Month: August 2003

Shac gets political

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SHAC: vote for the candidate w/ a blog
BRIAN: yeesh
SHAC: raised in oakland?
BRIAN: who, that guy?
SHAC: girl
SHAC: i bet she went to Moreau
BRIAN: I don’t see no pictures
SHAC: http://www.georgyforgov.com
BRIAN: ahh there we are
BRIAN: pretty cute
BRIAN: her “open letter” is pretty good
SHAC: wow she actually went to public school…
SHAC: tho its the best public school in oakland
BRIAN: OakTown! gotta represent!
BRIAN: get her on TV
SHAC: from the schools she went to..
SHAC: she lived in the more upper-middle class area of oakland
BRIAN: Disney Channel
SHAC: if not the upper class
BRIAN: she IS very idealistic
BRIAN: and very clean

Moment of Zen #3

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SHAC: umm… whats going on in
this banner?
BRIAN: what the fuck is that a picture of
BRIAN: is he strangling her?
BRIAN: I used to be on sixdegrees
SHAC: my interpretation…
SHAC: make crop circles…
SHAC: strangle each other..
SHAC: be buried together w/ green finger nails
BRIAN: Yeh why the hell not

Mochi

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Mochi mochi mochi. Recently I got the two big mochi recipe books: Hawaii’s Best Mochi Recipies and Unbearably Good! Mochi Lovers’ Cookbook. But so far I haven’t found any savory dishes listed which use mochi, only different ways to make dessert mochi.

Mochi melts like cheese, but since it is only rice and water, there is no fat. The rice mochi is made from is soft and sweeter than normal white rice. I had it when my friends Kazue and Kaori treated me and Aaron to okonomiyaki in Tokyo. We also had an appetizer at a nicer restaurant which were kind of like taquitos, but with more Japanese ingredients and mochi instead of cheese. I don’t know what it was called or how it was made. Yet.

While surfing I stumbled onto Kudzu Mochi. Insane! Apparently you can make a unrefined “black sugar” from “kudzu,” a plant which people in the South have grown to love due to its use as a ground cover in the 1930’s ( the vine is even more horrible than ivy and can destroy buildings). But you CAN’T BUY this black sugar due to intense sugar industry lobbying. Bizarre.

Won’t You Please Free The Software?

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I just heard RMS singing. Richard Stallman, the guy who runs the Free Software Foundation. I thought it was a joke, why would he write a song called “Free the Software”? It was just insane. Plus the name of the file was “why cooperation with RMS is impossible.” Got to be a joke.

But then I remembered hearing it in person once… and then I realised I had SUPPRESSED the memory. The horror of it had scarred my brain.

So I’m asking all of you, whether you have experienced this trauma, or aided a friend who has, or maybe just heard about it, to dig a little deeper and give to my
“For The Love Of All Things Holy Make RMS Stop Fucking Singing The Free The Software Song Goddamn It Fund” (or “the FTLOATHMRMSSFSTFTSSGI Fund” for short ).
Operators are standing by.

SF Zine Fest 2003

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Last weekend my friend and I went to the San Francisco Zine Fest hosted at CELLspace in the Mission. About half the room was filled with people presenting what I normally picture when I think of “zine” (did you understand that sentence? I sure hope so) .

A “Zine” being a white paper pamphlet, usually around 20 pages, with text by the publisher accompanied by black and white images cribbed from random sources, all “bound” with a couple of staples from the copy store. Super ghetto, but hey, what do you expect for $1 or $2? This is the kind of thing I expect to see from teenagers or maybe some of the more punk-rock zinesters…

Some had taken self-publishing to a more advanced level: there were a couple with very nice color covers (one woman was using a “Firey”), and one that even came with a CD with a sort of “sound collage” in every issue.

There would be a table full of these things, and a person sitting behind it (the author/publisher), and maybe one of their friends. They would wait for you to walk up and leaf through their zine, and then you’d kind of self-consciously shuffle on… So, I bought one because it looked interesting. I bought another one. Nothing real new, mainly good for morning toilet reading…. Lots of really ranty material and lame autobiographical / stream of consciousness articles (like say this one)

Then we got to the other half of the room- the self-published comics. Woo hoo!

The “Coolest Paraphenalia” award definitely goes to Debbie Huey and her comic Bumperboy. Books! Buttons! Stickers! Marble bags! All with Bumperboy on them. He’s just so damn cute!

One of the funniest things I saw there was “Gobler Toys: The Fun We Don’t Remember” by Steve Casino and Steve Fink. It’s one of those nostalgia books about all the cool toys they had in the 1960s… except in this case most of them are terrible dangerous ideas and none of them are real. For example the salami-scented remote control sandwich, or the giant “weeble” you can bolt your kid in and kick down the staris… Obviously I bought a copy of this. Plus I scored a free calendar, filled with Attaboy’s fucked-up imagery. You can see more of his work at Yum Factory and buy the little squeeze dolls he has there.

I was bummed to hear I missed Jason Shiga, who was there on Saturday. He has some of the craziest comics I’ve ever read- either because of innovative stories like “Fleep” (which is like a one-character “Phonebooth”) or his crazy choose-your-own-adventure comic, “Meanwhile…,” which not only has huge numbers of multiple endings, but also secret pages which you can only get to by reading the comic out of sequence. “Meanwhile…” has some zany plot elements embodied as sci-fi gadgets (a machine which lets you go back in time 10 minutes, a cap that lets its wearer read the minds of the dead, and The Killotron, which kills everyone in the world in a fraction of a second), but the story is not really sci-fi, it’s more “magic realism.”

Another online comic represented at SF Zine was Small Stories which is super cool. It’s written and illustrated by Derek Kirk Kim, who probably thinks I’m a complete maniac because I totally grilled him at his table about what he was doing for the “asian comics scene,” which I have to admit I knew was nonexistent even before I started interrogating him. I had been reading his comics online for months, and now that they are in print form I of course had to have a copy. I am lobbying my local comics stores to start stocking them.