Pornosophy: Ten Sex Clubs Where You Can Redeem Your Rewards Points

There's obviously nothing unusual about credit cards being used in sex clubs and lap dancing establishments. That's in fact how most of these businesses make their profits. The customer gets inebriated and the sky or his credit ceiling is the limit. How many purveyors of credit card sex wish the day after that they had not had their cards so readily available? But what about the sex tourist with a good business sense, the kind who is level-headed enough to use his or her rewards points to pay for their transactions? One of the most common ways of using rewards points is for air travel. Accumulate enough points and you can buy your tickets to Paris, Rome or even a sex capital like Bangkok. But once you have arrived the trick is to find the kind of lap dancing establishments, massage parlors and brothels where you can use your rewards points to buy foreplay or even intercourse. The question is can you reap a real reward for your rewards points and if in the moment of passionate lust, you have the wherewithal to defer your reward so that you can make a financially sound decision that will not exhaust the budget. How many sex tourists would have been spared credit card debt if they had had the presence of mind to employ this version of coitus interruptus? Sure they might drain their rewards point accounts to the point where it will be a long time before they’re flying, but the experience will undoubtedly produce its own high. Imagine a hypothetical list of ten new sex clubs where rewards points can be exchanged for sex. The first would be Last Tango in Paris’s Second Arrondissement. There for 1,000, 000 rewards points you’d be able to relive the famous butter scene from the Bertolucci classic.

Kim Jong-un and the Auteur School

Reading about the North Korean hacking scandal, and the role the persona of  country’s leader plays in the controversial film about his own assassination, one is reminded of the internecine battles that flared up amongst auteur critics like Truffaut and Godard, whose careers began as writers for Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema back in the 50’s. Significantly, of course, this was a around the time that Madame Mao (Jiang Qing) who would be an instrumental force in China’s cultural revolution, was refining her own interest in film. One thing that leaders in both China’s and North Korea’s totalitarian regimes and the auteurs shared was an infatuation with Hollywood and the stamp that one sensibility can have on an oeuvre or country. Kim Jong-un’s father, Kim Jong-il was reputedly a great lover of Hollywood cinema (“Kim Jong-il: The cinephile despot," BBC News, 12/19/11)and what father and son would eventually share was an unwanted casting in films about their own demise (in Team America: World Police, 2004, Kim Jong-il is vanquished)—which when you think about it is a really auteur idea. Kim Jong-il’s tastes apparently ran to Liz Taylor and Sean Connery while Kim Jong-un's love of film has taken the form of an inurement in Disney characters with whom he has cavorted on North Korean television. Many commentators have been taken aback by Kim Jong-un’s heavy-handed tactics in creating a cyber attack on Sony in revenge against The Interview. But his behavior becomes more understandable when it’s considered in the light of his family’s generational interest in film and the generally competitive atmosphere that has always existed amongst film critics. While neither Godard nor Truffaut ever threatened viewers of films they disapproved of, as Kim Jong-un, did when his proxies warned of a 9/11 type response against chains which exhibited the movie, there were always heated battles about film. And one wonders if Kim Jong-un’s current tactics are not ultimately aimed at achieving cultural hegemony for his people, in a world dominated by eurocentric critics like Manohola Dargis and A.O. Scott of The New York Times. Whatever the result of the strategy, it’s plain that Kim Jong-un is positioning himself to be a major kingmaker (like the late Andrew Sarris of The Village Voice) in those precincts where auteur criticism still holds sway.

Burmese Days

In a recent article, “Back to a Burmese Prison By Choice”(NYT, 12/6/14 U Htein Lin, the Burmese artist and dissident is quoted thusly about his years of imprisonment, “I was completely cut off from art critics and an audience. I just did what I wanted. In the cell I found freedom. It was the most important time in my art career.” Now Mr. Lin makes the journey back to his former prison “to reconnect with a sense of confinement.” Edmund Wilson's The Wound and the Bow intertwined the Philoctetes to myth with the lives of writers like Dickens, Kipling, Joyce, Wharton and Hemingway to show how suffering can lead to creation. And Lin’s career and his nostalgie de la boue, as the French put it, underscores the idea of the part misery can play in generating insight. Of course there are many former dissenters once incarcerated in Burmese prisons who probably don’t share Lin’s fond memories. While pain may result in enlightenment, it more often then not simply crushes the human spirit. Solzhenitsyn who survived the Gulag and Dostoevsky who went onto achieve greatness after a mock execution are the exceptions. In John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, Lawrence Harvey plays the role of Raymond Shaw a former prisoner of war, who has been brainwashed into becoming an assassin. The Times story recounts how Lin used “old prison uniforms,” “syringes,” and “the flint wheels of cigarette lighters” as his palette. It’s a wonderful talent to be able to constantly recycle experience, performing a version of alchemy in which dross is turned into gold. Hannah Wilke the sculptress made her own death the subject of her last pieces. Lest we forget, George Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, derived from his deployment as a police officer during the waning of the Raj.The only problem would seem to occur when things are good. Many artists become so attuned to making their own subjective experience into an object that they are no longer able to enjoy the unmediated experience of reality. 

DPRK Hackers

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Raining on the Rainmaker’s Parade

The Times ran a story about John J. Altorelli, who they describe as one of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s “most important rainmakers, the term used to denote partners who land clients  At his peak he was credited with generating more than $33 million in annual revenue for the firm,” (“The Rise and Fall of a Rainmaker,” NYT, 12/12/14). Altorelli is portrayed as leading a pretty high falutin' existence traveling in the company of glitterati, during the heyday of the now defunct firm. A picture accompanying the article shows Altorelli with Anna Chapman, who the Times describes as “being arrested by the F.B.I. on charges that she was a member of a Russian spy ring embedded in the United States.” The last movie which with a plot like this was The House on 92nd Street (1945) about the F.B.I. cracking a Nazi espionage ring that had established itself in Carnegie Hill. They don’t even make movies like that anymore. Perhaps the moral of the story is that to succeed, even for a little while, you have to cook up the kind of plot that’s so outlandish it would be rejected by most Hollywood studios. John le Carre has ventured into the world of corporate law, but it is unlikely that Altorelli would have been the model for any of his characters. Anyway Altorelli, who the Times piece described as coming from a family of l0 children growing up in Derby, Connecticut, must, one would think, be living a far more modest existence than in his glory days at Dewey & LeBoeuf. The piece went on to describe the fact that the bankruptcy trustee involved in the case "is suing him for $12.9 million." In Democracy in America de Tocqueville pointed out the fundamentally populist (and anti-aristocratic) nature of American life in showing how one generation could be rich while the next one poor. John J. Altorelli’s story shows a new America in which wealth can be amassed and lost in the same generation.