A friend of mine is in an animation class and was talking to me about Anime porn... a concept that is seemingly weird. Sexualized cartoons?! Abominable!

Then I got to thinking about a lot of the superheroes of my youth. They were muscular, barely clothed, and victims of the unflattering, squatting crotch view.

From the top:

1. A very sexy WonderWoman with killer lips and a whip.

2. Thundercats... I never got if these were bodysuits? They don't have private parts... This reminds me of the movie Dogma.

3. The Silver Surfer is also penis-less.

4. Dr. Manhattan from Watchmen. These illustrators didn't screw around. He had a penis and it was quite prevalent (and distracting) in the film that came out last year.

-Ali

Sometimes our obsession with pop culture icons is a bit obsessive... Who could resist that smooth-skinned baby face?

I am not sure if this video qualifies as being grotesque, but I mentioned it in class and figured Chris and Colby would enjoy it. (I know you guys are huge fans.)

Ali

Today I was watching a History Channel documentary on the popularity of tattoos in sideshows and their historical relevance in the military.

The traditional tattoo of the US Marines is called a "meat tag." A meat tag is a tattoo of a soldier's personal information (name, ss number, blood type, religion) that he (or she) gets on his (or her) ribs. It serves as an identifier if such soldier is ever blown up and his body is destroyed beyond recognition. Apparently, the ink is on the ribs because that part of the body is the most resilient and remains (mostly) intact in explosive instances. The fact that it is called a "meat tag" is grotesque. The title dehumanizes the body of a soldier. It makes soldiers seem like disposable animals who are no more important than the beef in your meat locker.

It is both scary and honorable how some people can acknowledge the possibility of a very painful and gory death.

-Ali

Also, I was thinking today about vulgarity as grotesque... after reading the Aristocrats post.

In third grade I remember running around singing this song and having no idea what it meant.

Thank you Hip Hop and thank you America.

Ali

Conjoined Consumables

Yum!! (Inspired by a conjoined grape I found in my lunch today...)

Ali

Memories.... like the corners of my mind...

Just like every other Jewish kid in America, I spent most of my summers attending overnight camp. (Camp Saginaw... near Longwood Gardens.) It was just as pot-induced and hippie circled as every movie portrays. I think most of our parents sent us there to get the sexual education they were too embarrassed to give us. And of course there was the occasional sneak out to boys' camp, but it was all innocent fun. Sometimes we would force our parents to drive us out to camp during the school year because we missed it so much. Getting my drivers license was a huge deal because it meant that we could drive there ourselves and hang out without our parents.

I had turned sixteen and of course, my first road trip was to camp. After driving for an hour or so, we reached the gates only to find them locked and chained and covered by a banner reading "Camp Crucible." I knew that the owner rented out the camp to other groups in the off season. Defeated, we turned around and went home. After some significant Googling, we found out that Camp Crucible is an S&M camp for adults. We found pictures on the website, and our response was something along the lines of "Ew! I eat off those tables" and "No way I'm ever swimming in that pool again." Needless to say, I did get a sexual education at camp. It was horrifying and hilarious, but mainly, it was grotesque.

-Ali

Placenta, the other white meat...

I read this article in TIME magazine a while back about how mothers are utilizing the medicinal benefits of placenta to fight postpartum depression. Apparently, there is a woman who comes to your house, cooks it and dehydrates it into pill form. I found the article here. Other recipes I found included placenta lasagna, placenta power shakes and placenta polenta (I made that last one up for comedic effect). You can also eat it raw or dried. Apparently, it also helps to soothe menopausal symptoms. Here is a video about eating placenta... I how the man rolls his "r"s.

I also found a link to artists who make placenta prints. That is, they take a fresh placenta and stamp it onto a page to form patterns and designs. My favorite link is here.

Ali

ambitious posting

I was doing some tragic homework for mythology and couldn't help but whip out some Eco regarding "Ugliness in the Classical World." I found a lot of images of masks used in tragedies.
Apparently, these surprised-looking masks came about because the theaters for preforming were too large. It was difficult for the actors to portray their character through subtle facial expression and therefore, to oblige the cheap seats, they wore exaggerated (and creepy) masks (that subtly resemble blowup dolls).

"On these grand scales, actors' tools for communication with the audience were entirely different than modern ones. Body language, facial gestures, and vocal tones, though very effective in a small, modern theater, would have been lost in the sheer size of an ancient one. Instead, the actor wore a huge tragic mask to roughly depict his state of mind and relied on his speech to do the rest." (taken from my Clst200 notes)

It is not so much the masks that I find grotesque as the themes in the stories they were used to portray. Themes that we still find to be taboo today were prevalent in most forms of Greek entertainment.

It seems that the expressions of horrification on these masks are not unwarranted. With themes like cannibalism (the stories of Tantalus, Atreus), incest (Thysetes, Oedipus) and bestiality (Leda, Pasiphae) it is obvious why an actor would be freaked out... warranting a face something like this:



While we tend to avoid confronting the grotesque, ancient Greeks seem to embrace it in all aspects of their religion and entertainment. Fascinating

(also, if you have a free ten minutes, Wikipedia any one of the above mentioned Greek stories...)

Ali

For all of those loyal students out there who actually read these posts, you may remember that my last blog was about the Nuremberg Trials and torturous acts preformed on the Jews in the concentration camps.
Well, after visiting the Mutter Museum and doing some extensive picture-ogling of shrunken heads, I came across the image above. It is a shrunken head made from a prisoner at the Buchenwald camp. The head of the camp, Karl Koch, and his wife, Isla, requested a number of these weird "gifts" to be made from the skin of unlucky prisoners. It is also rumored that Isla requested this lamp to be made out of human skin.



Notice the two heads on the left and the lamp on the far right.




Ali

The pictures were too sad...

In further exploration of my fascination with conjoined twins (thanks Mutter!) I discovered links regarding Dr. Mengele and the "Subsequent Nuremberg Trials." Mengele was the most famous "doctor"/mad-scientist who experimented on Jews during the Holocaust.

During his experimentation, Mengele would specifically target twins (scroll down the the part labeled "experiments on twins.") At times, he would sew twins together in attempts to CREATE conjoined twins. He would poke or torture one side of one twin in order to see if the other side of the other twin would feel anything. Often times, the twins would die because of damage done to their severed nerves.

I remember a couple of years ago I went to the Holocaust Museum in WashDC and they had a fascinating exhibit on medical experimentation.

Although ridiculously interesting, these types of medical experiments are always tricky. It leaves me to wonder if things like the Mudder Museum are contributing to science or exploiting the people's freakishness?

-Ali Blum

We are Siamese (if you please...)

I was watching some show about "medical mysteries" and came across this one particular Indian girl who was born with 8 limbs. It turns out the other four limbs belong to a parasitic twin who had not fully developed a head... they were attached at the pelvis if you can believe it. Imagine giving birth to that. Ouch.

Anywho, her village thought that she was the reincarnation of the goddess Lakshmi, the patron of wealth and prosperity. Obviously, they named the baby "Lakshmi" and were very hesitant when TLC came into their village with cameras, hoping to make a profit off this baby.

Eventually, she underwent surgery to remove her parasitic twin. It took 27 hours of surgery and a team of thirty doctors, but eventually they removed all the parasitic limbs, broke and reset her pelvis and clubbed feet.

The coolest part of this whole story is the photos... obviously.

- Ali blum

Do Not Eat Near These Pictures

A teratoma is a tumor that contains normal human tissues. Found most commonly in the ovaries and testicles, teratomas are capable of growing hair, teeth, bones and sometimes limbs. They contain tissue that resembles brain, liver and lung tissues. Some cases have even reported finding embryos encapsulated within a teratoma... yep, that is correct, a pregnant tumor. Most recently, in October 08, a doctor removed a brain tumor only to find it housed feet and slightly developed body parts.

In some cases, teratomas are confused with parasitic twins, conjoined twins where one "parasite" half-formed body feeds off of the life of another fully human body.

Besides the obvious reasons, teratomas are grotesque because they resemble the monsters I used to imagine that lived under my bed.

Without completely rewording the entire articles, I would definitely check out some of these wikiPages... this is some weird shit.

Enjoy your lunches friends,

Ali Blum

Genie in a Bottle

Recently, I have become fascinated with the concept of "feral children." For those of you who do not know, a feral child is a child who has been raised in isolation or by animals. Think Romulus/Remus and Tarzan.

In 1970, welfare authorities discovered a feral child (who they call "Genie") who had been strapped to a potty chair in a dark room
for 13 years. She had been beaten and isolated from the world by her father. Other accounts of feral children include a wolf-boy and an abandoned boy who was raised in the African bush by monkeys. These accounts seem too strange to be true, almost circus freak-ish.

While reading a book about Genie and other ferals, I came across this interesting passage...
"So wild children exist in the fault line between disgust and desire. They embody our desire for escape, freedom and wonder; yet they also provoke the disgust felt for the merely corporeal, the wholly physical- the disgust for that which has no self, no love and no remorse" (237).
- Savage Girls and Wild Boys, Michael Newton

It is definitely an interesting book and will be available in VanPelt as soon as I return it.
Also, if you have a spare forty minutes or so, there is a really great documentary on the discovery of Genie and the attempts to assimilate her into society.

Part 1

-Ali Blum

Everything Is Bigger In America!

Since the dawn of stores like Sam's Club and Costco, Americans have become obsessed with buying in bulk. A 30 lb t-bone (grotesque) and four dozen watermelon seem reasonable at the time of purchase but after several weeks, just the thought of a melon and steak sandwich makes us want to heave.
While wholesale purchases have made it easier for us to host holiday parties and cheese tastings, bulk-buying has seemingly revolutionized our need for birth control. Turn on TLC and you are swarmed with families numbering well into double-digits. How do you feed/clothe/bathe/afford that many children? you ask. We can only assume that the modern convenience of wholesale has made feeding a family of 21 (and counting) a lot easier.

Our reaction to cultural phenoms like "19 and Counting" and "Octomom" vary from fascinated to mortified. Is having so many children "fulfilling a religious duty" or is it contributing to world problems such as starvation and overpopulation? What is the quality of parenting received by a child in such a huge family? Are the parents kid-hungry, sex-fiend loonies or blessed and nurturing caretakers?

With the ability to field their own football team (defense and offense) are mass births grotesque?

-Ali Blum

Kathoey (Bless you!)

Kathoey, or Ladyboys, are an eastern phenomenon that I was introduced to during a summer trip to Thailand. These Kathoey are men who dress, act and look exactly like women. Most common in urban areas, Kathoey act as stage performers in Cabarets or as prostitutes on the streets and in brothels. They solicit both males and females for business, but are usually "employed" by drunken tourists who don't know at first glance the difference.

Recently, Ladyboys have been protesting for transgender bathrooms and transgender notation on the "gender" portion of their passports. Whereas Ladyboys may seem like a taboo subject in Western cultures, Buddhism discourages judgement and teaches that the feminine characteristics of a Ladyboy are remnants of a previous life.

If you find the desire to do further research, I would be careful about what you're typing into the search box. The term "ladyboy" guarantees some pornographic hits (learned this one the hard way.)

-Ali Blum

A Sticky Subject

In the grimy cupholder of my rusty Camry sat an old Wawa water bottle. My friends and I would spit our old gum into the liter, depositing these sticky toll payments daily. Eventually, gum wads began to pile up. Shades of green, blue, white, pink and yellow stuck together, and their effect slightly resembled Monet's Water Lilies. My mother, however, failed to recognize my impressionistic masterpiece and hastily trashed it.

"That is grotesque" she screamed.

"Isn't that an opinion?" I thought.

In a world where art is subjective, "grotesque" is a relative term.

Chew on this Wiki article on Bubble Gum Alley in San Luis Obispo! Fashionable, fantastical or just plain gross?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bubblegum_Alley

-Ali Blum