Well I guess not necessarily “new” since the book titled Kaopan was published on February 14, 2013. But it’s sure as shit new to me and perhaps maybe you, too?
Kaopan—which is a the name of this particular fetish and the same name as the book—is a combination of kao, meaning face, and pantsu, or panties. However, when using Google translate “Kaopan” or “かおぱん” translates to “Face Bread.” Make of that what you will…
Not much I can say about this except “Yep, you wear panties on yer face…”
Apparently even when you swim, play the recorder or chillax with a friend, you just put on your best pantyface. All casual-like…
I’m not sure if I should label this post NSFW… I mean, is it really NSFW? I’m truly perplexed. Is this actually sexy?
“They’re being brave and so am I,” explains photographer/artist Amy Gwatkin in her impeccable Queen’s English, sat in her white walled studio, pretty much bent double in her chair with nerves.
We are watching unedited footage for her new film installation Risk Assessment, which opens tomorrow night in Dalston. On the screen, in black and white, a fleshy, pale, aged man’s shoulder twitches and shakes with an effort that can only be called self-explanatory. “We’re being brave together—the one cannot exist without the other, the voyeur needs the exhibitionist, the exhibitionist the voyeur.”
“I’m not exactly an artist,” she continues. “Most of the year I spend interviewing people about shoes… photoshoppping already beautiful teenagers…” The otherwise employed fashion photographer (whose work has recently appeared in Dazed & Confused, EXIT, and The Independent, among others) pauses, letting us acknowledge what looks a lot like the old man’s petite mort. “But for a month of two every year I have the chance to make something that isn’t for anyone else—and I keep on coming back to this project involving naked men. First of all photographing them, now filming them.”
In 2010, Gwatkin posted an ad in the notorious casual encounters section of Craigslist (the world’s favorite sexual sewer). It read, “Exhibitionists Wanted.” Out of over 90 responses, she picked out ten that didn’t immediately scream “murderer”—EXCESSIVE CAPS LOCK AND BAD SPELLING BEING THE DEAD GIVEAWAY THEIR (sic)—and set about photographing these masturbating strangers, at their homes, at her studio, and even in the bushes of Hampstead Heath.
She then spent weeks with the resulting images, “obsessively” photographing, zooming in, and reprogramming them, in a way she concedes was partly about distancing herself from the subject and the experience. “The effect it created was almost overwhelming, like a vortex. At some point all the men became an amorphous mass. It was difficult to differentiate between the bodies.”
The resulting “vortex”—144 black and white prints forming a large, neat rectangular collage—was titled Nothing Happened (an allusion to the kind of questions she was asked whenever she described her work-in-progress). When I first laid eyes on this unique, powerful work of art, at the private view two years ago, an enthralled crowd milled about beneath it all night long, as if it were a stained glass window in a cave.
Gwatkin considers Risk Assessment her most significant work since. If in Nothing Happened, the participants’ bodies and identities were smudged and even obliterated, here they are given much more autonomy. Gwatkin acknowledges that she in turn is no longer hiding from the experience, the taboo. Everything is, to put it mildly, a lot less oblique, though Risk Assessment never fails to still somehow straddle that not-famously-fine line between the beautiful and the grotesque.
Risk Assement runs as part of the show “FOR” (also featuring the work of Bella Fenning and Anna Leader), at SixtySevenA, at City Studios, 67a Dalston Lane, London E8 2NG, Tuesday 12th March 6-9pm, and runs until 28th March. By appointment only.
Artist Sig Waller has given Dangerous Minds an exclusive preview of her latest work—3 drawings that form part of her Parlour Games series. The drawings are adapted from 18th century engravings (used to illustrate books by the Marquis de Sade), which are drawn in ink directly onto vintage napkins and antimacassars.
The Park is a disturbing art book by photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki which was originally published in 1980.
In the early 1970s, Yoshiyuki (not his real name) joined the throngs of voyeurs who would do their “peeping” in Tokyo’s Yoyogi Park, but not to peep himself (or so he says!), rather he was there to document the goings on with his camera and infra-red film. It would sometimes take him hours of waiting to get his shot. The photographs were blown up into life-size black and white prints and shown at the Komai Gallery in 1979 along with examples of amateur porn left behind in Tokyo’s hourly sex hotels. Post modern in the extreme—dig the triple transgression of the exhibitionist couplings, the peeping toms and the photographer capturing both—the show was a sensation in Japan.
Eventually Yoshiyuki’s paranoia got the best of him and he quit shooting the peepers, destroyed many of his negatives and began working in family portraiture(!). In 2005 the New York-based Yossi Milo Gallery contacted the artist and convinced him to reprint from the remaining negatives.
Characteristically serene and sweet, diarist and erotic writer Anaïs Nin waxes poetic on some of her favorite rebellious women, including psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé (who could hold her own against Freud and Nietzsche) and Caresse Crosby, the infamous libertine, anti-war crusader and publisher of Joyce, Kay Boyle, Hemingway, Hart Crane, D. H. Lawrence, René Crevel, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.
Nin expounds on her penchant for female rabble-rousers, as well as peacemakers, leading into her LSD experience (the drug was administered by Dr. Oscar Janiger) “a world accessible to the poet, accessible to the artist,” in which she “became gold.”
Blog of Zontar the thing from Venus posted some rather hilarious 70s porn movie paperback tie-ins. The one for Defiance!... is that an actual novelization of a porn movie? (I wonder how many of those there were?)
A few of these are so absurd, they’re just… absurd.
This Valentine’s Day, Vermont Teddy Bears is pushing their “Big Hunka Love Bear,” a four and a half foot high fluffy compensation, with the promise of decent, monogamous, heterosexual sex. What’s compelling about their pitch, though, is their attempt to rebrand the Teddy Bear; no longer is it a floating signifier for innocence and childhood! No, Vermont Teddy Bears wants you to get that teddy bears are pure sex. The attempt is valiant.
Watch the commercial below, as TV-sexy women float sublimely with a slow-motion etherealness befitting of a 90s R and B music video, men are lead to believe that not only is getting a giant teddy bear a good way to ensure coital consummation, it is the best way.
”Guys, this Valentine’s Day, size really does matter.”
Your penis is insufficient. This woman even carries a ruler, to scientifically prove it. Note her castrating gaze. She will tell all the other women you are inadequate. She is laughing at you.
”You wanna’ score big points with your Valentine? Go big, with the Big Hunka Love Bear from Vermont Teddy Bears.”
This stuffed animal will confuse your sexual target, obfuscating your obvious short-comings.
“This guy is a four and a half foot pile of awesomeness.”
We are employing youthful dialect here to relate to your obvious virility. Dane Cook wants you to buy this bear. So does Andrew WK.
”He’s big. He’s soft. And let’s face it—no girl can resists a teddy bear that’s this adorable.”
All female sexualities are permanently frozen in girlhood, and, contrary to popular belief, they would rather have something soft than hard.
”Who wants to spend a lot of money on flowers that will die in days?”
The goal of affection should always be one of permanent accumulation.
”Chocolates taste good for a few seconds, but then she’s gonna’ ask if she looks too fat.”
Bitches love chocolate, but bitches hate their bodies. Amiright, bros?!?
“…order your Valentine the giant Big Hunka Love Bear for this special limited time offer, of only $99.”
Capitalism dictates that, eventually, all sexual economies will use Teddy Bears as currency. You best get on that shit
”Get her this bear, and she’ll think of you every time she sees it. And when you aren’t around, her bear will be there to keep her company and to keep her thinking about you.”
It will be the fuzzy little guard to your panopticon of love.
”If you want the big reaction, and the big reward…”
Buy bear, receive pussy. Cannot stress this enough, dudes.
“It’s a great gift for her, and it’s sure to pay off for you”
The subscribership of Playgirl has always been a mystery to me. Their brand management has said their readers are about half women, half gay men, but that still offers little to no insight into the head-scratching randomness of Playgirl’s featured “eye-candy.”
In what appears to be no particular order (and additionally, no particular theme), we have Ted Turner (who would later monopolize US media and journalism), Calvin Klein (who would later date a male porn star), Woody Allen (who would later marry his girlfriend’s adopted daughter), and OJ Simpson (who would later murder his wife).
The next pages fare slightly better. You have Burt Reynolds (sure, why not?), Bruce Springsteen (totally respectable!), Alan Bates (first actor to do full frontal in a major studio movie in Women in Love), Johnny Carson (what?), Ted Kennedy, and Jerry Brown (there had to be politicians with more sex appeal).
Of course, this is the same magazine that did a feature of former Enron employees, after they had “lost their shirts.”
I hate to be judgmental, but Playgirl, you have really bad taste in men.
I found Stephen Smith, who presented this investigation into Vladimir Nabokov and his relationship to his infamous novel Lolita, an irritating prick. His opening premise that he can’t talk about Lolita to his friends without their prissy censure, explains much of what is wrong with Smith’s approach to documentary-making. When dealing with a subject as important, as controversial, and as difficult as Nabokov, what Smith or his friends think is irrelevant.
‘I want to be able to carry this around in public,’ Smith exclaims. ‘Read bits out to friends. Maybe not take it out at a parents’ evening, but feel comfortable with it—but I can’t. And that’s crazy fifty years after little Lolita first appeared.’
The problem is Smith’s petite bourgeois values infect everything he says. ‘What kind of person lives in a hotel,’ he asks, almost in sub-Lady Bracknell, before venturing onto what really interests him—the ‘conga-line of young women shimmering through the pages, particularly the latter pages, of Nabokov.’ He then tries to find the ‘missing link’ between Nabokov’s private life and that of his ‘aroused anti-heroes’.
Smith attempts to create a sense of Nabokov as some shady character (perhaps on-the-run?), hiding out in hotels, so that he can postulate about him being a dirty old man. He also asks trivial and facetious questions. For example, his opener to the bar man at the Montreux Palace, where the writer lived in his later years, is not ‘what sort of man was Nabokov?’ but rather, ‘was he a snob?’ which he followed-up with ‘did he tip?’
Whether intentional or not, Smith wanders round this whole documentary like some second-fiddle Nabokovian character, sweaty, charmless, petty, narrow-minded, and grossly bourgeois. It would be funny, if Smith did not clog-up so much of what should be interesting with his trite psycho-analysis (what would Nabokov make of that?) and his penchant for stating the-bleedin’-obvious. His conclusion is where he should have started, but then this would have been a documentary about why Stephen Smith thinks about Nabokov the way he does, and that would never have filled an hour.
What is good about this documentary is the original archive and interviews with Nabokov, and if you want to read the great man discussing Lolita and much more, then check out this excellent interview from the Paris Review
is a disturbing art book by photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki which was originally published in 1980. 
