Way better than that, it is fine photographic art. Speaking of which, did you see the lovely Howard Schatz photo on the cover of Time this week? I knew immediately that that was no ordinary photographer who took that picture. Schatz also has a great book of photos called "Water Dance", it's kind of a gimmick, but the photos are fabulous - he posed a bunch of ballet dancers, in various states of undress, underwater in a pool and photographed them there. The colors and the way the models's hair and clothes are floating through the water are a real delight to see.
I love that Sports Illustrated issue this year, and when I get the time to spare I plan to scan it. (In order to get good scans, especially of multi-page pictures, you have to cut up and ruin the magazine, so I bought two copies for where there's a good photo on both sides of the page.) If you like, I'll email you copies of my scans, Greg. I've got scans (by another guy) of "Water Dance" too.
> At a store near you! What if a 13 year old
> took it to skool?
Umm, promotes literacy? No, don't think so. A copy went all around my office. Not even one of the guys I talked to read the article about how those painted pictures were made! Hell, half of them didn't even notice that the swimsuits in those pictures were paint and not cloth.
> This raises all *kinds* of interesting questions.
>
> 1. The distinction between porn & soft porn.
"Porn" is not so much a definition as a defamation. Have you seen that issue, and do you really think those photos deserve that kind of obloquy?
> 2. The distinction between soft porn a la Playboy &
> this SI kind of soft porn.
A technicality - SI shows no fuzzies. Go back forty years, and that line would lie between Esquire's Vargases, which showed no nippies, and Playboy's pinups, which did show nippies but no fuzzies way back then.
> 3. The titillating fact that a woman wearing a bikini
> with partial show-through of the nipple is really *not
> much different* than a nude woman with a heavily
> painted nipple.
If you have a active enough imagination, there's not that much difference between those and a woman gowned from neck to ankles. But it's really hard to go for a swim with that much clothing on. This is all just academic for you up there in New York, but I live on the Gulf Coast of Florida.
> 4. Is it sexist,
> a. in the sense, argued by some, that *all*
> eroticized pictures of women are sexist
> b. in the sense, argued by others, that there has
> to be "equal opportunity" possibilities for equality to
> be respected. Because
> 5. How would you paint a male stud's whanger, like
> whatshisname, Fazio, or something like that, to make it
> look like it was in a swimsuit? And would you strive
> to disguise it in the "at attention" or "at ease"
> mode? Or is it plainly the case that a whanger needs a
> hangar and should not be painted?
The woman who painted the models in that SI (she also painted Demi Moore for the cover of Vanity Fair) could make Fazio's whosis look like whatever she wants. Look how she painted Rebecca Romjin's thumb on page 76.
> 6. Is this at long last the way for women to "take
> their shirts off like men" at the beach and yet not
> violate local customs that require patch-covered
> bosoms?
But then they'd not get a tan, because the paint would be in the way. What the Gulf Coast of Florida needs is a good, legal nude beach you can get to without a boat, damn it.
> 7. Should we simply argue that clothes are a material
> covering the body (including synthetics and natural
> fibers of many kinds) and that paint=clothes because it
> is a material covering the body which happens not to be
> woven, but smeared on?
You can if you want, but you'll get busted by the cops patrolling the beaches anyway.
> 8. Does that mean you would be clothed if you wore
> chocolate pudding?
I've got some swell scans of that, too! And speaking of food, that leads to question 8a: if we decide a model in chocolate pudding is dressed, how about honey instead? Honey is pretty transparent, you know.
> 9. If a man's (presumably female, given how this art
> form is developing so far) lover wears a painted
> American flag over breasts and stomach and they make
> love does that mean he is indictable, under proposed
> flag-worship rules, for fucking the flag? What about
> her? Is she exonerated because she is not, in a sense,
> doing the fucking (of the flag)?
It depends. Once we pass the Rag Protection Amendment, which seems sadly inevitable, then it will still be perfectly OK for a rich Republican car dealer to hoist up a five-thousand square foot flag, specifically for the sole purpose of advertising his squalid money-grubbing car lot, and leave it up in rain and lightning storms, in blatant violation of the Flag Code I read about in the Boy Scout Manual as a kid. That will be just fine. It will also be all right for cops, NASCAR drivers, and other "All-American" types to wear the flag on their shirts. On the other hand, it will be an indictable crime for a leftist, say, an Abbie Hoffman, to wear a shirt with an image of a flag. (Hoffman was arrested once for that.)
Now if something, a material thing that is, is mine, that kind of means I can do what I want with it, right? Once we trivialize the Constitution by inserting a Rag Protection Amendment into it, Republicans will be able to do whatever they want with the U.S. flag. But I will not. In other words, once we ratify the Rag Protection Amendment, then it won't be my flag anymore. It will be the Republicans's flag, and theirs alone. And then, to Hell with it.
> Reality is outpacing my feeble mind's ability to keep up.
Me too, WDK - WKiernan at concentric.net