Dig Me Out by Sleater-Kinney

I think: the first time I heard about Sleater-Kinney, I was in a car. But then I think, I must not have been. I was looking at them in Seventeen magazine, the photo of them taken from above so their faces look normal and their amazing chunky, frumpy shoes look tiny. I was always attracted to their shoes. I realize my memory of being in a car is on the corner of Pacific Avenue and Sleater-Kinney Road, and I probably thought of that intersection the moment I learned about them. There is a band, from here, called Sleater-Kinney, my friend Liz says. We are 13.

Later, I am reading a Time magazine at the library in a nearby town where my parents own a print shop. The library is a Carnegie library, glorious and old-smelling, set back from a park with a war memorial. It’s a couple blocks from my parents’ print shop and I go there alone all the time. I wish my sister would tag along and be an annoying pest like little sisters in novels are, but she is attached to my mother, so I go to the library alone. The Time magazine has either Hanson on the cover or Ellen saying “Yep, I’m Gay!”, or maybe it’s that an article about Hanson is in the Ellen-coming-out issue. And Sleater-Kinney are in it, in a tiny blurb which makes some reference to their potential lesbionic ambiguity, along with the photo of them with tiny shoes, again. I could be making this all up, but that’s how I remember it, and that sounds about right for 1997.

Sometime in the summer of 2003 I do a whip-it and my body remembers exactly how my body felt the first time I heard about Sleater-Kinney. (Another time, the two different shaped lamps with matching shades are my eyes and I realize that Kim Gordon is god).

Once I hear them on the radio, in my room on a Saturday afternoon. The song is “Little Babies.” It sounds exactly like I think I think it would sound. The production value is different than I am used to hearing; I think it is what an "indie" record sounds like. I know the first line is "I'm the water", but I still want to say it sounds wet, Northwesty.

The space between being 13 and 15 is vast, and the next time I think about Sleater-Kinney is when The Hot Rock is coming out and I read about them in The Olympian. On Saturdays, my mom has me “volunteering” at an art gallery owned by a couple she knows. When I take a lunch break, I walk over to Phantom City Records for the first time. I’m wearing khaki pants and a sheer black blouse interwoven with gold sparkles, my “nice” clothes, and I feel terminally uncool. This record store contains the entirety of my as yet unimagined potential futures. Every band name and CD cover image is a peep into this secret world I suspected existed but previously had no proof of save the Kurt Cobain memorial compilation of Rolling Stone articles and the band name Bikini Kill I saw on a CD in my cousin’s room. He was 15 years older than me. Many years later he started listening to Sleater-Kinney at my recommendation, and he took his future wife to their show on a first date.

I have to buy something at Phantom City Records in order to feel like I belong there, like it is OK for me to be in this dark, dusty, dare I say punk record store. I just read about Sleater-Kinney in the newspaper, so I find their CD, Dig Me Out, and I buy it, equally out of obligation as interest.

Cover art is so small on CDs, but of course this is not a problem when it’s what you’re used to, same as we don’t mind looking at tiny pictures of paradise and cats on Tumblr on our phones now. I look at the front and back CD covers of Dig Me Out intensely and frequently, but it is burned into my mind the first time I leave the record store with it. For me it starts with the shoes, the sensible shoes. I always cared a lot about shoes: the black mary janes on Molly the rag doll from a Saturday morning cartoon; Gwen Stefani’s vinyl steel toed Doc Martens; every Chuck Taylor Converse All Star in every music video, ever. The shoes are followed by legs, thick ankles and curved calves that I stare at. I’ve not experienced my sexual awakening yet, I don’t even masturbate, and I have never started at a body part besides a face like this. I’ve never even seen a woman in a photograph who doesn’t have skinny ankles. It’s absolutely exotic to me, a photograph, on a piece of media, of a real person. The photograph is taken somewhere that looks like my aunt’s driveway in Tacoma. It reads Northwesty to me. I would say up to 60% of the fashion direction I take right now is influenced by what Sleater-Kinney wore in this era.

I don’t know the Kinks record, so the organization of the front cover just looks non-referentially cool to me. I still think it’s cooler than the Kinks record cover. The colors and patterns hidden in the cover - 70s curtains and wood paneling, Corin Tucker’s ball-chain necklace, their dirty hair, the Black Sabbath poster, the big headphones. Basically, it’s where it’s at. It’s everything I have suspected about what is cool. And it’s right here.

The CD is blue. Later on when every friend in my life also had this CD, I realized there was a big variation in shades of blue. I still think my copy was the best shade.

MC5 Part II of ???

Click for Part I of this series.
I drove to work at McDonald’s and back, getting stoned and listening to the MC5 every day. I was still a “gold-star lesbian”, the spring I was 19 in 2003. I was in a long-distance relationship with a 17-year-old girl in Denver who I met at a Le Tigre show in Portland. She was the first/only femme I ever dated. We were radical feminists together, cataloguers of riot grrrl and girl-fronted bands. I liked sharing shoes with her but I hated when she put makeup on me and said I was pretty. I had just figured out that if I wore skirts and fishnet tights, the butches and trans guys in my group of friends looked at me differently than when I was wearing ragged camo pants and flannel shirts. (Later that summer, I came up with this slogan: Maybe I’m Not a Feminist, Maybe I’m Just a Slob). I was equally comfortable both ways, as long as I was stoned and carrying a pipe in my bag to smoke in the alley between bands at the shows Victoria, Slim Volume, and I went to regularly all that season. I don’t remember ever being worried about smoking weed out in the open in that alley, behind the warehouse-type venue which was then called No Exit (at another time it was called Praxis). I remember seeing Scream Club, The King Cobra, The Gossip, Veronica Lipstick, Gravy Train!!!, The Quails, Aisler’s Set, these fucking awesome feminine bands (I am not claiming they are necessarily all feminist or women-based, just that they were feminine rather than masculine in sound). The flipside of my life was working at McDonald’s and listening to the MC5 in the car. The continuity was that I was always stoned. I felt more feminine and more masculine than I ever had before, at the same time. I felt the universe expanding inside of me, in synchronism with the universe expanding outside of me.

I distinctly remember thinking that Megan, my girlfriend, wouldn’t like the MC5. She had a college radio show called Testosterone Detox. I was listening to “Rocket Reducer No. 62”: After some good tokes and a 6 pack, we can sock ‘em out for you til you’re flat on your back/I got to keep it up cause I’m a natural man, I’m a born hell raiser and I don’t give a damn/I’m the man for you baby, yes I am for you baby. WHY WAS THIS SUDDENLY SO HOT TO ME? I’d been listening to Corin Tucker scream Stay Away for years. Men were exotic. I’d never personally known any men, not men in the MC5 sense. In high school I had an online relationship with an adult male (see earlier blog post), and Cree and I were friends with a few gay boys. One week, a kid we called “Little Jay,” because he was younger than the established “Jay” at our queer youth support group (however, he was taller), rode around in the backseat of our car while Cree and I got stoned in the front. Little Jay passed us bags of dry sugar-cereal from Costco. And we realized that we could barely hear, or understand initially, what he was saying: our ears were so attuned to girl voices that the lower register of boy voices were literally inaudible to us. We thought that was hilarious.

I am trying really hard to remember what precisely this epiphany about men was. I remember exactly where I was when I had it - driving up Harrison towards Division - and I remember what it felt like - it felt like a fucking joyful epiphany. But what exactly was it? Honestly I think it was something about how I wouldn’t have to try so hard with men as I did with women. Because a man would want to fuck me merely by the merit of my having a pussy. And that doesn’t sound like such a fabulous realization to me anymore.

I’d been fantasizing about dick for some time. I hadn’t had a reciprocal sexual relationship yet. My first two girlfriends only wanted to fuck me and my third girlfriend only wanted me to fuck her. We all had fun and I’m happy for all of them knowing what they were into at that time, but none of these arrangements were exactly what I wanted. I very much wanted an equal partnership - everyone I’d dated was either older or younger. I also hadn’t dated another stoner or mind-expanding-drug user (I did mushrooms several times between 2001 and 2003 and ecstasy once; we never could find acid). I wanted someone else bringing weed into the relationship, and I knew the MC5 would. The MC5 would get me wasted and fuck me but because rock and roll had the highest religious ethics, because Fred Sonic Smith loved Patti Smith, they would also completely respect my genius and they would never ask me to be pretty.

During this time I was also falling asleep listening to Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine and also falling in love with Slim Volume. We went on a road trip to Denver to go to my girlfriend’s Ladyfest Out West and to see the southwest for the first time (we live here now, 12 years later). I forgot to bring The MC5 CD. Slim Volume said he brought the Mooney Suzuki, which was almost the same. I disagreed then but I almost agree now. Slim Volume made out with a girl whose boyfriend was at the WTO Protests and her busybody butch roommate told her she better not sleep with him. We left those girls in Denver and drove around the big American West.

“The MC5 Made Me Straight”* part I

*ps. don’t worry I’m still queer.

(PART I of I don't know how many)

I was watching videos my husband made in at The Evergreen State College the summer that he was 20. I was 21. Suddenly I could go to shows at bars, but he still couldn’t. When our best friend Victoria (see like every other post on this blog) and I went to the MC5 Tribute Show, Slim Volume stayed home and watched Dances with Wolves and drank Vermouth because it was the only booze we had around the house. Looking back on this 11 years later, I don’t know why the fuck I didn’t buy him some beer before we took off for Seattle.

After watching a few hilarious videos he made with classmates, I found the video I’d been curious about for years - a short documentary about me. In most of it I am wearing an American Flag bikini, except for when I am wearing my unbelievably frumpy McDonald’s uniform. I was training to become a shift manager at McDonald’s that summer, my fourth year working for the corporation (the following spring, just before my final evaluation to become a manager, by the sleazy regional supervisor, I quit). In some shots, I am wearing the American Flag bikini as well as sporting a mustache of black mascara on my blond upper lip hairs. In the shots where I have the mustache, I inexplicably also am not wearing my glasses (please remember this was 2004, long before cars wore fake mustaches). The film opens with me driving a car - as all good documentaries ought to - and telling a story about when Victoria and I saw the MC5, which must have been just a few days earlier. “They were like, does everybody know what time it is? And I was like, everybody knows what fucking time it is!” (it was Time to Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker.)

Then “Kick out the Jams” fills in the title sequence. I lead a tour of my parents lakeside property where I grew up - my little sister and her boyfriend are buying it now; my parents moved to Texas - describing it as “a nice place to grow up...there is a lot of...yard.” I was stoned a lot then, as I may have mentioned previously. I was stoned always, then. My hair is long and black with several inches of light brown roots. The film ends with me taking out the garbage and talking about how I moved out into that apartment complex with my BFF Cree when I was 18 and she was two weeks from being 18 - 20 days before our high school graduation. The surprise extra scene, after the credits, is me telling our roommate, James, a story that I do not now remember happening:

“I was at some reststop in Eastern Washington, and this girl had her skirt stuck in her panties. I thought about not telling her, because that would be hilarious. Then I decided to be a nice person and I was like” - here my voice drops  to a growled whisper - “‘Dude, your skirt is stuck in your panties.’” 

Then I giggle with the sweetest smile on my face. James is smoking weed out of the frame, but you hear a choked nasal laugh escape as he tries to hold his breath. I watched that part over and over, marveling about how I still don’t remember that happening, and I don’t remember telling the story, but also about the way I was making myself laugh. I was making myself laugh the way that a boy wants to make a girl laugh. 

*****

I was getting stoned with Victoria in her dorm. The first time she met Slim Volume, when he and I moved in together as roommates, she borrowed his Andrew WK CD so that she could be the loudest person in her dorm building at The Evergreen State College. When we were getting stoned in Victoria’s room, we mostly listened to Belle and Sebastian and Bratmobile (at my house, we mostly listened to The Need and Tracy + The Plastics). She had just brought home the MC5’s greatest hits CD. I got really excited about it because I knew it was Patti Smith’s beloved’s band [I was obsessed w/Patti Smith and I’ll write about that someday]. Fred Sonic Smith. I thought he was really ugly from the pictures I’d seen of him in Patti Smith’s books. Later I would come to believe he was the hottest man ever photographed. I recognized one song, “Kick Out the Jams”, because it was on I Shot Andy Warhol, which was then and continues to be one of my all-time favorite movies. 

Victoria let me borrow the CD and eventually she just gave it to me, because I was so stoked on it and she wasn’t as much. She recently reminded me that we actually traded and I gave her Glass Candy's first CD, but I didn't remember that until we talked about it.

Slim Volume and I weren’t in a romantic relationship yet, but we were roommates. He was opening at Starbucks and I was closing at McDonald’s and our paths rarely crossed. I left him a handwritten note taped to the front door: HAVE YOU HEARD THE MC5!?!?!!?

 

Sonny Angel, you're an Angel to me.

Oh for Christ's sake, I can't think the name Sonny Angel without getting "Johnny Angel" stuck in my head for-fucking-ever.

For as long as I can remember, I had little plastic zoo animals, and a sandbox. As I got a little older, I began creating houses (domestic spaces; not their preferred biosystems) for the animals in the sandbox*, breaking off pieces of the wooden frame to build driftwood fences and picking flowers I wasn’t supposed to in order to make gardens. When I was younger, I remember putting a fairy-doll in a L’eggs egg, which was clear on the top, and burying it partially in the sand so that I could still see the doll through the clear part of the egg. It kind of freaked me out; it seemed so outer-spacey.

And I always played with Barbies; in fact I played with Barbies until I was 13 when I abruptly realized that the scenarios I played out with Barbies could just be written down. I was actually writing stories. I still do.

I have always been interested in miniatures. Some of my earliest thoughtful memories (not just vague sensual notions) are of a family vacation to Leavenworth, WA, a mock-Bavarian mountain tourist trap. Among other specialty stores, they have a music box store and a dollhouse store. I had to look at everything in the dollhouse store, astonished at the tiny boxes of cereal and dog biscuits, with the exact brand-name packaging, and the tiny toilet paper rolls. The dolls, as usual, were hideous and not-life-like, but I was enthralled by everything else.

Maybe a year or two later, my friend, whose mom was very crafty, got a book from the library. It was a very fancy book about making dollhouse furniture with balsa wood and extremely exquisite, Victorian details. I distinctly remember a baby carriage made out of an eggshell, which was definitely not an option for me at age 9 or 10. Once she returned it, I checked it out and started making some of the furniture projects out of non-corrugated cardboard. My dad had recently worked in corrugation printing, and he gave me some oatmeal boxes which worked perfectly as the basis of my dollhouse. At that time, I also read every chapter book I could that had to do with dollhouses – historical fiction with dollhouses; mysteries about dollhouses; etcetera. I played with friends’ and neighbors’ dollhouses that they didn’t care about. I wanted a miniature world so bad.

I spent hours at the desk in my room painting, wallpapering (for a time a few years earlier my mom had collected a bunch of discontinued wallpaper samples. Conveniently.), and creating furniture and fixtures for my miniature house, using templates from the book and probably scaling them down, even, it seems. I entered my cardboard dollhouse in the Thurston County Fair and I got a Blue Ribbon but not a fancy rosette or anything. There is a picture of me standing proudly beside it but I’m living in Albuquerque right now and the photo is either in Olympia or Corpus Christi so it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to post it.

Another friend started collecting realistic-looking rubber animals from the teaching supply store. She had a panda family and I got a panda family, too. Hers lived in her old My Little Pony house (you know, Paradise Estates) that her grandpa had made her. It fit under the bed and was like a house with the roof removed, rather than the vivisected dollhouse we usually think of. I took my pandas camping, and I loved arranging them by a river, letting them get into the water. My sister and I had taken Barbies camping before and occasionally insisted on taking a picture of a Barbie in a wilderness setting. This was especially desirable in the Pacific Northwest rainforests where there are a lot of nurse logs or stumps sprouting Barbie-sized seedlings.

I remember realizing at a very young age that none of the toys advertised on tv would ever be as awesome as they looked because so many of them depended on the dolls inhabiting an outdoor space that was unlike the spaces I played in – I recall it as jungle-like or swamp-like; I might be thinking of a GI Joe commercial although I never had GI Joes. Camping near a river was as close as it got, and it was pretty great.

Throughout my childhood, I also had special pocket toys, first a Smurf who was writing and crying (my perpetual obsession with hurt/comfort), and then a My Little Pony friend who was a pink baby Dragon. I have always been and continue to be drawn in by the idea of boys who can be perceived as in need of care (LUCKILY THIS DOESN’T CROSS OVER INTO MY PERSONAL LIFE – well perhaps there was a little bit of that at the beginning of my relationship with Slim Volume – he fell ill with mononucleosis very soon after we got together – as mentioned in my Fellini post). Mostly I am looking for this model in fiction (I just found out about hurt/comfort as a fan fiction genre and while I don’t go out looking for fan fiction (at least not since my Hanson fan fiction days circa 1998, where I was featured twice on a prominent website for paranormal/horror Hanson fan fiction – you can still fucking find it if you google my full/real name), but I can see it starting with that little crying Smurf). I once left the Smurf in the Safeway cooler aisle because he was molded in a seated position and it was so neat  to make him sit somewhere weird like on the edge of the milk cooler, which was probably my height because I was like 3. We got him back. I actually still had that Smurf up until just a couple years ago. I think I gave him to the Free Store at the Olympia Food Co-op. Also in this Free Store deposit was Spike, the My Little Pony dragon, who once was lost for some time in the corner of the wooden arm on the “couch” at my parents’ house (an antique Mission-style train bench upholstered in slabs of foam on top of particle board), again because it was a really cool place for him to be.

Now I’m 31 and at Christmas Slim Volume gives me a Sonny Angel. It’s a little Kewpie-looking Angel Baby and it’s super exciting because you buy it in a closed box and don’t know what’s going to be on its head – but they each have a visible microphallus and bare buns. It’s divinatory. Mine has a tulip on its head.

So I get this Sonny Angel and I’m immediately thrilled by taking photos of him in various spots of the house we’re housesitting, especially in the plants on the sunporch. And technology allows me to immediately upload them for approval by The Internet (I went for Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook). Doll photos and other minature photography projects I’ve come across in the past legitimize this phenonmenon, and elevate my amusement to ‘art’. I am puzzled by the amount of photos posted by Instrgram users from Asian countries of Sonny Angel alongside plates of food. The next day we go down to the Bosque trail and I’m taking pictures of him ice skating on frozen puddles and in front of the Rio Grande (he fell in) and the next day he’s admiring a soap figure of Venus of Willendorf in the bathroom of a friend whose cat we’re feeding.**

SO THE ANSWER IS YES!

Haha jkjk…

Yes, I most certainly used Sonny Angel to re-enchant myself with my surroundings when I wasn’t entirely comfortable (we were housesitting and it was the holidays so everything was all weird and it also got colder than it’s been since we’ve lived in Albuquerque). And besides, I’ve been doing an awful lot of complaining about how it’s not green in the desert in winter (DUH), so Sonny Angel’s bright pink tulip made a lovely contrast to the dormant golden foliage. And Sonny Angel made the photos interesting - not just another amateur nature photograph, Sonny Angel made the photos both amusing and differentiated by playing with scale. Sonny Angel justified the close-up on small spaces. Looking close up allowed me to see another level of beauty overlapping BROWN GRAY AND NOT CASCADIA, which was all I was seeing before I added Sonny Angel.

Unlike in childhood, I would not have felt a need to put Sonny Angel in these places just because he looked cool there (though, he did). My work with Sonny Angel is strictly for sharing; I don’t get a huge kick out of just seeing him in a funny environment unless I can at least show him to Slim Volume, if I don’t have a camera handy. I want to laugh or marvel about his placement with others. I want Slim Volume to say “That is great.” Which is why I don’t really get just lying a Sonny Angel alongside a plate of food. If he was in the food, as an environment, it would be great. So again the answer is YES, I play with Sonny Angel for the purpose of sharing, and since Sonny Angel fans are all over the world, it makes most sense for me to share these photos online, with a hashtag (#sonnyangelaroundtheworld). The importance of this photo sharing on social media is twofold: 1) the mental reward system of collecting likes, hearts, favorites, etc. on my posts and 2) I know I like seeing photos of Sonny Angel in environments - it delights me - so I assume the same may be true for others, and I like to delight people.

Slim Volume includes the question of class, via Stewart. For one thing, I do not for a moment find the internet to be a “classless” world. While the Sonny Angel phenomenon may span across continents, I am assuming he is a pretty solidly middle-class character, financially and intellectually. I don’t expect my cousin who posts “Fish on ya baby” on Facebook to understand or be interested in my Sonny Angel photos (although Sonny Angel in relation to a large dead fish could be a nice composition). Also, most people are not going to be willing to pay $9 for a 3” plastic baby with a flower on its head. Just sayin’. And a lot of people wouldn’t even set foot in the store Sonny Angel came from; even my peers, people I thought would be delighted by the store (Stranger Factory, Albuquerque NM), have said it’s too creepy.

That said, I could make a claim against Sonny Angel’s reinforcement of “borders between interiority/exteriority, the domestic/foreign, inside/outside, nature/culture, historicity/timelessness.”

1. Well actually, this first item is the one I don’t think I can argue against. Even though I currently keep Sonny Angel in my backpack, as I would a Smurf or later a Hanson CD in childhood, he is not there for my comfort, just there in case a perfect environment presents itself which I wish to share with the exterior world. He does not transcend or fuck up the interior/exterior border.

2. But he does mess with domestic/foreign. Sonny Angel is decisively Kawaii, but he is also Kewpie, harkening to the carnival prize of mid-century America, and he is beloved across continents, as we discussed.

3. Sonny Angel’s plastic nature allows him to be impermeable to weather conditions, although he is nude both inside/outside. He stood barefoot on ice and it didn’t phase him.

4. Sonny Angel in nature at the Rio Grande; Sonny Angel in culture alongside a plate of food. He can draw attention to either.

5. Historicity/timelessness? Again, his Kewpie look originates in the Great Depression, but love for Kewpies has never disappeared.

I will be addressing the issue of cuteness in a future post. Because damn, that has a lot going on.

*My friend and I would build a mound and dig through starting with shovels, and finishing with  our hands, on either side of the mound, until our gritty fingers caught each other and it was so exciting. That’s one of the biggest thrills I remember from childhood: catching Erin’s fingers through the sand mound. I remember the sensation with unusual clarity; two hands touching with the weird barrier of the sand grinding into each hand [I’m stoned while writing this]. It had nothing to do with feelings towards the friend, it just had to do with surmounting the insurmountable and sharing that accomplishment with someone.

**We were the premiere pet caregivers for People We Know In Albuquerque this holiday season.

Uncanny Sonny: Some Questions for Lifeguard of Love

In her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart talks about how miniaturization effects interiority, a private enclosure, the production of the bourgeois subject. However, your play with the Sonny Angel figure, the photographs you took, and their placement within the flows of social media makes Stewart’s theorization seem reductive. As J. Allan Mitchell argues in his recent book, objects are not “used up” in the process of representing certain class formations, or, through play, disciplining certain social behaviors (G.I. Joes teaching boys how to be masculine, aggressive, etc.) In fact, your play with this odd, precocious, anthropomorphic baby-angel may show how messy the world of objects, consumerism, and the experience of change can be. 

To Stewart, the world of the daydream, the “infinite time of reverie,” that toys induce, limit change: that the world of the miniature produces a reified world of things. In the modern west, the anxiety produced between the gap between signifier and signified is reduced by the process of miniaturization: to scale things up or down requires the certainty that objects are what they are and that they originate in relation to the scale of the human body. While I agree that miniaturization can do these things, it seems as though Stewart is giving too much agency to humans and not enough to the toys, their material efficacy, and what they do in the human-object relationship—their social consequences in general.

As I look at your pictures, I sense a longing, not for narrative closure, but for an expanded engagement with the ecological meshwork of your surroundings, that is, central New Mexico, the ecology of the social meshwork of social media via Tumblr, Instagram, etc, or both at the same time. In this sense, I see you utilizing the Sonny Angel figure as a sort of way to enter into a different kind of relationship with your surroundings, or at least, to explore new ways of being in the world through (following Alphonso Lingis and Merleau-Ponty) a sort of new “postural schema,” or embodied way of encountering an ecology of objects. 

If the experience of place, according to Timothy Morton is always uncanny: familiar yet escaping description or complete knowledge, and if this experience may be productive of both fear or enchantment, is your disenchantment or lack of enchantment with “New Mexico”  (reified, ironically, as a “land of enchantment”—its own sort of miniaturization: an entire state on a coffee mug, snow globe, etc.!) addressed by reducing your scale to muddy river banks, reeds, icy puddles, and driftwood—a scale in which you can be re-enchanted with your surroundings, or opened up into an ecological meshwork? 

What happens when you take a picture of this play of scale? Were you playing just to take pictures? And who were you taking pictures for? Especially if you intended all along to post them on social media, why were certain compositions, especially of an “unnatural” figure in “nature” so important to how you wanted to depict your tastes in the very specific realm of, in this case, Tumblr? 

If the consumption of miniatures, according to Stewart, has to do both with taste as a performance of appropriate class comportment, and of composing borders between interiority/exteriority, the domestic/foreign, inside/outside, nature/culture, historicity/timelessness what is going on when you enter into the supposedly “classless” world of social media, a “virtual” place that has little use for such binaries?

And what does cuteness have to do with all of this? Especially how you are responding to the object itself? How has Sonny Angel directed you?