experience

‘They say we are almost as like as eggs.’ –Shakespeare

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been the type of person who would rather eat five cookies or none at all. I’d rather give a desert away than share it, would rather devour than savor. My hormones fluctuate on a reliable monthly cycle, delivering a week of ravenous hunger against a week of complete ambivalence toward food. During the times when I’m eating-crazed, I love food and feel intensely happy because of my love of it. During the times when I’m eating-apathetic, I feel like food has no impact on my life, my interests, or my desires. These are not states I summon. They are states that occur and subside of their own accord. […]

The assumption in most food consumption advice directed toward women is that they are in the process of trying to lose weight or, at the very least, maintain it, hence the popular “guilt-free” title for so many recipes in women’s magazines. Any woman who pays attention to her food consumption is assumed to be interested first and foremost in body modification.

{ Charlotte Shane/TNI | Continue reading }

To take the newness out of it the left side of my face the best my blouse open

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Since I had spent many years in self-destruct mode, I wanted to use my need for sexual connection to help others. Finally, I had my answer: working as a sex surrogate. […]

A sex surrogate is a therapist who helps people overcome their bedroom dysfunctions. Yes, it involves sleeping with strangers, but unlike prostitution, these men weren’t in search of a good time. They were in pain and filled with shame. They had tried everything. Usually, a sex surrogate is a last resort. And over time, they taught me more about intimacy and vulnerability than I could have imagined. […]

So I taught Bruce how to move his hips in a thrusting motion.

{ Salon | Continue reading }

photo { Jonathan Waiter }

Over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough brier

How can you live in a city like Karachi with all its rampant violence? I can’t really confess to the folks in my village that, unlike in the rest of Pakistan, in Karachi you can buy beer without much hassle. (Alcohol is illegal throughout the country.)

Nobody knows how many people live in Karachi. Current estimates range between 17 and 20 million. I have never met anyone who has seen the whole of the city. Every few months, you’ll hear of a neighborhood that you’ve never heard of before. […]

Half a dozen people are killed on an average day: for political reasons, for resisting an armed robbery, for not paying protection money, and sometimes for just being in the wrong spot when two groups are having a go at each other.

{ The New Republic | Continue reading }

All things proceed by a certain eternal necessity of nature

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For a long time, I had been in a dark, painful mood, a mood that had steadily transitioned into my personality. When I felt anger, I felt it so intensely that it took over my whole body. I would go to the grocery store with a carefully composed list, walk through the aisles fuming, and then leave so furious that I completely forgot to buy any food. The anger—which could have been over anything from a fight with a friend to a political issue—often lasted for weeks. Also, I was tired—always, always bone-tired. I was so exhausted that it was a huge physical effort to sit at my desk and type, except for rare weeks of nonstop energy in which I came up with an idea, worked to make it happen, watched it happen, and then treated it like a toy I’d gotten bored with after several days. I could always get my paying work done, but anything outside of that was subject to my ever-fluctuating energy levels. My emotions seemed remote, flat, hard to discern, as if I were trying to see them through dirty glass. I couldn’t really feel anything, and what I could feel was bad. I pulled away from people. I was determined not to trust anyone. I was depressed, in other words, except for those strangely productive weeks and long, terrifying rushes of anger. […]

I had been diagnosed in the past with depression and generalized anxiety disorder, both of which were common illnesses, and which I thought explained my problems. I would have been insulted if you’d suggested I had anything more serious. […]

What the doctors at the hospital finally decided was that I had bipolar II disorder, which is a scary diagnosis. It has a high suicide rate and can be very painful and destructive to your life if you don’t get it treated. It basically means cycling between phases of overconfidence and recklessness (and/or anger), and then deep shame when you crash down into depression and see the mess you’ve made.

{ Rookie Mag | Continue reading }

photo { John Divola }

There is one story left, one road: that it is.

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Sir George Reresby Sitwell (1862 - 1943) believed that novel-writing could bring about physical ruin, and travelled with an extensive collection of medicines, but all were mislabelled to confound anyone helping themselves.

{ The Age | BBC | Thanks James! }

screenshot { Gérard Jugnot in Le Père Noël est une ordure, 1982 }

‘Oh god, please stop the oversized clothing trend.’ –Colleen Nika

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aaand it’s on the tongue.

[…]

WHAT THE HECK THIS GUY NEXT TO ME JUST POPPED THE EMERGENCY EXIT WINDOW OUT I’M LAUGHING SO HARD LET’S GET OFF THE BUS NOW

I’m glad I showered before doing this because smells are EXTREMELY NOTICEABLE

{ brad does acid/Storify | Continue reading }

photo { Josephine Pryde }

The enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat which he contrasts with the blossoming of the human face

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I experience pleasure at work in the mainstream sex industry that I certainly perceive as ‘real’. This pleasure comes from physical sensations (lactic acid, endorphins, sweat, carpet burn, whipping hair, a double ended dildo angled against my g spot, real orgasms) but also from the thrill of voyeurism (exhibitionism, cameras, being naked in front of thousands of people).

{ Zahra Stardust/The Scavenger | Continue reading }

I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me

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“I’ve always been interested in overdoses and addictions,” she says. […]

“I’m obsessed with cocaine overdoses in British society. They call it the ‘white death.’” […]

“I think my dust dealer’s in jail or something. Where’s my cellphone?”

{ Cat Marnell/NY Post | Continue reading }

photo { Ernst Haas }

You can never hold back spring

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I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing. With a pair of short-wave diathermy forceps I coagulate a few millimetres of the brain’s surface, turning the living, glittering pia arachnoid – the transparent membrane that covers the brain – along with its minute and elegant blood vessels, into an ugly scab. With a pair of microscopic scissors I then cut the blood vessels and dig downwards with a fine sucker. I look down the operating microscope, feeling my way through the soft white substance of the brain, trying to find the tumour.

{ Henry Marsh/Granta | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

Oowah oowah is my disco call

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At 12 or 13, we started taking buses to New York City and going to raves. My friends and I discovered this underground culture and adopted this great style that was still foreign to our small upstate community. At the height of the rave scene, I could have described myself as a “polo” raver. I’d wear 60-inch wide jeans called Aura’s E, which was a brand by this girl in Long Island named Aura. I shaved my eyebrows completely off, pierced everything on my face, put platforms on my running sneakers… I’d work day and night in the mall upstate so that I could buy my rave tickets and take bus trips to get all the cool clothes in the city. I found out about everything from shops like Liquid Sky and Satellite Records––they would put flyers out and you had to call hotlines to find out all the rave info. All the great mixtapes were sold at the stores too. It was a real beautiful time to be a teenager and so close to NYC.

{ David Benjamin Sherry | Continue reading }

Extremes meet. Death is the highest form of life.

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For the most part, it’s illegal to sell your body in Britain. But, in fact, there are various legal ways human body parts can be sold that don’t involve waking up in a bath of ice with a kidney missing. In a research experiment, I tried to see how much of the human body can lawfully be put up for sale: by trying to sell as much of my own body as I could. […]

I tried to sell my hair. I was quoted £50 by a hairdresser in London that specialises in harvesting human hair to make wigs for chemotherapy patients. I was hoping they’d offer me considerably more, given that wigs can sell for £1,000. […]

The best offer I got was £30 for some blood. Another clinic would have paid me £50 for some skin – if I had psoriasis. […]

Human urine is about £30 a pot, breast milk £5, even fingernails and faeces do their own roaring trade. […]

My most valuable sale item was eggs. In the UK, they only allow donors £750 compensation, which means almost no donors come forward – and many desperate prospective parents are driven overseas to buy eggs. But in the US, thousands of women sell eggs – it’s a mainstream market.

{ Storm Theunissen/Guardian | Continue reading }

Twining, receding, with interchanging hands, the night hours link, each with arching arms, in a mosaic of movements

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James and Daniel are twins. What sets them apart is that one is white and one is black – and the differences don’t end there.

James is gay, gregarious, and academic. He’s taking three A-levels next summer, and wants to go to university. Daniel is straight, shy, and he didn’t enjoy school at all.

{ Guardian | Continue reading }

artwork { Bruce Nauman, Mean Clown Welcome, 1985 }

The occasional acid flashback

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Most people think perfection in bowling is a 300 game, but it isn’t. Any reasonably good recreational bowler can get lucky one night and roll 12 consecutive strikes. If you count all the bowling alleys all over America, somebody somewhere bowls a 300 every night. But only a human robot can roll three 300s in a row—36 straight strikes—for what’s called a “perfect series.” More than 95 million Americans go bowling, but, according to the United States Bowling Congress, there have been only 21 certified 900s since anyone started keeping track. […]

There’s almost never a time when every decision you make is correct and every step is in the right direction. Life, like bowling, is full of complicating factors, unpredictable variables, plenty of times when there is no right answer. But Bill Fong had some experience with near-perfection prior to the night.

{ D | Continue reading }

The decline of violence in History and its causes

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Lu thought that elements of New Yorker style were ridiculous; for instance, our habit of putting points in I.B.M. when I.B.M. itself had long since done without them. […]

“Would you do me a favor?” And when the woman said yes, Lu told her, “Drop dead.”

{ New Yorker | Continue reading | Thanks Sasha }

And history, said Hegel, was nothing but the expression of this flux of conflicting and resolving ideas

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You know the young Marx – I don’t idealise Marx, he was a nasty guy, personally – but he has a wonderful logic. He says: ‘You don’t simply dissolve marriage; divorce means that you retroactively establish that the love was not the true love.’ When love goes away, you retroactively establish that it wasn’t even true love. […]

For me, the idea of hell is the American type of parties. Or, when they ask me to give a talk, and they say something like, ‘After the talk there will just be a small reception’—I know this is hell. This means all the frustrated idiots, who are not able to ask you a question at the end of the talk, come to you and, usually, they start: ‘Professor Žižek, I know you must be tired, but …’ Well, fuck you. If you know that I am tired, why are you asking me? I’m really more and more becoming Stalinist. Liberals always say about totalitarians that they like humanity, as such, but they have no empathy for concrete people, no? OK, that fits me perfectly. Humanity? Yes, it’s OK—some great talks, some great arts. Concrete people? No, ninety-nine percent are boring idiots. […]

I especially hate when they come to me with personal problems. My standard line is: ‘Look at me, look at my tics, don’t you see that I’m mad? How can you even think about asking a mad man like me to help you in personal problems, no? […]

They claim sex is healthy; it’s good for the heart, for blood circulation, it relaxes you. They even go into how kissing is also good because it develops the muscles here – this is horrible, my God! […]

I like this idea of sex as part of love, you know: ‘I’m ready to sell my mother into slavery just to fuck you for ever.’ There is something nice, transcendent, about it. I remain incurably romantic.

{ Slavoj Žižek | Continue reading }

related/recommended { The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema }

photo { Fernando Gregory }

Just kiss’d the lake, just stirr’d the trees

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I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table.

{ Colin Nissan | Continue reading | Thanks Rachel }

Only the harp. Lovely gold glowering light.

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I’ve always been not only a “late adopter” but a “panicky retreater” when it comes to new media, and the something that should be said about when I first went online—which was early enough that I remember watching Web sites load as if being painted on the other side of a glass—was that I also immediately went offline. As I still often do.

{ Jonathan Lethem/The New Yorker | Continue reading }

photo { Vivian Maier }

Correctamundo. And that’s what we’re gonna be. We’re gonna be cool.

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The other influence happened when I was nine or ten. I went back East to visit relatives in New York and one of my uncles took me to a Russian Jewish bathhouse. It was exotic and interesting and although I don’t remember it from a sensual level, it was an unusual experience. I realized that bathing was an activity that people could indulge in. I remember, too, that there was food afterwards — it was great! Later, when I was in architecture school at UCLA, I visited a place that had a nice bath, and I began to take baths in the afternoon. I liked to take a bath after lunch. I know it is an odd time for it, but if you’re self-employed and are kind of a dreamer, it works. Then in Japan I started to take a bath before dinner, at six or seven o’clock. […]

Bathrooms are everywhere. Just about everyone has one. And every bathroom, no matter how crude or sophisticated, comes equipped with all the elements of primal poetry:

Water and/or steam.
Hot, cold, and in between.
Nakedness.
Quietness.
Illumination.

[…]

The WET distribution system started really small — hand delivery to a few select shops — and grew significantly through the life of the magazine.

{ Leonard Koren/LA Review of Books | Continue reading }

‘Man is born free; and everywhere he is in chains.’ –Rousseau

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I was like all of you. I believed in the promise of the Internet to liberate, empower and even enrich artists. I still do but I’m less sure of it than I once was. I come here because I want to start a dialogue. I feel that what we artists were promised has not really panned out. Yes in many ways we have more freedom. Artistically this is certainly true. But the music business never transformed into the vibrant marketplace where small stakeholders could compete with multinational conglomerates on an even playing field.

In the last few years it’s become apparent the music business, which was once dominated by six large and powerful music conglomerates, MTV, Clear Channel and a handful of other companies, is now dominated by a smaller set of larger even more powerful tech conglomerates. And their hold on the business seems to be getting stronger. […]

Everywhere I look artists seem to be working more for less money.

{ David Lowery/The Trichordist | Continue reading }

photo { Dash Snow }

And Madame. Twenty past eleven.

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{ Who do we have here? This is Eddie. We’re just cruising. He’s a dude magnet. My office is on Wall Street, and if I’m with Eddie, guys just surround me. They say, “Oh my God, I used to have one of these when I was living in the country!” Or whatever. I doubt that short dress hurts. I don’t know. No one talks to me unless I’m with the dog. | NY mag | Continue reading }