A Windy Day Poem

What You Need for Painting

By Raymond Carver, Based on a Letter by Renoir


THE PALETTE:

FLAKE WHITE
CHROME YELLOW
NAPLES YELLOW
YELLOW OCHER
RAW UMBER
VENETIAN RED
FRENCH VERMILLION
MADDER LAKE
ROSE MADDER
COBALT BLUE
ULTRAMARINE BLUE
EMERALD GREEN
IVORY BLACK
RAW SIENNA
VIRIDIAN GREEN
WHITE LEAD

AND DON'T FORGET:
Palette knife
Scraping knife
Essence of turpentine

BRUSHES:
Pointed marten hair brushes
Flat hog hair brushes

Indifference to everything except your canvas
The ability to work like a locomotive.
An iron will.

From Beijing

This is a part of a letter a friend wrote me from China:

Sometimes, I think life is hardest when you're trying to change it, to make it better. Acceptance of something is easier, though not necessarily the most recommended route. You and I are constantly changing our lives and as creatures of habit, change is hard. There are too many unknowns. Hang in there. Sooner or later, you find the parts of you that you wouldn't give up for a greener side.

=)
Helen


*Helen and I met in Seoul. She is originally from New Jersey.

Autobiographical Character Sketch

This was submitted to a certain film school that rejected me:

Tidbits of faces, places, conversations and moments that unceasingly fill my head.

On traveling verses shopping-
You should come, too. Instead of buying two,three Michael Kors bags.
Michael Kors is only three hundered dollars.
Only three hundred dollars?!
Yeah...CJ and I talked about it and we have psychological issues.
So two people with psychological issues got together and came to that conclusion?
It’s either that, or we’re superficial people with vanity issues.
So you’d rather be mental than be superficial?
Yeah.
Jamie?
Yeah?
We’re more similar than I ever thought.

On best friends who drunk-dial you daily from Tokyo-
Laughing is like crying, I don’t cry, I laugh. You, Addie, are a diver. I don’t like diving. I like breath strokes. I try diving but I see myself doing breath strokes again.

Matt on one of the greatest singers of our time-
Andrea Bernanni or something, HE’S BLIND! Before I was like, why does the dude look like he is always sleepy??

On Sun’s chipmunk cheeks that are about to burst-
Her eyes are brimming with tears but a stupendous smile engulfs her entire face. Have you ever felt so lucky you feel like you’re going to burst?

Hae-kyeong on laptops from IBM, the IBM T40 versus the IBM T30. It’s like this. You have a BMW. I have a Sonata. Jee on “smoke” rising from New York City streets. Yeah, New York is so dirty. No wonder they staged Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles coming out of the sewers here in the eighties. Harvard Law school student and dear friend Kerry on the topic of “despair, failure and loss of faith.” My biggest tragedy is that I’ve never experienced a tragedy. Jason on the topic of his squinting Asian eyes. If my eyes were any bigger I’d feel exposed. Boyoung on the topic of our own people. I think people should be free and not oppressed. If you’re oppressed you turn out like…Koreans. Cece brutally honest again. When you look at them they’re so ugly but they’re so happy. It’s cute. It makes you think about a lot. Like, why am I so unhappy? Timmy’s support on my choice of life. Don’t worry, Addie. Ten years down the road if you turn out to be a poor writer living on cereal every day, you’ll have rich and powerful friends like me to back you up.

But Gustave Lebon, French Sociologist, nailed the dilemma: To respect tradition is a condition of existence for people; to know how to disengage from it, a condition of progress.

And in the library five-year old curly-haired Tizian Frohn is hugging his Magic School Bus books to his chest and exclaiming these are my books forever and ever and ever!

I don’t want to be anybody else, I just want to be the best version of myself. Are you still swinging at the biggest piñata in the world?

Music from Asia

First video (old school):
Seotaeji /SUH-TAE-JEE/ & Boys - The most famous Korean pop group that ever walked the peninsula. A living legend. They released this song right before the group broke up in 1996. They changed the landscape of gayo (K-pop) forever.

Second Video (old school):
Eco - A popular all-girls group from the mid-nineties. They had a couple of hits then disappeared off the face of the earth. But this particular song lives on in Korean kereoke (this word is japanese, the korean word is 'No-Rae Bang' i.e. NRB) lovers. It's one of those songs that everybody knows and loves but not many people remember who sang it. This is the one I always sing when I hit the NRB.

Third Video (new):
Jay Chou - The "Seotaeji" of Taiwan. He took a quarter of the world by storm when he debuted with his first album in 2000. He is an amazingly gifted singer/song-writer. All of China, and a large portion of Asia, is obsessed with him. He is still very active. This is one of my favorite music videos of all time. It's a work of art. Jet Li is in it, if you're interested. My favorite part is at 3 minutes 10 seconds when the break-dancing and Jet Li's fighting is intercut with each other.

Fourth Video(relatively new):
M-Flo - I'm just throwing this one in. It's a Japanese group. I had a friend who listened to M-Flo all the time and got me interested for awhile. Another good friend of mine, was actually friends with "Melody" and would hang out with her in Seoul/Tokyo.

Midnight Snack

The can of chili can was marked "HOT" in capital letters. Spicy American chil? 'Big deal,' I thought to myself. Koreans dip green pepper in red pepper paste as snack food. Eating spicy food is a sport in Korea. When I was a kid, my mother filled a bowl with water and washed half the Korean food that was put on the dinner table for me. The water diluted the spicy red pepper sauce/paste/powder on the food. I remember the specks of red pepper powder floating around in the bowl of water that grew darker shades of red as the meal went on. All Korean kids went through years of training to eat spicy food. As an adult, almost nothing would come across as "spicy" unless you were directly squirting Tabasco sauce onto your tongue. I looked at the label on the can, again. 'Seriously, whatever.' I dumped the entire can of chili onto the sauce pan and stirred.

Half an hour later, I am wiping tears from my eyes. My nose is runny, too. I am currently pacifying my tongue and stomach with a cold glass of milk.

While I was eating the bowl of chili and my eyes watered up, a couple of things crossed my mind. The first was that if it's hot for Koreans then they should have a warning sign on the product - "Spicy even for Koreans." In fact, I think that should be the official name for the highest level of spiciness that people refer to on the "spicy scale" if there is such a thing.

Koreans have an entirely seperate word for spicy, hot, food that makes your eyes and nose water. It's pronounced (roughly) mep-dah. It means that the food is so hot (not in temperature but in taste) that it stings. Koreans think that meh-woon (a verbal variation of the noun above) food chases away the heat. So we eat a ton of meh-woon food in the summer. In fact, Korean people actually say, "It's so refreshing and cool," when they eat anything that is especially spicy.

As I chewed on the last bit of my chilly, I wiped the tears from my eyes, and continued with my mulling. Wait a minute. How COOL would it be to write a scene in the future (this is the writer in me kicking in) where the main character is eating food that is so spicy she/he is crying and then while she/he is wiping tears from her/his eyes and eating the chili, her/his friend (significant other, family member or friend - it can be anybody) steps into the room. They start talking. It starts out as a normal conversation but then ends up with the other person leaving the room (out of frusturation or anger) and the person eating the chili pushes the bowl of chili away and start crying vehemently. This time because he/she is upset.

I think that would be cool. Both ideas. I guess I have power over the second idea but not over the first one.

*Reading this post over, it doesn't even make any sense. I can't follow my own logic.

Church Approves Fishnet Stockings

I have just been told that a picture of me in fishnet stockings, a short black skirt, and black leather boots is going to be published in a church magazine.

So I attend this church called Mosaic. Mosaic doesn't believe that church is a building so we have services all over LA in different venues. One of these places include a nightclub in downtown LA. I go to that one. But just because Mosaic holds church services at a nightclub doesn't mean people show up looking like they're going clubbing. This is why I was surprised just now, when I received an email from their graphic designer telling me that they will publish a picture of me in fishnet stockings in one of their publications.

A random poem I wrote was chosen to be published in a magazine that's put out yearly by Mosaic. Everybody who is being published in this year's issue had to have their picture taken. I didn't want a picture of me next to my writing piece (it's awkward!) and I was busy, so I missed their photo shoot. They tracked me down and told me to send over pictures via email. Generally, I'm not even a picture person. So it was difficult to find high resolution pictures of just myself. I went through a plethora of digital files and found some pictures that might work. Among them was a full length picture of me in the fishnet stocking outfit. I was about to go clubbing in Hollywood when my roommate shot the picture of me. I sent over six files including that one to the magazine graphic designer. Then I added a note saying that I knew the fishnet picture might not work but she could just crop my face from it.

She wrote back within ten minutes and said that the "party outfit would work best" because it was the only high-resolution, full-body picture.

Uhh...I'm still relatively new to this church, and I don't want to be known, in the Mosaic community, as the girl with the fishnet stockings and leather boots without any given context. And I just remembered something else. The second line in the poem contains the word "naked." Whatever, they can handle it. So I guess this is how I make my debut at Mosaic.

Santa Monica & Malibu

My sister's told me a number of times to invest in a camera. We had a camera back in Korea, but she got first dibs on it. I haven't gotten around to purchasing a camera yet, but in the meantime, the blackberry picture folder on my hard-drive is getting really fat.

* A Santa Monica Sunset on my Blackberry: April 11th, 2009


















* A Malibu Sunset on my Blackberry: February 14th, 2009






* My day reminded me of the lyrics to Savage Garden's "Santa Monica":

In Santa Monica in the winter time
The lazy streets so undemanding
I walk into the crowd

Beauty so unavoidable
Everywhere you turn its there
I sit and wonder what am I doing here

But on the telephone line
I am anyone, I am anything, I want to be
I could be a super model or Norman Mailer
And you wouldnt know the difference
Or would you

In Santa Monica on the boulevard
You'll have to dodge those in-line skaters
Or theyll knock you down

I never felt so lonely
Never felt so out of place
I never wanted something more than this



ps) In Santa Monica, you can see the sun setting behind the mountains. In Malibu, you can see it directly dip into the ocean.