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Blog postOn Pamela: A Novel. By Alvin Lu. This first novel by San Francisco writer Pamela Lu, Pamela: A Novel (Atelos, $12.95, 98 pages) is the only legitimate antinovel I’ve come across in a long while. I can’t think of a work that more honestly portrays fiction—or rather the anxiety of writing fiction—in this degraded era, when any attempt at writing seems false, contrived, and ulterior. Pamela is uncontrived by being hopelessly theoretical, so wound up in its own reasonings and coun
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Blog postOn Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter of the Nile. By Alvin Lu. Such as it exists, the same conventional wisdom on Taiwanese new wave film that ascribes the “city boy” role to Edward Yang and “country boy” status to Hou Hsiao-hsien also evaluates Hou’s films according to how countrified they are. Time as much as place plays a role in this evaluation, with Taiwan’s countryside looking to the past, and its cities (specifically Taipei) occupying present and future. Accordingly, Hou’s films that have re
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Blog postyourimpossiblevoice:
2014 Your Impossible Voice Pushcart Nominations We at Your Impossible Voice are thrilled to announce our very first nominations for the Pushcart Prize.
The Traiguén Epidemic by Alejandra Costamagna, Translated by Mary G. Berg Excerpt from Early Spring by Alvin Lu Mistral by Lisa Williams from x y z & & by Pattie McCarthy Seven Strategies for Survival (in a small town) by Matthew Roberson Dear No. 2 Pencil, Decomposing in Whiskey by Steve Davenpo -
Blog postOn Gu Cheng and The Poet. By Alvin Lu. Once in class we had just got done watching and discussing a Hong Kong film (Ashes of Time), and a student, from an immigrant Chinese community of Los Angeles, commented on how strange it was for us to discuss (i.e., take seriously) a Chinese film. She could imagine why one would study a foreign (i.e., Hollywood) film, but Chinese films she just watched to zone out. They typically went in one side of her head and out the other. What was there to analyze
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Blog postyourimpossiblevoice:
Your Impossible Voice Live at Alley Cat Books!
The new issue of Your Impossible Voice is almost here! To celebrate, we’re inviting you to Alley Cat Books on November 21 at 7:00 PM for a reading featuring some of the amazing authors from our first and second issues!
Join us, Alvin Lu (the Hell Screens), Mary Burger (Sonny), Peter Kline (Deviants), Colette DeDonato, and Janice Worthen, and the staff at Alley Cat Books for a memorable night of literar -
Blog postRashomon, Dragon Town Story, and Asian historical costume dramas. By Alvin Lu. Period dramas are still a force in Asia, in both film and TV serials, though in Japan it’s evident they’re no longer the industry staple they once were. In China (as opposed to Hong Kong, where gaudy historical costumes remain as vital as they’ve ever been) it seems period films are enjoying new life, retooled somewhat in the wake of the Fifth Generation’s success abroad: sweeping landscape photography, state
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Blog postRuan Lingyu and the sounds of Shanghai’s silent films. By Alvin Lu. Chinese film history is a fractured one. Social chaos and political censure, more than economic or technical limitations, have been the primary obstacles to a continuous tradition. Until now, Chinese filmmakers have worked in pockets of isolation without a sense of their own history—any influences having tended to come from outside. The last great era of Chinese film—the simultaneous Hong Kong, Taiwan, and mainland new waves
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Blog postA Q&A with Jia Zhangke about Xiao Wu. By Alvin Lu. Xiao Wu: The title character, a pickpocket stuck in some cheesy backwater town on the wrong end of China’s economic development, struts the streets in a red V-neck sweater, ill-fitting gray suit, and white socks. He sits in a chair shaking his leg and milking a hard-won Marlboro. His cigarette lighter bleeps “Für Elise.” The kung fu/neorealist photography suggests a budget of the lowest of the low, but the hissing collage sound
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Blog postTalking with Curtis Choy about The Fall of the I Hotel. By Alvin Lu. “My 1969 intention was to be a Propagandist for The Revolution,” Curtis Choy once rather offhandedly wrote. His 1991 essay “Suckcess above the Line: From Here to Obscurity” concluded, “I have only this two-bit advice to you would-be filmmakers. Get your MBA, and sell real estate.”
In the middle of that trajectory, from ‘69 to ‘91, Choy made S.F.-Chinatown-based, world-class film art with a vengeance, back when makin -
Blog postA review of Wang Ping’s Aching for Beauty. By Alvin Lu. Aching for Beauty masks a festering feast of sex and death—the coming apart, and together, of a civilization—in impeccable, tightly wound, attractive trappings. Wang Ping, our cool, often sly, and scholarly narrator, presents herself as a woman of cultivation and taste through this house of Chinese wonders and horrors, while the physical book itself is prettily packaged, in a bandage of a slipcover and sepia-printed hardcovers that open
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Blog postOn Godzilla, Shiva, Missile Command, and the radioactive imagination. By Alvin Lu. Resurrections of Godzilla and nuclear testing in India suggest that Bombay mutant monster musicals may be on the way. They also got me thinking about my youth. Two gods belonged to what passed as my religion then. One was embodied in a toy Godzilla my ship-captain uncle had brought me from Japan. It was made of tin and was operated by a wire-attached control device. It walked, screeched, blew smoke, and emitte
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Blog postOn Irma Vep and Walter K. Lew’s “The Movieteller.“ By Alvin Lu. My favorite “film” this year was a poem published in a literary magazine of experimental writing. “The Movieteller,” by Walter K. Lew, is actually the script to a multimedia performance involving a live narrator, projected 8mm film, and live and taped sound. Aside from the fact that you’ll never see the performance unless Lew does it again, all that doesn’t really matter. The poem is narrated from the point of view of a pyŏnsa (
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Blog postOn Fishmans. By Alvin Lu. Clocks ticking are the dominant theme of Fishmans’ latest studio album, Uchu Nippon Setagaya (Polydor), appearing not only on the record as a musical motif but also on the sleeve art and the actual CD. The icon is fitting, self-knowing, given the band’s sound style. Titles on the album—"Weather Report,“ "In the Flight,” “Walking in the Rhythm,” “Daydream” —reflect how Fishmans’ unusual, somewhat indescribable blend of reggae, dub, electronica, and funk cha
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Blog postA review of Frederik L. Schodt’s Dreamland Japan and Stefan Hammond and Mike Wilkins’s Sex and Zen and a Bullet in the Head. By Alvin Lu. As the story goes, the great scholar and translator Arthur Waley refused to leave his boat while docked in Shanghai or thereabouts for fear of what he might encounter ashore: the shattering of the precious, poetry-perfect Asian world he’d come to know through literature. Today the Westerners who travel to Asia seem to be made of sterner stuff—and then some
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Blog postyourimpossiblevoice:
Issue One
The debut issue of Your Impossible Voice features new work from Guggenheim Fiction Fellow Jessica Hagedorn set in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin District, new poems from Pushcart Prize winner Gillian Conoley, newly translated work from award-winning Salvadoran author Horacio Castellanos Moya, and poetry from Oakland’s own Cave Canem Winner and California Book Awards Finalist Arisa White. Other notable writers appearing in issue one i -
Blog postOn Sogo Ishii’s Angel Dust, August in the Water, and Labyrinth of Dreams. By Alvin Lu. In the mid-1990s, then-punk provocateur Sogo Ishii, creator of the semi-legendary cult movies Panic in High School, Crazy Thunder Road, and Burst City, returned to feature filmmaking after a decade-long hiatus. He wasn’t exactly inactive during this sabbatical, as he resumed the experimental tone of his earliest work in shorts such as Master of Shiatsu (1989), which he said was made as a kind of therapy (i
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Blog postOn Ring, Juon, and the Japanese horror new wave. By Alvin Lu. When Japan’s “bubble economy” burst in early Nineties, the stage was set for one final movie trend before the century’s end and one more unexpected development in the rollercoaster narrative of postwar Japanese mass culture: an explosion of horror films. What makes “J-horror” peculiar to Western eyes is that it’s largely a teenage girl-based phenomenon. The genre’s core fans are readers of girls’ horror comics, whose eerily drawn
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Blog postTaipei in 1997 and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Goodbye, South, Goodbye. By Alvin Lu. Jet-lagged and sick in time for my own wedding banquet, I suffered through constant rain too. The relatives came to see the groom, but also an ill man in the bedroom downstairs. For a place (Taiwan: nation or province? Depends on whom you ask) that had just held its first free presidential election less than a year ago, and thus should have been charging ahead with youthful vigor, everyone was down, terminally or temp
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Blog postA review of Angura: Posters of the Japanese Avant-Garde. By Alvin Lu. Kul. The works reproduced here are the results of a particularly fruitful (and profitless) collaboration in the ‘60s and '70s between underground theater artists (including such talents as Juro Kara and Shuji Terayama) and graphic designers (including Tadanori Yokoo). The epicenter seems to have been the volatile Shinjuku neighborhood in Tokyo—the same scene that forms the basis for Oshima’s 1969 Diary of a Shinjuku Thief.
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Blog postA Yanaka ghost story. By Alvin Lu. In Tokyo, my wife and I were on a tight schedule, so we were trying to get in as many sights as possible, taking into account the fact that the weather had been volatile and it might rain. (This was during the Olympics. Remember the conditions?) That morning, though, was a beautiful, crystalline day, a bit windy. The weather wasn’t like California, but more like New England. We had already been to the stock exchange, which is near Tokyo Station, and had tak
Titles By Alvin Lu
San Francisco Noir (Akashic Noir)
Oct 1, 2005
by
Domenic Stansberry,
David Corbett,
Sin Soracco,
Peter Maravelis,
Robert Mailer Anderson,
Will Christopher Baer,
Kate Braverman,
Barry Gifford,
Jon Longhi,
Alvin Lu,
Eddie Muller,
Alejandro Murguía,
Jim Nisbet,
Peter Plate,
David Henry Sterry,
Michelle Tea
$9.99
