Jan Tschichold:

White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.

Via Veerle

Advice from Miles Davis:

When you play music, don’t play the idea that’s there, play the next idea. Wait. Wait another beat, or maybe two, and maybe you’ll have something that’s more fresh. Don’t just play from the top of your head, but listen and try to play a little deeper. Don’t play what’s there. Play what’s not there.

A concert to commemorate 35 years since the end of the Vietnam War and remember the 9/11 victims. “Ode to Freedom” will present the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and Chorus (KSOC), including around 100 professional musicians and singers from Ukraine, with participation of a community chorus from the Washington DC area and some Vietnamese singers from California.

When
September 11
6:30pm

Where
Rachel M. Schlesinger Concert Hall and Arts Center
Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria campus
3001 North Beauregard Street
Alexandria, Virginia 22311

View poster

Lineup
Afro Bop Alliance – ’08 Latin Grammy winning/Grammy nominees Latin Jazz
Jason Moran & the Bandwagon – Triple Downbeat ‘Rising Star’ winner
The Bad Plus – Explosive indie-rock & Jazz fusion band
Tierney Sutton Band – 2-time Grammy nominated vocalist & ensemble

When
September 11
1pm-7pm

Where
Gateway Park
1300 Lee Hwy
Base of Key Bridge
Arlington, VA

For more info, visit rosslynva.org

Check out the new dean’s site I pulled together to introduce our new boss. I met with him briefly early Monday morning to create his first video. He also blogs. I already am impressed that he takes advantage of the web. He will bring a fresh vibe to the School of Business and I am very excited about that. Best of all, he has a beautiful family and an adorable little girl.

Yesterday my wife asked to get some fried tofu from Thanh Son so I took Cu Dao with me. I put him in the car and gave him a bottle. We listened to some Miles Davis and drove about twenty-five minutes to Eden. By the time we got there, Duke was already fell asleep. I didn’t want to wake him up nor did I want to leave him in the car to go buy some tofu. So my other option was to ask for help.

I pulled up into an empty space a few cars away from Thanh Son. I asked an elder woman standing outside if she could go in and buy me $10 tofu as I pulled out $20 from my wallet. She told me to go in and get it and she would keep an eye out for me, but I couldn’t leave my boy with a stranger. I spotted another woman coming into Thanh Son, but before I could even asked her she already shrugged as if I was begging money or something. I thought it was kind of hilarious. I was being dissed in my own community.

I didn’t give up though. I knew someone would kind enough to help me out. So another woman walked by, I stopped her and showed her where Duke was sleeping. She was a bit hesitated, but I handed her a $20 bill anyway. She smiled and went in to get me some fried tofu.

We took a short vacation to San Antonio for Dana’s annual family gathering. We flew out last Saturday and returned last night. Cu Dao’s first flying experience was great. He walked around the airport prior boarding; therefore, he napped on our arms as soon as we took off. He woke up two hours later and just hang out until we landed. He didn’t cry at all when we were landing. He was probably fascinated by the scene outside the window and didn’t realize that we were going down.

Dana’s family rented out two houses by the river. One of the houses was alway packed with more than 20 people. It was great to meet and hang out with the everyone ranging from 15 months (that’s Cu Dao) to 80 something. We rented our own hotel right downtown so we could escape all the craziness inside the houses.

Because of the heat and the changing temperature from inside air conditioner and the outside fire, Duke got a fever for two days, yet he was no less active. One of our cousins was a pediatrician so we had him monitored. He was doing fine when we flew back. We got back home a bit late last night and he was already asleep. He didn’t want to get up but we had to drag him to daycare. I dropped him off and he cried a little.

I felt in love with Bitches Brew even before I started getting into Miles Davis’s electric music. Something about the double album that pulls me in every time I listen to it. I still struggle to define what that is despite the countless number of time I had spent with it. When it comes to experiencing the music, all I can do is letting the “Bitches Brew” me and Miles mind-fucks me. Miles knows damn well how to fuck with your mind because he doesn’t just give it straight to your ears. On Bitches Brew in particular, you have to wait patiently to hear Miles. He only plays when he has something to say and when he does he blows your fucking mind. There is no escape route when “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down.”

In celebrating the 40th anniversary of its release, I would like to share my favorite passage from Greg Tate’s “The Electric Miles Part 1” discussing Bitches Brew. Tate writes:

On musical terms though, Bitches Brew is an orchestral marvel because it fuses James Brown’s antiphonal riffing against a metaphoric bass drone with Sly’s minimalist polyrhythmic melodies and electronic sounds. Bitches Brew can also be heard as a devilishly Milesish takeoff on John Coltrane’s spiritual energy music and that music’s saxaphone, percussion, and bass batteries, modal improvs, tone clusters, and yearnings, thus making the double-set rank as an act of comic blasphemy with Richard Pryor’s Preacher routines or with certain African genesis myths in playing prankster with God’s tongue by dragging the heavens back into the province of the vernacular—namely the streets—and the language of the streets, the dozens, sermons made scatologies which find their musical parallel in what funk did to gospel. The streets though aren’t just a funky run of avenues where mom-and-pop stores front for numbers runners and storefront churches pimp for jackleg preachers. They’re also a place of mystery and romance, and given that Miles knows them and their music inside out, it’s not surprising that the melodies on Bitches Brew croon, sway, and reveal themselves like those of such balladeers as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, and Stevie Wonder—all of those gorgeous melodies and harmonies have yet to overcome the precious corn of Tin Pan Alley in the ears of other improvising composers—excepting Zawinul, Cecil Taylor, and Bennie Maupin, whose overlooked The Jewel in the Lotus ranks beside Miles’s Great Expectations, Weather Report’s Mysterious Traveller, and Cecil’s Solo in channeling the charm of exotic musics into forms which are as tightly knit, free-flowing, and fetchsome as Stevie’s, Smokey’s, Curtis’s, and Marvin’s vocal arrangements.

After college, I had a temporary job at a local web shop in Lancaster. My main responsibility was taking a Photoshop file from the designer and turned it into HTML using Dreamweaver. I remember slicing up the design and dropped it into the table. The text inside Photoshop looked funny to me, yet I didn’t even realize it was dummy text. I spent time carefully copied and pasted the text into HTML. I read every line, bolded and italicized a certain words just like the original design. After I did all of that, the designer told me it was just fill-up text.

Fooled me once and I hated Lorem Ipsum ever since. Whenever I look at a design with Lorem Ipsum I cringe. The text annoys me and gets very distracting. Since then I never used dummy text on my design. My policy is that I won’t start until I get some content from my clients. I need something to work with because I don’t want to waste my time with texts that don’t make any sense.

When I was asked to redesign something, I would take the contents from the current site to do my design. Without the contents, I can’t do anything. It’s a waste of time to create a blind design. I always ended up reworking the design simply because I have no idea what I was doing from the beginning.

Every time I start a new project, I always stress the important of contents before I start. If you hire me to do the job, you have to care enough about the project to do your part. When I was a still a student, I worked for a guy who had a dream of starting up an underground entertainment site. He didn’t have any content, but hired me to do the job. He sounded passionate about the project so I designed the layout for him. All that he needed to do was providing me the contents. He never did and the site never went live even though he paid for my work.

Six months or so ago, I also landed a contract, but I haven’t started on the project yet because the client never give me any contents. He did paid me the deposit, but I haven’t worked on the site. The guy sounds really nice when he writes me telling me he hasn’t forgotten about the site. He will provide me the contents soon. If this is going on for a long period of time, I’ll just give him the refund and call the whole thing off. We’ll see.

In any rate, this post was inspired by “Lorem Ipsum is Killing Your Designs.” It is so true.

Dressed up as a woman, Ly Tong approached Dam Vinh Hung to give him some flowers as well as some pepper spray. A clip has been captured and posted on YouTube. As much as I dislike Dam Vinh Hung’s music and wouldn’t paid to see him perform, I sympathize him. He’s standing a very thin line between the two political parties. He is more than just an entertainer. He’s a controversial figure. Still that’s not the reason to be attacked in public. Ly Tong, please stop your stupidity.