Penthouse, January 2002

Here ís an awesome sentence for you to cut your teeth on: With its power to commodify persons and personify commodities, the fetishist's vision potently cross-wires our primal needs for identity and possession near the mysterious heart of human desire.

So writes I.S. Levine in his preface to "The Beauty of Fetish: Volume II," a coffee-table book of, well, girlie photographs by Steve Diet Goedde. Commodify? Personify? In "The Time of Your Life," a wonderful play by the late William Saroyan, there's an old barroom character who keeps muttering, over and over again: "No foundation, all the way down the line."

Exactly.

That the girlie photos here are vaguely offbeat, off center and which is to say, offering a farfetched nod in the general direction of Fetish and cannot be denied, but nothing at hand could possibly be adjudged "near the mysterious heart of human desire" (except perhaps the impeccable face of the Persephone on page 84, whose long dark hair curtains her breasts as she gazes out a window dreaming of ??? like Maya Deren in "Meshes of the Afternoon."). [Ed.: To access this reference, see still from the film, courtesy of Picpal.com.]

Fact is, "The Beauty of Fetish: Volume II," like any other book of photographs, must stand or fall on its own: on the pictures. Forget the words, though photographer Goedde supplies a few of his own at the end of the book. Van Gogh went from the potato farms of Holland to the fields of Arles, and discovered sun. Matisse went from Paris to Nice to Tangiers, and discovered color. Steve Diet Goedde went from Chicago to Los Angeles, where "stucco replaced rust, mountains replaced desolate lots, green replaced gray, and bright sunshine replaced gloom." In Los Angeles he also discovered freedom "a major transition in my life that would flower into the first Beauty of Fetish volume in 1998."

Okay, letís look at the pictures.

There are no whips, no blindfolds, no gags, no ropes, no four-poster beds in "The Beauty of Fetish: Volume II", and only one incidental set of dangling handcuffs. What there ís quite a lot of in this compendium is latex, leather goods, corsets (leather or otherwise), steering wheels, boots, and 8-inch spiked heels that no human being really walks in. Mr. Goedde does make useful employment of a good many ordinary everyday settings and props: automobile seats, a shingled wall, a trellis, a swimming pool, a rubber float, a fridge, a kitchen faucet (its water being lapped up by a laughing maiden giving us the eye).

Also table lamps: once as a masturbatory implement, again as sheer Magritte Dada nonsense in a girl-as-tabletop arrangement - an homage, we're informed, to an earlier such image by Britain's Allen Jones. Another tribute, witting or not, is the photograph of a huge factory wheel on page 44, with sleek black-sheathed legs and thighs taking the place of Charlie Chaplin as per his film Modern Times. On page 99; there's the peroxide blonde with her bottom stuffed into a beer-bucket; and what pops unwanted into mind is Hustler magazine's famous, invidious cartoon of a female torso stuffed head-down into a meat grinder. On the beer-bucket's facing page is an equally weird photo: another blonde half-packed into an open suitcase. This is, one hopes, not fetishistic, but it's plenty perverse.

For just plain old-fashioned sex there is gorgeous Aria Giovanni, nude or nude but for a black-leather chastity belt on pages 81 (standing) and 82-83 (supine). Subtract the chastity belt and you subtract the "fetishism." Photographer Goedde would seem to have a thing for posteriors. It would be hard to better the plenteous buttocks of page 72 capped, of course, by a pair of spiked heels pointing heavenward.

Much farther on in the book a similarly high-heeled pair of shoes perches chastely on a rock amidst a running stream, next to the young woman who, seated on her own rock, head bent, face hidden, is struggling to undo the back clasp of her patent-leather black dress. What can be the fetish here? Skinny-dipping? Maybe the best fetish of all is simply as Mr. Goedde's title puts it - beauty.

Ward Stradlater, Penthouse Magazine