I Get Email
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“Hi boss can supply drugs”
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Ms. Destroyer
Wow. What a nutty movie. “Destroyer.” A bare-faced Nicole Kidman lunges across Los Angeles in pursuit of bad guys. Honestly, it’s been over a week, and I can’t even summarize the plot. All I remember is Kidman plowing through the world like it owed her something, and the debt holder had to pay. This movie was directed by a woman. It’s not for everyone. It’s for people who think life is a crock—and then you’re dead.
(Go see it.)
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The Boy's Club
The Artiste
19 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Signing up for a comics making class for no reason other than to blow @youngmattc out of the water..."
Not long ago, I signed up for a comics-making class. I’ve made some comics in the past and had several published, and I thought it would be a good idea to have an outlet for expression that wasn’t just words. I’ve always made comics by taking photos and using digital means to manipulate them into what looked more like art. This time I’m going to try actually drawing. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at it. I’m good at the words, and the storytelling, but my art is not strong. It’s not even close. I’ve made a few ahead of time, and I bought some colored pencils. So far, they’re pretty ugly. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what you tolerate.
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Sexing a Pigeon
Awhile back, I wrote that I’d be sharing the latest developments that I have regarding my investigation into the sexing of a war hero pigeon named Cher Ami who may be a hen or a cock. This issue is important for several reasons, including that the bird is identified as a cock at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where the bird is stuffed and on display. If the plaque that identifies the bird as a male is incorrect, it matters, given how many people visit there every year: 4.3M visitors in 2018, apparently. In any case, here’s an email I got from a reader and fellow Person Interested in Cher Ami—I hereby christen us: PICAs—who came across my posts: Dr. Marianne M. Gilchrist. Also, I’m excited to report I’ve gotten a very interesting lead from the National Archives. So, more to come. Thank you, Dr. Gilchrist! You can find the full thread of my Cher Ami posts here.
___
Email subject header: Cher Ami the Pigeon
Date: November 17, 2018
Hi, Susannah!
Having recently discovered Cher Ami's story, and your blog thread on her, and being very fond of pigeons, I just thought I'd add an observation on gender:
While it's difficult to be sure, given that the bird is stuffed, and taxidermists can change an animal's shape, my suspicion is she's a hen. Cock pigeons are chunkier and tend to have a thicker neck, with thicker feathers that they can puff out as a ruff in courtship dances. Cher Ami's neck is more slender. Cocks also have bigger ceres (the white 'nose') above their beaks.
I found these images online that demonstrate sex dimorphism in pigeons. Cher Ami looks to me more like a girl pidgie.
best wishes,
Marianne
___
[My reply on January 17, 2019]
Thanks, Marianne, and apologies for the delayed response. Would you mind if I posted your email on my blog? I could use your name or not.
___
[Dr. Gilchrist’s reply on January 18, 2019]
Hi!
Yes! I've also read that she was discovered to be a hen when she was stuffed.
I wonder if the stresses of war had stopped her laying eggs? She was an adult bird.
best,
Marianne
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To Be Read
Image via Rakuten
ForbesLife did a roundup of their most popular posts for 2018, which included my coverage of France’s first sex doll brothel. As of this writing, that post has 97,096 views. Here are a few thoughts on making content clickable.
People tend to write for themselves. In the click economy, that’s not so smart. You must consider your content as seen through the eyes of the readers. Readers suffer from the paradox of choice. Why should they click on your content instead of others’ content? If you think about topic and titles from their perspective, rather than your own, they’ll choose you.
Content doesn’t sit in a series of discreet buckets. It’s not binary. It’s fluid. Feature writing, copy writing, and long-form journalism pull from the same well to fill various vessels. Borrow and merge. Remix and redeliver. Stop being a snob about your words and care to be read.
The external real audience is just a projection of the audience inside your head. The critic, the fan, the artist, the voyeur, the flaneur. They’re in the world, but they’re in you, too. The path to finding your true self winds through them like trees, their boughs brushing as you pass.
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Ban Billionaires
45 Likes, 3 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💰BAN BILLIONAIRES💰 hoodie by my buddy 🖤@claytoncubitt🖤 #banbillionaires #getmoney"
My photographer friend Clayton Cubitt is producing some amazing works-for-sale as of late. I had to own his BAN BILLIONAIRES hoodie. The design is slick, and the sweatshirt is a cool cut and the softest material ever.
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Say Cheese
21 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Got photographed by @smeetamahanti today 📷"
The other day I got photographed by Smeeta Mahanti, who took this bad-ass photo you may have seen.
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Wait for It
1 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Graphic novel of Paul Auster's City of Glass 🏙"
The nice folks over at Seriocomic have asked me to write a short piece about the comic of my choice. Seriocomic is “a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.” My contribution will be appearing in the spring. For my “comic,” I chose the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
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Pigeon Shutdown
Image via Adriana Sassoon
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ll be posting some updates to my investigation into the gender of a famous war hero pigeon named Cher Ami who’s stuffed and on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. In the meantime, I’ll share this automatic response I got when I replied at an email sent awhile back from an archives specialist at the National Archives at College Park who saw my tweets about Cher Ami on Twitter. In my email to him, I asked if I could share the research he’d sent me, but I got this in response instead:
“The National Archives and Records Administration is closed to normal operations due to a lack of appropriations. I will be out of the office until I am authorized to return and will respond to your inquiry at that time. Thank you.”
Basically, the only thing standing between you and learning more about Cher Ami is Donald Trump.
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About That Pigeon
Some time back, I got interested in trying to figure out if a war hero pigeon that’s stuffed at the Smithsonian is a cock or a hen. In the interim, I’ve gotten various emails from various people, from a bird expert to a pigeon fancier to a fan, and I’ll be updating this blog with that information in the coming days and weeks.
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Porn Comixxx
This is an excerpt from a porn comic that I was working on in 2018. It’s about a woman who moves back to Porn Valley after a long time away, what she sees there, and how things have changed and are the same.
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Ride or Die
13 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💀 #cadillac #hearse"
High School Dreams
Every once in a while I have dreams in which I’m back in high school and screwing up. Last weekend offered a variation on that—and usually they are variations. This one I was in college, but a high school-like-college, and I had screwed up something—not doing homework, missing tests, that sort of thing—and I was going to fail all my classes. The tension of these types of dreams tend to revolve around the moment at which the problem becomes too significant to ignore, and the moment at which I address it. In fact, I dropped out of high school in my senior year. I was a bit of a fuck up. Sometimes I think about going back; you know, one could turn that sort of thing into an article. I never got my GED: I took classes at UC Berkeley when I was in high school, I went to junior college, I transferred to and graduated from UC Berkeley, I went to grad school. Despite all those boxes checked, I’m still the girl who has dreams in which I’m screwing everything up all over again.
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
An Excerpt From an Unpublished Essay
An excerpt from an unpublished essay:
Image via Harvard Health Publishing
“The tumor was mine. Arguably, it was my malignant baby, for my body had created it, and it was growing inside of me at an aggressive pace. But I did not want it. I wanted it out. There was a lot of debate over the best way to address the monster within me. The first oncologist wanted to chop off both my breasts and yank out my reproductive organs. After that, a plastic surgeon showed me his photo album filled with pictures of women whose heads were clipped out of the frame and whose breasts had been ravaged by cancer, the interior flesh of which had been removed by him, and which had been reconstructed in ways that did not, to my eye, look at all natural. Finally, a physician’s assistant came in the room after the plastic surgeon had left. I said I didn’t realize it would look like that, and he said he understood. He held one hand in the air palm up, and he held the other hand in the air palm down. His top hand made a tent over his bottom hand. He said my breast was like a circus tent and having a mastectomy was like taking away the tent pole. With that, he flattened his top hand against his bottom hand like a circus tent collapsing, crushing all the circus animals, carnival performers, and acrobats in the process.”
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The Stretch
Image via Plentifun
“For me, deeply immersive experiences have been both fascinating and disorienting. Spending long periods of time with people different from ourselves can affect our own sense of identity. When I return to my regular life, I think of it not like shedding a skin but like releasing the tension in a rubber band. My immersion stretched my somewhat flexible sense of self; returning home, the rubber band snaps back into its previous shape mostly … but not entirely. After all, rubber bands once stretched aren’t exactly the way they were to begin with. They hold more. And so I usually feel larger, in a good way, from having been stretched.”
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Eating Naked
On my Forbes blog, I wrote about the impeding shuttering of a restaurant in Paris for nudists—or, you know, people who want to eat in the buff. Here’s a bit from the post:
“Arguably, the most intriguing opportunity of nude eating in a restaurant is more symbolic than shrewd. Imagine a first date where everything was out on the table. Nothing in between you and your date but the table and the food. With little to hide, one might be more inclined to share more, to keep fewer secrets, to let down their guard and show the world who they really are.”
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Newsletters Are the New Blogging
Image via I Can Has Cheezburger?
I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere else already, but it seems like newsletters have kept some of the intimacy that blogging lost when it died or at least became strangled. I don’t subscribe to a lot of newsletters, finding most of them to be clutter, but here are three I like: Maud Newton’s, Sean Bonner’s, and California Sun. When I read each one of them, I feel that sweet sense of connection that I used to feel reading blogs when blogs were a thing. Maud doesn’t send hers a lot, but they’re worth it. In her last one, she wrote about going to Yaddo and concluded: “Whatever you create or most like to do, in 2019 I wish you stillness to do it in the way that’s most satisfying to you.” Who’s wished stillness for you lately? Sean’s is always an eclectic, punkish mix, starting off with a bunch of weird images, and in a recent one he talked about a health thing, and life in Japan v. life in LA, and “‘being a woman in blockchain.’” California Sun is a bit different—one could say commercial—and it’s, you know, about California, so maybe there’s no point in reading it if you’re from some state that just wants to be California—because, let’s face it, what state doesn’t—or maybe there is. Anyway, being a Californian (born and bred, not imported), it is maybe a thing of love or a daily dose of obsession. To read it is to remember what it is to like someone or something that’s better than yourself.
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Bones
10 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💀"
A photo from today’s Instagram feed.
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Don't Give Away Your Right To Negotiate For Yourself (Updated)
Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to find a clause like this in a contract for a freelance article.
(*see below for an update)
Image via Magic: The Gathering
Read your contract in full before signing it. Don’t skim-read it on autopilot.
Do not agree to terms like these. You are giving away your right to negotiate.
Explain the clause must be removed from this contract in order for you to sign it.
“10. Film/TV/Audiovisual Works: You hereby grant and assign to [redacted] exclusive decision-making, signing authority, and rights with respect to feature film, motion picture, video game, mobile application, television, episodic programming, and any other audiovisual work based on or derived from the Work.
[Redacted] agrees to make good faith efforts to consult with you before signing any such ancillary rights agreements.
Any monies actually received by [Redacted] upon optioning and/or selling the Work (after deduction of [Redacted]’s actual, out-of-pocket costs and expenses, including, without limitation, agency fees and other fees and expenses related to sale and exploitation thereof) will be distributed as follows:
Fixed Compensation.
i) Option Fees/Purchase Price: 50% to [Redacted], 50% to you
ii) Royalties and/or Series Sales Bonuses (if any): 50% to [Redacted], 50% to you
iii) Contributor Writing or Consulting Fee (if any): 100% to you
iv) Executive Producer, Producer, or Similar Fees for [Redacted] or its employees/contractors (if any): 100% to [Redacted].
Contingent Compensation and box office bonuses (if any): 50% to [Redacted], 50% to You
It’s acknowledged that [Redacted] may have a first look or overall deal with a third party, and any guaranteed fees associated with such an agreement are expressly excluded.
Accounting statements with respect to any ancillary exploitation of rights pursuant to this Section and payments, if any, will be delivered to you within 90 days following receipt by [Redacted] of the actual monies and such statements from third party purchasers or licensees of such rights.
It is agreed and understood that the services you are furnishing under this Agreement are extraordinary, unique, and not replaceable, and that there is no fully adequate remedy at law in the event of your breach of this Agreement, and that in the event of such a breach, [Redacted] shall be entitled to equitable relief by way of injunction or otherwise. You also recognize and confirm that in the event of a breach by [Redacted] of its obligations under this Agreement, the damage, if any, caused to you by [Redacted] is not irreparable or sufficient to entitle you to injunctive or other equitable relief. Consequently, your rights and remedies are limited to the right, if any, to obtain damages at law and you will not have any right in such event to terminate or rescind this Agreement or any of the rights granted by you hereunder or to enjoin or restrain the development, production and exploitation of the rights granted pursuant to this Agreement.”
I requested the clause be removed. The editor declined, describing the contract as “writer-friendly.” I declined to sign.
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