It could be said that women have, perhaps, not had a great time of it fashion-wise. Throughout the centuries the industry of clothing the second sex has produced bizarre and painful contraptions to push, pinch, and bind women into various, and oftentimes decidedly unnatural, shapes. Whether it be the lotus foot or high heals, corsets or neck rings there is a strange and morbid thread woven through mankind’s history.
Intermixed with this sadistic molding of flesh there is, of course, a fair share of positively ridiculous inventions designed to make all of this that much easier on the modern woman. Nowhere is this better evidenced that in the Frederick’s of Hollywood ad from 1960. Designed to accentuate the all important Bust, it proposes a simple inflation device; meaning that it supposes that women would take to inflating their bras like life rafts or water wings every morning, devoting precious time to shaping their already heaving bosoms into keen edged, yet pillowy, missiles. Of course the side effect of this is looking like the young lady in the upper left corner; surprised and chagrined when her lactation fetishist husband discovers and misinterprets her morning routine.
We are going to get right into it because you and I both know that there are copies to be made and collated A.S.A.P. As in As Soon As Possible. As in by 10 minutes ago.
The Naked Lunch is a mess of a novel which, I suppose, was the point. William S. Burroughs’s most famous work, made possible by the cut-up technique he championed* was decried as pornographic when it was published in Paris in 1959. It wasn’t published in the U.S. until 1962 where an obscenity trial was held for it and it was banned by courts in Boston, though the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned that ban in 1966. What The Naked Lunch is about is hard to say. There is a man named William Lee. He is an Agent. There are strange, far off places with names like Interzone and Freeland. There is a lot of sex of many varieties, centipedes, drugs, pedophilia, and Mugwumps. Somewhere in all this is satire. Mostly, it is nonsense.
And yet, it is interesting nonsense which is the key to its enduring legacy and the reason that David Cronenberg decided to make a movie out of it in 1991 starring Peter Weller, pulling an excellent Burroughs imitation. Also mixed in there are Ian Holm, Judy Davis and a crazed cameo by Roy Scheider. Naked Lunch does its best to make some kind of narrative out of Uncle Bill’s series of vignettes by filling in many of the gaps with snippets taken from Burroughs’s life, meaning we get to meet fellow Beat writers Alan Ginsburg and Jack Kerouac in the forms of Bill’s friends Martin and Hank. It also features the infamous “William Tell routine” which resulted in Burroughs shooting and killing his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer Burroughs née Adams, in 1951 for which he would spend 13 days in jail and eventually receive a suspended 2 year sentence, in absentia.
Luckily, the novel contains a plethora of just the kind of body horror material that so appealed to Cronenberg before 2002’s Spider. Fluids, orifices, and gruesome transformations are in gleeful abundance and the end result is a film that keeps the hallucinatory vision of the novel while adding a narrative anchor to keep it from completely floating away. Also, it helped to insure that, should one ever have to name a foreign rent-boy for their novel, short story, movie, whatever, it will always be Kiki. Always.
*This is not true, as pointed out by Ben Morris in the comments. While it is considered part of Burroughs’s cut-up period it was not produced using this method, a method Burroughs became acquainted with only after the publication of “The Naked Lunch”, meaning that Burroughs required no special technique to write a confusing mess of a book.
fapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapfapOH GOOD MORNING COMRADES I DIDN’T SEE YOU THERE.
What’s that? Oh, um. I was just, uh, playing with my tribble.
Ariana showed me the following picture last night…
…which spurred me to revisit that notorious “Closer” slashup, the gravitational pull of which sent me spiraling down a long, twisted YouTube wormhole of Trekkie aberration and depravity. Woooo!
To help you get your sluggish blood pumping, I’d like to share a bit of what I found with you. Just the tip…
Our next and final feature on Late-to-the-Party Sunday is this collection of prosthetics-inspired, insectlike body armor created by recent University of the Arts London graduate Úna Burke, blogged everywhere and recently rediscovered by Haute Macabre. On her site, Burke explains the rationale behind these creations: “This is a conceptual collection of wearable art pieces, depicting a series of eight human gestures associated with the cause, the physical and psychological effect and the healing stages of human trauma…in my research I have referred to the work of artists, photographers and designers such as Hans Bellmer, Anthony Gormley, Alexander McQueen, Erwin Olaf, as well as looking at the casts of the victims of Pompeii. The entire collection made from undyed vegetable tanned leather which is reminiscent of caucasian flesh.”
Burke’s pieces are reminiscent of fellow Londoner Paddy Hartley’s Project Facade in their sensual combination of sculpture and fashion to represent body trauma and the trappings of recovery.
Via Stylecunt & Haute Macabre – the good cop & bad cop of alt fashion – comes the discovery of Marko Mitanovski, a Belgrade-based designer with a penchant for ruffs, asymmetrical corsets, antler-shaped hairstyles and elongated, knife-shaped fingertips. Mitanovski’s recent Renaissance and Elizabethan-inspired collection, entitled Lady Macbeth, was splendidly captured by Coilhouse favorite Peter Ashworth. The richly hued orange-lavender series provides an upbeat look at Mitanovski’s rather somber designs, and can be seen on Ashworth’s site. Expect for Mitanovski’s designs to appear in the next Lady Gaga video in 3… 2…
Um. Remember not too long ago when I was going on about how edgy and alt Nutella is, sildenafil and asserting that peanut butter is boring by comparison?
The Skinemax-worthy soundtrack makes this infinitely more disturbing. Not to mention the plastic wrap.
Via our beloved Siege, whose curatorial instincts sometimes jump the track from sharing sublime beauty to just wanting us all to cry and punch ourselves repeatedly in the netherbits until they shrivel up and fall off. (He has proven thisonmultiple occasions.)
The above is a short but fascinating trailer for Dreamworlds 3, an hour-long documentary on the use and abuse of women’s bodies in modern-day pop music videos. You needn’t be a scholar of gender studies or media literacy to appreciate what you see here. If you’re a fan of thoughtful video editing, deadpan humor, or the ladiiiiies, this one’s for you.
Narrating over a relentless cascade titillating music-video imagery, Jhally finally explains the problem of sexual objectification in our culture in a way that does not, unlike many other texts that deal with this, make you feel like a real shit for objectifying others in your mind, or for wanting to be objectified. This point comes into clarity at the 29:30 mark:
There is nothing inherently wrong with [the techniques of objectification] in and of themselves. It is not that it is always negative to present women as ready to be watched, or wanting to be watched. We all – men and women – present ourselves to be watched, to be gazed at. We all – men and women – watch attractive strangers with sexual desire. To treat another as an object of our desires is part of what it means to be human. The problem in music video and in the culture in general is that women are presented as nothing else. If the story about femininity could be widened beyond sexual objectification to include many other qualities of individuals – [intellectual, emotional, spiritual, creative, etc] – then there would be no problem with a little objectification as a sexual aspect of femininity, to be balanced out and integrated with many other human qualities. The problem is that in our contemporary culture, the complexity gets crowded out by a one-dimensional femininity based on a single story of the body.
Click here for the full-length feature. It has a stupid watermark on it, but the documentary’s compelling enough that it really doesn’t matter. Even if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, the 5-minute version included here stands as a fascinating vignette on the subject on its own.
Dreamworlds 3 is only one of several media literacy titles that Jhally’s produced or contributed to over the years. Here are a few other favorites:
Dreamworlds 2 – Same as the above, but retro! Made in 1995.
Advertising & the End of the World – A discussion of advertising’s promise to deliver happiness, society’s high-consumption lifestyle and the coming environmental crisis.
Reel Bad Arabs – On the vilification of Arab characters in the American cinema.
Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying & Battering – Focuses on “professional wrestling and the construction of contemporary masculinity, they show how so-called “entertainment” is related to homophobia, sexual assault and relationship violence.”
Finnish photographer Juha Arvid Helminen has created a black on black series that has me all aflutter. It’s the same mix of fear and attraction as the first time I read The Invisible Man or watched The Headless Horseman at the age of six. And a more recent instance–a shameful tickle in my pants upon discovering Pyramid Head in Silent Hill.
Besides the fetish appeal of complete coverage, tight-lacing, and uniforms, for me the mystery factor is the most potent reason for such a strong visceral response. Masking to create apprehension and giving the imagination freedom to explore its limits is such a common literary and artistic instrument that it’s almost surprising to feel just how effective it is. I’m sipping a cup of tea in the middle of afternoon–far from a spooky ambiance–yet every time I look at these images another infinite, matte black dimension of anxiety unfolds.
Hey guys, remember our big “Vote for Coilhouse” effort from about week ago? Well, the three finalists have been announced, and unfortunately, we weren’t selected, despite your incredible feat of getting us into the top 10 out of over 4,000 nominees in under 24 hours with your votes. The finalists are Sacred Wind Communications (a telecom company), Beacon Paint & Hardware (I was excited when I originally misread this as “BACON PAINT”) and Happybaby organic baby foods. We wish them all the best during the remainder of the competition.
Actually, this is a huge relief. For the past week, we’ve all been kind of second-guessing ourselves every time we made a blog post, asking: “is this too risqué? Should we go easy with the gross/weird stuff, just this week, to avoid scaring the judges away from picking us as a finalist?” For some, the pressure was too great: Ross kept writing and deleting draft after draft until he just snapped, covering the walls of his office with writing in feces.
Now that all the suspense is over, it’s a huge relief to feel like we can write about anything we want (which most of us ended up doing last week anyway) without feeling any apprehension or guilt. Anything I personally might’ve felt too cautious to blog about last week, I will blog about in my next few posts, with interest! I kick off this trend with a song by one of our great heroes, Bob Flanagan, from Kirby Dick’s documentary Sick. If you don’t know who Mr. Flanagan was, the song explains it all. Much more about Bob Flanagan at a later date.
In the end, grant or no grant, we’ll make it. It would’ve been easier and faster with that funding, but we learned through this “Vote for Coilhouse” experience that we have something more valuable than any amount money that any large company could bestow upon us: a caring, kind, loyal group of friends & readers that was willing to support us when we asked for help. Also, we got a brief taste of what it’s like to feel beholden to a large company for any kind of support, and we did not like that feeling at all. We don’t need them to make it; we just need you guys. Thank you, all, from the bottom of our hearts.
Goddamn, your manager is a douche. I mean, it’s not just me, right? Like, he’s a total douche with his douchey paisley tie and his douchey, meticulously pressed pants, and his douchey attitude all sauntering over to your desk to “see how that proposal is going” and then launch into another retelling of his Labor Day weekend away from the “bitch and the brats” to go golfing with his buddies who are also, no doubt, just as douchey or perhaps more douchey than he is. Nah, that can’t be possible. This guy is too much of a douche; there can’t possibly be another person who could eclipse the blinding glare of his douchiness. This man is like the Platonic Ideal of a douche. Just…argh, such a douche.
Well, at least he’s reminded you that, at least in America, it was only a four day work week. This is good. Your boss, standing by your desk, reeking as though he bathes in Drakkar Noir, is not. Time to drive him away. Tell him you need to get back to work; have to finish that proposal. Is he gone? Yes he is. Don’t worry the Drakkar will dissipate soon enough, just power through it for now; for now is the time for the FAM.
This afternoon: David Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Many of you may have seen it. If not, I’m only going to drop a few, key phrases on you. They are, as follows: whipping, televisions, pulsating, hand gun, stomach vagina, Debbie Harry. That is all. Press play and enjoy.
