It's 11pm and the jackhammering on the main thoroughfare a couple of blocks aways goes unabated. My housemate tells me that this is not unusual -- better to dig up a major road when there is little traffic than at rush hour. I hope the noise stops soon however. This little camper needs his beauty rest.

i spent some time this afternoon at the Berkeley Public Library searching for children's books that involve Chinese-American or Chinese-Canadian characters and themes. (What I found is summarized in my Wiki entry ChineseNorthAmericanChildrensBooks.) Two major reasons motivated my search. First of all, I'm an uncle now; my sister Janice recently had a baby boy! Second, as I have alluded in past entries, I myself could stand to do a lot more reading. I actually think that reading children's books is a good way for me to get started. Not only do they assume less background on the part of the reader than adult books (naturally!), but they are really deeply multi-senory experiences that touch deeply the child in me who needs to get a bit more educated.

I'll continue my search, updating my wiki along the way. I didn't realize how much I'm enjoying spending more time in the children's sections of my local bookstores and libraries!

Some days, I really don't know what to blog. That doesn't mean that I don't have anything to write. For good or bad, I've gotten to a point where I want my blog entries to be reasonably well-crafted. And often, I don't have quite enough energy to write such entries.

That's where my wiki comes in. I don't feel the same high standards for entries there and therefore feel freer to do braindumps there. Ocassionally if I write something of particular interest in my wiki, I'll draw attention to it on my blog. Should you care, you can find out what's new on my wiki by going to the RecentChanges page, where you can see that I wrote recently about BachAndJazz and that my former housemate Christian Stimming has been posting information about his upcoming wedding to Anne. (Congratulations, Christian!)

Recently, I've started receiving comments on my blog that are on the border of being relevant to the discussion on hand, prompting me to think a bit harder about my policy concerning what to do with comments (or writing in general) that happens on my websites. I'm using my wiki to write up my thoughts and policy: MyBlogWikiCommentingPolicy. Any comments about it?

From Independent: "What should you write?":

But most blogs are, it must be said, badly written and poorly presented - the kind of drivel that gets read only reluctantly even by the authors' closest friends and family. Even so there are an awfully lot of good blogs - interesting, provocative, and passionate; direct, opinionated and informative. The best ones all have a unique approach or view that sets them apart, and engineer a sense of community among readers. They can be a great way of finding information too often ignored by the mainstream media. [via Scripting News]

Figuring out what to write is more of a challenge than I think that it should be. And I certainly find it incredibly challenging to maintain a consistently high level of writing.

Lloyd put out a call for lists:

So, who would like to share a list of something on a weblog entry? Come on, you've got a list stashed somewhere. I know it. 😉 Naturally, I'll list all responses here.

I was particularly struck by Lloyd's list of periodicals that he has subscribed
to at one point or another: Let me put in bold ones I also subscribed to at one
point or another.

• Atlantic Monthly
• Brill's Content
• Commentary
• Dissent
• The Economist
• Elysian Fields Quarterly
• Far Eastern Economic Review
• Foreign Affairs
• Granta
• Harper's Magazine
• In These Times
• Macworld
• MacWeek
• Mother Jones
• The Nation
• National Geographic
• The New Republic
• New Scientist
• The New York Review of Books
• The New York Times
• The New Yorker
• Newsweek
• The Progressive
• Psychology Today
• Red Herring
• The San Francisco Chronicle
• Scientific American
• Sports Illustrated
• Threepenny Review
• Tikkun
• TIME
• The Times Literary Supplement
• US News and World Report
• Utne Reader
• Vanity Fair
• Washington Monthly
• Weekly Standard
• WebTechniques
• Wilson Quarterly
• WIRED

I'll throw in two lists of my own:

• My amazon
  wishlist -- which I add to through my wireless phone when I'm browsing
  at a bookstore and see a book that intrigues me. I just type a search on amazon
  and drop it on the list,
• My
  current RSS subscription list in OPML (XML) format.

Not terribly inspired but I'm sure revealing, nevertheless.

Laura wrote:

ugh, I need to start writing here more often, and at greater length, because I'm losing my fluidity and my sense of my own voice. I want to follow up on Raymond's wonderful piece on the presentation by Neil Brand, which he and friends Ildi and Peter and I attended on Saturday night. I'm having so much trouble composing that I've been making notes in MS word and shuffling them around, the way I used to when I was on deadline. One thing I like about blogging is that I don't usually have to do that--so I'd better get back into practice.

I sympathize....I find that blogging is a game of inertia -- though not exactly of the Newtonian type. A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest. I know how fluid Laura's writing can be -- so I look forward to the return of words to her blog!

Last night my friends Ildi, Peter, Laura, and I attended a special PFA event featuring Neil Brand:

WHERE DOES THE MUSIC COME FROM?

Lecture and Piano Accompaniment by Neil Brand

Gain a new perspective on film, music, and the creative process in this special evening with Neil Brand, one of the best-known silent film accompanists working today. Brand will lead the audience through the creation of an improvised score, playing piano accompaniment to excerpts from Pandora's Box (G. W. Pabst, 1929), South (Frank Hurley, 1919), and Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, Robert Siodmak, 1930)—as well as one clip from the PFA Collection that will be a surprise to both the audience and Brand himself—and discussing ideas of emotional color and narrative structure in a presentation that promises to be funny, self-revealing, and provocative. This talk is adapted from a lecture first delivered at the Pordenone Silent Film Festival in memory of New Zealand's Jonathan Dennis, a tireless archivist, champion of silent film, and dear friend of PFA who passed away in 2002.

I must say that the lecture/demonstration exceeded my already high expectations for the evening. Granted, I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. Though I was intrigued by the prospect of hearing about how a piano player might create a "sound track" for a silent film, I could see why a lot of my friends couldn't care for it; how relevant is silent film today?

Plenty relevant, I learned from Neil Brand. First of all, he pointed out how much we expect music to be part of the films we see. But isn't that a bit odd? Why do we want a rousing orchestral accompaniment to big dramatic events like a plane crash or an invasion in our movies? That's pretty far from reality. Hence, the way that music is created for silent films provides a wonderful window into how music is created for today's movies. We might not think too hard about the soundtracks of today's films since we take them for granted. Having Neil Brand create that music for a film that was made years ago -- something we don't experience very often -- helps unsettle what we take for granted.

The amazing thing about "piano players" like Neil Brand (he never said "pianists") is that they often improvise the scores to films! So he is providing real time commentary to the film that must bring out key elements while not being overbearing. And he has to do it when he doesn't even know what the film will be about ahead of time. Rather amazing how many things piano accompanists would have to keep track of, all the while spinning out music suitable for the film.

Another key insight I got last night: silent films are far from dead. Why? Because there are a lot of amateur videographers -- parents, for instances, with videocams who are essentially making silent films. OK -- the films of little Johnny or Joanne have some meaningful audio. By and large, however, these videos are just crying out to have a soundtrack. The vast majority of us are not in the creative position that Neil Brand is. While we reach out for the CD of some music that we particularly like and think might fit as background music for our little masterpieces, Brand can write and improvise his own scores. So far from being relic of dead art -- Neil Brand has the gifts and skills that I'd love to have for my own media work. Would it be great for me to film aspects of life around me and sit down at the piano to improvise a score for it?

It seems that there is a chance that Neil Brand will be back at the PFA next year. Don't miss him the next time around!

After reading The New York Review of Books: Italy: The Family Business, I'm amazed that a corrupt leader of a modern western country like Italy can stay in power -- regardless of how rich he is. (Boy, that was a naive statement!) If you don't know much about modern Italy, I highly recommend the essay. A quote that caught my eye was:

It would be a mistake to dismiss Berlusconi as a vaguely comical product of an Italian subculture. Italy has a remarkable record in the twentieth century as a kind of laboratory of bad ideas that have then spread to other parts of the world. Fascism was invented in Italy, so was the mafia; and left-wing terrorism went further in Italy than in any other European country. All three were byproducts of a weak democracy with few checks and balances. As a country that was late to unify and industrialize, Italy is a place where all the strains and problems of modern life are present, but with few of the safeguards that exist in older, more stable nations; ideas get taken to their logical extreme. The increasingly close relations between big money, politics, and television are important everywhere, but in Italy, thanks to Berlusconi's domination of the networks and the press, they have achieved a kind of apotheosis. He has now introduced a law that will make it legal for him to own newspapers as well.

After reading the essay, I typed Berlusconi into google and got a lesson in modern media. One of the top entries is a "Cool man of the week" profile of Berlusconi from AskMen. As you can imagine, a different perspective from the NYRB. An illustrative quote:

He has a beautiful wife, but don't kid yourselves, he is well aware of his charm and his magnetism with the fairer sex.

Power and money have historically been aphrodisiacs for women, and Berlusconi has both. In a country with beauties such as Maria Grazia Cucinotta and Monica Bellucci, that could be a very good thing.

Though I've heard many good things about Michael Moore's sometimes over-the-top documentaries, I still haven't seen any. Nonetheless, I know that there is much controversy around them. (I remember seeing a website claiming to debunk Moore's Bowling for Collumbine.) In case I do end up seeing this film, I'll read his response to critics [kuro5hin.org]