Culture in the Blender

All day today, I’ve been listening to a song by S. H. E. (Taiwanese band) called Ni kuai le wo shui yi. It has some clear r&b influences in both singing and the music, and the play with the words is fun. (On a more third culture analysis level, I think the American influences are [...]

While watching an episode of Battlestar Galactica that had originally aired on Australian television, I recognized the song they used in the trailer for the next episode. I couldn’t remember who sang it, but I remembered the name of the song – Spaceman. A little YouTubing later, I remembered it was by Babylon Zoo and [...]

An older Racialicious post made me think of the attitude I’ve seen both online and in real life from some Americans, who seem to think it’s endlessly cool to be Japanese. I’m not really sure where this meme comes from. Americans are very patriotic, so what makes a subset of probably the most patriotic people [...]

I learned something interesting in my culture and psychology class the other day. Americans think that the world is more malleable than the self. (Whereas Chinese, and probably most everyone else, think that the self is more malleable than the world.) Maybe that’s why so many Americans play their music out loud without headphones on [...]

One of the most obvious differences between the United States and Europe is how racism is structured. In some ways, racism in Europe seems rather simple. Perhaps it seems simple to me in part because I’ve seen it so much more than in the US, but the key concept seems to be xenophobia. The people [...]

A while back, my boyfriend’s (sambo/avomies) sister told him, after him mentioning that the dollar was falling, that the dollar falling was some kind of lie or conspiracy or misrepresentation. I’m not sure how the wording was put, I wasn’t there. But she clearly hadn’t heard of it in the probably 2+ years that it’s [...]

You know you’re not American when the first thing that pops into your head as a defense when people accuse you of being classist, even as a joke, is to confess your bourgeoise background (because you know you’re not talking your way out of that one) and proclaim the insignificance of your suffering compared to [...]

Listening to Pandora at work, a song called New American Century by KMFDM came on. The lyrics caught my attention. In context of what I’ve been reading (and re-reading) this seems right on the money. There are strong directions in American politics that could endanger not only democracy and freedom in America, but given America’s [...]

While waiting at O’Hare recently, I made the mistake of walking into a bookstore to spend some time. (I don’t have gold status with any frequent flyer program, since I fly so little, so I can’t wait in a lounge.) I call it a mistake, because I’m almost incapable of walking into a bookstore without [...]

This morning, I read my American boyfriend some parts of Jeremy Rifkin’s book The European Dream. I read the sections pertaining to the American Dream and the religosity of the United States. The extent of religosity and its ties to the American Dream in the United States was made clear to me for the first [...]