Am Blogging
I'm working on two new posts for my Forbes blog. One is about the adult industry. One is about guns. Please keep an eye out for them.
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Fun Day
"Another day on the job. I smell like gunpowder and AR sweat. #journalism #guns #firearm #gun #ar #amnotwritingamshooting"
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Vanity Fair Does Hysterical Literature
Image credit: Clayton Cubitt
Amazing! A terrific profile of Clayton Cubitt and collaborator Katie James on "Hysterical Literature": "I'll Read What She's Reading." Writer Toni Bentley had the balls to do it herself.
Eight feet from the front edge of the table was Cubitt’s camera on a tripod. It would remain stationary for the entire session, no shaky hand-held camera work for this particular project: just a single, head-on P.O.V. It was left to Katie to do the hand-held work under the table with what Cubitt calls her “paintbrush,” a Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator—also known as “Big Buzzy.” “I think she’s the actual artist involved,” says Cubitt. “I just press Record and stand back.”
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Pilates
I've been getting more into Pilates lately and have been seeing and feeling a difference which is cool. At home, I sometimes do this Pilates DVD with Brooke Siler. You don't need any special equipment for it, and the fact that she's built like a stalk of asparagus is inspiring.
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The Wolfpack
"The Wolfpack" is such a strange movie that I had a hard time watching it. It's about a set of boy siblings, and the family that keeps them locked in a Manhattan apartment. Eventually, they venture outside. It's a documentary. I vacillated between enjoying the film's refusal to be a traditional by the book documentary and feeling annoyed with its refusal to spell everything out for me. It's more like an art film, in a way, an assemblage. Still, it's very peculiar -- you kind of wonder: Do I want to see this? Sometimes, I wasn't so sure. What's happened is distressing, yet you almost feel at times like director Crystal Moselle doesn't want to look at that dead on, but instead in passing glances. The parents are a mess. The reenactments of films the boys undertake to escape their confines is intriguing; the final film within a film is probably the most beautiful thing in it. I'm not sure what else is. The boys graduate from their prison childhoods, and it's very sweet to see them seeing their first movie in a movie theater, but the viewer remains a spectator, far removed from whatever happened on the LES.
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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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