Web Log Archives: May 18, 2003 - May 24, 2003
Saturday, May 24, 2003
India rediscovers kama. "At the height of its civilization, India was the land of the Kama Sutra, Koke Shastra, Ananga Ranga — the sacred literature teaching ways and means of heightening sexual pleasure, not only with one's own spouse, but also with other partners. . . . It was the land of Khajuraho temples depicting copulating couples and multiples on its inner walls that prudes consider pornographic. It was the land of Kalidasa, one of the greatest Sanskrit poets who celebrated sex with an openness unparalleled in world literature." That spirit disappeared for a millennium or so, but it's making a comeback according to recent Indian sex surveys. Sexpert Prakash Kothari says, "One can easily kiss that crummy era goodbye. A nation of 1 billion is getting sexy and kicking the guilt."
Salon runs a bunch of letters today about Andrew Sullivan's column about Richard Goldstein's column about the prominent bulge in Bush's flightsuit. Some letter-writers point out that Goldstein wasn't the first pundit to notice that bulge or its potential political impact. Two weeks earlier, G. Gordon Liddy gushed about Bush's impressive bulge on Hardball.
MATTHEWS: What do you make of this broadside against the USS Abraham Lincoln and its chief visitor last week?
LIDDY: Well, I — in the first place, I think it’s envy. I mean, after all, Al Gore had to go get some woman to tell him how to be a man. And here comes George Bush. You know, he’s in his flight suit, he’s striding across the deck, and he’s wearing his parachute harness, you know — and I’ve worn those because I parachute — and it makes the best of his manly characteristic. You go run those, run that stuff again of him walking across there with the parachute. He has just won every woman’s vote in the United States of America. You know, all those women who say size doesn’t count — they’re all liars. Check that out. I hope the Democrats keep ratting on him and all of this stuff so that they keep showing that tape.
BBC: "South Korea's first sex museum has opened, challenging traditional views that in the past Koreans were a chaste, even prudish nation."
Fascinating Village Voice review of a retrospective of German painter Christian Schad.
Among other subjects, Schad depicted naked women serenely and explicitly pleasuring themselves; lounging in post-coital torpor on tousled hotel sheets; and seated in nightclubs wearing dresses cut low enough to reveal tantalizing glimpses of aureole. . . . There are sketches of groping lovers, nude young men lost in a deep kiss, aristocratic transvestites, a charwoman making love to a corpse in the Père Lachaise cemetery, a juvenile being circumcised by an older man, and one woman performing cunnilingus on another while two cats sniff a nearby strap-on dildo.
At times Schad's art comes as close to being pornographic as any 20th-century paintings have. Kinkier still, he's one of only a handful of artists who unmistakably thought like a modernist but painted conservatively. Although many of his colleagues (Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz) also participated in the German Neue Sachlichkeit or New Realism movement of the 1920s, Schad's work veered closest to outright academicism.
Perhaps too close. While his colleagues were branded by the Nazis as "depraved," and included in the "Degenerate Art Exhibition" of 1937, Schad—whose work was as depraved as any of theirs—was embraced by the party and included in their rancid "Great German Art Exhibition" of the same year.
Neue Galerie has a short biographical essay and three works from the exhibition online. Here's a larger Christian Schad online gallery spanning several decades (some of the sexier works: * * * * * * * * * * * *).
The Vice Guide to Being Totally Crushed Out!
Friday, May 23, 2003
Xeni went shopping for ho (and pimp) couture in the LA garment district, and she's got the photos to prove it. "I'm told it's huge. Pimp jackets for postmodern playas." (Link snagged from Reverse Cowgirl.)
Select cuts from a 1940s Christian sex education LP available for download in mp3 format. (Link snagged from Metafilter.)
LadyFest comes to Austin this weekend. Among the events is the Gynomite non-stop erotic cabaret at Sacred Cup coffeehouse with fearless feminist porn readings, hot baton twirling and Miss Jessica’s supersexy burlesque. The Austin Chronicle reviewed a Gynomite anthology two years ago.
From the archives: Matthew Hilburn participated in a porn "star search" and found it nowhere near as exciting as you might think.
From the archives: Spike Gillespie recalls some strange freelance writing gigs for Playboy: reviewing "instructional" sex videos and helping Miss May 1994 fill out her centerfold questionnaire.
I don't link to Nerve pieces often, because I figure anyone who reads this site probably visits Nerve on their own. But what the hell, I enjoyed Kate Sullivan's (pretty much sex-free) paean to the White Stripes. She's apparently got the hots for Jack White, while Meg White has been one of my celebrity crushes of late.
Andrew Sullivan declares Richard Goldstein's "check out Bush's package" column his idiocy of the week (Salon, probably premium).
Thursday, May 22, 2003
Did you know there's a Japanese version of Am I Hot or Not? I'd go for this girl and this guy. (Link snagged from Coolios.)
Michelle Tea previews this weekend's Sex Worker Film and Video Festival at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco.
E3 Girls collects photos of the booth models at Electronic Entertainment Expo.
This one is from the DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball swimsuit show. (Link snagged from Coolios.)
Wednesday, May 21, 2003
When Tom Cruise sued over gay rumors, one of his arguments was that audiences wouldn't accept an openly gay actor in an action movie. But the presence of Ian McKellen as Magneto and Alan Cumming as Nightcrawler hasn't hurt the X-Men movies. (Yeah, I know, it's not the same — they're ensemble movies, and neither role is particularly macho. It's not as if a gay actor played Wolverine or Vin Diesel came out. But still, it's something.) I love this comment from the USA Today profile: "As Nightcrawler, Alan Cumming can teleport himself. But if he could pick a personal mutant power, he says, 'I want to be really bitchy.'"
More about the proposed public sex ban in New Orleans: Measure as clear as a cracked crystal ball. The bill passed by the state House yesterday would ban "vaginal, anal or oral sexual intercourse in any public place or place open to the public view for the purpose of gaining the attention of the public." Public sex is already illegal; the new bill just adds mandatory jail time for the "purpose of gaining the attention of the public" element. Columnist James Gill points out that "proving that was the point of the exercise will surely be impossible . . . this bill is so confused that it is more or less pointless." (Thanks, Jonno.)
The author of the stylish webzine Disgruntled Housewife has written three short essays about pornography.
Why I love the naked ladies. "Ever since I started checking out the naked ladies in my dad's Playboys, I've been entranced. When I was 9 or 10, my best friend and I would get out the stacks of naked lady magazines and pore over them, terrified and hopeful about what we would become."
The naked ladies under the bed. "So my boyfriend had this huge pile of naked lady magazines under the bed. None of them were horrible hard-core porn or anything, but I still found them menacing."
The naked ladies in the drawer. A more accepting followup to the previous piece.
(Link snagged from Sex Geek.)
Express & Echo: "An Exeter store is ignoring the city council's pleas for it to remove a window display which is outraging shoppers. Lush, the handmade cosmetics company, has been flashing a giant board with 'Sex' written across it in its High Street window. The shop's display could not be in a more attention-grabbing location - it is only yards away from two of the city's most famous landmarks, the Guildhall and Exeter Cathedral. Store staff say the display is just an eye-catching way of advertising the shop's new Sex Bomb fizzy bath ball." Even without the hypnotic effect of the flashing SEX sign, I really really really want a Sex Bomb fizzy bath ball.
Tuesday, May 20, 2003
LOL!
A new luxury hotel called The Glasshouse is scheduled to open in Edinburgh next month. Management has commissioned 220 photographs by Trevor Yerbury to decorate the rooms, all female nudes featuring nonprofessional Edinburgh models. A hotel official says, "Artwork in hotels tends to be boring prints on a huge production run so we saw this as an opportunity to do something a bit different, albeit slightly provocative. But the photographs are in good taste. They’re not of the Ms Whiplash variety." (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
UPDATE: Here's a thumbnail gallery of Trevor Yerbury's nude photos, just in case you can't make the field trip to Edinburgh this summer.
Richard Goldstein discusses an aspect of Bush's fighter pilot photo-op that "passed utterly below the radar. Discretion prevented anyone from mentioning that Bush's outfit gave him a very vivid basket. . . . Clearly Bush's handlers want to leave the impression that he's not just courageous and competent but hung."
UPDATE: When I linked to this Village Voice page early Tuesday afternoon, Goldstein's column was illustrated with a reproduction of a New York Post front page, allowing readers to check out that package for themselves. Four hours later, that image is gone. Strange.
UPDATE: An hour after the last update, the Village Voice has put up a new image alongside Goldstein's column. Maybe the Post complained about the reproduction of its front page.
UPDATE: A couple more shots of the vivid basket here and here.
Sex in the City: Shanghai debuted three weeks ago. The show's actual title translates as Hot Ladies, but director Zhu Yi plays up the similarities. "Our production might become the Chinese version of Sex and the City. The two shows put the women into a similar background, focusing on their experiences and views about love and marriage. But I believe the four Chinese ladies in our production are more closely related to the home audience."
New Orleans is debating a crackdown on public sex in the French Quarter, which primarily targets the annual gay Southern Decadence festival. A local christian conservative activist spurred the crackdown by videotaping public sex acts at last year's Southern Decadence and distributing the tapes to politicians. More from Jonno.
And check out Jonno's classic Southern Decadence diary for the lowdown on what really happens. (This piece originally appeared in the webzine Beardburn, which sadly seems to be defunct.)
Bollywood directors discover sex sells. "Cinema audiences in India are in for a shock: a string of films featuring previously taboo story lines, explicit dialogue and sex scenes are hitting the country’s silver screen this summer. . . . But the new wave is more than just about making money. Bollywood’s departure signals a change in social attitudes that makes it acceptable to audiences who would once have shunned such erotic fare. Economic liberalisation and satellite television with its Baywatch images changed all that. Even the Hindu Right, defenders of India’s traditional family values, has remained silent on Bollywood’s new wave. By Western standards, Bollywood’s latest incarnation is still tame, but the lusty kissing, raunchy dialogue and no-holds-barred story lines are a refreshing eye-opener for Indian viewers."
A rural Louisiana couple climbed to the top of a 215-foot water tower in the middle of the night because they wanted to have sex "on top of the world." Slidell Police showed up and arrested them after receiving complaints about someone "hootin' and hollerin'" atop the tower. The New Orleans Times-Picayune comments, "Although the tower is one of the highest points in St. Tammany Parish, it falls far short of Mount Everest, the true 'top of the world.' It would take 135 such towers to match Everest's 29,000-foot peak, a fact not lost on Police Chief Freddy Drennan. 'This is the poor man's version of the mile-high club,' Drennan said." (Link snagged from Obscure Store.)
Monday, May 19, 2003
The parents of a 12-year-old Utah boy are suing Barnes & Noble for inadvertently selling him a porn DVD. The kid purchased an issue of the skating magazine Rejects, which came packaged with a DVD full of skating tips and extreme highlights. But when he popped in the DVD at home, it actually contained a gay porn video called Hard Hat Pigs. Oops! The boy's mother says she received "little, if any, satisfaction" when she complained to Barnes & Noble corporate headquarters. More.
Cathy Young writes in Reason about what porn studies profs don’t get about sex.
Sunday, May 18, 2003
The Guardian: "Several 160-year-old pornographic photographs are among 300 daguerrotypes going on show at Paris's Orsay museum, in an exhibition which may rekindle interest in a neglected ancestor of modern photography. The images, fixed on silver-covered bronze plates, prove that Jacques Daguerre's clumsy invention pioneered every aspect of modern picture-taking, from page 3-style nudes to photojournalism, arty portraits to wide-angle panoramas, and exotic travel snaps to microscopic studies." (Link snagged from World Sex News.) The Musée d'Orsay website has more information on the daguerrotype exhibition, including a short catalog essay and some sample images (no nudes).
Jill Matrix offers a modest proposal in response to Rick Santorum.
Today's New York Times has a feature on photographer Thomas Ruff, who has created a series of nudes by downloading and photoshopping internet porn, "intensifying colors, blurring outlines and greatly enlarging the scale. The resulting photographs are both provocatively blunt and visually ravishing. Blurry, painterly and coolly mysterious, they recall the early photo-based paintings of Gerhard Richter — a comparison Mr. Ruff grudgingly acknowledges."
The first major exhibition of Ruff's "Nudes" was at the David Zwirner gallery in spring 2000. More articles and galleries here and here and here and here.
