toastykitten

Music: 



OMG the full Lip Sync Battle episode!



Movies, adding to my list, these are all going to make me cry:

And...the most terrible rap ever sponsored by an authoritarian government (yes, it's in English - apologies to your ears):

OMG all the amazing women who are in this video. + the sci-fi futurism of it all.



By the way, Luke Cage had the best soundtrack of all the Marvel shows. This is probably not a coincidence.

One word: AMAZING!


 

So...I went through our CDs and found some doubles. If anybody wants any of these, I'm willing to mail anywhere within the US. Just comment. or email me. I make no guarantees for the quality of the burned CDs, though. If after one or two weeks no one asks for them, I'll just post on Freecycle.

Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon. (Original CD)
Cowboy Bebop No Disc (CD-R)
Cowboy Bebop Original Soundtrack (CD-R)
Radiohead Kid A (CD-R)
Kraftwerk Autobahn (CD-R)
Kraftwerk Kraftwerk (CD-R)
Digable Planets Blowout Comb (CD-R)
Mos Def Black on Both Sides (CD-R) (Note: Missing the Brooklyn track because Mark didn't like that he ripped off the original song about L.A.)
Kraftwerk Ralph & Florian (CD-R)
Jurassic Five - I think this is Quality Control; it might also be Power in Numbers (CD-R)
Black Moon War Zone (CD-R & Original CD)
Glay Video Glay 3 (Scroll down for screencaps) (Original VCD - not a double - I'm just not that into Jrock anymore.)

Not that I'm planning to quit or anything, but this is very good to know: In California, a non-compete agreement is enforceable only if someone sells a business and agrees not to compete with the new owner. That aside, California employers cannot restrict the livelihood of their current or former employees.

Greencine had someone covering the Hong Kong Film Festival - the most interesting part is the controversial directorial debut of heartthrob Daniel Wu, who according to Wikipedia, went to Head Royce in Oakland. Head Royce is a pretty exclusive private school, and you either have to be very rich or very smart to get in. (Of course, the first thing that popped into my head was, so that's where all the hot Asian boys were!) I received an application, but I never applied, after looking at the cost. I remember we had a few friends who went there, and (my memory is extremely fuzzy on this) how once some people from Skyline went to visit them. One told a story about how the teacher, in order to get her class to be quiet, said that she would walk out until the class became quiet. And did. When one of the Head Royce students asked the Skyline kid what she would do if it happened in the public school, she replied, "We would walk out, too. Shit." Or something to that effect.

Of course, being from Oakland, Mr. Wu's a troublemaker, and his movie, Heavenly Kings, totally pissed off the Hong Kong media. It's basically a mockumentary/documentary, in which he and three other friends create a real band, and show how stuff gets manipulated and processed in the press and in the recording studio. He's been blacklisted from quite a few places, but it's only garnered him more media attention elsewhere, and his band is still Alive.

How is the movie itself? Don't know; have not received any VCDs from my sisters yet.

1. In the BSG finale of Season 2, the Chief (as union leader) gives a speech, which turns out is actually taken from a real one by Mario Savio, who was a leader of Berkeley's Free Speech Movement. I learned about it from Peterme.

"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part, you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies on the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"

2. Damn, they made a new version of the Condor Heroes already? I don't like the looks of it, mostly because these new protagonists look so damn happy. It's not a happy series! I will always like Andy Lau as "Yeung Gor" the best.

3. Ubuweb is awesome.

The 12 Girls Band is good Chinese New Year's music.

My sister burned me a few VCDs of their concerts, and I listened to it at work. I was really happy that no one sang, because if they sang, it would be friggin opera, which I can't stand in Chinese.

It reminded me of The Great Wall Youth Orchestra, a local group that "plays Chinese musical instruments and performs a variety of music". It is also most famous for Tyler Thompson, an African-American kid with an aptitude for Chinese operatic singing. I have two distant relatives in the group - they're the sweetest kids I ever baby-sat, and after watching one of their concerts, really talented, too.

In this one concert, one of the performances was a very famous scene in a Cantonese opera. (It's actually one of the few songs I like.) As I was watching, I was of two thoughts - "Oh my god, that's so cute!" and "Oh my god, that's so wrong!" You see, this scene that these two kids perform is this marriage ceremony in which the bride and groom commit suicide by drinking cyanide. The bride is a princess who's been forced against her will to marry someone else, so she's committing suicide as an act of rebellion, and to send a message to her subjects to keep fighting. I think.

Anyway, it was really, really cute seeing the kids all dressed up in the elaborate costumes and makeup, and I'm pretty sure they didn't know what they were singing about.

The KQED show about it was very entertaining. One of the kids interviewed cracked us up. She said something along the lines of "My dad had a flute in China, but then he had to chop it up for firewood." I bet her parents totally made that up. It's such a Chinese thing to say.

I have a dentist appointment in about an hour. I hope I don't have any cavities.

Things have been really quiet for me lately. I've been feeling really restless, though, and I feel like I ought to be doing something useful, but I have no idea what. Maybe I should start drawing again. I can't wait until my boss gets back from maternity leave; as soon as she does I am taking two weeks off to go somewhere.

I've read a lot in the past couple of weeks, mostly because I finally started using my library card. Books I've read:

Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler - This book freaked me out. This is the sequel to Parable of the Sower, and it's mainly about the heroine of the first - Lauren Olamina, through the eyes of the resentful daughter she's been separated from for most of her life. Lauren Olamina, in the first novel, starts a new religion called Earthseed, and this second novel is a continuation of that journey. It's classic Butler - stark prose, powerful ideas, and a protagonist who is hellbent on survival.

Butler also has a new novel out, called Fledgling. I can't wait to read it.

Tender at the Bone, Ruth Reichl - I was actually trying to see if I could find her new book, Garlic and Sapphires, which were about her years in disguise as a critic for the New York Times. This one is a memoir of earlier years, where food helped her cope with everything, from heartbreak to her manic-depressive mother. I think I'd actually read some of the chapters about her mom before, because they seemed very familiar to me. This was a very touching book, but I wouldn't call it great or anything. Reichl writes well, but has a tendency to resort to cliches when she's writing about actual food. I guess it's hard to capture the kind of ecstasy you feel when you're faced with truly sublime food, but maybe I'm just jealous, because she speaks French fluently and had an awesome life. My favorite chapters were the ones about her life during the seventies, in which the politics of her and her friends changed with the economic need, from recycling to dumpster-diving, and she argued to her mother that "ambition was what was wrong with America".

Miss Manners' Basic Guide to Eating, Judith Martin - I am a total sucker for advice columns. This tiny little volume made me feel sooo guilty, but I was also confused by some of the questions she got - like, "My kids are picky eaters and refuse to eat the food I cook for them and always beg for sandwiches. What should I do?" Oy.

The Book of Tea, Kakuzo Okakura - This book is sort of a primer on Japanese aesthetics. Anyway, it's a little bit snarky, surprising given that this was written over fifty years ago, and very elegant, even if I'm pretty doubtful about the accuracy of the information. He talks a lot about the aesthetic of imperfection, of leaving things unfinished so that the imagination can complete them. There's also stuff about Taoism, tea rituals, etc.

Other good things:

I received a t-shirt and print from Yan. I think the shirt fits fine, and I will probably frame the print and put it on my wall somewhere. Right now the walls are blank, and I'm thinking of just buying some canvas to paint on it, or something. Except I know nothing about how to paint stuff, so I might start small.

Demon Days, Gorillaz - This second album is delicious. I'm terrible at describing music, but this mostly instrumental, electronica, hip-hop-ish mash made me really happy and bouncy at my work desk. I'm glad I got it.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, soundtrack - The movie was just totally weird. It made no sense to me and I had no idea what the point was and Bill Murray was the same character he always is. But I thought the Portuguese covers of David Bowie were really beautiful, so I went out and bought this. It's lovely.