REALITY SEPTA

This is a letter, a completely fictional letter,
that I composed and left on a seat on the R6 train.
In doing this i was attempting to play with the boundaries
between fiction and reality--a subject that is very
interesteing to me ever since I heard about Orson Well's
radio broadcast "War of the Worlds." This particular project
is not as shocking as Orson Well's program, nor is it designed
frighten. This project is meant to play on melodrama--much
like the ridiculous reality shows that are on television.
Leaving this fake letter on a train for people to
read will, I hope, trigger the emotional
sensabilities of at least one traveler. It is meant
to portray an actual account of a woman who is
suffering from a fatal disease and has thus been
jiltted by a man who she loves and who she thought
loved her. I'm not interested in any kind of
statement about love or death, merely the manipulation
of emotions--and I feel like the construction of this
story lends itself adaquately to such ends. There is just
enough expositionto allow the reader to get a sense
of the situation, and there is enough left out to let
the reader imagine for his/her self the extranious
background info and the outcome of our dying hero.

FAT PEOPLE DON'T GO
TO HEAVEN

When I was four my grandmother yelled at me for taking tastycakes from the cupboard before diner. This is how I remember the conversation going:

GRAND MOTHER

Put those cakes down, it's almost dinner time, dear.

BABY KEV

Gram, what the Christ, I just want a fuckin Kandycake over here.

GRAND MOTHER

If you eat before diner you'll get fat.

BABY KEV
(sulking)

So the shit what?

GRANDMOTHER
(with a caring tone)

If you get fat you won't be able to go to heaven.

BABY KEV
(becoming intrigued)

Really, wait...why???

GRANDMOTHER

Because, Kevin, heaven is like a party, and you only want nice attractive people at your party, right, sweetie. If you are at a party with a bunch of fat people, is it really heaven? (Smiles tenderly) Of course it's not.

BABY KEV

Oh, right on, that makes sense.

My grandmother died at the age of 76--she was very thin.

When you look at the portrail of woman and (to a lesser extent) men in the media today I can see that my grandmother really knew what she was talking about. The ideal image of a female body is so warped that 100 pound women no longer have a place amongst those who could be called "thin." Women today spend all there time and energy combating "love handles" "canckles" and the dreaded "fupa." The chubby girl is definitely amongst the sorry ranks of those who Krzysztof Wodiczko would label the "strangers."

Look at Raphael's portrait of the Virgin Mary, depicted on the left. Such a painting would typify female beauty in the 15th Century.
Compare her now with the contemporary image of womanly beauty displayed on the right. There is no question which of these women would be featured in Playboy or Maxim. The Virgin Mary, had she been put on this Earth today would endure countless reproaches regarding the plumpness of her featurs, at the sorority house the sisters would cover her sacred body with the black lines of markers indicating the fatty regions of her body.

To pull these obese citizens out of their chocolate covered, often times peanutbutter filled, hell, I propose a fashion line designed to excentuate the many aspects of a plump physique. I call it Full Figure Fashion"--I'll work on the title. Shirts with the entire belly cut out to exhibit the beauty of that fleshy sack that is so often tucked away beneath baggy sweatshirts and moo moos would be available for the over-weight. Studs for piercing the saggy underchin fat will also be among the height of FFF. I thought that a line of nuget-scented purfume might also be a good way to celebrate the tastes and desires of the over-weight.

The point is that people who don't fit the current body image need to stop accepting what the media defines as beautiful and make a stand. Stick behind your body. Make it fashionable to be fat. Being that I'm skinny I may not be the guy to design your clothes, so design your own, just don't design your line of clothing to hide your body, design it to display your body with pride.

Here are the pics from tonight. Again this was placed on Main St. Manayunk at The U.S. Hotel Bar & Grill.

Below are some pictures of the work for this week's assignment. I wanted to make the sculpture about three times bigger than what it turned out--there were problems with that scale though. I will be posting pictures from the placement of the finished product later this evening. The product, "Eat Meat," will be placed in front of the U.S. Hotel from 5:30 to 6:30.

For the next project, entitled by our professors "Put Something Here," I want to expand on a project that I began with my Design and Visual Language class last spring. This picture here is a small installation that was exhibited on the kitchen counter of the U.S. Hotel Bar and Grill. I want to make a bigger sculpture that will be placed at a restaurant in Philadelphia. The meat sculpture will be two and a half feet tall and about two feet wide. I think i will do a cow bust out of ground beef and entitle it "Eat Meat" Any opinions or requests regarding this proposal will be entertained.

Green Shoes Might Make It

Regarding my last post I would just like to say that it is ficticious and meant to be taken as such. I would also like to say that I do not share any of the opinions of the narrator. The narrator is an invention based on what I think a racist would sound like. The point of the project--besides fulfilling the requirements of the assignment--was to sterotype someone who is stereotyping someone else--if that makes any sense. I personally, know very little about how a bigot thinks. A bigot, in all probability, knows very little about how the average object of their bigotry thinks. So, in this piece, you have a person (the narrator), who is being pigeonholed or profiled to the point of absurdity, by me, while he is pigeonholing someone whom he has absurd stigmas about (the Chinese Man). It's basically a layering of racial and social profiling.