1.

As of today, so many movies. I was asked to make a list for the Walker staff picks blog sometime in mid-December, but I hadn’t seen enough at the time to make any sort of list at all. There would have been about one movie of note on my list: Le Havre (which I had seen at the Walker), but in the last month plus, with award season in top gear, I have made a significant dent in this season’s theater offerings and Oscar nominations. And, you know what? Most of them have been pretty bad. My list, many movies later, still only has 4 items that I’d write home about. It goes like this:

1. Le Havre (charming, touching, stylish)
2. A Separation (harrowing, solid)
3. Melancholia (dreamlike, devastating)
4. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (intense, well done)

And then if people ask about them, I will include:
5a. We Need To Talk About Kevin (haunting, beautiful, Tilda)
5b. Moneyball (surprisingly engrossing)
5c. The Artist (charming, yet forgettable)

The rest, which were nothing to write home about: Drive (sexy fun), The Descendants (dull), My Week With Marilyn (fluff), The Tree of Life (heavy-handed), J. Edgar (historical), Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (dull), Hugo (at times enchanting), The Help (the worst).

I’m looking forward to seeing Beginners on DVD. I think that’s about it, though.

2.

I can’t stop listening to this song. I’ve got 26 plays on iTunes and I only downloaded it on Monday night. Plus, I’ve been streaming this video at work for at least 2 hours a day.

3.

Dear Sugar revealed. She holds my heart like a poem–the ability to completely destroy it. In light of any painful love situation, I always refer back to this column. It’s a must-read manual for 21st century breakups. It is so sad to not be able to dramatically burn ex-lovers’ correspondence, isn’t it? A ‘delete’ button is not as satisfactory.

When my friend Crystal and I were in third grade, we used to terrorize a boy named Adrian by chasing him around and yelling, “gong hay fat choy!” At first he thought it was funny, but then he started being downright hostile–for good reason. We were all Chinese, and I think we started saying it a lot after turning around the words on our tongues for awhile and realizing the comic possibilities in the rather emphatic syllables of each separate character:

GONG
HAY
FAT
CHOY

Say them. Emphasize them. They’re funny–especially to third graders. I am embarrassed now for my behavior at the age of 7 or 8 and have been embarrassed for approximately the past 18 years (just like I’ve been embarrassed for the past 23 for pushing the lever on the Playdoh shape-making noodle machine down on my friend Jimmy’s finger. I wanted to see if it would come out like a star. It is still probably the most outright violent thing I’ve ever done.)

Anyway, it’s Chinese New Year. A friend of mine asked me if he could follow around my family as they performed their ritual Chinese New Year festivities (he’s a journalist). You could, I said, but they’d just be running errands, though if you’re lucky, maybe to the Chinese grocery store (Ranch 99), and maybe my dad will send me a chain e-mail about the Year of the Dragon*. When both of us kids were living at home, we’d ask my dad for red pockets when he got home from work, and then we’d both be $20 richer, so that’s a classic ritual that all Chinese families do, but we’d still be a disappointing subject matter, being half-Chinese and having our Chinese New Year be pretty much half-baked. Ever since I got to college and got a little perspective on my life, I’ve had a weird desperate puppy love for this Chinese side of me. A little over a month ago, I went to Minnesota dim sum for the first time, and, I realized later, the first time I’d ever been to dim sum without my dad. I delighted in being a know-it-all (who doesn’t know much). “OH THAT, that is HA-GOW (shrimp wrapped in a noodle skin dumpling), I used to eat that by the bamboo container. Oh, and where is that sticky rice? OH, and we must absolutely eat some DON TARTS (Chinese egg custard pies) for dessert.” When we were in Tanzania and read about a little hotel that was half Chinese restaurant and half guest rooms, I was desperate to go there for a little comfort. And you know what? It worked (even though the hot and sour soup was a peppery mess).

What was I doing? Somebody texted me ‘Happy New Year!!!’ and I fell into this hole of self-meditation and identity and there’s probably a lot more I could dig into (there always is), but I kind of like not understanding the things I do.

*Classic e-mail from my dad upon my inquiry whether 2008 was the Year of the Mouse or the Year of the Rat: “Mouse and rat are the same in Chinese…no discrimination..we cook them the same way.”

Yesterday, NPR began streaming Bill Ryder-Jones’ album If….

I fell in love by the end of the first track. Nah, before.

It’s meant as a soundtrack to Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler (which, admittedly, I never finished) and he recorded it with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. One song in and I felt like the skies had opened up to bright sun rays, or perhaps, the gates had opened up and the horses had come running through the pasture, or, perhaps, I had woken up and gone to the bow of the boat and there was a wall of iceberg above me. It’s that kind of traveling, meditation music, meant to hug you when you’re lonely.

And the title reminded me of another piece that did all the things I mentioned above, but perhaps one step further.

I was at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco about five years ago for an Ed Ruscha show (my devotion to him newly discovered). I turned the corner and I saw this:

It was, of course, much bigger than the image you see above and of course, there was much more depth to the ink, and those two letters at the bottom (obscenely indelicate in this internet version), alone and so vulnerable in that black field. And, perhaps it was the day, you never know, but it really got to me. I shed a few tears. I have been awed into speechlessness by Flavins and Deans and Huyghes, yes, but this is the one that I felt in my chest.

(PS And yeah, that Bill is a cutie.)

So it’s the New Year. Usually I can’t stay away from this significant marker and I do a round-up of my favorite photos from the past year, my favorite stories. I may even write a few resolutions.

I’m afraid this year I’ve skipped all that. We’re round the corner and last night, while struggling to come up with a few resolutions, even in lightheartedness, I realized I had none.

I will do as I have to do, every day, as I see fit. That is all, I guess.

Happy New Year, though.

1.

I wrote a blog for the Walker a real genuine blog, born from a natural curiosity, about artist Red Groom and his The Discount Store installation, a replica-of-sorts of a Crystal, MN Target store. If I love anything, it’s research, and I used to write essay-length blog posts while I was a (bored and underutilized) intern, sneaking down into the archives for exhibition paraphernalia and old articles. This is getting closer to a return to form. (Complete with Disney reference!)

2.

I’ve been in a music funk for such a long time, but I think it’s because I find one artist (or song) and listen to it incessantly. Most recently: Little Scream. (Honorable mention: Suuns, who, with Little Scream, are on the trustworthy label Secretly Canadian.)

3.

Anthony Burrill. He spoke at the Walker tonight and, having not seen anything other than his iconic woodblock posters and the Gulf of Mexico project, the oil-printed Oil and Water Do Not Mix, I was in for a big treat. He’s interested in geometry and architecture, music and form, and, in an endearing statement: “I like lining things up straight.” He spoke to us like a person simply interested in making beautiful things–none of that designer frippery that sometimes happens at these lectures.

4.

A note from Patrice. I received a religious holiday thank you card from Patrice, who, as documented, I sent a letter to on behalf of a young man in Mali. Patrice is not a fellow 9th grader who has only seen Mali on a map, he is, in fact, an adult who met this boy last year when the boy asked him to be pen pals. “It was very nice to meet him,” writes Patrice.

5.

On Sunday, I went to see the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra perform a Brahms, a Beethoven Piano Concerto, and this crazy thing: Brett Dean’s Pastoral Symphony. The composer says:

Butin wishing to celebrate this wonderful abundance of treasures in the present day, I, for one, find it increasingly difficult to separate my love of the sounds of the natural world from an immense and growing sense of loss.

What a cacophony it was! There were two musicians in the back doing percussion full-time: a metal sheet, xylophones (those were wonderful), a sheet of aluminum, tiny symbols, a full drum set, a gong–all the while with pre-recorded samples zipping about, the aural representation of Dean’s “growing sense of loss”–construction, machinery, road noises. Was it pleasant to listen to? Not at all. Was it fascinating? Absolutely.

This concludes the first (of many?) round-up of things I have seen and heard in my life.