Dolce & Gabbana pulled their controversial ad campaign right after the strong protests from Italy and Spain. The company wanted to convey “an erotic dream, a sexual game,” but misinterpreted as gang banging or violence toward women. D&G shouldn’t have pulled their ad. What they should have done is following up with another one with the gender reversed. Five women with one guy laying down on the ground is no doubt a sexual fantasy (at least for me, it is).

A colleague of mine handed me an album entitled Beethoven’s Wig: Sing Along Symphonies. After listening to the opening title track, I can’t get Beethoven’s big, curly, white wig off my head (even though I never put it on). One of the questions that comes with the liner note is, “Where is the most far out place you could find a recording of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony?” My answer is the album itself, but when I look in the back of the booklet, the answer is “Outter Space.” I just get a kick out of that as well as Richard Perlmutter’s lyrics to the world’s most recognizable classical pieces including Liszt’s “Hungarian Rhapsody #2,” Mozart’s “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik,” and Beethoven’s “Fur Elise.” I asked my colleague how the hell did he find out about this CD, and his reply was, “All you need are kids.” Damn, I can’t wait to get musical inspiration from my own kids.

The Department of Spanish and Portuguese Web site at Berkeley is simple in layout, bold in typography, and refeshing in visual.

The New Yorker, one of my favorite magazines, Web site is redesigned. It’s about time they make the columns wider and have RSS feeds available.

I am going to put my head on the chopping block once again on this piece. For a bowl of bun mam, however, it is definitely worth it. Right, Mr. Ducster?

One of Tran Thu Ha’s approaches to renew a ballad is to sing at a faster pace. She did not succeed with Le Minh Son’s “Chay Tron,” but her rendition of Trinh Cong Son’s “Mua Hong” is incomparable. The playfulness is in every bar she pushed. “Con Mua Ha” (Tram Tu Thieng’s lyrics, Truc Ho’s music), however, is a wrong tune to sing in even just a slight up-tempo.

The first mistake is the producer for replacing the slow style with the rumba arrangement. “Con Mua Ha” is one of those tunes that paint a certain image; therefore, slow is a better way to convey the musical landscape. In Don Ho’s rendition, the guitar picks off the first bar alone to emulate the gentle drops of rain in a calm summer night. The violins join in to heat up the setting. Don Ho’s charming voice begins, “Tung hat mua nhe nhu tieng dan,” in a relaxed sentiment and the guitar responses to his vocals as if they could understand each other’s emotion. In Tran Thu Ha’s version, the guitar is swapped out for a cheap electronic keyboard and she kicks off with, “Tung hat mua nhe nhu nhung tieng dan.” The addition of “nhung” is like wordiness in writing. It doesn’t add anything to the context except making the flow more awkward.

The second mistake is that Tran Thu Ha simply rides along with the beat whereas Don Ho melts his flow inside the orchestration. Although she’s a woman, she sounds much stiffer than him, and the best part is that his fluid delivery never comes off as a pussy. One of the basic techniques that throw me off about Tran Thu Ha is her lacking of breath control. Coming from someone as experienced as her is very disappointing. Meanwhile Don Ho lets just enough air into the spared space to give the tune a human quality (something he seems to have lost lately with too much concentration on words’ enunciation), and he could have done it unconsciously based on his instinct.

To be fair, the biggest disadvantage in Tran Thu Ha’s version is in the musical arrangement. Truc Ho wrote the song; therefore, who could produce it better than the composer himself. On top of that, “Con Mua Ha” was written for the film with the same title; therefore, Truc Ho already has a clear vision of how he wanted to deliver from the tone of colors to the tempo of the score. Don Ho was just lucky to pick up the arrangement that previous made for Lam Thuy Van but with the rhythm section added, which make a huge different in term of liveliness. With the bass complementing his low register, all he had to do was pouring his heart out on it, and he did a hell of a soulful job. As for Tran Thu Ha, she is the “diva” who could do no wrong—in other people’s opinion, that is. However, if she could take this tune and reinterprete it similar to what Tierney Sutton has done to “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” I’ll fucking worship the ground she spits on.

Besides his incredible acting in Black Snake Moan, I was quite impressed with Samuel L. Jackson’s blues singing, particularly “Just Like a Bird Without a Feather.” He has a voice of a bad-ass motherfucker just like most of the characters he portrayed. Although he doesn’t sing in “Stackolee,” his foul-mouth charismatic of telling a story is right on the money: “You know that bartender gave me a dirty look and a dirty glass. I said, ‘Say it motherfucker, do you know who I am?’ He said, ‘Hell no nigger, I don’t give a goddamn.'”

A crisp new theme for iLoveNgocLan.com. I was going to post this alluring theme yesterday in memory of her death, but it didn’t seem to be appropriate.

It may not sound right listening to “Con Mua Ha” in the winter time, but the cold-ass temperature plus the bone-crushing wind make me yearning for summer. The time when we hid from the rain and sat in the park until three in the morning on a weekday and still got up and went to work the next day. Although Lam Thuy Van was known for this tune, Don Ho poured more soul into it than her. Somehow he sounded more natural back then with his laid-back flow and unrestrained delivery.

Thought that I am done and through with the “Khong” songs, but they are jamming in my headphone again and again. What makes Thy Dung’s “Lien Khuc Khong” is so damn addictive is the hipnotic arrangement. That country-style violin is so effective in such a strange way.

I was introduced to Amy Winehouse through Ghostface’s remake of “You Know I’m No Good.” After listening to her latest album, Back to Black, I could see why a Fishscale cutter such as Ghostface is attracted to her style. Winehouse is not only a soulful crooner, but also a bitch of a singer who sings from the pussy.

Unlike what her skin and appearance might suggest, Winehouse has an old, sultry voice with dark, esoteric soul, and a mind full of grime, smoke and booze. Right from the lead-off track, “Rehab,” she already commits a crime. Over a high-spirited gospel groove, she confesses, “I’m gonna, I’m gonna lose my baby / So I keep a bottle near.” On the title track, she continues with her other addiction and has no shame to admit that, “You love blow and I love puff / and life is like a pipe.” Yet the wittiest moment is on the Nas-inspired “Me and Mr. Jones,” in which she sings about her relationship: “What kind of fuckery are we? / Nowadays you don’t mean dick to me.”

Since the album started with “Rehab,” it makes sense for her to close it out with “Addicted” to complete the cycle. It only fair that when you smoked all her weed, you gotta call the green man. She doesn’t care if you got a man. Like she said, “I’d rather have myself a smoke my homegrown / It’s got me addicted, does more than any dick did.”

Through Winehouse’s lustful vocals, provocative lyrics, and damn good ear for beats, Back to Black is cross over between American soul and British substance. With eleven tracks clocking in a little over half an hour, the album is short, precise but fuckeriously fabulous.

Like the title of Margaret Mason’s book on blogging suggested, No One Cares What You Had for Lunch, but I just had a plain croissant with a banana, and they were not so bad at all.