Tattoo poetry

Off topic, as in it’s not by an Asian American, there’s this amazing poem about watching someone get a tattoo here. If you like poetry. Try it!

Help for your Bibliographies

This site, the Purdue Online Writing Lab, is a nice overview of MLA style that is very easy to just match your type of source to the proper style.

Remember, you need two sources from our reading. You can add additional sources or outside stuff like I’ve linked on the website if you want, but it’s not required.

I was using the term “fashion police” metaphorically!

In a confirmation of my argument that fashion is often more about following rigid codes and fitting in rather than expressing one’s individuality, Huffingtonpost has gotten hold of over seven pages of fashion rules for a Cornell sorority, issued to all their pledges. See the rules and requirements here.

My favorite, from the “Additional Notes on Clothing”: “I’m  going to be doing dress checks so have your outfits for each round completely figured out before you get to Ithaca. If you do not know if something is appropriate/works, email me a picture of it and I shall discuss things with you.”

More on eyelid surgery

I wonder how long it takes to get one’s eyelids “done.” Is it as invasive and hard to recover from as a facelift or nosejob? Or is it an outpatient process like, say, LASIK? ( had LASIK done as an undergrad … does that “count” as plastic surgery?) Why do people seem to “rank” plastic surgery procedures in a hierarchy of appropriateness?

Here is the clip from the Tyra Banks Show:

Secret Identities available at the bookstore!

Hooray! There should be copies of Secret Identities available at the bookstore now. I will announce this in class as well.

Go buy it right away as the bookstore is known for sending back books at the end of the quarter, even if they just got here.

Eyelid surgery, makeup, glue

There are a lot of sites out there discussing the whole eyelid surgery/tape/glue thing, and a lot of material on YouTube. The comments people make on these YouTube videos are especially interesting to read, as they range really widely from extreme approval to heated disapproval.

First, here are some vids on how to use glue and a forked stick to create a fold in a monolid. This is a demonstration of a product available in Asia (I don’t know what’s going on with the sound in this one but it doesn’t seem synced with the pictures) and here is a young woman giving a makeup tutorial on how to use these products in English (one of the huge and growing number of makeup tutorials on YouTube, as you may remember from class.) Warning: if you watch these right before going to bed you may have weird dreams about poking yourself  in the eye, like I did.

Next, here is a segment from the Tyra Banks show where she interviews a young Asian American woman who had eyelid surgery.It’s interesting that Tyra Banks won’t believe her guest’s reasons for choosing eyelid surgery, but I’ve never seen her question people’s reasons for wearing makeup or dieting, for example. Certain practices get to be labeled your real desires while others basically get you called untruthful or self-deceptive —- Adorno’s theory of the dupes of mass culture, reinvented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8C5ZnQA08c&feature=related

And just for fun, in case you wanted to see the makeup artist imsnowkei’s designs again, they are here.

Somewhat related to the topic of eyelid alterations would be a fashion style that has not really migrated over to America from Asia (at least not yet): Ulzzang. Translated roughly as “famous face,” Ulzzangs are currently the subject of a lot of cultural anxiety and disapproval in many parts of Asia, although I’m not sure these people are enough of a community to count as a subculture.

The Ulzzang look is supposed to replicate the look of an anime character or the “dolly eye,” which is achieved by wearing contacts that make your pupils look huge and round along with lots of makeup, careful lighting, and Photoshop. The result reminds me a lot more of an alien or E.T. than a doll, but it is certainly striking. (And I think I’ve seen Lady Gaga wearing the circle contacts in some of her videos — maybe it’s just a matter of time before it reaches the U.S.)

Here is a website for all your Ulzzang makeup and contact needs, along with lots of pictures, while this tutorial tells you how to get that look and this web site has some really interesting before and after photos. What interests me is that the girls posing actually change how they hold their  faces — by dropping their jaws open, lowering their heads, or pressing a finger into their lip or chin — to further diminish the lower half of their faces, making their eyes and foreheads seem even bigger. In one tutorial I watched that demonstrated the “puppy eye,” the young woman kept puffing her cheeks out with a little huffing noise each time she checked herself in the mirror to see how the look was coming along.  Fascinating! I always think of my face as just sitting there when I am not doing anything in particular (when I think about my face at all). I wonder if I would hold my face differently “at rest” if I were born in a different place or time?

Cultural Appropriation

The blog Racialicious has a discussion of cultural appropriation and Amy Winehouse (and cites Wikipedia on the definitions of cultural appropriation but it’s ok as a starting point).

The SNL white-guy-with-dreadlocks skit can be found here.

Have you found any other good or recent examples?

Indie media, internet media

One of your classmates has alerted me to the production company WongFu Productions. They started out making humorous videos while undergrads at UC San Diego and now they work full time at creating and selling their own t-shirts and directing short films aimed at an Asian American fan base as they explain in the following short CNN newsclip:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/showbiz/2009/08/15/rowlands.wong.fu.productions.cnn?iref=videosearch

So here is an interesting example of Asian Americans finding it easier or more useful to bypass Hollywood and create their own network of production and distribution rather than attempt to change the hegemonic media industry.

Check out their web site to see how they are “branding” themselves and building their independent media business here, and see their short films on YouTube.

One clip that might be especially relevant, considering our discussion of race and masculinity last week, is “Yellow Fever”:

I’m still on the fence about whether promoting positive representations of yourself counts as activism when compared to other serious issues like hate crimes or immigration/deportation issues or translation services or the foreclosure crisis. What do you think?

Bruce Lee

There are a lot of good fight scenes from Bruce Lee’s movies uploaded to YouTube, in addition to the “no dogs and Chinese allowed” clip we watched in class:

Someone who watched this clip of the Chuck Norris-Bruce Lee fight we viewed must have agreed about the homoerotic undertones, because s/he re-cut it to do a “Brokeback Mountain Oscars montage” effect:

You could say this YouTube user “queered” the movie by recutting it (or you could argue that it was pretty queer to begin with); this technique is very common in fan fiction and is called “slash fiction.” Why would fans want to recut or rewrite, say, classic Star Trek episodes to create a gay romance between Spock and Kirk? You’ll have to take Constance Penley’s popular culture class over in Film and Media Studies to find out.

In the meantime, here’s the Oscar awards “gay cowboy” montage from 2007, just because it’s so fun:

Syllabus Change

The bookstore is still trying to get in copies of Secret Identities (there are copies available for order on Amazon.com, I saw.) We’re switching around two weeks of the syllabus, trading the Ping Pong Playa week with Secret Identities. None of the assignment dates have changed. The updated weekly breakdown is posted below:

Updated Syllabus

Week 5: Masculinity

2/1            “Chinese American Masculinities: From Fu Manchu to Bruce Lee”

2/3            film, Ping Pong Playa

2/5             Ping Pong Playa continued

Week 6: Fashion and Beauty Queens

2/8            “Flava in Ya Gear” ; “Introduction” “Fashion-Nation”

2/10            “Rizal Day Queen Contests” in AAY, all selections from Crowning the Nice Girl: Gender, Ethnicity, and Culture in Hawai’i’s  Cherry Blossom Festival

2/12            “Making a Better Me? Pure. White. Flawless.”

Week 7: Body Modification and Fashion

2/15             HOLIDAY

2/17             all selections from A Cultural History of the Modern Tattoo Community

2/19             all selections from Permanence: Tattoo Portraits, on electronic reserve

PAPER # 2 DUE

Week 8: Representation and Invisibility

2/22            selections from Secret Identities

2/24            Secret Identities continued

2/26            Secret Identities continued

PROPOSAL DUE

Week 9: Consumption

3/1             “Hell’s a Poppin’ ” in AAY

3/3             “Instant Karma” in AAY

“Indo-Chic: Late Capitalist Orientalism and Imperial Culture,”

3/5             “Metaconsumptive Practices and the Circulation of Objectifications”

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY DUE

Week 10: Bringing it all Together

3/8             Fox Girl

3/10            Fox Girl continued

3/12             Fox Girl continued

3/18             Thursday, FINAL PROJECT DUE in my mailbox by 5 p.m.