Perhaps I'm allergic to Republicans...

...since I don't know what else would have affected me so violently. I woke up this morning with a swollen tongue from an allergic reaction. I developed hives that spread with a virulence rivalling that of Bill Frist's Justice Sunday. And I learned that the House passed The Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, which ought to be called The Abolishment of Girls' Personhood Act. But Republicans get to name everything these days, so CIANA it is.

Ostensibly, this law is designed to prevent "abortion mills" from luring pregnant girls from states that require parental notification into states that don't. This applies all those places that place sexy ads about abortion, the ones that glam it up to lure young girls into their clutches, the ones that make abortion the fashionable thing to do. All those thousands of places, just waiting on the other side of the Tennessee state line. Maybe Planned Parenthood, with their smart, responsible messaging and ability to convey life-saving information, will finally be able to get a foothold in the women's health market.

CIANA requires that pregnant girls from states that require parental notification get that notification regardless of the laws of the state they've travelled to. As Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler said, "It would in effect make the young girl carry the laws of her state on her back wherever she goes." And it would make it a federal crime for any non-parent adult to transport the child to a non-notification state. And it would require physicians to notify the girl's parents, or else the physicians, too, will be charged with a federal crime. Suddenly everything that empowers young women to make this difficult, personal decision becomes a federal crime.

All of this, according to anti-choice politicos, to prevent "secret abortions:" girls forced into having an abortion by abusive boyfriends. Right.

All of this removes a girl's personhood and reduces her to a pregnant uterus subject to the whims of a reactionary conservative anti-choice movement and the politicians who respond to them. It neglects the possibility that a young woman might not be able to gain parental permission (due to incest or any number of other abusive situations) and denies her the counsel of a non-parent, responsible adult to see to it that her body and her wishes are respected.

Supporters of the act say that they believe firmly that the decision to terminate a pregnancy should rest with the young woman's parents. Be they abusive, conservative, or simply wanting to punish their daughter for "getting herself pregnant," they get to make the decision for her.

This act has taken away young women's right to choose. It can only survive judicial scrutiny if the judiciary concedes that a young woman is not entitled to personhood under the law. She will, in fact, be less of a person than the tissue of an embryo.

A version of this bill will be before the Senate this summer. Contact your senators. Now.

Wal-Mart vs. the Pope

This JPII mania has gone too far. Even our local PBS station has become infected, afflicted with the strange notion that both Catholics and non-Catholics want to know every cultish detail about the selection of their new buddy Benedict. So they've decided to change their schedule, to jump into the sensationalist mix and broadcast a special report that will rival the special reports of every other cable and network news program.

And so it will be done. The Pope trumps Wal-Mart.

For these reasons our local affiliate has displaced a broadcast of Frontline that I have awaited for weeks. Rather than an in-depth consumer education story that Americans deserve to hear and need to know we get to visit, once again, with The Men of the Cloth.

PBS, you have let me down. The last bastion of neutrality, I felt you were immune to the religious macho-mania that has swept our worried nation. I was willing to overlook it when you gave Tucker Carlson such power through Crossfire; I was even willing to overlook the addition of the Journal Editorial Report.* And now this.

I am very disappointed in you.

At least I can watch it online.

*Eric Alterman speaks to this issue much better than I do. Read him here.

For Mary

I met my neighbor the other day. Her name is Mary, and her husband is Bob. They live across from me on our narrow, one-way street and I've seen them many times getting in and out of their little tan car. They're pretty old.

Bob always has to help Mary down their front steps, and back up again when they return. He holds her by her upper arm to steady her as they make their way up the five steps. Mary makes a habit of standing on her front porch for long stretches of time, doing what appears to be absolutely nothing at all. She just stands there under the awning.

A few days ago, I was walking to my car and Mary called me over to her. She has a raspy, jaunty voice. She asked me if my name was Sally. We talked in the street for a few minutes. At one point she pulled me over to her so I wouldn't get hit by a car. She was pretty strong.

When I got home later that day, I was still thinking about Mary. She was so interesting and strange. So I wrote a poem.


Mary

She always wears wide black
wraparound sunglasses. After lunch
she stands on her stoop for an hour or two
under the shade and shelter of
a rusting aluminum awning
as if awaiting formal guests.
She waves and waves me over, but
I don’t recognize her without her glasses,
and her yellowed smile, too many teeth
pushing forward, distracts me from her face.
I believe her

that they steal the cars around here,
and that’s why she watches
from the porch, since she used to know
everyone up the street – here she flourishes
her arm like a girl, like a dancer – but now

they have all died, or moved
on to bigger homes that they have
purchased. Still, her yard is kept
and seasonally appropriate, mechanized
deer in the winter, spinning pastel
windmills in the summer, green wooden
cut-outs of frogs and dwarves each spring.
I believe her that things just aren’t

friendly anymore, like she thinks I am. Perhaps
she thinks we will be good neighbors, we will
wave hello from our porches, drink
lemonade on her stoop and watch
silently for thieves. I’m not young, she
says, but I get it.

The name game...

So, I changed the name of this rag. I felt that "Icebox Plums" was too fluffy, too prim. It was kid gloves, broken bindings and dust jackets. It was a sneaky lover, but only if you recognized that I was paying homage to a fantastic poet. Perhaps I will resurrect it if I decide to start blogging on literature.

A skirt, however, is a woman. It is sexy. It is smart. And in this case, it is also a form of persuasion. Read on.

Looking for a few good women...

There is a new brand of feminism out there. If you believe that the government is only in power to fuck things up, so much so that you think that date rape is not a crime that can be fairly prosecuted, you might be an ifeminist. If you think the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional and that it's great family fun to train your 6-year-old daughter to kill with a rifle, you might be an ifeminist. If you think that the existance of women's studies programs is evidence that universities should not receive public funding, you might be an ifeminist, or Individualist Feminist.

Athough they're really just a troop of libertarians masquerading as feminists, the ifeminists' increasing presence on the web makes me squirm. These days, feminism has enough trouble with the apathy of the under-thirty crowd and the political disconnect that the mass media has created even amongst self-avowed feminists - pseudo-feminist movements only exacerbate these problems in our tired, thirsty movement.

Ask a woman today if she's a feminist and there's a good chance she will view your question as an accusation. Feminism has lost its course. Political action is rare and stigmatized. Any action is seen as radical. There is a lack of cohesion among young, culture-influenced feminist women who grew up in a more gender-equal era than our mothers could have imagined. The result is something in the zeitgeist that was articulated is this irreverent cover story in 1998:





The politics aren't there anymore. We have the outragous notion that "W is for Women." Wearing a "girls Rock!" t-shirt is considered a feminist action. Becoming a knitter is a form of self-affirmation and signals a self-conscious return to the feminine arts, and this, too, is seen as taking action. The members of NOW are all frizzy-haired old ladies and the grrl zines are disappearing faster than Google can remove them from their search engine.

I am tired of this. If you know of any organizations that are working right now to further feminism - ways that involve 20- and 30-something women and include more than weekly reading circles of Bust Magazine(even though I *heart* Bust Magazine) - email me. Better than that, email me and then plan to join up yourself. I'll need the company.

Boxing Squirrels and Baby Chimps: The Finale

If you're one of the people who just isn't interested in this topic anymore, you at least have to scroll to the bottom of this post. You have got to check it out. Really.

For those (nice, smart, beautiful) people who are interested in this last post on this topic, there are conclusions that I have reached. I will offer them to you. To begin, here are some squirrels in their natural habitat:



This is what they do in the trees where we can't see them. Why else would 19th century taxidermist Edward Hart pose them like that? Perhpas because Ed, like most modern taxidermists, considered himself an artist.

In covering the World Taxidermy Championships, I had to learn to divorce my concept of what hunters do from my understanding of taxidermy as a trade. Try to forget that most taxidermists are also seasoned hunters. That will only confuse you and weaken my point.

The reason the trade show felt so much like a craft show was because it was a craft show. The taxidermists, it turns out, obsess over the anatomy of the animals they mount. They study whole carcasses, read piles of physiology books, and sit in their hunting blinds just to watch and learn how an animal moves, how it behaves.

A taxidermist's pride, it turns out, doesn't come from mounting the giant head of a dead beast because they're glad the beast is dead, or because they are seriously insensitive. It comes from their ability to mount a lifelike pose. As one judge said, "they ought to look like they're about to breathe." And the good ones do. I can't tell you how many times I turned around in the judging area to come face to face with a deer - and caught my breath.

The result is that the animals and their reconstructed habitats are reduced to paint-by-numbers kits without any apparent reverence for the lives they are imitating through the use of putty, glue, glass, and plastic. The goal is to create an animal that is the quintessential example of its species, not to celebrate the life of each trophy buck.

All of this implies a certain arrogance that is at the heart of my questioning on this issue. As humans we are at the pinnacle of the food chain, and hunters and their taxidermist friends know this and live it. It's true that they're most often conservationists and that the fees they pay for hunting and fishing licenses cover the costs of land and habitat preservation in our parks and open spaces. They feel justified in their actions and often rationalize that they are performing a service, controlling burgeoning populations resulting from irresponsible land usage.

Honestly, though. I understand that argument when it comes to deer. But bears? Coyotes? Or any other predatory animal? I interviewed one guy who said I might think differently if I had ever visited a slaughterhouse. Unlike livestock, the animals he hunts "have a chance" to survive. As if the rifle is the great equalizer. And taxidermists are not exempt from this accusation: the men and women I spoke with absolutely love to work with exotic, endangered species.

As humans, we often assume dominance over arenas where we have no business presiding. We feel it is our right to shoot, stuff and mount these animals in poses that typify our perceptions of them: the snarling coyote, the swiping bear, the alligator eating a snake. We love the machismo-soaked stories of the kill and the capture. We say things like:

"There's room for all god's creatures,
right next to my mashed potatoes."*

*A note: This lovely sentiment was gracing the front of a t-shirt that was hung up across the way from a life-size mount of a black bear with a plastic bag over its head. As if that didn't sum it up...

In conclusion, I will leave you with something completely disturbing. It was the wildest thing I saw all day. These are freeze-dried pets. You can keep Fluffy by the fire forever. They are 100% real, skin and all. And yes, that is a baby chimp. This is another of Jay's photos you can see at Ambivalent Domain, the Mad Art Gallery opening June 3rd. You should check it out.



If you want a postcard for the show, email me your mailing info. Ciao.

Cows, cover your eyes.

I called my sister today. She had just watched someone slaughter a cow and I wanted to know how it went. She's an animal science major. She likes to make dinner conversation about bull castration. This was par for the course.

I had read her blog earlier today and learned that the slaughter involved decapitation. So, naturally, my first question was about the instrument at hand. Do they use something like a circular saw? Or is it more like a guillotine? I wanted to know. I wanted to picture it. I would, of course, regret this later.

"They just use a knife," she said. A knife? I tried to picture it. Was it a machete? Does a circus strongman with a stomach of steel just saw the thing clean off? Just how does this process work, anyway?

"They stun it, then hang it up by it's hind legs and cut it's throat," she said. "They use the cow's blood pressure to pump out the blood," she said. And then, "Hey, my workout class is about to start, so I gotta go." Just like that. Hm.

Apparently there's some also flailing and some involuntary mooing involved, but I didn't want to get into all that. The hanging slit-throat cow image is enough. It's the kind of image that will flash before your eyes when you're eating your Cheerios one fine morning and make you push your bowl away.

But of course, I wanted to learn more. I did some more research into the topic, which I learned is termed exsanguination. You can learn all about it on this nifty website. There's even a flash animation of a cow being exsanguinated and lots of cartoon blood shooting all over the place.

To be fair to my sister (who is going to veterinary school in the fall, by the way), this experience was necessary. Euthanasia is the only recourse for a very sick or very lame animal. She may have to do it someday when she is a highly successful large animal vet (large animals, not large sister). She didn't vomit. She didn't even faint. She's one tough mama.

and now for something completely different...

I need a break from taxidermy. I dreamed about a half-bodied deer mount last night. It was lunching on a the green sprouts of a young tree. It stopped and stared at me. This is too much. So I'm taking a breather and writing something else. About shaving.

When I was 19, I decided to stop shaving. I was a budding feminist and I had decided that enough was enough. I wasn't wearing pink, shaving my legs, or painting my nails. It felt like a one-woman revolution, but one that wasn't quite joyous or liberating. In truth, no one much noticed and I felt very anti-sexy. I felt hairy. Frustrated pleadings from my mother provided the only (mild) satisfaction I gained from this grrl adventure. I went back to the razor.

* * *

As of today, I have not shaved in a week. I was going to shave last night, but I just didn't feel up to it. I was tired. The hair on my legs is now 1/8 of an inch long. It is reaching the soft, silky phase. It makes me feel earthy and large. It makes me wonder how this whole shaving thing got started. So I've done some research.

Turns out that Neanderthal men were pulling out body hair eons ago to make body painting and tatooing easier, to reduce breeding grounds for lice, small rodents (!), and other wee nasties, and to eliminate the beard as a hand-hold during combat. Since the men trimmed their beards with sharpened stones to make life easier and eating less messy, superstition held that a man with a long, heavy beard was nearing the end of his life. Some men singed their hair off with burning twigs (I recently tried this on my favorite photo-maker to rid his ears of unsightly bristles. It didn't work so well. The hairs just curled up close to the skin so I couldn't get to them. We got the idea to do it from the two old men in Kitchen Stories, a gem of a Norwegian movie. They did it to each other. We ended up using scissors to finish the job).

Egyptian men shaved with copper razors to be fashionable, and women began concocting scary mixtures of arsenic, quicklime and starch to remove unsightly hair. Yikes.

Seems that the Grecians and Romans solidified the societal requirement to shave. Women began a "by any means necessary" crusade to rid themselves of body hair with regimens that included razors, pumice stones, depilitories, and crude tweezers. It is said that Alexander the Great, who went beardless to show off his striking profile, started the trend of the regular shave for men. If you conquer half the world, you get to set trends.

Women started to shave their pits around the turn of the century (they called it "smoothing"), and shaved, naked legs became the symbol of sex appeal during WWII when silk stockings became unattainable. Lest you think things have just gotten worse and worse for us, ladies, some things have changed for the better: during much of the middle ages and through the Victorian period, aristoctatic women were expected to remove all hair from their eyebrows, forehead, face, and neck. Like Whoopie Goldberg, but freakishly white. And if she was French, she also shaved her head to better wear those crazy powdered wigs.

In 1904, the first patent for a disposable razor was granted to King Camp Gilette. Sounds like a fop to me. Here is the diagram for it. I don't think I'd want it any where near my legs.

Tonight, alas, I will shave my legs. I have a much better razor than that contraption up there. Besides, it's not so bad. It's sexy, it's smooth, and everybody's doing it.

* * *

Stay tuned, my lovelies. Very soon, I will post the third and final installment of the taxidermy epic. I will answer those pressing questions. I will reflect. Check back.

Shot, stuffed and mounted ... part 2 of 3 (or 4)

Oh my. I just got through transcribing more than two hours of interviews from my visit to the World Taxidermy Championships. There is so much to tell, dear reader. I want you to be able to absorb every facinating detail, so I'll split it up into two posts. I wouldn't want anyone to lose sleep, toss and turn in bed tonight, tortured by the effort to envision my entire day after one reading. I'm always looking out for you.

So, yeah. The World Taxidermy Championships. Listening to the interviews really took me back to that smelly hotel in Springfield, rekindled fond memories of fur and putty and the skin artists who mold them.

Artists? You betcha. The trade show at the Championships had the same vibe as your local art supply store: high-minded artisans obsessed with their craft who never fear societal backlash from lording their superiority over lowly customers. Ever try to buy a tube of paint there and not know exactly which brand flows best, or (god forbid) not know what makes good paint good? But I digress. The skewering of ArtMart shall have to wait. And besides, the taxidermists were much friendlier than that.

But really, the trade show at the Crowne Hotel was huge. Entire tables of turkey heads (some mysteriously branded - yes, with fire - "John 3:16"), glass eyes, handpainted acrylic eyes, paints, glues, putties, textured fur, faux lily pads and grass, deep-frozen whole bobcats to take home and mount on your own, colorful pelts of thousands of animals, and the aptly named deer capes (if you put the skin of the deer head on your head, the body skin falls just like a cape flowing over your shoulders as if you were Conan the Barbarian or Highlander or some random Celt from 70s television).

And then there are the forms. Forms are what the tanned skins get stretched over to mount the dead animals, and they feature bone structure and musculature of the animal to be mounted. What I thought was a skinned head stuffed with sawdust is actually a skin stretched over a foam polyurethane mold, or form. Some taxidermists become sculptors and get paid to sculpt skinless animals; the sculptures are then cast and used to make hundreds and hundreds of replicas to be sold at trade shows for around $30. Folks can mount anything as long as they have the right form. And boy, do they ever.

What you see below is a raccoon form, hanging as it would from a tree. Cute, right? This photo is one of several that my favorite photo-maker, Jay Fram, may be exhibiting in his upcoming gallery opening at Mad Art Gallery on June 3rd. Come see it if you can. If you think what you've read here is interesting, imagine a room full of images like the one of the nude coon below. Crazy, right?

Shot, stuffed and mounted ... part one

You have waited long and with much anticipation. You want to know how the other half lives. Here's how it unfolded:

First, the drive: it's Illinois. If you've travelled through Illinois, you know that I need say no more. If you have not had the pleasure of visiting this fine flat state, you should know that my describing this two-hour drive would seriously hamper any pains I have taken to make this an interesting story.

Springfield is a small town boasting their claim as the hometown of the late great President Abraham Lincoln, and home to Lincoln Land Community College. A haven for mediocre strip mall developers, Springfield plays host to America's most heralded fast food chains and one particularly tasty Thai restaurant. The Crowne Plaza Hotel, home of the 2005 World Taxidermy Championships, towers over the highway, a beast of a building amidst a field of manicured lawns and hot black parking lots. My partner in crime drives a truck, and for this we were thankful. I don't think there was a single passenger car tucked in among the rows of pickup trucks and trailers.

After checking in and receiving our press passes from an unpleasant, Aqua-Net addicted woman at the Crowne reception desk, I rode the escalator with my favorite photo-maker to the mezzanine level where the judging of the World was taking place. Cigarette smoke was easing into the main hallway from a tapestried smoking lounge on the far side of the hotel, men in foam trucker caps and tight-fitting stonewashed jeans were congretating near the snack counter, and a weathered gentleman in a tan Izod jacket was standing at the ready to check our credentials.

We passed into the restricted access area, the main ballroom of the hotel where the Championship entries were being stroked, poked, tugged, and peered into by about fifteen judges. We were sternly warned against bothering the judges and allowed into the main judging area, where we were surrounded by hundreds of heads and whole bodies of mounted animals, divided into the Masters division, the Professional division, and the (often amusing) Novice division.

The sheer magnitude was disorienting. I had entered a dimension inhabited solely by heads and torsos of furry mammals and their slick, shiny fishy friends. There were the standard deer heads (staring, sniffing the wind, rubbing their antlers on tree stumps, caught in barbed wire), some with the beginnings of their front legs mounted but cut off at the knee to stand floating eerily amongst reeds or fake stone outcroppings. There was a creepy display of two deer heads poised as if standing around a frozen lamp post (complete with fake icicles, snow drifts, and stuffed squirrels crawling down from above). One deer had gotten his fat pink tongue stuck to the frozen pole while the other rubbed his antlers on the pole near the ground. No amount of commentary on my part could do this piece justice.

Joining the deer for this party at the Crowne were gads of turkeys (fighting, flying, lying dead in faux grass), bears (growling, roaring, swiping at prey), wild boar, elk, fish, badgers, snakes, alligators (one alligator eating a snake), mice, bats, zebras, coyotes (hunting, howling, sleeping), foxes, raccoons, wolves, and mountain lions. There was a bengal tiger, a kangaroo, and a black-and-white colobus monkey. There were baby animals, including a farmhouse display of a full-body colt, newborn pig, and various duck hatchlings. You name it, they've probably mounted it.

* * *

Dear reader, there is so much more to tell. But it's getting to be late and I need my beauty rest. I still haven't downloaded my recorded interviews with taxidermists, hunters, judges, and trade show salesmen. And I haven't shared with you the answers to the pressing, vexing questions I posed in an earlier posting.

I will be writing again very soon. Hang tight.

I have seen the dead.

And they were facinating. Friends, I have been so very busy. I went to the World Taxidermy Championships on Thursday and a report is forthcoming, I promise. Just give me a day or so and check back ... there is much to be told. For starters, the roots:

taxi.dermy: taxis (Latin: movement) + dermis (Latin: skin) = movement of the skin

... more (details, gruesome and otherwise) later.