undead astronauts

2009 Lights On Merrimac Ridge Animated Lights from Merrimac Ridge on Vimeo.

omg i love it.

The popular music being produced out of Taiwan and Hong Kong was an important part of my emotional life growing up. I remember my aunt brought me one CD of a successful pianist in Taiwan who released covers of popular Chinese hits. The CD included a small booklet with the sheet music to the songs on the CD, and I was so taken by the music that I brought this small booklet to my classical piano teacher – a red-headed lady who had once threatened to chop me up into little pieces after a poor practice session – so that I could learn one of the songs on it. The pianist was Eric Chen, and I can’t seem to find any solo performances of his, but here is an MV of him accompanying a singer on piano:
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This is from the Japanese Horror/Comedy/Musical ‘Happiness of the Katakuris’, loosely based on the Korean film ‘The Quiet Family’, which wasn’t a musical.

Here’s an old Jay Chou MV:

late, yeah i know. but this video really reminded me of how much influence michael had, and that pop culture used to accept uplifting songs that challenged ppl to be better.

here are some tribute vids:
filipino prisoner tribute (filmed 10 hrs after news arrived @ prison)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OK25cfzdTTg

jane liu cover of: you are not alone
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRKf9K5Tyg8

far east movement, quest, wongfu: dance like mj
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCtEvOdOZvg

there are a few moments in history that i just remember the feeling of and what i was doing. the challenger explosion, the berlin wall falling, the first moments of the first iraq war, 9/11. and now, maybe mj’s passing. his songs have been playing all weekend, and it’s just amazing how many of his songs are famous and how much he affected the pop culture of my youth. my dad was even talking about how he admired mj’s song & dance and tried to sing a line or two of billie jean to my utter horror. when my dad talks about pop culture affecting him, u know it’s gotta big.

w/ boa’s flop, i was thinking the korean attempt at entering the US music market was a complete failure. but news has leaked that the wonder girls are going to tour w/ those sickly sweet jonas bros. not sure how jyp managed to work that in, but i suppose it’s another chance for asian pop stars to “make it” in the US.

but boa’s not taking her album failure lying down. she’s apparently headlining the 2009 SF gay pride parade and will perform on the main stage. far be it from me to say boa shouldn’t jump at every opportunity to market herself, but i wonder how well her core fanbase of asian americans is going to mesh w/ the other paraders.

saw this at gnxp. some studies had shown that asians had perfect pitch much more often than other races. a new study shows that this is related to tonal language rather than genes.

“Perfect pitch for years seemed like a beautiful gift – given only to a few genetically endowed people. But our research suggests that it might be available to virtually everybody,” Deutsch said.

…

In 2004, she found that students at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, were almost nine times more likely to have perfect pitch than students at the Eastman School of Music in New York. That last study, however, left open the question of whether perfect pitch might be a genetic trait – since all the Mandarin speakers were East Asian.

The present study looked at 203 students at the University of Southern California’s Thornton School of Music, all of whom agreed to take the test in class (so there was no self-selection in the sample). The students listened to the 36 notes that haphazardly spanned three octaves. They attempted to identify the notes, and they self-reported their musical, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds – including whether they were very fluent in an East Asian tone language, fairly fluent or not at all fluent. Deutsch and her colleagues found that students who spoke an East Asian tone language very fluently scored nearly 100 percent on the test, and that students who were only fairly fluent in a tone language scored lower overall. Those students – either Caucasian or East Asian – who were not at all fluent in speaking a tone language scored the worst on average.

time to invest in companies that teach mandarin, no? anyways, if u’re interested to know whether u have perfect pitch, go here and find out. i most definitely don’t have perfect pitch.

courtesy disgrasian:

hip hop: the new lingua franca

mongolian bling teaser from benj binks on Vimeo.

so true.

Embedding has been disabled for this video, but the video is of a 47 year old lady singing on Britain’s Got Talent.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

Not much to say about this, other than that it is a masterpiece of songwriting.

http://www.britneyspears.com/2009/03/official-if-u-seek-amy-music-video.php