I was just at SFMOMA’s Photography of Mexico exhibit.  The work ranges from the 1920′s to the present. The initial work is by visitors Edward Weston and Tina Modotti, who both photographed and taught there and were instrumental in the 20th century Mexican photography movement.  The post revolutionary period also funded work that was based in Mexican culture, so a strong Mexican photography movement developed. The majority of the photographers are Mexican. The photographers are a mix of fine art photographers, documentary photographers, revolutionary photographers and press photographers, frequently in the same career.  Women are well represented in the exhibition, a pleasant change from most historical photography exhibits.
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Lourdes Grobet

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The selection of more than 150 photographs showcases works by Lourdes Grobet, Manuel Carrillo, Graciela Iturbide, Elsa Medina, Pablo Ortiz Monasterio, Mariana Yampolsky, and many more, drawing from SFMOMA’s photography collection and a recent major gift from Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser.

The work is frequently formalist or ethnographic.  I was struck by the fact that none of it felt anthropological (something I’m very aware of after all my Women of Japan work) and was on the whole respectful.  It may have to do with the initial starting conditions.  There wasn’t a way to make three images representative, so these are just somewhat random personal choices.

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Mariana Yompalsky

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A group of about 20 small photographs at the beginning of the exhibition (gelatin and platinum prints), mostly by Modotti, really struck me.  They were as strong and realized as the larger images. Because my present project is small images, these were significant for me. Make sure to see them if you come to the show.

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Graciela Iturbide

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I’m familiar with 20th century Mexican photography, and this show is exceptional in the quality of the work and the curatorial choices. This is an excellent opportunity to see fine work and the historical flow of major photography movements, both the art and the politics.  If you’re in the Bay Area, check it out.

For a long time I’ve been convinced that dieting is addictive behavior. This conclusion was reinforced by a throwaway reference in a recent New York Times Magazine article by Sam Anderson  on the addictive nature of digital games.

A side note in the article brought home to me how the diet industry is fostering addiction to dieting by presenting it as a “fun game” where the actual failure to lose weight becomes irrelevant:

[I]f we could just find a way to impose game mechanics on top of everyday life, humans would be infinitely better off. We might even use these approaches to help solve real-world problems like obesity, education and government abuse. Some proponents point to successful examples of games applied to everyday life: Weight Watchers and frequent-flier miles, for example.

I have to ask: For whom is diet addiction “successful”?

Anderson’s underlying assumptions (very popular ones, alas) are that obesity is even more evil than government abuse and that addiction to a diet program will somehow defeat this scourge. Turning dieting into a game is already happening. The success comes not in “solving obesity” but in jacking up the already obscene diet company profits.

Anderson goes on to discuss how marketers “gamify” products: “hooking customers on products by giving them constant small victories for spending money.”

Full disclosure: I am not a fan of competitive games, but I sometimes play a simple game with myself of keeping track of goals.  I grew up on the “gold star for brushing your teeth” method of teaching basic skills, and I’ve been hooked on gold stars ever since. I make little charts to reward myself for meeting certain goals in things like writing. In the unhappy days when I was dieting, I tried this method of to starve more effectively. It didn’t work any better than any other approach, and I stopped recording the inevitable weight gain that followed every dieting effort.

I don’t exaggerate when I say that the Behavior Modification class I took in college taught me how to learn as no other class had. As a fan of the gold stars in childhood, I was fascinated to see how the whole thing worked.

The professor demonstrated how a rat could be trained to press a lever and receive a food pellet. But the most dramatic effect came once the rat learned to press the lever. It turned out that the best way to keep the rat pressing that lever most often and consistently was not to give it a pellet every time, but to reward it only sometimes. Ironically this is called “a lean schedule of reinforcement.”

The professor ended by saying, “Welcome to Las Vegas. Gambling is a classical example of conditioning people to continue to play with very infrequent rewards.”

Game lovers report that the reward is not in the winning, but in the playing. This fits very well with the commercial goal of addicting people to dieting as a game they can only occasionally and briefly win. I wouldn’t stand in front of a bank of slot machines in Las Vegas and try to warn gamblers that the house always wins. So why do I keep trying to tell dieters about the futility of the practice? Until we have a 12-step Dieters Anonymous program, those of us who can see the damage done by dieting have a responsibility to tell the truth.

Anderson writes of interviewing Frank Lantz, the creator of Drop7, who cheerfully admits to creating addictive games and dissects his own experience with game addiction.

Lantz told me that the deepest relationship he has ever had with a game was with poker, to which he was almost dangerously addicted. “Somehow teetering on the edge was part of the fun for me,” he said. “It was like a tightrope walk between this transcendently beautiful and cerebral thing that gave you all kinds of opportunities to improve yourself — through study and self-discipline, making your mind stronger like a muscle — and at the same time it was pure self-destruction.”

This gambler’s euphoria applies to dieting. It is hard for people to give up on the illusion that dieting will allow them to “win at losing” and the vain hope that the slot machine of dieting will pay off despite all the odds–95% failure rate with many dieters regaining more weight than they ever lost.

What angers me most is the prize that the diet industry dangles in front of its Hunger Games players.  The lottery prize that dieters vainly pursue is the approval, love and, above all, inclusion in life that is denied to fat people. The fact that very, very few hit the jackpot (and that approval, love, and inclusion are still not guaranteed to them) doesn’t stop people from trying. The players’ addiction to the Hunger Games keeps them pulling the lever in the face of constant failure.

Just like the rats.

I was down in Santa Cruz last week visiting my daughter Cid as she gets ready for the tour of What We Do in Winter.  She created the dance during her Fulbright scholarship (school year 2009-10) when she was teaching at Tallinn University in Estonia.  She was back there in March both to teach and to rehearse her dancers.

We had a really good visit and got to catch up and I got to hear more details of the upcoming tour.  Her dancers arrived yesterday and may have seen redwoods by now.  Most of them have never been to California and among other things were looking forward to eating an avocado.

As her web site says:
What We Do In Winter features dancers from Estonia and the United States, performing to an original score by Pearlman’s long time collaborator, composer Jonathan Segel (Camper Van Beethoven), with costumes by Estonian scenographer Pille Kose. Starting as strangers—foreign bodies in the same room—this international collaboration reflects on the process of getting to know each other during the long, dark Estonian winter.

Her work is brilliant and original contemporary dance with subtle politics I admire.

Here is a video of Drowning Poems, her most recent work before what We do in Winter.  Very serendipitously we were both doing work at the same time (mine in metal) inspired by the poet Stevie Smith’s Not Waving But Drowning.

“…it was Pearlman’s “Drowning Poems” that trembled with a poignancy and grief so textually rich it took my breath away. With startling motifs that put the performers in a watery underworld, Daniel Bear Davis, Damara Vita Ganley, and Molly Katzman danced the piece with a solemn passion that was mesmerizing.” – Julia Ciapella, dance writer.

She’s raised 87% of the $3000 in additional expense money on Kickstarter and only needs about $500 more (there’s one week left.).  If you feel like helping the link is here.

Cid raised the money for the visas and to bring the dancers here from Estonia in 2011   The $3000 is for the … portion of the production expenses which will not be covered by box office receipts or other sources of income. The project budget includes light, costume & set design, a reworking of the music, dancers’ per diems, photo shoot, marketing, video documentation, and renting a van to take seven of us from San Francisco to Los Angeles.  None of these things are particularly romantic, but they are absolutely necessary to the success of the tour and the longevity of the dance company.

I’ll be seeing the performances at the International Arts Festival in San Francisco on May 19th and 20th.

And they will be performing in Santa Cruz May 17th and 18th, and in Los Angeles on May 24 and 25th.  Details are below.

Check it out. I’ll be at the San Francisco shows both nights.  I can’t wait.

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May 17-18, Santa Cruz, CA
Santa Cruz Dance & CP/PP present “This is what we do in winter” and works by Cid’s Estonian collaborators at Motion at the Mill. Both shows at 8:00pm.

May 19-20 2012, San Francisco, CA  San Francisco International Arts Festival presents “This is what we do in winter” featuring dancers from Estonia and the U.S at the Marines Memorial Theatre, Saturday at 9:00pm and Sunday at 5:00pm. Buy tickets here

May 24, Los Angeles, CA
The UCLA Department of Arts and Cultures presents a free noontime performance of “This is what we do in winter” and works by Cid’s Estonian collaborators at Glorya Kaufman Hall, Q&A to follow

May 25, Los Angeles, CA
“This is what we do in winter” and works by Cid’s Estonian collaborators, at Live Arts Los Angeles May 25, Los Angeles, CA

A connection of ours who does excellent community work, including in the field of fat activism, has asked us to summarize how we create community involvement (especially diversity of involvement) in our work. Because all of the work we did before Body Impolitic was done before the explosion of social media, much of it would be done differently now–and at the same time, we both believe that face-to-face contact is a profoundly important piece of connecting to any community.

The basis of most of our social change work is Laurie’s photography, which is fine art first, and then becomes a tool for social change. A working artist all her life, Laurie became a photographer initially to create Women En Large. She says, “Artistically, I envision the world in black and white. I never considered being a color photographer. When I’m shooting, I don’t think about the message. I’m too busy working with the model to capture a mood, a facial expression, a pose in which they are comfortable, or a particular combination of visual balances. Each photograph is a stand-alone work of art.”

The way we integrate text with exhibitions of the photographs is one way we bring social change in to the fine art context. All museum and gallery shows have embedded text by models and others. The presence of the text strongly encourages the audience to see the work in a community context, fine-art photographs and related words, showcasing the diversity within an identified group.

Developing appropriate wide-ranging diversity in the photographs, as well as developing appropriate complementary text, requires a great deal of community work. From the very beginning of our collaboration in the United States, we have reached out to the community of people being photographed (fat women for Women En Large, men for Familiar Men, and later Japanese women for Women of Japan).

All three portrait suites are designed to provide an opportunity for people in the group being photographed (fat women, men, women in Japan) to see people “who look like them.” In a media-saturated culture, whether in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan, or around the globe, we are inundated with (photo-manipulated and literally unattainable) images of whatever the most conventional current representations of beauty happen to be, and almost no images of anyone outside the standard. Whether the marker is race, ethnicity, skin color, age, weight, class, ability, or anything else, those who do not come close to the conventional, unrealistic “norms” are, in our experience, hungry, often desperate, for attractive, respectful images of people they can imagine themselves being.

Each portrait suite includes a wide range of people in the group being photographed, including differences in age, race, ethnicity, class, size, etc. To accomplish this, we needed to show early photographs to the widest possible range of potential models, hear people’s suggestions and ask as many questions as we can think of: what do you want to see in these pictures? Who is missing? What kinds of images do you wish you had available? What do you have to say about the topic? What works? What doesn’t? What could we be doing better? We use the responses to these questions to continually refine and improve the work.

Over and over, during all three projects, when people saw photographs of people like themselves, or like people they cared about, they were deeply touched, which translated into a desire to work with us on the project. People became invested in seeing the work completed, and widely available.

People she knew introduced Laurie to models, from college professors to sewing-machine operators.  Ideally, she and the prospective model would have tea, looking at some sample photographs and text and discussing the project.  Very often the models had already been introduced to the work.  She asked the models to decide where they wanted to be photographed.  The places they chose reflected how they lived and perceived themselves.  Laurie wants the portraits not only to convey a sense of the person being photographed, but also to provide a sense of their lives that went beyond a photograph taken in the moment.

This comment from one of the Women of Japan models is exactly what Laurie strives for:

I assumed that I would be asked to pose as a “model Ainu,” and so I prepared my traditional Ainu garment to be photographed in.  And so when I was asked to pose as “My naked self” and as “a woman,” I felt suddenly quite nervous.  To be honest, my real intention was to be photographed wearing the Ainu traditional dress. But, Laurie’s passion was communicated to me through the lens of the camera, your “naked self,” “pose as you like,” and yet I feel that my face was still quite nervous.  Laurie said “relax” with a smiling face, and waited until I felt comfortable – I felt happiness from my heart.  To sit or stand in front of a camera lens is no simple task, and this was definitely a good experience for me.

- Komatsuda Hatumi, Women of Japan model and collaborator

Both in the United States and in Japan, we most often speak and write about the fine art and social change aspects of our work, and in both places (including in this post) we have also been invited to speak specifically about our practices of community involvement and how they work.

Community outreach to groups you don’t personally identify with takes far more time, effort and creativity than outreach to “people like you.” Without thinking about it, you know where “people like you” gather, what general things they expect and want, what messages they will respond to. And they are inclined to trust you simply because they recognize you. “People not like you,” on the other hand, will by definition have different experiences, expectations and motives, and be slower to trust. And groups are always composed of individuals, and general assumptions about the group are dangerous. It’s all about taking time, building trust, watching and listening, being open to change how you do things because you value the input, and making the diverse involvement deep, long-term, and necessary to the project.

(A different version of this post is in our essay on “Body Image in Japan and the United States” for the journal Japan Focus.)

For a show set in Miami in 1959, the director and casting director are discovering that women who haven’t had breast augmentations are hard to find.

Producers discovered many women of South Florida have been surgically enhanced beyond anything natural to the late 1950s. “I’ve actually had better luck finding synchronized swimming groups than I did finding real boobs,” said Bill Marinella, local extras casting director

For Magic City (a Starz network show set in 1959), … Marinella had to look out for a long list of period-inaccurate body features: implants in breasts, yes, but also lips and butts; tattoos; shaved chests and waxed bikini areas, too-skinny females and too-ripped men.

“We need girls with the big hips and the curves. And down here, everybody is so fit,” he said. “It’s like tiny little waist and big boobs, pardon the French. But we have to be really careful about how we go about the casting process. It’s a huge challenge.

I’m almost certainly expecting too much of a simple entertainment article, but this story is deeply lacking in context. The journalist, Kenny Malone, doesn’t quite grapple with whether or not this represents a problem (other than for the powers behind Magic City). He doesn’t leave us feeling that widespread breast augmentations are either a good or a bad thing. He quotes Marinello as saying “everybody is so fit,” which seems to be about small hips and no curves.

Reading the article, you get the feeling that (other than breast augmentations), women’s bodies have magically morphed from one shape to another, as if advertising and other tools of social control are not factors, as if the fashions in women’s bodies transform the actual bodies in some mysterious, unexplained way. There’s no sense that women diet and sweat and toil to make these physical changes in our own bodies, no sense that women cry into their our pillows at night if we can’t make our bodies fit whatever happens to be the norm in the decade we live in, a norm that is generally not made by women. Also, of course, Malone has no understanding of the way the fashion in women’s bodies gets smaller when women’s political/social strength gets more visible.

Even the plastic surgery that is the focus of the article seems to happen without much volition or conscious choice. If over 300,000 American women had breast augmentation in 2011 (that’s about one percent of the entire U.S. population, about 2% of all women), this may be correct. A lot of breast augmentation may be happening “because everybody’s doing it,” or because “it’s next on the list.” Nonetheless, trends like this don’t happen in a vacuum–why is everybody doing it? What’s the pressure on everybody to do it? What is it costing them, and what are they not able to afford or do because of it. One glaring omission in the article is any quotation at all from a woman who has had the surgery.

Malone objectifies women in such a matter-of-fact, unaware way that it’s easy to miss, but if you read the article with any care, you’ll see that absolutely the only interesting thing about women in Miami is whether or not they’ve had breast augmentation, and whether or not they’d be less likely to have had it in Los Angeles.

Every pair of living breasts I’ve ever known has been attached to a real human being, who has pressures on them and reasons to do what they do. I’m starving for newspaper articles which take this into account. What’s more, I think more articles which did take this into account would be real ammunition against the war on women which we see played out in the U.S. halls of power.

Thanks to Alan Bostick for the pointer.

I just found out about this remarkable collection of photographs from Focus by Alan Taylor in the Atlantic.

The New York City Municipal Archives just released a database of over 870,000 photos from its collection of more than 2.2 million images of New York throughout the 20th century. Their subjects include daily life, construction, crime, city business, aerial photographs, and more. I spent hours lost in these amazing photos, and gathered this group together to give you just a glimpse of what’s been made available from this remarkable collection.

He has selected 53 images for the article and all of them are beautiful. I don’t know what the rest of the 870,000 photos are like but these are beautifully composed and give you a momentary immersion into their time. I had a hard time deciding on which photos to post

I grew up in New York City and almost all of these images are before my time. Even so, they have a very personal resonance for me. I’m going to have to spend some serious time looking at them.
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It’s the vaulted main room of New York City’s Grand Central Terminal with sunlight streaming in the windows.
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A worker on the Brooklyn Bridge, on November 19, 1928. (Eugene de Salignac).

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An experimental exposure made on the Queensboro Bridge on February 9, 1910 (Eugene de Salignac).

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I’m sorry to say I never heard of Kuttin Kandi (also known as Candice Custodio-Tan) before I read this article, clearly because I’ve been hiding under a rock.

The woman is a force to be reckoned with:

The first woman to reach the DMC USA Finals and a founding member of the all-female Anomolies crew, the Queens-bred Filipina turntablist has shared the stage with legends (Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa), big kids (MC Lyte, LL Cool J) and period contemporaries (Jay-Z, dead prez, Immortal Technique). In addition to beat juggling and competition-judging, she writes revealing poems, lectures regularly, does grassroots organizing and serves as a mentor and educator at the UC San Diego Women’s Center. She’s also spearheading a compilation album, The Womyn’s Hip-Hop Movement, co-writing a book about Filipino-Americans in hip-hop culture, and she proudly represents the 5th Platoon crew, Guerrilla Words and R.E.A.C.Hip-Hop (Representing Education, Activism & Community Through Hip Hop).

In April, she was diagnosed with a heart condition called “atrial fibrillation.” Shortly after she learned that, her heart stopped beating for seven seconds. Her medical professio nals prescribed a pacemaker and an indefinite course of blood thinners.

She’s been telling her story in a Facebook series called “Notes of a Revolutionary Patient.” I don’t read Facebook, so I’m not up with her writing there, but apparently she gets into everything from her hard childhood history to fatphobia in the medical profession. In the Colorlines interview, she’s extremely clear-sighted:

I realized I was receiving biased medical care the moment they didn’t ask me what work I have done and haven’t done to “be healthy.” The moment they told me, “You need to lose weight” without asking my personal health journey, I knew they were judging me. They didn’t look at me as though I was a person; they just looked at my pounds. If weight is the issue, okay fine—let’s discuss the weight [and] what got me here. But i think it’s more than just weight. For any patient, doctors need to know the details. I know that there’s a whole herstory about me. I’ve [suffered] a range of mostly invisible disabilities including depression, bulimia and binge-eating/compulsive disorder. In my 30s I was diagnosed with anxiety and panic disorder, agoraphobia, diabetes, hypertension, sleep apnea, bipolar disorder and severe allergies that require two shots a week for three years. I also have an Auditory Processing Disorder, which I occasionally reframe as a different learning style. Doctors need to take their time explaining things to people; many people have different learning styles.

And, the “true understatement that needs to be stated over and over” award goes to:

the simple fact that the health care industry is not [generally] educated in social justice, power, privilege and oppression is systemic racism.

I want to engrave that on a plaque and hang it in every hospital and doctor’s office in the country. Yeah, sure, I know; no one would let me. But I want to.

Everything else she says in the interview is golden: about histories of sexual violence, about working in male-dominated industries, about life/activism balance.

I’m sorry that her misfortunes brought her to my attention, but I’m so glad to know she’s in the world. And somehow I feel confident that she’s going to stick around and teach us (starting with her doctors!) for quite a while longer. Here’s her fundraising site; I sent some money. If you are in a position to, I hope you’ll consider it.

Thanks to Jan Herzog for the link on a mailing list I read.

I like to read urban paranormal novels in part because the heroines demonstrate their power in a very literal way. The magic used in these stories, which causes visible effects, is sometimes  accompanied by fictional “power words.” This post is about real-life power words.

I can’t write from first-hand experience about wounds inflicted by bullies. I don’t have the deep wounds of those who were literally battered and verbally attacked on a daily basis, often under the eyes of uncaring adults.

However, I do remember the day I stopped doing yoga in front of people because I was attacked by someone I trusted and thought of as a friend. The parallel sprang into focus when I ran across a Facebook post from Lauri Owen attributed to Don Miguel Ruiz:

People think that a spell sounds something like “Abracadabra.” Mexican shaman Don Miguel Ruiz proposes that real magic spells sound more like “nice girl; too bad she is Black”; “I believe in you”; “you are worthless”‘ “I love you”; and “why can’t you be more like your brother/sister.”

Lauri found the quote at this Facebook link.

I’ll call my old friend Mr. Toad, after the character in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Not that he looked like a toad, exactly, though he was short and stocky and not particularly handsome. His incorrigible good humor and headstrong, optimistic manner reminded me of Mr. Toad. We became friends because both of us used jokes to cope and refused to let people ignore us.

I got to know Mr. Toad when we were both in our 20s and active in the Buddhist lay organization. He probably joined the group because there were so many friendly young women, although he soon learned that none of us viewed him as attractive, and many of us were celibate–not as a lifetime commitment so much as an effort to change past patterns of rotten relationships. Mr. Toad openly vented his frustration with humor, and we got to be friends because both of us were naturally irreverent even as we faithfully practiced a rather labor-intensive religion.

He smashed my yoga efforts during a session of “look what I can do.” I was 24 and my friends in high school had been primarily books. I didn’t know about the pack mentality of young men measuring themselves physically against one another and jostling for status. If I had, I wouldn’t have tried to join in the game. I realize now that no other women were present, but in 1972 the feminist movement was distant thunder on the horizon of my world and I didn’t think anything of it. I felt safe with these guys and we were in the Buddhist community center for chrissakes during a rare moment of leisure.

One of the higher-ranking guys was the clear frontrunner when he demonstrated a knee bend on one leg with the other leg held out in front of him. I could only do two unusual physical things: the first was horseback riding, but with no horses available, I went with the second–yoga. I’d studied yoga from books and I could do a shoulder stand.

When I demonstrated, Mr. Toad called out, “Look at the size of it.”

He was referring to my ass. I had collected a bouquet of similarly cruel body critical remarks over the years but I had shrugged them off because they had never come from someone I trusted in a group where I felt accepted and valued. My wit, sharp enough to draw blood, usually protected me, although on that day it failed me.

Mr. Toad aimed to let me know that I was neither one of the boys nor an impressive sex object. He wanted to get points with the guys for pointing all this out cleverly. His role was court jester among the other men, and their acceptance of himi was conditional. He had no college degree in a nest of recent college grads and perpetual students. He worked a blue collar job and belonged to a union (“Local ___, bitch” he jokingly stated when I asked).

I never demonstrated anything physical in front of a group after that. I also stepped back from my friendship with Mr. Toad.

After experiencing how a pointed, uncensored comment from a friend with a wit as well-honed as mine could undermine my confidence permanently, I began to think more carefully about how I used my own wit. It took me some years to realize that he was a sniper. His damaging words were occasional, like a string of poison pearls strung out over the decades that I knew him.

When I ran into him at social functions over the years, I saw more clearly how his jokes were invariably ugly putdowns of women, sometimes mutual friends. Sniping insults were his primary way of relating to people. The more critically I examined his barbs, the more listening to him felt like getting kicked in the stomach.

Many people told him he was disgusting, but he was used to that. Occasionally he would joke about himself, but always including some ego boosting: for example, he quipped that he and his second wife had so many children because they could never figure out how contraception worked. He then described some of the things they did that could not result in conception. Yes, ick.  And yes, an eventual divorce resulted.

The last time we met was when a mutual friend dragged him over to my apartment the week after my husband died. I’d been away from the Buddhist lay organization for years, but people I used to know came out of the woodwork to pay their respects. Mr. Toad showed up with a mutual friend. They didn’t stay long. But as they were leaving, Mr. Toad made a joke so jaw-droppingly hostile and sexist that I couldn’t believe even he would say it, let alone to a grieving widow.

(If you (like me) are consumed with unwise curiosity about all things verbal and must know the reality behind even the most offensive joke, search for “Why do women have legs?” Like many cruel things, it’s alive and well on the net.)

Steven Brust opened up an interesting discussion on hurtful jokes that prompted 149 comments, many quite insightful. Here’s the first part of his conclusion:

There are those with an attitude that goes something like this: “It was just a joke. If you can’t take a joke, you need to lighten up.” The kindest thing one can say about this attitude is that it is over-simplified; we don’t all respond the same way to the same kind of pain, and your coping method might be exactly what makes it impossible for me to cope. More typically, someone with that attitude needs to be sequestered from other human beings so he won’t do any more harm.

When in doubt, I err on the side of caution, because the damage to someone who is sensitive about whatever one is laughing at is more significant than the benefit for someone it helps, at any given time (you can tell the joke later when there’s no one around it bothers). But usually, one doesn’t know one has crossed the line until someone reacts badly, and then one is, first, puzzled, then ashamed, then (sometimes) angry or determined to justify one’s self. It’s ugly as hell.

Oddly enough, once my eyes were open, it turned out to be even more painful on occasions when I played the joker–cutting with the scalpel of wit, inflicting harm and seeing the result. Once you recognize that, you don’t want to revisit it. You have a choice–you can actually use the power of words to make people feel better about themselves, or you can use that power to make them feel worse. Either way, those feelings are forever.

The Allure of the Collection, the celebratory 35th Anniversary exhibition of the National Museum of Art in Osaka opens today .  I’m thrilled that I have six photographs in the exhibition (two from Women En Large and four from Familiar Men). And I very much appreciate the care they took with the accompanying text.

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The exhibition is in two parts and presents some 350 works by approximately 150 artists from the museum’s collection of over 6,300 items. The first part will introduce a wide range of contemporary art from the 20th and 21st century by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Giorgio Morandi, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Yayoi Kusama, and Yoshitomo Nara.

The second part, the photography exhibition that includes my work, is contemporary photographs chosen from works that the museum has acquired since the mid-’90s. It consists of a diverse selection of works from both Japan and abroad. The exhibition catalogue includes my photograph of Bob Guter.

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I received my invitation to the opening a couple of weeks ago and I wish I could be there.  I was Skyping with my friend Rebecca Jennison in Kyoto today.  She will be taking a group of her students from Kyoto Seika University to the exhibition and I hope I’ll get pictures. (if they’re good enough I’ll post them.)

Having my work in the museum twice in the last few months is wonderful.

When we first saw this article on English speakers and Japanese or Chinese language tattoos, we were thinking along the same lines as Wendy Christensen, who wrote it for Sociological Images: basically, how dismissive of the original language it is to get a tattoo in a language you don’t understand, can’t read, and can’t check for accuracy. So English speakers wind up with tattoos like this one:

She thought it meant “warrior.” It actually means “waterfall” or “rapids.”

Christensen’s point is that this is cultural appropriation–and it is. It’s taking another culture’s language and alphabet without any real awareness or concern for what your actions mean in that culture.

Then we read the comments, which make some very salient points about how this works in the other direction. In Japan, and especially in China, English-language tattoos have some of the same exotic and exciting flavor that Asian-language tattoos have for us. Here’s an almost exact mirror of the one above:

Yuan Chi Hao in China asked for a tattoo meaning “old soul with young spirit.” He got “Frunk.”

Also, this phenomenon is not limited to Asian/English crossovers. One of the Sociological Images commenters pointed us to this site:

In this case, she wanted “Strength.” And the tattoo would be read as “goat.”

For people who get these tattoos without doing research, the meaning of the tattoo to them is often much more important than the meaning to a native speaker of the language the tattoo is in. People also get tattoos in unfamiliar alphabets not for their meaning, but for their aesthetic value–”I like the way it looks.”

While cultural appropriation (and cultural cluelessness) is often a factor here, it also seems that many people in cultures around the world are drawn to tattoos that lie outside of their experience and knowledge. Although English-language tattoos in French and Latin on English speakers’ skins are common, there does seem to be some pull toward the magic of an unknown alphabet, characters that–by their unknown nature–seem to express something stronger and more powerful than the characters you read every day.