A bizarre instrument?
Image delving for sexy girl robots for a slightly different purpose from this post, I came across a number or articles on the machine depicted to the left. It’s “Moaning Lisa,” a robot which you can manipulate to bring to a simulated orgasm.
Well, that might be mad science enough just on its own, but what really caught my eye was that one of the best articles on this innovative piece of technology was on Synthtopia, a site devoted to electronic music, under the headline “Moaning Lisa: The Most Bizarre Electronic Music Instrument Ever.”
Quoth her inventor, Matt Ganucheau
The process leading to a female orgasm is a uniquely delicate challenge for both sexes leaving it a mystery to most men and women. Moaning Lisa is an instillation that examines this complex process by simplifying it into an almost game-like state. With Lisa, as in life, there are no instructions on display. This leaves each participant to discover how Lisa’s true sexual potential is unlocked.
Wow. I would be remiss, of course, if I didn’t embed appropriate video.
Matt Bell reporting from 2007 Arse Electronica:
The presentation of Moaning Lisa:
One has to love an audience question like, “So when are you going to release Moan Moan Revolution?”
But what really motivated posting this (somewhat) old news is that I hadn’t seen it before, and it was yet another reminder of how other people are thinking what you’re thinking. Do you remember Tanya Yip’s rather unusual experience of being taught to sing better by being played like an instrument?
Tanya whips off her sweatshirt and casts it aside, then reaches back and undoes her bra-strap. Her bra hangs loose.
TANYA
Locrian! Please…
And, following that, her subsequent fantasy of becoming an instrument?
Sometimes I wonder if there are any unexplored erotic ideas.
Instrument transformations
An alert reader brought to my attention this short mocumentary: “This Is Sex” – An Interview with Phallik. And the first thing that caught my eye was a snipped of animation beginning at about 0:31 that should be of some interest to anyone who liked either Tanya’s fantasy transformation scene or the Kiki de Montparnasse post that riffed off it.
The whole thing is highly entertaining in its own right.
Libera me
Beware what you wish for. Connie Morton wanted more than anything to be the soprano soloist in the Verdi Requiem. Little did she know that it would be her requiem.
But before her end, Connie does really get to shine as the only soloist in the “Libera me.” In case you don’t know the words:
| Libera me, Domine, de morte æterna, in die illa tremenda: Quando cæli movendi sunt et terra. Dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem. Tremens factus sum ego, et timeo, dum discussio venerit, atque ventura ira. Quando cæli movendi sunt et terra. Dies illa, dies iræ, calamitatis et miseriæ, dies magna et amara valde. Dum veneris iudicare sæculum per ignem. Requiem æternam dona eis, Domine: et lux perpetua luceat eis. |
Deliver me, O Lord, from death eternal on that fearful day, when the heavens and the earth shall be moved, when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire. I am made to tremble, and I fear, till the judgment be upon us, and the coming wrath, when the heavens and the earth shall be moved. That day, day of wrath, calamity, and misery, day of great and exceeding bitterness, when thou shalt come to judge the world by fire. Rest eternal grant unto them, O Lord: and let light perpetual shine upon them. |
Here at EroticMadScience, so gloomy and medieval a sentiment might best be illustrated by Giotto.
Giotto di Bondone (1267-1337), "Hell," detail from Last Judgment, a fresco in the Capella degli Scrovegni in Padua (1304-6)
All sorts of interesting fetishes are indulged in hell, apparently.
Obviously I cannot cite all this stuff without coming up with a real example of the music. Here is one of the best I can find, with Renée Fleming as the soprano soloist. The excerpt isn’t quite complete, I think due to clip-length limitations imposed by YouTube.
One might just think that art like this would be worth giving one’s life for.
Quando me’n vò
Connie Morton takes singing in the shower to a high level.
(Image from Self-Pleasureforwomen.com.) What she sings is from Giacomo Puccini‘s La bohème, specifically Musetta’s rather risqué slow waltz, “Quando me’n vò.” (Google offers one translation, here is another one from this source, which includes a parallel Italian-English libretto for the entire opera.)
| Quando men vo soletta per la via, la gente sosta e mira e la bellezza mia tutta ricerca in me da capo a pie’… … ed assaporo allor la bramosia sottil, che da gli occhi traspira e dai palesi vezzi intender sa alle occulte beltà. Così l’effluvio del desìo tutta m’aggira, felice mi fa! |
When I stroll out alone along the street. The people stop and gaze at me, to seek out my beauty from from head to toe. …and then I taste the sly desire that gleams from admiring eyes. They can see all my beauty which lies concealed in my heart, perceived from my outward charms. So, this scent of ardent desire surrounds me and fills me with pleasure! |
A fantasy of visibility, of being desired. Quite the thing to sing when pleasuring yourself!
“Quando me’n vò” is a huge crowd pleaser and it’s easy to find versions of it on line. I’ll offer up two, because why not? First a concert version with Anna Netrebko
And also a recital version with Maki Mori:
The Mori version turned out to contain (when I watched it) a bit of a bonus for A.S.F.R. enthusiasts — not kidding, watch it and see!
Making beautiful music together
Tanya Yip‘s fantasy of tranforming herself into a cello and then being masterfully played has an obvious visual inspiration: Man Ray’s famous image Violon d’Ingres:
An erotic inspiration indeed, especially since the model who posed for the picture was the stunning Kiki de Montparnasse (Alice Prin), who posed for any number of other striking things, such as this 1920 photograph (thus taken when Kiki would have been 18 or 19) Mädchen mit Vase by Julian Mandel.
I felt well-moved writing Tanya’s fantasy — the analogy between a master musician and a skilled lover seems to me very close. (And the analogy also works the other way: cf Honoré de Balzac: “The majority of husbands remind me of an orangutan trying to play the violin.”) I suppose there’s a rather radical bondage element as well as a transformation fantasy element. After all, if you’re a cello, you can’t move and you’re at the mercy of whoever holds you…
Tanya’s special music lesson
Given the technical challenges in what Tanya Yip is trying to sing, it’s perhaps not too surprising that she needs a little extra help.
(Natalie Dessay show us how it’s done here in case your sight reading is a little rusty.)
The rather unusual and improving singing lesson that Tanya gets has its own rather unusual and special inspiration: a famous (or notorious) painting by Balthasar Kłossowski de Rola, or Balthus (1908-2001) as he was more commonly known. The painting is The Guitar Lesson (1934), and I’ll bet it’s scandalous even today (note that the image is from Wikipedia; I am reproducing it in-line for reader convenience):
Controversial, but unquestionably high art created by one of the twentieth century’s greatest painters. It is even used by Richard Posner in his magisterial 1992 book Sex and Reason (pp. 376-7) as an example of how it can be nigh impossible to draw a clean distinction between “art” and “pornography.”
Judge Posner helpfully notes also that the girl in the painting whose guitar lesson has turned into a very different kind of lesson is in the same position as Christ in Enguerrand Quarton‘s fifteenth century La Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon.
Ah, so it’s blasphemy as well as art! Good, good…
Pirates!
When I was just about ready to launch EroticMadScience.com I wrote to a friend describing my enterprise in these words:
I guess it’s time I raised the Jolly Roger and set sail.
And that’s very much in the general spirit of things at this site, since a core idea behind the Gnosis stories is that it is a blessing to be able to escape the realm of ordinary human life and its conventions, to find a morality-free zone where we might indulge our imaginations.
Dreams are of course the best and most blessed of all such zones, perhaps. Hence Gnosis Dreamscapes. But pirates do nicely as well.
And naturally, as pirates are outlaws beyond the reach of any state, one naturally imagines that they might get up to some rather interesting activities.
(For a larger version click through to Kinky Delight.)
I’m a little surprised that there isn’t more pirate-themed porn than I can readily find with simple image searching. “Rum, sodomy, and the lash” was how Winston Churchill supposedly characterized naval tradition. Churchill probably wasn’t right about the sodomy bit, given how little privacy there would have been on an a ship in the days of fighting sail. But seriously, wouldn’t a square-rigged ship be something like an ideal BDSM playground? What with all those ropes and spars and the great familiarity that sailormen are supposed to have with different kinds of knots? To say nothing of the fondness that navy men have long had for corporal punishment as a means of maintaining discipline… Perhaps the shortage of usable vessels explains why we don’t see sailing ships used for more bondage shoots. Perhaps the Village People’s use of the U.S.S. Reasoner lingers in institutional memory, making the Navy skittish of any possible proposal by fine folks at Kink.com to borrow the U.S.S. Constitution for an afternoon. But perhaps I speculate too much?
That said, there are certainly some people willing to make good use of the vast homoerotic potential of pirates.
But interestingly enough it was none of this that inspired Bill’s naval dream. Rather, it was Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht‘s song “Seeräuber Jenny” from Die Dreigroschenoper (1928) that really set my inner wheels in motion. A woman in an oppressive situation imagines pirates coming and wrecking destruction on all around her, and then carrying her off. Here is Lotte Lenya performing it in a 1931 film version. (German lyrics, and an alternative audio version, can be accessed here.)
So maybe this is really Michiko’s pirate dream?
Black Mass
What with all the generalized do-badding, and all the uses and abuses of religious settings going on around Gnosis, I guess it would only be a matter of time before someone decided on performing a Black Mass.
Félicien Rops (1833 - 1898), "Black Mass" (or "The Sacrifice") 1883
Just not that kind of Black Mass, fond as we all can be of Félicien Rops (intriguing gallery here).
This kind of Black Mass.
Alexander Scriabin‘s Sonata No. 9, performed here by naughty (but clearly virtuosic) young Arthur Kaufman, first seen in Invisible Girl, Heroine precipitating an orgy. A talented young man indeed!
The point at which Maureen walks in on him to settle his hash respecting the aphrodisiac she stole from him is approximately here in the score.
The dynamics marking in the score at the end of the crescendo shown in the third measure is only f, but I have yet to hear a recording of this work in which the performer interpreted that to mean anything other than “wicked loud.” I wouldn’t know how to characterize the technical demands of this piece other than “wicked difficult.” Small wonder Maureen had little trouble dropping in on Arthur.
And if you want to see it performed, you’re in luck, because YouTube has Yevgeny Sudbin doing just that.
Scarier than some old ritual with daggers and alters, or at least so it seems to me.
The dance comes from here…
Labour is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul.
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut-tree, great-rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
William Butler Yeats, “Among School Children” (1927)
And with respect to Bridget, where did you think the dance came from, or where might it be going?
Hans Zatzka (1859 - 1945), "The Harem Dancer"
Gaston Guédy (1874 - 1955), "Dançarina de harém"
A theme continued in a more modern visual idiom here, here, and here. Enjoy!
