I have spent the last few days trying to find a commercial on YouTube that I had seen a few times in the last couple of weeks. In my last effort, I sat at my laptop tonight searching when it came on the TV!...twice! Unfortunately, I still can't find it on the internet anywhere. Either way, the commercial interested me because the majority of the commercial is spent discussing how Canadians have no problem being in cold weather (showing people strutting down the street barely bundled up), and therefore, why shouldn't they wash their clothes in cold water with Tide! Don't ask me how this is related to being Canadian... I just thought it was interesting to see how a brand like Tide uses Canadian stereotypes to somehow promote the sales of their product. It was interesting to see how they used these "shared hardships" in order to create a kind of imagined community, connecting Canadians in this way and promoting their product.

Hip Hop in Japan

In a lecture of Black & White, I remember that we talked about Hip Hop as an anti-hegemonic culture. People who are marginalized in their real life commercialized their ghetto image by rapping. In a context of world Hip Hop artist such as Arab artist in France, Turkish artist in Germany, Professor Kalmar mentioned about possibilities of Korean artist in Japan since small amount of Koreans stays in Japan and it is often said that they had suffered discriminations historically. As I was curious about this, I researched a little bit. Surprisingly, one of the most popular rapper called ‘VERBAL’ was a third generations of Korea, and his nationality was actually Korean. I am pretty sure that not a lot of people know about this even in Japan, and he never mentioned or used this idea commercially. He rather uses his international experiences as marketing since he had studied in American University. I think it is because Hip Hop itself is just imported to Japan from States and its culture itself is not related to grass rooted culture at all. We are also not expressive about hardship itself. I think its radical commercialized image just did not fit into cultures like Japan.

Why would you say that?

In relation to a previous blog entry by Esther, entitled “Rape on TV”, I chose to discuss a recent event that happened in Toronto called the SlutWalk.

This walk was initiated after Toronto police constable Michael Sanguinetti told a personal security class at York University that “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.”

I believe that this comment by Michael Sanguinetti quite clearly is linked to the discussions we had earlier this year in relation to how romance and sexual acts are represented in romance novels. In these novels, the male character’s sexual advances are usually rejected by the female character, however the male character continues to make these advances with an inherent knowledge that the female character actually wants them.

Also, I found that in the romance novel that I read for class, Tempting the Texas Tycoon by Sara Orwig, when the story was being narrated by the male character, he would usually be describing either her dress or actions as inviting, even if what the female character was actually saying was the opposite.

This premise is similar to the one that was suggested by police constable Sanguinetti’s comment; that when women dress in a certain way (and also act a certain way), they is implicitly giving men the invitation to engage in sexual acts, despite whatever verbal protests the woman might actually be making.

This also relates to the lecture we had relating to pornography and its affect on both men and women who watch it. The learned idea of male sexual power and force as normalcy, which is common in pornography, is one that is again reflected in police constable Sanguinetti’s; his comment implies that it is a logical conclusion that if a male’s sexual power and force towards a woman is expected in sexual interactions.

An article by CBC about the SlutWalk, which took place this past Sunday, can be read here: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2011/04/03/slut-walk-toronto.html?ref=rss

Curious about Cool

"Ah," she cried, "you look so cool."

Their eyes met, and they stared together at each other, alone in space. With an effort she glanced down at the table.

"You always look so cool," she repeated.

She had told him that she loved him, and Tom Buchanan saw."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)

The above is a a famous excerpt from one of my favourite books. Daisy, the speaker, is saying this to Gatsby, a lover from the past, while her husband Tom watches. The dynamics are not totally clear if you're not familiar with the story and its setting in the Roaring Twenties. The statement about "looking cool" is one that sticks and what I thought of when we covered the topic of Hot and Cool in class. This book was written and set in the 1920s which is before the use of 'cool' as we discussed in class came about. I actually feel like it refers to a slightly different sentiment: look at this clip of the dialogue from the 1974 film version with Robert Redford, scroll to 8:21.

To me, Gatsby is anything but cool, as is evident from the video as well. First, he literally seems to be sweating (yes I know that isn't the opposite of cool as we mean it, but it does add to negating the cool of 'coolness'). Secondly, from the story, we know that Gatsby is someone who is trying very hard, not just at being cool, but really to woo Daisy (who is kind of shallow and idiotic) and so become all she seems to covet materially.

Another thought that came to mind during lecture, and I believe others will be more familiar with this one, is this clip from 'Almost Famous'. Start watching from 2:55.

In case you don't wanna watch, "William’s mentor and fellow music critic Lester Bangs offers a frightening prophecy for rock and roll: You missed it. Rock and roll is dead. It’s nothing more than an industry of cool. And of course, as everyone knows, trying to be cool is uncool." (taken from http://www.next-wave.org/apr01/cool.htm)

Here, cool refers to the meaning we understood in class. But it raises an interesting and inherent characteristic of 'cool': it okay to be cool, but its very uncool to TRY to be cool. That makes me wonder what Fitzgerald's meaning was when he used it in 1925. From the text and Daisy's generally flakey and silly personality, I always inferred it to mean something like the 196os cool. Is it irony then that Fitzgerald was going for? By trying to very hard to be cool, Gatsby is positively uncool. Yet Daisy calls him cool, maybe because compared to her own 'normal' expected existence, Gatsby comes across as this cool, mysterious person who walks out and walks back in to her life as he pleases? Despite his apparent lack of cool, I still feel terribly sad about Gatsby; his trying, instead of being pathetic (which some think it was), was passionate to me and showed his utter desperation. I find that very sad.

This post is a bit rambling and I'm not really trying to make a point, just wanted to muse aloud about some things that ran through my mind while wondering about the quality of 'cool'.

WARNING: Our School is TOO Asian!!!

First and foremost, I just want to be clear that I am not posting this article due to the fact that I am Asian. I simply wanted to share it with everyone because I think it parallels quite nicely with our lecture on Of Colour and White. As well, I believe the degree of controversy it has attained, both for the University of Toronto and for Maclean's itself, is definately worth paying attention to.

This Maclean's article was originally titled, "Too Asian" but was later renamed due to its controversial attributes. As you read, keep in mind the idea from class that "'white' is not a race" but an unmarked standard of normalcy.

In this article, it is clear "Asian" has become a substitute or the new "Black" or as blatantly expressed in the article, the new "Jew"; issues of race that we discussed in class. Simply being Asian in a university has become a marked characteristic worthy of criticism. And apparently, this marked characteristic has been discouraging young white Americans as well as disturbing univeristy admissions officers to the extent that imposing a limit on Asian applicants has even become a reality.

As you read the following article, try and think about which stereotypes are marked and normalized by both white and Asian parties and subsequently, how they perceive race... Enjoy!

The enrollment controversy*
Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada

When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”

Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.

Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”

Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students artificially high.

Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue, students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism, say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids, meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong, being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard for it.”

That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data. They tend to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded in their approach to university. Stephen Hsu, a physics prof at the University of Oregon who has written about the often subtle forms of discrimination faced by Asian-American university applicants, describes them as doing “disproportionately well—they tend to have high SAT scores, good grades in high school, and a lot of them really want to go to top universities.” In Canada, say Canadian high school guidance counsellors, that means the top-tier post-secondary institutions with international profiles specializing in math, science and business: U of T, UBC and the University of Waterloo. White students, by contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school lives around social interaction, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes, alcohol. When the two styles collide, the result is separation rather than integration.

The dilemma is this: Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so. Privately, however, many in the education community worry that universities risk becoming too skewed one way, changing campus life—a debate that’s been more or less out in the open in the U.S. for years but remains muted here. And that puts Canadian universities in a quandary. If they openly address the issue of race they expose themselves to criticisms that they are profiling and committing an injustice. If they don’t, Canada’s universities, far from the cultural mosaics they’re supposed to be—oases of dialogue, mutual understanding and diversity—risk becoming places of many solitudes, deserts of non-communication. It’s a tough question to have to think about.

Asian-Canadian students are far more likely to talk about and assert their ethnic identities than white students. “I’m Asian,” says 21-year-old Susie Su, a third-year student at UBC’s Sauder School of Business. “I do have traditional Asian parents. I feel the pressure of finding a good job and raising a good family.” That pressure helps shape more than just the way Su handles study and school assignments; it shapes the way she interacts with her colleagues. “If I feel like it’s going to be an event where it’s all white people, I probably wouldn’t want to go,” she says. “There’s a lot of just drinking. It’s not that I don’t like white people. But you tend to hang out with people of the same race.”

Catherine Costigan, a psychology assistant prof at the University of Victoria, says it’s unsurprising that Asian students are segregated from “mainstream” campus life. She cites studies that show Chinese youth are bullied more than their non-Asian peers. As a so-called “model minority,” they are more frequently targeted because of being “too smart” and “teachers’ pets.” To counter peer ostracism and resentment, Costigan says Chinese students reaffirm their ethnicity.

The value of education has been drilled into Asian students by their parents, likely for cultural and socio-economic reasons. “It’s often described that Asians are the new Jews,” says Jon Reider, director of college counselling at San Francisco University High School and a former Stanford University admissions officer. “That in the face of discrimination, what you do is you study. And there’s a long tradition in Chinese culture, for example, going back to Confucius, of social mobility based on merit.”

- Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler on Wednesday, November 10, 2010


Also Read Comments Online: http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/10/too-asian/

Black Comedy as the new Black Face

(The Clip does have A LOT of swearing and reference to sexual material so be warn when watching)

Thinking about the lecture on the relationship between Black and White, I was really interested in the way that the characters form Spike Lee’s movie bamboozled characterized their idea of what it was to be black. Putting on a black face and parading themselves in over exaggerated stereotype about black people and the black community. In the movie, the exaggerating of black character could symbolize two things. One, as a coping method in which to deal with the pressures they felt as part of the black community and another a way liberating themselves and controlling the jokes said about them. This idea about creating exaggerating character about the black community in also seen in modern comedy where there is a entirely distinctive genre dedicated for back humor. Jokes such as “yo mama…” “he was so black…..” and “I am so ghetto…” all buy into black oriented stereotypes. The jokes, besides there hilarity, often hold deep and hurtful ideas that are rooted in years of prejudice. Even in the video clip, he often refers himself as lazy, unemployed and poor, claiming at the beginning of his act that it was relating to his real life. He often also makes a lot of jokes regarding his mother, whom not only could not provide for them as kids but also was also addicted to drugs and suffered abuse. Although these are serious issues, he addresses them with exaggerated humor ad funny anecdotes as a way to make it easy for everyone to accept it. Comedy is seen as the taking of the ordinary life events is portraying them in a humours way, and in some way, the idea of black comedy sort of reaffirms these ideas as they take prejudice they feel as a community and add movie to it as a means to deal with it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgTPodsq3Aw

Rape on TV

Janice Radway analyzed the complexities of concept in romance novels, which blurs the line between rape and romance. I found it specifically provoking that something so unassuming as a romance novel could have the power to alter the rules of everyday erotic encounters as well as what is considered rape under the law. However, upon further investigation, it was revealed to me that the distinction between seduction and aggression is constantly being blurred in popular culture: on TV, in the movies, in comments by the Toronto police. Take for example, the award winning show Mad Men, in which 1960s power dynamic between men and women underlies all sexual encounters. When acts of coercion and sexual assault are portrayed on the show, audiences hotly debate whether or not rape actually occurred. Our culture teaches us to excuse rape, to rationalize it away.

Here are three instances of sexual assault or coercion, all of which have been hotly debated by TV audiences.

1. Season 2 Episode 3: Bobbie uses her sexuality as a bargaining chip
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDY9Zs5XWvo

2. Season 3 Episode 8: Pete and the Nanny


3. Season 2 Episode 12: Joan is raped by her fiancé
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6zZYCb-hyQ

Would you consider these events rape?

In an interview, Christina Hendricks, who plays Joan, is quoted saying,

“ The rape was a shocker—but the audience reactions were perhaps more disturbing. “What’s astounding is when people say things like, ‘Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?’ Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers,” says Hendricks. “I’m like, ‘What is that you are doing? Joan got raped!’ It illustrates how similar people are today, because we’re still questioning whether it’s a rape. It’s almost like, ‘Why didn’t you just say bad date?’ ” “

(The rest of the interview can be found at http://nymag.com/arts/tv/profiles/58170/ )