Alpha Psi Ecdysia, Part 1 (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/21/09)

Alpha Psi Ecdysia sounds like a college sorority. In fact, on most days you'd find its members wandering about the SUNY New Paltz campus. But the "Ecdysia" part comes from "ecdysiast," which (according to ye olde Wiki) is the term humorist H. L. Mencken coined for a stripper acquaintance who wanted a more dignified name for her profession. (Both words are based on "ecdysis", meaning "to molt" or "to shed.")

So yes, the girls (and guys) of A.P.E. are, in fact, strippers -- more precisely, burlesque performers, part of the neo-burlesque movement spearheaded by the likes of Dita von Teese, Angie Pontani, and the Suicide Girls. Alpha Psi is an on-campus burlesque club -- one of only three in the entire country, and the only one at a state-run college. It's old-school (pun very much intended!) bump 'n' grind that stops at pasties and G-strings, shot through with a healthy dose of role playing, satire, social commentary, and some serious polymorphous perversity. Gypsy Rose Lee would heartily approve; so would Germaine Greer. I'd say more, but their own press release pretty much encapsulates what makes this troupe so much fun:

Saucy coeds, funky themes, uncomfortable parents, and academic tomfoolery with a side of nudity!...Alpha Psi Ecdysia offers comedy, live music, circus, and the sexiest girls (and boys) to ever pursue a useless degree. See New York State taxpayer dollars put to good use as "America's Hottest Small State School" takes its title literally. Tip 'em well! College ain't cheap.

Last week, A.P.E. celebrated their one-year anniversary with a performance down the road from their alma mater, and a mutual friend suggested I check them out (thanks, Liz Savage!). There aren't a lot of things that'll make me drive seventy miles across state lines...on a Thursday...in the pouring rain...with the promise of not getting home until two in the morning. Turns out this is one of them. And here are some of the reasons why.

We start with the aptly-named Lady Legs, a classic fan dancer in the Sally Rand tradition. Elegant, posed, and graceful, whether with ostrich-feather fans that covered her as thoroughly as her evening gown, or a tiny paper fan that barely covered anything. Burlesque has always been the rougher downtown cousin of vaudeville, but Legs reminded us there are always exceptions to that rule.

Gemma Stone, on the other hand, is the polar opposite of "elegant" -- and God (or Satan, or Johnny Rotten) bless her for it. All you need to know about Gemma is that her three favorite movies are TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, Jenna Jameson's straight-to-DVD ZOMBIE STRIPPERS, and FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! -- all three of which came into play over the course of the evening.

Even before the show started, she was entertaining the crowd as one of the more literal of A.P.E.'s "stage kittens" (go-go dancers-cum-stagehands), and I dare say T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, had it dared to include Gemma, would have joined The Story of O in the banned-books category.



But wait -- you ain't seen nothin' yet. Once the actual show began, Gemma hit the stage for her very own tribute to Tobe Hooper's splatterama: bloody smock, red heels and lingerie, and a glitter-encrusted cardboard chainsaw, set to an unholy medley of "Deep in the Heart of Texas" and the Misfits' JFK-in-Dallas classic "Bullet" (which is only one of the Best. Songs. Evah!). Texas twang meets New Jersey punk rock meets drive-in classic -- in a country 'n' western bar, no less. (The irony just writes itself.)

So how the hell do you top that? With the Godfather of Punk Rock, that's how. Cranking up the Stooge's "Search and Destroy," Stone proceeded to get in touch -- literally! -- with her inner Iggy Pop. And if you know ANYTHING about "the world's forgotten boy," it should come as no surprise that a jar of peanut butter came into play.

(In an email to the author, A.P.E. founder/producer Lucida Sans wrote "Gemma is rather insane and brilliant; that girl has no idea how hugely badass she is." Oh, word word word.)

Insanity of a different flavor (no pun intended!) was the domain of one Ginger Snap. "Good girl gone bad?" Rhianna, you don't know the half of it. How about we start with the nerdy, goody-two-shoes schoolgirl who -- after her Valentine's Day gift is spurned -- sheds her glasses and old school tie and gets in touch with her inner Clockwork Orange droog?

But that was chump change compared to the followup, in which Ginger's Virgin Mary has some rather...uh..."forceful" opinions about birthing the Son of God.

I dare say there won't be too many Catholic parishes booking this for the Christmas Pageant. And for those wondering: no, that is not sacramental wine she's hosing herself down with.

(Prior to the venue opening, I was chatting up Miss Absinthe, a junior member of the troupe, and she'd warned me that Alpha Psi's skits weren't particularly "plastic fetus friendly." To which I retorted, in my best Sawyer-from-LOST drawl, "Darlin', I saw Alice Cooper in concert not too long ago, and he was running doll babies through with a friggin' sword. Didn't faze me then, won't faze me now.")

And let's not forget the aforementioned Ms. Sans, who let a smile (and not much else) be her umbrella, and offered up a classic "seven veils" bellydance -- despite a gold lace bra which decided that "wardrobe malfunction" should be a way of life...

In our next installment: social satire, feminist commentary, overcoming body issues, and more gender bending than a Ru-Paul world tour. You'd be a fool NOT to return!

(In the meanwhile, you can peruse the entire Alpha Psi Ecdysia gallery here.)

Anatomy of a Wrestling Feud (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/18/09)

LOUD WARNING: The following entry contains pictures of pro-wrestling-related violence, including real blood. Reader discretion is advised.

Pro wrestling, at its basest level, is the struggle between Good and Evil. There must be a face (the hero) and a heel (the villain), and ideally there should be a fundamental reason why they need to creatively beat the snot out of each other -- be it the prestige of a championship belt, the love of a good woman, a disrespect that must be avenged. Motivation -- that's the word I'm looking for.

In the Good Old Days, a convincing feud between two wrestlers was built up over time. In fact, if it was done correctly, the grapplers didn't even need to lay a hand on each other. A pumped-up insult here, a run-in that changed the outcome of a match there. When they finally met up in the "squared circle" -- preferably in front of a capacity crowd and/or a big pay-per-view audience -- the anticipation of what they'd do to one another was overwhelming. Thanks to a generation raised on MTV editing and instant gratification, the art of slowly building a wrestling feud is on the endangered species list.

Some wrestling federations, on the other hand, still do things the Old Fashioned Way. Bodyslam Wrestling Organization (BWO), a NJ-based fed-cum-wrestling school, spent a solid year building up a feud between veteran brawler Chaos (the metal-band-roadie-lookin' guy in the photos) and fan-favorite-turned-despised-heel Evan "Lone Wolf" Myers. Chaos had actually stepped away from active wrestling, due to a bad concussion and years of in-ring damage, but that didn't stop Myers from repeated and vicious verbal attacks, trying to get Chaos to snap, charge the ring, and injure himself further. All the while, Chaos stood at the sidelines, seething with fury, but unable -- or unwilling -- to attack, while audience members screamed for Myers' blood.

They got it this past April, at a Garfield High School show. A year of bad blood resulted in a near-thermonuclear battle between the two. This was no technical match, no highspot-fest, just a good old-fashioned ass-kicking with smashed chairs, barbed-wire baseball bats, and bodies tumbling down the bleachers. In the end, with both men lying bleeding and battered (literally: Chaos cracked some ribs at some point in the bout), it almost didn't matter who won and who lost. For the duration of the match, both made the audience believe, however briefly, that they were fighting each other for A Reason.

And that is when professional wrestling succeeds.

Hunter vs. Slice (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/14/09)

Another day, another USA-Pro show, another women's match. Here's Kara Slice clamping down on April Hunter at a September 2004 show in a Jamaica, NY nightclub. (The club itself wasn't a bad venue for a wrestling show, but the lighting was atrocious; the promoter didn't want to pay for the full nightclub lighting to be turned on, so everyone wrestled under the fluorescent work lights. Ugh.)

April and Kara had a whole bunch of battles on the NY/NJ/Philly circuit in the early part of the 21st century, in part because they were two of the taller wrestling ladies on the scene and their size parity made for more believable matches.

Kara eventually got a WWE developmental deal, trained at their Ohio Valley Wrestling facility in Louisville, KY, and debuted on Smackdown! in January '07 alongside GREASE-themed tag team Deuce 'n' Domino as the gum-chewing, roller-skating Cherry. In August of '08, she fell victim to one of WWE's periodic roster trimmings and was released from her contract; after returning to NJ for a handful of indy dates, she announced she was stepping away from the squared circle to further her education.

April will go down in the history books as one of the great coulda-shoulda-woulda stories of the Northeast scene. Despite getting camera time in both WCW (as Scott Steiner's valet) and the early days of TNA, Hunter never caught the lucky breaks that her tag-team partners (Nikki Roxx, Talia Madison) did. After years of not wanting to leave the Northeast, she finally relocated to Louisville and signed up with OVW on her own -- just as WWE was severing ties with them as a farm league/feeder system. And by that time, years of accumulated in-ring injuries had pretty much spelled the end of her career as an active wrestler, although she continues in a managerial role at ringside, and she's still in demand as a model and aspiring photographer.

But cry no tears for either lady -- they've both accomplished more (in and out of the ring) than most of us. And you will see a good deal more of them as this bloggeroo continues...

---

Update! April Hunter herself posted the following on the G.L.O.R.Y. Wrestling message board:

Like the pic, Robert!

And this part isn't exactly true: "After years of not wanting to leave the Northeast, she finally relocated to Louisville and signed up with OVW on her own -- just as WWE was severing ties with them as a farm league/feeder system. And by that time, years of accumulated in-ring injuries had pretty much spelled the end of her career as an active wrestler, although she continues in a managerial role at ringside, and she's still in demand as a model and aspiring photographer."

I quit in-ring work (except custom matches, since the bumping is minimal) back when I was still in the northeast. I moved to Louisville for JD [Michaels, her better half] to go to OVW...not me.

I'm simply a photographer & model down here and do some occasional match managing & journalism, too.
I'm shooting everything from maternity photos to MMA/UFC now. I hope to get some good Wallylighting for this weekends show.

(Wow, looks like someone's actually been, y'know, READING this damn thing...)

"Remains of the Martian Complex" (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/11/09)

As I may have mentioned elsewhere in this bliggity, I am primarily a people photographer. Never got the Ansel Adams bug to go outdoors and photograph Mother Nature in all her wide-angle splendor. Or slap on the macro lens and get up-close-and-waaaay-too-personal with assorted flora and fauna. Nope, as a rule my subject of choice is the human biped, optimally female, and ideally cute and a bit naughty. But that's not to say I don't have my "exceptions to the rule" moments.

This is one of them.

Driving down Route 1&9 through Linden, NJ in March of '08, I came upon a factory complex that was in the process of being torn down. The scene you see here pretty much stopped me dead in my tracks; it looked as if Godzilla had reached down with one claw and swiped a chunk out of the corner of the building.

And, as (bad) luck would have it, I didn't have my camera along with me. So a week later, en route to photograph another indy wrestling show in lower Joisey, I made a point of detouring through Linden just to take some shots of the building, which luckily hadn't been demolished any further.

The original shot was taken on a sunny, blue-sky day, and while compelling enough in its native state, didn't have the sense of -- for lack of a better word -- "foreboding," or even "menace," that destruction on that scale would have suggested. So into Photoshop the image went. After cropping it to get the Panavision-style layout you see, I duplicated the image onto a second layer, removed all traces of the original blue sky to isolate the building (tedious work, when you consider the density of the structural wreckage), then converted it to a pure monochrome image. For the underlying image, I used Alien Skin's Exposure 2 filters and tweaked the color of the sky to get the blood-tinged hue you see here. (Think Edvard Munch's "The Scream" reimagined for the cover of a Joy Division album...)

For a long time, this image was the wallpaper on my work computer, and the default on my MySpace account, and at the risk of bragging (okay, just a little), it probably got more positive comments from more people than any other picture I've taken. One MySpacer wrote, "So Upsetting. Yet Beautiful." Another, herself a photographer, said, "I would like to see more of your regular photography!" -- knowing full well that the wrestling/pinup/people stuff IS my "regular photography." And when I had an opportunity get a canvas-printed enlargement made, my day-job department director insisted that we hang it on the wall of our office.

Maybe I need to find some more buildings being torn down. Until then, this one'll do...

Backlighting Part Three (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/6/09)

Third and (for the nonce) final chapter of "Adventures in Backlighting." Today's entries come from a photo workshop this past weekend at Studio 6 in Passaic, NJ. One of the shoot's major props was a borrowed motorcycle, so I decided to haul my lights into the studio and set up two strobes with umbrella softboxes to evenly light the critter and whatever model might be draped across it. At literally the last second, I grabbed a third strobe, slapped a diffusion sock over the reflector, cranked it up to a fairly high lumen level, and stuck it in the corner for a little backlighting.

Photographing our model (Carmen Delgado) straight on, it's not that obvious an effect; you can see a little extra glow on the right, but it otherwise doesn't really draw attention to itself.

...but once we switch to a side view, the effect becomes more pronounced. Notice the nice edging of light on Carmen's hair and right arm, and how it makes her stand out from the background. That's exactly why photographers use backlighting. (The main difficulty here was composing the shot and posing the model so that the backlight wasn't visible in the shot; as you will see, that's not always possible, but it has it's uses.)

Also in the studio: what can only be described as hanging black gauze cylinders. Nice to pose a model in, but unless lit properly, they don't look like much. Again, drag a light directly behind the model (in this case, Carmen's sibling Joanie Delgado) and blast away. Here, the gauze helps to further diffuse the backlighting, and the entire scene takes on an otherworldly glow.

Finally, a runway setting with a black background. In this case, I used not one but two backlights (one low, one high) at 45 degree angles, which not only backlit model Sandii Hartke nicely, but also created a virtual "fog" of light thanks to some lens flare. Again, lens flare is not always welcome, much less desirable, but in this case I made a stylistic decision to use it. (What wasn't a stylistic decision: the light stand and extension cord showing up in the background. Maybe at some point I'll get around to Photoshopping it out...)

And one final shot of Joanie that actually incorporates the backlights as an intentional visual effect.

So remember: to make a model really stand out, grab a spare light and advance to the rear!

Backlighting Part Two (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/5/09)

Our discussion of backlighting continues with a phenomenon known as "Wallylighting."

Say wha?

Wallylighting (n): A type of accidental and/or inadvertant photographic backlighting, most often occurring during a boxing, pro wrestling, or mixed martial arts match, in which photographers directly across the ring from one another take pictures with their flashes at the exact same moment, thus backlighting each other's pictures. Named in honor of indy-wrestling photographer Wallace "Wrestling Wally" Lippmann.

Here's a canonical example, from a December 2007 Women Superstars Uncensored match in Lake Hiawatha, NJ. As you might guess from the name, WSU is an almost entirely all-female wrestling fed, but if you're thinking they must be pure T&A -- or at best, the Benny Hill-level camp of GLOW -- oh, how wrong you would be. These young ladies can WRESTLE, as solidly (if not more so) than their male counterparts.

As for Wrestling Wally himself, he tends to concentrate on all-women's indy feds such as WSU and SHIMMER, so it's no surprise that he and I would both be at ringside.

In this shot, Alexa Thatcher is giving Philadelphia's own Annie Social a particularly nasty hip toss. As you can see, Wally and I snapped our shutters at exactly the same moment, lighting the move almost exactly opposite one another. Notice how Wally's flash has given the shot an almost three-dimensional quality, particularly in the halo of light around Thatcher's hair. This is the whole point of backlighting: giving the illusion of depth to an otherwise flat image. If it weren't for the blast of light on the mat behind them, you'd think the illumination was coming from a "natural" source.

Not everybody is a fan of Wallylighting; some photogs dislike it intensely, especially if you can see the other shooter's flash in their pictures. Me, I'm coming to like ANY kind of backlighting (hasn't it been obvious?). And in a situation like this -- where under normal circumstances, the single flash on top of your camera produces, at best, a rather flat image -- a good strong jolt of "Wallylighting" can turn an okay photo into a terrific photo.

In the next installment: backlighting gone berserk! Don't touch that dial...

Backlighting Part One (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/3/09)

First post of several on the joys of backlighting, which in the simplest terms is exactly what it sounds like: sticking a light somewhere behind the subject for some kind of interesting effect.

This shot, which was part of my Model Behavior DVD Two project (WHAT?!? You haven't bought a copy yet? What's wrong with you?), put not only a light, but a whole lotta smoke, behind our subject (sometime wrestling diva and all-around cute goth girl Carrie Cooper).

The influence for this pic was, of all things, a promotional picture from the recent IRON MAN movie: Robert Downey, Jr. in his metal suit, standing in front of an back light with an oval cutout shooting through a lotta smoke. (Similar to this.) So in my boundless naivety, I said to myself, "Hey, self, you've got a smoke machine AND a softbox for your strobes with an oval mask. Piece of cake, right?"

Yeah, not so much. As you can see, the smoke machine (Halloween-store consumer grade at best) didn't produce huge volumes of smoke, and the soft box wasn't large enough for the cutout to create a well-defined oval. (It's clear the IRON MAN photog used a full-size cutout and a much better smoke source...) Nonetheless, I've found that any backlit smoke behind a subject is better than no backlit smoke etc. And -- most importantly -- both I and the subjects loved the results. Here are, respectively, Liz Savage and Lane Rosario, two more satisfied customers:



So half a win is better than no win at all.

Next time: "accidental" backlighting -- boon to, or bane of, pro wrestling photography? The answer might surprise you...

Name Change

Or, Bernie Schwartz just became Tony Curtis.

Although I started the Daily S.P.O.T. (Stiff Shots' Photos on Twitter) as an adjunct to my Twitter account, it's become clear that connection has become, at best, tenuous. "Real" Twitterers use TwitPic or the likes to post photos, while I was using (to paraphrase Roger Corman) The Beast With 140 Characters just to announce new blog entries.

Starting today, S.P.O.T. has been re-acronymed to "Stiff Shots' Photos, Observations, and Techniques," which was the intent in the first place.

Coming up shortly: a multi-part discussion of the joys -- and necessity -- of backlighting, both deliberate and accidental.

Sakai Vs. Luscious (Daily S.P.O.T. for 5/2/09)

Frank "Masked Maniac" Goodman's old USA-Pro wrestling promotion was the three-ring -- and often six-hour! -- circus of the Metro NY indy wrestling scene, an overstuffed buffet of WWE/WCW/ECW vets, ticket-selling beginners, and assorted freaks and geeks on both sides of the ring ropes. And while Goodman was a self-avowed non-fan of women's wrestling, he actually presented a few memorable ladies' bouts over the years.

This is one of them, from a Long Island show in early 2004. The lady getting her armed chomped on, DAWN OF THE DEAD style, is Ronnie "Simply Luscious" Stephens, to date the only female graduate of Shawn Michaels' wrestling school and a classic Southern heel: mouthy, sneaky, and antagonistic. The chompee is Sumie Sakai, who at the time was the USA-Pro Women's Champ -- and despite her culinary habits and other less-than-above-board tactics, a longtime fan favorite.

(This was absolutely one of those "right place, right time" pictures; a second before or after and I would have missed it.)

Surprisingly, Luscious not only recovered from the bite, but went on to win the belt that night:

These days, Sakai concentrates mostly on martial arts, Luscious rarely ventures north of the Mason-Dixon line -- and Goodman, who moved to Orlando a few years back and ran a handful of wrestling shows, now concentrates on being a full-time dad taking his sons on daily treks to Disney World. And sadly, New York wrestling is the poorer for the absence of all three...