2015 Goals (Late)
Image via The Pilates Perspective
- Blog once a day for 365 consecutive days
- Sell one product a month for 12 months
- Do more Pilates
Men at Work
Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
The Grand Boyhood Equalizer
This week I watched three movies: "Boyhood," "The Grand Budapest Hotel," and "The Equalizer." Somewhere along the way, I realized all the movies were, in one way or another, about what it means to be a man. I liked "Boyhood"'s dazzling cuts across time, but eventually it lapsed into one more Linklater movie in which rat-faced and hirsute men mutter on about the meaning of life or lack thereof. Watching "The Grand Budapest Hotel" reminded me of the time I went to Le Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris: an arresting visual spectacle that leaves you wanting something more than a lemon martini. I found "The Equalizer" to be no "Training Day," which is on my top ten list of favorite movies, but a very amusing investigation of Home Depot careerism and how the mundanities of selling home supplies can drive you to take up a side career in Russian mob gorenography. I wonder what stunt-cinema "Boyhood" will inspire: Watch as Christian Bale loses 100 pounds in 120 minutes! May "The Grand Budapest Hotel" cause nature to be more symmetrical. Boston beckons to us all, thanks to Denzel Washington and those men who make their money as sociopaths with business cards.
She's a Doll
RealDolls, Las Vegas, NV / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
Know Your Trigger
via FFFFOUND!
It referenced a post I wrote for True/Slant in 2010, "Trigger warning: this blog post may freak you the f*** out."
An excerpt:
"After some in-depth research (like, half an hour, maybe?), I was able to conclude that, for whatever reason, the feminists are all over their TRIGGER WARNINGS, applying them like a Southern cook applies Pam cooking spray to an overused nonstick frying pan. It’s almost impressive, really. I guess the idea is that blog posts are TOTALLY SCARY, and if you are EASILY UPSET, if you see a TRIGGER WARNING coming, you can look away REALLY FAST, or click elsewhere, so you won’t, you know, FREAK THE FUCK OUT."
Depressingly, Sia recently felt compelled to apologize for a video that some considered "triggering":
"I apologize to those who feel triggered by #ElasticHeart My intention was to create some emotional content, not to upset anybody."
How embarrassing. The point of art is to make you feel. Especially things you did not know you feel. Or don't know how to feel. Or are unwilling to feel.
"One eye sees, the other feels." -- Paul Klee
We all live in the Valley of the Triggers. Without them, we are merely shooting blanks.
The Red Queen
via Style.com
The Problem with Hating Cops
SHOT Show 2014, Las Vegas, NV / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
If you haven't read "Why We're So Mad at de Blasio," by Steve Osborne, a retired New York City police officer, you should. It served as a much-needed respite from the near non-stop anti-police tweets that have peppered my Twitter feed for the last several months.
More often than not, those tweets have spewed forth from the mouths of the various liberal journalists I follow. Seemingly completely lacking in self-awareness and without the vaguest qualification, they lynch police officers with unrelenting vigor and venom. Cops, they spout, are bad. Cops, they announce, are evil. Cops, they declare, are the real bad guys here.
Sometimes, as another tirade trickles down my feed, I wonder if any of these mostly male, mostly white liberal journalists know any police officers. It seems they don't. For them, it appears, police officers are some foreign invading army that has come to town and must be pilloried. The way they talk about police officers, you get the sense they believe all police officers are inhuman, or subhuman, or not human at all.
That's why Osborne's piece is so poignant: because he dares to do what seemingly no one else is doing, which is to paint a portrait of the real lives of police officers. "I sometimes regret having dragged her into the life with me," Osborne laments of his wife, who must bear the shared stress of his dangerous job. He shows us the human side of the badge.
Between here and there, I dated a few police officers. I was never a cop's wife, and I was no badge bunny, but I got a slice of what it's like to be involved with someone whose day job involves the reality that they might leave for work and get killed on any given day. The police officers I dated were the types of guys who ran towards fires, ventured into buildings from which gunfire had emanated, understood they might die doing a job that, at the end of the day, didn't even pay all that well.
I guess the liberal journalists I follow don't know those police officers. They have an idea of what all police officers are like, and that stereotype is what they tweet about daily. They do so while hiding behind their glowing screens, tucked in their offices, doing jobs in which they almost never risk their anything for anybody on any day.
Of course, eventually, something bad will happen to some of these liberal journalists. Their car will get broken into, and they'll call the police. They'll get mugged, and they'll call the police. They'll get into a car accident, and they'll call the police. Or maybe something worse will happen to them or to someone they love, and they'll call the police.
The officers will show up to do their jobs, and those same liberal journalists who screeched their anti-police rhetoric online will thank the officers very much for doing their jobs, and then those liberal journalists will go back to doing whatever it is they do for a living in their safe little lives.
Rugby in Florida
Struggle Reading List
What I'm reading: My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard and Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey. I picked the first one because of the first line: "For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can." I picked the second one because I saw this cool grid on This Isn't Happiness.
Work in Progress
via pixgood
"'Chipp Champion!' the robot cried. 'So nice to meet you!' The customer service representative had advised him that it would take some time for her system to be operating at 100 percent. Until then, there would be some repetitive speech patterns, and he was to keep an eye out for her limb functionality. The customer representative had recounted in long and excruciating detail the story of another owner who had failed to comprehend his model wasn’t working at full capacity, and his robot had ended up tumbling off a cliff and falling into a ravine located at the back of his property on the second day of ownership." -- from a work in progress
Z Is for Zombie Sex
Gun show, Las Vegas, NV / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
I finished The Fetish Alphabet 12 years after I started it, and the final installment is online today: "Z Is for Zombies" (because obviously). It's about a couple who build a McMansion underground (inspired by these nuclear-proof luxury condos, I suppose), and a zombie apocalypse, and a weird sex game they play involving the undead.
"'I have no heart,' she moaned seductively. The front of her peach silk robe fell open, and her mouth gaped. As he watched, she slid on to the floor and waved her arms up and down like she was making snow angels in weather about which they’d forgotten. 'I am undead,' she called and spread apart her legs."
I based the "no heart" comment off a series of heart tests that I had done a few years ago, during one of which I told the tech that he may not be able to find my heart because I was a zombie. I have a video of my heart beating around here somewhere.
It's nice to be done with the alphabet. Finishing things is always a good thing.
Living Death Positive
I was thrilled to see this tweet from friend Sarah Wambold on the last day of last year:
"I've seen some impressive death positive growth on my twitter in 2014. Most notably @susannahbreslin and @J_Utah. The rest of you, good luck"
What's "death positive"? It's about being "open to exploring their thoughts, feelings, and fears about mortality." Death negative, one can surmise, is about pretending the inevitable isn't going to happen. It's like sex positive -- but more fatal.
Death, after all, is just an event.
What's Your Beat?
Image credit: Basil Wolverton
"Beat reporting, also known as specialized reporting, is a genre of journalism that can be described as the craft of in-depth reporting on a particular issue, sector, organization or institution over time." -- Wikipedia
I've been thinking a lot about beats, lately. Sometimes, when people ask me what I write about, I answer, "Culture," which is neither the total truth or a lie. Most of the time, people don't inquire after that. If they do, I give them a list: "Movies, books, art, that sort of thing."
Initially, my Forbes blog was called Pink Slipped and was based on my life as as freelancer after getting downsized. At a certain point, I rechristened it Sin Inc. and declared vice my beat. This twist was interesting and gave me an excuse to shoot large black guns (see: "A Girl and a .22"), but vice was a bit broad as a beat. I mean, look at Sin Stocks Report's "List of Sin Stocks." It includes GE, cash advance companies, and the prison business. Vice is a lot of territory.
One could argue that porn is my beat (see: "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?"), which makes me an investigative journalist. On the other hand, I've done multiple projects that have gotten widespread attention (see: "The Letters Project") that are more along the lines of Adam Penenberg's description of me as a "modern-age Studs Terkel." At the same time, the fiction I've most enjoyed writing lately leans towards the intersection of sex and technology (see: "The Fetish Alphabet"), starring robots, the apocalypse, and alien women.
What's your beat?
The Alien Women Are Here
Image via Inquisitr
Today on 3:AM Magazine, you can read the latest installment of The Fetish Alphabet: X Is for Xenophilia.
"We looked on with slack jaws as they revealed themselves to us: their ability to switch faces at the drop of an astronaut’s helmet, the way the skin stretched taut across their alarmingly symmetrical bodies changed colors under duress, the mysterious orifices that, we swore, relocated themselves on a near nightly basis."
The Florida Percent
Down at the bottom of Southwest Florida, it can feel as if the one percent has eked out its own private orange grove. Take a drive along the coastline, and you will find yourself dodging Maseratis, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis. There's a glut of millionaires and billionaires, wealthy folks who can afford to buy second houses, and the immigrants who service them. Many of the homes have been built inside gated communities: mechanically-mapped imaginary moats wrapping around plots of land cut off from the rest of the world by gates and fences. Half the year, the place is besotted with the so-called snowbird population fleeing the snow up north. The other half of the year, it's humid and deserted. In the margins, there are bears, bobcats, alligators, turtles, dolphins, otters, pelicans, panthers, egrets, and rays. Take a walk along the beach at sunset, and you'll see how many of the high-end condo towers are mostly dark. These days, their owners can't be bothered. It's just nature and some tourists and what you get when you live in one of the United States that makes you feel like you're about to fall off the end of the world.
Where Creativity Comes From and How to Get There
So far, 3:AM Magazine has published The Fetish Alphabet I've been working on through W, and the rest of the letters have been written and will be published soon. One thing I really liked about this project was that it inspired me to be creative, and while it took me 12 years (see: "The 12-Year Deadline") to finish it, I think it was worth it. The other night I watched "The Counselor," screenplay by Cormac McCarthy, which is a bit of an odd movie but contains an interesting scene in which a very powerful, very wealthy gangster opines on death.
Image credit: Levalet via This Isn't Happiness
"You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist. But for those with the understanding that they're living the last days of the world, death acquires a different meaning. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. And then, all the grand designs and all the grand plans will be finally exposed and revealed for what they are." -- The Counselor
In a way, when you write fiction, you write the world anew. Here are a few ways I got creative when I set out to write an alphabet of fetishes.
Love Your Darlings
Popular belief is that one should kill their darlings. I've found that a lot of writing requires overcoming shame/embarrassment/self-awareness, and I believe interesting writing comes out of a willingness to be ashamed and share the words anyway. "T is for Trichotillomania" (see: Trichotillomania) is one of the weirder stories in the set and has a scene in it that makes me feel queasy ("One morning, I grabbed a fistful of head hair, tugged it out, and shoved it in my mouth." GAH.) The piece was based on my experiences undergoing medical treatment and the freaky my-body-is-a-monsterland things that happened along the way. Share your most precious parts, no matter how creepy.
Never, Ever Lie
"V Is for Vagina" (because what else could it be, AMIRITE??) was based on an experience I had years ago. I went to a strip club to shoot an episode of a Playboy TV show that I was on back in the day. A porn star was dancing that night. Somehow, I ended up coming home with a plastic version of her vagina. Or maybe it was silicone. Frankly, I don't know what it was made of. Side note: After that, it spent several years in a cupboard. The story ended up being about a guy who brings a fake vagina home and what he does with it: "Now, it’s just him, and this plastic vagina sitting on the edge of his bed." Truth is stranger than fiction -- and it helps to have an interesting life.
Serendipity Is Your Friend
My favorite installment is "R Is for Robot." It's about a man who has a robot for a mate, and their life in the suburbs together. An excerpt: "'Chipp Champion,' the robot said, 'installation is complete.'" I got the idea for that one because I had seen this RealDoll that was pictured being delivered in a crate. That made me wonder what it would be like for the guy who received her, how delighted and excited he would be, and how quiet their moment together would be. The internet is a wonderful place to get inspired because it's like fishing in the collective Id. And that's where you should be.
The Future of Litvertising
Image credit: Fuck Your Hustle
A few months ago, I ended up talking to a young woman in the back room of a large home. I'd just watched her perform in a porn movie. Most of the time, you show up on set, and at some point, the girl undresses. In this case, by the time I got there, she was already camera ready, and now, because she'd done her scene already, we talked as she got dressed. (Ergo: It was like watching a porn movie in reverse.) She pulled on some knee socks that had weed leaves on them; I'm pretty sure that she put those on first. Her hair went up in a ponytail. She donned a pair of short shorts and a T-shirt. The shirt was cut up in a way you might see on a beach in Brazil, and across the front of it, in cursive letters, it read, FUCK YOUR HUSTLE.
"This is your hustle, your five-year plan, the Excel spreadsheet that will fulfill your spin on the American dream." -- P Is for Porn Star
I'm a fan of hustlers, hustling, and the hustle. (See: "How a Freelancer Learned to Be a Hustler," which appeared on my Forbes blog.) I appreciated the sentiment. The shirt floated around in the back of my head for several months. One day, I was working on finishing a project, The Fetish Alphabet -- an alphabet of flash fictions about fetishes. I'd gotten to the letter P, and I'd decided that "P Is for Porn Star." And I ended up mentioning the shirt in the story. Days later, the story went online. Not long after, Fuck Your Hustle, the brand that created the shirt, found the reference, through a Google alert, I'd imagine, and tweeted about it.
The tweeter referred to the piece as an "article," not a work of fiction, but no matter. The tweet caught my eye because as someone who used to work as a copywriter, it made me think that fiction writers could work their hustle by teaming up with companies to help fund literary works. (To be clear: I didn't work with Fuck Your Hustle.) This isn't "The Secret History of Ads in Books"; it's more embedded than that. Of course, what I'm describing has been done before; although, at the moment, I can't find it referenced online. I seem to remember an author who mentioned a brand of jewelry as part of her story and got paid for it. It's like Chipotle's "disposable literature," but longer. It's like "The Internship," but better. Call it litvertising.
NYC, 1981
Image via PRIVATE
I wrote a couple pieces for NYC, 1981, which is a "website inspired by the upcoming film 'A Most Violent Year.'" I saw the film, as well, which I liked a lot. "Margin Call" remains my favorite J.C. Chandor movie. ("Maybe you could tell me what is going on. And please, speak as you might to a young child. Or a golden retriever. It wasn't brains that brought me here; I assure you that.") I wrote about "The Rise and Fall of the King of Swing."
"Since 1977, Larry Levenson, the son of a kosher meat businessmen, had presided over Plato’s Retreat, a Manhattan nightclub best described as Studio 54 for swingers. For $35, suburban couples could swap sex partners with hundreds of other likeminded individuals, join the orgy in the 'mattress room,' swim in a pool with a waterfall, soak in an enormous Jacuzzi, feast on an expansive buffet (the selection included chow mein, potato salad, and cold cuts), screw strangers in private rooms, or dance naked to disco music."
The Year in Sex
Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
Thanks to Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory for including me in "The Year in Sex Writing." She gave a nod to "For Women in Porn, the Personal Is Political and Profitable." I wrote the piece for my Forbes blog after a trip to the porn awards in January.
"'I’m not entirely comfortable with the label ‘feminist porn,' Stormy announces mid-discussion. 'What does my vagina have to do with it?' she asks the crowd rhetorically. 'Why can’t I just be a great director?'"
The 12-Year Deadline
Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
I've never been great with deadlines, but when I set out to write The Fetish Alphabet, I had no idea it would take me 12 years to finish it. But, it did.
In 2002 (as I recall it, and since this story covers many years, it's possible I'm misremembering parts of it), I reached out to Andrew Gallix at 3:AM Magazine. Andrew teaches at the Sorbonne, and 3:AM's slogan is "Whatever it is, we're against it," a phrase I wouldn't mind having pounded into my gravestone. (You can read more about 3:AM's illustrious history here.) I believe I pitched him the idea of a fetish alphabet. An alphabet. Of fetishes. A series of flash fictions exploring erotic derangements. He must've said yes because at some point off we went. A Google search reveals I wrote six installments -- A through F -- which were published between August and November of 2002. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, I stopped.
A year later, I published You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? with Future Tense Books. It was a collection of short stories I'd written and included a few of the fetish stories. That same year, I worked with artist Anthony Ventura on an illustrated version of The Fetish Alphabet. He beautifully illustrated the stories I'd written, and I wrote some more. I mean, look at this illustration for "A Is for Anthropophagy." Amazing. Some recent poking about online indicates I rewrote some of the letters -- for example, I changed "B Is for Bestiality" to "B Is for Bukkake" -- and I believe we got as far as O. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, I stopped.
Of course, this always bugged me -- the whole lot of it. That I had started it and not finished it. That it had been one thing and then another thing but never a finished thing. That I had said I would do it, yet in the end I had not. Over the following years, life happened. I moved, and I was broke, and I got sideswiped by Hurricane Katrina, and I moved again, and I worked as a waitress, and I moved again, and I got married, and I had cancer, and I got better, and we moved, and so on and so on. Buffeted by the waves, I suppose, or perhaps more like a drunk weaving back and forth across the road of life. Depends on how you look at it.
One day this year, I woke up, and I wasn't moving anymore, and I wasn't broke anymore, and I wasn't single anymore, and I wasn't sick anymore, and I wasn't in the eye of a storm anymore. Still, I had spent a lot of this year feeling like I was failing at things. Or at least not particularly succeeding at things. I wanted to do one thing and finish it. One. Thing. For fuck's sake. So I would know that I could. In that spirit, in November, I undertook a 30-day yoga challenge, and, to my quasi-surprise, I finished it. And then I set out to write 30 fictions in 30 days on my blog, and I did that, too. And after the former and during the latter, I emailed Andrew again, 12 years after the fact, and I asked if he would be interested in me finishing The Fetish Alphabet, and, luckily enough, he was kind enough and generous enough to give me the space to do it. The subject of my email to him on November 21: "An indecent proposal."
Today, the alphabet is done through W. I found a few of the ones I'd written along the way -- H, M, and O -- and the rest were lost. As of this writing, you can read The Fetish Alphabet through Q at 3:AM. A lovely woman named Emma posts them. That means X, Y, and Z are the only ones left. I told Andrew I'd do one every day, and for a while I did, but I ended up missing a few days here and there. Right now, that 12-year deadline is so close I can taste it, and you know what it tastes like? It tastes like rich New Orleans soil and bloody surgical gloves, aviation fuel perfume and prickly south Texas cacti, plastic bags filled with lavender air and the inside of an over-worn wedding ring. Surely, there are fetishes for all these things, including finishing things.