my latest thinking is that in twenty years or so when we are taken over by chinese/asian corporate/state entities we will all be alot better off… as i understand it the chinese economy is booming and if we keep depleting our funds on expsenive and pointless military initiatives… well its probably already too late to do anything about it, i dont pretend to understand the economics of the situation too specifically but it seems we are already deep in national debt to china/japan check http://202.221.217.59/print/news/nn12-2004/nn20041228d2.htm which discusses japanese and chinese funding of US deficit anyhow to me coming at it from a cultural artistic point of view i think we would be so much better off with more asian influence now yesterday i went to see constantine which was like fair to crummy depending on what your expectations of it mine being low, but before that i watched a korean film at home that i’d picked up in the airport at hong kong, “OLD BOY” is just a remarkable piece of filmmaking directed by Park Chanwook, i dont think it ever had a US release, then a few days before that i watched Wan Kar Wai’s “2046” which is slow but also amazing… it would be one thing if all there was in the way of films was the crap churned out by hollywood but with just fantastic films coming out of various foreign markets it just is all the more pathetic… but how much of all this is due to what is happening in our society is due to the rigidity, crazy censorships that are being instituted, etc… yeah etc etc anyway do check out ‘old boy’ its no doubt available online, 2046 is very beautiful, but is purely a romance, warning for action fans picture is DH in bangkok/asia is calling

back in new york, really if i never see another airplane… there must be a better way; boats, blimps, bangkok was a lot different than it was when we were last there in 1977, its a fascinating place still, urban jungle, d and i stayed on an extra day to look around i wish i could spend more time in these places… very different and more rugged than singapore in singapore we played with ‘pug jelly’ and the ‘zircon gov. pawn stars’ … really nice people all… there was a lot of heavy duty flu within the band, by the end everyone was feeling varying degrees of weird, its weird enough to come from blazing hot bangkok streets to the snow here, lots of great japanese, hong kong, style toys over there, (see kidrobot.com for the basics) also it hadnt occurred to me that i could just walk into an ordinary music store to score all kinds of cool asian films… its tough being in places that are so exotic and then getting back to the normalcy of the states… the gig in the sydney opera house was pretty fantastic i think the place was full… i still really like sydney, something about the bohemian atmophere in the tropical setting more when i wake up more later

singapore, is hot but a very seemingly happening place… we are almost done, two more shows here tomorrow and one in bangkok where we spent that memorable couple of weeks back in ’77… asia is most definitely on an upswing the local economies are thriving etc etc singapore has a local music scene we met some of the local bands and related people today i’ll get some names up later but i really dont like the oscars, i avoid it every year… why is that? well i found this couple of lists ok: hitchcock, c.b. demille, peckinpah, chaplin (charlie), king vidor, orson welles, scorsese, robert altman, kubrick, howard hawks… what do they have in common? should be obvious; never won… the other one is what films won as best picture against what other ones, so the year that ‘apocalypse now’ ran the best picture was ‘kramer vs. kramer’, ‘2001 space odyssey’ beat by ‘oliver, ‘raging bull’ by ‘ordinary people’, ‘pulp fiction’ by ‘forrest gump’ and my favorite ‘singing in the rain’ and ‘high noon’ both beat by ‘the greatest show on earth’ that burt lancaster soap opera circus movie… who is gonna put ‘kramer vs. kramer’ on their list of greatest films? now i’m presuming most of this is accurate so dont complain to me about it if its not, i read it in a magazine… speaking of films though our hotel here is right accross the street from the shaw brothers building, their logo is up on the roof, i can see it from my window ‘SB’ in a big crest like in the beginnings of the movies, fantastic

perth australia… and i cant help but wonder is its less wearing to spend a month on a leaky boat like the old days than 24 hours give or take on a fucking airplane… why cant they leave the windows open, figure out how to let in outside air rather than re-cycle the stale germ infested stuff thats floating around… i must have gotten my first case of corperal korporeal tunnel syndrome, however you spell it, cause my wrist was aching from blankly playing doom 2 on my stupid game boy for what must have been hours… now i feel like the heroine of the last wm. gibson book who says that her soul takes time to catch up after these longass rides, certaily mine is back there someplace struggling with headwinds, what a burn out… beyond that not much to report yet, perth is beautiful and calm, theres so little traffic out there… i do vividly recall our first trip down here in ’77, how weirdly conservative it was, now its a little slower than some of the other cities here but just another modern big city… i miss Akira a lot, we have been very close lately… last week we went into NYC to see the christo gates in the park, somehow twenty million seems excessive for the things even though they are nice, i think he got beat, probably could have got em done cheaper… what? nothing yet… oh yeah we saw ‘hide and seek’ what a farce, now if i was bob d. would i take the twenty million or so in exchange for two weeks of pretty easy work? well most likely… the question is why make it so obvious that thats whats going on… what a load of crap… barbara sort of dragged me to see ‘sideways’ but then i realised what all the buzz is about, its really a great little film, the sort that isnt done much any more, its likely to kick off a whole load of imitators like ‘blur witch’… any how the mall that we go to to see movies is the same one that had the dude go on a rampage last week… luckily we werent there and he didnt do much damage in spite of getting off 60 shots from his ak… its sad how the alienation out there is adding up to these events, what the hell else is it except all of the unfulfilled hopes and dreams blowing up in peoples faces, its so hard for me to avoid being sucked up by the consumer greed culture, how can anyone be happy when they are just constantly barraged with all the things they are not and that they are lacking, all this bullshit shoved down everyones collective throat… oh and on a related ‘lighter note’ who the fuck thinks sponge bob is really a gay conspiracy??!? so here are the same people who rage about anyone questioning the current governments political motives/agenda yelling “conspiracy nut!” carrying on about this craziest dumb concept… actually i was down on sponge bob myself cause i partially blamed him for bumping zim, so i never watched, but really its pretty funny… so whats next anti milton berle… what about the evil of monty python, they wear dresses

i have started sketching out some stuff for upcoming recording, a bunch of you have asked about whats happening, the last bunch of records had me writing primarily on machines and i’m determined to go into the next period writing on guitar, with a more primitive approach… we have discussed that the next thing should be more ‘raw’ or whatever, i still am endlessly frustrated by the US music scene, what rises to the surface, that by now the fifties to the nineties are represented by the same handful of ‘classic’ songs played over and over again… a lot of people are asking about us touring in the states this year, thus far nothing is on the books but we will figure it out hopefully…

currently i am amazed and amused by ‘grand theft auto san andreas’… i’ve been playing it a little bit though not too obsessively… what knocks me out about it is its cultural orientation… i’d dealt with the other earlier versions of the game but in them the central characters are less defined, they were a sort of mix of tough guy semi italian gangster types, but here we have the black gangster urban myth sharply etched onto a weirdly retro background; the game begins by telling you its taking place in the early nineties, already ancient history, is this cause the audience is so young or so the music is ‘right’?, its funny how fast things turn over… anyway we are/follow the trials and tribulations of ‘Carl’, archetypal black anti hero as he goes on drive-bys whacks crack dealers and gains ‘respect’ in the hood… but what weirds me out the most is just the intent of the thing… even more than contemporary films theres something about san andreas that finally puts the black gangster hero on a par with your wild west cowboy scenario, its always been there but here its right in your face… i keep thinking of an army of white geek computer types having heavy identification with this ‘dangerous’ black model, glamorized out of all reality… here we can live the urban ghetto myth without any of the real problems… i cant tell if its really a good thing but theres something compelling about putting this high end glamour on former social outcasts… if it makes a whole generation of white kids long to be black then i’m all for it even though all the murdering etc is possibly regretful, though we still have john wayne grabbing the indian by the neck and saying “you talk pretty good american for a red skin” something to that effect anyway etc… ok corral is certainly no less violent and is no doubt considered ‘respectable’ by those who might be detractors of grand theft