Category Archives: eroticism

World cinema classics #34

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LwaPJUtZBYc&]

Tokyo Decadence (1992) – Ryu Murakami

This is a film I chose in the mid 1990s at the video store because of its cover, not being familiar at the time with the work of Murakami (Coin Locker Babies). The key scenes are four sex scenes (see more at the wiki). Three out of these heavily feature drugs. The most exquisite one, featured in the Youtube remix above, is soundtracked by Xavier Cugat music. The audio used in this particular Youtube remix is not included in the original film. I wonder what the music is. Anyone? (De temps en temps is a song (André Hornez / Paul Misraki) voiced by Josephine Baker.)

The film’s only rival in terms of my favourite film of the 1990s is the Japanese film Audition, which is also written by Murakami.

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

Icons of erotic art #11

Jeff Bark (born 1963) “Untitled (Dusk)” (2004–05), of the Abandon series, provided me with an immediate frisson. It laterally depicts a kneeling woman, her hands stretched out over a sofa, something that appears to be a whip to her side. The colors are very suede-like.

“The Belt“, a short story by Italian author Alberto Moravia, provided me with a very similar frisson.

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

Tip of the hat to L’@mateur.

Belgian bloggers #1

Rafaela
Rafaela by carmendevos

I met Rafaela in January 2005. That was before she became SensOtheque. She blogged as Bitterzoet [1], a very personal blog about here sexual encounters, fantasies, likes and dislikes. It featured some of the best writing in the Belgian blogosphere at that moment.Since then, Rafaela has become a name in the world of Belgian erotomania, she launched SensOtheque; a website dedicated to eroticism, was featured in Feeling and De Morgen, and contributed to the most recent issue of TicKL Magazine [2] [3], a Belgian magazine launched by carmendevos [4].

I remember quite clearly what I liked about Rafaela. She managed to physically visualize a space hitherto primarily mental. She fleshed out this pornotopia as Le Château d’O[5].

“The Château d’O features erotically decorated bedrooms with luxury bathrooms, but also houses common lounge spaces with a cinematheque, a print cabinet, a sens’Othèque where one can use sex toys, a well-furnished library and a atmospheric bar and restaurant, a bathhouse with sauna and a BDSM attic.” [6]

Later, after she’d launched the SensOtheque “a guide to refined Literotica, Cinerotica & Bedroom Arts” [7], she incorporated these early comments into her mission statement.

“The sensOtheque is a dream that comes true, an empire of kinky chic, with an air of boudoir romanticism, of the voluptuous and the sumptuous. The sensOtheque represents a passion for far-off, more glorious days: the times of the courtesans and the distinguished geishas, the red velvet atmosphere of The Story of O and Venus in Furs, the decadent world of the 18th century Salons, where women were educated in the field of sexual pleasure.”

TicKL 2 can be ordered here. It includes the only and very short piece of fiction I have ever written, called “Brahms II“, version homme, inspired by Brahms I, by Rafaela.

This post is the first of a new series on blogs from Belgium

Blazon of the Ugly Tit

Contreblason du Tetin (1535) (Eng: Blazon of the Ugly Tit) is a poem by Clément Marot on ugly female breasts.  Here in a translation by Helene Marmoux [1]. Clément Marot (1496–1544), was a French poet of the Renaissance period, for his poems on body parts, known as blasons and contreblasons. The  ugly woman is a surprisingly common figure in Renaissance poetry, one that has been frequently appropriated by male poetic imagination to depict moral, aesthetic, social, and racial boundaries. The subject has been treated in dept by Patrizia Bettella in The Ugly Woman: Transgressive Aesthetic Models in Italian Poetry from the Middle Ages to the Baroque ( 2005).

Tit, skinny tit,
flat tit that looks like a flag,
big tit, long tit,
tit, must I call thee bag?
Tit with its ugly black end,
forever moving tit.
Who would boast having touched you?
With their hand fondle you? more…

Tip of the hat to On Ugliness

Icons of erotic art #10

As we have learnt from the first nine issues in this series, in the nebulous realm of erotic art, uneroticism runs rampant. Not with the photos I am about to present. NSFW, previously unpublished online, here is Unica Zürn photographed by Hans Bellmer [1].

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

Spinoza and bondage (“He swore he’d never touch her again”)

Of Human Bondage He Swore

“He swore he’d never touch her again and then she whispered his name and he was lost” -film tagline

Of Human Bondage 1964

“When a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse. ” —Ethics of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions, Spinoza

I believe my first exposure to radical Dutch enlightenment philosopher Spinoza was via Gilles Deleuze or via the “perishable monuments” of Thomas Hirschhorn which I discovered in Germany at documenta in 2002.

Via Guy de Maupassant and William Somerset Maugham‘s Of Human Bondage I discovered this bit on human bondage.

In the 1660s, the Dutch philosopher Spinoza writes, in his Ethics of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions (a part of his Ethics), that the term “bondage” relates to the human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions.

Icons of erotic art #9

Princess X, used here on the cover of Peter Webb’s The Erotic Arts (1975).

Constantin Brâncuşi‘s Princess X (1916) [1] is a representation of a phallus, although the artist – similar to a ploy used by Magritte in The Treachery Of Images when he said: “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” – himself always contended that it depicted the “eternal feminine”. Brancusi’s contribution to the Paris Salon des Indépendants of 1920, it provoked a quite a furor and had to be withdrawn following the intervention of the police.

Please excuse the uneroticism of this work, it seems the realm of “erotic art” is littered with unerotics. To make it up to you, let me give you some new Yoshifumi Hayashi from the excellent blog Banana Hole (this NSFW post is ambiguously amusing/disturbing), and a previously published one of the same artist by the ever reliable @mateurdart.

Lastly, some eye candy by Hajime Sawatari here from this series by this blog.

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

Erotic (un)possibilities in an Antioch world

Over the past few days I’ve been mulling over Siri Hustvedt title essay A Plea for Eros which is a rumination on the effability and ineffability of sex in connection with the Antioch Ruling. Since January 1, 2006, the Antioch College in Ohio, United States, requires students to gain consent at each stage of a sexual encounter.

Hustvedt’s essay on the unreliability and ambiguity of language in relation to sexual ethics reminded me of Georges Bataille when he said that “sex begins where speech [or words] ends”, a statement I tend to agree with.

[Youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=q7SNOX9W3WY]

Emotionally charged scene in A History of Violence (French version)

Which brings me to Cronenberg penultimate film A History of Violence, the Straw Dogs of the 2000s. It is the story of Tom Stall, his wife Edie and their two children. Tom is a good-hearted impostor with organized crime roots. After his family finds out his true identity they initially reject him. He is finally accepted in a superb silent scene which is a celebration of the nuclear family; but not until after an emotionally charged fight between Tom and Edie followed by rough sex on the stairs. Notice the absence of adherence to the Antioch Ruling.

However, as Hustvedt points out at the beginning of her essay, an Antioch world can be full of erotic possibilities.

Imagine asking a female love interest “May I touch your left breast?”; patiently and eagerly waiting for the answer.

Dutch director Warmerdam’s cult film Little Tony predates Hustdvedt’s sentiments by 8 years. In this tragicomedy the erotic possibilities of explicitness in sexual encounters is illustrated by a key scene in which Brand, the protagonist illiterate farmer asks Lena, the school teacher who has been hired by Brand’s wife, “May I see your left breast?“. After a putative “Why?” by Lena, Brand answers: “So I can remain curious about the right one.”

History of Violence flotsam: Steven Shaviro gives a roundup of cinerati such as k-punk, girish twice, Chuck, Jodi — followed by k-punk’s reply and Jodi’s counter-reply — Jonathan Rosenbaum and his own view here.

Great films vs. small films

Little Children, the pervert

The pervert in Little Children

“Sarah reminded herself to think like an anthropologist”

I watched Little Children yesterday evening. Little Children = Madame Bovary + suburban postmodernism, it is an attempt to create the “Great American Film” (see Great American Novel) in a tradition which started with American Beauty and Magnolia; ultimately the film is pretentious but proficient.

Kate Winslet shines as Emma Bovary and the “new Paul Newman” is as useless as the worst of Emma’s lovers. Given the choice between the Great American Film and the “Small American Film” (think Fast Food, Fast Women and Denise Calls Up), I’ll choose the latter.

Nonetheless, this is the best film adaptation of Madame Bovary since Chabrol‘s literal interpretation starring Isabelle Huppert, and I was amused with the book clubbers debating the sexual practices described in Madame Bovary (specifically, whether a vague reference to a “shameful” sexual act implies that she has anal sex). The sex scenes are as hot and steamy as The Postman Always Rings Twice. The film is recommended but I’m not going to count it as a World Cinema Classic.