Friday, January 29, 2010

Project Runway -- finally, worth blogging again

OK, so Mila, whose design I liked in the first episode, is really good. Not a coat that I would wear, but well-made and awesomely tailored; Jonathan is better than I initially thought.




Maya and Jay also didn't disappoint:



Amy and Jesus' piece was fantastic. I am crediting Amy with the awesome.



Now, Jesse is a horrible person; I didn't particularly like his designs to begin with, but man, was he mean to Ping! Also, dear people everywhere: punching your own hand forcefully is threatening. Especially when doing it in front of someone as sweet and flighty as Ping. Also, Jesse rewarding the model who threw Ping under the bus and complimenting her for sticking up for him came across as smug and creepy. I hope both Jesse and Megan go home very soon.

Now, I understand why Ping got eliminated, I do:



Like Ari and Melvin in the previous season who too were eliminated early. Do they bring on avant-guard designers just to make them the butt of a joke? Sure looks that way. Oh, now I will dream of Project Runway without Heidi and Co and with avant-guard designers only. Say what you will about The Fashion Show, they at least let the talented, non-mainstream kid make it to the finals. Miss you, James-Paul!

Also, the preview for next week showed a designer saying 'this is the biggest challenge ever!' Gee, I wonder if it involves a not-a-model person.

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Running with the Pack Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION
WILD RIDE, Carrie Vaughn
SIDE-EFFECTS MAY INCLUDE, Steve Duffy
COMPARISON OF EFFICACY RATES FOR SEVEN ANTIPATHETICS AS EMPLOYED AGAINST LYCANTHROPES, Marie Brennan
THE BEAUTIFUL GELREESH, Jeffrey Ford
SKIN IN THE GAME, Samantha Henderson
BLENDED, C.E. Murphy
LOCKED DOORS, Stephanie Burgis
WERELOVE, Laura Anne Gilman
IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING, Molly Tanzer
ROYAL BLOODLINES, Mike Resnick
THE DIRE WOLF, Genevieve Valentine
TAKE BACK THE NIGHT, Lawrence Schimel
MONGREL, Maria Snyder
DEADFALL, Karen Everson
RED RIDING HOOD'S CHILD, N.K. Jemisin
ARE YOU A VAMPIRE OR A GOBLIN? Geoffrey Goodwin
THE PACK AND THE PICKUP ARTIST, Mike Brotherton
THE GARDEN, THE MOON, THE WALL, Amanda Downum
BLAMED FOR TRYING TO LIVE, Jesse Bullington
THE BARONY AT RODAL, Peter Bell
INSIDE OUT, Erzbet Yellowboy
GESTELLA, Susan Palwick

Pre-order at Amazon

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

On exoticism of language

James McAvoy is being very clever here; one of the things he's especially clever about is accents. I won't belabor the point of why it wouldn't make sense to act out an entire movie in a foreign language -- the point of translation is making foreign books/movies accessible to audiences in other language environments. Unfortunately, in the US translation there's often a tendency to make a movie or text seem foreign by using actor accents or broken grammar respectively.

This convention seems to create an additional barrier between the audience and the work, by constantly reminding the audience that the work if foreign, by intentionally othering and alienating the characters. I find it supremely annoying, for example, when Russian characters in stories by American authors occasionally use Russian words a la Clockwork Orange -- because they are speaking Russian the entire time, they sound NORMAL to each other, and an occasional foreign word serves no other purpose than to exoticize. (I, of course, am not talking about words that have no obvious English equivalents, but perfectly normal ones -- babushka being a very weird favorite for some reason).

I don't get it. A couple of years back I was on a panel that compared several translations of Zamyatin's We, and both the audience and the panel participants seemed to prefer the translations that sounded the most broken, the most alien. I alone liked the one which translated Zamyatin's text into normal English (with a few quirks of the original preserved), and I still remember the vertiginous sense of trying to explain how alienating that broken English felt while realizing that my own accent, in turn, is rendering my point useless (after the panel, several people saw it fit to compliment me on my accent; just FYI.)

So all of this is probably tangentially related to the issue of world SF, or rather lack of translated SF in the US. Sure, some of it is cost and opportunity; but much of it, I suspect, lies in that culture of othering, while failing to admit that much of the SF audience is not looking for a truly alien experience. We like our aliens to be just like us, or at least shown through the eyes of people just like us. Foreign books, written for a foreign audience, assume different frames of reference, and a reader has to do a bit of work decoding them, and, most of all, relating not to him/herself, but a person with different life experience. It is much easier to create a faux difference by inserting an occasional foreign word/broken sentence than to cope with a real difference. This is the main explanation I can come up with for the dearth of translated books but an abundance of books by Americans (and for Americans) writing about other cultures. There's interest in the other, but only presented through a certain lens, and dotted with frequent markers of the otherness -- rather than a genuine desire of much of the audience to understand people coming from other backgrounds. And by defining them in our terms rather than allowing for self-definition and self-representation, the culture of Western-centric entertainment McAvoy is talking about continues. But hey, they are making Tolstoy in translation and with no silly accents. That's good, right?

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Retail spaces

And to conclude the series of my picture posts, here're some retail spaces. Much of the shopping is done in the open air markets, which has an excellent variety of food, especially fish and vegetables:









(Yes, there are supermarkets, but those are not nearly as fun to photograph)

Clothes can be found in the markets:


As well as more Western-style stores:


Living up to its title as the most expensive city in Europe, Moscow's downtown is crawling with high-end stores and boutiques. It looks like most of downtown houses have been converting into retail spaces. Ah, gentrification of an entire city. The mind boggles.


Friday, January 01, 2010

Picture Post -- Winter Landscapes

This is what we did today, the first day of the new year. And not just us -- the park was quite full of people, dogs, and children. It was a beautiful day.