Robert Rosen

In the final weeks of her life, Sonja Wagner told her friends to go to her loft and take whatever pieces of art they wanted. There was much to choose from among the paintings, photographs, metal sculptures, and assemblages. Sonja, who passed away last year at age 85, was a prolific artist. My wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, and I simply didn't have enough wall or storage space to take everything we loved.

As I was browsing the collection, I came across a framed photograph that Sonja had manipulated to look like a painting—that was one of her specialties. It was a gorgeous shot of pennants flying above a street in a Spanish city. One of the pennants said "Tio Pepe," a type of sherry.

"We need to take this one," I said to Mary Lyn.

Our friends Rocio and Jimmy Sanz own Tio Pepe, a Spanish restaurant that's been on West 4th Street, in Greenwich Village, for more than 50 years.

The other week, I brought the photo to Tio Pepe and told the manager, Leana Zittlau, about Sonja. She hung it on the wall in a conspicuous spot next to a Spanish flag, off to the left as you walk in. Leana then shot me standing next to the photo and posted it on Tio Pepe's Instagram.

The plan now is for Sonja's friends to gather by her photo for a meal at what I now call The Tio Pepe Museum of Fine Art and once again celebrate her extraordinary life.

You can see more of Sonja's artwork and read about her life in an article I wrote for The Village Voice.

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On days like this, when I prefer to not think too much about the need (obligation?) to write something substantial about the four days Mary Lyn Maiscott and I spent in Uvalde, Texas, on the first anniversary of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, I find it helpful to look at the whimsical creature known as Ruby Leggs, created by my late friend Sonja Wagner. So I plucked another Ruby from my Sonjabox. In this one, titled As I See It, Ruby has slipped out of her signature high heels and is having a smoke in her bedroom by an open window that looks out on West 37th Street, which is where Sonja lived for 46 years. Note Ruby's collection of shoes in the shoe rack next to the window, her cat occupying one of the shelves.

What I find most amusing about this Ruby are the black-and-white studies for the cat. It's as if she had a spiky punk hairdo and her tail were an arm of saguaro cactus (kind of like my own cat, Oiseau).

I hope this hit of Ruby has improved your outlook on a day in New York City where the air isn't fit to breathe and the sky is so hazy from wildfires burning in Canada that the sun looks like the moon.

If you want to read more about Sonja and her art, please see my tribute, "The Life of Sonja," in The Village Voice.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

One of the more whimsical creations of my friend Sonja Wagner, an artist who died March 3, 2023, at age 85, was her Ruby Leggs series, drawn over a 40-year span. I describe Ruby in The Village Voice as "a pair of bright crimson lips mounted on a long pair of legs in high heels, gallivanting about New York" and elsewhere. (She might also be described as the personification of vagina dentata.) Sonja had always wanted to publish her Ruby series as a book, but the project never came to pass.

After Sonja's death, two of her friends, Wendy Deutelbaum and Dee Morris, with help from Alexander Kalman, assembled what they call A Box for Sonja. The box contains 30 of her Ruby Leggs drawings along with preliminary studies for each one, and my piece, "The Life of Sonja," that ran in the Voice. They made only 16 boxes and gave them to Sonja's friends. It was an honor to see my story included.

Danger or Desire, the cover image from A Box for Sonja, shows Ruby walking at night in Central Park. The other image, Later That Night, is Ruby and her cat on July 13, 1977, the day of the New York City blackout, which occurred soon after Sonja had moved into the Midtown loft that she would transform into a Xanadu-like hub of social activity.

A Box for Sonja is a beautiful tribute to an artist who was underappreciated in her time. Perhaps more boxes will be made available—because Ruby Leggs is one of many Sonja creations that deserve to reach a wider audience.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Without death, we couldn't appreciate life. I read that somewhere recently. I don't know who said it, but I think it's true, and if it is true there's been a lot of life appreciation in this household lately. My wife, Mary Lyn Maiscott, and I have both been writing about people who died. Death, it seems, has inspired us.
 

Mary Lyn is a singer-songwriter. Last year she wrote a song about the horrendous shooting at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where an emotionally disturbed man with an AR-15 murdered 21 students and teachers. "Alithia's Flowers (Children of Uvalde)" was chosen Song of the Year on Michael J. Mand's St. James Infirmary show, on OWWR, Old Westbury College Radio, on Long Island. You can listen to the podcast of that show here. Michael's heartfelt introduction begins at 2:44:30. (As I write this, there's been yet another school shooting, this time in Nashville.)

Mary Lyn's latest song, "My Cousin Sings Harmony," is about her cousin Gail Harkins, who died in 2021. It's a story song, a tale of childhood, family, rock 'n' roll, and the joy of music. (You can read more about Gail here.) I think it's one of the best things Mary Lyn has ever written—a magical composition that continues to sound fresh no matter how many times I hear it (and I've heard it a lot). Next Friday, April 7, Michael will preview "My Cousin Sings Harmony" on St. James Infirmary. You can listen live beginning at 1 p.m. Eastern Time or listen to the podcast the following day. The song will be available to stream and download April 13, Gail's birthday.

If you've been keeping up with this blog, then you know about my friend Sonja Wagner, an artist who died March 3. My tribute to her, "The Life of Sonja," was published in The Village Voice while she was still with us. The above video, by filmmaker Jules Bartkowski, was played at her memorial. Sonja had circles of friends within circles of friends within circles of friends. If you never had the opportunity to meet her, Jules's video will give you a sense of who she was. "Flat Foot Floogie," which you'll hear on the soundtrack, was one of the biggest hits of 1938, the year Sonja was born.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Just about everything I've ever published in a book, newspaper, or magazine I've rewritten 10 or 15 times, sometimes more. That's what I have to do to get my sentences to sound natural, as if they flowed effortlessly from my computer. To paraphrase Thomas Edison: Good writing is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.

When I wrote "The Life of Sonja," a tribute to the artist Sonja Wagner, which ran in The Village Voice, something miraculous happened. I'd been thinking about her a lot since she was diagnosed with a terminal disease and given only a short time to live. I wanted to write something, but wasn't sure what to say or where to publish it.

Early one morning in late January, a few days after Sonja's birthday, as I was walking on The High Line, a fully formed paragraph popped into my head—the first paragraph of what became "The Life of Sonja." When I got home, I keyed the paragraph into my computer, and the rest of the story, more than a thousand words, flowed effortlessly, in a way that hasn't happened with an article of that length in longer than I can remember. It was as if a muse had dictated it to me, and I wondered if that muse could have been Sonja.

I knew I'd written something that captured her spirit and personality, so I sent it to the editor of the Voice, explaining the situation. I wanted Sonja to be able to read it while she still could. I wanted it to be a celebration of her life, not an obituary. The Voice got back to me in less than 24 hours. They were going to run it ASAP. I spent the next day in a frenzy running around Manhattan photographing her artwork to illustrate the piece. It appeared on the Voice website February 7.

A few days later I visited Sonja at a rehab facility in the Bronx. She was doing well that day, sitting up in bed and not needing oxygen. Just as I'd hoped, she was able to read the tribute, critiquing and commenting on it as she went along. "The Life of Sonja" gave Sonja a great deal of pleasure. She was thrilled to see her art alongside another piece about Edward Hopper. And then, in true Sonja fashion, she asked if I could score her some weed.

When Sonja died in the early morning hours of March 3, the Voice asked me to add a postscript "for the historical record." So I did. And now it's official. Sonja, my muse, has entered history.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

The first edition of Beaver Street: A History of Modern Pornography, published only in the UK in 2010 (it's now a collector's item), contains an eight-page photo section. One of those pages, above, has a picture of art director Sonja Wagner in her 1980s prime. She shares the page with some of the greatest porn stars of her generation (clockwise from top right): Dick Rambone; detail from Wagner's painting "Single Girl in Motion," based on a layout in D-Cup magazine; Wagner; Paul Thomas; a page from the 30th anniversary issue of Swank magazine, November 1984; Seka; John Holmes.

Sonja died March 3, after a brief illness, leaving a hole in the social fabric of New York City. As we continue to mourn her passing I will continue to write about her. Call it a vigil for Sonja.

You can read more about Sonja's life and art in The Village Voice and, of course, in Beaver Street, though the later editions, published worldwide, have no photo section.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

Consider this blog a vigil for my friend Sonja Wagner, who lies gravely ill in a Manhattan hospice. If you don't know about Sonja and her multifaceted art, please check out my article "The Life of Sonja" published recently in The Village Voice.

Last week, as an addendum to the Voice article, I examined her Dead Blondes triptych, paintings of three sex symbols who died tragically: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, and JonBenét Ramsey. This week I'll look at Sonja's take on three men who left ugly scars on the early years of the 21st century. Two of them are dead; the third one is undead. They're the kind of men whose faces most people never want to look at again. But to her they were a source of inspiration. Sonja calls them The Crusaders and The Great Dictator. As with Dead Blondes, she was exploring her own emotional reactions to horrific events. The images are based on prints of photographs taken from the Internet, which Sonja then hand-painted to give them their distinctive quality.

Dick Cheney, vice president under George W. Bush; Saddam Hussein, former president of Iraq; and Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda, were warmongers and terrorists who brought unfathomable misery to the lives of millions of people around the globe. For those of you who have forgotten, here are thumbnail sketches of their most notorious atrocities:

"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney, the most powerful vice president in American history, stated, unequivocally, in 2002. This led to the disastrous US crusade against Iraq, and the deaths of approximately 7,000 American soldiers and between 275,000 and 306,000 Iraqi civilians. No weapons of mass destruction were found. Now retired from politics, Cheney is kept alive with a mechanical heart.

Between 1979, when he assumed the presidency of Iraq, and 2006, when he was hanged, the Great Dictator Saddam (as he was known) conducted a crusade against his own people in order to remain in power, committing systematic murder, maiming, torture, imprisonment, rape, and repression.

Bin Laden, scion of a wealthy Saudi family, was the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, crusade against America, attacking New York and Washington with hijacked airliners, which brought down the twin towers of the World Trade Center and slammed into the Pentagon, destroying a portion of the building. (A third hijacked plane heading for the Capitol building, in Washington, crashed in Pennsylvania.) US Navy SEAL Team 6 shot bin Laden in the head in May, 2011, in a compound in Pakistan where he'd been hiding out for five years.

Just as Sonja transformed schlocky pornography into fine art, she transformed these two Crusaders and one Great Dictator into iconic images that some collectors have hung on their walls in the name of irony, which I think would please her.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

In my Village Voice tribute to the life and art of Sonja Wagner, who is seriously ill, I described her body of work as running "the gamut from the religious to the profane." Somewhere in the middle of that gamut is her Dead Blondes triptych, three Warhol-like paintings, which she also made into prints, of two women and one very young girl, all of whom were sex symbols who met tragic ends.

The official cause of Marilyn Monroe's death, in 1962, in LA, at age 36, is probable suicide by acute barbiturate poisoning, though speculation has persisted for decades that the CIA or John and Robert Kennedy had her murdered.

Jayne Mansfield, seen above, was Monroe's chief competitor in the sex-symbol arena. She died in 1967, at age 34, in a car crash in Mississippi. Her attorney Sam Brody and their driver, Ronnie Harrison, were also killed, though three of her children traveling in the back seat, including Mariska Hargitay, survived.

Six-year-old JonBenét Ramsey, a child beauty queen, died of strangulation and a skull fracture. Her body was discovered December 26, 1996, in the basement of her family home in Boulder, Colorado. To date, nobody has been convicted of the murder.

As grisly as the circumstances surrounding these three deaths seem, it's typical of the kind of material from which Sonja drew her inspiration.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

The Village Voice did a nice job putting together a retrospective of Sonja Wagner's artwork to accompany my story about her that ran last week. They had a Ruby Leggs; a puzzle piece painting; a ribbon painting; two photographs, Semana Santa, The Brotherhood, Seville, Spain and Temple of Aphrodisia; and a couple of erotic paintings including Stiletto & Dick. But they didn't include a tornado painting.

Not long ago, Sonja, inspired by her Kansas upbringing, had been in the midst of a tornado period, and some of those paintings were used to decorate a home in the Showtime series The Affair. Here then is the untitled tornado painting that hangs on my own wall. If you stare at it long enough it might carry you off to Oz.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

If you read my book Beaver Street then you're familiar with Sonja Wagner. She was my art director for such distinguished fetish rags as D-Cup, Shaved, and Plump and Pink. She's also a great artist whose paintings, sculptures, and photographs run the gamut from the religious to the profane. We worked together for 15 years and became close friends. I'm sad to report that Sonja is terminally ill and has only a short time to live. The Village Voice recently published a tribute I wrote about her, and included a wonderful retrospective of her artwork. Click here to check out the story of Sonja Wagner's amazing life and art.

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All my books are available on Amazon, all other online bookstores, and at your local brick-and-mortar bookstore.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter or my eternally embryonic Instagram.

All three parts of "The Provocateur," my series on artist and filmmaker Robert Attanasio, are now posted on Erotic Review.

In the 1970s, I worked with Attanasio on Observation Post, the radical student newspaper at the City College of New York. We published a lot of controversial material, much of it having to do with pornography and religion. Working on OP changed the course of our lives, but we drifted apart after graduation and eventually lost touch. I hadn’t heard from Attanasio in 30 years. Then, in February 2015, he contacted me and we reunited. By November he was dead—from cancer.

“The Provocateur,” adapted from a book I’m working on about the moment in the 1970s when the student left gave way to punk, is a retrospective of my relationship with Attanasio, and a journey through his art and film.

Click here to read Part I, Part II, and now Part III.

Attanasio appears at the beginning of this episode of The Madness of Art.

I invite you to join me on Facebook or follow me on Twitter. Read More 

"If Surrealism leans towards the pornographic, then outright pornographers find kindred subversives in the Surrealists--as with long-time pornographer Robert Rosen who claimed to embrace the idea 'that pornography and transgressive art could be one and the same.'" --from an untitled paper on pornography and surrealism, submitted to the English and Film department at the University of Exeter, U.K., and posted anonymously online

Readers of Beaver Street should be familiar with Sonja Wagner, whom I described in the book as my "dyslexic, spliff-smoking freelance art director," and whom I gave some of the best lines, such as the one on pages 123-124, when she asks our esteemed publisher, Chip Goodman, "Is something wrong, Chip, dear? Didn't Bobby and I put enough incest into your filthy little book?"

If you haven't read Beaver Street, then you can read about some of Wagner's erotic artwork on this blog.

Last night, over a couple of shots of vodka in her studio, Wagner got into talking about Ruby Leggs, a character she created more than 30 years ago, and in that time has produced dozens of Ruby paintings, mostly documenting her curious New York City life. Now Wagner has decided that she wants to publish the complete Ruby Leggs story in a book.

So she asked me to answer the following question: Who is Ruby Leggs?

I’ll give it a shot.

At her most basic, Ruby is three pairs: a pair of full, scarlet lips mounted on a pair of long, shapely legs, who’s always wearing a pair of high heels. Though lacking a head, arms, and a torso, she still manages to radiate erotic heat. This, then, makes Ruby a fetishist’s delight, a woman reduced to two body parts and a fashion accessory. In the above painting, Ruby is arousing a subway car full of men who ogle her through the peepholes they’ve cut in their newspapers. But the title of the painting, “No One Ever Looks at Me Anymore,” shows that Ruby is also a naïf on the loose in the big city, a creature unaware of her erotic power.

And New York is full of women like that, which makes Ruby Leggs somehow real, a recognizable character, somebody you’d like to meet, sit down with at a cafe, and over a couple of drinks ask her about herself. Because you know, behind those perfect red lips and white teeth, Ruby Leggs has a tongue, and she can do a lot of things with it, including tell you herself who she is, if she’s so inclined.

They're rioting in England! The economy's melting down! Everything's out of control! So let's talk about art again.

The other week I wrote about the erotic paintings of my former art director Sonja Wagner, a character in Beaver Street who goes by her real name and has some of the best lines in the book. Her paintings, I suggested, served as useful illustrations of the ongoing debate about what is art and what is smut. And I said that even her most overtly pornographic images, ones that I wouldn’t risk showing on this website, are still, clearly, art—because of the skill and imagination with which they were created, and their emotional impact.

I’ve also come to realize that Sonja’s paintings, based on her D-Cup layouts, are a parallel narrative to Beaver Street, though to appreciate this you had to be there, either when the photos were shot or when Sonja and I put together the layouts.

Her paintings remind me of the photographers who shot them—Steve Colby, John Lee- Graham, and Falcon Foto—of being in London or California and directing the shoots, of interviewing the models, or of simply standing in Sonja’s cubicle and watching her place the photos down on boards, and slice them with her X-acto knife to achieve a perfect fit. All of which I wrote about in Beaver Street.

And it amazes me that these layouts, created decades ago to be nothing more than disposable trash and masturbation fodder, have been transformed as if by magic into enduring works of art.

The past few days I’ve been posting the erotic paintings of Sonja Wagner, a character in Beaver Street and my art director when I was editing porn mags. I’ve used these images to explore the question: What is art and what is smut? The three previous paintings, “Reclining Girl,” “Single Girl in Motion,” and “Standing Girl,” are all, clearly, art, and for that reason I didn’t hesitate to post, uncensored, the entire image.

Today’s image is a detail from “Tropical Girl/Boy,” a startling 90" x 60" oil on canvas, based on a pictorial shot by Falcon Foto. Yes, this, too, is art. But I’m not posting the entire painting because it’s far filthier than any of her other erotic paintings—the “girl” is holding in her hand the semi-erect penis of the “boy.” Even if Sonja were as famous as Michelangelo and dead for 500 years, The New York Times wouldn’t post the entire image, and those are the unassailable standards we go by at The Daily Beaver, at least when it comes to art.

However, if you’re over 18 and you want to see “Tropical Girl/Boy” in all its naked glory, please click here.

Why? Because the art of Sonja Wagner is fun to look at. Do you need a better reason?

Between the massacre in Norway, the death of Amy Winehouse, the domestic terrorists posing as Republican Congressmen who are threatening to torpedo the US economy, and the 100-degree temperatures that baked New York City, all of which happened over one dreadful weekend, there’s a lot to recover from today. And one way to recover is to contemplate a work of erotic art.

To continue the ever-provocative Art vs. Smut debate, I’ll share another painting by Sonja Wagner, who was my art director on D-Cup and numerous other smut rags for 15 years.

If you’ve been keeping up with this blog then you know that Wagner’s a character in Beaver Street, and the only “private citizen” who allowed me to use her real name in the book. And if you’ve read Beaver Street, then you know she has some of the best lines. (See pages 123-124, for example.)

The woman in “Reclining Girl”—based on a layout of a John Lee-Graham photo set that Wagner designed for D-Cup—is Danni Ashe. Ashe, whose career I discuss in detail in Beaver Street, was the first model to discover that it was possible to have a virtual career in cyberspace. She launched her website, “Danni’s Hard Drive,” in 1995. It made her a “dot-cum” millionaire and took her from the cover of D-Cup to the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

But is it art? Ms. Wagner, would you care to respond?

“One of the pornographer's stock images—the ‘single girl’—returns in this work, but turned to my own ends,” says Wagner. “Instead of a quick, crude, easily replicable photograph intended for physical release, I offer an intensively detailed painting that asks the viewer to look again and again: to take pleasure in line, design and color.”

I hope “Reclining Girl” brings you a moment of pleasure in these traumatic times.