Spider girl triumphant

In celebration of the victory Cleo Mount achieves over national security thuggery using her curious emerging powers, a picture of a body-paint spider girl.

Appears (and, sadly, often disappears) in various places but this one is from here.

Comix footnote: I had been vaguely aware that Marvel Comics had created a slinky and appealing Spider Girl character, but in researching the Spider Girl meme I discovered somewhat to my surprise that there was also a DC universe Spider Girl who appeared briefly in the 1960s. Her primary super power was…super-strong prehensile hair.

By Cthulhu, that sounds like something out of the Tick‘s fictional universe…

The health of the state

I don’t normally comment too directly on politics here at EroticMadScience, but I should note one thing about Colonel Madder: his use of a terrorist incident to advance his program shows that he has taken to heart a lesson from a source that would seem improbable given Madder’s strongly-held though hardly-unusual politico-cultural views, to wit Randolph Bourne…

Lovis Corinth (1858-1925), "The Weapons of Mars"

…who taught us that “War is the Health of the State.”

Libera me

Beware what you wish for. Connie Morton wanted more than anything to be the soprano soloist in the Verdi Requiem. Little did she know that it would be her requiem.

But before her end, Connie does really get to shine as the only soloist in the “Libera me.” In case you don’t know the words:

Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna, in die illa tremenda:
Quando cæli movendi sunt et terra.
Dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem.
Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo, dum discussio venerit, atque ventura ira.
Quando cæli movendi sunt et terra.
Dies illa, dies iræ, calamitatis et miseriæ, dies magna et amara valde.
Dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem.

Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful day,
when the heavens and the earth shall be moved,
when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.
I am made to tremble, and I fear, till the judgment be upon us, and the coming wrath,
when the heavens and the earth shall be moved.
That day, day of wrath, calamity, and misery, day of great and exceeding bitterness,
when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire.

Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them.

Here at EroticMadScience, so gloomy and medieval a sentiment might best be illustrated by Giotto.

Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), "Hell," detail from Last Judgment, a fresco in the Capella degli Scrovegni in Padua (1304-6)

All sorts of interesting fetishes are indulged in hell, apparently.

Obviously I cannot cite all this stuff without coming up with a real example of the music. Here is one of the best I can find, with Renée Fleming as the soprano soloist. The excerpt isn’t quite complete, I think due to clip-length limitations imposed by YouTube.

One might just think that art like this would be worth giving one’s life for.

More girls in tubes

Not only does poor Marie get swallowed in a vore-like scenario as she gets abducted, she also gets deposited in a fluid-filled tube, prepared for transport.

Now this is a subject we’ve visited before here at EroticMadScience. Further digging has shown just how deep the whole “girls in tubes” trope goes. The blogger at Posthuman Blues refers to girls-in-tubes as “the meme that wouldn’t die,” and presents impressive evidence from the visual record of classic sci-fi to that effect. For example, this cover from Amaxing Stories (a publication we have also often visited before here at EroticMadScience).

A check against this astonshing cover archive puts this issue in January 1942. As usual, it’s hard to dig up much on the story, although one academic source makes it seem even weirder than the cover suggests.

Posthuman Blues also provides us with other fine examples of girls in tubes. This is my personal favorite example from a whole post dedicated to such.

From August 1955, at least according to one useful source. Beyond that, it’s hard to dig up much.

And then it gets stranger still. I recently found this image on Janitor of Lunacy:

And I think this is meant to be a girl in a tube. There appears to be lots of technical-looking information surrounding her, which seems just ideal from a mad science perspective. Though it is in Japanese, a language I don’t read. And since it’s part of the graphic image, I can’t even readily run through Google translate to produce weird-looking English.

If anyone want to pitch in (either explaining what the text in the image is about, or just tossing in your favorite girls in tubes images), by all means, feel free!

Rover

The means through which the shifty Marie is abducted into what the Victorians might have called “a fate worse than death” might look absurd on the surface. But like so many other things (all things?) in the Gnosis world, they’re inspiration stolen from elsewhere. In this case, from one of the most brilliant things ever put on television, The Prisoner.

In this 1967-8 series, a British civil servant played by Patrick McGoohan turns in his resignation and is promptly abducted by sinister forces — perhaps from within the very agency from whence he resigned, and thence is incarcerated in an absurd “Village” and subjected to periodic attempts to extract from him by force or by trick the answer to the question “Why did you resign?” Escape from the Village is made all-but-impossible by a number of artifices, the most frightening of which is…

…something resembling a large white beach ball that will pursue you and really ruin your day if you get out of line. It’s called “Rover.”

Now maybe “giant white beach ball” doesn’t sound terribly threatening. But within the fictional universe of The Prisoner Rover is no joke (it’s a measure of the genius of the series that such a benign-seeming object can be turned into something of such menace). That fucker can smother you to death if you’re not careful. And even if it doesn’t, any day you have to deal with Rover is a bad one, even by the standards of the Village.

Marie is hunted down and captured by something that resembles a giant soap-bubble, which allows us to imagine a threat posed by something even more benign-seeming than a beach ball (also that of a wet, nude Marie jiggling in peril across a deserted gymnasium floor)! And the moment of her capture evokes even if it does not duplicate, with its screaming and its schlurping and popping sound effects, another rather dark fetish.

(Proximate image source People Eaten By, ultimate source almost certainly Voreville.com. [Faustus note: May 11, 2018: Voreville appears lost and cannot be found in the Internet Archive]). Yep. Something called “vore,” which is all about swallowing or being swallowed, which is in a sense what happens to Marie, even if she has the (perhaps disputable) good fortune to survive the experience. We’ve actually encountered this fetish in attenuated ways in the Gnosis world before. Something like it happens to both Rob (liquified, then drunk) and Bill (swallowed by a whale at the end) in their Michiko-inpsired dreams in Gnosis Dreamscapes.

If you don’t already know this, there is a ton of vore-imagery out there on the Net — just Google image-search on “vore.” So obviously in writing I’ve stumbled on more than just another one of my own dark crevices in erotic consciousness…

(Postscript: The Wikipedia article on vore is terribly thin. Will Erotopedia do better, when it finally launches? [Note by Faustus May 11, 2018: The site appears either never to have launched, or to have disappeared after it did].)

Casablanca/Thaumatophilia

One might wonder whether it’s really worth spending so much time on Casablanca in a Gnosis College script, even if it is a key seduction technology. Aside from that, does this movie have much to do with erotic mad science?

Well, eros first. IMHO, the many close-up images of Ingrid Bergman are among the most beautiful images of a woman’s face ever captured on film, including those seen of her in the climactic scene watched by Rob and Jireen.

Looking at these images I’m sometimes hard-pressed to find a word that expresses what I feel, at least in English. There is a verb in Russian which I’ve encountered from time to time, налюбоваться, which means something like “gaze on in awe and wonder,” (the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary suggests “gaze on to one’s heart’s content”) so maybe that’s what I’m looking for.

But is there mad science? Not directly, as far as I can tell. But let’s look at a pair of members of this movie’s talented cast. Here is Claude Rains, who in Casablanca plays the corrupt but ultimately redeemed French police officer Captain Renault.

And where else have we seen (should we perhaps say, “seen?”) Claude Rains? As the Invisible Man of course. And human invisibility turns out to be a rather central device in the Gnosis fictional world.

(Image source: Movieforum.com.) Readers may amuse themselves, if they wish, trying to think of any A-list Hollywood actor who would be credible as both Captain Renault and the Invisible Man.

Consider now also Conrad Veidt, who plays the Nazi villain of Casablanca, Major Heinrich Strasser. (An irony, perhaps, in light of the fact that Veidt was himself a refugee from Hitler.)

Where have we seen him before? Well, it turns out that Veidt earlier in his career had played the part of Cesare, the hypnotically-controlled somnambulist in Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1920). (Personal note: Caligari is one of the few movies I have watched that inspired me to immediately go back to the beginning of the DVD I saw it on and re-watch. The only other one I can recall is Hayao Miyazaki‘s Spirited Away. Go figure.)

(Image source: FilmFanatic.org.) Hypnosis put to dubious use. Also a theme we’ve seen before.

The mad science is out there. You just have to look.

Note: Don’t groan about the presence of a weird-looking Russian verb in the post. If you’re a fan of a certain anime series (and I’m sure many of you are)…

It’s right there in the theme music for the title sequence (albeit as an imperative rather than as an infinitive).

Aнгелы и демоны кружили надо мной
Рассекали тернии млечне пути
Не знает счастья только тот,
Кто его зова понять не смог…

Налюбуйтесь, налюбуйтесь,
Aeria gloris, Aeria gloris.

Angels and demons circling above me
Swishing through the hardships and milky ways
The only one who doesn’t know the happiness
is the one who couldn’t understand his call

Watch in awe, watch in awe
Heavenly glories, heavenly glories

Worthy of its own minor tribute in Commencement.

And perhaps not all that far from Casablanca; both do seem to draw on a certain spirit of tough-guy stoicism.

La Marseillaise

Jireen goes after Rob with seduction technology that works: movies. And she picks a particularly powerful one.

I can say that I’ve actually had the experience of being in a college movie auditorium where everyone got up and sang the “Marseillaise” at the appropriate point in Casablanca, and about that experience this I can say. If you haven’t been lucky enough to have it, go out and have it. You won’t be sorry. It’s a true testimony to the power of song.

An extended clip of from the classic source:

So all together now:

Allons enfants de la Patrie
Le jour de gloire est arrivé !
Contre nous de la tyrannie
L’étendard sanglant est levé
Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes
Mugir ces féroces soldats?
Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras.
Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes!
Aux armes citoyens
Formez vos bataillons
Marchons, marchons
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.

Quando me’n vò

Connie Morton takes singing in the shower to a high level.

(Image from Self-Pleasureforwomen.com.) What she sings is from Giacomo Puccini‘s La bohème, specifically Musetta’s rather risqué slow waltz, “Quando me’n vò.” (Google offers one translation, here is another one from this source, which includes a parallel Italian-English libretto for the entire opera.)

Quando men vo soletta per la via,
la gente sosta e mira
e la bellezza mia tutta ricerca in me
da capo a pie’…
… ed assaporo allor la bramosia
sottil, che da gli occhi traspira
e dai palesi vezzi intender sa
alle occulte beltà.
Così l’effluvio del desìo tutta m’aggira,
felice mi fa!

When I stroll out alone
along the street.
The people stop and gaze at me,
to seek out my beauty from
from head to toe.
…and then I taste the sly desire
that gleams from admiring eyes.
They can see all my beauty which lies
concealed in my heart, perceived
from my outward charms.
So, this scent of ardent desire
surrounds me and fills me with pleasure!

A fantasy of visibility, of being desired. Quite the thing to sing when pleasuring yourself!

“Quando me’n vò” is a huge crowd pleaser and it’s easy to find versions of it on line. I’ll offer up two, because why not? First a concert version with Anna Netrebko

And also a recital version with Maki Mori:

Making beautiful music together

Tanya Yip‘s fantasy of tranforming herself into a cello and then being masterfully played has an obvious visual inspiration: Man Ray’s famous image Violon d’Ingres:

An erotic inspiration indeed, especially since the model who posed for the picture was the stunning Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), who posed for any number of other striking things, such as this 1920 photograph (thus taken when Kiki would have been 18 or 19) Mädchen mit Vase by Julian Mandel.

I felt well-moved writing Tanya’s fantasy — the analogy between a master musician and a skilled lover seems to me very close. (And the analogy also works the other way: cf Honoré de Balzac: “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”) I suppose there’s a rather radical bondage element as well as a transformation fantasy element. After all, if you’re a cello, you can’t move and you’re at the mercy of whoever holds you…

_Commencement_ now available

The seventh Gnosis College script, Commencement, is now available (a PDF version can be found here). As the title implies, it brings certain plotlines full circle, but it opens a few others. If you want to know more, you’ll have to read it. It’s the last one that I have in reserve, so I guess I’ll have to start writing some new material.

Somehow I don’t think that will be all that hard. But I just might try shifting the format a little. Stay tuned….