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Web Log Archives: September 28, 2003 - October 04, 2003

Friday, October 3, 2003

Entertainingly sleazy "blind item" from Ted Casablanca's E! gossip column.

She came, she saw, she served.

Herself, that is. Ms. Famous Aimless, who's supposedly dating Mr. Rocko Rocker, stepped into the kitchen of a very hip Hell-Ay hang recently. Table 8, to be exact. F.A. got herself up on the counter, she did, all ready 'n' panty-free. Skirt hiked, tiny bum squatted, legs parted--all she needed was a condom and a sprig of parsley.

But Mr. Funny Fart--who, unlike R2, isn't supposedly romancing our cuisine cutie--had something more tool-free in mind. F2, horny and hungry, eschewed protective gear and instead decided to devour F.A.'s delicacies with what is traditionally used during finer masticating experiences: the lingua.

Right smack in the open, for worker bees to see. And they did.

Don't think too many of Table 8's dishes got washed that night.

Gawker helpfully supplies names for the nonbicoastal: Famous Aimless is Paris Hilton, Funny Fart is Jamie Kennedy. A little googling reveals that Rocko Rocker was Deryck Whibley (of Sum 41), though they've since split and Paris is now dating Brian Urlacher (of the Chicago Bears). Page Six adds, "In other news, we hear that a stripper ex-girlfriend of hulking Urlacher, who is separated from his wife, nicknamed him 'Jungle Gym' because she liked to climb all over his massive frame. Have fun, Paris!"

Thursday, October 2, 2003

David Steinberg visits the Lusty Lady peep show club in San Francisco in its new incarnation as a worker-owned cooperative.

Just how much does Rolling Stone suck these days? In August they ran a story about the Shane's World reality porn video series, in which pornstars visit various college campuses and party with frat boys on camera. There are lots of ways to spin a story like this, and Rolling Stone opted to go the Nancy Reaganesque scare piece route: "If that porn star next to the keg is coming on to you, beware: two minutes of fun could ruin your life."

Wednesday, October 1, 2003

Did you know . . . that California recall candidate Cruz Bustamante's sister Nao is a performance artist who once "strapped-on a burrito to her loins and called for white men to come up on stage, take a bite out of the burrito and absolve themselves of 500 years of the white man's guilt. There was no shortage of enobled participants, who knelt in front of the protuding offering, some taking delicate bites, others deep-throated chunks"? With photo. (Link snagged from Hit & Run.)

No intercourse, please -- we're enlightened. Brilliantly infuriating essay by Ann Marlowe at Salon (yeah, you'll have to watch a Flash ad to get the day pass) about sex and power, social equality and low-quality sex, oral sex vs. fucking.

I suspect that there's a connection between the collapse of masculine authority and the mainstreaming of S/M; neither gender is too good at distinguishing power and authority, and nostalgia for male authority can translate into fetishizing symbols of power. Women secretly want men with authority, but they fall for insecure passive-aggressive guys who view every aspect of life as a power struggle, or for cranky killjoys or petty sadists.

The collapse of the patriarchy was supposed to make women happy -- we were supposed to get more sex, freer sex, better sex, more loving sex and better relations between men and women. If you went to an Ivy League college in the last 20 years or had a professor who did, you probably heard something about this.

But instead men treat women worse than ever, women are retreating to 1950s notions that sex is something men like, and the nearly successful effort to stamp out gender contrast has made upper-middle-class American sex miserably dull, with or without handcuffs. Men and women are just too much alike stylistically now for much erotic energy to arise from their conjunction.

Tuesday, September 30, 2003

County government officials in Nevada ordered five paintings containing nudity removed from an annual art show in the county administrative building. One offended politician bleated, "This is not an art museum. We have to be concerned with who's going to come in the building. For me particularly, it's children I'm concerned with." The pissed-off artists covered their banned paintings with cloth, tacked signs reading "CENSORED" on the cloths, and rehung the paintings in the exhibit.

Link snagged from Flutterby, where Shawn has some choice words for the county officials.

Pretty good New York Post piece on the mainstreaming of pornography.

Monday, September 29, 2003

The Moscow advertising watchdog committee has banned posters depicting the euro fucking the dollar sponsored by Russian Finance magazine.

The magazine's publisher claims innocence. "I thought the currencies were dancing on our poster. But after hearing from Mr Presnyakov I saw that, yes, maybe, this is a love scene."

A forty-foot statue entitled Musica will be unveiled on October 11 in Nashville, in the center of a large traffic circle leading to the city's Music Row. The piece was created by Nashville sculptor Alan LeQuire, known for his classically-inspired (or kitschy faux classical, depending on your taste) statues, including the forty-two-foot Athena in the city's Parthenon replica. Musica features nine nude bronze dancers, five female and four male, rising from a limestone foundation. A boosterish article explains that the statue "celebrates Nashville’s rich musical heritage and ever-increasing cultural diversity through nine graceful bronze human forms joined together through the spirit of joy and the natural rhythms of dance." But some locals are in a tizzy over the nudity.

"I never expected it to be a big issue, but it is an issue for some people," said LeQuire, reached in Wyoming where Musica is being completed.

LeQuire, 47, said the surface of the 16-foot-tall figures will have a rough texture, so that the genitalia "don't really grab your attention. They are semi-hidden, but they are definitely there."

LeQuire's personal site has more information about Musica, including two studies and several photographs of the construction work.

One local columnist points out that Nashville already has many nude public statues and murals. "At the War Memorial Plaza, the enormously tall statue also has some careful draping going on. But look at the back of the statue. Talk about your buns of steel." She urges bemused indifference to the current controversy. "If you have such a peculiar fetish for bronze that fondling Musica's tambourine will be simply irresistible, just steer clear of the roundabout. Otherwise, don't get your toga in a wad."

An alt-weekly satirical piece reveals that a vigilante group called Ashcroft's Avengers plans direct action protests.

"This is a tableau of debauchery, with all these naked men and women cavorting together," says Emily Dyer, local organizer of the group, which takes its name and philosophy from U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, who ordered that the bare-breasted statue, Spirit of Justice, be draped at the AG's headquarters in Washington.

Dyer says her group will endeavor to keep the LeQuire work draped with black cloth at all times.

"We'll take it by shifts," she says. "We'll just climb up on it, anchor our cloth, and then walk around and around until all the indecent parts are covered up," she says. "We don't think of this as vandalism, but if we are arrested, so be it. This thing is like 'Attack of the 40-Foot Perverts,' and it isn't fit for our children to see. We're going to do all we can to protect our children, because I believe they are our future."

It's a joke. (Link snagged from World Sex News.)

Sunday, September 28, 2003

Chinese police and media are up in arms over a massive orgy at a luxury hotel in Zhuhai, a coastal city just north of Macao in Guangdong province, involving 380 Japanese tourists and 500 local prostitutes. The incident has exacerbated cultural tensions and "threatens to fuel smoldering anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese public." This Japan Today story draws on an earlier story in the state-run Beijing Youth Daily.

A 100-strong Chinese group attending a conference was among the hotel's guests, and one Chinese guest overheard the Japanese tourists talking about unusual sex acts, the report said.

The newspaper noted that the mass orgy happened on the eve of the 72nd anniversary of the Manchurian incident marking the start of Japan's invasion of northeastern China.

Local police are "paying great attention" to this case, the paper said. The hotel has been closed for "rectification," and the police are investigating with an eye toward punishing anyone who allowed the "debauchery," the report added.

The reader comments following the article are highly entertaining. "I wonder what they'll do to commemmorate Pearl Harbour?"

UPDATE: BBC News reports that Chinese authorities have shut down the hotel and that the incident "has prompted thousands of angry messages to be posted on the internet by Chinese users."

World New York identifies two main problems and a minor, bonus problem with Friendster.