Though I haven’t played in more than a year, I love ping pong. (I also have two shirts from my high school days in ping pong club, two other items of clothing with ping pong references, and the nickname of “net whore,” thanks to my lovely sister and my skill at coaxing the ball to catch the net and drop right over.)
So, I would be remiss if I didn’t share this new ad for a limited edition Bruce Lee Nokia phone that has been viral video-ing itself all over the internet. General consensus seems to be that it’s an actor, not really old footage of Bruce Lee, and that it’s all digital and CGI and not really someone playing ping pong with nunchucks blah blah blah. Whatever. It’s awesome, so check it out.
Rachael Yamagata is one of my favorite musicians, if that status can be earned with a single album (2004’s Happenstance ), and I’ve been waiting ages for a follow-up. Now, Elephants… Teeth Sinking Into Heart (a two-disc CD) comes out on October 7!
Here is the video for her first single, “Elephants”. It seems like a bit of an odd choice to kick off the new album–it’s super mellow, and not really infectious. But it is pretty, and I’m jazzed to hear the other 14 tracks.
No, I haven’t joined a gang. Nor have I died–long absence is due to deadline (new mag out by August 1st!).
But I have been excited by news of a bilingual West Side Story to be revived on Broadway by Arthur Laurents, who did Gypsy last year. I’ve never seen the stage show, and I do like the movie, but it’s not exactly culturally authentic (or convincing). It will be interesting to see how a non-bilingual audience responds to it. There will be supertitles, but having to look away from the stage would be distracting (although I guess operas have dealt with that for years)…
On non-related news, I’m totally excited about the olympics, and plan to watch as much of the 3,600 hours of online and tv coverage as possible with a full-time job and the Sacramento Film and Music Festival taking place at the same time–but I get upset when scandals like this one arise. Two of the gymnasts on the Chinese women’s team (which is expected to go head-to-head with the USA for the team gold) may be lying about their age (they’re maybe 14, and the minimum age is 16), but there’s no good way to tell prove it because their official Chinese documents say 16. (yay for authoritarian countries.) With this, the new steroids doc Bigger, Stronger, Faster, the current Tour de France doping problems…I hate that I can’t just be in awe of athletes and the amazing things they do, because there’s so much rule-bending going on. (The argument is that younger gymnasts are lighter and less fearful, so they’re better than when they’re older. Those poor girls peak so soon!)
So this whole thesis and graduating and starting a job 7 days after graduation thing killed my blog. But I’m back! For all of you remaining readers…and by that I mean Liz, who has me on her blogroll.
But anyway, I’m back because I just saw something that blew my mind, and I thought I’d share it.
I love gymnastics–I did it, I taught it, I wrote a script about it–and this weekend is the US Championships, which determines the Senior National Team and who competes at the Olympic Trials in a few weeks. So I was talking about Shawn Johnson (a girl, btw–currently unstoppable and super cute and charismatic) and my dad brought up how he has a really strong recollection of when he first saw the cute and charismatic Olga Korbut (from Belarus) in 1972.
Olga changed the game. Before her, gymnasts were actually women, not girls. And while this whole shift to the waif-like gymnast child hasn’t necessarily been pretty–see the book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes: The Making and Breaking of Elite Gymnasts and Figure Skaters–Olga captured a nation. Claims her website: “She did more to ease the tensions of the Cold War than all the politicians and diplomats of the day put together.” Says my dad: “That might be true.”
But to the blew-my-mind part: usually, if you watch old gymnastics routines, they look really easy and not that impressive compared to the dare-devil routines today. But this bar routine is the coolest thing I have ever seen. It’s also funny that you can hear the announcer say, “This is a historic performance you’re watching”–and I’m watching it 36 years later.
So watch this:
Then watch it about ten more times because you can’t get over that sequence where she did a backflip on the high bar.
Last week Pitzer hosted the Black Maria Film Festival, a touring festival that promotes experimental filmmaking. It was cool, although after a while I got sick of the apparently common idea now that quickly flickering images equal edginess.
For that reason, and many others, I loved “The Drift,” by Kelly Sears–she has taken the opposite route, and slooowed down. “The Drift” is about a space-mission-gone-wrong in the 60s, and the images are photographs taken from old National Geographics she found at garage sales. She then animates the pictures–I have no idea how, but apparently frame by frame–so figures drift or disappear or move so slightly that you’re not sure they’re really moving, and the pictures take on a lot of depth. The piece occupies this weird place between documentary and (science) fiction, and still and moving images, and is almost haunting.
Kelly is actually the director of the production center at Pitzer, and was at the screening. She said one of her favorite comments about this piece was when, after a screening, a friend came up to her and said, “That didn’t really happen, did it?”
J. Robert Lennon (author of Pieces for the Left Hand…in related news, I e-mailed him a few days ago to tell him that I love that book, and he wrote back the next day thanking me and revealing that his grad school roommate had gone to Pomona and used to be in the brochure with bizarre mutton-chop sideburns) runs a blog for experimental writing called the LitLab that I just started reading, although posting has been slow lately. Hopefully it will pick up soon.
The way it works is that authors set themselves up with restrictions or specific challenges (kind of like how Lars von Trier did for Jorgen Leth in The Five Obstructions (2003), for which Leth re-made his old short film “The Perfect Human,” five times. Watch the original film below).
As an example, take the very short story, in Czech, by Lida Sobkova, in which every letter starts with the letter “p.” Then we read it translated into English. Here’s an excerpt:
“Prší. Pátek patnáctého prosince. Pošmourné počasí protíná polední pauzu. Pozdní podzim povzbuzuje pápěří pampelišky poletovat. Plnicí pero popsalo papír poletujíjcí pod podloubím. Proslulý proutník Pavel provází podél podloubí pihovatou Pavlínu. Proč právě Petra? Proradný prostopášník povalil Pavlínu pod platan, poodhalil Pavlínin pihovatý pupík. Pořád poprchává. Pavlína promrzla. Pojď popijeme pro pohodu. Pokračují paloukem, přicházejí k pohostinství „Pod Pařezem.“ “
I like the attention to the visual aesthetics of writing, not just how it sounds or what it means. To find out what it means, go to the LitLab.
Here is the music video for “Scissors” (off the album The Vigilante) by my friend/awesome singer-songwriter-piano player Ariel S. Lee, starring her (of course) and directed by me. We discussed the video last fall, shot over winter break in Sacramento and Santa Cruz, and now it’s finally done. Enjoy!
We’re in the midst of the craziness that is New York fashion week, and I’ve found plenty of totally weird stuff (see below for a white deer headdress…) and lots of glorious clothes, too. Below are a few of my favorites.
This is a delayed post, but…a couple of weeks ago while half-watching tv as I took off nail polish, I stumbled upon Bravo’s Make Me a Supermodel. Now, when I first saw the ads for the show, I thought, “Seriously? Another modeling show? As if ANTM, A Model’s Life, 8th and Ocean, Janice Dickenson Modeling Agency, etc, etc… aren’t enough? Hurry up writers’ strike and bring back real television!”
But then I saw that a girl from my painting class last semester, Stephanie, is on the show. (I’m trying to figure out the timing–it’s an American Idol-style “vote for your favorite” show, so she must have taken the semester off from Scripps to be filming right now.) I haven’t actually watched either of the episodes, but I’ve checked out her photos, diary entries, and videos online. I’m withholding real judgment on her skill and potential until I watch, although I’ll say now that I don’t know what the hell they did to her bangs, and also that I love her shoes.
Just thought I’d post to express my sadness over the lack of a real Golden Globes this year. Tonight, instead of the big, glamorous awards show–which is thought to be more fun than other shows like the Oscars because everyone sits and chats at tables and gets semi-drunk rather than sitting in a big auditorium, and also because the stars take more fashion risks than they do at the Oscars–there was a half-hour news conference to announce the winners, none of whom were present.
I understand the WGA not wanting to grant the Globes a break from the strike, and I understand writers and actors not wanting to cross picket lines, but I feel bad for the people who were nominated who missed the chance for a big celebration. Hopefully the Oscars will still go on as planned, and I’ll have plenty of gowns to drool over or pick apart soon.
Both Behnaz Sarafpour
Monique Lhuillier
Badgley Mischka
Benjamin Cho
More Benjamin Cho
