I got my hair cut SUPER short!! and I love it! I won't be able to see Sal, my wonderful amazing hair-master until October. and I figured China's and India's weather may make me want to shave my head - so short hair is better than shaved hair.
This is what it looked like before it became SUPER short:
And before I forgot - I AM IN LOVE WITH SAL!!!!!!! he is the most amazing and patient hairmaster in the universe!!!! I wont' reveal why I tested his patience, but let's just say that he should be an uncelibate nun.
here's some photos of the perm process and our first date together - kinda love at first sight if you ask me!
On another notes, my friend Mia pointed out to me that lately, when I talk I move my left
lower lip to the side in a weird way - as if it was detached from the
rest of my lips - when she showed me what I looked like I was horrified
because it looked like I was talking like I had a stroke!!! she said I
only do it when I talk about academic stuff, like migration,
citizenship, rights, border policy and etc. So now I thought i would
try a test and take a picture of myself pursing my lips and I am
HORRIFIED to see that left lower lip really does kinda sag on its own
and doesn't purse with the rest of my lips - I look like I had a
stroke? Academia is not only turning my teeth yellow, making my hair
gray but now it also making me lose muscular control of my lips!!! Well
you know that aphorism that it takes more muscles to frown than smile -
well scientifically it's true - so maybe I have been frowning too much
in grad school!!!! Do people with Phds frown more than non-Phd's -
unequivocally YES and I can produce a study to prove it.
Leah says that I'm crazy and it's more a skeptical look, but I still think I look like a half-stroke/half-skeptical victim.
jinge and I were having lunch at El Cuervo -my FAVORITE FISH TACOS in the WORLD!!! anyways - he pointed out to me the posters on the wall, which I had never noticed until he said something. All around us were posters of the winner of the Miss Makita Drill Competition! I thought it was the oddest thing to have these women holding the tools, which suggestively are stand ins for phallic imaginations. When I looked this up, I found out that indeed this was a real competition! and not only was there a MISS Makita but this year there was a Senorita Makita! Unbelievable! And why these posters were hung up at El Cuervo and over this beautiful TABLEAU (thank you adriana), was so interesting! Does Makita tools send these posters around to Mexican restaurants every year? And why is there also a senorita makita? what does that mean? how she different from the miss? And interestingly in their bios they both love sushi? sushi ? Oh El Cuervo this is why I love you! you are just like NYC - full of contradictions and surprises just like every block- I can walk into your restaurant every day and find something new.
MISS MAKITA 2006
MISS MAKITA 2007
MISS MAKITA 2008
THE TABLEAU - 
OUR WONDERFUL LUNCH!!!
Yet another 100 Best Films list from AFI. The genres they chose are kinda odd, but there is a great interview clip with Harold Ramis in which he explains the duration of Phil's existential stay in Punxsutawney in Danny Rubin's original script. He also explains Phil's ingenious mechanism for keeping track of how many Groundhog Days he's lived through.
Harold Ramis talks about how much “real” time passes for Phil Conners.
I just watched Epic Fu's great episode, which included a piece on The Face Transfomer. Beyond thinking that the Face Transfomer is cool, I started thinking about the social meaning behind this exercise.
Here I am pretending to be an “Afro-Carriabean” - wtf? I mean cool yes, sure, I want to see what I look like as a manga character and am curious to see what I look like as a black person, but there was something odd about trying on different races. Literally.
What does it mean for race relations and conceptions when we feel that we can freely try on different races? Have we become so comfortable with race that we can play around with it like shopping for clothing?
I am always really sensitive when people say that a person acts like a certain race or culture. It’s almost akin to imaginatively being another race - kinda like what we are doing with Face Transfomer. And you know I actually hear this verbal exchange most often among my white and black or latino friends. I’ve heard a black person say to a white person, “you know so much about black culture that you are black or at least must have been black in a past life.” Now I find that on one end to be a compliment, that the white person is accepted as part of the black community, but on the other end I find it difficult to swallow as a form of compliment because most often it is white people who have the most latitude to be absorbed into another race or cultural group. You don’t usually hear the reverse, that a white person will say to a black person, “wow you know so much about black culture that you are actually white!” It's like you hear in the movies where they say to white people, you can always come into our part of town, but we will never be allowed to come into yours.
For dominant groups, like Caucasians in the US, race can be an after thought so it’s almost like a novelty to pretend for a moment that one is another race or ethnicity. For people who look anything other than white in Western countries, there isn’t as much freedom to forget one’s skin color because they are reminded of it (usually negatively) in their daily interactions with institutions and people.
In particular, for non-whites, being a certain race or ethnicity can be a complicated process of accepting ones skin color and coming to terms with the popular (mis)conceptions of one’s race or ethnic group. A lot of times, this entails the imagination of being white before a full embracement of one’s race or heritage. For a time period when I was a teenager raised in an all white upper-class community, I wished I was white so badly so that I wouldn't have to deal with the racist jaunts by my classmates. And so here I am, trying on a "West-Indian" face. Kinda surreal. Now do I really want to imagine what it is like to look like an Indian female, let's say in the US? or in India? and from what class? what is my migration history? or was I born here? My point is that being another race is more than just trying it on for a few seconds digitally, but some how we've reduced it down to just that and I wonder if this novelty is an indicator of that we're comfortable with race or that we're just dealing with race in a more post-modern removed and techno-mediated way.
And you know it's usually people who are more affluent who have the opportunity become the "other," to learn about another culture and to transplant themselves into another ethnic group’s cultural world. So jokes made to white people like “wow you know so much about my culture, you must be Mexican” just make me uncomfortable because there’s a certain level of privilege that comes with learning about another “culture.” The fact that I make time and spend money to learn Spanish because I find the language beautiful and useful for my academic interests in Mexican migration is a privilege. Now it is a privilege that I embrace and am not embarrassed of and make no apologies for, but at the same time I am quite aware of my social position to even be able to learn another language more out of interest and less out of need.
So back to Face Transformer - does this mean America is comfortable with race (and manga, chimps and euro painters j/k) if we can freely try on different races? And what does this say about race when we can collapse large groups of people together into general categories? In Face Transformers all the blacks, Caribbeans and Africans are grouped into the afro-caribbean category, and all Asians are collapsed into the East-Asian category and I think the West Indian group is not referring to people from the West Indies but Indians and Middle-Easterners. This is an odd form of racial reductionism. And where are the Latinos – where do they fit in this? And Inuits?
I’ve always kept a tab on these Face Transformer-like sites and I think the fun in trying these online sites out is an expression of an underlying desire to temporarily imagine another physical body without fully committing to that body/face. And the kinds of changes rendered by these online sites point to a greater cultural obsession or let’s say anxiety with that rendering. So for Face Transfomers we could say this is an obsession with race and euro paintings:) Oh and with age also – you can chose to be a young adult, baby, teenager and old person.
One of the predecessors to Face Transformers was My Heritage and I wrote about the social meaning behind that too 2 years ago when it launched. So instead of transforming into a race or chimp, like Face Transformer, you can transform yourself into a celebrity and see which one you most closely resemble. So this points to an obsession with celebrities.
Well after my social diagnosis I think I will upload another picture on Face Transformer and see what I look like as a Male. Hmmm perhaps I have an underlying anxiety with switching genders? Well did anyone have these thoughts when they uploaded a face on Face Transfomer?
oh and one thing that I definitely learned is that I don't like good as a Caucasian! Good thing that I embrace my Chinese face!
Although almost every day at Six Apart is Take Your Dog to Work Day, Friday was extra special because it was the official Take Your Dog to Work Day! Plus, as lovers of blogs and animals, we think it's great that active blogger and Human Society's President and CEO, Wayne Pacelle, thinks having dogs around the office is a good reminder of "who we're working for."
We realize some people have it ruff and aren't lucky enough to be able to bring their dog to work, but hopefully these pictures taken at Six Apart last Friday will get your tails wagging... And let me tell you, it's harder than it looks to get all the doggies and their fetching owners in one picture.
I got a cryptic e-mail last week from Lo asking of I'd read Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins 2005. She also made me swear not to attempt to find it or research it at all. Um...OK.
I got a call from Beca today telling me that a package from Lori arrived with a comic book shaped parcel inside...plus Trader Joe's 73% dark chocolate!
When I got home and opened it up, there indeed was Batman Villains Secret Files and Origins 2005. Lori had also mailed me with instructions to skip the first story. I flipped open to look at the contents and see which page to start on, and my eyes landed on this double-stuff credit:
Pg. 27 IF A MAN BE CLAY!
Steve Purcell: Script
Mike Mignola: Pencils
"Oh my god! Look at this!" I exclaimed holding out the book to Beca. I had the pleasure of working with Steve on the ill-fated Frankenstein feature at ILM, and was a fan of Salmon Max and Gumby's Winter Fun Special before that. And Mike Mignola - well hell, you know who he is...
What can I say? Pure awesomeness! Complete "day the mail-away Boba Fett action figure arrived" awesomeness!
Best. Batman. Story...Evar.
But wait, there's more!
I finally found Scott Pilgrim, a comic I've been looking for for months after seeing a review on TRS which reminded me that Scott McCloud featured it in is epic lecture tour and told everyone to read it immediately. After finishing my Batman comic, I dove into the Canadian-style manga, and was blown away! More pure awesomeness!
I got the same feeling reading these comics tonight that I got watching Spaced the first time:
"Hey, someone went to the trouble of making this just for me. Kind of a small audience, but...thanks!"
I'll be reading Volume 2 of Scott Pilgrim later tonight and I'll be trying desperately to find Volumes 3 and 4 in Singapore this weekend!
Yay! Awesome stuff from awesome friends written by still other aweome friends and Torontonian manga masters! And now I've shared them with you...go get all this stuff right now. Go! I mean it. Admit it, your life could use some extra awesomeness right about now.
Gee whiz, I haven't even had the chocolate yet!
For those of us in the northern hemisphere, today is the summer solstice. For ancient civilizations, this day was akin to our modern day New Year's Eve and was viewed as a time to reflect and renew. So why not kick off your summer celebration with a new theme?
See all of our themes in the Design Area.
Or choose from one of these brand-new themes. (Available under "New.")
I've only had to wait a few months to be able to tell folks about the game that's being developed at Lucasfilm Animation Singapore, but my friends on the game team have been toiling away for over a year in secrecy!
In any public presentation about the studio, we've all had to dance around our video game IP, usually joking about the fact that all we could tell folks was that it was a game for a handheld platform and that they had a 50% chance of guessing which.
So here's where you can find out all about it:
Official Star Wars: Clone Wars Website at LucasArts
Interview with Project Lead (and fellow giant dog owner) Feargus Carroll on IGN
"New Star Wars: The Clone Wars game coming to DS" at Pocket Gamer
This is really exciting news and the game team has been working really hard to make this an awesome game!
