Happy Monday Magically Real enthusiasts —

Yesterday saw a couple of magical experiences. One being the Female Surrealists exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The other being a foray into e-book best seller 50 Shades of Grey.  There’s a connection.  Artists like the now famous Frida Kahlo and the lesser known Dorothea Tanning used their bodies and their dreams to articulate a new and still startling set of visions for what the feminine could be.  The sexual for them is at once frightening, beautiful, mechanical, spiritual, political and always strange.  In her own pop-culture, s/m for beginners way, EL James is trying to articulate new possibilities for women readers in her bondage-light trilogy, and although the sex so far is expected (“I never knew it could be like this”) sex, there are moments of DIY brilliance such as offering the reader an actual template of what a dom/sub contract might look like.  If imagining is a pleasure,and for some of us, it certain IS that, then let us imagine weird and big.  What follows is an attempt to make fun of the limits of 50 Shades but also perhaps acknowledge their cultural power and (possibly) look beyond them:

Sh-boom intercut with 50 shades of grey

Life could be a dream

If he was a dominant with a trillion dollars

If he had a sh-boom room like that man

And a ya la la la la la la like his, we wouldn’t

Need paradise, for we’d have our own kind of

Hard limits, hello hello hello again sweetheart

Of dreaming, we’d be so fine if we had that

Life of sh-boom and cash and freedom.