Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Tom Paley Playing "Sporting Life Blues"


Maybe Neal Hellman and Jane Babits know of him?
btw sister Maggie appears in Kim Cattrall's movie, "Sexual Intelligence" as one of the experts. I think the KV Rambo may help Kim in some of the how tos
Accompanied by seven men and women and four sexology experts, presenter/host Kim Cattrall takes viewers around the world and back home in an exploration of the boundaries and aspirations of our own sexual identities. Our first stop is the bucolic town of Dorset, England, home of the mysterious "Abbas Giant," a huge figure carved into the chalky hillside centuries ago depicting a man with "the largest hard-on on earth" - a phallus some 12 feet long. Such overt expressions of sexuality were common in ancient cities like Rome and Pompey (we see phallic oil lamps and doorstops recovered from the ruins), and it is only recently (within the last few hundred years or so) that society began "covering up" or censoring these expressions. Nor was the concept of "bigger is better" necessarily in vogue for the ancients; as many statues and paintings attest, smaller penises were coveted by the ancients while large ones were usually attached to devilish characters and reprobates.
Interestingly, in the dark ages when penises were banished from sight, the female genitalia was not. Indeed, there has always been something of a celebration of the vulva, in art and in nature; it occupies a unique and mysterious place in our sexual imagination, a kind of doorway that can be either inviting or frightening, with the potential to invite the phallus into a special place - or swallow it up and render it impotent. The vagina's beauty appears to be in the eye of the beholder; while one man says the vagina "looks awful, feels great," others feel it to be the paradigm of pulchritude, noting that contemporary artists like Georgia O'Keefe devoted a preponderance of their paint and palettes to vulvaesque subjects. Another "miracle" of nature is the clitoris; Cattrall asserts that the human species is the only one in which females achieve orgasm. Ultimately, pleasure arises not from the penis or clitoris, but from the brain, which processes the information it receives from the nerve endings below.
Human sexual behavior has been chronicled since the dawn of history, starting with the "first lady of lust and libido," Aphrodite, who symbolically rose out of the water as a symbol of sexuality and fertility. Her image is in many ways the blueprint for desire, though we're each "hardwired" with a "love map" that arouses us when the right person arrives. While many of our desires stem from childhood experience and are more complex and hidden than we realize, there are certain quantifiable determinants that both stimulate our sex drive and, ultimately, make it fizzle out. The chemical component to attraction is Oxytocin, the hormone of love, and it's why most men experience the so-called "seven-year itch" (though more likely it's about five years). While infidelity is often the result, sexuality at its human zenith involves ethics: the ability not to exploit, but to allow freedom, both in the act of sex and in the choice of sex partners. Ethics also allow us to act out our fantasies without allowing them to become addictions, where they may cause harm to others or interfere with the rules of society. As Cattrall says, fantasy is the opposite of reality for most of us, because "we want to be safe." The mystical possibilities of sex flow from the act of surrender. The writer D.H. Lawrence was fascinated with how sexuality entwined with religion, how sex connects us all to something much bigger. In a way, the body is the doorway to the divine, both in physical imagery and spiritual ecstasy. The story of Aphrodite's son Cupid, who is the object of love for the human Psyche even though she is not allowed to look at him, illustrates how humans lust after the divine as if it were a sexual object.
Ultimately, sex opens us up to our emotions, both physical and aesthetic. It is also the driving force in a human's most passionate search: for love and issues of the soul. As Cattrall concludes, "Sexual intelligence helps us explore the roots of our desires. It encourages us to embrace and celebrate the sensual dynamics in life, nature, culture and, most importantly, in ourselves."
Kim Cattrall Sexual Intelligence was shot on location in Dorset, England (where the world's largest depiction of a phallus exists), Cyprus (near the ruins of Pompey, a civilization that celebrated sex in its art and its lifestyle), and the U.S.

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