Category Archives: jeanie’s musings

In the 4th grade, I had a best friend named Jacqueline.

I think she was French. She was not pretty but she was graceful and smart.

I would love to say her name in my American accent. Jack- qwa-leen.

It sounded like a health spa.

Then, one day, she said, why don’t you come over.

So, I did.

She lived in a condo in Great Kills. Her father wore a sports coat with slacks.

Her parents seemed terribly alone.

They only had her, and you could tell, they felt this singularity.

But the way they said her name:

Jah-qwa-leen was so beautiful. Like a house that was leaning off to the side. Like a waterfall. Like a wind out of a cave.

It felt surprising, when I first heard it.  Like eating olives for the first time.

I couldn’t go back to calling her name the way I did. Instead I called her Jac, trying to soften the “a” a little in there.

Trying to capture a bit of that wind, in a name.

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The Ocean

[i forgot about this poem that i wrote two three years ago!] 

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When love ends, it is exactly how you imagine.

 

Like swimmers in the sea, you lap the latitude,

Its blue ribbon. The sea is large.

The sea is wide.

At some point we stop

And wade.

We point to the shore

For rescue, the sky for

Weather,

The fish for fuel.

No longer able to swim

We hold each other up

Weighting the possibilities.

My arms grow tired and I cannot

Keep treading.

 

So I let you go.

 

I swim for the white outline,

The one that promises

The sun and shore, perhaps a

Palm tree in which I can rest.

 

I lap. I lap large and wide

My arms like helicopter blades

That cut through the blue of the

Ocean.

I realize how strong my limbs

Are without you

How heavy the heart

Can rest in the chest as it heaves

and looks for breath.

 

When I reach the sand

I don’t look back.

This is the only way

Out of the large ocean,

This is the only way

 

We can save ourselves.

-Jeanie Kwak

The Cat

The Cat

picture-20

She is not my cat. But she acts like she is mine. Or perhaps I am hers.

When I close my door, she cries. I can hear her plaintive song through the wooden door. When I open it at night, she stalks in regally, her eyes boldly challenging mine. She leaps onto the bed, studies my expression, licks her chops and settles in, hair by muscle by hair. Like watching a dust cloud disappear. Only the eyes remain, 2 pale pools that take me in.

In the summer, when the windows are open and she has rubbed enough ankles and shins, leaving her mark, no doubt, she climbs up onto the ledge with two paws and her eyes grow greener, the iris like wounded slits. She smells the birds, the wet laundry, the dirt, the wooden planks, the chicken wire, the weeds beneath the ground. She works her jaw a bit, in her mind she is biting down on feathery flesh. We watch her–we, the two tall things that stroke her head and back, she watches our expression, like scanning the sky for weather.

We are her storms, we are her placid seas. We are everything to her. When we leave, the quiet of the apartment folds her in. She settles on a soft spot and crosses her paws. She can watch a pattern of light until it disappears. Then she withdraws into herself, into the tiniest porthole of where we cannot follow. Everything is there but the world. There is nothing she does not know. For what little there is, she is sure, she knows everything.

I think if I were a sea creature, I’d be a deep water squid. I’d be translucent and speckled and shy. I’d spill ink if  you were to bother me. I’d have paper fine fins and float through the depths, shaped like a throat or a  flower. I’d be solitary and song. I’d be a bell in the dark.

Picture 12

9-7-2009

this past weekend was strange.

*

the octopus is fresh here, she said. we are in flushing. flat, dark fish are swooping or resting in glass aquariums. like cages. except the bars are clear, invisible. Underwater, it is like flying.

a tentacle falls off the small plate and writhes a bit.

i watch it, mouth open, i watch it as it curls a small muscular arm, blind, waving, desperate.

the waitress tries to scoop it up with a chopstick but it clings to the table with its suckers.

*

7 am sunlight on a rooftop. the photographer has a room filled with cameras paper and photos, on the floor, on the walls. when i open the door, i am in shock a bit. as if witnessing a murder scene. there is something violent about it.

*

you have so much power right now, he says, gently.

(they look at her thoughtfully.)

the amber lights go on, like the end of an opera. It is beautiful. It is 4 am, and it feels like the sun has turned its face on early, it feels like a hum, the beginning of a song. a progression.

*

she wonders what exactly she is doing and what she is feeling. she puts a pair of yellow sunglasses on her nose. good morning, she says.

*

Black milk of daybreak. We drink you at night. – Paul Celan

Mountains

7mihTLgctpoi0pcwJS1udoHQo1_500There was a part of the mountains in Korea where you could hear the howling. My uncle lived up there and he wasn’t well.  He lived, hidden in those rooms, in that house that seemed shadowed. He had servants. He smoked cigarettes. They would serve lunch on the long low table with short ebony legs, porcelain dishes full of pickled treats. I was a little girl and I liked to wander. They let me, the adults, and they sat smoking and drinking iced rice drinks in the cool rooms, in the shade. I encountered two mountain men slaughtering a pig in the stream, turning the water a brilliant crimson, and also a cliff with caves: the moaning. At first I was frightened and remained rooted to the spot but I always returned because the wind was so beguiling. Perhaps there was a little bit of the storm in me, even then.

photo: Nobuyushi Araki

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I decided something this past weekend and this decision feels quite sure and right. Doing something purposefully feels so empowering. I am going to watch what happens in the course of the next 6 months. Something has anchored me. I’ve discovered what it is that has caused so much dissatisfaction lately and the little things I have been doing since this weekend has alleviated this feeling. Isn’t it amazing how much of a mystery we are to ourselves?

I don’t mean to be cryptic! But this is a public blog and I know, from the feedback I get, that people I know and don’t know read it.

This is how the entire course of a life can be changed: by doing nothing.”
— Ian McEwan (On Chesil Beach)

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In other news, interview with London based photographer Hatnim Lee (see my post: “The Roses Curved Inward” below) coming soon….

Sweet n Vicious

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I feel a bit somber today. Don’t know why. Last night was fun. We had cocktails in the dark garden and I looked up and saw all the lit up apartments and the quiet behind that. And what could be my voice floating up there. And the listening.   And here, in the outside there was just darkness and laughing and broken glass. I saw an old lover and we pretended not to see one another. I put my hair slowly in a bun and looked past his face and into the room where all the wheels turned into liquid and this girl, I don’t know her name, but she had shadows under her eyes that matched her voice and it made me want to be like her — if only for a moment. The bartender girl leaned over and said I like your hair like that, it’s so pretty, I like your hair away from your face. And I leaned back to her and said, thank you. And then I went to a mirror to look at myself to see what she was seeing but I couldn’t see it, even when I tried and tried and the mirror just turned to gold and then it became opaque and  I turned away. I think I was telling a friend about a grievance and she said that it’s time to just move on and I said I know I know  I know that I know and it was like a rhyme that could sing but I couldn’t  understand.  And then I let loose my hair and waited.

Joanna Newsom On Lady Gaga

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Newsom was quoted on a recent Guardian article about her thoughts on Lady Gaga:

“I’m mystified by the laziness of people looking at how she presents herself, and somehow assuming that implies there’s a high level of intelligence in the songwriting. Her approach to image is really interesting, but you listen to the music, and you just hear glow sticks. Smart outlets for musical journalism give her all this credit, like she’s the new Madonna […] Although I’m coming from a perspective of also thinking Madonna is not great at all. I’m like, fair enough: she is the new Madonna, but Madonna’s a dumb-ass!”

Who knew Newsom had that kind of venom inside of her?! Not even Joanna herself, apparently, because she quickly realized the quote was a bit much, and later sent an e-mail to The Guardian clarifying— though not taking back— her statement:

“I may have contradicted myself. My problem isn’t actually with Lady Gaga. But there’s not much in her music to distinguish it from other glossy, formulaic pop. She just happens to wear slightly weirder outfits than Britney Spears. But they’re not that weird— they’re mostly just skimpy. She’s fully marketing her body/sexuality; she’s just doing it while wearing, like, a ‘fierce’ telephone hair-hat. Her sexuality has no scuzziness, no frank raunchiness, in the way that, say, Peaches, or even Grace Jones, have— she’s Arty Spice! And, meanwhile, she seems to take herself so oddly seriously, the way she talks about her music in the third person, like she’s Brecht or something. She just makes me miss Cyndi Lauper. […] I shouldn’t have called Madonna a dumb-ass. Her music and she have just gotten so boring to me, this last decade. I think maybe she doesn’t hold her money very gracefully, the way some people can’t hold their drink. But one thing she is surely not is dumb.”

-reblogged from Towerofsleep tumblr

hmm.. I’m of the Gaga camp. Not that I find her music revolutionary, but I find her a bit of a perfect storm. All the right elements at the right time.  That’s her egg. Or her cake, or what have you. She’s meant to go viral. I don’t find her antics irritating. YET. Do a bit more and it might be glaring. Do it just enough and I’ll continue to listen. and watch. and google and twitter and update and pass it on. That line might shift though. Who said the music public wasn’t fickle?

also, I think it’s a generational thing: millenials and Gen X’ers grew up in the age of EMO and indie. We just don’t understand Hubris of any kind. It’s foreign, distasteful and goes against trend. Which is exactly why it is so fascinating to watch. For me, anyway. Who had it last? Maybe Madonna. It’s a dying breed.

The Ones To Watch/Part I

Being an Asian girl that lives in NYC, the Asian face, I confess, is not something I ponder about deeply. Shame on you, you might say.  But here’s how I see it:  Why think about something that’s a given? It’s just something that I accept as fact, as part of the landscape, as real as subways and cart hot dogs and yellow cabs. It’s the de facto that comes with living in an ethnically diverse city. Are we the minority? Perhaps, but what does that word mean anymore? I recently had a conversation with a fellow who bristled at this question. Does it mean statistics? Does it mean that we are marginal? That we don’t have a say, that we aren’t movers or shakers, that we wield no influence? Yes and no. Thinking back on this instance, I think my momentary struggle to define the word came from a deep sense of dissatisfaction with it’s traditional meaning. I was trying to redefine the word I’ve heard almost all my life in reference to what I was and ultimately resisted. For me, all the old meanings no longer applied. I wanted a new kind of language to define who I was. Do I have an agenda? Perhaps. And it’s admittedly this: to de-exotic-cize (if that’s a word). To make familiar and no longer foreign. Do I understand that the Asian image is used because it feels novel? Absolutely. Is it a trend? I hope not. I don’t care how we get there, let’s just get there. Let’s use the stereotype for the opportunity to break it. But talking about it only gets you so far. The Asian face in the real world are business owners and entrepreneurs, they are dreamers and workers and entertainers and teachers—they are real people that make things happen in the world. But media, that wonderous place that projects all one’s ideas about beauty and fantasy and want and consumption- well, that place has been slow coming in realizing the need for an ethnically diverse image. And let’s not underestimate it’s power: it can, quite effectively, influence the attention of the public, shape our ideas about what we find “beautiful” and worthy of our attention.

But the times are changing—thanks to technology and the global neighborhood we live in, our neighbors can be as near or as far to us as we’d like them to be. There’s no excuse anymore – wherever you are, wherever you live, your “backyard” has become virtual. In a sense, your “neighborhood” has now become global. The world has gotten smaller, faster and more accessible.  And with this new globalized view of communication, the face that greets us as we watch a cell phone commercial, or a glossy editorial spread or reports to us about the newest band or trend or style has also changed. It could be an American-Vietnamese designer who has taught herself to make lovely ethereal clothes, it could be an L.A. Japanese blogger whose messy rock and roll style captures thousands of readers everyday, or the Korean model that, for the first time in Ford Model History, won the International competition for the face of 2008. All of these could be firsts, they could be seen as small advancements in creating ripples in an otherwise predominately westernized pond. That being said, this piece is just a slice of what you might see happening in the world of media. It’s the slice that I see, a world that I participate in—and it just happens to be in the realm of fashion.  So, before you start emailing me about how I’ve left out news anchors, sports figures, actors, writers, musicians, Asian American activists and community leaders, I just want to say this: tiny slice.

In the following weeks you will see 4 Asian faces that actively engage in the world of media and fashion and that have made things happen. Familiarize yourself with them. They are definitely the ones to watch.