music for godard


(from estevan carlos benson.)

very fucking surreaaaaal.

someone out there stitched a scene from jean luc godard's "vivre sa vie" onto his own staticky, twitching composition and it's like... watching an astronaut adrift with ballet shoes on.

i love it when anna karina maws.

i wanna go out dancing now.

lazysaturday








just around kowloon, tai po, hong kong.

jeana sohn





so i guess in the last painting, the boy and the girl are wearing moustaches made out of bird wings?

razzle dazzle




apparently a true story.

"During World War I, the British and Americans faced a serious threat from German U-boats, which were sinking allied shipping at a dangerous rate. All attempts to camouflage ships at sea had failed, as the appearance of the sea and sky are always changing. Any color scheme that was concealing in one situation was conspicuous in others. A British artist and naval officer, Norman Wilkinson, promoted a new camouflage scheme that was derived from the artistic fashions of the time, particularly cubism. Instead of trying to conceal the ship, it simply broke up its lines and made it more difficult for the U-boat captain to determine the ship's course. The British called this camouflage scheme "Dazzle Painting." The Americans called it "Razzle Dazzle."

after shoe shopping with my brother

1: so, are those shoes still popular now, the checkered vans?

2: the spicollis. man, we started that shit! we saw fast times at ridgemond high, drove to the mall, copped two shoes on a buy 1 get 1 half off sale (which they don't do anymore for classic shoes at vans), rocked them, and now everyone wears them!

1: yeah!

2: everyone's biting us.

1: you know what else we started? the red-white-blue wristbands!

2: yeah! i got them initially because i needed them for when i play tennis, and i was, like, "cool, french colors." and then afterwards, everyone started wearing them too. johnny knoxville, justin timberlake, avril lavigne on rolling stone magazine! now i can't wear them anymore.

1: ridiculous.

2: we run this, man, asian kids run this!

2's girlfriend: can you take me home?



ps:

"you are so young, so before all beginning, and i want to beg you, as much as i can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. do not now seek the answers which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. and the point is, to live everything. live the questions now. perhaps you will them gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

- by ramier rilke, "letters to a young poet."

were scribbled on a letter i received recently, the letter, i think, grew from a patch of earth, like a garden planted fifty years ago and only now sprouting, verbs red as tomatos, commas curled like roots.

got lots to do now... showed to work on wednesday jetlagged and mohawked, and my boss assigns a list of impossible things to do with a smile.

"you want... new skyscraper apartment plans, sections, and area calculations... all by the end of the day?"

"yes."

"wait... all of it???"

"everything."

andinh and denise first meet, 2002?

brian, berkeley, 2001

brick



"coffee & pie."

"'coffee & pie, oh my'?"

it's duck soup for you, vegs. whatta cool movie.

[leah beeferman]

come take a look at Leah Beeferman's gowanus,
"a map of history, fact & fantasy" about the gowanus canal neighborhood in brooklyn.

it’s a lovely map, full of cool details, her site has a larger, downloaded version that you can print out and imagine the place with. “Washington Park, formerly located at roughly 3rd Ave, between 1st and 3rd Streets, was the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers (then called the Superbas) from 1898 – 1912, the Dodgers then moved to their famous next stadium, Ebbets Field, before relocating to Los Angeles. All that remains of Washington Park is the wall, which – although it has been painted over – still stands along 3rd Avenue.”

this map feels like a many things at one time - a sketchbook, an afternoon of coffee and wandering around with a friend, and visual/anecdotal history of a place, it feels, you know, real...


[sam flores]

there are so many layers to a place, hard and soft layers, who lived here, what used to be here, things come in, things vanish without a trace, all the time, you really have to literally read the sidewalk to learn about a place’s history – different textures, for example, indicate the original size of a street, give clues about what kind of place a neighborhood once was.

and the softness a city, not buildings nor bones but the spaces in between, the morsels made for us, living in rhythm, losing our breaths. between the stanzas of telephone lines... a calligraphy of pigeons swirling above us in fading ink, the breakbeats of the marketplace, earrings, beads, and butchers, twinkling and cleaving in synch, the ghost stories we hear about... “that blue building, with the balconies, they say it’s haunted, you know... think about it... why else would there be a temple nearby?” and, of course, under all this, concrete, gravel, piping, electrical lines, and deeper still, infill. all of this was water once.

APRIL 10, 1999

The enemies proliferate
by air
by land
they bomb the cities
they burn the earth
they force the families into miles and miles of violent exile

30 or 40 or 80,000 refugees
just before this
check-point
or who knows where
they disappear

the woman cannot find her brother
the man cannot recall the point of all
the papers somebody took
away from him
the rains fall to purify the river
the darkness does not slow the trembling
message of the tanks

Hundreds of houses on fire and still
the enemies do not seek and find
the enemies

only the ones without water
only the ones without bread
only the ones without guns

There is international TV
There is no news

The enemies proliferate
The homeless multiply
And I
I watch I wait

I am already far
and away
too late

too late

- june jordan

great. just fucking great.

this post will be deleted within 48 hours because of utter embarassment.

(see junichi's blog for details.)

10 reminders for better ( anything )

1
i n v e n t n o t h i n g

2
m i x e v e r y t h i n g

3
c o n s u l t a r t i s t s

4
r e f i n e s i m p l y

5
t a k e i t f u r t h e r

6
r e m a i n e n i g m a t i c

7
e m b r a c e t h e o l d

8
s e p a r a t e s h e l l f r o m c o n t e n t s

9
b e b o l d

10
l e a r n i n g b y n u m b e r s

(slightly adjusted from ortner and ortner bankust)

like globe trotting, back-packing, jet-setting without leaving your seat, like sand under your feet, snow on your lips, and you haven’t moved an inch... freda hooked us arch-nerds up with some spectacular seats at the show, we were so close it was like jonsi was singing to us while cooking spaghetti in the kitchen.

felt home-sick after the show, and remembered that concert in oakland a few years ago, jean, dom, sheng, andinh, chen... i slept through the opening act, but when sigur ros started i was set on fire, third degree burns all over my heart. after the show, on the ride home, i wasn’t feeling anything, i was just sitting there in a daze, wondering where i was... after a concert like that it takes some time getting used to being yourself again.

after last friday’s show, i took a walk around kowloon and the way the yellow street lamps hung over the highway... i felt like i was in Oakland again (was i 19 back then?) i told s a few weeks ago on the phone that no matter where she goes from now, she’ll bring berkeley and london with her. it was just something to say to make someone feel less sad about moving on, and i wasn’t sure i really believed in it myself. but out of nowhere, oakland crept out of my bones, the way the buses moved, buildings looked, i don't know how to say it, it was just an oakland night, you know? i swung around lamp pole and tried to sneak into a warehouse when i got a phone call.

“hey, where are you?,” she asks.

“i’m… not so sure.”

FLORENCE MANLIK




“it’s really cool that she’s doing that…”

“yeah, there’s so much about diana that we don’t know.”

“that girl is getting her master’s in audiology. she’s catch, you know, you should go out with her. move to seattle."

"but it rains in seattle."

"but you just said you liked the rain! rain on wet concrete!"

“mm. maybe… but you have to go out Luca.”

“FO SHO!”

(apologies to luca and diana.)

HIROKI TSUKADA
(orginally spooted on mintcar)




"i have the biggest crush on darth vader. dude, the cape, the boots. he's so intimidating... and hot. half-machine, half-man... everything a woman could dream of."

"oh... um, whoa."

---

let’s make a dream out of ink and bank statements, pull a pen out of your pocket and start with a circle, just keep on swirling, don’t lift your hand, just twirl, it’s a dance floor, freshman year, and the girl you like has just grabbed your hand, don’t let go, just move, move, until the circle is no longer a circle but a spiral in a oval in a womb like a Charles Bukowski poem carved out in binary code ( 0000110000010000 ), if it looks like the sky, or your mother’s cooking, you may be getting it, now loosen your grip, draw with your elbows, remember that you can bring back to life what’s already dead, or what was never there, and that drawing is for those that feel like the world is not yet enough, carve it, use your tongue, spit, make up a map to a city that you promised you’ll meet that someone at, it’s a house, no, it’s a room, no it’s just a line, and you haven’t even lifted your pen yet…

---

music download: edan and mr. lif - making planets (sorry, m4a format... you'll need i-tunes, but you'll getchoo galactus on.)

been building buildings for too long. maybe it’s time to build a boat.

"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow, and without trees we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either….

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the tree cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. Thepaper and the sunshine inter-are. And if wecontinue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too

You cannot point out one thing that is not here–time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything co-exists with this sheet of paper…. As thin as this sheet of paper is, it contains everything in the universe in it."

- Thich Nhat Hanh, Vietnamese Zen Master