The ads above, part of a European AIDS prevention campaign, appeared today on my favorite advertising blog under the title “There Are A Lot Of FishDicks In The Sea.”
But before I tell you about more about this magical blog, a quick trip down memory lane: before blogging existed, back when I used hide in the school library because no would would sit with me at lunch, I discovered back issues of Consumer Reports and Ms. Magazine – in particular, their Selling It and No Comment back pages, which were eerily similar. Both departments critiqued advertising. Consumer Reports was strictly in the business of calling bullshit; highlighting self-contradiction, spoofing ridiculous copy, and pointing out deceptive images. Meanwhile, Ms. made it their mission to shine the spotlight on the advertising world’s misogyny. At 13, my obsessive love-hate relationship with advertising (currently a.k.a. “my job”) had begun.
All the pleasures I got from those magazines – from the pleasure of mockery to the pleasure of discovering an interesting photo, even if my beloved Ms. was hating on it – I now find at the incredible Copyranter blog. Copyranter is this phenomenally hateful individual, a New York advertising copywriter who’s been working at the same ad agency for the past 16 years. His bio consists primarily of his exhaustive shitlist: capri pants, advertising, advertising people, PR people, marketing people… the list goes on and on, ending with “men named Jack” and Scrabble. Almost every day, he provides ingenious commentary on a given ad campaign (usually ripping it to shreds) with inimitable elegance and wit. Lots of insight about the advertising industry, our culture, and the creative process here. To show you what I mean, I present some of my favorite posts in categories of interest below:
Sensual, challenging, awkward and sublime in turns, Katie West‘s self portraits readily draw comparisons to folks like Cindy Sherman and Aaron Hawks, although I personally find her output more endearing. She is vulnerable and toothsome, and an unrepentant goofball. It’s been such a joy to watch her vision deepen and ripen over the years. Fellow brave, wee wonkettes of the world, you’ve found your muse. Buy her book.
What makes Viktoria “bizarre”? Is it her amputated leg? Is it the fact that she has an amputated leg and is still incredibly sexy? Or is it that she has an amputated leg and still considers herself a sexual person? Is this empowering? And to who? Surely the disabled are desexualized in this country, so it’s nice to see that challenged even, I suppose, in a magazine about weirdos. And yet, I suspect her sexuality is acceptable, fetishizable, only because she conforms to expectations of feminine beauty. In the big scheme of things, does she reproduce the standard of beauty, unattainable for most women, that crushes women’s self-esteem and sense of self-worth? And will disabled women, most of whom (like most non-disabled women) could never dream of being so beautiful, actually look at her and be able to identify? Or will this just draw attention to another way in which they don’t match up?
Now really, I think that SocImages went a little overboard with Viktoria (especially when they dismissed her comments about sexuality as “standard porn star talk”). Maybe it’s because I know her little better than they do, but I think that they oversimplify the genuine place that she comes from in choosing to be a model. However, they do bring up an important discussion that’s been nagging me for some time. What is an alternative model, and what is an alt model’s role in visual culture? In my life, at various points, I came up with 3 different definitions. I believe in each of them, and I have a problem with each of them as well. Here they are below. Which one resonates with you? Do you think it’s a combination of the three below, or something completely different? Opinions, please.
1. The model who challenges society’s notions of beauty.
I love these models, but the issue here is that, while they appear to push the boundaries of beauty in some direction, they usually wind up brutally reinforcing another traditional notion in the process. For example, trans models make us rethink gender/beauty, but with their self-presentation they usually reinforce the ideal of a sleek, hairless feminine figure, thus fueling the hair-removal industry. In fact, epilator-manufacturer Philips Norelco has already found a way to to capitalize on this to great effect – just watch this ad. And large models like Velvet D’Amour and skinny-by-comparison but still-considered-plus-size recent ANTM winner Whitney Thompson help to redefine weight in modeling, but what makes them “legitimately beautiful” in the eyes of the mainstream world is their “correct” bone structure, their blond hair. Without some “redeeming quality” of this sort, the world doesn’t recognize them as models, and wouldn’t even give them a shot at making a difference. Mainstream media often presents them as beautiful “in spite of,” not “because of.” While their individual messages are empowering (I love Velvet’s interviews), I don’t find our culture’s use of these models empowering at all.
Cyd Charisse might be most remembered for her emerald gangster mole number in Singing In The Rain but it’s her serpentine performance with Fred Astaire in The Girl Hunt Ballet, a sequence from The Band Wagon, that has me floored this morning. Here they are, cutting the rug at Dem Bones Café like there’s no tomorrow.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pDGGw3RH5ug" width="400" height="330" wmode="transparent" /]
Coilfact: Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” video is based on this number.
By the time she was fourteen, Cyd (born in Texas Tula Ellice Finklea) was honing her moves under the pseudonym “Felia Sidorova” with the Ballet Russe. I don’t exactly envision Nizhinskaya secretly teaching her to loosen her hips and knees, but Cyd’s signature style certainly displays the precision of strict ballet training behind the fluid writhing and risqué kicks so loved by her fans. There is a power to this performer’s presence that transcends sexuality and grace, as if hinting at a playful sorceress, ever-threatening to reveal herself before a charmed audience.
Coilfact: Charisse made the 2001 Guiness Book of World Records as “Most Valuable Legs” after receiving a $5,000,000 insurance policy on her legs. And how!
Phyllis Lyon (left) and Del Martin, lesbian activists who have been together for over 50 years, embrace during their marriage ceremony at San Francisco City Hall in 2004. (Chronicle photo by Liz Mangelsdorf )
It’s a beautiful, balmy evening here in the east bay, but the mood in my neighborhood is uncharacteristically quiet, even somber. In a few hours, the California Supreme Court will publicly rule on the legality of this state’s ban on gay marriage. The tension is palpable.
In 2004, in a remarkable act of civil disobedience, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom allowed thousands of gay and lesbian couples to wed before the courts stepped in and disallowed the marriage licenses. Debate has been raging ever since, with civil rights activists and SF city officials challenging the state family code law that restricts marriage to a man and a woman, and a SF trial judge declaring the ban unconstitutional. In 2006, a conflicted appeals court upheld the ban, stating that it should be up to voters or legislators to legalize same-sex marriages, rather than judges.
Conservative interest groups and the state attorney general are defending the ban, and the justices have remained divided. It could go either way. Regardless of what happens at 10am, Pacific Standard Time, it’s going to be a historic day.
I am the fly in the ointment. Accept the next dose of disease.
Okay, so we’re a little late to the Green Porno party. But what we lack in punctuality we more than make up for in enthusiasm for these warped short films.
Isabella “Put Your Disease in Me” Rossellini outdoes herself (and actually does herself) in this eight-part series about the sex lives of various insects, arachnids and molluscs. Produced by Sundance expressly for smaller digital screens (computers, cell phones, etc) the whole series is just dirty, filthy, good clean fun. Try to imagine a Children’s Television Workshop-produced interpretation of that transcendently horrible pterodactyl pr0n and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark. But not really.
“Developed by an American physician, George Taylor, M.D., it was a large, cumbersome, steam-powered apparatus. Taylor recommended it for treatment of an illness known at the time as “female hysteria.” Hysteria, from the Greek for “suffering uterus,” involved anxiety, irritability, sexual fantasies, “pelvic heaviness” and “excessive” vaginal lubrication — in other words, sexual arousal. However, since it was the Victorian era, women were not considered to be at all sexual and it was therefore deemed a disease. Physicians of that era treated hysteria by massaging sufferers’ vulvas until they experienced dramatic relief through “paroxysm” (orgasm). Unfortunately, hysteria was a recurrent condition and repeated treatment was often necessary. Taylor touted his steam-driven massage device as speeding treatment while reducing physician fatigue.”
Does anyone know where this image actually came from? It’s been around for years. Of course it would be awesome if this were a real artifact from the 19th century, though I somehow doubt it. Someone told me once that it’s actually a scan from an old issue of a men’s magazine (Esquire, maybe?), and that this was a humorous illustrative prop for an article on the history of vibrators. If that’s the case, then whoever designed this masterpiece was ahead of their time. Or backwards in time, only on another timeline. Or whatever.
One technique from the book “The Art of Kissing,” published by Hugh Morris in 1936, lends itself well to some sort of steampunk re-imagining:
“Some few years ago, a very peculiar kissing custom arose which deserves mention here because, from it, we can learn how to adapt the method to our modern devices. At that time, when young people got together, they held, what was then known as, “electric kissing parties.” Young people are ever on the outlook for novel ways of entertaining themselves. In fact, when ether was first developed as an anesthetic, the young bloods of the town used to form “ether-sniffing” parties in which they got a perfectly squiffy ether “jag.” But to return to the “electric kisses.” An excerpt from a contemporary writer will, perhaps, give us some idea of what happened: ‘The ladies and gentlemen range themselves about the room. In leap year the ladies select a partner, and together they shuffle about on the carpet until they are charged with electricity , the lights in the room having been first turned low. Then they kiss in the dark; and make the sparks fly for the amusement of the onlookers.’ The same sort of experiment could be performed nowadays, on cold, dry nights when the air is overloaded with electricity.”
You can read the rest of the experiment here. It starts off gently, suggesting that you generate static electricity from the carpet in order to make a spark fly between yours and your lover’s lips. Then things take a more dramatic turn! “Once you have practiced this for some time, you will become so innured to the slight shock that you will seek more potent electric shocks. These can be obtained with the use of an electric vibrator or in fact, any device that is worked from a battery and a coil which steps up the weak 3 volts of the battery.” You can see where this is leading… read on.
The image above — this is what I imagine a successful electric-kissing experiment might look like — comes from a book of alchemical collages by artist Max Ernst called “A Week of Kindness”, which was published only two years before “The Art of Kissing,” in 1934. Coincidence? I also want to mention that I searched high and low for this particular image for maybe 10 minutes before finally finding it on Mer’s Flickr Page. Even while she’s off adventuring in the American Wild, Mer finds a way to contribute to the blog. Mysterious forces are at work.
Before Val Lewton died of a broken heart (a figurative and then literal one), look he produced a string of nine films for RKO Pictures from 1942 to 1946. None of them cost more than $150, cialis 000 to make. None ran longer than 75 minutes. All of them were saddled with lurid, buy focus group-tested titles like Isle of the Dead, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Ghost Ship. “They may think I’m going to do the usual chiller stuff which’ll make a quick profit, be laughed at, and be forgotten,” he told writer DeWitt Bodeen, “but I’m going to fool them…I’m going to do the kind of suspense movie I like.”1
The kind that I like too. Atmospheric2, stylish, literate—I might squeeze two of his films onto an all-time Top Ten list of horror favorites. So the news that Twisted Pictures (the people responsible for the Saw franchise) is in the process of re-making four of Lewton’s RKO classics—including my favorite, I Walked with a Zombie—makes me nauseated. I’m finally old enough to appreciate why critics bemoaned the oversexed Cat People remake in 1982. That film, at least, had a twenty-year-old Nastassja Kinski going for it. All we have to look forward to now is snuff porn. So, rather than look ahead, I thought I might take a look back—at Lewton’s meteoric career, and at a few scenes from his movies that still haunt me. The past is no vaccine for the future, to be sure, but in the here and now it can act as a topical salve.
“The gentleman who has the pleasure of tying the final bow owns you.”
– Mr. Pearl, interview
What strikes me about fetish legend/corsetier Mr. Pearl’s images is how much he looks like a true English gentleman – and how, magically, his 18-inch corseted waist works to enhance that image, the opposite of what one might expect it to do.
Mr. Pearl grew up in South Africa and moved to London at the earliest chance after completing his military service. He spent three years in New York in the early 90s, where he did his most intimate published interview, of which there are few. Already a renowned tightlacer by this time, Pearl treated corsetry with such reverence that he insisted on precision in every aspect of his involvement with it; when his New York interviewer described him as a corsetier, he interrupted. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am a designer who employs the corset and lacings into his designs. I am not a corsetier – I have not attained that specialized knowledge. There are only about five left in the whole world now, who possess that art. I hope one day to be amongst them.”
Fast-forward to the 2000s: Mr. Pearl is a successful corsetier, commissioned by Mugler, Lacroix, Galliano and Gaultier when they need a master to produce their corset designs for the runway. Clients include Dita, Kylie Minogue and Jerry Hall. He lives in Paris, and works out an atelier behind the Notre Dame.
Despite his success, Pearl doesn’t have a flashy website. There’s no web store to offer plastic-boned corsets that bear only his name, no MySpace page and no blog. He’s known for his aversion to modern technology, and his only web interview was handwritten and transmitted by fax.
