pretty dumb things

feeding the dream of The Impossible Girl

I don’t remember when I started following Kim Boekbinder, The Artist Also Known as The Impossible Girl (or TAAKaTIG, for brevity), but I do remember when she first responded to one of my Tweets. I posted a picture of myself in her “Kim Boekbinder believes in me” t-shirt with commentary along the lines that I wear it whenever I feel immersed in a pit of self-doubt. Kim said, “So all the time, basically.”

Yup, pretty much, I wrote back.

I’m not one of those people who believes that everything happens for a reason. I’m more of one of those people who believes that everything happens. And yet every once in a while, something happens that makes me reconsider that pragmatic if chaos-loving stance. Becoming friends with Kim is one of those things.

We’re not close friends. We don’t call each other up or braid one another’s hair. When I have a problem or a celebration, Kim is not the first person I text. She’s not even the seventh. That’s not Kim’s role in my life, though I’d be open to it if it were. We occasionally do things together like go places and eat dinner; we’re often at the same parties. Sometimes we Gchat. We’re not close, but we are friends.

Despite my ethos of chaos cut with pragmatism, I do believe that Kim is in my life for a reason. I believe that Kim shows me that sometimes, if you work hard and are genuinely nice to people and completely true to yourself and do your best to make art that means something to you, if you do all this (and even if, or perhaps especially if, you fall down and fail and then come back again with a radical tactic and a galvanized sense of purpose), you will do something new, something wonderful, something magical, and something transcendent.

Kim may call herself the Impossible Girl, but I’ve come to think of her as the “Anything is Possible Girl.”

Last spring, Kim had a disheartening touring experience when attendance at venues was low because the club hadn’t really marketed her well, or properly, or at all. It made Kim sad, so she drank whisky, which got her drunk and in turn gave her an epiphany. She decided to create a tour based on her fans’ desires and to use Kickstarter to presell her own tour. I’ve already bought my ticket for her New York show, but if you live in San Diego, LA, San Fran, Seattle, Portland (the one in OR), Minneapolis, NOLA, Boston, or Hartford, you can also see her there. Or you can just throw money at her. She’ll catch it.

I believe in Kim Boekbinder, and not merely because my shirt says that she believes in me. She’s got this combination of artistry, savvy and grace. It’s a combination that’s unicorn rare, and it’s why I feed her dream. This and the fact that she does make some really good music.

 

her name isn't bubbles

My friend Bubbles Burbujas, also known as the amazing StripperTweets on Twitter, wrote a post about my joining the My Name Is Me campaign for her communal blog Tits and Sass, a website devoted to the intelligent, often funny, always real, voices of sex-workers. Bubbles says:

Google is becoming like that irritating customer who thinks he’s so clever for figuring out that stripper probably really isn’t named Fantasia, what with asking people, “No, really, what’s your real name?” Welcome to our world, online handle users! Choosing a work name is one of the first things nearly every sex worker does when entering the business. My name isn’t really Bubbles, Kat’s driver’s license says something else, and Charlotte wasn’t given that name at birth. We all have different reasons for using other identities online from the frivolous (to bitch about work without trouble) to the very serious (malevolent stalkers).

As a former stripper, I'm fascinated with identity--the ones we choose for ourselves, the ones we find society pastes upon us like so many adverts for Mila Kunis rom-coms, the ones that chafe, the ones towards which we aspire. A rose by any other name may still be a rose, but I'm fairly certain that the Society of American Florists would rebrand it if its name were stinkweed. Stripping for six years, I saw many dancers change their names when they realized that no one wanted to get a dance from Suede.

I've written often about identity; it's not just an idle concept for me. There was this post about navigating the choppy waters between my strip self and being in grad school. There was this post about choosing the strip name CeeCee, and this post about what it meant. And then there's the pice that I wrote for Tits and Sass on the weirdness of being a sex writer. I don't know if I became interested interested in the smoke and mirrors of identity because I was a stripper or if I became a stripper in part because identity was always smoke and mirrors.

"I am my mane, my mane is me," my friend Rita would say every night she geared up to swivel another shift at FlashDancers. And, really, it's as good a strip mantra as any I've heard. Flattening your self into glossy swinging strands can seem to work well in the ever-plastic world of a strip club. It's way more snarled in the world of the real, which if you're a stripper includes the plastic playland of silky Lycra, Lucite shoes and fake names. 

Real, fake, digital, analog, call it what you will, it's always complicated.

 

 

tits and sass and wits and class

I'm a friend of Bubbles, one of the unstoppable forces of seduction and intelligence behind the sexworker blog site, Tits and Sass. I'm half in awe and half in love and more than a little scared by Bubbles, particularly her hipster cred and music nerd chops. An added bonus to our relationship is the ability to drop phrases like "as my friend Bubbles said" into conversation; however piquant that may be, the actual friendship is far more meaningful and rewarding.

Bubbles asked me to contribute a piece or two to Tits and Sass, and my first one, "Shaking Tail and Spinning Tales, From Shaking It to Spinning Them," is up today. The piece explores the intersection of stripping and writing erotica. Here's an excerpt:

Strippers and erotica writers choose to write under names not only because they fear personal and professional reprisals—sex is a dangerous business, even if you’re just depicting it in words; you don’t even need to airfuck for cash to make sex dangerous; never mind the zip code, just living in the Congressional district of sex is dangerous and implicating—but because the fantasy of being someone else isn’t just for the audience. In some way, it’s there for you as the stripper or the writer too. I call this “The Sasha Fierce Effect.”

Beyoncé created her alternate wild-girl persona Sasha Fierce in order to do the stuff on stage that she as Beyoncé wasn’t entirely comfortable doing. If, like a person with multiple personality disorder, you fracture your self into discrete (and ideally discreet) units, you might find you can deal with the perceived dangers of that freakish enterprise. 

Go here to read the rest. It's free. While you're at it, take some time to read the site's coverage of the Ashton Kutcher/Village Voice sex-trafficking "Real Men Don't Pay for Sex" kerfuffle. Both sides could gain from reading what Tits and Sass have posted, frankly. 

In my post, I namedrop a series of posts that I've written here (as well as a couple of Penthouse articles, stories for anthologies and the like). For those readers who might like to read those posts, I thought I'd give some links. Here they are, in order:

The one about the time my boyfriend bound me, blindfolded me, and made me come like a yowling banshee. 

The one about the time I had the world's fasted threesome.

The one about the time I was the girlmeat in the boy sandwich.

The one about the time I fucked a clown.

The one about the times I gave head. Really, there's a lot of head giving.

The one about the time I first squirted.

The one about the time I admitted my ambivalence over nipple clamps.

And if that's not enough, here's the whole smut enchilada, and here are the oral parts and the anal parts. It's like Freud's stages, but without the shaming or the cigars. And finally, here are all my strip tales, starting at the beginning. Because as long as we're talking about tits and sass, we might as well go full circle.

 Ps. I also write about a lot of stuff that has little if anything to do with sex. Because there's also rock 'n roll, zombies and Buffy.

the stuff of dreams

I made a sound recording of this piece. You can listen to it, or you can read it, or both. Your choice.

The stuff of dreams

 

Last week, I had a sex dream about a friend of mine. It was vivid and delicious, and when I woke to my cat’s mewling and tromping heavy across my head, I struggled to return to it. The details dribbled away faster than I could recall them. Like an Aboriginal sandpainting in a tornado, it flew apart and slipped into cracks, and all I was left with were a few pastel scraps and orts. An improbable coupling on a mattress in the middle of a medieval courtyard. The breath-warm feeling of joy and completeness and pleasure that suffuses good sex. The sense that in fucking, this friend and I had done something wildly irrational, murderously stupid, and ill conceived, and that we had defied the odds.

I often have sex dreams. I rarely have them about friends. Usually I dream about celebrities or ex-boyfriends, people whose private existences are dwarfed in size by the scale of my own projections about them. When I do dream about friends, I wake wrapped in the disconcerting and weird. It’s one thing when I willfully choose to place friends into my onanistic fantasies, when my inner Candida Royale casts them in the porn narrative that plays as I do the voodoo that I do by myself, so well.

It’s another thing entirely when my despotic unconscious usurps that role and suddenly I’m plunged in the throes of hot, hot, dirty friend-on-erogenous zones action. It is, of course, fine in the dark of the night. Everything is entirely natural in a dream. But by the light of day and naked bulb of conscious thought, I find the lingering dream-shred disconcerting. I find myself mildly haunted, the erotic specter of my platonic relationship poking its head out at inopportune moments. Suddenly, the dreamed about is cast in a new and flattering light. My conscious mind gets hijacked. Thoughts wander. It’s weird and discomfiting.

Then there’s the question of whether I tell the friend. Do I or don’t I? Does he or doesn’t he (or, occasionally, she)? Will this confession lead to further weirdness and discomfiting? Or will it lead to some dreamy land of fulfillment? Or will it, as is and should be most often the case, lead to nothing more than a brief flicker of flattered feeling on the part of the dreamee and the not-unpleasurable frisson of shame and revelation on the part of the dreamer?

This time, I did confess—both to the world at large and to the friend in specific. First, I tweeted that I’d had a sex dream about a friend, and then, I emailed my friend and told him that he was the person about whom I’d dreamt. “Feel flattered or, you know, whatever,” I wrote eloquently and not at all ambivalently. He wrote back and, half-jokingly, asked whether in my dream he’d had a big cock. Sadly, that detail is not one of the grains of sand that stuck. I could not give him an accurate answer. I like to make people feel good about themselves when I legitimately can, but I’m hesitant to conjure details when I can’t.

Later in the week, this friend and I had a drink at a bar in Brooklyn. It was a cold night, and sitting at the bar, talking about Sarah Palin’s blood libel and the smell of my cat’s excrement and Twitter and writing and other sundry subjects, we got waylaid by this assertively drunk guy. This guy, bald and sporting hipster eyewear and hipster facial hair and garbed in hipster black, was double fisting red wine and Couvoisier. When the girls to his right left, he swung and turned on us, inserting himself into our conversation like an f-bomb. My friend patiently and deftly redirected the guy. Almost Mr. Miyagi-like, my friend made the guy wax off into the patient Brooklyn dark, and we were left alone to finish our night.

This friend and I, we have a history of unusual candor. It’s good and it’s interesting, and it’s nice to have men in my life upon whom I don’t project white picket fences and the entire Kama Sutra. I’d like it if my unconscious stepped the fuck off that particular stoop and meandered down the way to furnish me a dream about The Situation or Sherrod Brown, someone healthy and positively silver in his ripeness for projection. Sadly, I don’t have the choice, but that is the point of the unconscious. It visits us in the night and lays the mice we’re not expecting at our feet.

Confession has one clear advantage: unbosomed of the secret, I am no longer the sole bearer of it. Priests, therapists, friends, readers: they all play the same role in this. In telling, we are no longer Atlas shouldering the globe, all lonesome alone. We share and in sharing, we lighten the load. My friend, I think he’s cool with it. We laughed and quick-kissed good-bye. He went to his apartment and his dreams, and I to mine, each to his or her own, never the twain to meet, except as we choose.

Or, you know, not.

 

at the saloon at the ends of the worlds

Because I'm powerless over the sweet-evil wiles of Molly Crabapple, I agreed to curate a series of flash fiction written in celebration of the fifth anniversary of Dr. Sketchy's Anti-Art School, the life-drawing franchise that happens with alcohol and naked people, a winning combination if ever I've known one. Below is the piece I wrote for the series. You can read earlier incarnations both on the Dr. Sketchy blog and on its Tumblr. If you want to write something your own darn self, I suggest you do so. Because like Molly, I make art, and then I encourage others to do it too.

The dead continue to dance, drink and make sportive in this story from chelsea g. summers. Belly up to the bar and pour yourself a tall frosty glass of what-the-fuck, here at the Saloon at the Ends of the Worlds…

The Road Warrior, Satan, Kali-Ma and the Whore of Babylon walk into a bar.

“Gimme a pint, ey?” The Road Warrior spat at the barkeep.

“Why do you have to be so insufferably cliché?” the Whore of Babylon said. She looked around the room, through its crepuscular gloom. “Jesus, what a dump.”

“I know,” said Kali-Ma, “I could crap a better existence than this.”

Satan tried to order an Irish Car Bomb. The barkeep told him they were out of C-4. Satan pointed to a dusty bottle of Jameson’s tucked away on a shelf behind a bottle of 1896 Absinthe Robette. The barkeep looked blankly at the Prince of Darkness, who unfurled his wings menacingly, knocking Kali-Ma’s crown askew. Satan, enraged, pointed at the Jameson’s and screamed at the barkeep, “No, clay-brained guts, you knotty-pated fool, you whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch! You are unfit for any place but hell.”

“I swear to Christ,” the Whore of Babylon shot a withering look at Satan, “you are so goddamned lacking in originality.”

“Fer fuck’s sake,” added the Road Warrior and waved drunkenly at the room.  “Gimme another pint. Give ‘m all a pint.” The Road Warrior grabbed his beer and stalked off to the jukebox.

The Whore of Babylon rolled her eyes. “Jesus Fucking Christ, Max, if you play ‘Cracklin’ Rosy’ one more time, I’m going to call the horsemen and make them draw and quarter you. I’ll wear your guts for garters.” She brightened at the prospect and sipped her beer.

“I miss Shiva.” Kali-Ma slumped in a chair. “I wanna dance.”

“I know you do, honey,” said the Whore of Babylon. “Why don’t you come over here and kiss the Mother of Harlots with that mouth?” The Whore of Babylon stared at a shadowy man in a booth. “Hey, is that Godot?”

Satan demanded, ever louder, his fucking Irish Car Bomb right the fuck now. The barkeep pulled a sawed-off shotgun out from behind the bar. He took aim and blew a hole in Satan’s head. Gore flew and blood misted. Satan wobbled, shook his head like a dog, and grimaced. The hole in his head grew back together with a sucking sound. Satan leaped over the bar. He poured a Guinness, but every time he reached for the Jameson’s, it slipped out of his fingers, like smoke, like a mirage, like heaven.

The Road Warrior looked over. “He told you they was out of C-4, mate. Have a pint.”

Kali-Ma began twirling, desultory at first. Her necklace of skulls clattered like sepulchral cutlery. She twirled, ever faster. Sparks flew from her blue feet. It was a pretty sight, and everyone in the bar watched, transfixed at their own imminent destruction.

And so it goes, another infernal night. All apocalypses, all the time. Never a cover. Ladies free on Wednesday, but it’s always late Sunday afternoon at the Saloon at the Ends of the Worlds.

If you're interested in being part of this cavalcade of revenant fiction, email me. We'll do this thing.

close personal naked friends (no benefits)

A cigar may just be a cigar, but a hot chick holding an AK47 is a phallic symbol. Or something.

I recently sat for more illustrations drawn by the illustrious Molly Crabapple. Like the last set, these will become t-shirts for Dirtee Hollywood’s men’s line. Molly said that of all the men’s t-shirts, the one of me holding the paddle over my head sold the best. Thus, in an effort to capitalize on a good thing, the marketing minds asked her to do a series of weapons-toting models. And the images below were born.

If you’re interested in seeing what I look like in the flesh, rather than merely the coyly photographed and enchantingly inked, you can see me this coming Thursday, August 5 at the Red Umbrella Diaries reading at Happy Endings at 302 Broome Street in glamorous Gotham. This reading series is organized by Audacia Ray, that force of nature and politics, and it’s always an amazing group of writers and performers. I’ll be reading something I have yet to write on my last days of disco.

Finally, I’ve a couple of pieces coming out this week on Filthy Gorgeous Things. One is a piece about naked photography and the other is a crazy drunk interview with Katelan Foisy, a charming naked lass possessed of an ass with sass. Read it, and you'll love her almost as much as I do.

Without further ado, below are Molly’s latest drawings.

Tristan Taormino and my big mouth

Today I received an email from sex educator, writer, feminist porn director, and all-around nicest bad-ass sex goddess known to woman and to man, Tristan Taormino, asking for permission to quote something I wrote in her upcoming informational DVD called The Expert Guide to Advanced Fellatio. Of course, I gave her permission because I'm altruistic that way, and if I can help just one more woman or man to overcome the gag reflex given by the gods in their limited foresight, then I have done a small spot of good for this wet, blue planet.

Tristan, being terribly generous and really just the nicest--I mean, I can't stress this point enough, but this is one seriously nice person; Tristan is so nice she actually makes a misanthrope like me reconsider her permanently dour stance towards humanity--chose to Twitter her request and link my blog and suchlike, thereby bringing an influx of folks to my Twitter page and to this blog. Given the new audience, I thought it might be nice of me (see how inspiring this woman is? It's phenomenal) if I linked again the post that Tristan is quoting from, as well as an additional blow-job how-to.

Tristan chose this exact passage to quote:

Deep throat exercise: Take a moment and think about your mouth and throat. Now pull the base of your tongue at the back of your throat down, as you would if you were about to yawn. Think about making a big, round cave at the back of your throat as you kind of retract the base of your tongue.

Think about how it feels as your tongue begins to move, how you feel your throat open up, until you can almost feel pressure in your ears. Do it over and over again.

It comes from a post called "deep-throat and deep-throating: a primer," and you can find it entire here. If you enjoy that post so much you need more, more, more, please read this other post called "bobbing for semen." It gives tips that aren't quite so double black diamond as deep-throating, but I hope it's helpful nonetheless.

On a side note, this deep-throating primer is my most popular post. It's the one that readers always thank me for. It's also my most-linked post. It brought me to the notice of the legendary Susie Bright and she interviewed me about the post (listen to the interview here), and the incredibly intimidating, intelligent and porcelain-skinned Violet Blue™ linked it on her Suck page. Now Tristan has given it a big thumbs up. Apparently, the night I wrote this primer, I did something right. Which gives even a curmudgeon like me the good down-low warming.

(Can't stand going days without my pretty dumb thoughts? Join me on Twitter and enjoy a hot-and-cold-running blathering.)

write on, a status report

A realization struck me yesterday: for the past year, for better or worse, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, I supported myself with my writing. One complete year now, I’ve been a writer. I’m a bit stunned, actually.

To be skeletal honest, most of my paid writing isn’t the writing I’d like to be doing. I am not, for example, being paid to be a columnist, a job I’d dearly love. No great media giant like Condé Nast is doling out my happy yearly salary in great dripping gobs. I don’t get much groovy gratis stuff such as hot-and-cold-running tickets to rock shows (like my friend Sasha Frere-Jones) or tickets to plays (like my friend Terry Teachout) or cruises with 90’s bands and trips to Sasquatch seminars (like my friend Eric Spitznagel). I don’t have a book contract. I didn’t get my piece published in the Times, sadly. I don’t even have agents falling over themselves to court me, as I once did. But I do pay my bills by the fruits of my linguistic labors.

Most of what I write falls under the broadly defined rubric of “copy.” The term brings to mind packing excelsior: stuff that’s made to fill other stuff so that yet more stuff doesn’t rattle around and break from stress, entropy, or gravitational force. The copy I write sells things. It seems I’m fairly adept at writing stuff that sells things. I also ghostwrite, and it seems I’m also fairly adept at ghostwriting, that practice that seems more ventriloquist than apparitional, for when you write as a ghost, you’re transmitting someone else’s voice through your body of work. I sometimes write for magazines, though not often and not the ones I want to write for. I had three sexytime stories published in three separate anthologies last year. I’m writing for a sexytime website (which writing I actually do enjoy). But what I want to write for money mostly isn’t what I’m getting paid to write, not yet anyway.

I have hope. I have guidance. I have ideas. I have talent. And—enter the weirdness—I also apparently have diligence, devotion and discipline. It has been four years since I waywardly began my journey into this writing life, and though I’ve not quite stumbled onto my perfect path, I don’t veer off the trail, to run a metaphor into the dark, loamy ground. I doubt myself with soul-keening acuity, but I do so less frequently. This is a good sign. I also feel as if my writing is getting stronger, more structural; it’s losing its wisteria. Don’t get me wrong: I like wisteria; it’s pretty and it smells good. But wisteria in all its purple glory hides its roots that tear up foundations and leave buildings hollow rubble. It needs to be pruned. Prose is the same way.

I may not yet be paid to write what I want, and I may not yet be paid enough with the kind of consistency to keep me thoroughly solvent, but I am getting closer. Most importantly, none of it would be possible without this blog. This blog started me writing consistently. Having it made me write honestly, bravely and dangerously. I am not a person who can write without an audience. If there’s no one reading, I don’t want to write.

Like the generous support that makes the fine programming at PBS possible, my freelancing year was made possible by this blog, and by extension those people who read it. Because not only did my blog kick my writing ass, and not only did it provide me with my much loved and very necessary audience, but it also brought me almost every single opportunity I’ve had to write. With the exception of one magazine gig, the paid projects I’ve received have come to me through people who read my pretty dumb things: the copywriting, the ghostwriting, the Penthouse and other magazine pieces, the public relations copy, the erotic stories, the sexytime website—all of it.

One thing I’ve learned about blogging: you never know who is reading. It’s a risk to choose to write, but it’s deadening to choose not to. I’d rather be alive and reckless than inert and reckful.

All of which is to say thank you. I write as much because of you as because I must. I don’t know most of you, but you’ve made an indelible, positive mark on my life, like a collective big check in the plus column. I’ve only yet realized an imperfect version of my dream, but I’ve found some lurking eldritch confidence that I’m edging closer to what I want. Slowly, slowly, I’m getting there. Thank you for pushing me.

stepping onto virgin territory: a tale of friendship

I have an unlikely best friend. Most of my friends are very much like me. We misspent out youth in an array of anti-social and vaguely creepy manners. We have long and tortuous histories with sex, drugs and/or rock ‘n roll. We fucked at least a handful of strangers and at least one of them was most likely a stranger of our own biological sex. We flopped about aimlessly in various professional pursuits, and only after throwing many fistfuls of mud at the wall did we finally find something that stuck in an artistically arresting position. When young, we stole stuff, and though we’ve given up the practice the thought remains. We vote Democrat, reflexively.  We are not always kind to strangers. We tip overly well because we worked in the service industry. We distrust the mechanisms of culture: marriage, religion, corporations, suburban housing developments and their lawns. We’re the ones voted “Class Weirdo” at graduation, if we bothered to formally graduate at all.

Standing apart from my usual band of miscreants, malcontents, low-level addicts, and tattooed love children is my friend Elizabeth.

so many words, so little skin

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single tattoo in possession of open space is in want of some company. Which is to say that my intermittent compulsion to get inked seems to come not from my conscious but rather arises from my flesh itself. This feeling is, of course, imaginary. I realize the limitations of my skin; its cognizance is limited to expressions that feel metaphorically onomatopoetic. “Ow!”, “mmmm!” and “eesh!” are about as articulate as my soft tissue gets. The time has come to get tattooed, for my usually dumb dermis has started to scream.