Tag: fucking

[↑] Kerbcrawlerghost – Detail from cover art for Weregoat’s Pestilential Rites of Infernal Fornication (2016); [-] Christian Martin Weiss – Untitled (2017); [↙] Source unknown – Title unknown (201X); [↘] Chitra Ganesh – Girls with Skulls (1999)

My initial thought had been to just throw this out there as an Acetylene Eyes All Hallow’s Eve  themed post. But I’ve been pondering transgression a lot lately, so…

If you consider the Xtian belief that humans were given free will but in order for us to truly be free we had to be presented with the option to choose slavery by eating of the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil…

Except that’s already functionally wrong. The notion that freedom is less than intrinsic and is instead given or revoked suggests an overarching framework of command and control structures–which isn’t freedom, it’s authoritarian.

After the Biblical Fall, humanity is supposedly saddled with a sinful nature. (Again, logically this doesn’t track given that evangelical theology posits that Jesus was the both God and Man but if by being born he became human, then his sinful nature would’ve precluded his distinction of being without sin. The idea that Jesus was born with a sinful nature but never surrender to its temptations is truly a semantic dodge for the ages.

But what interests me is the inter-penetrative nature of sin and salvation–the latter both precludes and is necessitated by the former. If you remove either concept, the other becomes essentially meaningless.

There was this enormous tug-of-war in the Evangelical community when I was in high school in the 1990s. The notion of once saved always saved–by which rational I am still a Xtian–and the sin and salvation two-step (commit a sin, ask for forgiveness, sin again, ask for forgiveness again).

I don’t know how that ever shook out because I 100% stopped caring shortly after I became aware of this schism. (Judging by most Xtians these days, I’d say things landed decidedly on the side of once saved, always saved but that’s not at all scientific.)

But it occurs to me that sin is such a prerequisite for salvation, that perhaps sin is salvation.

The assertion seems like pablum until you stop and carry out a grammatical investigation of the way the concepts are used in context. A sin is wrong doing or making a mistake. I prefer the latter way of framing it. Because when you make a mistake–you either learn from it or continue making the same mistake. (There’s that famous criteria for insanity–wherein someone performs the same action again and again each time expecting a different outcome than the one that manifests.)

I don’t like the way that Xtianity situates sin as something motivated by guilt instead of a desire to learn and grow. (This manifests in other ways–where Xtians believe the world is going to end soon and do not really give more than half a shit about what they leave in their wake for subsequent generations.)

And I guess that’s my point here–I wish you all on not just today (but especially today) that you may not be afraid to trangress in favor of discovering that what you’ve been told isn’t a transgression or that it is and why it is so that you can learn and grow–so you become more instead of less.

Source unknown – Nacho Vidal & Kristina Rose (2015)

This position is apparently called The Amazon. SWOON.

This gif? As much as I’m always harping about #skinnyframebullshit, I will admit there’s room to argue w/r/t still photographs/images. There’s not when it comes to video–go horizontal or stay your ass home.

Also, I had not seen the scene this is from before deciding to post it. I have subsequently seen enough of the video to know that it’s both too extreme, sexist and seemingly unconcerned with consent to be something I’m ever going to be into. Still, I do think this is gif is sexy af and the segment of the larger clip it’s from is slightly less obnoxious than the rest of the video.

Source: plumeti-and-sex

Inside Flesh – Title Unknown (2016)

If you’re at all familiar with music criticism, you know that generally there are three templates for artists with long careers of making continual relevant, ground breaking work:

  1. Do the same thing you did before–except this time around do more of it and do what you do bigger;
  2. Apply your essential voice to something completely different in scope and execution (generally referred to as ‘making a left turn’);
  3. Burn everything to the ground, then burn the ashes and only then reinvent everything again from the beginning (think: David Bowie).

If Inside Flesh can be said to be following any of the above trajectories, it would be #1.

To me, that’s not just interesting–it’s surprising. Let me attempt to explain what I mean…

I’ve always appreciated IF’s aesthetic. But I’ve always worried that it’s a little too rigidly circumscribed–the whole glitching, industrial hell thing seemed to me that it would become cloying at a rather quick clip.

Quite the opposite, in fact: it feels like someone exploring the interstices between art and pornography could do worse than to immerse themselves in IFs oeuvre.

What I’ve noticed is a degree of conceptual recursion in their work. The limitations of their aesthetic are frequently mirrored in a certain heteronormative predisposition in their work. For example: they have a lot of scenes like this, where the viewer sees an nearly disembodied phallus vaginally penetrating a definitely embodied woman. (I really like that their frames tend to include the entirety of the woman’s body within the frame.)

However, there are two things that distinguish IF from most straight porn:

  1. Running counter to the strict aesthetic limitation (or perhaps, because of them), IF’s work possesses a profound sense of animalistic desire–the limitation of the form presents itself as artifice (or, you might say: the pornographic fantasy of it all is a set dressing intended to be seen as a set dressing which contributes an ambiguity to whether the form isn’t merely a means of helping to illustrate the strange beauty of two people who would be fucking in which the same way with or without the production design, props, costumes and cameras rolling.)
  2. As unsettling as some of it is, there’s never a sense that what the viewer sees is in any way divorced from a legitimate experience of interpersonal intimacy.

In their artist statements IF refers to their ongoing preoccupation with “human carnality in all its aspects.”

I know they are based in Poland. But I can’t help seeing what their doing as a sort of radical fuck you to on going policing of sex workers by ‘well-intending’ fuckwits–I’m thinking specifically of the AIDS Healthcare Foundations utterly ridiculous ballot initiative that would empower private citizens to personally sue adult performers not wearing a condom in adult media.

I am about as against the contrived Puritanical prudery that suggests sex is a sin in the eyes of some deity as a means of dodging unwanted pregnancy, disease, eternal damnation, etc., as one person can possibly be. When it comes to sex positivity, I err on the side of over-the-top. I think people who enjoy sex should have more and better sex.

By the same token, I find the sort of heteronormative no risks/all reward notion of sex perpetuated by most mainstream pornography to be only a bit less repugnant. I mean how many times have you watched a scene where a cable guy or plumber shows up to fix something and upon finding the person with the troubles is scantily clad and horny, things progress to sex with little if any flirting, communication or foreplay. It’s pure simulacrum.

But although it’s fantasy, and part of the fantasy is the randomness and availability, the context indicates that there should be behavior in place that pays attention to safer sex. (I say ‘safer ‘specifically because I don’t think there is any such thing as 100% safe sex–at least if your doing it right by recognizing that risk is an intrinsic feature to anything in life truly worth doing–and vulnerability, connection and giving expression to unfiltered desire are all risks; plus, the queer milieu in which I maneuver, I don’t know a single person who uses dental dams or condoms when performing oral sex.

My point is you choose your level of risk and accept the consequences. It’s not really anyone else’s call to make.

Yet, I feel like whereas most porn would argue against condoms for being elements that pull the viewer out of the fantasy, their absence in feels like a radical decision to experience the extremity of human carnality.

And it’s true: safe sex is good sex. But there’s something about unsafe sex that is completely immersive. (It’s like the difference between the hallucinations associated with mushrooms vs LSD–when I’m shrooming, I always remember I’m shrooming, when I’m tripping on acid, I sometimes lose site of the fact that I’m hallucinating–interestingly, I don’t especially like LSD.)

Like you can feel the smallest changes in engorged rigidity, changes in the viscosity of vaginal mucus, the slow build up of clenching and unclenching micro contractions, the warm surge of unrestrained ejaculation.

Really, I think it’s exactly these sorts of intangibles that IF is trying to convey in their work.

Source: herlovelygore

Source unknown – Title unknown (20XX)

My first partner loved the show Friends.

At the time, it seemed like a fair trade off. She’d ‘suffer’ through the latest von Trier or the odd early Bresson and in return I’d hold her while she giggled at the vapid banality of Joey and Chandler. (With hindsight, I definitely got the short end of the stick, but…)

There’s this one episode where the white cis men discover that they are getting free porn via their cable provider. They think it’s a stroke of luck but as things progress they begin questioning how it effects their perception of reality. If I remember correctly, Chandler mentions how while interacting with a teller at the bank, she never offered to take him back to the vault and seduce him.

It’s a knee-jerk, made-for-sitcom parsing of the ethics of porn w/r/t gender representation. But it does suggest a point (to me at least) that I feel is worth exploring; namely: whether the frame is an edge or a boundary.

In the case of the porn that Chandler and Ross were consuming, the frame is an edge. It is separated, so much as to be cut off from reality. However, due to the non-critical consumption–this fantastical representation of a reality that is at a remove from the one either inhabit, they begin to question why their world isn’t like the one they spend the most time considering.

In other words, when you spend too long studying a world unlike the world in which you live (without keeping in mind the fact that you are watching a discrete fantasy), you begin to note discrepancies.

However, some work–and the above image definitely fits in this category–where the frame is a boundary not an edge; a broader reality exists outside the frame. There aren’t people with stock, archetypal designations acting on sets. There are reminders that there are people, places and things beyond the limited view provided to the audience.

This is cool because there’s more hinted at beyond the frame’s boundaries. There are at least 5 people in this scene. Likely six, including the person taking the picture. (And the proximity to the action of the camera person, suggests that they are a participant in the proceedings.)

I love that the one guy is wearing stockings–which note have clearly been pulled on and off enough times that their is a rip opening in the left thigh–and cowboy boots. His scrotum is clearly still irritated from being recently shaved. And the hand that is presumably tracing it’s way up the right arm of the woman eyeing the camera. It all speaks to both the immediacy and intimacy of the moment but also that it exists within the context of a broader world beyond the outer boundary of the frame.

Source: futursx

WowPorn – Size Matters! featuring Bella Baby (2013)

Despite what tend to be better than the run-of-the-mill online porn outlet production values, I object to the over-the-top heteronormative tropes in which WowPorn traffics.

And as much as this video is emblematic of everything I detest about the company, this shot actually has a great deal of inherent potential–I mean I’ve never seen framing quiet like it before.

Granted, the camera probably needs to pull back about two feet and perhaps angle up slightly. Cover that too hot key light source–probably a west facing window–with a couple layers of frost; gel what ever is casting that godawful purple sodium vapor tinge that’s working as the fill here (I’d say CTB but then I like everything to match and correct via a grade in post, CTO could work too.)

Also, production design dropped the ball. Sure the wood floor is nice, but how about some sort of rug to add some color. And the difference between the color of the wall and that cabinet needs either color or at least two stops greyer.

Lastly, this is one of those situations, where the default 16:9 aspect ratio isn’t quite as wide as you’d want. Ideally, this scene would’ve benefited from the abbreviated depth of field an anamorphic adapter would’ve brought to the table. However, given that those tend to be expensive, they camera guy could’ve opted for a wider lens and then letterboxed during editing. (Something I’m discovering is that the more rectangular your image, the more it invites a narrative reading–which is not to saw every movie made needs to be shot in 2.35:1 but there are cases where it is appropriate; this is one, IMO.)

k.flight – [←] in the back of the bus (2008); [↑] we thank you for the spirits that dwell in us and all things (2008); [→] P1080259 (2011); [↓] good morning (2008)

I don’t know what to say.

I’m just… I mean… fuck me, whoever k.flight is, she has a perfectly, omnivorous eye. I didn’t know it was possible to be in love with images but, well, yeah… learn something new every day.

Not to sound like a twitter tween but this, this right here is fucking everything.

Absolutely perfect.

Go ahead and do whatever you want with what’s left of me. And also, if someone knows who k.flight is I would do anything, and I mean ANYTHING for the opportunity to collaborate with her at some future date.

Source: Flickr / ladyalpha