I hate children who end up carrying around a tatty nasty stinky smelly ugly piece of ratty old blanket. I have no compassion for the 'binkie' attachment. Perhaps because I never had one myself. Instead, I had my one and only stuffed animal (I know, here in the UK you say 'soft toy', which sounds wrong) which was a standard brown bear. For as long as I can remember, I have concluded that any child of mine will not have a binkie fetish, but it would be okay for them to have a stuffed animal fetish.
Over the years, I have developed this ideology. Stuffed animals are fine, so long as they are not wimpy cutesy prancy shmancy animals.
I think any stuffed animal a future child of mine should have, will be strange, bizarre, and freakish.
There are many examples of weird things made into stuffed animals. Every time I come across one, I think to myself, "That would be perfect for a future child of mine." and strengthen my resolve to carry through with this plan.
I suppose what makes this experiment interesting is that children relate to dolls as they see themselves. So when one gives a child a doll that generally has the features of a recognizable form, the child relates well to it. So if a child was surrounded by the abnormal, how would this impact their view of themselves in the world?
It makes me think of a line from one of my favorite movies, "Live people ignore the strange and unusual. I myself am strange and unusual."
(Note: The images I've picked represent a diversity of typologies of bizarre stuffed animals I've come across over the years. There are many more I have seen and admire. I assume you get the idea however.)
01 August 2005
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2 comments:
Funny, it says I have a comment, I got an email of the comment, and yet the comment is not here.....
Yeah, the bear with the three extra heads really weirds me out. It's by the designer Phillipe Starck. I wonder what his parents did to him....
-K
for refernce sake, the missing comment was:
"I'm pretty sure that teddy bear with the bunny foot could damage a child's mind forever.
Wow."
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