Tag Archives: A.S.F.R.

Fusion organique

Here’s another Elvifrance cover, from it’s Série Blanche, No. 36, which is intriguing for the thaumatophile, because one has to ask, what on earth is going on here?

Are we looking at

  1. A conjoinment fantasy?  That would seem to be one obvious reading of une fusion organique.
  2. A liquid girl story?  Wiktionnaire gives the first definition fusion as “liquéfaction d’un corps par l’action de la chaleur” and there certainly does seem to be a bit of melting going on at the base of the illustration.
  3. Something A.S.F.R.-related even?  Women are not normally silver or gold like that.

As for the grotesque figure looming over them, I haven’t a clue.

It gets stranger from there, because there is some evidence that whatever was beneath the cover you see above was considered too naughty even to be published in France.  The index page for the cover art in the series tells us “Les n°35 et 36 sont des microtirages destinés à la commission de censure, donc jamais commercialisés.”

Which fact, of course, only makes this thaumatophile want it more.

Altered (liquid) States

The weakness of human memory means you’re often surprised when re-encountering your influences.

I saw Ken Russell‘s movie Altered States (1980) sometime when I was in high school, I think by passing myself off as a student at a local college and attending one of its film society’s screenings (I did that a lot — it made adolescence vastly more bearable).  And I recalled thinking at the the time that it was weird and sort of interesting and then largely forgot about it at least consciously.

Just this weekend I re-watched for the first time and realized that it must have lodged a lot more deeply in my subconscious than my conscious mind.

William Hurt played a psychology professor named Edward Jessop who was obsessed with the idea of finding deep secrets from the human evolutionary past — perhaps the universe’s entire past — buried within the self.  He thought he could do this by inducing various altered states of consciousness.  One of his initial techniques involved the use of sensory deprivation tanks, which meant a real mad-science setting.  His initial experiments were with student volunteers, and then he began trying out the apparatus himself.

A psychology professor who’s something of a mad scientist who experiments on his students using a fluid-filled tube.  Looks like that was something that would be popping back out of my own consciousness later on.  In addition, we get to see an example of William Hurt as a tube guy.

Later on Jessop will travel into central Mexico and experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms.  He has an erotic vision of his wife Emily, played lusciously by Blair Brown.

In the course of the vision “Emily” is covered by some sort of blowing sand or dust, which gives an A.S.F.R. feeling to the whole vision.

That’s something that would return to my erotic consciousness later on.

Putting the magic mushroom juice together with the isolation tank produces very strange results — a man who begins dissolving into something like primal protoplasm:

And eventually into a swirling vortex of liquid, before being reconstituted into his normal self, or at least, as normal as his self ever really gets.

Obviously that’s also something that will be back for me as well.

I could probably go on mining this movie for plenty more if I really wanted to try to decode all its drug imagery (I can’t help but note that crucifixions are common).  But for now I’ll just leave with a bit of dialog that left me drop-jawed.  It’s Emily early in the movie, talking to Jessop.

emily

You don’t have to tell me how weird you are.  I know how weird you are.  I’m the girl you bedded the past two months.  Even sex is a mystical experience for you.  You carry on like a flagellant which can be very nice but I sometimes if it’s me that’s being made love to.  I feel like being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.  And you are a Faust freak, Eddie.  You’d sell your soul to get the Great Truth.

And she’s delivering this remarkable speech in the course of proposing to Jessop that he marry her. Talk about a girl willing to jump in with both feet!

Hyperspatial cincture inspiration

A browse through my library the other day brought to mind a possible inspiration for the hyperspatial cinctures that play such an important technological role  in the parascreenplay Where Am I? If you’re not up to speed here, the hyperspatial cinctures were devices that allowed someone to section off a part of ver body without harm — blood, nerve sensations, etc. would continue to flow across some sort of hyperspace, so you could put your limbs in one place and your trunk in another.  Quite the mad science bondage toy.   Potentially quite dangerous, as Dolly Gibson would find out.

Well, it turns out that these mad science devices have a magical antecedent in cinema, from the wild Hong Kong movie Erotic Ghost Story 2 (1991). (*) Want to take a guess as to what’s going on in the scene below?

Yes, you got it right.  An evil demon has kidnapped a pretty peasant girl and cloven her magically in half, copulating with her lower half, while her upper half complains of lack of satisfaction.

This movie has a hell of a lot going on in it.  Sure, it’s not great by any reasonable cinematic standard, but it does have lots of energetic softcore sex, copious male and female nudity, demon sex, underwater sex, very creative use of a swing, and even an A.S.F.R.-like scene in which one of our heroes is frozen naked in a giant block of ice.

He gets better, though.

Why oh why don’t we have movies like this in English-language cinema?  Lots of unapologetic sex integrated with goofy-fun mad science/magical effects inside an actual story in which we do care, at least some, what happens to the characters?   Granted there are a few, like Invasion of the Bee Girls.  But where is our Robotrix? We need more of these, dammit!

I guess that’s a large part of the reason I ended up writing parascreenplays.  More ordinary people can have movies that enact sexual fantasies, but thaumatophiles like me have to fantasize even the movies…

(*) Chinese-language title 聊斋艳谭2, which in pinyin I believe would read liáo zhāi yàn tán èr. Unfortunately my feeble attempt to excavate a literal translation generates gibberish: “chat fast beautiful Tan two,” so not only do I get too few movies, I suck at Chinese also. Darn.

Weird Science anticipates me

…in the matter of the whole Apsinthion Protocol/liquid girl thing.

Time I guess for another one of my melancholy Dr.-Fausuts-has-no-original-ideas posts.

A word first on how we might have gotten to the strange situation depicted in the panel above, and the provenance of the art.  It’s a panel from Weird Science #7, not a comix-format of the 1985 John Hughes movie, but an actual series put out in by famous EC Comics.  EC’s publisher William Gaines is an underacknowledged hero of American culture.  His comics lines broke new ground in many areas including horror and science fiction.  He acted defiant in front of a persecuting congressional committee.  He put an African-American character in a position of high competence and responsibility at a time when they were largely confined to menial or comic relief roles in mainstream fiction.  And when it became impossible to sustain his comics-making enterprise in the face of cultural backlash, he founded Mad magazine, which I’ll bet did more to train the satirical intelligence of generations of young Americans than any other publication — a latter-day American Mercury for the adolescent set.  A great story, which you can find entertainingly told in David Hajdu‘s The Ten-Cent Plague:  The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America (click on image to the left).

But before Mad and all that, EC had Weird Science, a pioneer of science-fiction comics.  The stories were largely written by Gaines and Al Feldstein, and drawn by a remarkable set of comics artists the included Harvey Kurtzman, Joe Orlando, and the great Wally Wood.   Though the story of this post, “Something Missing!” was written by Feldstein and drawn by Jack Kamen.

Submitted for your consideration:  Professor Roger Lawrence is miserably married to Hannah, a shrewish middle-aged woman who rides him hard to give up his experiments and teach more classes so that they can have more money.  It’s not his fault:  Professor Lawrence’s life is the way it is because he lives in the EC Comics fictional universe, where bitterly unhappy marriages are the norm.  They drive plots forward, you see.  Lawrence finds comfort in two things:  the laboratory in which he has just perfected an amazing machine he calls the “Physio-Chemical Decomposer and Re-aligner,” and his pretty blond undergraduate research assistant, Sally Chadwick.

Lawrence and Sally successfully test the machine on a mouse, which they decompose into slime, then recompose into — a piece of cheese.  Sally’s explanation:  “…that’s what it was thinking about when the machine dissolved it.”  They reverse the process, restoring the mouse.  Then, of course, they fall in love.

Well, Hannah is not pleased at all when she sniffs out this turn of events.  She marches to the laboratory and demands admission.  Sally is trapped:  there will be scandal, ruin, unless she can improvise a method of escape.  And, being a brilliant as well as a beautiful girl, she quickly improvises one — leaping into Lawrence’s amazing machine and melting herself into something else!  (Thus the panel above.  For the fetishist, the detail of Sally’s abandoned dress and shoes on the edge of the machine really makes the scene.)

However, this does not work out quite as well as one might have hoped once Hannah storms in.

Doubtless an “oh shit” moment for Professor Lawrence.  For Dr. Faustus, though, it was a moment of marvel, because not only has Feldstein anticipated the whole “liquid girl” scenario, but in having Sally turn herself into a statue, he’s also anticipated the whole A.S.F.R. thing.   I mean, damn!  (And don’t get me started on the whole professor-scientist/student experimentee thing.)  Probably the deepest thrill, though, comes from the willingness of the girl to jump into the machine.

All is not lost, though, because Lawrence still has his machine.  Or…

I’ve omitted the last panel, because your imaginations may be better than fiction.  But if you really must you can, with some effort, find a reprint of the story.

Mad Science pulp art — Virgil Finlay

The cover of Weird Tales, February 1938, done by prolific pulp artist Virgil Finlay (1914 – 1971), and depicted at left.   A win for the thaumatophile:  Weird Tales was were much of H.P. Lovecraft‘s work first appeared.   The story it illustrates is part of Seabury Quinn‘s “Jules de Grandin” series of occult detective stories.

It’s exquisite (I think) by pulp cover standards.  I love the way the central figure appears to glow; and her attitude recalls that of Ashley Madder at the end.  An anticipation of cryonics?  I can’t say — the nearest libraries that are likely to contain the story are a good hour’s travel away from my personal mad lab.  But someday perhaps I’ll find out.

Found in a gallery at this French-language site.

Suborn and petrify

The means through which Iris dispatches Professor Mora once and for all draw on a certain curious A.S.F.R. micro-genre which, for want of a more obvious name, I’ll call the “suborn and petrify panel.”

To make something in the micro-genre, someone takes a picture of a pleasing model (usually female, usually naked or near-to-it) and modifies the image of the main figure (I assume using image software) to make it look like the model’s flesh has turned or is in the process of turning to stone, gold, or some other hard inanimate substance.   One then attaches a micro-narrative to the image, which explains how the figure was gotten out of her clothes in the first place (a pretext, like a modeling assignment or an assignation or just something as simple as taking a shower) and then turned into a statue by some magical or technological means.   Needless to say, this transformation comes as a surprise (probably a rather shocking and unpleasant surprise) to the character depicted.  It’s an intended petrificaton, unlike that which happened to Ashley Madder back in the Apsinthion Protocol, which was an accident.  Sort of.

A large source of these panels can be found at the Medusa Realm here.  One example, from the artist calling verself Eocene, is this.

Kinda twisted, yes?  (Yes! Yes!)  I don’t want to speculate too much about the psychology that drives the creation of images and micro-narratives of this kind.  I do know what drives Iris and her elaborate set-up that leads to doing the same to Professor Mora.  Iris is really mad, and it’s not enough just to dispose of the problem professor.  She wants to humiliate an enemy in the process.

What a process, at that!  Another image from the artist calling verself Rodin.

And Iris’s revenge runs deep, not just because it’s humiliating to find yourself naked when you really shouldn’t be, but because Iris has created a living metaphor:  the process of exposing Professor Mora’s body is at the same time the process of exposing Mora as intellectually fraudulent.  Well done, Iris!

That last is an entry in the micro-genre from the artist calling verself “Drake,” who I think went on to more ambitious projects over at Medusarrific.

Ashley’s transformation and mine

When I was perhaps twenty I had a fantasy of a beautiful woman turning, at least quasi-voluntarily, into a statue.  It was satisfying to have, but at the same time I thought, “This is too weird.  Surely almost no one else thinks like this.”

I was wrong about that.  But productively wrong.  Because not only could I write Ashley Madder into a version of that fantasy into The Apsinthion Protocol, but I also had an opportunity to find out that there seem to be a lot of people — some of them rather talented — out there on the Internet thinking along the same lines.

The general school is called “A.S.F.R.,” initial taken from an old Usenet newsgroup called “alt.sex.fetish.robot,” and perhaps more specifically “pygmalionists” or “agalmatophiles.”  And for them, the idea of transformation into a statue sounds deep erotic notes.  If you are interested in such things, a good place to start looking would be the The Technosexuality FAQ. Large galleries of fan-art for this kink can be found at The Medusa Realm.

Some specific artists who merit mention:  there is Naga at Naga’s Den, creator (I believe) of the cute and thematically apropos animated gif to the right (it appears originally on the Technosexuality FAQ) and another creator who works under the name of Drake, and puts out vis own self-published web comic (lots and lots and lots of scenarios and illustrations, in which almost all the characters are female) called Medusarrific. An example of vis work:

From Medusarrific #42, p. 17

,

Not quite the same as the Ashley Madder experience hedonically, even if it similar thematically.

If you like stories rather than pictures, I can point you to at least one exquisite one, “Sara’s Self-Portrait,” by RM, although you can find many others at the Medusa Realm’s story index page.

And what was my own transformation?  It was that, in finding so many other people who were into the same strange fantasy I once had, that I realized that in the age of the Internet, no one is ever really alone.