Merry Christmas

 
A Christmas postcard from HOUSE OF SIN, done through AI art.

Imtemporal beauty

She appears onscreen for just fleeting moments in Robert Redford’s QUIZ SHOW (1994). She has no name, and I don’t recall if she utters a single line of dialogue. She’s just there. There with the brevity of a breath, forever immortal on the perennial celluloid strip, morphed into bytes in digital support, like an aesthetic infection wanting to live for eternity, a virus of beauty spreading throughout the culture, throughout time.

Her bejeweled glamour speaks to us as if from the deep millennia of History. Hers is Nefertiti’s beauty, Cleopatra’s devouring allure, Circe’s timeless spell. In the context of the film (if we can so broadly frame her presence onscreen) she seems at the same time to contrast and to absorb the two wives of the married men in the triangle of male protagonists: she seems to be the very opposite of shrill Toby Stemple (Johann Carlo), and a more posh, and yet less intelligent version of middle-class beauty Sandra Goodwin (Mira Sorvino). Halfway between those two, she resonates with contingent possibilities, a Schrödinger’s box of yet undecayed realities. She's at the same time all possible women and a sole vision of desire, burning for a few frames, and then disappearing into the river of unrealized eternal beauty, leaving behind her, seared into the viewers’s retina, just one instance of that realized potential.

First day of Spring

I don’t like winter. There’s no other way to put it. The cold numbs my brain. The grayness outside, the low leaden clouds, the cold rain, as cold as if the sky was melting ice, falling to earth bit by icy bit, drains my will. Winter is a great annual unwanted parenthesis in my life.

But springtime…well, that’s a whole other thing. A realm of different colors, smells and tastes. It is a time of activity. Just as in soon to come summer, even idleness is an activity in itself. The brain synapses begin firing like out-of-control neural bombs, authentic fireworks of ideas daring me to give them form. In rest, inner restlessness.

The image above, culled from a well known image bank, has been used for several ends. If I remember correctly, I saw it in an advertisement for an insurance company. But that is irrelevant. For it speaks of springtime, inner calm, sublime beauty, quite eroticism.

Today is the first day when the weather outside is really hot, with a balmy breeze gently rocking the cradle of this newborn Spring. And I feel like that image draws me into the inner realm where the gentle erotic ghosts of springtimes past still roam. And I am there, dancing among them, while the sun shines down on a pair of beautiful legs.

Happy New Year, you perverts!

I guess there’s nothing quite as relaxing, on a cold winter new year’s eve night, than to relax on a hot spa, with a glass of sparkling wine, with nothing but a ceiling of stars above you.

Knowing the world is beginning its crazy merry-go-around the sun once more. It is strangely comforting, a way to clear one’s mind of all the troubles that plague this same crazy world, behaving each day more insanely than before.

But then you had to show up, right, you pervy peeping Tom? Hiding behind the shrubberies, like a creepy stalker. Don’t you think the world is trouble enough, that I have to cope with your gluttonous eyes as well?

Don’t you have nothing better to do on a night like this? Didn’t your mother taught you that it is not nice to spy on naked girls when they’re unaware? Just relaxing, defenseless, not wanting to care about perverts like you?

What? You never saw such lovely breasts as mine?

Really? I can’t see what’s so special about them. I’m sure you saw lots more breasts just as nice?

No? Really? Not in a million dreams? Come on, don’t look at me like this. I can’t stand that sad my-puppy-is-dead look.

Well, Ok. Take a good look at them, you crazy pervert. And Happy New Year to all your perverts out there!

Pin-Up Bunty

I can’t say that I’m a fan of the popular BBC series FATHER BROWN (2013-present), as I haven’t seen more than a couple episodes from its fifth series (2016-2017), and those, caught by chance on TV, not in its entirety. However, the character of Penelope “Bunty” Windermere, played by British actress Emer Kenny, and of whom I always think of as Lady Penelope Windermere, caught my fancy.

Setting the series in the early ninety-fifties, instead of the first third of the twentieth century, like the Chesterton stories they’re loosely based on, allows for wonderful fashion and beautiful cars, and Penelope distinguishes herself on both counts. Now, Emer Kenny, in the few episodes I did catch, makes for a fascinating fifties fallen aristocrat, at the same time daring and yet feminine, outspoken and yet wise, haughty and yet compassionate. And terribly sexy.

Then, in the episode “The Eagle and the Daw”, Father Brown is incarcerated, framed for murder by a condemned woman that he had helped convict, and it falls on the shoulders of Bunty and Mrs McCarthy to clear him of the false charges. And while I was watching posh Lady Penelope visiting the vindictive woman in jail, interrogating suspects, and even climbing a ladder into the parish church’s rooftop to recover a decisive piece of evidence, always dressed in those elegant fifties clothes, her lips properly glossed, her hair wonderfully wavy, I found myself thinking that I would love to have a set of posters/calendars/whatever of Bunty posing as a Pin-Up girl. You know what I mean: those gorgeous fifties Pin-Ups by Gil Elvgren, with pleated skirts and garter belts, tight sweaters and ballerina shoes, tight pants and naked torsos, with slender arms covering trembling breasts…

Those were images that plagued my mind for a few days afterwards. Then, just two episodes after that one, there came “The Crimson Feather”, and the place that gave its name for the episode, was no more and no less than a house of ill repute where, as fate demanded, Lady Penelope chose to infiltrate herself in order to check if a missing girl was working there. And then, some of the images in my mind gained form when Bunty appeared on stage on a casting performance, clad in stunningly daring lingerie.

And I found it soothing…or should I say fitting…to find out that clearly I was not the only one harboring such undignified erotic thoughts about Lady Penelope Windermere. 

Sights not seen

Around the time HEAVY METAL (1981) was released, an older cousin of mine had a poster of this scene on his bedroom wall. I would be eleven, maybe twelve, he was already sixteen. After much cajoling, and begging, and trading, I finally persuaded him to let me have it, unbeknownst to my parents. He always had wonderful posters on his walls. I remember another one, with a psychedelic Bob Marley painting that made his rasta hair seem alive like that many colorful serpents, and another one of Björn Borg, and an unstapled double spread from a music magazine featuring Agnetha and Frida from ABBA, singing in very short skirts and fishnets. Later on, this last one would also be mine. But right then no other image set my mind on fire like this one did. For in it, there was an unexpected revelation: animated cartoons could also be sexy.

As every preteen, I watched lots of cartoons on TV, and just like any preteen, I felt that quite indescribable pre-sexual tingle of arousal when a sexy cartoon girl – say, Sheila on the Dungeons & Dragons TV series, for example – was in dangerous situations; or – supreme pleasure – was captured by the bad guys and tied to a post in some damp and dark cavern. In that image, however, in its printed immobility and glorious color, was suddenly depicted everything my young mind struggled to imagine could happen to my bound heroines. Or, more precisely, what was hidden beneath their cartoon clothes. (Of course, I knew some of it; at age seven I’d seen SUPERMAN (1978), and Valerie Perrine’s stunning cleavage would haunt many a sleepless summer night thereafter; as would Jessica Lange, bound and frightened as offering to savage Kong, clad in ragged furs, in Dino de Laurenti’s  KING KONG (1976); moreover, Tarzan’s mate, Jane, didn’t have much in the way of clothes, and Tarzan movies were my favorites when I was a kid).

But I don’t recall having seen a naked cartoon girl before I saw this poster. And the scenarios this image of Taarna (I didn’t knew her name then), naked and bound, with proud breasts exposed, and that defiant look in her eyes, would fire my fantasies for years. What had happened to her? What would be done to her? At the time, I hadn’t no way of seeing the movie. It didn’t play on my hometown cinema, never ran on national TV, and when I got my first VCR I was already eighteen and, by then, there was no way in hell that the real movie would ever reach the peaks of depravity my mind had accrued around that scene and what was done to Taarna. And so, although I have the film in DVD (I bought it as soon as it came out), I never got to see it. And I guess I’ll never will. So Taarna will be forever tied in that spread-eagled pose, looking defiantly at me, with gorgeous naked breasts, trying to figure out what’s going on in my mind.

Eros vs Academia: In Space No One Can Hear Your Mind Fart

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