Web Log Archives: July 21, 2002 - July 27, 2002
Thursday, July 25, 2002
The Village Voice has a moving feature article by Alexis Loinaz about juvenile prostitution in New York and efforts to help young girls get off the streets.
A man from Bath has been charged with "impersonating a parent" after taking his daughter and her 13-year-old friend to get genital piercings. The man signed a waiver at Blackstar Body Piercing stating that he was the father of both girls, but the shop's owner called police to come and verify that the man was actually the girls' father.
A Taiwan court has handed down three guilty verdicts in the Chu Mei-Feng case. Kuo Yu-Ling, Chu's former friend and spiritual advisor, got four years in prison for making the videos and then selling them to the tabloid Scoop. Two Scoop editors got two years apiece. Read Daze's complete Chu Mei-Feng sex scandal coverage here.
A US appellate court has ruled against Mattel in a lawsuit over the pop song "Barbie Girl". Mattel argued that the song infringed on the Barbie trademark and that the song's sexual innuendo sullied the doll's image. The judge stated that Barbie was "not just a toy but a cultural icon" and that the song was a parody protected by the Constitution. In response to the increasingly hysterical war of rhetoric between Mattel and Universal, the judge also stated, "The parties are advised to chill."
Wednesday, July 24, 2002
Older translations of Mozart's letters made him sound decorous and eloquent, but a recent translation by Robert Spaethling preserves Mozart's childish rhyming and vulgar humor. In a love letter to his cousin Maria Anna, he wrote, "Oui, by the love of my skin, I shit on your nose, so it runs down your chin." Writing to his mother, he penned the verse, "Yesterday, though, we heard the king of farts/ It smelled as sweet as honey tarts/ While it wasn't in the strongest of voice/ It still came on as a powerful noise." Some critics see a paradox between the sublime music and the smutty prose, but reviewer Aaron Retica argues that "the word-drunk contrarian-vulgarian-comedian who emerges from Spaethling's excruciatingly exact rendering of Mozart's linguistic games — his rhymes and his puns, his scatological and coprophilic obsessions, his doublings, inversions and mirrorings — is the essential Mozart, a spitting image of the composer. Or should I say farting image?"
Steve Almond profiles Phil Harvey, owner of the mail order sex emporium Adam & Eve, with emphasis on Harvey's non-profit work promoting contraception and voluntary family planning in third world countries.
Salon has a rave review of Steve Almond's new erotic story collection, My Life in Heavy Metal. "Every once in a while somebody comes up with the ability to describe the mechanics, the emotions, the raw energy of sex in such a way that you get a soaring -- and sometimes searing -- experience of it."
New in The Onion's family section: Dad Keeps Dropping Hints About Mom's Sexual Proclivities.
The anti-porn hipsters at xxx church ("the #1 Christian porn site!") set up a booth at last month's Erotica LA convention and kept a diary of the weekend's events. They're dead wrong, of course, but very witty.
More on that Iowa public library banning Sari Locker's teen advice book: Debra linked to this transcript of a CNN Talkback Live segment dealing with the incident, in which Locker squared off against some reactionary fundi.
This story seems to pop up once a year: someone sends a phenomenally asinine email to a small circle of friends, the email somehow escapes into the Internet wilds, people forward it endlessly to their friends ("check out this asshole!"), the original emailer suffers well-deserved humiliation. (See also Peter Chung.) In this rendition, a young female professional in Chicago named Jacqueline Kim emailed thirty friends an account of her first date with a day trader named Casey. She gives the guy grades on his looks, haircut, car, manners, etc.; describes the evening's events in detail; and concludes, "The car, the money, the job, the cute apartment, the boat--which by the way only seats six people, so I really don't consider that really amazing... I can tell you now unless he cuts his hair and sends me gifts, it won't lead to anything." Read the complete Jacqueline Kim email here. Fucked Company has a merciless discussion thread about the incident. (Link snagged from Six Different Ways.)
Johnjoe McFadden reviews two books about sex in the animal kingdom: Sexual Selections: What We Can and Can't Learn About Sex from Animals by Marlene Zuk, and Stud: Adventures in Breeding by Kevin Conley. On the former:
Zuk is a biologist and expert on bird behaviour. She is also a feminist, and her writing is a double-edged sword that alternately exposes the sexist cultural stereotypes penned by male naturalists (who for instance claim that "testy" female birds suffer the avian equivalent of PMT) and the "sentimental twaddle" espoused by many ecofeminists in search of the "feminist Eden".
The latter book deals with the breeding of thoroughbred racehorses.
Conley spent a season travelling from Kentucky to California to provide us with an account of what the dustjacket boasts is "the most expensive 30 seconds in sport". . . . Conley describes it all in a direct journalistic style that never flinches from all the buttock-clenching details, with trainers on hand (literally) to guide the participants through the proceedings, equine sex aids, hormonal boosting, video recordings, even the presence of a "teaser stallion" to warm up the mare in readiness for his more expensive stablemate.
Debra Hyde interviews Alma Marceau, author of the erotic novel Lofting.
Tuesday, July 23, 2002
The inaugural class of students at Paradise AV Academy, "Japan's first school for porno directors," have completed their six-month course of study. The academy's head explains, "Our school aimed to nurture students capable of making a product of superior quality. The adult video world needs people immediately capable of dealing with the demands of the digital age." As a class project, the students jointly produced a video called Sex Diet.
No idea who made this snowman or took the picture. I snagged it from Rich.
The public library in Dyersville, Iowa, has banned the teen advice book Sari Says: The Real Dirt on Everything from Sex to School by Sari Locker, advice columnist for Teen People. Library trustees deemed Locker's sexuality advice too explicit. Check out her Sari Says column online.
Frank Sanello explores the "Heaven and Hell of Internet Dating" for gay men, starting from his own experience. "About six years ago, I subscribed to AOL, with its virtual supermarket of sexual chat rooms, and I've had the wildest, most varied sex that surpassed any of my fantasies. I had never had sex with a famous porn star until I went online. Courtesy of AOL, Gay.com, PlanetOut and a few other gay Web sites, I've met and mated with buffed hunks who had been avoiding making eye contact with me for the past two decades. . . . But amid this garden of erotic delights and pro bono computer support, I gradually began to notice something that first perplexed me, then depressed me: I couldn't find a boyfriend to save my (love) life." (Link snagged from Banana Guide.)
Internet dating services have become one of the few highly profitable dot-com business niches. This AP feature story looks at both the business models of sites like Match.com and Lavalife, and the experiences of singles using these sites.
Brittany Schaeffer and David Walker try out "speed dating" in Portland.
Monday, July 22, 2002
Yet another "terror sex" story, with a twist. Tanya Corrin and Anna Moore at the Observer claim that New Yorkers have progressed to full-fledged terror orgies! "Ten months on, the middle classes can't get enough of erotic parties — and it's no longer just a reaction to fear." Ten months on, lazy journalists can't get enough of catchy socio-psychobabble. Why not just admit, "We like writing stories about group sex"? . . . Meanwhile at the New York Times, Julie Salamon wonders how the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks will change Sex and the City in its new season.
New Times LA has a long feature article about the Michael Jackson charity single/gay porn producer debacle.
Spencer Tunick photographed his latest nude human sculpture at Expo.02 in Neuchatel, Switzerland. This page has a French article about the event and two small photos. The site also has an interview with Tunick (also in French) and this fabulously nerdy-looking photo of the artist.
Sunday, July 21, 2002
LA Weekly and New Times LA review Platinum Oasis, an 18-hour "performance-art spectacular" and incredible party staged during the annual queer arts festival Outfest. (Thanks, Larry-bob!)
At 3 A.M. Magazine, D.A. Blyler recounts a trip to Pattaya, Thailand. "The city of Pattaya is described in guidebooks as a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, a place that would have made Hieronymus Bosch say, 'I told you so.' Located on the gulf of Thailand it is known to sex tourists throughout the world simply as paradise. A place where fantasies come true, be they ones involving ladies, boys, livestock, or a combination of all three. Where the tropical heat, sands, and sea combine to play tricks on the eyes of local girls and wreck havoc with accepted norms. The homely turn handsome, the obese become sexy, the old grow young again, and fetishes are the standard." (Thanks, Jon!)
Debra at Pursed Lips reports that eBay is purging vendors who sell BDSM gear.
Police arrested clerks at four Tallahassee porn shops on Wednesday. The raids followed an undercover sting operation in which police sent a 17-year-old girl into the shops to try to buy merchandise.
More on the Warhol Retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Last weekend Daze linked to a New York Times review which criticized the show for downplaying Warhol's gay sensibility and homoerotic art works. Three weeks earlier, Robert Summers made similar criticisms in The Advocate. "But even though I welcome a Warhol retrospective, I must say that both the selection of the artworks (and the calculated omissions) and the scripting of Warhol as an asexual (read: heterosexual) art historical figure disappoint me." Summers may have a valid point about the selection of artworks, but he loses me here:
The retrospective fails to contextualize any of the artwork on display. Quite noticeable is the absence of any explanatory wall text that would aid the general viewer in understanding both the context and significance of the works. It would have been instructive for the exhibition to have explained that many of Warhol's early drawings, especially his homoerotic nude drawings of boys, were first exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1956 but were dismissed as "smut" by critics and that they were dropped by the Tanager Gallery because of their blatant homoeroticism — indeed, the reception of these images was Warhol’s first experience of art world homophobia.
Ugh, count me with the curators on this one. The modern museum trend of placing long, didactic, jargony explanatory text alongside the artworks annoys the hell out of me. Put the commentary in the exhibition catalog and let the artworks stand by themselves.
