Everyone does it, but how many do it well?
Kissing, that is. I'd be willing to wager that most of us think we are fantastic kissers, but in reality, maybe we could use a little help or brushing up on our skills.
I think that a kiss can stand on it's own, meaning it can be sex-that's-not-sex. Giving someone an intense kiss is making love to them, if you do it the right way, anyway. Sure, we all know that, but how many of us think that a kiss leads to "real" sex, that it is a prelude, an after-dinner mint, a half-second way to say hello or goodbye? Once we get into a relationship, we seem to forget the long, ever-so-long kiss. It's just something that gets us somewhere else.
If you've been in a relationship two years ask yourself, when was the last time you were vacuum kissed (suck the breath from your partner), butterfly kissed (eyelashes fluttering against another's cheek) and you ever been given a Trobriand Islands kiss (it involves teeth, hair and eyelashes?.)
If the answer is no, Michael Chistian might be in your neighborhood soon, and drag your partner down there to see him lickety-split.
Learning The Art of Kissing
DEARBORN, Mich. - The challenge wasn't getting students to show up for a lecture given by a kissing expert, it was recruiting volunteers to demonstrate for the group.
Of the 200 students who showed up Wednesday to see author Michael Christian speak at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, just five three men and two women were willing to lock lips.
Christian implored those jammed into the auditorium: Who else will volunteer?
And then, a nervous 17-year-old from Eastpointe raised her hand, spoke briefly with Christian and filled an empty seat next to the young man without a partner.
The crowd applauded, and the show began.
Over the next hour, Christian, author of the book "The Art of Kissing," walked the volunteers through techniques and variations on 30 kisses, the Detroit Free Press reported in a Thursday story.
Learning The Art of Kissing
Thu Oct 16,10:19 AM ET AP
DEARBORN, Mich. - The challenge wasn't getting students to show up for a lecture given by a kissing expert, it was recruiting volunteers to demonstrate for the group.
Of the 200 students who showed up Wednesday to see author Michael Christian speak at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, just five three men and two women were willing to lock lips.
Christian implored those jammed into the auditorium: Who else will volunteer?
And then, a nervous 17-year-old from Eastpointe raised her hand, spoke briefly with Christian and filled an empty seat next to the young man without a partner.
The crowd applauded, and the show began.
Over the next hour, Christian, author of the book "The Art of Kissing," walked the volunteers through techniques and variations on 30 kisses, the Detroit Free Press reported in a Thursday story.
One female volunteer performed a kiss so erotic that an audience member jumped up with a freshly written sign that said "10."
Christian delivers his PG-13-rated show full-time to college campuses across the country. The student activities board at the University of Michigan-Dearborn brought him in for an undisclosed fee.
Organizer Tim Trunzo, a senior from Woodhaven, said he fielded a concerned question or two from students about the propriety of the event, but men and women in the crowd Wednesday left smiling.
Most people know the French kiss (the favorite of men and women, Christian said), but he also had his subjects demonstrate the vacuum kiss (suck the breath from your partner), the butterfly kiss (eyelashes fluttering against another's cheek) and the Trobriand Islands kiss, an aggressive liplock involving the teeth, the hair and the eyelashes.
Christian, a slight man with graying hair who said he's engaged, spoke of tongues, braces, electricity, giggles, first kisses, racing hearts, tears, caresses, earlobes and hickeys.
Most of all, Christian said, he was there to promote the beauty and grace of one of humanity's most thrilling gifts.
"If you do it right," he said, "it feels like your souls are merging."
Meet Cynthia "Plaster Caster."
Cynthia was one of the most storied 'super-groupies' of the golden age of rock and roll. Hailing from Chicago, in the late 1960's through the 1990's, Cynthia made impression-molds of some of rock and roll's most famous artist's penises...for example, Jimi Hendrix. Jimi has been gone for a long, long time, but if you have the cash, he can live on in the form of sculpture in your living room....you can buy a copy of Cynthia's mold of his penis.
But before you think that Cynthia is yet another rock profiteer, she's not selling likenesses of her collection for her own gain..instead, she has established a foundation to assist up and coming (please excuse that pun!) artists. You can find out more at the Cynthia P Caster Foundation website, as well as view all of the iteams that she has for sale.
If you'd like to know her story, there's a film coming out about her adventures (which sound wonderful to me!) and it has a web site too: Plaster Caster.
Cynthia was not only a rock and roll luminary, but also a historian and true sexual revolutionary. Sure, Michaelangelo carved David out of marble in all of his glory, but then, you can't slip a CD of David into your car while you're riding down the road. She knew true legends and she kept part of them for us. And what girl would not be lying if she said she never had a crush on a particular rock star, at least in her teens?
A quick entry today, as always, time is lacking...here is a picture of Marilyn Monroe from very early in her career. Something to enjoy on a Sunday morning...
It never ceases to amaze me when I talk to young people how they have the attitude that the things that they do are new in any way. Sure, it may be novel to a twenty-one year old to dress provocatively and go out to a club, but it is not like it was the first time anyone ever did it -- just maybe the first time that they did.
Anyway, this came to mind when I was talking to a much older friend, and she started regaling me with tales of her and her husband's adventures. Nothing especially unique, until you consider that they did their thing when they were in their twenties and thirties, which was back in the fifties and sixties. The thing that got me was when she said "Oh yeah, I was wild, but nothing like my Grandmother."
Really, I asked, do tell.
She then proceeded to tell me that her dear old sweet Gradmother was quite the man's lady back in "her time" -- and that on a dare she had posed nude, and liked it so much that she posed nude again with another woman. Another woman, I said? Yes, she replied, and after her grandmother had had a "nip from the brandy bottle" she let it slip that she and the other woman were not only flangrante delicto but flagrantly enjoying Sapphic love.
Ohhhh, I said, she did a porn shoot...
Yes, came the reply. But it was a lot more scandalous, back then.
Perhaps, I thought, wondering to myself how today's "amateurs" are going to feel in fifty years about the body of their work, or should I say the work of their bodies? Will it be scandalous for them on that far off day, when their grandkids might mention to a friend that once "Grandma had really saucy web site?" Or that "Grandad had sex with quite a few women...he has this old computer he pulls out when he thinks that no one is looking and looks at all he did."
Food for thought.
And it's amazing what people will tell you after they've had two glasses too many of wine, and sat and read your web site.
But anyway, I got to wondering what it was like for my parents, newly married, with no kids, at home drinking a pitcher of martinis as was their custom. And the scan from this album comes from their collection that I inherited a few years back. Go figure. Guess they didn't just play cribbage and grouse about the government. Just goes to prove once again that we all do it, or did it.
I've noticed lately that sometimes eating in public can turn into a major turn-on for some guys. It struck me as odd at first, then of course the light bulb lit up over my head and the obvious connection between oral sex and food came along. Then again, there's always the food fetish, and what connoseur of lust doesn't love being covered in whip cream, oil or ice cream while tossing their head back in the throes of passion?
Anyway, the other day, I was eating a Tootsie Roll out in the park, and it was having an obvious effect on a guy who was a few dozen yards away on the path where I was sitting. I know guys are, well, obvious, but this poor guy was clearly beside himself. And it's not like 1) I am an obvious drop-dead knockout, or 2) I was dressed particularly provocatively...actually, far less so than I was at dinner later that night.
But there he was. I did smile at him to let him know that I knew. Then he left, kind of stiltingly and rather quickly. Ah well, sometimes the joys of the 'burbs are small, but they are there.