Shoot Promos on Race, Class, Gender, Etc

"To recognize one's own insanity is, of course, the arising of sanity, the beginning of healing and transcendence." - Eckhart Tolie 3/11/2022. I'm meeting with Zachary at a coffee shop in Lakewood to select the photos from my photoshoot on 3/8. I assumed that I was only going to limit it to 20 but my best friend assured me that I wouldn't be able to resist going with the package of 30 photos. Sure enough as we went through the 150 or so photos he showed me, we kept whittling it down until we couldn't whittle it past 30. I called Piper and put her own speaker so she could tell me "I told you so", which I enjoyed giving her the opportunity to do so. Zachary and I would meet 4 weeks later so I could pick up a beautiful box with my 30 photos enlarged in 11x14 prints. I would also receive the digital copies of my photos. When he asked me what I intended to do with the photos, I shared that I intended to start a blog series and tell a story or anecdote wit...

"All too often we think of community in terms of being with folks like ourselves: the same class, same race, same ethnicity, same social standing and the like... I think we need to be wary: we need to work against the danger of evoking something that we don't challenge ourselves to actually practice." - Bell Hooks Continuing from my blog last week about the fallout and trauma response from the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident at the Oscars ( and that my friends is what we in the business refer to as a callback; no I am not in the business ), I was left with the feeling that I had no place in a world that perpetuates and indirectly rewards such broken masculinity. I felt isolated. I felt disconnected. I felt defeated. Because the truth of the matter was, I was broken too. Maybe not in the same way that caused Will Smith to lose his sh*t, but I identified with that hurt even while recognizing how toxic it was. It's why I had such an intense reaction and why it elicited a ...

"The reality of truth is not to be bought, to be sold, to be repeated; it cannot be caught in books. It has to be found from moment to moment, in the smile, in the tear, under the dead leaf, in the vagrant thought, in the fullness of love." - Jiddu Krishnamurti I was tasked with having a difficult conversation with a client this week: she was to be given a move out date from our Transitional Program for failure to adhere to our guidelines. When families enter our domestic violence shelter, there's not a lot asked of them. They are expected to work and/or go back to school. If they are not currently working, then they are expected to attend domestic violence classes going over topics like parenting, anger management, and self-empowerment. They are not regular tenants so they are expected to keep their units, 1 bedroom apartments, clean everyday. They are not required to pay rent or utilities but they do have to put money away into a savings account; money put away that the...

"Maybe he's found the answer to all the April snow" - Prince, Sometimes it Snows in April The following portrait was inspired by album covers from two of my favorite artists, Prince's 1986 album Parade and David Bowie's 1977 album Heroes . They were two prolific genre defying singer-songwriters who constantly reinvented themselves and pushed the boundaries of gender image and sexuality. As a music nerd, I like to create debate topics like: if you measure the body of work in both quantity and quality, which artist had the greatest decade of music? Some of my qualifications: do they have 3 or 4 widely considered classic albums and several songs from that era that have stood the test of time? While Michael Jackson is synonymous with the 1980's like no other pop star, he technically only released 2 solo albums ( Thriller in 1982 and Bad in 1987). Is that enough quantity to stack that up against every other artist and decade? For me, David Bowie in the 1970'...

"A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Music is such a time capsule so we will romanticize the music from our formative years as the "golden age". I will resist the urge to be old man yelling at cloud and say that the music of the 80's and 90's is far superior to the music of Gen-Z, signaling that I'm officially washed. One of the formative songs of my adolescence was 1995's "I Wish" by Skee-Lo, the very definition of a one-hit wonder. While rap music can often characterized by braggadocios hyper-masculinity, this track was a humorous, self-deprecating lament on personal shortcomings. "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her...". Even though Skee-Lo was a black man from Los Angeles via Chicago, "I Wish" was for me the quintessential Korean American male anthem, as a 5'9" Korean male...

  "I know um... it's just that my truth is that I am damaged goods, and this has really messed things up for me. And I think I need some time with it." - David Rose, Schitt's Creek, S04EP07 I met Lee at a youth group church retreat where we both signed up as counselors. She was engaging, bubbly and far less stuffy than the churchgoers I was accustomed to. I must have stood out from the other Korean American college guys in my pink bandana print t-shirt (I can't stress enough the cultural impact of Cam'Ron and Dipset in the early 2000's) and cane that I used due to my knee tendonitis. Lee grew up at that church and hadn't really been back since she left for college; I was the newbie who had only recently started attending.  The thing about "black sheep": in many settings you're the only one there. But when two or more are gathered, be prepared for anything.  We set next to each other on the bus to UC Santa Barbara, where the retreat was to...

  "Having grown up so familiar with creating a pleasing facade, I now end up compelled to reveal things inside and say, 'Okay, now you really see me. Do you still love me?' And then it's never enough; it always has to be total self-revelation." - Kathryn Harrison One of my earliest coping mechanisms were to create facades, not because I'm a sociopath who lacks empathy. Quite the opposite; I created facades because I have empathy and inherited the people pleasing trait from my parents. I became whatever version of myself that I felt people wanted, in order for them to feel safe and valued. While I may have used a different toolbox than a sociopath, my facades were still a form of manipulation to get people to like me more.  Why do we create facades? If you're a person of color, woman, LGBTQ+, or non-Protestant, something we're all familiar with is  code switching,  a survival tool we adopt to assimilate in predominantly WASP (White, Anglo-Saxon, Prote...