Bruce Springsteen Inspired Robert DeNiro's 'Taxi Driver' Line
According to 'Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales,' written by Clemons and co-author Don Reo, De Niro confessed to having heard Springsteen utter the question in concert. "That was part of our shtick back in the day," Clemons tells Spinner.
As adoring fans roared in approval, Springsteen would say, "Are you talkin' to me?" Then he'd look around the stage and back toward the crowd, repeating the line.
De Niro later borrowed the line for trigger-happy Travis Bickle, the circling-the-drain cabbie he portrayed in the 1976 film. When 'Taxi Driver' came out, Clemons says he immediately recognized the line, which would become synonymous with De Niro.
"It made a connection, but there was nothing said about it," says Clemons. "Nobody said, 'Hey, you took that from Bruce Springsteen!' We all knew where it came from so that was it."
Some time later, De Niro confirmed that he did, in fact, lift the line. But he made Clemons promise not to reveal his secret for 25 years. Now that the secret is out, Clemons is waiting to hear from De Niro.
"I sent him the book, so I'm sure he's seen it," Clemons says.
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Followers & Readers
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Bruce Springsteen Inspired Robert DeNiro's 'Taxi Driver' Line
Bruce Springsteen Inspired Robert DeNiro's 'Taxi Driver' Line
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
~~Suicide Tryptych-Evolution of Alan Vega~~
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Dream Baby Dream or Deathmatch: Alan Vega vs/ Bruce Springsteen
Intro
DREAM BAY DREAM is a 1979 single by the band Suicide. Check out Suicide's original version for more details. Bruce Springsteen, who was influenced by the band, closed his Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic Tour shows with a solo version of DREAM BABY DREAM. Note that Springsteen wrote the song title DREAM on the shows' handwritten setlists.
Springsteen and Suicide
"I've liked Suicide for a long time," Springsteen told Mojo in an October 2005 interview. "I met the guys late in the '70s in New York City, when we were in the studio at the same time. You know, if Elvis came back from the dead I think he would sound like Alan Vaga. He gets a lot of emotional purity. I came across 'Dream Baby Dream' again because Michael Stipe included it on a compilation and I thought maybe I could do it."
In his 06 Dec 1984 interview for Rolling Stone, Kurt Loder had this exchange with Springsteen:
Rolling Stone: What bands have you been listening to lately?
Bruce Springsteen: I listen to a lot of different types of things. I like U2, Divinyls, Van Morrison. I like the band Suicide.
Rolling Stone: That makes sense: "State Trooper," one of the songs on Nebraska, sounds very much like Suicide.
Bruce Springsteen: Yeah. They had that two-piece synthesizer-voice thing. They had one of the most amazing songs I ever heard. It was about a guy that murders...
Rolling Stone: "Frankie Teardrop"?
Bruce Springsteen: Yeah! Oh, my God! That's one of the most amazing records I think I ever heard. I really love that record.
Springsteen's version
Springsteen played his modified version of Suicide's DREAM BABY DREAM on the pump organ with synthesizer in the background (played by Bruce's keyboard technician Alan "Fitz" Fitzgerald). The song is repetitive, but that adds to its strength. At the end of the song, Bruce just stands up, focuses the mantra directly at the crowd before him, "I just wanna see you smile", and then walks off the stage while singing the last line, with the synthesizer still playing and the lights dimming.
Springsteen told Mojo: "It's a mantra and it works because the night is filled with so much narrative and detail and then at the end there's just those few phrases repeated and they are the essence of everything else I'm saying and doing in the course of the evening. The night opens and opens and then, at the end, when you think it can't open any more it does and it's completely embracing. It's yeah, I guess... I have an eye for a lot of detail and this is a lesson in, uh, 'What is a song?' It's so purely musical, that's what's beautiful about it, it's so simple and so purely musical."
Live History
Bruce Springsteen debuted DREAM BABY DREAM on 11 May 2005 at Rosemont Theatre, Chicago, IL. That was the 9th official date of the Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic Tour. From then on, the song closed every single show of the tour, making a total of 64 appearances.
Suicide's Alan Vega was in attendance at Springsteen's 20 Jul 2005 show at Arena At Harbor Yard, Bridgeport, CT. Springsteen dedicated that night's performance of DREAM BABY DREAM to it's writer.
Alan Vega's comments
"I'm still high from that show [20 Jul 2005]. Now I can die. Not only he's [Springsteen] playing 'Dream Baby Dream,' but it's the big encore song, the last song of the show," Alan Vega told Backstreets Magazine in an interview. "A lot of bands have done my stuff, Suicide stuff [...] Thank god, finally somebody did their version of it. He [Springsteen] interpreted my song, he did it his way, and such a great way that I'm going to have to sing it that way, or not sing it at all anymore!" In the interview, Vega talks about Springsteen's version of DREAM BABY DREAM, the Bridgeport show, how he first met Springsteen, the Nebraska album, and much more... At the end of the interview, when asked what's his favorite Springsteen song, Vega answered "'Dream Baby Dream.' On my death bed, that's the last thing I'm going to listen to. I'll play it at my funeral." The full interview can be found in the Winter 2005/2006 (#83/84) issue of Backstreets Magazine.
Official Release
Springsteen's live 28 Oct 2005 performance of DREAM BABY DREAM at T. D. Banknorth Garden, Boston, MA, was officially released in October 2008 on Dream Baby Dream, a UK-only various artists 10" vinyl EP (Blastfirstpetite, catalogue # PTYY 017). The official release date is 06 Oct 2008 in the UK and 28 Oct 2008 in the USA. The release commemorates Suicide vocalist Alan Vega's 70th birthday. It is limited to 8,000 copies, pressed in two different runs of 4,000 each. It comes in a black-and-white cardboard picture sleeve with individually numbered sticker on rear. The track was also available for official download in mp3 or FLAC formats on the Blast First (Petite) label's website, and as an mp4 on iTunes. According toBackstreets, the seven-minute audio is taken from the yet-to-be-completed Devils & Dust Solo Acoustic Tour DVD.
Live 28 Oct 2005 version
[Spoken intro:] Alright, this is for Dave. Dave, I'm gonna send this one out to you tonight. [chuckles] Had a great time yesterday.
Dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Keep the fire burning
We gotta keep the light burning
Come on, we gotta keep the light burning
Come on, you gotta keep the fire burning
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on darling and dry your eyes
Come on baby and dry your eyes
Come on darling and dry your eyes
Come on baby and dry your eyes
Come on darling and dry your eyes
Come on, you gotta keep on dreaming
Come on, you gotta keep on dreaming
Come on, you gotta keep on dreaming
Come on and dream baby dream
Come on, you gotta keep a fire burning
Come on, you gotta keep the light burning
Come on you gotta keep a light burning
Come on and dream baby dream
Well I just wanna see you smile
Now I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Now I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on, you gotta keep on dreaming
Come on, you gotta keep on dreaming
Come on, you gotta keep on dreaming
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on, we gotta keep a light burning
Come on, you gotta keep a light burning
Come on, we gotta keep a light burning
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on baby and dry your eyes
Come on darling and dry your eyes
Come on darling and dry your eyes
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on and open up your heart
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Yeah come on and open up your heart
Oh come on and open up your heart
Yeah come on and open up your heart
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Now I just wanna see you smile
Yeah I just wanna see you smile
Come on dream on, dream baby dream
http://www.springsteenlyrics.com/lyrics/d/dreambabydream.php
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Suicide: Alan Vega Is Going To Kick Your +ss or How the GodfathersOf Punk Kept The Faith
Suicide: Alan Vega Is Going To Kick Your +ss or How the Godfathers Of Punk Kept The Faith
New Yorkers Alan Vega and Marty Rev were punks before punk was invented, known in the '70s for their violent gigs and raging synth rock. Now they're hip again, with Bono, REM and Radiohead citing them as influences.
You may not have heard of American duo Suicide, but you will have heard of the groups they influenced. Depeche Mode, New Order, Moby, Radiohead - almost every techno or industrial act, or rock band that uses synthesisers, has cited Suicide as an influence.
Bono said U2 were listening to Suicide's song Cheree when they wrote With Or Without You. Bruce Springsteen, their early supporter and friend, has recorded a cover version of their song Dream Baby Dream. Suicide's eponymous 1977 debut album has been hailed as "the Sgt Pepper of electronica", while REM have described them as "the true sound of New York".
And their confrontational performances, which often resulted in orgies of violence and destruction, led Joe Strummer, frontman of The Clash, to call vocalist Alan Vega "one of the bravest men I have ever seen on a stage".
But they were not always this highly regarded. "Even the punks didn't like Suicide," says Vega today, his thick accent closer to Jackie Mason than a Bronx hoodlum. "We were the ultimate punks because even the punks hated us."
Did he and musical partner Marty Rev relish their ultimate pariah status, being spat at and having everything from bottles to axes hurled at them?
"Well, it made it difficult to get gigs because there would be riots every time. At one gig in the Hague, the police sprayed the theatre with teargas. At another in France I got punched on the nose and Marty had to fight off stage invaders with his spare hand.
"We had a reputation as the band everyone loved to hate, and I kind of enjoyed that. But there were times when we thought we were insane. It almost pushed me towards a nervous breakdown. We confronted and challenged the audience. We weren't entertainers - it wasn't an escape from people's problems."
Vega draws a shocking parallel between the aural assault of Suicide at their confrontational '70s peak - Rev's ear-punishing keyboard drones and Vega's bloodcurdling arsenal of yelps and screams - and the darkest period in Jewish history. "When the Jews were shipped off to the concentration camps, to Dachau, Auschwitz or Treblinka, they would arrive and there would be a beautiful station and they looked like quite nice places. But then they'd walk past the nicely painted walls through a door right into hell. And that's exactly what Marty and I were doing with Suicide: we were giving them Treblinka. The audience would walk through the door of the venue and they'd be in hell. We were angry and we wanted to wake people up. The Vietnam War was raging, Nixon - who I hated - was in charge and the whole country was collapsing. We were saying: 'Wake up, man! You've got to change this shit!'"
Despite their torn clothes, their choice of band name and the individual aliases they assumed in the early days - Nasty Cut and Marty Maniac - Vega and Rev were not your average semi-literate, cartoon-
nihilist delinquents proposing chaos for its own sake: there was a vast difference between Sid Vicious and Suicide.
Vega, born Alan Bermowitz in 1938, was brought up in a poor blue-collar household by his mother and diamond-setter immigrant father. "They were from another planet," he says. "Fortunately they didn't ever get to see me perform, otherwise they would have put me in a mental hospital."
He describes himself as a loner who initially studied physics and art at Brooklyn College before pursuing a career making light sculptures at some of the most prestigious art galleries in New York.
Rev, real name Martin Reverby, was an avant-garde jazz buff studying classical music at New York University who got expelled for refusing to toe the line. Vega remembers the day in 1971 when Rev turned up at the Project of Living Artists, an artists' space he was managing in Lower Manhattan.
"He was a strange-looking Jewish guy with bushy hair like an afro and a blue turtle-neck who sat down on the floor and started tapping these pencils. He was out there - the first guy to play jazz rock on keyboards, long before Weather Report," he marvels, comparing their meeting to those epoch-making first encounters between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger and Lennon and McCartney. "It was," he says, "a miracle."
Vega and Rev became part of a music New York scene densely populated with Jews, including Joey Ramone, Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group, Richard Hell of the Voidoids and Chris Stein of Blondie.
Vega even jokingly refers to the legendary club CBGBs where all those bands played as "one big synagogue".
As Suicide, they created a new type of electronic rock'n'roll - they were a sci-fi Sex Pistols, before the Pistols existed. The problem was, nobody knew what to make of them or their guitar-, bass- and drums-free line-up. In fact, they were the prototype synth-duo, the model for Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys and the rest, with the lugubrious keyboardist and gregarious frontman.
"If we were the future, it was a future that nobody wanted," admits Rev, who was once approached by the Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren to form a boy-girl outfit with Blondie's Debbie Harry. "There was nothing about us that was familiar."
Rev is as thoughtful as Suicide's music is visceral. Of his religious beliefs, he says: "I can't box myself into any one system of practice or ritualised thought for very long." And he describes his upbringing as "social-oriented humanitarianism; non-religious bordering on agnostic". He admits, however, that he later "studied in-depth ancient Hebrew texts for a period of years". He concedes that he "can't imagine living in a world where there isn't a God". He admires non-believers but cannot quite make that leap himself. "Having that sense of awe about the universe, which is what religion is to me, I wonder how they can live without that.
It's like love - it doesn't have to be real or true, but to live without it... It's hard enough to get up in the morning as it is."
Vega is similarly ambivalent. He alludes to the "miraculous" nature of his career with Suicide and fateful meeting with Rev, begging the question - does he believe in a higher power?
"I distrust the name 'God' but, yes, I do believe in a higher power," he says. He adds that he shares the rationalist stance of Spinoza, the 17th-century Jewish philosopher and "pantheist theologian". "God is in all of us," he says, before deciding: "There is an immense power. There has to be."
After years of changing his back-story, telling journalists his mother was Catholic, he is finally proud of his roots. "I made that up to fuel the myth, because really, my whole life has been a myth," he says. Now he can come clean. "It's funny, but I'll never stop feeling Jewish, no matter how much I might talk my way out of it.
I'm very proud to be part of this tradition. It's brought me a lot of knowledge."
He is equally proud of Suicide and flattered by the attention of musician-fans - artists as varied as Springsteen, Nick Cave, Primal Scream and Julian Cope are lined up to release cover versions of Suicide classics every month from now until 2010. Even Amy Winehouse is apparently keen to get involved.
"There's an authenticity to our music," he considers. "It's country 'n' eastern music, or New York City blues. I sometimes call it 'Two Jews' Blues'. Really, though, we're our own category. People always say: 'You're too much in the future.' And I tell them: 'No, you're too much in the past.'"
To mark Alan Vega's 70th birthday, blastfirstpetite is releasing monthly limited-edition 10-inch vinyl singles featuring versions of Suicide songs, starting this month with Bruce Springsteen's cover of Dream Baby Dream.
Snapshot
Who are Suicide? Marty Rev and Alan Vega - two Jewish New Yorkers who founded the band
after they met in 1971. Vega says: "We were angry and we wanted to wake people up"
Why are they important? Suicide had a punk-style attitude and violent edge to their music that predated the Sex Pistols by several years. They invented synthesiser rock, paving the way for a host of '80s and '90s electro-pop bands
Who have they influenced? Who haven't they influenced? Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, New Order and Pet Shop Boys would all probably never have existed without Suicide. U2, REM, Radiohead, and even Bruce Springsteen claim them as heroes.
By Paul Lester, October 10, 2008
http://www.thejc.com/arts/music/suicide-how-godfathers-punk-kept-faith
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Ten things you need to know about Haruki Murakami
The key facts about the coolest writer in the world today
Haruki Murakami is quite possibly the most successful and influential cult author in the world today. The 59-year-old sells millions of books in Japan. His fifth novel, Norwegian Wood, sold more than 3.5m copies in its first year and his work has been translated into 40 languages, in which he sells almost as well. Last year's novella, After Dark, shifted more than 100,000 copies in English in its first three months. His books are like Japanese food — a mix of the delicate, the deliberately bland and the curiously exotic. Dreams, memory and reality swap places, all leavened with dry humour. His translator, Professor Jay Rubin, says reading Murakami changes your brain. His world-view has inspired Sofia Coppola, the author David Mitchell and American bands such as the Flaming Lips. He is a recipient of the Franz Kafka prize, has honorary degrees from Princeton and Liège, and is tipped for the Nobel prize for literature.
MURAKAMI DIVIDES PEOPLE
In June 2000, the panel members of German television's literary review show Das Literarische Quartett disagreed so violently about his writing that one of them quit after 12 years on the programme. Opinion is equally divided in Japan. While younger readers adore him and even choose to study at his alma mater, Waseda University, in the hope of living in the dorm he describes in Norwegian Wood, he is viewed as pop, trashy and overly westernised by Japan's literary establishment, who prefer the formal writing of Mishima, Tanizaki or Kawabata. Born in Kyoto in 1949, he studied theatre arts at Waseda — although the course didn't interest him hugely and he spent much of his time reading film scripts in the library. He was hugely influenced by the student rebellions in 1968, which find their way into many of his novels. As a result, he's a typical baby boomer — openly critical of Japan's obsession with capitalism. He finds Japanese traditions boring. This doesn't go down very well.
MURAKAMI IS HUGELY INFLUENTIAL
As well as countless Japanese novelists, the plot and style of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation were partly inspired by Murakami's novels. David Mitchell — twice nominated for the Booker prize — owes a huge debt to him after reading him while teaching in Japan. Indeed, the title of his second novel, Number 9 Dream, is a veiled tribute to Norwegian Wood — both were named after Beatles songs. Among others, the Complicite theatre company adapted The Elephant Vanishes in 2003; Robert Wyatt reads from Murakami's books on Max Richter's 2006 album Songs from Before; and the Grateful Dead-style jam band Sound Tribe Sector 9 soundtracked a 2007 film version of the story All God's Children Can Dance.
HIS BOOKS WOULD NOT MAKE A HIGH-CONCEPT MOVIE PITCH
Imagine that JD Salinger and Gabriel Garcia Marquez had collaborated on a manga version of The Maltese Falcon. Norwegian Wood is the Japanese equivalent of The Catcher in the Rye — required reading for every troubled adolescent. Curiously, Murakami translated The Catcher in the Rye into Japanese and found it good but incomplete. "The story becomes darker and darker, and Holden Caulfield doesn't find his way out of the dark world," he argues. "I think Salinger himself didn't find it either." Murakami balances the mundane — intimate descriptions of preparing and eating simple meals feature regularly — with the fantastic. His protagonists are usually ordinary people trying to get by in life, until some type of ethereal male guide steers them into a new direction, sometimes quite literally. In All God's Children Can Dance, Yoshiya, a young man working at a publishing company, wakes up with a crushing hangover and heads to his office hours later than usual. On the train coming home that night, he sees an older man who has the distinguishing features of his absent father. Yoshiya follows this man on the train, then through darkened, empty streets, to find himself in a deserted baseball diamond at night. The man vanishes, and Yoshiya stands on the pitcher's mound in the cold wind and simply dances.
MURAKAMI IS CONFLICTED ABOUT HIS HOMELAND
Both his parents taught Japanese literature, but he preferred reading second-hand pulp-fiction novels picked up in the port city of Kobe. He is a devoted fan of western music and hates the formalism of Mishima. In 1987, the huge success of Norwegian Wood made him an overnight celebrity, which terrified and annoyed him. In December 1988, he left the country, becoming a writing fellow at Princeton. A Japanese weekly magazine reported his departure under the headline "Haruki Murakami has escaped from Japan". Published in 1994, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle picked apart the cultural groupthink that led Japan into the second world war, a theme he revisited in his first nonfiction book, Underground (published in 1997), about the Tokyo subway attacks by the Aum Shinrikyo cult. He worries about Japan's tendency to forget wartime atrocities. Even so, he says: "Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer. But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country."
MURAKAMI USED TO RUN A JAZZ CLUB
He owned it from the end of his university years until 1981, when he was able to support himself with his writing. The experience may have contributed to the negative role of drinking in his books. He uses alcohol as a signifier of the petty, the negative and the evil. That is not to say he is teetotal. He loves beer, rewarding himself with a cold one for feats of writing or sporting endurance. Perhaps it was the crushed, social blend of booze and crowds that made Murakami uneasy. He once said: "When I had the club, I stood behind the bar, and it was my job to engage in conversation. I did that for seven years, but I'm not a talkative person. I swore to myself, once I've finished here, I will only ever talk to those people I really want to talk to." As a result, he refuses to appear on radio or television.
MURAKAMI OWES EVERYTHING TO BASEBALL
On April 1, 1978, he was watching a baseball game at the Jingu Stadium, in Tokyo, on a warm, sunny day — the Yakult Swallows against the Hiroshima Carp. An American player for the Swallows, Dave Hilton, stepped up to bat and hit a home run. In that instant, Murakami knew he was going to write a novel. "It was a warm sensation. I can still feel it in my heart," he told Der Spiegel earlier this year. He started work that night on his debut novel, Hear the Wind Sing. It has many Murakami themes: there are animals; the hero is a young man, rather isolated, laconic, operating on cruise control and jobless; his eventual girlfriend has a twin (Murakami likes doppelgängers); cooking, eating, drinking and listening to western music are described often and in detail; and the plot is both incredibly simple and bafflingly complex. Writing while running a jazz bar proved difficult, however, and it is a fragmented, jumpy read. The unpublished manuscript won first prize in a competition run by the influential Japanese literary magazine Gunzo, but Murakami himself doesn't like it very much and didn't want it translated into English.
MURAKAMI LIKES CATS
His jazz bar was called Peter Cat, and cats appear in many of his stories — usually indicating that something very strange is about to happen. It's a missing cat that starts off the whole surreal chain of events in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, while Kafka on the Shore features a confused and possibly brain-damaged pensioner called Nakata, who, after a mysterious incident involving a strange silver light at the end of the second world war, fell into a coma and woke to find that he had telepathic communication with cats. This, it turns out, is fortunate, as a conversation with an unusually bright member of the species, who is on the run from a strange cat-catcher called Johnnie Walker, ultimately leads to Nakata preventing the living embodiment of pure evil from destroying the planet.
As I said, something very strange.
MURAKAMI REALLY LIKES MUSIC
Many of his book titles are musical references: Norwegian Wood after the Beatles song, South of the Border, West of the Sun after a Nat King Cole track and Dance, Dance, Dance after the Beach Boys tune. The three books in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle are named after a Rossini overture, a piano piece by Schumann and a character in Mozart's Magic Flute respectively. In Kafka on the Shore, the hero's contact with the spirit of a dead woman who has obsessed him throughout the novel finally comes about when he discovers a cache of vinyl records in a desolate library on the outskirts of a regional city and plays Beethoven's Archduke Trio. In Pinball, 1973, revolutionary students occupying a university building find a classical-music library and spend every evening listening to records. One beautifully clear November afternoon, riot police force their way into the building while Vivaldi's L'Estro armonico blares at full volume. One interviewer visited Murakami's flat and found a room lined with more than 7,000 vinyl records.
MURAKAMI REALLY, REALLY LIKES RUNNING
His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, is the closest thing he's written to an autobiography (although some fans suspect Norwegian Wood has more than a little of his own life at its core).
In this extended monologue, Murakami reminisces about his life as seen through the prism of the sport.
He began running at the age of 33 to lose weight after giving up smoking. Within a year, he had run his first marathon. He's also run the original marathon, between Marathon and Athens — albeit in reverse, because he didn't want to arrive in Athens during the rush hour.
His personal best time for a marathon is 3hr 27min, in New York in 1991. In 1995, he ran in a 100km ultramarathon. It took him more than 11 hours and he nearly collapsed halfway through. He describes his second wind as a religious experience, but decided that he wouldn't run another one. He believes that "a fortunate author can write maybe 12 novels in his lifetime. I don't know how many good books I still have in me. I hope there are another four or five. When I am running, I don't feel that limit. I publish a thick novel every four years, but I run a 10km race, a half-marathon and a marathon every year". He gets up at 4am, writes for four hours, then runs 10km. On his tombstone, he would like the phrase "at least he never walked".
MURAKAMI IS A ROMANTIC
His protagonists are usually transformed by exquisitely tender physical unions with unusual, beautiful and often confused or mysterious women. He describes love with delicate wonder, and his hero is driven by passionate need once the woman of his life is revealed. "I have to talk to you," Norwegian Wood's Toru Watanabe tells the emotionally troubled Naoko. "I have a million things to talk to you about. All I want in this world is you. I want to see you and talk. I want the two of us to begin everything from the beginning."
Yet it usually doesn't work out. Murakami's women are often spirits or extremely fragile. They write the hero long, rambling letters from afar and either attempt suicide or manage to kill themselves during the course of the novel. In one case, the love interest turns out to be the ghost of the hero's mother, captured when she was a teenage girl. Murakami himself has been married since 1971 to Yoko, although he has speculated in interviews about whether this was the right thing to do. "Unlike my wife, I don't like company. I have been married for 37 years and often it is a battle," he told Der Spiegel. "I am used to being alone. And I enjoy being alone."
Stephen Armstrong
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4352966.ece
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How to Conserve Art That Lives in a Lake?
How to Conserve Art That Lives in a Lake?
In 1972, a year before his death in a plane crash at 35, the artistRobert Smithson wrote, "I am for an art that takes into account the direct effect of the elements as they exist from day to day." And with the creation of his greatest work — "Spiral Jetty," the huge counterclockwise curlicue of black basalt rock that juts into the Great Salt Lake in rural Utah — he certainly put that conviction to the test.
After the piece was constructed in 1970, it spent decades underwater as the lake rose. It has re-emerged in the last few years because of drought, but its appearance has changed markedly, whitened by salt crystals and the buildup of silt. Mr. Smithson, who was fascinated by the concept of entropy, might have welcomed this transformation. But it is less clear what he would have thought about changes wrought by visitors to the remote site, who have, at times, carried off some of the rocks as art souvenirs. Or moved them to construct their own tiny spiral jetties nearby. Or, in one case, used them to spell out what they were undoubtedly drinking at the time — "BEER" — in the pink-hued sand next to the earthwork.
Issues like this recently prompted the Dia Art Foundation, which owns the work, to begin exploring the idea of systematically documenting the site, photographing it from year to year to give curators and conservators a better idea of how it is changing and a better basis for making decisions — always tricky in the world of land art — about whether to intervene.
"In my field we're trained to make condition reports," said Francesca Esmay, Dia's conservator, but she added of Smithson's work, composed of more than 6,000 tons of rock and soil: "Its scale is such that I can't just go out with a camera and pencil and clipboard by myself and describe it." So several months ago she turned to the Getty Conservation Institute, an arm of the J. Paul Getty Trust, which has organized and assisted in conservation and monitoring of art and historic sites from Central America to Africa to the Middle East.
After considering nearly every possible way to document "Spiral Jetty" from above — Rent a weather satellite? An airplane? A helicopter? Use a kite? — the institute, which often works in countries where conservation projects are carried out on shoestring budgets, came up with a remarkably simple solution: a $50 disposable latex weather balloon, easily bought online.
Along with a little helium, some fishing line, a slightly hacked Canon PowerShot G9 point-and-shoot digital camera, an improvised plywood and metal cradle for the camera and some plastic zip ties (to keep the cradle attached and the neck of the balloon cinched), a floating land-art documentation machine was improvised, MacGyver-like.
"I'm not supposed to use the word cheap — it's inexpensive," Rand Eppich, a senior project manager with the Getty institute, said. Mr. Eppich, who conceived the balloon plan, made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from Salt Lake City last May with a Getty assistant, Aurora Tang, and Ms. Esmay, to put the system in use for the first time.
And despite a couple of balloons that popped in the Utah heat ("Thankfully, we didn't have cameras on them," Mr. Eppich said), the three managed to get some spectacular and highly useful shots of the jetty from heights ranging from 800 to 1,600 feet, as they unreeled the fishing line tied to the balloon, allowing it to rise.
"You don't need to be skilled conservators to do this part — it's literally like remembering back to childhood birthday parties," said Ms. Esmay, who joined Dia three years ago as its first full-time conservator. She is also responsible for the condition of sites like Walter De Maria's "Lightning Field" in western New Mexico and for works by artists like Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Louise Bourgeois at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, N.Y.
Mr. Eppich said the Getty's goal was to create a system that Dia could use annually at little cost and one simple enough that Ms. Esmay could operate it herself. "We want to help people do something that's repeatable and sustainable after we're gone," he said.
Preservation concerns about "Spiral Jetty" have arisen lately not only because of the work's re-emergence from the water but also because of plans announced in the last two and a half years by companies to initiate industrial projects near the site. One is a large expansion of a field of solar evaporation ponds used to extract potassium sulfate from the water for fertilizer. Another is a plan for exploratory oil drilling that Dia officials argued would disrupt the way the work would be viewed and potentially harm it physically. As a result of the drilling proposal — currently in limbo — Dia and Utah officials have begun exploring the creation of a buffer zone around the sculpture that would help protect it while still allowing the lake area to be used for other purposes.
But in addition to industrial threats to the work, there are also natural ones, like silt, which has begun to accumulate between the outermost band of the spiral and the next one in, as the lake's level has dropped. The lake is so low it is now possible to walk a quarter-mile into it with the water reaching only knee-high.
"In my personal opinion alone," Ms. Esmay said of the silt, "I think it's to such a degree now that it's foreign to the piece. But in 10 years it could be gone or in one year it could be gone. Or it could be worse. You have no way of knowing, and that's just inherent to the work itself."
She emphasized that the documentation project was not a prelude to any active plans to rebuild or even touch up the jetty. "Something like that might not happen for 20 years, if it ever happens at all," she said, "but at least we'll have 20 years of data that will show the patterns of change."
And if any conservation plans were to go forward, then the really complicated work would begin: trying to figure out what Mr. Smithson would have thought about it.
"Nature does not proceed in a straight line," he wrote. "It is rather a sprawling development. Nature is never finished."
Published: November 17, 2009
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The funny thing about Kafka
The funny thing about Kafka
Reviewed by Lawrence Norfolk
KAFKA'S SELECTED STORIES
trans by Stanley Corngold
all by Franz Kafka
Norton, £6.99; 400pp
METAMORPHOSIS AND
OTHER STORIES
trans by Michael Hofmann
Penguin, £8.99; 320pp
EVERYONE LOVES Kafka. Writers cite him as an influence or benchmark. Readers keep his sales ticking over. Academics set his texts.
Kafka is supremely teach-able. Take The Judgement, which he wrote after years of false starts in a single furious night in September 1912. The story begins with Georg Bendemann writing to a childhood friend, now a failed businessman in St Petersburg (the old stamping ground of Gogol and Dostoevsky, two of Kafka's own touchstones), and debating whether to tell his friend that he is engaged.
We expect the fiancée or the friend to appear. From any other writer that is what we would get. Instead we get Bendemann's magnificently mad father. Consulted on the fiancée question, he launches a multipronged attack on his son whom we begin to suspect of ousting the old man from the family business, neglecting him (suggested via a critique of the old man's underwear) and of falling for a skirt-raising gold-digger.
Even the existence of the "friend" is thrown into doubt. Perhaps the old man is not so mad? Perhaps Bendemann is the one in the grip of delusions? This all takes place while Bendemann attempts to put his father to bed. The terrible row culminates with the old man passing sentence on his son. "I sentence you to death by drowning!" This sentence is then carried out.
Kafka unfolds narrative bends from within his tales that extend their dimensions beyond the normal three. All the above (and much else; I have simplified) takes less than 14 pages. Kafka's insistence on concrete actions releases a superabundance of metaphorical possibilities. Almost any interpretation may gambol in the spacious ambit of Kafka's work: Freudian, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist. What does it all mean? Better to ask what doesn't it mean? "Unimaginable quantities of ink and ingenuity have been spilled on Kafka," Michael Hofmann writes in the introduction to his fine translation of Kafka's stories. Stanley Corngold speculates that more is written on Kafka each year than any writer except Shakespeare. Even The Zürau Aphorisms, Roberto Calasso admits, "have been published and translated many times".
Hofmann's wise introduction hints at a solution. Although the interpretation of Kafka is endless, reading him is surprisingly easy. "There is no threshold of boredom or difficulty; you don't even need to have a particularly literary disposition." Why not just do that? His translations render Kafka's conservatively modulated, near-dictionless German into a less dry, slightly more expansive English. It is the most readable version of Kafka to date.
The selection is Kafka's own - the works that he allowed to appear in his lifetime. The (very) short stories of Contemplation form a kind of prologue, reading as if sampled from works yet to be written. With hindsight, some read as self-parody.
"When it had already become unbearable . . ." begins a vignette entitled Being Unhappy. The book gets properly under way withThe Judgement. This was when "Kafka became Kafka", Hofmann comments. The Stoker, which follows, later became the opening chapter of the unfinished novel posthumously published asAmerika, and brings us to the heart of Kafka's work: the near-novellas Metamorphosis and In the Penal Colony, the shorter works collected in A Country Doctor, the four stories of Hunger Artist and three miscellaneous pieces round out the book.
In terms of bulk, this is not much to show for a lifetime's commitment to literature. But Kafka's editor, Max Brod, famously ignored the instruction to burn his manuscripts: Amerika, The Trial, The Castle, along with shorter works such as The Great Wall of China, Researches of a Dog and The Burrow and other bits and pieces.
Potentially at least, Kafka is funny. The mainspring of his fiction is the maintenance of hope amid overwhelming evidence. InMetamorphosis Gregor Samsa struggles on, hoping for the best. His predicament is serious, he knows, but surely not hopeless? This from a man who has been locked into his room by his family after turning into a cockroach.
It is less funny, I would argue, at length. Hofmann notes that Kafka's novels give a heft to the oeuvre that has helped his posthumous reputation. That is a polite way of saying that academics like "serious" writers to have serious-looking bodies of work. My copy of The Castle was given to me, optimistically perhaps, on my 14th birthday by my mother. I had some difficulty finishing it but was mollified by the discovery, 30 years later, that Kafka hadn't finished it at all. In the strange world of Kafka's work, the "novels" are the fragments. The short stories reach and define the boundaries.
Corngold has translated and edited Kafka's Selected Stories for a Norton Critical Edition. All the major stories are here, except forMetamorphosis, which appears in a Norton Critical Edition of its own, also edited by Corngold. For this edition, Corngold states that he has "translated each story 'cold' " and has resisted the temptation of a "colourful colloquial bounce". Excitability has been consigned to the footnotes.
"Feel the self-reflexivity of this," one exhorts. There are essays at the back, one of which spends 13½ pages on a 400-word story.
The exorbitance of Kafka criticism is, obviously, Kafka-esque. Wonderfully, Corngold blames its recent explosion on a plethora of work by recently unrepressed academics from Eastern Europe. Damn those Czechs! Kafka's very concision seems to provoke the bulk response, so we can expect much academic chuntering onThe Zürau Aphorisms. These brief paragraphs and sentences, written while he recovered from tuberculosis in 1917, are translated by Hofmann and introduced by Roberto Calasso, in a beautifully produced compact hardback. The contents of this intellectual design-object could have been printed on two sheets of foolscap, but no matter. Kafka compels, and we read on.
Aphorism Five encourages: "From a certain point, there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached."
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Franz Kafka’s porn brought out of the closet
Franz Kafka's porn brought out of the closet
A stash of explicit pornography to which Franz Kafka subscribed has emerged for the first time after being studiously ignored by scholars anxious to preserve the iconic writer's saintly image.
Having stumbled by chance across copies in the British Library in London and the Bodleian in Oxford while doing unrelated research, James Hawes, the academic and Kafka expert, reveals some of this erotic material in Excavating Kafka, to be published this month. His book seeks to explode important myths surrounding the literary icon, a "quasi-saintly" image which hardly fits with the dark and shocking pictures contained in these banned journals.
Their additional significance is that the publisher, Dr Franz Blei, was also the man who first published Kafka in 1908 - a series of miniature stories later gathered in his book Meditation.
Hawes, an Oxford graduate and university lecturer, emphasises his total admiration for the literary Kafkaesque genius who wrote brooding classics such as The Metamorphosis, The Castle and The Trial, and argues that these discoveries merely show Kafka as more human than the popular image. He believes that "suppressing" them detracts from sensible assessment of his work, and has even led to nonsensical evaluation.
Even today, the pornography would be "on the top shelf", Dr Hawes said, noting that his American publisher did not want him to publish it at first. "These are not naughty postcards from the beach. They are undoubtedly porn, pure and simple. Some of it is quite dark, with animals committing fellatio and girl-on-girl action... It's quite unpleasant."
"Academics have pretended it did not exist," Dr Hawes said. "The Kafka industry doesn't want to know such things about its idol."
He added: "Perhaps Kafka's biographers simply don't like the idea that their literary idol was helped out in this... way in the vital early stages of his career... Of the world's authors, only Shakespeare generates more PhDs, more biographies, more coffee-table books... Everything Kafka wrote, every postcard he ever sent, every page of his diary... is regarded as a potential Ark of the Covenant... Yet no-one has ever shown his readers Kafka's porn."
The journals' title - The Amethyst/Opals - reveal nothing about their contents, but Kafka kept his collection locked at his parent's house where he lived, taking the key with him when he went on holiday.
Perhaps he feared his father Hermann. But the obsession with a supposed brutal father and with being a Jew, are two other myths which Dr Hawes challenges. Hermann, a conventional Jewish businessman and ex- sergeant-major in the Hapsburg army, was probably "a father of his time", may indeed have been stern, but Dr Hawes - who is also senior lecturer in creative writing at Oxford Brookes University - argues that Kafka admits that he "hardly if ever actually hit" him. He also let him study what he wanted, live at home rent-free for years, when Kafka earned handsomely, and come and go "as he pleased".
As to the myth that Kafka's works are based on his experiences as a Jew in Prague, and that Kafka somehow predicted the Holocaust, Dr Hawes acknowledges that Kafka was very much aware of being Jewish. But "there is zero actual Jewishness" and no Jewish characters or scenes in his work. He was immersed in German culture.
Dr Hawes's biography also challenges the enduring popular portrait of Kafka as a tortured and lonely figure, neglected in his own lifetime, stuck in a dead-end job and struggling to write. The true Kafka could not have been more different, he said, describing him as a popular and well-paid state lawyer whose writing was supported by a prominent literary clique. It was only towards the end of his short life in 1917 that TB was diagnosed, and his poverty only occurred near the end due to economic collapse after the 1914-18 War.
Commenting on the book's discoveries, Ritchie Robertson, a professor of German at Oxford University and author of Kafka: A Very Short Introduction, said he was unaware of any academic actually looking at the pornography pictures, let alone reproducing them for biographies, even though they knew of his subscrition to Amethyst/Opals.
He added: "The many myths about Kafka circulating among the semi-informed public... do include the idea of Kafka as a kind of saint, originally propagated by his friend Max Brod. So it's salutary to assemble evidence that he was human."
Kafka's interest in pornography, which left traces in such works as The Metamorphosis, matters if it makes us look at any of Kafka's fiction in a new way, he said: "Kafka had a strongly visual imagination, and the importance of the visual arts for him hasn't yet been fully explored."
Dalya Alberge, Arts Correspondent
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article4446131.ece
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Pornography as high art
Pornography as high art
Alain Robbe-Grillet's latest novel is obscene and disturbing, the more so because of its evident artfulness
In Britain, we have the annual Bad Sex award, created by Auberon Waugh to celebrate instances of embarrassing sex writing in novels; in France, they have the Prix Sade, to reward "works defying the moral or political order of society". Transgressive US gay author Dennis Cooperhas just been awarded the 2007 prize for his novel The Sluts. How typical that we should denigrate sex in literature while the French call for its celebration.
However, even in France, the recently published novel by Alain Robbe-Grillet - Un Roman Sentimental - is creating something of a stir, with calls from various sources for its actual ban. Publishers Fayard, aware of its potential to disturb, even went to the extent of issuing the book with pages uncut, sporting a sober, purely typographical cover, with each copy shrink-wrapped and featuring a warning sticker to the effect that "this is a fairy tale for adults and a fantasy that might well shock sensitive souls". Were Robbe-Grillet not a member of the respected Academie Francaise and best known for having invented the ascetic and stylised form of the nouveau roman, it is unlikely his novel could have been published at all even in these liberated times. But then, cinemagoers will recall the frequent nudity and sado-masochistic tropes present in many of the art films he has directed, including Trans-Europ-Express, La Belle Captive, Glissements Progressifs Du Désir and L'Éden et Après. Unlike the flesh on frequent display in the films of Peter Greenaway, Robbe-Grillet's movies never had the alibi of a painter's perspective and the bound, captive women he loved to display always evoked a disturbing sense of troubled eroticism and deliberate fetishism.
Un Roman Sentimental, however, is unlikely to be filmed. It's a venomous flower of a novel which defies convention and taste and takes a tradition invented by the Marquis de Sade, principally in 120 Days of Sodom (the Prix Sade jurors presciently awarded their prize to Robbe-Grillet in 2004 for the whole of his oeuvre), and its film adaptation by Pasolini in Salò.
What constitutes pornography is very much in the eye of the beholder, but there is little doubt that this is an openly and joyfully pornographic book, in that it turns into an unbound celebration of deviancy at its most explicit and imaginative.
Gigi, also known as Djinn, a young girl in her early teens, is being groomed by her father to become a woman much like her own mother, Violetta, whose education, contamination and death by devices and persons unknown occurred some 10 years before the novel begins. The fact that Gigi is underage and sleeps naked in her own father's bed is only the transgressive prelude to a series of stories within stories within stories in which the fate of similar young girls is examined in the most minute detail, often culminating in terrible orgies of desecration, violation and ecstatic torture to the point of death. Every female character in the book is well under the age of consent, and are all complicit in their fate to a troubling extent.
There is little doubt that Robbe-Grillet is a major writer and the precise, almost analytical prose that unfolds over the 239 short chapters is classically elegant even as the action moves from disturbing to perverse and well beyond. The book is intended to shock but also to arouse in the most unhealthy of ways, as an hypnotic waltz of domination and submission forces the reader to face his or her own morality or even sanity. Excessive it no doubt is, but it also engenders a worrisome form of fascination for the evil inside us, the temptations of sex for its own sake.
Since Sade, many French writers have continued to mine this lonely and disturbing area: Apollinaire, Louis Aragon, André Pieyre de Mandiargues... Robbe-Grillet, now 85, is not, as some critics have suggested, just another dirty old man, but another trailblazer on this perilous and very French road. And what could well be his final book should be read with the utmost care. Provocation, titillation or an intellectual divertissement? I remain uncertain. But one thing's for sure: I cannot imagine any English or American writer daring to take such an unholy risk.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2007/dec/18/pornographyashighart
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Books: 10,001 nights of piety and pornography
Books: 10,001 nights of piety and pornography
Jan Morris hails the Victorian Burtons, a globe-trotting double- act who could outperform mere movie stars; A Rage to Live: the life of Isabel and Richard Burton by Mary S Lovell Little, Brown, pounds 25, 910pp
Jan Morris
Saturday, 31 October 1998
A RAGE to Live is about Richard Burton - but not, as one of its author's young relatives was heard explaining to a friend, "the famous one". The young relative was wrong, though. I suspect that long after the world has forgotten Richard Burton the actor, and his Cleopatra, authors will still be writing books about Richard Burton the Victorian adventurer, savant and pornographer extraordinaire, and his doting, brave and foolish wife, Isabel.
Burton's was a life of astonishing richness, embracing grand physical exploits and works of profound learning. True, too, that his wife was an archetype of Victorian pluck and dedication, given added piquancy by Roman Catholic fundamentalism. Still, they were essentially minor historical figures of the 19th century, and it proves their personal fascination that they generate such a continuing plethora of literature.
Mary S Lovell now gives us the most ambitious Burton study of them all, a whole-hog blockbuster of a dual biography. It contains more than 900 pages, 78 pages of source notes, eight pages of bibliography and a stunningly comprehensive index. By my count, 72 individuals are named in its acknowledgements, not to mention helpful institutions from Aberystwyth to Kuwait. No detail of the Burton's story is neglected, no date ignored, no symptom of sickness undiagnosed. Their life's journey is followed mile by mile, from their birthplaces to the end of their road as Her Majesty's Consul and his consort at Trieste.
And what do we get from all this diligence? Not exactly a work of art; no very thrilling new facts; just an agreeable read that will doubtless engage the specialist passions of Burton scholars, but for the rest of us might well be cut by half. The compensating charm of the book is its engaging sense of the amateur. Mary Lovell has written several successful biographies, but still there is something beguilingly innocent about her manner. It is not just that she makes the occasional naive slip, implying that Hussein is a Christian name, or that the second highest mountain on earth is in South America. What is more endearing is a sort of writers'- circle enthusiasm: she is so delighted with her researches, so proud of her massed material, so pleased to offer gentle corrections to previous biographers, above all so irrepressibly devoted to her subjects.
This affection, rather unfashionable in modern biographies, is the real point of the book. Others have depicted the Burtons more ambiguously: Richard as glamorous but bad - if not a Muslim apostate, as contemporary rumour had it, at least a secret homosexual; Isabel as a besotted and sanctimonious ass, who unforgivably burnt many of her husband's most precious erotic writings after his death.
Lovell will have none of this. Burton's interest in sexual variety was purely anthropological; Isabel did nothing that her husband would not have approved; they loved each other dearly, and through their lives were undeserving victims of malicious rivalries, greedy opportunism and the myopic obfuscation of bureaucrats.
I was not entirely convinced. Of course, Burton's journeys were tremendous, and he wrote some admirable books about them. Of course, he was a marvellous linguist, one of the best fencers of his day, splendidly iconoclastic and outrageous. His sexual investigations were brave and original. His unexpurgated translations of The Thousand and One Nights and other Eastern classics, defying all the Grundyism of the day, were great works of scholarship.
But he could be extremely tiresome, and even Mary Lovell cannot disguise the fact. He loved to shock people: even when he was far too old for that kind of thing, he deliberately surrounded himself with mysteries and enigmas, and he was childishly ready to make enemies and bear grudges. As a British Consul, he must have been one of the most maddening ever appointed, constantly getting sick leave to go on one expedition or another, or grumbling about pay and promotion. By the end of this book I felt quite sorry for the poor Foreign Office functionaries who had to deal with him - often confused as they surely were by the influential bigwigs whose sympathy Isabel enlisted on his behalf.
For Isabel is always present in the story: organising, protesting, fussing, contacting Lords or Secretaries of State, writing prolix books of her own, making a fool or a heroine of herself, riding on camels, fending off villains, standing up for her mate against all the vagaries of fate, human prejudice and misunderstanding.
Lovell is very fond of her, too, and brings out the best in her. Her burning of the books at Trieste, A Rage to Live demonstrates, was neither so unreasonable nor so extensive as everybody used to think. She was a snob and a religious nut, but her wifely devotion is wonderful to witness now that uxorial duty has gone to pot. On she plugs, now sorting dear Richard's papers in her "little flat" in Baker Street - only nine rooms, plus kitchen - now wondering, on page 666, whether her current ailment could be due to what had happened "during the flight through the forest from the brigand". (Which brigand was that? See page 471.)
I think Mary Lovell would have been wiser to stick to Mrs Burton alone - Lady Burton as she became, Countess as (thanks to something to do with the Holy Roman Empire) she was entitled to call herself. Nothing very new is here revealed about the old hero of the tale, who just seems to me to have been an actively omni-sexual agnostic, as many sensible people are. But the portrait so carefully drawn of his childless wife, so pathetic but so courageous, so fiery in the defence of husband, faith and animal life, is genuinely touching. They don't make women like that any more - Elizabeth Burtons still, but not many Isabels.
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A Rough Trade
Martin Amis reports from the high-risk, increasingly violent world of the pornography industry
Pussies are bullshit. Don't let them tell you any different. "Answer me something," I said to John Stagliano. We were stepping out of the porno home - on to the porno patio with its porno pool. This was Malibu. Down the slope and beyond the road lay the Pacific Ocean; but the Staglianos have no access to its porno shore, in the evening they can watch the porno sunset with its porno pink and mauve and blood-orange, and then linger awhile, perhaps, under a porno moon. "Answer me something. How do you account for the emphasis, not just in your . . . work but in the industry in general, how do you account for the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex?"
After a minimal shrug and a minimal pause Stagliano said, "Pussies are bullshit." Now John was being obedient to the dictionary definition of "bullshit" which is nonsense intended to deceive.
With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated - well, here you have some chick chirruping away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jack-knifed over his flying fist) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit?
With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly puts it, "Her personality comes out." He goes on: "You want guys who can fuck really good and make the girls look more . . . virile." Virile of course, means manly; but once again Stagliano is using the King's English. You want the girls to show you "their testosterone".
The name of Rocco Siffredi, again and again, was wistfully and reverently conjured. Rocco, the big-dorked Italian, and porno's premier buttbanger or assbuster (to use the dialect of this tribe).
"Rocco has far more power in this industry than any actress," said Stagliano, pleased to be pulling one back for the boys (generally speaking, men are the also-rans of porno). "I was the first to shoot Rocco. Together we evolved toward rougher stuff. He started to spit on girls. A strong male-dominant thing, with women being pushed to their limit. It looks like violence but it's not. I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right? Rocco is driven by the market. What makes it in today's market place is reality." And assholes are reality. And pussies are bullshit.
Features and gonzo
There are, at present, two types of mainstream American pornography: Features and Gonzo. Features are sex films with some sort of claim to the ordinary narrative: characterisation, storyline. "We don't just show you people fucking," said a Features executive. "We show you why they're fucking." These movies are allegedly aimed at the "couples market". Couples, it asserted, want to know why people are fucking. I can give these couples a three word answer that will hold true in every case: for the money.
In Flashpoint (Wicked Pictures), for instance, a bunch of porno stars are dressed up as firefighters. As the film opens, we see the porno stars sliding down the pole and boarding the crimson firetruck. An exploding car, a colleague (not a porno star but an ageing extra) falling in the line of duty. There follows an insanely boring funeral, which includes the whole of the Lord's Prayer and the slow and solemn furling, by a porno star, of the American flag. Porno star Jenna grieves for the fallen extra. After returning from the funeral she finds herself alone with another porno star dressed up as a firefighter. He seeks to assuage her grief, so she gives him a blowjob plus full intercourse. The next sex scene, which occurs about a millennium later, is also triggered by grief counselling. Here a male porno star comforts two female porno stars, one of them anally . . .
After a while you begin to think that porno stars, despite being very bad at acting, are very good at acting in one particular only: they can keep a straight face. But then humourlessness, universal and institutionalised humourlessness, is the lifeblood of porno. Films like Flashpoint go out to the video stores and, in the soft version (where the hard action is partly obscured by some stray object - a fireman's hat, say, or a fireman's boot), are sold to cable and to hotel chain franchises, and so on. Features owes the humiliating fatuity of its conventions to an old legal precedent called the "Miller Test".
Miller v California (1973) established that a dirty movie was obscene if it was "utterly" without social, literary, artistic, political or scientific "value". In juridical terms, the key word here, of course, is "utterly" and millions of dollars have been spent on its definition.
With a wife like Hillary, Bill Clinton could never be a true pal of porno, but he largely left it alone on First Amendment grounds. Unlike his two predecessors, who systematically harassed the industry with confiscations, multiple prosecutions, fines, jail terms. It's a fair guess that porno never felt more gorgeously secure than when Clinton, in his second term, became in effect the porno president.
Now porno is tensed and braced forchanges. It feared Gore. It dreaded Bush. Gonzo porno is also known as "wall-to-wall". It shows you people fucking without concerning itself with why they're fucking. There are no Lord's Prayers, no furled American flags in Gonzo. Features porno is much, much dirtier than it used to be, but Gonzo porno is gonzo: way out there. The new element is violence.
Strength and Pain
I had lunch with Temptress (Features). I had lunch with Chloe (Gonzo). And the next day I joined Chloe on the set of Welcum To Chloeville.
My lunch with Temptress was a relatively sedate affair. At first I was reminded of the time I interviewed Penny Baker, a Playboy Playmate of the Year: within a minute I had run out of questions. Temptress, like Penny, seemed to be inhibited by the presence of a company executive - in this case Steve Orenstein of Wicked Pictures, for which she is a contract player. But Temptress loosened up.
"Tell me, Temptress," I said (having apologised for the corniness and mild hostility of my inquiry), "what won't you do?"
"I won't do anal," said Temptress. "They keep trying to coax me into it. You know: 'Just a finger or a tongue. Or just a little bit: just the tip.' But I won't, I used not to do facials. But I do them now."
Temptress is not talking about beauty treatments. She is talking about the destination of what is variously referred to as the "pop-shot" or the "money-shot": the ejaculation of the male.
"What happens," I asked, "when a co-star can't get hard?"
The fiasco used to be the nemesis of porno. A penile no-show could make the difference between profit and loss. But the situation has been changed, I was told, thanks to Viagra. On Viagra, the actor performs 45 minutes behind schedule, with a flushed face and a headache. "You also lose a dimension," John Stagliano would explain. "The guy's fucking without being aroused." He's just "showing off" - and pretty soon you're back to bullshit.
Another thing with Viagra is that the guy can have a problem with the pop-shot, thus endangering the facial.
"What do you do then, Temptress?"
"You get some pina colada mix. The cock's in your mouth and you let it, like, ooze out around it."
Physically Temptress reminded me of the daughters of my friends. She didn't sound shy, but she looked it. With her long straight hair frequently steered over her shoulders by her slow-moving hands, with her face unglazed by cosmetics, with her gently narrowed eyes, she exuded what Philip Larkin called the "strength and pain/Of being young". I asked about her history and she told me something of it. And there was strength and there was pain (and there was certainly youth: Temptress is 21).
"But I don't want you to write about that. And could you not mention my real name? . . . I don't have relationships any more. They make life unstable. The only sex I have is the sex on screen."
Temptress is one of the lucky ones. She's a star. After lunch I went to Wicked Pictures and had a talk with Jonathan Morgan (performer turned director) in a computerised cutting-room while he edited his latest Feature, a fantastically unfunny comedy called Inside Porn.
"Ah," said Jonathan. "Now here we have a double anal."
A double anal is not to be confused with a DP (double penetration: anal and vaginal). A double anal is a double anal. And there have been triple anals, too. "The girls could be graded like A, B and C. The A is the chick on the boxcover. She has the power. So she'll show up late or not at all. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of them do that." He gestured at the screen and said, "Here you have a borderline A/B doing a double anal. Directors will remember that. She'll get phone calls. For a double anal you'd usually expect a B or a C. They have to do the dirty stuff or they won't get a phone call. You've had a kid, you've got some stretchmarks - you're up there doing double anal.
"Some girls are used in nine months or a year. An 18-year-old, sweet young thing, signs with an agency, makes five films in her first week. Five directors, five actors, five times five: she gets phone calls. A hundred movies in four months. She's not a fresh face any more. Her price slips and she stops
getting phone calls. Then it's, 'Okay, will you do anal? Will you do gangbangs?' Then they're used up. They can't even get a phone call. The market forces of this industry use them up."
I thanked Jonathan Morgan for his candour. But he wasn't as candid as Chloe. We met in the lobby of my hotel and we strolled out to her Mustang.
"See that?"
The number plate said: STR82NL
"Straight to anal," said Chloe.
And she hadn't even got started.
Chloe was gonzo. She gave me the truth.
Extreme Productions
A single issue of Adult Video News (April 2000) yields the following. Last October porno star Vivian Valentine attended the XXX-Treme Adults Only vacation in Mexico sporting the black eye she copped from Jon Dough on Rough Sex (Anabolic Video).
"I have no regrets or bad feelings about it," she said. Regan Starr who worked on the second film in this "line", Rough Sex 2, had a different take. "I got the shit kicked out of me," she said. "I was told before the video - and they said this very proudly, mind you - that in this line most of the girls start crying because they're hurting so bad . . . I couldn't breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn't stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, 'Turn the fucking camera off', and they kept going." The director of the Rough Sex series (now discontinued), who goes by the name of Khan Tusion, protests his innocence. "Regan Starr," Tusion claims, "categorically misstates what occurred."
If you don't like Khan Tusion, you won't like Max Hardcore. AVN's regular "On the Set" column carries a cheerfully scandalised account of the making of Hollywood Hardcore 13. In this scene, actor-director Hardcore is having rough sex with Cloey Adams, who is pretending to be under age. "If you're a good girl, I'll take you to McDonald's later and get you a Happy Meal." Hardcore then "proceeds to piss in her mouth". Addressing the camera, Cloey Adams says, "What do you think of your little princess now Daddy?" Nor is Hardcore through with her. "Turning to the crew, he calmly says, 'I'll need a speculum and a hose' . . . One of Max's favourite tricks is to stretch a girl's asshole with a speculum, then piss into her open gape and make her suck out his own piss with a hose. Ain't that romantic?"
Now. American porno (and how could it be otherwise?) is market-driven. We can see what the above tells us about porno. But what does it tell us about America? And if America is more like a world than a country, what does it tell us about the world?
• The average American spends three hours and 51 minutes of every day watching porno (video and internet).
• The average non-homeowning American male spends more on porno than he spends on his rent.
• Porno accounts for 43.5% of the US Gross Domestic Product.
Like pussies, these statistic are bullshit.
I made them up. But the true figures are similarly wild, similarly dizzying, similarly through-the-roof. This isn't bullshit.
• Porno is far bigger than rock music and far bigger than Hollywood.
• Americans spend more on strip clubs than they spend on theatre, opera, ballet, jazz and classical concerts combined.
• In 1975 the total retail value of all the hard-core porno in America was estimated at $5-10 million. Last year Americans spent $8 billion on mediated sex.
Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: Banish porno, and you banish all the world.
Chloe
"I have herpes," said Chloe as she drove me to a smoker-friendly bar. "After you've been in this business for a while, you have herpes. Everyone has herpes. On the set sometimes you'll say to a guy, 'What's this?' And he'll say, 'What? That? It's a fuck sore.' And it may well be a fuck sore, what with all the traffic. But it's more likely to be a herpes sore, and that guy shouldn't be working. My movies are all-condom, but condoms won't protect you from herpes. They don't cover the base. Sometimes when you're doing girl-girl you'll say, 'Honey, I think you should go and see someone.' It can be a very stinky scene down there. I'll send her to a porno-friendly doctor (the others treat you like shit) and she'll come out holding her Flagyll prescription with multiple refills."
Chloe is 26. For 10 years she trained as a ballerina; then, at 17, she got into drugs, mostly speed ("I'd fuck for 72 hours"); at 20 she started shooting up heroin and was already in the industry by the time she quit, over two years ago. Chloe has fair, fine red hair and a warm and clever face. She has a ballerina's body: strong legs, a full muscular butt -
"- and no tits. It's true that some Features companies urge the girls to have implants and offer to pay for it. On the road [ie, stripping] girls used to boast about the cubic capacity of their titjobs. 'I've got 840s.' 'I've got 1220s'. One of them turned to me and said, 'Get tits or suck cock.' I'd rather suck cock, I really would."
If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And - probably - you need damage in your past. You also need to be humourless. Chloe is not humourless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over a wall demarcating two different worlds, telling me stories about the other side.
"I like to be peed on. I like being spat on: it feels like come on your chest. I like to be choked. I like to be fisted. Here we have the 'no-thumbs' rule? A girl can have 16 fingers up her. But no thumbs." She laughs, and continues: "For vaginal I prefer a girthy kind of dick. And some of these guys" - Chloe seizes the broad base of a water glass on the table before us - "are like this. For anal I prefer a longer, thinner kind of dick."
"So when you do DP you get one thick one and one thin one."
"Right . . . No. Come to think of it," she said brightly, "I get two thick ones. I like to feel crammed. You know, I did my first anal for $200? I still can't believe that."
"And what are your rates now, Chloe?"
"In Gonzo, you're paid, not by the picture, but by the scene. So it's girl-girl: 700, plus 100 for an anal toy. Boy-girl: 900. Anal: 1,100. Solo [a rarity]: 500. DP: 1,500. I won't do anal fisting or double anal. People ask me how I can hang on to my title as Anal Queen of LA when I won't do double anal. But I have hung on to it."
In common with about 10% of the porno girls (her estimate), Chloe retains the approval of her parents (and so does Temptress). In fact, Chloe's guardians are gonzo. She recently shot a film out near their place, and her stepfather (while absenting himself from his stepdaughter's scenes) "was like a towel-boy". And Chloe's mother, for two years running now, has marched out of the AVN Awards, brandishing Chloe's Best Anal trophies above the heads of the crowd.
After lunch we drove to Chloe's apartment: barred gates, the feel of a two-floor motel, a modest, comfortable, orderly apartment, featuring a cute black cat with a porno name, Siren. Chloe thinks that some porno girls get their names by looking out of the window at the road sign: Laurel Canyon, Chandler, Cherry Mirage.
For a while Chloe talked about her love life. She is torn, at present, between the neglectful Chris, a rock musician (bass), and the attentive Artie, a fellow performer. She suspects that Chris just strings her along because it's a status symbol for a rock star to have a porno-star girlfriend. Chris, I think, knows about Artie. But Artie doesn't know about Chris.
"And with Artie, he comes over and I'm horny as hell and he says, 'I can't, I have to do two scenes tomorrow.' "
"With private sex, is there a crossover in your head?"
"Oh yeah. I find myself thinking, 'Fuck. I should be being paid for this.' Or 'Fuck. I wish I had a camera.'"
"I'd better not write about Chris and Artie."
"Go ahead. They'll both be over anyway. Here, it doesn't last."
Chloe was unforgettable. I won't forget the way she said this (she said it with sorrowful resolve): "We're prostitutes . . . There are differences. You can choose your partners, and they're tested for Aids - you won't get your john to do that. But we're prostitutes: we exchange sex for money."
"You've thought this through."
"I looked it up in the dictionary and that's what it says."
In etymological terms pornography is what I'm doing: I'm writing about whores. I will see Chloe on set tomorrow morning. The scene they'll be shooting? Gonzo girl-boy-girl anal.
Mister Monster
Towards the end of Rabbit At Rest, John Updike writes: Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives . . . The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all his life he's been in love with Ronnie Harrison.
Or, as a friend would put it to me later that week: It's no good without Mister Monster. You must have Mister Monster.Must you? Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an undertaker. That week in Los Angeles I found out what I don't like.
I don't like Mister Monster.
High up in higgledy-piggledy Hollywood Hills, I hobnobbed with Andrew Blake, the Truffaut of porno, and two incredibly beautiful girls in incredibly expensive underwear (and six inch heels).
Strictly speaking, Blake's work is Gonzo: scriptless, storyless, with the performers interacting with the camera. But Blake is pre-eminently "high-end". His actresses look like voluptuous fashion models, and he flatters and glorifies them on the screen, with oils, unguents, silks, cords, ribbons, textures.
"I hired Monica because she has these beautiful breasts," he told me, "and that's what we're going to be concentrating on. I've never worked with Adriana before but she seems to be really something."
Laconic, gruff, direct and, of course, humourless, Blake goes about his business.
"Now put your hand into her panties . . . And maybe a nipple comes out, a nipple is revealed? . . . Squeeze them, caress them, do the whole nine yards with them . . . Try opening your legs. Kind of tease the panties . . . Don't smile so much. Just kind of be into yourself . . . So is the bra ready to ride? Kiss the nip . . . Arch up your butt a little more . . . Cross and uncross your legs. Show a little pussy . . . Now this is the panties coming off . . ."
Behold. A platonically perfect pubis, wearing nothing but the latest hairstyle, a minimal mohawk.
"This must be a tough day's work for you," said the make-up girl amiably. "Someone's got to do it. Right?"
Her remark obliged me to examine my "affect", or feeling-tone. I admit to a strong sense of furtive beauty-assimiliation. But the instinct being aroused in me was not sexual so much as protective. Naked Adriana was 20 years old. And the last thing I wanted to see, at that moment, was Mister Monster.
Outside, during an intermission, Blake said in his flat, declarative style, "I'm into looking at woman. Not all this 'pissing and fisting'. I've never had any legal problems."
Work permit
A "tough" day's work for me, then, and the same could be said for Adriana and Monica. They weren't being slapped around by Khan Tusion or peed on by Max Hardcore. But were they being "used up"?
If you're a porno performer, your latest HIV test is your work permit. Two years ago the actor Marc Wallice started to become evasive about his work permit. He was using an out of town health centre and seemed to be fudging his results. By the time he was found out, Wallice's condition was fulminant. He infected six actresses.
"The tests we take only test for Aids," says Chloe. "We've contained Aids in the industry but what about all the others? You know we're now up to Hepatitis G?
"You should be at least 21 before you work in this industry. You should know your body, understand your body. But that would wipe out half of San Fernando Valley. There are whole lines on the 18 pluses."
And there are: Dirty Debutantes, Nasty Newcomers, Filthy First Timers . . .
One of the actresses infected by Marc Wallice (his condition now is so pitiful that no one thinks him worthy of persecuting) is Mrs John Stagliano. Stagliano himself, the pioneer of gonzo, is HIV-positive (he contracted the virus recreationally, in a Rio bordello). A medium-sized fortune has been made by Stagliano, in a business where, contrary to popular belief, very few fortunes are made. But I often think of the Staglianos, out by the pool, gazing at an ocean to which they have no access.
Gonzo Girl-Boy-Girl
Chloe's shoot is on Dolorosa Drive.
The porno house, the porno fish in the porno tank (the fish are porno-coloured: yellow, mauve, blood-orange), the porno TV set (as big as a double refrigerator), the porno deck, the porno pool, with a plastic duck floating around in it. Beyond the fence stands the house of the pain-in-the-ass neighbour who keeps climbing on to the roof with a mouthful of nails to get himself shocked enough to call the police.
Girl-boy-girl: the girls are Chloe and Lola (a friendly Amerindian-style beauty); the boy is Artie (Chloe's offscreen lover: tattooed, muscular, balding). Artie seems to be a nice guy, but he keeps talking with a jokey French accent. Porno performers are great ones for funny voices, funny faces. German scientists, Russian spies, French connoisseurs; in Features they can keep it up all movie long.
There is a crew: the DP (for the time being this means Director of Photography) and the sound-recordist, who go about their business like middle-aged handymen; a plump youth who seems to be there for general work experience; and Chloe's sister, Shannon, caterer and towel-girl. Chloe will soon be calling out to Shannon, "Stop that phone!" Shannon: "It's the home phone! There's like ten of them!"
Artie is giving us more French accent, then more French accent, while Chloe and Lola strip for the "pretty girl" shots that will go on the box-cover. Chloe, with whom I spent five hours the previous day, walks past me, naked. It doesn't bother her that she's naked. She doesn't know she's naked.
The porno stills by the porno pool. "See pink? Want lots of pink?" "Let's have some booty." "Open it? You want it all?"
It is barely 10 o'clock in the morning, and I am, I realise, experiencing the kind of anxiety that usually precedes a mild ordeal. A line is about to be crossed. I shouldn't be here. None of us should be here. But we all have work to do.
Fifteen minutes later, referring to the achievements of Lola, Chloe stabbed a hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the director, remember, and she was thrilled to have this scene in the can): "That's the kind of blowjob I was telling you about yesterday!"
I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing, and shaking my head. There are plenty of "jokes" on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth to dispel tension. But only a Chloe, only an exception, can inject humour. She sounded like Mel Brooks, in The Producers, saying, "That's our Hitler!"
The kind of blowjob Chloe was telling me about yesterday was this kind of blowjob. It is as if the girl's passionate - indeed desperate - intention is to kiss the boy's lower abdomen. She faces an obstacle. She can't go around it. She has to go through it. "I mean," Chloe had said admiringly, "some of these girls go down. Drooling and slobbering, saliva everywhere, choking dry-heaving."
It had to be said that the dry-heaving, from Artie's point of view, was visibly efficacious. When Lola was done, he gazed down with some complacence as Mister Monster went from three o'clock to half past 12.
And that was the tenor of it: heat. That is where the market is taking us: toward heat, intensity, a frenzied athleticism. More than this, porno, it seems, is a parody of love. It therefore addresses itself to love's opposites, which are hate and death. "Choke her!" "Spit inside me!" "Break me! You can't break me! Try!" "COMING!!!" Chloe screamed this last word like a mother answering a child's cry from the other end of the house. Then, to Lola, "Choke me!" And Chloe's entire upper body flushed with pink, and she seemed to swoon . . .
"I wanna piss," said Artie, during one of his many intermissions.
For a moment the DP's eyes widened in alarm. He thought, wrongly, that Artie wanted to piss on camera. "Pissing is as bad as coming," he confided to me. "They're supposed to piss and they can't. They go off to the shower, then they say they can piss and they can't."
Artie trudged back from the can, worriedly nursing his condomed erection. "God I'm old," he muttered, as he headed back to the fray.
Well I'm old too, and I blew a kiss at Chloe and took my leave - before the anal and the popshot. Shannon drove me back to the hotel. Poor Shannon: she was having one of those days. First, shopping in a health-food store, she dropped a jar of wheatgerm on her foot and was now limping heavily. Then she discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her - and she fired him. Contemplating the suspension of her love life, Shannon said sadly, "And when you compare it to that, the sex doesn't seem much anyway."
I knew what she meant, in a sense. Chloe-Artie-Lola made me feel like a virgin.
The owl and the bullshitcat
Later that afternoon I journeyed from San Fernando to Pasadena. I was expected at a conference on "The Novel In Britain, 1950-2000" at the Huntingdon Library. After some prompting, I told a gathering of delegates about my recent experiences. "Pussies are bullshit" became the (unofficial) conference slogan.
If pussy is bullshit then bullshit is pussy. On the second night I played a regrettably sophomoric parlour game on this theme with Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Mr and Mrs Christopher Hitchens. What's New Bullshitcat. Bullshit in Boots. The Owl and the Bullshitcat ("Oh lovely Bullshit! O Bullshit, my love,/What a beautiful Bullshit you are.") Bullshit-whipped. Bullshit-wagon. Bullshit's in a well. Someone mentioned the character from Goldfinger: Bullshit Galore, Salman Rushdie paused; his eyes widened and he said, suddenly,
"Octobullshit."
Jokes have been defined (by Nietzsche) as epitaphs on the deaths of feelings. In other words, the best jokes are always a new low. It is utterly characteristic that the coiner of "pussies are bullshit" had no idea that he was joking. In any case, porno is littered - porno is heaped - with the deaths of feelings.
Every time a porno star opens a megastore, or advertises a line of perfume, or does a walk-on in a TV show, porno people start saying that porno is "mainstream", that porno is hip, that porno is cool. Is masturbation hip? It doesn't feel hip. And it doesn't look hip either: you don't see anyone doing it. Porno can never be mainstream, partly because of the contrarian nature of the form. For porno to become mainstream, human beings would have to change.
Porno people: they've changed. In the yard of the house on Dolorosa Drive, during a break in filming, Chloe, Artie and Lola stood there naked, discussing a new rollercoaster ride called Desperado. They were all smoking. I came across many a good little smoker in pornoland. What with the risks they run already, who cares about smoking? Then it was butts out and back to work. And I do mean work. Porno is a proletarian form. And porno people are a hard-grafting, ill-paid fraternity who, by and large, look out for each other and help each other through. They pay their rent, with the deaths of feelings.
No, Chloe, you are not a prostitute, not quite. Prostitution is the oldest profession. And porno is the newest profession. You are more like a gladiator: a contemporary gladiator. Of course, the gladiators were slaves - but some of them won their freedom. And you, I think, will win yours.
© Martin Amis
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2001/mar/17/society.martinamis
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Sarah Palin is an insider playing a rogue
- Kim and Reed: Sarah Palin pretends she's "rogue" but political insiders made her career
- Palin insults McCain camp; aide calls book "fiction;" writers call it GOP "Thunderdome"
- They say outsiders don't get $27 million for their town, run No. 1 state for pork spending
- Bush last GOP politician to claim "outsider" status, they say Palin's claim almost as absurd
Sarah Palin is an insider playing a rogue
New York (CNN) -- Sarah Palin begins her manipulation of the readers of her book "Going Rogue" in the title, embracing as a badge of honor the accusation leveled at her by McCain campaign staffers during the last bitter days of election 2008 -- even though she's exemplified the political insider throughout her career.
In "Going Rogue," she describes the campaign as disorganized and defeatist and writes that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's aides had a "jaded aura" about them.
She's a "diva" who is "playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party," one anonymous McCain staffer alleged at the time. Now, Palin wants payback.
It's not yet clear who will emerge the victor in this Republican Partyversion of "Thunderdome." But it's telling that Palin intends to twist the meaning of "rogue" -- an untrustworthy and unprincipled person -- into its very opposite.
She writes that when the McCain team decided to pull out of Michigan, she disagreed and broke ranks by telling reporters about their difference of opinion.
There's no other "average hockey mom" in the world who gets this kind of press.
Palin wanted to make an issue of Barack Obama's link to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, while McCain wanted to give the reverend a rest. Again, she went to the media, this time the ever-adoring William Kristol, then a columnist for The New York Times, with her tale of woe.
In particular, she takes shots at "grim-faced" and "rotund" campaign strategist Steve Schmidt for swearing in front of her daughter, belittling her, criticizing her for being on the Atkins diet and setting her up for a disastrous tête-à-tête with Katie Couric, while unfairly lambasting her for succumbing to a Canadian prankster posing as French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
She's still miffed about election night, when she wanted to give a concession speech, an unprecedented soapbox for a losing vice presidential candidate, and the McCain team kept her off the podium.
Schmidt calls the book a "total fiction" and has said that if the GOP nominated Palin for president in 2012, the result would be "catastrophic."
Beyond the intra-party knife-fight, "Going Rogue" has two purposes: to burnish Palin's credentials as a Washington outsider and refugee from the old boys' club and to cement her image as a victim of the mainstream media elite, who, according to Palin, have never given her a fair shake -- hence her strategy of taking her message directly to the people, instead of speaking through the "media filter."
There might indeed be something charmingly roguish about this maneuver, if it weren't so disingenuous.
As Jane Mayer wrote in her eye-opening New Yorker magazine piece, before McCain picked her from seeming obscurity, Palin was championed by a coterie of establishment conservatives, including Kristol; Michael Gerson, a former Bush speech writer and columnist at The Washington Post; and Fred Barnes, an editor at the neocon bible, the Weekly Standard. These are card-carrying members of the elite media boys' club if there ever was one.
Just recently, she signed onto an open letter organized by neocon usual suspects Kristol and Robert Kagan urging President Obama to ratchet up the war in Afghanistan.
Her book is being published by HarperCollins, a division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the second largest media company in the world.
Palin reportedly received as much as $7 million for the book, which topped the Amazon.com bestseller lists for weeks, and has been interviewed by Oprah Winfrey and Barbara Walters to promote it.
There's no other "average hockey mom" in the world who gets this kind of press.
But it's not just recently that Palin has demonstrated an eagerness to exploit connections in the political and media elite.
While she was mayor of Wasilla, The Washington Post reported, she hired a Washington-based lobbyist, Steven Silver, to secure $27 million in federal earmarks for a town of just 6,700 residents.
As governor, she presided over a state that ranked No. 1 in pork barrel spending in 2008, according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, and hired an East Coast PR company to promote a gas pipeline in Alaska.
Whatever her limitations with the English language, "rogue" is one word Sarah Palin knows well. She's used it to tar her opponents in the Troopergate scandal, and angry campaign colleagues have employed it against her.
Now she wants it as an honorific. Perhaps that gesture is a bit roguish, in a way, but the reality is that her carefully crafted image is entirely conventional.
Recall the last GOP leading light to claim "Washington outsider" status: George W. Bush. Given that Bush was the son of a former president, Palin's claim to that title is slightly less preposterous -- but only slightly.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Betsy Reed and Richard Kim.
By Richard Kim and Betsy Reed
Editor's note: Richard Kim and Betsy Reed of The Nationare co-editors of "Going Rouge: An American Nightmare," available from ORbooks.com.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/OPINION/11/17/palin.going.rogue/index.html
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Sphere: Related Content
Army suicides set another yearly record
- Officials say recent trend downward could mean Army is making headway in prevention
- As of Tuesday, 211 active duty soldiers and reservists have killed themselves the year
- In 2008, total was 197 suicides among active duty soldiers and reservists
- Fort Campbell, Fort Stewart and Schofield Barracks singled out for special concern
Army suicides set another yearly record
The number of suicides in the Army so far this year have topped the number from 2008.
Suicides among soldiers this year have topped last year's record-breaking numbers, but Army officials maintain a recent trend downward could mean the service is making headway on its programs designed to reduce the problem, Army officials said Tuesday.
Since January, 140 active-duty soldiers have killed themselves while another 71 Army Reserve and National Guard soldiers killed themselves in the same time period, totaling 211 as of Tuesday, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, U.S. Army vice chief of staff, told reporters at a briefing Tuesday. But he said the monthly numbers are starting to slow down as the year nears its end.
"This is horrible, and I do not want to downplay the significance of these numbers in any way," Chiarelli said.
For all of 2008, the Army said 140 active-duty soldiers killed themselves while 57 Guard and Reserve soldiers committed suicide, totaling 197, according to Army statistics.
The Army is still trying to tackle why soldiers are killing themselves.
"We still haven't found any statistically significant causal linkage that would allow us to effectively predict human behavior. The reality is, there is no simple answer -- each suicide case is as unique as the individuals themselves," Chiarelli said.
He also said there were troubling new statistics showing an increase in suicide rates among young soldiers who have never deployed, another factor puzzling Army researchers.
To add to the Army's problems, Chiarelli said there is a rise in numbers of soldiers abusing prescription drugs and alcohol upon returning from the war zones.
But Chiarelli said the news was not all grim.
"I do believe we are finally beginning to see progress being made," he said referring to a downward trend in suicide numbers in recent months. "The general trend line with the exception of a couple of months has been down."
"We attribute this reduction in the number of suicides to the many actions we have taken since February to inform and educate leaders and soldiers on this important issue," Chiarelli said.
Since March, the Army has implemented numerous programs and policies in an attempt to quickly slow the rate. Programs range from a suicide prevention task force to a day off from official duties to focus on suicide prevention. The service has implemented what it calls a Comprehensive Soldier Fitness Program, giving every soldier a mental assessment twice a year in the same style the Army tests soldiers for fitness.
"It gives the same emphasis to psychological, emotional and mental strength that we have previously given to physical strength," Chiarelli said.
The Army also has tested a program that gave mental-health evaluations to a group soldiers returning from the war zone. Some were treated face-to-face with mental-health providers while others were treated online by providers.
Chiarelli said the initial results were promising, and doctors said they could have great success treating patients online.
The test seems to give the Army some answers on how to treat the variety of soldiers from young to old.
"Younger soldiers prefer the online method of evaluation more than they do the face-to-face, and older soldiers -- some of you might not find this so surprising -- find face-to-face more to their liking," according to the general.
Chiarelli also gave examples of Army bases that seem to have shown improvement in suicide warning signs and prevention this year resulting in decreased number of suicide rates, including Fort Hood in Texas, Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Drum in New York.
Fort Bragg has had six suicides to date, Fort Hood has had two and Fort Hood has had 11, but it is the largest U.S. military base with 60,000 troops.
There are Army posts, however, that were not showing signs of improvement.
"We are very concerned with the increase this year of suicide at Fort Campbell, Fort Stewart and Schofield Barracks," Chiarelli said.
Fort Campbell, in Kentucky, has had 18 suicides so far this year, with 11 of them occurring in the first quarter of 2009. Fort Stewart in Georgia has had 10 deaths, six of them occurring over the first five months of the year. And Schofield Barracks in Hawaii has had seven deaths.
All of the bases Chiarelli mentioned have different populations and deployment levels and reflect different suicide rates and ratios.
Chiarelli stressed his frustration with getting answers to the suicide problem.
"Everywhere I try to cut this and look at it to try to find out what the causal effect is, I get thwarted. And that's why we think that we've got to look in its totality at a whole bunch of different issues, and it's going to take time," he said.
By Mike Mount, CNN Senior Pentagon Producer
November 17, 2009 9:36 p.m. EST
http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/11/17/army.suicides/index.html
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35 Objectionable Books in Fayetteville School Library
35 Objectionable Books
in Fayetteville School Library
Books below include vile, vulgar, obscene, graphic, explicit passages on sex, oral sex, anal sex, sadomasochism, multiple partners, three-way sex, gang rape, orgies, group sex, homosexual sex, lesbian sex, psychopathic sexual murders, and pedophilia in a titillating manner.
(The grade level of the library is given just after the title and author. FHS stands for Fayetteville High School; Woodland for Woodland Jr. High, 8-9th grades; Ramay for Ramay Jr. High, 8-9th Grades; Holt for Holt Middle School, 6-7th grades, and McNair for McNair Middle School, 6-7th grade. These are listed under to book to indicate which school library they are in. Any other name under the book would indicate elementary schools.)
Always running : La Vida Loca, gang days in L.A. objectional
by Luis J. Rodriguez
FHS
"shit.. What the fuck is going on.. we ransacked the stand. ..I thrust out the gun and yelled, Freeze, motherfucker! ..Fuck you!.. open the safe. ..Gunfire.. Get the fuck out of here!.. I aimed at him.. he fired again.. Fuck it --I ran"
"touch me there.. just like that..ummm. ..Sweat roamed down the sides of my face. ..car windows steamed. ..R lay on the back seat.. blouse open and ample breasts wet with my saliva. Don't stop..ummmmm, don't stop. My tongue drew circles around her nipples… rubbed her cunt from the outside of her pants. Her hip.. pushing harder and harder into my hand. She groped for my zipper.. slid it down. Her fingers kneaded the top of my penis, hard and wet.. oh baby, lick me. ..my back arched.. my head scraped the top of the car.. she held onto my penis with both hands while her lips smothered it and her tongue lightly flickered over the tip. ..pushing [her pants].. off.. saw the tuft of wild hair at her crotch, her legs spread.. inviting me to enter. ..pressed me down to her. the penis sank into the bristle of pubris, then slid into the oiled vagina, covering it in flesh and juice and the rhythm of the pelvis. [her] mouth sucked at my chest, my neck and shoulders as her fingernails scraped into my back. ..I moved and quivered inside her. Night after night I stayed over at ]her] place. ..made love in the car, beneath the staircase, or fondled in the driveway"
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
FHS
"minus women, fucking cows, dreaming of rape... rubbing their thighs and waiting for the new girl... She waited a year... the.. men abused cows while they waited for her. She chose H. and for... first bedding.."
"Over whelmed as much by.. luck.. as by the certainty of giving her his sex... before him was.. new girl they dreamed of at night and fucked cows for at dawn... what leapt to eye were places to lied down, and all else - door knobs... was interference. It was over before they could get their clothes off. 1/2 dressed and short of breath, they lay side by side resentful of one another... were sorry and too shy to make talk. .. P. saw the float of her breasts and disliked it, the spread-away, flat roundness of them that he could definitely live without,.."
"A lowdown something that looked like a sweet young girl and fucking her..."
Bless me, Ultima
by Rudolfo Anaya
Holt; Woodland; FHS
At school he pretends he is a priest taking confessions: "..Tell him only your worst one R. coaxed H. ......I made a whole in the wall... could see into the girls bathroom... could see everything.. her ass...hear the pee...You have sinned i said... There's more .. I saw a teacher..... it was biggggggggggg....... give him penance the girls chanted....you are dirty H. they cried....... me next! .....B. shouted. I got a better sin than H. ....Bless me, father! .....he kept making sign of the cross over and over....... i saw a boy and girl fucking in the grass.....smiled proudly and looked around... Ah, I see them every night under the railroad bridge V. scoffed... naked! Jumping up and down. Give me penance (B. said) .. a rosary to the Virgin, I said .....Like H.? he shouted. .....but my sin was bigger .. he threw me down.... another rosary for daring to touch the priest...that made him happy and he settled down... F. next...they grabbed F. and made him kneel in front of me..... No! i protested....Confess him they chanted...what are your sins I asked? ... I don't have any F. said ..... Tell me one sin I pleaded ....Confess your sins or your go to hell R. cried out ..... It was God who has sinned against me (F. said)... They were gathering around me now, I could feel their presence and hot bitter breath. ...they wanted me to punish F. ...Make his penance hard....Make him kneel and we'll beat him ....Stone him! ...beat him! ..kill him!
Breaking Boxes
by A.M. Jenkins
Woodland; Ramay
C calls T a pervert because he is mad but knows he really doesn't think that. "I generally know the last names of people I sleep with [T says].. care about them first.. feelings for somebody before you drop your pants!.. refusing to take phone calls from a girl.. been screwing for months.. take some stranger's virginity like she's offered.. a Kleenex.. take sex about as seriously as blowing your nose.. Fuck you [C says]" C slams T into wall and pounds his fists on his chest. T says, "I'm so fucking sorry.. too fucking quiet in here.. [C goes out].. too bad you can't tell who hates gays, just by looking at them. ..that fuckwad [B].. sounds like he thinks T's been secretly lusting after him.. Why does this shit happen to me?"
C at school: "..hear your brother's a fag. Anger.. anger's this hot wave.. blast… their whole fucking crew.. bastards.. son of a bitch. is it true?.. Your brother likes boys?.. goddamn.. Does it run in the family?.. Fuck you.. You like boys, C?.. C likes girls [K says]. ..God, she's pretty.. I remember how soft. ..How would you know? sneers L.. I know.. M's party.. C and I went for a walk.. didn't just walk.. L's pissed.. K's.. got more balls than anybody.."
Chronicle of a death foretold
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
FHS
"Who the fuck would ever think that the twins would kill anyone.."
- "Nobody fucks with me... Not even my father with his war veteran's balls"
- "..didn't cry out again... Just the opposite: it looked to me as if he was laughing. Then they both kept on knifing him against the door with alternate and easy stabs,... Shit, cousin.. you can't imagine how hard it is to kill a man!... P. gave him a horizontal slash on the stomach, and all his intestines exploded out... P. was about to do the same, but his wrist twisted in horror and he gave him a wild cut on the thigh. S. ... saw his own viscera in the sunlight, clean and blue, and he fell on his knees....... saw S.... face down in the dust, trying to rise up out of his own blood."
Deal With It! : a whole new approach to your body, brain, and life as a gurl
by Esther Drill, Heather McDonald, Rebecca Odes.
Woodland; FHS
"Sexual preference is a continuum.. not.. question of being gay or straight.. continuum.. many people fall in between.. people move around on this continuum over time. Sexuality is constantly evolving-one of its many joys… Boys turn me on, but sometimes I dream about girls. ..I'm attracted to both.. Who knows?.. is fine and normal to be confused about your sexuality.. QUEER is *NOT* SOMETHING YOU CHOOSE TO BE. I was born it… Animal sexuality.. bonobos have sex often and in all different combinations: female-male, male-male, female-female. Female bonobos [apes] often mount each other.. rub their clitorises together.. [they] use sex as a way to resolve tension.. the 'make love, not war' primates"
- Section on "How do 2 girls have sex… one of the cool things about being with girls is that you know what it feels like when you touch them… oral sex, dental dams.. MICROWAVABLE plastic wrap.."
- "..your sexuality is your own work in progress,.."
".vibrator.. fingers in my vagina.. rub your clit with an ice cube.. feels great afterward.. put your hands or a blanket.. between your legs, squeeze.. rock.. apply pressure.. rub in a circle.. do it hard and fast. ..Many people get turned on by watching other people touch themselves. masturbating together is a fairly popular activity among couples who have sex on a regular basis.. Some people don't start masturbating until much later in life.. whatever feels good to you is the right thing to do."
"going down on him giving a blow job fellatio oral sex on a guy: Bringing a guy to climax using your mouth and tongue.. I try to look into my boyfriend's eyes when I'm sucking.. get him off faster.. lick and suck his balls.. If my mouth gets tired I use my hands to jerk him off.. until I can suck again.. make my mouth soft but tight.. Concentrate on the head.. Underneath the shaft is also a good place.. roll your tongue down the bottom of it. If it's.. big one.. don't try to get the whole thing in your mouth.. might.. gag.. have fun and just go with what seems right. ..literally sucked on his penis.. when you 'suck'.. kinda put him in your mouth.. bob your head up and down sliding your hand up and down his penis at the same time. ..think guys like it better if you swallow, but if it grosses you.. move your mouth away.. cover the head with your hand so he's not squirting all over the place. ..ain't so bad. ..Wouldn't put it on my cornflakes, but it doesn't taste too heinous!"
- "eating out cunnilingus going down.. like fingering a girl.. just using the tongue.. make a girl cum.. some guys just like eating girls.. he knows I like it a lot.." Discussion on how condoms, some flavored like touch o' mint, or dental dams are required to be totally safe. "69 is simultaneous oral sex.. Vaginal fluids are meant to be aphrodisiacs. That's why people get off on going down on girls: the smell, the taste,.."
"Anal sex: penetration of the anus by a penis or other stuff, such as fingers.. many people find.. this.. pleasurable.. should involve substantial lubrication
- Using objects: "Body massagers.. Dildos.. often.. resemble a penis. Vibrators.. designed for penetration, others for external use. Anything, as long as it's clean, unbreakable, and has no sharp edges, is a fair game as a sex toy"
- "role playing… Tying each other up (bondage).. Sadomasochism (S&M).. deliberately inflicts pain.. kind of power role-playing. These games can be fun to experiment with.. Multiple partners Three-way sex.. An orgy or group sex.."
- Lists web resources: All About Sex, The Go Ask Alice Web site, and the Sex, Etc. site
- Recommendation for the "first time": ..request he perform oral sex on you first. ..lubricates things up.. condoms.. lubricated kind."
Druids
Morgan Llywelyn
FHS
"he bound each wrist separately with a leather strip so tightly my fingers grew cold at once. Then he repeated the procedure with my ankles..... Sulis stepped out of the circle and took off her robe. Beneath it she was naked. The druids and the trees watched....... Sulis... arranged my body....began stroking me... She pulled up my tunic, working it off my body, and I squirmed to help her. When her hands reached my belly, my penis stirred and rose like a creature with a will of its own..........She separated my legs and knelt between them. Using her thumbs again, she caressed the insides of my thighs.... Her warm breath stirred the hair of my groin......The energy Menua had described pulsed through me, and Sulis sang, and touched me, until pleasure became excess became agony. I would die without release of the force building in me. I would burst like an overripe fruit ...the power, power, flowing through me now.....thundering with the rhythm of the chant and the gorgeously insistent hands on my body, the power gathering itself.... and exploding out of me in great aching spasms that arched my spine and made me cry out as Sulis gasped and the trees spun around us and the strength sped from me, the magic released like a spear to go singing invisibly through the air to our distant warriors....."
- "Sex magic was wonderful. My first experience had left me avid for more, which only amused Menua."
"....Her soft, round little belly charmed me, and I pressed my lips against its warmth. She rose onto hands and knees to crawl the length of my body from head to foot, pausing along the way to touch, to caress, to look back mischievously over her shoulder and inquire, 'Do you like this? And this?' I grabbed her from behind and buried my face between her buttocks, savoring the juiciness of her. She laughed; I laughed. The two of us were a festival. The wildness returned, deeper and richer than before. ....at the ultimate moment.....I whispered into Briga's hair as the cosmos crashed around us. .........When we lay quiet once more......I...reflected on the nature of the special climax that can occur with a special woman. The climax that takes place not in the loins, but in the head and the spirit. ............ We slept and woke....... At last I thought I had nothing left to give; then Briga took me into her mouth and caressed my thighs and belly until they grew heavy with the need to give again. She swallowed my seed in lavish gulps. 'Now your body will nourish mine and become part of me ,' she whispered, pleased with herself."
Fade
by Robert Cormier
Woodland; FHS
P now can make himself invisible, and observes a classmates dad paying another classmate to perform oral sex on her: "T, who giggled and pressed herself against boys.. tight sweaters.. displayed her budding breasts.. her small breasts. I drank in the sweetness of her body.. never could do this before.. could look at the movie.. or pictures in magazines but.. had to avert my eyes.. in real life.. staring deliciously.. could go anywhere.. watch them.. making love... take off their clothes as they went to bed.. [he observes the girl going into a store and the owner locking it]... [the owner] touched her cheek, then her breast. His daughter was in my class.. same age as T.. Now.. I saw Mr. D who collected at.. mass on Sunday mornings, pull T to him and run his hands over her breasts.. took out his wallet... extracted a bill.. It's yours, he said. After.. She giggled as he raised her up.. setting her on the desk facing him. She pulled back her skirt.. he raised her legs onto his shoulders and plunged his face between her legs. He moaned and his shoulders jerked violently as he burrowed between her thighs.. Her eyes were vacant.. Oh, T Mr. D moaned.. voice muffled as he gasped her name and reached around now to clutch her buttocks
Observes bully demanding money and then oral sex from a 9 year old: "Okay, kid. Down on your knees, No, the boy cried.. Down, [the bully] snapped. ..saw the boy dropping to his knees with [the bully] standing over him.. [his] hand moved to his belt buckle and then to the buttons of his fly.[P intervenes, invisibly, so the bully is unsuccessful with the oral sex]"
Fair Game
by Erika Tamar.
Woodland:FHS
"Everyone knows.. girl was available to anybody.. been 'servicing' 1/2 the football team.. saw her doing CG.. she wanted it.. her own mother doesn't want to press charges.. What I really wanted to say is the girl's a slut and she's been giving out blow jobs,.."
"..laughing abut getting a bite of hot and dark spicy dark meat.. wanted to punch his face.. I'd hump the ears off some WASP bitch!"
C thinking back to 6th grade about when she had to perform oral sex on a man: "..said if I came in the back.. He sat down.. pulled me on his lap.. Sweet Girl.. held me.. sweaty.. he tickled me down there.. felt bad and scary and good.. took his thing out.. red and ugly.. said to kiss it.. Do what I tell you.. Make believe it's a lollipop. I kept my eyes closed.. he gave me 2.. doughnuts.. [my mom] called.. policeman came.. questions.. other men.. more questions.. mommy talked to me.. bad man.. my body was my own private property.."
You want to take C with you?.. You know you want to. ..think you're the only one she's sucked off?.. Who else?.. maybe we'll have a party.. want to party? OK C said.. say I want a get-laid party.. pawing her.. I want a get-laid party… Say I'm horny.. yelling out things for her to say.. crudest words.. she parroted everything giggling.. I stared at her bouncing boobs.. 10 of us.. D's house.. C, stark naked, was in the middle.. when we first got [there] C dancing in front of us… strip.. take it off!.. can swear on a stack of Bibles that she took off every stitch by herself.. underpants.. natural blond.. never saw anybody that light.. riveted.. Her patch was silky, no kinks. ..Who goes first?.. [J leaves because he] didn't need this Screw-a-retard Brotherhood."
Fallen Angels
by Walter Dean Myers
Woodland:Ramay; FHS
"..dumb fucker.. Simple-ass.. I know [a prayer].. Flying into combat, 'bout to have a fit, Lord, if you listenin', please get me out of this shit!"
- "..shithead!.. fucking hero.."
- "..I'll be 20.. and I'm still a virgin.. noble flicks about interracial love, and they kill you off at the end so they can show it in Georgia. Shit."
- "What the fuck's a cootie?.. like calling me a nigger... Two-Timing Slut..."
- "..just shot the shit out of [our guys]"
- "..run this shit over.. get your ass in gear.. fucking kid!.. fucking kid!.. fucking soldier, but you're a fucking kid.. hell with L. ..Who the hell.. little fuckers.. joined the friggin' army.. so he would stop thinking I was a faggot.. fucking trained for.. fucking trained for.."
- "kept shooting at the bodies even though they were already dead.. What the fuck happened?.. What we hadn't done to the village [the chopper] did. It leveled the huts.. mostly women and old men, running for their lives. Few of them made it more than a few feet as the chopper guns swept everything.."
- "..fucking each other up.. same shit.. Tortured? They tie them to trees and pull their guts out.. just leave them there.. found them.. still alive and begging for somebody to kill them."
Fools Crow
by James Welch.
FHS
"After awhile I took my hand from the girl's mouth but she lay there with her eyes closed. I felt under the robe and she was naked and her skin was hot. I felt her breasts and belly and they were hot and damp.... she was naked and sweating. .... I found her there between the legs and entered her - not without some difficulty , for she was on the verge of becoming a woman. When I had my pleasure, I rolled away, and that's when it hit me...... I pulled back the robe and looked at her. There on her face and chest were the dreaded signs. I had copulated with one who was dying of white-scabs disease."
- "He must have learned it from that fat white woman.....Ah, she was good... She taught me many things.....Perhaps you should go to the white man's school. They teach you to sit off the ground. That way you know where your ass is....This one wants another white woman... He says they are better than his hand, even better than his dog! ... And when you kill this Napikan you will feel better? I have thought how I will kill him, little by little. I will cut of little pieces...."
"she stood just inside the entrance, her legs trembling......R.F. held the robe back. He was naked from the waist down.....she slipped beneath the robe. He sat up and pushed her dress around her waist. He undid her leggings and pulled her moccasins off. ...she pulled him down and felt his warmth growing against her thigh. His fingers stroked her.... and she gave herself to him."
- "...she recalled the sounds of their lovemaking. She had stood outside the tipi...3 paces from where they carried on. She had felt her own legs grow weak, as though each moan and cry were her own. She had closed her eyes and imagined that she could see them, could smell the juices of their coupling."
- "He had found.... some pictures. I'll give you this and you give me that finger ring. There is a white woman here that will make you squirt."
Girl Goddess #9 : nine stories
by Francesca Lia Block
Woodland; FHS
-"He said I had 2 moms and no dad.... I knew I had a dad.. wasn't proud of [my mom's] anymore... No other kid at my school lived with 2 women who slept in the same bed and kissed on the lips all the time. No one else got picked up from school by a 6-foot tall woman in a beaded mini-dress holding hands with a short haired woman with a pierced nose and leather pants."
-"..she asked me to rub some lotion on her.. Much softer [skin] than anything. it was hard to imagine that many men touching it.. I said, You're so soft, and she said I have a special beauty secret. Rock star body fluids."
-"the window opened. Dobey slid into the room. You scared the fuck out of me, she said."
-"D swallowed mouthfuls of beer.... beer bottle crashed and shattered... Bull yelled, Fuck!... She took [Dobey's] hands and pulled him to her, wrapping her legs around his torso."
from Orpheus:"J died last winter... tonite , I'm at the club where J and I used to hang... looking at the man sitting across from me... he held me all nite in bed.. I left before the sun came up.... got kinda sick... I've never wanted anyone that much... He's as fucked up as I am. Can you imagine the 2 of us together? Fucking each other up... psychic i went to said 'soul mates'. J once said 'sex', and then, when it didn't stop -- 'voodoo.'"
How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents
by Julia Alvarez.
McNair: FHS
"...since she couldn't spend an overnight with him in New York, she had to travel thousands of miles to sleep with him. .... On the way home, she tossed her diaphragm in the first bin at (the airport)."
- "...father regained his ..fury....Has he deflowered you? .......Are you a whore? ... It's none of your fucking business!"
"..cuddling and kissing, R's hand exploring down my blouse. But if he wandered any lower I'd pull away.... I was afraid I'd get pregnant....so many references I didn't know.. didn't want to just be in the sack, screwed, balled, laid and fucked my first time with a man. ..worth a shit........are you frigid or something? ....Jesus, we've been going out a month.... When's it going to be all right?"
- "He was nude... He was wore down with frustration, he said. I was cruel. ... didn't understand that unlike a girl it was physically painful for guys not to have sex .... I thought you'd be hot-blooded being Spanish ... under all that Catholic bullshit, you'd be really free.... But Jesus, you're worse than a fucking Puritan."
- "..I was frightened of having sex with a man who called it getting laid. .....I played it out in my head. .....We would make love .... we would screw and fuck and ball and get laid..."
I Was a Teenage Fairy
by Francesca Lia Block
McNair: Woodland
"When the man stopped, she hesitated. Usually she tried to hitch only with women. ...as soon as she got in, he was taking bites out of her with his eyes. ...staring at her chest as if her breasts were exposed... be disappointed if he saw how small they are... something nauseating about the man's tone. Like he would get off later on some vision of her and Boyfriend having sex."
- "You might have been cuter when we were little, but your tits never lived up to your namesake. Fuck off, bitch."
- "...could have thought he had to give it to her to get her to sleep with him..... probably figured he could just smile the right way and offer her another glass of wine... mother kept her so sheltered. But she knew boys had her picture up over their beds to look at when they jerked off."
"It wasn't that G. wasn't in love with T. ... But G. hadn't gotten beyond the dark feelings he had for T. Not love feelings he told himself again. He just had a crush like everyone else did, even ...straight guys... He reached under the covers and touched his groin. Maybe if he came he wouldn't need to cry. But sex, especially sex like this alone and hot more from shame than desire [would only] make his sheets wet and his wrists ache.... G. gave up... Fucking mosquitoes!.. heard the strangest thing... What the fuck? ..hadn't thought he was that high. Shit, T., what did you put in that pot... [it was M. the nympho fairy] ...if your real.. prove it...[go fly with me] .. what the fuck, he said....
Less Than Zero
by Ellis
FHS
According to back cover book is about spoiled children of LA with "sex and drugs… world devoid of feeling and hope.. parties, seedy rock clubs.. seamy underworld of drug dealing and prostitution." The book is filled with controversial material. Profanity [approx 55 uses of fuck, approx 26 uses of shit, etc.]; nearly every other page involves drug use, drinking, drunk/high driving, binge drinking…. Coke/Lines/Blow [over 30 times], Marijuana/Joints [18 times]. Other drugs/drug terms in book include needles/syringes/shooting up, heroin, brown powder, smack, O.D., thorazine, tranks, librium, meth, Desoxyn, preludin, trackmarks, mainline, acid, freebase, nembutal, quaalude, pills, lude, stoned, gram, dealer. Explicit sexual material including homosexual/bi-sexual, snuff/sex torture film, child sex slave being kept high on drugs, and homosexual prostitution. Most drug use in book is not excerpted below since so extensive. The book all takes place in 18-year old C's break between college semesters, at home in LA. Starts with "girlfriend" picking up C at airport. C has told his girlfriend he is not interested in her any longer and it is unclear if she knows he is bisexual.
"He said, have a Happy New Year, cunt,.."
- Friend [J] asks him to borrow money so his girlfriend can get abortion. C agrees to loan it but suspects the money is really for something else
- "..T, suck my dick, R yells. Take it out, T calls.. Some guy propositioned me today, R [a guy] is saying… offered me $600.. to go.. with him for the weekend."
Graffiti in bathroom: "How do you get a nun pregnant? Fuck her. What's the difference between a J.A.P and a bowl of spaghetti? Spaghetti moves when you eat it… J gives great head. And is dead."
Like water for chocolate : a novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remediesby Esquivel, Laura
FHS
- "..hand first slid down her neck to her breasts and then explored her entire body. ...P. took her hand in his and invited her to explore his body... touched the hard muscles on P.'s arms and chest; lower down, she felt a red-hot coal that throbbed through his clothes."
- "..stripped of her clothed, got into the shower.. felt her nipples grow hard as stone... water ran down her back and curved like a waterfall over the round thrust of her buttocks.... ... what did she see on the other side of the planks but [him] watching her intently."
- "...went to her, [put out] lamp, pulled her to a.. bed.. throwing himself upon her, caused her to lose her virginity and learn of true love."
- "Everyone else.. was making mad passionate love, wherever they had happened to end up. Some under the bridge.. more conservative, in their cars, hastily pulled over to the side of the road... rest wherever they could. Any spot would do: in the river, on the stairs, under the washtub, in the fireplace... under the counter.... Necessity is the mother of invention, and of every position. That day it led to some of the greatest creativity in the history of the human race."
- ".. T. & P. were making.. effort to keep their sexual impulses under control... so strong that they went right through their skin and came out in the form of heat and a distinctive smell... [J. left, C. left] T. and P. could make love freely. For years they had to take all sorts of precautions so... no one would see them...so.. would not become pregnant, so... wouldn't cry out with pleasure when inside each other. ..P. placed T. on the bed and slowly emoved her clothing, piece by piece... The striking of the.. headboard against the wall and the guttural sounds that escaped from both of them... She was experiencing a climax so intense..."
Love in the Time of Cholera
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
FHS
-"..he tried to teach her the tricks he had seen others perform through the peepholes in the transient hotel... to let themselves be observed while they made love, to replace the missionary position with the bicycle on the sea.. chicken on the grill... the drawn and quartered angel.. almost broke their necks.. trying to devise something new in a hammock.. she was a fearless apprentice but lacked.. talent for guided fornication.. never had a moment of inspiration.. her orgasms were inopportune.. an uninspired lay.. She often said to him: I adore you because you made me a whore.. he had taught her that nothing one does in bed is immoral... convinced her that one comes into the world with a.. allotment of lays, and whoever does not use them.. loses them.."
giving him time to greet her.. first the buttons of his fly, one by one after each kiss.. until he was like a live fish that had been split open from head to tail [more description of undressing].. she attacked him.. there on the same sofa where she had just undressed him, and only on rare occasions in the bed. She mounted him.. absorbed in herself, her eyes closed.. {blah, blah] until she succumbed.. with a jubilant explosion of total victory.. he would say: you treat me as if I were just anybody.. she would say: Not at all; as if you were nobody.. [one ] Sunday.. they spent the afternoon naked in the captains enormous bed... she.. step[ped] out of the bedroom.. screamed with horror.. the only objects left in the house were the lamps attached to the walls.. everything had vanished.. message painted on the rear wall: This is what you get for fucking around."
-"If they don't have more children it's because they don't fuck"
Lucky
by Alice Sebold
FHS
"..pulled my underpants off me .. he unzipped his pants and let them fall around his ankles. ..lay down on top of me and started humping. I was familiar with this. This was what S, a boy I liked in high school, had done against my leg, because I would not let him do what he wanted most, which was to make love to me. With S. I was fully dressed and so was he. He went home frustrated and I felt safe. My parents were upstairs the whole time. I told myself S. loved me."
- "He worked away on me, reaching down to work with his penis. ..called me bitch. ...told me I was dry. I'm sorry, I said.. I'm a virgin.. Stop looking at me he said. Shut your eyes. ..Stop it or you'll be sorry. ..knead his fist against the opening of my vagina. Inserted his fingers into it, three or four at a time. Something tore. I began to bleed there. I was wet now. ..made him excited. ..intrigued. ..worked his whole fist up into my vagina and pumped it ..prickly numbness took over my lower half.. Stop staring at me he said. I'm sorry I said. You're strong, I tried. He liked this. He started humping me again, wildly. ...base of my spine was crushed into the ground. Glass cut me on my back and behind. ...still wasn't working for him."
Give me a blow job he said. ..was standing now. I was on the ground, ..search[ing] among the filth for my clothes. He kicked me and I curled into a ball. I want a blow job. He held his dick in his hand. I don't know how... I've never done it before... I'm a virgin. Put it in your mouth. ..kneeled before him. Can I put my bra back on? I wanted my clothes. I saw his thighs before me, the way they belled out from the knee, the thick muscles and small black hairs, and his flaccid dick. He grabbed my head. Put it in your mouth and suck ...Like a straw? I said. Yeah, like a straw. I took it in my hand. It was small. Hot, clammy. It throbbed involuntarily at my touch. He shoved my head forward and I put it in. It touched my tongue. ..taste like dirty rubber or burnt hair. I sucked in hard. Not like that he said and brought my head away. Don't you know how to suck dick?"
- "Bitch... His penis still limp, he held it with two fingers and peed on me. Acrid, wet, on my nose and lips. The smell of him - the fruity, heady, nauseating smell - clung to my skin. Get back on the ground.. do what I say. ...he told me to close my eyes ..Talk to me he said. I believe you, you're a virgin. I'm your first. ...he worked against me, trying for more and more friction, I told him he was strong, ..he was powerful, ...he was a good man. He got hard enough and plunged himself inside me. ..ordered me to and I wrapped my legs around his back and he drove me into the ground. I was locked on. All that remained unpossessed was my brain. ...He made noises and rammed it in. Rammed it and rammed it... Nail her, all right! someone yelled toward the tunnel. ...kind of fraternity reveler's voice... They passed. ...You're so strong, you're such a man, thank you, thank you, I wanted this. ....then it was over. He came and slumped into me. I lay under him. ...heard his breathing. Light and regular. He was snoring. I thought: Escape. I shifted under him and he woke."
My Father's Scar
by Michael Cart
FHS
-"Shit, I [told E].. I wish he were dead... My fucking father. ..Did you know that my father killed himself? [E asked me].. for a long time I guess I thought it was my fault.. I've never told anybody this.. here's the thing; My dad used to, well.. play with me.. Sexually... [A] says my old man hits me.. E.. looked at me... Did you want him to?... to slap you? Of course not, I said... [E said] Well, I did. want my dad to. To.. play with me.. all I could think of was my old man doing something like that to me, and I felt like I was going to throw up. [E says] I know you think that's sick.. But I couldn't help it. I don't know why I wanted him to. ..maybe it was the only way I could be sure he loved me. Or needed me."
- A's college professor invites him to Thanksgiving dinner but the professor's assistant pleads with him: "Don't go to his place... Come home with me instead... what does that make me, a piece of shit?" A is very nervous about the dinner with the professor but buys flowers and goes. "Shit!" A doesn't eat much and professor asks him what he is hungry for. "It's love I'm hungry for - starving for - and I think.. [the professor] is, too. ..he comes around the table.. stands close to me, I get up and gladly melt into his arms and turn my face to be kissed... [professor's] reaction when I put my arms around him was not exactly what I expected. WHAT THE HELL!... what the hell do you think you're doing?.. I thought you were going to kiss me. I was just going to pour you some more wine, you idiot. Christ! He sounded disgusted and pulled away from me.. This is how you repay my hospitality? he hissed, making some cheap faggoty pass at me? What in hell could you have been thinking of? How could I ever tell him that I had been thinking that perhaps he might love me?... want you to leave.. Brazen little bastard.... I am NOT a homosexual.. And for Christ's sake.. if the police should stop you on the way home, don't tell them where you've been. drunken slut... my heart keeps blubbering; no one will love me now.. Fuck love! my mind snarls."
-"Oh, shit... before I opened my eyes I knew what happened.. Oh, shit.. It's morning. we've been here [in the house] all night... I gotta go... [mom and dad] were in the kitchen.. So, the old man said, did she give you your graduation present?.. look.. of complicity.. was it that girl? my mother asked.. was it that girl.. So there it was: my out. My easy out. Just a little betrayal of BC. And myself. And what we were together. Yeah, sure, wink, wink, nudge, nudge, she gave me my present all right - all night long. The gift that keeps on giving. Haha... I could be a hero to [my old man]. My son is normal. He spent the night with a girl... It wasn't a girl, I said.. it was a boy. I spent the night with a boy. I'm gay... just spoken the truth.... simple words of one syllable.. the truth shall make me free... His features contorted.. thought he might explode... Jesus Christ, a faggot, my son's a fuckin' faggot, oh, Jesus, get out, get out of my house an' never come back, never... could see [my mom's] lips move.. he doesn't know, he doesn't understand, it looked like she was praying... he was sputtering now.. Jesus, faggot, out.. I smiled a little smile because it sounded like he was performing an exorcism.. I didn't look back. Not once.."
My Heartbeat
by Garret Freymann-Weyr.
FHS
Book is about a E, a 14-year old girl who "loves" the high school senior boy who is her brother's (also a high school senior) best friend. She (and everyone else) thinks both the boys are homosexual and in love with one another. Her brother verbally denies this but E (and everyone else) doesn't believe him. E eventually has sex with her brother's friend, who has slept with other men but also likes girls. The cover has two large figures (her older brother and friend) clasping arms, with a heart between them, towering over a smaller figure who, with head bowed, is punching both of them.
]... the men he has been with.. make J reluctant. ..men he slept with.. to annoy [my brother]. I read in one of my books on gay identity.. when you have sex with someone, you have sex with all the people that person has slept with. ..J.. creeped out by the idea of those men coming into contact with me when they were meant to help him reach my brother. ..I ask J if he thinks I would prefer him sleeping with another girl.. before he sleeps with me. I would.. he says. ..funny. The picture of us I will draw later. ..one of me and J in bed with the 3 men he has slept with." They talk about a man who works for J's dad that he slept with and how he cried when he found out J wasn't as old as he thought he was and how J's shrink thinks it had nothing to do with her brother but was about J's dad. They talk about him talking to her brother about his sex with this man. "If I had been older I wouldn't have slept with him J says. By now, I have other ways to deal with my father. I.. try to think if Dad has any friends [my brother] or I would sleep with."
One Hot Second : Stories about Desire
edited by Cathy Young.
FHS
11 short stories about teenagers and sex - 8 heterosexual and 3 homosexual.
"..tales of weekend lust in B's family room while B's family was somewhere else. ..We did it. last night! ..Do it; don't do it; do it. ..guess she'd made up her mind. ..had this vision of the 2 of them lying.. naked on some.. old couch with squeaky springs. ..You did use something.. B had condoms. Condoms. Plural. ..remembered.. found some in.. older brothers room and filled them up like water balloons. ..were only.. 10 at the time. ..looked so funny.. called them our hot-dog toys and laughed.. It was wonderful.. He kept asking me if it felt good. ..Did he get on top.. She nodded. ..didn't hurt or anything? When he.. put it in? ..don't think about.. that.. you want to hold on to him and keep him warm inside you forever!"
"they didn't waste time talking about it ..was like soccer - the sweaty tussle of it, the heart pounding thrill.. [one night] they took the risk and did it in J's room. The door had no lock. ..kept the stereo turned up very loud.. was the best time yet. Afterward.. slumped in opposite corners.. D said.. I was thinking of telling the folks.. I am, you know.. had my suspicions for years.. thought I'd give it a try with your sister, but nada.. You're freaking out at the thought of anyone calling you a faggot... we're not.. so what are we..? We're mates.. mates who mess around a bit. Fag-got! Fag-got!"
"N asks me when me and T are finally going to do it. ..Sex. Make love. Screw. Do it! ..[friends in] my face about being a virgin. they say virgin like I'm drowning puppies.. say it like it's spit on all of them."
One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
FHS
- "..[he] spotted.. a very young gypsy girl, almost a child.. made his way through the crowd.. stopped behind her... pressed against her back.. girl tried to separate.. [he] pressed more strongly.. she felt him.. remained motionless against him, trembling with surprise and fear, unable to believe the evidence.. turned.. looked at him with a smile.. They did not witness the decapitation. They went to her tent.. kissed.. with a desperate anxiety while they toke off their cloths.. incipient breasts and legs so thin.. [he] could not respond to her because they were in kind of a public tent.. During a pause in the caresses [he] stretched out naked on the bed.. while the girl tried to inspire him... [another couple came in] and they both began to undress in front of the bed.. [his] companion asked the [the new couple] to leave them alone, and the couple lay down on the ground, close to the bed. [Their] passion woke up [his] fervor. On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch.. her skin broke out into a.. sweat and her eyes filled with tears... But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery.. his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears..."
"A person fucks up so much.."
"..her breasts succumbed to the tedium of endless caressing.. in [her] house.. the girls from the neighborhood would receive their casual lovers... I'm happy knowing that people are happy in bed.. never charged for the service... just a s she never refused the countless men who sought her out... without giving her money or love and only occasionally pleasure."
"..she did not shit shit but shat sweet basil.."
- "..child accidentally bumped into a [policeman] and spilled the drink on his uniform, the barbarian cut him to pieces with his machete, and with one stroke he cut off the head of the grandfather s he tried to stop him... town saw the decapitated man pass by as group of men carried him to his house, with woman dragging the head along by its hair, and the bloody sack with the pieces of the child... A.C. was found.. with an icepick between his eyebrows driven up to the handle.. woman who was with him said later that A.A. jumped out of bed and opened the door and was greeted with the discharge of a Mauser that split his head open."
Paula
by Isabel Allende
FHS
"I was 8 years old. ...man came out of the sea.. wearing goggles... [he says] don't believe your dolly can pee-pee... show me the little hole.... does it have a pecker or not?... took my hand and placed it on his sex... felt.. something that moved.. like a .. garden hose.. tried to pull my hand away but he held it there firmly.. pointed to his groin.. want to see what I have here?... how your Mama and Papa do it? ..like dogs but, oh, much nicer.. we'll go to the woods where no one can see us."
- "He took my hand and led me ..into.. woods. ...Don't let anyone touch you, if someone touches you between your legs it's not just a mortal sin, you'll be pregnant... belly will swell up.. bigger and bigger until it explodes and you die... Lie down.. we're going to play Mama and Papa... stroked my face.. feeling for my childish nipples, which contracted when he touched them... panic swept over me and I began to cry.. hand.. to my legs.. feeling between them.. pushing them apart...moving up, up to my very center... just going to touch you softly with my finger, there's nothing bad about that, open your legs.. I'm not going to put it in... not going to fuck you.. [took off] my dress... left on my panties.. voice hoarse.. mumbling obscenities and endearments and kissing my face...shirt was wet.. gulping fo breath, pressing hard against me. I thought I might die... crushed by the weight of his body.. fingers crawled like lobsters between my legs, pressing rubbing,.. rubbed against me, faster and faster,.. moans and rasping breath...then slumped beside me with a choked cry.."
"...she enrolled in a seminar on sexuality and then - hugging case filled with eye opening accoutrements - she went around measuring penises and orgasms. ...if she acquired a reputation as a sexologist no one would.. take her out - men fear comparisons.... P. asked me to bring back certain.. material [from Holland]... poking through X-rated shops for.. telescoping rubber cocks, dolls with authentic orifices, and videos featuring imaginative combinations of women and spirited paraplegics or libidinous dogs... in.. airport when the customs official.. fingered those.. objects before... other passengers, especially when I explained they were not for my own personal use but my daughter's"
Peter
by Kate Walker
FHS
There's only one thing that scares poofters more than big dicks.."
"[your mom] Bit butch, is she?.. She into whips, P? ..bondage!.. big butch mummy!"
Their housekeeper sees his brothers gay friend holding him, stroking his hair after the fight: "Oh, my God!.. what's he done to you?.. I warned your mother about him.. You fuckin' old bitch! you fuckin' old bitch!"
- "A girl had kissed me and I'd pushed her away.. bloke had stroked my hair, and I'd melted.. The boys had seen it. [my brother] had seen it. I was.. dumb.. taken 15 years to notice... what did I do now?.. bastards!"
He buys a "gay men's magazine... ducked into another public toilet.. smell of urine.. perving on pictures of naked men. Or 2 men together... good looking blokes with terrific bodies. Mostly they were naked, or they wore scraps of leather.. got the lot, full on, balls and all.. got the stirrings, perving on naked men.. One of [them] reminded me of D.. smiling in a 'come on' sort of way. I touched his face and let my fingers creep down the page, seeing how far I could go. Seeing what it did for me... So now I knew.. didn't want it for me.. poofter joke.. candidate for AIDS.. flush the magazine [clogs].. no way I was going to.. pull it out.. soaked in everyone else's shit-water.. pain.. Living hurt.."
- He thinks about D: "..I liked his hand stroking my hair. I touched my own neck, trying to bring back the feelings of his fingers there.. touched his face in the photograph.. could imagine being kissed by him.. made my pulse rate pick up.. What would it be like with a bloke?.. least with a bloke you'd know what to do, having practiced on yourself.. if I could hug a man, and imagine being kissed by him, why not the rest?.. Sex is part of living.. Why should I miss out?.. AIDS thing worried me.. thanks to Mum, we had a houseful of condoms and pamphlets on the subject [goes to D's house].. had condoms in my pocket.. I'd expected he'd know why I'd come.. figured he'd get the message... watched my hand shoot out and grab his.. No, he said.. I wanted to die [starts to cry and D comforts him].. stroked my hair.. letting his fingers rest along the back of my neck.. Do you think you might be gay [he asked].. dunno.. You're a pretty gorgeous kid. Not too many guys'll knock you back.. could get screwed and still not know. Is that what you want, just to get screwed?.. why not wait.. Think I've always known. From when I was 12, anyway.. crush on my swimming coach. Then it was a teacher. Then.. one of the senior boys at school.. met my first lover when I was 18.. went crazy over him.. special.. How did you know?, I asked... kept falling in love with men [he said]"
Push : a novel
by Sapphire.
FHS
"..knowing a man can put his dick in you , gush white stuff in your booty you could get pregnant. I'm 12 now, I been knowing about that since I was 5 or 6.. always known about pussy and dick."
"..fucking my husband you nasty little slut.. Fat cunt bucket slut! Nigger pig bitch!.. mother fuckers… should KILL you!.. Miss Hot-to-Trot.."
- "..looked over at her mother, her greasy lips, her brown face swollen like some grotesque pumpkin, her torn.. house dress, her dark brown thighs spreading out.. took up half the couch.. arms seemed like huge animals.. watching the grease run down her.. chin.. slick fat meat explode its salty lusty taste in her mouth.."
- "..felt her mother's hand between her thighs.. felt her mother's.. fingers.. knew by the smell in the room her mother's hand was between her own legs.. hand inched up P's thighs into the wet opening of her vagina."
"..feel the hot sauce hot cha cha feeling when he be fucking me.. get.. confuse. I HATE him. But my pussy be popping. He say.. Big Mama your pussy is popping! I HATE myself when I feel good. …Farrakhan, a real man, who don't fuck his daughter, fuck children."
- "..am choking between [mom's] legs A HUH HUH. She is smelling big woman smell. She say suck it, lick me.. her hand like a mountain pushing my head down."
"My clit swell up I think daddy. [he] sick me, disgust me, but still he sex me up ..nawshus.. stomach but hot tight in my twat.. want it back, the smell of the bedroom, the hurt.. pump my pussy in out in out in out awww I come. he bite me hard.. slam his hips into me HARD. I scream in pain he come.. slap my thighs.. Orgasm in me, his body shaking.. call me Fat Mama, Big Hole! You LOVE it! say you love it!.. wanna say I DON'T.. I'm a chile. But my pussy popping like grease in a frying pan. he slam in me again. His dick soft. he start sucking my tittie… wait for him to get off me.. stare at wall.. then my body take me over again, like shocks after earthquake, shiver me, I come again. My body not mine. I hate it coming.. go bafroom.. smear shit on my face. Feel good. Don't know why but it do.
- "..girl have her father's dick in her mouth know things the other girls don't know.."
- "Smell mama. [Dad], the way his knees on either side of my neck."
Ragtime
by E. L. Doctorow.
FHS
"Are you wearing a corset [she].. asked. E. nodded... G... unbuttoned [E.'s] shirtwaist and removed it.. unclasped E.'s skirt and had her step out of it.. removed [her petticoat]... loosen[ed] [the corset].. step out, she said... slid E.'s lace-trimmed underdrawers to her feet. Step out she commanded. E. did so... stood nude.. except for her.. stockings... G. rolled the stockings down and E. stepped out... Lie down.. on your stomach.. G. rubbed E.'s back and buttocks and thighs. E. was squirming and her flesh cringing with each application [of the astringent]... shivering now and her buttocks were clenched together.. G. now took from her bag a bottle of massage oil and began to knead... Turn over G. commanded... G. massaged her breasts, her stomach, her legs. Yes, even this, .. briskly passing her hand over her mons... E. put her own hands on her breasts and her palms rotated the nipples.. she rubbed her hips. Her feet pointed like a dancer's and her toes curled. Her pelvis rose from the bed.. began to ripple on the bed like a wave on the sea.. hoarse unearthly cry.. closet door flew open and Mother's Younger Brother fell into the room, his face twisted in.. saintly mortification.. clutching in his hands, as if trying to choke it, a rampant penis which... whipped him about the floor, launching to his cries of ecstasy or despair, great filamented spurts of jism that traced the air like bullets and then settled slowly over E. in her bed like falling ticker tape."
"He was a lusty old fuck.."
- "..clasped with loe and gratitude the foul body, like a stinking fish, of an Eskimo woman. he had put his body into the stinking fish."
"..fuck you.."
Rats saw God
by Rob Thomas
FHS
"I suppose if I had given you shit about your never having done heroin, you'd be playing bass for Alice in Chains by now?"
Long descriptions of him buying condoms and having first sex: "D. was a medical expert.. had to change my flights.. because I would have arrived at her most fertile time… discussed the pill.. mood swings.. nauseous.. gain weight.. make my boobs bigger. I say go for it. But she hadn't. She offered to purchase the condoms.. [but] was a man's job.. made me promise not to buy them from a gas station bathroom vending machine. No fancy colors, no feathers, no glow-in -the-dark.. nothing.. 'for her pleasure'.. [sister] says lubricated kind.. You asked your sister what kind of rubber..? ..planned on swaggering up.. daring checker to notice my crotch.. thrown off by the selection offered by the contraceptive industry… gazing at the condom rack.. wondered if I would eventually develop.. brand loyalty. ..selected a box of 12.. less would seem superficial and cheap.. more.. narcissistic.. [she] unbuttoned her shirt.. We undressed each other.. standing naked from ankles up, hopping on one foot, then the other.. resisted the urge to cover my titanium love barometer between my legs. Was it the right size?.. shape?.. color?.. Would [she] know whether it was? ..was the first time she had seen it.. had rubbed it through my blue jeans.. groomed up my shorts dry humping until I thought I would die.. first time Junior had the pleasure of meeting a woman in the flesh. [She] gripped the shaft and gave it a couple.. tugs. How does that feel she asked?.. every sensual pleasure in my lifetime would be compared to this. ..nothing so far.. approached this sensation. As a.. middle-ager I might describe landing a marlin as feeling like great sex but right now I couldn't tell [her that]. Nice, I answered. ..In final scene [in movie Shampoo].. Beatty putting it to Julie Christie on a.. floor, his naked butt ramming away pistonlike… Unless you count 'oh yes' no tender words were spoken.. I had a flash.. sex isn't indulging in each heartfelt caress.. is friction, pure and simple. …loomed in push-up position over [her] naked body.. could have used Junior to cut glass. I began doubting she had an orifice down there.. I tried again. Brick wall.. Let's roll over she said.. trading positions, [she] began grinding into me… meeting point turned into.. tropical rain forest.. don't think I would have lasted.. had I not been sheathed in latex. [She] raised her haunches and reached back between my legs.. positioned Junior.. lowered herself down on me.. was inside her.. no longer a virgin.. allowed to hunt buffalo with the village elders. I could almost feel my complexion clearing up.. [She] started rocking back and forth. I attempted to thrust in a matching rhythm.. twice I fell out and had to be reinserted.. became easier to accomplish.. convinced her we should try this the old fashioned way. Back on top.. increased.. hip speed… condom.. was numbing most sensation.. sweaty bodies sliding.. her.. panting.. After years of self-service.. recognized.. impending orgasm.. my testicles desire to join my lungs.. reached point of no return. [her] eyes were closed, and she was biting her lower lip. And then it was over… Did you? she asked. ..2 minutes of snuggling, but in back of mind I was reviewing instructions.. [on] box of condoms… grip sides of condom when I pulled out.. tip contained only a moderate amount of fluid.. should be a billiard-sized globe at the end.. walked naked and embarrassed to the bathroom.. tied off end.. flushing it down commode.. didn't want some renegade sperm scaling porcelain.. slithering into bed with [her]… Do you know why the French call these chairs boudoir chairs?.. Louis.. liked boffing sitting down.. Do you feel any different? No. What about you?.. sad [she] said.. closes a door behind me.. like my dad doesn't have to love me anymore. ..wasn't a big deal as I thought it would be.. I was gone before her parents came home. She didn't try to make me stay."
Snow falling on cedars
by David Guterson.
FHS
"Fuck you anyhow…."
- ".. noted the girth and heft of (CH's) sexual organs…..his testicles were taut and hairless…. And his penis, at least as twice as large as (his) own, even frozen…"
"…kiss and touch…pressed against him…moved his hands…slowly up her thighs and over her underpants..and pulled her hand against him…felt how hard he was and pressed back into his hardness…could feel the hard length of him..arched her breasts…moved his tongue against her nipples…both hands felt his hardness…hand inside her panties…peeling them down…pulling his pants to his knees…he pushed..inside of her, all the way in, his hardness filling her….."
- "that fucking goddamn Jap bitch"
- "Jesus fucking Christ" (numerous)
"behind her he massaged…. Her buttocks…he lifted her skirt and slid her underpants out of the way…she shut her eyes and rocked."
- "Their marriage had largely been about sex……She washed his large penis and felt it harden in her fingers….his face against her breasts…licking them."
- " …he could no longer achieve an erection….it would wither in his hand before he had a chance to take pleasure from it."
- "Occasionally he attempted unsuccessfully to masturbate…"
- "..how the invasion of his penis had brought a truth with it she would discover in no other way……He had not come…"
- "Once every two weeks or so he masturbated into the folds of his handkerchief, .."
<p style="margin-top: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-bottom: 0in; margin Sphere: Related ContentTop 10 Banned Books
Top 10 Banned Books
Throughout the history of the world, starting with the church, censors have been put on many different things. The church was able to create a list of banned books, and many of the books were burned. The first list of banned books came from Pope Paul IV who established The Index of Prohibited Books to protect Catholics from controversial ideas. However, authors found ways to get around these censors. Many just published in a nearby country.
Whether it is for political reasons, religious reasons, or some other reason, books, to this day, continue to be banned, extremely looked down upon, or challenged harshly. As for me, I believe it's completely ludicrous. Who says anyone has to right to ban someone else's hard work and ideas? In any case, here are the top 10 banned books.
10. The Color Purple
"I see Sofia and I don't know why she still alive. They crack her skull, they crack her ribs. They tear her nose loose on one side. They blind her in one eye. She swole from head to foot. Her tongue the size of my arm, it stick out tween her teef like a piece of rubber. She can't talk. And she just about the color of eggplant."
A novel written by Alice Walker, The Color Purple depicts the life of a young black girl, Celie, who speaks about her life in letters to God. Celie has been raped by her stepfather, beat by her much older husband, and is basically alone. The book expresses what life is like in the deep south through the eyes of a black female. It has been banned because of its extreme and graphic violence, troubling ideas about relations between races, African history, human sexuality, and man's relationship with God.
9. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
"If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult."
This novel is an autobiography of the early life of Maya Angelou. It is able to show how trauma and racism can be overcome by strength and a love of literature. Angelou is able to depict her life from age three to age 17, in Stamps Arkansas. She at first lives with her older brother, and in the end becomes a parent. Throughout the novel, there is a lot of racism and violence, including rape. The book has been banned because of its explicit scenes of rape and other sexual abuse, as well as violence, homosexuality, and vulgar language.
8. To Kill a Mockingbird
"So it took an eight-year-old child to bring 'em to their senses…. That proves something – that a gang of wild animals can be stopped, simply because they're still human. Hmp, maybe we need a police force of children."
Published in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird became popular quick, and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize. It was immediately successful and has been said to be a classic of modern American fiction. The book is known for its humor and warmth while still dealing with critical and serious issues such as racism, rape, and loss of innocence. Many see the banned book's famous character, Atticus Finch, as being a hero both morally and racially. However, the book has been challenged many times because of how it deals with race issues. It is extremely prejudice and stereotypical. The novel also portrays an assault that is somewhat sexual, resulting in a rape. Vulgar language, including the "n" word, is also used.
7. Brave New World
"We can make a new one with the greatest ease-as many as we like. Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at Society itself."
Written in 1932 by Aldous Huxley, this book revolves around a setting of a drugged, dull and mass society. The book takes place in the future, but it doesn't provide much hope for generations to come. The book is a parody of a Utopian society. The novel explained much disdain for youth, as well as a culture that is driven by the market. The book has been banned for its strong themes of drugs, sexuality, and suicide. In the novel, something as minute as chewing gum is seen as a way to deliver sex hormones, and pornographic films are spread around like free candy. Simply, Brave New World has been banned and challenged for its negativity, the latest being in 1993.
6. 1984
"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Written by George Orwell in 1949, 1984 is a novel that depicts an extremely grim future of society. The society has no free will, truth, or privacy. The book was first banned in 1984 by the American Library Association because of its "bleak warning of totalitarian government and censorship." Many see the novel as one that is expressing immoral themes, as well as being pro-Communist. The book tosses around the idea of "Big Brother," which is still highly influential and popular in culture today. The banned book has also been challenged for sexual themes.
5. Lolita
"A normal man given a group photograph of school girl or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine…"
This 1955 novel written by Vladimir Nabokov, analyzes the mind of a highly intelligent, self-loathing man named Humber Humbert, who is a pedophile and has an extreme obsession for "nymphets," which are young girls, generally around the age of 12. Lolita was first published by a French pornographic press after being rejected by four publishing firms, but soon after, it was banned in France for being obscene. It was also banned in South Africa, New Zealand, England, and Argentina. However, the book was never really banned in the U.S. because when it was published, sexuality and teenage sex weren't out of the norm. In any case, most countries have challenged the book because of its portrayal of a sexual relationship between a child and an adult.
4. Catcher in the Rye
"Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it – the same night, as a matter of fact."
Written by J.D. Salinger, Catcher in the Rye became a best-seller weeks within its release in 1951. The novel explains three days in the life of a 16 year old boy, who is seen as extremely troubled. It is a true expression of teenage angst and rebellion against adults, and many have challenged the book because they fear younger people will look up to Holden, the main character. The banned book first caused controversy in 1960 when a school principal fired a teacher for using the novel as part of an 11th grade class. Many states around the country have issues with the book, some saying it is "anti-white," while others express that it puts too much emphasis on slang, sex, violence, and issues with morals.
3. Harry Potter Series
"As much money and life as you could want! The two things most human beings would choose above all – the trouble is, humans do have a knack of choosing precisely those things that are worst for them."
The most recent books on the list, the Harry Potter series tell the tale and adventures of a young boy named Harry Potter, who is a wizard, and his friends Ron and Hermione. The central theme of the book is a struggle against evil, Lord Voldemort, who killed Harry's parents. Since the first book's publishing in 1997, the series has been under much scrutiny. In 2001, parents from all over the U.S. and other parts of the world challenged the book because of its witchcraft, violence, the occult, and its overall scariness. Years later, the series is still banned and challenged for the same reasons, including lying, cheating, stealing, ghosts, and promoting Wicca ideology.
2. Candide
"'What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?"
A great book of great satire! Candide is a classic French novel that satirizes all things that many saw sacred in its day. Churches, philosophers, armies, and rulers were all poked fun at. Voltaire, through the use of satire and funny phrases, was doing nothing more than trying to express a man finding the best of all possible worlds while going through some of the worst things that could ever happen in life. The Great Council of Geneva banned the book after its release, but more than 30,000 copies sold in a year. In 1930, U.S. Customs seized Harvard-bound copies of Candide, and then in 1944 the U.S. Post Office wanted the book dropped from Concord Books.
1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
"I knowed he was white inside, and I reckoned he'd say what he did say – so it was all right, now, and I told Tom I was agoing for a doctor."
This book, written by Mark Twain, has been banned in many different places since it was published. Huckleberry Finn is a story of a young boy, Huck, and a runaway slave, Jim, who travel down the Mississippi in order to escape "sivilization." Here in the U.S., the book was banned in 1885, a year after it was published. At first, the book was banned for its use of slang, which was seen as demeaning. Over time, the focus shifted towards the fact that the novel uses the "n" word so many times, in fact over 200 times. Many cannot get around the fact that such a derogatory word is used so much. Readers often substitute the word with "slave" or "servant." Despite much controversy, many of the most famous writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, see the book as a great piece of literature, as do many readers.
http://www.toptenz.net/top-10-banned-books.php
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Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Dictionary word of the year: 'Unfriend'
Dictionary word of the year: 'Unfriend'
- Oxford dictionary names "unfriend" its word of the year for 2009
- Term means to delete someone as a friend on Facebook or other networking site
- Other finalists: "sexting," "hashtag" and "birther"
- Some online say the term "defriend" would have been better
It's prone to cause drama in the online world.
And, according to the New Oxford American Dictionary, it's the word of the year.
"Unfriend" beat out a tech-heavy field that included "netbook," "hashtag" and "sexting" to take the annual honor.
"It has both currency and potential longevity," said Christine Lindberg, a language researcher for Oxford's U.S. dictionary program. "In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for Word of the Year."
Oxford defines "unfriend," a verb, thusly: "To remove someone as a 'friend' on a social networking site such as Facebook."
Every year, Oxford tracks how the English language is changing. Researchers debate the merits of newly birthed terms and choose their word of the year "to reflect the ethos of the year and its lasting potential as a word of cultural significance and use."
A hashtag is the symbol (#) used on Twitter posts to allow them to be found more easily by other users, a netbook is a small portable laptop, and "sexting" is the act of sending sexually explicit texts or photos on a mobile phone.
Other tech-related finalists this year were "paywall," a way of blocking parts of a Web site to all but paying customers, and "intexicated," the state of being distracted while driving because of sending a text message.
The economy provided "zombie bank," a financial institution still operating even though its liabilities are greater than its assets, and politics brought us "birther," which Oxford describes as "a conspiracy theorist who challenges President Obama's U.S. birth certificate."
On blogs Tuesday, debate about the decision was ongoing. Chief among the issues of dispute: whether "unfriend" or "defriend" was the proper word for weeding someone from one's online circle.
"Frustrated that 'unfriend' is the word of the year. It's definitely 'defriend' when referencing Facebook," one Twitter user wrote, adding the hashtag #dictionaryfail.
Others defended the choice: " 'Defriend' makes me think of 'defoliate' and, well, I dunno, it sounds weird," one wrote.
Oxford spokesman Christian Purdy said researchers found that "unfriend" was more commonly used.
For the past few years, Oxford and other dictionaries that pick words of the year have leaned heavily on the digital world.
In 2004, Merriam-Webster kicked off the trend by adding "blog" to its lexicon. The Webster's New World Dictionary went with "overshare" last year, inspired in part by the habit of spewing too much personal information on social networking sites and blogs.
With gas prices spiking, Oxford's word last year was "hypermiling," the act of conserving gasoline by making fuel-saving changes to one's automobile and driving habits.
By Doug Gross, CNN
November 17, 2009 12:10 p.m. EST
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/17/unfriend.word/index.html
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Sunday, November 15, 2009
THAT WORK THAT IS SO FINE
| THAT WORK THAT IS SO FINE bustill is pleased to present work by JoyandDubblex Leftow @http://joyleftowsblog.blogspot.com Sketch by violetart and writing on the sketch by dubblex poetry by Joy Leftow
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THAT WORK THAT IS SO FINE
My painting invested
with four months of life
oil colors on canvas three feet wide
interpreting the artists' studio
The room burnished
with earthen colors
the ceiling high and wide
represented as a clear blue sky
with clouds of varying shades
from white to grey
Using colors to reveal my feelings
inspired by my master
investigating my strengths through
his wisdom, usurping his vision
How do you get this effect or that
Make a cloud look billowy and soft
Train your hand to make an image
and still relay your feelings with
training, craft and skill?
While I shyly bowed my head, the master
declared my work showed great strides,
my growth in perspective was a triumph for him
He was astonished how I used
colors to accomplish these effects
Four months, three hours a day,
two days a week I slaved
to nurture my untrained abilities
to complete my still life
My lover was fascinated by the color,
the depth, the room where the ceiling
became a sky with no limit,
the inner space that stretched
to meet the cosmos of time
Please, my lover begged me
Give me that work that is so fine
that piece of you, your mind,
that inner space that I can claim is mine
Please give me that work that is so fine
in which you invested great
quantities of self and time
I gave him my work of art
because I believed he loved me
There came the day I stood outside his door
found that he had gone away
I stood pondering and saw nothing amiss
Then suddenly I looked up and saw
Atop the lamp post that stood outside
his door, my cherished work of art,
its insides crushed and torn,
the lamp post protruding through my blue sky,
my grey white clouds, my heart
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Saturday, November 14, 2009
Damien Hirst: 'Anyone can be Rembrandt'
Damien Hirst: 'Anyone can be Rembrandt'
Since he made his name in the early 90s, Damien Hirst has been less an artist than head of a multinational. In the process, he's earned an absolute fortune, if not critical respect. But why should he care?
Damien Hirst stares into his portrait of a skull. This is the new Damien Hirst – Hirst the solitary painter rather than Hirst the art world's flamboyant marketing magician. He has painted these pictures with his own hands, rather than employed minions to produce work under his name, as he has done in the past. But, he says, this is also the old Hirst. After all, like most artists, he started out painting rather than conceptualising and mass-producing. "I gave up painting by 16," he says. "I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then."
I give him a look. But Rembrandt was a genius?
He shakes his head. "No, I don't believe in genius. I believe in freedom. I think anyone can do it. Anyone can be like Rembrandt."
Hirst is a master of the potty soundbite. I wait for a smile or wink, but it doesn't come. Instead, he gets into his philosophical stride. "Picasso,Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It's about freedom and guts. It's about looking. It can be learned. That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings."
How far away does Hirst think he is from producing a Rembrandt? "A long way. But then again, there's no need for that sort of thing today." He's got a touch of the Arthur Daleys about him – the chutzpah, the patter, the self-belief.
It's mid-October and Hirst is giving me a guided tour of his upcoming exhibition at the Wallace Collection in London. Being Hirst, it's bound to be controversial. For starters, he's paid £250,000 of his own money to have his work hung here against the same striped blue silk wallpaper beloved by Marie Antoinette. What's more, he's pitting himself against the likes of Rembrandt and Titian hanging in neighbouring rooms. And then there are the paintings themselves. For two years, he has painted alone in his garden shed in Devon. He didn't show them to anybody, didn't think they were any cop, discarded them one by one, until he finally came up with some he liked. But as he leads me round the exhibition, I'm not quite sure how to react. He's right when he says he's a long way from Rembrandt. Perhaps a little further than he thinks. I say they're spooky – it's the best I can come up with by way of a compliment. At times, they seem more like illustrated CVs than paintings. All the traditional Hirst signifiers are there – skulls and sharks, dots and butterflies, crude nods to his hero Francis Bacon by way of spidery white lines, and the usual references to death and decay. There's certainly no mistaking who these paintings are by.
Hirst has been battling with painting for years. He's always wanted to do it, but could never quite face up to it or get down to it. "The spot paintings and spin paintings were trying to find mechanical ways to make paintings," he says. "And I just got to a point where I thought I can't avoid it any longer." Technically, they might have been paintings, but he felt he wasn't getting down and dirty with his oils and his soul, like a true artist should.
Damien Hirst remains the figurehead of Britart, the movement of British artists whose work was bought and championed by Charles Saatchi in the 90s. In 1992, he first came to prominence at a Young British Artistsshow at Saatchi's old gallery on Boundary Road in St John's Wood, London. The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Something Living, a shark in formaldehyde in a vitrine, became Britart's signature image.
Hirst was the star of Saatchi's Sensation show at the Royal Academy in 1997, an event that was more of a coronation than an exhibition for the new generation of British artists. Post-Sensation, Hirst and his contemporaries (the Chapman brothers, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin,Marc Quinn, Marcus Harvey, et al) became the new punk establishment. Britart was bursting with enfants terribles, and Hirst seemed the most terrible of them all. It wasn't simply the pickled cows and sharks; it was the swagger, the swearing, the rock'n'roll attitude. He even wore tinted glasses like Bono. He became as well known for his partying and his pill-popping as he did for his art. Then he discovered cocaine and became even louder. A night out for the Britpack was not really a night out until Hirst had taken down his trousers and waggled his willy in public.
The funny thing is, Hirst was never meant to be the poster boy for the movement. He had always thought of himself as the back-room boy – more an enabler than an artist. In 1988, while a student at Goldsmiths, he curated an exhibition of his contemporaries' work called Freeze. Another irony is that the young Hirst had been rather conventional – not nearly as wild as he wanted to be. He was born into a working-class family and grew up in Leeds. His parents divorced when he was 12, and his mother, Mary, who worked for the Citizens Advice bureau, brought him up with a fierce sense of the right and proper. The true punk at his school was Marcus Harvey, who went on to create the scandal of Sensation with his portrait of the child killer Myra Hindley. Hirst adored Harvey, who was two years older. "I wanted to be like him. He was just mental. He wore a kilt and had a tiny blue Hitler moustache on his chest. I remember being incredibly jealous because my mum would cut up anything I went out in that was bad. She'd just say get back in the house. My mum made Never Mind The Bollocks into a plant pot – she put it on the gas, with a rock in the middle, and it just went whooosh! – because it said bollocks." Today, she lives next door to Hirst and his family in Devon.
He was not an academic boy, only just squeezing into sixth form, where he did two A-levels and ended up with an E in art. He was initially refused entry to Leeds College of Art & Design, but eventually got a place. He was later turned down by St Martins, before studying at Goldsmiths. When he first moved to London, Hirst worked on a building site for two years.
He was 23 when he curated the Goldsmiths show. It featured some of his own work, but his cluster of painted boxes went pretty much unnoticed. In 1991, he got his first solo exhibition – In And Out Of Love featured rooms with live butterflies, hatching, flying and dying, with dead specimens stuck on canvases. From early on, his curating skills were evident in his work – the labelling, the titles, the layout, the display cabinets. To an extent, the presentation was the art.
In the late 90s, he became Britain's own mini-Warhol, embracing celebrity, mass manufacture – and money. No British artist seemed so obsessed by the relationship between money, art and value. For Hirst, concept was all. If he'd had the idea (even if others claimed to have had it before, as they often did), that was enough. He loved the notion that he could attach his name to work he had not laid a finger on, claim it as his own and make millions. It was funny, ludicrous and hugely profitable.
Things reached their apotheosis (or nadir, depending on your perspective) in 2007, with For The Love Of God, a human skull, recreated in platinum and adorned with 8,601 diamonds, that cost an estimated £14m to produce. Again, Hirst's timing was perfect, the symbolism acute – after two decades in which art had become the supreme commodity, money was now also the subject of art. There was nothing left to say. The work sold for an estimated $100m, although it later emerged that the consortium that had bought it included Hirst and his dealer's gallery, White Cube.
Earlier this year, he ditched the gallery system altogether and sold a load of work at a massive Sotheby's auction that raised a reported £111m. He seems to be trying to create a new business model for the art world. Hirst thinks it's about time his dealer, Jay Jopling, was given a tougher ride by artists. "He always said I've got your best interests at heart, but he doesn't really. It's like he's got a harem, and I've got to be monogamous, and you just go, 'Fuck that' after a while." (Hirst has always liked his swear words.)
It was after the diamond skull that Hirst retreated to his shed. And it was after the auction that he realised paintings would be the next thing he exhibited. "The auction was definitely the end of something. A brutal change for me – go out with a bang." He admits, reluctantly, that Britart is a product of Thatcherism, but insists he has no politics and says he has never voted in his life.
Hirst verges on the evangelical when it comes to money. He says that he has spent so long trying to make Sarah Lucas, his favourite contemporary British artist, appreciate the value of money and herself. To no avail. "She'd be like, 'I don't give a fuck, give me what you want' and I'd be like, 'You should sell your work for more' and she'd say, 'I don't care. I'm not interested in all that shit.' I was like Sarah in the beginning, but then I had to give a fuck at some point." He comes to a frustrated stop. "I kind of admire her for it," he adds wistfully.
He was jealous when he found out that Rachel Whiteread's work was selling for £100,000 at a time when his was going for £20,000-£30,000. "I remember telling Jay to put my work up to £100,000. And he said to me, 'But I can sell anything you make' and it dawned on me: 'It's cos you're selling it too fucking cheap.' He said, 'It's going to alienate your collectors' and I said, 'I don't care, just do it.' We didn't look back. When he sold something for £100,000, something changed – you get taken seriously by a whole new group of people and they start buying."
Isn't there a danger that the money becomes all-consuming; that the sole measure of a piece of art is what it sells for? "You just keep an eye on it. Selling out is very different from dealing with cash." What is selling out? "My business manager always says you've got to make sure you're using the cash to chase the art, not the art to chase the cash." Hirst would argue that his diamond skull is an example of cash chasing the art.
Has he ever sold out? "I think I've got very close. There was a point I could have just churned out the spot and spin paintings for ever and laughed all the way to the bank."
Was he taking the mick out of the art market? "No. You can take the piss out of art, but I don't think you can take the piss out of the art market. All markets are serious."
So why did he stop mass-producing? In the end, he says, he found it too depressing – it began reminding him of his own mortality. "With the work I was doing, I couldn't see a route to the end of my life. I was doing these sculptures, and the people who work for me have always stayed the same. Then I thought, as I get older, they're going to get older and fucking older… And then I'd be getting old and have to get young people working for me so they could lift the sculptures."
Also, the paintings were no longer relevant to him. "The spot paintings were all about immortality. They're just a total celebration of when you're twatted, when you're taking drugs, when you're under the table. In that moment, you feel you can live for ever. Then you just get to the point where you think you've got less time in front of you than behind you."
There's a story about the spot paintings, possibly apocryphal, that I love – that Hirst started selling kits to make up the paintings for tens of thousands of pounds. In other words, he was charging people a fortune for painting them themselves. Hirst grins. Of course it's true. It came about when a man said he'd like to buy a spot painting painted directly on to a wall and Hirst asked how he planned to do it. "He said, 'Oh, just make me a certificate and give me some paint and tins. So I went through it in my head and worked it out – the certificate certified ownership of the artwork, the artwork must be painted by an authorised representative and the spots are these dimensions, these colours, and the spot painting can't exist in two places at the same time. I bought my own tins, mixed the colours, put it all in a box, a brush for every tin, so you get 150 tins and 150 brushes, compass, pencil and a certificate."
He must have thought that was funny? He shakes his head. "Every time I had a new idea, I realised it had been done years ago. Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Carl Andre, Donald Judd, all the minimalists, they all had certified artworks."
Hirst was recently estimated to be worth £200m. What does he do with all his money? Well, there's his rapidly growing art collection, his many houses, his cars, his office. "I've got a lot of projects, and there's lots for charity as well." Hirst tells me which charities he supports, but he's hardly gushing about it. I can't help sensing he prefers the bad boy image and isn't overly keen to destroy it with heartwarming tales of do-gooding. But a number of his friends tell me of the times he has helped out when they've been in trouble.
He's more likely to tell you about the horrible things he's done. His friends confirm this side to him, too. Although he doesn't reckon he sold out, he did come close to destroying himself with drink and drugs, notably cocaine. He got clean only three years ago, and says for a long time he was insufferable. "The problem is, at the time I thought I was cool, but now I look back and think I was a twat." Shortly before his great friend Joe Strummer died, the musician had had enough of him. "He was going, 'Ignore him. Everybody ignore Damien. He'll go away.' I was just talking spew."
He tells me about a recent conversation with a friend. "I said, 'When I met you, I thought you were really cool' and he went, 'I thought you were a twat.' I went, 'What?!' And he said, 'I thought you were arrogant and stupid and pushy.' Lots of people say that's the impression I give off. I can't quite work out what I do – maybe I just show off – but it always surprises me. I think we're getting on like a house on fire. Maia [Norman, his partner] says it about her friends – they were intimidated by me or I was aggressive or arrogant or they don't like me. 'Who is that twat?' "
And when he was doing drink and drugs, he says, he was hideous. How? He can't remember all the details, so he turns for help to Jude Tyrrell, director of Hirst's company Science Ltd.
Tyrrell: "You were more in your face when you were on the booze and coke."
Hirst: "Yeah, you wanted to give up a few times."
Tyrrell: "No, only once."
Hirst: "Was that the knob out in Dublin?"
Tyrrell: "No, the knob with the chicken bone was fine. It was that girl's 18th birthday party. It was a posh boutique hotel and Damien was there, very drunk and abusive. It was just the kind of thing you don't want to see. Had he continued as he was, I don't think anybody could have stuck around. Also, he would have lost the art. He just wouldn't have been able to do it. He'd be staying up for two or three nights, and I'd have BBC news arrive, and I know how much that costs, and I'd be sending them away because he'd just not turned up."
Why does she think Hirst acted like this? "With everybody else, you think it's because there's shit in their lives. Damien I honestly think did it because he loves life – for purely hedonistic reasons."
And the chicken bone? That's an entirely different matter, says Hirst. "I went to a Malaysian restaurant and I had chicken, and I got a thigh bone from the chicken and kept it in my pocket and back at the hotel I put it in my foreskin, so I had a bone sticking out of the end of my cock."
Tyrell reminds Hirst, aged 44, that he has missed an important detail: "You were in a bar when you were doing it, and this American woman took offence."
Ah, yes, says Hirst, his memory clearing. "She stormed out in disgust, and next day she sued for $100,000. She claimed she'd been traumatised."
That was the last time he exposed himself in public. "I became aware that, in a room full of people and at $100,000 each, it could become very costly. We settled for 8,000 Irish punts."
How did Hirst manage to straighten himself out? "I just got sick of myself." What did his partner, Maia, make of him throughout this period? "We were both battered." She was as bad as him? "Yeah. If we hadn't been, I don't think we'd have stayed together."
Hirst and Maia have three sons. The oldest, Connor, is 14, Cassius is nine and Cyrus four. Hirst worries that their lifestyle affected Connor badly. "He's a bit quieter than the other two, and sometimes I think it's because of that."
We're looking at some white roses on a blue-black background. This is one of his favourite paintings in the exhibition. How important is it to him that the show is well reviewed? "Jay [Jopling] always seems to want to get people to be pleased, but I always say I try to ignore the good press so then I can ignore the bad. If you like the good and try to ignore the bad, you can get fucked up. But you make it for yourself at the end of the day, and that's who you've got to satisfy."
A couple of weeks later, we meet up again at Hirst's London offices, which double up as a beautiful, if unofficial, modern art gallery – a Jeff Koons silver sculpture on the ground floor, Warhol's electric chair upstairs, Hirsts galore. He is wearing different blue-tinted specs (he has some 50 pairs), the customary hoodie and trainers, and is explaining why he wasn't cut out to be a curator. "Dealing with the ego of artists is mental." Who's got the biggest ego among his British peers? "Er, me? You need a big ego to be an artist. I suppose you need a big ego to deal with the shit reviews I've been having for this show."
The Wallace show has received a real mauling; I've rarely read such scathing reviews. The paintings are described as "embarrassing", "shockingly bad", "Francis Bacon meets Adrian Mole", and Hirst labelled "a jumped-up pretender".
Did the reviews surprise him? "Well, I kind of expected them," he says, "but I suppose secretly you do hope they won't be as crap. The worst thing is, I've had phone calls from people who've treated it as a death – phoning up and asking, 'Are you OK?'" He grins. "A couple of the reviews made me laugh. [Guardian critic] Adrian Searle said, 'I failed at painting, too.' I thought that was a cracking line. He rejected me at St Martins."
Has it dented his confidence? "I've had all the confidence dented for two years in the studio, so I've looked at the work and gone through all the doubts and come out the other side. In a way, it was personal and quite aggressive. What got people's backs up most was that I was doing it in the Wallace, in the context of these great artists. But it's early days for me painting. I don't think I've arrived. I don't think I'm as great as they are. These are the first paintings I'm satisfied with… But the Wallace are well happy. The viewing figures are through the roof, sales in the shop are massive."
Some critics have suggested that the exhibition is a joke, that he has deliberately produced bad paintings, knowing that they'll still sell for huge sums. "Maybe it is… who knows? There's an element of that in everything I do. Someone once said to me, 'You could sign a dog shit and sell it' and I said, 'Why would I?' And then you think, if you did, itwould be art. Manzoni blew up a balloon and called it Artist's Breath and sold it. And people go, 'Are you taking the piss, or is it for real?'"
He says there's nothing more boring than an artist wanting to be taken seriously, and it's true there is a playfulness to most of Hirst's work, but the bottom line is the paintings are for real; he does want them to be taken seriously. "I didn't think, right, I'm going to make paintings now and I don't give a fuck what they look like because we're going to make loads of money. That's not what they're about. They've got to be good."
Has he learned anything from the reviews? "No. I like what Warhol said: you don't read them, you weigh them." Perhaps he couldn't win, he adds. "It's the hallowed area of painting. The same guys who are saying to me these are shit are the guys who've said you're crap because you can't paint. So you paint and they say you're crap now you're trying to paint."
That's not strictly true. Many of those who were most damning about this show loved his earlier work, particularly the dissected cows and pickled sharks. The concept was so fresh, the lines so clean, the appearance so startling. I ask where he got the ideas from. "School. Even then I was doing that sort of stuff in art with frogs. And there were skulls and pine cones and bits of bone. It was like a nature table with things in formaldehyde. So we'd always draw from that."
He talks about the inspiration for Mother And Child Divided. "It was about my mum and sister, who had fallen out at the time. It was a funny take on that."
But this is all in the past, he says. The future, for him, is painting. He shows me the work that will form his next exhibition, Nothing Matters, opening later this month at the White Cube. There are more skulls and sharks and dots, but the colours are brighter – reds and greens. He's also introduced a few new motifs: deckchairs, windows, splattered crows.
Does he think this show will get better reviews? "I think it'll be another kicking," he says. "It's only a few weeks later and it's similar stuff, so they're just going to say, 'He won't go away!'"
And, he says, they'll be right. "The paintings are going to get better and better and better, and they're not going to go away. There's no way back for me. I've just got to barrel on through. If you want to make it easy for yourself, you can say there's a whole history of great artists who've been slagged off, so you can just embrace that, can't you?"
Hirst tells me he watched a documentary about Francis Bacon the other night. "I loved the way he talked about the Popes. He said they were failed paintings. I loved that. He said he tried to combine the Eisenstein shot of the nanny screaming with the Velásquez painting, and it was a disaster. He said, 'I don't even know why I tried.' I thought what a great thing to say – his greatest paintings, to talk them down like they're shit. That way, no one can slag 'em off." He pauses. "I should have done that."
But Hirst has never been one for regrets, and he chucks a final Warhol quote at me to prove the point. "Warhol said a brilliant thing. He said if anybody slags anything off, make more."
• No Love Lost, Blue Paintings, by Damien Hirst, is showing at theWallace Collection, Manchester Square, London W1 until 24 January 2010. Nothing Matters is at the White Cube, London N1 from 25 November-30 January 2010.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/nov/14/damien-hirst-interview
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Sex craze fading fast, says Tracey Emin at London exhibition launch
Emin says her work was always about sex but these days she prefers ideas
In the middle of her new exhibition, in which the most arresting piece is a looped animation of 150 drawings that depict a woman masturbating,Tracey Emin explained that sex is loosening its grip as her 50th birthday looms.
"It always was about sex, not money," she said. "Sex was what held me in bed and got me out of it again in the morning. But now it's fading fast. I don't have the same craziness about sex that I had I'm more interested in ideas."
The artist was haloed by a pink glow emanating from a neon piece in the next room. Its inscription read: "Oh Christ I just wanted you to fuck me and then I became greedy, I wanted you to love me."
Her latest exhibition, at the White Cube gallery in Mayfair, is her first in London for four years, and the price of individual works ranges from £5,000 for a simple drawing to £22,500 for each of the five copies of the animation.
Tim Marlow, director of exhibitions at the gallery, said: "I'm no economist, I don't know whether we're in a V or a W-shaped recession, but I've been amazed at how resilient the gallery's sales have been. These will all sell. People may come looking for a deal – but they won't get one."
None of the work has been exhibited before, although it includes pages from an 18-year-old diary, as well as the new neon pieces and her trademark embroideries and appliqués on blankets.
Many are autobiographical, but the woman in the animation with the busy hands and the enviable legs in high-heel sandals is not.
"I wish it was me!" Emin said.
The figure is based on a collection of vintage pornography magazines. "I got some funny looks [when buying them]," she said.
One of Emin's most famous pieces, the embroidered tent entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, was destroyed in an art store fire five years ago. Her fellow artists Jake and Dinos Chapmanrevealed at the Guardian Hay Festival at the weekend that they had recreated the work.
Emin said: "It won't be my tent, it would be totally their version ... They're always teasing me. The more I say I'm not happy, the more the buggers will do it."
Emin has recently been working in temporary exile, having loaned her studio to another artist, Stephen Cornell. She said: "When the time came for me to take it back he was in full swing, paint everywhere, so I said 'Don't worry, I'm working on an animation anyway'. It was just an excuse, but then I decided to do it anyway. I didn't know if the animation would work, but it was like magic when it all came together when we scanned all the drawings into the computer, I was thrilled with it."The exhibition, Tracey Emin: Those Who Suffer Love, runs from 29 May to 4 July.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/may/27/tracey-emin-sex-london-exhibition
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Tracey Emin Quite Big in Britain, Not Quite in the U.S.
Tracey Emin Quite Big in Britain, Not Quite in the U.S.
That the artist Tracey Emin had asked to be interviewed at her hotel swimming pool and showed up in a bathing suit would probably mean more to readers in her native England, where her self-revelatory and at times exhibitionist tendencies are well known. They have helped make her an object of public fascination there — a national celebrity, in fact — for more than a decade.
Ms. Emin first gained notoriety in 1997 for her contribution to the famous "Sensation" show at the Royal Academy of Arts: a tent embroidered with the names of everybody with whom she had ever shared a bed. Soon after came an installation consisting of her bed itself, littered with blood-stained underwear, condoms and lubricant, which was shown at the Tate Gallery in 1999 and got her on the short list for the Turner Prize.
Recent years have brought a strong run of museum exhibitions, with major retrospectives at the Stedlijk in Amsterdam and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, along with regular appearances in British party pages and fashion magazines. In 2007 she was chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. She is quite possibly the most famous living artist in England afterDamien Hirst.
"And Damien's not recognized like I am everywhere I go," she said. "In London I'm in the papers every time I blow my nose, essentially. I'll be followed by paparazzi. I'm taught in the school curriculum in Britain. It's actually kind of nice when I come to New York and I don't have that recognized thing."
What brought Ms. Emin, 46, over from London was a new exhibition of her work at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery on Chrystie Street on the Lower East Side, titled "Only God Knows I'm Good." While it was hardly a dull week —Madonna and Kevin Spacey, both friends who collect Ms. Emin, came by to see her new output, and a crowd she put at around 1,000 came to her opening on Nov. 5 — she couldn't refrain from comparing it with her openings at the White Cube Gallery in London.
"There, it's 5,000, 6,000 people spilling into the square outside," she said. "It's like a rock concert."
The difference between her receptions on the two sides of the Atlantic may be due partly to her nationality, as Ms. Emin pointed out — after all, "Jeff Koons isn't famous" in Britain, she said. Even so, given that the New York art world has become much bigger and more international in scope in recent years, it is notable that an artist who has achieved Ms. Emin's level of stardom in Europe should struggle to make inroads here.
This is Ms. Emin's fourth solo show in New York. So far it has not received much attention from reviewers, and Rachel Lehmann, an owner of the gallery, said that 10 of the 53 works there — which include many single-edition prints and embroidered cloths, along with a handful of sculptures and a short animated film — have sold so far.
By contrast, when the White Cube held an exhibition of similar pieces by Ms. Emin six months ago, about three-quarters of them were sold within a week, according to Tim Marlow, a director of that gallery (who cautioned against reading too much into the comparison).
That opening was a major event in the British art world and generated a great deal of press. Rachel Campbell-Johnston, the chief art critic for The Times of London, wrote, "This new show should have been the one she presented at the biennale" in Venice. The Evening Standard's review raved about the animation piece in particular and declared that "no museum exhibition about feminist art, art about the body or sexual identity in art will be complete without this work."
Ms. Emin's new prints and embroideries are rendered in the spare and sketchlike style she has taken to calling "my salty Egon Schiele line." ("Imagine if you would there's salt poured on the paper, and you draw right over it," she said poolside, drawing an imaginary line with her finger on the arm of her chaise longue.) The works explore perennial themes of Ms. Emin's: sex and loneliness, sex and self-reproach. One print depicts a dog and a woman having sex, with the scrawled text: "No You Were A Dog But Thing Is I Was Less."
Ms. Emin said that the longer critical and commercial discrepancies exist between her status in Europe and America, the more puzzled she is. For years she attributed it to uneasiness over several autobiographical video pieces and essays in which she discussed being raped as a teenager and having two abortions, though now she doubts it is that simple.
"I'm not mourning it," she said, adding, "Over here, I've never really shown in museums at all."
She noted: "The Guggenheim hasn't bought my work, but I think they received a donated piece. The Tate last year bought and displayed a whole room of my work."
The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis exhibited her tent, which was not yet famous, in a group show in 1995 — but she did not want it sharing a room "with all these little pieces by everybody else," she said, and tried to pull it from the exhibition. "They stopped me when I was dragging it down the escalator. Richard Flood, the curator, said, 'With your attitude, you'll never show in this country.' I told him with that attitude I didn't want to, although actually for the time being he was right."
Ms. Emin's art is so closely bound up in her persona that detractors are wont to say that the artist herself, or at least her endless capacity for self-reference, is the turnoff. She has produced works and shows titled "The Tracey Files," "The Tracey Emin Museum" and "CV," which stands for two words — the second of them is "vernacular" and the first is unprintable. She has made hundreds of nude self-portraits, including "I've Got It All," a photograph in which her loins are obscured only by piles of money, which she is either giving birth to or forcing inside her vagina.
Mr. Marlow said her approach has been viewed as "perhaps a bit confrontational" for the American market. Ms. Lehmann suggested that sexism was a cause: "The male museum directors and curators were extremely hostile, which didn't help Tracey get the right attention," she said.
Nancy Spector, the chief curator of the Guggenheim Museum, pointed out the degree to which Ms. Emin's appeal as both an artist and a personality had its roots in contemporary British culture. "So much of her public persona is about the appearances, the tabloids following her, the confessional nature of her work," Ms. Spector said. "I think of Tracey's work as having a lot in common with the sort of reality television that came out of Great Britain."
But even Ms. Emin appears to have reached a point of saturation — and, finally, the capacity to be embarrassed — with her own oversharing. Last Saturday, at a public reading at the University Settlement on Eldridge Street from her collection of personal essays, "Strangeland," that was part of the performance art festival Performa, Ms. Emin prefaced one of several passages about her promiscuous youth with the declaration, "I'm afraid this one's going to be quite stupid," and then refused to read the last few paragraphs.
Ms. Emin acknowledged that there is a downside to making such an open book of herself. "People see me in the street and cuddle me," she said, scrunching her face into the asymmetrical squint that has long been a trademark, at least in Britain. "It's difficult, because I don't like being touched."
Published: November 13, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/14/arts/design/14emin.html?pagewanted=all
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Tracey Emin's Painfully Good Humor
Tracey Emin's Painfully Good Humor
What is so remarkable about Tracey Emin's work is its simultaneity. How can art so deeply personal be so transcendent too? The grief imbued in her images is so extreme, so out of the ordinary, that it feels almost dangerous to relate to. One will try to marvel at her splayed out and broken figures, wondering from what dark place such images came. But it's guaranteed that the least stubborn among us will catch ourselves and realize we aren't so touched because those feelings are new. Pain is universal; Emin just articulates it.
Lehmann Maupin Gallery's Lower East Side location hosts Tracey Emin's fourth New York exhibition Only God Knows I'm Good (through December 19) a collection of her latest monoprints and embroidery. Each work is laden with the heaviest of emotions, communicated through brutally honest words and drawings that physically sting. Try as one might to relegate the hurt to Emin's own extraordinary circumstances, her work grabs hold and refuses to let go until the viewer relents, recognizing that there really isn't too much difference between Emin and ourselves.
Lehmann Maupin is divided into four separate spaces, each room playing host to a different feeling of Emin's. The first space holds her signature monoprints, almost all of them depicting a woman engaged in what looks like frantic masturbation, words floating above them in her illegible hand. "Nothing Touches" (2009), the biggest piece in the room, is a large, cotton sheet embroidered with the figure of a bride. Her face is obscured by a dark shadow and gaudy, fabric flowers orbit around her without ever getting too close. The title is embroidered below her, a contradiction of childish scrawl rendered in neat, even embroidery, echoing her sentiment; hopelessly numb and desperate to feel all at the same time.
Moving deeper into the gallery's interior, the feelings Emin evokes get darker. The self-hatred is almost stifling. "Dog Fuck" (1999), another monoprint, reads "No you were a dog but thing is I was less." "Just Like Nothing" (2009) is another sheet, this one embroidered with just the vaguest outline of a lone female figure, prostrate and legs spread. Emin depicts the space between the figure's legs as a strange void; it is reminiscent of shattered glass, like a bullet shot through a window, instead of something made of flesh and blood. "Scared Shitless" (2007) shows a female figure laying prone on a couch, hands gripping the cushions with the words "Don't kid yourself Trace you're scared shitless."
The most disturbing thing about the monoprints in this second space is that they resemble memories of some sort of debauched childhood. They are furnished on what looks like construction paper, the corners ripped and wrinkled with careless stains and smudges all over the page. Two rectangular shadows appear on the top corners of almost all of the prints, hints that maybe they once belonged taped to the refrigerator, the most significant gallery space of infancy. The third and smallest space holds "Only God Knows I'm Good," (lyrics from the David Bowie song "God Knows I'm Good"), a neon sculpture that provides the exhibition's title. A looped video of Emin's monoprints plays on the blank wall opposite the sculpture.
But the exhibition is not all one, sad note. Patient viewers will discover more than just her confessions, but Emin herself, someone who is, if she is anything like her art, resilient, bold, and, rather unexpectedly, funny. It's almost inconceivable that she manages to crack a joke that doesn't feel out of place in as oppressive an atmosphere as this. But her irreverent humor is a welcome respite from the relentless emoting. These works, the ones that could be considered mundane when compared to the other monumental pieces, are actually the real jewels of the exhibition, adding another lighter and necessary dimension to her work.
"So Picaso" (Emin swears her misspellings are not affectations but genuine mistakes) is one such image, a small, easy-to-miss monoprint on the gallery's second floor. A female figure leans against the right side of the picture plane, knees bent, back arched. Her features are flattened and hard-edged; vaguely Cubist. The real joke is what's written in the center of the picture plane: "PicasO." Emin has said that she regards Picasso, the man some revere as the greatest painter of the 20th century, as nothing but a misogynist. Here she takes another shot at him, reducing him to something as fleeting and self-serving as an orgasm.
On November 7 Emin read passages from her biography Strangeland at University Settlement and further discussed her feelings about Picasso. When an audience member asked what she thought about him, she smiled and replied "someone wants me to tell the Picasso story." According to Emin, at another exhibition years ago someone asked her that same question, to which she replied, "fuck Picasso." When an angry attendee yelled, "Why? Why fuck Picasso?" she laughed and said, "I don't know but I wish I did."
The fourth and final space in the gallery is up a narrow flight of stars. A small, windowed room holds some of Emin's older prints including the aforementioned "So Picaso." From that room, a short hallway brings the viewer to a small balcony overlooking the gallery's entire first floor. "Some Crazy Fucked Up Dog Hell That's How It Feels To Live Without Love," another neon sculpture rendered in her hand buzzes quietly on the balcony wall. That final piece offers what comes closest to a peaceful in