Work of art that's gotten you laid the most.

Is it a movie that your dates can’t resist? Is it a go-to song or album that works every time? Is it a painting that you allude to or a character in a book you reference that somehow makes you that much more irresistably attractive/sensitive/intellectual/?

Incredibly, for me, it’s e.e. cummings’ poem that begins “somewhere I have never travelled”, particularly the last quatrain:

Looking back, I am surprised how many opportunities have come up where I could use this stanza. It speaks of passion and soulfulness (without explicitly mentioning the L-word) and encourages the fondling & interlocking of fingers and the sincere examining of one’s partner’s baby blues (or browns or greens, etc.). Even though I was an English major, it still seemed to impress the ladies when I could extemporaneously find just the perfect literary piece to fit the mood (though that was the only literary piece that I could recite by heart, and just about any hot-&-heavy mood would work).

Don’t get me wrong–this isn’t like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day; I loved the poet & the poem first, and my retention of those words came before the notion of employing them in such a way, but I have to admit that eec definitely did help, if not explicitly close the deal, then get me a little closer to “the power of [her] intense fragility” and “the color of [her] countries.”

So, which great (or even not-so-great, but incredibly effective) creative achievement has helped your love life the most?

Shakespeare - Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Well worth memorizing back in Junior High. Although these days I’m having great success with dbygawdcapn’s

Roses are red
Violets are blue
I want to put
My penis in you.

:smiley:

Almost any song by the Kings of Convenience. Particularly Singing Softly To Me.

Side one of Led Zeppelin IV.

I once knew a guy who said that his girlfriend’s favorite song was Dust in the Wind, by Kansas. So he taped it over and over again on a cassette for them to boink to. I always think of that when I hear it, and giggle, because it’s not the sort of song that lends itself well to boinking. At least, I don’t imagine so.

The Red House Painters’ self-titled (Rollercoaster) album was an insant panty-dropper in the mid to late nineties. I never used it unfairly, though; with great power comes great responsibility.

Sonnet 29 was read at my wedding.

For me, it would be Peter Gabriel’s album Passion, the soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ. I always say he should have called it Play This While You’re Fucking.

I must be old. My go-to song in high school was Open Arms by Journey.

Small, green portraits of Benjamin Franklin seem to work pretty well…

:smiley:

A former roommate came home blushing prettily once. She handed me a scrap of colored paper on which was scrawled a poem. She said that this guy had met her at work, asked for her name and a piece of paper, then went off and brought this back about five minutes later. “He wrote it for me,” she said, amazed. I read it. It was very general, very trite, and cleverly designed that her name, Erica, did not cause it to break either metre or rhyme.

I’m afraid that I scoffed and said I reckoned that he learned it by rote, then wrote it out with the name of any girl who took his fancy. She believed me.

It would have worked, if it weren’t for this meddling kid…

A “cummings” poem gets you laid? How appropriate! :smiley:

The Bonzo Dog Band. I’d talk about them and eventually the women would want to come to my apartment to listen to them.

You’ve got me beat by about a year I guess.
It took me both discs of 1999 to get anywhere.

My backrubs. And yes, they’re works of art. :cool:

The soundtrack to the Hal Hartley movie Flirt has served me quite well. It’s excellent make-out music.

My etchings, man, my etchings. Wanna come up and see 'em.

My roommate swears by the movie Arsenic and Old Lace. Go figure.

Recently Sense and Sensibility, the movie. It works for me because I don’t look particularly like someone who would enjoy that movie and I come off as sensitive (which I suppose I am, for better or for worse).

[Denny Crane] Women are interested in one thing: money. I start a date by putting cash on the table.
[Alan] Does that work?
[Denny] With the hookers.

(paraphrased from memory)

Wow, what a coincidence. One of my favourite authors has one of her characters quote this quatrain in Temples of Delight, to similar effect.

Awesome book, btw.

Kate Miller-Heidke has featured prominently in my pash playlist of late. (Isn’t it sort of awful that my iPod has a designated make-out playlist?) She’s sort of wistful and girly and at the same time soulful and poignant. I’m so excited – she’s playing in my town in July! In my pub! Two blocks from my house!