Some Amazon Pilots Reviewed

Since we the people get to decide which TV series get made on Amazon and which don't, here are my thoughts thus far.

"Mad Dogs": Just stupid and gross. Bad and wrong. Buncha guys acting like dicks. Pass.

"Salem Rogers": Not bad. Overly-rehabbed actress gets out and tries to make a comeback. Her catch phrase: "Right on, tampon." Pretty funny. Mildly embarrassing. Make it filthier.

"Down Dog": So stupid I can't even remember what it's about except yoga.

"The New Yorker Presents": Interesting! Fun for intellectual types. Marina Abramovic talks art, and Tyrone Hayes talks frogs. Recommend.

"Cocked": Haven't watched this one yet but am very interested. Guns! No network bullshit so whatever on politics. Well timed, what with SHOT Show and all.

"The Man in the High Castle": Terrible name! Best show. SO INTRIGUING. We lost the war and half the country belongs to Hitler and half the country belongs to the Japanese. Stupid white Americans are everybody's bitch. Really beautiful and fascinating and love.

"Point of Honor": Hate old timey shit so no comment at press time. 

Also: moar "Transparent," please.

[Amazon]

Creative Advertising for Perverts

Previously, I wrote about "litvertising." In other words, using fiction to sell things.

Speaking of which, I wrote a few pieces for NYC, 1981, a site created to discreetly promote "A Most Violent Year," which was written and directed by J. C. Chandor and for which Jessica Chastain was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actress. The movie takes place in 1981, that most violent year, and the content of the site is all about that year or that time.

I did one piece that was non-fiction, "The Rise and Fall of the King of Swing," and one piece that was fiction, "Sex and the City, 1981." I did some research before writing the latter piece and came up with the idea of portraying a man wandering the streets of the city at night and ending up at a peep show. I ended up watching this video of Show World. It is amazing.

In any case, literary prose can sell products. Several years ago, I ran some racy American Apparel ads that caused some controversy. It would be interesting if AA ads had micro-fictions paired with them that illuminated what the girl was thinking, revealing what's under her surface.

From my piece:

"I end up at Show World, and I hand the guy my cash, and I get in the booth, and the curtain slides up, and there’s a girl dancing on a pedestal in the middle of the round room, and she’s totally naked. This is why I love this city. There isn’t anything you can want that you can’t find in it."

[Sex and the City, 1981]

Her

"Her." An interesting movie. A guy falls in love with his operating system. Strange colors. Lots of shots in Shanghai, which you will recognize if you've been there, although here it is pretending to be Los Angeles of the Future. Scarlett Johansson as the throaty computrix. First half: a bit twee (see: Spike Jonze). Second half: more interesting, metaphysical. An intriguing scene in which the OS hires a sex surrogate for a ... kind of ... three-way? It's all very [something]. The best part is when the computer evolves beyond human capability, leaving love and language in its wake.

In Case You Were Wondering

"(2) 'Adult film performer' shall mean any individual whose penis penetrates a vagina or anus while being filmed, or whose vagina or anus is penetrated by a penis while being filmed."

via Mike South

2015 Goals (Late)

1. Blog once a day for 365 consecutive days
2. Sell one product a month for 12 months
3. Do more Pilates

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.

Know Your Trigger

I was mildly amused to see my name mentioned in the entry for "Trigger" on Know Your Meme.

"On April 13th, 2010, the news site True/Slant[16] published an article by writer Susannah Breslin, who criticized feminists for using the phrase too generously."

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 Problem with Hating Cops

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

Photo credit: Susannah Breslin

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

"'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

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.

[The Fetish Alphabet]

Living Death Positive

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

— Sarah Wambold (@Sah_Raw) December 31, 2014

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?

"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

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 Fetish Alphabet]

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.