Munch
A selection of art books for sale at an estate sale. For more of my L.A. photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Books I Read: After land
After Land is an extremely strange book by Chris Taylor. I loved it for the images. It’s haunting and weird and striking. The story is elusive and slippery. If you’re looking for something that’s different, this book is that.
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Watch out!
Image credit: Dina Litovsky
In this week’s edition of The Reverse Cowgirl Roundup: a dominatrix slips on her boxing gloves, a new board game posits players as strippers, a famous actress shares a secret about her private parts, and more.
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Data Baby Is a New York Public Library Book of the Day
Thank you so much to The New York Public Library for making my memoir, Data Baby, a Book of the Day!
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Books I Read: The Road - A Graphic Novel Adaptation
I was really looking forward to reading this graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by Manu Larcenet, and I was equally disappointed. The book looks impressive: Hardback! Generously sized! Nicely printed! But the contents amount to a grim, underwhelming, forced march (ha!) through a hellscape that reduces McCarthy’s brilliant novel into snatches of dialogue that amount to nothing. Where is the literary-ness? Where is the lyricism? Where is the new thing ideally produced when a work is adapted into another form? Not here. I’m not fundamentally opposed to graphic adaptations of literary works—I loved Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh’s artful adaptation of Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House—but this ain’t it.
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Fuck You, Pay Me #19: Best of Forbes.com
Porn star in wax, Las Vegas, NV | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This is part 19 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
Off and on for a period of many years, I was a contributor to Forbes.com. Earlier this month, I decided to refocus my energies away from someone else’s website and on my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl. Here are some of the best things I posted on Forbes.com, from the Oscars of porn to the biggest strip club in America.
To my right, an older man—maybe 60, or 70—is reading the evening's program with a small yellow flashlight.
To my left, a young Asian woman is studying her program as if cramming for a final.
"WE CAN'T HEAR YOU!" a man behind us screams.
On the stage, a woman whose breasts risk overflowing the neckline of her sparkling dress is at the microphone, but there is a technical difficulty, and we can't hear what she's saying.
It doesn't really matter. This is porn.
“How the Biggest Strip Club in America Grinds”
If you drive north from Miami, Florida, on Interstate 95 to Miami Gardens and make a series of turns, you'll end up at the front door of Tootsie's Cabaret, the biggest strip club in America.
On the late Friday afternoon I was there, the massive parking lot was filling up slowly. A valet directed me to the VIP parking, where I was greeted and led down a maze of hallways to an office past a stack of shelves overflowing with a rainbow of Tootsie's T-shirts to the office of Ed Anakar, the director of operations and president of RCI Management Services Inc. In other words, he works for RCI Hospitality Holdings, a publicly-traded, Houston-based corporation that until last year was known as Rick's Cabaret. Today, RCI operates over 40 establishments in the hospitality space, among them: Rick's Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City, Bombshells in Houston and Down in Texas Saloon in Austin, and Club Onyx in Charlotte and The Seville in Minneapolis. You can find RCI on the NASDAQ under RICK.
“Paul Manafort's Purported $15,000 Ostrich Jacket Is the Talk of the Trial”
Who would spend $15,000 on an ostrich jacket? If you believe Assistant U.S. Attorney Uzo Asonye, Paul Manafort would. The high-priced fashion item was cited today on the first day of the trial of the lobbyist and former President Donald Trump campaign manager. Manafort has been charged with 18 counts of bank and tax fraud. He is being tried in Alexandria, Virginia.
Asonye made the assertion in court in an effort to shed light on Manafort's income and seemingly extravagant spending habits. According to the Washington Post, “the most peculiar new detail [Asonye] offered was on Manafort's spending, explaining how the lobbyist spent so much on menswear. He had a $15,000 jacket, Asonye said, ‘made from an ostrich.’”
“Playboy Is Naked Again and It Is Awesome”
Playboy is back to peddling nudes.
Just in time for Valentine's Day, Playboy has announced its 63-year-old magazine will return to publishing naked women.
In 2015, the magazine, faced with competition from the internet where anything goes when it comes to sex, stopped running images of unclothed young ladies.
By all accounts, including my own, the results were terrible.
Now, Playboy Enterprises is back in the skin game with its March/April 2017 issue.
I took the liberty of downloading a copy. (Want one? It's $5.99.)
Here's why I like it.
“The Hardest Thing About Being a Male Porn Star”
You might think being a male porn star is easy. Have sex for a living? That's a piece of cake.
So, what can some of the biggest woodsmen in the porn business teach us about work?
As it turns out, guys who get it up for a paycheck have something to offer when it comes to career advice.
I heard from seven of Porn Valley's biggest studs via email and got the secrets to becoming a successful working stiff.
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Books I Read in January: Favorite and Least Favorite
This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In January, I read eight books. (You can find them and my short reviews here.) My favorite was Pierre Le-Tan’s A Few Collectors, a lovely, sweet, unexpected collection of small essays and delicate drawings about curious people the author knew who collected things and what happened to those collections. My least favorite was Chester Brown’s Paying for It, a sleazy, callous tour through the sex industry told by a man who sees women as cum receptacles.
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That Guy ... Who Was in That X-Rated Thing
Daniel Shar is the guy in that porn movie who didn’t have sex with anybody. Read my interview with him here.
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Books I Read: Can of Worms
Can of Worms by Catherine Doherty is a remarkable semi-autobiographical account of the author’s attempt to track down and reconnect with her birth mother. Unflinching and insistent, it peels back the layers on what happens when the mother-daughter bond goes wrong and the devastating effects on the truth-teller.
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Mondays Are for Newsletters
Image credit: Steve Diet Goedde
In this week’s edition of The Reverse Cowgirl Roundup: a review of a comic book by a man who paid for sex, a brothel manager tells all, Playboy returns to print, Jeff Bezos’s fiancé shows some cleavage, and more.
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Life in L.A. (Munch)
From the comic book store to the retro diner, scenes from my life in L.A. For more, follow me on Instagram.
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Books I Read: Paying for It
The first time I read Chester Brown’s Paying for It was around the time it was originally published, I believe. I decided to buy a new copy and reread it when I heard that the woman who had been Brown’s “last girlfriend” before he started paying for it had directed a movie adaptation of the book. I seem to remember liking the book more the first time I read it. This time I found it kind of grim and sort of ick. I write about a fair amount of stuff related to this subject matter, and I even ran a website for a year where I posted anonymous emails men wrote to me about paying for it, but this comic is so dark and weirdly dissociated and lacking in any kind of empathy that I read it faster than usual just to get it over with. If you don’t know anything about paying for it or why guys pay for it or the politics of paying for it (particularly in Canada, Brown’s country of origin), this book may be of interest. Also, the drawings are cool. But to the Brown on these pages, sex workers are receptacles to be judged, used, and discarded. That take is retrograde, boring, and depressing.
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We're All Very Happy to Be Here
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Books I Read: A Few Collectors
I’m in love with A Few Collectors by Pierre Le-Tan. It is a wunderkammer of a book, an extraordinary collection of small essays about collectors that Le-Tan knew and / or admired and / or encountered. I’m not even sure what this book is about, because I don’t think collecting is it. Perhaps how to live one’s life, or the importance of beautiful things, or the inherent transience of existence. I actually read it slower and slower because I didn’t want it to end. Also, the printing is beautiful. It’s a coffee table book in miniature.
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A Sign (She's Hot)
Image credit: Justine Mae Biticon
In this week’s edition of The Reverse Cowgirl Roundup: a sign from God that Justine Mae Biticon is hot, AI is for falling in love, a woman crushes watermelons with her thighs, bush is back, the Supreme Court weighs in on XXX, and more. Like it, share it, and / or subscribe to it and get all the sex news that’s fit to print.
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The Artist Goes Shopping
Some of the wonderful art supplies at Carter Sexton. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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I Am Team Charles
Follow me on Threads here.
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The Reverse Cowgirl Interviews the Dick Lazers Guys
Image credit: Dick Lazers
In my first installment of The Reverse Cowgirl Interview series, I interviewed the young masterminds behind the penis laser that was purportedly involved in that fight Jamie Foxx and Jackass franchise-related individuals got into at the Beverly Hills restaurant Mr. Chow. Read it here and subscribe.
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RIP David Lynch
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Books I Read: Parasitic City #0.1
Parasitic City #0.1 is a total insane, very extreme comic book by Shintaro Kago. As I wrote in my newsletter: “it’s for anyone with an amputee fetish, a bio-clothing fetish, a bio-furniture fetish, a bio-prosthesis fetish, or a bio-firearm fetish.” There’s a woman, and a war, and copulating chairs. It’s sci-fi meets hentai. It’s weird.
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