Ron Burgundy: I won’t be able to make it fellas. Veronica and I trying this new fad called uh, “jogging”. I believe it’s “jogging” or “yogging”. it might be a soft “j”. I’m not sure but apparently you just run for an extended period of time. It’s supposed to be wild.
-Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
There’s something haunting, and not quite right about Pinar Yolacan’s portraits of old women in Victorian fashions. Look carefully, her clothes fit her models like sagging skin. Wait a minute. It *is* sagging skin.
Not just animal skin, but tripe, stomach, chicken heads and other animal insides feature in her clothing. New Yorker Yolacan’s “ Perishables ” exhibition opens December 10 at Rivington Arms Gallery.
I’ve got to hand it to her. How did she come up with an idea like that? And how did she convince the women to put the animal-cloth creations on? (Apparently a vegetarian model declined at the last minute, forcing Yolacan to rush to the nearest Starbucks to find a replacement before her clothes rotted.) Best of all, Yolacan’s work found an audience of admirers.
I admire someone who doesn’t give lip service to the term “thinking outside the box”. Can you imagine what her a-ha moment must have been like?
“Hmmm, this chicken stew is amazing!”
“I quite agree.”
“Look at this skin. It’s beautiful, and so flexible, and so… You know what I’m thinking? This could be a dress.”
Is Singapore ready for new ideas? Enough self-congratulatory talk about entrepreneurship and enough stories about Kenny Yap. I realize change takes time, and institutional change will take a longer time. But a top-down approach won’t work. The government needs to know when to cut the apron strings: It wants Singaporeans to loosen up, but it will tell its citizens how, when and where.
The problem is, they want people to “think outside the box”. They show you the box, carefully outline its dimensions, and then say, “Go think outside this box.” Creativity has no box. Eliminate the box. Don’t judge how clever an idea is by how far away from the box it is. There is no box.
Sometimes, outrageous doesn’t mean silly. New doesn’t mean unacceptable. Different doesn’t mean bad. I’d like to see how chicken skin will go down in Singapore.
If anyone wants to listen, I’ve got a killer idea for parallel parking.
One man lost the election
To another over values.
We want someone with morals,
Chanted half the frenzied nation,
While the other saddened half
Threatened immigration.
The Man who would be King
Said he’d rule by ancient books,
And simply ignored the masses
With their taunts and dirty looks.
The power of the new foe
Scares my lily-livered soul,
I pledge a new allegiance
So in bacon I will trust.
We watched “Charade” last night. The 1963 movie starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant told the story of a clueless widow pursued by unscrupulous men after her late husband’s fortune. No one had any idea where the fortune was, until the last 15 minutes of the movie, when it was revealed that the three stamps on an old envelope were worth $250,000.
Some facts were a little hard to swallow. For starters, Hepburn looked impossibly elegant running around in heels. Grant held the gun like it was a fashion accessory. He also, at one point in the movie, gleefully took a shower with his suit on. Ah, the sixties. But three stamps, $250,000?
That was when I reached for my Google and typed in “world’s most valuable stamp”. Folks, say hello to the Swedish Treskilling stamp, mistakenly printed in yellow instead of green in the 1880s, and bought by one very devoted fan for $2.2 million.
After a few similar Websites, I had learned a bit more about stamps than I wanted to. (Useless party cocktail chatter: Check.) One, printing mistakes often result in valuable stamps. Two, unused stamps are more valuable than used ones, no matter how rare they are.
I disagree. A stamp is made to be a stamp. If it has performed that function and has lived its life on the edge of an envelope, I say it is worth more than an unused exact one of its kind. Why assess the stamp as a work of art, to be unsullied, untouched, placed behind glass? I think the raison d’etre of the object must be considered. The beauty of a used stamp lies in its untold story of its birth, its sale, its sticky contact with its user, and its journey through many hands.
My husband Jay felt differently. There is still possibility left in the stamp, he said. That’s what makes it valuable. I don’t know. What I do know is I wouldn’t pay more for an unused stamp, coddled from birth, hidden in delicate sleeves, handled with tweezers. I want my stamps hardy, well-traveled, licked.
Dot vs Knitting. Round 1.
I gathered from the instructions that you had to first wind a ball of yarn. After about five minutes of winding, I realized I had lost the loose end of the yarn in a rather sad-looking ball no respectable cat would play with. I needed that loose end to start knitting. I eventually found it after undoing most of the ball.
I opened the “How To Knit” workbook and looked warily at the instructional drawings. My hands neither looked like the hands in the book, nor could I get my needles to move in the same way. I patiently meddled with my needles and yarn for about 20 minutes. Fingers, yarn, needles. It remained a mess. I ended up with a knot. A dead knot.
Dot: 0. Knitting Needles: 1.
Someone on NPR said, “If you want to know where your husband or boyfriend is, look in the room where the Xbox is.” That in turn led to some irate female listeners writing in to complain that many women played the game too, and what the journalist should have said on the air was, “If you want to know where you wife or girlfriend is, look in the room where the Xbox is. A woman’s place is not in the kitchen anymore.”
For anyone still confused, video game Halo 2 launched a few days ago and initial estimates peg the first-day sales at US$100 million. One hundred million dollars. That’s a lot of people – men, women, children, poodles – giving up $49.99 for a chance to blow up bad guys and save the world.
But I digress.
Back to NPR. I chuckled when I heard the listeners’ reactions. And then I felt guilty. Does that mean I’m not feminist enough? Or (gasp) not feminist at all? Should I take offence at every slight against women? What constitutes a slight anyway? I met some women who took offence at the phrase “you guys” when used on a group of women or of mixed gender. However, that’s a long way from calling someone a “b***h”, for example. What about that line from NPR? Was the journalist – who happened to be male – making a blithe remark? Was that the same as using “he” instead of the pesky and grammatically ugly “he/she” for a pronoun? Who makes the call to say it’s insensitive? Just women? Men?
I’d like to think I’m a modern, forward-thinking, well-adjusted woman who happens to swear some. Should I be outraged every time I hear someone call a bunch of women “you guys”? Do I pick my battles? Part of me thinks the Xbox remark was simply the reporter’s attempt to be witty; part of me feels if one doesn’t step up to correct these asides, they pile up and perpetuate stereotypes.
Is it a feminist reaction to correct the journalist? Perhaps it’s a matter of respect and courtesy. What about not using the gender loaded “he” or “she” to make any statements? Stick to “they”. Or perhaps political correctness is passe.
The same women who told me they found fault with “you guys” simply gave the example that it would be equally unacceptable to call a group of men, “you girls”. You know, I never really thought about that.
I read that in the early days of sushi, people ate the fish but threw away the rice. At the time, the vinegared rice was used merely as a preservative for the fish and no one thought to eat it. Funny how things are unheard of in one century and commonplace in another. Change – it often takes time to accept it, but mostly, it takes time just to see it.
Would taste as sweet. Ah, the sweet taste of home in the US.
I’ve only ever had one racist incident in my life, until yesterday. Perhaps there were more, but none were in my face. That first time many years ago, in a country which will remain unnamed, some people called my family “chinks”. Yesterday, I was surprised to experience my second incident, because this recent slight came from, at least in my mind, an unlikely source.
I am calm now, but I was incensed this morning. It took me at least 12 hours to process the conversation I had with a particular person. On hindsight, I should have tossed my journalistic training aside and given as good as I got. However, my initial reaction was to listen calmly to the words coming out of this person. I told myself, “This is interesting, an alternative view. Remember, never argue with your sources.”
Person: “What’s your race? Are you Southeast Asian?”
Me: “I’m Chinese, since my ancestors in Singapore were from China.”
Person: “Chinese don’t do well in this business. The Vietnamese and Cambodians do much better.”
Me (Eyebrows arched but still civil): “Huh? What do you mean? What business?”
Person: “The media industry. Chinese are too quiet.”
I should have fallen out of my chair at this point. Or cussed and shouted at how rude that was to prove Chinese could be very noisy, thank you very much. Instead, I found myself justifying my race to her. I should never have had to do this. No one should. I pointed out there were great journalists practising in China, and in Singapore, and wherever there were Chinese as well. And I told her no personality trait was confined to a certain culture.
I should have picked up the signs early in the conversation. The problem was, it started out really well. We were having a good political discussion and she was disappointed with the Bush election results, as was I. My mistake was to immediately assume that as someone who supported Kerry, she had an international outlook, was tolerant and smart. After all, in my little stereotypical world, the Bush supporters were the ones who were Bible-thumping, uneducated and unintelligent.
One red flag went up when she mentioned that most immigrants entering the United States now were illiterate. I’m a new immigrant, I sputtered. Another red flag went up when she insisted that we were controlled by our genetic make-up. A person who came from a family of illiterates, she said, most likely would have trouble reading and writing. Taken in light of what she said about new immigrants, I feared where her assumptions were going. What about environment? And nurture? Our genes take us that far, but education will bring us further, I said. There’s more, but I could take another blog to detail the conversation.
What turned me off about this person was that she started the conversation telling me how liberal she was. How she had international experience, how she lived overseas. She was involved in the civil rights movement too. And she called herself a radical. Her family was ignorant, she added, because they supported Bush solely for religious reasons. Wonderful! Someone from the Blue, not Red, states, I thought.
I learned a lesson yesterday. She wasn’t the only one with the stereotypes. Just as she assumed I would not do well in media because I was Chinese, I assigned her all these glowing attributes when I discovered she was a Kerry supporter. I expected her to be accepting of me and my culture, just because I figured she was a liberal.
We banter terms around too easily these days. In the heated aftermath of the elections, some really nasty vitriol has been slung both ways – by people calling themselves conservatives or liberals. What does it really mean to be one or the other? It’s time we stepped back and talked to one another without the assumptions, without the baggage of stereotypes.
Recent Comments