Hua Hsu

On Feeling the Same

2009-11-23T16:11:02Z

"I hope that the rest of the country feels the same way."

(via Footnotes of Mad Men)

Thursday Mixes

2009-11-19T06:02:51Z

+Exclusive Todd Edwards mix for Piotr and Eric's excellent weekly Treehouse party. (While you're at it, be sure to bookmark the Treehouse blog...)

+Some hip-hop for Fall '09: LM favorite JBX implores you to "Turn Off the Radio"

+So International: Matthew Africa and DJ Fuze with an African funk mix and a dancehall/hip-hop mix, respectively

+New soul mix from Deejay Om

+Great UK hip-hop documentary (via Ian):

+And a bugged-out video snippet for Edan's bugged-out, new Echo Party:

Robert Enke, R.I.P.

2009-11-18T18:20:30Z

Last week, German goalkeeper Robert Enke committed suicide by stepping in front of an oncoming train near his home in Hanover. He was, by all standard metrics, a successful professional athlete: once a promising youngster, he had spent time abroad for clubs like Benfica and Barcelona; a consistent contributor to the national team, he had earned a roster spot for next summer's World Cup; he was a star and crowd favorite for his current team, Hannover 96. But he was also apparently a very depressed man still haunted by the death of his two-year-old daughter back in 2006. There was a service for him in Germany this week, and his devastated, World Cup-bound teammates--from whom he hid the depths of his illness--composed this deeply moving letter:

"Your death for us is still omnipresent. It has made us all speechless, stunned, helpless ... We were not able to put our grief into words ... We could not simply go about business as usual. We have long sat together and thought of you. We have been silent together, cried together and searched for answers together, but in fact found only more questions - agonising questions of 'Why could not we help you? Why did you not want to talk to us about your problems? Why is it that, in our competitive society, it is not possible to express fears over such illnesses?' It is for all of us a painful thought that you felt so alone and in need, even if you were with us. For you there was so much more at stake than for any other of us. Your death is so bleak. But we will do everything we can to carry on in your memory, play good football to be successful. And we will do our best to ensure that stigma and prejudice have no place in football" (via the Fiver)

The Everton Collection

2009-11-18T17:31:47Z

As a lover of stuff and things, I find people like David France absolutely fascinating. For the past twenty years, from his home in America, he has patiently assembled one of the most comprehensive collections of soccer memorabilia in the world. The collection, which consists of some 10,000 items, details the early history of France's cherished club, Everton FC, as well as English football as a whole. The EPL Talk podcast has an interview with him here, and it's fascinating even if you could care less about the Toffees. France recently entrusted his massive collection to Everton (with stipulations being that it is never broken up and that the whole collection stays on Merseyside) and there is a beautiful site devoted to it here. (An Everton supporter's perspective here.)

France's collection began after he had relocated to the United States, when his mother shipped him a collection of his boyhood mementos from England. His account of his collecting days is charmingly straightforward--he pursued home and away programs and team ledgers soberly and almost dispassionately, as though he were running a business, though one without any ultimate goal, it seems.

* * *

What compels the rest of us to collect or acquire or hoard compulsively? I'm eager to read this forthcoming book, which ventures into the psychology of obsessive compulsion to answer this question of why stuff offers us meaning. (I thought it was capitalism.) In the meantime, there's 20 Ltd, an edition-fetishist's dream.

Pirates of the Everything

2009-11-17T18:29:44Z

"It's the end of an era"--so reads the release from the Pirate Bay blog about their decision to decommission their centralized torrent tracker. They continue:

This is what we consider to be the future. Faster and more stability for the users because there is no central point to rely upon.

The acephalous organization: It's the way of the future (and, the Bay folks are eager to remind us, the present) isn't it? From terrorist cells to the Invisible Committee to digital "pirates," how do you ceremonially behead a headless organization? The Pirate Bay founders may go to jail, but without a central hub or hierarchy, how can industry hope to contain infinite, ever-migrating packets of information?

I was thinking about this recently while preparing an essay for eMusic on the year "2000," part of a "yearbook" series they commissioned to reflect upon the past decade. I kept coming back to Napster, a precursor of both Pirate Bay and eMusic. At the time, it really seemed like peer-to-peer networking on that scale might endanger whole industries, and in the end, maybe it did. But the lane Napster opened up was not one toward subversion or global barter-networks--there's no money in that. Instead, Napster--and the instant celebrity of Shawn Fanning--returned as Friendster, blogspot, MySpace and Facebook, and whatever new innovation in online community-building will emerge in the next year or two. It returned as Pirate Bay, too, but we know how their story will end.

Anyhow, here's my essay on the year 2000, originally titled "Another World was Possible."

Vaguely related: a look at Cory Doctorow, "publishers' enemy no. 1"

The "Match of Hate" -- 20 Years Later

2009-11-15T02:23:47Z

Unbelievable. Egypt needed to win their World Cup qualifier vs. Algeria by exactly two goals to none today in order to force a sudden death playoff between the two national teams this Wednesday in Sudan. Oh, and it was a rematch of the November 1989 "match of hate." Egypt went up 1-0 early, and the score remained unchanged, until the 95th minute...

Plug One, Plug Two

2009-11-13T15:48:04Z

New York! Join us tonight for the North American debut of Mamachas del Ring (@ the Margaret Mead Film Festival -- info here) (Full disclosure: a good friend made this, but it is still objectively fantastic.)

* * *

The Asian American Writers' Workshop is hosting the first-ever (?) Asian American Literary Festival this Saturday:

Join us for a celebration of the brightest voices in the Asian American literary community! Star studded, yet intimate, this all-day extravaganza features readings, stand-up comedy, academic discourse, and the Twelfth Annual Asian American Literary Awards!

JHUMPA LAHIRI
DAVID HENRY HWANG

More than 40 writers including: Meera Nair, Mohan Sikka, Hirsh Sawhney, Mae Ngai, Mitra Kalita, Kavitha Rajagopalan, Luis Cabalquinto, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Jen Kwok, Porochista Khakpour, Ed Lin, Sesshu Foster, Alexander Chee, Ron Hogan, Rakesh Satyal, Abha Dawesar, Jennifer Hayashida, Sree Sreenivasan, Ravi Shankar, Deborah Poe, Zoe Beloff, Zohar Kfir, Peter Vilbig, Purvi Shah, Ed Park, Hua Hsu, Dennis Lim, Julie Otsuka, Rea Tajiri, Sunaina Maria, Jack Tchen, Tania James, Hasanthika Sirisena, V.V. Ganeshananthan, Amitava Kumar, Lijia Zhang, Katie Kitamura, Henry Chang, Mort Baharloo, Monique Truong, Hari Kunzru, Alexandra Chang, Ye Mimi, Paolo Javier.

For a complete schedule and tickets see:
http://www.pageturnerfest.org.

I'll be on panel on criticism with two of my heroes, Ed Park and Dennis Lim (info here)

Thursday Mixes

2009-11-12T17:36:37Z

Be back soon with a more substantial update, including a long post on music criticism. For now...

Looking at/Watching:
+These incredible images of QSL cards over at Cantab

+"Tough as old boots" - a tour through the Alden shoe factory

+A guy brushing his teeth during last weekend's (unjust) Chelsea-Manchester United match

+An animated short about Dock Ellis tripping balls and tossing a no-no

+Engrossing tour of producer RJD2's

Listening to:
+The legendary Andrew Weatherall's "London Belongs to Me" audio tour

+Funkineven and Mr. Wonderful's Cosmix! outer-space-boogie/fusion/disco mix

+Even outer space: Dam Funk!

+Spooky Fever Dream Field Recording micromix over at Bradford Cox's (Deerhunter/Atlas Sound) blog

+Funky16Corners anniversary Beatles mix

+Everything all at once: a live mix from Optimo

Reading:
+Suite 2046 asks: is Bored to Death simply Stuff White People Like in televised form?

+Respect game, 2012: a primer on famous not-quite-apocalypses

+Are too many students going to college?

+Related, in a weird way: the intriguing case of Latavious Williams...

+A preview of Luc Sante's incredible new book, Folk Photography

Ron Artest on "Afghan Women"

2009-10-29T18:23:21Z

Via Free Darko, the most bizarre YouTube video I've seen in quite a while: Ron Artest's "Afghan Woman"

As Shoals put it: "I never understood all those metaphors about faces melting and brains collapsing until now."

Thursday Mixes: Halloween Style

2009-10-29T14:16:41Z

"You remind me of a haunted house I was once in...": Chairman Mao's Halloween-themed episode of "Spine Blowing Decisions."
As Johnny from Good Records points out: "among all of the well-sorted funk, afrobeat, disco, and boogie mixes and compilations out there, nobody had really touched the most popular form of music in West Africa: Highlife." Problem solved.
Funky16Corners has a placeholder funky Halloween mix from 2007 up, with promises of a new '09 edition on Friday.
Via GvsB: Fever Ray's appropriately moody Halloween podcast. And GvsB's own Halloween mixtape.

Not Halloween related but scary good: Matthew Africa's 12x12 rap mix for Southern Hospitality.

Photo Credit: Flickr User John Althouse

"Legalize Kemp"

2009-10-28T19:29:41Z

Last night marked the opening of a new NBA season. The perfect modern sports league, really, and I don't mean that in a good way.

If you have a couple hours to kill, this is a fairly moving, charmingly biased, labor-of-love documentary about the NBA's willful negligence during the much-protested move of the Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City.

Sonicsgate SD Full Version from sonicsgate on Vimeo.

Brave Thinkers

2009-10-28T19:19:48Z

The "Brave Thinkers" issue of the Atlantic finally came out. Haven't had a chance to read it yet, but for what it's worth, these were some of my nominees:

*Editor's Note: Nominate Your Own Brave Thinker

Adventures in the Postracial*

2009-10-28T17:48:01Z

I was on the road last week giving some talks on new media, pop culture and ideas of the "postracial," a term I only ever use in jest, i.e. "Asher Roth dissing Barack Obama = postracial" or "Tracy Morgan = postracial" or in any situation wherein longstanding ideas of racial identity collide with the ironic, the absurd, or the previously impossible. I'm still not totally clear what sort of future people are describing when they use this term seriously, but these stories from UCLA's football team (via Oliver) surely fit this half-serious definition. First, read this LA Times article about UCLA wide receiver Randall Carroll's twitter-diss of offensive coordinator Norm Chow. And then read this.

* * *

(This mini-controversy, sure to be irrelevant by next week, also dovetails with my previous post about obscenity/language in a digital age. Truly bizarre for the LAT to censor the offending term, since it probably resulted in a lot of people assuming that Carroll had used a different racial epithet.)

*whatever that means

Thursday Mixes

2009-10-22T20:49:58Z

Been on the road all week. Thanks to everyone who came out to the talk on Tuesday night in Santa Cruz. Also: Santa Cruz makes so much more sense to me after reading Thomas Pynchon's oft-maligned Vineland, which really captures the occasional darkness and dystopia of California. It also features one of my favorite Pynchon lines about the "California pizza concept at its most misguided."

+Over at Arthur, Dave Reeves' last (latest?) installment on the anatomy of Defend Brooklyn hipsterism.

+Absorbing segment of Fresh Air, wherein Terry Gross confirms most of the prevailing stereotypes about NPR during her interview of Tracy Morgan.

+Wayne Marshall with the decibel levels of various things we might hear out there in the real world, some because they are merely the sound of modern life (lightbulbs humming) and others because they are the sound of a cannon trying to disperse a crowd. Related: is it still music if it's used for torture? (All this and more is discussed in Steve Goodman's upcoming Sonic Warfare, btw...)

MIXES

+Splitting the difference between Animal Collective, Burial and Dilla, Phaseone offers the White Collar Crime mix

+I appreciate that Gucci Mane's latest mixtape series is named after and inspired by the Cold War

+New Balance-wearing purists rejoice: the latest Southern Hospitality mix is all A Tribe called Quest

+Ian recommends, Jeff Chang likely approves: a T.R.O.Y. hip-hop mix featuring only songs that have "can't stop" or "won't stop" in their title

+Oliver's guest post of Latin (Funk, Soul, covers) over at Super Sonido

+Will C unearths a facemelting 1990/91 (?) UK rap documentary

+Via Lamaraba: an Eddie Ruscha cosmic jazz, funk, disco mix over at the always mighty Lovefingers

Thursday Mixes

2009-10-15T18:56:27Z

Via reader J Brown: a "Tasty Afro Mix" up at Soul Strut. Speaking of "tasty," Wayne Marshall's "Masala Mix And another J: J. Rocc offers up Beat Junkie Radio Vol. 5. Debut installment of Stretch Armstrong and Eli Escobar's new E.V. radio show, Delancey Music Service, here. And two more from longtime favorites DJ Chorizo Funk and Recloose (an all-soundtracks special).