Haute Couture

I hate the above words - "haute couture". It sounds like something a Frenchman coughed up, like a hairball of horrible, undigestable French words. My mom and I used to make fun of it, exaggerating the sounds as much as possible until it really did sound like retching. I also hate the concept of the words, and the way they're used, especially around here in New York City, where "couture" is a very sought after little piece of fabric that happens to have Burberry knitted on to the hem, and clothing that is not "couture" is shunned and deemed uncool.

You're so vain, you probably think this post is about you...

Here's a nugget of knowledge for the day: "haute couture" is actually a term owned/guarded by the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris (say Paris like "pay-ree"). They publish a list of fashion houses each year, and those fashion houses on the list qualify as "haute couture". No one else does. Crucially, haute couture houses must make clothing that is custom-fitted. If they stop that and start making pret-a-porter, or ready-to-wear clothing, then they'll lose their haute couture status. There are ten today: Adeline Andre, Chanel, Christian Dior, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Givenchy, Christian Lacroix, Scherrer, Dominique Sirop, Frank Sorbier, and Emanuel Ungaro. Note that the brands you think would be haute couture aren't even among them. As the wikipedia article states with much pride, those that challenged the haute couture establishment aren't around anymore, and people have realized that cheap clothing doesn't cut it, and have returned to bowing at the haute couture altar. In America, this altar means all that is sold at places like Neiman Marcus, by the way - not those ten fashion houses. So you know what haute couture really means? Elitism. And that's the nugget of knowledge for the day.

Anyway, I just decided to call this post about the random "extracurricular" things I've been doing these past three weeks "haute couture". Even though it has nothing to do with dressmaking.

A woman without a man is like a... something without something else.

The first thing I did this year was see the play "Mother Courage and Her Children" at the Shakespeare in the Park festival on the first weekend we were at Barnard. A bunch of us went - me and Amelia and Mir did not wait in the humungous Central Park line for tickets (Shakespeare in the Park is free and open to the public, as long as you're willing to stand in line from 5 am to noon), we got the boxes of storage items for the whole suite instead. I think that was more gratifying than waiting in line trying to sleep in uncomfortable positions anyway - we actually accomplished something physically, something that burly moving men were supposed to do, three relatively little girls. Appropriate too, given that the play "Mother Courage" features a very capable, strong, assertive woman in the spotlight of the plot - the titular Mother Courage, a woman living in the Thirty Years' War in Europe, profiting off the war by peddling an assortment of goods in her covered wagon, a monstrous piece of wood that she has her children lug around like oxen, following the troops as they march ceaselessly in and out of battle, dying regularly, and killing peasants. While Mother Courage wants the war to continue so she can keep buying and selling at a profit, and thus survive, she does not want her children fighting under the banner, because she's convinced they'll all be killed. And they are all killed, somehow or other, by the war.

Never give up on the good times ("Mother Courage")

Running alongside the one-by-one loss of the children is Mother Courage's economic ups and downs and her intense frugality that forces her to make some horrible decisions. At one point one of her sons has been captured by the enemy and is about to be executed if he doesn't tell them where he hid his side's cash box. Being a stupid, honest soldier he doesn't tell them. Mother Courage uses her prostitute friend as a go-between to try to negotiate a deal, and the army is willing to be bribed - for the price of Mother Courage's entire wagon. She cannot simply throw the entire wagon away, even if her son's life hangs in the balance. Losing the wagon means certain death for herself and her daughter. So what does she do? She offers them less than the asking price. They say no, and she finally decides to throw in everything, but by then it's too late, and he's dead.

This woman is like a DEITY ("Mother Courage")

So yeah, lots of stuff like that - horrible, horrible decisions. I can't put it into words exactly what this clash is about. I suppose it's about the political economy of a war, but it's also about choosing who gets to survive, and about the way capitalism does not lift us out of our misery but instead drags us down from our dreams. As Mother Courage recounts in "The Song of the Great Capitulation", she was once an optimistic young girl who wanted to climb to the highest peaks and look down on everyone else - but she has been knocked down, forced off, and there's no use in the uphill battle anymore. But I haven't mentioned the best thing about this production: Meryl Streep, who plays Mother Courage. I hope everybody understands how amazing of an actress she is - well, she's like that live too. She was absolutely perfect for the role and played it cunning and sharp at first, then psycho as time went on and her children started dying off in the war she needed to continue for her livelihood. As we know she excels in playing a woman who must make truly nauseating decisions - i.e., "Sophie's Choice" - and that translates here. Meryl Streep is so emotional and blazing and intense - the New York Times review described her as a "supernova", and I think that's an apt assessment. The sadness of her condition by the end of the play definitely made me cry, and the people around me too. We saw the play on its last night, and I was so thankful to be able to witness such an amazing actress, acting in the flesh and blood. It's more than acting, sometimes. It's more like a manifestation.

Are we cool enough to be haute couture? Please dear god let us be hip enough... (Y Tu Mama Tambien)

Other than the play, I haven't really seen a whole lot of random acts of culture in New York. We did go to the Latin film festival to see Y Tu Mama Tambien, which I had never seen but is some kind of an indie cult classic. Let's just say that I was not so impressed. It's one of those movies that tries to change your life, man, and make you see the world in a whole new way, and make you just want to pick up and go somewhere, man, just live. Get the impression? There's no real plot and no real moral of the story. Two immature, horny teenaged boys whose girlfriends have just left for Europe decide to take an older woman to a mythical beach that they just made up. Chaos ensues. But it's not really chaos. It's just gratuitous sexual conversations and random tidbits of information about the scenery that tries to make some kind of political statement, but fails miserably in making any kind of impact. Okay, if you liked Motorcycle Diaries, you'll probably like this. If you hated it, then you'll really hate this.

They are not haute couture, and I love them for it (Little Miss Sunshine)

Other than that, two really great movies that I would recommend to anyone that I recently saw were Little Miss Sunshine and My Sassy Girl. The former is a recent indie release about a dysfunctional, working-class, fucked up American family in Albuquerque who, upon hearing that the little girl has been entered in the beauty pageant Little Miss Sunshine, packs up in their ugly, rotting yellow van and drive to Los Angeles. The latter is a few-years-old Korean movie about a guy who saves a drunk girl from walking into a subway and then just can't seem to get rid of her - that and she also can't keep herself from brusquely going up to complete strangers and lambasting them for picking up underaged prostitutes, and she looks for any possible excuse to hit the poor guy who can't resist following her demands to meet whenever she calls. But both are hilarious and heartwarming in very, very offbeat ways. And by offbeat I mean Little Miss Sunshine features a grandpa who does heroin and a brother-in-law who just survived a suicide attempt because his gay lover left him for the other Proust scholar at the university, and My Sassy Girl features a heroine who is really a no-holds-barred all-out bitch (but in a good way!). There are also UFOs in My Sassy Girl. And that's all I'll say.

Look how happy they are. It's how happy you'll be if you watch this movie (My Sassy Girl)

Other than that, me and saffron have started regularly going to this awesome store called Kinokuniya. It sells Japanese books and stationery, or at least that's what it says on the front window. But really it's a mecca of all things Japanese, featuring not only boring "books" and "stationery" but rows and rows of manga, anime, and soundtracks to match. Practically everything you could've possibly heard of, Kinokuniya has. We went to get posters, and woefully, they don't have a very good poster selection. But you can get the manga and anime, as well as totally random things like calendars, action figures, Totoro t-shirts, stuffed animals, books that have to do with fandoms, and like every issue of fandom magazines like Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat. They also have non-animated movies, books in Japanese and English on everything from origami to cooking, a children's section in the back, and a very wealthy stationery section upstairs that sells gorgeous paper. Most impressive to me, however, was the fact that manga goes as low as $7.50 at Kinokuniya. As in an entire graphic novel, as in one of the 42 tankobon that I only have three of but spent $10.00 for the other two each in the Lincoln Nebraska Barnes & Noble. Fuck yes. So far that's the only thing I have found that is actually cheaper in New York than in Lincoln.

All hail the God of Otakus Everywhere.

Kinokuniya, at Rockefeller Center, is also so very Japanese-cutesy in its demeanor. All the staff are Japanese, and there's this little contraption in the front of the store that you put your umbrella into, and when you pull your umbrella out it's wrapped in plastic. You're actually not allowed to enter the store unless your umbrella's wrapped up. It's so kawaii. I end this post with the warning that: things that are cool are sometimes worth shit, and things that look very grubby are sometimes gems, and things that are truly awesome do not need to be called cool in order to be respected. El fin.

Guess Who's a Bitch?

iTunes is a bitch. Remember how I gave that little instruction about going to a web site and clicking launch application and shit? That doesn't matter... not if you do it on Friday.

Friday is (un)happy hour at the iTunes store.

Here's the deal: the iTunes store is "inaccessible", apparently, on Fridays. Same thing happened to me again this Friday, and I thought, that's just weird, the same glitch two weeks in a row? And I tried going to the phobos.com web site, but it did nothing, it didn't help. So I got up on Saturday morning and tried it, remembering that it was on a Saturday that I got it to work last week, and lo and behold - iTunes store is right there. Whaddya know? I have no idea why this is - if iTunes does maintenance or something on Fridays or if my computer remembers that I installed iTunes 7.0 on a Friday and is holding some kind of anniversary vigil of silence, who knows. So if it's Friday and you can't get to the iTunes store, try on Saturday.

End of post.

House of Mirth

Part two! How exciting is this? As you might have guessed from the title this one details the oft-horrible experiences of living off campus, or perhaps just living in a residence in general. Mirth, in case you don't know, means "gladness and gaiety, especially when expressed by laughter" according to the American Heritage dictionary. But I'm more referring to the depressing book by Edith Wharton and the depressing movie starring Gillian Anderson. As in, broken dreams, crushed expectations, false appearances, racing to the bottom, etc. I'm sorry, my life really isn't that bad. But it's more fun to bitch than to applaud oneself, isn't it?

This is what we look down on. Well, I guess it is New York

* The Building - well, I guess we were thinking it would be a nice "walk", being the furthest down 116th street and thus the furthest of the 116th buildings from campus. And it's fine when you're walking toward the building, down the hill. Except if you're carrying a lamp. Or a box. But at least you're going downhill. The only trouble was keeping the carts from rolling down the hill on move-in day and just sliding into Riverside Park. But on the way out of the building, when you're walking toward campus, up the hill? In the rain? Ugh, brutal. At the corner there's this Chinese restaurant, the sidewalk of which is always crammed with Chinese guys screaming at each other because apparently their blood pressure is even higher than mine. They seem to be delivery men, but you know, I don't exactly have the Chinese skills to decipher their yelling. The building, sadly, has only four washing machines and four dryers (for about two hundred residents). At least there are elevators, even though they're sort of old and creaky and creepy and I don't like taking elevators alone anymore, not since The Eye movie. *shiver* The building is old, and it too creaks at night - pipes shifting and the like. When it was unfurnished and empty it was sort of creepy. These buildings were erected in the early twentieth century, after all. There's lots of history lurking in the shadows.

The kitchen. Apparently that wall there had a burst pipe behind it, which necessitated repairs. You don't even want to know how it looks now, after facilities staff have dissected the ENTIRE wall and our kitchen is completely inaccessible

* The Suite - shared with five other girls, it's not bad, and it's not great. I mean, there are rooms and furniture in the rooms, and the appliances work. Except they painted over one of the outlets in the kitchen. And the walls in the kitchen are rotting. I mean, they seriously seem to have tumors bubbling up underneath the surface. They're also made of cement, which means we can't use push pins in the walls. *groan* So we're left with white pasty, prison-like walls with god-awful paint jobs (they paint over hinges, understand? Everything looks like melting wax in the kitchen). And we can't really file work orders because they just switched to an online work order system (they think they're SO technologically advanced) but of course we're not in the system, because we've never used it, so we have to email this lady to be put in the system, and... it's all so convo-fucking-luted. The suite itself is organized around a narrow corridor. My room is the first on the left, and three other rooms follow, the two singles at the end. It winds around, followed by an overhead pipe-electricity thing (there's lots of pipes and random things sticking out of the ceiling), and the floor is basically patchwork linoleum, and seems to have been assaulted by a small child with markers. The doors are bright turquoise. It could be worse. We could have purple walls, like one dorm on campus.

Turquoise doors and winding hallways

* The Room - shared with saffron. We have a huge window that looks out onto a tree, which is lovely, because on the other side of the tree are brick buildings, the backs of other apartments, and a strange little courtyard area where people look to have been murdered, in all probability, and where abandoned bicycles sometimes lie. To our far left is what seems to be Columbia housing, since there are boys (one has a poster of Inside Man!) and they have loud parties. Across from us, it could be anything, and some of the apartments we see don't seem lived in at all.
Some, however, blast weirdly eccentric music on Friday nights. Unfortunately, our pretty-looking window is non-functional. I opened it and then couldn't close it. Maintenance came and closed it, but said "eh, they were stupid and didn't finish it, so they have to come back over winter break and fix it" and "it's best if you don't open the window until then". Insert swear words here. So at least now we're not freezing at night, but it's stuffy as hell. We have two narrow windows on the side that we could theoretically open, but they're so small they don't do much. And one's hidden by saffron's dresser. The walls have random nails sticking out and are littered with the remnants of blue sticky tack. There's also random hooks. I almost died impaling my head on one of them. The room is also filled with furniture. We have two beds, two wardrobes, two dressers, two desks, and two bookshelves. That's a lot of shit, and it took my ingenuity to figure out how to make it all even accessible (jutting the desks out instead of having them rest against the wall was the answer). There's two mirrors - one hanging on the other side of the door, which looks very nice and even has gold rims, and one that hangs, 80% concealed, behind my wardrobe. God knows how the hell it even got there. Oh well, at least the outlets in our room work. That wasn't the case in two of the rooms, and the other room has only two-pronged outlets.

My bed on the bottom, saffron's on top - as you can see we are not the neatest people

* The Bathroom - it's ok, it's liveable. I mean, the toilet's not a squatting toilet, at least, right? It was, however, a yucky brown along the bowl, with grimy-colored water. And recently the handle has decided to stop flushing properly. A plumber came after five attempts to dial the correct number for "emergency services", and kept coming in and out to get more gadgets to fix the porcelain god, but it still doesn't flush properly. We just have to hold the handle a long time to make it understand. But at least now the toilet's clean - Shout and a scrubbing brush did the job. The shower is something out of an Indiana Jones movie. It'll work fine for a while, at a nice warm temperature, even if the pressure is somewhat hard and pounding, and then you'll hear a distant clunk from somewhere in the old creaking building, and suddenly the water will be the temperature of molten lava and you'll jump two feet into the air and slam yourself against the far wall of the tub to get away from it. Slowly it returns to normal. Occasionally someone in the building feels the need to flush four times and you're just fucked, basically.

The bathroom! Yay! The shelf thing was supposed to go the other way but the damn pipe was in the way.

* My Computer - this is part of the "residential life" post because my computer is like my home. I love this fucker. I freak out when it freaks out. When it gets viruses I feel as though I'm the one dying. If the computer crashes and burns, there goes my writing, my music, and my pictures. I've had one experience with the "blue screen of death" already, in eighth grade, when our family desktop computer was fizzled by an electrical surge during a storm. By some grace of God, it was that 1% of cases in which the blue screen of death appeared but the hard drive was unaffected and could be salvaged. Miraculous, no? So anyway, the computer transition to college was at first working well, but suddenly after removing it for an hour to watch a couple episodes of DB, it decides not to reconnect to the LAN internet connection. On a Friday, mind. Ah, fuck, right, because the computer help desk is nonoperational over the weekend, and the wireless is spotty at best. I'm freaking out because I don't know what's wrong, and I have to study for my Globalization class. I didn't get a lot of work done this last week because of this computer malady. The computer helpdesk couldn't help me, but referred me to a tech repair company, and it was hard as hell to schedule appointments with them - the tech dude was like two hours late, the first time - but eventually, on Thursday, I got an external ethernet "card" to replace the one that apparently decided to croak inside the computer, that's attached to the motherboard. So now internet is back. Then I downloaded iTunes 7.0 during a massive revamping of my desktop appearance and theme, and it almost didn't install (it kept installing itself for like, half an hour, as if it couldn't quite finish the job). Then it installed. My world was saved. Then I couldn't open the iTunes store. On another Friday. I was like, fuck, why on weekends? Why me? WHY? But after screwing around reading the iTunes help discussion board and the like, I managed to get to the iTunes store web site, trigger a thing that said, "iTunes not detected on your computer", and then clicked the button "I have iTunes", and got a pop-up about phobos.apple.com, and how if this was not an expected pop-up, it could be a malicious attempt to compromise my computer. But it is an expected pop-up, I launched the application, and now miraculously the store is back. So if anybody's having similar problems of being unable to connect to the iTunes store after downloading iTunes 7.0, and you have Windows XP, first make sure that you can receive pop-ups from phobos.apple.com and apple.com, then go to this web site, click "I have iTunes", and click "Launch Application" when the pop up window comes up. Cross your fingers that your iTunes comes up with the store. On the happy side, everything now seems to be functioning on my computer. I have a very cutesy desktop background and I downloaded a new skin for my Firefox, something about "Japan" and "Max" (always good words to have in your desktop skin, ne?). I just hope this little bugger's not gonna choke again anytime soon.

My desk area. Notice the random paper circles on the wall - we decided we wanted a "bubble room"

Damn, I love how the "computer" section is the longest in this blog. Heh. I'm so Generation Whatever-Generation-This-Is, aren't I? I've heard it described as "iGeneration", in a song by Mc Lars Horris - a good song, when you think about it:

"The Berlin Wall fell and out we came, the post-Cold War kids laid claim to AIM
LOL, OMG, yo, BRB. Space, colon, dash, closed parenthesis
We sat at our laptops and typed away, and found that we each had something to say
Web-logged our fears, our hopes and dreams,
Individuated by digital means
Fiber optic lenses, DVD, Coca-Cola, Disney, and Mickey D's
Flat mass culture, the norm that took hold; I hope I die before I get sold"

State of the Brain Address

Shit, have I ever not written in a long time! I don't really have anything to rant about in particular, although much has changed. Basically I'm now in my sophomore year of college... back in New York City, back to the projects, back to the streets. That's the big thing. And the biggest thing about college is of course the learning and the schoolin'. So this is part 1 of my "status update", the State of the Brain Address. I'll try to sound more intelligent than Bush, but it's 1 am and no guarantees. To make things easier for myself I'm going to organize according to "subject". See how school-oriented I already am? God, I hate school.

This is where I live. I love my life.

Class:
Depends on the class, doesn't it?
* Globalization and International Politics - kicks ass. We read articles titled things like "International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order", and I buy books with titles like In Defense of Globalization and Globalization and its Discontents (they're on opposite sides of the spectrum). At least I keep pace with the class, that's more than I expected of myself. Our professor is rather frightening. He was asking the class, "What do you obsess over in 1601 (Intro to International Politics in most schools)?" A brave kid raises his hand. "The Cold War?" he suggests meekly. "Yes!" shouts our professor, eyes widening rabidly, fists clenching. "War! War! War!" On another note, I'm sort of turning less liberal than I used to be. I know this will frighten many, but what can I say? It's pretty hard to argue against international trade and foreign direct investment, and Multinational Corporations are required for that. I will always remember, as should you, that MNCs need to be regulated, preferably by the international community and preferably in narrow, specific terms, to keep things like the dethroning of Salvador Allende and the whole Nestle baby formula thing from happening again. The class itself moves fast and who knows how tough the midterm and final is going to be. I have yet to participate, but I'm not really much of a "participant". Yeah, I'm gonna be such a great politician, aren't I? Sigh.

Francisco Goya's The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters came up on a "political science" Google image search.

* Statistics for Economics - boring as all hell, but sadly enough there are apparently people who don't know what the mean, median, and mode are. I know, I'm thinking the same thing, don't worry. In this class me and saffron write notes to each other about how much we hate life. Basically. I've also taken to doodling. As of two weeks in, I have not learned anything. Well, a few things that I probably could have inferred on my own - like the fact that if you're looking for consistency you want a very small standard deviation, and the sample with the slightly lower mean but smaller standard deviation is better than the sample with the slightly higher mean and huge standard deviation, meaning it fluctuates all over the place. And yeah, see, I just killed half your brain cells with that, didn't I? It's too bad there's a problem set due every week. This is the lab instructor teaching us how to use Excel: "Oh, this is bad, guys, this is really bad."

Ha ha ha, only a Seattle company would make this sign.

* Environmental Science - not really boring, but the way the class is set up, and the professor, is a "face-vault". Everybody knows what that is? Google will not help you. A face-vault is an anime-to-real-life term, used to describe a reaction to something outrageously, unbelievably stupid, usually by falling over on one's face, hence face-vault. Me and saffron just look at each other and go "face-vault" during this class. The glorious professor (sarcasm radar going off charts here) went on this tangent on 9/11 about how "there are people that want to kill us" and he puts up an American flag to indicate the start of class. He also gives out five million handouts, which seems to contradict his supposed environmental principles. He also has yet to teach much of anything. He just shows off his vacation pictures and bemoans how stupid students today are. Thanks, Mr. Professor-Man.

Yay trees! Boo Environmental Science!

* Elementary Chinese - on some days, this is a good, fun class. On other days, I want to shoot myself, not because it's so easy, but because it's so goddamn hard. Everyone told me Chinese would be hard/impossible. Did I listen? No-oo-ooo... so here I am, trying to pronounce four tones that make no sense to me and at the same time forcing my lips and tongue into formations they don't understand, and trying to understand the word. And that's just with the pinyin (romanized writing system). The characters themselves are basically artwork, okay? They are not letters, they are freaking pictographs. I had no idea a language could be as supernaturally foreign to me as this class is. Although I had a little breakdown on Thursday and now I've spent enough time staring at the sheets with a blank, frozen expression on my face that maybe I'm memorizing some words. Wo shi Meiguo ren. Wo bu hui shuo Zhongwen. (I'm American. I don't speak Chinese) On the plus side my Chinese name is Lin Mei Na, and "mei" means "beautiful" and "na" means "graceful". Aww, right? I didn't choose it myself, by the way. I'm not that vain. I'd have chosen something like "smart". Of course, this class makes me feel anything but...

Fuck it, why isn't Chinese like this?!

In general, however, I hate homework, I don't much like sitting in class, and I just want to be done with school. This is college: "Welcome to the next new exciting phase of your life! Everything will be totally different! You'll be independent! You'll take classes you want to take, instead of classes that are just graduation requirements! You'll meet so many new people! You'll start making a difference! Oh, except for the fact that it's just high school with harder classes. And you don't live with your parents. But some of your classmates will. And you can't really take classes you want to take, you have lots of graduation requirements to fulfill because we're a liberal arts college. And everybody still acts like dumb teenagers. And you still mooch off your parents." Sorry to spread the awful truth, but you better take it with your vitamins now rather than waiting till you're here and you have to go crawling to the campus counseling center to deal with the crushing disappointment.

Lies. ALL LIES.