What Michelle's Reading

How did porn get to be cool?

Generation XXX … Acclaim magazine featuring porn actresses Ryan Keely and Justine Joli.

The latest issue of Sydney-based hipster/fashion mag Oyster features a long interview and several lavish photos of Faye Reagan, a pretty, freckle-faced young woman who is also one of the It Girls of American porn.

In one highly cinematic still, Reagan stands gazing out the window in a creased Mickey Mouse tee, cradling a vintage telephone in one hand and juggling the mouthpiece and a cigarette in the other, looking as though Clyde Barrow (or at a pinch, Jean-Paul Belmondo) might be whispering sweet, existential nothings on the other end of the line.

It would be a perfectly ordinary style-mag shot, were it not for the fact that Reagan isn’t wearing any pants, a stark reminder of her day job.

In the accompanying interview, Reagan (who does appear to have her feet surprisingly well planted on the ground) is lauded as “wise for her years, and very, very cool”.

So is porn cool now, so much so that even ever-sniffy cool hunters have tuned their tortoiseshell antennae to it? Is it just more stuff white people like? And if so, should we blame Terry Richardson, the A-list, high-end fashion snapper notorious for inserting his scrawny, bespectacled, middle-aged self into his hyper-saturated photos of naked, barely legal women? 

And what of French fashion publishing maven Oliver Zahm, of Purple fame, whose explanation for the countless sexed-up photos of obliging young women he posts on his Purple Diary blog reads like a dispatch from the Age of Aquarius, complete with “free love” guff: “To me love and sex is the most beautiful thing on earth, you know. It’s more beautiful than a landscape, so I love to keep pictures of the girls in these private moments because they are giving you the most beautiful side of themselves.” 

How did these chaps succeed in getting the beautiful people to act as props as they went public with their porn-lite sexual fantasies? Since when did dirty old men stop being a bit scuzzy? 

It would be all too easy if we could just wag our fingers at sleazy old men, but what are we to make of it when women get in on the act, too?

The latest issue of Acclaim, a Melbourne-based street culture mag with a dude-ish affinity for tattoos and graffiti art, mines the same porny Zeitgeist as Oyster. Its cover story is a series of photos by “erotic photographer” Ellen Stagg that, at first glance, looks like soft porn in its most gauche form, yet its mixed signals make it somewhat trickier to decode.

Stagg’s subjects are, again, American porn actresses (Justine Joli and Ryan Keely), in a series of ludicrously girly action shots wearing very little; painting each other’s nails while lolling around on a pink bedspread, playing hula hoop, sucking suggestively on phallic icy poles.

It looks like something from the mind of a man so unevolved he truly believes that women get together to have pillow fights in their negligees. Yet the message is tricked up by the knowledge that the images were shot by a woman who worked in close collaboration with the models.

“In terms of the aesthetic, I mean I focus more on their face than their ‘pink parts’, but I also focus on them as women, as people, as someone with a personality, over just a woman with a face and body,” Stagg tells her interviewer. 

So maybe porn is the new black, and we should all wear it. There is another view, of course, one far from happy to be seduced by all that nubile, fashionably un-attired flesh.

Academic Gail Dines argues forcefully in her new book, Pornland, that porn is simultaneously more scuzzy and more pervasive than ever, and that it’s doing profound psychological damage to both men and women. In Dines’s view, the aesthetics of pornography have become so dominant they’ve crowded out other representations of women in popular culture:

“What is different about today is not only the hypersexualisation of mass-produced images but also the degree to which such images have overwhelmed and crowded out any alternative images of being female,” she writes.

“Today’s tidal wave of soft-core porn images has normalised the porn star look in everyday culture to such a degree that anything less looks dowdy, prim and downright boring.”

Yet the so-called “porn star look” can be difficult to pin down in today’s voguish style mags, even as their pages bulge with a flesh parade of models striking carnal poses. It’s all slightly pervy, sure, but arty enough not to be a brown paper bag proposition.

But then the modern-day proliferation of pornish pics of barely post-pubescent girls hardly qualify as “art” either. Just check out any number of American Apparel’s many sexed-up ads. The label is quite partial to using porn stars as models too. In the end, sex sells. But only for as long as we’re all buying.

It’s OK to Be a Hater Because Everything Is Bad

youmightfindyourself:

By: Sam Biddle, Gizmodo

Almost everything is bad. Usually, really bad, and not even bad in an interesting way. Tech is no exception—if anything, tech might be the worst of the bad. The Internet? Gross. The people who use it? Ugh. And it’s fine to hate it all.

If you walk out of your door during daylight you’ll have to look at your feet in order not to see something horrible. And even then, you might be wearing some dumb shoes I hate, like those dumbass finger shoes. If you wear those, go to hell. Then look up, and I bet you’ll see someone wearing Beats By Dre headphones. Follow him back to his apartment, and he probably has some idiot overpriced Bose sound dock that plays music just as well as something cheaper, but because he’s a suggestible semi-human, he bought bulky rainbow idiot headphones and that dock. He bought them because he just wants to look cool, and feel cool, and be accepted. And he is, because everyone around him is just as dumb. Look, that girl’s wearing Beats By Dre too, or maybe they’re the equally bad variant churned out by a few spare neurons of 50 Cent’s. Maybe she saw the same ads I see every day on the subway for Monster audio equipment. She wants something bright on her head due to some low evolutionary reflex, and anything expensive is good. That’s the way things work. Expensive things are better, no how many articles we and our peers write to the contrary. If you buy the most expensive, widely advertised headphones, they’ll be the best. The bigger the poster on the subway, the better the headphone. Does it have a letter on the side of it? Is it shit lime green and shiny? Is it tacky and horrible? Buy that, at Best Buy, because it’s the good one.

People who buy headphones are awful.

But of course they’re not alone. Most Android users are insufferable and the worst too. No, you see, it’s fine that this phone is ugly and slow, because you can root it and customize it. Don’t you want to spend hours customizing your phone? Don’t you realize how superior the flexibility of a new ROM is? Don’t you know what a ROM is? Aren’t you downloading a ROM? Download a ROM and put it on your phone—or just use that iPhone, you troglodyte. You poseur. Meanwhile I’ll be over here installing my ROM. Power use. Power user, power using. I’ve got this thing customized like you wouldn’t believe. Don’t believe it? Watch me as I’m forced to manually install an app so I can get text notifications that are actually visible outside of the notification bar. It doesn’t matter that the keyboard my phone came with is this bad. I’m downloading a new one right now. Fragmentation? Fragment me. Fragment me and throw away the key, or whatever.

I hate you. Oh hey guess what:

iPads are fucking horrible, as a concept. They’re fun to use, but pouring pearls out of giant flour sacks onto the dancing and desperate homeless would also probably be fun. Tablets are a complete luxury item—PURE luxury—and owning one makes you an asshole, instantly, categorically. It’s a wonderful toy. But a toy. A big boy toy. Nobody needs an iPad. Nobody. Not a single person, unless you’re literally so stupid and/or infirm that you can’t use a keyboard and mouse like the rest of the industrialized (or barbaric) world. iPads are a status symbol, a second computer that’s built expressly for convenience. You’re spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars to make your cushy life even cushier by carrying a beautiful computer you don’t need that you can use while flopped down on the couch or leaning against an airplane window like the bourgeois brat idiot you are. You don’t need this thing, and you know you don’t need it. You need a PC-yes. You need a PC to be part of modern society. But you don’t need an iPad, and the entire notion of the luxury device is noxious and offensive and the very throbbing essence of Western decadence. It’s immoral to own an iPad, but that won’t stop you or me or anyone from coveting them and reading about them until our eyes squirt blood, dripping down the pristine oleophobic Gorilla Glass IX.

Twitter! Websites! Oh they’re almost all bad. Virtually all websites and people who make them and use them are horrendous. Subhuman. Maybe inhuman. Nobody on Facebook is funny. They recycle the same horrible image memes that 4chan snowballed into Reddit’s mouth months ago. Years ago. And now they’re back again. Remember Shit Girls Say? Remember the 560,000 knockoffs? That was fun. That was funny. Look at QuickMeme—people are making the same jokes, over and over, over and over and over, and it’s being viewed more than anything I’ll ever write in my life. The same picture of a raccoon with Impact text over it. Have you ever been to 9GAG? It’s worse than a Taliban coordination message board.

It’ll go on like this forever, because people will never change, but technology will only get faster. Well, we might change, in that technology is turning us into ever-stupider, ever-strunger-outer attention anorexics with a thirst for nothing but meme gristle and Internet lists. Before we implode from the psychological strain strains of saying, doing, making, buying, sharing, and generally slathering about the worst ideas and products in the history of humanity, let’s all agree that it’s OK to whine. It’s OK to say that things are terrible, because they are. It’s OK. It’s true and it’s OK. Try it with me. Try it with me and then go to hell, because you’ll probably share a Scumbag Steve pic later today.

9 months ago - 173

A Book Lover's Guide to Reading and Walking at the Same Time

youmightfindyourself:

I stand up. I start walking. I’m still reading. My secondary senses go into overdrive to keep me on track (you know, like Daredevil). My mind divides: I’m both here and not-here, in the reality and in the fiction at the same time. The world scrolls by around the edges of the page, the margins outside the margins—furniture, stairs, pets, children. I keep a weather eye on all that, but I’m still reading, I’m still taking in sentences. I’m navigating by memory and peripheral vision, eyes down, course-correcting as needed.

Then I’m safe at my destination without once having broken contact with the fiction. It’s satisfying. I feel like I got away with something. Screw you, Aslan, I’m stayin’ in Narnia.

Though it’s a slippery slope from there. Once you master the basic skill, it’s tempting to take it to the office. I do. That’s familiar turf too, though there’s a new element, namely my co-workers. They probably think it’s odd. Eccentric even. Bah! It’s worth it. By reading and walking at the same time I’ve got uninterrupted access to the page. It’s like broadband, it’s always on.

Now reading and walking outside—I’ve seen it called readwalking—that’s a different proposition. I do it, but it depends on where I am. Marilynne Robinson lives in Iowa City, where I imagine (I’ve never been there) you can find dog-walking paths that are relatively free of foot traffic. I live in New York City, where the sidewalks are crowded, and there are already a lot of people bombing along them with their heads down because they’re texting. My favorite part is when two texters meet head-to-head and they both look up and stare at each other blankly, neither one budging, like the north-going Zax and the south-going Zax in Dr. Seuss.

I try to be a little more considerate than that. But once in a while I get off the subway at a crucial juncture in a novel, and I just cannot wait till I’m in my office to find out what happens next. I have to squinch out a few sentences in between. I just have to.

My first move is to clamp the book under one arm, inside-out, at my current page, like a running-back with a football, so I can whip it out at a moment’s notice.

Then I pick my spots. Short bursts is the approach. You look for a stretch of open sidewalk, maybe a half a block, you hastily memorize the major obstacles, and then you glance down at the book. You’re speed-reading here—you don’t so much run your eye over the page as grab the next few sentences all at once. Then the book goes back under the arm. You look up again and digest the words as you walk. You check your location and bearing, like a submarine, and you prepare to dive again.

Strangers look at you a bit funny, but come on—they’re strangers. Not like the characters you’re reading about. Sure, they may be fictional, but they’re not strangers. They matter.

In extreme cases I’ve even been known to draft off the backs of other pedestrians, the way cyclists do in a crowded peloton. I pick a target who looks like a fine upstanding citizen, with somewhere to be and a tolerant view of humanity. I find I can follow the person at a discreet, respectful distance, keeping his or her feet at the upper edge of my peripheral vision, and use them to lead me around fire hydrants and sidewalk café chairs and people hailing taxis, like a seeing-eye dog.

It’s foolish, of course. I know it is. It’s the opposite of being a flâneur: I’m not practicing what Balzac called “the gastronomy of the eye,” feasting on the rich details of the world around me as if it were a novel. I’m doing the opposite. I’m not a flâneur, I’m a lecteur: I’m opting out of life’s rich pageant in favor of literature’s rich pageant. I can only imagine the serendipitous encounters I’m missing out on, the interesting cloud formations, the fleeting eye contacts, the fine architectural details, the noteworthy trees, the changing seasons, all the chance beauty that’s passing me by while I walk and read. But sometimes life just isn’t as interesting as art.

Of course the other thing I miss is sightings of my fellow lecteurs, charging along the pavement, nose in a book, steering by feel. But I know they’re there. We pass like ships in the night—mon semblable, mon frère. But there’s a kinship between us nonetheless. We’ve made the same choice. They too have chosen art over life, looking weird over looking normal, the printed page over the blank, uninteresting, unreadable faces of the crowd. They’ve opted out of it all.

11 months ago - 88

Five Levers for Social Change: Part 1 (SSIR)

The Cheat Sheet: Obama Talks Afghanistan Loss of Life at NATO Summit But Silent on Chicago Gun Violence

Twelve year-old Nazia Banks was in his last 90 minutes of life when Air Force One landed at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Saturday night.

As President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama were greeted on the tarmac by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his wife, Nazia was on the opposite end of the city,…

1 year ago - 3

anarchist anthropology

commonunity:

follow the link to read the complete two page article.

The anthropologist David Graeber has a strong claim to being the house theorist of Occupy Wall Street. A veteran of the antiglobalization uprisings in Seattle and Genoa, he helped orchestrate the first “General Assembly” in New York this summer, and has since become one of the movement’s most outspoken defenders. For him, the encampments in cities across the country prefigure the kind of anti-hierarchical, stateless society that ought to be our future. In a recent opinion article in The Guardian of London, Graeber proclaimed OWS “the opening salvo in a wave of negotiations over the dissolution of the American Empire.” For a movement that has attracted an array of political sympathies, his voice reminds us that at its organizational core, Occupy Wall Street cleaves to anarchist principles.

But Graeber’s most important contribution to the movement may owe less to his activism as an anarchist than to his background as an anthropologist. His recent book DEBT: The First 5,000 Years (Melville House, $32) reads like a lengthy field report on the state of our economic and moral disrepair. In the best tradition of anthropology, Graeber treats debt ceilings, subprime mortgages and credit default swaps as if they were the exotic practices of some self-destructive tribe. Written in a brash, engaging style, the book is also a philosophical inquiry into the nature of debt — where it came from and how it evolved. Graeber’s claim is that the past 400 years of Western history represent a grievous departure from how human societies have traditionally thought about our obligations to one another. What makes the work more than a screed is its intricate examination of societies from ancient Mesopotamia to 1990s Madagascar, and thinkers ranging from Rabelais to Nietzsche — and to George W. Bush’s brother Neil.

1 year ago - 36

Alerting Monopolies

1 year ago - 6