One sharp young woman

When John Samson makes a crude (and racially loaded) pass at Michiko after his own dream experience, Michiko retorts with a reference to someone named “Abe Sada.” And who was Sada?

A real person, it turns out, whose activities were in fact significant enough for her to have a movie made about her, just as Michiko says. (The historical Sada is depicted in the picture to the left, after her arrest in 1936.) The movie is indeed called In the Realm of the Senses, made in 1976 by Nagisa Oshima. Sada is a former prostitute who starts a torrid affair with her boss, an inn-owner in 1930s Japan. In the movie she’s played by Eiko Matsuda.

Sada conducted a torrid affair with her employer, an inn owner named Kichizo Ishida (played in the movie by Tatsuya Fuji). Things apparently got pretty kinky and erotic asphixia got into the game.

…and eventually strangled him to death. (You have been warned that these practices are dangerous.)

Sada probably wouldn’t have enjoyed that much celebrity had it not been for what she did after asphixiating her lover.

She carried it with her for three days.

So implicitly, Michiko is responding to Samson’s crude overture with a suggestion that he be castrated. (Don’t mess with Michiko!) Sadly, Samson has been spending his life learning how to kill people and listening to talk radio, so he doesn’t get this rather subtle cultural reference.

I’m pleased, by the way, to be able to tell you that In the Realm of the Senses is now available in fine new editions from the Criterion Collection, so by all means give it a look in.

BS of A

“The Scouts taught me to to my duty.”

Okay, so I’m a Really Bad Person for having a villain invoke the Boy Scouts in the course of committing a sex murder. I got my inspiration from Penn & Teller, who devoted a whole fourth season episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit to pwning the Scouts.

These splendid entertainers make the point that the Scouts discriminate against gays, bisexual, transgendered people, and atheists. “[W]e won’t let in any faggots…” Yeah, I’d give the Scouts the finger, too.

On the plus side, Penn & Teller propose an alternative organization with its own merit badges. And very much in the spirit of things here, there is a merit badge for porn.

Hot damn! I wish these guys had been around when I was a lad. In the meantime, I can hope their producer calls if they ever need a thaumatophilia expert. (If ve does, I can even promise to say the word “cunt” and not break down laughing, like that John McWhorter guy did back in season two.)

For a different vision of a better kind of Boy Scouts, see Tom Lehrer, who had it right decades ago.

A hanging

Alfred Hitchcock attributed to the playwright Victorien Sardou the maxim “torture the women” as good advice for constructing dramatic plots. Even if Sardou never said such a thing (I haven’t been able to find an unambiguous French-language source for it), as the creator of the source-text for Tosca he would surely have had that maxim in his heart if not on his lips. I might more modestly note that if you’re going to construct a plot in a world like that of Gnosis which has its share of paranoid melodrama, you’re going to have to have villains. And you can’t make a villain by just by putting a character in a t-shirt that says “I’m depraved.” You need to show their depravity.

John Samson sure shows his depravity, and that of his boss. In line with the rules of his universe, he makes the wrong woman his victim. That’s bureaucracy for you.

Whether it is to my credit or demerit that the scene in which Jill-Prime is murdered has a clear precedent, rather than being a full-blown product of my imagination I leave to others to judge. It’s from one of the most notorious exploitation movies ever made, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. (A film which also leaves its imaginative marks on Invisible Girl, Heroine, in that it depicts helpless incarcerated innocents being destroyed in “experiments.”)

In this film, a group of Nazis visiting a concentration camp in which medical atrocities are taking place are entertained by a sadistic spectacle. A young woman is placed at the end of a dinner table.

She is bound, and wired by a noose, not quite taut, to a rafter in the ceiling.

And she is made to stand on a block of ice.

It does not end well.

Two appetites together

I suspect that many young women might not be all that pleased to have a lover quote the Monster of Malmsbury at them, even in the pleasantest of afterglows. But Jill (and therefore Jill-Prime) is a scholar as well as an athlete (sexual and otherwise), and so it goes pretty well.

Frontispiece to _Leviathan_ (1651). Click through to see an amazing collection of politico-religious visual references in the larger image

Now you, dear reader, might well at this point be scratching your head and wondering what a 17th century English political philosopher is doing in the middle of all this erotic mad science. Well, for one thing, Hobbes is a natural go-to for the thaumatophile, because in his striking image of a political commonwealth as a sort of man-made man, he got close to the whole Frankenstein theme a century and a half early. From the introduction to Leviathan:

Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Naturall, for whose protection and defence it was intended; and in which, the Soveraignty is an Artificiall Soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; The Magistrates, and other Officers of Judicature and Execution, artificiall Joynts; Reward and Punishment (by which fastned to the seat of the Soveraignty, every joynt and member is moved to performe his duty) are the Nerves, that do the same in the Body Naturall; The Wealth and Riches of all the particular members, are the Strength; Salus Populi (the Peoples Safety) its Businesse; Counsellors, by whom all things needfull for it to know, are suggested unto it, are the Memory; Equity and Lawes, an artificiall Reason and Will; Concord, Health; Sedition, Sicknesse; and Civill War, Death. Lastly, the Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let Us Make Man, pronounced by God in the Creation.

And the erotic is not an element lacking in Hobbes. The passage quoted by Rob is real. It’s cited seriously by the contempoarary Cambridge philospher Simon Blackburn. Blackburn’s a delight as a writer. Not only did he administer a well-deserved intellectual spanking to theism-apologist John Polkinghorne in the pages of The New Republic a few years back, but he also gave the lecture on “Lust” as part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins put on at the New York Public Library. It’s there that Blackburn actually quotes Hobbes. Have a look, if it’s your thing.

(Well, it’s at least my thing.)

Suction

The means through which Bridget O’Brian is abducted from Gnosis are of course implausible and absurd, but since they invoke a cinematic scene so important in my thaumatophile development, I couldn’t really help myself.

The scene is a tribute — somewhat more explicit one than the original, since Bridget loses all her clothes — to the famous “girl at the piano” scene in Weird Science (1985). And I know I’ve shown these pictures before, but I still can’t quite help myself.

Writer and director John Hughes died last year, so we can’t inquire as to his inspiration to the scene, though with writing like this I hope he managed to make it to thaumatophile heaven. Naturally if anyone has any background to add I’d welcome it in comments.

The unnamed girl at the piano was played by Kym Malin, who was Playboy’s Miss May 1982. As I rolled her famous Weird Science scene around in my head I hit upon a backstory for her indignity: the gods themselves decided they wanted Kym as a plaything, and so that’s why supernatural winds stripped her naked and sucked her up the chimney.

The gods probably had a point…

Playing cards?

The slightly unorthodox card game Bill manages to get himself into after his improving oneiric experience plays off an old joke, but what the hell, why not? It’s certainly a good excuse for going image diving for strip-poker pix. This classic game is visually well covered, whether in conventional naughty photographs that show up on Flickr:

Or in semi-vintage erotica:

Or even in manga-inspired comix:

Who wouldn’t want to play?

Moar Pirates!

Well, if the last pair of posts on pirates weren’t sufficiently strange for you, maybe this will be.

Because it turns out at the illustrators at SheAniMale.com have kinked into the whole pirate theme:

This narrative is going…exactly where you think it’s going.

Good use of the nautical setting, guys. Though I imagine that Patrick O’Brian must be spinning in his grave.

Boxed up

The visual image of Abigail the Lady’s Maid — captured and ravished by Moorish pirates, and now boxed up for shipping out as “a pretty addition to some harem.” has a rather specific visual inspiration in the art of Kiyoaki Kanai. I’ve blogged about Kanai before at ErosBlog, and his interest in girls in boxes has leaked into Gnosis Dreamscapes, it seems.

And perhaps more to the shipping out point, this curious illustration, which I think is meant to illustrate some sort of novel about sex slavery.

We’re a long way here from the Age of Fighting Sail, but the connection is no doubt clear.

Pirates!

When I was just about ready to launch EroticMadScience.com I wrote to a friend describing my enterprise in these words:

I guess it’s time I raised the Jolly Roger and set sail.

And that’s very much in the general spirit of things at this site, since a core idea behind the Gnosis stories is that it is a blessing to be able to escape the realm of ordinary human life and its conventions, to find a morality-free zone where we might indulge our imaginations.

Dreams are of course the best and most blessed of all such zones, perhaps. Hence Gnosis Dreamscapes. But pirates do nicely as well.

And naturally, as pirates are outlaws beyond the reach of any state, one naturally imagines that they might get up to some rather interesting activities.

(For a larger version click through to Kinky Delight.)

I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more pirate-themed porn than I can readily find with simple image searching. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” was how Winston Churchill supposedly characterized naval tradition. Churchill probably wasn’t right about the sodomy bit, given how little privacy there would have been on an a ship in the days of fighting sail. But seriously, wouldn’t a square-rigged ship be something like an ideal BDSM playground? What with all those ropes and spars and the great familiarity that sailormen are supposed to have with different kinds of knots? To say nothing of the fondness that navy men have long had for corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline… Perhaps the shortage of usable vessels explains why we don’t see sailing ships used for more bondage shoots. Perhaps the Village People’s use of the U.S.S. Reasoner lingers in institutional memory, making the Navy skittish of any possible proposal by fine folks at Kink.com to borrow the U.S.S. Constitution for an afternoon. But perhaps I speculate too much?

That said, there are certainly some people willing to make good use of the vast homoerotic potential of pirates.

But interestingly enough it was none of this that inspired Bill’s naval dream. Rather, it was Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht‘s song “Seeräuber Jenny” from Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that really set my inner wheels in motion. A woman in an oppressive situation imagines pirates coming and wrecking destruction on all around her, and then carrying her off. Here is Lotte Lenya performing it in a 1931 film version. (German lyrics, and an alternative audio version, can be accessed here.)

So maybe this is really Michiko’s pirate dream?

Oriental princess

I might have a real weakness for sorceresses, but not for princesses, even if they are designed like the fearsome but alluring Michiko Maeda. If you’re a sorceress, you can keep all your clothes on and you’ll still have me at the word “abracadabra,” but princesses will have to work harder, even if Rob’s dream-self will fall hopelessly and fatally for you.

What constitutes working harder in the context of an oriental fantasy might be easy to specify but not that easy to find. But I have a certain weakness for orientalist art (more evidence that I am a Bad Person) and it turns out that Flickr makes available a pool of fine orientalist art, from which the image to the right stood out for me. This will do very nicely as the image of an oriental princess working harder for my attention. I am especially pleased by the use of jewelry here, which seems to me spot-on. I’m not sure that the image was originally intended to represent any sort of royalty but really, who cares?

But the thing that really tickled my fancy when I looked into the provenance of this image a little further was that I found out it had been created by Henri Privat-Livemont (1861-1936), who was more famous as a creator of this Art Nouveau advertising poster.

An advertisement for Absinthe Robette. That works for me double. Not only does it reference the fact that Rob undergoes a dream analogue of the Apsinthion Protocol, but it also picks up on a theme I find personally appealing…