Category Archives: art

art, culture, philosophy, politics

>ABOUT PORN!!!!!

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Diego Beyró, Orgasm series 2008 (oil on bed sheets)
Click the images to enlage

What about porn? It’s an established culture, deeply rooted in today’s modern consumer society. Porn is everywhere, and since the arrival of the Internet it is everyfuckingwhere – and people are fucking everywhere too! There’s no escaping porn. And people wouldn’t really want to escape porn, because then it wouldn’t exist, right?

I’d say most of us get sexually aroused by watching (some kind of) pornography, there’s no shame in that. It’s a combination of that suggestive attraction and our simple biological needs, I guess. Still there are people trying to ban porn and inflict censorship. I can understand that to some extent, but no porn ban will ever last. Porn is in the mindset of just about everything and it’s all over the mainstream media (MTV, Sex And The City, commercials, fashion…). Big cable operators offer adult channels and giant hotel chains offer porn on pay-per-view (as well as the mandatory Bible!).
However, to me porn is more honest than hypocritical shit like Slitz, Café and Moore (Swedish equivalents to Esquire, GQ etc); auteur maestro Micke Eklöf’s olden goldies are definitely the most honest porn films in existance… Jesus. Christ. Spermafesten.
Some might argue that that kind of men’s magazines are sensual, leaving a lot to the imagination… Hoho. Fuck that shit. Please.
This is a consumer society (stuff you can put a price tag on is real, the rest is uninteresting) and pornography is big fucking business (and thus very real). The attitude in Slitz is just plain braindead and awfully sickening.


Here’s what I’m worried about, though. It seems like today’s extreme sides of porn are becoming norm. Degeneration is at hand when humiliation, throat gagging and ”forced sex” (a term I stumbled upon just recently) is what’s expected in commercial porn. This is what bothers me. Where’s the style and intelligence? All I see is commercialized crap. People making money off the humiliation of other people. To each his own, you might say, but of course it affects society in the long run. If rape sex and stuff like that isn’t forbidden fruit anymore – if it has become your everyday treat that you’re bored with – then what’s next? Commercial child porn? Yeah, I know it sounds sick, but society is grotesque and respect is nothing but a seven letter word. It lost its meaning a long time ago. This will show as porn is driven to new extremes…
I have nothing against porn per se, but when degenerating extremes become commercialized norm… Well, I guess it’s a sign of the times. Zeitgeist.


René Magritte, The Lovers 1928 (oil on canvas)

To finish this off I’d like to quote a brilliant essay written by Lou Reed, an essay that might skyrocket this blog’s visitors count by millions. ;) Lou shows what commercial porn is all about: exploiting humiliation. I just love his take on that porn spam shit that contaminates our mailboxes every hour (thank God for Gmail, the best spam filter ever. Who reads these mails anyway?).

”Welcome Lou” by Lou Reed

Hey Lou! These chicks will do anything for a Buck. Horny bored Housewifes are waiting for you. Watch these Bitches be ANALLY DESTROYED. Big Black cocks! How do they do it! Insane Penetrations. A Fucking Baseball Bat. No B.S. These horny women will do Anything. Why Be alone. Japanese Hardcore Anime and Kentai Art. Nasty! Over 25000 xxx by today’s best Asian Artists. These women will moan for you. The Fleshpussy. Tighter and better than the real thing and they won’t TALK BACK! Order now Mr. J. Watson of Akron writes, ”I increased the lenght of my penis by 3 in. in one week. Girth by 2 in. My wife is delighted and so am I with your invaluable product. Bigfuckin African Bros put it to the white bitchin Ho’s. What these sluts won’t do. Facial Cum Shots and our Famous Cum Shake. Yes that’s Right – I want it – I have a HARD time saying NO! Check out my home tape collection from me and my HORNY girlfriends right now! I like it in the bumbum. LOU!
See the girl next door being POUNDED! Ron wanted to shoot his wad all over MY BIG BOOBS! I finger myself at the same time. Watch The Glory Hole. These Bitches don’t care who they suck. Watch this Bitch vomit all over herself! Hear her gag and beg for MERCY! Facial Fantasies caught On Film! Sex Without Strings! Defanged and Declawed Gerbils For you Anal Ecstasy. Captain Croaker’s Anal Adventures on the Open Seas! Me and my crew go out on the open seas on the SS Stabem and find some Backdoor Virgins for your video/dvd delight. A millionaire a yacht and some sluts. INSANE PENETRATIONS! This guy said he loved my ass so much he would LICK IT! Hunting down Moms Across America. Watch these mature bitches take the Big Pony! This slut sucks a fuckin horse off till HE BLOWS IN HER MOUTH. what won’t these horny wives do for money. Why Be Alone. There out here waiting for YOU. College Chicks or their mothers, Lou. See celebrities caught on tape with their pants down. See your favorite stars. Morgue and mug shots. What did they REALLY DO?! Piss Place – watch them make a SPLASH! You’ll never miss a single drop. Live Web-Cam. On command – these sluts will DO ANYTHING YOU WANT! TABOO INSERTIONS! KINKY LADIES TAKING IT DEEP. See the Space Shuttle Booty! Thelma Tounge – Tight Asses Pounded Hard. Wet Teens. Homeless Black Women! Instant Access. Extreme anal Sex! More Extreme! Crazy! Wild! Ruining Rectums since 1998!
Her first Lesson. Real Home Blowing! Young Sluts on Wheels. Watch what she does to that Bentley! Dirty Anal! Nasty Anal! My Body wants your body Lou! 1000’s of porn clips free free free!
She put it in her mouth for the very first time, These BABES are waiting for you! Panty staining Teens! Cute young Babes with FARM ANIMALS! Smile your on Fisty Camera. My name is Young but I’m 18 and Horny! Women doing men Women doing Women! What’s Left. It’s Insane. Garbage mouthed pigs squirting cum shots and cooking pancakes at the SAME FUCKING TIME. Goddamnit get Loose. How does an ungly pig like me get the beautiful Bitches! I don’t know MONEY MONEY MONEY! Watch this Mom put AN ENTIRE REFRIGERATOR UP HER BUTT. It don’t get Better than this Jonesy. Latin Asian Greek chicks waiting for you!!!! Respond for Chrissake. Do you need Viagra – cheap cheap cheap. Horny dogs and their masters. Wowee! Waiting for you Waiting for you Waiting for you! Sex Crazed Whores with Big Tits! Respond! Respond! Snatch Party! They’ll Hunt You down To Suck you Off!
Screwing Machine! Come See Huge Dicks pounding their tight Little Pussies as these Sluts Scream for more! Woman with PHD’s Taking it up the Dung Basket. Hear them BEG IN 5 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. My God! Respond Please! Respond Please! These woman are Waiting For you. Fornicating Giraffes. Erect Baboons. What are you Waiting for!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Quoted from the book XXX 30 Porn-Star Portraits by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

art, culture, literature, movies

>Watchmen – Illuminating reality

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Yeah, you know, that old graphic novel (i.e. comic book) by Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator) which is now being adapted to the screen. I love that comic. It’s kind of Ny Moral in a nutshell.

Because to me Watchmen is about the delusion and condemnation of humanity. It’s about what happens when we abuse power and responsibility, when ”soft-spoken” fascism dictates the rules of everyday life. When people who think they know what’s best for you tell you what to do. It’s about what needs to be done to save humanity. And it asks two questions:
Who watches the watchmen?
Does the end justify the means?
The solution to humanity is rather dystopic and misanthropic, I’d say.

When Alan Moore unleashed Watchmen in 1986/87 he created a whole new way of looking at comics. All of a sudden comics where of literary value. When TIME Magazine picked the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present, Watchmen was right up there alongside The Catcher in The Rye (J.D. Salinger), Catch-22 (Joseph Heller), 1984 (George Orwell), Blood Meridian (Cormac McCarthy), Tropic of Cancer (Henry Miller), A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess), Lord of The Flies (William Golding), Gravity’s Rainbow (Thomas Pynchon), Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut), The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) – to name my personal favourites – and other novels by William Burroughs, Doris Lessing, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ernest Hemingway, Salman Rushdie, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene, Toni Morrison… The list goes on. Watchmen is also the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award. All this elite stuff is almost hard to believe, but when reading Watchmen you’ll understand. Or else, in a fascist kind of way, they will make you understand, with the help of the written word, commercials, money, capitalism, corruption, chaos – a maximum overload of information. That’s how it works. But constantly being told what to do raises scepticism amongst individuals, and anti-authority works both ways; some like it, some don’t.

Watchmen thrives on the complexities of life, of being human, and adds to that the odd twist of what it would be like if superheroes – or rather masked ” heroes”, devoid of supernatural powers (Dr. Manhattan excluded), acting as vigilantes – really existed in our modern world. What if God all of a sudden walked the Earth? ”Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”, quoted from Genesis chapter 18, verse 25.
Obviously, it’s not that easy.
What Moore does is that he gives coherence to these complexities. In his own words: ”it is possible to think about politics, history, mythology, architecture, murder and the rest of it all at the same time to see how it connects”.


Catching up on Alan Moore, and watching The Mindscape of Alan Moore DVD (watch it here!), I find I really like this guy. Check out what he says about information in this great interview:

Information is funny stuff. In some of the science magazines I read, I’ve found it described as an actual substance that underlies the entirety of existence, as something that is more fundamental than the four fundamental physical forces: gravity, electromagnetism and the two nuclear forces. I think they’ve referred to it as a super-weird substance. Now, obviously, information shapes and determines our lives and the way we live them, yet it is completely invisible and undetectable. It has no actual form; you can only see its effects. Information is a kind of heat. I would suggest that as our society accumulates information, from its hunter-gatherer origins to the complexities of our present day, it raises the cultural temperature.
I feel that we may be approaching a cultural boiling point. I’m not saying this is a good thing or a bad thing; I really don’t know because I can’t imagine it, quite frankly. But I think we may be approaching the point at which the amount of information we are taking becomes exponential, and I’m not entirely certain what kind of human culture will exist beyond that point. Except it will happen sooner than we expect, and the difference between us and the kind of people that will exist after such an event will be vastly different than the difference between us and the hunter-gatherer society we’ve evolved from.

You’re saying we might not be able to recognize human beings of the future that well.

Yeah, it could be a quantum leap, a sudden, massive and unprecedented leap. Boiling point is a good analogy, because what you have before that stage is water. What you have after it is something that does not behave at all like water; it’s a completely different substance altogether. And that’s what I see looming for society — and it’s probably necessary, probably inevitable, probably scary. That’s my prognosis. I suppose, as an artist, one of the obligations upon my work is to try and prepare people for the more complex world, to try and make it more palatable and accessible to them and not quite so frightening. That would seem to be a worthy goal, illuminating reality.

On another note: As for the nobel prize in literature I’d suggest we give it to Cormac McCarthy. Or Iain Sinclair. Or why not Alan Moore? But maybe it would do them and the fans more bad than good, so let’s not make it complicated.

PS. If you’re really interested in Watchmen, you should check out The Annotated Watchmen!
And here’s a Watchmen Wiki…
And this blog post pretty much concludes that Rorschach is a Jew…
As you can see, we’re dealing with information overload here as well.

And as for the movies, From Hell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, V For Vendetta and Watchmen, here’s Alan Moore talking about his disgust for Hollywood, stating clearly that the comics ”were written to be impossible to reproduce in terms of cinema”. He obviously hates them all.

art

>Graffiti – Art Crime – Hardcore tagging

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BLAZE

And now for the part of graffiti that the majority of people hate the most, and that I – of course – love the most: TAGS! I was about to write something pretentious about the beauty and individuality of the tag, when I found German writer REW had done just that in the magnificent book Writing – Urban Calligraphy and Beyond, so I just copied parts of his text…
Watch the videos, check the pictures (click on them for larger size) and read his writings. Give it a try. There’s more than meets the eye.

…to the majority of people, who hardly ever think about this aspect or simply don’t understand it, the shapes and histories of tags mean absolutely nothing, least of all appeal to them. ”I enjoy those large, vidid images! But I don’t see the point of the small, black scribbles on the wall. Those are ugly!” Sound familiar?
[…]
I should point out that there will always be people who, even if they are familiar with the subject of tags, simply don’t like their aesthetics and would rather see a pristine wall. These people get extremely upset when it gets ”soiled” again. This is a topic that should be considered in a different discussion on property and personal values. I would like to talk about the tag itself instead, its form and its essence. I’d like to talk about the fact that a tag is very different from banal ”smears” such as a few random brushstrokes in a room that’s about to be repainted anyway. Tags are the result of very specific needs that have accompanied humanity for thousands of years. Tags are about spreading a message, about drawing attention to something.
[…]
No matter if 74,000 posters all over the city shout out that a new Volvo is finally available, or if Peter lets Maria know that he has fallen for her on the wall that’s on her way to school, or if a writer leaves his tag at representative locations – the parallels are obvious. Especially when it comes to writing, there are a number of different reasons for tagging. The most obvious one is fame and recognition from simply generating as many tags as possible at many conspicuous locations in different parts of a city or districts. Another big motivation for tagging, and this aspect I’d like to emphasize here, is working with different styles!
In addition to spreading their own name, there are some writers who place a lot of importance on the form and the individual style of a tag. This might be about how an ”R” or an ”S” should be shaped, what the ideal proportions are, if it would look better broad and long or slim and tall, if a certain line of a letter should be long or short, if it should be round and curved or straight and angular, if the transition between the letters should be gradual or distinctly separate, or which, if any, further elements or other ornaments should appear next to the tag. Such criteria and viewpoints are used to define and measure the quality of your own tags and those of other writers.
Based on this, it is easy to see and understand that not each and every one, but a large number of the tags we encounter in the streets (and fortunately every once in a while still on trains) possess individuality and beauty as defined by the studied commitment to the task and the constant evolution of an individual, stylish tag honed by years of practice.


OXBOE


DELTA ONE


ZASD (onelines where the pen never leaves the surface)


Alphabet by ZASD


Alphabet by AKIM


BABBO

But then again, sometimes it’s all about All Out Destruction…