Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)
You rain on me and I, like the earth, receive you.
–Frida Kahlo, in a letter to José Bartoli (via soracities)
Tag: gif exception
Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)
I have so many complicated and conflicting feelings about posting shit like this. Or honestly even looking at them–it feels a bit like being stranded in the middle of a desert desperate with hunger and thirst and having an airplane fly overhead and drop menus from a fancy restaurant. I’m looking at something that will never be a part of my life.
I don’t know maybe that’s what gives this project a vitality that some of you seem to respond to: the wanting makes it seem more relevant.
In the end I’m posting this gif loop not because of what it depicts but because of the notion that maybe someday someone will see me as containing multitudes and within those multitudes are contained all three of these lovers.
Aaron Tsuru – just you and me feat. Lorelei (2015)
There’s this marvelous @reverendbobbyanger quote from one of his Sunday Posts a year or so ago:
There is more than finding the right light to shoot in. You must find
the people with the right light in them.
He’s absolutely correct. That’s always the first step. But a think a indispensable second step follows implicitly given that first step.
I remember being told once that the Sanskrit word ‘namaste’ translates to something like the light in me sees and acknowledges the light in you.
It’s not enough to find the right light in someone else–you must also find that right light in yourself.
Whether it was Hemingway or Leonard Cohen who said it first or best, it’s still true: the broken parts are where the light gets inside.
Or to borrow a monologue from the film with the best color cinematography of all time that was subsequently appropriated by Texas post-rockers Explosions in the Sky:
If you’re curious what it looks like when someone has passed through this night is seen by someone who has also passed through similar nights: it looks like this. Exactly like this.
Erika Lust – Pansexuals (2015)
I probably shouldn’t base my opinion of this scene based on an 8 minute excerpted cut…
…but all the problems I have with Lust crop up in abundance: solid concept hindered by uneven/lackluster execution.
I think the problem–besides the fact that her grip/gaffe team can’t set up lights fer shit (sheesh, invest in some softboxes and close down that key light by 2.5 stops)–is that Lust seems inherently preoccupied with subverting the male gaze typically associated with pornography.
She does this by soliciting fantasies from women which she then enacts for her cameras. Take Pansexuals, it treats a group sex scene in a typically porn-trope turn by using strip poker as a throw away plot device. That’s something I’ve never understood–strip poker is such a means of symbolically addressing power dynamics, creating tension, building anticipation. In essence, the game itself is a chance to hone the subsequent eroticism, to contextualize it. This seems to skip over all that to hurry up and get to the fucking. (Watching this I felt exactly like my 16 year-old self fast forwarding to the parts that got me the wettest.)
So while: yes, I’m always going to support a FFMM group sex scene that skews full on gay once your too far into it to back out. (I love shit like that because as I’ve said if you like watching people fuck, you should be fine with watching people who don’t fuck like you in the process of finding representations of people who do fuck like you), I do think everything about this scene is almost to awkward to even be sexy.
I mean sex at it’s best is always a bit awkward and group sex–in my admittedly limited experience–tends to be awkward. So I feel like maybe kudos for being honest in the depiction?
Truthfully, though I don’t think it’s the right kind of awkwardness. Like in this scene it’s Ermagerd Girl level awkward. And really, it’s usually more tender, idiosyncratic and charming.
Like this:
Or this:
Also, I’m reminded of Pina Bausch’s prompts designed to get her dancer’s to enact a mood or desire:
- Copy someone else’s tic.
- Do something you’re ashamed of.
- Write your name with movement.
- What would you do with a corpse?
- Move your favorite body part.
- How do you behave when you’ve lost something?
Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)
If she says come inside I’ll come inside for her
If she says give it all I’ll give everything to her
Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)
One of my favorite things about sex with others is gap between orgasms, the space where everything is intensely sensitive. (It’s something with which I’m completely preoccupied with, if I’m honest.)
The way a-trusted-nother can guide you beyond any boundary you thought you knew yourself to have and to hold.
Pleasure is amplified–a river escaping its banks, flooding the levees. Senses sharpen–the smell, of sweat slick bed sheets, eucalyptus tinged summer breath through the screened window. The dewy drops dotting pubic fur–pearls and diamonds caught in a spider’s nest.
Saliva, sweat and orgasmic fluids layered, intermingled on the lips, skin, tongues and genitals of lovers. The holy taste of the holiest of communions.
[↑] Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X); [↓] Source unknown – Title Unknown (201X)
As much as I’m utterly fascinated by depictions of ejaculation, I’m really super not into facials.
I’ve already written about this once before–and while it was from way back when I was a baby blogger: my opinion hasn’t really changed.
These two posts are not really an exception that proves the rule so much as a proof of concept that whether or not I dig facials, they can be depicted in at least a somewhat artful fashion.
In the top .gif there’s a focus on palate–namely, a monochromatic scale from a pale through peach skin-tone, to the shadowed masturbating hand to the burnt umber background. (I do worry here because it looks like the stud probably jizzed in the woman’s eye–and seriously getting semen in your eye is an awful experience.)
In the lower .gif, the staging from left to right, uses the natural motion of the eye’s tendency to instinctive scan left to right actually adds to the dynamism of the trajectory. I love that her hands are covering his and that she appears rapturously in the moment.
I also really love how if you look in the background you can see his hand open and pull back, as if he’s a magician conjuring a magic trick.
Source unknown – Title unknown (201X)
While I think this could probably be interpreted as an allegory of how to behave on the internet when given a front row seat to explicit content, i.e. drool appreciatively and keep your comments to your self.
But I’m gonna go a different direction. I saw this the morning after having a dream that was very similar in tone–look but don’t touch. I’m intrigued enough to want to track it down even though I suspect I’m going to end up turned off when I discover the original context.
Does anyone happen to know where it’s from?
Erika Lust – An Appointment with My Master (2015)
You know that feeling you get when the idea behind something is solid but the execution just isn’t up to snuff? That’s how I feel about Erika Lust.
Take her It’s Time for Porn to Change TEDx talk: a feminist/sex-positive vision of a new porn with an emphasis on characters presented in context and diversity in depicting modes of sexual expression. Awesome. A+ I’m 120% on board sign me up.
Completely discounting my opinion of TED (hint: it’s hardly rose colored), it’s an awkward, halting ramble/rant all but devoid of any dynamism.
That’s not to say I dislike her videos. The concept underlying her XConfessions series–of which the above scene is a part–invites folks to share their fantasies with the video makers. Subsequently certain fantasies become prompts for explicit enactments. (I’ve featured another XConfessions scene I Wish I Were a Lesbian previously.)
And I wanted to draw attention to the above scene. I love the way in muddles the line between mutual masturbation and frottage–both masturbating as foreplay but edging perpetually closer towards engaging sexually. Further the fact that both are using their right hands and the balance between one visible hand each in the foreground and one mostly obscured hand in the background is deftly balanced from the standpoint of composition.
The thing that bothers me–and I haven’t seen the entire scene but I’m guessing from my reaction to I Wish I Were a Lesbian, I’m almost certain my instinct is on point: it may be pretty and resonate with me but Lust demonstrates some astounding technical lapses.
Back to the above scene. It’s pretty–nice warm light. I’d like to have seen this same shot in a wide master, but I’ll grant that’s a matter of personal taste. It’s the fact that this embodies a style of lighting that I detest. A set lit with stylish practical lighting and then a super hot theatrical spot overhead which emphasizes the action.
It’s this sort of hyper stylized lighting focused on cheap and easy effect. And it’s becoming endemic. (Netflix Daredevil is an–what’s the opposite of glowing?–opaque; what the fuck were they thinking shooting some of those scenes so goddamn impenetrably dark. It’s awful.)
As a counter point–Blade Runner presents an endless stream of pitch dark vistas–but unlike most of the lighting in Hollywood fare these days–what light there was was always thoughtfully shaped/sculpted so as to be legible to folks sunk into their seats in darkened theaters.
It’s like I teach my students in lighting workshops: you know the classic quip where the petulant veteran actor demands the hotshot young directory what’s my motivation? Good lighting is–more often than not–logical motivated by the augmenting of existing, naturally available light or illumination provided by extant light sources.
To preempt the standard objections, no David Lynch isn’t a fucking excuse, shit bird. You clearly haven’t watched his films with any sort of detail oriented eye because that man is a goddamn master at selling hyper stylized lighting and the reason he’s so good at it is because it’s logically motivated by light sources you can see in the frame.
Acetylene Eyes 