“How nifty, Barbie®’s fifty”

(WARNING: Skip this digressive post if you hate bubblegum pink and/or prefer to steer clear of the general morass of American popular culture.)

I watch the news semi-regularly and I’ll bet that more than a few Americans have noticed that the network news anchors have started softening their evening broadcasts with lots of uplifting, aw-shucks human-interest stories.

These segments are obviously meant to serve as antidotes to the steady stream of bad news bearishness bombarding us from the global marketplace.

Perhaps these salt-of-the-earth profiles of courage and altruism are there to inspire and shame the hoi polloi into staying put in their overstuffed couches instead of taking to the streets armed with steak knives and handguns.  (They could be right; many people seem to be pushing aside their woes and seeking comfort in entertainment and social connections right now.)

A few days back the well-coiffed talking head personality anchors were paying homage to that paragon of perfect, injection-molded plastic womanhood, Barbie^®, who débuted early in 1959.

Amidst the retrospective coverage of this pop culture milestone, I heard about a bizarre Mattel^® product launch from 1975, “Growing Up Skipper^®.”  This junior cousin of Barbie^® was an “action” figurine; if you cranked her arm, her torso elongated and her bust “grew.”

Actual marketing copy printed on the box:

“She’s 2 dolls in 1 for twice as much fun!”
“Make her grow from a young girl to a teenager in seconds!”
“Cute little girl! ... Tall, curvy teenager!”

This “toy” should have been packaged with a miniature paperback book:
Are You There God?  It’s Me, Body-Dysmorphic Skipper^®

For those of you who think that toys and play time don’t have a lasting impact on children, check out this caustically funny commentary [warning: language].  It’s a blistering account of mid-seventies childhood drama between the author and her cousin, allegedly the Growing Up Skipper^® doll’s “most fevered and devoted disciple.”

Incidentally, 1975 is the same year The Stepford Wives hit U.S. theaters, presenting Americans with an assault on the ideal of suburban domestic perfection by swapping pretty, docile, affluent suburban housewives with near-identical animatronic body doubles.

* * *
The media blitz on the Barbie^® merchandising empire & its cultural aftershocks led me to dig up an arty artifact from the eighties.
This unnamed cult film has a running time of about three-quarters of an hour and looks like it was partly shot on Super 8.  Official prints were yanked and destroyed in the wake of a copyright suit won about two decades ago.  Bootleg copies still circulate; I don’t name the filmmaker, title, or subject here because I don’t want the files to get pulled.  But if you have any familiarity with American popular music of the 1970s, then you can probably follow along here.

The film imaginatively dramatizes the real-life story of a woman was who the vocalist/drummer of a ubiquitous brother-and-sister pop powerhouse with lots of lush orchestral chart-topping hits throughout the early-to-mid-’70s.  (Can you guess which one?)

It’s a lovingly enacted 1:9-scale tragedy of female suffering, complete with painstakingly crafted miniature props and sophisticated mise-en-scène featuring Barbie^® line dolls outfitted in dead-ringer ’70s and early ’80s fashions.

Without further ado, click here (Youtube) if you’re still curious.  (Right after the page loads, try pausing the player in order to give the stream a chance to buffer footage a few minutes ahead.)

* * *

“The early seventies had felt like the last moment of pure, popular culture fantasy and fakeness that I shared with my parents, when we were still united in this image of happy American familyhood.  And The C________s’ music seemed especially emblematic of that time.”

—the auteur who directed and co-wrote the film linked above

What’s a little startling to me is this: as a child growing up in the Washington area in the late ’70s through mid-’80s, in many ways I lived in a late ’60s through mid-’70s time warp.  This is because my decidedly Establishment parents listened to a lot of WGAY* and their LP collection consisted of selections like the orchestral folk-pop stylings of The Sandpipers and the soundtrack to Ryan’s Daughter.

While my spouse’s boomer parents were more plugged into the “counterculture” and familiar with the mid-to-late Beatles catalogue and even ventured into the post-punk and new wave territory of bands like Talking Heads and the Clash, as a tyke I remember being enthralled by cheesy Las-Vegas-revue-like pop arrangements such as Steve Lawrence’s rendition of “Go Away Little Girl”.

This decade-lagging anachrony from early childhood may explain some of the chronic cultural disorientation and confusion that afflicts me to this day.

* * *
And finally we have Sonic Youth’s cover of a song that was a signature Top Ten hit by that same ’70s pop group.  (The Sonic Youth interpretation was originally released as part of a 1994 tribute album.)

The vid features Thurston Moore as Tragic Troubadour Ken™ and Kim Gordon as Rocker Chick Couture Barbie™.

* * *
So here’s wishing a belated happy birthday to that indestructible American icon, Barbie^®, and that princess of 1970s pop perfection, Karen C________ (March 2, 1950 – February 4, 1983).
* For those of you who didn’t live in the D.C. area before 1990 or so, WGAY was an adult contemporary easy-listening radio station.  (Its transmitter was located on Kemp Mill Road in Wheaton before it moved to the World Building in downtown Silver Spring.)

(More trivia:  According to this source, oddly enough, the “GAY” in WGAY originally stood for “Government And You” way back in the forties.)

Octogenarian on Octuplets Controversy: It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.

Quote: “With our economy the way it is, with California going to hell in a basket, I should be excited?!  Doesn’t make sense to me.”

Me neither, lady.

Fact: This Whittier woman, the 87-year-old next door neighbor of the “miracle” octuplets mother would have been about eight years old when the Great Depression hit about eight decades ago.  Many of us remember being eight years old fairly vividly.  I sure do.

See the short segment on the BBC World News YouTube channel (duration = 1:58) for an example of how this story is being covered abroad.

Yes, this controversy has been festering for a while now, but this lady’s reaction is my favorite aspect of the story so far; she’s such a breath of fresh California air compared to, say, all the back-peddling fertility specialist experts.


Here is some not-so-fresh air.  The image at right depicts carbon monoxide (not CO₂) emissions over South America in September 2004 as recorded from NASA’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Terra Satellite.  See NASA’s excellent Visible Earth portal for more stunning images.

A question: Do crisis refugees have higher fertility rates, on average?  Consider the case of the Indian Ocean rim baby boom/boomlet soon after the December 2004 earthquake/tsunami.

This paper might offer some insights: “Mortality and Fertility Interactions” [PDF].  This was published by the Population Research Center, National Opinion Research Center (NORC), & The University of Chicago around 2003.



Now, as far as the octuplets lifestyle saga goes, I wonder if the bread-winning Iraqi grandfather who brags about his wealth plans to support his family with U.S. contract money for Iraq, courtesy of Bush and his neocon crony club of amateur nation builders.  (Sorry for that dig, Dubya apologist holdouts.  We know your disgraced figurehead has left for the warm climes of Crawford, but his legacy is to be found everywhere nowadays in These United States.)

Welcome to Slumburbia. Now get lost.

I live in slumburbia.

I started using this term about 4-5 years ago, right around the crescendo of the housing bubble. At the time, the term didn't have much currency. Mainly the only other person using it on the web was some visual artist from Canada.

If you're in your 20s or 30s and grew up liberal and neurotic; the suburbs are a Tragically Unhip* place to live. The suburbs are considered a destination for losers and clueless middle Americans. I know this because I used to be one of those self-hating liberals. Now I'm an independent and over 30 so I don't have so much patience for this culture anymore.

*another Canadian allusion there

California Über Alles:

Early last spring, San Francisco real estate journalist Carol Lloyd used the term to apply to some rather spacious tract house communities around the Bay area. To be quite honest, far-leftist anti-sprawl activists would like nothing more than to see suburbia rot. It's powerful symbolism, like vandalizing Eisenhower’s tomb or something.

But I have to say that this is such an absurd application of the term slumburbia. Anybody applying this neologism to millenial large-lot McMansion boom developments in central Cali has never experienced authentic American slumburban living in a fifties-era small-lot roach magnet. And even I know that the corner of slumburbia I live in has nothing on the strains of slumburbia found in L.A. County.

Luckily, around the same time as the San Francisco Chronicle / SFGate article, The Atlantic published a more well-researched piece that extended the term beyond outer-ring exurbs.

Here is an excerpt:
“On the other hand, many inner suburbs that are on the wrong side of town, and poorly served by public transport, are already suffering what looks like inexorable decline. Low-income people, displaced from gentrifying inner cities, have moved in, and longtime residents, seeking more space and nicer neighborhoods, have moved out.”
“The Next Slum?,” The Atlantic, March 2008

Now, that’s the slumburbia I’m talking about. The old housing stock slumburbia. The middle-class flight slumburbia. The slumlord rental units slumburbia. The lawn-paved-over-into-a-mini-parking-lot slumburbia.

Now that's my corner of America.

Welcome to slumburbia, friends. You must be lost.

So here's a tip: Lock your car doors, do a U-turn in the clogged cul-de-sac up there, and keep driving until you get to the mall.