Take me to these Copenhagen delegates...

...or suffer death by cuteness.

look what finally turned up in the mail

Grown on and spoilt by the convenience of the internet makes holding a copy of an underground magazine from a town that's 9365km away a rather surreal experience.

The 'c' word

Well, writing about it certainly pushed me over a bit, so I ordered a pair and here they are, no, not the best of colours:



...but it was the only one I could find with my size (pardon the hairy appendages, I haven't had my monthly shave yet, see, and since we're on it, sorry about the crotch shot too).

Fits nicely around the toes with a bit of a pocket by the heels, I'm wondering if a size smaller might be the perfect fit, although at this point the toes are pretty snug; a size smaller (which is a quarter inch) falls into that gray zone of toe abuse that has confounded hordes of lawyers both alive and 6-feet under.

REM PAIN

The power of dreams brought me awake last night, and found me hobbling into the kitchen to fetch a pair of band-aids to cover up the dry cracks under my heels that have turned sore of late; I was running in my sleep, and it hurt.

shoe blues

Y'know, I've been growing increasingly suspicious of my shoes recently. Having chanced upon the phenomena of going barefoot and the alternatives thereof more than a year ago (in this New York Magazine article), my seeded hunches have since blossomed into convictions after reading Christopher McDougall's Born to Run about a month back. Add to this my life-long discomfort of sweating in my socks and you can understand why I've been hunting for these shoes high and low for quite a while now (short of actually ordering them online, which is a bit iffy when it comes to shoes).

McDougall's book, by the way, is a wonderfully written tour regarding how the human body is designed to run, and how we have always been runners, with scientific evidence weaved into a story that incoporates elite ultrarunners, together with a hidden tribe of Mexican runners, the Tarahumara. Something for everyone, even if you're not a runner.

Until I find those vibrams, I've traded in my onitsuka tigers for the straw slippers I bought when I first visited Okinawa two years ago: comfortable yet still retaining some level of taste(rubber sandals so do not go well with long pants), and from all the curious stares that I've been getting, I surmise this to be nothing short of the birth of a new trend that'll probably set the walkways on fire come, oh, next winter.

(For balance, I've also been keeping a eye out for a shoes book. Really, I can't believe no one's written "The Culture of Shoe" yet.)

Moore Eno

Because anyone who's an Alan Moore fan is probably by extension a Brian Eno fan, here are two old interviews with Eno:

Arthur Magazine - with an opening piece by Moore(who isn't the interviewer)

The first half of the twentieth century saw all energies and the agenda that had driven Western culture from its outset reach their logical albeit startling conclusions in the various fires of Auschwitz, Dresden, Nagasaki, after which we all sat stunned amongst the smoking fragments of our worldviews, all our certainties of the utopias to come revealed as flimsy, wishful, painted sets, reduced to vivid splinters, sharp and painful.

Chain Reaction - where Moore is the interviewer(care for a listen instead?)

revealing

Finished reading Alan Moore’s 25,000 Years of Erotic Freedom, which first appeared in Arthur Magazine #25 under the title, “Bog Venus Versus Nazi Cock-Ring: Some Thought Concerning Pornography”, which can easily be found online. The hardcover edition, released last month by Abrams Books, comes with the added bonus of *pictures*, which, considering the theme of this book, must have piqued your interest by now.

Having said that, only the Venus of Willendorf and Felicien Rops’ Pornocrates, which mark the beginning and end of the book, respectively, make for useful turn-the-page references in the 90-odd page essay, as the warlock of Northampton gives us a brief tour of the history & development of pornography in western society.

It’s all rather interesting.

Amongst the more questionable virtues that Moore ascribes to a society that is more openly sexual (Denmark, Spain and Holland given as examples), and therefore a society that has less sex crime due to the diminished sense of guilt and shame tied to the act of viewing pornography (and hence a completely different mindset to pornography itself), is a huge (unsaid) leap in judgement that being more open about sex means equals getting more sex too – which, if you think about it, probably has a more direct connection between sex as a escape valve for society and the incidence of sex-crime in that same population.

The real point of interest for me, however, lies in Moore’s argument that just as there is “bad” pornography, there is “good” pornography, which –with the exception of “pornography that has a beneficial influence upon society”- he feels to be an area that has yet to be defined, let alone explored by “artists, writers, film-makers or poets”, within whose arms the future of this area awaits.

Moving back from the positive social implication that “good” porn may confer, I tend to feel that tasteful porn by itself would be a step in the right direction, that is to say, porn that has values. By value here I refer entirely to narrative potential, beyond the simple plotline of wham-baam-thank-you-maam that forms the backbone of all pornography that I cannot help but consider as being bad.

It seems pointless to bring this up, because you probably won’t believe me, but I’ve hardly watched that much porn. Porn when occurring within the context of a narrative, for example, makes for a more meaningful viewing than when it’s the main course – that sounds daft, but we relate to something, I feel, when we see our own values reflected back at us, even if it’s values that we hope to develop, and whether it’s acknowledged or not, all of us want our experiences to be meaningful (then again, perhaps how we feel about porn as it portrays itself can be the yardstick of some facet of our own personality.). It wasn’t until I read this book that I sort of remembered how much nicer if there was an actual story to that flick I saw when I was age so and so.

Somehow, and this makes for a bad pun, but Haruki Murakami’s book, Norwegian Wood probably makes for one of the few candidates that I would consider as porn with some value, although if I were to venture further I would have to admit that I cannot define “porn” by itself (unless you consider valueless sex to be porn), simply because our definition of porn falls under that same value umbrella, which houses our own conventional outlook towards pornography as a society. This struggle of what is porn can perhaps be seen in Bertrand Bonello's Le Pornographe, which I actually remember watching on TV when I was in Canada (hmm, funny how I’m remembering that now).



In the film, a retired director of pornography finds that he has to return to his old job, only to find the same area that he once practiced in to be without vision, without narrative and confined to a rigid regime of structured frames (next the boob shot, next the money shot, you get the idea). I cannot recall how the movie ended, or if I even got through the whole thing, but I do remember the director encouraging more intimacy between the actors that he was working with in the film – intimacy? In a porn flick? There is a reason why the beast with two backs appears less often in film, as does its ugly cousin, the beast angled openly towards the camera.

(Also in the same scene, the director asks for the climax scene to occur during coitus, only to have a supervising director overrule this decision during the film as it completely flies in the face of market expectations.)

It has to be said that when this director was making films before he retired, what he did was probably considered "pornographic" to society at that time, yet those same sensibilities seem hopelessly outdated and ineffectual in the modern period of the movie. Yet if we follow the adage of "more is better", then we either all end up in Paul Pope's Gastro Clubs, as seen in 100%, or face up to the same dead end that Baudrillard said of Madonna, "Her tragedy is that she can never get naked enough."



Granted, there is Alan Moore’s Lost Girls, which I cannot say much of since I’ve yet to read it, but at the very least it is to Moore’s benefit that he’s putting his money where his mouth is, instead of pointing fingers and taking the piss. Presumably, Lost Girls is Moore’s conception of what “good” porn might amount to. If, together with Lost Girls and 25,000 Years… we are to see a new wave of artists redefining what porn could be, well then, that'll certainly be something to get excited about.

urban butterfly

Been experiencing an extended spell of poor weather here lately, which finally lifted today(or else the trend would truly have been elevated to the deserving level of a curse). Taken two days ago, this savvy butterfly was found seeking shelter behind the glass doors of my workplace, right beside the umbrella stand.