pleasure is easy > male beauty

23 June 2010 05:00 / plus de crush

autoportraits 2010 by sacha dumain. 19, parisian, knows how to take a photograph, has posted the following mp3s on his blog recently:

david bowie - hang on to yourself
new order - leave me alone
lcd soundsystem - home
crystal castles - suffocation
hot chip - i feel better

file under; male beauty
link / 1 have made it up

16 April 2007 15:57 / R I P

james lyons

James Lyons, filmed by Todd Haynes

--
he died on Thursday; he was 46. he was in Poison, Swoon, Safe, and even that daft film of Frisk. he cut Velvet Goldmine. he was hot and smart. listen to his commentary [with Haynes] on the Poison dvd if you haven't heard it yet.

things James Lyons and i had in common: admirers of Todd Haynes, riders of the Brooklyn F train, members of ACT UP

file under; filmed; male beauty
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29 September 2006 22:59 / Hollywood Bl

Josh Winter, 2005

Josh used to play bass with my boyfriend and me. Now he plays keyboards in Waterlaso. I took this photo in an apartment building on Hollywood Bl that was once owned by Peter Falk. While Steven and I were living there, we spotted Ron Jeremy in the building several times. He didn't live there, but at least one time, he was clearly there filming a porn movie. He was in the lobby coercing some poor woman who kept saying 'I don't want to do that with that guy here'.

file under; male beauty
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18 September 2006 04:05 / Party Fears Two

In the first place, I'm writing this without the magazines at hand. I'm in a room where musical instruments are scattered upside-down, empty glass bottles crowd every surface, and a busted trampoline faces me directly: my view. Not exactly how I planned it but at least Storz+Bickel are present.

I encountered this girl in the apparently final print issue [2001] of Propaganda Magazine, an enterprise of Fred H Berger, a dude whose cultural role I have never quite gleaned. He takes photographs [which are pretty good]; reviews minor music releases. For a time, I guess, he was behind a print magazine called Propaganda. I always find that the most unexpected people know Propaganda Magazine, so if you know it, you know it. If not;

Early issues were goth-oriented and 2 steps above Xerox. As years passed, it grew into a reasonably glossy... 'scene magazine'? 'Fictional photoessay' magazine? Basically, these really hot, androgynous boys and girls would pose for clearly made-up Life Magazine-type photojournalism pieces. Or would you call the pieces porn? The narratives were similar. The pictures were generally sexual, but didn't have nudity.

For example, in the photographs below, The Girl, dyed blonde in black leather looking like a boy, is acting the part of 'Dmitri', a Russian street hustler. Dmitri's words are briefly quoted; he mentions his girlfriend 'Zosia' [the other girl below]. He actually says 'I'm not a faggot' with reference to his invented profession, and this gets a block quote. Seriously... at whom was this magazine aimed?

So yeah: The Girl. I don't know her name. My feelings for her are singular... unlike, unlike, unlike...

One time I tried to explain it by saying I didn't know whether I wanted to fuck her or to be her. It wasn't a flippant expression; it was an honest attempt to reduce the conflict, to aim it at a 'central tension', chill the situation out. I asked other people, who is it for you? You can't decide whether you'd prefer to be or fuck who? And I mean really, like if you actually gave it a lot of thought?

I got gorgeous answers: Egon Schiele, Kim Gordon, Morrissey. But I realized that my friends played the game differently. To the names that attracted them, enormous lives and myths were attached. No one proferred an anonymous photo and said, That One. Instead, they felt a pull, more or less, between Fucking That and Having That Career / Having Made That Art.

It's true that with the girl in the photos, I don't know if I'd rather fuck her or be her. I know that I'd say yes to either and both. The former, of course, is unremarkable: you can all see that she's boyishly cute, self-aware, and involved in some kind of weird art project. But as for being her, I don't know what her daily life is like now, or what it was ever like; I don't know where she lives; I fundamentally don't know what she does. Further, if I were to be her, it wouldn't be so that it was me in these photos in Propaganda Magazine. It's not that I wish I had been the one to make that art- art that's totally unobjectionable and quite sexy at turns, but not the sort that makes me jealous.

I guess I see: The Surface of The Girl. If she walked toward me, in a mirror or on the street, and said, Do You Want To Switch?... and she would become me and I'd become her and we'd walk away, each into a new life formerly belonging to the other... I Would Say Yes. No doubt, I would probably try to fuck her too. So basically this makes her... a point of entry? I see the other side already.

Some people want themselves. Some people want you. Some people want boys or girls coaxed halfway into existence; some people want light; and some people want the whip. Me;

I want Two I want Twice

2 more photographs

file under; male beauty; twins; writ
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02 May 2006 21:11 / Unspeakably spoken

He's been in two stunning films, Todd Haynes' Velvet Goldmine and Mike Figgis' The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Other than that, the crap-roster is pretty incredible - from that Woody Allen movie to indie garbage like B Monkey to the painfully calculated attempt at a cult hit that is Killer Tongue, it's hard to know where to begin. Bend It Like Beckham is enjoyable enough and probably his best-known film, but still he's perching, waiting to be really seen, actually remembered. Maybe his role in the next James Bond movie will be the one, but I sort of doubt it.

It must be said, neither Velvet Goldmine nor The Loss of Sexual Innocence demands much of him as an actor. He plays the former in more-or-less one tone (to good effect), and he has almost no lines in the latter. Not to say he's a poor actor, precisely, but he seems to have two effective strategies, blankness and melodrama. When he tries for something in between, it rarely works.

If films were still silent, he'd be one of The Ones.

For me, he's a symbol, what of, I don't know. He's one of the beauties, and if he's remembered, it will probably be for that only. His surface is endless and holy. Anyone who claims that physical beauty has symmetry at its heart has never closely studied his face.