Robohookers

July 3rd, 2008Blog1 comment

My current poll: Is it cheating if your significant other sleeps with a robohooker?

This has elicited surprisingly emotional responses in some segments of the population. Some people definitely do think it’s cheating; others (myself!) think that it’s like plugging your ween into a vacuum cleaner, but who am I to judge?

Likewise, something that always bothered me about Star Trek: They have these holodecks, right? Is it cheating if you sleep with a hologram on the holodeck? I.E., have holosecks?

My current favorite album: Blonde Redhead — 23.

Oops

July 1st, 2008Blog3 comments

At the crossroads where cultures collide, some pretty weird things happen. Like this Japanese telecom commercial depicting Obama as a monkey.

People have been all “THAT’S RACIST!!!” but this article in the Guardian explains it fairly well. Apparently monkeys are good luck symbols and Japanese people don’t comprehend a connection between black people and monkeys. And apparently this monkey is already the spokesperson for this telecom company. Plus there’s also a town in Japan called Obama. And they love Obama there.

I love neato cultural collisions like that. It’s also kind of interesting to note how human beings always expect everyone else — even people that live on the other side of the planet — to see the world through their own particular viewpoints.

NOT that there aren’t racist people in Japan. They’re just racist towards Koreans and Filipinos. Black people are so rare in person that they don’t even know what to fucking do with them.

So I’ve written this play about young Cambodian Americans. I myself am not Cambodian, which is an interesting sorta thing.

I think that a lot of people tend to write within their own ethnicities. Italians write about Italian Americans, Chinese Americans write about Chinese families, etc.. I didn’t want to do that. My work tends to encompass various groups of people. My goal is to write universal stories that just happen to have Korean, Cambodian, etc., people in them.

Anyway, writing about people from another ethnicity is a weird thing — it makes you less beholden to them since you’re writing as an outsider and you can touch certain topics that might be too-close-to-home; at the same time you’re more beholden to them because you want to get things right and honor their perspective. It’s tough but fun.