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She Stirs My Cocktail: Chas Ray Krider |
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Ask photographer Chas Ray Krider that question and
he’ll answer with austere conviction, a series of erotic snapshots that
capture the pure essence of desire that lies beyond the glow of the
vacancy sign. Krider’s most recent – and famous – project, Motel Fetish,
is a thick slab of suggestive sleaze, a psychological panorama of long
legs and antique lingerie. The book is propped up on the pillow beside me.
I clear the smoke with a wave of my hand to get a closer look at a creamy
red head spread eagle on green shag. She’s wearing black heels and
panties. The table lamp casts her in a somber light. I flip to another
page and I see the backside of a brunette in red sheer panties and a bra.
She’s standing beside a vinyl chair, clutching at the wall. There’s a
suitcase on the floor and a man’s feet creep into the scene on the edge of
the bed. I take a shot of whiskey and look down at my own feet. |
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Despite the book’s name, the idea of Krider’s work
as strictly fetish amuses him. It’s really much more genuine then that.
“I’m not a fetish photographer,” he says. “It’s women in various states of
undress in motel rooms. I just want to see women in their underwear.” A
noble cause, no doubt. But we’d be foolish to dismiss Krider’s work as
just that – women in their underwear. Motel Fetish reveals an eroticism
rarely found in art these days. It’s more than pin-up lore, less than
porn; a beautifully constructed balance of contemporary voyeurism and
retro smut wrapped in dim lighting and shivering anticipation. “I’m not
trying to recreate the past,” says Krider. “I want to create a time warp.
I put a modernist spin on it, but I’m dragging what I love from the past
into the present.”
The Motel Fetish premise is, in fact, as old as the underwear tossed over the lampshade. “I started collecting women’s underwear in the mid-80s,” admits Krider. “I would shop thrift stores and find vintage lingerie in good shape.” |
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And it’s not just the garters and
corsets Krider drags back from the past. Perhaps more than anything else –
more than the fishnets and ashtrays, the silhouettes and stockings – it’s
Krider’s devotion to surrealist ideology that dominates his imagery,
revealing the truth of his vision. “All my friends were surrealists and
I’ve always been a sympathizer. In surrealism, the strangest things can
coexist in the same moment of reality. I’m constantly mixing up how you
would encounter a human being with the space of a motel room. I try to
seduce through color and sexuality but something is always nagging at you.
Is this a love scene or a crime scene?” Is this a love scene or a crime scene. By now my
senses are shattered. I’m between worlds. I’m constantly getting up and
pulling back the curtain just enough to spy. I know there’s something
going on out there. I press my ear against the wall and close my eyes. I
chew on a piece of ice then take a puff. Charlie Parker clicks off so I
flip the tape over. I take one more look at the book. This one looks like
a silent film actress and she’s standing on the night side table, her
panties around her knees, her hands caressing her neck. Her eyes are
closed. She’s waiting. For death or sex, I just don’t know. Either way,
she’s already gone, just a piece of the room, and she’ll be there when the
next person checks in. I hop up on to the night side table and rock back
and forth, back and forth. This must be what Krider calls Zen smut. “The
idea of Zen smut,” he says, “is that the most irrational thoughts can be
accepted, or that reality is irrational and has to be accepted.” And so
we’re asked to accept this coalescence of haunting urges that dare to be
bound by unspeakable atrocities of cigarettes, lipstick, gin, and fucking. |
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And there’s no better place to do that then in a
motel, the one place we’ve all been, the one place we can truly relate to.
“Since you’ve been in that room before, you’re already familiar and
comfortable with it.” And there’s no better voice, or eye, than that of
Krider. “Photography has been a vehicle through time and space for me,” he
says. “It’s helped me get through 30 years. I was interested in images and
it was an art form I could master.” For Krider, images are physical
manifestations of the psychological state. With each flip of the page,
with each knock of the door, with each turn of the key, we ask ourselves,
who’s in there and what are they doing? “I’m trying to find out what my
primordial drive is. I’m not a good photographer, but I’m good at making
images work and in as many times as I’ve done these images is how many
times I can reinvent them. That’s what keeps me involved.” It’s what keeps
us involved too. |
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She told me to call her when I felt the urge. So I did. Now I’m sitting here nursing one half of a round for two. I’ve been watching television static for what seems like an eternity even though I can barely see. I remember Krider telling me that if the motel people knew what he was up to they wouldn’t let him in. For a second I think it’s highly probable they know exactly what’s going on. But that thought quickly fades as I spot my pants on the floor. The phone is off the hook. He’s right, I think. No one could possibly know. And then I hear a knock at the door. -FIN- _____________________________________________________________________________________ -Hero |
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Charlie Parker’s
Heavy Weather is scratchin’
at me out of this handheld voice activated cassette recorder, like the way
actresses in old black and white movies move across the television screen,
taking me somewhere I’ve never been, but somewhere I’m almost certain I
want to go. I brought the jazz with me to the motel, along with several
other items of necessity – 26 ounces of Crown Royal Special Reserve, my
Old Port Colts, paper, pen, a copy of Comte de Lautréamont’s Les chants de
Maldoror, several joints, and a bottle of Advil – as a reclusive gesture
to god knows what. Some sort of artistic adultery, I tell myself, the
belief that I too dabble, albeit in a manner more autoerotic than most, in
the very same secrets that the occupants in the adjacent room whisper to
one another between sweaty sheets. Because this isn’t the sort of place
vacationing family’s stay; its carpet the color of rancid booze, the
curtains tarnished with years of bad air, and the walls bulging with
unspeakable stories. And everyone’s got them; threesomes, gambling, fist
fights, over doses, telephone sex, home movies, afternoon affairs, all
night rock n’ roll parties. Of course the diseased glamour is nothing more
than a torn lining, which strains to unveil the primitive underbelly of
the motel culture. I once heard someone remark, “What do you do in a motel
room besides fuck and drink?” What do you do indeed.