Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts

Mar 10, 2024

A Visit by Caspar David Friedrich

Huh? Caspar David Friedrich, the German romantic painter (1774-1840) (?)  A picture of our garden (?):

The garden of Michael Ampersant and Chang Man Yoon in Alcobaça, PT

 Or not? Not Caspar David? Let's try some more of his pictures:

Abtei im Eichenwald (1810)

Zwei Männer in Betrachtung des Mondes (1825-30)

Striking, the artistic similarity, isn't it?  Or not? 

Spoiler alert: the first picture is by Chang Man Yoon, the renowned contemporary photographer.


Feb 10, 2021

Our Lady of the Flowers --- Variations on a Genet classic


Jan van Rijn, the celebrate bibliophile publisher, has a new book out, and it's about "Notre Dame des Fleurs", the mind-boggling first oeuvre of Jean Genet. Genet wrote it in a Paris prison in 1942, on brown-bag paper, whence his "manuscript" got confiscated by prurient prison guards. Undaunted, he asked for more brown-bag paper and rewrote it from scratch. Eventually it got published, so that Jean-Paul Sartre could discover it---Sartre, the inventor of Existentialism---and promptly declare the author a "saint". Genet's career was made---such was the way of French cultural life at the time. 

We read the "Lady" four times and it got better with each pass. Four times? Yes, because we had promised to contribute to Jan's publication and didn't know for quite some time what to do.
 


But then, in late 2019 we hit on an idea during a chance meeting with...




...the mysterious founding fathers of the Verse Reconstruction Movement. 

We had always dreamed of writing prose that could pass as poetry (and vice versa), and---having already isolated the "hottest" passages of the Fleurs---we undertook to turn them into poetic language. Six poems resulted, and they are in the book. Here's the first one:


EACH CELL A HISSING NEST OF SNAKES

(by Michael Ampersant)

I’m like those prisons,
Open to all the winds,
Empty and pure,
Swarming with dangerous,
Promiscuous males,
Sprawled out on their beds.

Prisons of dreams, I’d say, for a race of murderers,
Each cell a hissing nest of snakes,
And a confessional.

Their eyes,
Without mystery,
Terrifying,
Like empty theaters,
Machinery at rest,
Deserts.

I approach, my heart racing,
And see nothing,
Nothing but looming emptiness,
Sensitive and proud,
A foxglove possessed by terrible souls.


There are 16 contributors to this volume (if we don't count Genet himself), and one of them is John Coulthart, gay life's most prolific high-culture blogger. Have a look at his post about the book here.

You can order the volume here. It is also for sale in a few bookstores throughout Europe, ie,

Vienna 
buchhandlung löwenherz
https://www.loewenherz.at/

Milano
liberia antigone
https://www.libreriantigone.com/

Berlin
prinz eisenherz 
https://prinz-eisenherz.buchkatalog.de/
https://www.instagram.com/p/CK6rSnOlNM1/

and if things work well in Paris very soon at

les mots à la bouche 
https://motsbouche.com

PS: There are only 150 copies printed; it's a bit like bitcoins, and if we manage to convince Jan to rechristen his book "GenetCoins", or "CoinGenet" or anything else alluding to blockchains, the price will certainly skyrocket into the millions, especially if and when Elon Musk chips in a brief tweet. So, please, hurry.


Dec 27, 2020

The White Stud presents...

Our alter ego, The White Stud, has a new piece out on LustSpiel...it's a bit direct, perhaps, but it's already a big success on FB: 




Dec 25, 2020

To the triumph of Logic...

So we went to Porto de Mos, the nearby town that dominates the Parque Natural das Serras de Aire e Candeeiros, where we shot our Christmas Card: 


And inside the castle, there was an exposition of contemporary inlay stonework (Porto de Mos prides itself on its stonework). And what do we find? Haven't we founded and run the Applied Logic Laboratory at the University of Amsterdam in our days?

So, we found this:

It's a bit difficult to read, despite some photoshopping, but it says: "To the triumph of logic over the disruption of the truth." A bit optimistic perhaps, this congratulatory shoulder-pat, but now it's set in stone, and we'll hang it on our new walls as soon as we find a printer nearby.


Aug 23, 2020

"Agathon!", "Alcibiades!" -- Alcibiades crashes Plato's "Symposium"

We've been at it for quite a while, Plato's "Symposium." But now we've hooked up with David Cantero, the famous comic strip artist, and voilà, Alcibiades crashes the Symposium again: 




The text is in German since we are targeting the German market.

Remember the original, Anselm v. Feuerbach's painting of 1874? We've put it up in 2015. Here it is again (click for a larger image):


Feb 11, 2020

Claire Bretécher died at the age of 79

She was a trailblazing comic strip artist with an incredibly explicit page in the Nouvelle Observateur during the '70 and '80 of the last century.

Here's a harmlesser, yet informative drawing from that period:


Do you get it? Don't be shy. (Hint: this joke wouldn't work today (Heidegger was a celebrated German philosopher, who would routinely write lines such as: "Das Sein seint, und das Nichts nichtset" (which don't even make sense in German (J.-P. Sartre visited Germany during the '30's to meet Heidegger and hailed him as the leading inspiration of his own Existentialism (Hanna Arendt was Heidegger's girlfriend before she fled the Nazis and went to America))))). 

(Yes, yours truly did a lot of LISP programming (don't ask)).

Let's get serious: 40 years ago, intellectualism (like dropping names of philosophers) still did things to people; now we have Donald Trump (not Trump's fault (Trump is a symptom, not a cause (as we have been saying long before Obama did))). 

(In this spirit).

Jan 13, 2019

Portugal (17) --- Plus ça change...Além disso, muda



Nothing special, but we found this nice little picture (left) that dovetails neatly with Chang's picture of a tram in Lisbon (right), which Chang took last year:


Dec 31, 2017

Happy New Year!




Harem Rock


By Michael Ampersant (text) and Theo Blaze (art)


Michael Ampersant had dreamed of using some poetry in THIS IS HEAVEN---one character speaking in verse, say---but nothing came of it. But then he discovered that the first part of Chapter 33, "Harem Rock" would actually work as poetry if reformatted as a stanza. Nothing up to Shakespeare standards, but still. Next, the formidable Theo Blaze put up an invite on his site, asking authors to come up with a brief story to illustrate one of his pictures. Michael reacted, and they got a deal; Michael would write a story, if Theo would create an illustration for "Harem Rock." And there we are:
  

John,
Why couldn’t you,
At the end of a page-turning,
Adverb-packed day,
Of unparalleled heat levels.





Why couldn’t you,
Just down the third ‘fortification’ the lady of the house was handing you,
And chuck your dirty shorts one more time,
And let the sex slave fix the Magic-Mike collar around your neck.

In view of the advanced hour,
We’ll keep the strip-tease to a minimum.

Sep 9, 2016

In the woods and on the heath --- another book of prayers --- by Jan v. Rijn


Cool, folks, cool, we're in Jan v. Rijn's highly bibliophile book "In the woods and on the heath." And it's not, as you might expect, another explicit exercise. No, it is, as the subtitle says, "another book of prayers," so more in the old-school, Aubrey Beardsley style of cheeky suggestion. Jan's drawings are subtle, elaborate, time-consuming, black-and-white, and AROUSING! Michael is not the only author, there are contributions by Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, Vanessa de Largie, and many others. 





Here's one of Michael's stories, accompanied by the corresponding picture. The story was written after Michael saw the picture, and the hero of his tale, Jeffrey, really is a spitting image of Jan's model. And as so often with Michael's work, the story is mostly true. Enjoy.  



Jennifer

The town house was located in an off-center residential street of Amsterdam inside its own red-light bubble: Blue Boys said the neon-sign on the façade. Jeffrey was one of the boys, although he’d come into the picture only after I’d failed to talk up a hot guy who sat behind the improvised bar on the second floor and assured me he’s a customer himself. 

The sex with Jeffrey on the third floor was so-so, so we had time to talk. He’d just enrolled with the Blue Boys because he had no place to stay, and no money, and a bright future with me—-if he could stay with me, that is, at my place, which wasn’t far.

Jeffrey spent one more working night at the brothel and then we had sex one more time, although I failed to penetrate. He pushed me away, wrapping himself in the blanket. I don’t remember how I came.

We separated, and he would sleep in the second bedroom. He’d “help,” or “contribute”—-he’d keep the place clean, which he did very well. 

My friends would comment on him, especially my female friends. He’s beautiful, they’d say.

On Saturdays he’d ask me to give him a ride to the acting school for poor boys/gals. “Cycle faster,” he’d say while sitting on the luggage rack behind me; he was from South-Africa.

We’d organize parties with his class mates and his new boyfriends. He had a Moroccan class mate, Muhammed, who’d complain later that the gals would never leave him alone and that he had to have sex in the spare bedroom, early-on during the feast, under the cover of the guest’s overcoats, and then more sex with somebody else later on, and it wouldn't stop; he didn’t look the part.


Jeffrey needed the money that I didn’t give him, but then he remembered Phillip, who had more money and was much older. I spent a lot of face time with Phillip while both of us were waiting for Jeffrey to show up. Phillip made his money running drugs but he’d always been honest with his clients, I learned. And he was addicted to Jeffrey.





Apr 25, 2016

Applause, applause: Piotr Urbaniak and the GREEN EYES

The first chapter of the Green Eyes, the chapter Michael didn't dare to include in his book because he feared it would "discomfort or even harm" some readers, will now appear in the German yearbook Mein Schwules Auge---the Germans supposedly being a hardier race when it comes to graphic sex. 

Anyhow: Piotr Urbaniak, the eponymous Polish-German artist, has just released eight illustrations to this chapter, and here is one of them: 



Beautiful, isn't it? Stay tuned!

Fragment, fragment? Okay:

A shadow enters my periphery of vision. Anybody who cares? Yes, a lank, blond, crew-cut guy. Perhaps he’s heard my screams and got interested. He’s shocked. No, he isn’t, he’s just curious. A tumescence builds in his trunks and develops its own life, the penis shaft seeking the path of lowest resistance. It’s pushing upward and outward like a trapped rodent until a solid erection has created an obscene-looking bulge. Crew-cut appears somewhat out-plussed by his private parts, he’s waiting until the erection is complete and then sheds his trunks. He has experience. His dick means serious business...   
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