Tuesday, July 09, 2019

Quote of the Day

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When I got photographed with John Waters the other month I also had him sign some of my books by him, and it was torment, trying to figure out which of the many books I own by him to get him to sign -- I brought an enormous sack with me to the talk knowing I wasn't going to thrust them all on him, and only decided at the last moment which four (plus my "Odorama" scratch-n-sniff card!) I was going to shove in his face. John's put out a lot of books at this point and one day I hope to have them all but I still do not, and it was only about a week after that meeting that I finally went ahead and bought off of Amazon a copy of his 2003 book about sex and art called, funny enough. Art: A Sex Book. Anyway I just noticed this very morning when I opened the book up to read it on the train that it's actually autographed, as pictured above! What a treat! It also makes me think I probably shouldn't have worried about having him sign everything though -- he's clearly game. 

Anyway as I said I started reading Art: A Sex Book this morning and it's funny, reading it here fifteen years after its publishing and right after having just finished John's latest book Mr. Know-It-All last night -- yes after posting about it yesterday I decided to just go ahead and finally finish the book, it's true -- how he's sharing and elaborating some of the exact same stories and ideas now; yesterday I told you his latest book has a whole chapter on Warhol? Well he tells some of the same stories, and some different ones, in Art: A Sex Book's introduction. He also, while discussing porn theaters, sums up one of my own deepest held beliefs about what the movies exist for, and I'm gonna share that right now:

"It used to be that people did have sex at the movies, but it's rare these days. My friend Pat Moran's mother always used to say, 'Why would you want to go to the movies? Sitting in the dark, wasting an outfit with a bunch of strangers?' It always makes me laugh - 'wasting an outfit.' In prison, movie night used to be really sexy because you could buy drugs, get a hand job and see a movie in the dark. Now it's on video; the experience is gone. You have to stick your head out of the cell, like in a hospital room, because there's a monitor on each tier. The movies and sex: well, basically, no matter what anybody says, everybody wishes when they're watching a movie that every person in it was nude. ... The fantasy of nudity is why people go to the movies. Hollywood is an entire industry based on voyeurism."
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