The great city of Baltimore has finally decided to give The Baltimore Guerrilla Suspension Crew their 15 minutes in the sun by writing an article about us for The City Paper. It's going in the Valentine's Day issue. I didn't really understand the connection between artistic urban guerrilla style suspension and Valentine's Day in terms of Narwhal-dom, but after learning that the story is actually about kinky love, how could we say no? Hopefully BDSM and kink get a shown in a positive light via this article. I mean, what could be more positive than a bunch of beautiful people hanging around naked/in underwear?
F0r those of you who don't know what the BGSC is, let me give you a quick overview. The Baltimore Guerrilla Suspension Crew is something that Daddy and I cooked up a little less than a year ago when we first began to learn rope suspension. Suspension to us isn't really about play; it's more of a performance. It's an art and art meant to be seen by everyone. So we started to do things in public that we believed could show the average Narwhal that BDSM isn't so scary; it can be quite beautiful in it's own right. We also wanted to showcase the unusual beauty we found in Charm City. The project really started to gain popularity and before we knew it, we had a small following in our area and tons of people wanting to be riggers or rope bottoms for our photoshoots. It was, and is, pretty exciting. I've gotten a
tumblr up and started that we post our pictures, bios and other things of interest. You should check it out and stroke our egos a bit.
We originally planned to do said photoshoot off of the cannon in Federal Hill, an homage to the original shoot we did there when we were scrubs that lacked any real photographers. The photos we have from the summer '11 shoot are all cell phone shots: grainy and rough. We really wanted to go back and put that Ham Sandwich, our photographer, shine on it. He's really taken our project to the next level. The cannon would have been perfect: it overlooks the Inner Harbor. It really proves that what we do is out there, in the public eye.
The major problem we ran into was that last minute, mother nature decided to give us the middle finger and snow. Federal Hill is quite steep and I remember that the first time we did a shoot their we ran into some dangerous issues that we absolutely could not address if there was snow and ice everywhere, so we ended up scraping this location for another time. Instead, we chose a merry-go-round outside of the Maryland Science Center. This also overlooks the Inner Harbor and gives that quintessential Baltimore view of the harbor's dingy sky and water.
We brought a bunch of newbies with us, N and J, a rigger and rope bottom, respectively. We also brought my girl-crush, Misha, along as well. She's never done a guerrilla shoot before and had always wanted to come out. I always feel like I stare at her and never make any advances when it comes to getting to know her more intimately. Girl-bot fail.
We kept the suspensions simple, just inversions, and dirty quick. Nothing feels better than kicking it old school with the guerrilla hits that last a grand total of 15 minutes or so. Normally, I usually feel pretty prepared for guerrilla shoots, but the cold weather really threw me for a loop. Luckily, N and J are from cold weather and knew exactly what to bring to make sure we didn't freeze our cute little bodies to bits. The suspensions themselves weren't bad at all, probably the most comfortable to date.
I do believe that Ham Sandwich and The City Paper's photographer got in some really excellent shots :) I saw the raw images from Hammie and I just know they'll be fantastic. I just need to grab model release forms for N and J (aka the 'please don't sue me' paperwork) before I can post their images.
