jun nguyen-hatsushiba





"film is a medium with as many pros and cons as any other. it all depends on how it is applied and in what context. for people who think multimedia is the future, i feel a little sad. it should be us and our perception of life that becomes multifaceted and multiflavored. then, everything we see will add something significant to our experience. compare the sound of a single mosquito vibrating its wings to a bass-enhanced hifi personal surround-sound theatre system. it's the imagination in us."

book designs by willy fleckhaus

bookbook

So, I made one book for my job interviews, now I’d like to make another book… perhaps a children's book? book of poems? or a graphic novella!

Procedure (courtesy of Bruce Mau):

1. Establish form and content.

2. Collect materials (photograph, record, download, ask questions…)

3. Start with the spread (define the page dimensions, the number of pages is unlimited.)

4. Insert the grid (at its largest, follow the golden canon of Jan Tschichold, drawn in 1953: the inner margin is one-ninth the page width; the outer margin is two-ninth the page width; the top margin is one-ninth the page height; and the bottom margin is two-ninths the page height.

5. Select the images

6. Apply the appropriate templates and masks (templates define the position of content, masks control the degree of expression…)

7. Specify typography

8. Create a feedback loop (ask friends, collaborators, peers, and persons off the street, find conflict, amplify content.)

now... go!

This is my dream job: not a desk but a city, an office physically dispersed across three to four cities at any given moment and constructed on the fly, an office with no center, just consultants and collaborators and fabricators working together from around the world…

once, we spent a week
in a skyscraper
surrounded by forest

we were waiting for an elevator
and watching the trees

lost in translation

James, my friend in Hong Kong, had an away message up that read, “gno hei gei ho,” which I thought meant “I’m am doing very well!” in Cantonese. I asked him about that, and he said, “nooo, you mistranslated, gno hei gei ho… I am a gay ho!”

found in translation


photo from: jake dow-smith

I wonder about a couple, in a coffee shop, sharing steamed milk and tea, and one asking the other, “are you happy with me as the translator of the book of you?” I think we’re all translating someone else, all expressing someone else’s dream and qualities on their behalf.

Translation: moving an idea from one medium to another.

For instance, from sketch to construction, or even, as I hope to do one day, from architecture into film. This process brings into focus each medium’s particular qualities, potentials, and limitations for expression, as well as the structure and technique of the work itself. I think, the trick is to find the heart of the original and produce it in a new way.

You can't cut a tree in spring.

I was leaving the No. 1 subway line in Times Square on my way to grab the shuttle to Grand Central. I was already late, and I was deliberately wearing the I-am-a-New-Yorker game face of the would-be anonymous man, distant and apart, eyes carefully lowered, never connecting with anyone else, neither granting nor receiving signals from other humanoids.

As I started to get off the train, the transit cop who had been riding in the same car and who had, I thought, been staring at me, came over. "You're Halberstam, aren't you?" he asked. I said I was. He had been one of my readers, he said, since he came back from Vietnam, where he had served with the First Cav, one of the most famous units to fight there. My books had helped him in that difficult time when he had just returned, and he wanted to thank me for them.

For a brief moment, both of us, all the while moving at the relentless, unfaltering speed of true New Yorkers, closed the gap between writer and reader. We did this on the move, leaving one train, hustling our way to another, never a stop lost because of the social amenity of this new instant friendship; the first law of the shuttle, whether it is the subway or the Washington or Boston shuttle, is that it must not be missed.

rest in peace, david halberstam

baroquoccoco: infinitely surface, infinitely deep

perhaps, something along the lines of "the aleph": how one point can contain all points, one room can hold every room, one house can hold all homes, one moment contain every single moment, and how we search and fight and worry and dare to get this one moment, find this one space, and we once we do get it, we can only hold on to it for less then a second because if we had it for any longer it would be too much for us to bear.