Today is Record Store Day and if you’re in the market for some new sounds, I hope you skip the iTunes or the Best Buy & head for a locally owned shop of your choosing.

As a kid when I wasn’t browsing libraries or thrift stores, I could be found in record shops methodically searching every square inch for audio treasure. The people you meet in local stores are almost guaranteed to be 1000 times more helpful, more knowledgeable than your average corporate retail drone – and that goes for your fellow patrons as well as the staff.

Much thanks and love to friends & loved ones currently keeping their respective independent music stores alive, and to everyone else around the globe working hard every day to make sure that music geeks like moi have somewhere friendly to turn to.

Enjoy this muxtape, in your honor:
http://totalitarianvegetables.muxtape.com/

Some shopping suggestions:
Sonic Boom, Seattle
Charley’s 33s & CDs, Albuquerque
Stinkweeds, Phoenix
Lou’s Records, Encinitas

love
,k

My personal creative projects, which include this blog, are always at the back (sides, corners, walk-in closet) of my mind – poking the parts of my brain consumed with my day job. “Marketing Assistant” is what my business cards say, but I function like a production artist – cranking out layout after layout. It can be frustrating and overwhelming, and I complain about it a lot, but the truth is I would rather be frustrated about my Quark problems or client problems than… filing problems.

I realize that I’m pretty fortunate to have a job that actually relates to my college degree & satisfies that part of myself that lives in Photoshop. I haven’t always been so lucky. I’ve had to squeeze myself into a myriad of retail, clerical, IT, etc. jobs in my 10+ year work history, and though I made the best out of each situation, they weren’t where I was meant to be.

Okay, so here’s the funny part:

In order to encourage myself through those dark “file clerk, etc.” times in my life, I’ve always thought, “This is perfect! A throwaway job will free up my brain for all my creative ideas and I’ll have so much energy to get my personal projects done that I’ll be able to leave Corporate America behind!” Except, the fact that I’m staring at filing cabinets or invoices or mall patrons all day kills my soul, thus draining my creative energy. So I get a “creative” job, thinking “Finally! This will energize my brain and get all of those ideas really moving!” But I invest so much time and energy in projects at work that I’m burnt out by the time I sit down to start on my own. Thus killing my soul.

I haven’t quite got the solution worked out, one that will allow me to balance the professional & the personal, but I know it can be done. I have a feeling it has to do with my work ethic and my attitude towards my own art. I tell myself that I’m not affected by what other people do or what they think of me, but that’s not entirely true. Whether or not I agree with “other people”, they still influence me on certain levels. Every time I get ready to create something, impressions of the design sites and artist portfolios I’ve bookmarked since the beginning of time start swirling around me and I start to think, “This isn’t going to be good enough.” Before the implement even touches its intended surface, I’m already criticizing myself.

But my brain is screaming, “It is good enough, you stupid cow, it’s your art! Just create, for Cliff’s sake!”

Which leads me to my least favorite word in the universe: potential. That word has haunted me since elementary school.

“Kari, you have so much potential – if only you would:

• Stop ‘thinking’ and just do these excruciatingly meaningless homework assignments
• Stop ‘day dreaming’ and pay attention like everyone else
• Start acting ‘gifted’ like we labeled you so we can get that set of ‘We Educated A Genius’ steak knives!”

If you were a victim of those “gifted” programs in American public schools (or just a victim of school in general) you might want to watch this TED talk:

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

(Actually, I would recommend the entire TED site to everyone reading this right now. It’s full of a lot of interesting ideas and conversations, and it’s all free.)

I had a bit of a marathon viewing of a bunch of these talks this past weekend, and took a bunch of scribbled notes to match. One of my favorite ideas, so far:

No one else is the authority on your potential.

So simple and so obvious, yet given my personal history with that word it frankly left me on the verge of tears. Then I watched the Ken Robinson talk that I linked to above and it really started sinking in that I need to take hold of my own artistic direction – immediately.

Then I read this quote in an article at the Guardian:

In the past, I’ve been criticised for making ‘juvenile art’. This affected me for a while, and I tried to make ‘mature art’ … but I couldn’t do it. I realised that what I should do is make even more juvenile art, and it’s very enjoyable.

Ex-fucking-actly! I’m at this point now, where I’m tired of trying to make my art make sense to anyone else. It’s time to let my instincts back out for some fresh air. When was the last time they got a little of that anyway? College? I’m going to be 30 next year and I’m determined not to start this phase of my life with the same hesitation that’s plagued my 20’s.

So I’m proposing something a little radical. I’m going to stop looking at art for 3 months. A 90-day probation period where I will abstain from design blogs, portfolio sites, neat little desktop decoration sites, etc. Since I seem to have a compulsive need to judge my work against everyone else’s out there, I will remove them from sight and concentrate on my own expression. And at the end of it I hope to have enough done to share with the rest of you. I’m not going to stop blogging here, stop listening to music, or – dear god – put my Netflix on hold. I’m talking strictly static, 2-D influences.

Think I can do it? Think I’m crazy? Have your own creative struggles to share?

Ready-Set-Go!

love
,k

I have also added links to sign up for email updates and RSS for The Veg. If you have any questions or need help using either feature just drop me an email. Alternately, check out the FAQ for Feedburner, the service I’m using to manage both the mailing list & the feed.

Viva la Vegetables.

,k

Sheesh
,k

Well, maybe half-blown.
0.125-blown.

Four years ago I rented a movie called Happy Together because of it’s star, Tony Leung Chiu Wai – a Hong Kong colleague of Leslie’s and one of the most talented actors in the world, IMO. As much as I enjoyed Tony’s performance, I was speechless watching Leslie Cheung. It’s a good thing Tony had scenes of his own in that film, otherwise I might not have remembered him even being in it. Cheung’s captivatingly violent pouting skills were something of a trademark of his. His characters were usually troubled, often sullen, which made their moments of joy so disturbingly bright.

I was hooked. After Happy Together, I found Days of Being Wild, then Ashes of Time, and then the realization that I was a year too late. Leslie had killed himself the year before, in 2003 (on April Fools’ Day, actually – making today his 5 year Death-iversary). It was a sad and disappointing discovery, but I hadn’t been in the habit of building shrines to superstars so I filed it away in my brain and let it blur into memory.

The inspiration for this post came recently as I was planning my next Netflix film festival [1]. I had rented Lust, Caution and the whole time I kept thinking, “Where’s Leslie?” Tony Leung was the star again, and like I said, he’s amazing and was completely right for that role, but I suppose it was the film’s time period or the sentimental soundtrack that got me thinking about what Leslie’s missed out on. What we’ve all missed out on [2].

Yeah, he made some shitty movies, nibbled at the mise-en-scene, and was otherwise pretty much…ahem…a diva, but he entertained me. So I decided to hold a Leslie Cheung-a-thon, not realizing that thousands of his fans were thinking the same thing at roughly the same time.

Read more about him here.
Watch him here, here, here, or where ever you can [3].
Raise a collective eyebrow at the mixtape I made for this post here.
,k

[1] Okay, so I like to thematically arrange my Netflix queue into mini-festivals to give myself a solid block of Godard, or Fellini, or ST:Voyager Season 4 to contemplate all at once. I know I’m not the only one.

[2] In The Mood For Love? But of course. 2046? Are you kidding me? He would have rocked the part of that damaged, womanizing sleaze. No offense, Tony.

[3] Just don’t watch his last movie ever unless you’re prepared for the art-imitating-life ending. I never thought derivative tripe could make me cry, but there you have it.

In the meantime, enjoy the next post, on the house.

,k

Look at her, she’s just a kid.
Oh my god, she’s nearly 30!
And you aren’t married??!
You’re quiet.
Why don’t you talk more?
Why do you wear so much black?
You have a French last name, so you speak French, right?
Say something “French”.
What do you mean you don’t know the latest celebrity gossip?
What’s wrong with you?

My current job is, unfortunately, no exception.

sigh
,k

No.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!

And look who’s in it, just look!

,k

Time goes, you say? Ah no!
Alas, Time stays, we go.
~Henry Austin Dobson

If that’s true, I’m so far gone today I don’t know when or where I am.

I haven’t had to deal with Daylight Savings Time in nearly 5 years, so this morning was something of a crisis for me. I can barely drag my ass out of bed at the “normal” time every morning, and now they want me up an hour earlier? So, I feel a little out of it.

Last night I watched a movie called What Time Is It There? and I must admit that I completely overlooked its relevance to the recent DST switch until I started to compose this post. The film takes place in Taiwan, where a watch vendor sells to a woman leaving for Paris the next day. Upon her departure, he goes around town switching every clock he can find to Paris time. Hilarity doesn’t ensue, but if you’ve seen any other Ming-liang Tsai films, you might have guessed at that. I really like his style, in the same way I like Wong Kar-wai and Jim Jarmusch. Human stories told with minimal interference. They hit me in the gut every time.

What Time Is It There is about being alone, and the dull despair of being lonely. It’s about our perception of time and distance, and the invisible connections between people worlds apart.

,k

Lovely.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr4s7KeCbV8

edit:
If you missed it, sorry. You’ll just have to buy it. Or watch the trailer.

More info & links at Wikipedia

,k