It's the Sig FAQ! Under construction.

If you think of a question for the Sig FAQ, then send it here and I'll try to answer it, even if it's weird.
  • What's still worth saving?

    1. Save Charas. A former elementary school, renovated and built into a community center on the Lower East Side, Charas/El Bohio is a public space that has served a largely low-income neighborhood for years. Drug rehab, support for gang kids, rehearsal space for downtown yuppy artists, practically everybody's had a meeting or a party there. Along with the community gardens, our beloved mayor Giuliani decided to put Charas on the auction block. A bunch of private interests came in and bid on it, including NYU, which lost the bid early on with a measly offer of one million dollars. Giuliani is refusing to release the name of the party that eventually won the auction. (Update: The buyer's name is Greg L. Singer.) At a press conference in front of City Hall, caretaker Armando Perez informed us of legal action, and his plans to go on a hunger strike if all else failed. But how clear does it have to be? Let them take Charas. We'll take City Hall.
    2. Save beer. Life is precious, but no one human life is more precious than wine. Your plane falls into the sea, we'll forget. But how will we forget without wine?
    3. Save the pre-1998 issue twenty dollar bill. God that new twenty is godawful ugly.

    4. Two new questions from Jane, who must be in a real polka dot funk if she's sitting around browsing the Ever-Under-Construction Sig FAQ. Smile, Jane! Can't smile?! Okay, then at least smirk! Come on, you can do it! I know you can smirk! SMIRK, SMIRK, SMIRK! THAAAT'S MY GRRRLLL!!!!!!

      • "Why don't you update it anymore? (you do, but not at all at the rates at which you used to)"

        1. Cuz my qualifying exams are over. My webpage-updating juices were flowing at a peak frenzy when I was still studying for my exams, but now I got nothing left to procrastinate for.
        2. Cuz we've been approaching our limit of 2 megs diskspace on NYU's server. It's at something like 1.6 now. Scary.
        3. Cuz I been a lil distracted organizing for economic justice at NYU. And in January, they were threatening to expel me for it, so I knew I might end up losing this whole site anyway.
        4. Cuz I just been too busy working nite and day on my dissertation proposal. Yeah right.
        5. Cuz I been too busy stressing over lookin for a job. AAAAGH!!!
        6. Cuz unlike some Janes I mean people I know, Ming doesn't get fifty people signing up on a guestbook every week. Ming doesn't even have a guestbook.

    5. "Whatever happened with that chick you were chasing from the asian group thingie???"

      Ahem. I asked her out to a concert, but the only reason she went was cuz she didn't know I liked her. Let's keep it that way. Anyway, she's got a man and I's got a woman now, so it's all good. She ain't my type anywaze. She thought Contact sucked! (Shaking head in disbelief.)

    6. Help, I can't sleep! What do you do when you can't sleep?

      • Power up the VCR and pop in either Terror of Mechagodzilla or Varan the Unbelievable.
      • Garden the "little flower".
      • Try to reread the first chapter of Conrad's Nostromo.
      • Build levels on Final Fantasy III. Around Narshe.
      • This.
      • Dream of electric sheep.
      • Mentally hum the theme from Battlestar Galactica. That's it.

    7. Are you good at basketball?

      I suck at basketball. When I play basketball, I'm not really playing basketball; I'm failing to play basketball. Last Sunday in the park all you could hear was the twittering of birds, the laughter of small children, and Sig moaning "Pass the ball to meeeeeee!!! Pass it to meeeeeee!!!!"

    8. So do you know how to play any musical instruments?

      Nope. Well actually I took two years of violin in junior high school. When I left for high school I was at the top of my class. I was already learning "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star"! Yes, I knew full well how lame that was at the time. Then when I got to high school, I thought of auditioning for the orchestra, but very quickly realized I wasn't good enough. Promised myself and my music teacher that I'd take it up again on my own someday. Doubt that'll happen now.

      On the bright side, my parents got me a flute last Christmas! Well, not a real one, but a Chinese, wooden flute that they got on the street in Chinatown. It looks like a recorder. I can't play my favorite flute music, like Young Chen's song from Raise the Red Lantern or Terra's theme from Final Fantasy VI, but I can still toot a few neat lines. Today I taught myself the chorus from "Country Road", which I think is originally by John Denver? No I don't like country, but this pretty song is all over the soundtrack for Studio Ghibli's wonderful Whisper of the Heart. It sounds so nice and cheerful, and yet the sequence isn't complicated at all. I can also play the main melody of the countryside theme from My Neighbor Totoro, the Star Wars theme of course, and a piece of "Buenos Aires" from the Evita CD. I can't do tunes that change key (it's either impossible on this flute or I just haven't figured it out) or that range more than an octave (I can scale two octaves by blowing harder or softer, but it's just too confusing to jump around.)

    9. Well, what kind of music do you like to listen to?

      Every few years I sign on to BMG and Columbia House, grab the ten free CD's, and cancel. I've accumulated a whole bunch of disks that way. I wouldn't do it now cuz I'm so out of the pop music scene that it wouldn't be worth it, but next time I do it, I'll prolly try to get the new Depeche Mode, Sonic Youth's Washing Machine, Prince's Emancipation, the new Wu-Tang Clan, and maybe the new Primus.

      I'd left pop in a hurry after what happened to Kurt Cobain (both his pathetic suicide and MTV's contemptible release of the Nirvana Unplugged disk immediately after - by the way, MTV YOU SUCK, YOU DON'T DESERVE TO HAVE BEAVIS & BUTTHEAD OR AEON FLUX ON YOUR CHANNEL CUZ MIKE JUDGE AND PETER CHUNG ARE BOTH FUCKING GENIUSES AND YOU'RE NOTHING BUT THE PARASITIC CORPORATE SCUM-WITH-NO-SHAME, I HOLD YOU PARTLY RESPONSIBLE FOR KURT'S DEATH) and had gone back to obsessing over movie soundtracks. I'd already had a big John Williams collection on vinyl from when I was a kid, but now I was buying all Asian stuff - music from HK movies, from Studio Ghibli animes, from the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest video games, and of course from the Godzilla movies. (A CD I've been looking for for a while now, with no luck, is the awesome jazz soundtrack from Juzo Itami's A Taxing Woman's Return. Help!) I still listen to some western stuff too - Phillip Glass and Ennio Morricone and a little bit of the Kronos Quartet.

      Sitting quietly among the John Williams records in my parents' basement are also dozens of dance 12-inches - stuff like Jungle Brothers' "I'll House You", T99's "Anasthasia", Lisette Melendez's "A Day in My Life Without You" (which I used to think was "I'd Take My Life Without You"), Rob Base (of course!), Public Enemy's "Fight the Power", Cliviles & Cole's "Pride", Michael Jackson's "Remember the Time", St. Etienne's "Only Love Can Break Your Heart", 808 State's "Pacific", D-Mob's "The Way of the World", Fast Eddie's "Let's Go", George LaMonde, Art of Noise, Technotronic and lots of others I might never listen to again.

    10. Do you like to sing?

      Sure, although I don't have much of a voice. Back in 92 and 93, when I had to share a tiny studio with a roommate and was unhappy for other reasons too, it was crucial to be able to hang outside on the porch overlooking Washington Square Village and sing quietly in the evenings. Songs from DM's Black Celebration are good, cuz they're easy to remember and very tonal in an old-fashioned way. The "Don't you fret Monsieur Marius" song, sung by Eponine in Les Miz, is also one of my faves. And I am far from done gloating, Andy, over the time I out-rapped ya at that KTV. Come on, slowpoke, and just bust a move!

      Had fun on the set of Telly's movie - played this clueless sell-out Asian actor wannabe. How clueless was he? He was so clueless he went to an audition and sang "The Last Night of the World" from Miss Saigon. That was real fun - I got to jump on the table and start strangling one of the producers, who was failing to appreciate my voice, until Telly, (wearing his fake beard!) pulled me off and threw me on the floor. Come to think of it, it was almost like that scene in Aliens when Hicks tore the face-hugger away from Sigourney Weaver's neck, hurled it on the ground, and sprayed it with his pulse rifle! Dang! I shoulda wriggled on the floor like that face-hugger. Oh well.

      If I kick it before Jack Nicholson, I want him to dress up as the Joker and deliver my eulogy - "Sig was irresponsible, amoral, and a reverse racist of the most noxious kind. On the other hand, he had a tremendous singing voice."

    11. So what's your real name?

      My English name is Sigmund Shen. My Chinese name is Sheng Ching Hwa. (If you think that's funny, you oughtta hear how we say your name in Mandarin.) "Sig" is Old English (Anglo-Saxon) for "victory". "Mund" is "hand". Together it means "victorious protection" - or it did in Norse myth. Here in the U.S. different possibilities emerge - for example if I was to ever open up my own casino, I could call it Sigmund's Winning Hand. I don't gamble though. Yeah, Dawn, I realize I just contradicted myself . . . very well then. (Don't even start on Whitman, whom I've come to hate all over again.)

      An ESL student once explained the etymology of my Chinese name, but all I remember is one of the parts had something to do with "literature" and another with "nationhood" . . . *

      . . . One more thing, tho: the tone of the "Hwa" is the one that curves down and up. It does NOT mean "flower". Every now and then some comedian'll hear my parents call me "Shiao Hwa" and say something like "Hey, Little Flower! How's it goin, Little Flower!" Booooy, that really eats my lunch. (You never heard that expression - "That just eats my lunch"? I'd read it was a Midwesternism but Tina claimed she'd never heard it before, plus it wasn't in Fargo or anything so I guess she wasn't lying.) White people be making fun of my name too sometimes - calling me "Freud", or sometimes even "Sea Monster". That's cool though. Just you better NOT be calling me "Shiao Hwa" and fuckin up the tone on purpose, cuz I'll get my revenge. That's right. I'll show ya the "Little Flower" . . .

      Actually, I wasn't even named after Freud, or the Norse guy - my parents just used to hang out with a lot of German people when they first came to this country, plus my dad really liked this opera called The Student Prince by Sigmund Romberg. (Dad has the record but I've never put it on - one of those things I gotta get around to.)

      Like Jazz, I used to really hate my name. This came from having to hear the song from "Sigmund the Sea Monster" over and over when I was a kid to, well the low must have been, hiding in the dark at the Rocky Horror Picture Show (back before the place on 8th St. closed down) while people screamed "SIGMUND? YOUR MOTHER NAMED YOU SIGMUND?!" Ohhhh, the horror. But anyway, then I had this creative writing teacher at Queens College called Bill Wilson who used to pronounce my name in this way that actually sounded dignified. Then again he was one of those classically trained folks who could say "I really need to go to that bathroom as soon as possible" and make it sound all intellectual so you be gettin mesmerized, like "Yes, yes, I had a similar experience . . . " Remember, Giga, when we were making fun of the way Raphie talks? That's how Bill Wilson sounded.

      Another thing that's cool about having an Anglo-Saxon name is if you ever find yourself surrounded by people from the Society for Creative Anachronism, you won't have to miss out on all the fun cuz at least you can go around shaking people's hands and saying "Hal! Sigemund is mine nama!"

    12. Okay . . . so then what's up with all this "Sigzilla" and "Ming the Merciless"?

      I just started using "Sigzilla" after I discovered the monster movie newsgroup - loads of fun, those people. Don't worry, Conster, it isn't supposed to mean Sig=God or anything like that. I just think "Sigzilla" sounds kinda cool so I didn't want to waste it - ya know, cuz if my name didn't go so well, I'd be envious of people like me, like if my name was James then it would have to be "Jameszilla", which would be all fucked up cuz it sounds like "Jame-Zilla", which doesn't make sense. Or like if I were a woman and my name was Priscilla and then it'd have to be something like "Priszilla" which, how would you even say that? (Although "PriscillaZilla" - now, that would actually be awesome! Speaking of which, why was that woman in The Rise of Silas Lapham named Zerilla? Has there ever been a worse name? No offense if you happen to be named like that, but, come on. ZERILLA?)

      But I've just always loved Godzilla, too. You gotta admit, it's hard not to identify with the big G. We build up the tall buildings, but he just comes and knocks em down, and he doesn't even stop to make excuses or say he's sorry. All the monuments of our so-called civilization - from office buildings to mega-malls to learning institutions to correctional facilities - are nothing but stage props, lightweight toys and flimsy set-pieces. All our asphalt streets, cement walkways and sunlit outdoor plazas amount to a frail layer of dust over the primal earth - earth that rumbles, crumbles, quakes and shakes itself free, anytime it feels like it needs a change of scenery. G is chaos without a theory, animistic retribution, poltergeist of our scientific adolescence. G is a warning that the gods won't be our puppet dictators anymore - that we had it backwards, cuz we're the puppets. We're the ones who dreamed that the moment we learned to speak for the earth, and even talk back to the earth, would be the moment we didn't need that earth to lift us up anymore.

      Somebody from Canada actually asked me once who "Ming the Merciless" was - she knew he was a character from a CD-ROM game called Civilization; was he based on some historical person too? Well, I have no idea if there ever was an emperor of China named Ming, or if so, if he went around calling himself "The Merciless" like Alexander called himself "The Great". My hunch, though, is that Ming the Merciless started out as a figment of U.S. pop culture orientalism. He showed up (him and his yellow-horde-planet-full-o-terror "Mongo") as the Force of Evil in the ol "Flash Gordon" comic strip, which I guess did as much good for Asian-Americans as "Tarzan of the Apes" did for Black Americans.

      So why the self-imposed stereotype? Why perpetuate the image of the Oriental Despot? Well, it's not like if I left him alone, he'd vanish back into outer space like a good alien - the National Review and the New York Times would make sure to drag him back out whenever they thought they could get away with it. So since I have no occult power to banish him back into the id of orientalism, why not let him loose to wreak some havoc instead? At least this way I'll be the one writing some of his lines. It's kinda like how Bert Wang put it at the "Peeling the Banana" show - "They wanted Bruce Lee? I gave em Bruce Lee!"

      (If this part seems cut off, it's prolly cuz Sig got so bored talking about himself he fell asleep. So check back soon for more of the Under Construction Sig FAQ!)
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