The Scanner - Treatment for B-movie
When you have an access to a DV cam, it’s tempting to make your own movie, but it’s too much hassle. It’s better to just write treatments. Read »
Speech at the Harvard Law School for Asian Pacific American Conference
Before I discuss the future of the Internet, I’d like to briefly talk about how I ended up here. Although I have lived in America much of my life, I’m not a typical Asian American because I was not born here. Psychologically, I don’t feel like an American any more than I feel like I’m Japanese. I was born and raised in Japan until I was 17, then moved by myself to California through an exchange program. In retrospect, my high school years were very interesting. I was a typical Asian nerd, much like Long Duk Dong in the movie “Sixteen Candles.” Though there were many Asian Americans in my high school, none of them bothered to talk to me. It’s quite obvious now why they didn’t. After all, I was contributing to the stereotype of Asians being nerdy. Perhaps, some of them even had a feeling of anger towards me. Remember, this is the mid-Eighties: there was no Chow Yun-Fat or Jet Li. Our only representative who wasn’t a nerd was Bruce Lee. So, since most of the Asian-Americans I met did not want to be seen as nerds, I was alienated from my own people. In fact, I’ve never felt Asian Americans to be “my” people. This lack of sense of belonging is something that continues to this day. Read »
Frames Per Second of Life
I must be getting old. Watching “Naked Chef” makes me dizzy. The continuous extreme close-up and the jerky motion of it make my eyes tired. I remember the days when all the adults around me would complain about the same thing when I watched MTV. Not so long ago, as a motion graphics designer, I would design a piece where each clip was no longer than a few frames (on NTSC TV, there are 30 frames in a second). I thought that was cool. Now I don’t. In fact I can hardly take it. Read »
One Would Think
Trying to write grammatically correct sentences without making any sense is quite difficult. This is the result of my attempt. Read »
Kitchen Confidential
There is a new show on Food Network called “A Cook’s Tour” in which Anthony Bourdain, the executive chef of Les Halles in New York, travels around the world experiencing exotic local cuisines. Until I saw this program, I had never heard of Anthony Bourdain. He seemed like an interesting guy, so I looked further into who he was. He became famous for his book “Kitchen Confidential” which comically describes what it is like to be part of the restaurant culture in New York. He had published two fictional books prior to it, but they did not achieve the same kind of success that “Kitchen Confidential” enjoyed. Read »
Alcatraz
Alcatraz served their poison to the punk and the metal crowd. I’m not sure if the punks came to Tompkins because of this bar or the bar came because of the punks in Tompkins. Read »
The Alchemist
“The Alchemist” by Paulo Coelho is a great book that incorporates various schools of thought, some very esoteric, like Jung’s Collective Unconscious, Gurdjieff / Ouspensky / Collin’s concept of time in universe, as well as the teachings of more mainstream religions and myths. It even echoes some of the sentiments of the popular happiness peddlers like Anthony Robbins and Alan Watts. The book successfully combines all these ideas into one neat mythical tale. What it tries to ultimately achieve is to shed some light on the eternal question of human race: the meaning of life. Unlike the Existentialists, Coelho apparently believes that each one of us have a purpose of our own called “Personal Legend.” The book illustrates the process of achieving it. Read »
On Void
Looking back at my own writings from 1993, I found something that’s worth bringing back. I was depressed out of my mind then. Most of my writings from that period were so bitter and self-pitying. This one seems to show some honesty of my true feelings then. Read »
My Personal Account of 9-11
Yesterday morning as I was walking toward the subway station, I heard a big bang. I had no idea what it was, but I thought at the time that later it could turn out to be something big. Had I looked downtown, I would have probably seen the smoke and the fire. (From Houston Street, where I was walking, the World Trade Center towers used to be clearly visible.) I got on the F train at the station on Second Avenue and Houston Street, and got off at the 23rd Street station as usual. As I walked up 6th Avenue, I saw a crowd of people looking downtown. I wondered what it was all about but didn’t bother to look downtown. Once I arrived at work, one my co-workers, Laurens, told me that an airplane had smashed into WTC. We switched on the TV and there it was; both of the towers were on fire. Read »
What came after Cafe 9
Here is what came after Cafe 9, Bel Air. Read »
Chow Yun-Fat
Is it just me or have you noticed it too? I now see a lot more couples where the man is Asian and the woman is white. This started happening about 3 years ago, especially among late teens and early twenties. Read »
Postmodern Self
The aim of art originally was to represent beauty. That is to say it tried to reproduce the beauty that existed in nature. Abstract Expressionists came and changed that. Their works of art did not represent beauty, but were themselves the beauty. What did not change with the Abstract Expressionism was that it still expressed artists’ subjectivity, that is, it expressed their subjective sense of beauty, their human experiences, pain, sufferings, and joy, which appealed to the viewers’ emotions and feelings. We believed that art represented essence of the artists’ self. Then came Postmodernism where any style of art including those of Abstract Expressionists became a mere vehicle of representation. Pop Art, especially, treated every style and movement of art history to be a mere symbol, or an icon. Representation was back again, but this time, beauty is not in what it represents; it is in its use of representation. What we have lost in Postmodern art is the sense of self, or at least so it seems. Read »
NETABSTRACTION
NETABSTRACTION is an attempt at abstracting the dynamic content of the Web in real time. These Shockwave programs will surf the web on their own in order to create continuous random collages out of the texts and the images that they find along the way. Read »
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