Historiann

This creepy doll by Hans Bellmer, 1935

I can’t let the coincidence of this pass me by, since we’re talking about dolls and the objectification of girls’ and women’s bodies again.  Squadratomagico has a great post up on the off-label hormonal engineering of baby girl fetuses who have tested positive for (gasp!) Congenital Adrenal Hyperplasia, which means that they frequently have ambiguous genitalia, may possess a strong interest in softball, and “as a group have a lower interest than controls in getting married and performing the traditional child-care/housewife role.” 

(Well, what thinking woman doesn’t agree with that last bit?  Seriously:  if you dig scrubbing crusty surfaces and wiping snotty noses and bums, that should be a symptom of clinical depression, not normative behavior in any adult, male or female.  Most of us do that junk because we don’t want the state condemning our houses and taking our kids away.)

Click immediately on this link to join the discussion.  I left a comment over there, so I’ll be following that thread.  Something else I didn’t mention in my comment is the odd equation of childhood behavior with adult predisposition for motherhood among these alleged sufferers of CAH:  “As children, they show an unusually low interest in engaging in maternal play with baby dolls, and their interest in caring for infants, the frequency of daydreams or fantasies of pregnancy and motherhood, or the expressed wish of experiencing pregnancy and having children of their own appear to be relatively low in all age groups.”  What a stupid way to think about children or the importance of play.  Continue Reading »

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Remember all of those dolls and doll parts I’ve found running on back roads and country byways in Colorado, Michigan, and Maine?  Well, here they are–you can’t see it very well, but there’s a blue-haired doll in the mint pot on the left that looks like it was designed to be a dog’s chew toy, too.  Naked Barbie-like doll, doll in the homemade dress, and creepy doll head are all standing guard over my mint, parsley, sage, catnip, and lavender.  (The garden looks pretty scrubby, I must admit:  the sage is a re-plant just introduced, the mint leaped around the pots that were to contain it, the chives are totally overgrown, and the parsley needs to be decapitated and revived somehow.)

Here’s a view of more of the beds.  In the top left bed is garlic and brussels sprouts, and in the right foreground is yarrow and a just-starting-to-bloom red hollyhock.  (What’s eating the hollyhock leaves?  It seems to happen to every hollyhock in my neighborhood lately.  They still seem to bloom and come back every year nevertheless.)

Continue Reading »

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Date:  June 9, 2010

Time:  10:50 a.m.

Place:  In the Northbound lane of an unimproved road in Lenawee County, Michigan

Longtime readers might remember that during my visit to Michigan last June, I stumbled upon a lot of dolls–in antique shops, and in museums.  Well, I almost literally stumbled over this one yesterday as I was out for my run.  Here she is, complete with a homemade sarong.  I put her on the side of the road in a patch of grass, in case the child who so carefully sewed the homemade dress for her drove back down that road to find her.  But, six hours later I went back to check, and no one had claimed her.  She’ll join the one I found on the beach in Maine last week on a run–a Barbie-like doll who had received an unfortunate haircut and was naked but appears otherwise uninjured.  I’ll give them a sunny afterlife in my herb garden.

It’s never a stuffed animal or other child’s toy that I find along the roadside.  It’s always beat-up or mutilated female dolls–baby dolls, Barbie-type representations of grown women, it doesn’t seem to matter.  I find it disturbing–which is why I can never not pick up an abandoned doll.  Continue Reading »

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Hi there!  This morning, I have some more photos for your delectation.  (Hey–at least I’m not subjecting you to a slide show in my basement, fergawdssakes!)  Now, this little beauty can be yours for just 230 Euros.  I thought about buying it for GayProf, but then I thought it would mean so much more if I just took a picture and showed it to all of you.  (Thanks for sharing, GayProf!)

It seems like Wonder Woman’s costume gets skimpier and skimpier as the years go by–which is just about the opposite of most Earth women’s wardrobes. Continue Reading »

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Here’s hoping you’re not working “on spec” today.

“Let’s get into trouble, baby!”  Continue Reading »

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Can I choose "none of the above?"

Howdy!  Hellsapoppin’ here.  While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend.  Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:

• National Politics:  What’s up with our Transformational President?  Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure.  Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective.  Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence:  “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?”  Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing.  (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
• Local Politics:  Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck.  (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.)  Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator?  Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter.  Go figure!  Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway.  Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state?  (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
• Literature:  Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts Continue Reading »

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This is the Sesame Street short film from back in the day that was immediately called to my mind by Flavia’s recent post on book covers, more specifically, by the book cover she nominates as the freakiest of all time:  “the original cover art for Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972),” which she calls “hideous and compelling at the same time.”  (Go over to her place to see it, and the full-size blowup when you click on it.  It is impressively weird.)  Incidentally, “Rolling Ball 1, 2, 3 (rare ending)” is the only one I remember–I never saw the version with the cherry sundae ending until last night.

When I was over at YouTube researching this short film, the film below came up as a related video.  Continue Reading »

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"Deborah," Alex Prager, 2009

Over at The Daily Beast, Rachel Wolff informs us of two exhibitions of photographs by L.A.-based artist Alex Prager opening in both New York and L.A. this winter.  Check it out–and be sure to click through the gallery of Prager’s “living dolls.”  There are samples from two series by Prager–”Weekend” and “The Big Valley.”  (I thought the photos in ”The Big Valley” were more interesting.)  Wolff writes:

In many ways, Prager’s women—draped in faux fur, coolly smoking cigarettes—are metaphors for Los Angeles itself, which the artist has called “a strange picture of perfection… with a sense of unease under the surface of all this beauty and promise.” It’s an easy metaphor (and one we’ve seen before) but there is a certain allure to Prager’s images. They recall the roleplay and self-imposed artifice of Cindy Sherman’s film stills; they offer a user-friendly antidote to the sort of palpable grit embraced by other female artists living and working on the West Coast (Katy Grannan and the duo Harry Dodge and Stanya Kahn among them); they’re pretty, private, and self-referential—the sort of thing you’d want to hang in a bedroom instead of over the couch—but nonetheless macabre, especially given the recent demise of pretty young things Brittany Murphy and Casey Johnson.

Wolff calls the images ”living dolls,” not because they’re perfect–far from it, in most cases.  Continue Reading »

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Well, it’s been quite a holiday here in the ancestral homeland–everyone got here safely for the holiday celebrations, but it looks like our ride home next week will be a little more complicated, thanks to the latest wannbe-Jihadi’s attempt on an American airliner.  Thanks a lot, a$$hole!  We still have to take our frakkin’ shoes off every time we go through airport security eight years after “shoe bomber” a$$hole Richard Reid tried to set his chucks alight.  I wonder what new meaningless ritual inconvenience awaits us now?  Let me guess:  no more pixie sticks and juice boxes allowed in our carry-on bags, because this a$$hole tried to mix a powder with a liquid.  (Does Homeland Security know about the explosive properties of Pop Rocks?  Because I don’t want to fly if anyone is carrying Pop Rocks.) 

On a happier note:  here are a few images from our Christmas here in the Northwest Territory: Continue Reading »

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I’ve been slacking off on my doll blogging over the past several months–so it occurred to me that a certain stop-action animated movie I saw recently might qualify as a doll post!

I saw The Fantastic Mr. Fox last weekend.  Wes Anderson has become a successful director because he shares and manipulates baby boomers’ and Gen Xers’ nostalgia for our childhood:  the mid-century office technologies, the clothing that always looks like it’s right out of a Goodwill grab bag ca. 1963-1979, the self-conscious references to things that appealed to children in the 1960s and 1970s (Jacques Cousteau and Davy Crockett, for example.  Pass the Space Food Sticks and Tang!)  If you’re in your mid-30s to your mid-50s, Anderson is like a very clever kid brother who missed out on all of the fun you had during your late midcentury childhood, and who’s getting rich selling it back to you in idealized dreamscape slices.

As to the movie itself:  Continue Reading »

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