art • cinekink

From director Michael Ney comes word that photographer Noel Graydon died last week from heart failure.

Subject of the documentary, Liberty in Restraint, which played CineKink in both short (Best Documentary Short/CineKink 2004) and feature (CineKink 2005) versions, Noel had been a fixture of the Sydney fetish world for over a decade. For five years he trained and worked as a BDSM Master, aka “Master Venom,” and established the friendships which led him to genuinely photograph and capture this sometimes clandestine world.

Noel began his career as an assistant to a commercial photographer and assistant video cameraman in several video production companies. During this time he pursued freelance photojournalism with several newspapers and street press. As a photojournalist, Noel covered a variety of fields including humanities, Gen X and sexual lifestyle issues. His work was published in many magazines in Australia, as well as in the UK’s SkinTwo. He also spent time with Flesh magazine as their BDSM columnist and recently launched a series of podcasts documenting many aspects of the fetish world.

The funeral will be held Friday, July 13 in Brisbane, Australia, with his wife, Annette, and their two daughters, as well as his parents and sister. Noel was 36.

Our very best thoughts to his family, friends and colleagues. Noel will surely be missed.

Quite alot of twisted knickers seems to be the result of a new video promoting European filmmaking. A rapid montage of sex scene clips builds and, er, climaxes to the slogan “Let’s come together.” Granted, the end image of an apparently male-only audience in rapt attention left us a wee bit skeeved, but we suspect much of the reported outrage was piqued by the inclusion of lovers that fall outside of strictly heterosexual and HWP parameters.

Or then again, maybe it’s just any excuse for nationalism. Reports The Guardian:

Godfrey Bloom of the Eurosceptic UK Independence Party described the film as “cheap, tawdry and tacky” and demanded to know the cost to European taxpayers. “You might say it’s appropriate for them to put out films like this,” he told the Sun newspaper. “Brussels has been screwing the UK for at least 30 years.”

We probably shouldn’t take comfort in this, but we’re finding it oddly uplifting to know that moralistic posturing isn’t restricted solely to this side of the pond.

>Our friends over at Shooting People are currently hosting a short film competition to mark the launch of Destricted, the “most controversial and sexually explicit film ever to receive an 18 certificate from the BBFC.” (It’s a British thing.)

Part of the intent behind the competition is to continue pushing at the boundaries of what constitutes art vs. pornography and what is a “certifiable” onscreen depiction in the UK – and the contest guidelines include some interesting delineations of how that’s currently defined.

Given that intent, it’s no surprise that some of the works are a bit outrageous for the sake of outrageousness. And several more have that horribly annoying trait of somehow equating kinky sex (or mere sex) with severe mental dysfunction (and/or castration, take your pick.)

But several are quite hot and lovely, such as Eva Midgley’s Footsie. And all are definitely worth a quick look-see.

>Sad news from Australia

>Yeah, so where do you get off?!

>Oh, we’re so very, very bad.