Last week I made my obiligatory trip home for the summer. Only a few days, just enough time to make dinner for the parents and drink a little too much downtown.

As soon as I got back into town (10:30pm) Bekah took me to Main Street bar in Grass Valley to share some drinks with her soccer team. One of the guys ended up buying me a couple Jack ‘n Cokes and I went home tipsy at 1am.

Thursday night I met up with my holy friend Jesus and shared a few drinks in Cooper’s and The Mineshaft. We almost ventured onto the roof but were discouraged by the webcams that had been installed looking at the point of attack.

Friday was Troy’s first, and probably last visit to Nevada County. He ducked out of Google early at battled Friday traffic all the way across the valley. We met Bekah and friends down at Main Street in Grass Valley at the end of Friday Night Market. After conversing with some people I hadn’t seen in over eight years we left GV and headed to The Mineshaft to show Troy where Beth was conceived and birthed. After a few minutes of coaxing by the dancers we headed up to McGee’s. For those of you who are not from Nevada City or have not yet ventured inside this short-bus of clubs its like walking through the popular, jocky area of your highschool five years after you’ve graduated, plus older hill-billy gangsters all trying to dance to music spun by a man who’s never seen a strobe light. Nevertheless Troy had an excellent time dancing on and around the girls on the floor while I caught up with friends I found in the corner. Last call. I end up taking a car load plus one back to my house and two of them promptly pass out on the couch. I tossed another a sharpie before he passed out too. Troy, Matt and I got in a few games of pool before we crashed. I had to wake Troy up off the couch and send him to bed so he didn’t get murdered by Bekah “the canvas” sometime during the night. Pass out.

The next morning I got up at 8:30 for some god awful reason. Almost everyone else was awake too so I didn’t sweat it too much. When Troy finally wandered upstairs he pulled me aside and told me that “blackout Troy” might have done something bad in his sleep. He explained to me that sometime during the night he woke up and decided he was too hot and needed to get some fresh air. His first instinct was to go out the window. So he carefully removed the screen and climbed out the window onto the patio. Troy said he vaguely remembered pissing in the plants and wandering around the moonlight in his boxers. After a filling breakfast at Ike’s Cafe downtown Nevada City I sent everyone home and was able to clean up a little before Bekah and I took off for the wedding.

That’s right another wedding. This time between two popular people from highschool that had no idea I existed. Needless to say I was awkward. If not knowing more than two people at a 200 person wedding was weird enough try having most of your parents’ friends and your parents there too. Yeah, awkward. I called my sister and she came and hung out with me a little before the bride and groom made their glorious exit. The afterparty didn’t last long since Bekah passed out in the car on the way over. Another highschool pair married and crossed off the “cool” list.

Sunday I hung out with half the family at Donner Lake. I got a sunburn. Next week I’m meeting them in Santa Cruz for Labor Day weekend. If you’re around call me, I’ll be waiting.

At work on a Saturday afternoon and it’s not that bad. Blasting my music, nursing a beer and getting ish done while five stories below downtown SD lazily soaks up the sun. Cycling to work is more and more fun, too—traffic was light and I kept grinning as I cranked down Park Ave at 30 mph today.

In “Baby, Give Me a Kiss,” Claire Hoffman profiles Joe Francis and the Girls Gone Wild empire he has worked to create. While the article is interesting on its own and Hoffman does a commendable job revealing what a childish creep Francis is, I’m making a big fuss of linking to the article because it ties in with all these thoughts I’ve been having about privacy, participatory media, sexuality and technology. Hoffman touches upon MySpace and reality TV a day after I felt compelled to do the same:

“Francis has aimed his cameras at a generation whose notions of privacy and sexuality are different from any other. Nursed on MySpace profiles and reality television, many young people today are comfortable with being perpetually photographed and having those images posted on the Internet for anyone to see. The boundaries that once contained sexuality have also fallen away. Whether it’s 13-year-olds watching a Britney Spears video, 16-year-olds getting their pubic hair waxed to emulate porn stars or 17-year-olds viewing videos of celebrities performing the most intimate acts, youth culture is soaked in sexuality.”

Obviously, Hoffman stops short of trying to embrace these changes like I half-heartedly did in my previous post, but she sees the same trends. Her tale humanizes the insecure, victimized women that the Girls Gone Wild tour bus turns out, but offers up no solutions or consolation—two things I feel a tremendous need for.

So, the butt-fingering, nudist society is the best I can do for now. Once we’ve all shown up on MySpace, YouTube, or Flickr in a compromising situation or two, will we still fight as hard to keep our personal lives private? How long until it becomes acceptable to post nude photos of yourself on MySpace, and how long after that before nudity at parties becomes popular? From there, perhaps the US might take a more relaxed stance on nudity (as you can already witness in parts of Europe), and eventually public nudity might find its way into the mainstream. These ideas are all flights of fancy, but there are plenty of people already putting everything but their genitals on display on Facebook, and photographers liberated enough to post self-nudity on Flickr are surprisingly common. Plenty of people post nude photos of themselves online, but they take comfort in anonymity or the relative obscurity of whatever subculture they operate within. MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites are no longer a subculture, and the limits being pushed on those sites represent a new tributary to mainstream culture. The children of politicians are making national news because of party photos that they’ve placed on their Facebook profiles, and Tila Tequila was vaulted into C-list stardom because she posted slutty photos of herself on MySpace and recruited a hundred thousand fans.

I think nudity has its place in utopia, but I can’t shake this whole attention whore aspect that the influence of reality TV brings to the table. Freedom from shame isn’t really freedom if you’re sharing your private sphere out of a desire for attention.

Let’s all go skinny-dipping, but let’s do it because it’s fun. No cameras allowed.

My name was cut from the photo caption, but the New York Times covered Zero One + SPECFLIC 2.0 and ran a photo of our Sousveillance Grid with the story. (Use BugMeNot to bypass site registration, doyee.) Let’s hear it for infinitesimal publicity!

Grab your popcorn, it’s movie time!

Perversion for Profit

I was going to post this hilarious 1965 anti-pornography propaganda film as a plain ol’ link, but my commentary grew too lengthy and I figured it deserved its own post. Watch the movie, though. That’s the first step.

In forty years, today’s middle america will seem just as antiquated and scared, and the expression of its beliefs and fears—TV, newspapers or otherwise—will be just as pitiful. Progress is a juggernaut, and while the pace may slow occasionally (e.g. The Inquisition and/or Patriot Act), trying to freeze culture in place is a losing battle. Conservatives, especially the religious right, remind me of Sisyphus. I often wonder how people can shut their eyes to these trends I see laid out through history. Bathing suits will keep getting smaller, skirts will get shorter and so on and so forth, despite the best intentions of some.

Of course, the ancient Romans were all card-carrying NAMBLA members until the Middle Ages came and ruined their party, but that seems to only reinforce this idea that cultural progress cannot be stopped. Will contemporary society evolve to the point of accepting child molestation? Who knows? Maybe we’ll have plunged the Earth into another ice age before it reaches that point.

Regardless, I’m interested in seeing how current trends play out. Kids, like every generation before them, are wearing less and less, and thongs are now routinely marketed to girls who aren’t even in high school yet. Kids are posting risque photos and movies of themselves online as fast as MySpace, YouTube and their clones can handle them, and in general the internet-savy seem eager to publicize more and more of their lives for their peers to see. In a paper I wrote a couple years ago I hypothesized that phone cameras and other ubiquitous recording devices might evaporate the notion of personal lives, and I wouldn’t be opposed to walking around naked like the Native Americans used to once technology helps us get over the idea that nudity is heinous. Imagine that, a society in which people aren’t ashamed of their bodies.

I hope that by the time I die everyone just walks around public naked and fingering their own asses. There, I said it.