E-mail: globalityorg at yahoo dot com
Very important news: A correspondent in Taiwan informs me that Mayday's fifth album is scheduled for release in late October or early November. Apparently they are talking about a return to their rock roots. I believe this would be a reference to the punk sound from their club days (Time Machine having put them pretty solidly in rock territory already). I'll be honest with you: The farther back I go in Mayday's catalog, the less I want to hear their rock songs. But I'm certainly giving them the benefit of the doubt. They're so much more mature now. If they can come up with 12 tracks like "Armstrong," I'll be a happy man.
It's Bruce Springsteen's birthday! I've been a fan for years. Best album: Tunnel of Love. (If that doesn't get people writing in, I don't know what will.) What a great artist. Tonight I started up the new album by some other great artists, Mayday's May of Love: Music Inspired by the Movie. I only listened to half of it because there's so much to absorb. This is just a big, thick slab o' Mayday. Mostly new versions of old songs, but these guys are endlessly creative. "Wu Zhuang (Ling Hun Remix)" is brilliant. Totally layered, abstracted, and scratched up.
The middle-class retiree on an overseas group tour is a well-known cliche: fearful, sheeplike, clueless about the local culture, an easy mark. That cliche has a firm root in reality, but there are certainly exceptions. I had a teacher in junior high school, Mrs. Elston, who showed us her slides from Moscow and Egypt and taught us about the "Uuuuzzzbecks" in this weird place called "Uzbekistan." We thought of her as sort of a silly woman trotting around the world with her mother in tow, but when I think of it today, I know she had it all over me on world travel. To Uzbekistan in the Seventies? You go, girl!! Well, these people have got to be the craziest, bravest, most hardcore package tourists ever. They took a 13-day tour of Afghanistan. Like, just the other week. From the Bay Area, of course. No mas!! Mrs. Elston and I both surrender!
When we start watching a DVD sort of late at night, I worry when I don't know how long the movie is. I hate to fall asleep or have to stop it and finish it the next day. Well, last night we put in the Korean movie Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring, and I forgot to check the running time. With a title like that, you can see why I'd be worried. But it turned out that this movie (only 103 minutes long, incidentally) was so unconventional that I could never really tell how long it had been playing. Nor did I care, because it carried me off to its own timeless little world. There's hardly any dialog. There's a monk, he raises a student from boyhood, and there's love and drama and humor and tragedy, but only about six plot points. Plenty of nature and changing seasons, but director Kim Ki-duk doesn't fall into preciousness or sentimentality. His direction is sharp and economical and gives the film a strong forward momentum. It's a modern fable told with images. I'm curious to find out what some Buddhists thought of it, but I found it deeply spiritual. cool car games
The other day I found out that the little independent cellphone store down in our neighborhood is run by a Filipino family -- father, mother and teenage daughter. It's right down the street from a laundry run by a couple from Hong Kong and their two sons, and around the corner from a Middle Eastern family's coffee store. The fact of migration, and of living surrounded by immigrants, is just part of modern life. There are businesses like this all over San Franciso. But the way these families live seems so strange, when I think about it. It certainly runs counter to this country's popular concept of family life, in which work calls the parents away from the children and later is a springboard for the kids to become independent. It also flies in the face of how we think about employment and the economy. These family businesses aren't necessarily global (though the phone store sells Filipino discount phone cards), the way they do business/live as families is directly tied to the circumstances of migration. Or are they just ways of life imported from home countries? I need to look into this. Test the most winning money online play poker games and forget about losses forever!
An old man who's perfectly comfortable in China just wants to visit his daughter and her husband in California. But he'll have to apply to immigrate first. Something about how he stayed so long last time (legally) that the U.S. government thought he'd want to stay -- illegally. I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense. But it's just one example of the things a lot of transnational families have to go through for a family visit these days.
Thanks to a friend in Taiwan, I just received Mayday's latest CD, the soundtrack to the movie "May of Love," and I'm impressed even before hearing a note. Rock Records and the lads from Taiwan have outdone themselves in packaging. The cardboard case folds out to four panels and includes an eight-page folding lyric sheet, a poster, and a book of stills from the movie. The two discs themselves, one in violet and blue and the other blue and green, are quite lovely. It's all done in a flowers-and-trees theme. They even used this beautiful metallic copper-colored ink for the lyrics. Between that and 33 Mayday tracks, what more could you ask for?
Here are one short and one long article about the significance of this day. Both the brief, eloquent New York Times editorial (free registration required) and the SFGate piece on teachers' lesson plans touch upon something I hadn't thought of before: When it happened, 9/11 was an enormous news event that spawned thousands of other news items. Today it still essentially qualifies as "current events" -- something that most schoolchildren probably remember, for example. But it was such an important event that it will live on as history even after everyone who remembers it is gone. We have to start thinking about what it means as history.
Of course, that meaning is already being created through books, movies, advertising and political imagery. A book I just read, which was published in 2000, sheds some light on this. Buffalo Bill's Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History, by Joy S. Kasson, tells how U.S. Army scout William F. Cody cast the Indian wars of the late 19th century as triumphs of individual heroism. He did this through stage plays and his Wild West Show, beginning while the wars were still going on. Partly he did it in order to make himself into a hero, but he succeeded in making people "remember" the events that way, and thus helped to define the West and America. People were hungry for war heroes after being devastated by the mass killing of the Civil War, Kasson writes. It was a time when Northerners and Southerners both were looking for meaning in that war and searching for national unity. 14k White Gold Nurse Charm
That was going on a little more than 100 years ago, not long before the turn of the century and a few decades after the Civil War ended in 1865. So, if you're an American, let me ask you: What was the meaning of the war in Vietnam? And what do people in San Francisco and New York have in common with farmers in Kansas these days?
Mexico is torn politically over whether to let its citizens living in the United States vote in Mexican elections, but according to Yahoo News, it goes both ways. Americans abroad (about 6 million of them) are now a major constituency in U.S. elections, after the close 2000 vote, and as many as 1 million of them live in Mexico. So both the Bush and the Kerry camps are making campaign stops and taking things very seriously south of the border.
Scrabbel made the San Francisco Bay Guardian's "Class of 2004" of bands that are ready to graduate from the local scene to the big time. It's nice not to be the last one to know about something, every once in a while.
For people like me who only keep a casual eye on space, the Genesis space probe story was like a science fiction tale suddenly come to life. Hollywood stunt pilots? Wafer-thin panels made of diamonds and gold? Collecting stardust? And then I saw the pictures from the reentry and crash: Genesis was literally a flying saucer. It's very sad, especially when you consider that these were the first physical samples retrieved from space since Apollo 17 and the first things from beyond the moon that we've ever had on Earth. But I can't help but be reminded of a James Thurber story about an early nuclear scientist who is collecting "heavy water" with extra atoms. Thurber suggested we all go collect some atoms, put them in a shoebox and leave them at his door as a surprise gift. If these atoms end up uncontaminated, they'll be just like that: A surprise gift for all of us who've been keeping one eye on the sky.
It's about time for some more globality. I don't know much about this artist, but his Website, which I found through Angry Asian Man, has an interesting transnational quality. He's clearly American, but obviously very big in Japan. The site has that sleek, high-tech Japanese look, and he's got this merchandise that's just not like a typical American artist. DVDs, keychains, wristbands? Of course there's the Japanese and English sites. Appropriately, he comes from smack in between, in Hawaii.
It's where hamburgers, Quaker Oats, and Juicy Fruit Gum came from, and that's just the start, according to this Website on the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Those seven months in Chicago shaped modern America, forging the connection between corporations, technology, consumerism, and progress. It's a great Website, though huge. Read the "Legacy" section to find the coolest stuff. But maybe the most interesting thing about it is that the Website itself is an artifact of the gee-whiz age of the past – in this case, the mid-1990s. The homepage quaintly describes the site as a "hypertextual thesis" that includes a "virtual tour" (in text and pictures). Actually, the Exposition itself was a little like the Internet, with technology showcases, cultural exhibits, and entertainment all together in huge portions. The Rev. R.B. Eggleston of Richmond, Virginia, knew what we were in for: "I saw so many wonderful things I hardly know what I liked most, and everything is so confused in my mind I hardly know now what I did see."