"I know a guy!"
Thursday, February 5, 2015
Objectum Sexuality: I want it, OH I want it
It took the last post to make me realize how much of this blog is about "old stuff".
It just is.
Blogs are supposed to have themes (?), so maybe mine does now, as much as it ever will.
(Sayyyyyy. . . that's really swell!)
Things were browner then, and somehow more dreamlike.
These '40s cars are erotic, their jutting noses phallic, bulging fenders like blown-up bosoms, and bottoms squatting haunchily like some faunlike forest animal. This one looks completely unreasonable with its slitty little windows and ridiculous upward thrust, but it must have belonged to someone. Who knows who that is in the foreground. Was this a piece of artwork? I don't think so, but still, it doesn't seem real.
My favorite thing about them is the rear wheels. Why did they cover them like that? They had little disclike things that must have flipped up to service the tires. Some of these are so extreme that the car seems to be sinking into the ground.
If you look at this dispassionately, which frankly I can't, you see a gorgeous galleon of a thing, insurmountable, its bulbousness both male and female, jutting like the shoulders of certain military men, all out of proportion but devastatingly beautiful.
This one is all haunch, but still with those mysterious wheel covers. Looks a little bit like a Volkswagen bug from the '60s. Who owned this thing, what was his/her life like, what did they like to eat? Everyone has a story.
This one is some sort of roadster, very sporty, but still with those ridiculous luscious curves and the jutting nose. Also the vestiges of a running board, which carried on well into the decade. Not sure of the year, but surely it's 1940s.
Surely these are animals. They seem alive. Their smoothness makes me want to wrap myself around them, feel the heat and the hum. The tensed haunch seems ready to spring the vehicle straight into the air.
This one is all nose, ugly really, but interesting for the exaggerated nature of it, the cartoonishness. And still, the covered wheels. I am not sure how long this quirk lasted. (Come to think of it, this DOES look like a toy car. Maybe it came with a toy man.)
And this, one of the most beautiful photos of a car I've ever seen, for it bespeaks Hollywood in the '40s. It's not faked like so many of these sepia poses, as the background vehicles are period-accurate. That caramel tone is irresistible. I want it, oh I want it.
Post-blog blatherings. OK, I watch My Strange Addiction too, everybody does, I don't care how clean your hands are. You masturbate too, c'mon admit it. So I see this really weird one where a guy is in love with his car. It's plain this is not a platonic thing, either. He - well, I won't go into detail. In an even stranger episode, a woman is married to a carnival ride, one that doesn't even function (but then, can't that be said of many "real" husbands?).
I don't think what I "have" is this, since I have barely ever seen one of these 1940s monsters, nor have I ridden in one. But I'd be in ecstasy if I did. I will never forget that cream-and-aubergine dream that I glimpsed maybe 12 years ago, that moment. It wasn't just admiration or love, it was a jones. I won't go on the show cuz my addiction isn't colorful enough: if I owned one of these beauties, it might be another story.
It's a definite disorder, this I know, for Wikipedia tells me so: Objectum Sexuality, also called OS or "fetishism", but that term has gone out of style cuz it doesn't have "disorder" on the end of it, or initials that sound good on talk shows.
Dr. Marsh, writing a weekly column called "Love's Outer Limits" for Carnal Nation, began with three columns called "People Who Love Objects".She has also published "Love Among the Objectum Sexuals" in the Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality, March 2010.
In March 2012, British citizen Amanda Liberty gave an interview to the Daily Mail newspaper (complete with photos) regarding her romantic feelings for the Statue of Liberty. Liberty said:
'She is my long-distance lover and I am blown away by how stunning she is. Other people might be shocked to think I can have romantic feelings for an object, but I am not the same as them.'
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In the same month, 40 year old Reighner Deleighnie was interviewed by the Daily Mail newspaper regarding her romantic relationship with a three-foot marble statue of the Greek God Adonis that she bought for £395, and which she had nicknamed "Hans". A later example involved Val Theroux, a 64 year old Canadian woman who flew thousands of miles from Kamloops to the UK every year to see an Oak tree which she had fallen in love with.During the summer of 2012, Babylonia Aivaz, a Seattle woman, married a 107 year old warehouse, however, this particular relationship is not being described as object sexuality, due to the political protest nature of her marriage demonstration.
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Erika Eiffel, who adopted her surname after a 2007 "marriage" to the Eiffel Tower, founded OS Internationale, an educational website and international online community for those identifying or researching the condition to love objects.
Wednesday, February 4, 2015
So you want to be a blogger
OK, so I've wanted to write about this for a long time. Then I'd say, wait a minute, what do you know about it? Then I'd come to the conclusion: that depends.
Depends on whether the worth of this blog is measured in "views", shares, likes, followers, etc. or merely the daily fulfillment of writing it.
When I started keeping this blog in 2010, I think my main goal was to get a contract for my novel The Glass Character. And after something like 3 years of solid effort, I did, though I don't think it had anything to do with the blog.
What do I know from blogging? Nothing. I used the simplest template I could find and changed the header many times, even changing the title of it when the book finally came out.
So it failed in its first purpose. What is its raison-d'etre now, that I keep on with it with such ardor? I think there are two parts to it. In my case, I made a solemn vow, not unlike getting married (and I've been married 42 years - gasp! - so I think I know something about that), that I would write whatever the hell I wanted to write, just whatever topic struck my fancy. There would be no "shoulds". There would be no "musts". There would be no "popular" topics. It was pretty much wide open. I did delete a few which were too whiny or too personal. But I allowed myself the option of short fiction, lots of photos, Blingees, videos, and ESPECIALLY (my favorite form of illustrations) gifs.
I love gifs because they are a movie in a handful of seconds. If you use archival material, e. g. those very rare George Gershwin home movies, you can discover a lot about the subject. In these snippets, Gershwin hauls a little dog up by the scruff of the neck, and puts his hands around a woman's neck as if he is about to "playfully" throttle her. I could not get dates or a context for these, but made gifs of them because they fascinated me.
There is hardly any film of Gershwin, only a couple of bits of him performing, and those frustratingly brief private movies. Mostly he was shooting them, as in this few seconds of the one-of-a-kind genius Oscar Levant. One wonders why he at least didn't make some recordings of his piano playing, which was said to be gaspingly, even jaw-droppingly brilliant. Instead, he'd play in the background at parties with (actual guest list) Cole Porter, Otto Klemperer, Frank Capra, Jimmy Stewart, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, and (yes, even) Oscar Levant, standing around smoking, drinking champagne and gabbing. Probably no one really paid any attention.
Slippery as an eel, Gershwin was, really unknowable, so if I can just get a ten-second gif of him at the piano, and if I notice something new on tenth or twentieth viewing, so much the better.
So why Gershwin? He is my current happy obsession. I say happy because I've never enjoyed my obsessions more. Information is at my fingertips, and I can write anything I like, pro or con. So the blog tends to leap from one mad topic to another, but not before it has been thoroughly macerated and giffinized.
Some readers (if there are any) seem to believe that the overbalance of gifs on my blog trivializes it, makes it cartoonish, especially since old cartoons are my favorite subject (along with TV ads from the '40s and '50s). Well, too bad, I love gifs, and like everything else I am good at, they go unsung. Making them is really not that easy - try it some time.
What else? The other pledge, commitment, whatever, along with writing about anything that pleases me and/or makes me angry enough to HAVE to write, is to keep it up. Nothing irritates me more than to discover a really fine blog and to notice that the last post is dated 2011. There is such an "I-lost-interest" feeling about it, a lack of dedication. I think if you're going to keep one of these, you need to keep it, like tending a garden.
About views: I seem to average anywhere between five and (my all-time high) 99,085 - no kidding, I just checked it, it's nearly 100,000! - for a post called I See Dead People: Victorian Post-Mortem Photography. People are still reading this thing, because the number of views continues to rise. Fifteen more views and I'll be at 100,000! How is this? Hell if I know, but I did find a link to it on someone else's blog, a very popular one, I would imagine. I've had a few in the ten-thousand-ish range (Some Cats Know, which is really just a bunch of cat pictures) and more in the hundreds. But for the most part, I don't look.
About repeats. Yes. I do them. I do them because I have a very small number of followers. I do them because in no way, shape or form do I expect people to read this blog every day, or even every week or every month. Even I don't remember much about these repeats. I pick ones that I think are good, ones that I especially like.
Why do I do this? If hardly anyone reads it, why do I bother? I need it. It's like a diary, yet it isn't, because I have to keep most of the personal stuff out of it. The "blogger" develops a certain persona over time, and if that persona is enjoyable to inhabit, then it's fun and gratifying to keep a blog. Though there are topics I return to again and again (I mention "celluloid, Harold Lloyd and me" under the title, and old film/photos/film history/ads/cartoons do form a sort of nucleus for the other mad stuff going on), I don't restrict myself to one subject. It would bore the piss out of me, that's why. And if I am bored, you, gentle reader, will be too.
So I'm a blogger. I don't think it has made one iota of difference to my book sales, because book sales just don't stick to me. It's all very flukey, like that one post that got 100,000 views, when many of the others (much better ones, in my view) get maybe 5 (four of them from me, when I go back to edit them).
So. You want to be a blogger? Go ahead, just make sure you enjoy it, follow your nose, don't be afraid to be quirky, don't pay much attention to views (even though the entire internet seems to revolve around numbers and popularity), and - this last one is the most important - KEEP IT UP. Nobody wants to find an absolutely wonderful, stimulating blog that ran out of steam in 2009.
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