New York 2008 from James Yu on Vimeo.

A video montage of some of the footage I shot with my flip while in Taipei.

Taiwan 2008 from James Yu on Vimeo.

Places in the video:
CKS Memorial
Shilin Night Market
Shida Night Market
Ximending District
Taipei Contemporary Art Museum
Taipei 101
Taipei MRT (Subway)
Starbucks

Tay Zonday has officially sold his soul to Dr. Pepper.

It looks like VH1 had Tay Zonday make a Summer Break version of Chocolate Rain. It looks like Tay may be making it big. We’ll know it when he finally gets his own Wikipedia page.

The Flying Steps have a video that poignantly shows the life of a breakdance troupe on tour. The Flying Steps are renown bboy group from Europe. I remember watching their videos back in 2000, when they won 1st place at Battle of the Year, one of the world’s largest breakdancing competitions.

The life of a breaker is hard, both financially and physically. Most breakers dance because they’re passionate. It’s just not an easy way to make money or become famous.

This video is a small glimpse into the life of the street dancers you see on urban corners.

Apparently this is the new viral video that’s spreading. It’s Chocolate Rain by Tay Zonday, and he states two things that people always say about him: his voice is low, and he looks young (he’s 25). There’s already too many remixes to count on one hand: Sung by McGruff the Crime Dog, Vanilla Snow, Sung by Darth Vader, Animated, and Music Video-ized.

Already at 844,559 views at the time of this post.

This has to be one of the weirdest renditions of Thriller I’ve seen. It’s done by the inmates of the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, Cebu, Philippines. Apparently, they put their free time to good use with a pretty impressive show.

This is a video of Imogen Heap performing one of my favorite songs, Hide and Seek, live for 103.1 FM. Her use of the vocoder on the vocals is simply beautiful and penetrating. Ironically, the sparseness of the vocals lends depth to the song.

Here’s the original audio and video:

I played my first round of golf this past weekend with my good friend Joel Sacks. He was patient enough to show me the ropes, despite the fact that I’m a lefty. Yes, I’m a lefty when it comes to sports requiring two hands, like golf and baseball.

My first experience with golf has taught me two fundamental lessons: golf is all about the individual, and the golf swing is a totally unnatural motion.

In golf, the ball sits motionless waiting for you to hit it–there is no one to blame but yourself for a bad shot. The only enemy is the course itself, and the only person you have on your team is yourself. Also, there is only one chance to hit the ball for each shot, and an error could mean disaster for your score (and also a long walk off the fairway). These elements all add up to a lot of psychological pressure.

Furthermore, the golf swing is a monster. From a non-golf player’s standpoint, it doesn’t look too difficult. But, in actuality, it’s probably one of the most difficult movements to master, and I’ve done a lot of other sports that have notoriously difficult movements, including wushu and breakdancing. For me, it’s the combination of the precision required and the unnatural twisting of the torso that make it difficult.

But, the good thing is that the people at Nike have done a beautiful motion capture of Tiger Wood’s swing, which, as Ray Romano says, “reminds me of looking at the inside of a Swiss watch.” You’re able to view the super slow motion swing video from 6 different points of view.

The flexibility in his arms and shoulder is simply amazing. Pay attention to his arm position at the top of his swing, it’s frightening how twisted they are with respect to the rest of his body. I think next time, I’ll be spending more time at the driving range.

This is DJ Kentaro doing what he does best: rocking it on the vinyl. Pretty amazing stuff about halfway in.

And here he is DJing at the 2002 DMC Technics World Championship. He was the first Asian to win the Final in the championship. He was 20 at the time.

I also noticed that he doesn’t use any headphones. Is that common? It has to make is so much more difficult to find and manipulate the beats.