Tuesday, December 19, 2006
Navel Commission
I don’t have the focus to type up anything long, so here’s a few weird notions I’ve had to bat around my various lobes:
There is a new series of billboard ads going up around town to fight childhood obesity. They show photos of cute kids reaching for a burger or a soda or something like that, to encourage parents to step in and make a difference. I support that message, but I can’t help but wonder what it does to a child model’s self-image to see him- or herself as the actual literal poster child for childhood obesity. Might as well give up on those Hollywood dreams now and take your greasy solace in those fries that fell out into the bottom of the bag….
Have you seen the blue camos? They’re like the green ones you might have for the forest or swamps, or the tan ones they use for the desert, or the tan and grey ones for “urban theaters” (sounds so refined!)…. And now you can get them in blue, too, different shades of blue from indigo to cornflower in overlapping, intersecting, coruscating closed curves of varying shades. They’re very easy on the eye, but they do raise a question for me: in what environment would they perform the camouflage function of making one less visible? The word “camouflage,” as we know, dates only from 1917, deriving from the French word camouflet – a “puff of smoke,” on the notion of “blowing smoke in someone’s face.” The British navy in World War I called it dazzle-painting. This information is from the Online Etymology Dictionary, which has endeared itself to me permanently by both introducing the notion of “dazzle-painting” to me, and the image of camouflage as the pigment design equivalent of blowing smoke up someone’s… is it the face up which they blow smoke in France? Well what a world. Anyway, the blue camos: are they so you can sneak around unseen underwater, or through raspberry jello without being detected, or what? If the tank top came with the jello, I would have to get it just for the marketing tie-in. Come on, jello-tops are sure to become a collector’s item instantly.
I also want to give a shout out to the good people of Oregon, where you can pay a little extra and have a license plate that does more than tell on you when you make illegal U turns – it also supports the common cultural trust. Ancient traditions, keening melodies, painstaking craftsmanship and emerging artistry – all this is our entrusted culture and we should all cherish it just as we cherish the natural environment, benevolent technology, and our elected overlords. I think it’s very cool that there is a special license plate just to support this phenomenon. HOWEVER: it’s got the weirdest damn image on it I’ve ever seen on a government product. New out of the box it looks like it’s been fading on a fencepost for a decade. I finally went to their website and figured out what it actually is: NOTHING. It’s abstract, meant to elicit the phenomenon of culture, rather than any culture in particular. It’s devoid of actual visual meaning, save what you project into it. Well thank you Oregon DMV, for blowing my mind. You think you’re pretty clever, don’t you? Don’t be so damned smug. Just because you make the plates doesn’t give you free license to play games with them.
Costume idea: Islamo-hippie woman. Very simple: just two items needed!
* Burkha
* Burkhinstocks
Well, I had a couple other brainspasms to share but one of them just isn’t worth bothering with and the other one, I just plum forget what it is. I’ll remember soon enough and I just got me some killer memobooks to write it down in then (thanks sis!). Remembering things, that’ll be me from now on! Meantime, sorry, four random bits of lint from the itchy navel of my mind is all you get. Don’t forget to floss.
