This Is Branding

If you're a creative working in the gig economy, Kim Boekbinder's terrific interview with photographer Clayton Cubitt is a must-read: "Thriving in the Attention Economy."

"Artists shouldn’t kid themselves that most people give a fuck about them directly. At least not at first. People want what you’ve made, they don’t want you. You have to seduce them into also wanting you. And you can only do that by making more stuff that they want, and hopefully attaching yourself to it in the minds of some small percentage of its fans. This is branding."

[Medium]

My Valentine

For Valentine's Day, I bought my husband this NRA "Coexist" T-shirt.

"This 6 oz., 100% preshrunk cotton shirt is the perfect balance of humor and attitude. Carrying a subtle, yet compelling message, it spells out the word 'COEXIST' using rifles, pistols, magazines, ammo and the venerable NRA shield. To really drive home the message, we’ve added 'A Free People Must...' at the very top of the t-shirt."

[NRA]

What She Said

Photo credit: Henrik Purienne via This Isn't Happiness

"Maybe it’s just me but doesn’t it seem the entire system for performers in Porn Valley is set for failure? There is no career in porn for 99.45 percent of these girls. The talent agencies are really nothing more than walk in Ready Labor outfits with zero benefits. Get in line…perhaps you’ll work…perchance you won’t. Step out of line and voice your concern, to the back of the line with you. For most performers in Porn Valley that’s the reality. The quick paycheck is the nail in the coffin. Used by the agents and producers alike, it is the best career suicide diversion of all time. The talent base in LA has yet to grasp that and also figure out that everything and anything they shoot or will shoot in LA was or is going to be sold, resold, repackaged, resold again and then promptly shipped to the tube sites where the real damage subsequently begins to their careers. Just about every performer who has more than 15 or 20 scenes in LA is so saturated on the tube sites; she is simply not marketable anymore. Why would she be? She is on every tube site a thousand times over…for the low price of free. That kind of saturation can be insurmountable. She gets a few scenes here and there, and before you know it she is doing the million man double anal cream pie followed by an anal toilet brush reaming for $500. The vast majority of Porn Valley performers are destined for the industry standard of an extremely short career that seems to be so popular among them. The good news is that their retirement package ensures that they will always be able to log on to PornHub and watch their own scenes for free in HD…for eternity…resting comfortably knowing they will never be paid another dime for any of it. Perhaps that is why I really don’t know of any “porn stars” right now…just a bunch of talent passing through Porn Valley and landing permanently on Porn Hub. Maybe these other girls…you know the ones who seem to be doing so well outside of Los Angeles…are on to something. I could be wrong."

[Mike South]

86'd List

"LOST HER MIND" RT @ZakSmithSabbath @misskatehate on the office wall in the strip club. Miami. pic.twitter.com/rKftnARNe1

— Susan E. Shepard (@SusanElizabeth) February 2, 2014

Space Dandy!

I don't do much anime, but I read about "Space Dandy" on Lauren Rae Orsini's blog: "Why Is the Media Covering 'Space Dandy' While Other Anime Get Ignored?"

"The New York Times. The Atlantic Monthly. The two last places you’d expect to see critical reviews on a show with 'breasturants' as a major plot point." [Otaku Journalist]

I haven't been to a lot of breastaurants. I think the only one I've been to is Hooters. I've been meaning to go to the Tilted Kilt, but I haven't made it there yet.

"So perhaps there’s also reason to be patient when 'Space Dandy' gets off to a rocky start in its first episode, the only one available for review. Particularly painful is an early sequence in which the pompadoured title character, an intergalactic alien hunter, travels through space to his favorite hangout: a cross between the 'Star Wars' cantina and Hooters, where 'zero G meets double D.'" [NYT]

It sounds hilarious. It's not surprising that a clever, surrealist take on sex comes from outside the US. In America, the gender wars turned the bedroom into a battleground.

"Ironically, Space Dandy’s campy style—there is a literal boob monster in one episode—begs to not be taken too seriously, but with his pop-culture sensibility and cinematic directing style, Watanabe may be anime’s greatest chance of getting the respect it deserves." [The Atlantic]

Playboy Bunnies, Years Later

"These headshots, taken at the Former Playboy Bunny Reunion in Las Vegas, are the result of my interest in the women of Playboy and where they are now. The tight frame and non-retouched images allow space for one’s personal reflection on age and beauty. The body language suggests even more about who these women are: strong, beautiful, fragile, provocative, and everything in between. They are complex characters that are proud and empowered by their beauty and sexuality, at the same time stricken by the fleeting nature of it."

[Feature Shoot]

Straight to Video

"MDL:  'Boogie Nights' scored horribly. They recruit for these [test screenings] off a paragraph [synopsis] in the mall, and the paragraph for 'Boogie Nights' made it look like a sitcom, and then they come for this three-hour exegesis on existential crises in porn. It got to a point where Bob Shaye, my old boss, chased good scores on that movie, and that movie was never going to score high.

MW: I remember he did his own cut and made Paul watch it.

MDL: Yeah, it was horrible. It was tough. That movie was going straight to video, and then the reviews started to come in at the New York Film Festival. If it wasn't for early reviews…"

[Cigarettes & Red Vines]

Smells Like Tesla

Elon Musk sounds like something a bro would spray on his balls before running a train on a sorority sister.

— Sovereign Syre (@Sovereign_Syre) February 8, 2014

Let's Go Long

Long-form is a type of journalism. If you are stupid and young and you wrote something that was several thousands words long, you probably think you are writing long-form journalist. You are not. Probably, you've read a few of these pieces. Maybe you left a tl;dr in the comments.

"What, then, is the function — the purpose — of 'long-form'? To allow a writer to delve into the true complexities of a story, and also to bring readers closer to the experience of other people. Whether a long-form story is published in a magazine or on the web, its goal should be to understand and illuminate its subject, and maybe even use that subject to (subtly) explore some larger, more universal truths. Above all, that requires empathy, the real hallmark of great immersive journalism." [NYT]

Going long is about more than word count. A monkey could type 10,000 words in a row. Well, perhaps not words, but characters, surely, given the right tools. IMO, LFJ is about: immersion, empathy, and depth. Unsure you have met these requirements? You have not.

"I have had it with long-form journalism. By which I mean—don’t get me wrong—I’m fed up with the term long-form itself, a label that the people who create and sell magazines now invariably, and rather solemnly, apply to their most ambitious work. Reader, do you feel enticed to plunge into a story by the distinction that it is long? Or does your heart sink just a little? Would you feel drawn to a movie or a book simply because it is long? ('Oooh—you should really read Moby-Dick—it’s super long.')" [Atlantic]

No one ever said long-form journalism that goes beyond word count is fun. It is hard. One could argue it took me 10 years to write "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" because that's the period of time over which it ranges -- longer, really. And who wants to work that hard for that long? It's so much easier to upload another blog post, watch another TV show, fill up endless empty spaces with words considering subjects about which you fundamentally know nothing.

"Over the next ten minutes, he threatens to beat her, threatens to torture her, pulls up her shirt, pulls up her skirt, hits her breasts, hits her thighs, throttles her by the neck with both hands, humiliates her, degrades her, makes her cry, chokes her until she is gasping for air. He gets her to tell the camera she is 27 years old and the only reason she’s here doing this particular job on this particularly day in this particular hotel room in the Valley is for the money, and the fact of the matter is she has two young children to support, of whom the man asks rhetorically, and seemingly for the sole purpose of screwing with her head, 'They’re going to grow up to be proud of her, right?'" [TSPSDT]

V-Day in the Club

"Valentine’s Day is one of the those special 'off' days that happen every-so-often in the strip club. Working the night of one these off days is never business-as-usual—it’s usually, business-as-oh-my-God-did-that-just-happen. The day of Cupid falls on a Friday this year, and there’s going to be a full moon."

[Tits and Sass]

You're Shit

Writing someone's name in shit vs writing someone's name on a piece of shit. Same in component parts but very different in nuance of insult.

— Bigfoot TheBigfoot (@hellobigfoot) February 8, 2014

Girl Gangs

"His confident, upbeat portraits of young women wearing  veils and djellabah while posing on motorcycles subvert preconceived notions of Arab women; his subjects are traditionally clad but defiantly modern, bearing bright smiles and the markers of youth, independence, celebration, and fun."

[Taymour Grahne via Kottke]