U Might Not Be Aware Of: Dollcore

i’m working on the discolology of björk but i’ve barely started and it’s gonna be a lot.  gonna have spooktobers to post en octubre.  until then, what can i say to bump myself up the sidebar?  lessee…

One of the reasons trans gals got whammied so hard by the “autogynephilia” theory (advanced by some cissexist I don’t care to look up) is because the feelings around thinking of one’s self as a woman can be very sexual in a society where women are objectified – and women are not blind to the messaging that is conveyed through advertisement.  The theory pops like a balloon when you ask the question, do many cis women get turned on by the idea of themselves as a woman in sexual contexts?  In cute outfits etc?  Yes?  I guess that’s not so much a pathology for a woman now, cis or trans, is it?

Thinking of one’s self as a woman in sexual contexts does lend itself to developing fetishes, which hopefully don’t eclipse all other possibilities of arousal+release in the person who has them.  Trans gals, at least in the latter half of the twentieth century thru the present (that I know of), have been quick to latch onto “forcefem” / forced feminization scenarios.  Like the romantasy author who subjects her author-insert main character to being raped by bad boys and werewolves, this is a way to divorce yourself from the “blame” for your desires.  Makes sense.  It’s kind of a cultural touchstone, occasionally verging on in-joke?  As fetishes go, it’s kinda cute.  I’m not big into it, but I do have a novel on the backburner that takes it into litfic territory.

More recently, it’s become popular to take objectification to another level and adopt “it/its” pronouns.  I’m sure you can think of at least one creepy context of that being done in fiction (hopefully) by someone expressing disdain for a victim, but in the realm of fantasy, whatever goes.  This should be seen as distinct from “objectum” kids, about whom I know zilch.  For these people – mostly trans gals, some others – being treated as an object has (sometimes sublimated) sexual appeal.  They’re also usually into some flavor of bdsm fetishes.

So.  Maid fetish, objectification fetish, art descended from the mutant mannequins of Hans Bellmer, and… gals who fantasize about being cute dollies.  Sometimes in maid outfits, sometimes packing plasma cannons from mashup with “gunpla” and “bjd” hobbies.  I feel like this post really could use about five times the length to properly communicate its concepts, but it’s supposed to be dashed-off in-between content, so bear with me.

Again, I’m not really into it, but it has a cute aesthetic.  You go, girls.

Now you know about #dollcore.  Be a doll, would you?

–

Je ne blorbe pas.

I do not blorb.  I blorbn’t.  Ich schreibe keine Blorbogeschichten.

I was in my writing group sayin’ hm, don’t have strong ideas for what my road rage demons should be like.  I’m aeternally jealouse of Mr. Barker’s cenobites, the most iconic people-shaped monsters ever.  I suppose that these ones don’t need to be so cool, since they’re just jerks damned to traffic hell, but the longing is there.

So I say that to my writing group, and in the subsequent discussion, where people are making suggestions, one of my fellows said, “Sometimes blorbo wants to digivolve.”  I didn’t say anything, but I felt tainted by the suggestion that my monsters could be categorized in any way as blorbos.

Blorbo is a term that emerged from fan culture to describe a character, be they original or (more often) from a fan’d intellectual property, whose suffering you enjoy.  Not out of hate, but out of love.  Look at that middle-aged white man look like a drowned rat as he is beaten and humiliated.  Delicious, apparently.

This is a species of the sense of dysphoria I get when someone suggests that I am a nerd or a geek.  I would never regard one of my characters as a blorbo.  I don’t want to fold spindle and mutilate them for perv joy.  They are a vehicle to storytelling.  I just don’t get emotional (or horny) about them, not like that.  I was coming up with an idea for how to make some monsters interesting, not getting fannish about my own bullshit, and somebody had to tar me with the fan culture brush.  Filthy.

I suppose this is now a “U Might Not be Aware of…” post.  Blorboing.  Not even once.

–

A Thing of Stuff and Such

Didja know A Song of Ice and Fire by George “Rail Road” Martinson inspired a bunch of ripoff titles, prominently the romantasy A Court of Thorns and Roses by Bret Michaels?  I’m sure that romance author made a bank full of money specifically on the back of cracking George‘s secret code.  Join me, if you will, in becoming hojillionaires of literary science.  What should we write?

  • A Bunch of Elfs and Dwarfs
  • A Torrent of Cats and Dogs
  • A Personality of Quirks and Flaws
  • A Time of Clocks and Watches
  • A Load of Cock and Bull
  • A Herd of Turtles and Cats
  • A Flock of Seagulls and Synthesizers
  • A Pile of Sleepyheads and Snugglebugs
  • A Network of Freethoughts and Blogs
  • A Bongload of Kush and Resin
  • A Hooptie of Fellas and Freaks
  • A Bevy of Beaus and Beauties
  • A Joy of Mans and Desirings
  • A List of Jokes and Failures

Hey, cats made the list twice.  I’m losin’ it.  Again, I outsource the upkeep of this blog to the comment section.  Write your own below!  It’s not optional!

–

Brainjackin: Let’s Play

Didja know, there are yewchoob channels where all the person does is play video games?  Sometimes they do it straight, like, only the sights and sounds you would see if you were playing the game on your own, with their invisible hand on the controller.  Other times they do a voice over, with varying degrees of snark or foolery.  Other times, they have a face on the screen – either their actual mug, or a cartoon avatar of some kind.  Originally these were called “let’s play” videos.  I’m not hip to the current lingo.

I wouldn’t know about these if it wasn’t for my husband and his perpetual search for distractions.  He introduced me and I have enjoyed many hours of diversion as well.

Let’s play videos evolved into the more recent generation, which is people running live video streams on a place called twitch.  They play the game live while the chat runs on the screen yelling nazi memes and throwing fractional bitcoins at the players.  idk, never created an account over there.  But it’s all good.  Time marches on.  And there are still plenty of let’s play videos on yewchoob to choose from.  I favor John Wolfe.  Currently he does most of his gaming content on his second channel, which is something he had to create because yewchoob’s algorithms are crap for the liddle guy and even the middle guy, which is where he finds himself these days.

Before James? Stephanie Sterling came out, and before she?they? became too doomy and repetitive for me to watch (hence my lack of awareness of current pronouns), they occasionally did this kind of content for their own channel.  They were especially focused on playing the shittiest games polluting steam and itch.io.  A fan made collections of the best excerpts from those videos, and I include one below, for your delectation.  The Lenny Kravitz near the beginning is from Neil Cicieraga’s amusing remix.  Enjoy.

edit to add cw:  for the none people who still care, this does have a ton of ableist language.  technically some of these are horror games but the horror content has trouble breaking thru the wall of mangled medium.

–

Brainjackin: Kiyoshi Kurosawa Good

Hey remember J-horror?  Japanese horror movies?  Who cares at this point, right?  There was a long-haired lady ghost, maybe a well, a video tape, a tiny boy in his tighty whities?  I dunno.  On the back of viral success of a few imported movies, Hollywood decided to milk the genre for a few bucks.  Attempt one was pretty successful, followed by nothing but suck.  Probably the coffin nail was the last iteration of hollywood’s the grudge.  Ill.

When this was going on, I became aware of the genre, but knew about the same as anyone in amurrica.  However, very early in my relationship with my husband, we shared our favorite movies with each other, and I discovered more.  There was a standout among Japanese horror directors that does not get much love in the USA, save from the extremely hip.  That’s Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Did I say Akira Kurosawa?  Is that what you read?  Go back and reread that name.  It’s worth remembering.  Kurosawa means something like Blackmarsh, and is a fairly common name.  It ain’t like the highlander; there can be more than one.  Kiyoshi thinks of himself primarily as a horror genre director, but his work has so much virtue that he keeps getting tapped to direct arthouse movies, like Bright Future.  That film is fine, but lets allow the boy to do what he wants.

My husband’s favorite film by him is Cure, but a few others hold special places in his esteem as well.  Retribution is the first and unfortunately only one we saw in the theater.  Pulse is excellent and had a shit hollywood adaptation filmed in like, a community college in sarajevo after it closed for the night.

The guy is a feminist.  I don’t know how common that is in Japan, but the themes of certain other famous j-horrors are sometimes low key misogynist, so it stands out.  He doesn’t use the word, but in movies that are otherwise full of subtlety, he will sometimes stop the proceedings to underscore that women are full-on human beings whose lives do not depend on men, and whose lives matter.  Retribution features a scene of dark humor at the expense of a traditional-minded male character, Guard From Hell ends with the male and female leads shaking hands and parting ways.  He drives away in his car, she walks to the bus.  He was once tasked with making a titty film called The Excitement of the Do-Re-Mi-Fa Girls and made it without titties, getting into trouble with the studio, blacklisted for years.

That’s just one example of the ways he stands out from the crowd.  How do I describe what the movies are actually like?  He’s just one of the best movie directors in the world.  Sometimes his subject matter will keep you away.  Sometimes budget or other constraints have caused weakness in a project, like on Charisma, so I can’t say he’s perfect.  But when it’s all working right?  Easily as excellent a director as Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Danny Boyle, John Carpenter on his best days.

His movies don’t invade your space, hammer you with what they’re about.  They are quiet and reward paying full attention to the screen.  They make it hard to look away from the screen, drawing you in with something more than just suspense or drama.  It’s hard to characterize the art of making film out of sight and sound, out of medium and edit, of coordinating the work of others to create a single coherent story that transcends its subject matter to get right into your head.

My personal favorite was Retribution.  I hope someday a lot more of his older stuff becomes available in the west.  It’s hard enough to make the time to give a two minute song your full attention these days, and I’m asking you to watch two hour movies, so…  Make of this all what you will.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa good.

–

Brainjackin: Kafka Good

There are things I wouldn’t know if it wasn’t for my husband.  I was broadly aware of Franz Kafka and his works, aware of what people meant by “kafkaesque,” but that awareness meant I wasn’t actually reading it.  I’m just sunshine and lollipops over here.  Unfortunately I am also horney on goffs, so I ended up married to one, and ended up reading some Kafka for myself.  Now I know – Kafka deserved the fame.  It’s absurd to say he’s really good actually, but he’s really fucking good, actually.

On my husband’s thirtieth birthday, he got the dying words of Franz Kafka character Josef K tattooed on his arm – “Wie ein Hund,” in the handwriting of Kafka himself.  My dude must be more goth than anybody in alles die deutschsprachige welt, because google image search for that quote comes back with nothing but cutesy inspirational dog pictures.  Yes, we know that means “like a dog,” but c’mon.  Sort yourself out, Deutschland.

One time I mentioned Kafka to a German lady and she had no idea who I was talking about.  Yeah, he was Jewish and lived in Prague, but he’s the most famous writer of the German language in much of the world for a reason.  Sorry, Goethe is cheesy.  Mann is lovely but I never heard of him until I was cohabiting with a goth.  The disregard for our boy feels antisemitic.  Do you like your own language or not?

So.  What’s good about Franz Kafka?  He owns your ass.  As an author, you want to communicate a feeling to somebody, make them experience it, and if it’s a feeling that cannot easily be expressed in words?  All the more impressive.  People will talk about the absurdity and futility in his stories, but they don’t mention the humor and the pathos.  It’s dark humor, the emotions are sad as hell, and when you’re experiencing both of these things and more, all at the same time, you are spellbound.

Unless you’re immune to art, which is a trait we can add to DickDawk‘s laundry list of character defects.  At least he has the courage to never delete his history of incredibly embarrassing tweets.

So far I’ve read The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and The Hunger Artist.  I know, I haven’t even read The Trial.  Fake Kafka fan.  Despite my high praise for him, I would not call myself a fan.  What he did as an artist was basically perfect.  Sometimes I can think of a quibble with even some of the greatest literature of all time, and I have no such criticism for Kafka.  However, did I mention my sunshine and lollipops?  When it comes to dark art, I am a tourist.  It isn’t for me, for who I am.  But it’s absolutely worth reading, regardless of who you are.  Just once.  Check him out.

–

Brainjackin: Renaissance Cuties

We’ve all heard the names of various renaissance artists before, right?  Not being Italian, it’s easy to miss that some of those guys are known by nicknames.  Davinci, Caravaggio, Raphael, Tintoretto, Botticelli, and Bronzino sound similar enough to anglophones, but that list is the equivalent of Anglos being named Stratford, Carmichael, James, Spunky, Reginald, and Prettyboy.

In particular, Tintoretto’s nickname meant something like “little painter boy” and Bronzino’s “tan boy.”  There was a military dude from back then, who is best known now from being the subject of art – a sculpture bearing his nickname, the Gattamelata.  That shit means “honey cat.”

I suppose history will remember Cherilyn Sarkisian as Cher and Louise Ciccone as Madonna, so maybe we’re still at it.  But regarding those renaissance cuties, I didn’t know about it until my husband told me this information he had picked up in Art History.  Thanks, man.  I’m turning this tidbit into blog content.  The essence of brainjackin’.

What other historical figures are known by a nickname?

–

Brainjackin: The Normal

There are some things in life I only know about because of my husband’s evil influence.  Once upon a time he got on a jag of listening to a musician known as Fad Gadget, aka Frank Tovey.  Good lookin’ guy, passed too young due to a congenital heart defect, made wacky art-influenced electronic music.  While he was digging that guy, he told me all sorts of other adjacent things.

It starts with a guy named Daniel Miller in 1978 releasing an indie electronic track called “Warm Leatherette,” for his solo project The Normal.  That song did well for the indies, inspiring Grace Jones to do a more successful cover of it in 1980.  “Warm Leatherette” is very basic, even crude, and has lyrics that are just basic bitch fanboying about J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash.  You know, the one that was portrayed in cinema some years later, with James Spader and Holly Hunter getting their rocks off by experiencing car crashes.

Meanwhile, Miller established the soon to be ultra-successful Mute Records.  One of his other projects there was a silly little album of classic rock and roll covers as The Silicon Teens.  According to wikipedia Miller provided the vocals, but they do sound rather like his friend Frank Tovey, who posed as the band’s singer.  Who actually sang?  Dunno.  But Mute Records had all sorts of interesting artists.

Of primary interest to my man, Frank Tovey’s Fad Gadget, who had several cool songs, most famously “Ricky’s Hand,” “Collapsing New People,” and “Lady Shave.”  Did Collapsing New People make you think of Einstürzende Neubaten, whose name means Collapsing New Buildings?  No coincidence, that band was also on Mute, and the song was about them.

That’s not what made Mute a gazillion dollars.  That would be Depeche Mode.  I love those guys.  Once upon a time they were young men, and there’s a picture of lil’ Dave wearing a Fad Gadget T-shirt.  At least, I remember seeing that somewhere.  Might be misremembering it.  Anyway, the world wouldn’t have all that great Depeche Mode music if it wasn’t for these weirdos, and if it wasn’t for The Normal, and if it wasn’t for Warm Leatherette.

Join… the car crash set.

–

Brainjackin: Abbott Handerson Thayer

Another type of post to add to the rotay, so I don’t run out of birdposts and dreamposts and discposts: Thunks I Stole from My Husband, aka Brainjackin’.  These won’t necessarily all be original thoughts or observations of his, run thru the filter of my misunderstanding.  Sometimes it will just be Things I Wouldn’t Know About if It Weren’t for Him.  Like this post, about Abbott Handerson Thayer’s hot idea.

OK, this idea might have crossed my horizon before, but it didn’t take root in my memory until my husband mentioned it to me one random evening.  Early 20th century painter Abbott Handerson Thayer was very successful in his own time, a man of letters as well as visual art.  Seems like everybody had to have big opinions about everything, and he put forth an idea on the topic of zoology, which may have been a good example of people talking outside their expertise.  According to Thayer, even boldly colored animals were actually adapted for camouflage.  After all, predator or prey, you have good reasons to wish to remain unseen.

In support of this idea, he used his exceptional painting skills to illustrate a book.  Very beautiful pictures of not-at-all cryptic (camouflaged) animals, in just the right circumstance that they could fade into a background.  Por ejemplo,

I think this guy was more famous for paintings of pretty girls, but this stuff is a lil more memorable in the scheme of things.  At least, to me.  Were peacocks adapted to blend in with bushes and trees?  Probably not, but the idea was at least good for producing some very cool art.  Thank you, Hander Thaybotson Randers.  Aw shit, I’m losing it already…

–

These Gay Antics

Hey, what’s the deal with the gay antics out here?  Lookit that guy up on the stage, kissin’ the other guy on the stage, and nobody says nothin’ about it like we all get it, big joke, they get the no-homo pass because they’re rocksters.  That ain’t fair.

I’m thinkin’ about the boys in Nirvana back when they were all alive, makin’ out on Sunday Night Live and whatnot.  But also about Bruce Springsteen kissin’ that one guy from his band, and didn’t some of those hairbandmans do it too?  Like Bon Chovies or David van der lee Rothe or Motley Poisons?  Why does nobody think any of them suck wieners?  That’s kinda weird.

Rap guys can’t get away with it.  Every time they wanna say something nice about gay people they gotta backpedal into the depths of hell to keep their street cred.  I feel like one of those Mobb Deep dudes had to do it.  It’s kinda interesting tho, some rap bands are cocksucker this faggot that, and others don’t use those slurs at all, like, mysteriously absent from their vocabulary.

And however hardcore that rapper is, when I notice that about them, I have to wonder, who are they being nice to?  Themselves?  Their friends and relatives?  Some of them even stay sorta vaguely respectful to women.  Can you imagine?  But they can’t make out with other rappers on stage and get a pass.  No permiso.

Gay antics tho.  Dire Straits using the f slur in Money for Nothin’.  Probably about Duran Duran, but he did go on to say Duran man gets his chicks for free.  As opposed to Dire Straits who have to pay for it?  Or do they get their dudes for free?  Reverse reclamation maneouvre?  I don’t get it.

Are these liddle old men trying to appeal to fujoshis?  Scare republicans?  Is it a homophobic joke like “wouldn’t it be funny if we were gay lol u losers”?  I remember high school jocks being on that tip, but doing very overt gay things in pursuit of that “joke” and leaving one wondering.  Or jacking it, depending on how hot you thought their homoerotic display was.  A few of those situations may have entered my “spank bank” as it were…

Rocksters explain it.  I’m at a loss.  How u do these gay shenanigans and get away with it?

–