Date:        Wed, 20 Sep 1995 10:26:37 EDT
From: Karen Ocana <BJFC-AT-MUSICB.MCGILL.CA>
Subject: Sodality


THE SODALITY OF SUSANA AMERICANA

Dear Susan,

We love you, like we love our buffalo jeans.

An ad for Buffalo jeans, a huge ad, maybe 24 x 18 ft. (8 x 6 m.),
is pasted up against the audio-video equipment store at a busy
intersection in my neighbourhood in Montreal.  It's an ad that gets
in your face, every time.  It reads, "On me dit que je suis sexy.
JE LE SAIS."  It shows an oblique full frontal photograph of a
long-haired, slutty, square-jawed buxom strawberry blonde in a
tight sleeveless chemise and panties, with a round little potbelly
a la Pulp Fiction, crouching, with her hands down her panties on
her ass; her buffalos are gone, her second skin is about to go.
Susan is sexy.  You can see it three blocks away and it cums in
your face every day, in the most irritating way, and you wonder if
you might not miss it when it's gone.

"I know," says Susan.  Susan isn't, but she knows.  Uncanny that.
She doesn't have to think, just say it like it is, like she's told,
with overbrimming self-confidence.  All language is hearsay,
poster, slogan, order-word, that is the repetition or recurrence
part, but language is made of discrete slogans, words, bodies
individualizing themselves, that is the difference part.  And how
language mingles with bodies, their interpenetrations, that is the
uncanny part.  The Buffalo slogan has a hammerheaded sexiness is
like Susan is like Chris is like American-style capitalism, is like
like Tarantino...

I look on the tag of my worn-out holy patched much-loved four-year-
old Buffalo jeans which I hardly ever wear anymore.  Now i wear
Request, but what's next?  Nope, I'm wrong, they're not made in
France, but are French order, made in Hong Kong.

Susan loves Tarantino, the Punch-and-Judy brutality of it, getting
medieval on that ass.  It's amazing.  We live in medieval times,
what's moralizing about that?

Maybe it's not so much that Susan says is moralizing it's that the
ethics go hand-in-hand with an aesthetics -- of invasiveness, of
intrusion, of overkill, of population too, posters, slogans
populating, multiplying,,,,get your Guess, get your Paco, get your
Buffalo, get your Levis, get your Nikes, get your Nikon, get your
NYT, your UCLA, your ISEA, get your D&G.  It's on TV.  It's global
culture.  The commodity is here to f**k you over, i mean to charm
you, it is uncanny.  You can become one too, make a name for
yourself, a population, a market share, on market square.  At first
you hate it, you have an immune system depression, but the more you
do it, like an athlete of affect, the more you will love it.  And
it pays.  Ask Susan.  She knows why she is so clever.

--KOca$a, Montreal.



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