golden noir

Debbie Harry

Debbie Harry in “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” Punk Magazine, Issue 6, October 1976

Marco V - When The Night Falls

Artist: Marco V

From: The Netherlands

EP: When The Night Falls

Label: INCHARGE

Release Date: 17.nov.2009

Genre: Trance – male vocal

Rating: BOMB!

Buy

When The Night Falls EP (original + dub), 320kbps

taishan towers

Photo by: Alan Chin

Fortresses Inspired by West Crumble in a New China, NYtimes article

I visited this place when I went to China a few years ago. My dad's side of the family is from Taishan, which is actually pronounced toisan in Cantonese, and hoisan (with more of a down tone) in taishanese/toisanhua/hoisan, the local dialect.

shh: when you ask why they look so upset

Josie: Hey Ethan!

Ethan: [heavy sigh] Hey, Josie.

Josie: Why the long face?

Ethan: What are you talking about?

Josie: Your face. Just now, you look mad or sad or something.

Ethan: I was just thinking.

Josie: About something sad?

Ethan: What, is this an interrogation? Do I need to relate a sordid tale now? Christ, are you expecting something about how I didn’t get a puppy when I turned 8, and instead I got a fucking trumpet, and I was so mad I threw it on the carpet and I thought it would be fine because it’s carpet but the bell crumpled and everyone yelled at me and so I’m all fucked up now?

Josie: Sorry. Jesus. Just wondered if something’s wrong.

Ethan: Do you really want to have a conversation about this? Do you really fucking want to get into all the reasons we should be fucking terrified? Glenn Beck is on TV telling his 3 million bobble-headed viewers the Three-Fifths Compromise was a step toward abolition, voters are shooting down gay marriage left and right, the ice caps are melting, we’re spending more money in the Middle East in a day than I’ll see in my entire wasted existence and Sarah Palin’s book was a bestseller on Amazon before it fucking came out. We’re on the brink of a fucking apocalypse. Anyone who’s happy is either deluded, misinformed or just fucking stupid.

Josie: …so nothing’s up with you today?

Ethan: Me? I’m actually having a really good morning. This is just my default face.

Infected Mushroom - Killing Time

Click the YouTube logo and watch in YT window, larger and "HQ".
Infected Mushroom live @the Regency, San Francisco, CA. 17.07.2009
OMG I wish I were there! But I was still down in San Diego doing stupid summer classes! Gyahhzz! But big ups to the guy who took and uploaded the vid. The performance looks EXCELLENT! definitely rocked hard. (who says psy trance doesn't rock crowds? looking forward to when psy trance gets main stage. remember John 00 Fleming at Nocturnal, hella rocked it.)

and OMG WHAT??!!?!?!!? (yes, I really need that many question marks and exclamatory points.)

THEY ARE PLAYING AT THE REGENCY AGAIN, THIS YEAR. FEBRUARY 5TH, 2010.

ZOMG WHAT THE HELLLL I am going to miss them yet another time! Dx major fail at going to see IM. And Christopher Lawrence is guest opening DJ. How good is that? =[ You should go and take a lot of videos for me, so I can experience them vicariously. :T Tickets are $28 online, $38.60 after their "service charges".

Anyhow, MERRY CHRISTMAS! I managed a squeeze in a music post (even though it's non-download). :)

homeless hipsters

Hipster napping on the L train or homeless chick braving the cold?

hipster is the new homeless

---

Leaving in a few hours to drive up to Tahoe for a short va-cay, coming back on Christmas Day. Going with the mother and aunt and uncle. And the 3 bratty little cousins. Oh I hope they sleep on the car ride up, so I can listen to my trance in peace and nap.

bento box artists

Pirate Bento by sake-bento

NYtimes article on bento box art, sept.2009, and the subsequent commentary/debate over the subject.

Zhou Yu's Train (2004) review

Title: 周漁的火車 (Zhou Yu De Huoche)

Romantic Drama, 93 mins, Hong Kong/China

Director: Sun Zhou

Starring: Tony Leung Kar-Fai, Li Gong, Sun Honglei

Rating: EXCELLENT!

A porcelain painter (as in artisan, played by Gong Li) takes the train twice a week to Chong Yang, quite a far distance, to see her lover boyfriend poet Chen Ching. Later she meets another guy, a veterinarian, Zhang Qiang (played by Sun Honglei).

—my short concise summary (also not wanting to spoil anything). For more, IMDB.

This film is beautifully shot. I'm finding that I'm really liking this sort of cinematic style. The story is "chopped up", sort of lots of flashbacks, but more like cutbacks to short moments, plus later it will all seem like sort of a flashback, with the addition of Xiu (also played by Gong Li—meaning: remember, different characters, just also played by Gong Li, don't get confused). But this cut-back style serves to show the theme of confusion: torn between the two lovers, the two new lovers trying to find out their love's previous loves..

Poetry is another prominent theme in this film. Two of Chen Ching's poems are recited multiple times. Lines that one character says are said by another in similar situations at different times. This film is truly a beautiful piece of cinematic poetry.

I would definitely watch this again. Have to return it back to the library tomorrow, though. Kinda wish I had watched it earlier, it was lying around my relative's house for a while, but the old film cover/poster art made it seem like it was erotic-heavy and would have made me feel uncomfortable about asking to borrow it. Newer poster art for comparison.

Highly recommended!

SFgate review (scroll down, after Zatoichi). And here's is a good review on IMDB you can read (the one titled "Train Painted On A Vase"). But I advise not reading too much plot summaries and reviews, and rather to just watch it. I usually go into films without having seen trailers and knowing much about the story and only on knowing if the films received good reviews/ratings.

And if you're into art house, foreign films, and Gong Li (superb performance!), this is a must-watch.

hanging

reblogged from libraryvixen

black house ttn japan

black house, TTN Japan.

designsdelight

Natural Born Killers;; Lolita

The media is like the weather, only it's man-made weather.

—Mickey, Natural Born Killers (1994)

Okay, I guess this is really turning into a regular cool-stuff-posting general blog. Takes a few too many minutes more to write music posts. Also because I haven't been scouring for music lately. Winter break started. I worked a couple full days already at my aunt's restaurant in Berkeley. (Party Sushi, 1776 Shattuck. Come visit me if you're in the area! :) ) Going to make a website for business, and I'm updating the to-go menu.

I'm trying to watch a film every night during winter break.

So far I've watched:

Natural Born Killers (1994), AWESOME 90s film! Director Oliver Stone's over-the-top satire on America media culture, story by Quentin Tarantino.

Lolita (1997), sad story. and Humbert looks older than I had imagined from reading the novel. (edit: oh. He's a 45 year-old professor. Guess I forgot that. I read it 4 years ago.) If you haven't read the novel, I HIGHLY recommend it. Beautiful prose, with (a lot) of archaic English words that if you try to look up each one you don't know, will quickly grow frustrated, written by Vladimir Nabokov, for whom English was his actually his second language.

I really want to delve into more 90s films. Yay for my local Berkeley video store, Elmwood Videots! And my favourite library (not that I've been to a lot), the Claremont Branch of the Berkeley Public Library!

mother and child

with, by Nikola Tamindzic

Obama's accomplishments

thus far that the media has failed to report.

Obama, the great disappointment?
The Miracle President hasn't actually accomplished much? Wrong.

by sfgate columnist Mark Morford

DJ Dan & Steve Aoki @theRegency, pres. by Ruby Skye

Ruby Skye: DJ Dan & Steve Aoki, Friday, Dec. 18th, 2009.

tickets

Ja, ich nehme teil, mit Freundinnen.

wird Spaß macht!

applied mathematics in action

jl godard

The scale of it looks remarkably similar to what’s often called “no-budget” filmmaking now-a-days, no? Camera’s about the size of an EX3. Lit by household lamps. Director pushing a wheelchair for the “dolly”.

And well shit, while I’m waxing authoritative about indie filmmaking and A bout de souffle (and I know most of you already know, but for those who don’t, the english title is “Breathless” and it’s mandatory viewing for artsy fartsy film snobs like us), here’s an already widely known tidbit that I’ll hereby take heroic credit for spreading a teency weency wider.

The filmmaker pictured above, Jean-Luc Godard, was a film critic before he made movies. He and a bunch of other thinker/writer/cineastes upkept a periodical called Cahier du cinema. Nowadays, historians tend to attribute these guys with beginning to convince the world that film was not mere pulp and circus but was indeed a form of art.

The story continues that one day, some filmmaker who had perhaps received some negative criticism from the Cahier, or perhaps not, I don’t really know, I’m half making this up, put the question to them. If you guys have so much to say about movies, why don’t you make some yourselves?

So they did. Of course, they didn’t have the resources had by the standard filmmaking endeavors of the day. But they didn’t try to imitate the glossy look of Hollywood’s golden age. Instead, they embraced their limited resources and created what everyone now calls the “New Wave” that spread out into the crop of American masterpieces in the late 60s and 70s — Raging Bull, Badlands — all the way into the “Independent” movies of the 90s — Pulp Fiction, Sling Blade.

It seems to me that this is a pertinent story to tell here among the internauts for a couple reasons. First is the obvious analogy of adapting limited resources into a new genuine aesthetic rather than imitating the established one. Second, there sure are a lot of critics online. Now writing comments about movies and videos is cool and all. But for my bet, RECords are way more fun to make than Remarks.

—reblogged from hitrecordjoe

Trei - Thunder Biscuit

Artist(s): Trei & State of Mind, from New Zealand

Title: Thunder Biscuit

Genre: Drum & Bass

Label: Samurai Music

Release Date: 30.oct.2009

EP: Thunder Biscuit / Innuendo

Rating: Sehr gut.

Trei & State of Mind - Thunder Biscuit (320kbps, 14.6mb)

Buy: chemical records, triple vision

impaired axiom

oregon winter

photos by samantha w. and alexa f, 2009.

Got back home today. Flight delayed for 20 minutes, but didn't start boarding until after that time, so I actually ended up arriving in OAK an hour later than originally planned. Tired. Didn't do all that much today either. A friend took me out to brunch, we hung out and then he dropped me off at the airport. I got boarding position A35 (yay!) and went to sleep with trance around the world on immediately after I seated myself next to a window.

Going to go yum cha with grandparents tomorrow, then going to church/visit church friends (1pm service FTW!), and visit a Berkeley/Cal friend. Then when I get back home maybe I'll finally organize my desktop and music and deal with transferring everything onto my new 1TB external hard drive, and after that maybe even restore my whole old Compaq Windows laptop or something. Then I should be on my way to reading a book and watching movies and chillin'.

And posting links to musikz.

windowsill art

by lynnea

wall of blessing

photo by w. moore

Please let the curve in econ132 (environmental economics) be spectacular, so I can pass the class. And that I have studied enough for scandinavian politics to do decently on the final.

despite all the protests

photo by: s. glidden, (2002?, new york)

definitely goes well with the other

explosions and boobs

alriiight.

Energy Econ final today was alright. I just wasn't sure how to do one of the 2 calculation problems. German final tomorrow, German conversation and Int'l101 final on Thursday, then Scandinavian Politics right after Environmental Economics final on Friday. Then wooot, Launataina! Seeing a special friend for a bit and then flying back home. Winter break! Yeeeah.

texting: the hipster way

Let us suppose that a hipster girl named Marni is out on the town with a gaggle of other hipsters, kickin’ it at a local watering hole’s massive experimental jazz dance night. She recently met a hipster boy when she was at her friend’s DJ thing at that bar that no one goes to anymore, but she went because, you know, Liam is at least trying to make something of himself (even though he lives in Jersey and gets wasted pretty much every day). For some reason she and this dude with an impressive neck tat started talking. She was struck by his passion for the Irish author James Joyce and his piercing blue eyes. He was struck by her knowledge of French New Wave films and the fact that she touched his arm a lot. They exchanged digits. They haven’t actually gone out yet, but have been volleying back witty texts about the cinematic score of The Virgin Suicides and Neck Tat’s slight Napoleon Complex for days now. It’s late. Marni is feeling kind of lonely/blue, so—bolstered by whiskey and against the advice of her friends—she shoots a text to Neck Tat (who is entered in her phone as such, as she does not give romantic interests real names until they earn that right—they never do).

To: Neck tat

Hey, I’m at Trophy Bar, if you’re around.

Sent: Thurs, Nov 12 11:45 p.m.

Marni stares at her phone for the next hour and a half. She puts it in her pocket, set to vibrate so that she will know when Neck Tat deigns to answer. She wonders, frantic, whether she’s fucked things up by contacting him as the minutes tick by.

Meanwhile, Neck Tat, sprawled on the floor of his friend’s loft, receives and reads the text immediately. He put his phone back on the floor next to the pile of empty Tecate cans and ruminates on what to say. No fucking way is he going to answer after, like, five minutes like some kind of desperate clod. No.fucking.way. After the requisite hour and a half, he flips open his phone.

From: Neck Tat

I’m at home. Come by and hang with me.

Received: Fri, Nov 12 1:15 a.m.

Marni, being smashed out her mind at this point, texts him back immediately, asking what his address is.

Back at Hipster Douchebag headquarters, Neck Tat peeps the text, flips his phone closed, drains a Tecate and settles in for about 30 minutes before the next text. Marni continues to drink.

That’s right, children: Although technology has made it possible for us to contact each other in mere seconds, hipsters have de-evolutionized the concept of communication, taking us back to the dark ages. You might as well send a fucking telegram, because the average hipster texts at the speed of a carrier pigeon.

Stuff Hipsters Hate: Texting You Back in a Timely Fashion

crunchtime

by a. litak

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Finals week. Must record good demo to turn in tomorrow for "Let's Bounce" tryouts.

Must study. Was not feeling too stressed, but now: yeah, pretty much. First final is on Tuesday, but I feel like I really should know everything on the freaking subject.

After finals and go home: music posts.

Cyaz.

shit's too scene

Jane: So how do you like living in Greenpoint?

Toby: I dunno, I used to like it, but now it’s just too much of a scene.

Jane: Oh, I get that. I just moved here and I can already totally appreciate that. I’m thinking of getting a bike soon. Seems like a good thing to have around here.

Toby: Oh, I was thinking of getting a bike, too. But then there’s all those bike kids around all the time, like, talking about vintage frames and shit. It’s just become too much of a scene.

Jane: Oh, well. I just thought it would be easier than taking the bus, but I can see what you mean. Do you go to a lot of shows around here? Where’s good to go?

Toby: I used to go to shows more, but then it started to seem like people were going to concerts to be cool, not because they actually like the band. It’s too much of a fucking scene.

Jane: Oh, OK. I get that. I feel like that at shows sometimes. But, you know, I like seeing bands live sometimes… So what do you do for fun?

Toby: I mostly just spend a lot of time by myself…

Jane: Ah.

Toby: But that whole loner thing is starting to become too much a scene.

stuffhipstershate: when shit becomes too much of a scene

exploring santa cruz

photo by o. applin.

delights and epiphanies

I have a question. It might be damn near unanswerable. It might be rhetorical, open-ended, imponderable, a bit obvious. But it also feels terrifically important, essential to a deeper understanding of how time and love and eternity function in this meek and humble terrestrial plane we call reality. Or maybe that's just the sake talking. Shall we find out?

A very nice column by Mark Morford, devoid of political bashing and whatnot.

sfgate

all made-up

amanda n./photo by a. litak.

sleeping in

photo by a. litak.

yeah I fb photo-stalked again.