Web Log Archives: August 25, 2002 - August 31, 2002
Saturday, August 31, 2002
Russian novelist Vladimir Sorokin lost his copyright lawsuit against protesters who reprinted, then burned copies of his book Goluboye Salo. The pro-Putin youth movement Moving Together wants the book banned over its absurdist sex scene between clones of Stalin and Krushchev. Moving Together managed to convince Moscow police to investigate Sorokin on obscenity charges. Last month Sorokin denounced the police investigation, calling the affair "absurd, vicious and humiliating to me as a writer and humiliating to Russian literature as a whole."
Suzie Mackenzie interviews Michel Houellebecq and tries to pin down the author's politics.
Chris Petit reviews Once More, With Feeling, in which British humor writers Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton chronicle their attempt to make a porno film.
Richard Morrison takes a peep inside the British Museum's secret Cupboard 55. "Imagine a kind of dirty-mac edition of The Antiques Roadshow, furtively conducted around a dusty cupboard in a dimly lit corridor at the back of the most famous museum in the world. . . . It used to be the British Museum's equivalent of the newsagent's top shelf: the place where it stored objects considered far too shocking for the hoi polloi. Here the cognoscenti could examine fragments of ceramic penises ('votive offerings in the 17th century,' explains Hamilton), and even a highly detailed set of 16th-century Italian drawings simply known as I Modi ('the positions' — I think you can guess what they show). How these things got into the BM's secret cabinet is a story that tells us a great deal about attitudes to sex — ours, the ancient world's, and in particular the Victorians'." (Link snagged from World Sex News.)
The sex education book It's Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex & Sexual Health was pulled from a Texas library after complaints from local yahoos that the book "tries to minimize or even negate that homosexuality is a problem."
The East Bay Express profiles a new alt-porn site based in Oakland called Naked Raver.
Annie Sprinkle wants to establish a Sex Worker Education And Training program (SWEAT) at the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco.
<peeve>With all due respect to Annie Sprinkle, whom I adore, using "Dr." in front of your name is deceptive and pretentious if you've got a Ph.D. rather than an actual medical degree.</peeve>
An Australian "morals campaigner" vows to fight plans to set up an internet pornography collection at the National Library of Australia.
At A List Apart, Denice "Davina" Warren explains the job of information designer with an extended metaphor: The art of topless dancing and information design.
Friday, August 30, 2002
London artist Liam Yeates has created an installation consisting of a couple spending the week in bed in a Soho gallery storefront window with a condom machine on the wall behind the bed. "From 'Big Brother' the idea kind of evolved, and this exhibition is even more of a microcosm, with just the bed and the idea of sexual practices. It's loosely based on John and Yoko's love-in, but because this is the age of HIV and AIDS, there's a condom machine."
From The Onion: Price of penis-shaped swimming pool negotiated. "The pool, originally slated for 80 meters, will be 50 meters in length, ranging in depth from three feet in the shallow play area at the base of the cock to 12 feet at the head, where a diving board will be positioned. Hand rails and steps will be built in the scrotal area, as well as midway down the shaft. A triangular deck will be added at the base, and bushes will be planted to create the effect of pubic hair."
Thursday, August 29, 2002
Two more Ohio hotels have stopped offering pay-per-view adult videos under pressure from social conservatives and prosecutors.
SF Weekly and CNN have articles about the Burning Man organization's lawsuit against Voyeur Video, which distributes hidden camera tapes of naked women at previous Burning Man festivals.
Utah polygamist Tom Green has been sentenced to five years to life for having sex with one of his wives when she was 13. The sentence will run concurrently with Green's previous five-year sentence for bigamy, which means he could be out on parole in four years.
While we're on the subject of obscene song lyrics, Mimi Smartypants has written one of the all-time great songs about testicles. Bill O'Reilly would not approve. (Link snagged from La Di Da.)
Steve Almond is out promoting his short story collection My Life in Heavy Metal. Tamara Wieder interviewed Almond in May about the book, book tour, reviews, teaching and more. And Almond himself has written a humorous travelogue entitled "How to go on a nationwide book tour and not get laid". (Link snagged from Pursed Lips.)
Pepsi is pulling its TV ad featuring Ludacris one day after Bill O'Reilly complained about the rapper's obscene lyrics on his Fox News program. The NYT article cites Ludacris's "sexually explicit, profanity-laden lyrics," while O'Reilly layed more emphasis on "peddling antisocial behavior" and quoted lyrics from "Move Bitch" (without mentioning the title). Daze readers are probably more interested in the sexually explicit stuff, so here's something from "Freaky Thangs".
I come from the eighth planet in the 19th galaxy,
where the royal penis is clean, yo' majesty. Can it be,
Sheila E, Appalonia, Vanity, all mad at me? I'm the
Prince dick of insanity. I'm good lovin, body-rockin,
knockin boots all night long, we not stoppin.
I don't care if the kids watchin, I stir it like motherfuckin
coffee and brown sugar. Girls dem sugar. World class lover.
Kama sutra, porno music producer. Tallywhacker is a rock hard
storm trooper with a purple helmet, made for crushin
pink cookies. Goonie goo-goo, we cut bigfoots and wookies;
and fat women, because they need love too.
So go on big girl, whatchu gon' do?
If I complained loud enough, yathink Fox would take O'Reilly off the air? I hate that guy. His turn-the-whole-country-into-one-big-gated-community rants are harmless to mature adults, but what about the children?
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
The Washington Post previews the Museum of Sex, "known as MoSex to the cognoscenti," which opens in New York in September. The museum's inaugural exhibit is entitled "How New York City Transformed Sex in America."
The Washington Post profiles retired Library of Congress curator and amateur pornography archivist Ralph Whittington.
For 36 years -- until his retirement in 2000 -- Whittington worked at the Library of Congress. He started out fetching books and ended up as curator of the Main Reading Room. Along the way, he was given the responsibility of overseeing the library's collection of phone books. "I was in charge of every phone book in the freaking world," he says.
Working with phone books, he learned how to organize, catalogue and archive a collection. And he took those skills home, where he was building a couple of archives of his own. The first was a collection of R&B and doo-wop music, which now includes 5,000 records. The second was pornography.
Whittington started collecting smut just for his own, um, edification. But then, in the early '70s, he had an epiphany: The Library of Congress was collecting nearly every variety of printed matter -- even phone books, for crying out loud! -- but not porn. Apparently, it was up to him to preserve the X-rated aspects of America's glorious heritage.
Whittington recently sold his complete collection to the new Museum of Sex, which opens in New York next month. He "is thrilled. He figures this vindicates his 30 years of curatorial labor in the vineyards of smut. 'This should give me a little credibility,' he says."
Four North Carolina men have been charged with intentional dissemination of obscenity for driving through High Point on a Saturday night watching a porno flick on the video screen of their SUV. A police officer saw the video screen through the open rear hatch of the SUV and pulled them over. The four men range in age from 17 to 21. Each faces a felony conviction and six months in prison.
Debates over pornography may again cause a rift among Liberal Democrats (UK third party) at their annual conference. Many party activists favor a libertarian policy toward pornography produced by and for consenting adults. One Liberal Democrat MP said: "It is time for a modern approach to pornography. It is about having a sensible attitude that says that if it exploits children or is violent the penalties should be greater. But if it is consenting adults, we should not be trying to limit enjoyment of it. This is the view that most people take on this. So if it's acceptable, why be prudish about it?"
The New York Times wades into the sleazy side of e-commerce: From Unseemly to Lowbrow, the Web's Real Money Is in the Gutter. "The dot-com bust has left the economy littered with the husks of companies that said they would transform the way that people work, live and play." But the Internet still teems with pornography, spam, penis enlargement systems, 419 letters, pyramid schemes and other assorted swindles and vice-related businesses (no mention of gambling sites, for some reason).
The article quotes Bruce Sterling's concern that the Internet is "debasing itself in front of our eyes.... We will lose the Internet if we don't save it." But it also points out that this phenomenon affects virtually every new communications medium and that plenty of good stuff is thriving on the Internet too. Gary Chapman says, "I am astonished practically every day by something new on the Internet.... At this point, it's almost impossible to characterize what the Internet is like.... [Spam] is an annoyance and something that is a regrettable display of the human tendency to go for the lowest common denominator, but it can't possibly be viewed as representative of the entire Internet." (Thanks, Matt.)
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
The Stranger rips the decision by Seattle's two daily newspapers to refuse to print ads for the film Sex and Lucia.
Jane Ganahl rants about the flood of penis enlargement spam emails and the apparent obsession that fuels them.
I think men have this fantasy that women sit around over coffee and talk trash about the size of their man's penis. I think men also fantasize that if they were only bigger, it would solve all manner of relationship problems. The wife that had turned off to them sexually would come alive again.
But it's all patently wrong, wrong, wrong. My friends and I talk more about sex than most other women on the planet, but the size of the male member is rarely on the list of topics. "Gee, I'd be so much happier in my relationship with Mortimer if only his penis were the size of a large zucchini!"
I feel sad for men who cause themselves pain and expense in order to be more attractive to women, the same as I feel sad for women who subject themselves to plastic surgery thinking it will bring them love.
Monday, August 26, 2002
The local alt-weekly profiles Austinite Ryan Richardson, who owns the world's largest collection of lesbian-oriented pulp fiction paperbacks.
"There's definitely a titillating aspect to it," says the 29-year-old. But what really grabs him is the cover art. The literature itself follows a paint-by-numbers script, although there have been some genuine artistic accomplishments to emerge from the kitsch, most notably Women's Barracks, by Tereska Torres. For the most part, though, as Richardson says, "the books themselves can't live up to the covers. I'm in it for the covers, plain and simple." His pursuit is thus a kind of strange inversion of reading Playboy just for the articles.
Richardson displays nearly 200 scanned covers at his site Strange Sisters, which may well be the coolest site on the Internet.
SF Weekly's nightlife column covers the monthly sin-themed parties sponsored by the First Church of the Second Thursday. Each month's party is based on one of the seven deadly sins — July was envy, August was lust, September will be pride. (Link snagged from Mouth Organ.)
Opie and Anthony, the shock jocks fired last week by WNEW-FM over their St. Patrick's Cathedral public sex stunt, may be back on the air soon for rival New York radio station Q104 (which is owned by Clear Channel). "Meanwhile, the trash-talking team's producer Paul Mercurio, who was arrested as he gave a play-by-play description of the St. Patrick's sex romp, bashed the Roman Catholic Church during a nightclub comedy appearance on Saturday. He told a cheering crowd at the Supper Club in Times Square that the church had no reason to be mad at him in light of the numerous sex scandals involving pedophile priests and young boys."
Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reports on the ongoing investigation into a large, institutionalized casting couch system in that country's entertainment industry.
The National Library of Australia may soon start collecting pornographic websites to add websites to its extensive collection of erotica, according to its latest newsletter. Electronic librarian Edgar Crook wrote, "The examination of society and culture of a period by necessity involves the study of its sexual life. The erotic matter created in, for example, the Victorian era is of great interest to the modern historian. . . . With this in mind, it is clear that there is no merit in being coy today and therefore delivering an incomplete picture to future researchers."
British retailer Marks & Spencer has developed bulge-enhancing wonderpants for men.
Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton, humor writers for the Erotic Review, have produced their own porno flick and written a book entitled Once More, With Feeling chronicling the venture. Observer Stephanie Merritt writes:
It is a relentlessly funny book and I couldn't put it down. But it is almost exhaustingly funny, as if it's being performed as a stand-up show and the audience's attention will wander if a moment of pathos or serious questioning is allowed to linger. In one sense this doesn't matter - they have made it quite clear from the beginning what kind of tone the reader is to expect, and it is more Carry On Cinematographer than Naomi Wolf - but as thinking people they cannot help questioning some of the attitudes they encounter, as well as their own, and the reader might sometimes wish they would allow these thoughts room to develop, rather than appearing embarrassed by them and quickly swatting them away with a gag.
The Observer also has an excerpt from Once More, With Feeling.
Sunday, August 25, 2002
Jon Levine writes polite responses to porn spam. Brilliant.
