Too much garbage? What if there wasn’t enough fruit jelly Up your body (havoc!)
“Too much sauce! That is spaghetti with anchovies and olives tomato soup! Blasphemy!”
Posts of this kind will not be permitted in this carnival. … Aloha! I am leaving paradise next week.
Notice that the aggressor is not wearing too much padding and taking a substantial amount of hits without getting hurt!
BTW I don’t dislike Aloha, we don’t wear grass skirts and … i drink too much and cry a lot but dance often
What is the meaning of “too much metal can destroy you”? Gold fabrics won’t work, because they shimmer too much, and there’s WAY too much rice, in comparison to spam
I’m teaching a class this summer called Image/ Text/ Screen. Today my students and I watched the first part of the second episode of the BBC TV version of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. It’s from, I guess, around 1972, and it’s worth watching for the mod 70s fashions alone. Really. There’s a pair of blue-green granny boots in this video that I can’t believe I don’t own.
If you didn’t take the time to watch it, and haven’t read the seminal (love that word, really) book of the same name, know that this episode focuses on the female nude in art and also on women as objects of the gaze (including their own). He narrates:
Men dream of women. Women dream of themselves being dreamt of. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.
At the time, I imagine this was a very radical observation. Of course in some ways it is still true. But it doesn’t, in its elegant essentialism, really represent the reality of how women look at men, or at each other, or even how women look at themselves, does it? I think you could switch the genders in the quote above and it would be true, and would even be true in some cases if you had the same genders in each line. Do you agree with me? If so, do you think that has always been so or has our (everyone’s) situation changed dramatically in the past 40 years or so? Granted, there’s still a lot of “old thinking” left. One of my students, a male, insisted today that “men are more visual” and even printed out an article by some (male) sexologist to “prove” it. “Nonsense,” I told him, saying that no male “expert” can contradict my own experience.
The notion that men “own” the domain of the visual and the power of the gaze is so last century.
All the same, there are other remnants of the traditional Western way of seeing that linger, and that I have been noticing as I move through this project, namely,
1) the notion that to solicit the gaze by displaying oneself is somehow shameful and vain 2) the idea that clothing as a subject of discussion is trivial or superficial
The first point brings to mind those Western painters Berger mentions who, desiring to look at women, painted them nude, put mirrors in their hands, and made their paintings anti-vanity morality tales. The same is true of images of expulsion from Eden. What thin excuses! European cultures were so long steeped in this kind of culture of shame that it seems to have found its inverse extreme in the exhibitionist climate we now live in. Even the word “exhibitionist” has disparaging nuances. The fact is that we all exist as form in at least three dimensions, and we all have eyes, and image capturing devices, so why does the shame (or inverse “shamelessness”) around display (and this occurs to me, applies not only to visual display, but to verbal display as well) still linger? I don’t pretend to have an answer to this question. It’s just something I’m noticing.
Regarding the second point, it occurred to me today that clothing is in fact neither trivial nor superficial. Deciding what to wear is a daily aesthetic choice that everyone has to make. There’s nothing trivial about aesthetics. So much meaning and affect and history go into every one of these decisions. We assume that clothing is superficial because it covers the surface of our bodies, but really that is too literal and just wrongheaded. Cloth and clothes wrap us just after birth, in sleep, and even in death: nothing is closer to us or more intimate than the garments that touch our bodies (“nothing comes between me and my Calvinism”). The clothes are part of us.
Something else I have noticed: I am not interested in “fashion.” Not really. I am interested in clothing.
Fashion is about hegemony.
In the same way, I am not interested in what group of poets is ahead or who the powerful figures are or who gets to have the most secure toehold on eternity. This seems to be the focus of many squabbles on the blogs and elsewhere, and those are the sort of posts that get the most comments and attention. At the risk of sounding quaintly essentialist (or just insufferably superior) myself, I really do think this is a male concern. I’m interested in poets and poetry and poems, but not Poets and Poetry and Poems. Correct me if I’m wrong.
Today’s outfit really can hardly be called an outfit. It turned into an uncharacteristically-for-July cool and rainy day, and I really just threw this on. I wanted to wear the aloha dress I mentioned yesterday, but that really is a dress for a sunny day. Again, my students liked this outfit: the colors, they said. The bright orchid cardigan got a couple of nice compliments. I like the cutouts on the purple empire top, but I do think overall the ensemble looks very teenage, and not really artfully so, either. A co-worker stopped me on the campus at lunchtime to tell me I looked like a student.
It was so humid and sticky that I had to do something with my hair, which felt like a scratchy wool poncho, so I did this top bun thing and then the four braids on either side. I did it while waiting for my lunch to come at the Thai restaurant. Another co-worker, an Indian guy, stopped me later and said I looked like Laura from Little House on the Prairie. I thought to myself, don’t I look more like Shiva? Anyway. Here I am, looking tired today, because I have pain from using computers too much, and it’s rainy.
And here’s another co-worker, Cassandra Dawn, looking so cool in her Wayfarer glasses, understated navy shorts and t-shirt, and smudgy Converses:
It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow. Maybe I’ll put the damn dress on anyway? We’ll see.
Shoutouts to Laura and Anne as well as Suzanne on flickr & Steve Evans on FB for keeping the meme flowing. Mwa!
Dreamed that a friend of mine bought a house where the Obamas were temporarily living with their three children (they had a new baby boy). The house was painted a kind of oxidized copper color, and was near an ocean. The house was designed to have a partly open space inside like a kind of dock beneath which water from the ocean was flowing. The water was full of life: a strange creature I was calling a “skate” although it wasn’t a skate, but some kind of camouflage-y, leaf-resembling fish that stayed upright on the water like a little sail (it “skated”), and any number of jellyfish, octopi, and other creatures that looked like microscopic organisms blown up very large… and all of these were biolumimnescent. Trippy! I remember some of the details of the house’s interior: a kind of patchwork of linoleum and hexagonal bathroom-style tiles on the kitchen/ entranceway floor, a little corner shelf made of decorative Italian tiles, but very old, everything old, unmatched, in yellowed tones. Old hardware on the kitchen cabinets, lucite with little flowers, I think, and circular, like those I saw recently in a neighbor’s house, apparently the same ones Louis Armstrong had in his house in Queens Anyway I kept going back in the dream to look at the water space and all of the life forms that moved around in it.
The dream got even more alaborate, with wish-fulfillment scenarios, but I think I’ll stop here.
Dream I go into a room where there are maybe five guys who look like figures from Aztec cartoon drawings. Some of them are maybe animals. Each one is bodypainted a different kind of metal: oxidize d copper, bronze, etc. Each one has some kind of magic jewelry that, when they put it on, acts as a torture device. Two of them argue about whether they have any volition or not about whether the jewelry will torture them. One says, I’ve been painting? eating? it all my life.
Lynn, you can just automatically take the dreams, you don’t have to even ask. Carte blanche.
Anyway I woke up to find I’d been clenching my teeth something awful.
He typed: “I’m in a relationship… with everything.” It sounds so sweet, but all human beings are in bondage: to each other. Thinking (then) makes me squirt on a parallel bee: this lachrymal honey. Poems may be the pimples of the mind – I am the fuschia frosting of the voice ( I think), and this is a cue to you to start paying attention (to me) immediately! I retain water as a swollen obduracy. The perfection of wire fences and their pinkish insides. Darling, when first we met, the lime contention was an indignant sun. There is pleasure all in and around me, knotted through with infinity like a do-rag, and I’m not hungry, or tired, or lacking in entertainments, because doing this entertains me. Even your absence is amusing, a piquant musk rubbed on the cusp of everything. I swear undying love to the stripe on the street, the dirty subway pole, the greek to-go cup, the advertising insert, and of course to homo erectus, aww yeah, his eager condescension…
Something blurry in my imaginings today: naked stork pictures, naked… pictures, like I’m firing at my own sonar echo in the dark. The naked metaphorical clarity of gum wrappers… folded into tiny dumb animals…so the rhapsodies now turn inward, like condoms on ghosts. Well, I had a yen for something in the dusky confabulations of my anguished iconicity, but that was pesky, like all the inventive humans. I love the beading on the edge of their kameezes. You just bathe in the bitter light. I notice that. I just notice that. Everyone is “lumped in.” You have preferences, although not for me. I like tea. I am a syrupy pariah with such. beautiful. ears, and I pull all this together! Yeah, rhapsodic cows always hold babies in the cool midnight against a million telephones that vibrate against a billion babies: this body just SHIVERS with signification as a kind of bugle… whither we are tending… peach angel sleeves, and today I heart the heat/ smearing neroli and civet on meat.
A screw loose in the universal machinery: like I care. Interpersonal machinery: all the mean valentines! And you know naked vultures have their own mean valentines (I’m not soothed by this) (or anything in the natural world). Well, you have metallic emotions in the listless absence. You battle in buttery light, bite back as a stone idol with a candy inside him whereas I am a parasite who understands “bell-like” perfection (bronze? plastic?), and that’s OK, in the way that everyone on this train actually has a crotch. It’s (what’s?) a vapid campanula – with an eye. I burble the already-learned coyness. “Art is my life,” the identical twins whisper to each other, stroking (like foals) the pretty topiaries. Again. And again.
Otohime 