The Inner Monologue
31 October 2011
The Inner Monologue
by Vesperae
SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - November - December 2011
There are countless thoughts that we all have throughout the course of any given day that we'd never want to share with anyone. And of course this is as it should be. Our private fantasies provide each of us with a psychological release valve that's essential to our sanity. Were it not for our ability to vent internally and safely in this way, I'm certain that most, if not all of us, would either be dead or in prison. So thank goodness that we have the ability to abstract and to decompress in the harmless ways that we do.
Somewhere between imagining what it would be like to enact ultimate brutal animalistic vengeance on your boss as a result of the accumulated frustrations resulting from his or her horrific personality deficiencies, and the more innocent indulgences of daydreaming about what it would be like to win the lottery, lies the stuff of what constitutes our Unusual Desires. And while the Personal Mythology that comprises any Fetish tends to also fall within this realm of hidden fantasy, we at least have places like this to come and explore and make real that secret unspoken world.
The focus of this installment of my column is devoted to exactly this – giving a voice to the inner monologue of various aspects of my SF, and specifically to the Darker aspects of the SF that many of us share. I've decided to take a multimedia approach for my offering this time, and to this inner DS SF monologue, in the hope of making many of the concepts both reductive and portable, as well as fun for you to play with. While these text only video loops might be fun to watch by themselves, if you haven't already, I invite you to take a look at my May-June column, which should give you lots of ideas on how you might be able to creatively combine, layer, and play with these clips. I also hope that they might inspire you to explore and create some expressions of your own inner SF monologue, whatever it might be, and whatever orm it might take. I've always found that there's something incredibly liberating about discovering and expressing what's lurking around in my head into something discrete and explicit outside of me, even if I choose to never share it with anyone.
But these I felt brave enough to share, and I hope that you find both food for thought, and pleasure in viewing and thinking about them.
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Derived and distilled from a variety of print clippings and online news blurbs about the persistence of female smoking over the years, this is just the sort of heavy-handed anti-smoking message that made the Taboo appeal of smoking overwhelming for me:
Looking at cigarette print ads while I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, I was endlessly fascinated, horrified, and titillated by the juxtaposition of the scary black and white Surgeon General's Warning box and FTC report of the tar and nicotine content of the cigarette advertised with the image of a sexy model smoking that very brand. This is a retrospective fantasy exploration of the thoughts and feelings I had surrounding the profoundly mixed "do it / don't do it" message contained in those ads, with that iconic Surgeon General's Warning as the conceptual focal point:
This short clip was inspired by / perverted from an American Cancer Society anti-smoking brochure from the 1970s that I have in my personal SF print archive:
Another short clip. A simple redux of every anti-smoking message I've ever seen, read or heard:
I came across a great SF interview clip last year in which the model discussed how much her mother hated her smoking, and how she tried to persuade her to quit by leaving notes for her in her purse. Thinking about the innate rebelliousness of the daughter's defiant smoking really struck me, and I found myself imagining what sort of things an anti-smoking mother might write to her smoking daughter, and this was the result:
From TV and print ads in the 1960s and 70s to current SF video models, I imagine that we've all wondered what that beautiful model is thinking about while she puffs away in front of the cameras. And while I'm probably just projecting, I'd like to think that at least one or two of the more intelligent and self-aware models had at least one or two of these thoughts:
Whether you're a voyeur or a participant, or both, as I am, this is the essence of the DS of the SF, at least for me:
