Writer John Updike passed away this morning. I used to confuse John Updike and John Irving, so I was, as a child, afraid to pick up a John Updike book, for fear someone would get their penis chomped during a blow job. Of course, that was “The World According to Garp”, but I already said I was a kid when this confused me.
Most obituaries today will probably mention the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom novels which won John Updike two Pulitzers. The series is Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit At Rest, and Rabbit Remembered. I don’t really recall why I confused Rabbit and Garp, other than perhaps just the fact that both participated in somewhat unappealing grown-up sex I was too young to understand. I’ve seen a few obits today which refer to John Updike as a chronicler of small town life”, but only people from Manhattan think Ipswich, Massachusetts is small town America, John Updike wrote about the suburbs during a time when Americans were migrating from the cities to the burbs. On the topic of adulterers from suburban New England, John Updike once famously said, “if I have not exhausted it, it has exhausted me.” (Actually, I’ve seen that quote written a few ways over the years, so he once famously said something kinda like that which expressed that sentiment.)
For a writer, John Updike’s commitment to actually produce writing was inspiring. He was very candid about the fact that his prose writing paid the bills more than his fiction did, and that he liked the security of knowing that something along the lines of a book review would be published . . . and paid for. The Simpsons alluded to this in the episode “Insane Clown Poppy” where John Updike writes a Krusty the Klown bio called Your Shoes Too Big To Kickbox God. Your Shoes Too Big To Kickbox God is of about the same commerce/quality ratio as all Krusty endorsed products, which is to say it is comedically short and better for making money than whatever its stated purpose is. Krusty Burger, anyone? Delightfully, John Updike voiced himself on The Simpsons.
If, unlike me, your siblings don’t use Mr. Burns sound files as their custom ring tone for you, you would probably be most aware of John Updike as the writer of The Witches of Eastwick. The Witches of Eastwick is possibly the only time I saw a movie before I read the book and then didn’t read the book. (I saw Fight Club before reading the book, but I read it.) Ironically, the reason I didn’t like the movie enough to seek out the book was that the aforementioned witches conjure the perfect man and he is Jack Nicholson, who was not nearly femme-y enough for my taste at the time. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate Jack Nicholson more because, in adult life, fearlessness and force of personality are so deeply more important and enjoyable than sharp cheekbones and full lips. And I’ve grown to appreciate John Updike more because I am now more sympathetic to (or at least tolerant of) weakness of character, of the sort John Updike so deftly wrote about, than I was at age twelve. As a child, I thought that only bad people were imperfect. Part of growing up is accepting that nobody, including yourself, is as perfect as you wish.
Much is made of the fact that John Updike had one of his fictional characters win a Nobel Prize in Literature. The famous author did win a lifetime achievement Bad Sex in Fiction Prize. And, as mentioned, a couple Pulitzers. And a couple National Book Awards. And about a gajillion other honors. So I think his life can count as one well-lived, without the Nobel. I just looked at a listing of all the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1901 to the present. I’m pretty darn well read and I’ve only heard of maybe half a dozen of the winners from the past thirty years. You have to go back to Jean-Paul Sarte in 1964 before it is someone I’ve heard of, read, and thought was good. Sarte declined the prize. I took the ferry from Copenhagen to Sweden with a friend once and I feel that qualifies me to state categorically that playing yourself on The Simpsons is definitely cooler. Rest in peace, John Updike.
Quarantine opens in theaters everywhere today. Check out this video about this classic style horror flick about the modern day dangers of being trapped between chemical warfare and the CDC. The video features star Jennifer Carpenter, writer/director John Erick Dowdle, writer Drew Dowdle, actor Johnathon Schaech, actor Jay Hernandez, yours truly, and more.
What would you do if you thought you might be in danger of being killed by people infected with a mysterious disease? What would you do if you were trapped with the people who might murder you and an illness which might kill you if you catch it? What would you do if you were quarantined?
In this original Blue Blood interview, Forrest Black and Rachel Kramer Bussel have just eaten a whole lot of delicious cupcakes. Forrest Black interviews the writer/editor about her Cupcakes Take the Cake blog. They also discuss her naughty themed anthologies which include Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Writer/editor Clint Catalyst has a cameo appearance. And I helped eat the cupcakes.
In the forthcoming Mirrors movie, Kiefer Sutherland plays Ben Carson. Ben Carson is a burned out ex-cop with a drinking problem, forcibly retired over a bad shooting, and alienating his family with his rage. I guess Alexandre Aja, the writer/director of The Hills Have Eyes, is, like me, a 24 fan too. Kiefer Sutherland is not battling terrorists in Mirrors, however, but evil forces who use mirrors as entryways to our world.
He goes to work in a haunted old department store where the previous night watchman may have met a disturbing demise. I would usually post the redband trailer for one of our advertisers here and assume that a Blue Blood audience is well able to handle a little gore. But Mirrors is actually a very grisly movie, so I’ve posted the standard teaser above. You can view a gallery of pictures from the Mirrors movie in the gallery section. The less faint of heart can view the good stuff after the jump below. (more…)
The event was at a Venice couple-oriented adult store called Freddy and Eddy. Freddy and Eddy has the adorable slogan “where couples can come” for their brick and mortar location and I’ve been meaning to check it out forever. I keep getting invited to cool readings there, but it took Rachel’s extra dollop of coolness to get me to venture out to new territory and I’m so glad I did. The reading area is a spacious beautiful patio out behind the well-appointed and very pink store. I enjoyed chatting with one of the owners and the smart sexpert folks who had gathered for the occasion.
Although the video above is what Rachel read at Freddy and Eddy’s, the clip is actually from the most recent right coast In the Flesh reading event. (People say left coast for Cali all the time; can you say right coast for New York?) At the California one, the theme was Survival. The first reader was Willam Belli who is an incredibly charismatic trannie whose reading, about an odd hook-up with a tattooed hottie, connected so much with the audience that it came across more as performance than reading. The way this piece tied into the theme of Survival was more punchline than actual fit, but it was very entertaining. Esteemed anthologist Maxim Jakubowski read a piece about how relationships have soundtracks, which I think is a very true insight. Stan Kent dressed like a rockstar and read an excerpt of a series of novels he has written about a gothic punk girl who can relive the sexual experiences of whoever wore the shoes she has put on. Naturally this leads her to serial kill serial killers. Stan Kent so totally seems like someone I would know that I’m shocked to have never even come across his work before. Shana Ting Lipton is a writer whose work, given her credits, it seems likely I may have read before, but whose byline I was unfamiliar with. She introduced her stuff saying it was going to come across G-rated by comparison and then read a really beautiful and creative piece about exploring her sexuality in the Netherlands which, having spent some of my formative years in Europe, really spoke to me. I’ll definitely be looking for more by her. I unfortunately missed the reading by the evening’s organizer because we were coordinating the Blue Blood limo service for Rachel and Jackson West from Silicon Valley dough gossip blog ValleyWag. Rachel Kramer Bussel herself read the piece from the video, about what Erica Jong would term a zipless fuck in an airport. The idea being that it was about surviving a horrible layover in the Atlanta airport. Having spent a lot of time there, I felt it definitely fit the survival theme.
The DVD of the movie version of Stephen King’s The Mist came out this week. I think it is interesting that Stephen King is such a brilliant writer, yet his work does translate to the screen. It is rare that a good book can become a good movie. I think the key is the remarkable sympathy in Stephen King’s prose. I find it difficult to read his work because his characters are so likable and understandable. And then, of course, horrible things tend to happen to them, it being horror and all. Having horrible things happen to bad people can produce a certain schadenfreude, but watching bad things happen to people you like, people who make sense to you, can be painful and sad. King seems to have a unique comprehension of the human condition, which allows him to make people see what makes others tick in a sympathetic light. You always know why a Stephen King character would do the things they do and there is a certain strong and unusual comfort and appeal in that.
The movie version of the novel The Mist maintains a good sense of tension, as terrified townfolks try to figure out what is menacing them from inside the fog and try to make sense of why monsters would be after them. As neighbor turns on neighbor, The Mist asks the age old question of who the true monsters are. Bonus points for creepy religious zealotry. Triple word score for casting Emmy award-winner Andre Braugher, known for his role as Det. Frank Pembleton in Homicide Life on the Street, as Brent Norton.
Writer/director Frank Darabont has also done the successful adaptations for Stephen King’s The Green Mile, The Shawshank Redemption, Nightshift Collection Volume One: The Woman in the Room, and a variety of other genre films based on things besides Stephen King stories. He also directed the pilot of my favorite canceled show from this past year, Raines, starring Jeff Goldblum as a high-functioning insane detective.
For some interesting behind-the-scenes info about The Mist, you can check out this video shot at Comic Con by the good folks at Dread Central.
My mother’s generation had a saying about how you could go anywhere so long as you had a little black dress. I’ve been working on putting this to the test this September. Every year, I tend to feel kinda gothic during the summer and I perk up as soon as it is Fall. I don’t know if this is some sort of Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (Disorder is such a judgmental word.) or if I just really like school to be in session, whether or not I am attending it. My birthday is also in August and I tend to use my birthday and New Year’s as times to make adjustments designed to perfect my existence. This Fall, I’ve made a commitment to get out and enjoy what Los Angeles has to offer. So I bought a lot of little black dresses and have been trying new things and enjoying it a lot as it happens. The only weird thing about doing so much which is brand new is that it creates a bit of social anxiety.
The feminist blog/site Say Object referred to me saying,
“One of our favorite feminist thinkers, Amelia G of BlueBlood.net, recently weighed in on the “Captivity” billboard controversy, and some of what she says suprised us (plus, Girl clearly did her research).”
Writer/editor/cupcake fetishist Rachel Kramer Bussel and I were chatting about the Say Object mention and she told me they were having a party.
So Tuesday night, although I knew I was eventually headed to the West Side to help Blue Blood hottie Superna celebrate her birthday, I started all the way on the East Side at The Echoplex in Echo Park. The first event on deck was the The Conversation which was the opening act for Yo Majesty at Lady Party 911. Apparently comedians Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin do a weekly show called (I think) The Pages where they intellectualize tabloid fodder in a humorous fashion. The duo moderated The Conversation for this event where the topic was Punishing the Princesses. Basically the idea was to do a feminist deconstruction of why, as a society, we put people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan on a pedestal and then knock them off it. The panelists were Tracy McMillan who I kind of think maybe writes for television, but I’m not sure. Then there was Jen Sincero who was apparently booked because she wrote The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, although Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer is the books of hers I’m familiar with. It would be most accurate I guess to say I’m partly familiar with it, as I was enjoying reading it but was in the middle of it when Blue Blood exhibited at Erotica LA and a couple of members of Jen Sincero’s entourage stopped by my booth and acted so weird that I never got back to reading it. Rounding out the panel was Nina Hartley who, at least for me, I thought needed no introduction. For the event she was billed as Porn Queen Nina Hartley.
Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin were good moderators and kept The Conversation flowing. They have a sort of intelligent sex-obsessed vibe that strikes me as sort of Sex and the City, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to seeing that show is watching a spoof of it on Saturday Night Live. Tracy McMillan says that she thinks masculine energy is all about going out into the world in a hunting sort of way and that feminine energy is about being receptive and gathering things in a powerful way. She says that she thinks Madonna has evolved from seeking masculine power and energy to seeking the feminine side. I think that I am secretly a man. Jen Sincero explained that she wrote her The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks because she found herself thirty-five-years-old and in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She said that she interviewed a lot of people for the book and that the people her own age she interviewed were very caught up with issues of sexual identity, but the younger people had more of the attitude of why wouldn’t you just sleep with whoever you feel like. Nina Hartley surprised me by being really awfully cool. I sort of thought I knew who she was in a general way, but she had really interesting insights. She is definitely not just another pornstar with an unconventional relationship and a publicist who claims she is smart. She is very well-spoken and was able to make interesting counterpoints all evening to an audience which was not necessarily porn-familiar or even porn-friendly. At one point, the panelists were talking about some reality show chick who had nude photos of herself posted to the internet and, while deconstructing whether the photos were more simply nude than prurient, someone mentioned that the girl was seventeen. Nina Hartley expressed horror and the other people on stage were like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what’s the difference? From a professional performer’s perspective the issue has to do with what is legal and I thought she handled that and other issues really well. The most interesting point she made was when they got to the topic of blowjobs. Apparently, some teen perv researchers recently did some sort of study (yeah, sure, a “study”) of how girls as young as twelve are just handing out the blowjobs these days and boys are not reciprocating. Nina Hartley said that, when she was fifteen, the notion of boys not reciprocating would have been totally uncool, but that she was interested in penises and would have been interested in giving blowjobs. However, she did not know that she could be alone with a boy and have limits on what she would do and she did not feel ready for intercourse.
Now you would think that, having had the site responsible for the event call me a favorite feminist thinker, I would not be experiencing any social anxiety, but that would be inaccurate. I figured I would be just kinda incognito and get to see other people talk. Only my good friend Lange kept hitting me on my cell during the talk because he had gotten to the club for the Superna birthday party an hour early. My cell phone is set so it is really loud when being turned off. It sings an entire song before powering down. I generally only think of how annoying this is at times when it would be even more annoying to play with the cell phone settings. So I just kept hitting mute and texted him where I was. I think the ringing makes the people sitting near me glance over at me and it turns out that one of them is Julia Rubiner with a super different haircut from the last time I saw her at a party at her house. Julia was kind enough to help write some Blue Blood About Us stuff when I was totally hyperventilating and blocked on writing it. I actually would have worked with her a bunch more, only all of her publicist pals were apparently part of the same pact to put a media blackout on Blue Blood projects. Whatever. It was nice to run into her.
Once The Conversation was complete, I got back in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, just long enough to get kind of turned around and lost in Echo Park. Fortunately, my cell phone features the primitive form of GPS where you call your friends and make them MapQuest where the fuck you are. I have nice friends.
I make it over to The Viper Room and meet up with the rest of the Blue Blood posse. The entire downstairs lounge is set for a Superna takeover and she is getting ready to play an all acoustic set with a new drummer. Uber-scenester Casper, of Coyote Shivers band fame, makes me and Forrest Black feel very welcome and we appreciate it. Last time I bought Superna shots, she vomited blood, so I don’t get her any birthday shots, but everyone else does. After her performance, she and Scar spend most of the rest of the night making out.
We hear that Fred Durst is filming a reality show in the upstairs of the club shortly. That seems like the perfect surreal end to the evening, so we all trundle upstairs. Fred Durst is gracious and nice, although I get the sense that, like me, part of him is really into being where he is and part of him is just crawling out of his skin with so many people around, looking and maybe judging. The band on stage for the reality show has a kind of an 80’s hard rock Pat Benetar sort of thing going and I like them, although security requests that I not shoot while they are on stage and I comply because I am considerate like that. When folks are nice to me anyway.
The thing people who are not extremely shy sometimes don’t get about me is that, it is already kind of painful to leave my house. Once I’ve exited the building, it is no more uncomfortable for me to talk to a rockstar than it is to chat with someone I vaguely know. It is all over the agony threshhold in a way and it is all interesting and stimulating in a way, so it is sort of all the same to me. I’m actually most comfortable with total strangers and with people I know very well. People I sort of know make me the most uneasy.
In closing her set, Superna mentions from the stage that people who want to see her naked ass (which must be everyone!) should go to BlueBlood.com. When I go into the bathroom, someone has put a Blue Blood sticker up in one of the stalls. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain my anxiety level, if the universe is going to be so sweet to me. I hope my art doesn’t suffer.
Harlan Ellison was going to be doing some sort of screening and question and answer session tonight. I realized that it had been about a decade since I read anything by Ellison, meaning I pretty much stopped reading his work when I came out to the West Coast. Although books are a serious vice of mine, Angelenos do not tend to be big readers and this makes it easy to just sort of not think of some writers I once would have been hyper-aware of.
At any rate, some friends and I went to see a sort of documentary/promo piece for Harlan Ellison tonight. It was a potentially not quite final cut and of course it was a book event in Los Angeles. I was all fretting, when we arrived with only three minutes to spare, that it might be sold out. Oh yeah, book event in sunny Southern Cali. It was only about a quarter full, but the audience struck me as quite devout, despite Ellison heckling us all during the Q&A portion, comparing our relative silence to a boring Jackson Pollack painting or something. I don’t recall the exact analogy, but, even though it did not quite work for the situation, it still sounded fairly entertaining the way Ellison said it.
The movie had a lot of delightfully well-delivered lines and a few bright spots. Writer Neil Gaiman describes a telephone answering machine message where Ellison told Gaiman he was a dead man, that his house would be burned down, salt would be poured on the radioactive remains, etc. and finishes saying “call me” and Gaiman tells the story with surprisingly humorous delivery. Actor Robin Williams wanders in and out of the flick and of course it is no surprise that he brings the funny. The biopic begins with Robin Williams asking Harlan Ellison a series of true/false questions. Each question features an outrageous incident which the author then confirms is true, sometimes with footnotes. Finally, Robin Williams asks Harlans Ellison if it is true that he slept with 500 women and bragged about it. Ellison replies that this is false. Wait a beat. Then he caveats that he actually slept with 700 women.
Ellison describes the way Warner Bros asked him to let them use an interview with him in the behind the scenes DVD for a science fiction show. Ellison asked them to pay him. They got peeved. He tried to get them to at least send him the DVD he is on and they told him to buy it and finally sent him the wrong DVD, by, uhm, accident no doubt. (The saavy director points out during the Q&A that he thinks it is cute that Ellison can believe that was an accident.) Ellison explains he needs to get paid for his work, even if the work is an interview with him for a DVD extra, and he doesn’t take a piss without getting paid for it. I am personally sick to death of people who want to make money off of other people’s entertainment value and are hostile to the notion of even comping anyone, much less compensating them. It was nice to hear Ellison describe making the lives of those who exploit in this fashion just a little bit harder. I couldn’t help but think, though, that he probably could have written something cool in the time he spent fighting over a single copy of a DVD. And, of course, if most people are happy to be interviewed for BTS extras for free, then the going rate de facto is zip.
I was interested in the subject matter and I’m glad I went to see it, but overall the movie bummed me out. Here was someone I once worshipped and he just seemed so old and so discontent and so shticky. How can I have someone be a role model, if the path they took looks like it leads to a bad place? Although it is impressive that director Erik Nelson was able to put the project together at all, given its famously cantankerous subject, I kept wanting to re-light the interviews he did with Harlan Ellison. I felt like some of the disturbing and tragic way the author came across was probably the result of lighting choices and I was curious how he would come across in the Q&A portion. The Q&A kicked off early with an intoxicated gentleman from the audience interrupting to say he also liked the part about yelling at people at Warner Bros on the phone. I actually couldn’t make out precisely what he was saying about the movie giant, however, because Ellison was yelling at him because he incorrectly thought he was someone who posted mean things about a friend of his on the internet. Then other audience members asked Ellison about his dead father, about mortality and legacy, about what to do when your artistic dreams are really not panning out, and some other cheery topics. Even if I hadn’t been bummed already, that took the gloom a little farther.
There is a signing across the street at a pseudo-bookstore, after the Q&A. I have resolved that I will take a flattering picture of Ellison when I shoot him with the one of my companions who brought a book to be signed. My friend with the book and I and another pal wait for the fourth member of our party to come out of the theatre. Bizarrely, Ellison stops to chat with my friend. They have never met before and it is a really cool moment when my friend tells him that the first time he ever saw the word fuck in a book was Ellison’s short story “A Boy and His Dog.” It seems like Ellison is perhaps going to sign the actual edition of the specific book in question, which my friend has brought along, but he repeats my friend’s name and tells him he has to head across the street. Then he steps kind of into my personal space, looks at my other companion, then stares directly into my eyes and also bids farewell to something along the lines of “people he does not know at all.”
I look sadly after him and glumly mention that he never remembers me. I’ve met Harlan Ellison around half a dozen times over the years, yet he always oddly aggressively claims to have no recollection of me, despite our first meeting being very memorable, at least for me.
We go across to the bookstore and it is called Every Picture Tells A Story. The store’s niche is visually-oriented books, so a lot of their merchandise is collectible volumes and prints and beautifully-produced children’s books. If I were decorating a house, it might be a bitchin’ store, but it kind of freaks me out as a bookstore. They have many beautifully printed art books and limited edition prints and incredibly glossy children’s books. These are the sort of items an interior decorator would buy to give a room a certain flavor. The store has a good selection of books for appearance, but it does not appear to have much in the way of books for reading.
I look around for a new Ellison book to buy. Even though I have read no Ellison for a decade now, there are none. I own everything they have by him, except for a couple of art books and these are interesting mostly for their collectible value. I start thinking about the headspace I was in when I first discovered Ellison’s dark writing. We wait in line so my one friend can get his symbolically significant book autographed by Harlan Ellison. The line is good-sized for a book signing, but it is not so giant that it needs to take particularly long. I even think we might still make it to the Cabinet of Curiosities show in Silverlake later in the evening. Ellison chats extensively with most of the people in the line, all the while complaining about how stupid it is for anyone to want a signature in a book, that it is basically defacing the book. I semi-agree, but I’m hanging out with my friends and that is cool. Plus I’ve promised to take a photo of my one friend with the great author. There is a poster for Charlotte’s Web and we start talking about that and I mention how much the book upset me as a child. Then I start really thinking about how bad Charlotte’s Web made me feel as a little kid. Then I point out that certain kinds of nostalgia give me a stomach ache.
We are finally almost at the front of the line, but Ellison takes forfreakingever with the trio in front of us. He signs multiple books and does photos with them all and even answers questions about whether he really hates doing signings. Finally, Ellison goes to sign my friend’s book. I take out my camera and hold it by my side. Ellison tells the room that devices like digital cameras cost you. I point out that I’m pretty sure my camera has paid for itself. He looks nonplussed. My friend asks the great writer for tips on overcoming writer’s block. Ellison tells him that he personally never ever sends email or goes on the internet, although he is at pains to point out that there are five sites devoted to him, and there is only one he sometimes goes on. Ellison goes on to advise my friend that lower tech is the way to go. I realize that Ellison believes he writes speculative fiction and not science fiction, but, as an SF fan who discovered his work in the SF&F section of the bookstore, I find it dismal that he would limit his ability to benefit from technology and human progress. Ellison uses only a manual typewriter. He shows us a DVD a fan brought him of all the interviews he did with a beloved and now deceased interviewer. Ellison points out that he will never watch the DVD. I think, from what he said in the Q&A, that he prefers to watch Betamax, but I can only listen in horrified fascination. Then he shows us a flyer for a gallery show he says a fan gave him tonight saying he might like the art, but that he will throw the flyer out and never look at that inconsequential web site on it. I kind of think he says the site in question is Salon.com, but I don’t read the flyer and I’m not sure. One of my other companions, a successful cameraman, taps my arm to give him my camera, so he can get photos of us talking to Ellison. I shake him off because I don’t think Ellison likes being papparazzied.
So I ask the author if we can get a picture and prepare to turn my camera on. Ellison says, “no.” I look at him, sort of waiting for the rest of the sentence. I have a $20 bill stuck into the top of the cell phone pocket in my purse, on the theory that, if he doesn’t take a piss without getting paid for it, he might not take a photo either. But all he does is raise his voice and ask me what part of no I don’t understand. I start to walk away pretty bummed. I know, I know, Harlan Ellison can be a dick to fans and also the sky looks blue sometimes. But, in my fannish heart, I want him to be a righteous warrior, rather than a petty bully who justifies meanness as honesty.
And people just don’t usually forget me, not when they have interacted with me extensively. Plus it seemed weird that he went on and on to the guy in front of us about how he never forgets anyone he meets. So I turn around and point out to him that we have met like six times and even had dinner together and yet he never seems to remember me. He asks me if he tried to get in my pants. I am blindsided by the question, utterly unsmooth, and I stutter, “uhm, yes.” Flabbergasted by the whole interaction, I turn to his wife and point out that it was before they were married. After a bit more interaction, Harlan Ellison tells me that hand-feeding a girl cookies is not the same thing as trying to get in my pants and that the cookies in question were Hydrox rather than Oreos and that he remembers me perfectly and that it is just terrible that I would go around saying a thing like that. Uhm, he was the one who asked me. I certainly didn’t bring it up in front of his wife. That would have been rude. So what does one say to a surreal onslaught like his? Does he remember me or not? Why would he repeatedly tell me he does not remember our meeting, if he remembers it “perfectly”? If he does remember me, why the fuck would he ask me, in front of his wife, whether he tried to sleep with me, when he knows the answer? If he doesn’t remember me, why the fuck would someone that promiscuous ask a woman if he tried to get with her? What if I had turned out to be someone he fucked? Having turned it over in my mind for a while, I really have no idea.
I really think it would have cost him nothing to get his picture taken with my friend, after we had waited hours for it. Not doing so was pointlessly cruel and needlessly stingy.
And, of course, due to the Murphy’s Law of Unsmoothness, someone is shooting video of the whole signing. Due to a bizarre series of coincidences, most of my interactions with Harlan Ellison over the years have had an embarrassing number of witnesses and been recorded on audio and/or video.
Walking away from Every Picture Tells A Story, two things occur to me. The most important is that, for all his talk of just being a man about it and getting down to the brass tacks of writing, I’m not sure Harlan Ellison is really still writing. Did he take his hands off the typewriter keys when Keebler acquired Sunshine Biscuits and discontinued the Hydrox cookie? I think the only teleplay he has done, since the turn of the century, is The Discarded for Masters of Science Fiction and, in the book department, Every Picture Tells A Story appeared to have only new editions of older work. The second thing which occurs to me is that I’ve already written about my first meeting with the great author.
Below, you will find an article which first ran in Blue Blood in print in 1997, after the fourth or fifth time I ran into Harlan Ellison. The then most recently prior meeting was in the VIP area at a White Wolf party at a convention Harlan Ellison and I were both guests at. As it was already a theoretically exclusive gathering, it was the sort of situation where it would be normal to shake the hand of anyone friendly and ask who they were, but Ellison seemed oddly standoffish to me. For the unitiated, White Wolf is a roleplaying game company with a flagship product kind of like Dungeons & Dragons. They had grossed like three or four million bucks that year and were hoping to get into more standard genre book publishing. I could be slightly off on the figures, but these numbers are close. White Wolf paid Harlan Ellison like $200,000 to reprint some of his work. Unfortunately for them, Harlan Ellison found out that writer Michael Moorcock, creator of Elric, got a quarter mill, so he called up the company and pitched a fit. Although I was more into Ellison’s work than Moorcock’s, so I probably would have paid him more in White Wolf’s shoes, I also believe that, when a grown man makes a deal, his word should be his bond. I don’t think it is right to renegotiate because you realize you left some money on the table. And, in all fairness to those who chose to pay Moorcock more, inside sources familiar with the Borealis Legends imprint at White Wolf told me that the Moorcock did better for them in sales.
At the time, I viewed the great author Harlan Ellison as such a giant that I did not imagine anything I did could particularly touch him. Maybe it was really a bummer for him that I put our real life interactions in print. Maybe, the first time he met me, he waited up in his hotel room all night and is still pissed off that I never stopped by. In my mind, I absolutely did not reject him; I was just really young and inexperienced and starstruck. It might be better to have an anecdote where I could say I was such a badass, even then, that I tied Harlan Ellison to the headboard and rode him with my young cunt, like a teenage girl rides a pony, but, alas, it didn’t go down like that. Years after the fact, I figured, if he didn’t even remember me after being reminded, wasn’t even particularly interested in finding out my name, then how much could he possibly care what I had to say. I kind of feel that Ellison’s own words are some of what probably created my view that it would be okay to talk about such things. If the man slept with 700 women and talked about it, how much could it matter if he happened not to hit a 701st and she talked about it?
My friends and I go to a diner named Dolores and it is yummy and the conversation is good. I tell my friends I sometimes wish I were a boy.
And it fucking well was Oreos and not Hydrox.
When I was about seventeen, my friend Keith Kanik brought Harlan Ellison to my college to speak. Ellison did an informal talk with the Science Fiction & Fantasy Club in the afternoon and a more formal speech for the Jewish Lecture Series that night. (It was a total coincidence that Keith was a budget officer for both organizations, we swear.) At the time, my pleasure reading consisted primarily of Harlan Ellison collections of short stories, with the occasional longer work by Harlan Ellison thrown in. So I was excited to see the author speak, but that didn’t keep me from showing up late for the SF Club thing. I think maybe I had a class or something pesky like that. By the time I got there, the only seat free was the one next to Ellison. Lots of my classmates had seated themselves on the floor in order to avoid taking that seat, but I was born without the normal number of intimidated chromosomes.
So I sat down next to Ellison and he immediately started flirtatiously bantering with me and touching himself. (He claimed he wasn’t touching himself; he had a tear in his pants. But I wasn’t buying it.) What I didn’t know, because I had arrived late, was that my little pals were taping this whole exchange. So somewhere there is an audiotape of Harlan Ellison offering to fly me to Florida if I would fuck a flamingo while he watched. (Years later, I wrote to him and offered, but it turns out he was married by then.) As a result of discussing bestiality and such with our honored guest, I was invited to the dinner for Ellison and seated opposite him so he could play footsie with me or whatever. A number of people I liked were at the dinner, but there were also more than a few I didn’t. I shared my little opinions with Ellison on the car ride over. So when introduced to a member of the Wesleyan Clergy, Harlan Ellison goes, “I’ve heard so much about you.” “All good I hope,” says the clergyman with a guffaw. “Actually,” Ellison replies, “I heard you were an asshole.” Technically, I said the man was incompetent and devoid of compassion, but watching his face was still worth it. Harlan Ellison, unlike most celebrities, is exactly the way his readers would want him to be.
After the dinner, we rode over to Ellison’s lecture together after he had picked up some Oreos in order to increase audience participation. (He likes to throw cookies at an audience.) So it is dark and the two of us are in the back of my friend’s car and I’m eating cookies out of Ellison’s hand and he’s whispering in my ear, hot and wet, “I bet you’re kinky, I bet you’re kinky in bed, I bet you’re kinky as Hell . . .” Technically, he was right; he was just a little early. Somewhere there is a videotape of Harlan Ellison calling me a sex object in front of a lecture group, but I thankfully do not have a copy. Today, I would insist on at least some oral sex for a statement like that, but then I was too young even to really respond to the tongue he slipped me at the end of the evening and I skipped going by his room. Hopefully, he doesn’t remember the incident too clearly as I had a different name and hair color at the time.
But for years afterwards, I continued to scour used book store racks for books by Harlan Ellison. I loved his ability to slip in and out of different genres, to weave genres together, and to remain angry and righteous for so many years. At a certain point, I gave up looking, however, because only a few of his books could be found and I had read all of those. Today, all of Harlan Ellison’s works from 1958 to the present are being rereleased in a series of omnibus editions. I dislike the omnibus format because the hardcovers are heavy and I’m likely to have read at least one of the sections in every one. But I believe that Harlan Ellison is one of the best living authors writing in the English language and I think he ought to get paid. Watch for the Edgeworks series finally once again coming to racks for new books.
I was super psyched to see notable writer Gram Ponante join the Blue Blood forums this week. His writing cracks me up. I was also super psyched by his recent press mention of Blue Blood where, among other things, he said:
“Part of the 1300th photoset hosted on pioneering punk erotica site Blue Blood.com, the photos of Sara X remind me that I really need to watch my diet.“
Gram made the interesting point that he feels labels have to constantly be defined and re-defined because of the human “tendency to aggressively misunderstand.” This was primarily apropos of whether or not I could talk about feminist issues which matter to me and not have my existence become unmitigated hell.
But Gram has, for quite some time now, been promoting the notion that the annoying altporn terminology should be changed to steveporn because steveporn is a term which comes without the baggage. Now, it is my impression that some of the support for the steveporn terminology comes from the same divisive, art-destroying, and scene-damaging camp which coined the altporn terminology in the first place, and that the main point of using the term steveporn is in the hopes of mollifying famous director and writer David Aaron Clark. DAC’s objection to altporn is complex. I should probably have him explain it here some time, but perhaps his view can be summed up as generally feeling that, as an adult video genre, it is neither an alternative to anything, nor particularly quality pornography, nor generally being produced by the best that industry has to offer.
I’ve known David Aaron Clark for many years and I adore him and I respect his opinions. I agree with him on many things and enjoy debating the topics on which we do not agree. And I feel qualified to say that dressing up the same problem with a new name is not going to fool DAC.
Nonetheless, I am entertained by Gram’s blog and his suggestion that perhaps altaltporn could be termed steveporn. Sadly, a rose by any other name and all that.
I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.
Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.
He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:
1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – butnot yet . . . St. Augustine!” All her little friends laugh and cheer. Amateurs.
1:59: I raise my shot, “This is for all the bitches, ho’s and tricks, I’d wouldn’t talk to any of you, if I didn’t have a dick . . . Tucker Max. Everyone laughs.
2:00: One of the girls asks me, “Who is Tucker Max?”
2:10: Two shots later, my female opponent bows out of the shot contest. I taunt her mercilessly, “You may be able to vote and drive, but you’ll never be equal!” I am not a gracious winner.
2:11: One of her little friends comes up to me. She is cute with short hair and thick black framed glasses. She is pissed:
Girl: That was really sexist.”
Tucker: No it wasn’t, it was a joke. If I had said that women are nothing but life support for pussy, now THAT would be sexist.”
Girl: “Excuse me?”
Tucker: “If I had called her a hot mouth, that would be sexist too. Or, if I said that the only thing going for her is that she’s 98.6 degrees and has two wet holes, that would be very sexist. But I didn’t say those things, did I?”
Girl: “WHAT?”
Tucker: “Uh oh! Did I piss you off? Are you going to write angsty poetry?!?”
Women in the stories Tucker recounts also tend to say things along the lines of, “I can’t believe how funny I think you are and I’m a girl.” It is my opinion that they are either (a) easily manipulated chicks or (b) missing the fucking point. I’m not delusional, so I’m well aware that some people look at my own work and aren’t aware of anything deeper than quality photos of punk genitalia and gothic boobies, although there is more to it. But I do understand that sometimes pervy sex is the common denominator for a reason. Sure, Tucker regularly points out how much pussy he has thrown at him 24/7 and how great he is at acquiring even difficult pussy. His writing career started when he first launched his site as a dating application. Some chicks will always be attracted to a guy they believe other chicks want. Some guys will be impressed by any dude who claims to have laid miles of pipe. Although I went through a phase in the late 80’s where I liked to tie up blonde boys from good families, that was a long time ago, so some people will undoubtedly be surprised that I am such a huge fan of Tucker Max’s writing that I told my panelmates at the recent SXSW confab that I’d be late getting to the green room for our panel because I was going to watch Tucker Max speak at his first. Then again, readers who really gotBLT, the antisocial punk rock humor zine I did in DC, well, I think they will understand the Tucker Max appeal.
The point is not that Tucker Max is a hard-drinking vanilla guy who has frequent sex with varied partners. The point is that his writing is brilliant, articulate, painfully insightful, and totally fearless and he is able to find the humor in absolutely anything. John Hargrave of Zug.com, the moderator of Tucker’s one man SXSW panel From Blog to Book called the author “a promiscuous drunken Tolstoy.” To give you an idea of the Zug perspective, my horoscope on the site today suggests I “Call a hardware store and whisper “stucco” into the phone over and over. “Stucco stucco stucco stucco stucco.” If they hang up, simply call back.” I used to manage an adult boutique where callers sometimes attempted this sort of thing. They might as well have been saying “stucco” for all the impact it had on folks who sold lingerie and vibrators, although only the serious submissives called back to speak with the manager, once I got through with them. At the end of the From Blog to Book panel, John Hargrave was kind enough to pour healthy doses of something called Tucker Max Death Mix. The ingredients of which are apparently Everclear, Lemon-Lime Gatorade, and Red Bull. No wonder so many Tucker Max Drunk stories entail such copious amounts of vomit.
Tucker Max claims to have little formal idea how to write properly. This is debatable as he went to both U Chicago and Duke Law. Both good schools. But he assured his SXSW audience that he has no clue how to use commas, confuses forms of the word ‘too’, and doesn’t really consider himself a writer. He says he tries not to consider his audience when writing, to just concentrate on telling his story in his own authentic way. “I write in my authentic voice,” he says. Oh yeah, and then he works on trimming the fat from his work. But the authenticity is key.
According to Tucker Max’s business card, the name of his company is Rudius Media. According to the Rudius web site, “a rudius is a wooden sword, given by the Roman Emperor to a gladiator upon attainment of his freedom.” It may be happy coincidence that this is probably also a play on the word ‘rude’, but whatever. The best thing about Tucker Max’s writing is the sense of abandonment, the extreme freedom. He’ll tell you his ferocious opinion of some lesser person that himself and he’ll tell you his dick is average in size, although a bit large to put in a midget or a small girl’s colon. He may be coy about whether he has ever done cocaine in Vegas, but he’ll tell you how much hostile fun he is on absinthe. He’ll detail how he drove a mildly inconsiderate girl’s car through the storefront of a donut shop. He’ll pressure all the law firms in Silcon Valley into raising their salaries for summer interns by posting sock puppet conversations with himself on Infirmation.com. He’ll tell girls he is in a Christian rap band and coerce his friends into playing along. He’ll get accidentally pepper-sprayed during the sex act. He’ll bring friends in Special Ops to a politically left wing cocktail party. He’ll get thrown out of IHOP. He’ll get thrown out of Denny’s. He’ll get thrown out of Mickey D’s. And he’ll pretty shamelessly tell you – and everyone else – about it. Although his book has been out for more than a year now, he says it is still selling a remarkable 2,000 copies a week to people like me who are just discovering him. He says he designed the flawlessly appropriate book cover himself too. Tucker Max challenges the SXSW audience to check his numbers on Bookscan because everything he says is true and this is one outlandish tale which is verifiable.
And why, you may ask, was I at the airport, while visiting my family, buying noir novels and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell? All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Actually, I have a pretty happy family, as these things go, but that just seemed like such an elegant literate way to close that I almost couldn’t help myself. Of course, now I fucked it all up with the disclaimer.
Writer John Updike passed away this morning. I used to confuse John Updike and John Irving, so I was, as a child, afraid to pick up a John Updike book, for fear someone would get their penis chomped during a blow job. Of course, that was “The World According to Garp”, but I already said I was a kid when this confused me.
So I sat down next to Ellison and he immediately started flirtatiously bantering with me and touching himself. (He claimed he wasn’t touching himself; he had a tear in his pants. But I wasn’t buying it.) What I didn’t know, because I had arrived late, was that my little pals were taping this whole exchange. So somewhere there is an audiotape of Harlan Ellison offering to fly me to Florida if I would fuck a flamingo while he watched. (Years later, I wrote to him and offered, but it turns out he was married by then.) As a result of discussing bestiality and such with our honored guest, I was invited to the dinner for Ellison and seated opposite him so he could play footsie with me or whatever. A number of people I liked were at the dinner, but there were also more than a few I didn’t. I shared my little opinions with Ellison on the car ride over. So when introduced to a member of the Wesleyan Clergy, Harlan Ellison goes, “I’ve heard so much about you.” “All good I hope,” says the clergyman with a guffaw. “Actually,” Ellison replies, “I heard you were an asshole.” Technically, I said the man was incompetent and devoid of compassion, but watching his face was still worth it. Harlan Ellison, unlike most celebrities, is exactly the way his readers would want him to be.
I would like to say that I was aware of 
The point is not that Tucker Max is a hard-drinking vanilla guy who has frequent sex with varied partners. The point is that his writing is brilliant, articulate, painfully insightful, and totally fearless and he is able to find the humor in absolutely anything. John Hargrave of 
