One of the jewels in SL’s naturist crown has to be the lovely, charming, photogenic Lupe’s Magical Forest.
I’ve been meaning to do a major article on it for ages, and have only recently got around to joining, as I previously relied on Pookes to cover it for me. And what a ‘miss’ it was, for me, to have wasted so much time not joining, because seen first hand it’s a stunningly beautiful build.
I’ll begin with a few photos from our library of shots from it, and just ask you to marvel at the beautiful detail involved, right down to the dandelion seeds floating in the breeze in the top photo.
It really would be possible to wander its tracks for an hour, simply taking SL photos of nature, and create the most wonderful album of its vistas.
What I particularly like about it is its dismissal of ‘modernity’. No cars, or even tractors or bikes, to be seen, and it has an aura of peace and tranquility, not always available in SL because there’s no commercial aspect to be had. People do love to build, build beautifully and create wide, empty spaces in SL, but the tier cost (i.e. the cost of renting some SL space) can sometimes be prohibitively expensive. Thus, people are drawn to building shops and selling items of SL clothing to claw back some tier costs. Which is fine, but sometimes it feels we’re missing large chunks of ‘the SL natural world’. I’d have thought a way to build and grow SL (or the planned ‘Samsara’ V2 version of the game) would be to reduce tier costs substantially, practically to zero, for those who wish to create the natural world just for the sake of it existing, and being there for us all to explore.
As the summer progresses it’s my intention to revisit the major SL naturist sims, Eden, Turtle, Su Casa, Lupe’s (again) and report on the state of naturism around the grid.
You can’t have failed to notice that 2017 is the 50th anniversary of the original 1967 ‘Summer of Love’, and if we take the release of Sergeant Pepper (released May 26th in the UK, June 2nd in the US) as the kick-off point (you may wish to argue a different date for valid reasons, but it seems the release of Pepper is as good a place as anywhere to have some arbitrary start date), then the 50th anniversary celebrations have now begun. We’ll be celebrating it on SLN as well, and highlighting RL events, some of which we’ll try to replicate in SL, throughout the summer months.
I suppose the summer of love had two main centres of existence in the minds of the public. Swinging London and San Francisco. Indeed, beyond ‘Pepper’, kaftanned beautiful people, Hendrix and Carnaby Street, much of the focus of the summer of love would have been in San Francisco, with important counterculture bands, such as the Grateful Dead, emerging from there, and activity around Haight-Ashbury and the Castro district.
In many ways the hopes and freedoms tantalisingly offered by the original summer of love lives on in San Francisco and could conceivably claim itself as the capital city of LGBT activism and rights issues, as well as being an important centre for the visibility and acceptance of nude activism.
Gypsy Taub, whom we’ve written about on numerous occasions on the blog, and even awarded one of our coveted ‘Heroes of Naturism’ awards 😉 continues to fight for nude rights in San Francisco with another march celebrating the summer of love.
San Francisco also has a key role in offering both topless, and then bottomless, go-go dancing, courtesy of Carol Doda, at the Condor Club.
While Carol Doda’s exploits aren’t naturism as I understand it at all, we do need to recognise that it was breakthrough moments such as these that would draw nudity, public nudity, more into the open. Previously, naturism (my understanding of naturism) existed behind privet hedges in private clubs. Our ability to enjoy nudist beaches and resorts, to walk public roads in the nude (be it where I go in Spain, or in San Francisco) owe just a little to the likes of Carol Doda. Her breakthrough would have helped to start debate and discussion on morality and what’s acceptable while much naturism possibly still existed out of view, being quiet.
Join us, then, throughout the next 3 months as we embark on a celebration of that first summer of love with an occasional series of blogposts about RL & SL events where nudity is visible and acceptable, thanks to many pioneers from half a century ago.
A chocolate (i.e. candy) bar in the UK is Fry’s (the maker’s, now owned by Cadbury) Turkish Delight. I’m not a chocolate/candy person, but I do occasionally binge on a couple of bars of chocolate/candy and then forget about chocolate for another six months.
My favourite, now, is Cadbury’s (the maker’s) Dairy Milk. Not actually ‘chocolate’, allegedly, as the EU, the European commission -another reason to hate them- tried to say that British chocolate wasn’t actually chocolate. It was ‘vegelate‘, as its chocolate content didn’t meet EU requirements, and Cadbury fought a 30(!) year campaign against the EU to have it marketed as chocolate. Try telling a Brit that, and try telling a Brit that the EU is a good thing if these are the sort of battles it -the EU- is going to fight. Absolute nonsense.
Anyway, Turkish Delight , in the UK, is a confection covered with chocolate rather than the same confection, in rose or lemon flavours, dipped in sugar, the original way method of manufacture.
The TV advert, featured above, comes directly from my childhood, simpler times 30 years ago when there was a sense of the east being exotic, and much less a sense of Turkey being ‘them and us’, in the days when Turkey was more secular than it is under President Erdogan, a man history will hopefully record as anathema to the edicts of Turkey’s founder, Ataturk. Erdogan’s an asshole, but hey, that’s not so different from most politicians from Trump to Blair to Juncker and Tusk, via Merkel and Hollande.
By the way, if I’ve offended your political ‘hero’ in the list above… good. You shouldn’t have political heroes. They’re flawed human beings like the rest of us and more flawed than most.
Anyway, my point is that the world has simultaneously become much smaller and much more zonal in my lifetime, much more ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Back in the 80s, when I was a child, you could present a sense of ‘exotic Turkey’, in a positive way. It was a place of mystique. A place, along with other parts of the Middle East, that contained a harem. Of course, that exoticism as presented by orientalists was nonsense. The harem wasn’t a place of untold sexual pleasures, a place filled with concubines and belly dancers, but rather a place where women sat separate from the men. But that exotic, mysterious harem persists in western culture.
I’m delighted to see that the Paris 1900 sim has an exhibition of Orientalism on display in one of their buildings, if only for the fact that now is a time in history when we need to garner a greater understanding of other cultures, so any broadening of knowledge, even in an SL context, even if partly historically incorrect, is to be welcomed.
You’ll also find a couple of gifts available. A free male ‘Aladdin Pirate’ outfit, partly modelled by Timiany below, and a female exotic dancer outfit priced at L$10.
Once inside, there’s an exhibition of paintings with some excellent informative panels. The whole thing is exceptionally well done.
Made aware of the exhibition, I teleported over to wander around and enjoy the exhibition for itself, and also because I’m drawn like a moth to the flame where harem pants are available.
A selection of his & hers harem pants
I love ’em! Both in and out of SL.
Jim, Mr. Keng, and I owe a couple of pairs each, probably closest in the style shown centre in each of the above photos. They’re great lounging and leisure wear and are a loose, airy garment that we do utilise in the context of naturism, easy to throw on with a T shirt and look respectably dressed (if a little hippy like, but there’s nothing wrong with that) should someone ring the doorbell unexpectedly. They also go on naturist holidays with us and they’re my preferred style of dress for yoga classes I’ve recently taken up.
Ella utilises the Aladdin yoga pants for her yoga class.
In case you’re wondering about my hairstyle in the photo above…all will be revealed on Thursday! 😉
These pants are also ideal for anyone who role-plays any sort of hippy or alternative lifestyle in SL, as they’re fairly commonplace in hippy circles. And, of course, those counterculture lifestyles do often feature reasonable levels of causal undress as normal modes of daywear.
Timiany models the pirate pants and its accompanying turban (rest of outfit not used)
With Spain, and our first naturist vacation of the year, less than a month away, harem pants will go into each of our naturist suitcases.
Worth visiting for the free pants, and also worth visiting for the educational nature of the exhibition, ‘Orientalism’ at Paris 1900 sim shows SL done exceptionally well. I’ll be picking up on ‘hippy’ type clothing, and attitudes to nudity often displayed within that lifestyle, next week.
Ella
EDITED TO ADD: PIRATE OUTFIT RAISED IN PRICE FROM L$0 to L$100????!!!!!
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