Shot

An awesome shot of me by Clayton Cubitt.

The Weiner report

Head on over to my Forbes blog, where I've got an exclusive from Anthony Weiner sext recipient Ginger Lee: "How Porn Is Making Money Off The Anthony Weiner Scandal."

With Spitzer struggling to put his call girl-loving past behind him in a bid to become New York City’s next comptroller and Weiner staggering through an increasingly messy campaign in hopes of becoming the next mayor of New York City, pornographers at the other side of the country are rubbing their palms together and trying to figure out how they can make money off the steamy headlines.

Venus

Awhile back, I had the awesome experience of being shot by my friend Clayton Cubitt. This is what you look like after breast cancer treatment. Thanks so much to the incomparable Katie Wedlund for styling me.

Where I'm going this weekend

This weekend, I'm going to Kewanee, Illinois, hog capital of the world.

Wildcatting

Read Susan Shepard's excellent piece: "Wildcatting: A Stripper's Guide to the Modern American Boomtown."

At times the customers were bafflingly delightful. The farmer who pulled a Leica out of his overalls and asked if he could take my picture. The shy, funny drilling contractor who would bring us surf and turf from the nearby steakhouse on slow nights. The tattoo artist who said the town was so small you could walk across it. The photographer on assignment to shoot one of the first boomtown articles written about the area. The local fortysomething lesbian smiling like a 21-year-old. The kid who was tickled that I recognized his Daniel Johnston T-shirt. These people would make my day.

Trance

I watched "Trance." It was deeply horrible. Do not recommend. Redeeming qualities: Vincent Cassel, lush colors, the soundtrack.

What I'm reading

"Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-​brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-​print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek."

-- David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

Monkeys

Monkeys, Chicago, Illinois

The Loser

"In the smaller room is a large bed he makes up himself, several record albums he rarely plays, a telephone that seldom rings." -- Gay Talese, "The Loser" via Damon Brown

Le Sex Shoppe

When porn was sold in brick-and-mortar stores. I took this photo about a decade ago. It will appear in an upcoming book by Charles Saatchi.

Nicki Minaj would like to buy you a drink

I interviewed Nicki Minaj for Forbes:

“I kind of think of myself almost like a man,” Minaj explains. “I’m not going to fall back from something because it’s never been done before by a woman. It’s time for a female Jay, a female Puffy.”

It's hysterical

My friend Clayton Cubitt launched his Hysterical Literature site today, and it includes an essay I wrote: "The Last Real Porn Star."

This is the number of people who have watched a video of porn star Stoya read an excerpt from Supervert's Necrophilia Variations: 6,986,096.

Stoya is not: naked, having sex, in a porn movie.

She is: reading a book.

By the time you read this, over 7 million people will have watched Stoya read a book.

"We were at a party, you and I," Stoya reads, and everybody listens.

Flowers

Flowers, Chicago, Illinois

Woman's work

"So you end up maximizing, rather than minimizing, the risks."-- "Woman's Work"

Newsstand

Newsstand, Shanghai, China

Shine on

If you're at Target, swing by the book section and pick up my girlfriend Lydia Netzer's SHINE SHINE SHINE, now available in paperback. It's Target's pick for what you should be reading at the beach. I loved it.

What it's like to be a human lab rat

What is it like to be a human lab rat? Let’s say, for the sake of illustration, it’s the future. Privacy is an antiquated concept, an artifact of an age in which secrets were possible. In this future world, your selfhood is quantified. Every nanosecond of your day-to-day life is automatically recorded, tracked, measured: your heartbeats per minute, the cornflakes you ate for breakfast, the number of times you’ve cheated on your wife, the 2.33 minutes you spent gazing distractedly out the window of your corner office at the rapidly-changing skyline, the weight of this morning’s post-latte bowel movement, those dreams you have but do not recall upon waking. The great data archive of your life is created at the very moment you move through it. Without questioning or thinking, you understand on a deep, visceral level that within the brave new hive mind, "the unrecorded life is not worth living."

["What It's Like to Be a Human Lab Rat"]

Why Eliot Spitzer did what he did

Since Eliot Spitzer has announced he's running for New York City comptroller, it seems like a good time to revisit my Letters from Johns project.

The project ran from January 2008 to January 2009. I requested letters from readers of my blog who had paid for sex, letters in which they shared their experiences and why they did it.

A few months after the project began, Spitzer was busted for patronizing a call girl.

At that time, I wrote about the project for Newsweek: "Dear John."  

"I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done":

One can try to hang a sign on us, the collective john, as perpetuating the global conspiracy of sex/slave traffic, and I'll grant that my Thailand trip may have/probably did contribute to some sort of thuggery. But in the end, I am ashamed of nothing I have done.

"I'm a State Investigator":

I keep a coded diary, in case it's discovered. 1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good/bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week.

"I Have a Physical Disability":

I am now a regular customer, although not as regular as I’d like to be. This is mostly because my brother has moved overseas, and it is hard to find people who will willingly accompany me. However, each time I go, I no longer feel like a cripple. I feel whole. 

The guinea pigs

Over at my new Block Kids project, I explore the most famous controversy spawned by the study for which I was guinea pig: "The How to Spot a Baby Conservative Debate."

Conservatives were outraged. Glenn Beck attacked the study on the debut of his CNN show, noting, “I really shouldn’t be happy, because I’m a conservative." Michelle Malkin wondered, “If whiny kids grow up to be conservatives, how do you explain the sniveling psychosis on the Left side of the blogosphere …" At the Volokh Conspiracy, James Lindgren took a deep dive on the data. SEED explored both sides. 

[READ]

What I'm reading

What I'm reading right now: I'm Right, You're Wrong, Now What?: Break the Impasse and Get What You Need.

I found it while reading this HBR piece: "Practical Tips for Overcoming Resistance."

From the book:

The results of a recent study of 3,682 couples [...] found that women who give up and give in during arguments with their husbands are four times more likely to die prematurely than women who argue productively. The women who held it in also had a higher risk of depression and irritable bowel syndrome. The study's authors conclude that healthy arguments are good for your health and longevity.

The Block Kids

I've launched a new project: The Block Kids.

We weren’t just preschoolers; we were test subjects. My fellow preschoolers and I became the subjects of one of the most ambitious studies of identity ever undertaken: the Block study.

[READ]

Of Maggots and Madonnas

The concept is quintessential Knight/McQueen. Create the face of an angel and place it, pride of place, in a church in the southern French town of Avignon. Nothing much new about that, you might think, except that instead of using stained glass or any other such obvious and/or widely deemed appropriate materials, the pair constructed the piece entirely out of dyed maggots – 80 gallons of dyed maggots, to be precise. It’s a frankly horrifying thought, which is, of course, the point. -- "Of Maggots and Madonnas," c/o Clayton Cubitt

Squares

I'm looking for someone to build me a custom personal site using Squarespace. Know of someone? Email me.