Posted by Lex Konrad in Snaps | Jul 27, 2005
Casanova Action Figure
I found this the other day at a little novelty store on the Upper East Side. The packaging warns Casanova is not suitable for children under 3 years. I should hope not. It also informs me Casanova presents a “choking hazard,” which should really settle any questions about the man’s endowment.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Snaps | Jul 18, 2005
Natalie
Natalie was a pure joy to shoot. Equal parts ordinary young girl and wanton vixen, she is one of those rare individuals who’s entirely comfortable being on the business end of a photographic lens. I wanted to do a few underwear shots before we got into the nudes, mostly because I needed time to figure out how to use a fucking camera. Though it was her first time posing nude for public consumption, I was the one experiencing the first-time jitters.
[Update: Click on the thumbnails for the full pictures. Obvs.]
Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Jul 15, 2005
Good evening morning my fellow Earthicans. I want to let you all know about recent developments here at NLP HQ. I’ve been so preoccupied with my various photo projects lately that I’ve almost forgotten I’m supposed to be having orgiastic circus-sex and writing about it.
Which brings us to the first order of business: Natalie’s photos. Les and I met her at a coffee shop yesterday and handed over a CD-ROM crammed full of her nudes; I’m anxious to hear what she has to say. I’m planning to write a piece on the experience and post high-resolution galleries in several installments. Stay tuned.
Also, I’m pleased to announce a partnership with Nerve.com. I asked for and received permission to post samples of their premium amateur photography in the Naked Loft Party Gallery. I’m happy to promote them, seeing as I was a subscriber to their now-defunct print magazine and their personals have gotten me thoroughly laid on many occasions. At any rate, I’d rather pimp Nerve than jism-enemas.com or whatever (budding pornographers take note: the domain is still available).
Soon enough I’ll return to heady accounts of my highly unlikely Penthouse Forum sex life, but for now I’m feeling visually inclined and I’m going to run with that.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Opinions | Jul 12, 2005
W. S. Cross from Beyond You & Me sent me a note the other day informing me he had written a review of Naked Loft Party. He struck a conciliatory tone, so I braced myself for criticism, which, at any rate, is better than ass-kissing. When I clicked over to his site I found the Internet had this to say:
With Naked Loft Party, I’m not sure what to think sometimes. It’s a site that I definitely have mixed emotions about. The stories seem at times too perfect and not that far removed from the classic faux erotica of “Letters to Penthouse”. Dude, if you’re lurking and I’ve done you wrong, I apologize, I call ‘em as I see ‘em. If the stories are true and without embellishment, then everyone reading this should drop whatever they’re doing and move to NYC, because AIDS and Herpes and all the other things that scare people about the 70s never seem to have happened in the world of Naked Loft Party. The girls are all slender, beautiful and bi, the men never get shut down or rejected (if anything, our hero, Lex, seems to have that weary put-upon aura of a man in demand in the bedroom). ...
In a perfect world, all the boys and girls are beautiful, we always (and I mean always) come, and no one ever feels rejected.
At times it strikes me that to many people my stories must be about as believable as the tales of Lake Wobegon or the pronouncements issuing from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. While this notion once caused me distress I’ve come to appreciate that such is the lot of the sex diarist—particularly the heterosexual male sex diarist living out what appear to be typically heterosexual male fantasies.
Later on in the same entry, Cross praises Suicide Girls, which is often held up as that shining city on the hill of grrrrl-centric sexuality—the vanguard of a new sex-positivism that, if reports are to be believed, marks the extinction of the objectifying male gaze. I can only shake my head at the cognitive dissonance: Suicide Girls is selling nubile ass just like everyone else is these days, from hardcore porn sites to hipster clothing companies. All the tattoos and piercings in the world cannot mask the reality that the models are still barely-legal and skinny and white. The breasts may no longer be pumped-up with silicone but the beauty ideal is as much beyond the reach of mere mortals as it ever was. To paraphrase Marx, when you negate powdered wigs you are still left with unpowdered wigs.
Whatever alliance I might have with self-styled sexual progressives is an uneasy one at best. It seems we’ve done away with one kind of orthodoxy only to elevate another: whereas once upon a time men and women were expected to conform to a particular heterosexual script, nowadays we sex-positive types are encouraged to frown upon anything that vaguely resembles, say, the sex that transpired inside the Playboy Mansion during the 70s. Anything that isn’t queered and kinky in the appropriately gender-deconstructed ways is automatically considered suspect. Rather than simply cast aside all the old cultural baggage, we’ve loaded ourselves down with new baggage made from, like, all-natural hemp fibers. It all seems rather humorless and cynical. And so drearily academic. To wit, here’s an excerpt from the entry that started it all:
As Penny straddled Leslie I made the mistake of muttering something to the effect of “that’s kinky.” Penny shot me an evil glare and responded, “It’s not kinky. It’s my sexuality!”
No, dear. Someone soixante-neufing my girlfriend while I watch is pretty much the fucking definition of kinky. Well, that’s what I would have said had I been half the man in college that I am today. It’s taken me awhile, but I’m finally learning to drown out all the self-limiting cultural noise, to unburden myself of the baggage of gender politics. To me sex isn’t a power struggle: it’s this amazingly pleasurable and utterly nonsensical and sometimes messy thing that happens when I least expect it. The less I worry and analyze and criticize, the more it happens. I’m liberating my own ass here and no one else’s.
So, yes. I am heterosexual and, dare I say, happy to be so. I have a beautiful, aggressively-bisexual girlfriend who can come from intercourse alone in about three minutes. We meet a variety of beautiful women and sometimes we have sex with them in groups of three or more; and when we do the sex is, on the whole, very much fun. The women who sleep with us often want more sex from us, and they jump us about as often as we jump them. Our nubile prospects are almost always willing to sleep with us at least once, so rejection is rarely an issue. Sometimes there are warm, fuzzy feelings involved, other times not so much. And being selective about our partners and good about using protection has staved off any horrible, icky diseases. Oh, and when I wake up one morning and decide I want to photograph a naked amateur, I of course find someone within four hours and she’s eighteen and looks like a model.
Phew. Does that cover it? Come to think of it, Cross might have a point. I used to cast aspersions upon Belle but looking at this I see that I might even have her beat. Yes, I know my sex life is allegedly “every man’s fantasy.” I’m also aware my escapades are almost painfully hetero-normative. Honestly, I try not to think of my life in these terms; I just want to be naked like everyone else does.
But I won’t apologize for living in a perfect world. My life is filled with moments of perfection—so many that it fills me with sadness that I’ll never find the time to record them all—and even the imperfect moments are somehow perfectly imperfect. And for reasons I am still trying to understand I share these perfect moments with the world, perhaps in the hope that at least one other person out there understands what the fuck I’m talking about.
Posted by Lex Konrad in Snaps | Jul 08, 2005
Natalie
“I want to work the book in somehow,” he sez.
“I’ll just read it then,” she sez.
“Gah! Everything’s so… pink,” he sez.