Category: Poseur Alert

Poseur Alert

"During my years as editor of Harper’s Magazine, I could rely on the post office to mark the degree to which I was living in what Goethe surely would have regarded as straitened circumstances. Every morning at ten oclock, I sat down to a desk occupied by five newspapers and seven periodicals (four of them embroiled in politics, the others concerned with socio-economic theory or scientific discovery), three volumes of ancient or modern history (the War of 1812, the death of Christopher Marlowe, the life of Suleiman the Magnificent), a public opinion poll sifting Americas attitude toward family values and assault weapons, and at least fifteen manuscripts, solicited and unsolicited, whose authors assured me in their cover letters that they had unearthed, among other items of interest, the true reason for the Kennedy assassinations and the secret of the universe," – Lewis Lapham, just clearing his throat.

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Poseur Alert

"Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media – a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future," – Gary Shteyngart, Absurdistan.

For some reason, this didn’t win the annual bad bad sex writing award, which Norman Mailer picked up posthumously. The full awful passage can be read in full after the jump.

Here it is:

    “You wanna pop me?” she said. This must have been some new-fangled youth term. The verb “to pop.”

    “I wanna bust a nut inside you, shorty,” I said. “I wanna make you sweat, boo. Let’s do this thing.”

    I’d like to say that she stepped out of her jeans, but in truth it took a while to maneuver two large dimpled buttocks and the accompanying vaginal wedge out of the hard shell of her Miss Sixty denims. We huffed and sweated; I had her hanging off the edge of the bed while I gripped the cuffs of her jeans; I nearly pulled a groin muscle getting her naked; but through it all I stayed hard, a testament to how much I wanted her. She kept her T-shirt on throughout the initial popping, which is just how I like my sex, infused with a little mystery. I slipped my hands beneath the cotton tee and felt the smooth creamery of her breasts while saving the visuals of those brown glossy globes for later. Her vagina was all that, as they say in the urban media – a powerful ethnic muscle scented by bitter melon, the breezes of the local sea, and the sweaty needs of a tiny nation trying to breed itself into a future. Was it especially hairy? Good Lord, yes it was. Mountains of kinkiness black as the night above the Serengeti with paprika shoots at the edges – the pubic hair alone must have clocked in at half a kilo, while providing the inspiration for two discernible trails of hair, one running up to the navel, the other to the base of the spine.

    Naturally, considering my size, she got on top of me. But given her impressive overall body mass and natural resilience, I could see a day when we could broach the missionary position, not that there’s anything special in attacking a poor woman that way. After we had fussed with the condom, I reached for her pubes, but she slapped me away. These preliminaries did not interest her. Instead, she just plain mounted me, holding on to my tits for balance, slipping me inside with no effort, both vaginal lips working to usher me into her tightness. I find it clichéd when couples insist that they have “the perfect fit,” but between the busted-up, zigzag, Broadway boogie-woogie of my maligned purple khui and the all-encompassing nature of her Caspian pizda, we reached a third way, as it were.

    That is to say, she rode me. It was all very classy and contemporary, like a modern-art survey course at NYU. I wanted to have the slogan I RODE MISHA VAINBERG imprinted on her T-shirt. “Yeah, do me,” she kept saying, after issuing a few grunts so male and assertive they startled me into a brief homosexual fear, a fear compounded by one of her sharp nails digging into my tight rectum. “Do me, daddy,” she said, her eyes closed, her thighs slapping against my upper and lower stomachs, my own tits making wet noises against my frame. “Just like that,” she said, stealing a brief glance at me and then turning her head to the side so that I could lick her ear and plunge into her neck. “Just … like … that.”

    “Yeah,” I said, “I’m fucking you, boo,” but the words did not convince me. “I’m busting my nut tonight,” I sang.

    “My pussy fills so tight,” she sang back in perfect ghetto English.

    “Ouch,” I said. She was crushing my pubic bone, grinding into it. “Ouch,” I repeated. “Baby doll … ouch.”

    “Just a minute, pops,” she said. “Just give me a minute. Do me right. Just like that.”

    “Move up a little,” I said. “Move up. It hurts. My bone.”

    “Just … like … that,” she said.

    “My bone hurts,” I said. “I’m losing it.”

    “AW,” she shouted. “FUCK ME.” She leaned back. I slipped out. Her thighs trembled before me, and I felt a warm, abundant liquid spreading on my own thighs, not sure which of us had issued it. My bedroom was filled with the smell of asparagus and related greenery. “Aw,” she said again. “Fuck me.”

Poseur Alert

"Barbara and I went to Indianapolis for a Toby Keith concert, where we partied with something like 25,000 happy rednecks, most of them young, most of them wearing boots and cowboy hats (and cheering Keith’s great song "I Should Have Been a Cowboy"). It’s a great show, and he’s a wonderful performer, not least because of his deeply moving patriotic songs like "American Soldier," "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue," and " The Taliban," etc. 

It’s great to get out of the Washington culture of narcissism and spend some time with the rednecks, a.k.a. real Americans," – Michael Ledeen, NRO.

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Poseur Alert

"Claiming a macho film friendship is not-so-secretly gay has become its own kind of silly convention, a fake-subversive cliché. It is better — sounder both aesthetically and sociologically — to view the masculine pathos in films like [Keanu Reeves surfer movie] Point Break in light of the tradition of heroically minded philosophy that runs from Aristotle to Nietzsche. If Point Break is homoerotic, in other words, then so is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Indeed, the thing that connects Johnny and Bodhi is precisely the thing that Hegel says distinguishes the Master from the Slave: The master prefers death to a life without honor and beauty, a life of mere survival," – Matt Feeney, Slate.

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Poseur Alert

"It is creative intuition that permits both the artist and the viewer to leap over logic, whether scientific or artistic, and emotionally experience the problem laid out here of reconciling the "wet" domain of nature with the "dry" domain of electronics."

Actually, it’s a big blob that produces water when you stroke it. Looks a little like the South Park clitoris to me.

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Poseur Alert

A classic of downtown snootiness:

The Bowery Whole Foods tells us something remarkable about its shoppers: how ignorant they are of where they are and how alienated they are from food.  Perusing it, the thing that impresses you most is the pervasive labeling, the enormous amounts of information appended to everything.  Everywhere are little identificatory notes, signs overhead, brochures on what to do with their sausages (eat them?), glossy photos of the smiling man who supposedly dredged up your mussels or baited the hook upon which your (always already headless and filleted) wild salmon met its end.  This is food shopping for people who have come to trust only that which is mediated by text, addenda, explanations, certifications.  It is a website come to life, or a piece of life for those who prefer websites: each piece of signage functions as the hyperlink that clicks through to a capsule review.

I once served some sliced raw albacore tuna doused in soy to a friend.  I had bought the fish not far from Whole Foods from Alex, the fisherman who had caught it and brought it the next day to the Greenmarket.  I’m lucky to live in a city where this is a humdrum and everyday transaction.  My friend, a film producer, remarked, "This is great!  But how did it get sterile?"

"Sterile?" I asked.

"Yeah. How does it get safe to eat?"

Food? Sterile? This is the alienation on which Whole Foods depends.

I guess I’d rather be alienated than puking my guts out.

Poseur Alert

"When Anthony Zuiker goes down in the books as somebody in Hollywood that was a leader in the industry, I want people to look back and say, ‘You know what? He did it right.’ What we did, the team and myself, was to construct a storyline to tell other producers in the business, ‘Here’s how you do this. Don’t just say ‘no’ to the topic of HIV because you can’t pull it off in the right way or because you think it’s too scary or it’s too dark or it’s too whatever."

If a producer or writer thinks they can’t work HIV into a show, I want CSI to serve as a model. You weave it in a way to where you take people on a journey, where they’re still satisfied with the journey as a CSI viewer, but you’re dealing with a social issue that’s very important and impactful for the greater good, and everybody wins. We have developed the blueprint for other shows to tackle these same kinds of issues, and shown how to utilize television to really get the word out," – Anthony Zuiker, executive producer for CSI: NY, congratulating himself for including HIV in a storyline (non-sexual transmission, of course) after five years of discussion.