Screengrab by Various Today in Nerve's film blog: Holiday special - 35 people, places and movies we're thankful for.
The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Michael Phelps indulges Anderson Cooper in some watersports and Dexter makes a 'bitch move.' Plus: the secret of Tina Fey's scar, revealed!
Dating Advice From . . . Engineers by Steph Auteri Q. For optimal functionality, what should go into a first-date emergency kit? A. Fine wine, road flares, a snake-bite kit and Ghirardelli chocolates.
In Andy Warhol's six-hour film opus Sleep, John Giorno is the guy sleeping. He also happens to be the inventor of performance poetry, marrying technology, rock 'n' roll and pornography with an art form all too often associated with the sublime and genteel. Giorno's books include Balling Buddha;Cancer in My Left Ball;Cum; and You've Got to Burn to Shine (1994), featuring memories of his love affair with Warhol. Other former Giorno flames include William S. Burroughs and artists Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and, anonymously, Keith Haring.
Now in his sixties, Giorno still lives in the Lower East Side flat he shared with Burroughs, where he played with friends like Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, Gregory Corso, Anne Waldman, Lydia Lunch, Jim Carroll, the band Husker Du and Marianne Faithfull. In a room full of Buddhist paraphernalia (Giorno lends Burroughs's old room to a weekly meditation group), we looked back on his lifelong relationship with pornography, celebrating his famous 1965 groundbreaker, "Pornographic Poem."
Seven Cuban
army officers
in exile
were at me
all night.
Tall,
sleek,
slender
Spanish types
with smooth dark
muscular bodies
and hair
like wet coal
on their heads
and between their legs.
I lost count
of the times
I was fucked
by them
in every conceivable
position.
At one point
they stood
around me
in a circle
and I had
to crawl
from one crotch
to another
sucking
on each cock
until it was hard.
When I got all
seven up
I shivered
looking up
at those erect pricks
all different
lengths
and widths
and knowing
that each one
was going up
my ass hole.
Everyone
of them
came
at least twice
and some three times.
Once they put me
on the bed
kneeling,
one fucked me
in the behind
another
in the mouth,
while I jacked off
one
with each hand
and two
of the others
rubbed
their peckers
on my bare feet
waiting
their turns
to get
into my can.
Just when I thought
they were all spent
two of them
got together
and fucked me
at once.
The positions
we were in
were crazy
but with two
big fat
Cuban cocks
up my ass
at one time
I was
in paradise.
Tell me a little about the poem.
I wrote it in 1965, recorded it in 1966, and the album came out in 1967. It was a found poem, from a gay mimeographed porn magazine. In those years I was using a lot of found pornographic images. I don't think of it as porn, I just think of it as sexuality.
Who were your influences?
William Burroughs. In Naked Lunch, there's a metaphor of a hard penis as somebody's "hung" or something, and the pornographic image is just like "penis" — not "hard penis" or "cock" or "dick." Just "penis."
Didn't you spend a couple of years with Andy Warhol?
He was another influence. He never allowed anything gay in any of his work. He didn't want to lose or destroy his career. I would suggest something, like in the movie Kiss, with Naomi [Levine], you know, a guy kissing Naomi? I would say, "Why don't you have two guys kissing?" He didn't even answer my question. He would just turn his head away. Other gay artists — Bob Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns — they never allowed anyone to mention that they were gay.
, featuring curious yet marvelous infusions of cucumber and rose petal.
