Strange Flesh Week 12

I'm putting the word count bar on pause until I finish reorganising and rewriting several huge chunks of Parts Two and Three - right now the numbers are just going up and down meaninglessly. We'll see we're I'm up to when the dust clears.

I didn't get much work done as I was ill this week (from Tuesday until yesterday evening) with another of those odd bouts of queasiness and wooziness - a combination of fever and minor tummy trouble which I suspect of being a flareup of my mild Crohn's disease (I'm off to the specialist for advice). But I did manage to break down the mess chapter-by-chapter, so I know roughly where all the bits go.

The Face

Waiting to be posted for lo, these many moons: Loo Brealy's piece on performing nude as Helen of Troy. It's beautifully written - what is it with these literate British actors? The bit that struck me in particular was this:

"Exposing myself to 75 strangers a night has made me think a lot about what psychologist Susie Orbach calls 'body terror', the chip in your brain that tells you your body isn’t good enough but if you buy this cream, eat this thing, do this exercise, you can look like Rhianna and you will be happy. The idea that to be beautiful you must have one specific body: poreless skin, endless legs, tits that would get stuck in a champagne glass."

One specific body. One specific face, too - what I call the Face, the identical mask you see on the cover of the magazines at the supermarket.

As it so often does these days, my mind travelled from these thoughts to the magical world of Kpop, which challenges the white fan to learn how to tell Asian faces (and bodies) apart, something we've probably never had to bother doing before.* To borrow Loo's words, Kpop idols are "bleached, waxed, sprayed, toned, sliced, photo-shopped", and their every expression, gesture, and word is picked, edited, packaged, and analysed, by the entertainment media and the fans alike. It can make you intensely aware of how much it's all appearance and performance. A surprising number of fans, though, swallow the illusion whole.


*Jon and I are watching a Kdrama called Chuno ("Slave Hunter")**, a terrific, award-winning show in which everyone is wearing historical Korean dress. Which means I had two characters confused for a while because they were wearing the same kind of hat. (I feel slightly less a dim-witted Westerner when I remember that I can't remember who half the people in Game of Thrones are, either.)

** Try to imagine Monkey with no magic and a ton of swearing.