shards

From GOTHAMIST

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:17:24 -0400

From GOTHAMIST

Dude Builds McMansion on Top of a Tenement Building in Williamsburg

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 21:16:59 -0400

Dude Builds McMansion on Top of a Tenement Building in Williamsburg

On the Sea

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:54:24 -0400

We drove up to the house, and it was HUGE. We’re right on the basin on the island, and every morning, the water laps right up against the deck. Around 3PM, it starts to recede, leaving a bed of mud and seagulls pecking at small things in the dirt.

It’s now Wednesday, day 5 of our Spring Break. The house is still beautiful; we try to keep the fireplace lit as much as possible, and we can’t tell when it will start to get dark. I don’t want to go back to school. For once, it’s nice to have the privilege of thinking only about school and work, without having to navigate all the dynamics on campus. But I guess that’s a labor of love, no?

Pictures to come very very soon.

An e-mail showed up in my inbox today. I call this screenshot,...

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 15:25:16 -0400

An e-mail showed up in my inbox today. I call this screenshot, “SHOOT ME IN THE FACE DAMMIT.”

To Remember Dora...

Sun, 02 Mar 2008 19:07:02 -0500

Last week, I learned that my friend Dora committed suicide. I haven’t really been able to cry, but I managed to write little (shards).

Dora liked to leave things places. She’d come over, leave a sock, her tweed hat, and once, a nip of Kahlua that sat in our fridge for weeks until she reclaimed it, with a snort and a grin. An intern laughs, “She always got locked out. Sometimes, I think she did it just to see people.” When Dora first got her ukelele, she strode in beaming, only to forget it by my hamper. I didn’t even bother calling her; she was back, three hours later, with a box of Annie’s Mac & Cheese.

Nights with Dora went like this: Dora, let’s do work, Joyce, I’m hungry. Her, singing with a mouthful of macaroni or rice and bacon. Me, trying not to get distracted from interethnic anti-racism readings by her renditions of Kelly Clarkson and Dusty Springfield. Or, we sat out strategic songs at parties: Sean Paul is not a cigarette break, slow Wu Tang is. She center-parted her hair when she came over to sing, side-parted it when she had arrived to dance.

I don’t remember meeting Dora. It seems like she was Dora one day, and once she was Dora, she’d always been Dora. She was Dora, try the french fries with mayo just once, Dora, get Sokchea back from the Monkey Bar safely, please, Dora & Zardon, Sugar Water It Up on our stoop, Dora cry to me in bed bra crooked hair matted, Dora you’ll be famous one day, Dora of the piano and guitar, the booty-shake like no other, the three-sentence, fifteen-second life debrief in front of the library on the middle of the day.

I might leave this unfinished; I’ll come across her shirt, that other sock, or the earring that fell in mid-break-it-down. I don’t think she left things everywhere because she knew they’d stay there. I think she just knew that they’d come back to her if it really mattered. She took risks like that.

- Joyce Choi Won Li

My girlfriend yelled at me for not updating every day. That’s because my computer was away...

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 00:10:30 -0500

My girlfriend yelled at me for not updating every day. That’s because my computer was away from me this week. Now it’s back. So, I’m updating. So there.

Happy Lunar New Year!

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:39:04 -0500

Joyce: Did I wear this to Floyd's class last week? (Shows off dress.)
Brecklyn: No, you wore black. Oh yeah, it's the holiday...
Joyce: SHIT! I'm wearing white on the New Year! (runs away)
Brecklyn: Uhh...
Joyce: White is the color of death!
Brecklyn: Yikes.
Joyce: (from room) Good thing I also have this dress in hot pink!

Photo

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:37:19 -0500

Google is Cute and Asian today. Probaby because they have so much stake in the Chinese market (see...

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:37:07 -0500

Google is Cute and Asian today. Probaby because they have so much stake in the Chinese market (see video below). It’s the Year of the Rat, 4706!

My Wireless Communities course @ Amherst College: Discussion of...

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 20:25:33 -0500

My Wireless Communities course @ Amherst College: Discussion of Adorno’s “Schema of Mass Culture,” some thoughts on Appadurai’s globalization theory, lots of Raymond Williams’s industrial “where is it all going” stuff.

And of course, this video, one of those quiet YouTube phenoms where everyone goes, you gotta watch this. It left our class speechless at the end. Me, I wanna break it all down.

Sample from Jan Von Holleben’s really cool “Dreams...

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:14:58 -0500

Sample from Jan Von Holleben’s really cool “Dreams of Flying,” where he poses a bunch of kids on the ground, mimicing childhood dreams of flying. Um, there’s a weird one with a little blonde boy with an orange turban on a Golden Retriever-As-Camel, and another one with jungle vines, but you get the picture. I like the concept so much.

Giants Win Superbowl!; NYers Get Arrested!

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 01:07:30 -0500

Here’s a story on Gothamist about the post-Superbowl antics of Giants fans, let loose screaming all over the City. Apparently, multiple arrests were made (check out the cop cuffing in one of those taxi-masqueraded squad cars). It’s been a long time since the last SB win; apparently, last time, Mayor Dinkins didn’t want to hold a ticker tape parade because the Gulf War was starting.

"Fashion Week! Where my WOC at?"

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:23:00 -0500

“Fashion Week! Where my WOC at?”

Photo

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:22:37 -0500

The fashion industry, in my opinion, can be divided into classed sectors: those that market to women...

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 14:21:00 -0500

The fashion industry, in my opinion, can be divided into classed sectors: those that market to women of color, and those that do not.

The Luxury Goods Sector: Most successful Asian or Asian-American designers must dress white women in order to be successful, and only enjoy moderate success in Asia, where European designers hold much more stake in business, real estate, etc. As for black or Latino designers, much of the same is true; the Argentinean and Brazilian elite would much rather be dressed by Versace than Isabel Toledo.

Meanwhile, women of color will constantly be marketed to in mainstream, mid-price point, and bridge collections. It is HERE, in the malls, department stores, mid-price boutiques, that we’ll see models of color, and more versatile silhouettes. We buy, wear, account for so much spending power as a collective, but continue to be excluded or ignored by the upper-echelon aesthete-makers.

Honestly, that’s fine by me. I’m not interested in even being MADE to want a $3K dress (or really, a $300 dress for that matter). But that’s why Rachel Roy’s design work is so interesting. She’s beautiful, present in media (being the wife of Damon Dash), and extremely talented. And she uses women of color in her shows, and DESIGNS for women of color.

For her Fall 08 show, Roy showed what Style.com quotes as “the intersection between Native American and Colonial styles, but brought up-to-date for the women of today.” That sounds a little far-fetched to me, but her execution? Beautiful. The reviewer didn’t like it, but I honestly just didn’t think she got it; really, what white woman could get away with black lipstick, open-toed ankle boots, a feather necklace, and a silk jacquard suit?

(Photo Courtesy of Style.com; Click picture to follow to Review of Roy’s Fall 08 Show)

Divad's Cuba Travelblog: Staying Out of Trouble

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:04:00 -0500

Divad's Cuba Travelblog: Staying Out of Trouble: Okay, so when one of your best friends leaves to Cuba for a semester, the first thing any good media-obsessed culture-tech dorkesse does is convince him to get a Tumblr, the best no-nonsense way to blog. Follow the link (and remember to bookmark) for some of that mischievious Vadi action.

"At the very moment… that we have torn down our elevated railways, because of their spoilage of urban..."

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:39:00 -0500

“At the very moment… that we have torn down our elevated railways, because of their spoilage of urban space, our highway engineers are using vast sums of public money to restore the same nuisance in an even noisier and more insistent form. But what is Brooklyn to the highway engineer - except a place to go through rapidly, at whatever necessary sacrifice of peace and amenity by its inhabitants?”

- Lewis Mumford, The New Yorker (1959), cited from NYCRoads.com

What is Our Urban Space?

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:37:55 -0500

I’ve run away back to the sticks of Massachusetts; it’s so funny because I’ve never made such a reactionary decision, so quickly, to go from one place to another. So, my mentality here, amongst these woods and piles of snow, is still ringing from the sounds of the city. Driving back, I hadn’t even realized that we were out, already past the Bronx, past Co-op City, until I saw the booths for the State Thruway.

Even stranger (funnier?) then, to read about, and think about, the cycles of urban space, especially gathered from the litany of blogs and news sites I visit daily. Sometimes, the news and the comments go head to head for what-makes-me-angrier. But for what, right?

I told someone once, that one of the reasons I (and some of my friends) don’t always get along with upper middle-class New Yorkers, especially Manhattanites, is that there’s such a mentality of “NY is the best, I love NY blah blah blah;” we’re so spoiled by our city, apparently, with its 24-hour convenience, and flat-rate subways, cultural offerings, rampant consumer options. But what we don’t often talk about, only complain about in passing, is the kind of pain someone from New York experiences when, say, rents on the block go up, or a family’s business can’t renew the lease on a space. Or, someone who has just moved in around the corner calls the cops on someone suspicious-looking, who has lived there for twenty-five years.

Anger, pain, blah blah. So why do (we) still love our city?

Gothamist posted today about an inkling of plans to restore the waterfront along Sunset Park, the neighborhood I grew up in, and one day, hope to call home again (if I can afford the rising rents upon graduation). What stands there now? A Costco, some piers, maaaad industrial warehouses, and the Gowanus Expressway, a long stretch of what is really just part of the BQE [from the Verrazano Bridge to the Battery Tunnel entrance]. I’ve [been] driven along this road so many times: the same “Say No to Drugs and Yes to Rugs!” and “Utz! Chips!” signs have been up for as long as I can remember. Starting at about 24th Street, I can see the huge white steeple of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, where I attended pre-K, and in the flashing glimpses of the waterfront between the warehouses, I can recount two middle school-era first dates.

The post, and its links, say much about the ambivalence I feel towards these urban cycles. Some architects want to re-green the waterfront for the neighborhoods that lost access when they first expanded the expressway? When they built the Els in the first place, tons of residents were displaced? It’d be better for the neighborhood than all the porn shops in the area? (See Mumford quote above.) All of it sounds simultaneously ominous and exciting. Did a new generation of urban planners realize their predecessors’ mistakes? Or, will the construction just continue to displace an already-hurting borough, whose residents now have to move further out along the subway lines, to Canarsie, Coney, and Queens, just to afford the rent? Just like the West Side Highway reconstruction, which sounded the death rattle for working-class West Villagers…

I think I’m partially projecting personal feelings onto the canvas of everyday city politics; I also feel, however, that this Catch-22 of prospective change epitomizes the “losing battle” sentiment that so many New Yorkers have, when it comes to holding on to our urban spaces, their histories, our respect. There’s nostalgia, and resentment, and fear. Most of all, there’s a crisis in action: really, what would an “un-gentrified NY” look like? We know: it can’t exist.

New Plan for Getting Rid of Gowanus Expressway (Gothamist)

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 00:07:34 -0500

New Plan for Getting Rid of Gowanus Expressway (Gothamist)

Bhutto's NYTimes Obit

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 17:08:53 -0500

Bhutto's NYTimes Obit