Fetish Dayz

The Fetishistas goes live, and I can blog again!

Unnatural act? Gen of Society of Genitorture, topping the LA Kink Ball bill

Keeping up a blog — even a mere weekly one — when you’re also trying to launch an entire webzine is, as I discovered in February, easier said than done. So my apologies to everyone who has dropped in on FetishDayz over the last month or so to discover no new entries since my preview of mid-February’s Los Angeles Kink Ball Weekend.

There were just not enough hours in the day, in the run-up to the launch of The Fetishistas at the LAKBW, to do anything except work on the ’zine’ s debut. And after that event, my energies were inevitably focused on creating the party reportage for the new site that was a natural consequence of tying the ’zine’s launch in with the LA weekend. Not to mention catching up on all the other, ongoing editorial work that would otherwise have been done in the period when I was away. So this has been my first chance to return to blogging — but hopefully it’ll be the last time there’s such a large gap between pieces. It’s not like there’s not plenty to write about!

Anyway, the launch of The Fetishistas looks like it can be counted a success, even though what went online on February 16 was, in the end, only a taste of what a full monthly edition of the site will eventually look like. The fact that we went live with as much content as we did, looking how it was supposed to look, is a testament to the dedication of my two partners in grime, editorial associate and graphic designer Jan FetishClubPix, and webmaster Martin Pelzer.

In order for the site to launch as planned at Slave2Fashion, the Friday night opening party of the LA Kink Ball Weekend, Jan in the UK and Martin in Berlin both had to work right through their respective Friday nights. When I finally turned off my laptop at 10pm in LA on the night of the launch party, they were shutting down their computers at what for them was breakfast time the next day. Respect is therefore due to them in no small quantity.
   

Above, L-R: Slave2Fashion MC RubberDoll; House of Harlot’s star performer Jewell Marceau; one of Pretty Pervy’s scary alien bugs; Jolie Vaughn walks Torture Garden

Slave2Fashion had been planned as a dresscode event with the primary focus on networking, which tied in very nicely with its rôle as a media launch party. The fashion aspect was reflected both in the efforts the well-turned-out audience made to meet the party’s strict dresscode (this not being something LA audiences are accustomed to), and in the onstage fashion shows which featured Germany’s Tatjana Warnecke and three UK latex labels — House of Harlot, Pretty Pervy and Torture Garden Clothing.

MC’d by RubberDoll, S2F was undoubtedly successful in bringing a lot of the West Coast’s fetish fashion and media people together under one roof, with an impressive complement of top fetish photographers (see below) turning up to check out all the modelling talent the party attracted, both onstage and off.

Photographers’ gallery, above, L-R: Michael Helms with fashion show co-ordinator and Fetishistas columnist Marina St Mark; Helms’ buddy Perry Gallagher on production photography duties; Christine Kessler with Howard Vacbed; Michael Diamond of ErosArtist.com and friends

Photographers’ gallery, below, L-R: Taboo’s Gerry Koehler is attacked by Talia Monet; Steve Diet Goedde (left) and Jody Cortes lean towards Imp of Satan’s Rose Algren; New LA resident Nadya Lev (left) with Toronto’s Black Widow

It was great to see out-of-towners so well represented here. There was a whole enclave from Seattle, including my favourite kinky catsuit creator Rose Algren (Imp of Satan), while Portland was represented as only Betka Schpitz can represent it. I was delighted, too, that I finally got to meet Toronto’s Black Widow, who some years ago sent such hot pictures of herself to me at Skin Two that I was obliged to create a completely new section in the magazine just so I could publish them. The section was called Model Card, which quickly became one of the most sought-after spots in the mag. (Sad to say, it no longer has a place in that publication.)

Another thing that gave me quite a buzz, as a confirmed networking addict these days, was to meet in the flesh a substantial number of people who had friended me through MySpace or Model Mayhem. People who use these sites to build up a more or less random network of ‘friends’ around the world may never meet more than a tiny percentage of them. But if you use these sites for something as focused as fetish networking, then every time you go to a fetish event outside your usual locale, you have a fair chance of connecting with some of your new virtual pals in the real world. Which makes it all seem strangely worthwhile.

Masque moments, L-R: Arachnia Webb; Betka Schpitz; RubberDoll and Anastasia Pierce; Maxine and Athena Fatale

Quite a few people whom I recognised, but couldn’t always think from where, came up and introduced themselves as recent MS or MM friends, and it was great to get to know some of them, such as bondage model Arachnia Webb and Master Liam, better during the course of the weekend. I’d first bumped into these two at Saturday’s Masque dinner, where Arachnia would find herself invited, with rope expert Charly B, to stand in for the absent Maria Shadoes at Sunday’s Bondage Brunch. There were some great performances at Masque by the likes of Athena Fatale and Maxine, though it has to be said that the night belonged to RubberDoll, whose second show, featuring Anastasia Pierce, blew fuses literally as well as metaphorically.

Socialising at events like this also produces many new MySpace friend requests, and in the wake of the weekend, I’m pleased to have added to my circle of cyber-chums the likes of V and Nikki, a couple of fun girls who shared my Masque table; and Angelique, a proper stocking-wearing miss with great 1940s style whom I met at Sunday’s Kink Ball.

If Masque belonged to RubberDoll, then the Kink Ball itself belonged to the legendary Gen, whose Society of Genitorture show predictably transgressed just about every guideline that LA venue managements could imagine laying down for live performances. Whether by coincidence or as a direct consequence, the party finished a good hour before it was scheduled to, leaving some of the billed entertainment unsampled by me. Although it has to be said that much of Kink Ball’s spectacle, such as that provided by dommes-at-play Mya and VonLivid, was of the unscheduled variety anyway (and not unsampled by me).
   
Kink Ball kinkery, L-R: Angelique has a quiet nylon moment; Gen and her girls givin’ it large; LA discovers that Seattle is not wearing any drawers; Mya and VonLivid provide their own floor show

Up until this point, I’d been staying at Kink Ball promoter Robert Fluty’s impressive downtown studio, but after the craziness of the weekend, I needed a quiet place to work on my report. So I decamped for my last few days to the house my good friend Veronica shares with her man Joseph overlooking Coldwater Canyon, which is a haven of tranquility even when Joseph is recording music in his studio above the guest bedroom.

Apart from a brief shopping trip to Glendale Galleria that gave me a chance to hook up for dinner with my pal Perry Gallagher, and a scouting trip with Veronica to a bisexual fetish bar (don’t ask), I hardly saw the outside world again until the following Friday. It was my last night in LA and the redoubtable Sonny Black had taken it upon himself to organised a perv dinner at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. The venue had been carefully chosen to give Hollywood — the more usual location for such gatherings — a wide berth, because this was Oscars weekend, which meant all around Hollywood the roads would be gridlocked.

The Italian restaurant Sonny picked had told him that it had recently lost its liquor licence, so everyone had to take their own booze. Then when we got there, we learned that the restaurant had miraculously regained its licence in the two days since the BYOB advice. So those of us who ended up being an hour late because we’d been searching for somewhere to buy booze in Beverly Hills were not perhaps in the best of moods at this point. However, the food and the ambience soon made up for it, and of the 30-plus diners in our party, a good few accepted the invitation to end the evening with a drink or three at Miss Kitty’s, where the genial Christos and his cohorts were on good form.

By the time I boarded my Virgin flight back to London the next evening, I felt that I’d barely scraped the surface of Los Angeles on this visit. My ten-day stay had just flown by, leaving me with insufficient time for some of my closest West Coast pals. On the upside, however, some interesting new friendships were started… and there was the small matter of launching a new fetish webzine too. So, all in all, not an entirely fruitless trip!

Above, L-R: Last supper with Sonny, Veronica and Joseph; a bit of cheek from our first Fetishistas Style File subject, Jolie Vaughn; Marina bends my ear about her next Fetishistas column

A full report on all the Los Angeles Kink Ball Weekend parties, complete with extensive photo galleries, can be found at www.thefetishistas.com. Use the menus and go to Events > Reports > LA Kink Ball or just click directly on the second link below. You can also use the menus to find all the site content not displayed in the site’s current Front Page trailers.

Fetish webzine: www.thefetishistas.com
Full LA Kink Ball Weekend photo report

Launch of ‘The Fetishistas’ at LA Kink Ball Weekend

The fetish webzine project that I’ve been working on since my departure from Skin Two at the end of May last year is about to go live. Launch of the webzine The Fetishistas will happen during the first Los Angeles Kink Ball Weekend in mid-February. The site will officially go live on Friday February 16 at Slave2Fashion, the opening event of the weekend, at Knitting Factory, 7021 Hollywood Boulevard.

I was very pleased when I heard last summer that LA was going to get a proper European-style fetish weekend in early 2007, and I happily made a commitment on behalf of my as-yet-to-be launched ’zine to support it. Why? My last four years editing of Skin Two magazine had seen me forging a strong relationship with Los Angeles’ growing community of fetish creatives. Looking back on LA’s emergence as a fetish force, it seems almost as if someone must have thrown a switch to produce the surge in the quality and quantity of work that I observed coming out of the area over that period. But I think the truth is more that this great mass of fetish talent had been simmering quietly away for quite some time, and what it needed was for publications like mine to take notice.

I’m the first to say that London can teach the rest of the world a few tricks when it comes to playing home to more top-drawer designers and international-standard events than anywhere else. But I can’t help also feeling great affection for this new West Coast scene — a scene I’ve witnessed blossoming rather as I watched the London scene grow from its roots in a single Soho club in 1983.

I had originally thought that by the time the LA Kink Ball came around in mid February, The Fetishistas would have been online for two or three months. But getting this big project off the ground has turned out to be more complex than predicted (quelle surprise) and so we find ourselves in January 2007 still working on getting everything just as we want it. Though delays are never desirable, in this case they have at least had the positive effect of enabling me to tie The Fetishistas launch date in with the other very significant launch of early 2007. Both these ventures — webzine and weekend — are, I would suggest, important milestones for the international fetish community. Los Angeles finally gets a full-scale perv-fest that befits its importance as a centre of kinky excellence, and the world gets its first truly world-class online fetish magazine.

I know Los Angeleans will turn out in force to support their own weekend, but I’m expecting also to see a lot of old friends from further afield, not to mention some of my many new MySpace and ModelMayhem mates from near and far. I’m sure a lot of people are disappointed that there’s no San Francisco Fetish Ball this year, but in its absence, the LA weekend this February could be just the way to get your first fix of West Coast fetish fun in 2007.

As for the launch party itself, well, reflecting the London-based but shamelessly internationalist outlook of The Fetishistas, Friday night’s Slave2Fashion brings strict dresscode European pervy partying style to Los Angeles, with latex fashion shows from UK labels House of Harlot, Torture Garden Clothing and Pretty Pervy, plus distinctive pvc designs from Germany’s Tatjana Warnecke. With its ambient/chill-out/trip-hop musical backdrop, the night aims to provide the perfect vibe for socialising and networking. It promises to be a particularly good promotional opportunity for models, with the chance to show off their hottest outfits and be photographed for the world’s Fetish Press. And of course there’ll be the bonus of seeing, in the flesh, famous fetish fashion labels never before brought to the Los Angeles stage.

In case my presence alone is not enough, The Fetishistas’ team at Slave2Fashion will also include several of the webzine’s much better-looking contributors, who’ll be participating in the fashion performances. Look out for such launch edition luminaries as Los Angeles’ very own Ms Marina, Chicago’s VonLivid and Miami’s Jolie Vaughn among the fashionistas strutting their stuff for your entertainment.

It promises to be quite a night — and quite a weekend. I hope as many of you as possible will turn out to support it. See you there!

www.lakinkball.com
www.thefetishistas.com (goes live Feb 16)

Ugly Betty poses some interesting questions for Brits

I don’t know what it was like when Ugly Betty first made it onto US TV screens. But anticipation levels for her New Year debut here in the UK were extremely high, with television pundits falling over themselves to tip the show as the new hottie for Friday nights, and Betty herself (actress America Ferrera, above) as the coolest anti-heroine since Roseanne.

I wondered if the programme (shown here on Channel 4 and E4) would provide any legitimate fetish angles for this column. Fortunately the very first episode did just that when Betty, the newly-appointed, less-than-fashionable assistant to a New York fashion magazine publisher, was humiliated in fetish attire while performing model stand-in duties on a magazine photo shoot.

Betty makes her entrance as magazine photo-shoot stand-in for absent model

Now, allegedly, Ugly Betty is full of irony, or at least what passes for irony in American television. ‘Not especially beautiful girl gets job on fashion magazine and is good at it’ may be just about as ironic as things can get in a country often considered an irony-free zone. This being the case, it was hard for me to decide whether the tacky, plasticky dominatrix gear that Betty and the ‘real’ models were forced to wear for the photo shoot was part of the show’s conscious irony or not.

I wondered where they’d got this stuff from, and the end credits suggested an answer. The programme’s costume designer is none other than Patricia Field, who earned her television wings providing outfits for that earlier New York ‘fashion television’ confection, Sex And The City, and more recently had designs featured in movie The Devil Wears Prada. I suppose Field’s style (which, as a result of encounters with her downtown Manhattan store in the early 1980s, I always think of as having its roots in TV of a rather different kind) is not entirely inappropriate to this sort of lightweight fairy story fodder. I can’t help wondering, though, what kind of a look the show might have, overall, if its producers involved a designer with less of a ‘Hollywood glamour’ take on fashion.

 

Betty, dwarfed by ‘real’ models, is obliged to pose in tacky fetish gear

But will Betty be a big hit over here, and does it deserve to be? Well, given its stylistic similarities to Sex And The City and Desperate Housewives, it could easily enjoy the same kind of popularity as they have. We’ll probably all watch the first series because there’ll probably be enough originality in it to keep things fresh, but as the novelty wears off, and the fund of simple morality tales dries up, our interest might not be sustained.

But I could be wrong. I actually do like the Betty character, so I want to see what they do with her. And unlike esteemed British TV critic AA Gill, I don’t find the ‘real’ irony in this programme to be the fact that Americans think that placing an ‘ordinary’ person in a ‘glamorous’ setting is in itself so inventive as to be revolutionary. AA may have forgotten that Ugly Betty is not an American creation at all; she started out as Colombian TV soap character Betty La Fea, and from there the concept has been appropriated and adapted for television in about a dozen other countries including America — everywhere, in fact, from Germany to India. So the Ugly Betty we’re seeing here in the UK is not a Hollywood original but an example of US studios doing what they do all the time — remaking someone else’s ideas.

Humiliated, Betty flees the photo studio pursued by her boss

But I do find it interesting that in all of these remakes, the actress chosen to play Betty is in reality (just as America Ferrera is in the US version) somewhere between very attractive and stunningly beautiful, and has to be ‘made ugly’ to play the part. Why? Why couldn’t any of these programme makers have had the guts to cast a genuinely plain Jane in the lead role? Why has it become the rule with this show, wherever it is remade, that the only way to create an ‘ordinary’ woman suitable for the rôle is to de-beautify a beautiful one? That, I think, is a far more telling indictment of the mindset behind the whole conceit.

Ironically the best chance of a plain Jane playing Betty would be if we made our own version of the show right here in the UK. British television is renowned for featuring, in starring roles and especially in soaps, plenty of ordinary-looking people, not to mention a fair smattering of genuine baby-frighteners. But that is also why a British remake of this show was probably never on the cards. Precisely because British television has been embracing ‘ordinariness’ (or what we like to call ‘realism’) with enthusiasm since the 1960s, today’s UK audiences would just not see anything remarkable in a short, slightly chubby girl with braces on her teeth getting a job on a British magazine.

Fortunately for Betty, though, we are still willing to suspend disbelief if she appears on our screens in a more appropriate cultural context — to wit, one where (we are led to believe) perfect teeth really can get you further than a perfect mind.

www.channel4.com/entertainment/tv/microsites/U/ugly_betty/   

How Fetish Conquered The World

The holiday period TV repeats gave me the opportunity, finally, to watch the (UK) Channel 5 documentary How Fetish Conquered The World, which I’d missed on its first screening earlier in the year.

Although I didn’t appear in this programme, it looked suspiciously, from the general tone and content, like the one that I was interviewed for towards the end of 2005. And sure enough, when the credits rolled at the end, there I was, wrongly spelt as Tony Michell but nevertheless acknowledged for my (invisible) contribution. But believe me, I’m not just trying to put a brave face on things when I say I’m grateful for my non-appearance. I had plugged my old firm Skin Two throughout the interview and was not looking forward to seeing myself promoting an organisation that had subsequently dispensed  with my services.

Anyway, even without any soundbites from moi in it, How Fetish Conquered The World has to rank as one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen on fetishism and BDSM. It was authoritative, non-judgemental, non-sensationalist, full of interesting opinion and analysis, and packed with hot visuals, a few of which I’ve included here.

L-R: Mistress Margo & slave; Mistress Miyabe; ropemaster Akira Naka & model

Expertise was provided by some pretty heavyweight commentators from both sides of the Atlantic, including editor Diane Hanson, author Katherine Gates and photographer Eric Kroll from the US, and Wellcome Library archivist Dr Lesley Hall, film critic Derek Malcolm and the inimitable Germaine Greer from the UK. There were interviews with American and Japanese dominatrixes and slaves, British pony racing enthusiasts and inflatable latex lovers, and Japanese bondage practitioners. Clips were included from such seminal SM movies as Barbette Schroeder’s Maitresse, Just Jaeckin’s Story Of O and Masaru Konuma’s ground-breaking Wife To Be Sacrificed (Ikenie fujin).

L-R: Maitresse (1976); Story Of O (1975); Wife To Be Sacrificed (1974)

Never as far as I know released in the UK, but available on DVD from Kino.com in the US, the visually stunning Wife To Be Sacrificed, a product of the ailing 1970s Japanese movie industry’s move into so-called ‘pink film’, was one of several revelations delivered by this hour-long documentary.

Another came in the guise of latex-hooded-and-catsuited New York dominatrix Mistress Ayla (aka Ayla Alya) — see top picture and below. Her extreme medical scenes with a male slave and her interview pieces direct to camera had two very different tones, but were conducted with equally impressive panache. Definitely someone worth talking to for my upcoming webzine The Fetishistas. Unfortunately though, the lady seems, at least for the moment, to have disappeared off the face of the earth. If you’re out there somewhere Ayla, please get in touch!

L-R: Mistress Ayla and slave; The Other Pony Club; Mr Blow-Up

How Fetish Conquered The World was written and directed by Jim Funnell for independent London production company Illuminations, who were commissioned by Channel 5. At this point the show is not obtainable as a commercial DVD, but if it ever becomes available, it would be one for every perv to add to their collection. In the meantime, it’s certainly worth keeping an eye out for any re-appearances on TV.

www.channel5.com
www.illuminationsmedia.co.uk
www.kino.com
www.thefetishistas.com
 

Doctor Who Christmas Day special is a runaway success

The Christmas Day Doctor Who special The Runaway Bride, with Catherine Tate playing a mouthy wife-to-be who finds herself transported from the altar to the Tardis before getting to say ‘I do’, was a brilliant way to kick off the evening’s TV. With its arachnoid alien villainess played by Sarah Parish (below) in a prosthetic outfit reminiscent of one of Midori’s wilder creations, this one-off episode was a welcome return to form by writer Russell T Davies after the disappointments (for me at least) of the spin-off Torchwood series.

Despite John ‘Tom Cruise’ Barrowman’s best efforts, Torchwood has never achieved the kind of chemistry between its lead characters that was established in an instant between David Tennant’s Doctor and Tate’s bride, an unlikely but totally inspired pairing (above).

However, I’m not sure that I believe all that stuff in the press about everyone being really disappointed that Catherine wasn’t offered the job of Billy Piper replacement when the new Doctor Who series arrives in 2007. Tate is already established as one of Britain’s top comic talents through her own TV series, and frankly she’s too versatile to be locked into playing one character in a long-running drama, and too good to be playing sidekick even to someone as charismatic as David Tennant.

Me, I’m more than happy to give the Doc’s impending new assistant Martha Jones (far left) a fair chance. She looks like she might turn out to be quite a spunky chick.
www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho

Fetish Fashion has a (seasonal) Sunday Times moment

We’re all used to the women’s fashion and style pages getting a little more interested in erotic clothing as Christmas approaches. It’s that time of the year when the media fashionistas are most likely to mention lingerie, stockings, high heels and other kinds of sexy garb without the accompaniment of involuntary shuddering.

However, I have to say that the Sunday Times Style supplement excelled itself with its December 17 spread The good, the bad and the kinky. Teasing us with a contents-page picture by Perou of Midori in her legendary latex kimono of a few Rubber Balls ago (left), the magazine declares: “Fetish fashion is having a moment. But where is it coming from?”

The answer, according to the piece’s author Tony Marcus, is Torture Garden. Which is handy, because almost the entire piece is devoted to his account of a visit to one of TG’s parties at Mass in Brixton. Here, the writer, clad in an electric blue bridesmaid’s dress and hold-up stockings, encountered “insect-shiny catwomen” in black catsuits on the door, before entering the main dance area populated by “a lot of stern looking ladies in rubber skirts, high heels, high heels, high boots, tight corsets and rubber nurse outfits”. Who would have believed it, at Torture Garden, eh?

Soon. of course, Marcus is tackling the thorny question of just how much pain and pleasure is actually there for the taking. Every journalist writing about fetish clubs for the vanilla press always has to address this issue. And, like so many of his profession who’ve trod this road before him, he seemed a little disappointed by the lack of the kind of debauchery he’d hoped to find at TG.  Marcus felt most of the club’s denizens weren’t doing “anything particularly frightening” but admitted there was still a “whiff of latent danger” in the air. Interestingly, he decided it was “all a bit public school in the days of coroporal punishment”, an accusation I doubt has ever before been levelled at TG of all organisations. Makes you wonder just which public school Marcus went to, yah?

Contrary to the promise of the subheading, the piece doesn’t actually establish the connection between what goes on at TG and current mainstream manifestations of kinkery such as Gareth Pugh’s fetishistic catwalk fashion, Sienna Miller sporting a harness, Dolce & Gabbana’s SM-inspired spring collection and “every second woman on the Tube” wearing boots redolent of female domination. However, it does have a happy ending of sorts, when Marcus finds himself being chatted up by a girl who says she likes to whip men. Not at TG and not in public, you understand — but the writer concludes that he “could, I imagine, arrange to see this girl again”. So it isn’t all just make-believe then.

www.sunday-times.co.uk
www.torturegarden.com

Sign the petition against UK censorship of BDSM!

Despite eloquent opposition from a wide variety of sources including, surprisingly, a number of right-wing newspapers not normally associated with liberal views on kinky sex, the British Government is introducing a bill during the current session of Parliament to outlaw extreme BDSM imagery.

As Fetish Dayz readers who saw my earlier piece (Don’t Look Now — Britain’s Thought Crime) on this subject may recall, the bill, if past in its proposed form, will criminalise thousands of British BDSM enthusiasts simply for looking at images of so-called ‘violent’ porn. Condemned by its many critics as an unwarranted intrusion into the private behaviour of adults, the bill is a blatant attack on the human rights of a sexual minority for whom it is assumed there is not much public sympathy. It is another example of the shameful, knee-jerk, crowd-pleasing legislation the Government has been championing ever since former Home Secretary David Blunkett started proposing laws based on whatever the Daily Mail was complaining about on any given day.

In this case, however, it wasn’t a right wing newspaper that provided the ‘popular’ angle the Government was looking for. It was a campaign by Liz Longhurst, whose daughter Jane had tragically died in an erotic asphyxiation game with Graham Coutts, a man who admitted he was a user of extreme internet porn.

By the Home Office’s own admission there is no causal relationship between viewing violent imagery and committing violent acts. And Coutts’ original conviction for murdering Jane Longhurst was recently overturned by the House of Lords, which said the jury had not been presented with evidence that pointed to the death being unintended. But not wanting to let the facts spoil a good piece of legislation, the Government is going ahead with its bill anyway. Not because it thinks BDSMers who view violent porn will be inspired to commit murder, but because it can’t reach the people it really wants to prosecute, who are the porn producers.

If the law is passed, people in the UK who are found with the ‘wrong’ type of extreme porn images on their hard disks will face three years’ imprisonment and placement on the sex offenders register. Even though, according to leading human rights lawyer Rabinder Singh QC, the proposals appear incompatible with Articles 8 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights as enshrined in UK law, and it is likely that “an individual will find it difficult to assess under the legislation whether he/she is committing a criminal act by viewing particular material”.

Not surprisingly, therefore, Backlash, the umbrella organisation for UK groups campaigning on BDSM and the law, is urging Brits to sign its petition asking the Prime Minister to abandon plans to make possession of  ‘violent porn’ a criminal offence. It’s really important that as many people as possible do sign, because this is an attack on our personal pervy liberties that needs to be repelled. The online petition can be found here and the deadline for signatures is February 20 2007. So if you want to start the New Year in good fetish grace, you know what to do.

www.backlash-uk.org.uk

BOND GAMBLE PAYS OFF — AND I GO FOR GREEN

It was the 1960s and I was about 12 years old when I discovered the James Bond books by Ian Fleming. Brought up as I had been on the usual schoolboy diet of pre-watershed fiction, Bond for me was nothing short of an epiphany. The first book I read, Moonraker, catapulted me instantly into a world of unbridled adult adventure, where thrills, spills and derring-do were for the first time accompanied by liberal lashings of grown-up sex.

And I use the word ‘lashings’ advisedly. Because the James Bond stories, in their original literary form, went well beyond the ‘handsome hero beds gorgeous girl’ formula that has characterised the Bond movie franchise and its countless imitations for most of the past 40 years. The big difference was that Fleming’s novels invariably included elements of sadism. So too, you may argue, did many other adventure yarns. But Fleming’s sadism wasn’t the sanitised, comic-book stuff I’d encountered in other books and films — it was a distinctly dark and often overtly sexual variety that fed my own nascent sadomasochistic impulses before I had any idea what sadomasochism was.

The first three Sean Connery movies were truest to the spirit of Fleming’s creation. After that, the franchise slipped into the empty-headed, ludicrously-glamourised action style that has characterised it pretty consistently until now. With every new Bond movie having to top its predecessor for science-fiction gadgetry, slick stunts, cheesy quips, slow-motion explosions, entertaining deaths, exotic bimbos and luxury product placement, plots and acting were rendered pretty much obsolete (how else could George Lazenby ever have got the call?).

So when it was announced that Daniel Craig (top) had secured the lead role in Casino Royale, I didn’t immediately see it as an inspired piece of casting even though I had admired Craig’s previous work. For all the sins of these films, I’d got pretty used to Pierce Brosnan as Bond and had even had the treat of attending the Royal Première of one of the Brosnan films on my birthday (you probably saw me in the audience, just below and slightly to the left of the Queen).

But now I’ve seen the new movie, I can see just why there was so much enthusiasm among the sharper pundits for Craig as Bond. Because Casino Royale — in which, basically, Bond plays poker for Britain — doesn’t just substitute one lead man for another. It completely re-invents Bond. Or rather, de-invents him, and gets back substantially to the spirit of Ian Fleming’s books, which were, for their time, pretty revolutionary. You can’t, of course, entirely ignore what has gone before, so setting Casino Royale in 1953 (when the book was first published) was always going to be one nod to authenticity too far. But given that Fleming’s very first Bond novel has, like its stablemates, been updated to the present day, the film does remarkably well in giving us a Bond we’d forgotten (or never knew) had existed. A man who had earned his double-0 status as a cold hearted assassin with a sadistic streak rather than as a philandering adventurer who could remove women’s undergarments at a hundred yards by the mere raising of an eyebrow.

Although the Casino Royale movie plot is still a bit flimsy, there is an unprecedented focus on characterisation and dialogue. With Craig in the role, I saw James Bond as a real person for the first time since the films took over the books’ job of delivering me the Bond experience. Pervery-wise, it gets points for including a fairly accurate depiction of the book’s infamous scene in which a naked Bond is tied to a chair from which the seat has been removed so that he can be tortured in an overtly sexual way. But it’s in the choice of Eva Green (right and below) to play the story’s full-blown love interest, Vesper Lynd, that this film is absolutely inspired. This black-haired, blue-eyed, French-born femme fatale is going to have pervs everywhere swooning.

Described by Bernardo Bertolucci, who cast her in his 2003 film The Dreamers, as “so beautiful, it’s indecent”, she has that something — call it a dark radiance if you will — that pushes the old kinkometer straight into the red. Louise Brooks had it, Bettie Page had it, and for a lot of people, Dita von Teese has it too. But Eva Green takes it to another level, and even if you haven’t noticed it in her previous movies, you can’t escape it in Casino Royale. If she doesn’t emerge from 2006 voted the actress most pervs would like to get kinky with, then there is no justice in the world.

But that’s enough about me; back, albeit briefly, to Casino Royale. The friend I saw it with, who was similarly impressed, pointed out that it was the only Fleming book the Bond franchise hadn’t previously turned into a film. “So,” she wondered, “what are they going to do next?” The answer, if they’ve got any sense, is go back to all the genuine Fleming stories and remake them with the same renewed attention to the authentic Bond character.

Who knows, if they do, they could get another 40 years out of him.

www.sonypictures.com/movies/casinoroyale

CHANTA KNOWS WHAT BONDAGE IS FOR!

Since I first met Chanta Rose during a trip to the States in 2003 to cover a Las Vegas bondage convention, there’s been quite a lot of water under the bridge. Not least at WaterBondage.com, one of three extremely successful websites that Chanta ran for CyberNet, San Francisco’s kings of extreme internet BDSM.

Australian-born and bright as a button, Chanta spent time in London working as a Page Three glamour model before heading for San Francisco to become, first, a bondage model and then a bondage rigger, art director and webmaster. Her career at CyberNet came to an end when she was diagnosed with cancer, which she beat, only for it to return again quite recently. That she beat it for a second time is no small tribute to her focus and determination, especially considering she declined chemotherapy on the grounds that losing her beautiful long hair would have been a sacrifice too far.

While Chanta (on the left in this picture) is no longer associated with CyberNet — the split with them was acrimonious to say the least — she is still very much involved in the professional BDSM scene. Not only does she now run her own websites (her first two are BondageExpert.com and ChantasBitches.com) and rig for other bondage sites, but she has also become a bondage educator — a rôle for which she is well suited thanks to a winning combination of intelligence, articulacy and a down-to-earth attitude to sex. She has been teaching workshops on a wide range of bondage-related subjects, from photography to suspension to electrical play, and she has now turned one of her favourite workshop topics into a beautifully produced book called Bondage For Sex (top picture).

Published by BDSM Press and available from Amazon as well as numerous kinky outlets, Bondage For Sex is a book that delivers exactly what it says on the cover. Not only does it distil the author’s knowledge about the many different ways of tying your partner up for some hot action in a straight-to-the-point, eloquent and easily absorbed style. It also recognises, to a greater degree than any other work on the subject, the importance of really good photography. For the first time, a serious book about bondage techniques comes in a very stylish glossy coffee table format with a full complement of high quality colour visuals — see example below right. They’re by one of Chanta’s longtime collaborators, who also happens to be one of Los Angeles’ most accomplished BDSM photographers. Take a bow, Ian Rath, the man behind the legendary Fetish Nation website.

To promote her book in the UK, Chanta has been doing workshops with people like JustRope as well as signing sessions at venues like Coffee Cake & Kink, the Covent Garden coffee shop with the unbeatable USP. I dropped in on one of these CKK gatherings last week, and found Chanta deep in conversation with a mixed bag of people including some obvious enthusiasts and others who were still at the curiosity stage. She was equally impressive whether answering questions about BDSM, property investment or her battles with cancer. If she ever gets tired of bondage, her openness about dealing with cancer could be as a valuable to others trying to beat the disease as her openness about pervery surely is to those anxious to embrace a life of kink more fully.

In the latter area, everyone was very impressed by the pretty girl in the blue dress (left and above) who volunteered (well, begged) to be tied up by Chanta so that our visiting rope expert could demonstrate some of her moves on live flesh. So inspiring was this encounter that the evening ended with the young lady in question deciding that she wanted to become a bondage model, and the rest of us agreeing that it was a wise decision and debating the perfect professional name for her. Now that’s what I call a successful meeting.

For the record, Chanta reckons this girl definitely has what it takes. You know, little things like maintaining a cheerful disposition even when your your elbows are tied tightly together behind your back (see below). And if Ms Rose has her way, her new discovery will be turning up at a kinky URL near you very soon. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for her first appearance on a naughty website to see the debut of new British bondage model Sophie Croft, because it was recorded at Coffee Cake & Kink by yours truly. Remember where you saw her first.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to listen to Chanta talking about erotic bondage, her book and related fetish subjects, there’s a great audio interview with her available from Fetish Flame, the San Francisco-based pervy podcast site. Fetish Flame 23 is free and you can download it directly from the site or from iTunes. What are you waiting for?

www.bondageexpert.com
www.chantasbitches.com
www.coffeecakeandkink.com
www.fetishflame.com
www.fetishnation.com
www.justrope.co.uk

LONDON WELCOMES PERVY GIRLS

With a few notable exceptions, fetish photographers are not exactly noted for putting a lot of effort into the outfits they wear to fetish clubs. The usual excuse is that taking decent pictures in crowded, dark venues is hard enough without being expected to look as good as the people you’re trying to photograph.

So when one of our ilk does make the effort, the least I can do is acknowledge it. Especially when they’ve gone to so much effort that they’re able to spend an entire night in a club unrecognised by most of their friends.

Who exactly was the blue-latex-hooded mystery woman I photographed getting some tongue action from Darenzia at Torture Garden’s Rubber Ball Weekend party? Step forward and take a bow, please, the normally shy and retiring Christine Kessler. Steen is one of fetishism’s most prolific and accomplished photographers and webmasters, running her own sites plus those of numerous well-known fetish glamourpusses. She was making her Rubber Ball debut this year, joining us all the way from LA just as her first book was hitting the bookstores across Europe.

Called, very appropriately, Pervy Girls, it features around 100 shots of America’s finest fetish divas, not to mention a foreword — in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish — by, ahem, yours truly. Bet you didn’t know I could even speak that many different languages, right? Neither did I. But apparently I can. It’s all there in black and white. (The pictures themselves, of course, are in the glorious colour for which Ms K is rightly renowned.)

Pervy Girls is published by Goliath and we’ll be featuring more of this tasty little tome in my new webzine The Fetishistas, which is due to launch very shortly. Watch this space!

www.christinekessler.com
www.goliathbooks.com
www.thefetishistas.com