The Weinstein Co. delivered a C&D to ANIMAL, confirming the Quentin Tarantino script for "Inglorious Bastards" that was posted on ANIMAL was, in fact, the real deal. Read my review here. I thought it was pretty hot.
Update: The script is back online--for the time being.
"She wants you to think for your arousal, and to my eye, would rather have you walk away confused or shaken up or slack-jawed than simply turned on." -- Rachel Kramer Bussel
"The really rough, druggie girls were fascinating to me because they were exotic and intense. (After all, I grew up on a farm and had just moved to the city a few years earlier.) I did this in such a compulsive gonad-stupor that I only later gained the minimal empathy required to realize what hellish lives many of these women must have had. I realize now what karmic awfulness I was implicating myself in."
Over at ANIMAL, where I blog in a tone that could easily be categorized as "cruel," I posted something about two silly broads who tongued each other for New York's Look Book and said ridiculous things like: "We met first at a friend’s house. Charlotte walked in with one of her breasts hanging out and someone said, 'Hey, your breast is hanging out,' and she said, 'That’s okay, I have another.'"
One of them, Charlotte Kemp Muhl, whose claim to fame is boning Sean Lennon, weighed in with a comment that begins "Hello blood thirsty bloggers" and ends "Peace love and LSD!"
The initial New York post had two images: one large photo of the girls making out and one smaller photo of the girls looking like dreamy poets. Later, the images were swapped, so the making out image was smaller.
Halfway through writing this post, I realized I have no idea whatsoever why I am posting about this.
Excuse me while I go stab my eyes out in the kitchen.
2. Someone who reads this blog sent me something. Most of the time, I don't answer emails that people send me because I am antisocial. That is how I roll. But this guy I email with because we worked on a subject that was the same, and so there's that. Anyway, for a while, until this week, really, I had been posting sort of grim and hello I am drowning kinds of posts. For various reasons, really. Anyway, at a certain point, he sent me an email and was like saying he wanted to send me something. And I was like, ah, no. Because who knows? Maybe it would be something godawful. And then he was like, well, this is what it is. And then I was like YES, please. And I got it in the mail today. I went to check my PO box, and there was a yellow note, and it sent me to a package, and inside the package was the thing that he had sent me. What was it? It was one of the "Magnolia" frogs. One of the ones that had fallen from the sky. He said the frog had been like a kind of writing talisman for him, and he wanted to pass it on to me, and since "Magnolia" is one of my all time favorite movies, this was a great thing indeed. My ex-boyfriend in Los Angeles worked in special effects, and there was a point in time, I dimly recall, that there was a possibility, years ago, that I was going to get one of those same frogs back then, but it didn't happen.
3. Based on some various things that have happened in my life recently, I have decided there is no way of understanding anything. You can call it luck, or chance, or fate, or destiny, or a deus ex machina, but whatever it is, it is beyond the scope of human comprehension. Who knows why things happen? Nobody. That's who.
4. I got quoted in this piece about "Mad Men": "She created some controversy when she wrote that 'Mad Men is man porn,' and in an interview with Maclean's, she adds that the show 'fetishizes the era before the advent of political correctness, offering up a fantasy of a time when men were men, women were women, and politically incorrect fantasies weren't only permissible but livable.'" There's something missing, for me, in "Mad Men." It's not quite dirty enough. In that New York Times Magazine piece there was a lot of whining about how HBO hadn't picked up the series, like they didn't take it seriously, but there's a bite lacking in "Mad Men" that "The Sopranos" had in pitbull spades. "Mad Men" is so... anal. "The Sopranos" is full-frontal. I guess I prefer my drama hardcore.
5. Every weekday, I post twice a day at Animal. It's been pretty cool. I'm getting the hang of it more as of late, I guess. And by "hang of it," I mean learning how to be as spitfully (yeah, I made that word up) cruel as The Copyranter. Well, I mean, that's what I aspire to; it's not like I'm there; not yet anyway. (I'm sure that was a highly illegal use of semicolons, but whatever.) Anyway, people are noticing. I'm the one who called these girls "culturally parasitic members of the human race." Also? I made fun of midgets. Payback on that will be a bitch. Oh, well.
6. If you want to read the best letter from a john ever, read the one I got and posted tonight: "I Partook." Thank you for your glass-shattering honesty, John #39. It's about time.
7. Fruits of my day job labors: "Condom Controversy." Not bad for a first full day on the job. Internet, I salute you.
9. I almost forgot. Last night, I watched "Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal." It starts out beautifully, but isn't much of a movie, really. More like a postcard. The best part is when Sheila Nevins asks Heidi what she looked like before all the disfiguring plastic surgery, and Heidi says: "A monster."
10. Yes! For all those of you who have written in, concerned my new job will interfere with my novel-writing, I am still writing, and I have no intention of stopping. I think this is the part where I am supposed to say something profound. Maybe you should listen to Eric B. & Rakim instead: "if I strive/Then maybe I’ll stay alive."
The other day I mentioned I landed a new gig. What is it? I'll be doing online publicity, or what they call "Blogger Outreach," for The Frisky. In the past, I was a publicist for an imprint of Simon & Schuster, so this is a bit of that.
In the loosest of parallels, I suppose this job is something like what I've watched, with interest, Hugh MacLeod do over the years with various entities. Or maybe not. It's an emerging field, I suppose, which is what makes it interesting. One of my earliest online gigs was working as a movie critic for TNT's Roughcut, which, like The Frisky, is owned by Turner. Ah, those halcyon days before the blogosphere ate our brains.
For reasons I will never fully understand, one of the most popular Reverse Cowgirl posts this year was "Stripper Nation," which featured a pair of stripper shoes that had a coin slot in the platform in which men could, ah, insert their, um, tips. Why was that post so popular? Who knows. Perhaps it was the intersection of sex and economy. At the time, I was no doubt influenced by Dlisted, a site I read with embarrassing frequency, and the writer of which is highly obsessed with Shauna Sands, who wears Lucite stripper shoes like kids wear Converse. In any case, today Dlisted points to a German fashion show that was part of Berlin Fashion Week, where the models wore Lucite stripper shoes that were decorated with flowers. The designer, Scherer González, makes some pretty wild clothes, including accordion-bottomed bustiers and fox stoles with the skulls exposed, that are one part McQueen and one part Mugler. The New York Timessays: "The result is an unequivocal argument for repression." On the other hand, Dlisted says: "You know Christian Louboutin is stabbing his dick with a stiletto heel for not coming up with this shit."
Years ago, I met Chasey Lain. For some reason I can no longer recall, I guess it was part of some story I was working on at the time, I ended up with her and some other porn stars at the Viper Room. At the time, Lain appeared to be high. Over the years, I saw mentions of her online. That she was an addict, turning tricks, had a kid. A slow-motion train wreck.
Today, someone, a male, sent me an an email link to these videos.
"While I find it appalling to air one's dirty laundry online, I find the condition and behavior of Chasey Lain equally appalling. How the mighty have fallen. I really think there is some commentary to be made here, but I wouldn't be qualified to make it."
I'd heard about the videos but hadn't seen them. They're pretty depressing. I wrote the guy an email back, asking him what his relationship is to all this.
"I have no relationship except being befuddled and disturbed by what I saw. I'm a guy, I watch porn, but if this is what the girls become... I don't know the industry at all. I've heard tales here and there about meltdowns like this, but to see it is another story. The girl needs help, clearly. I'm just wondering if this is common in the industry; if this is the culture and what your insight on it might be. Think it would be an interesting and insightful post."
1. Correct. You don't know the industry at all. This is the shit that ends up on the editing room floor.
2. Correct. The girl needs help. Who knows if she'll get it.
3. This is not common. This is not uncommon. Welcome to Porn Valley.
4. This is a part of that culture. This isn't Wicked. Or Vivid. But it is a part of Porn Valley. Of course, it's part of America's reality, too. Have you seen the tweaker down the street? He's not that far from you.
5. My eyes roll when people call porn empowering. Porn is porn. "Pro-porn" pundits turn a blind eye to girls like Chasey to sell their own delusions that have nothing to do with Porn Valley's realities.
The other day I watched some video interview with David Lynch talking about the creative process, and he said it was like you were sitting in a room, and there was a man in another room, and he kept handing you pieces to a puzzle. You never know when you're going to get another piece. Writing that, it makes the whole thing sound rather like something Forrest Gump would say if he was a writer, but one does what one can. So, basically, I've been getting up in the mornings, when my thinking mind is most asleep, and then I churn out a certain number of pages before I have to go do other things and have other jobs and things like that. I had a dream this morning that someone was handing me two tickets, they were time travel tickets, and he said, well, why don't you go back in time and fix it then, and I said, no, thanks, if I did that, then things wouldn't have turned out like this. Which is a good thing, I guess. Sometimes, if I get stuck, I just sit there and ask the guy in the next room to hand me another piece to the puzzle. Sometimes he does. Sometimes he doesn't.
Thar she goes, trailblazin' again. Today, Xeni Jardin announces the launch of BBtv World with a first installment that she shot in Guatemala. Xeni has been my friend since--eh? what is it? 2002?--and it's just so awesome to see her do so many awesome things. In this cabinet of curiosities, Xeni is a wonderful thing.
"On behalf of all my Boing Boing and Boing Boing tv colleagues, I'm excited and proud to announce the debut of a new series within our daily video program: BBtv World. This ongoing series will feature first-person glimpses of life around the world, told through the lenses and voices of Boing Boing editors, guest collaborators -- and through the people in these places, their own stories, their own way. When we can, we want to place the camera directly in the hands -- literally -- of the people whose lives, cultures, and lands we're visiting."
I've posted a new letter from a john: "I Was Smitten."
"Unfortunately, I started having true feelings for her. I remember a really sad moment where the impossibility of the situation hit home. We were having Sunday brunch at a cool little neighborhood spot, and it hit me: 'Dude, you’re dating a prostitute.'"
"I am a journalist call girl. Or at least I was, until recently. I met someone. I quit before he had a chance to ask me to. It's just easier that way."
More letters from johns and working girls are welcome.
Earlier today, I was happy to discover that Susie Bright's latest episode of "In Bed with Susie Bright" on Audible looks at Letters from Johns and Letters from Working Girls. She deems the projects "riveting reading." Bright's been an inspiration to me since I was coming up in the Bay Area back in the day, so this was kind of like a cardinal being blessed by the Pope. Contributions to both Letters sites have slowed since Spitzergate, but if you'd like to contribute, email me.
My friend/photographer Clayton Cubitt is debuting some new work in a group show that opens this week. They're his decay prints, which, he reports, have been "six months in the destroying," and they'll be on view at the swanky Tribeca Grand as part of "This Eclectic Explosion." The opening night reception is this Thursday, the 24th, and starts at 7PM. Siege says: "Plus there’ll be beautiful drunk people and free booze, which means drunken hook-ups in the bathroom, even if you’re ugly."
"The more recent work, the personal and the fashion work," he reveals, "where I'm literally degrading the quality of the image—injuring it, damaging it—is a result of Hurricane Katrina, what it's done with New Orleans, and what it's done with my family. It's that notion of beauty—not in spite of decay, but because of decay. It becomes so horribly beautiful that you can't look away." -- Siege, JPG
I changed the template on my Tumblr to this beautiful Vertigo theme created by Matthew Buchanan. I turned the orange to pink, which is probably a horror for real designers, but that's what happens when the little people stick their hands into back ends, I suppose. Thanks, Matthew. It's very pretty. Also, I'd been using a one quote and one image a day format, but I decided to chuck that out of the window. I'd had enough of it. I'll be posting higgeldy-piggeldy there for a while. Relatedly, I love this photo of Christy Turlington. Boots for stompin'. You can see more here.
ANIMAL EIC Bucky Turco got me the "Inglorious Bastards"/"Inglorious Basterds" script on the DL. I read it. Shit is long! But pretty dope. I enjoyed it. Make it, Quentin! And learn how to use your spell check while you're at it. Read my review and the script now online exclusively at ANIMAL, thanks to Bucky, before he drowns in a rain of C&Ds. And have a great weekend. You're welcome.
I'm sick. Today will feature nose-blowing, the prone position, and Chicken with Rice soup. Supporting roles will include passing out, NyQuil, and excessive use of pillows. Tomorrow, I will feel better.
reading your blog the last few weeks has felt like marlow's trip down the river... its been scary, crazed, scattered, over indulgent and deafeningly silent... i am in awe of your ability to communicate even a tenth of what it feels like to be the middle of writing something that encompasses all aspects of your life, myself im a blubbering mess who disappears to remote places when i write...but i again digress, the point of the email was in regards to the note you ended today's post on... 'I'm looking for a second wind."'
That second wind can only come from your own doing but I would like to give you something that might help nudge that wind into motion. In the simplest terms, i'd like to send you a writer's 'care package.' The contents of which id rather keep a surprise but as the subject line noted, I promise it'll be much cooler than the choke anal beads... if you feel uncomfortable sending a stranger your address i totally understand, but i promise you its worth the risk :)
I offer this as the smallest token in response to the immense help your blog has been to keeping me sane while i plug ahead on my own journey down that dark river... thank you
I'm going through one of those stages where I have weird dreams. I'm climbing up a series of floors, and each story is barricaded behind a series of sofas, and a friend of mine keeps reaching out to me from the next level and pulling me up, and when I get to the top, I find a bar and order what I keep referring to as a "Goose and Gimlet," and the bartender has no idea what I'm talking about at all.
"When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle." -- Willard
A month or so ago, I sent the first thirty pages of my novel, Happy, my Porn Valley story, to an agent. I wasn't sure whether or not to do it, but I did it anyway. A few days later, my cellphone rang, and I looked at the number. I didn't pick it up because I didn't recognize the number, but the caller left a message. So I listened to the message, and it was the agent, and he loved it. And then I hung up the phone, and then I sat on the sofa, and then I cried because I was so happy. Most of the time, I cry because I'm so unhappy, but this was like a Deus ex machina, and I was thankful for it.
"The Greek tragedian Euripides is notorious for using this plot device as a means to resolve a hopeless situation."
After that, writing the novel got harder, because it felt like a ghost was peering over my shoulder, but I got through it, because things have been kind of hard for me over the last few years, and I guess my general feeling about life now, having been through this, is that if God lays glass down in the road before you, you crawl across it. What I wrote wasn't perfect; I wrote it anyway. The other day, I tried to describe that choice as a fork in the road, but it's not. It's more like a toll. And there comes a point where you either keep writing or you don't write at all, and I can't stand not writing this novel, so I keep writing it. And I got through it. So now there's a contract between me and Endeavor on my bulletin board on the wall, held up by thumbtacks between this and this, and that's where I'm going. When the writing doesn't come easy, I lie in bed and make up stories about meeting Scorsese.
One challenge is that my main character is going crazy. Maybe I know something of this from my not too distant past. (If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know what I'm saying, brother.) How do you articulate it? Insanity. There aren't really words for it. The letters gather themselves together and fly away, and there's nothing you can do but wave your hand and hope they return someday.
"Much of the time he talks to Rottman in a kind of gibberish, using nonsense words and sentences, albeit with the syntax and the cadence of proper sentence construction." -- "In Search of a Beautiful Mind"
I didn't appreciate this. It's stupid and petty and nothing with which I am interested in being affiliated. A long time ago, I was somebody who courted crap like that. I worked for Playboy for five years. Now, it makes me want to vomit, who I used to be, like that. She's dead. I killed her. Or she did. Who knows. It doesn't have anything to do with me. Or reality. As I write, a part of my laptop is being held together with Scotch tape. That's the truth. Everything else is a lie.
"Crossing the river, jumping from stone to stone, could be done only in one continuous movement. If he tried to stop or even think about what he was doing, he would fall in. His only hope was to keep moving." -- Infinite Potential
I had a dream this morning that I was a waitress, and everyone kept moving around while I was taking their order, and the whole thing was fucking impossible. The only way for the novel to make sense is for me to put myself in it, jam myself between its pages, stuck like a bug between its bookends, stringing out one more sentence that says what I'm trying to say. I'm halfway there. I'm looking for a second wind.
Awhile back, I posted a link to a remix of Missy Elliott's "Pass That Dutch." Then Reverse Cowgirl reader and DJ extraordinaire Vinny B. dropped me an email, saying there was an even funkier-fresh-dressed-to-impress-ready-to-party better remix than that, featured on a set of his. I loved his set. When I write my novel, I listen to it. (Page 100, bitches!) After I heard from Vinny, I sent him an email, saying, you know, if he ever felt like making a dirty-funky, stanky-sexy set, he should let me know. And he did. And I love it. It's called "Tortas," because, Vinny says, he's been eating a lot of them lately. Very cool, Vinny. It's a great set, and I'll be listening to it as I write more of Happy. There's some hot stuff with the Beasties, a Missy/Britney mashup, and a broken down Portishead. If you want to tell Vinny thanks, your work is dope, or how'd you do that, man, you can email him.
Thank you, Vinny B., for letting us download "Tortas" for free.
Some days, I love the blogosphere.
Update: Vinny sent a new remastered remix that sounds better, so I've changed the link to it.
"Instead, a rupture occurred, a violence was done to each of us, an act or acts that were outside our ability to avoid or manage or even understand--the kind of thing that wasn't supposed to happen, didn't happen, could not happen." -- While They Slept
1. In terms of the blogsphere micro-controversy du jour--watch the video--in which two Jezebel editors seemingly got shitfaced and made some pretty out there statements (Moe: "I guess, I like, regret being date raped," Host asks why she didn't prosecute, Moe responds: "Because it was a load of trouble and I had better things to do, like drinking more"), I think this is less a blog-based, political/feminist debate than an example of what happens when you train a camera on an alcoholic. That said, I used to do a show called "Politically Incorrect" and would say crap like this on a pretty regular basis. Perhaps it wasn't quite so out there, but I'm sure it was just as offensive to some. Several years later, I watched the videos and was completely humiliated. Ah, the folly of youth, a failure to understand what happens when the opaque eye of the camera trains itself upon you, and the next AA meeting is thattaway, kid. Of course, Res Ipsa Loquitur (via Fimoculous) summarizes the entire situation far better: "Fuck everyone and anyone you want, and tell everyone and anyone the details, it still won’t buy you a vowel and isn’t enlightening anyone but your ego when you read your visitor stats."
2. Recently, there was a big fuss because Vogue Italy came out with an issue featuring all black models, which prompted everyone else in the fashion industry to run around debating whether or not the business of fashion is racist. (Uh, prolly.) More recently, sets starring Naomi Campbell and Toccara Jones surfaced online. I'd say they indicate that black models are welcome. As long as they're willing to show their tits. Or get stuffed in a trunk. I'm sure that's progressive. In Zimbabwe.
3. Speaking of political incorrectness, this story from W, "Money Honeys," is pretty enlightening in terms of providing a peek into the billionaire brainset. "Hedge funds aim to hire hot women [to work in marketing]... They want a hot chick with a nice ass and nice boobs who is going to come in and sell the fund to them... These girls don’t talk to anyone worth less than $50 million." I don't have a lot to say about the mind of a hedge fund manager, but the idea of not settling for anyone worth less than $50 million sounds totally awesome.
"The Internet is for porn. Since I spend days and nights watching online video, people frequently remind me of this maxim from 'Avenue Q.' A little too rapidly, I protest that YouTube, the Web’s most comprehensive video site, where people watch around three billion videos a month — fertile territory for pornography any way you look at it — has somehow kept itself (relatively) clean and outstripped the video-sharing competition."
Well, OK. So, her thesis statement is... Thank heavens there's no porn on YouTube? I just don't know how compelling that declaration is, especially considering "one in four search engine requests on an average day is for pornography." What all those searchers are really looking for may generate more interesting questions and answers.
Daily Intel contemplates the broohaha over the Christie Brinkley/Peter Cook sex--I mean divorce trial of the moment, especially considering the revelations regarding Cook's purportedly excessive porn watching practices.
"Is porn really still something that's regarded as for deviants only? You'd think we all would have been tipped off to the fact that it's not — that all guys masturbate..."
Well, I'm not a guy, so I can't verify the veracity of that statement, but I think that "all" is probably in the ballpark.
Instead, Heffernan gets turned on by watching popcorn pop. "I was skimming thumbnails as usual when the popcorn video arrested my attention. I watched four times, transfixed... As I kept clicking and watching, I began to feel excited, even turned on."
Apparently, Prime condoms are really great if you want to have sex under a freeway overpass. Which I'm sure works really great as a marketing ploy. If your target demographic is homeless.
OK, maybe not president. But how about Playboy centerfold? Reverse Cowgirl patron saint Xeni Jardin could be asked to pose naked in the pages of Playboy. But only if you vote for her! I know I did. Forget the bikini. I'm thinking a strategically placedG3. (Photo: Steve Diet Goedde)
Last week, someone challenged me to post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress on this blog. In fact, I've done so previously, but I've never been one to skirt a challenge, regardless. In any case, I've posted an excerpt here, a paragraph, that may or may not make sense out of context. The novel, as I've written before, is Happy, and it's based in large part on my experiences in Porn Valley--and beyond that, too. The central character, which I've talked about some here and there, is Xerxes Xavier. More recently, I've redacted his occupation. Over the last few years, I've found bits of my work in the works of others, and I suppose I've grown more cautious about what I reveal when it comes to this project.
In any case, this particular passage from the novel was born out of a period of time in my life during which I wanted to kill myself. I've written about this--oh, I suppose I should say--somewhat obtusely on this blog. That period of time was roughly from February of 2005 to April of 2005. I wanted to die pretty much from the time I woke up until the time I went to sleep. While things peaked--or should I say bottomed out--around my birthday of that year, the feelings stayed with me until approximately August of that year.
I believe, closing in on being nearly halfway done with the novel, I chose to make the main character a male because it enabled me to immerse myself in all these things but to maintain a kind of distance from it--or perhaps a fantasy of distance from it--that without which I don't know that I could write it. Of course, this "fiction," if that's what it is, doesn't really accurately capture what happened. Words fail it. Instead, I attempt to make light of it. Nothing funnier than the time you want to die, really.
The person who suggested I post this excerpt suggested, at least in my interpretation of it, that the excerpt wouldn't stand up under scrutiny on its own alone. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it really matter?
I was interested in a story from last weekend's New York Times Magazine: "The Urge to End It." There's a great line in it: "What united all the survivors I spoke with was a sense of having been so utterly transformed by their experiences that, in essence, they had become different people." As I write this, it all seems like another life--and like yesterday. Writing about it in the novel has been a catharsis of a sort I hadn't expected. Kathryn Harrison writes about "[t]hose of us who insist on speaking what's often called unspeakable..." And this is that. Because as much as it remains a thing of the past, once you've been there, you live with a certain kind of quiet fear that from the bowels underneath your bed, the Boogeyman will reappear.
"Somewhere between the here and the there of his life, Xerxes has begun to malfunction like a robot with a damaged microchip in it. He isn’t sure what comes first—the wanting to die part or the slowly dying inside himself part—but either way he is a human being trapped inside an exoskeletal suit that will not stop slamming itself forward, no matter what he does, even though all he wants to do is nothing anymore ever. Since January 1st, when his last girlfriend left him after he did something very bad that he may or may not recollect, he has considered killing himself a million different ways a million different times. In February, he contemplates hanging himself by one of his belts in the walk-in closet alongside his perfectly pressed suits but doesn’t because he’s worried no one will find him until the smell becomes unbearable, and he is bloated and blue in the face and more horrible in death with his black tongue protruding like a giant leech than he was in living. In March, he inserts his head into the oven on one especially depressing morning before he realizes the stove is, in fact, electric, not gas, and learns little from the experience other than he eats take out food and relies upon the microwave far more than he had thought previously. In April, he considers taking a bath with a household appliance, but the toaster feels like a total cliché, and being as tall as he is, bathtub spooning with, say, the living room lamp seems really awkward. Most of the time, he stays alive for reasons he can explain to nobody and ends up feeling like a zombie, his rotting arms stuck straight out in front of him, his face sliding down his front, this lowing, this horrible moaning coming from inside him, scaring away small children who skirt him like the virus he is as if he will contaminate them if they get too close. His pallor is a seafoam green. Late at night, he puts his hand on his chest, and he doesn’t feel anything. In the doctor’s office, he is, frankly, surprised when the man in the white jacket places his cool stethoscope against his chest and listens quietly, as if the doctor can hear something in there talking to him; Xerxes is dubious. He’s wasted his life, all this time, the whole day like this. Now, the world is black, but none of it compares to the forever twilight inside himself, and he can’t take it anymore. He puts his feet on the floor, dresses himself, stands in front of the mirror with his shirtfront hanging open, and spies in the half-dark reflection swaying before him in the glass that the place in his chest where he used to have a is in the shape of a , and once you’re there, he knows, there's no coming back."
5. I don't know. I was gonna post something about all this fighting, which I sort of got involved in, and the latest manifestation of it, but then it all got really boring, and I think I'm done with it. When the desert plain is deserted, the beasts feed in a frenzy. I think maybe I'm going to go sit in the mud for a bit.
Will you have a happy Fourth of July? When the sky explodes in front of your eyes, don't blink. It'll be you before you know it.
I have an agent for my novel, Happy. He is kind of a bigshot, so he will remain nameless, for the time being. But the point here is that I had a dream this morning that I ended up in a nightclub that was like DNA, and I saw him, and he was this crazy rock star on stage with a giant black mohawk, and his backup singers were the Vivid Girls. I turned to whomever I was with, and I was like, "Wow, I had no idea." He looked like Edward Scissorhands. I was impressed. I have no clue what all that adds up to mean, except to say the dream was rather pleasant. In any case, I am supposed to finish my novel by the end of the summer. Which is fast coming. I guess I better hurry the fuck up.
"It's not every restaurant that greets you with an out-of-season Christmas tree decorated with brightly colored condoms and then offers more condoms on your way out (perhaps in lieu of an after-dinner mint). But then not every restaurant combines Thai cuisine with safe-sex education. That just about sums up Cabbages and Condoms." I just seems like the odds of finding a condom in your food are really high. This place is at the Birds & Bees Resort. Go figure. "A Weekend in Bangkok, Thailand." Being in Pattaya, like, right now, sounds awesome, though.
Yesterday, I came across this New York Timesobituary for John Holmes. I guess I wouldn't have thought such a thing would exist, but there you have it. Sadly, it's marred by a printing error that repeats the first paragraph twice. I guess it's sort of tragic, isn't it?
"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs." -- "A Cyborg Manifesto," Jean Paul Gaultier Fall 2008 Couture, click for bigger.
"Who are we beyond our physiology, beyond the truths we are taught by genetics and biology? What reality exists between masculine and feminine ideals? [M]ore than a visual treatise on the androgyne, the collection and its presentation suggest that fluid understandings of self and the performance of gender are part of the contemporary human experience." --YSL - SS09 Men's Collection - Full Version
"XJ: My biological father who died when I was a kid was a painter and a print maker. He went through different phases in his creative work. A lot of what he did was paint very beautiful photorealistic portraits of nude women. Sometimes he went off into experimental territory that he was embarrassed about... sometimes he would just grab batches of the stuff that was crappy as years went on, and go to the backyard and burn it. And it wasn’t that he was censoring himself, and God knows nobody else was censoring him. It was that this was his creative work. This was art. And he felt like some of it wasn’t representative of who he was anymore and he didn’t want it to be available to the world to see.
That’s how I felt with this situation. (I mean, there were other reasons for removing the posts.) But –- it was my work. And I felt like: This is my work, this is my blog. This is not the same thing as Wikipedia or the paper of record. It’s BoingBoing. And I have the right to take these things down while I think about whether I want them out there or not." -- Xeni Jardin
So, a few weeks ago, I wrote about how Fox Searchlight was passing out anal beads to promote the fall release of "Choke." At the time, I emailed a Fox Searchlight VP of publicity, Melissa Holloway, who confirmed Fox Searchlight was, indeed, passing out anal beads to promote an upcoming movie--and she said she'd send me a set. My Fox Searchlight Anal Beads (TM) were in the mail! But then I didn't get my anal beads. Totally tragic, I know. Anyway, I figured that out not long ago, and I whined about not getting them, and then lo' and behold! I walked outside today, and there was a big UPS box on my doorstep, and I thought, oh, it's some godawful book from some craptastic publisher, and then I peered a little closer, and I saw the box read: "FSL -- CHOKE -- BOOKMARK BEADS VER. B (BLACK)." And I think you can figure out what was inside. Anyway, thank you, Fox Searchlight! You are my new BFF. Now if only Doubleday would send me their Snuff promotional lube, I'd be all set.
I think this is the third week that Snuff has been on the New York Times bestseller list. Meanwhile, The Garden of Last Days is looking to fall off the list after, like, one week. Lesson learned: If you want to write a bestseller, write about a gangbang, not strippers.
My old pal Hugh McLeod, who created the image you see here, sent me a shout out on Twitter: "Hurrah! My favorite pornographer is blogging again." Well, Hugh, it has been a couple years now. ;) Yesterday, I saw this card that he created, and I liked it a lot, so there you have it: electronic synchronicity or something like it. I like Hugh's blog because he always returns to the subject of creativity, and how to do what you want to do, and how to do what you want to do and survive at it: "It just kinda sorta happened, one random event at a time." It's a struggle, a real battle, to be a creative type: whether you're a writer, or a thinker, or a photographer. E. L. Doctorow: "Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia." Somebody who is related to my novel sent me a letter, and he included a note in it, and the note is written on very beautiful paper with his name embossed beautifully on it near the top in that way where if you run your finger across it you can feel the letters, and the paper is in the shape of a bright white rectangle, or, say, a tiny, shining gravestone, and the note reads: "Can't wait to read the rest! Here's to a ton of success in the future!" I took the other piece of paper in the envelope and tacked it to my bulletin board between two photographs: this one and this one. And I took the note, and I propped it up on my desk, so it would be right there, every time I sat down to write. So. So! So? Now it's time to write.
"Filmed by Nick Knight and with a soundtrack of Professor Helen Storey intoning scientific formulae as fitting backdrop, this filmic finale to the 'Wonderland' project documents the aquatic aerobics of Helen's collection in the last stage of its life. With the clothes literally peeling from her body as the remarkable biodegradable polymers react against their submerged state, watch as model Alice Dellal twists and turns through her underwater ballet and Helen's creations ultimately surrender to their watery grave."
All I'm gonna say about this thing that's going on is that I'm embarrassed to be a sex writer. Not long ago, I posted something saying that I had resigned from the sex writer community, which was sort of tongue-in-cheek and sort of true. I'm pretty over it. Here's the thing about writing about sex--you have to go out into the world and cover it--that is, if you're a real writer, and if you had to take a minute to think about that, you're not. When you write about sex, you find that you engage in a kind of intimate pact with your subjects. When people get naked and fuck in front of you, whether it's on a Porn Valley set or in a New York City penthouse, you become keenly aware that you have entered into a kind of unspoken agreement with those who are doing whatever they're doing while you're standing there watching them do it. It may be unsaid, but it's there, in the room, and if you're not stupid, you can feel it. So you write about what they give you, but you understand there's a line, and if you cross it, you're fucked. You can't betray your subjects and expect them to keep exposing themselves to you. So you write about what you see, but sometimes you don't write all of it. You write what you know, but sometimes you don't write everything you know. In a way, you're like a whore. You hustle, you take the money, you do your job. And the thing about whores--good whores, that is--and writers--real writers, that is--is that they know when to shut the fuck up. And if you don't? You're a hack.
This is so boring as to be mind-boggling. Blah blah blah, the LA Times, "Dust-Up," pits pornographer John Stagliano, blah blah blah, against law professor from Pepperdine, blah blah blah, for big obscenity debate. Two dudes spend a week writing emails to each other online for us all to see in which they dissect the hardcore, pornographic subject matter like two surgeons poking at a half-dead body. I read shit like this and my eyes glaze over. Blah blah blah: Pepperdine guy calls for some kind of decency. Blah blah blah: Stagliano gets his knickers in a twist and defends his right to make squirt movies. The premise is ridiculous and the consequences are retarded. Are you fucking me? I mean, really? Is this 1981? Are we still debating this crap? Haven't we been through this already? I thought we could talk about something more interesting like, say, why everyone is so interested in shit like this. The fact of the matter is a recent obscenity case is what led to this pseudo-intellectual debate in the LA Times, and the only reason that story became such a big one is that America couldn't get enough of a story about scat videos. What America wants is more of what they came here for, whatever it is they haven't yet seen, and that's what these stories are really about: fucking, squirting, shitting. The story here isn't obscenity law. It's what's obscene. And our refusal to admit that fact, to see it, to address it--well, that's obscene.
The Comics Reporter has a terrific interview with Lynda Barry that is about a lot of things, but perhaps mostly about the creative process. What makes the creative process "work" is pretty fucking enigmatic, but Barry gets at some of the marrow of it here. "There is a specific feeling, a state of mind that happens when the strip starts to roll." She also writes about being rejected by editors, and struggling to do what she wants to do, and what it's like when you have been doing what you do forever and you still aren't sure it's right. It's hard. I haven't been doing what I do for as long as Barry, but it's been a pretty long time, a dozen years, and I'm fucking exhausted. Sometimes I think it's easier to do what I do, and sometimes I think it's harder. It is exceptionally difficult for me to find a place to do what I want to do and keep afloat. And right now? Right now, I feel like I'm drowning. Last night I had a dream I was touring a prison for midgets, and I don't think I even want to know what that means. What's tough is not knowing if you've come so far or if you've crawled a few feet. Yesterday someone I don't know wrote me an email and near the end it said: "Please keep writing your book. After reading your blog for this long, I know how important that book is to you. Your readers are rooting for you." And I am. I am I am I am. I am really fucking trying.
I'm a freelance journalist. I've written for Details, Harper's Bazaar, Newsweek,
Radar, Women's Health, Salon, Slate, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, The LA Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Variety, Inc., Esquire, The Atlantic, and I'm a Forbes contributor. In 2008, TIME named me one of the best bloggers of the year. I've appeared on CNN, NPR, and "Politically Incorrect." [EMAIL]
is in the shape of a 
, and once you’re there, he knows, there's no coming back."
