Float

Yesterday, I was interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. It's for a story that has to do with new media, including True/Slant, where I blog at Off the Record.

During the course of the interview, the writer asked me about how some of the other bloggers at True/Slant were apparently using their opportunity at this relatively new venue to transition into a new subject. They were carving out a new niche. And when he asked me about that, if that was something I was doing, I realized I had completely forgotten that was my original intention.

For the past few months, especially in recent weeks, I've had a hard time moving forward on a new long-term project that I've referred to a few times here over the last six months or so. For a time, Chris Bishop was illustrating, designing, and building it, but about a week ago, he finished.

And then, there it was again, and someone asking, well, what about that?, and I had sort of forgotten, and I didn't really know what to say. I stammered something to the effect of, well, yes, I had wanted to change, and then, in one way or another, he asked me, well, why hadn't I, moved forward on this new project, and in my head, I thought, I don't know.

I thought about explaining that it was for personal reasons, but in the context of an interview, that would have sounded like I was saying, well, I'm not going to discuss that with you, although, had I said it, that's not what I would have meant. I would have meant, Because I find myself unable to move forward on it, and I don't know why.

Which is how I end up writing things like this.

I wish I wasn't conflicted. Sometimes I think the only reason I am conflicted is because I have the luxury of being so. Internal conflict is a real first-world problem, isn't it? Real conflict, on the other hand, affords you nothing. It points at the decision and screeches MAKE IT, so you do.

The novelator

I've been working what I would like to refer to as "steadily on and off" on the novel, and it's coming along well. I'm about halfway through. In a way, it's a bit like what it was the last time around, only totally different, if that makes sense, which it doesn't.

I write new material, and I go back and revise. In my most recent round of revisions, I broke down a lot of large chunks of text into smaller bits of text, so there's a lot more white space on the page, and less claustrophobia on the sentence level, because the claustrophobia level on the content level is probably enough to bear. It's crowded in the mind of a madman, I've found.

This time, the midway point feels more like reaching the top of the mountain, and then preparing to pick up steam while tumbling down the other side. Other times, this was the part that felt like you lifted your head up, and remembered this was a long hard slog, and wondered why you ever raised your cranium.

I feel most comfortable with this version of the novel, and the other versions have been legion. It is the most what I set out to do, lo' those many years ago, which was simply turn a short story into a long one, which, as it turns out, is decidedly doable.

I wish for the rest of my life I would just do the easiest, most obvious thing first, but sometimes I have a way of winding around the circumference, taking the long way before I get home. And home is where I want to be. Like Dorothy.

[Video via Siege]

I get more email

In a nutshell:
The project is the book about my life story.

Aside from being the first person to bring porn into the bedrooms of the world in1974 via The Underground Tonight Show the very FIRST xxx rated cable access show w/ Marilyn Chambers, Betty Dodson, amoung many other guests. Over a three year period there was 150 hours of adult televion produced and televised every friday. I am still very active 40 years later shooting for adam&Eve, Wicked, Pl;yboy and all the other major strudios, and, aside from doing time, two years with G.Gordon Liddy, E.Howard Hunt(ie:Watergate) and Clifford Irving, and, aside from growing up in NYC during the counter culture movement's birth, being friends with most of the "beats", Ginzbug, electric cool-aid Kerouak,et al and having directed/produced Jgger, Plant, Allman Bros,Patti Smith and others i was there when it aALLhappened Plus growing up a jewish kid in the bronx but a huge red sox fan. Gangsta father, housewife mother, and then,..me!.

High Shool teacher turned porn Icon. All of the women i have had serious live-in relationships were ALL with sex workers ever since i met a street walker on Bwy two days before my wedding to my college sweetheart. Earned a MSEd. and need two corses for the PhD. (.Ed.d).

It's really all in the details.
I'm a pretty interesting cat.

Everyone says to me .."you should write the book."
I saw your article "they shoot porn...." and liked how you write and your thinking.
I talk better than I type.

wanna chat a bit?
Hope to hear back from you.
Thanks,
[Redacted].

[Image via This Isn't Happiness]

The desert

"Insanity is being shit on, beat down, coasting through life on a miserable existence when you have a caged lion locked inside and the key to release it." -- "Wanted"

Of course, the only good answer to where do you want to live? is the answer you give when someone asks, if you had a million dollars, where would you live?, and, for me, that isn't New York, Washington DC, or Los Angeles. It's the desert.

Years ago, I went to visit Dixie Evans at Exotic World, now known as the Burlesque Hall of Fame, before it moved to Las Vegas, back when it was located on an old goat farm in Helendale on the edge of the Mojave Desert.

It was really an amazing place, and Dixie danced for me while a movie of her from decades ago played in black and white behind her, and I remember it like it was yesterday: the wind whipping up, and the tin foil star lined driveway, and the way when you looked into the distance, there was nothing but you and the long flat horizon line.

Increasingly, I need more nothing in my life. I'm tired of listening to people tell me what to do, tell me where to live, tell me why I should do what they think I should do. I don't understand why people continue to inform me how to do the things I've been doing for years, as if they know better. I'm reaching some kind of a breaking point, and, frankly, I'm ready for it. Because the rest? It's bullshit.

Change can't come soon enough.

Checkmate

"Chess should not become an obsession. Otherwise there’s a danger that you will slide off into a parallel world, that you lose your sense of reality, get lost in the infinite cosmos of the game. You become crazy."

-- Magnus Carlsen

In so deep

At some point, I should write about New Orleans: why I went there, what happened, and what it was like when the hurricane pushed me out of the city. So far, with a few exceptions and a smattering of allusions, I haven't. Not really, anyway. And it will have been five years this August.

In fact, I rarely talk about it. There's not much to say, in a way. Or maybe it's the words that would describe it that are lacking. The gap between words and that which they seek to represent, in this case, is too great.

I did talk about it with someone the other day, who reminded me of things that had happened that I had entirely forgotten, that, even when she reminded me of them, I don't really remember. My brain is Swiss cheese.

I still have dreams: floods, drowning, escape.

Sometimes, I think I'm waiting for the happy ending, which hasn't happened yet, but maybe what happened is in the way, and any ending is better than no ending at all.

So you wanna be a superstar

I like this new song and video from Lykke Li, "Possibility." She sings: "So tell me you hear my heart stop/You're the only one that knows." Li isn't afraid to come across like she's batshit.


I don't know what's cooler about this: the video, the music, or Tokyo. I need to relocate, stat. I want to go to a place where I can fly at night.


My friend Xeni is one of those people who listens to music cooler than you will ever be. She introduced me to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. Exiled nun playing some serious piano.


"me bored ass hell doin a lil dance to Punjabi MC." Artist Dennis Knopf takes the part in booty shakin' videos before the girl comes out and starts shaking her booty, loops it, and calls that art. It's a "Bootyclipse."


That whole iamamiwhoami thing turns out to be Jonna Lee. A viral campaign works for only so long. I contracted this one.


This is the mostly instrumental version of Cypress Hill's "Superstar," which I re-enjoyed recently in "Training Day," where it's featured in the scene with the infamous "shit pushed in" exchange.


Gil Scott-Heron, "Me and the Devil": "So if you see the vulture coming/Flying circles in your mind/Remember there is no escaping/For he will follow close behind."

I'm a big name

My friend Dana Harris at Variety sent me this link late last week, "True/Slant Builds Platform for Journalists, Brands" from Advertising Age, in which I am referred to thusly: "The network has 301 curated contributors today including big names like Rolling Stone political writer Matt Taibbi and photographer/blogger Susannah Breslin." Amusing.

In any case, I've been getting a surprising-to-me amount of joy from blogging at Off the Record. True/Slant is like The Huffington Post if Arianna were assassinated, there were way less bloggers, not everyone was retarded, and you actually got paid.

Recently, I've written on whether or not Perez Hilton violated a federal obscenity law, why Warner Bros. wants you to torture a woman to death, and the Tiger Woods love doll. Follow me there, too, won't you?

Hey, fuck you

This is a photograph I took of myself and my friend, photographer Siege, in Brooklyn on my last night in New York. I'm the girl one skulking around in the background, and Siege is the boy one making an obscene gesture in the mirror. In case you weren't clear.

Mr. Siege lives in an apartment in Williamsburg that is one of the coolest apartments I've ever seen. It's like a human bento box, and you are the sushi. Every time I go out there, I suggest they adopt me. This time, I offered to sleep on a cot in the kitchen, but Siege said the morning light coming through the windows would wake me. I guess that's a no.

We took pictures in the bathroom because the bathroom in this pad is my favorite room. All blood red tile and silver sinks and a shower like a car wash. It's a sexy beast.

Taking pictures of Siege was horrible and embarrassing, like if you were forced to write a sentence in front of Faulkner or something. You think you bring something to the table? Ha-ha. No. You do not.

I ended up hanging around by the toilet while Siege made this lewd gesture, and there you have it. Next time, I'll either try and be more confident, or maybe I'll just take pictures of people who don't know how to take photographs.

Mirrors

Today, I met with a literary agent. Right now, I don't have one. Although, I have had a few. This one emailed me a few days ago, and he had sold a book in my milieu, as it were, so I decided to meet with him. Usually, I reply, "Not interested, thanks," as if I could not even be bothered to be grammatically correct.

In any case, these things go as these things go, and before long, it was clear what we were talking about was the idea of me writing a nonfiction book about the adult movie industry. This is a subject upon which I remain torn. I believe that if your life takes you a place, and you bear witness, you have a responsibility to testify. I do not feel that I have testified fully.

If you know me (or even if you don't, really), you know I am very competitive and very driven. I do not like to perceive myself as having failed at anything, ever. So, I'll have to think it over. I don't have to live there, but it requires a return, nevertheless, and I'll have to consider if that's a move I want to make.

NYC

It's nice to wake up in one city, and find yourself in another by noon. Another day, another night, another hotel room, another city. So far, Manhattan is treating me well. I got a manicure in black, got into trouble with Miss Wendy, went to a party, rode around in cabs, and ended up eating complicating cheeses and sipping enigmatic wines. Not bad, for 24 hours.

Now, it's just me and the hotel room and the TV, which is probably what it's supposed to be. Mostly, the conversation veered all over the place, but some of the time, it was, like, what is this that controls us: chaos or intention? I told somebody that if you can envision it, it will happen, but I'm not even sure that I believed it, although, increasingly, I'm not sure that I don't believe it, if you know what I mean, and maybe you do.

Anyway, the bed is made and ready to be rumpled, the manicure is still intact, metaphorically speaking, if you know what I mean, and tomorrow I'm going to work, and going to some meetings, and we'll see what happens in between. There are so many people on the sidewalks. And the skyscrapers are so high they almost touch the sky. And before I know it, it'll be gone.

El Toronado!

Over the last few months, I've been increasingly interested in living a car-free life. Don't get me wrong, I love cars. I love cars with every fiber of my being. My preference is very large cars. Cars most typically driven by old ladies, cops, and drug dealers. (Strange those three groups have similar taste in automobiles, no?) Do not get me started on Grand Marquis. Or the CVPI I drove a few months ago. (That I did not buy that car is one of my life's great regrets -- omahgawd, that baybuh could moooove.) Sure, anyone could drive a big black SUV (and if you want to buy me a Yukon Denali, do not be shy about it), but I like those sort of battle axe type of cars, you know? One of my first cars was a 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. 'Twas cherry. And it flew. And it had whitewall tires. Oh, how I loved that steel beast so.

And yet, a part of my brain in recent years has developed a fondness for unloading. For the letting-go-ing. For the why-the-fuck-do-I-need-all-this-stuff-anyway-ness of it all. My current mobile is muy grande. And it keeps needing things that require money. Like repairs. And gas. And insurance. And sometimes I fantasize about just walking up to someone, and throwing the keys at them, and being like, "Here, fucking take this shit." Yet, I haven't. Yet.

There is really nothing like palming the wheel as you fly around the corner in a vehicle that sails down the street like a 5,000-pound land yacht. So, one day, I do hope to unload my car. Hopefully, something better will come along to replace it. In the meantime, let's enjoy this 1967 Oldsmobile 70-X Toronado customized by George Barris himself. It's only $187,770. If there's any place I know I could finish my novel, it's in that rear seat lounge with a writing desk.

I get email

Susannah.

Google is an amazing thing, isn’t it? Thanks Al.

Searching for one thing leads to another and I suppose that’s how I happened upon your writing “ They Shoot Porn Stars...”

As a Hollywood expatriate and film Director who’s first feature is about [redacted] who play cards (an action film), I long ago, once had the surreal experience of working with Ginger “Allen” Lynne, before AND after she did jail time in LA county.

(Thanks to Tracy Lords, I think)

This particular film I was “co-producing” ( SEE: low paid slave for the experience) - a little low budget film called [redacted]. We were shooting 2, 35mm films, back to back in two weeks. It was Insanity. But I was younger then. Anyway... I digress.

And One day... In between takes, Ginger was surrounded by six or so female extras as she was recalling, like a high school girl ... What it was like on her first date with Charlie Sheen. This was not a porn film, by the way, but Gingers first jump into “mainstream” cinema. Yeap. And there I was ... Hearing Ginger with the excitement of 16 year old, talking of the butterflies in her tummy, as she wondered if Charley was going to kiss her or not at the end of their ver first date.

I recall the moment I heard her say it... And I wondered to myself.. “Is this really happening? Did she REALLY “feel” that... Was she actually nervous about her first kiss with Charley Sheen? Ginger Lynne? “How does that happen to a person?” I wondered to myself... Porn actress? Nervous about a first kiss? What?!!!

Needless to say... It didn’t work out for Ginger or Charlie.

I’ve not been on a porn set. And I’d never seen a porn film starring Ginger Lyne, yet as a man I’ve certainly seen my share of porn. I also know what it does TO men. And now, as a parent of a [redacted]... who’s growing up all too fast in the youtube age of... signing on and being inundated with images that objectify women every split second of every single day ... I am concerned for him. What once was hidden behind the black curtain of your local video retailer... Is now available through a few key strokes in a search engine. And the kind of porn that

So. As a filmmaker, who’s directed a couple of ... “Real Movies,” [redacted] (the [redacted] playing Action Film) and ... Another movie called “[redacted],” aka “[redacted]...” I am always looking for my next film project. And when I happened upon your titled: They Shoot Porn Stars Don’t They...” I saw it... Began reading and wincing... And I thought... O boy... What’s that? How can a different story be told on that same industry with a twist?

And as a filmmaker I always loathed the term, “sex sells.”

My, how I’d like to take that term and turn it into something... Useful AND commercial!

What do you think?

Best,
[Redacted]

Spread your love, baby

I'll be in NYC later this week, partly for a work thing and partly for a fun thing. I'm still thinking about moving to NYC, so if you know of a sublet or an apartment that's coming available, let me know. Next month is my birthday, which means anything can happen.

In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing my crazy friends from work and doing some other fun stuff.

My overlord, The Harpoonist, says I should move to NYC if my heart so desires, so there's that. (Also, she is a great book doctor, so hire her if you have an ill book.)

Now, I just need $100,000 to fall out of the sky, and my life will be complete.

Make it happen, people.

What it is

"[I]t's very hard to do some extraordinary triumph without taking some extraordinary risk or making an odd judgment that other people would not make. That’s why the triumph is extraordinary." -- Penelope Trunk

I think one of the reasons -- well, the reason, actually -- that I am having such a hard time deciding where to live next -- by way of example, not long after I wrote that post about wanting to move to NYC, I took a walk and decided that what I really wanted to do was move back to Los Angeles -- is because I don't really want to live anywhere. I would like to live everywhere.

A few years ago, something happened, and, for a while, I didn't have anywhere to live. I had a carry-on bag, one of the small ones, of clothes, and that was it. My best friend took me in, paid for my plane ticket to fly me to her, and put me up in her son's room in the attic, where I slept in his red race car bed. The ceiling was a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stickers.

As it turns out, the inclination is to master it by repeating it. In a way, I don't really want to live in LA or NYC; I want to live nowhere. Today, I got an email from this guy I don't know. "Sometimes the most important place to live is in yourself," he wrote. That's about right, I thought.

I love hotels. For their transience. You live in this weird kind of limbo, and food gets brought to the door, and every once in a while, you peer out between the curtains, and see what's going on: the cars crawling up the street, the skyscraper lights blinking in the night, the landscape you don't know blanketed by the snow.

Years ago, I drove across the country. Or, mostly, anyway. From California to Chicago. It was crazy, to see the country like that. The big Montana sky, and the endless Iowa fields, and the dry Nevada desert. The Mississippi River took my breath away. The Faulkner story had come alive before me.

I want to get rid of everything. I want to be unmoored. If I can get to nowhere, I'll be somewhere.

Here or there

I'm trying to decide whether or not to go to NYC next week, ostensibly for some work party thing, but mostly in the spirit of being anywhere but here. Also, on account of it's New York.

I got some very interesting responses to my post the other day on Philadelphia. I got some wonderfully detailed notes about the who's and the how's of the city, but I also got a great many emails from people who saw that post as an invitation from me to them to tell me where to live, something I would have beforehand anticipated as totally irritating, but which was, in fact, pretty hilarious and sort of fascinating, at least in part because it reminds you that all you need to do to live somewhere else is decide. Suggestions ranged from Seattle to Brazil, Vermont to Vancouver, Lexington to New Mexico. You people are crazy. But it was sort of sweet. So, thanks. Now, stop.

Sometimes, I wake up in the morning, and I think, what the fuck? And I wonder if all this "I can't decide where to live" shit is really just me hemming and hawing and beating around the bush because what I really want to do is move to New York, which, as I have stated previously, has been my dream since I was small, or, well, at least young, because my father was from Brooklyn, and used to tell us stories about some kid gang that he was in which I don't think was really a gang at all, because that's not how my father rolled, more like a pack of kids playing, and they called themselves Pigtown. So, this is the stuff of dreams, right? And you're supposed to live the dream, right? Upon waking. My father also drank Zombies, when he was a young man, but that's another story altogether. In any case, I should probably make up my mind, and maybe next month I'll take the plunge. After all, my birthday is coming, and what better time to be reborn than that?

Last night, I was watching "Sex Rehab," because there is nothing like a special on addiction to move your soul, or rot your brain, and Kari Ann Peniche, soothsayer of our times, was like, basically, you really don't need to be dwelling in the house where your dysfunction lives. Which is sort of how I feel about where I am now. Extraction seems necessary.

[Image via This Isn't Happiness]

Google searches that led people to this blog

1. "how to write like a guy"

2. "susannah breslin naked"

3. "the stripper hates you"

4. "do nothing i cannot defend"

5. "hairy chests gold chains porn"

6. "bathroom between husband and wife"

7. "breslin nakad girlas"

8. "chasing the dragon best way"

9. "i love men"

10. "susannah breslin - pornstar"

Not for the cheesesteaks

I've continued my internal debate over where to move. Every once in a while in this life, I like to move. Expands my brain, my body, my life. I'm a cat with nine lives. How many left? Who knows.

The itinerary thus far. Los Angeles: Done that. Bay Area: Never going back. New Orleans: Nearly killed me. Chicago: The cold did me in. Honolulu: So expensive, I fled.

Where next? Thought about DC. Too pricey. Too conservative. NYC beckons. But more expensive than I can stand at this point.

I want to live in a major city.

So, last night, it occurred to me: Philadelphia, maybe?

Pros: Cheaper than NYC. No car. Sustainable.

Cons: Crime. Blight. The like.

Northern Liberties seems to be the place to be, no?

If you've got helpful and positive insight, drop me a note.

An homage to Walmart

I don't know why I like Walmart. It's just so there. Whenever I wander the aisles, I think of that French word hypermarche, a word I knew before stores like Walmart grew, and grew, and consumed the American appetite.

Without a doubt, they are frightening places. Take, for example, the people. Did you ever wonder when the last time a Walmart floor was cleaned? I mean, really cleaned? That's right. You do not want to know. And to think someone lived in one.

You could get lost in a Walmart. You could lose yourself in a Walmart. Or, you could find yourself in a Walmart. On some shelf loaded with lotion. A body cream that smells like cupcakes. You smell it. It smells right. You buy it. You take it home. You smell yourself. You smell like cupcakes. You smell like Walmart. You reek of the obese American dream.

2010: A space odyssey

This weekend, I leave you with a 2010 space odyssey. It was created by Nowness, which is doing some really amazing things online and seems to be part of a web 3.0 movement in which luxe is everything, another example being the lovely Luxirare.

"Aanteni" stars supermodel Guinevere, takes place on "the deserted grounds of Paypal founder Elon Musk’s Space X jet lab in Hawthorne, California," and was shot by Todd Cole. The beauty wears Rodarte. It's about the promise of space, body as machine, and escapable wastelands.

"The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in." -- Heinlein

I'm off the record ... again

I started blogging -- and by "started," I mean I wrote one post -- over on True/Slant in early January, but the following Monday, I found I had kidney stones, and spent the next six weeks in pain. In any case, now recuperated, I am back at it again. Join me there, won't you?

So far, I've written about "The Hurt Locker," Susannah-brand journalism, and the monkeys at the Playboy mansion.

I'm rather enjoying it. I'm trying to get down some stories and/or ideas that I haven't told thus far, demanding of myself a modicum of greater seriousness, and, who knows, in the coming weeks, I may even offer up something approximating investigative journalism, or its limp-wristed cousin Maury who whines during dinner and then passes out in the foyer. He's so embarrassing.

The rules of writing fiction

"Do not place a photograph of your ­favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide."

-- Roddy Doyle, "Ten Rules for Writing Fiction"

Your daily shoe porn

I may have quit Twitter, but I've resurrected a popular tidbit I used to do on it over at The Frisky, "Your Daily Shoe Porn." Basically, it's one hot/sexy/weird shoe of the day. Not a lot of text. Just you and the shoe. In case you're wondering, women like shoes because they will never make us ask you, "Do these make me look fat?"

Pictured here, Pleaser's bordello polkadots for $60, courtesy of Gala Darling.

If you're a girl who loves shoes, or a guy who loves girls in shoes, a few other of my shoe favorites:

Jak & Jil
The Shoe Girl
Sea of Shoes

Live from Afghanistan

Boston.com's "The Big Picture" has posted its latest roundup of photos taken on the frontlines in Aghanistan, "Afghanistan, February, 2010."

"In southern Afghanistan's Helmand Province, thousands of American, Afghan and British troops entered Marja in the biggest offensive of the war, with the goal of destroying the Taliban's largest haven and restoring government presence in southern Afghanistan. Resistance was sporadic and fierce as troops seized positions around the area. Stricter combat rules and a concerted effort by the Afghan government and NATO forces were aimed at not only protecting the civilian population, but planning for the aftermath, building infrastructure, support and trust in an area long dominated by the Taliban."

Here, a Marine with 1/3 Charlie company patrols a poppy field in Trikh Nawar.

"Afghanistan, September, 2009"

"Afghanistan, October, 2009"

"Afghanistan, November, 2009"

"Afghanistan, December, 2009"

"Afghanistan, January, 2010"