“Warm, yellow mid-morning sunlight; I love how it shows this house off!” her platinum blond hair glowing in the morning’s brilliance, radiating a blinding aura from her oyster-white business suit, she admires the home’s curbside appeal and slams the door shut of her black Buick Regal. JoAnn, the real estate agent for this two story, three bedroom/two bath Spanish-styled house, under contract to the sellers, has arrived.
The master of the topgallant crew sang out the command “heave” at intervals and thus the deck hands drew in bight after bight until the last of the sail was hauled in and made flat over the yard. To secure the salt-crusted bundle they wrapped it with hemp cords and “made fast” to the jackstay, that metal rod protruding a few inches above the spar for a handgrip and anchoring post.
The public knows me as a prize-winning artist, invited to interviews for magazines and talk shows, but that’s far from how I started out.
But first, understand this: women enchant me when they light their cigarettes, when they expel their chalky, membrane-thin sheets from moist, barely spaced lips, and when they concave their cheeks and make taut their mouth around a slightly staining filter tip during a hungry pull. On those increasingly rare occasions where I happen across feminine smoking, I pause and watch them, transfixed. The memories of her smoky immersion, her cloudy delights of nasal and oral joy compel me afterwards to capture it on canvas and paper. But for years I felt that images of this kind were not to be shared. They aren’t Art and they certainly aren’t marketable.
When the famed violinist Dalila lights up, she turns the heads of concert-goers who flee outdoors during intermissions at Severance Hall, Cleveland. They are agog at how she enjoys a smoky duet with her Dunhill Black. One observer remarks “she deserves the title ‘smoking virtuoso’ bringing her gold Yves St Laurent lighter up to her cigarette to bestow it with life, and thus entwine with her in a glowing, smoky creation, flowing together”.
This is a brief excerpt from the September–October 2010 issue of Smoke Signals magazine, and one of my first columns for the free/public version, "My First Decade at The Orgy":
Boardhost shut down my forum and multimedia archive near the end of March because they recently implemented a ban on smoking and fetish content. Way back in 2000 when I opened the first incarnation of "Sublime," I asked the then owner of Boardhost (who was pretty much a one man band at the time) if he had any problems with SF content. He told me flatly that he absolutely did not.
La petite mort is French for "the little death." The expression is most often used to describe the experience of having an orgasm, but is also used to describe the release of emotional energy (catharsis) that accompanies experiencing the climax of a creative expression, as well as the experience of going through a shocking life-changing event.
