Friday, May 12, 2006
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The Jewish Press (Orthodox Weekly) Publishes A Dirty Joke
Arnold Fine writes in the April 28, 2006 issue:
Two old-timers met on the street. One said, "Sam, I haven't seen you in years. Where have you been?"
The second old-timer said, "I've been in jail."
"In jail? What for?" his friend asked.
"I was accused of rape."
"You? Rape? You're 85 years old. What are you talking about?"
The old man sighed, "I was walking down the street when this beautiful young girl sees me and scream, 'Rape...Rape.'"
"Then what happened?"
"A cop came and arrested me."
"What happened then?"
"I pleaded guilty. I was so proud!"
The Jewish Press Editor Jason Maoz writes in the May 5 issue: "A number of readers have taken us to task - and rightly so - for the joke... This obviously was a temporary lapse in judgment on the part of Mr. Fine coupled with a breakdown in editorial oversight. We apologize to all who were offended."
I love these apologies to those who are offended. Jason sounds like Justin Timberlake after he exposed Janet Jackson's breast (I was interviewing a Reform female rabbinical student while it was happening and I kept my composure and proceeded with the interview as though nothing had happened) during the Super Bowl halftime show and later called it a wardrobe malfunction.
I don't think you should ever apologize to people just because they were offended by something you said or did. If you said or did something wrong, then you should say it was wrong and if need be, explain why it was wrong. If you did something that was not wrong and people got offended, then unless it is a friend and you want to salve their feelings, it's just tough.
So I would've dropped the last five words and left it as "We apologize."
Frankly, I would've chuckled if Jason had responded: "I wrote it. I meant it. I'm the old man rapist in the story. And I'm glad."
A friend writes: "That Jewish Press joke is shocking. Not too many things in the media can fit that description anymore."
I Have A New Name - Liquid Luke
I don't like to tie my money up in real estate or stocks or bonds. I just like to stay liquid. I'm conservative that way.
I Have A New Syndrome
I recently discovered why I jump when I hear an unexpected noise, grind my teeth at night and ejaculate prematurely (all at the same time). I have Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was only six years old when I first saw my mother naked...
It goes along with my Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, I Won't Work Syndrome, and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
The Open Source Legal Motion (Wald v. Ford)
My attorney Justin Levine blogs:
How would you like to take part in what some are calling “Hollywood’s most bizarre and potentially important lawsuit”? How would you like to make history by being part of an effort to further push the legal profession into the Internet age? How would you like to test your own legal and debating skills against seasoned attorneys in Tinseltown?
Now you can do it! And the best part is, you don’t need a law degree. You don’t even need to be over 18. Anyone can participate, and no specific time commitment in necessary!
Welcome to the Open Source Legal Motion – a groundbreaking experiment to harness the collective force of the Internet to help improve legal motions that will be filed in real cases.
Here is the gist of how it works –
I will post a first rough draft of a motion that I am working on in the case of Wald v. Ford. You (or anyone else) can read it, comment on it, and give me feedback. Maybe you can rewrite some passages to make it better. Maybe you can come up with some theories, arguments, or legal authorities that I haven’t. Maybe you can provide the best counter-arguments on the other side that will allow me to anticipate the other side’s response and be better prepared to deal with them. Maybe you simply want to help out with my grammar, punctuation, or case citation formats in order to make the motion better stylistically speaking.
Anyone who ends up contributing an original improvement to the final product that is both tangible and identifiable will be given credit both on the pages of this blog as well as in either a footnote or page attachment on the court motion itself.
Tell your friends. I encourage anyone to participate. Law students, kids, professors, attorneys, bloggers, Luke Ford fans, anyone. Whatever your motivation is, I want to hear your ideas. Even if you think my client’s case is weak and you would vote for the Plaintiff, I want to hear why.
I consider myself to be someone who knows a fair amount about defamation law and has had some extensive experience in the area of libel defense. But as the Internet and blogs have proven – you don’t need to be a so-called “expert” in order to improve upon works done by “professionals”. Maybe I’m too close to the situation to see some potentially better arguments out there. Maybe a layman just happens to study the “opinion defense” in libel law as a strange hobby and therefore knows about some obscure but powerful case law that I haven’t come across. Maybe they think the entire motion is bunk and would like to rewrite the entire thing from scratch – thinking that their version would be better. Maybe you don’t know much about the law, but are simply a better a writer than me and can fashion a more sublimely crafted argument based on the building blocks I provide. Maybe I'm full of crap and really don't know as much as I think I do and you can help point that out to me. The possibilities are wide open….
'Am I A Joke To You?'
People often ask me that.
Author Allan MacDonell - Prisoner Of X
Does anyone have the email address of any magazine editors so I can ask them what I just emailed Dr. Nick Gillespie at Reason:
Dear Dr. Gillespie,
As one great magazine editor, do you have any thoughts on the job Allan MacDonell did with Hustler and how he informed the national conversation about our society's pressing issues? Luke
PS If you purely had a physiological reaction to Hustler, it would be groovy to hear that too.
The former editor of Hustler reads from his book Friday, 7:30 p.m. at Skylight Books on 1818 North Vermont Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027. He reads to the LA Press Club the evening of May 18.
Allan (MySpace) calls me Wednesday morning, May 11.
More than a decade ago, he struck fear into the industry while he was writing as "Christian Shapiro."
Then the years went by and hardly anybody talked about Hustler any more. Not inside the industry (where people mainly talked about AVN and the internet) and not outside the industry.
Between 1995-98, many people in porn hated Mike Albo, the Editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide.
Luke: "How did your life change after you left Hustler? Suddenly you are not going into the office every day. Suddenly there's this huge blank in your schedule. How did you change?"
Allan: "I slept better. I look better. I seem happier. I'd meet people a year later and I'd have a lot of anxiety because I haven't got a career going. I'll run into people and they'll say, 'Man, you look better than ever.'
"A lot of weight was lifted from my shoulders.
"I'm not saying that Hustler was any worse than any other job of that calibre. You have a lot of people working under you. You have a lot of expectations on you. There'd been a lot of strain for years.
"I don't mind the void. For the last couple of years, there was a lot of headache. Now I don't have that headache. It's great except for the anxiety about how I'm going to make a buck."
Luke: "What feedback did your wife [Theresa] give you about leaving Hustler?"
Allan: "She was supportive. She'd sensed that I had burned out on it, not because of the sexual material. Any kind of material, working on it that long, you would've burned out. I burned out because I worked hard for a long time. She noticed the change in me immediately. I became easier to live with.
"She's getting a little impatient for me to figure out how to get some money coming in. She has a lot of faith in me and the world that something good is happening.
"She's been a really great support to me except for when we fight."
Luke: "Are you an easy person to live with?"
Allan: "Probably not. I'm not that bad. I'm subject to circumstances. If circumstances are not good to me, I recede within myself and I'm not responsive. For the most part, I have a cynical optimism. This is going to sound like a big surprise to people who've worked for me, because I was known for being temperamental and flying off the handle, but things don't bother me to the level they might bother other people.
"But she's not that easy to live with either. She's wonderful. She's a strong personality. I'm a strong personality. I need a strong personality to be with."
Luke: "You and God?"
Allan: "I'm not an atheist. I have no conception of what God might be like. I have no interest in creating some image for myself of what God is, but I do feel I have been very blessed and very lucky throughout my life. I can look back and see dozens of times where I was in somebody's pocket. I feel it now. It's something I don't understand, that's beyond me, beyond my conception, that has my best interests at heart, with a wisdom beyond anything I could know.
"I don't have any theology. I'm open to reading about it in other people. I don't disbelieve hardly anyone."
Luke: "But you feel like there might have been some divine contact with your life?"
Allan: "Yeah, yeah, yeah. At different times."
Luke: "Is that a humbling experience?"
Allan: "I don't like the word 'humbling' because I equate it with humiliation. It's comforting that there's some kind of divine presence that is going to carry me through this life and into whatever happens later.
"I think about dying a lot like anybody would. I have no idea about what's going to happen but I have a feeling that whatever has been carrying me through this life does not end when this life ends.
"Let me give you an example. My girlfriend Frankie and I got a dog from the Glendale pound. The dog was going to be killed within hours. The dog was a problem dog. It would lunge at people and snarl at people and snap at people. We kept him. We were consistent with him. We loved this dog and he loved us. I had him for eleven more years. He had this whole life that was very rich for a dog because I extended myself and brought him in.
"When I think about that when I'm having all these worries -- what is going to happen with my health? What is going to happen with the wife? I'm not that powerful of a person but I completely changed this dog's life.
"This God that I experience is far more powerful than me. If I can shelter this dog, who am I to doubt that I am in good hands."
Luke: "Are you sure that the sexually explicit material that you immersed yourself in for 20 years did not take a unique toll?"
Allan: "I got tired of it in a way that I would not have got tired of it if I had worked at a general interest magazine.
"I enjoyed working on the layouts in Hustler. I'd see people who it bothered to look at that [material] and it would drive them out quickly. But because I liked it, it took a long time for me to become tired of it.
"I was interviewed on NPR. It's going to run this Sunday. The interviewer asked me this same question and I was very defensive about admitting that perhaps I burned out on the sexual material. I felt that they might corral me into an admission that the material had some long-term negative effect on me, which I believe it has not.
"In the book, I state that you see too much of this stuff, you doubt reality and I was plagued by visions of anus. I denied my own book to not get pushed into this corner.
"I did burn out on the material but to the end there was the occasional thing that I would like. I got tired of seeing the same crap over and over. The same poses. Occasionally one of the models or one of the photographers would still charm me. But it did not have a negative effect on my own sexuality. All the way through, I was very interested in sex. I am very interested in sex. I am just not interested in porn. If I look at advertisements, in Vanity Fair or wherever, my eyes still go to women.
"I've looked at one porn tape since I got fired [almost four years ago]. We watched it twice. Joanna's Angels."
Luke: "Did you enjoy it?"
Allan: "Yes. It was great. It was all natural breasts. It was the Suicide-type girls with the tattoos. They're avid about what they're doing. The sex is good. Evidently Joanna Angel is in charge of the production. It's got a lot going for it.
"Some people think porn is addictive. When I got fired, I had no withdrawal symptoms."
Luke: "Christian Shapiro has written about the soul-destroying nature of pornography."
Allan: "I keep hearing that about my Apocalypse Culture piece, but I thought that piece was more about how society as a whole was degrading itself. That pornography might seem like that people wanted to degrade themselves and expose themselves to degradation... Reality TV had not yet started but there were all these talkshows that people go on and revel in their own misconduct. I argued that society as a whole was as degrading as pornography if not more so.
"With all this reality TV, with everything that people put themselves through to get attention, my feeling is that a large part of the entertainment industry is a degrading industry. The drive for attention leads people to degrade themselves and there's a huge enabling network that's profiting on it."
Luke: "Do you feel a teeny bit protective of the industry or the choice you made to be in it?"
Allan: "A bit. You read the book. I'm not a cheerleader for porn. Obviously some people made the wrong choice to be in that. On the other hand, I've known a lot of people who thrived in it."
Luke: "You talk about porn the same way you talked about it while you were editor at Hustler. You're talking about it now a little differently than the way you wrote about it in the book."
Allan: "Am I? In what ways? When I was questioned at NPR, the interviewer kept trying to edge me back. I felt like I was in therapy. I'd want to talk about something else and the therapist would say, 'What about this?' The therapist wasn't trying to corner me or contradict me but to ease me towards...
"I was talking to my wife, 'Why couldn't I just say, 'I burned out on it'?'"
Luke: "You don't want to sound bitter about porn and your choice of being in it for 20 years."
Allan: "Occasionally you'll get someone who comes out and renounces it."
Luke: "You'll bend over backwards not to do that."
Allan: "Yeah. I got to do a lot of things. It gave me a lot of chances. I worked in this company and rose from assistant copy editor to making a lot of editorial decisions and artistic decisions. I got to meet a lot of people I would not have been able to meet otherwise. I wrote this book. I don't want to seem like I am renouncing what I did. I'm still very proud of a lot of the stuff I wrote and published. Within this medium, we were working as well as anyone could.
"I'm not sure that burning out is a negative effect. It's a message that it is time for you to do something else. A negative effect would be something with lasting repercussions that would effect my personal relationships, turn me into a raving sex predator..."
Luke: "How many people do you remember from the industry who had lasting relationships? There are so few lasting relationships in this industry, and I'm not only talking about performers."
Allan: "Four I can think of -- Jim Kohls, Larry Flynt, Bruce David and myself."
Luke: "Why didn't you name Bruce in your book?"
Allan: "There were a whole bunch of guys who were the same guy to me. I just dumped them all together. I didn't want to single one person out."
Luke: "You were pretty gentle in not naming people."
Allan: "I named people who were public. There were people who were more private or people I worked with on the political thing. The contractor we hired [in 1998 LFP hired investigative journalist Dan Moldea who was public about his participation but Allan does not use him name], he didn't want his name on. I felt like I committed to him to not put his name in there. It wouldn't gain me anything. There was another guy when we did the abortion thing who didn't want his name in there. The two journalists who did the research for us in Texas. They were always anonymous. I honored that. The guy I called Features [David Buchbinder] is working for the Christian Science Monitor. He's working for something along the lines of the peace corps. He doesn't need to have his connection with Hustler brought up."
Luke: "You could've been a lot more vicious."
Allan: "I could've been a lot more vicious. In various drafts, I was a lot more vicious. We went through this thing eight times. There'd be entire sections I wrote just to show that I was smarter than this other person. As a person who's not related to you reads through, he's put off by that. It didn't help whatever narrative momentum I had. I excised a lot of that and I'm glad I did. If I saw something that was just me settling some score, who's interested in that?"
Luke: "Me."
Allan: "But the wider audience does not care. You want them on your side but you do it by baring yourself. You have to treat the other people like you treat yourself."
Luke: "What was your relationship like with Mike Albo and how did he react to his section of the book?"
Allan: "I like Mike Albo. Initially, I was opposed to his hiring [as Editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide]. Reb [Sawitz, porn agent] recommended him, but I felt like I was being railroaded on this guy. I wanted to hire David Aaron Clark at Screw or some other guy who worked at Screw. They were great writers, which Albo also was. The other two guys didn't want it, so we got Albo.
"Once I met Albo, I was just charmed by him. I loved that guy. We were colleagues. Eventually, I got promoted to Editorial Director of LFP Publications. He was working for me. He was very smart. He was volatile. He had some volatile relationships with people in porn. I always had a nice relationship with him."
Luke: "Wasn't there some concern at LFP about him calling up people and leaving death threats?"
Allan: "I didn't know he was leaving death threats. People would call him and leave amazing threats. Those are the ones I heard. You'd go, 'Wow, Mike, you need to back off. Take it down a notch or two.'
"After I stopped writing porn reviews, I realized our audience was fans of the people we were writing about. They were enthused about this stuff. The harsher descriptions I had been doing as Christian Shapiro, perhaps they should be done more judiciously. With Mike, I felt there was a bit of slagging on the porn industry that, especially for his magazine, were contrary to our best interests and to the porn industry's best interests. I talked to him about softening some of that. He was receptive to what I said. He would have these personality conflicts with people that got out of hand."
Luke: "How much heat did you take for his stuff?"
Allan: "I didn't take any. [LFP leader] Jim Kohls would direct it right at Albo. I talked to Jim a lot and he knew what I was trying to do to best serve the magazine. When the heat came, it went directly to Mike."
Mike Albo (now managing editor of AVN Online magazine, he's causing no waves at AVN or within the industry) and company composed (in early 1997) a list of the industry's most powerful people that caused a furious reaction when many industry leaders heard about it. There was talk about getting Albo fired. The industry leaders feared that such a list would give the government better targets. About two years after it was first composed, a version of the list was published in Hustler. Many of the selections were screwball, just to mess with Albo's enemies such as Jim Holliday (leaving him off the list in favor of virtual unknown historian Sam Stetson).
Luke: "Mike wrote some great vicious stuff."
When I read something he wrote about me to my therapist, she collapsed in laughter because of its accuracy.
When my friends and I want to signify that something is not for publication, we flag it "Mike Albo."
Allan: "He was great. There was a lot of creativity in his work."
Luke: "How did he like what you wrote about him?"
Allan: "He's accepted it. I showed it to him in a draft. If it was going to offend him or hurt his feelings, I would've changed the name and changed some characteristics so he could've had plausible denial."
Luke: "I figured that because he liked and respected you, he was fine with it."
Allan: "I think he thought it was funny. We know each other well enough that we make fun of each other. I love Mike Albo. He's a great guy. A little volatile. He never focused any of that on me."
Luke: "Tell me about Jim Kohls."
Allan: "I enjoyed working with Jim [who now owns Pulse Distributors]. He was a very reasonable person. Sometimes, like Larry, he'd get hardheaded about something. You could always use reason on Jim. If he didn't go along with you, he had a reason. You then had a choice -- do I want to go along with Jim's vision of how to make this company more profitable or do I want to sulk? It's best not to sulk.
"Most people who've gone through LFP will complain that they were grossly underpaid and are somewhat bitter. I ended up getting well-paid [circa $150,000 a year at best is my guess though Allan won't say] because of my cooperation with Jim Kohls. We worked out policies where I would get paid for freelance stuff. My salary was very low [$70,000 per annum at best is my guess]. When I got started [as editor] of Hustler, I got paid less than $40,000 per year.
"Scott Schalin worked for us. He got stolen away [along with Evan Wright] by Seth Warshavsky. When that happened, LFP realized there were some key people who needed raises.
"Jim seemed to appreciate the amount of effort I put in as editor. When I'd make a mistake that had a temporary effect on distribution, he'd realize that I was attempting to follow the vision of early Hustler that was set up by Larry Flynt to maintain the integrity of the magazine and keep the core audience.
"I haven't spoken to Jim since I got fired. I was surprised that I've never heard from him but then I've never called him."
Luke: "What did your [LFP income] top off at?"
Allan: "You've had it in there before but I'd rather not say, but it was pretty good."
Luke: "You were a good corporate soldier. You were a team player. You were an organization man. You worked with concern for the good of the porn industry."
Allan: "It wasn't just that I did what my bosses said. My bosses, after a point, started asking, 'What do you think?' They would take into account what I thought about things. I had influence on policies. It was a collaborative thing. I wanted what was best for Hustler magazine. I loved it.
"There's a perception by people who haven't read the book that it's all about how much I hated working there but I loved working there. We were presenting a viewpoint that's sorely underrepresented in the American media -- my viewpoint. Luckily, my viewpoint and Larry's viewpoint were very similar. We had a similar view on the structure of society and where the inequities are. What should be made fun of and what should be praised.
"Being a good corporate soldier, I take it as a compliment. It's a strong quality for someone if you're going to be working for a company that you feel that way.
"I had much of myself involved in making this product the best it could be and not just some tossed off thing, though for most people buying the magazine, it was a tossed off thing.
"You wanted to think that you were creating this thing for an audience somewhat like yourself. I hired people who were somewhat like me. And then all the feedback was from people, ohmigod. What am I doing? Why am I bothering?"
Luke: "You write about starting your car and wondering whether or not to raise your garage door?"
Allan: "I got discouraged at the end. I was very depressed. If you work at a job for 20 years, you are going to get tired of it. There were aspects of it that were quite annoying to me. The political aspects were very annoying. I thought Larry should've protected me from them.
"At the end, there were three different factions conspiring on their own and together to get me out. I don't know what they were telling Larry but I know it wasn't true. It's been proven subsequently by what's happened with these people.
"Whatever they were telling him, I thought Larry should've been able to see through it. Even though I was burning out, I was still a very loyal person. I was still very committed to trying to keep Hustler vital and the company vital and he should've cut me a break.
"When you sense people trying to undercut you, you have to address issues with Larry that you anticipate they'll try to discredit you with so Larry knows you've run it through. You can't bring it up directly because that makes you look like you're paranoid.
"That is time-consuming. It takes a lot of energy. And it's just annoying. Particularly when you're working on a men's magazine and that particular niche of the market is getting harder to sell. You have to figure out how to reach out to new readers when they have so many more options.
"At one point, I just stopped my sly rebuttals. I would see what a photographer was taking, and I'd say, 'Larry, if you want this, go with it. I'm done defending myself against being defamed.'
"At the same time, I've got this guy in Afghanistan. People are being murdered. In my mind, he's an innocent. If I had had Evan Wright over there, I would never have worried about Evan Wright because he's streetwise, while this guy was a do-gooder. That was a continuous source of anxiety for me. I was afraid I was going to have to meet his mother at his funeral. I saw that tape of Daniel Pearl being murdered. That had a big effect on me.
"The morale was bad."
Luke: "How close did you come to committing suicide?"
Allan: "Not very close. It was just something to divert me, to amuse myself. I have black humor. You can see it in my writing. I have it when I talk to myself too. It's an indulgence, a form of masturbation."
Luke: "Was Hustler worthy of your love and loyalty?"
Allan: "Yeah, why not? It was the venue I had. No one else had hired me. I was predisposed to it. When I first started working there, I'd read 'Asshole of the Month' and think, 'This is me. I want to write 'Asshole of the Month.' That became my big ambition. Eventually I wrote it every month for ten years. Yeah, I think it was.
"I had a movie agent who read my book and said, 'You were too good for that magazine.' I like hearing that. It's flattering. At the same time, that was the magazine that suited my frame of mind.
"Now, if I was so great, why aren't people lining up to recruit me?
"I'd hire people with decent degrees and they would come in and you could tell that they thought they were too good and they'd give half-effort. Those people either shaped up or they didn't last.
"I used to tell people that David Mamet used to write girl copy for Oui [magazine]. If someone wrote something that I could tell was half-assed, I'd tell them, 'Do you think David Mamet half-assed his girl copy for Oui?'
"Obviously David Mamet was way too good for Oui. But I believe that when he worked there, he wrote some great girl copy."
Luke: "How many friends did you keep from porn?"
Allan: "None.
"I didn't make a lot of friends in porn. I was good friends with Greg Dark for quite a while and then we both got really busy and fell out of contact.
"I saw him at the Grove around Christmas but I had bad laryngitis. I thought to myself, 'That guy looks like Greg Dark. It is Greg.' I [croaked], 'Greg, Greg.' When he couldn't hear me, by the time I realized I really wanted to talk to him, he moved into the crowd. I went running after him like in a movie but was unable to locate him.
"A lot of people I worked with, I'm still in contact with."
Luke: "What are the implications that you made no friends in porn?"
Allan: "I was isolated at Flynt in a way that was perhaps deliberate. I would meet people but I was sorta like a journalist covering them. I was never that intimate with them. I didn't get girlfriends out of the porn industry. I didn't hang out except with Greg."
Luke: "You write that your relationship with Greg was mutually beneficial?"
Allan: "Yeah, plus I liked Greg a lot. Greg's hilarious."
Luke: "Yeah, I like Greg a lot too, but he used you and you used him."
Allan: "To some extent. Even beyond that, we had a good time with each other. But then he got really busy with the rock videos."
Luke: "Do you think Larry Flynt had sex with at least one of his daughters [Tonya Flynt-Vega]?"
Allan: "I have no idea. I can't imagine it. The girl who made the accusation seemed like a troubled person."
Luke: "Did you insult Islam to the degree you insulted Christianity?"
Allan: "Maybe a little bit here and there. We didn't have a reverse jihad going. We would insult individuals than a religion. One of those individuals was Jesus Christ but I feel that Jesus Christ has a good sense of humor. He might've enjoyed the 'What Would Jesus Do?' thing we did. The old joke about M&Ms -- They don't melt in Jesus's hands because they fall through the holes."
Luke: "You understand the deeper meaning behind the question? That you can insult Christians and their god with impunity."
Allan: "We insulted a number of [Muslims]. We insulted the Mullah behind the first World Trade Center bombing [in 1993]. I don't know how we would've handled the [Mohammed cartoon controversy of a few months back]."
Luke: "What effect did working at Hustler have on your social life?"
Allan: "Not bad. Before Hustler, I worked at Slash magazine. The people my wife and I know are askance from the mainstream. For most of them, it was never an issue. People would meet me and realize I would not be inappropriately slobbering on his wife. They'd judge me on my own.
"My friends are public defenders, teachers, lawyers, people in the garment and music industries... To them I was doing something interesting."
Luke: "The way you speak is completely different from the way articles were Hustlerized under your reign."
Allan: "Well, yeah."
Luke: "A guy would turn in a regular journalistic article and it would get Hustlerized. All articles while you were editor got Hustlerized."
Allan and his editors would change the adjectives to make them more shocking. Porn stars would become "porn whores" or "porn sluts." Women were usually referred to in demeaning terms.
Various people (including Tony Lovett, Editor of AVN Online magazine) who wrote for Hustler would keep their original article in their portfolio as well as the version published in Hustler.
"Hustler would rewrite their writers horribly to fit the company manifesto -- that women were dirt," says a former Hustler writer. "Women are nothing but sex objects."
Allan: "We competed to come up with different ways that were shocking. We liked to make language shocking. It was fun. It was what we did. If you are with a like-minded person, that's how you entertain one another. Or if you want to appall somebody...with that kind of vocabulary.
"I know who I am and I know who the Hustler persona was.
"The article on the handicapped? Was that a sex play about having sex with handicapped people?"
Luke: "It was about the sex lives of handicapped people. I didn't read the actual [Hustler] article. I read the account of the author who said he turned in a straight journalistic piece and then when it came out, it was Hustlerized and all the people he had talked to and told he was doing a serious piece were upset. And he was upset."
Allan: "A lot of the articles were generated within our editorial area. I can understand how for somebody coming from the outside, that would've been a jolt. We had to get a salacious element into everything.
"The way the template went for sex plays was you'd start off with a scenario illustrating what you were going to talk about. You'd have someone having sex with a handicapped person. You'd sensationalize it. You'd think about the jerk-off reader and try to grab that guy. Then perhaps you'd get some real information coming and you'd perhaps get to see a new viewpoint. I can understand how that would offend someone who turned it in."
Luke: "Did you make any apologies to anyone after you left Hustler for what you did at Hustler?"
Allan: "Not that I can think of. I would never apologize to anyone I wrote an Asshole of the Month about."
Allan did one about me in the Holiday issue of 1999 and I'd never expect an apology for it. I feel it was an honor to be selected for Allan's poison pen.
Allan: "There may have been inadvertent times when someone's feelings were hurt or the writer mistakenly believed that a straight dry piece of journalism would fit in with the Hustler format.
"I can't really picture things that I have to apologize for. Things where I deliberately set out [to slam someone] or were deliberate parodies or were deliberately set out to mock somebody, I'm not going to apologize for them. 'Oh sorry, I should've been a nicer person.'"
I asked a former writer for Hustler for his thoughts on Allan. He replies: "I have no printable thoughts on MacDonell."
Luke: "How possible is it to have an open discussion on race and how successful do you think you were at Hustler pushing forward this open discussion?"
Allan: "Race is one of the biggest dilemmas in this country. It's difficult on any level of medium, whether it is refined academics, or left-wing opinion makers or right-wing opinionmakers, it's an inflammatory subject. It's beyond opinion. People are emotionally attached to their positions. It's very much an emotional rather than an intellectual topic in this country."
Luke: "Honest discussion of race is more taboo than pornography?"
Allan: "Yes. You can be friends with someone from another race, but then if you try to talk to the person about racial issues, you can endanger your friendship.
"As for Hustler, I don't think we helped at all."
Luke: "What happens when you try to get work as a writer since you've left Hustler? What reactions do you get?"
Allan: "I've gotten a little bit of acceptance but I don't have the persistence I need. It would be easy for me to say that it's because of Hustler that people won't accept me but a lot of it is just that I have not followed up enough.
"I got two years of free-lance from MrSkin. They paid me well. I wrote a lot of biographies and a lot of movie reviews. The difference with what I wrote at Hustler is that everything for MrSkin is positive. You are not there to critique them. You are there to say here's the nude scene. You don't want to alienate the people who are supplying you with grabs, the material of your success.
"If someone is looking up a particular actress, he doesn't want to hear your opinion that she can't act or that her tits are sagging. He likes her. Whether it's Rosie O'Donnell or Selma Hayek, they're both great."
Luke: "What are the blocks you have to go through to write non-porn for mainstream publications?"
Allan: "There is stigma from Hustler. There is a big resistance. When I first got fired, about three weeks after I got fired, there was an interview on the Internet with Art Cooper, who'd been the longtime editor of GQ. He'd been inducted into the magazine hall of fame. He was speaking about his tenure at Penthouse. How he'd been lured away by the money at Penthouse. He was there for a while but at one point he realized he had to get out of that field because another magazine came along that was going to ruin everything for that field. He said it was a 'disgusting magazine.' Hustler magazine.
"I respected Art Cooper's opinion. When he said Hustler was a disgusting magazine, I realized I was going to have a hurdle getting my job at Vanity Fair."
Luke: "What are the most interesting responses you've received when you've pitched stories? I bet most people won't even acknowledge you."
Allan: "Mostly you get no response. Not even, 'We'll pass.' Some people consider your ideas. From my experience as an editor, I've given people a stream of ideas that I think would be exactly what they want and I felt that if my experience had been at the auto-club magazine, I would've had a better chance. But since it's Hustler, they're predisposed to think it won't work. I had one guy say, 'I'm concerned that you wouldn't have the journalistic standards that we have here.'"
Luke: "Is there any part of you that is worn down by this or ashamed of your Hustler past or afraid to launch into the non-porn world?"
Allan: "I feel worn down. I get discouraged easily. There are people who have gone from Hustler who had the persistence and thrived.
"I love working at magazines as an editor. I've never been attracted to the life of the freelancer -- having to crank out story after story. All the travel. I'm 50. As a magazine editor, you're in the middle of things. You have to keep up with current events, the new trends in music and art, depending on your field. You feel that you have an impact on things as they are happening."
Luke: "The story of great magazine editors is a sad one. Most of them descend into alcoholism."
Allan: "I haven't read about that.
"My favorite contemporary editor is Lewis Lapham from Harpers. That guy was brilliant. After 9/11, he wrote an editorial that nobody else at that time was voicing those concerns. A lot of the things he laid out came to happen.
"The breadth of interest he had in that magazine. Even if I had not always agreed with his political views, there was always something interesting in the magazine."
Luke: "Why don't you have a blog?"
Allan: "Because you don't get paid. Can I make money on a blog?"
Luke: "You could. It'd be great promotion for your book. But you're 50. I'm 39. I don't like it when people 11 years older than me tell me what would be good for me."
Allan: "I don't mind. At Hustler, you're not paying these people much. You're hiring the same age group. I was getting further and further away from it. I liked having young people around."
Luke: "I haven't read a negative word about your book?"
Allan: "Not yet. Spin magazine's review was negative, but I felt it was inaccurate. I felt the person had not read the later chapters."
Luke: "Were you aware of how vicious the LFP organization could be to ex-employees? Following them around, stalking them, harassing them."
Allan: "Who did that happen to?"
Luke: "I'm thinking of one woman who worked there."
Allan: "I was not aware of that. They have not harassed me. They've had no interest in me whatever."
Luke: "You're not aware of them setting out to ruin the lives of former employees?"
Allan: "Not that I am aware of.
"I only wanted my former employees to succeed. There are a few people I fired who could have a case that I should've fired somebody else. One of them has put an ad for my book on his website.
"I was certainly not involved in any harassment. I have great relationships with people who used to work for me."
I email former Hustler writer and editor Evan Wright: "What advice would you give [Allan MacDonell] about pursuing a writing career outside of porn?"
Evan: "Try not to jack off too much when working at home during the day."
Luke: "How did you overcome your Hustler background?"
Evan: "I never tried to overcome my Hustler background, since I have always been proud to have worked there."
I talk to a former writer for Hustler who has not read Allan's book. "Everybody hated and fear Allan MacDonell. That's why I don't buy any bile that he's putting out, that he's some victim of the LFP empire or how horrible it was to work there. Everybody at LFP I ever talked to said Allan was the one who made it impossible to work there. He was the one who so hard to pitch stories to. If I was dealing with an editor, the editor then had to go pitch to MacDonell. MacDonell was always a hard sell. Of course MacDonell was answering to his higher-ups but MacDonell was the brick wall that people came up against.
"Allan was the ogre under the bridge. He was the one all the editors feared. If they didn't pitch something right, it wasn't going to be flown up the flag pole."
Luke: "Have you read any of his writings?"
Source butts in: "I have no desire to."
Luke: "Did you ever read his writings as Christian Shapiro? I find it amazing what an organization man Allan was at LFP. He was that organization. He embodied it."
Source: "That's exactly what I'm saying. If Allan tries to paint himself as any kind of a victim in his book... Everyone who leaves LFP immediately goes on this PR campaign to portray themselves as victims of this corporate behemoth."
Luke: "He doesn't portray himself as a victim.
"He's still able to snap right back into the mindset of the LFP organization man."
Source: "He's been doing it for so longer. If it wasn't for MacDonell, I would've stuck in longer at Hustler. I got tired of hearing from my editor, 'I've got to sell it to MacDonell.' I've never had that experience with another magazine before.
"It's that MacDonell was at odds with his editors, that he created an environment of hostility, a climate of fear.
"MacDonell was always toeing the company line or creating the company line.
"Working for Hustler was the most 'I need to go take a shower' experience I've had in the Adult industry. They really do make you feel like you are down in the gutter."
I know many people who've worked for LFP and for AVN and from what I gather LFP was the worse experience. "AVN is a trade magazine that fellates the business it covers," says my source. "Hustler is the opposite. Hustler has absolute contempt for the Adult industry and contempt for women."
Luke: "Though LFP will pull its punches if it's going to hurt their bottom line."
Source: "Mike Albo and Evan Wright had nothing but contempt for porn. Putting Albo as Editor of Hustler Erotic Video Guide is like naming Tammy Bruce as Editor of Playboy."
Allan's publisher Adam Parfrey emails me: "Luke: Interesting but perhaps overlong piece with Allan MacDonell. This "Source" you quote on your site about Allan MacDonell being an ogre is obviously uninformed and holds a grudge for getting some piece of his canned for incompetence. I know over a dozen people who worked with Allan at Hustler, and every single one of them regarded him highly. I must have written a couple dozen articles for him from the '80s and '90s."
I'm tired of writing my conference paper, and so Eliot Epstein is taking over. It's his fault if there's too much Slavoj Zizek in my paper and not enough Emmanuel Levinas. We've been going at it all night: aesthetics vs ethics. Note the insane look in Eliot's eyes, his crazy hair falling into his face.
The Blogs An Orthodox Rabbi Must Follow
Wald v. Ford [Anti-SLAPP motion draft as of 5-10-06]
My attorney, Justin Levine, and I welcome any feedback on this.
Don't Look Back
Recently a girlfriend confided in me that she may be in love with two men at the same time for completely different reasons. She looked to me for advice, a reason to allow the scales to tip one way or another -- a way out of the erotic dilemma. I felt for her, and yet I also sensed something enviable in the way she allowed herself to experience the fullness of life in multiple directions, the way she allowed herself to be extended in different directions without breaking. I wanted to tell her she didn't have to choose, that she need only feel and that would be enough, all anyone could ask of her. Forget logic, dispose of boundaries, confound reason.
Another LA Jewess Blames Men For Her Spinsterhood
Her soulmate wish list, then and now.
Hillary's a friend of New York Jewish singles columnist Esther D. Kustanowitz.
Teresa Strasser Joins Adam Carolla's Show
A check of the net shows Strasser to be a part of the Carolla-Jimmy Kimmel "family" already -- an actress and TV host who worked as a writer on Win Ben Stein’s Money, the game show that featured Kimmel in a supporting role. She’s got a website that shows her to feel pretty good about herself, but that’s bound to change as Carolla will systematically grind her into powder on the air, trampling on any jokes she might throw out, and trumping her witty asides with his long-winded, monotonous stream-of-consciousness “comedy” monologues.
Strasser's no sex kitten. Physically, she’s cut from the Sara Silverman mold and seems to consider herself a smartypants. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of sexy shots the Carolla team digs up for their site.
DISCOVER YOUR INNER JEW - WALLPAPER
Hitler Laughing: Comedy in the Third Reich
Anyone read this yet? It looks like a scream. Should be the book to be seen with at shul this summer to advance one's social and romantic prospects.
Henry Alford writes about his boyfriend and more in the 5/7/06 NYT:
BOOKSELLING, it's said in the publishing industry, is a matter of "hand selling." Books considered tough sells — say, a book about an obscure or overly specific topic, or a book that buyers might actually be embarrassed to be seen buying — need an extra push to be viable in the marketplace. Without that push, these books meet that most dreaded fate: the calm before the calm.
...Having earlier piqued one browser's interest in "Hitler Laughing" by playing up its rarefied quality ("Everyone thinks 'Weimar: funny,' but not everyone thinks 'Third Reich: funny' ")...
Khunrum writes: "You remember the old joke: One of the last things Hitler said in his bunker before the Russians overran it -- 'Next time, no more Mr. Nice Guy.'"
Author (Hitler Laughing) William Grange calls me back Sunday night, May 7, 2006.
Luke: "When did it come out in hardcover?"
William: "It never came out in hardcover. Academic presses are going almost completely softcover and the libraries will bind them up usually. Among the Germans, this has been going on for 30 years. They're intended for purchase by libraries. Every once in a while, an academic book [will sell widely to a general audience]. The best example is Jared Diamond of UCLA who wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and won a Pulitzer Prize. That's like having lightning strike you. Usually academic books are done on the cheap. In the theater business, there have been dozens of books done that way. The guy in NYT [Henry Alford] said the title was so bizarre, who could possibly be interested? I thought it would be very interesting."
Luke: "What kind of reactions have you gotten to Hitler Laughing?"
William: "Most people are curious. Most people assume that nobody was laughing in the Third Reich.
"In Nazi Germany, people bought theater tickets voluntarily and went to plays they wanted to see. There were a much wider range of plays to see in Nazi Germany than in the Soviet Union. In terms of genre, there were about the same plays as during the Weimar Republic. There were more productions during the Third Reich. The Nazis created a market vacuum by shutting out all these objectionable playwrights and actors and there was still a demand for these situation comedies, what you see on television... These whimsical superficial comedies were the lifeblood of theater. It wasn't until television came along that theater became an elitist activity that has to resort to things like Angels in America."
Luke: "What were Nazis laughing at?"
William: "Jewish comedies. The Weimar Republic is the era of the great comedies by Oscar Blumenthal, Franz Arnold, Bruno Frank...[from the 1880s - 1933]. They were extremely popular playwrights [of situation comedies] very similar to Neil Simon and Woody Allen. The Nazis banned them. Somebody had to write plays like them during the Third Reich."
Luke: What humor did Hitler like?
William: "We know that on his 50th birthday, Joseph Goebbels gave him 18 brand new prints of Disney cartoons and Goebbels reported that Hitler said it was the best birthday present he ever had. They had a lot of movie nights. Even in the depths of the war, about once a month, they'd watch Gone With the Wind. They really liked the production values of what they called 'Film Jews.' In his attempts to get starlets to go to bed with him, Goebbels was the biggest film Jew of them all.
"Maria Von Trapp tells an anecdote about Hitler laughing hysterically, gasping for breath for laughing, at a gross joke. (Maria von Trapp, "The Trapp Family Singers" (New York: Dell, 1949), pp. 135-137.)
Luke: "What can we learn about Hitler from what made him laugh?"
William: "You can learn that he was absolutely normal. People don't like to think that Nazis were like everybody else. They liked to laugh. They liked to see plays. It's true that Hitler was a little strange, but in many ways, he was just like you and me. People try to heroize people who stood up to Hitler as morally superior and when you get into those kinds of debates, then you look at somebody like Hitler as defective. But he wasn't defective at all. He was an evil genius.
"Yes, by all means, people who stood up to Hitler were heroic. The best example is Sophie Scholl. But there were others, especially in the theater. But they stood up to the Hitler dictatorship in non-heroic ways. Heinz Hilpert, Gustaf Gründgens, Käthe Dorsch, and dozens of others surreptitiously sought to save Jews, hide them in closets, get them across the Swiss border, and used other subterfuges that collectively undermined the regime.
"The real question is, 'Were people who did not resist Hitler collaborators with the regime?' It's a difficult question, predicated as always on a sense of moral superiority. It's easy to look back sixty years and appoint moral standing or deny it to someone else. My contention is that nobody has the moral authority to assign blame to anyone. In a similar way, everybody places Hitler in the lowest circle of Hell. On what or whose authority?"
Luke: "What was Hitler's sexuality?"
William: "As far as I can tell, absolutely straight. There's no hint of any homosexuality."
Luke: "Did he play the field?"
William: "He had affairs but he was not promiscuous. There were lots of women, particularly older women, who were madly in love with Hitler and wanted to take care of him. He cultivated that got a lot of money from them."
Luke: "Did he bang a lot of chicks?"
William: "No. It was basically Eva Braun. He could've had any woman he wanted. He could've had thousands of women. He was a rock star. He's the first modernist politician. He exploited airplane travel. In the campaign of 1932, he traveled to 100 cities a week. He left behind long-play records of his speeches. They would set them up and play them on street corners. He exploited modern technology in a way that Roosevelt only began to do, and that was only the radio.
"The prime minister of France said around 1938 that if Hitler wins, it will be the Middle Ages all over again, but without the mercy of Christ.
"Churchill said, I beg to differ. It won't be a return to the Middle Ages. It will be a new age of modern barbarity. Hitler is not going back. He's very forward-looking.
"A lot of people like to think of Hitler as reactionary. He was progressive. He had a system that today would be called affirmative action. Hitler was not a fascist. He was a socialist, a national socialist."
Luke: "What type of jokes did Hitler tell?"
William: "We don't know for sure. There's little record that he told jokes but he had a lot of bonhomie. He loved being around his men. He had no sexual attraction for them but he loved male companionship, particularly with the guys who were the early fighters who were with him in Munich in the twenties and were responsible for the revolution."
Luke: "What were the distinctive characteristics of Nazi humor?"
William: "It's very old-fashioned. It's barnyard humor. They loved jokes about pigs. There was a play, Uproar Over Iolanthe (a big old sow), there's somebody who lands in a manure pile and brings it into the house. That goes back to a play by Carl Zuckmayer in 1925 called The Merry Vineyard. The Germans are always making jokes about "mist," their word for manure. They think it's funny.
"The term 'swine' is a term of insult among the Germans. At the same time, they recognize an enormous debt to pigs [for helping them get through the winter in ancient times].
"You don't have too many jokes about people defecating but there is a ribald sexuality in these plays. OK, they're not married, but they're creating an Aryan baby. That comes right out of the Weimar Republic and before that."
Luke: "Was there anything distinctive about Third Reich humor?"
William: "No, except that it condemned it [Weimar humor] while it embraced it. People think that because the Nazis were these murderous bastards, they must've had a murderous sense of humor. No. They were not murderous bastards. They were people just like you and me. That's what's scary. People don't like to think about that.
"If you see the movie Schindler's List, the character played by Ralph Fiennes was a conscious killer. But in many ways, they weren't. If you are dealing with people you don't consider human beings... Hitler had a soft spot for children. Children loved him. But Jews and gypsies and those we would call handicapped, he didn't consider human.
"The kind of humor the Nazis liked is exactly the kind of humor we like on television today. They embraced technologies in their highways, cars. The first comedies on television were done from the Reich Chancellery in 1938. The Third Reich was way ahead of everybody in their embrace of technology."
Luke: "Did the Nazis tell Holocaust jokes?"
William: "There were an awful lot of jokes about Jews. It's pretty tacky, tasteless stuff.
"Because of my German background, I can read Yiddish better than most Jews. I just got a research grant from the Dorot Foundation [a Jewish foundation that supports research into Jewish artists] to study Stella Adler, Marlon Brando's teacher.
"There's a great book in German called 'Persecuted and Forgotten' about actors, standup comedians and cabaret players who made the mistake of making fun of Hitler... The Gestapo were ruthless about this stuff, particularly during the 1940s. Any attempt to make light of the situation or insulting of the Fuhrer, they did not have a sense of humor about that."
Luke: "What about Eichmann (kept the trains running on time) and Himmler (ran the Gestapo)? What did they find funny?"
William: "There's very little record. I'd assume that any joke at the expense of the Jews, they'd find funny.
"The only Nazi leaders with an exalted background were Albert Speer (a degree in architecture) and Goebels who had a PhD (on a novelist) from Heidelburg.
"There's no record of a musical extravaganza during the Third Reich. Hitler was shy about his persona and you would never even think about putting a character like him in a play. He was much too serious about winning back Germany's honor and saving Europe from itself.
"Goebels wrote five volumes of diaries. There's little record in them of Hitler laughing.
"Because they were socialists, this was the first time that the entertainment industry was put on a national footing. theater and other things were always local before the Nazis."
Luke: "What surprised you in your research?"
William: "That the German people continued to like the same humor, the same theater, and were completely impervious to the propaganda that the government was putting out. That the Nazis were so unsuccessful in everything they tried to do.
"I was surprised by how successful Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and George Bernard Shaw were in Nazi Germany. Hitler felt that Shaw was important to the Nazi cause. Wilde of course was gay. Hitler embraced Wilde's plays as socially relevant and promoted them well into the war years. Hitler promoted Shaw well after Shaw denounced Hitler in 1941. All of Shaw's plays were translated by Siegfried Trebitsch, who was a Jew. Trebitsch was collecting royalties on all these Nazi productions (paid through Switzerland).
"Erich Kastner, a Jew, gets asylum in Switzerland but Goebbels calls him out of asylum circa 1944 to work on the screenplay of Kolberg of a huge military movie about the Prussians versus the Russians. They brought 160,000 troops back from the Eastern front to appear in uniform in this movie.
"Hitler would set up five or six cabinet ministries to compete with each other to protect his own position. They all vied for his favor. The result was terribly inefficient."
Luke: "Did the Nazis watch Charlie Chaplin, particularly The Great Dictator."
William: "They knew about Chaplin. They considered him to be a communist."
Luke: "Was there a racial purity element in Nazi comedy?"
William: "Oh yes, in the subject matter [and among those who put on productions]. You had to get a license from the propaganda ministry before any of your plays could be performed. Anyone who worked in the theater, or anywhere, had to fill out a racial purity affidavit."
Luke: "Was there great humor that came out of the Third Reich? Stuff that forever changed the course of comedy?"
William: "No. There's little poetry. There's no music or painting. There are some great movies and fabulous Shakespeare productions."
Luke: "What were the names of the great movies made under the Third Reich?"
William: "Der Mustergatte (1937, based on an American play by Avery Hopwood titled "The Ideal Husband), Pygmalion (1935, based on the play by George Bernard Shaw), Eine Frau ohne Bedeutung (1936, based on the play "An Ideal Husband" by Oscar Wilde)1936), Tanz auf dem Vulkan ("Dancing on the Volcano"1938, a fabulous star turn for Gründgens about a song and dance man in the French Revolution), Grosse Freiheint No. 7 (Big Freedom No. 7,1934), Münchhausen (1943), Wasser für Canitoga ("Water for Canitoga,"1937), Savoy Hotel 217 (1936), Titanic (1943, yes, the Titanic that hit an iceberg in 1912; not a great movie, but interesting), Die vier Gesellen ("The Four Associates,1938, with Ingrid Bergman in her only Third Reich appearance), Kleider machen Leute ("Clothes Make the Man," 1940) and several others."
William: "...The Nazis called everyone they didn't like a 'cultural Bolshevik.'
"The Nazis were the revolt of the little man. They were bourgeois petty murderers who got hold of the country. Imagine Jimmy Hoffa or Al Sharpton getting a hold of a country. There probably wouldn't be any great poetry to come out of that.
"If you wanted to be funny [under the Nazis], you had to be officially funny."
Luke: "Are the Germans considered funny?"
William: "No. Not among English-speaking people. What led me to write these books is my experience of a bunch of Germans laughing hysterically at a play while I was in college. If you watch television in Germany today, there's very funny stuff going on.
"I'm fascinated by your background. My father was also a minister (Disciples of Christ). We knew about the Seventh Day Adventists. My dad used to say, 'They're great people. They've just got this thing about going to church on Saturday.' We never did figure that out. You guys are very similar to us. I was baptized by immersion. I don't have any pictures of it the way you do. We were always told that Seventh-Day Adventists were real Bible-believing Christians."
Luke: "Are you still a Bible-believing Christian?"
William: "Pretty much. I'm a Methodist now."
Luke: "There aren't many religious people in drama."
William: "No, they're not. I was at a conference in Los Angeles a month ago and there was a woman from Brigham Young University who said that the sleeper hit Napoleon Dynamite was a Brigham Young University student film expanded into a studio film.
"Neil LaBute is a Mormon and a very good playwright."
Luke: "He's an ex-Mormon. Are there other practicing Christians [in theater]?"
William: "Yes, but we're in a minority."
We both like Michael Medved and his autobiography Right Turns.
William: "I am completely out of the mainstream [of theater professors]. You wouldn't believe how often I've been whistled or hooted off the platform when I give talks at conferences. The feminists sit there and look at their shoes and shake their heads."
Luke: "How often has that happened?"
William: "Every time I get up and talk. They just can't believe what they're hearing. They thought they had rooted guys like me out of the profession."
Luke: "It's a feminized profession."
William: "Yeah. You go to these conferences and men are in a distinct minority."
Luke: "They boo? They hiss?"
William: "Yeah. Groan."
Luke: "Do you give up if it gets too loud?"
William: "Oh no. They're polite during the thing. But you can tell when you look at people as they stare at their shoes or groan or talk to each other.
"One of the guys I gave a talk with at Chicago was Henry Bial (University of Kansas), who's an Orthodox Jew. I was delighted to be on the panel with him. His talk was predicated on the way the old rabbis taught and spoke and did their research. We're talking about putting our papers in a book on theater, how we should be more rabbinical in our approach."
Luke: "How do you understand 'rabbinical'?"
William: "Thorough. Skeptical though there are certain core beliefs -- that God exists, that God has a plan for our lives, that God loves us. If you're a Jew, He devised this diet for us. If you're a Christian, He's got this plan for you, though we borrowed that from the Jews.
"We're [conservative theists] all in this together. We are up against a formidable enemy."
Luke: "Theater is the home of the transgressive."
William: "Yeah."
Luke: "The f-word and nudity etc were all the rage in theater."
William: "We started that because we didn't have anywhere to go after television. Theater was shunted aside [as a mass medium entertainment] and got more elitist to the point where we're all feminized, we're all gay... The AIDS plays are the valorization of the victim. If you're not a victim in today's academic world, you really don't count. All the disease plays -- Whipped, Marvin's Room, Shadow Box. It's tough dealing with students about this because they think of it as real theater. No, that's not real theater. Real theater doesn't deal with disease plays. It deals with action and conflict. When you're talking about disease plays, you're talking melodrama, superficial, two-sided thing."
Luke: "It must be discouraging."
William: "It is but that's one of the reasons I'm a Christian.
"There's lots of successful theater [today] but it's retrograde. It's Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables. Phantom is the most successful entertainment property in the history of the world. There's hope in it. Les Miserables is a story of Christian renewal and faith.
"You try to talk about and get it published and you're barking up the wrong tree.
"David Mamet is on to something. He's an iconoclast. He wrote an interesting play called Oleanna.
"Harold Pinter is an abomination.
"Dissenting voices that say there is a God, He loves you, he has a plan for your life, that is so retrograde, so primitive. Ted Turner says Christianity is for losers."
Luke: "What's the last play that meant something and influenced people?"
William: "Glengarry Glenross by David Mamet. Sam Shepard's Fool for Love. Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things."
Henry Bial replies to my inquiry:
I've just finished reading your profile of William Grange. Professor Grange seems to have misunderstood my position on the issues at hand. Specifically: though I identify as Jewish, my affiliation is not Orthodox; while I sometimes characterize my approach to performance analysis as "rabbinical," my understanding of the term is significantly different from Bill's; and while I respect him as a scholar, Bill and I have widely divergent views about how theatre should be practiced, studied, etc. For a better understanding of my work, I recommend you consult my recent book, ACTING JEWISH.
Dropped From Google
My site lukeford.net has disappeared from Google search. I use Google as my site search engine (Search LF.net). Now there are no results for lukeford.net. I emailed Google several times. No reply. I lost much of my traffic because of this.
Google responds: "Your page has been blocked from our index because it does not meet the quality standards necessary to assign accurate PageRank. We cannot comment on the individual reasons your page was removed. However, certain actions such as cloaking, writing text in such a way that it can be seen by search engines but not by users, or setting up pages/links with the sole purpose of fooling search engines may result in permanent removal from our index. Please read our Webmaster Guidelines for more information."
It must be these sub-domains which I sold for three months:
Wholesale Clothes
Student Loans
Software Creation
Management Theory
Jewelry Cases
I drive to the Israeli Independence Day Festival, Sunday morning, May 7.
With the price of gas, I'm only doing it for the glory. A documentary film crew is supposed to meet me and record my religious journey for posterity.
It's a nice change from the topic I'm usually asked to comment on (the political philosophy of Leo Strauss).
I never find the documentarians (nor any hot chix who'll give me the time of day) but on the up side I spend most of the day with Mensch publisher and editor Matt Lipeles, who's written for the Jewish Journal.
His whole Orthodox life is a great piece of performance art. Yasher koach!
Video of a hot blonde Israeli singer from 5 p.m. Sunday.
I consider stopping by the Jewishspermdonor.net booth and making a donation.
"The festival is like Israel -- filled with garbage and smoke," says a friend.
I walk past Chabadniks throwing a football around outside their Camp Gan booth.
My allergies act up and I go through four paper towels blowing my nose.
I'm not the only one exploding with sprays of wet sneezes.
I stumble out of the bathroom and get weirded out by some freak singing scales.
I look closer. It's Sam Glaser preparing to go on stage.
I tell Matt that I want to talk to these wanton girls about tzniut (modesty).
"Hey good looking, don't you think you should cover up a bit?" suggests Matt. "I don't think that'll work."
A man comes up looking for a restroom.
"They are over to the left," says Matt.
"Be a mensch," I reprimand. "Tell him to go anywhere."
"Everyone's nice," reflects Matt, "but nobody's buying."
"It's not about the money," I say. "It's about the work."
He stares at me.
I smile.
"That's the funniest line you've said all day," he says.
Matt, who's sunk thousands of dollars of his own money into this venture, has a 250-pound bruiser named Jay going around collecting ad sales. "Buy an ad or I'll break your legs," is the implied message of Jay's body language.
"Don't call him a thug," reproves Matt as I dictate my column into my tape recorder.
Matt has a form where people can sign up for information about subscribing to the magazine. Over the course of eight hours, about 20 people sign up.
I figure it's just a way Matt can snag names and addresses of hot chix.
Anyone who comes near the booth is immediately jumped by Matt or his friend Stephanie. "Hi, would you like a free copy of our magazine? Please write down your name. We're going to be selling subscriptions. Would you like to advertise?"
Most people shy away.
My theory on sales is that you offer your product to the public while you stay cool and collected, reading a book in the background. Those who want to talk to you will come up and interrupt you.
I plough through 130 pages of Steve Stern's A Plague of Dreamers while less intellectually-minded persons than myself talk to their friends.
Slumped over with fatigue and rejection, Matt walks off to meet Dennis Prager, who was a gracious master of ceremonies.
Matt returns ten minutes later energized. He met the great man, who said he'd read Matt's magazine. Matt wants him to write for it.
Matt's excited. He's ready to walk the grounds. Nothing can hold him back now.
Outside the Mentsch booth is a Chabadnik asking Jewish men if they'd like to wrap tefillin. A girl about six years old wants to put on tefillin. The Chabadnik explains that tefillin is a mitzvah for men only. She's disappointed.
Much of the day, Matt can't even give his magazine away.
Luckily he has me by his side to offer a continual stream of encouragement.
"I feel like a member of the Mensch team," I sigh.
"Just don't expect a check," says Matt.
"A chick? I object to that objectifying language."
I see my friend Scott, an engineer confined to a wheelchair since he was 19.
I put my hands on Scott's shoulders and say, "By the power of Jesus Christ, I command you to rise."
Scott doesn't budge.
Oh well, it was worth a try.
"As an observant Jew, you would've been in a dilemma if that had worked," says Matt.
I try to date Scott's leftovers. He meets some hot chix at Starbucks and if he doesn't want them, I hit him up for their contact info. I almost got one date with a gorgeous blonde before she came to her senses and read my blog.
"As the Talmud says, the greater the man, the greater the yetzer hara (lustful impulse)," I intone.
Matt suddenly develops a guilty look. "Is all the food sold here kosher?" he asks.
For the first time since they moved in five months ago, I have a chat with my Israeli neighbors.
"Good fences make good neighbors" is an American poem. It's not the Israeli way.
"I've been like a zombie all day," Matt complains. "I only got two hours sleep last night."
"What were you doing? Don't spare any juicy details."
"I was printing up press releases."
"You always were the master of the metaphor."
As Matt scrambles to get away from me, he runs over a little kid.
"Suffer the little children to come onto me," I preach. "I will tear down the temple and rebuild it in three days."
Matt flees.
I consider hanging out at the teen tent but upon reflection decide it's not a good idea.
I'm torn between pony rides and the rabbi rubbing tent.
Matt wants to date a woman who takes his magazine.
"She's looking for marriage," a friend tells him.
What's all this dating mishegos? The Torah believes in marriage.
4:25 p.m. A girl in a short jean miniskirt, four inch wedgies (heels), and D-cup breasts bouncing around (without a bra) just under her t-shirt walks by.
I don't notice.
I glimpse some scantily clad female dancers on the main stage and stagger out of the Mentsch booth to get a better view.
Mashina sings 98% in Hebrew but I love them. They're my type of rock group. I stand like a white man in the middle of a group of grinding teenagers. Could I get arrested for this? I clasp my book and my Seraphic Press man purse and try not to look aroused.
Shtup?
I pick up Amy Klein Saturday night and drive her to the Los Angeles river.
"Shtup?" I ask.
"I usually don't," says Amy, "but you talked me into it."
The Making Of A Gadol (Great One)
I took time from writing my autobiography (Luke Ford: The Making of a Gadol is the tentative title) this weekend to celebrate the Sabbath.
At 9 p.m. Friday, I caught a lecture by Rabbi Meir Soloveitchik (the grandson of Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik): "The Making of a Modern Gadol: A Reflection on the Lives of Rabbi Yosef B. Soloveitchik and Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik."
I figured this could be a good blueprint for telling my own story of moral triumph.
Just as Rabbi S. was beginning his talk, he was interrupted by a man who demanded to know if there was a punch line to his opening joke. "Is that it?"
With grace, Rabbi S. said that was it though he would refer to it a minute later in his talk.
Later, the interrupter suffered through waves of horror rolling over his body (while his wife rolled her eyes and said his name as though his interruptions had occurred before at lectures) as he learned that Rav Yosef Soloveitchik was a life-long Republican who supported America's intervention in Vietnam, which Rabbi Aaron Soloveitchik opposed and said it was forbidden to serve in such a war.
Rabbi Aaron was also opposed to the death penalty, which I believe the Rav supported. The Rav, eleven years older than Aaron, spent those extra years under communism so he had a more vivid appreciation of communism's evil and believed in the domino theory that if Vietnam fell, it would threaten the freedom of bordering countries.
During question time, the man gave mini-speeches including one on the need to respect the dignity and humanity of the Palestinians.
I don't think he realized he was preaching to the rabbi who wrote the famous essay "The Virtue of Hate."
Normally I wouldn't blog about such a sacred gathering, but Rabbi S. called for a return of Religion sections in newspapers and greater journalistic coverage of gedolim.
I wanted to ask Rabbi S. if he truly meant this but I did not get a chance until late Saturday afternoon.
I figured the good rabbi was saying something he either did not understand or did not believe.
I figured that holding rabbis to the same level of scrutiny basketball coaches receive would result in many defrocked rabbis, and many angry rabbis and angry Jews. Religion is the soft spot of journalism. It's the area usually assigned to crap journalists and coverage of religious figures is usually a softball equivalent of the religious and ethnic press (such as the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles).
If rabbis received the same coverage as secular leaders, we'd quickly find out that:
* A significant percentage of rabbis plagiarize their semons and writings.
* Put their hand in the till (financially and sexually).
* That many of them don't take well to being challenged and having anyone else but themselves reveal them to the world.
"How many gedolim would remain if they received the same journalistic scrutiny as basketball coaches?" I finally asked Rabbi S. over the third meal. "Don't you realize that many of them would be revealed to have serious flaws. You remember the anger about Marc B. Shapiro's disinterested scholarly book on Jechiel Weinberg [which revealed, among other things, that the rabbi was an early supporter of Hitler and the Nazis]."
Rabbi S. said: "Go for it [journalistic scrutiny of religious leaders]."
He said Marc Shapiro's book was superb.
I wanted to ask him why the Rav devoted so much time to studying secular philosophy when we lose no Orthodox Jews to philosophy. Yet the Rav never spoke publicly about Biblical Criticism and the scientific approach to religion ("scientific" here is just a fancy way of saying the disinterested pursuit of truth) which prevents tens of thousands of morally serious, intellectually serious people from taking Orthodox Judaism seriously.
Rabbi S. said that when he was courting his wife, he bought her a flower a day. "How many girlfriends do you have?" asked the florist.
His wife's sister insisted to her: "A Soloveitchik can't be romantic."
Rabbi S. referred to an article entitled: "A Rabbinic Conception
of Conception: A Tale of Fertility.
He said that if his career in the rabbinate did not work out, he wanted to write headlines for the New York Post.
Rabbi S. said that a gadol must combine saintliness with deep learning in Torah.
After his speech Friday night, a host rabbi hugged Rabbi S. who stood frozen.
The audience laughed.
"Welcome to California!" somebody yelled.
I notice Bnai Akiva (a Zionist Orthodox youth group) using Debbie Friedman ("the leading Jewish lesbian cripple singer of her generation," says a keen observer of modernity) tunes.
This week's Torah portion forbids Kohanim (priests) from marrying hookers, which leaves the rest of us free, notes a bachelor friend in his forties.
It was delightful to watch the horror spread over the faces of the teenage girls in the audience when he said this.
A kid came over to me. "I saw you on VH1," he said. "That's a bad channel. What were you doing on there?"
"Spreading the light of Torah," I replied.
The Torah Portion This Week Condemns Faggotry
Did the Jews at Sinai consider the day would come when it'd be difficult for aging twinks such as myself to practice heterosexuality?
One argument the discussion primer offers is: "Some would say that even if the Torah forbids an act, there is room to be more flexible on a case-by-case basis. After all, the Torah in this week's portion also obligates us to fast on Yom Kippur. Nonetheless, someone who feels that he or she cannot fast for medical reasons can opt out."
Jack writes: "We already have an halachic rule on drinking on Yom Kippur which should help homosexual Jews: It's ok as long as each time you drink it's less than melo logmav... (less than a mouthful)."