Monday, March 09, 2009

obligatory Barbie 50th birthday posting!

From Barbie's 50th birthday
Oh, where to start. Monday, March 9 was the official 50th anniversary of the creation of the Barbie doll. This snuck up on me, so I didn't have time to unearth my actual Barbie collection, which is massive and consists of many vintage dolls (mostly bought back when you used to be able to go to a Barbie collectibles show or two a year in Chicagoland), collectible and vintage reproduction dolls (some bought at Cut Rate Toys, who are on my links list), and untold amounts of dolls, clothes, and accessories for actual kids to play with (hours and hours in toy and discount stores).

From Barbie's 50th birthday
Neshachan on Flickr posted a lot of new shots from her impressive Barbie collection for the birthday; here's one of a Mod-era Barbie (my favorite Barbie era). I didn't do that, but I at least could observe some media coverage and take weird shots of the TV screen.

From Barbie's 50th birthday
The top photo, from a CBS evening news piece, was when the screen changed, showing the original striped-swimsuit Barbie and her latest incarnation; then some NBC shots of the original Barbie (or a reproduction?).

From Barbie's 50th birthday
Talking about Barbie's influence, I guess; that's Andy Warhol's portrait of Superstar Barbie in back.

From Barbie's 50th birthday
So I had a few requests...or hopes...for the news and entertainment media when discussing Barbie:

1. Must you use the song "Barbie Girl" for your reports? You have to admit it's a tad grating. It's funny, though, that that band got sued by Mattel but won in the end, having their song apparently the go-to soundtrack for any piece about Barbie from now until the end of time...

2. I haven't heard this in a while and it's impossible to quantify, but I could swear, so many pop culture references to Barbie mention "Malibu Barbie." This was a doll only around for a few years in the 1970s, yet the name lived on for decades (I don't mind the doll on The Simpsons being "Malibu Stacy"). My theory was always that all the comedy writers for years were kids in the 1970s and that was their frame of reference. I actually don't know if anyone knows what the hell I'm talking about here, or is a fraction as pedantic as I am...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
3. The discussions of Barbie's influence are always "Barbie's body shape is so unnatural!" versus "Barbie's had all these careers!" Well, actually, I can't quibble with that, they're both true and you just can't expect much more in a two-minute TV news piece...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
4. Re: the Talking Barbie controversy of years ago (that inspired the amazing Lisa Lionheart/Malibu Stacy episode of The Simpsons): the doll didn't say "Math is hard," it said "Math class is tough." I don't think that's a terrible thing to say, but I'd say it was ill-advised to have a doll say it when there are still real issues with women's advancement in math and science. Make your point about Barbie and stereotypes of women, sure, just get the quote right!

From Barbie's 50th birthday
5. And...I had faint hopes that by the time Barbie turned 50, we'd no longer have the thing of talking about Barbie as if she's an actual woman turning 50, and saying how good she looks, or speculating on hot flashes (yeah, that was you, Kathie Lee), or whatever...yeah, no luck with that. Maybe if Barbie lasts to 100 that'll go away...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
The above shots were all from The Today Show on NBC; I caught some of the ABC and CBS evening news pieces Monday too. ABC showed the infamous German Lilli doll that inspired Barbie...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
That's Barbie's creator, the late Ruth Handler (she started Mattel with her husband Elliott). There's a new biography I want to read, Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her. Jeopardy had a Barbie category on Monday's show and the hardest, $1000 answer was Ruth Handler...no one knew it, sadly.

From Barbie's 50th birthday
Obviously I LIKE Barbie and can admire Handler as a pioneering woman in business and all, but...one of these pieces said that she created Barbie, and the early TV commercials reflected it, to help "tomboyish" girls learn to be feminine and get along with guys or whatever...and I almost cried at that point. Really, can't it just be a fun toy with nice outfits? No, I know it never can be...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
(I always check the Barbie aisle when I'm in a store that has one; this is the Toys R Us in Riverside, IL) Barbie has never actually gotten married; she just dresses up for it with different outfits every year. I know there was some "breakup" with Ken a few years back, but I thought they got back together. But I noticed the "groom" doll here didn't seem to have a name at all...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
I'm not attempting much of an analysis of Barbie; that's what the books I list below are for. Barbie, for me, was always kind of on a level with the ground-breaking Sex and the Single Girl--freeing (middle/upper-class white) women from certain 1950s roles and establishing others. I suppose today's version is evangelical religion versus "raunch" or "hookup" culture, both rather limiting, but I'll leave that to the blogs I've blogrolled to critique...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
That's Day-to-Night Barbie, which I never owned, but Day-to-Night Ken was my first male doll. These magazine covers, and the "Barbie Drama" stories enacted with dolls, ads for appalling 1980s clothes, and more are in my new Flickr set of Barbie magazine scans. This is the earliest issue I ever owned...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
This Seal Press anthology was put out in later editions under the name Body Outlaws, so I'm glad I got the first edition with the title Mattel forced them to change...

From Barbie's 50th birthday
See, Barbie's had all kinds of exciting jobs, even astronaut...even if this outfit does have a bit of a B-movie feel to it, perhaps...

Now a little recommended reading: So much of my Barbie obsession was piqued by M.G. Lord's Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll, a book I loved so much I have the original hardcover with color illustrations, and bought the 10th-anniversary paperback with extra material, and if there are future editions I'll buy those...

If you can read cultural studies (which I enjoy in small doses), Barbie's Queer Accessories is full of fascinating ideas.

Ten years ago, a number of women writers were anthologized in The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty; it's pretty good. For a fiction and poetry anthology, there's Mondo Barbie, from the early 1990s, where I first read A.M. Homes and David Trinidad, among others.

It included poems from Denise Duhamel's excellent book about Barbie, Kinky. Her poem "It's My Body" somehow inspired me to take and post a near-nekkid shot of myself for the first time (no, I'm not linking; it can be found, I'm not that many places on the Internet, I mean, it's not on Goodreads), which probably got a lot of views because of searches for words in the poem and the book title. I just got inspired to post something "authentic"...it's also been a strange week where I might regret things I've put on the Internet. Or might not... By odd coincidence, maybe, I wrote most of the text here while blond hair dye is on my head; it's basically searing my skin off at this point so I'd better go...

Saturday, March 07, 2009

somewhat newsworthy


$1.29, now $2.89: Office Depot going-out-of-business sale FAIL
Originally uploaded by katherine of chicago

So on this Flickr photo I said "someone should blog this" and since it appears to not be exactly huge breaking news, I guess it'll have to be me. The next paragraph is the text I put on the caption (there's a little more discussion on the actual photo):

Wow. I'd heard this happens at some closing stores, now I've got proof. I'd noticed the Evergreen Park Office Depot was closing, with deep discounts on everything, and finally made it there Thursday. I haven't shopped at Office Depot in a while, but I did find it odd that nearly all the merchandise had price stickers on it, and the prices of pens, stickers, etc. seemed high. I noticed almost all the price cards in the plastic holders were gone. Then looking at these colored pencils, I saw this package has a $2.89 sticker on it...and the price card of $1.29 was STILL THERE. So these are 40 or 50% off of $2.89. Do the math, the "clearance" price is higher than what the store used to charge! I took this photo, put back the markers and pencils I'd selected, and only bought some 59 cent glue sticks and two laminated Rand McNally maps (the price is printed on them, so I knew they couldn't scam me on those). There were some items, like phone cords, where the price card and sticker matched, but I'm suspicious of the prices on a lot of the stuff here...BTW there was a 12-pack of smaller colored pencils, but it was also more than $1.29...but if there's some logical explanation for this I've missed, I'd like to hear it.

In addition: I discovered this sale while looking for another going-out-of-business store in that shopping plaza (which I don't think existed). It took me almost a week to get back. I wasn't planning to buy much (I'm sure I have unused stuff from the closing sale of the Office Depot that used to be near North & Wells, and has been a gym for many years), but I did want to stock up on basics. So this was a bit of a letdown, but worth it to get this shot. This is why I'd tell people it's such a good idea to carry a camera at all times...well, it meant more to say that before so many people got cell phone cameras...

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

how the Metra-riding obsession started...

I've always said my biggest regret in my years in Chicago (just in terms of photography; thinking of regrets in all areas of life here would be a ticket to unending misery, wouldn't it?) was my failure to document the tremendous changes going on in the city--in particular, the old Maxwell Street area, Wicker Park/West Town (I've lived not far from there virtually all my Chicago years), and the South Loop (I went to school there for years, starting when "South Loop" only went to Roosevelt at most, not all the way to Chinatown). Then I added my failure, until 2007, to get the concept of "urban exploration" and get more intimate photos of the buildings I've seen vanish. Now I'd add how infrequently I took Metra commuter rail until the past couple years. I've never needed to take it for family, school, or work, so it's been purely recreational.

From Metra March 2008
Not until 2008 did I get the idea of Metra-hopping (visiting many stops on a line so I can explore the communities they're in, using the $5 pass that's good all day Saturday and Sunday), and I believe what I'm picturing here, March 8, 2008, was my first true day of this. I had specific aims in mind--to visit the (closing in 2008) smallest Macy's/Marshall Field's store in Chicagoland (Lake Forest), my interest having been piqued by this piece on Chicago Public Radio, and to revisit parts of the North Shore I'd spotted out the car window (and wanted to photograph) on a long Valentine's Day drive up there with someone.

From Metra March 2008
This trip came in the midst of my project to photograph every station on the Chicago Transit Authority. The idea to photograph every Metra (and South Shore) station didn't hit me until much later...in fact, after much of my summer 2008 Metra travel. That's the project (among many others) I'm engaged in now. At first I wanted it to be open-ended, because it could take years (the fact that several Metra lines run only on weekdays, with limited stops, no $5 unlimited pass, messes things up). But now the hyper-organized side of me has taken over and I wish I'd set an official time frame. If I started it in summer 2008 (I'm not counting this trip, because I wasn't really making an effort to photograph all the Metra stations themselves), how about I finish shooting all the stations that are open every day sometime in summer 2009?

Anyway...I boarded a northbound train on the Union Pacific/North line at the Clybourn station (which is not near the street Clybourn; a recent issue of the Metra commuter newsletter "On the Bi-Level" explains this mystery; quoted by Jennifer). You can see I was already taking shots of passengers and approaching trains...

From Metra March 2008
I started off in Lake Forest. Everything was green and tasteful, discreet signage instead of a typical Walgreens. This is something you find on the North Shore...McDonald's that don't look like McDonald's because of some sort of tastefulness ordinance or something.

From Metra March 2008

From Metra March 2008
The very small Marshall Field's there was part of the well-known Market Square shopping plaza, designed by Howard Van Doren Shaw.

From Metra March 2008

From Metra March 2008

From Metra March 2008
Unfortunately, I was weeks too late to actually see the store...

From Metra March 2008
More tasteful green, a post office this time.

From Metra March 2008
Even more tasteful green.

From Metra March 2008
A very nice independent bookstore.

From Metra March 2008
I haven't taken many interior shots of Metra stations, because a lot of them are closed on weekends, or there's no real "interior" to the station; this is Lake Forest's.

From Metra March 2008
And then I went to Highwood, which originally developed next to Fort Sheridan. Many Italian immigrants settled here in the early 1900s, and there's now a substantial Latino population; all of these make Highwood different from all the other North Shore communities I visited that day.

From Metra March 2008
Side view of this; the front was attractive too.

From Metra March 2008
I ate lunch here. Charming, but the prices were higher than I'd expected...

From Metra March 2008
Sweet. This is what I'd spotted out the car window and NEEDED to come back and shoot. Like most of these photos, I need to go back again and get better photos for Flickr...

From Metra March 2008

From Metra March 2008
Brief wandering in another direction turned up the Highwood library, so I went inside for a few minutes.

From Metra March 2008

From Metra March 2008
Puzzling...

From Metra March 2008
And then I moved on, and the sun came out, but mostly just for Highland Park (which couldn't be more different from the Highland Park by Detroit I'm now familiar with).

From Metra March 2008
Wow, wow, wow...

From Metra March 2008
Part of the Metra station in Highland Park, I think.

From Metra March 2008
And now, a shopping area in Winnetka. I stopped in Winnetka, then went to Wilmette, but with the help of a Pace bus went back to Winnetka. Fun fact for non-Chicago readers: Chicago's public television station, WTTW, has been jokingly called "Wilmette Talking to Winnetka" (both posh North Shore communities) for as long as I can remember (does anyone know the origin of that? a Google search was no help; in fact, almost no one has quoted this phrase online).

From Metra March 2008
This toy store had a huge window display of kid's Lego projects.

From Metra March 2008
A cooking supply store, I think. I liked the sentiment (even if I prefer white for grilled cheese sandwiches at least).

From Metra March 2008
Now to Wilmette...

From Metra March 2008

From Metra March 2008
There were a few cute buildings...another attractive cleaners.

From Metra March 2008
I came back mostly to spend a few minutes visiting the Winnetka library.

From Metra March 2008
And to reshoot a few things...there was a little bit of sun.

From Metra March 2008
Another attractive clock.

From Metra March 2008
Heading back towards the Winnetka Metra station...I believe this did end up, as I'd predicted at the time, being the strangest and most random graffiti I saw anywhere in 2008 (Huckabee was already out of the presidential race by then).

From Metra March 2008
A little bit of pre-Union Pacific history there...

From Metra March 2008
Another attempted shot of passengers and approaching trains...

From Metra March 2008
I finished Metra-hopping by ending at the Davis station (next to the Davis CTA) in Evanston. I must have gotten a very early start (8:30 on a Saturday!), because looking at my photos from the day I went on to shoot CTA stations in Evanston and the North Side, and stop by a demolition site, all before dark, in winter.

I didn't do much more Metra travel until summer, when I finally took my long-awaited trip to the end of the UP-N line, Kenosha, WI (I loved the idea that I could get to a different STATE on Metra...even if we no longer have the interurban that runs from Chicago to Milwaukee, sadly). And that was my first trip on Metra with a bicycle! Though I've had a few more trips to Kenosha, I feel I've neglected this line and hope to get out shooting on it again soon.

(Oh, and I still like using a lot of lowercase letters for things, especially on Flickr, but I've already dropped it as a habit in my writing here, because I'm not trying to be cute. Well, I am, but not in my writing...so back to standard sentence form...)