From Look Twice,

A few months ago, I got into a fistfight on the subway.

I was coming home from work and it was packed. There was this gawky twelve year old kid standing nearby. I’d noticed him earlier in the ride clowning around with a friend: Skinny kid, all fingers and toes, awash in the dorkiness of an actual pre-teen who does not have his own show on the Disney channel. I was tired and spacing out when the door slid open and people shifted to get off. The kid made a move for the door but I had a few stops left so I twisted out of the way to let him exit but instead of moving forward he just stood there, blinking and stammering. Just as I was asking him, “are you getting off?” someone behind me gave me a hard shove out of the way. I fell forward, the guy walked around me, and out the door…but not before I gave him a hard shove back.

Then he whirled around and sucker punched me in the face.

In retrospect, the dorky kid was probably paralyzed because he could see past me to the impatient guy who, it turns out was big. Very big. But I didn’t really have time to process any of that in the moment because when he punched me I saw red and…do you remember how Garfield the cartoon cat used to sail through the air to throw himself on to a cartoon lasagna? I did that. “Hello,” said my lizard brain, “I will be taking it from here.” Impatient guy was surprised. The people around us, who were streaming off of the subway, were surprised. Hell, I surprised myself. We stumbled out on to the subway platform as New York commuters, disinterested but ready to move away in case one of us pulled out a weapon, watched blankly.

For some reason, this is the part of the story where everyone wants to know if the guy was black.

Read the rest here.

On the way to see “Slumdog Millionaire” in Kolkata, I had my cabdriver pass through the slum district of Tangra. I lived there more than 35 years ago, when I was in my late teens, but the place has barely changed. The cab threaded a maze of narrow lanes between shacks built from black plastic and corrugated metal. Scrawny men sat outside, chewing tobacco and spitting into the dirt. Naked children defecated in the open, and women lined up at the public taps to fetch water in battered plastic jerry cans. Everything smelled of garbage and human waste. I noticed only one difference from the 1960s: a few huts had color TVs . . .

I think it’s safe to say that I’m obsessed with any kind of writing related to “Slumdog Millionaire.” More than two weeks after viewing the film, I still haven’t developed a full argument on what I thought of it, but in the meantime, read this great piece written by Sudip Mazumdar for Newsweek.

From Shocked by Slumdog’s poverty porn,

As a review on the same website by Vrinda Nabar, an Indian professor at a US university, put it: “Slumdog’s eventual victory comes at a price. When the selective manipulation of Third World squalor can make for a feel-good movie in a dismal year, the global village has a long way to go.”

. . .

Quite. The Mumbai Mirror dubbed it “Slum Chic”, and notes that the term “slumdog” is not widely recognised in India: “It appears to be a British invention to describe a poor Dharavi kid in a derogatory way.”

. . .

That said, most Indians have not seen the film, because it will not open there until next week, a delay that has raised an eyebrow or two: did Mumbai not deserve to see Slumdog first? Instead, pirated copies are doing the rounds while America watches a film that Hollywood refused to fund, because “who wants to see misery and street kids?”.

. . .

And it may be that the brilliance of the film rescues Boyle from criticism: he is a film-maker, not a social commentator, and nobody doubts its cinematic brilliance. As The New York Times put it: “It’s hard to hold on to any reservations in the face of Mr Boyle’s resolutely upbeat pitch and seductive visual style.”

That very seductiveness is the problem. But if Boyle may be absolved from criticism, I am not sure the same can be said of the audience. “Slumderful!” declared the New York Post. When we are suckered into enjoying scenes of absolute horror among children in slums on the other side of the world, even dubbing them comedy, we ought to question where our moral compass is pointing. Boyle’s most subversive achievement may lie not in revealing the dark underbelly of India – but in revealing ours.

I’m always wary when a Western director takes up a film project to depict non-white film subjects. On one hand, it’s not conducive to societal progress to limit talk on sensitive subject matters only to “the” subjects themselves; on the other hand, privileges afforded to these directors (dare I say that “white privilege” is really the most important one?) often taint Western perspective of cultures deemed different from theirs.

Like the writer of the Times article states, Danny Boyle is not a social commentator and his purpose in making “Slumdog” may or may not be to bring about sociological change. Nonetheless, amidst the hooplah surrounding the film (and what with Oscar season just around the corner), the way his subjects are depicted in his movie and the way that audiences receive those images is often not talked about in the way that it ought to be talked about. If this film had been directed by an Indian director, would it receive the same acclaim? If this film has been awarded with so many Oscar nods, why are there none for any of the (Indian) actors? Surely this movie can’t be as praise-worthy as it is if there was no good acting. These are all things that I think are important to consider.

“If the relative freedom in intellectual work that the Chinese living in the liberal West enjoy is a privilege, Chinese intellectuals must use this privilege as truthfully and as tactically as they can — not merely to speak as exotic minors, but to fight the crippling effects of Western imperialism and Chinese paternalism at once.”

– Against the Lures of Diaspora by Rey Chow

Man, if she ever taught at my university . . .

Peter Som has canceled his showing at the Fall/Winter 09 Fashion Week. I really did gasp when I read about this because Peter Som is one of my fave designers. In my lament, here are some of my favorite looks from the past few seasons:

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Jim Carrey’s ‘Yes Man’ is racist and stereotypical. It never fails to surprise me when people come across yet another mainstream Hollywood film that is fully blatant with their stereotypical portrayals of non-white Americans. It also never fails to surprise me that when the issue is brought up, there are always people who try to defend it in the name of “entertainment” or in the name of “comedy.” I also hate people who say things along the lines of, “But what about the white characters who got stereotyped against?” as if that is in itself an appropriate answer to the stereotypes used against minority races. Yes, stereotypes are all unnecessary and there is always a smarter way to pen your humor, but at the end of the day, while there may be stereotypes of white people, the protagonists in the movies are still white. We sympathize with the white characters, the white characters are the heroes, and the stories are about the white characters. Ethnic characters are used predominantly as supporting characters to further a story and to further the white characters’ development/journey.

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SNSD’s MBC Comeback – “Gee.” The song’s grown on me after a few listens and while I won’t actively look for an mp3 of the song or put it on any playlist, the performance of the song is cute. Plus, I think the music makers over at SM are trying to take note of JYP’s practices of creating a song with a singular chant-y chorus line that’s easy to repeat and thus easy for the masses to remember. “Tell me, tell me, t-t-t-tell me…” -> “Gee gee gee gee, baby, baby baby…” “Gee” is another one of those sickeningly sweet bubblegum pop songs, but at least the tempo is quicker and thus it seems to go by faster. And you can hate SM’s music for all you want, they always still manage to insert ways to showcase their singers’ vocals no matter how un-challenging a song may seem. It might not look it, but the song is a hard song to perform live because of how much jumping around the girls do and Tiffany, Jessica, Seohyun, Taeyeon, Sooyoung sing very smoothly. Even if they look like they’re struggling to breathe and sing at the same time, they can do eet. (The song also did help me finalize my decision that Yoona and Hyoyeon can’t sing for shit. Sunny has a really odd face voice, but she can still sing. Yuri has to keep practicing, but she ain’t helpless.)

(Be grateful this wasn’t another post on Hanadan. Those will resume in two short days when the new eps air, hee.)