Category Archives: eroticism

2 x Rita Cadillac = 2 x guilty pleasures

Rita Cadillac

“Ne touchez pas à l’animal” (1971) by Rita Cadillac via au carrefour étrange

“É Bom Para o Moral” (1984) by Rita Cadillac

The first Rita is French, she was an exotic dancer of the generation of previously mentioned Rita Renoir, the tragedienne of strippers. The title of her single reads “Do not touch the animal”.

The second Rita is Brazilian and her song translates as “It’s good for the moral”. It’s an outrageously uplifting Euro-dance song of the same mantle that holds Lou Deprijck, the virtually unknown but at the same time one of the most successful Belgian music producers ever, of whom I’ve given you guilty pleasures #7 and Que Tal America.

What Lou and Rita share is a love of the Brazilian thing, logical for Rita since she is Brazilian, logical for Lou since he loves party music and Brazilians have been very apt at producing party music.

Icons of erotic art #22

File:Masked nude woman, seated, by Thomas Eakins.jpg

Study of a Seated Nude Woman Wearing Mask (c. 1865–66) by Thomas Eakins

This drawing by American artist Eakins is a testament to the aphrodisian qualities of sensory deprivation. Central to this drawing are the breasts, ripe and heavy, surreal and unreal, proof that the most beautiful of women are not to be found in real life (except in brief photographic glimpses); but rather on paper.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

Nobrow manifestos, #2

The Pornographic Imagination is is my second entry in this series, the first was Leslie Fiedler’s Cross the Border — Close the Gap (1969).

The Pornographic Imagination is a nobrow essay by Susan Sontag first published in book form in Styles of Radical Will. It had been originally published two years earlier in the Partisan Review of spring 1967.

The subject is erotic literature and Sontag contends that five French literary works are not ‘just’ pornography but literary fiction and thus genuine literature. Although the term paraliterature had not been coined at the time of its writing (we have to wait 17 years for Fredric Jameson to do that), the connection between science fiction and erotic fiction makes this essay one of the first defenses of the nobrow or paraliterary category.

Her ‘case’ is based on these five novels:

On Georges Bataille she writes:

“One reason that Histoire de l’oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and unsettling impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn’t sex but death. I am not suggesting that every pornographic work speaks, either overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, “the obscene,” do. It’s toward the gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends.”

An obsession with the female form

Miroslav Tichy

Baby Got Back (a.k.a. “I Like Big Butts“)

Via gmtPlus9 (-15) comes outsider artist par excellence Miroslav Tichý, a Czech photographer and painter. During many years Tichý wandered the small Moravian town of Kyjov in rags, pursuing his obsession with the female form by secretly photographing women in the streets, shops and parks with cameras he made from tin cans, children’s spectacle lenses and other junk he found on the street. He would return home each day to make prints on equally primitive equipment, making only one print from the negatives he selected. His work remained largely unknown until 2005, when he was 79 years old.

Gratuitous nudity #7

Jekyl and Hyde

From a small Danish magazine via Au Carrefour Etrange comes this Jekyll and Hyde photonovel, one of the first clearly pornographic print productions published openly and in full color in Europe. Losfeld, the author of Au carrefour has  deliberately omitted the more explicit scenes and urges to write him if you want to see more.

Previous entries in this series.

Icons of erotic art #21

The illustration Artist and Model in the Studio by Albrecht Dürer, first published in The Painter’s Manual in 1525, is a woodcut that has been readily used to illustrate the dominance of the male gaze in Western visual culture, as well as the general consequences of mechanizing the relationship between the viewer and the viewed. In 1993 French photographic artist Dany Leriche appropriated Dürer’s original image as Hanneke et Elise [1], interpretable as a feminist-inspired rejection of the male gaze. The image is part of a diptych – the second part is a photograph of the model taken through the grid from the point of view of the observer.

Previous appropriations at Jahsonic included Balthus’s The Guitar Lesson [1] by Japanese photographer Naoto Kawahara in 2007 [2].

Tip of the hat to Lemateurdart.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

Icons of erotic art #20

Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme

Consider me: my hands can not cover my breasts, I cling to them tightly to hide my shame. But also consider this: sunlit windows gaze down upon me like undeniable eyes, millions of bronze eyes; and shame turns into pride.

Jeune fille en buste 1794 by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a typical illustration for the blog Femme, femme, femme.

Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.

Introducing Chris Morris

The list of sensibilities published in my recent post on Grillet prompted a regular reader to alert me to the work of Chris Morris.

“Sex for Houses“

Chris Morris (born 1965) started his career on radio, the clip above is from his television work, which – so it is said – is a little less powerful than his radiophonic work, but works better on the blog format.

The clip is very disturbing and funny, it appropriates the tropes of reality TV shows.

I’ve long stopped watching television on a regular basis, but I have known periods of serious telephilia. The BBC has always been a haven to the telephile.

Recent British television I did enjoy (on Youtube) have included:

World cinema classics #40

Today’s World Cinema Classic is Glen or Glenda Youtube, sorry embedding disabled, a film on transsexuality directed by Ed Wood, Jr. and released in 1953. I only saw this a couple of years ago. Since the arrival of the VCR, the film has been marketed as one of the worst ever. I would have to disagree with that statement, it’s very enjoyable. There is a dream scene in this film (a bit similar to the one shown in the clip) which ranks way up there with “genuine” surrealist films such as Un Chien Andalou. By all means, see it.

The defining sentence is “Pull the stringk!”

Caveat emptor: There is the slightest of chances that I liked the soundtrack (I cannot identify it, does anyone have the details?) so much that it prejudiced me in a favorable way.

Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.