Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Caltech Girl

So, a friend of mine from college forwarded this link to me this afternoon. The geek pictured on that page is none other than Niky Morgan, dancin' queen, young and sweet, only seventeen (sorry, you have to scroll down to see her pic). I don't remember her being all that geeky--in fact, I thought she was pretty cool. She did, after all, pierce her belly-button, and had some snazzy britany spears moves. Then again, it was tech.

Now I'm kinda sad I gave away my TV. I think I'm going to have to find me a Beauty and the Geek buddy, at least as long as Niky's on the show.

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Message in a bottle

Yeah, I know, it's September 11th. I should blog about something deeply, profoundly patriotic, or at least spiritual, since this is not only the 6th anniversary of the fall of the twin towers, but also the 150th anniversary of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. I should, but I'm not going to.

Instead, I'm going to comment on iWNEX studios services. If you want to see a sample of what they do, look at their portfolio of re-touched celebrity photos. I'm not surprised that celebrity pictures are frequently heavily re-touched before being printed in magazines and such (it's expected, in fact), but the extent to which faces and bodies are manipulated is impressive. Eva Longoria (a rather tiny woman in real life) is made skinnier, as is Kelly Clarkson, and just about every other female celebrity pictured. Ever wonder why celebrities often bear only a passing resemblance to themselves on the cover of Cosmo or Vogue? Well, this is probably why.

I wonder at the utility of creating these idealized images for we women to compare ourselves to and chase after. I realize there are whole industries built up around the pursuit of physical perfection (photo re-touching being only one of many), and I realize our physical appearance plays into social hierarchies, but still, how useful is pursuit of an unobtainable ideal? How useful is it that we spend so many resources and so much energy in trying to become something that nobody could actually be?

Tuesday, September 11, 2007

World falls

Definitely a get a clue kind of moment. I'm not sure why it is, when so many adult actors and actresses lead such obviously divergent lifestyles from the characters they portray, that we expect child actors and actresses to be the pure, idealized, perfect children the Disney channel makes them pretend to be on TV. Really, what child is perfect, pure, and ideal? And why is it such a shock when an actor is different from the character they play? Really.