Category: Uncategorized

#900

The complete clusterfuck that are politics in my country continues unabated.

In an effort to curb FuckFace Von Clownstick’s momentum, Republicans have begun to grudgingly rally around the Zodiac Killer. One of the first to endorse him being the same senator who stated: If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, no one would convict you.

This endorsement is based on the craven (and completely inaccurate) assumption that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t (or whose actions are impossible to predict)..

Keep in mind that when asked if the stridently pro-life rhetoric from the right had any bearing w/r/t motivating the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter, Cruz famously tried to shift blame to the militant left. Subsequently, when it’s proven that the comments about the alleged shooters comments about ‘baby parts’ were factual–Ted is unwilling to address his and his ilk’s culpability in fomenting this tragedy.

But that’s not even the worst of it: never forget that Ted Cruz counts Iowa pastor Kevin Swanson–who has called for the extermination of gays–among his supporters. (Also, take it from someone who grew up in an extremely conservative Evangelical Xtian milieu where folks like Cruz are a dime a dozen: the man is pure evil.)

Further, the Republicans have started to blame Obama for creating a situation where they’re forced to choose someone like Cruz over Trump. There’s an essential reading piece over at Slate addressing how this is true but not in the way Republicans would like to think. (I’d add that it’s partly Fox News fault for their persistent airing of mistruths presented as infallible fact–because Trump can now incite his followers to violence and in the next news cycle claim her never said any such thing and even in the face of video evidence, he gets to maintain some sort of high ground with his acolytes.)

Not that things are all that much better on the Democratic side of things. The media (which has never given Bernie Sanders a fair shake) along with Obama are signalling that it’s time to get behind HRC.

A lot of liberal acquaintances take umbrage with my pointing this out but HRC is to Trump what Bud Light is to Budweiser. She’s a hawk who has sold her soul to protecting the entrenched privilege of the 1%. If that was all, she’d be in good company with the last X number of Democratic presidents. But it’s all more problematic than that. Take her response when confronted by a Black Lives Matter protester Ashley Williams in S.C. Consider how HRC defended a man accused of rape by saying that his underage victim asked for it and laughed about the crime on tape. (I have an especially difficult time with that last item in the light of all the white feminist who are ready to attribute any opposition to their candidate as misogyny.)

Not saying that Bernie is the perfect candidate either–although at least he’s talking about structural inequality and drawing attention to the fact that most of the folks who were shouting about how it was unpatriotic to criticize a sitting president during a time or war when it was Dubya in the office are the same ones accusing Obama of being an un-American muslim. And you know turning the mic over to Black Lives Matters protesters. Still, when asked point blank whether Trump is a racist, he waffles and bumbles just like HRC.

Enough about politics, let’s turn our attention to more topically relevant news.

Did you hear about the Brooklyn student suspended for reporting her rape to school administrators? Or the 48 transgender women killed in Brazil during January?

There’s more on my list but you’ll understand, I hope, that I just can’t anymore…

Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

There’s no stretch of imagination wherein this could conceivably be considered a ‘good’ image.

Still, it gets me extremely hot and bothered (given that a scenario like this is one of my top five unfulfilled fantasies).

Yes, like so many fantasies/paraphilias there’s the pure carnality of the proposition. In this case there’s something more subconscious–a sort of instinctual resonance.

I’ve vowed to try to explain it but it’s probably going to be messy–so I apologize in advance.

…

Two weeks ago, Andy Wachowski came out as Lilly. Together with her older sister, Lana–who is also transgender–The Wachowski Brothers, filmmakers responsible for Bound, The Matrix and my personal favorite Sense8–are now the Wachowski Sisters.

Apparently, Lilly wasn’t exactly ready to be publicly outed but a British tabloid had begun nosing around–so it was only a matter of time and Lilly decided to release a statement to a local Chicago news outlet.

It’s extremely well-written–clear, measured, thoughtful and profoundly sensitive. I can’t recommend it enough, really.

One of the things that stuck with me is the following quote attributed to Jose Muñoz:

Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality for another world.

In truth, I’ve thought of myself as queer for longer than I’ve known their was a word that described my precarious relationship to other beings in this world. I’m lucky in that I’ve had some amazing queer folks with whom my narrative arc has intersected.

All of those folks have been far more comfortable identifying me as queer than I’ve felt with using the word to self-identify. Lately, however, that’s begun to shift.

…

I’m not a competitive person. The closest I get is pissed off and irritable when mediocrity gets elevated to ‘greatness’ by the tasteless masses. (See: Humans of New York.)

I’ve never understood the heterotypical mating game. I don’t want to win you because I don’t want to own anyone else. I want someone who chooses to be with me and who I choose to be with in return. I’ve always thought that it has to be one person. Increasingly, I know it doesn’t.

Between Complex PTSD and/or autism spectrum tendencies, I’m decidedly neuroatypical. I have friends who tell me about their perfectly compartmentalized lives–friends divided into spheres of influence: work, school, extra-curricular interests; and then potential lovers–which are sometimes not even one in the same with those who are sought for romantic entanglements.

Hearing them talk about it exhausts me. (I can’t even begin to fathom how someone would enjoy living that way.)

Given that with the most rose colored prognosis I’m socially awkward (and borderline anti-social is probably more accurate), those few people that I care a great deal about while I don’t think our entanglement has to necessarily be sexual, I don’t understand the imaginary boundary that renders sexuality off limits.

I guess I just see it like this: sometimes a carefully considered kind word is enough to comfort someone, sometimes it takes a hug or holding hands through a shoulder wracking sobbing fit. And it seems there are times when someone is lost and that giving them pleasure, just seems to be the only thing that might possibly help sooth the hurt. But not just as a means of fighting against the darkness of sad times, as a way to share joy, express trust, etc.

I believe in the possibility of another world. For the last six and a half years, it’s felt like it’s only me that feels this way.

Passion-HD – A Big Gamble feat. Ariana Marie and Lily Love (2013)

I don’t recommend wasting your time viewing this since the above is the only moment of merit during the approximately 35 minute run time.

On the one hand, that truth saddens me. Judging by just this .gif it’s easy to think it’s an edgy/experimental threesome.

I like how in the gif, the woman on top dismounts–ostensibly to include the other woman. And it looks like the stud continues to self-stimulate.

But I guess it’s naive of me to think so-called creampies in porn are somehow less heterotypical because of there erstwhile status as a niche genre. After all, creampies functioned as a punchline for one of last season’s episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Really, the way the scene plays out makes the technical standards of your run of the mill daytime soap opera seem visionary by comparison. Scenes that could’ve been looped–stretch out painfully with all parties looking boredly mechanized and/or moaning without a shred of conviction.

Still, I think this scene has potential. If the camera was scooted back several feet, or, even better: moved so that it includes a frame within the frame formed by her left side and his right side. With an incredible shallow depth of field you could rack focus between their two faces. Her with her eyes closed, face flushed; him watching her, mouth hanging slightly open.

She moans, his eyes flutter, head lulls back his lips tremble, muscles tense. She opens her eyes, a slightly smirk lining her lips as she watches him.

Focus on his face as he starts to come and then follow his spasming musculature down to his juices co-mingling with hers as she continues to ride him.

She pulls out and the stud continues to masturbate but focus shifts further down and we see several dollops of semen plummet into her friends open mouth; her friend begins to eat her out ravenously.

As his stroke slows, the woman on top continues to stimulate him while he writhes begging her to stop. Running her fingers through the semen on his abs, she reaches up and pushes them between his lips.

That would be so, so effing hot. But then I’m queer and it’s probably an unfair expectation to have such expectation of heterotypical porn.

Source unknown – Title Unknown (20XX)

A couple of posts back I mentioned about how in unselfconscious moments, no one really gives a second thought to accepted notions of public decorum. We pick our noses, scratch our asses and just generally give in to the entropy of personal comfort.

As such, this is clever insofar as the pose–although leaving little to the imagination–is actually not salacious. I mean, if a young woman riding her bike nude down a picturesque country road were to question whether or not she had a flat-tire, it might look something like this.

Yes, the camera is positioned ever so carefully to offer the audience the best view. But I do like the sense of scale, perspective and other than the dead flowering weed that just seems to float in the foreground, it’s actually a pretty damn decent composition.

(And, yes, anyone who was a seasoned bike rider would probably stop, straddle the bike and lean over the handle bars to check the tire–but that would be far less coy.)

With these type of images I always encourage people to ask: why is the subject naked? In this case, that’s not a question I think to ask. (I may not have ever had a chance to go skinny dipping in my life but I’ve damn well ridden a bike naked on dozens of occasions.)

But what I don’t understand is the damn umbrella strapped to the back of the bike? I mean, she doesn’t appear to need to wear glasses, she’s rocking the bedhead straight to braids look so it’s not like impending showers are going to muss her look and it’s warm enough for her to be riding her bike naked down a deserted country road…it seems to me an umbrella just doesn’t make a goddamn lick of sense.

Because riding a bike naked is great and all but running around without a stitch in the summer rain is bloody transcendent.

Source: nudepageant

Barahona Possolo – Sweet (2013)

I love this.

Stylistically, it wouldn’t be out of pace displayed side-by-side with any of Caravaggio’s biblical paintings. (In fact, there would be a reasonably interesting paper comparing/contrasting the influence of both Caravaggio (with a distinction between his biblical vs mythological work) and Klimt‘s paintings after 1900 in Possolo’s work.)

Granted, such explicitly suggestive depictions don’t really exist in the Western Art Historical Canon. There certainly aren’t rigidly errect penii in Caravaggio–however, I believe there may be a few lurking in Klimt’s criminally under-appreciated sketches.

But my point here (as well as with this blog) is there is no reason there couldn’t be/shouldn’t be graphic depictions of sex in art.

And that’s not to say this completely works. Ostensibly, the fellow on the top left is ladling honey out of one of wide mouth wine glass with a wooden spoon and letting it drip onto the engorged glans of the man on the lower left. (Note: the wine glass bears more than a passing resemblance reminds me to a similar object in Vermeer’s The Wine Glass.)

On the right half of the frame, you have the exuberantly performative excitement/delight of the guy on the top and the transfixed and lets be honest clearly thirsty AF woman on the lower right.

Some of the other facets are much more difficult to decode. Like–there’s a feeling that all the men in the image are aware of each other but the woman seems oblivious to everything except the honey marinated hard-on. (Let’s be honest, that is the locus here.) This conjecture is at least supported by the strange elf like ears all the men have.

I’m not really sure what the bumble bee on the woman’s flank indicates either–given the context of the image it seems it could speak to her sexuality and contrast that against the seeming ambiguity of the elf-eared ones; yet if that’s the case there are potential ways in which it could be interpreted that the image erases gay, lesbian and bisexual women. (And that’s not ever cool.)

But what really strikes me about this image–and like so much of the way my brain works this isn’t an association I would have made if I hadn’t read this article several days ago–the way he of the honey slicked dick breaks the fourth wall reminds me of the way Robert Mapplethorpe performs a similar action in (arguably) his most notorious image. It’s as if both are saying: this is who I am. But in the case of this painting there’s an insouciance and arrogance in contrast to Mapplethorpe’s studied gravitas.

Source: possolo

June Canedo – Various Untitled (201X)

I shouldn’t be as completely over the moon about Canedo’s work as I am–almost without exception she composes vertically, she’s all about Kodak Portra and she’s exploring the currently trendy no man’s land between portraiture, fashion/editorial and so-called lifestyle photography.

But, contrary to everyone else hanging out in that space–her sensibility comes across as generally curious and engaged instead of being just another cookie cutter hipster affectation.

The above photos are my favorite and they fit the theme of this blog. However, I do feel a little conflicted for focusing solely on photos featuring nudity to the exclusion of some of the other work.

For example: Canedo has a bunch of what appear to be medium format film portraits of people in Wal-Mart parking lots. That these images are luminous and enduring is one thing; but as someone who frequently feels a desperate urge to make something against the odds and my own personal stagnation–I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought about doing something similar in order to run some film through the camera. It’s never something I do–because I’m convinced that there’s no way the ends will justify the means. It works for Canedo, though. And the results are noteworthy.

She also does fashion/editorial work.Yet, although it fits the expected mold for that sort of thing, her work always features a distinctive personal style–low angles re-envisioning the customary tropes into towering and statue-esque abstractions, rendering a cool and detached view of something that is fundamentally unreachable; or a stunningly humane flicker between subject and photography, the splendor of which the viewer sees without ever being fully able to decode the entirety of the context surrounding what they’re seeing.

Source: junecanedo.com