Monday, October 29, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Six

LEGENDARY SIN CITIES
A Canadian Broadcast Corporation documentary, summary from the CBC website

Of all the remarkable events of this century perhaps the most fascinating has been the spontaneous growth, flowering and then decay of a handful of great cities. These cities were places where art, culture and political liberties co-mingled with corruption, brutality and decadence. Everything and just about anyone could be bought and sold. The immigrant would struggle beside the artist. Gamblers, thieves and prostitutes co-habited with soul-savers, the rich and the powerful.

The exhilarating combination of the seamy with the sublime made these places a magnet for all the lost souls and refugees of the world. Pushing the limits of tolerance and freedom, they defined the social, political and sexual culture of the 20 th century. Their names ring out: Paris of the ‘20s, Berlin of the ‘20s and ‘30s and Shanghai of the ‘30s. In the period between the wars, these were the LEGENDARY SIN CITIES of the world.

Contemporary footage mixed with rare and richly evocative archival films, stock shots and stills give resonance to the stories of an extraordinary cast of characters: novelists and artists, musicians and journalists, rogues and sinners. Added to the mix are excerpts from feature films, married with the music of those remarkable times. What results is a richly drawn portrait of a time and place that helped define our century.

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PARIS: THE CRAZY YEARS

As Paris emerged from the hardship of the Great War, a wave of hedonism swept through the city. In the wake of deprivation, decadence flourished as Paris once again became the centre of modernity and creativity.

The French call the interwar years “Les annees folles”, the crazy years, and for those who could afford it, it was indeed a wild party. Censorship was minimal, women’s bare breasts were an accepted part of an evening’s entertainment and brothels were legal. The American dollar was much stronger than the Franc, and American expatriates indulged in all that the city had to offer. Back home prohibition and narrow mindedness reigned, but in Paris, champagne and ideas flowed.

Kiki, of Montparnasse (also photographed above)

Some of the greatest artistic collaborations of the century fermented in Paris. It was in a Parisian café that the surrealist photographer Man Ray, met his muse, Kiki of Montparnasse. Here Ernest Hemmingway boxed with Morley Callaghan and F.Scott Fitzgerald kept the time. Across the Seine in Montmartre, Cole Porter would stay up all night at Bricktop’s nightclub and wake up to compose some of his greatest tunes.

While the legitimate arts thrived, so too did the city’s seedy underbelly. It was here that pornographic films and electronic vibrators emerged and student parties turned into marathon orgies. The Grand Guignol theatre walked the line between art and pornography nightly with its feigned mutilations, graphic sex scenes, and private balcony with a double bed.

Foreigners in Paris found a new tolerance for lifestyles that were taboo at home. From the rampant libido of Natalie Barney to the more staid partnerships exemplified by Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, lesbians were chic in Paris. Male homosexuality was more covert but sympathetic friends and casual partnerships were easy to find.

Jazz legend Cole Porter moved to Paris where he hosted lavish parties and explored his bi-sexuality.

The soundtrack to “les annees folles” was unquestionably the syncopated import from Harlem: jazz. Paris had a long of tradition of welcoming foreign musicians, and jazz clubs sprang up in the Montmartre district. When Josephine Baker debuted on a Parisian stage, carried in by a half-naked black man, she sent a message across the city, black was beautiful. She became an instant celebrity and a potent sex symbol, all before her 20th birthday.

As the 1920’s came to a close, the staggering numbers of boisterous tourists in search of booze and entertainment began to enrage the French. But it was not the growing animosity towards foreigners that finally ended the great migration. As Black Tuesday toppled the stock market in October 1929, the stream of money that had supported the Americans abroad ran dry. For those who stayed, Paris remained, as Hemmingway described, “A Moveable Feast”, but it became less exuberant, less exciting, perhaps even less sinful.

Josephine Baker became a huge star after she performed an erotic dance, ‘the danse sauvage’ on stage. A teenager from St. Louis she transformed herself into a symbol of liberation and sex.  “She devoured men like crazy. She had lots of lovers. The French like to wink at that but she flaunted it and slept with men of the best circles of society as well as men in not so nice parts of society. She also slept with women.”

Many of the creative, successful women in Paris were lesbian. Their weekly salons became famous as the place to mingle with the creme de la creme of the literary and artistic worlds.  Famous lesbians like Gertrude Stein and Natalie Barney lived their lifestyle openly in Paris.

Organized by the arts students of the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the Bal of the Quatz Arts was held every spring. It was a huge party that spilled into the streets in a bacchanalian orgy of alcohol and sex.  “You were expected to go naked and very elaborated painted or otherwise decorated and things would deteriorate in the course of the evening and these turned into massive sexual encounters.”

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BERLIN: METROPOLIS OF VICE

An Otto Dix painting of the decadent film star Anita Berber. Some called her the ‘Scarlett whore of Berlin.’

As Allied Europe recovered from the First World War, the turmoil in Germany was still raging. In the wake of defeat, extremist political groups sprang up and city streets became battle zones as the Left clashed with the Right. Out of this struggle emerged a new democratic state - The Weimar Republic.

Censorship fell with the Kaiser and in the aftermath of war, Berlin shed its conservative past to become the “Babylon of the 20’s”. On the city stages, Anita Berber flaunted her body, bisexuality and drug addictions. In the city-centre the world’s first institute for sexual science boasted the world’s biggest library on sexual matters and pornography. And at nightclubs such as the Residenz-Casino, you could send attractive patrons bottles of cocaine through pneumatic tubes.

Decadence thrived alongside desperation in post-war Berlin as inflation soared out of control. For the impoverished middle class, crow and turnip soup became luxury items but for anyone with foreign currency, the city was a never-ending party. Desperate for hard currency, Berliners catered to tourists’ every appetite, from four-course meals to mother daughter teams in family-run brothels.

But there was more to Berlin than sin. With its superb orchestras, hundreds of newspapers, theatres and cabarets, Berlin was the place for anyone with ambition, talent or hustle. It was here that Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill collaborated on The Threepenny Opera, and where Marlene Deitrich’s legs stole the show in Germany’s first talking picture, The Blue Angel.

With most of Europe still closeted, the love that dare not speak its name was shouted out all across Berlin. Homosexual artists such as W.H Auden and Christopher Isherwood flocked to this centre of sexual liberation. Isherwood later turned his experiences in Berlin into a novel, which became the stage play and movie Cabaret.

As Germany’s politics remained splintered, one of Berlin’s most famous artist, George Grosz, took special pleasure in satirizing a little known demagogue making noise in Munich - Adolf Hitler.

With its frenetic pace and insatiable libido, Berlin had been a hard nut for the Nazis to crack. The city did fall, however, partly due to the influence of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich minister of propaganda. As much as he hated the city, he understood it and used scandal, sensation and sheer brutality to bring the city into step. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nazis set up headquarters in the old transvestite haunt, the Eldorado, raided the institute of sexual science and started a campaign of brutality that climaxed in WWII. As the Shangrila on the Spree faded, new sin cities emerged in the East.

There were approximately 160 completely different lesbian and gay male nightclubs and lounges in Berlin.  The home of some of the most famous transvestites in the city was the Eldorado. Everybody, the hat check girls, the waitresses, the barmaids, were all men. The top female impersonators performed there.  In the thirties the Eldorado was taken over and turned into a Nazi headquarters.

Anita Berber was one of the earliest stars of German cinema and the first to dance naked onstage. Her performances were notorious for their eroticism and sexuality.  Off the stage she flaunted her bisexuality and her love of drugs and alcohol.  She died, at 29, surrounded by statues of the virgin mary and empty morphine syringes.

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SHANGHAI: PARADISE FOR ADVENTURERS

In the Twentieth Century, a handful of cities became legendary- and for a time in the twenties and thirties, there was one place known as the wickedest city in the world- it was Shanghai.

For the Chinese, Shanghai meant openness and modernity - the Paris of Asia. For tourists, Shanghai was the whore of the East. The city became a standard port of call for adventurers from around the world and its star grew as a city of vice with everything for sale.

In this Sin City, perhaps the only elusive commodity for the Chinese was power. Shanghai had been carved up into foreign concessions after China’s defeat in the Opium wars of the 1800s and the British, with their posh clubs and colonial attitude were by far the most powerful group in the city, followed closely by the French. The foreigners brought with them their own military, courts, police and even their own architecture. Insulated as they were, the Shanghailanders built up immunity to the poverty around them, ignoring all that they saw as ugly and squalid.

Enterprise ruled Shanghai, whether legitimate or not. In this city of 4 million, there were an estimated 100,000 prostitutes plying their trade from streetwalkers to courtesans. Gangs proliferated, mostly under the control of Big Ears Du and Pock Marked Huang who doubled as gang lords and police detectives. With their ties to the French officials, they supplied the concession with opium, ran the gambling houses and inflicted severe punishments on their enemies. One gruesome punishment involved cutting every tendon of the victim’s body, including the Achilles and the tongue.

With abductions a daily occurrence, home security was a priority for both foreign and Chinese magnates. One nationality had cornered the market on protection- the White Russians. Once well-to-do pillars of Old Russia, they found themselves exiled after the revolution. The men worked as guards or chauffeurs but many of the women ended up in the entertainment industry or prostitution. For both the Europeans and the Chinese, a White Russian mistress became a common accessory.

Among the foreigners, few cut a more arresting figure than cigar-smoking journalist Emily Hahn. She traveled with her pet gibbon perched on her shoulder, lived in a renovated bordello and had affairs with Shanghai’s most fascinating men - Chinese Poet Sinmay Zau and aristocrat Sir Victor Sassoon. An acknowledged playboy, Sir Victor had revitalized the family dynasty, which had its roots in the opium trade, by building the luxurious Cathay Hotel, where he hosted the city’s most lavish costume parties.

There were many classes of prostitutes - at the top were the ‘sing-song’ girls.

The party, however, was over when in 1937, Japan invaded China. By the end of the summer, the Chinese sections of the city had turned into a lawless badlands where abductions, torture and death became commonplace. The international settlements dispersed, with women and children sent home first. As many Shanghailanders said their last goodbyes, however, another group of refugees flooded into the city - European Jews, escaping Hitler to one of the only places in the world still open to them.

The Shanghai that had flourished in this uneasy mix of Chinese and foreigners, of corruption and religious rectitude, of poets and revolutionaries was coming to an end. But it left an indelible mark: for the Chinese, Shanghai’s creative energy and political ferment was a crucible of change; for the Shanghailanders, the city became the stuff of legend.

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* * * * *

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

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Five

Obscene Losses
by Claire Hoffman, Portfolio Magazine (November 2007 Issue)

DVD sales are in free fall. Audiences are flocking to pornographic knockoffs of YouTube, especially a secretive site called YouPorn. And the amateurs are taking over. What’s happening to the adult-entertainment industry is exactly what’s happening to its Hollywood counterpart—only worse.

On Friday, May 18, Steve Hirsch, founder of Vivid Entertainment Group, the world’s largest producer of adult videos, was expecting a mysterious visitor. But Stephen Paul Jones was late. When Jones, an unknown figure in the pornography world, finally arrived in the all-white reception area of Vivid’s Los Angeles offices at 2 p.m., he was apologetic. His private plane had broken down, he explained, and he was forced to fly commercial. Hirsch, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, found that excuse a little slick. But he was eager to speak with Jones, so he let it slide and introduced him to two Vivid colleagues. When the four men sat down in the company’s conference room, Jones got right to the point: He wanted Vivid to buy his website, YouPorn.com.

As its name suggests, YouPorn lets users upload and watch a virtually unlimited selection of hardcore sex videos for free. The user-generated clips on YouPorn—like those on YouTube, the site it mimics—range from the grainiest amateur footage to the slickest professional product. Also, like YouTube, the site has far more traffic than income. Just nine months after going live, in September 2006, YouPorn was on pace to log about 15 million unique visitors in May, Jones told the Vivid executives, and its audience was growing at a rate of 37.5 percent a month. Today, YouPorn is the No. 1 adult site in the world; Vivid.com, a pay site, is ranked 5,061. According to Alexa, a website-ranking company, YouPorn’s overall rank is higher than CNN.com (84), About.com (114), and Weather.com (195). (Those numbers are averages for the three-month period from mid-June to mid-September.)

Blond, barrel-chested, and wearing a sport coat, Jones oozed Silicon Valley confidence. According to Hirsch, he mentioned his Stanford M.B.A. repeatedly. He offered reams of documents and audience data, emphasizing YouPorn’s global reach. (Only 12 percent of the site’s traffic comes from the U.S., he said.) Jones told the men that he and one other executive, a young Malaysian man living in Australia, were the owners of YouPorn, and he stressed that with the site’s traffic, its opportunities were manifold: dating, gaming, mobile content, pay-per-view, webcams (“already very popular in China”), and more. He shared his vision of turning YouPorn into a “very cool brand, perhaps the Virgin of adult entertainment.” As Jones rambled on, Hirsch and his executives traded raised eyebrows. Malaysia?

Still, they were intrigued by YouPorn—and more than a little intimidated by its size. In recent years, competition from the internet had cut deep into the porn studio’s revenues. DVD sales, once Vivid’s financial bedrock, were down almost 50 percent since 2004, and the proliferation of cheap Web-based videos was stealing market share from the company, which specializes in high-end sex films. Vivid and its top rivals—Wicked Pictures, Evil Angel, Digital Playground, Red Light District, Penthouse Media Group, and Hustler, to name a few—had lately been getting an unwanted glimpse of the overnight crisis that the file-sharing revolution brought to the music industry and Craigslist brought to newspaper classified ads.

The meeting lasted an hour. As Hirsch listened to Jones’ pitch, he considered the risks of acquiring YouPorn. Hirsch had been in the adult-entertainment business long enough to be mindful of its legal pitfalls, and that was a chief concern. How do you verify the age of the participants in these thousands of sex videos—or, for that matter, the age of the audience?

For the time being, Hirsch put those questions aside and focused on the business challenge: How, exactly, would you monetize this site? All the features were free, and, as Jones admitted, the advertising revenue was meager—about $120,000 a month. Jones said he wasn’t too interested in figuring that out himself. He planned to grow the audience as large as possible and then “exit” to an established company with the resources and know-how to parlay the traffic into revenue. Not that he’s expecting the $1.65 billion Google paid for YouTube or even the $580 million Rupert Murdoch coughed up for MySpace. Jones told Hirsch he’d be willing to part with YouPorn for $20 million. Hirsch said he’d be in touch.

“It doesn’t make any sense!” Hirsch tells me a month later. It’s a hazy afternoon in June, and he is sitting behind his oak-slab desk, his eyes flickering between a pair of flat-screen monitors, one tuned to Bloomberg News and the other showing a YouPorn clip featuring a gaggle of naked women and an oxygen mask. “They’re giving porn away. You can’t make money on this.”

A compact, well-exercised man of 46, Hirsch is one of the biggest names in the $12 billion adult-entertainment business. The very picture of a respectable, down-to-earth smut peddler, he lives with his wife and two young children in a gated community in a quiet suburb in California’s San Fernando Valley, the industry’s global capital. He’s proudly sober, eschewing the rollicking parties of the sex business for quiet passions, such as his prehistoric-amber collection.

Hirsch’s life in the industry started early. In 1970s Cleveland, his father left a career as a stockbroker, says Hirsch, to sell stag films for Reuben Sturman, the porn pioneer who eventually went to jail for tax evasion. Hirsch went to work for Sturman during high school, and Sturman nurtured the young man into a sort of porn prodigy. In 1984, when Hirsch was 23, he co-founded Vivid with the then-novel idea of signing actresses to exclusive contracts and marketing them like Old Hollywood stars. He was just in time for the dawn of the VCR, and Vivid grew quickly. It has been the largest producer of adult videos in the world for more than a decade now, in part because Hirsch borrowed heavily from the Hollywood studios he can see from his office window: expensive sets, big names (most famously Jenna Jameson), and slick packaging. By porn-industry standards, his films are expensive. He says they typically cost $50,000 to $300,000 to produce and $20,000 to market and distribute; they sell for about $25 on DVD. The company makes approximately 60 movies a year and posts roughly $100 million in annual revenue.

But lately, success hasn’t come easily for Vivid and its upmarket rivals. Three years ago, 80 percent of Vivid’s income came from DVD sales. Today, Hirsch puts that number at about 30 percent, with the rest coming from a fragmented range of sources: subscriptions to Vivid.com, pay-per-view TV, internet video-on-demand, merchandising, and mobile-phone deals. Domestic DVD sales are down 35 percent this year alone. His revenue is flat, he says, but that’s mainly because he’s been cutting costs. Within five years, he claims, DVD sales will be close to zero.

Vivid’s situation is grim but not unusual. DVD woes plague the entire Valley, from multimillion-dollar corporate operations to backroom bottom-feeders: Total sales fell 11 percent in 2006, to an estimated $3.8 billion, according to Adult Video News, the industry’s leading trade publication. Hirsch’s company shares the high end of the market with about 20 other studios that each claim more than $20 million in annual revenues. Outside of those are at least 100 small producers who bring in $500,000 to $5 million a year, estimates Paul Fishbein, president of Adult Video News. These companies shoot on shoestring budgets of $10,000 or less (sometimes much less) per film. “Those rinky-dink companies are struggling to get 1,000 to 1,200 DVDs out at $8 to $10 wholesale,” says Fishbein. “That barely pays for the cost of a cheap production.”

And the decline of DVDs will only accelerate. “You’re going to see a precipitous drop now,” Fishbein says. “Hopefully for producers here in the Valley, that will be offset by internet sales. Hopefully.”

As the portion of Americans with broadband connections (47 percent and growing) continues to rise, consumers are becoming increasingly addicted to the immediate gratification of Web video. But suddenly, there’s a chasm between porn consumption and porn sales. While sales of internet-based adult entertainment grew 14 percent last year, to $2.8 billion, that figure would be substantially higher if there wasn’t so much free competition, especially from the user-generated adult sites.

So far, the Valley’s biggest players have tried to combat this by offering subscription sites, which give users access to a deep trove of content in exchange for a membership fee, usually paid monthly. Vivid.com is one of the more successful. With about 40,000 subscribers paying $30 a month, Hirsch says, the site generates roughly $15 million in annual revenue. Ali Joone, the founder of Digital Playground, charges the same monthly rate and says he has a comparable number of subscribers.

Much like the TV networks, movie studios, and record labels on the other side of town, porn companies are also engaged in a frantic attempt to diversify their offerings, filleting their films into smaller pieces that can be easily sold via an ever-shifting variety of digital distribution channels. From the pay-by-the-minute model on video-on-demand sites such as Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network and Hotmovies.com, to the four- to six-minute clips edited for mobile devices, the industry is looking to take the 90-minute sex videos from its old business strategy and carve them into bite-size moneymakers.

But for many companies, the sum of these new revenue streams doesn’t even come close to offsetting the decline in DVD sales. What’s happening in porn right now is directly analogous to what’s happening to the music industry—CD sales are down 16 percent since 2005, according to Nielsen SoundScan—but worse.

“What you’re losing in the DVD market, you’re not making up on the paid internet side,” says Fishbein. “Instead of 99 cents a song on iTunes, these guys are doing 10 cents a minute for porn.”

The irony is that Hirsch and his ilk have always been the first to experiment with—and profit from—new technologies. The revolution began with VHS, which moved porn out of the theater and into the home. This made watching pornography private, an advance that created millions of new customers overnight. But to buy the stuff, you still had to venture out to the store, and who knew who you might run into?

The Web, in its early days, solved this problem. Few industries, if any, figured out e-commerce faster than the adult-entertainment business, and online DVD sales soared as a result. But Web 2.0, the catchall term for the crush of user-driven startups that have emerged in the past few years, has left the porn industry’s biggest players scrambling to keep up. For the first time, technology is hurting Big Porn. “Everyone was excited because they thought the internet was going to affect our business in a positive way, and it’s been the opposite,” says David Joseph, the founder of Red Light District. “It’s been a little scary.”

“Instilling the most fear are YouPorn and its closest competitors, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network’s PornoTube and Megarotic, which draws in users with a limited layer of free videos, then tries to sell premium memberships that offer more content and faster video streaming.

These sites didn’t invent free porn; they just made it exponentially easier to access. Of the three, YouPorn most closely resembles YouTube, with its stripped-down interface, unobtrusive advertising, and—for now, at least—content that’s 100 percent free. PornoTube and Megarotic feel more commercial, with plenty of links to the for-pay features. But the free parts of all three sites are basically the same. Some videos are lengthy (30 minutes or more), but most are closer to three minutes. Some are bona fide amateur videos, shot and uploaded by exhibitionists, but most are clips of copyrighted professional pornography. Of these, some are scenes from high-end features, but a larger percentage are so-called gonzo clips—unscripted, rough-cut footage in which the camera operator often jumps into the action. Some clips are posted by the porn companies themselves, as trailers for the full-length versions available on their own sites, but most are uploaded by users from their own collections. Some are gay, some are straight.

In other words, there’s something for everyone—and the sites are ridiculously easy to use. You don’t even have to log in to watch videos, much less pay. (You’re simply required to say you’re 18 or older.) And the sites can’t prevent users from uploading proprietary material produced by the major porn studios. All of which is why Hirsch and his counterparts in the Valley are at least as nervous as the Viacom executives who have filed a $1 billion copyright suit against Google, YouTube’s owner.

But for now at least, there’s no significant push to shut down the sites. Although producers in the Valley have largely resigned themselves to the fact that the copyright genie is out of the bottle, they’re putting user-generated sites on notice about former moneymaking features that are now posted for all to enjoy. A few major porn companies say they regularly monitor postings on PornoTube and YouPorn and email requests to take down copyrighted material. In July, Red Light District sent a cease-and-desist letter to YouPorn after a user posted “One Night in Paris,” the “official” full-length version of the Paris Hilton sex tape, which Red Light distributes. YouPorn removed the video.

By their very nature, though, user-generated sites might be vulnerable to other kinds of legal problems. If anonymous users post child pornography, it could be difficult for site owners to verify the ages of the performers. While these sites generally require viewers to confirm that they’re over 18, “my 11-year-old could go on at any point,” says Red Light’s Joseph. Earlier this fall, a German internet provider temporarily blocked access to YouPorn because the site didn’t comply with German age-verification laws. Up to now, U.S. user-generated porn sites have not been prosecuted.

There’s no sign on the door of PornoTube’s headquarters, in Charlotte, North Carolina. The building is concealed in a low-slung office park on the outskirts of the city, next to the railroad tracks and an aluminum factory.

Inside the air-freshened warren of bunkerlike offices, Suzann Knudsen, a PornoTube marketing executive who moonlights as a D.J. for sex-fetish parties, shows me around. She explains that despite PornoTube’s 15 million monthly visitors, the website’s parent company, Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, views it as a marketing expense, not a profit center. The site was originally conceived as a feature within Xpeeps.com, A.E.B.N.’s X-rated social-networking site, to provide a way for members to trade sex videos. But soon after it launched, in July 2006, PornoTube had dwarfed Xpeeps’ traffic, and A.E.B.N. decided to turn it into a separate site. The company has tried to monetize it by striking profit-sharing deals with two dozen porn studios to create promotional channels that funnel traffic toward the studios’ own sites. A.E.B.N. won’t disclose the value of these agreements or the small amount of advertising revenue generated by the ads placed on page margins, saying only that PornoTube breaks even. It’s worth it, Knudsen says, for the traffic.

But when traffic means tens of millions of people sharing porn, there are some unique business challenges. Daphne Reeder, a customer-service rep for PornoTube, spends her days trolling the site, investigating clips that have been reported as problematic. On the July morning when I visit, she had more than 500 videos to review, most of which had been red-flagged because their descriptions included words such as little boys, force, or rape. She says the community polices itself, with users and porn companies emailing to alert the site about child pornography, copyrights being violated, ex-boyfriends uploading once-private videos, and other issues.

Adult-video producers are legally required to verify that performers are of legal age. The 2257’s, as the verifications are known (after the corresponding section of the federal code), are a costly hassle to the porn studios. Vivid, for example, has an employee whose sole responsibility is 2257 compliance, and Vivid makes only 60 films a year. Reeder is one of 10 people working on compliance at PornoTube, which has about 210,000 videos. Every clip on the site is supposed to contain a link to “2257 info” documenting the age and identity of the performers, but many of the clips (mostly the genuine amateur videos) include no such information. In these cases, PornoTube attempts to perform its own verification. If it can’t, the clip is removed.

One of the items on Reeder’s to-do list is an age-verification complaint about a video called “Adriana Lima Blowjob.” It has no 2257 info. So Reeder cuts and pastes the name into a search engine and clicks through a few sites that say Adriana Lima was born in 1981. Reeder is about to move on when I point out to her that Adriana Lima is in fact a fairly well-known model and that the woman in the video is probably not she. Is PornoTube concerned about that? Knudsen, standing behind Reeder, tells her to take it down quickly. “We do the best we can,” Knudsen tells me repeatedly.

So how are big adult-video companies coping with the borderless erotic geography of the Web? By creating ever more expensive product. Like their counterparts on the other side of the Santa Monica Mountains, the studios realize they can’t fight amateur with amateur. Instead, Penthouse, Vivid, and others are more committed than ever to their version of the Hollywood model—big budgets, big names, big marketing, and content distributed across a range of platforms.

In a hilltop home in an affluent corner of the Valley, Kelly Holland, the 47-year-old head of production for Penthouse Media Group, stands behind a camera monitor. She wears crisp khakis and well-worn white sneakers, and her lens is trained on a performer named Dee Lilly, who is wearing a beaded black corset. Lilly sways lazily to soft rock. Curtains billow in a fan-generated breeze.

“Beautiful, baby girl, it looks gorgeous,” Holland encourages, as she watches on the monitor 10 feet away. Sitting beside her, a beefy lighting guy stares blankly out the window at the dirty swimming pool. The rest of the heavily tattooed crew—more than two dozen—wander in and out of the kitchen, where the caterer has laid out platters of just-cooked salmon, rice, and vegetables. James Sullivan, the chief operating officer of Penthouse, is visiting from New York. He stands behind Holland, studiously casual in dress shoes and a T-shirt. As the scene wraps up, Holland asks the actress to leave the frame. When Lilly stumbles, tripping over her towering plastic stilettos, Holland sweetly reassures her. “You’re so cute,” she says, “you don’t have to know how to walk.”

Holland’s plan for the day is to shoot two features, each cut in a hardcore and softcore edition, plus softcore and topless content for the Web and on-demand cable. Time is tight, and the director hustles the performers around the set in order to get the most footage for their day rate: usually about $800 to $1,500 for women, less for men. Today’s shoot is a conscious counterjab at the cheaply produced, handheld hardcore videos that flood user-generated adult sites and chip away at the big studios’ bottom line. The total budget for three days of filming is about $110,000.

As Holland shoots Lilly for the softcore episode, designed to be downloaded onto a cell phone, another director is shooting a feature in a nearby room. Titled The Looking Glass, it’s the story of a young suburban couple who buy their first home, only to discover that one of its sliding glass doors is a portal into an alternate universe where people have nonstop sex. In a bedroom done up like a Pottery Barn showroom, performers Alec Knight and Carolyn Reese are staging a crucial scene. With blond extensions and a thick mask of makeup, Reese is attractive in a girl-next-door-in-L.A. kind of way. Knight is equally average, for the most part. As they go through the motions, the cameraman urges them to act lovingly toward each other. No matter what position they’re in, they find a way to gaze into each other’s eyes.

Holland, a veteran in the growing ranks of female directors, believes women—and the men who want to watch with them—are customers she won’t lose to online viewing. “Women are more reliable, they are more loyal, and they spend more money,” she says. “For women, you have to make sure the girls have great manicures, great pedicures, and great lingerie—put them in La Perla or Agent Provocateur—and you can serve up some pretty explicit material.” Holland cites HBO’s new sexually explicit miniseries Tell Me You Love Me as evidence of just how mainstream pornography has become.

“It’s not just a man thing,” agrees Samantha Lewis, the C.E.O. of Digital Playground, who estimates that 45 percent of her Web-based sales (which include site subscriptions and DVDs sold online) are to women. “As each year goes by, we’re realizing, Oh my goodness. The percentages are climbing.”

The porn industry has long wanted to expand its female audience, but some producers concede it will take more than fancy sets, gauzy lighting, and a story line. “Women are just as unpredictable as men, only more so,” says Phil Harvey, the 69-year-old Harvard grad who 35 years ago founded Adam & Eve, a $90 million adult-film producer and sex-toy retailer based in Hillsborough, North Carolina. Harvey is a pioneer in marketing toys and videos to women and couples, having instituted a “sex positive” approach to pornographic retailing in the late 1980s. But as important as women are to Adam & Eve’s business—Harvey says 40 percent of its Web customers are female—he cautions against overgeneralizing. “At least five times we’ve tried to produce a women’s catalog, with cuddling and coupling,” he says drily. “It didn’t work.”

What has worked, Harvey says, is porn that is best appreciated on the big screen—or at least a television. Last year, Adam & Eve teamed with Digital Playground to make Pirates, an adult take on Disney’s billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Shot in high definition, set to an original score, and driven by a plot involving Incan magic and sea battles, Pirates was billed by its producers as an “electrifying and swashbuckling sex tale.” Digital Playground’s Joone says the film cost the two studios more than $3 million to make—one of the biggest budgets ever for an adult video—and the resulting three-disc set initially sold for $50. Harvey credits Pirates, Adam & Eve’s bestselling film of all time, with helping to pull the company out of a five-year growth slump that he attributes directly to intense competition from free porn on the Web.

YouPorn—the site Stephen Paul Jones tried to sell to Vivid in May—is a strange and mysterious business. There are no links to founders’ biographies, no contact information, no hint of who is behind this booming Web entity. Its domain is registered using a service designed to mask the registrant’s identity.

Back in July, I sent an email to the lone address on the site. It went unanswered. I asked around and, after a series of dead ends, was told that a Stanford alumnus—an outsider to the industry—had started YouPorn. A porn producer gave me the man’s cell-phone number. I left a voicemail. Jones called back a few hours later.

“It’s a brave new world, man. People are crazy. What can I say?” he said, during a freewheeling two-hour conversation that swung wildly from the subjugation of female porn stars to federal regulations governing obscenity to the existence (or nonexistence) of God. Jones insisted that the site was not intended to make money. “It’s not a profit center; it’s more of an experiment. If you wanted to be philosophical about it, it’s kind of an exploitative industry, and this is sort of the opposite.”

Jones said that “Stephen Paul Jones” was an alias. He said that he was 27 years old and worked at a Newport Beach, California, hedge fund, where he managed billions in assets. He used the alias, he said, because his bosses would fire him if they knew about YouPorn. He said he wasn’t the owner of the site anyway. He said it was founded by “a German” who wrote the underlying software and now runs the site’s day-to-day operations.

Still, Jones seemed proud of YouPorn. “People have been telling me that this site would die and the traffic would go away, and they’ve all been wrong,” he said. “When a new model enters the market and impacts other companies’ business by 15 percent of their revenue in a year, that’s historymaking.

“Porn is recession-proof,” he went on, “so if other companies’ sales are going down, there’s a reason. If the reason is the world saying ‘We like to blast ourselves over the internet,’ and the consumers of the world saying ‘We like the amateur stuff better,’ then that’s significant. You could call it a revolution.” He liked the sound of that. “Sure, why not?”

It turns out there is a Stanford alum named Stephen Paul Jones. But he’s fortyish, not 27, and he lives in South Lake Tahoe, California, not Newport Beach. In the past two decades, this Stephen Paul Jones seems to have had no connection to the adult-entertainment business. Public records show that he was involved in a handful of security companies. According to Stanford alumni records (he earned his M.B.A. last year), he enjoys skydiving, stunt piloting, and snowboarding.

Meanwhile, the man who says he’s 27 and uses Jones as an alias has stopped returning my calls. So I drive north to Lake Tahoe.

I knock on the door of a lodgelike three-story house with an enormous backyard. A blond, barrel-chested man answers, an entourage of children in tow. I tell him my name and ask to speak to Jones. “Wrong house,” he says, as his face goes hard. His wife asks what this is about. I say I am a reporter writing about an internet company. “Oh,” she says and gives him a look.

He hustles his family inside, grabs a pack of cigarettes, and comes back outside to yell at me. And from the minute he starts talking, I recognize his voice and his patterns of speech. This is the man I spoke to on the phone. This is the same Stephen Paul Jones.

Jones confirms this, apparently without meaning to, saying he knew during our phone conversation that I had an agenda because I told him that I didn’t like porn. (I told him no such thing.) He threatens to sue me, saying he has “Google’s lawyers.” Then he asks if we can talk somewhere farther away from his home. He drives his S.U.V. about a mile down the road, with me following. For the next 2½ hours, in a diatribe that is always convoluted and occasionally hostile, he keeps returning to one theme: his amazement at the sheer number of people who visit YouPorn every day. And he repeatedly insists that he is not the site’s owner.

But in his emails to Vivid executives, Jones had described himself as “the decisionmaker at YouPorn” and said that he and his Malaysian partner, Zach Hong, “own 100 percent of the company.” (Hong, when reached at his home in Australia, confirmed his involvement with YouPorn but declined to answer further questions.) In these emails, Jones sounded like a no-nonsense M.B.A. with an articulate, if familiar, vision for growing his Web 2.0 company. Among other things, he said he would follow “the Skype model” and cited a quote he attributed to one of Skype’s founders: “If we have 100 million users, and if just 1 percent of them give us $10 per month, we will have $120 million in revenue.”

Now, though, leaning against my car on a dark country road, Jones refuses to answer the most basic questions about the financial particulars of YouPorn or his plans for its future. As the conversation wears on, he sounds proud of the site one minute and worried about tarnishing his family’s reputation the next. After all, he says, he has five kids. He seems deeply conflicted about being in the sex business, much less a mastermind of the most popular adult site in the world.

Back in the Valley, Vivid’s Hirsch says that while he envies YouPorn’s traffic, he has no plans to buy the site, mainly because of the legal exposure associated with hosting user-generated pornography. But he also says that he can’t figure out how to make money through YouPorn and that it would be inconsistent with his strategy of focusing on high-end feature films. A.E.B.N. was also approached by Jones, says an executive there, and passed on YouPorn too.

According to several industry executives who say they would have heard otherwise, YouPorn hasn’t been sold. After our conversation near his home, Jones continued to deny that he owns the site.

As this issue went to press, YouPorn’s Alexa rank was 51—and rising.

* * * * *

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

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Four

Pornography: The Secret History Of Civilisation

Appelllate Judge Mike Pinsky, of DVD Verdict, urges you to check out this documentary he’s got hiding under his raincoat.

The Charge

“You cannot imagine a revolution without shocks."—Lasse Braun, European porn entrepreneur

The Case

I have offered a theory for years that every technological advance in communication since the invention of the printing press has been spread and made cheap enough for consumers thanks to pornography. Usually, people just look at me indulgently, nodding their heads as if they are simply humoring me. Even my students do this. Well, apparently I am not the only person who thought of this. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, the producers behind Party Monster and Inside Deep Throat, believe that such a theory is worth five hours of television time.

Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation—well, you see its thesis right in the title. Over the course of six episodes, this 1999 documentary series, created for Britain’s Channel Four, examines six turning points in the history of art and commerce and places pornography squarely at the center of each one.

Episode One: The Road to Ruin: The word pornography (which literally refers to writing for or about prostitutes) only appeared in English in 1857: the Victorians invented the genre as way of containing the improper by taxonomy. It was associated with addictive behavior, with pathology. It terrified the mainstream. When Pompeii was uncovered around this period, the Victorians discovered that the noble Romans liked sex—everything from paintings of couples both straight and gay in explicit couplings to a statue of the god Pan porking a goat. I expect the Victorians decided that this was what caused Vesuvius to erupt. One museum curator jokes that all good people of taste in ancient Pompeii apparently had to have sex pictures in their homes.

But the ancient Romans would have seen the Pompeian dirty pictures as a necessary part of public discourse. Fertility was the health of the nation. The satisfaction of desire was the marker of affluence. Queen Victoria’s assertion that women should not enjoy sex but should lie back and do it for the good of England would have puzzled Romans. For the Victorians, fertility and desire were markers of lower-class status. Poor people needed children and the distraction of sex; the rich could afford to live without them.

Episode Two: The Sacred and the Profane: The expansion of printing in the 17th and 18th centuries led to a censorship war. Again, class is the key. Even before the printing press, wealthy patrons could commission religious books with erotic images illuminated in the margins. One book we see even includes naughty pictures of the baby Jesus!

But the printing press made books cheaper and opened up a market for porn for the masses. The use of sexual imagery in the hands of the church and state is “not just telling you what to do with your body, but how to think,” according to one historian. Sex is used to draw attention, but also to warn you against sin. However, once the masses learn that sexual desire is permissible, social unrest against the authorities that have always controlled desire always results. The notorious Fanny Hill by John Cleland was as much a social satire in an age of Enlightenment political awareness as it was a dirty book. (You can find a free copy easily on the web and discover this for yourself.) Even the French Revolution was accompanied by often brutal satires (including the work of the Marquis de Sade) of the aristocracy fucking while Paris was falling apart.

Episode Three: The Mechanical Eye: The development of photography changed everything. Now caricature became specificity; representation became realism. Photography encouraged static poses (an effect of exposure time, so to speak). In order to convince authorities that the new medium was “artistic,” photographers shifted focus exclusively toward female nudity (earlier porn was more egalitarian by comparison). Of course, at first, all this was only for the wealthy who could afford those early daguerreotypes. Once reproducible photography brought prices down, once again the democratization of porn had social and political consequences.

It should be clear by this point that the consistent theme of Pornography is that class politics is the central factor in the development and dissemination of erotic material. Most discussions of pornography focus almost exclusively on gender issues. Bailey and Barbato are trying a different approach. Porn is celebrated as a form of resistance against authority. Throughout the documentary, there is little discussion of the typical criticisms against porn: sexual exploitation, criminal activity, psychological trauma. Of course, these arguments have been so well documented elsewhere. Perhaps Bailey and Barbato felt that the other side had its say for long enough.

On the down side, their documentary appears on DVD from Koch Vision with no subtitles or extra content. Jeez, guys, you came this far. How about some outtakes or even just a research bibliography? There is so much material to cover here that those with an actual scholarly interest in this stuff (like us popular culture professors) might want to follow up.

Episode Four: Twentieth Century Foxy: From the underground economy of stag films to peep show booths to the public celebration surrounding Deep Throat (check out Bailey and Barbato’s Inside Deep Throat for more on this) and the surreal Behind the Green Door. The early films were made for all-male, ritualized group gatherings ("stag parties"). The Hays Code (and later the MPAA) struggled to keep sex marginalized. The result was almost exactly what would later cause the rapid drop in prices for camcorders and webcams: people started making movies in their homes. The promise that porn would go mainstream fizzled.

Considering the prevalence of film clips in this episode, I suspect that it might be a good time to mention what you are already thinking: Pornography is pretty explicit for a made for television documentary. There is no actual penetration shown, but pretty much everything else is fair game. Female nudity is something that has almost become routine (and the documentary has theories as to why). But if too many penises give you the willies (I know, but I figured we needed to get that joke out of the way already), then you will not feel comfortable with this series. Pornography does not shy away from showing bodies and describing everything bodies do, right out in the open with good lighting. This is history, and the show treats every artifact with respect. Better still, the documentary does not try to go to the other extreme and dry the material into intellectual leather: tough and hard to chew. There are great stories and interesting historians who show us this material in a much livelier fashion than the usual abstracted talking heads.

Episode Five: Sex Lives on Videotape: Speaking of prominent experts, I spotted cultural critics Douglas Rushkoff and Camille Paglia (both of whom I have taught in popular culture courses) in this episode. And check out the cool clips from Cronenberg’s Videodrome. Anyway, this episode focuses on the shift toward interactivity through video tape, camcorders, and the turn toward amateur production. Some film lovers thought video was cold, inorganic, hard—but it was cheaper and faster. It took a few years (and the development of digital video) before it looked good, though. The porn industry expanded to massive proportions.

Back in Episode One of this series, a Cambridge professor points out that the Victorians were so “passionate about repressing” sexual desire that they couldn’t stop talking about sex. Is it possible that sex may become so omnipresent, so acceptable in all its forms, that it may just seep into the mainstream and become just another commercial enterprise? Just visit San Fernando’s “Porn Valley,” where dozens of production companies, distributors, and studios reside, and wonder if anybody in the neighborhood even pays attention.

Episode Six: Pornotopia: Or, you could just stay at home and play on the computer. The apotheosis of pornography has come in the digital age. Now, even as we leave the body behind for virtual experience, pornography has permeated our culture. It can be accessed anywhere at any time. It can go live; it is completely plastic and manipulable. Without borders, pornography slips under and around all efforts at censorship; no law can directly touch it. Everyone can participate. For Bailey and Barbato, the democratization of technology is complete. Everyone becomes connected, and getting plugged (and plugged in) becomes more than just the fulfillment of desire. It becomes an act of self-determination and resistance.

I am not sure I entirely buy Bailey and Barbato’s porno-political manifesto, but I am also not sure they entirely buy it either. There is a dry sense of humor about this entire series. There has to be. You cannot be a historian or cultural critic scrutinizing a museum full of erect phalluses or a cluttered and decidedly unerotic porn-movie set and not laugh. Authority figures have always viewed sexuality as a control issue, and pornography has long been a weapon in the satirist’s arsenal.

Bailey and Barbato’s documentary never tries to apologize for its content by distinguishing between “erotica” (which implies something artsy) and “pornography” (which implies something sordid). Sexual imagery of all sorts, whether intended to arouse, edify, inspire, or whatever, is all fair game. This avoids stuffiness. Literate and entertaining, Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation never displays its naughty bits for prurient reasons. In short, Pornography is fun, intelligent, and blessed with wisdom and wit. And that’s really sexy.

Scales of Justice
Judgment: 90

* * * * *

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

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Three

Listen as these artists shine.

This is an occasional feature focusing on musicians that will capture both your ear and your soul with their music and melodies.  And when you hear them, you’ll stop what you’re doing...and listen.

SomaFM offers 11 unique channels of listener-supported, commercial-free, underground/alternative radio broadcasting from San Francisco.  These choices are from Groove Salad, a nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves.

* * * * *
Ulrich Schnauss “Far Away Trains Passing By”

Alex Cortiz “Magnifico!”

* * * * *

B-Tribe “5”

The Higher Intelligence Agency “Colourform”

* * * * *

PhuturePrimitive “Sub Conscious”

Tosca “J.A.C.”

* * * * *

Global Communication “76:14”

Man Ray “Volume 3”

* * * * *

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

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-Two

Dial Tones
Enamelists of the Swiss watch industry grope for a future.
by James Malcolmson, for Arts & Antiques Magazine

In some ways Dominique Baron seems much like the other artisans who practice the traditional craft of enameling in the French-Swiss Jura Mountains. Working from her home atelier in the town of Les Rousses just over the border in France, Baron is the master of a variety of techniques that she plies in the service of the internationally known Swiss watch brands who commission elaborate enamel dials. During the 18th and 19th centuries, such watches were important status symbols for aristocrats in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

Van Cleef & Arpels’ “Lady Arpels Centenary” watch presents a simplified, modernized enamel painting technique on a rotating disk.

Today, Baron and a handful of fellow craftspeople are the last of a once-flourishing profession that has dwindled due to changing tastes and its own failure to train young apprentices. But unlike her peers, many of whom are elderly and in the twilight of their careers, Baron is in her mid-30s and something of a revolutionary in enameling circles. In cooperation with some of her watchmaking clients she is changing time-honored techniques to make them more responsive to modern tastes and, she hopes, to enable them to survive for years to come.

All the traditional enamel techniques (among which are grand feu, cloisonné and miniature painting) share the same basic properties. Powdered glass tinged with metal oxides for color is applied to a surface—in this case a watch dial—and then fired in an oven until it emerges with an intense translucence. The process is repeated many times to give depth and form an image, but doing so carries risk. Any given firing may crack the piece and ruin it altogether.

Grand feu uses extremely high temperature to achieve colors of exceptional color and quality. The pictorial art of cloisonné, on the other hand, uses a thin gold wire to create cells in which different enamel colors are laid, creating a mosaic-like effect. The most exalted art of enamel is undoubtedly miniature painting, which shares many characteristics with both oil and watercolor painting. Color is applied with a brush, but it must be applied in a strict order and riskily fired many times during the process.

Miniature painting on watches evolved from miniature enamel portraiture during the 17th century, especially in France. One early master, Jean Petitot, became famous for adapting vivid English watercolor techniques to enamels, working on both sides of the Channel. The genre soon became a highly prestigious form of vanity art throughout the courts of Europe, but as many of the artisans were Protestants, a large contingent sought refuge in Geneva after the religious persecutions of Louis XIV. There, they turned their attention to watches, perfecting their skills on beautiful enameled timepieces decades before watchmakers were able to achieve consistent accuracy. Their work is the overlooked basis for Switzerland’s reputation as a center for luxury watchmaking.

Miniature painting at the scale of a watch dial takes precision.

Considering their place in history, it is not surprising that the old enamel techniques are held in such reverence in Switzerland, even as they have faded into commercial irrelevance. Today, miniature painting in the Geneva style, the most traditional and prestigious form of the craft, is practiced by a small handful of mostly aging artists who may spend weeks or months on a single dial. They hoard their pigments, many of which were made by companies that closed decades ago. Customers can wait years for watches from companies like Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin, which take commissions mostly for reproductions of well-known 19th-century Romanticist and realist paintings. The wait is so long because of the manpower shortage; few young artists get the chance to learn the techniques. Baron experienced this first-hand. “The masters are reluctant to share their skills,” she says. “Sometimes they take apprentices but don’t show them everything.”

Baron herself managed to become a master of miniature painting, but she had to learn circuitously, in the process working with some of the companies that had begun to break with the enamel tradition. After graduating from art school, she accepted a job at Jaeger-LeCoultre under enamelist Miklos Merczel, who established his own style in the 1980s. Merczel is best known for his Art Nouveau-style reproductions of the work of Alphonse Mucha, which are often placed on the case back of Jaeger-LeCoultre’s Reverso model. These pieces feature brilliant coloration and fine detail, but are not true Geneva enamel, as they receive only half as many firings as in the traditional technique.

After leaving Jaeger-LeCoultre, Baron worked for a time at Roger Dubuis in Geneva, but her work on various subjects, some of it erotic, very much reflected the personal vision of the firm’s president, Carlos Diaz. Baron really hit her artistic stride when she took a position at the boutique Geneva watchmaker Delaneau, whose president, Christina Thevanez, is as obsessed with preserving traditional enamel techniques as she is with redefining women’s watch designs. Under Thevanez’s guidance, Baron was able to flourish as an artist capable of capturing a fine level of detail and expression, from the subtle coloration of a butterfly’s wings to the whiskers on a tiger.

While she still performs Geneva-style enamel for Delaneau, much of Baron’s time is now spent as a consultant for Stern Creations, a dial-making company through which she is bringing enamel to new audiences.

Dial design from Jaeger-LeCoultre’s latest enamel series, Reverso à Éclipses.

One of its clients, Van Cleef & Arpels, released some of this work last year in its “Lady Arpels Centenary” watch, which features a hand-painted enamel disk, only a part of which can be seen as it slowly rotates once per year. These pieces, like the work of Merczel, are fired less than the Geneva process, and are abstract, an area the traditional painters rarely touch.

Perfectionists like Thevanez, whose company, Delaneau, manufactures pieces in much more limited series, are quick to point out the difference. “True Geneva enamel should be perfectly smooth on the surface with no rough spots,” she explains. “You can easily tell the difference if you look carefully.”

Pieces like the “Lady Arpels Centenary” and its newer variants can made in much larger series at a more affordable price, because they do not require so many firings and can be executed by Stern Creation’s larger staff of young artisans. They have also achieved a level of commercial success that still eludes traditional pieces, particularly in the United States, where large series of branded pieces can be marketed much more easily than exquisite one-of-a-kind creations. In so doing, they offer the possibility of further life for all the techniques and for future enamelists to learn the craft.

“It was so hard for me to learn what I know,” Baron says. “It has been wonderful to be able to pass it along.”

James Malcolmson has been writing about the Swiss watch industry for more than 10 years. A frequent contributor to Robb Report, Chicago Social, Angeleno, Celebrated Living and several others, he visits the factories and workshops in Switzerland several times annually.

* * * * *
Luxury Erotic Watches For Just Over $100k
From TrendHunter

They say you reach the classification of ‘Super Rich’ when you earn more interest that you can spend.  I think you reach that point when spend over $100k on an erotic watch.

However, if you have the spare cash flow, why search for free porn on the net when you can buy a $160,000 watch with customized porn?  Blancpain, an extremely high end watch company, has introduced its new line of Erotica Watches.  Flip the classic watch over, and on the back, you’ll see a mechanically animated source of erotica.

“The two-sided nature of the erotic watch is aptly illustrated by Blancpain, one of the most stolidly conservative Swiss manufacturers and also one of the leading makers of the traditional erotic automaton watch. For $160,000, you can purchase a classic Villeret minute repeater with your choice of erotic scene underneath the sapphire caseback.” – Robb Report

If this is your style, but you don’t have the $160,000, you may want to check out Erotica Watches, who offers an array of automation watches for those of you looking to spend closer to $150. 

* * * * *

Erotic Watches through Time
From WatchLuxus

A (very) short history of erotica is achieveable by an attentive look at the collections of luxury watch brands.

In tribute to the couple that started it all: Corum’s Golden Bridge Adam et Eve.  The handpainted miniature images required 36 hours of painting artistry and 15 hours to dry in various stages in an oven.  Great time was involved to also delicately engrave the bridges and mainplate by hand, then expertly assemble some 137 components and encase them within four specially shaped and cut sapphire crystals.  In the words of Corum: ‘Such a beautiful creation could only be a labour of love’.

Next, the period of Romanticism when greater importance was given to the emotions and the imagination.  Depicted with Angular Momentum’s ‘Eglomise Romanticism’; sapphire crystal reverse painted by an artist.  In the words of Angular Momentum: ‘A perfect fusion of elegance and technology, Angular Momentum watches catch the spirit of the time’.

Finally, Fortis Art Editions - a collection of watches designed by contemporary artists which ‘set different standards in the watch industry’.  Pictured is a piece from the Charles Wilp collection which represents Wilps’ new strategy of product-advertising: sexy American Pin-Up-Girls from the American artist Mel Ramos and respectable brands.

* * * * *

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

Monday, October 22, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty-One

Concubine culture brings trouble for China’s bosses
By Jonathan Watts in Beijing, The Guardian, with additional reporting by Chen Shi and Huang Lisha

· Eleven mistresses unite to denounce corrupt cadre
· Post-Mao era sees revival of ‘second wives’ tradition

China’s concubines have struck again. A corrupt senior official in Shaanxi province has been brought down by his 11 mistresses, according to reports in the state media yesterday.

Pang Jiayu, the former deputy head of the provincial political advisory body, has been sacked and expelled from the Communist party after his former girlfriends exposed him, the People’s Daily said.

As at least the fourth cadre to lose his job in the past year as a result of accusations from “second wives”, Pang’s case has prompted a flurry of reports in the domestic media about the resurgence of China’s ancient concubine culture among corrupt officials.

According to one recent survey, 90% of the senior officials convicted of serious corruption in the past five years kept mistresses. In many cases, they are accused of abusing their positions to make enough money to shower their lovers with gifts.

It is hard to separate the salacious stories from political point scoring, but when a victim falls from grace, the accusations in the local media fly thick and fast.

Mr Pang, 63, was the Communist party chief of Baoji city. His position gave him the power to decide the fate of his subordinates and the awarding of local development contracts.

According to the People’s Daily, he persuaded many of the most attractive and young wives of his employees to become his mistresses in return for “big money projects” for their husbands.

Local media said Mr Pang earned the nickname “mayor zipper” in Baoji and city officials had a saying among themselves: “No sacrifice [of one’s wife], no gain.”

In one case, Mr Pang’s wife and mistresses worked together on a water-diversion project that collapsed less than a year after the construction was finished, the paper said.

His fate was sealed when several of his mistresses’ husbands were sentenced to death for bribery. The wives joined forces to denounce Pang, who would otherwise probably have escaped censure because of his political connections.

With no independent judiciary, no free media and no electoral accountability, China is suffering a plague of corruption. The country’s leaders have repeatedly warned that it is one of the biggest threats to the legitimacy of the Communist party.

When cases do come to light, the punishment is swift and often deadly. The party’s discipline inspection commission said in July that Mr Pang would be dealt with severely.

“Pang did not expect that he would be brought down by his own 11 mistresses,” the People’s Daily said in a report on its website. “What awaits Pang Jiayu is severe punishment.”

In imperial times, a large number of concubines was a symbol of power. The practice is thought to have been stamped out after the Communists took power in 1949, although Mao had many lovers, according to his physician. But in recent years the keeping of mistresses and ernai - second wives - appears to have been making a comeback.

This week, Duan Yihe, former Communist party boss of Jinan city in Shandong province, was executed for blowing up his mistress in collusion with a local police officer. Duan was said to have been driven to murder because his lover constantly asked him for money and would not leave him despite his repeated attempts to break up since 1999.

The highest-ranking official to fall from grace in the past year, Chen Liangyu - the former party chief of Shanghai - is to feel the wrath of China’s justice system after accusations of keeping two mistresses and embezzling at least 3.5bn yuan (£230m).

Corruption and concubines go hand in hand, according to a report in the Beijing News this week, which found that 14 of the 16 most senior officials found guilty of gambling, illegal property deals and money laundering also had mistresses.

This has become a target of black humour among the local media, internet community and even Chinese expatriates. According to a widely circulated report on the Rednet website, there are five motives for officials to keep a mistress: using their power to play with women, showing off, addiction to sex, perversion and a desire to have more children.

Mistress’s story

‘I do it because I feel desperate and alone’

There are thought to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of ernai - second wives - in China, but few have spoken out as publicly about their experiences as Azhen. The 24-year-old from Jiangsu province has a blog about her life as a concubine in Shenzhen, a city close to Hong Kong.

For three years, she says, she has been the mistress of a man who is old enough to be her father. “Society calls us ernai. It is not a job that any of us would choose to do when we were children. Some do it for money. Others for love. Many, like me, do it because they have suffered some cruelty and feel desperate and alone,” she told the Guardian.

Azhen says she was neglected as a child because her father abandoned her mother while she was still in the womb. In her first job at a factory, she was raped by one of the bosses.

“No woman wants to demean themselves, but there is no social safety net. I have suffered psychological wounds from my experiences. It has changed my views. I don’t expect my life to be satisfying any more, it is enough if it is peaceful.”

She met her current patron while working as a cleaner in a sauna. Although reluctant to go into details about how much money he gives her and what kind of apartment he pays for, she says her life has improved.

“He comes to see me if he has time. If he is busy, he calls me. As long as he is nice to me, he doesn’t need to seduce me with too much money because I am not a material woman.”

* * * * *

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

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Thirty

The Case of the ‘Power Jewels’
By J.J. Martin, Fashion Wire Daily Milan

“It’s a portable tabernacle of love!” exclaims Betony Vernon just before unveiling the “Boudoir Box” in her lilac studio in the historic residence of the famous Italian decorative artist Piero Fornasetti. The Anglo-American jewelry designer, a towering Botticelli beauty with tumbling fiery red hair and skin the color of dusty pearls, dramatically moves toward the giant leather box before her and cautiously unlocks its sterling silver hinges and heart clasp.

“I’m dealing with taboos here,” she warns FWD, “and lots of people are either offended or break into giggles.”

With that cryptic introduction, the enormous black leather doors swing open to reveal a stunning assembly of shocking, yet exquisitely beautiful, pieces of handmade jewelry. Shocking only because all of the sterling silver baubles, which resemble valuables dug up in a Victorian boudoir, actually lead double lives as luxury sex toys.

“These are what I call power jewels,” says the designer, fingering the impressive line-up of edgy rings, necklaces, bracelets and piercings, which are hung like weapons in an arsenal lined in luscious kid goat skin.

Vernon, a former model and accomplished goldsmith with 17 years of jewelry making experience, is herself a radiating female force as she provides FWD with a PG-13 demonstration of each of the custom-made “sado-chic” pieces.

“This whip makes a great necklace,” she says, showing how a heavy sterling silver handle fits perfectly around the curve of her neck and the long leather strips are clasped in front to form a chic long trail down the chest.

“Feel the effect of these rings,” she urges, while drawing sophisticated rings with large silver balls or a horizontal row of pearls across the arm. The sensation is outstanding, but using the tool on this part of the body seems a bit like test-driving a Ferrari in a cramped parking lot.

“Believe me, in the bedroom, your boyfriend will be thrilled with this,” she says with a playful wink.

Just as she does in her private showings to individual clients, Vernon dives in wholeheartedly, and unabashedly, into shocking details of the form, action and resulting body function of each of her seemingly innocent jewels. Without going into explicit details, let’s just say some of these jewels are going places no precious stone has ever gone before.

“I’m really quite naughty,” she says unapologetically.

A non-plussed Barnaba Fornasetti, Vernon’s companion for the last 10 years, peeks in to the proceedings taking place in his late father’s famous studio and smiles at what seems like typical fervor from his redheaded lioness.

“Have you seen what’s offered in those awful, tacky sex shops?!!” Vernon exclaims with horror, jumping into an explicit description of the kind of purple plastic wares that she says are a total turn-off. “The world needs me!”

Tom Ford may have just come out with his own spanker sex toy for Gucci, but Vernon has mined the upscale erotic territory since 1996 when she offered pearl studded gold handcuffs, then later whip necklaces, alongside her more straight-laced designs for her established jewelry line entitled BV by Betony Vernon.

Needless to say, many American retailers turned a prudish nose away from the jewel tools. But Vernon pushed on with her vision, conducting extensive research into sexology and historical sex objects over the years while developing a specialized collection called “Paradise Found.” The culmination is her trademark Boudoir Box, a shrine of light bondage toys aimed at private clients with a penchant for Rolls-Royce-style sex play.

“I’m not an S&M dominatrix bitch,” she announces, while drawing on one of several Golden Virginia hand rolled cigarettes and crossing her endless legs in a demure pose. “This is pro-love. It’s about empowering people, especially women to explore and discover their bodies. It’s like ‘c’mon girls, stand up straight, stick out those boobs, and be a lady!’”

Using casting molds, Vernon custom-makes every piece in the box according to the personal dimensions and physical desires of her male and female customers. The result is a series of exceptionally original jewelry, which is as beautiful to wear as it is titillating to use.

But they’re not just climax inducing. Vernon has also designed some remarkable cuffs and unusual rings that cling to the skin like puddles of silvery water. One two-fingered ring enforces a “chi mudra” yoga pose with the thumb and forefinger to stimulate concentration and relaxation. Whisper-weight body chains can be worn on the hands or cascading down the back, as one recent client did with her backless evening gown.

Amidst all of the passionate fury surrounding her erotic jewelry, Vernon still finds time to produce commercial collections for Japanese retailer Kashiyama, as well as a line of jewelry featuring Fornasetti’s famous decorative art motifs.

Later, while sitting in her hidden garden, the 34-year-old designer reveals her other most recent endeavor—designing a new collection of precious jewelry for Italian fashion designer Gianfranco Ferré.

“Ferré is a genius, he has such an eye,” she says while describing working side by side with the former architect for the last year.

“He’s never been here,” she says, referring to her studio and home space, “so I don’t even know if he knows what I’ve been working on lately!”

Ferré doesn’t have much to worry about, though. The gold and diamond 30-piece collection, which bows in Ferré stores in September, won’t be making any X-rated statements.

“It’s actually based largely upon the safety pin, which is an iconic symbol for Ferré’s style.” The line, which is composed of various rings, necklaces, money clips and cuffs, many of which morph into new pieces, are interchangeable.

But this creative, independent woman isn’t swapping high profile collaborations for the freedom to navigate her work and develop her passion. “I don’t ride golden ponies. I prefer to walk,” she explains.

For a private viewing of Betony Vernon’s “Boudoir Box,” or for information on her other designs, please contact: betony@planet.it or write to: P.O. Box 1309, Milan, Italy 20101. 

* * * * *
Paradise Found
Milan, Paris
by Jason Campbell, JCReport

The first impression of the fetching Betony Vernon is that her world must consist of many layers of intrigue. The flaming red hair, an hourglass shape, a tentative yet commanding voice; and then there’s the miniscule phone-numberless card printed with the words Paradise Found that she hands you — all appear to tell a fascinating tale. We set out to discover more.

Vernon’s world is as titillating as one would suspect and the paradise we found centers around pleasure. Based in Milan and working out of Paris, London, and indeed the world, Vernon’s profile is directly from the pages of a Stanley Kubrick script. Paradise Found sells a selection of erotic jewels and “Jewel Tools,” some available at Coco de Mer in London and Maxfield in Los Angeles. But the company’s mere existence (never mind its complete offering) is only known among an elite group of members and insiders.

As this is our gift buying issue, Paradise Found’s Petting ring tops our list of suggested cadeaux this season. Vernon had it patented in 2001 but it has remained a tightly held secret until the recent sniffing about of fashion players set to blow the lid. The Petting ring (don’t you love how that sounds?) is sized for men and women, connects to the index finger and the thump to form the chi MURDA (you know, that yoga/meditation gesture for a one-pointed, concentrated mind) but is also designed to perform an awesome, ahem, hand job. It comes in 18-carat gold or silver, with pave diamonds optional, and can be worn as a beautiful ring when not stroking.

Further into Paradise Found’s arsenal of unisex pleasure power tools are the Yoyo ring, a sexually stimulating massage ring, and the whip collar (diamond handle optional) that doubles as a sophisticated necklace that mixes fashion and fetish, boldly going where squares don’t dare. Both are formidable gift options this season.

Vernon says “love is a spiritual thing” and she’s found ways to fully immerse some very fortunate clients in a well-rounded Paradise Found experience. Most enticing is her Boudoir box, a treasure trove that comes in croc, ostrich or Beluga, stocked with custom-made sex toys-cum-jewelry that the designer travels with Bond-style across the globe. There’s an appointment-only salon in Paris where all of Paradise Found’s offerings are on display, and Vernon conducts erotic events and private consulting for couples in luxury hotel rooms and private clubs like Soho House in London. Give the gift of pleasure this season.

* * * * *
Paradise Found in Paris
from Paris Gridskipper

Not a million miles away from la Place de la Bastille is what Paris’ premier erotic bookstore La Musardine’s owners described as “the most exclusive sex club on the Planet.” If you’d like to explore eroticism with an aesthetic and elegant flavor you need to find some way to gain admittance to Betony Vernon’s Paradise Found. The location is secret, but the address is very central—minutes away in Bastille, shoppers go about their mundane errands. The address is known only to Paradise Found members; new members must be sponsored by someone already part of the group. So what’s going on behind the velvet drapes?

Anglo-American Betony Vernon is a jewelry designer who has created custom made jewels for collectors and exclusive boutiques, such as the Coco de Mer in London and Los Angeles as well as Kiki de Montparnasse in New York. In the 1990s she renounced a career as a runway model (although this arresting Boticellian beauty is still much photographed) and refined her jewelry-making skills with Florentine masters of repoussé, mosaic, and engraving. After attaining her masters degree in industrial design at Domus Academy in Milan, she became the principal jewelry designer for Italian interior design firm Fornasetti and for Gianfranco Ferre. Research in eroticism and the history of sex and sensuality gave birth to the “Paradise Found” collection, which she launched publicly in 2001. These “jewel tools for aesthetic love-making” have inspired her forthcoming PhD thesis in human sexuality.

Once you pass through those deep velvet drapes at Paradise Found, you’ll see how Vernon has arranged the boudoir to pulse with sensuality. The main room houses a frankly raunchy little saddle and stirrups get-up and a beaded corset by Mister Pearl (an English corset maker) on a tailor’s dummy. The beautifully padded and upholstered walls also serve as a gallery featuring erotic photographs, one of which shows a pair of sole-less silver shoes tip tapping across a naked back; that one was photographed by Michael James O’Brien, who worked for years with Matthew Barney. And it’s Vernon’s own design, of course.

Paradise Found is ostensibly dedicated to the pleasures of safe, aesthetic, creative sex between consenting adults. The salon allows members private consultations with Vernon, with an aim to developing sexual awareness, improving sexual skills, and general erotic well being. Members can order the Salon’s limited edition artwork, participate in events and talks, and arrange consultations with international sex specialists.

Of course, there’s also the chance Vernon might allow you to peep inside the Boudoir Box, which is only opened by invitation; its contents are never photographed. Inside are erotic jewels designed to heighten sexual awareness and multiply pleasure. (The Salon is the only place the Boudoir box can be discreetly viewed and privately ordered.) These accessories allow you to do things with your mouth, hands, and your sex, but the use of tools add an aesthetic factor and allow you to do these things better and longer. Rings, belts, chains, and earrings all have multiple functions. For instance, the rings could be used as a runner for bondage cords, or worn on different parts of the body. Metallic fronds from earrings delightfully swish over your erogenous collar bones but could become testicle ticklers later on in the evening.

Vernon’s frank tips and ideas about how to experiment and enjoy the objects are all part of the process. She suggests using the jewelry as a secret sign that one is in the mood. She believes jewels are for the inside of the body too, and promoting sexual confidence is part of her mission.

* * * * *

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

Friday, October 19, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Nine

Imprints of Joy

Half past five at the Embassy. I wait for my “parasol” from last night. I need a whisky. I’m very shy deep down, and ready to be furious if she doesn’t show up. It’s my curiosity that would be most disappointed..
Five thirty-five. There she is! Can it really be her? Ravishing, tall, slim, with a small mouth and full lips, and dark porcelain eyes. She casts aside her fur coat in a gust of warm perfume. We’re going to dance. Mexican? Cuban? Her very small head sits on a very long neck. She is tall; her mouth is at the level of my chin. When we dance my mouth is not far from her mouth. Her hair brushes against both.
“Romanian. My name is Renée P… I was a model at Doeuillet...” Delicious. She takes off her gloves. Long, little girl’s hands. Something in my mind starts dancing at the thought that one day perhaps she would agree to paint the nails of those hands…
---Diary, Paris, March 7, 1930.

Jacques Lartigue, the famous French photographer & artist, met Renée Perle in Paris in March 1930. He was soon won over by the grace and elegance of this Romanian-born professional model. For a period of two years she was both his companion and his favorite model for paintings and photos.

“ . . . . From the beginning, this obsession with bodies in motion is matched by an eye for beauty and glamour, and Lartigue begins taking what are now called society portraits before he reached his teens. ‘Women - everything about them fascinates me,’ he records in his journal. ‘Their dresses, their scent, the way they walk...’

He married his first wife, Bibi, in St Tropez, and, as with every glamorous woman he subsequently encountered, he was entranced by her beauty. He photographs her in bed, in the bath, and, daringly for the time, on the lavatory. She stares back at his lens, accepting and at ease. The Hayward has included some of his early 3D stereoscopic images here - the viewer has to look through binocular lenses fitted into a wall - and the sense of intimacy in some of them is extraordinary.

By 1919, Lartigue had established himself as a society photographer and was moving with the season along the Riviera and Côte D’Azur, in search of the glamorous and exotic. His intoxication in the presence of female beauty is transferred to the viewer in image after image of the wondrous Renée Perle, his lover in the early Thirties. ‘The small mouth with the full parted lips! The ebony black eyes!’ he enthuses in his journal, but it is the images that truly capture the languid beauty of one of the great muses of the 20th century. . . . ” from “A machine for trapping beauty” by Sean O’Hagan, The London Observer

“John Galliano calls Renée Perle, the inspiration behind his fall show, “a kittenish Parisian coquette.” Jacques Henri Lartigue, who immortalized her in his pictures, had another term: angel. The revered photographer met his muse in 1930 on the Rue de la Pompe. He thought she was Mexican, but he guessed wrong; Perle was Romanian, and a model once employed by the French dressmaker Doeuillet. “She is beautiful,” Lartigue told his diary. “The small mouth with the full painted lips! The ebony black eyes. From under her fur coat comes a warmth of perfume. The head looks petite on her long neck.” The pair spent two years together, cavorting as if on eternal vacation in Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Biarritz, with Lartigue’s camera always at the ready. In the “shadowless heaven” of his photographs, glamorous women, including his first and second wives, Bibi and Florette, abound, but Perle’s lacquered hair, slender silhouette, modern T-shirts, armfuls of bangles, and talonlike nails shone the brightest. “Around her,” Lartigue wrote, “I see a halo of magic."”
—Laird Borrelli, Style magazine

Postscript:  All that’s generally known about Renée Perle, is from her time with Jacques Henri Lartigue and the photos he captured of her during their two years together.  He, the photographer; she, the model, muse, and mistress.  Beyond that, she’s an immortal memory and a mystery.

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

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Eight

La Belle Noiseuse
Reviewed by Appellate Judge Dan Mancini (Retired) (2004)

Judge Dan Mancini might actually be able to talk you into watching a four-hour movie about a guy painting a picture. See, it’s a nude picture.

The Charge

“If I go the whole way, there’s blood on the canvas…on La Belle Noiseuse you see blood."—Edouard Frenhofer

Opening Statement

The idea for La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker) came to director Jacques Rivette while editing a scene in his 1988 film La Bande des Quatre in which two characters discuss Honoré de Balzac’s short story The Unknown Masterpiece. In the story, a 17th-century painter named Frenhofer intrigues his colleague and a young acolyte with tales of a painting he’s been struggling with for a decade. The acolyte convinces his beautiful lover to pose for the master provided Frenhofer shows them the painting—called La Belle Noiseuse—when he’s completed it. Billed by Frenhofer as a perfect realization of mimetic representation, the finished painting is incomprehensible to the colleague and acolyte, either a work of madness or of genius so complete it’s beyond their ability to perceive.

Rivette and his long-time writing partners Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent joked that if they adapted Balzac’s story and no one went to see the movie, it would truly be The Unknown Masterpiece in every sense. It may have begun as a joke, but the idea took hold of Rivette, and grew into his next film. La Belle Noiseuse isn’t an adaptation of Balzac but uses the short story as inspiration, a point of departure. Moving his story from 17th-century Paris to modern-day provincial France, about the only elements Rivette keeps are characters’ names, the name of the painting, and a philosophical fascination with the production of art. La Belle Noiseuse is less concerned with its masterpiece, though, than with the symbiotic relationship between artist and model, and how that symbiosis becomes the source of a work of art.

Facts of the Case

Edouard Frenhofer (Michele Piccoli, Contempt) is an enormously talented painter who’s fallen into decline and obscurity since abandoning a potential masterpiece called La Belle Noiseuse a decade ago. The rigors of Frenhofer’s search for truth proved too much for the project’s model, his wife Liz (Jane Birkin, Blowup), and the aging artist chose life and marriage over art.

Frenhofer finds new inspiration in a young woman named Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart, Mission: Impossible) when she and her lover Nicolas—an aspiring artist and admirer of Frenhofer’s—visit his chateau. Marianne agrees to pose for Frenhofer, but they end up in a battle of wills as he tries to peer past her disguises and capture her true nature on canvas.

The Evidence

Balzac’s Frenhofer is a spiritual disciple of the Flemish mannerist painter Jan Gossaert, renowned for his portraiture and detailed, full-sized nudes (Frenhofer makes references throughout the story to his mentor Mabuse, Gossaert’s nom de plume, though he died nearly a century before the story’s setting and had no connection to the French tradition). In the story, the painter is obsessed with capturing the essence of life through an eerily mimetic reproduction of his subject, and his madness/genius takes the form of a rejection of the artifice of line in favor of minutely-studied color, shading, and contour. By contrast, Rivette’s Frenhofer is a post-impressionist whose struggle at the boundaries of expression involves seeing beyond the physical to the deeper existential or transcendental “truth” of his model.

While Balzac’s piece is focused on representation of the material in art, he treats the actual modeling session only briefly and elliptically. Relayed in a single paragraph, we remain with Frenhofer’s colleague and acolyte outside the studio, wondering what’s going on inside. But long stretches of Rivette’s four-hour film are consumed with the sessions, which play out over the course of at least three days. They are the staging ground for the filmmaker’s simultaneous exploration of character and the nature of art. The initial session is awkward as Frenhofer and Marianne rarely speak, and he gives her little direction, allowing her to strike natural poses. There’s a timidity to the proceedings. She poses slumped and fidgety as nearly any woman standing naked in front of a stranger would; he assesses her clinically, avoiding eye contact, as he scratches out pen and ink drawings. In the next marathon session, his demeanor changes. He begins to pose her, selecting the furniture on which she sits or reclines, and directing the placement of arms and turn of head—sometimes moving them into position himself. The poses are less natural, but more formally, compositionally beautiful. Frenhofer’s casually dictatorial behavior and the physical rigors of maintaining the unnatural poses anger and exhaust Marianne. It’s as though the painter is trying to break her down mentally and physically in order to get at the real Marianne beneath. By the third session, they’re mildly antagonistic compatriots, looking for La Belle Noiseuse together. When he loses hope of successfully executing his grand design, she pushes him onward because she now has a stake in the painting, too.

Throughout these sessions, Rivette’s camera is trained on Frenhofer and his hands (played by artist Bernard Dufour) more than on Marianne. Just as, paradoxically, Frenhofer must push past the physical presence of his model in order to render that unique humanity that makes her her, he must also find a way to express those intangibles via the rigidly mechanical processes of drawing and painting. La Belle Noiseuse is a singular film because it allows us to watch those processes nearly uninterrupted. Rivette uses cut-aways to compress Dufour’s studies slightly, and the first session contains a few jump cuts, but the distended scenes still feel as though they’re unfurling in real-time. Rivette nearly fetishizes the physical details of the artist’s studio environment: the texture of the paper and canvas on which Frenhofer works; his slapdash use of water and ink, charcoal, paint; the sounds of pen, chalk, and brushes; and the slow revelation of form from the hasty dashing of lines. And by favoring Dufour’s studies over Emmanuelle Béart’s nude form, Rivette highlights the intermediary function of the artist—the energy in Frenhofer’s work alters our perceptions of Marianne. We begin to see her in light of the artist’s interpretation of her, just as we see the film’s characters through Rivette’s careful interpretation. While La Belle Noiseuse is a work of the 1990s and doesn’t necessarily feel of a kind with the director’s earliest films as a New Wave innovator, this radical approach to the use of time is a twist on the sort of self-consciously uncinematic and naturalistic approaches that defined that movement. It makes for a unique cinematic experience, hypnotic or excruciating depending on the degree to which the viewer is invested in the hard-fought evolution of Frenhofer’s work.

The model in Balzac’s story (named Gillette) is little more than a romantic abstraction who, passive and subservient, submits herself to Frenhofer’s project out of love for Nicolas and the belief that her lover’s proximity to a great master in the act of creation will prove invaluable in his quest for greatness. She knowingly sacrifices their relationship out of deference to his ambition, the humiliation of her naked body being given to the wizened Frenhofer irrevocably severing the bond between lovers. In Rivette’s film, Frenhofer, who lives a comfortably bourgeois life with his wife Liz, isn’t the fevered genius of the short story. The modeling sessions still have a corrosive effect on Marianne’s and Nicolas’s relationship but the director steers clear of the obvious sexual subtext. It works in Balzac’s story because of the subtlety with which the writer handles it, as well as the fact he’s working in a non-visual medium. Playing it up in the film, where we see Marianne nude and are privy to her sessions with Frenhofer and the psychological struggle between the two, would yield cliché. Instead, the catalyst for the erosion of Marianne’s relationship with Nicolas is her growing involvement and passion in La Belle Noiseuse itself. At first agreeing to model as a favor to Nicolas, she’s soon an active participant, and the vitality of Frenhofer’s work reveals aspects of her own character of which she was unaware, as well as revealing Nicolas as a smaller artist than she’d previously understood. Frenhofer’s relationship with Liz is equally fascinating. Her replacement as his model creates a psychological tension refreshingly free of sexual jealousy—Liz isn’t worried her husband will sleep with his beautiful young model, but melancholy over the forced recollection their marriage couldn’t have survived the sort of piercing dissection of her person required when she was his model. The tension between the characters is palpable but understated. It never strays into melodrama, and the actors reward us with careful and natural performances, surprisingly void of pretension considering the subject matter.

Rivette cut two different versions of La Belle Noiseuse: the full four-hour cut and a 130-minute edit called Divertimento. New Yorker’s DVD offers the longer cut (which actually runs about 230 minutes, but is intended to be exactly four hours in length with a 10-minute intermission), spread across two discs. In order to best capture the paintings in Frenhofer’s studio, Rivette and cinematographer William Lubtchansky (Va Savoir) opened up the vertical space of their compositions by shooting the picture at the full 1.37:1 aspect ratio (though they carefully framed shots so they would work matted to 1.66:1). The DVD maintains the full screen aspect ratio, and the transfer is sharp and detailed, though edge enhancement is excessive, producing some haloing as well as an overall quality that often looks rooted in a video source rather than film. The source materials were incredibly well preserved, exhibiting few flaws and accurate colors. Shot on location at a rustic French provincial estate, the simple clarity of the film’s cinematography immerses us in a gorgeous, textured, lived-in world.

The original French audio is presented in a stereo mix that is more than adequate. Excerpts from Igor Stravinsky’s Agon and Petrushka appear at the beginning and end of the movie, but it is otherwise absent a score. Dialogue, ambient noise like crickets, and the carefully recorded sounds of Frenhofer’s pens and brushes working on paper and canvas, are all reproduced with perfect clarity. It’s difficult to imagine any of it would benefit from a more elaborate mix.

Disc One of the set also contains a handful of supplements. Jacques Rivette offers a jovial 13-minute interview in which he discusses the genesis of project, details the different editorial approaches taken with the two cuts of the picture, and touches on the inspiration he drew from Stravinsky’s modernist music. Screenwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent are featured in a 21-minute interview in which they rehash some of the background information, but then discuss the influence on the film of art-focused literature like Henry James’s The Liar and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Oval Portrait. Unfortunately, Bonitzer annoyingly dominates the conversation, often contradicting and talking over Laurent. Finally, there’s a theatrical trailer, and selected filmographies for Rivette, Béart, Piccoli, and Birkin. The extras may not sound like much, but I found them sufficient. La Belle Noiseuse is a deliberate, resonant film that’s best absorbed and pondered rather than dissected and explained.

Closing Statement

La Belle Noiseuse is probably the most subtle, detailed, and complex examination of the artistic impulse and the psychological and emotional demands of art production ever committed to film. Its pacing, length, and the simplicity of its plot versus its complexity of theme will make difficult viewing for some—their loss. It is an utterly unique piece of cinema. That alone makes it worth at least four hours of your time.

The Verdict

Not guilty.

Scales of Justice
Video: 90
Audio: 95
Extras: 30
Acting: 95
Story: 95
Judgment: 90

* * * * *
Some choice selections from Emmanuelle Béart’s work.

* * * * *

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

Number One-Hundred-Twenty-Seven

Emmanuelle Béart
The face of a virgin and the body of a whore

* * * * *

* * * * *

The kiss of death
In a 20-year career, Emmanuelle Béart has played neurotics, prostitutes and femmes fatales.  Now she’s tackling Aids.
Jon Henley, of the London Guardian, meets her.

Almost every interview I have read with Emmanuelle Béart refers - usually, if the interviewer is male, within the first three lines - to her staggering, or striking, or stunning beauty. This is, of course, true, but it is not why I am interviewing her, so I will try not to mention it too much. The fact is that she has a new film out, Les Témoins, or The Witnesses, which opens this week, and we are sitting in the quiet, semi-private side room of a cafe on the absurdly Parisian Place de la Contrescarpe in the fifth arrondissement to talk about that.

And perhaps just a little bit about her staggering beauty.

In any event, Béart is dressed today in grey tracksuit bottoms and a black cashmere sweater, with no makeup. She is drinking still mineral water through a straw but has given up cigarettes, which is a big relief because interviews with her - particularly if the interviewer is male - also tend to go on about how sensual the act of smoking becomes when performed by Béart, describing at great length her slender fingers and full, Bardot-esque lips. I, though, do not have to bother with that.

The movie, then. The Witnesses, by respected French director André Téchiné, is set in 1984, in the early days of the Aids pandemic. It tells the story of Manu, a young man from the rural southwest of France who comes to Paris. He shares a cheap hotel room with his sister Julie, a would-be opera singer, and, out cruising one night, meets Adrien, a middle-aged doctor, with whom he starts a cheerful - and chaste - relationship. Through Adrien, Manu meets Sarah, a children’s book writer, played by Béart, and Mehdi, a policeman, who enjoy a very Gallic “open relationship”, but have rather inconveniently just had their first child. Manu falls for Mehdi; Mehdi falls for Manu; the two begin a relationship (unchaste) and, as the film’s blurb puts it, all five main characters “become protagonists in, and witnesses to, a contemporary tragedy”.

Not a lot of laughs, but a good film, an honest film, about a period at once fresh in the mind and long, long ago; an age before the internet and the mobile phone (and, crucially, before antiretroviral drug treatments) when Aids was a mysterious and alien scourge that seemed to strike blindly and savagely. Téchiné, who has said Aids was “the fate I escaped”, films it all coolly, from a distance. You sense that he is somehow in mourning, but he does not do pathos. The Witnesses is not a film that tries to take the emotions hostage, and is the better for it.

That is also what appealed to Béart. R