Chavela Vargas #1 Listen: Los peces en el rio
Recommended reading.
Female dancers cover their faces as a state policeman guards during a raid in Ciudad Juarez, Jan. 27. (Union-Tribune)
Totonacas
Rufino Tamayo
El Pipila
Hotel Habita
Posted in Tickles My Fancy
Today, you read an interview with RuPaul to remind yourself that “We are born naked, the rest is drag.” And then you remember fondly of Judith Butler’s Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. And to remind you that action is the perfect accompaniment to a good idea. In this case, activism about perceptions of certain expressions of gender and sexuality. (Thanks, Steven!) And you write in second person singular because Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt is still spinning in your brain, even though it has nothing to do with this RuPaul.
And here we read a part of the interview with Frontiers LA, but the rest can be found here.
One of my favorite parts of the show is finding out who the celebrity judges are going to be for the current or upcoming episode. Because drag is such a long-standing component of gay culture, it feels like these celebrities are supporting gay culture and gay rights and everything that goes along with that. Do you feel the same way?
You know, it’s hard for me to separate gay culture from any culture—I really think it’s all the same. Once you cross a certain line in show business or cross a certain line in your life, leaving restrictions behind, it’s an open game. Most people who are in show business—celebrities, whatever—understand that there is life onstage and then there’s life offstage, and that it’s important to undersand that. So, most performers understand that they are in drag too. Once you’re onstage, you’re in your drag.
We have Elvira on our show. She and I have been friends for many years, and have commented on the fact that she is of course Cassandra Peterson, but she has Elvira as her stage persona. I bet if you spoke with Matt Damon or J.Lo—about her drag name of J.Lo—she would have the same attitude toward what she does—her drag. So the celebrities who come on understand very well what this is. It doesn’t have to be gay culture.
And listen, I’m gonna really blow your mind here. The truth is, these human bodies that we are in, they are just like a drag persona. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. I think at its core, our show is attractive to people—or attractive to their spirits—because they know that you are not the description on your driver’s license. You are actually much bigger than that. That’s why our show and drag exemplifies that … not even theory—that truth. I think that’s what the real attraction is. We are born naked and the rest is drag. That’s for everybody.
Posted in Tickles My Fancy
After five years, the magazine dedicated to illuminating the sex industry is closing down. If you’re in NYC on January 5, stop by their farewell party, as part of the Red Umbrella Series. Made by sex workers for sex workers, $pread believes that all sex workers have a right to self-determination, it worked to destigmatize sex workers and provided a platform for the varied voices in sex work. This is an important magazine that represents all that is good and vital about free speech, entrepreneurship and a sane discourse in sexuality in all its safe and consensual forms — even the ones that are harder to parse, like sex work. Thinking of Sen Santorum 8-vote loss in Iowa recently, I hope the people behind $pread and everyone who feels a call to action for matters of sex and gender continue to make their voices heard. I’m sorry I didn’t find out about it sooner. In honor of their last issue, here’s a reprint of a timeline of milestones for sex workers created by Will Rockwell and Christina Cicchelli that was in the Age issue and that is also available here at SpreadMagazine.org.
August 1966—A group of transwomen, hustlers and street queens, many of whom were sex workers, effected a riot in the Compton Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin when a police officer known for assaulting transwomen initiated an arrest.
Feb. 4, 1967—42 bunnies of the New York Playboy Club launch the Bunny Strike of 1967 in the midst of a blizzard. The Bunnies staged a walkout on a busy Saturday, after the breakdown of union contract negotiations.
June 28, 1969—A police raid at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn, known for its clientele of low-income drag queens, transpersons and gay men, including many sex workers, resulted in a series of violent protests.
1971—The Nevada State Legislature passes a law permitting county-level regulation schemes for prostitution in counties with populations under 400,000. Lawmakers specifically exclude Clark County (home of Las Vegas).
1973—The National Organization of Women (NOW) passes a resolution in support of the decriminalization of prostitution.
May 13, 1973— Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics (COYOTE) was founded by Margo St. James in San Francisco.
1975—The English Collective of Prostitutes came together under the International Wages for Housework Campaign. In 1979, a sister organization begins in the U.S. PROS, coming out of the New York Prostitute’s Collective (NYP), a group of black sex workers and black women supporters.
June 1975 – More than 100 working ladies of the French city of Lyon occupy the Church of Saint-Nizier for over a week in protest of their prostitution convictions. The occupation triggers multiple protests, occupations and strikes throughout France, with hundreds turning out in Paris, Marseilles, Grenoble, Montpelier, the Riviera, Cannes and Nice.
1980—At the United Nations Mid-Decade Conference on Women, U.S. PROS opposes a resolution on trafficking in protest of its affect on migrant sex workers, while COYOTE supports the resolution. In press releases around the incident COYOTE accuses members of U.S. PROS to be “dressed like whores but [aren't] really prostitute women.” U.S. PROS further distances itself from COYOTE on the grounds of differences in economic and racial analysis.
[GAMECHANGER] 1980—“Sex Work” is coined by Carol Leigh at a Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media meeting in San Francisco.
[GAMECHANGER] 1981—The porn industry is credited with pushing VHS tapes past Betamax, bringing pornography to mass audiences and beginning the consolidation of big studio pornography.
June 5, 1981—A disease that would later be named AIDS appears in medical literature in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
1983—Minneapolis, Minnesota conducts hearings on the Dworkin/MacKinnon Ordinance to outlaw pornography. The hearings result in the Meese Commission, a national commission on obscenity.
Posted in Jewelry, Fruit, and Sex
Hello and goodbye to 2011, which has brought wonderful things and dragged with it tidy denouements to brackish stories.
Art
This year I fell in love with collage.
Robert Mapplethorpe
Jonathan Yeo in London until 21 January at the Lazarides Gallery.
(Source)
Songs
Madder Red by Yeasayer from Secretly Jag on Vimeo.
Short Story
“The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are never as they were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions.”
‘The Nightlong River,’ Sarah Hall in her new collection The Beautiful Indifference.
Books
From a review of Rikki Ducornet’s Netsuke by Madison Smartt Bell in the Boston Globe:
Our society is numb to explicit depictions of sexual acts. The perversity, decadence, even the depravity that Ducornet renders here feel explosively fresh because their sources are thought and emotion, not the body, and finally there’s pathos too, which means the book cannot be dismissed as porn. What interests Ducornet is the magnetic collision of eros and thanatos in their most chthonic, archetypal forms.
Madison Smartt Bell’s The Color of Night as reviewed in the LA Times:
It’s no easy task to make readers care about a character as disturbed as Mae — Bell is careful to never cast her as a victim, which in itself is a deft narrative stroke (and one that is likely to make some readers turn away). But those who stay will find a novel that challenges the very anatomy of evil, a novel that breaks down a deeply flawed character until all that’s left is a vast and terribly familiar darkness.
And then, Play it as It Lays by Joan Didion, for speaking LA.
Causes (Give, give give)
Slutwalk Toronto (and beyond)
The ACLU’s freedom of speech campaigns regarding Internet censorship.
Places
Posted in Tickles My Fancy
Eva Ionesco is an actress and filmmaker, whose photographer mother Irina Ionesco used her as a model as a child. These are some of the less explicit photos. These are beautiful images, but complicated to look at. What does it say about the viewer if they are inspired, moved or provoked to thought through the representation of a child with touches of adult sexuality. The self-conscious erotic charge is something I remember from childhood. Children don’t need the adult eye to create themselves as erotic creatures. Children naturally imitate and emulate adults. For reasons I do not know, the power read in confident, radiant and erotically charged portrayals of adult females was something that spoke to me. Many of my friends, as well as I, worked this into their play. Trying on our mothers’ lingerie. Posing in a pin-up style. Before we had developed our secondary sexual characteristics.
This quotation from an essay I wrote on Josephine Mutzenbacher, a fictional memoir written by an aging Viennese prostitute who recounts her sexual awakening, between the ages of 7 and 14 (the age of consent in Vienna at the time) sums up the complicated pleasure of viewing Ionesco’s photographs: “The identification with the erotic child does not condone pedophilia. Rather, the conceit of truth in this text and the sexual child protagonist ask the reader to confront all his notions of decency and brings awareness to just how easy it is to draw pleasure from conventionally transgressive sources.”
In this sense, Irina Ionesco’s images hold a mirror up to the corners of our mind that we do not examine enough and should, in order to infuse the current fear about children as erotic objects with a bit of sense. Pedophilia, of course, is unacceptable, but the panic over children as potential erotic objects creates a disturbing backlash. The scholar James Kincaid writes: ‘By insisting so loudly on the innocence, purity, and asexuality of the child, we have created a subversive echo: experience, corruption, and eroticism. More than that, by attributing to the child the central features of desirability in our culture—purity, innocence, emptiness, Otherness—we have made absolutely essential figures who enact this desire’ (James R. Kincaid, Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1992).
I read that Eva now condemns these photos. With this in mind, was it wrong for her mother to document this aspect of child sexuality, innocent for the child but an artistic theme or inquiry into behavior on the artist’s behalf? Adult female porn stars, such as Deep Throat’s Linda Lovelace, who one assumes were in charge of their mental and emotional faculties when they made the decision to allow themselves to be filmed having sex, sometimes also renounce their involvement in documentation of the erotic self. Is it shame for Linda and Eva? Or is it regret that they did not know what they know now; feel as they feel now? Both Deep Throat and these images have a meaningful place in society and in the discourse of sexuality. As someone with a deep interest in the meaning and function of pornography, prostitution, eroticism, expressions and representations of sexuality, I think these documents are valuable.
Can the same be said the fashion images of Thylane Lena-Rose Blondeau, the 10-ish year-old model? Is it easier to appreciate Ionesco’s photographs than images that are made for commercial reasons (Deep Throat included)?
Some of the pictures feature wittily in editorials about age and beauty. (Lipstick felt like a potent gateway to womanhood. And misapplied lipstick, especially scarlet and berry colors, makes me feel like a child.)
But others balance precariously on the edge of a self-referential fashion commentary on the fashion industry’s use of child-like models to market clothing to, presumably, fully grown women. Even though shoes that don’t quite fit are common in fashion editorials (I assume it’s often unintentional), Thylane’s too-big shoes upset me a little. I like processing these feeling of discomfort, but I am unable to make up my mind on if in fine art and pornography I allow for a wider dialogue than I do in commercial representation. Just look back at this Marilyn-Monroe-ish image of Madison Young and her child.
And then I think of the Blue Lagoon and its assertion of natural love. Every new moment of a child’s life is a step towards adulthood and the procreative urge.
Thylane in Blue Lagoon-style.
Let’s return to the basic tenets of good BDSM play: Safe, sane and consensual. Consensuality is key in thinking about these images. Can a child consent to representations, as above? How can a child be equipped to understand what representation like this will mean, not for society’s sake, but for themselves as they mature into adults?
In this way, it’s not about the erotic elements of the work, but the exposure of child. Far more disturbing than these photos could ever be is the Marni Kotak, the performance artist who recently gave birth to Baby X in Microscope Art Gallery, NY. Yes, giving birth to a child is probably ‘the highest form of art,’ as she asserts. For many reasons, the first that comes to mind is the draconian relationship of corporate America to women having children (Bloomberg, hello.), this seems like a valuable performance, reminding us just how organic life is — even if we have adorned it with a sophisticated architecture of economics, etc.
But when Kotak stated that she’ll document the child’s upbringing with a weekly podcast for 18 years, questions of a right to privacy and perhaps even dignity, must be posed. It smacks too much of the notion of a child as property and the liberties parents take with their children.
I suppose we won’t have the answer until Thylane grows up. In the meantime, we can watch Eva Ionesco’s film “My Little Princess.”
MY LITTLE PRINCESS – Trailer – CINERAMABC INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL from Cineramabc Filmes on Vimeo.
Thanks to Samantha Sweeting for showing me Eva Ionesco’s work.
Gin punch in tea cups and winter air on one of London’s loveliest streets. I’m ready to let the holidays roll in! From the turtle dove to the maids a-milking to the naughty twist on the carousel, I adore this tableau. Photos by Lisa Wormsley.
Posted in Tickles My Fancy
[via]
Might someone enlighten me regarding the rosy gem peeking out from the corset? I keep seeing this in portraiture and 18th-century-inspired comic representations of hot-blooded women in the throes of their hot-bloodedness. This is a portrait of a famously prudish lady-in-waiting. Am I meant to divine from the portrait that she is also a lady-of-giving? Is it a painter’s joke about 18th century ‘Tijuana Bibles’ in which she featured?
Marie Louise was by nature extremely prudish and there was never any gossip about her private life. However, in popular anti-monarchist propaganda of the time, she was regularly portrayed in pornographic pamphlets, showing her as the queen’s lesbian lover to undermine the public image of the monarchy. (Quotation from Wikipedia. Source: Chantal Thomas, The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette)
Posted in Tickles My Fancy
Women in Lust is the new erotic anthology from editor and writer Rachel Kramer Bussel, published by Cleis Press.
The number of works of erotic fiction I have read can, I think, be counted on one hand. One of those was Artist’s Slut. It was a gift from a friend in the years I was working as an art model. He found it in a secondhand bookshop and told me that the model on the cover had a body just like mine. A lovely compliment. I hadn’t read an erotic book since the Story of O. I wanted this book to deliver in text my occasional lusty daydreams, while standing silent, nude and still in a room full of strangers. Alas, the author was fond of quoting Saturday Night Live-era Billy Crystal in the oddest places and seemed to be writing with one hand. Like with driving, you must use both hands to write and you need to keep your eye on the road. But the poorly written story of an objectified artists model and muse who becomes the toast of the town was still effective. Just the mention of sex, the mention of sex acts, the poorest descriptions of what goes where and with what intensity, really, are enough. Let me read this paragraph, this sentence, this word again and again until the rhythm of the page is overtaken by the rhythm of my breath. Books are awkward erotic companions — ending up on top of me or next to me, stretching my neck to just look at the text, barely able to read, reaffirming that those paragraphs are still indeed there, that those people are doing that thing always and forever on the page. The joy of erotica: lust is never spent and the memory of lust is long.
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s new anthology Women in Lust is refreshing erotica. I like my erotic heroines to have agency, to know what they want in bed, to be bold enough to make new experiences. In 20 short stories by female writers, the reader is served knife play, butterscotch pudding, musings on orchids, female voyeurism and more. The stories affirm the absurdity of lust and its varied nature, with bite-sized stories of women fulfilling their fantasies. The writing is pleasurably playful and inspire as much as they do arouse. With the holidays coming up, this luscious morsel would make and excellent stocking stuffer for you know who. You can buy it here or visit the Women in Lust blog to find out more and read excerpts of the stories. Full disclosure: I adore Rachel Kramer Bussel’s work. Her Best Sex Writing series brings together some of the most engaging, intelligent writing on sex around. Read more about her here.
