My Interview at Leehom's Concert at MGM Grand

Dharma Poem

There’s a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken,
A shatteredness out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow beyond all grief which leads to joy,
And a fragility out of whose depths emerge a strength.
There is a hollow space too vast for words,
Through which we pass with each loss,
Out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sound,
Whose serrated edges cut the heart as we break open,
To the place inside which is unbreakable and whole,
While learning to sing.

Simpsons Couture

Love this Simpsons PR campaign in Bazaar. Check out how they stack up the each designer's style.

Leehom as a Kick-ass Revolutionary!

Oh, I can't wait till the release of this film on Friday!!! Woo-hoo. Leehom as an anti-Japanese revolutionary!!! What a hottie! I'll follow you through a war, no problem!!!

Kitty's Evil Plot

Cats Harbor Secret Plan to Turn Us Into Litter-Scooping Robots
By Lore Sjöberg 09.19.07 2:00 AM

One of my cats -- the one that has not yet appeared on I Can Has Cheezburger -- has developed an elaborate routine for getting me up to feed him in the morning. It involves a lot of meowing, jumping on things, knocking things over, and the occasional loud coughing up of hairballs. I can't prove that last bit is intentional, but I'm pretty sure it is.
If I had a real job I wouldn't have to set an alarm clock, but as it is I feel that this is a problem that I must solve, as I solve all my problems, with technology.

The technology in this case is an automatic cat feeder. Most of the automatic feeders on Amazon come with reviews detailing how the cats have managed to work around the DRM (dinner rights management) built into them.

No matter what lies between them and kibble, the cats manage to prod, pull and shove their way to an extra serving. I'm buying one anyway, because I have a Dremel tool, and somehow that convinces me that I can re-engineer the thing to outsmart the one primal urge a cat has left after being sterilized.

I already have an automatic water dispenser for the cats, and I'm thoughtfully eyeing one of those elaborate automatic self-cleaning litter boxes that scoops, flushes and sprays its interior with the delicate scent of live mice, the better to make it not just a litter box, but a space to exist. It occurs to me that with the proper application of money and floor space, you can get machines to take on most of the duties incumbent upon the cat owner.

For instance, any number of electronic cat toys will whip a fuzzy thing around so you can watch Best Week Ever without having to move any part of your body. Better yet, they make actual electronic mice. When I get that time machine working, I'm going to go back to colonial times and explain to a farmer that in the future, we go to the store and buy artificial vermin. I'm sure he'll enjoy thinking about that when he's not busy watching locusts eat his crops or burying his children.

This covers most of the services I provide to my cat, but not all of them. Let's start with the scratching and/or skritching. As far as I can see, this is between my cat and my hand, with very little participation from me. I just kind of stick out my hand and make a repetitive scratching movement, and my cat moves his head and neck around to his liking. I can even do it while playing Warcraft, provided the other people in my group don't mind dying for a cat's pleasure once in a while.

Really, though, there's no reason I couldn't substitute one of those robotic hands scientists build to prove that some day robots will be able to make shadow puppets. Just stick it on a "repetitive scratching motion loop" and the cat can go nuts, assuming he isn't terrified by the whirring and buzzing. On the other hand, fiction teaches us that a) most robots turn evil and b) most severed hands turn evil, so maybe this isn't such a good idea.

After that I only need to build a robotic lap -- I think that's called a "heating pad" -- and some sort of sweeper arm to knock the cat off my desk when he's being pesky, and then I'm set. Modern science has very nearly rendered human beings unnecessary when it comes to the life of a cat.

And you know, I can't back this up biologically, but I somehow suspect this is how the cats planned it all along. Time may prove that, evolutionarily speaking, we are simply a large and complex external cat organ, one given the duty of making itself obsolete.
I think, on some level, we know this. That's why so many stories and movies and TV shows are about robots replacing mankind. I think if you look carefully, somewhere in the corner of their austere mechanical fortresses, you'll see a cat box being scooped.
- - -
Born helpless, nude and unable to provide for himself, Lore Sjöberg eventually overcame these handicaps to become a large and complex external cat organ.

"I Can't, It's Vera Wang!!!"

"I can't, it's Vera Wang!!!" cried Nelson, as he was about to slingshot Ms. Crabapple on her wedding day as she ran out of the church.

That's one of my favorite lines from the Simpsons. ;)

This week was the debut of Simply Vera, Vera Wang's cheap and chic line at Kohl's. Oprah was absolutely in love with her stuff at a discount. It reminded me of all the clothes this season, frumpy sweater coats with black leggings and some satin tops. Don't get me wrong, I like the designs but I swear, fashion these days just is not figure-flattering. Nothing to get excited about.

I do love Vera's dresses though. They are so well-constructed and just plain gorgeous. Simple too...and elegant. Man, I am definitely going to invest in a Vera Wang wedding dress one day. All the boning and structuring underneath is customized to frame and suit your body. The result is unbeatable. Fitting for a dress doesn't just mean trimming the hem, ya know? Anyway, it got me wondering what the astronomical price tag would be and I found this:

How Much Does a Vera Wang Wedding Dress Cost? Vera Wang's Luxe Collection starts at $6,000, with some dresses costing as much as $12,000 or more. However, most of her dresses range from $2000 to $7000. While certainly expensive, it's within the range that many non-celebrity middle-class brides spend on their dresses. If this is still out-of-your budget, look at Vera Wang bisque-colored bridesmaid dresses which start at $200 and run under $1000. Other brides look for her famous sample sales in New York, where one-of-a-kind samples and stock overruns have as much as a 75% discount.

I'm Simpsonized

Emmy Winner: "Dick in a Box"

SNL - Digital Short - A Special Christmas Box

Just saw the HBO JT Futuresex/Loveshow last night. Here's his best video...

Lust, Caution Trailer

Watch the Trailer

Can't Wait to See This

...Whoa! it's NC-17!

NY Times Article: Love as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold

August 26, 2007
Love as an Illusion: Beautiful to See, Impossible to Hold

By DENNIS LIM

IN “Brokeback Mountain,” the 2005 critical hit and cultural flashpoint that won Ang Lee an Academy Award for best director, love is a haunting, elusive ideal briefly attained but forever out of reach. Mr. Lee’s new movie, “Lust, Caution,” which will have its premiere at the Venice International Film Festival this week, is also a tragic melodrama, one in which the lovers are up against forces beyond their control, but it takes a harsher view of romance. This time love is a performance, a trap or, cruelest of all, an illusion.

“ ‘Brokeback’ is about a lost paradise, an Eden,” Mr. Lee said this month, taking a break from a final sound-mixing session in Manhattan. “But this one — it’s down in the cave, a scary place. It’s more like hell.”

Based on a short story by the popular Chinese writer Eileen Chang, “Lust, Caution” is set in the early 1940s during the Sino-Japanese war, mostly in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. The heroine, Chia Chi (Tang Wei), belongs to a university drama troupe plotting to assassinate a collaborator named Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Assigned to seduce the target, an official in the puppet government, she falls into a desperately physical affair, driven (as the title suggests) by both passion and suspicion. The cast also includes Joan Chen as the grasping, gossipy Mrs. Yee, and Wang Lee-hom, the American-born Asian pop star, as the student ringleader. (The film, which will also be shown at the Toronto International Film Festival next month, is set for release on Sept. 28 by Focus Features.)

Mr. Lee said that when he first read Chang’s story, which she started writing in the ’50s then obsessively revised and eventually published in 1979, it struck him in much the same way as the Annie Proulx story that was the basis for “Brokeback Mountain.” “At first I thought there’s no way I can make it a movie,” he said. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it. “There’s a point where I feel this is my story. It becomes a mission.”

Like Mr. Lee, 52, who was born in Taiwan but has lived and worked in the United States since the ’80s, Chang had a foot in two worlds. Her celebrated early stories and novellas, written in the ’40s, evoked the heady, glamorous fusion of East and West, old and new, that characterized Shanghai before the Communist takeover.

After the 1949 revolution she fled to Hong Kong and then to America, where she continued to write and translate but became ever more reclusive, even as her fame grew throughout the Chinese diaspora. She died in Los Angeles in 1995. Her work has been adapted for the screen by the Hong Kong directors Stanley Kwan (“Red Rose, White Rose”) and Ann Hui (“Love in a Fallen City”).

For Mr. Lee, an astute observer of the warping power of sexual desire and repression (not just in “Brokeback Mountain,” but also in films as disparate as “The Ice Storm,” “The Wedding Banquet” and “Sense and Sensibility”), the allure of “Lust, Caution” lies in the irreducible mystery of its love story, which culminates in a seemingly rash and irrational act. “It’s complex and hard to pin down,” he said. “Maybe it can’t be pinned down.”

To expand Chang’s slender story to a feature-length script (the film, which is in Mandarin, runs two and a half hours), Mr. Lee worked first with Wang Hui-Ling, a co-writer on some of his Chinese-language films, including “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994) and the martial-arts fantasy “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000). He then turned to James Schamus, CEO of Focus Features as well as the producer of all of Mr. Lee’s films and the writer or co-writer on most of them. Mr. Schamus’s lack of familiarity with Chang’s work was an advantage.

“I didn’t have the innate reverence that I think Chinese readers do,” he said. “I didn’t have to worry too much about suggesting significant changes.”

A grand production on a modest budget of under $15 million, “Lust, Caution” was shot over four months in Hong Kong, Malaysia (standing in for old Hong Kong) and Shanghai. The most ambitious undertaking was a full-scale re-creation, built in only three months on a Shanghai soundstage, of a section of Nanking Road, the city’s commercial thoroughfare, complete with more than 100 storefronts. But above all it was the raw intensity of the intimate scenes that made for a grueling shoot. “We didn’t have to stick our stars 60 feet in the air above a bamboo forest,” Mr. Schamus said, referring to the wire-work ballet of “Crouching Tiger,” “so in that sense it was easier. But especially for Ang this was a much more difficult film. It took him to a place that was really emotional and extreme.”

Mr. Lee’s “Lust, Caution” makes overt the first part of its title, which Chang only hinted at in her lush, stylized prose. “It was very brave of her to fit this story of a woman’s sexual pleasure into a story of war, something so patriarchal and macho,” Mr. Lee said. “How she put that subject matter in this huge canvas — it’s a little drop but the ripple is tremendous.” He said he felt no obligation to retain the relative discretion of the writing: “In Chinese literature the art is the hiding. But movies are another animal. It’s a graphic tool.”

Accordingly, his film features a few notably revealing and acrobatic sex scenes. (A less explicit cut is being prepared for a possible Chinese release.) These were shot over 11 days on a closed set, with only the main camera and sound personnel present. Leaving room to improvise, Mr. Lee talked through the physical and emotional content of each scene with Mr. Leung (the Hong Kong star best known here for his roles in Wong Kar-wai’s films) and Ms. Tang (who had never before acted in a film). “Ang’s a unique director because he trained to be an actor,” Mr. Leung said by e-mail from China, where he is shooting a film with John Woo. “He’s very quick and intuitive and is always offering his actors something new to work off of.”

The process was harrowing. “We could only shoot for half the day because we’d be exhausted,” Mr. Lee said. “I almost went insane.” But he was convinced of the necessity of the sex scenes. “They’re like the fight sequences in ‘Crouching Tiger,’ ” he said. “It’s life and death. It’s where they really show their character.” He added, “And it’s part of the plot, since it’s all about acting, levels of acting. You’re performing when you have sex.” (At press time “Lust, Caution” had not yet received a rating from the Motion Picture Association of America, but both Mr. Lee and Mr. Schamus said they were expecting an NC-17.)

“Lust, Caution” conjures not just ’40s Shanghai but ’40s Hollywood, summoning the ghosts of film noirs and wartime romantic melodramas. The shadow of Alfred Hitchcock looms large. A poster of “Suspicion” — which Mr. Lee noted was “the biggest hit of 1942 in Shanghai” — is glimpsed at one point. “Notorious,” with its intricate entangling of perverse love and espionage business, is the obvious influence (possibly even for Chang, an occasional film critic who wrote screenplays for Hong Kong’s Cathay Studios in the ’50s and ’60s). Mr. Lee cites another touchstone: Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 “Dishonored,” starring Marlene Dietrich as an Austrian secret agent spying on the Russians.

For Mr. Lee, whose parents were exiles from mainland China, “Lust, Caution” resonates on a political level. “It’s about occupying and being occupied,” he said. “The peril here is falling in love with your occupier.” But he was also drawn to the poignant notion that the story, though inspired by an actual assassination plot in the 1930s, incorporated elements of Chang’s own life: a university education in Hong Kong interrupted by war, and a doomed romance with an older man publicly known as a traitor. Chang’s first husband, the writer Hu Lancheng, briefly served in the puppet government and was an inveterate philanderer.

“It was hard for me to live in Eileen Chang’s world,” Mr. Lee said. “There are days I hated her for it. It’s so sad, so tragic. But you realize there’s a shortage of love in her life: romantic love, family love.” He added, “This is the story of what killed love for her.”

Home Sweet Home

Overheard in NY

My favorite (which can be said for the L train too):

I Meant Nowhere White People Would Want to Go

Blond Tourist Bimbo: I've never even heard of the G Train.
Blond Local Bimbo: Yeah, it's a ghetto train.
Blond Tourist Bimbo: Where does it go?
Blond Local Bimbo: Nowhere.
Black eight-year-old boy: Except my home, bitch.

--G train Hoyt/Schermerhorn station

Overheard by: Ian Robertson

Funny, I used to take the G to Hoyt/Schermerhorn for high school!! LOL

Luxury Psychology

It's tough reading about my own flawed I'm-a-sucker psychology.

When High Price Is the Allure

The Psychology of the $14,000 Handbag

To Punish Thai Police, a Hello Kitty Armband

I had to post this article. It's too funny. How can this REALLY be a punishment from the police force??? In Japan, it would probably be like a commendation!

NY Times article
“Simple warnings no longer work,” said Pongpat Chayaphan, acting chief of the Crime Suppression Division in Bangkok, who instituted the new humiliation this week.

“This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offense, no matter how minor,” he said. “Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”

An early experiment using armbands was not encouraging. Mr. Pongpat first tried using plaid ones. But instead of feeling shame, Major Weeraprach said, the officers took them home as souvenirs. The force still has only one of the ten it originally issued.

After that misfire, police commanders met again to consider strategy, he said, and agreed that Hello Kitty might work where tartan had failed.

Oh Julian...don't be shy now!!!

More Pics...

More Henry's Bday Pics

Henry's 30th!

Introducing Nori

Summer lovin' Miso

...exhausted after reading Harry all nite

More BDay Pics...

More Bday Pics..

More BDay Pics

Quote of the Day - 7.30.07

"We are locked into our minds, but we do not really know them. We are adrift and struggling, buffeted by the waves of our minds, having not learned how to float."

-Mark Epstein

My 30th

Insomnia

The best thing for insomnia is to write. Collect your angst and whatever tidbits that are tugging at your mind and deposit it all on a page. Damn, I missed writing on my blog. Good old blog...where I can say a lot of something or a lotta nuthin' at all.

I'm looking at Miso, chin-up...sleeping oblivious to the world. I'm jealous. Why can't I just close my eyes and BOOM...slumber?

I can't believe it's been 3 months since I've moved here. It seems twice as long. Maybe because I've been twice as "active". =) I dunno...something is still missing. I feel like I should be doing something more with my time though. I'm not sure what that is, whether it really is going to get my EMBA or something else more fulfilling...who knows? But I'd better figure it out soon.

Hmmm...so it's a week into turning 30. I think it was a whole lotta griping and worry over nothing. It was a very odd mental hurdle. As soon as I turned 30, I was ok with it. But the month leading up to it, I was fraught with anxiety.

I was reading my horoscope today and there was an interesting entry for Cancer:

We think we want so many things. We create wish-lists full of hope, dreams, desires and details. Yet, actually, we don't want anywhere near as much as we think we want. Indeed, when it really comes down to it, we all of us only ever want one thing. Wisdom. When we have that, we have everything else we require or, at least, we have the way to it... which amounts to the same thing.

I only wish I had the wisdom to know what things to take up and what to leave behind. What to bemoan and what to celebrate. All I know is that fast-forward a bunch of years and life's lessons will have hopefully imparted enough learnings to yield a good amount of that wisdom.

Derwin's 30th