MiniBosses is a cover band that covers themes from Super Nintendo (SNES) games. At first I thought this was some kind of post-ironic thing but the bandmembers seem fun and dedicated to their videogames. A lot of kids grew up on this music. I am not so familiar with many of the tunes but I am a fan of the often strange mix of the cartoony and the operatic. Here's some strange, sometimes beautiful rock instrumentals from MiniBosses:

Kraid Metroid
MegaMan 2
Ghosts 'n Goblins
Wizards and Warriors

Talking about post-ironic I had a strange Frank Chu sighting. It wasn't his sign about the Zegatronic Rocket Society or the latest news about the 12 Galaxies that was strange. I'm used to that, as is anyone who has been through San Francisco's Financial District.

This time though he was at 111 Minna, a nightclub here in San Francisco. Some friends and I were there this past wednesday because DJ Spesh was doing his first all-night set. Anyways, Frank Chu was there along with his sign, standing back a little from the crowd.

Now, Frank Chu has become a lovable figure here in the city. He is always there with his indecipherable signs walking determinedly up and down the street. I'm a little distressed though that he is now hanging out at nightclubs (though I suspect someone coaxed him in) since it polishes away some of his outsider status.

Its always disappointing to see the quirky and authentic dissolve as a crowd of people grasp at it, not unlike how old monuments vanish piece by piece inside the pockets of tourists.

(still, frank chu may not be so easily captured. He seems to show up at the strangest places (warning: nudity))

Wow, what happened to january? I never meant to ignore this little pet project of mine.

This month has been drab and sunless here in san francisco. There's something vacant in the air, like someone has just left. An absence.

As I was falling asleep a couple nights ago I thought I heard a door open and close, as if someone had walked into the house. I thought about checking but I was already drifting into dreams and it is not uncommon to hear stray noises from the street. A. had just left the day before and so I was alone in the house.

Later that night, my sleep was disturbed when I felt something like a human hand brushing my forehead. The room, I remember, was unusually warm and I was sweating. I opened my eyes and turned my body to look around. When I looked up I saw someone standing next to my bed. It was still dark and I couldnt make out much more than a silhouette. The figure had come in through my bedroom door which was half-open and I could see that the hallway light seemed to be on.

My first instinct was not fear but more like anger. I was angry at myself that I had let this happen. I yelled out 'Get out of here! Get out!' but my screams were half-choked. I felt as if I were gargling rather than screaming. I don't know whether I was dreaming or I had just fallen back into a dream. The room seemed real enough except for the presence of this figure who was now dissapearing. I fell back into sleep.

When I woke up a little later, I looked around and noticed only that my bedside clock had been turned upside-down. Did I do that myself in the middle of the night? My bedroom door was closed. I got out of bed and went around the house checking that all the doors were locked. They were.

It was still dark out. I stayed up in the kitchen until I saw daylight. Only then did I go back to bed to get some more sleep.

What a gorgeous trailer! i haven't been able to track down the background music in the trailer but it seems like it might be from a band named Die Knodel.

I am so proud. I feel like an uncle.

Ian was my roommate at Harvard. I looked up to him because he was one of those magical people who just breezed through any task. He was the editor of Let's Go Spain and a talented writer. Alhough he was an East-Asian studies major (he had to learn japanese for this) he decided to take an advanced algebra course just for the fun of it. He aced it of course.

After graduation, he got a scholarship to go travel in Asia. It is as if a bird had been released. He traveled all over Asia - China, Thailand, Southeast Asia - and stayed in Asia even after his grant money ran out. He would send occassinal missives to me and to other friends documenting his journey and his continued efforts to find new creative ways to survive.

He wrote it all down for us furiously. There was a famous "letter" that Matt, another friend of his, received. It was actually a roll of toilet paper that had to be unwound to be read. The writing was crooked and nearly illegible, like a mad scrawl. Ian had written it in a bathroom where, he wrote, he had had to spend the night having no other place to stay. He was living close to life's ground level, holing up in squalid areas, getting involved in strange affairs. His letters were full of his adventures - families who took him in, girlfriends who attached themselves to him and supported him, short stints doing busywork for foreign companies in order to fend off starvation.

Later, traveling through India, he wrote us of meeting yet another girl - another in the endless parade, or so we thought. Her name was Jessica and she was bicycling through India by herself. They joined together for a while, partners in wanderlust, and traveled the southasian countryside together. They made a brief visit to New York then, I remember, and we, his friends, dismissed her as the woman of the month. We couldnt have been more wrong. Ten years later, they have never left each other's side.

They lived in India together. Later they decided to move to Tokyo together, where they each took jobs which were unchallenging but were also keys to a life in Japan, their lives filling up with more stories, of strange fights with their neighbors, of making a life for themselves in a land unwelcoming to foreigners, of social encounters and misunderstandings that bordered on the surreal.

They lived also in Europe. They took the Siberian railway and lived in Prague. Also Italy and then in Austria. Over the years I would lose track of these two nomads until a letter would suddenly arrive in my mailbox bearing strange postal stamps and warm regards. They always found me.

After being together for almost ten years, they decided a couple years ago to get married. The wedding was held on the country estate of Jessica's parents - just outside of London. I flew from san francisco to attend. Friends of theirs from all over the world were there. I stayed in a little country Inn with a couple from Tunisia.

I still tell people that this is the best wedding I have ever been to. The wedding was in a small old medieval church. This was a full british wedding with the men in top hats and the women wearing long gloves. It was a small spectacle. Each of the reception tables was named after a country that Ian and Jessica had lived in. Ian's family composed and sang a capella (his family is full of wonderful singers) a piece they had put together for the affair. We stayed up all night, drinking, teaching each other new dances, telling intimate stories.

As the dawn broke, the entire wedding party walked across the countryside, crossing farmlands single-file behind the bride and groom like one of those animated promenades from a fellini movie. We arrived at a small pub that had been expecting us all for breakfast. Many of us continued to drink and toast. The bride and groom announced that for their honeymoon they were headed off an another adventure - they were heading to Bangladesh.

I just saw them a few months ago on my way back from Germany and stayed at their house in London. I have never seen them so domestic, arguing about the plumbers bill or about what plants belonged in the garden.

It was only recently that Jessica told me that a child was on the way.

I've been hungover from 2003. Even as I am still waking up, hesitantly acknowledging the new year with one eye closed, I have already had some changes in my personal life. Also, my career is taking a big switch. I am leaving the company I own to go off and do some work for another company. And I have some new creative projects I am working on (more on that soon.)

Oh, and I also just learned that one of my close friends is having a baby. Not unexpected but still. I'll use another entry to plot his particular trajectory...

Happy New Year!

I am off tomorrow to see my parents in san diego. More than one friend has asked me to bring them back some tamales. It is a tradition at least among members of my family to make batches of tamales for the christmas holiday. These are usually consumed with a side of atole or, if you like, cinnamon tea.

All of my aunts make tamales but it is those made by my mom that taste best to me. Others are too wet or too dry or too rubbery or filled with too many vegetables, etc. Any number of reasons that are probably more about the subtleties of taste and the draw of the familiar.

This last week or so for me has been a week of many mood swings. Good news follows bad news follows good news like some train plagued with erratic combustion. I have had some wonderful surprises and some terrible revelations. The net effect though, if life and emotions could really be combined like factors in an equation, is positive. I am looking forward to this upcoming year. Great things are to come.

If you are looking for film recommendations, try reading through this thread.

I've been exploring what I can only call for lack of a better term, cartographies of the imagination. It was inspired actually by this beautiful diagram (the parageography of Ibarborou's Diaria de una Islena) I found on another weblog (you might have to scroll down.)

From Chatwin to Schama, I usually cant keep my hands off anything map-related and if I had any sort of collector-bug (which I lack) I'd have a whole room devoted to maps. The draw is so strong that I can probably trace my urge to sail from that first instance when someone unrolled a nautical map on a table and outlined some possible courses. The actual sailing then, the tacks and jibes, was a physical realization, an incarnation of that token on a map.

Here are some shiny things I found:

-Harmon's Personal Geographies and other Maps of the Imagination
-The World of Experience: Life as a map
-Nancy Graves: lithographs based on maps of the moon (see also The Selenographica)
-The peralta stone maps
-Micronesian stick charts
-Workers at the japanese GSI create animal maps
-Six artists who use maps

All these holiday parties this past week have forced me to get out of my indoor hibernation. The best gathering I have been to was a party at the loft of my old friend El Naughty. It was just what you always hope for in a party (but rarely happens) - everyone was interesting, stimulating, friendly, intelligent. Senor Naughty likes to collect people that he finds beautiful or fascinating and this was definitely quite a crowd.

Heres something interesting. I was at an event yesterday with A. We were greeted at the door by a woman who did not know us but whose task it was to give us a nametag and give us a name. She had only two types of tags. One said "I am the Master of _____" and the other said "I am the Muse of _____"

Anyways, she looked us up and down and wrote up A.'s tag which said "I am the Muse of Open Expression" and then wrote one for me which said "I am the Master of Passionate Action"

What I liked about this is that at the party everyone felt the need to comment on why you had been branded as you were. It was a reliable conversation-opener.

"Oleg, know what", began Andrei in a roundabout way; "I had this idea of filming a man asleep in one continuous sequence, without any editing - from the moment he falls asleep at night to the moment he wakes up in the morning. Imagine what a subtle and grandiose range of human emotions would be reflected on his face in that time! Especially if he dreams...".

"I´ll have dreams in the film?", I cautiously inquired.

- Yankovski on Tarkovski and the Inextinguishable Candle

Yesterday at the Roxie theater I had a chance to see Thicker than Water. This is a mesmerizing film - the surfing is acrobatic but inspired, still maintaining that elegance and beauty in which surfer and wave are like two dancers.

I try to explain what this is like, to summon up words which can describe that sense of exaltation and yet also a sense of connection with the forces of nature, a personification of force and wind and water that does justice to this all. But films like this do so much better. The more intelligent surfers I know are natural philosophers, high priests of an unrecognized religion.

I should also mention that Rob Machado (like Gerlach who I mentioned before) is also from my same small beachside hometown of 5,000 people. He still lives there and has a small band that plays at the local elementary school festival every year (the same elementary school linked below in the coastline project) and used to play in a band with Kelly Slater.

I realized for some reason that it must snow on beaches but what would that look like? For me its a strange conjunction.

I was reading an article by Umberto Eco, a lecture he gave at the Alexandrian Library (The Alexandrian Library is itself an anachronism, a 21st century library emerging from the mediterranean landscape not as a new venture into the electronic age but more as a confused homage to its ancient predecessor.) In his lecture you can hear the old pleas for the book form (which I am sympathetic to), a pile of fading paper in a world where information is now transferred electronically, rendered as pixels rather than bursts of ink.

So, one of the sidebar images was from one of my favorite books, Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte. I had forgotten I owned this book and so I went looking for it among some boxes of books that I had stored away.

This is a wordless novel, a surreal collage, in which bird-headed women vie with lion-headed men. In which bats and dogs and enormous serpents appear in bedrooms, water and sand and elements flow through Victorian streets and ballrooms. The novel is intractable, it makes no sense. But Ernst maintains a light, distant sense of continuity from frame to frame so that you cannot help but feel that there must be some logic.

When you read this book, you end up inventing your own story to make sense of it all, to try to explain it away. A parable maybe?

A friend asked me what I thought of Tapscott's translation of Neruda.

Love, how often I loved you without seeing-
without remembering you-
not recognizing your glance, not knowing you, a gentian
in the wrong place, scorching in the hot noon,
but I loved only the smell of the wheat.

Or maybe I saw you, imagined you lifting a wineglass
in Angol, by the light of the summer's moon
or were you the the waist of that guitar I strummed
in the shadows, the one that rang like an impetuos sea?

I loved you without knowing I did; I searched to remember you.
I broke into houses to steal your likeness
though I already knew what you were like. And, suddenly,

when you were there with me I touched you, and my life
stopped: you stood before me, you took dominion like a queen:
like a wildfire in the forest, and the flame is your dominion.


This is from Neruda's 100 Love Sonnets translated by Stephen Tapscott of course.

I have to admit that any sort of analysis, either of poetry or prose, makes me squirm. I'd rather take things as they are and not dissect them. But I am fascinated by the art of translation.

I think a translation is best viewed as an original work of its own, an inspired variation of the source. A good translation is one that stands well on its own. The "best" translation may not even be the most faithful. A faithful attempt might be too literal, too grounded in the original phrasing, too clunky.

That said, there is not much to discuss when Neruda writes, as he does in another poem, "Beso a beso recorro tu pequeno infinito,/tus margenes, tus rios, tus pueblos diminutos" and it is translated as "Kiss by kiss I travel your little infinity,/your borders, your rivers, your tiny villages." That is almost word for word, rendered strong and succinctly.

In the poem up top though it might be surprising to learn that the phrase "I broke into houses to steal your likeness" can be translated literally (by me) from the Spanish as "In the empty houses I entered with a lantern to steal your portrait"

Here, Tapscott has made some alterations. Neruda didnt explicitly say he was breaking in to the houses but it is implied. The original "retrato" means "portrait" to me but "likeness" may in fact fit in better with the overall theme. Sacrifices have also been made to render a translation which sounds smooth in the rhythms of english.

Hundreds of Bongard problems are online and I had some fun trying to solve as many as I could. Most are by Bongard, some are additions by Hofstadter. There are apparently some meta-bongard problems too though I havent tried those. Someone pointed me to SET earlier, but it doesnt appeal to me for some reason. Maybe the rules are too prescribed.

You might be familiar with the guy who photographed the entire california coastline. Well, this photo is the area where I grew up. My parents house is just inland from here but we used to walk down to that beach. The construction on the left is a remodeling of Cardiff Elementary School where I spent a couple years.

With this, I can also show you where I spent thanksgiving. It was at one of these beachhouses pictured here.

I helped some of the little kids hunt for fish and crabs in the lagoon you see in the middle. LB said that being near water was somehow mesmerizing, like being slightly hypnotized, and I agreed with her.

Clothed in heavy jackets, groups of us also walked up and down along that beach, chatting, gossiping, throwing stones, picking up seashells.

Blame it on thanksgiving and on being caught by a mysterious flu-like thing (no, I havent been in Asia) which is disrupting my sleep and leaving me feeling tired and unable to concentrate on anything more weighty than cooking pasta or flipping through comic books.

The day before Thanksgiving, I helped to serve food at Glide church. I was part of an assembly line and my big duty was to put cups on the trays that went by me. It was easy at first but I was deceived. As literally hundreds of people filed through for their meal the pace sped up so much it was like that episode of 'I Love Lucy' and the bon-bons where it seemed hopeless and I wondered how many trays I had messed up. It slowed down later but by the end of the day I had some mild form of repetitive cup-placing disorder.

I'm looking forward to doing it again.

I spent this past Saturday night drinking bourbon and watching Fellini movies. Listen if you can to the audio commentary on the 8 1/2 DVD! (usually these are to be avoided) You will learn that the psychic clown in real life went on to become the leader of a Sufi cult. That Saraghina (who can forget La Saraghina, the enormous prostitute who lived on the beach?) was an American opera singer. Or hear one of the narrators lament at how Fellini used people up, how he brought out the best in them and then discarded them. You will also hear that same narrator say how he himself was one of those people.

You'll think I'm lying to you if I say that dark, articulate writing can be erotic even when the subject is hard and intellectual. Even when it is comically academic. This is the case with one of my favorite book of essays: Wole Soyinka's Myth, Literature and the African World. This is what I mean:

You must picture a steam-engine which shunts itself between rather closely-spaced suburban stations. At the first station it picks up a ballast of allegory, puffs into the next emitting a smokescreen on the eternal landscape of nature truths. At the next it loads up with a different species of logs which we shall call naturalist timber, puffs into a half-way stop where it fills up with the synthetic fuel of surrealism, from which point yet another holistic world-view is glimpsed and asserted through psychedelic smoke. A new consignment of absurdist coke lures it into the next station from which it departs giving off no smoke at all, and no fire, until it derails briefly along constructivist tracks and is towed back to the starting-point by a neoclassic engine.

This, for us, is the Occidental creative rhythm, a series of intellectual spasms which, especially today, appears susceptible to commercial manipulation. And the difference which we are seeking to define between European and African drama as one of man's formal representations of experience is not simply a difference of style or form, nor is it confined to drama alone. It is representative of the essential differences between two worldviews..

The McGurk effect is something I saw a long time ago but just rediscovered. Essentially, what we hear (or think we are hearing) is closely tied with what we see.