Today in Porn – Childhood Nostalgia Edition

I was perusing Hugh Hefner’s Twitter feed, as one does, when I happened upon this item from his Saturday Scrapbook collection:

Screen Shot 2014-06-02 at 9.50.05 AMI’m not sure what it means that two of the great architects of my childhood delight – Bill Cosby and Shel Silverstein – enjoyed playing croquet (and possibly other sporting activities) with the guy who founded Playboy magazine, but I did think it worth noting.

Those really were the glory days for ol’ Hef. Here’s a particularly witty cartoon from the magazine during that era:

Screen Shot 2013-07-28 at 8.37.43 AMGet it? Women are never too young to make men feel inadequate! Oh Hef, you scamp.

 

 

New Dante Canto found! von Balthasar (partially) vindicated! Unitarian Universalists enter Catholic Church in droves! Poor (in spirit) hardest hit!

Sort of.

Follow-up to follow-up to follow-up to previous day’s post

Familia Romana - p. 19

From LINGVA LATINA PER SE ILLVSTRATA – PARS I: FAMILIA ROMANA, by Hans H. Ørberg.…

I’ll see your Pope on the cover of Rolling Stone

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…and raise you St. Francis De Sales over at Paris Review Daily:

In fact, hell has a way of rearing its infernal head at awkward moments throughout the Devout Life, perhaps as in life itself. Here’s a bit from “Balls, and Other Lawful But Dangerous Amusements,” which doesn’t mean what you think it does:

“Balls and similar gatherings are wont to attract all that is bad and vicious; all the quarrels, envyings, slanders, and indiscreet tendencies of a place will be found collected in the ballroom. While people’s bodily pores are opened by the exercise of dancing, the heart’s pores will be also opened by excitement … while you were dancing, souls were groaning in hell by reason of sins committed when similarly occupied, or in consequence thereof.”

Buzzkill, Francis! Not all his advice is so starchy, though. In “We Must Attend to the Business of Life Carefully, But Without Eagerness or Over-Anxiety,” he writes, “Imitate a little child, whom one sees holding tight with one hand to its father, while with the other it gathers strawberries or blackberries from the wayside hedge.” (I do this literally all the time—can’t recommend it highly enough.)

Still, if Francis has really been watching over the Fourth Estate for these many centuries, one imagines he’s pretty disappointed with the profession. After all, journalists and writers are not known for their piety, to put it mildly. Saving Calvinists from perdition no longer moves us to dip our pens.

“Buzzkill, Francis!” is my new “Settle down, Francis.” I do feel a bit sorry for the writer, however – in his rush to smirk, he’s overlooked Francis’s perceptive genius: quarrels, envyings, slanders and indiscreet tendencies on the dance floor form the basis for a great many of today’s more popular poems, the kind that show up on the radio.

Quarrels? Check 50 Cent’s “In Da Club”

When my joint get to pumping in the club, it’s on
I wink my eye at your chick, if she smiles, she gone
If the roof on fire, man, just let it burn
If you talkin’ about money, homie I ain’t concerned
I’mma tell you what Banks told me Cuz, go ahead, switch the style up
If they hate then let them hate and watch the money pile up
Or we can go upside your head with a bottle of bub’

Envyings? The list is endless, since the club seems to be as much about establishing status as anything else, but let’s take this very basic example from Will i. Am’s “Scream & Shout”

Everybody in the club
All eyes on us
All eyes on us
All eyes on us

Slanders? Back to 50 Cent and “Get Out Da Club”

Bitch you think you high class you ain’t worth a third of a nigga
Ya man is gangsta but we ain’t never heard of the nigga

And hoo boy, indiscreet tendencies. I’m gonna use this bit from Jennifer Lopez’s “On the Floor,” since it actually mentions sweat, and Francis mentioned the open pores brought on by dancing…

That badonka donk is like a trunk full of bass on an old school Chevy
Seven tray donkey donk
All I need is some vodka and some coke
And watch, she going to get donkey konged
Baby if you’re ready for things to get heavy
I get on the floor and act a fool if you let me
Dale
Don’t believe me just bet me
My name isn’t Keith but I see why you Sweat me
L.A. Miami New York
Say no more get on the floor

The poor devil also seems to misunderstand what it means for a saint to be the patron of this or that profession. Please correct me if I’m mistaken, but I always thought it had more to do with the excellent execution of the work than the piety of the worker. As long as we still dip our pens in the service of truth, I’m pretty sure Francis has to be pleased.

Still.

Surfing with Mel available for pre-order

Spread the word.

SwM-cover-pic

Flannery and Me

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The New Mexico Nurse (long since transplanted here to La Mesa, where all good people live) was kind enough to email and let me know that the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine carried a collection of excerpts from the grad-school (some place in Iowa?) journal of Flannery O’Connor. The entries are addressed to God. I haven’t read them yet (waiting ’til I can savor), except for the line “Please help me to get down under things and find where You are,” which naturally jumped out at me, and the last bit, which I couldn’t help but notice:

My thoughts are so far away from God. He might as well not have made me. And the feeling I egg up writing here lasts approximately half an hour and seems a sham. I don’t want any of this artificial superficial feeling stimulated by the choir. Today I have proved myself a glutton – for Scotch oatmeal cookies and erotic thought. There is nothing left to say of me.

Isn’t it fun to find you have things in common with one of your heroes? Scratch “oatmeal cookies” and replace “half an hour” with “five minutes,” and it could be me writing that entry! Just not, you know, in the New Yorker.

Trolle, Lege

comic extant

 

Today in Porn: Calvinist Lapso Cineaste Edition

Bruce Fretts’s retrospective essay/interview with writer-director Schrader may be of interest to some of the readership here. The occasion for the article is the release of Schrader’s new film, The Canyons:

Aside from [pornography performer James Deen’s] character’s name—Christian—and a “Thy Will Be Done” tattoo across the chest of one of his sex partners, “The Canyons” features no overtly spiritual content. While Schrader denies that the film is about porn, “what’s terribly interesting is these kids in this movie—I’m a generation away from [screenwrier] Bret [Easton Ellis], and Bret’s a generation away from [stars Deen and Lindsay Lohan]—are the result of the post-porn generation. These are kids who have been raised in a world full of Internet pornography. How can that not affect someone’s moral ecosystem? I don’t know. All our cultural artifacts now come with the notion that we have to raise our children in a sea of pornography.”

from Fretts, Bruce. ‘Paul Schrader: Porn Again?’

Oh NOES!

Don’t Forget ‘Obdurate, Dipsomaniacal, Seedily Satyriastic Bad Catholic’

The Week: Take a pill on gay marriage

Yale Key

Damon Linker at The Week stops short of saying the popes were/are right, but it’s a clear to those “who have eyes” that it comes to the same thing:

Permitting gay marriage will not lead Americans to stop thinking of marriage as a conjugal union. Quite the reverse: Gay marriage has come to be widely accepted because our society stopped thinking of marriage as a conjugal union decades ago.

The most astounding implication in Linker’s piece, though, is the suggested thesis that without religion there is no hope for heterosexual marriage. Is that the case? Is it really up to us, whether we like it or not, to reaffirm the baby-making aspect of marriage, whether we like it or not, as the popes have from the day Peter slipped the Church’s Yales on his ring?

That’s not quite sporting, if you ask me. Remember when those wigged-out Enlightenment chaps assured us that they was taking care of civilization and all that stuff? “Now you good Churchy-Goddy types, don’t you worry your poor little heads off – we’ve got it all taken care of. Go off and do your – well, whatever it is you do behind those closed doors on Sundays, and let us sweep up the public square for you. It will be as good as new – and so clean, you’ll hardly recognize it. Really. Trust us.”

Now what? They’re saying they can’t figure this thing out with reason alone? What in Sam Hill is up with that?

JOB

 

I chopped some chops

Here are the beauties before the action gets hot:

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And here, during.

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And again, during (man with fag is master butcher/griller of the operation).

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And again, about to come off…

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(They were consumed too quickly for any presentation shots. But then again, life is a series of frustrations, in’nit?)

The rest is silence

My man in Monmouth speaks out for the voiceless: (sourced from here: http://chrissmith.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=328605)

“Mr. Speaker, will the decades-long major national news media cover-up of the brutality—and violence—of abortion methods ever end?

“Will Americans ever be told the horrifying details as to how—and how often—abortionists dismember, decapitate, and chemically poison innocent babies?

“Will Americans ever be informed by a conscientious, unbiased news media that in the past 40 years, over 55 million child victims have been brutally killed by abortion—a staggering loss of children’s lives that equates to the entire population in England? And that many women have been hurt physically, emotionally, psychologically—and according to the Center for Disease Control over 400 women have actually died from legal abortions.

“Will Americans ever be told that of the 55 million children, Planned Parenthood alone claims responsibility for destroying over 6 million babies and that just two weeks ago a Planned Parenthood leader in Florida testified at a legislative hearing on a state initiative to protect born alive infants that even when a child survives an abortion, the decision to assist or kill the born alive infant should be “up to the woman, her family and her physician.” In other words, even if a child intended to be aborted survives the assault, the choice to kill remains—so called after birth abortion. Isn’t that extreme child abuse?

“Murdering newborns in the abortion clinic, it seems to me, is indistinguishable from any other child predator wielding a knife or a gun. Why isn’t that that child seen as a patient in need of medical care, warmth, nutrition and dare I say—love?

“Now another national media cover up! In this case, even when a Jeffrey Dahmer-like murder trial of an abortionist named Kermit Gosnell, who ran the benign-sounding Women’s Medical Society, unfolds in a Philadelphia Courtroom replete with shocking testimony of beheadings, unfathomable abuse, death, and body parts in jars. To this day, the national news media remains uninterested, indifferent—AWOL. Why the censorship? Gosnell’s “house of horrors” trial fails to attract any serious and meaningful national news reporting.

“Dr. Kermit Gosnell is on trial for eight counts of murder. One count is for the death of a woman who died during an abortion at his clinic. Seven counts are for babies who survived their abortion and were born alive but then killed by severing their spinal cords with a pair of scissors.

“In the words of the Grand Jury report: “Gosnell had a simple solution for unwanted babies: he killed them. He didn’t call it that. He called it ‘ensuring fetal demise.’ The way he ensured fetal demise was by sticking scissors in the back of the baby’s neck and cutting the spinal cord. He called that ‘snipping.’ Over the years there were hundreds of ‘snippings.’

“Indeed, the national news media has not only taken a pass and looked the other way, but their stunning indifference has done a grave disservice to Gosnell’s victims—the woman killed, other women injured and children slaughtered by Gosnell. Because of the national media’s indefensible silence—because of their failure to report—other women and children at other abortion mills might be at risk.

“Indeed, the Gosnell Grand Jury Report in January 2011 powerfully noted that an absence of press coverage—and gross negligence by health department personnel in Pennsylvania—enabled Gosnell to show a “contemptuous disregard for the health, safety, and dignity of his patients that continued for 40 years.”

“Some media commenters, however, are beginning to take note of the national news media bias and blackout in the case.

“Yesterday an editorial in the Investors Business Daily titled Newtown In The Clinic: Media Ignore The Gosnell Trial said
‘Media Bias: A basketball coach who shoves and curses at his players merits constant coverage by a media also transfixed by Newtown. But a Philadelphia doctor on trial for murdering a woman and seven babies? It’s ignored.

Those who get their news from the three major networks have probably not heard of Dr. Kermit Gosnell, now on trial in Philadelphia, charged with seven counts of first-degree murder and one count of third-degree murder for killing seven babies who survived abortions and a woman who died after a botched pain-killer injection…

According to the Media Research Center, in one week Rice received 41 minutes, 26 seconds of air time on ABC, CBS and NBC in 36 separate news stories. Gosnell received zero coverage…

If Dr. Gosnell had walked into a nursery and shot seven infants with an AR-15, it would be national news and the subject of presidential hand-wringing.’

“In today’s edition of USA Today, columnist Kirsten Powers writes:

‘Infant beheadings. Severed baby feet in jars. A child screaming after it was delivered alive during an abortion procedure. Haven’t heard about these sickening accusations?

It’s not your fault. Since the murder trial of Pennsylvania abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell began March 18, there has been precious little coverage of the case that should be on every news show and front page.’

“She goes on to point out:” ‘A Lexis-Nexis search shows none of the news shows on the three major national television networks has mentioned the Gosnell trial in the last three months. The exception is when Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan hijacked a segment on Meet the Press.’

“In a letter sent by Media Research Center President Brent Bozell and 20 prominent leaders call on the broadcast networks to stop censoring coverage of the trial, pointing out that as of April 4th, since the trial began ABC, CBS and NBC have given the story zero coverage in their morning and evening news shows.

“Again I ask. When will the media blackout stop? Will America ever be told about the brutality of abortion and the violence that is commonplace inside the abortion industry? Or will the media continue to censor this trial of the century, because it exposes an all too inconvenient truth that not only are unborn children destroyed in these killing centers, but that even babies who survive the abortion can’t escape the deadly hand of the child predator.”

UPDATE: At least one reporter either backpedals into honesty or honestly backpedals:

[Daily Beast reporter Meghan] McArdle discusses a reply from Washington Post reporter Sarah Kliff when she was questioned for not covering the trial by Mollie Hemingway of the GetReligion blog. On Twitter, Kliff said: “I cover policy for the Washington Post, not local crime.”

“I could also offer Kliff’s defense, that this is a local crime,” writes McArdle. “But George Tiller’s murder was also a local crime. There was no ‘national policy issue’ involved: murder is a matter for state law…Nonetheless, lots of national journalists — including Sarah Kliff, for Newsweek — covered the killing and discussed what it meant for abortion provision nationwide.”

Complete story here: http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/pro-choice-reporter-apologizes-for-not-covering-gosnell-calls-it-trial-of-t/

‘There once was a Catholic dandy…’

There once was a Catholic dandy;
Collar-pins and cufflinks were his candy.
As he fixed his tie-dimple,
He thought: ‘Here’s a temple
So furnished as God might command me!’

You know what hour it is….

[Y]ou know what hour it is, how it is full time now for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed; the night is far gone, the day is at hand.

Let us then cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves becomingly as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.

But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Romans 13:11-14 (Reading for Lauds of the First Sunday of Advent)

“…nobody will be shocked by any amount of exposed sheet metal…”

This article does a good job of explaining the joy of Svexuality, explaining why others have fallen where stout Dominican hearts have made a final and persevering stand.

Heh.

Well, of course:

“As [Jobs’] life wound down, and cancer claimed his body, his great passion was designing Apple’s new, three-million-square-foot headquarters, in Cupertino. Jobs threw himself into the details. ‘Over and over he would come up with new concepts, sometimes entirely new shapes, and make them restart and provide more alternatives,’ Isaacson writes. He was obsessed with glass, expanding on what he learned from the big panes in the Apple retail stores. ‘There would not be a straight piece of glass in the building,’ Isaacson writes. “All would be curved and seamlessly joined. . . . The planned center courtyard was eight hundred feet across (more than three typical city blocks, or almost the length of three football fields), and he showed it to me with overlays indicating how it could surround St. Peter’s Square in Rome.’”

New from Korrektiv Press: Surfing with Mel

So there’s this.

And of course, it all started here.