Tag: bodies

Embodiment and drifting.

Old half-baked draft from 11 December 2008. I kind of want that asterisk question on a t-shirt. I think I was really asking **** How do I want to talk about this on the internet after such a long break??? ****

Talking to Heather about embodiment, being in your body. She had an idea that maybe when teenagers are focussed on having sex even when it is pretty “rape-y” and risky and not beneficial or pleasurable, it has partly to do with their lack of other ways to feel their physicality and be in their bodies. No access to nature, nowhere to safely walk, not allowed to play outside unsupervised, even encouraged to eliminate or replace all body odours, etc. That’s a lot of pressure on sex for being physical.

It got me thinking about how I relate to the internet. I’m on here a LOT, in this disembodied place.

Anyway. I’ve been realizing that one of my big ways to be in my body for the last year or so has been looking at things. Sensing with my eyes, and sensing the reactions my body has to colours and shapes (and letters, boy howdy). When I got to go to the UK with my mum last fall, and we spent so much time in art galleries because it was rainy, that was the most physically altered I’ve felt since I stopped eating psychedelic drugs. High on modern art— physically dizzy and speedy and sometimes getting auras like before a migraine, from seeing enough art nouveau in one room to really experience and understand the concept of biomorphic whiplash. I made this website these colours because they do similar things to me— they are stimulating and encouraging and they make me want to write. I remember using music that way in the past. Galen would come home sometimes and be able to tell when I was working on something important, because I’d be blasting some or other personal power music. In high school— I just remembered this— I did a lot with smells. Other people’s sweaters, specific incense, open window when it rained.

*** where does fucking fit in?? ***

So, notably, none of this involves movement or muscles. It’s all sensing and processing and information. It’s physical to me, but it’s what a lot of people would identify as being in your head.

My forays into physical activity are marked by a lot of head time, too. Office bike— the exercise bike I can pedal while I make websites. Wing chun— if I have to punch and kick to learn which way shoulders bend and how momentum works, I guess that’s alright. Fucking— “erotics is the process through which sex acquires meaning.” I think I get bored, otherwise.

I’ve been casting around for some more physical motion in my life, to make me stronger.

I have high hopes for a bastardized version of this pretentious French art thing, the dérive, or drift. Walking to nowhere. OK. I do not like walking for the sake of walking, even though I love walking. Growing up, my parents were all about taking a walk, but not so much about negotiating where to walk or talking about what they feel like on the walks or whatever, so I have a lot of stored up experience being deeply bored with walks.

Walking to nowhere: ok. Just paying attention to see where you want to walk the most: ok. Also, paying attention to local geography and how it feels, that can go on forever. I think this could be useful in trying to figure out more of how I relate to being a settler on colonized land.

So yeah, I’m glad I’ve practiced walking by myself, home alone from various locations. I’m glad Victoria is a mostly non-threatening place for me to walk around.

Plant dyes, having a smell, odourlessness in general.


Lump indigo (blue)
Old recipe from Outer Hebrides

Boil wool with onion skins till clear yellow, then let wool dry. Have an old pail filled with urine at least two weeks old, or until skin forms on top… Put lump indigo in a muslin bag, heat the “bree” by placing a hot stone in it. Squeeze in the blue bag. Wet the wool and place in the liquid. Cover the vessel and place where it will keep warm… For navy blue, 11 to 21 days are required. Fix with boiled sorrel roots as rinsing water.

— Dye Plants and Dyeing, Brooklyn Botanic Garden Record, 1964.

Books about natural dyeing have a lot of lore I hadn’t foreseen. So many smells! Boiling weird fungi, soaking fiber with onions (“It will take at least four washings to eliminate the odour”), fermenting urine. One book detailed an argument between the author and her editor about whether traditional Harris tweed, dyed with lichens, smelled “musty” or, less judgmentally, “earthy.” I had no idea that tweed used to have a smell. I am fascinated by this, and want to dye all my clothes with different plants to get to know the smells.

Why don’t I expect my clean clothes to have a smell? Not a laundry scent, but a part of their nature. I can remember talking about the smell of my clothes like a normal thing, all the time. Wool sweaters smell sheepy if I get wet in the rain. A couple of weeks ago I told someone (who?) that I liked the smell of raw silk, because I was knitting with a silk blend yarn. I can recall the scent of cotton in my mind’s nose: wet, dry, or hot. Why did I still think of clothes as odourless?

Heather wrote once (or maybe we spoke) about why people are so obsessed with genital odours. Do they smell right? Do they smell too strong? How to keep the smells in control? She suggested that this was partly because we have come to expect the entire rest of our bodies to have no odours at all. Healthy hair, feet, armpits, mouths, and skin in general all have smells, too, but between washing and deodorizing they’ve been redefined as ideally odourless. It’s total fantasy, bodies still smell, but we expect odourlessness. (Like my clothes!) Compared to that, genitals are almost getting smellier by contrast.

Thinking about the more familiar politics of body odours makes me even more interested in knowing what smells are required to make the colours in my clothes. These plant dyes seem like an opportunity to make experiential connections, to know things by observation. To have know what clothes smell like and why, instead of not knowing what shocking petrochemical smells are happening at distant textile factories. It feels grounding. Educating my mind’s nose. I have some pondering to do, regarding wood smoke and other smells that have been banished from modern, civilized, classy life.

I think I will start slow, though, with tea and lavender dyes. Fermenting a bucket of my own urine is going on the “someday I will peek behind this curtain” list along with attending a pig or goat slaughter. Someday.

Homemade deodorant, a straight-up re-link.

Do us a favor stinky, by Natalie Dee.

Do us a favor stinky by Natalie Dee

Every time I mention that I use homemade deodorant, I realize that I’ve never actually linked to the awesome internet recipe that I use.

So here it is, Angry Chicken’s homemade deodorant recipe, styled after Lush’s Aromacreme natural deodorant but less likely to cause a rash. This is the only deodorant recipe I’ve ever tried, and I’ve been using it happily for about a year. It’s cheap and it works and it gives me a better vibe than the “you stink” industry.

Our personal household version is a little simpler, like so:

5 Tablespoons shea butter
3 Tablespoons baking soda
2 Tablespoons corn starch
Essential Oil (ylang ylang, rosewood, nutmeg and cinnamon)

Melt, stir, pour into container(s), cool. Store extra in the fridge.

Nighttime, trees, rocky beaches…

She moves only by night and on a south wind, by Pamela Phatsiimo Sunstrum

She moves only by night and on a south wind, by Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum.

I’ve been going through some old photos that my mum brought me. They show a lot of crouching at the beach. This collage looked familiar in two ways then: the beach crouching from when I was small, and the nighttime trees from my neighbourhood now. I think this new combination will add something to my night walks.

Like Busby Berkeley with censorship bars

Toe Jam by David Byrne feat. Dizzee Rascal (via).

I need to organize more time to hang out naked with my friends. I love it so much. In the summer, there is usually night swimming and maybe this year I’ll go to our local nudie lake with it’s one hilariously small dock. But what about winter? What about now? I don’t think there is a women’s bath or anything in this town. I need to organize some nudeness at home. Anybody want to come over and take expressive naked photos? Give me a call.

Horror movies, self-mutilation, vampire-incest?, publishing old drafts.

Letting more old drafts shine their light into the internet. More quotations from The Monster Show .

I think the reason I saved this first quotation was that I hadn’t thought about movies being made by the most surgically altered and self-mutilated people around. I liked thinking about horror movies reflecting the horror of Hollywood culture, not only of wider American culture.

p.167, On Arlene Francis, star of Murders in the Rue Morgue:

Her real shudders came after the film was completed when other producers, eager to discuss her future in films, began wielding scalpels shaper than those of Dr. Mirakle. They would offer her riches, it appeared, but only if she would consent to give up a portion of her nose. Rhinoplasty was all the rage in a Hollywood that now placed a premium on robotic, standardized glamor in the Busby Berkeley mold. Dorothy Tree, for example, was a highly regarded Broadway actress of the late 1920s, but her strong profile relegated her to bit parts in films, shuffling around in a shroud, for instance, as one of Bela Lugosi’s vampire wives. Finally, after leaving her original nose behind her in the vaults of Dracula, she began to get speaking parts and billing. Producers and casting directors were eager to prescribe and preside over surgical rearrangements of the female body, an obsession beginning to be weirdly echoed, or perhaps weirdly magnified, in horror movies and popular literature. Indeed, the persistent, essential connection between plastic surgery, self-mutilation, and horror had only begun.

And this next one just made me curious about what this proposed link is.

p.191, on incest and vampires…

[In Mark of the Vampire, 1935, Tod] Browning and his screenwriter Guy Endor likely took some inspiration from Ernest Jones’ pioneering psychoanalytic study On The Nightmare (1931), which explicitly linked vampire fantasies to incest guilt.

Freaks, zombies, horror movies… old drafts.

More old drafts that have been sitting in the archives, more quotations from The Monster Show .

p.200-1

[Tod] Browning spent a lot of time at the ballpark and racetrack in the early thirties, and veteran Hollywood writer Budd Schulberg (author of The Disenchanted and What Makes Sammy Run? ??) had a memory of another Browning pastime. “The marathon dance was in vogue then and we went a few times to the Santa Monica Pier to watch the young unemployed zombies drag themselves around the floor in a slow motion dance macabre,” Schulberg wrote in his 1981 memoir ??Moving Pictures. “Even more appalling than the victims on the dance floor were the regulars, affluent sadists in the same front-row seats every night, cheering on their favorites who kept fainting and occasionally throwing up from exhaustion. One of the most dedicated of the regulars was Tod Browning, who never missed a night and who got that same manic gleam in his eyes as when he was directing Freaks.”

p.292

The rediscovery and rehabilitation of Freaks became almost a cause celebre in the film journals beginning in the early sixties. Once considered crass and tasteless, the film was now “compassionate” and “sensitive.” In a way, the appreciation of Freaks became a politically correct means to indulge a morbid curiosity about thalidomide deformities, while still being able to feel self-righteous and progressive.

Look good naked, bring your own analysis, a lot of video links.

A bloggy friend of Erin’s posted about a TV show called How To Look Good Naked. I don’t have cable, and I didn’t know anything about this show. This blogger, Sarah, said the show basically relied on body image coaching to help women like their nude bodies, with no weight loss or surgery suggestions at all. I found this improbably thrilling news regarding a reality makeover show, so I looked it up on YouTube. This is from the American version (the original is British).

They just pointed out that plastic surgery doesn’t work? On TV? And they used their feelings to decide how to solve their personal distress? Yay hooray! The clips I found raise a ton problems for me, but wow, I am really happy to see this conversation happening on a mainstream makeover show.

Problems/boring parts:

And yet, I am still definitely pleased to see a rounded woman’s butt cellulite on screen in a positive context, hear someone make the basic point that clothes need to fit your body and not vice versa, and even see men touching each other fairly comfortably.

This is a very narrow discussion of body image, but it is at least in a direction that I value: unpacking all the crap that people said you should do and deciding for yourself. (My body and I are totally bff almost all the time anyway, so I’m not disappointed about the lack of new ground.)

It’s quite the comment on the state of TV that eliminating weight loss and surgery without discussing anything else is cause for celebration, but maybe these baby steps will make some room for a similar show that adds a couple of elements, and then a couple more. No weight loss, no surgery, and no dissing fat. Or getting to know your body without looking at it. Queer eye for the straight girl, finally, or a show where women come up with ways to enjoy their bodies without a host/star/authority at all. I dream.

7 wrens, sets of sets

seven wrens

Look-alike wrens and the art of using field marks.

I was thinking about sets of sets when I came across this set of similar wrens, discussing the collections of identifying marks that make up a distinguishable bird species.

The same site has a lovely little discussion of preparing the mind to see birds.

Experts say that when we lose something, before we begin our search to find the lost thing we should picture the object in our minds. This kind of “visualization” causes the brain to do something wonderful. On the one hand, it appears to filter out many unnecessary sightings but, on the other, if something even remotely resembling the lost object comes into view, the mind seems to “jump” at it.

Power of pattern matching.

G-rated YouTube porn, feathers.

I ran into this while I was looking for info about whether found feathers can have any germs or mites or whatever (probably not). I love the wealth of g-rated porn that has blossomed under YouTube’s anti-nudity terms of service. I don’t think they intended to create a video sharing service where only kinky sexplay is allowed (watching women fart, smelling socks…), but I guess that’s a fairly predictable side-effect of banning mainstream, tab-a-slot-b, show-the-boobs sex in an online space.

So far I haven’t found anything especially subversive— lots of groomed women and muscular men, lots of hypergender, whatever— but I actually like this tickling video because the tickler and the ticklee seem to have actual communication with each other. “OK, OK,” feet flex, feet relax. That’s kind of magic to see on YouTube.

a skinny older man body

{Flickr photo}

‘many years have passed with the quiet hum of the staircase bulb going on and off and on again.’ by tetheredto

When I saw the Century Project (a man took nude photos of women from ages 0-100), my first thought was to wonder whether anybody was making a similar collection of naked men. I think there is more of a lack of images of naked men overall. So I collected this one a few months ago, and that’s as far as I got.

Fertility awareness, old feelings, heart connection

Galen is taking charge of his fertility'

Galen is reading Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Partway through a chapter, he popped in to do a dance of excitement about how interesting he is finding fertility awareness. Ovaries! Mucus! Feedback cycles! DIY science! He asked whether it would have been cool to learn about cycle charting when I was thirteen or so, so I could have had a lifetime archive of data about my reproductive health. Wow, that caused a lot of feelings at once.

First, go team! It is useful and friendly for bio-guys to learn about female physiology, reproductive health, menstrual cycles and all that. I still tell people gleefully about the time last year that (male) Galen and our (male) friend Nathan were discussing their favourite features of the diva cup. (“Well it has marks so you can measure your blood.”) Doing their part to make the world safe for menstruators.

But also, awww, yes I do wish I’d known interesting ways to chart when I was starting out, or had any decent period information. It is amazing to me that after a solid eight or nine years of purposely investigating menstruation and cultivating positive attitudes and general insatiable curiosity, I still get ambushed by leftover sad feelings around menstrual cycles.

I don’t seem to have had an especially negative or ignorant upbringing compared to other people I know, but I managed to accumulate a fair amount of emotional trauma about periods just through a general lack of self-determination as a teenager. Dumb everyday stuff, like I was neither in charge of buying my own underwear nor in charge of how the laundry got done when I lived with my parents, so I was constantly frustrated and embarrassed (and often getting yelled at) about dealing with period laundry. It seems like surely I could have been responsible for either or both of those things if it had occurred to me— I don’t think my parents were that authoritarian— but strangely I remember arguing about wanting to do my own laundry my own way and being unable to work out any arrangement. Even now, I often find simple plans impossible to coordinate with my parents, for reasons I can rarely even remember. It’s deeply confusing. I think part of my lingering upset about menstrual cycles is actually due to the fact that I can’t recall any coherent explanations for past conflicts on the subject. Hmm.

Galen knows all this, at least superficially. I talk about vagina-related feelings with pretty much anyone who’s up for it. The most recent neighbourhood rock club was on the theme of songs to change your past and I picked a song that might have prevented me from going on the pill if I’d heard it while I was resigning myself to modern living through pharmacology. (In The Evening by Nina Nastasia and Jim White, because it makes me feel stubborn and that’s what I needed to be.)

I am sad that I ate all those chemicals, and that it seems to have done some damage to my cervical crypts (where the infamous eggwhite fertile mucus is produced). Sad sad sad. Angry too, to feel so misinformed. Disappointed that I didn’t listen to my own better judgment, and betrayed on behalf of the part of me with better judgment. I said most of that at rock club, but I’m not sure that is something people can relate to without a fair amount of relevant experience or other knowledge. Erin afterwards said she had a grieving process about the pill. Me too, going on it and again going off.

So Galen’s latest round of excitement about menstrual cycles is complicated. I was immediately glad to have company, and also immediately lonely, realizing I’m cut off from the possibility of feeling simple, impersonal excitement about uteruses and their ways. It was good to realize that he’s in the rather privileged position of not having personal emotional baggage about menstrual cycles. Once I managed to make him all sad about my damaged cervical crypts and assorted teen angst, we had a better connection there. It’s good to be on the same team.

So. For my future babies, I keep track of books like Cycle Savvy, in case they don’t want to talk with me about their personal strategies and feelings about periods.