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50books_poc2009-06-22 02:55 pm
sanguinity) wrote in 50books_poc2009-06-22 02:55 pm
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Kip Fulbeck
58. Kip Fulbeck, Paper Bullets: a fictional autobiography.
I loved this a lot. Kip Fulbeck's background as a spoken-word artist is very prominent in Paper Bullets: this is a man who knows how to tell a story, how to pace it, how to deliver it, how to catch up his audience and seduce them. And these are good stories, too. I enjoy a lot of what I read, but I don't savor that many books; Paper Bullets is one I savored.
59. Kip Fulbeck, part asian, 100% hapa.
What are you?
100-some individuals, each photographed very simply against a white background; each photograph is faced with the subject's hand-written, free-form answer to the question "What are you?" Some people write several paragraphs, others come back with a one-liner ("Shouldn't you be asking my name, first?"); school-age kids draw pictures; toddlers scribble. The so-called "official" answer to said question, the list of each individual's ethnic heritages, is typewritten up in the corner, but the "official" answer is always dwarfed by the handwriting and the direct gazes. If you're kinda starved for representations of mixed people (which I am), this is all kinds of awesome.
Cons: White-Asian mixes predominate, even though some individuals are Asian-Asian, Asian-Black, or other mixes. Additionally, fully a third of Paul Spickard's afterword is a defense of the Asian-American appropriation of "hapa". (And not a very good defense, in my mind: language changes, we're using the word respectfully.)
Samples from the book (different layout than in the book, but same images/info) are available on the website.
I loved this a lot. Kip Fulbeck's background as a spoken-word artist is very prominent in Paper Bullets: this is a man who knows how to tell a story, how to pace it, how to deliver it, how to catch up his audience and seduce them. And these are good stories, too. I enjoy a lot of what I read, but I don't savor that many books; Paper Bullets is one I savored.
59. Kip Fulbeck, part asian, 100% hapa.
What are you?
100-some individuals, each photographed very simply against a white background; each photograph is faced with the subject's hand-written, free-form answer to the question "What are you?" Some people write several paragraphs, others come back with a one-liner ("Shouldn't you be asking my name, first?"); school-age kids draw pictures; toddlers scribble. The so-called "official" answer to said question, the list of each individual's ethnic heritages, is typewritten up in the corner, but the "official" answer is always dwarfed by the handwriting and the direct gazes. If you're kinda starved for representations of mixed people (which I am), this is all kinds of awesome.
Cons: White-Asian mixes predominate, even though some individuals are Asian-Asian, Asian-Black, or other mixes. Additionally, fully a third of Paul Spickard's afterword is a defense of the Asian-American appropriation of "hapa". (And not a very good defense, in my mind: language changes, we're using the word respectfully.)
Samples from the book (different layout than in the book, but same images/info) are available on the website.
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He does video, too. If you click through to his website, he's got a bunch of his short films there.
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"I meant to talk about the parts of the lecture addressing the selection process for the project and forgot. On being asked, Fulbeck said that to get picked, it helped to write something interesting and to be male (because 75% of the participants, all volunteers, were female) and not of Japanese ancestry (because some large percentage of the participants were). He was also asked about whether he was concerned about people fetishizing the portraits. He said yes; he had to cut the number of portraits by half, and as he, his editor, and someone else were going through the portraits with sticky dots, his editor stopped and said, "I have a confession. I haven't picked any hot girls." And it turned out they were all doing the same thing (so they went back and put a few in). Anyway, aware of the issue, but he said he didn't really know how to stop people. Which is okay as an answer, though a better one, IMO, would have been to say that he was attempting to portray people as people, which is one way to avoid fetishizing; but then he said shucks, no-one's ever fetishized me, I don't know how it feels. And then I was annoyed on gender grounds, especially since he'd made a few Mars-Venus comments previously."
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:: but then he said shucks, no-one's ever fetishized me, I don't know how it feels. ::
Not!Kip is fetishized in Paper Bullets. But he's also really slow to pick up on it.
Mm, Paper Bullets might irritate you, too: gender grounds and/or being overly facile. There's a bit near the end where not!Kip is guest-lecturing, and tells the audience that he wants his art to "fuck" the viewer; not!Kip then spends the rest of the lecture obessessing that everyone in the room is now looking at him and seeing just a giant walking erection. On reading that I thought, "But dude, you are a giant walking erection." Because as much as I was loving the book in other ways, there is something giant walking erection about it, too.
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