photoAday_ Jan 11

DAY 11, WHERE YOU SLEEP: it's not like sleeping on a cloud (it's a fold-out futon, going to get a mattress for it eventually), but a bed is a bed. Regardless of what kind you have, when it's your own it's the first place you want to be as the day wanes to its close. My bed is a throne waiting for it's queen.

photoAday_ Jan 10

DAY 10, CHILDHOOD: this letter is exactly 10-years-old. Wow. It was sent by an old penpal of mine named Ameenah. We found each other on a Koreananime (for real) penpal exchange guestbook. I don't remember who answered the penpal inquiry of who, but somehow we developed a very strong friendship out of our letter exchanges that lasted for several years: 2000 to perhaps 2004-2005. In August of 2001, I managed to convince my dad into letting me stay at her family's house in Circleville, Va. for a week, while my dad was in D.C. for various projects. The day I left was the day Aaliyah died, and that's all you heard about on music media outlets - especially radio. So that's how I remember all this, I guess. Anyway, apparently this is the only letter that managed to survive the years. I swear I managed to hold on to most of them because I keep every single personal memo, note, letter, card that comes my way. This was a very special friendship that stuck with me because it was my first success in connecting with someone outside of geographical reach. I don't think I would have done this if websites like Myspace and Facebook existed. I'm very happy they didn't taint my efforts of making a strong bond** back when social developments go through a very dramatic milestone: the adolescent years.

Update Jan. 20: changed "bond" from "bong." Dumbest typo ever, or best?

photoAday_ Jan 9

DAY 9, DAILY ROUTINE: my eyes sting and I'm tearing up profusely. Oh, it's that big bowl of onions I just cut. Let me just wipe my ey- oh shit, now my vision's all blurry. Now I can't see the notification someone left me on Facebook via my Blackberry app.

I always make sure that at least one of my meals is made from scratch. I rarely buy TV dinners/microwavable/oven-baked meals because for one, we don't have a microwave; and second, I know how to cook and I like to know what I'm eating so why not? For breakfast I ate brown sugar wheat waffles (the batter was made from scratch days ago), leftover lentils sloppy joe (made two days ago) on spinach and wheat for lunch, and in this photo I'm prepping up some tofu scrambles. Can you tell I love to cook? Apparently there was a full moon out today, which kind of explains why today felt like a drop down the Millennium Force roller coaster at Cedar Point. I calmed down after I made this meal, served with a side of blackberry spinach salad. Cooking is my daily therapy. And sometimes my phone is too.

photoAday_ Jan 8

I decided to cave in on this "photo a day" activity after seeing a few of my friends upload their daily Instagram snaps in lieu of the challenge. Unfortunately I am not "with it" and don't have an iPhone, and therefore, don't have the Instagram app. I have a Blackberry Curve with no flash and a sepia setting as its COOL, QUIRKY photo filter. Also, it tends to blur badly with the slightest move. Anyway, these will be taken with my Fujifilm camera and I'm still deciding if I should play catch-up on the past seven days or just forget about them.

DAY 8, YOUR SKY: every morning I do some warm-up stretches and cardio activity so I can face the day with some energy and a great body. This photo was taken in the living room of my third floor apartment. When I'm lying down with my back against the floor, maybe after doing leg lifts, maybe exhaling deeply from stationary drills, my eyes often inquisitively greet the blue skies. When we question our existence, our purpose, we look to the skies. When we experience miraculous moments in our lives, we look to the skies. When it's just a need to simply escape but can't really do so under current restraints, we look to the sky. I do all of that when I cool down: I bask in my existence and escape in a dream.

Visionaire 61

Maggie and I finally made the easy, two-subway-stops trip to the gallery on Mercer to see the magazine that broke a Guinness world record in the flesh. For years the super team behind Visionaire - Stephen Gan, Cecilia Dean, and James Kaliardos - had always wanted to make the largest magazine ever, inflating the excitement behind seeing beautiful photography and artwork beyond what the eyes (and hands) could originally handle. Thanks to the sponsorship and conceptual push of African Global founder Nizan Guanaes, the team assembled the contributed artworks and miraculously scurried over to a billboard printer in Wisconsin to create a very impractical, but very beautiful magazine.



standing next to the 'standard size'

It takes two to tango, but it also takes two to flip through this massive issue. We didn't want to be liable of damaging the $1,500,79 x 57.8 inches super-mag, so we went over to the "standard size" and took turns daintily flipping through the works of Ryan McGinley, Bruce Weber, Karl Lagerfeld, and Marina Abramovic, to name a few.

The two versions of the magazine are available for the public to peruse until the end of January. Gallery hours are 11-7 p.m. I highly recommend that you do not go alone. Also check out Visionaire's website for an absolutely adorable promo vid featuring three models purchasing the issue at a newsstand and taking it out for a "relaxing" park read.

Melding Screams and Shouts

stylin' into 2012 with origami samurai hats cause the dollar store across the street was closed

If you think about it, it's pretty lousy of us to wait 365 days just to tell ourselves that within the next 365 days you're going to do what you didn't do in the 365 days you just lived. I try not to force myself to make a turn-of-the-year resolution lists as a result, but I can't help but go to bed - covered in confetti, champagne, and remnants of slime from some celebratory Frenching - with thoughts of what the new year will entail and how I can better myself to make shit happen.

My family came to visit me last weekend, but more so to experience new year's eve in Time Square for the first time. (I'm pretty sure I put their travel priorities in the right order.) That weekend marked the end to the longest I've gone in not seeing my family, five months since August; and before that only three months last summer when I was in this city for an internship. Although there were bouts of annoyances that I didn't miss in living under the same roof, it was overwhelming to accept that through time, these familial encounters will shrink and the length of absences will expand. My mother is more understanding, more open, curious but not invasive; my siblings are more mature, more willing to share their personal passions, more respectful. I need to make the most out of these qualities and shared times for now on.

Mentally, this has been a very trying year. I stepped up to a green platform decorated in honors ropes questioning what I've been working on up to that point, realizing it may not be what I wanted to pursue as a career. Dealing with various setbacks has sprinkled my year with thoughts of uncertainty, uncertainty turned to fear, and thus slowed down my motivation and productivity. My social support fluctuated as my closest friends settled on opposite coasts (and Chicago) for the next chapter of their lives. Despite the tiny handful remaining in the small town which I spent most of my life, I knew that their emigrations were imminent, including my own.

I won't say that this has been a terrible year. A lot of my money went into some solo traveling on the weekend and breaks: visiting friends at shows and events around Ohio, Chicago, and saying hello again to my New Yorkers before settling months later. I've sent snail mail and care packages to those I couldn't see in the immediate future. I split my birthday week in Chicago and Columbus eating, drinking (a lot), dancing (not enough), and sweating (hot as balls that week), and somehow turned several awkward encounters into budding relationships. That didn't stop when I abruptly packed my bags and headed East. I stumbled upon new friends, rekindled old ones, and even developed unpredictable relationships with former acquaintances.

So fuck it. I'm diving into this year with smiles and laughs, and embracing my creative potentials. I've limited my resolutions to a very small, but powerful list: take chances (the part of 2010 me I miss greatly), embrace relationships, and "get money get paid." (Thanks, Chi City.) Oh, and finally combust into a giant cloud of dust when an asteroid hits the planet on doomsday.

... and I guess blog more. That was last year's resolution, and frankly I don't think I did a terrible job with that!

Reality of NYE: wasn't covered in confetti or doused in champagne, and didn't even receive my first kiss of 2012. (Yet.) I lost contact with all of my friends and, therefore, potential plans, around 9 p.m. Luckily, my brother bailed my family and the Time Square ball drop and come back to my apartment to use the toilet. A mixture of blasting Lil B, streaming the ball drop happening mere miles away (ungrateful denizen), walking around Williamsburg after midnight, and heading to bed before 2 a.m. Next year, a hotel party's gonna save me from being stranded YET AGAIN.

BUT WAIT! DON'T LEAVE. In the midst of this jovial state of mind, I compiled a mix of songs that stuck with me in the past year. This is not so much a "top songs of 2011" sort of mixtape... okay, maybe so as a lot of these tracks went through heavy rotation on my iPod, turntable, cassette player, etc. I know the music tastes of you readers are all over the board, but c'mon! It doesn't hurt to give it a spin and surprise yourself with a track or two you didn't expect to love. Hell, that's how I discovered a lot of these tracks. Plus, I decided to go pro and use my amateur knowledge of Audacity to MIX the mix. So ENJOI.

brought to you in 3D thanks to Miss Chance Morris

DOWNLOAD HERE

TRACK LISTING
1_ Lil B "Pretty Bitch"
2_ The Spits "No Place to Live"
3_ Warsaw "Leaders of Men"
4_ Unwound "Lucky Acid"
5_ Career Suicide "Cherry Beach"
6_ Duffy and the Doubters "Spider Baby Jesus"
7_ Milk Music "Out of My World"
8_ Bleached "Think of You"
9_ Toro Y Moi "Fax Shadow"
10_ Xeno and Oaklander "Sets and Lights"
11_ Pictureplane "Techno Fetish"
12_ Gary War "Grounds for Termination"
13_ Shabazz Palaces "Free Press and Curl"
14_ White Ring "Rick Ross - BMF [White Ring/One Nation Under God Remix]"
15_ Trust "Bulbform"
16_ Glass Candy "Etheric Device"
17_ //Tense// "Pulse Beat"
18_ Tyga "Racks City"
19_ Tyler, The Creator and N*E*R*D "Inside of Clouds [Remix]"
20_ Araabmuzik "Lost in A Maze"

And if you haven't gotten the chance to do so, download my other 2011 mixes: Sweaty Summer and Indonesian DIY Punk.

12_20. Fool's Gold Holiday Party @ The Dream Hotel, NYC

I had two friends stay over at my place for the week, and when they weren't spending their day doing some mushy, lovey-dovey sightseeing, I took on the duty to personally entertain and introduce them to what I hope was a good introduction to the New York City nightlife scene. The first night they bar-hopped in Alphabet City; the third was spent at Weird Records' Chthulhukah holiday party/Thalia's continued b-day extravaganza at Home Sweet Home. Sandwiched in the middle was what I most anticipated, the holiday party.

The saying is true: third time's a charm. I've managed to learn and adapt from my frustration of getting into some previous Fool's Gold events, and this time around I gave my visitors careful instructions to be ready to leave the apartment around 9. It was a close call, a gust of wind escapes from my sigh of relief as the bouncer stamps our wrists. I looked backed over a long, wide congeries of people, certain that 90% of them were told to go elsewhere when it reached capacity.





For some of my readers who aren't in the know of the DJ/dance world and its labels/artists/producers, Fool's Gold is one in the top of the genre's U.S. establishments. To make this more familiar, some of its forefront artists include A-Trak, Kanye West's DJ, Chromeo, and, thanks to "Drive," Kavinsky. So imagine what the holiday parties entail. The Dream Hotel provided the perfect backdrop to the fancy shirting, leather (and hot damn there was a lot of leather in this room), and streetwear get-ups that could garner Kanye's shades tip of approval.




The real party people made a swarm around the stage, waiting for Danny Brown to make what would be his celebratory performance after snagging the #1 spot on Spin's 40 best rap albums of 2011. Surrounded by the label's most recognizable faces, founders Nick Catchdubs and A-Trak, and Dave 1 of Chromeo. As last year got a surprise appearance from Drake, A$AP Ferg's host spot made it no secret that A$AP Rocky would bring out a surprise short set: two songs, jumping into the crowd, and creating a rowdy pit that mocked the nature of clashing atoms. (Not sorry for that dork drop.) Just so you know, the A$AP crew has a show coming up in February at the Irving Plaza. Tickets for that show go on sale at 10 a.m. on the 30th. Happy holidays indeed.



Obligatory holiday photo booth.

Happy Hawwwlidays.

I guess this is when and where I'm supposed to plug in my obligatory "happy holidays" post. My family doesn't celebrate Christmas (though for consumerism and unity reasons, I sometimes wish we did), so running around this city for gifts and making very expensive travel plans wasn't something I had to worry about in the past month.

So... Merry Christmas or 5th day of Chanukah. Holiday orphans like me (or Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist/Pagan/Satanist/not-gonna-fall-for-the-holiday-tradition-bullshit New Yorker) got out of our ghost town NYC neighborhood and into Chinatown because it deters cabin fever. Plus, I'm not gonna put myself through the jealousy of seeing friends ring in the holidays with an inexplicable bump in their bank accounts or wardrobe via Facebook. I did this last year when I stayed in NYC to intern at Opening Ceremony for a month, and since I am here again and have nowhere to go, I decided to keep traditions alive. I have also recently rehashed my bubble tea addiction and needed to relieve my lustful fantasies of sucking up tapioca pearls.

Here are some OK photos from my walk around the neighborhood. As always, everyone infiltrated the narrow streets in herds, it reeked of durian and fish, and I continued my streak of discovering uncharted retail territory. I wanted to do what everyone was doing and have some lunch at a Chinese restaurant, but the wait for seats were too long because everyone else wanted to have lunch at a Chinese restaurant too.







Stick HK on a bag of dirt and I'd probably buy it





bossin' with RenTen black milk bubble tea

I'll be walking backwards in the upcoming posts. Just want to get them out of my system before they're D.E.A.D. and the year is 2012 and hopefully we all won't be D.E.A.D.

The Zine Pile_ Benoit Pepin 'Ta Yeule'

"If seen on stage, he resembles any other... until you spot a cheap disposable in his hand, or some outdated, potentially radioactive pinhole nightmare he found in the crypts of a Sherbrooke thrift shop, as he flies across the stage and dives off to get a better vantage." -- excerpt from introduction by Jonah Falcon, August 2011

Picked up a copy of Benoit Pepin's photo book at the Omegas/The Boston Strangler/CREEM show the other night. Bludgeon, sweaty, and skewed faces of hardcore's finest in the '00s pervade this photo documentation, which is a compilation of show snaps between 1999-2011 - mostly in Toronto and Montreal, Canada. Above are photos of Fucked up and Cheap Tragedies (Ohio wut up) taken between 2007 and 2008.

Of course I'm not going to show you the entire book, go get your own copy. $10 if Omegas is coming your way for a show, and I'm sure you can find it elsewhere.