OR JUST PLAIN COMMON SENSE.

If you have reached the age of 25, I have a bit of bad news for you, to wit: it is time, if you have not already done so, for you to emerge from your cocoon of post-adolescent dithering and self-absorption and join the rest of us in the world. Past the quarter-century mark, you see, certain actions, attitudes, and behaviors will simply no longer do, and while it might seem unpleasant to feign a maturity and solicitousness towards others that you may not genuinely feel, it is not only appreciated by others but necessary for your continued survival. Continuing to insist past that point that good manners, thoughtfulness, and grooming oppress you in some way is inappropriate and irritating.

Grow up!

And when I instruct you to grow up, I do not mean that you must read up on mortgage rates, put aside candy necklaces, or desist from substituting the word "poo" for crucial syllables of movie titles. Silliness is not only still permitted but actively encouraged. You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.

And now, for those of you who might have misplaced them, marching orders for everyone born before 1980.

1. Remember to write thank-you notes. If you do not know when a thank-you note is appropriate, consult an etiquette book — the older and more hidebound the book, the better. When in doubt, write one anyway; better to err on the side of formality. An email is not sufficient thanks for a physical gift. Purchase stationery and stamps, set aside five minutes, and express your gratitude in writing. Failure to do so implies that you don't care. This implication is a memorable one. Enough said.

2. Do not invite yourself to stay with friends when you travel anymore. Presumably you have a job, and the means to procure yourself a hotel. If so, do so. If not, stay home. Mentioning that you plan a visit to another city may lead to an invitation to stay with a friend or family member, which you may of course accept; assuming that "it's cool if you crash" is not. Wait for the invitation; if it is not forthcoming, this is what we call "a hint," and you should take it and make other arrangements.

3. Do not expect friends to help you move anymore. You may ask for help; you may not expect it, particularly if your move date is on a weekday. Your friends have jobs to go to, and you have accumulated a lot of heavy books by this point in your life. Hire a mover. If you cannot afford a mover, sell your books or put them in storage — or don't move, but one way or another, you will have to cope.

4. Develop a physical awareness of your surroundings. As children, we live in our own heads, bonking into things, gnawing on twigs, emitting random squawks because we don't know how to talk yet. Then, we enter nursery school. You, having graduated college or reached a similar age to that of the college graduate, need to learn to sense others and get out of their way. Walk single file. Don't blather loudly in public spaces. Give up your seat to those with disabilities or who are struggling with small children. Take your headphones off while interacting with clerks and passersby. Do not walk along and then stop suddenly. It is not just you on the street; account for that fact.

5. Be on time. The occasional public-transit snafu is forgivable, but consistent lateness is rude, annoying, and self-centered. If we didn't care when you showed up, we'd have said "any old time"; if we said seven, get there at seven or within fifteen minutes. Do not ditz that you "lost track of time" as though time somehow slipped its leash and ran into traffic. It shows a basic lack of respect for others; flakiness is not cute anymore, primarily because it never was. Buy a watch, wind it up, and wear it everywhere you go.

6. Have enough money. I do not mean "give up your scholarly dreams and join the world of corporate finance in order to keep up with the Joneses." I mean that you should not become that girl or boy who is always a few dollars short, can only cover exactly his or her meal but no tip, or "forgot" to go to the ATM. Go to the ATM first, don't order things you can't afford, and…

7. Know how to calculate the tip. Ten percent of the total; double it; done. You did not have to major in math to know how this works. You are not dumb, but your Barbie-math-is-hard flailing is agonizing and has outstayed its welcome. Ten percent times two. Learn it.

8. Do not share the crazy dream you had last night with anyone but your mental wellness professional. Nobody cares. People who starred in the dream may care, but confine your synopsis to ten words or fewer.

9. Learn to walk in heels. Gentlemen, you are at your leisure. Ladies: If you wear heels, know how to operate them. Clomping along and placing your foot down flat with each step gives the appearance of a ten-year-old playing dress-up, but a pair of heels is like a bicycle — you need momentum to stay up. Come down on the heel and carry forward through the toe, using your regular stride. If you feel wobbly, keep practicing, or get a pair that's better suited to your style of walking. It isn't a once-a-year prom thing anymore for a lot of you, so please learn to walk in them.

10. Have at least one good dress-up outfit. A dress code, or suggested attire on an invitation, is not an instrument of The Man. Own one nice dress, or one reasonable suit, or one sharp pair of pants and chic sweater — something you can clean up nice in for a wedding or a semi-formal dinner. You don't have to like it, but if the invitation requests it, put it on. Every night can't be poker night. Which reminds me…

11. Do as invitations ask you. Don't bring a guest when no such courtesy is extended. Don't blow off an RSVP; it means "please respond," and you should. "Regrets only" means you only answer if you can't come. If the party starts at eight, show up at eight — not at seven-thirty so you can go a "better" party later, not at eleven when dinner is cold. Eight. Cocktail parties allow for leeway, of course, but pay attention and read instructions; your host furnished the details for a reason.

12. Know how. Know how to drive. Know how to read a map. Know how to get around. Know how to change a tire, or whom to call if you can't manage it, or how to get to a phone if you don't have a cell phone. We will happily bail you out, until it becomes apparent that it's what you always need. The possibility of a fingernail breaking or a hairstyle becoming compromised is not grounds for purposeful helplessness.

13. Don't use your friends. It's soulless. It's also obvious. If the only reason you continue to associate with a person is to borrow his or her car, might I remind you that you have now turned 25 and may rent your own.

14. Have something to talk about besides college or your job. College is over. The war stories have their amusements, but not over and over and not at every gathering. Get a library card, go to the movies, participate in the world. Working is not living. Be interested so that you can be interesting.

15. Give and receive favors graciously. If you have agreed to do a favor, you may not 1) remind the favoree ceaselessly about how great a pain it is for you, or 2) half-ass it because the favoree "owes you." It is a favor; it is not required, and if you cannot do it, say so. If you can do it, pretend that nobody is watching, do it as best you can, and let that be the end of it. Conversely, if you ask for a favor and the askee cannot do it, do not get snappish. You can manage.

16. Drinking until you throw up is no longer properly a point of pride. It happens to the best of us, but be properly ashamed the next day; work on your tolerance, or eat something first, but amateur hour ended several years hence.

17. Have a real trash receptacle, real Kleenex, and, if you smoke, a real ashtray. No loose bags on the floor; no using a roll of toilet paper; no plates or empty soda cans. You are not a fierce warrior nomad of the Fratty Bubelatty tribe. Buy a wastebasket and grown-up paper products.

18. Universal quiet hours do in fact apply to you. They are, generally, as follows — midnight to six AM on weekdays, 2 AM to 8 AM on weekends. Mine is a fairly generous interpretation, by the by, so bass practice should conclude, not start, at ten PM. Understand also that just because nobody has complained directly to you does not mean that a complaint is not justified, or pending. Further, get your speakers off the floor. Yes, "now." Yes, a rug is still "the floor."

19. Take care of yourself. If you are sick, visit a doctor. If you are sad, visit a shrink or talk to a friend. If you are unhappy in love, break up. If you are fed up with how you look, buy a new shirt or stop eating cheese. If you have a problem, try to fix it. Many problems are knotty and need a lot of talking through, or time to resolve, but after a few months of all complaining and no fixing, those around you will begin to wonder if you don't enjoy the problems for the attention they bring you. Venting is fine; inertia coupled with pouting is not. Bored? Read a magazine. Mad at someone? Say so — to them. Change is hard; that's too bad. Effort counts. Make one. Your mommy's shift is over.

20. Rudeness is not a signifier of your importance. Rudeness is a signifier of itself, nothing more. We all have bad days; yours is not weightier than anyone else's, comparatively, and does not excuse displays of poor breeding. Be civil or be elsewhere.

via tomatonation.com

-Cinista.

SASHA GREY+NERVE.

How does a porn star become an indie-film darling? Sasha Grey, with diminutive features and a melancholy expression, never looked like a typical porn star, but watching her 2006 debut film, Fashionistas Safado: The Challenge, you’d be hard-pressed to pick her out as a future mainstream star. (Her co-stars might’ve noticed something different; the eighteen-year-old Grey reportedly shocked porn veteran Rocco Siffredi by asking him to punch her in the stomach during fellatio.) But Grey’s persona grew as the mainstream press noticed her penchant for discussing Godard instead of blowjobs in interviews. She was a deliberately highbrow anomaly in a genre not noted for elevated brows; she had even debated between Anna Karina and Sasha Grey when selecting her nom de porn, the former a reference to director Jean-Luc Godard’s ex-wife, the latter to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Her mainstreaming continued with an American Apparel modeling stint and an appearance on The Tyra Banks Show.

Now she’s starring in Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, an exploration of five days in the life of an expensive Manhattan call girl. Grey’s character offers her clients not only sex, but an entire relationship — the titular experience. Grey delivers a candid portrait of a prostitute wrestling with the ambiguities of her profession, with economic and emotional collapses hovering on the horizon. Nerve spoke with Grey about working with the Academy Award-winning Soderbergh, what her female fans make of her extreme depictions of sex, and what she plans to do next. — Michael Estrin


How did Steven Soderbergh approach you? I got a MySpace message from Brian Koppelman, one of the writers. But since it was through MySpace, I didn’t think it was real. Brian wrote me a note saying that Steven Soderbergh would call me, and I was like, “Yeah, right.” But a few days later I had a voicemail from Steven, which was a total surprise. A few days after that, we were having lunch and talking about the project. I think they had heard of me because of the Los Angeles Magazine story about me a few years ago.

What was it like to work with Soderbergh? How did he compare to other directors you’ve worked with in the past? Very few people in porn can actually direct. I mean no disrespect, but in porn, if you can white-balance a camera, you can be a director, which is why the industry is so oversaturated with awful content.

Steven was amazing because he was so focused. He knows what he wants. That kind of made me feel lazy in a way. His process is so intense. You watch him do what he does and prepare, and you don’t feel like you work hard enough. Sometimes we did four locations in a single day. We had a very small crew. But with a small crew and a camera, Steven can do anything.

What did you think about the night before filming started? I was incredibly nervous. We didn’t get a lot of information on the film, so I think I was nervous because I just didn’t know what it would be like. Steven wanted this organic, natural performance for the film. And that was a bit of a struggle for me, to let that be part of the process.

What was it like for you to do so much improv work? I took acting lessons from [the ages of] twelve to eighteen, so it was hard for me to abandon some of those processes as an actor and to strip it down to something more raw. You know what you need to do in the scene, but you don’t have the lines to get you there, so you need to sort of figure it out. I got an outline. But there would generally be changes everyday because Steven wanted the film to be very real and in the moment. We would get to the set, pick up a newspaper, and talk about what was really going on in the world at that moment. A lot of that made it into the film.

In the film, your character is an escort who juggles her profession with the complications of a relationship. Do the issues your character faces with her boyfriend compare to your real-life relationship with your fiancé? It wasn’t very similar because I actually care about my fiancé. The characters are vain people just looking for a bigger mirror. That relationship dynamic is different from mine at home. If someone didn’t like what I did for a living, they wouldn’t be with me, so I don’t have that problem. And [in the film] they both use each other as a crutch. That’s very different from my life.

In 2006, Steven Soderbergh told The Believer magazine that he thinks a person’s views on porn are a better indicator of their mindset, than saying they’re Republican or Democrat. Would you agree? We never talked about that. But I think there’s a lot to that point. There are a lot of people who would say that we are numb to violence — but when we depict sex on screen, or talk about porn, some people get totally freaked out. Like it’s gross, or wrong. There’s this belief out there that you have to be so guilty and ashamed when you talk about sex. That’s not everyone of course, but maybe in a way a person’s outlook on porn does show you who they are, and what they believe.

You’re known for doing extreme stuff in your movies. What’s something you haven’t done that you really want to?
There’s plenty of stuff I haven’t done that I’d like to do. But there are a lot of things I won’t do because I don’t want to go to fucking jail. It wouldn’t be worth it.

Can you name one of those things? I’ll leave it up to your imagination.

We hear you’re a fan of the late Hunter S. Thompson. What do you think he would make of the term gonzo being applied to porn? [Laughs]

Why is that so funny? That’s funny because I did a screening of this adult film recently, and I used the word “gonzo” when I was talking. This girl in the audience asked what gonzo was. And I told her it wasn’t Hunter S. Thompson’s type of gonzo, but she didn’t know who he was. That’s kind of sad.

As for gonzo porn, I have very mixed feelings. It was a great thing and some of the pioneers of gonzo really did some amazing work, but it also allowed an influx of people who aren’t that great. There’s no plot in gonzo, and so people without creativity just call it gonzo and they end up just ripping off what everyone else is doing.

There’s a great deal of media buzz about you, right now. A lot of the headlines are titillation: porn star acts, reads Sartre! Do you worry fans will focus more on you, than on the movie? I think people will come to see the film with a preconceived bias, and I’m not sure there’s much I can do about that. Some people won’t allow themselves to strip the idea of me away from the character. They’ll just see a porn star, not the character.

Who is the character? You can’t just boil down the character in a few words. She’s not me, but that’s my point. There are similarities. I have a boyfriend, and so does my character — but almost everyone has a relationship, and they’re all hard. So, I hope that people can see these two characters for who they really are, because that’s what the film is about.

Has being “the smart porn star” become your shtick? Is that a fair way to characterize your persona?
I’ll leave the shtick up to the consumer. I pride myself on being myself. That’s one of the reasons I don’t want a contract. There’s something wrong with confining somebody into one little box — to say, “This is who you are and this is how we market you.” As humans, we are allowed to change. I don’t want someone telling me to do this or that. I don’t want to be told that every other word that comes out of my mouth has to be cock or pussy.

I think that’s the first time you said either cock or pussy in this interview.
[Laughs] Well, that’s the point. You can call it a shtick or a persona, but it doesn’t really mean very much. People just don’t fit into those labels as easily as we would like. I mean look at me, I’m a porn star, but it’s not like I fit that classic porn-star image. I’m not blonde with big, fake tits and tons of makeup.

Do you have a lot of female fans? What do they like about your films? I do have a lot of female fans. You don’t get that one-on-one exchange all that often. But the most common comment I get is that women say they feel unabashed about who they are sexually when they watch my movies. I really like that.

That’s a tough one. I don’t know if this is funny, but I saw a girl defecate on a couch by accident when she was filming. She wasn’t even doing an anal scene. I felt pretty bad for her.

What did the guy in the scene do? It was kind of second nature to the guy. I guess that had happened to him before. He wasn’t grossed out, but he didn’t help, either. He just walked off-camera.

What’s next for you?
I’m working really hard on launching my website, so I’m building content for that. I’m also working on a graphic book but that hasn’t been solidified yet. It’s sort of a coffee table book about sex and philosophy, but a lot more involved.

Would you ever want to direct? What story would you want to tell? I direct stuff for the website I’m building. But as far as non-adult directing, that’s a few years off. I’ve written a few scripts, but I’m still working on them. I lean toward dark comedies and drama.

How did the sex scenes in The Girlfriend Experience compare to your prior work in porn? [Laughs] You’ll have to see it.

-Cinista.

SUUUUUPRAAA!

Which is sexier of the two?


-Cinista.

ARGYLE LOUNGE.

Study break.


-Cinista.

DRIVEN.

-Cinista.

MUST BE 18 OR OLDER.

-Cinista.

AUTO TUNE THE NEWS.

via thatswhatjennsays

-Cinista.

FIGHT THE POWERS THAT BE.

Started the day early and went to local BB to look for a BB. No luck at that time cause these sales kids out here are rookies. Unmotivated children with no hustle in the brain. When I was at that age, I had three hustles going on. But I digress. Walked around the place and was surprised... I'm glad that nostalgists and the powers that be won't let this media die. They had records on the shelves!

...crazy muthaf*cka named Ice Cube.. from a gang called Niggaz with Attitude!


...been caught stealin once when I was five.

Not really sure if that song was in that album. Crazy cover art. I had to take the sticks off to show the boobies.


...woooooah oh oh sweet child of mine.


Too many to mention in this album. Clicky this..


Got a text stating that there's a get-together at a pool somewhere. Jetted out the spot quick-like.

Had some beers with the crew and thought it was a nice enough day to take a dip. I miss the cali beaches but this is a hell of an alternative.


The beers got me started. Went to a local spot and had another drink. Kettle dirties FTW.


Headed to Woo Che after the drink and had all you can eat kbbq.



Perfect end to a great day.

=]

-Cinista.

YEAR OF THE GENTLEMAN.

Went shopping for socks. Check the mini foxes.


-Cinista.

BLOW ME.

"Taking pictures of yourself in the mirror is masturbation.
-Ellen Stagg



-Cinista.

WORD OF THE DAY.

The word of the day is VIVID colors. There are more words to describe this post. Douchebag girl. Drunken food. Waffles and chicken. Chicks on bulls.













-Cinista.

CHUBBY BUDDY.

-Cinista.

MmMM FOOD.

This is why you're fat.

Bacon crab cake eggs benedict.

Crab cake stuffed with bacon, sunny side eggs topped with bernaise and asparagus.



-Cinista.

SO ACTION LOVE.

I enjoy house music like any other dbag out there. I go to Pure like once a year. The club was outdated when I first started going there and my feelings about the place now have not changed. Why the hell do you go there then? Negative. Negative. Blah blah blah. Sometimes I don't really have a choice. When the tourists[LA] comes down, that's what they want to do. I tag along and get excessively druuuunk.

We listened to the same stale house upstairs and the top 40 downstairs is horrendous. A wise man once told me to Never Complain Without Offering Solutions. Here they are. In order for Pure to get a different clientele, they must update that house into electro. I think that's what the kids are listening to these days. My second suggestion is to loosen up the dress code. When I wear sneaks to a club, I still look good. Just sayin.


This is how a guy from Ohio will dress like to try to stand out with the door people. It's not Studio 54, you don't have to try so hard. Just smile and be polite.


When nerdy and rock cross.


Went to Kirby's birthday shindig on saturday. He was already drunk when I got there. And cake goes in your mouth, friend.


Here's Roger sharing some of that sweetness. "He's got that honey in the throat".. Hahaha.


Poke Her face.


Two of diamonds, son.


Heiny.


"Are we friends on Facebook? Hahahaha.



On to Palazzo. They were druuuuunk.


The tables were hot @ the Venetian; so, they had to play. It was way too late and I was way too drunk to drive home. I slept @ the suite.


Woke up to this view in the morning. I felt like playing hookie and just lounge.



I want to go to there.


I did the right thing and went home. F*cked up hair. Wrinkled clothes. Walk of shame.


-Cinista.

MmmMM FOOD.

You wanna know how I know you're gay?

I saw you make a frittata for breakfast.


-Cinista.

CHICKA WOW WOW.

-Cinista.