As a teenager, I happened upon a trashy novel called Tidal Wave, the only part of which I remember was a sex scene which went something like this: His fingers explored the tangle of her pubic hair. “Is this a search and destroy mission, captain?” “I don’t have to search for it and I sure don’t want to destroy it.” 
Over the years, I realized that writing about sex was almost always like this. Trite and ridiculous, it just shone a spotlight on the naked stuff – Oh my goodness! Look at that! – destroying the essence of what makes sex rapturous. Whatever the erotic opus – Miller’s Tropic of Cancer or Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being – the writing of the sexual self just fell short. 
The problem is that sex is about another self, a naked self, a self that the clothed self looks at in confusion. What the hell are you doing? Are you really going to do that? You’re completely naked! The clothed self tends to stare and judge, incapable of reflecting on the intimacies of the naked self with any sense or sophistication. 
And yet, it is there, in all of us, the fingers tightening, everything stretching out, the head tilting back, peering into the chasm, ready to fall. Perhaps it is Xaviera Hollander who came closest (haha) to writing of this sexual self in her Penthouse Magazine column only because she wrote about sex and nothing else.
Category Archives: sex
Virginia Adamantine: Prometheus Stripped
My screenplay Sister Prometheus is a reworking of the Promethean myth, utilizing elements of the Oresteia. 
I realize that this is a dangerous and foolhardy pursuit, as any modern work is likely to pale in comparison with the work of Aeschylus, exemplified in the passage below, describing Iphigenia’s death at the hands of the priests of her father Agamemnon:
Rough hands tear at her girdle, cast/ Her saffron silks to earth. Her eyes/
Search for her slaughterers; and each/ Seeing her beauty, that surpassed/
A painter’s vision, yet denies/ The pity her dumb looks beseech/
Struggling for voice; for often in old days,/When brave men feasted in her father’s hall/
With simple skill and pious praise/Linked to the flutes pure tone/
Her virgin voice would melt the hearts of all/
Honoring the third libation near her father’s throne/
The rest I did not see/ Nor do I speak of it.
This sacrifice is said to have appeased the gods and given the Greeks fair winds to Troy and eventual triumph in their bloody quest for Helen. My Prometheus is female. Her name is Virginia Adamantine, and she’s furious with the Agamemnons of the world, ready to fight anyone in her way. And she’s a stripper. 
That’s the part I doubt Aeschylus would have appreciated.
Understanding The Bachelor: Tierra LiCausi’s Sparkle and Brow
There is something remarkably terrifying about the ABC network reality TV show, The Bachelor. 
A man searches amongst 26 pre-selected women for the one who is on the show for the “right reasons” and wants to “take it to the next level”. Adding to the difficulty of this quest, all of the candidates proclaim their love for this man and their desire to be with him for the rest of their lives.The process itself is laborious, involving group dates, cocktail parties, hand-holding, heart-to-heart talks and awkward sequences of kissing. Although the show is predictably structured – with pathetic story arcs, villains and insidious repetition – there are some moments which amuse and surprise. 
Tierra LiCausi, the villain of this season, blurted out a ground-breaking deconstruction of the self near the end of last week’s show. In defending her position on how she might have been seen by others when she raised an eyebrow in an insulting manner, she explained: “Raised eyebrow? That’s my face! I can’t help that…I can’t control my eyebrow. I cannot control my eyebrow. I can’t control what’s on my face 24/7.” 
There was no sense of irony, no sarcasm in her position; this was in fact a bold statement attempting to establish a startling new possibility that the face is an independent entity. Dissatisfied with the simplistic notion of the duality of mind and body, Ms. LiCausi sought to shatter the self into billionths, every cell and corpuscle independent of each other, only of itself, self-governed, self-determined, rarely, if ever, attuned to the body and mind as part of a whole. Ms. LiCausi continued, “I know in my own skin that I am not rude…If I could walk around with a smile on 24/7, I would. But my face would get freaking tired.” 
In other words, it is a virtual impossibility for another to understand the consciousness of Ms. LiCausi, or as she refers to it, her “sparkle”. Other selves, or “sparkles”, can only assume and thus interpret; they are incapable of capturing the essence of another sparkle simply because of the face’s independent notion of self and potentially abrasive manner. Predictably, Ms. LiCausi’s revelations left the other faces and bodies on the show dumb-founded, including that of the Bachelor himself, who decided to reject Ms. LiCausi, eyebrow, face, sparkle and all. 
New York Inspired IV: Trisha Brown Dance at BAM
The Trisha Brown Dance Company performed four pieces at BAM last night, including two New York premieres. 
I know very little about dance and lack the vocabulary to describe the movements and style; but I do know when it works, when the energy makes sense. It is like music in how it opens thoughts from the day-to-day into something skulking deep within. The dancers spun, flipped and dashed, and I found myself thinking back to my first book, The Sacred Whore. 
As I told agents time and again back in 1988, “It’s the story of a group of prostitutes who kidnap a college basketball team so that they can air their views on what is wrong with America on primetime television.” The first draft was 720 pages and had 15 major characters.
I eventually got that down to 282 pages and five main characters. It’s a chaotic, action-dependent, socio-political piece that stumbles and ultimately fails, but I still am interested in the premise. 
It opens on the back roads of Oklahoma, women climbing out the back of an 18-wheeler truck like refugees. They’ve been kidnapped by a pimp who wants to address the hypocritical morality of the nation with a hair-brained kidnapping scheme. I was standing in a Paris apartment when I thought of this, a mannequin sitting in the dark beside the bed. Prostitutes transported across the country by a truck. What about that? 
It seemed like something, I didn’t know what, like the moment some months later, halfway through the book, when a character I had expunged from the text, Chantal, decided to return. She did that on her own. I want back in. She was like the woman on stage last night at BAM, dancing with a camera on her back. 
She was self-realized, something out of nothing. I thought about that coming back over the bridge.
Cold Weather Tips
As Robert William Service wrote in The Cremation of Sam McGee: It’s the cursèd cold, and it’s got right hold till I’m chilled clean through to the bone. 
It starts at your fingertips and toes. It grips your face and neck. Breathing hurts. It creeps up from your extremities into your inner thighs, your armpits, into your core. You have to keep moving. And it still gets in. You think about what it would be like to die of exposure, such as the 129 men on the Franklin Expedition did in 1846.
Three Arctic Graves
Or frozen in the Death Zone near the summit of Mount Everest.
The trick is to wear layers.
Avoid snow camping.
And just don’t expose your flesh.
Barbarella: The Best and Worst of Science Fiction all in one film
Barbarella offers everything in Science Fiction film-making, all that is bad, and equally so, the good. 
Widely known but little seen, the 1968 film directed by Roger Vadim, is notorious for Jane Fonda’s sexpot character in various stages of undress. 
There is more to this film than vague eroticism; the costumes and sets – including Barbarella’s shag-lined spaceship – are awkward and clever at the same time, yes, campy, wildly so. 
The lines of dialogue are equally outrageous; the characters are vapid and the plot pointless and confusing. At one point, Professor Ping (played by Marcel Marceau) tells Barbarella that the angel Pygar no longer has the will to fly and so cannot get her out of the labyrinth of evil in which she is trapped. Barbarella solves that by making love to him; and off they go. It’s as simple as that. 
The film begins on a fantastical note, mocking the violence of man: “Why would anyone want to invent a weapon?” Barbarella is genuinely confused; after all, anything is possible in science fiction. The answer is overtly stated throughout the film – all you need is love – and resolved in the same way. Pygar rescues not only Barbarella from certain death but also Tyrant, the evil queen. 
His explanation, much like the logic of Chihiro in Miyazaki’s anime film Spirited Away, is that, “An angel has no memory.” 
Barbarella herself is enigmatic. She repays everyone who saves her life with sex. The President prefers to share matters of state when she is naked. The Mad Doctor tries to destroy her with a sex machine – only to be foiled by Barbarella’s remarkable sexual threshold. She dresses like a space whore, but she isn’t. Why, you may ask, does she not do battle with clever tricks and big guns? As trite and misogynistic as it might sound, she is above it all. She is an innocent who wants to help mankind. 
Rumor has it that a remake is in the works with a budget of $80 million and Rose McGowan to star.
I am dubious about a 21st Century Barbarella. I envision a multitude of bikinis and an excess of CGI. Fonda’s half-begotten Barbarella, in all of her wide-eyed stupor, is sure to be lost.
Looking for The End
I’ve come to the end. My novel, My Bad Side is done. Ending is hard. I’ve worked toward this moment for over four years. I’ve read through some 40 books for research – on everything from zoos and fire fighters to sex work and Newfoundland. 
And I’ve written lots of words – over160,000 – some of them too often (suddenly, everything, turned) and edited those down through four drafts to 99,065. 
And here I am, not as exhilarated as I would have liked – when is it ever like that? It’s almost the opposite actually, like I don’t want to be at this point, finished, like it’s a death. 
I have the ending down to one of three final scenes: a walk with Apollo, a night of music or an ocean swim. 
I have vacillated between each. Each has something, some essence, but then I wonder if it is too much. Is it melodramatic or too damn trite? Then again, I can’t avoid the guts of moment – like The Beatles did in their final album Abbey Road, ending not with The End, but with the lousiest Beatles song ever recorded, Her Majesty’s. 
It’s been a struggle, all of these endings in the mix, and then wondering if there might be another. I’ve considered just throwing it all away and using the Debbie Does Dallas finale where all the characters gather naked and say in chorus, ‘If it feels good, do it!’ 
Something like that. Or I could go with the ocean swim. It’s a tough call to make.
Sensationalism: the whittling of a word
Warning: This blog is entirely derived from sensationalism
Sensationalism is a type of editorial bias in mass media in which events and topics in news stories and pieces are over-hyped to increase viewership or readership numbers (Wikipedia), such as a horrific event from this week in which a man was pushed onto the tracks and killed by a New York subway train. 
This image of the man’s final moments has led many to ask why no one helped and instead took pictures of his death. This type of imagery dominates the media and has indeed infected my memory. (Or as Cormac McCarthy writes in The Road: The things you put in your head are there forever.) I remember well the 1979 murder of ABC journalist Bill Stewart in Nicaragua, played over and over on network television, and obsessed over another image taken in 1988 of a German bank robber threatening to kill his hostage. (He didn’t.)
In the end, I used this as source material for my first novel The Sacred Whore, a sensational story in itself about prostitutes who kidnap a basketball team so that they can broadcast their views on what’s wrong with America.
Sensational (also a horse, album and hip hop artist) is defined as causing great public interest and excitement, as in “Sensational Superstar Vickie looks sensational!”
The 3D tools for Sensational Superstar Vickie
Sensation (also a song, event, film and type of BDSM play) is a style of writing, similar to verisimilitude, which aims to imitate the sensations of experiencing an event.
Christopher Walken experiencing too many sensations in film, “Brainstorm”.
Sensa is Latin for ‘thought’ or ‘teachings” as well as being a weight-loss program.
Rodin’s “The Thinker”
Sens is a commune in Burgundy, in north-central France.
Cathedral in Sens, France
Sen is the name of the protagonist in Miyazaki’s magical Spirited Away.
Sen (Chihiro) in “Spirited Away”.
Se is the internet country code for Sweden and also represents the element Selenium. 
And S is a letter, a series of Tesla cars, the stock identifier for Sprint Nextel and the sound a balloon makes when it’s run out of air.
State Birds and Naked Ladies
The writing has moved along today: 17 pages and maybe another 10 tonight. I spent a good deal of time tweaking a conversation in which state birds are discussed:
“California’s state bird.”
“That’s the Meadowlark, isn’t it?”
“California Quail.”
“I should have known that.” He opened the door. “You know Maine’s?”
“I know Rhode Island is the chicken.”
”The Rhode Island Red Chicken.” He placed Apollo’s cage beside the bed.
…and another scene in which Dee, only 11 years old, discovers a Playboy magazine hidden at her uncle’s house:
There was a magazine on top with a picture of a woman standing in a white see-through top. She had thick blond hair, long legs and silvery high heels; she looked at me over her shoulder. I opened it to the center; she was completely naked there, shiny brown skin and crazy big breasts. I couldn’t understand how she was like that, standing there so naked.
I also got rid of a ‘crazy-legged’ bird and changed a sweater into a pink hoodie from Las Vegas.
Onward! Ho!
My Bad Side – The Pitch
The time has almost come to get an agent. The book needs to be pitched…
Crystal and Dee Sinclair started life as a news story.
SACRAMENTO, June16, 1978 Two young girls – one an infant of 14 months – were found alive on Wednesday afternoon, beside their recently deceased mother, Dorothy Keynes, 33. 
Ms. Keynes was undergoing treatment for depression after the father of the children, Mr. Raymond Sinclair, was killed in alcohol-related single-car traffic accident on Sunday, May 4.
Lillian Murton of Sacramento Social Services made the discovery on a monthly wellness visit. Neighbors along the 7400 block of 21st Avenue expressed outrage that Social Services had not been to the home in the past week.
The elder sibling, 3 years of age, is believed to have fed both herself and her infant sister in the days following their mother’s death. The children are currently being treated for dehydration at U C Davis Children’s Hospital; their names have been withheld. Mrs. James Keynes of Pittsburgh, the mother of the deceased, has filed for adoption of the children.
My Bad Side begins many years on. Crystal, now 27, defiant, knows that her life was borne of tragedy and accepts that with a drink. 
I’ll tell you what everyone is like. Ever think about torture? Ever think about what that is? People torturing others, I mean, people actually willing to literally torture another person, strap someone down and torture, tear off their fucking fingernails, put wire through their flesh, burn their fucking eyes out, what the fuck else? These people will watch, just watch, another person freak out and scream. And for what? Because they fucking can. Because they can get away with it. That’s who we are. That’s what this is about. We’re fucked. We’re so completely and entirely fucked. (201)
Dee, desired and adored, was too young to remember, and yet the memory persists. She chases after it like a childhood dream, desperate for contact and pushing everyone away. 
I had a tightness creeping inside. It wasn’t bad. It was more like almost remembering something, not what I had been told; it was more of a biological thing, molecular. It was spinning in my head. Words wouldn’t go together; the sounds were broken apart. I wanted this. I wanted to move into this, whole, that glacial wall of light, the sex, in and out in one pristine act. It was my promise. (157)
The sisters try to understand each other, but they don’t know how to forgive and feast on their addictions instead.