Embalmed Beauty, Part 2: fan art

Quite a while ago I went through a doll phase - all right, an obsessive doll phase - all right,  a completely obsessive doll phase that took me down some very dark corridors in my mind.

I think the first significant genre I found was on a web site called Enchanted Doll (http://www.enchanteddoll.com/) which features a collection of exquisite and disturbing dolls by Russian-Canadian artist Marina Bychkova. Barely 30 years old (and living in my hometown of Vancouver), she has been creating these shockingly original alabaster dream-figures since her early 20s. It has certainly paid off: one of her dolls commanded the headspinning price of $27,000.00 on eBay, and the waiting list for purchase is now several years long.

What exactly is happening here? How to analyze this strange and spooky magic? You can't, and I won't try or I'll be here all morning. Most of Bychkova's dolls are in a category called BJD (and it doesn't mean what you think it does, so shut up or I'll smack your filthy mouth). It means ball-jointed dolls, whose arms and legs have the capability of moving in practically any direction. (Please don't count those Monster High monstrosities, whose arms, legs and hands have an alarming habit of falling off.)

The bodies seem identical, slim and virginal, sometimes elaborately tattooed, with realistic genitalia that freak a lot of people out. Some even have pubic hair and a visible clitoris, which is strange because the average woman's clitoris isn't visible. The slender figures and spookily lifelike skin of these dolls contrasts startlingly with their blatantly visible, marionette-like joints. The nudes pose innocently or provocatively, faces sad and sometimes frightened, eyes brimming with tears. Costumes can be incredibly intricate, and there is even some furniture, velvet sofas and the like. But this is hardly Barbie's House of Dreams (from which the name of this blog is derived, by the way. Some people don't get the satire at all and just think I'm stupid.) 

There are recurring themes in the world of the Enchanted Doll. One seems to be subjugation and even a kind of captivity. Many of the dolls wear costumes that would feel something like a suit of armor, with enormous headgear (one even has a cathedral on top of her head!). Even the Scheherezade-like figures look like creatures kept under glass (which, during the many exhibits that draw wildly enthusiastic crowds, they actually are).

I had a Bychkova fit a year or so ago - or was it two? - then decided I had had enough and had better leave it alone before I crossed some sort of disturbing threshhold. Enchanted doesn't mean what people think it does. It means living under a powerful and often unbreakable spell, a spell cast through words or even song (the "chant" part). Abricadabra, bibbidy-bobbidy-boo, and you're captivated (captured?) for life.

But when I got triggered off again recently, God knows how, I found a trove of a couple hundred images I had previously hoarded (most of which I ruthlessly weeded down to just 66 or so - not 666! - figuring the rest of them  are already accessible on the internet, and will be for the forseeable future). I found only a few that were really new to me, including the heartbreaking one at the start of this post. If you really want to freak yourself out, pretend you can hear what this doll is saying. And there is the really disturbing one, the battered doll, which seems to cross the line even for a dollmaker who likes to push the envelope.

So do these dolls "make a statement" about female subjugation? I doubt if it's done consciously. If they do, it's in the sense of holding up a mirror, both to society and to ourselves. We prize the waxen beauty of girls kept under glass, and even find them sexually irresistable.

SOOOOOOOOO. . . we come to my Daily Special. Those few years back when I first became obsessed, I produced a bit of fan art. There is fan art on Bychkova's Enchanted Doll site, but it's done by actual amateur artists, not people like me who can't paint or draw. I play with my Enchanted Doll images like Colorforms, that primitive form of magnetic paper dolls from the '60s, which I was startled to see my granddaughters playing with the other day.

This is photoshop art, placing the dolls in settings that worked for me, stolen from the internet. The backgrounds are  meant to be standard wallpaper, but there is nothing standard about these dolls. They call up disturbing feelings in people, from "Ewwwwwwww! Cree-py!", to "Who made these?" to "Where can I get one?"

In case you think these dolls represent harmless social satire, just look on Bychkova's site and watch some of her videos. They feature "playing with" the various nude dolls, placing them in postures that often seem frankly lesbian. In one, a doll has died and is being buried. 

It all makes the mummified Barbie in the shoebox sarcophagus of my childhood seem much less strange.

CODA. I kept getting a funny feeling when I looked at this one:

It was perhaps the simplest one to compose, with only one figure in the extreme foreground. But it looked funny, kept changing somehow.

It was like one of those "can you see two faces in this picture?" things that I can never figure out.

With a few magical photoshop changes, I was seeing a giant goose or duck or some other strange bird, a malevolent-looking one that seemed to be dominating the entire picture. It's what fairy tale enchantment can do to you.

My Harold Lloyd doll: I got my mojo working

NO! This is NOT my Harold doll, notnotnotnotnot. This is a horrifying clip depicting a Harold Lloyd windup toy from the 1930s, one that actually appears to still work. The Harold we see here has a sad affliction, some sort of seizure disorder that causes explosions of frenetic movement. He doesn't walk so much as flail along. Toys like this are worth plenty, and are uniformly hideous. I've even gone into this subject in past posts, and frankly I'm pretty sick of it.

So we know that Harold toys have existed for a long time. There were even Harold dolls, sort of, which consisted of two flat pieces of oilcloth sewn together with a uniform pattern stamped on them.

But soft! What's this??

 

 

It's a Harold with features, a face, hair, in three dimensions even. And glasses.

 

 

A Harold complete with white straw boater and bowtie. A soft and cuddly Harold, unlike those tin things that scare the hemoglobin out of me.

A Harold with blue eyes and glasses and hair like he had, sort of wavy and slicked-back.

 

 

A Harold who can doff his hat.

 

A sitting Harold.

 

 

 

And, most importantly. . . a Harold with SADDLE SHOES!

 

 





I am not too shy to tell you that I made this doll myself, and with no pattern. He evolved under my hands. I had certain feelings when I began this project. I'd been thinking about dolls and writing about dolls (and if you're following this blog, you'll be tired of the whole subject by now) and their strangeness, creepiness. There's something eerily powerful about a human making an image of a human. It goes back to the Venus of Willendorf or something. It has juju, cachet, mojo, power.

 

I feel like I lost track of my mojo a long time ago now, and I want it back. It's funny that, though I initially got very excited about this project, I then fell off it for a while and didn't particularly want to do it.

I think it was the misery and despair of realizing that no one seems to have the slightest interest in publishing my novel, The Glass Character, a fictionalized treatment of Harold Lloyd's life and loves.  Part of me died when that happened, for I had so many hopes for it and STILL think it's the best thing I've ever written.

It dropped with a clunk. It was like throwing a pebble into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

So I needed Something. I don't believe in voodoo or anything (though obviously some people do), but I wonder if I might be able to beguile a sort of reverse voodoo here, to have some sort of power over somebody's attention or perception or influence or something.

To get someone to notice.

Harold got noticed, believe-you-me. He stood out. Part of it was his fierce ambition, part of it his sleek and slightly vulpine good looks, blue eyes crackling with intelligence and life force.  A hell of a lot of it was a talent that was surprisingly slow to bloom. Even by his own admission, some of it was "luck", whatever that is, which is maybe what made him so incredibly superstitious.

(I just remembered something from several years ago, a very strange story. My granddaughter Caitlin, then only about five, found my DVD set of The Harold Lloyd Comedy Collection. She saw the photo of the man with the glasses and his hair standing on end and looked at me strangely, then asked, "Grandma, is that you?"

"Yes," I said. "It's me."

"Can we watch this?"

"Of course. But we'll just play the good part."

So I put on Safety Last, the climbing scene, and all through it she was totally absorbed. Every once in a while she'd say, "Ah!" or "Oh!" when it looked like he might fall. At one point Ryan, only about 3, mosied in, put his hands over his eyes and said, "He's gonna faw! He's gonna faw!" He watched the rest of it through his fingers.

But after the clock-hanging scene was over, the spell seemed to be broken. "That's not really you, is it, Grandma." It wasn't a question.

"No, it isn't. It's a man named Harold Lloyd. I wrote a book about him."

A little while later I could tell she was still thinking. I asked her what she was thinking about. Then she looked at me and said the most remarkable thing.

"You're Harold Lloyd, and Harold Lloyd is you.")

You can't throw your heart over the jump and have your horse get halfway over it and get impaled on it and throw you off so that you land on your head and are paralyzed for life. So much for THAT adage. And it's NOT true that "you can do absolutely anything you want in life, so long as you keep on trying". That's the biggest piece of bullshit I've ever heard, and do you know what? I hear it EVERY DAMN DAY, along with "everything happens for a reason" (childhood cancer? Random shootings? The Holocaust?) and "God never gives us more than we can handle" (so then why are our prisons and mental hospitals always full to overflowing?)

And here I go into a rant again. I need my Harold doll, someone to watch over me. And though I know this sounds incredible, his eyes, the rather rudimentary blue eyes that I embroidered on myself, DO appear to follow me around through those glasses, the glasses that made Harold who he was.

I made him. I made his face, his eyes, his body, his shoes and hat. Without me he'd be bits of yarn in a basket, nothing. He is me; he is mine.

Gummi Baby: unliving or undead?

<sup>I admit I tend to harp on one subject until I can't stand it any more. It's part of my relentless nature and necessary for surviving all my self-generated difficulties.

But these! These things, these "reborns" (sometimes called "unborn" or even "unliving") got me onto the subject of "the undead", though not in the usual zombie sense of people staggering around with raggy clothes and painted faces.

I am drawn to this subject, and yet repelled. Yes, sometimes I wish I could hold a baby again. Hell, ALL the time! My grandchildren are my life now, I'd be bored and/or dead of despair by now without them, but my eldest granddaughter is turning NINE on October 31.

I was there in the delivery room when she was born, an amazing experience that can never be exceeded in power and wonder and love. But it will never happen again. In a sense, it was the very peak of my life, but of course I didn't know it.

My first novel had just been published, I was the thinnest I'd been in many years, and people kept asking me, "What have you been doing? You look ten years younger!"</sup>

<sup>Never mind the rest of the story, but let's say I'm lucky to be alive now, if very fat, and much, much older, most of my dreams sadly packed away.

But these babies! I can see how someone, stricken with grief, might latch on to one of them. They don't poop, never cry (though as the info below explains, some of them "coo" and make baby noises when you throw a switch somewhere). Some are heated and/or even appear to breathe and have a heartbeat.</sup>

^{The newest category, and one I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around, is "full-body silicone babies". These are molded out of that rubbery stuff you make sex toys out of (not that I'd know anything about THAT), not to mention fake breasts and full-size sex dolls. It's hard for me to get a bead on what the exact difference is between these and conventional vinyl Reborns. I know that the original reborns were baked in the oven, and I don't think you'd do that to silicone unless you wanted a big puddle. The artists who make the Reborns don't say much about the silicones (which I suspect are a new thing that's catching on now) except to be defensive and rather negative. I suppose they're poured into a mold of some sort, but it's hard for me to grasp how you'd make that mold. I have horrible visions of newborn babies being encased in plaster of Paris.}

<sup>One traditional Reborn site said that "silicones" have the squishy texture and cold feel of a Gummi Bear. The real plus however is that you don't have to look at that awful cloth body when you change them. I always hated that about dolls: it interfered with any feeling that I was handling a real baby. Plus you can bathe them and make their little arms wave around and splash in the water cuz they're so rubbery.

I HAVE to get off this, I know, but I'm stuck in it now and feel like I'm walking around in the Ninth Circle of Hell. So, more knowledge from Wikipedia:</sup>

Supplies

Starter kits are equipped with basic reborning necessities such as limbs, faces, heads, paint brushes, eyelashes, weighting pellets, genesis 'heat set' paints, cloth bodies, cable ties, nose drill bits, fake tears, thinning shears, cosmetic foam wedges, cotton dipped applicators, and glue. Genesis 'heat set' paints are an odorless, non-toxic paint that dries when the artist chooses by applying heat. The nose drill bits are used for creating and perfecting the nostrils of the doll. Acetone or a paint thinner medium is needed for removing the factory paint from the doll. Hair is an optional choice to add to a doll. Fine mohair, human hair, or wigs are usually used, but it is found in a variety of types. Rooting tools are utilized for this process and are available in numerous sizes 20,36,38, 40, and 42. The smaller the number the thicker the needle which will grab more hair and leave a bigger hole in the head of the doll. Eyes for a reborn doll are offered in a variety of brands and sizes.^[6]

 Process

Vinyl doll kit shown side by side (unpainted parts & painted "reborn" doll). The doll has a "chest/belly plate".

The technique of reborning a play doll typically involves a number of steps. To begin the doll is taken apart and factory paint is removed. Then a blue color wash may be applied to the inside of each vinyl part to give the appearance of realistic baby skin undertones. For dolls with an awake appearance eyes must be replaced.

The outer layer of the vinyl doll is given its skin tone by adding dozens of layers of flesh colored paint. If heat set paints are used, the doll parts must be heat set by baking them inside an oven or by using a heatgun after each layer of paint is applied. Lighter skin tone dolls can take 15 to 30 layers. The effects of the blue color wash combined with the outside layers of paint creates the appearance of veins, and gives the doll its newborn mottled look.

Manicured nails and opening of the nose holes are other details that are added during this process. The next step is to apply hair. The hair can either done in one of two ways; wigging or microrooting. When microrooting, hair is added strand by strand. This can take up to 30 or more hours per head. Once the hair is finished, the original vinyl body is weighted with a soft stuffed body filled with pellets. The weight corresponds with its age to achieve a real effect.

Various additions also can be added to give the doll an even more life like appearance. Reborns heads are often weighted, so that owners have to support the head like one would a real newborn. Purchasers can have magnets attached inside the mouth or head for attaching a pacifier or hair bows. Electronic devices that mimic a heart beat, or make the chest rise and fall to simulate breathing are common. Reborns can come with an umbilical cord, baby fat, heat packs to make the reborn warm to the touch, or voice boxes that mimic infant sounds. For preemie dolls, they may come in incubators with a breathing apparatus attached to their nose.

(Emphasis mine.) If you found one of these lying in a crib, motionless, not breathing (unless it had one of those pump thingies installed inside it), wouldn't you think you had a dead baby on your hands? If this thing is really as rubbery as they say it is, wouldn't picking it up be like scooping up a giant jellyfish?

I think technology has gone too far, both in filling gaping needs with inanimate objects, and in preventing those needs from really being filled because there are such satisfying and manageable substitutes available on eBay. Ones you can buy and sell, not bother to feed or change, and toss in the closet when you get tired of them.

What mother was ever so richly blessed?

 

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA

Barnes & Noble

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-glass-character-margaret-gunning/1117863913?ean=9781927068885

Thistledown Press

http://www.thistledownpress.com/html/search/genre/Fiction/the_glass_character_p580.cfm

Chapters/Indigo
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/the-glass-character/9781927068885-item.html?ikwid=the%

Just when I want to take a rest, another demented idea comes to me

Just playin' around with dolls. . .

. . . and I ended up here.

The shitless, screamless, no-mess, no-fuss baby

Most people who see a video like this one have an instinctive "ewwwwww" reaction: "oh, that's creepy". There's something about an object that's described as "lifelike" - those embalmed-looking Madame Tussaud's waxwork figures, or the Victorian post-mortem "subjects" photographed sitting up with sculpted smiles  - that makes most of us feel a sinkhole open up in the pit of the abdomen.

These sweet little things are called Reborn dolls, a creepy name if there ever was one, evoking both recycling and born-again evangelism. For many women, mostly older women, they call forth feelings that we normally associate with a kicking, squalling, pooping, drooling, red-faced little spud that causes endless trouble because it requires constant care.

But if you "adopt" one of these (and the cost can be well into the thousands), the baby is surprisingly low-maintenance, or perhaps even NO-maintenance, for it doesn't cry or require changing or bathing or cuddling. No, the requirement for cuddling rests with the cuddler, who must be trying to fill some sort of inner emotional abyss in constructing and buying/selling these things (for things they are, complete with crusty little rashes and runny noses).

The obsession with collecting is beginning to spread into a mania for actually making these things, and Reborn kits are surprisingly easy to obtain on the internet. The woman in the video, who with her stony face and turned-down mouth looks extremely unhappy, turns out a complete Reborn doll per day - but, even more disturbingly, she doesn't sell them or even give them away. Her house has rooms packed full of them, 1800 in all, to the point that I don't see how she has time to rock and nurture them all. Though she insists she was only seeking "inspiration", the local maternity ward told her to stay away because she was giving patients the creeps.

The more I got into this subject, the more I was reminded of something infinitely more horrifying. Awhile ago I saw one of those semi-sensationalistic documentaries about World War II on the History Channel. I confess right now that I'm obsessed with that war and with the Nazis and their twisted ideology. Probably the most pathological idea they ever had was to breed babies.

The Lebensborn project was a means of producing a master race of full-blooded Aryans, many of them fathered by members of the SS and handed over by their young mothers as a duty to the Fatherland. In fact, surrendering a baby in this way was seen as an honor, with your child guaranteed the best possible education in the unassailable truths of Nazism. They'd learn that stiff-armed salute before they were two.

What gave me the shivers - and I haven't been able to find a picture or clip of this - was a very brief shot of babies - dozens of babies - scores of babies - some with diapers, many without. They lay kicking and squalling, squashed together on the flat surface of a giant table, with a few nurses moving around among them, maybe checking to see if they were still alive. But that's not the worst. In the foreground more babies were coming in, shoulder-to-shoulder and knee-to-knee. . . on a conveyor belt.

These babies were "product", something systematically mass-produced to carry on the horrors of the Reich. My personal view is that the Nazis feared that these children might feel something unacceptable - pangs of conscience, perhaps  - if they weren't indoctrinated  from their very first breath.

When I found these photos, they made my scalp prickle because everything seems so wholesome, so "normal". No doubt much of this normalcy was fabricated for the camera to reassure people that their lost babies were being properly cared for. The shot of nurses cuddling life-sized dolls made my hair stand on end. What is this bizarre photo all about?  Did they really think they could perfect their childrearing skills on an inanimate object?

I'm not for one minute saying these dollmaking women are Nazis, but they sure are strange. They're turning out what amounts to "product": inert replicas of babies, blobs of primal instinct made of latex and fabric, monuments to departed children or grandchildren, or maybe just something to fill an aching space inside.

I've felt it in unguarded moments, usually at the supermarket checkout line: a sudden pang when I see a newborn baby. Not only did my own children's infancy hurtle by in a blur, my grandchildren are growing up at an appalling rate, like those old Wonder Bread ads where the kid shoots up right before your eyes. I was in the delivery room when Caitlin was born, a compact little football swaddled in a green towel with almost unnaturally-bright, almond-shaped eyes. And now she's nearly nine. NINE - ye gods, I remember being nine! That was the year Kennedy was shot. The Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show on my tenth birthday. So she's already in that phase of cynicism that I remember so well, sometimes causing my older (much older) siblings to cry out, "Oh, stop!"

I'm not in a rush to get one of these Reborn things, carefully weighted in head and body so that it "handles" just like a real baby. I'd rather get a puppy or a kitten, something that is at least alive. As a matter of fact, being very tired of shovelling shit and listening to earsplitting shrieks, I don't think I'll get another bird when Jasper dies. Didn't I do enough cleaning up shit when I looked after real babies?

But this is the perfect creation, the shitless, screamless baby, a baby that never changes, as if it has been dipped in wax or embedded in plexiglass. Frozen in time, it's always there as a comfort. The only problem is, it gives me the shivering creeps.

SPOT THE REAL BABY! One of these photos is a real baby (not counting the Caitlin newborn shot). Can you guess which one?

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

Order The Glass Character from:

Amazon
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA