Visual pleasures

[imomus]

From left to right, and from top to bottom:

1. Street Peeper has started showing Tokyo snaps. This Comme-des-Garcons-wearing person is Yama from Tokyo Bopper staff. They publish very merry clothes pictures daily in a blog called Merry Daily.

2. This "boy's day" fish enhances any environment you put it in, I've discovered. Bought from Goko, a Japanese restaurant in Berlin Mitte, for ten euros.



3. Alin Huma has chopped a copy of the Pillowbook of Shonagon Sei in half, thereby affording me a surprising bolt of visual pleasure.

4. The Comme Un Garcon blog -- set in Japan, and written in Italian -- puts everything it treats and discourses of into a line-drawing of a cubic rectangle. This week they have treated and discoursed upon the yukata.

5. Smiley has published Fairy Doll 43. Spilly black hair and parted lips -- could anything better illustrate what Eno says here about the joys of capitulation?

6. Hibisanpo means walking around, and the author of this Flickr page of the same name has been walking around the boardwalks and beaches of Fire Island. Atlantic austerity meets homosexual refinement, with a net gain in visual pleasure.

7. 16 Japanese women pleasure as many Japanese men in an orgiastic entertainment set in a ryokan party room with bright fluorescent lighting. The result is not unlike the first Boards of Canada sleeve.

8. I've been watching lots of Kenji Mizoguchi films over the past few days. This is the original -- and lovely -- poster for Ugetsu Monogatari: Tales Of The Pale And Silvery Moon After The Rain.

Comments

[petit-paradis.livejournal.com]

hey momus,

over at dennis cooper 's blog a fellow blogger posted a beyond extentive guide to japanese porn:


http://denniscooper-theweaklings.blogspot.com/

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Wow, "Water Tank Restriction Incident"! Dennis Cooper blogs where angels fear to tread!

But my intention with today's entry was slightly different -- to demolish the compartmentalization between sex and other pleasures. An entry like that one on Dennis' blog collects sex-only things and makes a list -- in linguistic terms, a paradigm. I wanted to show visual sexual pleasure here as part of a syntagm; on the same order of pleasure as looking at lovely scenery or admiring a neat drawing or a yukata. And likely to be enjoyed in a syntagmatic sequence with them, not separately, in "a sequence of pleasures".

I'm against obscenity, and pleasure which resides principally in a sense of the obscenity of things -- basically, the idea of orgasm which depends on a feeling of "Ooh, The Police / Mummy / Daddy / My Wife / My Boss would be furious if they could see me now!"

I think obscenity is created by the compartmentalization of sexual pleasures, their separation from other pleasures (whether for legal reasons or just cultural ones, encoded in embarrassment). Obscenity results from destroying the organic relation of sex to other pleasures -- it's an obsessional, secretive and furtive over-attention to the transgressive dimension of the sexual. Obscenity is created by taboo and by compartmentalization. I wanted to de-compartmentalize. This has been a public service announcement!

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Paradigms and syntagms (http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem03.html) without tears.