Happy Holidaze, You Crazy Kids!

Love,
Fall Collection

Sliver!

Uh, no, not that sliver.

But, and please excuse my bubbling excitement which is obviously undue considering all the cooler things happening to other people in the world at any given time, BUT I was just flipping through the newest Elle magazine (January 2007, Jennifer Garner cover) when something lurking at the very edge of a small picture in the middle of page 44 caught my eye... a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver of... myself, walking for Mandate of Heaven's Spring '07 show!!!


Holy schmoly, not bad for a staid solicitor huh?

In fact I think if I buy ten copies, cut out the slivers and put 'em together, I might be able to construct like, one whole me...almost.

[Images: Paramount Pictures's Sliver promo, Elle coverpage from Elle.com, backstage photo of Mandate of Heaven Spring '07 show taken by Jeffrey Brown.]

TV on the Internet

I've started watching TV again.

New Seiko Ad

I feel bad for Seiko. It is the new Kodak. Wristwatch duties are being usurped by cell phones just like print has given way to digital photography. Kodak recently announced that it will discontinue making Advantix cameras while shifting its focus to Kodak Gallery, a surprisingly convenient and easy-to-use photo management website.

What will Seiko do --make cell phones? Develop a technology that will allow us to know the time by looking up into the sky (like when Gotham calls Batman)? Make a watch that speaks with your cellphone, so you can glance at your wrist and see the time, missed calls, voicemails, and text messages without having to fish for your cell phone or pressing buttons?

Uh, whatever magical high-tech plans are in the works behind the scenes, all I see right now is a poorly conceptualized ad campaign. You can see the new Seiko television commercial on their website.

In case you're video-shy, the television commercial goes like this:
1. Barren but beautiful landscape with cliffs and sand and canyons.

2. Beautiful woman looks straight at the camera, her robe-y dress violently ruffled about by the wind, and says: "it's not your clothes."

3. Same landscape, image of African-American man standing with white earphones and arms outstretched, his voiceover says: "it's not your music."

4. Similarly, another guy says "it's not your favourite color." Then a third guy says "it's not your neighbourhood."

5. Then the first woman reappears and says "it's your watch." One of the guys reappears to give us a men's point-of-view and says "it's your watch."

6. A second woman voiceover drives it home: "It's your watch that tells most about who you are." The commercial then follows up with shots of Seiko watches and the woman talks about them, a little bit obligatorily like how subscription medincine ads have to tell you that in addition to helping you manage herpes, you may also experience a modicum of death and glandular trauma.

First how awkward is the tagline, "it's your watch that tells most about who you are"? I had to toggle back to their website four times just to make sure I wrote it down right in this blog post.

The big problem is that it doesn't ring true. If you do a "it's not A, it's not B, it's not C... it's D" where A, B and C are actually sort of true, and you are building up this big moment of truth where viewers expect something pretty damn revelatory for what D is, then you better have something satisfying to give 'em.

And satisfying means TRUEISH and off the beaten path (if say, D = whether you give your seat up to old people on the subway) or TRUEISH and funny (D = poster you stuck inside your 9th grade locker) or UNTRUE and ironic and ballsy (D = whether you wax your floors with a Pine Sol product or not).

But c'mon, your watch? That's the new status symbol? In the face of all of the new emerging ways we define ourselves via electronic gadgets: cell phone ornaments and ring tones, Saworski Crystal encrusted PDAs, Myspace profile layouts, .sig files, and cable packages as complex and individualized as DNA combinations, we're suppose to believe that it's WATCHES? Why, have you done something NEW to them? The commercial sure doesn't say that.

Man, somebody pay me (or any random kid on the block who has no incentive to kiss your ass) to tell them this next time BEFORE they plunk down the big bucks for a misguided ad campaign.

Rosie O'Donnell's Chinese Rant

On December 5th's broadcast of The View, Rosie O'Donnell was talking about how everyone's talking about Danny Devito's curious (i.e., drunken) appearance on their show earlier that week. She said:

The fact is that it is in the news all over the world. You know, you can imagine in China it's like, "Ching chong, ching chong, Danny Devito, ching chong chong chong, drunk, The View, ching chong."

You can find it on Youtube; I'll try to put it up here soon. Anyway, this started a shitstorm on the internet, and Asian American journalists made a statement.

Everyone covered the predictable bases:

yet another celebrity saying racist stuff!
asians are overracting!
no, everyone else is underreacting!
rosie is fat and a lesbian!
ching chong is as bad as the n-word!
that's what chinese sounds like!
no it's not!
asians drive bad!
you're white!
who cares!

And so forth. Uh, my only point is that, having watched so much late night TV recently, I tried to imagine how I'd feel if Conan O'Brien had said this instead. You know, with his ridiculous big hair flopping up and down... and I just know that Conan could have done this and not made me feel bad the way Rosie saying it sort of made me feel bad. With this highly scientific test, I have concluded that in this specific instance, it's less about the content and more about the delivery. And dude, Rosie seems pretty angry; the way she said it was kinda nasty. Self-depreciation is a strong undercurrent of Conan's schtick, whereas Rosie's schtick is that she's kinda mad and thus makes what she said meaner, almost violent with contempt.

Look, life is probably much harder as a fat lesbian than a chink, so I'm not saying she's a bad guy. And in the end I don't think she actually hates on asians any more than she does on any other group. I think her anger extends to include chinks, sure, but that's no skin off my back in an abstract sense. If impressionable viewers watching that segment are influenced enough to, I don't know, do something mean to me because I'm a chink, I can take care of myself. And of course the era of "if you're on tv you have a special responsibility to be careful about what you say" has ended, not only because we have become morally depraved creatures run amok in the garden of ethos, but because with Youtube it has become impractical and meaningless to talk about public/private fora in that context.

I have more stuff to say but I think I've already succeeded in making this the boringest blog post ever, so why continue?

Scheming for a White Christmas

It's December 12 and the weather is frightful --ly mild! Dang it --I'd rather have the snow and ice over with right now insteada waiting for it in MAY.

The Old Man and The Sea

I was on a boat going from Stockholm to Helsinki a few years ago. Everything I did that summer had been deliciously rash and I was shocked to realize that it was not just a boat, but a 12 hour party boat with a casino, a danceclub, and the Swedish Banditos, a motorcycle gang second in its reach only to Hell's Angels. Many memorable things happened on that boat to me, including meeting a Swedish soccer team who adopted me as their own and gave me a key to their cabin, being encouraged to take a picture of male genitalia while its owner lay passed out drunk, standing in the way of a Bandito member at the dance club, who gave me the tiniest shove, which almost sparked a fight between the soccer team and the Banditos, which I got to indulge in my ultimate fantasy of stopping a fight in a nightclub between angry built dudes (it's true, I've wanted to do this since the seventh grade).

But I think the most memorable thing that happened to me that night was before the sunset, when the mood was still reserved and I had tucked myself into a small booth by a window facing the water.

"May I join you?"

I looked up and saw an old smiling Japanese man. I smiled yes and thus began an hour long ramble past the basics and into each other's lives, but cryptically, dropping plotlines in no particular order, explaining only the thing that we wished to explain in great detail and leaving the other supporting facts, the messy contexts, out. For convenience.

I learned that he was retired but still taught middle school at an all girl's school.

"I like teaching girls very much," he said. I smiled and fidgeted a little bit, both slightly creeped out and then immediately guilty for feeling creeped out by such an harmless old man.

We were both traveling alone.

"Why didn't your wife come with you?" I asked after an oblique reference by him to a spouse.

"Oh, she doesn't like to travel with me. She travels with her friends!" he laughed, pushing the idea away.

We talked about the small Japanese village where he lived and a list of places in Japan that I really needed to visit. We found a few scraps of paper and, in the setting sun, wrote our names in characters, nodding with familiarity at those that are found in Japanese and Chinese writing.

I felt a warm surge of admiration towards the old man. Look at him, I thought, he keeps so young at heart by being curious about the world and traveling to satisfy his curiosity.

So that was why I was so caught off guard when, as our exchange slowly tapered to an end, he said, with a self-effacing shake of the head, "This will probably be my last trip."

"Why? What do you mean?" I asked in disbelief.

"I... I am getting too old for travel," he answered accompanied by more headshaking and smiles.

"You? No way! You're not too old!" I grinned at him. He was obviously just joking around, fishing for compliments. "You're still young!" I continued cheerfully, certain that we were both kidding around, being silly.

"No, actually," the old man said steadily, patiently, but without attaching any importance to it, "actually you might think that I am fine right now."

I nodded eagerly.

"We had this wonderful talk..." he made a gesture around the circle of table between us.

"We sure did!" I shouted nervously, wondering what was going on.

"But if I see you tomorrow morning," the old man continued. He looked up at me and for the first time I saw nothing in his eyes. I shivered.

"Yes, tomorrow?"

"I will not remember who you are," he finished, and smiled gently at me.

And that's what I remember most about the boat trip to Helsinki.

I'm in San Francisco, Advice Me Immediately!

Dudes, what should I do? I'm just here for tonight. Please tell me! Four Seasons at Union Square. Call my room or something.

Too Rough

I remember my first Canadian recess. Mrs. Bambridge had asked Amy Chan, the only other asian girl in my grade (other than creepy quiet Mary Chen, who had arrived from Shanghai in the same summer as I had, and hadn't yet changed her name to Mary yet) to watch over me. Rotund Amy with her shiny eyes and loud voice that always sounded slightly hurt, the voice of daughters of those new-immigrant families that make no secret of valuing boys over girls. We stood in the asphalt between the playground and the school. A few passerbys, fellow members of our second grade class, loitered around us curiously. I had not spoken all day and felt no desire to change that until suddenly, before my shyness could stop me, I held my arm out towards a small thing in the field beyond us and yelled in Chinese, "Dog!"

I had never seen a dog before. At that time, Chinese people did not have dogs and I hadn't even heard of that rumour that Chinese people eat dogs yet. For me, seeing a dog was like seeing a camel.

Amy was somewhat taken aback at my sudden movement, as was I. A few of the passerbys held their heads together and murmured, "it's the dog, she pointed at the dog."

By the next week, I had gotten rid of Amy and began to spend recess with a few boys in the sixth grade. We would spend all our time on the tire swings. Well, I would, and the boys would push the tires, hard, and we would yell insults to each other. We did not go beyond insults and thus I learned to swear in English before I learned to ask to go to the bathroom. I never thought that I was cool for hanging out with older boys, even though when they were in middle school they would come to my house and we'd play tag in the dark until somebody's mom came looking for them. I guess I never considered it playing, since every time I hung out with them, they would be so rough with me that I'd think that I was going to die at their hands.

One day, walking back to the school from the tire swings, separately. (We weren't friends --we were friendly enemies.)

"Hey Ying," Andy yelled from behind me. Instead of turning around, I spread my feet apart, swung my upper half between them while grabbing a handful of pebbles along the way, and responded by throwing rocks at him while yelling an obscenity. I swung back up, grinning, and found myself face-to-face with Mrs. Bambridge, who had a particularly bewildered face, the face Oprah has when one of her guests says something unusual, which the audience reads as a clue to say "oooh." She had that face.

"Ying Ying, is that you?" she asked. In class I did not speak, ever. I wasn't girly, but I was most definitely not wild like I was on the playground.

I looked back at her, myself shocked as much as she was, as if I was being made aware of this duality the first time.

She stood there looking at me silently for a good while before turning around and walking away without another word.

Then, a few months later, I was playing with Wei, a second grader like myself who had just come from China, except a boy. It was before school and we were running around the playground when Jenny and Kristin came up to me. I was a little bit shy and nervous and glad, because Kristin and Jenny were the popular girls in our class who wore pink corduoury and bring brand new stuffed animals to show off at Show and Tell. Kristin, or was it Jenny, smiled a little and then said in a sing-song voice, "Is he your boyfriend?"

To my horror, the next thing I know, Kristin/Jenny's horrified eyes were staring, bulgingly, at me, in alarm, below them a big dirty gloved hand... mine, smothering her face.

"Ying Ying!" the other girl that was not being smothered yelled at me, and I withdrew my hand instantly, her vocal reprieve a million times more potent than the rocks that the boys threw at me at recess. The smothered girl stumbled back a little, stunned, while the other one tended to her, cooed to her.

"You shouldn't do that!" they declared, in a style reminicent of Mrs. Bambridge, and left.

Earlier, in China, before my dad left, when I was barely 4, he had taken me to a park and let me wander off by myself, a move that he later regretted as much as my mother wanted to guilt him into regretting. An older girl, bigger, fatter, but most importantly, older, was walking around in a white sundress, with a sort of authority that I thought was unavailable to me.

"Hey, hey!" I called out to her. She ignored me and kept walking. I followed her through the Beijing park, the winding paths and the dusty blades of grass, industrial greenage. I studied her, and found that she was transfixed in a world of her own making, she seemed to float one way and the next, oblivious to me and my admiration of her.

"Wait up," I yelled, trying to emulate her floating, her olderness, her authority with the environment around her.

She stopped infront of two boys pointing a shotgun at us. Well, I should say that she stopped slightly to one side. It was I, who, wanting to stand beside her and see what she saw, stood exactly infront of the long barrel of the gun. The only thought in my heart was gladness that she had stopped and let me stand beside her.

"Move!" the boys yelled, peering into the gun, batting each other's limbs out of the way, wanting more than anything to feel like experts.

She did not move and so, naturally, there was no way I was going to give up this hard-won position of standing beside my new idol.

When I woke up I was lying on the ledge of a water fountain in the park looking up into the sky, which was eclipsed by my father's head. He was using someone's shirt, probably his, to mop up the blood gushing out of my face. I remember wondering, sadly, why the girl had not said anything, told me to move --surely she knew that even though I did not listen to the boys, I would have done anything she told me to do?

"Do you remember how you asked Dad to buy you a book earlier that afternoon, before you were shot?" my mom asked me later, after he had moved to England.

"I did?"

"Yeah. But he didn't get it for you. Afterwards, after you got hurt, he felt really bad about that, about not buying you the book."

I thought over what I could remember of that day. Him carrying me somewhere, my legs swinging over his arm as he changed directions. The sound, in the distance, of two boys trying to plead their case to angry adults. But between us, it is wordless, but I feel comfortable and safe, taken care of. It was different from the girl's silence, which had hurt me.

Twenty years later, a week into my first Manhattan lease, I posted an ad on Craigslist looking for friends, girls specifically, to go clubbing with, to be new to the city with. Somehow (and I swear to god this is true), that Craigslist post led me through on a winding path to the 5757 lounge, where I sat across the table from a fifty year old engineer, handing him napkins as his nose bled quietly and steadily, threatening the span of white tablecloth between us.