Bad Girls Club

I have a confession to make: I've been watching The Bad Girls Club: Miami. Typically I don't watch the Oxygen Network and typically I'm not into television shows depicting foolish women who are my age, but this show is actually entertaining. Originally, I wanted to see an episode because it was filmed Miami, but after watching I became dumbfounded how ridiculous this show is and became somewhat obsessed.

Now, imagine being born a cute baby girl. You get smacked on your tush by the doctor, you get wrapped around a pink blanket, you get breast-fed by your mother, you start growing, you love cookies, you have tea parties with your teddy bears, you skip to school, you have your cootie shots, you have been taught every good manner, and you're sugar and spice and everything nice. Now imagine everything opposite of that and you have these ladies:

a photoshop disaster

My Tuesday nights have been pretty dull ever since Lost ended so whenever I wasn't doing anything on my former Lost night I would turn on, tune in and drop out by watching The Bad Girls Club: Miami. I've watched tons of screaming, "fights", shit-talking, bad girls leaving the house, new bad girls entering the house, drunks, bleach thrown around, and that one time they went to Churchills.

Did I learn anything from watching the show? Yes and No. Yes, this Miami season was more entertaining than Jersey Shore's Miami season (seriously I only watched two episodes). No, it's not earth shattering, but what I did learn is to embrace the "bad girls". When I first heard of this show a few years ago, I was completely baffled that a show like this exists. Who wants to watch belligerent women hmm, I mean girls, literally do nothing but drink and fight? I'm a classy board but after seeing a couple of episodes of this season of The Bad Girls Club I realized that "bad girls" are more interesting and always makes history. Com'on the first official bad girl is Eve-y Eve herself, the first woman on earth who ate a forbidden fruit from The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

Heck, even the Maries from the Czech New Wave film Daisies (Sedmikrásky) were on to something. They figured since theres bad everywhere in this world, they should go bad themselves.

A nihilistic approach to life! So can I conclude since these bad girls are without (or barely with) moral standards, they are the faces of the future of post-nihilism?

Ugh, too much thought for this show. If you want to read more I suggest checking the coverage by Miami New Times.

Voting or something like it

Election Day is tomorrow and sadly I have been slacking. Normally I'm on top when it comes to voting: studying the sample ballot, research candidates and amendment articles etc; I just haven't been swayed by politics this past year. What I can say is:

• I have a super political crush on Debbie Wasserman Schultz. I thought about applying for her internship.
• Out of the 14 mailed political advertisement sent to my family only 1 was endorsed by the Democrat Party.
• One of these 13 was directed to me: a person who has voted for socialist candidates in past.
• All of these endorsed Republican Party ads all mention wasteful spending.
• And Obama Liberal/Liberal Media
• I can't find my voter information card.
• I'm hungry and I want pizza.
• Shit, I really should've done an absentee ballot.
• Oh well, photo shoot tomorrow.

Why I "deactivated" my Facebook account

Because I'm tired of it. Since deactivating my account last week, the first question I've been asked from friends is "Did you delete FACEBOOK!? Are you okay?" Yeah I'm fuckin' okay.

This is one of many reasons I felt the need to leave. Why did I let this social networking site (now a social brand) become the source of communicating with friends?

When I first made an account with Facebook was back when I was in undergraduate and my university was invited to be Facebook (yes, back when your university was invited to be on Facebook). I took it as a joke and signed up as Angelica la Douche, then a day later I deleted my account. Why? Because I thought it was dumb and I didn't want former classmates from high school to find me and try to request to be "friends" with me. I simply did not care what they were up to. It wasn't until about 3 years later when I decided to join again as suggested by a good friend who had recently moved. The first two days of joining I was overwhelmed by the amount of people requesting to be my friend. Some people I didn't know, but knew them as a friend of a friend who I later end up meeting. It's always awkward when you meet someone and you add, "Oh yeah I think we're Facebook friends." What does that even mean?

I had an amazing art history professor who once had a huge 4 hour debate about the meaning of friends and communication (there wasn't much art in this art history course at all, it was more like a philosophical debate course). He argued that you're only allowed to have 5 true friends and everyone else is just an acquaintance. If you had more friends than that, you're lying to yourself. It's about quality not quantity, am I right!? He also argued that the best way to communicate with your friends is face to face, 2nd was calling them/or writing a letter and the last was texting them. He did not discuss much about social networking because it was slightly before its peak and it was the era of texting. One of my readings for the class was Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra & Simulation. Baudrillard's main argument was everything now is just a hyperreality -- references without no original (a simulacra). Facebook and etc., are simulations of actual human interaction.

All this is not to say that I don't believe Facebook and other forms of social media is not a great tool. It makes communicating a whole lot easier, especially when you have something to say to all of your "friends" or instead of driving around to see your friends. I have good friends living all throughout south Florida, from North Palm Beach to Coral Gables and Facebook made it easy to connect with my friends.

Recently, one night a friend posted and tagged a photograph which led all my friends in the photo (including myself) posting comments at 2 in the morning. After 20+ comments one friend mentioned why were we all on Facebook at 2am instead of actually hanging out and that this was some creepy futurist event. This is when it first dawn on me -- why was I using Facebook? Why was I replacing actual human interaction?

All of these thoughts, from my art history professor to Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra & Simulation to creepy futurist events to Facebook's fucked up privacy policy to people who once hated Facebook (and other social networking sites) who all of the sudden they won't stop posting about their personal life to the simple fact that I've always hated Facebook made me deactivate my account -- for awhile of course. An experiment of sorts but also to get my butt geared on applying for graduate school.

A friend (a real one, not a Facebook one) said that if we become dependent on these tools (social media) then need to get rid of them of our lives that we're just using them incorrectly. I disagree with him, because of two reasons:

1. There's no actual way of correctly using Facebook. You're either on it or you're not.

2. Most people I know who uses Facebook are dependent on it, and if you believe that's the incorrect way of using it then you should deactivate/delete your Facebook account.

Todos vuelven a la tierra en que nacieron, al embruje inconfundible de su sol

This past weekend I've been obsessing over Rita Indiana y Los Misterios. Hailing from the country everyone thinks I'm from, Dominican Republic, Rita Indiana's music pays respect to merengue (old) and experimenting with electro (new) making her music completely groundbreaking. Rita Indiana, has been taking DR by storm without having an official release. You could watch any of her live performances on youtube and hear the crowd singing along (as well as following her dancers' steps).

What makes me so excited aside from the smart lyrics and musical fusion is her androgynous look. There's always room for tons of criticism when a latina doesn't look "womanly" enough. Complete fearlessness is what you see and hear from Rita Indiana. Merengue and other forms of latino music have always been dominated by men. The machismo music industry is just going to have to set aside, hopefully forever. With all respects to reggaeton which I always like to think is the reason why there's MTV tres, I never felt like it was creative enough. I'm glad someone took a part of reggaeton and mixed it more in her sancocho.

Rita Indiana y Los Misterios -- La Hora de Volve

La Hora de Volve couldn't be a more perfect song, the African influenced merengue highlighted with electro. Could this be what our future sound like? Hope so!

Plus this video, with all its greatest has awesome tribal-like dancing.

Show your roots!

Where have all the architectures, gone?

City Hall of Opa-Locka

Last summer I picked up a poster "Only 6 Months Old Is Opa-Locka -- Sincere, Sustained Development is Making it Miami's Fastest Growing Suburbs" with images of historical places in Opa-Locka at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami. The poster illustrated points of Moorish Revival architectures interest in the city, incorporated in 1926. The work in progress is a collaborative by Anne Daems and Kenneth Andrew Mroczek entitled Opa-Tisha-Wocka-Locka, will tell the histories of Opa-Locka. Perhaps my immediately placement of the poster to my wall comes from my nerd fascination for historical places. Sadly, I didn't think much of it afterwards.

It wasn't until two months ago, when I making a trek to visit a friend in Coral Gables that I past the Opa-Locka Tri-Rail station. I was completely amazed. Never in the history of me riding trains, was I head over heals for how a city's train station was constructed. Everything I could remember from my Islamic Art and Architecture course came to mind: minarets, domes, arches, mosaics, the color (cobalt) blue. I felt like I was no longer in South Florida, heck, for sure not in the states either. To make me even more excited was an article I read about the city's developer, Glenn Curtiss in the Miami Herald...I believe. This whole town was developed by the theme "Arabian Fantasy" based on 1001 Arabian Tales.

In my recent trip to New York City, I made sure to look up as much as I can. There are buildings with many excessive decorative constructions, something you do not see in recent town developments and plazas. It made me wonder what future will hold for architectural design and how will people response to our current structures. I can't help but be completely bored and sad to see new constructions being built. Granted there's so much to planning constructions: monies (make it cheap, make a profit), labor, deals with the city and etc., but I miss looking at beauty.

Cool as smoking while pregnant

Sociological Images has to be one of my favorite website which I try to keep up with on Google Reader. Sometimes I end up skipping posts that are crucial reading because

1.) I tend to catch up with Google Reader at work.

2.) I'm probably catching up on Best Show on WFMU with Tom Scharpling while doing work that doesn't use too much of my thought process.

3.) FAILblog is a whole lot easier to take in, than reading amazing, informative articles.

It takes a lot of commitment to be a better person.

Catching up on Sociological Images, I came across a video called "The Story of Bottled Water"

A pretty simplified "story" but nevertheless, informative. The last few weeks I've been thinking about how much water bottle consumption is done in my household. My thoughts were mostly on the energy it takes to produce these bottles, which mostly never gets recycled.

Time for changes!

My Friends are blogging, so why did I stop?

First off, my awesome # 1 undergrad (undergrad, instead of 'college' because I need to work on that 'grad' school or what I like to say because it makes me feel like I'm an aging adult) bff ANDREA, has a new blog Eating with Good Intentions. An honest blog on Andrea's trials and tribulations on her effort to eat healthy. As a person who doesn't eat as healthy I should, it is inspiring to read and a call to action for myself as well.

Second off, my awesome # 2 undergrad bff Misael over at Art. Music. Film. Whatever. finally posted his last part to his Art History Senior Seminar paper.

Misael managed to get an A+ on his paper and I think Andrea and I only got a mere "A". My argument, there's no such thing as an A+ in the university level, because a 4.0 GPA is just an A, nothing more. Boooo! In all joking-ness aside, I looked over/slightly help edit this A+ paper. I thought about this paper when Jeanne-Claude past away a few months ago, and was glad that Misael decided to share it on his blog. Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, and Part Five . If you just slightly interested in art or always wondered about what the deal was with Christo and Jeanne-Claude, this is a must read.

Thee One to Change

A magazine about female drummers? I giggled and held the first issue like a prize. Interviews of Frankie Rose, Ali Koehler and others makes Tom Tom Magazine a forceful beat (harhar) to the lack of media representation of women in music.

Since I can remember no other instrument made me want to play music. I spent hours in front my parent's mirror, listening to Hole's Live Through This and pretending I was playing the drums. Since then, I have only been on a drum kit twice and both occurred last year. Finally I will get my drumming lessons and possibly buy my kit once funds and space kick in. Which leads to why I was disappointed with Frankie Rose's interview. A quite boring interview in which Frankie Rose shrugs at all the questions related to drumming. Understandably she doesn't consider herself a drummer but has been in some of the most talked about bands such as Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts and Dum Dum Girls. How can it be that this magazine's first interview is about a drummer who doesn't consider herself a drummer?

I've thought about it for awhile, and thought that deconstruction of drum playing is fine, keeping it simple is fine, but it gets boring quickly. You can't be punk at the age 40. As a listener I can appreciate Frankie Rose and her musical projects, but as a musician I would want to change everything she represents. I guess that's how it usually goes.

Lift American Spirits

More reasons to love Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

ZING!

Previously on Lost

Robert Gibbs on Lost

For some odd reason this past year I developed a crush on White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs. It's possibly because of his charming smirk he flashing during press conferences. There's a feeling there's a big joke residing in his mind and none of us are aware of. Plus, he looks sweet.

Although the State of the Union occurred last week I wonder if Gibbs will be watching Lost tonight. I wonder...