Insights from the wee hours of the morning gleaned from various crevices of the internet. Media, politics, sex, and art from an(other) asian queer perspective
It's kinda been a hellish week - and you know what they say - sharing it makes it go away faster.... but yeah NSFW... just in case you ever thought about getting freaky with someone on a webcam. Your video stream may be captured and then where would your future political career be?
A quicktime movie that promotes safe sex. It's less disturbing than stereotypical - the instilling fear advertisement technique.
So, here's a pop quiz - what would you have done? The other night at the gym I've since decided not to join. I was enjoying a nice relaxing post (arm not seizing) workout steam. There were several guys already in the steamroom - a twinky red head, a built latino guy, a tall black guy and a solid asian guy (not me). It seemed kinda cruisy - but I just closed my eyes and leaned back. When I felt a foot brush against mine what did I open my eyes to see?
It's been a crazy couple of days - met with a filmmaker, hung out with a past advisor of mine and her partner, attended an all day symposium, crashed a book release party as well as a couple of receptions. Who knew the life of a grad student could be jammed pack with activities that don't involve reading?
I totally bombed this test... how good is your sexdar? I only managed 5 out of 16... it told me to go and rent some porn... (via H2OcolourBoy)
My graduate program is hosting an open house this week for incoming students - last year too many of us showed up after getting accepted - so this year the program was only able to accept six students. Lots of applicants were rejected. I myself also received bad news over email today. I got rejected for a fellowship I had applied for last fall. It's a big bummer because it would have been 3 additional years of funding and I really worked hard on the application. But it's better to know now - and at least I got an email instead of just no information forthcoming - I find it much more respectful than when you just never hear back. C'est la vie. So I went and got myself a consolation prize of an external harddrive.... Why? A good friend of mine on law school dropped her laptop a couple of days ago and her hard drive went bust. She lost over 400 pages of typed notes from the semester as well as two twenty page papers that she had written over the last week (she had no hard copies or recent external backups when this happened). Rejections I can handle, there are an infinite number of worse things that could happen I suppose.
I found Lost in Translation through distant early morning. You type in a phrase and it translates it multiple times and "babelizes" it.... so "Nothing to fear but fear itself" becomes "Here in anything it scared for scared nevertheless."
When it includes Chinese, Japanese and Korean... the sentence becomes "What to being the slight ones scared the interior if they were scared, nevertheless, of a form, that it eliminates of this place."
Ahhh Beer Street and Gin Lane a 1751 exercise in bianaristic thought. These prints were created in an attempt to change lower class "habits." Apparently if you partake of gin - you'll be diseased, emaciated, force your barber into suicide and let your baby fall to its death. On that note, doesn't this sound totally appealing right now? This book was written by a man who really likes the drink - the dust cover notes the author "began to learn the lore of the premeir American Cocktail as a teenage Martini drinker in the 1950s. He has been employed as a professor of classics at several university."
The Whitney is always crowded when I go - I need to make sure not to go on Fridays anymore - maybe that will help with the feelings of clusterphobia. Too many women in furs and hipster kids from williamsburg! Anyhow. I need to head back to see some more of the video and film installations, but on the whole I was a bit disappointed by the Whitney Biennale. Though one of the themes of the biennale was that of nostalgia an interesting topic to explore artistically and processually. Curator Debra Sanger writes: "Many of the artists in this biennial and beyond take full advantage of nostalgia's possibilities, putting it to use as a means to their own critical ends... the most visible specters from the past are from the political, social, and cultural histories of the 1960s and 1970s." However, the pieces that I remember seeing tended to unproblematically re-appropriate images and ideals from that era under the theme of selective misremembering. I didn't get the sense from the pieces of the ideological basis and impetus for selective misremembering and nostalgia that Renato Rosaldo outlines in his essay "Imperialist Nostalgia" in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. But rant aside - it is intriguing to me the turn towards the unfinished in almost a folk art sort of a way that many of the pieces exhibited. It seems that materiality and the evidence of the process of artmaking is starting to be something that artists are playing with again. Seems that people are starting to get tired of sleek clean digitally enhanced lines in there works so prevalent in contemporary work for the past couple of years.... There was a series of "self-portraits" done by this artist whose name I can't recall... but they were of men in different life stages... and none of theme were technically images of the artists own body. I liked this series, though I think it was part of the permanent collection and not part of the Biennale.
From the bloggosphere... this site presents (with pictures with maps) a list of all those who contribute to the presidential campaign. Some desperate non-profit development officer is going to go through the data base and to snag the mailing address for these contributors - I just know it. They also have a list of which candidate gets what type of contributions.
Via a certain someone
Go to google, type in "procrastinatory" and click "I'm feeling lucky" and see where you end up!
Spring break calls to mind images of sun, the beach, parties and tanned college aged bodies. Oh wait, that's just an MTV vision of reality. What really happens during during spring break? First, since you're a grad student who probably spends more time blogging than writing papers that are due, you get "extensions" which hang over your head during your "break" making you feel like that every day of the extension means that your paper should be that much better. Second, you get a week pass to the gym across the street. Thinking that perhaps some exercise might be good to relieve the tension, you work out only to have your arms cramp up upon your return home. So now your walking around with your arm all bent unable to fully extend, stressed out on too little sleep. Third, you go to the barber shop - hey - personal grooming never made one feel worse right? Well, your barber notices that you can't straighten out your left arm and sees what appears to be a track mark on your arm (the area is just a bit red from me trying to massage the pain away). Wearing a yarmulke, and regaling me with stories about how he is planning to go to Israel for vacation he ends the haircut by looking me in the eye and asking "Are you doing ok? You aren't getting in any trouble are you?" while gesturing to my (seized) left arm. I half expected him to give me drug rehab literature with my change. Fourth, wake up the next day and realize that your right arm is seizing too, which makes typing kinda painful. Lastly, plans to go (north!? what was I thinking?) to Boston for the day are finalized with non-refundable tickets. So despite the BLIZZARD yesterday and below freezing temperatures, I will be spending most of the day today walking around Boston. Wheeee!
Redux as today I got linked by two more bloggers! Him and him.
A pretty hilarious flash movie, not as great as the Mario prestory epic, but still funny. It's hosted as part of a larger site that houses film, vignettes, and commercials involving squirrels. (via H2OcolourBoy)
Heather Hendershot's most recent research has been on the parallel world of Christian media production that exists in the United States. One such media object that has made the crossover into the maistream (due in part to their merchandising contract with the evil empire) is Veggie Tales. I saw a clip of the "silly songs" video - and it's quite catchy. The direct-to-video Veggie Tales cartoons tend to present a message of chastity, forebearance, obediance, frugality, and non-violence (with occasional reference to the bible). I wasn't quite sure how to interpret this song... any suggestions?
I did notice in the article that there was a contradiction in how it described the death of Brad Pulaski as both due to blunt trauma and getting "stabbed" with an ipod 40-80 times. How does one stab with an ipod? That'll teach me to post quickly on such quirky topics. I still think that they did a great job of creating the site though. Adding of the contextual ads, brilliant. (via MacworldUK)
We're on the A-list, we're on the A-list;
On the idea that fat people have no self-control: "If we were out of control, every time someone made some nasty comment about weight, we'd just sit on them until they apologized. If we got really good and out of control, we'd boycott the diet industry and show them who's boss. We'd run amok with chainsaws, whacking out the armrests in movie theaters and commercial airliners. We'd stage sit-ins at New York fashion shows, in state legislatures, on beaches... Fat people out of control? I can't wait!"
Here's review of Kate's Joint, where I will be heading shortly. "All in all, Kate’s Joint is a very welcome addition to the New York City vegetarian restaurant scene. In fact, the highest compliment I can give it is to say that it’s a neighborhood restaurant worth leaving your neighborhood for." I'd have to agree, as I live nearly 100 blocks away on Manhattan and I've started brunching there every Sunday with friends. At this site, you can also check out Kate's and other NYC restaurant menus.
Salon article about Skin on Skin a porno film produced by this UC Davis Professor, who is also interviewed here. This undergrad response to the film and its maker in the UCD student paper not super well written, but was what tipped me off to the film in the first place. An initial gut reaction - Hamamoto is made to sound vitriolic and really kinda stupid, yet I am sympathetic to the project that he sees himself engaging in.... well, off to the "Media Images of LGBT APIs" session of the Queer Asian Pacific Legacy Conference.
So - someone linked to me on a discussion board - via a Prolix discussion board hosted at dangpow.com. What is it a linked to!? I'm kinda curious. Feel free to cut and paste into my comments, or email me.
Coming this weekend to NYU. A three day "regional Queer pan-Asian Pacific American conference to network, organize, agitate, educate, and build capacity." Apparently, they got so many pre-registrations that they've closed off registration and have put a bunch of people on waiting lists. If I manage to be super productive, I'll write my two papers and sneak into these sessions.... [ed. Forgot to include the link to the actual conference.]
Sometimes I'm messy. Sometimes clothes, laundry bags and socks accumulate in front of my closet. This morning, in the attempt to clean and hang articles of clothing up in my closet, I slipped on some of said clothes and fell, hard. For 30 minutes, I had to hold this against my right Gluteus Maximus in hopes that it doesn't swell up during my 8 hours of classes today.
Genesis 19
BIBLICAL ADMONITIONS ON MARRIAGE:
So, somewhere, someone invented the garbage chute. Roosevelt Island has an entire pneumatic tube Automated Vacuum Collection System, "Here on Roosevelt Island, we take pride in our garbage. Taking out the trash, for us, is not so mundane a task: We know that when it is released from our hands, it travels the high-tech route known as the Automatic Vacuum Collection (AVAC) System. A computer brings the trash receptacles in each building to life every hour, opening up a valve that releases trash into one of two underground pipes. (There are two main pipes, one each along this island's east and west sides, that alternate operation every 30 minutes.) ... The trash is whisked away through these pipes at 55 mph to the AVAC complex across the street, built in 1975, designed by Kallmann & McKinnell (Motorgate's architects)."
