Category Archives: eroticism

The Valley (1989) – Burroughs/Haring

Via American author Dennis Cooper’s blog, comes:

“”The Valley” is a group of etchings by Keith Haring with text by William S. Burroughs. The portfolio consists of sixteen etchings drawn by the artist in April of 1989, in his New York studio. ” –Dennis Cooper

“There is no way in or out of the Valley, which is ringed by sheer cliffs with an overhanging ledge. How did the people of the Valley get in there in the first place? No one remembers. They have been there for many years. Children have been born, grown up and died in the valley, but not many children. Food is scarce. A stream runs through the Valley, and they have dammed up a large pond to raise fish. There is an area along the stream where they raise corn. Sometimes they will kill birds, a few lizards and snakes. So most children must be killed at birth. Just an allotted number to continue the line.” –William Burroughs

The installments can be found here, here and here.

Tip of the hat to Georges Bataille.

Update:

From the Dennis Cooper website:

“Dennis Cooper, God help him, is a born writer” – William Burroughs

“In another country or another era, Dennis Cooper’s books would be circulated in secret, explosive samizdat editions that friends and fans would pass around and savor like forbidden absinthe… This is high risk literature”
– The New York Times

James Cain (1892 – 1977)

Lifespan: 1892 – 1977

Related: hardboiled – crime fiction – 1900s literature – American literature

Jealous Woman (1950) – James M. Cain
Corgi Edition published 1966
Image sourced here.
See also: jealousy

The seminal American writer in the noir fiction mode was James M. Cain—regarded as the third major figure of the early hardboiled scene, he debuted as a crime novelist in 1934, right between Hammett and Chandler.

Rationales for movie sex and nudity

Found a good article titled Rationales for movie sex and nudity:

“To avoid the charge of presenting scenes involving “gratuitous sex and nudity,” Hollywood filmmakers often suggest a reason (or at least an occasion) for their stars’ behavior, offering various rationales for movie sex and nudity during each decade of the twentieth century.”

In many ways this phenomenon was also apparent in European art from the Middle Ages until the 1850s. But the rise of modern art and the related rise of realism in the arts in France changed all that. Artists no longer wished to hide behind artistic pretexts to represent nudity and eroticism. An important example of this is Manet’s Olympia.

Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) – Richard Brooks

 


Looking for Mr. Goodbar (1977) – Richard Brooks

Looking for Mr. Goodbar is a 1975 novel by Judith Rossner, and a 1977 film by Richard Brooks starring Diane Keaton and Richard Gere, based on the true story of a woman who has an affair with her sadistic and misogynistic professor as the beginning of a long downward spiral that culminates in her brutal murder.

In recent years the film has been compared to Jane Campion’s 2003 In the Cut. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post called the latter an “erotic thriller that amounts to an implausible update on Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”

Notes:

  • Looking for Mr. Goodbar foreshadows the end of the sexual revolution.
  • Looking for Mr. Goodbar wasn’t the first foray of Richard Brooks into true crime, there had been a film adaptation of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood in 1967.

Key texts of paracinema

Key texts of paracinema: Hard Core (1989) – Linda Williams – Men, Women, and Chain Saws (1992) – Carol J. Clover – The Monstrous-Feminine – Barbara Creed (1993) – Trashing the Academy (1995) – Jeffrey Sconce – Sleaze Mania (1999) – Joan Hawkins – Cutting Edge (2000) – Joan Hawkins – Porn Studies (2004) – Linda Williams

 

Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to ‘legitimate’ film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.

The term was coined in the early seventies by Ken Jacobs to denote countercultural and underground films of the sixties but re-coined in 1995 by Jeffrey Sconce, an American media scholar, to denote ‘an extremely elastic textual category’ which includes entries from seemingly disparate genres of the non-mainstream fuelled by oppositional taste strategies (see The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste (2003)). Major theorists of the 1990s and 2000s paracinematic variety include Linda Williams, Joan Hawkins, Carol J. Clover and Barbara Creed (1993). [Aug 2006]

Off topic: Yesterday was my brother’s birthday party; of the music he played I especially enjoyed a recent album by British psych folk singer Vashti Bunyan and French singer Benjamin Biolay’s 2003 album Négatif.

k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium

k-punk’s contribution to the pornography symposium:

What Ballard, Lacan and Burroughs have in common is the perception that human sexuality is essentially pornographic.

For all three, human sexuality is irreducible to biological excitation; strip away the hallucinatory and the fantasmatic, and sexuality disappears with it. As Renata Salecl argues in (Per)Versions of Love and Hate, it is easier for an animal to enter the Symbolic Order than it is for a human to unlearn the Symbolic and attain animality, an observation confirmed by the news that, when an orang-utan was presented with pornography, it ceased to show any sexual interest in its fellow apes and spent all day masturbating. The orang-utan had been inducted into human sexuality by the ‘inhuman partner’, the fantasmatic supplement, upon which all human sexuality depends. —k-punk [Aug 2006]

Capitalized Phrases analysis:

Eyes Wide Shut – J. G. Ballard – Jacques Lacan – William Burroughs – – Renata Salecl – Boschian – Jean Baudrillard – Sigmund Freud – Delvaux – Helmut Newton – David Cronenberg – Immanuel Kant – Marquis de Sade – Sacher-Masoch – Jonathan Weiss – Dior – Chanel – Iain Sinclair

In search of photographic realism

Detail of the The Birth of Venus (also known as Aphrodite) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, 1879.

In Plato’s Symposium the speech of Pausanias distinguishes two manifestations of Aphrodite, represented by the two stories: Aphrodite Ourania (“heavenly” Aphrodite), and Aphrodite Pandemos (“Common” Aphrodite). These two manifestations represented her role in homosexuality and heterosexuality, respectively. –via Aphrodite’s Wikipedia page [Aug 2006]

In his own time, Bouguereau was considered to be one of the greatest painters in the world. In 1900, his contemporaries Degas and Monet reportedly named him as most likely to be remembered as the greatest 19th century French painter by the year 2000. Although with Degas’ famous trenchant wit, and the aesthetic tendencies of the two Impressionists, it is possible the statement was meant as an ironic comment on the taste of the future public. 

When the paratext is more interesting than the text

Exploitation Poster Art (2005) – Dave Kehr, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Horror Poster Art (2004) – Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Science Fiction Poster Art (2004) – Christopher Frayling, Tony Nourmand, Graham Marsh [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

In Europe, publisher Taschen have teamed up with Nourmand/Marsh, to publish a series of film poster books. Available in Belgium at a price of 13 Euros, they are a bargain. Some of the accompanying text of these lovingly produced coffee table books was written by American film critic Dave Kehr (Exploitation poster art) and British art historian Christopher Frayling (Science-fiction poster art). The posters are masterpieces of visual innuendo, offering, in most cases, far more that the films actually delivered. And that is what I meant in my title about the paratext being more interesting than the text.

Porn symposium

Update: Aug 24: pornography – symposium

Via girish again comes:

Terrific post by Owen Hatherley, part of the Porn Symposium (hey, there’s an idea for a future blog-a-thon): Russ Meyer, Vilgot Sjöman, etc, but mostly Dušan Makavejev.

Sexpol and Sexploitation in the cinema of the New Left

Part of a Porn Symposium with K-Punk, Infinite Thought, Poetix, Effay, Bacteriagrl and Different Maps. —Owen Hatherley

There is a story of the permeation of pornography into mainstream cinema and into everyday life, and it goes much like this; a combination of American exploitation directors and French arthouse in the early 1970s, through a conjunction of fake orgasms and truck drivers on the one hand and soft focus and cod-philosophy on the other takes what was previously suppressed and places it in the heart of the multiplex. In this narrative the heroes are the hucksters behind Deep Throat or the faux-sophisticates of Emmanuelle, with even dissenting semi-mainstream directors like Russ Meyer considered too original to be relevant. These are two films from which one can trace a line to the frat film, the overlit horrors of most American porn and the ‘another round of whispering on a bed’ (Foucault) that is, the French sex drama, always aiming to reveal some essential truth or other. The confirmation seemingly of the Foucauldian admonition that ‘sex is boring’. —Owen Hatherley

P.S.

[This post forms part of a symposium with bacteriagrl, k-punk, sit down man you’re a bloody tragedy (I still dream of orgonon), infinite thought (the money shot and vintage porn), effay, poetix.] —Different Maps

My two cents:

 

Related: 1971 – European cinema – Freudo-Marxism – Dušan Makavejev – Wilhelm Reich – the sexual revolution in the cinema

The ravishing sex reformer and radical in a provocative pose; composing sex and politics, it also reveals Makavejev’s “aestheticism”; the unexpected rabbit, the strong, two-colored vertical stripes and particularly the inexplicable empty frame. SC via Film As a Subversive Art (1974) – Amos Vogel

Update Aug 23 2006:

As you’ll recall, Ariel Levy snarled about porn studies in the confessional section of Female Chauvinist Pigs. If you are unfamiliar with the evil that is porn studies, you should check out the Porn Symposium going on now! You can see why Ariel Levy felt that this kind of feminism contributed to raunch culture and the gyrations and tough talk of female chauvinist pigs. –via blog.pulpculture.org