Aimé Van Rod, Edition Parisienne

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Boys Peeping at Nature
subscription ticket by William Hogarth, 1830.
Notes from Rylands: "Subscription ticket, signed & sealed by Hogarth, issued to Samuel Hill in receipt of the first payment for 6 prints of 'A Harlot's Progress'. Hogarth features as the satyr lifting Nature's skirts & exposing parts previously ignored by art."

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New Zealand court allows 'boobs on bikes' parade

Tue Aug 19, 5:25 AM

WELLINGTON (AFP) - Topless porn stars are expected to cruise down Auckland's main street on motorbikes on Wednesday after a court said the "Boobs on Bikes" parade was not legally offensive.

Bureaucrats in New Zealand's biggest city had called for a court injunction against the event, saying it breached an Auckland City Council bylaw banning offensive public events.

But a female Auckland District Court judge rejected the plea, saying she was not convinced that bare-breasted women parading in leathers was legally offensive, local media reported.

Judge Nicola Mathers said that while critics in the council might find the spectacle tasteless, last year's event drew a crowd of 80,000 photo-snapping supporters.

Her decision was based on the law, not morals, she added.

The annual parade is part of an "Erotica Expo" organised by "porn baron" Steve Crow, who had threatened to stage the event with or without a council permit.

Crow said outside the court his lawyer would seek a judicial review of the bylaw involved, while it is understood the council may appeal Tuesday's decision.

From The Times
August 2, 2008
Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent

A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.

Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.

Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 - a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.

Hawes, an Oxford graduate and university lecturer, emphasises his total admiration for the literary Kafkaesque genius who wrote brooding classics such as The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial, and argues that these discoveries merely show Kafka as more human than the popular image. He believes that "suppressing" them detracts from sensible assessment of his work, and has even led to nonsensical evaluation.

Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."

"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. “The Kafka industry doesn’t want to know such things about its idol."

He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books... Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."

The journals' title - The Amethyst/Opals - reveal nothing about their contents, but Kafka kept his collection locked at his parent's house where he lived, taking the key with him when he went on holiday.

Perhaps he feared his father Hermann. But the obsession with a supposed brutal father and with being a Jew, are two other myths which Dr Hawes challenges. Hermann, a conventional Jewish businessman and ex- sergeant-major in the Hapsburg army, was probably "a father of his time", may indeed have been stern, but Dr Hawes - who is also senior lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University - argues that Kafka admits that he "hardly if ever actually hit" him. He also let him study what he wanted, live at home rent-free for years, when Kafka earned handsomely, and come and go "as he pleased".

As to the myth that Kafka's works are based on his experiences as a Jew in Prague, and that Kafka somehow predicted the Holocaust, Dr Hawes acknowledges that Kafka was very much aware of being Jewish. But "there is zero actual Jewishness" and no Jewish characters or scenes in his work. He was immersed in German culture.

Dr Hawes's biography also challenges the enduring popular portrait of Kafka as a tortured and lonely figure, neglected in his own lifetime, stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to write. The true Kafka could not have been more different, he said, describing him as a popular and well-paid state lawyer whose writing was supported by a prominent literary clique. It was only towards the end of his short life in 1917 that TB was diagnosed, and his poverty only occurred near the end due to economic collapse after the 1914-18 War.

Commenting on the book's discoveries, Ritchie Robertson, a professor of German at Oxford University and author of Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, said he was unaware of any academic actually looking at the pornography pictures, let alone reproducing them for biographies, even though they knew of his subscrition to Amethyst/Opals.

He added: "The many myths about Kafka circulating among the semi-informed public... do include the idea of Kafka as a kind of saint, originally propagated by his friend Max Brod. So it's salutary to assemble evidence that he was human."

Kafka's interest in pornography, which left traces in such works as The Metamorphosis, matters if it makes us look at any of Kafka's fiction in a new way, he said: "Kafka had a strongly visual imagination, and the importance of the visual arts for him hasn't yet been fully explored."

Man says he's porn inspector, demands free videos

Mon Aug 11, 6:40 PM

By The Associated Press

LONGMONT, Colo. - Nice try.

Authorities in Colorado say a man claiming to be a police detective asked an adult novelty shop to give him free X-rated videos, saying he wanted to make sure the performers weren't underage. The man, who is on the run and has not yet been identified, attempted to get the videos on three separate occasions over a nine-day period last month.

He was turned down each time and the store manager called police after the third try.

Authorities said Monday that the man showed a badge and left a business card from the Longmont, Colo.. police "age verification unit."

Longmont police Cmdr. Tim Lewis says there is no such unit.

The business card didn't have anyone's name on it, but the store gave officers surveillance video of the man.

Mexican sex workers want place at AIDS conference

2 hours, 12 minutes ago

By Tan Ee Lyn

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A global AIDS conference that opens in Mexico City on Sunday is meant for people infected with HIV, but transsexual sex worker Elma Delea cannot get inside.

She will be protesting on the fringes of the six-day biennial event.

"They (Mexican health authorities) said they had no money for everyone who wanted scholarships. We are very angry," said Elma Delea, as she stood at the junction of Calle de Alfredo Chavero and Calzada San Antonio Abad, a stretch of road where transsexuals wait all night to be picked up by customers in passing cars.

Her friends nodded, citing other explanations given by organizers, such as not being able to speak English.

Some 25,000 people are expected at the event, which draws scientists, international agencies, government officials, non-government organizations and the media.

But people most at risk of the disease, such as sex workers, homosexuals and intravenous drug users, are least visible. Most are poor and cannot afford registration fees.

"The conference is a place to exchange opinion but now, only those in power have a say," said Elvira Madrid, an activist working for the rights of sex workers in Mexico City.

At one point, passengers in a passing car hurled eggs at the group standing on a street corner, narrowly missing.

"This is common. One time, some men shot paintballs at us, and it hit my thigh," said Orchidia Montenegro, as her colleague Marthade Juarez nodded in agreement.

SHUNNED IN HOSPITALS

Those infected by HIV say they are shunned in hospitals.

"We are told to stand far away and open our mouths from three feet away," said another sex worker. "And when they do examinations, they use the same tools without disinfecting first."

The AIDS virus infects 33 million people globally, 1.7 million in Latin America. In Mexico, $23 million was spent on keeping blood safe in 2005 and $5 million on prevention and care among men who have sex with men, but less than $1 million on sex workers.

"Interestingly, although prostitutes are considered to be victims, they are also viewed as wanton, debauched and morally weak," reads a UNAIDS report on sex workers.

Delea, who had been hoping to speak at the conference, said it was important for society to acknowledge sex workers, starting with the police, who often detain prostitutes when they find them with condoms. This makes it harder for the workers to practice safe sex.

"We also want the government to reduce prices on HIV drugs, which are 13 times more expensive than in Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras," said Delea, who heads the sex worker group Angeles en Busqueda de la Libertad or Angels In Search of Freedom.

Prostitution is illegal in Mexico but widely tolerated everywhere from grimy street corners to swanky brothels. Police can easily be bribed to turn a blind eye to sex workers.

Delea's group wants to coach women on how they can protect themselves when customers refuse to use condoms.

"We have to be very creative when using condoms. We have to start looking at them as tools of eroticism instead of disease prevention," said transvestite sex worker Chrisna.

"We are able to put condoms on our customers with our mouths without them even knowing, so that they even think we have swallowed their semen. But we have it in a bag to go," she said with a laugh.

(Editing by Maggie Fox)