Sylvia Lowry: Erotica Writer

An Ode to Dangerous Beauty

Remember the 90s, where the opposing worlds of indie film and light eroticism collided on the silver screen? Think “Wide Sargasso Sea,” “Henry and June,” and the mightiest of all art-smut genre warhorses “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.” I was reminded of this fine-ass era while watching the 1998 Catherine McCormack juggernaut “Dangerous Beauty” as a Netflix rental with my bon ami, a work that jettisons the art-house pieties of the above films and delivers something that’s not really softcore, not really art, not really historical verity, but an unashamed “bodice-ripper” desperate to entertain.

 C-Mac plays a young thing in 16^th Century Venice who is forced (or rather mildly coerced by limited opportunities) into courtesanship. She is mentored by her mother (Jacqueline Bisset), who helpfully produces a male nude subject and memorably instructs, “use your tongue and fingers judiciously and your teeth never.” The rest is a faux-historic romp with swords, impromptu displays of poetic wit, and final vindication of the courtesan and her unimpeachable fusion of brains and T&A.

 My bon ami and I actually took a sex break in the middle of the film, not because the onscreen action was powerfully arousing, but because some unabashed rumpy-pumpy just seemed like a natural part of the retro-libertine aura lingering in the air. I used my tongue and fingers judiciously. And my teeth? Well, maybe  a little, dear reader…

XO

Syl

P.S.: My main site is now sylvialowry.wordpress.com. Go get it, tiger!

 

Carla Bruni Contemplates Life, Youth, Sex and Death

I am quite amused by Jean Pigozzi’s 1991 photo of Carla Bruni and Comtesse Jaqueline de Ribes. It was taken in Venice, of course. Even without landmarks, the whiff of picturesque decay and grotesque privilege rise like up like the devil’s dong on Walpurgisnacht.

But it’s a moment of deference and vulnerability. Ms. Bruni turns, mid-puff to contemplate her aristocratic future as the Comtesse grins like a momento mori in life. Perhaps the future Ms. Bruni-Sarkozy reflects on the rictus smile of her companion, the grin that Mick Jagger’s microscopic pud failed to bestow upon her.

There is always space and longing. We all remember that we are mortal.

XO,

Syl

 

Too Fast for Love: A Brief Ode to Quickies

I love quickies.

Beside the obvious benefit of rapidly getting laid, it provides an opportunity to sample the carnal Fast and Furious, to give in to that lingering craving for near-immediate penetration, to rut ferociously and return to reading Isaac Babel, and to (in the words of my fave Midwestern convenience chain) Kum and Go.

My bon ami and I have a little passcode: I snap my fingers and wink; the next thing I know, he’s nibbling my neck and whispering unspeakable, unpoetic thoughts about how he’d like his cojones to slap against my rump while we listen to the Cocteau Twins. My response is polite but game: I beckon silently and whisper "por supesto." 

Naturally, this unfolds on a tight timeline. I just keep my Mills Fleet Farm T-shirt on and dutifully slide the 100% cotton unicorn panties to the side...

The Shameless Plug

OK—So here’s the literary promo. My girl-rocker, 70s-period piece f**k yarn is gonna be in Gotta Have It: 69 Stories of Sudden Sex , edited by best-freaking-editor-in-the-world Rachel Kramer Bussel, on the admirable Cleis Press in February 2011. It is available for pre-order on Amazon.com. Lots of references to punk rock, dripping wet torrid steaming hot fricking sex, and one rocker chick’s desire to screw an anonymous consort while he wears his Bob Seger ringer jersey. Hell, it was the 70s, after all.

S-s-s-s-s-smokin'!!!

XO,

Syl

I Sing the Showerhead Electric

I have often combined electricity, a shower, and gratifying acts perfectly aligned with Nature. But I have never experienced the forceful electrical shock that I experienced recently in Argentina in an unnamed hostal, city, and shower.

 The journey, this one-woman peregrination into America del Sur, is a long story. But the scene is simple, dear reader: After a day of sightseeing, sun, and a paucity of rutting or the prospect of a randy coupling, I returned to wash away my sins (or lack thereof) in the tepid waters of my ducha…

Let it be known that across Latin America, shower heads are often affixed with a supplementary electric heater that encases the head and is frequently attached to the electrical main of the building with varying degrees of elegance. Mine featured electrical tape around the base, suggesting a kind of racing stripe borne from Hades.

 The water was hot, and so was I. I imagined, for a moment that a Gaucho’s caña had infiltrated my honey pot, his cojones slapping delightfully against my culo, a whimsy heightened by my own deft digits. But as the moment of climactic Bolivarian liberation neared, I felt struck by lightning, as if Zeus had whipped down his divine judgment.

I leapt from the shower and cowered on the floor, electricada…Was it my hand-fricking skillz or the evil electrical implement and its proximity to water?

 As always, I re-embarked on my labours of self-satisfaction, guilt free, on the board-hard mattress. Oh Gaucho of the imagination, you were freaking fabulous.

Meow!!

 XO

 Syl

 

Am I a Playgirl?

Am I a playgirl? According to Merriam-Webster, the term (which first emerged in 1912), means “a woman who lives a life devoted chiefly to the pursuit of pleasure.” Hmmm, “yes” so far. But there’s a subtext, here. What kind of pleasure? Chasing butterflies and listening to Peaches and Herb? Or hot, wet, sexual 70s-style exploits?

Well, hopefully, life is a healthy mix of Apollonian and Dionysian delights. But I couldn’t help think of the free-spirited, uber-sexual feminine archetype when I picked up some used 70s-era Playgirl magazines at a second-hand bookstore recently. One memorable issue featured stories about training for non-Orgasmic women and [grin] husband-coached childbirth, and…[fanfare] medallion-swinging hirsute nude male models, sans medallions.

It all turned me on mildly—I got some warm fuzzies in my loins, rather than fiery explosions, but I enjoyed the studied hedonistic aura of the whole thing. I prefer dirty words to dirty pictures, since they plumb the reptilian imagination in a more evocative way. But still, they must have had fun in 1978. Screw the Steely Dan, Peruvian nostril candy and hot tubs. I’ll just take the sex…but wax your shoulders first!

 XO,

Syl 

 

Trick or Treat!

I dig Halloween. It is ineffably sexy; perhaps it’s the dark nights that come with the arrival of Samhain, perhaps it’s the pagan energies and delirious disreputability evoked by the all of the plastic pumpkins and cobweb strands fashioned from glow in the dark cotton. Maybe it’s the profound suggestiveness of bobbing for apples.

 I don’t get any trick or treaters in my secure co-op building, which means that I get to reign as Queen of the Night, slink around the crib indecently exposed, quaff a little Poire au Cognac and watch Roger Corman’s “Fall of the House of Usher” in splendid Technicolor, then call up my bon ami for a midnight booty call. We screw like black cats atop a Père Lachaise crypt; you should hear us howl, dear reader…

XO,

Syl

 

Reflections on a Rock n Roll Ass Raffle

Remember the crushingly heavy all-female band L7? A chance listen to their “Hungry for Stink” LP on a recent morning summoned an unalloyed rock n roll memory from 2000. The punk-metal combo audaciously raffled off a one-night stand with their drummer Dee Plakas at a show in London, an opportunity to frick the woman who was dubbed by British press as the most shaggable member of the band. The outlaw crew declared: "Rock'n'roll is prostitution. We want to give our fans more bang for their bucks!"

I’m not sure of the outcome, but I hope that the decade-past memory of the back-of-the-bus rumpy-pumpy is lingering deliciously in the battered brain of the winner, perhaps an apprentice collier from St. Swivens-on-the–Swamp. I expect that he can recall how the thighs of the goddess descended for the night and dained to bonk his cringing knob into the stratosphere, uniting slippery organs and wayward souls, binding all into the sloshy primordial, skin-slapping rhythm of a delirious super-shag.

XO,

Syl

The Sexy Side of Dungeons and Dragons

Role-Player or Role-Playa?

I occasionally played Dungeons and Dragons in college in the mid-90s, mainly to meet guys. There is nothing like getting busy with nerds, since the amount of repressed sexual energy unleashed can be apocalyptic. I remember once frolicking after a game of Divine Right with a long-forgotten consort; we f****d furiously but briefly, and the commanding flood of spunk that erupted into the Ramses (does that brand still exist?) threatened to rip through the latex and drown the room in scrumptious, sticky elixir. He was embarrassed, but I flashed the "live long and proper" Star Trek sign, and then licked my fingers suggestively to recommend his next move. When the phallus flags, the tongue is still serviceable.

Ahhhh...

But, back to another RPG (role-playing game, d'accord?) memory from 1994…I didn't get laid that night, but I was struck by the continual, suspicious presence of the Succubus in a furious game of D&D with four of my male gamer associates. My warrior elf "Silverleaf" had fought off two of the Babes of Baal, and I was getting like a little bit female-fiend-fatigued. I began to sense that my fan-boy buddies were just trying to inject a little bit of distaff monster-booty hotness into the game. 

I quaffed my Bartles and James wine cooler, which I received as the honorary hot chick in the room. The other guys drank lowly draughts of Sun Country. Then I drifted into half-torpor as the 12-sided dice flew and the Succubae kept attacking our intrepid band as we traveled the depths of the catacombs. I dreamt briefly of jumping on the fan boy to my right, swallowing his broadsword and tickling my tonsils until he trilled, showing him that Syl could put the "Suck" in "Succubus." But I was as timid as the rest, as absorbed in the geeky pre-sexual escapism of the game at hand.

A lineage forged in Tartarus?

And then another she-demon attacked from behind a crumbling sarcophagus, giving my elf a nasty 5 hit point blow-- What of this evil spirit? It is perhaps the ultimate passive male fantasy: the slobbering, otherwordly chick that arrives in sleep, predatory, unannounced and distastefully welcome. If the illustration in the D&D Monster Manual is to be believed, it is also stacked like Janet Lupo, November 1975 Playmate of the Month. Legend has it that the Monster Manual illustration is indeed modeled on something from Hugh Hefner's immortal rag. Of course, fable also has it that Succubae favored seducing monks as much as the Lynx digs munching Snowshoe Hare, and my fellow players were as close to monastic life as possible: peaceful, scholarly, repressed yet endearingly insulated from the larger world of women, lost in an ascetic world of raging insecurity. Which is of course, undeniably erotic.

I imagined reaching to both left and right to simultaneously unzip the boys who flanked me like trembling sentries, lapping alternately at a tantalizing pair of deliciously engorged magick wands…but then someone passed a 12-sider my way and the game persisted into the night...

The everlasting Game, the eternal dragon's coil, always continues, dear reader...

XO

Syl

Musical Notes: Katy Perry Freaks in a Jeep

The art of the Jeep-Freak

I was eating breakfast at 8:00 am in 2008 at a Paris hotel, with a television inexplicably blasting music videos. First there was a homoerotic French techno vid featuring soldiers kissing ardently in the rain, then came Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” I could see the visible, physical discomfort of a British couple eating dry croissants nearby.

My complaints on Ms. Perry were purely aesthetic, however.

I won’t honor the song with any kind of Camille Paglia style deconstruction. I’ve never enjoyed highly processed electronic pop or the kind of torrential, overblown, cutesy sexuality in which Ms. Perry Trades. It is highly unsexy to Ms. Sylvia, who prefers the old school, haute grandeur of classic jazz and Kate Bush.

Of course, pop music is designed to forcibly enter our lives against our will, assaulting our olfactory organs like an invasive earwig. And now, other work by Ms. Perry has infested my life. I saw the video of “California Gurls” by chance, but averted my eyes mostly; the phalanx of synths couldn’t hide lines like “Freak in a Jeep” and “Mount your lollipop.” I later learned that it was “Melt your lollipop.” I sense that my Freudian slip was not rooted in my own consciousness, but in the machinations of Ms. Perry, and her desire to demolish the double-entendre and reduce it to the single-entendre.

Katy Perry sings from the derriere...

But then, she was singing ass-up in a cloud of cotton candy. I’m a little envious; I wouldn’t mind getting naked and frisky in an expanse of pink spun sugar.

I will always forgive Katy a little, since we both share space in the February issue of UK’s Scarlet Magazine, me as the author of a featured erotica story and she as the featured interview subject. In her tête-à-tête, she is asked whether she would kiss Pink or Lily Allen. She chose to answer with the giggly compromise, “ménage-a-trois.”

I’d tongue-lash Pink. But Lily can join Katy’s squadron of the “Sylvia Disapproved.”

But that’s another day’s rant…

XO

Syl

Dark Shadows!

Screamin' for a Love Bite: Jonathan Frid and Grayson Hall

If you want vampires, spare yourself the BYU-freshman-sock-hop agony of “Twilight: Eclipse.” I spent the last few nights watching “Dark Shadows” on demand on Netflix, drinking Chilcanos, and surrendering to the murky pleasures of this remarkable, sui generis television offering from the Age of Aquarius. In theory, “Dark Shadows” was a soap opera, airing daily from 1966-1971, but the stories and vibe were drawn from the contemporaneous gothic horror of Hammer films: Vampires, werewolves, witches, 18^th century ghastly grimness, all abounded, underscored by a quivering, operatic sense of longing that wailed in the night like a lonesome Theremin.

Like Hammer films, the show had a coffin-load of class to counterbalance the occasional wedge of cheese: Joan Bennett, Grayson Hall and Jonathan Frid all brought chops, gravitas and old school star-juice to the tale of the doomed vampire Barnabas Collins and the brood congregating in the gothic Maine manse of Collinwood.

What endures about DS is the id-borne soul that informs all legit Gothicism: a sustained, delicious yet unsettling, conflation of yearning and dread. Like a 24-bar Messiaen piece stretched to twelve shuddering minutes, or the five quivering, unremitting hours of “Tristan and Isolde,” the show actually gained something from its attenuated, brooding storyline. In 1970, years of episodes were collapsed, like an accordion from Hades, into the feature film “House of Dark Shadows” with the same cast and plotline. It works, mostly, but the Llorona cry of the TV version was somehow muted.

 

Wytchy Womyn: Lara Parker

Lara Parker, who played the muff-diveable witch Angeliqué (or rather, Angeliqué Bouchard Collins DuVal Rumson), is now writing “erotic” Dark Shadows novels. I checked one out on Amazon: Mildly purple but literate, relentlessly gothic but somehow knowing, they appear to do the job admirably, even if the purported eroticism remains bound beneath the bodice. But the real magick is on the small, flickering screen. Take a bite.

I also hear that Tim Burton and Johnny Depp (who is reportedly obsessed with DS and the character of Barnabas Collins) will attempt a feature film. Tim and Johnny, be gentle!

But please nibble my neck...

XO,

Syl "Vampira" Lowry