Tanya’s special music lesson

Given the technical challenges in what Tanya Yip is trying to sing, it’s perhaps not too surprising that she needs a little extra help.

(Natalie Dessay show us how it’s done here in case your sight reading is a little rusty.)

The rather unusual and improving singing lesson that Tanya gets has its own rather unusual and special inspiration: a famous (or notorious) painting by Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola, or Balthus (1908-2001) as he was more commonly known. The painting is The Guitar Lesson (1934), and I’ll bet it’s scandalous even today (note that the image is from Wikipedia; I am reproducing it in-line for reader convenience):

Controversial, but unquestionably high art created by one of the twentieth century’s greatest painters. It is even used by Richard Posner in his magisterial 1992 book Sex and Reason (pp. 376-7) as an example of how it can be nigh impossible to draw a clean distinction between “art” and “pornography.”

Judge Posner helpfully notes also that the girl in the painting whose guitar lesson has turned into a very different kind of lesson is in the same position as Christ in Enguerrand Quarton‘s fifteenth century La Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.

Ah, so it’s blasphemy as well as art! Good, good…

Limbless

The bizarre sex toy that Buck Yale and his friends come into possession of, the set of “hyperspatial cinctures,” raises an interesting possibility for bondage sex enthusiasts: what if your limbs weren’t just bound, but missing altogether. That would really be pushing matters to an entirely new and kinky level, wouldn’t it?

In the real world, going the amputee route would, of course, present significant challenges and require real commitment, and you would of course, like anyone else in society who wants to be too far from the norm, be considered sick and in need of “treatment”. The fun part of the hyperspatial cincture is that it allows sexual game-players to try out being an amputee (among other, even more radical possibilities) in a way that’s reversible and doesn’t put you at risk of being locked up somewhere nasty.

I created the mad-science device of the hyperspatial cincture because I’m pretty the temptation to play with the possibilities of a partner rendered helpless by amputation (or be one yourself) might be commoner than people would like to admit. There is a lot of amputation fetish art out there. I’ll present two examples.

GammAtelier, which has been featured here at EroticMadScience recently and has been added to the links bar, has an entire gallery of amputation fetish art, of which I show one specimen below (click on image to see it in context):

And the intriguing (though perhaps dangerous?) Naga’s Den, from which we’ve also seen art before, has (among other things) a page of sketches called The Rubber Brush, which, like the hyperspatial cinctures, is a quasi-magical technology that allows participants in a bondage party to just…eliminate parts of themselves or meld them together. The implications are obvious.

As always, if you have favorites in this sort of art, I welcome your suggestions in comments.

In the sculpture court

So I went image-delving to try to give the reader a bit of visual experience to go along with the narrative of Iris in the sculpture court where she discovers the statue made out of Ashley Madder. This naturally involved a trip to the Medsua Realm, a great big A.S.F.R.-related site where they do that sort of thing well.

My eye was first attracted to the image at the left, presented on one of their webfinds pages. Not much provenance there, unfortunately. But we do live in a happy Internet era, and there is now a tool called TinEye, which is a reverse image search. Got an image you’re wondering about? Well, now you either upload it or just send the URL to TinEye and it will give it a shot for you. On this image, I was able to turn up that this is a sculpture known as “Femme Eternelle.” Neat! (Unsurprisingly, TinEye is now listed on my links bar as one of the Cool Tools, so by all means enjoy it.)

Interesting. Over to Google image search. Can I find it larger or better or more like it? Enter “femme eternelle sculpture” and all sorts of interesting results come back. Nothing bigger on this one, but something did come up that seemed even better from the perspective of “sculpture court visual experience.” It’s a woman on a pedestal, indentified only by the title “Une photo d’art.”

That from a French-language blog called The Dreamsland, whose collection of photography is so exquisite that it too is now added to the EroticMadScience blogroll.

Where Am I? now available

The sixth Gnosis College script, Where Am I?, is now up an available for consumption. The campus Lothario discovers a most dangerous toy, leading to some highly improbable bondage sex and a very ill-advised prank. Colonel Madder advances his schemes but also gets into hot water with his superiors. Cleo Mount, appearing for the first time since Study Abroad, is acting kind of strange. And meanwhile Iris Brockman is getting really, really mad at her trendy philosophy professor…

Hope you all enjoy. The in-blog version is linked at the top and the sidebar, while a PDF version is available here.

Bursting out

Bert I. Gordon (look at the initials) is best remembered, perhaps, as the creator of movies like The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), but he also gives us at least one decent thaumatophile moment in what is otherwise a real stinker of a movie called Village of the Giants (1965).

The movie does feature a Mad Scientist of sorts — an annoying Boy Genius imaginatively called “Genius.” He invents some sort of wonder substance that causes biological organisms to grow to colossal size (a theme dear to B.I.G.’s heart, obviously). A crew of dim, overaged teenagers steal of of the substance and camp out in an abandoned theater, and consume some.

And while this movie is stupid on all sorts of levels (it was riffed on but good by the MST3K crew), B.I.G. does manage to get one thing right, which is that he takes account of the fact that a wonder substance that blows you up to several times your natural size won’t necessarily blow up the clothes you are wearing, and that’s a result that B.I.G. rightly exploits for some decent sexploitation, at least for 1965.

I’ve done part of the result as animated GIFs for your edification. Since they’re sort of big (hmm…) and since some people find them annoying I’ve tucked them beneath the fold. Click at your own risk!

Continue reading →

Teen-age sweetheart of the 21st century

After all the Sturm and Drang with which Gnosis Dreamscapes ends up, I thought it might be nice to come up with a little something bright and cheerful for all of you to start your workweeks.

A few years ago, James Lileks as part of a series called “Funny Books: Dubious Moments in Comics History,” featured the following cover from a short-lived early 1950s series…

…together with some appropriate (and funny) snark. Naturally, when I first saw it, I wanted to see more of this curvaceous redhead in her natural habitat. The illustration alone would have been appealing enough, and the artist Dan DeCarlo — probably best known for his work on Archie — was one of talent.

But what to do? This was a very minor comic book written over half a century ago (and a pain to Google, too, since a certain car made by Volkswagen will swamp your attempt to do so).

But we live in a happy age, we do. Back in the 1970s a critic named Roger Price formulated something he called Price’s First Law, a dismal reflection on consumption in a mass-production age: “If everybody doesn’t want it, then nobody gets it.” But now in the era of the long tail, a new principle has taken hold (let’s not call it Faustus’s Law, please): “If anybody every loved it, then everyone can get it.”

And so with Jetta. We are blessed to have among us one Craig Yoe, comix historian extraordinary. You might be familiar with him as the compiler of Clean Cartoonists’ Dirty Drawings or perhaps Secret Identity: The Fetish Art of Superman’s Co-Creator Joe Shuster. (And if you’re not, you owe it to yourself to have a look-in at the steamy, seamy demimonde of comix art — it’s fun!)

As it turns out, Yoe has a recent project of some interest:

Ta da! Every issue of Jetta ever to be published, right in an appealing hardbound edition. The long tail wins again!

Now perhaps one might think that Jetta is a marginal topic for EroticMadScience. Eroticism is rationed strictly in the form of winking, nudging cheesecake (this was a book thought fit for sale to minors in the 1950s). And the science isn’t too mad. It’s more like a goofy imagined future, full of jet packs and flying cars and clunky robot servants in a brightly colored populuxe built environment. But personally, I think that’s appealing. YMMV, dear readers.

Maybe there’s a little hint of conjoinment in one episode, and thus a tenuous link between Jetta’s innocent future past and my rather kinky present.

But even if DeCarlo’s teen-comedy romp isn’t your particular cup of mad-science mystery formula, there’s another virtue of Yoe’s collection: 39 pinup artists who’ve re-imagined Jetta for our age. I’ll provide some examples of — thumbnails only, as these are working artists who deserve patronage. You can click through to the websites if you’re interested.

Jetta (right) as envisioned as a pure pin-up girl by artist Ben Tan.

A humorous take (left) done by comix artist Colleen Coover.

And additional, rather sexy take (below), done by Bill Presing. Looks like the robot won out after all!

Plus 36 more if you pony up for the book itself, and original DeCarlo pinup art to boot. See Veronica Lodge just a smidge hotter than you probably ever have, with perhaps one exception…

Conjoinment

At the end of Gnosis Dreamscapes, Aloysius attempts a Hail Mary play with the Apsinthion Protocol to try to save the lives of Jill and Maureen, both gravely wounded in their encounter with Madder’s thugs.

As so often in mad science, what happens isn’t exactly according to plan, and what results is a conjoinment of Jill and Maureen. More personal identity porn

Now with a little bit of effort you can find a fair amount of conjoinment material out there. This example is found at Gammatelier, which has a lot of this sort of thing, very fetchingly done too.

But of course this art, though perhaps appealing, isn’t quite what’s going on in Gnosis Dreamscapes. Jill and Maureen fuse completely to make a single individual, not just a sort of conjoined non-twin (or triplet, or what have you). Artistic representations of that more complete process are harder to find, probably because a single fused being looks rather a lot like just another human being.

But there is at least one fine example of a complete fusion. Back in the 1990s John Byrne , a prolific comic book artist who has worked on more superheroes than most people even know exist (website here) created a short-run series called Babe. Babe was created when five separate women were fused together through some weird process involving alien technology and arcane forces (can you hear the thaumatophiles panting?), creating a being geometrically stronger and tougher (and arguably, more comic-book outlandish) than any of the five women put together.

Eventually the situation got defused and we get to see Babe’s five component women:

Though in a later series Babe was re-created. The scene in which one of her component women vanishes to recreate Babe should have a familiar feel to readers of The Apsinthion Protocol.

I don’t think Carolyn actually melts away — panels in the previous number suggest she spontaneously dematerializes/is teleported away while showering, in a scene reminiscent of one that happens in Mars Needs Women. (If you remember that scene, or indeed anything else in Mars Needs Women, you have my sympathy.)

And as for Maureen and Jill? As the last intertitle says…to be continued.

Girls and washing machines

Apropos of the excessive woman-washing machine short, I can say that I had seen images of women interacting at least somewhat erotically with washing machines: the one featured in this ErosBlog post is a particularly amusing example. And of course, sex-tech maven Violet Blue has at least one post on humping the washing machine. But I was rather surprised, when I did an image dive on the topic, just how many images I came up with. (On all of them you can click through for links back to the original context). Here is one example:

And another:

And yet another:

And of course, one suggested by my friend Bacchus:

And finally another, this one with a slightly vintage feel. Beware the spin cycle!

I haven’t yet found one that ends in the bizarre way that Waldron Lee’s short does, but I’ll keep looking.