We Can't Let Stuff Like This Get By in Mainstream (White) Media

Cultural appropriation never looked hotter 

The disheartening news that Mindy Budgor, a rich white American chick, decided to forego her very comfortable lifestyle to rough it in Kenya and become the "first female Maasai warrior" because she was bored with her high-paying job and fancy car has been sweeping the Internet for over a week already. The book (what else?) Mindy wrote about her experiences is called Warrior Princess: My Quest to Become the First Female Maasai Warrior (take comfort in the scathing, one-star reviews). 

Luckily, Mindy's story has been exposed far-and-wide for the white-saviour-complex-solidifying, self-indulgent, and offensive schlock that it is. But these critiques have been almost entirely from black bloggers (Try Spectra Speaks and Madame Noire, to start). 

Friendly Glamour magazine apparently didn't flinch when excerpting part of Mindy's lovely story. Neither did the mainstream-as-apple-pie Today show. The first golden moment in the Glamour excerpt arrives when our little warrior explains that her inspiration was insecurity:

If you'd told me a year earlier that I'd be deep in the bush, hair knotted from days in the forest, running in the direction of a 1,300-pound animal that could make short work of me, I'd have told you to get your head examined. Yet there I was. And I'd never been more sure I was in the right place. 

I hadn't always been so certain. As a young girl in Maryland, I wasn't the daughter my parents had hoped for. They wanted skinny and polished; I was what my mother referred to as pleasantly plump. They wanted a ballerina; my first day of ballet class, I got booted out for knocking over an entire row of dancers with a spontaneous cartwheel. (I switched to ice hockey.) No matter what I tried, I just never fit their picture.

Aw, guys! It's okay that Mindy made a mockery of Maasai culture (and made light of actual challenges of living in the bush -- see here) by using it as a token for self-edification before heading back to her white, wealthy lifestyle. Because when she was a kid, she just didn't fit in. Boo fucking hoo. If you're gonna try a little sob story to justify your quest to exploit Kenyans' customs for your own gain, at least try a little harder than that. 

But the clincher in this Glamour piece is the caption under Mindy's glowing portrait (in Kenyan robes, of course): 

"I tried to soak up as much of the Maasai's wisdom as I could—including their way of living in the moment," says Budgor, here in New York City. Coat, dress, Zero + Maria Cornejo; necklace, Victoria Simes for Zero + Maria Cornejo; belt, Salvatore Ferragamo; ring, Budgor's own (made from the horn of the buffalo she speared)."

Please, for sanity's sake, tell me this was written tongue-in-cheek! We have here a light-as-air, couture-ified description of an artifact taken from a white woman's "travails" in Africa, and of a culture that is facing state-imposed extinction. The cherry on top, of course, is that tired noble-savage BS about "living in the moment" that apparently every culture of dark-skinned non-Westerners is able to master, and that us "corrupted," educated, comfortable, future-having Whites just can't seem to grasp (Poor us!!). 

But this is all actually besides the point. I re-kindled this dying blog-in-training to riff on something else, which was unearthed in an article on Racialicious the other day by Spectra Speaks, whose anger-fueled tweet-rant about Mindy's book was spot-on ("Dear Western Saviorists, Stop Reducing Africa to a Play Pen for Your Personal Development"). She tells us:

Never has it been more essential for Africans to tell their own stories, actively share their perspectives online and via traditional media outlets as well. In so doing we at least make it harder for ridiculous narratives like this to be perpetuated without stirring up controversy. That said, there are other voices who really should be engaging the author of this book.

The emphasis is mine, and her point is astute. We can't stop self-righteous fools like Mindy from going to Africa to "find themselves." But we can try to make it harder for these people to get positive press, and for their stories and books to be lauded in mainstream media and women's magazines.

Which is why Spectra thinks "there are other voices" that should be opening up dialogues with this author. She means white voices. She's right. Unless white voices as well as black voices start calling out exploitative stories like Mindy's for what they really are, shameful and pathetic instead of inspirational and "empowering" (ugh, that word!), the mainstream (read: white mainstream) will never get the point. Because what we've got now is a cheery-as-kittens profile in Glamour and a "what-an-inspiration-to-all-women!" segment on Today. And that's not good enough.

We should already be at a point where a young woman like Mindy would be discouraged from writing such an insulting "memoir." We should be at a point where an editor at Glamour, upon seeing Mindy's book, would flip through the pages and throw it directly in the trash, just as she might throw out a memoir by a white supremacist. Or where a producer at Today would avoid profiling such a self-righteous, culturally-insensitive young woman for fear that another similarly-positioned person might try to "discover" herself in the same flawed, fundamentally racist way.  

Ironic, indeed, that I'm hemming and hawing about white people needing to speak up and transform the media on a forum that nobody reads. But if I ever get lucky enough to be a taste-maker in the national media, I'll take Spectra's words--and my own convictions--fully to heart.

In the meantime, let's hope Mindy doesn't sell a single book.

Young, Over-Educated, and Worse than Ever

Look how smart we are! Look! Are you looking?

What?
An invitation-only meeting of The New Inquiry, a "scrappy" online journal that offers literary essays and media criticism. The meeting takes place weekly in a clandestine bookstore (a "literary speakeasy of sorts") on the Upper East Side. Described in this NYT article.

Who?
"Members of the city’s literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment," meeting to discuss lofty topics such as Edmund Wilson and poststructuralism.

In reality:
A circle-jerk of over-educated, underemployed elitists who think they're above the publishing and literary industry just because they cannot find the jobs they want.
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Believe it or not, I'm not here to mock the content of The New Inquiry. The journal is for the most part well-written and thought provoking, albeit incredibly pretentious at times. So let it be.

My problem, of course, is with the holier-than-thou attitudes of the 20-somethings who attend these weekly meetings. If you wanna sit around with your college buddies talking about the ins and outs of poststructuralism, be my guest. But don't you dare project an identity of an underdog struggling to make it in a city that just won't accept your brilliance. What did you say to the writer of this article to make her call you the "city's literary underclass"? Who do you think you are: starving, radical writers who just won't get acknowledged by the mainstream? (This isn't even true, because The New Inquiry has endorsements from Jonathan Lethem and other big-shots). One attendee, a junior at Columbia, comes to the New Inquiry meetings to “discuss ideas at an extremely high level, without worrying about status or material support of traditional institutions: publishing houses or universities.” Don't you just love 19-year-olds who think they're smarter than everyone else?

Give me a freaking break. The people in this article are just bitter because they are over-educated and cannot find jobs. Helena, a recent Columbia undergrad, was apparently rejected from a top magazine. Rachel, a 2009 Barnard graduate, lost all interest in the publishing industry after a disillusioning internship at The New Yorker. Rebecca, with a Masters from Columbia in English and comparative lit, couldn't even get an unpaid internship. This article was written on her 25th birthday, but she was sad, "having graduated summa from Cornell, with a master’s from Columbia, only to find [herself] unemployed and back living at home with your parents." Frustrated and wallowing in self-pity and self-indulgence, it's clear that Rebecca and her friends attend the New Inquiry "salons" to stroke and fuel their elitist egos.

Boo Fucking Hoo.

Publishing is hard to get into -- I would know. But I will say this: the moment I graduated from undergrad (from a school not as good as Columbia), every single internship I applied to got back to me the next day. So I'm not sure why Rebecca had such bad luck. Could it have been that she went off to "write on a farm in upstate New York" for several months? And how could Rachel let the goings-on at The New Yorker, literally the most obnoxious publication on the planet, get her down about the entire NYC publishing world?

The real problem, I think, goes back to unbridled elitism. These girls aren't interested in working for just any publisher or magazine. They aren't interested in working for an unknown independent press or a big-time corporation like Random House. They need the perfect middle ground, a fine specimen of gritty intellectualism, fine writing, and underdog charm. And of course, it has to be trendy. Why else would The New Inquiry, in all of its self-imagined ruggedness, hold their "social debut" at the ritzy, hipster-chic Jane Hotel? Why else would they partner with Google and New Directions (a prominent indy press) and quiver in pleasure when a Vanity Fair writer criticized one of their essays via Twitter?

These New Inquiry club attendees are nothing but intellectually-masturbatory literary social climbers. Which would be just fine (albeit disturbing), if only the NYT writer had not called them the "literary underclass barred from the publishing establishment." It's not a freaking "establishment," and they're not barred. They just need to try harder to find a job.

Newsflash: Removing Your Clothes, Crying, and Taking Pictures of Yourself is not Artsy

Contemporary Art Space? More like MySpace

Lately, a pesky issue of self-indulgence has agitated me to the point of no return: Girls (worse, women) photographing themselves (or being photographed) in the nude or semi-nude and brashly proclaiming it "art," when really it's nothing but a grossly narcissistic expression of their own egos, and not even worthy of MySpace let alone competitive contemporary art spaces.

My rage was first incited last weekend, when I took a trip to PS1, the extension of MoMa that used to be a really cool outlet for art in Queens.... and now is a veritable bee's nest for swarming hipsters. PS1 has its attributes and interesting exhibitions, but it's certainly not impervious to useless bullshit (like all contemporary art centers). What really set me over the edge was the work of a 30-something young artist named Laurel Nakadate, who had the better part of an entire floor dedicated to displaying dozens of immense photographs that were cheesy, Internet-esque shots of herself crying in different positions, often half (or fully) naked. This part of the exhibit is called "365 Days: A Catalogue of Tears," and some of the photographs (rather, pics) were worse than something I would have taken in 1997 with a disposable Kodak. 

I was ready to dismiss the "art" to the garbage chute of my brain when I caught Nakadate's statement, in which she explained that she traveled the country for 365 days, "deliberately taking part in sadness each day." PS1's website says: "These photographs document a year-long performance that began on January 1, 2010, in which the artist documented, and continues to document herself before, during, and after weeping each day." Constructed sadness, huh? BOO FUCKING HOO. 


Are we really at a point in self-indulgent hipster art culture that the expression of "sadness," a somber emotion with great poetic potential, is acceptably conveyed by one self-infatuated "artist's" experimentation with camera angles? PS1 clearly saw something insightful; all I see is shameless, embarrassing narcissism. 

"Do I look sad in just a bra, or should I take that off, too? "

As if Ms. Nakadate's "art" weren't enough to get my blood boiling (you don't even wanna know what else she had on exhibit), I nearly fell off the subway platform upon reading of Miru Kim, a 30-year-old "Manhattan artist" who, for 5 years, "has meticulously researched New York’s history and explored its unseen infrastructure. She disrobes and caresses the walls with her body at each location." This is like that article about idiots spelunking in NYC sewers because they're too bored with their everyday lives. Thinking she's marvelously original, Ms. Kim takes photographs of "edgy" places in New York... oh wait -- she doesn't even take the pictures! She just appears nude in them! She's just doing this because she thinks she's hot! (Seriously, when do you see an enormous artist exhibiting herself this way? It's only the attractively-figured ones. You know why? Because they just want an excuse to parade in front of the camera).

Urban Narcissa, staring into a lovely sewage reflection

NY Metro's take on Ms. Kim's impact on our art world is just too good to paraphrase indirectly, so I'll quote it here:


"[Kim] inserts her naked body into the 'organism' of the metropolis, producing ethereal landscapes that explore the interaction of classic femininity and twenty-first century urbane. Her artwork has been heralded internationally, though she has gotten into more than a few scrapes with local law enforcement, she says. She’s been chased by police officers, encountered a violent homeless man in an abandoned Hell’s Kitchen tunnel, and eluded NYPD helicopters for the sake of her art."


OMG she's so badass, getting in trouble for her art! There's nothing like a disillusioned idiot stalking abandoned tunnels and getting into altercations with violent homeless people... 

Oh, another thing: Miru Kim also poses nude with pigs in farm pens. ...And tries to make it sound deep.

"As I lay down next to a sow weighing five hundred pounds, I felt the warmth travel from the soft underbelly of the animal into my bare right thigh.  I could no longer reason whether I was feeling the pig's abdomen on my thigh, or the pig was feeling my thigh on her abdomen. The line between the subject and the object were obscured, and two souls mingled on the plane of contact." from: http://mirukim.com/statementThePigThatThereforeIAm.php

Self-Indulgent Performance Art Reaches Record Low

Videogames Adventure Services. Where do I begin?

Featured in the Times about a week ago (article here), V.A.S is "a company that constructs 'reality adventures' for paying clients." Run by Columbia M.F.A-grad Brock Enright, this mind-boggling service arranges staged kidnappings at $1,500 and full-fledged odysseys of strangeness for no less than $10,000. The customers? Yuppie idiots with cash to burn, idiocy to spare, an inability to create meaning in their own lives, and an overwhelming need to make others do it for them.

At first, it's kind of cool to read about the "adventure" Enright and his team plan for Cristina, one such client. Cristina meets the team in a bar, interacts with people who are actually actors, and gets to act out a series of riddles culminating with a disappearing ventriloquist. Well, it's really awesome, actually -- or it would be, if this had been arranged by her friends or maybe as part of a movie. But when we find out that Cristina paid up to $60,000 for the complete unraveling of this life-overlapping-art fiasco, it gets a little less awesome -- especially when we know, well, it's all staged.

At some point, you could almost commend Enright for being the mastermind of what seems like an ingenious structure. He brainstorms, designs, and organizes incredible scenarios that people only dream about (or see in The Matrix), receives all the money needed to make it happen, and makes a profit to boot. He gets to hire actors, blindfold people, and even stage abductions.

But Enright, shacked up in a Bushwick apartment with his girlfriend and child, is one of those performance art junkies who thinks that urinating and defecating on himself are profound forms of self expression, and that's an immediate turn-off. He is a pretentious provocateur extraordinaire, armed with a Columbia degree that surely won't turn away fans -- or buyers.

Speaking of these buyers, let's review a few:

-Margo, a 38-year-old former Goth who was harassed with fake phone calls nightly and eventually flown to Germany, where she unknowingly played the role of rape victim on stage.

-A married couple looking to reignite their romance, chased by staged assailants in a country wood.

And the best:

-David, who paid under $5,000 (a bargain, no less) for a "superhero fantasy" during which he was "forced through a labyrinth of puzzles and endurance tests" and trusted to rescue a female damsel in distress (planted by V.A.S., of course). 

The outcome? "The comedown hit me immediately," David reports. "Everything had been so heightened. The next day I had to go back to work, and it was tough. I got very depressed."

........

"Very depressed," huh? BOO FUCKING HOO. That's what you get when you pay shit loads of money to be the star in an alternate reality game that is not only not real, but completely indulgent and ridiculous and unnecessary to the umpteenth degree of all degrees. This reminds me of those fools who suffered "depression" when they realized Pandora, the fictional planet showcased in the movie Avatar, was not real, nor were the blue Nav'i (and their know-all Tree of Life).

...Really, people? You deserve to feel a "come down" if you think it's okay to pay several thousands of dollars to have someone else engineer a quest of meaning in your life, and to make you the center of the world. If you had any real consciousness, you wouldn't need this kind of validation.

"Hey Mom, I just paid $10,000 for someone to involve me in a perverse alternate reality game where I might be beaten, kidnapped, or flown out of the country with minimal notice. It's like, totally cool, yah."

Can't Grow A Mustache? At Least Your Fridge Can.

If you can't grow it, buy it.

As you all know, mustaches are a major cornerstone of hipster culture, and the ultimate trendy accessory for skinny white men. With just the right amount of Village People sexiness and old-timey appeal, the mustache has far surpassed the skinny jean (I think) in the attainment of "I'm Cooler Than You" status. And, along with everything else hipsters find cool, it has thus inspired mountains of useless kitsch and novelty items.

Let's peruse a few gag gifts online to see just how far the insanity has gone. While some of these items are undeniably cute, they are far beyond any kind of normal, and seriously need to be condemned -- not on the side of the retailers, who clearly have a pulse on the current market, but on the side of those for whom they have been created.

Exhibit A: "Fingerstache" Tattoos

It's one thing to not have an actual mustache. But to not pretend to have one? That's just bollocks! If there's anything hipsters love, it's a combination of vintage trends and materialistic throwbacks to childhood ("OMG remember those?!). The 'fingerstache' tattoos provide both.

Brilliant.







Exhibit B: Mustache Bandaids

Kind of in the "childhood throwbacks" category, but worse. While 110% of real adults do whatever they can to avoid showing their boo-boos in public, hipsters think it's cool to pretend it's 1993 again (or 1970, for that matter), and flaunt their minor injuries wherever possible. So don't try punching any skinny mustachioed guys in Williamsburg -- it might give them an excuse to wear these.



Exhibit C: Handlebar Wine Bottle Opener

A blogger who picked up on this item says it best, imagining the user on a date. "She'll be so distracted by your Handlebar Mustache Bottle Opener she'll hardly notice the label on your cheapskate $4.95 bottle of fine." If that's the case, they're a perfect pair.

Exhibit D:  "Flavor Savers" Chip Clips 

'Cause even soy crisps won't stay crisp in a Williamsburg pantry full of Salvation Army clothing dust. These come in different colors for mustache diversity, so the hipsters will feel like they're celebrating the "colorful" aspect of their neighborhood.

Exhibit E: Mustache Candy

Um, these look like bats.

Exhibit F: Mustache Jumbo Magnet    

As the product description puts it, "Everything looks better with a mustache, right?"

Wrong. Very, very wrong.

Goldman Settles for Silver

Goldman employees have yet another reason to cry into their company-card dinners this week. The firm's budget for compensation and bonuses has reportedly dropped to $15.4 billion (down 5% in 2010). That means that instead of receiving an average bonus of $498,246, faithful workers must settle for a mere $430,700.

Boo Fucking Hoo.

What's Next, "Dog & Deluca"?

Far more than the revolting sight of dogs dressed in brand name clothing, ads for 'organic' and 'wholesome' dog food have caused me a lot of angst over the years. After all, nearly 50 million Americans struggle to feed themselves, and millions more don't have access to healthy foods like fresh produce, whole grains, etc -- yet lucky pooches are getting gourmet dinners served right under their anus-sniffing snouts.

Lately, I've encountered a series of commercials that have driven me to the brink of fury. They're for a brand called 'Blue Buffalo,' and here's an example. I couldn't load the isolated clip, so you'll have to bear with this one -- it starts at 1:02 (or, watch here).

Like, Oh em gee, Kim. "Ground corn was the first ingredient, not meat," says this frumpy valley girl.

Boo Fucking Hoo, lady. I'm all for not serving animals by-products and poison, but seriously, ground corn? That is the issue? And the romantic montage of mood-lit poultry and colorful produce that follows is not only cheesy as all hell -- it's frankly insulting to anyone who might never have access to such a nice assortment of foods.

"I love Murphy like family, so I wanna feed him like family," she continues.

Someone should tell Mom Jeans over here that Murphy is a fucking dog, and would eat literal garbage if given the chance (ever seen those glammed up chihuahuas sniffing turds on the street?). Something else tells me that this woman probably spends more time caring for her dog than for her family -- if she's got one (Yes, I know she's just an actor, but she's representative of real idiots out there).

I have nothing more to say. WHAT IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE TODAY?!