hmc’s bathroom in her lost angels apartment used to have a faucet that wouldn’t stop dripping. that finally got fixed, but now there’s this strange periodic sound, sort of like a pump or the sound of water from another apartment. but what it really sounds like is that the bathroom’s breathing.
it’s kinda creepy.
ok, just before running out to cook dinner to go and then pick up hmc for the lakers-hornets game, here are the films from this year’s film festival that i picked to see. mizhol’s getting married in seattle that opening weekend of april 17th, which complicates things greatly, so sacrifices had to be made. however, it’s still good stuff…
Burning Dreams (Wayne Peng, Taiwan, 2003)
Taiwanese Wayne Peng’s spectacularly shot documentary of a Shanghai school that teaches musical, tap and hip hop dance to young Chinese captures the struggle for artistic ambition and portrays the energy of a modern city in motion and transformation.
4/19 KAB 1:00 BURN19K
Get Up! (Kazuyuki Izutsu, Japan, 2003)
An accused mob boss idolizes the Godfather of Soul so his gang sets out to kidnap James Brown to perform for him before he is incarcerated. A hit yakuza comedy with a lot of funk and even more soul!
4/19 KAB 3:00 GET19K
Last Life in the Universe (Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Thailand/Japan, 2003)
Tadanobu Asano plays a suicide-obsessed librarian whose orderly life is disrupted by a yakuza killing and a chance meeting with a Thai bar girl in Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s contemplative, enigmatic, quietly funny almost-romance, gorgeously photographed by Christopher Doyle.
4/19 PFA 9:00 LAST19P
Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan, 2003)
It’s a rainy night in Taipei, and a crumbling kino-barn is screening the action epic Dragon Inn. However, in Tsai’s tribute to cinema, and to cinemagoing, the audience and staff seem more concerned with cruising for a different kind of “action.”
4/21 KAB 7:15 GOOD21K
Doppelganger (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Japan, 2003)
Doppelganger uses the classic supernatural theme of the double to generate dread and tension. It’s also a darkly funny and heartfelt work, held together by a dazzling dual performance by Koji Yakusho (Shall We Dance?, SFIFF 1997).
4/22 KAB 7:00 DOPP22K
Love Me If You Dare (Yann Samuell, France, 2003)
Amazing visuals, brisk editing, an antic-driven plot and knockout performances enliven this dark romantic comedy about two friends whose obsession with a childhood game may end up destroying the love they discover for each other as adults.
4/26 KAB 7:00 LOVE26K
Grimm (Alex van Warmerdam, Netherlands, 2003)
A 21st century Brothers Grimm of illicit sex and organ transplants in this absurdist Dutch fairy-tale thriller. Abandoned in the dark woods, a brother and sister trek to deceptively sunny Spain and take refuge with a family with sinister intentions.
4/27 KAB 6:45 GRIM27K
the taiwan election controversy is dragging on, with more lawsuits and investigations. but the thing that really caught my eye was this:
i’m speechless.
this fresh from the pj harvey mailing list:
The full tracklisting is as follows:
1.The Life and Death of Mr Badmouth
2.Shame
3.Who The Fuck?
4.The Pocket Knife
5.The Letter
6.The Slow Drug
7.No Child of Mine
8.Cat on the Wall
9.You Come Through
10.It’s You
11.The End
12.The Desperate Kingdom of Love
13.The Darker Days of Me & Him
Harvey will be making a series of European festival appearances this summer, including a mainstage slot at Glastonbury and T in the Park.
European dates include a solo show at Le Zenith, Paris and a headline appearance at the Primavera Festival, Barcelona, with more dates to be announced.
just caught the ninjatune zentertainment show in lost angels, featuring kid koala, amon tobin, bonobo, diplo, and blockhead (although admittedly we missed diplo and blockhead, as we got there late— shocking, i know!).
it was pretty great. kid koala is so much fun it’s ridiculous.
so there’s that thing where you’re stranded on a desert island, and you have to pick ten albums that you take with you, knowing that you may never listen to anything else. ever. (can i just take a different flight that won’t crash, since i’ve got time to plan? and what do i play these on, that coconut powered cd player?) anyway, i guess it depended how strict you were, but my general rules were that they had to be albums, not compilations, and not even greatest hits collections. box sets were pretty much out as well, otherwise you could have the complete ella fitzgerald song books just as one selection, right? i think the last time i did this, it was something along the lines of:
the pixies - surfer rosa & come on pilgrim
pj harvey - rid of me
liz phair - liz phair
the orb - the orb’s adventure beyond the ultraworld
meat beat manifesto - storm the studio
art blakey & the jazz messengers - moanin’
boards of canada - music has the right to children
chemical brothers - exit planet dust
and i dunno, some other stuff. so where this comes up to me now is, my 30gb ipod is completely full. meaning that whenever i want to put a new album on it, i need to take something off of it.
and suddenly i’m making these decisions, only i’m not really choosing the top ten albums, i’m choosing the top 500. i know it sounds silly, and sure, you can get around some of it with the easy choices, taking off some of the stuff you just put on there when space was cheap and you thought you’d never fill it up. like i don’t need any brand new heavies albums beyond their first, and how did that angelique kidjo get on there in the first place? and do i really want to listen to lush or luscious jackson anymore?
but then you get to those harder questions: do i really need every brad robinson dj set? how about those episodes of this american life that i’ve been carrying around but never seem to listen to? do i need fifty episodes of ninjatune solidsteel? and how about that latest and kind of bad liz phair album? how much stereo total do you have before it becomes too much and too annoying?
and wouldn’t all these questions just be solved by an additional 10 gigs?
zero, c, and i went to see gus van sant’s elephant last night at the red vic.
so i’m not quite sure. some of the people we bumped into afterwards didn’t really like it at all, but i don’t know if i’m ready to make a verdict on it. there’s a strange formlessness to it, where a lot of it is following kids around a high school shortly before and during the time where two of them go on a shooting spree, much like columbine. maybe the problem is that we have been trained to expect some sort of linear storyline, and not just that, seeing as the time-shifting technique is more and more prevalent these days (memento, 21 grams, etc.), but we expect some sort of purpose or clear sense of “what does this movie try and tell us?” or “what point is this movie trying to make?”
maybe we’re too caught up in trying to figure out who’s the good guy or bad guy, or lay blame on someone, or even have some sort of resolution at the end, when sometimes there just isn’t any of that. for a lot of kids who got killed, whatever they were doing (which we witness as we follow them around school, flit in and out of their lives and their hopes/dreams/fears) doesn’t really matter at all with respect to whether they live or die that day. it’s almost about random chance, and no matter how noble or ignoble your intentions or life is, something else entirely can effect whether it will continue or not.
the new yorker sums it up pretty well, saying elephant “is not very satisfying, but it’s still something to see.” (note: the review contains a spoiler. bad new yorker!)
so there’s really no resolution in the movie. but i guess there’s not supposed to be any anyway.
it is what it is.
i love this! the quick house is made from recycled shipping containers, and is essentially a prefabricated kit that is dropped on the location, and custom (but simply) built. by assembling the shell you have a fully enclosed building by the end of the week, and from start to finish, you can have a three bedroom, two and one-half bath 2,000 square foot house in three months.
the cost for the basic house is only $76,000. a premium house, which includes a stainless steel kitchen, appliances, hvac, fireplace, insulation, electrical, carpets, light fixtures, stairs, beds and dining nook, costs $160,000. if you even have them do installation, estimated costs end up being under $200,000.
hmc and i want to sneak in to her parents house, knock that sucker down, and drop one of these on the lot. hell, i’d love to live in one of these. i’ve seen talks of these in those shelterporn magazines (dwell?), but this is the first offering that i’ve seen where you can buy something. now i keep looking around for empty lots…
my parents just flew back from taiwan on sunday, where they had spent the past week+ over there for the election and the campaigning.
he was tired, but he said that it was pretty crazy: besides the normal election rallies and tour stops, there was the assassination attempt on the president, which caused a sudden end to campaigning on both sides on the eve of election day, and then the sudden claims by the opposition that the assasination was staged, despite the photos, which led do the release of pictures of the president on the operating table (talking on his cell!). in the end, the president was re-elected, but by an incredibly slim margin, leading to calls for a recount as well as election fraud by the opposition, despite an admitted lack of evidence. and of course, still claims that the assasination was staged for sympathy votes, which has also been refuted by taiwan’s criminal investigation bureau. note, this is the same party that earlier tried to compare the president to hitler.
so, the election’s still up in the air, but it looks like it’ll most likely go through, and some people will be disguntled about it for a long time. sound familar? it’s odd for me to be on the other side, and compare how easy it is to rationalize whatever way you want the outcome to end up.
still, it’s impressive that people are still so passionate about their government. something like 80% of the population turned out to vote. hell, even my dad left the country without having been issued passport (and subsequently almost wasn’t allowed back in) because he wanted to get to taiwan to take part in the process. this all sort of puts us to shame, doesn’t it? maybe if they tied elections to the last episode of survivor or the bachelor or the apprentice, that you had to vote to see who won, would we actually get some sort of interest or passion in our electoral process. because it’s only the future, right? whatever.
saw a couple of great films this weekend.
first was underground by emir kusturica, which starts off following a couple of yugoslavian freedom fighters and the woman they love, and seems merely crazy, but then it just gets more and more bizarre and fantastical. now, i can’t seem to stop muttering “fucking facist motherfuckers!” to myself, and wishing i had a brass band following me around providing a personal soundtrack.
we also saw the new charlie kaufman film, eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, directed by michel gondry, probably best known for directing most of bjork’s music videos, including the incredible story within a story within a story video for bachelorette. i’ll try to describe as little as possible of the film, as it’s best experienced without any bits of the plots revealed, and you definitely should avoid all reviews, as i haven’t seen a single one that doesn’t spoil something. the basic conceit is that there’s a method where you can go in and have them erase all memory of someone in your brain, as if they never existed for you. it’s pretty interesting and rather (bitter?)sweet.
but this reminded me of an idea that i must have read in some book somewhere (kundera maybe?), that aside from any ideas of afterlife or reincarnation, our span of existence goes on for one, maybe two generations after we die, in the memories of people that we knew and affected. so even after we’ve passed away, we still exist in the memories of our children, and maybe even grandchildren, and it’s not until they pass away do we actually cease to exist. of course, if there were machines that could erase you from peoples’ memories today, then your existence would possibly get even shorter as well, as you’re killing off lines of life, strands of memory which are versions of you, right?
but now thinking about this, the corollary might be that fame is the way to live eternal, to at least have some form of yourself live forever. like jesus or elvis or martin luther king. or paris hilton.
that just about says it. which is a good thing, as it seems i’ve lost my voice as well. i’m not complaining, though, as it’s the first time i’ve been sick all winter. or is that spring? or is it fall now?
according to abc news via Johannes Grenzfurthner’s guestbar on boingboing:
China’s largest adult-only sexuality museum and combined natural theme park has opened in southern Guangdong province, boasting such attractions as “penis-like” rocks and “vagina-like” caves, state press report.
The 2,400 square metre sex museum is located not far from Hong Kong on Danxia Mountain near Shaoguan city and is believed to be the biggest such museum in China, Xinhua news agency said.
wait a minute… are they implying that there are more sex theme parks in china? like so many that this just happens to be a really big sex theme park in china?
The mountain was listed on February 13 as one of the “28 world geo-parks” by the United Nations cultural arm UNESCO, the report said.
Investment in the museum topped 15 million yuan ($US1.8 million) with six exhibition areas, showcasing such themes as “Sex in Waters and Mountains,” “Sex in Phallism,” “Sex in Chinese characteristics” and “Sex and Literature,” it said.
“The museum is a perfect integration of sexual culture and tourism… [and] is open only to adults,” it said.
all this, and they can’t just leave taiwan alone? or maybe they just want it back so then can open another sex theme park?
not that you’ve likely noticed, but i was having some problems with the blog the past few days. i think speakeasy changed something, so my mt scripts wouldn’t actually publish. it did take them four days, but they fixed it, so i’m back and yammer-enabled again…
apparently, mit researchers have discovered that carbs are not only good for you, but are the only thing that enable your brain to make seratonin.
the interesting thing is that the brain makes serotonin only after a person consumes sweet or starchy carbohydrates. but the kicker is that these carbohydrates must be eaten in combination with very little or no protein, otherwise no seratonin is produced.
hmm, i love the part where they slip in the plug for adara, her new weight-management company. maybe this is just a ploy for her to become the new anti-atkins. no website for adara yet, although there are ones for adara the hearing recovery professionals support/networking group, and of course links for adara michaels the porn star…
it looks my favorite place to get fried chicken, powell’s place, is now being forced to move or close, due to a rent increase in increasingly gentrifying hayes valley. i guess you can’t blame them, as how do you deal with a rent increase from $2,800 to $7,350 a month?
people like the temptations and the rev. jesse jackson frequented powell’s, as well as bitches like scottie pippen, but their fried chicken is so good that we’ll let that one pass. plus, the best part is that they let you order individual parts, so you could order, say, five drumsticks and three thighs, and not be stuck with any breasts or wings.
but now what? i guess there’s lois the pie queen, but that’s all the way in oakland…
so while i was out with mamaluna last night, we stopped by the kwik-e mart to get her some coke, and i was suckered in to buy one of those pepsi bottles so i could win a free song on itunes. i think i was just curious since it was the first time i actually saw any on sale, and then i used the tilt trick to make sure that i found one that had a free song winner and not a ‘play again’ cap.
however, the pepsi cost $1.39. a song on itunes normally costs 99¢. so i ended up spending 40¢ extra for no good reason.
well, although i did get a pepsi out of it, right? except that i don’t like cola that much, and only drink it as a desperation move in bars.
it’s a wonder i make any money at all.
emiliano, the big fat cat downstairs, mananged to get caught in the tiny space between our building and the house next door. it looks like he was able to crawl in over some wood and crap, but then as he went further down the space gets narrower and narrower, to the point where he was stuck and couldn’t get out. he could move his paws, but couldn’t really get any traction to push backwards, and he certainly couldn’t turn around. we kept trying to coax him to back out the way he came in or maybe come forward, but to no avail.
animal control came and tried to loop him with their little tool, but couldn’t get it around him. they suggested to either wet him or oil him down, to try and make him a little more slippery. so we doused him with water, which he hates, but all that really did was make him unhappy and wet.
convinced that there was no other option, animal control called the fire department to take the final option: cutting through the wall! i moved the land cruiser out of the garage, because my parking space was right next to where emiliano was trapped, and then they went at it, using axes and metal cutters to rip through the metal sheeting over the wall, and then pulling out the chainsaws to cut a sizeable hole through the side of the building right over emiliano, so that animal control could pull him out.
finally they did, although he really was quite wedged. voila! one scared, wet cat.
and the firemen’s response? “it happens far more often than you’d think.”
moral of the story: don’t let your cat get fat!
roo flew out here from chicago for her birthday today to frolic in the warm sun, which i feel is a much better choice than staying home in the cold and snow, tagging along with someone else’s birthday party.
we started with brunch at kate’s kitchen, a spree at amoeba, and then decided spur of the moment to go to the charles schulz museum in santa rosa.
so, um, it’s a little, uh, disappointing. let me say that i was actually pretty excited to go and had wanted to go for quite some time, having read peanuts ever since i was a kid, and having been a really big charlie brown fan. to the point where if i were ever to get a tatoo, i keep thinking i might end up getting a young charlie brown looking exasperated.
so first off, all the docents there are pretty agressively helpful octogenarians. while waiting for roo to use the bathroom, one of them talked to me exensively about the morphing snoopy exhibit, which is cool, but pretty self-explanatory (and you know, i can read signs as well), and not really requiring of a five minute explanation.
and then she was trying to direct me to the introductory video, and how that worked. and how that it would loop. so if i got there in the middle, just wait for it to start over. because it will. because i guess that confuses some people.
and then the video itself was pretty dull, and i only lasted like 45 seconds there. the sad thing was that it was talking about what sparky liked to do, and it said that “when he got bored and needed inspiration, he would walk across the street, and spend time at the mall.” this, i find more depressing than anything else i’ve seen at the museum. i guess i should be happy that he didn’t end up at the tcby instead.
i guess the problem is that it’s pretty tiny. not that i was expecting the guggenheim or anything, but you figure with such a legacy and fifty years of strips, they’d just have more. there was a nice recreation of his studio upstairs, but i was quickly chased away by another agressively friendly docent. there were some funny strips about love downstairs, including a series which i don’t remember where peppermint patty and marcie are hounding charlie brown about which one of them he likes better. but really, there just isn’t that much to see. you figure with the fifty years of strips he did, if nothing else, just pack that hall with hundreds of strips, why not?
you could probably just stay home and read the art of charles schulz book instead and get more out of it.
so i finally got around to seeing hero last night, the zhang yimou epic starring jet li, tony leung chiu wai, maggie cheung, donnie yen, and zhang ziyi.
wow.
i mean, really.
wow.
just so incredibly beautiful. phenomenally beautiful. the cinematographer was christopher doyle, who is wong kar wai’s main guy, so i was expecting the lush, saturated colours, but this was stunning. delicious use of filters, to make different parts of the movie have an entire pallette, something not seen to that extent since the cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover.
i did chuckle a little, as it’s a very chinese movie. the whole theme, the whole outlook, is very chinese, almost blatantly pro-party, and wouldn’t quite have been the same (or even made?) as a hong kong film.
but to no detriment. because it’s fabulous.
maybe it was worth $30 to see this on the big screen…
so the biggest news, really, is that the weather’s been gorgeous. ever since i’ve been back from pittsburgh, it’s been brilliantly sunny and crazy warm, like in the 70’s and 80’s. and it’s only march. this is even warmer than it usually is in the summer, it’s more like fall weather here. or proper indian summer-time.
this usually would seem like nothing to comment about, as it’s a purely temporal and transient thing, sort of like saying, “i wore a blue shirt today.” i mean, who cares, right?
but we’re not living in a vacuum. weather and environment exists, and it’s part of whatever we do and everything we experience. the whole package. it reminds me of a stanislaw lem story, i think it was one of the ijon tichy ones, where he meets this scientist who claims to have invented eternal life. it turns out what he’s done is made this little box, where he’s taken his wife and put her mind in it, which will live and exist forever. only the catch is, it’s just her mind. alone. no sensory inputs or outputs. no feedback of any kind. just pure consciousness, everything else is a void. only when tichy makes the scientist understand that what people want isn’t actually just eternal life, but they want their life as it is right now to last forever, with everything and everyone around them, does he realize the horror of what he’s done.
and so likewise, why should i pretend that i’m in a soulless vacuum? it’s beautiful outside.
william gibson’s latest book pattern recognition has this throwaway concept that your soul can’t really travel as fast as an airplane, so when you fly somewhere across great distances, your soul actually trails behind you, attached by a string, and will eventually catch up to you later, at which time you become whole again. but until then, you’re sort of a shell, there but not quite all there.
maybe i feel like this this weekend. or maybe it’s just the jet lag.
i’m sure getting up at 3:30am pst, flying back to sf, and then going to an all-night party and not getting home until 8:30am on saturday didn’t help. in any case, i’m doing a lot of sleeping this weekend.
or meditatively waiting for my soul.
i spent a hell of a time trying to get back home from pittsburgh yesterday. i’ll spare you the details, but high winds in chicago delayed and cancelled multiple flights, making yesterday a big fat mess. i should have not tried to get home earlier, and just waited for the evening nonstop, which would have saved me a lot of headache.
however, the one silver lining was that on the long return leg out of chicago, i was kindly upgraded to first class, which i had never flown before. what an incredible difference. in economy, you get into this rhythm which lets you know how much longer you have until you’re set free: you take off, you’re served one drink, you wait, the drink cups are picked up, they come around to serve/sell you food, the movie starts, they pick up the food plates, there’s a long rest, the movie ends, they come around and serve you another drink, and then seats and tray tables up, it’s time to land.
but in first class, you’re wonderfully separated from all of that. you have drinks all the time, they’re constantly checking on you to make sure that everything is ok, they call you by your name (and even pronounce it correctly!), and the food is not only gratis, but substantially better.
flying first class is at least ten times better than coach. if not more. who knew it’s not just about the big seats?
i’m gratified that cities across the nation are standing up against the president and the right and taking on the homophobic laws that they are trying to enact. at first, i was worried that this was going to be used as a divisive wedge and be exploited as some moral issue that would let bush steal yet another election, but it’s just too important to worry about that. it’s about what’s right, it’s about defending against discrimination, it’s about defending against hate.
being a minority, i can’t help but see the parallels of this possible proposed constitutional amendment against gay marriages, and how people would have once proposed stopping interracial marriages as well. and in fact, this was once a proposed amendment by rep. seaborn roddenberry in 1911, as a reaction to the famous boxer jack johnson’s wedding to a white woman, lucille cameron.
it’s the same thing all over again.
earlier this week, nasa announced that there was once water on mars. however, does that really mean that there was once life?
i’m here in pittsburgh for training, and i’m wondering the same thing:
The scientists do not know what kind of cutural environment existed at the building site: perhaps simple puppet shows, perhaps aborigines meeting at a water hole, perhaps something else.
Nevertheless, “we believe at this place ‘Pittsburgh’ for some period in time, it was a habitable environment,” said Dr. Steven W. Squyres, an astronomy professor at Cornell and the mission’s principal investigator.
“This is the kind of place that would have been suitable for life,” Dr. Squyres went on, but quickly added: “Now that doesn’t mean life was there. We don’t know that.”
in related news, the rate of depletion of the ozone layer could be three times worse than currently forecast. so agrees the pentagon as well. dubya bush responds, “damn hippies.”
flew to pittsburgh today for some training. so the odd thing for me was this was the first flight that i was on that didn’t serve real food, but instead made you buy meals yourself. you could get the cheap-ass hoagie (which was a crappy little sandwich and a lot of junk food) for $5, and then the option of two wolfgang puck meals for $10. i opted for the chinese chicken salad over the roast beast, and it was acceptable. the chicken itself was pretty good, but the brownie was possibly a leftover shuttle heat tile. i might have been outraged at the whole process had i not been expensing the cost. i wonder, then if they’d let you bring your own food on instead? i think southwest lets you do this. how about some nice fried chicken from powell’s place, with collard greens and yams? mmmmm…
they also subjected us to the film shattered glass, which is about the national review journalist stephen glass, who was exposed for having fabricated many of his stories. unfortunately, they had hayden christensen in the lead role, who may be the worst actor ever. i think i may have swore that i’d only watch one more movie with him in it after suffering through star wars 2: attack of the clones, which i guess means i’ll have to skip star wars 3. or maybe he’s just practicing not emoting so he can do darth vader without having to use a mask? in any case peter sarsgaard was good, at least.
so i just walked over to the other pet food store (not counting that one down the street, which seems to be some very suspicious non-pet food store, posing as a pet food store but apparently using the leftover supplies of the last pet food store that used to be there) to get some more cat food for mika, having to stock up before i go off to pittsburgh for a few days. yet when i get there, i notice that they no longer have any of the standard iams dry cat food that i usually buy, so i ask them about it, and they say that iams is not only owned by proctor & gamble, which already does animal testing for numerous products, but iams themselves also does animal testing, and therefore they won’t sell them anymore. i did end up walking to the other store and getting a bag of iams, but now that i know, from now on i’ll buy some pet-friendly food. it seems particularly important, since it’s actual food for my pet, right?
i used to be a lot better at this, being aware of who was testing what, carrying my peta good shopper guide around, and making sure to consciously support companies that didn’t hurt animals. but it seems i’ve forgotten, or at least have become less aware. call it laziness, or just getting more apolitical in my old age.
on the way back from the second pet food store, i walked past this three-car garage on valencia, which only has a sliding metal gate for a door, where there’s almost always someone working on some car or another. and it was just then, after having walked past it for years and years, that i finally realized what was going on there, that someone was actually fixing cars there, a sort of auto shop on the sly.
it’s so obvious, now that i think of it, but i never really realized it. maybe i’m not paying attention after all.