

My best film is always my next film. I couldn't make Chungking Express now, because of the way I live and drink I've forgotten how I did it. I don't believe in film school or film theory. Just try and get in there and make the bloody film, do good work and be with people you love.

I was born five months after my parents were married, so I understand why mistakes have informed my world."

love it, live it!

high five your friends goodbye, walk down the stairs, tip toe out, close the front gate slowly, light your cigarette, walk down regent, try not to wake the homeless up, peek into bars for familiar faces, turn onto telegraph, share a cigarette with a stranger, say what's up to old guys outside blondie's, ignore traffic lights, cross the street onto campus, walk on the grass, leap over trashcans, take the long way home, all around the library, avoid street lamps, walk in the dark, don't turn around, don't look back, you're almost there, almost out of town.

like sparkle says, i like animals, but i love baby animals.








vietnamese baby animals

a strange weekend

hongmuhfugginkong


where i'll live next year


lonely skyscrapers