meikuree

vanity and haircut chat

I got my hair cut recently again for free; a new hairstylist at a salon needed models to build up her portfolio and get more practice so I happily volunteered. even though I love drawing hair I can never visualise or describe what I want -- drawing's a 2d space, hairstyling is 3d -- but my hair is imo hard to fuck up and I also truly do not mind looking ugly in the worst scenario, so I asked for the usual of shoulder-length layers with face framing. it ended up being the best haircut session I've had in the UK, because the hairstylist and her supervisor were both attentive and tried to tailor the cut to my hair texture. I learned, for instance, that (no surprise) like many Chinese people I have dense but fine hair with a slight wave/curl that benefits from blended or feathered cutting, a la Japanese salon styles. and I have an angular jawline such that softer or rounder layers help balance that out. 

modelling for hairstylists is also unintentionally a cool way to get a look at what happens behind the curtain of how hairdressers do what they do, the techniques they use like point cutting, etc. 

anyway, essays and other things that have caught my eye lately:

short stories

The Girl That My Mother Is Leaving Me For by Cameron Reed: In a corporate-run dystopia, a trans girl plucked out of poverty to give birth to a clone meets her replacement.

this was a bittersweet story, with a trans lesbian and a rather sweet if ominous ending, and I liked it. but: acquaintance and I were both remarking about how, despite the title practically begging for it, there were very few freudian undertones in the story itself. maybe a mind-boggling choice (and this is not a spoiler, this is discussed in the opening paragraphs), given how often the narrative references some variation of 'your mother put [a child] in you' and 'you are carrying your mother's future daughter'. (to clarify, these are adoptive mothers and foster daughters.) otherwise, there are interesting thematic lines wrt trans embodiment, clones as a metaphor for fungibility, surrogacy labour, and the ironic, hypocritical paternalism (or maternalism?) of corporate you-can-be-anything-you-want ideologies.

articles, commentaries

In Italy, Punjabi Farmworkers Are Treated as Expendable. After decades working the fields in Italy, Balvir Kumar “Birra” was still paid barely five euros an hour. Killed in an accident last month, his story shows how little value Italy’s vast food industry puts on its workers’ lives.

This article is my small testimony to Birra; he will live in the memory of everyone who met him and of his family back home, who now mourns his loss. I will never forget his smiling eyes; his clumsy, swaying walk; his contagious laughter and quick way of speaking, as if he was in a rush to end the sentence; his funny bhangra dance moves; and how he gave a €10 banknote to an eight-year-old girl on her birthday, equivalent to two hours of his hard work. One of his friends — who informed me about his death — remembers him by the few words they used to jokingly tell each other whenever they met: “edda hai” (“it’s like that”). It’s like that, Birra, but it shouldn’t be.

Liam Kofi Bright: Self-Audit a Decade In.

When people ask me why I decided to go into academia I typically reply that it’s an indoor job with no heavy lifting. This, of course, is a simplification. I was also depressed. To be more precise, when I was deciding whether or not to go to grad school I had then-undiagnosed severe recurrent depression [in hindsight I had a lot of sympathy for this lovely piece Railton, 2015]. Both these were probably the most important factors in trying for graduate school.

a 2016 interview with Margo Jefferson by Tobi Haslett. this has many moments of the characteristic sharpness I associate with Tobi Haslett's commentaries, and Jefferson is of course an intellectual heavyweight.

TH [Tobi Haslett]: You say that you were born at the perfect time in history to have the news and the world of politics be an objective correlative for your inner life: the chance to reinvent yourself as a result of Black Power, the New Left, Feminism. You write: “One had to take blunt weapons to oneself and start hacking away.” The bluntness that rejects the finely modulated world whose mores you had inherited.

MJ [Margo Jefferson]: Crude action is required here, or you’re damned in some way. Just hack, take it away. Take off that limb, see what’s left.

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MJ: [...] And sometimes I look at myself on tape—I haven’t seen this movie in years—and I think, “Ugh, God, that perfect diction.” It’s natural to me—but oh it’s just so pristine. You know? It’s strange to keep confronting, in these stylistic ways, how you were constructed. What you were constructed to be in the world.

TH: The bourgeois rebel is such an unusual pose for a black person to strike. I remember reading Darryl Pinckney’s novel High Cotton and having a little shudder of revulsion—and recognition—when the narrator finds himself ostentatiously reading the latest issue of Semiotext(e) or a huge collection of the Frankfurt School’s writings when he takes the subway down from Columbia.

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TH: There are so many strange attitudes surrounding race and class available: the sense of “lifting as we climb” is different from noblesse oblige is different from a more Marxist take: revulsion at a class position that can only be arrived at through the exploitation of others. [...] There’s something about the friction between race and class, the exquisite sense of having been ever so slightly derided or overlooked, of having to be ever so slightly defensive or proper—it’s a virus, a mania. There’s an odd symmetry to being a black woman born to Black Society who is jealously guarding your own class advantages—and being a Jewish Marxist growing up in a tenement in the Bronx. There’s the feeling that while you might be maligned or marginalized for now, that history is secretly working in your favor. The Talented Tenth will triumph, the proletariat will be redeemed.

music, fragrances, misc

tumblr user amarocit answers: have you ever made your own perfumes? I'm a fragrance pleb so this was a really illuminating look at what happens behind the curtain of fragrances and how perfumers come up with notes. for instance, did you know: "if you're trying to create a specific effect, stuff gets thorny. That's because most fragrances are actually illusions! Note lists are not ingredient lists; a fragrance with a jasmine note might not contain any jasmine products."

Tori Amos’ From The Choirgirl Hotel is progressive rock/pop in its truest sense. see also this Reddit response thread. I don't have a musical background whatsoever and I know nothing about composition, theory, scales, or time signatures. but I always enjoy analysis of the musical elements of Tori's oeuvre and the why of why they're so layered and compelling, which is maybe a little like practical criticism but for music. Among other details: "[Tori] plays around with song structure in ways that aren't usually common in pop"; "If you try to analyze what’s going on you stumble upon a plethora of odd and unusual time signatures and arrangement choices that sound coherent and memorable bc of her immense melodic vision."

and some of her songs where she goes off the fucking walls and switches time signatures multiple times or even with every measure -- brilliant insanity -- are my favourite ones, like Datura. for me, she's the musician equivalent of a writer whose next word is unpredictable and never what you expect, someone who makes full use of a medium's constraints for reinvention.