TV & Media.

[fickle]

First of all, click this to get a scary look at exactly how much photos are tampered with before they're put on the covers of magazines. It's an animated gif, I don't recognize the woman in the photo but gods, they've changed her a ton.

Secondly, being at home without Internet has resulted in me watching more TV along with my sewing projects, and I've yet again managed to get myself hooked on stuff that hardly anyone else watches!

1. Help! I'm A Teenage Outlaw!

This airs at 11:30PM on Nick and features a twelve-year-old who found out that his mother was a highwaywoman before she dies, and now needs to carry on the family tradition. It's set in 1643, and his sidekicks are Lady Devereux (a name I've always loved) disguised as a fellow peasant called Deedee and Moses, a ten-year-old inventing genius. Deedee is actually the smartest of the lot, and although there's only one season of this show, it's funny and easy enough to follow. Kinda like Big Wolf on Campus, except cuter.

2. Boston Legal

I've only seen one ep of this show but in that one ep, there were two heterosexual men that have sleepovers, a kickass African female lawyer, an old kickass woman lawyer that's the boss of an incompetent African laywer and white lawyer, and a female judge. Talk about diversity and a good way to yank in Fans of Color (FoC).

3. Monk

Okay, this I got into last night, because of Numa. She sat down and watched two and a half eps with me, and the best way to get me into a show, any show at all, is to watch it with me. If you can explain it to me and be there to chat to, then I'm more likely to pay atttention to the show. In this case, it was funny enough that I think it's worth watching some more of. I know that someone else on my flist also mentioned it to me once, but I can't think whom, unfortunately.

The mention of Fans of Color made me think about the music I liked -- I've attended three concerts in Boston so far (Flogging Molly, Placebo and Placebo again) and both times, I was the only South Asian there. Not just the only South Asian girl, but the only South Asian, full stop. Sum 41 has a South Asian guy on drums, I think, and Damage has a Sri Lankan lead singer but apart from that, the music scene that I'm aware of seems to be split mostly between white and black, with J-Pop and J-Rock also starting to creep in. I mean, punk is angry lower middle class or upper-middle-class-pretending-to-be-lower, punk rock and pop punk are mostly the same. Hip-hop, rap and R'n'B tend to be black-dominated, and I have no idea about hardcore but from what I've seen from what Savior's shown me, that's white-dominated.

Good thing I ID myself more by my gender than by my race, huh?

Oh, and I found out what AS/S stands for. *dies*

Comments

[abrandnewboom.livejournal.com]

XD I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU HAVEN'T SEEN BOSTON LEGAL BEFORE???!!!
James Spader! COME ON, WOMAN! GET WITH THE PROGRAM!

Also, lol, AS/S shipping. XDDD *crackvids*

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

Ha. Reality-to-final-product model morphs are always fun. And by fun I mean a deeply disturbing statement about our times.

Monk's fun. I think I posted about it once rambling about how some episodes of it bring out my own OCD so hardcore I have to mute and physically cringe/look away, but I could be lying. Still fun, though. Not something I usually watch, but more than I would watch something like. Boston Legal.

Re: PoC in the music scene, yeah, hardcore is hugely male- and white-dominated. Similar distribution to punk and emo bands. Which is a shame for sheer lack of diversity of thought. I could rattle off a couple metalcore and screamo bands have black singers (most famous probably being Howard Jones from Killswitch Engage, but there's the dude from Sevendust, etc.), and there's a couple who have Asian guys on bass or guitar (veering into power metal, probably Herman Li from Dragonforce is the Big Name Asian), rarely Hispanics pop up (can't think of one in genre atm but I'm sure there is, so have Claudio Sanchez from Coheed as a prog rock example? Atreyu's got a Hispanic bassist, but no one knows who he is.) It's like chicks in the same genre, you see people who are not white-and-male so infrequently it becomes "Oh the band that has a chick drummer/black singer/etc."

Now I go see why I have like 43589437593759843 comments from you in my inbox.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Dove's ad is pretty cool. And YouTube has some fantastic vids to show what people can do with Photshop.

Monk, might start watching depending on how much of it is online. Any chance I'd like Oz, besides sociopathic gay staring? I looked through Wikiquote on Boston Legal and the main chars seem a little sexist for my taste.

Re: PoC in the muic scene, I was thinking specifically of the lack of South Asian people since black people at least dominate in rap and R'n'B and power ballads or whatnot -- grab any random person and they should be able to name at least five big name black people in the music scene. You can't do the same for Asian, unless you include Gackt and Mana and whatever, and even then, I doubt the average person would know who they are.

Chick singers, though, they're a little easier in general. I know that I tend to pause on any vid that looks punk rockish with a female singer (like Paramore), but I also did watch an Atreyu vid on Scuzz the other day -- the title was something about a girl? Maybe in black? *not sure*

It's because I've had not enough time online lately, so my inbox got clogged and I have this thing where I always want my inbox to have under 25 messages in it. I don't mind if it's 25 exactly but I don't want to have to click a Next or Previous; one page, and that's it. So today at work, I've been mostly answering comments and deleting comments and sorting comments into folders so that the niggling feeling of my inbox being too full will go away.

Also, I ♥ you. Comments are a byproduct of ♥.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

...So wikipedia informs me I totally lied about Atreyu. The kid's called Travis Miguel and he's the extraneous guitarist, not the bassist. And trawling around for other useless info, there's a couple no-name Aussie -core bands with one member a piece from the Middle East. Relevant only because judging by the bands that actually made it, the Australian scene is composed entirely of funny looking sunburnt blonde kids. </useless comment amendment>

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Ah-HAH! Apart from Wiki, you are the perfect person to ask about the Dead Heads or whatever the garage band was called where all the fans called themselves Deadheads or whatnot. XD

And huh. Okay, well, at least they have some Middle Eastern members. Though I still can't think of anyone except whatever the guy from Sum 41 is and the guy from Damage.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

It seems a little sexist, though, from the Wikiquotes!

And yeeeessssssssssss, I just saw the crackvid. And rofled. But I swear, I figured out what AS/S meant before that!

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

! You're alive!

I like the Dove ad.

OZ IS AMAZING EVERYONE SHOULD LOVE OZ. But it really comes down to your threshhold for gratuitous violence, male nudity, and shit like people being crucified or drinking piss. And really desperately unattractive facial hair. And Nazis. I like the idea of microcosm shows, I don't know if it's an acquired taste.

I think there's some Aussie noise band who has a South Asian drummer, but I don't remember the name and they haven't put out even an EP yet afaik, so they might not actually exist. But yeah, if I tried to make a list of Asian musicians in popular genres, I'd be stuck at like "Herman Li, Vienna Teng, That Dude from That Band, Meg & Dia, That Dude From That Other Band, That Guy Who Used To Have Pink Hair From What's It's Face," and it would be thoroughly depressing on all counts and still not include any South Asians.

Chick singers are easier, especially if you go into pop, pop punk, etc., but it's still enough in genres like hardcore that you just don't see it done/the primary mode of expression is "blah blah blah straight white guy from a middle class background wailing about That Girl and how broke up he is about her because she's such a bitch so now he's going to kill things" or something equally stupid. Paramore grates on me, but I did actually buy my tickets for two weekends from now, so I could theoretically see them twice. I think they're mainstage.

...Shit, I used to know these things. Atreyu, chick, video. I had to wrack my brain for this. That's "Her Portrait in Black", maybe? Did it have cheesy clips from the second Underworld? I used to make fun of it for being so pop but it sounds so much better in retrospect now I've heard the new single. It's sad.

*goes to attack rest of the comments*

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

...Do you mean the Grateful Dead.

I know there's a pop punk band who had some famous Asian guy in it who wasn't That-Guy-Shinoda-from-Linkin-Park but I can't pull it out of my brain. It sucks there's no "Wikipedia show me pictures of bands until I see the guy I think I might be talking about if he actually exists" options.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

YES! Them! EXACTLY!

I knew I could count on you! That's been bugging me for at least a day now!

And oh? Asian as in East Asian or South Asian? South Asian, I swear, those are the only two I know. And the whole Bollywood influence never really seemed to trickle into music, even though it had an impact on fashion.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

...How could you not know that. He said as if it wasn't yesterday he had a five minute aphasia where he Could Not Remember what Jimi Hendrix's name was.

East Asian. That's easier than South or Southeast. Iirc he's Japanese but I could have made him up. South Asian is like impossible to find, which is weird because it's not like we don't have people of South Asian heritage here.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

I am! Or at least, I'm at work and online, though unfortunately I'm not on MSN because, well, I'm at work. And checking my e-mail compulsory and thus talking to you via comments.

The Dove ad is pretty cool. But so is this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osl2sIerAbk), which has nothing to do with Photoshop but is a clip from Boston Legal, talking about freedom of speech and America's slide into apathy. XD It's AWESOME, really. I like the snippets where he gets onto a soapbox.

Hmmmm. Gratuituous violence, I am quite happy with. Male nudity is 'AVERT THINE EYES, FICKLE!' time. Crucifixation is okay, but drinking piss is a little cringe-inducing though tolerable. No opinion on facial hair, and Nazis, well, I watched all of Schindler's List (but was quite happy with the pretty evil dude Amon).

...Damn. If even you can't do it, then it's probably impossible at the moment. I need to nudge anyone South Asian I know into considering music as a serious career just to even out the numbers a bit. My cousins play drums and guitar and piano between the two of them, but they're both going into medicine, so I doubt they'd be willing to give it up for music, even though female + South Asian would be a double whammy.

Chick singers need more voice, less cleavage. Or at least, they need to show less cleavage. It's a little soul-destroying when they have female singers but they seem to exist solely as eye candy. And Paramore, the name made me snnicker a little and huh, I've only seen one of their vids and thus only heard one of their songs. Her hair is pretty damn awesome, though.

YES! That's the song. Though I've still not seen Underworld, let alone Underworld 2, but the 'Her Portrait in Black' title is right since I remember thinking that it sounded like the Lipgloss and something Black song title that I remembered you talking about once. Or twice. Or several times.

*watches the comments defend themselves!*

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Because my mind kept going Dead Heads and I was thinking Dead Match Heads or something, and I knew that it had to be a two word name, just like all the TV shows that are popular right now have one word names. Why were you thinking of St. Jimmy anyway?

Hah. I knew it. East Asian, you can at least get J-Pop and J-Rock since those are popular now but dude, South Asian music isn't catching on and South Asians don't seem to head into the music scene or get successful there. Maybe they're all too busy being doctors or driving taxi cabs, if you want a negative stereotype.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

Does yours have set up to block things like meebo, etc?

Ha. I can't take anything seriously from James Spader.

I think the only thing about Oz that genuinely makes me cringe is some of the on-camera sex. Recurring theme of brutality = it doesn't get filmed unless it's violent and/or disturbing in some way. Oh, and the narrator. Having a narrator was cute for about ten seconds, then he kept babbling incoherently for twenty minutes every episode about whatever topic was plot-relevant and edgy. But he is Mercutio from the pop art Romeo & Juliet.

James Iha! James Iha, I forgot James Iha. Of Smashing Pumpkins/A Perfect Circle fame. I think I mentally combined him with Herman Li. And I don't think I've ever sat through a song by Kittie, but they have a South Korean chick on bass. So clearly Fickle should join a band, become famous, take over the world, etc.

I don't care how they look in theory. It's the perception that's a bitch. And all the female-fronted-but-all-the-rest-are-guys bands kind of reinforce it that chicks can hop around on stage in skimpy clothes but they're not "real" musicians who actually play instruments, unless they're part of a girl group. Which is weird. And the majority of female fans seem to be based around "she's so pretty!" and "her voice is so pretty!" which again, reinforcement that guys can look like shit and be in a band (it's practically a requirement) but chicks who front bands have to look like models and have to do things that are pop/conventional-for-chicks/cute so they're not seen as who even knows what they're trying to avoid. I don't like that more chicks can't get up there and so something "ugly" the way no one blinks if your typical white straight male rawkstah does. There are chicks who do, and people who accept it, but it's not..."okay" in a way. It's lame. Like my typing atm.

"Lip Gloss & Black". I still love that song. Atreyu can suck and suck and suck but I will still love that song. It's hilarious.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

I love the way the one-word-title trend is in. I'm waiting to see if it keeps going until we get shows like Dishwasher and Ambidextrous. Ironically enough, a conversation about Dylan & the Dead.

In part due to the fact that (East) Asian is "in" enough now that there is no other kind of Asian. The "large alluring cats"/"inside that Asian suit" wank was hysterical but in a sick way really accurate of the way the scene is. I'm still trying to think of bands with South Asians and failing.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

I have no idea what meebo is, sadly. *could check?* Do you have a gmail account? Google Talk still works on this work comp, yay!

Awwww. I heart it. Especially the bit where he brings in a celebrity to talk about gay Santa Clauses but the guy starts in with black Santas and has to be corrected to work on the gay selling case.

...On-Camera sex? Wow. I'm reading through their Wikiquote page right now.

Keller: I couldn't face living the rest of my life in here without you. Don't you see? I did what I did out of love.
Beecher: I loved alcohol. I loved heroin. But I had to put them behind me because they were poison. Death. You... are death. Let me live.

Should I be cracking up at that? I'm hoping it's better when acted out.

Oh? South Asian? His name sounds East Asian. And Fickle is musically lacking in talent and passion and joining a band just to make a statement seems kinda shallow. Music's one of those things where if you don't have the passion for it, it'll sound hollow. Or so I've always thought.

I don't like it when the camera focuses on cleavage under the pretext of zooming in on the throat, or when it sets up shots that deliberately look sexualised but only do it for the girls. It bugs me that the focus is on their body parts instead of the song, or that the song isn't telling a story of some sort. And huh, interesting. I like Emilie Autumn's Marry Me song and I got Sian hooked on it, but that's because it's a fucking waltz with twisted like crazy lyrics and twisted lyrics are love. But wild hair and makeup is also love -- I like something colorful and crazy and daring better than conventional pretty, just because conventional pretty is everywhere.

And you mean like spitting onto the floor of a mosh pit? I didn't mind the prospect of falling until then, because at that point, I was all icked out by the idea of falling onto someone else's saliva. Ick. *picky about things like body fluids* And your typing is fine.

Ahhh. Yeah, that song. Hah for me knowing two whole Atreyu song titles!

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Ambidextrous, I'd consider watching. But off the top of my head, it's House, Scrubs, Oz, Dexter, Bones, Smallville, and NCIS. Though I can't figure out what the last one stands for. ...Which I also know nothing about. Interesting.

I have no idea what the wank is, but damn doesn't it sound interesting. XD And again, Sum 41 is the only one I can think of. And Damage. And damnit, I really did think that the 'Truth' song and the stylishness of Asian embroidery meant that South Asia would rise. Or, to quote my South Virginian roommate, 'The South WILL rise again!'.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

This (www.meebo.com). And I do. If I remember its password.

The wikiquotes page for Oz sucks imo. And I have enough faith in Beecher & Keller's actors to assume that scene comes across well (it's definitely not supposed to be gushy and romantic given the one's idea of love is breaking every bone in someone's body and seeing if they'll crawl back to you, but Beecher can get very melodramatic/maudlin/introspective/spewing poetry/etc. He also spends half a season high as a kite shouting little rhymes at people à la Ophelia, so! Grain of salt, grain of salt!) but the dialogue does look like shit on paper. Iirc, that's right before Keller suicides, way at the end of the series.

James Iha? He's Japanese-American. But! Soundgarden has an Indian guitarist, and so does Flyleaf and No Doubt and Billy Talent and Bush (but it's not the current band Bush who's British but a different one who's Canadian and worked with Lou Reed and Alice Cooper). So wikipedia tells me. I don't think I've actually listened to...any. Of those bands.

No, not like spitting, but like doing anything a pop punk princess wouldn't. If a chick's up there, she has to be pretty, she has to be dressed "pretty", her hair has to be "pretty", her makeup has to be "pretty", her voice has to be "pretty" etc. etc. etc. it's too much about pretty. Sure I like looking at it but if she wants to punch her face full of holes, cut all her hair off, wear guy's jeans and a t-shirt, and sing with a little more range than "I can hit an octave's worth of pretty notes and do your basic pop rock melody", then fuck everyone, she should do that. And I don't think in this atmosphere a band like that could survive without heavy pushing as a freakshow/shocking and controversial for the very fact she's not "pretty", and that's as fair as if Killswitch Engage were a success purely because oh my god Howard Jones is black, etc. etc. Chicks in bands have to be fashionable and look like models and be cute, guys in bands can look like shit and no one cares, why is this still an acceptable divide? Adding bands where the guys have to be cute and feminine gets labeled as adding diversity in some way but I don't see how, given we're still talking about straight white males.

Though if your band has few enough people coming to see it that if you spit at the front rows you're going to hit concrete, I feel sorrier for the band than the people who step in spit.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

...Yeah, I'm linkspastic today. CP and fix it. If it's even the right url to begin with.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

"Naval Criminal Investigative Service". Monk, Psych, JAG, Shark. I know there's more. SVU doesn't really count since it's a shortening, but CSI might. LOST, Medium, Heroes. Vanished, Supernatural, Numb3rs, Traveler, Damages. I'm sure there's more. Collaboration between Bob Dylan and the Grateful Dead.

One of those hipster types who moves into low-income neighborhoods wrote some post attempting to be hip and cute about it, taking moving in as a rich white chick to a poor black neighboorhood as some kind of safari experience, describing the whole place as "pre-gentrified" and herself a "pioneer" blah blah blah, had some great paragraph about how she always "forgot Asians were people" because they were so beautiful and thin and fashionable and catty. She'd like to make friends with them once she sees that "inside [every] Asian suit" is a biting, sarcastic, charming person, but she thinks the moment she speaks to them they'll realise! She's "helplessly driven to think of them all as large, alluring cats". It was amazing. I don't know how people survive to adulthood in this world without realising that there are People Who Are Not Like Them and interacting to the point of them being, you know, people, not exotic zoo animals.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Damn, doesn't seem to work from here. What's your Google account, if you can get into it?

Yeah, the page is SHORT. House, on the other hand, is way long. And Boston Legal's page was long enough to make me realize how much I'd hate the main characters' views on women. As for that speech, I wouldn't call it romantic but very overblown. I'd be interested in seeing how any actors could make it work. (Hah! Ophelia complex in a guy would just about serve the universe right).

Ahhhh. Hey, wait, I've heard No Doubt! I think. And Kathy likes Bush, though I think it's the modern Bush. I haven't seen anyone South Asian looking in No Doubt, though, but that's because Gwen hogs the camera.

Well, what about Goth and that sort of genre, where you're meant to be angry instead of pretty and being pretty takes away from your cred? And I like the name Killswitch Engage, but I've only heard one of their songs and I can't remember that one, alas. But no, that wouldn't be a fair way of marketing and, well, at least emo bands demand a degree of prettiness. I think that does count as diversity because even if it's still guys, it's showing that there are more ways of being a guy than just being angry-shouty or tough-jockish -- it's okay to be feminine or to be pretty. Like the bit from Cement Garden that was in the Madonna song that I loved.

*dies* I was talking about the guys in the mosh spit. I don't think that anyone from the band actually spit AT the audience, else there's no way that I would have been willing to be in the front rows for any concerts after that.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Damnit, LOST! I should have remembered that one. And I saw Naruto on Cartoon Network the other day and Ash's voice is such a cross-circuit barrier for me, it honestly does want to break my brain. Just like Natalie from Monk being the chick from Two Guys, A Girl and a Pizza Place breaks my brain. Ah. Well, HAH! Grateful Dead indeed.

What. The. FUCK?! How did I miss that? Is that woman INSANE? Asians aren't all thin, just to address the main issue (my coworker made me want to claw her eyes out when she looked at some old photos of me and commented that I used to be so thin, I should look like that again, it was so pretty and maybe that'll motivate me to lose weight LIKE HELL IS IT HER BUSINESS HOW MUCH I WEIGH IF I CAN STILL FIT INTO MY CLOTHES FROM THAT TIME) and as for the fashionable or catty or beautiful bit, WHAT THE HELL? We're as diverse as white people or black people, though we're probably all catty just because all people are catty. And she is either insane or playing stupid or has bleached her hair so many times that she's damaged her brain permanently. Really.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

...I will tell you when I investigate and find it.

The page is short and has shitty quotes. Or else I just like the scenes in Oz that no one else does, or something. I can't quote better scenes off the top of my head but most of those scenes were pretty nothing-to-write-home-about and the fact that the dialogue was out of context made it even less interesting. House, of course, has almost every piece of dialogue spoken on the show quoted. I use "romantic" in ways it wasn't intended, I think. But yes. Beecher's frequently overdramatic, but his actor can handle it. Keller's more of a sexual predator. Both characters where straight dialogue doesn't convey what it does in context at all.

The guy from No Doubt's called Tony Kanal and he's the boyfriend-in-the-band that "Don't Speak" was written about, he plays bass guitar & keyboard, he bleaches his hair blonde, and here's a picture he's actually in (http://www.nodoubtweb.com/disco/hellagood/hellagood3.jpg). His wikipedia photo I wouldn't have made him for Indian, but there I can buy it.

I don't think being pretty at all takes away from your cred in goth-type genres. I mean, Emilie Autumn, Amanda Palmer, the chick from Jack Off Jill. All very pretty. They may use screamy vocals at times, but Emilie Autumn especially is exactly the poster girl I'd reference, all prettiness. It may be "dark" and "edgy" and it may have actual musical talent behind it, but if you can't tell her apart from an "alternative" model then it's still a kind of pretty. I would be amazed if you could pull out a chick singer from a band you consider "goth" who wasn't "pretty."

But there've been straight-white-males who wore makeup and dresses since what, the seventies? It's not a new idea and it's not an earthshattering concept, and it's not bringing any new perspective. Forty years later, if we're still talking about the same straight white middle class male? He may be glib or angsty or angry or trying to act hard or in love with his flat-iron, but he's still dominating the genre, and there's still no equivalent representation for any other group. Gasp shock horror, a guy wears a dress, that's only been done how many times since the history of the earth -- still not the same as giving other people a voice.

It happens, depending on the band whether it's hecklers or their fans just like being spit on.

[fickle-goddess.livejournal.com]

Good hunting!

Why don't you add some quotations, then? It sounds like a good thing to do next time you get bored. Personally, I'm pouting at the lack of a page for Help! I'm A Teenage Outlaw, especially when it has snicker-worthy passages between Giles and his father like:

Giles: Hey, big boy!
Sir John: ...Are you flirting with me?
Giles: That depends, darling. *winks*
Sir John: Well, don't. It's creepy.

Setting is that Giles just came back from a flirting lesson. And he's a blond pretty teen.

And huh, I meant more like heavy goth/metal/rock types. Emilie Autumn is pretty, yeah, Jack Off Jill isn't necessarily pretty to my eye but they are striking and no clue who Amanda Palmer is.


And hm, lead singer of The Gossip (http://www.flickr.com/photos/justinevans/293298765/)? She's a chick, and not conventionally pretty. Not sure if The Gossip counts as goth, though, they're more along alternative.

And it's not new but it's still not common. And girls can wear male clothing anywhere they like, including in public, without being ridiculed -- unless you live in Iran or something, admittedly -- so there's something there, at least, even if the chicks on stage, even if the supposed revolution models are still pretty. Guys in dresses are still odd to me, though I'm accepting of their right to wear whatever they want. It's just something I haven't become blase about yet, because it is unusual from where I'm standing. Which is in the UN, at the moment. XD

...Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

I didn't recognize Natalie from anything, but! I'm curious, how did you like her? I still miss Monk's last Girl Friday type (who got fired over salary negotiations ages ago) but I haven't watched Monk in forever.

Exactly! (Though re: your co-worker, that's kind of special. You're hugely pretty in the old photos of you I've seen. You're hugely pretty in the recent photos of you I've seen. Hi, you have a mohawk. I love that weight is such a common-domain thing now, like hair and whatever else, that people can come up to you and critique it and tell you what you should do with it. I mean, if I wandered up and started telling people they should really go read a book and then maybe they wouldn't be so ignorant, you're really mentally deficient now, maybe it'll motivate you to not be an asshole, I don't think it would be taken as friendly. But if you change an aspect of your appearance people can be all "Wow, you used to be so pretty (now you're hideous put a bag over your haed?) you should really do whatever it is I think would look better on you and maybe your inherent value as a human being in the eyes of society would increase".)

The whole "people like this are why gentrification makes me cringe" horror of the OP is in a locked post now, but I dug up some part of the alluring cat section from logs pasted to someone. It's magic! "There are a lot of really goddamn pretty Asian girls in this city, many with extremely good fashion sense--which I lack. I've never lived near many Asian girls and they still kind of come as a surprise to me. There's something about them that makes me forget they're human beings. I think they know that, too, because lately I've been eavesdropping a lot on conversations in the subway and I am finding that Asian girls are one sardonic group of people. Of course, once I learn that inside that Asian suit is a funny, brilliant, biting person, I totally want to be friends... but I can't! Because I feel they'll ALL TOO QUICKLY recognize that I have been helplessly driven to think of them as large, alluring cats."

I know up until high school my classes typically had a max of two kids who weren't white, but by the time I was through middle school I'd cycled through "best friends" who were Chinese, Korean, black, Puerto-Rican, Mexican, various kinds of multi-racial, Pakistani, Indian and probably some poor kid I'm forgetting, in addition to white kids from various backgrounds, and I highly doubt it was because I had some magical diversity genes from my handful of non-white ancestors. People are so willing to make other people The Other, I don't understand it. It makes me deeply curious what Other I am, who I'm the Other to. And where the brain damage started that people gave a fuck.

[fairly-grimm.livejournal.com]

Because I'm lazy and I don't know what I'd add? Oz is so much about delivery, they did a reasonably good job (barring Hill, the narrator) of not giving people too many lines that were over-intelligent or complex. Like Keller's quoted "Fuck you, ya fuck!" scene. It's exactly that level of dialogue that's appropriate for characters and setting, and that's where it stays. Beecher kind of gets a free pass on dialogue for being a Very Sensitive alcoholic lawyer from some Ivy League school. And then there's Said, who heads up the Muslims for a while, who also has some pretty stilted and pretentious lines, but he's a self-declared political prisoner trying to be the next Malcolm X so another free pass. It makes more sense then it sounds like it does.

I don't find Autumn or JOJ attractive, but they are pretty, or definitely trying (http://www.sarahsplanet.cwc.net/img27.jpg) if not. Amanda Palmer is on the left (http://sherihausey.com/dresdendolls/orpheum_06/dd_orpheum_2006_dual.jpg), she's the chick from the Dresden Dolls (if the mime paint didn't make it obvious).

I think I've vaguely heard of them but I could be making it up. I kind of like her for looking so not like Avril Lavigne. I don't know about your definition of common, though.

Ewwwwwwwwwww what?