Tourfilter is a fantastic new tool that I discovered through the Hype Machine blog, Machine Shop. It’s simple and brilliant: put in the name of an artist you like, and Tourfilter will email you when they’ve got a show scheduled in your town. You can see my list and share your own with your friends. It’s a great way to keep track of numerous artists without having to fish through dozens of listings at various clubs. I’m just hoping they integrate with Google Calendar soon.
[soundtrack to milfs]
“Nobody loves you like your mama loves you / But who’s lovin’ your mama? I am! I am!” Genius. Watch the video. (Via 2 Many Scenes.)
[too much music!]
Now this is dangerous: The Hype Machine is a music blog aggregator that allows you, with the click of a button, to listen to the latest tracks from a ton of blogs, or else the most popular tracks, and provides links to the original posts so you can download the stuff you like. There are hundreds of blogs, and thus hundreds of eclectic tracks — more than you could possibly listen to, especially if you let yourself get waylaid by interesting blog posts with additional songs in them. But it’s also an inexhaustible source of new music, which is pretty fabulous.
[it makes me smile]
Big Chief by Professor Longhair
Lily Allen is a pop sensation in the UK, where she’s already hit number one with her single “Smile.” Set to chipper, ska-inflected beats, Allen’s songs hide a sharp wit and a dark worldview. Though she doesn’t rap, her lyrical rhythms and density are informed by hip-hop, and there are hints of The Streets and Lady Sovereign in her music — Allen has the dour intelligence of the former and the charm of the latter — as well as a touch of Dawn from The Office.
I first heard of Allen through Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker. You can hear a great deal of Allen’s music on her website, and also catch a couple of videos. And the MP3s are from Aurgasm, which may well be where Lily Allen first heard that fantastic Professor Longhair piano riff before turning it into the backing for “Knock ‘Em Out.”
[colors and numbers]
I have discovered a most extraordinary blog. 16 Colors elegantly combines the Internet’s tendencies to spectacular pointlessness, acute nerdiness and accidental beauty.
I stumbled across this strange beast while searching for an online random color generator. And why was I searching for such a thing? Because I’m learning Korean.
See, when you’re learning foreign vocabulary, you can often help yourself along by creating little mnemonic stories about the new words. For example, I can remember that sukje (숙제) means “homework” because I think of an Arab kid who’d rather go to the souk and smoke a jay than do his homework. Elaborate? Yes. Effective? Very.
There is some vocabulary, however, that is simply not amenable to that kind of mnemonic storytelling. Specifically, number and color terms just have to be memorized through brute force and repetition.
Koreans have a couple of different number systems, and while the Chinese-based system is relatively simple — higher numbers like 25 are just “two-ten-five” — the Korean native numbers, used to tell people’s ages, have unique terms for 20, 30, 40 and so on up through 90. (Past 99, it’s all the Chinese system.) To bang these beasties into my head, I dug up an online random number generator, made a long list of numbers between zero and 99, and then sat there for a while reciting them. After about ten minutes, my intuitive knowledge of number terminology had increased substantially.
Looking to replicate this success, I googled “online random color generator,” and lo and behold, I found my way to 100 Random Colors 2.0, which is exactly what it sounds like. Hit reload and watch the colors change! (The site was created by web designer Regnard Kreisler C. Raquedan.) But somehow the random colors are even better in blog form. There are even archives!
Meanwhile, I should get back to mumbling Korean words at the screen.
[yet more beck]
Looks like Beck’s new album is to be called The Information and released on October 3. The tracklist is up at Beck.com, and you can hear two new tracks — “Nausea” and “Strange Apparition” — there, while Beck’s MySpace page has “Nausea” plus “Motorcade.”
According to Billboard Magazine, The Information will have 15 tracks and come packaged with a DVD containing videos of all the songs.
[maybe]
This one’s for you, Jenny.
On Tuesday, with the day off for Korean Independence Day, I made my way to the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central branch, at Grand Army Plaza, and came home with an armload of books, among them Roadmap to Korean by Richard Harris (not the actor), a student of the Korean language, a resident in that country for five years at the time of publication, and a kindred spirit. His book is a compendium of useful concepts that he wishes he had, and now I wish I had, upon first arriving in Korea (example: an appendix with translations of typical ATM screens).
When we were in Korea, our school’s assistant director and our primary boss, James, was fond of prefacing every statement with “Maybe,” which led to much bafflement. “Maybe tomorrow is a holiday.” “Maybe you teach one extra hour tonight.” “Maybe I have to go to Seoul tomorrow.” Maybe? What the hell does that mean?
In a chapter about how Korean is a high-context language, meaning much is said indirectly or left understood based on context, Harris has this to say about Korean maybeism:
Another example of Koreans not being direct linguistically is the only-too-common, seemingly ubiquitous ‘maybe.’ Though some visitors to Korea don’t ever pick up on this, even after years of interaction with Koreans, the fact is that the Korean language itself is ladled with grammar structures that imply that something is not definite, when everyone knows it clearly is. That’s why Koreans, when speaking English, say things absolutely baffling with regards to the use of maybe.
Harris feels my pain!
He goes on to give a few examples of phrases that make sense in Korean but translate bizarrely into English, like “Maybe I can’t go to class” and “Maybe your sister’s tall.” They make more sense to me now, knowing what I know of Korean grammar. At the time, though, they left us completely at a loss. This is why I want to learn Korean so badly. Just as I needed to go back to Nepal and India a second time to find out what had so completely addled my mind on the first go-round, I feel now like the only way to work out what Korea was really about is to get inside the language.
No easy task, that, but I’m working on it.
[the new york korean film festival]
The New York Korean Film Festival is back, from August 25 to September 3, with films showing at the ImaginAsian Theatre, BAM and the Anthology Film Archives.
The Film Festival website offers a fair amount of information, including synopses and even trailers — although without subtitles, so I can’t get more than the gist of what they’re about. Still, it’s enough for me to have picked a few highlights that I hope to see.
Korean film has developed a reputation for moody thrillers and crime dramas, but I’ve never been wild for the genre, and my own interests lean more towards films that reveal the experience of daily life in Korea. Two romantic comedies, Rules of Dating and When Destiny Meets Romance, look like they’ll be good fun, and even without understanding most of it, the trailer for the latter is hilarious. On a darker note, Grain in Ear is a social drama focused on the plight of a poor Chinese-Korean woman and her young son, and it seems to have won a fair amount of international recognition.
I have to admit that I’m intrigued by Forbidden Quest, an erotically charged historical drama. Also historically 
interesting are Water Mill, a black-and-white drama of revenge and betrayal from 1966, and The Way to Sampo, a 1975 film about the rapid pace of change in South Korea. And then there’s If You Were Me, a collection of six short animated films.
But the film I’m most excited about is Wedding Campaign, which follows an unlucky Korean bachelor to Uzbekistan, of all places, where he goes to find himself a bride among the substantial Korean diaspora that lives there. How often will a movie come along that can satisfy my fascinations with Korea and Central Asia simultaneously? Right: once. And this is it. I’ll be at the showing at BAM on Sunday, September 3 at 4 p.m. See you there!
[old friends]
Yesterday, out of the blue, I got a message on Friendster from an old high school friend, Nicole Kristal. She was a sophomore when I was a senior, and we were never that close back then, though we had a number of friends in common. But we worked together on The Voice of Troy, the school newspaper, and we developed a certain mutual respect as capable writers who actually cared about both the craft and the purpose of journalism.
I hadn’t talked to Nicole since we were both in college, so I was fascinated to learn of the twists and turns her life has taken since. After earning her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon in 1999, she found her way to Los Angeles, where she tried to make it as a singer-songwriter (if the audio links on her website don’t work, you can find some samples here). To make ends meet, she fell into “tutoring” rich kids, which ultimately meant writing their papers for money.
This demoralizing career did get her published in Newsweek, no small achievement, and even got her on the CBS Evening News, where you can see a clip of her speaking in what used to be my accent. (Her troubling career also inspired a lengthy article about hemmorhoids for Ostrich Ink.)
She’s now a staff writer for Backstage West, a wholly more decent line of work, and has a book coming out — The Bisexual’s Guide to the Universe, a tongue-in-cheek work to be released in October by Alyson Publications.
We talked last night for the first time in years, and we’ll probably chat again soon. Unlike a lot of my high school acquaintances, who’ve settled into boring suburban babymaking lives and with whom conversation is a tedious chore, Nicole is actually interesting to talk to. And it’s always kind of interesting to catch up with people you knew way back when.
[oh, lordi!]
Hard Rock Hallelujah (Audio | Video) by Lordi
The Eurovision Song Contest is usually an ABBAesque cheesefest, but this year’s winners are different. Still hopelessly cheesy, yes, but different. Taking a page from GWAR, Lordi — the most popular thing to come out of Finland since Nokia — is a metal band that only appears in ridiculous monster constumes and that indulges in parodic Satanic lyrics. From their contest-winning anthem “Rock and Roll Hallelujah”:
On the day of Rockoning
It’s who dares, wins
You will see the jokers soon’ll be the new kings
Apparently the day of Rockoning has come, and these jokers reign supreme. In Europe, anyway.