Wednesday 24 July 2013

Let Them Eat Kake!

British Human Easel
British Human Easel
Kake Broek is one of the most imaginative, surreal, funny, poignant and prolific photographers I know of in SL. He is absolutely one of my favourite artists.
I first met Kake at last year’s Annual WarBug Air Show where I acted as the Official War Correspondent.  Kake was dressed in his ‘Cockney Cowboy’ guise and contacted me with an vaguely flirty exploratory IM. I zoomed in and thought “what the blooming heck is this”! However, it was pretty obvious pretty quickly that this “ugly” avatar had been thought out and created with care and attention. I was of course immediately reminded of my dear friends The Puddlegums and Old Lar. Kake had sufficiently piqued my interest to read his profile - and most significantly - follow the link to his flick stream, named “Adolf Chaplin”. Immediately on seeing the first picture I added him as a contact and have been following his work since.
Das Signal
Das Signal
Kake’s pictures are funny. They make me laugh. But like many of the finest comedians, underneath that easily digestible sugar-sweet coating is a more bitter-dark interior. These two complimentary sides of Kake’s work are perfectly amplified in the name he has chosen for his account - Adolf Chaplin – the icons of political-evil and comedic-silliness, respectively.
Cockney Cowboy
Cockney Cowboy
Integral to the visual images Kake creates are the titles he gives his pictures. The titles almost always give background information about the image and sometimes can change entirely how you perceive the image. The title sometimes make a hard picture lighter, and other times change a light, fun image into something dark and edgy.
Londonistan
Londonistan
Politics, religion, topics of the day, Second Life, TV programmes, movies, celebrity culture and much more are given the Kake treatment of light and darkness. In fact, many of the themes Kake presents can also be found here on my own humble blog. This is not entirely surprising – we both currently live in London and, we discovered, share a number of SL friends. Notable among these friends are Phillip Sidek – whom I made a fun film with and Kake a number of photos – and Arduenn Schwartzman – who created the V-2 Rocket WarBug with me as his Muse and with whom I created two WarBug machinima.
Stop Drama
Stop Drama
Add Kake Broek as a contact on flickr and you’ll quickly find you’ll enjoy his combination of irreverent light-dark humour and weird and wonderful creativity as much as I do!
Pixie xx
Noblesse Oblige
Noblesse Oblige
Sunday afternoon at Cica Ghost's yard ("black cat under a ladder")
Black Cat Under A Ladder
Auschwitz side by side (#2)
Auschwitz Side By Side #2
mutatis mutandis
Mutatis Mutandis
The Secret Adventures of Tintin #4
The Secret Adventures of TinTin #4
Walking Class Hero
Walking Class Hero
How noir of you to ask that we go through that dark alley at this time of night
How Noir Of You To Ask We Go Through That Dark Alley At This Time Of Night
Jawohl Mein Meister
Jawohl Mein Meister
This is not art
This Is Not Art

Tuesday 23 July 2013

Art In Hats - Hats In Art

I love hats. I have many outfits with many different hats. My two favourites are my ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ hat and my traditional English bower hat.
Recently I have re-made my avatar – new skin, hair, clothes etc. Of the seven new hairs I purchased, five of them have hats built in!
Quan Lavender has recently been promoting the ‘Art In Hats – Hats In Art’ exhibition. It presents hats created by numerous SL artists and fashion designers, and an accompanying artistic picture of the hat. All the hats are for sale and are very reasonably priced. There are some real dandies!
The exhibition closes at the end of July and on Friday 26th July at 2pm there will be a Hat Party with DJ Morlita Quan. I’ll be there and will decide which of the dandies to purchase and wear!
Pixie xx

Monday 22 July 2013

James & Nora: A Pornographic Love Story

Tell me now, Nora, truth for truth, honesty for honesty. When you were with him in the dark at night did your fingers never, never unbutton his trousers and slip inside like mice? Did you ever frig him, dear, tell me truly or anyone else? Did you never, never, never feel a man's or a boy's prick in your fingers until you unbuttoned me?
- Love letter from James Joyce to Nora Barnacle, 1909
Nora Barnacle & James Joyce
In June last year I blogged of ‘Bloomsday’, the celebration of James Joyce’s novel ‘Ulysses’ held in Dublin on 16th June each year. I intended a follow-on post for Bloomsday this year but found myself too immersed in ’mere reflections of her’ to concentrate on writing it. This is my belated ‘Bloomsday’ post!
Last year I concentrated mainly on the relationship between Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly and the effect that the death of their son Rudy, aged only 11 days, had had on their sex life. I also observed that ‘Ulysses’ is a remarkable novel for its depiction of the ordinary.
For this post however I am interested in the relationship between Joyce himself and his wife Nora Barnacle. ‘Ulysses’ takes place on the 16th June because that is the date of Joyce’s and Nora’s first ever date, in 1904. They had been introduced six days before.
It is fair to say that Nora wasn’t particularly impressed with Joyce’s’ novels and found them incomprehensible. In letters to her sister, Nora describes Joyce as weak man and a neurotic artist. Nevertheless they had two children – in 1905 and 1907 – and finally married in 1931. They remained together until Joyce’s death in 1941 aged 53.
Their relationship was complex – tender, often strained but always passionate. Just how passionate was revealed in 1975 when a series of Joyce’s’ love letters to Nora from 1909 was published by Faber and Faber. These letters would certainly not look out of place in a copy of Penthouse Letters! That they come from 1909 was an eye opener for me. I am not quite sure why. It’s almost as if I unconsciously have some sort of belief that people of that era didn’t have pornographic thoughts, or if they did they certainly never admitted to it! It is similar to the phenomena of when thinking of any time before the 1950s some of us mentally see it in black and white - a totally incorrect perception of an era we do not have any direct experience of and know only from television period dramas and Hollywood films.
These love letters are interesting for numerous reasons. One is that the various reoccurring sexual themes within them also occur time and again within ‘Ulysses’ – underwear fetishism, cuckolding and adultery, voyeurism, anal and oral fixations, masturbation and others – arise throughout both the letters and the novel.
Of course I was already aware of many of the sexual references in ‘Ulysses’ – it is impossible to read it and not be! But I think I attributed them to the novel being modernist, or “cutting edge”, or Joyce trying to be controversial and provocative. Something like that. I don’t think I considered for a moment that they were anything but “fiction”.
Since being introduced to Joyce’s love letters to Nora a few weeks ago by Tutsy, I have discovered a wealth of fascinating literary studies regarding the sexual elements of ‘Ulysses’ - their symbolism and significance.  For example, I now understand the meaning behind the references to Bloom carrying a potato in his pocket all day. And also how baby Rudi’s untimely death symbolises Bloom’s proof to himself of his own lack of sexual prowess, as he has left no male heir. This has greatly enhanced my appreciation of the novel.
That much of the sexuality within the book is actually rooted in Joyce’s and Nora personal life only adds to my enhanced appreciation. I’ll re-read it – my third time – with a greater depth of understand.
You can read the full love letters here, but below are some quotations from them.
Pixie xx

My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers…
Your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt…
The last drop of seed has hardly been squirted up your cunt before it is over and my true love for you, the love of my verses, the love of my eyes for your strange luring eyes, comes blowing over my soul like a wind of spices…
When that person whose heart I long to stop with the click of a revolver put his hand or hands under your skirts did he only tickle you outside or did he put his finger or fingers up into you? If he did, did they go up far enough to touch that little cock at the end of your cunt? Did he touch you behind? Was he a long time tickling you and did you come? Did he ask you to touch him and did you do so? If you did not touch him did he come against you and did you feel it?
I would like you to wear drawers with three or four frills one over the other at the knees and up the thighs and great crimson bows in them, I mean not schoolgirls' drawers with a thin shabby lace border, thigh round the legs and so thin that the flesh shows with a full loose bottom and wide legs, all frills and lace and ribbons, and heavy with perfume so that whenever you show them, whether in pulling up your clothes hastily to do something or cuddling yourself up prettily to be blocked, I can see only a swelling mass of white stuff and frills and so that when I bend down over you to open them and give you a burning lustful kiss on your naughty bare bum I can smell the perfume of your drawers as well as the warm odour of your cunt and the heavy smell of your behind.
You say when I go back you will suck me off and you want me to lick your cunt, you little depraved blackguard. I hope you will surprise me some time when I am asleep dressed, steal over to me with a whore's glow in your slumberous eyes, gently undo button after button in the fly of my trousers and gently take out your lover's fat mickey, lap it up in your moist mouth and suck away at it till it gets fatter and stiffer and comes off in your mouth.
I got your hot letter tonight and have been trying to picture you frigging your cunt in the closet. How do you do it? Do you stand against the wall with your hand tickling up under your clothes or do you squat down on the hole with your skirts up and your hand hard at work in through the slit of your drawers? Does it give you the horn now to shit? I wonder how you can do it. Do you come in the act of shitting or do you frig yourself off first and then shit? It must be a fearfully lecherous thing to see a girl with her clothes up frigging furiously at her cunt, to see her pretty white drawers pulled open behind and her bum sticking out and a fat brown thing stuck half-way out of her hole. You say you will shit your drawers, dear, and let me fuck you then. I would like to hear you shit them, dear, first and then fuck you. Some night when we are somewhere in the dark and talking dirty and you feel your shite ready to fall put your arms round my neck in shame and shit it down softly.

LATE EDIT:

Film of 'Ulysses' produced in 1967. This film was banned from general release in Ireland until year 2000!

Sunday 21 July 2013

Keep Calm and Spread Memes

The original Keep Calm And Carry On motivational poster was produced by the British government’s Ministry of Information in 1939. It was intended to boost the morale of the populace by conveying a message from King George IV should a German invasion seem imminent.
Fortunately, although around a million of the posters were printed, there was never a need to release them. At the end of the war, the posters were gathered up and destroyed. It is believed that only two of the original posters survived.
In 2000, two co-owners of a Northumberland independent bookshop stumbled upon one of the original 1939 posters in a box of second hand books purchased at a local auction. They liked it so much that they framed it and hung it in their shop. They soon found others were also attracted to the poster and received numerous offers to purchase it.
Its popularity continued to spread and was being regularly mentioned on TV, in newspapers and other forms of media. Many English country pubs now proudly display it as a symbol of the defiance, steadfastness and resoluteness that put the ‘Great’ into ‘Great Britain’.
We have used various mash-ups of the original slogan on this blog a few times - namely in ‘Lie Back and Think of England’ (April 2012) and ‘Kung Fu and Karma’ (July 2013) – and happily do so again today to bring to your attention a free, fun web site which lets you generate your own Keep Calm mash-up and download it, or even have it printed on mugs, t-shirts, kitchen towels, baseball hats, you name it!
The site is http://www.keepcalmstudio.com and it already has over 64,000 variations of the Keep Calm poster in its galleries. The one I created on the site is above. The picture below I created for an earlier blog-post.
Pixie xx

Sunday 14 July 2013

Porn for the Blind – A Valuable Resource

Spunky Puddlegum
Many thanks to Spunky Puddlegum for forwarding me this information. It is presented here jointly as part of my Blogger’s Public Information and Education obligations, and as part of Spunky’s Community Service obligations.
‘Porn for the Blind’ (pornfortheblind.org) is a not-for-profit organisation based in Cambridge, Mass. dedicated to producing audio descriptions of pornographic movie clips found on adult web sites. The clips can be listened to online while the film plays or downloaded for enjoying at some later time. The service is provided free of charge.
Movies from sites such as redtube, turkeyfuck, bangbros, milfsoup, collegefuckfest and many more are represented. Spunky proudly informs me that his hero and uncle, Nasty Puddlegum, already has four of his movies represented with the ground breaking ‘Shemales A-Go-Go’ expected to be uploaded soon.
It would be all too easy to ridicule ‘Porn for the Blind’  or the take the moral high-ground against it . However we sincerely hope that that doesn’t happen and that this charitable organisation can continue their valuable work in peace and without unnecessary and time-consuming distractions.
An example of their work is included below. ‘Porn for the Blind’ are always looking out for volunteers willing to devote the time and effort to orally describing the contents of adult films for those less fortunate then themselves, but nevertheless equally needy. They also take donations by Paypal (tax-deductible).
Please give generously.
Pixie xx



Friday 12 July 2013

Britain Has Talent: The Double-Entendre

With full credit to Frankieforehead from this 2005 thread on BritishExpats.com, a special presentation of that most English of humour, the ‘double-entendre’. These examples are unintentionally made by sports commentators:

Michael Buerk, as he watched Phillippa Forrester cuddle up to a male astronomer for warmth during BBC1's UK eclipse coverage: "They seem cold out there, they're rubbing each other and he's only come in his shorts."

A female news anchor who, the day after it was supposed to have snowed and hadn't, turned to the weatherman and asked: "So Bob, where's that eight inches you promised me last night?"

Mike Hallett, discussing missed snooker shots on Sky Sports: "Stephen Hendry jumps on Steve Davis's misses every chance he gets."

Ken Brown commentating on golfer Nick Faldo and his caddie Fanny Sunneson lining-up shots at the Scottish Open: "Some weeks Nick likes to use Fanny, other weeks he prefers to do it by himself."

Willie Carson was telling Claire Balding how jockeys prepare for a big race when he said: "They usually have four or five dreams a night about coming from different positions."

James Allen interviewing Ralf Schumacher at a Grand Prix, asked: "What does it feel like being rammed up the backside by Barrichello?"

Harry Carpenter at the Oxford-Cambridge boat race 1977: "Ah, isn't that nice? The wife of the Cambridge President is kissing the cox of the Oxford crew."

Cracks me up!

Pixie

Tuesday 9 July 2013

France Has Talent - Lullaby Crash

"Oh my sweet summer child," Old Lar said quietly, "What do you know of fear?"
- George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

Sunday 7 July 2013

Kung Fu and Karma

Buddha Ruf: One must first master the highest level of kung fu developed by Master Wuxi in the third dynasty.
Naughty Nataly: ikr!
Buddha Ruf: Legend tells of a legendary warrior whose kung fu skills were the stuff of legend.
Naughty Nataly: Arse sum!
- quote from the 2013 TV re-make of the classic 1970’s series ‘Kung Fu’
starring David Carradine  (1936 – 2009)

Saturday 6 July 2013

Telegraph Pole of the Month - July 2013

At the beginning of every month Klute Coppola sends me a wonderful notecard jam-packed with landmarks to places she has discovered in Second Life during the previous few weeks. I really look forward to receiving it.
The landmarks include beautiful and distinctive regions, interesting and exciting stores and a general hotch-potch of worthy SL weirdness. The landmarks are often accompanied with cryptic comments like “Make sure you drink the green slime from the broken wishing well” or “Sit on the white warthog and shout ‘Ride My Piggy!’ in open chat”.
Sometimes she will deliberately tease me with comments like “mmmmm sexy telegraph pole” just to push my buttons!
As I worked through the landmarks, I landed at a region called Black Kite, owned by TheBlackCloud Oh (Cloudy Turbo). This is a lovely, tranquil and picturesque region with lots of enjoyable details – most notably the ability to rez and fly kites.
It was then I saw it...a telegraph pole with a street lamp appendage! I nearly cum!
Thanks Klute! 

Friday 5 July 2013

Wishing You Were Here

Click images to see full size

Thanks to Quan Lavender’s indispensable blog, I learnt of Solkide Auer’s Pink Floyd tribute installation on LEA17.
Solkide has spent three months creating various pieces celebrating the work of one of the most influential global bands of the last four decades.
In amongst the numerous individual installations you’ll see hat tips to The Wall, Animals, The Division Bell and of course The Dark Side of the Moon, as well as others.
When visiting this installation, it is essential that you have ‘Advanced Lighting Model’ selected in your Graphics Preferences. When you do, each individual piece and the venue itself become bathed in a sea of ever-changing vibrant colours.
Although it is easy enough to set a high draw distance and camera around at the work, the most fun way to experience Solkide’s LEA contribution is to sit on the big pink pig and be taken on a guided tour around the venue.

Most recommended!
Pixie xx 





Thursday 4 July 2013

The Raven That Refused To Sing

Steven Wilson - The Raven That Refused To Sing (And Other Stories)
This is a beautiful animation – ‘The Raven That Refused To Sing’. It is based on a story by English musician and producer Steven Wilson and the is title track of Wilson’s 2013 solo album.
Take the time to make yourself a mug of sweet English tea, sit back, relax and watch in 1080HD.
Wilson’s web site has high-definition screen shots from the movie to use as desktop backgrounds.
Many thanks to Anatol Andretti for the hat tip!
Pixie xx

Wednesday 3 July 2013

Machinima of the Month: The Rejects of Gor

I have been informed that my ‘The Rejects of Gor’ machinima has been selected as the Linden Endowment for the Arts (LEA) July 2013 ‘Machinima of the Month’!
Needless to say, I am chuffed.
The Rejects of Gor’, embedded below for your reload enjoyment, was spontaneously filmed at Lar’s House in Second Life and stars Nasty Puddlegum, Baz Soulstar and myself.
This is the second time one of my films has been selected. In November 2012 ‘Fwd:Evolution’ was chosen as the ‘Machinima of the Month’.