A Blog is a Treat

Yesterday I got the weirdest call at work. (I work!) A man, not very old-sounding, no discernable accent. Told me that his friend had recently moved to New York, and was pregnant, and needed some help. She wanted to have an abortion, and did I have any suggestions for where she might be able to go? I work in the ladies’ studies department, basically, but the name it is given here is a little more high-falutin’ than that. It seemed like a trick, right? Like some kind of weird political Acorn-y setup where this guy was trying to get some quote out of me so that he could claim that this university is trying to kill babies or something? It was weird. Apparently, we also get amusing calls from the press sometimes (I haven’t yet, but I’ve been told) for quotes from profs, any time a lady does a thing. The black history dept is just down the hall, and they get the same calls, any time a black person does a thing. When I was at the theatre dept at my last school, the only really funny calls I ever got were the ones asking me if/when that one famous actress who went there would be in a play. There were probably three or four different people who asked me to CALL THEM to let them know when she got cast in a play. I would go, “uh-huh…right…four-three? Oh, four-two, okay,” while they gave me their phone number, and would chat and gossip and all, and of course never wrote anything down and then made fun of them.

So, work. Man. I dunno. It’s good. It’s good to have a job! The commute is loooooooong. I’ll probably move to Harlem as soon as my lease is up in BK. The west side is weird. I work like three blocks away from Monk’s! I’m too embarrassed to take a photo of it. Ivy league college students are all alike, maybe? Or maybe just “all college students are alike.” Though maybe I liked the last ones better. Seemed friendlier? Maybe I just knew MORE of them. And there were boys. I don’t know any boys here yet, except the one dude who works here. It’s true – we DID work harder than all the other departments at the last place, I guess. These guys not only ACTUALLY get “vacation hours” – where they leave early when classes aren’t in session, etc? – but man, they fuck off so much more than we did. Or, at least, maybe we fucked off that much, too, but it mattered more! There’s less to DO here, and they have a million work-study students coming in to help every day! All they do is, like, answer phones and make copies and stuff, but damn! That is LUXURIOUS! I don’t have an office anymore, boo, but I think my office was super-nice and unexpected at the other place, anyway. Um. I dunno. That’s all? I’m using a mac. That’s weird. I feel stupid sometimes when I like, can’t find the printer and stuff. The wall calendar is from a grocery store and has a photo of buffalo wings on it, and it makes me want buffalo wings every day. Okay. That’s all.

I heart the show Work of Art! I don’t even think I need to explain or defend this. It’s, I dunno, one of the “good” types of reality tv, where people apparently actually have skills and do productive things? Also, it’s sort of artistically fascinating, with, like, all the arguments about “Is it art if it’s reality tv” and “yeah but eff you they totally have real artists there” and “why would you judge a sculptor by how well he can make performance art” and but speaking of performance art, also, these contestants all probably know enough about it that they can claim that what they are doing here IS performance art, and I love the at-least-one-per-season contestants who straight-up full-on are truly seeming to do exactly that (the guy who may or may not have been pretending to have Asperger’s or OCD or whatever last year, The Sucklord this year).

Also, Simon de Pury. Oh god, Simon de Pury. Shena referred to him as “French Tim Gunn” recently, which is pretty good. He’s really really wonderful. He’s…god. Cheerful but blunt but not mean? He says really inspirational things that once you think about it, are very depressing. “This could be very good maybe!” “Keep working! Maybe something will happen!” Stuff like that. He’s sort of impish? Like a secretly scheming cheerful innocent French…imp? Plus, China Chow wears AMAZING things (though I think they were more amazing last year, frankly?) and is sort of also a really cute character, as well. Like she’s sort of interestingly robotic, and you want to make fun of her for being a model who was thrust into hosting a show about art, but actually she says some pretty intelligent and perceptive stuff sometimes – she just does it while standing very stiffly and wearing $20,000 cocktail dresses. (Also, the performance artist from season 1 was a guest speaker/performer last year at the college I used to work at. She included her appearance on this show in her professional bio. I wonder if she’s kind of embarrassed about it? If it was good PR? I didn’t go see her, so I don’t know if it got mentioned. I dunno. I kind of would have thought it’s the kind of thing you leave off of your bio when you go to Ivy League schools?)

Anyway, there was me not explaining or defending Work of Art.

But! I noticed something that at first I thought was weird and inconsistent – maybe even an oversight – but then which I realized is actually fucking clever as hell and totally brilliant and great. So, I think both because this is on cable (Bravo) and also because it’s about ART, the show tends to get away with some stuff that other shows wouldn’t: like, they show a lot more naked bodies than most shows would.

“This isn’t too many dicks, is it?” one artist asks another, re: this painting:

“No, I don’t think so at all!” says the other artist. “Here, look what I just drew!”

They do do some censoring, but…in extremely clever ways.

So, Lady Artist is doing a piece about the environment, and the way that plastic water bottles are sold to the consumer as a delivery device for clean, healthy water, but how in reality, they are a major source of pollution. It’s a pop art contest, and so she decides to make an “ad” for dirty water. “The nudity in the piece is very important,” she says, “because it’s supposed to insinuate sex trying to sell you a product.”

Here she is taking her shirt off in preperation for her photo shoot, as seen through her camera’s viewfinder:

And during the photo shoot:

Boobies always either blurred out or obscured, which makes sense for American tv, whatever.

Here she is editing the photo:

One of the other contestants (the wonderful Sucklord, unfortunately playing one of the parts of his character that was designed for me to get mad at), makes a big amusing deal of it. “This is fucking distracting,” he says, and “You need any help with that, you let me know,” and “I’m kinda surprised that Keenya was willing to put her boobs out there like that. She doesn’t seem like the type, but I’m willing to give her credit for doing it. And they’re nice-looking tits, too. You know who I really wish would do it is Sarah K.” (The Sucklord has a very cute running gag where all the girls like him, and he likes them all in return. Oh, The Sucklord.)

The finished piece, hanging on the gallery wall for judging:

For a long time, I was trying to figure out what their basis for to-blur-or-not-to-blur was. Was it whether or not her face was in the frame at the same time? Whether or not the boobies were seen through an added layer of projection (her camera’s viewfinder/the computer screen)? I couldn’t figure it out until I saw that they didn’t blur it while it was hanging in the gallery: they didn’t blur the boobies once they became ART. They blurred them on a lady, they blurred them before a photo was taken. They didn’t blur them after she had started to edit them. They didn’t blur them once they were hanging on a wall. That is their dividing line between “acceptable for television viewers” and “not acceptable for television viewers.” Is it boobies, or is it art? Has an artist applied some skill or thought to the boobies? If so, we can look at them. If not, it’s fucking pornography, and inappropriate.

Maybe I should be offended by this, but I think it’s charming and clever and somehow sort of naive and high-minded and helpful and sweet.

(She got second place.)

EDIT: Okay, so, incidentally, I’m re-watching a couple episodes of season 1 now, and they totally DO blur drawn dicks and butts and stuff the first time around. Also, they include a “this program may contain offensive material unsuitable to children” warning at the beginning of the episode. Wonder why their policy changed? Also, the fake-OCD guy was even cuter than I remembered him.

Okay, so this is not anywhere near exhausted yet. Unfortunately, Netflix keeps fucking with me – so many great recommendations, but so few available to watch instantly! And I am not quite bad enough yet to actually order a hard copy of Masterminds. (Well…okay, I mean…we’ll wait and see, I guess. Patrick Stewart! Vincent Kartheiser on what appears to be a pretty radical skateboard!)

Will Wheaton’s jeans after the jump… Read the rest of this entry »

Jessica is drinking $6 red wine and eating chocolate chips straight out of the bag and watching whatever this is:

SUPER SUPRIZE PRIZE!!! Name that movie! And win something sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeettt!! (It may or may not be half a bag of chocolate chips.)

I just got my Brooklyn Public Library card! (Which is apparently a whole separate thing from the NY Public Library? And I guess there’s really no particular reason for me to be sad about that, aside from no longer being able to casually say, “I’m going to the Nipple this weekend,” or “Oh, I go that from the Nipple,” or “You probably shouldn’t actually lick the Nipple; it’s got a bunch of homeless people all over it.” It’s all terribly clever.)

It’s such a cliché to wax rhapsodic about the library, but…man, the library’s great. It just seems like a thing that the government doesn’t HAVE to do, you know? Just giving away all this knowledge! and betterment! and good old wholesome fun! and all they ask is that you give it back after a while so other people can borrow it, too. It’s just so NICE, you know? Like weirdly unreasonably nice. Seems like the government should be using that money to feed hungry people and house homeless people and cure sick people, not…let people read Nicholas Sparks novels for free. Er…actually, maybe that’s a really decent argument, but…anyway, the library is nice, too.

The one closest to my apt is very very heavily Chinese – like half the books are Chinese-language books, and when I went there today, I was one of maybe 3 or 5 people in the whole building who was not Chinese. (When I got my card, the librarian, who was, like me, white and apparently American-born, was so prepared to serve Chinese customers, that she at first incorrectly entered my last name as “Li Lian.”) And the place was PACKED, too. Huge long fast-moving line that snaked back and forth across the whole room to check out. Tons of kids. All very polite, running around, bumping into you, squeezing back and forth across the line, but saying, like, “Excuse me!” when they did. And the first 4 turny racks right by the front were pretty much the “Jessica Section.” It was all purse-sized, well-worn, spine-taped paperbacks, a perfectly weighted mix of undergrad-level classics (just classic enough to make you look smart on the subway, but fun enough to not have to feel like you should be taking notes: Vonnegut, Hemingway, George Eliot, all the big Russians), on-the-literary side popular novels (the Jonathans Franzen and Safran Foer, We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Girl With the Stuff, The Room, etc), and young adult guilty pleasures (aaaaaaaaaalll the SE Hinton – chose whichever cover of Tex you prefer!, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, The Perks of Being a Wallflower – I’m noticing suddenly that these seem kind of old…like…my era? Where’s all the Hunger Games and Twilight and whatever the kids are into these days?).

Though also this, which I’ve probably pointed out before. It’s way too cute to be annoyed about.