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