This is what I imagine women do when I'm not around. I wrote a play about it:
Women
Stevie: It smells so good here. Sue Ellen: We smell so good. A Warm, Gentle Wind: Here I come: fresh white cotton dresses, wisps of long blonde hair, loosely tied bows of hair ribbon white and black!
Juliana: Let's share our worlds with men! Sue Ellen: Let's destroy men! Stevie: We will love men. They will destroy themselves, some of them. Others will be strong. Juliana: let's sing a song. Stevie: I've got one:
Sue Ellen: that was really good, guys.
Stevie: The sun and wine and weed make me so warm inside! I can barely keep my ....eyes....open.... A Warm, Gentle Wind: Sleep. Sleep, dreamless, sweetly.
Here's a game I made up. It's called "In This Economy..." or "Slate pitch meeting."
It's just fill-in-the-blank and the rules are whoever does it best wins. Here's the template: "In this economy, ________________________."
I'll go first.
In this economy, you have to get creative. Which is why I sewed recycled buttons all over my suit.
In this economy, I've gotten to spend a lot more time with my teenage son and that's worth a lot.
In this economy, you can still enjoy yourself and even indulge yourself!
In this economy, it's like DJ culture.
In this economy, I got a grant for my non-profit.
In this economy, maybe we should spend our money on everyone gets a cool gun and a cool knife.
2.
Here's a country hit (that might also be a viral hit (?) [I can't figure out the Billboard charts, here, but people are loving it on Youtube]) that's about the new economy/greater depression. It's by John Rich.
I like it when country songs do this. It makes me realize I sometimes don't know where to draw a line between gross opportunism and political relevance. John Rich wrote "We're All Raisin' McCain." He wrote it about how we're all just raisin' McCain.
Anyway, check this new economy song out. It contrasts the "make believe" of finance, sums like "billions," and New York, to the real world where they're shuttin Detroit down. It's politically complicated, it's surprisingly urban-centric, and it's legitimately good.
"The more things change, the more things stay the same." - Martin Luther King
I'm glad the feeling of finding out about Furries, and trying to figure out what was going on with Furries, coincided with the rise of the Internet and trying to figure out what was going on with that. Each helped me explore essential and otherwise hidden truths about the other, and from those truths I learned genuinely new things about people, the world, myself, truth itself, my roommates, etc. More simply, each — furries and baby Internet 2.0 — will forever be linked in my mind, as I fondly remember the brief period of time when 3/4ths of Google image searches included things like this:
(PS — if you like "there are two kinds of people in the world"s: Ta2KoPitW, ones who keep their image search safesearch on medium, and ones who look at those people like they don't understand the joy of living in the world at all)
But, now, The Internet is a different thing. The world is a different place. Researching, sharing, and discussing Furries is no longer a valid use of time. Bringing them up is sometimes necessary for reference, but bringing them up as central objects of talk dings culturally tone deaf, like mullet jokes or telling people discussing Facebook that you prefer real human interaction or Michael McDonald impersonations. It should all still be valid and fun, but, meme over.
But like I said, Furries wasn't any old meme, and it's being over has left a void. I wonder: what in our current cultural landscape has taken Furries' place? What could? What phenomenon out there is going to teach us and guide us, with the gentle nudging of the Furry-encounter's mixture of discomfort and too-much-comfort, toward the truths of our world, people, selves, and roommates today, in 2009? I'm pretty sure that's a valid question and that's how things work. As a wise man once said, culture and society maintains exactly the same structure, always, and progress is found in the variables. Like how cavemen had tiny dog-shaped dinosaurs for pets, and now regular men have real dogs. Or another good example is how cavewomen wore necklaces made out of jagged white rocks, and now women prefer necklaces made out of beautiful smooth pearls and knee-high leather boots over their pants even though it's basically like wearing a burkha in all-over print of the words "boring, let's Netflix entire seasons of HBO dramas." I can't think of another example, but probably just think about cavemen more. It's the best way to answer big social questions.
Anyway, Furries 2009. What will it be/is it? It's an open question, readers, but I'll get the ball rolling with some options I figured out. I'm grasping, though.
Still, here goes:
Possible Contenders for the Furries of ObamAmerica
1. Dubai
Reasons: Like Furries it is jacked-up, mysterious, 80's-style dreamy looking, fascinating, fantastical, futury, foreign, not nearly foreign enough. It's like a weird part of our collective dreamscape that we never believed was actually in any real world until we heard whispers of the dream, somewhere, being true, and then tried to research on the Internet only to get locked into a frustratingly asymptotic journey of confusion.
Like Furries, Dubai is often referenced as a "symptom," and as such is rumored to be the subject of an upcoming MTV TrueLife, just like Furries were.
Additionally, Dubai seems like where Furries would live.
This might be because pictures of Dubai look like things from Second Life, and Second Life legitimately has a lot of Furry avatars in it. See, the Furry wiki for more on that, if you want to save your linden bucks
Witness: Furries in Second Life watching a Second Life TV show called the Funday PawPet Show, that looks like it was filmed in first life:
Remember this insane misunderstanding of the Internet? When Second Life Newt Gingrich held a virtual press conference announcing that the conference itself was the "future of government"? To a crowd of horrible monsters, face-morphing and flying around on segways?
But all that might take Dubai out of the running. Dubai might be too much like Furries to be the new Furries. Furries : sex :: Dubai : architecture I think that's the final verdict.
2. Reborns
Reasons: Similar internet/blog buzz, subject of similar BBC documentaries, similar mix of the most benign love and the most perverted.
The structure of reborn moms' relationship to their reborn babies might be similar to relationships in Furry-dom as well. On the documentaries they always say things like "all the good parts of being a mom and none of the bad!" They're obsessed with living some very particular Oprah-set-hued dream-image of babies/motherhood and not the "real" experience of babies/motherhood.
It's about loving/living images like these:
not these:
Similarly, Furries are are obsessed with a very specific 70s-80s Japan-ish cartoon image of animals, and not actual animals at all.
It's about being overly attracted to animals like these:
Not these:
Outside of both groups being likewise locked into a very specific world of images, both include a weird shared world of tactile and "thing" obsession. Technicalities of latex and fur and fake eyes, as well as an obsession over the materials and techniques of making the actual fur costume/fake baby look like the the image in the Furry's/re-mom's respective minds, dominate discussion on both crews' message boards. Furries are obsessed with working jaws and eyes for their costumes. Reborn ladies are obsessed with wrinkles and veins and individual hairs. In the BBC doc a lady is pacing for the arrival of her "mixed race open-eyed smiler," but then, after it arrives, she is forced to return it because it has a crack in the back of the neck and she doesn't want anything "not perfect, because its supposed to be perfect."
Furries have the added tactile obsession of rubbing and cumming in their costumes. Cumming doesn't seem to be on Reborn ladies' minds. But I guess that's ladies for you. Why periodically milk the cow for milk it needs to be milked for when you can have the rubber baby to love for $200-$1000?
As a side note here, regarding the place between being trapped in a world of images and an obsession with weird tactile sex things: A friend of mine was telling me that she had a friend who made fur sports mascot costumes for a living, and she was amazed that most of said friend's clients weren't actual mascots but just people who wanted the suits for themselves. She didn't know what Furries were. But then my friend said "she says they're almost all autistic." That's one to put in your pipe next time you're trying to figure out autism.
ANYWAY—
Final verdict: just maybe. But still, I don't know what additional lessons reborns teach us that Furries don't.
There is even this strain of reborn-dom:
Which makes enough sense to reborners that dolls like that are included alongside pure human reborn dolls available for adoption at this reborn nursery.
3. MonKids
I guess this one is more for the easy segue than an actual contender. "MonKids" was a brief but noble effort on behalf of ABC News and the Internet, but learning about women who buy monkeys as a replacement for dead/impossible children didn't really teach me anything new about people, and instead reassured me that people's misunderstandings of monkeys are timeless. Monkey babies can't be the new Furries because monkey babies are the monkey babies of forever.
Still, I will never forget Angelle Sampey:
She was a professional motorcycle racer who "didn't have time to be pregnant" so she raised a monkey as a child, until it attacked her and she sent it to the old monkey sanctuary.
The best part of the Primetime special featuring Angelle was when she visited the sanctuary where her MonKid lived and her MonKid only came up to her to eat her carrot pieces and acted like he had no idea who she was and then she said something like "It's good that he doesn't recognize me. That's what we want. That's why he's here. So I'm glad he acted like that."
The truth: she wasn't glad.
Devastated.
I guess MonKids could be like: Reborns : thing theory :: MonKids : animal rights arguments. in that there is clearly a similar disconnect between what the moms in both of these situations are giving and what they're getting. And the complication for us watching from the outside is that the moms seem to be getting everything they want. It's not a comforting thing to deal with, and watching the story unfold with MonMoms forces us to that dark place in our minds via real living animals instead of just inanimate objects. It's kind of like when Werner Herzog talks about how bears don't care about us in Grizzly Man, which was a furry-like phenomenon in it's own right.
Actually, redact that "best part." The real best part of the special was when she said "everything was going great" while they showed her buying baby clothes for her monkey. Because, like I said, the joy is in being reminded that monkey babies are the monkey babies of forever. Also I wonder if, since the monkey was already in the sanctuary, Primetime didn't make her fake buy baby clothes for no monkey. "Everything was going great."
Verdict: no dice, but I'm glad I finally blogged that off my chest.
4. Masking This gets included because the way I found it was via a horrible youtube accident, and that's part of the Furries experience I'm looking for in my quest.
If you don't know what masking is, it's when people get into wearing full-head latex masks of other people. Or even full-body latex suits of other people. Then what they do is they put them on and then take off. And that's it. In their videos they never reveal their actual faces, and sometimes pull off one latex mask to reveal another latex mask underneath. Sound stupid? It is...STUPID LIKE A NIGHTMARE!
Here's someone's masking playlist. It includes masking vids, scenes from movies of people taking off masks to reveal themselves, scenes of Tyra Banks's face looking like a mask, a new way to never trust other human beings again.
[crying break]
Verdict: This one is another too-close-for-comfort with Furries. The masker's inclusion of mask-reveals in famous movies gives it the same heartbreaking, trapped-in-image-prison quality of Furries and reborns, but where the latter vibed of an image of love and/or fun, this one vibes of pain-sex and death and a history of molestation. There doesn't seem to be anything to learn that I can't get from an essay about identity by a lesbian.
They're young, so maybe they know something I don't. Check 'em out. AIDS-3D. Minnesota boys. GO TWINS!
Conclusions:
If you feel unfulfilled, I'm with you. Maybe everything seeming too much like Furries already suggests that I was going about the whole thing wrong. Maybe being trapped in weird love-and-fun-centered image-cages isn't the lesson of 2009 at all. Maybe the fact that Obama is already kind of an instance of that — like how he's rendered in Furry-hues, he seems like a cartoon president from the 80s, he's futury, he's alien, he's all too human— actually suggests this is an old frontier. Maybe Furries can't guide us anymore because we live in a Furry world now. Maybe "lesson learned," time for the truly, structurally new, you know?
Maybe, like everyone said after the election, and then again after the economic collapse, it's time to "get real." So maybe that's how we re-structure the cognitive building blocks of the Furry encounter in our heads before we go out looking to see what meets its requirements. Like, what if the new furries are "vertical farms" or something?
IDK, folks. I truly dk.
In closing, here's a list of proto-furries from the much realer 90s, chronologically to the point of the first — at least my first — real Furries encounter: 1. Conjoined Twins 2. Primordial Dwarves 3. Ren Fair People 3.a Historical re-enactors 3.b LARPers broadly 4. Diaper Fetishists + Dommy Mommies 5. Cartoon Porn like those pictures of Belle blowing Beast and Judy Jetson ft. Mr. Spacely's creampie.
I just watched Darjeeling Limited and it turns out it's really good. Why didn’t anyone tell me?
"Anderson is still a maddeningly cool filmmaker. He's remote from his characters, which makes him remote from his movies. There's also a way in which he uses race as a novelty, suggesting an assertively white-kid view of the world."
Paging Dr. Obvious: Salon.com needs you in the operating room STAT. (What? Somebody please teach me how to use that expression.) Saying that about Wes Anderson is like complaining that Jane Austen’s novels are all set in drawing rooms or that gold is maddeningly expensive. That’s just how it is. The sun provides heat. This movie is about the white-kid view of the world. And who doesn’t want to spend two hours seeing the world through the eyes of a rich globe-trotting expat? It’s Henry James, if only Henry James didn’t take for boring eternity to read. It’s not an oppressive colonizing of normativity, it’s “normative fan fiction,” and it’s beautiful.
“I give this painting a bad review because Whistler doesn’t seem to love his mother.” – overheard at Salon.com’s great-great-great-great-grandfather (just a physical salon).
The Darjeeling Limited is a movie about literature, and it’s better than most short stories. The two best parts of this movie come close to being the two worst parts: one, the scene where Owen Wilson takes off his bandages and the brothers say that he’s still healing. First you’re like, “really??” Then you’re like “oh. The metaphoric and the literal have been caught in the world’s most charming feedback loop. Well played.” It’s Nick Adams making coffee, coffeemaker design courtesy Marc Jacobs. And a Rolling Stones B-side playing in the background that I’m going to download right now.
The other best part is the scene toward the end where the train goes by and you see all the individual compartments, like the frames of a film strip. Oh yeah, did I mention this is also a love letter to the magic of cinema? That's right. Fuck you, Salon.com.
Then, as a final twist, Angelica Huston as the mom says something about trying to communicate without any words, and you realize what this is: a short story written by the smartest kid in your senior-year fiction writing workshop, who you were jealous of at first, but by the end of college have come to admire not even begrudgingly, translated into cinema.
Wes Anderson: dude is for all time. I blogged it. No turning back.
