oh, don’t forget… to text your girl telling her how much you love her or else she’ll get a fist. Ask Tim, he knows what’s up! Thanks for the link, man.

A year ago, I acquired William Zinsser’s On Writing Well at a garage sale. Last week I took a crack at it and couldn’t put it down because, obviously, he writes so well. His advice on “Who am I writing for?” alone is worth the price of the book:

You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person… Don’t worry about whether the reader will “get it” if you indulge a sudden impulse for humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it in. (It can always be taken out, but only you can put it in.) You are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don’t want them anyway.

I feel like an idiot for leaving this book in a box all these times without reading it, but at least I am not the one who sold it for a buck.

The new Brown University homepage is slick, edgy, clean, and organized. Nice work, Brown and Pentagram!

Aimi Kobayashi, an eight-year-old (at the time of the performance) pianist, knocks the amazement out of me with her unbelievable talent. Watch for her hand gesture and facial expression on the Mozart Concerto.

Trinh Cong Son’s lyrics are damn near impossible to grab, especially for those who weren’t around his time to comprehend his references. I’ve been listening to “Chi Co Ta Trong Mot Doi” and still not sure what was the man up to. My only conclusion is that he was producing a musical painting with this composition. Because he was also a painter, he could have wanted to connect the two art forms together. The first stanza, “Doi ve toi ten muc dong / Roi ve them con ngua hong / Tu do len duong phieu linh,” painted quite a dreamy, fantasy image. I would love to hear your view on this song, and if you come across any articles, please share.

Too fat for camera? No need to worry, HP cameras “instantly trim off pounds from your photo subjects with the slimming feature.” What a fantastically sick artistic effect! What worse is that the demo shows both women (no men) who look great without the slendered illusion.

In Dieu Huong’s “Tinh Xua” (performed by Quang Dung), the chorus begins, “Yeu de dan vat nhau suot ca kiep nguoi.” Is she refering to mental abuse or physical pleasure? I prefer the latter, and can see why most guys (Quang Dung, Tuan Ngoc, Nguyen Khang, and Don Ho) love to sing her songs.

As blogging gains its popularity (even people with Yahoo mail can blog), fun and worth-reading contents are hard to find. No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog aims at providing you tips on how to make your entries more enticing than your mundane life. From “Fifteen Minutes to Fame” to “Think Like A Writer,” Margaret Mason who is the owner of MightyGirl.com (used to be one of my frequent stops) presents her ideas in a short, concise, witty with the blog-formatted approach to help people write down their own experiences. Although my main interest for Visualgui.com is “unprofessional criticism” on music, design, or whatever interests me, I could use some of Margaret Mason’s advices to juice up my posts. So flip through the book, find something provokes your head, and set your blog on fire.

Fuck Christina Aguilera. Diana Krall’s From This Moment On is what I call “Back to Basics.” With a dark, raspy voice, Basie-inspired piano (sweet and tasty), and real accompaniments (full orchestra and quartet), Krall takes us back to the big-band swing and soulful blues. She not only knows how standards should be sung, but also how they should be reinvigorated. She doesn’t croon over trip-hop or high-tech beats and exaggerate her style as groundbreaking. The inventiveness is in her piano solos and scat-singing improvisations. From bossa-nova “How Insensitive” to sensual-swinging “Day In Day Out” to mellowed-out “Willow Weep For Me,” Krall keeps the good old jazz spirit alive with a contemporary sensation.

The more I listen to Khanh Ly’s recordings of Trinh Cong Son’s music prior to 1975, the more disappointing I get with her later works. Not only her voice has dreadfully deteriorated (easy on the cig, ma), but also the soulless, fake musical arrangements that killed the aesthetic experience. Especially the productions made from the early days in the States, the monotonous beats served nothing more then just to maintain the rhythm.

While the rain was pouring outside last night, I went through 86 tracks of Trinh’s collection that Khanh Ly had recorded during the mid 60s and 70s, and I just want to throw all my other Trinh’s collections out the window, including her own after 1975. Her voice was incomparable, and she had the whole nine yards (real drums, bass, piano, guitar, saxophone and trumpet) backing her up. I am wondering if our music were influenced by American jazz at the time because even the drums had that jazz’s rollicking style in them. Her version of “Bien Nho” is timeless. Her voice was filled with sentiments, and the muted sax was just soul wrecking. I can barely get through the rendition of “Mua Hong” from Thanh Lam and even Ngoc Lan without yawning, but Khanh Ly’s effortless, ethereal vocals keep me coming back for more. I disliked her latter version of “Xin Mat Troi Ngu Yen,” but her former version is totally irresistible. That cascading piano’s gushes make the tune ageless. But the classic component of the collection is in those political pieces that are rarely covered today. Compositions such as “Chinh Chung Ta Phai Noi,” “Toi Se Di Tham,” “Canh Dong Hoa Binh,” and “Nhung Giot Mau Tro Bong” were simply begging for peace. So I don’t know why they have been banned.

Even though the computer-generated productions today are top-notch, I wish our musicians went back to the basics to bring real humanistic quality to their works. Call me an old-school head, but after listening to these soulful masterpieces and then went back to Ha Tran’s Communication 06, how the fuck did we go from treasure to trash? It’s definitely time for me to give up on Vietnamese contemporary shit and stick to the good oldies. Call me a sell-out, but I’ll be looking for real modern, innovative music elsewhere, besides Viet Nam. Fuck all that Vietnamese acoustic fusion shit.