I am the fly in the ointment. Accept the next dose of disease.
Okay, so we’re a little late to the Green Porno party. But what we lack in punctuality we more than make up for in enthusiasm for these warped short films.
Isabella “Put Your Disease in Me” Rossellini outdoes herself (and actually does herself) in this eight-part series about the sex lives of various insects, arachnids and molluscs. Produced by Sundance expressly for smaller digital screens (computers, cell phones, etc) the whole series is just dirty, filthy, good clean fun. Try to imagine a Children’s Television Workshop-produced interpretation of that transcendently horrible pterodactyl pr0n and you’ll be somewhere in the ballpark. But not really.
“Developed by an American physician, George Taylor, M.D., it was a large, cumbersome, steam-powered apparatus. Taylor recommended it for treatment of an illness known at the time as “female hysteria.” Hysteria, from the Greek for “suffering uterus,” involved anxiety, irritability, sexual fantasies, “pelvic heaviness” and “excessive” vaginal lubrication — in other words, sexual arousal. However, since it was the Victorian era, women were not considered to be at all sexual and it was therefore deemed a disease. Physicians of that era treated hysteria by massaging sufferers’ vulvas until they experienced dramatic relief through “paroxysm” (orgasm). Unfortunately, hysteria was a recurrent condition and repeated treatment was often necessary. Taylor touted his steam-driven massage device as speeding treatment while reducing physician fatigue.”
Does anyone know where this image actually came from? It’s been around for years. Of course it would be awesome if this were a real artifact from the 19th century, though I somehow doubt it. Someone told me once that it’s actually a scan from an old issue of a men’s magazine (Esquire, maybe?), and that this was a humorous illustrative prop for an article on the history of vibrators. If that’s the case, then whoever designed this masterpiece was ahead of their time. Or backwards in time, only on another timeline. Or whatever.
One technique from the book “The Art of Kissing,” published by Hugh Morris in 1936, lends itself well to some sort of steampunk re-imagining:
“Some few years ago, a very peculiar kissing custom arose which deserves mention here because, from it, we can learn how to adapt the method to our modern devices. At that time, when young people got together, they held, what was then known as, “electric kissing parties.” Young people are ever on the outlook for novel ways of entertaining themselves. In fact, when ether was first developed as an anesthetic, the young bloods of the town used to form “ether-sniffing” parties in which they got a perfectly squiffy ether “jag.” But to return to the “electric kisses.” An excerpt from a contemporary writer will, perhaps, give us some idea of what happened: ‘The ladies and gentlemen range themselves about the room. In leap year the ladies select a partner, and together they shuffle about on the carpet until they are charged with electricity , the lights in the room having been first turned low. Then they kiss in the dark; and make the sparks fly for the amusement of the onlookers.’ The same sort of experiment could be performed nowadays, on cold, dry nights when the air is overloaded with electricity.”
You can read the rest of the experiment here. It starts off gently, suggesting that you generate static electricity from the carpet in order to make a spark fly between yours and your lover’s lips. Then things take a more dramatic turn! “Once you have practiced this for some time, you will become so innured to the slight shock that you will seek more potent electric shocks. These can be obtained with the use of an electric vibrator or in fact, any device that is worked from a battery and a coil which steps up the weak 3 volts of the battery.” You can see where this is leading… read on.
The image above — this is what I imagine a successful electric-kissing experiment might look like — comes from a book of alchemical collages by artist Max Ernst called “A Week of Kindness”, which was published only two years before “The Art of Kissing,” in 1934. Coincidence? I also want to mention that I searched high and low for this particular image for maybe 10 minutes before finally finding it on Mer’s Flickr Page. Even while she’s off adventuring in the American Wild, Mer finds a way to contribute to the blog. Mysterious forces are at work.
Before Val Lewton died of a broken heart (a figurative and then literal one), he produced a string of nine films for RKO Pictures from 1942 to 1946. None of them cost more than $150,000 to make. None ran longer than 75 minutes. All of them were saddled with lurid, focus group-tested titles like Isle of the Dead, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Ghost Ship. “They may think I’m going to do the usual chiller stuff which’ll make a quick profit, be laughed at, and be forgotten,” he told writer DeWitt Bodeen, “but I’m going to fool them…I’m going to do the kind of suspense movie I like.”1
The kind that I like too. Atmospheric2, stylish, literate—I might squeeze two of his films onto an all-time Top Ten list of horror favorites. So the news that Twisted Pictures (the people responsible for the Saw franchise) is in the process of re-making four of Lewton’s RKO classics—including my favorite, I Walked with a Zombie—makes me nauseated. I’m finally old enough to appreciate why critics bemoaned the oversexed Cat People remake in 1982. That film, at least, had a twenty-year-old Nastassja Kinski going for it. All we have to look forward to now is snuff porn. So, rather than look ahead, I thought I might take a look back—at Lewton’s meteoric career, and at a few scenes from his movies that still haunt me. The past is no vaccine for the future, to be sure, but in the here and now it can act as a topical salve.
“The gentleman who has the pleasure of tying the final bow owns you.”
- Mr. Pearl, interview
What strikes me about fetish legend/corsetier Mr. Pearl’s images is how much he looks like a true English gentleman - and how, magically, his 18-inch corseted waist works to enhance that image, the opposite of what one might expect it to do.
Mr. Pearl grew up in South Africa and moved to London at the earliest chance after completing his military service. He spent three years in New York in the early 90s, where he did his most intimate published interview, of which there are few. Already a renowned tightlacer by this time, Pearl treated corsetry with such reverence that he insisted on precision in every aspect of his involvement with it; when his New York interviewer described him as a corsetier, he interrupted. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am a designer who employs the corset and lacings into his designs. I am not a corsetier - I have not attained that specialized knowledge. There are only about five left in the whole world now, who possess that art. I hope one day to be amongst them.”
Fast-forward to the 2000s: Mr. Pearl is a successful corsetier, commissioned by Mugler, Lacroix, Galliano and Gaultier when they need a master to produce their corset designs for the runway. Clients include Dita, Kylie Minogue and Jerry Hall. He lives in Paris, and works out an atelier behind the Notre Dame.
Despite his success, Pearl doesn’t have a flashy website. There’s no web store to offer plastic-boned corsets that bear only his name, no MySpace page and no blog. He’s known for his aversion to modern technology, and his only web interview was handwritten and transmitted by fax.
Brothers and sisters, I have a terrible confession; I was once A GAY. Lord have mercy! Lucikly, my parents had the good sense to ship me off to Love in Action, an ex-gay recovery camp for teens in Memphis, Tennesse. I learned many things at this camp; that homosexuality doesn’t exist, that men with bios like this and this make great mentors for kids, and that a 4-week course called WIVES’ TRACK can change your life forever. The reason I’m telling you all this is because I recently re-watched the 2000 film But I’m a Cheerleader and I was outraged. Outraged! How dare they ridicule something as holy as conversion therapy?
The entire cast is going straight to Hell: RuPaul (as camp counselor, completely out of drag), Clea Duvall (thou shall not tempt me!), Mink Stole, Natasha Lyone (damned since ‘86 for appearing in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse), Bud Cort (Harold from Harold and Maude - here in a dad role, and I can’t believe how much he’s aged), and all the rest of them. Inspired by that filthy pervert John Waters, the film’s mockery of gender identity and the sacred institution of marriage is unforgivable.
The team that created this film has a new film out called Itty Bitty Titty Comittee. Lord Jesus, it hurt to even type that! As soon as I get the chance to see this one, expect an angry write-up. In the meantime, I urge you all to focus your anger at Singapore for frowning upon cosmetic products that promote Our Lord. For shame!
Irina Ionesco is French photographer known for her sensual and sometimes controversial work. She reminds me a little bit of Ellen von Unwerth and a little bit of Sarah Moon. Her crisp black-and-white images focus on artificial beauty and harbor a fetishistic fascination with lace, beads, fake flowers and other textures. Born in 1935 in Romania, Ionesco traveled the world and painted before discovering photography. She is a cult favorite among alt photographers, and her influence can be seen in the work of John Santerineross and Tina Cassati.
What made Ionesco’s work controversial? Her most prolific model was her daughter, Eva. At a young age, Eva posed semi-nude for her mother to create artsy, erotic images similar to Irina’s work with older models. Some images of Eva by Irina (NSWF links ahoy!), though nude, look more like a child playing dress-up to me, but others have a distinct fetish element. To me, these are some of Ionesco’s most powerful images.
Eva Ionesco
Irina’s daughter Eva went on to model and act in many productions that no normal parent would ever let their child near today. It makes me wonder how her career would’ve gone if she hadn’t started posing for the images above. At age 11, she became the youngest model ever to appear in a Playboy pictorial by Jacques Bourboulon in 1976 (check out his doleful Wikipedia entry). Two years later, her images appeared in a Spanish edition of Penthouse in a selection of her mother’s photographs. Eva’s acting debut, also at age 11, was in The Tenant by Roman Polanski (yikes!). That same year she appeared as a Lolita-type character in a soft-core sci-fi film called Spermula. Her career wasn’t all erotic, and she soon graduated to playing varied roles in French cinema and on stage that didn’t revolve around sexuality.
Have you ever been filled with the burning desire to see your favourite 80’s rocker step out of a massive, glowing vag and use his tongue to make sweet love to another man’s eyeball?
I knew it. You people disgust me.
I give to you the 1993 tour-de-force of homo-erotic gluttony that is Seth et Holth. Set to the backdrop of some actually rather wicked industrial rock, the 43 minutes of beautiful confusion that follows is staged by one Hide (X-Japan) and Tusk (Zi:Kill) as Angels who communicate with their blood, struggling after being cast out of heaven and eventually executed by earthlings. It’s kinda like a less pretentious Cremaster Cycle done in the style of a New Wave music video but with cooler-looking dudes.
Don’t make too much of an effort to ‘get’ this movie — seriously, it would make David Lynch cry — as it presents itself to be more of a visual and musical experiment. It’s worth a look as an unusual piece of rock nostalgia alone.
The women of NY-based painter Colette Calascione’s world are the most luscious and enigmatic lot you’re likely to encounter in modern classical painting. Inspired by Victorian portraiture and Surrealism, Calascione is gifted with an Old Master’s hand for technique, a fevered imagination, a wicked sense of humor and a reverence for the feminine form rivaling that of Vargas himself. The resulting work is whimsical, provocative and elegant in turns. Demure masked nudes entice viewers with smoldering eye contact and slight, come-hither smiles. Grand dames of the parlour consort with beastly Ernstian suitors. The rosy aura of myth and allegory that surrounds these ladies is a fetching as their silken lingerie… maybe more so.
Scrupulous attention is paid to everything, and the color and contrast she imbues in each form — powdery decolletage, folds of drapery, the riotously rococo backgrounds — is exceptional.
Truly, Calascione knows that Goddess is in the details.
This common-sense guide to the heterosexual lifestyle may help you come to grips with the strange, repressed feelings that have been haunting you since puberty. Reading it opened my eyes and made me love myself for who I am. Someone gave me this flyer a few years ago on campus, and, as a public service, I now pass it on to all of you. May it help to guide you in your internal struggle.
