What I'm reading

Necrophilia Variations, Supervert

My new logo

The awesomely talented Chris Bishop has designed a logo for my Forbes blog, SIN INC. It's a redux of the logo he created for my Reverse Cowgirl blog years ago. It is awesome.

Check out Bishop's original cowgirl logo. His haunting Bad Memory painting hangs in my home office. He's famous for his unicorns humping shirt.

[CHRIS BISHOP]

Tax that ass

My pal Bubbles let me interview her for my Forbes blog. What's it like to work with a pole tax? Bubbles explains.

Jezebel, as you pointed out, called Houston’s pole tax “genius,” adding, “Pretty smart to use money from folks who enjoy sexualized women to aid sexually assaulted women.” Are pole taxes feminist — or anti-feminist?

The pole tax is a regressive and optional tax and as such is definitely not progressive, liberal, or in line with a statewide economic policy that would further the interests of most of the working women in the state.

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You are no longer distinct

Hey! That's me. Back when I had a mohawk. Or maybe it was when I had a fauxhawk.

In any case, please go read photographer Clayton Cubitt's latest phototreatise. It's a fascinating evaluation of how photography has transformed time. Fall into his dark worm hole.

"What if every phone in every pocket had this technology, and you could consent to have your presence 'photographed' from anywhere on Earth at any time, by sharing your own connection with another artist, and vice versa? Imagine Errol Morris' 'Interrotron' in hyper-realistic 3D, from all angles, at all times. What if a future decentralized social networking platform allowed everyone to connect their capture node, for the use of any other artist, or just a chosen circle of friends? We already use Google Street View for location scouting. What if it enabled us to change to any angle and scrub back and forth in time as well, and from any 'open' node near it, side to side, and from drones above, not just from a single Google car that passed by once?

This is the Constant Moment. This is as close to a time machine as we're likely to get."

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Cowgirl in Asia

Last week I returned from my second trip to China. The first time I went was in December of last year.

In case you are not aware, Asia is insane. Or at least China is. Or at least the parts that I went to are -- Shanghai and Suzhou.

What is the population of Shanghai? Closing in on 24 million. As a point of comparison, the population of New York City is around 8.5 million.

When people find out you went to Asia, they are most of the time impressed. I am not sure why. Invariably, if they haven't been there, they want to know what it's like. I say, "It's like New York City on steroids," but that doesn't really cut it. It is massively busy, a completely different world, hyper-capitalist and deeply old school.

My favorite things are: Pudong, with its wacky skyline; the antiques market with busts of Mao at every turn; the food, especially the crispy duck at 1221; the animals and insects market, where the frogs are rainbow colored and the crickets have a fight club; the marriage market at People's Park; the golden temples populated by saffron-wrapped monks and surrounded by skyscrapers; the sensation of being a stranger in a strange land.

At one point, I was meandering around a park in Suzhou, camera in hand. I thought, There is nothing here to photograph other than trees and bridges. A minute later, I rounded a corner to find a statue of a little boy bent over, his pants pulled down, a sculpted dog sniffing his butt.

That's China for you.