Greatest…Guidance Counselor…Ever

The Jenna Jameson story is not a great success story. I mean, technically, it is a success story with the making of tons of money, and the rising to the apex of one’s field, and all the, well, “success” per se. But still it’s not a “great” success story. I mean, when a woman like Jenna Jameson or Tera Patrick comes from nowhere to create her own media empire you have to admire her determination, and business savvy, and all that stuff. But come on, “super hot chick does well in the porn biz,” I don’t know if that really screams achievement of epic grandeur.

Now Buck Angel on the other hand, that’s a story that impresses me. I came across Mr. Angel (no relation to Joanna Angel) in the pages of the Audacia Ray blog that I have been reading for a couple years now. I don’t know too much about who he is as a person, but based solely on his career path I can definitely tell you one thing. This is a man who has some pretty serious balls. And, of course, by that I mean he has no testicles.

Buck Angel, the burly bald man in the photo (who looks as though he could snap me like a twig if needed), is a female-to-male transsexual. As it happens, people without a Y chromosome who can kick my ass aren’t that uncommon. Somewhat less common though are people born genetically female who have found success in gay male porn.

I fully understand that some people might not be too hip on the very concept of porn. And there are even some people who might not be particularly pumped by transsexuals in general. But if you can momentarily put your own psycho-sexual-politico-moral leanings aside and look at what this man has achieved occupationally, you have to give him some props.

To say I’m a bald man and I’m going to make it in the porn world is one thing, but to say, oh by the way, I also don’t have a penis, well, that’s some moxie. And just how strong was the high school guidance counselor that got to work with this career choice?

"OK, you want to be a porn star, well, I don't know if that’s really the type of career I would recommend to a nice girl like you. But, I don’t know, I guess if you feel so strongly about it, I suppose we can work with that... Ohhhhh.. you say want to be a male porn star, hmmm, OK well...uh, that's going to be a little more difficult. Yep. I'm not sure about... Hmmm... Oh heck! If that's what you really want, and you can tell me that you want it hard enough, then what the hay! Sure, I would imagine there are going to be a lot of people who are going to tell you that you need a penis to be a male porn star, they’re going to try to bring you down. But I'm going to tell you that you have something far bigger than any penis I've ever seen. You have a dream! And no freak car accident can ever take that away from you."

As it happens, I’ve never actually seen Mr. Angel’s work. Nonetheless, I was always brought up to respect the dreamers among us so when I recognize him at the Adult Entertainment Expo I go to congratulate him on his success. For some reason though, I misremember his name. I address him as Mr. Adams, not Mr. Angel. If he is offended by this, or even notices it, he doesn’t let on.

I ask if he would mind if I grabbed a picture. With a hearty and infectious laugh, he lets me know “that’s what I’m here for.” We take the picture and I get a sense that this is a man who, at this very moment at least, is happy to be where he is, happy to be recognized for his work.

In what I would imagine was his ever so subtle way of correcting me for calling him Buck Adams, he simply says “let me give you one of my cards.” And with the business card also comes a broad smile, a smile that seems to say, honestly and unpretentiously, “it’s OK if you don’t get my name right, I appreciate the support anyway”.

Buck Angel, easily and without a doubt, one of the 7 nicest female-to-male transsexuals working in porn today.

Disgusting Philistines at this Year’s Adult Entertainment Expo

So here I am at this year’s Adult Entertainment Expo, and let me tell you, I am learning quite a bit about the state of the American cultural landscape. The part of the Expo that I am exploring consists mainly of various booths for porn production companies. They come every year to show off their wares and they bring their Lucite heeled stars with them. Fans wait in lines that snake all the way up and down the convention floor. 10, 20 minutes they wait in line to get a fast autograph, to simply stand next to a woman they have lusted after from so far away. Hopefully she will smile at them for a couple seconds.

Unfortunately, what I see at the expo doesn’t leave me with a lot of pride for my gender. The problem really comes about when I make it to the far corner of the convention hall, specifically the booth for the Adam and Eve Production Company. When I get to Adam and Eve, the actress on display is a young woman by the name of Joanna Angel. With her copious tattoos and multicolored hair she works in what has been dubbed as “alt porn.”

Now, by no means have I seen all of Ms. Angel’ works. Young Ripe Melons 8, Grand Theft Anal 10, Joanna Angel’s Guide 2 Humping, these are all films that I cannot pretend to know. Nonetheless, I do believe I have seen enough of what Ms. Angel does to be disgusted by what I find at her booth.

What I find at her booth, after having to wade through the trite mediocrity of the other booths, is an autograph line that consists of no more than four people. FOUR PEOPLE! This makes no sense whatsoever. As I’m sure you know, this woman of porn is clearly a national treasure and I cannot describe to you the disgust I feel when I only see 4 people in her autograph line.

Joanna’s Angels, the Charlies’ Angels themed porn that she did: Brilliant. Burning Angels, the Brooklyn based adult website she founded: Groundbreaking. This woman, raised orthodox within a Jewish household, has accomplished so much within this industry and yet the fans of AEE don’t seem to care. Everywhere I look I see these unbearably boring blonde bimbos, every one of them with staggeringly long lines and yet here, before an actual artist, there are no more than four people. Is this really what America has been reduced to, a country of tasteless philistines? For shame, porn fans of Vegas, for shame indeed.

I understand that possibly I should make some allowances for the subjective nature of such things. Maybe it’s even possible that I’m the one who is wrong here. Maybe it’s just a case of rooting for the home team since she’s Brooklyn based. Maybe I like to think that every night I’m not out successfully having copious amounts of random noncommittal sex can be offset by the work she is doing in New York. Somehow she’s working to balance the scales. Whatever the reason, she still seems so much cooler than the throngs of overly-siliconed fembots populating the other booths.

Initially I want to tell her what a disgusting shame it is that she has so few people in her line. I really am dismayed by the wretched taste everyone seems to have. I really want her to know that I feel for her, with the not being as popular as some of the lesser talents that I passed by. But eventually I wonder if this is really the kind of thing she wants to hear from a stranger.

Even if your intentions are in the right place maybe reminding someone about injustices they have no control over isn’t really the nicest thing to do. I mean if you’re a one armed Log Cabin Republican or something maybe you don’t really want some well meaning stranger coming by and rubbing it in with a “Hey sir, I just wanted to say how much it must suck to be a one armed, Log Cabin Republican, with the belonging to a political party that actively strives to prevent you from getting the same basic rights that other people have, and all that, and then when they do successfully pass a constitutional amendment preventing you from getting married you can’t even clap for it (being a one armed man and all), so I just figured you’d want me to tell you how much that all sucks. I feel for you bro!” So in the end I decide not to saddle her with my disappointment.

In all fairness I might just have caught her on a slow hour. And even so it isn’t like she is just sitting there by herself doing Sudoku. I just kind of feel like there is an unjust discrepancy in fan attention at the AEE. I decide that I’ll try to do my little part to make her feel properly fanned. Hers will be the only line I stand in to get a picture.

The kind of strange thing is that I feel this weirdly shy, celebrity intimidation thing as I’m standing in line. This is something I don’t entirely understand. A week earlier when Leonardo Dicaprio jumped into my poker game at the Bellagio I wasn’t uncomfortable at all (in fact I was so comfortable that I took middle set about $2000 farther than I should have against him).

So maybe my uneasiness is not so much a proximity-to-celebrity thing. Maybe it just has something to do with this weird social inversion where I am only just meeting someone long after I have already seen her hoo-ha.

I understand that when you’re in a stage fright situation it’s sometimes helpful to picture the intimidating people as sitting there without their clothes. In this particular case though, I imagine that is probably somewhat unhelpful, unconstructively redundant in fact.

Still I find the courage to overcome my shyness and when I make it through Ms. Angel’s short line she gives me a comforting smile. I tell her what a huge fan I am and, as I am wont to do in such situations, I give her a hearty handshake of gratitude. Much later I wonder if this was presumptuous of me to unilaterally take her hand. I just mean some people might find it kind of gross to be obligated to touch the unwashed masses. I bring this up to Christi, and she tries to explain that if you did have some sort of Howie Mandel OCD thing about being touched, then maybe the porn industry wouldn’t be your primary occupational focus. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Anyway, neither my celebrity shyness nor my hand grabbiness seems to bother Ms. Angel. I ask if she would mind if I took a picture and she says that for such a big fan it would be a pleasure. She hops off of her autograph signing chair and I snap the pic. It is at this point that I discover something that I really feel like I should have realized about her but never did.

Joanna Angel, as it turns out, is a tiny, tiny woman. I mean she’s like a mini-person. Like 2 feet tall or something.

Of course that’s neither here nor there. It doesn’t have any bearing on how super hot she is. For some reason though I’m always a little disoriented when a celebrity turns out to be significantly taller or shorter in real life than they are in my head. And in Ms. Angel’s case this forces me to rethink a lot of her work.

I’m not sure if they still use it or not, but there used to be an ad for the Rosewood Grille in Vegas that I would always see. If you really understand this ad, what it means and what it represents, you will probably understand pretty much everything you will ever need to know about Vegas.

The ad consists of a picture of a man in a tuxedo, presumably the well dressed maître d’ of the rosewood Grille. This well dressed man is holding up a lobster that is almost as large as he is. If you had to guess you would assume that the lobster must be 4 feet long and weigh 300 pounds. You walk away from this ad thinking, wow, if I wants me some big ass lobster, the Rosewood Grille must be the place to go!

Old friend Dave Avrick, self professed fat Jew criminal and esteemed professor of all things Vegas, was the first person who told me to look a little more closely at the man in the ad. When I did, I noticed something a little off about his fingers. Staring at those stubby fingers I eventually realized what Dave was referring to. That’s no maître d’ in the tux, that’s a midget! (Technically I don’t know if he is a dwarf or little person or even what the contemporary inoffensive phrase would be (bald footed hobbit?), but whatever it is he is it.)

The Rosewood Grille hired the tiniest person they could find that would look normal in a tuxedo so that the lobster would look monstrous by comparison. Of course there’s no explicit lying involved in this ad. It’s not like it’s a computer generated lobster or latex rubber maître d’. No, it’s not a lie necessarily; it’s just that special sort of Vegas magic that allows a man’s pituitary defect to be artfully exploited to create the illusion of a lobster feast for four.

Since the gentleman in the tux looked like the proud maître-d’ of the restaurant, and since steak houses are obviously, by their very nature, viciously size-ist, it was natural to assume that this was an average sized person and a grotesquely oversized lobster. However, once you realize that the gentle man in the tux is so small you have to reevaluate how frighteningly large the lobster is.

In a similar vein, while it was a little strange to realize that Joanna Angel was so petite, it did allow me to reevaluate some of the more frightening objects that seemed so very intimidatingly large in her movies. With this new understanding of who Joanna Angel is I may have to do an extensive restudying of her oeuvre.

It may turn out that, much like Vegas, everything you see in porn might not be exactly as it seems. Live and learn.

Not Vagina Cookies

This is something of a first. I actually have had posts done but just haven't been able to get them up for technical reasons. I spent the weekend reinstalling Windows and whatnot and if you're seeing this I must have fixed whatever needed fixing. Hopefully this means I'll actually be able to put up more than a post a month for a little while. So feel free to check back more than monthly (this month at least)

Anyway, for those of you who've asked about this year’s Christmas cookies, in the end I decided I wanted to commemorate something that had made an impression on me, a cultural milestone or turning point from 2007. Obviously, like all years, this one had plenty of memorable moments: Military surges, stem cell breakthroughs, viable nontraditional presidential candidates, and the like.

However, there was one addition to the cultural landscape that stood out in my book. While it wasn’t the most politically or technologically relevant event, it was something that really made me say “Wow, the times they are a’ changing.” It was the almost mainstream acceptance of vagina paparazzi.

Now obviously both celebrities and vaginas are nothing new. But I don’t remember exactly when it become politely acceptable to stick a camera up a celebrity’s skirt as she’s coming out of a car, take a picture of her bare womany parts, and then publish it for worldwide consumption.

If a celebrity wants to wear a miniskirt without underwear, and fly out of the limo crotch first flapping that thing in everyone’s face, she definitely has that right. I’m just saying that I can’t pretend to be so hip that at least some part of me doesn’t say “Hmmm, that’s um, that’s, uh… am I really supposed to be seeing that?” Of course, with the rate we’re going I would imagine this will all make me look like quite the mayor of Squaresville in a decade or two. But I have to admit that I am still impressed by how much young Hollywood va-jay-jay that I can Google these days.

Of course, I don’t want anyone to misunderstand me. I am neither anti-vagina nor anti-celebrity. I always have and always will find both celebrities and girl bits to be a source of bewildering fascination, individually and together. Nonetheless, I still want to say that I have always liked underwear as well. I would hate to see celebrities eventually force panties and boxers to one day go the way of the monocle and top hat.

So this year I decided to use the underutilized medium of Christmas dough in the hopes of reaching the kids of today and letting them know that, regardless of what Britney Spears might try to tell them, underwear is still cool! And that’s why I chose to celebrate underwear as my cookie theme this year (that and the realization that if I made actual vagina shaped cookies for Christmas I might not get invited back next year.)

As you can see, I mostly went with the cotton brief as the most easily recognizable underwear icon. But I also made a longer striped boxer for all the celebrities who seem to be spending so much time in the slammer these days.

Of course the one group of celebrities this year that chose to proudly wear undergarments, and then some, were the crazy love struck astronauts. Astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak drove extra covered in her long haul adult incontinence wear. So the Astro-Pampers cookie is to commend astronauts in general for bucking the commando trend with such hell bent enthusiasm.

The red dotty square was just my attempt to shoehorn some Aqua Dots into this year’s batch of cookies. The idea of a children’s toy that put a date rape drug into shinny, candy colored dots, and that was shipped over here from China, had a lot going for it in my search for the most “Wow!” story of the year. But in the end it just got an honorary mention in the form of my failed attempt to make AquaDot based underwear.

In the end you might be asking, did the project on a whole work? Were the cookies well received? Well, as the photo of Christi’s nephew Cam clearly shows, I think underwear, or at the very least underwear based cookies are once again cool with the kids. While they might not have been Tamiflu cool, they were enjoyed nonetheless.

And to prove that you can like underwear and still be a complete badass I’m throwing in this picture of Cam from the Dallas World Aquarium. As his fist full of death clearly shows, Cam is not someone to be trifled with lightly. (I’m not quite sure what mid 90s, spare change massacre prompted this sign, but it did force me to look at the nickel in a whole new light.)

Bonus Cookie:
While I was relatively satisfied with the choice of pro-underwear cookies this year, I did have a back up cookie just in case. The other milestone of note that I felt deserved cookiezation came from TV. 2007 saw 13 seconds of TV that we had waited over 7 years for and that we were still talking about months after it aired. It might seem old hat now, like underwear, but still I have no problem giving cookie props to the final episode of the Sopranos. Personally I can't remember when a blank screen has sparked so much emotion and discussion. So here it is the official Last-13-Seconds-of-the-Last-Episode-of-the-Sopranos Commemorative Cookie (with onion ring cookies).

Bada Butt

A couple months back I’m having dinner with Gene, a friend of the family, and obviously I get peppered with some poker questions. Gene is not really a player but he does ask an astute question. With these new tournament fields being as large as they are, he says, you probably are not going to sit down with many people you know at all. So if that’s the case then how can you cater your game to someone’s style of play if you know absolutely nothing about them or how they play?

I allowed that he had a point. It is very different than even a couple years ago when the band of nomads traveling from tournament to tournament wasn’t quite so large. I remember TJ writing about what an advantage he had because he could remember every player he’s ever played with and how they played. Still though, I explained to Gene, you never know absolutely nothing about the people you see. The second someone sits down at your table they are generally drenched with information of some sort or another. What they’re wearing, who they’re talking to, how they hold themself, it all helps to give some sense of how they might play.

For instance, if you are sitting down to the first day of the 2006 World Series of Poker and the guy next to you is wearing a souvenir 2006 World Series of Poker shirt, 2006 WSOP jacket, 2006 WSOP baseball cap and has a plastic WSOP card protector, there’s a decent possibility that he may not be a stone cold 20 year veteran of the series. (Of course if you sit down to a similarly attired player 6 or more weeks into the series it may have less to do with the fact that he’s a star struck 1st year player and more to do with the possibility that this guy just hasn’t left the casino in 40 days and is too lazy to do laundry.) Likewise, if you sit down and the guy to your left spends 5 minutes dissecting a hand he played last night in a home game with Lee Watkinson this is also going to give you some insight about what level of game he plays. Obviously these are not things that will tell you the full story of how someone plays, but they do give you a starting point to think of their game.

This conversation that I had a few months ago, on the information that players wear, was at the forefront of my mind last night. You see I missed something about an opponent at my table that may have been more informative than any tell I’ve ever run across before, and more obvious than any tell I’ll ever run across again. Having played the poker circuit off and on for a couple years I pride myself on being able to size up an opponent fairly quickly. The more subtle cues may occasionally elude me but I have no trouble catching the obvious stuff. Or so I thought.

So I’m playing a single table satellite last night and across the table from me is a young woman, cute, short hair, spaghetti string top revealing a somewhat tattooed left shoulder. I play with her for about 35 minutes or so until she calls all-in on the river with no pair/jack high and, not surprisingly, gets knocked out. Well, at this point she gets up from the table and being the Clouseauesque master of observation that I am I just then notice the one thing about her that probably would have told me everything I might ever need to know about her game. As she walks away from the table and towards the bathroom, what I so keenly observe is that the woman just happens to not be wearing pants. Yep, no jopke, staring right back at me, nothing but bare ass. When I see this, the all in call with jack high starts to make a little more sense.

I had a friend who once used the phrase "it was like playing in a dealer’s game" i.e. that it was a game where all the players were professional poker dealers, i.e. that it was supposed to be a soft game. See, the general belief is that if a poker dealer were a good enough player then they wouldn’t have to deal to make a living. Therefore poker dealers are lousy players. Beyond just being condescending this is a characterization that just isn’t true. Michael "The Grinder" Mizrazi, Mike Matasow, Robert Hanley, Scotty Nguyen, a number of the best players in the world were all once dealers. In fact to make such a broad generalization about any diverse group of players is obviously dangerous. With all that in mind though I will still give you one piece of infallible advice. If anyone ever offers you the opportunity to play in a high stakes strippers’ game then by all means run, don’t walk, to the nearest pawn shop and hock whatever you have to to buy in, strippers not generally being know for their keen understanding of implied pot odds.

Now, why am I playing poker with a stripper? Well, that has to do with something called (the oddly apostrophied) Bar Poker Pro’s.

Having slogged from sterile hotel to hotel, grinding out this "easy living" for so long I sometimes forget that a lot of people actually like to play poker. They actually do it not for the rent but rather for some kind of fun. And that’s the idea behind http://www.barpokerpros.com/ a business that offers poker as entertainment. Instead of hiring a band or a DJ to get people into a bar or restaurant you hire a poker game. The Bar Poker people bring a table and a dealer and they advertise for a game. People who might not have frequented your establishment come by to play poker and while they’re there they of course might buy a few beers, order a burger, whatever. Playing is free. You get league points for how high you finish and at the end of the season there is a championship for the people with the highest point totals. Then the winner of the end of the season tournament gets a WSOP seat.

They run these little games throughout South Florida, in various bars and restaurants. Next week the game closest to my father is at a fancy steak house. This week however the closest game happened to be at a rustic little pub by the name of Bada Bing. Now I was not familiar with the Bada Bing chain before this and I’m not even sure if it is a chain. For all I know it may just be an unrelated group of bars that haven’t gotten around to suing each other for having the same name. I didn’t ask.

Anyway, I pull up to the Bada Bing with my father and the first thing that I notice about the decor is what looks to be a homeless man sleeping in front of the building. Upon closer inspection though I see that said man is not moving and the police tape cordoning him off would seem to imply that the gentleman is not sleeping so much as dead. Finally though under closer closer inspection I realize that said man is not only not alive but is actually not even a man. It’s actually just a mannequin dressed up to look like a dead guy.

See the Bada Bing is not only a nudie bar but a nudie theme bar, the theme being gangsters chic. You walk in and all the TVs are playing old gangster movies, the VIP room is called the Godfather Suite, etc, etc. Of course my favorite decorative touch was not gangster specific. It was in the bathroom where someone had taken the time to take a red cloth napkin and place it on top of the toilet. For some reason this just really impressed me. I mean I’m lazy. I know lazy when I see it. Sometimes though I find myself impressed by a sheer artistry of sloth and it sticks with me. It was obvious that someone cared enough to think "what might make this space more inviting?" They might have thought about maybe putting plants in there or repainting it or even just occasionally mopping it, but no. Out of all the things that could improve the aesthetics of a dank and dingy space someone said "yep, red napkin, that’s definitively the way to go. Problem solved," and walked away.

Of course I don’t imagine that environmental aesthetics are really what draw most people into strip clubs. It’s all about the ladies, which Bada Bing had plenty of. In fact when we arrived at around 8 o’clock there had to be more performers than patrons. And to make matters worse the six or so patrons that were there were poker players. As the evening went on the place filled up a little more but at first it was just six patrons and two off duty strippers sitting at a poker table.

This of course didn’t turn out to be too profitable for the working strippers since poker players can be a little single minded during a game. When you’re in a hand, once the flop comes out, everything outside of the game temporarily goes blank and ceases to exist. I’ve long believed that a monkey and a one armed midget could be having a knife fight and once that flop comes out not an eye would be on them. While I haven’t had the chance to test this particular hypothesis yet, I can give you one piece of empirically proven truth, cards do seem to trump boobs. Two feet in front of our table: nubile young womany parts; Two feet to the side of our table: another stage with another woman jiggling her junk. Yet not once did I see a player even look up from the game much less miss a hand due to the nudeness around them. Poker players are strange people.

And the really weird thing was that everyone seemed to be having fun, even without playing for cash. I mean no one was losing grotesque amounts of money and yet everyone was still smiling. Strange people indeed.