Guys, I’m gonna be real with you.
I may have just peed a little in my witchy-pooh panties.
And that’s all I have say about this:
The sprawling, quicksilver lyrics to this bilaterally symmetrical magnum LULZ opus have been posted below, because they’re… well, just read ‘em. And weep bitter crimson diamonds. Ov Darqueness.
[via DJ Dead Billy / Dangerous Minds]
Shien Lee. Styling by Vecona. Photo by Tina Cassati.
New blog alert!
New York-based artist/performer Shien Lee - who you’ll know as the fanciful designer of the anachronistic event Dances of Vice – has launched a new blog, titled ”Not Your China Girl.” In Shien’s own words:
The title of the blog was conceived in response to the frequent catcalls I’d get on city streets, which include “China Girl”, “China Doll”, “Konnichiwa”, “Ni hao”, and “Geisha Girl”, among other terms associated with The Asian Mystique. This compelled me to examine the Orientalized and fetishized filter through which Westerners frequently view Asia—and Asian women in particular—which perpetuates a subconscious racism fueled by dehumanizing stereotypes. I wish to challenge the Occidental misperceptions about Asia that are based on mythologies and sexualized for the male imagination.
My aim is not to attack or destroy the fantasy of an exotic, romantic, and beautiful Orient, which many Asians, including myself, can and do appreciate. You’ll find that many of my photos are infused with romanticized Asian imagery; even Asians possess a fantasy of the grandeur of their own history, colored by art, images, and stories passed through time. But can a beautiful thing be detached from the social inferences governed by the male gaze? Yes, and no. To analyze a dream, a fantasy, or thing of beauty calls attention to its flaws, and takes away from its wonderful mystique. Nevertheless, it is imperative to acknowledge and understand the filters that contort our perspectives so that we can see ourselves and the world in which we live more clearly. My goal is to call attention to the issues of race and sex, fantasy and power in representations of Asian culture.
By simultaneously appreciating and examining lavish Orientalist imagery through a feminist lens, Shien tackles an interesting set of issues that often crop up in anachronistic/decadent movements. Within the steampunk subculture, questions are regularly raised about whether or not certain ideals ganked from the Victorian era have reinforced a colonialist narrative. In gothic/industrial spheres, conflicts often flare up around longstanding presumptions regarding whiteness (why has there never been a dark-skinned cover model in 12 years of Gothic Beauty? Why was Side-Line “stunned“, in 2010, by the black lead singer of O. Children?), misogyny (the phenomenon of Combichrist), and supremacism (the racist gray area that begins with Death in June).
Shien clearly cares very deeply about the world that she’s creating for herself and her friends – in the case of Dances of Vice, a world of cinched waists, powdered faces, and themes that reach into a deeply gendered past. Enough to ask: What’s really going on here? How can we be more self-aware about the motifs we’re playing with? So far, the answers involve a romp through 1950s Rockabilly in China, 1920s Deco Japan, and a thoughtful post titled “On the Asian Fetish, Why Asian Women Date White Men, and the Remasculation of the Western Man“. Throw in some gorgeous Pinterest finds, and the blog becomes an addictive mix of analysis, pop culture, fashion, and art.
Congratulations on your new platform, Shien… we’ll be reading!
Man, do 2012′s Republican presidential hopefuls ever have a penchant for apocalyptic fiction! While Rick Perry fantasizes about Obama’s war on religion, (“the openly gay military hereby sentences you to re-education at Camp Kwanzaa!”) and Newt Gingrich speaks of colonizing the moon and pens alternate-history fiction in which Nazi Germany thrives (see also: “terrible sex scenes written by politicians”), Rick Santorum has just upped the ante.
This week, the Santorum camp released a chilling (read: hilarious) trailer for an eight-part series titled Obamaville. Rife with a combination of Silent Hill-like visuals, random stock imagery (meat grinders and babies!), and Obama/Ahmadinejad speech footage mashups, the 1-minute video closes with an ominous shot of the open road, with promises of more “coming soon.” YES PLEASE. It’s the perfect film to pair up with newly-released Iron Sky.
Matt Novak of Paleofuture has helpfully screen-captured and captioned the most striking images from the video. At time of writing, the video has 852 likes and 11,011 dislikes on YouTube. ”Santorumville” porn parody coming in 3… 2…
[via Matt Novak via William Gibson]
YouTube user frannintendo64 has made a beatmatched mashup out of scads of Skrillex dubstep/electro house tunes, with no pitch-shifting. Pretty darn funneh:
Via Ariana, who says: “The whoa-that’s-off-pitch of the first ten seconds or so fades fast. And then it’s… well it’s basically just Skrillex, innit. If you hold out (or skip ahead) to 1:20 it kinda starts to get a little magical. Honestly, I think this is a lot like what the internet sounds like when I’m scrolling fast.”
WUB WUB WUB.
Last year, Vania Heymann, a first-year student at Bezalel art school, took a Canon 7D out into the seething spiritual/cultural microcosm of Jerusalem and –over the course of two very busy afternoons– shot the footage for this remarkable satirical short. Beautifully done. Can’t wait to see what Heymann comes up with next!
(Via Reddit / Sam Harris / GreatDismal )
Oh, PETA…
(via SigKate)
Can’t you folks create any campaigns that don’t hinge on some form of insipid, othering, sexist objectification? It shouldn’t be that difficult, considering your stated aims. Here’s an idea: rather than euthanizing a vast majority of your rescues, how about hiring ‘em to come up with some new marketing and promotional material for ya? Argh… I’m halfway serious. It’s entirely possible that a golden retriever could provide something more palatable than the dehumanizing dreck you keep churning out like, well, sausage.
Seattle Stranger commenter CrankyBacon puts it well: “This isn’t a sex-positive vs. prude situation. Women can be engaged in policy issues, make coherent arguments, be persuasive, protest, etc. They have more to offer than standing naked outside a butcher shop, or pretending to give a blow job to a cucumber and titty fuck a carrot.” Female activists have more to offer than going nude to titillate for the cause. Women can aid your agenda in ways that don’t require them to be depicted as battered, pantsless-in-public, grocery-buying/fanny-flaunting fuckholes for ubersexed males. (Sure, naked men sometimes feature in your campaigns, but not nearly as often, and never presented in a remotely similar context.)
“Chicks Agree”? No, actually. Not this ”chick”. Not with the persistent, lazy, women-as-meat misogyny, anyway. C’mon, PETA, don’t you owe it to human beings and animals alike to try to encourage more responsible and respectful discourse?
Map of the Online Communities by XKCD, 2007. Larger version.
J.G. Ballard one said that his biggest fear was that the future would be boring. He feared the future would be “a vast, conforming suburb of the soul.” The notion, as applied to the Internet, was recently explored in two pieces on the changing face of internet culture.
Both are wonderfully-written, playful and full of insight. The first of these The Death of the Cyberflâneur, an opinion piece penned by Evgeny Morozov for the New York Times.
Thanks to the French poet Charles Baudelaire and the German critic Walter Benjamin, both of whom viewed the flâneur as an emblem of modernity, his figure (and it was predominantly a “he”) is now firmly associated with 19th-century Paris. The flâneur would leisurely stroll through its streets and especially its arcades — those stylish, lively and bustling rows of shops covered by glass roofs — to cultivate what Honoré de Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye.” … it’s easy to see, then, why cyberflânerie seemed such an appealing notion in the early days of the Web. The idea of exploring cyberspace as virgin territory, not yet colonized by governments and corporations, was romantic; that romanticism was even reflected in the names of early browsers (“Internet Explorer,” “Netscape Navigator”). …
In the second half of the 19th century, Paris was experiencing rapid and profound change. The architectural and city planning reforms advanced by Baron Haussmann during the rule of Napoleon III were particularly consequential: the demolition of small medieval streets, the numbering of buildings for administrative purposes, the establishment of wide, open, transparent boulevards … But if today’s Internet has a Baron Haussmann, it is Facebook. Everything that makes cyberflânerie possible — solitude and individuality, anonymity and opacity, mystery and ambivalence, curiosity and risk-taking — is under assault by that company. It’s easy to blame Facebook’s business model (e.g., the loss of online anonymity allows it to make more money from advertising), but the problem resides much deeper. Facebook seems to believe that the quirky ingredients that make flânerie possible need to go. “We want everything to be social,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, said on “Charlie Rose” a few months ago.
Updated Map of the Online Communities by XKCD, 2010. Larger version here.
In response, Jesse Darling has penned a brilliant response essay titled Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs over at The New Inquiry:
Evgeny Morozov writes from Palo Alto, a Californian charter city established by the founding father of Stanford University, at which Morozov is a visiting fellow. Palo Alto, nestled in a dewy corner of Silicon Valley, has been at various times home to Google, Paypal, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard: a prime piece of sun-drenched, Nor-Cal sprawl. Social media is to the Read/Write Web what sprawl is to the metropolis of modernity: a homogenous, cancerous, rhizomatic junkspace that expands exponentially outward on a sludgy wave of strip malls and sponsored links, greed and induced demand. This ruthless modernization produces miles of “junkspace” — a term coined by the architect Rem Koolhaas, who wrote that “more and more, more is more. Junkspace is overripe and undernourishing at the same time, a colossal security blanket that covers the earth in a stranglehold of seduction…
Junkspace is like being condemned to a perpetual Jacuzzi with millions of your best friends. Seemingly an apotheosis, spatially grandiose, the effect of its richness is a terminal hollowness, a vicious parody of ambition that systematically erodes the credibility of building, possibly forever.” Koolhaas was referring to the airport and the strip-mall and the single-zone sprawl, but he could have been talking about Facebook…. If space is a practiced place, then collective navigation produces the commons. Like mall rats flipping tricks in a parking lot, users exhibit a feral fluency in the use (and transgression, as it is reimagined daily) of this common timespace: we tune out the ads and get on with the serious business of flirting, hustling, hanging out and talking shit. We know that this serious business is affective labor which produces capital for the custodians of netspace; indeed, meme culture (including but not limited to YouTube parody, stock photo art, cut-ups and image macros) can be seen as the user asserting a subjectivity that exists and thrives despite (and beyond) her status as targeted marketing demographic. Like the Occupy movement, these activities amount to a kind of politics of the public (virtual) body in (virtual) space. We may never own the means of production as such, but will continue to assert, pervert and subvert the commons anyway: a gesture of post-corporeal territorial pissing which necessitates neither phallus nor spray-can nor html.
The Internet: Serious Business. Well-played.
On a tangentially related note:
Oh… um.
Wow. Yeah. So… this exists:
Via Jess Nevins.
That’s the video preview for a full-length comic book mashup of The Muppet Show and The Wicker Man by Paul O’Connell.
It’s… uh…
Well, words seem to be failing at the moment.
Really, what can one say when confronted with something like this, except:
WOW! Check out this splendid footage of three human-shaped, remote-controlled planes being flown above downtown NYC/Brooklyn, creating the illusion of people flying:
VERY cool. Perhaps somewhat less cool: it’s apparently viral marketing for that movie Chronicle. “Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… product placement!” But still. Wow.
[Via Wayne Chambliss / Gizmodo]
Courtesy of Base-Book, some truly heart-jolting footage of wingsuit badassery, recently shot in China’s Hunan Province:
Via Jason Zendtraedi, thanks!
Previously on Coilhouse:
