Yeah, I Got a T-Shirt
"Master Bait & Tackle #florida #Naples #masturbate"
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The Art of Titles
Bentley, Naples, FL / Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
Sure, it's only July, but I've decided "Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me A Maserati" is my best title of 2015. It came to mind after reading "The Story Behind Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz.'"
Janis and I were giggling and showing off a bit in front of Rip and Geraldine. The alcohol wasn’t meant to do anything except keep us laughing in that bar, but it assumed control, and the result was “Mercedes Benz.” I figured that what we were doing there was just an exercise to impress Rip and Geraldine and pass the time. Nothing more.
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Current Status
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Speechless
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Some Stuff I Left Out Of The Donut Burger
I ate a donut burger.
Here's what I didn't write about it:
1. I debated whether to spell it "dougnut" or "donut."
2. The walls were decorated with airplane themes: propellers, maps to make an airplane, paintings of planes.
3. The burger arrived without tomato or lettuce, because wtf would you need tomato and lettuce?
4. It was good.
5. I didn't eat all of it.
6. There's no relationship between 4 and 5.
7. I wouldn't call the donut milkshake a disappointment, but it felt like what happened was the sugar part went into the milkshake part, and then you had a milkshake with dough balls in it.
8. There were two vacuuming incidents.
9. The owner was in the back cooking burgers.
10. It was so hot outside. So hot. Really hot.
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Do Work Here
"Home office vignette featuring small girl and pig knife standoff painting from a street vendor in #shanghai, pink glass hand from scary vintage store in..."
I've been working more on setting up my office, and posted this shot to my Instagram. It's got some random things in it. I think the room should reflect my spirit animal, by which I do not mean something with mange, but maybe have pops of color, and images of ghosts, and trinkets from China. I wrote a story once about a woman who had one hand. Maybe that's what this is about. How to get work done when you've mutated.
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#gunequality
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Not Ballers
"Ballers." Why does it suck? I'm not sure. Maybe it's the writing. Maybe it's the casting. Maybe it's that The Rock doesn't seem sure how to be anything other than a cartoon. Force him to act like a worried money manager for athletes, stick him in too tight suit pants, make him talk finance, and he gets lost in translation. The biggest problem "Ballers" has isn't ballers. It has plenty of those. A crew of athletes in the various stages of their wound up careers: climbing, struggling, out of it. The biggest problem is that there isn't anything counterintuitive about it. It's all a series of grand cliches. The great hub upon which "The Sopranos" spun was that it was about a mobster who was seeing a shrink. What the fuck is up with that? it made you wonder. Watching "Ballers" is like watching the dramatic version of "Hard Knocks," and, shit, we've seen that already. The closest thing to something interesting is Rob Corddry, who's a fucking freak -- but even then they've got him on too tight of a leash -- and Omar Miller's inhabituation of what happens to players after the NFL. Maybe the problem is that while all the active ball players on the show, the ones whose lives we follow as the plot meanders about confusedly, are black men, and, unless I missed something, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, not a single one of the show's executive producers is a black man. But, hey, it's Hollywood, and I guess that's how they play ball.
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Failure and Other Items
I got back to blogging at Forbes, and my god what a horrendous first month. I managed to bang out five posts in the couple weeks I had access, and the traffic was horrendous. Quelle embarrassment! And look at this girl -- she's killing it! Git 'em, LRO.
I don't know what the problem is. Possible theories:
I took a year off, so now the traffic sucks for my new stuff.
I'm a bad person and am being karmically punished.
I fell back into writing for others, when I should be writing for myself.
Probably, it's this last. Nothing worse than words with no heart. July, I will crush you.
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Interior Designer I Am Not
Recently, I've been trying to decorate my home office. So far, that means cool artwork, fun pops of color, and the resultant effect of looking like someone stumbled into a half set up booth at a flea market. Over the years, I guess I spent so much time appreciatively admiring others' interior design that I somehow confused the ability to recognize it with the ability to do it. I can't do it. Or maybe I have to give it a chance. Either way, I did buy these bold orange Bisley filing cabinets from The Container Store which are awesome and way better than having papers all over the floor.
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For the Sad
I spent a long time reading this very sad piece, "Five Hostages."
"According to several freed hostages, Kayla was not tortured or sexually abused. Didier François, the French journalist, sometimes heard Kayla asking her jailers for fruit or sanitary napkins. The male hostages wondered who she was. At one point, they heard a guard say that she was Muslim, and Kayla corrected him. The guard was impressed. 'She’s stronger than you,' the guard told another prisoner. 'She doesn’t pretend.'"
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Ballerz
"It's a tough job but ... #work #Bentley #baller"
I Spent Too Much Time Focused on Drugs
"Big ups to mr. @dannylepore for this dope ass sleeve tattoo! Make sure to follow us @cholo_tattoos to keep seeing fresh tattoos daily! #cholotattoos..."
Well, drug tattoos, that is. I spent way too much time searching Instagram for drug tattoos to create what I think is actually a pretty cool post for my Forbes blog, which should've been titled: "Instagram Your Drug Tattoo And Everyone Will Heart You." Or what have you. Do you know how goddamn hard it is to get good results for #cracktattoo? You're looking for someone who's posted a shot of their crack-inspired tattoo, and you end up looking at people's ass cracks with tattoos in them or on them. Also: #coketattoo. You think it is easy, but it is not. Do you know how many idiots have Coke the soda tattooed on them? Way too many. Also: People, get more XTC tattoos. Or at least let me know what hashtag to search so I can find them. There was also this insanely interesting one that had to do with like heroin and a pregnant woman combined in a tattoo -- or something??? -- and I saw it once, but I couldn't find it again. What I think ended up being the most interesting part were the sobriety tattoos. They were powerful, and I like how they had a function: to remind their owners not to go down the road again. Kudos. Oh, one more thing: Where the hell are all the flakka tattoos? Man. All I got was Waka Flocka Flame.
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The Nightingale
The other night I watched "Nightingale," an HBO movie starring David Oyelowo as a guy going nuts. Something terrible happens, and you watch as the main character's mind unspools. The best things: Oyelowo's disturbing, nuanced, terrifying performance, the gorgeously dated interiors, the brilliant writing. The worst things: well, there aren't really any, unless you don't like watching people unhinge. One of the most intriguing and rare things about "Nightingale" is that it forces you to follow in the footsteps and faux rational thinking of a deeply unreliable narrator. No one else makes an appearance in the movie, so, as a viewer, you are left with two choices: go it alone or trust the nutbird. And because Oyelowo's articulation of the man going mad is so careful, you find yourself wanting to believe: in him, in something, in resolution. There isn't really any -- not anything that's good anyway. Still, the reason to watch it is that it provides a considered alternative to the hysteria our culture inhabits every time someone unhinged does something insane. We want to declare: That person is Other. In fact, the most disturbing thing about someone who goes off the rails is how much we see of ourselves in them, which, of course, indicates how close we are to doing the same thing -- or, you know, something like it. In the end, the movie's clever use of technology -- an iPhone, a laptop camera -- reminds us that nowadays, craziness isn't just for loners. It's a show for us all, one that we can't get enough of watching.
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The Zombie Hunter
"Delighted and cool to get my contributor's copy of Clackamas Literary Review! Includes my short story: The Urologist."
The other day I got my contributor's copies of the latest issue of Clackamas Literary Review, which features a new short story I wrote, "The Urologist." Thanks, Trevor Dodge! You can buy a copy of it on Amazon here. I was delightful to be featured along pals of mine: Lydia Netzer, who wrote the widely-acclaimed Shine Shine Shine and contributed a wonderfully weird short story called "Suicide Doors," which is about a woman who tries to write erotic fiction and keeps getting distracted by life, and Kevin Sampsell, who wrote A Common Pornography, published my very own You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?, and contributed a series of fantastical collages. In any case, I hope you'll pick up a copy. Here's an excerpt from my story:
"Sometimes, at dinner parties, someone would ask her why she had married the husband, and she would say, 'If there is ever a zombie apocalypse, my husband will hunt other humans for us to eat.' Invariably, the person would laugh, thinking she was joking, and she would laugh, too, playing along. She wasn't kidding. The husband was a killer."
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How to Not Choke When You Blog
Now that I'm back at Forbes, I'm trying to post a fair amount, but on Friday, I sort of choked. I'd written a post about a python pizza, and a post about porn on HBO, and then it was Friday, and I got stuck. I spent way too much time overthinking it: Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Then on Sunday, I realized I needed to post anything, which actually prompted me to write the post that I originally wanted to write, which was about a work of art made of crack vials.
Be fucking specific
One thing that's sort of a challenge when you write about vice is that you can write about a lot of shit. You can write about: heroin, cam girls, internet gambling, a line of wine named for dead criminals, a gun show, pruno, DeLoreans, and all kind of other things. I spent too much time casting too wide of a net in the form of Google News, which sucks. When I wrote about things successfully, I realized, they tended to be about the intersection of two things: vice and something of particular interest to me. So, for example, I'm not that interested in pizza, but I am interested in Florida, so an Everglades pizza made sense. Be as stupidly specific as a PhD candidate in your endeavors. Niche your brain.
"NBD. #Egypt #fortmyers #florida #parkinglot #ruler"
Write something, anything
I think one problem was that I was focusing too much on what people would maybe want to read. This is an old bad habit that comes from having jobs that required heavy traffic-getting writing, and it can ruin you the way love can get ruined for an old whore. Also, Forbes has a somewhat different way of paying bloggers for traffic nowadays -- because that is how it works there -- and so far it's been ... well, I'll give it a positive slant by saying I'm sure I'll figure it out. But it's different. In any case, post what you love, and fuck everyone else. After all, most people are dumb.
Do shit, dumbshit
I wrote a nice post on my Forbes blog a couple years ago: "A Girl and a .22." It was fun to do and fun to write. I went to a firearms superstore with a big range and shot some guns. If you don't have to be a churn-and-burn blogger, why would you act like one? Use blogging as excuse to go live a more interesting life. For me, that's meant going to porn shows, and gun shows, and drinking expensive Bloody Marys. Find what you love, and then fuck the hell out of it. I'll be going on another adventure later this week that should be interesting. Stay tuned.
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A Bit More on That HBO Porn Show
Yesterday I wrote on my Forbes blog about the news that David Simon has a "porn drama" in development with HBO, but I sort of left out the broader point I was trying to make, which is that it is very difficult, and I'm sure HBO knows this, to make a TV show or a movie about the adult film industry. Obviously, PTA did it deftly with "Boogie Nights," but you'll be hard-pressed to come up with other examples. And that's because it's very difficult to depict the pornography within the porn industry without turning your project into, well, pornography. Whether people are simulating sex or having sex in front of the camera, it has a hard time looking like anything other than that: people fucking. This is why people are always saying, "Someone should make a really great art porn movie," but it hasn't been done, because it's difficult to do. (The lone exception, IMO, is "The Operation," shot in infrared.) For porn, there is no gap between what it is and what it appears to be. Of course, the obvious way to dodge this quandary is to focus on something other than screwing: the storyline, the period in time, the characters. And that's where you see success. Sex, in the broadest sense, works best as background noise. For example, think of "The Sopranos" scenes that take place at Bada Bing! It's less naked chicks prancing around and more B-roll; it's scenery. But what happens when the scenery becomes the star? That's where things get tricky. As a journalist, I try to avoid doing what I call "going in through the front door"; that would be something like dealing with publicists. Instead, it's generally better to go through the side door. (Historically, when writing about the porn industry -- take, for example, "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" -- I avoid the big production companies and seek out the mid-range entities because it is there that the truth resides, not in a meeting facilitated by a PR lackey.) In any case, to bring sex alive before the cameras as something other than what I'd be inclined to call straight up fucking, you must enter through the side door. Clayton Cubitt's "Hysterical Literature" comes to mind. (Not porn, obviously, but an exploration of sexuality that renders sex into something else altogether: desire?) In any case, I'm always optimistic that it can be done, and HBO, or Showtime, or Netflix is really the place to do it. Advertisers have really killed the effective distribution of thoughtful considerations of the porn business, and yet the outliers offer hope. Personally, I'd rather see something other than some tee-hee bullshit created by some chick from "Sex and the City" and something more knowledgeable than whatever gritty grind Simon will perhaps create. The thing to remember, as PTA did, is that it's always about heart. After all, porn isn't about fucking at all. It's about love, and intimacy, and how difficult it is for us human beings to navigate their slippery terrains.
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I'm Back at Forbes
Don't choke on a frog leg bone, kid. (Photo credit: Susannah Breslin)
For three years, I blogged at Forbes. (You can visit my blog here.) Initially, the blog was called Pink Slipped, and I started it because I'd gotten downsized from my last job. For a while, I wrote about freelancing, and getting gigs, and making money. Eventually, I decided I wanted to pick a more rigorous beat, and I renamed the blog Sin Inc and started covering vice. By early 2014, though, I decided I'd done enough and left. Not long after, I started to miss it. I missed the beat, the adventures, the trips to gun shows and porn conventions. So, last week, when I was in New York, I ended up talking to an editor there, and now I'm back. Thanks for allowing me to return, Forbes. When I started blogging for Forbes in 2011, I believe there were no more than a couple hundred contributors (which is the Forbes moniker for bloggers), and I believe there are now something like 1,500. The pay model has been tweaked, and what you can do and upload has grown more sophisticated. I like writing for Forbes for a few different reasons: the autonomy, the brand, the fact that it makes me stretch a bit to think about how things work. At Forbes, you're compensated by how much traffic you bring to your blog, and there are some new challenges in that regard. Hopefully, I'll meet them. I'll be covering a swath of things that I like to think of as aspirational sin. That'll include sex, guns, drugs, drinking, gambling, and weirdly over-the-top decadent food items. My first post is on a pizza that I ate: it was topped with python, alligator, and frog legs. It was quite a feast. So, would you pay $45 for this pizza?
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Creature
"What is this? #mystery #enigma #whatisthis"
I saw this in a vintage store today. What the hell is it? A phone? Speakers? An alien life force?
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I Heart New York
"Scary."
After I went to the journalism program at Yale, I spent a couple days in NYC. It was an amazing time. I ate at The Breslin, which I Ioved. I sat at the bar upstairs and enjoyed a Brooklyn Bramble cocktail (I tried the Pickled Gibson, but it was too weird for me), the market salad with tahini dressing (tasty!), and the duck and sausage (delicious). Thanks to Matt for being a cool bartender. I stayed at the Algonquin, which, oh my god, I loved so much. Dorothy Parker and the Vicious Circle! Dark wood! A cat named Matilda working the front desk! A copy of the New Yorker in every room! I will definitely return. On my first full day there, I went to see the Alexander Calder show at Dominique Levy. Everything was white, white, white there, and you had to wear booties to not scuff up the floor. The Calders were mostly small-sized, and there was a very dear set of miniature sculptures that fit into a cigar box, a gift for his wife. The rooms in which the pieces were shown were designed by Santiago Calatrava. After that, I saw the Richard Prince show at Gagosian. The show featured cheesy pulp books that were coupled with the original artworks that had been commissioned for them. It was a little odd, and somewhat amusing. Of course, the infamous appropriated shot of an underage Brooke Shields in the nude was included. As usual, Prince underwhelmed. After that, I went to the Met. This show required a warning, and I loved the China fashion exhibit. There were some amazing Tom Fords and a lot of glorious Galliano, but I wished there were more McQueens. Don't miss the weird, watery floating box on the roof garden. The next day, I had to check out the new Whitney Museum. So glad I did. It is super cool. It's like a stack of fantastic shoe boxes, or art-filled jewel boxes, and the views that frame the art make you feel agog. The all-floors show is America Is Hard to See. The top floors with older works were crowded and less impressive, but the lower floors with newer works were just spectacular. Oh, and I walked the High Line, too.
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