No Love for Big Marilyns
Hey, hey. It’s been a while since I’ve written, hasn’t it?
As usual, there’s not a lot of giantess news arriving lately. For the past month, every week of Google Alerts has been the Daily Star gushing over the same “7ft spicy adult actor” and trivialities like how much she eats, how she only dates short men, how she’s celibate until marriage, and what a fan she is of the Daily Star. Ugh, must be a slow news month for everyone.
I can’t create giantess news … or can I? Using a diversity of search engines means you don’t get Google’s resources, but it also means you’re not limited to Google’s resources. I’ve been saving up Size Fantasy articles for a while, and today I poked around through the other channels to see what I could find. Maybe I’m blowing my wad with this installment, but I just want to make sure you feel you’re getting your money’s worth.
Missing Giantess
One interesting story comes from none other than Guinness World Records. Jane Bunford was a lovely woman who, at age 21, had grown to her lifetime height of 7’11” (2.41 m). A skull fracture in her youth likely damaged her pituitary gland, causing an overproduction of growth hormone. She never wanted to capitalize on her height, appearing sideshows or circuses. Sadly, she died at the age of 26 in 1922 and was buried in a custom-made coffin … then 50 years later, her skeleton was discovered on display at the University of Birmingham's Anatomical Museum.
It’s likely someone exhumed and stole the poor woman’s corpse, whether that was the University or their agents. And when Jane’s descendants demanded the return of Jane’s skeleton, the University was uncooperative and self-righteous, despite increasing media attention and controversy. Only revisions to the Data Protection Act in 2005 were able to force the University to do the decent thing and return Jane’s skeleton to her family. Today she rests in a private, unmarked grave.
Japanese Giantess Hair Commercial
YouTube won’t let me embed this video, but the actress Aoi Miyazaki appears in a shampoo commercial. She looks good, strutting between skyscrapers and such. The only growth scene is that of the bottle of shampoo, strangely.
Another Band Called Giantess
You’ve heard of Yes, Giantess, doubtlessly. I’m sure I’ve mentioned them. They don’t write music about giant women, unfortunately: they just came up with their name based on an idea one of them had, in which a 12’-tall woman won’t let you leave a party. I used that for the intro of the first episode of Zheightgeist, incidentally.
Here’s another band, simply called Giantess, from Salem, OR. Fate pushed their live show into my lap, where they’re performing on an open-air stage for Make Music Day. It’s not my style of music, but they actually do have a couple songs that have to do with, like, Mega-scale giantesses. Check them out on Bandcamp, and please to enjoy their live show below. I like how one of them warns the audience about searching for them on YouTube.
Giantess: Art Display
And as long as we’re on the topic of people appropriating the word “giantess” as though no one else had ever thought of it before, next week there’s going to be a solo exhibition of Portland artist Rose Dickson. She has called her exhibition Giantess, but if you look at the images, there are no gigantic women represented. There are lots of elemental themes, and her partner is very praiseful of her “pre-language, pre-intellectual associations,” but come on.
Why am I bringing this up to you? Just so you know what’s going on out there, unlike these artists and musicians.
Marilyn Monroe, Cinematic Giantess
Oh, you’ve got to hear about the gigantic Marilyn Monroe statues. If I have to learn it, you have to learn it too.
There was an 26’ (8 m) statue of Monroe’s famous blown-skirt pose from The Seven Year Itch, displayed in Monroe Plaza in a business center in Guigang, China, for half a year before being unceremoniously dumped in the trash. Photos of the travesty were shared on June 19, 2014, and two days later photos documented the statue being dismantled. Not due to copyright issues, general manager of Guigang Bali Real Estate Development Co., Ltd., was quick to point out—it just no longer fit their design plans. The deconstruction was featured in Angels Wear White (2017), a Chinese drama, to underscore the film’s message.
NBC and Hyperallergic only had a fragment of the facts behind this story. You can use Google Translate to read a much better article: Removal of the Monroe Statue Sparked Controversy.
This statue was designed by Professor Sheng Enyang, director of the Department of Art Education, School of Fine Arts, South China Normal University. Prof. Enyang was somewhat distraught to learn of its destruction, but apparently he had no rights over it.
The Hyperallergic article I link to points out that this status bears “uncanny similarity” to another Marilyn Monroe statue in the blown-skirt pose from the same movie. Well, the professor openly admitted he referred to The Seven Year Itch and “Forever Marilyn” to create the best likeness possible for this project. Artist Seward Johnson (36-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune) created his own 26’-tall Marilyn statue, called “Forever Marilyn,” 17 tons of steel and aluminum.
Now, let’s learn one word in Chinese: shanzhai (“knock off”), a cultural artifact of copying items, breaking copyright, making ripoffs. Shanzhai is about making money, but it’s also about making things available to people who don’t have access to them. If you can’t afford a flight and hotel room to visit the real Statue of Liberty, why not build a shanzhai Lady Liberty in your own country and experience pretty much the same thing?
Perhaps the Guigang Marilyn was shanzhai, but 2015 (probably) in Dalian city, China, the Central Avenue shopping center featured an authorized replication of “Forever Marilyn,” believed to have been installed while the mall itself was still being built.
And that’s not even the end of the story. The original “Forever Marilyn” statue was displayed in the Magnificent Mile of Chicago, where it was vandalized three times between August and Sept., 2011, and derided by critic Abraham Ritchie as “creepy schlock by a fifth-rate sculptor.” It has toured the country: Palm Springs, CA; Hamilton, NJ; Rosalind Park in Bendigo, Victoria, Australia; Stamford, CT; returning to Palm Springs in 2019.
Currently it’s mounted in front of Palm Springs Art Museum, though it has no relation to the museum or its exhibits. Crema (Committee to Relocate Marilyn) has pressed a lawsuit to get it removed or dismantled, citing misogyny and blocking the view of the museum. Just over a week ago, the mayor of Palm Springs announced that the city council has agreed to relocate the statue to a nearby green space.
Good luck, Marilyn.
Actually, that last bit took much longer to research and write about than I’d anticipated, so let’s just go with this for a newsletter. I’ll save the truly weird and random stuff I uncovered for a later edition. Thank you for your patience and understanding! I hope it was interesting!
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
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