Heather Benjamin

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Early on, the New Jersey native used old copies of Penthouse and Playboy, as well as vintage nude photos culled from flea markets and thrift shops, as raw material for her illustrations. The erotica helped power the many art zines she released. In “Sad Sex,” put out in 2008 when she was a student at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, nearly all the images were informed by her mighty collection of print porn. But while many of the women depicted posed with the alluring swagger of pinup models, their facial expressions or actions were anything but centerfold-friendly.

One work featured a woman spreading her pussy lips with one hand, the other reaching toward the viewer in agony. Her eyes are scratched-out, her mouth is agape in horror, but she sits beside the words “YOU MAKE ME FEEL SPECIAL,” the capital letters dripping blood.

From the start, Benjamin’s work has included images of women mutilating their nipples, threatening their labia with scissors, or flexing in ecstasy as insects swarm their limbs. Imagine the deviant, DGAF attitude of an R. Crumb comic, fused with Leonor Fini’s surrealist explorations of femininity, and you’re getting somewhere close to a Benjamin artwork.

Yet despite the carnal carnage she regularly depicts, a sensuality and agency emanates from her characters, especially because they usually appear alone. This tension is not unlike the ambivalence most of us feel about our own bodies — that vacillation between love and loathing of our flesh. It’s a duality that fuels Benjamin’s practice, and she’s able to translate this abstract, almost ineffable experience into something both visceral and vivid.

“Looking back, I feel like ‘Sad Sex’ was a metaphor for my extreme confusion and self-hate and depression at that time, which was manifesting in a very teenage way because I was a teenager. In order to express it, I was resorting to extremes [in my work] because I felt so extreme,” Benjamin says. She’s quick to point out that she still has a “dichotomous relationship with my body and other people’s bodies — this really extreme fluctuation between perceiving beauty and experiencing lust, and then alternatively experiencing disgust and repulsion.”

Since “Sad Sex,” Benjamin has self-released numerous other zines (most of which sold out), participated in dozens of art exhibitions, and become something of a cult figure within the East Coast punk scene, with her illustrations adorning countless DIY gig posters.

In 2011, the Vancouver band White Lung (fronted by Penthouse editor Mish Barber-Way) posted flyers featuring Benjamin’s ink drawing of a woman pulling out her hair, veins bulging on her hands. Scrawled in the corner of the illustration are the woman’s stream-of-consciousness thoughts, including the line, “My God… I cause my own suffering through my desire to think of myself as a being of value and permanence.”

In other words, Benjamin’s work continues to explore many of her early themes. “I’ll probably be wrestling with them for the rest of my life,” the artist says.

But since her student work, Benjamin has honed her voice and technical skills, and expanded her visual language to the degree. This development is captured in the new book Cavegirl Monologue, which she describes as an anthology of work from the past five-plus years. “I really tried to organize it in a way so it wasn’t perceived as a retrospective, but rather a collection of my work from a specific period,” she says.

Released by the Brooklyn record label and art-book publisher Sacred Bones (they’ve issued music by David Lynch, Pharmakon, and Zola Jesus, and books by illustrator Alexander Heir), Cavegirl Monologue compiles 150 pages of Benjamin’s drawings and paintings in full color. The hardcover showcase — and the cachet of the publisher — means Benjamin’s art, by turns arousing and grotesque, titillating and disturbing, will find even more fans.

Yet even as this book is being published, its creator speaks of transitioning into a new season of her practice and life. With a breakup in her recent past, and having made a decision to return to New York City after several years in Providence, Rhode Island, she’s feeling reinvigorated, and says this energy is apparent in the text’s newest images. As Benjamin puts it, this work expresses “growth and exploration and sensuality, because that has so much to do with my experience of reconnecting with myself.”

Since sending Monologue to the printer, Benjamin has been attending artist residencies, curating group exhibitions, and focusing more on larger-scale paintings. She describes her latest work as “looser,” less “cerebral.” That said, she’s not done drawing clitorises and bodily fluid in her signature, Janus-faced style — erotic, disquieting, and incendiary, all at once.

Asked how she hopes her work will be received, Benjamin says she’d like it to resonate with anyone who can “identify with aspects of my own experience of womanhood and sexuality, especially the darker stuff.” The boundary-pushing artist continues: “I’m trying to create something beautiful and stimulating out of pain and trauma — that’s my ultimate catharsis. When it works, and people can relate to it, that’s the biggest high for me.”

Photo of Heather Benjamin by Justin Cole Smith 

High Voltage: Matt Pike

Posted on by Team Penthouse

The musician Matt Pike shouldn’t require an introduction. The world is a little fucked up, though — as he’ll be the first to tell you — and the virtuosos who walk among us usually don’t get their due until it’s too late and they’re already six feet under. Pike deserves better, and anyone who knows the difference between a blast-beat and break-beat would agree that the metal maestro should be a household name by now.

But for those who have never carved an anarchy symbol into a desk, Pike is essentially your favorite headbanger’s favorite headbanger, a guitar guru if there ever was one. As a founding member of both Sleep and High on Fire, the 46-year-old has spent the last quarter-century eviscerating eardrums and unleashing riffs that have shaped the contours of contemporary metal. Without him, “stoner metal” wouldn’t have a Wikipedia page, and thrash might never have had a twenty-first century renaissance.

Both Bay-area bands, despite their stark differences, have cultish followings, and the legacy surrounding their music has been passed from dorm room to dorm room, record shop to record shop, over the years, making Pike something like the Alejandro Jodorowsky of the fretboard. After all, taking a cue from the title of Jodorowsky’s trippiest film, Sleep named its second album Holy Mountain (1992), and the creation story of Dopesmoker — the trio’s infamous hour-long song/album about a cosmic caravan of “Weedians” sludging through a “riff-filled land” on the way to Nazareth — has developed the type of feverish mythology usually reserved for midnight movies or conversations about Elvis’s current whereabouts.

Pike’s most recent trip around the sun might elevate his status outside the metal underground, though. 2018 has seen Sleep awaken from a mighty hibernation with the release of The Sciences, the group’s critically acclaimed fourth full-length and its first since Dopesmoker. (Naturally, the album dropped on 4/20, courtesy of Jack White’s Third Man Records.) And this month, High on Fire will release Electric Messiah, the band’s eighth LP and its best in years. Packed with the types of speed anthems that should soundtrack a bank robbery or coup, Pike believes the record has the potential to swell the group’s audience to its rightful size. “This album’s definitely got the material to do it,” he told Penthouse over two long and epic interviews as he was wrapping a set of High on Fire shows in Las Vegas this past summer.

Sleep might be compared to Black Sabbath (if drowned in cough syrup), and, as frontman of High on Fire, Pike is regularly described as the American Lemmy Kilmister. But, in reality, the metal lord has carved his own path and sounds like nothing other than Matt Pike. If the guy doesn’t receive some sort of monument during his lifetime, then maybe he’s right that humanity is truly on a “spiritual downward spiral.”

At the very least, we promise to make our children listen to Dopesmoker. This generation might not recognize him as a living guitar god, but the next will.

Hey Matt, how’s Las Vegas treating ya?

I’m the mayor of fucking crazytown, so I’m busy as fuck.

Keeping up with your mayoral responsibilities. Are you partying?

Maybe just a little. It’s more that I’m trying to schedule and manage everything… but I like to gamble, play games, and stuff like that. Plus, I’m with my girlfriend Alyssa Maucere, who I haven’t seen in quite a while. We’ve been together for two and a half years, and live together [in Oregon]. She’s kind of my life partner. She’s amazing. She’s not only a tattoo artist, a poster artist, and a musician, but her band Eight Bells is playing here on Sunday, so I’m staying in Vegas until the end of the weekend.

You must be touring at least ten months a year, right? And if Alyssa is also in a band, how often are you able to get together with her?

I’ve been making sure that I make time. We’ve been scheduling our relationship like we schedule our bands. If something great comes up for one of my bands, and I’m into it, yeah I’ll take it. But I’m usually the first one to go, “No, I don’t want to do that.” These days, I try to allot time for my personal life because probably for the past ten years, I haven’t allowed any of that time, and quite frankly that destroys my brain and it makes me hate everybody I’m around. It makes me hate music, it makes me hate everything. So I’ve got to take some time for myself. You have to learn how to say no. That’s hard. I’m a pretty sweet person, so I have a hard time saying no to anyone. There needs to be boundaries, though, and don’t forget I’m in two different, full-time fucking bands.

You just finished touring with Sleep, and now you’re on the road with High on Fire. What’s that kind of transitioning like?

It’s like juggling. It’s hard to explain. I put ’ludes in Stove Top stuffing, and then I can play Dopesmoker after touring with High on Fire. Or you go from Sleep to High on Fire, and you pretty much put meth on spaghetti and meatballs [laughs]. I wish it were that easy! No, it takes a lot of like meditation and it takes a lot of focus, as well as knowing the material very thoroughly. I have rituals for both.

Tell me about them.

I have to breathe, I have to think about all the lyrics, or I have to think about all my parts and my solos. I just have to review everything. This is where I really do keep a sober mind, and I take it very seriously — my playing and how I perform with my brothers. I don’t like to let people down, so I don’t let people down!

Some rituals, though: I do pranas and I electrocute myself with these little electrodes, and I squeeze a hand thing. Pranas are the breathing and stretching exercises you do before yoga, but no one really practices those ’cause Westerners are too impatient to take any time. I also do some stretching, some push-ups, sit-ups, and like I said, I meditate and I think about the task at hand. For this part of my life, for the things when I have to perform and when I have to be at my best, I just try to be present — mentally aware of my consciousness and how I’m feeling about the amount of serotonin and dopamine in my brain. I practice a couple different types of meditation. I do a walking meditation, where I count my breaths. I have a breath meditation, too. Sometimes I’ll listen to some frequencies, and then other times I’ll just listen to Dogman Encounters and I get off on the terror that other people have, which sounds draconian, and perhaps it is, but at least I understand the dark side of what I want to call my “spirituality.” Why not explore what might be considered dark?

You’ve had a busy year, with lots of touring. I’m curious what tour life is like for you today, compared to when you first started out.

Well, the rider has gotten better. Some of the travel’s gotten better. And some of it’s not better. I wish the guarantees were better, and I wish we could do more with the stage show. I wish we could do a lot. But we worked hard on this upcoming album, so High on Fire will be working on getting some traction and moving in a forward direction.

Sleep is doing way better than anybody ever thought it would [laughs]. For me, Al [Cisneros], and Jason [Roeder], we just go and jam, and then we think of even more fucked things to do as that band. It’s been pretty good. It’s been a good ride. We did all the blueprinting early on, and no one listened to Sleep. We were on tour with bands like Cannibal Corpse, Cathedral, and Hawkwind, and some weird bands [in the beginning]. It’s like we were planting seeds, and now that seed has spread and it’s become gigantic. That’s a great thing. We’re trying to strike while the iron is hot and the three of us continue getting together to write. It’s a real band.

What are your writing sessions like today, compared to the 90s when the band was known to practice 12 hours a day while passing the smoking “chalice” nonstop?

I think me and Al just smoke some weed and work on ideas. And when it’s me and Al and Jay, we work on drumbeats. I mean the whole concept of Sleep — what the music actually is — it’s all about the drummer. It’s just me and Al sprinkling things here and there when the drummer’s playing and hitting notes at certain times. The whole playing technique to Sleep is to be listening to the drummer and hit on the right spot. Like, one note, then he plays 30 beats, then you hit another note. It’s not always like that, but musically, the concept behind the band is rhythmic.

Sometimes, I throw shit at Al. But my job in High on Fire is definitely that I’m in charge of the themes and the lyrics. In Sleep, that’s kind of Al’s job. His singing and what we sing about are definitely mostly his concepts. I will throw ideas at his head now and then, but that’s not my role in the band. My role is to make a rhythm section sound like it has a guitar player — and that he doesn’t suck [laughs].

When you’re coming up with the crazy conceptual ideas that inform High on Fire’s music, what’s that process like? Are you sitting down with a pad and paper at a bar? Are you hanging out at home and smoking a joint?

Well, it all depends. While I’m traveling, I might be in my bunk, just like trying to ignore the rest of the world. Sometimes I still do hallucinogens. I’ll take mushrooms or acid, and really just think about things. I do a lot of research on conspiracies and esoteric stuff — things that interest me, often historical things. I believe that history is fucking bullshit. Everything I’ve been taught since kindergarten is a lie and I believe that thoroughly.

I really don’t share my mind all the way with everybody until I know that you’re a person who might be open-minded enough. If I put all my ideas and interests out in public, they’d just put a tinfoil hat on me. CNN or FOX, or whatever news channel, or whoever puts the fucking tinfoil hat on whoever’s head, doesn’t realize they’ve been separated and that we are weaker when we’re separated.

That’s what the media is there to do, and I’m not that dumb. I don’t share my thoughts or opinions anymore because I don’t want to be mocked when I’m right. I don’t give a fuck what anybody says, I am who I am, but I’ll keep that shit to myself unless you’re smart enough to read my lyrics and understand the metaphoric things I present within them. If you’re smart enough to do that, you’re probably of like mind. And if not, like I hope you enjoy the music anyway because it’s just a metal record, dude.

Sleep

That’s one of the things I like most about your music. I can appreciate it on an aesthetic, head-banging level, or I can dig into it, learn about the esoteric shit, and appreciate the ideas you explore that a lot of people might call “fringe.”

Most of them don’t talk about this stuff because most of them don’t believe it. They are all watching TV on their cell phones, and that’s all they do. They don’t fucking read anymore, unless it’s on their fucking cell phone. They don’t pay attention to anything unless it’s Hillary Clinton or Trump. They don’t fucking think. And if they do think, they’re thinking about the next lollipop they can get with the next buck that they make. Mankind is on a spiritual downward spiral that has been going on for the last 40 or so years. I think about the 1970s to now, and it’s gotten just dramatically intensified. Is humanity going to exist and coexist in this universe, or are we just gonna let ourselves keep burning on fire like we’re doing?

I don’t mean to be like that… because we have a choice.

People are taught to be complacent or think the woes of society don’t matter because they don’t directly affect them. We’re sort of conditioned to live in a delusion and accept it.

Yeah, that’s what they taught you in school. Or the American Dream, whichever one you want to buy, whatever bullshit thing you’re buying. There are a few things in the world that I fucking do love though, dude. I love fucking guitar. I’m sorry, but this is Penthouse — I really like butts [laughs]. I like yoga pants and bikinis. I like weed! I love my car, which is swampy because I haven’t been home in months. It’s a beautiful car, but it needs to be fucking cleaned. It’s a ’78 El Camino, but it’s got a 383 Stroker and is 500-plus horsepower. It’s fucking badass. It’s not the year I would have chosen, but it had the motor in it, which is worth more than that fucking car. The car is beautiful, too. It has a perfect interior, great paint job. It took me a long time to earn. I bought myself something nice, after enduring all the times I’ve eaten shit for this job. But I love what I do.

“Mankind is on a spiritual downward spiral that has been going on for the last 40 or so years. I think about the 1970s to now, and it’s gotten just dramatically intensified. Is humanity going to exist and coexist in this universe, or are we just gonna let ourselves keep burning on fire like we’re doing?”

I also like freedom of speech. What do Penthouse and Slayer have in common? The First Amendment. You can’t fucking call hate speech on someone because they have an opinion! Fuck you if I don’t like you and I want to say “fuck you.” If I don’t hurt you physically and I’m not a threat, you don’t have the fucking right to tell me what to fucking say. That’s what this whole new fucking fight is about. We have freedom of speech so people can talk their fucking bullshit. But it’s like the vegan wearing leather. Don’t talk your shit if you’re not going to walk your walk. And I know why that generation is pissed off: It’s because your parents were fucking yuppies and they suck. They’re the reason that it’s too expensive to afford a house. I’m not on the side of Trump, either. He’s a distraction — that’s what I believe.

So you’re frustrated with both the left and the right. What about some modern political groups, like the Democratic Socialists of America?

I don’t support socialism, but I agree with socialism sometimes. I mean, I love Scandinavia. Socialism is great there because if you’re in a band, you get paid or even funded. I’d love to have something like that, or universal health care that doesn’t fuck you. American health care fucked me.

I’m fucking pissed about that because I worked really hard to be who I am and do what I did.

On top of digging ditches or driving a fucking tow truck, I went to band practice after work, and I slept like one day a week — for years! I’m not against a left person or a right person, I am against the fact that no one will take responsibility for themselves and they blame it on their personal fucking pocket Jesus… which is your cell phone or computer. Social media is the worst thing that ever happened to man, aside from the fact that once in a while someone tells the truth on it. But even then, it leads to them getting attacked and shut down.

To me, the best part of social media is that new audiences can get introduced to culture they might otherwise be unable to find. Like, there’s a new generation of Sleep fans who probably found out about the band through the internet and social media. But yes, the vast amount of American culture’s relationship with social media is fucking sinister.

I agree with that. I would like this interview to strike something in the hearts of all the left and all the right, and all the people who don’t even want anything to do with all this shit. I’m telling you this is the point: They are separating us and it’s the fucking TV, and this social media bullshit. Turn your fucking TV off and throw it in the hall. Turn your cell phone off and fucking make a friend without knowing if they support the left or right. Then there is no narrative. You’re on neutral fucking ground. There’s no fucking anarchy flags, no American flag, there’s no flag they’re flying anywhere. And when you get a grip on all that, then we’re going to get somewhere. Then, shit, maybe Matt Pike for president?

Hell yeah. President Pike.

Yeah, well, I don’t know if I’d ever want that job. The minute you get it, whether you did anything or not, they shut you down in one way or another. They point a finger at you out of a narrative… if one side likes you or the other, CNN or FOX will inevitably attack you. If I were president, I would just make everybody fucking meditate. I’m not a narcissist or egotist, this is just a hypothetical [laughs]. I do think if everyone shut off their electronics, they might know what north and south are. It’s like fuck, dude…

What’s your connection to Albert Pike? I know he was an infamous Freemason, but you told me to look him up.

It’s horrifying, but yeah, as far as I’ve done research, I’m very much related to that guy.

Are you a Freemason?

Nope. I actually have been approached, and it’s nothing against the Freemasons or anybody else. I’m a one-man gang, or my gang consists of my crew and my bands. So I really don’t need any sort of narrative. I don’t need any sort of higher-up.

I’m an anarchist that enjoys his gun rights, and that’s who I am.

When you’re digging through arcane history and looking up esoteric stuff, how do you find it? Are you looking online? Are you taking out books?

Sometimes it’s from books. There are certain lectures I like, including ones from people like Michael Tsarion, even though I don’t agree with everything he says. He’s really well-read. David Icke turned me on to the Reptilians and all that kind of stuff. I think he turned a lot of people on to that. There’s David Wilcock and Ancient Aliens. I’ve been to Peru, so I fucking know for a fact that mankind — some guy with a fucking knife made out of stone — didn’t make the shit that’s there. There were giants walking around, and I know that for a fact. And the same thing with the Sphinx. How come you can measure around the pyramid [in meters], and up and down it, and it is exactly the speed of light, 186,000 miles-per-second? Why is that? What is that sacred mathematics there?

If mankind is egotistical enough to think that we are the only ones who’ve ever been here, you’re fucking fooling yourself. At the end of the day, really, we all should just be hunter-gatherers and go back to the fucking Dark Ages because we’re being separated [laughs].

I’m not trying to get all conspiracy theorist, I just know that the world is full of fucking shit. I’m not saying this place is all bad. After all, I’m in Penthouse, and it’s full of a lot of fun, a lot of good music, a lot of hot girls, a lot of cool people. You know, I love my fast car, I love my guns, I love my dog, I love my girlfriend. I love a lot of things about the world. If we try hard, it might not fucking fall apart. But it’s not looking good because people just get dumber instead of smarter — and that’s by design. That’s what I’m saying. Fucking shoot your TV. I know cell phones are necessary, but… They gave cell phones to everybody knowing humanity would become that much more stupid. It’s by design, dude. If they turn off the electricity, now they have all the power. If they turn off the fucking electricity, I want to see how many fucking DIY people that want to be politically correct know which direction to walk to find fucking water. What will you do to start a fire, dude? I want to know what you’re going to do when they take that all away from you.

Society feels bleak right now. At the same time, you and I haven’t jumped off a bridge yet. What could we do to change things? Are there any solutions to this bullshit?

Unfortunately, the only thing that teaches people who have fucking ego problems a lesson is consequences… and it’s going to be too late. Finding things in spirituality like forgiveness, kindness, goodness can help. Instead of having an attack on someone’s self-esteem, you build them up, and you try to make them see your point of view by being intelligent and by making choices that help humanity. Or you can be a selfish little prick and just go with a bunch of other selfish little pricks that really don’t care if anybody’s hurt or anybody feels any bit different about anything.

We’ve been taught to be a complacent, sad species. We are fucking sad. We are not the apex predator we were. Dude, I could take a hundred kids out of school and not one of them would know how to hunt or kill their own food. They will eat at fucking Burger King or McDonald’s all day, but not one of them would know how to survive ten minutes. Me, personally, I’ll be eating all your fucking legs and asses. I’m telling you, cannibalism is the way to the future [laughs]. That was a hypothetical, but the people who are going to survive are going to be cannibals. The people who are going to survive are going to be gangsters with all the guns that have pirate rules. But the New World Order is not the way to do this.

High On Fire

I know you’re a gun enthusiast and always have been. I remember reading an old interview where you detailed your mighty collection at the time. Has it grown since?

Oh yeah. I just got a CZ Scorpion with the new laser sight. It’s a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol, but kind of like an Uzi or submachine gun. I can make smiley faces on targets from like 60 yards. CZ is a great company. I have another Sub-2000 which is a Kel-Tec. I’m going to keep kind of quiet about the rest of my gun collection because if they come for ’em they’re not going to know what to look for. I’ll have a stash, somewhere.

So I have a Sleep question. From the beginning, the band had a big relationship with weed. Do you still smoke pot?

Actually, now that I live in Oregon and recreational marijuana is available, I’ll smoke weed once in a while. Like, I did bong hits with Al while we were writing during the last little session working on The Sciences. I hadn’t done a bong hit in like five years. We were in Albuquerque, and it’s not like there’s traffic, but I had a hard time getting from his house to my hotel right up the street. I was so high. Oh God, dude.

Now, I buy gummies. I guess I consume edibles more than I actually smoke. Every once in a while, we’ll be in Europe or something, and my guitar tech and sound man, Chad Hartgrave, will get me to smoke so I go to bed and don’t go out and fuck up and party and do all that stuff. He’ll make me smoke a joint with him, even if it’s just hash and tobacco. It knocks me out and makes me go to bed.

What are Sleep fans like today?

Multiplied [laughs]. I see a lot of younger people at our shows, and I think their parents were probably into us. I’m kind of an old dude. I’m 46 — not even close to a millennial.

I’m obsessed with all the mythology around Sleep and the recording of Dopesmoker. I know you’ve said the rumor about the band spending its entire advance from London Records on weed is exaggerated. At the same time, the album was recorded in Mendocino, California, and you must have had access to great pot.

Dude, it’s so different today. There used to be weed that had seeds in it. They don’t do that anymore. Anyway, yes, we were in Northern California, which was definitely a great place to find some good fucking weed. That’s where most of it was coming from. Hippies with guns were scary back then, though.

How much weed you were smoking during those recording sessions?

I don’t know exactly, but we each had at least a pillowcase’s worth at all times. We even made a fucking chalice out of the sink. We turned it into the biggest bong ever, using duct tape, some surgical tubes, and a kludgy mouthpiece we fired. We’d fill the sink with water and tape it off, so it was kind of like a gravity bong, but way fucking bigger. I think Al was the only one that actually got the thing to hit. I don’t think anyone else had the lung power, but Al’s got special DNA for shit like that.

Over the entire recording of Dopesmoker, how much pot do you think you consumed?

It was something like three to six ounces a day for two months. Yeah, it got to the point where I got so sick of just smoking it that instead I would just grind it up in a coffeemaker and throw it in spaghetti and make everybody eat that. Then we’d be, like, drooling, and you’d forget your name and address. It was a lot of weed [laughs].

Sleep released its long-awaited fourth album this year. Now that The Sciences is finally out, are you and Al still digging through the riff vault? What’s the current status of the band?

Well, we’re just treating Sleep how we treat Sleep. We’re just trying to get together and write and have some fun with it and do some shows. We don’t like to be too agenda-filled. We’re pretty casual about it until we’re done with something or have an album’s worth of music ready.

I’ve always appreciated that you’re in two very different bands, but both are so fucking good.

I appreciate it, too. It’s apples and oranges. I’m glad I have both apples and oranges because I have two kinds of juice. And now High on Fire has a new album called Electric Messiah. We just released the eponymous single. The record is like an anarchy-Sumerian rock opera. I had a dream about Lemmy Kilmister after he died. People have told me I’m the American Lemmy, even before he passed, and it always bugged me. I can’t touch that man. I used to tell people, “Dude, I am not fucking nowhere near Lemmy. I might have a raspy voice, and I might play similar music, and Motörhead is an influence on us, but I’m not fucking Lemmy Kilmister — no one is.”

“I love my fast car, I love my guns, I love my dog, I love my girlfriend. I love a lot of things about the world. If we try hard, it might not fucking fall apart. But it’s not looking good because people just get dumber instead of smarter… They gave cell phones to everybody knowing humanity would become that much more stupid. it’s by design, dude.”

And I guess that’s what the dream was essentially about: Lemmy got hella mad at me. Dude was pissed. In the dream, I felt guilty or that he would scold me or something. I had been writing a tune with Des [Kensel, drummer], and I started singing about the weird fucking dream. I ended up writing a bunch of lyrics that I thought Lemmy would sing, while approaching it like an homage to Lemmy. I got to go on tour with him, I got to interview him. I knew him a little. He was one of the biggest deals to rock and one of the last of his kind. So the single “Electric Messiah” is our ode because Jeff [Matz, bassist] and Des love him just as much as I did. I wasn’t trying to jump all over a poser bandwagon or something. It’s just a tribute to Lemmy, but it’s a great album title as well, so we stuck with it.

At one point, I wanted to call it Insect Workout With Lemmy [laughs], but Des convinced me to go with Electric Messiah, and we think it’s badass.

Can you tell me about the album art for Electric Messiah?

Oh yes, Skinner did it! I’ve been friends with Skinner for a long time. We all have. He’s an amazing dude. I met him quite a few years ago, at one of his art shows, and I was just blown away. For the album art, I talked to Skinner on the phone for a while, and told him what I was thinking about — the legend of the Nephilim and the Anunnaki giants waking up after they’ve been cryogenically frozen under earth. The Nephilim are half-Anunnaki, and were supposedly the people who first created our civilizations.

Are they the ones who built Machu Picchu?

I believe so. They were spread out all over the Earth. So were the Pleiadians. If I go into that fucking thing, I’ll be on the phone with you for another six hours. Anyway, the cover relates to the Nephilim giants, who used to be the kings of Earth, waking up from their underground tombs and usurping their thrones and slaying mankind. A lot of people have this hypothesis that that’s going to happen.

Basically, I took all Sumerian cuneiform tablet stories and put themes from them into the first block of the new album, as if it were my own weird little book report. I’m very versed in this stuff. I study and research a lot of crazy shit like that.

So you’re saying the album’s lyrics reflect ideas related to this mythology, too?

Yeah, most of it. There are other [songs] about cryptids, and witches, and “God of the Godless” is about artificial intelligence. “Freebooters” is about Sir John Dee and England’s colonization conspiracy with the pirates. The album is full of all the weird tales that I know.

But I’m not fucking telling you this is or this isn’t. It’s just shit I think about. What’s more metal than half-fantasy, half-mythology? It all came from somewhere true. I sing about the Reptilians on occasion. I listen to a lot of people who they call “conspiracists,” but dude, they have the best metal lyrics [inspiration-wise]. My personal beliefs, you can take or leave. I believe a lot of crazy shit. You know what’s cool about this album? It’s a fun album. It’s not as doom-y [laughs].

Any other thoughts you want to add for Penthouse readers?

Yeah. Stop listening to the media and go to more fucking shows. Fucking seriously. Doomsday’s coming too fast to not enjoy what you’ve got.

Must-Read Booze Books

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Along with all the philosophizing that goes on in Plato’s Symposium, there’s a shitload of drinking, since getting blasted on wine and debating the meaning of life was the whole point of a “symposium.” Exhibit B? The Bacchae, by Euripides, considered one of the greatest plays ever written. Not messing around, it makes Dionysus, the god of wine, its protagonist.

Shakespeare got in on the action with Falstaff, the corpulent knight who shows up in three different plays hanging out at the Boar’s Head Tavern getting wasted on sherry. Drinking buddy of Prince Hal, future king, Falstaff got his own Orson Welles movie, Chimes at Midnight, and inspired Falstaff Beer out of St. Louis, merrily quaffed for 102 years.

Books and beer, lit and liquor — they go together. Reading while buzzed is a risk-free activity (unlike, say, swinging a kettlebell through your legs drunk at the gym). Not for nothing do you have bookstores offering adult beverages these days. Next time you’re in Hudson, New York, check out Spotty Dog Books & Ale. Or grab a cocktail at Denver’s BookBar. And it’s not like you have to reach back to ancient Athens or Renaissance England for a work of hooch lit. Here’s our line-up of ten modern and contemporary keepers. They bottle their topic in different ways, but all give a leading role to the sauce.

Everyday Drinking 
Twentieth-century British writer Kingsley Amis, father of novelist Martin, drank like a fish, excelled at zingers, and wrote superbly. His hangover riffs, here and in Lucky Jim, are the gold standard. “His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night,” Amis writes in Jim, his first novel. This compendium, fizzily introduced by Christopher Hitchens, gathers the hilarious drink columns Amis wrote in the seventies and eighties. (Wine drinkers, be warned: He takes the piss out of your kind.)

The Joy of Mixology
A legendary barkeep and widely published writer, Gary Regan — mentor to hundreds of bartenders, cocktail competition judge, and longtime drinks columnist — is an ideal booze Yoda. Though written as a professional guide, this book works for anyone hoping to up their mixology game. The way it pulls back the curtain on Regan’s world will enrich your convivial nights out.Plus, the author shares recipes, including for his esteemed margarita.

Drinking with Men
Rosie Schaap, daughter of the late sportswriter Dick Schaap, sister to ESPN’s Jeremy, is a Brooklyn bartender, terrific writer, and lover of a good pub. Here she serves up an engaging, artfully written memoir focused on the intersection of her life with bar culture from the time she could drink. She shares stories, sketches portraits of regulars, and celebrates some of her favorite watering holes from Dublin to L.A. to New York.

I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
“My name is Tucker Max and I am an asshole.” So began this 2006 best-seller by a womanizing, bar-hopping dude smart enough to attend the U of Chicago and Duke Law. Max turned tales of guzzling, fucking, mocking posers and twits, and all-around drunken jackassery into a publishing gravy train that’s sold two million copies. Beer him!

The Lost Weekend
Made into an Oscar-winning movie by Billy Wilder of Some Like It Hot fame, this 1944 novel, written by booze-addicted Charles Jackson, scandalized readers with its tale of an epic bender by an alcoholic New York writer. In one famous scene, our hero Don trudges 60 blocks to pawn his typewriter, only to find the shop closed. Think Leaving Las Vegas without the call girl, and with a fall down stairs instead of into a poolside glass table.

Blackout
For years, Texas writer Sarah Hepola got loaded and slept with men she’d just met, barely or not at all remembering how she got in their beds. Blonde, pretty, smart, and witty, she was a party girl — until she realized it was destroying her life. This critically acclaimed 2015 memoir, like Drinking With Men, explores life in bars, but from a very different perspective.

Proof
Named a 2014 best science book by multiple publications, Proof, by Wired editor Adam Rogers, pops a top on the “science of booze.” Get your liquor geek on as the entertaining author hits laboratories, distilleries, wineries, and more, decanting insights from chemistry, metallurgy, neurobiology, psychology, and other relevant fields. In the hangover chapter, we learn Rogers’s technical term for the 23 percent of us who don’t get hung: “Jerks.”

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway’s breakthrough 1926 novel of Paris, Spain, bullfighting, lust, journalism, friendship, and Americans abroad also features a mind-blowing amount of drinking. Characters raise a glass (or squirt wine from a goatskin bag) more than 800 times. They down beer, punch, champagne, absinthe, cognac, liqueurs, and a couple barrels of wine. Everyone’s lit, all the time. Do not attempt a drinking game with Papa’s masterpiece!

The Drunken Botanist
This best-selling 2013 book illuminates alcohol and mixology in the freshest of ways. It explores the herbs, flowers, fruits, trees, and fungi that for thousands of years have been our sources for beer, wine, spirits, and other drinks. Author, gardener, and horticultural blogger Amy Stewart tells of the eureka moments, the trial and error, the craft behind the creation of our beloved gin, sake, and bourbon. Lively and funny, nothing if not enthusiastic, Stewart says a trip to a liquor store just fills her head with origin stories.

Drink
Perhaps you’ve heard of beer towers: colossal plastic cylinders filled with well over a hundred fluid ounces of lager, ale, what have you. This brilliant book — all 560 pages of it — is the hooch-lit equivalent of a beer tower. Iain Gately surveys the whole history of booze, from its start 8,000 years ago, through the Mayans and their pulque, all the way to Budweiser’s Spuds McKenzie. Subtitled “A Cultural History,” the account even covers the world’s most famous drinkers and drinks.

So belly up and start reading. Salud!

Tuned In

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Red Dead Redemption 2 (Rockstar Games, PS4, Xbox One)

Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Wild Bill Hickok — gunfighters were the rock stars of the Wild West, notorious for their oversized personas, unhealthy habits, and penchant for shooting a man for snoring too loudly. Rockstar Games’ Red Dead Redemption 2 delivers on the outlaw lifestyle like no other game. It’s a mash-up of historical fact and spaghetti western set in 1899 frontier country. Players strap on the six-shooters of fictional rabble-rouser Arthur Morgan. He’s the leader of one of the last remaining gangs in a Wild West about to be tamed. After a robbery goes awry, Morgan must lead his motley crew across the American heartland with bounty hunters and federal marshals in pursuit. Morgan’s base of operations is a mobile bandit camp from which you can stage misdeeds in nearby one-horse towns.

Like the previous game (which you don’t need to play to follow the story here), Red Dead Redemption 2 doesn’t dodge comparisons to Rockstar’s other classic crime series, Grand Theft Auto. You can giddy-up and go wherever you want in an open world and take on a dozen dirty side activities, from hunting wolves to robbing stagecoaches, while progressing through the type of cinematic story that Rockstar is famous for. The scenery is no less epic, shifting from desert mesas to alpine forests to gator-infested bayous as you push across the country. Each town has its own lively characters — card players, Civil War vets, saloon keepers, brothel professionals — who go about their daily duties and react to your presence and notoriety. Pistol play is more Django Unchained than Unforgiven, letting you quick-draw and deal devastating bodily injuries. But just because you’re an outlaw doesn’t mean you have to be the bad guy. An honor system tracks how you treat bystanders. If you sling lead indiscriminately, they’ll run you out of town. Gun down the town’s local thugs at high noon and you’ll become a folk hero — at least until the law catches up with you.

Brütal Legend (Electronic Arts, PS3, Xbox 360, PC)

A pantheon of rock gods from Rob Halford to Ozzy Osbourne joins Jack Black in this hilarious 2009 homage to arena rock. Black plays a roadie whose enchanted belt buckle transports him to a world ripped from heavy-metal album covers. Wield an ax — and an ax guitar — to rock the faces of demonic adversaries while banging your head to a soundtrack of more than a hundred metal standards.

PaRappa the Rapper (Sony Computer Entertainment, PS One)

A game about a rapping spaniel looking for interspecies romance might not sound like the greatest thing to groove on, but PaRappa the Rapper popularized a genre that until 1997 had been a mere Japanese novelty. Any fan of the game can still quote the motivational lyrics of its catchy rap-alongs (“Kick! Punch! It’s all in the mind!”).

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (Rockstar Games, PS2, Xbox, PC)

Gaming’s most notorious interactive crime spree might seem out of place in a list of revolutionary music games, but 2002’s sun-soaked Vice City pioneered the use of a soundtrack as a tool to pull players into the world. The game featured more than 100 acid-washed 1980s hits that players cranked on their stolen car’s radio as they cruised a stylized Miami’s neon streets.

Rocksmith 2014 (PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, PC)

Unlike the Guitar Hero games that shipped with a plastic instrument, Rocksmith requires a real electric guitar to play — and it actually teaches you to play it using the same scrolling-note interface used in similar titles. The software adjusts its difficulty based on your fretwork. The better you get, the more notes it’ll throw at you, until eventually you’re handling your ax like a rock deity.

The Long and Whining Road

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Some people believe art is more than a job, but some people believe in a very specific white-skin Jesus, and I don’t see why one sort of self-regard should be less dopey than the other. I mean, believe in angels or believe you’re special; it does no harm as far as that goes.

That being said, like people who brag about their IQs, the harm only comes when shit gets said out loud. While the fine-art world has seemingly resigned itself to largely being an endless circle jerk of commenting on its own existence, therefore keeping its audience limited to, well, fine artists and those who make money off it, music is still happily only, like, 20 percent living within its own asshole.

The 20 percent I’m talking about is the worst rock genre there is (worse even than crabcore, though maybe not as bad as crunkcore): Songs About Being in a Band. Those songs that operate from the premise that there’s something inherently more interesting about playing three chords than being a carpenter or locksmith. Songs like The Byrds’ “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” Nirvana’s “In Bloom,” and Paramore’s “Looking Up.”

Now, I’m not claiming that being in a band isn’t more fun or easier than those occupations. I’m not insane. But the only thing less cool than bragging is making that brag a whine.

The purview of the singer, to me, is sex and/or death. That covers a lot of ground, from political ranting to score-settling with contemptuous parents/teachers/gym coaches. But the ground it shouldn’t cover is the gig itself. That’s not interesting and it’s not fair to the fan to force them to pretend it is, to ask all the teens to sing along to verses about bad A&R brunches as if it were their own deep-rooted pain.

To make the point finer: If pornography was about pornography, half the fun would disappear (though — cough — I imagine the remaining half would still get the job done). In the same way we want, say, Riley Reid to be a neighbor or an astronaut or whatever, we want a band to be something else, something either relatable (like a Bon Jovian working stiff) or aspirational (a Bowie spaceman, a Cobain Hamlet, a Freddie Mercury… Freddie Mercury).

Rock songs about performing rock songs (not be confused with rock songs about rock songs, like “Land of 1,000 Dances” or even Bob Seger’s “Drift Away” — to me the worst rock song ever recorded) are just too self-aware, and then not self-aware enough. They’re what happens when a band decides that the fan owes them their empathy, that they no longer need to use metaphor to get the listener engaged because the listener is so dense as to want to sing along to “We’re an American Band,” doing all the heavy lifting, while the band just describes what was included in their rider.

Why do rock bands do this? With hip-hop, well, hip-hop throws the whole thing off. It’s a form with discussion of process baked in at its inception. Rappers have always talked about The Show and, having learned either something or nothing from the history of blues and soul exploitation, they’ve always bitched about the industry. Rock bands share the same sense of grievance, though, unlike rappers, they’re far more likely to extend their complaints to feeling misunderstood by their fans.

Fall Out Boy have forged an entire career talking about how they perceive their fans, and somehow convincing said fans to pigeonhole themselves. Pete Wentz might be the first man in history to beat the monkey’s paw at its own game. He wishes for success, and gets richer complaining about it. Arguably, he’s just following the template set by grunge mopers and their immediate corporate pop-punk descendants; we were misunderstood as teens and now we’re misunderstood as 30-year-olds who dress like teens.

If you spend most of your time in a tour van/bus, playing shows, it’s understandable that you want to write about your life as it’s happening. And there have been some great songs that prove the exception to my petulant broad-sweep irritation. To my mind, the good songs about being in a band are the ones about being unloved and/or hopeful. Songs like “Formed a Band” by Art Brut, and “One Chord Wonders” by English punk band the Adverts, operate as calls to arm, letting the eternal kids know that anything and everything is possible.

But eventually, even the punks end up like Rancid, ignoring the whole “no gods no heroes” thing and indulging in the most egregious kind of self-mythology. The singer can cloak his/her nostalgia in fatalism, but if they’re complaining about the open road being long (it’s paved, baby, you should write a thank-you note to city hall, or at least the Romans) or their amps in any capacity, then I’m checking out.

Of course, my crying may be moot, like complaining about dinosaurs or moderate Republicans. History has largely wiped out the guitar band and, to be honest, most of the new breed are ladies who write songs about bastards and the state — two topics I get down with. But the flip side is that, while the rich get richer, the niche has grown nicher.

I worry that so many of my peers love Pup’s “If This Tour Doesn’t Kill You I Will” because, besides it being an undeniable jam, rock is in the same popularity rut that fine art is: its fans are mainly its practitioners.

Maybe, in a time when selling a few thousand records will put you on the charts, fans aren’t fake-relating — they’re listening from their own vans, writing their own songs about listening to Pup in said vans, passing other bands in vans on their own way to play for whatever musicians or publicists or label owners live in the next town, everybody pissing in the same bottles and calling it art or, worse, interesting.

Score Bard

Posted on by Team Penthouse

For those of us with more, ahem, discerning ears, film scoring — the instrumental music written to enhance a story’s drama — can make or break a production. Ideally, it’s a thing of beauty that transports us, conveying emotions the images cannot. In reality, it can be an unrelenting assault on the senses, or overly dramatic schmaltz that offends our intelligence.

But not when it’s the work of L.A.-based film composer Craig Wedren.

“I always look at the music as the final character — this ghost that floats through,” says Wedren. “You’re not aware of it, you don’t know why you’re thinking or feeling the way you are, and this is frequently because of this all-important, nonverbal final character.”

Wedren’s composing style is versatile by nature — after all, pros have to adapt to each project and whatever music is required. But what catches our ear every time are his more languid, atmospheric scores, which is unexpected for someone who started out in D.C.’s legendary Dischord Records scene, fronting the post-punk band Shudder to Think (think Fugazi-type hardcore, but with Wedren’s dreamy, operatic pipes). But as the band achieved major-label status in the 1990s, touring with groups like Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement, Wedren’s interests began to drift toward film scoring, and in 1997, he and his bandmates hit the mother lode: writing and performing songs for Todd Haynes’ glam-rock opus, Velvet Goldmine, and composing scores for Jesse Peretz’s adaptation of Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites, and Lisa Cholodenko’s debut feature, High Art.

Shudder to Think eventually disbanded, but Wedren’s newfound career took off. Twenty years later, this professional film composer has a résumé full of winners, including David Wain’s Wet Hot American Summer and Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, along with an impressive list of TV credits, like Hung, Reno 911!, and The United States of Tara. In 2017, Wedren and Pink Ape — the name of his studio as well as his soundtrack “collective” of musician and composer friends — created the score for the hit Netflix series GLOW, and he also released an electro-acoustic solo record, his first since 2011, titled Adult Desire.

We had the pleasure of chatting with the very busy Wedren, who just turned 49, while he was on vacation with his extended family — wife, children, parents, in-laws — in coastal Maine. In honor of our interview, he jokes, “Everyone is walking around topless with cocktails.” Huzzah!

Let’s start with the movies you watched growing up.

Up until my junior year in high school, I lived in Cleveland, which was this cultural catchall, so anything my friends and I could get we absorbed. We were late-70s/early-80s boys, so it was Corvette Summer, Star Wars, and Caddyshack, and as we got older our tastes got weirder and artier, like Cat People and Liquid Sky.

Did you pay any attention to the music?

I don’t know if I was aware of movie music as a separate thing, but I was obsessed with the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. My big introduction to punk and new wave was the soundtrack to Times Square, which had songs by the Cure, Patti Smith, XTC, and all the bands that would feed into Shudder to Think, my own output, and eventually my film stuff — the more atmospheric background music. I don’t know that my friends and I were conscious of it, but what was embedded most deeply into our aesthetic DNA was music and movies.

You’re still involved with your Cleveland friends, right?

I grew up with David Wain, who directed Wet Hot American Summer, and Stuart Blumberg, who directed Thanks for Sharing and has written a lot of different movies [including Lisa Cholodenko’s The Kids Are All Right]. We were the Three Musketeers. We had bands together and we made videos and there were skits in David’s basement and a little recording studio, so we were always generating this material. Then David and I went to NYU and he joined this sketch-comedy group that became The State.

This was the late 80s and I was already in Shudder to Think, and all of The State guys were in film school. I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno, Arvo Pärt, and different composers that fell somewhere between the kind of post-punk/new wave/ambient/4AD stuff [Cocteau Twins, Pixies] that was going on then and, like, cinematic classical background music. So when I wasn’t doing Shudder, I was doing sound design for theater, making music for student films, or just recording experimental stuff, high with friends, on my little 4-track. It was a very natural, unconscious foray into what would become, essentially, film-score music.

The first movie I saw that Shudder to Think scored was Lisa Cholodenko’s High Art, in 1998. How did that project come about?

Lisa was editing the film at Post 391 in New York — the same facility as Todd Haynes, who directed Velvet Goldmine [for which Shudder to Think wrote two songs] — and somebody mentioned us to her. She was like, Who are these poser/wannabe queer/straight boys trying to make film music? At first she was skeptical, but I watched a rough cut of the film and I had a vision. I knew exactly what the score needed to be. So I created a demo using wine glasses as the instrument. I gave her a DAT tape and it worked really well with the material.

Do you get a cut of the film you’re working on and then figure out the music, or are you involved earlier in the process?

It depends. Frequently, producers and filmmakers are so overwhelmed keeping track of a thousand different elements of production that they don’t think about the music until the very last second. Then you get a cut of a movie or TV show dropped into your lap with a hodgepodge of music they’ve grabbed from different scores and sources, and you go from there.

The flip side of that is, for instance, this movie I just did with Ken Marino, Dog Days, where there’s a band in the story, so we had to figure out what this band sounded like. I recorded a bunch of music way beforehand that they could play along to on set. We also knew that there had to be a centerpiece — it’s a romantic comedy, so there needed to be that kind of classic love song for the montage in the middle. That was one of the first things that got written so [Ken] was able to play it for the actors and get everyone on the same page — melodically, atmospherically, and thematically.

In the case of High Art, I think Lisa cut the entire movie together without any temp music. Most editors will “temp” the film — which is to say grab music from wherever — while they’re editing. Which makes sense, because technologically you have access to everything. But there are some old-school filmmakers who believe that you should cut the film so it plays well dry, before adding any music.

Do you have a preference?

I used to like to have things completely dry so I could come to it with fresh ears, but now I like knowing a director’s tastes and what they’re thinking. I don’t mind having temp music to put me in the ballpark, but if they’re too attached to it then it can become a drag — this is called “temp love,” and it can take the wind out of one’s creative sails.

Temp music is also good because sometimes I like to take apart another composer’s work. Like, Let’s see, how did John Williams make this piece of music? For Reno 911! Miami, there were a lot of big, classic scores temped in — Jurassic Park and God knows what else. I had only done smaller indie films at this point, so I was like, Okay, I’m gonna get my crash course in big Hollywood film scoring. I didn’t go to school for this, I just kind of bushwhacked my way through. So that was really cool.

You scored the Netflix series GLOW, which has gotten great reviews. It’s definitely a weird concept — women’s wrestling in the 1980s. Did you think it would be this good?

I knew from the people involved that it was going to be a highly creative, intelligent, and fun project. Jesse Peretz, one of the executive producers, actually directed the very first movie that Shudder to Think scored, First Love, Last Rites. He was a friend of mine in the 90s, so we have a long history together. Then, Jenji Kohan, who created Orange is the New Black, was another executive producer. I know her through friends in L.A., and she’s amazing and smart and she doesn’t make bullshit.

I love your use of cheesy synth music — it really feels like the 1980s, not some greatest-hits rehash of that decade.

I remember GLOW when it was on [1986-89], and I was like, What the fuck is this? Before reading the Netflix script, I watched the documentary [Brett Whitcomb’s GLOW: The Story of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling], and it had this amazing sub-hair metal music in it. Then when I read the script, it reminded me of Wang Chung’s score for To Live and Die in L.A. — off the beaten path, and maybe a little lower budget than some of the more “designer” brand synth scores of the era, like [Giorgio] Moroder, Tangerine Dream, and Vangelis.

So we came up with what I would call “off-brand” music [laughs].

What you describe makes me think of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, where the director scored and played half the instruments himself.

I love that movie. Now that’s low-rent. It’s almost like the band Suicide, which was this rickety-ass synth-punk duo from the 70s — two chords, really creaky and trashy. But it turns out they were the foundation for half the indie music that’s been made in the twenty-first century. And I feel like John Carpenter’s scores are like that. At the time, we were like, Did he make this on a tin can? It was just so primitive. But now, if you watch something like Stranger Things, anyone who’s making a weird synth score owes a debt to John Carpenter.

Speaking of Stranger Things, how do you feel about all the punk/alternative music we listened to growing up now being used in all these mainstream movies, TV shows, and commercials?

I’m of two minds about it. On one hand, if the musicians are still alive to enjoy the spoils, I certainly understand, because it’s really hard to make a living making the music that you want to make. For better or worse, that’s one of the only games left in town — licensing for a movie or a commercial or a TV show. On the other hand, sometimes it’s utterly ridiculous.

I remember hearing a Buzzcocks song in some commercial, and I was like, What the fuck? The world doesn’t make any sense! There’s this duality to it. There was this precious, secret music that was our little coven, but we also felt like: This should be the big music! You can’t have it both ways. And of course it was the weirdos who ended up in creative jobs, like music supervisors, writers, directors, so inevitably you have these former freaks behind the controls of commercial output. So it makes sense that our peers making these commercials are like, I love the Buzzcocks, let’s put them in.

Then there’s the other phenomenon of the internet, which turns over every rock from the twentieth century, making all this stuff equally available to anyone. So this whole notion of our secret, sacred music is erased from the familiar categories we grew up with. With Shudder to Think, ours was beautiful music, but it was aggressively challenging at times. We wanted to be as big as Van Halen — that was our utopia. I don’t know that we wouldn’t have been disappointed had that happened, because there’s a whole lot of weirdness that comes from popularity and commercialization, but that was what we hoped for.

To learn more about Craig Wedren or to stream Adult Desire, go to craigwedren.com

The Ongoing Fight for Civil Liberties

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During my own lifetime, liberal president Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the detention of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in camps far away from their homes. This compromise of civil liberties was approved by the most liberal justices in modern Supreme Court history.

Then came the threat of Communism during the 1950s. The response was another compromise in civil liberties demanded by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his followers. Free speech was restricted, the Communist party was outlawed, and the courts upheld many of these compromises on civil liberties.

Then came the civil rights movement, with violence on both sides and the accompanying call for compromises in our civil liberties. The Supreme Court was asked to limit trial by jury so that segregationist governors could be compelled to obey court orders without the risk of jury nullification.

This was followed by the Vietnam War, during which the government drafted dissenters in order to silence them, and war protestors were charged with a variety of crimes to stifle dissent.

At the beginning of this century, we witnessed the disaster of September 11. This was followed by a call to compromise the civil liberties of suspected terrorists by detaining them without trial, torturing them, and silencing imams who advocated jihad.

And now, the presidency of Donald Trump has given rise to demands that we stretch the criminal law and the criteria for impeaching and removing the president. The justification offered for this compromise is that Trump himself has denied the civil liberties of people seeking asylum and immigration into our country.

In every age, we hear the same claim: “This time it’s different. Previous threats have never been as great. This time we really need to compromise civil liberties.”

But as Benjamin Franklin warned us more than 250 years ago: “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Whenever civil liberties have been compromised, I have been on the forefront of demanding strict compliance with our Constitution. It is precisely during times of crisis that civil liberties are most endangered, because decent people believe that the short-term needs for safety outweigh the long-term needs for liberty. I have been vilified, not only by the hard left, but by some centrist liberals as well, for insisting that the criminal law not be stretched to target Donald Trump’s political sins, and that the criteria for impeaching and removing a president not be expanded in order to target this particular president.

Had Hillary Clinton been elected president and had the Republicans tried to prosecute and impeach her, I would be making precisely the same arguments I am now making with regard to President Trump. The book I recently wrote, entitled The Case Against Impeaching Trump, would have been The Case Against Impeaching Hillary Clinton. The title would have been different, but the content would have been the same. To emphasize this point, I had my publisher produce a mock cover featuring Clinton’s name instead of Trump’s. Had I been making these exact arguments in regard to Hillary Clinton, people on the left would be building a statue of me instead of trying to tear me down.

Throughout my life, I have applied what I call the “shoe on the other foot” test. Whenever I make an argument, I ask myself: “Would I be making the same argument if the shoe were on the other foot, if the person whose rights I was defending was of the opposite party or political persuasion?” I pass this test with flying colors. Most of my critics fail it.

I will continue to demand civil liberties and constitutional rights for all Americans, regardless of party affiliation, ideology, race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. The equal protection of the law does not stop at the Oval Office. No one is above the law. No one is below the law. If the law can be stretched to target a president, it can be stretched to target anyone.

Our Date with Anarchism

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Illegal logging operations had been razing the oak forests surrounding the town for years, with the backing of one of the sprawling cartels that now effectively controls large swaths of Michoacán, the Mexican state in which the town of 20,000 resides.

And since neither the local police nor the Mexican government seemed interested in following up on the community’s complaints, Cherán’s residents — most of them indigenous Purépecha people — suspected these entities were cut in on the deal. After loggers began kidnapping, raping, and murdering locals, and the clear-cutting began to threaten a nearby spring, the town’s women made up their minds to fight back.

Early in the morning of April 15, a few dozen of them, armed with rocks and fireworks, surrounded a bus full of loggers. They took two loggers hostage and kicked the rest out of town. Then they ejected the mayor, the cops, and any representatives of Mexico’s main political parties they could get their hands on.

Seven years later, the cartels haven’t come back to Cherán, and neither has the government. A citizen militia tightly controls the border around the town, searching visitors for party propaganda along with more common types of contraband. On voting day for the recent presidential election that put leftist reform candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in power, Cherán residents who wanted to cast a ballot had to travel to neighboring towns to find a polling place.

Cherán now has a council of citizens instead of a mayor and a citizen watch patrol instead of police, and it effectively exists outside the rule of the Mexican government, thanks to a supreme court decision in their favor. Sending the feds packing seems to be working out for Cherán. Crime is down, happiness is up, and the forest is starting to grow back.

In 10,000 years of human civilization, we have yet to come up with a single form of government that’s functional, stable, and capable of scaling up to fit our forever-expanding societies. From god-kings to colonial empires, every idea we’ve had for organizing large populations under one power structure has collapsed when it was stretched too far. It seems like the only ways to unite people behind a government are to threaten them (like North Korea) or bribe them (like Denmark, which is so swamped with oil money that its secondhand-vinyl sellers can afford to winter in South America).

There was a minute there, between the fall of the Soviet Union and the launch of Russia’s internet war on Western politics, where it seemed like liberal democracy might win out as history’s final form of government, capable of uniting the whole world under one global order. But that was before hackers uncovered its possibly fatal vulnerability to the new information paradigm, and brought the entire postwar political order to the brink of collapse with what appears to be a modest Facebook advertising budget. The schisming of the United States, the European Union’s teetering on the edge of a breakdown, and liberal democracy’s seemingly insurmountable difficulty in finding a foothold in the Middle East all strongly suggest that this system isn’t any better suited for the future than Soviet communism was.

For the past few years, the news has felt like play-by-play commentary for a society spinning out of control. Our young millennium has seen technological change, societal change, and environmental change accelerate to dizzying, unprecedented speeds. We’re bound for a kind of a social singularity, one where our increasingly interconnected, digitized, globalized society reaches a tipping point and… something changes on a deep, fundamental level.

We’re about to cross the threshold into a new epoch, one as distinct as the Iron or Industrial ages, and we don’t really know what’s on the other side. Moreover, it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we don’t have a working plan for how we’re going to govern it.

So here’s the question: If we can’t figure out a kind of government that’ll work for us the way we want it to, why should we bother having governments at all?

Cherán isn’t the only community on Earth functioning effectively without a government. Other indigenous communities in Mexico have followed the example of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas and established their own autonomous cooperatives. Christiana, the leaderless city within Copenhagen, has existed almost entirely outside of direct rule by the city or national governments since 1971, and has even survived a few organized attempts by those governments to shut it down. Closer to home, Burning Man has been collectively building, operating, and dismantling a more or less hierarchy-free city in the Nevada desert every year for over three decades. Maybe, the animating idea goes, we’d all be better off if we gave everyone in power the boot.

The technical term for organizing people without a government — or at least the kind of top-down hierarchical structure that we usually mean when we say “government” — is anarchism. And for a growing number of people, it’s looking like the future of power.

In American politics, anarchism is a dirty word. We typically think it means bomb-throwing terrorists sowing chaos for chaos’s sake, which is why conservatives have for so long used it to try and discredit everyone from labor organizers to civil rights leaders. But America is, in a lot of ways, a deeply anarchist nation, born out of rage against restrictive systems of power, and has remained intensely skeptical of power, even during periods like the one right now where we vote for leaders who openly revel in accumulating it.

We’re taught early on that the United States is a democracy, but the ideal America that we’re raised to believe in — a place of infinite personal liberty, where everyone gets a say in how things are run and anyone who doesn’t like it can head out west and try their own way — is quintessentially anarchist.

The friction between the Thoreau-style anarchist utopia we’re raised on and the constraints of an imperfectly designed representative democracy has done more to shape the American political identity than anything else.

Although anarchism in the United States has operated mostly on the fringes, some of its most potent ideas have managed to embed themselves deep in the mainstream. Anarchism’s success as a political concept is difficult to measure by standard means. For obvious reasons, there isn’t an Anarchist Party fielding candidates whose votes we can tally. But its influence on mainstream American politics is undeniable, even if it doesn’t get much credit.

For instance, the model used by nearly every successful social protest movement of the past decade — horizontally distributed, leaderless, local — was designed for antinuke protests in the seventies and eighties by anarchists, along anarchist principles. On the left, social and political ambitions that even just a few years ago were considered untouchably radical by most politicians have become part of the mainstream discourse. “Abolish the prison system” used to be an intentionally provocative anarchist slogan, so far outside polite political discourse that it could shock an audience into action or reaction. Now? It’s something that people put in their Twitter bio.

Since the Reagan era, republicans have been infatuated with libertarianism — the idea that the government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub.

Liberals have for decades dismissed their anarchist cousins as either ineffective political daydreamers lost in theory and to the infighting that can arise over tiny points of abstract disagreement, or, alternately, as hotheaded hooligans who use revolutionary politics as a cover to excuse their enthusiasm for property damage. But as anti-Trump resistance pushes liberals farther left, many of them are rediscovering their anarchist roots and raising the black flag of anarchy over social media.

Anarchism hasn’t made the same kind of inroads on the right, which makes sense considering how much emphasis conservatism puts on structure, order, and obedience. But it’s there. Since the Reagan era, Republicans have been infatuated with libertarianism — the idea that the government should be shrunk down to a size where it can be drowned in the bathtub. Over the years, libertarianism’s antigovernment ideals have flourished so extravagantly on the right that it’s stopped being shocking to hear GOP politicians making passionate speeches against the validity of the governments they’ve been elected to serve.

All that libertarianism has left conservatives open to accepting ideas like the somewhat contradictory-sounding anarcho-capitalism, which pushes faith in the supremacy of the free market to its furthest logical conclusion, calling for the transformation of a government’s services and duties into saleable products. This philosophy’s been most closely associated with Silicon Valley, where everything new is by nature better than anything that’s been done before, and where the combination of billions of dollars and intense competition have produced egos of a seemingly ungovernable size. But it’s also found open arms in the business-friendly conservative mainstream, where legislators and regulators are already working closely with corporations to reduce the government’s ability to govern them.

PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel is one of the world’s most outspoken anarcho-capitalist true believers, and was one of Donald Trump’s biggest tech supporters during the election. His attention-grabbing speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention shows, ironically, just how much influence anarchism currently has in the upper echelons of power.

In real life, the current flourishing of anarchist enthusiasm doesn’t look much like the Hollywood action-movie conception we’re familiar with: balaclava-clad rioters, guerilla bombing campaigns, rogue hackers releasing viruses that shut down the world’s financial systems while broadcasting video of a shadowy anarchist leader, probably wearing a balaclava, reading a manifesto. Despite their badass reputation, most anarchists are bookish poli-sci wonks who spend more time arguing over theory than anything else.

All that arguing and theory have led to a vibrant spectrum of ideas about what anarchism means, and what the end results might look like. There is, of course, the kind of anarchism familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on a college campus since the eighties: left-leaning, heavy on collectivism, and intersectional with a whole range of social justice causes. There are anarchist schools of thought focused on ecology, ones centered on feminism, and ones for people who don’t want to do anything to help anyone else.

Queer and trans people have expanded the range of possibility for anarchist revolution by adding sex and gender to the list of systems it could disrupt. There are anarcho-communists counterbalancing the current fad for anarcho-capitalism. There are militant anarchists and pacifists. There’s veganarchism, which is exactly what the name suggests.

One of the advantages of anarchism is that it’s easily shaped into nearly anything that someone wants it to be. In an age where our politics and our identity are becoming nearly the same thing, this is a key strength. In our representative democracy, reform is electing someone who sees things more like you than the last person who had their job. Anarchism gives you a plan to tear everything down and rebuild it to fit your specific worldview.

From an outside perspective, the different models might seem impossible to implement in real life, but in truth organizing things along generally anarchist lines makes practical sense.

Systems that are regimented to within an inch of their lives can give the illusion of being secure and stable while hiding massive vulnerabilities. The U.S. spent two decades trying to figure out ways to protect its voting system from hackers and saw a presidential election disrupted by a swarm of cheap Twitter bots. Conversely, an anarchistic system designed for maximum flexibility and adaptability — maybe some kind of data-generated direct democracy — would be able to absorb the effects of unforeseen change. You don’t have to worry about whether or not your president is being blackmailed by foreign agents if you don’t have a president.

The internet gives us a real-life illustration of a nonhierarchical system in action. Organized to avoid hierarchy, the internet stands as the greatest experiment in mass anarchism in human history. It was deliberately designed with a bare minimum of rules by a community of scientists and programmers mixing radical anarcho-leftists and libertarians, and it’s largely resisted efforts by the strongest political powers in history to control it.

Anarchism’s influence on mainstream American politics is undeniable, even if it doesn’t get much credit.

The internet transcends geographic and social borders, allows theoretically anyone on Earth to speak to a global audience, and is set up in a way that even repressive, technologically capable governments like China’s can’t entirely dictate how people use it. In many ways, it’s the culmination of a century’s worth of anarchist dreaming.

The culture that’s emerged online is similarly anarchic. From the very start, the internet’s denizens have revolted at any top-down attempt to infringe on their ideal of unimpeded digital liberty, even as governments and multinational corporations have gotten involved.

Reddit and Twitter became two of the biggest communications hubs on the planet largely because they refused to tell people no in any but the most extreme cases of abuse. As internet culture rewarded platforms that allowed users to set the rules themselves, en masse, and starved ones that tried to import IRL hierarchies, it created a virtual world where the distribution of power is far more favorable to the average person.

In a very real sense, we are never more free than we are when we’re online. And the more time we spend in this virtual anarchist utopia, the more we want the real world to feel the same — and the more frustrated we get when it doesn’t. It’s no coincidence that some of the most effective political and social movements in recent memory have not only been born online, but reflect the internet’s inherently anarchist nature.

There’s no president of Black Lives Matter or #MeToo. There also isn’t a single mastermind behind the alt-right movement or the burgeoning incel intifada that began as an internet joke before crossing over into the real world with tragically real consequences.

Nor does it seem to be a coincidence that the most recent victorious presidential campaign was the one that promised more than anything to get rid of as many rules as possible.

Dapper white nationalists and sexually frustrated spree killers are strong arguments against making the real world more like the internet — and for keeping the societal structures that sometimes feel constraining and outdated but still do a decent job of holding the world together. Some people really do just want to watch the world burn. Giving them ways to share ever more sophisticated means for destruction has made the world more chaotic — a place where prank phone calls have evolved into swattings, where mass shooters are held up as heroes, and where national security specialists (and other concerned people) lose sleep over the possibility that a misanthropic 4channer will somehow set off a nuclear conflagration for the lolz.

Anarchism is a philosophy based on the idea that we can take away the rules and people will still more or less behave themselves. Certain quarters of the internet represent exhibit A in a very strong case that we don’t deserve that trust.

The idea of corralling the internet’s anarchist tendencies went out the window a long time ago. Still, if the world of the internet was organized in a nonhierarchical way, its creators weren’t actively seeking to dismantle dominant real-world structures and global power centers. Blockchain technology, on the other hand, is specifically designed for this job.

You don’t have to worry about whether or not your president is being blackmailed by foreign agents if you don’t have a president.

Like the internet itself, it can be confusing to explain in detail how the blockchain works, but in simple terms, it’s a way of distributing a bunch of information to a bunch of people in a way that preserves the secrecy of the data and prevents corruption by outside parties.

Its best-known application is Bitcoin and the many cryptocurrencies that are causing a virtual gold rush of as yet to be determined proportions. The identity of Bitcoin’s creator, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, isn’t known, and so ascribing any specific political philosophy would be just a guess. But since the technology’s unveiling nearly a decade ago, Bitcoin has attracted anarchists of all stripes — in particular crypto-anarchists — who are united less by a specific political goal as by a desire to make it as hard as possible for governments to snoop in on private communication. They want to create conditions for a revolution (or revolutions) without getting hung up on what specific form it will take.

While crypto-secured communication is undoubtedly helping to power some burgeoning people’s revolutions — and is most definitely empowering whistleblowers — it’s the more audacious goal of replacing government-issued money that seems to have the most potential to upend the status quo.

We deal with money every day. Money permeates every corner of our lives, and as long as the government controls money, it gets to share that constant intimate presence. It’s the ultimate form of control. If the U.S. government disappeared overnight, there wouldn’t be rioting because we felt like the grownups had left the room, but because we wouldn’t know how to buy and sell things anymore.

Being able to create and exchange money without the government’s involvement could potentially be even more powerful than communicating without the government being able to overhear. Cryptocurrency poses an existential threat to the establishment, not just because a lone wolf terrorist might use it to buy a nuke on the black market, but because a lot of people might use it to buy a lot of things.

Cutting the government out of our financial transactions would significantly shrink its footprint in our lives. And that’s only the beginning.

Thinking up ways to replace everyday government functions has become something of an obsession in the blockchain world. People are already designing smart contracts that would eliminate the need for courts to verify or enforce them. The blockchain could conceivably replace even deeper government functions, like voting.

If the technology’s evangelists have their way, it’ll chip away one by one at all the myriad roles the government plays in our daily lives until there’s nothing left to hold it up, and it collapses, unmourned and unmissed — anarchy through obsolescence. The fact that most of the financial daredevils flooding the blockchain market are in it for fortune and fast cars, and not explicitly to destabilize Western democracy, is beside the point.

The blockchain is a promising tool for bringing down the established order of things, without a clear picture of what will replace it (besides more things built on the blockchain). There’s a lot of hope that the tech world will be able to deliver us a solution to the situation, even though there’s not yet one in sight.

The model for how things might work after the social singularity we’re heading for could come from treating the distributing of power like selling apps. Software engineer Patri Friedman wants to apply the tech world’s iterative design philosophy — build it, break it, and build a better version — to our quest for a new way of running the world.

The co-founder of the Seasteading Institute, Friedman wants to turn the ocean into a laboratory for applied politics by creating autonomous mini-countries on floating platforms where we can see how even the most experimental governmental theories work out in practice. It’s a radical, sci-fi-level idea — not to mention the source of a lot of jokes about Silicon Valley “visionaries” — but it very well could make it off the drawing board. Friedman and the Seasteading Institute are tantalizingly close to putting a test platform in the water off French Polynesia.

The son of economist David D. Friedman, who coined the term “anarcho-capitalism,” and grandson of the Nobel-winning libertarian theorist Milton Friedman, Patri Friedman is personally rooting for a system based on a radically untethered free market. But the benefit of trying out every conceivable approach is that we might find the solution where we least expect it. Maybe someday soon the residents of a pontoon city in the Pacific will discover that veganarchy is actually the way of the future.

There are others who believe that technology is sufficient on its own to deliver us to the next stage in the evolution of human civilization. We’re on our way to becoming entwined with our technology on a deeper level than we can even wrap our heads around yet. AI, cybernetics, and most likely some new kind of technology yet to be invented are going to blur — and then maybe even erase — the line between us and our computers, between the real world and the virtual.

Anarcho-transhumanists fear that the world-shaking technological breakthrough we’re careening toward could turn into an opportunity for established powers to control us on a much deeper level than before — imagine being offered a powerful new computer brain, but you’d have to agree to let Google use it to sell you customized ads.

On the other hand, if we do things the right way, spreading this new power out evenly, and using it to maximize our use of the planet to benefit every person equally, we could be looking at a world of limitless abundance, where scarcity will disappear, along with the war and oppression and strife that scarcity breeds.

Anarchists are some of the only people besides sci-fi writers who’ve thought seriously about what that kind of world might look like. (The anarchist philosopher Murray Bookchin was already thinking about it when he published Post-Scarcity Anarchism all the way back in 1971.) And anarchy is really the only system that would make sense in such a world. If we don’t have poverty we won’t have crime, which means we won’t have cops.

Cryptocurrencies’ audacious goal of replacing government-issued money seems to have the most potential to upend the status quo.

In these kinds of futures, anarchy is both an inevitable outcome of our maturing as a civilization and a reward for growing up. If we can get to a point where everyone signs on for global peace and equality, we’ll show that we’re not only ready to live without so many rules, but that we deserve to. We’ll have earned our return to the idyllic hierarchy-free existence our species may have once had before we settled down and built farms and towns and cities and nation-states. After 10,000 years, we’ll finally have what we think we’re naturally entitled to: civilization without the constraints of civilization.

But do we really deserve to be let back into paradise? A hundred centuries of nonstop murder, war, slavery, genocide, and wanton environmental damage suggests otherwise, according to anarcho-primitivism, a fairly recent development in anarchist thought that’s surprisingly popular, considering its end goal is the dismantling of every aspect of human civilization separating us from our hunter-gatherer beginnings, all the way down to our use of language.

We get so caught up in politics and money and the busy work of keeping civilization running that we rarely ever stop and wonder if the costs — measured in lives shortened and ecosystems ruined — are worth it. The idea that the world would be significantly better off without us — that ultimately, the only path to peace is suicide on a civilizational scale — is almost incomprehensibly pessimistic.

And yet there it is, lurking in the back of your mind. It flashes into the open for a moment when you see photos from the latest mass shooting. Or when you reach for a bottle of water, realizing that the plastic will end up leaching toxins for decades, and grab it anyway. Or when you think too long about the fact that after 10,000 years, we still haven’t evolved a way for different kinds of people to live together without killing each other.

Asking humankind to throw away its computers and antibiotics and words for things, along with every other redeemable idea we’ve had, to go with our ten millennia worth of bad ones, is easily one of the most absurd demands ever made in the history of politics.

But it’s hard to deny that, if nothing else, it would at least be satisfying from a narrative perspective. Anarcho-primitivism’s idea of a utopia is one that most people wouldn’t enjoy living in — if they even managed to survive the cataclysmic transition it would take to get there. If we don’t figure out a way to handle all the power that we’ve created for ourselves as a species, we might end up there not on purpose, but by accident.

The Sizzle in NFL 2018

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Is it Jon “Chucky” Gruden, back coaching Oakland again after nine years in the broadcast booth? Or maybe you’re wondering how the Eagles will finesse the Nick Foles/Carson Wentz situation. Foles shone like a quasar after replacing the injured MVP-track Wentz in early December. The veteran led Philadelphia to their first-ever Super Bowl victory. But when Wentz’s knee is fully mended, Foles is expected to benchwarm.

Meanwhile, Minnesota rode the arm and seasoning of Case Keenum all the way to the conference championship game. Keenum’s reward? Team brass signed his replacement, Kirk “YOU LIKE THAT!” Cousins, to a three-year contract with $84 million guaranteed.

Expect Vikings fans to watch closely. Will the former Redskins QB have the same field chemistry with burner Adam Thiel? Or playoff hero Stefon Diggs?

Quarterback angles abound. In Kansas City there’s a changing of the guard, with five-year-starter Alex Smith, following his first 4,000-yard season, headed to D.C. and unproven Patrick Mahomes, picked tenth in 2017, slated to take over.

Packers QB Aaron Rodgers is back after collarbone surgery. Colts QB Andrew Luck is back after shoulder surgery. Sam Bradford might be back after knee surgery — we’ll see when Arizona hands him the ball. Tom Brady is reportedly miffed at Coach Bill Belichick for this and that. Speaking of Brady, will his former understudy Jimmy Garoppolo pick up where he left off last season, having powered San Francisco to five straight closing wins?

The QB-starved Cleveland Browns drafted Baker Mayfield, not Sam Darnold. The Giants shocked Eli-haters by skipping QBs Darnold, Josh Allen, and Josh Rosen, grabbing running back Sarquon Barkley with the second pick. Up in Seattle, Russell Wilson led the league in tossing 34 touchdowns, accounting for more than 80 percent of the team’s offense. Given their thinning roster, he might have to aim for 90 percent this year.

If Foles and Darnold (drafted third by the Jets) start game one, that will mean 14 different QBs trot out for a team’s first hike as opposed to last year. Seven squads have new head coaches. The off-season coordinator carousel nearly spun off its axis.

This new NFL season is jammed with storylines. The wisdom or folly of franchise-determining decisions will begin to surface in coming weeks. It’s the Penthouse “Power” issue and power rankings are a football staple. But in honor of the drama gamut, I offer something else. In each division, I pick the team with the most story sizzle.

Packers (NFC North)
Pundits love Minnesota to win the North. They point to Croesus Kirk Cousins, RB-phenom-in-the-making Dalvin Cook back from injury, and a stout defense getting stouter with ex-Jet Sheldon Richardson. But in terms of heat, I gotta go with the Pack. (Once a Cheesehead… ) Rodgers starts the season hungry as hell — and maybe a little salty about the team letting Jordy Nelson move to Oakland. A new GM is hoping new coordinators can put it together with a new tight end (Jimmy Graham) and new D-lineman, Muhammad Wilkerson. Top draft picks Jaire Alexander and Josh Jackson should stiffen the pass defense. Green Bay has two terrific young backs (Aaron Jones, Jamaal Williams). And Rodgers is reuniting with his Super Bowl-year coordinator, Joe Philbin. Expect a Pack-Minnesota tussle all season long.

Giants (NFC East)
Drafting Barkley was a bold, potentially awesome move. Imagine if he pops like a Todd Gurley or Kareem Hunt early on. Will Odell Beckham Jr. dazzle again after ankle surgery? Will new coach Pat Shurmur get more out of his guys than Ben McAdoo? Veteran left tackle Nate Solder, ex-Patriot, should give Eli Manning comfort in the pocket. Eli’s 37 now — anything left in the tank? Management obviously thinks so. If Eli and the Giants excel, it’s a national story. If he blows, and the Jints flop, New York media will shriek like Velociraptors.

Saints (NFC South)
Electric division. The Panthers and Falcons are scary. But it’s 39-year-old Drew Brees and the Who Dats I’ve got my eye on. The Saints came within a Minnesota miracle play of going to the NFC championship. They drafted edge-rusher Marcus Davenport with pick 14. He joins 2017 sensations Alvin Kamara (RB) and Marshon Lattimore (CB), your offensive and defensive rookies of the year. Pro Bowl receiver Michael Thomas will be catching passes. Will this be Drew’s year? Even a four-game suspension adds intrigue: How will the team do when running back Mark Ingram II sits for a positive PEDs test?

Rams (NFC West)
Gideon, blow your horn. No team loaded up like the off-season Rams. They traded for or signed elite cornerbacks Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib, WR Brandin Cooks, and DT Ndamukong Suh. Suh joins tackle Aaron Donald, the 2017 Defensive Player of the Year. The Rams unloaded, too: three of four 2017 starting linebackers were cap space casualties. There’s practically a small plane flying above the L.A. Coliseum towing a banner reading THE TIME IS NOW. Wunderkind coach Sean McVay, 32, is a season wiser. Imagine if the splashy roster moves work out. Imagine if Gurley keeps exploding through holes, and QB Jared Goff takes it up a notch. Imagine if Donald keeps dominating (prediction: he will).

Chargers (AFC West)
The LeBron-led Lakers, the star-studded Rams, the winning Dodgers: These teams have sizzle. But the stepchild Chargers have a chance to end up the hottest L.A. story. Gunslinging QB Philip Rivers led his team to nine wins and the league’s top per-game passing yards average last year. Joey Bosa and Melvin Ingram will continue to sack. Another quality Melvin (Gordon) totes the rock. The Chargers added Mike Pouncey at center. They drafted super-safety Derwin James. Wide receiver Keenan Allen is… very good. Ball-hawking cornerback Casey Hayward made the Packers regret letting him go. The 2018 Bolts look ready to zap.

Texans (AFC South)
While researching my Packers book, I met Texans fans tailgating at Lambeau in cowboy boots and cowboy hats in three-degree weather. It made me a Houston fan for life. Quarterback Deshaun Watson flashed in his seven pre-injury games. J. J. Watt should be ready to rampage again. Receiver DeAndre Hopkins is phenomenal. In their splashiest signing, they added the Honey Badger, former all-pro safety Tyrann Mathieu. If the Texans turn it around after going 4-12, they’ll be one of the league’s great stories.

Jets, Browns (AFC East, North)
Their combined record of 5-27 seemed to call for a joint entry. The Jets signed free agents Spencer Long, Teddy Bridgewater, Trumaine Johnson, and Avery Williamson (center, QB, CB, LB, respectively). They drafted the quarterback many felt should have gone No. 1. Darnold will be under the New York microscope — how will he respond? As for 0-16 Cleveland, will Baker Mayfield justify their faith? He’ll have Jarvis Landry to throw to, Carlos Hyde to hand off to, and rookie cornerback Denzel Ward, picked fourth, to snatch the rock and get it back to him. If he’s not ready, ex-Bill QB Tyrod Taylor should give the Browns a chance. n n n 2018 stories? Yeah, we got some. Richard Sherman has to play Seattle twice — in a 49ers uniform. The Jets play both the Packers and the Browns — will it be Darnold versus Mayfield, then Rodgers? I can’t wait for kickoff. Enjoy the season, Penthouse readers!

The Kingdom of Redonda

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Not just that: The dead man had, for more than a decade, believed himself to be the king of an uninhabited island in the West Indies. And according to the man’s will, Howorth, a freelance writer based in southeast England, was to succeed him on the throne.

Howorth was stunned by the news. Flattered, too. But there was a catch. In order to validate the claim, the new king would have to travel 4,000 miles to the Caribbean, hike to the highest point on the island, and raise his royal standard — all in less than a month.

Howorth knew he had to try. And so, after calling in a couple of favors, including but not limited to a borrowed helicopter, he raced down to the island and raised his homemade flag to the sky just in time, thus preserving the royal line of succession, and officially beginning his reign as King Michael the Grey of Redonda.

Or so he thought.

In reality, Howorth is the latest in a long line of writers across Europe and North America who have claimed to rule over Redonda, a rocky island about a mile long that is technically part of Antigua and Barbuda. By making a claim to the crown, Howorth became unwittingly entangled in one of the most complex and longest running in-jokes in the literary world, a half-serious fantasy that has been alternately handed down and tossed around for generations.

It started back in the 1920s as a publicity stunt, when the cult science-fiction writer M. P. Shiel started telling journalists that his father, who grew up nearby, had annexed the island and given it to his teenage son as a birthday gift. It’s unclear whether Shiel himself ever really believed his own story. And it likely would have ended there, were it not for the intervention of John Gawsworth, a mediocre but exceptionally ambitious poet who knew an opportunity when he saw one.

After convincing Shiel to pass the mantle, Gawsworth restyled himself as King Juan I and dedicated himself to Redondan mythmaking full-time. He talked up the fledgling micronation to anyone who would listen, including (and especially) the British tabloids, spinning royal yarns and handing out titles and duchies to anyone willing to pick up the tab at his local pub. The legend of Redonda began to spread.

But King Juan was also an increasingly penniless drunk. As his career floundered, Gawsworth started offering to sign away the kingdom itself in exchange for his rent, or even his next drink. More than one person took him up on his offer. And that’s where the power struggle began.

Today, thanks in large part to Gawsworth’s antics, there are multiple competing claims to the Redondan throne. The impish Howorth is one of the primary claimants, with the backing of many real-life Antiguans, and has even lent his power to an English pub in its attempt to become an official Redondan embassy (and thereby skirt antismoking legislation). But he has his challengers, and none loom larger than Javier Marias (aka King Xavier), perhaps Spain’s most famous novelist and a perennial Nobel Prize candidate, who has written several seemingly autobiographical books about the kingdom, and even founded an annual cultural prize in its name.

Where Howorth’s claim to Redonda relies on the land, Marias’s appeals to tradition: He was handed the keys to the kingdom in the mid-1990s, from the man who in turn received it straight from Gawsworth — this time on his deathbed. New would-be kings, meanwhile, seem to come out of the woodwork whenever either Marias or Howorth appears in the media to talk about Redonda. These claimants tend to have no connection to the island or the existing lineage, instead content to make loud, scathing pronouncements from the safety of their comparatively meager online domains.

Is the kingdom a joke? It’s hard to say for sure. Redonda ticks a lot of boxes for a micronation, which are tiny, unrecognized countries that tend to exist more in theory than in practice. But the length and sheer persistence of this particular kingdom — not to mention the shelves of Redondan stories, essays, poems, pamphlets, proclamations, and states of the union produced by its inner circle — suggests something altogether more substantial, and maybe even more legitimate.

Yet even as the battle for the Kingdom of Redonda rages on, fought by combatants who all live an ocean away from the West Indies, the island’s actual occupants — rats, seabirds, and a herd of feral goats — live their days as they always have, foraging for food in the tropical sun, blissfully unaware of the whole thing.

Step Aside From #MeToo

Posted on by Team Penthouse

And please don’t, in turn, belittle or reduce me by believing what I say simply because I’m a woman. What a risky message to be spreading. I and everyone else should treat women the way I treat men: I am suspicious of all of you. It doesn’t matter what anatomy you were born with.

We recently saw firsthand why this type of believe-all-women mentality is so hazardous and unhelpful. Case in point: Asia Argento.

On August 19, the world learned that the Italian actress/director was paying hush money to Jimmy Bennett, a former child actor who Argento allegedly sexually assaulted in 2013, when Bennett was 17. All this happened, of course, in the wake of Argento claiming to have been raped by Harvey Weinstein, becoming a #MeToo figurehead and the voice of sexual-abuse survivors everywhere.

As if the bombshell news wasn’t bad enough, Argento denied the allegations and decided it would be best to drag the name of her late boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, into the mess she created, putting the blame on him along with her alleged victim.

“Subsequent to my exposure in the Weinstein case, Bennett — who was then undergoing severe economic problems and who had previously undertaken legal actions against his own family requesting millions in damages — unexpectedly made an exorbitant request of money from me,” Argento wrote in a public statement on August 21. “Bennett knew my boyfriend, Anthony Bourdain, was a man of great perceived wealth and had his own reputation as a beloved public figure to protect. Anthony insisted the matter be handled privately and… personally undertook to help Bennett economically, upon the condition that we would no longer suffer any further intrusions in our life.”

But then, one day later, TMZ published a series of leaked text messages between Argento and a friend, along with a photo of Argento and Bennett in bed, confirming the allegations.

So, guess what, ladies? We can be just as conniving, cunning, cut-throat, and manipulative as men. Why is this so painful for women to admit? I find it empowering to know that my gender is as stunningly vicious — if not more so — as the opposite sex. We might not be as violent, sexually or otherwise, but what we lack here we make up for in other ways. Argento is a perfect example of this.

After my article “Can We Talk About Toxic Femininity?” came out in the August issue of Penthouse, a group of Argento’s supporters and fellow Weinstein survivors — Rose McGowan, Rosanna Arquette, Mira Sorvino, and Zoë Brock, to name a few — quickly came to her defense. They were up in arms. How dare I question a survivor? How dare I suggest that Asia was using #MeToo for personal advancement? How dare I share an opinion that doesn’t align with their claims? How dare I think for myself!

Just as many women who press charges against their rapist are then slandered — discredited by things that have nothing to do with the case in hand — these victims of Harvey Weinstein quickly perpetuated this same behavior. There was not one logical response to me from any of them. It was only things like: “You’re a cunt,” “Anthony would despise you,” “Get fucked,” and “You write for Penthouse.” I was called a misogynist, alt-right, and many other derogatory and untrue names that people use to discredit others these days. Argento’s lawyers even sent a letter demanding the article be taken down, and an apology issued.

This group is clearly not a fan of the free press.

A now-vanished blog was created in support of Asia, though it was basically a burn book about me. It was supposed to highlight Argento’s activism work; they ran out of material quickly. These women shared it on Facebook and Twitter. They had a friend, Louise Godbold, who calls herself a “trauma nerd” in her Twitter bio, write an article about me, which said: “You are protecting yourself from feelings that the primitive part of your brain has long repressed, believing that they will literally kill you, you become an enemy to yourself… and in doing so, you have internalized the abuser.”

Then on July 12, to show their support of the courageous whistleblower Argento, dozens of these “silence-breakers” wrote an open letter to the Los Angeles Times, which stank of self-righteousness and faux martyrdom.

“One of the most vocal and unwavering figures in the #MeToo movement has been Asia Argento,” it stated. “At the center of our community, Asia has stood, her fist in the air, fighting daily not just for justice for those of us she has come to know, but for abused people the world over. Asia has now found herself on the receiving end of vicious cyberbullying and repulsive slander at the hands of internet trolls who hold her responsible for Anthony’s death. She has been accused of everything from causing her boyfriend’s suicide to trying to use her ‘survivor status’ and the #MeToo movement to advance her career.”

Hollywood’s self-appointed leaders of #MeToo went on to show just how disconnected they are from sexual assault — unless it has to do with rich, powerful, famous men. Mira Sorvino asked me why I hadn’t gone “public” with my own rape that occurred at age 15. She said she found it “awfully convenient” of me to mention my rape in my article, now of all times. This is the same woman who claims to have so much love and compassion for all survivors and “broken people.” Mira, I have a question: What if Harvey Weinstein is a survivor? What if he is a broken person? Should we have compassion for him? Would you? After all, you say you stand by ALL survivors.

Like most rape victims, I didn’t get to go “public” with my rape. I didn’t tell anyone about it, besides my boyfriend at the time, until a few years later when my therapist at drug rehab helped me painfully tell my parents what had occurred and had been a catalyst for a major drug addiction at a young age.

They call themselves “silence breakers,” but they didn’t break their silence until it benefitted them to do so. Until their careers in Hollywood had dwindled down. After they had been in movies produced by Weinstein. What about this is supposed to make me feel as if these people are victims, silence breakers, advocates, activists, or any of the other names they use to describe themselves? Most abuse survivors don’t get to be angry when their survivor label doesn’t get them invited to the Golden Globes.

The response from these crusaders to Argento’s alleged sexual assault of  a minor — a kid she’d known since he was seven years old, when he played her son in a movie — has shown how badly certain members of Hollywood need to step aside from the #MeToo movement.

Rosanna Arquette blamed it all on Harvey Weinstein. Maybe Weinstein put a gun to Argento’s head and made her have sex with Jimmy Bennett? Meanwhile, Rose McGowan asked people to “be gentle” with Argento in a now-deleted tweet, a stark contrast to her usual demands of how to treat people (men) who have been accused of sexual assault.

McGowan had been Argento’s No. 1 enabler, rushing to her side after Bourdain’s suicide. She even intervened and spoke for Argento for days after his death, calling her “a remarkable human and brave survivor,” reminding us how Asia is a “victim,” and disclosing private information about Bourdain without his family’s consent.

But what I find even more pathetic and most telling is how quickly McGowan has distanced herself from Argento. She quickly tweeted that she only got to know Asia in the last ten months — when last November Argento was calling McGowan “my sister.” Later, after TMZ leaked the incriminating text messages between Argento and a “source” (who turned out to be McGowan’s partner, Rain Dove), McGowan got on her digital soapbox to reprimand her so-called friend.

“Asia you were my friend. I loved you. You’ve spent and risked a lot to stand with the MeToo movement. I really hope you find your way through this process to rehabilitation and betterment,” she said. “Anyone can be be better- I hope you can be, too. Do the right thing. Be honest. Be fair. Let justice stay its course. Be the person you wish Harvey could have been.”

This really makes me wonder: Do any of these women actually stand for anything? British GQ just awarded McGowan the Inspiration Award for her “bravery.” They must not have seen when McGowan was unable to handle being asked a simple question about her experience with Weinstein by a group of women. I guess the trauma therapy she received on her reality show didn’t work.

Another completely illogical excuse these actresses have been spewing after Argento’s sexual assault became public is that “victims become victimizers.” Since when did this shit become acceptable or have any kind of relevance? The Boston Strangler was a sexual-abuse victim, so does that exonerate him? There are many people who suffer abuse, sexual and otherwise, and do not go on to hurt others in the way they’ve been hurt. This is a pathetic attempt to justify Argento’s behavior. Watching the women who have been leading the celebrity side of #MeToo use this defense is cringe-worthy to say the least.

But what’s even sadder is the fact that thousands of women who have actually been raped and assaulted believed Argento was a voice for them. Women who maybe hadn’t had the chance to get justice or feel any type of closure or healing had found a hero in her. Argento preyed upon these women and victimized them yet again with her lies. I said it in “Toxic Femininity” and I will say it again: I do not believe Asia Argento was raped by Weinstein. I don’t believe Rose McGowan was, either. Their own accounts of what transpired do not constitute rape.

Has this affected the case against Harvey Weinstein? Absolutely. Has this affected #MeToo? Without a fucking doubt. I often wonder why Ronan Farrow even included Argento’s problematic story in his Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for the New Yorker. How did an award-winning investigative journalist not know about what happened between Argento and Jimmy Bennett?

Anna Silman, senior culture writer at New York magazine’s women’s site The Cut, is a perfect example of someone who’s been brainwashed by this glorified victim-centric rhetoric that’s poisoning our younger generation of women.

In a published conversation between Silman and a much more logical and reality-based thinker, The Cut’s editor in chief Stella Bugbee, Silman states that she finds it hard to be angry at Argento because she’s a victim of Weinstein and because her boyfriend, Bourdain, just died. She says her first impulse was to defend Argento. She does admit this impulse is hypocritical and I respect her honesty, but the entire convo also makes me sad to see how many young, successful, smart women have fallen victim to being a victim. Silman also says, “Asia Argento is ‘our’ girl. We have a vested interest in her narrative. But I think what we’ve learned in the past year is that a lot of these narratives are not as simple as victim and perpetrator, good vs. evil.”

For me, I choose not to call myself a “victim” or “survivor” or any other word that wraps my identity into what happened to me when I was 15. That is my personal choice. Though I certainly respect and understand why someone else would absolutely identify using these words.

What I don’t respect is co-opting a movement about something very real and very important for self-serving personal gain. What I don’t respect is taking words like trauma, victim, assault, rape, and activist and diluting their powerful meanings in order to manipulate the masses. I do not respect the idea of blindly believing someone simply because she’s a woman.

While the media and internet continue to offer up think pieces about the #MeToo movement being derailed by egos and lies, the silence of Anthony Bourdain’s friends and family is deafening. We now know Argento is capable of lying about, well, everything. The content of her and Bourdain’s last phone calls and text exchanges remain a mystery, but if recent events are any indication, it’s most likely that Argento has more victims than Jimmy Bennett and #MeToo.

Marriage Advice

Posted on by Team Penthouse

My wife and I are about to hit our five-year anniversary. We have a beautiful toddler son and our daughter is due in November. My wife has been my rock and a great life partner. However, our sex life has been a constant exercise of misinterpretation of bodily cravings. Foreplay: I like to give; however, she is self-conscious and doesn’t like to receive. I’m not a fan of handjobs, but she prefers to give them. We are limited to missionary due to my length and her body’s curvature. We’ve tried to spice things up by using toys and even watching soft-core porn. Neither yielded much change. My question is, can sexual compatibility be attained five years into a marriage, or are we finished products as sexual partners? Thank you for your time and advice.

Congrats on five years of marriage and for raising a great family. We all know how much work relationships and children take. It’s great that you tried using toys and porn to help out with getting sexually comfortable. It’s a really great first step, and it’s a very positive thing that you can be open with each other. Some couples can’t do that. I think your wife needs to address her issues with her self-consciousness independently, maybe even though therapy.

There is little you can do, though, because it’s a personal issue she needs to handle on her own. Aside from that, maybe you can ask for a blowjob instead of a handjob? It’s more intimate and good place to start. If she is open to it, it might help her open up a little and maybe turn her on. If missionary is the only position possible due to physical issues, then you guys have to get really creative. Get kinky! Go to a sex shop and buy some goodies: a ball-gag, a blindfold, etc. I know your wife is pregnant right now, but after she gives birth, maybe you guys need to do some MDMA together. Therapists used to use this stuff to help couples all the time. Just make sure you are taking pure MDMA and not some garbage. Good luck!

Leah: First off, I’m a HUGE fan of Married to the Mob. I’ll forever remember your MEN ARE THE NEW WOMEN stickers I had plastered all over my things in college.

Secondly, after reading your piece on Asia Argento and Anthony Bourdain, I felt like, “Oh my God, she’s saying what I’ve always thought, but didn’t have the balls to say.” So, I feel like you, more than most of the women in my life, can offer me your point of view on this situation.

Up until about last week, I was carrying on an affair with my married boss. I knew it wasn’t a good idea, but it was fun as hell and I just didn’t care enough about “not doing that” to another woman. It wasn’t as though I pursued him, it was just a growing flirtation over the span of months that finally manifested into some of the most fun, risky, and very public sex I’ve had in my life.

I like to consider myself a progressive woman, forward-thinking and steadfast in my belief that women are sexual beings and should experiment to our hearts’ content. That is partly why I felt no guilt about this affair. I wasn’t even looking for anything more out of him. I just wanted the fun, the danger, and the excitement. (Prior to this, I was in a six-year monogamous relationship.)

Am I a terrible person for not feeling any guilt about this affair? I had always been taught that we women have to stick together. But I wasn’t trying to break them up, I was just there for the good times and good dick. Shouldn’t that burden of guilt ultimately fall on the man who made the vows and commitment?

Girl, guilt is a completely useless emotion. I totally get it. It sounds like a hot situation. And of course it makes it extra hot that it’s “wrong.” There is no reason for you to feel guilty. He should feel guilty, even though he probably doesn’t. It is not your job to keep a man faithful. The burden of guilt and shame should absolutely fall on him. Listen, I’m not saying to go around and be a home-wrecker. Fucking a married person isn’t the best thing, but it’s also not the worst. Unless, of course, the wife finds out, goes insane, and tries to make your life a living hell. Just know that the possibility of it getting messy is very real. I’m kind of terrified of love triangles. Love and sex make people do very crazy things. So just stay drama-free. Good times and good dick are excellent until that dick’s wife finds out. Stay aware and stay safe.

I’m 23, I’m dating a girl I really like, and I have a good job, but for some reason I can’t be happy. I smoke a lot of pot, but I haven’t had a drink since college because I’ve realized it’s terrible for my health (I’m Type 1 diabetic). I know your story with your brand: You made the most of a shitty situation and that’s awesome. I guess I just want to hear your thoughts on how to be happy.

How to be happy? Wow! I think that is the quest everyone is after. No one feels happy all the time. Today, I’m not very happy. It happens. But to feel unsatisfied every day is a very different story. I think we all need to manage our expectations of our moods. Once I accepted that I wasn’t going to feel great all the time I felt a lot better. It takes the pressure off me. When I have a bad day, like today, I just remind myself that it won’t last forever. Tomorrow I get to start over and so do you. I try to exercise every day. It is really helpful. It’s actually a game-changer. I box and do SoulCycle. I’ve been on Lexapro for ten years. I try to stay away from shitty people and toxic relationships as much as I can, which is challenging in a city like New York, because it’s crawling with assholes. I just try to be honest with myself and with others about who I am. This makes me happy. Living in truth as much as possible is really freeing. Maybe you need to go deeper? You need to examine what it is that’s missing for you. Sometimes a good job and a great relationship don’t mean shit if there’s something missing within. So, I say search, and go read the Bhagavad Gita. XOXO

Contact Leah with Thoughts or Questions

Going into the Gregory Dark

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Smart, bookish, and visually gifted, Gregory Dark ended up going to Stanford University, where he graduated with a Masters in Fine Art, before heading to New York University’s prestigious graduate film school.

Returning to the city of his birth, the painter, conceptual artist, and budding filmmaker dove into L.A.’s burgeoning indie-film scene in the early 1980s. It was while directing a Showtime documentary about the porn industry, Fallen Angels, that Dark accepted an offer to direct his own porn film.

The deal set Dark on a path that would see him bring a new style and sensibility to porn, become a king of soft-core “erotic thrillers” in the nineties, and hit it big as a music-video director in the aughts (think Britney, Mandy Moore, Linkin Park, etc.). Oh, and he directed pro wrestler Kane, who played a deranged serial killer in the 2006 horror movie See No Evil. And did we mention New York’s Whitney Museum owns one of Dark’s early paintings?

Transgressive in his hard-core films (the “Martin Scorsese of the erotic thriller,” as he was once called) and a music-video helmer with more than a hundred credits to his name, Dark became the father of “alt porn,” bringing edge and a New Wave look to onscreen smut. And if anyone’s responsible for today’s porn stars looking more like pop singers and vice versa, it’s Gregory Dark.

Currently, the versatile Angeleno is pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, of all things. “I was curious about human behavior and subconscious and conscious processes,” Dark explains by phone. We talked to this influential artist and director, now 61 years old, about his life, his achievements, and how he got into porn in the first place.

How did your Las Vegas childhood influence your films?

My cousin owned one part of the Dunes Hotel and Casino. I would go to shows, where there would be these dancers and so-called models and topless showgirls. I started to go backstage to see my cousin, and I would see these women walking around naked. They all seemed to be tall, given that I was only nine years old. That was when I started getting interested in pretty women.

At Stanford and NYU, were you interested in exploring sex as a director?

Making porn was an accident. When I went to Stanford, I was into voodoo rituals. Later, in L.A., a guy named Richard Lerner came to me and said, “I just met this porn agent Jim South, and it was the craziest, most insane experience. This would be a phenomenal documentary if we just hung out at his agency.” The appeal was Jim’s personality, which was like a Texas car salesman, and how he would convince these girls to be in the adult industry by appealing to their narcissism. While I was interviewing the owner of the porn company VCA for the film, the guy said to me, “Have you ever thought about making a porno film?” And I said, “I could make a better film than any of these people!”

Why did you believe that?

I was more interested in the experimental films of Stan Brakhage than I was in Hollywood movies, and I thought I could make conceptual art films with sex — films not conventionally erotic but the antithesis of erotic while still showing the act of having sex. In those days, most people were used to porn movies with soap-opera plots and characters. In my movies, people actually wanted to have sex. They went wild. Women had orgasms. The women I cast wanted to have orgasms. You let them go. I would talk to them, tell them how beautiful they were and appeal to their narcissism.

Is that also how you dealt with pop stars?

Female pop stars hired me to make them as beautiful as I could, so I tried to make them feel good about themselves and feel natural and comfortable. The better they felt about themselves, the higher their self-esteem during shooting. The more natural the experience, the more naturally beautiful they would look.

How did the Britney Spears thing happen?

I worked for an agency at the time and a rep there told me, “Jive Records wants you to do a Britney Spears video.” I had no clear understanding as to why. I spoke to the president of the label and he said, “I want her to be buttoned-up and normal and natural. I want her covered up, to be pure and innocent.” I said, “Great! That’s an interesting conceit.” It’s the fetish of how pure, how normal, she looks. That was a challenging experience in itself because she was not a toned-down girl. She was flamboyant — she did what she wanted to do. The job description was to make her look wholesome, virginal, the girl-next-door. The good girl you could be friends with, who would be a great person to console you if you did something wrong. It also played into that fantasy.

You made Britney look more virginal, while your first big porn film, New Wave Hookers, in 1985, made porn stars look more like rock stars. How’d that idea come about?

I was driving down Melrose Avenue and I saw these girls that were New Wave-y, less so than punk girls, with hair colors and different kinds of things. I thought, Wow! Wouldn’t it be interesting to do a porno movie with these kinds of looks? I dressed porn stars like all these club girls you saw on Melrose. Nobody did that before.

That movie and your music videos, like the one for Mandy Moore’s “Walk Me Home,” utilized brilliant colors. Was that by design?

I didn’t do that consciously. I worked with a phenomenal colorist at that time. In the video for Linkin Park’s “One Step Closer,” there’s a lot of candy colors, but they’re contrasted with dark tones. New Wave Hookers had some of that, but a lot of the coloring was based on hair spray bottles.

What about parallels between your sexy thrillers, like the ones starring Shannon Whirry, and your other work?

I invented a genre of erotic thrillers, like Body of Influence. They were female-empowerment stories that had morality and negative endings. These have more similarities to the pop-star videos than they do to the pornos.

You’ve worked with actors, porn stars, pop stars, rock stars, rappers, and a pro wrestler. How was Kane?

Kane was easy to work with. He understood acting and was more similar to the actors in the erotic thrillers. Some porn stars are less easy to work with.

Was it the thrillers that led Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment to hire you for See No Evil?

No, they hired me because of the music videos. Also, I think because Vince McMahon liked that I was a porno director once!