basic hip has done it again. another great album for download. i would gladly fork over bucks for more reissues in this vein if the record labels were smart enough to re-issue them. but of course they are too greedy to do so.

mr. rogers is dead. another childhood hero gone. sad. sad. sad.

the taipei film festival is happening next month, and for once i have a little advanced warning to try to get tickets. it looks like a lot of the films have english subtitles so i'm hoping to see alot of films. but unfortunately, my work hours are going to cut into seeing as much as i'd like to. there is even a student film festival, but i don't see any information on subtitles for those films.

once upon a time cool and strange music magazine was going to put out a compilation cd of various thriftstore finds, sadly the actual cd will not be happening. but the good news is they have put up the compilation for download. i'm still in the process of downloading, but it looks like it'll be pure bliss for my ears. fans of otis fodder's 365 days should take special not of this.

things just seem to be getting scarier and scarier in the states. ted has just blogged about how his sister-in-law and her husbund had their bags searched upon entering the u.s. without them being present. and inside their luggage was a note saying they were not responsible if anything was damaged.

why is it that custom officials are rarely held accountable? i've had friends searched by the border guards(u.s. border guards) on returning from canada. the guards are so gung-ho that you are hiding something that they tear apart your car making a big mess, and then leave it that way! then instead of apologizing or saying sorry this is just a routine check, they act like they didn't catch you this time but next time they will.

more and more i'm wondering if it's worth it to return to the states at all, even for a visit.

last night around 2 am some dog decided to park it's butt at the end of our lane and bark its head off. surprisingly none of the dogs that live on this lane answered. but it sure didn't help me sleep hearing that barking bouncing off the walls of the buildings here.

after the dog left, we got treated to loud yelling and talking by some neighbors. this lasted until well after 3 am. peter and i both got up to see where these people were. it sounded like they were right outside our apartment, but they were inside an apartment across the lane with windows wide open. peter called the police and they actually showed up and made the people go away(they must of been visiting someone). thankfully this sort of thing doesn't happen very often.

the photobloggies winners have been announced. a few of the blogs i voted for won. though i was surprised that the finalists(for what the rest of us voted on) were picked by only three judges, due to the fact that no one volunteered to be one. considering all the bitching that went on over the regular bloggies, this sort of surprises me. i'm curious to how many people actually voted though.

the other day i picked up a cheapo dvd of the pink panther cartoons. one thing i miss is watching cartoons that i can understand. nearly all the cartoons shown here in taiwan are dubbed into mandarin often without any chinese subtitles even(most shows here have chinese subtitles regardless of language being used). one of the few shows i could watch and still understand was the pink panther since there is usually no speaking in those cartoons, it all works visually. has there ever been a cartoon as sophisticated and hip as the pink panther? i think not.

tonight i went to the taipei lantern festival at chiang kai-shek memorial hall. the lantern festival ends on sunday. i missed the lantern festival last year, so i was happy to see it this year, especially since it's my year(year of the sheep(ram, goat, etc.)). i snapped a few pictures some of which you can see below.

bob thompson's the sound of speed is available for download here.

from their website:

Each composition evokes a different mode of transport, from the horse and buggy to Vespa scooters to jet planes. Each vehicular vignette is book-ended by authentic sound effects, with vivid stereo motion. The music was composed and arranged by Bob Thompson, and the album was recorded in Italy by the Orchestra dei Concerti de Roma, conducted by Paul.Baron.

the public televison station here has been showing a mini-series called bad son(i just noticed that the english title of this is crystal boys, but i was told the chinese means bad son). it's based on a famous taiwanese novel, the first to really openly talk about gay men in taiwan. the story takes place in the 1960s, and follows the son's story as his family disintegrates and his life after that. the series is in chinese with chinese subtitles so it has been quite a test for my chinese. i can catch some of the meaning but a lot of it is hard as the subtitles move by too fast and listening to them speak is even harder. luckily peter translates some of the key things i can't catch. it's interesting to learn about this time in taiwanese history.

a basic synopsis of what i have seen so far follows:

in this family the mother is half the age of the father(i've been told this was very common at this time in history), the father having come over from china with chiang kai-shek after losing the war. he treats the taiwanese pretty bad and talks about when they will reclaim china. the wife has a fling with a handsome young trumpet player, when she comes home late the husbund beats her up and she runs off with the trumpet player and his can can dance troupe. the kids grow up with a father they don't seem to like very much. when the eldest son is in high school his younger brother gets really sick and dies. his best friend consoles him which leads to a make out session. when they are caught by one of the school staff(they were in the school's bathroom late at night) they get kicked out of school(i think this is what happened. my chinese sort of failed me in this section). when the father finds out he kicks the son out of the house calling him an animal. the son then goes to the park to sleep. an old man tries to pick him up, but another man gets the old man to leave him alone and invites the boy home to stay with him and helps get him a job at a restaurant where he meets another gay staff member.

that's basically what has happened so far. even with my poor chinese i'm finding it really interesting. in some ways i'm finding it surprising that they are showing a show like this at all. taiwan may not be as homophobic as some countries, but i wouldn't call it exactly queer friendly. i'd like to read the book the series is based on, but i somehow doubt that an english translation exists. i don't think i've ever read a novel from taiwan. maybe one day my chinese reading skills will be good enough to read a taiwanese novel in chinese, but i suspect that is probably more a pipe dream than anything else.

(note: just discovered an english translation of this book does exist. maybe i'll have a chance to read it after all.)

a few more pictures from the osaka trip:

pachinko anyone?

cable tv in one of the subway stations. we were all very happy to catch part of shazam! on the cartoon network(not pictured).

before and after.

i ordered this cd by twink after listening to the samples on this site. some really cool things they've done with toy instruments. it sounds quite different from pascal comelade, and the pascals(a japanese pascal comelade cover band) who also use a lot of toy instruments on their releases.

this is the first time i've ordered from cd baby and when they shipped the order they sent me this amusing email:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Monday, February 17th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.
Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!


for them it's probably just there typical form letter, but i'd rather have this than your typical "we shipped your order, if you are lucky it will arrive sometime in the next 6 months..."

i heard back from the playsoundz people. 8 bucks a cdr or everything on their site(three cdrs) for 20 bucks. i immediately wrote out a check and dropped it in the mail. i can't wait for those discs to arrive.

a good article here how the smithsonian folkways label is keeping their whole catalogue in stock by allowing people to buy cdrs of anything in the back catalogue that is not currently in print. i like the idea, but i can't see myself paying 20 bucks for a cdr that only comes with a photocopy of the liner notes. but still it's a far better attitude than that of the greedy major labels.

more goodies via yip yop. playsoundz - modern electronic music for children. i didn't know they still made such great and fun music. in a similiar vein to perrey and kingsley, but in children's song mode. but don't let that put you off, go download a sample. best thing is that they are available as cheap cdrs(i think for the price of postage and the disc itself). i've already emailed asking for mine. i hope they are still doing it.

the hello kitty theremin! this makes me want a theremin evenmore.(more pictures here). via yip yop.

the thunderbirds soundtrack is finally getting a proper release on cd. up until now, most of this excellent music by barry gray has been only available in bits and pieces on various compilations. fanderson did release some of the soundtracks on cd, but you had to become a member just to get the disc. so this release on silva screen is welcome news and i'm already planning to get one of the cd shops here to special order it for me to be on the safe side.

oh, and it looks like they have already released three discs of the prisoner soundtrack. i have a feeling i'm going to be even more broke very soon.

yesterday part of my order from djangos came in. i got barry 7's connectors 2 on the lo recordings label. this is a collection of italian library music. i'm a little confused, as library music is usually described as music written to be used in films, but not for a specific film. but each track here says it comes from a certain film. so i'm not sure if this is true library music, or merely music taken from obscure films. either way it's nice and groovy and spacey and funky in all the right places. ennio morricone and piero piccioni make appearances on this compilation among others.

today i sat down and watched one of the dvds from the hou hsiao-hsien's classics: from 1983-1986. i watched the boys from fengkuei. i've only seen a few hou hsiao-hsien films, so i'm looking forward to exploring his earlier work. i found this film especially interesting to see how taiwan has changed and how it hasn't. the scenes in kaoshiung particularly showed this. the buses, the nightmarket, the houses...i guess i'd find that interesting about any place i've lived or even for some places i haven't. a sense of history documented in photographs or cinema.

oddly enough most of the websites i've been to about this film describe the three main characters as just having graduated from high school, but in the film it's stated that at least one of them has dropped out of high school. well, maybe it's not that important, but when i read things like that it makes me wonder if the people have actually seen the film, or if the english subtitles were just wrong in some places.

the top ten sample list is ten years old! happy birthday top ten sample list! for those that don't know, the top ten sample list is a database of film or tv dialogue that has been sampled by bands. it tends to be a bit heavy on the techno and industrial bands, but i suspect that has a lot to do with the people who have supplied information to the site. or maybe those type of bands just sample movies more.

as promised earlier, a few snapshots from osaka.

ted has a nice write up about the bombing of dresden to remind us of the attrocities of war, for those that may be naieve enough to think bombing baghdad might be some simple and clean affair. i don't think i'll ever understand how anyone could support something like that again.

the photobloggies finalists have been announced. it doesn't look like any of the nominations i sent in made it into the finals. i ticked the box to be a judge for picking the finalists, and they emailed me about it, but unfortunately i was in japan at that time so couldn't be one. regardless, there are some nice photoblogs nominated so go take a look!

today i went in search of roadside japan but of course no luck in finding it. but while i was in the bookstore i came across a really beautiful and expensive book on joseph cornell. if i had the money, i would of loved to splurge on it. i also saw a really nice book on ray johnson. i was surprised to see the ray johnson book here. he's largely seen as the father of mail art. thumbing through the book got me inspired to do mail art again, whether i will or not is still a bit unclear. that creativity may be channeled into doing another set of artist trading cards though.

yes, i'm messing with the blogger template, so you can expect things to look a bit hideous around here for awhile.

yesterday i went back to the taipei fine arts museum to see the rest of the biennial show i missed the first time. one of my favourite pieces was an installation by kyoichi tsuzuki about love hotels. apparently the japanese government now considers most love hotels as a "sex related business" so that they can only operate in certain neighborhoods. so alot of them have been forced to become normal hotels, with bland decor. i'd heard about japanese love hotels before, but i don't think i'd ever really thought about what the decor looked like until i saw this installation. before i would think they were a bit expensive, but now i think they may be worth it just to spend the night in such a strange environment.

seeing this got me curious about kyoichi tsuzuki as i'd never heard of him before. i found this interview, which makes me like him even more. and now i'm really curious about this(second book on the page) book, and if i can find it here i may just have to buy it.

time capsule a nifty japanese toy site that is already giving me ideas for new toys to look out for. i especially like the toys by hideyasu moto and charles burns. via gmtplus9.

today in the mail i got a nice little package in the mail from my friend paul. among the goodies were these two postcards. one of the things i like about these postcards is what they have written on the back. one says how are all the poor people? regards jerry and gert and one says we think the perisphere is about the best thing at the fair. save your pennies, you can use plenty of them there. people do not go up in the trylon. marge & ralph.

a glimpse of the past, but it's funner if you read them as coded messages. who are these people, what do they want and what have they got against spending pennies and poor people?

somehow recieving these postcards connects with my recent discovery of the lost slide foundation and the discards site. now if only i would find such interesting photographs and slides on the street.

and yet another blog bites the dust.

well, we're back from osaka. peter and i managed not to kill each other on this trip which was a good thing. i had a wonderful time and really enjoyed both osaka and kyoto. i took a ton of pictures some of which will find their way to this blog over the next few weeks or months. some of the highlights from the trip:

• meeting sem sinatra from the exoticalist. he was really cool and showed us around our first two days in osaka. he took us to flea markets and to various parts of the city. it was wonderful to dig through stuff at flea markets again. peter bought a mazinger z toy and sem got some records. i bought something for my friend cat.
  
  

  

• the bridge. there is a pedestrian overpass in osaka where bands play. from what i can tell all very amateur and just really wonderful. every night there seems to be different bands playing in different parts. some on the overpass some under it. we caught part of this one band that was pretty cool. very rock oriented in a jimi hendrix sort of way(ok, so the jimi comparison is a bit off, but it'll have to do). the singer had this great black afro and was wearing tight jeans and had great presence. they aren't the sort of thing i would listen to at home, but i could see going to see them live(the above picture is from the flyers they handed out when we saw them).
  
  
• cd shopping. i spent entirely too much on cds as usual. picked up discs by hideki kaji, iwamura manabu, marcos valle, sketch show, among others. one of the most interesting things i picked up was this thing called cornelius presents curiousity killed the ape. it contains a decent sized book(all in b & w with words in japanese), and a cardboard record player that needs to be assembled plus some flexi discs. looks pretty cool.
  
  

  

• we met up with a friend of peter's friend, named yoshiaki. he was really nice, though a bit shy or soft spoken. he showed us around kyoto, mainly to various temples. the temples were amazing. even if it is winter so we couldn't see the trees blooming. i'd really like to go back again and see them in bloom and when it is warmer. we took lots of pictures, but towards the end of the day my battery died in my camera! and my backup battery was dead too! but yoshiaki took some pictures for us with his point and shoot. i wish we could of spent more time with yoshiaki but he took one day off work as it was and we couldn't very well ask him to take more time off(the picture above is from the pamphlet to one of the temples or pavillions, we weren't allowed to take pictures inside this one).