The New 'New Republic': Fewer Pages, More "Cum Blankets"!
When Marty Peretz announced that the beleaguered New Republic was going "fortnightly," he promised that even though there would be fewer issues, the magazine's new publishing schedule would allow for "deeper writing on truly significant matters. Again, on politics, with penetrating thinking in very literate prose. Domestic affairs and foreign relations, confronting the deep breaches in our own society. Culture is not a step-child." How's that working out?
Later in the day, I met the actor playing panty-addled Jack Fisher. He introduced himself as Porno Jim, a connoisseur, critic, and producer of alt-porn. When I talked to Porno Jim later on the phone, he told me that we were at the beginning of an Internet-enabled renaissance in independent porn—porn made, as he said, with a purpose that's "a little more than just the showing of people who are naked having sex." The Fold, while not itself porn, is an example of the direction erotica could go in if more ambitious, creative people get involved. The scene with the cum blanket, for example, which exaggerates the traditional cum shot to the point of subversive absurdity, represents the sort of genre-bucking experimentation Jim sees as critical to the alt-porn movement: "The best thing you can do [with porn convention] is look at it and take it apart and put it back together in another way."
Huh. That's probably what he meant when he mentioned "the magazine's political weight, intellectual depth, and beautiful style in words." We're sure the editors of Tranny Grannies wouldn't have been able to add the same eloquence to a detail like that.
