Hg2: Ultimate guide to the multiple pleasure-teats of 'travel' hedonism

The joys of lying about: Madame Arcati's idea of hedonism

One mark of a hedonist is an aversion to travel. Getting on a plane these days is not travelling. That's just sitting about. You get to the hotel - that's sitting about, too. Poolside, that's lying about. You want to see that quaint RC church with the transexual painting (really) in Ronda because you happen to be in Marbella? You get in a car and sit your way there before a long, long sit-down drunken mountain lunch adjacent to Orson Welles' lying-about remains.

To all intents and purposes you could have stayed at home and flicked through catalogues over an imported aguardiente. But it's nice to sit about and get pissed elsewhere.

I'm thinking these thoughts because I've just come across a fab publishing company called Hg2 designed for hedonists such as myself. Its founder is the extravagantly named Tremayne Carew Pole whose failure to find a decent bar in Budapest drove him to create the company that might locate that bar. In other words, his failure to find a bar to sit about in turned his mind to the basic problems of hedonism: the lack of authoritative guides to cool places to sit (or lie) about in.

Sitting or lying about is a wonderful thing. Do not be ashamed. People serve you, fuck you, guide you, feed you, hydrate you, as multiple pleasure-teats (some harder than others) temptingly play over your yielding and needy orifices - and all because you're not standing up. Hg2 has tapped into the great truths I am articulating now with an ethos that succours sit-downism elsewhere. It captures the glamour, the joy, the sheer purriness of loafing, elsewhere. Some of Hg2's elsewheres I am not familiar with: we are assured that Almaty and Astana in Kazakhstan have chic restaurants and spicy adult clubs. Did Borat know this? I shall be booking a return ticket online so I don't have to get up.

Hedonism to Madame Arcati is the 5* star hotel, with comfy chaises!, that has an "astrologer on call" service, as was the case when I sat about at the opulent Rambagh Palace in Jaipur several years ago. To have my destiny undressed as I fanned my damp, olive-pink cheeks (without dimples) was a thing too divine. "Whatever works for you," as the wise Tremayne Carew Pole says.

Q almost sunk by U2 interview

A spy at Emap tells me that the issue of Q that carried a mega-interview with U2 a couple of months back was the worst-selling in the magazine's history. Time for the Christ in shades to take off the perma-Red Nose.

Attitude's Matthew Todd seeks Cheese Scones

I assume that Matthew Todd, editor of Attitude since last year, placed this entry on MySpace before his giddy ascension:

"Who I'd like to meet: Someone to start a band with. I know a trillion and one muso industry people through work including a couple of very famous producers who said they'd be interested to hear anything I come up with. Wanna start an electro dance pop thang - kinda Pet Shop Boys meets Goldfrapp meets KLF. I sing and write lyrics so looking for a keyboardist/programmer/melody person. Get in touch. Or someone to be my boyfriend, move me to Cornwall/New York and feed me Cheese Scones all day long. Fuck off anyone from Attitude. (Xxxxx) "

Not exactly Anna Wintour, is it?

(My thanks to the naughty boy who drew this to my attention)

Is Love's Beth cover a Ditto of NME's? No

A couple of Arcatistes have drawn my attention to the claim that Love's recent debut Beth Ditto cover is a rip-off of NME's Ditto cover in 2007 (left). I think not.

Whereas NME's is done in vulgar readers' wives style, with the clear intention to fetishise Ditto's voluptuous curves for the purpose of male self-pleasuring (consider the magazine's core readership), Love's is an asexual aestheticising of her form (given that the title is high fashion/art, gay, guest cunt-cock-cocking [ie straight female gay friendly]).

NME has stained Ditto's body with a tan hue: a visual trope of soft porn imagery. Red coverlines subliminally comfort the viewer in a tabloid red-top ambience while the red kiss lips mark on her buttock cheek is both playful and defiant, a common attitude struck by glamour models: a fake frisson is enticing to those who require the simulacrum of will in a sex doll. Ditto bears a Victorian-style come-hither countenance, her lips parted for the fantasy possibility of a reader blow-job, her hair bottled brunette because blonde would not work against the yellowy-gold background, redolent of the sun/Sun - however, given the model's colouring, brunette is most unsuitable here which is paradoxical perfection: colour clash reassures she's human, lower class, not quite with alienating perfecting. At its most extreme this cover is a poster for the taste that finds expression in the movie Feed.

Love's cover is more suggestive of classless exclusion: you are invited merely to admire the thing on the canvas, not to auto-eroticise, not to take part. The light-bleaching of Ditto's body transmutes flesh to stone (white marble?), the deep purple of closed lips hints at sexual unavailability if not death in its advance stage. Ditto's eyes are closed; she is lost in her own world (or dead again?); the viewer's role in this exhibition is to stand back in awed respect, as an aspirant window shopper with nose pressed against Harvey Nicks glass. Fat folds are light minimised, one is not encouraged to be prurient: the red copper hair exists only for one purpose: to set off for complementary effect the mint green background. The squiggly cover-choral-lines both artfully accentuate Ditto's natural curves and script editorial unorthodoxy and personalisation. Ditto's pink, ruched fig-leaf connotes a stylish and witty portcullis to further inquiry.

On other matters, an Arcatiste has kindly referred me to the website of Terry Richardson - the Love photographer whom I described as "off my radar". I now realise why - this is his mother ...

Terry's website

Gunpowder Magazine and a Wintour/Brûlé orgy

I can't imagine anything more dreadful: an Anna Wintour-Tyler Brûlé sandwich (with ancient old me as the filling) in my canopied four-poster. And yet that is the dread image summoned up as I click through a newish online fashion daily called Gunpowder Magazine.

It confessedly aspires to match the work of the two divinities of Fashion & Style (Fasyle?) - my Wintour/Brûlé body warmers - though I can't help but wonder whether either of them would ever willingly showcase the work of, say, photographer Justin Monroe and his Muscle Mary fisters (almost) or The New InterCourses Cookbook and its Creamy Stuffed Figs, as Gunpowder does. I fear that editor Nick Clarke is dangerously contiguous to Arcatiland and its intermittent preoccupations with cock-cunt permutations. If this is the case then of course I am deeply honoured and welcome the future cross-fertilisation of ideas between Gunpowder and the unreadable and deadening zombielands of Vogue/Monocle/Wallpaper*. Certainly, Anna looks like she could do with a Creamy Stuffed Fig.

Even an Enache Florin-designed Peugeot, "with its lightweight body covered with sexy touch-sensors," is headlined I Touch Myself. Can you imagine Tyler, whose carbon footprint makes him the Yeti of International Travel, touching himself? Actually, I can.

So Gunpowder Magazine gets my ringing endorsement: anything that can sexualise a fig or a Peugeot can't go wrong. The fashionistas are sure to catch on once they've learnt there's life after Ugly Betty and death assured to Anna.

Perhaps these two trends can be hastened in a legally nice way.

Click here to have sex with Gunpowder Magazine.