FALL/WINTER 2000
Editors: Sarah Michelson and Bob Ajar
The secret is that I bought the L’Oreal Turning Point cream for myself. It cost $12.99. I didn’t have the cash but I had to have it. I would go into debt to stay fuckable. I didn’t tell fellow Virgo dragon, Bob, I bought it for myself… I told him it was for the Journal, and presented the age-fighting cream with irony and fake distance as if I couldn’t care less that my decay is now apparent, that I have budded and blossomed and that now my petals droop, as if I am not resisting with all my might the day they say, “she was really fuckable one…”, resisting with all my might the looking back which might mean my life was in the past and that the end is come. Ironically, meetings with the stoic and beautifully blooming Ellen Fanning, the designer for this and the last three journals, took place while I received single-process hair-dying treatment for grey hair coverage at an apartment upstairs in her building.
When I commented on this she replied with the devastating but pertinent question, “But what about when your pubic hair goes grey, what then?” And then the not-so-single process of the editing itself has both stimulated my fascination with surgical improvement and faithed me that decaying is ok (aka Frances Alenikoff) …all in all “regrets I’ve had a few and then again too few to mention…”
—Sarah Michelson
Ten years ago, I had something like the job Sarah Michelson has at Movement Research. When asked, I suggested age (!) and the body as a possible Journal topic. Working at Movement Research in the 80s with Richard Elovich in the back closer of the Ethnic Folk Arts Center on Varick Street (now a bar called Culture Club-The Eighties) included some brainstorm that made the first Journal in 1989 a necessity. The “age and the body” idea was inspired not by this look backwards but by a vintage biology poster I saw in which the developing primate depicted earns the name “aging primate” at age 35, my age, as the trajectory of the body’s life begins its descent. In the poster, that is.
Shortly after, an ARTFORUM about AGE from 1988 turned up in a box during a move by a friend who worked on it. Its cover is an odd combination of barbed wire, rainbow-monolith font, and the letters A, G, and E on top of their mirror images. Hmmm. I was 23 in ’88. How dated the 80s looked as I passed it around for about a month before I realized ARTFORUM’s editors had inserted a reproduction of the first issue, published in 1962, inside. “AGE? Why age?” the contributors asked in the 80s, outraged, and addressed instead the Age of Excess and the Age of Celebrity, or video’s “coming of age.” This Emily Litella-like response is especially visible in the Guerilla Girls’ amicable interview printed surrounding their confrontational response poster. The dance community has responded similarly to this invitation with angry missives and outrageous antics. A March 200 issue of The New Yorker surfaced with an extremely hi-speed Muybridge-like “Time Marches On” cartoon by Ian Falconer on its cover – the hapless primate is human ONLY BRIEFLY at around age 35, the joke appeared to be. New York magazine’s April 17 cover feature: “Washed up at 35!”
MRPJ#21 is dedicated to Richard Elovich, who started the Journal despite my whining.
—Bob Ajar
