This is a belated post, but I needed to blog this and thank Laksmi for this darling, little gift from her recent trip to Canadia. It's Princess Hello Kitty. "How fitting!", she says.You see, I have this approach-avoidance conflict with Ms. Hello Kitty. There are others who do too. Check out this guy who blogs about One Man's Life with Cute Overload.
I think it all started for me with an arts exhibition I saw at the Japan Society in New York called, "Little Boy: The Arts of Japan's Exploding Subculture." It helped me understand this Japanese obsession with cute cartoon characters, connecting them back to post-war corporate mascots (e.g., Sony Boy) and to the ornately costumed Japanese geisha dolls that previous generations collected. At this show, I was particularly struck by a Po-Mo commentary that deconstructed Hello Kitty in a psychosexual context. The New York Magazine also talked about this theme: "It has no mouth and no developed limbs--an image of powerlessness, and (guest curator and artist, Takashi) Murakami suggests, sublimated hysteria."
Yeah, man, that's it...
So, people who have heard me talk about this seem to want to bring me Hello Kitty gifts. A hint to folks reading this blog: they have to have a bit of IRONY to them, folks! Usefulness is also good. So to give you an example, a former employee gave me a HK plastic drinking glass that looked like a tall beer stein. Ironic and useful! Cute for cuteness sake isn't enough. If you want to give me a Hello Kitty coloring book, it's nice and cute as shit, but really, it's not fucked up enough for me. To wit, another example: Lax made me a homemade HK eye pillow filled with lavender. That was wacky enough, it warmed my stone-cold heart. Then when I visited my friend, Caroline, in Vancouver, I saw her VERY PINK HK umbrella. I had to get one for Laksmi. Very useful and very ironic, especially for Lax when she was going through a dark patch with long stretches of no sun in Seattle and she was swearing a lot. Well, a lot more than usual.
Back to the Kleenex. Here's another pack with the Hello Kitty theme. Isn't that cute enough to rip your heart out?And this one, not related to HK but is part of the collection. It has this schoolboy doing samasthiti. (There's your yoga content.) I got this from Sparklepony.
Onward, Hello Kitty, worldwide domination!
7 comments:
Hmmm... Now I too am intrigued by HK. You're saying that items intended merely for sake of cuteness become much more interesting when their cuteness is juxtaposed [ironically] with something else that is less cute? For example: Giving a pair of Hello Kitty boxing gloves to Stephen Hawking. That would totally blow your humor circuits?
god damn it, who is sparklepony? You must tell me! I want to be sparklepony!
carl, i think stephen hawking would need a hello kitty bendy straw. he can't use boxing gloves: see the 'must be useful' clause.
Who knew Hello Kitty was so deep?????
hiya carl, HK boxing gloves would be pretty cool. stephen hawking sipping a cosmo through a HK bendy straw also works.
armani, why do you insist upon skirting the issue of sparklepony?
I still say my Bad Badtz Maru lunchbox the THE SHIT. I almost bought a Keroppi bag once (it was pretty cool), but my friend kept calling it "Ke-rappy" and I just couldn't get that out of my head.
Pi': Ke-rappy. I love it!
Lax: You do not know Sparklepony. Yet. If you want, you can catch her in the new Harold and Kumar Movie: Escape from Guantanamo Bay.
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