“George Bailey, do you ever get tired of just reading about things?” says local sassypants Violet Bick in “It’s A Wonderful Life.”
That’s the way I usually feel when invited to erotica readings. I get nervous in a roomful of people who use the phrase “my sex” for their genitalia. But on the strength of participants the adorable Rachel Kramer Bussel, Canadian Carly Milne, and fashion plate Stan Kent I visited the debut reading of In the Flesh L.A., the west coast version of a monthly salon organized by Bussel in New York.
Carly Milne, former AVN writer and porn industry publicist whose 2002 Christmas gift thermos came in handy in this incident, is organizer of the L.A. version of In the Flesh, and last night’s inaugural reading at Freddy and Eddy’s on Venice Blvd. drew a respectable crowd of people who don’t blush easily.
The readings were an interesting combination of blog-based erotica and the more traditional kind, with a couple of stops in between.
Last night’s theme was “Survival” and, though not every reader kept to the theme, cross-dresser Willem Belli started the evening with a bang with a searing story of toe-rape at the nether digits of a male prostitute. Then Bussel read her riveting account of a mostly-zipless fuck at the Atlanta airport, which was the evening’s most graphic and evocative story.
British author Maxim Jakubowski read a story called “The Summer of Grant Lee Buffalo,” a sexual autobiography as it related to music. The title referred to a crush his lover had on the bass player of Grant Lee Buffalo, Paul Kimble.
There was a generational divide that affected my enjoyment of the story; while two people had just read from blogs (or, as I suspect of Belli, extemporaneously), Jakubowski’s reading was a chapter of his book. My attention waned as the litany of music and sex continued (Leonard Cohen, jazz, more Leonard Cohen), through no fault of his own, but through my own inability to pay attention to anything that takes more than two revolutions of a scroll wheel.
That Jakubowski referenced Grant Lee Buffalo but not the name of the bass player was also uncharacteristic of the difference between blogging and traditional literature; I found Kimble’s name on Wikipedia in three seconds, placed the date of the concert Jakubowski’s girlfriend first saw Kimble (1996), and listened to a GLB music sample online.
After a short break came Stan Kent, who also read from his one of his books, but it was a selection from his postpuk “Shoe Leather” series, and he referenced Jakubowski in saying that from now on he would introduce himself at parties as the bass player for Grant Lee Buffalo.
The evening ended with Shana Ting Lipton’s essay about revisiting Amsterdam as a tourist after having lived there. The heartlessness with which she dissected her flings made me cross her off the list of potential dates for the lonelyhearts porn performers I know.
In the Flesh L.A. returns to Freddy And Eddy’s the fourth Thursday of each month. I will be reading a couple of short stories in July’s show.
(pictured L-R: Rachel Kramer Bussel, Carly Milne, Shana Ting Lipton, Maxim Jakubowski)
Previously: The Naked and the Read; The Bi Apple
See also: Peter Gabriel’s anatomization of Sex, Carly Milne, Rachel Kramer Bussel; Stan Kent; Shana Ting Lipton
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