seen?

i recently bought harryette mullen's recyclopedia, an anthology of 3 of her books of poetry: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse & Drudge.

i've read muse & drudge, and it was a bit over my head. they say it is the book that is inspired by hip hop. she's clever in it, she manipulates language masterfully - but i'm not always sure what it means, if anything. i haven't yet read S*PeRM**K*T, so i won't comment on it.

but i am a complete believer in trimmings. it's all about women and their clothing and their relationships to their clothing and the world's relationship to women and their clothing. which is something i always love to read about. my collection of fashion magazines is actually shameful in its depth. i read fashion blogs. i shop too much. because i love and i hate women's clothing.

i'm also currently infatuated with prose poetry, trimmings is actually one long prose poem. here's one of the entries:

Lips, clasped together. Old leather fastened with a little snap. Strapped, broke. Quick snatch, in a clutch, chased the lady with the alligator purse. Green thief, off relief, got into her pocketbook by hook or by crook.

aside from the lovely rhyme, the double entendre is incredible. upon reading this, i was immediately reminded of the scene in maya angelou's i know why the caged bird sings, when young marguerite has her conversation with her glamourous mother about her ladyparts. she calls them, 'her pocketbook.' her mother immediately interrupts her, tells her not to use the southern, country euphemisms to go ahead and use the word vagina if that's what she means.

the green thief gets into the pocketbook. remember when you were a little girl, and you mother always reminded you to be a lady, keep your legs closed? you're also supposed to keep your purse closed. how interesting. what is it our mothers are telling us?

harryette mullen writes really rich poems that are really economical on words. i have a very short attention span, so, much as i love language, i don't love wordiness. give her a read - it won't take long to read, but it will give you something to think about long after.


at any rate, i highly recommend. and since we're talking about pocketbooks, i mean handbags, i might as well post one here:

Labels: fashion, poetry

Posted by call me aja at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Comments

i think they are near genius creatively.

i was excited about seeing the film.

idlewild.

i missed it in theaters. i miss lotsa movies in theaters. haven't been to a theater in ages, so i rely on my netflix. most of the time, i just add movies to my queue as soon as they come out in theaters, cuz i'm very likely not to go see it.

so i finally got idlewild and watched it.

it bored me.

5 minutes into the film i wondered if i was going to like. then i thought about how i needed to make some flashcards for learning the preterite conjugations in portuguese. and i did that for a while. then i worked on a poem. then i realized it was over 30 minutes into the film, and i knew what was going on, i just didn't particularly care.

why?

it was a bit all over the place. and much as i love outkast's music, it played too much like a video anthology that they tried to loop together with the odd bit of drama.

basic story: percy and rooster are friends. percy is the quiet and dutiful young man, rooster the flashy and ambitious (but still somewhat dutiful) one. due to a couple of shady deals and murders, rooster inherits the nightclub where he's been performing with percy as his pianist. but he also becomes indebted to the local gangsters. o, and a beautiful young woman shows up who totally bewitches percy.

yeah, not terribly hard to follow. and it could have worked except it was disjointed...every once in awhile there was a song break which didn't advance the plot. relate to the plot, they did. but it the film kinda dallied around, went off on tangents, threw in effects just for the sake of it. it would've benefitted from a less is more approach.

if the songbreaks had advanced the plot, the film would have been gold. i loved the effects and animations - the rooster on rooster's pocket flask, the musical notes that came alive on the paper, the cuckoo clocks. but they were extra, not integral, and it's all gotta be bigger than the sum of its parts.

cohesion. it lacked cohesion.

oh outkast. i will say, though, that it was a first of its kind foray for them. they have the talent, and they have the bravery. i hope the next one works out better for them.

and since i really like shoes, here is a pair that i adore.

Labels: fashion, film, musica

Posted by call me aja at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments

folks, it's been a long time.

but i couldn't sleep, so i thought i'd check this thing out. looks about the same as when last i blogged it.

minha aula de português é dificil mas vai bem. estou aprendendo muito.

one day in class we discussed the word saudade, the notoriously untranslatable portuguese word for the feeling you have when you are separated from someone by a great distance of some sort, and you miss them, and you wish to be with them. longing is an approximation in english, i guess, but it looks that way only cuz describing it in english is not quite grasping the depth of meaning in portuguese. we concluded in my class that there is no real, exact equivalent in spanish. (the class designed for those with a background in spanish. in fact, i am one of the maybe 3 non-native or heritage spanish speakers in the class.)

people always say english sucks as a language because it is not very expressive. i disagree. i think english is incredibly rich. and i got to thinkin about english words that are untranslatable. and i did a google search (of course) and stumbled across this list as voted upon by the linguists a couple of years ago. notice anything about it?

1 plenipotentiary

2 gobbledegook

3 serendipity

4 poppycock

5 googly

6 Spam

7 whimsy

8 bumf

9 chuffed

10 kitsch


i noticed that it kinda sucks. cuz most of these are not words in common usage. and kitsch isn't even english. and i don't know what a bumf is. however, i thought whimsy and serendipty were absolutely brilliant additions.

well, my point, i suppose, is well suited for describing the world that english speaking people live in, and it has some brilliant and beautiful words. what other english words would be hard to translate? maybe i'll try and keep a running tally.

speaking of brilliant and beautiful, i saw a girl on the street yesterday wearing some skinny jeans and these:



the mork & mindy dunks. oh my, they are lovely, lovely sneakers.

Labels: fashion, languages

Posted by call me aja at 5:03 AM | Permalink | Comments

a couple of exhibits are currently running in nyc that i'm dying to check out.

graffiti @ the brooklyn museum
all about, well you guessed it, graffiti, which may be the only actually illegal of of the four elements of hip hop* but, if this exhibition at a major institution is an indication, not the most transgressive/subversive. exhibition runs through september 3rd, i'm tryin to check it out this weekend.

legacies: contemporary artists reflect on slavery @ the new york historical society
until january 7, 2007
follow up to the much touted slavery in new york exhibition. to quote one person's thoughts on slavery in new york, that exhibition was a little too positive, meaning that it glossed over some of the true degradations of slavery that we should be learning from, but overall it was very interesting. i'm looking forward to seeing some of these contemp. responses from artists like faith ringgold, bettye saar, maria magdelena campos-pons, carrie mae weems, barbara chase-riboud, and kara walker. ok, i realize i don't mention any of the male artists involved, but i'm really more familiar with the female artists...that presents an interesting problem, but moving right along....

black style now @ the museum of the city of new york
september 9, 2006-february 19, 2007
all about black style, from street to haute couture, especially in nyc. zoot suits, bling, diahann carroll, kangols, all of my favorite things...


*the four elements: DJing, MCing, breaking, and graffiti. no i don't find it to be limiting to say hip hop has 4 elements, chemistry has a certain number of elements and many many combinations of them to form, pretty much, everything we know.

Labels: fashion, museums, visual arts, yeah i said it: race

Posted by call me aja at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments

this weekend, some friends and i were talking about interracial dating, and one of them mentioned something she'd read before - some writer suggested that black women and asian men get together and do some serious coupling, since they are the ones generally left out of the interracial dating world.

and then today, i read this article on slate talking about how, apparently, bob dylan has always had a thing for black women. definitely something i'd never heard before. the article suggests a bit of the fetishism, but then many discussions about interracial dating do the same.


what's most interesting, i guess, is the very fact that it's article-worthy that bob dylan is attracted to black women. funny, funny world we live in-the us census bureau finally allows for people to identify as biracial or multiracial, supposedly indicating a sign of the times, and yet interracial couples are still something of an oddity.

case in point: that movie "something new." now, i haven't seen the movie. but it seems to me that, whenever there is an interracial couple in film/television/media, that film/show/whatever is about the interracial couple. if interracial couples are so common these days, why is it that a couple in a film never only happens to be interracial? when they made that movie hitch, they had to cast a latina as the leading lady because american audiences at large would not go to see a movie where a black man dates a white woman, and only black audiences would go see a movie that featured a black couple.

well, maybe they could have cast halle berry in that role. of course, she is the exception, not the rule-an unthreatening black woman. then again, perhaps they could not afford halle berry? i dunno.

as for the title of this post: it comes from an urban outfitters t-shirt. honestly, i really wouldn't know if everyone loves a black girl....


urban outfitters, despite making the t-shirt, doesn't even love black girls all that much. it was apart of that series, you know, everyone loves and italian girl, everyone loves an irish girl, everyone loves a jewish girl. notice how all of the other shirts reference specific affinity groups? and then we have: black girl. this is not quite the same, after all, urban outfitters did not manufacture a shirt that says everyone loves a white girl, and yet there's nothing that says everyone loves a jamaican girl, everyone loves a sengalese girl, everyone loves a yoruba girl, cuz black girls are treated like they belong to an entirely homogeneous group. and i will admit that black girls are beautiful as a group, but also incredibly diverse...this thing about the t-shirts is pretty tangential, i will admit, yet typical.

Labels: fashion, film, yeah i said it: race

Posted by call me aja at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments

...being a girl of my skin tone tryin to find a good foundation at sephora. literally, the color selection ranges from 18 shades of peachy to one shade of dark*...buying one of the peachy ones makes me look like i have a colorism complex, buying the dark one makes me look like i'm in blackface* and the stuff is just too expensive to buy 2 colors and mix them.

there are lotsa colors in between. thank you.


* except for dior. dior only makes 6 shades of peachy. no dark.

**back in the heyday of vaudeville, black people had to wear blackface to get into the minstrel show. i'm not tryin to recall that era with my makeup.

Labels: aja, fashion, yeah i said it: race

Posted by call me aja at 11:44 PM | Permalink | Comments