big cat jia

coolchicksfromhistory: Kang Tongbi (Kang Tung Pih) 康同璧, circa...

Tue, 08 May 2012 09:50:19 +0800

Kang Tongbi (Kang Tung Pih) 康同璧, circa 1905.

The daughter of a Chinese intellectual, Tongbi was the first Asian student at Barnard. After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, Tongbi returned to China and became involved in feminist causes. Unlike many other women of her class, Tongbi’s feet had never been bound as her parents objected to the practice. In Shanghai, Tongbi co-founded a Tianzuhui (Natural Feet Society) with a female doctor. Tongbi also edited Nüxuebao (Women’s Education), one of the first women’s journals in China, and published a biography of her father Kang Youwei. In the 1920s, she helped organize the Shanghai Women’s Association, which petitioned the Nationalist government in Nanjing for a new constitution under the slogan, “Down with the warlords and up with equality between men and women.”.

I’d never heard of the consensus process or...

Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:29:18 +0800

I’d never heard of the consensus process or ‘stack’ until my last year at school when suddenly my life was flooded with it. Sure it takes a little longer, but there is something truly transformative and empowering about the process and resulting decision. This short piece made by the lovely folks at Meerkat Media does an excellent and beautiful job at explaining the method as seen in practice at #ows. worth the watch.

(This has been floating around in various parts of my network for the past couple of days so I’m not quite sure whom to attribute it to [via ?])

bought new beachwear/lakewear today for the first time in five...

Wed, 20 Jul 2011 16:42:47 +0800

bought new beachwear/lakewear today for the first time in five years. this is what i want my four weeks in america to look like. everyday.

198now:

Summerland II

http://sfbayview.com/2011/why-should-you-die-for-a-transfer/

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 09:26:03 +0800

http://sfbayview.com/2011/why-should-you-die-for-a-transfer/:

this is literally insane and horrible simultaneously.

nprfreshair: erikostrom: Garrison Keillor, infamous hipster....

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 02:43:43 +0800

nprfreshair:

erikostrom:

Garrison Keillor, infamous hipster.
(via City Pages)

Garrison Keillor.

Been listening to so much Lake Wobegon.

You Write Like a Girl

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:54:40 +0800

“I don’t mean this in any unkind way.”

I may have to skip those books of his still sitting, unread, on my childhood book shelf from a Christmas five or six years ago.

curator-of-curiosities:

“In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society this week, during which VS Naipaul provoked fury by suggesting that women writers are ‘sentimental’ and ‘unequal to me’, he also claimed that ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.’ Do you?”

The Guardian provides a helpful little quiz here.

Also, “sentimental?” Is it 1850? Jesus.

I’m just about to check out his website, but I can vouch...

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:48:23 +0800

I’m just about to check out his website, but I can vouch that the entirety of his flickr is worth the look.

Intending to be blogging more and more on Chinese photography so keep those eyes of yours open and seeing.

triangletriangle:

Yuanling Wang

good: We imagine you can’t go too hard toward the net for a...

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 09:41:27 +0800

good:

We imagine you can’t go too hard toward the net for a spike, but this is still pretty great.

climateadaptation:

Comedy/tragedy. Arizona/Mexico fence.

rthuether:

Now that is taking a useless object, and giving it purpose.

POTATO TYPE

Tue, 31 May 2011 16:20:45 +0800

POTATO TYPE:

“Potatoes are the first kind of living things to be grown in space”.

brief and lovely video typography by Cheryl Yau.

"In many ways, interviews are sustained acts of discovery, not only for the person being interviewed..."

Mon, 30 May 2011 14:52:46 +0800

“In many ways, interviews are sustained acts of discovery, not only for the person being interviewed but for even the well-prepared interviewer. Thus, it is refreshingly often the case that someone with a long list of carefully written out questions discards the list and proceeds simultaneously and directly to talk to me—from out of our discussion rather than off a page—and then more discovery often does occur, with results that are usually unpredictable. Every situation therefore reflects a specific set of circumstances, and since I have been involved in the public domain as a political activist as well as an intellectual and scholar, all sorts of challenges arise, which I have tried to meet.”

- Edward W. Said, in Power, Politics, and Culture.

some truth!

Mon, 30 May 2011 10:55:11 +0800

some truth!

Yanqing, China 2011

Sat, 28 May 2011 18:55:13 +0800

Yanqing, China 2011

"Modernity is involved in ‘a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control of..."

Tue, 24 May 2011 15:59:50 +0800

“Modernity is involved in ‘a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control of the accidental…an absolute reign of calculative reason’”

- Castel 1991 in Lupton 1999 in Wisner et al. 2005 (At Risk, p. 17)

good: An Illustrated Chart Explaining What’s in Season - Food -...

Tue, 24 May 2011 10:12:40 +0800

good:

An Illustrated Chart Explaining What’s in Season - Food - GOOD

I’m a huge sucker for illustrated fruits and vegetables.

Also, this lady, Emma Dibben, does some beautiful artichokes, beets, cabbages, and garlic among other things (which I actually had embroidered onto a backpack of mine by the champions over at Seagull Bags).

I’ve been thinking about typography and font design for characters since I moved to Beijing a...

Tue, 17 May 2011 14:34:32 +0800

I’ve been thinking about typography and font design for characters since I moved to Beijing a number of months ago. I haven’t really investigated it yet, but saw this at NeochaEDGE yesterday, which reminded me to look into it.

I did a little reading this afternoon, coming across a couple interesting articles and ideas in my initial meanderings. The obvious primarily difference is the sheer number of characters used in Chinese (tens of thousands, 3-4 thousand for literacy) versus the English alphabet (26), producing the difficulty for designers to account for that vast an ocean and the outcome of many incomplete sets of fonts with only a couple thousand of the most common characters.

There’s a short primer at 八八吧 (88 bar) on modern Chinese topography (via Quora) which has good visual samples of the basic categories of fonts.

At Issue Journal’s interview with Affiche International in Shanghai, they discuss the visual problems posed by simplified Chinese versus traditional characters—gaping white space not originally intended (see the second character of the four).

Originally an invention of China but promulgated by Gutenberg, in the (sadly disappearing) analog world, there’s moveable type. Remember that? Anyways, it poses its own issues of gigantic scale. I hadn’t yet considered the pre-digital print era of the Chinese language, but idsgn.com has a lovely article on one of the last moveable type shops in HK (with great accompanying photographs).

Hey, this looks good: On March 11, 2011, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai. This...

Sun, 15 May 2011 13:38:10 +0800

Hey, this looks good:

On March 11, 2011, an earthquake struck off the coast of Sendai. This earthquake was the strongest to have ever hit Japan, and one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history.

This event seeks to provide New York architects with insight into the connections between the tragedy and the built environment through the lens of architects and engineers with direct knowledge of Japan. The panelists are Mutsuro Sasaki, Joji Kurumado, Paul Katz, Rafael Vinoly, Leslie Robertson, and Cliff Pearson. Moderated by Toru Hasegawa.

When: TUESDAY, MAY 24, 2011
Reception: 5:00 PM,
Panel Discussion: 5:30PM - 8:00 PM
Where: The Center for Architecture
536 LaGuardia Place NY, NY 10012

Please RSVP HTTP://CFA.AIANY.ORG/INDEX.PHP?SECTION=CALENDAR&EVTID=3223
Free for Members; $5 for Japan Society members, $10 for Non-Members
AIA CES LUs 1.5; HSW 1.5; SD 1.5
This event will be broadcasted online at http://www.ustream.tv/user/archiPicnic

http://www.arch.columbia.edu/announcement/school/section/programs/architecture/aia-ny-gdc-dialogues-new-japan-japan-brainstorming

In honor of Tarkovsky’s 79 birthday (if he were living), Toxico posted some polaroids of his...

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 11:16:13 +0800

In honor of Tarkovsky’s 79 birthday (if he were living), Toxico posted some polaroids of his the other day. White Space Gallery and the Tarkovsky foundation are releasing a portfolio of these unseen Polaroids in conjunction with the publishing of his book, “Bright, bright day”.

Haunting and cinematic: I mean it in the best of ways, and in the way that means I want to see more still photography by filmmakers.

(via FB friend, ED)

Towards a Politics of Solidarity

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 16:52:10 +0800

Left Forum is happening this weekend again in New York. I missed last year’s and am absent again for this one, but if you’re in the area, know I’mma gonna be real jealous. They’ve got the whole line-up on the website, with panels like “Can Capitalism be Good for Women?”, “The World Food and Agriculture Crisis”, “The Struggle Against Mainstream Economic Theory”, and twenty million other great things on a whole spectrum of topics. Barbara Ehrenreich and Cornel West are part of the keynote roster, plus they have scaled conference fees, which are very reasonable. No doubt that it will be great.

Anyways, I know it’s a little bit of late notice, but guess I’m just telling you to go, and send me your notes.

on fashion: complications of modernity and gender

Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:46:30 +0800

on fashion: complications of modernity and gender:

“Like other common experiences primarily gendered female, struggling to think through the rock and the hard place of clothing production and consumption is an opportunity to observe the intersectionality of privilege and power in everyday life.” (Textual Relations)

Somehow in my internet meanderings, I stumbled across “Textual Relations”, a blog written by a sociology PhD student, with this very excellent post (among others). I’ve run into this issue myself countless times, grappling with the terribly tangled, both deeply personal and simultaneously penetratingly global, mess of fashion. I remember eating lunch one afternoon in college with a boy whom at that point I’d been only dating for a handful of months but felt very strongly about. We were arguing about affinity for and interest in fashion, and he nearly brought me to tears with his fierce declarations that dressing oneself was inherently vain and fashion a bane to the possibility of ideal human relationships. At 19, I had trouble thinking of a counter, but also knew that I could not and did not want to reject the very intimate pleasure I felt in the act of choosing my clothes. Now, I find myself starting to write on and on (because my understanding of global oppression through the creation of commodities has deepened; because I know now those declarations came from the privilege of being a man; because that several years argument still feels unfinished), but I’ll stop as this piece already does a wonderful job at articulating precisely the multi-pronged dilemma of fashion so real to many of us.

4 ALL MY NYC HOMIES: “At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the...

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 11:21:00 +0800

4 ALL MY NYC HOMIES:

“At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli’s 1972 diagram.”

I’ve also read suggestions to open several tabs of mta.me at once for a more complex effect. My internet’s too slow in China to successfully experiment—blah, but let me know how it goes. Check actual site here: www.mta.me or for more details about the project see creator Alexander Chen’s blog: http://blog.chenalexander.com/2011/conductor-mta/

(via motionographer)