maybe, storyboards for a short film. it's about a cloud who sprouts legs and moves to new york to be a fashion model. the cloud becomes a "muse," picks up an austrian accent, and is soon the darling of the runway. the cloud is on the cover of "vogue," catfights with kate moss, parties with "panic at the disco," and buys a dozen baby welsh corgies. soon all the other clouds start wearing mini-skirts too. weather reports start predicting mascara rain all day long.

sometimes, we make music videos into cities, make up a metropolis just for a song - night skyscrapers lit like sequine dresses, freeway overpases cut and paste out of cloth. some images sneak into our heads and never really leave. i wonder if, one day, someone might build a city inspired by a music video he saw a long time ago.

Here’s a mixtape for you, a collection of invisible cities. It begins with a ride across downtown in Futureshock’s “Late at Night” and it ends on an airplane, window seat, looking out at a developing world in Zero 7 and Jose Gonzalez’s “Futures.”

Maybe, one day, we'll live in one of these:


Futureshock – Late at Night (Dir: Ne-O)



Ebb – I’m All Made Out of Music (Dir: Tiny Tim)



Stereogram – Walkie Talkie Man (Dir: Michel Gondry)



Ken Ishii – Visionary World (Dir: Ne-O)


Zero 7 + Jose Gonzalez – Futures (Dir: Robert Seidel)

can anyone recommend anymore urban discoscapes?

Happy about the elections! Will celebrate by cooking

Banh Khoai (Hue Pancake)

INGREDIENTS:
1 cup rice flour
1-1/2 cups water
1 teaspoon superfine sugar
2 tablespoons cooking oil
4 ounces peeled shrimp (small)
3 strips of thinly sliced cooked lean pork or bacon
1/2 cup finely sliced straw mushrooms
1/2 cup bean sprouts
2 eggs, beaten
pepper
salt
1 cup fragrant leaves (basil, cilantro and mint)
2 medium starfruit, sliced
1 cup fresh mint leaves
1 cup peanut-based sauce

Blend rice flour with water, eggs, salt and sugar, leave to rest for 10 minutes, then strain.

Add one tablespoon of oil to the flying pan, and swirl it around. Turn heat on high. Ladle the rice flour mix into the hot pan, swirl it around quickly, then add the mung beans and mushrooms. Cook covered for 1 minute. Remove the lid. Add the shrimp, pork, bean sprouts and spring onions. Cook uncovered until the pancake is golden brown and crispy.

Serve with fragrant herbs, lettuce and sauce dip.

(I can't seem to find the sauce recipe for that Peanut based sauce they serve with Banh Khoai in Hue... does anyone know it's secret?)

Set Your Clocks



Worldchanging is putting out an exciting solution/innovation driven book about ways to build a better future, from the massive changes, like eradicating poverty and building greener cities, to the more minute, like how a cell phone or a bicycle can be re-imagined for the better.

But tomorrow, they will try to hack the publishing system. Check it out, and maybe pick a copy up too on Amazon, at 11:11 am, PST?

PS: I've just joined the Worldchanging team as one of their California writers. Will be focusing on sustainable design/mobility and exciting conscious film/media projects. Will put up some articles soon!

bubbles


city of the hemispheres, superstudio



seaside bubbles, archigram


float, deflate, breathe, exhale, grow, blow up your mind.

i.

My uncle is having a smoke outside, his third cigar of the evening, he goes through them swiftly, like flipped pages in a magazine. He’s watching the sky. We talk about Vietnam. He hasn’t gone back since he left. Never set foot in Hue, can’t imagine ever seeing Hanoi. But his daughters talk about going. Maybe one day he will go back because of them. His dog, Akai, is nervously running around the backyard. I take a photo of Akai with a flash and it doesn’t scare her.

I meet my cousins for the first time, and we kiss each others’ cheeks. I’ve been wondering when I’d meet them since I was 12. Now they’re that age, and I’m the one who’s grown-up. They think that I look like a bad guy. I think I should have shaved. We introduce ourselves by drawing portraits of each other. I carry one of them on my shoulders, the other in my hand. It’s like we’re pretending to be a tree, I think.

One of them steals my wallet. It takes me a whole morning to get it back. My uncle tells me to make sure they didn’t steal anything else. I think, “maybe they stole my heart.” But I keep it to myself. It’s sort of cheesy.

ii.

Moonlight in the midst of the Mission, Vinh and I lost at poker so we throw on a scarf of cigarette smoke and head up onto a rooftop. From up here, we’re as tall as the streetlamps. I miss San Francisco, I think, especially on nights like this, the streets are quiet, and when we toss our cigarette butts into the air they look a little like shooting stars. It’s been too long.

I ask Jimmy if he’d like to bike riding at 2 in the morning. After an episode of Ali G, he replies. Him and Ben took off one night on bicycles and have ended up all the way in Hanoi.

iii.

I think, maybe someone needs to invent a camera that can take photographs of what we dream about, but maybe it’s better to just make it happen. Ok, that’s pretty cheesy too.

i couldn’t sleep; so i dreamt that i sent you a postcard of a river, a water threading through the cloth of two continents, this postcard smells like mangos and cut apples since I like to eat while writing, i’m wondering if these sharpie strokes know that your name popped up when i took a polaroid of graffiti outside a museum, and I don’t know if I have enough room in the back to write about the music I heard or the places I visited, I just want to etch in what it means to travel with no real destination except for the direction your black ink pulls me to, or to not have a return address; just this river I’m following to the beach between this dream and the ocean.

window seat, please.

i like seeing cities slip behind clouds like bed covers, i like reading the shore jag and the rivers bend like graffiti lines, and when i’m so high up, i like staring at the still ocean, trace its waves like the grooves of a 12" vinyl record, and wonder if this record is what's keeping the world spinning.



i live in california again after a year in hong kong. hong kong was beautiful, and coming home was the hardest and the easiest thing to do. i loved my job out there, loved the feeling of building something, and i was part of some great teams on some very cool projects.

but sometimes you have to choose between the form and the formless, between what you can see and what you can’t. when i'm in a situation like that, i've learned to go where i can’t see and trust what i don’t yet know. i don't like to be vague: but that’s why i came back. i was pulled really, but i don’t know by what yet.

not many people know this about me: i studied architecture and city planning at uc berkeley. maybe i was a bit of an outsider in the program (i only have a handful of close friends in the department). i loved architecture academically (ohh... the sketching, the all-nighters, the theory, the flame throwers...), but what i loved in life pulled me towards organizations and student groups like APASD, Theatre Rice, Poetry for the People, Southeast Asian Student Coalition, Students for Hip Hop... i wasn’t joining all the clubs to fill a resume or be mister popular or anything like that, it’s just that in order to accomplish the things i really believed i needed to immerse myself in the people from those student groups, learn and grow with them, and maybe even build something together.

it was a gut instinct, and i found families there, and i am very thankful to all of them. thank you for laughing with me, for trusting and holding me accountable, for listening, for dancing and freestyling and daring me, for staying up all night with me if i needed someone there. really, thank you, whatever i do in this life i don’t want to let you down. some of the people i’m thinking about, i probably might not ever see again, and i’m not trying to be deep or anything, but i guess that’s life, you were there for me and i was there for you for that key moment, and that was that. our back was got and that’s all we need to know.

for the next month or so, we’ll do something different here on this blog. there's going to be a small look-back at some of the work i was part of from 2001 – 2006 (mostly arch/design/film.) it’s just to help me get things together before i begin a new life cycle (grad school in film or architecture next year.) it begins at 2001, when i first started doing theatre and architecture in the Bay Area (really, at the pushing of jimmy and kathy respectively), and it ends at 2006, after a year of experimenting and learning in hong kong.

i sometimes believe that in the things i do, the opposite can also true. any object/building/place has the potential to be something else. break it, stretch it, bend it, snap it, glue it. we just have to find the potential, dig for the metaphor, and keep moving.

so we're trying out a new look, does this coat look ok on me?

(wrote this to some friends who left town.)

Sure, let’s talk about dreams.

Books hanging from metal cages, gliding at the slightest movement, like hanging grapes. the room seemed like a big pomegranate, like a fruit containing a hundred seeds.

An igloo shaped room, with compartmentalized shelves, wood veneer and laminate, and dusty records neatly shelved.

A coffee shop with soft walls, made out of paper, curved and free flowing, temporary room. it sits on top of a cliff by the beach, we all had coffee there, all five of us (even though marl + bern have never met), plus freda, one door leads to the ocean (clashing waves, it’s high tide), the other opens into a smoky alleyway in wanchai, caged chickens and all.

You’ve all gone home and i’m sitting alone in our time machine. I had to sleep outside on the balcony because I didn’t want to clean up my room. I guess the next time we see each other, we’ll build an awesomer time machine. No flux capacitor this time, just wee cupcake-shaped chairs to sit on.

5. we’re dancing electronica at yumla, the sun starts to break, and we ride a taxi out to a beach I went to when I was a kid, the beach has giant statues of gods, and there’s a young fellow sitting on the shore by himself, looking like he’s about to cry. cops try to stop us, but they can’t. no one can.

4. we’re in Lamma island, chilling. we see four giant spiders, each twice the size of my fist, floating above us.

3. we’re riding taxi back from central, and I think James is talking about this place being a transient city. a girl nods in agreement. me, i try to tell the driver something in Chinese but it comes out in French.

2. I’m in Macau, and the whole city seems to be turned inside-out. There are construction cranes everywhere. My boss tells me that I can’t escape this, that no matter where I am, my future will be tied into China. I don’t know what to say.

1. we’re watching a Japanese movie called Tony Takitani, based on a short story by Haruki Murakmi. We found it at this recently discovered arthouse bootleg dvd store. The movie is very startling, very beautiful, but also very simple. I like these minimal movies with a quiet rhythm. they are refreshing, especially after work. You forget where you are. It’s like taking a slow boat out into the water.

hey there,