[sic] as ever

It's almost spring, so that means it must be time for another installment of Personal Ad Hell. Let's walk hand-in-hand-in-hand down to the underexplored mm4w alley of Casual Encounters, shall we?


Road trip to NYC

Me and a close friend just decided to drive to New York today. We have never been and would like to have some company to possibly show us around. We are currently on our way from Pittsburgh and may need a place to hang or crash. I am 23, white and the taller of the two. He is 22, white and wears glasses. We are both gentelmen and we know how to treat a lady. If interested we can send a pic or two. I can give my cell # to those who reply. Hope to hear from you soon ;)

PS we will arrive roughly around 7am and we will be staying till sunday

Wait. Um. Isn't this section for two dudes who want to screw the same woman? These guys also want a chick to let them stay at her house and perform tour-guide duties for free. No mention is made of sex, and I'd love to meet the woman - probably deeply religious - who would happily play NYC ambassador for these clowns and then be scandalized when they try to fingercuff her in her foyer. I love the useless physical descriptions: one is taller than the other one. You know, the one who wears glasses. And they're already in the car! Get ready, ladies of New York City!

mix it up (Deeply NSFW)

I can't say what, exactly, upsets me so about this ad. Both of the headshots look like they were taken by the dudes' moms, for starters. The lower penis looks, in shape, disturbingly like human excrement.

The cum show-It is always easier with two mature men vs one

Like all transcendent CL ads, this post quickly departs the subject of sex and becomes all about how WOMEN need to LEARN A THING OR TWO:

As you know many men are full of hot air and when a female takes them up, they cannot perform as advertised. We can and would love to meet up. We are not pornstars and do not pack attachments like they do, because they are freaks of nature, but females clearly have told us throughout our lives that we know how to use our nice sized and thick equipment.

Note: all women should read "nice-sized" as "uses fingercots as condoms." But at least they're not FREAKS OF NATURE!

While your sex life right now may be wonderful, non existent at the moment or you are just downright bored at the moment, when sex is good, there is nothing like it. However finding it, is easier said than done and going to a bar and just hooking up in an alcohol induced state is not your style. That is why you are trolling the posts here on Craigslist hoping that you can find what you want by responding to a few posts.

Uh, yeah. You guys know that everything written in second person is actually just clumsily styled first person narrative, right?

We play safe, are both easy going and very respectful. Condoms are always worn for penetration and we play with your pleasure in mind. Our favorite position is you in doggie style being very well fucked while also sucking the other guy. Saying that, we are fine with all positions, combinations and inputs. We also love eating pussy and will go down on you for as long as you want us to or you can ride our faces or 69. For the lady whom truly wants it all, we can go backdoor or DP, but you have to let us know if you are comfortable with it, since we want this to be totally enjoyable for you. This may not be for you and we'll totally ignore your backdoor if you tell us that. Blindfolds, spankings, light bondage, toys, a second female or more as long as we are on the same page is fine with us. We are so open, that if you have a strap on and want to fuck one or both of us, that is fine too. Or stick a dildo up our asses too. We are fine with that. We are hetero by the way, but it feels good and we are not uptight sexually. We are not neanderthals and your input is very important, because this way we know up front what you enjoy. We can be very dominant and if you want us to treat you like a total slut, totally controlling that is fine too.

Look. I'm of course happy that these guys practice safe sex and are so willing to negotiate the terms of their internet-arranged threeway. But I am pretty sick of the rhetorical device of suggesting exactly what one wants to happen as if it's another person's desire. This whole thing would be so much shorter if it wasn't reliant on such a whiny, accusative, passive-aggressive prose style. "We are fine with that. We are hetero by the way, but it feels good." Uh, okay, least-fun, most-defensive threeway participants ever. Is the gay panic you are guaranteed to have if your cocks touch at some point in the evening "fine"?

3 Dudes and/in You! - mm4w - 28 (Williamsburg)

Oh, cute. Of course you assholes live in Williamsburg. This thing reads like a hipster douchebag guidebook (maybe one that the author of the first ad discussed in this post could use on his NYC trip):

Hi there,

How are you doing today? If you're feeling up for it (and you aren't/weren't a dude), there are three wonderful dudes out there who want to have you over for a little wine, a little supper and some sex.

we're looking for a special lady who wants to enjoy three dudes at the same time, in multiple positions and areas of your body. we have lube, ribbed condoms, and a Jack Johnson CD so we're pretty much all set to go.

Must be OK with Eiffel towers, using safe words, crying, the word "booyah", bukkake, chest hair, and have a burning desire to get all sexxxed up by three dudes at the same time. This is an experience that will blow your mind.

Your pic gets one of me naked holding a teddy bear next my junk.

Oh, yeah, an evening with these clowns is exactly what the doctor ordered. Allow me to put on my white belt and triangular-fold printed scarf, hop on the L, and get ready for a room full of men-children who haven't been this scared since they watched It on cable three weeks ago. They didn't expect that anyone would take their stupid NYU joke seriously, you see, but I went to the trouble of looking up what an Eiffel tower is, and I want something for my trouble. To the soundtrack of "Better Together".

WE I DO YOU RIGHT - mm4w

WE ARE 2 STR8 MEN 44 AND 42 TALL ITALIAN CLASSY

You guys, I think I'm in love.

Like Coca-Cola in green glass bottles, they don't make offers like this anymore

Rorschach Sings!!! ("Watchmen" Parody) from Tame The Bear on Vimeo.

"Lisa, you've never even taken a clandestine shower."

I am incapable of keeping anything from anybody.


Deli Proof Daily! #1 from Deli Proof on Vimeo.

I HAD IT BAD tonight!

Having It, Badly

Check out the lineup for the next "I Had It Bad" Reading Series at Happy Ending Lounge, this Wednesday, February 18, featuring Nick Sylvester!

The Interior World

Last spring I found photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten's book Teenage Stories in a gallery bookshop in Paris. It's a collection of images of real-sized teenage girls stumbling through miniature landscapes, as well as other visual statements of dream life: a girl in the woods, her long red hair stuck up in the branches. A woman's body lying in front of a window looking out on an airport at night (an image that is now the cover of the Joan Didion book Play It As It Lays). These images have captivated me for a year now, and I thought I'd post a few here.






In my own dream world, one of Fullerton-Batten's images would be the cover of my first book.

Relics of the Nineties Anonymous

"Smashing Pumpkins to Appear on the Chris Isaak Hour."

Two Movies

Last week, after what I think was exactly a calendar year of not going to the Film Forum for no other reason than sheer laziness (well, also not living in NYC for five months of 2008), I saw two films at the Film Forum. They were Silent Light, directed by Carlos Reygadas, and Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles, directed by Chantal Akerman. It was my first time seeing both movies.





The premise of Silent Light (Stellet Licht in Plattdeutsch, the language spoken by Russian Mennonites) - a man falls in love with a woman who is not his wife - interested me less than the details of its production. Silent Light was filmed with a nonprofessional cast of Mennonite actors. Although it takes place in the Mennonite community in north Mexico (a community I did not know existed), the actors also hail from Canada and Germany, and were able to communicate with eachother because they all speak the same small language. Miriam Toews, one of the lead actors, is an acclaimed Canadian author who was raised in a Mennonite community. All of this is the type of trivia that makes me adore movies.

And I did enjoy Silent Light deeply, although my prurient interest in the film as a window into the cloistered lives of Mexican Mennonites ended up being inconsequential. The movie is an explosion of sensuality. Watching Silent Light reminded me of an African cinema course I took during my undergraduate career. The instructor told us that we would have to learn to read film in a new way, since African cinema features few of the tropes of mainstream American movies (closeups, quick cuts, flashy camerawork) and often features long still shots on people moving through a landscape. But Reygadas's film is by no means plain. every scene was so full of texture that I felt physically respondent to the film, wet when it was raining, heavy with sorrow during scenes of a funeral - but it subverts the expectations of the modern viewer. The film begins and ends with long dreamlike shots of a sunrise and sunset. The images are strikingly beautiful, and yet the desire to look away, to do something other than focus on what was in front of me, was hard to resist. Most of the people in the theatre did not resist - the rows were lit up with cell-phone screens as people texted and checked their missed calls. But Silent Light is all about the value of experience, even at the cost of personal comfort. A life fully lived, it seems to say, will never run out of surprises.



Jeanne Dielman is completely tonally different from Silent Light, but it too has a deep love for the unmoving camera. For nearly three and a half hours the viewer follows Jeanne through her day. She is a Belgian housewife without a husband, performing the rituals of domesticity seemingly solely for the benefit of her teenage son, who is at school all day. Even with the promise of "something" happening at the end of the movie, Jeanne Dielman is a long haul. Scenes ten and fifteen minutes long show Jeanne meticulously preparing food and then cleaning up after herself with a heartbreaking efficiency. The viewer returns with Jeanne to her chores - folding up the sofa bed her son sleeps on, making her own bed, grinding coffee beans - so many times that one starts to feel the same sense of exhaustion and misery at the routine that Jeanne herself must feel.



One of Jeanne's daily tasks is draping a small towel over her shiny middle-class bedspread, so that the gentleman caller she receives in the middle of each day will not sully her linens. Jeanne Dielman is a genteel prostitute, you see, selling dispassionate rolls in the sack in exchange for her continued stasis. These encounters are barely shown in the movie. Instead, we see Jeanne's ability to cope deteriorate over the course of the three days. On the second day, her hair is still tousled when her son gets home. "Your hair's a mess," he says, scarfing down his food. Jeanne's sister writes to her from Canada: would you like to visit us and maybe meet a nice man? But Jeanne can't even summon the energy to decide whether or not she would like to make the trip.

Where Silent Light was life-affirming for me, Jeanne Dielman felt uncomfortably familiar. I, too, am a woman who spends a lot of time alone in her apartment, although I am not also a discreet prostitute. I know the feeling of preparing a meal for yourself and then carefully cleaning up all evidence that the meal even occurred. The slight satisfaction that I take from small household tasks can become an enormous gloominess over the course of a day spent alone. By nightfall I'm restless, and if there's nothing for me to do and no one to see, the clean kitchen is small comfort.

Chantal Akerman was 25 when she made Jeanne Dielman. In an interview with my friend Dennis Lim, Akerman said:

“Jeanne has to organize her life, to not have any space, any time, so she won’t be depressed or anxious. She didn’t want to have one free hour because she didn’t know how to fill that hour. [...] I sometimes think I should have made it after many other films, at the end of my career,” she said. “I remember saying to myself, how can I make a better film? But it was also exactly the film I had to make then. It says something about a woman, about a way of living a life, about life after the war. It was the first thing I had to pour out of myself.”

She added, “I would have changed nothing about it.”