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The Ugly Truth about why The Kids ARE All Right

2010-08-02T13:29:00.000-07:00

A guest post by Jasbir Puar (JKP) and Karen Tongson (KT).
SPOILER ALERT: important plot points to The Kids are All Right are revealed in this post.

On opposite coasts, KT and JKP diligently turned their attention from World Cup fever to an important mission: sussing all the hoo-haa about the latest “lesbian film,” Lisa Cholodenko’s highly-anticipated The Kids Are All Right. KT saw TKAAR on a Friday night at the Arclight in Los Angeles, a well-appointed Hollywood multiplex with assigned seating and other bourgie accoutrements like Italian mineral water, chicken sausage baguettes, and a full-service bar and restaurant in the lobby. To put the setting in perspective, Nic and Jules--the lesbian couple played by Annette Benning and Julianne Moore in the film--would probably go to the Arclight to see something like TKAAR for a “date night.” (Admittedly, KT was there for that same purpose).

Lesbeaux pairs were neatly dispersed across the stadium-style seats, and a collective clutching of hands could be felt as the movie started, as if everyone was steeling themselves for yet another “dick intervenes” narrative about dyke couples. Despite what KT only half-jokingly refers to as her lesbian fundamentalism, she actually didn’t leave the theater hating the film, but felt provoked in ways both reparative and hostile.

On the East coast, in the heart of Chelsea’s gay male homo-ville, JKP went to see The Kids are All Right the weekend it opened, a few hours after a tepid, snooze-fest World Cup finale between Spain and the Netherlands. She too was on “date night,” and her beaux, being thoroughly nonplussed by the merits of watching football at the local BBQ joint while downing greasy pork ribs and cheap cuba libres, was more than happy to have something interesting to mull over. While JKP left the theater feeling more than a little uneasy with the liberal depiction of gay family, A.O. Scott's ringing endorsement finally making sense, the movie was a relief: entertaining, fury-rousing, thought-provoking and head-scratching.

We can see why the film has been pretty much reviled by many of our friends and colleagues. We felt compelled to nod vigorously along when reading Jack Halberstam's and Claire Potter's lively critiques of TKAAR. We’ve also been wowed by Daisy Hernandez’s bravado dissection of the film’s race politics in Colorlines. We definitely laughed out loud and hard upon reading Lisa Duggan's proclamation--undoubtedly true--that TKAAR has the worst lesbian sex scene in the history of cinema (Claire of the Moon be damned).

Within the reception spaces of these reviews, however, the film had gone from questionable to bad. Really bad. In fact, consensus has seemed to build among queer academics in particular that TKAAR is the worst movie of this summer, if not this year, if not EVER. How is this so? How is it that TKAAR can be trashed for not transcending the racial, sexual and gender stereotypes that dominate all of Hollywood filmmaking? Neither of us can remember the last time we saw a mainstream release that didn't have shitty race politics, gender politics, sexual politics, class politics or all of the above.

Maybe we’ve approached TKAAR with too much earnestness and not enough salt. What if everything that’s wrong with the movie is actually what's right about the movie?

Lisa Cholodenko’s major films, from High Art to Laurel Canyon, have never featured what anyone would call “likeable” characters. All of her films’ protagonists have been white, privileged, pretentious and undeniably fucked up. Viewed in triptych—to extend Kathryn Bond Stockton’s suggestion that TKA be read in diptych with High Art—Cholodenko has been building a formidable body of work that softly, but also scathingly satirizes the denizens of queer(ish) urbanity, primarily in Los Angeles. (Lest we forget, Frances McDormand’s character in Laurel Canyon seduces her son’s obnoxious, aspirational girlfriend, played by Kate Beckinsale.)

McDormand and Beckinsale, Pool-Smooching in Laurel Canyon

Cholodenko relies on the repulsive registers of her actors’ repertoires of gesture as a vehicle for her satire, one keyed to a lo-fi quotidian discomfort. Nic’s icy severity surfaces in Benning’s annoying facial tics, in a face that will not hold despite all the strain to do so. Jules’ casual but destructive indecisiveness is captured in Moore’s goofy, muppet-like head-nodding, the repetitive reflex of assent in lieu of her own ability to assert. Paul’s creative class douchery and hetero male narcissism is perfectly embodied by Ruffalo, the prototypical “sexy schlub” adored by many women (and quite a few gay men) because he seems “real,” a little soft, just a notch below “hot”—in short, because he reads a little like some butch dykes. Because many of us like these actors, maybe we wanted too badly to transpose our affection for them and their star texts to their fundamentally unlikable characters on-screen?

Don't get us wrong: we appreciate all the agro around this film and we each have our share of complaints. But what would happen if we could think of TKAAR beyond its designation as a "lesbian film," made by the inevitably essentialized figure of the "lesbian director," Lisa Cholodenko? Through this mainstream marketing lens, Cholodenko invariably carries the burden of lesbian representation, and “realistic” if not positive representation at that. What if we instead construe the film as a potentially astute political and social satire about the possibilities and pitfalls of family formations? If we switch to this register of interpretation—a stubbornly reparative one—we could look closer at the ugliness the film is conveying to broader, mainstream audiences about the costs and horrors of normativity in all its expressions.

In the spirit of wrongs turned right, here are some of the truly ugly things about queers that drew us in to The Kids are All Right:

1. Lesbians can have really boring sex, just like anyone else.

Alas, it's true: sometimes all the sex toys and props in the world just can't jazz up the long-term mojo. We too would be more than happy to see “the best lesbian sex” on screen. But what would that be? For whom would it be?

As one of KT’s friends joked, most lesbian sex scenes, especially in indie films seem to require rolling around in chocolate, then on a canvas or some other artsy surface, before strummy guiar music fades in and gauze flits between two dewey-eyed girls giggling and kissing tenderly.

In TKAAR, Cholodenko actually makes an incredibly smart intertextual intervention that references the mired history of representations of lesbian sex on screen. When explaining why lesbian porn is unappealing to their son Laser, who finds gay male porn in their bedroom (not to mention a pyrotechnic dildo--was it the classic Beaver from the early 90s?), Jules and Nic summarize the problem neatly: two straight women are hired to depict lesbian sex for straight men. Two straight women like Benning and Moore, for example.

The disparate sex scenes in TKAAR are also about contrasting “married-couple sex” with extramarital sex. Maybe the sex between Jules and Nic is rendered terribly not because it’s lesbian sex, but because it’s married sex? The long-termers’ encounter looks more conjugal and perfunctory, whereas sex outside the couple appears more spontaneous, urgent, even desperate. What if the depiction of extramarital sex were between Jules and another woman? Might it contain the same kind of desperation, improvisation and even hints of violence as her assignations with Paul?

Ultimately who knows what kind of choices Cholodenko could and didn't make, but perhaps the non-sexy lesbian/married couple sex scene, contrasted with the hyper-phallic straight/extra or non-marital sex scene, is also Cholodenko's way of saying F*ck You to Hollywood: you ain’t gettin’ any. Who winds up being hyper-spectacularized? Not the lesbians. Withholding (visibility) can be a powerful political act. Whether this is a satisfactory move is no doubt endlessly up for debate. But in any case, our point is simply that in the dialogue between Moms and Laser, Cholodenko makes it clear that she is acutely aware of audiences' desires for representations of hot lesbian sex, as well as the history of lesbian sex in pornography, and the pitfalls of repeating that history in mainstream cinema.

2. Just like anyone else, lesbians can look like shit when they’re depressed.

Of course it's always great to see Julianne Moore glammed up. But wouldn't that have seemed a bit weird given how utterly abject her character is? Ok she didn't have to be a granola-hippy-washed-up love child. (But ouch. How many of us—especially those of us on the west coast—know at least one lesbian like her?) More importantly, Cholodenko's trenchant point about the fantasies of reproductive coupling—the difficulty of maintaining a relationship where both (where all) people are equally happy with their own lives, as well as equally happy with each other—can, but should not be lost. Are lesbians superheroes who are naturally better at coupling? Surely Nic and Jules were once a hot-to-trot lesbian success story, and we all love those.

But in the scene at the bar where Jules finally asserts to Nic that she relinquished her ambition for Nic's paternalistic security, we are offered a crushing sense of what has been eroded over years and years through the trials of domesticity and the dynamics that stabilize in that form. It's not a zero-sum game exactly. More like: what is gained is divided by what is lost, and what is kept owes something to what is added, and so on. In other words: It's complicated, folks! And TKAAR reminds us that the couple form, especially the reproductive couple form, is often not malleable enough to admit these other algebras of affect, attachment and even ambition.

3. Families suck. Even queer families suck, despite their best intentions.

“Families We Choose” can be the worst families of all, because we choose them thinking they will be better, yet they often turn out to be the same and quite violently so. The family in TKAAR is the most queer when it is porous to Paul’s presence, the lines of affiliation arising and dissipating—an assemblage of alliances uncertain and open to changes, unexpected, convivial encounters and sudden, random intimacies. Daughter Joni prepares to hate Paul but finds herself curiously charmed upon meeting him. Meanwhile the eagerness of the son, Laser, is dampened by confronting a heretofore unknown masculinity. His potentially self-undermining disdain towards Paul is most effectively communicated in a scene when he accusingly asks his biological father, “Why did you donate sperm?”

Nic's resistance to Paul eases as they share a cringe-worthy Joni Mitchell duet (the song in question is, not insignificantly, “All I Want”*—a devastating song about romantic ruin as addition) at a long overdue dinner just moments before Jules’ and Paul’s betrayal becomes evident to her. (*We originally misidentified the song as "Case of You." Just for fun we've appended both songs here to listen and read along with):

What ensues next is nothing less than a classic re-emboldening of the couple form in the face of triangulation, but this time, homonationalist style. Jules tosses the phone--as if flinging a technological phallus--when Paul calls to exhort his passion for her, yelling “I’m a DYKE!” before hanging up. And in this sense TKAAR admirably departs from what KT has dubbed the “dick intervenes” genre by discarding the notion that hetero-sex will always turn a good dyke to a steady diet of cock once and for all. She was, in the end, fucking him not because of some latent heterosexual desire or need to exit her relationship, but because of an awakened, reproductive narcissism: she sees her kids in Paul's face, her family, her inner circle. He is biology, pure matter, as is his penis, the source of the sperm that fathered her children. He reflects back to her the possibilities and achievements deferred by her reproductive choices.

4. Yours, mine, ours?

As Nic refuses Paul entry into the house, she yells, "You're an interloper. This is my family. If you want a family, get your own." (Not once does Nic refer to "our family" even when talking to Jules). Despite her anger at "moms," Joni is similarly unable to see Paul as anything but a threat to her admittedly imperfect but still precious family unit. Laser’s already-disaffected stance is, in the end, unflappable. The full-family-shut-out of the very biological matter that made this family possible in the first place is complete. The kids are more than just all right: they fulfill their function perfectly, normatively. They complete the frayed lesbian coupling and provide it an alibi by acting in self-protection, justifying their parent’s choices. This homonationalist family self-defense is a bio-racial formation with dense social ramifications.

In fact, hardly the heteronormative conquerer or a symbol of the power of heteronormativity, Paul is a clumsy version of heterosexual masculinity. Let's say it out loud: he’s a doofus, and not-so-bright. Unlike the wholesome white family of which he seeks to become a part, he is of the earth, of mere matter, of bios; he is semen and smells “ripe.” He is an outsider, a foreigner, an interloper, someone who needs to "get his own family," as if family is something we can purchase, acquire, own. In the case of Nic and Jules, it is. They bought the sperm and they “own” the kids legally.

Despite the queer potential of Paul’s status as an interloper and his disposability which could ally him with the racial others in this film, his white, masculine, creative class privilege rescues him. His lack of education and rough-trade skills are converted from liabilities into cultural capital. This positioning actually serves as a foil for Jules’ own quashed, hippie-dippy ambitions to be, at once, a free spirit and a success—a someone (with a difference), rather than a nobody. White masculinity is what has enabled Paul, someone who is (on paper at least), pretty much a loser, to become a success amongst the hipster locavores on L.A.’s eastside, the same ones oblivious of their taste culture’s impact on the shape of the neighborhood.

We believe that in the end Cholodenko makes it clear through Paul’s interruption that she is not endorsing Nic and Jules’ particular version of the lesbian family, but simply exposing its instability. The trope of the interloper is neither intrusive nor residual, but rather supplementary—indeed foundational—to the capacity of the homonationalist family to reconsolidate and securitize its boundaries.

Cholodenko thus does not sanction, but instead offers a stinging critique of the racialized, gendered, classed, and sexualized costs of excluding others in the name of "my family." In finalizing Paul’s status as an interloper, Cholodenko exposes family for being what postcolonial and transnational feminist thinkers have described it as for a least half a century: a unit of national security, a formation of hierarchical unequals that naturalizes the exclusions and border patrolling of nationhood.

5. To shore up the family, either gay or straight, people of color become collateral damage.

Paul’s disposability is trumped only by the dismissal of the three people of color in the film. Jules fires the gardener because she wants to get her fuck on in secret (“protect the family”) with little regard for what it will mean to the gardener economically. Rather than being read as solely an abject caricature of flexible, Chicano migratory labor, we note that the gardener must be expelled because he has too much power to expose the homonationalist family for the unstable entity that it is. Paul dumps Tanya, his African-American hostess/fuck-buddy because he needs to “start thinking about having a family.” In this scene, Tanya figures as the antithesis of family—she is literally not “family material,” her biological matter, her racial coordinates unable to compete with the lure of the white homonationalist family unit. Joni can’t bring herself to express her tingles for her South Asian boy pal, Jai, until she sees another white girl try to mack on him at a party. But it’s also at that moment that Jai becomes used as the figure with whom Joni acts out against “moms.” She could’ve kissed any boy and driven home drunk, but we find it striking that casting choice was made to have her love interest be a boy of color (and presumably, one of equal economic privilege).

6. Yes, Hollywood is still butch-phobic.

But a lot of queers seem to be femme-on-femme phobic. Or whatever-on-whatever phobic. Or we-don't-know-what on we don't-know-what phobic. To read Nic and Jules within a failed butch-femme configuration is to reassert the centrality of their whiteness, and to uphold the standards of masculinity and femininity that adhere to whiteness and its particular aesthetics of gender presentation. Butch-femme is of course a multiply racialized gender formation with varied histories, but it is often in service, if not indebted to, whiteness. Perhaps Cholodenko shirked from a certain responsibility to redress a lack of variety in butch representation, but in the case of TKAAR it might have worked to good effect to underscore her critique of masculinity. Part of what may feel unsatisfying, uncomfortable or not toothsome enough about TKAAR is that it critiques masculinity while letting “actual” men get away with too much (especially the interloping bio-man embodied by Paul). TKAAR critiques masculinity regardless of its (un)successful embodiments—e.g. Nic’s/Benning’s “failed” butch aesthetics—by reminding us how much the power and coercive force of masculinity, even female masculinity, can have very little to do with hair, clothes, make-up or a lack thereof, but everything to do with money, career, ambition and the performance of paternity.

***

The Kids are All Right is, as we said at the outset, an ugly film. Or rather, it reveals the ugliness at the heart of queer and bourgeois-boheme fantasies about being different—and yet not. Nic and Jules may have formed an “alternative” family, but it still functions to securitize, protect and police the very notion of “family” itself. Paul may be a quirky guy, an “alterna-dude” who grows organic veggies and runs a green, locally-sourced restaurant—but none of this means he isn’t a douche. He’s still a white guy who benefits from all the accommodations the world makes for “creative” guys like him, from the discarded people of color in the film with whom he professes to be “down,” to the lesbians who never quite banished the power of masculinity from their own lived structure. In the end, we aren’t supposed to like these people or by extension and implication, ourselves, very much.

And yet Cholodenko dwells on all of this damage in a way that forces us to look long and hard, and maybe even laugh at ourselves as we confront the terrible realization of how fucked up we queer (neo)liberals can truly be. We may not always see ourselves, or even see what we want to see about ourselves in her films. Those of us who aren’t moneyed and/or white would be especially hard pressed to do so. But what makes The Kids Are All Right compelling for us, if not consonant with our views of life, love and the world, is how uncomfortable it makes us feel when we actually do experience the tiniest moments of self-recognition through these characters, their words, their failures and their actions; when we catch glimpses of ourselves doing terrible things in order to exert a tighter grasp on the people, places and things we imagine belong to us alone. - (JKP & KT)

Blacklisted: Racism at Essence magazine?

2010-07-29T07:13:00.001-07:00

I thank Thought Catalog for permission to republish this piece.

You know we’re not in a “post-racial” society when a controversy of epic proportions explodes over the appointment of a white person as the next Fashion Director of a black magazine. Angela Burt-Murray, Editor-in-Chief of Essence magazine, recently hired Ellianna Placas as its next Fashion Director. Before anybody decides whether the move is racist, post racial or somewhere in between, we need to think about the larger history of black people in fashion.

Controversy ensued when cultural critic Michaela angela Davis made a Facebook posting denouncing the new hire. “It’s with a heavy heart I’ve learned that Essence magazine has engaged a white fashion director,” she wrote. “The fashion industry has hist Esseence orically been so hostile to black people — especially women. The seat reserved for black women once held by Susan Taylor, Ionia Dunn-Lee, Harriette Cole (+ me) is now — I can’t. It’s a dark day for me.”

So now the question at the tip of everyone’s lips is what a white person could possibly know about black women’s bodies, trends, styles – in essence, what black women want? But I think the real issue is less that a white woman is the new Fashion Director, although it certainly comes as a shock, even to me. What really burns is that people are thinking that somewhere in the fashion industry is a fabulous black person who was passed up for the job. Are you telling me there was not one fierce black women, or outrageously fabulous black gay man who could have filled the position? More than anything this was a missed opportunity. Somebody like Andre J. (who has graced the cover of French VOGUE) would have been stunning.

The irony of this blacklash is that it’s quite similar to the moment in the 1970s when a then unknown model by the name of Iman Abdulmajid came from Somalia and took the American fashion industry by storm. At the time, readers of Esseence, among other black publications, were peeved that photographers, designers, and modeling agents had to reach all the way to Africa to find beautiful black women, when there are plenty of beautiful black women right here in the United States. Marcia Gillespie, then Editor-in-Chief of Essence , is widely quoted for saying that the only reason Iman was popular is because she “looked like a white woman dipped in chocolate.”

All told, I’m torn about how I feel about a white women at the helm of style at the premier black women’s style magazine. On the one hand, I’m curious to see what she’ll do. Maybe she’ll blow everybody out of the water and the backlash will die down after her first few editorials.

But on the other hand, I’m really skeptical, given the torrid history of black women in fashion. To start, advertisers didn’t consider black people a valid consumer group until the mid twentieth century, when they up and realized that black women were spending a phenomenal amount of cash on beauty products.

Second of all, black women weren’t allowed to compete in all-white beauty pageants such as the Miss America Pageant – never mind that they weren’t even considered beautiful then. As a result, black women had to cook up their own beauty pageants, like the Miss Black America Pageant, to set the tone for their own ideals of beauty. And the first Miss Black America Pageant was staged at the same time, and right across the street from, the National Miss America Pageant as a protest meant to bring awareness to the lack of black women in fashion.

When I was reading the comments on the Esseence controversy, one smartass said something like: “This is purely reverse racism. Could you imagine if a major fashion magazine did an All-White models issue, what would people say then?” I wanted to find whoever said that and choke them, because they don’t see the bigger picture. Every issue of every magazine is an All-White issue, whether it says so or not. I mean really: there have only ever been a handful of black women on the covers of major fashion magazines, such as American VOGUE, which saw the first black woman on the cover in 1974. Do the math: that’s only 36 years ago. Over the years there has been a lot of idle talk about the state of black fashion models. Why are there so few? Time and again I’ve heard the line: if you put a black face on a cover, the magazine won’t sell. So in 2008, Italian VOGUE dropped its first All-Black issue, (the hottest issue of all time, so hot it went into reprint) which featured all black models on four separate covers and all black models in the issue.

The White Hire at Essence is a very slippery move, more informed by business, what will sell magazines and what will get ad dollars than courting political correctness. Are people pissed off about the White Hire? Sure. But what irks them even more is the White Hire in the larger context of the lack of diversity in the fashion industry, the fact that everybody knows that diversity is a huge issue in the fashion industry, and the fact that the leading black style publication would hire a white woman as the Fashion Director regardless. There are already so few black people on the catwalks, designing the clothes, or working in the magazines. For the past few months I’ve been working at a Condé Nast publication, and I can tell you that I’m one of the only black people on the whole floor who’s not delivering the mail.

KOTW: Lighten Up, It's Just Drag

2010-07-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Last Monday, RuPaul’s long-awaited Drag U. , the latest brainchild from her blond highlighteness, premiered on the LOGO Network. Drag U. is basically a spin-off of Drag Race, that super successful reality competition series that’s searching for America’s Next Drag Superstar. Shantay you stay. Before I saw the first episode of Drag U., I didn’t really know what to expect. Whatever it was, I knew that Ru would serve the kids something fierce. And honey, there’s nothing I like more than a 7-foot tall drag queen in my television screen. Worrrrrk.

Drag U. is a makeover show, but one like you’ve never seen. Here’s the premise: a carefully selected group of queens from previous seasons of Drag Race basically descend from Sephora and WeaveTopia to unleash their wisdom and dragspertise, making the world a better place. One fake eyelash at a time. You might remember Nina Flowers (hey, girl), Raven (I can’t STAND this trollop), and Jujubee (yesss!), plus Ongina, Pandora Boxx and other favorites are in the house, too.

Each episode, one of the queens gets assigned a plebeian hot mess to make over into a more fabulous drqg queen version of themselves. The show just kicked off, so it’s hard to tell who the lucky group will be each week. But last time, the queens made over women who had seemingly lost touch with their femininity. Cue the house music! The queens sashay to the rescue and teach these women everything they need to know about hair, make up, and walking in high heels. There was something very Butlerian about the whole ordeal (and I’m not going to take it there) with the boys in drag teaching the women how to be more like women. Right?

The heart of the show is its big heart: you know, self-empowerment, inner beauty, self-confidence-it’s-what’s-on-the-inside-that-counts. And these ladies do come from diverse backgrounds: some were lesbians, but others were straight and married with children, with the husband and kids in the audience! How’s that for a progressive family dynamic?

But I don’t see how the show will survive week after week without changing the group who gets made over. People want to be surprised - that's TV for you. The gender doesn’t matter as much as how unfabulous their background is. I mean, the whole premise of the show is basically saying, Okay, so you’re really fabulous on the inside and that’s fine and everything, good for you, but let’s just go ahead and make that boring outside pop just a touch more.

I’m excited to see what becomes of Drag U. It’s an inventive, new kind of makeover show. Everybody remembers the Ricki Lake makeovers or the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy makeovers, but leave it to RuPaul to create the first Drag Over. Lord knows I’m dying to live in a world where everybody’s fabulous and rolling around in sequins and 42 inch weaves.

Apologies and Re-branding, Oh! My

2010-07-22T13:22:00.000-07:00

Look what Patty found... Mac apologizes for its collaboration with Rodarte on the Juárez collection and then decides to re-brand the whole line. Check out the full piece Here.

Lest you start feeling all warm and cuddly about the energies wielded by blogosphere outrage, please note that the Mac-Rodarte collaboration still looks to be intact. Mac - now enlightened - will donate $100K to help Juárez. Stay tuned for definitions of "re-branding."

Sex, Soju, and a Memo to Academics: Interview with Scarlet Chan, Cast Member of the First K-town Reality Show

2010-07-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

Cast, L-R: Young Lee, Jennifer Field, Joe Cha, Scarlet Chan, Violet Kim, Peter Le, Steve Kim and Jasmine Chang

I think it’s safe to say we should all be bracing ourselves and honing our “krage” (or Korean rage) for the ching-chong-chang, racist humor coming our way with the arrival of the highly anticipated K-town reality show. Though I’m a little disappointed that there isn’t a “sinful PK or Pastor’s Kid” (or is there??), a “chola/ggangpae girl” with eyebrows drawn in with a black sharpie, or a “was captain of the high-school volleyball team, closeted dyke from New Jersey,” I’m still super excited at the potential hot-mess looks of the first ever K-town reality show crew . If you’ve been sleeping, the K-town pilot was shot last weekend and the cast was finally revealed earlier this week. Which K-town am I speaking of? The ever-gentrifying, noraebang lit, densely populated, driving buzzed is A-OK-- Koreatown of Los Angeles that we all heart or will learn to heart.

Another reason I will be tuning in to K-town is because my good friend Scarlet Chan is one of the eight cast members. Trust that she's going to shake shit up! Here is our cute Sunday morning conversation for you all, which reveals a little on who she is, why she's in it, what she thinks of it all so far:

So Scarlet, what made you want to be part of the K-town Reality Show cast? What made you go to the casting call?

It was a leap of faith. Kara invited me to go out for jja-jjang-myun and I met all her Asian gamer friends. They were talking about the show, and I just overheard. And Kara said, Scarlet you should audition for that, you’ll totally fucking make it. She sent me the link for the craigslist ad, and I thought 'What the hell.' Since I go to a lot of casting calls for modeling, I just went. I thought it’ll be a fun project to be part of. A lot of drinking on camera, a lot of free partying, and I already party a lot on top of it, and thought it would be a pretty sweet deal. I don’t have an epic answer.

What’s your relationship to Los Angeles and K-town?

Well, I was born in Hong Kong, but I’ve always been in LA. I’ve never partied in K-town to be honest, I’ll just go to eat. The only time I party in K-town is when Peggy is in town. Laugh. And when you take me to places in K-town. But that’s the only time I’m there. I grew up in East LA and went to Los Altos High in Hacienda Heights, which is a very different demographic compared to the West side. LA’s been good to me. Because I grew up in the East Side a lot of my childhood friends are Latino, so, I didn’t really hang out in K-Town until I was an adult.

I know bloggers have already compared you to JWoww, do you see that? Why do you think people are already calling K-town the "Asian Jersey Shore?" What do you think about that connection?

Left (JWoww) and Right (Scarlet Chan) - Courtesy of MTV Iggy Blog

Jersey Shore came out with an “all-Italian cast.” In some ways without Jersey Shore, I don’t think the show would have happened the way it has. I’ve talked to the producers and asked them numerous times why they want to do it. The producers always talked about an Asian reality show, because there isn’t enough Asian Americans in the media, and Korean Americans, even less. The show is called K-town because Koreatown is such an exclusive network that people don’t talk much about and there’s so much that goes on, so much possibility, so much that could go wrong or right. Demographically and location wise, it’s the perfect spot to have a reality show for Asians. You could pick Chinatown too, but it’s fucking shitty in LA, really crappy, only 2 bars open at night and that’s it. In K-town there are hundred of bars and a million karaoke rooms you could go to party your ass off. A night of mayhem in K-town is totally worth it.

Well, you’ve been to the K-town in Manhattan, it’s like that one street. Do you remember that?

Yeah, in New York, there’s a huge Chinese demographic. The show could’ve taken off there, but the producers are in LA. And I feel it could’ve gone either way, but it just happened to be called K-town. On top of it, the bloggers are comparing the cast to the Jersey Shore cast, and of course there’s the “beef cake,” etc. Some of them also bitch about how much we’re drinking. Without alcohol, there is no reality TV. If everyone is sober, and in their rational state of mind, there would be no TV. When we’re not drinking, it’s fucking boring. Hello? Think about it. Anyways, I feel that the cast is meant to capture not only Asian audiences, but they [the producers] wanted to reach across and get those who usually won’t tune in to an all-Asian show. In order to do that, people are vain, so they wanted to cast a look that’s not only attractive to Asians, but attractive to someone who’s not usually into Asians. And they considered casting stereotypes, but at the end, they just said fuck it, let’s just cast people who seem interesting.

I know you’ve had various hustles going on in the past and even now, aside from the show, do you want to share them?

I’ve worked at a doctor’s office, waitressed for 2 years, in college, did a lot of work study jobs. Towards the end of college, I started my senior thesis on exotic dancers. I went into the industry, and worked as a dancer for 13 weeks for the project, and spent a year writing about it. After college, I decided to continue dancing because the money was really good and there isn’t a lot of competition for an Asian girl in the club, so I knew my chances of making good money was really high. So I went into it thinking I need to pay off my college loans and rent. On top of that, I thought it was really empowering and liberating to be in the industry, and so I did that for 2 and half years. At the end of it, I just felt really jaded, I felt just tired, mentally and physically, felt really drained. That was January of this year, when I went cold turkey, just quit. So ever since that, I did US census, going door to door, and been modeling for the past 3 years. I’m a woman with many, many, many different talents.

I think it’s funny that you’re in this K-town show now, because one of your pseudonyms was Sasha Kim, since you could pass as Korean.

Laugh. I know, when I danced, I used to go by Sasha Kim. It would work until the other customer would speak Korean to me, and I would think oh shit, and say I was born here.

How do you feel about being Chinese/American in a K-town show?

I feel like yes, majority of the cast is Korean. I’m Chinese and Peter Le, is Vietnamese, and Jen is Hapa. I feel the whole cast is so Americanized. Of course, sometimes there’s the language barrier, but I feel very comfortable with the cast, I don’t feel isolated because I’m Chinese. I have something else to bring to the table. Because once we start living in the house, all I know how to cook is Chinese food; and I don’t know if they’ve had home-cooked Chinese food before, but it’ll be nice to share the cooking my mom taught me with them and I’ll learn how to cook Korean dishes from them too. I think the media is making a bigger deal than it is. The show is called K-town, and not only Korean people live there, there’s Chinese, there’s Latino, because the rent is so cheap. There is a ton of other ethnicities that live there. The show is called K-town, not Korean-American life.

So, Peter Le’s pecs and dick seem to be all over the internet, the other female cast members are labeled various things, like princess, and I know a floating catch-phrase about you, is your being bisexual.

Yeah, I don’t know what is going on with that. I don’t remember putting that out or know where that is coming from. Anyways, finish your question.

I thought that was something you purposefully put out. Because my question was going to be what does being openly bisexual in K-town mean to you?

It means I have the best of both worlds. Just kidding. Let’s make it clear. I don’t consider myself bisexual, the word itself is so down the middle. I would go with pan-sexual more, I’m pretty fluid. Some days I feel really straight, and some days I feel really really gay. With guys, I’m submissive and dominant, and with girls, I’m very domme, top, I call the shots and that’s something I’ve come to really embrace about myself.

It seems like some haters of the K-town show are concerned that this show will supposedly tarnish the status of Asian American representation, or in other words, “bring shame.” What do you have to say about this? Do you give a fuck?

Personally, I don’t give a fuck. I think the majority of people who are hating are Asian Americans. And I think it’s because they just don’t know what to expect. They’re haters for a good reason, but at the same time they should have a little more faith in the cast. I’m not in this to fucking embarrass anybody. And I think Asian culture in general loves, loves to pretend we’re fucking perfect. Even within the family structure, they don’t want to air their dirty laundry. But there’s so much that is going on behind closed doors that's never talked about between family members. And there’s all this stuff about saving face, shame, and other bullshit. Yeah, of course you don’t want to do that, but there are certain things that need to be talked about and can’t just be swept under the rug. Personally, with my family, it’s super dramatic and I do plan on airing it out on camera. I’m not going to hold back anything. Yes, my family might hate me, be mad at me for putting them on blast. But I feel it’s a good way for the off-camera families who have gone through similar situations that I’ve had to see there’s someone that’s out in the media, and she's real, and is doing something about it. I want other people to know that it is okay to face your problems head on and be okay with the consequences.

After the airing of the show and when it’s brought up in future dinner conversations, what do you imagine or hope people will say about you?

That I’m hotter than JWoww. Laugh. Just kidding. I want a high five, that-was-fucking-awesome reaction. My friends know me, they know how crazy I am and can be and they love me for it. No matter what, I have support from people who really matter to me. Everyone else, I don’t give a shit what their reaction is because I can’t control how they’re going to analyze my image, take it apart, say how fucked up I am in this situation and you’re being a hypocrite in another. You know people with PhD’s are going to overanalyze this bullshit, and write a book about it. At one point in my life I thought I wanted to be part of academia, but ya’ll need to just put your pen down and go have sex, get laid, drink, live your life and please, go to the gym.

Gay Boi: The Hottest Accessory In Summer 2010

2010-07-13T06:02:00.000-07:00

Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was gay like me? Don’t cha wish your boyfriend was fierce like me? Don’t cha?

According to July’s Teen Vogue, gay dudes are this season’s Must Have Accessory. Hurry – everybody put down your ‘It’ bags and go get u a gay before we’re all sold out.

What’s missing from that article, though, is the gay perspective. Like – why we allow ourselves to be friends with straight chicks.

The “Gay Best Friend” (GBF), as Teen Vogue calls it (I so hope that acronym doesn’t catch on), is a new trend among teenaged girls, who are like sick and tired of bitchy, backstabbing frenemies. These bitches wear all your clothes but don’t take you out for a drink, meet all your boyfriends so they can steal them from you, promise you don’t look fat when you really do – the skanks.

But enough is enough! Teenaged girls everywhere are fed up and embracing gay dudes as their new BFFs. So suck it, mean girls. One sixteen-year-old from California was like, “A few years ago, all the popular, pretty girls were walking hand in hand with a preppy jock. Now you’ll see them in hallways with a Mulberry bag on one arm and a Johnny Weir look-alike on the other.”

Johnny Weir is the ideal gay BFF?? Oh really?…

Everybody is familiar with the straight girl-gay guy sort of coupling. Remember Will and Grace? Or what about Carrie and Stanford, Charlotte and Anthony, Perez and Gaga, Kathy and Anderson – allegedly! The all-knowing Teen Vogue says that one of the reasons straight girls flock to gay bois is for emotional comfort. It can get pretty complicated for a girl to be friends with a straight guy, because he will want to bone her obviously, and that would just ruin everything. A gay never befriends a girl because he wants to sleep with her.

Although many a gay has been invited to touch a boob. And he might actually like to get with the girl, you know, depending on how bottomy or toppy he is.

But writing gay dudes off as trendy accessories is totally bogus. We gays have been popular on TV for the past couple years now, and directly involved in anything brilliant for centuries, which, ok, I guess makes everybody want to go out and get their own personal gay. But the gays people like aren’t ever sexualized – they’re just well dressed, comical sketches. Entertainment!

I mean, why is it that everybody loves a lispy, witty, faaaaaaaaaaaabulous gay, but some of these people won’t even let us get married? You f’in’ hypocrites! I get really annoyed when the only way people like their gays is with a side of lisp and a pinch of faaaaaaaaaaabulous, even if some of us really know how to work a pair of high heels.

To some extent, I think that’s one thing straight girls love about the gay: we aren’t afraid to just put it all out there. We will tell you exactly as it is. In fact, yes, that dress does make you look fat. No, your weave does not look real. And bitch we will wear high heels and look better than everybody, and if you don’t like it then you can just get the fuck out the way and watch us clack past.

But! There’s another side to the story, too. It’s really hard for us gay boys to be friends with straight guys, mostly because they are so fucking protective of their warrior cocks that they don’t allow the forbidden nectar anywhere near. In my experience, the gay friend is likely to develop (sexual) feelings for said straight dude, as in, he probably just wants to sleep with him a couple times. My first year in college I was friends with the hottest dude, the appropriately named Ryan Hottle, – olive skin, green eyes, curly black hair, athletic body, ripped as Jesus Christ. I’m giving myself hot flashes just thinking about him. Anyway, I’d be in the room when Ryan smoked pot, when he played video games, when he played acoustic guitar. So one day I decided it would be fantastic to tell him exactly how I felt so I did and then we

Girls don’t like girls anymore so they’re getting cushy with gay dudes, gay dudes can’t be friends with straight dudes so they surround themselves with other gay dudes and fag hags. That leaves all the straight dudes to play by themselves, with their beer pong and flannel shirts or whatever it is they do.

I guess it makes like scientific sense or whatever, if men are supposed to be with women. Hey, it’s
like being straight without the sex! But what will really be interesting is the day when all straight guys are required to have a gay BFF. There’s a porn for that.

KOTW – A few poems for Oscar Grant

2010-07-13T02:15:00.000-07:00

Here at Oh!, one of the many things that binds us is our love of pop culture. We love it for its abundance and excess, for its whimsy and shine, its detours and swerves, but mostly, for the possibility it harbors between its opaque folds. We follow it eagerly through fantastical scapes and spaces that rhythm with promise.

Often, that sleepy wonder is cruelly shaken and those moments require a different set of energies. Last week, when juries took liberties and played with words and meanings and named murder “involuntary” was one of those moments. So, if you will allow, this Kick of the Week will be a digression from pop culture proper, in the hopes that moving askew can sometimes lead to productive encounters.

On July 7th, 2010, immediately after the verdict of “involuntary manslaughter” was made public, Wanda Johnson, Oscar Grant's mother, stood in front of the Los Angeles County Courthouse and spoke about her son's murder to the television cameras. She talked about the system failing, about endurance, about her unwavering commitment to god. She skillfully wove scripture with criticisms of the legal institution. She quoted Martin Luther King Jr. And then, urged to add a few more words, she ended with this: “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.”

Weaned on the daily bread of Soviet atheism, I could only vaguely discern – guess, really – that this was Biblical scripture. I looked it up. The passage comes from Ephesians 6:12, which is the tenth book of the New Testament. It is variously interpreted as an individual's strife against spiritual trespassing or as a prayer call of intercession on behalf of the blinded. The latter of the two governing interpretations easily unravels into validation of conquest, colonization, and holy war. I don't pretend to know exactly what Wanda Johnson meant when she invoked the passage. I only know that she knows her son was murdered – she repeated it stoically, five times over as if to make sure that this time, no words would accidentally escape definition and accountability.

This writing is not a campaign for Christian scripture, or even religious dogma in the most generalized sense. My intention here is far more pedestrian. That moment of calculated rage, worn by a woman who seemed to have expected no more justice than she was ultimately given, was moving. With that citation, Wanda Johnson called for warfare. More than that, it was a far more poignant articulation of what Jakada Imani, of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, said that same day, that “we must focus on continuing to transform the system that recruited, trained and armed Mehserle and thousands just like him.”

Perhaps because the decision in the case of Oscar Grant's murder came so closely on the heels of Arizona's latest legislation, or because recently, the headlines seem replete with mentions of “infiltration” (spies, both from Mexican drug cartels and from Russia “infiltrate” various systems; undocumented workers “infiltrate,” etc.), but for me, the Oscar Grant murder is difficult to separate from Arizona. The complacency that one legislation faced seems to have almost emboldened the decision of the other. There will be a million arguments for how different the two tragic situations are, how unique the racialized legacy of each event is. And those arguments will be correct. They are, of course, different in every way, except the most obvious: the bodies of people of color made visible in order to be cuffed and subjected to violence, their lives contouring the rapidly and constantly contracting sense of justice.

So, for Oscar Grant, for all those under attack in Arizona, for the many who wish that Arizona had summoned up enough rage to face the line of armed riot police in order to defend their neighbors, and finally, for Wanda Johnson, who imported scripture to point her finger at the state, here is a trio of passages on love, loss, and warfare...

(1) Love: Elizabeth Alexander, excerpt from “Praise Song For The Day” (composed for Barack Obama's inauguration)

“We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
…
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.”

(2) Loss: Oscar Bermeo, “Unsolved Crimes Perpetrated by Invisible Men as Reported by an Unreliable Witness” (published in the Oakland literary journal 580 Split, 2010)

“No one bothered to call 911
Name who set off the long fuse of neglect
Report the fire with no smoke, or flame
Drop dime on who stole the plumbing and glass
Rat out the man who left the explosives
Spot who set the controlled demolition
But I saw it, saw when the deed went down
Happened right in the middle of our night
Between sips and toasts, white ghosts came down
( )
Woke up to find a bomb was dropped on us
The neighborhood, now, a playground of snapped
Support beams and a sandbox of bone dust
The crime scene wiped clean with the blood of bricks”

(3) Warfare: Nas, excerpt from Revolutionary Warfare

“Book one, strategy, tactics, techniques
Look dumb, but massively notice the weakness, in all them
Gotta shoot only if necessary”

(inna)

Maquiladoras are In for Fall

2010-07-09T11:55:00.000-07:00

For those who religiously follow fashion's every catwalk and wade through designers' reported inspirations, this is unlikely to register as newness. But I'll offer it up anyway because it has less to do with fashion and more with geographic citation as practice.

A little while back, deep in the determinedly cosmopolitan exploits of Vogue's André Leon Talley (most recently, he shops with Michiko Kakutani and Maureen Dowd), I came across a note about Rodarte's Fall 2010 ready-to-wear collection and the source of its creative energies – maquiladoras in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez. Yes, maquiladoras. The same maquiladoras that serve as the site for violence, exploitation and femicide, all neatly brokered by global corporate capitalism. The same ones featured in Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre's documentary Maquilapolis. According to a Style.com piece, for Rodarte, the image of women making their way to factories in the middle of the night translated into an aesthetic of dreams and sleepwalking, complete with candlesticks for heels. As if to authenticate their interpretation, Kate and Laura Mulleavy – the sister design duo behind Rodarte – are quick to cite their Mexican roots and of course, the metaphoric journey through heritage that magically turned violence into floral patchwork, pastels, and embroidered leggings (they drove through Texas; El Paso to Marfa). Check out selections below and the full collection here. For me, questions of witness, creative translation and gnawing traditions of inspire-mutilate-and-move-on abound.
(inna)

Model Of The Moment: Joan Smalls

2010-07-08T17:11:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago I was at a party hosted by V magazine in honor of Iman, who was just awarded the CFDA Image Award. Iman is largely considered the first non-American black model to break out in the modeling industry. Her rise to fame in the 70s and 80s was met with hot resistance - Marcia Gillespie, then Editor-In-Cheif of Essence, said that Iman was only famous because she looked like a "white woman dipped in chocolate."

Since Iman retired from the industry decades ago, she's made it her mission to bring attention to the lack of people of color in fashion. She has written books about make up for women of color, and is committed to bringing diversity to the catwalks.

It's really depressing to me how few black models there are on the catwalks during Fashion Week, and in the fashion industry at large. Some designers, though, such as Diane von Furstenberg, are committed to showing models of color on their catwalks. But the debate about girls of color is certainly nothing new. Back in 2008, Italian VOGUE dropped a special "All Black" issue, and it quickly became the best selling number of all time. That issue featured four different covers, each one featuring a different black model.

To date, the hottest working black models dominating the catwalks are Jourdan Dunn, Chanel Iman and Sessilee Lopez. But move over, gals! Joan Smalls is the new black model in town.

At just 22 years old, Joan has walked for Antonio Berardi, Christopher Kane, Burberry, Givenchy, Yves Saint Laurent, Aquascutum, Julian McDonald, Anna Sui, Michael Kors, Rodarte, Marc Jacobs, Altuzarra and Alexander Wang - all the hottest tickets on the block.

What I love about J.Smalls is that she's so naturally beautiful that she almost doesn't need make up, and if you look at the images of her on the runway, her face is always very fresh, clean, with little to no make up.

The sad reality of the fashion industry is that your race is really a commodity like any other. Why do you think that for such a long time, most models had that Eastern European Death Glare (Sasha, Natasha, etc.) A particular ethnicity flows in and out of fashion to the point of almost fetishizing the race. But that's the way of fashion. I'll leave that to the critical race theorists to parse out. In the meanwhile, I'm just so glad to have more black models in fashion, so that little girls like my sisters and cousins have a beauty icon to look up to.

KOTW: Brown Eyed Girls' "Abracadabra"

2010-07-07T10:10:00.000-07:00

This kick is coming to you a li'l late in the week, I'll admit, but you know how these U.S. national holidays can send your temporality, diets, and drinking/smoking moratoriums into a tailspin what with the all-too-early dwindling news of oil spills and an endless array of fourth of July debt relief ads streaming through KDAY [FML].

But, to turn our attention to other news, the World Cup nears the end of its one-month colonization of my and many of your sleep schedules, writing and work regimens, and social connections with those friends and family members who could give two fucks about all the shirt-swapping, hair-flipping, body-flopping, homo-hugging, and tear-wiping histrionics of what the rest of the world calls football. With South Korea being one among a number of my favorite teams knocked out of the running-- the tournament will now most definitely conclude in an all European final-- I decided to dedicate this week's KoTW to a Korean girl group who has occupied a special place in my heart for the last half year.

The connection between S. Korean World Cup soccer and a S. Korean pop girl group might seem thin (save for those who would myopically find their shared national origins an exceptional detail). But, the morning that Korea played their final game in the tournament, my heart was moved by a group of young-ish girls who got on stage before the 7:30AM PST kick-off to perform the dance routine from Brown Eyed Girls' (BEG) scintillating music video for their 2009 single "Abracadabra."

Just to put this into context: For every World Cup game in which South Korea played, literally thousands of Korean Americans would congregate on the front lawn of the Radio Korea building on the corner of Wilshire and Western to watch the Red Devils battle other teams on a giant screen. For HOURS leading up to the start of each match, often in the last moments of pitch black before the sun rose, b-boys, drummers, cheerleaders, hip-hop dance groups, etc. would get on stage and pump up the throngs with synchronized backflips, pop-and-lock isolations, fist pumps, and fascistic flag-waving that would threaten most anyone's critical sensibilities.

So this group of girls' dance performance was not immediately extraordinary. But once they began to uniformly gyrate their lower halves in the "saucy" hip dance formation made famous by BEG in front of many yet-to-be (or already secretly) corrupted children, church-going elderly agashi's and ajumonis, and secular soju-drinking bad kids (like yours truly), something shifted. The nationalistic fervor that always draws me in and terrifies me suddenly felt deliciously homo. As if I didn't already know, Brown Eyed Girls are soooo naughty:

If you turn on the Closed Captioning, you'll get a very rough translation of the lyrics.

Initially, the video caused an uproar in Korea because of its hyper-sexual content and because of its ALMOST. LESBIAN. KISS at the end. To be expected. However, the contagion of the swervy hip swing became an even greater sensation as fans and other kpop stars began to imitate it on the dance floor, in live performances, and even at home (video courtesy of PLee):

The director of the video has explained in interviews that the pendular dance move is supposed to animate the thematic tension between reason and passion at play -- maybe even a kind of mania that's supposed to be overtaking their bodies -- within the music videos' barely intelligible narrative (that's not a dis at all-- music videos are supposed to be more evocative than story-driven). But, I think you and I both know that it also suggests a sexual motion: you need only refer to Sommore's bit from Queens of Comedy about how the swirling motion made while hoola-hooping unwittingly trained young girls on how to top their men right (and one could certainly imagine any other gender configuration making sense here). If anything, the hip sway symbolizes BEG's move away from good girls to bad: the group began their careers with a more modest persona, but then re-introduced themselves in this video with asymmetrical haircuts, studded leather jackets, aggressive lyrics, and swinging dance moves (if you're wondering about their vague aesthetic resemblance to Lady Gaga, I think they certainly imagine themselves aligned with her stylistically; see them perform "Telephone").

This kind of good-girl-gone-bad re-branding tactic is a familiar marketing strategy in many star systems, and BEG certainly falls within the production assembly line of a male-exec dominated music industry that has churned out a number of other highly lucrative all-girl sexy-cute super-groups (The Wonder Girls, above left, and Girls Generation, below left, being among the most famous examples). Nor is the girl group a new sensation to the Korean music industry; even my momma remembers The Kim Sisters act from the 1960s (big thanks to CBB for first pointing me to these amazing ladies).

But, the music video of "Abracadabra" also carries the mark of its female director Hwang Soo-ah. Hwang, who studied film at NYU and began her career by making music videos and commercials, made her cinematic debut in 2008 with 우리집에 왜왔니, or Why Did You Come to My House, which belongs to a body of Korean "female character" films that center on a righteous and often violent female lead, an archetype that stands stridently apart in an often highly masculinist national cinema. I can't help but read these narrative tropes into BEG's whip-wielding, studded leather-donning, BDSM-ish vibes, as they move to an industrial beat featuring grungy organs a-la-Front 242 or Stabbing Westward.

It's Hwang's role in the production that makes me naïvely and narcissistically believe that this video was made to include me, to speak to my dirty thoughts and anyone else who shares them, and not just to the dudes existing in the most profitable demographic pockets. In this video, not only do these girls presumably band together to sexually re-program the male protagonist, but then in the final shot, two girls from the group move toward one another for a kiss before an abrupt cut away (it was already a big deal that their kiss was even insinuated). Manufactured, yes, but these girls also strike this whole other register of desire for me-- I don't want them because they're "cute" and/or "pretty," but because they'll fuck you up and then make-out afterward. They overpower my "should-know-better-than-to-admit-this-shit-in-a-public-forum" U.S.-bred feminism, because they give us cosmo Korean femininity sullied, damaged, and much more perverse than what is otherwise nationally or transnationally imagined about Korean, and even Korean American, women.

Undoubtedly, the success of this single/video will produce a million other girl groups that will play with these kinds of images, seductive poses, and maybe even girl-on-girl eros. Moreover, their label will always find ways to "tidy" their image through publicity photos and other media appearances, especially when associated with nationalistic representations. See this montage of BEG and other famous Korean celebs pumping up the crowds with the sounds of a familiar Red Devils cheer. Yes, you'll hear the melody of The Village People's "Go West," though I'm convinced the choice in song for the chant has more to do with the power wielded by the Pet Shop Boys in Korea in the 1980s and 1990s.

Clean alter ego aside: when that young group of girls performed BEG's "saucy hip move" on stage at the nationalist spectacle on Wilshire and Western (though no one was really watching), the pleasurable discomfort it caused within me--and I'm sure among a few other attentive onlookers--felt productively perverse. Not radical, just perverse. It's true that a hip swerve ain't gonna change a whole lot, but it certainly can grind a few traditions down. (PJA)

Singing is Worth it.

2010-07-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

In a rare interview with NPR earlier this week, Ms. Hill-L. Boogie-Lauryn Hill expressed her excitement to record again. On why she hasn’t dropped any studio albums since ‘98:

"There were a number of different reasons. But partly, the support system that I needed was not necessarily in place. There were things about myself, personal-growth things, that I had to go through in order to feel like it was worth it…”

Girl, needed to get grounded, OH-kay?? Completely understandable, Ms. Hill. After the release of her debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill in 1998, she began to withdraw from the public spotlight feeling increasingly disenchanted and overwhelmed by the pressures and demands of the music industry and media culture. This was pretty apparent in an interlude of intimate chatter before "Adam Lives in Theory," from her 2002 MTV Unplugged release: she declares, “Fantasy is what people want, but reality is what they need. And I just retired from that fantasy part.” A Rolling Stone review called this concert a “public breakdown.” Many fans were disappointed by the “half-assed” acoustic strumming and voice cracking, preachy L. Boogie, but I liked the set a lot. What Rolling Stone labeled a “breakdown,” could be seen more as a private revival. Her performance hints at the same jaw-grinding anguish and surrender I witnessed in my own church-y past, but encased by Lauryn through cryptic lyricism soaked in Christian religiosity, fumbling on the guitar, and improvisational chanting. Watching revival acts can be unsettling because the high intensity emotion seems to deluge from a dot of seclusion. It’s this solitude that surfaces in the knots of her singing, the desperate, but committed search for lines between “fantasy” and “reality,” however fictitious or paranoid that journey may seem, that all draw me to Lauryn’s writing and smoky, melancholic voice. All this to say, it takes more than a few unfortunate wardrobe choices, public preachy stunts, and subpar concert performances to merit using my Lauryn Hill in the same sentence as poor cray-cray Whitney.

Before The Score and Miseducation, there was Sister Act II: Back in the Habit, where Lauryn plays the teenage Rita who just wants to sing. Despite knowing that her voice might be something special, she muffles her dreams, while struggling with the realities of life painted by her hard-working, single mother who states to Rita that “Singing is dead-end, no security." A few bad-ass eye rolls, wise remarks, and the chilly teenage-tude later, Rita finally lets our favorite Las Vegas lounge singer turned nun, Sister Mary Clarence played by Whoopi, into her life and begins to believe that singing may indeed be “worth it”:

Since the NPR interview, a whole lotta hope has been buzzing around the potential of a Lauryn Hill comeback. It’s been fun, yet bittersweet speculating with friends and fellow L. Boogie lovers the feel and sound of a future Lauryn Hill album. Bittersweet, because we know this impending new sound will be foreign, perhaps even a little resistant to the memories we exchange about how The Score and The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill affected us as teens so many years ago. Just last night, I was telling a friend that when I got my first-ever cell phone in high school, and it asked me to program a welcome message, I typed, ‘Respect is just the minimum’—a reminder from "Doo-wop" that jumped new phone to next for nearly 7 years. So, what’s your favorite Lauryn Hill memory?

Gaga: Now you see her, now you don't

2010-07-01T18:38:00.000-07:00

A few days ago (June 25th, to be exact) the interwebs were abuzz with the news that CNN used a photo of a Gaga impersonator instead of, well, Lady Gaga, in a news bit about her and Obama competing for Facebook popularity. (In the interest of super invested and thorough journalizm, Gaga is up by about 200K at the moment). Perez Hilton noticed it, others picked it up, the story swelled, CNN apologized and turned the whole mess into a quiz. With thinly veiled gestures towards the very old, very boring, and very homophobic debates about Gaga's sexuality, CNN now asks us to guess which is the real Gaga. Citing Eminem lyrics to make their point doesn't help any. The headline reads “Will the real Lady Gaga please stand up?”

The CNN gaffe plays right into the Lady's hand but also reminds us about her anonymity. Gaga – without that couture nest on her face or those slightly-crooked sunglasses she sported on Larry King – is unrecognizable to many. Without her layers, she is plain and easily transparent, in a small way, in charge of her own lighting team, wielding the conditions of her own (in)visibility. For those who are not die-hard fans, closely tracking her transformations through hair accessories and bodysuit-du-jour is really the only way to keep tabs. We know her primarily through her accoutrement, which allows her a nearly anonymous existence without it. This is, in some ways, the brilliance of her baroque costuming and tireless dedication to that difficult but fascinating line between conventional ugliness and beauty. Sure, there are problems with the way she does it, and any anonymity she may have the privilege of commanding has everything to do with race, among other things, but in a moment when pervasive surveillance should be on everyone's radar, Gaga's play with recognizability (and of course, readability) stand out as something resourceful. Of course the hyper-visibility of celebrity culture does not stand in even remote comparison to the surveillance aimed violently at say, undocumented workers or others targeted by the state. But the idea of baroque costuming used as a strategy for an existence on a lower frequency seems worth our attention.
(inna)

THAT'S HOT: See Paris Hilton Pack

2010-06-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

Behold Paris Hilton posing in a fabulous outfit on top of her fabulous luggage in her fabulous mansion. I know that all the luggage is from Louis Vuitton and everything, but we're really wondering about the rest of the luggage? Obviously this is only enough material for one night.

In Memoriam: Michael Joseph Jackson, 1958-2009

2010-06-25T18:24:00.000-07:00

It was one year ago today when TMZ leaked the news of Michael Jackson's hospitalization and then death, when blogs and twitter feeds were jammed with panic-stricken calls for corroboration of the news and finally tear-filled resignations that MJ had in fact passed. The haters came out of the woodwork on Facebook and beyond to remind us that the public disintegration (both literally and psychically) of MJ was not punishment enough, that his "sexual deviance" and freakish displays poisoned any possibility of mourning, celebration, or empathy for his own obvious dystopic views of himself, views that any one of us who grew up as perverts, or worse, black, brown and yellow perverts, have come to terms with at some point in our lives.

The rest of us meanwhile wrestled with utter shock and bone-deep sadness about the way he went, and about our own complicity in the media madness that pushed him to the edge and outside of... well, everything. This same media behemoth now sought for an endless array of ways to commemorate him and smooth over the contradictions surrounding this figure. While inevitably no discursive bridge between "old Michael" and "late Jacko" could ever be seamless, every time a DJ dropped an MJ track and the vocal tone that mixes childlike innocence and adult anguish flooded your ears, you were lost. Dancing your ass off in your mind or in the club, meditating on the overwhelming melancholy written all over his songs. It is in these sonic detours, wherever it is that MJ's music takes you, that you somehow always come to realize that you are not alone (PJA).

We at Oh! want to send you into your weekends with a multi-track mixtape of some of our favs from the MJ oeuvre.

From MDSN:

From PL (w/ a li'l special treat of fan vid accompaniment):

From INNA:

From PJA:

See Some Things I Liked From Milan Fashion Week

2010-06-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

Who doesn't love watching a bunch of hot dudes with near perfect everythings roll down the catwalk? Man Candy - that's what men's fashion week is all about, people. The Spring/Summer 2011 men's shows kicked off in Milan last Saturday, and some of my favorite designers showed their collections. Read on to see some of my favorite looks from Milan. Paris updates coming soon!

Burberry Prorsum

I am in love with this collection, and you might not peg me as a Burberry kind of dude. Burberry is known for fabulous coats and wonderful attention to detail and tailoring, but the label needed to figure out how to get the younger, hipper customers in the door. With Prorsum, Burberry kicks it up a notch with an edgier, more youthful spirit; Prorsum is Latin for "moving forward." And that's totally the zest of Christopher Bailey's latest collection. I, um, really need a pair of those skinny leather pants; they lend a spice to the traditional ease of the Burberry brand. The brightly colored trench coats, the cropped, loose fitted leather jackets that give off a polished yet "I don't give a fuck" kind of attitude. I especially love the way that suit is styled with a leather jacket thrown on top. How rock and roll!

Dolce and Gabbana

Dolce and Gabbana knows that sex sells. And if there's anything they're know for, it's a love for hard boiled masculinity. The ad campaigns always have ridiculously masculine dudes in them, often in homoerotic configurations (yay!), and you can only imagine that with all the underwear they sell, they realize that everybody loves a hot bod. So this time we get to see the models walk down the catwalk in nothing but draws. Does anybody know how I could arrange a private viewing?

Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen was a legend, admired as much for his highly conceptual, historical avant garde pieces as for his tailoring and attention to detail. Despite the designers recent passing, the label will live on, with former head of menswear Sarah Burton as creative director. What I love about this collection is the Englishness of it all, and yet it feels so modern. Anybody who knows me knows I love an off-the-shoulder scoop neck on a boy, and I love the play with gender there. I'd even wear that pseudo-butler outfit. Isn't that a great outfit for a first date? "Hi, I dress like this everyday. How are you?"

Rick Owens

If I had a lot of money, I would probably only wear Rick Owens. His stuff is so camp, but in a masculine way. Can you imagine somebody walking down the street with A Little Too Much Collar jetting off to the right like that? It's funny! Also: somebody get me a pair of those leather leg trash bags. It's so ugly it's fabulous. Just you wait: those things are totally going to be the new "It" accessory.

Trussardi

So, you get the reference here, don't you? Very James Dean, very mod-chic. You know, I'm not really in love with leopard, mostly because for some unknown reason I associate leopard with sex shops and, like, pimps. But here I'm into the way the leopard cranks the outfit up. And that dusty red leather jacket is on POINT. But what really makes these clothes work is the model and the styling. The hair is excellent, the irreverent poses are spot on, and the tats give him that "I'm a bad ass" thing that really turns me on.

Jil Sander

I know I'm not one for color - the blacker it is the more I like it - but the playfulness of Raf Simons' new collection for Jil Sander is really exciting. Only Raf Simons could put a dude on the catwalk in an oversized blazer and no pants. That ought to make for a really interesting stroll through SoHo when the collection drops.

"Not Her Genre": Tune In for Nao Bustamante on Work of Art tonight!!

2010-06-23T15:07:00.000-07:00

Don't forget to catch your favorite villainess/performance artist Nao Bustamante on Bravo tonight at 7PM EST!! Start channeling your best evil drag queen cackle, as Nao has been dropping some seriously precious kernels of wit for the past two weeks. While the judges continue to proffer infuriatingly antiquated ideas of what constitutes a "work of art," Nao maneuvers and shatters these narrow mine fields with a much needed element of wire-sharp snark, theatricality, and comedic genius. So, get your peeps together and gather 'round the tube (fugg that watching on the computer business), pour yourself a cocktail, and prepare yourself for an emotional roller coaster of rage, love, desire, and fagaiety. And keep showing your support for Nao via your blogs, tweets, message boards postings, and mobile votes-- that stuff does matter! Go here for more about Nao fabulosity, and to get your very own Nao Bustamante t-shirts. (PJA)

World Cup mania

2010-06-22T10:08:00.000-07:00

Dearest Oh! Community!

For those of you consumed by World Cup mania, follow Oh!'s twitter feed today as PJA will be tweeting the S. Korea vs. Nigeria match live from Koreatown, LA (they've been screening all of the RoK games in the Radio Korea plaza on Wilshire and Western; today's is finally at a decent hour). I'll be dropping some commentary on the latest ajuma fashions, weed-whacked haircuts, and skimpy customized Red Devils mini T's. And a few words about the actual game might creep in. Not sure yet which gender KT and I will try to pass as today-- always a precarious situation in these nationalistically charged environs. Will keep y'all posted. Korea fighting! - PJA

New Kids On The Block

2010-06-21T06:11:00.000-07:00

"You'll be sayin' no, no, no, no, no, when it's really yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah."

As the baton gets passed on to a new generation of the ALOTR, we -- Peggy Lee, Madison Moore, Inna Arzumanova, and Patty Ahn, Destiny's new children-- are delighted to bring to the "blog-Oh!-sphere" Another Bad Creation. Born in the '80s and culturally bred in the '90s, we remember the days when Chante sang about the man she had at home, when Beverly Hills High's most memorable political battle was to let Donna Martin graduate, and when it was okay to wear body suits so long as they were worn with cinched baggy jeans. While we share this trove of cultural memorabilia with the original ALOTR fellowship, our cultural journeys began at slightly different coordinates in our lives and consciousness. As ATV, CBB, and KT put the Oh! car in park for their last bitter sweet sing along to Wilson Phillips "Release Me," because it's time they got their two feet on the ground, we are there to graciously accept the keys, jump in, and re-route the GPS for a new kind of road-trip. So what's new at Oh?!

In the spirit of “cool juice,” the serum that morphs the painfully nerdy Steve Urkel into the oh-so-suave Stefan Urquelle, we bring small structural changes to Oh!'s veneer, but don’t you worry: The Heart of the Matter stays. On Family Matters, Laura Winslow eventually chooses the klutzy, suspender wearing, polka playing Steve Urkel over the r&b smooth stylings and heavy lidded seductions of Stefan Urquelle. We at Oh! appreciate and love both equally, but know that however suave we New Kids On The Block get, at the core of Oh! is the dorkestry and “Didd IIII do that?” (snort) lab explosions of the more awkward Steve Urkel.

You can look forward to shorter posts about Things Happening In Pop Culture, with longer posts on Pressing Issues to pop out as really important stuff happens. Plus, we're starting your week right with a new "Kick Of The Week (KOTW)," so stay tuned: the KOTW could be a song, a book, a model, a food, anything that gives us tingles! And as with any renovation, the cosmetics of the site have been refreshed with a fabulous new interface and pictures thanks to the “cool juices” running through Madison Moore.

We four, often believed to be from a generation of illiterati, are here to dispel that notion, to show folks that we can still "read" culture and that promiscuous tastes don't mean indiscriminate politics: we don't--but wait, we DO give a fuck. If ATV, CBB and KT felt the deep historical bonds of the Pinoy-Cuban 1898 axis, then we are the children of the Cold War, living in a world where socialism is still a "bad word," where corporate politics has made the idea of "selling out" totally meaningless, and where we take refuge in pop utopias, their misses and possibilities.

We hold on tightly to the spirit of Poptimism, searching for recuperative modes of engagement with the audiovisual worlds that surround us but rarely ever speak to our realities. And we welcome those unexpected bonds and syncretic conversations between worlds and folks, like those moments on the streamer-lined, dimly lit school dance floor when Hat 2 Da Back (or ANYTHING off Ooooooohhh...On the TLC Tip) blasted through the room, forcing tragically failed femininities and masculinities to give way to new forms of desire.

If we're Destiny's Children, then we're also the '90's R&B foursome Xscape. We're a kick-back crew, who asks you to "kick off your shoes, relax your feet and party on down to our xscape beat."

Not everything we post here is gonna be loved, but as Atlanta's not-really-a-housewife Kandi Buruss wisely preaches in her return to the stage nearly twenty years after Xscape's debut single, "you aint doing a thang if you don't have haters." If the first fellowship of the ring taught us to send our souls and ideas into perpetual flight with the wind beneath our wings, then we do it with Kandi in mind - we "fly above all the drama."

So Hold On!

Outro

2010-06-20T09:16:00.000-07:00

A lot has changed for us individually, as well as collectively since Oh! Industry launched in fall 2007. When we started Oh!, we had no idea if anyone would read or listen, so the experiment felt at once deeply private and communal. As it turns out many of you not only read and listened with care, but also talked back with words of encouragement as well as contestation. You shared thoughts that made us think harder. You traveled with us, but also guided us to places we never expected, or never anticipated we could love so much.

The project of Oh! Industry never began, nor does it actually end with the three of us in “girl-group” configuration, or as individuals. The ALOTR—our Audre Lorde of the Rings —has always been about an expansive, if still deeply intimate communion with so many of you from generations prior, alongside and well beyond our own.

Even though we—KT, CBB and ATV—are saying goodbye as the primary contributors of Oh! Industry with this post, it is with deep bass-thumping thrills and pleasure that we welcome a new, fierce assemblage of writers, thinkers and misfits. Patty Ahn, Inna Arzumanova, Peggy Lee and Madison Moore are ready to carry on the collective spirit, while remaking Oh! in ways the three of us would surely never imagine. Their new attitude launches tomorrow, June 21, on the summer solstice, so come back and see!

But before handing this stellar new crew the keys to the treehouse, KT is going to take us out with one last sonic stroll down memory lane, commemorating what Oh!—and all of you, our dear readers, interlocutors and friends—have meant to us through this journey.

xoxo,

ALOTR

***

I was living for a dream, loving for a moment

Taking on the world, that was just my style

- Survivor, “The Search is Over” (1984)

I’ve always been attracted to lyrical displays of humility swaddled in the sonic hubris of a power ballad. And what better way to try to make a gracious, if admittedly still crotch-rockin’ exit from the primary caretaking duties of Oh! Industry with my sisters, CBB and ATV, than to summon the echo of a song many folks already mock as a shallow imitation—if they remember it at all—of more substantial rock balladry from the same era by bands like Journey?

For 80s aficionados, Survivor, both musically and stylistically, always felt more like the Monkees to Journey’s Beatles. Their lead singer, Jimi Jamison (already a replacement for Dave Bickler who blew his vocal chords shortly after the band struck it big with “Eye of the Tiger”) seemed to share Steve Perry’s hairstylist, but without Perry’s prominent schnozz to add some gravitas to those bouncin’ and behavin’ feathers. Perry’s Dark Crystal features gave him that “hugly” (hot-ugly) edge that totally ratchets up a rockstar’s cred. And as you know, we at Oh! have always liked it both “hugly” and pretty, more Monkees than Beatles, legit and sometimes just legitimately dorky.

The search has come full circle

Our destinies are one…

When we began Oh! Industry almost three years ago, our heads and ears were flooded with urgent pop declarations like the one I opened with of “living for a dream, loving for a moment.” We felt like we were “taking on the world” with our distinct flourishes of style that we too often felt obliged to mute, or at least modify as we made our way through the minefields of the academy and the “other worlds” each of us belonged to, or sought remote communion with.

All of you, our readers, friends and secret-sharers, took pleasure in our long-windedness, the ideas askew, the concepts “not ready for primetime” but culled from pop and primetime repertoires. For that, we are always and forever grateful, and we feel we’ve shared many ephemeral and unwritten destinies with all of you. But to take another sonic turn to the changes and landslides made salient in the familiar warble of Ms. Stevie Nicks:

Time makes you bolder
Children get older
I'm gettin' older too...

The time together in Oh! definitely made us bolder. We grew to understand how the lack of discipline we feared within ourselves was not a weakness but a strength, a starting point for different techniques of listening, reading, writing that carry their own affective discipline and praxis. Our time together also saw us—children of the corny navigating through the academy’s elaborate mazes—getting older, feeling time as we never had before, and quite honestly, feeling the burden of the imperative to “make it count” in ways quantifiable to those who enumerate using methods we have yet to fully grasp.

In short, even though we know we’ve done the work—done our work while working through so much here on Oh!—it’s time for our Fellowship to hunker down and steel ourselves for the last and most treacherous stretch of the journey towards the fires of Mordor. Hobbitry and (to accommodate ATV’s height), poised and flowing Elfistry, remain in our hearts, even as we each face the fraught, final climb at our own pace.

Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On” has been one of our enduring ur-texts, and a “Wilson Philipina” karaoke favorite that CBB and I have performed together at the Smog Cutter on many occasions. But for our curtain call today, we’d like to dust off another of the trio’s huge hits from 1990: “Hold On’s” flipside (no pun intended)—the aptly titled “Release Me.”

NY | LA: Two Benefits for Haiti this Week

2010-01-27T08:05:00.000-08:00

While grand gestures of generosity like star-studded telethons and presidential charities are much needed and appreciated in the wake of the devastation in Haiti, there's also something special and intimate about local, artist-driven events, that may have more modest monetary goals, but hearts just as beneficent.

NYC | Tonight, Wednesday, January 27 @ 7:30pm - Stanley Pradel gathers together a stellar musical line-up for at the Arrow Bar in the East Village, including DJs Mas (Masaki Yamagata) and DJ Songco (Chris Songco).

What: Haiti Benefit
Where: Arrow Bar (85 Avenue A, bt 5th and 6th St)
How much: $10 donation (or more!) with 100% of the proceeds going to Doctors without Borders to give medical aid to Haiti. Link here to see what this money will help do.

The evening also includes a raffle with prizes from:
The Wat Gym | 10Deep |Acapulco Gold |Gap Adventures and more

************************************************

L.A. | This Weekend, Saturday, January 30 @ 8pm - Stand with Haiti, Listen! Dance!

Tropico de Nopal (1665 Beverly Blvd.), a community gallery situated on the cusp of Echo Park and HiFi (Historic Filipinotown), hosts a night of readings and music to benefit Partners in Health, providing medical care for Haiti's poor before, during, and after the earthquake.

Admission: $10 - but give more if you can!
100% of door proceeds will be donated to Partners in Health.

Music sets by:
Ceci Bastida + Domingo Siete

Poetry and prose featuring:
Will Alexander . Gloria Alvarez . Tisa Bryant . Percival Everett
Ben Ehrenreich . Sesshu Foster . Veronica Gonzales . Jen Hofer
Doug Kearney . Chris Kraus . Maggie Nelson . Abel Salas

DJ sets by:
Glenn Red | Concise |Gomez Come Alive

SOTW 11.15: "Defying Gravity" from Glee (feat. Lea Michele and Chris Colfer)

2009-11-15T11:39:00.000-08:00

There are some friends you haven't seen in awhile with whom the conversation requires a little warm-up. Some superficial chit-chat here, a few perfunctory questions about how life has been going there.

And then there are the friends with whom you pick-up as if you've never left off--as if the weeks, months or years between encounters never eroded the ease of familiarity, the depth of intimate knowledge, or the dormant in-jokes and shared secret languages awaiting their special interlocutors.

Today my hope is that returning to Oh! with a song of the week will feel like the latter. Or like slipping into the comfy "at-home wear" you insta-change into after a long day buttoned-up and flying right at work.

Last week, during an extended east coast jaunt to Washington, D.C. for ASA, and to New York to find a spring semester sublet, I was fortunate enough to spend some quality time with a couple of old pals--"civilians," not academics--from college and high-school.

One is my friend Lynne ("neither male nor female, but Kvang" as the joke went about the fake I.D. we once bought with her on Alvarado Blvd., misidentifying her sex as "male," and transposing her Chinese middle name into something more sci-fi). The other is my galpal Keri, a former alto-sister from my high-school's equivalent of Glee Club, The Ramona High School Madrigals. I hadn't seen Keri since my 10th year high-school reunion back in the Riv in 2001, but we picked up right where we left off, re-enacting Sprockets skits and quoting other early-90s SNL joints that weren't nearly as iconic ("you put your weeeed in there.") [Right - Photo Detail from 1991: Keri in the middle of the bottom row; me, third from the left, standing | Below: Ramona Madrigals cutting loose on tour a long way from Riverside, CA at the Heritage Choir Festival in Seattle, WA, 1991].

Both encounters lifted my spirits after a long stretch of time spent "doing the work" (to invoke the mantra of my Oh! sistah, ATV). My hang sessions with Keri and Lynne didn't merely reactivate the comfort to be found with folks who "knew me then," but also reminded me how much I've desperately needed the spirit of "then" to leaven the now: the hustle, bustle and flow of an assistant prof.'s life on the verge. On the verge of sharing something--the first book--that's been lovingly if sometimes tortuously wrought in that writing bunker we find ourselves sequestered in starting around year 4, as the tenure clock tick-tocks. On the verge of one of the biggest auditions of my life, not just for a panel of unknown judges who will ultimately arbitrate my future, but also for the rest of you. For anyone out there who might be willing to read, to listen to me straining for a "high F" that could very well crack beyond my range even as it aspires to defy gravity.

[Chris Colfer, aka "Kurt" performing his solo rendition of "Defying Gravity" from the musical Wicked]

And so my first SOTW back after a very long absence doubles-down with not one (the version you just heard above), but TWO renditions of "Defying Gravity" recently recorded for the hit-show Glee. Rest assured that my other Oh! sisters and I are bound to have much much more to say about the show in the coming months for reasons obvious (jazz hands, big feelings, Heart and Journey), and others maybe not-so. But that's for another time.

Last week's "Diva-Off" between Rachel, the pretty, but dorky and unloved ingenue spawned by two gay dads, and Kurt, the fabulously fashionable but ostracized queer son of a mechanic single dad, offered one of the most poignant "confrontations" I've ever seen on the small screen. Despite being billed as a clash of two divas, it was ultimately a reluctant stand-off, regardless of what the cut-away shots were meant to convey.

In the Broadway smash, Wicked, "Defying Gravity" is the finale to Act I, the moment when Elphaba, aka "Elphie," the green girl presumed to be wicked by virtue of her odd appearance, decides to "fly solo" in order to fight tyranny and prejudice in the land of Oz.

The nature of the conflict in last week's Glee is framed by a similar desire to ascend to great heights as a soloist in the hopes that a virtuosic display of talent might undo some of the tyranny and prejudice directed at a bunch of "losers" like the kids in Glee Club. And yet even the original source material from Wicked offers an option beyond the self, and beyond the individualistic gestures of heroism and self-sacrifice that win admirers and agitate adversaries.

[Wicked: "Defying Gravity" finale, Act I]

During the Glee "diva-off," Kurt cracks the high-F (keyed for a female vocalist) just at the moment triumph seems within his reach. We learn he does so out of sacrifice. Out of his wish to spare his dad (who passionately lobbied the principal and Mr. Schuester to let Kurt audition to begin with), the burden of a parental role he has yet to fully comprehend: caring for a gay son. Leaving aside debates about whether or not this gesture of generosity can be read as internally homophobic (for the record, I don't think so), something gives me the sense that Kurt is not done with "Defying Gravity."

In Wicked, Elphaba asks Glinda (the pretty, "good witch") to "Come with me. Think of what we could do - together."

Together we're unlimited
Together we'll be the greatest team...
If we work in tandem
There's no fight we cannot win

"Defying Gravity" is not strictly a solo number. The verses I just cited above are actually traded between the two divas of Wicked, Elphaba and Glinda (the latter role was originated by recent Glee guest star, Kristin Chenoweth).

Voices are best sharing verses. When we find ourselves struggling to reach notes beyond our range, solace and support come at unexpected intervals from companion voices capable of carrying the harmonies. As I learned from singing alto in the high-school madrigals, even if one splits from the splendor of a melody, a song will never truly soar without you. "Defying Gravity," in other words, is not something to be accomplished alone. (KT)

[Duet from Glee: "Defying Gravity" feat. Lea Michele + Chris Colfer]

This SOTW is dedicated to Kathy Rossi, my 7th grade English teacher. In that formative year at Sierra Middle School, she taught me how to love books, musicals and writing. I saw Wicked for the first time with her last December in Los Angeles. I know I'm not the first, nor will I be the last to say to her: "Because I knew you, I have been changed for good."

¡Special Event! Latina Moves: New Adventures in Performance 10/08

2009-10-05T12:06:00.000-07:00

Calling all Tri-Staters! Join us this coming Thursday, Oct. 8th for a jaw-dropping triple bill of Latina/o performance. Starring Carmelita Tropicana, Marga Gomez, and Nicolas Dumit Estevez. For free. At Princeton.

Co-organized by Ricardo Montez and Alexandra Vazquez
Thursday, Oct. 8th at 7pm
at the Marie and Edwards Matthews '53 Acting Studio
185 Nassau Street
Princeton, New Jersey

Come on ovah,
ATV

[Gomez photo credit-Jose Guzman Colon; Tropicana photo credit-Uzi Parnes; Dumit Estevez photo credit-Nicolas Dumit Estevez]

Dispatch from Rome and Paris

2009-09-07T20:38:00.000-07:00

There's much to compress so I'll need to do this scrapbook style. For many weeks, it has been Rome. For 48 hours, it was Paris. Visiting them in sequence rustled up the past itineraries of two uncles who played a large part in my intellectual upbringing: Calvert Casey and Severo Sarduy. Casey's Rome is Havana with its peeling walls and too many reminders and erotic dark corners. A place that absorbed his stutter as yet another anomoly, a place to rest his falling apart body. Casey's Rome is a city for being alone, locked in an August apartment with a lover, a solitary Cuban in antiquity's surround. Sarduy's Paris is bookstores reserved for Franco-Japanese literaria, a different baroque, Tel Quel. Sarduy's Paris was a place to find and adopt a crew. He found, among others, Roland Barthes and Francois Wahl. It made him draw and make prints, to think through the other surrealism. It was a place to be Cuban with other non--Cubans.

In the Paris of now, I saw fine cashmere sweaters with weaved in portraits of Che for 600 Euros. And traces of the past and present vogue négre too comfortable with the spectacle and trademark they made and make with the body of the other. Both did much to encapsulate an easy multiculturalism that made me feel more affectively delinquent than usual. I wanted to be vulgar, use the wrong fork. Reject butter and their food. Litter. Harbor music from Putamayo tendencies. My mouth wouldn't form their words.

But, as many have felt and sung, Paris is a Brown city. It is a place where I got to use two words I've rehearsed enough to say out loud and proud: Pho and Mango. Both were enjoyed at the island oasis Dong Phát, 10 rue Malar. And later, in a dirty bar, I heard AC/DC's Hells Bells before Habib Koité before Grace Slick needing somebody to love. I had a warm conversation about Marseilles football with a cab driver whose open-door policy extended to my ice cream. There were opportunities to make other multicultural connections (the messy and irresponsible kind): like that long roaming charge phone call to CBB after having made a ridiculous left off of Rue Descartes onto the Rue de Ecole and past the Square Michel Foucault.

This is all a scene-setting preface for what I really want to talk about. Since the too recent, too early passing of the great Barbara Johnson, I've made an oath to be more forthcoming about fan letters. More on this soon. She deserves a careful and time-consuming obituary.

...

I went to Paris for 48 hours because of Cuba Linda, the album universe made possible by the Cuban pianist Alfredo Rodriguez. I cannot yet share all of why this work has been the most transformative portal I've had the privilege of going through. This will happen when my book goes live. For now, by transformative, I mean a sustained, body-rocking philosophical reckoning that has gone down in a mostly alone space, under headphones, for several years. This monk-like relationship to the album was a necessary gateway; time was needed to get out the salt, to do the homework. And yet the album has not indulged stasis or isolation. Cuba Linda has made me talk to people and (thanks to a research fund) go places. It has made me seek out relationships with its intimate informal fan collective. It was the writer Armando Suárez Cobián who introduced me to the album over a Brooklyn summer. Other hearings of note include a formative car ride in Miami with Raul Fernandez en route to interview Juanito Marquez; and seeing Reginald Jackson get it during a talk I gave in New Haven. My relationships with them and many others have been forever made more affectionate by the shared fact of Cuba Linda.

I've also had the dream (deferred then fulfilled) of meeting some of the kind folks who actually made the thing. There was a chapter inspiring conversation with Yosvany Terry, (right) one of Cuba's righteous young musical emissaries who calls Harlem home. I've even had reason to make contact in the U.K., the base of music critic John Child, who was kind enough to send me a copy of a recorded interview he conducted with Rodriguez in 1990. Hearing Rodriguez's voice, in perfect Cuban Newyorkese, gave me an urgency to follow other ephemeral leads.

Which brought me to Paris.

I went to Paris to meet Miké Charroppin (left), a painter who has kept descarga alive between Cuba and France and long nurtured the jazz furrow in that city. She was called early by Cuban music via old 78s of the Orquesta Aragon. Born in Bordeaux, to a Martinican mother, she later became the runaway child running wild and moved to Paris to study art in 1968. Her vita is too humbling to address in this small space, but take this entry: she brought Conga de Los Hoyos to Paris for the first time in the early 1990s. It was Charroppin who was behind the concept of Cuba Linda. She wrote the liner notes and arranged two of its most stunning tracks, "Merceditas (Ya Me Voy)" and "Para Francia Flores (Y Para Cuba Tambíen)." She did all kinds of undocumented work. She was also Rodriguez's wife. When you talk to her you get the sense of a historic collaborative relationship (the stuff of storybooks).

I met Ms. Charroppin as I met Montmartre for the first time. being in that ground was long past due. I've lived with Montmartre in the sonic distance whether through the writings of Langston Hughes, the repertoire of Rita Montaner, and Graciela's anecdotes. It was a beautiful introduction. When you walk with Miké around the neighborhood--it feels less quartier, more barrio. She's got the kind of animas that makes you nostalgic for that 1980s generation of working artists in New York.

After Mr. Rodriguez passed away in 2005, Charroppin went through years of live recordings to put together Oye Afra, a lump-in-the-throat album homage (buy it from itunes). Also see this lovely and heartfelt review of the album by Maya Roy.

Charroppin's gift at assembly does not only extend to the songs she arranged, but for the making connections between like-souled people. The good vibes didn't stop there.

Back in Rome. As I turned the corner to his house, he was out front trimming the Bougainvillea. From Paris, Charroppin made my introduction to Roberto "Mamey" Evangelisti, another musical intimate in the Rodriguez buena gente orbit. One of those rare non-Cubans who is actually Cuban. Evangelisti is a Roman born and based percussionist whose childhood obsession with (and isolation from) the congas meant that as he taught himself to play, he also had to learn how to build an instrument to play on. To get that sound he could hear in recording but had no physically present models for. He was called to it by hands that didn't want the distancing of drumsticks, by the stuff that Armando Peraza did for Santana. I learned about his training with too many Cuban greats to mention and was shown footage of Rodriguez and Cuba Linda in the live. Evangelisti is an heir--actual, sonic, soulic--of Tata Güines . As such Evangelisti's is vecchia scuola elegance. His tender structuring held up many of Rodriguez's songs in the live, and continues to do so in recording. Hear him on the virtual whole of Oye Afra (see above) and especially, Alfredo Rodriguez y Los Acerekó Cuban Jaz z.

Critics too often deserve their sullied reputation because so many have used the bodies and words of others to advance their own. And yet many remain generous. Charroppin and Evangelisti reminded me that the experience of interviewing musicians can echo that album that changes your life. Gracias. Merci. Grazie.

Tonight I light my last antizanzara spirale. That smell now means summer.

More from the other side,
ATV

Memento Mori

2009-08-07T11:08:00.001-07:00

They were five total strangers, with nothing in common, meeting for the first time. A brain, a beauty, a jock, a rebel and a recluse. Before the day was over, they broke the rules. Bared their souls. And touched each other in a way they never dreamed possible.

For a majority of the 1980s, my family’s suburban home in LA's San Gabriel Valley became a way station for our personal family reunification program, as one wave of recently naturalized kin sponsored another set of newly immigrated family members. At the height of this era, my parents and I were joined by two other families – four siblings in their twenties and their retired father, another middle-aged cousin, her husband and their two toddler children. In this intergenerational and transnational household, our lingua franca became American and Filipino popular culture. From the family room, a television blasted the day's cycle of programming –from the morning news to Donahue, from afternoon soaps to Dynasty and Dallas. Over the sound of running showers and blow dryers in the morning, the bathroom radio blared out Boston, 38 Special and Rush. Crackling through the living room’s turntable coffin on the weekends, a double LP of provincial songstresses Pilita Corrales and Susan Fuentes’ torch songs and the smooth sounds of Nat King Cole and the Platters marked the twilight time of a lazy afternoon.

In 1986, our television’s screen was filled with the faces of students, nuns, and mothers fed up but still peaceful in protesting the Marcos dictatorship. Before the massacres at Tiananmen Square, these otherwise feminized, domesticated masses faced off with military tanks and machine gun-toting officers. Before Shane and Jenny, they brought to the globe another “l” word—Laban—through the digital display of simply a letter. In those uncertain political times, this visible public of revolutionary possibility brought me closer to my Philippine-born cousins—the ones who grew up in Metro Manila's Project 4, smoked hash at UP (University of the Philippines) while reading the Communist Manifesto, left their country with accounting and nursing degrees only to end up in America working at the McDonald’s on the corner of Amar and Azusa. This spirit of unlikely banding and bonding that I shared with my cousins was best captured onscreen in John Hughes’ detention hall classic.

To this day, The Breakfast Club still holds a special place in my heart because it gave me models of intercultural exploration and alternative counterpublics that my 12-year old self could understand. A lot of it may have had to do with the fact that, despite wanting to call MTV mine, my main source of pop culture was syndicated television and KTLA seemed to love playing John Hughes' Brat Pack-filled flick at least once a year. A lot of it may have also had to do with the fact that, in middle school, I chose to spend afternoons in detention with my friends – the other kids who spoke multiple languages in their homes, fought the shame of moms’ packed lunches everyday, and would rather draw comics, write stories and rhymes, and crack jokes than sound off the same roster of dates and names from somebody else’s U.S. history, year after year. Like the Schermer High School quintet, what we found in a seemingly abject event (detention) was the potential for outsider camaraderie and scattered belongings, a room of our own built precisely because we broke the rules and didn’t fit in.

The fantasies of adolescence and revolution share a similar affective relationship to time —their presents paradoxically angst or anxiety-ridden but full of hope. What brings together the 1980s of Hughes and Aquino is how they rested upon the potentiality of the visual, creating imagined communities in their wake. In an era before tweets and RSS feeds, before even emails and texting, the imaginary time lines of adolescence’s Neverland Club and revolution’s People Power could only be interrupted by late breaking news and reruns. Perhaps, more than anything else, what some of us mourn in the death of these two individuals is the loss of that imagined innocence -- a simple past viewed through rose-colored glasses, made pretty in both pink and yellow. - (CBB)

Dispatch from Manila: Songs of the City

2009-07-10T12:30:00.000-07:00

A ten-hour flight from Honolulu to the Philippines translates into a quantum leap from Monday morning to Tuesday evening. In this way, Manila is light-hours ahead of any U.S. city.

Upon your return, you will notice that Manila is a city of noise. The early morning moans of cranes building the latest high-rises. The incessant honking of cars to signal a quick movement, a disagreement, or the recognition of one’s existence. The loud rumble of train tracks above and the tiny voices and large, open palms of pleading beggars from below. These sounds become that much clearer as you try to read Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Listening” on this journey. He instructs you that listening is not just about turning the ear outwards but, also, the turning yourself inwards required so that sounds resonate. You decide that the only way to keep sane in Manila is to deploy this active listening. You sharpen your skills of tuning in and tuning out when necessary.

In the midst of all this cacophony, it’s no wonder that what is pumped out of speakers in taxi cabs and malls in this country are the sounds of soft rock (what scholar/musician Theo Gonzales and theatre artist Allan Manalo dub “the ubiquitous slow jam” and what DJ Un-G and Rani D lovingly refer to as “yacht rock”). The sounds of soft rock not only invoke the archipelagic propensity for sentimentality or are symptomatic of its throwback tendencies, the sounds of soft rock cushion one from the grueling noises that signal a seeming progress and the harsh demands of tropical heat, smog, and urban life. It’s the old De Barge melody that transports me, KT, and Kangagi from our teenage suburban bedrooms to that epic cross-town ride from Divisoria to Makati. It’s the lilting and haunting message from the 1990s Pinoy rock powerhouse, The Eraserheads – an uplifting anthem for the people of this island nation, the musical ethos of those who have too little and know too much.

Just like theory, songs travel. Like that sensual 1980s slow jam, “Careless Whisper.” Previously linked to its famous singer’s notorious escapades, it arose again and penetrated the ears of Filipinos through its repetitive referencing of the Hayden Kho-Katrina Halili sex tape. Despite and through the drama of sex, lies, and videotapes, we stole dance moves (an island instantiation of the insta-snake), fashion (red bandanas), and mottos ("ooh la la" and “sizzling hot!”) which we recreated on VIP dance floors at Ascend, karaoke band stages at Mag:net, and brunches in Quezon City apartments. That well-known lick of crotchy chords famously played on a solo saxophone were dropped, like a DJ inserts a break, into band sets and warm-ups from the indie rock stage at Ortigas Metrowalk's Fete de la Musique to the cavernously intimate playing area of Katipunan’s Route 196. Each time we heard it, each time it was played, we understood it to be a tongue-in-cheek sonic reference to the absurdity of Philippine politics and cultural life.

Careless Whisper - George Michael

When you are a female music critic, you also take songs along with you. You put them on, as ATV brilliantly describes, like the armor you need to get through a day, a sonic force shield of sorts. Like the recent female empowerment offering from Beyonce (made known to me by Rin on the Rox’s pared down, a capella rendition), “If I Were a Boy.” The melody and title lyrics echo in heavy rotation in your head while you avoid eye contact walking down Makati streets or refrain from too much conversation in late-night solitary cab rides or even when just choosing outfits for that day’s jaunt, that evening’s show.

If I were a boy even just for a day
I'd roll out of bed in the morning
And throw on what I wanted
And go drink beer with the guys

And chase after girls
I'd kick it with who I wanted
And I'd never get confronted for it
'Cause they stick up for me

But travel and research is always a two-way pedagogical experience. I learned that being asked each time I arrived alone at a show— “Sino ang kasama mo?” (Who did you come with?)—does not always signal patriarchy or women’s limited social mobility. What it more often gestures towards is the strength of the Filipino social formation—the barkada, or crew. I learned that the directives from Q-Feel’s “Dancing in Heaven” fit perfectly with the tempo of life in Manila, what some might call polyrhythms, as most un-American people know how to keep moving even when life and cars and other people switch their days’ rhythm on them. Slow, slow, quick, quick, slow.

Dancing in Heaven - Q-Feel

No proper way of ending, since this trip is only a beginning…Salamat na lang kay The Diegos (Diyegs and DMaps), Raimund Marasigan, Myrene Academia, Sandwich, Mikey Amistoso, El Bee, Zack Linmark, and Quark Henares for helping me to listen and learn.

Here, a few summer favorites from the streets, bars, and clubs of The Fort, Cubao, Quezon City, and Ortigas that I continue to keep in my musical pocket, for safe keeping. The first - a literal sonic mapping of the city of Manila (from Pedicab, the band that brings you the 45-minute megamix set). The second - a dark and funny noir-ish tribute to dead milkmen (from Ciudad, the band you can check out in New York in Oct/Nov 2009). The third - another artsy and upbeat video about friendship and life's trips (from Bagetsafonik, the band that brings the melodica back in full effect). The fourth - a geometrical journey around Manila's Global City guided by my newest favorite female vocalist, Sarah Marco (from the director that brings the best of David Lynchian aesthetics to Philippine film and the band, Taken by Cars). Enjoy! - CBB