Web Log Archives: June 23, 2002 - June 29, 2002
Saturday, June 29, 2002
A Denver radio reporter tracked down Fred Finlay, the fire victim whose photo appeared in the Rocky Mountain News, who says that was indeed his testicle on the front page. "As proof, Finlay posed for a second picture -- this time displaying his left testicle, an act the hysterical [reporter] recounted over the air -- and took calls from listeners volunteering to help him rebuild."
The ACLU is backing a challenge to Georgia's fornication law, which bans sexual intercourse outside marriage.
Thursday, June 27, 2002
Last spring, four Yale students generated a flurry of publicity about their extracurricular porn-watching club Porn n’ Chicken and their hardcore porn flick entitled The StaXXX being filmed clandestinely on campus with a student cast. The porn-watching was real, while the porn-making was an enormously successful hoax. Full coverage here. Comedy Central bought the rights to the four students' story, and production began this month on a movie called Porn n’ Chicken starring "a stable of young, on-the-rise actors as well as two authentic porn stars, Ron Jeremy and Jenna Jameson." A Comedy Central exec calls the film "a coming-of-age film about college kids who were just about to graduate, did a prank and got in over their heads."
Corey Summers talks about his short career in the adult entertainment industry, first as a stripper and later as a porn star.
Zeitgeist! At the Village Voice, Steve Weinstein says that gay public sex is bigger and better than ever. At the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Simon Sheppard says that gay sex is back.
Playboy held a news conference in Houston to introduce its "Women of Enron" issue, which hits newsstands later this week.
Wednesday, June 26, 2002
More news from Leavenworth County: "A public nudity resolution signed into law by a former Leavenworth County Commissioner has come back to haunt him. Former commissioner Wayne Eldridge Sr., pleaded no contest Thursday to violating the public nudity resolution he and two other commissioners signed into law two years ago. Eldridge pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting public nudity at Whispers Cabaret, a topless club he operated near Basehor."
Last fall we followed a zoning battle in Leavenworth County, Kansas. Local conservatives had campaigned to shut down the Gaea Retreat Center, whose events often feature nudism and paganism. The county commission voted in October not to renew the Center's special-use permit, and Gaea's owners took legal action to fight the ruling. More background here. The Gaea Center website now reports that they've reached an agreement with the county commission which grants them a perpetual Special Use Permit. Congratulations to Gaea, and three cheers for the First Amendment!
Wired has a good article on alternative porn sites. "Four stylish subculture sites are putting a new face on porn. Raveporn, Supercult, Suicide Girls and FrictionUSA feature artful nude photos of women who are more likely to be purple-haired, pale and pierced. And there isn't a pop-up ad in sight. What's more, a significant number of their members are women."
William Dean interviews erotica writer Ian Philips.
Seska reviews Turning Pro by Magdalene Meretrix.
Jennifer Aniston's lawsuit over nude paparazzi photos will go to trial next week, barring a settlement. She's suing three porno magazines for violating her privacy by running the photographs, which she claims were taken when "paparazzi scaled an eight-foot wall to photograph her as she sunbathed in the backyard of her home." An earlier report on the case from E! notes, "The spread, first published last year in Celebrity Skin magazine, featured the 31-year-old actress in a bit less than her wedding gown, with the understated, yet effective, headline: 'First Time Photos/Friends Stars X-Posed--Rachel, Monica and Phoebe Get Naked!'"
Porn studio VCA is incorporating rudimentary voice-command software in an upcoming interactive DVD release. "If it works, the software will allow DVD viewers to control exactly how Debbie does Dallas without ever touching a mouse.... If it works properly, the software will detect each verbal command by homing in on specific keywords like 'faster' and execute it on screen." If it works.
Wimbledon gets interesting. (Link fixed)
Tuesday, June 25, 2002
Picasso's Nu au collier, a portrait of his mistress/model Marie-Therese Walters, sold for £16 million at auction, roughly double what Christie's had projected. An auction house rep says, "Nu au collier dates from the height of their love affair and the fluid, sensuous forms of the painting reflect Picasso's love and desire for his young and beautiful muse." I love this anecdote:
Nu au collier was painted in 1932, five years after the artist first met Walters on the street and reportedly said: "I am Picasso. You and I are going to do great things together."
It's true: Pablo Picasso was never called an asshole.
Wai Wai delves deeper into Japanese erotic cultural history with a guide to surviving ancient fertility shrines around Tokyo.
Long ago, sex was sacred and in many parts of the Japanese countryside phallic shrines still stand in testimony to this belief. "In old Japan, people believed sex was a means of fighting off evil spirits or natural disasters," said Akio Maruyama, a commentator on religion, explaining the proliferation of the phallic icons across the country. But Maruyama notes that with the Meiji-era (1868-1912) government making Shinto an official national religion, the titillating tabernacles started to disappear. As a result, Tokyo and nearby areas lost nearly all their phallic shrines. [But] some phallic fossils can still be found in the nation's capital and its surrounds.
While we're there, some current Wai Wai sidebar blurbs summarizing stories from the Japanese tabloids:
Spa! (7/2) gasps that Saudi Arabia's disastrous showing at the World Cup may have been caused by team members' overindulgence in porno videos.
Hanashi no Channel (7/18) says housewives eager to make money selling their bodies are undercutting the prices charged by high school girls.
Tokusatsu Shinsengumi (7/20) provides a list of which cutie female TV performers are still virgins.
Some Bunbury residents and politicians are upset over new public sculptures depicting topless maidens. Councillor Wayne Major says, "I know art is in the eye of the beholder but ... the mammary glands are stylised but quite prominent. If they had been made with their hair falling down covering their breasts it would not have been so bad." (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
Leslie Camhi talks to Catherine Millet "over lunch of steamed halibut."
A Rocky Mountain News editor assures Jim Romenesko that that's not really a big testicle on the front page. ... UPDATE: Today's edition of the Rocky Mountain News contains a "clarification": "The misleading effect was created by a shadow. The portrait of Fred Finlay at his burned home did not reveal anything private about Mr. Finlay." I don't know, it still looks like a big testicle to me.
Monday, June 24, 2002
Heather Havrilesky takes on the pro-marriage revivalist movement. "With a host of new converts from actresses to sociologists touting matrimony as the one true path, marriage has shifted from a much-maligned, antiquated institution to an honorable, courageous endeavor, one that is said to ensure the health and happiness not just of our children, but of our country. As President George W. Bush and a gaggle of pro-family groups paint matrimony as the cornerstone on which America was built, marriage experts roam the country in ever-increasing numbers, proselytizing to all who'll listen on the pressing importance of upholding our duties as citizens by keeping our marriages strong."
Jane Ganahl profiles the pioneering Kensington Ladies' Erotica Society, a Bay Area reading/writing group founded in 1976 and still active. (Link snagged from Sex Geek.)
The latest issue of Suspect Thoughts has an interview with Kevin Bentley, author of Wild Animals I Have Known, a memoir of bohemian, hedonistic gay life in 1970s San Francisco.
Why would the diaries of a non-celebrity be interesting to readers?
Because they cover a memorable time and place--gay San Francisco in the late `70s and `80s--and are edited down to the most interesting narrative, leaving out the kind of tiresome personal soul-searching characteristic of young people's diaries, it's my hope that they succeed as a story. The book takes place in an era and a place of which you might say, "If you can remember it, you weren't there"--but I was there, to a degree, and I usually made notes the next day. The gay dream--any young person's dream--of fleeing your humdrum hometown and heading to SF, LA or New York is a perennially appealing story, I think. And then sex and drugs are always interesting to some people.
Several excerpts from the book accompany the interview.
Sunday, June 23, 2002
Jonathan Yardley doesn't quite know what to make of Catherine Millet. "This is by any reckoning one of the strangest books in many a moon."
