the doubling

Here is another image from “Without Sanctuary” that not only reifies Als claim that the working bodies of murdered men slip into the ‘ethos’ of modern porn but also plays with another contemporary spectre of duplication/replication/twinning. The doubling of objects magnifies the effect of the body but simultaneously relays that bodies are replicable and expendible. Another one grows where the last died out.

Moreover, when we begin to let Als and Cooper hover in a textual proximity, we conjure an ancient embodiment of dennis cooper. A white man who collects lynching photographs with private and hot delight- a white man ejaculating in his pants as the body dangles and the flashes burn white in the charred night. It didn’t start with Cooper – a man who is pure excitement as he sees the body destroyed by rage. I don’t think this is the sort of man who cares for the body chewed up by grain thresher or cut short by train. The desire percolates only because one human was subject/eclipsed by another human.

dennis cooper eroticizes brakhage on his own terms

Because we now know about the manner in which porn is in the eye of the beholder.

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This is where I become sad and disoriented

You wanted to know where the line is. The line where I stop having an intellectual interest in pornography and I begin to feel destroyed and sad. This is the line. I have picked the two tamest examples from denis johnson’s private scrapbook here. But here is the rest. See for yourself if you wish.

It is not so much that sex and death unpin one another’s form and swap. It is that there are these adolescent boys whose lives are taken as they give them away. It is the manner in which these previously scooped out boys participate in their own abnegation. They welcome it because they know they survived everything else. But they don’t survive this (these snuffed out death scenes) and I don’t know if we even survive what we thought we did in the past. Cooper is not like Nin. She makes all of the s/m seem without risk. Cooper restores the presence of the zombie. there are really people walking around with missing parts. And they enter you because something is missing in you as well. Your both zombies even before the sacrifice began.

strong man and horse

It is a killing but I do think it falls into the accidental pornography category.
And something closer to an ancient dennis cooper.

Dennis cooper extract on damaging sex with male escorts- see extract on page. Also see his gallery of pictures of ‘Brad’ for more images that make me extremely uncomfortable.

last centaurette

The centaurette, has been placed against a backdrop that had an uncanny resemblance to another set of portraiture photographs. Blue-toned, out-of-focus romantic landscapes. The collection of Taliban studio portraits echoed the gawky homely centaurette. They had similar backdrops and they too were playing around with a home-forged sexual persona that had little to do with mainstream conventions of allure or orientation.

More Horse Lady

Kentaurides- Centaurette

The female centaur, referred to by Disney as a centaurette, is less known. Her ‘double nature’ is spoken off.

“How beautiful the Centaurides are, even where they are horses; for some grow out of white mares, others are attached to chestnut mares, and the coats of others are dappled, but they glisten like those of horses that are well cared for. There is also a white female Centaur that grows out of a black mare, and the very opposition of the colours helps to produce the united beauty of the whole.” -the Greek rhetorician Philostratus the Elder

“In the high woods there was none comelier of all the centaur-girls, and she alone by love and love’s sweet words and winning ways held Cyllarus, yes, and the care she took to look her best (so far as that may be with limbs like that). She combed her glossy hair, and twined her curls in turn with rosemary or violets or roses, and sometimes she wore a pure white lily. Twice a day she bathed her face in the clear brook that fell from Pagasae’s high forest, twice she plunged her body in its flow, nor would she wear on her left side and shoulder any skin but what became her from best-chosen beasts.”[2]- Ovid – Metamorphoses

For Centaurs of African descent and a wipy white female centaur who eschews the visualization of Centaurides ‘with child’.

The Centaur’s Cock

I found a number of Centaur images. There seemed to be some confusion as to where a centaur’s cock should be. Between the back legs, like a horse? In between the front legs, like a man? None were doubly hung but some were left with nothing.

The centaur is considered a liminal being, trafficking between two worlds – the realm of beast and the realm of the human. But unlike the ghost, its interpenetration does not problematize the boundaries of presence, identity and all the other issues implicit in ‘haunting and the sociological imagination.’ However, while it doesn’t conjure the spector of what we were and who we killed – it rips open what we could be and what could be coming. It is distopic/utopic. For the Aztec, the horse/man is the beginning of the end. For the Minoans, the horse/man is the violent nomad from the north. The Centaur is the harbinger of a violent future that lays open the body to a new force. He sometimes hurls stones and branches. There is of course alot more to say about this and him and his possible slippage with notions of the terrorist – as sexual, as animal, as new force. The terrorist is never a ghost.

The Accidental Hoof

From the Acropolis in Athens, Greece. The accidental beheading of the statue. The accidental hoof.

Ducharse

This claptrap makeshift shower filled with military men bathing hails from the library of congress. The context presumes the disaffected view of a government documentarian. However, sexual drive makes do with scant resources and it is difficult to believe that this photo has not been repurposed. There is this lazy presumption that Porn Industries provide porn. But porn is produced, at points that are outside of economy and institution, simply by the desire. The viewer’s desire forces the “outsider” (outside of the porn industry) photo towards release. I am interested in the moments when unseemingly pornographic images are repurposed – a kind of ocular off-roading on the masturbator’s point. Outsider Porn…