Sophianotloren

We have to accept the truth…the oldest profession in the world [will only disappear] when humans no longer exist.  –  Khuat Thu Hong

Who Did Your Tits? 

A Tampa massage therapist, Jasmine Tridevil…contacted more than 50 doctors before finding one who would give her [a] third breast…The surgeon she found couldn’t create a silicone areola, though, so she had one tattooed onto the implant, which is made from silicone and skin tissue from her stomach.  While Tridevil’s dream is to star in an MTV reality show, she [said]…she had the surgery to become “unattractive to men” in addition to gaining fame.  “I don’t want to date anymore,” she said…

Alas, there is strong evidence that the story is a hoax.

Safe Targets

Here’s a good example of how criminalization makes sex workers vulnerable to extortion; Terra Jones not only shares the actual letters, but details the total uselessness of Alaska cops in responding to them and explains how “sex trafficking” laws have made conditions even worse.

Anatomy of a Boondoggle

Any amount of criminalization, no matter how slight, gives “authorities” an excuse to harass whores, even to the point of paying men to rape them:  “Fred Allen…is a gun for hire, having received tens of thousands of dollars from Sydney’s…councils in exchange for crucial evidence that is presented in court to help expose and close underground parlours.  In short, Mr Allen has paid sex with prostitutes and ratepayers foot the bill…”  Yes, I would class having sex with a woman for the express purpose of harming her – stealing her job or even getting her deported – as a form of rape.  No, I don’t want to debate it.

Halfway Whores

Pearl-clutching sociologist agonizes over the “exploitation” involved in recruiting models for VIP parties; she says “This is a system of trafficking in women” and thinks it’s a problem that “the girls don’t seem to mind all that much”, indicating that she absolutely Does Not Get the halfway whore concept at all.

Welcome To Our World

…surrogacy opponents…include…social conservatives and Christians, especially Catholics, who either see surrogacy as unnatural and immoral or a gateway for gay parents, and some feminist groups, who see surrogacy as exploitative…Even the ostensibly pro-surrogacy crowd seems to favor making surrogacy more complicated and less accessible…[such] solutions [are billed] as “pro surrogacy” because they don’t outright forbid or criminalize the practice but…create more categories of people who can’t participate and raise financial costs and privacy invasion for those who do…

The Proper Study

A new Canadian study won’t surprise anyone who’s been listening to sex worker activists, but the backup comes at a crucial time:

Researchers have released…the first national report on the sex industry in Canada…based on five studies undertaken in St. John’s, Montréal, Kitchener, Fort McMurray, Calgary, and Victoria…“Many of the people linked to Canada’s sex industry—workers and their intimate partners, managers and clients—have much in common with other Canadians”…The average age of sex workers’ first sale was 26 years old…29 percent of sex workers first sold…sex…before …19…The average sex worker has 10 years of experience…67 percent of sex workers finished high school, and 15 percent have a bachelor’s degree or more…77 percent…identify as women, 17 percent as men, and 6 percent as other genders…Sex buyers purchase a sexual service a median of four times a year…only 17 percent bought sex on the street…

Surplus Women

“The bodies of two Tampa teenagers…Angelia Mangum, 19, and Tjhisha Ball, 18, were found…[on a Jacksonville roadside] bound with zip ties and lying on top of one another…both…had been…working there as exotic dancers…”  Naturally, the media cares more about recounting their record of a couple of petty offenses than about two young women whom society considered disposable.  A fundraiser has been started to assist their families with funeral costs.

Follow Your Bliss

No, he didn’t “turn pedophile”; he took this job on purpose to enable and cover up his crimes:

…Gregory Pyle…of…Illinois…was sentenced to 50 years in prison…after confessing to sexually abusing a child and distributing images…online.  Pyle was a 10-year veteran of his police department who…worked in a child predator task force…and…used his position…to obstruct the investigation into his actions…

I’m Sure You Feel Safer Now

88-year-old grandfather, Edwin Venn, was arrested…for prostitution, along with his john Amanda Pearson, 23.  Police had been watching Venn for several months and noticed a peculiar  pattern…Mr. Venn stood most weekend nights with cardboard sign on Hollywood Blvd that read:  “I’m for sale.”  Pearson admitted during her arraignment that when she found the 88-year-old Venn trying to turn tricks she and her friends decided it would be funny to sleep “with an old guy”.  Word spread and lots of girls paid Venn for sex.  Pearson said he only charged five dollars and gave them lollipops afterward.

The Public Eye

Here’s another sex worker on a reality TV show:

Kate McGrew [says sex work] is…”an aspect of my feminism…sex workers…have good strategy.  People say it cheapens the experience [of sex]…No, it doesn’t, it makes it more expensive”…

And one who was previously on a show runs for office:

One of the independent candidates for the Clacton by-election is Exeter sex worker Charlotte Rose…[who] previously appeared in a…TV series…called Love For Sale…[with] Rupert Everett and Russell Brand.  “My main policy is about sexual freedom…I also want there to be better sexual education in schools”…The former teacher and mother-of-two…was hounded out [of her neighborhood] by locals following media attention sparked by the TV show…

Smoke and Mirrors

Another case in which the truth is so obscured by exaggeration, dysphemisms, myths and lies that we’ll probably never know what really happened:

A…[Missouri] Judge sentenced 24-year-old Tiffany Piper to eight years in prison for selling two high school girls for sex…managed the [girls' work]…and placed ads online…[prosecutors claim that]  someone was [previously] trafficking Tiffany Piper for sex…[and] said…”At some point she was no longer a victim…because she perpetrated the same crimes that were perpetrated upon her”…[they] can`t say who first trafficked Piper, or who worked above her, because Piper never said…

The narrative simply doesn’t allow the prosecutor to admit that there is no shadowy “pimp” pulling the strings here, so Piper becomes the scapegoat.

Backwards into the Future (TW3 #42)

…in recent months a fierce debate over whether to legalise and regulate the sex industry [in Vietnam] has sprung up online and in the official press…even the National Assembly is due to address the issue at its next session in October…Researchers estimate there are around 200,000 sex workers in Vietnam…”We should legalise prostitution because it is part of human rights. Everybody has the right to enjoy sex,” said sociologist Le Quang Binh…

Comfort Zone (TW3 #311)

Given that the Immigrant Council is one of the groups trying to impose the Swedish model on Ireland, I trust you can see the endgame here:

A report…finds that victims of sex trafficking are left vulnerable to further abuse in…[Ireland's] direct provision centres because they can be easily contacted or intimidated by pimps and traffickers…the Immigrant Council of Ireland said…”traffickers have actually used the asylum system for residency and accommodation while simultaneously trafficking victims”…

Lack of Evidence (TW3 #316)

“…California Governor Jerry Brown [signed]…legislation which now requires district attorneys to get a court’s permission to use possession of more than one condom as potential evidence [of]…prostitution…”  How this will play out in real-world courtrooms:

DA: Your honor, I need permission to use these condoms as evidence, because “sex trafficking”.  It’s for the children!

Judge:  Granted.

Traffic Jam (TW3 #403)

…sex workers…and advocates submitted a report to the United Nations…on human rights violations committed in the U.S. against sex workers…and those profiled as such…Best Practices Policy Project (BPPP), Desiree Alliance and Sex Worker Outreach Project-NYC (SWOP-NYC) [documented] extensive violations of the right to equal protection before the law, the right to be free of cruel and inhuman punishment, and the right to health…Due process violations are also rampant…The report…[calls] on the U.S…to make good on a [2011] commitment…to address discrimination and violence against sex workers…

Imaginary Crises (TW3 #410)

Another good article attacking the “rape culture” myth:

…Both critics and supporters…note [that]…While the CDC estimates that nearly 2 million adult American women were raped in 2011 and nearly 6.7 million suffered some other form of sexual violence, the NCVS estimate for that year was 238,000 rapes and sexual assaults…[the high numbers result from a loose definition of rape, but by this standard]…the…CDC [found] that women rape men as often as men rape women.  The CDC also reports that men account for over a third of those experiencing…“sexual coercion”…defined as being pressured into sexual activity by psychological means:  lies or false promises, threats to end a relationship or spread negative gossip, or “making repeated requests” for sex and expressing unhappiness at being turned down…We must either start treating sexual assault as a gender-neutral issue or stop using the CDC’s inflated statistics…

The Scarlet Letter (TW# #413)

At least a few reporters are publishing critical views of currently-fashionable “john shaming” tyranny:

…“This violates the bedrock principle that punishment should not begin until you are convicted,” says Jonathan Simon…[of] Berkeley Law…“It’s the police saying, ‘We’re going to punish you upfront’…This isn’t just a few days in jail.  It’s distinctly degrading treatment, public exposure that puts people at risk of long-term internal trauma …it’s the kind of thing that the 8^th Amendment…was designed to prevent”…assistant professor Andrea Roth says…“Public humiliation affects a lot of people besides the johns…People say, ‘I saw your dad or husband on Facebook,’ and that can be devastating.  Your career can be affected—maybe permanently, given that once something goes up on the Internet, it’s there forever. It can disrupt entire families”…

Full of Themselves (TW3 #418)

Of all the semi-whores, none are as pompous as masseuses; they even infect those who write about them:

…Many [massage parlors] are locally owned small businesses staffed by well-trained professionals who provide high-priced services.  On the other hand, some are fronts for brothels…California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new bill that acknowledges that the state’s last attempt to regulate the massage industry struck the wrong balance…centralizing power moved massage parlors outside the authority of local governments, which are more likely to know when a business is illegitimate…

Given that most unlicensed massage parlors are Asian-owned, there is a strong whiff of racism in phrases like “locally owned” and “high-priced services”.

The Roof Caves In

…Somaly Mam has spoken out to defend herself for the first time…in the new issue of Marie Claire, Mam tells Abigail Pesta, “I didn’t lie”…she adds that she didn’t mount a legal fight against the claims because “I didn’t need a lawyer…I did nothing wrong.  My heart is my lawyer”…

Whither Canada? (TW3 #423) 

Alan Young…summed up…bill [C36] as “a very confused response to a very clear judgment”…when…asked if the bill could be amended, he was unequivocal:  “No.”  As a constitutional lawyer, he said, he’d “have a field day” with the bill, given…irreconcilable inconsistencies between the objectives, as laid out in the preamble, and the text of the proposed laws…Young also challenged the assertion that the government had struck the appropriate balance…”How can you even talk about ‘balance’ when you use the word ‘asymmetrical’…I’ve never seen anything in the history of [Canadian] criminal law that sets up asymmetrical prohibitions”…

A Whore in Church (TW3 #433) 

If George is smart, he’ll call off his protests first:

…A letter to Pastor Bill Dunfee of New Beginnings Ministries and Foxhole North strip club owner Thomas George was sent by city officials asking them to stop the weekly protests of each other’s establishment…the feud is straining local law enforcement and hurting the community…[but] they can’t legally be stopped from protesting…George explained to [reporters] that he…believes it is necessary to draw attention to…harassment by Dunfee and his congregation…

Above the Law (TW3 #434) 

Another one from Oklahoma:

A Tulsa County sheriff’s deputy…accused of sexual assault and indecent exposure resigned…as investigators search for more victims…Gerald Nuckolls…was arrested…[after using drugs as a pretext] to ask [a woman] inappropriate questions and…exposed himself to [her]…Nuckolls reportedly said he had a problem with pretty women…

If that preacher man wants me to repent, he better pay me more money.  –  Minnie Rae Simpson

One of the recurring themes of these harlotographies is the difficulty of ascertaining the truth of almost any given detail about the life of any given whore who lived prior to the 20^th-century advent of obsessive recordkeeping.  The farther back in history one delves, the harder it is to be sure of dates and other details, and the more biography merges into fiction, legend or even myth.  By the late 19^th century we can be reasonably certain of things like birthdates and residences for whores of middle or upper-class birth, but solid facts about those of the working class – especially in the frontier regions of the young United States – can be just as obscure as those of a person born centuries earlier.  Add claims made by the lady herself to entice customers or inflate her reputation, and those made by reporters, biographers and other tall-tale-tellers during her life and after her death, and we have the recipe for a legend as misty as that of King Arthur even if its subject lived well into recent times.

One excellent example of this is the story of Minnie Rae (sometimes called Mary) Simpson, a young San Francisco streetwalker of the 1870s.  According to the popular narrative of her life, she was born in or near Philadelphia in 1860 to a woman known only as Lacey; her father is said to have been a shoe worker who participated in the Great New England Shoemakers’ Strike which began on February 22^nd, 1860.  He is supposed to have died en route to California in 1862, either just before or just after the birth of Minnie’s younger brother, Adam.  Lacey claimed a land grant near San Francisco under the Homestead Act and managed to build up a small farm, relying on young Minnie for assistance with her baby brother; however, she died of scarlet fever in 1869, leaving the girl an orphan (it is unknown whether Adam survived).  Without family or even friends in the area, Minnie was forced to provide for herself and did so, as so many others have throughout history, by prostitution; she lived for a time with a Mr. Simpson (from whom she took her surname) and is supposed to have travelled with him the following year to England and Scotland.  There she is said to have met the young J.M. Barrie, who in later years wrote Peter Pan and patterned the character of Wendy after her.

While on this tour she became pregnant, and the only known photograph of her was taken in 1871.  She gave birth to a son (whom she named Bartholomew) the following year; by this point she was no longer with Simpson and lived mostly on the street.  She was a close friend to the notable San Francisco eccentric Emperor Norton, who proclaimed her “The Little Countess”, and the association almost certainly contributed heavily to her fame; during the same time period she gave a series of interviews to a journalist, who turned them into a book entitled My Life as a Child Prostitute: The Autobiography of Minnie Rae.  Given the subject matter, it seems likely that the reason the journalist remained anonymous was to avoid controversy or even accusations of being one of Minnie’s clients.  It was a wise precaution; though the Cult of the Child was not yet in full swing in the US, Minnie’s pragmatic view of prostitution (“I get paid to be a whore.  If I married some farmer, I’d have to do it for free”) and her statements that prostitutes do the work because it’s lucrative and gives them a high degree of freedom, were almost as incendiary then as they would be now.  Only a few copies were ever printed, and these were gathered together by a preacher and burned in 1880, soon after the Emperor Norton’s death.  One copy survived, and was passed down to her descendants by Bartholomew until it, too was lost sometime in the late 20^th century; only a few photocopied pages remain.  Minnie herself left San Francisco in 1873 and vanished from history; how Bartholomew knew anything about his mother or gained his copy of her book is entirely unclear, considering he was an infant at the time.  The only other concrete evidence of her existence is Minna Street in San Francisco, named for her by a politician who was one of her clients.

Now, the skeptical reader will no doubt already see a few problems with this narrative; though there are exceptions to every rule, in the late 19^th century the average age of menarche in the US was about 14, and conditions such as Minnie lived in would tend to raise the age due to poor nutrition; in other words, getting pregnant at the age of 11 was even less likely in 1871 than it is now, and delivering a healthy baby from such a pregnancy would be unlikelier still.  Furthermore, though she was undoubtedly precocious, her making the kind of splash that she did in the short time she managed it seems to me less like something a 10 or 11-year-old could accomplish, and more like the actions of a bright 14 or 15-year-old with a baby face who realized that lurid narratives sell.  The intelligent, outgoing Minnie was well-known among clients and acquaintances as a tale-teller, and she even boasted that Mark Twain had been inspired by some of her yarns; it seems very likely that she ratcheted her age down a few years for the sake of marketing, but whether she told her clients that age or whether it was something she came up with for a credulous journalist is unknown.  Given that her business is known to have gone up after she got pregnant (an obvious sign of more advanced physical maturity), and that underage whores still to this day exaggerate their back-stories for gullible members of the press, the latter seems far more likely.  One thing I find fascinating is that those who retell her story never find it odd that her birth year is known with such certainty despite the fact that her birthplace, her original surname and any event of her life after 1873 are not; I reckon the wanking fantasy of the pregnant 10-year-old streetwalker is just too juicy to pass up.

Larger-than-life characters tend to live on in the imaginations of others long after their deaths, and Minnie Rae is no exception.  Beside Peter Pan’s Wendy, she was also named a Discordian saint in 2006 (unsurprising, given that the Emperor Norton was a major influence on the philosophy); the Discordians seem to have started a rumor that the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train system was named after her son Bartholomew.  Minnie believed in reincarnation, and claimed to have been a Babylonian harlot who was mentioned in the Bible; whether she meant Revelation’s “Whore of Babylon” is unknown.  But it seems likely that her belief inspired two modern-day strippers to claim to be Minnie reincarnated; one of them, who went by Fannie Mae, worked in Los Angeles during the ‘90’s. The other, Kitty, worked on Bourbon Street in New Orleans during the ‘50s and ‘60s, knew Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst (one of the founders of Discordianism), and because of that connection (and a tentative one to Jack Ruby) was suspected by Jim Garrison as being connected to the Kennedy assassination conspiracy.  Confused yet?  Read some of the links, and it’ll probably get worse.  But it all goes to show that when dealing with the demimonde, appearances are often more important than reality, and adhering to conventional beliefs about women and girls is foolish at best.

[jimbenton]

POW!

magnus-thegreat-redundancy:

I believe that every american should at least watch this monologue from The Newsroom

Go home, back to my parents’ house; open the closet door; find the three boxes buried in the corner; dig them out; drag them out; peal off the duct tape and take out their contents: notebooks, photo albums, mix tapes, zines—what’s left of my youth. Spread it out in front of me and search for evidence, artifacts. Find: two show flyers, a sheet of stickers, a demo cassette, a few crumbled photographs.

One CD. Rock Immortal.

That’s it.

*

Rock Immortal was the only full-length album produced by the end-of-the-millennium East Bay band Dory Tourette and the Skirtheads. Part of the lesser-known Geekfest scene, the band derived its name from the local slang for meth, “skirt,” and the punk name of its frontman, who did in fact have Tourette’s Syndrome.

The 1999 album was recorded in a reported drug-fueled two-day frenzy, when all three of the band’s members were under age 21. Produced by late Hickey frontman and San Francisco Mission legend Matty Luv, Rock Immortal was released on the now-defunct DIY co-op label Smarmy Post-Angst Musicians (SPAM) Records.

Mission artist Chubby did the cover art, an apocalyptic cartoon scene of burning buildings; a sun with a line-snorting straw in its nose; a spread-eagle pigtailed girl licking a lollipop and pinching the thigh of a character twice her size; and a tattooed tranny eating a bowl of cereal, with a quote bubble that reads, “Told you dat shit will kill you.”

At the center of the scene, a hairy man with a horse cock and penis arms is a nailed to a crucifix.

He is looking straight at me.

*

When I first met Dory Tourette at the Berkeley BART station, he was hunched over an acoustic guitar that looked twice his size, his head jerking and his fingers running up the frets. A black guitar case lay open in front of him and every few minutes, a commuter would deposit some coins. I was 15, he 19.

That summer, ostensibly selling zines out of my backpack, I began to sit with him. Really I just wanted to be near him, to soak in every burst of electric energy that shot off him and through the station.

I thought I was in love, but really it was just a typical teenage obsession exacerbated by depression, speed psychosis, and confessional poetry. I started following him around the East Bay, waiting around the corner while he bought 40s with his brother’s ID; crouching between the cars in a parking lot, chopping lines on the mirror of a Revlon compact; smoking weed in public parks, our hoodies pulled over our heads to block the wind; crashing college parties and drinking all their beer.

When I picture him now, I see him moving, always in the progressive tense. He is leaning against a brick wall, strumming; crouching down on one knee, fingerpicking; standing between the planks of a half-built patio, howling. Masturbating in the middle of the street outside Gilman. Jumping out of a car window. Falling to his knees on the stage at Burnt Ramen. Playing a guerilla show at Ocean Beach, taking a swig of whiskey, the burn of it rippling across his face as it hit his ulcered insides. Collapsing on Leile’s living room floor, piss spreading out in the carpet beneath him. Curling up on the porch, burying his head in his hands and sobbing, “My mom kicked me out,” over and over, and not moving away when I put my arm around his back. Leaning towards me the morning after I’d tried to hook with him, the morning after he’d refused to take advantage of me—touching my shoulder and asking me if I was cool, dude, you cool?

Reaching in his backpack and pulling out a CD, saying, “So like, some guy at a label could see this and be like, ‘Yeah, those dudes party and get fucked-up at their shows but they could still make this, they could still do this.’ Like, this is what we’re capable of, dude, what we could do: we could make this album.”

The florescent BART station lights glinting off the case.

*

Rock Immortal opens with “Sex With Junkies,” a thrashy-punk-meets-bubble-gum-pop song composed of two verses, one chorus, a catchy melody and just-seedy-enough lyrics. If they’d left it at that, if they’d made that into a formula and followed it, the album might have been a hit.

By the second track, Rock Immortal drives deep into The Skirtheads’ genre-busting subversion: dirty Mission punk mixing with country twang, Buddy Holly hiccups and a Johnny Cash story-telling sensibility. Frenetic sounds are anchored in basic chords and a simple song structure, then topped off with lyrics about snorting meth, killing white people, getting raped by cops, dating nine-year-olds, and crying, always crying: “Make me cry tonight,” “I’m gonna cry,” “If you fuck with my head and make me cry”—a vulnerability that complicates any shock-value appeal.

The driving force of the album is the character Dory Tourette, part invented alter ego, part self-mythologized caricature of frontman Dory Ben-Shalom—a tragi-comedy anti-hero who acts out our darkest and most taboo impulses in an ill-fated search for love. The album sends listeners careening into the world of that character, though in its vulnerable moments, you can’t help but get whiffs of the other, the person inside. You get closer and closer to that center, until at last the album ends with two solo tracks.

*

With its vulgar lyrics and genre bending, Rock Immortal was one of the best manifestations of the Geekfest sensibility, a fringe subsect more concerned with challenging paradigms and championing outsiders than donning bullet belts and pounding out power chords. The Geekfest scene grew in response to what many regarded as an increasing commodification and reductive aestheticizing of punk. Underage bands were told they didn’t sound “punk enough” to play Gilman or receive Maximum Rock N Roll coverage—a case of weirdos rejecting the weirder-os. There was nothing left to do except go weirder, grosser, more offensive and unmarketable. Bands formed their own free all-ages shows and in turn, their own label: SPAM Records, reachable at (510) BAD-SMUT.

While releasing Rock Immortal, SPAM Records co-founder John Mink “got a lot of flack” from people who “didn’t get it.” “I’m not even sure I got it,” Mink later wrote on a now-deleted Myspace blog post. He just knew there’d be lasting power in releasing a truly idiosyncratic piece of art. But the broader punk scene didn’t agree. They largely rejected the album, and the most enraged denizens demanded Dory Ben-Shalom be jailed for the supposed sex crimes of Dory Tourette. It goes without saying that there wasn’t a place for the album in the mainstream. Too strange, too grotesque, too unclassifiable and perverse, Rock Immortal slowly sank into the static of the thousand DIY albums of the thousand indie bands of that era.

And though Rock Immortal immediately became one of my all-time favorite and most-listened-to albums, I was 16, so that isn’t saying a whole lot. It probably had more to do with the scene and the era; with being young and fucked-up and killing myself; with my unrequited crush on Dory and the way I turned the album into an emblem for all those things.

At least that’s what I told myself. The album followed me as I drifted away from the punk scene: got clean, went to college, worked two jobs, muddled through a life that felt like a bombed-out battlefield. I wrote off that person I’d been and all the things she’d felt as teenage drama, theatrics. None of it was real. I threw my old zines and mix tapes and my copy of Rock Immortal into a box that I taped shut and stored at my parents’ house.

But I couldn’t quite get away from it. Before I locked it away, I imported Rock Immortal into my iTunes. It’d come on shuffle every now and then, and a few times a year I’d listen to the album all the way through. I’d hear those old songs and a wave of nostalgia would slam into me: cigarettes on foggy nights, distortion through toilet-paper earplugs, smeared ink stamps on my wrists, the taste of cheap speed dripping down my throat.

Images would rise from that buried place in me: Dory on the pavement outside Gilman, Dory on the corner in front of the liquor store, Dory on the floor between the ticket machines.

Dory in the parking lot between the cars, telling me which nostril to use when I snorted, telling me to use a hollowed-out Bic pen instead of a rolled-up dollar because it was cleaner, it was safer, I had to think about my health.

Dory crouched on one knee, strumming his guitar while I made us a straw.

Eventually SPAM Records went under and Rock Immortal became even harder to find. Everyone got older. The Geekfest scene disintegrated. Dory cleaned up a bit, got a regular job, got a girlfriend, put a damper on the self-destruction he’d performed all over the East Bay in the previous millennium.

Then sometime in the mid-2000s Rock Immortal reemerged. A wave of Geekfest nostalgia swept through the Bay, and the album gained a modest cult following among a younger generation of punks who weren’t so disturbed by its vile lyrics and genre twisting.

The Skirtheads played a few shows during those years, the last of which was in June 2007 at Gilman Street. The show was recorded and clips were later uploaded to YouTube. In the footage Dory has put on weight. His hair is shaggy and his signature pervert moustache is buried beneath a stubbly beard. The crowd is bigger than it ever was at any of their earlier shows, filled with kids locking arms and swaying and singing along, “The Saint, The Saint, The Saint St. Ides.”

I am in that crowd. I am one of those kids.

That was the last time I saw Dory. On October 22, 2007, Dory Tourette Ben-Shalom died in his sleep. He was 28.

*

You can still find Rock Immortal, which is somewhat impressive given the album’s release occurred before the advent of social media, before the end of the last millennium, before the curtain dropped on an era when things could still get lost, buried, distorted, and forgotten.

You can Google Rock Immortal and get led to a couple of sites that offer free downloads. Someone uploaded the whole album to YouTube. You can even still get the physical thing: Thrillhouse Records offers an LP version for $9, with the description “The best album you’ve never heard! Seriously!”

You can find blogs and Tumblrs that describe the album as “disgustingly overlooked,” and “criminally underrated.” You can find tributes written by old friends, usually stark and restrained, some of which note the scarcity of what has survived: “Rock Immortal remains Dory’s sole statement to those of us who weren’t there for the whole Geekfest scene.”

But you can also find write-ups by people who only knew Dory tangentially—from shows or parties, people he met on MUNI buses—who haven’t been able to shake the album either. They find themselves still humming the songs, they say. You can even find comments from people who never met Dory and never saw The Skirtheads play. You can read how the album found its way to the Tulsa suburbs “via a crusty with a home-made Crass tattoo on his neck,” and developed fans there. You can read about how Dory became “kind of a legend” in upstate New York.

You can see the rings of reverberation the album has made, the way in which I am not alone—how there’s a little group of us who’ve been followed by this bizarre, obscure album by one of the most bizarre, obscure bands of a scene and an era that are gone.

*

Near the center of Rock Immortal, buried between “The Lord Said Ejaculate” and “I’m Too Young To Be a Pedophile,” sits the oddball track “Build Me a Straw.” Stylistically, its execution is heavier, grinding-er, closer to the Hickey style of punk that so influenced the band. Gone are the country or rockabilly twists; gone also is the stripped-down despair present the first time I heard the song, acoustic and solo on the BART station floor.

Here the drums are relentless and the vocals come in one headphone like a far-away thing. There’s no chorus, just one verse that repeats itself before the song splits apart and a scrambling guitar solo takes over, driving you deeper towards something, though all it ends up being is a fade-out.

The lyrics are a diversion, a shift away from the over-the-top absurdity that characterizes the album. In this song, the character of Dory Tourette is not pseudo-celebrating drugs or inappropriately pining for the affections of an underage girl. Both of those elements are present but what occurs instead is a break in the character. Something else is glimpsed: the loneliness that underpins those longings, the desperation and futility that perhaps underpin the whole album and give it its gravity, its center, its thing that lingers.

When I hear it now I always see the same thing: this one moment in the parking lot when we’re crouched down between the cars. I am chopping lines and cutting a Bic pen, and Dory is sitting next to me, and I’m filled with so much longing—for him, for the high, for anything to make it all stop hurting—that it feels like my chest might explode. I want to give it all to him then, every ugly painful thing, all the shame I carry, and I want him to take me away, I want to run away, I want to go anywhere and be anything, as long as it’s with him.

And then it all sinks back. The static melts and the chasing fades, and there comes this funny little moment where it’s just us, sitting between the cars—two adjacent islands with his song reverberating between us.

“Little girl build me a straw / Stupid burning to my tongue / I can’t make her understand / I’m not violent enough / I’m not violent enough”

*

You could probably still do it: find someone with an original copy of Rock Immortal. If you asked around enough, I’m sure someone could dig one up.

You could follow them to their parents’ house, open the closet door, pull out the boxes, and sift through the refuse. You could find the CD. You could crack open the case, see the track list and the credits, and the sketch of another crying man with penis arms. You could see the montage of the promo stickers, snippets of lyrics written in cursive alongside simple hand-drawn images. You could see the CD itself, pressed with the image of a nose clutching a straw and chasing a bag of powder across a cityscape.

You could see that I’m not making this up, that it’s not all static and myth—that there was something tangible at the center, and that it survived.

Related Posts:

• The Other Bay Area
• ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: HICKEY’S VARIOUS STATES OF DISREPAIR
• Michael Chabon’s Punk Rock Days
• Albums of Our Lives: Death Cab For Cutie’s Transatlanticism
• Songs of Our Lives: Dead Kennedys’ “Chemical Warfare”

No real blogging today … unexpected life bits occupying me.  The blessed rain finally came! But the sunshade we just put on the front of the small “Haven” household (now inhabited by eldest son Manchild and his Beloved) inadvertently created an emergency.  Water ran off it to the end, where it pooled and ran back towards the slightly lower house!  It was almost over the metal door threshold when the Manchild noticed it.  So we old farts fell out along with him to do a fast repair job.

A ditch was dug, just as we used to do ’round our Army tents.  The runoff fell into this and was ditch-guided towards the lower back yard and Labyrinth. We filled the ditch with some of the plentiful fist-and-above sized rocks.  Then the inside out rubber tire planters were stationed around the edges of the rest of the sunshade area to catch and block water from the rest of the driveway….a dike of planters.

The little building was built, not by us, but by the original house owner and built at a grade where all the water of the yard drains towards it!  We had somewhat corrected this upon our remodel in 2006 that made it a habitation, by putting in a holed pipe in front of the doors.  Our mistake this week was not realizing runoff from the sunshade would overwhelm that drainage capacity.  But the problem is solved with only some muddied muscle power, no money spent.

And now, I am off for errands….fuming and powered past my physical weariness to realize that yes, yet again, we like war better than we like feeding hungry people.

Filed under: Life

So I was asked a few days ago to speak on Full Disclosure Podcast about the #MyNameIs controversy that’s got everyone moving to Ello/GooglePlus/whatever. A really good writeup by Dottie Lux is here- my profile has been reinstated, at least for now, while my girlfriend is still banned. She’s lost not only a social network, but close to 7 years of photos documenting her transition. It’s fucking horrible.

Anyway. Here’s the podcast interview, I hope you enjoy it. Note that there is also discussion of child pornography in the first half, relating to photographer Wyatt Neumann who had his social media accounts shut down when nude photos of his 2 year old daughter were deemed child pornography. As this may be triggering to some folks, I wanted to give you a head’s up.

I can’t get it to embed, so here you go!

In a dispatch this weekend appearing in Artforum’s usually stultifying Scene & Herd blog, it was reported that artist Oscar Murillo had carried out an intriguing intervention at a party hosted by the Brazilian collector Frances Reynolds. Coinciding with the ArtRio fair, the celebration was meant to commemorate the conclusion of Murillo’s residency at Reynolds’s Rio de Janeiro mansion. And although a residency might connote a withdrawal from the world as usual, even a sense of artistic monasticism, Murillo turned the monk in the abbey into the skunk at the garden party, delivering a fiery speech that expounded upon Brazil’s “colonization”; in doing so he brought his host to tears and caused Tunga, a Brazilian artist represented by Luhring Augustine, to leave.

The speech’s turn came from the content of the residency itself, as Artforum correspondent Frank Expósito writes:

Upon arriving for the stay, Murillo had been struck by the fact that the house staff was predominantly black. He said he couldn’t ignore it. So the artist, dressed in a white jumpsuit, worked as a member of the house staff for the entirety of the residency.

If what preceded the speech is compelling (perhaps the most interesting work the artist has undertaken in his short yet meteoric career), the hectoring that followed his address at the Reynolds party beggars belief:

Guests tried to enjoy the outdoor party after the polemical address, but it wouldn’t be so easy. The once pristine jumpsuit, now dirty by the knees, swayed overhead as a reminder. Murillo stood firm amid a fray of questioning. “Do you even know who Paula Cooper is? Do you?” badgered collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas, referring to successful social activists in the art world. “Do you know who Karl Marx is? Read it again,” pursued another. Murillo shook his head and responded to the questions about his integrity with more questions. “Do you know of any other artist coming from the working class in Latin America? Do you know how much Gabriel Orozco sells now?” The crowd could not be satiated. On my way out, David Zwirner’s Greg Lulay gave the artist a congratulatory hug.

I think it’s fair to say that Murillo’s labor-attuned gesture, though certainly not unprecedented in recent art history — Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s longtime Department of Sanitation residency and Fred Wilson’s “Guarded View” (1991) come to mind — represents a welcome transition away from the large and largely derivative canvases for which he has thus far been best known, and delivers more bite than the Chelsea chocolate factory that may have presaged this line of thinking.

And the community that so quickly lionized Murillo has more than earned his withering scrutiny, with Donald and Mera Rubell’s condescending remarks about the young artist in a New York magazine article this summer offering the most appalling example of the genre. (Sample quote from Mera Rubell: “People are always trying to figure out the power of the immigrant…The power of the immigrant is that they always show up. You don’t always know if you can deliver but you always show up. Oscar always shows up.”)

Unfortunately, his New York gallery, David Zwirner, did not have any more information about the Reynolds project when we reached out to them earlier today.

A 101-year-old film discovered by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is the oldest known feature film starring a cast of black actors. The footage, discovered among 900 negatives acquired from Bronx-based Biograph Studio in 1939 by the museum’s first curator of film, is set to be screened next month. The pioneering film will be presented alongside archival documents and other findings as part of MoMA’s 100 Years in Post-Production: Resurrecting a Lost Landmark of Black Film History. According to the Guardian, black actors appeared in film as early as 1909, but such footage is believed lost.

The untitled 1913 film, provisionally named Bert Williams Lime Kiln Field Day Project, features the Caribbean-American vaudevillian Bert Williams. In a news release, MoMA notes that the seven reels of “rushes” — unedited daily takes — were filmed at “virtually the same time” as the Ku Klux Klan–promoting film The Birth of a Nation, which ignited controversy and spurred the hate group’s recruiting efforts.

But in the Biograph Studio reels, ancillary documentary material depicting the movie’s filming presents “candid footage of the black cast and white crew interacting on set, and several frames of Williams mingling with white extras on a suburban street location during a break in filming,” per MoMA. Along with offering footage of sets in New York and New Jersey, the reels represent a substantive contribution to the video documentation of this period in American history and show business.

I have written before of how this case has affected Mrs Griffin – DLTs wife.

I have yet to see an ounce of concern or sympathy for the other victims of Operation Yewteree. The children and partners of those prosecuted. They are genuinely innocent.

Stuart Hall’s elderly wife has seen her life torn apart; Max Clifford’s wife has suffered; Freddie Starr’s wife has seen her husband reduced to a shadow of his former self. Whatever you feel about the guilt or innocence of these men – their families have done nothing to deserve the life they must now live.

Whilst that equally applies to the families of all those convicted of crimes – few have to suffer the gloating, gleeful, media coverage that blights the life of these women.

Financially ruined, fighting a personal battle against cancer – spare more than a thought for Mrs Griffin tonight.

If you have any spare coppers – tip them into the donate button, and I will ensure that they are turned into as large a bunch of flowers for Mrs Griffin as they will permit – from all of us who remember that ‘victims’ come in all shapes and forms and some of them bear a greater burden than others.

It will be a pathetically small gesture dropped into her ocean of misery – but hopefully it will let her know that not all of the social media landscape is dancing a jig of victory tonight.

* Edited to add: I have removed the donate button from this post to stop you generous souls from sending any more money! 

I have just sent a cheque for £283 to Dave Lee Travis’ solicitor who will ensure that Marianne Griffin gets her flowers from you all. 

If I hadn’t taken the button down – she was in danger of ending up with hay fever!!! Thank you all of you. 

Sapphophobia describes the intersection of biphobia and misogyny. It is named after the poet Sappho, who, despite what you might have heard, was actually bisexual.

Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as indecisive, because all women are seen to lack a strong mind. Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as deceptive, because all women are seen as liars. Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as making it up for attention, because all women are seen as attention-seeking minxes. Sapphophobia is where bi women are seen as greedy, because all women are seen to be out for all they can get. Sapphophobia is when bi women are seen as sluts, because all women in control of their sexuality are seen as pathological.

It’s impossible to separate sapphophobia from misogyny, just as it is impossible to separate it from broader biphobia. It’s telling that it’s usually men who repeat this trope, although as I painfully learned last year, women can do it too and that’s rooted in internalised misogyny as well as a heterosexual hatred of queer women.

So today, I send love to my bi sisters, my pansexual sisters, my queer sisters. You are beautiful, and fuck the world. Literally, if that’s what you want.

I did not wake up to smell the coffee this morning.  I slept an exhausted sleep with dreams so rich that morning felt like a foreign country.  My alarm had been practicing futility for 20 minutes.

My dreamscape was not totally unlike our waking world.  I was living in a rather grubby industrial town.  Somewhat oddly, a blocky dirty factory crowned the hill in town — an industrial “castle” full of exhausted workers instead of knights.
But my concern was of an archaeological dig on the edge of town.  It was the talk of the town.  A skeleton of an apparently important woman had been found.  One of the findings related to this was sending me scurrying up the hill to the town-crowning factory, because it had a large locking room used as a sort of commercial safe.  Anyone in town could store their valuables there and I stored my jewelry box there!

I was going to my jewelry box because on the ring finger of the found skeleton there was an imprint of a ring, as if it had been burned through her flesh and onto the bone itself.  The ring was the perfect image of one I owned.(And oddly, the image of a ring I DID actually own once, before I gave it away when I mostly stopped wearing rings.) I got to my jewelry box and took out a ring, putting it on my finger, eager to be out of the depressing environs of the factory and walked out to the parking lot. Peculiarly, the ring on my finger was NOT the one I meant to get…but a silver band with a garish heavy silver skull!

There I met a woman I knew; I treated her like family, but she certainly was not my mother. She was distressed and when I asked why she told me her daughter had gotten a job at the factory — but nobody had seen the young woman since. The factory blew off her phone calls and she was going to get an answer in person, put they had not let her inside. I led her toward the cars, greatly concerned and told her I’d heard some foul stories about women employees vanishing. I embraced her as I confided that there were rumors of possible human traffic, and we discussed how to get this addressed in a “factory town.”

We walked back towards our cars, and she suddenly said. “I need to cut string over a blade!” As the oddity of dreams often is, I knew what this meant IN the dream — it was some magical/superstitious thing like “knocking wood” apparently. She found a piece of dental floss, I pulled my key chain and held steady the little curving blade of an old P-38 can opener! (Yes, I have one of those on my actual keychain.) She couldn’t cut the floss, her husband joined us, suggesting a different piece of string and began searching the grubby parking lot of something of that sort. I told her I had a knife and opened my purse to find it. And searching my purse for my actual antler handled folding knife is where I awakened.

I had the sort of weekend that I would expect to induce stress-fed dreams. But that dream is pretty enigmatic with relation to real life issues that hit air distribution devices this weekend. My youngest son, my PTSD “Runaway” out of the Army since July out in the wilds of Texas, is coming home. THIS WEEK. He is coming to STAY and bringing his two dogs, to whom my allergy-pain-in-ass body will mount a ferocious reaction. His dogs will bring the combined household total of pets needing care and costly vet services to TEN. This freaked me out so badly I considered taking our two rescued dogs BACK to their rescue sites.

Of course, the pet stress was merely a surface distraction from the real issue. Knowing my much worried about younger son is returning, I was instantly in terror of feeling the sense of failure and helplessness that stalked me in the years following his precipitate flight from home in his teens. Knowing that to even COME home means he has hit the end of a rope with his medically disabled issues and PTSD makes me feel inadequate and frightened for him.

But thankfully, my friends and family rallied. Two young visitors offered me surcease and escape at need to their apartment. My husband and son promised I would not be “doing it alone” as it always was in the past. My son told me he would take Fen, the little beguiling terrier mix we’ve had only a week, to his house. Samoyed Jack doesn’t really increase my allergy load, so the two new dogs will hopefully not overwhelm me into the ER by themselves. We resolve to find a way to pay the vet bills for two ancient ferrets – Helen and Farley, ancient Jack, middle aged Fenster, Uncas, and Beatrice, young Gracie and incoming Ladybug and Marley.

I fell into bed and died to consciousness and my mind spun me a tale. I don’t know its meaning, but waking with Fen the scruffy terrier on my husband’s pillow under his covers? Well, start the week on a rueful laugh, right?

Tagged: dreams, family, parenthod, ptsd

…for the season?

Well, there sure is a reason I never liked playing dominos.  Any why I am sick of histrionics.

And that Starbucks doesn’t get any of MY bucks…cause one more “I love coffee AND guns” bumper sticker is going to make me puke.

And why guns are not the answer.

And here?  Well, it is the autumnal equinox.  Today I clean and take inside the beads counting the dead — to protect some of the more delicate ceramic bits from the frosts of winter to come.  And I will sit in meditation outside in the occasional misting rain, contemplating the change of world amidst the change of seasons.

I will wonder how the winter ahead will go.  My husband will retire, we will have less income. We still support my eldest son, medically disabled veteran and college graduate, who cannot find more than a minimum wage job that barely pays his child support and gas for the car.  We will soon be supporting our youngest medically disabled veteran son and his pets, too.  The house is filling up as I put up fall garlands and beg the skies for rain.

I will wonder why the national news is filled with a search for a nutcase who shot two cops; but has scarce a word about a nutcase felon who shot his daughter and six little grandchildren with a gun he shouldn’t have been allowed to have.  I will wonder why the White House is more worried about a man with an itsy bitsy pocket knife running through the front doors instead of why the man was PTSD crazed enough to do so. (And no, thank you, I don’t give a rat’s ass what was IN his car — he did not take anything really dangerous with him to the White House.)  I will wonder why my country is gearing up for war against the bunch of murderous religious asshats of ISIL, while not addressing the murderous minded (to women) religious asshats of THIS country. And I’ll wonder why we can’t quit religious justifying the beating of women and children in this country.(Maybe because we dont’ read the correct bedtime stories to our children?)

 

Filed under: Politics, PTSD Journals, Religious Nuts & Bolts, War & No Peace, War on Women Tagged: child abuse, ecology, environment, ISIL, moron media, propaganda, ptsd, religious folly, spousal abuse, war

Few did obsessive nature handicrafts like the Victorians, whether it was seaweed scrapbooking or shell arranging, something of the salon repression boiling over into insanely labored DIY arts. One of the fascinations was with the newly accessible microscopes, which showed previously invisible specimens such as the single cell algae diatoms, of which there are hundreds of different types in the world. With a single hair, practitioners would scoot the diatoms, encircled by iridescent glass-like silica cell walls, into kaleidoscope patterns only viewable beneath a lens.

Due to this being incredibly tedious, the art of diatom designs didn’t really make it into the 21st century. However, filmmaker Matthew Killip found one Englishman named Klaus Kemp who is carrying on the craft. In the short documentary The Diatomist, shared earlier this year on Vimeo, Killip visits Kemp at the work he’s perfected over years of research, showing some of the gorgeous miniature art, as well as expeditions to the water the diatoms call home. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a horse trough, or a ditch, gutters, you name it, where there is water it’s worth having a look,” Kemp says in the film.

“Klaus Kemp has devoted his entire life to understanding and perfecting diatom arrangement and he is now acknowledged as the last great practitioner of this beautiful combination of art and science,” Killip writes alongside the film. Kemp uses a needle instead of the Victorian hair to move the diatoms around, but the results are just as labored and lovely as the antique examples. You can see more of them at Kemp’s Microlife Services site.

h/t Boing Boing

There’s never been much of a unified scene when it comes to capturing landscapes in art, but maybe more even than before artists are very experimental with how to show a stretch of space. The environment is only being culled back further by development, and human eyes are more frequently fixed on the universe beyond our Earth. In Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography by William A. Ewing, released this month from Thames & Hudson, over 100 photographers are compiled to explore the contemporary landscape.

Ewing writes in his introduction to the book:

Environmental dangers notwithstanding, there are still pleasures to be gained from landscape photographs that remind us of what we have lost, or grasp for alternative routes to the future … Each generation of photographers has a new world to contend with, full of Chekhov’s good and evil, but also full of unique pictorial possibilities.

Some of the photographs were exhibited last year at Somerset House in London, but even if you’re familiar with the more prominent names like Hiroshi Sugimoto and his grey, liminal water views, or Edward Burtynsky’s shocking industrial captures, it’s really Ewing’s curation that is most on view. Usually massive group books divide up their pages by artist; here the over 230 photographs are arranged on generously-sized pages by subjective themes. Ewing acknowledges that landscape photography is “as varied a terrain as the landscape itself,” and seems as much interested in contrasting ways of looking as creating a cohesive argument for the genre.

For example, the “Sublime” chapter has a 1998 Sally Mann photograph of an ethereal forest right by a high-definition 1984 shot of the Witch Head Nebula by David Malin, and a tree void of leaves shrouded with snow in Japan photographed by Michael Kenna in 2005, alongside a NASA Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera image of the Moon’s frigid north pole. It’s like that throughout the section, stars, and small terrestrial views hauntingly joined. Later in the apocalyptic “Rupture,” the “battered world,” as Ewing describes our planet, reveals its growing wounds, like in Pablo López Luz’s aerial of the seemingly endless sprawl of Mexico City, and in “Scar,” its mutilations, such as Daniel Beltra’s eerily beautiful overhead of a 2010 ocean oil spill. Landmark has quite a scope of work, and is limited by its nature, yet Ewing’s careful eye and passionate voice in his writing are compelling in uniting these disparate photographs in a continuation of the landscape genre.

Landmark: The Fields of Landscape Photography by William A. Ewing is available from Thames & Hudson.

EDIT: v0.21 adds .OBJ export from the webplayer; you can now actually use this to make models and import it into whatever you want. (If you want to use this in Unity, you will need to apply a material / shader that uses vertex colors and doesn't cull backfaces, so pretty much any of the "Particle" shaders)

There are 2 common modes in 3D polygonal modeling: vertex manipulation and sculpting. But for many of these workflows, a 3D mass exists mostly as a surface to be unwrapped and painted. If all we need is a 3D canvas to paint upon, why can't we just go straight to the painting part?

"Mural" is an experimental freehand 3D modeling tool similar to SketchUp's "Freehand" tool or the impressive Tilt Brush, except SketchUp imagines it more as a tracing aid and Tilt Brush relies on VR hardware and doesn't readily export geometry.

I want to make Mural as an accessible 3D tool that borrows game UI metaphors (specifically, first person mouselook) and directly exports the resulting 3D models for use in games, or anything, really. Many of the models made in Mural will not look like "traditionally" modelled 3D objects, and intentionally embrace glitchy non-representational aesthetics, twisted normals, vertex colors, and z-sorting artifacts. If it hasn't already occurred, I imagine the "politics of 3D" will shift to embrace these phenomena as artistic features rather than aesthetic flaws.

(I am also indebted to Rich Edwards' early research with "3d concepts" using semi-transparent planes.)

CHANGELOG
v0.22

• decoupled canvas movement from painting (thanks for suggestion @Dewb) so you can now move the painting surface WHILE painting

v0.21

• added simple .OBJ export for webplayer; press F12 to save a .OBJ to your computer

v0.20

• fixed stroke shader, colors now render properly
• added a color picker hue / saturation circle, adapted from code in UnityPaint
• replaced line renderers with generated meshes from Vectorosity
• added .OBJ export
• added very basic undo support (press [Z] to delete most recent stroke(s) )

If you regularly follow geek culture, you've probably seen early versions of Dirk Loechel's spaceship comparison chart, which shows the relative sizes of vehicles from science fiction games, movies and TV shows. Well, it's finished -- and it's even...

I missed out on the big climate change awareness march in Manhattan today. I work weekends, and heading down to Manhattan for a spell before rushing back to Westchester in time for work was just not an option. I don't think that this was a cop-out on my part. I cover "green" issues fairly regularly, and the presence of one more person at the rally isn't as important as the presence of a voice consistently harping on green issues.

To me, the biggest problem facing our society is our utter failure to look beyond the immediate future: the next quarter, the next election cycle, the next ratings period... these occupy the thoughts of our policy makers to a far greater extent than a long-term, sustainable future. The symptoms of this underlying failure to develop a long-range plan, better yet, a multi-generational blueprint for the future, can be see in all walks of life- bubble economies, boom-and-bust cycles, environmental degradation, and infrastructure delapidation. Tragically, I don't see any changes being implemented until it's too late. Hell, at this point, I'm convinced that the best we can do is to lessen the impact of the coming crash, but big business and bad government actors are doing their damnedest to put the pedal to the metal.

I've long maintained that fossil fuels should be considered "startup capital" to be used to usher in a sustainable energy economy. The problem is that Homo sapiens has been burning (quite literally) the "seed money" with little effort to develop the next generation of energy sources. My personal feeling is that biofuels developed from algae or small, quick growing plants suck as duckweed. Carbon capture would best be achieved through reforestation efforts.

At any rate, the most important change that has to occur is that we, as a species, have to think of a future beyond the next quarter.

While I was on tour with Lock In, I turned off the comments here at Whatever, opening them for Big Idea posts and the occasional post when I was able to spend a little time babysitting the thread. Among other things I was curious to see what, if any, effect turning the comment off would have on visits to the site.

The answer seems to be not a whole lot. Traffic to Whatever overall was down in the last four weeks, but I expected it to be down, because it always goes down when I’m on book tour — I’m not posting as much and what I do post tends to be short bits about where I am on tour. Turning off the comments doesn’t really appear to have dropped viewership lower, as a percentage, than any other time I’ve been tour — or if it had it was negligible enough that I don’t see it.

In one sense this is not too terribly surprising. As I’ve noted before, Whatever gets thousands of visits and visitors daily, but only (generally) a few dozen commentors on any given day. As a percentage, the commenting class here — as it is pretty much everywhere — is small compared to the overall readership. The inability to comment is not a huge thing when you don’t comment at all. Likewise, I suspect that most of the commenters were cool with the comments being off for a bit if I couldn’t sit on them like I usually do. So overall: Not a huge surprise, although it’s still interesting to me.

It doesn’t mean that I’ll be keeping comments off, mind you. The commenting class here may be small relative to overall readership, but it is of high quality, if I may say so myself, and for those folks to who do read for the comments (and I’m one of them), I would hate to deprive them of that enjoyment. So comments are back on. Comment away, you crazy kids!

That said, I am going to make one major change: After 14 days, comments threads will automatically close. I’m doing this for two reasons. One, in nearly all cases, the conversation in any comment thread is done two weeks out, and the only non-spam comments the comment threads accrue are from people who generally don’t have anything new or useful to say — indeed, late hits in my experience are generally some form of trolling. They won’t be missed.

Two, I turned comments back on here and less than a half hour later had more than 200 fresh comments in my spam queue. The good news is that WordPress’ spam catcher caught nearly all of them, but on the other hand, it was a reminder that I get a couple thousand attempted spam messages a day here. The site has close to nine thousand entries, many of which still have (had) open comment threads. If you’re a spammer, that’s a lot of shots on goal. Limiting the spam opportunities to just a few dozen active threads will make my site maintenance a lot easier, and these days I don’t have as much time to moderate as I used to.

So if you have anything to say on a comment thread, say it in the first couple of weeks, or forever hold your peace, at least here on the blog.

Here’s another change I’m going to make. From time to time while I was traveling (or otherwise busy), I’ve wanted to comment on some contentious topic or another but held off because I simply didn’t have the time to sit on the comment thread. As a result, and because I am rather more busy with travel and work these days than I was before, I find myself not writing up those pieces. I think Whatever’s range of topics has suffered a bit because of it recently.

So, here’s the plan: If I find I want to write something on a contentious topic but I don’t have time to moderate a comment thread, I’m just gonna write the thing and not turn on comments, or wait to turn on the comments until I have time to moderate. Simple! So simple, in fact, that I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t think about it before (In fact, there have been times when I’ve done that, but it never occured to be to think to myself “hey, you know, this is a thing you could do whenever you needed to.” Because I’m an idiot, you see).

When I have the comments off (or delayed), how will you comment? Well, of course, there is Twitter and Facebook and your own blogs and even (gasp!) email, which is how people used to comment to me before comments were on here at all. Who knows, it may even lead to an increase in hate mail, which, to be honest, I hardly get anymore (this is not an actual complaint).

In any event, that’s where I am on comments.

 

An interesting conversation developed in my post from a couple of days ago on police unions and militarization. Unfortunately, a lot of it came down to what I see very often, which is people on the left supporting unionism in principle but then, when those workers take a position that these people don’t agree with, stripping them of their bargaining rights becomes the answer. The left appropriating anti-union right-wing rhetoric on workers they don’t like is not a good idea, whether BART strikers in San Francisco or police officers’ unions that take positions today’s progressives don’t like.

Joseph Slater had a couple of comments that I think are an important pushback against these ideas. Slightly edited, I want to present them in a front page post:

As someone who has paid a lot of attention to this area over the past few decades, a few observations.

(1) As Hogan at least implied, barring collective bargaining for police would not get rid of police unions or police union political activity. There is a First Amendment right for police officers (and most other public employees) to form unions and act as political advocates. Indeed, in states which don’t permit police to bargain collectively (and there are a number of those, because the First Amendment right to organize into unions does not extend to a right to bargain collectively), police unions still do lobby, often effectively.

(2) Speaking of the fact that a number of states do not permit police to bargain collectively, opponents of police collective bargaining might want to produce some evidence that police behavior, either on the ground or in politics, is “worse” (by their standards) in states that permit collective bargaining than in states that don’t permit collective bargaining: e.g., that the police in South Carolina and Virginia (where collective bargaining is prohibited) are doing better (by the lights of critics) than the police in Iowa and New Hampshire (where the police have collective bargaining rights). I’m not sure such a case could be made, but if you want to take away collective bargaining rights, you should be able to show how things are better where such rights don’t exist.

(3) The concern that police oppose, say, civilian review boards is addressed in public-sector labor law by consistent rules that limit the scope of bargaining for police about such issues. Public-sector labor laws routinely prohibit police unions from bargaining over civilian review boards, use-of-deadly-force rules, and similar policies that clearly affect the public interest. For example, there is a big case out of California on use-of-deadly-force policies squarely holding that police unions can’t negotiate about that topic.

(4) As others have said, critics of police unions seem to put a lot of faith in police management, which seems oddly misplaced in the context of “use of force” issues. It’s also oddly misplaced in the context of basic worker-rights issues, such as unjust discipline, abuse of overtime, and other basic workers-rights issues.

Bottom line / tl;dnr version: cops have interests *as workers* but society has an interest in restraints on the use of force by officers of the state. Collective-bargaining laws balance these interests by limiting what topics police can bargain about. Also, though, eliminating collective bargaining rights will not eliminate the rights of police officers to form unions and lobby for their goals.

One other point worth mentioning. Per Missouri state law, police unions in that state do *not* have the sorts of collective bargaining rights that police unions in most other states enjoy. So the problems in Ferguson — from over-militarization to plain old excessive force — are not attributable to union collective bargain rights.

I completely agree.

It’s amazing how many stupid lies about children’s health parents believe these days. Get your kids vaccinated for christ’s sake.

Teddy watches me playing but he is not the only one. In the shadows a more sinister audience waits. If only I could warn her, thinks Teddy. But Teddy can’t even cover his eyes, let alone warn me. All he can do is be a silent witness. To your thief of his little girl. Related…

I was…struck by how the…treatment for these women mostly consisted of convincing them that they were victims.  –  Jessica Gutiérrez

Bad Girls 

I suspect missing information:

…sex worker…Aarti Yadav…was arrested…[for] the murder of a constable, Dilip Borole…”Yadav owed him money and Borole had been insisting that she [repay him]…Yadav offered him a drink laced with a sedative.  After he passed out, she strangled him…[then]  wrapped the body in a mattress, before setting it on fire…”

Maggie in the Media 

Jayant Bhandari, who attended my presentation in Philadelphia, interviewed me for his podcast by phone last week after I returned home.  And a few weeks ago, I got my own IMDb page because of my appearance on The Independents.

Perquisites

Tip for reporters who don’t want to look like prohibitionist ignoramuses:  when reporting on sex work in East Asia, don’t simply say “prostitution is illegal”, but rather point out it was traditionally legal and only criminalized in the past few years due to American pressure:

…just as [US] companies…pick up the tab for employees’ lunch meetings, in Korea they subsidize…hard core boozing and…the…sex trade (never mind that prostitution is illegal)…To Koreans, the business districts of American cities appear staid, orderly and a bit dull…[Koreans say] North America is a “boring heaven” while their country is an “exciting hell.”  No salesman…gets far here unless he can sing mean, inebriated karaoke and then slug through negotiations the next morning with a thumping headache…

Against Their Will

Nobody in the Indian media seems to think it’s strange that “rescued” women want so badly to escape their “rescuers”:  “The Pune rural police have launched a search…[for] three women who escaped from a government hostel…A few months back, [they] were rescued from a brothel in Aurangabad…”  See also the next item.

Law of the Instrument

A social worker explains why she rejected the “sex trafficking” paradigm:

A few years ago I worked as a psychotherapist in a governmental institution in Mexico…we [were forced] to participate in…raids…to “rescue” victims of human trafficking…I saw how the rights of the women found in the hotel were trampled on.  I witnessed [their] physical maltreatment…This single experience made me resign my job…psychologists and social workers…were…sent in to win the confidence of the women and then use this information in an unethical way…the…["victims"] were unwilling or even angry at the idea of receiving therapy.  Some escaped from the refuges where they were housed “for their protection”.  They didn’t seem to see it as rescue…

The Clueless Leading the Hysterical 

…ABC News [wrote]:  “A 14-year-old girl was arrested after allegedly setting her family’s house on fire in what authorities suspect is the latest case of Slender Man-inspired violence“…This past spring, two girls stabbed a classmate as part of a bizarre plan to prove the fictional creature was real…many reporters seemed to think it was not a weird one-off but a harbinger of a new trend, and a short burst of Slender Man media hysteria followed…the supposed Slender Man connection in the new story?  “…The teen…admitted to using the websites  Creepypasta.com and SoulEater.com, which are associated with The Slender Man“…She…”admitted” to “using” (which I assume means “reading”) Creepypasta.com, a vast depository of online horror stories that is “associated with The [sic] Slender Man” in the sense that he is one of the many characters one might encounter there…

So What Else Is New?

…a…recent report…published in the journal Nature Reviews Urology  by Emmanuele Jannini…found that, essentially, the G-spot is just a sensitive area that’s part of the larger pleasure center that includes the vagina, clitoris, and urethra…a…2012…study by…Dr. Amichai Kilchevsky…found…that…what [women are] likely experiencing is a continuation of the clitoris…

Scapegoats (TW3 #10)

Given that politicians who obsess about certain kinks are nearly always practitioners of those same kinks, what are we to make of Joe Arpaio’s crusade against zoophilia?

…Arpaio says sexual deviants continue to flock to Craigslist…to locate like-minded deviants to engage in sex acts with animals.  Several suspects…have been arrested by Sheriff’s deputies, and many were later convicted and jailed…Terry Wayne Haupt…went to meet up with the Sheriff’s Office undercover black lab for the purposes of engaging in various sex acts…Arpaio says he has written to Craigslist…on three separate occasions asking the company to consider forbidding this type of solicitation…Craigslist…has never responded…

Yes, Arpaio is now doing bestiality stings.  Meanwhile, nearby in Albuquerque…

Broken Record

How low can they go?

Prostitution is common during the [New Mexico State] fair, and Albuquerque police are running…[stings in which] female officers dress up as prostitutes and [trick]…men [into talking to them]…“The officers have to be very careful about how they approach…to avoid entrapment,” [pig mouthpiece Tanner] Tixier [lied]…police are seizing the vehicles of men who are arrested…

As regular readers know, they aren’t “careful” in the least; they simply invent accusations against anyone they choose to target.  And what, pray tell, constitutes “dressing up as a prostitute”?  High-heeled boots or skinny jeans, perhaps?

The Widening Gyre

Lock up your daughters!  Sex traffickers are EVERYWHERE!!!

A new study…reveals…victims of sex trafficking are recruited in places we like to think are safe havens…girls as young as 12 and 13 are first approached…at schools, malls and even parties…The study looked at five years of cases in Minneapolis…Some 40 percent…come from families [with whom] child protection had contact…a potential [excuse] for intervention…police say major events like this summer’s All-Star Game can change the dynamics of what has become a big time business…

FYI:  looking at a bunch of police reports doesn’t qualify as a “study” of anything except cops’ and prosecutors’ masturbatory fantasies about underage girls. 

Like a Horse and Carriage

Gay marriage supporters claim that for two men who love each other to marry “makes a mockery of marriage”:

Two men got married in New Zealand…and people aren’t happy about it.  Heterosexuals Travis McIntosh and Matt McCormick tied the knot…as part of a radio competition to win tickets to the Rugby World Cup.  The “best mates” got hitched…with tens of thousands listening live.  But…gay rights groups and social conservatives…have both condemned the sham marriage…

Picket-fence gays:  if the state is going to involve itself in people’s interpersonal contracts, I support your right to make such contracts as you see fit.  But your busybody concern for whether two people who make such a contract are habitually shoving their body parts into each other’s orifices is deeply disgusting, and you need to STFU.

Under Every Bed 

I had an ad in the Baton Rouge phone book for years, and it only barely justified its cost:

…Emily Morrow-Chenevert…said the Interstate 10 and Interstate 12 corridor makes Baton Rouge a hub for sex trafficking.  New Orleans is among the top 20 cities…and Houston and Memphis are other big destinations.  Baton Rouge…serves as a convenient stop between those places…there’s an estimated 27 million victims of sex trafficking worldwide…

It’s a “convenient stop” an hour away from New Orleans and on no credible route between it and Memphis.  Note also that the 27 million claim has shifted from all “human trafficking” victims to specifically “sex trafficking” victims.

Lower Education 

Ohio State essentially defines all unscripted human contact as rape:

At Ohio State University, to avoid being guilty of “sexual assault”…you and your partner now apparently have to agree…“regarding the who, what, where, when, why, and how this sexual activity will take place”…[this] impractical “agreement” requirement…[also applies] to…“touching”…[and] Ohio State’s Student Wellness Center seeks to radically narrow the concept of consent further (and ban “kissing” without verbal consent as “sexual assault”).  It says consent must be “verbal,” “enthusiastic,” and must be “asked for every step of the way”…Consent also must also be a litany of other things, such as “sober,” “informed,” “honest,” “wanted,” and “creative”…

Sold Out 

Would Facebook dare to target picket-fence gay folk this way?

In a frankly creepy overreach of authority, Facebook is going after…drag queens, requiring that they use their “real names”…In some cases they’ve requested users send in a copy of their drivers license to prove a name is legit…Facebook just rolled out gender-neutral family options, so clearly they’re trying to appear sensitive to nonconforming identities.  So what’s with the name police?

Facebook temporarily backed down after protests, but hasn’t changed its policy.

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #335)

Once again: No, Zurich’s was NOT the first tippelzone in Europe:

…Vienna is considering installing…”drive-in brothels”…to improve working conditions for street prostitutes…The facilities were first installed in Zürich a year ago…Street prostitution in Vienna is generally legal, but…more and more restrictions [have been] enacted in recent years…

The rest of the article is actually a very good discussion of the bottleneck effect.

Paint By Numbers

Yet another cut-and-paste “sex trafficking” story:

Florida…ranks among the top five states for human trafficking…local authorities formed a team to recover victims and…increase public awareness…”it’s hidden…everywhere”…Polaris Project…Traffickers…use drugs to keep their victims…Florida…has enacted stricter laws…such as requiring strip clubs to…keep [workers' personal] information on file…Parents should monitor…their children…on social media…because…traffickers…Salvation Army…conference…how to get men to stop purchasing sex, along with a prayer walk outside of massage parlors and strip clubs…

The only novel element is the assertion that “Traffickers often change locations…using standard transportation that wouldn’t raise eyebrows…”  As opposed to what, howdahs?  Pogo sticks?  Dirigibles?  Amphibious landing craft?

Dirty Laundry (TW3 #405)

…a public inquiry into historical child abuse…has heard…of the abuse…at the Sacré Coeur orphanage…[in] Jersey, [where nuns] beat children with spoons and forced them to work in a knitwear factory…in one nightmarish instance, nuns confined a child no older than six to a room where a dead nun had been laid in a coffin…Other punishments included the children having sheets pulled up tightly over their heads so they couldn’t move and having to eat meals in a toilet…

Imaginary Crises (TW3 #410) 

Dr. David Ley shares the story of a young man with OCD who made the mistake of telling a “Mental Health Crisis Team” (which includes a cop) about his persistent rape fantasies, resulting in his suspension from university and dozens of strangers prying into his private thoughts.  Ley writes,

…This young man is terrified that his thoughts…of rape make him dangerous to others.  Unfortunately, that’s the message that he is getting, everywhere he turns.  I’m truly sad that this young man…is now learning that asking for help can result in punishment…he…is…surrounded by a system…driven by panic and fear…[which] is making problems worse, not better…

Uncommon Sense (TW3 #433)

The German Association of Female Lawyers (DJB)…rejects the prohibition of prostitution and criminalization of clients…A ban would mean a return to the times of social stigma and lack of rights for women, yet would not change the fact that prostitution takes place…[if clients alone are criminalized] an important group of witnesses in criminal proceedings would be lost…the DJB rejects the introduction of [licensing] for sex workers…the risk of stigmatization is…high and the benefits of such a scheme questionable…

Another Fine Mess (TW3 #435)

Ordinary business practices don’t magically become newsworthy when  hookers use them:

The company that operates Ireland’s biggest sex-worker website has moved its headquarters to Spain and is expanding its business across Europe…Escorts Ireland…[was] previously…based in London  to avoid [Irish anti-advertising laws]…chief executive Audrey Campbell…confirmed the company has moved to Spain because of its “more accepting” attitude…[and favorable] tax [framework]…Campbell set up the company with…Peter McCormick…who has a conviction for brothel-keeping in…the 1990s…McCormick’s son Mark was imprisoned for 16 months for brothel-keeping in 2010…

Translation:  “Internet-based company expands its operations and moves its domicile to a country with more advantageous laws and regulations.  Both owners are experienced in their field.“
Whither Canada? (TW3 #437)

Terri-Jean Bedford…[has a list of] names of politicians who hire sex workers…compiled from sex workers across Canada, and…is carefully considering which…to release…after [C-36]…receives royal assent.  This would shame the hypocrites who secretly go to prostitutes while publicly moralizing against sex work or [voting] for laws that endanger sex workers…C-36 will either be undone by the next government or struck down by judges…[it] is a doomed rearguard action — aimed at winning donations and votes — and the Conservatives know it.  What they don’t know:  whose names are on Bedford’s list.

I need an explanation of what that title statement means.  The sheriff of a little Florida town made that statement after looking at the bodies of a 28 year old woman, her three little boys and three little girls — one of whom was not even three months old.  They were dead at the gun-wielding hand of her father.

And the sheriff’s department had been called to that home numerous times.  The father was a convicted felon who had shot his own 8 year old son and had gone to jail for it, though they accepted that it was accidental, because he was not supposed to have a gun.  But he DID have a gun.  And he had a gun again.

What does a woman do? She calls the police, and the police do nothing.  And so that woman is dead and so are her little children.  “We’re all family here,” says the sheriff who did NOT protect her from her father.

I am finding functionality almost beyond my command today.  I survived my own father’s homicidal/suicidal impulses because I was over 1500 miles away when he decided it was time to go.  Otherwise, my children and I would have become another pretty much ignored statistic.  And some utterly useless sheriff’s spokesman would have said, “It’s a small town here, we are devastated because we are all family here.”

You know what?  No, we are not all family “here” or anywhere else where nutjobs, convicts, and drunks are allowed to so easily get guns with which to murder their own families because “OMG, 2nd Amendment.”  

What “we” all are?  Is at risk.  At risk of sudden death because America is having a love affair with the rather seditious idea that was have to all be armed to “protect ourselves from tyranny.”  Seriously, America?  I’ve got some news to break to you stupid movie/video game deluded twits: MOST of you have NO FUCKING IDEA what “tyranny” really is — you think it is when you have to drive a civilized speed limit, for pity’s sake.  You think it is when you have to act semi-civilized.

Tyranny is when you have to REGULARLY fear being summarily executed.  It is women, children, and schoolchildren who are tyrannized presently in this nation — by a host of men who have the absolute nerve to insist that they need a special deadly detachable penis to BE men.  I am SICK of it.

Expect an absolutely violent zero tolerance standard from me, as if I hadn’t made that clear before.  FUCK YOUR HOLY SECOND AMENDMENT, IT IS KILLING US.

Filed under: Life, PTSD Journals, War on Women Tagged: domestic violence, grow-a-real-dick-already, gun nuts, gun violence, guns, murder

In my last post, I told you about a former student who came to my office distraught because her father had threatened her life. It’s now more than two weeks since I walked her over to the counseling center on my campus, and I hope the fact that she has not contacted me since then means that she is somewhere safe, where she can start to figure out how to live the rest of her life. What struck me most about this student’s situation, I said, was less her father’s threat, which was of course bad enough, than the network of men he was able to enlist, or simply count on, to help him keep his daughter in line. Those men, I went on, made me think of these lines from Sa’di’s Golestan:

To please the king who eats a sin­gle apple
from a subject’s gar­den, his slaves will pull
the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard;
and if he lets five eggs be taken by force,
his army will put to the spit a thou­sand birds.

“There’s always someone willing to ride the coattails of someone else’s power and authority,” I wrote, but what makes these lines particularly powerful for me is the story that gives them their full context. Here it is:

The hunting party had stopped to eat, but there was no salt to season the meat they were roasting for [King] Nushirvan, and no one wanted to serve him an improperly seasoned meal. So they sent one of the boys who was with them to get some salt from a nearby village. Before the boy left, however, Nushirvan told him, “Make sure you pay for what you take. Otherwise, the village will be ruined.” Surprised and more than a little incredulous, those who were standing nearby asked how such a simple thing as bringing some salt to the king could have such profound consequences. Nushirvan replied, “When the world began, oppression was a small hut that few people entered, but as more and more people chose to go inside, they built it up, and look how high it reaches now.”

To please the king who eats a single apple
from a subject’s garden, his slaves will pull
the tree up whole to plant in the palace yard;
and if he lets five eggs be taken by force,
his army will put to the spit a thousand birds.

As the king, Nushirvan was very aware that he could have ordered the boy to take the salt without paying for it, and he understood well the dire consequences such privilege could have for those he ruled, if he allowed it to be taken to its logical conclusion. By telling the boy to pay, Nushirvan was taking responsibility for that privilege. What interests me is whether the boy would have paid for the salt even if Nushirvan had said nothing. If not, he would have turned the king’s privilege into an admittedly minor but nonetheless naked display of power. More to the point, by refusing in the name of the king to pay for that salt, the boy would have been claiming some of that power for himself, and he would have been doing so by choice. In other words, he would have done so knowing full well he could’ve done otherwise.

The men who spied on my student for her father, whether he asked them to or not, were in the same position as that boy was before Nushirvan told him to make sure he paid. They knew full well that they could have chosen not to inform on her, but they did so anyway. Similarly, in the wake of the recent nude-celebrity-photo hacking scandal, we were all in that position. Every single person who looked at those photos, tweeted about them, linked to them, posted them on Reddit, or otherwise treated them as anything other than the stolen private property they were, could have chosen to do otherwise, but didn’t. On the other hand, those of us who didn’t chose not to enforce an idea about women’s place in society that is, in its essence, no different from the one my student’s father was enforcing when he beat her for being (in his estimation) inappropriately alone with a young male acquaintance.

I have no doubt that few of the people who looked at those pictures would openly declare themselves that father’s ally. Nonetheles, just like he valued his idea of family, and particularly women’s honor more than the flesh-and-blood woman his daughter is, the people who looked at those pictures chose their salacious value, and the power they could feel in viewing them, over the human value of the flesh-and-blood people whose pictures they were. Neither of which is very much different from the dynamic Sa’di describes, in which people who work for the king value the slice of the king’s power that they are licensed to exercise more than the humanity, to use the examples in Sa’di’s verse, of the people whose trees they are uprooting or whose chickens they are stealing.

Pick your cause. Whether it’s in the context of racism or environmentalism, militarism or poverty, sexism (including heterosexism), transphobia, Islamophobia, homophobia, unionism, or antisemitism, we all face this kind of choice every day, in ways both big and small. Do we value the human beings whose lives are materially at stake or do we value the power that creates the imbalance that turns these issues into causes in the first place? No one makes the right choice all the time. I certainly don’t, but understanding that the choice is, first and always, mine to make has made my life a lot more meaningful.

Cross-posted.