The Sex Issue articles

{Originally published in the C. W. Post Pioneer. The fourth issue of the "Revue", the entertainment section of the paper, the Entertainment Editor let me take the reigns and theme an issue. I, being the rambunctious shit I was back then, decided it should be the "Sex Issue". It's main feature was an article on the "Sexiest Scenes in Movies", as well as small articles of "Sexiest TV Couples", "Songs to have Sex to" and "Shows That Shot Their Wad: Power Rangers" 'cause they let some weird kids write for the newspaper. Below are the articles I wrote, or my contributions to them. Additionally, the final piece, obscured in white, is an article I wrote on a dare from my editor, who swore I couldn't write something so vulgar he wouldn't publish it. I won that dare. It is extremely NSFW, and truly obscene, and reflects very poorly on me out of context. But, hey, read at your own risk}

Sexiest Movie Scene: The Graduate

You’ve just graduated college with no idea what to do. At your party, your family friend asks you to drive her home. When you get there, she offers you a drink, and starts to subtly seduce you. Nervously, you flee upstairs, only to find she’s followed you, stripped down, and has shut the door, telling you she’s “available to you” and asks “Would you like me to seduce you?” This sounds like a fantasy of the average man, and one that Dustin Hoffman got to live in multiple takes on the set of Mike Nichol’s The Graduate, a movie about boy meets girl who‘s the daughter of the woman he‘s been sleeping with. There’s little in this world sexier than a woman who doesn’t care about your worries, she knows what she wants and takes it (Are you listening, honey?). So, to that I say “Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson!”

Songs In The Key Of Sex

Shut off the lights and turn up the stereo. Whether it’s a lover or someone you barely know, no one likes silent sex. So, please enjoy, give them a try, but remember: I wouldn’t recommend inappropriate or dangerous sexual acts to everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.

• I Want You (She’s So Heavy)- The Beatles: A twelve word long song of sheer seduction hides between “Octopus’s Garden” and “Here Comes The Sun”. So what if you don’t have a god damn clue what “She’s so heavy” means. Odds are, neither did they.
• Let’s Stay Together- Al Green: When it comes to songs for sex, sometimes you can’t avoid the staple soul singers. If the person you’re about to have sex with isn’t in the mood after a little of Rev. Green’s styling, they’re not worth the condom.
• Roads- Portishead: Whenever a show on HBO or Showtime uses slow, ambient music to score a sex scene, they’re just wishing they had this song. The song’s laced with R&B beat, 70’s porno guitar, and Beth Gibbon’s trembling vocals that send the right kind of shivers.
• Chan Chan- Buena Vista Social Club Soundtrack: Sure, it’s in another language, and I don’t know what the f*ck they’re talking about. Sex isn’t about words. (Well, sometimes it is, but that kind costs 10 cents a minute.) This song sweats beach fires, Corona, and scantily clad Latin waitresses. If that don’t get you going, see a doctor.
• Pour Some Sugar On Me- Def Leppard: With a drum beat hand-crafted (with only one hand, no less) for the strip club, Joe Elliott and the boys from Def Leppard create a perplexing plea for a good time (Do…do they want to get covered in semen?) They’re “Hot, sticky sweet” and by the end of Phil Collen’s solo, you will be too.
• Let’s Get It On- Marvin Gaye: Sure, it’s the most cliché sex-song ever. But it doesn’t take much to figure out why. This has been the go-to shag song for decades. Hell, you may have been made to this track.
• Whole Lotta Love- Led Zeppelin: The entire album of Led Zeppelin II is designed for planting your Robert, but the opening track has the line “I’m gonna give you every inch of my love.” I need say no more.
• Crash Into Me- Dave Matthews Band: From a man who’s usually singing frenetic verses about whiskey, it’s touching to hear what sounds like a gentle love song out of old DMB. Then you hear him grumble out “Hike up your skirt a little more, and show your world to me.” Admit it, you’re already turned on.
• Justify My Love- Madonna: If phone-sex were set to music, it’d sound like this. Madonna’s never been one to hide the sex in her songs, but never has it been so…sexy. Hell, all the panting she does on this track, it sounds like she may finish first.
• Hallelujah- Jeff Buckley: Forget the crap track from Watchmen. This song is the pen-ultimate song for making love. “Remember when I moved in you, and the holy dove was moving to.” Leonard Cohen wrote about the pain of love, Jeff Buckley sang about the Hallelujah of the orgasm.

  The Article Made on a Bet

I’ve used the space I’m given in the Pioneer to rant against Lady Gaga, Megan Fox, and Andy Samberg. But I’d like to take this moment to complain about something I hate more than all three of them combined: sloppy blowjobs. That’s right. I said it. Look, baby, I’m touched you’re gonna do that, but do it right. If someone offers to paint my house, and then they just splash a can of paint on the wall, no one can blame me for being pissed, right? It’s the same here. After a night of passion (or a day of passion, or 15 minutes in my car between Major Forces in Film and Cinematography) I don’t want to feel like I’ve got a Doberman’s tongue dangling between my legs for the next hour and a half. It’s not a Popsicle. You can’t just slobber. Your tongue is like a paintbrush. Be Michelangelo, not Jackson Pollock. And while we’re on the subject, with regard to reciprocation: Fuck that. I always get “But I went down on you. It’s the same thing”. No it’s not. You get one shot of baby batter in the mouth, and you have the luxury of choice: Spit or swallow. We don’t. Down there for 5, 10 minutes, lapping up whatever’s going on down there, and we have to swallow every drop. There’s no spitting, unless we wanna do the Olympic swimmer move: Go down, turn head to the side, spit, breath in, repeat. No, that’s just not happening, honey. One last note to wrap this up: During sex, don’t say “Oh, baby, make me come.” What the fuck else am I gonna do, make you a hat? Of course I’m trying to make you come. Oh, and don’t call me daddy.

Getting Used to Life Without Linda

{The opening chapter to a novel I would later complete, and then burn the manuscript of, because college. Shortly after I would write this chapter in a small, red moleskin notebook in some dark Long Island basement, I would receive a call telling me my grandmother had died. For those wondering, it wasn't a terribly good novel.}

“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

    My eyes flew frenetic around the room. Had I no sense of decency? I mean, am I being perverse? Am I committing some sort of social faux pas? Am I a cuddle voyeur, as it were? I mean, I am just sitting here, staring. It is quite the awkward position. But, fuck, this house is empty. The scene: They lay together on the bed, I alone in the chair, the room chilled with the kind of morning “How did I get here?”s are made of. I could get up and leave. I should get up and leave. But then it’ll be obvious I’m upset, and why give that away? She’ll just come in with the “There’s no reason for you to act this way…” yipping away like a dog, rabid, it’s communicable infection: guilt.

    When I woke, I scoured the room from the comfort of whatever ice cold, rock hard surface I had passed out on. Woke up, the room was bare, “he couldn’t see her anywhere” as Dylan put it. Funny how that album keeps popping up in life (I’ll get to that in a bit). I was hoping to see her, I don’t know, asleep in a chair; or fixing her hair in a mirror; or curled up in my lap. (Preposterous, yes, but if you knew her, you’d know all three of those were.) But I expected, logically, to awaken to him splayed out across the bed, and she platonically bundled in blankets inches apart from him.

    But instead, I rose to see him alone on the bed, in the fetal position, his arm wrapped around his…wait a minute, I realized, he’s not in the fetal position at all. That’s HER his arm’s around. He’s HOLDING her. The bastard! The swine! My emotions jumped seemingly with every blink. I was angry, furious in fact, sad, complacent, reflective, melancholy, exasperated, jealous, and staggeringly ill. In the course of the night I had consumed 2 beers, 18 oz. of whiskey, a swig of rum, two cups of vodka, a shot of whatever was handed to me, what accumulated to approximately $10 worth of grass, a Xanax, some coleslaw, a cheeseburger, and a small coke. Personally, I blame the cheeseburger for all my symptoms.

    I glared at the bed. The scene of the crime. Not necessarily a crime of ‘passion’, per say, but one of…well…mutual…affection…ok, regardless, I was pissed. I should have known better. A girl and two of her ex’s alone in a house for a night? I knew one of us would become the proverbial third wheel. But I thought it would be like a tricycle, or one of those Big Wheels you had as a kid, you know, with all the Batman stickers, and the front wheel’s plastic traction all worn down so you couldn’t even ride the fucker on blacktop? I thought we’d be like that. And in a way we were, in the sense that, much like the tread-less, plastic-wheeled transport, what started out kinda fun had overstayed it’s welcome in the realm of boredom alleviation.

    I mean, come on, man, we shared moments today. We smoked together, we drank together, drove together, even talked music. Talked music, sir! I believe, in California, there’s a state law that says once such a bond has been established, it is a felony for a person in your position to perform any acts of affection upon my ex. Of course, despite it’s legal grounding, I would never raise my qualm, as he could, if he were a sharp strategic mind, counter with the stellar defense of “I was here before you.”, as chronologically he predates me in terms of romantic interest. I believe the California Justice System has established statutes for these situations.

    So I remain silent, burying my clenched fists in the pockets of my leather pants. (We’ll return to that later.) Forced to sit, watching him unconsciously cradle her handsome form, ever rising and sinking softly, wisps of air slipping through the slit in her serenely pursed lips. Surely, though, I accept that my misfortune is my own fault. With some effort, or even merely some simple submission, the scene I had awoken to could have been vastly different. I could be caressing her; we could be lying, disrobed, sharing our bodies in the simplest of ways; she could be fixing her hair in the mirror; (I keep going back to that idea. Why?) There are a million other variations coursing through my head even as I’m writing.

    But this way, in the long run, will be the more rewarding path. This is the path I consciously followed. Because tonight, 5 hours prior, I officially ended my relationship with Linda Barnes.

Big Whiskey and the Groogrux King by Dave Matthews Band

{Originally published in the C.W. Post Pioneer, the following was my contribution to an article about the best music of 2009}

Big Whiskey And The Groogrux King by Dave Matthews Band

While I want to give credit to Green Day’s highly underrated 21^st Century Breakdown (Yeah, I know, the cool, hip kids all say “I only like old Green Day”. Well, you all knew the words to American Idiot, so f*ck you), I have to admit that the best album of the year has to be Big Whiskey. This great collection of songs, with that vintage Dave Matthews sound, begins and ends with sax solos from the late LeRoi Moore, who was a founding member of the band. His tragic death, while in mid -production of the album, not only inspired them to name the album in his honor (Groogrux being, among other things, a nickname of Moore’s), but to write some of the more somber tracks on the album. Songs like “Lying In The Hands Of God” and the final track “You & Me” are filled with a mournful tone befitting a band in grief, the incredibly upbeat “Why I Am” seems to be a lyrical thank you to Moore, and a musical memorial for such a talent. Certainly, “Shake Me Like A Monkey”, their most James Brown-esque track to date, didn’t receive the airplay of “Single Ladies” or “Poker Face”, but it’s much less insipid, and I’m sure will better stand the test of time.