P1010018

P1010018, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010018

P1010018, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010056

P1010056, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

ray's bachelor party at the queen and beaver--rabbit, sweet breads, brandied peaches and sweat cream, and a negroni, old fashioned,  glass of south african red, mint julep, french martini, mai tai, and pimms cup.

Tagame’s fetishistic toolbox overflows: clamps, electrodes, chains, candles, gags, ropes, hooks, dildos, thumbtacks, blades, piercings, handcuffs, canes, vinegar, belts, needles, and a memorable Perrier bottle. Yet the ritualized, almost solemn staging of their employment distinguishes his comics from ero-guro manga, or “erotic grotesque nonsense,” to use the wonderful literal translation – an artistic phenomenon dating back to the 1930s, in which human bodies become props for extravagantly cruel theatre, aberrant and amoral. (from the hazlit article linked below)

the ritualizing of the body thru artificial phalluses (the candle, the dildo, the hook, the blade, are not cock) (to be stabbed is to have an orifice made, the artifical phallus creates an artifical oifice)  the flaccid rope against hard body, the hard chain or rigid cane  against pliable body, the size o the needle and the size of the cock--all of the collapsing of diacritical pairs in tamage's best work, is a ritualised grotesqurie borrowed not only from the ero-guero tradition, but an attempt to westernize it, no? and so this seperating porn from the bad old not art and the good new totes art, is intensely problematic? 

Imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie (at sixty-three years of age), Sade, we are told, used "every means his imagination could suggest… to seduce and corrupt the young people (to slake his lubricity with young fools) who were imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie owing to unfortunate circumstances and put by chance in the same corridor as himself."

barthes

On his part-Japanese, part-English website, Tagame has posted charmingly idiomatic lists of “horny things” from various periods of his life—The Thousand and One Nights, Story of O, Joe Gage films—and when I asked about the first one he could recall consciously taking in as erotica, he mentioned feeling intrigued by posters forSalò, Pasolini’s abject transposition of de Sade to the doomed fascist redoubt of the Italian Social Republic. “I was like, ‘Okay, I’ll go to the bookstore and look for the original book, ‘cause it looks like it’s based on something.’ And when I was looking for it I found by chance an issue of something with a picture of a naked man from the waist up, and I thought, oh, what’s this?, and opened it and went ‘ohhh!’, because it was basically a gay porn magazine. I have no memory of what happened after that, but somehow I obtained that magazine and went home with it.”

from here

thinking alot about tagame, who i have half dismissivley been referring to as bear manga, but i think is an important pornographer, and whose new book is vital. 

this might be a bit eurocentric, but reading it next to sade (because, seriously, the sheer overwhelming, formal attention paid to the extremes of viscera in this text, it's sadean), i was sort of willing to say, okay, this is like sade, this is like sade b/c its beautiful, this is like sade because it pays attention to rhetoric, this is like sade because its about ettiqutte and the heirarchy of sexual systems, and its like sade because as barthes teaches: ". Throughout his life, the Marquis de Sade's passion was not erotic (eroticism is very different from passion); it was theatrical" i suspect that tagame's interest is not erotic but aesthetic. 

sade's pornography is lapidiary, its excess is lapidary 8 or 900 pages, tamage tells his story in five or six. tamage writes for magazines, for small comissions, for the underground--so maybe its like the size of physique pictorial, the amount of time it takes for a quick wank--the 900 pages, are intended for a long stay, for the imagination to go free when the body is imprisoned (which is kind of ironic, because tamage is a master of the body being tied up, of bicep or cock or  throat  or pec pressing against a well tied rope, a rope that seems to have careful, almost diagramatic attention paid to how the rope works against the body--so the tightness of the narrative, the tightness of the accuracy of depiction, the tautness of the rope, and the tautness of the body, all narrow and deepn the tautness of the narrative story. 

what can be done in the short stories of tamage is what can be done with a willing partner or two or give or 10, and a rope. what can be done in the novels of sade, well little can be done in the novels of sade. 

which makes me think, maybe--of a taxonomy of porn. 

the philsophy, the lapidary, the endless repeating, the langauge interfering, the descriptions, the philsophy, as part of a eddy of unsolving or unresolving or unresovalble eros. 

the narrative, the quick shot, the collection of quick shots, the language receding to bodies, the lack of descriptions, the lack of phisophy...

i wonder if graphic porn (like pix, like comix, like the underground work that waugh marks in out/line or lust unearthed, for example, ie, etc...allows for a variety of informaiton sorting to occur--i wonder if the lapidary porn works better w/i the realm of written language for the sake of language, and if the quick shot porn works better w/ visuals. 

(is this why lost girls kind of failed--an attempt to make lapidary out of graphic images....)

if hosea talks to us about the problems of being obdient to those who are problematic, talks about a human failure of loyalty, then luke tells us the opposite--the gifts of being obdient to a god...and we can then talk about the split b/w the church and the gospel?

there is irony in the zimmerman trial. it might not have been murder. it might not have been manslaughter. these are legal technicalities. but, the stand yr ground laws was born out of centuries of white men killing black boys. the murder and manslaughter laws were constructed in an environment that were intended to police black bodies. there might be no legal justice, because in the american south, the history of policing black bodies, results in white men killing black boys. 50 years ago, there wouldn't have been a trial. and that is progress.

The governmentality Foucault describes in The Birth of Biopolitics does not seem sufficient for understanding what it implies from the 1990s on, when governmentality began to limit the freedom which Foucault made the condition of “liberalism.” The freedom in liberalism is always and primarily the freedom of private ownership and owners. When the “rights of man” are threatened – by a crisis, a revolt, or some other phenomenon – regimes of governmentality other than liberal governmentality are required in order to ensure their durability. In this way, the problem of “governing as little as possible” first created the conditions for, then gave way to, as has always been the case in the history of capitalism, ever more authoritarian politics. To read The Birth of Biopolitics in light of what is taking place today is to be struck by a certain political naivete, since the parable of “liberalism” always describes, leads to, the same thing: crisis, limitations on democracy and “liberal” freedoms, and the institution of more or less authoritarian regimes according to the intensity of the class struggle to wage in order to maintain the “privileges” of private property…

This is why the current crisis is not only a financial crisis but also a failure of neoliberal governmentality of society. This mode of government founded on business and proprietary individualism has failed Maurizio Lazzarato The Making of the Indebted Man Semiotext(e), 2012, pgs. 108-109

ten things to do in toronto 

1-2 two meetings with rachel, one with xspace, one with regina 

3 fairfied review 

4 carpernter notes 

5 radner essay

6 abelism conference

7 jukebox stuff 

8) revise toast 

9 bachelor party, wedding etc 

10 don make fun work. 

P1010256

P1010256, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010413

P1010413, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.

P1010620

P1010620, a photo by PinkMoose on Flickr.