Ion’s blog

Q. Being with a mannequin is better than being with another person. (I like to think of myself as half of a mannequpple.) They put out and they do whatever you want. It’s hard to get your hands on the mannequins in high-end designer stores. These companies have their marketing gurus design their mannequins, and they’re the best-looking ones out there. Unfortunately, you can’t get them at any mannequin warehouse, and most salesclerks don’t respond positively to inquiries about purchasing them. So I’ve resorted to stealing them—which is easier than it sounds. The best way is to dress up looking like you’re from “corporate,” bring a clipboard with an “Artificial Model Inventory Sheet,” remove the clothes from the mannequin, pick it up, and walk out like you’re doing nothing wrong. If they question you (which has never happened to me, and I’ve stolen dozens of them), just tell them to call Wanda at some number you give them. Then keep walking. —AB in Annapolis

A Thanks for the tip, ABIA, but I was just kidding around about the mannequin fetish thing. While there’s a clothing store near my office filled with skinny male mannequins wearing the kind of clothes that turn my head, I haven’t developed a fetish for hot, headless hipsters, despite what I wrote in this space two weeks ago. So to ABIA, and all the other mannequin fetishists out there who wrote in, and to all the folks who told me that I had a fellow fetishist in comic-book artist- walking freak show R. Crumb, and to the dozens of you who wrote in to point out the upside of fucking a hot, headless hipster boy (you won’t have to listen to him talk about his vinyl collection or read the stuff he’s planning on submitting to Vice magazine), and to the one person out there who offered to send me what he thought might be snuff porn featuring a hot, beheaded hipster boy—enough already! I prefer my hipsters with heads, thank you very much, and I have no desire to hang out with R. Crumb or be the lesser half of a mannequpple. It was a joke, one I’ve come to regret.

Supongo que es la forma perfecta de ir entrando en ambiente para la visita a mi amigo Jimmy en Florencia: una cita de Dan Savage, ese superh

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Mr. Eliasson explains “The Weather Project” in Bergsonian language: “I wanted a subject that implied `community’ and that was open-ended. Predicting weather is one way we collectively try to avoid the unforeseeable, which our lives are always about. The weather is a subject about which a community may also permit a high degree of disagreement: I can say `I hate the rain,’ you say, `I love it,’ and you may still think I am a nice guy.

“I’m not interested in weather as a matter of science,” he continues. “I’m not a meteorologist or a botanist. I’m interested in people: how people engage sensually with the qualities of weather — rain, mist, ice, snow, humidity — so that through their engagement they may understand how much of our lives are cultural constructions. We have a desire to assume that certain things, like our reactions to the weather, are natural, but they are in fact cultural, and the end result of this can be entrenched ideologies, which we take to be inevitable. This is the path toward totalitarianism.”

He rethinks that remark after a moment. “I shouldn’t have insisted that everything is cultural and not natural, because that is as dogmatic as the reverse. I should have said that the line separating nature and culture changes through history, and this is what we should be aware of.”

Mr. Eliasson cites the ubiquity of white walls in art galleries: “Chalk is white and chalk was used as a disinfectant and so early modernists decided on white walls as symbols of purification, clean spaces. But if chalk had been yellow maybe all our galleries would be yellow today, and we would interpret yellow as a neutral color.”

Hemos hablado ya varias veces de The Weather Project. Con motivo del cese de esta instalaci

Art Linkletter’s assertion that the stages of life are “infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence” is an insightful look into today’s societal values, specifically our valuation (or devaluation, as the case may be) of our elderly. For example, the stage of childhood, where we play our first role in the theatre of life, is lauded for its innocence, its hopefulness, and its future value. All this, despite the infant’s inherent helpless dependency and gross behavior: crying, self-defecation, and vomiting.

The second stage, childhood, is equally revered, but for slightly different reasons. An example of this is the image of Twain’s Tom Sawyer; with his scholastic insouciance and luminous malfeasances, he is indelibly etched on society’s consciousness. This is in spite of the fact that often the child is an unwilling actor on the stage of life, many times decrying the imposition of social rules by his adult mentors.

The third stage, adolescence, is the stuff of legend and fondness for our culture. The varied roles that the adolescent or young adult plays, be it as a lover, composing odes to every follicle of his sweetheart, or as a soldier: proud, jealous, aggressive yet ever idealistic, and thinly, almost mockingly bearded, are often the subject of nostalgic songs, doting books, and film. Too often, however, society forgets the consequences of this “boys will be boys” attitude: either introverted, almost suicidal behavior, or extroverted violence, as we have seen in Columbine.

In contrast, the fourth stage of life, adulthood, is the beginning of the end for a man. Gone is the innocence and glory of youth, replaced with corpulence, decadence, and sarcasm. The fashionable youth is replaced with the bespectacled man most comfortable in pajamas, with a voice that shrinks just as his limbs do. He is forgotten, degenerating into a second childhood, a childhood repulsive due to its regressive dependence. Consider, Dickens’ Scrooge: a spiteful and hated old man. At this point in life, a man is merely waiting to die, losing his teeth, his sight, his mind, and his life, but not before losing the love and admiration of a fickle society bent on youth-worship—in other words, he becomes “obsolete.”

La cita es extremadamente larga esta vez, pero es que la idea era meter el ensayo entero. Parodia deliciosa llena de hallazgos de los ensayos que mis cr

There have reportedly been more nose jobs in Iran during the past year than in any other country in the world. For more than 20 years strict social rules have demanded modest dress and covered hair. Laws forbid women to publicly sing, dance, or wear make-up. But today, frustrated with their lack of freedom, Iranian women are redefining what it means to live in an Islamic fundamentalist society. Iran, and Tehran in particular, has a female population that is pursuing rhinoplasty with the same passion that they’re pushing for government reform.

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