Last night, I watched Inglourious Basterds.

It's been reviewed to death, so I don't have too much too add, but it's certainly vintage Tarantino, with gorgeously choreographed action scenes, sharp dialogue consistent with the different countries involved (this time in not one but four languages), brutal violence bordering on the comical, amoral, stylish men and beautiful women.

And that, I realized this morning, is what makes this film. All this time, we've been laughing and cheering and wretching at Tarantino's presentation of gory violence as entertainment. We've been celebrating the glamorous murderers and lowlifes played by Uma Thurman, John Travolta, Harvey Keitel, Lucy Liu, comforting ourselves with the fact that it's okay to laugh because it's all fictitious anyway.

What's key is to view this film within the context of the director's broader work, with that same hip presentation of violence and amorality we've grown to love. The laughter all of a sudden becomes uncomfortable. We start to wonder about the difference between Christoph Waltz's Jew hunter and Samuel Jackson's hitman, both smooth-talking, bad ass motherfuckers who kill for profit and power.

And then to top it off, we witness a most meta of grand finales: Nazi brass view a film celebrating the impossible heroics of one sniper and the violent deaths of his enemies shortly before we, the film viewers, celebrate the impossible heroics of one Jewish girl and the violent deaths of her enemies.

Godwin's Law was never clearer.

Labels: film, review

I got a new watch this week. It's a big beautiful white analog watch with automatic gears, a technology that appears to go back as far as the 18th century. I wind it at night before I go to bed, but otherwise, the kinetic energy generated by my wrist keeps the gears turning for days at a time. I have three watches now--all of them analog. I have my Freelook white watch, a thin stainless steel watch with a red face from Guess, and a more formal black rectangular watch from Kenneth Cole. Each of their faces follow a basic circular format that goes back to at least the advent of the sundial.

I remember when digital watches were all the rage. The cool kids had fancy digital screens that counted the seconds and could serve as stopwatches and timers. Sometimes their watches would even beep on the hour, or when school ended. The nerdy kids had calculator watches, and some kids even had infrared watches that could send messages to each other. I even won a small design contest online when I was in my teens, and the main prize was a cute digital alarm clock/radio that my mother still keeps in her room. But that eventually faded, and next thing I know, even Target has more analog clocks than digital in their sales collection.

Of all the digital trends I read about and follow, the one I'm least enthusiastic about is the e-book. I certainly like the concept of the e-book. I like that a book could be interactive and that months' worth of reading could be kept in a small device that could easily fit in a purse or carry-on. I in fact read books on my iPhone and keep a few hours' worth of reading on me at all times. But I have a hard time believing that the e-book could ever replace the paper book.

A lot of my friends and colleagues have analog watches. Some are battery operated, some are wind-up. None of them could ever be as accurate as the clocks on their mobile phones, which are synced up with atomic clocks and automatically update as they traverse time zones. And it's that line of observation that helped me understand my reservations with e-books.



I have a feeling that e-books will be incredibly popular for a good many years. And this is a great thing. E-books will make books more accessible to more readers, especially as their production costs lower; they will offer innovative new ways to experience storytelling, with multimedia and hypertext possibilities only now being explored online; and they will offer new ways to share information, with social notes and other uses we can only begin to imagine.

But the really clever book publishers will understand what physical books offer that no e-book can: that the physical book is as much a design object as it is a tool for reading. The trailer above, from the New Zealand Book Council, offers a glimpse into the possibilities. As we anticipate Wednesday's arrival of the Apple tablet, the possibilities of which truly excite me, I try to remember that even the most beautifully-designed e-book, or tablet, or what-have-you could never replace a beautifully-designed book.

It's like this watch, I suppose, tick-ticking away with mechanical energy. My smartphone has a snazzy background and an accurate clock, but there's something about this watch that completes a look, that makes people notice, that is as much a design object as it is an indicator of time. The printed book, I suspect, will never go away.

Labels: 21st, design, fashionbeautystyle, technology

What's striking about the sight of two restaurant workers, tucked in the back of the space to sleep, is that it's such a striking sight. Outside of college campuses, subway stops and airports, it's rare to see people actually sleeping in public, especially if they're gainfully employed by that same establishment. The screen, which blocked them from almost everyone (except me and my dinner partner) seems to acknowledge this.

To what extent is the taboo against public sleep a cultural norm? Why is it more acceptable to spend $5-10 on a cup of coffee than 20-30 minutes on a nap? In my ideal world, we'd have better-defined public sleeping spaces, free from the cult of caffeination.

It's already done in some places: A place to rest one's head

Labels: citylife, culture, new york

Labels: rio grande valley, texas

One of the many water stations throughout the Valley. Got me thinking about water drinking practices--when we ordered agua, restaurants more often than not served agua de botella (bottled water), rather than tap. I didn't make the connection till I saw these stations throughout.

Got me thinking also about bottle sizes. In New York, SIGG water bottles are all the rage. Ain't nothin' that small in Texas.

See also: Drive thru culture

Labels: culture, environment, health, rio grande valley, texas

In McAllen Airport: a phone booth converted into a laptop station (notice the teeny tiny phone jack), now rendered totally obsolete by airport-wide free wifi.

Labels: rio grande valley, technology, texas

The other night, I watched Sin Nombre, directed by Cary Fukunaga. If you do watch it, watch it for the stunning visuals and what seems to be a well-researched depiction of life south of the border, on your way up north. I don't have much to add to this ITN review (above) and this Doha Tribeca Film Festival interview with the director.

Labels: film

What does "key" mean these days? A rental car key wasn't a key at all, at least not one of metal with serrated edges. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "key" has an uncertain Old English origin, but may be related to old German/Gothic words meaning "wedge" or "to come forth".

Jan Chipchase once wrote about how a quarter became a key--not to wedge open a door, but to grant access through a tollbooth. These days, we have keys for wireless networks, for smart phones, for airport terminals. We have keys in our pockets and keys that reside solely in our heads.

This particular key pictured here had multiple functions--it was a physical key to start the car and a radio key to unlock the doors and even, with a double-click, to automatically open the side doors. Handy for when you're carrying a ton of video equipment through a rainy Texas afternoon.

Seems like a stretch to connect this kind of key with a wedge, but maybe one day, even this button-activated key will one day seem foreign to future users of the word "key".

Labels: culture, language, technology

In the Rio Grande Valley, I am Latina. Buenos tardes, señorita, they tell me. Buenos tardes, I respond, and I do my best to keep up with the conversation as we shift in and out of Spanish and English. Sometimes I get by. More often, I have to admit I only speak un poquito de español.

Spanish was the first foreign language I fell in love with; Chinese was my third (my second was Latin, but I've never had a conversation in it). When I was little, I had many Latino friends, with families hailing from Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Ecuador. I slowly picked up the languages from being around them, from occasionally being assumed to be Mexican, and from deliberately teaching myself the basic conversational structures. The rhythm of speech is so ingrained that a Colombian friend in New York told me I have a Mexican accent, like a true Angelena.

It wasn't as easy to pick up Chinese. Yes, I grew up with many Chinese friends, with families from Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan, Canton, and I was also frequently assumed to be Chinese. But the structures of the language are so difficult and foreign to a native English speaker that it required many years of formal study before I could hold up any kind of conversation. And it shows: I'm told that I have a northern accent, which reflects that of my teachers, rather than my peers.

What is my ancestry? Few people guess immediately, even if they come from the Philippines. My ethnic background is a hodgepodge of cultures: Pinoy, Sino, Malay and Hispanic genes; I have dark-ish skin but a round face and long straight black hair. Inevitably, then, I become a blank slate, a Rorschach of different ethnic backgrounds east and west. I have variously been Mexican, Salvadorean, Chinese, Korean, Navajo, Sioux, Filipino, Indian, Italian, Arab.

For the most part, I don't notice these assumptions. There's no way to know unless someone explicitly mentions it. But then I enter a place like the Valley, and the person across from me opens his mouth.

Buenos tardes, señorita, he says.

Buenos tardes, señor, I respond. Me gustaría una agua, por favor.

¿y para comer? he asks.

And so it goes.

Labels: chinese, culture, language, personal, rio grande valley, texas

Grackles, 2010
An Xiao


We're driving down an FM road, one of hundreds winding their way through the rural Texas landscape. The first time I'd been told to make a right on an FM, I was confused. I thought it might be a radio station, or an acronym for some kind of building.

"You mean a highway?" I asked.

"No," the local responded. "An FM. A Farm-to-Market."

I'm watching the scenery here deep in the Rio Grande Valley, just miles from the border. Cows, horses, loose dogs roaming about. It feels a little like Texas, a little like Mexico, a little like something in between. Suddenly, I point ahead of us--black flutters burst from the cornfield. They fly upward and around, then back into the field.

My colleague pulls over, and I rush out with my camera to capture the moment. The grackles erupt in a huge flock, fly in one direction, then another, then settle back down. Every few minutes, they pick up again. Of course, as soon as the videographer gets his video camera out, frames the shot and is ready to start rolling, the birds stop. Individual birds flap about, but nothing on the scale of what we saw.

We try everything to rouse them. We throw a few pebbles (that always works for seagulls). We run to the nearby area, flapping our arms. We even shout. But to no avail--the grackles show no interest in us, and I can't for the life of me figure out what got them to flap around in the first place.

Then I have an idea. I cup my hands in front of my mouth and fan them out, to form a bullhorn shape. I take a deep breath...and I caw. A large, loud, high-pitched, feverish cry like I'd heard on a nature channel somewhere. Caw, caw, caw. I roll my tongue to create a trill. Crraaaaw, crraaaaw, crrraaaaw.

Somewhere in my colleague's camera, amidst hours of footage, is the sound of a 5'7", black-haired crow, and the sight of the grackles--dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, all in unison.

Labels: countrylife, personal, rio grande valley, zuihitsu

Frijoles served in the traditional molcajete (mortar) style. The design comes from the Aztecs and was originally made with volcanic stone. A perfect example of design bleed--hundreds of years of stone converted into soft plastic. The original purpose--I believe the legs were cool to the touch no matter how hot the contents--is no longer necessary. But the design persists.

Got me thinking about the ways cultures mix and merge and develop, and why some design elements continue for hundreds of years (molcajete, spoon, table), while others have a good run before ultimately fading away (scroll, chariot, slanket).

Labels: culture, design, food, rio grande valley, texas

For every culture, a carbohydrate staple. In most of America, it's bread. Bread for breakfast (toast), bread for lunch (sandwich), bread for dinner (burger). In east Asia, it's noodles. In the Rio Grande Valley, it's the tortilla, especially the taco. Breakfast taco, lunch taco, dinner taco.

Today, tortillas de harina (flour), por favor. ¿Mañana? Anybody's guess, but this native Angelena has died and gone to heaven. Pass the chili verde.

Also - better (read: SLR) photos to come. This is a stunningly beautiful place.

Labels: culture, food, rio grande valley

After a relaxing few weeks in California (can't get too complacent), I'm back on the road a good deal this month for video shoots, a talk/workshop and maybe a leisure trip snuck in there somewhere. I'm currently in south Texas, the Rio Grande (Gran-dee) Valley, just a few miles north of the border, by way of Memphis, TN. It's ho-hum for most, I imagine, but exciting for me--I'm a coastal kid at heart, with a sprinkling of Asia--, and the middle of country is like, well, another country to me.

Labels: memphis, personal, texas

Labels: augmentedreality

In Manhattan, the meaning of a few cabs parked near each other (transportation for pedestrians, annoyance for other drivers). In Jackson Heights, another meaning (livelihood, workspace, home).

Labels: citylife, culture, new york

One of the great aspects of living in a world with ever-evolving technology is watching how etiquette evolves alongside it. More and more, as we grow attached to our phones, I see people place their phones on the table, to be accessible at a moment's notice. And yet, by and large, we place them face down. No one taught us this--grandma certainly didn't nag us when we were kids--but the practice has evolved nonetheless.

Labels: culture, technology

Interesting sign spotted at the Huntington Library: "Please touch the jewelry." Yes, "Please touch", not "Please don't touch."

It's interesting how context primes us for certain behaviors. Imagine this jewelry in an outdoor market, or in a mall booth. It would already be understood that we can and should touch the jewelry--touching jewelry is part and parcel of evaluating it. But after a stroll through the revered Huntington, with its plethora of precious materials, it's easy to hesitate when looking at jewelry for sale.

Got me thinking about other hands-on activities, and the ways we use instructional signs to define behaviors in specific contexts and for specific audiences. Here's one from a self-serve frozen yogurt spot, popular amongst the childrens:

Labels: citylife, design, los angeles

A solar-powered parking meter. Why? The other side will read your credit card and charge you appropriately for your stay. Good to see more solar-powered options around sunny climes.

See also: Credit card culture

Labels: citylife, environment, los angeles, san diego

One of the many new bike lanes in Manhattan, divided from the sharks cars by hard concrete. I suspect the only way to encourage environmental behavior is to institutionalize it.

Labels: citylife, environment, health, new york

Labels: california, culture

Like most bookworms out there, I regularly order books through Amazon's used books system. I'd ordered countless times before and never really paid attention to the packing. It was just a necessary nuisance to actually opening the book, after which I'd give the seller a good rating without really remembering his or her login name.

But when I received this package from thriftybooks.com, I paused for a minute. First, its distinctive orange packaging jumped out at me, followed by the very clear web site. Since I ordered through Amazon, I didn't even know the seller had a dedicated web site, or that they were a company, not some college kid trying to get rid of last semester's book.

The power of marketing: years and years of ordering use books via Half.com and Amazon, and this is the first time I actually noticed the name of seller.

Labels: business, design, marketing

Design solution for providing condiments al fresco on a busy sidewalk in Venice--they only bring it out when customers have ordered and taken a seat. Theft-prevention and convenience all wrapped up in one.

Labels: citylife, design, los angeles

Spotted at the Huntington Library, as if anyone needed a reminder that "Location filming is an important part of the Southern California economy."

Labels: citylife, culture, los angeles

There's translation, and then there's translation. The more literal translation for this restaurant is "Three Harmonies Barbecue Noodle House". It sounds perfectly fine in Chinese, but "Sam Woo Bar-B-Q" just sounds better in English, no? "Sam Woo" is itself a play on the pronunciation for "Three Harmonies", yet sounds like a friendly fellow you might want to hang out with, or at least eat dinner with. The place is always packed, with branches throughout Los Angeles.



Incidentally, I also want to make a quick shoutout to KTdict+ C-E, the unintuitively-named but intuitive-to-use English-Chinese dictionary for the iPhone. My name is misleading--I studied Chinese for four years but still don't have a good grasp of it. Short of living in a Chinese-speaking country, I'm trying to at least maintain my rudimentary skills, hence the more frequent posts on Chinese things.

Where KTdict comes in handy is with the iPhone's fabulous Chinese input system, which allows you literally write out the character you're trying to look up, either in simplified or traditional script. It then suggests words that are probably what you just wrote. It's surprisingly accurate, even for all the complex strokes of an obscure character.

Why this is revolutionary: normally, to look up a Chinese word, you have to count the strokes and the individual parts, and then look it up in the dictionary based on the stroke count. As there are lots of characters with the same stroke count, you have to narrow down the word based on its individual parts, and slowly and surely, you'll find it.

You can't even type the word quickly using Romanization like pinyin if you don't know how to pronounce it, so even with the aid of digital technology, the process isn't too much more sophisticated than flipping through a paper dictionary. And I have a sense that a more experience Chinese speaker would probably have an easier time with a paper dictionary.

But now, with this iPhone app, all you need to do is write out the character (in this case, 安, my name), and it will give you all the different possible words it could be a part of, along with the pinyin. Combined with the ever-useful Zhongwen.com, I'm able to figure out most characters pretty swiftly now. I imagine something like this is already in widespread use in Chinese-speaking countries, but it will be interesting to see how and if the evolution of tablets and other touchscreen systems will encourage literally writing Chinese online, rather than typing out the Romanization.

Labels: chinese, language, los angeles, technology

I like Jan Chipchase's augmented reality thread--it's as much about digital augmentation as it is about analog. As I think about the future of augmented reality and its ultimate usefulness (vs. its gee-whiz applications), I think about what we already do to build on the existing world, to add information, gather information, share information.

For those unfamiliar, check out an augmented reality guide to the Tube:

Labels: augmentedreality, citylife, culture, design, los angeles, technology

Labels: citylife, culture, san diego

Interesting to observe how dining practices migrated from obscurity to normalcy, and the signs thereof. At Din Tai Fung, the chopstick sleeves no longer have instructions for how to eat with chopsticks--it's probably safe to assume that someone going to a place with no English words in its name will know how to use them, especially in Arcadia, the Chinaburb of Los Angeles. But how do you enjoy Din Tai Fung's famous soup dumplings? Best to include instructions lest patrons burn their tongues.

Thanks to haiku and speculative poet extraordinaire Debbie Kolodji and family for a lovely evening of conversation.


See also: Peppers as condiments and Dim sum codes

Labels: chinese, culture, design, food, los angeles

Every now and then, I have one of those "I'm living in the future" moments, when I realize that it's the 21st century and we're doing some stunning things with technology. Walking on Melrose past an interactive street advertisement for the Motorola Droid was one of them. There it was--a massive touchscreen, larger than me, on which I could play a video game involving Droids falling from the sky. I could've sworn I'd seen something like it in a movie, perhaps Back to the Future II, or Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.



I remember in the mid 90's, when we first got AOL. I chose a screenname with letters and numbers, clicked around to the news and weather reports, and then was drawn immediately to the chatroom. Back then, chatrooms were relatively safe spaces, as not enough people were on there yet, and spam had yet to snake its way into the modern consciousness. It was actually a place to chat--not to tweet, not to post ironically--just chat and get to know others.

I met a girl my age, whom I'll call Diane, who lived in Washington, and we migrated from the public chat into a private window. She told me about life near Seattle, and I told her about life in Los Angeles. We talked about our interests, about school, about books we enjoyed reading. I'd had a couple pen pals over the years, but this was different: we were chatting live, in the moment, using this new thing called instant messaging. It was funny to imagine another kid on the other end of the coast sitting at a computer like mine, tap-tapping away into the ether.

That night, after we disconnected the modem from the phone line and shut down the computer, I opened up my pocket organizer, which had a QWERTY keyboard and maybe 8K of memory, and imagined how cool it would be to continue chatting with her from anywhere, while sitting in bed, while riding the bus. I regularly typed short poems into my organizer, so why not receive notes as well? I'd seen some kids do this with organizers equipped with infrared beams, and I imagined one very long infrared beam, thousands of miles long. The little messages could just pop up from Seattle, and I could respond from Los Angeles.

That didn't happen, of course. At least not yet. But each day after school, I'd log into AOL and listened expectantly for that knowing "You've got mail", which signaled a new note from Diane (who else would email me in those days?). I'd of course respond immediately, and then I would check the news and log off. Diane and I eventually lost touch, but my online life continued, as I taught myself HTML and set up a poetry blog, made friends in other countries via Telnet and MUDs, and talked about movies on Usenet and IRC.



Clicking through the various blogs and articles summing up the past decade, one of the biggest themes I've encountered is the stunning emergence of social, mobile technology. I began my life using letters as my primary mode of communication with distant friends and family, and I began the last decade with a fast modem connection and a pager. These days, my moments away from the grid are so rare that I often deliberately disconnect, just to help refocus my mind and remember a life without flashes and beeps, a life when true solitude was still a given.

What will it be like 10 years from now, looking back on some technologies that became obsolete (floppy disks, pagers) and some that merely evolved (instant messaging, dial-up modems)? What will the 2020 breakthroughs be, the emerging technologies that have everyone buzzing and that we can scarcely imagine now? What will be the new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary? What will be the watershed moments, like Mumbai and the Obama election, that mark just how influential those new technologies will have become?

As I've written before, I suspect that the developing world will benefit greatly from mobile technology in particular. We'll see more phenomena like #iranelection, in which the global agora of Twitter and Facebook play a vital role in social change, and citizens from vastly different cultures and countries connect directly with each other. But what I'm looking forward to most is those serendipitous moments, like when I walked past an interactive ad on the street and said to myself, "Wow. I'm living in the future." I'm excited to see what 2010 holds.

Labels: internet, personal, technology