Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Feb 28, 2004
During our mid-afternoon stroll through the park, Les and I came across a crime scene investigation of harrowing proportions—bloated blue fabric and what appears to be the hood of a sweatshirt visible just above the frozen surface of the Harlem Meer, the body surrounded by a battalion of police vehicles and investigators. A brave investigator in an orange jumpsuit crawled across the ice to verify that what we’re looking at is indeed a dead body. Now they’re trying to figure out a way to fish the corpse out as hordes of my fellow citizens look on in fascination. (It’s perhaps a tad ironic that the scene is clearly visible from the double decker tour buses that prowl Fifth Avenue.) I can’t figure out what’s more disturbing: that I can see this all unfolding from my apartment windows or that I must have walked by that dark patch in the lake a half dozen times in the past few days, blithely unaware that I was in the presence of death.
Even in the garden…
Posted by Lex Konrad in Dispatches | Feb 21, 2004
Les was on the 5th Wheel last Thursday night and will be on again this coming Wednesday. Check the archives for Leslie’s report from the trenches of her first experience. I watched the episode and I must say she livened up what would otherwise have been an achingly dull show. Where do they find these lame-assed, issue-laden people?
Posted by Lex Konrad in Opinions | Feb 20, 2004
He slithered around in his chair and made a noise intended to drown something out—my God: pornography turned the world upside down. You gave your head away, and what your mind liked no longer mattered; now the animal parts were in the driving-seat—and tall in the saddle. As Lolita took her Amazon from the rear, Brendan attended to the ordeal of his own arousal. You’d better hope that this doesn’t happen, he thought, when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller…
Martin Amis, Yellow Dog
It was during the summer of 1994 that I discovered dirty things on the Internet. I was trapped in rural Indiana on a National Science Foundation research grant (much less impressive than it sounds), a UNIX lab and umpteen thousand miles of fiber optic cable connecting me to the world. Yes, even way back in ‘94 there were terabytes of porn piled by the dumpsters in the shady back alleys of Usenet—mostly high-resolution stills scanned from glossy European sex magazines, old GIFs leeched from archaic bulletin board systems with names like Rusty-n-Eddie’s, and perhaps a few thousand grainy videos. This was before the deluge of broadband porn, before cocksucking sluts in every inbox, before anyone took seriously the idea that there was money to be made. Previously I had seen the Internet in purely technical terms: as a highly distributed network designed to survive a nuclear holocaust. Now I saw it for what it truly was: a sort of psychic holocaust all its own. A wanker’s paradise.
A few days ago, as we sat together downloading mp3’s, a kid boasted to me of his digital porn collection back home. I can barely remember what life was like Before Internet Porn (B.I.P.), when it was good enough to huddle under the covers with a copy of the Swimsuit Issue, enthralled at the mere outline of a nipple; to steal a glance at some kid’s coveted copy of Hustler magazine, maybe fish a mildly hardcore video out of the trash (Big Black Dicks in Little White Chicks, it might read)—when wanking at least required some imagination. Nowadays you’re always one slip of the mouse away from Paris Hilton doing double anal, or enemas, or goatse.cx. Pr0n, the kiddies call it. Listening to this kid, already jaded about so much at such a young age, I was glad I grew up in the B.I.P. era. I wondered whether we’re raising a generation of raincoaters. I told the boy he had to choose between downloading porn and having real girlfriends. He nodded slowly, as if acknowledging that he’d already lost touch with something vital.
During the heady, debauchery-filled summer of 2001, porn lost its hold on my imagination. The animal in me simply stopped responding to it, like when you’ve seen that video and you’ve wanked and wanked and then you’re done for awhile, except now for months at a time. You could say I was busy out there in the real world, but I still held on to my other solitary obsessions—reading, video games, madly surfing the web. Somehow the increasingly rarefied on-screen sex acts were no longer even appealing to me on an animal level—it was as if pornography had rocketed so far into the erotic as to come out the other side, to metastasize into the anti-erotic.
Like a whore doing her nth line of blow, the inundated wanker grows desensitized to the product. The industry has to constantly chase after the next big thing, to manufacture new stimuli at steadily decreasing marginal returns, to plumb deeper into those animal parts. But animal is at least natural—we’ve gone beyond that into something darker and more insidious in human nature. It’s not a matter of lust but of conditioned response: Wanker gets a hardon. Bored with his porn collection, Wanker downloads a video depicting quad-anal. Wanker confuses the organic source of his arousal with the depiction on screen and soon enough Wanker gets a hardon whenever he sees quad-anal. Eventually he doesn’t develop a hardon unless he sees quad-anal. Over time quad-anal grows boring and the cycle continues. Simple penis-in-vagina was left in the dust a thousand jizz-stained rags ago.
“Pussies are bullshit,” as Amis famously quoted porn-king John Stagliano. And assholes are reality.
Except that assholes, too, are bullshit.
As a sex writer I’ve been granted access to a lot of state-of-the-art porn, the balance of it overwhelmingly anal. But assholes are bullshit: mere assfucking ain’t enough anymore. Ready at any moment to plunge into rectal prolapse, the asshole now has to gape to proportions that would make a proctologist blush. Our barely-legal starlet is routinely expected to suck a cock clean after it emerges from her own—or someone else’s—pooper. “I want to taste my shit juice off you cock,” says one frenzied girl. “I want to gag off my own ass juice.” (What young woman doesn’t dream of this?) But even this is old-hat. The edgy performer now chokes down jism-enema after jism-enema expelled from the gaping maw of her playmate’s incontinent sphincter. We’ve gone off the deep-end of unusual sexual practices, and there’s some danger in this—not moral, but psychological; of expectations raised to the point that even a sphincter-ripping buttfuck seems bland. It’s not the physical acts I worry about so much as the lack of context or conscience. Looking at these videos I feel less like a wanker than a harried motorist rubbernecking at the scene of a particularly gruesome collision. This stuff doesn’t even pretend to be human anymore.
But perhaps I’m making too much of it all. The kids will probably turn out alright—desensitized to porn, yes, but not to the overpowering sights and sounds and scents and feelings of the real thing. I’m the last one on earth who should be hurling stones. Maybe you, the wanker, get turned on by gaping anuses and jism-enemas and that’s probably okay. Maybe I do, too. You’d just better hope that this doesn’t happen when you’re watching the one about the oversexed undertaker, the coprophagic pigfarmer, the ladykilling ladykiller…
Posted by Lex Konrad in Sex | Feb 17, 2004
The week was long and unforgiving. When Thursday night came around I felt ready to let myself out of my cage.
The subway is always depressing. Nobody smiles. The bland fluorescents sallow even the prettiest skin. I was reminded of those old Walker Evans subway portraits.
And so I was manic upon exiting the carriage at Houston, ready to claw my way back to the surface, to simply breathe again. Yama was a few blocks ahead so I whipped out my phone and called my parents on impulse. Don’t know why. I can tell them things but I can’t really tell them things but they may already know and I don’t mind if they do.
By the time I arrived at Zinc the girls were already properly soused on Godfathers and empty stomachs. They played with a plush red monkey Leslie had received as a Valentine’s gift. Nova made the monkey dance, deftly manipulating the doll’s booty and shoulders to the beat of some imagined house remix. We discussed our Valentine’s Day plans, made in jest some weeks ago and now suddenly rather serious—the three of us would cook dinner and then go out to wreak havoc among love struck couples and sullen singles.
Yama. A palace of exotic sushi, everything filled with spicy mayo, avocado, fresh scallions, multi-hued roe. “Henpai!” I announced when the hot sake arrived, intending a drinking contest, but Les couldn’t choke down the entire proffered thimbleful. Nova set the monkey on its back with a paw between its legs. We hooted and hollered and then stuffed our pie-holes with raw fish. Somehow I don’t think the other patrons appreciated our carrying on like fools. Dessert arrived—red bean paste wrapped in a moist green rice pastry wrapped in leaves of some sort, which were bound with makeshift twine.
“Uh, what is this?” I asked the waitress.
“Sosa-dango.”
I grinned at the girls. “Sosa-dango is the word of the day.”
On the way out we debated the merits of sosa-dango, stopping to interview a few people. We emerged into a sosa-dango night in a sosa-dango town under a sosa-dango moon wrapped in a sosa-dango sky. Sausa-dango. Salsa-dango. Bossa-nova-dango. Espinosa-dango. What’s-a-dango? Sosa-dango.
“You know, it’s like that movie Being John Malkovich,” I observed, “when he goes up into his own head and suddenly everything’s, like, Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. Cept now it’s sosa-dango, know what’m sayin?”
“Are you sosa-dangoing me?” Nova asked.
“Maybe later baby,” I replied. We all laughed.
Nova brought us to a club a few blocks down the street. The girls made merry while I stood a few paces away chatting up the bartender. A tall Indian fellow gazed at the two vixens, a Cheshire smile painted on his face. Leslie was up on the bar now, slinking, stretching and purring.
“I can’t take them anywhere,” I said to the bartender, punctuating the thought with a mock sigh.
She cracked a smile. “Looks to me like you can take them anywhere.”
I heard a hissing noise and turned to face Leslie. A narrow column of flame shot up the side of her head. “Your hair’s on fire!” I shouted and used my hand to grab and smother the hair-raising inferno. Leslie shrieked and Nova sprung to her aid, ushering her into the kitchen. Les left behind an awful, acrid cloud of smoke that burrowed into my sinuses. It smelled of a thousand ants set ablaze atop a funeral pyre. The Indian gentleman and I simply looked at each other and shrugged. We talked for a little while until the girls emerged from the kitchen, Leslie wet-haired and giggling at her misfortune. Further inanity ensued and culminated in Leslie not-so-discreetly pulling my pants open and getting in a few licks as Nova cupped my balls.
Really, it was time to leave.
Meow Mix was crammed to the rafters with lesbians and the odd assortment of male hangers-on. Leslie and Nova sauntered off to dance somewhere while I wheeled through the crowd fetching drinks and looking dazed. I stepped outside for a smoke and offered a young woman a light.
“Sure are a lot of girls in there,” I said.
She laughed.
“I used to feel uncomfortable coming here, but then I realized something.”
“What’s that?”
“Lesbians need dick,” I said, pausing for effect. “I have the numbers to back it up.”
She didn’t seem terribly put off by my bold assertion. “Oh really?”
“Yup. I read that around eighty percent of lesbians who don’t already have a live-in lover have screwed a man within the past two years. And, speaking anecdotally, I seem to get approached a lot in places like this.”
“Eight out of ten of my friends don’t have any interest in men.”
“Maybe they aren’t telling you for fear of being kicked out of the clubhouse.”
“Well, a friend of mine did recently confess to a double life.” She flashed a wry smile. “I’m sold. I’m offering you my nice warm bed right now. High thread count sheets. Just say the word.”
“Ha! I have my hands full at the moment… by the way, have you ever heard of sosa-dango?”
Once again inside, I found the girls dancing on stage at the back of the club. We soon decided to head uptown for the night. On our way out we stopped to gawk at a go-go dancer, bethonged ass swaying mere inches away from our slack jaws. Leslie cooed and stuffed a dollar bill down the front of the girl’s underwear.
Nova fell asleep as soon as she crawled under the covers. I immediately jumped Leslie, impaled her, and pumped furiously while rotating through a series of pornomaniacal positions. Nova’s pretty tits jiggled. The bed shook. Still the girl did not wake. I felt my own climax coming on and Leslie cried out. Nova began to snore lightly. Les and I erupted in a fit of laughter. We came.
