Tuesday, December 18, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Seven

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

Star quality… Pamela Gidley.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Six

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

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

* * * * *
The Charge

A Woman in Trouble

* * * * *
Opening Statement

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

* * * * *
Facts of the Case

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

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

* * * * *
The Evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *
Closing Statement

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

* * * * *
The Verdict

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

* * * * *
Scales of Justice

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

* * * * *

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

Friday, December 07, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Five

Lee Miller: Shooting star

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

The look of the moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The light and the dark. She was one of the first photojournalists into liberated Paris (and the first allied soldier to turn up at her friend Picasso’s flat). Then, crossing into Germany, she was one of the first allied photojournalists to enter Buchenwald and Dachau. Astonishingly, she washed the visit to Dachau off in Hitler’s own bathroom in his requisitioned flat in Munich, and, with the other GIs, was combing through his and Eva Braun’s belongings at almost exactly the time the pair were committing suicide. Scherman’s photograph of Miller in Hitler’s bath, her filthy great army boots on the floor and her elegant arm mirroring that of the statuette placed next to her, is their dually sardonic and triumphant take on composition itself.

The affectionate story goes that Miller got herself accredited as US army war correspondent because she so envied her American friends in London their smart Savile Row uniforms and their easy access to Scotch and Kleenex. The truth is she’d been badgering Audrey Withers for some time to let her write text for her pictures. So Withers assigned her a short descriptive piece about the US broadcaster Ed Murrow. Miller found it excruciatingly hard. “After all, I’ve spent 15 or so years of my life learning how to take a picture - you know, that thing that is worth ten thousand words, and here I am cutting my own throat and imitating these people, writers who I’ve been pretending are démodé.” But Withers liked the piece very much.

With her accreditation, in 1944, she flew into France to cover a quiet enough story about some nurses in an allied evacuation hospital and - “I grabbed a pocketful of bulbs and film, and clambered into a command car” - somehow managed to smuggle herself to a field hospital close to the front. Her first lengthy dispatch, “Unarmed Warriors”, was a formally deft piece about the re-evaluation of a familiar landscape. “It was France ... it was no longer France.” From the liberation of Paris she reported on the first fashion shows and the shaved heads of the girl collaborators, interviewed and photographed the great French writer Colette, covered the arrival of Fred Astaire and Marlene Dietrich and the press conference Maurice Chevalier held to clear himself of anti-patriotism. When a Vogue editor complained that neither the models nor the clothes in the fashion shots she’d sent were “elegant” enough, she snapped back: “These snap shots have been taken under the most difficult and depressing conditions ... Edna should be told that maybe there is a war on.” The shots are real-surreal masterpieces, with their smiling, starvation-thin models next to bullet-riddled shop and cafe windows. “The bullet holes in the windows were like jewels, the barbed wire in the boulevards a new decoration.”

Writing never came easily to Miller, who would fortify herself with cognac then batter at her Baby Hermes late into the deadline. “Every word I write is as difficult as ‘tears wrung from stone’. I lose my friends and my complexion in my devotion to the rites of flagellating a typewriter,” she told Withers in a typically funny and despairing cable. Scherman compared “being present during Lee’s creative process to feeding his brain slowly through a meat grinder”.

But what a writer. What an eye, what an ear. “A company was filing out of St Malo, ready to go into action, grenades hanging on their lapels like Cartier clips.” Arriving in Strasbourg, “it didn’t feel like an abandoned, evacuated city, but as if people were breathing somewhere behind walls.” In Germany, “leaning back on the sofa” in her father’s office, the Burgomeister of Leipzig’s daughter, who had committed suicide, has “extraordinarily pretty teeth, waxen and dusty”. An opera singer, photographed singing an aria from Madame Butterfly in the ruins of Vienna Opera House, is “perched on a plank across a drop ... her dress was safety-pinned to fit her hungry thinness”. Miller’s voice is always characterised by a combination of frank immediacy and surreal double-take. Her sense of edit must have come from years of knowing exactly how to retouch photos, where to cut, where to shade, where to lighten.

Great writers have never been strangers to the pages of Vogue (a quick scan of 20th-century writers for Brogue, for instance, turns up Virginia Woolf, Edith Sitwell, Jean Rhys, Iris Murdoch, Stevie Smith, Angela Carter). All the same, it takes a leap of the imagination now to re-inhabit the world in which even an advanced fashion monthly could house a voice like Miller’s, who might write, from liberated Paris: “The entire gait of the French woman has changed with her footwear. Instead of the bouncing buttocks and mincing steps of ‘pre-war’, there is a hot-foot long stride, picking up the whole foot at once.” Or, from St Malo under gunfire: “I sheltered in a Kraut dugout, squatting under the ramparts. My heel ground into a dead detached hand ... I picked up the hand and hurled it across the street and ran back the way I’d come.”

It’s not just in her photography that Miller asks you to look again. Her voice is as sharp as her eye. It bouleverses a reader’s expectations, turns form and cliché inside out, punctures preconception. Her redefinition over several written pieces, for instance, of not just the concept but the very word “liberation” as she encounters it from situation to situation, becomes a profound attack on all empty, nostalgic or politically manipulative rhetoric. She tore up a Nazi flag and made herself a red scarf. She “liberated” a pair of pinking shears and cut herself (and the boys) blue scarves out of parachute silk. She took this word “liberation” to task, from the joyous, perfume-smelling streets of Paris to liberated Luxembourg where freedom is “the cinema for no purpose; it’s the group in the street, laughing; it’s trusting your friends and your family; or a newcomer because he has an honest face”. But “the word was bound to degenerate. Now we ‘liberate’ a church when we wreck it, we ‘liberate’ a bottle of brandy when we beat down a mercenary publican, we ‘liberate’ a girl when we detach her from her chaperone ... ‘I got liberated last night,’ means I went on a particularly super drunk.” The word degenerates until she compares the Germans she meets, who believe they’ve been “liberated” from a foolish involvement in a rather badly managed pyramid scheme instead of having been party to a brutal regime, with a dark-eyed couple she photographs who’ve just been freed from the Gestapo jail in Cologne.

What she saw as the German people’s denial of knowledge and responsibility left her with a prescient sense that belief itself would be a war casualty. Her writing as she came through Germany (with nothing except her Rolleiflex lens between her and what she saw) became surgically cool, scathing, ironic; presumably this composure was also her protection. She was always a salty, street-smart, quick-witted writer; there’s a deep love of puns and a Blitz-influenced Open-As-Usual humour in what she writes, the humour of anger, a survivor’s lightness. It let her coin phrases such as “Gestapo Rotary Club”, let her comment bitingly about Eva Braun’s flat, its style “strictly department store, like everything else in the Nazi regime: impersonal and in good, average, slightly artistic taste”. But her irony congealed into a cold and righteous fury when she reached Buchenwald, where she watched a dead SS man thrown on top of a pile of cadavers looking “shockingly big, the well-fed bastard”, and Dachau, where the work-horse stables “full of fat-bottomed beasts” were terrible to the eye “after so many emaciated humans”. The bestial shock allowed her some of her most powerful, terrible, cold-eyed work. How do you compose Buchenwald?

My fine Baedecker tour of Germany included many such places as Buchenwald which were not mentioned in my 1913 edition, and if there is a later one I doubt if they were mentioned there either, because no one in Germany has ever heard of a concentration camp, and I guess they didn’t want any tourist business either. Visitors took one-way tickets only ... The tourists invited by General Patton fainted all over the place, although some remained arrogant. Even after the place was 95% cleaned up, soldiers who are used to battle casualties lying in ditches for weeks are sick and miserable at what they see here.

How do you compose Dachau? “I don’t usually take pictures of horrors,” she cabled Withers. “But don’t think that every town and every area isn’t rich with them. I hope Vogue will feel that it can publish these pictures.” Withers published her cable as well as her dispatch. American Vogue titled the photo spreads and the breathtaking text that accompanied them “BELIEVE IT”.

“There’s something inside a human being that no one has thought of putting into a machine.” Not being a machine, and having used up a spirit quota that would have kept 20 people happy for 20 lifetimes, Miller unwillingly returned to England after the war, profoundly disillusioned by its aftermath, and sank herself into the kind of silence that means that every book written about her is thick with detail till roughly 1950. The last three decades of her life always take up a disproportionately slim page-width.

A dismay at the mundane fashion jobs Vogue offered her, a dislike of being stuck in the country, an enervation and a descent into alcoholism commensurate with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder, plus a total fear of the typewriter when she sat down to write and a great unhappiness at not being able to write any more, meant that such pieces as “Working Guests”, her last text and photo spread for Vogue in 1953, are a rarity.

Its photos are of distinguished friends from the art world visiting Farley Farm. Even Miller’s photo captions are gloriously subversive. “Max Ernst plants borders - one entire bed of Indian corn is all his own unaided work. Dorothea Tanning (Mrs Max Ernst), painter, operates as master electrician. Alfred Barr, art critic and director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, feeds the pigs. Katherina Wolpe (Mrs William Turnbull), promising young pianist, paints greenhouse.” Maybe she always wanted art to make things work, to be something other than “just more ART”.

The text is a typical upending of form. “There are columns of print by experts advising guests and hostesses how to behave toward each other with tolerance ... I’ve devoted four years of research and practice to getting all my friends to do all the work.” Its tone is pseudo-clinical, cold-war totalitarian spiced with a cheeky, spiky violence. “Just in case there is something in the primitive idea of acquiring the qualities of the enemy by eating him, I refuse to have nettles or local snails on our table d’hôte, but we are going to try the curled young shoots of bracken (called fiddle-heads in New England), and without qualm we devour the inimical pigeons, squirrels and rabbits the gun-toters bring here.”

It was her last lengthy piece of writing. Not that her creativity went away; it passed, instead, straight into the next passionate incarnation, Lee Miller as gourmet cook, insatiable recipe collector, winner of prizes, famous for gorgeous, naturally surrealist, visually unsettling dishes such as her “Pink Cauliflower Breasts”.

It is as if, all her life, the 20th century in its brightest light and foulest dark threw itself at her feet or pursued her, snapping at her heels. Antony Penrose writes about the innate surreality in just flicking through an edition of Vogue from the war years, where “the grim skeletal corpses of Buchenwald are separated by a few thicknesses of paper from delightful recipes to be prepared by beautiful women dressed in sumptuous gowns”. From one end to the other, the spirit of Lee Miller looked the surreal century in the eye and answered back.

One of the finest pieces of writing she left us, published in Vogue in 1945, is about the visit to Colette, herself a symbol of changing times and freedoms, whose own writing voice was always all cool but passionate. The spirit of versatility meets its younger/older incarnation in the piece.

The parade of 50 extraordinary years was given to me like flashbacks or cinema trailers. Colette as Colette. Colette, the siren, the gamine, the lady of fashion, the diplomat’s wife, the mother, the author ... Colette on top of the Chrysler Building in the St Tropez barefoot sandals which tickled the jaded shutters of New York’s cheesecake ship photographers 10 years ago.

Colette, who knew the cost and liberation of transformation, is tucked up in bed on the telephone. Seeing Miller in her army uniform, it amuses her “that I should have been transformed from Cocteau’s statue in The Blood of a Poet to a poilu”. She and Miller look at photographs together, of cats, of dogs, of Colette, portrait shots by Man Ray, some by Miller herself, who enjoys watching Colette and Maurice Goudeket, her much younger husband, affectionately squabbling. “Her elfin face was 50 years younger while she was haranguing.” She records the survivalist persistence in Colette which meant that Goudeket, who was Jewish, survived the war years too. Then Colette “had me write” with her array of pens and pencils. “Hard points for digging, soft, easy ones for first drafts and letters, an old, wise one she trusted when she was completely stuck.” When Miller leaves, Colette gives her a souvenir to take away, a piece of paper “with embossed lace edges and coloured cut-outs like an old fashioned valentine ... the holiday paper of her girlhood”.

A thin piece of paper. A gift passing between two of the century’s kindred spirits. The great writer, Miller tells us, “suffers the same anguish for every paragraph now, after 50 years of experience, as she did on those first four books”. Miller wonders at the writing’s grace, its “easy intimacy” that comes at no cost to its “mechanical accuracy”. “Each of her perfectly poised words ... has survived total warfare.”

It stands as a very good description of Lee Miller’s own art.

* * * * *

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

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Four

NobEssence
Sculptural Sensuality

Wood’s Your Pleasure?
NobEssence: Exotic Hardwood Made Erotic
by Simone Wright, Good Vibrations Magazine (August 2007)

There’s something about wood—the smooth surface, the beautiful grain, the beauty only found in nature….

Tryst

When our Senior Toy Buyer came across the NobEssence line, she was immediately struck by both the design and functionality of the stunning wood toys. The product line is diverse, with something for everyone: Tryst is a double-ended toy, perfect for both anal play and G-spot stimulation, Fling is a G-spot specialty with a handy handle, Romp is a wearable prostate toy, and the Rendezvous Rings are a great alternative to metal or rubber cock rings.

All of the NobEssence toys are made of exotic hardwood and feature an odorless, non-porous and hypo-allergenic coating, making them perfect for folks with sensitivities.

I recently sat down (via the internet) with Alicia Yoder, President/CEO of NobEssence, Inc. for this exclusive interview:

How and why did NobEssence come about?

I would like to give you some deeply intellectual story full of lofty ideals, but I am afraid to say that it was mostly to do with the fact that I could not find a toy that I was satisfied with.

With delightful frequency and the enthusiasm of an eager puppy with a morning newspaper, my husband Jason would present me with a new toy – each one guaranteed to please. Unfortunately for him I must be a close relative of Goldie Locks, as everything I tried was too soft, too cold, bumps in the wrong place, pulled my hairs, absorbed the lube, was ugly or smelled bad.

Fling

I was pregnant with our fifth child and it was evident that Jason was looking for his pregnancy project. You see, it is common that while a woman is growing a baby, her partner has to use up surplus energy in some manner. This often manifests as decorating the nursery or remodeling a bathroom. When you get to your fifth child and only have one bathroom and no nursery, one has to start getting creative. So, I gave him his task, “we can not find the perfect toy, so make me the perfect toy.” My criterion; firm, smooth, beautiful, with just the right amount of essence of nob (British Slang for Penis)”. I was informed that while he was quite resourceful, he was pretty sure that glassblowing, masonry or steel forging were not going be happening in our garage. Jason however did know wood. Raised in a rural wood-based community he had made furniture, tree houses and some driftwood carving, and was now happy to be able have an outlet for his wood working skills.

As the baby grew, so did the realization that our project was so successful that it had to be shared. After a year and half, we are delighted by the positive response that we are receiving to the NobEssence brand.

NobEssence designs are ergonomic….

Ergonomics is very significant to our designs because as we were developing the sculptures so was my pregnant belly. Thus the “Tryst” was born. Finally, I could comfortably hit the right spots without requiring Yoga warm-ups.

I did not want to have to explain to my prenatal group that my repetitive strain injuries were due to my extensive use of sex toys – even if it was in the name of research. So we enrolled numerous friends and acquaintances to trial our designs. We were blessed with a really wide range of testers from the insightful San Francisco Bay Area Sexologist Danielle Harel who kindly featured an adventurous version of the Tryst in her quarterly podcast, to individuals who had never used a toy before. Each one has their part in our development process and we thank them all.

Romp

No one has a straight vagina or anus - we know, because we researched real anatomy – external and internal. The “Romp’s” design was derived from real impression casts of inside of some of our more intrepid tester’s bottoms. It is so comfortable that it can be worn for extended periods.

Layered through all of this is Jason’s undeniable artistic gift. It truly amazes me how he can select a piece of wood and instinctively know how to carve it to release its beauty.

Why wood?

Wood has long been associated with luxury and quality. A truly natural material, the whorls, knots, holes, and spectacular grain patterns are to wood as inclusions are to diamonds. We carefully choose all of our exotic hardwoods for their color, shape, texture and grain, so every single toy we make has a different character.

There is great versatility in wood. With access to the world’s diverse woods, we are able to greatly vary texture, color, pattern and weight. Rosewoods and ironwoods sink in water and are great for bottom sculptures and leopardwood has a uniquely bumpy texture. And because wood is a natural insulator, it stays at room temperature and soon warms with your heat and stays warm for a while if set aside briefly. It won’t be the temperature with NobEssence sculptures that makes you gasp!

The first thing people say when they hear wood in the same sentence as dildo is, “Oo! splinters!” But when handed a NobEssence “Fling” with its sensual curves and ergonomic handle, that “Oo” changes to “Mmmmm……” The wood species we use are hard and dense so they are able to be sanded to an incredible smoothness. It is lengthy part of our production process, but one that I won’t compromise. We caress each sculpture innumerable times before it is deemed smooth enough to caress you.

The other question most people ask is about wood being an absorbent material. I have really sensitive skin, have to be very careful with lubes and I am pretty fussy about what gets put in my most sensitive spots. There’s nothing worse than finding that your toy leaves you with a nasty itch. So it was a must that we found a way of finishing our products that made them waterproof and safe even for sensitive skins.

I am happy that we have achieved more than that. Our 16 step finishing process sets our sculptures apart from your standard toy. Not only will our sculptures not soak up your lubrication, but they are scent-free, hypoallergenic, non-porous and bacteria resistant. The slightest spot of lubrication makes them slick and slippery – compatible with all known lubricants – a little goes a long way.

Are all your pieces hand-crafted?

Yes they are. I love the fact that we can provide heirloom quality sculptures at a reasonable price and you can invest knowing that no one will ever have a toy exactly like yours.

Each sculpture is hewn from solid planks, hand-sculpted and finished with great care. As demand for our sculptures is growing we have sought out and trained additional craftspeople to assist us. We have very high standards and have found few artisans who are detail-focused enough to be able to meet our narrow tolerances for sculpture quality.

Rendezvous Rings

Unlike plastic, glass, stone and steel, wood is a living material and the only one that continues to develop its own shape and color over time. While this occurs in all of our wood sculptures to some degree, it is particularly pleasingly to observe in our “Rendezvous Rings.” Each ring is perfectly round until seasoned over a period of 2-3 months whereupon it settles into a slightly ovoid shape that delivers long-lasting visual and physical excitement.

While the artistic and organic nature of our products may imply that size and shape does not matter, we personally examine and caliper test every piece to ensure consistent results to within 1/8″ to ¼” of the original reference design.

Are there any special care instructions….?

Our exclusive waterproof finish means you can spend more time enjoying your toy and less time worrying about how to care for and sterilize it. Between uses or between partners you can wash it with warm water and non-abrasive soap, or wipe down with your favorite toy cleaner and finish by wiping down with a soft cloth. You can leave your sculpture out in the open or store it in its premium velvet-lined storage box. Though wood is very durable material, it can be damaged if dropped or impacted against other hard surfaces. If this happens, I recommend a close inspection before re-use.

Not all wood products are alike. Each NobEssence sculpture bears our unique “n” shaped mark meaning that you can trust that it has our hypoallergenic waterproof finish. I am not aware of any other wooden toys that can be cleaned to the same standard of hygiene.

Good Vibrations used to carry wood products years ago…

One of the reasons we have chosen to partner with Good Vibrations is their commitment to selling safe, quality products and educating consumers so that they may avoid materials that may harm their bodies or environment.

The fact that we use woods selected from our own estates or harvested from responsibly managed woodlands (replanting, selective cutting, etc.) is not our only story.

We understand ourselves to be stewards of our environment and therefore practice sustainable business practices that consider the entire lifecycle of our products and the materials we use in our business operations. This encompasses everything from the planting of exotic species for future generations, premium packaging made from renewable wood and paper, paperless office management, and the collection and composting of waste wood and sawdust.

As wood is a naturally occurring raw material, our products require very little energy to create. Oh! And did I mention that they are Phthalate free? No nasty chemicals or petroleum derivatives here!

What can we expect from you in the future?

*Smiles* Why, ‘vibes’ of course. We have developed a way to add buzz to our sculptures and are currently refining those designs. Early 2008 will also see the introduction of some remarkable new shapes and textures as we are very excited to have access to newer organic materials.

While some of our products are already dishwasher-safe, we are refining our finishing process so that we can confidently recommend this method of cleaning for all NobEssence sculptures.

Flogger

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

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Three

Dear Potential Employer
by Mimi in New York

Despite having an exceptional degree which may lead many to presume that I am, in fact, quite intelligent, I have managed to spend the last six years doing absolutely sod all with my privileged education. However, I feel that my experiences as a drug-taking chalet cook, a sailing chef, a waitress, a shop assistant at Marks & Spencer’s, a telesales representative, the person looking after your kids on the long summer vacation, a barista, a check-out girl at Tesco’s, a sandwich maker, a bakery assistant, a bar tender, a punt chauffeur on the River Cam, an unemployed, hungry writer and finally, the piece de resistance - A Stripper, do demonstrate a certain flexibility on my part, if not a willingness to completely embrace new experiences and skills.

Unfortunately, I don’t possess any prior knowledge of Quark Express and have only recently discovered how to work the spell check on MS Word, but I can text up to 20 words per minute using predictive text, and always sport a well manicured bikini area, whilst I have also developed an unerring talent for tolerating those itchy, spangly g-strings comprised mainly of plastic sequins. My people skills have been impeccably honed due to two years spent on various large sailing yachts with multiple stinking, farting men, and combined with 14 months grinding corporate cock, I feel perfectly qualified to work within the high-stress, male-dominated atmosphere of Corporate America. I have an ability to compromise, perfected from the lengthy and demanding negotiations involved in my former employment (eg “Give me a blow job”, “No, fuck off”, “Give me a hand job”, “No, fuck off”, “Give me a lapdance”, “OK") and yet a steely determination of where my goals are and how to achieve them ("It’s 850 bucks for a private room, no fucking freebies").

I don’t have any formal journalistic training, nor would I be conceited enough to count my small resume of published works qualification enough to adopt the title of ‘journalist’ - yet my illuminating writing on specific topics display a remarkable and ingenious departure from the usual female schlock produced en masse by Conde Nast (see my blog posts on ‘anal sex’, ‘The Masturbator’ etc). Indeed, I feel the height of my writing achievements, displaying my strong and sophisticated style, is aptly demonstrated by such works of literary genius as this.

I must profess that I lack both the positive attitude and willingness to make the coffee that an entry level position might require, and while neither a ‘go-getter’, nor a ‘team player’, I can’t help but suggest that perhaps your company might not have to advertise for employees quite as often if they didn’t insist on making the criteria so rigid. Having been exposed to the shocking rigours and unflagging enthusiasm of ‘go-getters’ and ‘team players’ throughout my various forays into the world of employment, I personally have found that the lazy fuckers sitting out the back having a sneaky cigarette are often the most fun at the office party, and never fail to supply the requisite xeroxed ass-shot, while they are frequently the most willing to blow the boss after too many Bacardi Breezers.

I have a demonstrated ability to multi-task - I am a modern day spiritual guru and yoga teacher with an excellent cock-grinding technique and impressive eka pada rajakapotasana, not to mention a huge capacity for alcohol, self-loathing, insulting people I care deeply about and drunken text messaging in the early hours of the morning - all the while managing to complete several great works of fiction yet-to-be-published. In fact, as a hungry, ambitious, attractive female with absolutely no suitable skills for useful employment besides a willingness to skive as frequently as possible and look up porn on the company computer, I am utterly unaware as to any reason why anyone would not find me employable, or indeed, why you are not begging to work for me.

I look forward to being rejected by your company as yet further affirmation that I am destined never to have a salary,

Yours Sincerely,

Mimi

P.S. If I do get the job, how much vacation time do I get? 

* * * * *

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

Sunday, December 02, 2007

Number One-Hundred-Fifty-Two

A Slightly Scandalous Woman
by Anonymous

She arched her back in unmistakable delight.  “Yes that’s right,” she said in a throaty whisper, “a little deeper, please.” The shirtless young man parted her moist labia further, and flicked his tongue lovingly around her glistening, distended clit.  The woman had the cold-hearted beauty of Charlotte Rampling, seated nude on the edge of the heavy oak dinner table at the Hotel Nord-Pinus, in Helmut Newton’s iconic 1973 black and white photograph.

The woman’s tuxedo-wearing husband stood in the doorway of the dining room with his stylish Portobello Road walking stick and watched approvingly.

“We are still going to the awards ceremony later tonight, right?”, he asked.

“Yes, my love,” she said in an overly excited voice.  “Of course, you don’t mind about Becket‚ do you?  I’m so fucking hot‚ I need to get off.  And I didn’t want you to wrinkle your gorgeous tuxedo.”

“Thoughtful to a fault; that’s what I adore about you. No, your lover is fine. Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all,” she panted, “I know how much this arouses you.”

And the husband truly enjoyed this decadent spectacle, like a deep musical note that could not be heard but was felt. He was an inveterate sensualist and could not control himself.  The semi-nude Becket sometimes looked up at the husband from between the wife’s moist thighs with a good-humored smile.

The wife met Becket at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park for a rally about Zapatista prisoners in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. The wife’s best liberal intentions quickly gave way to debauched sex that afternoon. She spotted Becket among the small crowd and wanted to fuck him within five minutes; so much for the suffering of Mexicanos in some backwater region.  The political activist was a very good-looking, well-built man in his early 30s, of medium height, with fair hair and a clever and very handsome face.  The wife whisked Becket to a coffee shop near Marble Arch, where she watched intently as his sensuous mouth moved, expressing his eloquent thoughts, and she struggled to avoid lifting her dress so he could immediately apply his oral talents between her legs. She kept two fingers carefully concealed in her growing dampness, as the bon-vivant’s eyes sparkled and darted around the semi-darkened room, and his strong hands tore at chunks of cheese and crusts of bread.

Like a stingy Medici, the wife kept Becket in her bedroom all afternoon. On the subject of passionate sex, the wife was an unerring connoisseur. She had an insatiable lust for the male body, and bestowed unimaginable attention on Becket. The pièce de résistance was performing fellatio while vigorously finger-fucking his compliant anus. This rendered her new lover in a fever, and completely delirious.

It was late, about eight o’clock, when the husband arrived home to find the couple in bed. His wife appeared thoroughly ravished when she looked up at him dreamily from the disheveled white pillow in the dwindling summer light.  He stood watching for a minute, and was profoundly stirred by her misbehavior.  The husband had long loved his wife fervently. He agreed with Oscar Wilde that life often presents one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to recapture that experience as often as possible. For the husband, just being with his wife made this all true.  The fact that she was sexually unfaithful on occasion simply made her more desirable.  Yet the husband willingly avoided involvement with other women because this made his wife dreadfully jealous. To outsiders, this contradiction probably baffled even the most sagacious observers.  No one could explain why she was a slightly scandalous woman, and he was a mild cuckold. This was the nature of their marriage and they both readily accepted their roles without tired justifications.

Only a few moments elapsed as the husband watched Becket perform arousing cunnilingus on his nude wife, still reclining on the edge of the heavy oak dinner table.  This was an all-time favorite treat for the married woman. She absolutely adored a man who paid homage to her clit with his loving mouth‚ whether it was her husband or a male lover.  So often, the wife only had to say two words and, like magic, her husband buried his face in her wet cunt. The term, of course, was: Clean me.  And the husband did so like a trusty zealot.  When Becket swirled his tongue quickly around her clit, the wife opened her eyes very wide and, throwing back her whole body, she stared vaguely at her husband without uttering a sound. 

“How is it, my darling?” the husband asked. “Are you really at a loss for words?”

She clutched the table edge harder and harder, and barely managed any coherency.

“My, God,” she gasped. “This is heavenly.”

“You love it‚ don’t you?” the husband asked.

“Yes, I admit it,” she said in measured breaths, scissoring her legs around Becket’s throat, running her fingers intensely through his hair.

“But you are the main event.”

As the wife half-heartedly managed this discourse, Becket skillfully brought her to that exquisite moment of personal transport.

“Jesus! Jesus!,” she stammered, disheveled and wild-eyed. “Oh yes, that was perfect.”

Afterward, the wife was seized by a vague feeling of languorous delight, and she had the sensation that she was not in her own body. She wanted to stand up and embrace her husband, but her weakened legs didn’t permit her to do this.  Becket regained his composure, grabbed his dress shirt and walked nonchalantly past the husband, shutting the front door behind him.

“My darling wife,” the husband said. “Let’s get you dressed for the awards ceremony tonight. Don’t forget, you are the presenter for Mother-of-the Year.”

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