Archive for March, 2008
day one: arrive at the airport after an eight hour flight, stumble around until i find a guy in an official looking green jacket to drive me to the hotel. resist the urge to play ‘tsing ma bridge’ by beyond, or yell from the taxi al la love generation whilst crossing into the main chunk of hong kong. crash at the hotel and then visit the first of many shopping centres for dinner.
day two: is only the third day a special shop for denise ho is open in causeway bay. the only real excuse to go to central, i have to go before the other fans buy up all the t-shirts, stickers, postcards, dvd-rs, cds, books, cups… but only end up buying stickers and postcards. after that shopping spree, find the nearest hmv and proceed to blow HKD$800 on cds (but only approx A$114; average cd price is about HKD$120?), and recieve a funny look from the cashier as a bonus.
day three: macau trip. hope to pass by the street they used in exiled, but i don’t think a regular tour covers that. wish to avoid stanley ho’s casinos like the plague, but when you’re in macau… nope. and, er, portuguese egg tarts please!
day four: drag parents on a train trip to kwun tung, so i can look for anna house, disguised as ‘let’s go somewhere and have a walk’. invariably get lost. impressed by the big screens at apm, but not much else.
day five: the beloved tsimshatsui, walking and eating. the advantages with travelling with your parents is that at least one of them can actually read the menus properly. knowing the words for ‘meat’, ‘pork’ and ‘noodles’ is not sufficient. visit kowloon park because it just bugged me that on my last trip with others, our hotel was opposite the park and i never got to visit once.
day six: mongkok, no markets allowed. no old ladies grumbling at you for not buying anything. the only exception permissible is the goldfish market, so i can make like ninagawa mika and take 10000 pictures of things that do not look like fake lv bags.
day seven: home, and ponder on what i’d like to do next time.
(i haven’t been yet, hence the ‘theoretically’. still two more days)
“if there’s a native animal that deserves to be exterminated, it’s the freaking emu…” - newstopia
may i reiterate my loathing of this animal? i don’t feel it needs to be shot unlike its coat of arms buddy the kangaroo (and the source of newstopia’s joke), but it sure is uglier, and due to its origins in the line of evolution, a whole lot stupider. i’m not going to use this as an excuse to eat it, though. i am yet to acquire a taste for the native items on the menu.
miho matsuda clothes
i know i’ve written about them before, but all i’ve been wearing lately are skirts, and recently ordered a gingham check skirt from the webshop at great expense. i’m so enamoured with the style and quality of the designs, and intend to wear them forever (along with maybe a jane marple collection sometime in the future). yes, everywhere, work and not work.
other items:
changing all the romanji tags in mp3s to regular japanese, and likewise simplified chinese characters to traditional instead
to blog more, even if it’s essentially about “nothing” and some association i made up
yuriha blog (a lot of cafe hopping and jane marple rambling)
mapping out places to possibly go in hong kong while on street treks (record stores i missed last time, the odd gothic lolita shop for interest only)
oh dave fridmann, your work is instantly recogniseable. it might be only two tracks on mass of the fermenting dregs first full length-ish album (s/t), but how could i mistake it? everythings distorted, even drums. echo. pulling voices out of the room you recorded them in.
a familiar sound as heard on sleater-kinney’s last great record, the woods, dark heavy fuzzed out guitars becoming the guts of the songs.
On The Woods, these intoxicating dichotomies are flattened out by bulldozer-like recording, reduced dynamics, and vocals that are almost always drowned out by fuzz. Loud is the only element left; even quieter, more textured moments like “Modern Girl” and “Night Light” are hurt by the brash recording and mix, and on the rocker tunes like “What’s Mine Is Yours” and “The Fox”, the guitars are so loud they seem to be clipping 100 per cent of the time.
- amazon review
(honestly, i’m a terrible hack at recording, so stuff clips anyway even without the volume up as loud as i would like. but i would rather have a mix that “jumps out” than one with a perfect balance of bass and treble, whatever that is. if i want a nice mix, i’ll go listen to a pop record!)
or even a variation on the sound of the three number girl releases fridmann produced and recorded. fridmann brought out the best in the band, that being their last album before their breakup, num heavmetallic, and i always marvelled over the amount of echo he applied to the hard hitting drums.
anyhow, i’m just amazed at the congruity of my favourite records without even realising its the producer who pulls it together, to a certain extent.
i hope mass… continue to grow from this promising early release, even if they’re now down to a duo. because their music certainly promises to be more than the sum of their influences.
