CThru.com Presents Tony Ward

Love Meter

Posted by John Gialuco

Lou-pop had been drawing cartoon characters for a few years and once in a while he would mention Bettie Page, a model and dancer during the 40’s and 50’s. When Lou showed me his latest scantily dressed Betty Boop drawings, he would have this sheepishly looking smile on his craggy face. I could see that he wanted approval for this risque moment. Some weeks later I brought him a group of nude photos I printed from Betty Page and Marlyn Monroe magazine spreads. He quickly stuck them under his 1940s something coffee table in his living room. Lou-pop had a lot of beautiful living room furniture form those earlier years.

I had peaked his desire to enter the soft porn artistic realm and he became more free spirited with his drawings. He eventually migrated to hard core porn in the months that followed. Louie’s favorite subject was Betty Boop, who for her time, was a sexually titillating cartoon character. Betty made her first appearance on August 9, 1930 in the cartoon, Dizzy Dishes.

One day I received a complete nude drawing of Marilyn Monroe in the mail from Lou, later to be followed by other nudes and a Betty Boop drawing in a sexual situation. Lou-pop was hitting home runs with his money shots. When my wife and I visited him, he would respectfully wait until Amy left the room, and then he would quickly pull out his latest naughty drawings and wait for my response, in which I was always encouraging him to do more of. He had a lot of fun with these heroines of his youth and was finally able to express his sexual love and desires for this much repressed era.

Our child within always needs acknowledgment throughout our lives. In time we would get a holiday card of Betty Boop or some other voluptuous blond in various tantric like positions from Louie. They always had a fun context and I found them to be very innocent as lovemaking usually is. Lou and Uncle Gus are examples of how we can age gracefully in our modern time. They used their expression of sexual desire as a way of adornment and compliments to women’s bodies. In our society’s schizoid integration of sex and morality, it seems that we must wait until our senior years to reveal our natural desire of affection for each other.

He started drawing around the age of 85, first interpreting TV Guide images, cartoons, ads and later progressing to the Smithsonian and other more refined magazines. Lou-pop had no art training during his life. Only the desire to express life as best as he could. I would call him an Outside artist. Louis Dominic Colagreco died on September 22, 2009 at the age of 93. RIP

Mr. John

Two Brunettes

Louie Porn

Nude Boop

Lou-Pop Porn

Sexometer

Lou-Pop

Dominance And Submission

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

BDSM is a form of consensual play (which may or may not include sex) between two or more individuals, who use their experiences of pain and power to create sexual tension, pleasure, and release. The compound acronym, BDSM, is derived from the terms bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
BDSM includes a wide spectrum of activities, forms of interpersonal relationships, and distinct subcultures. Many of these experiences are still considered to fall out of conventional sexual activities and human relationships.
Activities and relationships within a BDSM context are characterized by the fact that the participants usually take on complementary, but unequal, roles. Typically, participants who are active — applying the activity or exercising control over others — are known as tops or Dominants. Those participants who are recipients of the activities, or who are controlled by their partners, are typically known as bottoms or submissives. Individuals who move between top/dominant roles and bottom/submissive roles – either periodically within a relationship, or from relationship to relationship – are known as switches.

The Mysterious Distance Between Men Of Means

STATEMENT/BIO

Jed Williams was born in Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A in 1975 and raised in Paris, France. He is a French and American dual citizen currently based in the city of his birth. He is the son of famed Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams, who is currently teaching creative writing at Princeton University. Jed graduated from the University of the Arts (BFA in Painting and Drawing, 2000) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Certificate in Painting, 2005), both located in Philadelphia, and has been exhibiting his work in various venues ever since.
Jed works on his images in different kinds of media: oil paint, acrylic, mixed media; his art stems from a wish to blend a more formalist, expressionistic abstract tradition with a conceptual quest nourished by his interest in the human figure, pop and mythological culture, and different forms of spirituality.

We Have Ways Of Making You Smile

The images Jed makes simultaneously stem from intense inner turmoil and wonder expressing itself in his fascination with certain objects, images and symbols, which he observes and works from. The objects, images and symbols he chooses to work from possess “loaded” meanings as well as symbolic societal and cultural connotations. He is juxtaposing and associating ciphers of meaning by physically bringing these objects, images and symbols together in seemingly illogical yet intellectually and culturally relevant ways, all the while creating his own personal semi-abstract painting style.

I Speak To Me

C.K. sent us a poem that applies to Jed’s paintings. It was published in the New Yorker and will be reprinted in his new book “Wait,” this Spring.

THE FOUNDATION by C.K. Williams

1.

Watch me, I’m running, watch me, I’m dancing, I’m air;
the building I used to live in has been razed and I’m skipping,
hopping, two-footedly leaping across the blocks, bricks,
slabs of concrete, plaster and other unnamable junk…

Or nameable, really, if you look at the wreckage closely…
Here, for instance, this shattered I-beam is the Bible,
and this chunk of mortar? Plato, the mortar of mind,
also in pieces, in pieces in me, anyway, in my mind…

Aristotle and Nietzsche, Freud and Camus and Buber,
and Christ, even, that year of reading “Paradise Lost,”
when I thought, Hell, why not? but that fractured, too…
Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Kant, and Goffman and Marx,

all heaped in the foundation, and I’ve sped through so often
that now I have it by heart, can run, dance, be air,
not think of the spew of intellectual dust I scuffed up
when in my barely broken-in boots I first clumped through

the sanctums of Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and the Areopagite,
even, whose entire text I typed out—my god, why?—
I didn’t care, I just kept bumping my head on the lintels,
Einstein, the Gnostics, Kabbalah, Saint This and Saint That…

2.

Watch me again now, because I’m not alone in my dancing,
my being air, I’m with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats,
we’re leaping together through the debris, a jumble of wrack,
but my Keats floats across it, my Herbert and Donne,

my Kinnell, my Bishop and Blake are soaring across it,
my Frost, Baudelaire, my Dickinson, Lowell and Larkin,
and my giants, my Whitman, my Shakespeare, my Dante
and Homer; they were the steel, though scouring as I was

the savants and sages half the time I hardly knew it…
But Vallejo was there all along , and my Sidney and Shelley,
my Coleridge and Hopkins, there all along with their music,
which is why I can whirl through the rubble of everything else,

the philosophizing and theories, the thesis and anti- and syn-,
all I believed must be what meanings were made of,
when really it was the singing, the choiring, the cadence,
the lull of the vowels, the chromatical consonant clatter…

Watch me again, I haven’t landed, I’m hovering here
over the fragments, the remnants, the splinters and shards;
my poets are with me, my soarers, my skimmers, my skaters,
aloft on their song in the ruins, their jubilant song of the ruins.

Greetings From Home Planet

Faltering Onlooker

Trapped Radiance

Melissa Norbeck

Posted by Melissa Norbeck

I just don’t get it! You think things are going pretty well with a guy, and you think it may actually have the potential to turn into something, but no, he just stops calling. What makes a guy decide not to call or come around anymore? What turns men off? Is it a girl who gets too drunk, a girl who does drugs, a girl who has kids, a girl who talks about an ex, or maybe a girl who’s too clingy? Really, I’d like to know.

I consider myself pretty picky when it comes to men. However, I’m not saying I always make the right choices; I definitely picked some bad ones. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever picked the right one. I guess that’s one of the reasons why I’m single. Getting married was never really high on my priority list (obviously, since I’m still not married, and I’m 33). Going to college, receiving a degree, and starting a career were important goals I set for myself. Now that I have earned two degrees and began my career, I am focused on buying my own house. I feel like the relationship and marriage thing will fall into place when the time is right. Society looks at those who are single like there’s something wrong with them. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard, “Why are you single?” or “You’re pretty. How come you don’t have a boyfriend?” It kills me because many of the people who ask those kinds of questions or who are in relationships shouldn’t even be in the relationships they’re in. Besides, what’s wrong with being single?

But anyway, except for the few long term boyfriends I’ve had, the times I start talking to guys and actually like them (which is rare), it just ends. I’m curious what makes certain guys stay with certain girls and what make other guys want to move on so quickly. There are many people who are in relationships and many guys willing to be in relationships, but I always seem to find the ones who don’t want relationships. Maybe I am too picky. Maybe I let the good ones get away. Maybe I give off the vibe that I don’t want a relationship. Oh, and I’ve heard I’m unapproachable. That’s a good one. The guys who are interested in me, I’m not interested in them. I mean it’s not hard to find a boyfriend; it’s just hard to find a good one. Also, I think many guys are mostly looking to just get laid. If a girl gives it up the first night, the guy usually doesn’t call since he already got what he wanted. But if a girl doesn’t give up enough, the guy doesn’t call anyway because why does he want to bother with a girl who won’t have sex with him. And guys say we’re hard to understand.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my life, and I enjoy being single (most of the time). I just want to know what the deal is!! So – all you men out there – what turns you off?

Camden, New Jersey 2010

Posted By John Gialuco

Well Happy New Year everyone! Good news! On the last week of 2009 the Camden Courier Post announced that the murder rate in Camden was down 40%. This is wonderful news.

However on January 2, 2010, I received a phone call from Shorty at 5 am that someone broke into High Voltage Al’s house and tried to beat him up. Well Voltage, who is 73 years young, was forced to defend himself, in his own home, by beating up the perpetrator, who I will call Puffer, with a channel lock pliers.

Mr. John’s tip #1 for the New Year is that you don’t need to have a a gun in your house but a well prepared tool box… a 14 inch pipe wrench (preferably made of aluminum which is lighter for the ladies to swing), a 12 ounce claw hammer, a couple of long screw drivers (12 inches for children and 20 inches for adults) for those challenging dueling moments, a small first aid kit and a power stapler which should be plugged in at all times in your dining room. It’s a very accurate tool for those sprinters who are circling around the dining room table. Not to mention clipping the childrens drawings from school around the house. You might also want to get a small tape recorder or mp3 player. And just to keep the police on their toes, an oven timer so as to show the cops, if and when they arrive, that they took a little to long coming to your rescue.

To continue. So someone had called the cops and fortunately for Voltage, who carries a small tape recorder in his pocket, recorded the whole tussle so that when the cops arrived, in a timely fashion, he just played the recording to the police. The police told Voltage that he legally defended his life and home and so the cops proceeded to take the Puffer to jail, where he presently is (now 7 am or so on Saturday). Puffer will have to pay Voltage back all the monies for the damages, a broken window, door damage, lock replacement and some furnishings inside. The funny thing is that Puffer was staying there. You see Voltage doesn’t tolerate anyone using drugs in his home and when Voltage found a crack pipe in Puffer’s room he told Puffer to leave and Voltage changed the front door locks. This subsequently led to the break in and assault upon Voltage. Since I haven’t gone into Camden as of yet I will get a clearer story later on today. BTW thanks to Dizzy, who Amy and I celebrated New Years day with at a wonderful dinner in Chinatown, told me there was a money dispute between Voltage and Puffer brewing in the wind.

I have learned a lesson today and that is that we often get advanced notice of trouble in the air but we tend to dismiss it or not want to get involved, as I chose to do. But it came to me anyway. I didn’t feel it was my business to interfere and rightly or wrongly this event had its repercussions. I might have been able to mitigate Puffer’s anger beforehand, he certainly expressed his anger to me earlier last week…who knows? Puffer, despite his present situation, has shown me that he is a very good mechanic ( he always wanted to learn something he didn’t understand), he can repair almost anything and he always returned anything he borrowed from me. Puffer can be very responsible and direct. We all become very complex as we grow older, a mixed bag for sure. Whatever you take from this story be aware that most people, whatever their station in life, are willing to learn and make up for their wrong decisions. But it can be a tiresome process.

Live long and Prosper in our new year. Mr. John

…….To learn more about the chronicles of a Camden, New Jersey landlord, log on to www.camdenchronicles.com…………..

The Prophecy

Posted By Mikel Elam

“Numbers and letters may fitly be called eyes” Alan Ginsberg

……..I have a kindred spirit in another well known artist by the name of Francesco Clemente. We share in several ideals. Words can be great inspiration for future paintings, as I have always been an avid reader. I’m fascinated with the concepts of hidden messages. In my life numbers, letters and passages have become fodder for my imagination.

In this painting, there is a woman who is in a meditative state of consciousness. A place of relaxation and exploration of her future objectives. Something unexplainable is happening to her. Perhaps it occurs in her subconscious. It’s leading her in a certain direction. She clutches a tool for choosing her fate.
This story is one I created for this painting, yet as important to me is the viewer’s interpretation which can be quite different and equally as valuable.
My work has been a constant exploration of the mind’s eye, intermixed with the conscious world.

In fact eyes are the windows to the soul. It’s the place where breathing leads to meditation and ultimately to transformation.

…….To learn more about Mikel’s work log on to www.mikelelam.com……..

Women And Weapons

When I look at these photographs, I think 2 deadly weapons: women and guns………….
Also, they are 2 things that most men like: women and guns………..

Ready

They are definitely sexual, and in a way, playful……………

Yoko, Palomar Hotel, New Years Eve, 2009

…….The Studio wishes everyone love, peace and happiness in 2010…………TW

. Yoko’s lingerie Victoria’s Secret
. Makeup by Mac
. Makeup artist Ashley Bohl