February, 2008

fashion / television — No Comments
29
Feb 08

Project Runway: Season 4 Finale Part I

Here is a teaser vid:

Next week is the Fashion Week episode. This episode gives the expected preview of the finalists’ collections with drop-in visits from Tim Gunn, who gives his ever so thoughtful editing eye to garments the designers spent months working on. Also, we find see this limbo scenario unravel – will Chris March or Rami get to show in Fashion Week?

After Tim visits Rami in LA and Chris March in NYC, we see both their collections have promise. Rami does something not so drapey, but at the same time, his work is more constructed. Chris March’s collection is very gothic with a shocking twist – he sewed human hair extensions into some of his dresses. It strikes some of the judges as a bit creepy; however, it reminds me of some of those odd hairstyles that hair dressers, only it extends to the garment. There’s also a scene in Hedwig and the Angry Inch where Hedwig has a Cher/Tina Turner moment in blond dress to go with his very straight, long blond wig.

After they have the showdown at the end of the episodes, the judges still have a hard time deciding, but they ultimately decide on Rami. He is very talented, but his collection didn’t interest me as much as Chris March’s.

Now for the other finalists:
If anyone can make Big Bird pants work, it’s Christian with his Harry Potter magic. Tim Gunn, overall, is wowed, but he’s baffled by some items such as a gigantic, face-concealing ruffled collar (Late Renaissance), and a pair of feathered leggings. Somehow, it’ll all click.

Jillian, too, has a Renaissance inspired collection, with quite a dark palette. Will she put a little color into her revised collection?

I think Christian’s going to win this one, though the judges may have a hard time between him and Jillian.

Stay tuned for next week the Fashion Week finale.

blogging — No Comments
28
Feb 08

Yes, I’ve been hiding

I haven’t blogged much except to comment on Project Runway and the satirical Stuff White People Like Blog. I’m watching Project Runway right now, but no spoilers until Friday. I’m just waiting through the repeat of the reunion episode and then comes the Fashion Week episode extravaganza* we’ve all been waiting for. We know about Christian and Jillian getting to show their collections, but the reveal is tonight. No spoilers, please, people on the East Coast. It’s not fair you get to see everything first.

I’ve been busy with my classes. I feel like I’m buried in it, but at least I’m not too horribly behind. I’ve always been very disorganized. It’s threatened to bite me on the arse in previous semesters, but I’m working on it. I’m tired of feeling like assignments and papers fall upon me like an avalanche. I’m tired of observing problems in class, but have no proof of it. On the flip side, I haven’t always been able to effectively record merit when I see it. So, working on being organized is my new thing.

I have been able to catch up on a lot. As I’ve been trying to keep up to speed on everything, there have been a few things to challenge it. There’s some back-up as I’ve tried to keep current on lessons, grades, and other things for the class, but at least it’s not as bad as last semester. I just hate being behind.

Giving up procrastination for Lent hasn’t been easy. Perhaps, I should have done chocolate. That would be too easy.

*correction: Fashion week episode is next week. This week was the four month later visit by Tim Gunn and the unraveling of the biggest mindfuck ever generated by Project Runway.

Uncategorized — 1 Comment
24
Feb 08

Mr. Deity and the Help Meet

Lucy’s definitely not happy with how the Script dictates human biology, especially for women.

blogging — 1 Comment
23
Feb 08

You don’t have to use glue! You can use RICE!

Yesterday, I had one of those very odd serendipitous days. I kept having chance meetings with people I knew all day in various locations, and I happened to run in to my friend Brian (not to be confused with the other Brian) at Horton Plaza. During our conversation, he told me about Stuff White People Like, which amount to an anthropological view of white people. Well, not just any white people.

While others may take pot shots at white trash or neoconservative types (too easy), this blog’s targets are liberal middle class. It’s quite an unflattering spotlight with a nice dose of biting humor. I’m just jealous that I didn’t think of it first.

White guilt, hipster snobbery, sushi, and weed connoisseurs are just some of the fun observations to read. I have to warn you: You just can’t read one post. Stuff White People Like is very addictive.

fashion / television — No Comments
22
Feb 08

Project Runway: Reunion Episode

This is probably one of the most civilized reunion episodes on Project Runway. No bitchfights and no super incoherent rants to answer fan questions. The producers must have kept the contestants away from the alcohol.

There is, however, some never seen before footage. Heidi Klum questions if Kevin is gay and pulls out some of his odd gay humor moments. Ricky has some incredibly emotional out takes, and Heidi Klum also says some of the darndest things that doesn’t make it to the final cut of any episode.

Poor Victorya – she gets tagged as uptight by Heidi and Tim. However, she manages to have a Fashion Week show independent of Project Runway.

As for Sweet P, it’s nice that she’s getting some celebrity recognition.

Christian, the most likely winner in the Fashion Week Challenge, gets the viewer’s choice pick. Hopefully, he’ll put that $10G to good use.

The reunion went through some interesting questions, but no major spoilers for next week. We know for sure that Jillian‘s in, but whether Rami or Chris is to be in Fashion week is still to be decided. Tune in next week as Tim visits them and looks at their collection.

fashion / television — 3 Comments
15
Feb 08

Project Runway: The Art Of The Show


Getting inspiration for art from art. This is not as pretentious as it might sound. Fashion students really do study art history in school and also clothing of the past, and this episode certainly brought me back to classes I took a lifetime ago.

For this challenge, the five hopefuls for fashion week go to the Met to get ideas for creations to propel them into fashion week. As Tim Gunn points out, there were thousands of artifacts in this museum, so the field trip was only limited to three galleries: Greek and Roman, European art, and the Temple of Dendur.

We all know that Rami is the queen of the drapes. In all fairness, a lot of his style has yielded some successful results. However, it has gotten to the point where we all (not just Chris March and the judges) can predict he’ll look to the Grecian statues for inspiration. He creates a lovely, wearable dress, but it’s no match for what Christian, Jillian, and Chris March create.

Speaking of Chris March, I like that he guffawed in the Temple of Dendor. Everyone was so quiet and proper in the museum, and it was nice to see someone break that up. He goes for the 18th century, a drag queeny era if there ever was one. Big dresses, big hair, and lots of make-up – definitely his speed. While he repeats the gigantic shoulder in this one, it’s not the same. The other one looks like a gigantic Mickey Mouse ear, while this one had a very strange elegance as it was crumpled around the model’s shoulder. However, Nina Garcia and Michael Kors have to jump on it after Roberto Cavalli expresses how much he likes the dress.

While Jillian has made bad time management her signature, she makes an elegant and understated black coat hiding a splashy gold dress. She looks to a Renaissance painting depicting Jason and the Argonauts, but hers looks very modern.

Christian goes for ruffles and tons of them in his Spanish Renaissance inspired ensemble. While it’s also easy to point out this feature of his is predictable, he often creates some very complex items. Well, having the lightening bolt on his head doesn’t hurt.* I have to admit that I find his statement about the play on masculine and feminine very intriguing.

Sweet P creates a chemise that takes the colors of a peacock painting. It’s very mod and Twiggy. Too bad it doesn’t do much for the judges. I like her and her outfit, so I’m really sad to see her not go on to Fashion Week.

The final “in” is a total mindfuck. After selecting Christian as the winner and Jillian as in, the judges can’t bring themselves to send Chris March or Rami home. However, there isn’t a definite in as they put Chris March and Rami in a competition. Both will have to make collections for Fashion Week, and from there the judges will decide if one of them will get to have their showing in Bryant Park.

Next week, we’ll see them all in the same room again. Hopefully, the producers have thought about their alcohol policy and limiting how many martinis the former contestants are allowed to drink. I just can’t get out of my head one Season 2 contestant’s incoherent response to a viewer letter. It was some comic relief for sure. Stay tuned.

*I’ve referred to Christian as Harry Potter in earlier posts.

writing — 3 Comments
13
Feb 08

Remembering Jospeh K

Yesterday’s post took me down the proverbial memory lane regarding Professor Joseph K*. I’ve written several posts about him in the past, starting with when I first met him. Like the relationship itself, looking back upon the whole experience has been an emotional roller coaster. Several years ago, when my friendship with him disintegrated, I was hurt and angry. I’ve had some time to process those feelings over the past several years and I can now look at it a little more calmly and objectively, but I don’t think I’ll ever have anything close to “warm fuzzy feelings.”

At any level in college, students find mentors in their professors. That was the nature of my relationship with Professor Joseph K, or Joe, as I’ll refer to him from time to time. At the time, I thought he was different from all the other English professors at my university. He had a post-modern cool about him. He wore black clothing and sunglasses indoors. His course materials were outside of the canon, which I found intriguing. As I got to know him, he became very paternal towards me. Like my father, he had a very dry sense of humor. I would later learn that he could be just as mercurial.

There were some positive things, especially early on. When I took his upper division course in my last year of college, he gave me some confidence in my abilities as a student and a thinker. One of the things he did was to invite me to take a graduate course the following semester. I was, at the time, trying to find direction as a writer experimenting with various forms. Joe was the editor in chief of an avant-garde literary journal with the university press and he invited me to be part of the editorial team. He soon promoted me to assistant editor when my predecessor found himself too busy to do the job. He saw some of my work, gave me some encouragement, and helped me put together an application packet for the MFA program. He also wrote a letter of recommendation for me.

During the time I waited to get into the program, I had a place to hang my coat and a room of my own to read and write. Joe gave me a key to his office, and it was mine during the daytime. Joe often only came to the office at night before his classes.

As far as publishing goes, he gave me the lead to a journal that took one of his works and I got published alongside him. It was the Gold Lady’s debut. In Joe’s journal, some of Richard Kostelanetz‘s “one word stories” were accepted and I did the artistic formatting. I got to be a published writer and artist within a few month period.

Joe did not make extravagant demands upon me. All I did was check the mailroom for his mail and submissions, logged the submissions, and did a few other errands. He was a pain in the ass during the manuscript editing process, but even that wasn’t bad. I wasn’t expected to bring Starbuck’s coffee to him piping hot, nor was I expected to got unpublished Harry Potter books for his children.** None of the deadlines he gave were unreasonable, even when it came to dealing with the galleys.

I house-sat for Joe a few times. Like the office, the borrowed home during his times away served as a place where I could benefit creatively. He owned thousands of books and it was nice to have access to his personal library. It was a quiet place, away from family, so I occasionally had a place where I could do some work. Of course, there was an episode that wound up becoming part of the university’s MFA lore. It involves some cookies, but I’m not saying anything more.

to be continued…

*Pseudonym from the protagonist of the The Trial by Franz Kafka. The name change is designed to protect the guilty and even the innocent.
**The Devil Wears Prada.

college / teaching — 1 Comment
13
Feb 08

Monkey II

In my last post, I discussed the joy of dealing with incomplete grades for students. For anyone who doesn’t know what this entails, it is a basic right students have in the event they are not able to compete the coursework for a semester. There may be some variations on this policy from school to school, but here are the basic conditions:

  • The student needs to fill out an agreement with the instructor regarding their need to finish their coursework beyond the semester.
  • There is usually one assignment that’s needed to satisfy the requirements for a student’s grade, but there may be more.
  • The student has one year from the end of the semester date to complete their work.
  • After the conditions have been outlined in the agreement and the instructor turns in the agreement, the student’s grade is recorded as “I” or INCOMPLETE.
  • Here is the dangerous part: If a student does not complete the work necessary for them to get a passing grade, their “I” or INCOMPLETE will turn into an F.

I’ve never took an incomplete in college. I’ve never been a big fan of paper work, and the less there is, the better. Now, this is an unrealistic desire for someone in my profession. When I was in graduate school, there was some silly piece of paper to turn in to some office every week. Of course, this is a gross over-exaggeration, but I don’t think I’m too far from the truth. The incomplete was simply another document to fill out.

Given that, I did not make it a habit to approach my professor mentors and tormentors for incompletes. I usually finished my coursework by the end of the semester, even it killed me. There were many times where it almost did.

There was only one semester where I ever approached a professor to do an incomplete. It was a course on the great world novel and I chose to my semester paper on Shusaku Endo‘s Silence. This novel’s theme was suffering, which I would ironically experience as I struggled through the year to do the paper.

For some reason, it took me a while to decide on using this work as the topic for my paper. However, it would take me a long while to get it done. I often found excuses not to do it. The following semester, I dealt with drama. I had a personal and professional falling out with the professor who helped me get into graduate school (a cautionary tale against doing graduate programs in your undergraduate alma mater). It didn’t help that I worked as assistant editor for his disturbingly sick literary* journal at the time (I formally resigned mid-year shortly after any sign of friendship and personal regard disintegrated on both sides). I had an unrequited interest in a supposedly good friend of mine who took advantage of it. He lived in my apartment for a while and he didn’t hesitate to cash in the benefits when it suited him. He rejected me at a point when I started to think I had a chance with him. I then kicked him out of my apartment, but my woes were far from over. I wound up seeing a counselor that spring semester to deal with both issues, and one of the things that came up in the conversation from time to time was the incomplete.

In the aftermath, I was dealing with the emotional issues listed above, but I still struggled with getting a silly essay done. I still had to do creative writing for the workshops and readings for the lit courses in my program, which also had essays. I kept putting it off and putting it off, but the incomplete was always on my mind.

I did manage to get it before the year was over. The paper wasn’t great at all; however, I didn’t let it turn into an F. I just couldn’t afford it.

After that, I vowed never to take on another incomplete again. To use a cliché, it was a monkey on my back. I could not stop thinking about it even when I wasn’t working on it, and that was a constant distraction. As for the drama that served as a nice excuse? It soon passed. From time to time, I had to deal with the former mentor on a bureaucratic level. As for so-called friend, I realized he was useless and I never fell into that unrequited trap again. I am glad that the counselor didn’t let me forget about making sure I satisfied the incomplete.

Knowing that I don’t work well like this, I always feel some concern for students who take this on. As a teacher, I’m not too crazy to being tied to any class for a year.

*This is not a statement of literary conservatism on my part as it is more of a pot shot.

teaching — No Comments
12
Feb 08

Monkey

One of the joys I have returning to teaching this year is letting students take on incompletes. Actually, it’s not, but I somehow got into giving a student one at the end of a very short term summer course, the one that caused me to take marathon naps.

It was not my intention to enter into an incomplete agreement. With this student, I didn’t get all of her work, and I originally set out to assign a substandard grade. The grade gods must have been looking over her, because I wound up entering the grade as an “I” and I couldn’t change it, even with a grade change form. I could have pressed on, but it was difficult once she accessed her grades.

It’s also been difficult as she’s claimed to have e-mailed me the paper I never got. She has stuck to this claim and I’ve stuck to mine about never getting it. I have obsessively checked my e-mail many times for it. Recently, I have told her to print out the e-mails she sent me, attach it to a hard copy of the paper, and put it in the student drop section of the faculty mail room. For some reason, I never hear back from her after giving instructions like this, and I only get an e-mail when she has to deal with her college transcript.

Hopefully, she heeds my last e-mail and may the grade gods be with her.

literature / reading — No Comments
11
Feb 08

Ursula K. Le Guin in Harper’s

It’s almost been a year since I commented on an article in Harper’s. While there’s no shortage of great writers and articles featured, it’s not very often when I see one of my favorite writers in one of my favorite magazines. Last year, Jonathan Lethem explored the definition of plagiarism in the 21st century, but this time, Ursula K. Le Guin tackles the popularly elitist idea that reading is declining.*

Le Guin establishes that “Books are social vectors.” Along with other “social vectors,” such as television, film, and music, people do talk about what they have gained from this solitary activity. However, she questions if many people read less than they did back then. In addition, there is the modern problem of the book being made into a commodity by publishers. The literary establishment also seems to get off on a moralistic doom and gloom about how people don’t read.

That books are a social vector is evident in Goodreads, a website where people share what they’ve been reading. One can list what they’ve read, what they are currently reading, and what they will/hope to read. I found out about it through Rob and I put my own list up. Then there are book clubs, like Oprah’s which Jonathan Franzen made some comments about. Books in the hands of students still makes them a social vector even if they are a captive audience. People do discuss the books they’re reading, even if other media compete for their attention.

I don’t doubt that as long as we can kill some trees, we’ll still have the codex. Use them, read them, and love them. Oh, and don’t forget to thank the trees that were felled so you can hold a book in your hands.

*In order to access the full texts of Lethem and Le Guin from the Harper’s website, you need to have a subscriber account and login. “Staying Awake” by Ursula K. Le Guin is available in the print edition of February’s issue.

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