Tag: beauty
Fashion model with Asperger’s. Huh.
After reading this fairly incidental profile of a Top Model contestant with Asperger’s Syndrome, I am wondering if fashion model is the most mind-bendingly ironic job for someone with a diagnosable inability to conform to social expectations. Maybe an Aspie con artist would be more unexpected.
Scars, gray hair, “real” beauty
A photo: where I’ve been, by dayzoid on Flickr. A self-portrait I think.
I like this scar— I like looking at most scars, and I work on looking at the rest. But the photo itself seems like the kind of thing that gets referred to as “real” beauty in skincare advertising. An older woman, but with flattering makeup and lighting. Gray hair, but stylish and even. Not a bone rack, but posed to look smooth and curvy, never lumpy or saggy or folded. Making some kind of cute and peaceful facial expression. Definitely feminine, but not sexual (not coincidentally, usually looking freshly washed and clean). It’s a very contrived and limited type of “real.” Looking again, this photo is not as extreme as all that, but the demure smile and the smooth white hair reminded me.
I don’t get why more people don’t rant about how patronizing it is to use “real” as a euphemism for old or fat. I can’t decide if it is better or worse than the older concepts of “imperfect beauty” or “inner beauty.” There are probably more phrases in body image activism that drive me bonkers. The whole focus seems off to me— I don’t think it helps anyone to offer these alternate, consolation prize types of beauty, more ways to win at being beautiful. That doesn’t do anything to get away from ranking people or competing. I really think the focus should be on learning to see more kinds of beauty, to be a better beholder.
Scar pride
At first I was just looking for a few photos of people’s scars, having been reminded by Erin’s copy of the Learning to Love You More book. But, in typical internetto fashion, now I am intrigued by the patterns that show up when you look at a mass of public scar photos. There are some popular subjects— self-harm exhibitionism and processing, scars from pregnancy and cesarians (not so much finding episiotomy scar pics), voyeurism with optional processing (especially around major burn scars, and ritualized scarification by some African cultures), manifestos and statements about beauty and beautiful scars, and more general scar pride and storytelling. I find this last one the least complicated, the easiest to post photos without major accompanying comments. (In this one I’m only spotting basics, about how it’s easier to be proud of pretty much anything when you are cute and posing, but I still like how that calculator watch makes her look tough.)
Scars, stories
Photograph a scar and write about it is still one of my favourite assignments from Learning to Love You More.
Fabulous scar
by the time i hit grade nine i not only had a surface piercing in my scar, but had also cut a scar-shaped hole in a tank top the better to display it.
“Motto for LA”
“The life of art”
I’m reading a book on the history of horror movies (finally, prompted by a haunted house analysis that Dark Daughta linked). My horror book quotes a character from Upton Sinclair’s 1922 novel They Call Me Carpenter, talking about The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
This picture could not possibly have been produced in America. For one thing, nearly all the characters are thin. … One does not find American screen actors in that condition. Do your people care enough about the life of art to take a risk of starving for it?
“Babe of the day”
Casey phoned the other day to ask about my top photos of undressed women, as a response to seeing one of those lame “babe of the day” widgets on somebody’s Facebook profile. (I think he wanted to build an arsenal, in case he had the opportunity to unleash it on somebody.) I am pleased that somebody thinks I am a potential resource for images of people who are sexy in the body hair and bellies kind of way, but I don’t have a stash of that stuff at all.
For a start, I thought of Rose and Olive, photographers I found awhile ago, I think on Warren Ellis’ blog. Their photos are often quite posed, and they seem caught up in starving artist glamour and that artier version of girls gone wild that hipsters like (wet shirts, polaroids, poetry…), and they have a blog at Nerve.com which is a creepy place to have a blog… and the photo above is one of only two black models in their entire archive as well as one of a very few models who look older than nineteen and aren’t showcasing skinny bony shoulders… but also, they seem to know that wide thighs and forehead wrinkles and messes are beautiful, and they seem sincere, so I pick and choose from their photos.
I appreciate the love of armpits, textures and complicated facial expressions going on in this photo, and the way the model is kinda subverting a classic pin-up pose. It makes me want to be on that roof, in that light, touching skin with somebody. So this might go in my babe of the day stash, if I had one.
Marian Bantjes’ first font
Restraint is a font by Marian Bantjes, something I have wished for many times! So many obsessive, interlocking ornaments that it comes with instructions. (Restraint. Ha ha.)
Red and blue, gate
Erotics of sports?
Here are two things I’ve been trying to combine in my head since June:
- I watched the World Cup soccer games this summer. I’ve never been a sports fan. The competition seemed meaningless, like it was wasting its potential. It was still fun, but I wanted something. Surely atheleticism and competition could add up to more than some arbitrary, slightly psychotic spectacle.
- In his workbook The Erotic Mind, Dr. Jack Morin wrote that “eroticism is the process through which sex acquires meaning.” That made me think immediately of sports, believe it or not. I think my experience with sports might be like boring sex, without any erotic framework.
I’ve just been kind of storing that partial idea, pending further inspiration.
But, I think I found a film I need to watch. I spotted it in the Vancouver International Film Festival guide (after the festival was over— argh!). It’s called Mystic Ball.
Chinlone is a unique combination of sport and dance, a team sport with no opposing team. The focus is not on winning, but on how beautifully you play the game.
For director Greg Hamilton, what begins as a physical exercise soon becomes a meditation and a dance with gravity. Mystic Ball follows Hamilton as he evolves from an awkward beginner to a teammate capable of soloing with the greatest chinlone players in the country. During numerous trips to Myanmar and the city of Mandalay, Hamilton is embraced by a community that shares his passion. We see the development of his friendship with the “Golden Princess” Su Su Hlaing, the greatest chinlone solo artist in the country. And we learn what chinlone means to a couple of elders who have been playing the game everyday for the last 70 years.
That movie might be beyond my New Age threshold (Golden Princess?), and the sport sounds suspiciously like Burmese Hacky Sack, but I’m going to file it away just in case.