Late night voyeruism

April 28th, 2006 • 4 comments Culture Briefings

I enjoy reality TV. I do! I just spent an amazing hour watching “Taxi-Cab Confessions” on HBO. My favorite confession was this ultra cool guy who lived as a bushman in Tanzania for a couple months a year. His story was bizarre! Esp. the sexy with bush-woman part…

And the confession with the transexual was so heart-warming.

Who said late night TV was for losers?

Sicilian splendors

April 25th, 2006 • 3 comments Culture Briefings

This morning I woke up thinking about Erice, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been to.
A haiku in honor of the evening that awakened me…

Liquid sunshine
on a November evening
Frothing at the castle

Earlier this year when I lost my hard-drive, I also lost my writings, some of which probably meant more to me than I give credit for. To capture the memory of a serendipitious evening, a lovely date or even a fleeting moment is possible, but to capture its essence is never possible. Sometimes, I don’t understand the depth of a feeling even after it has left me. All I understand is, what I felt that moment may or may not ever be replicated later in my life. Versions and layers of that feeling may occur, but that particular flutter of my heart, or a pause of my breath or a bloodrush exists only for that moment.

For an entire semester I studied about Sicily, in anticipation of the five days I was going to spend in Sicily that winter. I watched and read and re-read Godfathers and all those versions, I also watched a repulsive but very scintilating movie about isolated shepard boys finding relief in the udders of their cattles. I learnt about the Greeks, the Carthiginans, the Romans, the Arabs and the Spaniards who all conquered and acquired and inhabited Sicily at some point in history, leaving their vestiges behind in the form of a rare, but deliciously fused cuisine, a language that has an identity of its own, and people, that have a fiercer identity than any other people I’ve ever met in my entire life.

You wouldn’t be able to tell a Sicilian from any other. Because a Sicilian could have blue eyes and blonde hair or green eyes and dark hair. He could be Adonis-like, beautifully built or he could be stodgy and stumpy. My favorite memory of a night in Palermo was sitting outide on the pavement outside a bar (upscale, seedy — we never figured out. We saw mafiosio, dressed in black from head to toe drive in with beautiful women spelling of expensige perfume and cigerettes) guzzling down beer, making lifelong promises to each other about staying friends forever. We were chased by a bunch of Palermo boys on our way back to the hotel, but it was thrilling. If I concentrate, just a little harder, I bet I can still taste the chill in the air that night.

Sicily is like no other place I’ve ever been to. Why Sicily? Because when I was 20, I asked myself, what were my chances of ever going to a place so mysterious and outskirted with a true understanding of its people and culture? Not many.

When our plane landed at the Palermo airport, we immediately began guessing the likelihood of us being admist mafio honchos. We did see plenty men dressed in forbiding blacks and wearing dark sunglasses, but were they really members of the mafia? Your guess is as good as mine.

The bus-ride from the airport to Palermo city is only about 40 minutes or so and yet, it is one a busride I most fondly remember. Cloaked in the inky darkness, you could hardly outline the savage beauty of Sicily. All I could see from my glazed window were the stars and little clusters of yellow lights high up on the mountains. The stars, seemed a lot more closer, so close that it was eerie. A city-girl heart and soul, I was simultanelously dazzled and scared to see such splendor at such close proximity. You know how the stars are always a lot more shiny and sparkly by the sea? This was far closer than that. At the risk of avoiding the *blanket* cliche. let me just say that the stars looked just like what me and you have imagined they’d look if it weren’t for the luxuries of the urban life. Within reach, is how I’d describe them.

Palermo, although incredibly alive in its own essence, is a hip, urban city with element that makes a city. A mix of urban hip and historical artifacts — swanky Sisley and Miss Sixty stores and Spanish churches fitting neatly into Palermo’s cityscape. Hey -I even passed by a restaurant playing an old Bollywood song!

But the real beauty of Sicily hits you wham when you are in a bus, enroute to the heart of the island. If Tuscany is a play of light and shadow and yellow rolling hills, Sicily is a savage wave, about to crash any moment, hiding innumerable mysteries under its nooks and crevices. While the Venetian beauty makes you fall in love with it, the Sicily scares you. It awespires and the sensations are a mixture of foreboding and adrenaline….

I feel transported to Sicily as I write about it.. and at 11.40pm on a Tuesday night, it is not advisable to go on Maybe some other time… some other night.

I will scan my photos from Sicily… in hopes of conveying to you the majestic beauty of this island as I percieve it. For now, the haiku should suffice.

Honest confessions

April 21st, 2006 • 4 comments To be filed

My Dare-all column is published in the April issue of Zink magazine. Under, Tales from the Darkside.
Buy a copy and read my article if you get a chance! I’ll post it here soon.

So outta touch!

April 20th, 2006 • 7 comments Culture Briefings

Today I had my share of the American suburbia experience after a very long time. I am very shamlessly going to let in on a secret of mine – I am 22 and I don’t have a driver’s liscense yet. So I took the bus to the train station first and then the train and then a bus from there to reach the heartland of New Jersey’s suburbia.
Driving Time: 20 minutes. Public Transportation: 1.45 hours (thanks patrix:P ) . Lesson Learnt: Get a liscense and a buy a Mini-Cooper soon.

I spent an very fun afternoon with high school kids talking about music and just hanging out. One of my new friends was relating an almost-car accident his Dad got into.

“And so a bull got behind us and…”

“Bull ?” Trust me. I had the image of an actual bull and for a second wondered how it was possible on an NJ highway when the group burst out laughing.

“Another automotive driver,” my friend corrected himself AND me.

Ahh.

Fresh of the Boat: The MSN messenger love affair

April 13th, 2006 • 7 comments To be filed

How much information about a friend is too much?
I’d like to know when he’s caught copying in class or when his dog gets run over by a bus, or even when he drowns in his own puke after a wild night of partying. But what I don’t need is this: constant alerts on MSN!

tHE uNForGeTabLe. – lunching at Johnson Garden (Okay?)
tHE uNForGeTabLe. – In the shower (OKKKKayy!)
tHE uNForGeTabLe. – Out in the sun! Yeah Baby, summer’s here. (Why do I need to know this again?)

Or from the recent past,

tHE uNForGeTabLe. – 9 degrees F. Can you fu**in believe it? (Umm, yeah?)
tHE uNForGeTabLe. – Brrrrrrrr. (Great! I can switch off my weather channel now.)
tHE uNForGeTabLe. – Happy Diwali! may god bless you and may you have a prosperous new year!!!!! (Ever heard of SMS? Ok Fine, I won’t be pissed off about this.. but this..
tHE uNForGeTabLe. – Getting jiggy with ***a! __|__ to you! (I really cannot not share with my friends!)

So I am really yet to understand why my just-gone-to-pardes- from-Indya friends indulge in such welcome-to-voyeriusm acts. Before my friends raise a finger at me, I will admit I am guilty of it myself. But really, it stopped when I turned nineteen.

Another thing about my friends, especially the boys, that peeves me is their passionate desire to let the world (atleast their MSN lists) know how popular there are with the girls. Especially, the gori girls. (Not my word dear friends, theirs) ahem. ahem,
There’s new picture of them with a gori chick every other day — and sometimes when they are feeling very lucky or getting a lotta love, there’ll be a picture of them with two gori’s, one on each side, like two shining trophies. And hwo can you discount the broad grin on my guy-friend’s face? It’s as though he’s telling his guys back in Indya — LOOK AT ME. I GOT LUCKY. LOOK AT YOU. YOU SUCK.

See, changing screennames every now and then is something we have all come to accept and deal with. We have no choice with that behavior of our friends and friend’s friends and people we don’t know on our MSN lists. So even when you see screenanmes like, “Off the Deep End,” ” Bloddy Eyes,” you aren’t supposed to freak out. Nor should you get overtly perceptive when you come across screennames that are more like sermons, ” If you truly love someone, set them free,” (Oh. Ohok. Easy there!) ” I will and I can do it.” (Go you!)

Oh I’ve had quite a few interesting ones too. When I broke up with my first boyfriend, (long distance , you see) I was inspired by the song, Can’t Fight the Moonlight, and literally believed I was the moonlight and my ex would not be able to fight me too long? (what was I thinking!) So long story short, my MSN screename was, “Can’t Fight the Moonlight” and his was, “I can fight the moonlight.” (what was he thinking!)

Now my screename only flucuates between my name, Jinal Shah, and my blog URL (yea well, shameless publicity!) And thank god for that!

Nevertheless, MSN lists do and will continue to provide endless entertainment to bored minds on lazy Sunday afternoons when work is elusive and sleep is nowhere in sight.

ps: my ex and I remain good friends and laugh about the moonlight incident.

the inevitable reality

April 12th, 2006 • 7 comments On my mind...

As most of my readers know by now, I was born and raised in Bombay, India. I grew up in a quaint colony of cottage-styled houses that shared walls. It was quite common for us to walk into our neighbours houses at odd times of the day and demand food if we were hungry or a place to hide if our moms were angry. And ofcourse with shared walls, everyone knew everyone’s business. We heard our neighbours when they fought, we heard the shriek when they discovered their father had died in sleep, we heard everything. They heard my mother’s frustrations with raising two difficult, teenage daughters, they probably heard my mother and father fighting and who knows, what else they heard.

My childhood was uneventful except for a few scrapes and a stitched finger that was slit and bloody when it got jammed into the bathroom door at a cousins wedding. But what I remember the most about my childhood are my neighbours. More than my extended family and friends, it is my neighbours that were witness to every minute detail of my family’s history as we were to theirs. As kids, the grandmothers and grandfathers of the colony were our gaurdians when our parents weren’t around. They’d keep a stern eye on us but unlike our parents, they let us play out in the fields without our shoes on.

It was my friend’s grandmother that fished me out of the nasty dry gutter I had fallen into once. And my grandmother who proved to be much cooler than anyone else’s for ordering ice-cream for us one day. And ofcourse, every colony has it’s share of villians. Our villian was the grandmother and grandfather in house number 3. Imagine, five saucer-eyed kids being yelled at every say for being too racacous and loud. We took our revenge every afternoon when they napped : we’d ring the house bell a hundred times and scurry away.

The big news in teh colony was when a little kitten dropped into house number 2 out of the ceiling. She’d been hiding there from the monsoons and I guess she must have fallen through the roof or something. Because most fathers were at work, and most mothers were napping, the grandmothers huddled around the whimpering kitten and inspected it, attempting to decide its fate.

These grandmothers were the backbone of our colony. They’d sit together on the parapets in the evvenings, gossiping, cutting vegetables and stitching buttons to old shirts. Always, keeping a strict watch on us, making sure were were within sight.

It was when I turned 16 or was it 17? that the exodus began. It’s as though they had all come with a limied time warranty, I couldn’t understand. Old age and frail health, started taking them one by one and it wasn’t until last year when my grandmother died of a minor fall, that the mortality of the eight strong women who contributed in raising me and who form such a solid basis of my childhood memory, hit me hard. And then this week, two of the last three died a few day apart of each other. It was like reeling from one shock to bang straight into another.

An entire generation of women I grew up with will cease to exsist in a few years. The thought is terrifying because it reminds me, I’m not a kid or a girl anymore. I am a full-grown up adult whether I like to admit it or not. What remains are the few precious memories, no last chances, no last goodbyes…if I’d known that when I met them last year would be the last time I’d be seeing them….what would I have done differently? I don’t know, perhaps — would have clung to them a little bit longer.

This is the way of life, I know. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Violent youth and reactions

April 8th, 2006 • 6 comments To be filed

What do you say to a 15-year old who wants to buy guns to kill his teachers and class-mates? A 15-year old should be trying to get lucky with the cheerleaders, he should be skipping class, getting detentions, going out to Taco Bell with his friends and to movies with his girl friend. He should be doing anything but seeking out underground dealers and hatching plans for a mass murder.

The Columbine massacre couldn’t have been prevented. But a Cherry Hill massacre maybe, has just been intervened. Were the four arrested teenagers really planning to kill the 25 student and teachers on their hit list? The school students knew about the plot but weren’t sure whether to take it seriously or not. Could this really happen to them? Would it have happened to them had police not intervened last week?

It is not terrorism as the news report indicated. If one thing that America’s done spectacularly right – is misuse the word terrorism. High school kids planning to blow up school is not any indication of a terrorist attack. What it is, is the painful anguish, the utter hopelessness and the dismal darkness of being differentiated against that has manifested itself in this form of violence.

There will soon be a litany of papers and analyzations blaming Madonna, video games and war movies for violence among high school kids. And then some papers will talk about how the kids are losing human contact because most of their communication happens via medi, internet, phones, IM’s, Ipods… Even parent’s and kids hardly exchange more than a few sentences a day. And maybe at some point, all these reasons will make sense and we will have another brilliant award winning documentary, maybe a book. But is that really where it ends? Or is this only the begining? When and how will the kids draw the line? When will their friends know when to inform the police and when to let it go? Will they ever know?

What must be thes kids feeling to take such drastic steps? To seriously look for guns? What is going on in their minds. Are some kids honestly just mislead and suffering or are they a really unusual case of just a messed-up, manipulative kid with a criminal mind?

How can we tell. How can you tell.

Gossipities

April 7th, 2006 • 1 comment Culture Briefings

“Angie’s too thin, is her baby in danger?”

“Angie wants to have baby in Africa. Brad doesn’t. Are they splitting?”

“Angie 7 months pregnant and flying planes. Will her baby survive ?”

Angie is going to come at you with an axe. And I know too much about Angie. Stop please!

I was passing by a particular hotel in New York and noticed a swarm of paparazzi camped in their cars opposite the street, their hawk eyes rooted to the entrance. I’ve worked long enough in magazines to feel totally devoid of any emotion, even helplessness as I passed the street. I wonder which poor celebrity was hiding inside the hotel, like a pot roast in the broiler only to be pounced upon my hungry predators.

I don’t even subscribe to glossies, but they are displayed so prominently at Barnes and Noble and little road-side stands. The latest read, “someone’s about to pop.” I forget which pregnant actress they were talking about. And Gawker had a Stalker bonanza today. They even distributed gifts to whoever took the best shot of George Clooney while he was filming in NY.

This is so pathetic. Did you know these weeklies routinely buy the most selling photographs of celebrities from the paparazzi for anywhere between a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars per photograph? And if it is a particularly great shot, like Paris Hilton’s peeking underwear or Kate Moss snorting coke, the weeklies will wage wars and auctions to be the first to capture that news.

There’s got to be somewhere they draw the line.

Maybe someone should start a gossip weekly or a blog about these people who have built empires out of gossiping about other people. Any interested parties?

Longing for more

April 6th, 2006 • 2 comments Culture Briefings

A couple weeks ago I was invited to participate in the Sprint Ambassador Program. Sprint is giving away a Samsung MM-A920 phone with 6 months of free service to certain bloggers in exchange for feedback, although it is not mandatory.

I got my phone in mail last week and have sorta ditched using my Verizon phone for this one. The best part about my Samsung A920 is that it allows me check my email. Woohoo. I’m not and I hope I never turn into those blackberrying-while-dining freaks, but I didn’t have a laptop until last night and my Sprint phone came to rescue when I had to check email.

I also checked out the other cool features – and managed to watch a couple movie previews on the phone. The screen’s too tiny and I’ll probably not do it again, but I have to admit, I got a kick out of using my phone or other than making phone calls.

I have to give credit to Verizon’s Audiovox cellphones for their amazing camera quality. But what’s the point when they charge you $0.25 everytime you send a pic message to someone AND provide no way to transfer your images to your computer or to the internet. Atleast no method that’s not uncomplicated and doesn’t require 10 different cables. Samsung’s camera is strictly OK. Even though it’s slightly more advanced than the Audiovox one– the quality just doesn’t cut it for me.

And I’m not very impressed with Sprint’s coverage. It loses me the minute I descend down the steps to the subway. Verizon never failed me like that, except when I was actually in the subway. Verizon has kept me very happy service-wise and that it has no roam charges (thank god for that!- I remember, a spring break trip to Virginia cost me $300 but my phone bill during those 3 days cost me $150)

But I would never continue with another CDMA service. Number one, the choices for cool phones are just so limited, its disappointing. And number two, I expect to travel a lot. And I’d rather have an instrument that only needs a different SIM card every time I’m in a new country than an different instrument! I made a mistake when I switched to Verizon and now I’m stuck in a 2 year long contract with them.

Phones and cell-pone services are just wayy cooler in Japan or even India for that matter. Sigh..

How Kavya Viswanathan made $500,000

April 6th, 2006 • 29 comments To be filed

I am a voracious reader. While it takes a lot to impress me, I am also in the market for good light-hearted chick-flicks. Viswanathan’s book, How Opal Mehta got kissed.. blah blah, is probably, the worst book I’ve EVER read by far. Factually incorrect,( when she writes about high school students who wear Jimmy Choos and use La Mer face creams and buy 17 bags worth of clothes at Bergdorf Goodman, makeup at Henri Bendel AND haricuts from Frederric Fekkai himself– who is she talking about exactly?) culturally incorrect (apparently a typical gujju Mehta family meets for diwali to reminicse past times in Madras) and it lost me somewhere in the first 50 pages.

So much for hype. So much for being touted as New York magazine’s 26 under 26 and so much for being the youngest author on Little Brown press and so much for being paid $500,000 for a two-book deal. What Viswanathan is smart at doing is hiring an efficient publicisit. And what wsa Dreamwork’s thinking when they optioned the book for a moive?

Jesus. I am appalled by this novel. Even if I were to grant it to fictitious licsense, the writing is so flawed , the characters are so rigid and the plot is so predictable that you need major guts to get beyond the first couple chapters.

Y’know I am a youth culture consultant and I do know 17 year old girls are bitchy, but the last time I checked they weren’t wearing Manolo Blaniks to school. This book tried too hard to be a cross between Devil wears Prada and Mean Girls. And sadly, sucks at it.

What sucks is, Opal Mehta is supposedly going to re-appear in Viswanathan’s second book. Poor unassuming readers.

Which brings me to an important questions — why do some books get it all? The money , the fame, the name, when they aren’t even worth that much. The Kite Runner was such a beautiful book and obviously wasn’t marketed well, and years later solely on word-of-mouth, it emerged as one of best-sellning fiction books and is still on Barnes and Noble’s best selling list. Yes, books with the chick-lit factor come with the potential of being made into a movie and believe it or not, there is a slew of writers out there that write only with the purpose of getting a movie deal out of their book.

Young talent should be nurtured. No doubts, but if this is quality of work that publishers are choosing to nurture and publicise, I guess the real talent will probably remain unheard and unseen.

Not very hopeful now, is it?

A dying industry or is it?

April 5th, 2006 • Culture Briefings

The last couple of weeks have been very interesting for the magazine industry. First, Cargo folded– out of the blue, leaving 40 people out of a job and Ariel Fox, the editor, with a very large mortgage on his new West village apartment and no job to pay for it. The New York Times blamed the stickers for the magazine’s demise.
It’s one thing to provide girls with YES, NO and MAYBE stickers in Lucky magazine, but really– what were the editors thinking when they decided to go with BUY and SAVE (something like that) stickers for men! Has any man out there used thes stickers? I bet their girlfriend’s used them (oh what the hell, even the page-full of stickers in Lucky aren’t enough for us girls!)

But on a serious note, my guess is that the magazine was just ahead of its time. I do believe that shopping mags for men will make a BIG comeback, but not yet. For the next couple of years, as men get accustomed to the idea of shopping from an already edited list, an edited store and an edited website– shopping from a magazine won’t be looked down as too gay or too metrosexual.

Infact, the next wave of shopping mags for men will come with effective online websites that will allow them to buy the stuff they loved in the magazine.

Two more magazines closed yesterday– Elle Girl and Celebrity Living. Now I couldn’t care much about the death of Celebrity Living. Good riddance to this already celebrity-obsessed culture. But sadly, Elle girl had substance. It wasn’t 10 ways to kiss your boyfriend or 10 things to do on spring break. It was more than a teenage magazine. The spokesperson for Elle announced that the magazine will continue to be published online and editorial content will be added on the website regulary. That’s VERY good news. And if they can manage enough advertising (which I am pretty sure they will!) it might even thrive online than it ever did in print.

A friend who is the assitant managing editor at one of the bigwigs, shook her head sadly and said, this is dying industry. It may be. But the way I look at it, it’s on the verge of a major revival. The grapevine is that luxury brands who have never before considered anything but traditional modes of advertising, are going into online advertising later this year. This will bring the new wave in print media.

Exciting times ahead! Very exciting times. Hey– the least we can do is be hopeful for the state of print media, for the sake of nostagia associated with it if not anything else!

Oh and did you check out Gawker? They are on a major Clooney bashing spree. Jeez, why lash out on other’s when you are unable to take criticism yourself !

Gawker’s Stalker under arrest

April 4th, 2006 • Culture Briefings

Nick Denton crossed the line when he launched Gawker/Stalker – a Gawker extension that encourages readers to SMS/email/call in the minute they spot a celebrity anywhere, providing more fodder for an already celebrity-obsessed culture. George Clooney is pissed off with Denton and I don’t blame him. One look at the site is enough to make me throw up : Candice Bergen has just entered Saks, Leo is at Nobu’s…

I know there’s an entire mob out there that does care for such information, but pandering to their voyeuristic personas to this extent is just reprehensible.

Gawker attracts close to 1m readers a day. Denton is basically sitting on a gold mine, capitalizing off of other people’s (preferably people who are rich, famous, famous and oh, did I mention, famous) lies, secrets and lives.

Clooney appealed to publicists, and all else to flood the Stalker site with false notes ten at a time and render the site useless. Which kinda makes sense!
“A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this Web site is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That’s the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride,” Clooney writes, signing the note, “Thanks, George

It’s sad and says a lot about the state of our culture when there’s a whole bunch of morally inept people making a shit-load of money out of such cheap endeavors. Denton, by the way, just launched a new gossip blog called, ValleyWag, that will open the doors on Silicon Valley smarties. Oh and I presume we are already aware of dealbreaker?

A personal victory

April 3rd, 2006 • 13 comments On my mind...

This blog has achieved its purpose.

I started StyleStation last year in August to enhance my job-hunting. I thought having a blog that displayed my (assumed) knowledge of youth culture would help. And it did!

I have recently accepted the role of Director of InSights and Strategy with Buzz Marketing Group and I am super psyched. My blog didn’t bring me the job, but it definitely helped to have my boss to look at something before she hired me. So there! Mission accomplished.

Now, this blog can relax! I can relax and allow my thoughts to relax.

Yay for me! Yay for this blog and yay for the new avatar of this blog!