Horny topless smoking Lily Allen (with optional lesbians)

The excellent James Blue Cat recently offered his readers an amusing tale of bad parking, a passive-aggressive note, two sexy lesbians and some rope. In fact, he only guessed that the two sexy lesbians were thus inclined, and I suggested that he only cast them as such in order to drive more prurient traffic to his blog. I was half-joking, I think, but the recent analytical bluebells and dogwhistles that came with my Blogger upgrade (it feels as if I’ve just managed to receive BBC2 at the point when everyone else is getting used to HDTV) have reinforced my gut instinct that my most popular blog posts in recent months were not those in which I ruminate on the Baudrillardian self-deception of modern culture, let alone deconstruct the primal weirdness of Asian street politics, but those that have saucy pictures in. The big eyeball magnets were posts that featured: a saucy picture of Helen Mirren; some saucy pictures of Charlotte Rampling, Anita Pallenberg and Princess Margaret; a saucy picture by (not of) Jack Vettriano; and a picture that may appeal to any reflexologists who need to get out more. (The only exception to this is Monday’s post, which benefited from an inevitable upsurge in interest about Osama, and an element of scepticism about the official line. Sorry to anyone who felt short-changed when their frenzied Googling brought them to a 40-year-old TV clip, but is it beyond the realms of possibility that the Dr Who community and the wacky conspiracy theory community might enjoy a certain overlap? Apparently not.)

Rubber masks and analogue synths aside, it’s not even that the punters prefer that I write about saucy ladies to writing about more serious, cerebral matters. Essentially, they aren’t really bothered what I write or whether I write at all; they just wanted to look at the saucy pictures, none of which were my own work, and none of which, I’m ashamed to admit, I credited properly (except of course for the Vettriano image, and I only mentioned him because I was discussing the essential badness of his art). I recently sighed at the explanation for Tumblr’s success (“With blogging you have to write, and this is just images.”) but now it seems that not only is writing a lost cause, the masses can’t even be bothered to read, beyond a few words that necessarily include promises of sex and celebrity. Of course, if you don’t agree, despite the fact you came here because you wanted a good look at horny topless smoking Lily Allen, please make your displeasure known in the comment box.

In short, where James went wrong was to talk about ropey sexy lesbians while failing to include a picture of them. Fair enough in this instance, you may think, as he never actually saw the ropey sexy lesbians, and doesn’t really know that they existed. But he’d unwittingly created an opportunity: he could have identified them as Kate and Pippa Middleton, with specific reference to the latter’s bottom. Because if a toxic casserole of sex, celebrity, photography and lèse majesté (with a bit of dead terrorist as an amuse-bouche) doesn’t save blogging, I don’t know what will.

Well, they wouldn’t, would they?

People complain about how sordid and salacious the British tabloids are, but in reality they’re incredibly prim. Take, for example, The Sun’s coverage of someone out of Girls Aloud getting married. She’s doing the deed at what the paper’s tuggin’-me-forelock-squire stylesheet requires us to describe as “posh Cliveden House”; we are then informed by our helpful hack that the place has also hosted the nuptials of a Liverpool footballer, and the one out of Ant and Dec who isn’t Dec. Oh yeah, and every British monarch since 1714.

What s/he doesn’t bother to mention is Cliveden’s real claim to fame; as the place where Jack Profumo met Christine Keeler, setting in motion a series of events that exposed the decadence and hypocrisy of the British establishment, paving the way for the Wilson government and the social upheavals and reforms of the 1960s. Maybe they didn’t like to mention this, since a sex scandal that really mattered, really changed history and society, makes the recent exploits of the Murdoch camp seem even more desperate and tawdry. Or maybe they were just cutting and pasting from a press release sent to them by Cliveden’s current management, who probably don’t like to draw attention to such unpleasant details (although, if they’re reading this, a Profumo weekender/pool party would almost certainly pack the place out).

Or maybe the hack had just never heard of Profumo, marshalling the “before my time, guv” excuse. Which is a pity: to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child, as Cicero put it. For the benefit of Sun journalists, that’s either the Cicero who plays in midfield for West Brom, or the one who got kicked off Big Brother 7. Or perhaps the one who isn’t Ant.

Jammy Helen Mirren

...so there we were, Charles Frith and me, lounging in Bed Supperclub, watching the floor show (gymnasts, gay pharaohs, a surveyor in teeny hotpants, King Kong), debating whether gorgonzola tart really classifies as a pudding and discussing hallucinogens and religion and search engine optimisation and I pondered the number of people who come to this blog on the promise of underclad images of three specific ladies, Charlotte Rampling in particular and whether they were more significant than adding catnip keyboards like *bosoms!* *bottoms!* *extreme  sexy rudeness with bosoms and bottoms!!!* and for some reason we decided that the most tempting come-on would be the three-word phrase at the top of this post. So there.

But then I received an e-mail from my dad asking why I had yet to commemorate the passing of Pete Postlethwaite, custodian of the finest cheekbones in the business, so here’s a little something that probably won’t grab so much traffic but hey, ultimately, who’s counting?

The new seekers

It’s only in the past few months that I’ve taken an interest in the numbers of people who read this blog (300-400 a day, since you ask), where they come from (weird surges from Latvia and Djibouti, what’s that all about?), and what they’re looking for. The latter data is a little disappointing: rather that seeking out my profound insights into culture and philosophy, they want to know about:

toby young wanker
drummer tattoo ideas
morrissey a sausage jockey
derivative art photography
religious boobs
viagra break glass
tights
can my car float on snow?
dave lee travis picture
musical pedantry in pictures

That said, all these are dwarfed by the desire to know more about three particular women: Charlotte Rampling; Anita Pallenberg; and Princess Margaret. In the past week, they have respectively been responsible for 71, 97 and 120 visits to Cultural Snow. What this means about my blog, or my writing, or my readers, I don’t really know. But this particular selection of variously damaged lovelies does suggest that the casting director of Charlie’s Angels was missing a trick.

Yes, yes, yes, oh yes we can

So the 8th Sex Culture festival in Guangzhou includes an Obama sex doll. What I think is rather wonderful is the way some thoughtful person has used virtual pasties to shield our vulnerable eyes from the horror of plastic nipples. Just in case we might be, y’know, offended or something.

Slip of the tongue

Still on a vaguely Gallic theme, I do have a degree of sympathy with the MEP Rachida Dati, who managed to confuse inflation with fellatio in a TV interview, something I suspect we’ve all done at some time or other. Her faux pas brings to mind an earlier French icon, France Gall, who in 1966 recorded the Serge Gainsbourg song ‘Les Sucettes’, apparently entirely oblivious to its, um, inflationary subtext; she remained in blissful innocence even after making this promotional clip. When someone (I bet it was Gainsbourg, the cad – I’ll never forgive him for what he said to poor, lovely, pre-crack Whitney Houston) explained what was going on, she hid in her bedroom for weeks, and never made a decent record again.

Next week: Ann Widdecombe attempts to warn us about the possibility of a double-dip recession, but accidentally starts talking about bestiality in the middle of the paso doble.

Play your cards right

Philip Larkin on his teenage years:

I had grown up to regard sexual recreation as a socially remote thing, like baccarat or clog dancing.

(And check out some Larkin cartoons at themanwhofellasleep.)

Duchy original

More shavings from the cultural Parmesan:

1. A vignette from Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which would appear, annoyingly enough, to be as good as everyone says it is:

Often I was joined by a very kind widow in a baseball cap who conducted an endless and apparently fruitless search and murmured to herself, for some reason, about Luxembourg.

It’s the subject of the murmuring that’s so perfectly chosen: Belgium or Cleveland would be too obvious; Mongolia or Ouagadougou too self-consciously wacky. But Luxembourg is just right.

2. In the BBC3 documentary Deborah 13: Servant of God, the eponymous pubescent creationist goes to stay with her equally devout but slightly less intense brother Matthew at university. He introduces her to the joys of clubbing, but leaves the floor when Katy Perry’s lesbian-till-graduation hit ‘I Kissed A Girl’ comes on: “I’m not going to dance to this song because I don’t agree with it,” he announces as he flounces. (Incidentally, did anybody else think Matthew was the campest fundamentalist Christian they’d ever encountered?)

As Matthew and Deborah stand outside assessing the experience, a slightly déshabillé young lady stumbles over and asks if anyone might be good enough to write on her prominently proffered ladybumps.

Matthew demurs, having previously recounted how he’d fended off the amorous attentions of a mud-spattered wench with the horrified retort, “you’re dirty!”; he's clearly a very picky young man. He then determines that she’s a fresher, and asks: “Why are you letting people write on your boobs on your first night?”

“I’m not,” she responds, “this is, like, my third night.”

3. And following on from the earlier reminscences about Uncle Tom Dolby and all, at Rock’sBackPages, I attempt to concoct a retrospective pop genre: Postmodern Futurism.

Under the covers

A glance at the tag cloud for LibraryThing, which measures the relative popularity of the identifying tags that members apply to their books, would suggest that people own a great deal of erotica, but no pornography.

Hmm.

The naked truth

I've been reading The Fermata, by Nicholson Baker. I think I've read most of Baker's fiction over the years, but for some reason this had slid between the cracks; a phrase that seems fairly appropriate because Baker has two obsessions - sex and language - and investigates them in the minutest detail. "Between the cracks" would probably send him off on a twelve-page discursion about metaphor, cliché and some woman whose bum he accidentally groped, or thought about accidentally groping, in a Dairy Queen on the outskirts of Baltimore in 1979. Perhaps with footnotes.

The Fermata is the peculiar tale of Arno Strine, who discovers a talent for stopping time. (Those of you who've seen Heroes will know what I mean, and will also have further evidence as to how startlingly unoriginal - yet strangely enjoyable - this mash-up of The X Files and The Tomorrow People really is.) Strine uses his gift for two purposes: to get his work done in apparently superfast time (he's a temp typist); and to look at women's bodies.

This makes Strine sound like a pervert, and he is, but (by his own perception) a fundamentally decent, thoughtful pervert. He does actually like women, and would be mortified if anything he did upset them. He looks at their bodies; touches them; even masturbates in their presence; but then ensures that everything is returned to normal when time restarts, so that they never feel violated. Sometimes he seems to overstep his self-defined mark, mysteriously introducing sex toys into the lives of strangers, but his motive is always to bring happiness. Sick he may be, Patrick Bateman he ain't.

Baker adds to the moral confusion by having Strine write pornography, which is offered to us in the course of the narrative. We're distanced from it (it's fiction within a fiction) and Strine's motivation is supposedly honourable; he offers it to the women he sees, to excite them, to bring him joy, although he also masturbates while writing it. But it's definitely porn, not erotica (don't ask me what the difference is, it just is) and can be read as such. Should a reader appreciate Baker's gift for aping the tropes of Hustler and Penthouse? Or enjoy a discreet hand shandy of his/her own? (Incidentally, Mary Gaitskill in the back-cover blurb describes The Fermata as "Rabelaisian" which is one of those glorious critical references that's taken on a life of its own; people who've never read a comma of Rabelais know what he's like because of all the other writers who've been described as Rabelaisian; essentially, people who write about morally suspect things with such joy that you can't hold it against them. There's a similar phenomenon in rock journalism; everything the Stooges and Captain Beefheart ever recorded could be permanently wiped, and their reputations would be unaffected. But we're veering into Baudrillard territory there, and I did promise you a holiday from that.)

The crucial thread throughout the story is that Strine keeps his gift a secret, so none of his 'victims' (and I debated long and hard - ooh, there he goes again - about whether or not to use those quotation marks) know they've been spied on, undressed, fondled. Which, of course, raises all manner of questions about supposedly victimless crimes. If you never know that a man across the road is watching you undress through the curtains, is there a problem? If I don't know that the CIA is reading my e-mails, is there a problem? Because his gift is so bizarre, Strine can only discuss it with his acquaintances as a hypothesis, a parlour game, a piece of conversational fantasy; I know it's crazy, but what would you do if you could stop time? Even in its theoretical state, they tend to be repulsed by the potential invasion of privacy, so he keeps the secret from everyone but the reader until the end of the narrative. And when he does genuinely attempt to persuade someone that it's true, there are unexpected consequences.

The only thing that Baker doesn't address is the notion that maybe everybody has these powers. Since nobody knows when Strine stops time, how would Strine know when someone else stopped time and undressed him? And stepping back a little into the realm that we desperately call 'reality', Baker has constructed a fictional possibility. How would it be if everyone in the world knew that possibility wasn't a fiction; except for Baker? He's merrily playing with the creative possibilities of time, unaware that everyone else in the world is groping his bum.