Sasha Frere-Jones
New Yorker Critic Goes to 'Pot'
Music critic. Blogger. Photographer. Composer... Advice columnist?
That's the newest gig The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones can add to his C.V. after appearing in Jezebel's popular "Pot Psychologist" video advice feature this week.
Mr. Frere-Jones appears alongside the usual Pot Psychologists, Tracie "Slut Machine" Egan and Four Four's Richard Juzwiak, answering questions about sex, dating, ailments, and the difference between ambivalence and ambiguity. (Don't even ask about ambidextrousness.)
It's unclear if Mr. Frere-Jones properly prepared himself for the role of Pot Psychologist (he's seen enjoying a large glass of red wine at one point and admiring Ms. Egan's Ikea bedspread), but as always, the video comes with a warning to kids to stay away from drugs.
Whither Twitter?
Who will ensure Twitter tweets uninterrupted? That's the question posed by Silicon Alley Insider's Hank Williams about the popular wireless and web-based application that allows users to share their brain farts on the web in real time. Everyone from Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody ("I'm smoking Virginia Slims today. I've come a long way, baby," 06:43 PM May 03, 2008 from txt) to Slate's political correspondent John Dickerson ("At Dairy Queen with Clinton. She had Blizzard with Snickers I had" [sic.], about 17 hours ago from txt) has jumped on the Twitter bandwagon (bandtwagon?), but what if their tweets wind up in the dustbin of histowy? read more »
Rum and Stumpy and the Lash
Stephin Merritt, in a Magnetic Fields publicity shot
Given this week's Slate article on Mr. Merritt, the song "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah," race, and dispute with Mr. Merritt by music critics Jessica Hopper and Sasha Frere-Jones, The Transom thought tonight might be a nice evening to stop by Mr. Merritt's party.
Nine fellows were on the street outside, smoking in the mist. Two were baldish, two were bearish. One was kind of short.
The Transom was equally delighted to be carded and to discover there was no cover charge.
Inside the light was all red. Thirty or so men loitered, an average age being perhaps 36. An apparently off-white D.J. was playing verifiably white music from a collection of compact discs; it may have been Yaz. It was decidedly Yaz-like. Some played pool.
None of the men appeared visibly short. (Some were sitting.) Mr. Merritt was most certainly not there, or at least not yet. It was 11:40 p.m. A story had been going around town that a few weeks previous at Runt, a similar crowd, height-wise, had watched in discomfort as a very short man, perhaps a midget, danced alone under the red light in the middle of the bar.
In a recent issue of Out, Mr. Merritt explained that among gay men, stereotypes of short men included qualities of passivity and submission. Other short men quoted in the magazine said that they had found that many men of "normal" height were concerned about the size of the genitalia of short potential sex partners. This is absurd; all imagined correlations between any other physical traits and penis size have been long disproven.
(Or, at the very least, those correlations have been proven mightily unstable.)
A great number of gay porn stars are quite short, to good effect. On film, naked, their relative proportions are often flattering. It is a question of scale.
Naturally-occurring issues of scale are not unlike the making of perspective in two dimensions. Leonardo da Vinci wrote something in his notebooks that applies as well to any critical dust-up as it does to making drawings of the human body: "There is no object so large but that at a great distance from the eye it does not appear smaller than a smaller object near." read more »
