Anne Other

[imomus]

As we've seen here (often), one of the things the internet allows us to do is to self-mediate. If I want to present myself as Paris Hilton, it's up to me. I go, girl!



Self-mediation is still virtuous in other media -- check this documentary about 1920s "It Girl" Clara Bow, known for her personality more than her beauty, and praised (especially by her contemporary Louise Brooks) for putting lots of her own "business" into her films; flipping up the tail of a toy dog in one scene, sprawling right across the boss' desk in another:

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Though still virtuous in film or television, self-mediation in these big, scripted, collective, centralised media is difficult. Someone makes you up, someone else lights your shot, someone else again wrote the script. There are people responsible for interpreting your physical presence, and they're professionals. That means they mostly make you look like everyone else on TV. Sometimes it means they make you look really bad, too. After all, they don't know your Achilles heels as well as you do, your good and bad points.

Magibon, the vlogging superstar, the semi-silent "it girl" of the roaring Web 2.0ies, recently discovered this to her cost... in Japan.

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Magibon established her brand and her legend at home, tilting enormous blepharoplastic eyes up at her wideangle webcam. Her genius was to reduce blogging to a pure minimalism of raw cuteness. On her vlog, Magibon speaks elementary Japanese, gestures, impersonates a manga character, lets the visual-cultural dialectic between her super-childish face and her big breasts set up its own disturbing resonances, or simply does what she does best: nothing. Here she is doing nothing with a fan. Here she's doing nothing with an empathetic look. This is nothing sideways and this is nothing pulling faces. And here's the original nothing -- Magibon doing nothing wearing a Real Thing t-shirt. Not since the 20s has silence been so potent a star-making device.



Earlier this month, Magibon achieved a longstanding ambition -- she visited Japan. She did so at the expense of a television company (which is odd, since for months Magibon has been collecting donations from her YouTube fans to make a trip of her own). The price she had to pay was an appearance in a Japanese television studio, using their lights and angles rather than her own. In other words, Magibon got to see the magic land of her dreams only on condition that she waive the power of her own control over her own image. She got to see the land of magic on the condition of losing some of her own.

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The result was a self-mediator's disaster. A Magibon -- absolutely mortified by adolescent body-consciousness, and covering her face with her hands -- emerged who looked quite unlike the It Girl her fans were used to. This Magibon was baggy-eyed, lantern-jawed and tombstone-toothed, a sort of spinster librarian rather than the sylph-like manga sex fairy we knew. Television had transformed the IT-age it girl into plain old Anne Other.

There's a lesson for us all in there. You know me, here, as Momus Hilton, glamour tart, thinking woman's crumpet. But were I ever to appear on Japanese television (and I won't, I promise you I won't) you'd see quite a different me: a 48 year-old Nosferatu with thinning yellow hair and horribly yellow teeth. I'd lose my glamorous art and style press columns, my book and record deals, overnight. The Nick Carrie Bradshaw of postmodern self-mediation would emerge, under the pitiless glare of the studio lights, as a living nightmare: Nick Carrie.

Comments

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

It would make my life complete if you made a vlog acting like Paris Hilton. Seriously, I would die happy.

Also relevant

[microworlds.livejournal.com]

(http://tinypic.com)

[(Anonymous)]

You're more Momus P. Orridge than Momus Hilton in that pic, I'm afraid.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

You're guaranteed youtube fame if you're one of two things:

1) A flamboyant gay man with sass
2) A semi-attractive English speaking girl who also speaks Japanese



Law of YouTube.

baby am bored

[(Anonymous)]

you look like evan dando!

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

[(Anonymous)]

“There are people responsible for interpreting your physical presence, and they're professionals. That means they mostly make you look like everyone else on TV.”

Totally agree. Everyone who works for the media (average age 24) is thinking "How do I do this PROPERLY? I can't be exposed as NOT KNOWING. What is EVERYONE ELSE doing?" Subsequently there hasn't been a television programme, chart hit, radio show, or book released recently that couldn't have come out fifteen years ago.

Dorian Gray

[(Anonymous)]

Same goes for internet dating, I find. Anyone looking up at a raised camera is hiding a double chin, anyone smiling really brightly has jowls like saddlebags, and bleaching light takes 10 years off. It's become the new 'black is slimming': it backfires because other people know the trick. They think "Mandy's wearing black! She must be huuge."

[count-vronsky.livejournal.com]

I think you're sexy momus. You look like the love child from the union of David Beckham, David Spade and Tin Tin. And the teeth? British dentistry is one of the few things left for us Yanks to tease y'all about.

Those magibon vids are disurbingly sexy and hypnotic. She is the spitting image of a girl I went to college with nicknamed Little Deb. Who had a crush on me for a change -- yay me!

(I think this Von (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHqaU0tTYPQ) Stroheim (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_yo4TBRxVg&feature=related) is from the same series as the Bow.)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I wanna see a picture of you, Count V!

[crowjake.livejournal.com]

I started a vlog once! Deleted it all, i've never seen anything so deppressing. I might try it again when the future comes, and try to do something other than narrate my life.

(ya look like iggy pop!)

[cerulicante.livejournal.com]

Watching Magibon's hard-earned YouTube cachet die in 5 minutes of Slanty-eyed TV was one of the best things that I've ever seen. I need to start watching more Japanese TV.

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

The first thing I saw when I saw the youtube STILL of Magibon was Internet Disease (http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Internet_disease)! That is a totally classic case. And exactly why she shouldn't ever have gone on real tv, where cameras are angled straight at you and not downwards. Downward camera hides all manner of sins.

[space-battle.livejournal.com]

That was unspeakably sad.

[beverlyhillscop.livejournal.com]

I disagree. This post made me very happy in many ways. Thanks Nick!

[mcgazz.livejournal.com]

If it's any consolation, I used to look like Karl Bartos, but am now halfway to looking like Pete Postlethwaite.

9 Commenters (2008) (pen and ink)

[viceanglais.livejournal.com]

*faps*

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

HAWT

If you put on more make up you might look like Eno in that wig. And then I can make a Momus Realdoll out of the Eno realdoll I'm planning.

translation: MOAR CROSSDRESSING.

Re: *faps*

[afoxdrinksblood.livejournal.com]

DO IT!

amazing

[(Anonymous)]

this, and spotting my roommate's girlfriend reading a copy of US magazine this morning with britney spears on the cover beside a screaming headline of "LIVING WITH MENTAL ILLNESS" really makes me question the times we're living in.

[tropigalia.livejournal.com]

I think poor Magi-bon is going to deal with quite a backlash. It's one of the first times that someone's been actually unmade after having become famous for doing nothing, and I think for a lot of people, seeing her ultimately punished for that was really satisfying.

I don't see what the big deal is with her teeth. I thought all celebrities in Japan looked like that. (teeth racism!!!)

[(Anonymous)]

I thought she looks a lot more appealing on the TV clip than on the YouTube clips. If she could only get over her teeth, instead of drawing attention to them all the time.

I'm not OK, You're not OK

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I feel sorry for the kid. To ignore her after this is one thing, but to actively rip this girl down because we can is just sick.

Re: I'm not OK, You're not OK

[(Anonymous)]

agreed. she made the mistake of playing into the hands of our obsession with looks, but to take pleasure in her one small triumph being publicly stripped from her is antisocial at best and incredibly unsettling.

You go, girl!

[payoption07.livejournal.com]

Nic I'm surprised or "How Could You", go to those lengths without a decent frock. Then you'd be hot!

[afoxdrinksblood.livejournal.com]

That girl is going to be horribly scarred from all of this.

[fettefraktur.livejournal.com]

baggy-eyed, lantern-jawed and tombstone-toothed

what a way with words you have...

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Yes, almost as bad as the phrase I used about myself: "a 48 year-old Nosferatu with thinning yellow hair and horribly yellow teeth". And a muslim trader called out "Hallo pirate!" at me in the market right after that!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

I have a weakness for the Louise and Clara type. Married one.

[ouranticipation.livejournal.com]

This was great!

[unicornburger.livejournal.com]

I'll never understand why she agreed to go on the show. Especially now that I know she was getting donations for a trip to Japan...

I can only guess that she thought they would just have her walk on stage and wave or something or a backstage shot of her blinking into a camera.
Poor kid.

Well, I guess now she can use the donations for braces since she seems so ashamed of her teeth.

[unicornburger.livejournal.com]

Only with your lips pressed against the glass do you remotely look like Nosferatu-- the Kinski version, of course!

I always thought Serge Gainsbourg in his "Comic Strip" Scopitone looked a lot like Nosferatu (the original, Max Schrek).

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

that video clip of her tv appearance was unsettling. In her incessant efforts to cover her mouth, she just drew attention to precisely that area. talk about rabbit-caught-in-headlights, I don't think i've ever seen anyone as unprepared for a Tv studio in my life.

[(Anonymous)]

Nastiness puts on a wig and pretends to be a critique.

[scarletgeryon.livejournal.com]

clara and louise are particulary interesting as representations of a quirky "gamine" performance that did a total 180 in the 60s. i could talk forever about this, so i'll let youtube do the talking. here's a clip of clara to contrast with another dramatically different "it" girl:



here we have a natural-seeming performance that laughs itself off as contrivance (haha, social mixer)...



vs. a really performative style that markets itself as "natural" (can't do it with make-up/you just gotta wake up" http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/funnyface/onhowtobelovely.htm).

but linking this back to your post: as postmodern ideas have permeated even the "itest" of media, notions of beauty, gender, etc. have decentralized (and don't get me wrong, i like that. i like postmodernism, i do i do.) however, in the wake of said decentralization, the camera's seemingly objective gaze becomes all the more questionable; as "texts," people become scrims for all kinds of shadily projected ideals. and needless to say, it doesn't afford one much agency in the construction of his/her image.

[(Anonymous)]

"Bring her DOWN" says The Wig.

"Bring them ALL down"