Marriage

Michelle is getting married. I went to her room last night after we finished watching a movie. She was already sleeping, but she woke up and let me get in bed with her. We just laid there, amazed that it is happening today. She was sad that she was so sleepy, but glad I came down to be with her. After we shook our heads muttering in awe for a while, I got up to leave. She said, “I love you so much.” I said I love her too. And that I am sad. So happy for her, but so sad that my sister is no longer going to be a gilmore girl. She’s a Walker now. I walked out of her room and started crying. I didn’t realize how much I love her and will miss her as my best friend. She will always be there, but it will never be the same. I wish I had better appreciated the last couple of years as we became best friends. I loved going to provo to have sleepovers with her. We had so much fun together. We laughed. So much. I am so glad she and I went to New York together. Our last outing as Gilmore sisters. I know that Clark loves her and will always treat her right. I always laughed in the movies when sisters warned the fiancee that if he did anything to hurt their sister, he’d have them to answer to. Now I understand. I love her so much. I can’t believe she is getting married. I can’t express myself. I can’t figure out what I’m wanting to express. How much I love her, I guess. How much I appreciate her. How much I will miss her and already do. How protective I feel. She is my sister. My best friend. Michelle Gilmore. Michelle Gilmore Walker. I love Michelle so much.

eight by eight

eight by eight
stolen from Jo

8 books I have loved
1. The Great Gatsby
2. This Side of Paradise
3. The Chosen
4. Slaughterhouse-Five
5. The Picture of Dorian Gray
6. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime
7. Harry Potters
8. Fight Club

8 favorite places to eat
1. Noodles and Company
2. Applebees
3. Chilis
4. Olive Garden
5. Plates and Palates
6. Wendys
7. Dairy Queen
8. my parents home

8 things that happened yesterday
1. Shot a gun?!?!
2. Watched Dark Knight with Robbie
3. Ate Noodles and Co.
4. Listened to Modest Mouse
5. Parked in a Parking Garage
6. Yawned
7. Hugged a few people
8. Drove a train. Not literally

8 things I am looking forward to
1. New classes
2. New people
3. Change
4. Seeing what my hair does
5. Hopefully being productive over the break
6. Talking to Tyler on Christmas Eve?!?!?
7. Architecture program
8. Growing up

8 concerts I would love to attend
1. Sufjan Stevens
2. Sigur Ros
3. Cursive
4. The Velvet Underground
5. Iron and Wine
6. Jose Gonzales
7. Mates of State
8. Modest Mouse

8 places to visit
1. Guatamala
2. New York
3. South America
4. England
5. Germany
6. France
7. Hong Kong
8. New Zealand

8 favorite movies
1. You've Got Mail
2. The Truman Show
3. Little Miss Sunshine
4. Triplets of Bellville
5. Tokyo Godfathers
6. Finding Neverland
7. The Prestige
8. The Dark Kight

8 great songs
1. Such Great Heights- Iron and Wine
2. John Wayne Gacy Jr.- Sufjan Stevens
3. Neighborhood [Power Out]- Arcade Fire
4. Mad World- Gary Jules
5. Shankill- The Decemberists
6. Giraffe Grass- Pishya Pishya
7. Angeles- Elliott Smith
8. Eleanor Rigby- The Beatles

8 amazing artists
1. Picasso
2. Michelle Gilmore
3. Jared Gilmore
4. Rob Gilmore
5. Judy Gilmore
6. Andy Warhol
7. Monet
8. Elliott Smith

8 impacting things I have heard with my own ears
1. Keep doing what you love and you'll find someone doing what they love doing the same thing. -Sara
2. Students make mistakes, erase them, then redraw the same thing. -Jerry Morre
3.
4.
5.hm. I guess I'm bad at remembering things I take to heart. I'll have to think about this one more. What a let down of an ending.
6.
7.
8.

Winter break

It is a boisterous day, beautiful, bright. The wind blows horizontally. My heart is light, my backpack is not. Students are sparse in the library, slowly filtering across the country, home for the holidays.

The Devil's Anus

December thirteenth, two thousand eight.

Sitting on my bed with Barbara, both typing on our computers, mine white, hers black.

DEVIL'S ANUS

For some reason it is hard for me to want to go out and do things with people, especially if it is the first time hanging out with them. On Monday my home teacher Dallas Dean called and asked if Barbara and I were up for some mischief for Friday night. We said sure. I didn’t know if it was a date of some kind or what, but turns out it wasn’t, thankfully. We invited Jordan Huntington along, which was perfect. All day yesterday though, I was wanting to bail and not go, even though I didn’t know what we were doing. I just always think I won’t have fun. It’s so strange because I always do. I’m glad I didn’t bail, thanks to Barbara.

So we met up with Dallas Dean, Nelson Diamond, and their friend Danny Bride at 7. We drove for eternity to a small town south of provo, stopping at a gas station (Jordan bought a hotdog and a water bottle bigger than the state of Texas) and at his grandmother Camp’s house. She’s adorable and played “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” and “I’ll have a blue Christmas without you” on her super out of tune little guitar, a set list of every song she knows on 3x5’s taped to the top of it. We drank water from zodiac sign glasses while Nelson at old Shrek fruit snacks. When we left she said “Act your age, whatever that might be.”

We drove, Barbara in front going crazy (60 mph cruise control) with Jordan me nelson and danny in back, Jordan going crazy with discomfort and ADD. Mostly funny, cute. We drove for ever, then got to “the devil’s anus,” a mining shaft that goes down for eternity, and dropped flaming cartons with gasoline in them down, down, down, down. So mind blowing. I have never seen something go that far into the earth. It literally went until it disappeared, who knows if it has hit bottom, still. I enjoyed sitting on the cage/grate thing atop the never ending pit. It was incredible. This weird feeling of being on the edge of the world, the edge of life and death, the edge of the stable and unknown. As the gasoline filled containers fell, hundreds of drops of blue light fell above it, maybe small bits of gasoline on fire. It was beautiful. The light dropped down this vertical hallway, tunneling like a domino effect, revealing piece by piece this bizarre piece of land.

Driving home Danny was in shotgun with us 3 girls in back, all over Nelson. It was fun and funny and pretty comfortable. We heard funny stories, like Dallas’s physical exam by a woman doctor. Pretty funny. We thanked them for the adventure, then Barbara and I went to Jordan’s house to have a sLeEpOvEr!!?!?!! Yeah man. Second sleepover in one week. Last saturday we slept at Leah Wilson and Rachelle Ballards. Livin’ the parentless curfew free dream.

THE SLEEPOVER

Jordan had 3 friends here from BYU-I. Taryn, Southern Bell, and Carly. Southern Bell was from Alabama and has a real name. She was exactly what an Alabama girl would be like. She was pretty but freaked me out a little. Reminded me of the girl from the town “Spectra” in the movie Big Fish; weird brow bone or something. But she had a cool accent. I didn’t get to know her hardly. She was sleepy.

TRAVEL

I talked with Taryn for a while. She is my age, 19, and has traveled through Europe and South America already. I am envious of her life. More encouraged though. She backpacked through Europe for a few months, had nothing planned but the airport in Ireland she’d be arriving at and the hostel for that night. She just caught trains and moved in the direction she should be going towards. She just lived. LIVED. I’m so excited about it. She lived in South America for about a year, a couple of the months with a rastafarian group, had dreads, sold jewelry on the side of the road and all. Surprising, based on the look of her. She said when she moved to byu-i last year, it was the 28th time moving. If I could (and I can if I am willing to), I’d drop everything right now, work really hard for a semester and save thousands, then travel from... probably August ‘til spring. Maybe. Then save up money and get back into school.

The biggest thing keeping me from doing that is the Architecture program. I have to apply in spring, like March or so, for Fall semester, the beginning of a 4 year venture. If I travel until spring, I’d have to take the last prerequisite fall semester and apply the Next year. So I’d not start the program until fall of.. 2011, graduate 2015, instead of staring fall of 2009 and graduating 2013. But think, if I served a mission it’d be similar. Huh. jfawoilscmwoiefh. I really really want to do this. I would love it.
Things holding me back:

1. Living at home next semester is one thing, but Not going to school is another. That cuts off almost all sociality. I wouldn’t spend nearly as much time with Barbara and Patrick.

2. People say to graduate from school as fast as possible. But I don’t really want to. I love school. And once I’m out I’m out. Might as well slow down, I’ll never have this time of life to myself again. Michelle is getting married in 14 days. If I get married I’ll never have this opportunity again.

3. Money. Think, if I could save up a ton of money I’d be safe for school rather than going in debt. I might already have to apply for a student loan for spring semester, unless I don’t do school. I don’t want debt. If I have any kind of debt though, it will be school debt, not car or home debt. that is just uncalled for. Dad doesn’t have money, but he made enough last year that I won’t qualify for any kind of government funding. Frustrating. I wish I could just get a 4.0. I am so disappointed in myself. If I didn’t get a bad grade in History I wouldn’t have to worry. It is so weird to me that I can’t get better grades. Why am I not pushing myself harder? I know I can. I know I can do better, I don’t feel challenged in school until I study for test or do final projects. Blah. Too stressful to think about. I do it later. Think, that is.

BACK TO THE SLEEPOVER

Anyways. Last night was great. We fell asleep around 3 I think. I asked Jordan to tell me a story to fall asleep to. It might have been about a duck; I fell asleep quickly. I kind of had a headache because of the smell of gasoline stuck in my hand or nose or brain. I wrote a poem while lying on the bed, before we were going to bed. It went something like this:

Jordan puts on a pink robe,
her friend looking like Tweedledee,
maybe Tweedledum.
Barbara makes impulsive decisions,
I panic, but keep breathing anyways.

The end. Barbara got her hair cut. It’s really cute. I like it a lot.
Speaking of hair, I can’t figure out what mine wants right now. It needs to be more lax than it is now, but I can’t figure it out. Oh well. It’ll happen. Now I must go shower. I am a piece of earwax.

Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair

This is an essay by Davey Davis, a student here at the U. I enjoyed it. It is about this photograph, Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair.

Erich Consemüller’s Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair is couched amid the clamoring struggles of power, expression, and representation that were central to the Weimar years in Germany. The woman’s bland portrait becomes the empty vessel for a host of insecurities and traumas created by the post-World War One experience. From the overt displays of this oppression through the work of Otto Dix to the more subtle accounts of sexism in the Bauhaus, the image of the free, creative woman is subverted and manipulated by the dominant patriarchy’s subconscious insecurities. Throughout the Weimar years the intention remains the same: for men in power to dominate and control women in order to maintain hegemony in the visual world.

The woman in the mask is exemplar of the mythological new woman. She is sexual, thin, slightly androgynous, and stylish. As the new woman, she is supposedly created out of the modernity that was ushered in by World War One, earning freedoms as a producer and consumer in the public realm. With women’s social freedom comes a sexual freedom that is cumulatively unnerving to even the most freethinking of men. Their reactions to the idea of an equal slate of sexual expression ranged from nervously warning to violently prohibiting, from publishing books on modernized sex[i] —with the patriarchal sexual hierarchy firmly in place— to the abhorrent Lustmord images.

Both of these reactions can be read visually through Consemüller’s image, the first through linking sexual stimulation and societal stimulation. One of the aforementioned sexual critics, Axel Eggebrecht, paired the endless stimulation of the modern metropolis and the state of constant sexual stimulation the new woman’s presence created. This sexual jitter in the air was certainly negative and had to be shut off: “The insecurity of the man in relation to the woman has become virtually unbearable.” [ii] Eggebrecht called for a return of old gender roles to desensitize the sexual currents of the metropolis. The discourse of limitation begins here, with the Schlemmer mask neutering and desensitizing the woman in the chair. If she once was the sexualized new woman she has been rebuffed and returned, put in her place. By connecting the over-stimulating city to the new woman, Eggebrecht creates a fallacy where the symptom and cause of distracted modernity is the modern woman; she becomes the scapegoat for a larger pervasive social condition.

The largest social condition of all in the Weimar years was the symptomatic trauma resulting from the First World War. Through a similar complication of gender and society, the traumatized reactions to the war make up the dominant discourse towards woman in the Weimar years. The work of Otto Dix is a clear example of men’s visual interactions and reactions to the condition presented by the new woman in a post-war Germany.[iii] In varying degrees of obscenity Dix’s oeuvre is a collection of sexist violence, through it one can map out manifold ways patriarchal reactions manifest themselves and attack women. In brief, female sexual licentiousness is equated with the violence of war, which brings the violence home and visually transforms it into an escalated battle of the sexes.

This violence is not immediately relevant to the woman in the chair; she is not graphically murdered like the women in Dix’s Lustmord paintings. But the motivations are connected: in literally destroying women through art, men can be seen as Pygmalion burglars of procreative power. As Maria Tatar writes, "the only way to manage the trauma of a military conquest is to transform the manifest tyranny of a "feminine" position (struggle, conquest, and submission) into an experience that emphasizes the procreative advantage of that position.”[iv] This conflation of physical violence with other forms of dominance forebodes the woman in the chair’s situation. It is on the field of creativity that we shall see the most grievous casualties.
The theft and barring of creativity is central to regarding the Consemüller image and the Bauhaus in general. In examining the Bauhaus it becomes apparent that the inscribed misogyny transfers from the overt hyperbole of Dix to a more pernicious situation: institutionalized oppression. Modern woman enrolled in the Bauhaus school in droves as a way of realizing their new opportunities as the acclaimed ‘new woman.’ The school, however, responded by marginalizing or rejecting female students, shunting them into the weaving program or categorically denying women access to the architecture school.[v] Lack of aptitude was used as an argument to hold women back, and oftentimes the students would take it as a personal failure when they were rejected.

The position in which the institution placed creative women is inscribed on the woman in the chair. At first glance she is simply a model, an absurd model with a modern mask on. Like the chair in which she sits she is a depersonalized art object ready to be sent into mass production. Already we encounter issues of sexuality and commodification, the role of the modernized techno-sexual body,[vi] but the ancestry of this pose has an older pedigree. The Consemüller image descends from a long line of portraits; beautiful women whose bodies have been turned into a superficial object to be gazed upon. She is attractive, her smoothly shaded legs and tailored dress are definitely feminine. She is not, however, outrageously sexualized, not a Venus of Urbino nor one of countless nudes in the very same chair[vii] whose image is manipulated by her sexuality. There is something equally pernicious and updated about the Consemüller woman’s treatment. In a classic female nude, painted by men, the subject of the painting is disarmed and subjugated by the painterly craft in a method similar to the procreative theft described earlier. One principal factor is control of the gaze. If the woman’s head is turned from the viewer they are free to look upon her, but she does not have the liberty to assert her identity back. The woman in the chair gazes directly at the camera but ineffectively. Like the sexualized woman before her, she has been disarmed of her gaze, but by a more tangible construct: the depersonalizing Schlemmer mask.

Oskar Schlemmer’s theatre pieces were meant to homogenize and dehumanize their wearer, in an attempt to abstract theater into a geometric or robotic pursuit. His performers are made into dolls by their props, they stand in as symbols for natural humans, cut off from world events.[viii] In order to achieve this effect Schlemmer borrowed from two worlds, primitive simplicity and mechanized homogeny. The mask mimics the European idea of a primitive object, with its simple shapes and exaggerated features. The crude eyes and trapezoid nose could have been lifted off of a tribal mask, but the mask’s smooth metallic construction makes it an industrial object as well. This combination of impressions is imposed on the female wearer and bars her individuality. The woman is both turned into ‘the other’ through the exoticiszing mask, and made into a nobody through its machined anonymity. The primitive, inhuman, staring eyes allude to the deeper fear men reserve for the alternative: an unbridled, sexual, and creative woman. Men react to this concept with repulsion and attraction, erotic interest and punitive subjugation.

Shrouding her face is an act of subjugation, as is a bloody corpse presented by Dix. They both represent the culmination of the male fantasy of control, the violence inherent within them underscoring how infantile these attempts at oppression really are. By controlling the woman’s gaze, the masters also control her agency, or her ability to control her creative output. A close parallel can be seen in the physical institution of architecture, where the gendered spaces of Loos and Le Cobusier again deprive the modern woman of her vision. [ix] In architectural space the simplified and fetishized mask has its counterpart in the masculine treatment of the feminine interior. Beatriz Colomina uses Josephine Baker’s house as an example, where the architects neutralized the occupant by putting her on display in a voyeuristic swimming pool, making her a fetishized and coded object. As an object she has been removed of her interior and has become all surface.[x] The superficial woman does not exist as a creative equal to the man who positioned her so; she turns away from the camera, visionless. This type of discourse puts the advances of the new woman in perspective as her position in the world is still modified and limited by masculine conceptions of visuality and space. These concepts, embodied by the Bauhaus and its masters, physically contain and enshroud the woman.

The masculine institutionalized power of the Bauhaus becomes inscribed on this image through the contrast of what is identifiable and what is not. Regard the name: Woman with Schlemmer Mask in Breuer Chair, by Erich Consemüller. The mask belongs to Schlemmer, the Chair to Breuer, and the photo to Consemüller. All these men's artistic achievements swirl around in perfect recognition, while she remains faceless, nameless, and sightless. The objects have more identity than she does, because they have been vaunted by history. In contrast, her dress belongs to Lis Beyer,[xi] a product of the same school that produced the mask, chair, and photographer. She is given no credit, as her role is antithetical to the myth of male procreation. The woman is blinded, visionless, and objectified, still caught in the control of misogynist visual representation. The focal depth prizes the chair over her features; the mask contains her expression and self-expression. She is simply a commodity to expedite the creative machine for men, to spirit them along like a disempowered muse. She is a faceless cog, a replicable agent of capitalism.

These objects and methods are certainly commodities. The photograph, the specified mask, and the industrial chair: all are objects of reproduction and mass production. Their value is not in their uniqueness or creativity but in their vacuous homogeny. By placing the new woman in such surroundings she certainly is modern, as modern and as disempowered as an assembly line tool. Yet unlike the Breuer chair the model was manipulated into this position through sexual power play. Women are inscribed with the inhuman side of modernity, the machine aesthetic of replicable anonymity.[xii] Dix silenced and dehumanized women through murder, leaving a corpse behind. The Bauhaus’ method of silencing is much more effective, because the viewer is unaware any violence took place. Anonymity goes both ways, however, it is possible to realize her oppression as applicable to all Weimar woman who were marginalized. The image can be recreated as a symbolic portrait of Hannah Hoch, Marianne Brandt, or countless other women artists who have been wrapped up by the masculine hierarchy and have been childishly barred from participating in the creative game. When women cannot participate in the creative, external world, they must not retreat further into the domestic realm and leave the public space unchallenged. That space is not intrinsically masculine, it has just been made masculine, and it can be unmade.

[i] Eric Weitz, “Bodies and Sex, Sexuality and the New Woman” from Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy, New Jersey: Princeton, 2007, pg. 310.
[ii] Axel Eggebrecht, “Machen wir uns nichts vor: Ein aufrichtiger Brief,” in Die Fraue von Morgen, pg. 121 from Weitz, Ibid, pg. 311.
[iii] Maria Tatar, Lustmord: sexual murder in Weimar Germany. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995.
[iv] Ibid. pg. 81.
[v] Anja Baumhoff, “Woman of the Bauhaus- A Myth of Emancipation” in Bauhaus, Eds. Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, Cologne: Könemann Verlagsgesellschaft, 2005.
[vi] Janet Lungstrum, “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity” in Katharina von Ankum Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, California: UC Press, 1997.
[vii] Karl Hubbuch, Nude in Bauhaus Chair, 1928.
[viii] Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls” in Art Bulletin; Dec2003, Vol. 85 Issue 4, pg. 731.
[ix] Beatriz Colomina, “The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism,” in Beatriz Colomina, Sexuality and Space, New Jersey: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992.
[x] Ibid. pg. 94.
[xi] Juliet Koss, “Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls” in Art Bulletin; Dec2003, Vol. 85 Issue 4, pg. 731.
[xii] Ibid. pg. 724-745.

Texting Conversation

--How's the homework coming?

~~Pretty well, I'm just getting into an essay that has been sitting in the back of my mind for a long time, and once I get started i always realize that it won't be as hard as I thought. So I'm feeling productive and relieved.

--Oh fantastic :) That's the best kind of feeling. Well maybe not the best. But it's up there for sure.

~~Yeah, top 3 when it comes to homework.

--Ha, that's a lot of qualifiers... That's like "when you're in the street, depending on the street, i bet you were definitely in the top three..." :)

~~Haha. Yes. I might even qualify it more, if you will, by saying it's in the top three when it comes to doing homework on a Saturday evening during the last couple weeks of school :) Better. Or better yet, when it comes to doing homework on a saturday evening during the last couple weeks of school when your name is Jessica Gilmore. And when you are wearing blue shoes. Yes. Perfect.

--I bet there's been at some point in time another Jessica Gilmore wearing blue shoes that has done homework in the last few weeks of classes that hates that feeling. What now?

~~Well, she was probably on drugs or had recently been through a dramatic breakup or was hungry or sleepy or had a name change or had more teal than blue shoes. There's no way someone wearing blue shoes named Jessica Gilmore studying on a saturday evening in the last couple weeks of finals could possibly NOT feel productive and relieved somewhere in the top three homework elicited emotions. :)

--Wow. Awesome text. Are you stopping to have dinner any time soon?

Melrose #3

It’s 2:12 AM, technically 12.3.8. I’m sitting on my bed in white Woods Cross Lacrosse Shorts and a pink vneck that barbara dyed. I just got out of the shower. My bed is sitting on the ground. It is from ikea and comes with risers but they wobble and I want a solid bed for all the nights I’m making sweet sweet love to gentlemen callers. My bed has white sheets that are turning brown because I never wash them :) I have three pillows, a red one, a black one that would have yellow writing on it if it wasn’t inside-out, and a grey and black one that matches the grey and black squared down blanket I have, which are from ikea as well. Also on my bed is damien, the stuffed dog that Davie Supinger gave me when he asked me to prom Junior year, I use him when I am reading in bed, and Michelle’s yellow fleece blanket with pink orange and brown flowers on it. My phone is my alarm these days, so it sits on my bed somewhat tucked into damien against the wall. I used to have a little boxlike thing to keep it in, taped to the wall, but it came down one day and I haven’t put it back up. On my wall is a sticker with a picture of Jimi Hendrix and a quote: “When the Power of Love overcome the Love of Power the World Will Know Peace,” along with 3 wire art pieces: Jared’s face, a face of a boy in my art class last year, and a smaller wire of a drummer. Then there are 14 pictures on my wall by a local artist who’s name I cannot remember. There are 3 rows of 5, one picture fell down. That I also have not put back. I think this is because I hope to move soon and don’t feel motivated to fix things. Near the light switch is an I Voted sticker and two paintings that belong to sara of Buddha. My roommate, Megan Heiner, is not here tonight. Her bed is made. It is not on the floor like mine, so she has a lot of stuff under it. My half of the room always looks messier because I don’t have that space to hide things in. The closet doors are made so only one of our sides can be showing at one time. One or neither. Right now mine is showing. I sort of have my clothes organized from lightest to darkest. There are a few things that aren’t exactly in the right spot. On our bedroom door is my coat rack with a million of my coats on it. I have a small “bedside table,” a simple single drawer, open right now. Lots of papers and notebooks and cds and such on top and inside. The last real thing in my room is a 3-drawer “dresser” with clothes in it. I should get ride of some clothes. Sleeping in the room down the hall is Jannali Wood. Seeca Larson is in Centerville at her best friend Janelle’s house. Our kitchen is a disaster, dishes and crap everywhere. Always. The living room isn’t too messy right now. Seeca just put up a tree. Christmas! But it’s fake, small ish, has a million ornaments on it, which isn’t always bad, but when they are tacky... and it has colored lights. I am stuck on my family’s ways with Christmas trees I suppose. Our front door is red and has a 3 on it. 1162 E 400 S #3 SLC, UT 84102. Melrose, if you will. Sleeping above me is Alex and possibly Eric Redbird. Chase Gentry used to sleep directly above me, but his gf got home from her mission about a month ago and he moved out because they are getting married on the 20th of this month. Freaky deaky. Sleeping below me is Bob Jensen and Benjamin Bailey. There you have it. Melrose. The glorious life of 195 a month. I need to pay the power bill, asap.