Sonny Angel, you're an Angel to me.

Oh for Christ's sake, I can't think the name Sonny Angel without getting "Johnny Angel" stuck in my head for-fucking-ever.

For as long as I can remember, I had little plastic zoo animals, and a sandbox. As I got a little older, I began creating houses (domestic spaces; not their preferred biosystems) for the animals in the sandbox*, breaking off pieces of the wooden frame to build driftwood fences and picking flowers I wasn’t supposed to in order to make gardens. When I was younger, I remember putting a fairy-doll in a L’eggs egg, which was clear on the top, and burying it partially in the sand so that I could still see the doll through the clear part of the egg. It kind of freaked me out; it seemed so outer-spacey.

And I always played with Barbies; in fact I played with Barbies until I was 13 when I abruptly realized that the scenarios I played out with Barbies could just be written down. I was actually writing stories. I still do.

I have always been interested in miniatures. Some of my earliest thoughtful memories (not just vague sensual notions) are of a family vacation to Leavenworth, WA, a mock-Bavarian mountain tourist trap. Among other specialty stores, they have a music box store and a dollhouse store. I had to look at everything in the dollhouse store, astonished at the tiny boxes of cereal and dog biscuits, with the exact brand-name packaging, and the tiny toilet paper rolls. The dolls, as usual, were hideous and not-life-like, but I was enthralled by everything else.

Maybe a year or two later, my friend, whose mom was very crafty, got a book from the library. It was a very fancy book about making dollhouse furniture with balsa wood and extremely exquisite, Victorian details. I distinctly remember a baby carriage made out of an eggshell, which was definitely not an option for me at age 9 or 10. Once she returned it, I checked it out and started making some of the furniture projects out of non-corrugated cardboard. My dad had recently worked in corrugation printing, and he gave me some oatmeal boxes which worked perfectly as the basis of my dollhouse. At that time, I also read every chapter book I could that had to do with dollhouses – historical fiction with dollhouses; mysteries about dollhouses; etcetera. I played with friends’ and neighbors’ dollhouses that they didn’t care about. I wanted a miniature world so bad.

I spent hours at the desk in my room painting, wallpapering (for a time a few years earlier my mom had collected a bunch of discontinued wallpaper samples. Conveniently.), and creating furniture and fixtures for my miniature house, using templates from the book and probably scaling them down, even, it seems. I entered my cardboard dollhouse in the Thurston County Fair and I got a Blue Ribbon but not a fancy rosette or anything. There is a picture of me standing proudly beside it but I’m living in Albuquerque right now and the photo is either in Olympia or Corpus Christi so it’s unlikely that I’ll be able to post it.

Another friend started collecting realistic-looking rubber animals from the teaching supply store. She had a panda family and I got a panda family, too. Hers lived in her old My Little Pony house (you know, Paradise Estates) that her grandpa had made her. It fit under the bed and was like a house with the roof removed, rather than the vivisected dollhouse we usually think of. I took my pandas camping, and I loved arranging them by a river, letting them get into the water. My sister and I had taken Barbies camping before and occasionally insisted on taking a picture of a Barbie in a wilderness setting. This was especially desirable in the Pacific Northwest rainforests where there are a lot of nurse logs or stumps sprouting Barbie-sized seedlings.

I remember realizing at a very young age that none of the toys advertised on tv would ever be as awesome as they looked because so many of them depended on the dolls inhabiting an outdoor space that was unlike the spaces I played in – I recall it as jungle-like or swamp-like; I might be thinking of a GI Joe commercial although I never had GI Joes. Camping near a river was as close as it got, and it was pretty great.

Throughout my childhood, I also had special pocket toys, first a Smurf who was writing and crying (my perpetual obsession with hurt/comfort), and then a My Little Pony friend who was a pink baby Dragon. I have always been and continue to be drawn in by the idea of boys who can be perceived as in need of care (LUCKILY THIS DOESN’T CROSS OVER INTO MY PERSONAL LIFE – well perhaps there was a little bit of that at the beginning of my relationship with Slim Volume – he fell ill with mononucleosis very soon after we got together – as mentioned in my Fellini post). Mostly I am looking for this model in fiction (I just found out about hurt/comfort as a fan fiction genre and while I don’t go out looking for fan fiction (at least not since my Hanson fan fiction days circa 1998, where I was featured twice on a prominent website for paranormal/horror Hanson fan fiction – you can still fucking find it if you google my full/real name), but I can see it starting with that little crying Smurf). I once left the Smurf in the Safeway cooler aisle because he was molded in a seated position and it was so neat  to make him sit somewhere weird like on the edge of the milk cooler, which was probably my height because I was like 3. We got him back. I actually still had that Smurf up until just a couple years ago. I think I gave him to the Free Store at the Olympia Food Co-op. Also in this Free Store deposit was Spike, the My Little Pony dragon, who once was lost for some time in the corner of the wooden arm on the “couch” at my parents’ house (an antique Mission-style train bench upholstered in slabs of foam on top of particle board), again because it was a really cool place for him to be.

Now I’m 31 and at Christmas Slim Volume gives me a Sonny Angel. It’s a little Kewpie-looking Angel Baby and it’s super exciting because you buy it in a closed box and don’t know what’s going to be on its head – but they each have a visible microphallus and bare buns. It’s divinatory. Mine has a tulip on its head.

So I get this Sonny Angel and I’m immediately thrilled by taking photos of him in various spots of the house we’re housesitting, especially in the plants on the sunporch. And technology allows me to immediately upload them for approval by The Internet (I went for Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook). Doll photos and other minature photography projects I’ve come across in the past legitimize this phenonmenon, and elevate my amusement to ‘art’. I am puzzled by the amount of photos posted by Instrgram users from Asian countries of Sonny Angel alongside plates of food. The next day we go down to the Bosque trail and I’m taking pictures of him ice skating on frozen puddles and in front of the Rio Grande (he fell in) and the next day he’s admiring a soap figure of Venus of Willendorf in the bathroom of a friend whose cat we’re feeding.**

SO THE ANSWER IS YES!

Haha jkjk…

Yes, I most certainly used Sonny Angel to re-enchant myself with my surroundings when I wasn’t entirely comfortable (we were housesitting and it was the holidays so everything was all weird and it also got colder than it’s been since we’ve lived in Albuquerque). And besides, I’ve been doing an awful lot of complaining about how it’s not green in the desert in winter (DUH), so Sonny Angel’s bright pink tulip made a lovely contrast to the dormant golden foliage. And Sonny Angel made the photos interesting - not just another amateur nature photograph, Sonny Angel made the photos both amusing and differentiated by playing with scale. Sonny Angel justified the close-up on small spaces. Looking close up allowed me to see another level of beauty overlapping BROWN GRAY AND NOT CASCADIA, which was all I was seeing before I added Sonny Angel.

Unlike in childhood, I would not have felt a need to put Sonny Angel in these places just because he looked cool there (though, he did). My work with Sonny Angel is strictly for sharing; I don’t get a huge kick out of just seeing him in a funny environment unless I can at least show him to Slim Volume, if I don’t have a camera handy. I want to laugh or marvel about his placement with others. I want Slim Volume to say “That is great.” Which is why I don’t really get just lying a Sonny Angel alongside a plate of food. If he was in the food, as an environment, it would be great. So again the answer is YES, I play with Sonny Angel for the purpose of sharing, and since Sonny Angel fans are all over the world, it makes most sense for me to share these photos online, with a hashtag (#sonnyangelaroundtheworld). The importance of this photo sharing on social media is twofold: 1) the mental reward system of collecting likes, hearts, favorites, etc. on my posts and 2) I know I like seeing photos of Sonny Angel in environments - it delights me - so I assume the same may be true for others, and I like to delight people.

Slim Volume includes the question of class, via Stewart. For one thing, I do not for a moment find the internet to be a “classless” world. While the Sonny Angel phenomenon may span across continents, I am assuming he is a pretty solidly middle-class character, financially and intellectually. I don’t expect my cousin who posts “Fish on ya baby” on Facebook to understand or be interested in my Sonny Angel photos (although Sonny Angel in relation to a large dead fish could be a nice composition). Also, most people are not going to be willing to pay $9 for a 3” plastic baby with a flower on its head. Just sayin’. And a lot of people wouldn’t even set foot in the store Sonny Angel came from; even my peers, people I thought would be delighted by the store (Stranger Factory, Albuquerque NM), have said it’s too creepy.

That said, I could make a claim against Sonny Angel’s reinforcement of “borders between interiority/exteriority, the domestic/foreign, inside/outside, nature/culture, historicity/timelessness.”

1. Well actually, this first item is the one I don’t think I can argue against. Even though I currently keep Sonny Angel in my backpack, as I would a Smurf or later a Hanson CD in childhood, he is not there for my comfort, just there in case a perfect environment presents itself which I wish to share with the exterior world. He does not transcend or fuck up the interior/exterior border.

2. But he does mess with domestic/foreign. Sonny Angel is decisively Kawaii, but he is also Kewpie, harkening to the carnival prize of mid-century America, and he is beloved across continents, as we discussed.

3. Sonny Angel’s plastic nature allows him to be impermeable to weather conditions, although he is nude both inside/outside. He stood barefoot on ice and it didn’t phase him.

4. Sonny Angel in nature at the Rio Grande; Sonny Angel in culture alongside a plate of food. He can draw attention to either.

5. Historicity/timelessness? Again, his Kewpie look originates in the Great Depression, but love for Kewpies has never disappeared.

I will be addressing the issue of cuteness in a future post. Because damn, that has a lot going on.

*My friend and I would build a mound and dig through starting with shovels, and finishing with  our hands, on either side of the mound, until our gritty fingers caught each other and it was so exciting. That’s one of the biggest thrills I remember from childhood: catching Erin’s fingers through the sand mound. I remember the sensation with unusual clarity; two hands touching with the weird barrier of the sand grinding into each hand [I’m stoned while writing this]. It had nothing to do with feelings towards the friend, it just had to do with surmounting the insurmountable and sharing that accomplishment with someone.

**We were the premiere pet caregivers for People We Know In Albuquerque this holiday season.

Uncanny Sonny: Some Questions for Lifeguard of Love

In her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Susan Stewart talks about how miniaturization effects interiority, a private enclosure, the production of the bourgeois subject. However, your play with the Sonny Angel figure, the photographs you took, and their placement within the flows of social media makes Stewart’s theorization seem reductive. As J. Allan Mitchell argues in his recent book, objects are not “used up” in the process of representing certain class formations, or, through play, disciplining certain social behaviors (G.I. Joes teaching boys how to be masculine, aggressive, etc.) In fact, your play with this odd, precocious, anthropomorphic baby-angel may show how messy the world of objects, consumerism, and the experience of change can be. 

To Stewart, the world of the daydream, the “infinite time of reverie,” that toys induce, limit change: that the world of the miniature produces a reified world of things. In the modern west, the anxiety produced between the gap between signifier and signified is reduced by the process of miniaturization: to scale things up or down requires the certainty that objects are what they are and that they originate in relation to the scale of the human body. While I agree that miniaturization can do these things, it seems as though Stewart is giving too much agency to humans and not enough to the toys, their material efficacy, and what they do in the human-object relationship—their social consequences in general.

As I look at your pictures, I sense a longing, not for narrative closure, but for an expanded engagement with the ecological meshwork of your surroundings, that is, central New Mexico, the ecology of the social meshwork of social media via Tumblr, Instagram, etc, or both at the same time. In this sense, I see you utilizing the Sonny Angel figure as a sort of way to enter into a different kind of relationship with your surroundings, or at least, to explore new ways of being in the world through (following Alphonso Lingis and Merleau-Ponty) a sort of new “postural schema,” or embodied way of encountering an ecology of objects. 

If the experience of place, according to Timothy Morton is always uncanny: familiar yet escaping description or complete knowledge, and if this experience may be productive of both fear or enchantment, is your disenchantment or lack of enchantment with “New Mexico”  (reified, ironically, as a “land of enchantment”—its own sort of miniaturization: an entire state on a coffee mug, snow globe, etc.!) addressed by reducing your scale to muddy river banks, reeds, icy puddles, and driftwood—a scale in which you can be re-enchanted with your surroundings, or opened up into an ecological meshwork? 

What happens when you take a picture of this play of scale? Were you playing just to take pictures? And who were you taking pictures for? Especially if you intended all along to post them on social media, why were certain compositions, especially of an “unnatural” figure in “nature” so important to how you wanted to depict your tastes in the very specific realm of, in this case, Tumblr? 

If the consumption of miniatures, according to Stewart, has to do both with taste as a performance of appropriate class comportment, and of composing borders between interiority/exteriority, the domestic/foreign, inside/outside, nature/culture, historicity/timelessness what is going on when you enter into the supposedly “classless” world of social media, a “virtual” place that has little use for such binaries?

And what does cuteness have to do with all of this? Especially how you are responding to the object itself? How has Sonny Angel directed you?