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

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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

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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

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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

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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!

Mourning the Death of the A.C.L.U

Posted on by Team Penthouse

When I was a young lawyer, I worked hand in hand with the American Civil Liberties Union in defending the free-speech rights of Penthouse magazine and other media that specialized in what the government called “pornography” or “obscenity,” and what its consumers regarded as erotica (hence the expression, “What they like is pornography; what we like is erotica.”). In those days, real civil libertarians saw the government’s effort to ban such material as full-frontal censorship in clear violation of the First Amendment. That was before radical feminists demanded that the A.C.L.U. stop defending sexist material and start defending the rights of women not to be offended, abused, and even raped.

Despite the lack of evidence of any connection between erotic images and rape, a group of feminists led by the late Andrea Dworkin and Professor Catherine MacKinnon claimed that freedom from pornography was a basic civil liberty and human right. They called me a “pornocrat” for defending the rights of pornographers.

We won that battle and pornography is now pervasive on the internet, in hotel rooms around the world (with several important exceptions), and in adult theaters (the few that still exist). With a few clicks one can watch Stormy Daniels earning her living in Technicolor. Although the Supreme Court still does not regard obscenity as protected by the First Amendment, adult pornography has become mainstream and legal as a matter of practice. There has been no increase in sexual assault crimes, and no reputable scientist has found an empirical connection between pornography and rape.

The issue of pornography, therefore, has not become a divisive one in the A.C.L.U., because there are no prosecutions of those who disseminate adult pornography to adults. In light of the A.C.L.U.’s movement away from civil liberties and toward agenda-driven left-wing politics, it is fair to ask how the current board of the A.C.L.U. would deal with a case involving the prosecution of an adult movie theater, such as the ones I litigated back in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

My first Supreme Court argument, back in the late 1960s, was on behalf of the owner of the Symphony Cinema Theatre, an art theater that showed European films. He was prosecuted and sentenced to prison for showing I Am Curious (Yellow), an antiwar film that included nudity and some sexual activity. Today that film would probably get a G rating and could be shown on network television. But back in the day, prosecutors claimed that allowing adults to watch the film would destroy our country. How far we have come, with the help of the A.C.L.U. I would not have a high level of confidence that today’s A.C.L.U. board would be as unanimous about this issue now as it was back then.

The A.C.L.U. has undergone a dangerous change from a nonpartisan organization that defends the civil liberties of all, to a partisan organization that now spends a large amount of its budget on elections and other partisan events. It would be hard for a civil libertarian like me to get elected to the board, because I have committed the cardinal sin of defending the civil liberties of President Donald Trump.

During the investigation that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon, I helped persuade the board of the A.C.L.U. to defend the rights of the despised president, including his right not to be named as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” since there was no mechanism for him to defend himself against such a charge.

Today the A.C.L.U. is on the forefront of defending the excesses of prosecutors who are investigating President Trump. Its legal director vigorously supported the search of the office, home, and hotel room of Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal lawyer. They pooh-poohed the notion that seizing lawyer-client documents that might well include confidential communications presented a core issue of civil liberties. They implicitly approved the use of FBI agents and prosecutors — rather than judicial officers — as members of the “taint team” that would read each and every communication and decide which were privileged and which were not.

Had the shoe been on the other foot — had Hillary Clinton been elected president and had her lawyer’s office searched — you can be sure that the A.C.L.U. would have taken a completely different position. For the current A.C.L.U., agenda-driven issues — especially “getting Trump” — trump basic civil liberties.

The director of the A.C.L.U. demeans critics like me by calling us “the old guard.” But his ageist ad hominem attacks do not conceal the reality that the old A.C.L.U. was far more protective of neutral civil liberties than is the new A.C.L.U.

A Da Vinci Dollar

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Integrating old-school printing-press methods with digital technology, the Chicago-born Williams did the impossible. As the Secret Service tried to trace the source, Williams reportedly created as much as $10 million in funny money, his visual skills allowing to him to craft a product stunningly realistic on every level, from the watermark and security thread to the ink and imagery. His exploits were captured in a best-selling 2009 book, The Art of Making Money. Eventually apprehended, the former petty thief turned gangster turned master counterfeiter was put behind bars for a third time. When Williams emerged, he had transformed himself yet again, walking to freedom as an exceptionally gifted painter.

How did you first get involved painting and creating art?

It started when I was in prison. I’d always had a fascination with old currency. I used to collect bills from the 1800s. I marveled at the beauty the old engravers could produce. I always felt like America was a strong, powerful force and the money back then actually showed that. I started drawing with a pencil. I was creating pencil images throughout my transfers from FCI Manchester to FCI Big Springs. I didn’t really start painting until I got to FCI Forrest City in Arkansas. I started with oils. A fellow inmate taught a class. I read art books. You don’t have an iPhone to Google images or watch instructional videos. Using books, I learned by studying the masters, like da Vinci and Michelangelo. I read up on colors and techniques. By the time I got out, I could paint anything my eye could see.

After serving seven years, you hit the streets in 2014. How was your transition?

Before going in, I was a pretty powerful dude in Chicago. I knew all the heads of the mobs. If I needed money, I just printed it. I could have gone to the basement, printed $100 million, and been done with it. Maybe I should have done that. But instead, I just printed what I needed. When I got out of prison it was real humbling. I only had a little bit of money. My wife had left me. She was down in Texas with the three kids. I felt really alone. I didn’t know what I was going to do. A really good friend of mine that I’d let down, Mark Schwartz, got me a job cleaning for $15 an hour.

I went from being a real powerhouse in Chicago to scrubbing toilet bowls.

How would you compare printing money to painting images of it?

Mixing paints is kind of like mixing inks. I feel like I’m still printing money. I’m printing it on canvas now. I get to have that same feeling. I got pieces that have watermarks in them, the same as money. I got the Capone piece. It has a strip like the bills. I also put little quotes within the strips. I got paintings that glow underneath, ultraviolet like money. I got almost every security feature that’s in the bills. Watermark. Strip. The interference. Changing colors. Ultraviolet. All these things, even micro stuff. I got micro-handpainted stuff I did that’s insane. I basically applied all the security features that were on actual money into my art. I got secret symbols in my art. Stuff that you don’t even know is there.

What was it like growing up in a tough part of Chicago?

I grew up in Bridgeport, on the South Side. I was stealing change from parking meters to put food on the table as a kid. Life wasn’t easy. My mom — the bipolar kicked in real bad. We ended up in the projects. Gangs, drugs, violence, the whole thing. Not too many people made it out of there. I had some friends get killed. I’d been shot. That’s when I ended up meeting the old man who took me under his wing and showed me how to print money. I was there until I was about 21. The last time I got shot I was like, I’m done. I went down to Texas. Nine years later, I came back to the same neighborhood.

Your career has taken off since showing your paintings at last year’s Art Basel Miami. What’s it feel like to have your hard work rewarded?

Three years ago, I was at a point where I felt ready to give up. Nothing was working. The jobs I had been doing were paying cheap. I got real close to feeling like, man, this shit just ain’t working. I didn’t look at the painting as something that I’d make money off of. I thought I would be painting houses the rest of my life. I kind of gave up on the dream of being an artist. I still painted but I didn’t look at it as, okay, this is what my life’s going to be. Then my house burned down and I lost everything. The only thing that survived the fire was my paintings. [Real-estate developers] Joey Jr. and his dad Joseph Cacciatore Sr. gave me a studio at Lacuna artist lofts. They’ve supported me since day one.

Art Basel Miami was last December. I didn’t know anybody down there. I didn’t really expect much. I was like, Let’s just go down there and let’s just make contact. Let’s see what it’s about. I packed up the truck and drove down to Miami. When I got there, there were freaking Ferraris, Lamborghinis, everything, pulling up. I ended up selling everything to one guy. An awesome dude. He invited me to his yacht. We showed the art there.

You recently opened your own gallery.

I wanted to open this gallery on Morgan. I didn’t have the money to do it, but I believed I was going to get it somehow. On the day they put the for-rent sign up, I had coffee in Bridgeport with my managers. I told them, “Guys, if we’re going to do this we got to go all-in. I got an apartment nearby. I can walk to the gallery.” They wanted to look at it. We went and looked at the place and what do you know? They wrote a check to the landlord right then and there. The space looked jacked-up. They were like, “Art, are you sure you want to use this for your gallery?” And I said, “Hell yeah, guys. I got the vision.”

Everybody was telling me I was crazy for getting this spot. For the next two months, we jammed on the gallery. I was getting help from local plumbers, electricians. It was really cool how the neighborhood came together to help me with this thing. I went back down to Miami and sold some more stuff to help pay for the continued work on the gallery. One of my collectors down in St. Louis came through and bought two pieces just when we were running out of money and I was getting nervous. Art always saves Art. Every time.

People are comparing your work to Andy Warhol’s.

Warhol gave me a blueprint for bringing the printing that I loved and the painting I now love and making them one. I studied what he did and how he did it. I think the difference between me and Warhol is, I realized art could be more than having people work for you. It has the ability to bring people together from all walks of life, like it did at my last show. I had blacks, Latinos, whites, Italians. Just everyone together having a great time. It showed me that I can reinvent myself through art.

Something that trips me out is that I know a lot of artists and they don’t want to be social. They don’t want to be in the crowd. That’s cool. I get it. There’s a level of privacy to art, but I think to be human is to be social and to love people. As you love people, you’ll create better art. That’s what’s happening to me. I’m seeing my artwork improve. I’m becoming more creative.

Recently you’ve been combining images of money and pop-culture icons, right?

These new pieces, the Bond girls, or even the Floyd Mayweather piece — that was the first one I did where I printed with the gold — are exciting to me. I change the bills to where they’re not the same. I get it to where it looks really close, then I change them. When I’m painting I mix colors. I find the texture of what I want to paint on. Different canvases. Maybe different papers, even glass, metal. I’ve painted on everything. Clay. It’s an experiment. I play with a lot of different things. I like to use different shading to do illusions within the image. With the collection I got now, the Icon Collection, the painting that got me going down in Miami was the Marilyn Monroe. But all the icons I did — Marilyn, Prince, Dorothy, Judy Garland — all these people died of an overdose. The reason I did them was because my aunt and uncle both died of overdoses. My sister’s hooked on pain medicine. It’s real to me.

You did a charity event with Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles. He bought a painting. What was it like hanging out with the Terminator?

I had the Arnold event, I had my gallery opening, and I was invited to go to Cleveland to speak to the Browns. I met defensive coordinator Gregg Williams and he was intrigued by my story. It was all back-to-back. It was overwhelming to me, the trifecta. In L.A., I met Arnold, Jason Statham, others. Arnold was awesome. Dude was like one of us. He was a real dude. He was digging the story. Loved the art. He spent time with me. I didn’t know what to expect from these Hollywood stars, but they were all freaking awesome. At the end of the night they auctioned off some of my work and we raised $150,000 for kids. Blew my mind. People always congratulate me, but I tell them this is just the beginning.