Just Another Auden October: This great society is going smash

Photographed by bagnino on the da.

This great society is going smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.

(W.H. Auden, Bucolics II: “Woods.” 1952. 51-54)

Goethe Month: The in-between places

Photographed by Jim Furness at the Pinncales in CA.

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,
Die eine will sich von der andern trennen;
Die eine hält, in derber Liebeslust,
Sich an die Welt, mit klammernden Organen;
Die andre hebt gewaltsam sich vom Dust,
Zu den Gefilden hoher Ahnen.
O giebt es Geister in der Luft,
Die zwischen Erd’ und Himmel herrschend weben

Two souls dwell, alas, in my breast and their
Division tears my life in two.
One loves the world, it clutches her, it binds
Itself to her, clinging with furious lust;
The other desires to fly beyond the dust
Into the realm of high ancestral minds.
Are there no spirits moving in the air,
Ruling the region between earth and sky?

So steiget nieder aus dem goldnen Duft
Und führt mich weg, zu neuem buntem Leben!
Ja, wäre nur ein Zaubermantel mein!
Und trüg’ er mich in fremde Länder

Come down then to me from your golden mists on high,
Give me a magic cloak to carry me
Away to some far place, some land untold,

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Act 1: Scene 5, 1110-1125.)

Goethe Month: Strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points

The arrows of Love are various: some scratch us,
And our hearts suffer for years from their slow poison.
But others, strong-feathered with freshly sharpened points,
Pierce to the marrow, and quickly inflame the blood.

(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Roman Elegies.)

William Blake Month: “The Tyger”

Holy cow, how’d I forget this one. You’ve probably been waitin’ for it. Exciting trivia question: what connection to Blake made me use the above picture from Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986). Answer will be posted up tomorrow if you don’t already know it.

via

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

via.

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart,
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And water’d heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

via

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake Month: Art of the Nude (Naked Beauty and no view of Money)

Artist being attacked by editors and creditors, photographed by Andre de Dienes.

Where any view of Money exists Art cannot be carried on
but War only.

Art can never exist without
Naked Beauty displayed.

(William Blake, excerpt from notes on “Laocoön.”)

William Blake Month: Proverbs of Hell

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God.
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

(William Blake, excerpt from “Proverbs of Hell,” The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.)

The Girls of Summer: Gale Olson, Miss August 1968

Adorable cuteness photographed by Ron Vogel. Brain-asplosions. See what I mean about the ’60’s being the Heyday?

Your Miss August 1968 was the lovely and talented Gale Olson, who as you can see didn’t need cheesecake poses and a strained, pageanty smile to turn in an adorable and upbeat photoshoot for this issue of Playboy.

It’s really interesting how some of the playmates are capable of keeping the material erotic instead of porny. I don’t know that I can pinpoint the exact difference … but I look at this shoot, and I look at something like the gatefold of Miss November 1995, Holly Witt, and I feel like Edwin Meese quoting Justice Potter Stewart about classing porn: I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it.

Kind of funny since he was describing the opposite; Meese made his referential remark in regard to the history in America of attempts at distinguishing sexually themed content from straight-up obscenity. I’m kind of talking about the reverse. Either way, it’s a dicey issue. Reagan appointed Meese in 1985 to head the Meese Commission, also called the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, who published their report in 1986 to lip-smackingly salacious public interest. Everyone loves a good witch hunt, am I right?

I mentioned all these shenanigans once back in November when we talked about the experiences of Miss November 1986, Donna Edmondson, the Virgin Playmate who got hit with a steamy little shitstorm of media criticism. As though it were her fault. The Meese Commission’s report on pornography had the moral majority howling for naked people’s blood and she got caught in the middle. And don’t get me started on what happened fifteen years later — as we still live in a nation of, if not puritans, then at least sweaty hypocrites — to sweet Lindsey Vuolo, Miss November 2001, with that publicity-seeking, accusatory, diminishing misogynist Rabbi Shmuley Boteach. Ugh.

I almost didn’t include this shot because it wasn’t very sharp or high-quality, but then as I contemplated it, I decided I actually liked the hazy quality, and the visible wrinkles in the image became dear and touching to me. There is something incredibly personal and human about the almost sad little private story one must conclude has lead to its well-worn threadbareness. Someone scanned this one with love, having either held on to it themselves, or acquired it from someone who had, for a long time. That idea is interesting as hell to me. What would someone make of the objects — letters, pictures, cards, old shirts — that you have secretly packed along with you to every new home in which you live, all these years, because of an emotional value, an identity-establishing familiarity, that far exceeds those objects’ original costs?

Pyjama Jam!

I do not want to use the word sentimental, per se, because these can be things that you keep for the gut, visceral reaction they can still incite. These are things that are part of the rhythms of your mind and body that I’m talking about, things worth holding on to because they are become part of how you operate. A roadmap to the art of you being “You” is this small collection of things so beloved that calling them cherished diminishes their import. These objects which represent long-passed moments or ways of feeling are part and parcel of the entirety of your experiences, your past, your emotions and stomach acid and sweat.

Things that have lasted longer than the relationships from which they came or phases in your mode of dress and hairstyle. To everyone else, because these objects are mixed in with other items, there is no shine or particularity about them. Only you know.

It is so incredibly personal and private, but the plain fact is that it will be gone through and picked over, someday, that collection of your private, true “belongings.” Because you’ll be dead, and those things that mean so much to you, those talismans of purpose and associative emotional properties won’t mean anything to anyone anymore.

I apologize. That was really downbeat. I’m getting close to a hard-hitting deathiversary (if you will) and I get all fucked up over it. Still. No need to drag anyone along.

Whew! Hot cross buns, enough with the self-audit, and enough with the needless sex-in-America history lessons as I retread ground I have already indignantly covered. Sorry — let’s get on with Ms. Olson!

The Olsons, who now live in Costa Mesa, are a large, closely knit family. “Having six brothers and three sisters really teaches you a lot about sharing things, materially and emotionally,” Gale says. Our August Playmate hopes one day to raise a family almost as large, but that won’t come about until she first fully satisfies her penchant for adventure.

(“Star-Spangled and Starry-Eyed.” Playboy, August 1968.)

“Last year I decided to become an astronaut, so I called the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Houston to find out qualification requirements.” Gale spent enough time being briefed on the phone by NASA officials to acquire four pages of notes. “So far, things are turning out fine for me,” she reports.

(Ibid.)

A model (36-22-35) of American femininity, Gale (who delivered talks on girl scouting over German television) stays in shape by practicing ballet and exercising, and plans to study Tahitian dancing next year.

(Ibid.)

I have said before that we superfly Girl Scouts are a bombass bunch. Take it to the bank.

“I think every girl who has the figure for it wishes she could be a Playmate, and I’m no exception,” [Gale] observes. “All I can say is that I was lucky!”

Lucky Gale, lucky readers.

(Ibid.)

Photographed by by Stephen Wayda and Barry Fontenot. Very close to the same pose!
And thirty-one years later, the readers were lucky again when Ms. Olson’s daughter, the lovely and talented Crystal McCahill, above, was Playmate of the Month for Playboy’s May 2009 issue.

It’s a different kind of Darwin Award: the Playmate gene, passed from mother to daughter, ensuring survival of the fittest and constant attention from males of the species. Examine the evidence before you in the curvy form of Crystal McCahill, the 25-year-old daughter of Miss August 1968 Gale Olson.

(“It’s Crystal Clear.” Playboy, May 2009.)

\

“I think every girl who has the figure for it wishes she could be a Playmate, and I’m no exception,” said Gale in her Playmate interview. “All I can say is, I am lucky!” Yet when luck strikes twice, it seems less like luck than destiny. It has happened just once before, when Miss December 1960 Carol Eden saw her daughter Simone grace the Centerfold in February 1989.

Says the Illinois-born Crystal, “I remember telling my brothers and sisters, ‘I’m going to do that one day. I’m going to do the exact same pose.'”

(Ibid.)

A fun-loving, positive, and thoroughly modern gal, you may follow Ms. Olson’s present doings on the twitter.

This picture is one of my favorites from the shoot. From a strictly aesthetic point of view it may possibly eclipse for me even the swan-butt ones. I love the movement and the colors in this composition. The impact of the yellow in all those little flowers around her is joyful and riotous, and her closed eyes imply a savoring of the moment. There is nothing forced or deliberate in this picture. It’s excellent.

The cover was photographed by Mario Casilli and Caroll Baker. The pose and styling of the model, Aino Korva — Miss Universe Denmark 1963, and first-runner-up in the 1963 Miss Universe pageant (in which Peter “Dr. Strangelove/The Pink Panther” Sellers was one of the judges!!), making her bid the closest a Dane has ever come to winning the title — are strikingly similar to the centerfold of Miss July 1967, Heather Ryan. I’m saving the lovely and talented Ms. Ryan for later this month. But you’ll see what I mean then.

As with the post on the lovely and talented Miss March 1967, Fran Gerard, I must throw up huge thanks to Fabrizio, an awesome and generous moderator over at the vintage erotica forums, which are free, well-moderated, full of fun, and they won’t give your computer any wack infections or the hantavirus. Grazie, bello♥!, and, to the rest of you, run — don’t walk — to the site. Enjoy!

William Blake Month: “The Divine Image”

Robert Demachy. “Mignon.” 1900.

To Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
All pray in their distress;
And to these virtues of delight
Return their thankfulness.

For Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is God, our Father dear,
And Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love
Is man, His child and care.

via smokeandacoke on the tumblr.

For Mercy has a human heart,
Pity a human face,
And Love, the human form divine,
And Peace, the human dress.

Then every man, of every clime,
That prays in his distress,
Prays to the human form divine,
Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.

Cairo, Egypt, photgraphed by Philip-Lorca diCorcia for W.

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew;
Where Mercy, Love, and Pity dwell
There God is dwelling too.


(William Blake, “The Divine Image.”)

“All must love the human form — there God is dwelling too.” We say things like this all the time, but consider that Blake wrote in the 1700’s. He prefigured all the poseur Romantics and social reformers, but transcended their work, too. And he really was disgusted by the inequities of life on earth in the Western world at that time.

Ryan McGinley, “Jake.”

Blake writes all the time about how his visions lead him to see that people truly, genuinely, are the same beneath, that plants and animals and even handmade objects hold a universal grain of likeness to people, being all made directly or indirectly by God and inhabited by a hierarchy of spirits, demons, and angels — that everything around us, ourselves and nature and all the things we make, are reflections of God because of our being made in His image.

Ryan McGinley, “Hysteric Fireworks.”

Logically, it followed to him that to raise your hand against these fellow creations was wrong and could not be God’s will; therefore all systems that enforced human governance over one another or intrusion in to nature was against God’s plan and was a sinful conception of man which had nothing to do with redemption — this included most organized religion, education, and politics, all of which he felt were offensive, grasping human attempts to control and oppress one another, which was the same as to try to bully God.

McGinley again — a Morrissey concert.

He really saw with the eyes of his heart: and almost more than anything else he truly did not understand why there would be starvation, child abuse, and especially war. And he knew well enough that he was unlike his countrymen in that way to write poems reminding them that violence and injustice were not the right paths. They all assumed he was crazy, of course. But look at his message, especially his emphasis on religious tolerance (an easy jump for him since he believed all people were equal plus his visions told him all religions had it all jacked up to begin with). It pretty obviously is still relevant and resonant today.

Ryan McGinley, “Fireworks.” He’s my new fave, if you couldn’t tell.

It is a reasonable enough message. If God created us and all things, then we must be peaceful and loving to one another and the animals and natural resources around us, and love them for being reflections of God. It is the only right way to be. So why is it such a challenge, again and again? Everyone claims to want it, so why it is always out of reach is depressing and mystifying. Kind of like how “the one thing we’re all waiting for/ is peace on earth and an end to war” to quote Queen’s “The Miracle.” I know I just went from Blake to Freddie Mercury, but I’m a maverick! Good people quote the Beatles. Great people quote the Beatles, Billy Joel, and Queen. Take it to the bank.

Daily Batman: Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior

“Catwoman Warrior,” by PurgatorioInferno on the deviantart.

“Courageous, untroubled, mocking, and violent — that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche

It’s true, I think I don’t have a great enough store of anger, or, if I do, I sublimate it into something else, repress it so it snaps out in an unguarded moment over something unrelated, or manifests itself in a sleepless night. I’m not saying I want to be rage-filled in perpetuity. But a little bit of healthy expression of displeasure would be good. I haven’t got enough anger. Not enough to defend myself when I maybe should, that’s the thing of it. I let myself get bulldozed. I don’t fight back. I need to work on that.

Daily Batman: Poisonville’s Dinah Brand, of Red Harvest, edition

Excellent photographs are titled “Batwoman” and come from maanuuu on the deviantart. Words, by pulp king and detective fiction master Dashiell Hammett, come from Red Harvest, the only published, novel-length account of one of the Continental Op’s cases.

Hammett, Dashiell. Red Harvest. New York: Knopf, 1929. Print. (30).

The widely-imitated plot of the book — in which an initially disinterested outsider is called in to help settle accounts in a small town beset with the strife of several disparate groups in a power-struggle for control of the town’s assets, then manipulatively turns the groups upon one another while attempting to remain detached himself — has inspired, among other works, the films Blood Simple, Yojimbo, Last Man Standing, and A Fistful of Dollars.

via Mark Sutcliffe books.

My life will only be complete when the Coen brothers just plain make this movie, with a screenplay adapted directly from the book by, say, James Ellroy. Please. You guys, I will gladly help you with whatever — ad copywriting, finances, and even craft table shit. Make my dreams come true, Coen brothers.

I think every geek has a secret list of ultimate-collaborative-fantasy movies that have never been but ought be made. This one is mine.

Unbelievably photorealistic art by painter Diego Gravinese

“Cometa.”

Check that mad rad shit out. Nope, it is not a photoshopped photograph, nor a digitally altered picture of a painting, or any other chicanery like that. Amazingly enough in this day and age, Argentinian artist Diego Gravinese uses oil paints and no fancy computer tricks to create these images.

“Coloso.”

Diego Gravinese was born in La Plata, Argentina in 1971. His work has been shown internationally over the past 15 years in New York, Paris, Madrid, Turin, Buenos Aires, Chicago, and Los Angeles. He worked with Ruth Benzacar and ZavaletaLab galleries in Buenos Aires and with DeChiara gallery in New York. He currently lives and works in Buenos Aires.

(bio via flavorpill.)

“My Favorite Thoughts.”

[Gravinese] sometimes goes by the name Nekomomix. His work explores the juxtaposition of vibrant and photo realistic figurative imagery with a variety of pop elements: these might include cartoons, book illustrations, maps and a plethora of other images borrowed from both personal and public realms.

(review via paintalicious, which I see is undergoing web maintenance today but should be up and running again soon. awesome site.)

“The Offering.” My favorite.

These elements sometimes cross over in subtle ways, thus bridging the gap between figurative and cultural elements of the paintings. Gravinese’s use of light and color gives the paintings an atmospheric quality, in a style both painterly and so refined.

(Ibid.)

“El elastico.”

His official site is under construction still, but you can visit his galleries of work on the flickr, which is from where I collected this small smattering of his art. There is tons more, and it’s all awesome.

Mr. Gravinese posing with some of his work. I know, right? I actually saved this picture as “omg,” all gushy like a twelve year old.

Oh, and P.S.? He is totally handsome and funny. Give him a spin, I’m serious.

Diego Gravinese is one of the best photorealistic painters in the world. He’s not just technically gifted, but his images are like freeze-frames from the TiVos of our lives — a quick hit of the pause button to capture a passing moment just as it was, forever. But taken out of context, there are endless stories to tell about each. … If Charlie Kaufman were a painter, he’d be Diego Gravenese [sic].

(review via yuppiepunk.org, right here on the wordpress.)

“The Method.” Look closely at the picture. It’s a picture of a painting of him painting a picture. AMAZING.

There has been much debate over the years on whether the replication of photographs in paint can actually be considered art or just an example of exceptional technical skill. Where do you sit on that topic? For me when I look at painting such as these by Argentinian painter Diego Gravinese I actually think they’re pretty damn amazing, but then again so are the photographs that he references for his work. Is the art in the idea, the execution or both? I don’t know, you either like it or you don’t, you decide.

(“Extraordinary photorealism of the ordinary by Diego Gravinese.” Lucas, Luke. April 11, 2009. Lifelounge.com)

For me, I like them. A lot. You can also follow Mr. Gravinese on the twitter. Super-cool!

Art of the nude: Andre de Dienes

Photographs by Andre de Dienes.

Calendar Girls Day: Nerdcore edition (NSFW)

Nerdcore.com, run by Jon M. Gibson, has put out a nerd-themed girly calendar several years running now.

2007 was girls playing video games:

Happens all the time.

2008 was lady superheroes and supervillains.

Seeing Famke Janssen as Jean Grey/Phoenix naked would have definitely cushioned the blow of watching the Golden Gate Bridge get destroyed in X-3 (so not cool, I was totally upset by that).

2009 was a salute to Sci-Fi, both newer and classic entries in the genre.

Say what you want, but my robot friend is metal and small and doesn’t judge me at all…

This year, the theme is Horror. Kick ass!

Bobbi Starr as a Frankenstein’s concubine

Justine Joli: Corpse bride



Mosh – Bloody prom (Carrie).



Jana Jordan and her ass do Poltergeist.

Kind of a high school slasher thing.

Night of the Living Dead. Naked girl zombies would get so many more brains than the traditional tattered-clothed male ones. Can you imagine?

Army of Darkness; the kneeling model is Penthouse Pet Aria Giovanni.

And I saved my favorite shot for last:

Justine Joli as Marion Crane in Psycho — that is a great shot, photographed by Cherie Roberts, designed by Jason Adams.

The calendar features noted days of both the civilian and hardcore nerd army variety; from holidays to ComiCons and Quentin Tarantino’s birthday. So scoop one up! You can buy this year’s calendar, plus back issues, direct from the source at totallynerdcore.com.