*_* (updated 6/11 - 6/12)

til my eyes turn red like cherries, things that i like looking at:

freaklub, tonho, matt sewell, opt, jon burgerman, david shrigley, gary trinh, fecal face, ambushdesign, hewho, fancy bicycles, airplane homes, apple g5s, homer's car, folding architecture, gehry's mit stata center, 2008 olympic stadium, and the pistons keeping the lakers down.

(by-the-by, all you friggin artsy fants, neomu7 is open for submissions.)

whales & orgies - harry kim

"What kind of degenerate scumbug writes fuck you on the wall? That's me! I write "fuck you" on the wall! (...) I'm gonna go in and bring the property value down, and make it look ugly, ugly fucking slash beautiful."

david choe, on whales & orgies and everything in between, on ifilm.

just tumbled through the celluloid skyline of new york, a multimedia exploration of new york, based on the book by james sanders. scope out some nice photographs of the old days of new york, as well as the upscale great gatsy daydreams old hollywood art director tried to turn the city into.

also, kathy showed this to me a while back: graffiti archaeology cassidy curtis brings us a timelapse collage of some sf graffiti over the past 6 years. nutso!!

meanwhile, my academic butt wants to cop this: the cybercities reader. and damn, i should be working on my thesis paper.

summer break's got me spraypainting the word "jackass" onto all over my skin, while i'm taking it easy in so cal, the sasc family is bending their backs like hyperboles for the 2004 summer institute. an all-expense paid educational experience on heritage, culture, community building and social change. the family has been working on this for almost a whole year and it's coming right up in two weeks. i'd give my bones and sweat glands to this program but i have summer school in the way. 24 students are coming up for this, including my younger brother. thank you for making this happen.

old boy - park chan-wook

sprout angel wings with this movie, the strange happiness i felt after seeing this, a knucklepunch that left me smiling. don't be surprised if every college dorm room has a poster of old boy up a year from now. don't mean to add to the hype, there's plenty of it here and here. we have a man who is kidnapped and imprisoned for no apparent reason and is set free 15 years later without a word of explanation. what happens next is something both gorgeous and vicious, like a butterfly with wings made out of shrapnel floating through your stomach. and damn, choi min-sik, who plays the main character, is insane (his performance in the first and final 10 minutes of the movie are unbelievable.) gnaw on a squid and give me a smile, see this movie and then have some coffee with me. i want to see some harry potter 3.

[update: 2/9, 2:14 am]



jsa - park chan-wook

oh, and have you seen park chan-wook's first film, jsa (joint security area)? i caught it one free evening during finals week, and i still remember that evening clearly, mostly because i got the chance to spend it with s, the first time we could hang together in too long a while. fascinating stuff, not only because i'm an ignorant ass who knows next to nothing about the north-south political situation there (see, all i knew about the korean demilitarized zone was taught to me by the drunken babbling of one mike nguyen at a party at steve's once) but also because it's a damn fine mystery too.

something that i wish i heard at my graduation: martin espada's "imagine the angels of bread."

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.

This is the year that those
who swim the border's undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.

If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.

So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

what i wouldn't do to watch him bust this!

i began reading the wind-up bird chronicle when i was sprawled out on the tiled floor of an empty house in the san fernando valley, a shipwreck of a home now, things hastily moved out, except for a few phone books and some old action figures that no one really wants to keep. as toru okada climbed down a dried-up well and looked up to see a half-moon full of stars, i was lying in the beach, forming half of a sand angel with the left side of my body. when he decided not to run away to the mediterranean ocean with the psychic prositute, i wanted to dip my head in the pacific ocean and imagine what would happen to him if he did. (no i didn't ruin a plot twist.)

c'est aujourd'hui samedi, et il y a des choses dont je n'ai jamais aime parler. je suis dans mon lit et je veux que la lune eclate contre ma peau. je veux nouer mes reves sur une chaussure et laissez la donner un coup de pied contre le toit de ma maison. soulevez le toit! je veux que le ciel soit mon parapluie contre mon coeur si effraye. benissez les etoiles si seuls. frappez-moi si j'ose oublier la language de mes grand-parents.

los angeles has me itchy in my own skin, maybe it's all the smog calling the nooks within my lungs "home", maybe it's the loneliness my legs feel with all this driving, maybe it's the lack of wind combing through my hair (which perhaps explains all the dandruff), but this, all this here got me tripping over my own shadow, i don't know what to say,

time to get out.

summer break so i've got some free time on my hands, i watched akira kurosawa's stray dogs and roman polanski's chinatown back to back last night and felt real blue after it all, film noirs got my blood running black i couldn't fall asleep. chinatown is set in pre-war los angeles, with jack nicholson's jj gittes (a private dick) shit talking and lying his way to find out the truth, stray dogs' got toshiro mifune's detective murakami running across sweaty post-war tokyo in search of his missing gun. dusty and sweaty films, kurosawa's got eyes made out of watermelons, his visuals are that rich and sweet. mifune give a subtle show but we get glimpses of the wolverine rage he'll show off in his later movies (seven samurai!) and their endings... damn, don't they make you want to drink yourself to sleep.

bomb the suburbs! (this place digs television antennas into my retinas.)


(primitivo suarez)

street art fans worldwide, clutch this asap, the wooster collective brings it through and through everyday of the damn week, gorgeous stuff, seeing all this is making me go bananas, i'm itching to get out of the suburbs quick, you have no idea how much i loathe for 405 freeway (everyday i dream of godzilla and mothra rising out of the pacific and thrashing the place down.) all i do is drive from point A to point B and back again.

(meanwhile, when i'm not driving, i'm - sigh - gaming... by-the-by: play bushgame - howard dean AND mr t, in the same game? pop culture nerds and political lefties, this is your mario party.)

i miss s so all i do is stare at these pictures of lower manhattan and imagine her shadow breeze by on top of them. amsterdam seems to be a happening place, any city that invests so much money in public transportation must be worth a visit. doesn't this bus stop make riding the bus seem like a rollercoaster ride? what did ruth forman say? "somethingsomething should ride the bus?" oh yes, poetry should ride the bus, but i think i've forgotten a thing or two about that subject.