Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

Are you doing a Beauty Parlor presentation this Friday?? There will be 4, yes FOUR, groups presenting this week, including mine, so let's do what we can to make sure things run smoothly. Please let me know in advance (by responding to my e-mail) what you need to have happen in your presentation, that is...

1. Will you be playing music?

2. Will you be playing a movie clip? In what format (youtube, DVD, VHS, etc)?

3. Are you showing still pictures? If so, please have them prepared in some way by putting them together in a powerpoint or quicktime slideshow!!

4. And finally, do you need to hook up a laptop? If you are bringing a Mac, do you have the ADAPTOR to connect it to the projector?? If you're afraid that your computer is too old or buggy to work with the projector please handle that in advance and locate (borrow) a suitable computer.

It's the last week of Beauty Parlor!! Astounding!

Thanks!
christine

[I also have all of this as a PDF.]


I. Writing Around Hannah Hoch’s The Beautiful Girl

(When viewed upside down, I see this extra thing I didn’t see before. At the very top is the high wall and receding tracks of an above ground train stop.)

The beautiful girl is a machine. She does not Talk or See or Think. She won’t have a face unless it is only a fragment of one with a single looming expressionless eye. The beautiful girl is German. She is white. Why do we love Germany for its beautiful uniforms, cars, and designs? Why do we sometimes love these things so much as to forget what certain ideas about cleanliness and industry have done to bodies – what it has done to girls?

The perfect (Beautiful) girl will move things along. She will attach things to herself so everyone knows that she is always trying to be beautiful for someone other than herself. She makes things happen. She won’t stop working. She is industrious/industrial. She is faithful. She makes a high, clean sound. She whistles like a machine.

She is replaceable when she is done. Over. Used Up. When there are no more babies to be had, dishes to be washed, smiles to be summoned, what use is she then? What do you do with her then? Where does she go? What happens when the Beautiful Girl can’t be wound up and made to totter across a plane?

Is this why we have mountaintops?

Is this why we have attics? Is this why accessory dwelling units are called granny flats?



II. How I Didn’t Notice That I Was In Love With This Prosthesis Among Many

You were
my friend
I swung you
around my wrist
I knotted up your long grey cord
just enough
so I could swing you
around and around
without fear of loss
or a hard fall to the pavement
We walked around
Clinton Hill together
We looked at
light
and shade
We counted
the stops in between
I really liked you
Your Lumigrid is the best thing ever

But I moved
I packed you in your box
and took you on the plane
I moved again and maybe one more time
I forgot all about you

Where are our buildings?
Where is the sun that makes piercing outlines despite
thirty degree weather?
What is the thing
that taught me that I could cut
shapes out of rooftops and sky?
What is the thing
that taught me
that I could make tones and colors
happen
however I wanted?

What happened to me that I could forget the feeling
of a smooth, smooth cord
circling, spinning around
that space between
my winter gloved hand
and my rolled up sleeve?
I don't know how I forgot



III. Barbie Karaoke Makes Dreams Come True

I am a pocket-sized Barbie brand karaoke toy. I am fairly small at approximately 5 X 3 X 1 inches. It has been suggested that, due to my appearance, I am similar to or some kind of predecessor to the original iPod. My job is to provide joy and entertainment to children (or really anyone who wants to talk, sing, do stand up comedy, or be a performance artist), but I have spent much of my more recent life traveling, having made stops at various homes and thrift stores for repurchase.

I am not sure about my body because I think of myself as a map of sound. But I’ve had a lot of spare time so I’ve tried to figure it out. My brain is an electronic board somewhere inside my white plasticy shell. My mouth is a pink, flower decorated speaker, which sits like a big, low belly. The mic plugs that reside in little notches are my ears. They take in sound (information) and let me dispense it back into my surroundings. I don’t have feet or legs so it works out that I look good leaning on things or lying down. Prior to it being broken off, I had a plastic clip that was like an arm for me to hold onto my companions.

I do have my limitations. There’s only a few phrases I can exclaim on my own and only so many beats that I can beatbox. I am at my best when there’s a mic plugged in and there’s a voice, someone to share a sound with, channeling through. If toy designers had gotten it right, I would have been made in 1988 instead of 2001. I think it could have been a less technologically demanding time. Did kids want different things? I could have been the highlight of many a play date. I could have spent a summer evening clipped to a pair of white jean shorts and riding on a pink and purple bicycle with two little mics tucked into the front basket.

Here is a recap for anyone who may have missed these announcements made on Friday:

1. Please write a corpus response to the Feminist Video Art of the 70s program. Reflect! Respond! Process!

2. Also write a corpus entry regarding your small group discussions on "Metropolis."

3. On Tuesday please bring a celebrity toy or doll to class if you have one. Guest appearances will include: Victoria Beckham (the "Spice Girls"), Luke Perry ("90210"), Rachel Blanchard ("Clueless" the TV show), and Mary-Kate Olsen and Ashley Olsen.

Use of Humor in "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story"

There was an earlier post that I interpreted as saying that Todd Haynes was intentionally making fun of Karen Carpenter in his film. This has me thinking about what makes humor work and the quality of the humor (by which I mean the way it was used and its intent) in "Superstar." First of all, I don't think that the filmmaker was set on making fun of Karen Carpenter, specifically, as a person. There isn't a one-to-one relationship between Karen C. Barbie and the actual person -- the Barbie isn't a stand in for the person so when Karen the Barbie seems silly or is in an absurd situation the humor is not a direct way of making fun of Karen Carpenter.

Though the film can be thought of as being about a lot of things, a central point is that it's not just about this one specific celebrity. We are meant then perhaps to look at how women's bodies, in general, in society, are used as sites of discourse: That women's bodies are projected upon. That entire national, political dialogs pass through them. That this exchange becomes out of control when it is not acknowledged as real, active, and happening. (I'm borrowing all of this from what I wrote down in class.)

Also, humor and empathy are not always in opposition to one another. Humor can be a way of catching your breath. It lets you to see the reality of things without making you throw yourself off the top of a building. Scott Turner Schofield said something along the lines of, "If we weren't laughing, we wouldn't be able to stop crying our eyes out." To be active, to participate as an Observer, you have to empathize to a degree. Part of being an Observer, rather than a Spectator, is being able to see when something you are being shown represents the same world you inhabit and has the same rules that you live with. Being able to relate emotionally does not mean that you've given yourself over entirely and that you're doped up and unable to see things clearly. Humor and empathy aren't mutually exclusive!

On a related note...
At some point, one of my heros Barbara Kruger wrote about "Superstar." I don't agree with her use of the word "saccharine" but I thought it was cool to get another perspective on this movie. I've attached a PDF of the article. It's from her book Remote Control and was probably also published elsewhere.

Up next, I'll finally do some research on CAMP.

(And I was joking when I said that "Superstar" is a documentary of my life.)