tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80623923131129009132023-11-16T07:00:12.519-05:00lipstickeaterfemininity, feminism, faggotry, egoless narcissismjoony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.comBlogger79125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-23595689200381203422013-06-27T14:42:00.000-04:002013-06-27T15:23:49.437-04:00It Died a Virgin<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Out in the fizz pop crackle world
of the internet, where every move, right and wrong, occupies a corner of
infinity, can something ever truly die?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can
blogs die?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I hope so, because the death
of something is an affirmation of its life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For something to die means it had to have been living, had a
body that breathed, wandered, giggled, fought and loved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By killing my blog, lipstickeater, here and
now, I hope to give it the flesh it always deserved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And hopefully, a non-Christian, non-mystic,
but witchy reality of afterlife.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
text pieces that are amassed here on this blogspot domain ain’t going nowhere,
and by the very stillness of their stasis they form the flesh of a body that
you and I can now confirm did inhale and exhale.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These words are the long white flowers I am laying
at the grave of lipstickeater.blogspot.com.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Five years ago, I began writing in/
as lipstickeater<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>to stabilize the
vulnerable molecules of my own body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
was two years into being a gay divorcée, trying to figure out how and if I was going
to be able to maintain being a femme without a butch husband: I had to learn to
be tautologically feminine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the same
time, I had recently, impulsively, brought to end a two-year negotiation with a
prestigious university press over the publication of a book, a version of my
doctoral thesis on black femininity. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I
wanted to write a book that changed the direction of not only queer theory but
also the discourse of critical theory itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I wrote purposefully in a chatty, gossipy voice; my footnotes were
minimal because I believed that citations should be functional, referring only
to work with which one actually engaged, rather than an bloated but dribbly farce of academic rigor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Anyone can do a
JSTOR search and plug in citations for a billion footnotes.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the reviewers engaged by the press saw my
aesthetic and conceptual choices as either laziness or inability (probably
both) and in their rejections of the manuscript, condescendingly harped on my need to change my rainbowbabywoman into
something other than what it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Mainly: books <i>they</i> had written.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Don’t
believe their progressive poses: academic theorists, and particularly queer
theorists, love to live the Oedipal narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>My book was not a traditional academic book; its title is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rainbowbabywoman, </i>for fuck’s sake. But the
editor agreed with them, and like a girl who had gone on too many dates with a
guy who fucked her hard while telling her she’s ugly, I decided to stop
revising and submitting to that press.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So there I was, a single femme, an unpublished academic, still furiously feminist, but the body that had
to hold those identities, my body, was just a cloud of electrons going quickly
to ash.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I am stretched next to the white
flowers over this grave.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I always
thought that writing could hold together my too disappearing flesh.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ever since I was a child, I’ve been writing
because I can’t sing, dance, or get pregnant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I was a frontwoman without a band, a failed ballet dancer, and a transsexual who doesn’t believe transsexual surgery can solve my problems.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I entered graduate school in 1997, I was
determined to write a book that would not only express my particular tangle of
racial and gender identities (I’ve always felt myself to be a black girl
trapped in an Asian gay male’s body; I’ve been a feminist since I was 12 years
old) but turn my own psyche into a live test for the theories of performativity
which is my formal training. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rainbowbabywoman </i>was to be a performance
of the performativity of race and gender.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I laid out a detailed phenomenology of cross-identification, showing that to embody the race and gender
that you are not requires a rigorous ethics of emotional, political and
physical positions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But this wasn’t just an
idea; it was me, my body.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The magic of these white flowers is
that roots regenerate from their snipped feet, like lizards.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eventually I left <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rainbowbabywoman </i>gasping in its shoebox, and decided to write new
theories through a blog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did so not
because I wanted to give my sentences a consolation prize but because I sensed
a certain kind of freedom and opportunity in digitalia as not platform, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">medium </i>of writing. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When a painter finishes a painting, it begins
to exist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If she has a gallery behind
her and has a show or sells the thing, hooray, but she doesn’t have to have a
show or sell in order for the painting to have a bodily integrity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether anyone wants it or not, the finished painting
simply <i>is</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In direct contrast, a writer’s
work doesn’t exist unless it is desired, not by a person, but people who proxy
for conglomerates.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve always found
this to be profoundly unfair: my text pieces were always my girls, my
daughters, my guardian fairies the moment I tapped the last period into being. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then suddenly, with the advent of digitalia,
it was suddenly possible for my textual pieces to become the little paintings
they’ve always wanted to be. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lipstickeater<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>was born. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Blogspot allowed me to fuse text making to the labor of creating a body for myself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To evoke my beloved Félix Guattari, it is an assemblage of my feminist
femininity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It taught me so much: to be
fearless in vulnerability, to write and think quickly, to produce a rhythmic body
of work rather than one <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ur-</i>text, to
believe in the power of the immaterial to accomplish material things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
I wore white to match the white
flowers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I feel like a widow although
it’s only a tail of me that’s died.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If
I’ve been slowing down on writing in/ as lipstickeater, it’s because its flesh
has been gradually congealing into its own infinite objectness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am always going to be all about femininity
and feminism, but my daily body craved other forms. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m working on a book-length piece about pure
feminism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I want to think big, to write
a manifesta, a daintier sequel to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Second Sex.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One might call it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fourth Sex.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I call it <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Artificial
Menstruation</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I also completed a
book of stories and named her <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lace Sick
Bag.</i> I’ve been supremely lucky to work with my new feminine feminist
heroes, Patricia No and Antonia Pinter of <a href="http://www.publicationstudio.biz/" target="_blank">Publication Studio</a> Portland, who will
bring <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lace Sick Bag </i>out in early
September.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In terms of taking my digital
prosemaking to the next level, I’m most proud of this collaboration because Publication
Studio is doing the kind of work that is going to be the future of books.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When they publish a book, it is tripartite: an
e-book, a free digital reading copy uploaded to their reading commons that can
be annotated by readers, and a hand-made physical book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are turning books into electron
clouds.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With their reading commons, they
are infusing the often cold bodylessness of the internet with the tactile intimacy
of touching a book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And in elegantly
converse symmetry, their production of the physical book is informed by the digital model of commerce and object-production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The beautiful physical books are produced on
demand: the book only comes into its paper body after a reader purchases it
over the Publication Studio e-shop. The traditional publishing model is
clunkily capitalistic: gobs of books are published, and then hawked to a public
in whom desire must be whipped up, like pounds of cheap and
cheaply-made clothes so desperate at H&M.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
physical books at Publication Studio are never wasted, never have to fear a
death in remainder bins or cold dark storage, because they germinate from the
reader’s desire.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
The words I’ll be writing from now
on will sit at <a href="http://girlscallmurder.com/">girlscallmurder.com</a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Lipstickeater is dead, but maybe someday it'll come back to life. But the good thing about being dead is that you
can now become a ghost!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lipstickeater
will keep appearing at its whim on girlscallmurder, in its new ethereal form: <a href="http://tmblr.co/ZXiOmxoAEpCE" target="_blank">hashtag</a>.
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m laying lipstickeater deep into the
grave, but its desire keeps wafting up like a heavy perfume: the desire to
hover, be granular, dissipate. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
creates a desire in me, too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I make
myself ready to be haunted, and my digital skin is growing pores like
uteri.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m holding white flowers in
mourning but I’m looking up at you because the earth is not where the body of
lipstickeater is; it’s in you, out there, in the fizz crackle pop world of sparks
and want.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-78701427135335862172013-02-14T10:50:00.002-05:002013-02-14T10:52:07.048-05:00My Melody Catcher<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
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What you are about to read began as
a suicide note for a blog. Then I
noticed that I was already dead. I
hadn’t written in Lipstickeater for twelve months, left it (my digital-textual
body) in a vegetative state. I left it
for dead. <o:p></o:p></div>
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But if in this state, I suddenly wanted
to compose a suicide note...it must mean that I am not dead after all! Suicide notes cannot be posthumous. Joy! I
am not going to kill myself, but I am still a little suicidal. <o:p></o:p></div>
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When you are unhappy with living
and discover the notion that you can actually end your own life, it is scary
but ironically, it returns to you a sense of yourself that everyone else wants
to steal only so they can destroy. In
fact, there begins to gather a glamour about it in the very etymological sense
of the word “glamour”: a dark haze over light.
Suicide becomes dangerously glamorous when you are ten years old and
suddenly kids in the playground begin to torture you because you are obsessed
with My Melody. The years drag on from
there as you get tortured for being homosexual before you know what homosexual
is. Then you conclude that all you want
to do is disappear from the tangible world.
<o:p></o:p></div>
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As a sullen teenager, I was a
stereotype of a suicidal kid. The world
hated me and I hated the world right back.
I was literally the kid smoking under the bleachers while the student
government led a pep rally for the football players and popular kids in Guess
jeans. Decades later, as I figure out my
place in my professional world—which is the rarified and small one of academia
and then, even smaller and more rarified queer academia—I found out that I am
still the kid smoking under the bleachers.
It sucked. It sucked and it
hurt. And hurt me so much that I wanted
to kill off the textual body that was ignored and belittled by my professional
world. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Sooner or later you discover Sylvia
Plath, and you discover the idea of being suicidal<i>. </i>Plath is more than the gleaming frighteningly blond head stuck in
an unlit gas oven. In life, as a
suicidal girl before she performed the act of suicide, she was a fiercely
intellectual and doggedly emotional writer who used her pain as material and
tool of her art. What stopped the
teenaged me from going on and through with suicidal attempts was the glamour of
Plath the Suicidal. “Being suicidal” is
an identity that requires you to be alive.
It is characterized by a constant and nagging obsession with one’s own
death, but one in which the death is also infinitely postponed, for if you go through
with it, you are no longer suicidal; you are just dead. If you are “suicidal,”
it means you are constantly haunted by thoughts of killing yourself, but you
are <i>living through it.</i> You write through it. You remain “suicidal;” you don’t commit suicide. <o:p></o:p></div>
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This week, fifty years ago, Sylvia
Plath committed suicide. Last week, I
found myself listening to Britney Spears for hours even though I never listened
to her during her ubiquity in the early 2000’s, even though I didn’t actually
own a single album of hers. I must be a
true vintage whore because most things feel sweeter and brighter when they are
at least five or six years too old. (Britney
circa 2001 or 2003 is now truly “Vintage”!!)
History is softer, more yielding, more yielding to one of my favorite
feelings, yearning. So it is with
Britney. Another blond who had suicide
on the horizon. I think of her as always
just about to burst into another breakdown, but only just so. Unlike Plath, Britney’s good at the
teeter-totter of living. She makes dull
soulless dance music, where “soulless” means not a lack of interiority but
SATANIC!!! Satanic as in: the refusal of
a dogmatic definition of inner life. The
voice that combines a satanic spirit and a temperamental computer. It takes a lot to soften that voice into
something vulnerable, but when it happens it might be really sweet. Her face is just this side of excessive
inbreeding. Enough makeup (a lot) and
she can tread between white trash rough diamond and plastic doll. I’ve been listening to her 2003 album <i>In the Zone </i>on repeat while struggling
through some academic prose on embodiment.
Obviously she doesn’t have the gift of language that Plath had, but <i>In the Zone </i>is kind of like Plath’s <i>Ariel</i>.
It is high-gloss style confessional music that simultaneously signals
the end of confessional music. Music
that is all about you yet nothing about you.
I purchased remixes of “Toxic” on iTunes and it sounded so right for the
story I was working on. I wrote the
following lines:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0opWBjorUVjB1CW2z5b9lnCAIDd0Vyr3yL9u_9VH91SY_LrYItDGBMdjmDuneQHKnxZ_Vv98ogDmDgcywUlB08DWMDX9EVCdVfE15fyt7beGkTzRB07NsPFEKwVzPbJqW89kNYbE4_IhP/s1600/rag+doll+excerpt.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0opWBjorUVjB1CW2z5b9lnCAIDd0Vyr3yL9u_9VH91SY_LrYItDGBMdjmDuneQHKnxZ_Vv98ogDmDgcywUlB08DWMDX9EVCdVfE15fyt7beGkTzRB07NsPFEKwVzPbJqW89kNYbE4_IhP/s320/rag+doll+excerpt.jpg" width="260" /></a><br />
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Afterwards, I went on ebay and
found exactly the same old tour t-shirt I made my character wear. My character
isn’t me, but after I wrote him to life I wanted to bend my flesh closer to his
outlines. I get nervous. We’ll see.
We’ll see. <o:p></o:p></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<br />joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-45637355360307122062013-01-22T15:13:00.000-05:002013-01-22T16:21:53.826-05:00this is me...then (Black Mistress Tina)<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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I’ve been
working out my body. Not as in the 90s,
when I believed that the thing to do with my femininity was to bury it under
mounds of unnatural muscle. No, these
past twelve months have been about living in the 90s that I should have lived:
working on getting my body to be the performative connector between my identity
as girl and that as writer. I am in the
process of leaving Joony Schecter behind for a new identity that I’ve already
begun building: A hausfrau and BDSM dominatrix of the emotions: <a href="http://girlscallmurder.tumblr.com/" target="_blank">BLACK MISTRESS TINA</a>. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Black
Mistress Tina is a hausfrau and BDSM dominatrix of the emotions. The name is an homage to Debi Mazar’s
character in Spike Lee’s 1996 film “Girl 6,” which is herself homage to Bettie
Page and to the hard romantic pragmatism of a femme. I have fallen in love with a man and we
decided to cohabitate. He is also a
wonderful electronic musician. One of
his early gestures of winning me over was listing me as his “muse” in the description
of a piece that he produced last summer.
But because my man Roddy is a modern man, he views “muse” as consonant
with “partner.” Historically, “muse” has
been understood as a pure and passive body that exists solely to submit to the authoritative
genius of the “artist.” Of course, this
history has been also used as a tool of the patriarchy, in which “muse” equals
“woman” and “artist” is “man.” From the
beginning, Roddy saw me as a muse because he understood my femininity, but with
a definite anti-patriarchal stance.
(This is partly why I love him.) <o:p></o:p></div>
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I then worked as muse on his
“Violets,” a nine-minute sound piece in which all the samples that Roddy used
as raw material came from me. I was a traditional
muse insofar as I was literally objectified: Roddy recorded my grunts, whoops,
hisses, wails, and even humming Culture Club’s “Miss Me Blind.” This process made me feel simultaneously
troubled and elated; I was cut up into voice samples, made into a thing. It was cutting of a different kind. I saw my body fluttering helplessly on the
cutting board and watching Roddy transplant a different pulse into it made the
heart still in my own body beat hard and happy. A piece of my body—my voice—was ripped from me
and snipped and pieced together like a rabbit fur coat. I just snuggled in the
luxuriousness of it all. And when it came
for Roddy to present the piece, he insisted that I be given credit as a
collaborator, and asked me to come up with a bodily performance to go with the
piece. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Which led
to “The Rabbit Catcher.” This time, the work began with me: I’ve wanted to
write a mourning piece for Whitney Houston ever since her untimely death last
year. But whenever I sat in front of my
computer, all I could say was nothing. I
had the same reaction to her death as Mariah Carey: “I’m almost incapable of
talking about it.” So “Mourning and
Melancholia: Whitney Houston” sat unfinished but for the quote from
Mariah. In the meantime, I got an idea
to adapt one of my favorite poems, Sylvia Plath’s “The Rabbit Catcher,” as a
performance piece. I became fixed with
the gesture of singing a song while eating my own hair. I wrote a score for it, and Roddy and I set about
thinking about what sound should come out of me. My job was to again provide
Roddy with a stockpile of sonic raw material.
Immediately, I felt that the sound should be a recording of me being
possessed by Whitney Houston. I decided
that I would transcribe in textual form all the sounds—including not only Whitney’s
voice but the instruments—in the epic 10 minute remix of Whitney’s cover of
“I’m Every Woman.” Roddy would record me
doing a “flat” reading of those texts, which he would re-cut into what he calls
an “aural bed” in which the audience—and I—can luxuriate. As he played his sound piece, I would then
perform live another version of the transcribed text. We performed a sketch version of the piece
this past December at the Apexart. We’ll
perform an expanded and fully formed version in May. But in the meantime: enjoy my new body, <i>al dente. </i></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/56604840" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe> <br />
<a href="http://vimeo.com/56604840">The Rabbit Catcher</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/nuuklang">Roddy Schrock</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-13178972061273077672013-01-11T08:49:00.000-05:002013-01-11T08:49:21.039-05:00MacArthur Park: Jennifer Ehle in "Zero Dark Thirty"
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<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Let’s lay things down sharply: “Zero Dark Thirty” is pro-torture
propaganda. The director Kathryn
Bigelow, writer Mark Boal (who are also the film’s producers), and lead actors Jessica
Chastain and Jason Clarke have all come out in ill-informed and illogical
defense of their film. They
misunderstand the critique of the film as endorsing torture as only responding
to their depiction of torture. But the
film doesn’t condone torture because it visualizes torture. In fact, its depiction of torture, and in
particular, waterboarding, is actually too softballed in this age of wild
filmic violence—there are worse, more disturbing scenes in a “Die Hard”
film. To make a critique of torture,
these scenes ought to be in at least Abel Ferrera land. Furthermore, the film’s lead character
participates in torture with no verbalized or bodily remorse; it is clear that
she believes in its efficacy. In fact,
in two separate sequences, the screenplay actually puts into words this
sentiment: a detainee practically begs the inquisitors to ask him questions, to
which he vows he will answer truthfully because, he says, he wants no more
torture; a CIA top gun informs his boss that all the information about the
location of Osama Bin Laden (which turn out to be correct) were “obtained from
detainees.” To make things worse, Bigelow
and Boal have contradicted themselves, condescendingly brushing off criticism
with the tired old claim that film is fiction, but claiming, both in interviews
and in the opening title card of the film itself, that the film is
“journalistic”—that it is part non-fiction created from classified information. A fiction with claims and ambitions to be political
fact is creeping fast toward propaganda. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> It is
difficult to think about aesthetics of a film that is in fact, not a piece of
art but propaganda. Thus it was hard to
see one of my sentimental favorite actresses, Jennifer Ehle, show up in “Zero
Dark Thirty” as a CIA agent. To see my
beloved 90s Lizzie Bennett serving the cause of a neo-Leni Riefenstahl! But I suppose the mark of a truly great
actress is her ability to reveal the limitations of the filmic material with
the force of her body. It is work that
is not done by most of the cast. Take
for instance, its lead actor. Jessica Chastain,
as CIA agent Maya who says she “will kill Bin Laden,” doesn’t so much interpret
a role as embody every patriarchal quality that is currently valued in America:
bullheadedness, cultural and historical myopia, emotional numbness. Her Maya is sorority girl as American
hero. The scenes in which she displays
her supposed toughness—screaming shrilly at her boss, referring to herself as a
“motherfucker” in front of a government top dog—are laughable. It is hard to take this character seriously
when her method of getting what she wants is to whine as loudly as possible,
and even more so when she discusses serious matters in a Delta Delta Delta Can
I Help Ya Help Ya Help Ya vocal cadence.
Why have so many people claimed her as a feminist hero? A feminist is not a just a human being with a
vagina. A feminist is someone who uses
her mind, soul, and body to exert revolutionary force against patriarchal
traditions. A character like Maya is no
different from Margaret Thatcher, Sarah Palin or Michele Bachmann, women who
have claimed personal agency and institutional power by becoming lapdogs of the
patriarchy. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Ehle’s
character is distinguished as an opposite of Maya: she seems at once more
pragmatically focused <i>and</i> more easily
distracted. The pragmatism is a matter
of representation; it’s written in the dialogue (she tells Maya not to obsess
over Bin Laden and concentrate rather on preventing terrorist attacks). It’s the quality of scattered distraction
that Ehle herself brings to the part with her physicality. Ehle’s trademark is her eyes, which for a
white actress are vaguely Asiatic, and always look like they are laughing. She used them to create an iconic character
of steely logic and wary playfulness in “Pride and Prejudice” (1995). In “Zero Dark Thirty,” the laughing eyes dart
frenetically, in direct contrast to the often unblinking, concentrated (and
creepy) stare of Chastain. Ehle’s
costumes also mark the contrast between her and Chastain. While Chastain stays in dark pantsuits and
neutral tops, and no jewelry, Ehle wears pearls, skirts, stilettos, chiffony
and ruffly blouses, and a variety of hairdos (loose waves, retro beehive bun, and
a bouncy Gidget-esque ponytail in her final scene). I’d contend that Ehle is the film’s sole
embodiment of femininity. When she lands
a highly-prized informant, she prepares for the meeting by baking him a
cake! The scene in which Ehle is icing
gleefully is a treasure. She seems to be
getting ready for a date with a lover.
There is something simultaneously disturbing and enchanting about a CIA
agent who views an enemy contact as a romantic interest. At least that is the way Ehle plays her:
waiting for the contact to arrive, she is all furrowed brows and jittery jibbering. We feel anxious for her: what if she gets
stood up on prom night??!! She’d have to
leave her cake out in the rain!! When
she sees him finally approach, those black eyes of hers laugh again, and well
up with happy tears. She asks the
security guys to stand down at the gates because “This is special.” The special date, though, begins to feel
ominous, and all the more so because Ehle’s excitement and giddiness is so
palpable. We know something bad will
happen, and it does: the contact turns out to be a suicide bomber. As he gets out of the car into Ehle’s
welcoming, open eyes, the film pulls back into a wide aerial shot and:
BOOM!! Ehle’s punishment (her “Just
Desserts,” quipped my partner sympathetically) is for her femininity. The
lesson, in line with a particularly American patriarchy, is that femininity should
be reserved for the personal realm. In work,
especially if your work involves matters of state and foreign relations, you
must be as non-gendered as possible; hyper-masculine aggression if you must. Ehle’s character doesn’t so much use her
femininity in her dealing with the enemy as she simply <i>is </i>feminine. The female character that performs femininity in
high-level intelligence work must die, while the one who performs not so much
masculinity but anti-femininity, is rewarded with heroic accolades. This pedagogy against femininity, though, is again
purely in the realm of representation: the screenplay sketches out the outlines
of two opposing female “types.” But it
is in performativity, the actresses’ wearing those outlines, that the real
lessons are learned. Ehle endowed her
character with her individual and charming femininity, and thus sacrificed her remarkable
perfomative ability to Bigelow’s violent propagandistic intent, just as surely
as her character sacrifices herself for her country’s cause. I never cry out at scenes of violence in
films, but when that bomb went off and I knew that “Jennifer Ehle” had indeed
thrown herself onto the landmine of patriarchy, I cried out. The bomb sound was so loud that it muted my
lone loud cry. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-35984013095187412272012-01-25T13:53:00.004-05:002012-01-25T14:04:04.515-05:00my boyfriend’s rival is fassy/ fassy is my boyfriend’s rival<p class="MsoNormal"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyIBSIocnIaVi8sLLLHRwykSlBPKY2X1ZauUYVEYa1ZvfhM3C0hRdo5Yy1KeSpXdYdfekPXS8LSBwqQYzFV6w' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe> </p><p class="MsoNormal">I am abnormally obsessed with the actor Michael Fassbender (better known to his disciples as “Fassy”). The above is a video tour of the textual sublimation of my peculiarly sexual obsession with Fassy. To narrate the exact provenance of my obsession with Fassy is a bigger textual task. Suffice for now to say that I saw <i>X-Men: First Class </i>in the theatre four times. My fantasy date is for me and my boyfriend to have a double date with Fassy and Zoe Kravitz. And I love that that tiny patch on Fassy’s right upper lip where facial hair does not grow. My boyfriend had patiently borne the hysteria of my obsession with Fassy, and rather than have me bear an illegitimate child of Fassy, suggested that I not only write something about it, but that I turn the text into a holdable object. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">We came to call this object a “foldover”: kind of like a turnover: text and art in a flaky buttery shell that can be popped into your brain when you’re walking to work or needing a mid-afternoon sweet fix. The foldover contains two short pieces on Fassy’s presence in the two films (<i>A Dangerous Method</i> and <i>Shame</i>), and an original drawing. It is color printed on vellum, and the covers (whose design is inspired from 90s issues of <i>Interview </i>magazine) have been hand-painted by yours truly. Only 28 have been produced. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The foldovers will be available for purchase at some fine outlets or blackmarket corner in the near future. In the meantime, they will make their public debut tonight at <i><a href="http://dirtylooksnyc.org/">Dirty Looks</a>,</i> a fabulous queer film series directed by Bradford Nordeen (tonight’s event, at Judson Memorial Church in New York, highlights the video work of Charles Atlas). The timing of the debut feels right, as Fassy’s name was not among the Oscar nominations that were announced yesterday. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">So in angora soft protest of Fassy’s victimization, my boyfriend Roddy will be representing me and my Fassy foldover at <i>Dirty Looks </i>tonight. My boyfriend is <i>so </i>Lord Warburton from Henry James’s <i>The Portrait of a Lady</i>: he has “a kind thought even for a rival.” So if you are in New York, swing by, catch some great queer video work, maybe buy a foldover, and say hi to the only man in my world who is Fassy’s rival. </p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-6248158450864657802012-01-12T15:02:00.002-05:002012-01-12T15:04:36.490-05:00california glitter manga (la fille du MTA)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnyS9_8Nseuaa6IWW_W3KN79XCiiwUS0QMFItLHmEWmw59ar0x6cFovnRneoJlpyhUxo5AyQig7gG1cFPrpICqCic1Z3NFaftxx2ij6gTvihPuSrqReEL8fOkRB5Ji0mYMAF5pbsVLONeu/s1600/mta-lady-star.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 279px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnyS9_8Nseuaa6IWW_W3KN79XCiiwUS0QMFItLHmEWmw59ar0x6cFovnRneoJlpyhUxo5AyQig7gG1cFPrpICqCic1Z3NFaftxx2ij6gTvihPuSrqReEL8fOkRB5Ji0mYMAF5pbsVLONeu/s400/mta-lady-star.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5696838790153761650" /></a><p class="MsoNormal">The night I became a real Californian I was in Manhattan (of course). My boyfriend and I were at the 66th St. subway station and a metro card machine had just eaten up ten of my dollars. Because there was no attendant station at this particular entrance, we had to climb out and seek out another that held a human being in an MTA uniform. I asked my strident boyfriend to take care of rectifying this situation, since I can barely get on the phone to order a pizza. He walked up to the glass cage and spoke with cute righteousness right into the little slotted metal oval that separated the MTA attendant from the outside world. After listening to his impassioned complaint and looking at my metro card, she said simply: “There’s nothing I can do.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This was the dreaded and expected reply. I thought maybe her metro card reader could magically see that I had stuck $10 in it, but apparently not. She could give me a complimentary entrance, but otherwise, the only thing we could do was fill out a complaint form and mail it to the MTA Office and wait for the big fat refund check to be mailed to me. “You have to go get the number of the machine that took your money though,” she instructed. My Brooklyn-dwelling boyfriend has a thing against the MTA anyway, so this was a welcome last straw. He went all fire-and-brimstone on the MTA agent: “Are you serious? I know it’s not your fault, but this is just ridiculous.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">As he ranted more, I just kind of stood off to the side, mutely watching the MTA agent. She was a small, thin-faced African-American woman of middle years. She was bundled in a grey fleece and she looked tired as all hell. Her face was tightly closed against the brief but broad range of consumer’s fury my boyfriend was unfurling on my behalf. But while she met my boyfriend’s gaze dead-on, her look was not unsympathetic. Her hair was pulled back into a tidy bun, with an elegant, almost Victorian middle part. I stepped forward, tugged at my boyfriend’s sleeve like a little wife and said, “It’s OK. Let’s just go get the number of the machine.” I skipped up to the attendant myself to receive the complaint form and self-addressed prepaid envelope. I thanked her and then we were off. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The whole time I dragged him up and out and back into the first subway entrance, my boyfriend was grumbling like mad, but I weirdly felt all daisies and buttercups. I felt something come out from that MTA booth and wind snugly around my feelings. As I explained to my still indignant boyfriend, it was almost midnight, and that lady was probably not thrilled about being trapped in that glass box, her hands tied by the MTA corporation that didn’t give a fig about her, either. I cooed at him and practically danced the both of us to and fro, from the attendant box, to the offending ticket machine, back to the attendant box. My boyfriend said afterwards that I was “bouncing around like My Little Pony.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The MTA lady was waiting for us. “What’s the number of that machine?” Her inquiry held fatigue, but also an upward lilt: it was not aggressive. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I skipped to the counter. “1733,” I chirped, sounding as if 1733 were a winning lottery number. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The lady nodded and wrote the number down. It could have been her grocery list for all I knew, but I appreciated the official quality of the gesture. She then waved us towards the turnstall. Her voice was, again, not friendly, but not unfriendly, either. “OK. <i>Both</i> of you go through the first entrance.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Thank you!!” My voice was so cheery it was almost a shout. I skipped and collided into an unyielding turnstall, but I bounced right off with an unsinkable “Yeep!!” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">“The <i>first </i>gate.” The lady called out. Gently, I think. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Oh, the first one! Thank you!!” I then bounced right through the right gate, harp tunes popping out of my pores. As we were waiting for our train, my boyfriend expressed his amazement at me. He told me that my unusual bounciness had melted away not only his own cynicism and grumpiness, but, he deduced, that of the MTA lady. “I think you shocked her. She didn’t shut down on us, which is the norm. She’s so used to all these grouchy aggressive New Yorkers. You brought a little California glitter to a hardened MTA attendant.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal">It is an understatement to describe myself as <i>not</i> the sunniest gal in the room. I learned how to be an adult by reading Sylvia Plath, and deep in my heart, I am still a depressed teenage girl. But that night, I felt like covering that grey metal and Plexiglas box with iridescent fluorescent hologrammatic stickers of hearts, rainbows, and unicorns. I know I’m not powerful enough, but I hope I had turned that MTA lady’s eyes into wide glitter starry manga eyes. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">There are some things I could attribute to (or blame for) my uncharacteristically puffy amiyumi behavior: the cheery opera we had just left (Donizetti’s <i>La Fille du R</i><i>égiment </i>with a heroine styled after Lucy Ricardo and Pippi Longstocking); the glasses of champagne inhaled during intermissions; the superfestive glittery Isabel Marant sweater I wore to sit with my boyfriend in plush blood red balcony seats, we the junior opera queens. What all of those factors did was open up the airwaves for the call of the wild, the call of California. Pack me in a pink box and call me Malibu Hello Kitty Barbie. </p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-58412557235937160472011-11-17T20:38:00.003-05:002011-11-17T20:41:50.877-05:00analog sex in a digital world<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-fjmeCjmWwSJH6jtYs2RaszvYhLkCCq4V03K3qriKLodh9U5Z7znJkOmB4PeviJQ59fdWHR4z-QBXMEkLUtIWxts_2kRKM8VDU2EVSQ_upFsN5eqfclVlnnhMhP2csNKShdOm2uzVOV6j/s1600/mariah+carey+kinda+scary.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi-fjmeCjmWwSJH6jtYs2RaszvYhLkCCq4V03K3qriKLodh9U5Z7znJkOmB4PeviJQ59fdWHR4z-QBXMEkLUtIWxts_2kRKM8VDU2EVSQ_upFsN5eqfclVlnnhMhP2csNKShdOm2uzVOV6j/s400/mariah+carey+kinda+scary.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5676144604161712290" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal">One of the things I promised myself when I fell in love this summer was that I was not going to look back. With my boyfriend, I didn’t want to be in love the same way I was in love in my twenties. This task has been surprisingly easy for someone whose idea of living in the present had been romanticizing/ regretting the past and idealizing/ dreading the future. It helps that my boyfriend is the kind of soulful being who would respond to an OK Cupid profile (mine) in which “Thinking about the past and the future” was the answer to the question “What are you mostly likely to be doing on a Friday night?” So yeah, I’m getting better at living fully fleshed in the present tense. What surprised me was how I—and my boyfriend—went back in time to construct a romantic sex life.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">A couple weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were verbally horsing around, and because he is that delectable combination of tech geek and music geek (with an MFA in electronic music to prove it) we somehow came up with the idea of my being a cassette tape to his tape deck. Exactly how we came upon this metaphor I don’t quite remember. All I know is we’ve been using it like hell to flirt with one another. A week ago, we had the following email exchange (which has been redacted for love and modesty):</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Me: “you make me feel like a cassette tape being slipped out of its case.” <o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i>Roddy: “i’m slipping you out of your case so i can sound your ribbon with my magnet this weekend!” </i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">OK, cue burlesque comic horns and please, gag if you want to. It could seem like we were making some kind of crude sex joke about a penis and a receptive orifice, but it sure didn’t feel like it. When I think about the cassette tape and the tape deck as a metaphor of our connective sexuality, I find that it resists cooption by human sexuality. Certainly, something is being inserted into another thing via an opening. But the cassette tape is hardly a phallic object. Not only is it not oblong in shape, the cassette doesn’t have the insistent willfulness of the phallus. The cassette is in fact a very coquettish object (even its name is a cute pink tease): it withholds the smooth brown thin ribbons of its voice within a tiny flat body. So traditionally feminine is the cassette that it must wait for a knob of magnet to push into its own slight opening and press its own magnetic skin down against a fairy bed of foam. But for the cassette tape to be invaded, rotated and read by the hungry knob, it has to first invade the bodily integrity of the knob. In their mutual invasion and caginess, the cassette and tape deck could be lesbianic...except that the two objects are totally different, physically. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This little mental exercise underscored for me how much heterosexuality structures the fantasy life of gay people: cock-dildo-tongue-finger up in the ass or vulva, the culmination of the sexual act is penetration leading to climax. Even when we reject it, penetration hovers above us like the patriarch we are rebelling against. Penetration hovers ever ready to invade all possible fantasy-representations of sex. But rather than creating a sexual metaphor out of the structure of human sexuality, what if we <i>use </i>a metaphor to re-structure human sexuality? What does sound-playback technology teach us about sexually connecting with one another? </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The digital means—the mp3 and CD—are depressingly tautological. Operated by light, digital playback forbids touch and tactility and thus offers sexuality that is...well, digital (skype sex). So onto analog: the classic vinyl and turntable combo is, by contrast, depressingly <i>too </i>human. Pointed, mechanized metal probe pierces into the chasms a round object to make it produce sound. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is why I find the metaphor of the cassette and tape deck to be such a functional conceptual tool for my sex life. It doesn’t shy away from penetration, but it refracts the focus of penetration in such a way that it is impossible to derive from it a phallic narrative. Penetrations cancel each other out, becoming pure choreography. Simultaneously, the mechanics of deriving pleasure emphasizes a gentle, tender tactility: if the magnet pushes down too hard, the tape will be ruined and silenced forever. My boyfriend and I have sex (and romance) like cassette to tape deck. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I always thought I was a girl, but maybe “girl” was just a placeholder in my child’s mind for the moment when I would learn about that glorious object of analog technology called “cassette.” Just hours earlier today, I went to the basement and pulled out a giant box full of my old cassette tapes. I was bummed that I couldn’t find my Mariah Carey “Emotions” cassette single, but I did find a bushel of old mix tapes, including one decorated with clippings from a 1992 issue of <i>Vibe </i>magazine: a tiny picture of Mariah and a caption that quotes Biggie’s “Dreams” (“Mariah Carey’s kinda scary.”) I had forgotten, but I also had multiple mix tapes that I had labeled, “My Girl Self.” This was back in the nineties, when I was looking desperately for love and having bad sex with bad men. In wanting a cassette to stand in for My Girl Self, wasn’t I really yearning for this inevitable moment in November 2011 when I would find myself fully upgraded in the technology of love and sex? </p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6U8R4uTKygx9baJl8Ms_qV4EesWRVkB1fXrj4-QO_SwAtsl2oU_K4up3A8WZ_7KfTimxVCML1-RZ7lMtuugWLysK9HDxV9xdKXwzm4R5QZ6q9GxUNpl88FjURtV3xKh4cPNWHjjKh9Des/s1600/my+girl+self.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6U8R4uTKygx9baJl8Ms_qV4EesWRVkB1fXrj4-QO_SwAtsl2oU_K4up3A8WZ_7KfTimxVCML1-RZ7lMtuugWLysK9HDxV9xdKXwzm4R5QZ6q9GxUNpl88FjURtV3xKh4cPNWHjjKh9Des/s400/my+girl+self.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5676144608100659202" style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 299px; " /></a></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-53393765968738192492011-09-28T08:33:00.000-04:002011-09-28T08:36:24.791-04:00friendship in the time of consumerism<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnuMJdyYKeGf6HwV78WU8jBEw9f7UDP-FB_-x0pTmMljmcOFzbQw36qZti3rZQyFweK0Imh0YcJEwKP_dUhYZ6zMHcHSkcIVRk_Eff2xkldmNMy9ivcUxf3a-SRHOToF2XnNgUpfGevVDB/s1600/whitney.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 247px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgnuMJdyYKeGf6HwV78WU8jBEw9f7UDP-FB_-x0pTmMljmcOFzbQw36qZti3rZQyFweK0Imh0YcJEwKP_dUhYZ6zMHcHSkcIVRk_Eff2xkldmNMy9ivcUxf3a-SRHOToF2XnNgUpfGevVDB/s400/whitney.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5657388159682830786" /></a><p class="MsoNormal">What you are about to read began as a love letter.<span> </span>Perhaps it is still a love letter of sorts—it’s definitely an ode, to someone who is all at once fleeting and everlasting.<span> </span>Her name is Whitney.<span> </span>I’ve known her for a couple years now, but I don’t even know her last name.<span> </span>She is a salesperson in the handbag department of the Barneys in San Francisco.<span> </span>I’ve always thought of her as “my” salesgirl but perhaps it is more accurate to say that I am “her” buyinggirl.<span> </span><span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I first thought about writing something about Whitney while I was preparing to come back to the East Coast from my usual summer in San Francisco.<span> </span>As I was packing my summer loot, I was suddenly struck with the thought that over the last few years, the friends I’ve had in the Bay Area have kind of faded into a distance that feels sadly like the past (This is mostly my fault—self-enclosed solitude is an easy instinct for me).<span> </span>Aside from my dearest sister, I was really not going to miss anyone in San Francisco.<span> </span>Except Whitney.<span> </span>But if this strikes any of you as a pathetic admission (“You think your salesgirl is your friend?”), I don’t care.<span> </span>It is true that Whitney is not my friend.<span> </span>But Whitney and I do have an intimacy.<span> </span> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Whitney is a young woman, probably in her mid twenties.<span> </span>She is tall, and in the teetering stiletto pumps she favors, she’s even taller.<span> </span>Chicly, her limbs are about the width of a toothpick. <span> </span>All of this, combined with the fact that she has a cute, doll-like face, makes her a shoo-in for America’s Next Top Model.<span> </span>Her long black hair is usually middle-parted and styled in soft waves that make you think ever so slightly of Farrah Fawcett, but pulls you back right at the moment of full-on 70s retro nostalgia.<span> </span>Of course she is always dressed perfectly, a femininity that seems simultaneously strict and floral.<span> </span>Maybe it’s the fact that she wears glasses (black Ray-bans) and resin earrings in the shape of roses in bloom.<span> </span>Her voice makes me think of raspberry peppermints.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Last summer, Whitney sold me my first Proenza Schouler PS1 bag.<span> </span>In the couple weeks leading up to my finally settling on (of course) plain black leather, Whitney welcomed my obsessive stalking of the bag with salesperson perfection: she encouraged me to test the tactility of various models (urban environment is rough in suede), try swinging various sizes off my shoulders, offered handbag camaraderie as a customer (she herself ownd the Givenchy Nightingale and we bonded about the inability of boyfriends to understand the primacy of expensive handbags).<span> </span>Whitney guided me through my investment with the strategic focus of a general and the soft leniency of a psychotherapist.<span> </span>And unlike a lot of snooty bitch salesgirls old and young who regularly ignore me in high-end shops, Whitney indulged me sweetly week and after non-purchasing week, even though I was wearing a cracked-out Danzig t-shirt and raggedy rolled up jeans.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">And out of that came a familiarity that became, this summer, a kind of intimacy.<span> </span>A week before leaving San Francisco, I dropped by to check out the pre-Fall wares, and while we were doing our usual loose small talk, she impulsively (it felt like impulsiveness to me) revealed: “I got engaged this summer!”<span> </span>We hugged and hopped up and down.<span> </span>I felt so happy for her I felt emotions gushing out of every pore.<span> </span>We grabbed each other’s forearms while she told me all the details of how her man proposed to her, when and where the wedding will be, showing me her ring.<span> </span>We were acting like old girlfriends, and so lost in our moment that Whitney almost lost sight of the unhappy-looking old woman waiting to be shown a bag.<span> </span>“See you at Christmastime!” she chimed in that inimitable raspberry peppermint voice as we parted for the summer.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But what is this intimacy between a buyinggirl and a salesgirl?<span> </span>Our relationship is predicated upon the capitalistic system of purchase and exchange.<span> </span>She is the employee of a corporation of consumption and I am a consumer who keeps that corporation going.<span> </span>It could be argued that her friendliness to me is fake, a performance necessary for her job and function.<span> </span>But if she began her friendly overtures to me as the performance of “salesgirl,” is it necessarily so that that friendliness remain “fake”?<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Obviously, I don’t believe so.<span> </span>A couple weeks ago, I actually had a discussion about this subject of performing friendliness with my boyfriend (My boyfriend refers to it as an “argument”).<span> </span>We were talking about urban affects, specifically the difference between New York and San Francisco affects.<span> </span>Being a boy who escaped from the South, my boyfriend prefers the bluntly abrasive affect of New Yorkers to the gliding-the-surface niceness of Californians: he found the post-hippie affect of San Francisco to be “fake,” on par with fakey Southern so-called charm, whereas New York aggression may not be nice, but it is always the truth.<span> </span>But my argument (OK Roddy it <i>was</i> an argument) was: performance is always performative.<span> </span>That is, you begin acting a certain way, knowing that the act is a fiction necessary for a certain kind of survival, but do it long enough and you find that you have <i>become </i>the fiction.<span> </span>You have turned yourself into the embodiment of the fiction,<i> </i>you have turned the script into an emotion.<span> </span>You have crafted fact out of fiction.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I believe that the affect of aggressive bluntness is a performance, too.<span> </span>If you are mean or abrasive to strangers, you are communicating a desire for, and in fact, effecting, a basic foreclosure of any desire for future friendship.<span> </span>(No matter how probable or fantastical that future may be.)<span> </span>On the other hand, You may begin “acting” friendly as an act, perhaps because your job requires you to, but if you are any kind of human at all, you do it long enough and you find that the friendliness becomes you because the feeling has actually produced real happiness, detached from the original context of the performance.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is the way I think about the intimacy between Whitney and me.<span> </span>Behaviors that produce contact points between humans have a tactility.<span> </span>I just prefer that it be soft.<span> </span>Whitney and I bonded over an outrageously expensive handbag.<span> </span>Our intimacy was negotiated and produced over the barrier of a brass-edged glass counter with a discreetly hidden cash register of which we were always acutely and silently aware.<span> </span>So the original form of our “friendship” was, quite simply, hierarchical: salesperson and customer.<span> </span>But with her consistent California salesgirl affect, Whitney pulled me down from the perches of customer and made me instead a baggirl—like her.<span> </span>Her wedding is set for next summer, and of course I do not expect an invitation.<span> </span>But I don’t need one; I’m giddy enough envisioning her as the radiant young bride I know she will be.<span> </span>Even if we never see each other again, Whitney will always be my friend, my California.<span> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-27728012340255967862011-08-28T13:55:00.000-04:002011-08-28T14:03:11.279-04:00salt<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilhCkfYsa_gnn6On0uoXITPlZsHOd9W4NVtNQqrpDfowcmYTmmWi-2Czva0G02aQ6g3Lds9hBJmrIBgab553psvcNELJyjj71ugtmcOLcogzsLggOlxZ9L7Mt9zN4Je7i0sMSXvzar0nsN/s1600/saltposter.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 224px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilhCkfYsa_gnn6On0uoXITPlZsHOd9W4NVtNQqrpDfowcmYTmmWi-2Czva0G02aQ6g3Lds9hBJmrIBgab553psvcNELJyjj71ugtmcOLcogzsLggOlxZ9L7Mt9zN4Je7i0sMSXvzar0nsN/s400/saltposter.JPG" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645968478489959074" /></a>
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<br /><p class="MsoNormal">Last year, I wrote about the experience of running a half-marathon as a profoundly feminizing experience.<span> </span>So now that I have run my first (and sweet Jesus, possibly last) FULL marathon, what kind of a feminine being have I ended up?<span> </span>Am I now twice the girl I was since I’ve run 26.2 miles in 3 hours and 55 minutes?<span> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYRX-3ImdC95hA4gT-dtJ40QHH6qmpZ1VgaieZyzcsb4Q1klbK9Ry-qUlWk7oMvnbyq4BmThEi0W70qct2_74G_GU9qZ9ajAB7VMEkKSf4Oyw0yQl0I1etlxn9Fj1iAGYf1DIhWdYO_4_I/s1600/IMG_0733.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiYRX-3ImdC95hA4gT-dtJ40QHH6qmpZ1VgaieZyzcsb4Q1klbK9Ry-qUlWk7oMvnbyq4BmThEi0W70qct2_74G_GU9qZ9ajAB7VMEkKSf4Oyw0yQl0I1etlxn9Fj1iAGYf1DIhWdYO_4_I/s400/IMG_0733.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645967769079383602" style="cursor: pointer; width: 299px; height: 400px; " /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-style: normal; "><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYYdwRYT4z410EHo_6pvRjE55xhSglEnm2TmVqcfeHHB2i_8abS1Ou0sSw8KKESrVGRIq6nolLfGv_D0Fa-6qCyKKb5Z91wMZIlNIcce1I-t2h4sBb6XpelX5SjvkxC4oM4_o3zTmEjLdr/s1600/IMG_0735.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYYdwRYT4z410EHo_6pvRjE55xhSglEnm2TmVqcfeHHB2i_8abS1Ou0sSw8KKESrVGRIq6nolLfGv_D0Fa-6qCyKKb5Z91wMZIlNIcce1I-t2h4sBb6XpelX5SjvkxC4oM4_o3zTmEjLdr/s400/IMG_0735.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645967761861834930" style="cursor: pointer; width: 299px; height: 400px; " /></a></span></i></p><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In the three weeks since I’d run the San Francisco Marathon, I’ve tried to think through what the experience has meant to my self-sense of femininity.<span> </span>But because the overriding sensory perception of the experience was pain, all I could think of was...childbirth.<span> </span>The four tenets of this metaphor:</p> <p class="MsoNormal">ONE: Near the end, with about a mile to go, having already run 25 miles, I felt ready to give up and die.<span> </span>But there was a thing inside me that said KEEP PUSHING.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">TWO: After the race, my nipples were completely engorged with blood.<span> </span>Dark blood curdled under the thin skin of their tips.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">THREE: Also, my skin had become a dangerous shade of grey.<span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">FOUR: I know I’ve accomplished this kind of amazing thing with my body, but at the same time, I feel utterly defeated by my body.<span> </span>I made my body undergo the most strenuous thing I’ve ever attempted, and yet I feel that somehow, my body is completely beyond the control of my mind.<span> </span><span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Of course, this metaphor is not only inadequate, but totally ridiculous.<span> </span>Holding for nine months a fetus that nourishes itself into a baby by sucking up your energy and flesh from within, then spending hours (days?) forcing the bugger to come out of an impossibly stretched vagina or a slice in your belly...that is clearly not even close to moving your legs and breathing hard for 26 miles over a few hours’ time.<span> </span>Yet the narratives can overlay one another because the tenets are evocative of one another.<span> </span>This is why metaphors suck, and I am really beginning to hate them.<span> </span>Because running the marathon DID make me feel more feminine, yet to say I felt feminine because the physicality of it, the utter defeat I feel at the hands of my own body, seems not only regressive but incorrect. <span> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>I am constantly trying to stretch the boundaries of my body by trying to get beyond a dependency on metaphors.<span> </span>All I can do is dive into the materiality of my physical experience: the feelings that give it its curves and stance.</p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>I kind of wish my chafed nipples had burst open and their blood seeped through my t-shirt.</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><o:p> </o:p></i><i>My mouth, drained of blood and caked with dead skin, reminded me of white lipstick like 1960s Priscilla Presley.<span> </span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i><o:p> </o:p></i><i>Those same lips was kissed by my gentle boyfriend.<span> </span>He met me at the finish line and licked my grey arm.<span> </span>He tasted salt left over from the evaporated sweat and said he liked it.<span> </span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0iL1Vl5YVghyRG3yWjnbgdBm6rqy5yEFQdWqzVM4Gfmow5xLeO6Yn7IHYhOZbNtXMy-Qtk_K-e1WIF34bcAsEs5p8rj44er_yl_MkU6shc2cx1xnDtBrOojcrfE_bZTYZ6y5e3SJ_QRY9/s1600/SDIM0990.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0iL1Vl5YVghyRG3yWjnbgdBm6rqy5yEFQdWqzVM4Gfmow5xLeO6Yn7IHYhOZbNtXMy-Qtk_K-e1WIF34bcAsEs5p8rj44er_yl_MkU6shc2cx1xnDtBrOojcrfE_bZTYZ6y5e3SJ_QRY9/s400/SDIM0990.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645967764624742450" style="cursor: pointer; width: 267px; height: 400px; " /></a></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-14543117314896475162011-08-25T17:26:00.001-04:002011-08-25T17:28:54.706-04:00(the) help is on the way (apologies to Melissa Manchester)<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg54oos3cl8_3LmOvKhthGxk7MO1hyphenhyphenD0fX5T92F25de-bQNT55f9hvm6SzsDOvvs61wR8AKW65yUxfY3z3CkXqExbwSE6_-IeydAR0Yh2KhBGhxWTullkm2ltC7j-VozTcMSm3UfbsDjjvy/s1600/777801-melissa-manchester-help-is-on-the-way.jpg" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg54oos3cl8_3LmOvKhthGxk7MO1hyphenhyphenD0fX5T92F25de-bQNT55f9hvm6SzsDOvvs61wR8AKW65yUxfY3z3CkXqExbwSE6_-IeydAR0Yh2KhBGhxWTullkm2ltC7j-VozTcMSm3UfbsDjjvy/s400/777801-melissa-manchester-help-is-on-the-way.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5644908173261029026" /></a>
<br /><p class="MsoNormal">I just saw the film <i>The Help.</i><span> </span>It is not complex.<span> </span>It can be summed up in one sentence: Is it really possible that a human being (or a whole group of human beings) can watch a group of human beings with brown skin go see <i>Cleopatra </i>through a back entrance marked COLORED and then take another few months to discover that she lives among racist people?</p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-1025000400522119782011-07-29T14:50:00.000-04:002011-08-19T09:59:55.511-04:00hard white resistance<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge_ujd8gSftQ8nMo5OCFOsML5FFkBjA9lSCZKamDyNgrWjVKYbEBfpasUVMdqGLnV7Mj_CaiYiGfky9vL6PT8gwzoFnu2HiTduVDzvHD895j6Z2iuf69Lu1tFZ6AsTEjInuuxcZcSBCP8Q/s1600/angie+drawing+7-23-11+5.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 299px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEge_ujd8gSftQ8nMo5OCFOsML5FFkBjA9lSCZKamDyNgrWjVKYbEBfpasUVMdqGLnV7Mj_CaiYiGfky9vL6PT8gwzoFnu2HiTduVDzvHD895j6Z2iuf69Lu1tFZ6AsTEjInuuxcZcSBCP8Q/s400/angie+drawing+7-23-11+5.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5634850303142845698" border="0" /></a>
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<br />I have tiny red scissors, Japanese, made of stainless steel, red plastic handles that fit around my fingers like rings just one size too big.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>With their mean little points, they are for prying off bruise-blackened toenails or trimming long bangs.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was doing the latter last week when I sliced through the pad of my left middle finger.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I cut myself quite often when trimming my hair because I cut my bangs vertically rather than laterally in order to create ragged ends.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The blood flowed out crazily and for a moment I felt that old adolescent electric shock of my body coming together.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> <p class="MsoNormal">In Ingmar Bergman’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Scenes From a Marriage, </i>the husband tells his wife that he no longer enjoys sex with her because he is sick of fighting the “hard white resistance” emanating from her body.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This hard white resistance, this feminine barrier, is how I’ve always experienced the rhythmic bloodpour of self-mutilation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I used to cut myself because I wanted to escape the tyranny of the visual.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I hated seeing myself: mirrors.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The pour of blood from blade is coming out of the girl in my head, from the prison of my imagination and taking glossy form in the oxygenated external world.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But sometimes my gender dysphoria gets so swollen that I can’t stand it, and even the blood pouring doesn’t help.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>My body just starts spreading out evil and slow out like Exxon at sea.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In my head, I am such a contained, specifically female thing—to confess, Angelina Jolie most of the time.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I get up in the morning, put myself together to make my body simulate that specific female thing and I just shatter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Now, I feel like the little outfits I put on are totally inadequate for containing the goo spilling around in myself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I hate skinny little jeans.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I hate 70s hippie bellbottom jeans.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I hate 50s rolled up jeans.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’m sick of seeing myself.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I want to FEEL myself instead.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>More and more I want to be naked all the time, naked except for maybe the heavy metal bracelet I bought in Providence in May (the girl who sold it to me for $5 couldn’t take the price sticker off so inside the bangle it still has the sticker—except she added a zero to make it, as she says, “seem more expensive”).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I want to be naked without mirrors, I just want to be naked in bed all the time, being caressed into Angie by the hands of a boy rather than the crackling zipper of jeans.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The last time this happened was last summer.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Let’s call the boy Drew (not his real name): he fucked me into the girl in my head not because he fucked me like a man but because he fucked me like a lesbian.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We would fall into bed kissing and he would put his strong arms around me (arms that were harder and bigger than his chest—the common mistake of boys who work out and not pay attention to body proportion work) and pressing down on me like a pin to specimen, he would fuck me not with his cock or even a finger or two but with his kiss.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’m not coyly describing analingus.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>We were naked, he was on top of me, but his hard cock was simply pressed into my tummy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Flattening me with his weight and muting me with his lips and tongue, he would just masturbate me while kissing me roughly and creatively, making me realize that kissing has like a hundred different positions.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He was manipulating my sex organ by making me forget about it, so hard was the kiss and the body that was breaking mine in its embrace.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">We stopped dating after a few dates.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>On one of those last few dates, we went to see the Angelina Jolie movie <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Salt</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was enthralled (as usual) by the sight of Angie kicking ass: no actress wears a dykey black pantsuit with crisp white shirt as well as Angie.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> Drew </span>was not so thrilled.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He kept cracking jokes about her big lips throughout the film, which irritated me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As we were leaving the movie, I went on about how much I loved it.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“You love these movies where chicks kick ass, don’t you?”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>he asked me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Of course.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Don’t you?”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Not really.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Maybe if it was a really good-looking guy doing the ass-kicking I would like it.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"></span>
<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">We went back to his place where he fucked me like a lesbian.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>He fucked like a lesbian but he certainly didn’t think like one.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I don’t talk to him any more, and while I do miss fucking him sometimes, I don’t mind not talking to him anymore at all.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-41068784304030414262011-06-01T10:34:00.000-04:002011-06-01T17:52:01.033-04:00feminist art midwife: go perfectly limp<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://girlscallmurder.tumblr.com/post/6071806683/joony-in-mariah-tuttle-mfa-candidate-jewelry"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh1Ld-5Zoi692iEDiY1PR-vFJrUfdQ7lsJvvNiL-nNrdHyDxRMAKOFloBHzL1CHKQeHlaOfb2oJFjpCwS7xPvAE5JiA1Hr0MFxjn-_3hzduJe_QwxP_ahiy2setbGhZkDnEROMvfoO09xjz/s400/J+3.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613263070966421410" border="0" /></a><br /><br />A few weeks ago, <a href="http://girlscallmurder.tumblr.com/post/6071806683/joony-in-mariah-tuttle-mfa-candidate-jewelry">I modeled some work for Mariah Tuttle</a>, who is an MFA student in the Jewelry and Metalsmithing Department at RISD.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Mariah had created some amazing, aggressively lacy neckpieces made entirely of caulking (yes, caulking—the plumber’s and contractor’s delight).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was flattered to be asked, and totally enjoyed the process of modeling.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Being a shy Virgo, I am not the most comfortable kid in front of the camera, but modeling for Mariah was great because I loved her work, and loved having them lay on my body, their weight and texture pressing into and challenging my own flesh.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span> <p class="MsoNormal">But as I scanned through the images that Mariah forwarded me, I was struck by a weird contradictory emotion.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I felt narcissistically happy that I looked so skinny (I forget I am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">that </i>thin at times, and I do like to be reminded) but I felt a twinge of sadness about that pleasure.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Mariah had created this beautiful body of work, and I was happy to be its hanger/ frame, but maybe I was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">too </i>happy.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I felt this because just a few days before I got the images, I also received from my dear comrade Minh-ha Pham her fabulous article, “Blog Ambition,” in which your true Joony Schecter is featured.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG3BDfwqDTC3I6rqv1_oHNCgdyYKBFtZlV7-SPz0aIIwrazqgRpBWEehkOoDUXE4k18HVtzv8h9qfF75aC0KDMJwKg25I7gh6qos5ymMfrvgj1w0QH19l-iIf_PnPJZOCtkzDfE51H35ZM/s1600/blog+ambition+screencap.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 260px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgG3BDfwqDTC3I6rqv1_oHNCgdyYKBFtZlV7-SPz0aIIwrazqgRpBWEehkOoDUXE4k18HVtzv8h9qfF75aC0KDMJwKg25I7gh6qos5ymMfrvgj1w0QH19l-iIf_PnPJZOCtkzDfE51H35ZM/s400/blog+ambition+screencap.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613263073080690706" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://cameraobscura.dukejournals.org/current.dtl">download article here</a></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Reading this articulate, complex work which analyzed this blog was like wearing Mariah’s heavy jewelry.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Minh-ha’s summation of my persona as Joony Schecter was so moving:</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align:none;text-autospace:none"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">In forgetting gender, Lee/Schecter refuses to remember and thus refuses to reproduce the two-gendersystem of heteronormativity. Such queer forgetting, Hannabach explains in “Untimely Forgetting,” “is not a passive process, but rather an active venture of tracing the edges of that which must be forgotten in order for subjectivity to be established and maintained.” In the hands of Lee/Schecter, red lipstick is more than a feminine commodity; it is an instrument for making “gender trouble.”</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Beyond flattering, Minh-ha’s articulation of my work gave me a fresh perspective of my body.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But her words, like Mariah’s materials, and the extreme pleasure they gave me, made me ask myself: am I actually built more to be a model/ muse than maker?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Am I too passive a work-maker?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Do I enjoy doing nothing to actually making work?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In Edith Wharton’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The House of Mirth, </i>the heroine Lily receives a warning from her friend (another woman, but one who is married), when she tries to hatch a strategy for landing a particularly rich husband: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">“Whatever you do, Lily, do nothing!”</i> <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>This is a caution not against the delicate minefield of gold-digging, but actually a dictum for feminine self-embodiment.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Lily is directed not to be too intricate in her scheming because the very act of activity in fact will give her an aggressive, and thus masculine, aura.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In other words: to “do” anything is to do oneself out of femininity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is why in feminist terms, bodily stasis (“doing nothing”) usually equals a passivity against which a woman must constantly and consciously rebel.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But the pleasure of modeling, the pleasure of stilling your body toward the construction of a femininity, does not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">feel </i>like passivity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The grandest counterexample to what I see as the false equation between bodily stasis and political passivity can be found in the strategy of protest concocted by the civil rights workers of the 1960s against police brutality.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Following to beautifully dogged extreme Martin Luther King’s interpolation of Mahatma Gahndi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, civil rights workers went “perfectly limp” against the physical violence dished out by Southern police.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The phrase “perfectly limp” I take from Nina Simone’s song “Go Limp,” a magnificent, complex anthem about racial protest and love.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>The song also begins with a scene of one woman (a mother) warning another (her daughter) into femininity:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Oh Daughter, dear Daughter,<br />take warning from me<br />and don't you go marching<br />with the N-A-A-C-P.<br />For they'll rock you and roll you<br />and shove you into bed.<br />And if they steal your nuclear secret<br />you'll wish you were dead.</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">As with Lily Bart, the daughter in “Go Limp” is warned against (political) activity (“go marching”) because to do so will lead to a loss of her virginity and thus her bounty as a marriageable feminine being.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But like all good daughters, the daughter defies her mother—though softly: she will carry a brick in her handbag.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Not only that, the daughter goes on to find that political activity, when fighting for desegregation, goes hand-in-hand with femininity-granting body stasis:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">One day at the briefing<br />she'd heard a man say,<br />"Go perfectly limp,<br />and be carried away."<br />So when this young man suggested<br />it was time she was kissed,<br />she remembered her brief<br />and did not resist.</i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The good people at “the N-A-A-C-P” are giving instructions on how to get arrested while peacefully demonstrating: “go perfectly limp and be carried away”—by the police who attempt to obstruct peaceful protest.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But this political pedagogy serves as a feminine one as well, for going perfectly limp and being carried away is in fact what she does to a cute boy with a beard who takes a fancy to her.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>What I love about the song is not just the complex ways in which it articulates the femme-centric core of the civil rights movement (at least the King, rather than Malcolm, faction) but also the ways in which a political commitment to peaceful protest grants a woman a different way to embody traditional feminine stillness that is not at all “passive” in a patriarchal sense.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I don’t have any urgent political activity in my life that requires me to “go perfectly limp and be carried away” by the police (I have a hard enough time as it is to find a cute boy with a beard for whom to go limp—although I’m getting close).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But there is a major, and I daresay, political part of my identity which has everything to do with doing nothing: that of being a teacher.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I love teaching my students at RISD.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But whenever I get <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">too </i>much pleasure out of it, this old hackneyed adage tears through my brain: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Those who can’t do, teach.</i>”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>As a professor at the college level, I am actually expected to do both: “do” (make my own work) and “teach” (help students make their work).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>And while I am constantly doing, there are days when I feel like my “doing” is growing smaller and smaller in comparison to the teaching.<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">Recently, two of my former RISD students, Tara Perry and Greg Kozatek (as a part of the production collective Hunting Party), sent me a music video they created for a raptress. For the video, they created a fake magazine called "lipstickeater":</p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtIb1ApMI19WKrlAqSvJwtmBwIZxup3EDgdbtNqhLlmkjL5tqBmRO2EoiSfuCU6E1p-1AuY3YLUTwf5SjZT2OCNVd5Hm7mk6y9zb9M_pFYUzfVmkgCzaPq28Vf-ECB5L6KhDNYKYxgU8Tn/s1600/vaygez+blakk+vid+2.JPG"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 311px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtIb1ApMI19WKrlAqSvJwtmBwIZxup3EDgdbtNqhLlmkjL5tqBmRO2EoiSfuCU6E1p-1AuY3YLUTwf5SjZT2OCNVd5Hm7mk6y9zb9M_pFYUzfVmkgCzaPq28Vf-ECB5L6KhDNYKYxgU8Tn/s400/vaygez+blakk+vid+2.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613274898219264546" border="0" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="http://vimeo.com/23828010">see the whole video here</a><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">So finally, here was the meeting point of "modeling" (Joony Schecter: Cover Girl!!) and "teaching." It encapsulated my relationship to bodily stasis and art making. I think of this teacherly “can’t doing” as going limp.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I let myself be carried away by the exuberance and beauty my student’s making.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is always good to find shards of myself in the work of my students, but I feel like I’m truly doing my job, truly going limp, when I see that I’ve been able to assist/ affect/ nurture my women students to create work that challenges the patriarchal norms of femininity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Then, not only am I doing my work as a teacher of art makers, but I am also doing my work as my own cultural worker: a feminist art worker.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">These are some of my women students who let me go limp for them:</p><br /><p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/19993972?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" width="400" frameborder="0" height="225"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/19993972">La Invitación</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/lafuentevideo">Diandre Fuentes</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com/">Vimeo</a>.</p> <p class="MsoNormal">DIANDRE FUENTES’ video employs warped out pop music to give an aggressive, revolutionary aura to the scene of an adolescent girl’s play with traditional feminine trappings.</p><p class="MsoNormal">++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br /><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><br /><br /><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/fYSuFtfKE40" allowfullscreen="" width="425" frameborder="0" height="349"></iframe><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal">JAMIE KRASNER’s words and videos conceptualize femininity as fragmentation (an idea which I share with her as a bedrock of my own self-creation these past threesome decades).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But her embrace of fragmentation shockingly builds a tough carapace of tenderness.</p><p class="MsoNormal">+++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj439JHTOJRi13aCVgEyZtQCTUYy9-yzTmaYU7x9p1NHkmLvA9LIM5UVm9XJHrbnSQx0vj0hHRQMSOOIW9MxBK4D0tup8yRUbTkmhheqc8oA_ycdq0us-g65L2LnCA48daTytcp_KSeBrqB/s1600/Tamara_01.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 266px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj439JHTOJRi13aCVgEyZtQCTUYy9-yzTmaYU7x9p1NHkmLvA9LIM5UVm9XJHrbnSQx0vj0hHRQMSOOIW9MxBK4D0tup8yRUbTkmhheqc8oA_ycdq0us-g65L2LnCA48daTytcp_KSeBrqB/s400/Tamara_01.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613261481292583778" border="0" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizgKfhssyF6NuhifLg9uLDfvYmPXq8o4qjPP5mWaoxvdPaRuG27cmwvuoFKjfbdN3cYv-dyHU-mUSFnWi4k9ZH_DxFziUr_26UrsBg6lfF6Xxz9n8YyROrgVZUTz3qGUm7t-ALokaHF13O/s1600/Tamara_02.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 267px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizgKfhssyF6NuhifLg9uLDfvYmPXq8o4qjPP5mWaoxvdPaRuG27cmwvuoFKjfbdN3cYv-dyHU-mUSFnWi4k9ZH_DxFziUr_26UrsBg6lfF6Xxz9n8YyROrgVZUTz3qGUm7t-ALokaHF13O/s400/Tamara_02.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613261486194703426" border="0" /></a></p><p class="MsoNormal">TAMARA JOHNSON’s performance transforms her petite self into a superwoman—able to hold up a beam that supports an entire building.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(The beam is made of foam)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Johnson erases her whiteness and blondness by not only shrouding it in masculine workwear, but by making her flesh merge with the “steel” of the scaffolding, she herself becomes the building.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">+++++++++++++++++++++++++++<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3J2ZOPc2sO0UHP1-y_PiNf0XoUHmtydCdQpYRgWr9aRJgeZuYyQpIRJ8_zmiPBiFcdaDU0C0Dw0oL_9MznQaMJVt_aynAjuQF6rD6vXp8momAQB-7IFwHd6Pl5Yo9RcrhVCYLkFGRj_mC/s1600/ajn1.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 272px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3J2ZOPc2sO0UHP1-y_PiNf0XoUHmtydCdQpYRgWr9aRJgeZuYyQpIRJ8_zmiPBiFcdaDU0C0Dw0oL_9MznQaMJVt_aynAjuQF6rD6vXp8momAQB-7IFwHd6Pl5Yo9RcrhVCYLkFGRj_mC/s400/ajn1.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613261856060479010" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">LEXIE XTRAVAGANZA (n<span style="mso-bidi- mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-latin;font-family:Calibri;" >é</span>e Newman) created, for her senior degree project, a collection of knitwear inspired by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Paris is Burning </i>(which she viewed in my class).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But this gorgeous work was but a material extension of a fascinating work she’s doing in the re-invention of herself as an “Xtravaganza.”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In taking on the moniker (it’s her official facebook name) she is linking herself to the famous drag house, but also digitally re-calibrating the boundaries of her body, so that her femaleness becomes distilled to femininity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I think (and thank) all of these women create femininities that rancor against patriarchal norms of how a woman ought to connect her body to the world.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But I think about Lexie a lot these days because I’ve been trying desperately to grow my hair back out to its Medusa length.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>(And most distressingly, hair growing is not an act of will)<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Lexie’s most recent facebook profile photo is a beautiful showcasing of big hair.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It looks as though the camera caught her mid-hair shake.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I love this photo because it reminds me of my own past facebook profile photos.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwavAdawOEnxtlIQ5lrXFQKHp-_KXjsUqMR9QQIVJ59jhDZan8n7YmkOF8olThayAk64pJJVKVc7ZOr2s5oXDP4PDpUDfSyvM03QZgcUo6kInkw7BUlftMvDwff54fjHVlZJY76v5AsB35/s1600/243900_550643009956_12502222_31757711_2047459_o.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 354px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwavAdawOEnxtlIQ5lrXFQKHp-_KXjsUqMR9QQIVJ59jhDZan8n7YmkOF8olThayAk64pJJVKVc7ZOr2s5oXDP4PDpUDfSyvM03QZgcUo6kInkw7BUlftMvDwff54fjHVlZJY76v5AsB35/s400/243900_550643009956_12502222_31757711_2047459_o.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613262104110111330" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl_183o8EO9On4RQRHSzAv-RmvU0xGQhgMH8m6FI-AMEa5pF9JmwLZMzVEfKxT8LV-7Loo7_HipG_DGAJDNqvSpbGTgnsUdA96NY6ucELg0u64acGfLCfhyphenhyphenFpRy1EotTUBRcQAqk9mv94r/s1600/IMG00053.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgl_183o8EO9On4RQRHSzAv-RmvU0xGQhgMH8m6FI-AMEa5pF9JmwLZMzVEfKxT8LV-7Loo7_HipG_DGAJDNqvSpbGTgnsUdA96NY6ucELg0u64acGfLCfhyphenhyphenFpRy1EotTUBRcQAqk9mv94r/s400/IMG00053.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613262272120142738" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Lexie is a twentysomething statuesque blond female.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I am a thirtysomething flat Asian male.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>But we are both girls in t-shirts, luxuriating in our hair.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> This is how gender and racial bodies get crossed: bodies that create echo. </span>I go limp for my students, but they also let me be carried away into my own body.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I was reading over the student evaluations for my courses last semester, and I came across one that really tickled and touched me.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>After the positive comments about the content of my class and the style of my teaching, there was a wonderfully indulgent flourish: <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">“Joon, if you read this let it be known that you have beautiful hair!”<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></i>If my teaching, my not-doing, leads me back to this place, I am more than satisfied.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-73919566313507540252011-04-14T17:34:00.001-04:002011-04-15T07:04:40.700-04:00elegy for elizabeth taylor<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinZ2TqyjzEgVGUExsSwJwKTq6NryAGHu5P-U2UapR5c1ouPSoqZKoBAni5lKHbLYQaEd06KPhbt0X2zS225kiwkZpi7fkytWHpzgtB6KprwocKSp0BYNuNi17KQ8z0plsCF2ZTU4PhIf4-/s1600/100_1596.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 293px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEinZ2TqyjzEgVGUExsSwJwKTq6NryAGHu5P-U2UapR5c1ouPSoqZKoBAni5lKHbLYQaEd06KPhbt0X2zS225kiwkZpi7fkytWHpzgtB6KprwocKSp0BYNuNi17KQ8z0plsCF2ZTU4PhIf4-/s400/100_1596.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5595556214290760978" border="0" /></a><br /><p class="MsoNormal">“<i style="">Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii</i>.”<span style=""> </span>This was my childhood name for Elizabeth Taylor.<span style=""> </span>It wasn’t because I didn’t know the name of this candy-eyed, black-haired, boom-busted film star.<span style=""> </span>Neither was it that could not pronounce her name.<span style=""> </span>“<i style="">Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii</i>” is not a complicated babyspeak for a future pornographic philosopher, but simply the Korean translation of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”<span style=""> </span>This is how I first came to know Elizabeth Taylor in Seoul, Korea in the early 1980s: dubbed in Korean, the television station showed a film in which a beautiful girl in a skintight white slip prowled around a bed the size of a small island.<span style=""> </span>I asked my mother what this was, and the words she spoke as answer were like a magic spell: “<i style="">Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii</i>.”<span style=""> </span>I still remember the visceral shock of chewing those words in my own mouth while memorizing the image of the candy-eyed girl in the white slip.<span style=""> </span>Why was a cat tipping around on a tin roof?<span style=""> </span>Why was it hot?<span style=""> </span>What did that have to do with the beautiful girl on television?<span style=""> </span>My mother explained to me that the girl’s name was Elizabeth Taylor, that she was a great American film star, and in fact, one of <i style="">her </i>favorite film stars.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Even now, I can’t speak the words “Elizabeth Taylor” or look at a picture of her without having “<i style="">Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii</i>” pop in my head like a favorite song.<span style=""> </span>Taylor was the first American film star I fell in love and obsession with.<span style=""> </span>I was already obsessed with various American femme icons before this, but they were all small (great, but small) potatoes: Lynda Carter (Wonder Woman), Lindsay Wagner (The Bionic Woman—in Korean, titled simply after her character’s last name: “<i style="">Sommuzz </i>(Summers).”<span style=""> </span>But Taylor was something mythic.<span style=""> </span>That slip, and the white chiffon dress she subsequently put on in the film, were nothing like the bellbottoms and wrap dresses that I associated not only with those television actresses, but my own mother.<span style=""> </span>Plus, through Taylor I learned about the existence of something called “film,” which did not happen with reliable regularity every week, but flared up randomly one afternoon, never to be seen again.<span style=""> </span>My brain didn’t know what to do with all this information, and I loved it.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">But more importantly, Taylor was like a father figure to me.<span style=""> </span>My own father was, to borrow the words of children’s book author John Steptoe, a monster...sometimes.<span style=""></span><span style=""> </span>My mother never regaled us with nostalgic tales of how beautiful and loving my father was or had been.<span style=""> </span>But once she found out my hunger for this creature called Elizabeth Taylor, my mother fed my bottomless brain stories about her.<span style=""> </span>We must have seen together <i style="">Cat</i> (my favorite Taylor picture—I know the above image is from <i style="">Butterfield 8, </i>but I just couldn’t do a slip justice.<span style=""> </span>Better a [fake] fur coat and lipstick on mirror), and <i style="">Cleopatra</i> (my mother’s favorite) at least a couple dozen times.<span style=""> </span>Watching these films, my mother and I had the same conversation together, each time as if for the first time: isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she kind of short-waisted, aren’t her breasts large, aren’t her breasts <i style="">too </i>large, isn’t her voice is a bit shrill, isn’t she so sensitive, isn’t she beautiful.<span style=""> </span>Taylor was someone our mother remembered fondly, admired, criticized affectionately, worried over.<span style=""> </span>I knew my mother didn’t love her husband, and in my eyes, for good reason.<span style=""> </span>But I knew that she did love Elizabeth Taylor, as I loved Elizabeth Taylor.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Of course, Elizabeth Taylor died last month.<span style=""> </span>On the day that she died, I texted my sister as soon as I found out.<span style=""> </span>My sister got into Taylor much later than I, but this time it was I who introduced her, and Taylor was the means by which she and I grew close again after an icy adolescence.<span style=""> </span>We texted back and forth like crazy, pouring out our sadness.<span style=""> </span>After I finished teaching my first class that morning, I called my mother.<span style=""> </span>When she picked up, even before I had a chance to say hello, she blurted out: “I was just going to call you to tell you that Elizabeth Taylor died.<span style=""> </span>But I thought you might be teaching.”<span style=""> </span>We both choked back tears.<span style=""> </span>We choked them back because it seemed kind of silly for a mother and son to be crying over a dead film star as if the film star were a family member.<span style=""> </span>But she did feel like a family member to us.<span style=""> </span>“It’s like she was a part of our family,” I said to my mother.<span style=""> </span>“Yes,” she agreed.<span style=""> </span>Then we proceeded to have the conversation about Elizabeth Taylor/ “<i style="">Ttguhwoon yangchull jiboong uy goyangii</i>” we always have, and always will have: isn’t she beautiful, isn’t she kind of short-waisted, aren’t her breasts large, aren’t her breasts <i style="">too </i>large, isn’t her voice is a bit shrill, isn’t she so sensitive, isn’t she beautiful.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-48144210388579490102011-02-27T17:11:00.000-05:002011-02-27T17:24:28.264-05:00murder she wrote<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjChYsGMfQuhVI1raW6cP7gjBSKfP-8y5iPCaJ161x3x6Al262t59Zwlz5wsbYLBpXjmqB1Mbcs8FibuYmm9rx3A9IQ7_2FbWNUXbZAMhAUaq3fRO2aR09OVxpAwt8gf4HksjKIC1mOcuvo/s1600/girlscallmurder+screencap.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 213px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjChYsGMfQuhVI1raW6cP7gjBSKfP-8y5iPCaJ161x3x6Al262t59Zwlz5wsbYLBpXjmqB1Mbcs8FibuYmm9rx3A9IQ7_2FbWNUXbZAMhAUaq3fRO2aR09OVxpAwt8gf4HksjKIC1mOcuvo/s400/girlscallmurder+screencap.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578496283638415266" border="0" /></a><br />Last week, I started<a href="http://girlscallmurder.tumblr.com"> “Girls Call Murder,” </a>a tumblr account for the visual aspects of my life: stills from my favorite films, and my drawings.<span style=""> </span>Its name is an interpolation of a Liz Phair song that talks about all the (bad) things a girl can and should get away with.<span style=""> </span> <p class="MsoNormal">Before I was reborn as a girl-writer, I was a fanboy: as much as I had always wanted to grow up to be a writer, I also wanted to grow up to be a comic book artist.<span style=""> </span>As a kid, I was obsessed with bands of spandexed mutants and genetically altered: X-Men, Teen Titans, Doom Patrol, New Mutants.<span style=""> </span>But even that fanboydom was influenced by my inert femininity, since I was drawn to those superpowered bands by their girl members. My favorite: Starfire, the 7-ft alien princess whose hair made a trail as she flew, who had neither irises nor pupils in her eyes but who cried bucketfuls as if she were a refugee from a girl’s romance comic.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>This seemed a natural extension of my love of drawing, as I learned to draw by copying the first pictures my artist mother ever drew for me: when I was around six, at my request, she filled a small notebook with varying renderings of Wonder Woman.<span style=""> </span>So I developed my drawing skill by drawing mutant gals endlessly, oblivious that the huge jugs I gave them to match their huge star-filled eyes had any other function than make them look beautiful in their armor.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Now I am one of those narcissistic drawers of limited talent and depth who can only draw his own body.<span style=""> </span>But when I was young, I used to draw other people: beautiful girls and cute boys, because my own body made no sense to me.<span style=""> </span>I looked in the mirror and it looked like a Pollockian jumble of molten mess.<span style=""> </span>That was not my drawing sense.<span style=""> </span>I preferred the cutting accuracy of a pen tip the width of a sewing needle.<span style=""> </span>I didn’t want to draw with cans of paint orphaned from brush sets.<span style=""> </span>I drew bodies that I wanted to surround me (dreamy-eyed boys) and bodies that were enmolded within the mess of my actual flesh (dreamy-eyed girls).<br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKi0_mcCzIF_y8aclnpaG_BtCTDVN34KW96oOJCW_TQCxaSFs6I3dsJmW3CFvJ1P7yaZSHq5LDCSh4vNt7vR1Rj40EbZiBcVjfDt_EkuFtKeJucIMYgn0LFZroXotpvt3xENgoT0HIxWnP/s1600/will.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 165px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKi0_mcCzIF_y8aclnpaG_BtCTDVN34KW96oOJCW_TQCxaSFs6I3dsJmW3CFvJ1P7yaZSHq5LDCSh4vNt7vR1Rj40EbZiBcVjfDt_EkuFtKeJucIMYgn0LFZroXotpvt3xENgoT0HIxWnP/s400/will.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578498337873394626" border="0" /></a><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL8zLPX4bjJCOani_nYB8Bto1BtBuwpvGAowsZBm-qEwVzAhaYJ6bIqlKoTxXeEYkz_E-29_alGiBH76ByZ1P9g_0xuqczNaHur0KjL4HX1WK1fY5UDv18uZJ5TZvRjalewSUbBZvTbgMn/s1600/new+eve.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 232px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhL8zLPX4bjJCOani_nYB8Bto1BtBuwpvGAowsZBm-qEwVzAhaYJ6bIqlKoTxXeEYkz_E-29_alGiBH76ByZ1P9g_0xuqczNaHur0KjL4HX1WK1fY5UDv18uZJ5TZvRjalewSUbBZvTbgMn/s400/new+eve.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5578496275806605250" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But the decades have dried up the silt around me and it’s been cracked off on jackhammered by my own growing confidence in the mess of my insides.<span style=""> </span>So I think of my drawing-manifested narcissism as something hard-earned.<span style=""> </span>My body is finally worthy of rendering and fiction.<span style=""> </span>I am more emboldened to draw myself, not only as I see myself now, but as I hope to be, and as I will be, hopefully.<span style=""> </span>The natural two-inch growth of my hair may be no big thing to the cells of my body but it is a great achievement to my emotions that constantly wait for the humiliation and petting approval of my cells.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-6002651344153905502011-01-26T20:05:00.000-05:002011-01-30T22:14:09.380-05:00in the mirror of my mind, my drapes match my carpet<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-2WxhDpPcDfFwF3l3vE4GbJ9KNhIuGCJaDNPXDQ_cGqNBlOzIUb4Rp6LWAABwbjA3BvSEKbQCjS2uoIF-qjprJDzpMQnjhO7QWf69aiM5THkAvVKsNSUX6oBQCJvw2TEeGkS9ckmC1I_x/s1600/me+and+january+jones.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 299px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-2WxhDpPcDfFwF3l3vE4GbJ9KNhIuGCJaDNPXDQ_cGqNBlOzIUb4Rp6LWAABwbjA3BvSEKbQCjS2uoIF-qjprJDzpMQnjhO7QWf69aiM5THkAvVKsNSUX6oBQCJvw2TEeGkS9ckmC1I_x/s400/me+and+january+jones.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566666976759897058" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">My facebook status from yesterday: “GIVING SOME BETTY DRAPER.”<span style=""> </span>I don’t twitter, and I don’t like to use the facebook statussing to inform my meagre 219 friends the extremely boring activities of my daily life: like they need to know that I cleaned my sister’s apartment.<span style=""> </span>But that’s just what I did yesterday (OK I just cleaned the dining area) but it felt significant enough to broadcast in the language of drag.<span style=""> </span>I was “giving some Betty Draper,” as in, I was embodying January Jones’s character on the television series <i style="">Mad Men.</i><span style=""> </span>Betty Draper is of course, the 1960s iceberg of a spouse (now ex-spouse) of the show’s protagonist.<span style=""> </span>(Betty is so glacial, when her widowed father and his new ladyfriend come for a visit, she puts them in separate bedrooms.<span style=""> </span>LOVE IT!!)</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">But this is not a glorification of housewifery.<span style=""> </span>I don’t find anything glamorous about being an indentured slave to some man, cooking cleaning and talking babytalk to an infant all day.<span style=""> </span>I clean house in an old Skinny Puppy t-shirt. The only way I like crinoline is shredded and cigarette burned. But I do like the way the January Jones embodies the tenets of her enslavement: she’s angry.<span style=""> </span>Jones plays a repressed housewife, but she practically seethes in every scene.<span style=""> </span>She’s so tense and clipped that she might as well just wear a sign that says “I HATE MY LIFE.”<span style=""> </span>Repression is the vase into which she pours the flower of her fury.<span style=""> </span>I love Betty Draper not because she is a (gay) male fantasy of a sexy housewife, but because I love the way the female actor playing her embodies the anger of a woman forced to embody the male fantasy of a sexy housewife.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">When I cleaned my sister’s apartment yesterday, I wasn’t seething at all.<span style=""> </span>My lawyer sister is a working woman and a former tomboy to boot so domestic labor is definitely not her thing.<span style=""> </span>But the night before last, she complained loudly, “God I hate how this house looks like a hoarder’s house!<span style=""> </span>Stuff everywhere!<span style=""> </span>The kitchen table is a mess!”<span style=""> </span>Which it was: half of it was covered with expired vitamins, dead pens, old bills, court documents, make-up she was bored with.<span style=""> </span> I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or thrilled, because even though she was just letting out the complaint into the air at no one in particular, she sounded exactly like some mid-20<sup>th</sup> Century upper-middle class American husband.<span style=""> </span>That’s when I decided I’d just take up her challenge and give (her) some Betty Draper.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">So what does it mean that I want to embody this hybrid of sexist femme persona and proto-feminist performing female that is “Betty Draper”?<span style=""> </span>Especially at this time in my life, when I have gone through almost a decade of giving various black ladies (Natalie Cole, Sarah Vaughan, Diana Ross, and of course, Mariah) as my everyday persona, I am suddenly wanting to embody...<i style="">a white woman???? </i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">That I see an Aryan lady when I look in the mirror of my brain always gives me pause.<span style=""> </span>It makes me think of Toni Morrison’s <i style="">Bluest Eye,</i> in which a little black girl loses her mind due to her consuming passion for Shirley Temple.<span style=""> </span>But that is a novel that is seriously misread all the time.<span style=""> </span>I’d love to explain more, but that is the last chapter of my old Ph.D. dissertation/ first book manuscript, which is still seeking a publisher home.<span style=""> </span>So I’ll use instead a faster and more contemporary example: the film <i style="">Precious: Based on the Novel </i>Push <i style="">by Sapphire</i>.<span style=""> </span>There is a scene in that film in which the dark-skinned, African-American heroine (who is also very overweight) is getting ready for her day in front of her mirror.<span style=""> </span>We (the camera) are positioned behind her and we suddenly see what she sees in the mirror: not a dark-skinned African-American who is very overweight, but a slim, pale, blond, white girl.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfMnagB2K24-gvY2D5uidVk1R5TUksiGwLmNpm7kG6zG255gALXrOzkZme64q6ixbQgtK3hx0iUNz6sMLObjmX66pLMofIt0JqOp9AgmKdnNR6Op-OruLQuARe7SyfFcK6nu2EQFHU-vJ5/s1600/precious+mirror.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 218px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjfMnagB2K24-gvY2D5uidVk1R5TUksiGwLmNpm7kG6zG255gALXrOzkZme64q6ixbQgtK3hx0iUNz6sMLObjmX66pLMofIt0JqOp9AgmKdnNR6Op-OruLQuARe7SyfFcK6nu2EQFHU-vJ5/s400/precious+mirror.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5566666973235913330" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The scene is presumably there to indicate to us the heroine’s lack of self-worth: she wants to obliterate her own body for a white one, which she believes will give her the happiness she desires.<span style=""> </span>As Venus Xtravaganza famously said: “I want to be a spoiled rich white girl; they get everything they want.”<span style=""> </span>In this way, the white reflection in the mirror is a symptom of Precious’s racial self-hatred: Precious wants to be a white girl.<span style=""> </span>However, that is true only if she thinks that the white girl in the mirror as her reflection.<span style=""> </span>But what if the white girl were not a reflection <i style="">in </i>the mirror, but the mirror itself?<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Then we have to think about the mirror itself as a tool of self-creation.<span style=""> </span>I’m not going to go into Lacan here.<span style=""> </span>Instead, I’ll cite a white lady: <span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="color: rgb(102, 0, 0);" class="MsoNormal"><i style="">"Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size." </i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Thus spoke Virginia Woolf in <i style="">A Room of One’s Own.</i><span style=""> </span>Substitute “Women” with “White Girl” and “man” with “Black Girl.”<span style=""> </span>According to Woolf, the mirror is useful precisely <i style="">for </i>its distorting function.<span style=""> </span>There is a difference between the material of the mirror and the phenomenon of the reflection.<span style=""> </span>Being a mirror: you are the object with which the looker creates a certain (amplified) image of one’s self; being a reflection: you are a distortion that the mirror provides.<span style=""> </span>I embody Betty Draper/ January Jones not because I desire to turn my yellow skin white, but because the white femininity becomes the hard glass with which I can make my flesh an unimaginable version of “girl.” <span style=""> </span>“White Girl” can be a mirror rather than a reflection. <span style=""> </span>It is in this way that the mirror scene in <i style="">Precious </i>is my favorite scene in the film.<span style=""> </span>There is something weirdly punkrock, something subtly rebellious, about a 300 lb. black girl seeing herself as <i style="">and through</i> a 100 lb. white girl.<span style=""> </span>Through the trick of fantasy (or psychosis, take your pick) the black girl has transformed the cells of her flesh into the cells of her imagination.<span style=""> </span>She was saying a big FUCK YOU to biology.<span style=""> </span>The image of white femininity is not an unattainable goal, but an attained one.<span style=""> </span>The white girl in the mirror is not a glamorous ideal, but something so merely and importantly mundane: a white version of herself.<span style=""> </span>Two girls, black and white, in the same black leather.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-88060028186904546232011-01-11T16:51:00.000-05:002011-01-11T22:10:04.103-05:00a tale of two sisters, part 3<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi1aBubqvDm0tUcpqZEMWVr3VoYYMaxokuQoEqW-hXSrmv0OBGhfwqUGBmw1NRpZ8JTBs4O1RsTx7PkxKrcNBvdwGvFo7estuC86ayJH7TeNReL7xvyc2tWmXzzvcFyfK6q71Aic3bpdOaJ/s1600/100_1569.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 230px; height: 400px;" 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mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--><br /><p class="MsoNormal">My tough femme public defender sister and I had been waiting five months to see Darren Aronofsky’s film <i style="">Black Swan, </i>and we were not disappointed.<span style=""> </span>Appropriately sandwiched by an opening title and credit sequence plated in Bodoni (the font that I would be were I a typeface), the film is not only an ode to femininity, it is a medium of femme-bonding.<span style=""> </span>When I’ve talked to boys who’ve seen the film (OK I don’t know that many boys so it’s like three) there was a common denominator to their responses, whether they liked the film or not: they were grossed out by the scenes in which Natalie Portman’s Nina Sayers tears into her bleeding fingernails and toenails to make them bleed more.<span style=""> </span>Having been a cutter myself, these scenes were viscerally moving for me.<span style=""> </span>But even my sister, who was far from a cutter as a teenager, did not find them “gross.”<span style=""> </span>We understood as femme beings that tearing into the self is part of the pain with which the character creates herself as a specifically feminine artist.<span style=""> </span>Funny that boys who usually have no qualms about blow-em-up action flick violence, were so disturbed by a close-up of a girl pulling at a loose skin of her finger till it snaps up like a fruit-roll up.<span style=""> </span>This reaction to feminine self-mutilation is gendering in the same way in which Toni Morrison’s <i style="">Sula</i> powerfully separates her black girl self from white boys: </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style="">“She slashed off only the tip of her finger.<span style=""> </span>The four boys stared open-mouthed at the wound and the scrap of flesh, like a button mushroom, curling in the cherry blood....Sula raised her eyes to them [the boys].<span style=""> </span>Her voice was quiet.<span style=""> </span>‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?’”</i><span style=""> </span><i style=""><span style=""> </span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Similarly, <i style="">Black Swan </i>is a text of femininity that takes place at the very liminal regions of the female body.<span style=""> </span>This is a film about girls, but not about their hair, their breasts, their hips, their reproductive organs, their heart, or even their face.<span style=""> </span>This is a film about girls that is about their feet.<span style=""> </span>Duh: it’s a film about ballet.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Early on in the film, Nina, superfrustrated by not being able to perform properly the role of Odile (a.k.a. the Black Swan Queen), turns to her security blanket of bulimia.<span style=""> </span>The scene is blocked so that our view of Nina’s puking is blocked by the wall of the public toilet stall.<span style=""> </span>We only see the base of the toilet, and the tattle-tale ballet-shoed feet: they face towards the toilet rather than away.<span style=""> </span>After she retches, Nina flushes the toilet by stomping on the handle with one foot.<span style=""> </span>This is one of my favorite moments in the movie.<span style=""> </span>Kick-flushing the toilet is such a punk rock gesture, so there is a weird thrill in seeing the stomping foot covered in dirty pink satin rather than black Doc Martens: the pink doesn’t at all dampen the violence of the gesture.<span style=""> </span>But at the same time, kick-flushing is also a gesture that arises from daintiness: you don’t want to touch with your hand the gross handle of the public restroom toilet so you touch it with your foot instead, because as a dainty being, you cannot leave a dirty toilet unflushed.<span style=""> </span>The gesture, like the film, reveals the way in which femininity is a method of self-styling that combines blood-and-guts violence with balletic anal-retentiveness.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Which brings us to the real unsung supporting character of the film: knitted Ugg boots.<span style=""> </span>From the beginning till the end, Nina bounds about, both on sidewalk pavement and backstage floor, in a pair of calf-length Ugg boots made of grey knit (I believe it’s their “Classic Cardy” style).<span style=""> </span>I hate these Uggs, these socks masquerading as boots.<span style=""> </span>I hate them for the same reason I hate flip-flops worn outside of a locker room.<span style=""> </span>Because sloppiness is not the same as indifference.<span style=""> </span>When you’re walking out the house with your hair teased and smashed for that just-rolled out of bed/ just-fucked look, that is not indifference; it is sloppiness.<span style=""> </span>Putting on a dress with torn hems in homage to Baby Jane Hudson or 1991 Courtney Love is not indifference; it is sloppiness.<span style=""> </span>Indifference is having such a big idea of yourself that you think the world ought to be your bedroom or bathroom: hence wearing your pajamas or house slippers outside the boundaries of your own home.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">What shocked me about the knit Ugg boots in <i style="">Black Swan </i>was not so much that Nina wore them (I didn’t think that much about them at first) but that as we were leaving the theater, <a href="http://lipstickeater.blogspot.com/2009/02/tale-of-two-sisters-part-2.html">my sister, my platform-and-stiletto-heel loving lawyer sister</a>, turned to me and said: “I gotta get a pair of those knitted Ugg boots.”<span style=""> </span>I fought her (weakly) on her style decision but her reasons were simple and similar (I imagine) to Nina’s: preciousness about feet.<span style=""> </span>My sister is not a ballerina.<span style=""> </span>But in her work as a public defender, her feet have to have two personalities: sky-high heels for court appearances, but something cushier and kinder yet not trainers, for hoofing about the jails to interview her clients. <span style=""> </span>So I understood her desire for them.<span style=""> </span>Still, even as I agreed to buy her a pair (in black) for our Christmas “gift” trade, I was not convinced of their cuteness.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’m still not convinced, although after my second viewing of the film last week, I might begrudge them a degree of cute respect.<span style=""> </span>(<span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">WARNING SEMI SPOILER</span>) Near the end of the film, when Nina discovers that she has stabbed herself rather than her rival, she slumps down on a chair in her dressing room, filled with the loud unutterable pain of regret.<span style=""> </span>On her feet are those knit Ugg boots.<span style=""> </span>But this time, the Uggs spoke to me in a different way.<span style=""> </span>The boots’ soft knitted body reminded me of the army of stuffed dolls that lined Nina’s bedroom.<span style=""> </span>And although she had just murdered those dolls just hours before, it’s as if they had wreaked vengeance upon her feet: the Ugg’s signature toe—round, hoof-like—renders Nina a kind of stuffed toy, and just as pathetic as that plush cow in tutu that was shoved down the trash chute. <span style=""> </span>The pathetic little girlness of the boots made the scene even more wrenching to me, and actually pushed it to the brink of a classical kind of pathos, which is after all the etymological sister of “pathetic.”<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I no longer thought of the knit Uggs as props of brazen, stupid indifference, but those of insulation.<span style=""> </span>The insulation that Nina received as “Sweet Girl” not only of her suffocating mother, but that of her feminine art, which has always (and by “always” I mean historically) demanded a kind of imprisoning preciousness of its women.<span style=""> </span>As much as that “Sweet Girl” persona—pre-lesbian experimentation, pre-masturbation discovery, pre-drug-addled sluttishness, pre-rebellious mother-beating—insulated her in a prison, we realize how its insulation was also <i style="">protective</i>.<span style=""> </span>It allowed her to practice her craft, to aim towards that supposedly quixotic “perfection” of technique.<span style=""> </span>And for all its apparent devaluing of “technique,” the film weirdly makes a case for the indispensability of technical perfection: because Nina is totally hungover on the day of her big opening, she would not have been able to <i style="">physically </i>perform the role were her body not trained to perfection.<span style=""> </span>In other words: without her maligned obsession with technique that marked her as an underdeveloped “girl,” she actually wouldn’t have been able to perform in art the black womanhood she’d learned the night before.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-36953279220859234502010-12-12T12:25:00.001-05:002010-12-12T12:28:51.968-05:00de profundis<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgtCyuTZwK_ay0PdBmhZ8AKcNXvDNCFnQwqaGD2YmCvbMuDfgwCmcJP6WLVI04UF8UdMK69jnwDJtzK7rTf77zvrt4dFUm83W5QqMOgikLv-yxZT1CrGp3EeKF5fGFGa17Jl0SkoGutaYx8/s1600/100_1537.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 259px; height: 400px;" 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{mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]-->I’m suffering the loss of my long long hair.<span style=""> </span>Sixty days after the impulsively calculated moment with scissors, I am in full regretful mode, in the pain of waiting.<span style=""> </span>I know it is frivolous and self-indulgent to plunge into mourning for long hair that you yourself willingly and willfully cut, but there it is.<span style=""> </span>Suffering is one very long moment. I can’t divide it by seasons. I can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. It feels like time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one center of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible laws of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Friends tell me it looks fine, but there it is and remains: the knifelike remorse I feel every time I pass the mirror.<span style=""> </span>And I find myself counting the days to go by, obsessing over the fractions of inches pushing out of my scalp and measuring it against the days gone by.<span style=""> </span> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Because my hair has been my diary.<span style=""> </span>Like a certain species of girl writers (Sylvia Plath, Ana<span style="">ï</span>s Nin, Uma Thurman in the film <i style="">Sweet and Lowdown</i>), I’m never entirely sure whether I’m writing down the experiences through which I’m living or I’m actually living through specific experiences so I can have something to write down.<span style=""> </span>That is why, right now, in the prison cell of my bobbed hair, I look back to that night I cut off the long braid of hair and wonder if I needed a reason to look forward to a day 365 or 730 days from October 10, 2010.<span style=""> </span>Some people’s lives are a nicely projected vector: they know the exact temporal and spatial point of their destination, and the arc of that movement is like an aced geometry test.<span style=""> </span>My life has always been a heat-seeking missile: I know where it needs to go, but unfortunately, the target keeps moving so my days keep hurling itself this way and that, getting lost, jagging up its path, knowing nothing but the sole certainty that it’s being pulled by the small but definite heat of a dream in the future.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Using the tiny movement of hair growth as the pages of my diary makes my days feel long and slow.<span style=""> </span>But at least I know my hair is a ceaseless change; its growth is a fact of my body.<span style=""> </span>Two years from now, I’m not sure whether I will have a published book, tenure at my job, or a husband.<span style=""> </span>Waiting <i style="">and </i>working for those things make me tired, precisely because they are moving targets with vague body heat.<span style=""> </span>But hair growth is inevitable: I just have to sit on my butt and wait.<span style=""> </span>The rate at which the pages of my diary gains heft word by hard-earned word is the same one by which my hair will become heavy enough to pull my head back into its destined posture.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">But waiting for the day when my hair can again cover my back is still painful; the viscerality of regret is real.<span style=""> </span>The diary is a way to create my body without the benefit of the mirror: my flesh constructed solely through the puked word-particles of my immediate past.<span style=""> </span>In this same way I will try to dissipate my body: to have a less visual sense of my body while I wait for my hair to catch up with my desires.<span style=""> </span>Less mirror-reliant, and more tactility.<span style=""> </span>A molecular sense of self.<span style=""> </span>A more abstract, yet more material sense of my body: air hitting my stretched out neck; the bounce of a good handbag against the tops of my hips; the red warmth of my eyes when it traps the dust of raccooned black eyeliner; how my titties get excited under a soft old t-shirt; the masochistic crunch of toes squeezed into narrow hard leather loafers.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal">(This piece contains an interpolation of “De Profundis,” by Oscar Wilde, 1897)</p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-61085941639299292362010-11-18T16:46:00.000-05:002010-11-18T18:41:17.696-05:00children get older<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" 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!mso]><object classid="clsid:38481807-CA0E-42D2-BF39-B33AF135CC4D" id="ieooui"></object> <style> st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } </style> <![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--><br />I have a white hair.<span style=""> </span>I <i style="">had </i>a white hair.<span style=""> </span>In the early morning light of November 9, 2010, that fucking one white lock was glaring at me, daring me not to pull it out.<span style=""> </span>I yanked it out.<span style=""> </span>I want to believe that it is a fluke of vegetarian vitamin deficiency, but I’m afraid that it is really the start of an ambush of aging cells.<span style=""> </span> <p class="MsoNormal">In fact, I had a foreboding of this getting old thing just the week before that fateful morning.<span style=""> </span>My buddy Trace and I were putzing around downtown Boston.<span style=""> </span>It was a Saturday, the day before Halloween, and at the Marc by Marc Jacobs store on Newbury Street, cute tweenies were planning a costume party:</p> <p style="color: rgb(0, 0, 102);" class="MsoNormal">“Yeah, totally dress up and come over tonight.<span style=""> </span>We’re having a party and the theme is 90s grunge.<span style=""> </span>It should be so <i style="">fun</i>!!”</p> <p class="MsoNormal">As we walked out of the store, I nudged Trace: “Did you hear what those shopkids were saying?”<span style=""> </span>She hadn’t, so I repeated it, and then got a bit hysterical: “Can you believe this.<span style=""> </span>‘90s grunge' is a costume for them!<span style=""> </span>But it’s not a costume for me; ‘90s grunge’ is MY LIFE!!”<span style=""> </span><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Which is true.<span style=""> </span>It’s not just about operating my brain to the rhythm of Hole’s “Miss World” and Liz Phair’s “Glory.”<span style=""> </span>It’s putting myself together in a way that grunge music pours of me like a too heavy perfume.<span style=""> </span>This personal aesthetic is dictated by the epic slogan of a Nirvana t-shirt:</p> <p class="MsoNormal">FUDGE <span style=""> </span>PACKIN</p> <p class="MsoNormal">CRACK <span style=""> </span>SMOKIN</p> <p class="MsoNormal">SATAN<span style=""> </span>WORSHIPPIN</p> <p class="MsoNormal">MOTHER <span style=""> </span>FUCKER</p> <p class="MsoNormal">OK of course not literally.<span style=""> </span>But I take the nihilist spirit of the text and turn it into a styling structure of feminine dissonance: stiff jeans, simpering t-shirts, limpid flannel; careful jewelry and sloppy make-up; big fat hair, small posture; clean skin, filthy mind.<span style=""> </span>I used to think all of these things <i style="">represented </i>me.<span style=""> </span>But the layers of the years, nay, layers of <i style="">decades, </i>have fused these things to my skin and <i style="">I, </i>me myself and I, have become a representation of those things.<span style=""> </span>In other words, I used to think I wore these things on my body to carry with me the ideas they symbolized.<span style=""> </span>But when twenty-year olds see me as an extra in a costume drama about the 1990s, I myself have become the symbol, I myself have become the costume.<span style=""> </span>Bag me up, price me up ($6.66) and staple a cardboard fold-over tag on top: 90S GRUNGE COSTUME.<span style=""> </span><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But unlike how the white hair makes me feel, I like this feeling of being a prepackaged costume for children ages 15 to 25.<span style=""> </span>Like my insides (Born in Korea, moved to Iowa, had bad acne, was gothically gay, went to University of Virginia, blah blah blah ofpersonal history) have been scooped out clean and replaced with a jittery expectation of being filled by a younger body who wants to embody an <i style="">idea</i> that my body has become.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">So growing old means: I’m becoming hollow.<span style=""> </span>Hollow like a costume waiting for October 31<sup>st</sup>, hollow like...a handbag.<span style=""> </span>As you may or may not be able to tell on my most current masthead, I have been feeling fused to my newest and most favorite handbag: a Proenza Schouler PS1 in black leather.<span style=""> </span>The intense level of attachment I have to this thing has been something over which I’ve been wrangling with my words, but is captured nicely in the publicity video for the PS1 in patent:<br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><object id="flashObj" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=9,0,47,0" width="404" height="436"><param name="movie" value="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1"><param name="bgcolor" value="#FFFFFF"><param name="flashVars" value="videoId=676292362001&playerID=8558003001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAAAF13hy4~,k-0ZIL64dAd--E4Uss2ll130zYPVMSNK&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true"><param name="base" value="http://admin.brightcove.com"><param name="seamlesstabbing" value="false"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="swLiveConnect" value="true"><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"><embed src="http://c.brightcove.com/services/viewer/federated_f9?isVid=1" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" flashvars="videoId=676292362001&playerID=8558003001&playerKey=AQ~~,AAAAAF13hy4~,k-0ZIL64dAd--E4Uss2ll130zYPVMSNK&domain=embed&dynamicStreaming=true" base="http://admin.brightcove.com" name="flashObj" seamlesstabbing="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" swliveconnect="true" allowscriptaccess="always" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash" width="404" height="436"></embed></object></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Skin-sheathed body becomes reduced to handbag.<span style=""> </span>When the cute tweenies unknowingly labeled me so old as to become costume, they also turned me into a handbag.<span style=""> </span>And this is not a bad way to learn to grow old: you become not a role <i style="">model </i>for youth, but a <i style="">role, </i>as in, a shell to put on over complex flesh.<span style=""> </span><br /></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Being a role, being a shell: If I am an empty handbag, who is going to carry me around?<span style=""> </span>I ask that, rather than: who is going to fill me and with what is that person going to fill me?<span style=""> </span>This is a totally different self-pedagogy of growing old than the tired one of waiting for that one (that man) who will make my soul feel like a blood-enriched vaginal cavity.<span style=""> </span>But what does it mean to think about the sugar walls of my brain as the jacquard lining of a luxury leather good?<span style=""> </span>Rather than mark the passing years by the dread of not finding the man who will fill me thus complete me, I will instead imagine how the children who grow older with me will, in their brain, skin me and pull me around them to have youth adventures in the world.<span style=""> </span>I might not know who or how many have done this to me.<span style=""> </span>But I’ll know that it has been done: my skin has become leather and is having fun, out there, everywhere.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-3253415319878819952010-10-14T20:14:00.000-04:002010-10-15T07:30:24.600-04:00bobby<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKTCssNjcSpg4W2jd5eeRCPzuMH-CKG62V1ADzmM5DPng6DdXEw7NoBibFQty84XS1pf0obV_kJoBNIZ4fc5MbWCp9z6kjdyFyUdK1TQwfyUrJ0N3L2hTAKbJqBNYWmmZdFrC2dUUDfsha/s1600/100_1478.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 239px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKTCssNjcSpg4W2jd5eeRCPzuMH-CKG62V1ADzmM5DPng6DdXEw7NoBibFQty84XS1pf0obV_kJoBNIZ4fc5MbWCp9z6kjdyFyUdK1TQwfyUrJ0N3L2hTAKbJqBNYWmmZdFrC2dUUDfsha/s400/100_1478.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5528060334605042194" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><p class="MsoNormal">So I bobbed my hair Saturday night.<span style=""> </span>I could say I “cut” my hair, but because I just hacked off twelve inches without any further shaping or layering, it really was a bobbing.<span style=""> </span>I had many bobbed hair ideals swirling in my head: David Bowie in <i style="">The Man Who Fell To Earth, </i>Gong Li in <i style="">To Live </i>(the female Maoist phase), Natalie Portman in <i style="">Closer, </i>Julia Fordham in the “Porcelain” video, the dancer Slam from <i style="">Madonna:</i> <i style="">Truth or Dare</i>, Louise Brooks, Ren<span style="">é</span>e Zellweger. <span style=""> </span>So as the hacked braid sat on the table pulsating with its last breaths, I felt no sympathy for it and no remorse.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> However, Sunday morning was a different story. <span style=""> </span>I had a major crisis of regret because my hair suddenly felt too old lady: it felt less “bobbed” (as in flappers: Zelda Fitzgerald and Joan Crawford circa 1929), and more like “<i style="">a </i>bob.”<span style=""> </span>Specifically, it was the hairstyle of my mother.<span style=""> </span>When I want to look like my mother, I want to look like her when she was my age (in her 30s), not necessarily<i style=""> </i>the age she is now (some years over her 30s).<span style=""> </span>As it is with most girls, hair follicles are attached some major emotional circuits that are as yet unchartered by medical science.<span style=""> </span>So near tears, I called my sister to wail: “I HATE MY HAIR!<span style=""> </span>I HAVE MA’S HAIR!!”<span style=""> </span><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"> But as soon as I started to tell her how depressed I was about this new hairstyle, I started cracking up and laughing.<span style=""> </span>My sister joined in on my laughter, and after snorts and giggle tears, I hung up the phone no longer sad that I have my mother’s hair.<span style=""> </span>Now I think: Jeez, there are worse things than having your mother’s haircut.<span style=""> </span>After all, when Lenny Kravitz first cut off his dreads and looked in the mirror at his (chic) mini afro, did he think: “Do I have my middle-aged mother’s hairdo?”<span style=""> </span>Which he does, by the way: in the years before she passed in 1995, his mother, the actress Roxie Roker (incidentally, I have the same birthday as her) also wore the mini-afro.<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> But even if he saw his mother’s middle-aged hairstyle in the mirror, I’m sure Kravitz was OK with it, because he’s an avowed Mother’s Child, which I am too.<span style=""> </span>Is this not the ultimate achievement of an androgyne, when your mother possesses your head so that you may present a sleek, unexpectedly male physicality to the world?<span style=""> </span>And while my mother may not be Roxie Roker, Jeung H. Kang is still a pretty chic lady.<span style=""> </span>So why is it that Lenny Kravitz’s wearing the hairdo of his middle-aged mother looks automatically chic to me and my wearing the hairdo of my middle-aged mother makes me feel...like a middle-aged lady?<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">It has something to do with the inherent chic of blackness<i style="">.</i><span style=""> </span>The afro itself is an androgynous style, but it wasn’t always chicly androgynous.<span style=""> </span>On the scalps of women, it was the mark of a certain working class of people too busy for lye and hot irons.<span style=""> </span>It wasn’t until the 1970s, with the Black Power movement’s infection (some would say “dilution”) into mainstream African-American style, that the short afro became chic.<span style=""> </span>The androgyny of the mini afro went chic because first, militant women adopted the hairstyle of their male comrades, and the resultant androgyny allowed “Black is Beautiful” to become “Black is Chic.”<span style=""> </span>Thus, it took a bodily detour—men, Black Panthers, Black Panther women—for the middle-aged black women to rock the short afro as a carapace of femininity rather than the byproduct of work-weary bones.<span style=""> </span>The men gave back to their mothers.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">So maybe my bob, my bobby, is a similar opportunity to give back to my mother.<span style=""> </span>As a fetus, I vampirically sucked energy from my mother from within, demanding strawberries in winter and raw white rice chewed through and through.<span style=""> </span>Now, I have a chance to bare my neck so that she may construct a fun femininity for herself through the blood of mine. </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The reason for cutting off my hair was, as Miranda Richardson’s IRA soldier declares of her own bobbed hair in the film <i style="">The Crying Game</i>: “I needed a tougher look.”<span style=""> </span>Of course I miss my twelve inches, and the soft and intimidating aura I put out with hippy-dippy locks.<span style=""> </span>But now I want to be something else.<span style=""> </span>The long hair I had, a result of three years’ growth, had begun to feel slack and crumply.<span style=""> </span>I wanted to be reconnected to my neck and shoulders, and the bobby does that: I’m stretching out my neck more, putting my chin up more, and my general slumpy posture feels slightly more balletic now.<span style=""> </span>Monday morning, when I greased and my hair back and slung on my trusty biker jacket with my APC Petit Standard jeans, I felt feminine in a way I never did when I wore the same outfit with my long hair.<span style=""> </span>I was somewhere between David Bowie and Wanda Jackson: I felt tough...and sweet.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">In “How to Conceive (of) a Girl,” Luce Irigray writes: “mother-matter affords man the means to realize his form.”<span> </span>I want to do the reverse!<span style=""> </span>Of course, not that my mother needs my help in realizing her form, but wearing the same hairstyle, I think of as gifting her with the aura of the Thin White Duke-meets-the Queen of Rockabilly.<span style=""> </span>Maybe she can feel like she is turning into a slice of her androgynous son, and maybe it will make her feel unexpectedly tough, sweet, and ageless.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-63647666228665144862010-10-08T20:44:00.000-04:002010-10-10T12:35:37.783-04:00popovers<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh_DXOB_hyTwm5MHLdDrIIKnwg-CDhk9Nw7tMEzqV_Z-OM2OLtIWiyPNywhpcApZyLW6_15s1v5CQmhqcj0zRHZk_b5t-sH9JtYYe5sVuNDeiYTKLXraRsD-rTua5vQauol7hsv7BBKYvP/s1600/100_1452.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgh_DXOB_hyTwm5MHLdDrIIKnwg-CDhk9Nw7tMEzqV_Z-OM2OLtIWiyPNywhpcApZyLW6_15s1v5CQmhqcj0zRHZk_b5t-sH9JtYYe5sVuNDeiYTKLXraRsD-rTua5vQauol7hsv7BBKYvP/s400/100_1452.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5526456631377815794" border="0" /></a><br /><br />When you are feeling hollow inside, make the kind of bread that is just as hollow inside.<span style=""> </span>If you must, line the insides of the popoovers with honey before you eat them.<span style=""> </span>Best just out of the oven, though. They have no real no flesh to burn your mouth, though the air within may feel like the moment before a sincere kiss.<span style=""> </span><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9sEDmpZLQBYxqDVw68UgZF4tXUWnqB8-8qJ4Ipdx5lrPPkg_b4XydYQvVdFgcatKOh6jYYz3LSUT2BgNsgUr17SxLsVPjJ_Cqq8wbFHwpMrUX6aoZuDSV9BJwG4cTAIw06nE_rbzIX4bv/s1600/2010-10-08+17.06.41.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi9sEDmpZLQBYxqDVw68UgZF4tXUWnqB8-8qJ4Ipdx5lrPPkg_b4XydYQvVdFgcatKOh6jYYz3LSUT2BgNsgUr17SxLsVPjJ_Cqq8wbFHwpMrUX6aoZuDSV9BJwG4cTAIw06nE_rbzIX4bv/s400/2010-10-08+17.06.41.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5525842923333883362" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8bZTj6YoG9Z7sfpNZe9OKHeri1Bc_zzgf6nHB1SBwIPc3Mv2ZHL-WIlIyIHX6B2wd1sCZvlnUvo3a2B3A2_cu-Gltq8XDJZhfh8fqQPJqtmKgJ07d_CqvVdHL11rTr7XKcIEtqq2deReq/s1600/2010-10-08+17.07.25.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 300px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8bZTj6YoG9Z7sfpNZe9OKHeri1Bc_zzgf6nHB1SBwIPc3Mv2ZHL-WIlIyIHX6B2wd1sCZvlnUvo3a2B3A2_cu-Gltq8XDJZhfh8fqQPJqtmKgJ07d_CqvVdHL11rTr7XKcIEtqq2deReq/s400/2010-10-08+17.07.25.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5525841330960540690" border="0" /></a>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-66132157251511273962010-10-08T20:40:00.000-04:002010-10-08T20:42:22.435-04:00it’s not the weather<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" 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</w:LatentStyles> </xml><![endif]--><!--[if gte mso 10]> <style> /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} </style> <![endif]--><br />I’ve given up eating cow’s flesh but returned to wearing blackened cow’s skin.<span style=""> </span>I’ve recently, and perhaps only temporarily, but then again, perhaps permanently, given up my cardigans for black leather biker jackets. <span style=""> </span>I have almost as many of these black babies in leather as I do of the woollies, but they had been stowed away for a few years now.<span style=""> </span>It is October in New England, so it may seem perfectly logical to throw on thick black leather over thin numb bones, but actually, I started wearing leather again this summer, in the Bay Area.<span style=""> </span>Again, because it is Northern California, wearing leather in the summer is not so crazy.<span style=""> </span>But I doggedly wore the black leather biker jackets, even through the intermittent days in the mid 70s, sweating against the padded lining and still refusing to trade it in for something thinner and circulation-friendly.<span style=""> </span> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><span style=""></span>I’m wearing the leather jackets now as I wear my angora sweaters: to make me feel warm and feminine.<span style=""> </span>But in both temperature and femininity, the warmth of a leather jacket is not the warmth of wool.<span style=""> </span>The sweater warms you by cozying up to you: when yarn fibers drill into your pores, it’s like the sweater is a lover who wants to fuck you. <span style=""> </span>The leather biker jacket doesn’t cling to you: it keeps you warm for sure, but it is a warmth that makes you feel more hollow.<span style=""> </span>The padding separates your skin from the carapace of the jacket, and you feel more tender and forkable in your warmth.<span style=""> </span>Wearing the leather stylizes the empty feeling I carry with me so it feels more like a hole rather than a void.<span style=""> </span>What I am doing when I wrap myself in a tough black biker jacket is turning myself into a handbag.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikryjedSIECLSNrSB_X66FhL-OIB4ZM50hCnpAGm5EqNilT4lwmVy-fWbiI7ZJawd9eNXj2W7a9mILGWSDfiN4vQcDsI34TNslA6jB6F3CprVGpRgCh1ATQQpO5Ma3-ba8qo9SCFEVI56g/s1600/100_1439.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 308px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikryjedSIECLSNrSB_X66FhL-OIB4ZM50hCnpAGm5EqNilT4lwmVy-fWbiI7ZJawd9eNXj2W7a9mILGWSDfiN4vQcDsI34TNslA6jB6F3CprVGpRgCh1ATQQpO5Ma3-ba8qo9SCFEVI56g/s400/100_1439.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5525839857257950082" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"> </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">When I’m surrounded by the laminated skin of something killed, my own skin melts away, my own flesh melts away, and all I am is not the squishiness of my sweetmeats but the steam that would rise from them should I ever be gutted for the sake of a small leathergood.<span style=""> </span>But that is a heat of sorts, and a heat that makes me forget the vacancy of love foreclosed. <span style=""> </span>The thick black leather that surrounds me turns my entire body into the black hole, the rabbit hole, the wishing well to kiss and tell.<span style=""> </span>It is a place in my head where I long to suck <i style="">in</i> that boy I love.<span style=""> </span>It isn’t forever, but then, it’s not the weather, either.<span style=""> </span>It’s a way of drawing expensive hearts and flowers around the emptiness and calling it an ideal, a vulva in my brain, a dream: </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle"> </p> <p class="MsoNormalCxSpMiddle">I was in a big loud house party full of twentysomethings.<span style=""> </span>I was at the party with the particular boy I’ve been in love with for the last year.<span style=""> </span>The boy told me he wanted to spend the night with me and we snuggled together on the floor amid cushions and cheap throws.<span style=""> </span>In the pit of my stomach, I felt 22 years old (instead of 36).<span style=""> </span>We smoked up a bunch of mind-numbing stuff.<span style=""> </span>Then amid the giddiness of fully-clothed cuddling, I blacked out.<span style=""> </span>When I woke up, the party was over and the boy was gone.<span style=""> </span>I wandered around the house and someone familiar was yelling at me about being irresponsible.<span style=""> </span>I missed my boy but all I could do was worry about having blacked out.<span style=""> </span>I walked up to the rooftop of the house and this familiar angry person accused me: “<span style="text-transform: uppercase;">Look what you’ve done!<span style=""> </span>Now they think it is OK to do this!</span>”<span style=""> </span>I looked up.<span style=""> </span>I had thought it was morning but there were stars.<span style=""> </span>The black tarred rooftop was covered with broken glass.<span style=""> </span>Neighbors in a higher house next door were throwing bottles out their window onto our rooftop.<span style=""> </span>The moment the bottles hit the roof they shattered into powder.<span style=""> </span>I know glass doesn’t break like that but it was my dream, and bottles bypassing shard directly into sand made the whole idea of breaking seem not violent, not destructive, not a loss.<span style=""> </span>But I still had a feeling of dread.<span style=""> </span>So I hugged myself hard and I felt a bit better.<span style=""> </span>The neighbors continued to launch bottles and the angry familiar person was still yelling at me, but all I wanted to do was take my shoes off and press my feet into the ground glass.<span style=""> </span>But I didn’t because I woke up.<span style=""> </span>It was 2:00 AM, September 8, 2010, and there were indeed stars out still.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-81297399917212545042010-09-17T15:43:00.000-04:002010-09-18T10:43:12.661-04:00muuuuuu (the lowing of whales)<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgt6wVeiWRuOmK5iZ-_klByl1hW8zi9ZfhzOjN7gSjkKu6On2rEfvMqMOqJ5IfyzW2n1RACw9_AUAxZPOa6uDuz8UZG5XmxRtyFgYd3GeLLTSVieYeTpKnauadkbzexcQVAUzyd3-0Fujy/s1600/100_1408.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgt6wVeiWRuOmK5iZ-_klByl1hW8zi9ZfhzOjN7gSjkKu6On2rEfvMqMOqJ5IfyzW2n1RACw9_AUAxZPOa6uDuz8UZG5XmxRtyFgYd3GeLLTSVieYeTpKnauadkbzexcQVAUzyd3-0Fujy/s400/100_1408.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517971011134526962" border="0" /></a> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">My ex-husband has always been a big guy, and I liked him for it.<span style=""> </span>But after we watched the episode of <i style="">The Simpsons </i>in which Homer gets so fat he decides to live in a muumuu, I turned to him and said (half) jokingly: “If you ever start living in a muumuu, I’m leaving you.”<span style=""> </span>Famous last words: he ended up leaving me, and this morning I woke up so depressed that the only thing that felt right against my body was a muumuu.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">The muumuu: a sheet with a hole cut in the middle for a neckline; the stigmatic outfit for the fleshy; the ensemble of someone who wants to lose the outlines of his/ her body within a batik-printed or tie-dyed piece of flowing Indian cotton.<span style=""> </span>This desire to erase/ blur the body’s contact with the atmosphere has become metaphorical of a certain self-hatred (in turn associated with fat people): I feel so shitty that I can’t bear being a recognizable human to the world outside my home.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">This is certainly what led me to forgo dressing at all this morning.<span style=""> </span>The cause of my depressing self hatred: the summer has ended, and the journals and publishers that held my work hostage over the last few months got back to me with their rejections.<span style=""> </span>(One academic journal which shall go unnamed actually sent <i style="">two </i>rejection slips for the one essay I submitted.<span style=""> </span>It’s like, <i style="">OK I get it; You don’t like me!!</i>) <span style=""> </span>I was so sickened by my sense of failure last night but since I no longer drink seriously there was no Johnnie Walker to caress me.<span style=""> </span>And then, no strong arm to surround me in solace, either.<span style=""> </span>I couldn’t sleep the pain off.<span style=""> </span>So after the shower, on came the muumuu.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">But then a curious thing happened: I put my head over the glorified tent, and I felt better.<span style=""> </span>As I walked about my apartment, the muumuu flapped around me like wings of a butterfly.<span style=""> </span>My hair, still damp but sprayed up, felt bigger and fuller: I was not going to leave my house today but I knew I was going to have a good hair day.<span style=""> </span>The muumuu, as shapeless as it is, is not just a dress of depression and self-hatred.<span style=""> </span>Or rather, it is only so for those who see it as a symbol, not a process.<span style=""> </span>The great jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, in her mature years, lost the svelte figure of her youth and with her weight gain, began wearing muumuus—as her stage costume.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIXFAjmmgQRI1vTfaEVbcv08229oP4yiWKYq9sjuV5kQM6cqly8QvEYA8ZW_6OQa2Jaerh8KCDoXyPXZ6rRMB4PN4stVfKCipKh9B0BH15bGo0ELHUCk8wda-aumlIktPCfAAAa20F5Py/s1600/2010-09-17+14.33.34.jpg"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 367px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpIXFAjmmgQRI1vTfaEVbcv08229oP4yiWKYq9sjuV5kQM6cqly8QvEYA8ZW_6OQa2Jaerh8KCDoXyPXZ6rRMB4PN4stVfKCipKh9B0BH15bGo0ELHUCk8wda-aumlIktPCfAAAa20F5Py/s400/2010-09-17+14.33.34.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517971003823384210" border="0" /></a></p> <p class="MsoNormal">(This is actually a snap of a page from my diary at age 20—a xerox of a photo of Sarah Vaughan with Betty Carter. Note Vaughan sticking out her tongue in mischievous joy!!)</p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">When I was a teenager, I saw a PBS documentary in which the muumuu-clad Vaughan talked about how physically draining it was for her to perform: “I’d come on stage looking like Lena Horne and go off looking like Sarah Vaughan.”<span style=""> </span>I love this quote, and it stuck to my brain because one, it speaks to the intense labor that is feminine performance.<span style=""> </span>But secondly, it is a wonderfully complex self-affirmation of a woman whose body and femininity, due to age and weight gain, no longer passed the litmus test of traditional feminine perfection.<span style=""> </span>The rhetoric of Vaughan’s self-observation depends on the binarism of “Lena Horne” and “Sarah Vaughan”: “Lena Horne” is light-skinned, skinny, eel-chic slick; “Sarah Vaughan” is darker-skinned, fat, a blubbery sweaty mess.<span style=""> </span>But Vaughan’s <span style=""> </span>self-deprecation is at once a self-glorification, because it’s not as if she <i style="">gains weight </i>in the course of her time onstage, when she goes from “Lena Horne” to “Sarah Vaughan.”<span style=""> </span>In other words: the muumuu-clad, fat Sarah Vaughan is in her own mind as chic as “Lena Horne.”<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">Vaughan’s health trouble in her later years (especially due to her weight) is well-known.<span style=""> </span>What I love though is that she didn’t simply say, “I’m fat and I love being fat,” as many of today’s self-help guru’d people would declare.<span style=""> </span>Instead, Vaughan had to deal with the reality of her body’s pressure upon her physical <i style="">and </i>emotional well-being, and she processed through it honestly, subtly, elegantly.<span style=""> </span>She put on the muumuu and something about the way its fabric swung around her made her happy, and allowed her to belt out “Send in the Clowns” for the trillionth time.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal">I like to think this is what will happen to me today, as I type these words, the ceiling fan wafting my own muumuu up softly around me.<span style=""> </span>As I go through the day, I’ll hug myself with these words of the poet Sandra Lim:<span style=""> </span><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">“Girls/ For the lowing of whales/ has conjured them up</span><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(153, 0, 0);">given them savage details”....</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"> </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1TZnM-W8_RreTwXDAJ9pQCfX-ZMULJn3YrR-hp6dO89wjfFubv5BpJxsHlq6wJmfgRWx3eQp9TLCUi-d2iqA5ioDeWo3EFKVDcgKUC4gn-PYy_YGsGQ6Xbbm2V2_hEqfaFxXlmtxLCJn-/s1600/100_1414.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj1TZnM-W8_RreTwXDAJ9pQCfX-ZMULJn3YrR-hp6dO89wjfFubv5BpJxsHlq6wJmfgRWx3eQp9TLCUi-d2iqA5ioDeWo3EFKVDcgKUC4gn-PYy_YGsGQ6Xbbm2V2_hEqfaFxXlmtxLCJn-/s400/100_1414.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5517971015970418338" border="0" /></a></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-16552330299872892382010-08-06T17:01:00.000-04:002010-08-06T17:06:29.248-04:00sappho<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioubqHoqY64scVxNn2LCnYJKue6PKkMQ-Uon4aWmGeSvikjvt-3fxvM1eC7ohu746xGDUDB8hAe__ub_ynemfqv7I6u3lJccpr6a5IartamK8YWcaMHkKTy_Sk1x75YCmnqTfZn-QVBSsN/s1600/100_1390.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 165px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioubqHoqY64scVxNn2LCnYJKue6PKkMQ-Uon4aWmGeSvikjvt-3fxvM1eC7ohu746xGDUDB8hAe__ub_ynemfqv7I6u3lJccpr6a5IartamK8YWcaMHkKTy_Sk1x75YCmnqTfZn-QVBSsN/s400/100_1390.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5502405282084516642" border="0" /></a><br /><br />I’d been stalking...a jean jacket.<span style=""> </span>It is a Lee jean jacket circa 1971, with a stitch-supported collar.<span style=""> </span>It was only $34, but because I get cheap at weird moments, I’d been half-heartedly haunting it at Wasteland, my favorite San Francisco vintage clothing shop, for the past couple weeks.<span style=""> </span>Thursday morning, I finally decided I would buy it.<span style=""> </span>When I got to the store, I saw that it was gone from the rack.<span style=""> </span>Lost it through indecision, I thought.<span style=""> </span>Then I looked up and it was hanging high on the wall, hugged over a Culture Club t-shirt.<span style=""> </span>I asked a store employee to use the big fat whaling hook to get it down for me.<span style=""> </span> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The gal who got the jean jacket down for me was also the one who eventually rang me up.<span style=""> </span>Whaling hook in hand, she asked me if I was wearing Amber.<span style=""> </span>When I replied No, Daphne, actually, she commented on the scent’s nice nostalgic warmth.<span style=""> </span>Like all the clerks at Wasteland, she was in her early twenties.<span style=""> </span>She was a tall, vaguely Nordic thing.<span style=""> </span>Thin, but voluptuous—perhaps deceptively so.<span style=""> </span>She may have been neither thin nor voluptuous.<span style=""> </span>But she was quite pretty.<span style=""> </span>The detail that really made her pretty in my eyes was that she had an odd, dark red-purple wound on the bridge of her nose.<span style=""> </span>It was a purposefully artsy splatter on her otherwise flawless typing-paper skin.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The total of my purchase came to one of my favorite number combinations: 49.28.<span style=""> </span>(I threw in a ragged three-clover tee as well.)<span style=""> </span>She had actually given me a little discount.<span style=""> </span>We chatted as she rang me up.<span style=""> </span>I told her how much I liked the long black knit dress she was wearing.<span style=""> </span>It was a crewneck one-piece with long sleeves, a black bodice and color-blocked maxi skirt.<span style=""> </span>“I love those little knit dresses,” I said.<span style=""> </span>Then she said the cutest thing I’d heard in a while:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“Yeah.<span style=""> </span>It looked so dumpy on the rack, but I had faith in it.”<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“That is so cute—you had faith in the dress!”<span style=""> </span>I said before she asked, “What’s your name again?”<span style=""> </span>“Again,” as if either she knew my name already or ought to know it. I told her, she told me hers.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">“I’ve seen you around a lot,” she said.<span style=""> </span>I almost replied, Well, I’m at this store a lot but instead, but self-conscious of my shopping addiction, I just smiled and said “Awww, really?”<span style=""> </span>We had a nice handshake, nice sweet wave goodbye and see ya round.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The encounter put me in a weirdly god mood.<span style=""> </span>I felt kind of romantic.<span style=""> </span>Of course I am homosexual and I cannot imagine desiring to use my penis with her (I have a hard enough time desiring to use my penis with boys) but I found this gal very pretty—as in, attractive.<span style=""> </span>I haven’t felt that bisexual in a long time.<span style=""> </span>And while the feeling was unfamiliar, it didn’t feel at all puzzling or destabilizing.<span style=""> </span>Her openness, her willingness to just pour herself out in words spoken out loud, her instinct to create immediate intimacy: I connected with that, because I <i style="">am </i>that.<span style=""> </span>These are qualities I value in humans, but what they really constitute is the defining quality of woman: a willingness to take risks with the ego.<span style=""> </span>With this pretty Nordic gal, that quality gave her a high gloss.<span style=""> </span>Thus she made my most sapphic moment.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Big purple Wasteland bag in hand, I then walked about the Castro to pick up some magazines and restock on Dunhill International menthols.<span style=""> </span>As I walked up and down Market and 18<sup>th</sup> and Castro streets, I inevitably saw a whole lot of fags—and in the small afterglow of the Nordic gal, they grossed me out.<span style=""> </span>Their muscles, facial hair, the sheer physical room they took up on the sidewalk, all seemed barriers to intimacy.<span style=""> </span>Femininity shoots towards closeness; masculinity is about closEDness.<span style=""> </span>Masculinity closes in on its own important sense of self.<span style=""> </span>The masculine closedness of gay men I saw made them so ugly it shocked me to think that I’d ever found bald heads, beards, and pectorals to be an unquestionable formula for sexual attractiveness.<span style=""> </span>At that moment, and for many hours afterwards, I found that pretty Nordic gal to be a preferable sexual partner, in spite of my sexual preference.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-86549766281968598752010-07-21T22:56:00.000-04:002010-07-22T13:46:45.249-04:00doughnut hole<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3iMH5SEBlO_EAcmsoT26g6FvBorVi9G5QQFrfxdC13z_fubkCt0xMo_FHlT9kxq-K_EA6_qGA8qR0jyL3NZBMXHFkV1crEkHxhmmRvj9pHg49X0B7BaekdVJLiWZfkK9dOrjYGyLudnuY/s1600/doughnut+hole+3.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 264px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3iMH5SEBlO_EAcmsoT26g6FvBorVi9G5QQFrfxdC13z_fubkCt0xMo_FHlT9kxq-K_EA6_qGA8qR0jyL3NZBMXHFkV1crEkHxhmmRvj9pHg49X0B7BaekdVJLiWZfkK9dOrjYGyLudnuY/s400/doughnut+hole+3.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5496559530244064178" border="0" /></a><br /><p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">When Fleischmann’s is sucking hard on the tits of warm water in a small china bowl, the soft swampyness fills the air and I buzz about the kitchen drunk on it, feeling like I’m on my tippi-toes.<span style=""> </span>I love the smell of yeast.<span style=""> </span>I love the smell of yeast so much I wish there was a Fleischmann’s dry active perfume I could drench myself in.<span style=""> </span>I realize that a yeast perfume may not be so desirable for females—who would want an olfactory reminder of <i style="">candidiadis</i>? (As pretty as it sounds, a yeast infection is still and always a yeast infection.)<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Not having a vagina, I guess I would want to stink of yeast all the time.<span style=""> </span>Though I kind of have a bread fetish, I always thought it was about the carb addiction, not the yeast (duh).<span style=""> </span>I didn’t realize how much I love the fume of yeast itself until last week, when I made doughnuts:</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);" class="MsoNormal"><i style="">1) Stir together the following in a big bowl: 1 cup milk, scalded and cooled;<span style=""> </span>½ cup of sugar; 1 tablespoon melted butter; a fairy pinch of salt. <span style=""> </span>In a small bowl, stir 1 packet (0.175 oz) active dry yeast into ¼ cup warm water and let stand for 10 minutes or until till foamy-bubbly. <o:p></o:p></i></p> <p style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);" class="MsoNormal"><i style=""><o:p> </o:p></i></p> <p style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);" class="MsoNormal"><i style="">2) Stir yeast mixture into milk mixture.<span style=""> </span>Blend in 1 beaten egg.<span style=""> </span>Mix in 3 ½ cup of flour, about a ½ cup at a time, till a soft slightly sticky dough forms.<span style=""> </span>Cover the bowl and let rise in a warm place (sunny veranda is ideal) until dough is doubled. <span style=""> </span>About two hours.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);" class="MsoNormal"><i style=""><o:p> </o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style=""><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">3) Heat about an inch of oil in deep pan or skillet to 370 degrees.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">If you don’t have a cooking thermometer, then heat oil no more than 10 minutes on high heat: oil shouldn’t be too hot, because then the doughnuts will brown too quickly into burnt.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Watch the oil...in 1997, I left heating oil while frying chicken and the whole kitchen caught fire.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Fry pieces of dough in hot oil.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Each piece should be about a handful, handrolled to a vaguely flat shape.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">With my handspan, this recipe yielded 20 doughnuts.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Don’t make it too flat or the skin of the doughnut will pop away from its flesh.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Turn once so it is golden brown on both sides.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Do not fry for too long—about 10 seconds per side will do otherwise it will char.</span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);"> </span><span style="color: rgb(204, 0, 0);">Have faith in the oil and dough to cook flesh of doughnut through.</span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style=""><o:p> </o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>Filling the kitchen with yeast-fume wasn’t me trying to become some regressive stereotype of a housewife; it was a weird act of remembering my father. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">My father is still alive; we just haven’t spoken to one another for a few years.<span style=""> </span>I don’t really want to go into the specific details of why my parents divorced, and why my sister and I are not particularly close to him.<span style=""> </span>Instead, I’ll just give you a passage from Louisa May Alcott’s <i style="">Little Women</i>, in which Alcott describes the March sisters’ patriarch.<span style=""> </span>This is what my father <i style="">was NOT: </i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><i style="">“A quiet, studious man, rich in the wisdom that is better than learning, the charity which calls mankind ‘brother,’ the piety that blossoms into character, making it august and lovely....These attributes, in spite of poverty and the strict integrity which shut him out from the more worldly successes, attracted him to many admirable persons, as naturally as sweet herbs draw bees, and as naturally he gave them the honey into which fifty years of hard experience had distilled no bitter drop.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Let’s just say that the only thing my father and the father of the heroines of <i style="">Little Women </i>have in common was their being shut out from more worldly successes.<span style=""> </span>When I used to read <i style="">Little Women </i>as a kid, I longed to be Meg (my sister is <i style="">so </i>Amy) and I longed to have a gentle honey-father like Mr. March.<span style=""> </span>My father was not defined by his gentleness.<span style=""> </span>But the best and softest memory I have of him is that of his making doughnuts for us.<span style=""> </span>In Seoul, Korea, when I was around five or so, my father, though overeducated, was unemployed.<span style=""> </span>So he would hang out and help out his younger brother, who at that time ran a gourmet doughnut shop in a fashionable district of town.<span style=""> </span>My father would then come home and make us the yummiest doughnuts using the tricks he’d learned at his brother’s store.<span style=""> </span>I talked to my mother about this memory recently, and she who never has a good thing to say her ex-husband brought out an unexpected sweet: “How did he make those doughnuts so delicious?<span style=""> </span>Those doughnuts were so good.<span style=""> </span>I ate so many of them.” </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’m not sure why I’m thinking about my father now.<span style=""> </span>Maybe because Saturn is finally leaving Virgo after three years.<span style=""> </span>Maybe because as I get older, I’m recognizing aspects of my parents in myself.<span style=""> </span>Despite her bad qualities, I have no qualms about turning into my mother.<span style=""> </span>On the other hand, I felt like I spent my twenties trying like hell to avoid becoming anything like my father.<span style=""> </span>However, as my mother says, you cannot deceive blood.<span style=""> </span>So as much as I want to deny it, I see parts of my father in myself.<span style=""> </span>I did inherit, among other things, his slackness, his short legs, his nonchalance with money, his penchant for pacing, his love of frying yeasty batter.<span style=""> </span>So maybe I am turning into a version of my father after all.<span style=""> </span>But hopefully, a better version, because there is one all-important difference between us: I don’t hate women.<span style=""> </span>All of my father’s bitterness and anger can be traced back to his deep-seated distrust and hatred of women.<span style=""> </span>My father made doughnuts for us but he hated the hole in the doughnut.<span style=""> </span>I can’t remember how yeasty his doughnuts were—I have absolutely no scent sense-memory of them.<span style=""> </span>I just know that my doughnuts are super-yeasty, and that’s the way I like them.<span style=""> </span></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8062392313112900913.post-84920826593647015472010-07-09T17:28:00.000-04:002010-07-09T17:31:30.498-04:00i am shelby lynne<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH-tCuYdIZkG1DT0bYYOOb6pgpPBXK6T_hFnogOKFAQ_dstFJaXPuC-JzM7h3bY2UpBIn_Qkl3ufdCLGjFSbieVPOWJMhcecJxOVqvxh4KoZ12EhesVtZ2hsLoi6meu3RNIPXvOFwgbRze/s1600/100_1336.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 300px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjH-tCuYdIZkG1DT0bYYOOb6pgpPBXK6T_hFnogOKFAQ_dstFJaXPuC-JzM7h3bY2UpBIn_Qkl3ufdCLGjFSbieVPOWJMhcecJxOVqvxh4KoZ12EhesVtZ2hsLoi6meu3RNIPXvOFwgbRze/s400/100_1336.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492022008644664770" border="0" /></a><br /><br />The singer Shelby Lynne shocked the hell out of us when she came out on stage.<span style=""> </span>In person, her body was smaller than the voice on her records would lead you to believe, and her voice was much bigger (not louder—BIGGER) than the voice on her records.<span style=""> </span>She does with her voice what all great troubadours do: drug you into wanting things that you thought, or been taught, you’d never ever want.<span style=""> </span>Like when she sings a sad lyric comparing herself to an old mangy dog: you want to feel love so hard that you feel that depressed.<span style=""> </span>You want to be the dog she turns herself into with that song.<span style=""> </span> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The desirability she produced on stage was something I haven’t experienced in a long time. <span style=""> </span>That smaller-than-the-voice-would-allow body: it’s not just that at 42 years old, Shelby Lynne is so thin and fit that she embodies everything that I want to be in seven years.<span style=""> </span>(In an interview a couple years back, she famously declared: “I wouldn’t trade my life for what Carrie Underwood has. I’ll be 75, and someone will ask me to sing. And I’ll still be cute.”)<span style=""> </span>As a woman artist working in an industry that prizes toothless girlishness or over-the-top “artsy” femme decadence (you know the cultural perpetrators I’m talking about), Shelby Lynne is, right now, the kind of girl I want to be.<span style=""> </span>Not just physically, but in work. <span style=""> </span>No big hits, eight-album combined record sales that fail to add up to a million, yet she’s still working and working passionately at her art.<span style=""> </span>I like to think that Shelby and I travel the same road: it takes at least three rough decades of work to become a proper girl.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">But back to that body that houses and manufactures that voice.<span style=""> </span>That night, Shelby wore, without a bra, a simple black lycra camisole (Probably Victoria’s Secret.<span style=""> </span>My little sister and I too wore black tank tops to the show that night, except ours were Rick Owens.<span style=""> </span>This is the only night when Victoria beats out Rick for coolness and beauty), black Rock & Republic jeans (tight, but not too tight: wrinkly calves) and black buckly boots (“Like you buy on Polk Street,” my sister assessed).<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>The ensemble was apt uniform for the booming femininity she projected on stage.<span style=""> </span>Her interaction with her band (well, a guitarist and a percussionist) and audience revealed a femininity that was stretchy and tough as that black lycra tanktop.<span style=""> </span>Bossy (getting pissed at her guitarist for changing keys: “It’s in G now, Ok?” followed by angry silence.<span style=""> </span>Was she joking?<span style=""> </span>Hard to tell!), gracious (“I appreciate your lovin’, I really feel it in my bones now” she said before her encore), never pandering or cutesy (Never a flirty sexpot, she scowled and worked her way through her guitar playing and communication with her guitarist.<span style=""> </span>Lynne’s reaction to some male geek audience member who yelled out at the end, “Don’t be a stranger!!”: SILENCE).<span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>“She’s so hard!” my sister whisper-exclaimed to me moments after Lynne took the stage.<span style=""> </span>She was right.<span style=""> </span>Sensitivity that shoots through a perforated black carapace: that is Shelby Lynne’s femininity.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">At the San Francisco Yoshie’s where my sister and I saw her this week, we were seated at our table with a cheerful middle-aged middle-class couple from Concord who had just discovered Shelby...through NPR.<span style=""> </span>“I’ve been following her since the 90s!” I snottily and warmly offered.<span style=""> </span>And while I’ve been co-opting her voice to blow up my own little heartaches since 1993 when I bought a tape of her Nashville album <i style="">Temptation</i>, Shelby’s look has never compelled imitation in me.<span style=""> </span>Until now.<span style=""> </span>Not because she’s not pretty (she is very pretty) but because she’s always been a bit too pretty (blond, blue-eyed, blah blah blah).<span style=""> </span>But Wednesday night, she showed up with short hair and made me want to crawl inside her black carapace.<span style=""> </span>Her hair was pitched—and I mean, <i style="">pitched</i>, like a bale of hay or a wall of Phil Spector strings—somewhere between a Teddy Boy’s ducktail, Morrissey’s flop top, and Etta James’s peroxide poodle cut.<span style=""> </span>The hair could have gone so wrong (i.e. small town white dyke) but instead it went so right.<span style=""> </span>(And note: the short hairdo was <i style="">not </i>a Rihanna ‘do.<span style=""> </span>Rihanna cut her hair to be a “good girl gone bad”; Shelby Lynne has <i style="">never </i>been a good girl.<span style=""> </span>Plus, Lynne’s hair is not ironic/ flamboyant/ science fiction.<span style=""> </span>Instead, it’s historical fiction that is indecisive about the particular decade.<span style=""> </span>Rihanna’s hair poses aggressively towards the future; Shelby Lynne’s hair muscles aggressively into the past.<span style=""> </span>Shelby’s short hair is definitely <i style="">retro</i>—but it decreates itself and its human source.)<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">For the first time in many years, I felt not only a bit dowdy but downright <i style="">boyish </i>in my scraggy long locks.<span style=""> </span>Shelby Lynne made me believe I could achieve a better kind of femininity if I chop my hair off short.<span style=""> </span>It gives some hoping room for the futurity of a girl whose male genetic destiny may include a receding hairline.<span style=""> </span>I haven’t taken up the scissors yet, but I’m not afraid to think about it.<span style=""> </span>I don’t know if a floppy beehivey ducktail will work with my hair, but Shelby made me want to find out.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Skh1PsFoYf7Q_5Fxs29KHTgeTrhDbOCcP2bmJpRiLMB1g0v7jqMxUzdG3BUHKH0BF_9zsCZuFl3CgGrQgr9D2IysStXkYbW_o79MEcWNjgVeUxFVvz1G-KQGujvgD0Se2vi5C4DNi6W4/s1600/100_1337.JPG"><img style="cursor: pointer; width: 279px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_Skh1PsFoYf7Q_5Fxs29KHTgeTrhDbOCcP2bmJpRiLMB1g0v7jqMxUzdG3BUHKH0BF_9zsCZuFl3CgGrQgr9D2IysStXkYbW_o79MEcWNjgVeUxFVvz1G-KQGujvgD0Se2vi5C4DNi6W4/s400/100_1337.JPG" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5492022020347867522" border="0" /></a></p>joony schecter better known as BLACK MISTRESS TINAhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11119576251295877389noreply@blogger.com2