Ha/f Culture

Eco Transparent Surfboard

The Transparent Surfboard by Atelier Yanagi can open a new ‘green’ arena for sports equipment. The ace-maker of sport equipments is working on a surfboard made out of 100 % recyclable material (PET & Balsa-wood structured hybrid) with no compromise on performance and safety. With the entire design industry seemingly hellbent on eco-friendly products, it’s nice to see one that will also help to prevent lurking sneak attacks whilst caching the ultimate ride.

You can observe Yanagi’s passion for surfing as well as the development of the Transparent Surfboard at his website (in English or Japanese).

Casey Ruble: Except in Struggle

Casey Ruble’s first solo exhibition in New York should resonate with any child of mixed Asian decent: behind a superficial conflict between her meticulously painted warriors lies a deeper struggle between color and Eastern and Western influences.

Showing at the Foley Gallery, Ruble takes the title of her show from the seventh declaration of the 1909 Futurist manifesto, whose first line reads: “Except in struggle, there is no more beauty.” In an achievement of simultaneous aesthetic chaos and harmony, Ruble pits her mounted warriors in battle in a literal depiction of conflict, entangled in dense, quasi-organic environments. Ruble’s vibrant palette heightens the assertion of tension and concord in an embrace of color-theory phenomena while she also forces together Eastern and Western spatial conventions and employs compositions influenced by the disparate practices of traditional Japanese pictorial art and American post-painterly abstraction. The patterns on her warriors’ costumes derive from sources including Islamic architecture, Art Nouveau designs, Chinese lattices, and 1960s op-art geometries.

For more work by Casey Ruble, you can visit her website. Except in Struggle is on view at the Foley Gallery, see details below.

Except in Struggle
Through 15 November 2008
Foley Gallery
547 W 27th Street, 5th floor
New York, NY 10001 
tel +1 212 244 9081

Kind Words from Beau Sia:

uberion

Body:

thank you very much for taking the time to write me, and for letting me know about the site and my appearance on it.

i’m glad you’re trying to explore and affirm your identity beyond what is being imposed on you by the world. i wish you strength with that.

i also appreciate your positivity towards me. although i am awkward about accepting compliments, it feels good and means a lot to receive positive messages in this world. thank you. it gives me strength to continue my work.

take care.

love, beau

AiAiAi

If you’re an egghead like me, you know more than anyone that over-the-head headphones simply don’t fit over your enormous cranium. If you’re also an east coast elitist like me, you have absolutely destroyed many a Apple, stock white ear buds in a cynical rage as you untangle the chords for the upteenth time while fuming about campaign rhetoric. Thankfully, the nice folks at AiAiAi have a bipartisan series of ear buds to solve all of your audiophile woes.

Recently H/C received a pair of AiAiAi Y-Model earbuds all the way from Denmark in a delightful acrylic package that is somewhere between a POG canister and a tube of secret Ooze from TMNT II. Printed on the cylindrical packaging are the technical specs (for all you Ivy League “scientists,” apparently the jury is still out on science) as well as graphic instructions for using the in-ear headphones (for all you Joe Sixpacks!). Included in the canister are three sets of buds (two silicone and one foam), allowing for comfort and sound isolation for an ear of any size.

Despite superior sound quality and bass response engineered by C4 studios, the most impressive design feature of the Y-Model are the AiAiAi extra wide wires. The relatively large diameter of the wires prevents tangled annoyances, passing the tried and true H/C “neglected at the bottom of a backpack” test without and singe knot.

The Y-Model earbuds come in a variety of colors including a medical device grey and pastel pallette. iPhone models are available as well. For more pics of AiAiAi products and a list of distributers, visit aiaiai.dk.

Masao Yamamoto: Kawa-Flow

Masao Yamamoto’s current installation, entitled “Kawa-Flow,” is an anachronism, belonging to a sensibility that contrasts vividly with the large-scale color photographs that are prevalent today.

Yamamoto explores notions of memory and time in this collection of several dozen pocket-sized and intentionally worn photographs. Functioning like words or phrases in what Yamamoto calls his “dictionary,” the unframed photographs are attached directly to the gallery wall in a loose constellation where the white space comes forward as an equal visual element in the composition. Says the artist:

What overflows from one photograph would flow into the next piece, and in two’s and threes, the groups would create a combined effect, like the layered notes of an orchestra.

Kawa-Flow is on view until October 18 at the Yancey Richardson Gallery:

Yancey Richardson Gallery
535 West 22nd Street 3rd floor
New York NY 10011 map
tel. +1 646 230 9610

In Search of Freedom: An Evening of Music and Conversation with Cheol Woong Kim

Photo and text by Gaetano Ling

As pianist Cheol Woong Kim wiped sweat from his forehead with boyish mannerism, he sheepishly said through a translator, “This is the most nervous I’ve ever been at a performance.” He then bashfully laughed along with the packed crowd at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center, which was primarily comprised of young music students and a few distinguished classical aficionados.

Such genuine, innocent humility is rare in a musician of Kim’s status: a piano prodigy born and raised in Pyongyang, North Korea, he was selected for admission to the prestigious Pyongyang University of Music and Dance at the age of eight. “Only eight or nine students are selected a year,” Kim recalls, “out of about 8,000 to 9,000 applicants. So it is very difficult. Not only must you be musically talented, but your family must be in very good standing with the government.” Thanks to his father’s position as a ranking member in North Korea’s powerful decision making body, the Politburo, Kim was able to excel at Pyongyang University: graduating as the top pianist in 1995 and going on to become the nation’s first pianist in the State Symphony Orchestra.

Despite his privileged life in his native country, Kim became dissatisfied under the repression of the North Korean government. While enrolled in the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, Kim was exposed to music that is banned in North Korea:

I heard this piece in Moscow. While I was practicing the song [after coming back to North Korea], some inspectors happened to be in the building and caught me. I wanted to play the song for my potential girlfriend. She was my love. I saw these movies where the guy plays a romantic song and wins the girl. So I thought if I played this romantic song, my potential girlfriend would become my actual girlfriend. But I never got to play the song for her.

Such government crackdowns on foreign influence are common in North Korea. In a country where any outsider contemporary music composed after the year 1900 is deemed as ‘jazz’ and considered barbaric, works from the likes of Stravinsky and Gershwin simply do not exist. Even external classical music dating before 1900 is hard to come by in North Korea as it is a law that for every one foreign song an artist learns, he must learn two songs composed by North Koreans.

Kim’s knowledge of North Korean music was evident in his repertoire Wednesday night, as it included his rendition of “Arirang Sonata” (based on a traditional folk tune) as well as a breathtaking duet with Korean-American pianist Sun Eun Han-Anderson of Dong Choon Sung’s “Chosun is One,” which elicited a standing ovation and shouts of “bravo!” from the audience. However, Kim was quick to note that such moving performances are rare in his native land: “North Koreans are all very good technically, but typically they are not good musicians.”

It was this lack of inspiration and passion in Korean music which caused Kim to seek artistic freedom. In 2001, he twice attempted to escape North Korea, but, due to his renowned talent and family ties to the government, he was easily found and deported back. On his third effort to leave the country, Kim left as a refugee, working 17-18 hours a day at a timber mill in China and in 2003, finally arrived in South Korea.

Unlearning the North Korean preconceptions of democratic, free cultures that were imposed on him by propaganda and repression was a non issue for Kim. As he puts it,

It was very easy. It doesn’t take that long to change. People who don’t know the taste of chocolate learn quickly how sweet it is. I learned the sweetness of chocolate.

Now a free man, Kim can play the song that he heard in Moscow; the one that caused him to defect from North Korea, the song that he was forbidden to play, the song to win over the girl.

So with sweat dripping from his forhead, he leaned over the keys, closed his eyes and launched into Clayderman’s “Autumn Leaves.” His fingers stroked each note with pronounced conviction, utter compassion and boyish anxiety, as if playing for his love, reminding everyone in the room that beyond any government lies individuals seeking pure self expression and a yearning for the most noble of human emotions.

Behind the Scenes at Corduroy Magazine

H/C very pleased to announce that our dear friends at Corduroy magazine will be featuring a photospread with models of mixed heritage in their upcoming fall issue. The shoot took place on the roof of Corduroy’s Brooklyn studio in natural light with photographer Peter Ash Lee capturing the unique qualities of each model; celebrating the odd and distinctive nature which makes being a mutt so (gosh darn) beautiful.

All the behind the scenes action can be seen at Corduroy’s blog. And keep an eye out for Corduroy’s fall issue, due to hit book store stands very soon.

(Image via corduroymag)

Japón en Negro

This year’s San Sabastian Film Festival featured not only new films, but an interesting assemblage of old. The festival hosted a retrospective of Japanese Film Noir or Japon en Negro. A complex genre born out of imported American detective films, Japanese film noir is essentially American film noir digested by the Japanese post-war psyche. It even has its own nationalistic spin. The retrospective was thorough, beginning with the first post-war Japanese detective movies, tracing the genre through the Yakuza films of the 1960s.

A list of the Japanese films that were shown at the San Sabastian Film Festical can be found at sansebastianfestival.com.

3 Compilation Albums

After Apple went and took all the careful dedication out of assembling a good mix tape with their “genius” button for iTunes 8, H/C decided to commemorate three compilation albums that were curated by professionals, offering a mélange of artists worthy of articulating a particular period/style in music. Because no matter what Steve Jobs says, a playlist that includes both Cream and Jon Mayer is debatable.

Tropicália: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound

As a coherent movement allied to worldwide political and cultural unrest, Tropicália, born in 1968,  lasted little more than a year, yet it had – and continues to have – a profound effect on Brazilian society. Mixing psychedelic rock, avant-garde musique concrete (tape loops, sound experiments), samba, funk and soul, Tropicália was so radical – and its social implications so politically profound - that its leading protagonists, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, were arrested, imprisoned and finally exiled in 1969. Tropicália’s unique ideology mixed high art with mass culture. Tropicália created musical and cultural anarchy, a revolution in Brazilian sound with a legacy later to be internationally championed by such diverse artists as David Byrne, Beck, Kurt Cobain, Stereolab, The Bees and Tortoise.

Tropicália from Soul Jazz records is the first album to bring together all the key artists involved in the movement – Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Tom Zé, Gal Costa among others. The album also features one of the most poignant tracks by the legendary Jorge Ben, Take It Easy My Brother Charlie, which is arguably more  socially radical and dancable than every M.I.A. song combined.

Summer Records Anthology 1974-1988

With the rapid approach of winter, the idea of curling up in front of a fireplace with some friends and chilling to reggae/dub becomes increasingly appealing.

Throughout most of the seventies, Canadian-produced reggae music was a commercial non-entity, bar a thriving underground scene of ex-pats who simply did what came naturally to them in small studios and private dances. The Summer Records Anthology (1974-1988) is a reputable collection of tracks and unreleased sessions from local and traveling Jamaican musicians who recorded in Jerry Brown’s Malton, Ontario-based Summer Sound Studios. A veritable who’s who of reggae music legends can be heard on this album including Jackie Mittoo, Willi Williams, Noel Ellis, Johnnie Osbourne and many others.

Lost In Translation Soundtrack

While a soundtrack may not evoke the same sense of grandeur in comparison to other music collections, anyone who has had to ride the night train home by his/her self can appreciate Sophia Cappola’s somber, quirky mix of shoe box and international pop songs. Ambient compositions by Brian Reitzell and Air as well as dusky songs from the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Kevin Shields, and The Jesus & Mary Chain lend to the general “I’m lost” sensation. Then suddenly the listener finds his/her self jingling along to sprinklings of subdued pop tunes from the French band Phoenix and Japan’s Happy End without interrupting the sunless mood. With its dark overtones and moments of charming discovery (there is also a hidden track of Bill Murray’s karaoke rendition of More than This), the Lost In Translation soundtrack successfully encompasses the solitude and serendipity of the urban experience.