hey.

(been trying to meet ya.)

mixtape dvd

thinking/dreaming about putting together a mixtape-dvd over summer, during those 4 weeks between graduation and summer school. a collage of visual stuff, not just sounds. all the lovely, cool footage and videos and experimentations in color. i know you - you who read my blog. y'all just like me. media/music/movie junkies and hopeless romantics. making mixtapes is always a personal process, but i'd love to hear what you'd like to put on a "mixtape dvd," what are the wildest things you've seen with your very own eyes?

(everybody, whether or not you're political, whether or not you're hip hop, you need to watch david ellis' "letter to the president," featuring the barnstormers graf collective. it's absolutely eye gouging.)

wish i was five again, a thousand lego blocks plastered on the carpet on the 14th floor of an apartment building, a building with green tiles trying to look like a tree growing in the city, this is hong kong, and i am used to bicycling through the sticky stomachs of underground parking lots, or on dusty rooftops high enough for my hair to tickle the lovehandles of clouds. i am catching butterflies with my breath, letting my feet dangle on the outskirts of our balcony, trying to peer at the cracking sunlight running along the jutting contours of this city.

now i'm twenty-one, lying on the floor on the top floor of barrows, watching a spider try to tango along the ribs of a railing where andinh once threw a dummy from.

i sharpen my spine with the two front teeth i lost long ago. i don't know why i'm feeling this way, times like this, there's no room for nostalgia.

booski

this stuff ain't even newsworthy. put it together mostly so my moms might be proud of me. a chronicle of little exciting creative things i'm taking part in. will update it whenever new opportunities come up.

i found the broken english conference in uc davis to be very bittersweet - i suppose you can't change the world in a single afternoon. if there is one thing to take away from the conference it's to ask a question that needs an answer so desperately now: when was the last time we were part of a YES campaign? NO on prop 187, NO on prop 54, NO on outreach budget cuts. we spend our time fighting back instead of fighting forward. if there are two things to take from this conference it's how you don't need a conference to talk about things and coalition build. all it takes is a sunny hour in the afternoon with ducks, poets, tissues stuck up our noses, and a glimpse of our backbones through the lens of a video camera.

"you know what the funny thing is? how in college you can make the work of 5 people seem like the work of hundreds..."

sony purchases movie rights to richard clarke's book

whoa. whoa - was i the last one to hear about this one? sony is making a movie out of richard clarke's against all enemies?

in typical movie-geek fashion, let's play cast the characters. i say:

ron perlman as george w. bush, philip seymour hoffman as dick cheney, mickey rourke as donald rumsfeld, steve buscemi in drag as condoleezza rice, morgan freeman as colin powell, catherine o'hara as laura bush, and tim roth as richard clarke.

can i just tell you how dazzling the blue scholars album is?

managed to nab it from fellow vietnamese soundhustler dandiggity two weeks ago at the collegiate slam bouts at Berkeley – at the nick of time too, just before Theresa Vu got her greedy fingers on em. this is blue school, folks. the beats are all blue, like the bruises on our hands after banging the sky one time too much. geologic wields the microphone beautifully.

bamboo, kiwi, geo, denizen kane and offwhyte from chicago, good ol' chops, prach ly, the friendly neighborhood magnetic north kids... a damn nice time for the apa underground.

if you haven't picked up the kiwi cd yet, shame! shame! also, shame on you if you don't know the unstoppable typical cats. while i dug denizen's solo record, his "tree city legends" and "lost found nation" songs are WAY doper without the beats or guitar riffs – the last track on the re-issued 2 tongues record is breathtaking.

(but... man, was i the only one slightly disappointed by chops' latest?)

welcome to schizotopia. school's making me lose my mind, and it doesn't help that all i'm reading these days are postmodern/supermodern hyper-real jargon like slavoj zizek, jean baudrillard, and george orwell, nor does it help that all i'm listening to these days are dystopic shit like el-p and iron and wine. slightly paranoid about the future - i'm an overly abstract achitecture major with a resume that's all over the place. the world's going to eat me up, but that's exciting, i suppose.

diggin' through a book a day - i'm obsessive, i know, but i can't stop with all these research papers. yesterday was "welcome to the desert of the real" by sizek, today is "IN" magazine, tomorrow it'll be "making and remaking asian america" by bill ong hing.

me and my mates are graduating soon. some cats are going straight into law school and grad school, others are going abroad for a bit - vietnam, china, germany, et al, other people are finding leads in dc or boston, or hopefully with fancy architects overseas... but some of us, most of us, we don't know what's happening next. we're naive and ignorant, we don't know better so we'll do what we want.

fuggit, let's just be filmmakers and rock stars, paint the world yellow and pink

this has to be a dream.

andinh, lili, an, carolyn, trung, and jennifer - thank you, we plant trees with our blood veins as roots.

these next two week: suji kwock kim, broken english conference in uc davis (ill-literacy and dandiggity, what), poetry 4 the people final readings, tourette without regrets (cal slam team is featuring), and three papers to write (on refugees, the end of cities, and the cinematic city.) poetry and papers - i'm more than loving it.

oh, and of course, a long-awaited coffee date at cafe milano.

damn, head still in the clouds from this weekend. how am i supposed to study with all these thoughts scampering through my head? sorry that i refused those lovely flowers - felt that there were many more people who deserved them than me (thank you jimmy, melanie, kathy, jolyn, nkauj iab, mike, vinh, hai, annabel, cindy, david, peter gee, old man, phatrick, stephanie, amorette, carina, cristina, j. lo, wanda, nancy, ronnie, and many more that i'm forgetting right now.) we merry-makers are unstoppable.

but, damn. big ups to david huang of poetic dream. he's got such a gorgeous eye. documentarian of the arts and activism movement, every step of the way. please, take a look at the rest of his til our chest burn pictures. beautiful through and through.





(now if only i could get some pictures of the vsa culture show - kathy bach where you at?)