People often like to get me alone and confide that they would really really love to pose nude for me but they are concerned about their future careers. When I lived in Washington, DC, I just took this at face value. I’m proud of how I have lived my life. I was class president in 10th grade. If I felt like running for some community office, I don’t think I would be daunted by my – gasp – association with artistic and activist depictions of naked people. Nonetheless, I understand how someone who aspired to be a beltway insider might be concerned about limiting their career options. But I live in Los Angeles now. These are actors, models, musicians, and celebutantes whispering to me about how they crave to have their bodies in front of my lens. But they can’t, they just can’t. Maybe the conversation is titillating and erotic for some people. I don’t know. It isn’t for me.

Did getting naked on camera hurt the careers of Marilyn Monroe or Sharon Stone? How about Ewan McGregor or Bruce Willis? I’m not even going to take a stab at naming naked models because there are nudes in existence of every single successful high fashion model I can think of. Tyra Banks devotes a whole episode of America’s Next Top Model to getting wannabe models to get naked. Has on-camera nudity hurt the careers of Madonna or Marilyn Manson?

When it comes to entertainment careers, the public’s response to nudes is generally either positive interest and applause or a complete lack of awareness. Except of course for poor beleaguered Fred Durst, but the public’s brutality for him is a subject for another article.

Do you usually watch mainstream pageants? You know, the kind where kinda regular pretty girls walk around in bathing suits and say they want to become veterinarians because they love children? Thinking about it, didn’t posing nude and having the photos run in Penthouse cause one Miss America to be stripped of her crown? Yes, yes, it sure did. That Miss America is Vanessa Williams. To the best of my knowledge, Vanessa Williams is the only Miss America to have a real entertainment career, starring in movies, recording albums, and being directed by some of the top people in the world. Wow, I bet she cries herself to sleep at night every night, knowing that she won Miss America and is the most famous person ever to wear that crown, but, like, some officials don’t count her win. Because Penthouse ran some photos of her looking sort of sensual with another woman.

Does this remind anyone, besides me, of something going on in the tabloids today? Donald Trump publicly chastised Miss USA, the winner of a pageant he owns. A lot of people had, not only never heard of reigning Miss USA Tara Conner (whose name I found by Googling +“miss usa” +lesbian), but they had never heard of the Miss USA or Miss Teen USA pageants. How convenient that it was Miss Teen USA Katie Blair who Tara was making out with. Now Trump can get promo for both pageants at the same time. Had you ever heard of Miss Teen USA before? Ever watched it?

Tonight, on The Apprentice: Los Angeles, the product placement is apparently supposed to include Playboy. There is also a tabloid rumor circulating that Playboy offered Miss USA Tara Conner the opportunity to pose for the magazine. Gee, but didn’t Trump threaten to strip the pageant queen of her crown if she didn’t straighten up and fly right? How could Hugh Hefner buddy up to Donald Trump on his show and simultaneously try to corrupt his virginal pageant lesbians?

And the most famous Miss America is Vanessa Williams, the Miss America who canoodled with another woman and had nude pictures of her published. The whole world talked about it when Miss America had her crown stripped from her and I do believe the Miss America pageant’s ratings went way up. Hmm, I wonder if the Tara Conner and Katie Blair scandal could be cynically modeled on the Vanessa Williams scandal.

Nah, what kind of cyberpunk social manipulation lunacy would have to be the norm for Donald Trump and Hugh Hefner to conspire to recreate the Vanessa Williams Miss America scandal? Oh yeah, the lunacy all around us every day of the digital age we currently live in. I should really work in television.

I wonder if television execs have to deal with people, they barely know, pulling them aside to whisper about how badly they would like to get naked for them. I guess they probably do.

If you go to NBC.com right now, it looks like you can watch a full replay of last Sunday’s episode of The Apprentice: Los Angeles. Only the link on the front page of the site 404’s. I don’t blame them one bit. If my name were on that pale imitation of their earlier success, I wouldn’t want to extend the viewership of that show either.

Full disclosure: I have watched every single episode of The Apprentice. I watched all of the Donald Trump Coke Classic shows. And I watched all of the Martha Stewart New Coke shows, even with the lackluster candidates provided to Martha, and even though I have never seen anything else of Martha Stewart. Unless you count SNL sketches. Realistically, I think my viewing habits re: The Apprentice make it more meaningful when I say that I expect to permanently remove it from my TiVo queue later today. I’m writing this at 2am Saturday night/Sunday morning, January 14, and the show airs Sunday nights. At the end of this article, I’m going to tell you a spoiler for tonight’s episode. I know this secret info either because (a) I went to college with some big muckymucks at NBC or because (b) I have committed my valuable time and sharp business acumen to the lame task of figuring this out.

There was a lot I really loved about the first season of The Apprentice. I loved the whole businessman-as-rockstar vibe of the show. Before I lived in Los Angeles myself, I used to constantly get asked if I was in a band. There is no reason why living your life passionately and flamboyantly and taking the road less traveled should equate to being good at singing or playing popular music. Of course, living in Los Angeles has sapped some of my desire to put on some over-the-top outfit and traipse around town. Sure, I’m a writer and a photographer and those might sound like creative pursuits to someone who hadn’t been overexposed to La-La-Land. Truly, people in my town tend to view anyone dressed very creatively as either (a) a stylist or (b) a tourist or (c) talent. And, when LA people say “talent,” they do not mean it as in “good at something,” but rather as the raw meat of the Hollywood machine, the stuff they grind up every day. Coming out of a punk rock DIY background, I find the idea of “talent” as another species anathema. I started off publishing pictures of my friends and peers. When I picked up a camera, I wasn’t documenting something I felt separate from. But I found that dressing the way I did was a drag.

If someone had directly yelled at me and overtly told me I had to change, I would have spit on them. They could not have forced me. But the Los Angeles pressure was more subtle than that. I found that, if I looked hot on a shoot day, the photos often didn’t work out as well, as models were likely to get either competitive or amorous or both. It is easier to not bother blow-drying my hair when I got out of the tub, so I wasn’t going to bother, if it made my day harder. And I found it difficult to do business. I would meet with people where I thought we could make win/win deals and they would try to take advantage of me and be shocked when I noticed. My kinky and freaky clothing and my multi-colored hair seemed to make the businesspeople assume I was wet behind the ears. It made it a lot more likely that there were going to be sharks circling me. Sharks who were sure my looks meant blood in the water. Sharks who were going to be really really pissed when they didn’t get a meal. And I definitely bear more than a few scars from sharks I didn’t manage to get away from in time.

So, I know I’m not as obviously flamboyant as I once was, but Donald Trump became a bit of a personal hero to me, when he displayed a combination of business wisdom and charismatic garishness. Most CEOs do not get in front of the camera and I appreciated that he did. In his famous boardroom scenes, where contestants on the show were eliminated, Trump had two very businesslike lieutenants in Carolyn Kepcher and George Ross. That first season of the show, Trump also had an amazingly impressive assortment of candidates. The structure of the show was to split the candidates into two teams and have them compete against one another in business tasks. The first season candidates seemed like truly exceptionally capable and innovative businesspeople. They impressed and intrigued even with the ways they addressed a task as simple as running a lemonade stand. At the part of each episode where Trump would tell the viewers some nugget of Trumpian wisdom, I used to hang on his every word.

This makes my disappointment in The Apprentice: Los Angeles much worse. The NBC web site has nicknames for all of this season’s candidates. They are pretty uniformly stupid and include such winning phrases as The Webhead and The Believer and The Blonde. The candidates from the first season of The Apprentice appeared to be, perhaps lower on the totem pole of life than Donald Trump, at least as presented. But they were still presented as all being winners. Many had achieved greatness before the show and many went on to still greater achievements after it and perhaps partly because of it. The name of the game this season, however, appears to be to degrade the candidates as much as possible. Why Trump would want to work with someone he has already humiliated is anyone’s guess.

The first twist on the show this season is that the losing team has to sleep outside. Essentially the two teams compete against one another on various basic business tasks and whichever team loses, not only has a member fired, but they have to sleep in tents in the backyard of a house. They refer to the house where the winning team sleeps as “The Mansion,” but the view from their backyard doesn’t look to me like Mark Burnett and Donald Trump sprang for the best Los Angeles real estate. Actually, it looks like “The Mansion” is in Southern California, but not technically in Los Angeles at all. Additionally, the entire winning team sleeps in the same room on beds which look like they were purchased last minute at Ikea. “The Mansion” looks like a decent enough house and placing a whole television show in a house or two is difficult, but glorifying that pedestrian abode just gives the lie to everything Trump has ever praised or bragged about in the past. Trump Tower, where the New York-based seasons were shot, looked nice. Candidates had roommates, but at least it was not a summer camp style dormitory. I cringe in embarrassment for this season’s crop as they go on for the cameras about the haves and the have nots and how sleeping outside makes people hungrier to win and being indoors makes victory so much sweeter. Keep in mind that we don’t really have weather in Los Angeles, so it is not like the people in the backyard are getting snowed on. Has Trump actually fallen so far that the best thing he could offer winners was the opportunity to sleep indoors? Has he actually managed to find people he thinks are good at business who are dazzled merely by having a roof over their heads? Mind you, a central plot point of the season opener for The Apprentice: Los Angeles was refusing to let businesspeople go to the bathroom. I’m not making that up. I wish I were. Each season of The Apprentice has shown less of the interesting business aspects than the last. I thought the shift in focus towards personality conflicts between contestants was bad, but telling professionals they can’t use the toilet and filming how they react is just pathetic.

Other things which suck about The Apprentice: Los Angeles include Trump having fired one of his lieutenants, Carolyn Kepcher, for enjoying the limelight too much. This suggests that the mere act of pointing a camera at someone makes people think they are a greater person at the very same moment it turns them into a lesser person. Maybe true and maybe a justified rightsizing, but it makes it look like working for Trump is not quite the “job of a lifetime” that the commercials for his show suggest. George Ross, with his brilliant insight and professional gravitas, apparently still works for the Trump organization, but he doesn’t really care for LA and has work to do in New York. So this past week’s boardroom, Trump had his daughter Ivanka Trump on one side and the leader of the winning team on the other. Of course, the leader of the winning team had to act like a jerk and rub her victory in the face of the losers (even thought they lost by a very very slim margin.) Here is the big twist coming up tonight: The candidates already know that the winning team’s leader (The Hottie) will remain the leader as long as she is winning, but what they do not know is that she is going to have to switch teams and try to lead the people she just lorded it over in the boardroom. Hardy-har-har.

I thought Ivanka Trump came across great on the most recent season of the show, when she guested. Her image then was tough, beautiful, flawless, brutal but fair. Unfortunately, she apparently went to image coaches over the summer and she just comes across as a mean person with bad manners now. Her taking Carolyn’s place on Donald’s left also gives one the sense that nepotism is going to be the way in the Trump organization and it may make no difference how hard someone works. Which makes viewers ask why anyone would compete hard to get a job working for the Trump family, especially when they never let anyone else finish a sentence.

Speaking of Ivanka, most internet users will have been unable to escape the recent feud between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell. I’ll give the Cliff’s notes, so anyone who missed it previously will now have this data filling up their gray matter. Trump owns a pageant or two. A couple of pageant girls were seen out on the town, behaving in a supposedly unseemly manner i.e. allegedly drinking, doing lines, possibly having sex partners back to her place, and maybe kissing girls. The implication was that the two pageant babes were lovers. There was a big public brouhaha where stripping one girl of her crown was discussed but she was given a second chance and the whole thing was unseemly for all involved. So Rosie stated publicly that she felt Donald did not have the moral high ground or compass to judge a twenty-year-old girl. So Trump called Rosie fat and is suing her and Ivanka told the press she felt Rosie was a bully. I’d feel more sympathy there, if Ivanka and her father were not both coming across as such bullies on The Apprentice: Los Angeles.

Full disclosure: Although I understand that Rosie appears on the show and has said inflammatory things on it before, I have never watched The View. Unless you count SNL sketches. It is my understanding that Rosie O’Donnell is a famous lesbian and my opinion that she may have felt a responsibility to speak out about the pageant nonsense. Or she could be a jerk. I have no idea.

Now, maybe I’m just letting my own sexual fantasies intrude here, but I get the impression Ivanka Trump knows how to please a woman. On the list of things this former Trump fan is horrified by is his apparent homophobia. Is it really that awful if some pageant winners make out? Is it really that awful if Rosie O’Donnell is not physically attractive to Donald Trump? Is Ivanka Trump not on the cover of The Advocate because Trump would consider it unseemly? And, most importantly, by being on the show The Apprentice, does Trump have the right to go after Rosie in court? Does The Advocate have the right to put Ivanka on their cover whether or not she wants to be there? Are they public figures who are subject to public comment? What makes someone a public figure? Does becoming a public figure make someone a worse person? I don’t know all the answers, but watching the tragic devolution of this brilliant TV show, I am definitely thinking about the questions. I hope I am not causing any damage by pointing my own cameras at people I think are cool.

At any rate, I think I won’t be buying any more Trump books or watching any more Apprentice shows after tonight. I do intend to continue to watch Saturday Night Live. But I won’t be watching Donald Trump any more. Unless you count SNL sketches.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.