From Light-Saraf Films: Calvin Black was a folk artist who lived in California's Mojave Desert and created more than 80 life-size female dolls, each with its own personality, function, and costume. He also built the "Bird Cage Theater," where the dolls perform and sing in voices recorded by the artist. The film works on two levels. One is the documentation of the artist's legacy and commentary on women: grotesque female figures moving in the desert wind and the theater with its frozen "actresses," protected by his widow from a world she views as hostile. The other is the re-creation of the artist's vision through the magic of film, as the camera enables the dolls to move and sing and brings theater to life as the artist imagined it.
What are the chances that I would be reading about Michael Jackson in Lipstick Traces on the day he died? It freaked me out a little. Typically, the only time anyone reads about Michael Jackson nowadays is when he is in the news for having done something terrible. Just a weird coincidence, then, but still. What follows is a chunk from the book that especially stood out. Read on: By 6 July 1984, when the Jacksons played the first show of their "Victory" tour, in Kansas City, Missouri - thirty years and a day after Elvis Presley made his first record in Memphis, Tennessee - Jacksonism had produced a system of commodification so complete that whatever and whoever was admitted to it instantly became a new commodity. People were no longer consuming commodities as such things are conventionally understood (records, videos, posters, books, magazines, key rings, earrings necklaces pins buttons wigs voice-altering devices Pepsis t-shirts underwear hats scarves gloves jackets - and why
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