by Lindsey Nelson

It could have been a tranquil holiday tea party, but as all signs of decency and decorum decayed, the night was sucked into a turbulent downward spiral of depravity and debauchery. What manner of shamelessness could account for such licentious derangement and disturbing mania? What barbaric madness could have possibly disabled the frontal lobes of these poor fanatics’ brains, leaving them drooling, corrupted, and degraded? An examination of the abundance of rich detail offered in these photos leads me to this irrefutable hypothesis: these people are in the lewd and spastic throes of helpless devotion to Dionysus himself! {Dionysus is the Thracian god of wine and revelry, madness and ecstasy.}

They say that the divine mission of Dionysus was to bring an end to care and worry. What a smashing success, in one house at least, for one night. Look at the pictures; you can almost see the divine satisfaction of the god, smiling down upon the insolent drowning of inhibition, the orgiastic frenzy, and the unabashed disorder. And although it’s never specifically mentioned by any scholar of theology, I am nonetheless convinced that eggnog baptisms were among the standard tenets of Dionysian worship.

Labels: Houses, Photos

I was (and perhaps still am) a naive simpleton, virtuously virginal: I'd never yet been to a party with strippers. This changed last weekend. I feel a little bit silly even mentioning their presence or state of dress because I actually don't really like to make a big deal about nudity. But I guess that sometimes it does elevate things to a certain level of comic hilarity, vibrant sexuality, or at least passing interest. It's sad that the word, "stripper" even has a "sleazy" connotation, but it does and that's why I find myself trying to defend my interaction with it with the staunch morality of my very being (ha). I actually felt that the taste was positive, there were no issues such as degradation or masculine dominance involved: it was joyous celebration. And anyway, the crowd was anything but lecherous, they were a creative, bubbling mass of beautiful, humanistic love.

But still it (the event) operates in the conceptual realm. The women who stripped removed themselves from personhood for a short while and they became images, objects, ideas. Their humanity was stripped away until all that remained was the stripteaser, the birthday suits for the birthday boy. I guess what it comes down to is that we humans really are not so much living beings but concepts that play out against each other. Sometimes they bump, sometimes they explode, but mostly they remind us of other images so we can know what our roles are and perhaps play within them, all the while tantalized by projections into the flowing symbology around us. What we saw and participated in was the idea of people who take off their clothes and smile and frolic while other smiling, laughing people watch while still others cringe in embarrassment as soft, naked body parts are squished into their faces. It is all a scripted play in the exchanges of attention that is our currency. We watch, we listen, we perform all at once.



It's only later that we contemplate. If you find it difficult to make sense of your senses then perhaps the images below can help put a fix on those shifting, intangible thoughts. But probably they can't. :)

Labels: Events, Photos