Alone in a Crowd

I was at a birthday party last night and I experienced something I've experienced so many times, the feeling of loneliness while surrounded by people. If my life was a novel, this would practically be the theme.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with being introverted, but the fact I secretly want to be extroverted makes everything more complicated. I wish I was completely secure with my timidness, that I truley despise socializing with strangers and being noticed. But there's something in me that wants to be more sociable and charismatic, able to hold conversations flawlessly with people without being uncomfortably awkward. Ultimately I wish that my introvertedness was a choice, not a safety blanket.

When this clawing feeling of aloneness begins to evaporate any sense of my confidence at a social gathering, I start to day dream. I could see myself as the main character of a Tarantino movie, the secretary for the Beatles, anything really. And this imaginary character can be the embodiment of all the idealistic qualities I long to have: confidence, wit, even beauty to a sad sad sad degree. This approach is the equivalent of a cough drop, it might lessen the pain but won't solve the underlying problem.

In the end I believe that life is too short to stay in the comfort zone, and the world is so big there's least one interesting person who can tolerate my existence.  I regret not trying to talk to more people yesterday, especially people I don't know.

Favorite Movie Stills

There was a time in my life, and still am, when I was obsessed with movie stills, even to the point I actually considered making that my concentration idea. There's something so ingenious about one shot or image having the power to tell a story, or utilizing one image to express the entire ambience of a film. 

Taxi Driver

Virgin Suicides

The Graduate

Lost in Translation

Grand Budapest Hotel

Spirited Away

2001 Space Oddyssey

Losing Friends to Politics

Art by me

Due to the public nature of blogging (and assuming anyone reads what I write lol) , sometimes I feel uncomfortable writing relatively private things/situations that deal with people I know.  But nonetheless I feel that this topic is a relatively relatable topic, so I believe it's acceptable. 

Asking someone to remove themselves from politics is like attempting to separate the art from the artist, something that should be easy in theory but pretty fucking difficult in practice. It's hard to enjoy Led Zeppelin knowing they practically ripped off all their early music, watch a Woody Allen movie without thinking about his relationship with Soon Yi. Politics informs almost everything in everyday life, an identity and ideology that is difficult to put aside. Yet is it worth to ruin perfectly good friendship over contrasting political views? 

For the sake of privacy let's call him Andy. Andy and I were really good friends for practically all of high school, with similar hobbies and complementary personalities.  Me being pretty liberal (as an Asian-American woman how could I not), my feminism and social justice quips would sometimes bleed into our conversations; actually the showed up quiet a lot. Unintentionally I began to somewhat influence Andy's political views, he would look up things about women's rights and etc on his own and report his findings in our many conversations. I was proud of my pupil. 

Then Andy got a girlfriend and began to turn the other direction. She was quietly conservative, but I didn't care because they loved each other and that's all that mattered to me. Then talking to Andy about politics became almost unbearable, especially when it came to race. He basically didn't believe that white privilege existed,  cultural appropriation is too politically correct, that people at Ferguson were incorrect to protest. Whereas before he was completely pro choice now he doesn't agree with later term abortions. Before he was okay with socialism, now he hates the idea of government run healthcare system. 

Despite this I can't really fault him for changing his political stances. It's naive to believe that all opinions, political or not, will stay the same in the transition from teenager to adult, and I'm actually quiet intrigued by his shifts in ideology. But does this make political conversations harder? Absolutely. We can't talk as in depth as before, and as a strange result I don't think we're nearly as close as we were before, for sometimes I feel as if he's much closer to apolitical friends than me. When we talk politics we're no longer on the same team anymore, fighting against evil for the greater good (cough cough Republicans). I admit I sometimes I feel guilty that my friends are pretty homogenous political wise, and that maybe I should try to talk to people outside my spectrum.

Currently Andy and I are still on pretty good terms, as long as the political discussions don't dip deeper than "Trump sucks".  And it's not like Andy and I can't agree on anything, although he'd never vote for Bernie hell would freeze over before he'd vote for Trump over Hilary. 

But if he voted for Trump I think we'd have a bigger problem. 

Style Inspiration: The GTO'S

I think I was stumbling on the weird side of youtube (you know, that one), when I discovered the GTO's. The tone deaf voices, weird-ass lyrics about talking cones with fluorescent lime green pants, the music was just so enchantingly gaudy and whimsically campy. Yet despite the strangeness, The GTO's were also innocent and naive. It sounds like a bunch of teenage girls at a sleepover founded their dad's tape recorder and decided to make a 30  minute album. Needless to say I fell in love with the band immediately.

To give a little background, The GTO's (Girls Together Outrageously) was a project created by Frank Zappa that involved putting a bunch of well known groupies from the Sunset Strip, with basically no musical training or skills (I mean that in a loving way), into a recording studio and recording their stoned ad-libbed conversations and songs. There debut album was called "Permanent Damage".

The other thing that basically sealed the deal for me was their sense of style, I mean just look:

The peasant skirts, feathers, ruffles, psychedelic floral patterns, flower crowns, this is basically 60's fashion porn for me. Their style seemed to always walk that line between random shit they found at a thrift store and theatrical costumes meant for fairies. 

The most famous member of  The GTO's is Pamela Des Barres, mostly due to her books such as "I'm with the Band" in which she recounted her youth as a groupie in the late sixties. It's not hard to see why she why she had such a successful career.

She also has a tendency to spread her legs in photo shoots 

I highly recommend checking them out and reading about them, the whole album is available on youtube. 

Finished AP Studio

After a school year of navigating through crowded halls with a giant portfolio and following a unrelenting schedule of churning out art weekly, I am finally done. With the sudden freedom of not really forced to make anything, I'm actually at a lost of what to do with all this free time. I've actually forgotten what it's like to make art for fun, which is kinda sad.

Little homage to "Two Fridas" in the background