“The objective of my work is to observe the impact of pornography on the sexuality of men, and how it shapes their perception of men and women. We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography but we couldn’t find any.”
-University of Montreal Professor Simon Louis Lajeunesse, whose attempt to compare the lives of men who never view pornography with those who consume it regularly was thwarted by the fact that all dudes watch porn.

by Erica Sackin

Joe is a bearded 24-year-old who tends to wax philosophical. Julian is 18 with a cloud of frizzy hair who plays drums for 13 bands. On a recent Saturday, I ran into both of them at a Bushwick swap meet. This was held in a warehouse. There were 4-dollar Bloody Marys, David Hasselhoff tote bags, used t-shirts and furniture that you could only pray didn’t come from someone’s bedbug-infested loft. Joe and Julian were monitoring the influx of used CDs at the swap meet’s used music section. Neither can remember their first concert, only that they’ve always been going to shows.

These are guys who did not spend their high school days getting high behind the 7-Eleven. They never threw keggers in the woods, dry humped in your mom’s basement or raided their grandparents’ liquor cabinet. At least not most of the time.

Instead they were packing themselves into as many sweaty basements and concert venues as they could, listening to bands the rest of us wouldn’t hear about until three years later, if we were lucky enough to hear about them at all. These shows were defined by how loud, dirty and sweaty they were, and often took place in venues of questionable structural integrity.

“Music is a kind of way of a large group of people syncing,” Joe said. “It’s inescapable for the people experiencing it. It aligns people in a much simpler way than most forms of communication do.”

Joe and Julian were also shilling the latest few issues of Showpaper. That publication carries the most comprehensive listings for all-ages shows in the tri-state area. Essentially a folded sheet of newsprint, with a bi-weekly circulation of 10,000, it lists concerts taking place at the Highline Ballroom right alongside those taking place in someone’s Connecticut basement. It is distributed at venues such as Brooklyn Tattoo, Cake Shop, Sarah Lawrence College and Soft Skull Press. The paper is advertising-free. It threw its most-recent benefit, called the Showpaper Intramural Film Festival, at Vaudville Park. That ended in a basement dance party.

It also boasts missed connections ads. One read: “The two brothers near the door at the 171 lombardy party-if I get pregnant from our threesome will our babies count as inbred??”

If it seems odd that kids who grew up on the Internet are finding out about live music through what’s essentially a zine, keep in mind that each issue is often the only tangible piece of memorabilia for shows that leave you $5 poorer with only a stamp on your hand to show for it, played by bands that may or may not exist in a few months, who may or may not ever put out a legitimate album.

It’s a “historical record. Let’s say we’d built it as a site on Geocities or something,” said Julian. “It would have disappeared.”

I asked if they have one favorite moment from a show. Joe scoffed.

“It’s been a lifetime of favorite moments,” he said. “The main reason I’m involved in this is for the unique unexpected moments. There have been thousands.”

Like, for example, when the two went to go see Dan Deacon play in Bushwick back in 2007. Julian was so excited that he showed up seven hours early, hanging around out front until the first band started. To hear him and Joe tell it, the place was so packed that when the fire department finally showed up (the warehouse wasn’t quite licensed to put on shows), they couldn’t even make their way through the crowd to shut it down. Instead the firemen retreated to the basement, cutting the power supply for the entire building. Only then, when the structure went dark and thousands of kids were stranded in a packed room with no electricity or sound equipment, did the band give up and finally stop playing.

Julian and Joe both laughed when I asked them about the future of the music industry, which when you think about it, is a fair response in light of a scene that has expanded the definition of “concert space” to include anything from the local YMCA to a coffee shop to someone’s cleverly-named living room-and whose members are generally in at least one band of their own.

“That’s like asking what the future of civilization is,” said Julian. “It’s not going away. People aren’t going to stop making music. The average artist is making more money than ever. You don’t need a huge backer anymore, you can go online and just market yourself.”

“Kids are people at a stage in their lives when they’re most excited about music,” said Joe. “They’re forming impressions about what they like and don’t like that will last them the rest of their lives.”

“What else are kids gonna do?” Julian said.

Erica Sackin writes and lives in Brooklyn. She was once a contestant in the Ms. G Train competition, but lost. ‘The Spandex Report’ covers the lives of the youngs.

“The ocelot is mostly nocturnal and very territorial. It will fight fiercely, sometimes to the death, in territorial disputes. In addition, the ocelot marks its territory with especially pungent urine. Like most felines, it is solitary, usually meeting only to mate. However, during the day it rests in trees or other dense foliage, and will occasionally share its spot with another ocelot of the same sex. When mating, the female will find a den in a cave in a rocky bluff, a hollow tree, or a dense (preferably thorny) thicket.” If you’re the kind of woman who only comes out to snag a man and then gets so drunk that you piss all over his apartment floor, hit up the Observer. Your story must be shared with the world.

You probably won’t be surprised by much in this story, but you probably will shake your head and sigh: “People in the record industry are very good at making bands believe they deserve the hundreds of thousands (or sometimes millions) of dollars labels advance the musicians when they’re first signed, and even better at convincing those same musicians it’s the bands’ fault when those advances aren’t recouped.”

Today’s Matt Lauer, interviewing that LESBIAN Meredith Baxter, known to old people as Mrs. Keaton on Family Ties, this morning: “So this first relationship you had with another woman. Did it create one of those B-movie moments when you go home and you go into the bathroom and you look in the mirror and you go, ‘I’m gay!’ And then you repeat it six or seven times? Or was it a more subtle-” End verbatim transcript. So. How many questions do you have about this question? For starters, what B-movie is this, and on what cable channel may I watch it immediately, please? And what personal experience of his own does this draw upon? What does Matt Lauer say to his bathroom’s mirror? Is it all about Katie Couric still? And, and, and what?

Because why not: Here’s Hamlet’s third soliloquy in Klingon. [Via]

“What we don’t need, no matter how pretty and pink, is a ladies’ auxiliary to the cancer-industrial complex.”

I’m not 100% on board with this Barbara Ehrenreich piece-I don’t know that I’d characterize the feminist response to the Stupak amendment as “muted” exactly-but she makes some excellent points about the troubling issues surrounding women’s health and the treatment of illness. Have a read.

We can’t really do any better than this, from The Brooklyn Paper. “A cat-loving Cobble Hill man whose valiant effort to save a lost feline last year was misinterpreted as the rantings of a crazy person has sued the hospital that medicated him in a way ‘normally reserved for violent psychiatric patients.’” Oh? DO GO ON. “Mild-mannered Chris Muth was cat-sitting when he realized the pussy had plunged down a 30-foot shaft and was trapped. That’s when Muth became a man consumed, a man who cared more for felines than his fellow man, he became… the Cat Man.” Sure! AND THEN WHAT HAPPENED? “Cat Man barged into an unoccupied apartment in hopes of rescuing the trapped feline — but his derring-do came with a price. Someone called the cops. Upon arriving, the boys in blue were skeptical of Cat Man’s claims that a mouser was trapped behind the wall. They thought that the frantic man was going through a psychotic episode, and hauled him to Long Island City Hospital.” I know what you are thinking: How long before this exact same thing happens to me? Not long, probably! “Muth was eventually proven to be sane-regarding the cat at least. Rumi was indeed rescued by an animal control officer after 15 days. But by then, Cat Man had been declawed: His landlord kicked him out, he lost his job, and his girlfriend dumped him.” Naturally. See you there, Cat Man!

Six of the suspects in the Richmond High School homecoming gang-rape of a 15-year-old have pleaded not guilty to rape. Somehow, the other four (or more) suspects have not been charged yet. Nor have the approximately twenty on-lookers! Also the school has not yet been massively sued into bankruptcy and the firing of all the school’s administrators by the girl’s parents, but we’re willing to wait a while for that worthwhile event. You know what’s interesting about Richmond High School? The teacher and principal salaries are well below average among similar California school districts-while the superintendent’s salary is well above average. Well. Not for long!

Republican senators are upset that they are being portrayed as rapist sympathizers just because they want to make it easier for businesses to sweep rapes under the carpet.