Johnny Murdoc

In a naked appeal for my dollars, Flaunt Magazine has covered their latest issue with James Franco’s butt¹:

I just returned from Kansas City. It was a work detour that came out of nowhere. I’m eager to write again. I didn’t have any time to write while I was there. We checked out the wonderful vegan options in town, and bounced around bookstores and comic book stores. I brought home a stack of new books. At one of the comic shops, writer Jason Aaron was just standing around, hanging out. He writes one of my favorite comics, Scalped.

Tuesday night, the waitress at Waldo Pizza recommended the most wonderful double-IPA but now I’ve forgotten what it was called. Waldo Pizza has a vegan menu and incredibly nice, awesome waitstaff.

We got muffins and scones and coffee at Mud Pie, a vegan coffeehouse. We ate Chinese food at The Blue Koi, a restaurant staffed by cute Kansas City hipsters.

St. Louis has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to feeding vegans.

While I was in Kansas City, I read a novella by Robert McCammon, The Room at the Bottom of the Stairs. It’s collected in a soon-to-be-released collection, The Hunter from the Woods from Subterranean Press.

The Room at the Bottom of the Stairs tells the story of Michael Gallatin, a British spy who’s tasked with infiltrating Berlin during World War II in order to distract Franziska Luxe, a German journalist, from her mission of exposing traitors within the Third Reich. Gallatin finds himself drawn to Luxe despite her role as a Nazi, and soon the two are caught up in a whirlwind romance. The book deals with the moral and emotional complexity of a damaged man who finds himself enraptured by an (un)questionably evil woman.

I came to McCammon’s work via another book, The Five, but I found that book to be hard to penetrate. While reading about McCammon, and reading his blog (I virtually always research writers and read interviews with them as I read their books.

The Room… caught me off guard. McCammon’s an incredibly talented writer, and the story of Gallatin and Luxe broke my heart; it’s erotic, exciting, and fraught with danger. McCammon beautifully twists between scenes of subterfuge, action, sex and romance in a way that made me care deeply for the characters, and made me want to strive to be a better writer. His language is clear and simple but manages to evoke a dramatic range of emotions and sensations and he presents a poetic view of Berlin as a war-torn city filled with debutantes who will continue the party at any cost. It’s in this backdrop that Gallatin and Luxe can continue their charade as though nothing is wrong between them, between their respective countries and ideologies.

The twist (not a plot twist, or a spoiler) is that Gallatin is a werewolf. He’s the star of McCammon’s earlier novel, The Wolf’s Hour.

That McCammon pulls all of this off in a story about a werewolf fighting Nazis is nothing short of astounding. Even if nothing interests you less than the topic of a werewolf fighting Nazis, I urge you to check it out.

The novella is available as a free download directly from Subterranean Press (scroll down to the bottom of the book description.)

The above illustrations are by Vincent Chong.

1: Noting of course that this may not, in fact, be Franco’s butt. Flaunt and Franco could very well be pulling one over on us all.

“I absolutely believe that writing and publishing erotica, especially for minorities, is a political act. We must write our own stories, our own truths, otherwise our detractors and enemies will do it for us.”

- Tristan Taormino

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post calling for a better discussion about pornography. I asked, “Where are the people who are thinking smartly about porn?”

I’m not entirely unaware of people who are having this discussion, and today I want to point you to one of them. Danny Wylde is a writer and porn performer. He regularly performs in heterosexual porn, but he’s been known to crossover into gay porn and I’m pretty damned determined to watch this scene with Kimberly Kane and Wolf Hudson because holy fucking shit this looks so fucking hot:

Wylde recently wrote an excellent post of the Smitten Kitten blog, titled “Porn is the New Punk.”

On the surface, the only thing porn and punk have in common is that you can follow each with, “is dead.” The proof of punk’s demise is there’s no longer anything at stake. Sling a guitar over your shoulder and wear a Mohawk, and some Beverly Hills mom will probably think you’re cute. The difference with porn is it’s a double-edged sword. Fuck on camera and your family might disown you, you’ll be called a whore in mainstream media and victim in the annals of anti-porn feminism, you’ll forgo ever having a career with kids or in politics, and – depending on where you live – you might even be arrested.

So despite the most mundane, selfish, or superficial of motivations, I’d like to make the case that every contemporary performer who makes a conscious decision to appear in a porn film is way more “punk rock” than some guy/girl in a band.

…

But if the stance of pornography is freedom of speech, choice, and expression, how does one combat the overwhelming wave of anti-porn propaganda? At the end of the day, every other form of media has just the same freedom to tell pornographers they’re dangerous, or worse yet, sub-human scum.

So it’s back to square one. Porn remains in a standoff of unequal proportion. The new breed of tech-savvy performer, the pro-porn feminist, the sex blogger, and the alternative press; they’re largely drowned out by mainstream film, television, and online media.

Yet mainstream outlets have all but teamed up with pornography in a combined effort to sell sex. The effect is a world media over-saturated by sexually provocative imagery.

In the same way that corporate commodification of punk rock has rendered the genre stale and easily digestible, the mass accessibility of sexually explicit material has turned porn into something status-quo. Hollywood actors, pseudo-celebrities, and children of the upper class have released sex tapes and continued on in relative success. Ads for top-tier merchandise regularly display models in little-to-no clothing. And hardcore sex has long since been depicted in independent and art-house cinema.

Given these examples, it’s hard to distinguish why pornography now stands alone in its battle to remain both a legal and legitimate form of entertainment. The only difference between a contemporary advertisement for jeans and a hardcore porn film is the degree of explicitness, and the level of honesty in regards to selling a product based on sex. While neither is necessarily shocking to the average consumer, one unmistakably bears the brunt of a well-rounded assault.

I highly recommend you check out the rest of the essay; Wylde is a smart voice in this discussion, and his insider view offers a unique perspective.

I started writing a story (the one I excerpted here a few days ago). The story was supposed to be quick and simple. Short, probably 2,000 words. It was a situation story. When I think about situation stories, I think mostly about Stephen King. King doesn’t plot most of his novels. Instead, he thinks about a situation and some characters to go into it and then goes from there. Most of my stories come around like this. “Wouldn’t it be hot if…” Sometimes, I tell myself stories when I masturbate, even when I’m looking at porn. I like a narrative to my fantasies. Sometimes, one of those stories sticks. This one was like that.

Like I said, though, it was supposed to be short. As I was writing it, I thought about how it should end. I’m not going to spoil anything. The ending involves more then the two characters. Actually, it involves another situation. I needed more characters to make the situation happen. So I started thinking about those characters, and how they got into their situation. Now, this story that started with two guys in a car has branched off into this Rashomon-like story about how these characters come together.

When I started writing it, I quickly named the file “Short Cuts.” The story was meant to be short. Anyone who has seen Robert Altman’s Short Cuts knows that this title may be a little more fortuitous.

I’ve been having an interesting conversation with Marlen Boro ever since I posted a handful of his photos last week. It’s nice to find someone as talented as Boro and then begin a winding conversation about pornography and art and the likelihood of collaboration. I wouldn’t have guessed posting his photos would have struck up such a fruitful conversation, but this blog has brought me a great many of talented conversationalists and collaborators.

These photos are from the slide show Joey in the Shower.

Well, here’s a theory about DRM-free that’s widely-held by advocates of DRM-free.

“Don’t treat your customers like criminals.”

That’s true, though it’s not the only reason we do it. Another theory is:

“Make something convenient for folks and they won’t pirate.”

Also true, though also not the only reason we do it.

The deep reason we do it is that we want you to forward the ePub to someone you think will really like it.

It’s not that I trust you not to pirate it—it’s that I trust you to appropriately pirate it!

Because the primary reason folks don’t read a particular book isn’t because it costs money (though for some folks that can be an issue), it’s because it takes time, and brain power, and emotional commitment. And you don’t give those things up lightly. You give them up mostly when a trusted friend advises you to.

Artist Felix D’eon returns from Burning Man and shares an awesome photo:

I’m spending my morning working on a new ebook and a new mailing list. I’m pretty excited about the ebook. Each of the stories in it were originally published in an anthology or magazine. I don’t value my “published” work over my “unpublished” work, because those are largely arbitrary designations considering the state of gay erotica publishing, but I do know that these four stories are really damn strong. It will be nice to have the four of them collected and helping me make more money on them.

The mailing list will be solely for announcing new ebooks, stories and essays, deals on ebooks, etc… You can sign up in the right hand column of this site, or right here:

I promise not to span you or abuse your email addresses for nefarious purposes. If you’d signed up on my previous list, you’ll be included. Also, if you’ve provided your email to me when purchasing books, you’ll be added. Don’t worry. You can always remove yourself later.

Writer Chuck Wendig (whose blog I don’t read but I probably should because people I follow are constantly linking to great posts and essays he writes, like this one on 25 Things You Should Know About Self-Publishing) is releasing a new ebook, and he has a handful of awesome desktop images to help him promote the book, like the following one:

You can access the full-size options at his website by clicking the image above.

I almost feel bad for writing this next bit, as it feels a bit like picking on one of my favorite writers. And don’t get me wrong, Stephen King is one of my favorite writers. However, his new ebook, Mile 81, has some really fucking terrible writing in it. While the story has some genuinely creepy moments in it, and I’m not opposed to the basic concept of King writing about another haunted car (because, honestly, From a Buick 8 is one of my favorite King books, as is Christine), it has a handful of things that just rip you right out of the story. Namely, a scene featuring a state trooper who is playing on his iPad while sitting on the side of the road:

“He was playing a Scrabble-like game called Words with Friends, his Internet connection provided by AT&T.”

Are you fucking kidding me? Product placement in the middle of a story? I was suspicious of King’s inclusion of Bing in a previous novella, but calling out AT&T as an Internet provider has no place in the story. Even if King receives no compensation for dropping these mentions (and I can certainly understand occasional references to branded objects), noting the ISP that the trooper is using is just bad writing.

And now, a video of a young, fit guy stretching in the nude:
Read the rest of this entry »

(original can be seen here)

Kennedy Carter and Lawson Kane in Naked Sword’s Golden Gate

Where are the people who are thinking smartly about porn?

I’ve talked about Warren Ellis a lot here on my blog. For those of you who don’t know Ellis’s work, he’s responsible for Transmetropolitan, one of the best mature science fiction comics ever written, a crazy dystopic story about a journalists’s search for truth. It’s full of random shit and sick jokes but it’s peppered with these amazing, pure, raw liberal rants. Ellis is also responsible for Freakangels, one of the first ever webcomics that just worked for me. Ellis is also a prolific blog/essay/letter writer, and one of comics’ and cultures’ best thinkers. He’s largely stepped out of comics, now, but I’m currently reading a collection of his columns called Come in Alone. In an industry that’s fueled by nostalgia and a desperate need to cash in on old ideas, Ellis challenges conceptions and digs for the, well, truth behind the industry and the art form. He doesn’t always produce the best work, but he’s thinking more smartly then most of his peers.

Where is that guy for porn? I get that we don’t ask much from porn; we want hot guys fucking each other, and we can find whatever specific quirk or kink that we’re looking for simply by searching for it. I’m as guilty as anyone else. I don’t masturbate intelligently. I may be incapable of it.

The problem with literary men who write literary sex scenes is that there’s a completely imaginary line between pornography and literature, and pornography has no time for your posturing and your irony because people only masturbate sincerely…

- Melissa Gira Grant

Don’t get me wrong. I know quality when I see it. I know what elevates the conversation. Travis Mathews’ I Want Your Love. Erika Lust’s work. I want more of that stuff every day, but in its absence I’m happy to jack off to preview clips and some shit on XTube.

Like comics “journalism,” porn writing is mostly regurgitating press releases and salivating over new stars’ dicks. There’s nothing wrong with that, except there needs to be something more. Gay porn is the dominant expression of homo sexuality (that space is intentional). Porn doesn’t need to be anything more than one or two guys and a hard (or soft dick), but that doesn’t mean it should never be. Where is the better porn? Where is the audience that’s asking for it?

I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this. I think I’m just starting a conversation with myself.

Yesterday, I posted about The Bearded Professor and Red Velvet Boylesque, and somehow I had not noticed that they had posted another great video! No problem, because this one deserves a post completely on its own:

Hell yeah, so much stuff I love. I may or may not have a huge, not-so-secret fetish for guys pouring beer on one another.

Along with The Bearded Professor, this video also features The Frenchman.

Last night, Travis Mathews and The Sword premiered the new trailer for In Their Room – Berlin, Mathews’ follow-up to his short film that documented the intimate lives of gay men in their bedrooms. From the look of it, Berlin will be even more intimate:

After the success of In Their Room, a series of vignettes exploring the different lives of eight men in San Francisco, Mathews set out to expand on the concept and traveled to Berlin. There, he captured raw and poignant moments similar to the ones he documented in the original In Their Room. Being a full length feature isn’t the only aspect of In Their Room – Berlin that is different. Unlike the original project, In Their Room – Berlin features real sex between real men.

Taking place during the course of one day, the feature explores the sex lives of seven gay Berliners as each searches for sexual intimacy in very different ways.

This fall, In Their Room – Berlin will debut on NakedSword.com and on DVD. It screens this weekend at New York’s LGBT film festival, New Fest. Click here for showtimes, and click here for the original In Their Room series.

Back in August of ’09, I had this to say about the first installment:

The series is the kind of voyeuristic outing that I live for. Mathews’ camerawork is involved without being intrusive, and watching the men in their bedrooms feels intimate and true. For the most part, Mathews’ subjects are calm and at ease, comfortable in their bodies and their evironments, and comfortable with their stories.

I’m sitting in a hotel room, waiting for a military investigator to call. Yes, really. Enough about that, though.

I have two more nights to spend in hotels, and three more days to spend in Tennessee. After that, I will be able to drive home. I’ll be able to put my arms around my boyfriend. I’ll be able to kiss him and feel the warmth of his body and I’ll be able to do a million other little things, many of which I will get in trouble for mentioning here.

Last week I mentioned that I wanted to post the sexiest video on the internet. I failed to do so because I used Saturday to show my boyfriend all kinds of birthday blog love, and it felt wrong posting videos of other men on my blog during his birthday. Then I fell into hotel doldrums and did little more than lay around and sometimes read.

So, without further ado, I present to you my new favorite internet video:

This performer, The Bearded Professor from Velvet Rope Boylesque, is astonishingly cute and talented.

I wish more performances like this happened in real life. Happened in St. Louis, or whatever city I’m in at the time, so I could see them. Yes, the boy is cute and yes watching him undress plays a role in my love for this video, but honestly it’s his voice, his delivery, his performance that makes this video so fucking sexy. I’ve mentioned before that certain words and the sound of a guy’s voice could get me off. The audio from this video alone could do it.

As a bonus, there’s another video! This one is a little more fun and cute but still manages to be completely sexy:

Huge thanks to Andrew over at Catch Fire for posting this! I’m in internet-love!

An added note for the type-lovers amongst you: Check out Lost Type, a font designer co-op with pay-what-you-will fonts. They do wonderful work. Both of the fonts in my logo, the one in the images above, and the one that I used in my boyfriend’s birthday posts came from their website. They add new fonts in what seems like weekly batches. Check them out!

A sweet, cute boy wrote me today and asked me to remove photos of him from my blog. He is beautiful, and my blog is a little less beautiful without him.

I’m in a hotel, somewhere in Southeastern Tennessee. It’s storming outside. The cable has gone out. I wonder what other people in the hotel are doing. Are they reading today’s complimentary newspaper? Reading a book? Are they talking? Are they fucking? The rain is coming down heavily. I’m sitting by the window, watching the water fall and I’m reading Jonathan Ames. I’m waiting for a phone call and thinking.

The lights surged, and the ones in the parking lot went out and stayed out. Now I can only hear the rain, the thunder, and the hum of the refrigerator in my room.

This is the passage I just read in Ames’ The Double Life is Twice as Good:

Because this post should have some naked boys in it, I’ll share Kennedy Carter’s recently-posted photos from a weekend at the lake, via his website:

You can see more at his website.

That’s it for tonight, boys and girls. I’ll return tomorrow with the sexiest video on the internet. (And I’m not joking.) (But it may be a terribly subjective judgement call.)