Happy New Year

This is something I wrote two years ago.  It started as an answer to an email from a friend who was soliciting advice from people about what they’d learned so far in life.  I ended up writing this, and  turning it into an editorial piece for an online magazine I used to be an op/ed writer for.

I think it’s kind of fitting for the new year.

Things I’ve Learned About Other People

1. Most people hide their suffering better than you think, you pass dozens of people a day on the street without any idea how well they’re wearing their tragedies.

2. People’s names are the sweetest sounds they hear. You should make a point of being good at learning and using them.

3. People love to spread their misery around, but not as much as they enjoy being lifted out of it.

4. Being young is not in and of itself an achievement. Neither is being beautiful. But people often treat you as if they are.

5. For a lot of people, music is a reflection of who they are and their relationship to life. Remember that before insulting someone’s favorite band.

6. The Golden Age never existed. People are always trying to get back to a time when things were simpler and better. The world was a far more dangerous place fifty years ago, especially if you were black or a woman or gay or diagnosed with cancer.

7. Most people, whatever their choice of profession, feel like complete novices that are about to be found out as frauds and fakers.

8. Most people love quite helplessly, despite what they would have you believe.

9. Show me the most beautiful woman in the world, and I’ll show you a man who’s bored with taking her to bed. Show me the most devoted husband, and I’ll show you a woman who feels that he’s just not doing enough. A lot of people are never satisfied because…

10. Most people have no idea what they want out of life, let alone how to get it. Most others are still waiting for someone to give them permission.

11. Whatever it is about yourself that you’re trying to hide, it’s usually the first thing someone else notices about you.

12. You should call your mother and tell her you love her. Like most women who decide to marry and have children or help take care of a dying parent, she probably sacrificed a lot of her dreams to be there for you, and she wishes that you appreciated her more for it.

13. If you tell a man about your problems, he assumes you want some sort of help or advice. If you tell a woman about your problems, she assumes you simply want a shoulder to cry on. Women rarely want to be told what to do about a problem, and men rarely want to be coddled through a hard time.

14. Creative people thrive on feedback. You can never give them enough of it, and you will endear yourselves to them mightily if you do it frequently, thoughtfully, and honestly. They understand far better than most think, the value of time.

15. For most people religion is a social commitment more than a spiritual one.

16. A lot of people who consider themselves intelligent can’t properly label all the states on a map, or all the countries in Europe, let alone Africa or the Middle East. Most couldn’t list off the ten commandments, five pillars, or the amendments of the Constitution, and feel that politics are too complicated to bother with understanding, let alone talking about.

17. A lot of Christians have never, and will never, read the Bible. Most of them will conduct their lives exactly as they would if they’d never attended a single church service. It is nearly impossible to tell a Christian from an atheist by their actions alone. Both Christians and atheists will probably find the previous statement offensive.

18. For nearly every crazy idea, you can find a fully credentialed scientist who will back it up.

19. People are more frequently kind and compassionate than they are fooled by our manipulations or lies.

20. Life often works in reverse. People treat strangers more politely than their family or friends. People will ask a friend’s band to play their party for free, will call their best girlfriend to come over and cut their hair without a thought to payment, but would never dream of calling a mechanic they found in the phone book and asking them to donate their time and labor to fix a broken down car.

21. Everyone has done something they would be desperately embarrassed for anyone else to know about.

22. Never joke with a man about his sexual performance, and never joke with a woman about her appearance. No matter how much they make fun of these things in themselves, never, never do it for them. They may laugh along with you, but you’ve just driven a tiny needle into their brain.

23. Most women get married because they want to have a wedding, most men get married because they are ready to settle down with a woman for the rest of their lives. Women, statistically speaking are more likely to suffer clinical depression if married, and initiate upwards of 80% of all divorces citing irreconcilable differences. People expect a significant other to change their lives and make them happy without any conception of how this change will take place. Sort of like assuming a college degree is going to guarantee you security in life without ever thinking of how this can be practically possible. I call this the “If you build it, they will come” approach to romance and one out of every two times it ends in divorce.

24. Most people are worried they’re not having as much fun as they should be. This usually makes men cheat and women nag.

25. When you insult or offend someone, always admit it and apologize promptly, even if it wasn’t your intention or you had no idea. It is always better to be a penitent villain than to appear so socially inept as to not recognize when you’ve hurt the people around you. An evil genius is someone to bring to your side, a blundering fool is someone to keep as far away from you as possible.

This was in a way homage to William S. Burroughs and his famous “Words of Advice for Young People.”

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Honey Facial

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I_<3_ass!!!, by JM Darling/BobbyLopez5000

Do you know the difference between satire and parody?  Do you get irony?  Then chances are, you’re a hipster.   Do you <3 ass?  Then chances are you’re a human.  The great creative minds and Darling House have paired with my ass to bring you this Hipster Holiday PSA :

Model: Sovereign Syre

Direction: JM Darling

Editing: Bob Lopez 5000

Of course, a gallery of stills:

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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, by Sovvy

Here’s a gallery of some candid photos Joshua Darling took of me in a studio in Long Island City.  He had just shot a friend in a Cowboy hat with a cigar for a conceptual shoot she wanted.  She’s one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever met, and she doesn’t care about that very much at all.

The hat was lying around and Josh wanted to test out a new lighting set up.  He ended up just taking a bunch of candids of me topless.  Everything always ends in being topless.

These were taken at the end of May this year.  Enjoy.

 

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Photos, by Collin J. Rae

Male sexuality is a varied and wondrous thing.  I wanted to shoot with Collin J. Rae for a long time because I like the highcontrast and bright colors in his work, and also the vague sense of menace.  I’d never shot with a foot fetish photographer before, and I really didn’t know what to expect, if he would be “weird” or not.  He was in Manhattan for a few days doing some business, he works in Nashville doing something related to music.  He was strange, but in a delightful way, unapologetic in his fetish and covered in tattoos of various friends signatures.

We talked about various models he knew that I was familiar with.  The modeling world of nude/fetish/erotica is actually quite small.  The same girls traveling across the country meeting men with cameras and various obsessions paying us by the hour to reveal the most intimate parts of ourselves.

Collin said I had a perfect mouth, even though he wasn’t really into lips.  He’s the first photographer I let touch me during a shoot.  It’s part of his style to have a sort of POV feel, him touching your feet etc.  He also touched my lips though, and put his thumb in my mouth.  I knew it was probably one of the last independent shoots like that I would do…a month later I was in LA making my first adult movie.  I thought it was a nice way to finish that chapter of my life.

Those two years in NYC changed me more than any other thing I’ve done.  At some point I will have to sit down and collect all of those stories.

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Rose of Lima (self portrait)

A portrait I did of myself after a long ascetic regimen earlier this year.  I’ve always had a thing with mortifying the flesh.  I wasn’t even raised Catholic, but I tend to believe that suffering makes you more beautiful.  Its me as Rose of Lima.  The three biggest sexual icons growing up for me were The Madonna, Rose of Lima, and The Magdalene.

 

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The Virgin-by Sovereign photos by Darling


I think this is a study on the Virgin.  So it’s very Christmas appropriate. Photos by Joshua Darling.  Manhattan 2011.

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The Female Gay(s): Part 1

Portrait in Pigtails by Joshua Darling 2011

I’m new to porn.  I come from a world where photographers consider themselves “auteurs” and are (generally)  more comfortable using the word “erotica” than “pornography” when referring to their work, even if it involved me sticking my fingers in my snatch.

Still from Psychopathia.Sexualis by Joshua Darling St. Lucie River, 2009

I’m frequently coming up against my own pretensions when I find myself disheartened over images of me with my pussy spread for the world to see with no attention paid to the zit that no one bothered to stamp out on my ass or the stray hair that’s raised defiantly from the coif on my head.   Some part of me is insistent on what I would call the female gaze: I ultimately want something to look beautiful, no matter how intense it is.

Kenn Lichtenwalter: He said his was raised Catholic and though he couldn't imagine what his mother would think, he couldn't resist when he saw the light forming a nimbus around my head.

The divide is clearest to me now that I’m on various forums that cater to the porn connoisseur.  First off, I have to say that I don’t think that gaze is something necessarily determined by gender.   Director and “Queen of Romance Porn” Nica Noelle would say she doesn’t cater to men or women, but rather to a specific sensibility.  That may be true, but she seems to have more vocal female fans than what I see for directors of more “intense” or “explicit”  straight pornography.

I do agree with her though.  I make lesbian pornography.  I have found that for the most part, the type of men and women who consume this kind of pornography have very different tastes than those that consume straight porn.  This was clearest to me when on a thread dedicated to me on the Viv Thomas forum, the images that they participants were posting were all my art modeling soft core nudes from when I was working in Manhattan the last two years. People were very clear in their preferences:

Yellow Silk: Imitating the repose of a model on a famous anthology of Lesbian Erotica. This first gift I ever recieved from a woman. By Joshua Darling

“Beautiful photos. And exactly the type of softcore artistic nudes I prefer as opposed to the sex still shots I’d much rather see in moving form in a video.”

Self Portrait in White Panties.

 

The photos most likely to get attention on the “straight” forums and blogs tend to be the more explicit and glamorous Holly Randall photos.  Once more of my movies come out, I’m sure they’ll be the “pretty girls” from my scenes…

Holly Randall, January 2011

 

I can say I don’t really mind the more explicit stuff.  I just appreciate the editing that is done by a photographer that isn’t bogged down by a deadline and isn’t trying to feed in insatiable machine.  I think it has to do with perspective, people on lesbian boards, and women in adult in general tend to use the word erotica (Holly Randall and Skin Diamond are two women who come to mind, both describe themselves as “erotic photographer” and “erotic model” respectively) more than men do.

Daniel Vaughn, 2009

 

George Pitts once described porn to me as “Explicit sexual depictions without sufficient compassion for their subject.”  I tend to like it as a definition.  I think of porn and erotica as points on a circle, like masturbation and sex…they kind of beget and destroy each other, like the Ouroboros.  I think its like trying to debate what is more fundamental, the head or the tail.

Manhattan Rooftop, 2011

 

 

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Sexy Creep

This is a post about the female gaze.  Occasionally I’m going to be posting about people I consider to be sexy.  A few years ago my BFF Cocette used to stay the night all the time and we would sit around listening to music.  One of our favorites was Smoov-E, a rapper from the bay area who had rapped with Andre Nickatina and Mac Dre.  There was something about his deliberately creepy “character” in his raps…always chasing after barely legal girls he has to drop off “in front of the highschool” as a running gag.   He reminds me of Morris Day from the Time crossed with Suga Free.

Some portraits of Cocette:

And now, for some choice Smoov-E:  These are videos of him performing his raps “live.”

Rollerskates:

“I see the truth inside your lies/so I hook the panties to the side.”

Clipboard Full of Game:

Smoov-E like Water

“I fucked your daughter/then I pops my collar.”

Mr. Biscuits

Alas, Smoov-E has moved on, transitioning into a rock musician…One Popular Guy.

 

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Bobo Fête

Some photos from a shoot I did with Ellen Stagg about a year ago in Williamsburg, the hipster section of Brooklyn.  I call it Bobo Fête.

I went and had my makeup done for the shoot, and then when I got there, Ellen had me try to take most of it off.

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Lesbian Slumber Party: The Kissing Game

So my first movie came out. Its the first film from Nica Noelle’s new studio, Girl Candy Films.

Here is the box cover:

A fan posted some screengrabs of my scene with Dani Daniels!

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