Hong Kong Vintage Pop Radio Station
Music
Driven by my FRENZIED POST on my personal blog about Adam Cheng and the unfairness surrounding him, I stumbled upon this wonderful site which streams classic Cantonese Pop online. Run by one Anni Lam, this radio station plays song from Cantopop veterans like Andy Lau, Sally Yeh and yes, even my beloved Adam Cheng. I’m damn proud of my Cantonese roots and I’d really like to share some tunes with all through HKVP.
Be Kind Rewind
Movies
Michel Gondry has done it again, but this time it’s a comedy movie hailing the brilliance of home made videos. Starring Jack Black and Mos Def. Expect bad, cheesy home created sound and visual effects.
患得患失
Musings, Writings
The Chinese saying of 患得患失 means upon gaining, one also fears losing, thus rendering one unable to enjoy one has.
I think it is a powerful message for everyone of us, especially to myself and it rings true for the philosopher, the designer and the lover. If you’re unable to read Chinese, the gist of the article can be extracted from this story.
A man had several pieces of pottery that he wanted to sell at the bazaar. So he loaded them onto cart and began to make his way down. On his way, the bumpy roads caused a few pieces of pottery to fall off the cart and smash into pieces, but the man continued onward to the bazaar without so much of a glance at the broken pottery. Alarmed, passersby tell him about his loss. To that the man calmly replied, “Why look back on the smashed pottery? It is already broken beyond repair!” His point was, rather than focus on the irreversible past, why not focus on the salvageable future and go towards it.
Simon Whybray
Design
Simon Whybray’s project’s page might be a temporary solution, but it is a temporary solution that will probably work better than any souped up idea dreamed up. The one-page-shows-all style saved me time and let me soak in Whybray goodness without having to deal with navigations that rival those found in architecture simulation programs. I like how the colourful, boldly sized graphics are displayed unapologetically.
Typing with invisible ink
Advertising, Design, Weird shit
I found these on Typeish. Typeish proclaims itself to be a image bookmarking database. Typeish is a wonderland of eccentric images, attitudinal graphics, beautiful photography, high fashion and questionable sanity. It is advertising without the fluff of candy copy. Typing with invisible ink, letting the imagery do the talking.
Great photography but…
Design
Great photography but horrible site. The many scrollbars and iframes made me tired even before I looked halfway through the site. The exhausting vertical scroll expanded into a lengthy horizontal obscured the photography. The confusing URL link colours (both red AND black) made me miss a good portion of Bela Borsodi’s work.
Bela deserves better.
Get bankrupt: A step-by-step plan
Weird shit
In a world obsessed about making money and even more money, it is sad for the unfortunate few who are desperately seeking information on how to bankrupt their very own start up business. But have no fear! Southwest Interactive has it covered!
Automatic Art
Design, Interactive
Julien Pacaud teams up with Kevin Luck to create a automatic canvas. Built in Flash, the Flick API allows Flash to pull user-specified images from Flickr’s ever-updating bank of photos. This showcases the beauty of good tagging. If images were tagged sensibly and logically, the flexibility of the API would be almost limitless and very specific to point.
Going mechanical in a digital world: Gondry for Motorola
Advertising, Design, Interactive
Michel Gondry insisted on going mechanical in a digital world and it resulted in the cutest, most fun video I’ve seen on this Monday. Play hopscotch on a pavement and a building greets you. Dive into a sea of blue coloured people after a concert of your choice. Friends appear a push of a button. Welcome to Gondry’s vision for Motorola RAZR².
» Take a glimpse behind the scenes here.
While visiting the site, I noticed that Papervision (Papercloud to be specific) was employed to display the gallery of stills. Personally, I am pretty disgusted with my fellow Flash designers for getting SO carried away with possibilities of Flash technologies that they utterly forget about usability and branding. While I am a bit irritated with the lack of control of what stills I want to view, (They kinda fly all over the screen), I like how it melds nicely with the whimsical nature of the Gondry’s showpiece. Along with the clouds floating slowly in the background, this is one sweet dream that I wish wasn’t plagued with streaming issues and slow loading.
Dark Side of the Moon
Writings
I can’t even begin to tell you how much, how much I love Pink Floyd’s sixth album without resorting to sugary clichés. It is singularly, THE richest, most expansive, most expressive seamless album ever created. Until now it still amazes me how Pink Floyd managed to create such a masterpiece without a massive bank of pre-recorded sound effects and the help of supercomputers to calculate complex, mathematical formulas for composing music. The quirky sound effects meld so perfectly with the velvety smooth bass, drums and guitars to support the vocals, pushing forth a dizzying, breathtaking song that lasts for the better part of an hour.Much as I hate to admit it, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon artful segue of tracks does outshine Queen’s 1974 Queen II segue on the Black side of the album. As the songs unfold and I lose all ability use words to describe that unyielding attraction that makes me hang onto every word (despite having heard this album through dozens of times). Every time I listen to Dark Side of the Moon, I get so hypnotised I cease to notice anything that happens around me. All I am aware of are the waves of varying beats and sound effects arranging themselves in my frontal lobe, explaining themselves without any words, yet I understand them perfectly. I run after them in hopes of finding out the secrets of the reflecting prism.
It weaves an elaborate, eccentric dream in the listener’s head without making sleep fall. In this dream, opera singers don’t sing intelligible words but we all understand them. In this dream, monetary objects become musical instruments. In this dream, every odyssey is different as each dreamer assigns his own meaning to his experience.
Dark Side of the Moon has a strange, calming effect on me. During periods of great stress, I’d put Dark Side of the Moon on and let it untangle the knots within me, created by the cold hands of panic. My heart revives as waves of pleasure wash over it. As the album fades into silence, I sigh in contentment and go back to real life.
