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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Merry Christmas

From childhood, I've always associated Christmas postcards with beautiful snowy landscapes of luminous pine forests and clear starry skies. Then came 1985, Dujan Makavejev's THE COCA-COLA KID (1985) and Greta Scacchi's scorching sex-scene dressed as Santa Claus. 

From then on, every December the 25th I picture that hot Summer Christmas in Australia, when quiet snowy dreamscapes were forever substituted in my mind for a furious tempest of downy feathers and Ms. Scacchi's enticingly beautiful breasts emerging from the classic Coca-Cola Santa costume.

So, in loving rememberance of that Christmas past, Merry Christmas you all!  

Face of an Angel

The face of an Angel. The body of a sinner. It doesn’t matter that she’s the villain of this particular episode of BONES (2005-2017), although one just finds that out in the end. This is, after all, a nicely done whodunit-procedural-crime-series. And it doesn’t matter that I give this info up ahead. One needs not be particularly attentive to the intricacies of plot structure to figure it out when one first catches a look of Lena Brodsky (then Emily Foxler, actually Emily Baldoni).

Her manner is all professionalism, and yet conveys some insecurity. Her Ukranian accent (how refreshing that this was done prior to the 2022 Russian invasion, when Ukranians could still be villains, and not just washed-up saints), or what passes for it in TV-land, makes her voice oh so sexy and as inviting as those deliciously pouty lips and those clear grey-green eyes. And those long, long legs… they just make you wonder… Can someone with legs like these be so innocent as those sweet big eyes imply? Can someone so hot really feel even a little insecurity? Or is it just a mask? A way of allay suspicion, just as the bejeweled belly of a black-widow spider makes it look just an object of natural beauty?

Some women are just like that. They look so sweet and so innocent, they makes us want to do things for them. And to them. And if you fool yourself, even for a tiny moment, that you’re on top of things, they’ll bite your head right off.

Goodbye Kirstie (1951-2022)

I don’t like obituaries. They tend to be mere pro forma exercises, a kind of duty one feels bound to perform. They rarely sound sincere. Maybe one cannot put into words true emotion when it is simmering inside one’s heart like smoldering embers. Or, sometimes, they’re the cold and cruel reminders that our objects of desire, our fantasies, are real persons, living in the real world like the rest of us. Sometimes insufferable, sometimes suffering.

Kirstie Alley was one of those persons. One of those objects of desire. I don’t have much to say about her as an actress, although she was always delicious to watch in any role. In my mind she’ll forever be Rebecca Howe of Cheers, so funny and lively, and full of life. So utterly sexy. Oh yes, Kirstie Alley was an incredibly sexy woman. And she was one of the actresses that filled my teenage years with wild imaginings. Strangely, however, despite her amazing body, it was her breathtaking beauty that captivated me the most. Her exquisite, feline face, her incredible grey eyes, and that sultry, warm, raspberry voice.

I fell in love with her long before I saw her in Cheers. Her beauty had caught my attention when she was playing Virgilia Hazard in North and South (1985-1986), and then in 1984’s RUNAWAY , which I caught later on satellite TV, on a wonderful summer night, somewhere in 1986 or 1987. After that, after Cheers got to an end and she starred in LOOK WHO’S TALKING (1989) and it’s sequels, I lost track of her. Babies are not my thing, alas, even if they’re talking babies. In a somewhat misguided way it was for the better: my infatuation with Kirstie Alley endured throughout the Eighties, and dissipated with the arrival of the Nineties.

From the glorious Eighties comes a minor masterpiece by Niko Mastorakis, the film where Kirstie looks more luminous than ever: BLIND DATE (1984). It is impossible for any red-blooded male to watch that movie and not fall in love with Kirstie Alley, so young, joyous and full of life. By not following her career after the end of Cheers, I’ll forever remember her as she was then, an indelible memory of fun and joy that I ritually rekindle now and then with a dip into my DVD collection.

So here’s to you, Kirstie Alley, in loving memory. Cheers!

Happy Halloween

It was with some surprise that I noticed it's been five years since I posted something on Halloween in this semi-dormant blog of mine. Tempus fugit, indeed. Well, maybe not to our cherished muse, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. She irradiates such immortal beauty. Oh, Elvira, tempus fugit, forma manet. So here it is: Happy Halloween folks. 

I fell in love with Temperance Brennan…

…from the get go. Maybe it’s due to the contrast between her bright brains and her sinner’s body, or maybe it’s due to the nonchalant disdain for all things that our pop-bubblegum culture thrives on. Truth is, I love her dedication. Her utter obsession towards the task at hand. Towards solving the mystery.

Her selfless quest for truth and enlightenment almost erases her inner self. Piecing together the puzzle of a smashed skull, the looks straight into the abyss of death, and although the abyss looks back at her, her capacity for marveling with the hidden truths and the cold equations of the universe, smothers that frightful look, like vacuum killing a flame.

Working throughout the night she seems lonely, but one feels she’s never truly so, as if she’s carrying the ghosts of all her broken, twisted, charred skeletons within her, collecting experience – lived experience – through the martyrdom of the victims she reveals in every episode. 

In a way, it’s as if Bones (Brennan’s nickname, derived from her anthropological expertise) is meant to give life to the Cartesian duality of body and soul. Something the series – Bones (2005-2017) – hints at, but never quiet fully explores. Temperance, Dr, Brennan, or simply Bones (Emily Deschanel), is a focused mind lodged in a body she’s oblivious to, however a body that we’re all too aware of.

Although to say she’s oblivious to her body is not the most truthful assertion, as she keeps it honed as a lethal weapon through martial arts training. The more correct statement would be that she thinks of her body as an instrument to her mind, and so the attention she gives to it is the same we give our cars. It must be kept functional, and clean, and impressive, but it is not who we are.

Not having met her when I was kid, I didn’t fell head over heels for her, as I had for Wilma Deering, or Daisy Duke, or Triple A. But I fell in love nonetheless. How can you not, when such a sharp mind is housed in a body like hers?