Through the looking glass
Feb. 6th, 2006 04:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusDoll Dress last night (the Gothic Lolita club in Osaka where I played my first concert of 2006, previewing lots of new material) turned out to be rather extraordinary. A dedicated group of devotees had turned a bar, clothes and antiques shop into a sort of cosplay den where the Mad Hatter's tea party from "Alice In Wonderland" was replayed around a table heaving with strawberries and cakes. Performers (me and a band called Harukiya, who combined their intriguing music for deranged dormice with a blindfold tea tasting test) were totally upstaged by the audience, who posed in crinoline Victoriana for the photographer loungeing on a sofa, their postures increasingly erotic. (I'm told these sessions often end in nudity, which seems like a strange and yet apt development for people who invest so much in dressing up.)
Perverse eroticism was also the theme of two excellent films directed by Gabriel "Coco" Fumitsuki, who likes Rothmans Royals, Vivienne Westwood, Shiina Ringo, Bjork and YMO, Bach, Satie, Faure and Ravel (not exactly Goth tastes), and entitles portfolios of teenage girls on her website "pedophilia". (It isn't: all the girls are over 17.) In the first film a Japanese Alice plays chess with a boy dressed up as a schoolgirl, but ends up lying dead on the grass with blood trickling from her mouth (the Cheshire Cat walks away callously). In the second, a kimono girl with bobbed hair is tied up then stabbed in the tummy by another girl. Instead of dying, though, she dribbles clear fluid from her mouth into the other girl's mouth. The ambience is one of aestheticized, eroticized menace, the kind often encountered in the world of Hajime Sawatari, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Yotsuya Simon, and Hiroko Igeta (who made the Hans Bellmer-esque doll in the photo above).
The MC, in Beijing Opera make-up and a vast yellow afro wig, was an awesome baroque Venetian figure. Coco, the film director, carried an air of powerfully erotic self-sufficiency wherever she went. A photographer in a tiny top hat and zigzag skirt looked amazing. Her partner, in bondage gear, didn't. The men, just like the performers, were upstaged at Doll Dress. Many of them were dressed as women, but looked like second-rate drag queens or Visual-Kei stars. Sure, both genders were faking it, flouncing around like precocious, spoilt Victorian children, but the women were faking it better. In a sharp reversal of the rules of the world outside, at Doll Dress testosterone made you a loser and oestrogen a winner. Through the looking glass indeed.
I'm still pondering what this style means. Obviously I've dabbled in it (I wrote a song about Kaneko, for instance) myself. Friends like Reika and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lord_whimsy seem to understand its impulses too. Is there some connection with the Aristasians? And if so, what does their link with white supremacy mean? And Mishima, never far from proceedings like this, wasn't he a fascist? And David Bowie...
Perhaps closer to these troubling things than it is to Goth style, Gothic Lolita seems to embrace flamboyance and a kind of florid formality as the pinnacle of civilisation. A poisonous, erotic sensuality replaces Goth's death cult. Instead of despair there's an elegant inhibition. And of course Alice, lost in a very Freudian wonderland.
Perverse eroticism was also the theme of two excellent films directed by Gabriel "Coco" Fumitsuki, who likes Rothmans Royals, Vivienne Westwood, Shiina Ringo, Bjork and YMO, Bach, Satie, Faure and Ravel (not exactly Goth tastes), and entitles portfolios of teenage girls on her website "pedophilia". (It isn't: all the girls are over 17.) In the first film a Japanese Alice plays chess with a boy dressed up as a schoolgirl, but ends up lying dead on the grass with blood trickling from her mouth (the Cheshire Cat walks away callously). In the second, a kimono girl with bobbed hair is tied up then stabbed in the tummy by another girl. Instead of dying, though, she dribbles clear fluid from her mouth into the other girl's mouth. The ambience is one of aestheticized, eroticized menace, the kind often encountered in the world of Hajime Sawatari, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Yotsuya Simon, and Hiroko Igeta (who made the Hans Bellmer-esque doll in the photo above).
The MC, in Beijing Opera make-up and a vast yellow afro wig, was an awesome baroque Venetian figure. Coco, the film director, carried an air of powerfully erotic self-sufficiency wherever she went. A photographer in a tiny top hat and zigzag skirt looked amazing. Her partner, in bondage gear, didn't. The men, just like the performers, were upstaged at Doll Dress. Many of them were dressed as women, but looked like second-rate drag queens or Visual-Kei stars. Sure, both genders were faking it, flouncing around like precocious, spoilt Victorian children, but the women were faking it better. In a sharp reversal of the rules of the world outside, at Doll Dress testosterone made you a loser and oestrogen a winner. Through the looking glass indeed.
I'm still pondering what this style means. Obviously I've dabbled in it (I wrote a song about Kaneko, for instance) myself. Friends like Reika and
lord_whimsy seem to understand its impulses too. Is there some connection with the Aristasians? And if so, what does their link with white supremacy mean? And Mishima, never far from proceedings like this, wasn't he a fascist? And David Bowie...Perhaps closer to these troubling things than it is to Goth style, Gothic Lolita seems to embrace flamboyance and a kind of florid formality as the pinnacle of civilisation. A poisonous, erotic sensuality replaces Goth's death cult. Instead of despair there's an elegant inhibition. And of course Alice, lost in a very Freudian wonderland.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:08 am (UTC)Owen.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:19 am (UTC)And don't you think that Western culture would be healthier if it came to terms with death as a celebration, as in the Mexican Day of the Dead, rather than dealing with it as a hush-hush affair behind the closed and clinical doors of medical science?
For my money, and this would apply to Gothic Lolita too, the saddest thing about traditional, lace- and velvet-wearing gothic subculture is the upward-mobility-ness of aping the aristocrats, turning a supposed exercise in subversion into one of disguised conservatism. And I say that as a Victoriana-phile... then again, I suppose there's not much difference between the lower strata of society from era to era, at least in terms of outward appearance.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:22 am (UTC)For me, Goth comes from an amalgam of Romanticism (via horror films) and punk rock (Siouxsie and the Banshees, etc).
Gothic Lolita is coming more from "Alice in Wonderland" (filtered through Freud, Hans Bellmer, etc) and Visual Kei.
Goth is American, Gothic Lolita is Japanese.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:24 am (UTC)Not at all. I think it already celebrates death way too much. There's the glee of Bush declaring himself "a war president", for instance.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:27 am (UTC)I'd say it glorifies war and violence, but the war we think of today is a sanitised war in which the 'death' aspect is edited out. Think of US media control over images of dead soldiers' coffins for example. And how often do we see dead Iraqis?
They're selling a myth of power and glory which has nothing to do with the messy reality of death, and they'll try and keep it that way as much as possible.
In this sense, that same sanitisation is going on on the macro scale.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:45 am (UTC)in japan goth seems totally awesome and open-minded..perhaps because it had a really late start there.but i mean this whole idea in itself of "doll dress" is just one aspect of japanese goth sub-culture..and they,and only they,can pull it off.
i have seen americans and europeans try and do this and they just look really stupid.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:58 am (UTC)Of course, this is just stuff I've picked up from Mixi and may not apply to everyone who dresses lolita in Japan. It seems to be Serious Business, though. Serious enough that they'll sleep with middle-aged dudes, just like the gal types, to fund their expensive habit. There's where the line of elegance and dignity doesn't really extend.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:05 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:11 am (UTC)The eyepatch thing is pretty widespread in the whole fashion. Gurololi and pirate loli ahoy.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:47 am (UTC)A lot of the goths I know favour the Victorian/Edwardian goth style and others are a more fetish style.
There are also the cybergoths, who are more like ravers with their colourful hair and dress (a la Cyberdog).
The perception of goth is different in different countries, thus the Marilyn Manson "goth" in the US, the "Siouxsie"/Victorian/cyber goth in the UK and the German goth as seen at Liepzig festival.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 10:03 am (UTC)Melissa
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 10:11 am (UTC)- Jolly Roger
american gothic
Date: 2006-02-06 10:18 am (UTC)up on to a screen and asked, "What's wrong with this picture?"
His postulation was that 'gothic' is not American really, that the very title 'American Gothic' is used deliberately as a kind of oxymoron, that what Gothic means in America is the European doppleganger that the settlers could not quite kill (apparently there's a Herman Melville story along these lines). Gothicism in America is the shadow that cannot quite be exorcised. In Britain, it's a kind of homely return to an older sense of identity.
The Castle of Otranto, usually cited as the first Gothic novel, if you read it, is not really very Gothic. It has been described as more rococo (perhaps somewhat like the gosurori dresses). It does deal with the horrors of atavism, but it is also a celebration of the imaginative freedoms to be found in the pre-Enlightenment barbarous age.
Re: american gothic
Date: 2006-02-06 10:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 10:48 am (UTC)I think my parents don't like the (very occasional) swearing. My sister probably thinks I'm a big chatterbox and can't keep up. My dad enjoys my Wired columns, he loved the one about bathing.
throw away your alice books, and go to gothic lolita club!
Date: 2006-02-06 11:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 11:11 am (UTC)Or at least, Kentish people before they were estuary-ised.
If you talk to someone from Kent who's over the age of 70 you might even notice a similarity in the vocal twang.
The whole of Kent was just a gigantic orchard before WWII. People used to live in it, never had a reason to go out of it.
I would have like to have lived in England when it was just one huge forest - like in the film The Company of Wolves.
Pardon me, just free-associating.
Time for some cereal and more coffee. Then off to a casting.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 11:11 am (UTC)I'd just like to add that your, what I'm guessing you'd call, "textural" approach to the issues of deconstruction and "differance", have proved to be quite the breath of fresh air for me in my studies. I'm currently studying both fine art and preparing an honours year philosophy paper on Derrida. And at a moment when I was set to drop the whole thing due to utter frustration and fatigue, your blog helped me to draw out a more vibrant and "embodied" (to borrow a little) 'reading', of not only Derrida and co but culture also. As opposed to the specialised, formalist and somewhat self-preocupied view of the world you get in the highly-specialised field of academic writing.
- Ivan - Formerly Jolly Roger
Re: throw away your alice books, and go to gothic lolita club!
Date: 2006-02-06 11:12 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 11:14 am (UTC)Re: american gothic
Date: 2006-02-06 11:16 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 12:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 01:10 pm (UTC)But It's not only in Australia; it happens elsewhere in the world as well, in the Coalition of the Willing and etc.
little corrections regarding the films
Date: 2006-02-06 03:02 pm (UTC)In the second film, the girl in the kimono is stabbed by a girl dressed as a schoolboy, and is later carried around a cemetary on the shoulders of a boy dressed as a schoolgirl.
Re: little corrections regarding the films
Date: 2006-02-06 03:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 04:00 pm (UTC)Strange how white people tend to think of everybody else as being a 'race', but of themselves being racially and culturally neutral (normal).
"Oh wad some power the giftie gie us
To see oursel’s as others see us"
- Robert Burns. (1759–1796)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 04:37 pm (UTC)Friends in Britain have mentioned this tribe of Amazons to me before, but other than their curious delineation of gender (blonde and brunette), I can't say much. Their choice of flag seems unfortunate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristasia
http://www.aristasia.co.uk/
There's an odd blurring of right and left going on in certain youth quarters these days; I see people blending fascist/aristocratic and socialist/marxist themes. It seems that anything goes, as long as it's an anti-democratic worldview. Gives me the willies.
I give the 'left' vs. 'right' dichotomy no credance.
Date: 2006-02-06 06:09 pm (UTC)J'accuse Koizumi
Date: 2006-02-06 06:52 pm (UTC)It's perfectly possible that someone at this end of the postal chain is responsible for their loss, but I've been keeping a close eye on the postman and he's not exhibiting any apparent influence of the Japanese avant-garde (nor requiring the assistance of three black-clad operators to go about his business).
(Thanks, I feel a bit better now I've let that annoyance out.)
Re: I give the 'left' vs. 'right' dichotomy no credance.
Date: 2006-02-06 06:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 07:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 08:48 pm (UTC)- Ivan (not so Jolly Roger)
Re: I give the 'left' vs. 'right' dichotomy no credance.
Date: 2006-02-06 08:52 pm (UTC)http://www.mariacuore.com/english/e-gallery.html
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 09:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 10:33 pm (UTC)Man "I'm from here"
Woman "I mean, you're originally from a different country, right?"
Man "Well, we're all 'originally from different countries' don't you know"
(short embarassing silence)
Woman "Oh, I never thought about it that way!"
woman leaves
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-06 11:42 pm (UTC)J'accuse Vic Goddard
Date: 2006-02-06 11:45 pm (UTC)Re: I give the 'left' vs. 'right' dichotomy no credance.
Date: 2006-02-06 11:54 pm (UTC)Just checked your blog, and liked your piece on that Japanese urban exploration magazine (http://bricology.livejournal.com/3023.html#cutid1). I browsed that same issue in a bookshop here in Osaka recently. Hisae told me it's a regular publication. It's called Wonder Japan.
I wrote more about Japanese urban exploration in Haikyo Deflation Spiral (http://imomus.livejournal.com/155417.html).
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-07 12:06 am (UTC)Re: J'accuse Vic Goddard
Date: 2006-02-07 12:41 am (UTC)(Similarly, once upon a time, you could blame disruptions Jah Wobble for disruptions on the Piccadilly Line.)
Re: I'm using "left" and "right" as a convenient...
Date: 2006-02-07 12:48 am (UTC)But I think there's a great need for reconsidering politics now; so perhaps all that mixing or marxism and fascism -- however mediocre -- is a necessary cesspool for spawning new ideas.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-07 01:14 am (UTC)Re: I give the 'left' vs. 'right' dichotomy no credance.
Date: 2006-02-07 04:57 am (UTC)And no doubt you're familiar with the musical duo Kokusyoku Sumire (http://www.kokusyokusumire.net/). They seem like they fit in with the milieu you described in your most recent entry.
Re: little corrections regarding the films
Date: 2006-02-07 12:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-02-08 02:44 am (UTC)