A RACE PUN

Is fashion the most racist industry operating today, you guys?  It's hard to think of another one where racism is so vertically-integrated, from globalist-racist textile manufacture to elitist-racist high fashion, to aesthetic-racist beauty standards in magazines. 

All these want talking about in a serious way, but high fashion is a particularly interesting case because it has a special quality, which I'll term "hipster racism".  Hipster racism is that style of racism which stems from the belief that through personal sophistication and irony you have transcended racism, and that henceforth no interpretation of your actions as racist can be valid.  This posture need not be informed by any kind of self-reflection or critical knowledge, just a belief that you can't do wrong if you mean well (or mean nothing).  The hipster racist knows that he is not a racist in his heart, because he is nothing in his heart, a valueless, empty point from which explorations can be launched.  Thus he frees himself to use racist language or imagery in the name of freaking out the squares. 

Avant-garde fashion is, by definition, obsessed with being shocking and unfamiliar, in exploring the heterotopia.  But in an information-dense environment, getting your shock from something that's new is very difficult, and so fashion often goes instead to the well of the socially-unacceptable.  So we get rotating collections of anthropological curiosities, sexual outrages, political bogeymen, obscene wealth inequity, the homeless, addict chic, grotesques. The atrocity is aestheticized and monetized.  And if you got upset, you had fallen for the hipster's trap: Gotcha!  You were holding something sacred, weren't you!  Thinking something was important, when in fact everything is arbitrary and nihilistic!  LAME.

All this is why I'm a just a little bit surprised that Dior shitcanned Galliano, rather than commissioning him to create a fall collection inspired by the legacy of Hugo Boss.

On The Perils Of Representation

 I borrowed this PSA poster--yes, let's say borrowed, I am definitely one day going to return to that university and replace that poster--from a bathroom stall at a university, because I think it is a poetic bit of propaganda.  It allows for a fair depth of deconstruction, which I like in an image.  Before reading on, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the ideas of literary and film criticism, particularly the concept of a "reading" of a text.  I don't want to have to delete a bunch of comments going "you're wrong because that's not what the creators meant" like I did when I said Disney's The Little Mermaid was about interracial relationships. 

So: what are our elements?  Black hand, money, white hand, disease.  I say that this will extend to metaphors about black people, white people, commerce, and all varieties of malady.  So: White imperialists come to black nations with the promise of enriching commerce, but instead blight them with poverty and disease.  Or a corruption affects all commerce, poisoning black and white alike.  Or the green bugs are not pathologies, but the "germ" of new life, created by the flow of currency.  Or money is germy.  Or black people are germy.  Note that this last (and maybe the first if we're being picky) is racist.  Indeed, there are several racist readings of the text of this image, even without getting into the positioning with respect to the viewer and who is accepting what and so on. 

Let us consider two hypothetical images like this, one with two black hands, and one with two white hands.  Because race, like most human categories, has a marked and an unmarked (or default) status, only one will appear to the casual observer (particularly a casual observer from a default category) to be dealing directly with race.  This problem is a Known Issue with race.  What are some of the proposed solutions (i.e. ways to avoid being called racist while portraying non-whites in media) and what are the possible drawbacks to each one?

• Always ignore race
Maybe a noble thought, but the problem is that people can't actually do this.  Largely it boils down to ignoring the fact that everyone in your portrayal is white due to the consequences of some unstated assumptions.

• Harp on race constantly
Annoying and exhausting for anti-racists, racists, and people who feel that not much caring puts them more in the former group than the latter.  Leads to films like Crash. 

 • Be black
Wait, hear me out.  In media contexts, people from marginalized groups tend to be granted more latitude to express opinions only on the matter of their specific group's relation to the mainstream, on the grounds that people from marked categories are likelier to be expert on these subjects than people from default categories.   More comprehensibly, on tv, black people get to talk shit about black and white people and no one except racists or academics or racist academics will really take exception.  Of course, there is a firmly-established political culture dedicated to catering to upset racists, so this is still a bit dicey.  Other possible drawbacks: society won't just let you become black for some bullshit reason.  And, I don't know if this is true, but I heard somewhere that there are disadvantages to being black in America that outweigh the notional pleasure of knowing that you could still potentially be on tv if you use the word "nigger" extensively. 

 • Tokenism/Diversity Checklist casting
Regardless of their level of racial savvy, pretty much everyone can tell if you're doing this.  The impulses that drive this style of character creation (a bid for universal appeal) usually also preclude fully humanizing any characters, and because the desire to have "one of each kind" of cast member need not spring from any actual political awareness, it's easy for it to be accompanied by a bunch of racial stereotypes or for Ma-Ti to not really have any good powers. 

 • Use only white people
Don't...don't actually do this, as a strategy or otherwise.  Besides being patently inhumane, people do eventually notice, and then you either have to justify it (questionable) or change (difficult).   

 • Stop depicting humans
This can backfire pretty easily.  Certain suites of characteristics you might wish to portray with a non-human character, George Lucas, are already associated with poisonous racial stereotypes and whether or not you meant them that way everyone will assume the worst.  Also, people generally need to be involved at some stage, whether in voice, character design, general aesthetic, writing, or premise, and any of these people can have unexamined racial biases or ignorance that make their way into the final product. 

 • Alien casting method
Maybe you know the story, but the scriptwriters for Alien supposedly specified that all the characters were "unisex", and encouraged the casting of actors of whatever gender to play any of them, except Ripley, who was definitely going to be a dude.  While a favored technique of mine, this can only work in situations where race and gender are genuinely interchangeable, and as such is limited in its capacity to tell stories in which these are meaningful dynamics. 

 • God, this is tricky.  What would Solomon do?  

 Oh goddamit it Solomon.

In Defense of MSG

I'm a vegetarian and a semi-avid cook, and I like MSG.  Not only do I like its meaty, savory taste in food, but I like it as a metaphor for how we deal with different kinds of social problems. 

MSG, or monosodium glutamate, or hydrolysed yeast protein, or yeast extract powder, or malt extract, or Parmesan, or Bragg's Liquid Aminos, is a food additive, one of a group of substances added to food to make it more in line with qualities we prize in foods.  There are too many food additives to count, with varying levels of harmfulness, but perhaps the most harmful of these is salt.  What I find reading people's offhand conversations--I read a lot of people's offhand conversations--on food forums and the like, is that salt is vaguely understood to be bad, but unless a doctor has directly told someone that they will die it is not really thought of as a harmful component of food so much as a basic taste.  MSG, by contrast, is widely understood to be Bad News if it occurs in a dish or on a label, and is resolutely to be avoided. 

Information on reducing your salt intake can be found online at sites like the Mayo Clinic, the American Heart Association, and the Center For Science In The Public Interest.  Information on reducing your MSG intake can be found online at sites like MSGTruth.org, Curezone, Holisticmed, and TruthInLabeling.org.  I advocate for the removal of neither sodium nor MSG from the diet, but for the monitoring and reasonable intake of each.  What interests me is the different reputation of each of these substances.  You don't see Alton Brown or Heston Blumenthal suggesting you glutamine your thanksgiving/christmas turkey, for example. 

MSG occurs as free glutamates in most savory foods as well as grapes and tomatoes, but it is very much viewed as a foreign menace which reached our shores from sinister Asia and immediately started killing people who ate at Chinese restaurants.  It is unusual among food additives for being quite heavily studied, due to a late-70s hysteria over Chinese food.  Glutamate is an amino acid and neurotransmitter which can, if overloaded into the brain, cause nerve death.  However, we do have this whole blood-brain barrier thing going specifically to prevent this type of death.  Consumption of MSG alone can briefly cause headaches, increased heart rate, and flushed skin in some people, but in double-blind studies taken with food, this effect can't be replicated either.  A recent study shows a small but positive correlation between heavy MSG use (over 150 mg per day) and overweight in Chinese housewives, with heavy MSG users consuming more calories overall and a greater proportion of their calories from animal sources.  Incidentally, MSG is a salt compound, and all of these results--neurotoxicity, headache, rapid heartbeat and dizziness, obesity--have been demonstrated much more reliably in studies linking them to salt.

Study upon study links high salt consumption to high blood pressure, contributing to heart disease and stroke, the primary killers of people.  Salt is additionally dangerous because we all need a little of it to survive--it's an essential electrolyte that helps us keep our nerves conductive.  Salt was thin on the ground when we were evolving, and consequently we have such a taste for it that we will gorge ourselves on salty foods when the opportunity presents itself. It is a taste sensation, to be sure, but the reason it is in most processed food is its qualities as a preservative (think of salt pork, pickles, preserved lemons, or kippers), as well as its use to make food with terrible ingredients taste less shitty. 

Salt is something of an intractable social ill because it is bound up with so many other aspects of our food system.  It's necessary for pre-prepared food to be well-preserved because it travels long distances and often sits for long periods on shelves or in refrigerators.  And it's necessary for food to be well-seasoned because profitability demands that food be made from the cheapest possible ingredients, which can be awful.  Dramatically decreasing salt would create problems which would necessitate a radical reshuffling of the organization and priorities of prepared food producers, and no one ever wants to do that. 
MSG also solves problems for processed food producers, by allowing them to create delicious, moreish snacks out of sawdust and paint chips.  No recommended daily intake has been established, and so no quantities must be shown on labels.  Although the additive is widely reviled, it occurs in enough forms that it can be swapped for a synonym with ease--for example, the chicken broth in my mother's cabinet proclaims "No MSG * " with the addendum " * except for that which occurs naturally in autolysed yeast extract".  A can of chicken broth has 80% of the recommended daily allowance of sodium, and the reduced-sodium version has 50%. 

So to recap, what we have here is two substances, both enjoyable, and both with some potential harm.  One of them is more harmful, and is overused by everybody despite dire warnings by health officials, because it undergirds the basic fabric of our way of life.  The other is less harmful, is feared all out of proportion with its objective health effects, has a reputation as dangerous substance due in part to its early association with shifty foreigners, and has been driven into hiding despite the fact that almost everyone uses it at some point during their lives.

That's why I like MSG.

In Every Color And Flavor Too

While I bear men no particular ill will, I do have a reflexive dislike of movies about them.  That is to say, not films in which a character is subject to a central premise or situation, and because there's no compelling reason for that character to be female, he's been defaulted to male.  I'm talking about films where the lead is presented in the preview as a captivatingly, intoxicatingly normal-man male regular-shmoe guy fellow and the film centers around the delightful and meaningful quirks of his precious character.  Usually he is either recently single or becomes so in the opening scenes, so that what little plot there is can center around him getting some girl.  I've seen a ton of these, of course: it's a major genre.  Another one comes down the pike every six hours or so, and it annoys me the same way the latest "His DAUGHTER...is KIDNAPPED by BAD MANS.  now HE...has to BREAK...ALL the LAWS...and EVERYONE'S FACE...TO GET HER BACK" film does.

Let's see if we can get a list going here.

Young guys:
  • The Graduate
  • Youth In Revolt
  • Adventureland
  • Garden State
  • Superbad (though many Judd Apatow films have this "behold, Man!" quality, constantly remarked on by lazy pundits writing on the theme of What's Wrong With The Youth, they often also have interesting premises)

Middle-aged guys (the largest section! this is the age and gender of hollywood screenwriters! "Write what you know", after all!):
  • Punch Drunk Love
  • Lost In Translation (unusual for spending a great deal of time on the inner life of gorgeous uggo Scarlett Johansson, but compensating for this slight originality by being utterly wretched)
  • Greenburg
  • Funny People
  • Sideways
  • Manhattan
  • Annie Hall
  • Marty
  • American Splendor
  • American Beauty
  • Downfall
  • Stranger Than Fiction (A meta example! In this film, which you are to see if you read this, the mancharacter is a creation (?) of female novelist Emma Thompson, which puts a spin on the whole genre that I think necessitates me rewatching it for a new reading)

Old guys:
  • The Wrestler (Debatable. This one has a premise: the dude used to be a wrestler.  If I include it, shouldn't I include Rocky, and Taxi Driver, and Bad Lieutenant, and The Machinist, and The Pianist, and The Professional, and The Driver, and The Horse Whisperer, &c; &c;)
  • As Good As It Gets
  • About Schmidt

These movies vary wildly in quality, like films in any genre, and my initial suspicion is often easily overcome.  My skepticism is based on an idea I have that films dealing with men's personal crises, their "journeys" to use the term of bullshit art, are widely viewed as more serious and more innately worthy than the same films would be if they had female leads and female-specific crises.

I'm sure such films are kicking around somewhere...let's see...oh, Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, that's a good example...Waitress and the whole raft of cute preganancy movies that came up with it, Juno, Knocked Up...Sherrybaby, if anyone's heard of that.  I'm sure a variety of Meryl Streep movies must focus on how she is aging and what that must be like.  And of course romantic comedies often play as "normal lady with issues that mean she can't land a man" films.  And there's Lifetime. 

Come to think of it, I reflexively dislike Manproblem Cinema more when it centers around women.  It just doesn't come up as often.  Man-films, with their seriousness, can attract a lot more talent and money and subtlety at every stage of production, and it shows.  Moreover, for myself the idea of being older, and male, and somewhat more free, is at the very least escapist.  Women's pictures are more like psychological horror.

Highly Reflective But Not Terribly Absorbing

Being against the idea of special privilege (or rather for the notion of extending all unearned privileges to groups which don't currently enjoy them), I do find the pride I take in keeping my pale skin pale somewhat shameful.  I've committed to being a single color all over for aesthetic reasons, and the color I've chosen is that of the flesh I've never exposed to the sun.  What this means is essentially that I am the only American who actually checks the day's UV index and follows associated government recommendations on sun exposure.  I am a clinical paranoid about invisible rays touching me.

There's some practicality in it--my father suffers skin cancer scares every few years.  There is an extent to which I fear aging, "losing my looks", and death, all at levels disproportionate to their objective harm.  Some of it is about a romantic idea of [racist & classist, obv.] beauty standards from the Western past and from parts of the world today where being upper-class means you can afford to avoid laboring in the hot sun all day.  And some of it is simply that I burn very easily, and each of the things I put on my skin or in my body--retinol, benzoyl peroxide, glycolic acid, ibuprofen, rosemary, lime--causes increased sun sensitivity.  Some of it is the idea of privacy, that no one but people I choose have a right to see my bare skin, and that I won't change it to suit a current fashion for non-blueness.  And there's a good deal of sexuality, too--the more that's covered, the more sensual it is to reveal anything. 

This is far from the only area in which my need for self-esteem or pleasure comes in conflict with what I think is right.  What I think would be right for anyone who can pass as white (or male, or upper-class, or able, &c.) is not some kind of decontextualized "play" with race, one that can be put on and taken off as a matter of convenience, but an aggressive campaign to confuse and destroy racial boundaries in every walk of life.  I want white people to black up for job interviews, court dates, and realtors, to adopt indigenous beauty standards, to refigure racial slurs to refer only to each other--all of them with perfect knowledge and perfect love.

But, importantly, I am much less a radical than I am a coward, and I have what I hope is a laudable desire to avoid hurting anyone who may already have it rough. The effect is like that of a mildly racially-aware media executive who, fearing accusations of racism if he allows the portrayal of any person of color, utterly whitewashes ad campaigns, films, and television imagery.  Basically I am the human equivalent of indie music.

Or you could just watch Aladdin again

Saw Prince of Persia yesterday, one of approximately seven people in the theater, all women.  I thought I'd make a quick attempt at one of the looks from the film, as worn by sole-named-female-speaking-role character Princess Tamina.  It's on the occasion when she's about to be presented to the King of Persia as the spoils of war, and is characterized by a sort of double-lining effect where kohl is used to rim the inner lid, and then a horizontal line is drawn below the eye, which is washed with gold. 

I'd use a less yellowy gold than Medusa's Makeup Golden Boy if I tried this again, and also I'd try much harder to make sure both my under-eye lines were ruler-straight.  The foiling I did with plain water, and as such the metallic effect lasted exactly as long as it took to dry.  Next time, perhaps some Pixie Epoxy. 

Now, I'm white, and Gemma Arterton is white, and Jake Gyllenhaal is white, and Ben Kingsley is white, and Richard Coyle is white, and Toby Kebbell is white, and Donald Pickup is white, and Gísli Örn Garðarsson is Icelandic, and Alfred Molina is Spanish-Italian but born in England, and Steve Toussaint is English but has a French name and in the movie he plays a the only member of a fictional tribe of super-accurate knife-throwers called the "Mmmbaca", and director Mike Newell is famously white and English, but the settings and several of the extras and soldiers in this film are Iranian or Arab.  Should I be concerned about any kind of cultural appropriation here by wearing this possibly authentic and culturally significant makeup?  I'm very troubled!

Incidentally, I spilled a bunch of eye dust while doing this, and not only on my face.  And now I can't reverse time.