The difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments

In a previous post Mhambi was telling how he felt guilty for two reasons. One was that I'm not in South Africa.

Mistress Storm, brothel, Slough, UK, 2002, from No Love Lost by Michael Grieve.

The second guilty feeling is my fascination with sexuality, with beautiful nude people, in particular women. I'll explore my guilty feelings (perhaps for a last time, because my blog is now being read by respectable people) in a next post.

Porn shoot, Cuffley, UK, 2006, from No Love Lost by Michael Grieve

But not today. Today we'll take a peak at Michael Grieve's photographic project, No love lost.

He describes it as a complex work about the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments. Mhambi recently accompanied a South African writer to a brothel in Hillbrow Johannesburg. I'm doing a documentary about him. After he had seen one of the girls they came downstairs togther and proceeded to eat pap and sous together, from the same plate. It was pretty endearing, yes intimate seeing them (client and prostitute) eating like that. "This is not like Europe the writer assured me."

Michael Grieve on his project:

No Love Lost is a visual project that inhabits sexual environments in contemporary Britain. People featured are active in the increasingly entwined and performative worlds of pornography, prostitution and stripping. What they share is a measured psychological engagement with strangers in close proximity that is a purely physical and sexual union lacking in affection. Fantasy is played out within the frame of constraints and closeness is kept at a distance. Menace is always present, control is often threatened. These are emotionally charged settings, both plastic and primitive, where the ‘stuff’ of life is all too present.

In essence, No Love Lost is a complex body of work that is about intimacy and dislocation in a theatre of sexual commodity. No Love Lost does not attempt to be a statistical documentation but works as a lyrical documentary metaphor in a factual world about real fictional encounters and conveys a sense of the difficulties of meaningful human connection in spiritually vacant environments.

Break in porn shoot, London, UK, 2003, from No Love Lost by Michael Grieve


— Michael Grieve

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It's time...

Lucie
Originally uploaded by Elisabetta Dell'Olio.

...its the end of an eventful year. Mhambi will blog only one more post (not the one above on Andries Nel), a summary of the year that was.

Then I drive from the metropolis of Bloemfontein to Cape Town, via lovely weird towns, armed with a Polaroid camera....

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...for fun...

beginning
Originally uploaded by tetheredto.

...so here is some more gratuitous gorgeousness, this one of Rose, an old favorite of mine...

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...in the SUN

Leah Embracing the Sun in the Mojave Desert near Boron
Originally uploaded by shadowplay.

...and I must admit, I'm missing my own lovely who in Galicia, Spain now....

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the lovers

the lovers
Originally uploaded by the.beautyseeker.

Mhambi adores the intimacy of this picture. It's great to be naked with someone you like.

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it's fun...

woman and man.
Originally uploaded by the.beautyseeker.

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...to be...

cocoon
Originally uploaded by Godiex.

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...together...

Lightsaber attack!
Originally uploaded by oj smith.

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...naked

brianjesson.jpg
Originally uploaded by lizorak.

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Sex - the Church has allot to answer for

Photo and copyright by Frugal Instinct. Fun and Marriage? More pics.

It's not only Polekwane on my mind. Mhambi has been worried about the Afrikaans girls who don't want to have sex.

Now I discussed this with a friends, one of which is a pre-eminent sociologist, another a film maker and another working for a bank. All Afrikaners and two of them female. And this is our considered conclusion.

It's the Church's fault. You see most of these Afrikaans girls 'saved' themselves for marriage. Many still do refrain from sex until they are married.

Aprt from inducing un told anxinty on their nuptial nights, it probably spiked any chances of haveing fullfiling sex lives.

I mean an individual's sex life is such a complex nuanced and specific thing. Some are sexed crazed, some submissive, some dominant, some straight acting gays, some like it orally etc. Not trying before you buy is like playing Russian roulette with your future bliss.

The chance of firing a blank is so much greater than blowing... well getting satisfaction.

And there ain't no denying. The chances of a happy relationship without the possibility of expressing your sexuality with your partner is greatly diminished.

Good sex is like a canary in a mine shaft. If the bird stops singing the end is nigh.

Somebody should stop the church before it ruins more lives.

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Welcome to our country

Mhambi often wishes he could write better. My writing is wooden.


Nora
Originally uploaded by theGentleman™.


Yesterday my inadequacy was reinforced when I met Kleinboer - the boer with the potent libidinous inter-racial libido and disarming words. To him Johannesburg has swapped "kont vir klont, en kondoom vir helmet." (Cunt for gold nuggets, and condoms for hard hats)

Once dubbed the Michel Houllebecq * of Afrikaans, no other than André Brink praised Kleinboer's first book Kontrei.

"Kontrei is a fucking good book. It is one of the most agreeable reads in a long time... A man who can write like this knows his job." said the fellow Lothario.

(* Like Houllebecq's Asian prostitutes, Kleinboer reckons black girls often enjoy their work. Not so the white girls.)


My first neighbourhood - Yeoville
Originally uploaded by ambermbabane.

A very friendly Kleinboer took me round his hood. Yeoville is where I occasionally hung out when I was younger, and where most whitey progressives and artists lived.

Today Kleinboer is one of very very few whites in the area. He bought a house here in the early 90's, from a couple traumatised during a violent break in.

Kleinboer looks at utter ease.

"This is the building where the guy from the band Koos jumped off the balcony", he gestures to a block of flats. It's a bit low I tell him. I mean, theres no certainty in jumping off that building you will die?

"This is where James Phillips lived."

We spot an old white guy. "The only whites left in the area are old ones to poor to immigrate."

Every now and again somebody greets him and asks after his wife.

Kleinboer reckons the area has already hit rock bottom and is now on the way up. Not to long ago his house was worth R100000. Now he thinks its three times that. It's all because of the immigrants he reckons. Especially the Congolese, and the Nigerians. He says that although he thinks about 50% of the blacks in the area are South African, 80% of the businesses are run by immigrants.

He also reckons the variety and kinds of foods to be found in the various new restaurants, trumps the local fare.

He loves the area, but he concedes, he does not have any black friends with whom he can discuss the things that matter to him. For interaction he goes onto the net, Litnet to be exact.

Currently he is upset about all these name changes, he tells me. He has book of the history of place names of South Africa.

Kleinboer took me in to a lively Congolese bar. We were greeted by a gentleman with a heavy French African accent and an old style Pretoria mustache.

"Welcome to our country!" he said, while shaking our hands vociferously.

"You must come back in 2010."

Kleinboer protested, but not too much.

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No sex please - were Afrikaans

Just looking...
Originally uploaded by Star_gazer_32.

Mhambi met an old friend for tea and cake yesterday. The friend, like many Afrikaans white middle-class girls of her generation (32 and older) had an independent career, was wealthy, married and worried.

First a familiar concern I have heard from numerous people during this visit to South Africa. She was worried about the country. Did she leave it too late to immigrate?

But that's not all.

She alleged that she, and her female friends all are bored of sex. It's a drag. Just too much effort for such a small pleasurable return. She only wants it once every two months.

Mhambi knows that on average male libidos are more powerful than your average female's. But this admission struck me as a bit over the top?!

Mhambi's experience (albeit very limited and no scientific sample), with females outside of South Africa has been very different.

Something is very very wrong. Mhambi is worried.

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Gevisser: Mbeki is still an Aids denialist

According to the UK Guardian, Mbeki admitted to Mark Gevisser that he is an Aids denialist, but was forced to withdraw from the debate because of pressure from cabinet colleagues.

Gevisser reiterates the opinion that Mbeki's thinking on Aids is driven by his views on race and sexuality. A point made by previously by Judge Edwin Cameron.

It also mentions the 100 page paper Mbeki wrote on Aids. Mhambi is amazed that it has not yet found its way onto the internet.

Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred describes how the president contacted the author earlier this year to reiterate some of the views that caused uproar in the medical community before Mr Mbeki stopped talking publicly about Aids several years ago. Mr Gevisser also describes how the president's view of the disease was shaped by an obsession with race, the legacy of colonialism and "sexual shame".

The book will reinforce the view of Mr Mbeki's critics who say his unorthodox opinions have cost hundreds of thousands of lives by delaying the distribution of medicines, and that the health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, has continued these views.

Mr Gevisser recounts how Mr Mbeki phoned him late on a Saturday evening in June to discuss Aids. The president asked the respected Johannesburg author whether he had seen a 100-page paper secretly authored by Mr Mbeki and distributed anonymously among the ANC leadership six years ago. It compared Aids scientists to latter-day Nazi concentration camp doctors and portrayed black people who accepted orthodox Aids science as "self-repressed" victims of a slave mentality. It describes the "HIV/Aids thesis" as entrenched in "centuries-old white racist beliefs and concepts about Africans".

The author said he did have a copy but the next day a driver from the presidency arrived with an updated and expanded version. "There is no question as to the message Thabo Mbeki was delivering to me along with this document: he was now, as he had been since 1999, an Aids dissident," the author writes.

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What doesn't move, the snow will cover

What doesn't move, the snow will cover
Originally uploaded by tetheredto.

Here they go again, my favourite Flickr photographers - Rose and Olive. This pic is lovely & strange I'm sure you'd agree.

But what is it with this intrigue in naked women, and is it art? In this weeks Guardian Germaine Greer, in response to a new exibition on Naked Potraiture, explained why women artists started taking their clothes off for their art .



a tenacious misfortune lodges in the loveliest bodies
Originally uploaded by tetheredto.

Mhambi as you may know has himself been intrigued, informed not to mention tittelated and charmed by the many intimate pictures by females of themselves found on Flickr. Some of it is unashamedly erotic and (self) exploitative (watch those page view counters grow) some gorgeous, viceral, disturbing and poetic.

According to Greer models in Renaissance nude paintings - even of female subjects - were almost always male, but by the beginning of the 20th century the naked portrait was becoming something of a female speciality.



Girl in red shoes
Originally uploaded by Miss Aniela.

"Only courtesans allowed themselves to be painted, naked and bejewelled, often horizontal, usually thinly disguised as goddesses and personifications, by the best artists of the day. The elegant female figures of Lucas Cranach the elder, nude but for massive gold chains and sumptuous hats, are almost certainly paintings in this genre. The painting by Raphael known as La Fornarina, with its deliberately erotic play of dark eyes and half-smile, is probably a portrait of a courtesan called Beatrice Ferrarese. Portraits of Diane de Poitiers naked outnumber portraits of her clothed; her naked effigy in stone still rules over her house at Chenonceau. Gabrielle d'Estrées posed naked nearly as often as Diane de Poitiers; the double portrait of her pinching the nipple of another naked lady (whose identity is the subject of some disagreement) is probably the best-known work of the Fontainebleau School, and parent to dozens of half-length portraits of naked ladies. All the painters of the Venetian school limned the beauty of the city's chief stock in trade, for the courtesans themselves, for their protectors, and for their clients to take home as mementoes.




speaks like dead fingernails
Originally uploaded by joycake.

The nakedness of respectable wives is not exposed to the public until very much later. Even the picture by Rubens that is usually supposed to be of his second wife, Hélène Fourment, emerging naked from a fur coat is probably no such thing, and the model for Rembrandt's Bathsheba may not have been his common-law wife, Hendrikje Stoffels.


gone crazy
Originally uploaded by calico courtney brooke.

If the art of the 19th century is revelation of the troubled self, the art of the 20th is revelation of the self as body. For reasons that feminism has explained ad nauseam, embodiment is a crucial issue for all women and creative women especially. In 1983 Edward Lucie-Smith wrote that the naked portrait was becoming a female specialty, citing Sandra Fisher's portrait of Ron Kitaj in Jerusalem, as well as naming Polly Hope, Maggi Hambling and Sarah Lloyd.


how many ways can i tell them that i love them?
Originally uploaded by dirtyfeet.

Women artists have always produced a disproportionate number of self-portraits; what is striking is how, in the early years of the 20th century, they took their clothes off to do it. In the beginning, the male artists more or less kept pace. When Paula Modersohn-Becker painted herself naked, she had Edvard Munch, Oskar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele and Lovis Corinth keeping pace with her. Since then, a horde of women artists who use their own bodies as their principal medium of expression has overrun the art scene. When Alice Neel paints her naked self, palette in hand, at the age of 80 she is doing much the same thing as Lucian Freud in 1993, painting herself as she might any other subject. The younger generation are doing something very different.


restricted
Originally uploaded by avolare.

When it comes to the work of Hannah Wilke, Francesca Woodman, Helen Chadwick, Jo Spence, Joyce Gunn-Cairns, Lucy Jones, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Elinor Carucci, Jemima Stehli, Joan Semmel and Alexa Wright, the artist's body is not just another subject among many. To list such work as naked portraiture is to maroon it in a lesser genre.

IMG_232211v2
Originally uploaded by kometa_raketa.

Hammer (the organiser of the exhibition) seems unaware of the heroic dimension of Hannah Wilke's work, and includes her piece Super-T-Art as if it were no more than an elaborated projection of the artist's own likeness. For Wilke, her own body was an art object that she deployed in performances, videos and photographs, acting out internalised masculine fantasy. The capitulation was of necessity partial, and feminists found much to complain of in Wilke's exploitation of her own undeniable beauty. After Wilke was diagnosed with lymphoma, she documented the devastation of her beauty in much the same way as she had earlier enacted ritual mutilations. She remains an artist too important to be lumped in with pedestrian makers of naked portraits.


self-portrait waiting
Originally uploaded by olya.ivanova.

Wilke died in 1993; Jo Spence's journey through terminal cancer had ended a few months before. Again, we must conclude that her subject is not herself but the conceptual system in which women struggle to function. Helen Chadwick is another artist whose subject is not her elegant nude body but the world of illusion in which that body has its being.

Erotic Ambivalent & Cruel
Originally uploaded by CinemaCowgirl.

When Francesca Woodman turns her back to the camera and cowers in a filthy corner, we must question whether her practice can safely be called portraiture. Something far more significant seems to be happening, something that lines her up with Ana Mendieta, for example. We might as well call the woman-shaped depressions Mendieta made in the ground when she was working, and even when she leaped out of a window to her death, self-portraits, as lump Woodman in with the self-publicists. Woodman, too, committed suicide by jumping out of a window, three months before her 23rd birthday, leaving us hundreds of extraordinary photographs. Female body art is a high-risk business.


disorder
Originally uploaded by .séverine.

Naked portraiture is a poorly defined sub-class of a pedestrian genre, calculated to appeal to a culture both besotted with celebrity and visually illiterate.


In terms of abiding aesthetic value, Polly Borland's photograph of me naked on my bed, for example, has nothing to offer beyond the footling detail of the toile de jouy wallpaper of my bedroom, which is at least in focus, unlike my face. It was the photographer's whim to photograph me in my bedroom, and mine to wear nothing, because I own neither a nightgown nor pyjamas."

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after the birds outside the apt. say hello

after the birds outside the apt. say hello
Originally uploaded by tetheredto.

Mhambi has long been enamoured with Olive & Rose, their pics and their prose. Allot of what they do is gorgeous and unashamedly naughty. Lovely.

there's coffee in a ceramic mug next door at the happy lobster cafe, santa claus drawn across the handle in magic marker. evaporated milk in a tiny silver pouring cup next to a saucer of raw cane sugar. there's a flat screen t.v. above the door playing only commercials sponsored by the tourism board of the government. caves and jungles and photos of impossibly shiny buses fly into and out of the silent screen.

a seven person group of australians pass around a digital camera and yell at one another, shifting naturally until a finger hovers above the shutter, and then smiling, their eyes wrinkling at the sides, someone accidentally blinking, someone else caught mid-mouth asking if there's enough light. two women hold handtowels behind the bar and stare at bottles of coconut rum while they talk, one of them touching her hair with the towel, the other one so very, very still.

a barefoot man in a straw hat sells bags of papaya and folds a basket of baby dresses on the sand street outside and waves at me when he realizes that i'm staring, when i realize that he's staring too.

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Girls are gorgeous

Super 8
Originally uploaded by marialy.

When I was younger, I loved to look at naked women in magazines. But I felt guilty. First the guilt came from was my strict protestant Christian upbringing.

Later, at university, it was reinforced when I became involved in left wing politics. We espoused equality in all spheres of life. We believed that men make sexual objects of women. I knew that at least for me, it was true. I adored naked ladies. But it was wrong, maybe not a sin, but degrading.

Something puzzled me. I wondered why women just don't make sexual objects of us men? Problem solved.

But they did not seem to want to objectify us men.

It was only later that I realised that women have sexual objects too. Other women.

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Male sexuality is a disgrace

Shame and lust
Originally uploaded by anastasiyamaleeva.

Are you male and embarrassed at your feverish desires? So is Mhambi.

Just think about how much we'd get done if we did not think about sex so much. Just think, none of those idiotic advances, embarrassing rejections, uncomfortable erections, distracting fantasies, and browsing off for a bit of porn when we should be editing our blogs.

But Mhambi is in good company. Surrealist Spanish film director Luis Bunuel wrote in his biography what a relief it was, when at old age he got rid of his libido and could concentrate on what matters (or so Mhambi hears). So too Kingsley Amis, who said on old age and loss of his libido: "For 50 years it was like being chained to an idiot."




The Last Dance.
Originally uploaded by inanutshell


Which brings me to J M Coetzee's Disgrace. When Mhambi read it first time round he thought it was a damning comment on male sexuality, and not primarily a post-colonial novel about the loss of white power in South Africa - as most people apparently do.

Ever wondered why lesbians dress badly?

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Kinderen voor Kinderen song / video - Two Fathers

Ah! But you have got to love the Dutch! This boy Terrace sings about his two fathers and everybody sings along. A far cry form the homophobic debate around gay marriage we have seen in South Africa.

When the Afrikaans South African Dutch Reformed Church recently surprised everybody and came out as the only South African church in favour of one marriage provision for everybody, instead of a separate provision for Gay South Africans, as is now being suggested, Mhambi thought - at last the old conservative church is doing proud the Dutch part of it's name.

I doubt this will be sung on Afrikaans channel Kyknet however.

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Pronto condoms Zuma video

Condoms, which promoters say can be put on in just one second, are going on sale in South Africa this week.

The firm's adverts, which can be seen on its website, feature video with jokes at the expense of two senior South African politicians - former Deputy President Jacob Zuma and Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

"Using an ordinary condom is a real pain," says Pronto condom designer Willem van Rensburg.

"By the time the condom is on, the mood is halfway out the window." Pronto condoms do not need to be unwrapped.

Mr van Rensburg told the BBC he hopes it will encourage people to use condoms in a country where 5.5m people have HIV - one of the world's highest figures.

"If you're slow, it'll take you three seconds. You can really do it in one," Mr van Rensburg's former business partner Roelf Mulder told the AFP news agency.

So there you have it, no you can live fast and not die young.

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Why do lesbians dress so badly?

...and gay boys look so great? Mmmmm....?

I'm talking on average of course. And ok, the average gay man is not a paragon of good taste and creative couture either. Anybody that has been to a gay club recently can attest to a near uniform and monotonous sea of muscle Maries, decked out with the same close hair crops, jeans, white t-shirts or pectorals.

But boy, the high level of self imposed body fascism to get those washboard stomachs *aer* evident.

But my contention still is that gay men do tend to spend more time on their appearance than the average bloke. AND the average lesbian does tend to spend less time and effort on theirs, than her straight gender-sake.

What could explain this phenomena? Are gay men more female like and lesbians more manly? That's just too crude an explanation.

This is my theory. (It does not take into account things like hormones etc but rather the social manifestations of human behavior.)

My theory is that the answer is tied up in male and female sexuality, what we desire and importantly what we need to do to be desired.

Straight male sexuality is all about desiring the other, the so-called sex object. It is often stated that male sexuality is visual and rather shallow. And that straight female sexuality is about being desired. For females it is said it is more about personalities and the emotional feelings their partner conjures.

Now when we have two males, they still desire like males do, their mate is the sex object, but they too are in turn also being desired and the sex object. The result is that both tend to spend allot of time on their appearance.

With lesbians it works the other way around. Being female, they do not desire a sex object. As a result neither needs to look at their best to get some attention.

This simple theory explains allot of things. For instance why you often see well kept females as partners with burly badly dressed men. This is why straight females openly say they find other females attractive, but their partners will be reluctant to admit the same of a male.

It also could explain why in swinger circles sexual activity revolves around the females. The gals can have other gals, and guys. But the guys can't be seen to be involved with other guys.

This is not because men are not bi-curious like allot of females seem to be. (Many young straight boys had some sexual encounters with their pals when they were out camping).

It is because for females male on male action severely threatens the way they as females see themselves sexually. Most straight women just don't find two men having sex sexy. Men don't go in homo territory in conversations with their female partners or when swinging for fear of not being sexy.

On the other hand they will freely admit that they find the idea of two girls together very titillating, and their girlfriends might nod approvingly.

This desiring of shallow physical beauty and the response to it could also partially explain why gay men have such promiscuous sex lives and multiple short relationships.

And this theory could explain on the other hand why lesbians tend to have more stable long term relationships.

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