the past couple of days have been busier than i anticipated, which have helped distract me a little from missing jer. a few of jer’s longtime forever friends are visiting here, and i’ve had a chance to catch up with a few people. thanks to everyone who offered their support.. i’m so grateful to you, and i’ll will certainly take you up your offers! bwahaha!
the following is a boring summary of what’s been going on here. it’s cuz i wouldn’t remember otherwise >_roger dodger.
tuesday: breakfast at hennessey’s with michael, sharon, and shaun. then out with jen wong for a steak sandwich, also at hennessey’s. spent the rest of the day at the beach, then jen took me back to their place for dinner with the rest of her apartment. shaun gets pretty badly beat up in a skateboarding accident, and has to go to the hospital. =(
wednesday: sharon and michael take shaun to the hospital again for some x-rays, while i sleep in. finally get a hold of jer after a day and a half of silence (their internet went down). jen and sue visit, and i give sue a tour of the place while jen hits the beach. evening is chill… sharon, michael, shaun, and i watch jay and silent bob strike back, followed by the breakfast club (if you can name the link between those two movies, you get a cookie!), then a south park dvd.
-so tired-
lots on my mind.
maybe i’ll write them out tmw…
one thing: about that bikini model link i posted a few days ago. is it about a triumph of artificial over natural? i noticed today watching a little of ‘what about bob’ that everyone’s skin has visible imperfections. you could see bill murray’s pores, the mom had some wrinkles, etc etc. maybe i haven’t been looking, but i haven’t noticed those imperfect skin issues in recent movies of a similar mainstream comedic audience appeal. if there really is a difference, what’s the difference? it could be that makeup trends have gone from gaudy, aggressive makeup where the makeup is the focus to ‘natural’ looks, where the skin is the focus. that is, you have to make your skin look as perfect as possible — free of redness, visible pores, excessive oiliness or dryness, etc etc. but then, realistically, that’s not really that natural either.
and then my mind jumps to video games, in particular, tomb raider, where a movie, a hollywood film production, is made around the hotness of a video game character. a video game character has no pores, just big round boobs and a sexy tendril of hair in the face.
and then there’s that woman who is getting hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of plastic surgery to look like barbie. why does she want to do that? why would she want to look so completely unnatural?
i wonder what the impact of the lack of detail and yet simultaneous realness of video games and electronic/digitized/mass manufactured renderings and models of humans is on our normal perceptions of beauty, and i wonder what impact it has on how we apply those standards in our everyday evaluations of attractiveness.
it’s so curious to me. i’ve been reading a lot more fashion and style magazines lately, and all the ads are so interesting to look at. like the one for jennifer lopez’s fragrance, ‘jLo.’ if you haven’t seen it, it’s a picture featuring a naked jlo seen thru a gauzy, filmy sort of curtain. and it looks so doctored. like, her skin is airbrushed to be perfectly dewy, her waist looks teeny tiny, her head doesn’t quite fit with the rest of the body, etc etc.
and you know, airbrushing is nothing new, but the extent to which we airbrush now is. kate winslet sued after a magazine ‘took few pounds off’ photographs of her that appeared in one of their issues. jennifer aniston was also the victim of egregious photoshop manipulation, after a magazine pasted her face onto a photograph of her from a few years earlier and put the photoshopped image on the cover. this was also a big deal because having aniston is one of the most profitable cover models a women’s magazine can have, and she had actually denied the magazine permission to do so. kelly clarkson had her ass doctored in the promotional materials for her bomb of a movie (if you look at the website, then compare it with the posters, you’ll notice a huge difference). etc etc.
so yea, this isn’t just airbrushing anymore. it’s digital recomposition. and it’s no longer limited to the funny farkisms you find online, but in magazines and advertising that sell a version of reality that really REALLY doesn’t exist, except in pieces digital artists used to make the image up in the first place. photographs look like digital renderings, and digital renderings look like photographs. the line is sooo blurred now that it really isn’t easy to tell, and that even if we could tell, it’s not sure to say we’d care. because that image/photograph is ‘HOT’ and we like it, whether it’s real or not…
so i wonder. i wonder what impact this has on people growing up nowadays. like, that trend with the super low rise pants. first of all, very very few people look good in those pants. britney spears is one (and borderline at that), keira knightly is another, but i think the list ends about there. and yet, i can’t tell you how many teenaged and tweenaged girls wearing those damn things this summer. it’s an awful look because it teaches girls that they have to flash skin to be sexy (not always true) and is really not flattering in any way shape or form: most of these girls have baby fat, which is cute, but ends up looking gross it’s ruched up cuz of the way the pantwaists are worn so tight. couple this with tight tiny midriff baring tops and you get a mini inner tube.
the whole point of low waisted things and midriff baring things is that they elongate the body, creating an illusion of height and length. and yea, they’re sexy because they show some skin and create some mystery about what you’re *not* showing. and if you’re going to show your body, show it in its natural form, not all bunched up in unattractive ways. and plus, the keyword is SOME skin. what kind of message is it to young girls in teaching them they have to walk around practically naked to be ‘sexy.’?? cuz what is ‘sexy’ really isn’t that simple.
the whole ‘baring everything between your boobs and your crotch’ trend seems to be dying down, thankfully. although it’s really a shame that teenaged girls don’t really have many options to express themselves in fashion. the media sells the image of ‘cute girl’ (1st album britney) and ‘sexy girl’ (christina aguilera, on the extreme whorishness side).. only recently has it come out with ‘talented girl’ (michelle branch, vanessa carlton) and ‘skater girl’ (avril lavigne). the default style for teenaged girls, tho, it’s cute sexy girl (hilary duff). it’s just so depressing that the homogenization has come so far…
anyway, the point was that these young girls are so easily influenced by what they see in the media about what to wear and what ‘personal style’ should be, even if it’s really awful, that who knows what these artificial images of how a person should look are having on people too. we humans are like any other species: we learn, we adapt, we gather information about our surroundings through our senses (most notably sight in today’s modern world), and we attune ourselves to what we need to out of social necessity. but when the real and unnatural can fool the eye so easily, what happens to our standards and ideas of what really is normal reality?
i could go on about movie special effects and so forth, but i’ll refrain from doing so for now. =P
