One of the reasons I still listen to Z104 is because I hear this song all the time. No joke.

Before Alicia Keys, there was K-Ci & JoJo. And like I wrote before, if you never dated a boy who played enough piano to play you the intro in front of everybody in the auditorium, you totally missed out.

So, for today, how about some Beenie Man and Mya (and the Neptunes!):

The workshop was supposed to be from 10AM-1PM, but we definitely went overtime. The instructor, Mitch, was very knowledgeable, patient, supportive, and perceptive. I definitely want to take more classes at the center – looking at pointed pen calligraphy next. Birthday present, anybody?

For this workshop, we were making a card, so I decided that it would be smart to make one for Adrian’s mom (since it’s her 50th and I can’t go to Costa Rica this week for her birthday party). I plotted a few ideas in my head before class and knew that I was thinking of centered justified text for the front, which turned out to be much harder when you only have pre-defined typefaces and sizes! No .5pt sizes like I have in Illustrator. Luckily, I found a really great Gothic font with just enough all-caps letters and a couple of 36pt ornaments to make the top line match the bottom two in width, so I set that for the front and a line in Helvetica for the back (just to let her know that, you know, I made it myself). We printed on a Vandercook No. 4 proof press with Pantone violet. The paper wasn’t super soft so it isn’t super debossed, but I’m happy with my final product!

And of course, pics or it didn’t happen:

Ah, Ceelo. Now I don’t have to Google the lyrics to your song!

…[Liz] makes a point of learning Italian, and director Ryan Murphy depicts her at various stages of comprehension, from a stammering negotiation with her landlady to a breathlessly fluent, restaurant-ordering triumph—accompanied by subtitles as needed. Dwelling on Liz’s Italian serves to illustrate her newfound curiosity. It is both realistic and dramatically functional. But when she gets to India and Bali, and becomes preoccupied with spiritual growth, Murphy stops focusing on Liz’s language skills. Locals conveniently speak to her in English, and there’s nary a subtitle east of Rome.

The Universal Translator: How Hollywood represents foreign speech at Slate

I do it at the airport when they tell me to have a nice flight, too.

Quick recap: The kids find their sperm donor dad and the stereotypically masculine doctor mom feels put out. The wishy-washy hippie mom sleeps with the self-absorbed hippie sperm donor and all hell breaks loose. People fight and shit goes down, but the moms hold hands in the end, having been reminded by their son that he is, after all, a perfectly normal teenager. FIN.

My main issues with the movie were that a) there was a whole lot of seemingly gratuitous (read: needless) sex/nudity, and b) I often felt very uncomfortable or confused and could only think to myself “…white people.” Since I attended the movie with two white girls, I had to keep it to myself and am now ranting about it on my blog instead.

Now, I don’t have a problem with sex/porn/nip slips/whatever, but I failed to see how multiple extended sex scenes added anything to the movie at all. Perhaps the whole idea was to take the audience slightly out of a comfortable viewing zone, but to me, it felt unnecessary and overwrought. Putting emphasis on and getting laughs using things that happen every day (like, you know, sex) made me feel bored in a sea of uptight titillated white people. Okay, it’s hilarious that moms are having sex to a gay male porno and they accidentally hit the remote and turn the volume up and are sort of overheard by the daughter. But, is this accurate? Is it only funny because it’s gay porn? Did I need to see so much of said porn out in public? Was that meant to make all the white people in the audience giggle nervously? Am I just too used to homosexuality because I’m a musician? As Kenneth said on 30 Rock, “Like my cousin, Steven, after he went to music college, it will come out!”

Moving past all of those questions leaves us with the issue of white bias in the movies. I felt like I got distracted from the intended goal of some scenes because I was so confused about why it was happening in the first place. For instance, in a scene where Laser (the VERY unfortunately named son) watches his friend wrestle with his dad, I guess the audience was supposed to understand Laser’s longing to meet his own father. However, the only thing I could think was: “White people are so weird… and who lets their kids tell them their armpit smells like burnt ass?! I would have been so dead!” The same goes for that kid’s name; I spent a good chunk of the movie wondering where such a dumb nickname came from, only to find out that his parents REALLY HAD NAMED HIM LASER, and that “Las” for short is apparently unacceptable. I mean, WHAT. And the girl was named Joni, after (duh?) Joni Mitchell. Except, oops, I didn’t get it. Nor did I get the whole a capella rendition of Joni Mitchell scene – THAT made me uncomfortable, though white movie critics claim it to be the defining touching/bonding moment of the movie. Girls making out? Fine. Gay porn? Fine (though maybe not in public). White people singing, nay, BELTING, at the dinner table? THAT IS NOT OKAY. THAT IS WEIRD, NOT TOUCHING.

Finally, I can’t help but think about all the conversations I’ve had with Vivian about Asian representation in media, especially movies and television. Most of the time I don’t think about it terribly hard; after all, “actor/actress” falls pretty near the bottom of the “jobs Asian people tend to occupy” list. However, The Kids Are All Right finally made me wish that, just once, I could watch an accurate representation of Asian American life in a movie theater. Better Luck Tomorrow? Yeah right. Gran Torino? Well, yes, the Hmong people really do experience some terrible things, but it’s not the average experience. Lost in Translation? Okay, so that’s not Asian Americans, but I just had to mention the first movie that actually offended me with its whiteness.

Why can’t I go see a movie wherein a couple of American-born Chinese (ABC) kids struggle between honoring traditional values and fitting in with their American peers without any shooting or other crime involved? Is Joy Luck Club all we’re going to get? Should I write it? Would I eventually get saddened by the fact that I myself am generalizing a set of disparate cultures when we should be recognizing that all people are individuals with their own experiences?

If I finish it, I’ll end up with a Certificate for Professional Development from the University of Illinois. It was half off for a few days and my mother loves the idea of me doing some non-music schooling, so for the cost of one grad school credit (seriously, one credit is currently $1,040 at Eastman) that’s not coming out of my pocket, I can get a piece of paper that proves that I know more than how to play the piano. Sure, books are way cheaper and the classes may or may not be of the best quality (I get the feeling I’ll finish the HTML/CSS basics one in an hour), but my gut tells me that as a person with two degrees in music but a job in web development, a certificate in web programming can’t hurt.

As I get started and move on, I’ll try to remember to blog some thoughts – maybe using a WordPress for iOS beta?! (I got into the testers group! Woohoo!)