Ozark
I intend to write a review of "Ozark," but haven't done so yet. I highly recommend it. It's about a financial planner who gets involved in some trouble. It's better than the trailer. Give it a look. It's on Netflix.
The Uncensored Stripper
311 Likes, 17 Comments - my uncensored life (@theuncensoredstripper) on Instagram: ""Pound of flesh" One of the more intricate (and endlessly frustrating) aspects of being a..."
If you're interested in getting an uncensored (well, except for the fact that it's Instagram) peek into the life of a sex worker, I recommend The Uncensored Stripper's Instagram feed. Filled with photos new and old, immediate-feeling anecdotes of sex work done and undone, and the complications of providing emotional labor, give it a follow here.
Hip-Hop Heads
What the Blog
The other day, Dave Winer wrote about writing a State of the Blog. Intrigued, I expressed my interest in it. In return, Dave noted: "A good way to get the State of the Blog thing going is for everybody to think about the SOTB from their POV and then (of course) blog it."
So.
I started blogging in 2002, as I recall. At the time, Salon had a clunky-but-cool blogging platform, and since it was attached to a publication, there was some promise of traffic, so I launched my blog there. It was called The Reverse Cowgirl, and it was rather successful. I remember getting a kind of high off what we called "hits" back then. I believe my first big influx of traffic arrived when I posted images of a woman who had streaked or half-streaked a golf tournament. Maybe she was a porn star. I remember I got something like 5,000 hits. Wow! I was really impressed. As it turns out, with a blog, you could do your own thing. You didn't really need an editor, or permission to write something, or a budget. You could just churn, and the world would burn. It was ... fun.
That blog, as one can surmise by the name, was about sex, mostly, as I recall. That's what I wrote about as a freelance journalist, and the blog was kind of a way for me to funnel some energy into an outlet where someone wasn't telling me "No" all the time. I really liked blogging. It felt like I owned it. It felt like it was all me. It felt kind of true.
Blogging isn't really like that anymore. Along the way, it got eaten by corporations, and some of the greats I loved died over time or were killed. What was once an outlier's art became a series of cubbyholes in which millennials sat to crap out shit that passed for what we used to think of as blog posts. What's a blog today? I don't know. The New York Times does it. Those idiotic sites for bros do it. Some people still do it for love.
These days, the blogs I read are limited, because I, too, get most of my feed of news from social media. For me, that's usually Twitter. But I do read some blogs, still. One example would be Kottke, which remains about as true to its original self as a thing can. (I've guest-blogged there a few times, and it was like praying in church.) Another blog I enjoy that is distinct, original, and unfaltering is BLDGBLOG. What is it? That's hard to say. It's about curious places in the world, and our curious place in the world, and how the curious never fails to delight us. Sometimes I read GOMIBLOG, which is like an anti-blog blog. Its primary stance is calling out bloggers for ridiculous or scandalous behaviors. It is the ouroboros of blogging.
For the most part, though, gone are the distinctive voices that rose to popularity in the early days of blogging. Its practitioners got hired away or started writing sponsored posts. And the very idea of a blog got sucked into the maw of capitalism, which has never really done anybody any good -- not creatively, anyway. Once upon a time, blogging was an act of rebellion. Nowadays, it's a lost art sacrificed to the gods of selling out and getting ahead.
Which is too bad, really. Because blogging was the bridge that brought us here. Social media gave everybody a platform, but when the chorus sings, the most singular, strident, and spectacular voices get lost in the din of the many clamoring for attention, showing their abs in hopes of parlaying their status into influencer, exposing their thirsty status in a short-term hustle for likes, clicks, and views that, in the end, signify nothing but vanity and vapidity.
So.
What's next? A return to blogging! Or, no. Scratch that. Blogging is dead! Or, well. Maybe not. To blog or not to blog is the question I sometimes ask myself. Maybe the answer lies in pornography. When I started writing about the porn industry, it was the late 90s. A boom was underway, and the internet was taking X-rated content to the masses. But after the turn of the century, Porn Valley found itself flooded by production companies. The barrier to entry had lowered with the affordability of the technology required to make it, and "porn movies" rapidly morphed into "content." Then: piracy, the Feds, the economic apocalypse. By '08/'09, the adult movie industry, like much of the rest of the American economy, had shit the bed. But something interesting happened in the years after that. The competition was wiped out, and only the strong and the stalwart survived. Few remained, but they persevered. And in a lovely sort of mirroring, the audience changed, too. Tired of dreck smut shot on cum-stained couches, exhausted by masturbating to crap content shot by fly-by-night operations, bored with the ubiquity of gonzo-porno starring gaping assholes and cam-girls-gone-wild, consumers of porn surmised what they wanted was more. Not more of what had come before: the outrageous, the explicit, the deranged. They wanted quality, they wanted stories, they wanted craft. Now, the pornographers who survived the apocalypse are learning that if they make better porn, there are people out there who are willing to pay for it. Slowly, but surely, it appears, some 20 years (to the fucking month!) since I first set foot on a porn movie set, the industry has come circle. You can hear the wheels churning from here.
Maybe that's where blogging is. A few of us have hunkered down to wait out the storm. We watched from the sidelines when the clowns showed up and hijacked the show. As the masses move on to the next hot thing, we are finding there is a little elbow room in blogging again, and we are stretching ourselves -- tentatively, at first, to see if these muscles of ours still work -- and we are trying to figure out what it is we have to say. I'm still here. I know you are, too. I am setting out on a journey that is the unfolding story of my life. Will you come with me?
X-Ray Artist
Here's a fun interview with the delightful painter John Currin. It covers sex, porn, and eyeballs. Oh, and painting, too.
GQ Style: Two decades back, did you feel like it was easier to show X-rated paintings overseas?
John Currin: That was more about my elegy to European painting and my naive idea of European libertinism.
So it wasn’t you tiptoeing around American conservatism?
No, and I subsequently got interested in making the convex-mirror paintings, because they’re less about a social reality and more a reflection of how my own ideas have changed about porn. I thought of the mirror’s distortion almost like an invasive eyeball.
Church at Dusk
29 Likes, 4 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Church at dusk"
The Queen Bee in the Corner Office
Read Olga Khazan's "Why Do Women Bully Each Other at Work?" It's an interesting, insightful, and illuminating investigation of how women relate at work -- in ways that are not infrequently toxic.
Large surveys by Pew and Gallup as well as several academic studies show that when women have a preference as to the gender of their bosses and colleagues, that preference is largely for men. A 2009 study published in the journal Gender in Management found, for example, that although women believe other women make good managers, “the female workers did not actually want to work for them.” The longer a woman had been in the workforce, the less likely she was to want a female boss.
Calling
33 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💖"
The other night I volunteered for Planned Parenthood. Usually, I'm an escort for those who are going to the clinic to have abortions. This time, I went to a house where maybe 40 or so mostly women were trying to stop one of this red state's senators from voting for legislation to defund Planned Parenthood. Typically, I would've joined the group of folks writing letters to the senator, but because I had recently read this article, by a guy who chose phone calls over emails and discovered a greater intimacy, I decided to stand on the back patio in the heavy humidity and call people to ask them to call the Senator and tell him they stand with Planned Parenthood and they don't appreciate his attempt to defund it. I actually haven't really done anything like this before. Sure, I've cold called, but this was more like chilly calling. Some numbers had since been changed. Sometimes, I left a message. Occasionally, I got a person. My favorite response on the no end of the spectrum was: "Honey, I'm 90 -- click." Clearly, she had better things to do. Sometimes, you got an enthusiastic response. More often than not, that was from a woman. Yes, she would call. Clearly, she was delighted to hear from Planned Parenthood. She understood that this was a call to action. She was ready to go.
The Mooch: A XXX Parody
I had fun writing a new post for my Forbes blog in which I asked porn industry insiders if Anthony Scaramucci has a future in being paid homage in a XXX movie. You can read that story here.
In Scaramucci and his graphic diatribe, Myers saw the potential for a sex parody that would be right at home alongside his long line of other successful pop culture parodies: "Game of Bones," "The Big Lebowski: A XXX Parody," and "Spongeknob Squarenuts" among them. He even went so far as to reach out to Tommy Pistol, a porn actor from Astoria, Queens, who has a background in sketch comedy, with the goal of casting him as Scaramucci. Pistol has been performing in adult movies for the last 12 years. "I think that was like the shoo-in for me," Pistol recounts of getting the call, "being a New Yorker and being able to act."
The Last Tycoon
I've been watching Amazon's "The Last Tycoon." It's not perfect, but it holds the attention. It's Old Hollywood, and lots of drama, and it's very easy on the eyes. Two standout performances from Kelsey Grammer in the role of Executive Blowhard and Jennifer Beals as A Woman with a Secret. The series is based on F. Scott's Fitzgerald's last and unfinished novel of the same name. Beals is the show's shining star, and her storyline, which is based in truth, is really interesting, and, I think, deftly handled. Lily Collins has really impressive eyebrows that tend to be scene-stealers. What the series does best is paint Hollywood as a complicated, rough, siren-esque place where dreams can be made and dashed all in the course of a day on a movie lot.
That Ghost Story
"A Ghost Story." Annoying hipster horror-ish movie or intriguing meditation of the meaninglessness of life? You've got to see it if you want the answer. The Other Affleck plays a dead guy under a finely draped sheet. That Girl With Those Cheekbones plays his widow. Neither of their faces are on camera for long. Shooting location: Austin, Texas. How very Malick of you, dude. The guy dies, the girl is sad, and time whizzes past us. There's a note, but in the end, you'll never know what it says. (I guess that's a spoiler.) I admire the intellectual reaching, but I feel like this movie ghosted me. That said, I enjoyed much of it. So, see it ... maybe?
The Bird
56 Likes, 3 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: ""You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the..."
Atomic Blonde Bombshell
I liked "Atomic Blonde," but there's just something missing. What is it? Hm. Maybe ... backstory! Which, apparently, Charlize did. not. want. And maybe if it's a Charlize movie, Charlize gets what Charlize wants. I don't really get the Bond/Bourne comparisons, in a way, because this chick is a true cypher. Why so inscrutable, Lorraine? Maybe because a dude wrote her. Perhaps the sequel will be written by a woman! Here's hoping the box office returns dictate a "Lady John Wick 2." Read my review and thoughts on Forbes.
No Filter Life
40 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "No filter life 💙"
It's right there, as long as you: leave the house, park the car, walk through the sand, move past the guys throwing fishing nets, turn your head, mentally pause while your feet keep moving, walk up the stairs, make your way down the path, and keep checking, yep, it's still there, and later, yes, it's still there, and, still again, it's all right there, hovering on the edge of the world, changing shape, until you realize, you are, too.
What I'm Reading
0 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "📚👮🏻♀️🚓💉🏙 #whatimreadingnow #whatimreading #summerreading #summerread #summerreads #donwinslow..."
Typically, I wouldn't read a book like Don Winslow's The Force, yet here I am. I read someone writing about it somewhere, and they described it as in some way Joycean, so there you go. It's about a dirty cop, and a city in disorder, and the blurry line between the supposed good guys and the purported bad guys. It's long and engrossing and a suitable summer read.
Here's a snippet:
"A strong wind finds its way through every crack, into the project stairwells, the tenement heroin mills, the social club back rooms, the new-money condos, the old-money penthouses. From Columbus Circle to the Henry Hudson Bridge, Riverside Park to the Harlem River, up Broadway and Amsterdam, down Lenox and St. Nicholas, on the numbered streets that spanned the Upper West Side, Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood, if there was a secret Da Force didn't know about, it was because it hadn't been whispered about or even thought of yet."
Your Monday Quote
0 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "🌅 "You are the sky. Everything else -- it's just the weather." -- Pema Chodron"
You can follow me on Instagram here.
Meet Mr. Porn
Earlier this week, I interviewed Greg Lansky. You can read about our conversation here. One question that didn't make it into the final version: "What's artistic about a girl with a dick up her ass?" I can't remember the answer. I suppose, as ever, the art is in the eye of the beholder. Or, in this case, the eye of the pornographer.
"It is art because you make someone feel something," he says. "When you create performance art, people feel something about it. You going to tell me people don't feel something when they watch my art? They feel something."
Vegetarians Need Not Apply
41 Likes, 2 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Meaty. Buying my copy of @recoilmagazine's new #carnivore at #walmart 🔪🐗💀🔥🍽 #meat #magazine..."
The editor of this magazine and I talked about me writing something for the magazine, and while that didn't work out, I was excited to see it on the newsstand. I love the title -- CARNIVORE -- and I love the cover: the chef's coat, the rifle in hand, the slab of raw meat. It's all very visceral. This magazine is for you if you enjoy hunting, you enjoy eating what you hunt, and you want to join the call to arms of the FIELD TO TABLE REVOLUTION. Also: you can learn how to make a wild boar patty melt, and who hasn't been pining for a boar melt lately?
The Thing
The Ice House
Image via Imbibe
Here's a great story about -- well, whatever you want to call it: intuition, luck, the brilliance of stupidity. Found via my friend Sarah's Twitter feed, read CJR's "Writers Dish on Scoops That Slipped Away." Make sure you read the last one. It's a doozy and a genius life lesson.
I was pretty new. I had been there maybe a month, and I was doing weekend cop shop. There was a story in which three 14-year-old boys went out and attempted to rape, and ultimately murdered, a classmate’s mom. A huge story. A capital crime. I just got beaten like a drum the whole weekend. Every step of the way, the News reporter, Bill Hendricks—the longtime cop reporter with all the sources—was just getting everything that I wasn’t getting. It was so bad that my bosses couldn’t even be mad at me. They treated me as if I were developmentally disabled.