meikuree

vanity and haircut chat

I got my hair cut recently again for free; a new hairstylist at a salon needed models to build up her portfolio and get more practice so I happily volunteered. even though I love drawing hair I can never visualise or describe what I want -- drawing's a 2d space, hairstyling is 3d -- but my hair is imo hard to fuck up and I also truly do not mind looking ugly in the worst scenario, so I asked for the usual of shoulder-length layers with face framing. it ended up being the best haircut session I've had in the UK, because the hairstylist and her supervisor were both attentive and tried to tailor the cut to my hair texture. I learned, for instance, that (no surprise) like many Chinese people I have dense but fine hair with a slight wave/curl that benefits from blended or feathered cutting, a la Japanese salon styles. and I have an angular jawline such that softer or rounder layers help balance that out. 

modelling for hairstylists is also unintentionally a cool way to get a look at what happens behind the curtain of how hairdressers do what they do, the techniques they use like point cutting, etc. 

anyway, essays and other things that have caught my eye lately:

short stories

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed: In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.

this was a bittersweet story, with a trans lesbian and a rather sweet if ominous ending, and I liked it. but: acquaintance and I were both remarking about how, despite the title practically begging for it, there were very few freudian undertones in the story itself. maybe a mind-boggling choice (and this is not a spoiler, this is discussed in the opening paragraphs), given how often the narrative references some variation of 'your mother put [a child] in you' and 'you are carrying your mother's future daughter'. (to clarify, these are adoptive mothers and foster daughters.) otherwise, there are interesting thematic lines wrt trans embodiment, clones as a metaphor for fungibility, surrogacy labour, and the ironic, hypocritical paternalism (or maternalism?) of corporate you-can-be-anything-you-want ideologies.

articles, commentaries

In Italy, Punjabi Farmworkers Are Treated as Expendable. After decades working the fields in Italy, Balvir Kumar “Birra” was still paid barely five euros an hour. Killed in an accident last month, his story shows how little value Italy’s vast food industry puts on its workers’ lives.

This article is my small testimony to Birra; he will live in the memory of everyone who met him and of his family back home, who now mourns his loss. I will never forget his smiling eyes; his clumsy, swaying walk; his contagious laughter and quick way of speaking, as if he was in a rush to end the sentence; his funny bhangra dance moves; and how he gave a €10 banknote to an eight-year-old girl on her birthday, equivalent to two hours of his hard work. One of his friends — who informed me about his death — remembers him by the few words they used to jokingly tell each other whenever they met: “edda hai” (“it’s like that”). It’s like that, Birra, but it shouldn’t be.

Liam Kofi Bright: Self-Audit a Decade In.

When people ask me why I decided to go into academia I typically reply that it’s an indoor job with no heavy lifting. This, of course, is a simplification. I was also depressed. To be more precise, when I was deciding whether or not to go to grad school I had then-undiagnosed severe recurrent depression [in hindsight I had a lot of sympathy for this lovely piece Railton, 2015]. Both these were probably the most important factors in trying for graduate school.

a 2016 interview with Margo Jefferson by Tobi Haslett. this has many moments of the characteristic sharpness I associate with Tobi Haslett's commentaries, and Jefferson is of course an intellectual heavyweight.

( some interesting (and possibly provocative) excerpts )

music, fragrances, misc

tumblr user amarocit answers: have you ever made your own perfumes? I'm a fragrance pleb so this was a really illuminating look at what happens behind the curtain of fragrances and how perfumers come up with notes. for instance, did you know: "if you're trying to create a specific effect, stuff gets thorny. That's because most fragrances are actually illusions! Note lists are not ingredient lists; a fragrance with a jasmine note might not contain any jasmine products."

Tori Amos’ From The Choirgirl Hotel is progressive rock/pop in its truest sense. see also this Reddit response thread. I don't have a musical background whatsoever and I know nothing about composition, theory, scales, or time signatures. but I always enjoy analysis of the musical elements of Tori's oeuvre and the why of why they're so layered and compelling, which is maybe a little like practical criticism but for music. Among other details: "[Tori] plays around with song structure in ways that aren't usually common in pop"; "If you try to analyze what’s going on you stumble upon a plethora of odd and unusual time signatures and arrangement choices that sound coherent and memorable bc of her immense melodic vision."

and some of her songs where she goes off the fucking walls and switches time signatures multiple times or even with every measure -- brilliant insanity -- are my favourite ones, like Datura. for me, she's the musician equivalent of a writer whose next word is unpredictable and never what you expect, someone who makes full use of a medium's constraints for reinvention.

title = bad Mandarin pun, a play on 'fool's spring' and 愚蠢 (yu2 chun3, 'foolish/stupid') + 春 (chun1, 'spring'). see the actual seasons of Britain:



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1000xRESIST is another one in the line of canons that have made me feel like I need a drink and a depressing book about grief to process it immediately after finishing it. it actually has an uplifting ending by a few metrics and it's also extremely funny, but it still puts the audience through the wringer and I respect it for that.

quick summary: it's a narrative game about a far-future sisterhood of clones cloned from a HK Chinese-Canadian teenager called Iris Kwan, but I'd alternatively call it a commentary concerned with the violence of parent-child relationships/abuse/memory/heritage/familial legacies. alternative alternative summary: this game is filled to the brim with women with mother issues, and clonecest that's both subtextual and not. and multiple matricides, because why not? party emoji. 

I'm going to put my cards on the table and say that I'm usually thoroughly lukewarm about the majority of Chinese(-North American) diaspora stories, for reasons I'll sum up at the end so I don't start this on a hypercritical note. this game, though, has an interesting and un-solipsistic premise and while I don't think its treatments of certain topics resonated (understandable! it's a me problem), in that they hewed close to familiar narrative grooves in that genre, it sticks the landing and I was taken with the clone society by the end.

fun fact: this isn't the first show/media/canon I've watched about a sisterhood of clones. Orphan Black was another one, and it was similarly concerned with genetic/personal autonomy, responsibility, and ethics.

I don't have the brainspace to write any meaty commentary, unfortunately so I'm just going to note some linguistic (foot)notes on the Cantonese lines and hilarious moments that stuck out when I watched Welonz's playthrough on Youtube (minor spoilers):

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and a few reasons I don't gel (broadly) with the genre of Chinese diaspora stories:

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very 'overdue' reading round-up of interesting articles/books/marginalia I've come across. in the spirit of "good is better than perfect":

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alternative title: i've forgotten how to write book reviews

note: not a spoiler-free review. also, can someone teach me how to create dreamwidth icons that won't get massively lossy in resolution after posting? I wish I could create a crisper jenny holzer slogan icon, but I'll take what I can get.

(  language (re)acquisition in 3... 2... 1... )

didn't read much, but here's what I've been up to!

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(a simple list for now due to time constraints, although I do want to review some of these sometime and add thoughts. feel free to reply if you've heard of any of these or want to chat about them!)

short stories

• Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead by Carmen Maria Machado
• Hungry Daughters of Starving Mothers by Alyssa Wong

and a bunch of stories I discovered from chocochipbiscuit's rec list -- thank you for the good fiction!

• Rabbit Test by Samantha Mills
• Unname Me at the Altar by Ashaye Brown
• Skin by Isha Karki
• The Storyteller by Rhea Roy

books/novels

• The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
• In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
• Flowers in the Attic by VC Andrews
• The Old Capital by Kawabata Yasunari
• Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto

journal articles and essays

• The Class Origins of Zionist Ideology by Stephen Halbrook (1972), published in Journal of Palestine Studies
• This Concerns Everyone by James Butler (on the UK care crisis)
• The Luddites of Hollywood by Gavin Mueller (on the WGA strikes)
• brief Brandon Taylor and C Pam Zhang interview in The Guardian
• the virtues of the boring draft from brandon taylor's substack, a craft essay where he discusses balancing disclosure and mystery and the principle of trying to bore your readers
• This article on earthquake adaptation in Tokyo, which I found interesting largely for how normal(ised) life with earthquakes is there and all the ways people adapt to the possibility of disaster
• Humbert Humbert and the Kids These Days: On Teaching Lolita in a High School Classroom by Benjamin Seigle (2017): read this months ago, actually, courtesy of firstroad; adding it anyway because it was a thought-provoking gem

immediate want to read list:

• Solenoid by Mircea Cărtărescu
• Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah
• Severance by Ling Ma
• Affinity by Sarah Waters