Category Archives: a picture is worth a thousand words

Pride

I had to travel to San Francisco this weekend, and therefore I had the good fortune of participating in the 41st San Francisco Pride Parade. My lucky star shone on me for I was able to drag Brilliant Sulk to walk in the pride with me.

Yes you heard that right. WE. WALKED. IN. THE. PARADE.

(Apparently it was not that hard at all to just WALK in a parade… When there’s a will, there is a way)

Yes there were “protesters”. Some preacher guy was on a soap box, literally, with a mike yelling something about sinners, and Jesus, and The Lord, and Wrong. A woman yelled back, “Jesus would fuck a man!” Laughter broke out. The preacher guy shot back, “You are a wicked wicked young woman. The Lord would wash your mouth with soap.”

Of course, I sure hope The Lord worries about more important things other than washing somebody’s mouth with soap.

For several hours, I basked in the gorgeousness of people. The joy of life. The wonders of possibilities.

I hesitate in taking pictures of people without their permission. I want people to know that I take pictures of them because I find them beautiful, that I can see their spirits shining through and not because I am gawking at them. I caught their attention and they posed for me. Afterwards, we blew kisses at each other. I had the urge to run across the street to tell them, “Stay fabulous.” I wish they could see this post. Stay fabulous.

When I pointed my camera at him, again I felt awkward. Despite the flamboyant make-up, he exuded quiet dignity. I lowered my camera, paused, and mouthed, “Could I take your picture?” He smiled in return. Then again, we blew kisses at each other.

I ended up taking more pictures of the spectators. The exuberance was uncontainable and I soaked it in through the camera lens. I found beauty in all.

Maybe it is because I am was a “theatre person”, I always pay more attention to what happens when the show is over. You see a side of the performers that are undeniably human and I find the untold stories fascinating.

The ironic thing was, at the end of day, the one picture I hastily snapped with my phone while we were waiting to start was probably my favorite of them all…

Amidst the droning of idiocy that we hear and read about every day, esp. that propagated by the network with an animal name, for one day, I was proud to be part of the human race, part of the American fabric.

Pride.

You can see all the photos on Flickr.

The Curious Case of Ruby, the Anti-Barbie

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I suspect that you have been seeing this picture popping up on your Facebook and/or Twitter stream this week. I did. Like you, I had a visceral response to it.

FUCK YEAH!

Was exactly what I said to the monitor as I responded to the plea on Facebook “This was an ad made by bodyshop. But Barbie INC. found out about it and now it’s banned. Repost if you think this ad deserves to be seen,” and hit the SHARE button before I could say “Happy National Donut Day!”

Then my inner Cyber Sleuth / Internet Meme Historian took over. “I wonder whether this is yet another hoax?” Ok. Fine. It was also my inner cynic’s doing. I googled it.

Good news (or is it in fact bad news?) : This is for realz. The Body Shop did wage such a brilliant war against The Barbie.

Bad news (or does it really matter?) : It was from 1998.

The late Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, wrote in 2001:

In 1998, The Body Shop debuted its self-esteem campaign, featuring the generously proportioned doll we dubbed “Ruby.” … …

Ruby was a fun idea, but she carried a serious message. She was intended to challenge stereotypes of beauty and counter the pervasive influence of the cosmetics industry, of which we understood we were a part. Perhaps more than we had even hoped, Ruby kick-started a worldwide debate about body image and self-esteem.

But Ruby was not universally loved. In the United States, the toy company Mattel sent us a cease-and-desist order, demanding we pull the images of Ruby from American shop windows. Their reason: Ruby was making Barbie look bad, presumably by mocking the plastic twig-like bestseller (Barbie dolls sell at a rate of two per second; it’s hard to see how our Ruby could have done any meaningful damage.) I was ecstatic that Mattel thought Ruby was insulting to Barbie — the idea of one inanimate piece of molded plastic hurting another’s feelings was absolutely mind-blowing.

In 2002, Ms. Roddick again wrote about Ruby when the Danish pop band Aqua was sued by Mattel for their song “Barbie Girl”. In the same post, she also mentioned how an American artist, Tom Forsythe, had been engaged in lengthy legal battle against Mattel when Mattel sued him for his photographic project “Food Chain Barbie“. (You’d be happy to know that in 2004, after five years and millions of dollars in legal expenses, Mattel was ordered by court to pay $1.8 million in legal fees for Mr. Forsythe.)

Googling also led me to believe that every year or so, this poster of daring and clever protest by The Body Shop would resurface to the Internet’s attention but then the buzz would die down as fast as it started. For example, this article in Mother Jones from 2007.

It seems that more and more people are being outraged on Twitter and Facebook asking people, “It is banned by Mattel. OMG! RETWEET IF YOU WANT THIS POSTER TO BE SEEN!” It has caught on like a bad rumor. (It has now appeared on BuzzFeed with no historical context).

At first I wanted to “set the record straight” by shouting from the mountain top: This was from 1998, people. Case closed!

Then I thought about what Ms. Roddick wrote:

It makes me angry, not only because it is a male-dominated industry built on creating needs that don’t exist, but because it seems to have decided that it needs to make women unhappy about their appearances. It plays on self-doubt and insecurity about image and ageing by projecting impossible ideals of youth and beauty.

Things have not changed much since 1998 when the world first met Ruby. And yes, the world needs to be reminded of Ruby once in a while. We are a forgetful people with short attention spans which seem to get shorter with each new generation.

Ruby, who still watches us from posters throughout The Body Shop’s offices, won’t let us forget. — Dame Anita Roddick

This just in: Bin Laden is dead!

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That is, OSAMA Bin Laden is dead. In case you are confused, like this Fox Network station.

You are welcome.

Source: twitpic @KyleHudgins

It seems that this is one of the criteria to be working at a Fox News network station… Worse than the mistake above that could have been a simple, innocent, typo, the video below shows a slip that really makes you go, “Huh. I wonder how long he’s been practicing saying that?”

Can’t Hardly Wait

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Some random associations from a picture I took this Sunday.

Budding.

Can’t hardly wait.

Spring Awakening.

Frank Wedekind

Frank Wedekind who in 1906 gave us a play criticizing the sexually repressed society with depictions of group masturbation and other subjects that scandalized theatre goers.

This quote attributed to Wedekind which made me chuckle because now whenever some trivial disaster happens in my otherwise mundane life, I think, “Yeah, a blog post has written itself!”

Any fool can have bad luck; the art consists in knowing how to exploit it.

The Lulu Plays by Wedekind.

Lulu, the complicated, contradictory femme fatal and victim, in a play that scandalized the audiences in the late 19th / early 20th century with its nudity, implied and not so implicit sex act, rampant confessions of lust and obsession, and an openly lesbian character.

Louise Brooks. Playing the role of Lulu in the movie adaptation of Pandora’s Box.

Louise Brooks. Writing a memoir many decades afterwards, so uncannily described how we feel now when we sit in front of our computers and pour our hearts out…

For two extraordinary years I have been working on it – learning to write – but mostly learning how to tell the truth. At first it is quite impossible. You make yourself better than anybody, then worse than anybody, and when you finally come to see you are “like” everybody – that is the bitterest blow of all to the ego. But in the end it is only the truth, no matter how ugly or shameful, that is right, that fits together, that makes real people, and strangely enough – beauty…

Double Whammy Wednesday – WTF and Wordless

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Sundays in My City – SNOW! (What else do you expect?)

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On February 1, 2011, at around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, snow started coming down together with the wind, fast and furious. The fortunate ones were able to stay in their own houses, waiting for the blizzard to end.

Before the sun came out again, the snow had stopped but the wind continued. When those fortunate people woke up on February 2, they were greeted with the aftermath of the blizzard and they picked up the shovels, started up their snowblowers and went to work.