IN TROPICAL - LIES

From In Tropical and Jonathan Leder, the NY-based photographer of vintagesque Playboy pornomodelling.


Note: I'm turning a blind eye on the preposterous implication that a prostitute would want her clients to love her, and otherwise she might be expected to exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic disorder. Particularly, because I'm such a big sucker for semi-gratituous nudity set to dramatic storytelling and catchy tunes. Besides, I like how vultures duplicate dispassionate sexual necrophagists that fill capitalist deserts of flesh exchange nowadays, and the way they feed on the perishing sensuousness reminds me of the Baudrillardian melancholia for true seduction, too.

THE NEW OLD PORN PROTOCOL

1. Do not imagine that the pornography upon which you are engaged will ever authorize any possible explanation, interpretation, or knowledge of the world; you have riskier, more interesting work to do. Pornographic invention is neither an alternative form of knowledge, nor does it replace knowledge. Rather, it is the irreducible supplement of knowing, pornographic invention engages what the aspiration of explanation, interpretation, and knowledge can only dismiss as accidental, transitional at best. [. . .]

2. Abandon the assumption that the pornographic enterprise is reducible to questions of representation, correspondence, adequation, or judgment; what is specifically pornographic in porn is precisely what in the act of presentation exceeds representation, for porn is not merely a portrait of pleasure, but presents itself as in itself pleasurable; provoke pleasure and enjoyment instead of teaching appreciation, and thereby free art's work from every possibility for a moralistic pedagogy.

3. Address yourself, therefore, to what of your readers exceeds knowing, judging, or desiring subjectivity, for it is neither epistemological, moral, nor desiring subjects who experience the unbearable pleasure of the fuck. Offer them not objects that would confirm them in the comfortable neuroses of their subjectivities, but the singular risk of the fetish, withdrawn from the very possibility of intelligibility and meaning. Honor thereby the ontological stammering upon which the art's work opens, thus recalling to your readers what of life, beyond all reason, is consecrated to pleasure, bios apolaustikos.

4. In addressing yourself to what is most obscene and perverse in your readers - that is addressing yourself to the indestructible supplement of interpretation, knowledge, judgment, or desire, in addressing yourself to the chaos of the passions and affects, in addressing yourself to thinking - you thereby abandon the respectable comforts of the seductive transcendence promised in nostalgia and prolepsis. Choose non-transcendence, the destitution of John Greyson's Patient Zero in Patient Zero, Luke in Gregg Araki's The Living End, the unrepentant faggot of Diamanda Galás's Plague Mass, the cast of Samuel Delany's The Mad Man, Isabelle Stengers and Didier Gille's "utter fool," all memebers of a "race" that in affirming its non-transcnedence "is not the one that claims to be pure but rather an oppressed, bastard, lower, anarchical, nomadic, and irremediably minor race - the very ones Kafka excluded form the paths of the new Critique," as Deleuze and Guattari have it: the whore, the hustler, the bad queer, the junkie, the Lumpenproletariat, the mad, the stranger.

5. And thereby abandon any project that would reduce the political (as such) to any geography of location or cartography of position, whether literal or metaphorical. Abandon the putatively neutral white cube of the museum for the labyrinth and the corridor; desert the boulevard for the alleys, forsake the park's lawns for the shrubbery; leave the stadium for the deserted warehouse. Or better yet, transform the white cube into a labyrinth, architecture into something not simply anti-architectural, but undecidedly contingent, something at once both and neither architecture and anti-architecture. Above all. transform location or position, always already a point in space fixed in a possible cartography or geography, into place, the "here, now" of Whitehead's prehension, or Deleuze and Guattari's plane of immanence, or the place of the stranger's pleasure - all of which specify an engagement of thinking with its impossibility precisely in an absolute resistance to any attempt to reduce place to location. "Here, "now" is the place of simultaneity of deterritorialization/reterritorialization, the place of fragmentation, anonimity, promiscuity, utter strangeness, unknowable difference, and an obscene perverse pleasure subject to no possible calculus. The New Porn never forgets that this untenable place of absolute risk is at once infinitely hospitable and entirely uninhabitable; "here, now" is nevertheless the New Porn's only place, for it is here, and here alone that the political ("in itself and as such") happens.

William Haver, from the Foreword to The Logic of the Lure and the New Pornography. London: University of Chicago Press, 2002, p.xi-xiii.

HOGG

"You know what I'd do if I was a bitch?" He looked at his finger, but there wasn't enough on it, so he dug out some more. "I'd get me a gun, go out on the street, and - bip! bip! bip! - I'd put a bullet in everything I even suspected had a pecker swingin' between its legs. Anything else a bitch is gonna do is crazy. Course, bitches is crazy. But the way you know it is just 'cause they don't do the one sane thing they could: Go out and start shootin'." Hogg gnawed on his thumbnail. He said around his knuckle:"Men hate bitches, man. All men hate all bitches."

Samuel R.Delany, Hogg. Boulder: Black Ice Books, 1994.

Over 40 years after its conception, I can't believe how profoundly vicious this book still is.

SOMETHING ENDS.

"Serce mrozi nadmiar czułości dla innego człowieka. Nadciąga chwila, której pełne przeżycie nie jest możliwe. Pojawia się zazdrość o coś nieidentyfikowalnego, co wyłania się z przeszłości i czego nie sposób przymusić do powtórnego przyjścia. Radosne wyzwolenie, z jednoczesnym poczuciem nieodwracalności chwili, zmienia popęd w płacz. Wiadomo, że wiele gatunków zwierząt umiera w czasie tarła lub parzenia się. Coś się kończy. Nawet kiedy kocha się najmocniej, coś się kończy."

["The heart freezes the abundance of affection for another person. A moment comes when the complete experience becomes impossible. Jealousy over something unidentified from the past appears and this something cannot be forced to return. The joyful release simultaneous with the feeling of irreversibility of the moment turns joy into cry. It's common knowledge that a lot of animal species die during spawning and copulation. Something ends. Even when you love the most, something ends." - Trans. mine]

Pascal Quignard, Seks i Trwoga. Czytelnik: Warszawa, 2002. Tłum. Krzysztof Rutkowski.

THE STORY OF THE I.

Tomasz Swoboda's Historie Oka is, as far as I'm concerned, up to date the most linguistically and meritoriously succulent synthesis of Bataillean thought, and notably by a Polish philologist and translator. For those unfamiliar with Bataille and his work - his input into French literature includes an expansive stream of meditation on the unspeakable in human sexuality and trasgressive [as in agressive and futile) behavior in general and his books are, for me at least, yet unsurpassed in their minimal though excruciating depiction of surreal eroticism of fetishistic paroxysms. He's also the explicator of material heterology, pineal gland, solar anus and other profanely contextualized concepts of great importance for us, the believers in the corporeal, the impossible and the excessive.
Here's a purely arbitrary and condensed collection of quotes from my favorite propagator of philosophical obscenity.

Hans Bellmer, a drawing for Georges Bataille's Histoire de l'Oeil, 1947.

The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing. - The Story of the Eye, p.23

... at the end of reason, at the end of man, at the end of the Cartesian pineal gland (the supposed seat of consciousness) there is only orgasm and a simultaneous fall, a simultaneous death. - Visions of Excess, p.xii

God, when he knows, is a pig. - Madame Edwarda, p.160

Realism gives me the impression of a mistake. Violence alone escapes the feeling of poverty of those realistic experiences. Only death and desire have the force that oppresses, that takes one's breath away. Only the extremism of desire and of death enables one to attain the truth. - The Impossible, Preface p.9

On a comprehensive view, human life strives towards prodigality to the point of anguish, to the point where the anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere moralising chatter. - Erotycyzm, p.65

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it. - Erotycyzm, p.141

Only the actual experience of states of normal sexual activity and the clash between them and socially approved conduct allows us to recognise that this activity has its inhuman side. The organs' plethora induces reactions alien to the normal run of human behaviour. A rush of blood upsets the balance on which life is based. A madness suddenly takes possession of a person. That madness is well known to us but we can easily picture the surprise of anyone who did not know about it and who by some device witnessed unseen the passionate lovemaking of some woman who had struck him as particularly distinguished. He would think she was sick, just as mad dogs are sick. Just as if some mad bitch had usurped the personality of the dignified hostess of a little while back. Sickness is not putting it strongly enough, though; for the time being the personality is dead. For the time being its death gives the bitch full scope, and she takes advantage of the silence, of the absence of the dead woman. The bitch wallows-wallows noisily-in that silence and that absence. The return of the personality would freeze her and put an end to the sensual delight she has abandoned herself to. - Erotycyzm, p.106

What is really loved is loved mainly in shame. - L'esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions

Why is the world of sin boring? Because it likes its sin without
wanting to know it. You always talk to us about the explosion of the
world of sin. This world is truly tarnished. - P.Klossowski on Bataille. Discussion On Sin - The Unfinished System of Knowledge,p.43

What is the worst aberration?
That which we ignore, gravely holding out for wisdom?
That from which, when we see it, we know there is no escape? - The Unfinished System of Knowledge,p.84

I risk myself if sensuality or pain project me beyond a sphere where I have only one meaning: the sum of the responses I give to the demands of usefulness; I am at risk when, at the end of the possible, I tend so strongly toward that which will overturn what the idea of death pleases in me-and I laugh, taking pleasure in it. - The Unfinished System of Knowledge,p.98

And so what: I'm free, powerless, and I will perish: I ignore the limits of obligation in every way. - The Unfinished System of Knowledge.p.108

SASHA GREY II

SASHA GREY from V Magazine on Vimeo.

"Shot on location at the John Lautner Chemosphere House off Mulholland Drive, the film showcases Sasha as a perpetually evolving figure. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (“Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Wall Street,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) dressed Sasha for the part in an array of lingerie and military inspired garments to highlight the dual nature of her masculine / feminine persona. Looking over the roadside from the vantage point of one the most legendary residences in modern and cinematic history, Sasha reflects on her relationship to the San Fernando Valley landscape- the location of some of her most noted adult performances. Back inside the circular vortex of the Chemosphere, Sasha's inner dialogue projects an equally diaristic and imaginary self-portrait that pushes beyond the extremes of her past filmography and into her new future." [emphasis mine]

Remember kids, she's not a whore if she's an actress.
I'm actually not even being cynical here. This verbal specification of her "portrait" blew my mind as something between a grandiloquent psychic reconaissance (Lynchian?? one at that!)into her porn-star-turned-model-turned-crypic-icon-of-postmodern-feminity persona and, on the other hand, a thin promotion of supposedly bland acting career in her independent film pieces. But again, I'm a fan so I'm not going to be objective here and, quite honestly - there's nothing NOT to like in this video - the minimal plot which nonetheless might leave you wondering as to the level of private self-exposure, the musical background with the haunting drummings of Chelsea Wolfe's "Moses" (which in my opinion are to express Grey's emotional struggle between her public violently pornographic exhibitionist facade and deeply reflexive and calm (perhaps even religious in a mystical sense) subliminal self, the landscape and lighting which bespeak loneliness, the future exertions or perhaps an isolated act of redemption in the limbo of Chemosphere simultaneously negated by the half-attired body and the black make-up of an unrepenting sinner, the as always sphinxlike visage which all the same could be just an empty mirror of our materialistic desires..

"TIE ME UP"

There is an original music video to this song directed by Mike Figgis, heavily styled up for Agent Provocateur's lingerie commercial (although it's hard to tell with those stiletto shots and supine bordello atmosphere, or maybe it's easier, dunno). Anyway, the song has stuck in my head for some time now and I officially need to rehash the old BDSM flame so all the same why not with these mainstreamized vapors of bondage sexuality.