Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Seventy

The Infidelity Files Day 3: ‘Adultery isn’t the end - it’s a wake-up call’
by Angela Levin, the London Telegraph (Jan 2008), Part 3

In the final part of her investigation into Britain’s infidelity epidemic, Angela Levin reveals how wronged partners deal with being cheated on - and how the crisis can improve their relationship

‘Sex is really important. It’s the glue in any relationship, and if you’ve been together for a long time you’ve got to make more effort to keep it interesting.”

It’s the sort of remark that not so long ago would almost certainly have been made by a man.

But, in fact, it was spoken by Rebecca, a thirtysomething married woman with two children - and it is further proof that in today’s world, women are calling the sexual shots as much as men.

She speaks from experience. Five years ago, she became so fed up with her husband’s lack of interest in her that she decided to do something practical about it and take a lover.

“My husband stopped fancying me when I had our first child,” she said. “We used to have a great sexual relationship, but now he keeps making excuses.

I don’t want him to see me just as a mother to his children. I found myself in a situation I’d never envisaged, but I decided it was better to have an affair than to separate.” The irony is that while sex in its many different guises is all around us, it’s often lacking in the one place it should be: the marital bed.

‘Adultery isn’t the end – it’s a wake-up call’

Men, too, don’t want to suffer in silence. “My wife and I have a great marriage and I love my three kids,” explained John, 49, “but I don’t have anywhere near as much sex as I’d like.

My wife is always too tired, and when I bring up the subject it starts an argument. There must be lots of other men like me, who pretend to the world that everything’s OK but who are far from happy.”

The happiness is relative. The partner who chooses to have a fling has to live a life of subterfuge and always be on the alert in case he or she is found out. They also have to deal with their conscience.

Even if they manage to reason with themselves that what they get up to has a positive effect on their core relationship, the truth is that most people don’t rely on their brain to tell them it’s OK to play away.

As well as the obvious health hazards, what you gain from an affair is small compared to what you risk losing - except perhaps if an affair is used as a deliberate exit strategy from the marriage.

It also only takes a second’s carelessness for your infidelity to be discovered. In the five months I spent researching infidelity in the UK and interviewing middle-class adulterers, I came across countless stories where one of the partners, usually the woman, finds an incriminating text on her partner’s mobile.

The straying partner often explains that he was only having sex with someone else because he loves you and is trying to keep the marriage together - but such comments are rarely reassuring.

Sexual betrayal can feel like an emotional juggernaut crashing into your heart, stomach and brain. It’s naïve to expect anyone to shake it off as if it is merely the equivalent of the person you love finding a new tennis partner. And it can take months or years for the emotional swingometer to settle back to anywhere near normal.

So what should the wronged partner do (if indeed there really is a wronged partner)? Affairs are often the result of something wrong in the marriage, rather than just the cause.

A consensual view is to do nothing in a hurry. Both women and men who rage and shout and tell their loved one to pack their bags and leave often live to regret it.

Jill, a 42-year-old accountant and mother of three, is one. She split from her husband two years ago because he had a fling and now thinks she acted precipitately. “I threw him out, despite his plea that he loved me,” she said. “I really miss him.

I thought we were happy and my pride was wounded, but I should have waited until I had cooled down a little. I have been very lonely and we have begun to meet again to see if there is anything left between us. I don’t know what will happen.”

Male partners can be just as crushed. It’s something Ben, 32, who has recently got married, worries about. “I would feel trashed and humiliated if my wife went with someone else. And would no doubt take revenge by finding someone for me. I would also retreat into my shell, but in the end I wouldn’t leave her.”

If the wronged party can hang on, science is on their side. Infatuation has a chemical base as well as an emotional one. When two people’s eyes meet across a crowded room, their pulses quicken and their hearts race.

As they are drawn irrevocably together, certain changes will take place in the body’s chemistry. Three chemicals - phenylethylamine, dopamine and noradrenaline - are released and together produce that amazing euphoria of passionate love.

The chemical combination can last in the body for between six months and two years. As levels drop, it is replaced by oxytocin, the so-called “cuddle hormone” which induces nesting behaviour. Most affairs end around this time.

A recent London university survey gives further grounds for hope by revealing that when unfaithful husbands leave their wives, only three per cent end up marrying their mistresses. When they do, these marriages have a 75 to 90 per cent failure rate.

It confirms the prophetic words of the late Sir James Goldsmith that: “When a man marries his mistress, he creates a vacancy.”

The unpalatable truth is that an extra-marital affair can be a wake-up call to a dull and predictable marriage. It’s harsh and cruel, but can be effective. If the innocent partner can go through the pain barrier, cope with the loss of pride, rise above the humiliation and talk, a relationship can be rebuilt.

“My wife didn’t understand how much sex meant to me until she found out that I had had a brief fling,” said 48-year-old Edward, who works for a marketing company. “It took months of conversation, but she gradually began taking more care of herself than she had done, lost weight and showed more interest in sex.”

Mary, who has had two affairs during her 18-year marriage, is more hard-headed and thinks that both sexes have to move with the times. “I don’t believe that having an affair should lead to divorce,” she insists.

“The whole structure and nature of society has changed. Any couple who have been together for any length of time should try to understand the circumstances they find themselves in and give their best shot at working it out.”

David Miller, who runs a discreet dating agency for married couples, believes that adultery - from which he earns his living - is deeply misunderstood. “No one walks down the aisle thinking: ‘Now I’m married, I can be an adulterer’.

People go into marriage thinking that it’s a lifetime commitment and most of them are deeply upset when it goes wrong. If a woman doesn’t want it to happen to her, she shouldn’t shrink away from talking about sex and then giving her man what he wants and needs.

“If a man doesn’t want it to happen to him, he should not think of her just as a wife and mother. He should make enough time for her, take her seriously, touch her and be romantic.

“From my experience, it is profound unhappiness that drives most men and women into the arms of someone else. Many women have thought about it for years before they are unfaithful. And although men don’t think about it for as long before they act, many feel quite isolated.

They take their partner’s rejection of sex as a rejection of them as people. Many come to see me more in sorrow than in anger.”

It is, of course, unrealistic to expect that the sexual feelings you have for someone you have lived with for years can stay at the level of passion you experienced when you first met.

The daily grind of life acts like a fire-blanket to passion, familiarity breeds apathy, and the “spark” is often the first casualty of marriage, especially when children come along. But you don’t have to let it happen to you and your marriage.

Of course, if an individual wants to have an affair, it’s not easy to know how to prevent it - but there are measures.

Most women and many men will be infuriated by the advice that I have compiled, but it is based on what I have learned from interviewees during my five months of research. Some suggestions may seem maddeningly obvious, but they just might put a tired marriage back on track.

Ten ways to keep your marriage alive

1 Try not to take your partner for granted: remember, no relationship comes with a guarantee.

2 Watch your weight, but don’t go on and on about your diet.

3 Don’t pick your nose or fart if your loved one is around.

4 Don’t slop around in baggy old clothes more than is absolutely necessary.

5 Don’t wear slippers.

6 Keep trying: the slippery slope starts when you feel complacent.

7 Try not to be too predictable - in anything.

8 Make a special time when you talk positively about each other. Avoid talking about nappies, arrangements, anything domestic, unfairness at the office, or, unless you are both sporty, the latest football crisis.

9 Make time for sex. Try to have a night away. Block out a lunch time in your diary when your children are at school. It’s important to keep practising.

10 Think of sex as a skill as well as an expression of love.

If you discover your partner is having an affair:

1 List the good points in your relationship.

2 Write down three things you could improve about yourself.

3 Be brave and ask your partner for three things he or she would like you to change.

4 Ask yourself if you laugh enough together.

5 What is your life really going to be like if you split up - worse or better?

6 Look at the whole relationship, not just at what you feel about him or her after the discovery.

How to stop your wife having an affair

1 Arrange surprises for her.

2 Treat her as a mistress rather than as a mother or a wife.

3 Be romantic, take her out on dates, let her feel that she’s a woman and desirable.

4 Buy her a negligée rather than a vacuum cleaner as a birthday or Christmas present.

5 Constantly show her that you find her attractive, interesting, exciting and romantic.

6 Don’t go to bed with your T-shirt tucked into your Y-fronts.

7 Don’t turn on the television as soon as you come home.

8 Listen to her.

9 Take her seriously.

10 Respect what she does in the home and in her job.

How to stop your husband having an affair

1 Be sexual and adventurous, even if you are tired.

2 Let him feel that he’s sexually exciting, and more than just an equity lawyer or headmaster.

3 Let him know that you fancy him.

4 Let him know you feel you’re lucky to have him.

5 Keep polishing his ego.

6 Don’t go to bed with a layer of moisturiser on your face.

7 Don’t dye your hair or shave your legs in front of him.

8 Don’t lose your own self-respect.

9 Be interested in his life, but don’t live only through him.

10 Don’t talk about the children in bed. HAve your Say

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Monday, January 21, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Nine

Infidelity : ‘Being unfaithful keeps me happy’
by Angela Levin, the London Telegraph (Jan 2008), Part 2

Continuing her investigation into Britain’s adultery epidemic, Angela Levin talks to professional women who have affairs to bolster their marriages - and revitalise flagging sex lives

Sylvia, 43, has a highly paid job in the City. Her husband is supportive and they have two children. She entertains at weekends, enjoys luxury holidays twice a year and has time for her friends.


Get some spice in you life: Many women turn to affairs to cope with a loveless marriage

To those in her circle, she seems to have an enviable life and to have mastered the difficult art of balancing work with home and family. What they don’t know is that she has a higher libido than her husband and regularly takes a lover.

Sylvia belongs to a small but growing group of alpha woman - financially independent, confident and uninhibited - who, like men, have developed a similar pro-active, almost cynical approach to sex.

For them, it is no big deal to seek sexual fulfilment outside marriage and they claim to be able to separate lust from love.

“I am one of those women who want it all,” she laughs. “My life is very hectic and I thrive on adrenaline. I really enjoy sex, but I don’t want any complications. So I am only interested in men, preferably married, who want the same.”

Just how many women today are having sex with men who are not their husband is hard to pin down, but some sex researchers are claiming it is as high as 60 per cent.

Whatever the numbers, much has changed since Emma Bovary decided she couldn’t take the humiliation of living life being branded an adulteress and committed suicide by taking arsenic.

The hard-nosed, predatory female of today is perhaps the evolutionary reality of a phrase originally coined by author Erica Jong in her taboo-busting 1973 bestseller, Fear of Flying.

She described a sexual encounter for its own sake, without emotional involvement or commitment and between two previously unacquainted persons, as a “zipless f***”; she also said it was “rarer than the unicorn”.

Nearly 35 years on, these encounters are available with a click of the mouse.

Over a five-month period, I talked to almost 100 middle-class professionals, both male and female, who confessed to being unfaithful.

What was remarkable was that not one of the women said they felt guilty. And those who believed they might get emotionally involved tried to work out hard-headed strategies of dealing with it.

Although it would seem that no-strings-attached sex is the emotional equivalent of McDonald’s - in that it can satisfy a certain hunger but is quickly forgotten and doesn’t do you much good - many of the women I spoke to saw it as a better option than having an affair with someone they work with, which could put their career at risk.

Nor did they want to get involved with a family friend.

Lynne, a 45-year-old married administrator, thinks the growing popularity among women of no-strings relationships is a result of their success in the workplace. “Now we are as successful as men at work and other areas of life, women like me think, ‘Why the hell not?’ My lover won’t jeopardise my work or family life. I am doing something that makes me happy, which, in turn, makes home happier, too.

“Women have come a long way in the last 20 or 30 years, so why should taking a lover without commitment be a male preserve? I just think, ‘Lucky me.’?”

Jenny, 48, who runs her own business, thinks the trend for uninvolved sex is part of today’s have-it-all society.

“In the past,” she says, “a wife would think, ‘I’ve got a decent husband and live in a presentable house, so I can’t expect too much.’ But now our expectations are much higher and we don’t want to compromise. I’ve done it and don’t feel guilty at all.

“I spend a lot of time caring for my husband and child and running my business, and I think of this as something for me. Women have always had sexual needs, but culturally we’ve not been encouraged to attend to them. Now we are more willing and able to make decisions about what happens to us. Some of us might choose to go to the cinema for a night out. Others might prefer to have sex.”

So while more men are in tune with their feelings and want more from an extra-marital relationship - emotional companionship as well as physical contact - some women want less. Less involvement, less friendship, and more sex.

But can women really be quite so matter-of-fact and unemotional about infidelity? Can evolution be gradually turning women, whose priority was once to build nests and care and be cared for, into hunter-gatherers?

Are Byron’s words: “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ‘tis woman’s whole existence” really no longer valid?

Possibly. Most women are sexually experienced before marriage. They are financially independent. Nor is there a stigma attached to the adulterous woman.

As recently as 1970, if a woman was found to have had an extra-marital affair, she not only forfeited her right to maintenance but also risked losing her children.

It was a penalty Diana, Princess of Wales’s mother, Frances, discovered to her cost. After years of an unhappy marriage to Earl Spencer, in the late 1960s she had an affair with wallpaper merchant Peter Shand Kydd.

She left her husband, taking their four children with her. He felt so humiliated by her adultery that although, at the time, women were routinely given custody of the children, he fought her in the courts and won.

The judge made much of branding her as an adulteress and seemed to take no account of her cross-petition on the grounds of cruelty. Now, when couples divorce, any sexual misdemeanours by the woman are considered on a par with a man’s.

We do not yet, however, have a no-fault-based divorce system like Spain or Canada.

Nor are women who have extra-marital relationships confined to a particular age group.

While today’s women of 40 and younger see having great sex as their right (some studies show that the more sexual partners a person has before marriage, the more likely she or he is to cheat on a spouse), many fifty- or even sixtysomething women, in common with their male counterparts, don’t want to be left out.

These are the generation of women whose children have left home. They are fitter and better looking than their predecessors, thanks to HRT, Botox and plastic surgery, and seek new challenges.

While some choose physical challenges, a recent report from Germany cited that one in three fiftysomething women are looking for a sexual adventure. Perhaps they are catching up on all they missed during those sleep-deprived times when their children were small.

Teresa, who is 52, is one example. She has been married 27 years and, when her youngest left home she decided she wanted more excitement in her life.

“I have a good husband, but I have spent my life lying on my back thinking of England when we have sex. He’s never been any good in the bedroom. He has a low libido and little interest. I knew that when I married him and he is a good man in every other respect.

“For years, I kept wondering what it would be like to meet someone who was really exciting in bed. Then about nine months ago I placed an ad on the internet just for the fun of it. I was inundated with replies, but mostly from losers. There was only one man who stood out. We met and there was instant chemistry between us. We met again on an occasional basis, but then I realised that psychologically I wasn’t the type to be unfaithful. I would hate my husband to find out, so I stopped. But I don’t regret it.”

Julie, 49, who is married with one son and has a senior position in a health authority, knew she wanted more out of an extra-marital relationship than just sex.

“My husband and I haven’t had sex for years,” she explained. “He is 15 years older than me and although it wasn’t a problem when we first got married 20 years ago, his approach to life now is that of an old man. We sleep in separate bedrooms and I don’t think he sees me when he looks at me.

“For much of our marriage, I put my needs to one side and concentrated on my work and looking after my family. But about five years ago, I began to feel increasingly unhappy and unsettled. I wanted to do something about it, but didn’t know how to go about it. The only men I met were my husband’s colleagues or fathers of my children’s friends. So I contacted a dating agency for married people. I was a little nervous of the interview, so I took along a close girlfriend.

“I only wanted to meet married men who wanted to stay married. I want to be happier, but not wreck my marriage. Although I’m not in love with my husband any more, he’s becoming elderly and I wouldn’t want him to be a lonely old man. I wanted to take a lover to keep me happy.

“I was offered a choice of three men. I contacted each one, we met for a drink, and I then spent about five months getting to know the man I most liked. It was important for me to develop a friendship and trust before we had sex. If I had just wanted sex, I could have tried to pick up someone in the local pub.”

The relationship wasn’t, however, as manageable as she hoped. “I broke off with him after a year because I found myself getting too emotionally involved and realised I would get more so if I continued. Although my partner, who is also married, enjoyed being with me very much, he didn’t feel involved with me in the same way.”

Other women, like Mary, 55, claim to have affairs to help them stay with their husbands until the children leave home. “I know that eventually I will leave my husband, but I don’t want to while our children are still at home,” she explained.

“I have a lover, our relationship has lasted two years, and I hope I don’t have to have another one. Although it has made me slightly distant with my husband, I am also less irritable and if something happens in the relationship I don’t like, I tell myself that I have different pleasures.”

Others, like Anne, who is 54, chose to have an affair because she wanted to be indulged and spoilt. “I entered into a relationship because I wanted to be adored, desired and given lots of attention - all things I don’t get at home. And that is what I have found.

“I meet my lover every two or three weeks in a hotel. He always pays and nearly every time buys me presents - nothing that would be awkward to explain, but perfume, chocolates and flowers. Of course, I can never take the flowers home and after our couple of hours together they end up in the bin in the hotel room, but he understands that.”

Getting caught is not a pressing worry. “I hope I don’t live to regret this,” she continued. “But I honestly don’t think it would occur to my husband that anything could be going on. If he did discover I’ve been unfaithful, he would probably be crushed. It makes me feel uncomfortable but not guilty. Guilt is a pointless feeling. Nor do I feel guilty about my lover’s wife. His relationship with her is quite poor. He hadn’t had sex with her for years, not just for a month or two.

“My daughter is a different kettle of fish. A short while ago, she commented that I seemed much happier than I had been. I fobbed it off. She once picked up my mobile and started playing with it. It gave me a fright as my lover regularly sends me sexy texts. I’ve since changed the pin number. I would hate to go down in her estimation.”

She admits she doesn’t always practise safe sex. “At the beginning of our relationship, I made sure he used a condom but when it looked as if it would work out, we both went to a clinic and got ourselves checked, showed each other the results, and then stopped using protection.”

Several women, including Mary, mentioned how much they enjoyed the feel-good factor that comes from a fulfilling sexual relationship. “I’ve relearnt how to be a sexually confident woman, which is a good thing,” she said. “I also take much more care of my appearance.”

If a woman starts to feel vulnerable, Anne, 45, believes in handling it rationally. “Women are naturally more emotionally vulnerable than men,” she conceded, “so we have to exercise self-discipline. Everything in life has its disadvantages and we have to learn to cope. It is easy to get too involved but we just have to stop ourselves and know where to draw the line.

“There’s no reason why a multitasking woman can’t handle extra-marital relationships in a similar way to a man. I multitask to an astonishing degree in my business life, and all I am doing is taking that ability into my personal life. It isn’t a big deal.

“The point is, I don’t believe one person, man or woman, can meet all your needs for the duration of your life. And having a discreet affair is one way of handling that.”

TOMORROW
How to cope if your partner has been cheating on you

Note: Names and some personal details have been changed

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Eight

The Erotic Print Society presents . . . .

F**k Fashion
by Ben Westwood

In his iconoclastic Fuck Fashion (we use the asterisk treatment for nervous media folk and bookshop managers), Ben Westwood lets rip. Frustrated by the censorship imposed by publishers on his previous books, he wanted his explicit images to be available to the public as well. Much to our delight he approached us with a portfolio of his, shall we say, less inhibited work, and a new book was born. The results are fabulous. In this collection of over 200 provocative images, the work is split into roughly three groups: Pinup, Porno-chic and Bondage. The colours are bold, electric, saturated; the models are stunningly sexy and pretty (and occasionally rather forward with one another). The lingerie is carefully chosen and in some cases designed by Ben himself; the shoes are often by Vivienne Westwood, no mean fashion iconoclast herself. Ben has a unique flair and style which is sassy and streetwise; in this instance the genre will appeal to girls as much as boys; as one-time production manager to his mother, Vivienne Westwood, he gained essential experience which he uses to great effect in the mise-en-scène of his photographs. Here is an extraordinary and sophisticated visual talent, which is only now beginning to be recognised. Fuck Fashion comes with an introductory essay by author and journalist Stephen Bayley, one of Britain’s best-known cultural commentators.

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Seven

Exceptional Artists
from Coffee, Cake & Kink
The only kinky cafe gallery in the UK

John Chilton

Smoking Room

Chained Reaction

Passion n Pain

Stiletto

Tender Touch

* * * * *

Elsie McKeegan

* * * * *

Georgie Tier

Black on White

* * * * *

Ray Leaning

Eve Four

* * * * *

Matthew Slade

Blue

The Whip

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Six

A R C H I T E C T U R A L

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Five

Pay for Play: Did the Romans issue sexually depictive tokens for use in foreign brothels?
from Cecil Adams, The Straight Dope

Dear Cecil:

In a Discovery Channel program I saw about the history of sex, there was a brief discussion of “Roman brothel tokens,” coins showing images of various sexual acts. Lustful Roman soldiers in far-flung corners of the empire apparently used them to overcome the problem of expressing their specific desires in the local dialect. This all sounded very interesting if true, but what’s the straight dope? — hoarj

Cecil replies:

The use of tokens or other counters in various sex-for-pay setups — as advertising to prospective johns, to keep track of how many had been served and by whom, to keep cash out of the workers’ hands, etc — wasn’t uncommon in the past; examples abound from the American frontier, Boer War-era South Africa, and turn-of-the-century Manhattan. In 1919 Upton Sinclair described learning in his youth of a system under which a brothel patron would pay a cashier up front and receive a so-called “brass check,” a token he could subsequently redeem for a sex worker’s services.

So if something similar was going on in ancient Rome involving the racy coins known as spintriae, it wouldn’t be much of a shocker. After all, the Romans, who were nothing if not well organized, enjoy a richly deserved rep for ingenuity in logistics-oriented fields including architecture, engineering, and military strategy; it makes sense to suppose they could have devised a token system to streamline the economics of prostitution, had anyone seen the need. It’s not clear, though, that this was the case.

Somewhat smaller than a quarter and struck from brass or bronze, a spintria typically depicts an X-rated scene on one face and a Roman numeral from I to XVI on the other. (In coin-collecting lingo, the side with the image would usually be designated the obverse, or front side, but in this case, depending on the activity depicted — well, you see where I’m going.) They’re thought to have been minted somewhere between the years 22 and 37, during the reign of the emperor Tiberius, about whom more later.

Typical rates for prostitutes at the time were somewhere in the range of two to ten asses (giggle if you must, but yes, the basic unit of Roman currency was called the as), which lines up fairly well with the 1-to-16 range imprinted on the coins. Throw in the fact that the hanky-panky is shown taking place in a luxe setting possibly suggestive of a high-rent cathouse, and you can understand why many have guessed that spintriae were in fact standardized sex tokens, with the number on the back naming the fee for the act shown on the front. Offered in support of this conclusion is a study by a Warsaw professor who surveyed modern-day prostitutes (ah, academia) and found that their higher- and lower-priced services corresponded to acts pictured on the higher- and lower-numbered tokens respectively.

Not so fast, say other researchers — for one, Geoffrey Fishburn of the University of New South Wales, whose 2007 paper “Is That a Spintria in Your Pocket, or Are You Just Pleased to See Me?” is well worth perusal by anyone interested in the topic. Such skeptics note that (1) the same sex act sometimes appears on coins bearing different numbers, which hurts the number-equals-price theory; (2) unambiguous references to such tokens are strangely absent from Roman writings (the purported examples that do get cited are notably iffy); (3) identical scenes show up in Pompeiian murals, suggesting these may have been commonly depicted artistic themes; (4) spintriae have been found in excavated bathhouses but never (points out Anise Strong of Northwestern U.) in the ruins of actual brothels; (5) the correlation between modern prostitutes’ rates and the tokens’ numbering system isn’t as neat as the Polish study would have it; and so forth.

We’ll likely never know for sure, but if spintriae weren’t a foolproof means for a Roman soldier to place his bordello order, what were they? Possibilities include gambling chips or markers, or claim-check tokens from bathhouse locker rooms. They could also just have been some kind of risque novelty item — the 30 AD equivalent of a ballpoint pen sporting the image of a bathing beauty in a disappearing bikini.

Whatever the intent behind their manufacture, spintriae apparently became objects of political humor. Tiberius was famously rumored to be into the kinky stuff (in citations provided by the OED, the adjective spintrian, basically meaning “anything but vanilla,” comes up several times in conjunction with his name), and since official coins bore his likeness, the idea of alternate, sexually explicit versions may have struck some as a joke at Tiberius’s expense — a sort of ribald editorial cartoon in brass. Which seems plausible enough: at this point, if you happened upon a fake 20 with a truly raunchy scene where the White House should be, tell me you wouldn’t at least for a moment think, yup, that’s what the administration’s been doing nonstop for seven years now.

—CECIL ADAMS

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Four

Infidelity: Desperately seeking someone
by Angela Levin, the London Telegraph (Jan 2008), Part 1

In the digital age, having an affair has never been easier. Author Angela Levin spent five months interviewing middle-class professionals for an extensive study that charts the rise of the no-strings-attached* relationship. In the first of a three-part investigation, she reveals why the UK is in the grip of an infidelity epidemic.

‘Been left parked in the garage of marriage too long, battery getting flat and needs somebody to give it a spark of life, full tank and ready to go.


Clincher: many unfaithful men blame their wives

“Present owner does not like going for a ride any more but am not up for sale. Seeking discreet lady mechanic, preferably married, to enjoy some NSA run-outs together.”

This advert was posted by John, a 44-year-old married IT manager on a popular dating website favoured by men like him who want no-strings-attached (NSA) relationships.

“I try to make my adverts witty because I don’t want sex with someone who doesn’t have a sense of humour,” the father-of-two explained. “At the same time, I want whoever she is to know from the start that if she is after a relationship, she can forget it.

“I have no intention of leaving my wife. I realise it sounds funny to say I care about her, but I do. I am just a bit bored.”

Quite how many married men and a smaller, but increasing, number of women are risking their emotional and physical health in this way is difficult to know, as few people ever tell the truth about their sex lives. However, a survey last week claimed that more than half of married people admit they are not completely happy in their relationship, and that 59 per cent of wives would leave their marriage if they could afford to do so. Seemingly trapped by their unhappy domestic situation, eight out of 10 couples will, at some time, be unfaithful to each other.

Of course, men have sought mistresses since time began. The difference is that we now seem to be in the middle of an infidelity epidemic. The dilemma seems less about whether to have an affair and more about finding the most convenient way of doing so. As a result, no-strings-attached relationships have become something of a cultural phenomenon.

In spite of a recent survey revealing that 70 per cent of married women and 54 per cent of married men don’t know about the extra-marital affairs of their spouses, infidelity remains the most common reason for divorce - a situation that is currently affecting 40 per cent of all UK marriages.

But is it realistic in this day and age to expect decades of fidelity? And should society come to a new accommodation of marriage and long-term relationships? “An awful lot of both men and women commit adultery but don’t want their marriage to end,” says James Stewart, a divorce lawyer at leading London solicitors Manches. “They can be quite shocked when their spouse considers it a deal-breaker.”

There are many reasons why more people than ever are having extra-marital affairs. We are all healthier and living longer, which means marriages can last decades more than they used to and there is an increasing chance of people growing apart or getting bored of each other. We also live in a me-generation, and fewer of us are prepared to compromise on the kind of life we want. Women today are more financially and psychologically independent than ever before, and more sexually active. They are far less likely to stick with a marriage if they are unhappy than ever before in history.

Viagra and other drugs help men stay sexually active for longer, while women have access to HRT, Botox and cosmetic surgery to keep themselves looking good. And - thanks to modern methods of communication, such as email, mobiles and text messages - affairs are far easier to run than ever before, at least in practical, if not emotional terms.

Over a five-month period, I spoke to nearly 100 men and women - all middle-class professionals with good homes, decent jobs and, on the surface, happy families - who have had extra-marital relationships. It was a random rather than scientific study but it confirmed that there seems to be a seismic shift in people’s attitude to adultery.

What used to happen (and still does to some extent) is that an individual met someone, perhaps a colleague or their spouse’s best friend, fell for them and as a result had an affair. Nowadays it is often the other way round and almost brutally clinical. Individuals decide objectively and in advance that they want an affair and then set out to find someone suitable. It’s almost as if he or she is a commodity to be taken off a supermarket shelf. As it has never been easier to find illicit sex, the adulterous shopper is often spoiled for choice.

Type “discreet relationships” into Google and an astonishing 1,670,000 websites come up. These include marriedsecrets.com, illicitencounters.co.uk, rekonnect.com, meet2cheat.co.uk, askmen.com, philanderers.com, and the sizeable personals sections on sites such as gumtree.com and craigslist.org. They cater for people of all ages who want to advertise for sexual partners.

But a glance at the type of advert placed reveals the age old differences between the sexes. While the men are self-promoters and boast about their sexual prowess, the women tend to undersell themselves. “I am not a stunner, just average,” begins one modest female. “I have no wish to lie about my circumstances. I am at the end of a long marriage but can’t leave just yet because of the children,” writes another.

John has been advertising on two sites with some success over the last nine months. “I’m doing it because my life has become dull and predictable,” he says.

“My job’s OK. I can pay my mortgage and go on holiday. My children are doing reasonably well at school. My wife works part-time and runs the home. But I want to feel adrenaline running through my body again and only great sex can give me that. I feel really excited when I place my advert. I have opened up a separate email account so it is unlikely that anyone at work or home can discover it. I’ve had a few short-term flings and haven’t got it right yet. But it is addictive, so I shall keep trying. You don’t know who is going to be out there.”

Some older men admitted that they have advertised for a sexual playmate to relieve the boredom of early retirement. “I had a busy career but now that I am at home all the time, I find life very dull,” one 60-year-old confessed. “I want what everyone else is getting. I can always get some Viagra if I find a much younger woman. I’m still very interested but my wife lost interest in sex long ago.”

Blaming their wanderings on their wives’ sexual rejection of them is a common way for men to justify their behaviour. Richard, who runs his own marketing business, shows unwavering confidence in his sexual prowess and has successfully found several casual encounters. His advert - “Another married guy, 54, looking for NSA married fun with married woman” - is pragmatic and to the point, but hardly enticing.

He insists his unemotional affairs are saving his marriage rather than putting it at risk. Like many men he doesn’t want a divorce, partly to avoid the financial wrangling and also because he wants to stay close to his children.

“I’ve been married a long time and have a high sex drive. My wife doesn’t. I’ve tried to talk to her about it, but she either gets angry, withdraws or cries and the atmosphere between us can be awful for days.

“But I don’t want to leave her. We are good friends. We have a lot in common, including our children. So having an NSA arrangement suits me fine. I love the excitement of a different body and know for certain that without it my marriage would be over by now.

“I have sex with a woman, rather like casual friends might meet for a drink. I don’t get emotionally involved. I enjoy the chase and can get very intense when I am after someone new. I send lots of flirty texts, and emails. Women are very susceptible to flattery. Most feel self-conscious about some part of their body and reassurance soon makes her mine.

“When the sex is good I feel 50 feet tall, confident and relaxed. Otherwise, I’m climbing up the wall, am bad tempered, difficult to be with and very critical of my wife. It’s as simple as that.” He believes men have been genetically programmed to stray: “Men can’t resist temptation. I get a thrill from chasing new women. I prefer older married women, because they know what they want and have fewer hang ups.”

The most likely times for a man to stray are after the first year of marriage, when the emotional high of finding the right partner subsides; after his first child is born, when he suddenly sees his partner as a mother figure rather than a lover; after between five and seven years of togetherness, when he’s bored, doesn’t want to settle into a cosy routine and yearns for excitement; and then at intermittent intervals.

Tony, 53, believes he could never be faithful, whoever he married and in whichever century he had been born. “If I wasn’t involved in NSA relationships I might have had more complicated affairs or even used prostitutes. Most prostitutes today are drug addicts whereas most of the women I’ve been with have been quite respectable.

“I like the fact that I don’t get involved in talking about mundane stuff like problems with the washing machine or little Billy’s latest upset at school. I get those passion-killers at home. Instead, I wipe out everything that is going on in my life for a couple of hours.

“I’ve met some attractive women who are fed up with their husbands because they have gone to seed and lost interest in sex. All they have to do is understand the deal.

I am straightforward about it, always use contraception, and if they show signs of getting involved I move on.”

All the men I spoke to were careful to take precautions and tried to ensure their wives didn’t find out what they were up to. But they all persisted in the belief that if she did catch them out, she shouldn’t take their behaviour seriously. “Although in some people’s book what I am doing is immoral,” said John, “I think it’s pretty harmless. No man wants to swap a meaningless relationship for a marriage. Particularly if it’s lasted a long time and you are good friends.”

It is perhaps the only saving grace of an NSA relationship. If there is a scale of adultery, NSA liaisons surely come nearer the bottom than the top. They are essentially top-ups, a desire for variety and sexual thrill and not intended to break up an established relationship. “It’s a bit like not wanting the same sauce on your pasta every single mealtime,” one man told me.

An alternative, that simplifies the process for both sexes and saves time, is offered by David Miller, a self-styled businessman turned adulterers’ guru. David, 53, runs lovinglinks.com, a London-based internet dating site that has 23,000 members all, in theory at least, married men and women who want to stray. He also runs “a bespoke one-to-one service” for a select few, where women pay £350 and men £1,500 every eight weeks for his services. ("Men pay more,” he explains, “because the type of men I deal with are usually high earners. It also helps ensure they are respectable.")

David, who is twice divorced and now “extremely happy and faithful” in a long-term relationship, likes to think of himself as a cross between a service provider and a social worker. “I am not in the sex industry,” he insists. “I am just a realist. People have these situations and want to deal with them elegantly.”

He used to produce TV commercials but 13 years ago decided he wanted a change. “I toyed with the idea of opening a specialist dating agency but realised married people don’t really want to get involved with singles. So I ran an ad in a Sunday newspaper with a PO box number that read, ‘Attached? Married? Bored?’. I was inundated and it went on from there.”

He meets each applicant personally and over a drink or two finds out his or her needs and desires. He then provides three carefully chosen individuals at a time for them to chose from.

His clients are wide-ranging. “I have all sorts of high-ranking professionals come to me and, recently, far more women. Many of my female clients are psychotherapists. I haven’t a clue why.

“All the women tell me they feel safer if I vet men for them before they meet - while the men are often so busy they rely on me to find them someone discreet and personable. I’ve even had a woman bring her son-in-law to meet me. She could see that there were things going wrong in [her daughter’s] marriage and thought a discreet affair might prevent a break-up.

“Nor are most of my clients only interested in the sex aspect. They also want to be able to talk intelligently with whoever they are with and even go out to dinner. They don’t want something dirty, nasty or sleazy. They want fun and quality in their life and I try to find it for them. I am a romantic and I want people to be happy.”

Isn’t their happiness at the expense of their married partner? “People can get hurt,” he agrees, “but they can get hurt anyway, and sometimes these type of relationships, if they are handled discreetly, are the Band-Aid a long-term marriage needs.

“Women have usually thought about it very carefully often for years before they approach me, and by the time they do they have already bought a separate mobile and set up an email account - whereas most of the men haven’t even thought about how they will manage it. Women also can handle a portfolio of relationships, men can usually only handle one. And not just because they are so busy.”

His liaisons are not for the emotionally vulnerable or faint-hearted and should come with a health warning. “Once people get involved in the type of situation I provide, it’s hard for them to stop,” he says. “They are the crack cocaine of relationships. People get addicted to the buzz and adrenaline rush of new encounters.”

Anyone who seeks a casual fling needs to have a cast-iron emotional constitution.

Re-assurance or tenderness isn’t part of the deal. It’s a take it or leave it situation, although it’s not always expressed in such basic terms. He, and particularly she, also needs to understand the difference between lust and love and try to protect their heart as well as their health - and that of their spouse. The health risks of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases are well-known, but the risk of psychological damage, particularly for the vulnerable and needy, can be underestimated.

Note: Names and some personal details have been changed

TOMORROW
Why more women are turning to NSA relationships

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Three

From Quiver Books . . . .

The Art of the Quickie
Fast Sex, Fast Orgasm, Anytime, Anywhere
by Joel D. Block, Ph.D.

It’s unrealistic to expect to engage in full-on sex all the time, which is why “quickies” are not optional, they’re damn necessary. The Art of the Quickie is a book that will coach readers how to have quick, but rewarding sex. Quickies can be even more fulfilling than those long sessions because the thrill involved in having sex unexpectedly and/or in forbidden locations adds a potent element of excitement. But what about women, is the quickie fair to them? The Art of the Quickie features definitive guidelines for women to experience faster orgasms (in 5 minutes!) thereby relieving men of the performance anxiety that often accompanies the responsibility of bringing their partners to orgasm. The Art of the Quickie features twenty-five full-color photographs of various techniques, positions, and exciting, forbidden places that are perfect settings for a quickie.

Dr. Joel D. Block is a senior psychologist at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Medical Center and is on the clinical faculty of Einstein College of Medicine. He is the author of sixteen books, and has written for popular magazines and appeared as a guest on numerous television and radio shows including TODAY and GOOD MORNING AMERICA. In addition, he is the relationship guru on lifestyles.com, the second largest condom company in the United States.

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-Two

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Saturday, January 19, 2008

Number One-Hundred-Sixty-One

Guy Bourdin

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Sixty

Gerhard Richter

Zwei Liebespaare / Two Couples

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Nine

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Eight

Clit Capsule
from WomynsWare, one of Vancouver’s Finest

To paraphrase the Bionic Man (okay, our age is showing!) and with a grateful nod to the original narrative: ... Gentlemen, we can rebuild it. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world’s first bionic silicone dual vibe. Clit Capsule will be that toy. Better than it was before. Better, stronger, faster.

Sometimes it’s a challenge to classify a toy that’s multi-functional. Consider Clit Capusle ... it’s certainly good as a dual vibe (penetration and clit stimulation) and special use dill on its own but it’s just as functional when used with a partner. The vibe cavity fits two fingers nicely! Consider two fingers in the enclave and the thumb on the clitoral pad and the manual manipulation possible when used thusly ! What an adventure for both the master of the toy and the receptor!

On the heels of seven years of invaluable customer feedback we recently had the opportunity to improve on all our silicone exclusive designs. Its predecessor was the pioneer silicone dual vibe, Clit Capsule takes the concept further by enhancing the pad with capsules. Besides caressing the clitoris, the clitoral pad now includes a great deal of movement from the newly engineered capsules. Envision a sea anemone swaying in the ocean current and you’ll get an idea of what the clitoris will feel.

Made of silicone, when you manipulate the shaft, the lanes of vibrating capsules run along the clit. We’ve maintained the curve for G-spot pressure, textured shaft for drag on the vaginal walls, and head for even more potential contact points. These features provide excellent vaginal stimulation to couple with what is going on at the pad. Thus, a dual silicone vibe (vibe is easily removed for clean up and replaceable over the long term) that can be used for many years. Womyns’Ware Exclusive Warranty.  Surface area of the clit pad is 1 3/8” x 1 3/4”.  Available with or without vibe. Vibe requires two AA batteries. Variable speed.

Colour Choice: Womyns’Ware cobalt purple only

Dimensions: 3 1/4” x 1 3/8”

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Seven

The Hollywood stars who never quite made it
You see a film and an unknown actor makes an indelible impression on you - then you never see them again.
by Maxim Jakubowski, London Guardian Arts Blog

Star quality… Pamela Gidley.

You know how it is: you see a film, and an actor or actress you’ve somehow never come across before just stands out and it makes an indelible impression on you. It might be their looks, their sexual aura or the intensity of their acting. It doesn’t even have to be a good movie, although that does help. Think of Julie Christie walking down the street in Billy Liar, or Edward Norton as the duplicitous character of Primal Fear, or even the young Gwyneth Paltrow’s jailbait character in Steve Kloves’ Flesh and Bone. I could go on: Connie Nielsen and Charlize Theron in The Devil’s Advocate, Vanessa Paradis in Noce Blanche, more recently Ellen Page in Hard Candy.

And yes, most of these examples are of actresses; blame it on my libido! At any rate, you tell yourself this is a talent to follow, a future star. And in most instances, that has proven the case. But what of those who fall through the net?

In 1991, British director (and fellow Guardian blogger) Mike Figgis followed-up his US breakthrough Internal Affairs with a self-penned thriller, Liebestraum. I still believe it to be one of the most underrated thrillers of that decade, but I know I’m in a minority. An architecture professor returns to his hometown in Illinois to visit his dying birth mother, who had him adopted years before. Here he gets involved with the wife of a college friend whose construction company is involved in demolishing an old building. Lust, murder, the hidden secrets of the past all combine to make this an exquisite and subtle mystery about feelings, buildings and the oppression of emotions.

Liebestraum is now best remembered for a brief appearance by Kim Novak as the older mother. Somehow Figgis’ story pushed all the right buttons for me when I first saw it at a film festival in Italy and this was due in no small part to the casting of a young American actress, Pamela Gidley, as Jane Kessler, the adulterous wife of Bill Pullman’s businessman.

Her whole performance walked a thin line between decorum and raging passions under the skin, and she made the part her own. Without even showing much skin in her brief shower scene, she conveyed the foolishness of lust barely under control with both discretion and elegance, and made her character’s dilemmas poignant and understandable. Even now, having watched the film several times, I still can’t point my finger at what makes the part work so well. Gidley’s beauty is understated throughout, her hair dark and Jean Seberg-short, but she burns up the screen as far as I am concerned.

Her career before Liebestraum was undistinguished, with small parts in minor films and TV series and, surprisingly, apart from an appearance in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, she has barely been heard of since, although her resume shows her as always busy in B-movies and well-regarded small screen series like CSI, The Pretender and Skin.

Am I the only spectator to have been struck by her in this way? Film viewers as well as critics all get unconscionable crushes on actresses, as the venerable David Thomson recently betrayed with his book on Nicole Kidman, but in my folly I really thought she had what it takes in looks and acting talent to take on Hollywood.

So, which actors haven’t met your personal expectations?

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Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Six

INLAND EMPIRE
Reviewed by DVD Verdict Judge Bill Gibron (September 7th, 2007)

Through the darkness of future past, Judge Bill Gibron longs to see, one chance out between two worlds...and that’s definitely David Lynch’s latest masterful magnum opus.

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The Charge

A Woman in Trouble

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Opening Statement

Look at the tagline. Could a film be any more ambiguous and vague about what it plans on presenting? After all, “a woman in trouble” could mean anything. It offers infinite possibilities and hundreds of interesting connotations. And then there are the inherent inferences involved. Who is this woman? Where does she come from? What kind of mess is she in, if it’s a mess at all? If she’s in trouble, who is there to help her? And if no one is around to assuage her wounds, why not? What’s the context? What’s the motive? More importantly, why should we care? Unfortunately, you can’t come to a film like David Lynch’s masterful INLAND EMPIRE (his capitalization) and expect to have your qualms quelled. Instead, this dazzling digital experiment is a literal interpretation of that formless statement, complete with every possible explanation and none of the necessary clues for closure. This is either the most evocative mess the moviemaker has ever created, or a radically hedonistic slice of esoteric egotism. It stands as a landmark in non-analog filmmaking (blowing efforts by Michael Mann right out of the water) as well as a testament to the power of images. Yet the question becomes, does any of that really matter? Especially if INLAND EMPIRE fails to fully explain our female lead, and the problematic issues she’s facing.

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Facts of the Case

We begin with a prostitute facing an abusive John. Within minutes, she is sitting in a dingy room, crying. On TV, a surreal sitcom starring humanoid rabbits unfolds. Suddenly we’re in Los Angeles, at the home of struggling actress Nikki Grace (Laura Dern, Wild at Heart). Hoping to land a new role, she is visited by a strange Slavic woman who predicts she will get the part. She also hints that there will be “murder” in this new movie. After accepting the lead, Nikki meets her costar Devon Berk (Justin Theroux, Mulholland Dr.). Together, they are informed by director Kingsley Stewart (Jeremy Irons, Dead Ringers) that the shoot may be cursed. Apparently, a previous production tried to helm this seedy storyline about an adulterous couple. Right before the final scenes were filmed, the performers were killed.

Things go along swimmingly at first. The history is forgotten as Nikki and Devon dive into their work. With his notorious womanizing, our leading man is warned about staying away from his costar. Her husband will kill you, and then her, they state. Soon, fate steps in and it appears the pair is involved. During some late-night pillow talk, however, Nikki begins to crack up. She starts seeing visions—of the film set, of her husband, of another quite different life. Running away from the pain, she is propelled into a parallel plotline. Now in Poland, Nikki is a nameless hooker hoping to hire someone to off her abusive spouse. As she spills the story to a sleazy hood, we see the entire enterprise unfold. As part of a group of girls (for sale? as strippers? as pay-for-love whores?), she is jaded by the lack of respect she’s given. Even worse, there’s a man called the Phantom who may or may not be hurting these wanton women. Eventually, our pained prostitute is betrayed, and revenge seems the only way to settle the score—or is it all just part of Nikki’s new movie.

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The Evidence

Prepare to be dazzled, disturbed, and dumbfounded by the latest accolade in auteur David Lynch’s growing artistic legacy. INLAND EMPIRE remains a frustratingly fabulous work of unbridled genius, a definitive statement in this director’s long-running desire to incorporate dream logic into his otherwise normal narratives. As is the case with any Lynch effort, there are moments here that break your heart with their beauty and passion. Similarly, there are sequences that will outright frustrate and flummox you. INLAND EMPIRE is a movie that never presents its problems or personalities outright. Instead, it’s all a question of implication: what do certain elements mean, and, vice versa, what does a lack of specific material mandate? Placing a massive burden on his actors, as well as the attention span of the audience, Lynch will languish over situations that seem slight, and then turn around and twist everything into a monumental ball of questionable quirk. Like a painter passively placing brushstrokes on a canvas to see what will blossom and develop, he’s one of the few filmmakers who sees the process as being as important as the byproduct. Eventually, the image will become clear. Until then, we will watch in blind faith as he builds his layers of creativity and prepares to unveil the finished version of his own idealized dementia.

At this point in his career, you either “get” Lynch or you don’t. You either appreciate his idiosyncratic interpretation of the language of film, or you shake your head in baffled disbelief. Hollywood loves to marginalize and manipulate his legacy, calling him everything from a talented visionary to a purposefully obtuse joke. It’s a reputation derived solely from the conventional, a view that forgets to take the actual films into consideration. So walking into INLAND EMPIRE, you kind of know what to expect. It is a sly combination of many of the man’s latter works. It has the tainted Tinseltown angle of Mulholland Dr., the bifurcated personality plotting of Lost Highway, and the far-out fabrications of his online experiments (both Rabbits and the long-delayed AXXON N play a part here). In addition, Lynch has discovered the joys of the digital revolution. Using the camcorder dynamic in creating this “film,” it provided him with a freedom and a looseness that grants him the luxury to follow his every whim. That’s why INLAND EMPIRE feels like the most personal David Lynch experience to date. It’s overflowing with his innermost idiosyncrasies, long-delayed experiments, and astounding artistic flourishes.

For those looking for enlightenment, this is one of the director’s knottiest narratives. There are many ways to interpret what’s happening, but the basic storyline consists of one of two potent possibilities. Perhaps the prostitute we see at the start of the film is so alone and afraid in her pathetic sex-for-pay life that she fantasizes about an existence outside the fringes of reality. In her mind, she becomes a famous movie star, hired to play a demanding part and using that celebrity to step in and save a number of her “friends,” also desperate in their white-slave surroundings. Another view would suggest that Laura Dern’s actress, motivated to win a much-needed part, has turned so inward and method that she can no longer distinguish the meaningful from her motivation. In trying to connect with her character, she loses her own sense of self, frequently disappearing into flights of fractured, fearful fancy. In either case, we are definitely dealing with a “woman in trouble,” and again Lynch is looking for as many literal and metaphysical ways of expressing this ideal as possible. That’s why we get scenes of domestic strife, interpersonal difficulties, professional insecurity, cold-blooded calculation, and intense internal struggle. Relying almost solely on Dern to deliver the goods, Lynch lives up to these hyperbolic conceits, while tossing in a great deal of simple cinematic splendor. His lead deserves complete and utter kudos for taking on such a surreal statement; it’s the medium he’s manipulating that deserves the most praise.

When it was announced that Lynch was using the digital format as a way of making his next movie, many in his formidable fan base were disturbed. The reaction was two-fold: first, many feared the man couldn’t get financing to create an actual “film” film, and so was “slumming” just to get his muse across. The other, and more oddball, idea was that Lynch was abandoning celluloid in favor of a grittier, gonzo concept. He wanted to go back to his idyllic indie days, and a DV would help him achieve that aesthetic. In fact, both notions held a kernel of truth. Studios, especially the Hollywood heavyweights, are not about to give an already problematic artist (while critically acclaimed, Lynch doesn’t do well with mainstream moviegoers) a huge hunk of cash to run around the globe and create a conceptual collage without any manageable marketing points. So digital allowed him to do more with substantially less…dollar-wise. On the other hand, all craftsmen like to mess with tools to see where the inspiration takes them. In this case, armed with a series of new toys, Lynch could simply go out and play. Similar to when he had the time, location, and unlimited stock to work with (resulting in his first film, the amazing Eraserhead), INLAND EMPIRE feels the closest to this director’s oft-proclaimed imagination than anything he’s done recently. And besides, the movie looks amazing. Lynch understands both the technical and the ephemeral aspects of the medium he’s working in, and he does digital 100 percent right.

The result is one of the most breathtaking accomplishments you will ever see. And hear. It’s important to note that Lynch places video and audio tests and calibration menus on his discs so that people can “tune” their home theaters properly to reproduce (as best as possible) his work outside a big-screen setting. So both sound and vision are incredibly important to him, and with INLAND EMPIRE, he has really outdone himself. This is a startling experience, one that begins as a standard motion-picture drama and descends into both the hearts of darkness and the disturbed. Colors crash and blend, as slow, soft rumbles build to crescendos of aural assault. For Lynch, film is as sensual (meaning, “of the senses") as it is cerebral or emotional. He wants you to get lost in the opticals, to use the bombast blazing out of your 5.1 setup as a doorway into another dimension. Similarly, what you will see onscreen will cause you to question the facets of reality while firing forgotten synapses way off in the back of your brain. The end result is a defining, draining experience, a means of meeting cinema at its very core—and then continuing beyond. Like his beloved meditation, which he claims allows him to tap into the inner pool of possibilities within his creative ocean, Lynch is a magician manipulating echoes and ideas into a test of one’s potential perception.

Sometimes we don’t like what we see. At other instances, the elements can come together so effortlessly that they make the soul soar. Never one to explain or expound (this is the guys who used a psychogenic fugue as a legitimate plot point, after all) while leaving interpretation and intent for others to determine, David Lynch seemingly celebrates the insane and the bizarre. But actually, all he’s doing is redefining experience, one fascinating graphic at a time. It’s as if he taps directly into your nervous system and captures incidents without the benefit of an intellectualized filter. All drama appears found, all horror or happiness arrives spontaneously and unprocessed. While it’s possible to label this as self-indulgent, delusional, excessive, or unapproachable, the proof is that everyone sees what they want when it comes to film. A comedy that causes some to crack up may actually be a witless wonder. Similarly, an action epic that gets your blood boiling and your adrenaline droning may put others into a sound slumber. Love him or hate him, David Lynch at least deserves to be recognized for what he is—a true artist working in an arena that usually shuns such arch philosophies. If it’s not simple, saleable, and strategically targeted at a base demographic, it doesn’t matter much to studio suits. But all art lives beyond its pop-culture calling, and one thing is for sure—decades from now, when scholars are sorting the weakest wheat from the rock-solid chaff, Lynch and INLAND EMPIRE will be among the mighty.

True to his tech-specs word, Lynch supervised the transfer of INLAND EMPIRE to DVD, and Rhino’s release is something quite special. The movie’s amazing look is brilliantly captured by the 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer. Don’t listen to other sites that criticize this film as an ineffectual DV production. There are only the slightest of hints of the telltale facets we expect from the medium (fuzziness, lack of clarity, unclear contrasts), but Lynch makes them work to his benefit. In this critic’s considered opinion, this is a jewel of an image, a complete representation of what can be achieved with the new advances. On the sound side, things are equally solid. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 Stereo mixes provided play with spatial ambiences, and yet both deliver devastating sonic significance. You feel lost in Lynch’s world, enveloped by his music and involved in his effects. Again, there will be those who believe this is less-than-reference quality, and, believe it or not, they’d have a champion in the director. Home video actually sickens Lynch, since it deprives the viewer of the project the way he intended them to experience it—in a theater, with a properly calibrated projector and a full-blown, properly volumized speaker setup. What he hopes to do here is not recreate the Cineplex dynamic as much as give the best possible product for the living room.

As for added content, this stellar set provides lots of insight—as well as a few comic asides. Offered up as something entitled “More Things that Happened,” we are treated to 75 minutes of deleted scenes. Most deal with incidental aspects of the narrative, but there is more material regarding Dern’s hobbled home life and the prostitute’s predicament. “Ballerina” is a nine-minute meditation on an ethereal dancer, captured as only Lynch can. “Quinoa” is the director, at home, making up a pot of the famous South American “superfood” (actually, a small, protein rich grain). Trailers and stills are self-explanatory. The best bits are reserved for two amazing supplements. “Stories” is 30 minutes of Lynch discussing his rationale for the film, what inspired him, and the various issues he has with moviemaking and the industry in general. It’s the closest thing to a commentary you’ll ever get from the man, and its fascinating stuff. Similarly illustrative is “Lynch 2,” a collection of behind-the-scenes sequences showcasing the director as a cross, if calm, curmudgeon. He pisses and moans, demands and barks orders, but always within his mild-mannered Midwestern character. It’s like seeing a dictator shorn of all his sturm and drang, and yet still getting exactly what he wants. It presents a side of Lynch we rarely get to see, and gives the DVD of INLAND EMPIRE the “extra” boost it needs to be a definitive digital statement.

* * * * *
Closing Statement

So, in the end, what exactly was the “trouble” our “woman” was in? Sure, we see someone struggling with a difficult acting role, set inside a film that may or may not be cursed. We see a beaten and abused hooker seek the help of a hitman to take out her cruel and brutal husband. We see other streetwalkers, feigning happiness as the reality of their life hits them hard. And finally, we see an actual Hollywood celebrity, a female noted for her fine, Oscar-nominated work, walk effortlessly through a troubling, tentative experiment in expression. Together, they become all aspects of the gender big picture, a portrait of women as heroes, villains, whores, saints, lovers, adulterers, mothers, and mistresses. Few filmmakers today would even try to make something so all encompassing and endemic, but it’s clear that David Lynch is not your ordinary artist; he never has been, and he never will be. Instead, he continues to clip the boundaries of the art form while redrafting many of its original ideals. You may not like everything inside INLAND EMPIRE, but it’s near impossible to deny its designs. Sometimes, a director is so ahead of the curve that it’s unfair to fault him for not living up to our everyday expectations. As a planned provocateur, Lynch is a man of startling genius—and INLAND EMPIRE is a near-masterpiece.

* * * * *
The Verdict

Not guilty. Both Rhino and their DVD of INLAND EMPIRE are free to go.

* * * * *
Scales of Justice

Video: 96
Audio: 97
Extras: 90
Acting: 100
Story: 95
Judgment: 97

* * * * *

Sincerely.
Eve and JW3 and Mélisande
Dirty Girl Things ©
Unrepentant.  Unpretentious.  Unconventional. ©

Friday, December 07, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Five

Lee Miller: Shooting star

From ‘Vogue’ cover girl to war photographer, from Surrealist muse to alcoholic lady of the manor, Lee Miller’s life certainly didn’t lack colour. Ahead of a new exhibition of her work John Banville (London Telegraph, August 2007) salutes one very talented, passionate and troubled woman

If Lee Miller had not existed, Ernest Hemingway would have had to invent her.
Tough, ambitious, hard-drinking and hard-swearing, and good-looking enough to have been a Vogue cover girl, Miller not only captured, in her most celebrated photographs, the horror and euphoria of D-Day and its aftermath, but was herself a part of the action, sharing in the terrors, the excitement and the ‘delirium of the brave’, in Yeats’s phrase, as the Allied armies swept eastwards into the heart of what for Hitler and his forces had been Fortress Europe.

When war broke out Miller was living in London with her husband, the painter Roland Penrose, who was a friend of Picasso and later his biographer.

Their Hampstead home was a treasure-house of works by contemporary masters - her lifelong friend Picasso, of course, and Braque, and Max Ernst and René Magritte, and Miró and de Chirico and Brancusi.

Their guest-lists, as the photographer David Scherman wrote, ‘read like a Who’s Who of modern art, journalism, British politics, music and even espionage’.

By that time Miller - or Lady Penrose, as she had become - had turned herself into a cordon bleu cook, was a keen gardener and a hostess of genius; she was also an alcoholic and, according to her only child, Antony Penrose, a dysfunctional mother.

It was a long way from Poughkeepsie, in New York State, where Elizabeth, ‘Liz’, then ‘Li-Li’ and finally just ‘Lee’ Miller was born in 1907.

The most momentous and certainly the most scarring experience of her childhood years was the rape she suffered when she was seven.

The rapist, described as ‘a family friend’, also infected her with gonorrhoea, the treatment for which in those days was extremely invasive and painful. Her brother John said of the rape that, ‘It changed her whole life and attitude - she went wild.’

In later years she liked to claim she had been thrown out of every fancy school in the state of New York.

She also had what would surely seem to us nowadays a dubious relationship with her father, Theodore, an engineer and, according to Miller, ‘a very advanced amateur photographer’.

Is it fanciful to detect evidence of post-rape confusion in the androgynous appearance she presents in a photograph Theodore took of her on the family farm outside Poughkeepsie when she was 15?

Also among her father’s portfolio were a number of nude studies of Miller as a child and as a handsome young woman.

What Miller’s mother thought of these sessions between father and daughter is not recorded. However, Freudianism was still in its infancy then, and perhaps it is just a case of autres temps, autres moeurs.

While still a teenager Miller went to Paris and fell in with the so-called Lost Generation chronicled by Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald.

Her hometown she used to refer to dismissively as ‘Pokey’ or ‘Pok’, but, ‘One look at Paris,’ she said in 1969, ‘and I said, “This is mine - this is my home.“‘

Back in New York and still on fire after her European experiences, she studied acting and theatre lighting, was a chorus girl for a bit, modelled underwear and tried her hand as a painter.

Luck played a large part in Miller’s life - she had the true photographer’s gift of being in the right place at the right time - but never so markedly as one day in New York in 1926 when, by her own account, she was about to step off the pavement into the path of an oncoming car when she was pulled back in the nick of time by a bystander who turned out to be Condé Nast, the founder and publisher of Vogue.

As Mark Haworth-Booth writes in his new book, The Art of Lee Miller, Nast ‘recognised in Lee the look of the moment’. The issue of March 1927 was her first appearance on the cover of Vogue, in an illustration by the highly fashionable Georges Lepape, who managed both to soften and to accentuate Miller’s somewhat coarse, even brutal beauty.

For Vogue she was also shot by leading photographers such as Edward Steichen and Hoyningen-Huené.

In 1929 she returned to Paris, where she studied, and lived, with the surrealist photographer Man Ray and, among other adventures, appeared in Jean Cocteau’s film The Blood of a Poet (1930).

The douceur de la vie of the French years she captured in 1937, when she famously photographed a latter-day Déjeuner sur l’herbe with her friends the Eluards and Man Ray and Ady Fidelin, and a distinctly phlegmatic-seeming Roland Penrose.

Lee Miller was a natural surrealist, and remained so all her life, if with a lower-case ‘s’.

As Mark Haworth-Booth points out, all her photographs have a surrealist slant. One of the reasons her wartime pictures are so striking is that the prolonged state of emergency provided her with countless ready-made surreal images - see, for instance, her picture of two women in fire masks, a scene that might have been arranged by her friend Salvador Dalí.

Writing of her at once witty and sinister study of four rats perched on a wooden bar, Haworth-Booth points out how ‘Lee delighted in detaching rectangles of reality from the contexts that ordinarily determine their meaning,’ as good a description as any of the surrealist project in general.

In her 1930 picture of an ‘exploding hand’, taken in front of the Guerlain parfumerie in Paris (the ‘exploding’ effect is due to the scratching of the glass of the door by countless diamond rings), she achieved, according to Haworth-Booth, ‘that “convulsive beauty” identified by André Breton as the hallmark of Surrealist art’.

By 1932 Miller was in New York again, where she married a rich Arab businessman, Aziz Eloui Bey, and moved with him to Egypt.

It was in Egypt, among the magnificent wreckage of an ancient civilisation, that she took some of her most poetically charged photographs.

Portrait of Space is surely her masterpiece, an exquisite and ambiguous ‘representation of her psychological state’, as Haworth-Booth observes, which seems both to offer the possibility of escape and flight and to portray the aridity of a failing marriage. This photograph was the inspiration for Magritte’s 1938 painting Le baiser.

After three years of boredom in Cairo and Alexandria, Miller took off for Paris, where, through the painter Max Ernst, she met Roland Penrose, and sailed with him for England on 1 September 1939, the day Hitler’s armies invaded Poland.

In London she combined work as a Vogue photographer with the compilation of a photographic history of the Blitz.

When D-Day came, on 6 June 1944, she wangled an accreditation as a war correspondent - again for Vogue - with the invading American forces, and set off to cover the workings of an army hospital behind Omaha Beach in Normandy.

Her report, ‘Unarmed Warriors’, ran in the August 1944 issue of Vogue. It showed her to be not only a fine war photographer but also a natural writer; her article is as straightforward and vividly immediate as her accompanying photographs.

In subsequent months she followed the invading armies across Europe, from the frenzied joy of a newly liberated Paris, through the horrors of the camps at Buchenwald and Dachau, to Munich, where David Scherman famously photographed her bathing in Hitler’s bath, and on to the Führer’s mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden, which had been set alight by retreating SS troops.

It is hard not to think that those months after D-Day must have been the high point of her life. Many of those who took part in that exhilarating venture found it difficult to return to the drabness of civilian life in a Europe exhausted by war.

She continued her work in photography, particularly as a portraitist - one might again echo Yeats and say of Miller that her glory was she had such friends - yet her glory days as an artist were over.

After the war the Penroses bought a farm in Sussex, and Miller settled down as best she could to being the wife of a country squire, though on one occasion Lady Penrose was heard to mutter, ‘F- weekends in the country!’.

However, if one is to credit her photographs of her guests, life at Farley Farm must have been sweet. She loved to cook, and, as Haworth-Booth writes, her ‘new life in cuisine can… be seen as part of the imaginative renewal of the domestic arts after a period in which their practice had been necessarily reduced’.

Even here, she showed herself still the unregenerate surrealist, serving up such delights as cauliflower ‘breasts’ in pink sauce.

Although she produced many haunting images, as a photographer Lee Miller was not up there with the greatest ones such as Cartier-Bresson or Robert Capa - though Haworth-Booth’s beautifully written and illustrated book, published in conjunction with the exhibition ‘The Art of Lee Miller’ at the V&A, does make a case for her as a genius of a kind.

She was probably a chronicler before she was an artist, and her first interest was the human spectacle, in all its beauty and horror, its glamour and its tawdriness.

She got the best out of her time, and recorded much of it for our after-time. As Hemingway might have said of her - and perhaps did - she was some woman.

‘The Art of Lee Miller’ is at the V&A, London SW7 (advance tickets 0870 906 3883), from 15 September to 6 January

* * * * *

The look of the moment

Gifted, beautiful and unpredictable, Lee Miller’s career took her from the fashion pages of Vogue to the front line of the second world war. But while she is celebrated as one of the finest photographers of the 20th century, her great talents as a writer are often forgotten, argues Ali Smith (London Guardian, September 2007)

In occupied Vienna in 1946, Lee Miller photographed an emaciated child dying in a hospital bed. The photograph is both merciless and despairing. The child’s bones are clear in a too-tight, too-loose skin. The white folds of the sheets round the child are too rich. Their softness contrasts with the bed’s iron frame, which suggests prison bars. The child’s look, straight into the camera, is unanswerable. One hand holds the sheet, the other is open.

Miller was one of the first correspondents into the liberated concentration camps. In a fury at the bureaucracy that routinely meant no hospital drugs were available (except to the military), she cabled Audrey Withers, her editor at Vogue, with her Vienna dispatch.
For an hour I watched a baby die. He was dark blue when I first saw him. He was the dark dusty blue of these waltz-filled Vienna nights, the same colour as the striped garb of the Dachau skeletons, the same imaginary blue as Strauss’s Danube. I’d thought all babies looked alike, but that was healthy babies; there are many faces for the dying. This wasn’t a two months baby, he was a skinny gladiator. He gasped and fought and struggled for life, and a doctor and a nun and I just stood there and watched ... There was nothing to do but watch him die. Baring his sharp toothless gums he clenched his fists against the attack of death. This tiny baby fought for his only possession, life, as if it might be worth something.

Miller’s report is a steely, eloquent piece of work in which she watches with awed wryness as the city of art and music ("the music which first cheers then haunts and finally irritates one to a frenzy of abuse") surreally reconstructs itself in its own ruins. The full dispatch hasn’t yet been published in its entirety. This is just another astonishing anomaly in the story of Lee Miller’s life and afterlife, or lives and afterlives, as her son, the writer and film-maker Antony Penrose, coined it in The Lives of Lee Miller in 1985. The latest book about Miller, The Art of Lee Miller by Mark Haworth-Booth, written to coincide with her centenary retrospective which opens at the V&A this month, is by far the fullest and most satisfying consideration yet of Miller’s art and Miller as artist. Beautifully illustrated, with many images that haven’t been widely available before, it is a work of proper appraisal, particularly good on areas of her work that have, until now, pretty much escaped critical attention, such as the series of frames she took in Egypt between 1934 and 1937.

But then Miller as artist is something we nearly didn’t get the chance to consider at all. This is partly because, in her later years, she disparaged her own art, acted like it didn’t exist, tidied what survived into the loft in Farley Farm, Sussex, the art-filled home she shared with her husband (and clearly her soul mate), the surrealist artist and collector Roland Penrose. That she was one of the finest photographic artists of the 20th century was just one of the discoveries her son made when he opened up some boxes in the attic and found original prints, negatives in their thousands, and several official-censor-shredded manuscripts.

We’re only now, a hundred years after her birth and 30 after her death, coming to terms with Miller’s many lives and gifts, and the one that’s been most overshadowed by her photographic talent is that she was also a writer of great grace and force. Her rare later writing about art, about artists, about her long friendship with Picasso and about many other aspects of her life, is always witty and striking. Her war writing is stunning. Her skill was honed under intense pressure, on the hoof, in the war dispatches published by Vogue between 1944 and 1946. It was as she moved through liberated Europe and reported back to the magazine, for which she’d previously been a photographer - and whose editors, astonished at what she was sending, published her visceral text alongside her equally visceral photography - that she became a figure in whose combined eye and voice notions of politics, fashion, liberation and eyewitness met and made history. Her writing, like her photography, is about a lot more than the acts of witnessing and recording truth. It’s about the act of composition, about the composition of all things, and about what truth actually is.

How to see Lee Miller? Much of her life would be a negotiation between the act of seeing and the act of being seen. She was born Elizabeth Miller in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907. Her father, Theodore, was a keen amateur photographer who took pictures of engines, bridges, and more and more incessantly of his own daughter, usually nude studies, all through her childhood and well into her young adulthood when he also persuaded friends of Lee’s to join the (sometimes rather disturbing) nude tableaux.

Theodore was fascinated by stereoscopic photography, where the same image, doubled, viewed beside itself, creates the illusion of three-dimensionality. It’s heartening to look at his double image of the nude Lee Miller at 21 and to see how the possibility of different selves must have fed positively into the young Miller’s notions of the seen self.

She was raped by a “family friend” when she was seven and contracted gonorrhoea, the treatment for which was so painful that her brothers had to be sent two blocks away from the house so as not to hear her screaming. She grew up clever, energetic and so anarchic that every school expelled her (one particularly memorable prank was the surreptitious feeding of blue dye to a schoolmate who nearly fainted at the colour of her urine). She longed to be like Anita Loos, the girl scriptwriter on DW Griffith’s film sets. Her young energy is re-conjured in one of her most vibrant later pieces of writing, “What They See in Cinema”, published by Vogue in 1956:

The first theatrical performance I ever attended was in the Poughkeepsie Opera House. It seems highly unlikely, but is memorable and true that the ‘Bill’ consisted of Sarah Bernhardt in person, playing the ‘greatest passages from her greatest roles’, from a chaise longue; secondly, artistic, immobile nudes, imitating Greek sculpture (livid, in quivering limelight); and as a curtain-raiser there was a guaranteed, authentic ‘Motion Picture’. The Divine Sarah dying on a divan was of considerable morbid interest to me . . . Though I understood no French, her Portia, pleading, seemed urgent enough (she was propped up vertical for that); the nudes were just more ART. But the ‘Motion Picture’ was a thrill-packed reel of a spark-shedding locomotive dashing through tunnels and over trestles . . . The hero was the intrepid cameraman himself who wore his cap backwards, and was paid ‘danger-money’. On a curve across a chasm, the head of the train glared at its own tail ... the speed was dizzy, nothing whatever stayed still and I pulled eight dollars worth of fringe from the rail of our loge, in my whooping, joyful frenzy.

Never mind boring old nudes (look at the glorious, throwaway “livid, in quivering limelight” or the line of “Divine . . . dying . . . divan” - Miller loves assonance and alliteration and the slightly louche effect they have on rhythm). Never mind “just more ART”. Miller saw herself as in love with life, with the dangerous way it moved, with the real thing. If you could capture that, you’d be heroic.

A visit to Paris, where she shook off her aged chaperones (and instead rented a room in what turned out to be a maison de passe and much enjoyed watching the comings and goings of the clients), gave her a love of the city’s style and freedom. Back in the States, she was discovered - the legend goes - by Condé Nast when Nast himself hauled her back to safety after she stepped off a sidewalk into oncoming traffic one day. (She was so in shock that she babbled in French.) Nast took one look at her and signed her up as a model on American Vogue.

But she returned to France as soon as she could, in 1929, with an introductory letter for the surrealist artist and photographer Man Ray given to her by the photographer Edward Steichen, for whom she’d modelled; the model had decided to become the photographer and knew exactly which teacher she wanted. She tracked Man Ray down in a Paris bar. “I told him boldly that I was his new student. He said he didn’t take students, and anyway he was leaving Paris for his holiday. I said, I know, I’m going with you - and I did.”

She helplessly stood for the new age. She was “the look of the moment”, as art critic Richard Calvocoressi says of her modelling for Vogue in the 1920s. Then she was “the universal muse of the surrealists”, as Angela Carter wrote (and it’s interesting that even as late as 1990 a cultural writer as fine as Carter was still unaware of Miller the artist). Her very beauty was blinding, perhaps; certainly it became the focus for some extraordinarily modern face-offs. In America a portrait of her by Steichen had, by chance, become the first ever picture of a real-life woman on a sanitary towel advert, which caused a mini-scandal. In Paris, with eyes painted on top of her eyelids, she played the beautiful armless statue in Cocteau’s 1931 surrealist cult classic film, Blood of a Poet. Her breasts were used by one French glass company for modelling the shape of its champagne glasses.

But the embodiment spoke back. The muse had her own muses. The face of modernity had a camera eye, and as soon as she got the chance, she was composing her own self-portraits, Lee Miller par Lee Miller. The woman who modelled Chanel and Patou began doing her own fashion shoots of other women in their clothes in her own studio for Frogue (French Vogue). The woman whose breasts were models for champagne glasses went to take some medical photographs and borrowed an amputated breast from the lab, then photographed it beautifully and bloodily on a dinner plate with a fork beside it, her composition a cuttingly close-to-the-bone comment on the meat market of which she was herself a part. The woman who was a shockingly good surrealist photographer shocked her daring male surrealist friends with her far-too-open attitudes to sexuality. Free love was for the boys; even the surrealists found it too surreal in a girl.

If her aesthetic independence unsettled her teacher/lover Man Ray, her sexual independence drove him nearly insane with jealousy. He took to threatening suicide, walking round Paris carrying a revolver and wearing a noose, then made his famous sculpture Object to be Destroyed - a metronome whose ticking pendulum tip is, revealingly, a photograph of one of Miller’s eyes. Meanwhile, she hightailed it back to the States and opened her own portrait studio in New York (doing all the electric wiring herself), where she photographed perfume bottles and movie stars with the same stylish clarity with which she’d re-seen contemporary Paris as surreality. In both her commercial and her portrait work, she put to good use the experimental technique of solarisation, which she and Man Ray had accidentally discovered and perfected.

Haworth-Booth calls solarisation “a perfect surrealist medium in which positive and negative occur simultaneously”. There couldn’t have been a better dark-light conceit for Miller’s own life circumstances. By 1940 she was in England, refusing to go back to safety in the States, instead winging it at Brogue (British Vogue), managing fashion shoots of pretty girls in utilitarian clothes on grimy realist streets (when shoots outside the studio were still quite a novelty). At the same time, she was compiling her own shots of bombed London, like Remington Silent, whose title is a witty play on the brand name of the mangled typewriter, its casing broken, keys splayed, loose ribbon staining the classically carved broken masonry or gravestone on which it sits. Four years after she took this picture, her friend and lover, the Life photographer Dave Scherman, photographed her room, Room 412 in Hotel Scribe, the Paris hotel where the allied press corps holed up (using the facilities that the retreating German press corps had just abandoned). An astute portrait of Miller, whose instinct about when and where to position the subject is central to all her art, it features her Hermes Baby portable typewriter next to the whisky on the table in a shaft of sunlight, lit up in the chaos, and presided over by the composed presence/absence of Miller, visible only in reflection.

A year earlier, she had been in England taking portraits of the war correspondent Martha Gellhorn (whom American Vogue was featuring because she was Ernest Hemingway’s new wife). A year later, Miller’s own dispatches would be making the work of contemporaries such as Hemingway and Gellhorn seem a touch sentimental. Here she is in 1946, on the execution of Lázló Bardossy, the fascist ex-prime minister of Hungary:

Then, accompanied by a priest and some gendarmes and a noise of the silent crowd shifting, a cocky little man jaunted in from a dark archway. He wore the same plus-fours tweed suit, ankle-high shoes with white socks turned over the edges as when he’d been arrested. He held his beaky grey face high and his gestures were taut. He listened to the words of the judge and as he walked in front of the sandbags he waved his hand refusing the blindfold. The four gendarmes who had volunteered for the execution stood in line awaiting the order to fire. They were less than two yards from him. Bardossy’s voice orated in a high pitched rasp, “God save Hungary from all these bandits.” I think he started to say something else but a ragged tattoo of shots drowned it. The impact threw him back against the sandbags and he pitched to his left in a pirouette, falling on the ground with his ankles neatly crossed.

At the end of the second world war she was the only woman photojournalist to advance with the allies across Europe, “the only photographer for miles around and I now owned a private war”. She was one of the first people to take a photo of napalm in action, in St Malo in 1944. Not that she knew it was napalm; her photos were confiscated by the censors immediately she filed them. “It is almost impossible today ... to conceive how difficult it was for a woman correspondent to get beyond a rear-echelon military position, in other words, to the front, where the action was,” Scherman wrote. The troops toned down their strong language for her, not knowing that she was toning down her own, for them.

The light and the dark. She was one of the first photojournalists into liberated Paris (and the first allied soldier to turn up at her friend Picasso’s flat). Then, crossing into Germany, she was one of the first allied photojournalists to enter Buchenwald and Dachau. Astonishingly, she washed the visit to Dachau off in Hitler’s own bathroom in his requisitioned flat in Munich, and, with the other GIs, was combing through his and Eva Braun’s belongings at almost exactly the time the pair were committing suicide. Scherman’s photograph of Miller in Hitler&