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Web Log Archives: July 20, 2003 - July 26, 2003

Saturday, July 26, 2003

All About Romance selects the worst romance novel covers of 2002, with humorous commentary on varieties of awfulness.

(Link snagged from ShanMonster.)

Alexander Zaitchik reports on the Romance Writers of America convention and the state of romance fiction today.

While the romance formula has developed over the years, the core elements haven't changed. The RWA's official definition dictates that every romance must have both a central love story and an emotionally satisfying and optimistic ending. There can be unromantic subplots and tragic subtexts, but the basic dialectic is holy. All adversity and romantic conflicts must be resolved in a happy-ever-after way; joy must be delivered to the heart of the reader.

The delivery vehicles for this joy have diversified in recent years. Among the current subspecies of romance fiction are inspirational (i.e., Christian, no sex), paranormal (magic, science-fiction), regency (set in early 1800s England), suspense (mystery, intrigue) and time-travel romance. The more modern subgenres—chick-lit, mommy-lit and women's fiction—have even started to bump against the limits of the romance formula, dealing with antidepressants and Mr. Right Now more than with Mr. Right, but the RWA seems eager to claim these money-making new splinter movements as their own.

One myth the RWA is anxious to dispel is that all romance is just softcore porn for housewives. And it's true that the amount and explicitness of the sex isn't static across genres. Harlequin's American Romance line deals with small-town values and themes (often on military bases), while the Harlequin Blaze series is described as "sizzling journeys to the edge and beyond."

(Link snagged from Obscure Store.)

TechTV host Cat Schwartz maintains a weblog, where she recently posted some photos of herself. Due to a little-known Photoshop bug/feature, those JPG files contained hidden thumbnails of the original, uncropped versions of the photos . . . in which Schwartz appeared topless. An admiring, enterprising fan explains the trick and posts the topless shots. Schwartz responded to the error with humor and grace — "it was a mistake... you all lucked out... BIG time. ;-)" — then later responded to some asshole comments with a new photo.

Found via this MetaFilter thread. Lots of the discussion there is tech-oriented, but another line deals with the titties themselves and standards of beauty:

Boobies yes. Worth looking at? no, not really.

I don't know if I really wanted to see that pair

Well, I think her boobs are very, very nice.

Man, there are a bunch of sourpusses around here. You're complaining about the quality of free boobies. Free boobies! I'd really like to see the high level of perfection of all the breasts you've previously interacted with, that you are now so picky. Jeez. (Plus, I think she's cute.)

I suspect that if nude images of the guys who sneered got out on the internet, they'd be pretty horrified (and horrifying). (PS: get a realistic image of what a beautiful woman looks like. It has nothing to do with the siliconed women in your jerk magazines.)

[responding to the first two posters quoted above] -- Howsabout you show us *your* tits, gorgeous?

For some guys, putdowns add to the fun of girlwatching. Those guys are generally losers. Count me in the latter camp — I think she looks great, and seeing those photos added a tiny but welcome bit to the sum total of erotic pleasure in my life.

Friday, July 25, 2003

Wired: "The owner of the porn site Sex.com scored a victory Friday in a protracted dispute with the nation's largest domain name registry. In a ruling that could pave the way for a large payment of damages, a federal appeals court in San Francisco held that Network Solutions, which operates the central database of dot-com domains, may be held liable for wrongfully transferring the Sex.com domain to a con man based on a forged letter." This is great news. Network Solutions deserves to be held responsible for its shoddy, irresponsible practices.

Caitlin Macy rereads a classic. "Settling down with Helen Gurley Brown for an evening, via her 1962 exhortation to premarital gratification, Sex and the Single Girl, is much like sharing Thanksgiving dinner with a scandalously un-p.c. great aunt. A throwback to the days when men were men and girls prepared Pepper Steak España for them, this aunt has never learned that one simply doesn't tell a young woman she has to learn to cook, or come out with statements such as, 'No one likes a poor girl. She is a drag.' This is the aunt who is apt to pull you aside and tell you that to get more dates, you ought to change your hair, wear makeup every day, and ditch the chunky heels for more feminine shoes. Appalled as you know you ought to be, you instead find yourself surreptitiously writing down her pronouncements for future memorization, not so much for specific advice, but for the sheer invigoration of opinion without disclaimer, opinion that feels—for all its frequent indefensibility—like something you can grab onto."

Westword (Denver alt-weekly) points out a gaffe in Hillary Clinton's book.

"The night before the meeting convened in Denver, Madeleine Albright invited her Russian counterpart, Yevgeny Primakov, to a dinner at a local restaurant," Clinton wrote in a section of Living History recounting her time in Denver for 1997's Summit of the Eight -- including a meal at The Fort in Morrison. "She treated him to a regional delicacy called 'mountain oysters,' a polite term for deep-fried cow testicles."

Maybe someone in the sold-out crowd at Hillary Clinton's book signing on Saturday, July 26, at the Cherry Creek Tattered Cover can let her in on this little-known fact: Only bulls have balls.

Snopes refutes a widely circulated email warning about Tampax Pearl tampons supposedly causing an outbreak of toxic shock syndrome. (Link snagged from La Di Da.)

"Lara Croft: feminist icon or cyberbimbo?" is an academic article at Game Studies, the first academic journal devoted to videogames and computer games. "Lara as a pro-feminist icon" is a quasi-academic article at Geocities, which includes the marvelous line, "Technically, the possibility of childbearing with Lara's physique is close to nil."

German academic Birgit Pretzsch and friends "kidnapped" a Lara Croft cutout display and played dressup. If you're so inclined you can also read Pretzsch's masters thesis, "A Postmodern Analysis of Lara Croft: Body, Identity, Reality", at this site.

Dumb fun from the archives: the interactive nude Lara Croft gallery.

Here's an irrestistible headline: Monkey clue to male sex appeal. "Females of a common primate, the rhesus macaque, prefer males with red faces, a study has shown. It signals high levels of testosterone which, in many male animals, mean a healthy immune system and good genes. A rosy glow might also act as a similar cue in humans, say British researchers. They speculate that it could explain why women use rouge and lipstick."

Thursday, July 24, 2003

The great Cincinnati porn crackdown hits a snag. "The judge in an obscenity case declared a mistrial Wednesday because one juror fell asleep during the showing of the sexually explicit video key to the case and at least one other juror missed portions of the video because she averted her eyes. It was the second mistrial in the case." The video in question was Maximum Hardcore Extreme, Vol. 7. More and more.

Wednesday, July 23, 2003

Celebrity crush confessional — Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about his crush on Condoleezza Rice despite their political differences. "Simply put, Rice, with her commanding presence and steely confidence, is the ultimate black woman."

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Roll Call, a newspaper covering Capitol Hill happenings, ran a very funny piece about the Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr. email scandal.

"This young intern ought to know that one must learn how to use spell-check before one is even allowed on the ladder," one veteran Congressional aide cracked about the climbing-the-ladder aspect of the correspondence. "Now he should really go fetch me a latte and fill the copier with some paper."

The story is subscribers-only at the Roll Call website, but happily reprinted at the free-hosted fan site "Paul Kelly Tripplehorn, Jr. is Better Than You!!!!!!". Also check out the photo of Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson posing with her interns and try to guess which one is the email's recipient (PKT is the blond guy in the gray suit and yellow tie). Elsewhere, Flak has a fine satirical piece on Tripplehorn's surprising new assignment. More.

Photographer Olivia Gay's personal site features her photos of prostitutes in Cuba, Argentina, Brazil and France.

Monday, July 21, 2003

End of the Line for Penthouse? Seth Mnookin at Newsweek reports, "Penthouse employees on Friday received only 25 percent of their usual salaries, according to several employees at the company. And Kennedy Funding, a commercial real-estate lender, is planning on foreclosing on the mansion on Tuesday, according to Joseph Wolfer, Kennedy’s founder and principal. Meanwhile, employees and the magazine advertising community are questioning whether the once high-flying skin magazine will ever publish again."

China claims condom record. "A bright yellow condom covered the facade of a 20-story, phallic-shaped hotel in the southern Chinese city of Guilin to mark U.N. World Population Day in the most populous nation on the globe. "Our hotel is very round," said the manager of the three-star Fragrant River Hotel.

Fragrant River Hotel? Oh, come on. (Link snagged from Uffish Thoughts.)

VodkaPundit lists 50 words and phrases not to use on a first date.

Shatner settles fight for stallion semen. His ex-wife wanted fresh semen, he was offering frozen. Terms of the settlement are confidential.

"TwirlyGirl pasties are the finest, most exquisitely constructed breast adornments available anywhere! In a matter of minutes they will transform your beautiful boobs into downright dazzling boobs!" (Link snagged from Flutterby.)

The former personal chef to Kim Jong-Il has written a book about the dictator's sybaritic lifestyle amidst desperate poverty and mass starvation.

Kim's "Pleasure Group" of female singers and dancers are a staple attraction at all-night banquets prepared by dozens of highly-trained chefs.

On one occasion witnessed by Mr Fujimoto, Kim ordered the girls to strip naked, then made his guests dance with them, but warned them to go no further. "Dancing is okay but you can't touch. If you touch, it's theft," the Dear Leader told them. Kim, he writes, specifically forbade his underlings to sleep with members of the Pleasure Group. [...]

Kim also considers himself a practical joker, summoning Mr Fujimoto the day after his wedding to inquire if he had any hair "down there". Mr Fujimoto then found that he had been shaved after drinking himself into a stupor and passing out.

This article also details Kim's tastes in food and drink: "caviar from Iran and Uzbekistan, melons and grapes from China, durian fruit from Malaysia, papaya from Singapore, bacon from Denmark and beer from the former Czechoslovakia." (Thanks, Jeremy.)

Sunday, July 20, 2003

Woman dumps man for his online alter ego. Strange but true or new urban legend?

The Stranger runs a skeptical piece about Friendster. Amid so many puff pieces, it's refreshing to read someone piss on the parade. But the author's characterization of Friendster users (and LiveJournal users) as pathetic nerds and dorks, and frequent assurances that he's not a dorky nerd, are themselves pretty pathetic.

Elsewhere, Business 2.0 looks at Match.com's attempts to refine "what could be the industry's ultimate trade secret: a scientific method for helping customers find true love." Which calls to mind this Simpsons exchange (during a 1970s flashback to Apu's days as a computer science grad student wearing bellbottoms, paisley and sideburns; Frink is the scientist who talks like Jerry Lewis).

Frink: Well, sure, the Frinkiac-7 looks impressive [to student] Don't touch it! [back to class] But I predict that within 100 years computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings in Europe will own them.

Apu: Could it be used for dating?

Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest. Ha-ho-ha-hey-hoo.

Thanks to the Simpson archive for the quotation.

Christian Viveros-Fauné at the New York Press savages Matthew Barney, the Cremaster films, his Guggenheim exhibition and the New York art world powers who made him a star. "Matthew Barney isn't transgressive. He's a fraud." This bracing, well-informed review places Barney's career in the context of asinine modern art trends.

Once, not so long ago, in a time sure to eventually occupy a mere footnote in art's larger story, a group of artists calling themselves Conceptualists undertook to replace the objet d'art with a flood of mostly terrible ideas. Puritanical in their disparagement of art's commodification, they reduced artistic practice to a series of largely self-referential actions, words, propositions, gestures and performances. Locking themselves into steel cabinets, crucifying themselves on Volkswagens, entreating their friends to shoot them with pistols, masturbating inside galleries, covering walls with meaningless writings and exposing themselves to third-degree sunburns, the Conceptualists embarked on a series of schizoid activities that they imagined would change the world.

They didn't.

Today, one encounters the watered-down legacy of Conceptualism everywhere, having been absorbed into the bedrock of contemporary art like acid rain. Among Conceptualism's positive influences is a social and political drift that has, over time, grown in complexity and doubt as it has discarded certainty and shrillness. On the negative side is the continued compulsion of certain artists to fetishize the notion of "process." A poor justification for thousands of aimless performances, bad photographs, long-winded videos and absurdly recondite textual exegeses, art that prizes its "processes" (read: methods of production) above everything else has in turn spawned what is perhaps the last stubborn redoubt of postmodernist art-think. Works like these are the ultimate excuse for purposely obscure, boring art and deserve a description befitting postmodernism's bogus tradition of meta-chatter: the post-boring.

Right on, I hate that kind of art too. However, I very much enjoyed Cremaster 3, which Viveros-Fauné calls "simply a long, pretentious film that, despite a few memorable images, never manages to transcend its noxious sexual essentialism or make a bit of sense (or even counter-sense)." Barney's pre-Cremaster work sounds dubious.

Barney's early performances, videos and sculptural props look not accidentally like homoerotic calisthenics for the four-eyed, epicene art gang. One such work is teasingly called Field Dressing (orifill): A buck-naked Barney is seen lowering and raising himself from the ceiling with the help of harnesses while filling his orifices—ears, nose, mouth, anus, penis—with petroleum jelly.

Alas, I couldn't find photos of this performance on the internet.