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Sugarpill Cosmetics reviewed by Fauxnique

Thu, 1 Apr 2010 10:18:52 -0700

Amy Doan (Shrinkle) recently launched a new line of eye cosmetics called Sugarpill. The colors are dense and intense, and a kind that most makeup collections lack. She sent some samples to Whore! Magazine and I gave them a whirl.

The “Addicted to Pretty” Pressed Eyeshadow has a fine consistency and heavy pigment, which together means easy, lasting coverage. The bright, primary yellow and the rich purple especially are phenomenal! I experimented a little with getting them wet, which only ups the pigment power.

The “Chromalust” Loose Eyeshadow has gorgeous rich pigment. Often, loose eyeshadows, especially when they involve shimmer, tend to spread out and get a little wimpy, necessitating a base coat of something wet or sticky to grab the pigment. Not the case here. The blue went on like a dream and showed its shimmer like crazy, and the red/orange is a knockout, surprisingly flattering as an eye color.

“Eyelash Overdose” False Eyelashes: What can I say? You are preaching to the converted. I am so pleased to see shapes that I think may be sorely needed—the thick, long, cat-eye shaped lash!

Conclusion? The line is limited to eyeshadow and false eyelashes, so don’t look for more at the moment. But given how difficult it is to find colors that are this dense that apply this smoothly, Amy’s filling a much needed niche very effectively. Sugarpill is now a valuable part of my makeup case.

Air Comet Flight Attendants

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:35:43 -0700

European news agencies are reporting that flight attendants for defunct Spanish airline Air Comet have posed for a provocative calendar intended to bring attention to their dire situation. More than 600 employees are owed up to nine months' wages by the company, which filed for administration late in 2009 and had nine of its aircraft impounded. Any schedule for the settlement of their wages is apparently still pending.
"We are just demanding our rights to receive what is ours, we each have eight or nine months of unpaid salaries," attendant Adriana Ricardo, who appears in the calendar, told Reuters.
The photos are by noted Spanish photographer Augusto Robert. Calendars can be ordered by visiting http://www.azafatasaltacontacon.com, which is the source of the images below.

To the Editor of The Times, Anonymous, 1858

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:41:02 -0800

Published on February 28, 1858

Sir, another “Unfortunate”, but of a class entirely different from the one who has already instructed the public in your columns, presumes to address you.
My parents did not give me any education; they did not instill into my mind virtuous precepts nor set me a good example. All my experiences in early life were gleaned among associates who knew nothing of the laws of God but by dim tradition and faint report, and whose chiefest triumphs of wisdom consisted in picking their way through the paths of destitution in which they were cast by cunning evasion or in open defiance of the laws of man.
I do not think of my parents (long in their graves) with any such compunctions as your correspondent describes. They gave me their lifetime, according to their means and knowledge, and as they had probably received from their parents, shelter and protection, mixed with curses and caresses. I received all as a matter of course, and knowing nothing better, was content with the kind of contentedness which springs from insensibility. I returned their affection in like kind as they gave it to me. As long as they lived, I looked up to them as my parents. I assisted them in their poverty, and made them comfortable. They looked on me and I on them with pride, and as for shame, although they knew perfectly well the means by which I obtained money, I do assure you sir, that by them, as by myself, my success was regarded as the reward of proper ambition, and was a source of real pleasure and gratification.
Let me tell you something of my parents. My father’s most profitable occupation was brick making. When not employed at this, he did anything he could get to do. My mother worked with him in the brickfield, and so did I and a progeny of brothers and sisters, for somehow or other, although my parents occupied a very unimportant place in the world, it pleased God to make them fruitful. We all slept in the same room. There were few privacies, few family secrets in our house.
Father and mother both loved drink. In the household expenses, had a accounts been kept, gin or beer would have been the heaviest items. We. The children, were indulged occasionally with a drop, but my honored parents reserved to themselves the exclusive privilege of getting drunk, and they were the same as their parents had been. I give you a chapter of the history of the common life which may be stereotyped as the history of generation upon generation.
We knew not anything of religion. Sometimes when a neighbor died we went to the burial, and thus got within a few steps of the church. No parson ever came near us. The place we lived was too dirty for nicely-shod gentlemen.
Our neighborhood furnished many subjects to the treadmill, the hulks and the colonies, and some to the gallows. We lived with the fear of those things, and not with the fear of God before our eyes.
I was a very pretty child, and had a sweet voice; of course I used to sing. Most London boys and girls of the lower classes sing. “My face is my fortune kind sir, she says,” was the ditty on which I bestowed most pains, and my father and mother would wink knowingly as I sang it. The latter would also tell me how pretty she was when she was young, and how she sang, and what a fool she had been, and how well she might have done had she been wise.
Frequently we had quite a stir in our colony. Some young lady who had quitted the paternal restraints, or perhaps had started off to seek her fortune, would re-appear among us with a profusion of ribbons, fine clothes, and lots of cash. Visiting the neighbors was the order of the day on such occasions, without and more definite information of the means by which the dazzling transformation had been affected than could be conveyed with knowing winks and the words “luck” and “friends”. Then she would disappear and leave us in our dirt, penury and obscurity. You cannot conceive sir, how our ambition was stirred by these visitations.

“I lost, what? – not my virtue…”
Now commences an important era of my life. I was a fine, robust, healthy girl, 13 years of age. I had larked with boys my own age. I had huddled with them, boys and girls together, all night long in our common haunts. I had seen much and heard abundantly of the mysteries of the sexes. To me such things had been matter of common sight and common talk. For some time I had coquetted on the verge of a strong curiosity, and a natural desire, and without a particle of affection, scarce a partiality. I lost, what? Not my virtue, for I never had any. That which is commonly, but untruly called virtue, I gave away. You reverend Mr. Philanthropist-what call you virtue? Is it not the principle, the essence, which keeps watch and ward over the conduct, the substance, the materiality? No such principle ever kept watch and ward over me. And I repeat that I never lost that which I never had-my virtue.
According to my own ideas at the time I only extended my rightful enjoyments. Opportunity was not long wanting to put my newly-acquired knowledge to profitable use. In the commencement of my fifteenth year one of our be-ribanded visitors took me off, and introduced me to the great world, and thus commenced my career as what you better classes call a prostitute. I cannot say that I felt any other shame than the bashfulne4ss of a novitiate introduced to a strange society. Remarkable for good looks, and no less so for good temper, I gained money, dressed gaily, and soon agreeably astonished my parents and old neighbors by making a descent upon them.
Passing of the vicissitudes of my course, alternating between reckless gaiety and extreme destitution, I improved myself greatly; and at the age of eighteen was living partly under the protection of one who thought he had discovered that I had talent, and some good qualities as well as beauty, who treated me more kindly and considerately than I had ever before been treated, and thus drew from me something like a feeling of regard, but not sufficiently strong to lift me to that sense of my position which the so-called virtuous and respectable members of society seem to entertain. Under the protection of this gentleman, and encouraged by him, I commenced the work of my education. That portion of education which is compromised in some knowledge of my own language and the ordinary accomplishments of my sex; -moral science, as I believe it is called, has always been an enigma to me, and is so to this day. I suppose it is because I am one of those who, as Rousseau says, are “born to be prostitutes.”
Common honesty I believe in rigidly. I have always paid my debts and though I say it, I have always been charitable to my fellow creatures. I have not neglected my duty to my family. I supported my parents while they lived, and buried them directly when they died. I paid a celebrated lawyer heavily for defending unsuccessfully my eldest brother, who had the folly to be caught in the commission of a robbery. I forgave him the offence against the law in the theft, and the offence against discretion in being caught. This cost me some effort, for I always abhorred stealing. I apprenticed my younger brother to a good trade and helped him into a little business. Drink frustrated my efforts I his behalf. Through the influence of a very influential gentleman, a very particular friend of mine, he is now a member of the police. My sisters, whose early life was in all respects the counterpart of my own, I brought out and started in the world. The elder of the two is kept by a nobleman and the next by an officer in the army. The third has not yet come to years of discretion and is “having her fling” before she settles down.
Now, what if I am a prostitute, what business has society top abuse me? Have I received any favors at the hands of society? If I am a hideous cancer on society, are not the causes of the disease to be sought in the rottenness of the carcass. Am I not its legitimate child; no bastard, Sir? Why does my unnatural parent repudiate me, and what has society ever done for me, that I should do anything for it, and what have I ever done against society that it should drive me to a corner and crush me to the earth. I have neither stolen(at least since I was a child), nor murdered, nor defrauded. I earn my money and I pay my way, and I try to do good with it, according to my ideas of good. I do not get drunk, nor fight, nor create uproar in the streets or out of them. I do not use bad language, I do not offend the public eye by open indecencies. I go to the opera, I go to Almack’s, I go to the theaters, I go to quiet, well-conducted casinos. I go to all the places of public amusement, behaving myself with as much propriety that society can exact. I pay business visits to my trades people, the most fashionable of the West End. My milliners, my silk mercers, my bookmakers, know, all of them, who I am and how I live, and they solicit my patronage as earnestly and as cringingly as if I were Madame of the right reverend patron for the Society of the Suppression of Vice. They find my money as good and my pay better than that of Madame, and if all circumstances and conditions of our lives had been reversed, would Madame have done better or been better than I?
I speak of others as well as myself, for the very great majority, nearly all the real undisguised prostitutes in London, spring from my class. We come from the dregs of society. What business has society to have dregs-such dregs as we? You-the pious, the moral, the respectable-who stand on your smooth and pleasant side of the great gulf you have dug and keep between yourself and the dregs, why don’t you bridge it over or fill it up, and by some urban or generous process absorb us into your leavened mass, until we become interpenetrated with goodness. What have to be shamed of, we who do not know what shame is-the shame you mean?
I conduct myself prudently, and defy you and your policemen too, Why stand you there mouthing with sleek face about morality? What is morality? Will you make us responsible for what we never knew? We who are the real prostitutes of the true natural growth of society and no imposters will not be judged by “One More Unfortunate”, not measured by her standard. She is a mere chance intruder in our ranks and has no business there.
Like “One more Unfortunate’ there are other intruders among us-a few, very few “victims of seduction”. But seduction is not the root of the evil-scarcely a fiber of the root. A rigorous law should be passed to punish seduction, but it will not percept5ibly thin the ranks of prostitution. Seduction is the common story of numbers of well brought up, who were never seduced, and who are voluntary and inexcusable profligates. Vanity and idleness send us a large body of recruits. Servant girls who wish to ape their mistresse’s finery, and whose wages won’t permit them to do honestly-these set up seduction as an excuse. Married women, who have no respect for their husbands, and are not content with their lawful earnings, these are the worst among us. They have no principle of any kind and are a disgrace to us. If I were a married woman, I would be true to my husband. I speak for my class, the regular standing army of the force.
Gentlemen of philanthropic societies may build reformatories and open houses of refuge and may save, occasionally a “fallen sister” who can prevail on herself to be saved; but we who were never sisters-who never had any relationship, part or interest or communion with the large family of this worlds virtue’s, moralities and proprieties-we, who are not fallen, but were always down-who never had any virtue to lose-we who are the natural growth of things and are constantly ripening for the harvest-what do they propose to do with us?
Hurling big figures at us, it is said that there are 80,000 of us in London alone-which is a monstrous falsehood-and of those 80,000, poor hardworking sewing girls, sewing women, are numbered in by the thousands and called indiscriminately prostitutes, writing , preaching, speechifying, that they have lost their virtue too.
It is a cruel calumny to call them in mass-prostitutes; and as for their virtue, they lose it as one loses his watch who is robbed by the highway thief. Their virtue is the watch, and society is the thief. These poor women toiling on starving wages, while penury, misery, and famine clutch them by the throat and say, “render up your body or die.”
Admire this magnificent shop in this fashionable street; its front, fittings and decorations cost no less than a thousand pounds. The respectable masters of the establishment keeps his carriage and lives in his country house. He has daughters too; his patronesses are fine ladies, the choicest impersonations of society. Do they think, as they admire the taste and the elegance of that tradesman show of the poor creatures who wrought it, and what they were paid for it? Do they reflect on weary toiling fingers, on eyes dim with watching, on the bowels yearning in hunger, on the bended frames, the broken constitutions, on poor human nature driven to its coldest corner and reduced to its narrowest means in the production of these luxuries and adornments? This is an old story! Would it not be truer and more charitable to call these poor souls “victims”. What business has society to point its finger in scorn, to raise its voice in reprobation of them? Are they not its children, born of cold indifference, of its callous selfishness, its cruel pride.
Sir, I trespassed on your patience beyond limit, and yet much remains to be said… The difficulty of dealing with the evil is not so great as society considers it. Setting aside “the sin”, we are not so bad as we are thought to be. The difficulty is for society to set itself, with the necessary earnestness, self-humiliation and self-denial to the work. To deprive us of proper and harmless amusements, to subject us in mass to the pressure of force-of force wielded, for the most part, by ignorant, and often brutal men-is only to add the cruelty of active persecution to the cruelty of passive indifference which made us what we are. I remain your humble servant, Another Unfortunate.

Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!: by Penny Arcade

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:29:55 -0800

“I called myself a fag hag before I was old enough to drink!”

First performed in 1990, Penny Arcade’s almost one-woman show has inspired countless performers and, two decades later, continues to delight and offend audiences everywhere.
An almost–solo show because throughout it, Penny is flanked by erotic dancers of all shapes and sizes. The show mixes political hyperbole with scenes from Penny’s life with the drag queens, queers, drug addicts, prostitutes, and racous performers of New York. Sexy, shocking, and surprisingly moving, the show challenges on every level.
Penny ran away from home at 13 and quickly dove into the underground. She was once an Andy Warhol girl, worked with Jack Smith, Jackie Curtis, and Charles Ludlam. She currently has a number of projects in the works, including a premium cable show. Look for Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! on your television dial soon.

www.pennyarcade.tv

For An Interview with Penny:

http://www.pennyarcade.tv/press/2005/trigger_magazine_finding.html

THE BACK PASSAGE: by James Lear, 2006

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 17:27:24 -0800

Filthy. Funny. Gay. Three words to make many women prick up their ears. James Lear’s Back Passage ranks high on all these fronts and is a brilliantly funny riot of shagging and sleuthing. It's topped the Lesbian and Gay Bestseller charts on both Amazon UK and Amazon US, and is also a finalist in the Lambda Literary Awards
Gay historical sleuth erotica! Whew, who would ever thought such a thing would be possible? Or—a better question—why hasn’t it been around for ages? Of course, there’s long been supposition that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson had more than a professional relationship. For those who entertained this idea and always wanted to read about them getting down in graphic detail, James Lear is the author for you.
I have long adored Victorian fiction, loving the lengthy sentences, the complex character exploration, and the illumination of an entirely different world. I still love it but the moralizing gets to be a bit much. I suddenly find myself reading Jane Eyre or Great Expectations and wanting one of the characters to be gay or to have wild, raucous sex in the scullery. And hey, while we are at it, it might be nice for one of them to be black too, or at least not quite so white.
So it was with delight that I read this bit of historical fiction, where the handsome blond boys in grey suits do actually find themselves laid out on the billiards table en flagrante.

Yum!