Nearer My God To Thee

Thane the Profane

Lukeford.net's Unkind Jew of the Month.

Other recipients have included Michael Aushenker.

Thane Rosenbaum's Weird Luke Ford Obsession

He's on this bizarre jihad to let people know that I'm not a writer and that they should have nothing to do with me.

He's losing friends over his Luke Ford crusade.

For months before I wrote a word about him, Thane's been terribly disturbed, even threatened, by little ol' me.

I don't understand it. I've never slept with anyone who's slept with Thane. I've never even shared a kiss with one of his women, nor held hands. Yet he's on this weird mission to persuade people that I'm a lothario.

Lothario was a character in Nicholas Rowe's 1703 play The Fair Penitent, who seduces and betrays the female lead. The name has come to mean any lecherous individual, especially male.

Thane, dawg, I'm just a humble man of God. I don't spend my spare time kickin' it in the hood with the brothers, but rather in the beit midrash with my face buried deep within in the heavenly pages of the Talmud.

Since I critiqued Mr. Rosenbaum, he's been telling anyone who will listen that they should have nothing to do with me. He's told writers who've given me interviews that such interviews betray his friendship.

Thane's out of his gourd. Why do his friends indulge him and send me emails requesting that I remove their interviews? I'd never do that.

The Torah says you should not hate your neighbor in your heart. If you have a problem with somebody, you should go to that person and try to talk it out.

I've politely emailed and called Thane several times and invited him to talk things out with me, but he's not man enough to pick up the phone and talk to me. Instead he emails and calls everyone with the remotest connection to me and complains about my critique of him and his work. He goes on weird lengthy tirades about how I misunderstand him and his work.

His pathological behavior just reinforces my initial perception of Thane as a narcissist.

Now, I am every bit the narcissist that Mr. Rosenbaum is (frankly, I'll match my narcissism with anyone) but I can't imagine making the requests Thane is (asking novelists to pressure me to remove our interviews from my website). I've never never done anything like that. It's absurd.

It's pathetic that Thane's friends are going along with his request. They know it's pathetic. I can feel it from their reluctant emails.

For the record, I am not going to remove anyone's profile on my site because said person wants me to do so in the interest of their friendship with Thane.

Be a man, Thane Rosenbaum. Don't hide behind women's skirts and ask them to do your dirty work for you. If you have a problem with me, send me an email. Write it out. Talk it out. Deal with me directly.

I'm not going after your private life. I'm not publishing your private correspondence. I'm not investigating you. All I've done is publish my opinion that your writing is shallow (though often entertaining) and that your writing reflects flaws in your character.

I don't view your flaws as any more significant than the ones I have. I give you props for being a far more accomplished and recognized writer than me. I just blog. I'd love to write a novel but never been able to. You've published several. You're published by major houses and teach at major universities. You're invited to speak at major conferences. You have friends in the literary big-time. By all these standards, I'm nothing compared to you. Why do you devote such energy to shutting me down? It won't work and it only makes you look bad.

I hope at least that you'll get some good material out of this silly one-way feud.

Mate, I have a ton of lithium I'm willing to share with you. It's helped me out to no end.

Frankly, Thane, if we ever hung out together, we'd probably get along famously. We'd be narcissists in platonic love.

The Porn-Mafia Connection

Kenny Gallo writes on the HollywoodMafia blog :

The whole benefit for Leslie Glass was cool. I really just kicked back with Deven. We all had rooms at the Valley Hilton. I ended up talking with Deven [Davis?] all night. The next morning I had to get up at dawn to drive Jill and Jenna to a Penthouse shoot in Santa Monica. I had to drive back up to the Valley to meet Louie Gelfuso.

We were eating at Jerry's Deli once again. Louie was pissed off because Joe Isgro had refused to give them a loan. Joe had told them he was not Shylocking. Joe was Shylocking, but he was smart. Why loan out cash you will never see. Louie told me he was going to call his buddy Paulie in Denver. Paulie later came to town and loaned Louie cash. Did Paulie ever get his cash back? It is hard to say.

I know that Porno Mike [Esposito] leased Louie a car. I also saw John DeMattia get checks from Porno Mike. Porno Mike was a good sport. I got 50 porno's a week from him. I never gave him a dime. I sold these at the store and would get at least 9.99, but I would sell most at 19.99 so that was worth the time it took me to pick them up.

I did find time for trouble in the OC. Peter North aka Al Brown Aka Matt Ramesy the gay star. Got all bent out of shape over my telling people he was gay. Look if you take a load on film, you are gay! So he had this Bonnano associate Angelo Ales come by to see me. Angelo is a scammer, but not a tough guy. He travels with large guys or a guy. Angelo uses his presence as a threat. He likes to throw out that he is with this guy or that guy. What do I care? I was in California.... So he came by the store. I just shut him down by saying my guy would call him. I told him Matt Ramsey was an asshole.. Angelo was an idiot because it was my place. The place had already become a hangout for criminals.

I keep getting a lot of mail about Peter "Shakes" Milano being a capable guy. Shakes was an earner, bigtime. People have to understand that in order to get made you do not have to actually pull the trigger on a hit. You could be a wheelman or a backup shooter. Then people have to understand that Shakes was the son and Nephew of very powerful Cleveland LCN guys. Most LCN families really only have a few guys who do all the heavy work. The former Boston Underboss that people speak about Jerry Angiulo never did any work. He had two brothers that could and would do the dirty deeds. He also had Larry Bione and his whole gang to enforce his rule. Raymond put Larry with Jerry for that reason. Do you think guys like JR Russo would really listen to Jerry? People can say what they want about Shakes, I am no fan! Shakes has been boss of a family longer than most LCN guys.

I was shooting a lot of porn for this company AGV (All Good Video) that was run by this guy named Eli. Eli was a loud mouth who smoked pot all the time. He used to yell at everyone that worked for him. I was getting videos for my work so it paid off. Working for AGV just kept me in the porno loop, so I knew who all the new people were in the biz. Eli was an ass. He yelled at me and I pulled him aside and told him that I was not that kind of person. He did it again so I just left. True to form Eli soon lost his company. I think he lost his GF, the owner of a large SUCCESSFUL company in the Biz.

Jill Kelly started her own Porn Company with a series called Perfect Pink. It was well shot and had killer covers. The girls were hot! The posters she made were awesome. Deven Davis, Bonita Saint and Jill. She was in business with Dewey [Toshi Gold] from Sacred Pools. I was at the whole shoot and shot behind the scenes footage. I still have it! I was still up to whatever came my way.

My buddy from Florida moved to California. Billy moved into a house owned by Richie the disbarred lawyer... Richie was always good for some cash. Richie was involved with stocks and he was working with this guy we call Stockboy. Stockboy was from Brooklyn and he had worked on Wall St... He was a Stock promoter and he worked the Chop Houses. He had lost his license, but he was working with Richie to merge companies and take them public. This was the tech stock, day trader time. Soon I had a few brokerage accounts open.

Ministry to pornographers ‘crossed a line,’ Mohler says

By David Roach LOUISVILLE, Ky. (BP)--A pastor who runs an anti-pornography ministry and passes out Bibles with “Jesus Loves Porn Stars” printed on the covers has crossed the line of appropriateness in his effort to share the Gospel with the porn industry, R. Albert Mohler Jr. said on ABC News World News Tonight June 25.

Appearing in the news segment with Mohler was Craig Gross, the leader of the anti-porn ministry XXXChurch.com. Gross regularly attends porn conventions driving his “porn-mobile” and says the new Bible, the text of which is a paraphrase of “The Message,” is a way to reach sinners like Jesus did. He handed out his Bible at the recent Erotica convention in Los Angeles, according to ABC News.

“These younger guys seem to say that older evangelicalism is just out of touch,” said Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “In a rush to be relevant I think these guys have crossed a line that I would not cross.”

Gross’ Bible was well received by those in the porn industry, but some Bible publishers have refused to print it, ABC News reported, adding that the American Bible Society wrote Gross a letter refusing to publish his Bible “out of a sense of propriety,” saying the “wording … was misleading and inappropriate.” It finally was printed by NavPress.

Gross said Bible companies “just freaked out” and thought, “I’ve never seen something like this, and I don’t know if we can do this.”

Gross argued that his new methods of evangelism are necessary to reach people in the adult entertainment industry. “We’re trying to reach a new audience, and so we can’t just do things like our parents did, like the generation before us,” Gross said.

Gross also said he believes Jesus would attend porn conventions with him if He walked the earth today. “I believe Jesus, He’d be in the show with us,” Gross said. “He’d be mixing it up with these people. Because He doesn’t look at them as porn stars, or porn producers. He looks at us all the same.”

Mohler said he admires Gross’ intent of reaching people with the Gospel but believes the new Bible is packaged in a way that demeans the Word of God. “It is, after all, the Word of God, and there’s no way to package it as just another book,” Mohler said. “It’s not just another book.”

Gross challenged critics to find a better way to take the message of Christ to the porn industry. “If they have another approach, if they have another idea, come join us,” Gross said. “We’re here riding solo here. There’s nobody else doing this. … Sure we’re gonna maybe make some mistakes along the way, but we’re trying.”

Mohler predicted that Gross’ Bible may end up as a passing fad and said its cover commits a major error by misleading people about the book’s content. “I just have to wonder what people think when they see that cover,” Mohler said. “In other words, are they expecting the Bible or are they expecting something else?”

Holly Randall's Secret Garden

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Holly IMs me Tuesday morning that she has a nasty cold. I hadn't heard from her since Friday afternoon so I knew something was up.

Being the courtly considerate gentleman that I am, I picked up the phone to provide comfort and a sympathetic ear. Also, I was a tiny bit curious about her nude shoot Saturday. Maybe she'd torn a muscle spreading?

Once we begin talking, I only make a passing reference to her shoot because it's not something that matters to me. No, I am not concerned if Holly wants to throw away her life and never find a husband.

A couple of minutes into my phone call, I notice something that often upsets me about Holly -- she is not giving me her 100% undivided attention. She's checking her email.

Now, I multi-task all the time when I talk to her, but that doesn't mean I like it when she does it to me. I am a narcissist. I must be the center of attention at all times or I get upset. I need Holly and company, each day, to tell me who I am so I can act accordingly.

Holly giggles over a photo of a model. My irritation rises into pique and finally anger.

Jack writes: "I can completely agree with you, though I'd never admit it online. I do the same thing and it drives me nuts when women do that to me. A distracted conversation is worse than no conversation."

I cut her off and hang up the phone abruptly.

I'm so upset, I don't even bother to transcribe our phone call. I'm over that.

Instead I list all the intellectual, moral, and psychological reasons why young women such as Holly destroy their lives by posing nude.

It skeevs me out to think that something precious that she once shared with me is now going to be given to the world.

Holly posing nude upsets me and I don't like that.

At 2 p.m., I wake up from my nap and decide to add that she's 15 pounds past her playing weight and that was another reason she should not pose nude.

WillieD writes on XPT: "Uhh, DUC, calling your gal-pal fat--and then making it public--probably not going to score any points. Remember, this is not the woman to who you lent your tighty-whities in Tampa, this is the woman who agreed to borrow them."

Bad_Bad writes:

Wow if Holly dumped that guy he'd be up creek without a paddle, he's very dependent upon her for his positive affirmations. I've never seen or heard of her making snide comments about him. I hope she picks out a character defect of his and starts to needle him about it constantly. She'd have him a babbling idiot (well more so than he already is) in short order.

I would not like it at all if Holly wrote about me as I write about her. I'd feel hurt and angry.

3:54 p.m. The phone call I've been dreading arrives. It's Holly. She's going to ream me.

I answer in a weak defeated voice, playing my passive aggressive card. "Hello?" I whisper.

"Hey, whatcha doing?" asks a playful Holly.

"Just working on my website."

"I want you to meet Bonnie. Would you like to come over?"

A wave of relief pours over me. Normally I would never drive through rush-hour traffic for a woman unless I was in the early stages of courting her or in the certain stages of bedding her. But Tuesday afternoon I'm so grateful that Holly has not flushed me down the toilet of history, I'm willing to fight bumper-to-bumper traffic to meet her new dog, return her DVDs, and pick up some green beans from her garden. That seems like a generous return for 25-minutes roundtrip of driving.

I want to believe that my burden of guilt for unsportsmanlike conduct is dissipating.

"How long have you been sick?" I ask.

"Since Sunday morning," she replies. "I'm not contagious."

"OK then."

I park outside her house. Holly is playing with her dogs in the front yard. I pull her mail out and hand it to her. I am careful not to touch her so I'm not contaminated by her cold, just an outward manifestation of her porn taint.

To think that once we sported carefree and condom-free, oh, I could've been a contenda. I could've been Bob Woodward. Instead I'm the Matt Drudge of porn. And it's all Holly's fault. She forces me to write on porn every day. How I hate it!

I've never gotten to study the Word with Holly, nor play her more than three Air Supply songs. She has always refused my keenest needs. Witchy woman!

No wonder they put them to death in Salem.

If it takes Holly going to prison to clean up this industry, than that is a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

I show up in my black shorts, white shirt, white socks and white sneakers. Holly's eight-month-old puppy Bonnie takes to me right away.

"She likes you," says Holly. "She normally doesn't respond to strangers like that.

"You look like you're dressed to either play tennis or become a martyr."

I have black arm bands near my elbows to redirect the strain on my ligaments.

"Do you think they make me look athletic?" I ask.

"No, they make you look like a dork," says Holly.

I talk to her about monogamy. I wax lyrical about its virtues and how I look forward to its moral rigor.

Well, that's how I would like to remember what I said, but I fear I just moaned about my moral weakness. I believe G-d is keeping me a failure because if I ever attained any success, I'd play around with women instead of staying true to my one love.

"You know the shoot was only implied nudity," says Holly, deciphering the reason for my dark mood.

"I thought it was all spead shots," I whine.

She demonstrates how she kept the goodies covered up. She shot on a horse and in the studio with her photographer friend Beatrice.

"Why does she want to shoot you nude? Is it just what two girls do together like putting on make-up?

"I guess Beatrice is like a painter. Nudes are one of the basic forms of painting."

I explain to Holly that I worry her posing nude will lead her into drugs and down the path of destruction.

"Were you offered drugs to pose nude?"

"No."

Holly yawns. She's about to fall asleep on me.

That's wrong! I demand 100% of her attention.

She's on Dayquil, which relieves her cold symptoms for a few hours at a time.

Doesn't that have alcohol in it? Soon she's going to be sipping vodka, for medicinal purposes only.

We visit her garden. She goes into fits of ecstasy when she finds her first ripe tomatoes. She puts them in a plastic baggie for me along with some strawberries and green beens.

I notice her house is particularly clean. It smells good.

"When was your housekeeper last here?" I ask.

"Not for a few days. It's all thanks to Aria Giovanni."

"Where is she?"

"At a photoshoot."

She empties the dryer of Aria's lacy things. Holly, a B-cup, plays with Aria's enormous bras.

Brian writes: "Luke: Why aren't you tapping that? I can tell just by the way she looks and acts in your videos that she is in to you BIG TIME! She is also gorgeous and seems like a real nice girl. What are you waiting for?"

From Cindisnakedtruth.com:

Cindi-So have you ever had sex in Luke’s serial killer van?
Holly-No. I have never even been in his van. I have never even seen the inside. I refuse to get in that van.
C-Has Luke ever paid for a date?
H-Once when we went to a kosher restruant and he has a tab there. And he bought something else once, I think it was coffee. I forget.
C-I can’t believe that doesn’t bother him.
H-You know what, I can’t believe it doesn’t bother him either.
C-Luke is such an old-fashioned gentlemen, and the way things are supposed to be is where the wife stays home and has babies and cooks and cleans. I would think that part of that would be paying for everything. I guess not.
H-It’s an odd idiocyncrasy with him because I have dated a lot of guys that are just as poor, well I don’t know if anyone is as poor as Luke. Close enough, and I offered to pay and it’s bothered them a lot. It has actually been a major problem in a lot of relationships I’ve had.
C-Do you often hang out at the hovel (Luke’s apartment).
H-Hell no. I have only been there two times and I think both times was because he was sick.
C-Does he really not have a bed?
H-No he really doesn’t.
C-No mattress, no nothing?
H-He recently got some kind of magnetic theraputic thing for the floor, but it’s ridiculous.
C-Don’t you often wonder, I mean I know that I do. He has a lot of illnesses and a lot of problems and takes medication. Do you wonder if it has something to do with the environment he puts himself in? He lives in a Hovel and sleeps on the floor. He drives a crap van. He writes about a thing he hates and that conflicts him. The fact that he eats so many carbs, and sugar and doesn’t eat any meat? That’s all so unhealthy. Maybe he needs a fresh environment and some turkey or chicken.
H-That could be it. But he was raised that way as a child. He was never allowed to eat meat. He was very healthy as a child, and as a young adult. He used to run marathons. And when his Chronic Fatigue Syndrome hit, it’s since then he’s been unhealthy. But he’s had basically the same diet. That’s a good question because I don’t know, I wonder if that kind of hit when he started living on his own. Because he doesn’t have a kitchen, he really doesn’t have anyway to make himself good meals.
C-It bothers me, and I worry about him. His father would make lentil and potato and carrot stew which is healthy. But he eats the glazed donuts and bagels and cream cheese at all these sets and at these writer meetings because that is all there is.
H-He mainly lives on peanut butter, chocolate and banana smoothies. I’ve made him food many times. There is a soy, basil, tomato soup that I make that he loves. I’ve made him food before and bring it over for him, but I can’t feed the guy. I’m not his mother.
C-I know.
H-I do what I can. But I can’t support his eating habits.
C-I know Holly, but it just always bothers me. I want him to come to my house and let me take care of him, just for a week. And say Luke-You are going to eat whatever I put in front of you and sleep in a real bed, and write poetry about flowers. Just to see if he feels better.
H-I know, but he is sooo picky. He doesn’t like this. He doesn’t like that. He’s a vegetarian that doesn’t like vegetables. I’m serious. One of the first times we went out to eat, he ordered a tostado salad and he picked all the vegetables and ate the beans and the cheese.
C- That's funny, you just called him picky. And yesterday I called you picky. You two do have a lot of things in common.

I am doomed to spend my life leaching off women. I don't think that's so bad considering the prodigious efforts I make on my blog for the sake of humanity. It's like I'm a poet laureate and I deserve the thanks of the grateful female.

Gram Ponante writes on Fleshbot:

Ford began blogging about Randall, and Randall willingly agreed to be blogged about, as soon as the unlikely pair began dating.

The rest is in Loftus' site, complete with pictures of Ford when he began looking like his adult self at his eighth grade graduation.

I asked Ford what it was like to be the Written About person for a change. "I am keenly conscious of where I am vulnerable," he said. "Cindi is a friend who would never knowingly hurt me, therefore I have no fear about her series.

"If a friend is writing about me, I have little fear. If an enemy and they are good at what they do (is writing about me), I have fear."

"Fear is the opposite of love. God is love," I said.

"Yeah, but He does not write about me in earthly publications," he said.

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June 25, 2006.

I walk into Erotica LA at 11:10 a.m. and see Alicia Rio. I raise my camera.

She puts out her hand to stop me. "I charge!" she says.

"Press," I say and show my badge.

"Oh, you've written bad things about me," Alicia says.

"I haven't written anything about you [for many months]."

"That's what Dominic says.

"Anyway, I'm not comfortable with how my body looks. I don't want a lot of pictures."

An hour later, I run into Alicia again and she apologizes for jumping down my throat.

I don't try to take her picture.

I hang out at the XXX Church booth with Pastor J.R. Mahon, who I met in Las Vegas in January. Here's the .wav file of our chat.

The Church was featured on ABC's World News Tonight June 25.

JR: "JimmyD comes up [Saturday, the show was open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.]. He's a friend of the ministry. We were catching up. He has new grandkids. Out of the corner of our eye, we see Ron [Jeremy]. Ron is an old friend from the road. We debate him regularly. All of a sudden we have two porn legends sitting at the XXX Church booth and a crowd of people around us. We were talking about kids and wives. It was surreal for us."

Luke: "Do you think you are making any difference in anyone's life?"

JR: "Absolutely. The Bibles were able to spark a lot of great conversation."

The volunteers at the booth handed out over 3,000 "Jesus Loves Porn Stars" Bibles yesterday.

Here's the first page:

Does Jesus really love porn stars? Absolutely. Now that may go against what you thought about Jesus but it is true. You see Jesus loves porn stars as much as he loves pastors, soccer moms, liars, thieves, and prostitutes. In his eyes, we are all the same. We're all just people in need of a savior who can come into our world and fix our messed up lives. The Bible says that we have all messed up. Whether you're making porn, working at a coffee shop, or running a church we are all sinners. And despite this fact, Jesus really, really loves us. He is not angry with us. He is not too busy for us. He isn't waiting for us to get our junk together. He just says come. Come now. Check out what I have for you. A life that is greater then you could ever imagine.

So what you're holding in your hands is a New Testament written in a contemporary language, which contains this radical message of Jesus. It hasn't been altered or changed. And sorry, no pictures for those who aren't big readers. Just pure truth. Just the story of Jesus and how he loved the unlovable and rebelled against the religious rules of the day. As you read through this book you will discover what Jesus really thinks about people just like you and me. You will see how he had incredible love and compassion for the town whore (Luke 7) and tax collectors, and those whose lives were a complete mess. How Jesus handles these people might surprise you.

So it is our desire that you read this book. And don't read it like a normal book. Find yourself in the story. See what it says to you. Figure out what all this stuff means for you and your life. It is our prayer that it impacts you the way it has impacted us and so many others over the ages. It is radical, groundbreaking, and surprising. Almost as radical, groundbreaking, and surprising as saying Jesus loves porn stars. Now get reading.

AVN Editor Mike Ramone writes:

“Just pure truth”? That hasn’t been “altered or changed? Please. The four gospels were written decades after Jesus allegedly existed, by anonymous authors who didn’t know the “historical” Jesus (but assumed the names of his disciples) and who based their accounts on several generations of unreliable oral hearsay – the same hearsay that would not be admitted as evidence into any American courtroom. Small wonder then, that the Jesus Seminar, a large group of New Testament scholars who know considerably more about those texts than the XXX Church or many other blindly faithful fundamentalists know (just as many atheists/agnostics/secular humanists know more about the roots of Christianity than do, well, Christians), has concluded that Jesus never said 82% of the sayings ascribed to him in the NT, words that were, in fact, made up by his followers after the fact in order to spread their new faith via their propaganda.

And based on those texts, the religious right is trying to legislate morality, impose their beliefs on others and most importantly for this discussion, shut down this industry? Now that’s obscene. And absurd.

Tod Hunter writes:

So Jesus only allegedly existed, and he didn't say most of what is ascribed to him.

Reminds me of the old Shalom Aleichem story.

A man loaned his neighbor a plate. The neighbor breaks the plate and then sneaks into the man's house to return it. When the man confronts his neighbor, the neighbor says: "You never loaned me a plate. Besides, it was broken when you loaned it to me. And it was in one piece when I brought it back."

Tod - Not much of a Biblical scholar, but I know faulty logic when I see it.

Mike Ramone replies:

No faulty logic Tod, but perhaps faulty understanding on your part. A good case can be made that a “historical” Jesus never existed, namely that the only references to him are found in the Christian propaganda known as the New Testament, not in any of the more secular histories of that time (the one exception is considered by many NT scholars to be a forgery). But the early Christians who wrote the NT obviously may have still believed that a physical Jesus existed decades earlier (or maybe not: some early Christian sects believed only in the Jesus of the spirit, considering the concept that God could take human physical form to be blasphemous), even if the facts were to the contrary. Ca-pesh?

Tod Hunter writes:

No, I don't. I find it hard to wrap my mind around the contention that a character who didn't exist was misquoted. No matter. I don't turn to Mike Ramone for spiritual or historical guidance.

Tod -- Somewhat amused that I quoted Shalom Aleichem when I discussed Mike's contentions, and he responded by asking me "Capisce?" We instinctively went to each other's cultures to make our point.

Mike Ramone responds:

OK, remove the word “alleged’ from my original post and that should clear up the confusion. Bottom line? A very strong case can be made that the NT is hardly an accurate record of what Jesus said. See, among other works, The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the AUTHENTIC Words of Jesus, by Robert W. Funk.

And another, separate case, perhaps not as strong, can be made that an “historical” Jesus never existed. See, among other works, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus, by Earl Doherty.

Distinguished Bible scholar and pornographer James DiGiorgio (who got into Erotica LA with a JCsGirls.com badge) writes: "It was hundreds of years later that the Roman emperor decided Christianity needed a Bible of it's own. The bishop of alexandria, Athanasius, who attended the first council of Nicaea where, three-hundred years after the Jesus, they decided whether Jesus was man, God, or a bit of both, was appointed the task of deciding which books would be included in the New Testament. His choices remain in place today."

Dominus DiGiorgio sez: "You might also ponder this question -- Did the creation of the NT represent the first, official, anti-Semitic act of organized Christianity? After all, before the NT all they had was what some refer to as "the Jew bible" or OT (Old Testament.) Early Christian leaders weren't about to work hard at conquering the world for Jesus without a book of their own! This was a great way to distance themselves from Judaism."

JR: "If people are filling that God-sized hole with porn, they don't need to do that anymore."

Luke: "How do you keep yourself from getting corrupted?"

JR: "It's not like I look up and see some porn and get nutty. I see through it, just like many of the people in the industry. I see the brokeness that surrounds porn and it just makes me want to be here even more."

Luke: "How much anger and hatred have you received?"

JR: "Yesterday we had three guys from the industry that had a bug to come over here and let us have it."

Luke: "Who were they?"

JR: "I don't know their names. One guy was all dressed in leather. You can't miss him. Bald head. Dark glasses. This was his quote. 'I know the Bible inside and out and you guys are hypocrites.'"

Luke: "Was he tall?"

JR: "Yes."

Luke: "Skinny?"

JR: "Yes."

Luke: "He's the Editor of AVN -- Mike Ramone."

Mike Ramone responds: "Luke, as lawyers sometimes say in criminal trials, you’re assuming a fact not in evidence: Don’t know who JR is talking about, but it wasn’t me friend. I had no contact whatsoever with the XXXChurch guys at Erotica (and I wasn’t dressed all in black either). But I’m happy to know that another tall and skinny guy sees them for the fundamentalist fools that they are."

Luke: "About 45?"

JR: "Yes. Totally dressed in black."

Luke: "Did he stay around?"

JR: "No. He came. He let us have it. Two or three minutes tops. He didn't stay around."

Luke: "Did he have any interest in what you have to say?"

JR: "No."

Luke: "Have you ever felt physically threatened?"

JR: "Not at a porn show. Once at a church."

Luke: "What do you see out here?"

JR: "When guys walk down the aisles and they don't even want to make eye contact with you. They don't even want to shake your hand or embrace you in any way. There's a lot of loneliness and brokeness. People in the industry see that too."

Luke: "What about the porn girls?"

JR: "We have a different relationship with them. When they come to our booth, we do hair and make-up for them. The girls shed a little bit. They're able to talk to us. Our girls go into the bathroom, their break room, and really talk to them. They hear, 'Yeah, I don't want to do this forever. I'm looking for ways to get out. I wish I could stop this.'

"The dudes, particularly the guys who come here as consumers, they're just looking for another piece of meat."

A lot of girls got groped at the show, including the gay executive director of the Free Speech Coalition, Michelle Freridge.

"This show attracts the lowest of the low," one porner tells me. "Guys expect that for their $30 entrance, they can grope a girl."

Luke to JR: "You have to feel more for the disabled."

Escorts for the Disabled is the booth next to the XXXChurch along with a gay porn booth.

JR: "Last year at this show, a guy came up to me and said, 'If you want to help me, you'll give me money so I can buy a hooker. Otherwise, no one touches me.' I had nothing to tell that guy. I got on my knees that Monday and studied the Word. I don't have the answer. I still don't think that porn is the answer."

I hang out at the JCsGirls booth.

I run into Summer Haze and her husband Craig Valentine. They tell me about videotaping Summer's extensive surgery on July 27.

Craig: "Playboy is going to tape it and we're going to broker it.

"They're going to do a hysterectomy, a full-body liposculpting, a full face lift, a mini lift, upper and lower eyes, brow lift..."

Summer: "I'm going to keep my 37 inch hips and my nice booty."

Craig: "We're going to unveil her at Exotic Dancer."

Scott Nails says he is not getting married to his girlfriend Lacie Heart, a Vivid girl.

I'm told that Brett Rockman was having sex with Gwen Diamond in his booth on the show floor Saturday night.

Heather Veitch complains about the screening of animation porn with aliens splooging on the faces of women.

Luke: "You've never had sex with an alien?"

Heather: "No. Just an illegal alien."

Julia Ann has been doing make-up for eight months, her next profession. She dances on the road a couple of weekends a month.

I chat with three Mark Spiegler girls. They slip into his growl and mannerisms.

Mark used to have an office but found he rarely went there, so now he just works from home. Many girls live with him until they save enough money to get their own apartment.

One girl recalls coming in for an interview and Mark was sprawled on the bed. He interviewed her from that position. Once he knew she had credits, he said he didn't need to see her naked.

Spiegler girls say he looks out for their best interests. He doesn't over-work them. He gets them to save their money. He drug-tests his girls and those who've had drug problems in the past often carry around their test results.

I see Pastor J.R. Mahon at the XXXChurch booth talking to a young lady sucking a lolipop. She eventually walks off.

JR comes over to me and Pastor Mike Foster. "That was the strangest thing I've seen yet. This young lady, a porn star, was sucking a lolipop. She takes the lolipop and puts it in her situation down below and then she pops it back in her mouth and says, 'God loves sex.'

"At which point, we started having a discussion about who God really is.

"It was a real porn show moment.

"It was a regular sucker, just like you'd buy your kids.

"Luke, put that in your column."

Luke: "I thought it was unprofessional when you asked her for her phone number because you wanted to counsel her."

JR: "Oh right."

I love teasing these guys.

I hear funny stories of people having meetings with Video Team head Christian Mann who all of a sudden will turn his back on them, print out the definition of a word, and hand them the proper meaning along with a little lecture on the importance of using words correctly.

Holly Randall's Got A Nasty Cold

I call her at work Tuesday morning, June 27, 2006. She sounds horrible.

I tease her that she caught her cold while posing nude Saturday.

Why do women such as Holly, 27, pose nude? She doesn't need the money. She's no model. She has everything to lose by posing nude and nothing to gain. (My guess is that most decent men would never marry a woman who's posed nude.)

Because she wants the attention and she's not willing to do the hard work necessary to get attention for noble pursuits such as non-pornographic photography and writing.

A woman's deepest fear is that she is not worthy of love. By posing nude and getting attention for it (Holly's listed in a forthcoming Celebrity Sleuth magazine's 25 Sexiest People issue), a woman feels desired and that she's worthy of love. A woman who knows she's worthy of love doesn't pose nude (because she puts a high value on herself, she doesn't share herself promiscuously, photographically or otherwise).

Dennis Prager writes:

By showing more of their bodies, women can announce that they are women. There are other ways young women can publicly demonstrate their distinct female identity -- for example, by wearing feminine clothing and other feminine behavior, being a wife, being pregnant and being a mother.

But those ways are increasingly ignored, deferred and discredited.

Dennis Prager writes:

With no feminine role to aspire to, many young women feel powerless. The one area of power left for them is sexual. The more a young woman has bought into feminist notions of equality (i.e., the sexes are essentially the same and there is no such thing as a woman's role), the more she is likely to flaunt her sexual power. It is the only power left to her.

Cindi Loftus Interviews Holly Randall

C-What is the hardest thing you ever had to tell anybody, besides turning them down. You must of had to tell people things that you didn’t want to say.

H-I’ve definitely had to tell this one girl that, we shot her once and then we shot her again a month and a half later and she had gained like 10-15 pounds and she was a small girl. It really showed. It definitely showed in her stomach. So as a woman I understand weight issues, I’ve been battling my weight my whole life. But I don’t make a living in front of the camera. I can get as fat as I want and I’ll still have a job. I told her in the nicest way that I could, "You’ve gained a little bit of weight. I want to shoot you again, and I want you to be in the best shape possible cause I want to get the best shoot on you." I gave her some pointers like spinning class, running and cut some carbs, watch the sugar, no sodas. I told her she was a beautiful girl and she had a beautiful face. You can always work on your body, that is something you can change and control.

C-So she didn’t get pissed?

H-No she was fine, but she took it really to heart. She was only eighteen and after that she refused to eat.

C-You, Holly Randall, are the cause of the poor girls anorexia!

H-I know, I felt terrible. Because then she ended up collapsing and having to go to the emergency room. I thought it was all my fault, but then I talked to her and she said a couple other photographers had told her the same thing. And I don’t know how they put it. But I tried to feed her.

It sounds like Maya Hills.

Asia Carrera Update

She writes on AsiaCarrera.com:

06/26 - Today was a pretty good day. It's a little after 9 pm and I haven't even cried yet today. That's a first so far. I was able to take Catty out to do some stuff today because my loyal assistant dictator bought Catty a dvd player for the car. She loves it - thank you me2!

Ok, since I am not going to vent about anything today, I will explain why I am asking for donations. I know the media made me out to be this financial wizard, and I guess I WAS, at one time. When I was around 27, I had a lot of money invested in the stock market. I had almost enough to buy a nice house in LA for cash, which is a lot of money for a 27-year old kid to have saved up. But then came the tech collapse, the stock market tanked, and I lost half my savings overnight. I was sick about it, but I know bigger and better people than me got burned, so what could I do? All I could do was keep working and keep saving.

But then came another knockout punch, my boyfriend of 5 years got deported back to England, and my world just fell apart. I suffer from extreme co-dependancy, in addition to social phobia, so I was trapped at home alone with my overwhelming grief. I worked just enough to pay my bills and keep travelling to England every few months to see my boyfriend, and I saved nothing.

In fact, I am ashamed to admit, I developed a terrible online gambling addiction, and blew through half of my savings yet again, over the next two years. I never cashed out, because I didn't want to stop gambling - then I would have to feel my loneliness and despair! There were days I wouldn't even get out of bed because I couldn't see any reason to. The rest of the time I spent gambling and blowing my savings.

Then I met Don... and everything turned to sunshine in an instant, I was so freakin' happy every day! We were SO in love, SO fast, it was a true fairytale come to life! He moved in after two weeks, we were engaged after a month, married at 3 months, moved to Hawaii and got pregnant 3 months after that. The happiness just never stopped, it seemed too good to be true! Well, I guess it was... *sigh* ok, where was I...

So anyway, I kicked my gambling addiction after I met Don, because I didn't need that emotional crutch anymore now that I had him. But all I had left was 1/4 of the savings I'd had before the market crash, and I used that to put a down payment on this house when we found out I was pregnant. So the last of my money went into this house. I make a little money off the site each month, but that was just "fun money", to buy toys for Catty and stuff, not enough to pay the bills.

Don paid all the bills, and he was happy to do it. He never wanted me to go back to porn, he wanted to take care of me, and I wanted to be a loving fulltime mommy to his babies. However Don had nothing in the bank either. He was a "live for the moment" kind of guy, he figured "it's just money, I'll make more" and he didn't really talk to me about what was up with the finances. And I didn't ask because it wasn't my business. I was happy to just worry about the babies and not money for the first time in my life! But when I asked him about life insurance and even got the forms for him, he put them aside on his desk and said he'd take care of it when business picked up a little. And of course, as you now know, he never wound up getting any.

Bottom line, I'm scared because we have nothing in the bank. And if you ever read my essay on "Why I Did Porn" on the bio page, you know that when I ran away from home I had nothing at all, and did things I didn't want to do just so I could eat and have a place to sleep. And I have had a deep-seated fear ever since of being put back in that position. Having kids to worry about now only makes it worse! I don't want to be standing on a street corner with two babies, begging for money!! I just don't have the "everything will work itself out" mentality, because I've BEEN on that street corner with nothing, and it is an experience I am terrified of repeating!

Ok, so there you have it, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, the whole reason why I'm asking for donations from you, my loyal fans. And I thank everyone from the bottom of my heart who has helped me out so far, with donations, kind words, Walmart giftcards, baby clothes, books on grieving, and talking to me in the chatroom. All of it, every bit of it is SO appreciated, thank you thank you thank you. Ok, guess I'll wrap this all up with another reprint of the donation info in case anyone missed it: (yes, it is totally humiliating for me to ask you guys for money, but when I look at Catty and my 8-month pregnant belly, I just feel so scared for the future! ARGH!!) There's a spot on my sales page where you can donate up to $100. Or you can use my Paypal Account, to address asiac@asiacarrera.com (that's asiaC@, not just asia@). And for those who requested a snail-mail address, here you go: Asia Carrera 875 W Redcliff Dr. #2, PMB 144 Washington, UT 84780

Thanks everyone, for all your support, you've been SO good to me the past two weeks!! I love you guys!

I call him Monday morning, June 26, 2006.

Steve sounds sleepy.

Luke: "Is this a good time to talk?"

Steve: "I'm just making some coffee."

Luke: "It's 5:50 a.m. my time."

Steve: "Wow. Where do you live?"

Luke: "Los Angeles."

Steve: "Wow. You live there."

Luke: "Yes. Is that incredible?"

Steve: "That place is an abstraction to me."

Luke: "Have you spent time here?"

Steve: "One night. I had a job interview in 1982. I went to some hotel, sat in a room with some academics. They asked me a few questions which were utterly bewildering. I spent the night in a friend's apartment and flew back, not before a drive up Sunset Strip and did a handstand on Cary Grant's handprints, back in the days when I could still do handstands."

Luke: "How do you think of LA?"

Steve: "The whole West Coast. I grew up in Tennessee and developed a phobia of traveling west of the Mississippi."

Luke: "Why the phobia?"

Steve: "I came to the Northeast about twenty years ago. I really like it up here. My girlfriend Sabrina [43 yo] is in Brooklyn. We are back and forth between upstate and down. It's the best of both worlds.

"After growing up in the South with a heat that is so debilitating in the summers, the garbagemen say, 'Throw out your dead!' in the morning, I like the fierce winters."

Luke: "Can you just stay inside or do you have to venture out to teach classes?"

Steve: "I travel between my apartment and the school [Skidmore] and that's about it, though I've become a homeowner recently."

Luke: "I am 40 years old and I have friends who tease me for using the word 'girlfriend.' How do you deal with it?"

Steve laughs. "It's a problem. I've taken to referring to her as my unplatonic sometimes domestic partner, but that's a little clumsy. At 58, it's undignified to say girlfriend. But what are you going to do? We have no plans to marry. We've been together six years now. She's an old Lefty, an underground comic artist. My association with her keeps my hipness quotient up."

Luke: "Have you been married?"

Steve: "I was married when I lived in Memphis. We split up around 1986. We were technically married a couple of years. We were together about seven."

Stern has just the one marriage and no kids.

Luke: "Are you a serial monogamist?"

Steve: "I suppose so."

We laugh.

Steve: "I'm always very faithful to the one I'm with. This last one seems to be terminal."

Luke: "How do you feel about marriage?"

Steve sighs. "It's not something I think about a lot. I married my ex-wife because she said, 'Marry me or leave.' It seemed the path of least resistance. But everything changed once we had done it. I'm not comfortable with the institutionalization of relationships. But if Sabrina wanted to do it, I'd probably do it in a heartbeat.

"She's outdoorsy. I'm not. I'm an old shut-in, an anemic, myopic diaspora type. She's a vital shiksa who drags me up mountains. I've done more globe trotting since we've been together than in all the years previous, which everyone says is good for me."

Luke: "Does she make you feel 15 years younger?"

Steve: "No. She's constantly reminding me of my age and putting me through my paces."

Luke: "Do you wear bow ties a lot?"

Steve: "Not since that [dust jacket] photo was taken. That may have been the one time in my life I put a bow tie on. It was just a clip-on. It was 1986 for Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven. In those days, I was cultivating an image. I've become less of a narcissist in my twilight years."

Luke: "How does your shiksa relate to your Jewish and Yiddish obsessions?"

Steve: "She's tolerant. She's a seeker. She's much more spiritual than I.

"When I was invited to Israel in 2004, I'd never been. It was not high on my list of priorities. Sabrina said, 'You're going. I'm going with you.' When I taught [at Bar Ilan], she came and stayed for a month and dragged me to every manner of a holy place, which I'm better for."

Luke: "Where are you and God?"

Steve laughs. "It's an on-again, off-again relationship. It depends on the time of day and my mood. I've never liked the phrase 'secular Jew' or 'cultural Jew.' I don't think there's any way of taking God out of the equation."

Luke: "Why don't you like the phrase if it is accurate?"

Steve: "I remember doing a reading in Detroit sponsored by the Arbinger Ring [sp?], all these old Jewish lefties who were guardians of Yiddishkeit. I loved being with them because they were old agent provocateurs. They were also fiercely secular and atheistic yet devoted to the culture of Yiddish and kinda Zionists yet devotees of the Yiddish literature I love and read mostly in translation. I remember them asking me, 'How do we teach our children the history and culture and heritage and the tradition exclusive of God?' My answer is, 'You can't.'

"I'm an armchair mystic. My discovery of this mystical component of Judaism I came upon in my mid-thirties. I read everything in translation that I can get my hands on.

"It's a literary endeavor with me but I reserve the right to believe that the myths are real and true even if they never happened."

Luke: "I hate to sound like a Christian, but does God play a role in your life? As a practical matter, do you not do things because you believe God does not want you to?"

Steve: "It's a tough question. It's a tricky business when you feel a strong attachment to the tradition without practicing the rituals. Where's the line between authenticity and hypocrisy? I'll wrestle with that to my grave. There is real mystery to our lives but I'm not someone who pays a lot of attention to the mitzvot. I don't know where ethics come from without some notion of the divine."

Luke: "The New York Times."

Steve laughs. "I do believe in the sacred.

"You're catching me after half a night's sleep. This periodic relationship we have, it takes me a couple of nights to get used to sleeping with somebody else in the bed. So I take heavy doses of barbiturates. I'm inarticulate but probably honest.

"This morning I was reading the Zohar as translated by Danny Matt. I resonate to this stuff in ways I'm not sure I understand. I don't read Hebrew. I don't pretend that one can approach the Jewish mystical discipline without a foundation in Biblical scholarship. I've always loved the idea of the book. The people of the book is a literal concept. The state of Israel begins when the Jews who had taken up residence for some 2,000 years in the book depart. They steal out of pages and back on to the land. It's a reason I've never been able to identify with Israel.

"I'm not sure what the stories of the Zohar mean. There's something of the mysterium tremendum in my reading of the literature. I'm a bookish guy. That's the way I connect. I'm bookish without being particularly scholarly. I have a profound emotional response to the texts. That's about as close to the sacred as I get.

"I distrust myself as I'm telling you this because I don't feel that I'm functioning on all my pistons, so I'll just continue to embarrass myself. How the hell you are going to organize this..."

Luke: "Don't worry about me. This is great. How are your Yiddish skills?"

Steve: "Halting. I have some friends in town who are a husband and wife Reform rabbi team. I used to get together with Rabbi Linda once a week to study Yiddish. She was fluent in Hebrew but it was still the blind leading the blind. It made me feel that I was approaching authenticity. I grew up in the South in a Reform synagogue. My joke is that I thought I was a Methodist until I was 35. It was so completely stripped of the accouterments of the Jewish tradition.

"I came to the Jewish tradition through books. I'd been writing stories, most of which remained unpublished. They had these Jewish elements -- characters with Jewish names. That came as a surprise to me. I did not think of myself as particularly Jewish. I had few Jewish friends. My whole frame of reference was the South. I still like to be thought of as a Southern writer though it doesn't happen very often.

"I had courses reading the standard American Jewish writers. I always had a passion for [Bernard] Malamud and Philip Roth but it wasn't like they spoke to me more deeply than the post-moderns such as John Barthe, Thomas Pynchon, or Samuel Beckett.

"There just came a time when the chords began to vibrate stronger. It's still a mystery to me.

"I got a job doing oral history interviews at a folklore center at Memphis [circa 1982] researching an old Jewish ghetto on North Main Street in Memphis. This place began to reassemble itself in my imagination and became the locus for a bunch of stories and about three books.

"This imaginative territory I wanted to live in was a homecoming. It was a completely self-contained East-European ghetto community. When I began to explore that culture, it included stories and folklore and the mystical dimension of Judaism. I had no idea that there such rich Jewish folklore and these wonderful motifs such as dybbuks and golems and lamed vavniks, tzadikim, liliths, citra acura, and a whole magical dimension that informed this gritty and squalid Jewish neighborhood.

"Being seduced into this world wasn't a choice. Sometimes when I look back, I wonder, 'How did I end up in the ghetto?'

"It still seizes my imagination, even if it doesn't delight too many readers.

"I've got to let the cat in."

Luke: "What was your last sentence?"

Steve: "It was a regretful notion that if you write about the ghetto, there's a good chance the books are going to remain there. Often I think that most of my audience is dead and gone and never made it past 1944."

Luke: "Can I challenge you on that as someone who has never published a novel?"

Steve: "Sure."

Luke: "My hunch is that the noncommercial aspect of your work is not the subject you deal in but the fantastical mystical multiple-thread approach rather than having a single protagonist relentlessly going in a direction."

Steve: "That's fair enough. The Jewish content compounds..."

Luke: "It's not commercial."

Steve: "When I began writing about this stuff 25 or more years ago, it seemed fresh and nobody had much heard of the dybbuks and the golem. These things have oddly become common parlance. So many younger writers such as a Michael Shaven, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krauss, are using this material and they are wildly popular. I'm not sure it is the material as how it is used.

"At the risk of sounding sour grapes, I think there's a way of taking the material out of the tradition, detaching it from that exclusive Yiddish world, and bringing it into a popular arena. If it works, more power to them. I feel responsible for keeping those motifs as anchored to as authentic environment as I can. There's a reluctance to go there for readers.

"I don't know. It's something I brood about. It's my fate. I can still wake up in the morning and wonder, 'How the hell did I get into Yiddishkeit?'

"There's a story by Malamud called 'The Man in the Drawer.' The narrator goes to Russia in the late sixties and meets a Jewish communist cabdriver who turns out to be a closet writer and wants the narrator to sneak his stories out of Russia. It turns out that his stories are steeped in Jewish ritual.

"The writer explains, 'When I think Jews, comes stories.'

"I still have friends who ask me, 'When are you going to drop this Jewish masquerade?'

"I've worn the masque so long, it seems to have become a part of my face."

Luke: "Have you had a period of your life where you were observant of Jewish law?"

Steve: "No. Never. When I started getting into Yiddishkeit, my friends worried I'd show up in sidelocks and a caftan. For a while, I thought if I'm going to explore this, why not go the whole hog?"

Luke: "Why not live it?"

Steve: "The observance is not that important. I don't disparage it. I hate fundamentalism in any form but I have a lot of respect for observant Jews. I have good friends who grew up in homes I envy, where they took for granted, not just the observance, but the heritage, in ways that I will never be able to.

"Going to Israel was a reckoning for me. How does one define oneself as a Jew."

Steve laughs. "The cat wants to be on both sides of the door simultaneously."

Luke: "Were you speaking literally or as a metaphor for your life?"

Steve: "Well..."

Luke: "You have a cat there right now?"

Steve: "Yes. Sabrina has shut herself up in her studio so she doesn't have to listen to me blathering.

"For me, the Holocaust is the end of the story."

Luke: "What do you mean?"

Steve: "The Diaspora was the story I was interested in. The Holocaust made a nice operatic climax to the arc of Diaspora Jewish history. I ignored the State of Israel as an afterthought. It was too messy, too complicated. I wondered what the hell Jews were doing in the Middle East. Then I got invited to teach at Bar Ilan [for the fall semester in 2004].

"Most of my friends in Israel were quite Orthodox. There's no question of identity in Israel [even for the secular]. A kind of identity I was not used to. I was used to the definition and baggage of the Diaspora and the suffering and the neuroses and the self-loathing and Kafka as a role model. You take that to Israel and they say, 'Drop it already. It's old. We know who we are here. We're bold. We're courageous. We're warriors. We're builders. We're all the things that you anemic bookish Jews weren't. I was humbled."

Luke: "How did your time in Israel change you?"

Steve: "My experience was stereotypical. Suddenly you're faced with the existence of a place that is an astonishment. It's miraculous. And a kind of Jew that seemed like a whole other species. Men my age who had seen so much more of life, who'd been in wars, and wrestled with all the socio-political-religious aspects of their lives till sundown every day and lived in history in a way that I hadn't, except through books. I found myself humbled and admiring but knowing I am not one of them.

"My glib line is that I went to Israel feeling insecure about my authenticity as a writer and came back insecure about my authenticity as a human being."

Luke: "Martin Buber said certain mysteries are only available to those in the dance. You've never been in the dance of the mitzvot. Yet you write a tremendous amount about that life. I'm wondering how authentic can you be if you've never practiced it?"

Steve: "I wonder about that myself. I went to New York [two weeks ago]. My friend Melvin Bukiet [the novelist] has done an anthology called Scribblers on the Roof. I participated in this reading program on the roof of the Ansche Chesed synagogue. There were the usual suspects of Jewish writers. A bunch of us went out afterwards. I was with younger writers such as Dara Horn, who I admire tremendously. She's exploring and redeeming Yiddishkeit in a way that feels very authentic despite the fact that she's coming at it through books. I feel a sense of attachment to community with her that I never had. I was talking to her about this. I don't know that she is particularly observant."

Luke: "She's moderately observant [and literate in Hebrew and Yiddish]."

Steve: "She was amused by my dilemma of conscience. It didn't seem to be an issue with her, that you enter that world by the imagination and that it is as valid a means of participating in the dance as any. I'm not so sure. I reserve the right to call myself a fraud.

"I remember meeting Chaim Potok and almost asking his permission to poach this material. He didn't know me from Adam and said essentially, 'Go for it.'

"I've had the blessing of writers I regard as super-kosher -- Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Dara Horn... Even at 58, I need the assurance of writers I do regard as authentic that I'm not just an impostor.

"I'm much more a child of Kafka than of Isaac Singer. I love his paradoxes. That he can write about hopelessness in the language of midrash, connecting his godless cosmically-paranoid vision to a sacred dimension. Nobody can do it like him. That elevates him to sainthood, if there's such a thing as a secular saint."

Luke: "What do you have against linear narrative?"

Steve laughs. "Absolutely nothing. I love linear narrative. I encourage my students at every opportunity to write a linear narrative.

"I guess I broke with my own convictions in The Angel of Forgetfulness. Most of my short stories are linear.

"I love the oral tradition and folklore and those are about as conventional as narratives can be. I know I seem to have strayed in recent years from pure cantankerousness. I'm doing it again.

"I like to play with different time frames. The book embodies a kind of timeless place. If you can connect a secular narrative to a mythic timeless element, that dissolves all times into the same.

"The book I love, a revised New Testament, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude. The message is to give you what appears to be a linear narrative but turns out to be something that was already written and had existed all along. It renders historical time into a universal timelessness."

Luke: "What about the poor reader?"

Steve: "I see myself as reader-friendly. I recently published my only Holocaust story. I generally concede the ground to people who were there, such as Bruno Bettelheim. Cynthia Ozick wrote about the Holocaust. She said, 'The devil made me do it.' The devil made me do it too.

"Most of the story takes place in a boxcar where the character is trying to overcome the horror by telling a story. The narrative moves back and forth between the reality and the tale. And the tale assumes its own reality. There's a deliberate ambiguity between a real horror and an enchantment."

Luke: Some argue that a linear narrative with one protagonist battling the world to achieve something he desperately wants (and in the process having a realization) is the way the human mind best responds to stories.

Steve: "I emphatically agree. It's the thing I try to indoctrinate my students with. That storytelling is a natural function of the human and there are conventions and a design, almost in our DNA. I love that. I believe there should be entertainment and fascination in telling a story. If it doesn't happen in my stories, I regard it as a failure. I don't mean to subvert narrative. Whether what I do works or not, I will leave to my four readers to decide."

Luke: "You get such glowing reviews. How does that feel?"

Steve: "I can assure you that they don't translate into sales. I've always gotten good reviews but it doesn't help. It's pathetic to be on the dinner circuit when you'd like to be on Broadway."

Luke: "May I share my experience of reading you and perhaps eliciting a reaction?"

Steve: "Sure. I'm going to hate this but go ahead."

Luke: "I enjoy the realistic portions of your writing. I feel like I am there in the scene, but when the protagonist changes or it becomes magical, it throws me. Segments of your writing are commercial. I jump into a story and I see everything going on and then suddenly there are rabbis flying in the air and ugly old women with really bad breath."

Steve: "I don't know why I'm constitutionally inclined to fantastic events. It's a matter of taste. The literature of our time that is most honored, appreciated and read is in the realistic naturalistic tradition. That's fine. But it's not where literature began. The great classic American authors were all fabulists -- Hawthorn, Poe, Melville. It's not that as a writer you decide to write stark, gritty urban realism or fabulist or magic realist.

"Don't do that! Stop!"

Luke: "The cat?"

Steve: "Yes. He's clawing the sofa.

"I was writing stories with flying human beings before I fell into Yiddish literature, but in that literature, those boundaries are largely ignored."

Luke: "How do you think spending so much time in academia has affected your writing?"

Steve: "It's completely infantilized me, made me out of touch with real world experience, made me this mewling, puking neurotic. Otherwise...

"It's something I don't know how to measure. I've been doing it for so long. I don't love teaching. If I didn't have to do it, I'd leave it in a heartbeat. But when I do it, I work hard. I'm conscientious.

"It takes a toll. The energy you give to it is not recyclable. I hear writers talk about how 'My interaction with my students feeds my work.' It's bulls---. You give them the same energy you give to your work, but it doesn't come back.

"I guess it is a measure of my failure as a writer that I am condemned to teaching until I die."

Luke: "Are your politics left-wing and how important is that to you?"

Steve: "I'm becoming more political as I get older. Part of it has to do with suddenly discovering we are in a fascist administration. Also, I'm less of a narcissist than I used to be. The more you get out of the way, the more room you give history to pour in. Being in Israel woke me up to political realities. I take history more personally. And yeah, I think it is filtering into my writing in a way I hadn't anticipated. There's a lot more bloodshed in my work than there used to be."

Luke: "There are sections of your writing that are erotic, but the eroticism always gets killed by the arrival of some old lady with bad breath."

Steve: "It had to do with that I have never had sex. I've only read about it.

"There is a lot of coitus interruptus in my stories. I haven't examined that. I'm afraid to. There's an impulse to sabotage the experience of my characters. Often they are sabotaging themselves.

"A friend was over last night pawing the paperback of The Angel of Forgetfulness, and he was saying, 'The sex scenes really are quite good.'"

Luke: "Why do you have so many old, ugly and smelly people in your books?"

Steve: "I'm a geriatric-phile. I like old people. I've been practicing to be one for a long time.

"These are interesting questions."

Luke: "I bet you haven't been asked them before."

Steve: "I haven't. And I haven't really thought about them. In folktales, there's always a hag, a witch and a hunchback. I am fond of grotesque characters. It's a way of endowing characters with mythical accessories.

"I'd like to think I'm in line with the Southern writers I admire such as Flannery O'Connor. All of her characters are grotesque. I also think it comes from something very perverse in my own nature, but I can give it a literary rationale."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Steve: "An acrobat. I could walk on my hands until my mid-forties when the arthritis set in."

Luke: "What's with the flying rabbis in your work?"

Steve: "It's part of my innate hostility towards gravity. It has to do with that passage between worlds and that one can elevate oneself from the ordinary to the extraordinary. With me, there has to be an element of irony, so if you have a character who does it, it has to be an old moth-eaten rabbi who's an unlikely candidate for that sort of elevation in transcendence."

Luke: "What crowd did you hang out with in highschool?"

Steve: "I hung out with the popular crowd but I was the courtjester. I was the friendly hunchback. I did not have a great sense of self-esteem in highschool unlike the incredible confidence I radiate today. After highschool, I went from the cool crowd to the wrong crowd. There were a lot of years in the counterculture, which is a dignified way of saying drug-taking hippies. Those were the lost years of Steve Stern."

Luke: "Which years of your life were the happiest and why?"

Steve: "Oh boy. I could be really corny and say now. There's truth in it. This feels like the first truly healthy stable relationship I've been in."

Luke: "You better say that or you're going to get in trouble if she ever reads this."

Steve: "My graduate school days were a lot of fun. It was unexpected. I came off the hippie commune in Northwest Arkansas and I went over to the university in Fayetville. I'd been a hippie for a bunch of years. They were colorful years, but I wasn't doing what I wanted to do. Once I got into graduate school, I became full-throttle a reader and writer. That was euphoric. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back it seems like an idyllic period. Those were the days when I was pals with the Clintons [from 1974-1976]. They were in the law school when I was in Arkansas. Hillary's best friend was my best friend's roommate.

"I got to know them. I played volleyball with them on Sundays. They were starry-eyed idealists. Uncorrupted."

Luke: "Have you been quoted on the Clintons?"

Steve: "I don't know. Probably not. When he was elected, I wrote a long heartfelt letter, probably the best thing I've ever written. I expected that during the inauguration, he'd take a piece of paper out of his pocket, unfold it, and say, 'As my friend Steve says...' Then I got a form letter back. I'm probably long forgotten."

Luke: "Did anything that happened during the Clinton presidency surprise you?"

Steve: "Hillary was much better in bed than I expected.

"Oh, I was very disappointed. Like everyone, I had high hopes."

Luke: "Were you surprised that Bill was a philanderer?"

Steve: "No, I wasn't surprised.

"I thought he was in love with Hillary. They were the perfect couple.

"I held such high hopes for Hillary, but things like this flag-burning bill she's trying to pass feels like such a betrayal.

"Hillary had a sense of humor. She could be ironic in a way that Bill couldn't. He was always laughing. He could tell a joke.

"I remember my last conversation with Bill. He was always earnest. When you're in his zone, you're his best friend, but as soon as he looks away, you cease to exist. I didn't feel that with Hillary.

"I remember Bill asking me, 'How's the writing going?' I earnestly told him it was going well. 'I'm writing a story about a kid who escapes the Nazis and spends the war in the trees. I'm calling it Tarzanstein.' He's nodding genuinely. Hillary was standing behind him saying, 'Why do you listen to this guy?'"

Luke: "Did you have any inkling that this was the future president of the United States?"

Steve: "There was a sense then that he had a large ambition and that he had the ability to realize his ambition. He was regarded by everybody in Arkansas as someone with a destiny. That's a phenomenon I don't think I'd ever encountered before."

Luke: "Did he feel your pain?"

Steve: "Only on the volleyball court. He was a moral compass on the volleyball court. He played with the law students, all of whom were corrupt. I think he kept them honest. They cheated like crazy."

Luke: "Was he known as a philanderer?"

Steve: "I don't think so. I had a sense that it was a solid marriage. They were newlyweds. They had just bought a house.

"There was clearly a sense that he was marking time."

We've been speaking for 100 minutes.

Luke: "Would you be willing to give Bill Clinton oral sex for keeping abortion legal?"

Steve laughs. "I have some standards. But no. I'd rather let my country die for me.

"Luke, I'm going to have to go. It was fun talking to you. I hope this is something you can use."

Afterwards, I email Steve: "What kind of sexual voltage passes through attractive women when they learn you are Steve Stern, the acclaimed novelist?"

Steve: "I tend to have the same effect on women that Joseph had on Potiphar's wife. This leads to many broken hearts all around, but hey, not my problem."

Luke: "What are your degrees? From where? Years graduated? What is the name and city and year of the highschool you graduated from?"

Steve: "Nothing very distinguished. East High School in Memphis, 1965. Rhodes College, Memphis 1970, Univ of Arkansas, 1976. A lot of dropping in and out and washing up between degrees."

I ask Alana Newhouse, Arts and Literature Editor of the Forward, why Stern has not had more commercial success.

She replies: "Ah, if only someone could figure out that mystery. I presume the decreased readership for literary fiction in general must have something to do with it, but beyond that, I'm mystified. His fiction is gorgeous and funny and smart and dirty -- in short, my ideal."

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin On Chabad

Shmarya writes June 25, 2006:

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin has written a nice little column for the Forward on Chabad. He captures the myth of Chabad very well. But does Telushkin really know what he's writing about?

...What Telushkin does not know – or will not write because it is "lashon hara" – is that both Rabbi Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn and his father Rabbi Sholom Dov Ber Schneersohn, the 6th and 5th Lubavitcher Rebbes, told their followers not to leave Europe for either Palestine or America. The 6th rebbe's position changed only during the Holocaust. That Telushkin does not know this is surprising.

Telushkin was a strong backer of Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, using the laws of lashon hara to silence victims and accusers that he did not bother to speak with, and touting the results of an "investigation" that was never done. I have seen no public apology from Telushkin and no repentance. Not surprising, then, that his "facts" on Chabad are equally tainted, and his research non-existent.

Cassia Riley's Thursday Night Party At Basque

Rayveness Rayveness Rayveness Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Martina Warren Cassia Riley Cassia Riley Cassia Riley Jamie Lynn, Cassia Riley Jamie Lynn, Cassia Riley Charlie Laine, Martina Warren (L-R) Jamie, Cassia, Charlie, Martina, Norman Bentley girls girls Charlie Laine Cassia Riley, Charlie Laine Cassia Riley, Charlie Laine Cassia Riley Cassia Riley Cassia Cassia Charlie Laine Charlie, Cassia Charlie Laine girls Jamie Lynn Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Charlie Laine, Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Cassia Riley, Jamie Lynn, Martina Warren Jamie, Martina Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey A.J. Bailey A.J. Bailey Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey Nevaeh, A.J. Bailey pic Aria Giovanni, Holly Randall Aria Giovanni, Holly Randall Aria Giovanni, Holly Randall Aria Giovanni, Holly Randall Holly Randall Holly Randall Holly Randall Holly Randall Holly Randall Holly Randall Holly RandallAria Giovanni pic Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Aria Giovanni Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Bella Starr Rayveness Rayveness pic Rayveness Rayveness Rayveness Rayveness Rayveness Rayveness Heather Vandeven Heather Vandeven Heather Vandeven Heather Vandeven Heather Vandeven Sunny Leone, Holly Randall, Justine Jolie Sunny Leone, Holly Randall, Justine Jolie Sunny Leone, Holly Randall, Justine Jolie Sunny Leone, Holly Randall, Justine Jolie More Photos

I arrive at 9:20 p.m. and chat with the mainstream publicist handling her first porn event -- tall, buxom, blonde Mallory.

I chat with Rayvness, who says she missed 55 days of her senior year in highschool, but graduated anyway. She took four years off porn (from 1999-2003) to study at the UCLA extension school.

She entered porn at age 18 in 1990. She does about five scenes a month.

The Pets arrive.

I yell at Cassia, "I haven't written anything bad about you lately."

"Not lately," she laughs.

Holly Randall and her wife Aria Giovanni arrive. They talk like a married couple. Everything is "we went here and we did this."

Holly's posing nude on Saturday. I'm so proud of her.

"I'm not looking forward to tomorrow -- my heart is really not in it," writes Holly Friday.

Maybe your heart is trying to tell you something?

"It's not the nudity, it's modeling in general. I hate it."

Don't think of yourself. Think of your fans and your family and how by posing nude you are building a better tomorrow.

"If you have any affection left for me," I say Thursday night as I stand beside the red carpet snapping inane photos, "please buy me a bottle of water and bring it outside."

She does.

I walk inside the club for ten minutes and then leave at 10:10 p.m.

Piracy

Martin writes:

Luke,

Why do I keep reading comments from people like Patrick, that want to correlate the adult biz with legit Hollywood? A social interaction may exist, but as business models, they're only comparable from a far distance.

Look at the piracy issue. Patrick wonders why Big Porn doesn't start dropping lawsuits for copyright infringement, like MPAA/RIAA has. The first difference is money. Not money lost, but money spent by the orgs to pursue these handful of cases. MPAA/RIAA are collectively financed by all the studios/labels and also act as a lobbying arm for the industries, (which is why Dan Glickman, a former US Secty, replaced Valenti and not some ex-studio head). The legal, technical and political resources needed just to pursue the handful of cases they've gone after is immense and would be a huge burden to any singular media conglomerate, which is what Patrick and some others are advocating. When that's coupled with the earlier part in your thread, (real profits v. industry hype), it's not hard to see why, from a purely financial position, a company like Vivid would decided to invest more in offense, (technology), than defense, (lawsuits).

Another thing one must remember, is that a porn company did try and follow RIAA's lead and it went nowhere. IIRC, it was a gay pornhouse out of San Fran. They used the same tactic, (sue an ISP for the name behind an IP address), and were grounded out in court for privacy reasons. So consider the Pandora's box an Adult Video Association of America organization could open by challenging its audiences first amendment rights. If they won, and names were made available in court, these people would probably countersue on the basis that "what I do in the privacy of my home is my business" and the outing of their names and sexual tastes has had a detrimental effect on their livelihoods in the community. So while an AVAA could sue from a purely copyright violation position, the damage to the privacy/obscenity argument could be huge and in turn, give stronger ammunition to State and Federal Justice Dept's.

Studio movies are not made with the same outlook porn takes on its product. You don't see the latest releases sliced and diced for download from a website a week after release. The vast majority of music and film piracy are still ripped from a hard source and then placed online - which is the main target for the MPAA. Technology like iPod is trying to create content parity with fast-n-cheap downloads, but the studios aren't playing along yet. Like usual, legit media is watching adult to see what does and does not work in new technology mediums.

The Problem In Porn

Mark Pornographer writes:

The biggest problem isn't online piracy. The problem is the over-abundance of s---ty gonzo companies. Notice the companies who built their brands on quality are doing just fine. It's the ones who built on foundations of sand and figured, "It won't hurt if we keep putting out s---ty movies with ugly girls." Last time I checked Evil Angel is doing just fine. Anabolic and Diabolic are healthy (and any decline in numbers are due to a dropoff in quality... thanks Chico). Jules Jordan is selling as many DVDs out the door as anything aside from Club Jenna releases starring Jenna herself.

But maybe the public is smarter than we think... that cookie-cutter gonzo isn't that exciting. Fifteen years ago, everyone wanted to copy the "Buttman style" and "Ed Powers style" because it looked so easy. Some of those guys are still around, some are long gone. Some of them are on Showtime. Ten years ago it was the "Anabolic style." Next it was the "Jules Jordan style." Same story.

Sometimes it isn't as easy as it looks to make the whole thing work. But a mix of great product, a good business sense, and a touch of luck never hurt.

The problem started around 2003 when everyone noticed that Jules Jordan (at the time an Evil Angel director/producer) and Vince Vouyer (then at Red Light District), among others, were driving much nicer cars than they were. They thought, "Hmmm... maybe the path to a $130,000 Benz is to shoot hard gonzo and own my titles."

That's great in the 2003 market. But not such a good plan in 2006. It's almost a joke now when you see an AVN ad for a new studio. First you think, "Wow, for someone as tapped-in to the biz as I am, how have I never heard of so many companies?" Then you realize, "It doesn't matter, they'll all be gone in 120 days when the distributors start smelling blood and telling them to go f--- themselves." Somehow I don't see Defiance Films and Vicious Media still around in 2010. Call me Nostrapornus.

Earlier today, Patrick wrote, "I believe the only solution is to follow the model use by Hollywood and the recording industry. Start suing the down-loaders. It won't completely stop the problem but it can make a major impact."

First of all, the music industry (RIAA) and movie industry (MPAA) haven't made a habit out of suing downloaders. Actually, I may be wrong, but I don't think they ever have. They have gone after the uploaders. Big difference.

The adult business needs to succeed where the RIAA and MPAA have failed -- evolve. Though Jack Valenti might not want to hear it, this battle won't be won on Capitol Hill or with "piracy education" in grade schools. It will be won by creating new, profitable, more secure methods of content delivery. That is something the jizz biz has always been very innovative at doing. Remember when the internet was going to destroy the VHS market? It didn't. Porn got bigger than ever. New customers realized they liked it. VHS only died when it was replaced by the DVD.

The VOD market is evolving and becoming lucrative, but that is only part of the puzzle. Vivid just launched a "download-to-own" and "download-to-burn" business model. It may work, it may not. But there's enough creative, smart people in this business that some of these new ideas will work, and will make them very rich. And maybe when it does, they can buy that Benz they've always wanted.

Chaim Amalek writes on the Luke Ford Relationship Blog For Morally Healthy Americans:

I have three friends, Fishel, Rivkah and Leah, who are in a state of tumult. I have tried to get them to behave nice with respect to one another, and while in an earlier time they would at least be cooling off in their respective corners, in this time they each have access to the internet. A big mistake. Let me recapitulate what has been happening:

Act One: Fishel meets Rivkah at a shabbaton (that's sort of a hippyish "happy to be a Jew" celebration of the Jewish Sabbath where unmarried types meet one another to pray to God and prey on one another). Fishel decides, rather impetuously, to let Rivkah carry his tallit bag while walking her home from shul to do a few shabbos mitzvahs. (All of this took place within an eruv, so there was no sin involved in carrying on that score.) Rivkah is smitten with the slightly younger and rakish Fishel, and throws him a birthday party.

Act Two: In parallel with these doings, Fishel meets a nice young oriental Jewess of breeding age Leah (Fishel is adamant that he fulfill the commandment to be fruitful and multiply). Preliminary reports indicate that these two have truly bonded with one another, and across the full range of matters that the torah approves of. In the meantime, Rivkah - who knows nothing about Leah at this point - decides to use her considerable success and influence in the Kehila (community) to help Fishel out, which Fishel finds to be emasculating.

Act Three: Fishel says a few inappropriate things at a social gathering that Rivkah and her friends are attending, not because he wishes to hurt anyone, but rather, to prevent future hurt and to pursue his budding chavura with Leah. Also, Fishel tends to act a bit oddly whenever he neglects to have some fish or meat for dinner the night before, which, for him, happens quite often. As could be expected, especially given the extremely unfortunate timing, Rivkah takes great offense at Fishel's words, and attempts to strangle him with his own teffilim. I, He Whose Name is to be Blotted Out, am called by one of these parties over the phone (a very rare occurrence for me, as people seldom wish to speak with me), and am briefly convinced that I have succeeded in calming nerves. This is important to me, as I would have this Rivkah (whom I've never met) bestow her favors upon me, but that is a different matter. BUT THEN the internet's malevolent presence comes to the fore. Rivkah starts blogging about all of this, says unkind things about Leah (thereby triggering the entirely appropriate and manly desire in Fishel to come to Leah's defense) and everyone is angry with or fearful of everyone else.

As all parties are Jewish, lawyers cannot be far behind. And there you have it. A tale of three Jews and the Internet: Fishel's, Rivkah, and Leah.

The moral of the story? The Rabbenim of Brooklyn are right: A Jew should not ever access the internet. And the New York Times is right, too: blogging is often a very bad idea. If you have any ideas as to how restore a modicum of "shalom bais" to this trio, kindly let me know.

ACT FOUR: Coming soon!

Ralph Peters Addresses Wednesday Morning Club Breakfast On His New Book - New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy

Wednesday, June 21, 8:30 a.m. Here's a .wav file of his speech.

I find out that David Horowitz's assistant is former B-movie actress Elizabeth Kaitan, who stars in my favorite Air Supply video, Making Love out of Nothing At All. I go home and Google her body of work. Impressive! Good Girls Don't (1993), Roller Blade Warriors: Taken by Force (1989), Assault of the Killer Bimbos (1988), Scandalous Simone (1985) and Violated (1984).

By contrast, Ralph can only manage this (according to the CSPC press release):

Ralph Peters is a writer, strategist, commentator and retired military officer. He is the author of 20 books and several columns, articles and essays. A controversial strategist and respected expert on military and intelligence issues, he argues that the United States is actually poised for even greater success in the twenty-first century-if our leaders make the right decisions about the opportunities and dangers we face today. In New Glory , he offers a strategic tour of the globe's hot spots and how we should respond to the challenges they pose.

Peters criticizes the Bush administration for over-relying on high technology and defense contractors in the Iraq war and for not committing enough troops and being too afraid of casualties to do the job properly. He also offers a sharp analysis of what's wrong with our intelligence system and why the changes proposed by the 9/11 Commission aren't enough. He then takes readers far beyond Iraq and the Middle East on a lively tour of other regions-including Latin America, Africa, and deeply troubled Europe-that rarely get serious attention in the media. Drawing on his twenty-five years of experience in more than sixty countries, Peters shatters the dogmas of both left and right in this manifesto for a much more assertive and visionary U.S. foreign policy.

Ralph says:

Do not underestimate the European ferocity when sufficiently roused. Europe perfected ethnic cleansing and genocide. I lived in Europe for ten years.

The only thing the Germans regret about the Holocaust is that they didn't finish the job and they got caught.

United States troops will probably stand guard when Europe ejects Muslims.

...I'm a believing Christian.

Monopolies are always destructive. Religious monopolies calcify society.

America defangs religion. The issues that our ancestor killed over don't come up here.

You can tell a lot about a country by the percentage of women who wear jeans. The more Westernized, the more free, the more women in jeans.

The Koran is a bore. Mohammed should sue James Joyce. The Koran is the original stream of consciousness book.

Whenever the State Department says a country is too dangerous to visit, I know that when I go there, I'll find Australians drinking beer by the pool.

Saudis are proof of the banality of evil.

Donald Rumsfled couldn't have screwed [the Iraqi occupation] any worse.

Many in the media have an interest in the U.S. failing in Iraq.

I'm cautiously optimistic.

I've split my vote over the years between Republicans and Democrats, but now there are no Democrat leaders, except Joe Lieberman.

The Iraqi experiment with democracy may fail because of the Arab genius for failure.

Iraq is worth the investment.

I was an early feminist because I figured out by the time I got to college that it made dating cheaper and easier.

It's unAmerican to condemn an entire group of Americans (in this case Muslims) because of the bad behavior of a few.

I'm a former soldier. I'm all for killing the bad ones, but don't kill the wrong ones or your problems will get bigger.

I think Islam is a degenerate religion but I'm not crazy about Revelation either. It's the most dangerous religious text ever written because it is vague and open to many interpretations and because it is mean.

All religions are dangerous.

Osama Bin Laden is closer to Revelation than to the Koran.

From Medialifemagazine.com June 17, 2005:

Ugly George is making a comeback. The infamous New York pornographer, who had a late-night cable access show from the ‘70s all the way into the early ‘90s, wants to get back on the air, according to report in today's New York Post. Ugly George, whose real name is George Urban, was known for searching the streets of New York for women willing to get naked for his late-night show. Over time the show gained such cult status that he was able to snag interviews with celebrities like John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as a number of politicians. No surprise, a favorite topic was the First Amendment. Ugly George says he's now gathered fresh interview footage and that the new incarnation of his show will be available on satellite for cable operators sometime during the next couple weeks. His web site, UglyGeorge.com, warns visitors that it’s “Not for minors or commie pinkos.”

Link Link Pic Pic 

George (born June 13, 1941 according to IMDB) calls me Monday night, June 19: "You may be richer than I am but I'm more famous. Is that true?"

Luke: "I have no money."

George: "Just good looks."

Luke: "I hope so.

"When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

George: "Many different things, least of all a guy who picked up girls and got 'em nude. I wanted to save society. I wanted to save America from the baddies. I want to kill the commies. All the things I was taught to do in my straight borsch-belt right-wing American upbringing."

Luke: "When were you born?"

George: "Depends upon whom you talk to. I don't want to make fun of journalists, but sometimes they lie. I know the guy who started the Biography series on A&E. It's full of crap. Journalists write what they want to write. Every journalist provides his own answer."

Luke: "What do you say?"

George: "I don't say anything. You've got to understand, Luke, that I am in New York, the so-called capitol of journalism. I've been interviewed a hundred times. Every time the journalist has his preconceived ideas of what he's going to say before they interview me. They want me to confirm what they think already. If I say anything different, they say, 'Oh, you're just lying to cover it up. You really mean this.'

"I've learned to answer 'Yes' sarcastically. I'm asked, 'You really love women with large breasts?' I say yes. They say, 'You really hate women. You despise them. Picking them up and filming them is your way of disguising that you really despise women.' I say yes. They say, 'You're always surrounded by women but underneath you're secretly gay.' I say yes.

"That's what you do in New York when you talk to wiseass journalists who have their own agenda."

Luke: "Have you encountered any journalists that you respected and trusted?"

George: "Very few. One guy you're probably too young to remember -- Hugh Downs. I'm in the land of liberal big-mouth hypocrisy. No one here in journalism is a conservative. Hugh Downs was one of the few journalists who not only wanted to interview me, but said hello to me on camera and signed a model release. He was on ABC with Barbara Walters, a typical big-mouth phony liberal. She would never say hello to me. She ran away from me. I can give you a hundred journalists who ran away rather than talked to me, like Dan Rather."

Luke: "Are you still a conservative?"

George: "I am anything anyone wants me to be. I am a real person. I pick up real girls. That's why the show was called 'Truth, Sex and Violence.' You know that many years ago there was a lot of controversy and people said there was too much sex and violence on television.

"You're aware that there are a thousand websites imitating me without real girls. Almost all those girls are contacted in advance or paid in advance or plied with drugs and liquor in advance. It's set up.

"When people watch my show, they say, 'This is real. This girl doesn't want to pose nude and he's talking her into it. She doesn't want to go into a hallway.' No girl ever said yes to me. Not one. I had to be a great psychiatrist and figure out when they said no, what they really meant by that.

"Girls with great bodies in New York get hit on 50 times an hour. The last thing they are looking for is a guy coming up with a camera who says, 'Let's go into a hallway and pose nude.' They're used to guys coming up to them handing them business cards and saying, 'Do you know who I am? Do you know who I know? I know Mike Ovitz. Do you know that I am best friends with David Letterman and I'm going to get you on the show.' The name dropping here is unbelievable. 'I know Luke Ford. You should come into a hallway and give me a BJ because I know Luke Ford.' Your name is dropped fifty times an hour here."

Luke: "Which values have you retained from childhood?"

George: "God, country and the American way.

"Did you look me up on the net? Did you put quotes around 'Ugly George?' Did you see the unimportant people who put 'Ugly' in front of their name to get noticed? Did you notice that one of the most unimportant is a guy named George W. Bush? I know a journalist in Washington and I asked him to relay this to the president: 'Mr President, you're just the president of the United States but I'm a sex star. I outrank you.' Apparently he's gotten that message.

"You may have noticed Ugly George Steinbrenner, Ugly George Clooney, Ugly George Lucas and so on.

"The word 'Ugly' is becoming one of the most used words on the net for the sole purpose of getting on my search pages, which I'm proud of."

Luke: "How often has the scorn that you've endured gotten to you?"

George: "I have the greatest weapon in the world -- it's called the TV camera. Rather than shoot people, which I might like to do... I have people come up to me and say, 'You're filthy and disgusting and how dare you have that show on cable. How dare you pick up those girls.' I resist the urge to punch them in the mouth or shoot them. I whip out my camera and say, 'Would you like to say that on camera?' They run away. They do not want to be on the show that they are watching.

"Teddy Roosevelt and I say that the television camera and cable TV is a bully pulpit. It scares the s--- out of phoneys. If I'm on a moral crusade, it is to unmask phoneys. Nearly everyone likes sex of one sort or another, but only in New York are they loudmouth about it. Only in New York do they say, 'I love my wife. I love my husband. I wouldn't watch a show like yours.'

"Notice that they all know who I am."

Luke: "I've read on the web that you've been homeless."

George: "They write all kinds of crap."

Luke: "Is it true?"

George: "It's not true at all but it doesn't matter.

"LA is not as ethnic as New York, but do you know that a lot of Polish peasants came to New York a hundred years ago and they were the poorest and stupidest Poles. They found out quickly that the rents were cheaper if you lived in the basement. They spun a whole lot of Polish jokes. In LA, you may not be familiar with them. There are a lot of Polish jokes on the show. I call a basement a Polish penthouse.

"Did you see the picture of me with Andrew Cuomo? You see a little grey in my hair. You see I'm a little fatter than I used to be. But I'm still doing it.

"I don't know if you know who Mario Cuomo was? Our governor here. This is his son who wants to be the next attorney general. He came over to me and stood next to me for the sole purpose of getting his picture in the paper and helping his campaign. When I say have an effect, I mean I have an effect.

"Everybody used to watch the show in Manhattan. I used to wipe out the networks three nights a week. The networks were predictable. You knew what was going to happen. I invented reality TV. On my show, you never knew when the girl was going to do it or not do it. It would happen many times that I'd be in a hallway and the girl would be smiling and I'd get her bra half off and she'd say, 'My God, I can't do this. What kind of girl do you think I am?' She'd button up and run out of the hallway."

Luke: "If you didn't go into your line of work, what do you think you would've done with your life?"

George: "I could've been an undertaker or a garbage collector. I could've been a college professor, but I said, 'Do I want to spend the rest of my life behind a desk with some morons? Or do I want to be out in the streets in the beautiful hot stinking New York summer and the freezing snow in winter to document hot girls?'

"When I started, New York had 73 channels on cable. The Nielsen people told me quietly that I was getting 66% of the ratings.

"The trouble was I was ahead of my time. None of the big-mouth liberals would come out and support me with money. But now I'm getting close to streaming my old shows and new shows on uglygeorge.com."

Luke: "How has your line of work affected your relationships with women?"

George laughs. "I'm glad you asked me that. I live in liberal-land. Many many women say to me -- you know I'm liberated. I'm not a conservative from middle-America. I am a hip woman. We have a relationship but I know you have other girls you have to pick up, and we'll have a relationship in spite of that.

"Every time, I'd say, 'You know I'm not in love with this girl. But my show has to go on. I have to pick up other girls.'

"So they'd break off and say, 'I'm liberal but I can't spend time with a guy who chases other women.' So, so much for liberalism."

Luke: "Do you think it is possible for you to meet the kind of woman you'd give up your work for?"

George: "No. That would never happen.

"Most people in the Adult industry like women but they like money better. After a while, it becomes like a job for them. They go to the office and they wear a suit and they look at pictures of naked women all day long. At 5 p.m., they go back to the suburbs. That's not what I do. I'm on duty 24-hours a day with my silver suit and my backpack."

Luke: "How do you decide what is right and what is wrong?"

George: "What do you mean what is right and what is wrong?"

Luke: "How do you decide what is right and what is wrong?"

George: "I never force anybody. My backpack is very heavy. It happened many times in the past that some disgruntled woman would run over to the cop and she would say, 'Officer, I want that man arrested. He tried to drag me into a hallway and rip my clothes off.'

"After I got finished taking a picture of the cop and his badge number, I'd say, 'Listen, wise-ass. Pick up this camera.' Every once in a while, I'd get one to do it. I'd say, 'Do you see how heavy this camera is? Sixty five pounds. Do you think I could chase anybody and drag them if they didn't want to be dragged?' As you know, you need some light to take pictures in a hallway.

"You can never do anything wrong. They know what is going on, even though they say they don't.

"You know about guilt? Later on they would say, I didn't really do it. He dragged me into the hallway and ripped my clothes off.

"Do you remember Dana DeLany from China Beach [TV series from 1988-91]? I had met her and tried to take her into a hallway. Not a helluva lot happened. She said, 'I'm going to be a big star. I can't do this. It would destroy my reputation.'

"Years later, she wound up on China Beach. If you remember the series, she got her blouse opened every week on China Beach.

"When she was promoting the movie Exit to Eden, a bomb, she was going around talkshows. She didn't have a lot to say. One day she's asked, 'Dana, you're a well-built girl. You're pretty. Did you ever meet a guy named Ugly George?'

"She said, 'Did I ever meet him? He tried to drag me into a hallway and ripped off my clothes and he said, 'You're going to be nothing if you don't pose nude.'

"It made US magazine. It made 50 other magazines.

"Suddenly, she gets an inspiration. Why doesn't she embroider the story? Every time she went around getting publicity on the news, the story got bigger and bigger.

"I understood she had something to sell. But a lot of girls, I don't appreciate it. I get them in a hallway. I set the lights. I walk into the picture and we get it on.

"Later they say, 'He had a light on. I thought he was kidding. I had no idea. He put a microphone in my face but I didn't know what it was.'

"They present it as though they took advantage of me and they couldn't get away from me."

Luke: "How do you approach women? What do you say to them?"

George: "There's no one thing. This is why I'm the greatest psychologist in history. You can't go up to girls and give the same line every time. You have to read them. The Beach Boys say, 'Good vibrations.' You have to read their vibrations and work with them.

"Many guys say to me, 'If I had a big camera, I could do it too.' I've been responsible for more nerds buying cameras than any other guy in history. And they still can't make it with the chicks. Everybody thinks it's just the camera. I like to say it's my stunning personality."

Luke: "How many women do you think you've been with in your life?"

George: "Over 400. I have videotapes of every one of them."

Luke: "You've never done it with a woman you haven't videotaped?"

George: "That's the exception that proves the rule.

"There's a tremendous amount of guilt in New York. Plus, you have large ethnic families. Every once in a while, there's an incredibly stunning woman and she says to me, 'The family would never forgive me.' A good example is [the 2002 movie] My Big Fat Greek Wedding where she says, 'My family is my life.' We have a lot of that here.

"Every once in a while we have a woman who is up to my standards who says, 'Please, put the camera away.'

"Once in a while, I lower myself to do that."

Luke: "Why do women do this with you?"

George: "They like my honest approach. This being New York, 80% of guys try to impress women with their money. I have no diamond rings. I have no limousine. I have no chauffeur, no cadillac. If I'm not taking them into a hallway, I'm taking them into a basement.

"I consider the lowest form of life on earth a beautiful female who's taking acting lessons. My idol is that Los Angeles native Marilyn Monroe. She didn't worry too much about acting lessons. She knew what the guys wanted and that's why she became a big star.

"Of course I can't say this to you over the phone but I interviewed her husband Arthur Miller, the last man who went to bed with Marilyn Monroe, two days before he died. And off-camera, he told me quite a bit about her.

"Marilyn Monroe became the biggest female star of the 1950s because she did what she had to do.

"Most women with beautiful figures who want to be actresses work as a waitresses. I consider that worse than being a prostitute.

"Marilyn never waited on table for one day in her life. She always managed to get work, one way or another, in her chosen field. What did she say? 'I have a beautiful body. You want my body. Let me use it to get somewhere.'

"Whereas we have hundreds and thousands of women walking around with portfolios saying, 'I'm going to be an actress but I'm not going to use my beautiful body.'

"Every once in a while, I pick up a beautiful wanna-be actress and I get her nude and she says, 'Gee, I hope this doesn't destroy my career.' I say to her, 'You mean your career as a waitress?'

"I'm on everything. I'm on all the talkshows from Jerry Springer on down. Every woman I've ever picked up and stayed with me long enough got on a talkshow. She could've never done that on her own. Only with me. I'm proud of that."

Luke: "What are the differences in sexuality and getting naked between Jewish women, Catholic women, Protestant women, Hindu women?"

George chuckles. "I'm glad you asked me that. Jewish women say, 'I shouldn't have let him take my picture.' My show would come on at 11:30 p.m. I'd get calls many times at 11:35 and it would be some Jewish woman, 'George, George, my Uncle Hymie just called. He said he doesn't watch the show. He just happened to turn to it by accident. And he saw me on the show and he called me up and said, 'Rachel, why would you do shmutz like that?'

"I had many guilty calls like that.

"Protestants are the best because the only Protestants in New York are wealthy Protestants and they have less guilt and more brains than anybody else.

"Catholic women have been browbeaten by the nuns. You know another word for nun? Lesbian. 'Those men want young girls for sex. You shouldn't let me touch your body.' Meanwhile, the nun is trying to touch her body.

"I've had many Catholic girls say to me, 'I went into a hallway and posed nude for you and we had a little sex and I shouldn't have let that happen. Now I'm going to burn in hell because he told the father confessor and he told the mother superior. I am doomed for eternity. They have all this bulls--- about purgatory and burning in hell and it's usually about sex.

"One of the biggest rabbis in New York a few years ago was a so-called expert in ethics. He was invited to synagogues all over the country to talk about ethics.

"He was flying somewhere. There was a ten year old girl sleeping under a blanket and he molested her and got arrested. They called off the lecture.

"The people who are the most vociferous against me have the most to cover up.

"I discovered this 1910 silent movie (A Soul for Sale?) about an alleged crusader against sex. At that time they called it the white slave trade. It turns out he's the owner of a secret whore house. In 1910, they knew that those who were loudest are the biggest hypocrites.

"We have a lot of rabbis here who are always yelling and screaming and with young Jewish girls, it is always about sex. What else would they talk to young girls about than sex? They don't talk about the opera. They're always talking to young girls about not giving their bodies away, especially not with a shaygetz [a Gentile man]. Because if you do, you might get pregnant and you might burn in Gehenna."

Luke: "Have you had any experiences with Orthodox Jews?"

George: "Oh yes. I hope you're not shocked, but I was actually in bed with an Orthodox girl from Stern College. She had a gorgeous body. She said to me, 'You're not Orthodox,' and she tried to push me out of her. 'I shouldn't let you do this. You're not Orthodox.'"

Luke: "Are you Jewish?"

George: "Yes and no. It's a difficult question. I didn't grow up that way but I found out about my heritage."

Luke: "I'm interested in getting more of your insights into the different reactions you get from Jews, Protestants and Catholics?"

George: "Where would all three of those religions be without guilt and hell? If you read the Torah and the scriptures and Maimonidies, they have a lot to say about loose women. But that was before cameras.

"You see the word 'harlot' all the time in the Bible. What they meant was that a woman would do something in a tent and somebody may or may not find out about it. But now we have cameras and cable TV and the internet and all that. For thousands of years, a Jewish woman could do something and no one would know about it. Now there are no tents left to close because it is on television. A woman could be on my show for a fwe minutes and a 100,000 people could record it off the air. Then they'd make dubs and send them to their rabbi in Jersey.

"I'm about to be seen and heard by 50,000,000 people around the world. And it doesn't show any nudity. John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

"I was at a big movie premiere years ago. John came up to me and tugged on my sleeve. He said, 'Aren't you Ugly George, the fellow who gets the babes nude on television? Me and Yoko have been watching your show.

"I turned the camera on and he did the dirtiest interview he ever did.

"I don't know if you're familiar with public access cable but it's huge in New York. I had the biggest show. I had 600,000 viewers in Manhattan alone. John knew it. We talked about hard-ons and wanking. Do you know what wanking means? It was not the standard interview. Somebody recorded it off the air. Legally, I'm trying to track them down but there's nothing I can do about it yet. They've announced they're going to put it on the internet for 50,000,000 Beatles fans around the world.

"I met John later. He said, 'Aside from the publicity, you know the real reason I asked you to interview me? I live at The Dakota [elite Manhattan apartment house]. I wanted to see how many of my phony neighbors would say to me, 'John, what were you doing on that dirty show with that fellow Ugly George?'

"He told me some of the names and I plotzed. From Goldie Hawn on down, who knocked on his door or ran into him in the lobby.

"Anybody can do a porno show. It depends on how much money they will pay as to what the girls will do. I meet regular girls, nice girls. They're not porno stars.

"I had the top people in New York City, and, because New York is like the capitol of the world, the top people in the world watching my show. They'd make copies of my show and bring them back to Saudi Arabia where it's completely illegal.

"A guy admitted to me when he was the attorney for the House Committee for Telecommunications, his job was to go to New York three nights a week, tape my show, duplicate copies, and quietly hand it out to Congressmen."

Luke: "Do you have any children?"

George: "My stock answer, which is probably true, is that I have 14 illegitimate children. You'd be amazed at how many kids come up to me and say, 'You know you're really my father. My mother told me all about you.'"

Luke: "How would you feel about your daughter doing things with a guy like you?"

George: "This is America. It's her decision. I just hope she would do it right.

"Fifty percent of the time when a young woman tells me that her mother went to bed with me, the daughter will go to bed with me. I have no idea if these girls are really my daughters or not."

Luke: "If the girl was really your daughter, would you still want to have relations with her?"

George: "No. But if she did something with some other guy and it made her famous, it would be a good thing. It would advance her. We return again and again to Marilyn Monroe and other actresses who use their bodies to climb to the top."

Luke: "How do you feel about gay marriage?"

George: "Being the libertarian that I am, that's their business, not my business."

Luke: "What about human - animal?"

George: "If the dog doesn't object... It's up to the dog.

"I know some guys who are married to some dogs. They're human. But any port in a storm. You'd be amazed at how many guys are married to ugly women because they know they won't stray."

Luke: "How do you deal with the angry fathers, brothers, husbands?"

George: "After I get my axe out and murder them, I forgive them. I say, 'The girl made a decision. What does that have to do with anybody else?' I'm a libertarian hippie."

Luke: "What do you love and hate about your life today?"

George: "I hate not having enough bread. I hope that will change soon. I hate watching everyone else take my thing, do it in a money way, do it with a tuxedo on, fake these reality TV shows... Not too many years ago, Sarah Jessica Parker walked up to me on the street and she all but admitted that I was the inspiration for Sex in the City and Real Sex.

"A few years ago, I met Norman Mailer. He thought I was great. He got money. He did a movie. It bombed.

"Time magazine asked a writer to do a story about me. The writer (Dean Brelis) was very annoyed. He came over to my studio and he barely concealed his contempt for me. 'Do you understand I'm a highbrow writer. I've written about presidents and prime ministers and the biggest people in the world. Somehow the editor of Time assigned me to you, you a public access guy who goes around and picks up girls on the street.'

"Like a lot of writers, he didn't live in the city. He lived in the suburbs. He didn't have a chance to see my show. He considered it so far beneath him, he practically insulted me to my face.

"We walked down Fifth Avenue. He said, 'I'm going to give you the acid test. I'm going to follow you by about ten paces. Don't acknowledge me. Don't turn around and talk to me. Just pretend I'm not there.'

"I started to chase a few girls. Not ten minutes passed, and he rushes up to me and says, 'Let's go into that coffee shop. I don't want to talk to you on the street.'

"His whole attitude changed. His face lit up completely. He said, 'George, I now see why I was told to do a story about you. You don't know these people but that was the president of Chase Manhattan who passed by. I know him because I did a story about him. He passed by with the vice-president. He kept a straight face while you walked by with the camera. As soon as you passed, they laughed and said, 'Did you see the tits on the babe Ugly George picked up last night?'

"And then it was the head of the stock exchange and Father So-and-So.

"Unfortunately, Time magazine never did the story.

"He said, 'The way you appeal to people in high places is unbelievable. Too bad they're all in the closet and they're not going to admit it.'

"I don't want to name a lot of names to you, especially over the phone. Kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers..."

Ugly George emails June 20:

Hollywood Porn Ignores UG: Good 2 rap 2 U last night. As noted, besides Mike Tolkin writing of me in the NY "Village Voice" c.Feb '77 and ignoring me in 'The Player'; another cat with a very high opinion of himself named John________(when I remember I'll email u) also went on the spend million$$ on a failed Hollyw. flick--ignoring me completely, c.1984. Have u ever noticed that Hollyw. fails UTTERLY when it tries to do the Porn World without Ugly George? I know virtually every Player who ever worked in NYC, from Jonny Wadd on down. Linda Lovelace REFUSED to go on another mindless talk show when she saw me in the Green Room & knew I would explode her bullshit tale of drugs & enslavement. So I'm left out of "Hardcore," "Notorious Betty Page," "Inside Deep Throat" (ad nauseam)--and they FAIL at the B.O. It seems that Suits and Accountants think they know everything -- when Ugly George video'd and slept with every 2nd femme Adult Star except Lovelace. Did screenwriters ever do that? So how could they make a Hit Movie? Check your mailbox for the Emmy.

1985's documentary "Rate It X" was assembled out of pieces on a NYS Arts Council Grant; I was cut in together with Arnold Schwartenegger. Whatever happened to Arnie-did he find work in Calif? As you see from my last attachments, all my Classic footage is now golden. as soon as I get a cash advance from a distributor, I will intercut that footage with today's pickups--and the new DVD will sell 4ever!

Living in the Image of God: Jewish Teachings to Perfect the World: Conversations with Rabbi Irving Greenberg

Many of Orthodoxy's best known rabbis such as Yitz Greenberg, David Hartman, Emmanuel Rackman and Joseph Telushkin (all are favorite thinkers of mine except for Hartman) have almost no role and no influence on Orthodox Judaism (because they swung so far left in religious terms).

Greenberg got a lot of press for saying that the Holocaust changed the nature of the covenant between Jews and God. Because God did not keep up his end of the deal to keep Jews alive, He had to be more forgiving of Jews who did not live up the Torah's demands.

This is the type of fancy talk that theologians and other intellectuals love but it is meaningless. Why is the death of six million Jews in Europe during WWII change the covenant but the destructions of tens of thousands by the Romans two thousand years not change the covenant? Why does the unjust death of any person not change the covenant?

As Dennis Prager says, God gave the Jews a recipe to make a good world -- ethical monotheism. If the doctor doesn't give the medicine to the patient, the patient's going to get sick. The Holocaust wasn't the Jews fault but it was a consequence of the Jews not bringing the world to God and His moral demands.

Now that's talk that makes sense and should lead to behavioral changes (theological talk that doesn't lead to behavioral changes does not mean much).

In this 1998 book, Yitz praises womanizers Shlomo Carlebach and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

[England's Chief Rabbi Immanuel Jakobvits] was then the head of the Interfaith group that carried on dialogues and cooperative programs among the various faiths in England. [Jakobvits] met regularly and talked respectfully and publicly with various Christian groups. That he could and would do -- because the average Jew, especially the average Orthodox Jew, is still afraid of the gentiles. In religious theory, most Orthodox rabbis look askance at Christianity... But the community leadership -- including the ultra-Orthodox, whose pressure against any respectful conversation with non-Orthodox...

So the interfaith policy had the touch of duplicity about it. He was dealing with gentiles without engaging them theologically. He was being nice to them and saying nice things to them. Ironically, he sat with Reform rabbis when he talked with Christians because it would be too blatant and obvious if the Reform were not htere. But, as Chief Rabbi of the Jewish community, he refused to talk directly with the Reform in any public forum because that would legitimate them. (p. 144-145)

The Orthodox percentage [of American Jewry] dropped from 14.4% in 1970 to 7.7% in 1990. (p. 151)

As the years went on, the Y.U. (Yeshiva University) and CLAL interns felt more and more isolated. Y.U. was afraid to openly and publicly cooperate with CLAL in interdenominational activity.

Many Y.U. rabbinical graduates would not or could not at Hillel , also, because they had been taught that it was forbidden to work in pluralist settings. (p. 153)

I honor Rabbi Soloveitchik's extraordinary contribution and model. He opened up many areas with his insights. But there were many areas he did not want to, or could not, deal with -- that must be confronted. Item: Historical criticism, especially the history of halachah. Item: biblical criticism. The Rab officially dismissed it, although he used it and learned from it. (See his comparison of the two accoutns of Creation in his essay, "The Lonely Man of Faith.") Modern Orthodoxy must be deepened intellectually.

Ann Coulter At Maia Lazar's Graduation Party

Cathy Seipp hosted the party at her home in Silverlake Saturday afternoon. Ann spent a lot of time with Maia who's a big fan.

For only the second time in almost a decade (but the second time in two months), Friday Night Live was on the third Friday night of the month (normally it is the second) and this time there was no age limit for any of the activities.

Pastor Rick Warren, author of the bestseller The Purpose Driven Life (sold about eight times as many copies as The DaVinci Code), walked in wearing jeans and a blue dress shirt. He walked down the aisle introducing himself, seeming the model of the integrated man.

"He looks like he'd be the same no matter what context you saw him in," said a friend afterwards.

Warren is a natural public speaker and captivated the audience. He just came from a photoshoot with Brad Pitt for Newsweek's Best of the Best issue in two weeks.

Rick's embarking on an approximately 12-nation 30-day tour where he will meet the political leader of each country (starting with Australia's prime minister John Howard Sunday night) and many of its business elites to try to solve the world's most pressing problems.

Warren knew something about Judaism and made no foupes. He said he joined 27 religious leaders in signing a letter condemning torture. He said the U.S. has to stop using it (other than that, he didn't say anything controversial). I wonder what his stand is on gay marriage and other controversial matters such as the war in Iraq? How does he keep himself from speaking out on things where he has no expertise (a common weakness among the famous)?

10:30 p.m. I began my purpose-driven walk towards Pico/Robertson.

Saturday I went to a friend's Torah lecture over a delicious meal. He came up to me beforehand and said in honor of my earlier blog, he would not be handing out photocopies of the relevant sacred texts.

Good on him. They weren't needed. Handing out photocopies of sacred text is unnecessary unless you are going to be engaging in close textual analysis. Usually handing out these things is pretentious (an effort to make the speaker and the audience feel like they are going to do something rigorous when all they are really doing is hearing reheated homilies that challenge nobody and lead to no behavioral changes).

Then my friend courageously came out against indulging thoughts of lust, idolatry and heresy.

If only I had heard him last week, how much wickedness I would've avoided.

What's the best kosher sugarless teeth-whitening gum?

Nathan Nance writes:

Sasha skipped a grade and was home-schooled, so she graduated early. She tried college and stripping before moving on to porn. She’s obviously smart, but talented as well. Already, there is a huge buzz in the industry about her. That’s odd, most girls have to wallow in obscurity for at least a month before there is some kind of adulation from on high in pornland. Sasha seems different.

...That’s when she dropped a bombshell on me…

“Do you have a steady boyfriend?”

“Yes, I do actually. We started dating Monday.”

“Do you think working in porn will affect your relationship?”

“You don’t let the business interfere with your personal life. And it is a business.”

John hired Layne Thrasher to run Danni.com. Layne in turn hired people to impersonate Danni Ashe and make subscribers to Danni.com feel that she was still active in the company when in reality she's retired in Montana.

From Sunshinecompanies:

John O. Morisano has spent his entire 18-year career helping to build and run entertainment and media companies. From his first job forward, John has always found himself at the heart of a company's operations. John started his career at the Vista Organization, Ltd., a publicly-traded indie film company, and aided in its sale in 1989. After graduating from Pace University in 1989, he joined the accounting firm of PricewaterhouseCoopers in its entertainment and media practice and received his CPA. In 1993, he moved to Paris to take over the European operations of Activision, a leading video game publisher. He subsequently moved back to the States and co-founded that company's biz dev group. John left Activision in 1995 and returned to NYC from L. A. where he served as interim CEO of Dewynters NA, a UK-based merchandising and licensing concern. In 1996, he joined forces with Tim Nye at Sunshine Amalgamedia. While at Sunshine, John has overseen the production of dozens of hours of television, numerous feature films, hundreds of hours of Internet content and a wide variety of other types of branded intellectual property. These included the development and sale of SonicNet to MTV, the positioning and construction of the Company's highly successful movie house - The Sunshine Cinema, Alltrue Networks and JetSet records, among others. John is responsible for the strategic positioning of SD's products. His expertise is in creating relationships that uniquely match the inventor's needs and talents to those of Sunshine Direct.

From CareerJournal.com:

Pets can also embarrass their owners in other ways. John O. Morisano, a principal of Sunshine, a small New York investment company, recalls a breakfast meeting attended by Milton, his partner's now-deceased husky. When a visiting executive denied the dog a bagel at the boardroom table, the dog walked over to a row of briefcases, sniffed out the offending executive's and relieved himself.

More:

Alltrue.com was conceived by Tim Nye and John O. Morisano, founders of Alltrue Networks, Inc., a division of Sunshine Amalgamedia, Inc. "Reality-video, no doubt about it, is the most popular television genre in the world today," said Morisano, Alltrue president and co-CEO.

All clips are pre-screened by the Alltrue.com editorial staff. Clips containing graphic sexual content, hate propaganda or gratuitous violence against man or animal will be excluded. Everything else will be put up on the site and users will ultimately determine the content that rises to the top.

From NYMag.com:

"I am, to my knowledge," says John Morisano, Alltrue Networks co-CEO, "the only Republican in the company -- and the only Republican, possibly, in Silicon Alley." Morisano is in his spartan office right next door to Nye's, in front of an eerily tidy steel-top desk watched over by two framed portraits of Ronald Reagan. (The first one he already had; the second was from Democratic colleagues intending to mock his devotion to the Gipper.) The Republican, says Nye, keeps this little multimedia-content company from coming unhinged. "It's taken discipline, and John just slaps me back into it." Not that Morisano was exactly eager to sign up for the job of slapping discipline into Silicon Alley's arty boy wonder. When he met Nye through a headhunter in 1995, "Tim greeted me in leather pants and had a roaring fire in his office. It was too like a scene -- and I am not a scene guy. But Tim is a charismatic guy. We started talking, and, you know, the way I always tell why Tim and I have hit it off and done fairly well together over the last few years is that guys like me do much better in the world with guys like Tim, and vice versa. I am a creative guy, but I am not the idea guy. Tim very much likes to be the idea guy and would rather have somebody else figure out if (a) is it executable?, and (b) how to execute it."

7/25/00

Banking on the soaring popularity of reality-based TV programming, Atlas Ventures yesterday announced it had invested $8 million in Alltrue.com, which the founders are building as reality-based video network.

"We'll have that video clip of the donkey chasing the guy with his pants around his ankles. That is the kind of content we will be offering on the site," said Morisano, one of Alltrue's co-CEOs.

Morisano said Alltrue's video collection will include pranks, scams, confessions, revelations, extreme action and other astonishing, but real, moments captured on video.

10/26/01

Just two years after paying a bundle to acquire music news and information pioneer SonicNet, Viacom-owned MTVi has pulled the plug on the Web radio network.

The streaming media play, which was co-founded by buddies Tim Nye and John Morisano as a bulletin board service for fans of modern rock, has had its share of corporate owners over the years.

By Vicki Polin

Early in 2003, while The Awareness Center, Inc. was in its infancy, several orthodox rabbis (who had a connection with the Rabbinic Council of America and Agudath Israel) started calling to request our organization to do something about Marc Gafni (AKA: Mordechai Winiarz). In order to comply with wishes of the rabbonim, our board and volunteers attempted to track down three known survivors of this alleged sex offender.

We had very little difficulties tracking down the second and third survivors, yet had trouble locating the first. Gary Rosenblatt was the link to finding the first survivor.

During our initial conversation with Winiarz/Gafni's first survivor, we learned that several years prior, she had provided Rosenblatt with her story. Back in the 90’s Gary had heard rumors and tracked her down. The first survivor stated that she was not seeking an opportunity to share her abuse history, but was convinced by Rosenblatt that sharing the story might spare future women the pain of abuse at Winiarz/Gafni's hands.

This survivor shared every painful detail with Gary Rosenblatt. Gary promised that he would publish a story right away. Years went by, there was no further contact and a story was never published. The survivor felt exploited and betrayed.

In 2004 finally Gary Rosenblatt reestablished contact with the first survivor, providing her with the contact information for The Awareness Center. The survivor was apprehensive, yet followed through and made the initial call.

I'll never forget the day Survivors two and three communicated with the first survivor. It was amazing to watch; a day filled with old terror and pain transforming into tears of healing, joy and empowerment.

Amazingly the three survivors were eager to work with Gary Rosenblatt. The intention was and always has been to prevent any more women from being victimized by Mordechai Winiarz/Gafni. The Awareness Center did it's best to work with Gary Rosenblatt as well, and provided him with names of individuals who had first hand knowledge of Gafni’s past.

Gary had ample information and factual content from highly respected rabbis and members of the community. The original story Gary wrote was to be published in the spring of 2004, yet nothing happened. Every week Mr. Rosenblatt told the survivors it would be published the following week, yet nothing happened. It wasn't until September 24, 2004, that an extremely watered down version of what was originally written was published.

In Gary Rosenblatt’s most recent article “Deconstructing The Gafni Case” he wrote:

"They felt they were the victims, that they had suffered enough and did not want to go through a public scrutiny of past abuses and humiliations. His former wives and the other women had new lives to live and reputations to protect."

Vicki says: The problem with this statement is; Gary ceases to mention that in the code of journalistic ethics created by the US department of Justice, one should never publish the names of victims of sex crimes. Three women spoke directly to Rosenblatt with the understanding that thier names would not be used, all of whom were quoted in his original article. It is common journalistic practice to have unnamed sources. Remember Watergate?

Rosenblatt continued:

"But for a journalist probing these accusations and knowing that the resulting expose could destroy the subject's career, professional standards require offering up real people and real names to make those charges. That is why I spent three years on the Gafni trail, interviewing dozens of people about the allegations of sexual misbehavior, before publishing anything. And at that point, in September 2004, I wrote an opinion column rather than a news story because I still did not have anyone with firsthand experience of abuse speaking on the record."

“And I offered up Gafni’s denials, and other rabbis defending him. They said that even if these things had happened, it was a long time ago and he had done teshuva (repentance). . . I think I should have written at the time that I found the women far more credible than Gafni. . . One thinks I should have acted on my instincts and been tougher on Gafni, even though I had no firsthand accounts on the record. Another said I was right to have held out for on-the-record attribution.”

Vicki writes: The survivor who was thirteen at the time of her abuse stated that it wasn’t until years after her initial contact with Mr. Rosenblatt that he connected her with The Awareness Center. The survivor had already given a detailed account of her sexual assault directly to Rosenblatt, yet she requested that her name be withheld from the story. From the point this survivor contacted The Awareness Center, it was another six months before Gary's watered down article was published. He promised the survivor years before that he would publish the story the week following the initial interview, yet nothing ever happened.

Back in 2001, survivor number one received a telephone call from Winiarz/Gafni supporter Naomi Mark, ACSW. Naomi's goal was for a survivor of childhood sexual abuse to meet with her offender. Naomi told this survivor that Marc Winiarz/Gafni wanted to make amends. She told the survivor that Mordechai Winiarz/Gafni had wrote a letter stating: “he thought the survivor was hurting because he ended their relationship instead of marrying her”. He wanted to apologize for "breaking her heart.”

The survivor told Ms. Mark that she would not meet with the man who raped her. The survivor disclosed that she let Naomi Mark know that “the relationship” Winiarz/Gafni was referring to should be called RAPE. A far cry from what Winiarz/Gafni called a “heartache, or a fallen romance.”

The Survivor believes the reason Winiarz/Gafni wanted to contact her at the time was because he learned of the interview she had given to Gary Rosenblatt. The survivor was sure that Winiarz/Gafni was worried about what Rosenblatt would publish. Winiarz/Gafni wanted the survivor to say that she had forgiven him for the assault. Marc Winiarz/Gafni neither acknowledged that he had sexually abused a child, nor admitted to any violent acts.

It appears Gary Rosenblatt's attempt to re-create history has been influenced by his long time friend, Rabbi Saul Berman -- who to this day is believed to be a defender of Mordechai Gafni.

If Mordechai Winiarz/Gafni has done teshuva, why has he not contacted the other women whom he victimized? Why didn't he ever offer to pay for the pain and suffering all three women endured because of his offenses?

Once again Rosenblatt's affiliation with Rabbi Saul Berman influenced his ability to get the facts straight. Gary Rosenblatt had firsthand accounts. He spoke to three women who were sexually victimized by Mordechai Winiarz (AKA: Marc Gafni). Two survivors had sexual contact; the third was a survivor of inappropriate sexual advances by an orthodox rabbi, who was also a married man.

Gary Rosenblatt spoke to numerous rabbis and other credible individuals who backed the survivor’s stories. What more evidence did he need?

If Rosenblatt really wants to make amends to the survivors of Winiarz/Gafni, he should put an advertisement in the New York Jewish Week calling for the extradition of Mordechai Winiarz/Gafni, and have all those who have blindly supported Winiarz/Gafni sign it.

Should a pornographer lead a Jewish charity?

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen writes:

Of course I detest pornography, but if we do not shrink from turning a blind eye to dubious sources of funding throughout the Jewish world, then we must not pillory one man just because he is an easy target.

Asia Carrera: 'Why I Do Porn Even Though I'm Very Bright And Could Have Done Anything I Wanted'

By Asia Carrera

I got awfully tired of telling this over and over, so I'm telling it for the last time - here it is.

OK, we all know I was an academically gifted little girl. What I don't publicize, is that I was not an especially motivated one. I was an overachiever only through a)genetic luck, and b) incredible pressure from my parents. My parents wanted me to go to Harvard and be a doctor or a lawyer, and I wanted to play piano and hang out with friends.

...The next day I took a bottle of vodka and got myself hired at all the local go-go bars. I then proceeded to work seven nights a week, and I saved a minimum of $1000 every week, and sent it off to various mutual funds. (ever hear of someone who still has the first dollar they ever made? That would be me!)

...As one of the highest paid dancers in NJ, I searched for a way to get paid even more money dancing. I discovered that girls who made movies or magazines got paid more than regular 'house girls' like me.

For years, I invested only in mutual funds, but finally I gathered the courage to buy some baby Berkshire shares right before the tech collapse. Go Warren!

...And when I die, I'm leaving behind a trust fund to provide help and shelter for abused and homeless children, so a little piece of me will live forever!

Asia Carrera's Husband Dies In Car Crash

She writes on AsiaCarrera.com:

06/11/06 - ...and the fairy tale comes to an end. The police just left my house. Don [Lemmon] was driving home from a business meeting in Las Vegas, and he got into an accident and rolled the Jeep. He's dead. He's never coming back to me. My husband, my soulmate, my other half, the one I was meant to grow old with. I'm almost 8 months pregnant with a son he will never get to see, and I have a one year old daughter who will never be able to remember anything about her father... and he was such a GOOD father to her, she was such a daddy's girl you wouldn't have believed it! Now she'll just have to take my word for it when I tell her how much daddy loved her, because she's too young to remember him for too much longer. Oh god, how that breaks my heart. How am I going to go on without him? How am I going to get a job at almost 8 months pregnant, with a one year old baby??? I couldn't go back to porn even if I wanted to, I'm much too huge. My ex-hubby, Bud Lee, is driving out here in the morning with another good friend of mine, and they are going to help me get through this. Somehow. If anyone wants to make a charitable donation to a pregnant widow who doesn't know how she's going to raise these two babies on her own, there's a spot on my sales page where you can donate up to $100. If anyone wants to send more than that (I'd be forever grateful!), you can use my Paypal Account, to address asiac@asiacarrera.com (that's asiaC@, not just asia@). I trust that no one out there is heartless enough to misuse that email address at a time like this. Oh god how I wish I could wake up from this nightmare. My life went from being a dream come true to hell on earth in just an instant. Please keep me in your thoughts and send me strength! I've got to get through this for my two little babies, otherwise I swear I'd have nothing to live for anymore. But I have no choice, I will do the best I can for Catty and Devin, somehow, some way, I must...

I asked Bud [Lee] & friend to stop at the Clark County Coroner's office on the way here from LA as they pass through Vegas, to pick up Don's belongings and anything from the truck... they were told that the truck was strewn over 300 yards, wheels here, axle there... he rolled across so many lanes the truck was just disintegrated... there was an RN (registered nurse) in the car behind him, she tried to help Don, but there was nothing she could do. I can only hope it means he died quickly and maybe painlessly? It just breaks my heart to see Catty's smiling face now, knowing she has no daddy... I show her pictures of Daddy and say "who's that, Catty?" and she shouts "Dadn! Dadn!"... I'm going to have to do that with her every day so she never forgets her daddy. Oh please give me the strength to get through this, somehow... we had no life insurance, I have no car now, no job, no income, I'm pregnant, I have a one-year old baby... this is not how my life was supposed to go. What wouldn't I give to go two days back in time and just hold Don again and never ever let him go...

Luke says:

I traded a lot of friendly email with Don Lemmon in 2003 and 2004. We were going to meet but it never happened.

Don writes me Oct 29, 2003:

Asia's BF (what a great job really, hours are convenient, pay is good, plenty of overtime, the perks ROCK)

Hi Luke, What's up dude? You asked if I were a religious man, the answer is, only if my Dictator allows me to be, which isn't often, or is it? The regular evening chants include, Hail To The Dictator, Raise Your Glasses To The Euro-Asian Goddess, and on select evenings I run through a medley of The Savior Has Come, and the Don Ho favorite, Tiny Bubbles. Now tell me something, what is with this woman's obsession over having a cyber-church? I personally feel it would be a much better idea to work on a grander scale of possibly a group gathering where the mignon drink kool-aid, where kilts, bask in the Guyana sun, and of course put us in their wills... I don't know, seems like a pipe dream at this point. I haven't much direction outside of being bossed around these days anyhow. Ever tried carrying a porn star's makeup case and wardrobe bag when a hillside fire is nipping at your heels? It ain't easy work. Oh, hey, would you be willing to donate your hovel to our cause? Think about it... Anyhow, besides that, I met Asia delivering her pizza. She answered the door naked, and well, you know the rest... Love your work by the way (yes, I know it, saw you on VH-1 last week too),

I am on the fence over who or what caused the big bang or whether someone else snapped fingers to raise the dead.... I was however brought up Christian but am not Christian... If that makes sense... Yourself?

Asia loves to try and drag me into religious debates but we always end up physically wrestling rather than verbally wrestling, so that works. Thanks for the email exchanges, I get a kick out of meeting her friends...

>Do you agree that pornography is destroying the moral fabric of our society?

I think that guy who owns the 3 block plot of land above Sunset that also owns the Pizza Hut empire is to blame. We would be in a better position to blame porn if so many Americans weren't too fat to find their naughty bits.... Yourself?

>Don... Good to hear from you... It sounds like Asia has got a prince...

She's my queen without a doubt.... If you ever need anything, let me know....

David Bezemek writes Don Lemmon and CCs me on Oct 30, 2004: "Hey if you're into health, why would you have a asian porno star for a girlfriend?"

Don replies: "The fact that you have 'seen' her do anything says it all... So how can you judge a person for what they do when you so willingly watch what they do... Thanks for emailing.... Does this mean I am a better man than you? No, but I also do not stick my foot in my mouth when attempting to frazzle someone either..."

Don replies to me Nov 10, 2003: "I do believe in God, I am just not sure which one to pick!"

No Funeral For Don Lemmon

She blogs on AsiaCarrera.com:

06/12 - Trying to pull myself together and take care of business today, put Don's bank accounts on hold (his ATM and credit cards are impounded with the destroyed vehicle and I don't know who can get to them), talked to some of his business partners about trying to keep his business continuing without him somehow, and I made a down payment on a nice little used car with a new car seat for Catty so we can get around town and try to take care of things the best we can. I'm using the money in the paypal account to buy this car, so I thank each and every one of you who donated money from the bottom of my heart. Please, if you can spare it, I have no pride, I'm scared and I'm asking for your help - please donate a lot or a little to me, Catty, and my unborn son Devin, due August 11th, to my Paypal Account, use address asiac@asiacarrera.com (that's asiaC, not just asia). I'm so scared that I won't be able to handle this newborn baby all by myself, along with Catty... I'm socially phobic, living alone in a state where I know nobody, afraid to leave the house by myself, without Don... every day is going to be such a huge struggle for the rest of my life. God this whole thing just breaks my heart, what happened to the perfect family I had a week ago? I was so in love, I woke up each day grateful to have such a good life, and in an instant... it's all gone. Don, I miss you, I need you, I don't know how I'm going to do this alone... *cry cry cry*

Asia Carrera blogs:

06/13/06 - I am having him cremated and his ashes sent to me. I want to keep him in my house, close to me, where I can talk to him and feel him nearby. I have not contacted the press about his death, nor do I plan to. That is really the last thing I want to deal with right now. If you feel a pressing need to confirm his death for yourself, you can call the Clark County Coroner's office in Las Vegas and ask about my husband, Donald Lemmon. I am not going to post the phone number on here because they already called once yesterday asking who "Asia Carrera" was (they only had my birth name on file) and why they were getting so many calls about my husband. Thank you to all my fans who are supporting me through this, you mean more to me than you will ever know.

Don't Donate To Asia Carrera?

Mr Soul writes on GFY:

I feel bad for her loss but I'm really getting sick of these pornstars wasting their money while having KIDS and no insurance, in a country where having insurance is probably the most imporant aspect of adulthood, especially when you're a parent. I would live in a f---ing one bedroom appartment in the ghetto before going one day without health and life insurance. I know guys who work jobs making way less than she does who support their famillies and have insurance. They just don't have nice cars, fancy clothes, big screen TVs, expensive vacations, etc. I feel sorry for her loss and I feel terrible for two kids who have to grow up without a dad, but I don't feel sorry for her financial situation. I'm angry at her and her late husband for being such irresponisble parnets and blowing thousands of dollars on themselves before protecting their children. Don't donate money to this women. Send your money to a war widdow in some devestated African country who have never had an option of protecting their children. There are billions of people on this earth who have never had a chance at a good life, and could use your money a lot more than she could.

Nismo writes: "Am I suppose to help someone who has probably made millions in the porn industry? I think its in bad taste to immediately start asking for donations when your spouse died that same day. I know she is probably not in her right frame of mine and might be in shock, but still I will not be donating."

GatorB writes: "He was a fitness guru and 37 so I'm sure his life insurance would not have been that expensive. If you can afford fancy cars, motorcyles, boats, houses etc then you can afford life insurance and health insurance."

Carlos Martinez writes June 12, 2006 for AVN:

Lemmon was returning to his Utah home from a business trip when he rolled his Jeep across several lanes of traffic on a highway, apparently killing him instantly, his wife said on her Web site Sunday. She could not be reached for comment.

According to police, the single-car accident took place around 9:30 Saturday night near Las Vegas.

Bud Lee Writes Freepornstarpix.com:

Hello, my name is Bud Lee. I would like to set you straight about Asia Carrera. I have just spent the most diffiicult 3 days of my life trying to comfort Asia. Don is dead. I have been with the coroner, gone through the wreckage and been helping her as much as I can. I know I will not be able to stop the pain she is in, but being here and loving her is the best I can do. If the best you can do is act the way you are and say what you have been saying, I would like to suggest you shut the fuck up.

I would be interested in being near you when your world crumhbles and see what you are able to do, say and respond too. Asia is in desperate straights due to the loss of her husband, best friend and father of her child and unborn child. Many times people in those circumstances do and say desperate things. She is unable to work, being 8 months pregnant and is looking at how she is going to raise two children and exist with out the man she loves so deeply.

Why don't you be a good boy and help someone in need instead of accusing them of scamming her fans. I would be more than happy to meet you in person anytime to futher discuss this situation. But I am sure youare like most blow hards on the internet and will hide behind the web to cover your identity as you act like a chicken s--- and attack innocent persons in their time of need.

Lux Kassidy Interview

After three weeks of playing phone tag, I finally chat to the Vivid girl (MySpace) Monday afternoon.

Her phone keeps cutting out and we don't develop a rhythm. But if you like heartbreak, there's a killer moment two-thirds through.

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Lux, 21: "A lawyer."

Luke: "Why? Were your parents lawyers?"

Lux: "Nope. Nobody in my family is a lawyer. It was just something I always wanted to do and something my family always thought I'd do."

Luke: "Were you argumentative?"

Lux: "No. It was just an interest to me. I think I would've gone into entertainment law. My older sister is a tour manager. I would've helped her. It was something I was looking into for a while."

Luke: "How did your ambitions change to bring you where you are today?"

Lux: "Law is something I definitely can't do now. I've ruined that chance doing what I do now. I've got to find something else to do later on."

Luke: "When you were in highschool, were you still thinking law?"

Lux: "Yes."

Luke: "Did you have fantasies about becoming a model?"

Lux: "No. Not a long time ago. When I was a freshman in highschool, I had a friend who sent in one of my pictures to Teen magazine. They contacted me and asked me to start doing modeling and I said no. From eighth grade to sophomore, I was a punk rock girl. Music was what I was most interested in -- going to concerts... If I did modeling, I wouldn't be able to do any of that stuff anymore."

Luke: "Were you doing crazy stuff to your hair?"

Lux: "Yeah. I've had my hair dyed every color. It's naturally blonde, so if I dye it blue or red, it's pretty bright."

Luke: "Were you always cute?"

Lux: "Yeah, I would say so. I've always been into make-up, since kindergarten."

Luke: "You like being a girl?"

Lux: "Yeah."

Luke: "At what age did you start having an erotic interest in boys?"

Lux: "Seventeen."

Luke: "You were a slow bloomer?"

Lux: "I dated guys back and forth but I didn't sleep with them."

Luke: "What kind of group did you hang out with in highschool?"

Lux: "Everybody. I got along with everyone. I fit into every group. Everybody in highschool liked me."

Luke: "And your parents loved you?"

Lux: "Of course. I've always had a good relationship with my family."

She grew up in Southern California.

Luke: "Did you have a consciousness of the porn industry as a teenager?"

Lux: "I didn't know about it. It was never brought to my attention. I never watched it. I never looked at magazines."

Luke: "Did you ever have a period of your life when you were promiscuous?"

Lux: "Never. I put a really high price on that. It's something valuable to me so I don't throw it around everywhere."

Luke: "How did you start posing nude?"

Lux: "[At 19,] I called up a friend of a friend who was a photographer [who became her boyfriend Kaden]. We started out doing fashion and artistic nude stuff. And then I stuck to Playboy-style stuff. Everything you see of me on the internet is basically Playboy-style. Then I made an exception and started working with magazines and doing explicit work."

Luke: "With girls?"

Lux: "The spread the legs stuff. Toys. Until recently, I was only doing Playboy-style stuff. No open leg."

Her boyfriend is Kaden of KadenPhoto.com. "He's my main photographer. His main work is fashion. He's in a lot of European fashion magazines. He started doing nudes when I first met him."

Luke: "How important is it for you to like the photographer you work for?"

Lux: "There have been a lot of photographers who were jerks. I've never walked off the set. I've thought, 'I want to hurry up and get this over with.' But I've never walked off a set if I'm getting paid for it. I don't think that's right. I'm going to give him the best I can. I'm not going to purposely look like crap so I screw him over."

Luke: "What are important qualities for a photographer?"

Lux: "That they have a good sense of humor. That they're not total sticklers on how you have to look and how you have to move. It's good if they let you do your own thing and they instruct you a little bit."

Luke: "What are the bad qualities that you sometimes encounter in photographers?"

Lux: "A photographer who pokes around and takes forever to do one set. Twelve hours to do it. I've dealt with those photographers before."

Who are these creeps? Lux won't name them. Perhaps my readers can? Email Luke

Lux: "If you just hurried it up, we could get this done in two hours. Photographers who poke around and talk too much. I've had photographers who basically just hire the girl for an all-day shoot and they sit there and talk to you for half the day because that's what they really want."

Luke: "That's pathetic."

Lux: "That's the biggest thing that annoys me."

Luke: "They deliberately just want to hang out with you?"

Lux: "Yeah. It's retarded."

Luke: "What about photographers who want to put you in painful poses?"

Lux: "Yech. That's ridiculous. I had this one photographer who has you sit there and hold this really uncomfortable pose and then they have to sit there and light-meter everything and then change the lights around for every single pose and stare at it for five minutes and make sure that they like it. And then they start shooting it. Then they have to look at each picture they take while you're holding this uncomfortable pose."

Sounds like Earl Miller to me but Lux won't say.

Luke: "Did you sense that they get a kick out of the power and inflicting pain on you?"

Lux: "I don't think it's that. I just think they're not good and they take forever to do everything. They're just not thinking about it because they're not the ones actually doing it. I don't think they get a kick out of it. I think they're just dumb."

Luke: "Are they successful?"

Lux: "There are successful photographers who do this. It just makes you not want to work with them again. They do high-quality work and get you into good magazines but at the same time it's just not worth it if you have sit 13 hours on a shoot and be really uncomfortable and in pain and be really annoyed. It's just not worth it."

Luke: "What percentage of photographers try to screw you?"

Lux: "I've had a few photographers try to hit on me. Sometimes it's just because they mistake my kindliness. I'm really nice to photographers. I have no reason to be a bitch to them. Some people mistake that and think, 'This girl likes me.' I've had about five photographers take that the wrong way and try to hit on me and ask me out to dinner."

Luke: "Isn't that true of guys generally? If you're the slightest bit nice to them many of them will think you want to sleep with them."

Lux: "I agree."

Luke: "What went through your mind prior to your becoming a Vivid girl."

Lux: "I decided on it when I was at AVN. I was signing at a booth. I was looking around. I walked past the Vivid booth and the Club Jenna booth and all the big booths. I was like, my still photography is slowing down now. Maybe I should take it to the next step. I went around to all the big booths. I talked to all the talent directors. I gave them my number. After I got home from AVN, I sent them all emails with a bunch of my pictures.

"Wicked and Vivid both really liked me. Of course Vivid was going to be my number one choice out of those two. Out of all of them, Vivid is number one. I set up meetings with Vivid. I met with Steven [Hirsch, the co-owner] a bunch of times. He just turned out to really like me. I told them I wasn't going to do any video stuff unless I was signed to a contract. They agreed."

She's done two shoots for Vivid. "Lux's Life was my favorite. I had so much fun. We had cameras set up where you confessed stuff to the cameras. I'd just go up and do something really weird and bizarre."

Luke: "What do you love and hate about being a sex star?"

Lux: "I love being published in magazines. I love opening up magazines and seeing myself in it. I love working with new people and meeting everyone in the business. There are a lot of great girls out there and a lot of really good photographers. I can't think of a downside of that. I guess if you're going out at AVN and people stop you every two seconds. I was at Lake Havasu and I got recognized and everybody was stopping me and asking for autographs. Sometimes it gets a little annoying."

Luke: "What do you love most? The money? The publicity? The attention? The fame? The glory? Looking pretty?"

Lux: "I love the attention and the money the most.

"It hasn't changed me. I still hold the same beliefs."

Luke: "Have you noticed a change in the way people relate to you, including people you've known for years?"

Lux: "Yeah. I've lost a lot of friends."

Luke: "How many?"

Lux: "All of them basically. Twenty."

Luke: "That's huge."

Lux: "Yeah. A lot of these people were really good friends I'd known for a long time. The other half I haven't even told them what I do and won't. This is a business that not too many look kindly upon. It's rough."

Luke: "Did you break down and cry?"

Lux: "I just figured that if you can't accept what I do and who I am, then you're not worth my time. I accepted them and what they do for a living. If they can't do the same for me, that's their problem. It does suck because I lost a lot of people I love but there's nothing I can do about it now. I can't give up my career because of them."

Luke: "Did you retain some friends?"

Lux: "Yeah, I have some friends, but they don't know the extent of what I do. They just think I model. I didn't tell 'em the rest of it."

Luke: "Do you have friends who know everything and have known you for years going back to highschool?"

Lux: "No, I don't. Now the only girls I really meet are girls on set. Of course they're going to approve of what I do because they're doing it too."

Luke: "Do you feel like you've stepped into a whole new world?"

Lux: "No. I see it as just moving on. Just going through life. This is what happens. You're going to keep friends and you're going to lose them. Consider it a big circle."

Luke: "You don't wake up screaming at 3 a.m.?"

Lux: "Nope. I'm still up at 3 a.m."

Luke: "What are your goals and dreams?"

Lux: "I want to keep modeling for as long as possible. I've started doing mainstream movies. I worked with Warner Brothers. That's something I could do later on. Kaden's teaching me photography. We run a photography studio in downtown L.A. I'm keeping my options open. I'm not sure exactly what I will do after all this is over."

Lux stands 5'7" and measures 34C-24-34.

Luke: "When did you get the breast job?"

Lux: "Five years ago."

Luke: "When you were 16?"

Lux: "Yes."

Luke: "What was up with that?"

We laugh.

Lux: "It was something I needed to do."

Luke: "Were you totally flat?"

Lux: "Yeah. My parents agreed to it but I paid for it."

Luke: "How did people at school react?"

Lux: "I think I became a legend at my school for being the youngest girl to get a boob job. Everybody was like, 'I want to see your boobs.' I'm like, 'No, get away from me.'"

Luke: "How many people did you show your boobs?"

Lux: "I only showed my close girlfriends, but everybody at school knew. That first day I came back to school, that was a tough one. Imagine all the stares. Everybody coming up to me, yech. It was hard the first couple of months but everyone got over it."

The Career Trajectories Of Chasey Lain, Jenna Jameson And Juli Ashton

They all entered porn around the same time (1992). Chasey was the best looking but descended into drugs and oblivion. Juli Ashton did just fine. She did her last Night Calls radio show last summer and her last Night Calls TV show in January. She's now married and pregnant and living in Florida. She operates HeyJuli.com and may well be the happiest of the three. Jenna Jameson is the biggest star, a crossover cultural phenomenon. Why? I don't think it's primarily her beauty and the quality of her sex scenes (I've never seen one). I think it's her savvy choices. She listened to the right people and made the right decisions to become a star. She wanted it more and she sacrificed and she put the effort in on her book and she's porn great success story.

I don't think Jenna is seeking to have kids right now. That was a temporary obsession. I figured she'd succeed at that like she has at everything else. I even posted last year that I believed she was pregnant. Not the first time Jenna's proved me wrong.

Lunch With Playboy TV (American Sex Star) Producers Eric Mittleman, Derek Harvie

I show up to the Playboy TV studios in a 90065 industrial park in Glendale.

12:20 p.m. I walk up to the receptionist. She's on the phone. "He doesn't say on his voicemail that he's Hugh Hefner, does he?"

I sign in behind Hugh Hefner's brother Keith Hefner (about 60 yo) who does voiceovers.

Eric's assistant leads me on the long walk to his office past dozens of cubicles.

On Eric's wall, Sasha Grey and a couple of other girls are scratched out from the American Sex Star show. Most of the girls are from LA Direct Models and none have of them have dropped out.

Mittleman's on the phone. "This is a real voice-over just like the first one," he says.

Playboy TV's employees have the relaxed manner of most people in porn who realize they aren't rocket scientists and they aren't curing cancer. They're in the business of stimulating masturbation, about the lowest of artistic endeavors.

Derek Harvie joins me in Eric's office.

He says Ann Marie hosts the 30-minute Night Calls Hotline show which follows the regular three-hour Night Calls (hosted by Kirsten Price and Jesse Jane).

"It's half an hour of phone sex with Ann Marie," Derek says as he leads us on a tour of the studio. "We take a couple of girls from Night Calls and they take phone calls."

Luke: "Do you give spread-legged action? Girls going down on each other?"

Derek and Eric say it is XX, meaning everything but anal and a pop shot.

Derek: "Night Calls is single action except for special occasions."

Eric: "We broke down a wall last week."

Derek: "We had sex toys. We had the f---ing machine guys come in. Unfortunately the giant robot malfunctioned."

Only on clips is there a penis entering a vagina.

Next door are the Spice studios and they show hardcore (but not anal nor pop shots).

Eric: "When we go to porn sets to shoot the girls, we have to shoot it soft, Austin-Powers style."

Playboy radio (broadcast over Sirius, with over one million potential listeners, perhaps one or two thousand of them actually listen at any one time) studios are down the hall. They provide about 14 hours of original programming a weekday. Ann Marie hosts a show.

Christy Canyon and Ginger Lynn do three hours a night of Night Calls Radio.

If you have a Sirius subscription, you don't automatically get Playboy Radio. You have to call and opt-in.

None of the programming on Playboy TV or Playboy Radio is gay.

Eric, Derek and I have lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant. I eat some rice and tofu. I don't want to even name the strange little critters going into the mouths of my mates.

I want to develop on my theme from last week (and over the past decade) that porn is a refuge for the lazy (in many ways, I am lazy and slovenly and porn suits this part of my personality).

Luke to Derek: "How would you compare the stress levels of working at MTV and Playboy?"

My thesis is that all achievement comes through stress.

Derek: "Playboy is much more relaxed. At MTV, people were always fighting because everyone had conflicting visions and everything was subjective. At Playboy TV, we ask ourselves two questions: Do we have naked girls? Check. Are they naked? Check.

"A former producer at Playboy TV said, 'Give me a hot chick standing next to a bag of s---, and I'll give you a TV show.

"We had so many rules at MTV. At Playboy, the basic rule is no anal.

"I didn't think I'd be here [in porn] this long but at this point I can't see myself going back to the real world.

"My wife and kids are gone for six weeks. I'm going to turn my home into the Playboy Mansion - Encino style."

I ask the gents if Playboy requires drug tests. They say no. "But what if you were drug-tested?" I persist.

Derek: "I'm clean."

Eric: "Depending on the month."

Mittleman says he has a doctor's note to smoke pot. Derek says he's allergic and throws up if he smokes pot.

Penny Flame was interviewed on American Sex Star and on the first question she says she didn't finish college because of cocaine. She goes into detail about her drug problems.

She showed a level of honesty that can inspire all of us to be better people.

The girls take it hard as they get eliminated from American Sex Star. They start crying. They can become vindictive.

Codi Milo was balling up. Jenna came up to her backstage and hugged her.

Jim Powers plays the Simon Cowell role on the show, a porn ripoff of American Idol. He teased Angie Savage about the wing tattoo on her back.

Last year, one girl got a pail of water and was going to dump it on Jim Powers. She was intercepted by McKenzie Lee who ended up receiving the pail.

Neither Eric nor Derek fear obscenity prosecution for their work.

Many of the rockers who come on Night Calls end up with the porn stars. They have a higher rate of success with the ladies than the stand-up comics.

Eric's creepiest shoot for American Sex Star was at an extended stay hotel where numerous out-of-town porners reside. The hallways were lined with garbage and dirty linen.

Eric remembers a sweet little Playmate from the mid nineties who opened her purse and a .38 special popped out.

We discuss the explosive relationship between hot chicks and firearms.

Eric: "When I was in Scottsdale, I wanted to get footage of Jenna at a shooting range. Her brother owns one. Jenna's a phenomenal shot."

Derek remembers shooting at Taylor Rain's house. Taylor, the longtime queen of porn's potheads (though she may have brought this under control over the past few months, since her retirement, and gained 20 pounds) reached under the bed, and instead of producing the expected sex toy, came up with a shotgun three feet away from Derek.

Another time Derek took four porn chicks out to the desert and got video of them shooting off automatic weapons.

Eric says he wants nothing to do with porn stars and automatic weapons.

Eric: "I should add that question to their profile -- what kind of gun do you own?"

There's no pot smoking nor drinking at the Playboy studios.

Derek: "Our show is like a day off for porn stars. They don't have to have sex. We bring them in in the morning. We dress them up. We put them in make-up. We feed them. We have a chef. They play all day. We look after them. Our host arranges play time for them. It's like day care.

"And we pay them."

Eric: "It's like Burke Williams (day spa) for porn stars."

On the drive back to the Playboy studios, we stop at the lights and an army of kids in school uniforms cross the streets.

Derek says this afternoon he has to shoot Roxy Jezelle doing man-on-the-street interviews about anal sex.

I hope they leave the kids alone.

Marsha Plafkin Marries

Friday night. I read Jason Leopold's brutally honest memoir News Junkie in 90-minutes.

I kick myself for not talking to Jason when he appeared with Evan Wright and Allan MacDonell at the LA Press Club May 18.

At the time, I'd only read horrible things about Leopold and didn't have any reason to talk to him.

He was having a bad night. He'd claimed that Karl Rove (the President's advisor) had been indicted and news of it would break by May 19. It didn't.

I wrote off Leopold as a loser.

Then I read his book, recognized parts of myself, recognized some keen insights into journalism, and became intrigued.

Sunday morning, I went to a memorial lecture at a synagogue I betrayed. I had to walk into a place where I'd prayed and studied Torah almost every day for nine months only to be ejected in June 2001 when my "Levi Ben Avraham" front was pierced and Luke Ford revealed.

I had to look at the rabbi who'd given me beautiful tefillin. I had to face and shake hands with people who'd befriended me because they only knew me as "Levi" and not as "Luke Ford" the porn gossip columnist.

No matter how jaunty my hair and my swagger, I still feel sleazy.

I find it particularly nauseating to have to face up to times when I've done the dirty to others. When others have harmed me, I find it easy to hate them. But when I confront my true self and the people I've hurt, I hate that. I hate myself. I bounce between depression and anger.

I take lithium and company until I mellow out.

Sunday I take little pleasure in regaining my old seat. I mechanically shake hands and greet people. I once had close connections here but none of those friendships survived my ouster.

The people who are the friendliest know me the least.

No, that's not true, but it sounded good.

My relationship with this shul was a love affair gone wrong (because I wasn't who I presented myself as, though, frankly, if I had been honest, I would never had the chance for the affair in the first place, and it's better to have loved and lost).

Dear reader, you could walk in here and love everything about the place. The wood paneling is so exquisite, the rabbi is so passionate... But I'm returning to the scene of my crime.

I don't want to be here but it is right for me to be here. It's good for me to sit here once year for a couple of hours and re-experience the horror that my former friends felt when they read my old site lukeford.com (I sold it August 8, 2001).

Everybody gets a six-page handout for the lecture. What's with this Jewish fetish for photocopied handouts at every lecture? Even atheist Jew Eddie Tarbash uses them when he speaks publicly.

I rage that these handouts are phony. They represent what's wrong with Modern Orthodoxy. Putatively it's all about living the Torah in modernity but it's a sham.

I'm no scholar but I already know the basic Torah text and gist of the main commentators and I know how to dig up the other texts of the Jewish tradition on the internet. So what's with these handouts? I usually give them the same polite attention as those around me but only on rare occasions do I see anyone study them and write in their margins. And why should they? If a person wanted to study these texts, he could go home and do so. The only reason to go to a lecture is to hear the original insights of the speaker which are not going to be found on photocopies of sacred text.

By accepting these handouts, we all pretend that we're scholars and that we're going to delve into the text. But come on. It's a rare lecture that holds my attention all the way through, and if it does, I don't need the handouts because the lecturer always gives over the text orally.

Frankly, I'm so jaded these days, I give myself points for just showing up for the Torah and staying awake.

I may not be doing all I can to keep the Torah community alive but I want it there when I feel the need for it.

Most Torah lectures are just excuses to eat, see friends, and feel good about being Jewish without pushing oneself to think about the implications of what one is supposed to learn (and how modernity/reality challenges the assumptions from which the text is taught).

I want to get carried away when I go to a lecture so I am hanging on every word out of the speaker's mouth. I don't recall Beryl Wein or Dennis Prager distributing photocopies of sacred text before they speak.

There's definitely something phony in this practice, a fake pious obeisance to Torah, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Maybe the problem is not in my text but in myself?

I want a speech to be as intense an experience as a good movie (such as Legends of the Fall).

Is that so wrong?

If I can feel that at a good black church, why can't I feel that in shul?

And I don't want a bunch of sweaty ugly people in either my movie or speech unless they are extraordinarily good or smart.

What do shuls do with all these handouts covered with God's name? I only carry one home when it is of particular interest to me. Otherwise it is too much trouble disposing of it (paper with God's name can't be thrown away, it can only be buried). If I am not going to dig up my landlord's backyard to bury such papers, what do I do with them? There should be a place in shul where you can dispose of your God-covered papers and old tzitzit (fringes) and the like.

Most of the time I'm in a Torah lecture, my mind wanders over the following topics:

* Sex
* How am I going to pay my bills?
* Sex
* How am I going to cure my physical, psychological, moral and social ailments?
* Sex
* What am I going to do when I get thrown out of my shul?
* Sex
* How am I going to land this lady?

What percentage of Modern Orthodox Jews have premarital sex? I bet at least 70%. I figure it's about 99% for non-Orthodox Jews. The only good reason not to have premarital sex is because you believe God says not to.

June 11 I don't think in shul about sex. I just feel sick.

I soothe my anxieties with several helpings of dessert.

I sit by a good man. He gives his full name. He tells me his profession. He asks me about myself. I try to keep the conversation light. "Sir," I think, "you really don't want to get to know me."

He's eaten bread. I try to avoid eating bread because you have to say a bunch of blessings before and after the meal if you eat bread and frankly it's usually not worth the hassle. Bread's just a bunch of carbs and it doesn't taste that great.

So what blessings do I have to say after my meal for eating a lemon tart (m'zonot)?

I know I have to say an abbreviated series of blessing but I don't want to.

The bread man wants to say his prayers of gratitude and I need to accompany the beginning of them. Then I need to carry off like I know what I'm supposed to say after eating m'zonot.

I rip off a few paragraphs of the Grace After Meals, put down my bencher (prayer book for meals), and move my lips while my soul and stomach churn.

Everyone needs a home. Orthodox Judaism is mine. If I have to go through the motions sometimes to stay in the club, that's a small price to pay.

I push myself to stay until I'm about the last person in the shul, which strikes me as so wrong that I abruptly rise and leave.

At 3:30 p.m., I have Marsha Plafkin's wedding to Dan Hurwitz (her first, his second) at the Reconstructionist temple in Pacific Palisades -- Kehillat Israel.

Reconstructionist Judaism reconstructed Judaism without God. I hate that.

I rant into my tape recorder as I drive down Sunset Blvd. I drive into the temple's parking structure but start to feel claustrophobic and back out and park on the street.

I walk in and see some Orthodox friends. I see some great racks. If I were not so religious, I'd imagine that it was me who was getting married and I'd never again get to possess another female body.

I sit in the corner and read How to be a Man. On page 63, there's a drawing of a vagina. Perhaps I should've chosen instead Rabbi Zelig Pliskin's book on happiness. More appropriate for a synagogue.

A pimple grows on my right cheek.

I read the chapter on how to impress women. For some reason, that's the section of the book of most interest to me. Cheating on cards, spotting a cheap suit and landing a jumbo jet just aren't high on my priorities.

The ceremony begins. Groom Dan Hurwitz says we're having a tisch. Marcia reads from the Torah about a man needing a woman (early Genesis).

Dan gives a complete dvar Torah. The Orthodox custom is to interrupt the dvar torah with singing before the groom gets more than a few sentences in (unless the groom is a scholar) to make sure the guy doesn't embarrass himself on his wedding day.

Dan's hands shake as he holds the mic.

Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben (slender, dynamic and funny) comes to the rescue.

I figured that any rabbi who talks and writes so much about unconditional love and self-esteem had to be a charlatan.

But that's just my bias.

Marcia cries. Rabbi Reuben gives her tissues.

She talks about the Torah's view of a helpmate who will sometimes stand in opposition to the man.

There are over 150 guests. Many of them laugh.

"I see there are people here who know me," quips Marcia.

I've never seen her so radiant. Her hair is long and dark and bunched on top of her head. Her dress is "golden taupe" color says a woman.

Dan (whose 17 and 21yo daughters are in the crowd) and Marcia met in Torah class here in 2002.

After his father died in 1999, Hurwitz began attending that Saturday morning Torah class.

Rabbi Reuben: "Anyone been to a wedding like this? No!"

He describes the Judaism of ancient times as chauvinist and sexist.

Dan and Marcia's ketubah is in Hebrew and English and is completely egalitarian.

We go into the sanctuary.

"We've tisched," says the rabbi. "Now we chupah."

"Marcia created almost everything here today. I think she created Dan."

A haredi couple walks in. He wears a black hat and has a white beard. His wife wears a sheitl (wig).

The rabbi describes Sam Glaser's music as "precious."

If someone called my writing that, I'd take it as a put-down.

The cantor emeritus gives her a tissue and then recites from the Song of Songs.

During the chupah ritual, the rabbi dabs Marcia's eyes and gives her a tissue.

The bride alternates between laughter and tears.

Dan is his solid self.

If things are going to be so egalitarian, why does nobody offer Dan tissues? (Not that he needs them.)

I'm glad Dan and Marcia don't french-kiss. It grosses me out when couples do that as part of their wedding ceremony.

Yes, I want to theoretically reserve my right to frenchkiss in a secular setting, but not in a synagogue. At least not in front of everybody.

When I was in a particularly wicked mood a few years ago, I took my shiksa first date to the entrance of my shul where there was a security camera running and I made out with her.

But that was then and this is now. I'm a different man. I've left the part of me that likes to shock behind with my Air Supply CDs.

After the chupah ceremony, I stand in the sun and talk to a Christian couple.

"Are Jews still waiting for the Messiah?" he asks.

Though it's not possible, I try to convey to him that what is of premium importance to Christians plays little role in the lives of religious Jews. We don't wonder about when the Messiah is coming. We do our duty each day believing that eventually God will make everything right. That's all you need to know about Judaism's teachings on the Messiah and the Afterlife.

During dinner, I pick Aimee Golant's brain then run away from my assigned table to sit next to Jason Leopold at the table of Dan's cousins.

An Orthodox friend writes me:

You ought to remove the Emmanuel Levinas page which sounds like you haven't actually read him, only intros, and nonsense by this Chaim Amalek. Levinas was one of the most beautiful Jewish thinkers of the past century, and certainly, given your particular set of concerns, recognizing a Judaism centered upon concern for the Other should be more sympathetically viewed. And that comment about his Talmudic discourses is way off base, it is a fabulous collection and I even specifically made a trek in Paris to the Jewish bookstores to get the ones not translated into English. [Read this essay about Levinas's] attack on Kierkegaard. He was actually quite a scholar, ran the Jewish school, and learned regularly with many distinguished French Rabbis, both Ashkenazic and Sepharadic.

Gary Rosenblatt, Mordecai Gafni And Merit Uber Alles

In the fall of 2004, The Jewish Week Editor Gary Rosenblatt (the most praised man in Jewish journalism who had the Gafni story served to him on a platter yet blew it), the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles and I wrote about Rabbi Mordecai Gafni.

Rosenblatt and the Journal portrayed Gafni as a powerful religious leader who'd committed sexual indiscretions two decades ago.

I portrayed Gafni as a creep and a charlatan. I wrote that he was dangerous whether or not he was screwing people under his religious leadership.

In retrospect, it turns out that I got it right and the Journal and Rosenblatt got it wrong (even though we all largely had our facts in line).

Did I get it right because I had better sources than my competitors? No. I got it right because I have different values than they do. Their primary concern is journalistic protocol (and perhaps community politics and advertising). My primary concern was merit (where you weigh competing values and decide which are most important in this case).

(As for the Forward, they haven't even been in the game reporting on sexual predators with the exception of their breaking the Mordecai Tendler story. Along with the Jewish Journal, they had the Aron Tendler story served to them on a platter in the fall of 2004 yet published nothing.)

When I started reporting on Gafni and other predators, Rosenblatt told a lot of people that my reporting could not be trusted.

So even though I was right on Gafni, Aron Tendler and company, does Rosenblatt apologize for not only blowing the story, but denouncing the one person who got it right? No.

He writes this June 9, 2006 column:

I was not surprised when I learned a few weeks ago of the public downfall of Mordechai Gafni...

...But for a journalist probing these accusations and knowing that the resulting expose could destroy the subject's career, professional standards require offering up real people and real names to make those charges. That is why I spent three years on the Gafni trail, interviewing dozens of people about the allegations of sexual misbehavior, before publishing anything. And at that point, in September 2004, I wrote an opinion column rather than a news story because I still did not have anyone with first-hand experience of abuse speaking on the record.

...My role is journalist, not judge. But in hindsight, I think I should have written at the time that I found the women far more credible than Gafni.

Luke says: The most important thing in writing about Gafni or anybody or any subject is to produce something of merit. That trumps following journalistic protocol. What's most important is to be right about what's most important.

What's most important about the Aron Tendler story is not that he was a sexual predator, but that the Jewish community (particularly the Los Angeles Orthodox rabbinate) allowed him to move from job to job while he was rubbing up against the vulnerable under him.

For instance, Rabbi Avraham Union (who runs the Rabbinical Council of California) knew about the Aron Tendler story for at least as long as he's run the RCC (more than a decade?) yet he did nothing until he had no choice. That Union lacks the courage of his convictions can be deduced from Rob Eshman's February 14, 1997 report on the Kabbalah Centre where Union says he backed off sending a letter denouncing the cult when he got a threat on his doorstep.

It's time to compile a list of all the people who protected Gafni and Tendler and company when they had reason to believe they were sexual predators. For instance, David Suissa of Olam was a big Gafni supporter. Rabbi David Wolpe had Gafni speak at Temple Sinai.

Ernest Greene aka Ira Levine posts June 2 on Nina.com:

I do not see anything narrowly political about the bust, as in somehow related to the Abu Ghraib thing, but it is clearly part of the larger DOJ strategy of calling out the harshest material first, hoping to secure a conviction for adult obscenity against someone somewhere that will actually hold up as far as SCOTUS.

Therefore, I'm hardly shocked that JM was next on the list after Rob Black. Like Black, Jeff Steward has a major attitude problem and that's exactly what gets you busted everytime. When I was a police beat reporter, I learned that the crime for which most people actually got dragged downtown was the general offense of "being an asshole," a description I heard used aloud more than once on that gig. Certainly and at every level Steward qualifies.

Full disclosure here. He said something truly vicious about Nina on his cheesy little forum a few months ago that led to some discussion of litigation, so if I'm not exactly grief-stricken over his troubles at a personal level, that should come as no surprise. Having some jerk post or allow to be posted on his bandwidth the suggestion that one's wife should be murdered along with other porn performers of her generation solely on grounds of said jerk's ideas about aging isn't likely to inspire sympathy.

And it doesn't help that I find many of his movies and his company's general posture repellant. Any producer with "Whores Degraded Daily" as a slogan clearly isn't too concerned about the disapproval of others, including those who can actually make something of it.

However, the fundamental things apply. The principle at stake here is still freedom of expression. Steward's company has, at times, been accused of physically and psychologically abusing performers. If any of that is true, the individuals involved should be arrested and tried for assault and battery. But that's not the charge that's been filed. The indictments concern the distribution of obscene content, and such indictments must always be opposed, however offensive the content in question. "The principle of free thought is not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought we hate," says US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in United States v. Schwimmer (1929). That's what's at stake both in this instance and in the Rob Black case.

Should the feds succeed in establishing that some speech (as opposed to physical action) is so hateful as to merit criminal prosecution, any speech might be next, and don't think it won't be. If they get their convictions against Steward and Black, expect them to try and draw the noose tighter until it includes Vivid, Andrew Blake and us. That's why we have to fight on behalf of those we don't feel the least obligation to like. It's our own rights we're defending.

If any woman feels she was actually brutalized in a Donkey Punch video, let her come forward and see the brigands hauled off to the slammer amid cheers from many of us. Until then, this is still about sending somebody to jail over some pictures, and that kind of thing has no place in any society that calls itself free.

Blogging Sexual Predators

Daniel "Mobius" Sieredski writes on Jewschool.com:

Two of the three rabbis at Beliefnet's Virtual Talmud have issued backhanded denouncements of the Jewish bloggers who have brought attention to sexual misconduct in the rabbinic community, while calling for the same “"protocols and procedures for dealing expeditiously and confidentially with charges of sexual misconduct" said bloggers have been demanding for years apart from that bit about confidentially, cuz, ya know, our rabbinic leadership has such a great track record of handling these cases behind closed doors.

Conservative rabbi Susan Grossman of Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Maryland, writes:

While I don’t agree with the use of the Internet to publicize unproven charges of sexual misconduct, I certainly understand why such postings happen: All too often victims find no support or redress in the organized Jewish world.

...Perhaps [protocols and procedures], once in place, would vitiate the need for blogs that ultimately do more for the spread of lashon hara than the effective protection of potential victims of sexual misconduct.

...The elephant in the room is, of course, Jewish Whistleblower. We all know who these two are actually talking about. The question is why paint the entire blogosphere with a lashon harah brush for the misdeeds of one universally-condemned, overzealous, anonymous blog commentor?

Jewish Whistleblower responds (here it is as a word document exactly as JWB emailed it to me June 8):

Huh? I make the same challenge you have. Point out some examples from my posts. You can't. While you were busy Arguing about the process like the morally challenged pigmies above, I was exposing Gafni, Tendler and others. While you weren't publically demanding answers from your leadership, I was. Mobius, you're nothing but a Monday morning quarterback and no better than those you attack above at Beliefnet. I have the transcripts from our Gafni "debates". You used the same arguments you now attack. I think you're "facts" about me are nonsense. Universally-condemned? By whom? Your new pal Larry Yudelson and his friends in Team Worch? What nonsense.

Mobius posted on Protocols: 4:44PM | 2004-06-23

oh the horrible thing he said -- that he wishes filmmakers would make movies where people develop relationships and care for each other before they leap straight to the fucking.

apparently, luke, this is a concept lost on you. porn movies have always been weak on plot lines...

as for gafni, if he has a minute, i'm gonna ask arthur about it when i see him tonight. in the meantime, does anyone have any solid evidence against him? is womanizing a crime? rape is a crime. sexual abuse is a crime. is being a male chauvenist, a pig, or just generally randy a crime? no... it's not appropriate conduct for a rabbi, sure, but, rabbis are people like everyone else. one of the issues we have with antisemitism is the idea that non-jews hold us to higher moral standards right? and that when we jews hold ourselves to higher standards, we're being antisemitic in effect as well? so when a rabbi turns out to be human, why do we get all up in arms? if he's committing a crime he should be prosecuted as a criminal and "defrocked." if he's guilty of womanizing, he hasn't committed a crime--he's just an asshole. is that any reason to badmouth the entire movement of which he's a member? cuz if that's the cause, baruch lanner -- and the manner in which he was completely protected and shielded by the frum community, and allowed time and time again to prey on his students -- shows why all of orthodoxy is equally reprehensible morally. but i won't hold an entire movement responsible for the actions of one man, or even two or three

...as for gafni, if he has a minute, i'm gonna ask arthur [Waskow] about it when i see him tonight. in the meantime, does anyone have any solid evidence against him? is womanizing a crime?

...cuz if that's the cause, baruch lanner -- and the manner in which he was completely protected and shielded by the frum community, and allowed time and time again to prey on his students -- shows why all of orthodoxy is equally reprehensible morally.

...i'm not going to defend gafni, nor renewal's defense of gafni (though one organization's inclusion of gafni in a lecture series, which is the only "evidence" you provide of such defense on the part of the renewal movement does not a defense make) without being wholly aware of the situation. can you provide me with clear cut evidence of impropriety? do you have any evidence of criminal procedings against gafni for sexual abuse or other misconduct? have people come forward publically? or is this all hearsay? i need to see evidence before i indict a person. what's the talmudic stance on hatred -- it says you can't hate a person unless you've seen them commit a crime for which they haven't been punished, or unless two credible witnesses attest to having witnessed that crime--is that correct? lest we forget, baseless hatred was the reason the temple was destroyed. so i'm going to have to not defend gafni, but defend his right to be viewed as innocent until proven guilty. and that has yet to be proven to me. not that i'm not open to hearing it. i think sexual abuse is repulsive, worthy of both condemnation and severe punishment, and i'll be the first to ruin his day if it is the case...

..."me" [JWB] or whatever you want to call yourself to protect your anonyminity while you engage in potentially libelous behavior on the internet: do you have court papers? police records? official statements? his rebbeim on record? anything? one shred of anything beyond your own testimony as an unrelated party? ANYTHING AT ALL? just show me SOMETHING. one scrap of evidence. and i'll be more inclined to believe you. 1. have you spoken to the victims? can we see their testimony? 2. have you spoken to the rabbis? can we see their testimony? is anyone willing to go on record with this at all? if not--how can you slander a person on hearsay? it's not just irresponsible--it's illegal. both by u.s. law, and by talmudic law. so... prove it or i mean, shit, expect a subpeona from someone.

JWB responded then:

Ask Arthur about the 14 and 16 years olds Gafni abused along with the adult women. Ask Arthur why Gafni is not welcome in Efrat. Ask Arthur if he's bothered to speak to the Rabbonim who gave Gafni smicha, who were his rabbonim. If he has, what do they have to say. Ask Arthur why Gafni left to Israel, why he changed his name. Ask Arthur what Gafni's spin is on all this. Ask Arthur about Carlebach and the comments from Lilith I posted earlier about him: It is all the more alarming that ALEPH's primary response to the issues raised in the article is Arthur Waskow's disturbing treatise that, incredibly, mistakes chesed rather than Carlebach's unchecked power as the cause of his abusive behavior, and rationalizes Carlebach's actions as being about "overflowing energy."

I agree that the community leaders who protected him have to go. Period. That means a number of people at the OU still need to go and other community leaders need to leave communal leadership positions. There has never been proper accountability for the decades that Lanner's abuses were tolerated. The Orthodox institutions still need to address their failures and do real Teshuvah. Something they haven't done, nor are they willing to do. There are still too many people like Lanner around and even more people who enable and tolerate their abuses. These abuses are not specific to any movements. Reform, Conservative etc. have all had there fill. Lanner was simply more public than other cases, as it should have been, given the length he was allowed to continue.

"but i won't hold an entire movement responsible for the actions of one man, or even two or three."

I will, while they continue to put their creadibility and reputaion behind a monster like Gafni. I will not excuse a person nor a movement that fails to stand up and protect Jewish children and uphold Jewish values. Accountability is key if things are to improve and children are to be safer. That means holding both people and institutions responsible.

Mobius responds June 8, 2006 to JWB:

i said i'm aware of someone else's plan. in your eyes that translates into my own plan. on the contrary. i am not in a position to regularly conduct these investigations, particularly because i am not 'close' to them in a way i was to the gafni case, but also because that isn't my avodah. there are people much more qualified to handle such matters. i will also, once again, ask you to cease referring to renewal rabbis as "my leadership." i have long been an outspoken anti-rebbeist and i reject your characterization as an apologist for renewal's misdeeds.

i spoke to waskow at your behest, i told you what he told me, and i said that until someone comes forward the matter wouldn't be resolved. from that time on i have consistently warned all of my friends in the renewal community about the allegations against gafni, and my persistence in doing so led one of my friends (who showed up here last summer singing gafni's praises) organizing those members of the bayit chadash community who came forward. upon becoming more clear of the details of the original investigation, i have held his defenders firmly accountable.

my contention with you is that you have always been quick to leap into "damn them all" tirades without providing any conclusive information other than hearsay and anonymous testimony. allegations aren't enough to convict a person, and the invective you serve them with provides all the needed room to brush off the charges as those of someone on a witch hunt. beyond your tone, you often reach into conspiracy theory, seeing collusion where there is none, connecting dots that have no connection and then damning everyone who fails to agree. it is for these reasons that i believe your activities hurt others' abilities to resolve these matters meaningfully.

i agree it is important to make people aware of the allegations and to rally for action around them, but i don't see you raising these issues within the communities effected by them. rather, i see you jumping on every mention of shlomo carlebach's name on my blog to denounce him as a criminal even years after his burial. to put it plainly, you're just a troll.

i have spoken to a dozen rabbis connected in one-way-or-another to the renewal chevra. each expressed their prior suspicion of gafni, their discontent with the manner in which the investigation was dealt with, and relayed their own personal stories of breaking ties with renewal and with gafni personally. many of them noted your "unhelpful" contributions -- acknowledging the importance of the work you do (as have i), but regretting the way in which you go about doing it. in fact, several contributors to jewschool asked me to ban you from posting before i chose to do so myself. all were coming from the same place.

so, whatever... condemn me for not exalting you as the true seer, if you must. but you might be more effective if you actually consider the way people have actually responded to your actions, and then figure out how to go about getting the responses you're looking for.

in the meantime, i don't appreciate being associated with your smears by virtue of being a blogger alone.

Aria Giovanni

Lainie Speiser writes from Penthouse:

This week was really great because I had the pleasure of working with Aria Giovanni. She’s the July cover girl for our music issue and since I wasn’t here when she became a Pet in 2000 I jumped at the chance to work with her. I was a fan for a long time because she’s a classic pin up girl – striking exquisite face and a stacked slamming bod – they don’t make ‘em like that anymore. Everywhere we went people asked if they could take a picture with her, everyone knew who she was, and Aria is very sweet and gracious with her fans. She’s a classy lady through and through. Aria also has great taste in clothes and is very knowledgeable about good food and fine wines. She’s going to be doing a signing at The Virgin Megastore in LA you should come down and interview her and take pix.

If Holly Randall...

Jack writes:

If Holly's mom was a teacher or doctor or an artist, would have Holly have become a pornographer?

I don't think the kind of stuff Holly does is offensive in itself, it's that it is a trajectory to a whole heap of problems, physical and emotional.

It's a pity you two can't work together to make serious docu films about these issues. I wondering if you have ever discused it? Could Holly make serious docu films and do porn, or is that of zero interest to her? I rather suspect a possible way to persuade her would be for you to make an example and for you to make money from it.

Luke says: There aren't any difficult issues here. Porn is bad for you like cigarettes and MTV and a million things are bad for you. Humans are weak. They struggle to survive. Sometimes we do bad things, often because they are less bad than the alternatives. Nobody who could be shooting or writing for Vanity Fair magazine or Hollywood is making porn or writing about porn. Porn is a refuge for the lazy, for people who don't want to push themselves to do something noble.

Oone of the definitions I've read for pornography is that it is the lowest form of artistic endeavor.

Holly wanted to be a fashion photographer but decided that would be too hard. Porn is easy, particularly for a girl like her. Holly, like any decent photographer, can shoot beaver in her sleep. There aren't any special skills to making porn. It's the easiest way she can make a great living and buy lots of expensive shoes and take exotic vacations.

Do I respect pornographers? Not for making porn. I may respect them for other qualities.

If I was a great writer or reporter, do you think I'd be writing primarily on porn? No way. I'm only here because I'm not good enough (as yet) to make it anywhere else.

Cam Long reports from Shane's World 10th anniversary party

On the shuttle ride back to the hotel, I somehow ended up with Penny Flame on my lap--she was completely smashed. The lap ride wasn't intentional--she basically dove onto the three guys in our row to avoid having to wait for the next shuttle--and found her way to my lap when she realized that lying down + moving shuttle van = the spins. Penny announced in a rather loud voice to all of the passengers in the van that she was a drunk, crying porn star and we should pay her no mind. She then told me that she had broken up the night before with her boyfriend Hector, and that he was sitting in the row just behind us. Fortunately, Hector is not the sort of person who carries a big gun and sticks it to the head of the innocent reporter trying to comfort his drunk and emotional porn star ex-girlfriend. After she had calmed down a bit, Penny told me a rather hilarious story about how the principals of Shane's World owed her money, and since she didn't think she was going to get paid, she set out to drink all of their booze. Let's hope she steered clear of the Voodoo spiced rum, because I'm pretty sure that was comped, and it would have nullified her rather heroic effort at revenge.

Mike Davis Vs. Rob Spallone

Mike Davis, Rob's former business partner with Lowdown Entertainment (in 2004), writes:

Guenther sold the Low Down films (4) to a Germany Company who had realized they had already been sold to the German Market. Guenther made representation that the films were original and he owned them. In Europe they have what is equivalent to our American ASCAP to Music. They are able to track adult material sold in Germany, mainly because adult is so excepted in Germany. To make a long story short he was arrested and had to turn in his Visa to the German authorities along with a 100,000.00 FINE. When he confronted Rob Spallone back in 2004 Rob threatened to turn him into the INS and beat him up. I ask you Gentlemen where is the Justice is this? All I can say is what comes around goes around.

Richard Abowitz Of A Moveable Buffet

He blogs about Las Vegas for The Los Angeles Times.

I busted his chops for writing about the sex industry in only glowing terms.

Abowitz (on staff at the Las Vegas Weekly) replies:

Dear Mr. Ford: I appreciate your note on the blog. I have put a lot of thought on how I cover adult. More probably than I should have and certainly more than most people give me credit for. And, I am going to keep doing it as long as my editors let me.When I moved to Las Vegas I discovered what a huge and very mainstream business adult is here. It is also a legal business: from the strip clubs, to the brothels over the county line, to the movies shot here, to the AVN convention held each January. I also discovered that my colleagues (despite the fact that many of them consumed the various adult entertainments in Vegas) never wrote about this side of Vegas as a business or as entertainment. The only coverage adult got was from a moral perspective. I lack that perspective. Consenting adults having sex or being entertained by it neither excites nor offends me. It is fine just like skydiving or eating liver or watching baseball---just not for me. So, I admit I am not ideal for a mainstream reporter to cover your industry. I do not watch porno (or, really any movies including mainstream Hollywood ones) and so I have always realized that there are limits to how well I can cover it. Still, as a writer what has always interested me are independent thinkers, outsiders and great stories about people and adult entertainment offers all of that. I am not pro-porn or anti-porn beyond a strong support of the first amendment. I cover entertainment. I don't pick what entertains people, the public does. Anyway, if I ruled the world condom use would be mandatory on all those films I don't watch to reduce the health risks to performers. I remember John Stagliano told me a few months ago that he was trying to think of something really extreme for Fashionistas 2 and I said, "John, use condoms and you will shock everyone that has seen your stuff." He didn't buy that plan. Anyway, thanks for your comment on the LATimes blog. Yrs., Richard

Luke says: I am not at all sure that the Adult business is as legal as you say. There's been plenty in the Las Vegas sex industry that has ended up in criminal court. Any strip club chain has historically had ties to organized crime and I believe they still do. Eg, Vincent Faraci at Crazy Horse Too. Pornography is only legal if community standards accept it. That is being tested by federal obscenity busts. I believe that escorting in Las Vegas is illegal. That's one huge illegal sex industry in your backyard.

You're missing that part of the story, perhaps because you believe that consenting sex between adults should be legal, but that's not the law when particularly when such sex is turned into a commercial transaction. I'm thinking of the excellent work that John L. Smith has done about organized crime ties to the sex industry, including in Las Vegas, and particularly, of late, about strip clubs in Vegas.

I remember when various New York mobsters such as Craig Marino were hanging out at the Bizarre Video booth at the AVN show in January 2003. You also see numerous Hells Angels at the AVN show, members of a gang notorious for such criminal activity as methamphetamine manufacturing and distribution.

I recommend these links: HollywoodMafia.com, HollywoodMafia.blogspot.com, Mafia, Craig Marino, John Baudanza, Vincent Faraci.

On Set Of DCypher's Taboo 22 From Metro

Ava Rose video of Ava Rose video of Ava Rose, Van Damage video of Charlie Laine, Celeste Star, Nevaeh video of Brooke Haven video of August video of Brooke Haven, Van Damage video of Charlie Laine, Celeste Star, Neveah, Carli Banks, Faith Leon, August, Herschel Savage video of Charlie Laine, Celeste Star, Neveah, Carli Banks, Faith Leon, August, Herschel Savage video of Charlie Laine, Celeste Star, Neveah, and Carli Banks video of Faith Leon, August, Herschel Savage

Van Damage Van Damage Van Damage Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose smokes Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose smokes Ava Rose smokes Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose, Nicole Sheridan Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose, Van Damage Ava Rose, Van Damage Jason Sullivan, Van Damage, Ava Rose Van Damage, Ava Rose Ava, Rose Ava, Van Ava Rose Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Brooke Haven Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Ava Rose Brooke Haven, Van Damage Brooke Ava Rose Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Ava Rose and the PA Duke Duke Ava, Duke Duke, Ava Rose Ava, Duke Ava, Billy, Duke Ava, Duke Ava Rose Ava Rose Duke Ava Rose, Duke Duke, Ava Rose Ava Rose Duke, Ava Duke Duke, Ava Carli Banks pic Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks smokes Carli Banks Carli Banks smokes Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli Banks Nevaeh, Carli Banks, Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Carli Banks Carli Banks, Charlie Lain Carli, Charlie Carli Banks, Charlie Lain Carli Banks Carli Banks Carli, Charlie Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Nevaeh Celeste Star Celeste Star Charlie, Celeste Celeste Star Celeste Star Celeste Star smokes Brooke Haven, Van Damage Faith Leon Faith Leon Faith Leon Faith Leon, AVN's Peter Warren Faith Leon, Peter Warren Faith Leon, Peter Warren Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Charlie Lain Carli Banks Carli Banks girls Navaeh Nevaeh Charlie, Celeste Star Charlie, Celeste Carli Banks Celeste Star Carli Banks Charlie Lain, Carli Banks Girls Girls Girls Girls, gaffer Girls Charlie, Carli Celeste, Nevaeh girls DCypher Faith Leon, Herschel Savage, August Faith Leon, Herschel Savage, August Faith Leon Faith Leon Faith Leon Faith Leon August Jason Sechrest, Lisa Sparxxx Jason Sechrest, Lisa Sparxxx Gene Ross reports

I arrive on set at 10:20 a.m. I park on the street (and later forget about the sign that says no parking from 4pm-7pm. I pick up a $65 ticket).

DCypher looks happy to see me. "I can't remember when I last punched somebody," he admits. "It was probably when I was in bar and drunk. There have been a few people I've wanted to punch but they didn't want to fight. These days, it's not what I'm into. I try to approach people from a perspective of compassion and understanding. But I have bad days."

Ethan Cage holds the boom today. He's proud that his wife Lexi Lamour threw an elbow in a guy's throat when he grabbed her bum at McKenzie Lee's birthday party.

"I put her in karate class," boasts Ethan.

DCypher (now with Justine Jolie, he used to be married to Bunny Luv who's now the Digital Playground director Celeste) says that people who come into porn, including himself, have emotional issues they haven't dealt with. "They're put into an environment where they get a lot of attention, a lot of money, and there's access to drugs... That doesn't create the greatest environment to have a healthy functioning relationship with another human being.

"Why aren't you in a successful relationship? You have a strong moral basis. I read on your site that women find you quite dashing. What are you waiting for?"

Luke: "I hate it when people treat me like a porn person."

DCypher: "You feel like you are more than that?"

Luke: "Yeah."

DCypher: "You feel it demeans your intellectual capacity?"

Luke: "Yeah. LA Magazine says the only thing I know anything about is porn."

DCypher: "That hurts?"

Luke: "It did. It's not true. I have many dimensions."

DCypher: "Many people in the industry feel the same way. Even though they use their genitals to get paid or capture people using their genitals, they've been stereotyped. Why do you think society stereotypes like that?"

Luke: "Because sex is so powerful, anyone who trafficks in commercial sex is stigmatized, is primarily viewed as a pornographer."

DCypher: "Don't you think that's hypocritical?"

Luke: "No, it's inherent to the human condition. No society will view a commercial sex provider or entertainer as a human being."

DCypher: "Do you view porn people as inhuman?"

Luke: "No, because I know them and I don't care about their porn work."

DCypher: "What happens after they are done? Can they return to human status?"

Luke: "Generally, no."

Van Damage walks up.

DCypher: "I was just asking Luke if he felt that people in porn lack moral fibre."

Van: "How are you doing, Luke? Can I pinch your nipples?"

Luke: "No.

"They lack some boundaries. That's interconnected with morality but it doesn't encapsulate it. I don't think everyone in porn is a scumbag."

Van Damage: "What constitutes moral fibre?"

Luke: "Doing what is right."

DCypher: "You never want to answer my questions."

The crafts service Asian girl has tits to stop a bus. Her t-shirt reads "I luv my boyfriend."

I bet he loves her too.

I yell at DCypher: "I walked in here expecting to see some slamming action."

DCypher: "You've got to be the post we measure ourselves against. If you move, we'll slide into moral anarchy. How do we know if we're improving or declining?"

DCypher defends me for quoting from porners' MySpace postings. "I keep a journal. I would never dream of putting things from there on my DVSX site. A girl writes that she poisoned her girlfriend. What was that? Then they get mad when you reprint it. I'm confused why people get so upset. They want to control how it looks.

"In the MySpace era, everyone has a blog. The blogosphere is killing the news. Rupert Murdoch says it is good it is going, that personalized partisanized news is triumphing. In the age of reality TV and blogging, everyone is becoming Luke Ford."

DCypher tells his videographer Jason Sullvan: "I don't want to alienate you like I did Barry Wood. He thought I was talking down to him. If you start to feel that I'm talking down to you, let me know."

Ava's scene requires her to act like a crazy person. She rocks back and forth screaming, "It's not real, it's not real."

She's about to cry.

Throughout the day, Ava says to me, "Luke, you're not an animal."

DCypher: "Despite what other women have said."

Luke: "Despite what Holly says."

I am a human being. I am a man.

Off camera, Ava Rose goes down on Van Damage.

I walk into the make-up room. Somebody says that Vivid girls are all powder and plastic.

Girl A: "You ever worked for Vivid?"

Girl B: "I don't think I want to."

Girl A: "I worked for them once."

I return to watch the director interviewed by a crew from Playboy's American Sex Star.

DCypher takes my recorder: "Are you lonely at night, Luke? What do you think about when you're alone? Can you hear the lambs screaming?"

The director says about his lead actress: "She has perfect shaped tear-drop breasts."

"Derek [at LADirectModels.com] asked Ava if she would be comfortable working with four guys and she said it was something she'd be interested in trying. He said she would probably feel safe on my set. We don't beat the girls up so much. It's not like a gonzo."

Ava says she would never have sex with four guys for a gonzo movie.

Luke: "How were you able to tap into the craziness for your role?"

Ava: "I came in here and I was like, 'How am I going to come in here and act?' I don't know where that crazy girl came from. I knew this crazy lady in the next door apartment who was a drug addict. I wanted to go over and save her but I was young and my parents thought I'd do drugs."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Ava: "Insurance fraud. I wanted to be a secret agent and insurance was the closest thing I could get.

"I know you don't twist words, Luke. People twist words."

Van Damage, dressed like a fascist, says his father and grandfather were in Auschwitz and to this day it still affects his grandfather. "He won't walk into a gas chamber."

Van: "How do you know what's right?"

Luke: "You need a transcendent moral code or it's just everyone's opinion."

From Chicago where she worked as a stripper during highschool ("because I wanted to move out of my parents house"), Nevaeh (a Penthouse Pet) moved to LA a year ago after entering porn.

She's skinny. Her t-shirt reads, "Do I make you feel fat?"

"I want to make as much money as I can," she says, "and then move back to Chicago and buy a house.

"I used to come out here two weeks of every month and it [the travel] just got so annoying."

She loves the money, beautiful women and attention that come with her work in porn.

Luke: "So how has it affected your life being a porn star?"

She pushes my recorder away and ends the interview. She finds my questions too intense.

DCypher: "I owe Metro one more movie. I'm off contract."

A light bulb explodes.

"It's the whole 6/6/06 thing," says a crew member.

DCypher: "I want to be more like Holly. No matter what you write about her, she ends up looking good. You want to put a bullet between the eyes of her friends. She writes back, 'Oh Luke, don't judge them so harshly. They didn't know I'd quit drinking.'"

In the name of his rebbe Jim Holliday, DCypher instructs the girls that their fingernail and toenail polish should match.

Joe writes: "Bless that director for wanting the girls to have their fingers & toes painted the same color. That's a real life thing that drives me crazy. Especially since women are so quick to say "That doesn't match!" to most anything a guy wears."

Ava (older by a year) and Mia Rose entered porn in February 2006.

Van Damage throws a fake tirade: "How do you expect me to act in this atmosphere? Where's my injector? Where's the water I asked for ten minutes ago?"

A crew guy who's worked in the industry for 20 years remembers when he used to stunt-cock all the time in the eighties when the main actors were limp from cocaine abuse. You didn't need an HIV-test then to jump into the action.

1:15 p.m. Charlie Lain and Nevaeh go smoke a bowl. The make-up artist requests that they do not smudge her work.

Ava Rose is strapped down. I ask DCypher if she'll be having sex while strapped up.

"Yeah," he says. "And then we'll bring in kids and they'll have sex with animals."

"Luke, you're not an animal," says Ava. "They can't have sex with you."

Referring to Van, Ava says: "Yeah, he's my daddy. He does dirty things to me because I'm a f--- hole."

I wonder if Ava (one of 15 contestants on Playboy's American Sex Star) would say such things if she truly understood how much God loved her.

Brooke Haven is asked what she would do if she got a million dollars.

Van, from behind her: "Get this strange guy out of my ass."

Playboy asks Ava repeatedly, "What would you like to say to Jenna?"

Ava doesn't know.

Who can blame her? What does one say to Jenna? "I admire your work"?

I interview Iowa's Carli Banks, in porn for 18-months. "I only do girl-girl.

"I signed up one 1Modelplace.com.

"My boyfriend at the time (for a year, ended a year ago) was always looking at porn. 'That chick is so hot. She's the most beautiful woman in the world.' I said, 'You watch. I'll be in one of those magazines.'

"An agent found me. I told my boyfriend I was doing fashion work.

"One day I brought home a Penthouse. 'Look at this honey.' We were flipping through the pages and there I was. He was so pissed. We broke up for like a week.

"That was one of the main reasons why I did.

"I wanted to live here. He wanted to live [in Iowa]. He's a momma's boy. He can't keep a job. He depended on me making money."

She has natural C-cup breasts.

"I love the money. It's easy. I hate that everyone knows what I do. It's kinda embarrassing that everyone's seen me naked. I'm more of a private person. Now I'm used to it but I kinda regret having my pictures all over the internet.

"I'm with a guy [UCLA student]. We don't talk about it. I keep it private. My personal life is completely separate. I don't let it affect me.

"We live with eight guys from this frat. I'm like a sister to them. They go, 'Eww, that's gross. I can't look at what you do.' The whole UCLA school knows what I do."

She giggles. "He doesn't like that too much."

"I will never do a scene with a guy. I couldn't live with myself.

"I haven't talked to my mother's side of the family in four years. My dad knows. I can't tell my grandma.

"I'll tell me dad, 'I'm going to be in this magazine this month. Don't get it.'

"My dad loves porn. He's a very sexual person.

"I moved in with him at 15. I had a crazy stepmom. She chopped off all my hair. He was married to her for five years. She was really sweet until I moved in. I moved out on my own at 16.

"He'll tell me, 'I had five girlfriends this week.'"

Celeste Star has been in porn for 30 months. She did one scene with her boyfriend at the beginning but since then has been girl-only.

Luke: "What motivated you to get into the industry?"

Celeste: "It was more my boyfriend."

Luke: "He was pushing you?"

Celeste: "Yeah, he was. When I started, it was for the money.

"I've had a boyfriend for two years. He supports me. He was going to drive me today but he went golfing instead. He's going to make us money golfing one day."

Luke: "Does he have a job?"

Celeste: "No. When I first started, when I was with my first agent and I wasn't working much and wasn't making much money, so I needed him to bring in a paycheck. I enjoy spending time with him. If we get married, it'll be both of us working and taking care of the kids.

"He doesn't use my money. He's not like my first boyfriend. He's laid back and he respects me and loves me."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Celeste laughs. "A doctor. In highschool, I wanted to be a plastic surgeon. I took all the necessities but I didn't pass my SATs with a good score so I decided I wouldn't be a doctor."

Luke: "How did your family react to your being a porn star?"

Celeste: "They don't know. I think my mom would be OK with it. She'd be shocked at first. One of my sisters loves it and the other sister says I'm throwing my life away."

Luke: "What do you love and hate about being a porn star?"

Celeste: "I hate waiting around. I love the sex. I love the make-up. You get to do pretty girl and look all pretty."

Luke: "What do you do with your spare time?"

Celeste: "Hiking, playing basketball. I sit and watch TV a lot."

Nicole and Voodoo celebrate their sixth wedding anniversary in October. She did her first scene in late 1999. For the past two years, she's worked as a photographer in addition to doing a few scenes a month.

DCypher, who ranks among the 700 most powerful people in porn, enjoys the admiration and caresses of his actresses.

"Why did we never date?" he asks them.

"Bad timing," is a frequent answer and one he finds comforting.

When he's all done with this movie, he can sit in the shower trying to wash away the filth and rock back and forth and cry, "Bad timing! Bad timing!"

Shooting pornography after Auschwitz is barbaric.

Charlie Laine walks around burping. She's bored and high. "If I get any more stoned, I'll fall asleep," she declares.

The four girls doing a lesbian four way protest when they learn that a boy-girl will be going on at the same time in the same place. They clash with the production manager Jay Shanahan, who's filling in for his sick wife Shanna McCullough. They call him Sergeant Porno.

Director DCypher steps in and calms everybody down and works out a compromise.

A member of the crew repeatedly straps Ava down.

"He can never love you more than he loves himself," says another crew guy to Ava. "And he hates himself."

It takes me an hour, but Tuesday evening I finally work up the courage to ask Faith Leon for an interview.

She's from a small town in North Carolina, which has shunned her since it found out she does porn.

In the industry for two years, she's done over 100 scenes. "I usually come out here for two weeks at a time and do two-three scenes a day. I moved here last year."

Luke: "What group did you hang out with in highschool?"

Faith: "I had friends in all the little cliques. I was the chick who had all the guys."

Luke: "Were you a cheerleader?"

Faith: "No, I was a sports player (soccer and basketball). Me and my sister (two years older) took number one in basketball North Carolina. I'm 5'11. I played forward. My sister is 5'10. She's an English teacher."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Faith: "A veterinarian. I'm an animal freak.

"After highschool, I went to college for about a year -- North Carolina State. Taking 18 hours and working fulltime. I couldn't take it. I needed more money. So of course, blah blah blah. I am going to go back to school but I have to gain residency in California."

Luke: "What do you love and what do you hate about being in this industry?"

Faith: "I like the freedom. You feel pretty. You get dressed up and made up.

"It's overwhelming sometimes. Mentally, you've got to cool off. My fiance Marcus Leon (30yo) works in the industry too. We have to separate it from our lives."

Earlier, I heard Faith say her fantasy was to see two guys have sex.

Luke: "Would you lose respect for your fiance if he allowed another man to plough him up the rear?"

Faith: "I wouldn't lose respect, but I wouldn't want to see it because I know he wouldn't like it.

"We'll be together two years in November. We're getting married in November.

"When I met him, we had both just started but we didn't tell each other. Come on. If you weren't in the industry and I came up to you on the industry and said, 'I f--- guys for a living, do you want to go out?' Would you want to go out with me anyways?"

I shake my head.

Faith: "Exactly. I told him two weeks later. He said, 'Ohmigod. I do the same thing.'"

Luke: "What are the joys and sorrows of dating someone in the industry?"

Faith: "It sucks because I don't like seeing him with other girls. I don't watch his scenes. I like to know who he's working with for my own mentality's sake, my defence mechanism.

"Good things? The money. We own a house in Chatsworth that's paid for.

"I do want kids. I don't want to wait ten years to have them.

"We're trying to get the website thing going. We're planning to build up north (in a small town). I love the snow and the mountains. We're going to move up there. The standard of living is a lot less. Hopefully we won't have to do this. He does photography. I'll do a little small business. I've researched the town and I know what kind of business they need."

Luke: "Have you had to pay any prices for being in this industry?"

Faith: "Yes. The whole town (about 25,000) I grew up in knows what I do for a living. They've blackballed me. When my ten year reunion comes, I've got these pictures to show. 'Hey, I'm looking gorgeous. I've got a husband on my arm. I'm 21 and I own a $600,000 house.' I don't see any of those people my age doing that."

Luke: "Did some people stop being friends with you?"

Faith: "They completely cut me off. They found something on the internet, a huge company on the internet. It was one of my first scenes. It was absolutely horrible. I looked hideous. Of course that's what they found. Word spread like no other.

"My [born-again Christian] friend calls me up: 'I can't believe you do this.' You f--- other people. So...

"It's Bible-belt country. My brother (three years older) stopped talking to me. My dad for a while. We kinda told them that I'm out of the business. They don't go looking for porn. They're church-going people."

Luke: "Why are you such a rebel?"

Faith: "I've always been. I'm a loner. I do what I've got to do. It's for better causes. That's my excuse.

"I talk to my sister about my scenes. 'Yeah, I had to do this!' She's like, 'What?' She teaches highschool English. She thinks it's great. 'My little baby sister does that.'

"I'm still shy, reserved. If you see me on set, I'm not approaching people. You might think I'm a bitch because I won't come up and talk to you because I'm scared of talking to you. But if you talk to me, I'll talk to you."

Faith has no southern accent. "My family is from Michigan so I wasn't raised southern. My family doesn't. You won't catch me saying 'Y'all.'"

Luke: "What do you love and hate about Los Angeles?"

Faith: "I hate LA! Too many people! There are cars everywhere! Coming to work today, I sat on the exit ramp for 20 minutes."

Luke: "Do you get recognized?"

Faith: "No, because I don't wear make-up."

She finds many porn fans creepy and when her husband gets recognized in public, she doesn't like it. "Eww, that means they masturbate to our movies."

With her husband, Faith moved into this "cute neighborhood in Chatsworth. It's safe. You can go jogging at night. I thought the neighbors would bring pies but nobody did anything. There were no welcome baskets. I was disappointed."

Luke: "On the other hand, it's good that they don't know you because they won't know what you do."

Faith: "We're very private. They think that my husband is a photographer and that I'm a model."

Most of the girls are stoned. They alternate bowl breaks with cigarette breaks. Some of them have been waiting around since 11 a.m.

7:40 p.m. Charlie Lain yells out: "There's no 'I' in 'team.'"

I overhear AVN's Peter Warren say to DCypher: "Ron Jeremy was at my house last night. It was so weird."

James DiGiorgio writes me: "While checking out your latest 'photographic verite' images from DCypher's set, I became impressed with Duke, DCypher's PA, cuz he's wearing an "Archaeological Institute of America" baseball cap. In one of the images, he seems to be joyously preparing for a "dig" in Ava Rose's ass. It's makes me proud to see people in porn combining smut and academic research."

Whatever happened to Sin City contract girl Gina Austin? I guess she didn't want to do porn anymore and just left.

I ask the Dalai Porn Llama of Sin City who replies: "I really don't have a clue. I didn't ask this time figuring either religion, drugs, embarrassment, parental intervention, just plain tired of sucking cock on video, better offer, suitcase pimp's influence, roommate's influence, herpes, chlamydia, or all or some of the preceding."

A friend writes: "I saw her being interviewed on video at AVN.com, and she had a deer in the headlights look on her face. She hadn't done a lot of sex. She'd stripped briefly in Ohio."

I arrive at Porn Star Karaoke at 9:10 p.m. It's almost empty.

Sponsor Jason Sechrest rolls up at 9:20. He promises the crowd to make PSK more gay.

I hang out until 11 p.m. but I don't see any porn stars beyond Lisa Sparxxx.

A friend tells me that Tyra Banxxx is doing really well for herself. "She was tricked by Tyra Banks on her TV show to say that she was leaving porn, but she never had any intention of leaving porn. She's on the boxcover of America's Next Whore. It's a feature for Hustler directed by Roy Karch. It was shot on film."

Luke: "She can be proud of that. The boxcover no less. America's top whore. Wow."

Friend: "It's been a long time since there's been a black contract girl. Since Heather Hunter."

Luke: "She's like the next Rosa Parks. She'll be a role model for black youth all over the world. This will revolutionize the black underclass. Give them hope."

If you work hard in America, you can go straight to the top of a porn boxcover. Shot on film no less.

"She's like Stand and Deliver. It's like she's teaching calculus to inner-city kids."

Friend: "She's a great performer. Did you see her on Monster Loads? She was teaching other women how to ----."

Roy walks up.

Roy: "It's called America's Next Top Porn Model and it's from Sex Z Pictures. The broadcast rights will go to the Hustler channel."

Friend: "See!"

Luke: "Was she good?"

Roy: "She was very good. She's a nice girl. She took special time with this one for us because of the situation with the original Tyra and the Tyra Banks show. We shot some of the scenes in the same location where the original Tyra Banks show was taped. It's quite the parody. We're just finishing the editing. It should be out in the fall."

Friend: "I just saw the boxcover for it. It looks great."

Roy says I've carved out a niche for myself as the reluctant porn journalist.

Friend: "He's in wikipedia!"

Chick Fight: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez vs. the Miami Herald

Cathy Seipp writes:

That Alisa can be a royal pain is obvious even just from the titles she's considering for her next book (I think she should stick with her first choice, the excellent "Girl Crush.") These include: "All-American Bitch," "Selfish," "Me, Me, Me," "Boosters, Bitches and Babes" and "Latinas Who Lunch."

But that's what makes her such a great story, and you'd think that especially in these days of declining circulation, editors would jump at the chance to engage readers rather than bore them.

Beyond that, the public isn't well served when stories are assigned (or not) on the basis of who Brenda Starr and friends feel like talking to this week. Newspapers are a public trust, and those who work for them have an obligation to rise above their personal squabbles and hurt feelings. Even if they're women.

Mickey Kaus Eats During Blogging Heads

It's disgusting.

"Belittling and fake deference are the two weapons in my quiver," says Mickey.

Add eating on camera while arguing.

Dating Advice For Teenagers

CecileMLDubois: hey luke
Luke: yes
CecileMLDubois: when a guy says he's feeling a relationship fade, does that mean he wants to break up?
Luke: yes
CecileMLDubois: my bf said that
Luke: oh well
CecileMLDubois: should i go ahead and break up with him
Luke: dunno
Luke: so how does this make you feel?
CecileMLDubois: i dunno
CecileMLDubois: i guess a little sad
CecileMLDubois: my mom will be happy
Luke: when he rolled the car, that was his signal he wanted out
CecileMLDubois: you mean passive aggressive?
Luke: yes
CecileMLDubois: he wanted out of his life, or you mean afterwards
Luke: he wanted to kill you
CecileMLDubois: you're horrible

'The Surprising World of Marital Intimacy in Jewish thought'

I want to go to this drasha but only if it is about sex. I fear it is about communication.

In most of my relationships, I've had way too much communication and not nearly enough sex.

Frankly, there's nothing wrong with me that a six-foot black gangbanger couldn't cure.

Variety Columnist Brian Lowry Is A Fool

He writes: "Print and radio are more compatible than newspapers and TV, though in general the attributes that pop in broadcasting -- energy, animation and the willingness to sound off on any topic, conscience-free -- would surely make most newspaper editors and ombudsmen wince."

Radio and TV hosts who give their opinions are no more or less conscience-free than journalists who strive for objectivity. One major difference between the Bill O'Reillys of the world and the Brian Lowrys is that the Bills are more transparent. You know where he and Al Franken etc are coming from. Journalists in The LA Times pop off with their opinions too (read almost any study of media bias, particularly the work of David Shaw on abortion), it's just that they do it in ways that were rarely challenged until the rise of the internet.

Drive-By Gang-Related Shooting In My Neighborhood

It occurred Sunday night in the 1600 block of Wooster (near Pico/Robertson Blvds). I've heard there were other shootings in the 'hood recently. Nobody has been hurt.

Residents of Pico/Robertson rarely commit violent crimes but a few blocks south of us, there are a lot of blacks who run in gangs. Many of them commit violent crimes. I don't care if they kill each other. I just wish they would leave innocents alone (which is impossible, no man is an island).

I remember one Friday night I heard a shout that there was a young man outside. I grabbed my gun and ran out. On the neighbor's roof, he was about ten feet away, about 18 years of age, and carrying a backpack. When he saw me, he ran.

I have Jewish friends who've been held up at knife-point and gun-point in my 'hood and it's usually (if not always) been by young black men.

I believe all law-abiding citizens should carry guns. And even if it is against the law, some Jews I know carry guns on Shabbos.

Let's roll.

I email my friends: "There are a lot of young black male gangsters penetrating my precious 'hood. What should and I the Jewish community do in response?"

Khunrum says: "Befriend them. Convert them to Judaism and take them to your shul. Start Afro/Jewish rap group singing songs of Hebrew devotion. Grow rich. Become a playa in the music biz."

Chaim Amalek writes: "I thought the Mexicans were serving as a human barrier between sensitive white people such as Jews and Hollywood types, and the more savage races of the earth. You might want to consider playing Wagner very loudly at all times along the borderland."

Fred writes: "I have the solution. Try to look poor so they aren't tempted to rob you. For example, start driving an old broken-down van that looks like it was heisted from Jeffrey Dahmer, move into a one-room run-down hovel, avoid wearing anything trendy.... Oh, never mind...."

Robert Goodman's Next Documentary - Rabbi Mordechai Gafni?

My friend Rob (r.goodman@mac.com) writes June 7, 2006:

I didn’t realize you were going to cut and paste my e-mail. Now I know so I’ll be more deliberate with my thoughts.

And I heard no one really read your blog! It seems that people do and that what’s written gets around. I received a bunch of e-mails responding to your post the other day about my idea for a documentary film addressing the “Gafni situation” ... a film I imagine at this point to be more about the response of the “establishment” of the community he was/is in than about the bad behavior itself.

I received a few e-mails from people offering to “dish the dirt” on Gafni: three of these were from people who had crossed paths (spiritual paths?) with Gafni over the years; two were from people who described more on-going dealings with him.

I also heard from a friend today that Rabbi Tirza Firestone said she’s not sure about meeting me when I come to Boulder.

I’ve never met, written about, filmed, or spoken with Rabbi Firestone, but I guess she’s hesitant to meet me because in the blog that you posted I wrote that I believe that there was a kind of iron wall put up by rabbis associated with Renewal against “Gafni accusers” and someone told her about this. Or she reads your blog.

I’m having second thoughts about this documentary. First. I’m not sure I want to spend time doing a Nick Broomfield-type thing where I’m accusing/uncovering/making people uncomfortable. Sounds kinda sad and depressing.

Second, I really like a lot of the people who I believe acted badly in a bad situation and now are just defensive about the whole thing, insulating themselves by saying things like “we need more time to reflect on what’s happened so we won’t say anything now” or “we’re doing our own personal healing with the people affected so we prefer just to keep it to ourselves” or “we’re doing a workshop next Tuesday where we’re hosting a roundtable seminar called “Men, Women and Authority” so we’ll discuss it with you then.”

The irony is that these people are in the spiritual business usually in a capacity of authority so now are really confused.

The best, of course, would be if the film started off as a kind of typical accusation, but through investigation found out that the truth was something different. This would be inspiring. Cynicism turned on its head!

You should know at this point that I also received an angry e-mail from a woman who a few weeks ago on the phone described to me, in detail, her very hurtful sexual relationship with Gafni as well as narrated stories highlighting what a manipulative cad he is (and oh, was he a cad!).

The irony of this story is that last month – just a few days, coincidentally, before the women in Israel made complaints to the police about Gafni – she had contacted me for the first time to get a copy of my film 180 Degrees to Jerusalem, which has a clip of Gafni in it. At that time, she sent me 4 documents defending Gafni. I’ve attached these documents for you.

One of them is addressed “To The Jewish Community worldwide:” and written by 18 people, including Rabbi Tirzah Firestone” and other important Renewal leaders. In it, they write that the focus of their "discussion is Rabbi Mordechai Gafni (but) the issues we address are universal and timeless."

Their letter (GafniSupportLtr.doc) makes the following points:

(1) Several people have led a campaign to besmirch Gafni’s name. These people are bad.

(2) The people writing the letter did their own investigations of Gafni and he is fully innocent.

(3) Anyone who speaks bad or makes false accusations about Gafni is doing lashon hara – fully prohibited by the Torah (and, by the way, an extremely serious “sin” according to many Torah scholars).

(4) Because Gafni has been wronged, we are obligated to “right the wrong” and support him.

(5) The writers have worked closely with Gafni for a long time and say that “Rabbi Gafni is a person of real integrity” and possesses a unique combination of courage and audacity and… genuine humility”.

(6) They “urge the reader …to reject the false reports…and give him your full support, as we all have done and continue to do.”

(7) “If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact any one of us directly.”

What the letter doesn’t say of course is that if in the end they were wrong about Gafni -Very sorry. Really. – contact us only if you won’t take us to task. (Isn’t this what Bush, Rove, Cheney and Rumsfeld said after the conclusions that there really were no WMD in Iraq?)

A few of the criticisms I received after the last blog was that I had unfairly grouped “all Renewal leaders” – as if they spoke in one voice and all had the same information and reactions.

The truth is, the above the letter was written by prominent Renewal leaders – and others. Are these people involved now in healing and helping people affected by Gafni? I’m sure they are.

For me, I’ll do the film if someone’s actions inspire me to believe that the hypocrisy, bad behavior, and self-righteousness isn’t pandemic in “spiritual Judaism” – in places like Renewal – in the same way that it is clear it is in so many obvious places in our modern lives. Come on, people! Stop the double-talk! We're cool Jews; have we become "Them"?

And the whole story’s beginning to bore me anyway.

Remember the B-movie They Live! - with Rowdy Roddy Piper? Get me the people with the glasses.

AwarenessCenterLtr.doc GafniInquiryLtr.doc GafniSupportLtr.doc Jewish Week response.doc

Why Aren't We Offering Judaism To Illegal Mexican Immigrants?

On Laura Ingraham's show June 5, she said about 70,000 illegal Mexican immigrants in the US have embraced Islam. Why aren't we offering these people Judaism? I propose dinners with a difference -- invite an illegal immigrant home for your Shabbos dinner.

Robert Goodman's Next Documentary - Rabbi Mordechai Gafni

Rob emails me:

Hey Luke;

I want to tell you about the documentary and how it's shaping up. This Friday I leave for a week trip to Boulder where I'll start to meet people in the Renewal movement.

What's interesting to me in the Gafni story is not what he did, but how the "machine" around him responded to his devious deeds. I believe that (1) all the important leaders/rabbis in the Renewal Movement knew exactly what he was up to all along; (2) they conspired to keep it a secret for their own selfish reasons; (3) they attacked all accusers - including me when I alluded to Gafni's indiscretions a few years ago during the filming of the other doc I made in Israel. These Renewal rabbis responded in like fashion to the Bushies' typical response to criticism and accusations from journalists; (3) hypocrisy, close-mindedness and meanness is no more a stranger to the "hippie" Jewish Renewal movement than it is to the Catholic Church. This makes me really sad.

I have a second question I plan to raise in the documentary: how bad exactly was Gafni? Is he just a cad ... or is he more evil than this? How much hypocrisy must we stifle in ourselves when we pass judgment? How much did "we" allow him with a nod and a wink?

From this question, I thought an interesting format for this documentary might be to do two separate 45-minute documentaries - one by me and one by another (I think woman) filmmaker - both addressing these same questions around Gafni. No shared material, just specific questions that must be addressed. Maybe they'd be shown back to back or maybe they'd be cut into each other by chapters.

...I haven't formed a clear opinion about how the "establishment" has responded over the years - and is responding now - to the Gafni story. In truth, I don't need their cooperation and certainly will not disguise my inquiry in some sort of flattery so that they'll open up to me.

If I decide to do this, Rabbi Zalman Shlomi Schechter and all the others will be in it - in situations where they agree to speak with me or in situations where they're running away from me as I chase them with a camera rolling. These people need to answer questions about actions they made that have affected A LOT of people.

If they act like Don Rumsfeld and are snide and secretive, then they'll come off as Don Rumsfeld does - dishonest and manipulative. I don't feel I need to be "nice" to them. I feel I need to serve notice about what I'm about to do.

Put it all on your blog. I'm happy to get it out there and see who has integrity and who's the same kind of phony Gafni has turned out to be. (If he's a phony at all - we'll see in the doumentary...)

The only other thing I ask is that you not portray my documentary a type of witch hunt to expose and discredit rabbis in Renewal. I will not try to do this; rather, I want to be clear that I have questions that I will demand be answered, whether it is comfortable for them to answer or not. I believe they ARE involved in this story - the ones who defended Gafni at least - and are therefore it is legitimate to question their actions without consideration for how this will make them feel, or somesuch nonsense.

When A Rabbi Does Wrong

Calev Ben-David writes in The Jerusalem Post about another example of the "yesterday's news tomorrow" approach of establishment Jewish journalism:

A few years ago, while I was still a senior editor at The Jerusalem Post, someone at the paper suggested we do a profile of American-born "New Age rabbi" Mordechai Gafni. At the time, his television appearances and some mentions in the Hebrew media were beginning to gain him widespread notice in Israel. Well before that, though, I had attended a few of his Torah lectures in Jerusalem for the Anglo-Israeli community, and saw firsthand that he was a compelling speaker and charismatic personality.

Unfortunately, I also knew there were some disturbing rumors about him in the Orthodox community concerning inappropriate sexual behavior while he was still a rabbinical student in the US - including an alleged relationship with the underage daughter of one of his patrons. I asked around the paper and one of the reporters said she knew a woman who had been more recently involved in an inappropriate (though in this case not illegal) relationship with Gafni. Though I pressed the reporter to get more solid information, in the end she was unable to come up with anything that could be put on record.

Under these circumstances, especially in dealing with a figure much admired by several people I knew personally, I decided not to go ahead with any sort of profile of Gafni for the time being.

...To my regret, I didn't quite rise to that challenge as a journalist when it came to the case of Mordechai Gafni. It's a lesson that I - and many other people - would do well not to forget next time.

Holly: "You don't have to worry about a lesbian relationship blossoming between Dani [Woodward] and I."

Luke, in a flat voice: "How do you get the strength?"

Holly: "Come on, Luke. Put a little more emphasis in your question."

Luke: "It was a cute thread."

Holly: "Yeah, minus the panty shot."

Luke: "You knew what you were doing. You're a big tease."

Holly: "I swear to you I did not know. I wouldn't have put it up if I had known."

Luke: "Sorry, I'm being a creep."

Holly: "I work with creeps. I'm surrounded by creeps at all times."

Luke: "At least you look wholesome when you are in your garden. I like you in long skirts and in gardens."

Holly: "I know you do. The reason I wear long skirts is because I hate my legs and they're covered with bruises."

Luke: "I thought you were preparing to convert to Orthodox Judaism."

Holly: "No. That will never happen. Never."

Luke: "Does Dani seem speedy to you?"

Holly: "No. No. She's been clean for a while. I've seen her several times. She's restless. She's gained about 20 pounds. She looks very healthy. When I saw her at Cherry Rain's baby shower, Dani looked great. She's definitely not on drugs."

Luke: "I wouldn't think that Paul Fishbein and his wife would have her in their life if she was speeding.

"How was your mother's birthday party yesterday?"

Holly: "It was just family. It was just lunch.

"You're not supposed to interbreed so naturally you find it repulsive to think about family members having sex. It's the thing biology instilled in you so you wouldn't interbreed."

I don't believe biology instilled it in you because there are cultures that interbreed. I believe society instills a horror at incest, just as it used to instill a horror at homosexual behavior and pregnancy outside of marriage and all sorts of taboos that have broken down in the past 40 years.

For instance, society chooses the level of homosexual activity. When society says that it's cool, you'll have plenty of it. I am not arguing the percentage of homosexuals changes. I am arguing that the percentage of people engaging in homosexual sex depends on the strength of society's taboos against such behavior.

HollyRandall: you are impossible
Luke: huh?
HollyRandall: you 're just funny how you don't tell me your opinons/thoughts on the phone but you'll post it on your site
Luke: how so?
HollyRandall: your disagreement with me about biology being the springboard of one's natural instincts to find family member's sexual experiences disgusting
HollyRandall: whatever it doesnt' matter, just funny
Luke: you didn't ask my opinion...on the phone.
HollyRandall: do i have to ask?
HollyRandall: you don't offer it up freely like most people?
Luke: i guess not
HollyRandall: most of the time you do
Luke: I'm not sure I even had that opinion formulated while we were on the phone. It came to me later.
Luke: On most of the things where we think completely differently, there's no point my telling you how I think, unless you really want to know and ask.
HollyRandall: well then i guess i can forgive you ;)
HollyRandall: did you get my myspace comment?
Oh, OK I see how it is-- I throw you a 40th birthday party at my house and I get bumped from your top 8. That's fine, just fine...
HollyRandall: about how you bumped me from your top 8 again?
Luke: yes
HollyRandall: don't you feel terrible?
Luke: No.
Luke: I have to keep a distance from you in some ways.
HollyRandall: lol via myspace?
Luke: But it does not mean I don't appreciate everything you've done for me.
Luke: I've established varying boundaries between me and you, just as you have.
HollyRandall: i know i'm just teasing you
Luke: You are half teasing and half serious.
HollyRandall: i just think it's funny that you keep your distance on myspace but not in other areas of your life
HollyRandall: the top 8 thing, as you know, i think is silly
HollyRandall: i told you i've had friends get in fights over it
Luke: I understand why. I don't think the top 8 thing is silly.
Luke: It's one way of stating who you value.
HollyRandall: so you don't value me, is what you're saying
Luke: No. It's one way of stating publicly who you value.
HollyRandall: so publicly, you don't value me
Luke: I don't feel that you do not value me because I am not in your top 8.
Luke: No, IT IS ONE WAY!
HollyRandall: lol i'm teasing you
HollyRandall: i don't need to be in your top 8 to know you value me (dramatic music begins to play in background)

Cheryl Shuman Meets Luke Ford

Why Do I Have To Be So Irresistible To Women?

ir·re·sis·ti·ble adj. Impossible to resist: an irresistible impulse to sneeze. Having an overpowering appeal: irresistible beauty.

Cheryl blogs:

I’ve known about Luke for about four years. I discovered him by accident when I realized that he had written or should I say cut and pasted some inaccurate information about me that was damaging to my reputation and costing me work, time and money. He has been a constant source of stress and headaches for me without him ever knowing it. Four years ago, I had my attorney look into it and was basically told, the “guy has a long standing history of doing this, has no assets other than a rented hovel and a beat up serial killer van to go after…so my suggestion is to not waste your money chasing him legally, just ignore him, because everyone else does.”

...Luke’s photos on his website, don’t do him justice. When I walked in to the Starbucks that day, I was expecting to hate him, tell him he’s an incompetent jerk and tell him off. However, I was thrown off completely by his presence by his spellbinding persona. You see… there are several layers and facets to Luke.

Luke, in person, is a very handsome man. His smile lights up a room and his laughter is contagious. Although he laughs at the most inappropriate times. For example, he burst out in laughter when I started sharing issues of being abused and tortured as a child. Why did I laugh with him? I have no idea? Could it be this intangible “it quality” of charisma and charm? This quality is the essence of Luke that captivates his fans worldwide, and drives traffic repeatedly to seek his website for the latest news and gossip from the man, Mr. Ford, himself. I found myself immediately hooked on his every word and not a day goes by that I don’t read not one, not two, but the entire family of Luke blogs.

Luke is like a drug. You know he’s dangerous, because you’ve been warned. There are warnings on his website just like with cigarettes....(use of this product can be deadly and dangerous to your health).. Luke even warns you upfront about himself live and in person about what to expect and NOT expect from him…. But you’re drawn to him and want to just taste a part of him to see what “it’s all about”.

I’ve never done drugs, but I immediately think about GHB where I’ve read about people taking just enough to get really sexually aroused, but too much of “it” can kill you. For me, that ‘s a perfect description of Luke. If you can handle “just a taste” of Luke, it’s orgasmic. Too much of a dose of Luke can be deadly.

Cheryl blogs:

...Fade in.....there he is reading....I've never seen anyone so "consumed" by a book.... beside him sat a "burlap or flour sack type" sachel or book "sling" of some sort.... quite the designer look I might add... how chic! (NOT) I laugh inside and say wow... what a piece of work. then he looks up and has this infectious smile that literally made my knees shake. Inside my head I went from arrogant bitch in discipline mode to "HOLY F---" he's hot! I sat down. He was having tea.

...He gets to the "unisex bathroom" just as a hot blonde is entering.... will he notice? No, his nose was buried in this book. I laugh and I decide to observe him and wonder if he'll notice that I'm mesmerized for reasons I don't understand. As he goes to open the door.... he realizes it's locked. He returns to the table he smiles again. I melt. I want to kiss him. I want to run away with him to a tropical island. Fiji, yeah Fiji is nice this time of year... no no no, Costa Rica.

More:

In the past he had mentioned his relationship and friendship with Holly Randall. He told me that their romantic relationship was over. That was that. However, by reading his website, it was obvious to anyone that they had a strong bond. I know that Luke respects her and likes her and her family very much. While I was on the plane I had looked at Holly's websites etc. and read about her. What found kind of funny is that Holly is almost the same age as my daughter Aimee, who's my dearest closest friend. Aimee and I also work together just as Holly does with her mother Suze.

Reading about Holly on LukeFord.net, I had been entertained for hours reading about their interchanges. What I loved about Holly was she's cute and strong, just like my daughter. So I thought, hey, why not it might be fun.

Luke had been really busy so I just dropped her an email introducing myself and telling her about the segment. To maintain discretion with Luke and our private life private, at that point, I didn't even mention his name and and fact have never mentioned his name to her.

Things I Hate In Shul

* Anyone who takes my seat, particularly if you know it is my seat, particularly if I have a book on my seat, saving my seat while I go to the restroom.

* Chewing gum, wearing jeans on Shabbos or holidays, letting your cell phone ring, answering your cell phone on Shabbos or holidays during prayers (unless it is a medical emergency).

* Interrupting the speaker (usually with some remark you find funny but everyone else finds annoying).

* Women wearing short skirts into an Orthodox shul and not having the legs to carry it off.

* Visitors to the shul turning around and telling me and another member of the shul to keep quiet. Pal, if you are a visitor (unless you are a truly righteous person), don't go telling members of the club how to act. Know your place. I hate people who don't know their place.

* Friends who want to make witty jokes at my expense about things in my life I'd rather not discuss in shul.

Frightening Parallels Between Samson And Me

He was set aside as different from birth (Nazirite).

Samson was always intertwining himself with Philestine women (he had three such wives).

His parents complained that he wouldn't settle down with a member of the tribe.

Samson was alienated from his Judean brethren. They were fine with turning him over to the enemy.

Samson had his own weird moral code whereby he felt justified in killing a lot of people (Philestines) if he was done wrong.

He knew his third wife was trying to kill him but he finally laid his head on her lap and let her cut his hair, his source of strength, because he had nowhere else to turn.

I think Shavuot is my favorite Jewish festival because it features dairy food and focuses on Torah study.

It's amazing not only what a good woman can do for your soul, but also for your social life.

There's a world of difference between going at it alone and going at life with someone by your side.

I don't want to end up like Samson, handing my head to some shiksa.

Hipsters vs. Heebs in Hymietown

Chaim Amalek writes:

The ever-rising cost of renting apartments in New York City has driven the young artist from Manhattan and is remaking the outer boroughs as well. Apart from the few remaining enclaves where people of color dwell (often as a legacy of New York's liberal past), Manhattan belongs to the investment banker, the plastic surgeon, the corporate lawyer, the celebrity, the wealthy foreigner, and the children of the rich. It is a fact that virtually all of the apartment buildings here are in Jewish hands, baruch Hashem, and that most of the developers of commercial space are Jewish as well (Trump being the exception to the rule).

Still, there are enclaves of "hipsters" still left here and there, the most interesting of which is Williamsburg in Brooklyn, just north of the Satmar community. These people are mostly white, young, gentile, and come from all over the country. Some are trust-funders, and some are not. They come here after college to taste New York for a few years before returning to the lives they are expected to live. Their women are quite attractive (not surprising, given that they are young, white, in shape, and have lots of Aryan blood coursing through their veins) and are often harassed by leering hairy-palmed hassids on the streets of Brooklyn.

Thus have the Jewish Hipsters - known locally as "Heebs" - seem to have fallen off the radar of popular culture (e.g., no mention of them in Gawker). The children of Jewish real estate developers and the children of Christian small businessmen are destined to clash one day, with consequences for Jews everywhere.

6/1/06

I tune in to YNOTradio.com at 1 p.m. to hear people talking over the top of the hour news. Then the hosts introduce Holly Randall as a photographer and "director." Yeah, Holly's a director like I'm a moral leader and Herschel Savage is the equal of Robert DeNiro.

I've been listening for 15 minutes and yet to hear anything compelling.

Snore.

This is my first time and last time listening to this show.

The first 20 minutes are a clumbsy read of of previously published news articles and party updates while the advertising for the show boasts that it puts you ahead of the curve. If you want the porn news, you can catch it in a minute or two by scanning the news sites. Who wants to waste 20 minutes having yesterday's news read to you by people with no radio skills?

1:25 p.m. Holly comes on.

MJ McMahon: "You knew we'd have to talk about Luke."

Holly: "I figured that would come up."

Aimee Sweet: "Let's get it over with. Luke's blog Lukeisback.com always has little anecdotes about you. What exactly is your relationship with Luke?"

Holly: "Luke and I are very good friends. I threw him a 40th birthday party at my house Monday. It was the first time I'd seen Luke as the center of attention. Usually he's there merely as the observer and leaves. Usually the model is the center of attention.

"When he first walked in, he was so excited about his party, you know how Rodney Dangerfield was in Caddyshack? He's cracking jokes. He goes, 'I said to Holly the other day, 'Can I buy you a drink?' She said no. It hurts my legs. 'It makes them swell?' 'No, it makes them spread.'

"Luke, that was a great joke. I've been repeating it constantly."

Aimee: You have your conversations with Luke posted on his website.

MJ: "What's up with that? Does that ever get annoying or intrusive?"

Holly: "We've had our clashes about it. But I'm a very open person. I'll tell you anything about my life. I don't have anything to hide. I don't take myself as seriously as most people do. When I'd read something about me that was funny and slightly disparaging, I would laugh harder than anybody else."

Aimee: "Did Luke ever write anything that pissed you off?"

Holly: "He did go into a little bit too intimate of detail about one of our sessions. I asked him to remove, which he promptly did. But of course he's going to have it in the last chapter of his next book."

MJ: "If you need something taken down from Luke's website, call Holly Randall."

1:28 p.m. Now I'm embarrassed. I can't believe I've been ripping on Holly's friend earlier in this blog.

MJ: "You said you guys were friends. I heard you dated for a while."

Holly: "Yeah. I said we were friends now.

"We had actually met at AVN. We were walking down the red carpet [at the awards]. It was my first time walking down the red carpet. I was dazzled. He stopped us and interviewed us for 30 seconds. He hardly asked us anything. We were obviously not interesting to him.

"I didn't remember that meeting because it was such a hectic night.

"When I met him again at the Nightmoves awards [ten months later], that's when we started talking. Luke and I live in a parallel universe. We've very similar in a lot of ways. I've never felt like I belonged anywhere. Luke's always had that feeling as well.

"When we were at the show, he was standing there reading in the corner and I was feeling really out of place. And so I went up to him and started talking and found out that we had a lot more in common. He seemed easier for me to relate to than a lot of other people there.

"That's how we started. We kept talking when we came back. You know, one day we were hanging out on the couch watching a movie and one thing led to another. You know how I am. I'm a little aggressive. It was totally my fault. What was Luke going to do?"

Aimee: "It would be hard to say no to you. Such an interesting topic. I hate to leave it."

MJ: "Let's talk about it more.

"I asked Luke to come on this show and he declined. But here he is today. He showed up [in the chat room] for Holly."

Holly: "Hey Luke, what's up with that? Are you too good for AVN Afternoons? Huh? Are you too big for being on the E! True Hollywood Story?"

MJ: "How do I put this politically correct? Luke doesn't have a lot of fans."

Holly: "That's a good way to put it."

MJ: "What's it like to date somebody like that?"

Holly: "It was hard. My parents would have people pull them aside and say, 'Do you know your daughter is dating Luke? He's evil.' My mother got into a tizz because it's easy for her to get into a tizz. I said, 'I'm a big girl. I know what I'm doing. He's not as horrible and vicious as everybody says he is.'

"Obviously he has done many things to many people. Back in his day, say, ten years ago, there were some pretty crazy things he did that I'm like, 'Ohmigod, I'm so glad I didn't meet that guy.'

"But he's a good guy and we get along fine. Ultimately, I don't give a damn what other people think."

Aimee: "The first time I met Luke was at Porn Star Karaoke. I'd heard about him but he was very nice to me. He posted a little interview about me."

Holly: "He asked me for an interview before I met him in Tampa. My publicist was like, 'You can do an interview but be careful because nothing is off the record with Luke.' Everybody was telling me not to do it. I was thinking, god, is this guy a big bad scary wolf? So I was kinda fascinated. When I met him in Tampa, I wanted to get to know him. Everybody is always much deeper than they appear to be on the surface.

"He writes about what he hears. He doesn't censor so much."

Aimee: "I assumed he was just a punk but I was totally wrong."

Holly: "I write as well, obviously not as prolifically or as well as he does, but sometimes he won't actually say to you what he's thinking but then he'll write it on his website. I'm the same way. Sometimes it is easier for me to say things in writing than in person.

"He can trick people into trusting him when you first meet him because he seems that way, but then he spills the beans."

MJ: "Last question on Luke. With all the ramblings on the site focused on you, I would see some of them from time to time and my first impression was -- this guy is a little obsessed, even a little stalkerish. Is that the case?"

Holly: "He's the anti-stalker. Perhaps he'll write things but if I did anything that he felt blew him off, he would not contact me, he would not call me. He's not the type of guy who shows up at your house. No, he's not a stalker at all. He tends to write in free-thought..."

1:33 p.m. I'm really enjoying this interview. I'm getting huge narcissistic supply as the conversation is about Holly and me.

1:38 p.m. Holly: "I had a great childhood. I rode horses. I was like any other kid except my parents did porn, and we had to hide that from some people."

Holly doesn't like her voice but she's a terrific interview subject (on the radio or anywhere). She has a great Southern accent she can put on and she puts all of her magnetic personality into what she says (when she wants to).

When you get Holly on the phone and her voice is flat, you need to let her attend to what's on her mind because she won't be listening to you carefully.

When you spend time with Holly, she's not present much of the time. She has a rich inner life. If you want to get close to her, that's a frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying quest. So make sure you are OK with yourself and when Holly shuts you out, leave her alone and go do your own thing. The more you try to hunt her down, the more she'll elude you.

With Holly as with anyone, you can either appreciate what you have with her, or you can obsess about what you don't have.

I feel guilty listening to Holly because she's more kind and careful about what she says about me than I've been with her.

Holly often tries to trick me into saying something disparaging of someone's looks but I always refuse. I email her: " I wish I could grow this pecular virtue of mine and add to it."

Holly (who had few friends growing up) says on the show that no kids in her schools were prohibited from hanging out with her because her parents were in porn.

Holly: "I've always been obsessed with visual images. At the beginning I thought I wanted to be a model. Most young girls do.

"I became hooked [on photography] when I took my first photography class at age 12."

MJ: "Did you expect to follow in your mother's footsteps?"

Holly: "No. I was going to do the exact opposite. I wanted to be a fashion photographer. I just heard so many nightmare stories... I thought, I'm not sure I'm the cut-throat person who can go out there and make it. I'm not sure if I want to deal with all the attitudes and the hierarchical standards they have..."

Aimee Sweet was Holly's first nude model.

Holly: "My mom can't write and my dad can't shoot.

"I've got the short legs. The whole reason my mother said she married my father was so her children could get his long legs. I got screwed. My brother and sister got the long legs."

Holly says she did not like the Brooks Institute. "It was very conservative. I loved UCLA. I loved literature."

MJ: "What kind of porn does Holly Randall like?"

Holly: "I like the dirty stuff... Gangbangs." But she doesn't like ugly guys.

Holly: "It's annoying when a guy walks around naked with nothing but socks, Luke!"

That really annoyed her but I have cold feet even when I'm doing hot things.

Holly did not like my sweats that were held on by elastic. She gave me a pair that you have to tie up. She may prefer that look but they are a pain to wear because you have to untie them to go to the bathroom, etc. I prefer elastic.

Holly: "What I shoot is the opposite of what I like...

"I like the sex to be hot and on the rough side, but not too rough.

"I've tried to make our movies more hardcore and my mom says, 'Holly, that's so bloody rude. You're such a pervert.' Both my parents say I'm a pervert. I say, 'Come on, mom, can't we do ATM?' "No! That's gross.'"

Holly says her mom has the philosophy that you don't go to bed mad. "We're both hot-tempered."

But when Holly's mad or hurt, you may not hear from her for days. She's not someone who must confront and solve an issue when she feels wounded. She'll retreat and isolate herself from you, take a few days to heal, and then come back if she's still interested in you.

Holly: "I love my job. Eight years later, I still look forward to going to work."

The AVN Afternoon hosts can be fun when they are interviewing someone lively like Holly. I just wish they'd cut out the crap.

Holly: "I'm afraid of the Bush administration coming after me [if she did her own line of gonzo lines]. I have such a dirty mind, I'd give JM Productions a run for their money."

She laughs.

Holly writes on her suze.net chatboard: "No, we won't have a booth this year [at Erotica LA]... Pure Play will and I might make that my pit stop area, but I won't be hanging out there. I'll show up for one day to check out some new models but then I'll be out of there. I don't like porn conventions, especially if I'm not exibiting. Unless I'm working, I spend little time around the biz."

Holly's photo of Shay Laren. More.