Based in Melbourne, Prior travels to international burlesque shows and photographs the dancers on and offstage, capturing the joy of performance as well as the athleticism involved in keeping those pasties from launching into the crowd.

His new book "Titzen Blitzen!" is an available-light travelogue through London's week-long Burlesque Festival, which drew an international roster of dancers. Sado vamps to naughty maids play to crowds that range from elegant to rowdy, which says a lot about burlesque's place as a living art form, as a "body type"-neutral treat, and as a mirror of class structure.

And that's all well and good, but I liked the women.

Prior's site also contains a wealth of studio shots of burlesque performers without those awkward nipple-obscuring impediments.

· Michael Prior (michaelprior.com)

Read about the "Mortified" phenomenon after the gap.

. . .

"As much as we know it runs our adult lives, sexuality is the number one thing kids write about," said David Nadelberg, creator and founding producer of a series of stage shows called "Mortified", in which brave (or terminally narcissistic) adults share their adolescent journal entries, poems, lyrics, videos, and comics in cities across America. "(Sex is) this thing they're not having, and when they do have it, it's this thing that makes them miserable."

While the content of the nine stage shows, two books, and "Mortified Shoebox" webisodes is not limited to sex, that subject is the river that runs through the often poignant, hilarious, and cringeworthy true-life tales of "Mortified"'s contributors, from summer camp crushes, straight and gay blowjob primers, real sex with the football coach to porn fantasies featuring Duran Duran and the foiled masturbatory imagery of Tori Spelling and Anna Nicole Smith (writes contributor MCC, "When Anna Nicole Smith didn't work, I knew I was gay").

And when the teen crush is unrequited (as it most often is) or when things go horribly wrong (as they most often do), readers and viewers can take comfort in the fact that the author has lived to tell the tale. In that way, Nadelberg said, "the happy ending is built in."

But confessional isn't the only criterion, said executive producer Neil Katcher.

"If it isn't both funny and fascinating," he said, "we can't use it."

Local producers solicit and develop submissions from authors who've rediscovered their freshman diaries or shoeboxes of Bon Jovi tickets. Some find their way to the web, stage, and page, and others are best suited for just one medium.

"Some people are natural performers," Katcher said, "where others are shy." Still, Nadelberg said, 85 percent of the books started on stage.

Nadelberg and Katcher also make sure no one "jokes the joke", undermining the efficacy of the tender source material with too many adult asides. "We have to preserve the tenderness, and the humor is a byproduct," Nadelberg said.

"I thought girls had two holes; one for urination and one for sex," reads Leonard Hyman from something he wrote at age 12. "Wrong! The vagina!"

The Mortified stage show launched in Los Angeles in 2002 and was followed by counterparts in San Francisco, New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Austin, Portland, Chicago, and Malmo, Sweden in the next five years. The most recent Mortified book, subtitled "Love Is A Battlefield", was released this month.

And the demographics are not restricted to the Livejournal generation. While contributors are mostly in their 20s and 30s, Mortified boasts both performers and contributors in their seventies, and the appeal spans gender and sexual orientation.

"We've seen some amazing and heroic coming out stories," Nadelberg said, pointing out that straight men aren't big contributors of journals, often preferring power chord rock lyrics instead, "but the gay guys are diary-happy."

Katcher added that, while Mortified is often a "manly show", what with its many stories focusing on late 80s/early 90s heavy metal and hair bands, "I am aware that I am involved in the girliest project of my generation."

This does not stop monthly sellout crowds of diverse and delighted voyeurs at the Mortified stage shows, sharing a little bit of the performers' triumph.

"They made it through the rain," Nadelberg said.

· Mortified (getmortified.com)

· Photos by Autumn Sonnischen (autumnsonnichsen.com)

See also:
· Darenzia
· Miss Kendra James
· Miss Maya
· Ruby Luster

Previously: FetishCon 2007: Florida Heat, Anastasia Pierce Does Rubberdoll (And Vice Versa)

Read more about the festivities after the gap. - GP

- - -

For those unexposed to the drag king phenomenon, imagine if the members of the Village People were women and inhabited those male stereotypes more convincingly than actual cowboys, construction workers, and leathermen. And that's just a thumbnail.

"We have every kind of drag from suits to fruits; studs to puds," continued Frottage. "Everything from Elvis impersonators to Leather Daddies, Wrestlers, Contortionists, Hillbillies, Clowns, Jocks, and their female counterparts. It's a mind-boggling, dress-to-impress occasion, where part of the fun is just trying tell the performers and audience members apart."

As if the onstage entertainment wasn't enough, Frottage, known as "The Man with the Biggest Balls in Show Business" will be joined by The Indra, a "bi-sexual, bi-polar, half male, half female character" as Master and 1/2 Mistress of Ceremonies.

We think we're pretty pan-sexual around here, but still we gained insight from The Indra's words: "My motto," The Indra said, "If it doesn't look phallic enough, turn it sideways."

The 12th annual San Francisco Drag King Contest will take place Saturday, August 18, at SomArts on Brannan Street. Tickets range from $15 to $35.

· San Francisco Drag King Contest (sfdragkingcontest.com)

Previously: Drag Archive

Is there really anything better one can do with a prosthetic paper-maché cavern of simulated ladyness than to strap it on and make performance art with it? We don't think so—and neither does performer, artist, and erotic provocateur Patrick Bucklew, the one-legged muse for fiction writer Jonathan Ames. Citing his own genital-related psychoses and his urge to expose his balls at Dunkin' Donuts, over the last few years Bucklew has created codpieces with outsized, colorful, and somewhat spooky looking vaginas molded and painted into them ... and then he gets naked (save for the mangina codpiece) with assorted similarly-festooned friends and shows up at various parties, galleries, performance venues, and events in New York City and beyond.. That's art at its finest as far as we're concerned. -AR

· The Mangina (mangina.com; see also LiveJournal)

Previously: Zumanity's Vadge Pasty, How To: See Your Vagina ... From The Inside!, Pussy Power: The Remix, When Dildos Attack!, "Without Your Vagina, There's No You!"

When is a gangbang video not porn? Why, when it's art, of course. So don't visit this archive of clips from a film project by Chicago-based filmmaker and artist Kristie Alshaibi hoping for some cheap thrills: near as we can make out, the four videos from her "Other People's Mirrors" that have been posted recently on Insane Films deal with themes like submission, identity, capitalism, religion, joyless anonymous sex, and zit picking. (Yes, each one is introduced by producers who worked on the project, but who has time to listen when we're trying to get to the dirty stuff?) Conceived in 1999 as a web-based "community-online-editing-station-web-cam-performance" experiment, the film was released on DVD in 2004 and spawned a series of websites featuring Alsahibi's sex worker and camgirl alter ego "Echo Transgression" before she gave up on the project citing "mental collapse"; given the fact that what we've seen of the final product (which screened at the CineKink festival in New York last week) is rather muddled and not terribly sexy, perhaps it's just as well, even if its original premise of creating a participatory kind of erotic spectacle is one worth exploring further. And if nothing else, there's always that joyless boardroom gangbang video to get creeped out over.

· "Other People's Mirrors" (video excerpts @ insanefilms.com - thanks Matt)

See also:
· "Other People's Mirrors" (film project site and director's statement @ 12taboos.com)
· Echo Transgression (Wikipedia)
· Echo Transgression and Objectify Me (echotransgression.com + objectifyme.com)
· Artvamp (artvamp.com)
· Learn Dirty Movies (Kristie Alshaibi's filmmaking class info @ learndirtymovies.com)

Previously: Usama Alshaibi Photography, Michele Capozzi: "Pornology", Berlin Porn Film Festival, "Psychopathia Sexualis", Cinekink Kickoff Party