Sleepy Photos

the day i hadn't slept and went exploring the streets of chinatown was a strange day. it's one thing to be entirely sleep deprived and in public trying to give muni advice to tourists, but the entire mess just gets messier when it's 40 degrees and you haven't witnessed anything earlier than 10am in over a year.

and finding rocket ships on the embarcadero can be a little strange under any circumstance.

techboy had told me about that ship, but we'd missed its debut over by pier 27 and never thought to look for it again. but, as it turns out, it's camped out by the ferry building right where that gigantic metal spider used to live.

seeing that spaceship at such an early hour in such frigid weather made me feel a bit like i could be in a low budget sci-fi-- no part of my brain was making a lot of sense. but it was oddly enjoyable. waking up at 8am is something i cannot do. but staying up till 8am is just good comedy. everything is hilarious.

even bright red window-undies make you laugh.


i will say even though i've slept plenty since that walk, i still don't full understand what people do at 8am if they're awake but not headed to work. everyone we saw seemed to be headed to one job or another-- yet, in a fit of irony-- nothing was open. even the homeless people weren't awake yet.

there's something lonely about mornings in the city during winter-time. but something peaceful, too.

the city could stand to see more ice cream cones. i used to carry oil paint pens around so i could leave a smiling pink ice cream cone where ever i went. it was meant to put everyone in a better mood. it's hard to be angry when staring into the eyes of a happy little ice cream. i even made my first graffiti stencil of that ice cream. but, unfortunately, it turned out i am not bad ass enough to really get into the street art scene. it's sort of like why i don't have any tattoos: sometimes i'm just not that cool.

besides, i think graffiti may be the type of art i'm just better at enjoying than creating-- like music, and interpretive dances.


i found this guy in chinatown and despite the haphazard style, it made me smile. he's a sort of emotionally disturbed purple clown, who seems to have a penis. he's a bit like me.

i really ought to head out with my camera more often. and perhaps during times i am not desperately in need of a nap.

Kids and "Vintage" Technology

i enjoy watching elderly citizens trying to work their cell phone almost as much as i enjoy watching videos of kittens trying to do anything-- which is a lot.

but as we move into the digital world at an exponential speed, other great moments of pathetic comedy are coming to life.

you know, like tiny children mistaking a floppy disk for a very thin camera.

sometimes i feel very blessed to be born during the end of the manual/tangible world and start of the digital-- it makes me feel rare, like i'm a part of the only generation that actually understands a good majority of both worlds.

but who knows how long that'll last.

oh, and i tried to ask a french-speaking friend to translate the parts that aren't subtitled, but the kids above are apparently speaking french-canadian-- which is quite possibly the only language more ridiculous than french itself.

it would be great if this experience sparked an interest in life as a d.j. for the kid at 2:36.

Fashionably Irrate

i know few heterosexual males who will choose to wear a ruffle shirt as often as me ever. but i've always thought those shirts were simply too rad to have anything to do with sexuality. in fact, the most common reaction a ruffle shirt receives is strangers wanting badly to caress it without hesitation.

the reason i bought my first ruffle shirt was high school. those of you who knew me then should know i had/have a slight problem with buying costumes and wearing them to places that don't necessarily call for costumes. i needed a pink ruffle shirt to go with my white tailcoat. i wanted to look a bit like a deranged cotton candy salesman and i think i pulled it off with great success.

sometime afterward there was likely a laundry fiasco that resulted in my wearing the ruffle shirt as if it were just a regular shirt meant to be worn while doing mundane things like purchasing coffee or reading a book. and eventually it grew into a shirt i wore as regularly as any other shirt.

once, with my first love, a ruffle caught her lip ring and tore it clean out. this is one of the many things that went on my list of REASONS I WILL NEVER BE CONSIDERED ROMANTIC.

but it didn't stop me from wearing the shirt any more than constipation stops me from thinking poop is funny.

then, back when i was studying psychology at a community college, i got a second ruffle shirt. this one was white with black threading that ran along the tips of each ruffle. it was gifted to me by a professional figure skater on account that it was too small for his torso and i was likely the only other male he knew might wear it.

and i definitely did.


now, the reason i've decided to write about these two ruffle shirts is that they have both been stolen from me by people i had reason to trust. or maybe trust had nothing to do with it-- i just assumed no one would want to do much more than borrow a ruffle shirt and that it was far too ridiculous a clothing item to steal.

the white shirt was the first to go. i lent it to a host at the restaurant i used to work at during 2007 so that he could wear it for his 21st birthday. then he moved to new york. with my shirt.

i wasn't particularly bothered by the fact because the shirt was originally given to me for free and because i still had my pink shirt.

but that was till very recently.

the pink ruffle shirt was lent to a coworker who needed a clean shirt. and, as you likely know, i don't commonly have very many clean shirts as i do not commonly do my laundry. the pink ruffle shirt was the only one i could offer.

without going too far into details, let me say that the shirt is now being held hostage and i would rather not go try and rescue it.

instead, here are pictures of the two thieves. the man lives in new york with my white ruffle shirt and the woman lives in san francisco with my pink. the dog is innocent to the best of my knowledge.


i turned the photos black and white for dramatic effect.

as it stands, the majority of the visitors to this blog are coming from either the san francisco bay area or new york itself-- so there's a good chance some of you have run into one of these two characters unknowingly.

well, now you know they are thieves. the next time you see them, slap them in the face for me. maybe compliment their shirt, and then slap them across the face. so they know.

i'm not too sure about the legalities involved in posting photos of people and recommending that you install physical harm to them-- but i'm also not too sure about the legalities involving stealing my fucking ruffle shirts and thinking i'll just forget.

so slap them. slap them hard.

About Being [Half] Jewish

i was in the touristy part of chinatown for no particular reason outside of being awake for 28 hours and going for a walk with a friend. and i had an unnecessary urge to enter one of those little knick-knack shops that sell wooden katanas and rice paper umbrellas.

inside, i found a rack of knitted dolls that uselessly doubled as keychains. there were knit frankensteins, knit ninjas, and all sorts of other characters hanging about.

but what got me was this fella':
i immediately recognized him to be jewish. after all, he was carrying a dreidel. but the longer i stared at the knitted jew, the more amazed i grew. he had a decent jew-fro and seemed to be the only doll who actually had a nose-- but why was he carrying cash?

and then it hit me: jewish people are all about money.

i'm not sure if i was offended as much as i was a bit dumbfounded. there weren't any other awkward racial stereotypes like little knitted chinese kids slaving over a pair of nikes. it was just the jew, waving his cash, and silently continuing a degrading message.

i asked the store owner if he found the doll to be racist and he informed me that he did not. so we left and i looked the doll up online.

what i found quickly was that i am not the only one who has seen this doll and felt confused. in fact, an organization known as ADL (anti-defamation league) had already written an upset letter illuminating a similar thought.


yes, the doll is really named "the dreidel hustler".

i'm glad ADL wrote this letter of complaint. because it helped me change from confused to completely amused and to remember something my dad told me when i was younger.

"if you're going to be jewish, be prepared to laugh at yourself."

there's a lot of truth in that statement. if every race has at one time been picked on, segregated, or generally murdered for no reason, i think those who survived were able to do so by finding their peace. a lot of japanese folk in internment camps turned to poetry (though most of america still considers haikus to be utter and complete bullshit). and jewish people survived by having a sense of humor.

after reading ADL's letter, in which they awkwardly refer to the dollar sign as "the universal symbol for currency" (which is not just awkward, but also untrue) i started laughing. ADL seems to have forgotten what it is to be jewish. if i may be blunt: they're a team of babies.

a money-hungry jew-doll is not exactly something that will gradually lead back into a holocaust.

and look, i've held this one in for a long time, but jewish people are historically cheap. or thrifty. or frugal. the fact remains whatever word makes it easier for you to hear. if you need proof, take a look at the story of hanukkah:

there was only enough oil to last one day and the jews were fucked. (you will find in most jewish holidays, the story goes "the jews were fucked") but they managed to make the oil last eight days. they called it a miracle, but i call it being thrifty. hanukkah, as great as it is, remains a celebration of making shit last during the hard times. if that's not being cheap, then i've got an entirely misconstrued definition of the word.

but seriously, there's nothing degrading about having that associated with your race. that same stereotype has been reconfirmed by the extensive number of wealthy jews with an amazing accounting background. it's something more of a talent than a curse.

so back to the doll.

the problem-- if there is one-- is not that the dreidel hustler has been depicted as thirsty for cash and therefore spreading a stereotype. the issue is that it seems the jewish doll was the only doll with a blatant stereotype. and it's for that reason my noticing the doll left me so dumbstruck and confused.

but, again: if you're going to be jewish, be prepared to laugh at yourself. ADL needs to remember that. they need to sit back, have some manischewitz, and just laugh a little. the amazing ability to always find good humor in bad situations is one of the greatest gifts jews were ever handed. that and being cheap.

Huck Finn and the N Word.

(Source: Publishers Weekly)

Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a classic by most any measure—T.S. Eliot called it a masterpiece, and Ernest Hemingway pronounced it the source of "all modern American literature." Yet, for decades, it has been disappearing from grade school curricula across the country, relegated to optional reading lists, or banned outright, appearing again and again on lists of the nation's most challenged books, and all for its repeated use of a single, singularly offensive word: "nigger."

Twain himself defined a "classic" as "a book which people praise and don't read." Rather than see Twain's most important work succumb to that fate, Twain scholar Alan Gribben and NewSouth Books plan to release a version of Huckleberry Finn, in a single volume with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, that does away with the "n" word (as well as the "in" word, "Injun") by replacing it with the word "slave."

"This is not an effort to render Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn colorblind," said Gribben, speaking from his office at Auburn University at Montgomery, where he's spent most of the past 20 years heading the English department. "Race matters in these books. It's a matter of how you express that in the 21st century."

The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with "slave" when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the "n" word ("My mother said it's only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people") and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. "My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it."

Including the table of contents, the slur appears 219 times in Finn. What finally convinced Gribben to turn his back on grad school training and academic tradition, in which allegiance to the author's intent is sacrosanct, was his involvement with the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Alabama.

Tom Sawyer was selected for 2009's Big Read Alabama, and the NEA tapped NewSouth, in Montgomery, to produce an edition for the project. NewSouth contracted Gribben to write the introduction, which led him to reading and speaking engagements at libraries across the state. Each reading brought groups of 80 to 100 people "eager to read, eager to talk," but "a different kind of audience than a professor usually encounters; what we always called ‘the general reader.'

"After a number of talks, I was sought out by local teachers, and to a person they said we would love to teach this novel, and Huckleberry Finn, but we feel we can't do it anymore. In the new classroom, it's really not acceptable." Gribben became determined to offer an alternative for grade school classrooms and "general readers" that would allow them to appreciate and enjoy all the book has to offer. "For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs," he said.

Gribben has no illusions about the new edition's potential for controversy. "I'm hoping that people will welcome this new option, but I suspect that textual purists will be horrified," he said. "Already, one professor told me that he is very disappointed that I was involved in this." Indeed, Twain scholar Thomas Wortham, at UCLA, compared Gribben to Thomas Bowdler (who published expurgated versions of Shakespeare for family reading), telling PW that "a book like Professor Gribben has imagined doesn't challenge children [and their teachers] to ask, ‘Why would a child like Huck use such reprehensible language?' "

Of course, others have been much more enthusiastic—including the cofounders of NewSouth, publisher Suzanne La Rosa and editor-in-chief Randall Williams. In addition to the mutual success of their Tom Sawyer collaboration, Gribben thought NewSouth's reputation for publishing challenging books on Southern culture made them the ideal—perhaps the only—house he could approach with his radical idea.

"What he suggested," said La Rosa, "was that there was a market for a book in which the n-word was switched out for something less hurtful, less controversial. We recognized that some people would say that this was censorship of a kind, but our feeling is that there are plenty of other books out there—all of them, in fact—that faithfully replicate the text, and that this was simply an option for those who were increasingly uncomfortable, as he put it, insisting students read a text which was so incredibly hurtful."

La Rosa and Williams committed to a short turnaround, looking to get the finished product on shelves by February. Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition will be a $24.95 hardcover, with a 7,500 first printing. In the meantime, Gribben has gone back to the original holographs to craft his edition, which is also unusual in combining the two "boy books," as he calls them, into a single volume. But the heart of the matter is opening up the novels to a much broader, younger, and less experienced reading audience: "Dr. Gribben recognizes that he's putting his reputation at stake as a Twain scholar," said La Rosa. "But he's so compassionate, and so believes in the value of teaching Twain, that he's committed to this major departure. I almost don't want to acknowledge this, but it feels like he's saving the books. His willingness to take this chance—I was very touched."
 
Question for my readers: Is it appropriate to edit Twain's work in this manner? Is it ever appropriate? If so, when?

The Digital Tablet & Dad

it was always hard to tell if my dad was sick, a hypochondriac, or if all dads went to the doctors' as often as ours did. but whichever it was, he seemed set on making sure we were his idea of healthy and didn't have to go through the same trouble when we were old.

in spending time with my wacom tablet, sketching out the spider short, i started thinking about my dad and what in the world he's missed.

there's a lot i wonder if he would've been able to handle. he was excited about the internet when it first came to our house, but i don't see him doing to well with the internet today. i do, however, think he would like the wacom tablet.

of the many things he'd warn us of, the one i remember most is back-related injuries.

if i was laying on my stomach, he would tell me to put a pillow under my belly or to lay a different way because i was arching my back. arching my back would eventually cause back-related injuries. but at other times, like during certain kinds of gymnastics, he would shout "arch your back!" with the same demand as when he shouted "use your arms!" during our sprints. it seemed his thoughts on back-arching was back and forth-- like america and carbohydrates. whether i could understand the pattern of when arching my back was good and when it was bad is not the point. one way or another, my dad was looking out for my back because he knew he'd probably passed on a shitty spine.

he made me an easel once. it was small and could sit on a table the same way a laptop can. the idea was to help correct my drawing posture. i did, and still do, bend my back till it resembles a candy cane and my face is two inches from the paper.


those are my knees pushing on my chest, for the record. and i've been compared to the girl from the ring.

i never enjoyed using that easel because it made my arm tired a lot quicker than my way. and also because it made it very easy for everyone to see what i was drawing. while i've found new fun in drawing in front of people, i definitely did not consider it a social activity as a kid. the easel ultimately made me draw less.

i'm not sure whatever happened to it-- if it was removed so that i wouldn't give up on drawing altogether-- but it didn't exist for very much of my life.

but it brings me some kind of peace knowing somewhere on another world, wherever people go when they die, my dad is probably wondering if i am a crotchety man with a wretched spine yet, or if i just gave in and built myself an easel.

he never would've guessed that years after his death companies manufactured digital tablets that allow an artist to draw on a horizontal plane, while looking straight forward at a screen. our posture is perfect and our arms don't get tired-- we no longer need to look down while we draw. it's the best of the easel and the bent-over back method.

i think he would be happy to see me drawing on this tablet, not needing to twist my back like i used to.

but i think he might also just move toward the idea that it's very bad for my eyes.

5 Things I Just Heard (or Read)

1. "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." is something of a sentence phenomenon and is grammatically correct. "Buffalo" being the city in new york-- and a noun adjunct in the sentence, and "buffalo" either referring to the noun and animal or the verb meaning "to bully." the eight-buffaloed sentence can be rephrased as "Buffalo bison whom other Buffalo bison bully, themselves bully Buffalo bison."

2. an old lady walked by me at 6:30am and chuckled, "lord, oh lordy. 'nother day. yes."

3. ted williams, that homeless man with the smooth radio voice, is already getting job offers from the cleaveland cavaliers, and nfl films. it's this sort of insta-fame internet story that almost makes me forgive the internet for also making justin bieber successful.


4. a man-- who i am assuming is mostly blind, given his red and white cane-- was rushing by with a friend and commented on the rain. he said, "honey, i might be wicked, but i'm not gonna melt!"

5. today (january 6) is a holiday known as epiphany in greenland. it's a little like halloween during a different time of year and without half as much class. at epiphany, "both children and adults visit neighbouring houses and demand whatever they want." although, nowadays, that's limited to candy, buns, and pocket change-- otherwise i would come with a mask and ask each neighbor to give me their deeds. oh well. happy epiphany, greenland. i'm still going to find a way to take over your country and name it japoland.