Body Parts
I took this photo in Burbank on Magnolia Boulevard. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Filtering by Tag: DEATH
RIP, Evan Wright
Image via Mark Ebner
Last weekend, I got a call from a friend who had heard that Evan Wright had killed himself. I knew Evan, had met him over 20 years ago, had kept in touch over the years but not in recent years. Before he did all the war reporting, he had been an editor at Hustler. So we had writing about porn in common. I wasn’t really surprised to hear that he had killed himself. This kind of journalism takes a toll on you. It’s taken a toll on me. It’s hard to bear witness when you stand in the face of insanity. Back in 2009, I interviewed Evan about Hella Nation for The Daily Beast. In the last question, I asked him about his friend David Foster Wallace’s suicide.
You were friends with David Foster Wallace. Were you surprised that he killed himself?
I wasn’t surprised because, I mean, actually there were a couple conversations we had a few years before where, you know, he said as a grim joke, “Well, if I continue in this state of mind …,” and then he did say, “I’d be hanging from a rope,” or something like that. On a super-functional level, he had a gallows sense of humor. It was actually a theme. When I heard about [Wallace’s suicide], I was surprised.
I once complimented him on some piece—he referred to his writing as his “shtick”—and he was very self-deprecating. He separated himself from the persona he had as a famous writer. So, when he died, I was very sad. Back to that gallows humor, knowing him pretty well, what I resent is all these stories where they’re all, “Oh, it was inevitable.” I look at it like he had a bad day. And as an accidental death. I know there were attempts before. A lot of people almost do this, and then they don’t. He was a really great person, a really extremely generous person, and it’s hard to see him as anything else but that.
Read the rest here.
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The Last Thing
This week’s must-read essay is “The Last Thing My Mother Wanted” by the (pseudonymous) Evelyn Jouvenet.
Books I Read in 2024: My Friend Dahmer
I really enjoyed Derf Backderf’s graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer. It’s about the author’s high school relationship with the guy who would become America’s most notorious serial killer. Creepy, suspenseful, voyeuristic, savage, and peculiar, it raises interesting questions about how things might have turned out differently if you’d lived your life another way and didn’t end up murdering and eating other people.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects
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Retro
Vintage tech at a Valley Village estate sale. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.
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Selfie at 55
“There comes a time when you look into the mirror and you realize that what you see is all that you will ever be. And then you accept it. Or you kill yourself. Or you stop looking in mirrors.” ― J. Michael Straczynski
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The Other Funny Girl
The estate sale of Carol Burnett’s assistant. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.
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You Can't Take It With You
A few highlights from my “You Can’t Take It With You” estate sales photo series exploring love, loss, and the fleeting nature of fame in the San Fernando Valley (and Los Angeles too). Follow me on Instagram for more.
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All Her Dying Lovers
Loved this short from The New York Times Op-Docs: “All Her Dying Lovers.” It combines animation and assemblage audio to recount the enigmatic tale of a woman who sought revenge. A fascinating parsing of truth, memory, and myth.
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You're Thinking of Ending Things
Behold the trailer for Charlie Kaufman’s “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” Amazing.
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The Last Plague
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Awhile back, an audio producer friend of mine asked me to write up a pitch for an original fiction podcast series inspired by the COVID-19 pandemic. The series I pitched wasn’t picked up, but here’s an excerpt from the pitch:
What if you thought you were the last person left alive in the world? What would you do? And what if one day you discovered you weren’t the only one? “The Last Plague” is a two-part, 70-minute, fictional oral history of what happened after The Last Plague (as it’s known) leaves one lone virus-immune survivor on each continent. Narratively framed through interviews conducted by a researcher in Singapore, this original fiction podcast series examines the power of our will to survive and the determination to connect with others in the wake of a global catastrophe.
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Death of a Woodsman
Earlier this week, AVN reported that performer / director Brandon Iron, “who had mysteriously fallen out of contact with friends since roughly mid-April, in fact died around that time in Dublin, where he had been living for several years with his girlfriend Sarah O'Brien and their daughter Lily.” A sad story. I interviewed Iron several times, and he seemed like a nice, sensitive guy. I quoted him in the most-read story I’ve ever written for Forbes: “The Hardest Thing About Being a Male Porn Star.”
According to Iron:
"‘The hardest thing about being a male porn star is convincing your female co-workers that you are an interesting, well-rounded, fun guy who they might consider dating in a parallel universe after a few drinks,’ Iron says.”
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Ride or Die
13 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💀 #cadillac #hearse"
An Excerpt From an Unpublished Essay
An excerpt from an unpublished essay:
Image via Harvard Health Publishing
“The tumor was mine. Arguably, it was my malignant baby, for my body had created it, and it was growing inside of me at an aggressive pace. But I did not want it. I wanted it out. There was a lot of debate over the best way to address the monster within me. The first oncologist wanted to chop off both my breasts and yank out my reproductive organs. After that, a plastic surgeon showed me his photo album filled with pictures of women whose heads were clipped out of the frame and whose breasts had been ravaged by cancer, the interior flesh of which had been removed by him, and which had been reconstructed in ways that did not, to my eye, look at all natural. Finally, a physician’s assistant came in the room after the plastic surgeon had left. I said I didn’t realize it would look like that, and he said he understood. He held one hand in the air palm up, and he held the other hand in the air palm down. His top hand made a tent over his bottom hand. He said my breast was like a circus tent and having a mastectomy was like taking away the tent pole. With that, he flattened his top hand against his bottom hand like a circus tent collapsing, crushing all the circus animals, carnival performers, and acrobats in the process.”
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
The House That Jack Built
3 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "🎥 #larsvontrier #thehousethatjackbuilt"
I mean, is anybody a fan of Lars von Trier, really? I happen to be intrigued by him, because if you can say one thing about him is that he’s never boring. Or, at least, even when he’s boring, it’s because he’s doing something outrageous to death. Speaking of outrageous and death, LVT has a new flick out, and you don’t have to walk out of a theater at Cannes to see it. “The House That Jack Built” is available for streaming on Amazon. Convenient! Nothing like home delivered endless slaughter of women and others in scenarios in which the victim fairly makes the killer kill, I always say. The movie’s best kill, if you will, is the first one, when Matt Dillon, aka Jack, kills Uma Thurman, who plays a really annoying woman. Because this is LVT, you’re not sure if you’re supposed to laugh hysterically, feel grim, or just hold on for the duration of the ride. But, boy, can Uma take a jack to the head. In any case, you can look at the movie as a series of vignettes in which Jack murders people, or you can look at it as a meditative study on the creative process as told through the persona of someone who happens to use murder as his tool d’art. Frankly, the mutterings of Jack to a Virgil stand-in are the most interesting parts of the movie, particularly when Jack waxes philosophical about how matter dictates its form in art. Don’t search #thehousethatjackbuilt on Instagram, like I did, if you don’t want to have the penultimate shocker spoiled for you. It’s crude, but this is LVT, isn’t it? I won’t mention the part with the windshield wiper; I mean, that’s just ugly (or is it?). We have come to expect this sort of thing from the enfant terrible of Dogme 95. What I could never quite resolve with Jack is if LVT is trolling masculinity or wallowing in it. Toxic masculinity is a fair thing in which to flail. To attempt to redux The Inferno, the place to which the film devolves, is a mistake. Stay in your am-I-a-misogynist-or-not lane, LVT! Alighieri you ain’t.
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Porn Isn't the Problem
Image via Twitter
Awhile back, a screen grab from an article I wrote on my Forbes blog was circulated on social media. The original story was "A Porn Star's Widower Delivers a Moving Speech at the Oscars of Porn." The portion of that piece that was widely disseminated focused on the fundamental challenge presented to women who work in adult. While everybody watches them, no one truly sees them. This tension -- between being visible and invisible -- is a fraught place in which to live.
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Hugh Hefner: Misogynist or Revolutionary?
BBC Radio 5 Live had me on yesterday to talk about the social media controversy in the wake of the death of Hugh Hefner. On social media sites, feminists celebrated the demise of a man they asserted turned women into objects while others (like me) celebrated the life of a man who'd helped pioneer the sexual revolution and was a longtime champion of freedom of speech. The debate starts at the 1 hour 22 minute mark here.
With Love, to Hef
I woke up in the middle of the night, checked my phone, and saw there was a text from the BBC. Was I available to talk about Hefner? There was only one possibility: Hef was dead. Not long ago, I received an invitation from his son Cooper to attend the annual Midsummer Night's Dream part at the Mansion. I couldn't attend, and in declining, I wondered if it was my last chance to visit the Mansion while Hef was alive. I've been there two or three times before -- for various events. I worked for Playboy TV for five years, and at one event at the Mansion, I met Hef. He was smaller than I expected. I think he was wearing either a pink or a lavender shirt. He was friendly, and I was gobsmacked to be meeting a legend in the flesh. Wandering the grounds of the Holmby Hills property was another experience altogether. Pink flamingoes picked across the lawn. Little monkeys danced around enclosures in the yard. The grotto was unreal. It was a kind of Shangri-La. Here's to presuming Hef now presides over some equally paradise-like dominion in the sky, surrounded by bunnies.
I wrote an homage on my Forbes blog:
"For years, I proudly wore the Playboy bunny on the front of my shirt, in the shape of a pendant I hung around my neck, on a baseball hat. Unlike the feminists who had attacked Hef for his portrayals of female sexuality, I found in his entrepreneurial spirit, his unabashed love of women, and his unrelenting curiosity about our sexual selves a role model that gave me someone to be."
Writing Prompts
I came across this writing prompt yesterday:
"Write a love story about two inanimate objects."
Let's give it a shot.
The Married Couple
The dead husband and the dead wife were hiding in their drawers. It was late, and someone had turned out all the lights. Inside the drawers, it was dark. It was impossible to hear anything -- not the soft whir of the refrigeration stopping them from rotting, not the absentminded whistling of the coroner who had gone home, not the endless buzzing of thoughts in their minds for there were none. The bank of drawers was like a condo overlooking a river when a hurricane is coming: windows shuttered, blinds drawn, toilets flushed. Time itself filled up the spaces where their dreams, and their feelings, and their memories used to be. Briefly, a neuron lit up, then flamed out, vanishing into the blackness.
I Give It a Meh
Over the years, I've owned several Mary Roach books, but I've never read them. This week, I finally got around to plowing through Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. People accuse Roach's books of being formulaic. One Word Title. Semi-Colon. An Odyssey Through Something Weird. In Which the Author Relates a Lot of Facts. And Cracks a Lot of Jokes. Titter. Titter. At first, I was dazzled. I mean, this book opens in a room with pans in which human heads are sitting. Impressive! And there are all kinds of strange and dismembered things along the way, as Roach undertakes to answer the question: What happens to dead human bodies, anyway? A lot, apparently. But even though Roach is a significant presence in the book, she is sort of like a shadow figure. I mean, you never really get why she's standing there watching a transplant surgeon pry a still-beating heart from a woman's brain-dead body. I suppose if you don't want your author in your story soup, that works just fine for you. But if you're going to show me a still beating heart, I think you should get me to understand why I should care. And I guess I know that I do, but I don't know why, and Roach never says if she does, or if she does, why. The closest thing to an explanation that I happened across is that her father was sixty-five when she was born. So maybe that explains her fascination with bodies and death. Who knows?
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