0 January 11
i am a huge fan of yosuke yamaguchi‘s work, but i especially love the calligraphy of「森へ」on this album cover. the strokes remind me of twists and knots in the trees of the forest. maybe i will start writing my last name like that. i seldom write my chinese name, and it’s a shame that i don’t. 2012 will be the start of this habit.
this year, i also vowed to do more ongoing personal projects. so, as promised: one is in the works, one is in idea development stage, and one is already out! i’m really excited about this collaboration with brian. it’s something we’ve been doing for a while now – sending music back and forth with each other – but it feels great to present something in a concrete format. i’m also considering this as a semi-official dj debut.
2 December 19
hong kong by ward roberts
What is at issue is how an image of Hong Kong’s architecture and urban space is used to support a narrative that implicity attributes the colony’s success to the smooth combination of British administration and Chinese entrepreneurship. Such a narrative also mobilizes ethnic and psychologistic assumptions that cannot bear scrutiny: the dogma that Hong Kong people are by nature hardworking, that they have a high tolerance for crowded living conditions by genetic design, that they will do anything for money. Peeping out from under this narrative is a master discourse that, seeing only its own mirror reflections, inscribes the primacy of the economic everywhere in the most literal-minded fashion. This is a discourse that elsewhere I have called decadent. This discourse manages to make a complex space disappear into a one-dimensional image, structured on a facile binarism. Such a binarism not only tends to domesticate differences and restabilize change; it also avoids the spatial issues, to give us only a copulation of clichés.
Ackbar Abbas
0 December 3
if you ever get a chance to see this film at the cinema, do. one of the best documentaries this year.
