Chapter 7: Of GHOST HOSTS, DISNEYLAND AND TEXTS SUBVERTED

 

Chapter 7: Of GHOST HOSTS, DISNEYLAND AND TEXTS SUBVERTED

​As for me, my entrance into the events began as the “Ghost Host" introducing the very first Soft Cyborg performances at these salons. The performances were filmed by Scott Hilton, and as the "host" came out, myself dressed in a clown mask found at a garage sale, gloves from Goodwill and a medical gown borrowed from a local hospital, I began laughing a broad, goofy laugh and introduced each performance section; a Big Bear painting a flower, the “Krazy Kat” who loved cereal more than life itself and the Trix/Tryx/Tricks Rabbit who attempted and failed to make a proper sculpture out of plaster, Froot Loops and milk.

​While "The Ghost Host" was named after the disembodied voice at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, the character and his behavior was completely different than the Paul Frees voice-track, except, perhaps in that they both took their participants on a kind of voyage through their creator's visions, one through a haunted space, the other through the mind of the Soft Cyborg--a kind of subversive amusement park ride in Lacanian, liminal space.

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Let's think for a moment about how stories and texts are subverted, despite their original intentions and are opened up to new interpretations. Within the Fantasyland attractions, for instance, little attention is given to the original, “authorized” narratives of the books and movies. Especially in rides like Alice or Pinocchio the narratives break down and are overturned, becoming new ride narratives.

​Because of this, often there is little chance for the rider to make sense of these rides in a traditional sense. At times, characters appear and disappear for no good reason, and events occur out of order. In Alice, for example, the White Rabbit appears at times when he is meant to be missing. The Queen of Hearts screams at riders unprovoked and the Mad Hatter's Tea Party occurs at the end of the tale.

​Pinocchio is one ride that especially contests the traditional narratives found in the book, film and the moralities of the park in favor of an amoral ambivalence. The savage interior of Pinocchio’s Daring Adventure is one of the many places in which Disneyland logic breaks down, and a cautionary tale transforms into a celebration of the vulgar and low. This “daring Adventure" is a breakneck of Carnivalesque imagery, ultimately turning Disney’s own messages against him.

​Pinocchio’s Daring Journey was originally meant (like Mr. Toad) to be an admonishment to children against the dangers of breaking the rules of society. This, however is not what occurs by the end of the ride.  Throughout the ride, walls are painted with scenes of Pinocchio’s temptation, in fact, Disney is meticulous in showing the threat and punishment of acting through desire. From the start, however, Disney’s intentions are thwarted. Riders begin at the gates to the puppet theatre, already mise-en-scene and Pinocchio is shown dancing on strings, already entrapped because he has succumbed to the temptations of sublimated sexual desire and the greed of fame. He has chosen an “actor’s life” (literally, he has chosen to be an active participant,) to take active control of his life and environment, and is no longer the passive puppet that many accuse Disney guests of becoming.

Like the civilized admonishment and implied threats throughout the park, this daring journey was also meant to be about the control of base emotions and the unregulated id (the child in us all.) In the adventure though, Pinocchio’s conscience, (Jiminy Cricket) is always shown attempting to catch up and only ever reaches the puppet at the end of the ride--when he has already safely returned home.  In this telling, Pinocchio never has to deal directly with his conscience.

Interestingly, this ride contains a Disney representation of a carnival. However, unlike the Bakhtinian carnival, riders are not meant to enjoy the ironically named “Pleasure Island.” Very quickly, any implied pleasure turns into menace. This is a manic, malicious carnival that hurls riders through at a breakneck pace while a loud calliope organ plays atonally in the background. As guests pass through a debaucherous orgy of smoking, gambling and sex, they are unnerved by the distant braying of donkeys—the threat of Pinocchio’s eventual transformation into beast. This is the ultimate fear of coupling with our own animal natures. To add to the threat, against the last wall before Pinocchio’s transformation can be seen a jumbled sexualized creature--a mixture of moving human and animal figures.

​Once Pinocchio has finally and utterly succumbed to all sorts of debauchery and has become a jackass, he is almost immediately swallowed by “Monstro the Whale.” The next scene immediately shows the “good fairy” returning Pinocchio home safely. Where Geppetto greets him with the words, “I’m so happy.” But something is amiss and the traditional story has been radically changed. Pinocchio has not renounced the ways of debauchery and sin. Within the ride, we do not see a moment in which the puppet has any change of heart. Any misgivings must be extrapolated from sources outside the ride—outside of this text. Instead, here, Pinocchio has to be saved only when events would surely have destroyed him. This Pinocchio has unremorsefully enjoyed all that the carnival has to offer, and (just barely) survived. To further show the lack of his awareness, in the final scene of the ride--Pinocchio has not become a boy. He has chosen to stay in this imperfect state. The traditional Happy Ending has been thwarted. Here, the attraction itself has “overturned” Disney’s narrative in favor of a new ambivalent one. Despite all of their scriptwriting, Imagineers have been incapable of controlling their own text.

​Here, Pinocchio becomes Soft Cyborg and shows that he has lost interest in becoming a real boy and instead has decided that rather than going back to being anything as silly as wood, or becoming flesh, it is now time to turn to plastic, foam and rubber. This is not mere musing, something is going on here and it may be zeitgeist--the flesh made plastic.

​It is certainly Soft Cyborg and it is this ambivalence toward humanity that inflects the Ghost Host's laugh and gives it such a threatening and haunting timbre—behind its almost silly. goofy guffaw. While the final effect of the Host, in toto, may have been more comedy than horror, this underscores an element that I had not been aware of at the time, but which has been there since the very first of my performances. The underlying tension between the Real and reality in my work reads very clearly as horror—a very Lacanian vision of terror that stings with knives.

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In a similar way, painter Lisa Yuskavage describes her work: "I like to think of my characters as “The Brood”… have you seen that movie? It is by Cronenberg. It is about a woman who is the main suspect in a series of brutal murders, but her perfect alibi is that she is locked up in a mental hospital, so (she) couldn’t have done the deeds… Then you find out that her...therapy is producing these creatures, which are manifestations or personifications of her different neurosis… They then go out and “heal” her by killing the responsible parties. Cool, huh?"

​While I don't like to think of my own work in such simple terms, nor as a kind of therapy, the idea that I am creating these characters, half-beings, mutations--all broken--seems to me to be a fertile space that may gain power as I move into the next phase in my work, most likely mixing my ghosts with pantomime. As I do move forward, I would not be surprised if many of my characters might even be presented as armless, leg-less, blind or otherwise un-whole--especially as I grow older, I think and it becomes clear that one cannot always count on the body to do what it is supposed to. In fact, this work may have already begun as we will see with the Diabetic Luchador--whose narrative is rocked by the highs and lows of diabetic blood flow.

 

Super Sugar Bear

​At the same performance of the Soft Cyborg, The Super Sugar Bear is an exemplification of the Soft Cyborg and how this manifesto was turned into performance, as well as being about the commodification of our bodies in the name of society and our allegiance to its hegemony. Here, I dressed up in the carcass of a giant grey teddy bear from which I had taken out all the stuffing. The name I used for the character was, of course, partly taken from the cartoon emcee in the beloved classic cereal commercials.  It is the personification of the toy emcees that I used to place outside frames as an undergraduate, but also more personally from a friend of my father's when I was growing up, who was part of the Chicano Art movement in California. He was called "Sugar Bear," and if I remember correctly, he might have even been my godfather! I actually remember asking my parents what this meant and being worried that he was going to take me away!

In the actual performance, I came onstage, really, Katherine's dining room dressed as a cute human-sized teddy bear, who mugged for the camera and elicited many oohs and ahs, much like I imagine a real teddy bear would if they had suddenly come to life. The bear then reached into an opening in the "bottom" of his bear suit and, mirroring the first art act for many of us, reached in and pulled out chocolate icing viscera that appeared to the audience to look like excreted body fluids and then proceeded to draw a big flower on the kitchen wall behind him.

​This reenactment of the primary act of creation is part of most of my performances and refers to the first painting I ever made as a toddler--a story that my parents love to point to as proof that I was always meant to be an artist. What I do know is that my parents apparently responded with pride and that particular die was irrevocably cast.

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In this first instance, however, I was unsure what I would draw until the very last moment when I chose to create a very simple, eidos of a flower.  In fact at the time I was thoroughly unhappy with my choice, even though it ended up being a very good chance opportunity that I now own completely and what started out as a flower has evolved and changed over time and has become an abstract pattern as in "Teaching a Hare to Tell Time," or become darker and more of a warning as the flower morphed into a painting of a nuclear explosion in "The Magician" segment of "When the Body Speaks” in 2017.

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KRAZY KAT

This "un-amusement park ride," introduced us to a whole menagerie of characters from a giant Trix/Tryx/Tricks Rabbit, a big, gray teddy bear, a ghostly clown creature and now the Krazy Cat.

​Much of my work and writing, including "Toward a Dada Dialectic and the Soft Cyborg," which I had just presented at the 2001 UCDavis Graduate Student Association Interdisciplinary Graduate Symposium, has been influenced by the idea of the "Carnivalesque" as described by Mikhail Bakhtin and the "Krazy Cat" is evidence of this. In actuality this character, which reminded me of some of comedian Tim Conway's slapstick characters or some modern-day puppetry was created using a Mickey Mouse stuffed teddy bear bought at the park, which when turned inside out actually ended up looking more like a cat—something akin to the conceptual opposite of a mouse, and should be seen as an overturning of "Mickey" in an absurdist, Carnivalesque, anti-hegemonic act.

​When I was a child I remember a cartoon dog that used to float up in the air in a state of what has to be described as orgasmic bliss, when he was given a doggie treat. I loved that doggie and was fascinated by how happy he would become when he received the object of his affection.

​Of course, I don’t have to reach so far back to find his contemporaries. Scooby Doo, for one will do anything to get his “Scooby Snacks.” He will easily apprehend the same villain that had eluded the "Scoobies" for the first half of each cartoon, yet he will happily overcome his own fears and attempt all sorts of inexplicable super-heroic feats for the promise of these snacks. He too becomes orgasmic and ecstatic in the presence of his main addiction—just like the Krazy Kat.

​Think of cereal commercials with their animated emcees, those spokes-chickens, muscle-bound Tigers and Sugar-bears. Think of the Trix Rabbit, who is named after the product of his affection—one that according to the logic of his mythos, he can never attain, because when he does, if he is not stopped by the children around him--he goes insane. This is true also about Sonny, the Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Crow, who wants nothing more than to be one with his General Mills cereal. But what drives these characters to be such all-consuming need machines?

​It is interesting that one of the ways to see the evolution of our society is as one of an increasing alienation of mankind from the baser needs of the human as animal. This is evident in our language, in our supermarkets and oddly, it is evident in our media. In fact, though, there are very few instances in the popular media in which the food chain is ever dealt with--excepting two very notable areas. Firstly, television commercials—of course, deal with food and feeding in very abstract ways—but still, it is a component of many of their one-minute narratives. Secondly, however, many of the narratives of cartoons continue to deal with the intricacies of the food chain, animal against animal, hunter and hunted, cat and mouse, vulture and rabbit, coyote and roadrunner all with the frustrated intention of feeding. These dramas continue to this very day in new Warner Brothers Cartoons, Ren and Stimpy and even on the Simpsons with the Itchy and Scratchy Show.

It is with these cartoon characters that we have allowed a kind of Lacanian imaginary space to grow—one in which we safely and with a distance allow our baser needs to be represented. The need to feed, which includes the need to kill, which is not pretty, clever, comforting or kind—as Morrissey said ages ago—"it is the unholy stench of murder." However, again, we see a kind of sublimation—a fetishization which occurs and allows us to distance ourselves from the baseness of these dark, animalistic desires and which makes them palatable, which in turn allows us to deal with even deeper issues than mere feeding—issues of addiction and even of desire—again, from the safe distance of sublimation into the alien/alienation.

​In fact because the text is opened to us by way of the perceived distance that is allowed us through alienation and fetishization—it actually becomes easier to see why these cartoon spokes-creatures love these products so much—they are in fact addicted to them. Desire and addiction fuel their narratives. Cocoa Puffs and Trix are the drugs that they seek. They wrap their existences around these products; they promote them and thus they become part of them. This is evident when we look closer at characters like Toucan Sam, and Sonny, the emcee for General Mills’ Cocoa Puffs, who are even the same color as the products that they promote. It is a part of their cellular makeup and especially Sonny seeks to return himself to his originary place of utter bliss, one in which he and cocoa puffs can become one.

​We have always been asked to imagine that they are indeed real beings—these cartoon emcees. These characters are seen to exist in a world that is very much like our own. Like Roger Rabbit, they interact freely with the humans they encounter. These commercial emcees, too, seem to exist via a set of defining rules, their existences calculated to make others happy, they are also incapable of passing up the punch-line to a joke and they seem to exist as slaves to our, and especially their own passions. Sonny, Toucan Sam and the Trix Rabbit may be cartoons, soft and furry and made of painted cells like Roger, but they are something more—they live in and effect our world.

​This is an odd assertion to make about characters that are, in fact creations of corporate men and women—whose sole agenda is to sell a product. But if one looks around, she will see that these hybrid creatures are in fact everywhere, from Mickey Mouse, The Michelin Man, the Jolly Green Giant, talking and singing dogs on TV at X-mas™, even Snuggles the living teddy-bear—we must admit that we are surrounded by these grotesqueries and I will make many more assertions before I am through.

​Let’s look at perhaps, the most well known of these creations, better known than even Bugs Bunny, I am of course speaking of Mickey Mouse. A moment ago, I spoke of the Bakhtinian idea that comes from the caves and grottoes of the mythic world, images that have come to be called grotesque. In these ancient drawings and carvings animals and humans were seen to be interacting, often in vulgar and obscene ways, at other times and throughout history we have seen fantastic images of men and women who may have been the offspring of these grotesque carnivals. Mythology is filled with Minotaurs, Hecubii, etc. those creatures, which are a mixture of man and animal. However, now these creatures have lost their connections to the real animals, they once mimicked, they are now mutant fabrications instead of having connections to their real counterparts.

​These are creatures like Mickey Mouse, who wear pants and shoes, who live in 50’s houses and who own other animals, speak openly and who’s jobs seemingly are to act as spokes-creatures and film-stars. But there is something more here, something that gives these creatures, perhaps, an even greater claim to being real than you and I. No longer happy with Pinocchio’s simple desire to be a boy, to be human, to enter our world and be one of us. These Soft-Cyborgs are claiming immortality. They are immortality machines, hegemony in its furriest of forms.

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Tryx Rabbit

 

​It was this Soft Cyborg treatise that influenced the first group of performances that I presented at Katherine's apartment--once again mixing genres--what began as a conceptual writing exercise became live performances.  Like the Krazy Kat, the Trix, Tricks or Tryx Rabbit continued the adventures of the Soft Cyborg as the ultimate consumer/emcee creature. In this performance, donning the head of a stuffed bunny and wearing a tank top, I proceeded to mix plaster and the fruit-loops from the earlier Krazy Cat performance in a failed attempt at making a sculptural art piece.

The Tryx Rabbit, Sugar Bear and Krazy Kat recall the cartoon emcees who hawked the wares of our collective childhoods. It is also as emcees that, by selling their animated souls to monopolies and mega-corporations that the Soft Cyborg has become larger, longer-lasting, stronger, more powerful than the men that created them. The Soft Cyborg is immortal and can no longer die when its creator/s die/s. They simply acquire a strange voice, a new stance, realistic shadowing and continue on. The Soft Cyborgs have become demi-hegemonic, that is, they continue as long as the product they speak for continues to sell. This sell/cell/cellular aspect of the soft cyborg is fascinating and puts our mere mortal bodies to shame.

​In Roger Rabbit’s tale, Roger, who made those first tentative steps into our world in the thirties only to find that he missed the comfort of his own world, we can find a system that has begun to invert itself. One in which it is humans who are attempting to enter the world of these cartoon characters, to trade in their flesh and blood for the promise of immortality. That is the secret of the Soft Cyborg—this has always been about us—about saving ourselves from the artificial constructs that we have created and which are killing us.