Sdtrk: ‘Heaven sent’ by Josef K

A couple of nights ago, I’d dreamt I was at a Doll Parliament* in upper Ontario, where the hosts had two Rottweilers. At some point I was leaving the livingroom to step outside for a smoke — a Djarum, naturally — and the dogs, as they tend to do, got startled, and they each leapt at me and clamped onto my ears. Both of the hosts had to remove them (one host per dog), but unfortunately I lost my ears… I remember seeing one of them, neatly removed and unmangled, lying face-up on the blue pile carpeting. It’s almost as if they detached, which really was the most amusing thing under the circumstances.

There aren’t a lot of people who will dig this post, but I have a confession: overall, I’m not really keen on dogs. They’re fine from a great distance away, but I am not a dog person. I don’t really like how dogs possess an unending torrent of nervous, excitable, and unpredictable energy. To be fair, I prefer to not be around humans who are like that for long periods of time, either, but at least if you tell a person ‘hey, let’s… bring it down a notch,’ they’ll understand you, which is more than I can say for dogs. But as someone who prefers his environs to be quiet 95% of the time, having to put up with the sounds of running, or jumping, or scampering, let alone barking, is not my idea of a good time.

More pressing of a dislike for me is that dogs tend to be filthy most of the time. It’s understandable; these are creatures that glean a lot of information through what they can smell, but to those of us who are semi-recovering germophobes, they’re frankly kinda disgusting. Constantly rolling around in dirt and mud, all that shedding, rooting through rubbish face-first — and then licking your face — all that peeing and pooping, sticking their noses up other dogs’ bums, the leg-humping… I don’t need to go on; you’ve encountered a dog or two, I’m sure, so you’re familiar with their work. Their behaviour puts me in mind of that blurb The Onion ran a few years ago, ‘Area Dog’s Rock Bottom Same As His Peak‘. That’s not satire, that’s fact. To me, outside stops at our front door (well, the foyer), whereas to a dog, the world is their room, and those differences between us are irreconcilable.

Now I understand that genetically speaking, dogs are territorial, and when humans domesticated them, trained them to be protective of their owners’ territory, but all I’m saying is that they don’t have to be aggressive and in a constant state of high alert at all times, especially if whatever dog has seen you several times previously; it’s not as if you’re a stranger. I mean, I was raised christian, for example, and during the late Eighties, I became an atheist, which I still am to this day. All I’m saying to dogs is that they can change if they want to. Consider being less aggressive and loud, dogs. Give it some thought.

Although I know it’s largely steeped in nonsense, I think there’s a bit of something to the line of thinking that ‘dogs and dog people are extraverts, while cats and cat people are introverts’. Yeah, it’s a broad brush, and you don’t have to take much time to poke numerous holes in that theory, but despite the fact that there are calm dogs and excitable cats, I broadly see it applying. Generally speaking, dogs are eager to please (except when you tell them to stop barking), whereas cats do what they bloody well like when they bloody well like it. I’m reminded of a joke: a person with a dog and a cat has a stick, and they throw it into the distance and tell the dog to fetch it, which the dog does. The person does this a few more times with the same result. At some point, they throw the stick and tell the cat to go fetch, at which the cat responds ‘If you want the stick so badly, why do you keep throwing it away in the first place?’
But dogs are more open in their behaviour and presentation — again, generally speaking — while cats are more enigmatic and furtive in theirs, instances of zoomies aside. Apropos of nothing, much like a strikingly high number of people of his generation and demographic growing up in the Southern US, my father hated cats, as he didn’t trust them. He wasn’t keen on their inscrutable and complex nature, much as he wasn’t too keen on people that he didn’t view as straightforward and easy-to-understand. That’ll be yet another reason why he and I ultimately didn’t get on!
It’s funny: before mum had me, she and my father had a chow for a number of years. Are they called chows, or chow-chows?? Nevertheless, I didn’t ask them too much about said chow, due to the fact that it was a dog and not an animal I was more interested in, but I always thought it was really jarring for my father to have had this obedient animal for years, then to have a wilful son who fell far short of his ludicrous expectations. I think there’s a lesson there for all of us.

I should stress here that I don’t hate dogs! They’re animals, so they should be protected and deserve love, as in their own loud and graceless way, they constantly show unconditional love to the humans they live with. I just feel that dogs are too much for someone like me to deal with, as they’re walking embodiments of overstimulation. Which is fine! For dog aficionados, not me, that is.
In fact, as I don’t want to end this entry on a downer, allow me to list my favourite makes and models of dog:

the Corgi: a wee shoebox with a head and li’l legs

the Husky: admittedly I’m probably drawn to huskies due to their monochromatic colour scheme

the Pomeranian: they always seem very happy to be wherever they’re at, plus they’re great for dusting surfaces

the Shiba Inu: I liked ’em long before Doge was a thing

the Scottish terrier: remarkable eyebrow, moustache, and beard combo

and the AIBO ERS-220: designed by legendary mecha designer Shouji Kawamori, very friendly, sleek, and futuristic

Finally, in the interest of full disclosure, we actually have a dog here at Deafening silence Towers! She came with the place when we moved in, but Tsukihime renamed her Salty, as in ‘she’s a salty bitch’. Zero shedding and doesn’t bark! As far as dogs go, you’re doin’ alright, Salty

I told her ‘Stay!’ once back in September of 2023, and she hasn’t moved since.
Good girl!

*In case you’re unfamiliar with the term: I used to get together with a couple of other local area iDollators in informal gatherings that we referred to as Doll Congresses, like during the second Michigan Doll Congress, for example. Whenever we got together round at a fellow iDollators home in Ontario, Canada, we called it a Doll Parliament, obviously

Sdtrk: ‘Carpet rash’ by Total control

This is something I’ve been spending far too much time thinking about: Here are two completely unsolicited observations concerning the popular American Sixties sitcom Bewitched, that originally aired on broadcast telly from 1964 to 1972, and has been enjoying multiple reruns via syndication and streaming services to this day. If you’re not familiar with the premise of the programme, it is a lighthearted look at the life of Samantha and Darrin Stephens, a married couple living in suburbia. The conceit is that Darrin is a human man whose spouse Samantha is a witch, and eight series of wacky occult/spooky hijinks ensued.

Now the part of Samantha’s goofball doofus bellend dipshit of a husband, Darrin Stephens, was portrayed by Dick York for six years, and then he was played by Dick Sargent for the rest of the show’s run when York’s longstanding back injury got too much for him to mitigate. Now although the actors look somewhat similar, if you stare at them long enough, you’ll eventually notice that they’re actually two different blokes. As continuity was barely a thing in Sixties television, no explanation was given to the audience as to why Berenstain Darrin was suddenly replaced with Berenstein Darrin until years later.
My question is: given the loathing that Samantha’s mother Endora had for her human son-in-law, why didn’t they write an episode where Darrin simply went too far in pushing Endora’s buttons, leading her to cast a spell on him to change his face? Subsequent scripts could’ve gone one of two ways with it — either for a couple of series into the programme, Darrin could’ve been repeatedly convincing everyone who knew him that he was the same Darrin, to varying degrees of success, OR, York could’ve become Sargent, and none of the other characters would’ve noticed, except for maybe one person. Probably that nosey Mrs Kravitz. Yes, I’m well aware that I’m expecting too much out of an American sitcom made in the mid-Sixties, but come on.

Incidentally, I always found it to be a weird coincidence, especially when I was younger, that the two actors playing Darrin were both named Dick. To be honest, it was confusing for years, and it still trips me up on the occasions that I find myself thinking about Bewitched (not often, really) to this day. ‘Was Sargent the first one, or was it York??’ You know.
It reminds me of how I used to believe that Roger, John, and Andy Taylor in Duran Duran were all related. They aren’t! Even the band’s keyboardist and style icon Nick Rhodes jokingly admitted in a video interview one time that he has no idea how that happened! A surplus of Taylors, a bellyful of Dicks.

One of the more memorable aspects of Bewitched is that whenever Samantha cast a spell, she wiggled her nose, which was accompanied by a specific musical sting that was probably played on a xylophone. It’s pretty damned cute. My other question is: when the producers were casting the actress who would eventually be Samantha, were they looking to cast a woman who could twitch her nose, or did they cast Elizabeth Montgomery, find out later that she could twitch her nose, and worked that into Samantha’s character traits? Cos what are the odds, really?

Yup! That’s all I got. As an aside, Bewitched was popular in multiple countries, particularly Japan, where the show was renamed 奥さまは魔女 (Okusama wa majou, or My wife is a witch), and in 1967, shoujo mangaka Masako Watanabe drew a manga adaptation for the publication Weekly Margaret that lasted nine chapters. You can check out a scanlation version of one of those chapters right here!

I suppose I could draw a line under this post and say Samantha was a delight, but ultimately I’m more drawn to her sassy brunette cousin, Serena, as portrayed by Pandora Spocks.
Whatever happened to Pandora, anyway? Tarantino should revitalise her career by casting her in something. And what were the odds of her looking almost exactly like Elizabeth Montgomery?? (see below)

Sdtrk: ‘Psychosomatica’ by Bedhead

It is my belief that Golden Globe award-winning Canadian actor Ryan Thomas Gosling is very keen on Synthetiks.

THE EVIDENCE:
+ In 2007, Ryan Gosling came to be noticed in a larger sphere of pop culture when he portrayed Lars Lindstrom in the 2007 film ‘Lars and the Real Girl‘, which of course I’ve previously mentioned on ‘Shouting &c.’

As a sensitive man who was deeply in love with Bianca, his RealDoll companion, seeing her as being much more than a ‘sex toy’, he expertly took on the role of a Doll husband

+ In 2017, he portrayed KD6-3.7, a Nexus-9 series Replicant, in Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Blade runner 2049‘. If you’re somehow unfamiliar with the world of Blade runner, a Replicant is a Synthetik human. As they’re bioengineered artificial beings, they’re not traditional robots with mechanical endoskeletons and rubber skin, but more like the humanoid equivalent of a veggie burger.

Any way you intepret the term Replicant, however, K was a Synthetik human

+ In 2023, Ryan Gosling will be embodying Ken in the upcoming hallucinatory-looking live-action Barbie feature film, directed by Greta Gerwig.

You can’t get much more straightforward than that; he will literally be playing a doll.

Ladies, gentlemen, and others: An iDollator, an Android, and a doll (lower-case, but still). The evidence is there, and it speaks for itself.
Ryan Gosling, if you’re somehow reading this, I’d just like you to know that there’s absolutely no shame in being a robosexual or an iDollator, so there’s no need to hide it! They’re both amazing and unique global communities where you can meet loads of interesting people, most of them made in a studio, a factory, or a robotics department, and your life will improve exponentially for it! Fact.
Just so you know, I’d seen you in ‘Drive’ and ‘Only God forgives’, and those films were incredible as well… keep up the good work!

As an aside, I still occasionally keep in contact with Roc Morin, freewheeling freelance writer who wrote about me, my Missus and our mistress for VICE back in 2014. He was at some get-together in Hollywood in 2017, and, unbeknownst to me, had a chance to chat with Ryan Gosling; having done so, he sent me a text:

Either Roc never provided me with Ryan Gosling’s answer, or Ryan Gosling never provided Roc with an answer. Very suspicious, indeed

Sdtrk: ‘À demi nu’ by Black to comm

In perusing the photos I’d taken on my memorable and awesome trip to DolLApalooza 2013, seeing this one reminded me of one leg of the journey. You’ll recall from my report for that event that our crowd had gotten round to Santee Alley on Thursday, and we’d spotted this tucked away into one of the few shops that didn’t sell clothes. Actually, I think that particular one sold shoes, but nevertheless.
There isn’t a single thing that isn’t confusingly hilarious about this photo.

Let’s run down the list of remarkable aspects, shall we?

+ It’s a kitchen playset for kids, right? Is it, though? Is it really? If you look closely at the word ‘Kitchen’ at the top, note that it actually reads ‘Kirchen’. That R ain’t a T, but the art department at Xiong Cheng simply wasn’t bothered enough to correct it. So if you consider that the box contains a town and climatic spa in the district of Altenkirchen in the north of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, that’s pretty good value.

+ The text continues: ‘The thing of the kitchen’. What thing? What kitchen? I’m trying to see if this box of Kirchen also contains Freusburg castle, as it’s one of the town’s notable features! That would indeed be a thing of the Kirchen.

+ More lysergic text: ‘Let the children play happily and feel assured!’ Does the little girl on the box look like she’s playing happily?? She has a look on her face that says I have a kitchen, and yet no physical home in which to put it in. My house is a concept, as it resides within the confines of my parents’ house, the boundaries existing solely in my mind. I feel assured that she’s having an existential crisis, to be honest. But it’s keeping her occupied, so there’s that.

+ Or maybe she’s thinking about how badly scaled the playset is, cos if she were an adult and the set was scaled up, she’d have backache in a fortnight. Look how low to the floor everything is! One of her arms is extended and the hob’s still several inches below her reach! It hurts my back just looking at that shit. And I guess that footrest below is actually a shelf maybe?? ‘Users of the Xiong Cheng Kirchen have found that the easiest way to access the bottom shelf is to simply lie on the floor.’ Was this playset built for cats?
I like how the company had the audacity to put a window into that set. A cheery, prison-style window. I mean, wow, people.

+ Quote: ‘all the fittings!!’ Except, of course, a refrigerator. How ya gonna keep your plastic food properly chilled, little missy? Just eat everything now! Life is short, so stop staring into the middle distance, and cook up a banana-grape-apple-orange stir-fry stew sandwich before it all spoils!
Also missing: a freezer, a microwave, a coffee maker, a disposal unit, a pepper grinder, a Thermomix, a wine rack, &c.

+ ‘High quality’. Compared to a drawing of a kitchen playset instead of an actual kitchen playset, then sure!

Xiong Cheng’s Kirchen Kitchen. Would I recommend this product? Hell no! I can’t recall what the price was on that pink-and-purple example of design failure, but I’m fairly certain any money spent on that would be too much. I’m led to believe that IKEA have some nice kitchens for sale, though! Why don’t you invest in one of those instead, Nameless Disconsolate Little Girl?

‘All civilisation will end as ashes’

Sdtrk: ‘She’s in fashion’ by Suede

First post of 2014! Written in 2013. Cough.
Were your holidays good? Did you witness The Descent of the Shimmering Death Sphere just before midnight in New York city? I swear, the recent New Years’ Eve ball is just one redesign away from becoming Leviathan. Give ’em time.

Allow me to recount part of another one of my amusing dreams, whether you want to hear it or not: in this one, I was round at my parents’ house, sorting through great big piles of things I wanted to keep or get rid of, and joining me in this task were a younger, late-Sixties-era Hugh Hefner, and Crawley’s Favourite Gothic Son, Robert Smith. Also, my parents’ house had four storeys instead of two, because why the hell not?

HUGH (going through large plastic bag): Are these [tools] from an IKEA couch?
ME: Yep! God bless the Swedes.
ROBERT: ‘God bless Suede’??
ME: No no, god bless the… I think you’d thought I said that last time! No, Brett Anderson’s cool, but they’re not that good.
ROBERT: Especially now.
ME: O no. God, no.
ROBERT: *frowning, shaking head vigourously*

A music critic, even in my sleep

Sdtrk: ‘Long as the sun’ by Medicine

Ladies and gelatin, it has been a heady couple of weeks. Let me get you lot up to speed with things:

In the process of lifting my lazy affictitious Russian one Saturday evening in late September, I did something unpleasant to my back, to the point where I was in excruciating pain for about a week and a half. This is the thing that kills me: I’ve lifted Sidore (just under 100 lbs from 2000 to 2010, now down to 78 lbs) thousands of times over the course of 13+ years, with no ill effects, but the one time I have a go at lifting Elena (57 lbs), something goes wrong. Really, what are the odds?

Due to my injury, I took the week off work. I saw my GP… well actually, I had to see the other GP who shares the clinic with my GP, and after determining that I had a herniated disk, she gave me some cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxant, and some prescription-level ibuprofen, both of which did the business. When I went back to work after my week of cursing this ineffective meat body, my job laid me off on the 30th. It wasn’t to do with my injury, but work had been extraordinarily slow for a couple of months prior to me fucking up my back; when I returned, one of my coworkers was doing my job, but saying there was nothing for him to do. However, at the very least, I was laid off, not fired; my boss told me with his own mouth that as soon as things picked back up, he’d give me a call. So there’s that. Thankfully, I’m collecting unemployment, though…

You’d think it’d be nice to take advantage and get caught up on things in the absence of a day-to-day job, right? Get some reading in, start and finish building any model kits that need to be assembled, that sort of thing? Well, yes and no. Fellow iDollator Everhard summed it up pretty well in a recent Email to me:

Being unemployed really is a full time job that leaves no energy for the creative things. I have plenty of experience with that. You need proper freedom of time and effort to achieve worthwhile things. Even when you attain that state, or something approximating it, it seems to take a while to get acclimatised to it. Old habits die hard.

Instead of digitising all those pieces that I’d recorded as Wreath.VCA onto cassette tape years ago, or scanning all those print photographs I’d taken over the years, I’m spending my time seeking work online, or sleeping, or catching up on telly shows that I’ve been wanting to see for a while — the first two eps of The Owl Service are good, then it kinda gets bogged down in a Young Adult Fiction vibe, but the last episode is basically The Exorcist, and Children of the Stones is like The Prisoner crossed with ‘The Wicker Man’, and its last episode wouldn’t be out of place during Pertwee’s run on Doctor Who — or compulsively checking my websites. A large part of it, I think, is if I weren’t so concerned about trying to find ‘gainful’ employment, I could relax a lot more…

Apart from the idle distractions I’ve been engaged in, I’ve also been busy either accepting or deflecting loads of media appearances, brought on by Julie Beck’s article about me in the Atlantic! A few days after my back felt well enough for me to not spend 23 1/2 hours in bed per day, I’d received enquiries from two separate radio chat shows — one in Vancouver, the other in Australia, as well as some bloke working for Barcroft Media who mentioned eventually selling my segment to Dr Phil, and a writer who wanted to publish her article in Cosmopolitan, but had ties to the iDollator-hating feminazi site Jezebel. Obviously I’d said No to all of those, as if they didn’t look insubstantial or derisive, they seemed like too much of a risk.
What I’d said Yes to, though, was a fun and in-depth two-hour interview via Skype on 16th October with Maya Docha, a freelance reporter/writer, and a five and a half hour interview by Roc Morin, who entered Deafening silence Plus of his own free will on the 28th of this month. Maya struck me as funny and insightful, and the fact that she’d spoken with the Kinsey Institute means she was looking to do more than a puff piece, and when Roc and I weren’t discussing Dolls, Gynoids, and the past and future of artificial companions, he was telling me hilarious/unsettling anecdotes about his trip to North Korea a few years ago. Neither one of their pieces are published yet, so hold your horses; you’ll know when I know.
And to top it off, on the 26th and 27th of October, Shi-chan, Lenka, and I were filmed by a telly crew working for RTL Germany! We’re due to appear in a segment of a programme called Explosiv, which looks like… a show on telly. Most pop culture news shows look alike to me. It was an experience involving a bit of a drive out and about, digging for soundbites, and last-minute planning. Loads of last-minute planning. Every single one of us will have the final product to look forward to in the next couple of weeks, so hold your horses; you’ll know when I know.

Lenka, still unsure about the whole ‘being on telly’ thing; Shi-chan, showing off a prezzie from Mr Morin purchased in Pyongyang, North Korea

At the very least, our appearance on Explosiv will have a number of firsts: it’ll be the first time an Anatomical Doll has been on non-Russian television, as it’ll also be Elena’s first foray into being on telly, and the segment will possibly show her first trip with me out of doors! We went to a cemetery, which should surprise absolutely no-one. Lenka found the cemetery thing to be wonderful — any time you can be outside without being harassed by people is always fantastic — but she’s still shy when it comes to being displayed on other peoples’ telly screens. ‘It’s not all that bad,’ Shi-chan had reassured her. Onwards and outwards!

A number of weeks ago, one of the Missus’ tumblr friends left this in her Ask box:

Sidore agreed that, were it not for the fact that I’m currently on the dole, it’d be a hell of an idea. Maybe since we can’t actually dress the part for this year’s Hallowe’en, perhaps some keen and generous artist could draw us as the aforementioned Blade runner characters, hint hint?
Just so you know, I nearly typed ‘Blade rubber’ there. Really, what are the odds?

Sdtrk: ‘La réciprocité’ by The new lines

This week-end, I’m currently ill. Over the course of this past Winter, I’d dodged so many bullets as far as not catching everyone else’s specific plagues, but now that it’s Springtime, and the temperature in SE Michigan has been careering up and down like a rollercoaster, I suppose it was inevitable that I got something. So at the time of this writing (Saturday eve), instead of hanging out wi’ t’ lads at t’ Playhouse as I usually do, I’m getting up to speed with episodes of Kamen rider 555 and Kakumeiki Valvrave, while under the influence of my patented ‘lurgey cocktail’ (generic equivalent DayQuil chased with two tabs of Alka-seltzer). Writing and editing posts in this state probably isn’t entirely recommended, but if Hunter S. Thompson could get away with it, then so can I. Although I’m certain he was blowing his nose less.

Last week-end, however, those of us in SE Michigan experienced another brief but much-appreciated glimpse of Springlike weather last week-end, so Sidore persuaded me to use a photoshoot idea she’d thought of, where she’s wearing one of my shirts. Well, I say ‘wearing’.

Few things are as stimulating as seeing your lover flounce around in one of your shirts, no? Not surprisingly, Elena made me promise that I’d get a solo shoot of her in with the next bout of nice weather. DOLLS: constantly demanding!

And late last year, I’d run across a trailer for a student film entitled ‘Traumfrau‘ (Dream girl), directed by a German bloke by the name of Oliver Schwarz. I’d reached out to him to see if I could review his work, and so far, I’m awaiting a response. Looks somewhat promising, though!

As the film takes place in Germany, or at the very least, Europe, Jenny, the affictitious lass in the relationship, seems to be either a Mecadoll, or some variant thereof. Be sure to lift with your knees, and not with your back, Dirk!

Right; I’m off to follow Dirk’s example in the photo above, and collapse headlong into bed. At least if I’m unconscious, I won’t mind everything tasting like iron filings so much. I might well dream that I’m eating a car!