Jones gives good blog?

The thread wasn't exactly sitting out there in the noonday sun, Zeke. If you're determined not to give them credit for anything, then this is a pointless exercise. Let's just agree to disagree on this, and let's just agree to agree on Zevon.

Besides, I didn't come on here to defend Gawker. I came on here to make fun of Chris Jones, sex panther and one-man Hite Report. Let us return to the topic at hand.

 

Where's Patty Hearst when we need her?

 

I reached full sex panther status once my back was completely covered in hair. (I think that makes it a pelt.) I look like Robin Williams and Alec Baldwin combined their tufty cosmic forces. It's unsightly, but it's sun safe, and it makes for excellent purchase during particularly daring, acrobatic sex acts, such as what the pros call "the missionary position."

Luggy—my wife, my super lucky wife, knew totally what I was writing. I got the assignment, told her about it, and she said, and I quote, "If you write one word about me, I will cut your balls off." That was our understanding. That left me "sexual partners who are not my wife." And off I went. (Which, you know, makes John Cook's thing even more dumb than it was. He wrote the POLAR OPPOSITE of what I was VERY CONSCIOUSLY doing.)

Here's the thing. My wife knew I was a moron when she married me. I do and say dumb things. Believe it or not, I am ruder in person than I am online, Frankenberry Cocks included. (wicked isn't joking about having a picture of my ass. I dropped my pants in a bar during one of the SJ outings. Maybe more than one of them. I definitely did in New York, shortly before a guy got knocked out behind me. What a weird night.) I have always been this way. My wife understands. Sometimes, she even laughs at me.

Now, with this Gawker thing, I thought she was going to blow a gasket, and that my balls were doomed. (As I wrote in my second-best piece ever, titled "Balls," they are huge, my warm scrotum as billowy as a curtain next to an open window. Super sexy, like a wrinkled pink jellyfish trapped in black kelp.) You know, because of our conversation, pre-writing. But she knows she's awesome, and that I think she's awesome, and in her awesome way, she took it in stride.

That didn't take away anything from my anger with it, because I still think it was a lousy thing to do. Had Gawker taken a run at me or at the piece, the way Jezebel did, no problem. If they did it in a way that made me laugh, all the better, because I like to laugh, and really this piece was meant to be funny more than anything else. The comments on the Gawker piece? I could give a shit. You think I'm fat? You wear an imaginary gold star as a badge of honor.

However, is it really so revolutionary to say that some women aren't good in bed? You know, because nobody ever says that about men. No woman has ever raised her little finger, for instance, to describe a man's penis. No woman has ever made a joke about a man orgasming too quickly or being too sweaty or acting like a battering ram. Like, the entire opening of Bridesmaids was that. Half the rebuttals against my piece are that. But they're funny, because we're making fun of a guy.

Well, sometimes it's the woman's fault, or at least she's partly to blame. Except in the case of my wife in this instance, who's totally blameless, except that she married me, and Jesus, what a mistake. More than three billion men on the planet, and she picked me. In the spectrum of blunders, there's Three Mile Island, my wife marrying me, and then Bill Buckner.

Strangely, my ass is not all that hairy, because I know you were probably wondering, Luggy. wicked has the proof. I mean, it's not baby smooth, but it's pretty smooth. And super muscular. Like, it has ripples in it. I am very hard to knock over. But if I do get knocked down, ass first, I'm doomed. Then I'm like an upside-down tortoise. Totally helpless. I have to be very careful when I'm sleeping that I never leave my sides.

 

And now, if anyone needs to refrain from coming too quickly, they can simply think this:


(As I wrote in my second-best piece ever, titled "Balls," they are huge, my warm scrotum as billowy as a curtain next to an open window. Super sexy, like a wrinkled pink jellyfish trapped in black kelp.)

Here endeth the lesson. Go, and ejaculate prematurely no more.

 

When I teabag my friends when they're passed out, they look like the aliens in Mars Attacks.

 

I appreciate that Jones, while a superstar, is still a hired hand and if Esquire wants him to bat out 300 words in a hurry, he can't say, "Nope, I need to spend six months interviewing 400 people." So no knock on him. I can't say I've never turned in awful shit just because my employer needed to just get it done right away, or because the boss was an idiot and gave me idiotic instructions. But Esquire is cheapening the Esquire brand and the Chris Jones brand with content like this.

Esquire's editors usually can put up whatever they want on the website with no squawk from me because I probably won't read it. But this wasn't just a blog post, this was in the mag. And I am a paying customer of that Esquire product. So they can't just throw offhand stuff into the ink-on-paper product without me at least considering whether I've gotten my money's worth. Also, I become annoyed if I have been lured into wasting my time reading something worthless. And having Jones' name on it is usually enough to lure me. In this case, I sat on my sofa and thought, "I missed two batters of a spring training game for this?" And, "Cripes, what a complete managerial waste of Jones, too."

Esquire remains my favorite mag, and I understand that not every story in every issue can win a National Magazine Award. What has disturbed me during David Granger's tenure (and I had been reading the mag for nearly a quarter of a century before he became editor) is that when the mag falls short I get the impression they think we'll accept it because the editors are just so smart/clever that they can fool us with a sleight-of-hand into thinking it's good.

Perfect example today on the website, which I rarely read. One of their splashes is "Shoe Porn" in which "the fashion editors" pick the 20 shoes you need to see, out of all the thousands of shoe models available. Coincidentally, one of them is an Allen Edmonds model called "the Ridgeway" that I mentioned on our recent thread on "Brand Loyalty" as being especially ugly. Except Esquire.com calls the model "the Webgem." The shoe company calls it "a webgem" in the sense that it's a supposed "gem" that is available only on the Web, for a limited time. But the actual model name is the Ridgeway. The next webgem will be called something else (perhaps The Moderator One, or The Boom_70). A simple mistake? Yeah, it would be if my newspaper made it in a news story -- but then we don't hold ourselves up as the experts who advise you on which shoes to buy, having evaluated all the shoes out there and coming up with a studied Top 20 list. To me this, this is indicative of the level of due diligence Esquire expends in advising its readers how to spend $295. And how much their "fashion editors" truly know about their subject matter.

They do some great journalism there, much of it by Jones. But then they also sign off on their share of really bad, misleading, uninformed crap under a facade of expertise. Gawkeresque sometimes in just throwing shit at the wall.

 

Frank, no matter what the shoes are called, that post was distilled Ridgeway.

 

Next month in Esquire Gay Talese explores the hip hop New York club scene.

 

This thread is like an Ess Jay montage scene. We've even got Ridgeway talking about a SHOE NAMED RIDGEWAY!

 

Frank, this is an interesting conversation. I sometimes wonder about this myself. (I know I'm writing a lot on this thread right now, but I'm at my sister's house, because my nephew's birthday is tomorrow, and Charley is asleep upstairs and everyone else is in bed, so I'm sitting here in the dark with nothing else to do. CUT ME SOME SLACK.)

Sometimes, I write those little pieces and I think, David Grann isn't doing this. Skip Hollandsworth isn't doing this. (Not comparing myself to them, blah blah blah.) But the truth is, I kind of like doing those pieces. I think if all I wrote, all the time, were the 8,000-word monsters, I'd get a little burnt out. It's why a little celebrity story can make for the same sort of break. Life can't be heart surgery every time out. And sometimes, if I'm being honest, I'm pretty pleased with them.

I like the one I wrote about jujubes.

http://www.esquire.com/features/recipes-for-men/man-food/man-candy-0909

I like the one I wrote about the chicken in the Hangover.

http://www.esquire.com/features/the-screen/2010-oscar-contenders-0310#slide-31

This one? Some people liked it. Some people didn't. But I don't see it as something that Esquire tried to get over people or that will cheapen my brand, which is a word I feel really uncomfortable about. (It's like "voice," which is one of those gaggers for me.) I think, really, you're asking us to bat a higher percentage than might be humanly possible. We don't have a huge staff. There are what? Seven writers at large? Not everything is going to be great. We try, but sometimes we don't quite get there.

Was this sex thing a miss? I don't think so. I still think it was pretty funny. Do I want it to be the thing I'm remembered for? No. Do I wish I'd never written it? No. Given a number of things, some will just naturally land in the middle. Like sex partners, for instance.

The shoe thing is a mistake.

 

Oh for the love of fuck!



Christ Jones. I'm not territorial about much here at SJ, but talking about my own ass is an exception. And I don't let that shit ride, not for damn sight.

For starters, it IS baby smooth. Clinical studies have shown there's not a damn thing wrong with that.

How baby is it? It's like my ass got progeria when I was an infant. The ass reached the age of 25 when I was actually 3, then, as if it has its own intelligence, it instinctively knew to stop aging at its zenith, and hasn't aged a day since. I may be 40, but my ass isn't a day over 25.

My ass is not unlike Joseph of Arimathea from Indiana Jones and The Lost Crusade. Only instead of a cave, it's hidden in my pants, waiting to be discovered by the faithful who heed its call. If you choose not to believe in its undefinable "it", you have chosen poorly indeed.

Breaking news ... there's some hair, but it's tastefully grown. There's enough to qualify my ass as manly, but still baby enough to be mistaken for the great missing link of baby-assdom ... the never-seen backside of the Gerber baby.

Forged by years of suppleness, it has a smoothness that can only be described by adjectives normally reserved for alien metals in sci-fi movies.

Ethereal? Hypnotic? Lyrical? Talismanic? Grabbable? Those are not my words to choose.

I am comfortable with the words history chooses. It is my burden. But one I am at peace with.

So, with respect, leave the ass talk to me. I promise I will not talk about my battery-acid tasting semen. Vive la difference, no?

 

God DAMN I love this place!