This sounds lazy, but it’s noon and I’m just having my coffee and a bagel. But this Quicktime video of a transformer blowing up (sent to me by fellow SRL member and Tesla coil midwife Greg Leyh) was a real picker-upper!
It’s a gorgeous San Francisco day, and last night was a great SF night. I went to the premiere of the documentary Forbidden Photographs, about the wild life of photographer Charles Gatewood at the Roxie Theater, and it was absolutely incredible — especially from a social anthropological perspective. He’s shot Bob Dylan, Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Charles collaborated on his first photo book with Burroughs. For the past 30 years, Charles has documented the wild sides of Mardi Gras, African-American struggles, and has traveled deep into American subcultures to photo nazi bikers, Native American satanists, ritual body modification "tribes," urban pagans, fetishes such as the "messy" fetish and as many forbidden things that he can find. I do fetish modeling for Charles about once a year (you can find me naked and messy in his latest book Messy Girls), and I’m blown away to now be a part of this cultural documentation by way of the camera’s gaze. The film is traveling around the country, catch it if you can — and be warned that you will see some possibly unsettling practices onscreen, such as body piercing, explicit sex and blood play (he has documented the vampire subculture, too).
Thinking of art, I’m currently fixated on the works of Wim Delvoye. This Belgian artist has taken X-rays of hetero couples having sex and if that wasn’t fascinating enough, he mounted the see through images into giant cathedral-style church windows, coupled with colorful stained glass. The last show of record I can find of his was last year, but if anyone knows more about this artist, please drop me a line.
Today I’m headed over to the offices of woman-owned porn makers, SIR Video to meet with Shar Rednour (whom I used to work with at the Good Vibrations store — see, it’s all connected somehow). They have two new titles that I’m going to cover in my next book, and though these titles aren’t out until this summer, I’m really excited about them. One is a guide to dirty talk, called Talk to Me. The other is a (surely groundbreaking) video for survivors of trauma and sexual abuse who want to build a healthy, safe and pleasurable sex life. Neither of these titles are pornographic per se, though the dirty talk video is likely to be damn hot, knowing Shar’s love of the potty mouth. Either way, it’s nice to know that there are people out there making forward-thinking titles about healthy adult sexuality, no?
