Wednesday 26 December 2012

receipts

It being Christmas, I bought a few items:






















Julien Gracq - Château d'Argol (Pushkin Press), £1.26

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/285413.Chateau_d_Argol


Thomas Bangalter - Irreversible (Original Soundtrack) (Thrive) CD, £8.00

http://www.discogs.com/Thomas-Bangalter-Irreversible-Original-Soundtrack/release/130050



The Parking Attendant - I've Heard It All Before (Creme Organization) 12", £7.75

http://www.discogs.com/Parking-Attendant-The-Ive-Heard-It-All-Before/release/4053898


Legowelt - The Paranormal Soul (Clone Jack For Daze Series) 2LP + 10", £15.75

http://www.discogs.com/Legowelt-The-Paranormal-Soul/release/4049938

Trevor Jackson presents Metal Dance - Industrial / Post-Punk / EBM : Classics & Rarities '80 - '88 (Strut) 2LP, £20.00

http://www.discogs.com/Trevor-Jackson-Presents-Metal-Dance-Industrial-Post-Punk-EBM-Classics-Rarities-80-88/release/3434309

Tuesday 25 December 2012

Yuck 'n 'yum spring 2013 deadline


























This 'ere flyer advertises the Yuck 'n 'yum spring 2013 deadline. We are always looking for submissions for future issues of Yuck 'n Yum! We invite anyone to submit work for consideration to submissions@yucknyum.com

http://www.yucknyum.com/

Friday 21 December 2012

Dopplereffekt - Gesamtkunstwerk

Dopplereffekt is an electronic music act which has been active since at least 1995 (year of first release). It is named after the German word for the Doppler effect. While the musical style and the act's image changed radically during a non-release period from 1999 to 2003, two steady characteristics are the display of a thematic affiliation with science and the obvious use of pseudonyms and the hence rumoured but unconfirmed identities of the members.

The main member during all periods has probably been producer/ artist Gerald Donald alias "Rudolf Klorzeiger". Donald is generally accepted to be also the author of the acts Heinrich Müller/ Der Zyklus, Japanese Telecom and Arpanet as well as one half of the band Drexciya (with James Stinson). During that period the sound of these two acts showed strong similarities, in their detroit electro sound that took influences from industrial, new wave, electro-pop and others, reforming them in a style which is musically complex, often using jazzy modal sequences, and alongside other Detroit based acts on the labels Underground Resistance and direct beat they were highly influential in the 90s' revival of electro. The 1999 compilation of all Dopplereffekt releases from this period, Gesamtkunstwerk, depicted Donald with a new member, "To Nhan Le Thi", who most likely had not been involved with the old material but was given credit anyway and who has been a steady and visible member since, giving occasional live performances.

There are no known interviews of Donald or other members concerning Dopplereffekt at this time, except for a feature in the October 2009 issue of new music magazine The Wire, containing exchanges with two people purporting to be associated with the group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopplereffekt

Dopplereffekt are one of the strangest and most mysterious units of the contemporary electronic music scene. There is only one known interview and very few live appearances.

The composers hide behind strange German pseudonyms whereas the track titles and lyrics are in English and make up a strange mixture of scientific, sexually explicit and political allusions. Dopplereffekt’s music is also highly eclectic and unusual. Even if at first sight the forefathers Kraftwerk seem to be more than present, Dopplereffekt have developed their very own and highly influential sound aesthetic, without which the current electro culture seems to be unthinkable.

Their best known album is Gesamtkunstwerk which appeared in 1999 on International Deejay Gigolo Records. This album featured a collection of tracks which were previously only available on the vinyl only releases: Fascist State & Infophysix.
http://www.last.fm/music/Dopplereffekt

This is indeed a classic techno album. Everything is appropriately done, from the titles of the tracks to the levels of the instruments, to the cover art. It's one giant cold slab of dance music that gives me a twisted vision of some white room in which scientists are creating pornographic movies starring mannequins. The hammer and sickle on the cover harks to an age or culture in which emotions are somewhere near last place. This could have been the soundtrack for much of the film Kontroll. No, it isn't overly ornate, impressively intricate, or ever time-signature bending. But Gesamtkunstwerk IS moving.
withoutatrace 
http://www.discogs.com/Dopplereffekt-Gesamtkunstwerk/release/43671

Amid the late 90s’ fascination with electro, Dopplereffekt’s first widely available record barely ever counted as a cult artefact. Gesamtkunstwerk may have been compiled from virtually unobtainable dispatches trickling out of Detroit, but received wisdom on its contents was well in place by International Deejay Gigolos’ original 1999 release. With the backing of DJ Hell’s label, word  then spread to the developing electroclash scene, whose prototypical acts already acknowledged an influence.

Adopted staples such as ‘Plastiphilia’ pervert Kraftwerk’s automaton shtick, in a way humanising it – “I want to make love to a manikin,” we’re informed in the mannerism of ‘The Robots’, “I want to suck it, I want to fuck it.” Combine this with the female vocals of ‘Pornoviewer’ and ‘Scientist’, and the model is evident for the blank-eyed but provocative delivery cultivated by Miss Kittin and ADULT.’s Nicola Kuperus.

It’s perhaps surprising that the sexual imagery appears to be more notorious than that of ‘Superior Race’, which comes from an EP entitled Fascist State, or ‘Sterilization’, with its body-mutilating sonic and the lyric “we had to sterilise the population.” Consider that Donald periodically assumes the identity Heinrich Mueller (which he claims doesn’t reference the Nazi Gestapo head of the same name) and the sense of an ambiguous outlook, rather than a wholeheartedly dystopian one, could be thought at least a little edgy.

Curious in this context is how often Dopplereffekt’s programming short-circuits to the Kraftwerk of Computer World, sonically deleting a good deal of the imprint of black music – as conventionally understood – made on electro from Cybotron and Model 500 onwards. Some like to debate techno and electro’s derivations from the Europhile interests of Detroit’s first wave, playing up instead the debt to synth-funk and even, supposedly, electric jazz fusion. It isn’t clear that Donald aims to satirise or confound such hand-wringing, but his chosen aesthetic obviously does contain a wry dimension.

Despite figuring in a genealogy of music that trades on notions of inhumanity, it’s the uneasily human, sometimes witty counterpoint that makes this more than an extremely well produced electro record, continuing to bring listeners back.
Robin Howells
http://www.factmag.com/2010/03/30/dopplereffekt-gesamtkunstwerk/


Thursday 20 December 2012

mystery

Man Ray - Les mains d'Antonin Artaud, 1922

Extract from Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double:

No More Masterpieces

 One of the reasons for the asphyxiating atmosphere in which we live without possible escape or remedy—and in which we all share, even the most revolutionary among us—is our respect for what has been written, formulated, or painted, what has been given form, as if all expression were not at last exhausted, were not at a point where things must break apart if they are to start anew and begin fresh.


 We must have done with this idea of masterpieces reserved for a self-styled elite and not understood by the general public; the mind has no such restricted districts as those so often used for clandestine sexual encounters.

 Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us. We have the right to say what has been said and even what has not been said in a way that belongs to us, a way that is immediate and direct, corresponding to present modes of feeling, and understandable to everyone.

  It is idiotic to reproach the masses for having no sense of the sublime, when the sublime is confused with one or another of its formal manifestations, which are moreover always defunct manifestations. And if for example a contemporary public does not understand Oedipus Rex, I shall make bold to say that it is the fault of Oedipus Rex and not of the public.


  In Oedipus Rex there is the theme of incest and the idea that nature mocks at morality and that there are certain unspecified powers at large which we would do well to beware of, call them destiny or anything you choose.


 There is in addition the presence of a plague epidemic which is a physical incarnation of these powers. But the whole in a manner and language that have lost all touch with the rude and epileptic rhythm of our time. Sophocles speaks grandly perhaps, but in a style that is no longer timely. His language is too refined for this age, it is as if he were speaking beside the point.

 However, a public that shudders at train wrecks, that is familiar with earthquakes, plagues, revolutions, wars; that is sensitive to the disordered anguish of love, can be affected by all these grand notions and asks only to become aware of them, but on condition that it is addressed in its own language, and that its knowledge of these things does not come to it through adulterated trappings and speech that belong to extinct eras which will never live again.

  Today as yesterday, the public is greedy for mystery: it asks only to become aware of the laws according to which destiny manifests itself, and to divine perhaps the secret of its apparitions.

Tuesday 18 December 2012

Paul McCarthy & Mike Kelley - Family Tyranny / Cultural Soup (1987)

Paul McCarthy (born August 4, 1945), is a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_McCarthy

Michael "Mike" Kelley (October 27, 1954 – January 31, 2012) was an American artist. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with the artist Paul McCarthy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Kelley_%28artist%29

In Family Tyranny, McCarthy grinds a funnel full of wet plaster into the spherical face of a crude mannekin, as if demonstrating a recipe on daytime TV. He talks us through the process: ‘Do it slowly. Let him feel it; let him get used to it. They’ll remember it. Don’t worry about that, they’ll remember it, they’ll use it.’ Mike Kelley, an artist nine years McCarthy’s junior and a longtime collaborator, plays the son, and ends up scampering around on all fours in his attempts to evade his father’s cruel and unusual punishments.
Jonathan Griffin
http://jonathangriffin.org/2011/09/02/paul-mccarthy/

Writes McCarthy: "I was given access to a community television studio for two days of shooting and one day of editing. I had been given the grant based on a proposal to do a video tape on child abuse. I taped for one day alone and one day with Mike Kelley. I asked Mike Kelley to be the son and I would be the father. There was no written script. After taping for two days, I edited the tapes, making two separate tapes: Family Tyranny and Cultural Soup. They are often shown together."

Writes Kelley: "Paul McCarthy is an artist familiar in the performance art world who is, finally, starting to become more visible in the general art world. I have been a fan of his work for years. I suppose you could say that Paul is an Automatist but the work is grounded not in Jungian Archetypes but rather in everyday social conventions. His version of the primal is the one found in store-bought Halloween masks and embodied in plastic dolls. This tape, Family Tyranny and another one, Cultural Soup, come from one taping session. In a public access television studio, Paul built a rough set approximating the type seen in television situation comedies. He called me in to help him out. When I asked what I was supposed to do he said, 'I'm the father, and you're the son.' That was it. When I arrived at the studio the cameras were turned on and, I would guess, at least six hours of tape was shot. The two tapes that came out of the taping are just short sections of this mass of material."
http://www.eai.org/title.htm?id=1297 

Both artists are interested in repressive family structures, so it is perhaps no surprise that their first collaboration should take up the theme of the family's dirty secrets. In 1987, when McCarthy asked Kelley to perform in a video, he offered only the instructions I am the father, you are the son. After all, training for society starts in the family and the subjection to authority begins with the relation of son to father. Tellingly entitled Family Tyranny: Modeling and Molding, the videotape opens with the text The father begat the son. The son begat the father. But this is not only a keyhole peek into the household where the reproduction of authority is replayed in family abuse. The video is modeled on a typical 1950s television fix-it, hobby show. In a wood-paneled television set/basement workshop, the father prepares a white concoction made out of processed foodstuffs. Using a makeshift styrofoam ball on a stick as a mock boy's head, he shows how to force the liquid through a funnel down the throat of the child, saying My daddy made me do this. You can do this to your son, too.


The architectural set here is both a hidden site of discipline and a surveillance device. As the latter, the set and the camera become one - a means through which society peers into the family, most effectively through the apparatus of television which instructs individuals as to society's dominant values. What was enacted there by Kelley and McCarthy became a prototype for their subsequent collaborations.

Kelley and McCarthy's collaborative interests extended to society's conditioning - through its institutions and cultural representations - of the individual and repression of his or her sexual instincts. In their installations and videotapes, architecture is used as both a model of these social formations and as a structural framework that incorporates the artists' analyses of contradictory cultural phenomena. 
Philip Monk
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2000/03/28/26760.html


Monday 17 December 2012

Yuck 'n Yum winter 2012






















A Christmas gift for you from Yuck 'n Yum x LINK

Saturday 15 December 2012

Yuck 'n Yum winter 2012 launch - pictures

To the Hannah Maclure Centre this evening for the Yuck 'n Yum winter 2012 launch, featuring Dirty Santa in his Grotty Grotto. I took a few photos and here they are:























Dirty Santa's Grotty Grotto


The Yuck ’n Yum winter issue, ruining Christmas since 2008 























Alex is thrilled to see Dirty Santa


Santa sees some good little girls and boys


Peter William Holden's Finding Kinaesthesia show

Beneficiaries of Dirty Santa's largesse

Simon with a gift

Your correspondent with a gift

The Yuck 'n Yum Guest Zine Project will launch in January, more details coming soon!

http://www.yucknyum.com/

Friday 14 December 2012

pilgrimage

Vivienne Eliot 

Extract from Kate Zambreno, Heroines:

Chicago now our pilgrimage, which we once wanted to desperately escape. In Chicago, New York was our Moscow, like in Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It is our pattern: we forget so soon what made us want to flee, we cover it over with nostalgia, Zelda writing her novelist-husband wistfully of their honeymoon days while in the asylum. This shrine we build to our own shared origins. Viv’s shrine to Tom, once he had abandoned her, next to her framed picture of Sir Oswald Mosely, head of the British Union of Fascists. (Does every woman, really, love a fascist?)

I’ve tried to block out the local uproar dealing with Akron native LeBron James leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers. I’ve always found it pernicious, how those in the Midwest criminalize those who leave, like it is some rejection of their own lives. Unlike the ambivalence towards their now-prodigal son, rock musician Chrissie Hynde of the 80s group The Pretenders is a much loved celebrity here. “Chrissie” this. “Chrissie” that. The vegan Italian comfort food restaurant she owns in town has become our culinary sanctuary.

As a girl I remember reading an interview with Chrissie Hynde in Rolling Stone about how she left this city in Ohio when she was young and moved to London. I remember thinking of her as this example of what I could do myself one day. That I could leave Chicago, leave the family, leave the Midwest. And I did. For a little bit. But now I am back here. The eternal return. (To write, perhaps, is to always return.)


So many of the gods of modernism hailed from the Midwest. Scott Fitzgerald from St. Paul. Ezra Pound fired from the college in Indiana. Tom Eliot of the lofty Eliots of St. Louis. And they all escaped, to Europe—they became expatriate, cosmopolitan. They managed to shed their origins, their Midwestern skin. Hemingway years earlier attended the same high school in Oak Park, Illinois as my father and his siblings. God, I idolized Hemingway when I was in journalism school. Now I hate his guts because of how he demonized Zelda in his memoir A Moveable Feast. And for how he treated his wife Hadley. She, summarily dismissed.

(I am now in another union. It is a union of forgotten or erased wives. I pay my dues daily.)

Monday 10 December 2012

Richard Kern - Fingered

Richard Kern (born 1954 in North Carolina) is a New York underground filmmaker, writer and photographer. He first came to underground prominence as part of the underground cultural explosion in the East Village of New York City in the 1980s, with erotic and experimental films featuring underground personalities of the time such as Lydia Lunch, David Wojnarowicz, Sonic Youth, Kembra Pfahler, and Henry Rollins in movies like "The Right Side of My Brain" and "Fingered." Like many of the musicians around him, Kern had a deep interest in the aesthetics of extreme sex, violence, and perversion and was one of the leading lights of the movement which Nick Zedd coined the Cinema of Transgression.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Kern

FINGERED is an art film that's constructed like a regular movie. Lydia Lunch plays a phone sex operator/prostitute that gets together with a guy she's been on the phone with. After a semi-hardcore sex scene, the violence begins. The man cuts someone's throat for looking at Lydia's character, then they go for a drive. The two abduct a hitch hiker and rape her in a junkyard. Written by shemp77
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0091052/plotsummary


‘The Cinema of Transgression’ was a small underground film scene in New York. Richard Kern along with Nick Zedd were the most prominent and widely known directors from that scene. ”Fingered” is possibly Richard Kern’s most shocking and unsettling short film. It features punk rock queen Lydia Lunch as the phone sex operator. After a violent and explicit sexual encounter with one of her phone sex clients, the two set out on a rampage of murder, brutality and attempted rape leaving the viewer aroused and disgusted.
Christian Storm: I was reading some of the reviews and one of the main critiques was that these people were shitty actors. Was that a secondary care for you?
Richard Kern: It's funny you just said that because I never thought about that. It wasn't the same kind of approach, and if I was making one now, I still wouldn't think about it. I never thought about that. But yeah, they are shitty actors. It's all your state of mind when you're looking at them, everybody in the movies is pretty real.

Yeah, the things they were doing were real.
Believe me, in Fingered, Marty Nation was exactly like that, no exaggeration. The guy who's lifting weights, he was like that. Everybody was real. Lydia Lunch was like that. Lung Leg was like that. The story was based on Lydia and Marty's travels when she was 16 and they would hitchhike and get picked up by somebody, and Marty would take his knife out and start stabbing and cutting up the upholstery in the car, looking at the guy. All those guys were really scary. The guy who's lifting weights in it got killed about two years ago, somebody shot him finally.

You were pretty prolific in that time period, when these films were made. Were you just obsessed with making these films?
Yeah, it was what I did and I had a lot of ideas and I had all the equipment, which wasn't much, it was a Super-8 camera and three lights and I had a big apartment to shoot in and plenty of people who wanted to do stuff. And I wouldn't call them actors, I'd call them performer types. Nothing was scripted, the closest thing we had to a script was Fingered and You Killed Me First and those were just, "This is what's gonna happen in this scene. You're gonna say this. Or you say something like this." Lydia and Marty in Fingered would just make up dialogue as they went. They would play off of each other. I would tell them what we were gonna shoot tomorrow and they could say what they wanted. It wasn't traditional filmmaking, by any means. 

I'm really interested in understanding the evolution from doing these nihilistic films to the stuff you do now, which seems a little bit more gentle and subtle.
Fingered was one of John Waters' favorite films, and I hung out with him a few times and he said, "It's interesting to be an angry young man when you're young, but when you're old you just look like an idiot to still be angry." A lot of those films were made when I was a drug addict, and when I got clean the only thing I could afford to do was take photos. And I started taking photos of everybody I knew and tried to get them naked. And it just evolved into this other thing. 

Friday 7 December 2012

Trisha Baga - Holiday @ DCA 07.12.12 - pictures

To the DCA this evening for Trisha Baja's sensory overload show Holiday. I took a few photos and here they are:

Objects from discount retailers, charity shops and Tayside Recyclers in Dundee, including paintings, fake flowers and household goods, are stacked, marked with luminous paint or projected upon to create a series of immersive installations.

Holiday

Trisha Baga holds forth over Halo

Plymouth Rock Dun3

The Story of Painting: Back in the Habit

Wednesday 5 December 2012

Yuck 'n Yum winter 2012 launch


Christmas wouldn't be Christmas with the winter Yuck 'n Yum. And it wouldn't be the winter launch without Dirty Santa in his Grotty Grotto!

Yes that's right, he's back to spread his unique brand of lugubrious greetings. To do this, Santa will need your help!

All he asks is that you bring along a little prezzie to help those less fortunate than yourselves. It could be an artwork, a trinket, an object to spread a Christmassy aura all over the land. Nicely wrapped up presents are what Dirty Santa wants. He's gonna make all your Christmas dreams come true!

http://www.yucknyum.com/2012/12/05/winter-launch/

Tuesday 4 December 2012

Red Hot Riding Hood

Red Hot Riding Hood is an animated cartoon short subject, directed by Tex Avery and released on May 8, 1943 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. In 1994 it was voted #7 of The 50 Greatest Cartoons of all time by members of the animation field, making it the highest ranked MGM cartoon on the list. It is one of Avery's most popular cartoons, inspiring several of his own "sequel" shorts as well as influencing other cartoons and feature films for years afterward.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hot_Riding_Hood


But the Big Wolf decided if the story wasn’t going to change, he wanted no part of it. Riding Hood agreed. Grandma made it unanimous. Change was a must. The old story was, well, old.

The new story began on the corner of Hollywood and Vine. Wolf was dressed ‘to the nines,’ driving a sparkly convertible, and howling at the ladies. A highly modernized grandma lived in the penthouse of a tall, swanky building.

Likewise, Little Red Riding Hood worked in a nightclub, the wolf ‘hot on her trail.’ Now called Red Hot Riding Hood, the star of the story was introduced to the club audience as the ‘Sweetheart of Swing,’ and a ‘red headed ball of fire.’ Her sexy entrance onto the stage drove Big Wolf absolutely mad, and he acted accordingly.

During a break in her act, Wolf pulled her to his table and asked about a later date. Red Hot Riding Hood declined, saying she had to go visit her grandma. She took off in a cab, closely followed by her discombobulated suitor.

Wolf burst into grandma’s apartment, and GRANDMA went wild. Her physical attraction to him was immediate and evident. Not what he was expecting or desiring, Wolf clamored for the door.

Unfortunately, grandma beat him to it and locked it. In typical cartoon slapstick they chased and ducked, ducked and chased. To extricate himself, Wolf jumped out the window, landing where he began, tangled in a streetlamp at Hollywood and Vine.

The cartoon ended with Wolf seated at the club once again, bandaged and swearing off women until death. His ghost began where he ended, making a complete fool of himself as Red Hot Riding Hood once again made her stage entrance.
Grey Hall
http://www.examiner.com/article/7th-best-cartoon-ever-red-hot-riding-hood

The title character of Red Hot Riding Hood was designed as a pin-up, to boost Army morale, but the Hays Office objected to the wolf's reaction to Red — "showing body heat, the steam coming out of the collar, and the tongue rolling out" and forced Avery to make cuts. "Sometimes we would just stiffen him out in mid-air; he'd make a take and his whole body would stiffen out like an arrow! And they cut that one out on us." Such imagery was apparently important enough to Avery that, rather than capitulate, he devised a strategy to salvage it. He would insert a number of over-the-top gags he knew would be cut, and the ones he really wanted would be left alone by a then-satisfied censor. Like Djuna Barnes, Avery knew that kids — and soldiers — "like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!"
http://brightlightsfilm.com/22/texaverytales.php 

Tex Avery's first excursion into animated sexual frenzy is his best. Some have suggested that having the Wolf's pursuit by Grandma follow the raging libido scene was a mistake in pacing, but it all works for me. It's too bad Avery didn't complete the opening misdirection by having the FIRST title card read "Little Red Riding Hood," but it goes by so quickly, and is drawn so conservatively that it doesn't really hurt. Besides, is there a context in which this film could be realistically expected to be shown where the audience would be truly surprised when it doesn't turn out to be a straight version of the fairy-tale?
Ted Watson (tbrittreid)
http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0036295/reviews 


Saturday 1 December 2012

Audrey Horne

Audrey Horne is a fictional character from the ABC television series Twin Peaks, played by Sherilyn Fenn. The character was created by David Lynch. She was introduced in the pilot. The daughter of Ben (Richard Beymer) and Sylvia Horne, sister of Johnny Horne (Robert Bauer) and half-sister of Donna Hayward (Lara Flynn Boyle), her storylines focused on her infatuation with the series protagonist Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan), infiltrating the brothel/casino One Eyed Jacks and becoming an activist through civil disobedience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Horne 

Audrey’s been great for me. She has brought out a side of me that’s more mischievous and fun that I had suppressed, trying to be an adult. She has made it OK to use the power one has as a woman to be manipulative at times, to be precocious. She goes after what she wants vehemently and she takes it. I think that’s really admirable. I love that about her.
Sherilyn Fenn, quoted in "Fenn-Tastic! Meet Twin Peaks’ Mysterious Siren Sherilyn Fenn", by Glenn O'Brien. Playboy. December 1990.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sherilyn_Fenn

I’m a little surprised no one has brought up the stable of eminently crush-worthy, swooningly enigmatic stable of dreamboats David Lynch and Mark Frost created for Twin Peaks, a television breakthrough that had a profound impact on my development as a hormone-crazed adolescent. You couldn’t really go wrong with any of Lynch’s vixens, but none could compare to Sherilyn Fenn’s Audrey Horne. As the show’s preeminent femme fatale, Fenn radiated sex from every pore. Whether it was the tight sweaters or the famous tongue-gymnastics she performed on a fortunate cherry (seldom have so many been so ferociously jealous of an inanimate object), I was completely besotted. She was mysterious, she was dangerous, she was everything a boy on the cusp of manhood could possibly ever desire. When Fenn appeared in Playboy in fulfillment of all my wildest dreams, I coerced my father into buying me a copy. I’m not proud of that fact, but oh was it ever worth it at the time. 
Nathan Rabin
http://www.avclub.com/articles/crushes-on-fictional-characters,69158/

The wind outside was cold and Audrey shuddered slightly. Cooper immediately took off his coat and placed it carefully on her shoulders. "Thank you" she whispered, breathless. It smelled like him and it was the second best thing to being in his arms. "You're very welcome, Audrey" said Cooper.

"I must say I'm impressed" she said. "I never would have been able to keep my composure if I was the one to throw a speech and you suddenly came up out of nowhere." Cooper smiled affectionately at her. "I knew very well you'd be here. Do you think I haven't checked up on you these past years? You're the reason I agreed to do the speech, Audrey." Audrey was speechless. "I don't … Why?"

Cooper let his fingers travel carefully through one of the tendrils that framed her face. Audrey leaned into his touch and sighed with pleasure. "I have a present for you" he said finally. Audrey's eyes widened with glee. "Really? Because I happen to love presents, you know."

Cooper smiled and fished a small box from the pocket of his coat that was draped around her shoulders. It had a pink bow. "It's a graduation present. I hope you'll like it and that it'll be as useful to you as mine has been to me, Audrey" he said. Audrey bit her lit and opened the small package. It was a state of the art tape recorder. Audrey looked up at him. She didn't know what she'd been expecting, but certainly not a tape recorder. That was so … personal. She knew how much Cooper loved his.

"Oh Cooper. It's perfect. Thank you so much, I don't know what to s-"he interrupted her by catching her lips with his own. The kiss was obviously supposed to be sweet and undemanding, but it quickly turned rough and needy. Their mouths were exploring one another properly for the first time and nothing had ever felt as good before.

Audrey held her tape recorder in one hand and tugged at his hair with the other while Cooper wrapped his hands around her waist and pulled her close. Every cell in Audrey's body was on fire. "Mhrph" she moaned while he sucked on her lower lip. "Fuck, I need you Cooper!"

He pulled away from her for a second and then his hand was cupping her cheek again. "Call me Dale, Audrey. Please. Dale". His eyes were on fire and she realized in that moment that he wanted her just as much as she wanted him. Audrey smiled up at him. "Dale. Yes."

Then they were kissing again and suddenly he was leaving a trail of sweet kisses down her neck and to her collarbone, and everything seemed to fade away. They kissed for a long time, but when they stopped to just hold each other for a moment, Dale lent his forehead against hers and murmured: "I guess you'll be my special agent now ..." softly into her hair.
J.I. Fevang
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8348385/1/Special-Agent-Audrey-Horne


Audrey Horne shoes by janelleburger
http://audreyhornestyle.tumblr.com/