Love Contemporary Blog

NINA HARTLEY

Sex-symbol, porn goddess, and a lady.

Nina Hartley is the woman almost every man over 30 jacked off to at least once.  In the 80s she was L.A. blonde, permed hair, shoulder-pads and an ass no one could forget.  Mainstream audiences know her from the cult classic Boogie Nights and her latest book, entitled “Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex”, is the book everyone wishes their parents had been cool enough to give them on their sixteenth birthday.

The woman is a legend.

When she talks to you, she looks deep into your eyes.  Her voice is confident.  She laughs a lot and has amazingly, beautiful skin.  She’s a classic beauty, like Grace Kelly- but curvier.
I want to call her the Grandmother of Porn- she’s been out there for some time- and though this description would be insult for many 50-year old women, it’s less about age and more about Nina’s attitude; her incredible charisma.  Grandmothers have wisdom, inner-peace.  They are women who have seen enough, done enough, to be deeply intelligent, strong and complex personalities.  They are the ones who tell the stories you want to hear, believe in and learn from.

I met Nina in a hotel in the Hollywood Hills to shoot a 16mm flick and ask some questions.  I knew right away that she was a special kind of a woman.

paola

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I LOVE

New York street survey continues—

1.

Edgar Ayala, 46 years old, Bike Messenger

Hometown: Lima, Peru

I love: The Dictators. It’s a rock band from NYC. One of the members runs a bar down the street. The waitress’s a fucking transvestite who’s in love with me and just got me drunk

2.

Emily Flouton, 27 years old, Actress/fiction writer

Hometown: Boxford, Massachusetts

I love: seeing famous people in the street. I ran into Ethan Hawke in Williamsburg the other day

3.

Jean-Didier Faure, 43 years old, Restaurant owner, Cafe Charbon

I love: flea markets. There’s a good one in the East Village on 11th Street and Avenue A

4.

Bonnie Morales, 42 years old, currently unemployed, seeking a job in Education

Hometown: The Bronx, New York

I love: My mom. She fills the gaps and voids in my life, and there seem to be a lot lately.

4.

Richie, 4 years old, Bonnie’s son

I love: race cars! Air planes! The bus!

5.

Jen Hanley, 27 years old, Fashion Journalist

Hometown: Daytona Beach, Florida

I love: Anne Demeulemeester, my husband, my puppy Nico, opiate drugs and amazing cut leather jackets

6.

Lancelot Isaacs, 33 years old, Hairstylist for Actors and Celebs

Hometown: London, UK

I love: children, because they’re not tainted by all the BS that happen to us when we get older

7.

Tanya S., 35 years old, Sex Shop Manager (PLEASE NOTE THAT SHE DOES NOT WANT HER LAST NAME TO APPEAR IN THE MAGAZINE)

Hometown: The Bronx, New York

I love: having an orgasm out of doggie style sex

8.

Malcolm Harris, 35 years old, Creative Activist, Founder of « Designers for Darfur »

Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica

I love: anything by YSL!

9.

Joe Hazan, 35 year old, Chief Engineer and DJ at East Village Radio

Hometown: Miami, Florida

I love: to play music with strangers and when it gets so good, we just stop and laugh in wonderment

10.

Daphnie Sicre, 33 years old, Theater teacher

Hometown: Madrid, Spain

I love: my dog Nala. She’s so special. She keeps me warm during the cold lonely nights in New York City

11.

Russell Manley, 43 years old, Hairdresser and owner of Tommy Guns Salon

Hometown: London, UK

I love: my wife (OR: red wine and Italian ham)

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Alexa Wilding

Singer and songwriter

www.alexawilding.com

My big love story is with this city. I love New York.  I was born and raised here.  It’s the backdrop for everything that’s happened in my life. All my songs take place on these streets, especially downtown where I grew up.

I can’t really walk down a street in this city without pointing to a curb or a stoop or a tree or a cafe without [remembering] some event that happened there.  My first kiss was on Barrow Street right next to the Greenwich music school. I was 15. My second kiss was around the corner from CBGB’s, on a stoop.  Lot’s of stoop kissing!  I had all these amazing romances on stoops downtown in the village.

My first date with my husband (I didn’t know it was my first date) was right before Christmas. We stood in line at Film Forum. It was the film noir season and we saw ‘The Killers’. Then we went to Arturo’s, the old Italian place on Houston.  Because I didn’t think it was a date, I ordered spaghetti and meatballs because it’s my favorite meal. Then we had a nightcap at Von.

It’s a big playground that’s always available to you, New York. You can always find something wonderful to do and it feels like you’re in your own movie.  Life can never really get that bad if there is somewhere you can fling yourself out into and become part of the city story.  It’s safe to have adventures when you know you can run home, or run into a café or the subway or a cab. I’m a very romantic person so it’s very nice to know that there’s a city in which I can live out all my dramas.  It’s scenery to your love story.

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Ebony Booth

Actress

I don’t necessarily know that I’ve had a love of my life.  I’ve had lots of amorous moments and times when I’ve thought I’ve been in love, but looking back now, I don’t think I’ve had a love of my life. It always felt like there was all this work and strife and hoops to jump trough.  It never really felt comfortable and easy.  It was too hard. It’s like it’s too hard to be love.

So I thought I would talk about what type of love I think would be really fulfilling for me.  My parents aren’t together.  They were never married.  I’m not totally convinced that they were ever in love with each other. So, I think a lot of my notions of romantic love are informed from movies and books and television.  I’ve always had this idea that I would meet someone and we wouldn’t have to date or court each other. It would be really instantaneous, and everything that was special about us we would be able to get right away.   As you get older you realize that things don’t work that way and relationships are really complicated.

I want the love of my life to be someone who just kind of gets me and speaks my language and I don’t really have to do anything. It’s just enough to be me and show up.  This person just wants to be around me- that’s how I feel when I’m really enchanted by someone. Someone who just likes me just the way I am.

I’m still in search for this kind of love.  I’m sure it’s out there.  I haven’t lost hope.

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Corinne Jones

Artist and musician in the group Effi Briest

http://www.myspace.com/effibriest

I was attracted to the idea of saying one sentence about love in a cryptic way because I can’t divulge anything about my life. I found out recently the story of a past life which I thought was pretty good: I was meant to marry an Egyptian Prince and then he died. So in this life I’m looking for that figure.

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There is nothing greater in the world than love. It has been the cause of war, the reason to leave home, the object of killing and conquering worlds. It has been the source of inspiration for many artists throughout time to create something unforgettable. For most people, it has simply been the reason to live.

It’s a new decade now, a new bold era. It´s time to say farewell to the cold and suspicious winds. Leave the flashy bling, the sarcastic “wanna-be cool” attitude and the ridiculously cynical lifestyle behind.

It is a new dawn of pure, emotional honesty and simple pleasures. We are slowly becoming wiser. It is a new decade for modern romantics who demand to love and to be loved. The time to fight for dreams to come true is now. It is a new day for heroes, kings, queens and sentimental warriors.

With all the thousands of magazines that exist today, there are none dedicated to modern love. This is what Love Contemporary is all about. We are not only a magazine, but also a movement. This is the manifesto of our time.

Love Contemporary wants to create emotionally remarkable moments, memories to collect along the way. We not only want to observe this new, beautiful time, but we also want to be part of it. We want to take road trips, camp together and invite people to participate, play and love! Love Contemporary is joyful, deep, poetic, daring, rough and something to remember. It is built on the interaction of people coming together and their emotional and physical communion, resulting in a higher level of beauty and happiness.

The mental landscape of Love Contemporary is a unique mix of innocent Scandinavian purity, Slavic melancholy and sixties vintage sensuality, combined with a contemporary urban edge. Love Contemporary is frivolous but intelligent, easy but shameless, naughty and Nordic erotic cool.

It is an international open community of artists, designers, writers and other creative thinkers and we invite everyone to participate. It’s a magazine painting a picture of what’s going on in modern love today. It’s a kind of public experiment, a scientific lab in search for different dimensions of love, be it social, philosophical, artistic or sexual, while breaking many of the traditional magazine conventions in the process.

Sometimes it’s easier to think objects or phenomenon as people in order to understand their true character.

The most charismatic personalities in our history have been the ones who have had great opinions and have been honest and brave enough to say them aloud. They have loved a lot, they have been adored and they have been hated. But they are the ones that lived large. They have been passionate, sensitive, serious and sparkling. I would want our magazine to be a great lover, living free, brave enough to admit its mistakes. I would want it to be a human, a passionate leader and to light up the dark, unknown paths.

I would want it to be the one to carry the fire, not just the one to shine.

– Paola Suhonen, Editor-in-Chief, Love Contemporary

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