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westshellos · 1 year

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cyborgs, magical girls, girlboss capitalism and temp-scapes: a review of bee and puppycat

[ preface: this is in reference to the original youtube series, not the netflix lazy in space re-release. i liked the original’s subtle storytelling and worldbuilding techniques (ye old adage, “show not tell”), which, in my opinion, was carelessly done away with in the re-release. the netflix version feels more “tell” than “show”, and its in-your-face expositions completely remove the ambiguity and complexity that made the original so enjoyable. so yeah, i’m a little disappointed with the direction of the netflix version, but because i love the concept of the series so much, i’ll be following it to see if it gets any better.

also, spoilers ahead, of course. ]

the first time i watched bee and puppycat 4 years ago, i couldn’t help but see parallels between bee’s damaged arm in the final episode and major kusanagi’s mangled cyborg body in the iconic tank scene of ghost in the shell (1995). i couldn’t find any sources linking the two, and i don’t know if natasha allegri drew from mamoru oshii specifically, but let me outline their similarity: in their respective scenes, both of them exert themselves to the point of bodily destruction, exposing their bodies as mechanically-constituted—beneath the appearance of skin, both bee and kusanagi are shown to be amalgamations of wires, nuts and bolts.

immediately i was reminded of donna haraway’s cyborg manifesto, which suggested that examining the figure of the cyborg was productive for feminism because it represented a rejection of established boundaries—such as that of human/animal, human/machine, nature/nurture, man/woman and so on and so forth—that have structured our ways of knowing thus far (gross oversimplification but you get the point).

ghost in the shell captures this sense of productive transgression more directly: kusanagi is portrayed to be simultaneously masculine in her strength and behavior yet feminine in her physical appearance; she’s also a mechanical body with an (albeit questionable) “organic” implanted soul or “ghost”. the movie in turn asks questions about life—how we classify something as living and why others don’t fall under the same category. it complicates our assumptions about biology, humanity and gender. in line with haraway’s project, ghost in the shell highlights new possibilities of thinking about the human. maybe if we abandon our narrow-minded assumptions, they both posit, we can also leave behind the pointless bickering over who can or cannot go to which bathrooms or why men shouldn’t be allowed to wear dresses and focus on other things that might actually contribute to improving lives.

bee and puppycat doesn’t quite interrogate the same things, or if it does it isn’t presented as overtly. starring an unemployed woman named bee and her part-puppy part-cat pet-partner, the series revolves around the eponymous pair traversing strange landscapes in an alternate dimension named “fishbowl space”, completing absurd “temp jobs” and hanging out with bee’s friend and aspiring-chef deckard. on the surface, it’s easy to look at its pastel color palette and cutesy aesthetic and dismiss its seriousness. but a closer look at allegri’s history and the series itself proves that it’s far from shallow. having worked on adventure time (like her contemporary rebecca sugar) prior to bee and puppycat, allegri’s show has been compared to both adventure time and steven universe, which have each gained attention for the depth and solemnity of their narratives when contrasted against their cartoon visuals. combine that with the parallels between bee and kusanagi, and you get me wondering what the significance of the cyborg is in the show. i don’t have an answer quite yet, but i do have thoughts.

one thing that caught my attention was the character bee herself. unlike your usual girlboss (think amy dunne, furiosa, lara croft, or even major kusanagi), bee is unemployed, unmotivated, lazy (hence the tagline: lazy in space), lives alone with her pet and does nothing but eat and watch tv all day. under the lens of contemporary girlbossery, bee is a catastrophic failure.

but girlbossery, as we already know, is a capitalist scam. not only does it perpetuate the idea that gender equality is contingent on economic productivity, it repackages consumerism as feminism—“if you want to be the perfect girlboss like me, you need to have this thing!” or “if you want to support a girlboss, please buy this!” worst of all, girlbossery sells you the lie of an ideal woman who is, more often than not, just a reinforcement of the status quo: she’s usually thin (coded as “healthy”) and conventionally attractive (read: european-looking), smart and always financially successful (by her own merit, of course). at its core, the girlboss is an exclusionary construct that ignores the intersections of race and class in favor of a flimsy promise of meritocratic justice.

bee, then, signals a “willingness to move beyond the ‘girl power’ rhetoric...and offer a range of nuanced female characters”, as mihaela mihailova writes. sometimes, this just means someone who’s relatable. bee might not be a girlboss, but she is one of us. allegri herself was surprised at “[h]ow many girls [watched the show and] were like, ‘oh, that’s me.’” having relatable female characters means having realistic depictions of women that might not conform to societal norms or expectations; it means representing women as we are rather than putting forth abstract ideas of women that are fundamentally unattainable.

what has the cyborg have to do with all of this? to be honest, and like i said, i’m not sure. but allegri has cited sailor moon as a major inspiration for the series, and that gives me some sort of insight: maybe it’s an update of the mahou shoujo (literally magical girl) genre. instead of a young girl who transforms into a cute costume via the power of magic and defeats evil (often older, powerful women), you have a cyborg who’s essentially your average millenial/older gen-z woman fighting a mysterious, abstract dark force from an alternate dimension that coincidentally is a realm where precarious (and not to mention absurd) work is found. while classic mahou shoujo tropes arose in the 1990s and are aligned with notions of feminine power and innocence, bee and puppycat’s incorporation of the cyborg seems to be a 2010/2020s rejection of these ideas. for the cyborg, as haraway says, “is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence.”

bee’s cyborg ontology firstly highlights that femininity is a construct that is fluid, malleable and therefore imitable—when we find out that she’s actually a cyborg at the end of the series, it doesn’t stop us from perceiving her as a girl. she looks like a girl, dresses and behaves like one, so why would we think any different? what that unveiling does is say that anyone can be a girl, as long as they adhere to enough social norms. in doing so, bee and puppycat suggests that there is no magical feminine power because there is no inherent feminine essence to draw from. bee doesn’t channel the magical power of femininity like her magical girl counterparts; she relies on her mechanically-constituted body. her attempt at saving moully in the final scene wasn’t done with magic but by harnessing her mechanical strength as a cyborg.

that is not to say that older mahou shoujo depictions are “bad”—what does that mean, anyway?—rather, bee and puppycat conveys a shift in female representation that is more inclusive and relevant in the present. which brings me to my next point: temp jobs and precarious work.

while deciding on the primary text for my ht i stumbled upon temporary, a book by hilary leichter with a premise that’s supiciously similar to bee and puppycat’s concept of fishbowl space (albeit published after the web series aired): a young woman floats through different worlds, fulfilling various duties under a myriad of temporary positions with no prospect of stable, permanent employment. similarly, bee is fired from her job at deckard’s family restaurant and earns a living with puppycat by going to strange places in “fishbowl space” to complete whimsical, absurd tasks. in one of the first episodes, bee and puppycat go to jellycube planet (pictured below) to complete the task of feeding a sugared cherry on one side of the planet so food will grow for the animals on the other side of the planet, all of which are owned by an unnamed alien farmer (also pictured below).

if leichter’s temporary is about the precarity of work in the age of late capitalism, then bee and puppy cat is undoubtedly on the same page. not only do the disparate planets and unnamed clients in the show parallel the fractured, contract-based and short-term nature of jobs in our real world, bee almost always encounters danger within fishbowl space. whether it’s the aforementioned cherry being a soul-eating monster that tries to eat bee or the shadowy black hands that end up capturing moully, these landscapes of temporary work (or temp-scapes, as i deem them) are often treacherous and difficult to navigate. with precarious jobs taking up an increasingly larger proportion of the job market, and with the pandemic exacerbating this trend, bee and puppycat sees the magical girl grow into a woman whose freedoms and safety are threatened by the demands of the economy. bee’s cyborg body, then, is also symbolic of the effects of capitalism as it continues to figure humans as productive machines.

nevertheless, i think bee and puppycat is trying to construct something positive. about femininity, capitalism and about the future of humanity. and with a cyborg at the heart of the show, i don’t doubt that they will. or maybe i’m just overthinking all of this. either way, the web series was really fascinating and engaging and, if fate allows, i might write all of these ideas out in full detail in the future. until then, i rate the bee and puppycat series a 9/10.

#rambles

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westshellos · 1 year

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preface to “a few of my favourite things”

coming across @/dieworkwear’s tweets on ethical fashion while coming home to a perpetually-full wardrobe everyday really made me reconsider some of my sartorial purchases.

one thing he pointed out was the fact that the average american spends $600 on clothes a year. with that kind of money, he argued, you could buy a good piece of quality clothing that would undoubtedly last you more than a year and that didn’t involve slave wages and inhumane working conditions in the production process. this was in response to somebody defending SHEIN—what i like to call TaoBao lite for people who can’t read chinese—an ecommerce website that was recently crowned 2022′s most popular fashion brand. with the countless number of labor law violations we’ve seen from other brands (nike, zara, h&m, or most of what��s on the market right now) over the years, it’s no surprise that SHEIN too was found guilty of all these violations and more.

this isn’t news to anyone. if anything it’s become something that’s almost a given for any fashion brand that’s able to put out new stuff on their website every week (or day). as someone who knows how sewing works (sort of), i of all people should know that ethical fashion is expensive fashion: clothes aren’t easy to make, and sewing is one of the few things left that hasn’t been fully automated because it’s a meticulous, arduous process that takes immense skill and dexterity. the closest we’ve come are automatic electric sewing machines that still have to be operated by skilled tailors. it’s why clothes from a label like los angeles apparel (not the best example for dov charney reasons, but that’s a whole other topic that i don’t have the space to get into here; point is, they pay their workers a living wage of US$20-35/hour) charges US$24 for a plain cotton t-shirt and not $2. it’s why a hand knit sweater from a small business on instagram costs US$300 and not $30. making clothes is hard, and when SHEIN charges a suspiciously low amount of money for clothing, it’s because it is suspicious.

a common defense for buying from SHEIN is that it’s one of the only options for people who can’t afford to buy from ethical brands. but as @/dieworkwear has already pointed out, the average american (and arguably, singaporean in my context) probably has enough money to buy what they need (good quality things, too) and have it last for a year or more. this “defense” is, more often than not, a thinly veiled excuse for people who want to do $1000 SHEIN hauls without feeling guilty. using “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” as a reason is arguably even worse, as it’s co-opting a phrase that’s supposed to describe the unethical nature of capitalism as a whole. it’s not something you say when you want to consume as unethically and freely as you want.

the point is that despite there being no ethical consumption under capitalism, we still have the ability to make it as ethical as we possibly can. working on an honor’s thesis on labor, capital and the ethics of care, it’s become increasingly clear to me that this tweet (pictured below) was exactly right. capitalism would want you to care less, because pessimism and resignation paves the way for compliance. they would want you to say “screw it, i’m going to do that $1000 SHEIN haul because nothing i do matters” because then you’d be doing exactly what they want: buying stuff you don’t need to line the pockets of gajillionaires.

drawing from many feminist philosophers and scholars, i wrote (or rather, am intending to write at this point in time) that love and care, under a system that promotes and reproduces itself through carelessness, is inherently radical. apart from loving and caring for the people around you, i’d say loving and caring for the things you have now can be an act of resistance too: after all, what’s not anti-capitalist about refusing to participate in the cycle of endless consumption?

despite knowing all of this for a long, long time, i was, sadly, a culprit of all these things i’ve listed. in the past, i’ve been guilty of buying way too many things when i didn’t need to. i’ve also been guilty of buying things from places with more-than-questionable ethics (i’m looking at you, TaoBao). reading these tweets and working on my thesis has imbued me with some sort of hope—that even if i don’t manage to lead the proletariat to revolution and dismantle the system from top to bottom, there’s still some point in trying. that the little things do count. so to atone for my previous sins and to help me buy less and more ethically, i’m going to start a series titled “a few of my favourite things” to appreciate the things i already have rather than feel the need to buy more. this is just the preface.

#fashion #fave things series #rambles

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westshellos · 1 year

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equate coffee @ orchard central

a couple months before their orchard central outlet opened, i visited equate coffee’s original tanjong pagar store. i can’t remember the exact cost of the items or the exact variety of food or drinks offered, but i do remember only being able to order mostly coffee and some tea variants (i believe i had a matcha latte?). i did enjoy the ambience at the tanjong pagar outlet—apart from being located in a small, quiet corner in tanjong pagar plaza, the storefront is framed with a gigantic jagged-edged, almost raw-looking (but not really, obviously) hole in the wall that serves as the entrance to the café. inside, the décor is a mix of brutalist and minimalist aesthetic, with unfinished (again, done intentionally, of course) cement screed floors and tiny stools next to tiny coffee tables.

(photo from shout.sg, sorry. i didn’t intend to review this place when i was there)

so when i heard they were opening a new outlet in orchard, i was pretty excited. i was a little disappointed, though, when i found out it was in orchard central, a shopping mall. i don’t know if it’s personal bias, or if it’s a legitimate design concern, but cafés in malls just don’t feel the same as cafés located in your average gentrified-retro-looking-shophouse neighborhood. i could go on about how the location of these cafés plays a role in its “artisanal” image but that’s probably a topic for another post.

i don’t completely hate the design of the new outlet. i do like how they kept the brutalist theme and added an eco twist to it—the two large tree trunks sprouting from the center of the space and the shrubs growing between slabs of rocks add a hint of nature and greenery to the drab of the steel-and-glass interior of orchard central.

the counter, like the tanjong pagar outlet entrance, is also framed by the same jagged-edge, hole-int-the-wall design, which again helps break the monotony of the mall setting.

the décor couldn’t save the café from the awful overhead lighting of the mall, though. it ultimately made for a difficult time trying to capture photos of the food without any harsh shadows lurking over the table. combined with my lack of skill in photography, it’s safe to say my pictures were not the best. i apologize in advance.

as for the food, i had a cup of hot mocha ($5.50) with a tonkatsu sandwich ($15.80) and hazelnut chocolatine ($7.80).

the mocha was a little bitter and acidic; admittedly, i can’t say much about its quality or value-for-money, but it was good for the most part. i wanted the iced version but must’ve screwed up my order. it’s my bad, they do operate on a self-served ordering system where you scan a qr code for the menu, select what you want and pay on the website.

the tonkatsu sandwich is supposedly made up of “japanese panko-breaded pork loin, emmental, sesame dressing and shredded cabbage in toasted milk bread”, according to the café menu. the pork loin was cooked perfectly, which helped to bring the whole dish together.

the hazelnut chocolatine is essentially a filled croissant in cubic form—to be fair they do state it on the menu, as i quote here: “croissant filled with homemade chocolate hazelnut praline”. i appreciate the aesthetic novelty though.

i like the contrasting textures in this one. the softness of the praline pairs nicely with the crunchiness of the hazelnuts and mini chocolate biscuit balls. along with the perfectly flaky pastry and irresistible cube shape, this is probably my favorite dish here.

overall:

7/10 affordability

8/10 taste

6.5/10 ambience

#cafe review

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westshellos · 1 year

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the final product has a little bit of a more bluish tint, but i like it nonetheless! sorry for the lack of desk pictures, my cable management is horrible and my study gets no sunlight

hand-drew some flowers and kittens to create a custom design for my desk pad! i was inspired by the ditsy floral patterns on some of my favorite clothing pieces and decided to add my favorite animal into the mix. colors are a little dull since i needed to use the cmyk color model to optimize it for printing, but i love how it turned out regardless!

i’ve sent the design to a manufacturer and they’ll be printing it soon, i’ll update this post with photos when it arrives o( ❛ᴗ❛ )o

#designs

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westshellos · 2 years

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dawn café

despite its warm, woody exterior being anomalous with the cold, grey colors that cover the rest of its neighbors, dawn café’s minimalist, almost bare-bones storefront décor makes it easy to miss.

[picture above found online, sorry]

the interior, however, is unforgettable. upon first glance the interior seems typical: the cream, beigey color palette combined with sleek, minimalist wooden furniture is definitively japandi, a popular interior style that is so commonly found in many “instagram-worthy” cafés in singapore. yet, the unfinished look of the concrete accent walls and raw marble bar counter are industrial elements that make the overall space feel (strangely) homely.

it is cramped, though. apart from the medium-sized table at the end of the store that sits up to 3, seats are lined up closely along the bar counter, with 2 pairs of skinny stools placed opposite. the result is a narrow walkway formed by the bar and stools up to the aforementioned table and an uncomfortable proximity to other guests during peak periods, which seems to be always these days. nevertheless, once i was seated the feeling of other guests being too close dissipated and “cramped” slowly morphed into a feeling of coziness.

it also helps that the food is enjoyable: i got a black sesame friand ($5), an avocado toastie ($12), and an osmanthus summer soda ($8). the final bill was $25, gst included with no service charge, which is a plus point. the friand’s black sesame flavor was light and subtle, while the toastie’s topping of black pepper, sea salt and olive oil complimented the fluffy house-made shokupan and sliced avocadoes wonderfully. the soda had a unique blend of flavours—i can only describe it as markedly floral, mildly sweet and the teeniest bit of saltiness from what i presume is the soda water they made it with.

because of the size of the friand and the soda, it seems pricey—like all gentrified modern-minimalist-coffee/teahouse-bistros in singapore—but the generous heap of avocado slices on the toastie makes up for it somewhat.

evidently i didn’t snap too many pictures of the food or the place, i admittedly was distracted trying to take more videos, which you can see compiled in a tiktok instead (gif of it below for the non-tiktokkers).

overall, i’d say:

7/10 affordability

8/10 taste

9/10 ambience

#cafe review

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