Best Erotic Comics 2008 - Google Books
Monday, May 31, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
BALLARDIAN
Monday, May 17, 2010
NYMPHOLEPSY
On Right: Charles Durand's Hebe
“Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked — had always looked — like Botticelli’s russet Venus — the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty.” (Ch.29, part 2, p.180)
Excerpts from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
“Sometimes… Come on, how often exactly, Bert? Can you recall four, five, more such occasions? Or would no human heart have survived two or three? Sometimes (I have nothing to say in reply to your question), while Lolita would be haphazardly preparing her homework, sucking a pencil, lolling sideways in an easy chair with both legs over its arm, I would shed all my pedagogic restraint, dismiss all our quarrels, forget all my masculine pride — and literally crawl on my knees to your chair, my Lolita! You would give me one look — a gray furry question mark of a look: “Oh no, not again” (incredulity, exasperation); for you never deigned to believe that I could, without any specific designs, ever crave to bury my face in your plaid skirt, my darling! The fragility of those bare arms of yours — how I longed to enfold them, all your four limpid lovely limbs, a folded colt, and take your head between my unworthy hands, and pull the temple-skin back on both sides, and kiss your chinesed eyes, and — “Pulease, leave me alone, will you,” you would say, “for Christ’s sake leave me alone.” And I would get up from the floor while you looked on, your face deliberately twitching in imitation of my tic nerveux. But never mind, never mind, I am only a brute, never mind, let us go on with my miserable story.”(Chapter 10, part 2, p.126-127)
“Curious: although actually her looks had faded, I definitely realized, so hopelessly late in the day, how much she looked — had always looked — like Botticelli’s russet Venus — the same soft nose, the same blurred beauty.” (Ch.29, part 2, p.180)
“I loved you. I was a pentapod monster, but I loved you. I was despicable and brutal, and turpid, and everything, mais je t’aimais, je t’aimais! And there were times when I knew how you felt, and it was hell to know it, my little one. Lolita girl, brave Dolly Schiller.
I recall certain moments, let us call them icebergs in paradise, when after having had my fill of her—after fabulous, insane exertions that left me limp and azure-barred — I would gather her in my arms with, at last, a mute moan of human tenderness (her skin glistening in the neon light coming from the paved court through the slits in the blind, her soot-black lashes matted, her grave gray eyes more vacant than ever — for all the world a little patient still in the confusion of a drug after a major operation) — and the tenderness would deepen to shame and despair, and I would lull and rock my lone light Lolita in my marble arms, and moan in her warm hair, and caress her at random and mutely ask her blessing, and at the peak of this human agonized selfless tenderness(with my soul actually hanging around her naked body and ready to repent), all at once, ironically, horribly, lust would swell again — and “oh, no,” Lolita would say with a sigh to heaven, and the next moment the tenderness and the azure — all would be shattered." (Chapter 32, part 2, p.189-190)
Excerpts from Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Sunday, May 2, 2010
SASHA GREY
I’ve read recently a quasi-Nietzschean comment under a youtube’s national lampoon’s interview with Sasha Grey concerning the ‘look’ of her eyes that says: “It's a dead inside porn look that is glassed over by Heroine and Xanax. A lot of girls do those numbing drugs […]. If you take shit to a dark place it takes you. That's the Half closed look that you think is sexy.”[1] Google “half-closed look” and if you come up with, par example, Buddha and the Setting Sun, canine eye tumors, or morning enlightments, and, additionally, if you’re a neophytic Sasha Greian, it might become obvious after some pondering that this is a saturnine one-way pornographic Nirvana we’re dealing with. The other connotation that came to my mind through the process of exuberant mental linking was Georges Bataille’s “The Solar Anus,” as delineated in this quote: “The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.”[2]
Apátheia?
And here’s Sasha on her MySpace profile: “Dark is the light and everything is black.” My take on this quote would be purely superficial and involve her Roman Catholic upbringing, fondness of black metal, Coco Chanel, and black nail enamel, yet she lists Bataille among her favorite writers so I guessed the analogy is not totally uncalled for. For those unfamiliar with Sasha Gray and her rise to pornographic career, she started at the age of 18 and during the time span of five years has shot ca. 200 movies, as enumerated by the Internet Movie Database, 98% of which qualify as adult entertainment. Also, as can be gleaned from the viewings of adult web sites, her specialties include rough sex, anal intercourse and messy deep throating. Despite the fact that religious parallels often fall inappropriately thin when it comes to pornography (excluding perhaps the ‘Utah paradox’)[3], for the sake of argument and inspiring youtubbing, let me state that Sasha Grey is not Buddha squinting for nothing. Twenty-two is perhaps too early to achieve spiritual enlightment, but in our culture of pornographic sleazification, to paraphrase the authors of “Pop Porn,” who is to say what’s enlightment anymore. Obviously, sometimes it’s hard to see the dark and rambling metaforest of joyous pornography for an eighteen-year-old solar anus.
Sasha Grey’s Buddha squint.
Steven Soderbergh who casted Grey in his independent 2009 movie “The Girlfriend Experience” also described her as “kind of a new breed"[4] Apart from the fact that she takes her job very seriously and makes obscure references to porn business existentialism and Godard, both unbefitting a porn star apparently, what ELSE would make her a “new breed”? Well, nuances. The common misconceptions about Grey are that a) she’s too beautiful for X-rated movies, b) too brainy for a porn star and c) too young for sleazy porn. Plus, in interviews she perpetually declines the common judgment that women go into the porn industry solely out of economic reasons, that is for money, and as slaves to ‘patriarchal machinery’ (you can read about the influence of economic crisis on Porn Valley’s actresses here: http://theyshootstars.com, for example). In short, according to Grey, being a porn star is a regular physical job, which might get you both pleasure or infected vagina from time to time, but afterwards you get back home to your boyfriend or girlfriend and snugly watch ‘South Fucking Park’ (also according to Grey’s MySpace one of her favorite shows) or do whatever you do after shooting porn. As for beauty and youth, Bataille said it justly after Sade: “Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism.” (Eroticism 141).
One of Grey’s cardinal ‘sins’ in terms of Puritan mentality lies in the fact that she eroticizes pornography by her mere physical qualities, which in fact allow her to declare publicly artistic pretensions for ambitious pornography and state that she’s not doing this for money. I’m not saying were she young and ugly, nobody would pay attention (though that’s very probable), I’m saying though that her beauty in terms of contemporary modeling standards (which do not necessarily need to agree with porn industry standards) is unquestionable and of elementary importance. Economically speaking, she is, to use Bradford Mudge’s comparison, “[d]angerously androgynous” like prostitutes who “combine that which is most attractive about women – physical beauty – with what men fear most from each other – commercial competition” (The Whore's Story 50). Not to say that the comparison to a prostitute is relevant, since she's a performer, above all, and, as Georgina Spelvin convinces in the brilliant Massive Attack video to "Paradise Circus," the presence of the camera makes all the difference for some. Neither are all prostitutes beautiful physically, of course. Interestingly, in “The Girlfriend Experience” Grey plays an escort whom men – mostly business dignitaries – prefer to talk to about investing and politics rather than have sex with, though that of course happens, primarily off camera. At the end she gets unflattering review from a self-proclaimed 'Erotic Connoisseur' and owner of an evidently influential web site: "with her smoky eyes ... [w]ith her flat affect, lack of culture, and utter refusal to engage, Chelsea couldn't even dazzle the likes of Forrest-fucking-Gump. And that's just where the problems begin. Just as her perky little tits seemed to literally shrink at my touch, so too did the connoisseur's cock fail to launch at the clammy touch of her hand and the lukewarm and loose embrace of her mouth. To quote the great sage Jamie Gillis in 'Misty Beethoven,'this number is the Nadir of Passion.'A splendid time is absolutely not guaranteed for all." Unmistakingly, during the short scene of conversation between Chelsea and the reviewer, we can see that the latter is a relatively abhorrent, much overweight middle-aged man who lives with his father and lacks both sensibility and emotional refinement which should characterize a true connoisseur of eroticism. Plus, as she later reveals to her client in one mesmerizing moment of nervous collapse, he also ordered her to insert a Q tip into her vagina, which doesn't sound THAT bad in view of some porn directors' fantasies, but is telling as to the meat status of a product in men's 'erotic' (as in slight contrast to pornographic) commerce. Different strokes for different folks, but why would an arbiter on all matters contemporary high-class prostitution ask for something like that, apart from the fact that no other wood was handy at the time? If Grey eroticizes pornography, he pornographizes eroticism like all those "hairy, pot-bellied, fumbling, wisecracking, sweaty-handed men" (Paradoxa 169) of whom Pat Califia spoke in his essay on Female Liberation. In the end, one might ask after Califia: are those financially threatened, in most cases wedded, childful and elderly homines economici "worthy of her perfect body, her sultry glance, her silky skin?" (ibid) Would Mary Magdalene as of the New York Empire, 2009 AD, ask her Christian boyfriend to quit 'woodworking' as body sculpting trainer for those who fail at marriage experience, erotic experience, and superficial girlfriend experience for economic neurosis experience and become a businessman and father to her children? Wouldn't you consider it a spiritual event of a higher level if someone ejaculated inside their clothes merely by embracing your naked body? But perhaps that only depicts the ancient male perplexity at the complex nature of women as whores, partners, girlfriends, saints, consolers and devils that wears them out and prompts them to look for something true that can be bought for money. Soderbergh doesn't seem to believe that genuine communication exists anymore either in intra- or inter-gender relations and if something suffers, it's erotic(ism in) sex being raped by economy.
As for Grey and intellect, before I go and apply Mark Dery’s meritorical judgment of Lady Gaga as “confining [her] outrageousness to [her] image while ensuring that [her] music is safe as milk,”[5] I’d rather speculate in a purely random pornological fashion whether the fact that she’s young, pretty and performs in sleazy flicks legitimizes the statement that her acting delivers anything outside safe-for-home casebook pornography, in terms of subject-matter? So far, I’ve seen most of her online amateur porn, eleven adult feature films, numerous interviews, one mainstream movie, one yiffing photo reel[6], and two music videos, which permits me to declare that it mildly does. Even assuming that her roles are casual and extrinsic to her choices, she delivers a spectacular and,in all likelihood, unconscious, blending of the personal and the hyperpornographic. To give a few examples, in “Throat: A Cautionary Tale” she narrates in a voiceover during a striptease show when she exposes her exquisite body to the unimpressive male audience: “I was ok with it. I didn’t have to talk to the losers who came there. Those wearing the lady underwear under their business suits or who walked around with the rubber bands squeezing their balls. The ones with the butt plug up their ass. I was sickened by the pathetic neediness. Their slimy hands motioning for the girl open up and show her pussy. But I felt sorry for them too. If they had someone to love them, they wouldn’t be here.” Kudos to the script writer. I don’t know how about male viewers, but this is not a regular porn line from a young and attractive peep show performer that would get me off.
Birthday Girl.
In the music video to Roots’ Birthday Girl, she licenses cryptically envisaged gang bang from a range of male guests to her 18th (lyricswise) or early twenty-something (candles-on-the-cakewise) birthday while the chorus gleefully trumpets: “Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now R-rated show.” The males in the video come out of nowhere, are sleazily average and get democratically, albeit smirkingly (and you need to know, the smirk is already legendary), accepted by Sasha and her pigtailed teenage friend for the inevitable birthday orgy. This is however, a mainstream video, so what we see during the three minutes of its duration time is Sasha Grey unpacking phallic and erotic presents tucked inside the pants of the raunchy visitors, at her mouth level, which provokes uncalled for laughter and face-palming from her two female friends. Then, the party shifts to the sofa where a ceiling camera records the fully clothed celebrators switching positions, meanwhile instructed/quieted by a bearded director(?) and filmed by a two-person camera crew. At the end, the guests consecutively leave the room and Sasha, finally, gets up and longingly/accusatively looks up into the camera. A eupeptically tuned meta-anti-porn music video if I ever saw one.
And there’s of course the atavistic matter-of-fact coolness with which she undresses in front of the camera and talks about her work and how every shitty day brings new experience that beams of Sisyphean hope, be it drug-induced or inbred. Purportedly, she’s going to play Eve, an ‘anti-sex Christian’ in an up-coming horror movie “Hallows” and her directorial debut will be entitled “Fuck Junkie.” So there, the paradoxes of pornography.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6zPch9fMM
[2] http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html
[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/6607812/Sasha-Grey-interview-for-The-Girlfriend-Experience.html
[5] http://trueslant.com/markdery/2010/04/20/aladdin-sane-called-he-wants-his-lightning-bolt-back-on-lady-gaga/
[6]http://www.randomnude.com/2010/05/05/sasha-grey-fucks-mohammed-the-prophet/sasha-grey-fucks-mohammed-the-prophet-2/
Apátheia?
And here’s Sasha on her MySpace profile: “Dark is the light and everything is black.” My take on this quote would be purely superficial and involve her Roman Catholic upbringing, fondness of black metal, Coco Chanel, and black nail enamel, yet she lists Bataille among her favorite writers so I guessed the analogy is not totally uncalled for. For those unfamiliar with Sasha Gray and her rise to pornographic career, she started at the age of 18 and during the time span of five years has shot ca. 200 movies, as enumerated by the Internet Movie Database, 98% of which qualify as adult entertainment. Also, as can be gleaned from the viewings of adult web sites, her specialties include rough sex, anal intercourse and messy deep throating. Despite the fact that religious parallels often fall inappropriately thin when it comes to pornography (excluding perhaps the ‘Utah paradox’)[3], for the sake of argument and inspiring youtubbing, let me state that Sasha Grey is not Buddha squinting for nothing. Twenty-two is perhaps too early to achieve spiritual enlightment, but in our culture of pornographic sleazification, to paraphrase the authors of “Pop Porn,” who is to say what’s enlightment anymore. Obviously, sometimes it’s hard to see the dark and rambling metaforest of joyous pornography for an eighteen-year-old solar anus.
Sasha Grey’s Buddha squint.
Steven Soderbergh who casted Grey in his independent 2009 movie “The Girlfriend Experience” also described her as “kind of a new breed"[4] Apart from the fact that she takes her job very seriously and makes obscure references to porn business existentialism and Godard, both unbefitting a porn star apparently, what ELSE would make her a “new breed”? Well, nuances. The common misconceptions about Grey are that a) she’s too beautiful for X-rated movies, b) too brainy for a porn star and c) too young for sleazy porn. Plus, in interviews she perpetually declines the common judgment that women go into the porn industry solely out of economic reasons, that is for money, and as slaves to ‘patriarchal machinery’ (you can read about the influence of economic crisis on Porn Valley’s actresses here: http://theyshootstars.com, for example). In short, according to Grey, being a porn star is a regular physical job, which might get you both pleasure or infected vagina from time to time, but afterwards you get back home to your boyfriend or girlfriend and snugly watch ‘South Fucking Park’ (also according to Grey’s MySpace one of her favorite shows) or do whatever you do after shooting porn. As for beauty and youth, Bataille said it justly after Sade: “Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism.” (Eroticism 141).
One of Grey’s cardinal ‘sins’ in terms of Puritan mentality lies in the fact that she eroticizes pornography by her mere physical qualities, which in fact allow her to declare publicly artistic pretensions for ambitious pornography and state that she’s not doing this for money. I’m not saying were she young and ugly, nobody would pay attention (though that’s very probable), I’m saying though that her beauty in terms of contemporary modeling standards (which do not necessarily need to agree with porn industry standards) is unquestionable and of elementary importance. Economically speaking, she is, to use Bradford Mudge’s comparison, “[d]angerously androgynous” like prostitutes who “combine that which is most attractive about women – physical beauty – with what men fear most from each other – commercial competition” (The Whore's Story 50). Not to say that the comparison to a prostitute is relevant, since she's a performer, above all, and, as Georgina Spelvin convinces in the brilliant Massive Attack video to "Paradise Circus," the presence of the camera makes all the difference for some. Neither are all prostitutes beautiful physically, of course. Interestingly, in “The Girlfriend Experience” Grey plays an escort whom men – mostly business dignitaries – prefer to talk to about investing and politics rather than have sex with, though that of course happens, primarily off camera. At the end she gets unflattering review from a self-proclaimed 'Erotic Connoisseur' and owner of an evidently influential web site: "with her smoky eyes ... [w]ith her flat affect, lack of culture, and utter refusal to engage, Chelsea couldn't even dazzle the likes of Forrest-fucking-Gump. And that's just where the problems begin. Just as her perky little tits seemed to literally shrink at my touch, so too did the connoisseur's cock fail to launch at the clammy touch of her hand and the lukewarm and loose embrace of her mouth. To quote the great sage Jamie Gillis in 'Misty Beethoven,'this number is the Nadir of Passion.'A splendid time is absolutely not guaranteed for all." Unmistakingly, during the short scene of conversation between Chelsea and the reviewer, we can see that the latter is a relatively abhorrent, much overweight middle-aged man who lives with his father and lacks both sensibility and emotional refinement which should characterize a true connoisseur of eroticism. Plus, as she later reveals to her client in one mesmerizing moment of nervous collapse, he also ordered her to insert a Q tip into her vagina, which doesn't sound THAT bad in view of some porn directors' fantasies, but is telling as to the meat status of a product in men's 'erotic' (as in slight contrast to pornographic) commerce. Different strokes for different folks, but why would an arbiter on all matters contemporary high-class prostitution ask for something like that, apart from the fact that no other wood was handy at the time? If Grey eroticizes pornography, he pornographizes eroticism like all those "hairy, pot-bellied, fumbling, wisecracking, sweaty-handed men" (Paradoxa 169) of whom Pat Califia spoke in his essay on Female Liberation. In the end, one might ask after Califia: are those financially threatened, in most cases wedded, childful and elderly homines economici "worthy of her perfect body, her sultry glance, her silky skin?" (ibid) Would Mary Magdalene as of the New York Empire, 2009 AD, ask her Christian boyfriend to quit 'woodworking' as body sculpting trainer for those who fail at marriage experience, erotic experience, and superficial girlfriend experience for economic neurosis experience and become a businessman and father to her children? Wouldn't you consider it a spiritual event of a higher level if someone ejaculated inside their clothes merely by embracing your naked body? But perhaps that only depicts the ancient male perplexity at the complex nature of women as whores, partners, girlfriends, saints, consolers and devils that wears them out and prompts them to look for something true that can be bought for money. Soderbergh doesn't seem to believe that genuine communication exists anymore either in intra- or inter-gender relations and if something suffers, it's erotic(ism in) sex being raped by economy.
As for Grey and intellect, before I go and apply Mark Dery’s meritorical judgment of Lady Gaga as “confining [her] outrageousness to [her] image while ensuring that [her] music is safe as milk,”[5] I’d rather speculate in a purely random pornological fashion whether the fact that she’s young, pretty and performs in sleazy flicks legitimizes the statement that her acting delivers anything outside safe-for-home casebook pornography, in terms of subject-matter? So far, I’ve seen most of her online amateur porn, eleven adult feature films, numerous interviews, one mainstream movie, one yiffing photo reel[6], and two music videos, which permits me to declare that it mildly does. Even assuming that her roles are casual and extrinsic to her choices, she delivers a spectacular and,in all likelihood, unconscious, blending of the personal and the hyperpornographic. To give a few examples, in “Throat: A Cautionary Tale” she narrates in a voiceover during a striptease show when she exposes her exquisite body to the unimpressive male audience: “I was ok with it. I didn’t have to talk to the losers who came there. Those wearing the lady underwear under their business suits or who walked around with the rubber bands squeezing their balls. The ones with the butt plug up their ass. I was sickened by the pathetic neediness. Their slimy hands motioning for the girl open up and show her pussy. But I felt sorry for them too. If they had someone to love them, they wouldn’t be here.” Kudos to the script writer. I don’t know how about male viewers, but this is not a regular porn line from a young and attractive peep show performer that would get me off.
Birthday Girl.
In the music video to Roots’ Birthday Girl, she licenses cryptically envisaged gang bang from a range of male guests to her 18th (lyricswise) or early twenty-something (candles-on-the-cakewise) birthday while the chorus gleefully trumpets: “Now you are old enough to go and see the R-rated show now R-rated show.” The males in the video come out of nowhere, are sleazily average and get democratically, albeit smirkingly (and you need to know, the smirk is already legendary), accepted by Sasha and her pigtailed teenage friend for the inevitable birthday orgy. This is however, a mainstream video, so what we see during the three minutes of its duration time is Sasha Grey unpacking phallic and erotic presents tucked inside the pants of the raunchy visitors, at her mouth level, which provokes uncalled for laughter and face-palming from her two female friends. Then, the party shifts to the sofa where a ceiling camera records the fully clothed celebrators switching positions, meanwhile instructed/quieted by a bearded director(?) and filmed by a two-person camera crew. At the end, the guests consecutively leave the room and Sasha, finally, gets up and longingly/accusatively looks up into the camera. A eupeptically tuned meta-anti-porn music video if I ever saw one.
And there’s of course the atavistic matter-of-fact coolness with which she undresses in front of the camera and talks about her work and how every shitty day brings new experience that beams of Sisyphean hope, be it drug-induced or inbred. Purportedly, she’s going to play Eve, an ‘anti-sex Christian’ in an up-coming horror movie “Hallows” and her directorial debut will be entitled “Fuck Junkie.” So there, the paradoxes of pornography. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZ6zPch9fMM
[2] http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_010/solar.htm
[3] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16680-porn-in-the-usa-conservatives-are-biggest-consumers.html
[4] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/6607812/Sasha-Grey-interview-for-The-Girlfriend-Experience.html
[5] http://trueslant.com/markdery/2010/04/20/aladdin-sane-called-he-wants-his-lightning-bolt-back-on-lady-gaga/
[6]http://www.randomnude.com/2010/05/05/sasha-grey-fucks-mohammed-the-prophet/sasha-grey-fucks-mohammed-the-prophet-2/
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