hairline nibbles
playful bites
down her spine

lingering
licking
tasting

nape of neck
shoulder tops
and
shoulderblades

darting tongue
grazing teeth
on collarbone

savoring
sampling

slender neck
Well defined
muscles firm
and
tendons taut

lips on hipbone
circling tongue
nipping teeth

hairline nibbles
darting tongue

sometimes salty
always sweet
always warm
against my lips  ¶ 23:33

 
Helmut Newton Saw the Dark Side Of Fashion's Dream

By Robin Givhan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 24, 2004; Page C01

The photographer Helmut Newton transformed fashion into a form of erotica. With his long-legged models shot from below and lit like goddesses carved out of stone, Newton's vision of women was both threatening and compelling. Through his lens, sexuality was transformed into power.

Newton, 83, died yesterday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. According to friends, the photographer had just driven away from the Chateau Marmont Hotel, where he lived for three months during the winter (his main residence, with his wife, June, was in Monte Carlo), when he suffered a heart attack and crashed. Although the photographer had health problems recently, only days before he had been swimming, dining with friends and attending a party in celebration of the designer Alexander McQueen.

Newton, who was Jewish, was born in Berlin but lived a nomadic life after his family fled the Nazis. He bought his first camera at 12 and gained acclaim when he joined French Vogue in 1961. Over the years, Newton established a reputation for a style of fashion photography that was icy and aloof. His models stood and lounged about in a haughty manner, sometimes rudely ignoring the camera and at other times staring intently and tauntingly into the lens.

From the start, Newton understood the sexual frisson to be found in androgyny and exploited it to sell not just the clothes of a designer but also the attitude, sensibility and mystery that make fashion so tantalizing. One of Newton's most striking photographs was of a female model dressed in one of designer Yves Saint Laurent's pinstriped suits from the 1970s. The model's hair is slicked back and a lit cigarette dangles between her fingers in the manner of an unrepentant gigolo. She stands on an empty street, her eyes tilted toward the ground. The photograph captures that inexplicable sexual energy that is churned up by the sight of a woman dressed like a man. It also illustrates the essence of the Saint Laurent aesthetic, with its emphasis on authority, sex appeal and intellectualism. The photograph also captures a moment in the culture when gender roles were shifting and the notion of sex and sex appeal were being redefined.

Newton explored the emotional shadows, turning his attention to untamed and unspoken human desires. Technically, his work was always glossy, pretty, perfect. But his subject matter was often raw, disconcerting and unnerving. He explored the darker side of sexuality -- the place where pleasure, pain, joy and anger all converge. Newton reveled in nudity -- not the soft and sensual curves of the body, but the hard angles and planes of it. His models would not be turned shyly away from a camera and their bodies would not be romanticized into something abstract and dreamy. Instead, breasts, torsos, legs and buttocks were defiantly on display.

Newton's photographs could be disturbing. One of the most troubling was an image for American Vogue several years ago in which models who were not disabled were photographed wearing leg braces and in wheelchairs. The image struck a nerve as it seemed to proclaim that there was something erotic in disability, in pain, in a broken body. But the work reflected his personal history rather than an obsession with self-conscious contrivance. Newton used images and memories from old Europe -- such as a cumbersome, heavy leg brace -- and combined them with things that were modern. For him it was part of his life experience, said Charles Churchward, design director at Vogue. For those that later copied his style, "it's just kinky."

"The difference between him and people who copied him is the sophistication. The way he saw things was not a fantasy," Churchward said. "He didn't mind blending irony and style and sophistication with blatant eroticism. He did it with such ease."

He continued to work, with his little camera held together with tape, even as his health began to fail. The March issue of Vogue will have one last example of Newton's vision.   ¶ 12:00

 
In a recent conversation, a friend said, "One reason I believe I'll never get married is that I'm holding out for an invitation into the Long family."

A reference to Heinlein's "Time Enough for Love", Lazarus Long, was born in 1916, and the story is told from his deathbed in 4272 as he recaps his life, loves, and thoughts. Considered controversial when published, Long had lived his life communally with an extended family, open relationships, and philosophies based on self-reliance and personal responsibility.

As J. and I explore open relationships, I've often mentioned that I find the notion to be very natural to me, and it makes sense with my world view and personal philosophies. It didn't really strike me though, until the conversation noted above, how influential Heinlein has been on my life.

At the top of my list of values for my life, you'll find personal responsibility and self-reliance (which I think are very intertwined). Both of these are constant themes with Heinlein's work. And when these ideas are applied to alternative relationships and notions of family structure, you get "Time Enough for Love". Thinking back, Heinlein always had very alternative relationships in his non-juvenile ficton. Jubal's compound in "Stranger", the communal marriages in "Friday"...it's no wonder that reading about that in my formative years left some kind of an impression.

The fun questions for my life are whether reading Heinlein solidified those concepts and philosophies in my psyche, or if I was drawn to Heinlein because he matched what was already percolating in my head?  ¶ 08:14

 
One of the things I've always enjoyed about where we live is the greenspace buffering our block at the end of the street. Like a welcoming gateway of trees and shrubbery every time I turned onto our street, it was a pleasure to see, to pass in the car or pass on foot. For the past nine months, there've been signs announcing the construction of new condominiums on the site, and we've been dreading the destruction of the grassy space.

Today, I heard the unmistakable buzz of chainsaws, and looked outside to see remarkably less brush to the south. It's started.

  ¶ 02:05

 
There's this older guy working at a computer. There's this younger, kinda butch woman, androgynous actually, wearing a security uniform, who walks in. She gets her coffee.

She stands next to his table.

"Still working on your song?"

"Yeah," he barely mutters, not taking his eyes of the screen.

"I have some bad news," she says. "I'm late. Three and a half weeks late."

He stares at his screen. Not a glimmer of anything crosses his face.

She sets her coffee on the table next to his, then drags it over next to his table. She sits opposite, at her own table. Working on a crossword puzzle, smoking.  ¶ 13:09

 
There’s something missing from Lester Burnham’s life. His daughter hates him, he’s trapped in a dead end job and his wife is having an affair. The high point of his day is when he gratifies himself in the shower, and it all goes downhill from there.

His epiphany comes quite by surprise. Reluctantly trailing his wife Carolyn to a business function in order for her to “project an image of success,” he excuses himself to the bar for drinks. Ricky Fitts, the son of Lester’s neighbor introduces himself and invites Lester to get high with him behind the restaurant.

While they’re smoking, the manager comes outside, telling Ricky he’s not paying him for standing around. “Fine,” says Ricky. “Then don’t pay me. I quit. You don’t have to pay me.”

Lester stares at him. “I think you’re my new personal hero.”

For the first time in a long time, Lester gets a glimpse of what life can be like if he were to just take control of it. He realizes, and this is the critical point in the movie, that he is about him, and it’s not about him. By refusing to take control of his life and his destiny, he’s been buffeted about by fate, quite bitter about the hand he’s been dealt.

This is the turning point at which Lester begins shuffling the cards. In a confrontation with Carolyn, he stands up to her in a way that she’s not used to. She realizes that something’s about to change, and Lester is very pleased with himself. “It’s a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself,” he thinks. “It makes you wonder what else you can do that you’ve forgotten about.”

From there, Lester collapses everything familiar around him as he molds his life into what he wants it to be instead of what everyone else expects of him. He gets himself fired, but not until he blackmails a generous severance package out of the company. He smokes a lot of weed. He buys a 1970s Firebird. He gets a job at a burger place “with the least amount of responsibility.” He starts working out.

Life’s been pushing him around for so long, and he’s finally pushing back. Like the Hanged One, he’s turned everything upside down, and is observing everything from a different perspective, anticipating what’s going to transpire. He’s come to terms with the fact that the choices he made in the past have affected his present circumstances, and by making different choices now, he’s waiting to see what different choices present themselves in the future.

His eyes are opened to a future that he never thought possible, never even imagined.

When a friend of his daughter’s asks him, “How are you doing?” he replies, “It’s been a long time since anybody asked me that.”

After a reflective pause, “I’m great,” he answers. “I’m great.” And he believes it.

“American Beauty,” with Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening and Thora Birch is available on VHS and DVD in most video stores. It won five Academy Awards in 1999 (Best Actor-Kevin Spacey, Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Director) and was nominated for three others (Best Actress-Annette Bening, Best Editing and Best Original Score). The film is rated R for nudity, language, and violence.

This article is the first in a series of film reviews based on the major arcana of the tarot. It was published in the Diana's Grove Mystery School Newsletter in January of 2004.

  ¶ 10:57

 
For those of you who missed the award-winning Polish film “Edi” at the Milwaukee International Film Festival this past November you’ll have another opportunity to see it at the Times Cinema in January of 2004.

The film takes place in Poland, where Edi and Jureczek are homeless squatters in an abandoned factory, eking out a meager living collecting scrap metal. They’re respected and well liked by the people who know them. ‘The brothers’ are loan sharks with a hold on the neighborhood’s criminal underworld. They’re raising their 17-year-old sister, Princess, ferociously guarding her virginity.

Edi’s and Jureczek’s lives become intertwined with the brothers’ when they hire Edi to tutor the girl. After all, a middle-aged homeless man is hardly a sexual threat. One night, with the brothers gone and Edi and Jureczek sleeping in the living room, Princess sneaks out to see her boyfriend. When the brothers discover that she’s pregnant, she accuses Edi of raping her in an effort to protect the identity of the real father. Edi doesn’t deny the charges, the brothers exact a gruesome revenge and insist that he care for the baby. Edi, Jureczek and the baby depart for the country to stay with Edi’s family where they begin raising the child.

Their idyll is abruptly when the brothers discover that Princess lied to them about the father’s identity, and in the stirring conclusion of the film, through the decisions he’s forced to make, we see Edi’s sacrifice and redemption.

Like many eastern European films, “Edi” slow-paced, giving the viewer a wonderful opportunity to discover the characters, to really understand their lives, passions and motivations. Though at times some plot elements seem contrived or unrealistic, they ultimately become essential to our understanding of the people in the richly complex character study.

Henryk Golebiewski, playing Edi, is wonderfully subtle in his portrayal of a middle-aged man who’s fallen upon hard times and is only doing the best he can with his circumstances, and give one of the best performances in contemporary European cinema.

Piotr Trzaskalski’s feature film debut is a masterfully crafted story about what we, as humans hold onto when all our hope is gone. The film explores how mistakes and bad decisions can lead to more noble outcomes when the when we hold on to our humanity despite the tribulations that we’re facing. Ultimately, it’s that humanity that saves us.

“Edi” plays at the Times Cinema, 5906 W. Vliet St. (in Washington Heights) from January 9th through the 15th. The film shows nightly at 7:00 and 9:00pm with weekend matinees at 3:30pm.

This article was published in Riverwest Currents, January 2004. See the article here.  ¶ 10:52