“Can desire, the anticipation of pleasure, ever truly be photographed? No one has done it as well as Chas Ray Krider, and no one has equaled his blend of salaciousness and subtlety.” — Esparbec, writer, Paris 2007
A new book by “Motel Fetish” Chas Ray Krider
Chas has a blog with photos like this one. His latest book, Do not Disturb, was published by French imprint/bookseller La Musardine. For a good Esparbec cover, click here.
“You think I’m gorgeous” from Miss Congeniality.
I’ve seen the film twice. The film’s been bugging me (in a good way) for the last couple of weeks, when I started thinking about world peace (remember Bullock’s reluctance at the beginning of the film to wish for it, and than after she’s won, concedes to do so?). World peace brought to mind a passage by Georges Bataille on the impossibility of world peace which I can’t seem to re-find.
Then, when finding the clips (in nice filmed-from-a-TV-set mode) above, I was reminded of how much I had enjoyed the film and its good-natured romanticism. In such is the state of feminism I’ve defended another fluff film for its ability to portray part of the man-woman relationship in the 21st century.
So, will this remain a guilty pleasure, or get a promotion to World Cinema Classic? I’ll have to think about it.
“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.
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.
[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6Xgn63o7UU]
Erotissimo is a 1968 French–Italian film directed by Gérard Pirès. Its theme is a satire on the use of sex in advertising and sexual objectification of women. I’ve mentioned this film before and posted a different trailer, but this trailer is superb, good rhythm, extremely funny (sorry French only!), nice score and stunning visuals.
Previous “World Cinema Classics” and in the Wiki format here.
Sensuality (1891) – Franz von Stuck
Although a mediocre painter at best and deservedly one of the minor figures in European fin de siècle Symbolism, there are two paintings by Franz Von Stuck that I like: Salome, which I “exhibited” here, and Sensuality (pictured above) . In Sensuality, the image of the serpent as phallus is left in little doubt and shows an enormous python-like creature passing between the legs of a nude woman. The serpent’s head rests on the woman’s right shoulder; both the serpent and the woman gaze at the viewer. There are obvious connections to the tentacle eroticism trope.
Previous entries in Icons of Erotic Art here, and in a Wiki format here.
Grand bath at Bursa (1885) by Jean-Léon Gérôme
The Turkish Bath (1862) – Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
I quote from my text on Ingres’s Turkish Bath, but the validity is for all three paintings:
When Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, director of the French Académie de peinture painted a highly-colored vision of a turkish bath, he made his eroticized Orient publicly acceptable by his diffuse generalizing of the female forms, who might all have been of the same model. If his painting had simply been retitled “In a Paris Brothel,” it would have been far less acceptable. Sensuality was seen as acceptable in the exotic Orient.
Most of my renewed interest in these painting has been thinking about books such as the Pre-Victorian British erotic literature epistolary novel The Lustful Turk and reading Turkish author Bedri Baykam’s pamphletish but nonetheless thought provoking history of modern art Monkeys’ Right to Paint , which contends that modern art (he means modernist art) is largely influenced by non-Western arts. Baykam takes the 1984 MoMA exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art as a starting point for his rant against the art establishment.
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
Breast Ptosis, or sagging breasts is a medical term for the drooping or sagging of the breast. See the work of Stanley Spencer [1], Lucian Freud [2], John Currin, [3], and Lisa Yuskavage[4].
The Black Champion
Although Curt’s of Groovy Age is no longer personally digging the crates for transgressive Italian fumetti, his Scandinavian (I assume) correspondent Jaakko has taken over the helm. It is quite impossible to imagine that these Terror Blu comics would be sold today anywhere in the Western world today, except maybe Japan.
Virginia, 1812. Tom the slave is about to be hanged for raping his owner’s daughter, even though Tom swears the girl is lying.
Read the rest of the Black Champion here.
![[1]](http://static.flickr.com/68/226456552_66b863b4b0.jpg){kind=link}
![[2]](http://www.pjcrook.com/freud.jpg){kind=link}
![[3]](http://flashartonline.com/OnWeb/interview/JOHN_CURRIN_2.jpg){kind=link}
![[4]](http://ocio.quitua.com.mx/blogs/media/big_art_yuskavage.jpg){kind=link}