Joey
One day Joe got a $300 phone bill. All the calls were to those 976 dial-a-sex phone numbers and they were from the kid’s phone. Joe moved faster that day than anyone had ever seen him move. Joe told them to hold him down and had started undoing the belt from his trousers. Everybody got nervous because they knew about Joe’s priors, the court case, the whole bit. Especially the kid. Joe had something else in mind though and took the phone receiver and jammed it up the kid’s ass and duct taped it in. Joe used a whole roll of duct tape and then threw the kid down the back staircase.
By Eugene S. Robinson.
Toytowns of Literature: the UNESCO Kiss of Death
Leaving aside the parallel development of inner cities of Naples or Havana being UNESCO heritaged into toytowns for tourists, I simply wonder how in a Dublin literary world, “with experience in hosting literary events and festivals aiming at promoting domestic and foreign literature” – all so redolent of caffe latte zones and buy three for two deals – filth-mongers like Joyce or a young Edna O’Brien could now thrive. My guess is they wouldn’t. The only kind of literature that a UNESCO pat on the head supports is more Banvilles and Toibins and Sebastian Barrys that may well satisfy middlebrow, Sunday supplement assumptions of what constitutes writing, but cannot lift it beyond that to the “vile and inhuman” future of art.
Gerry Feehily condemns UNESCO‘s literary Toytowns.
His Nibs
penpusher (n) A person who writes a lot, esp a clerk involved with boring paperwork Pen Pusher, they of “cool, rock’n’roll aesthetic[s]” fame, are holding a launch party for issue 16 of the magazine which features interviews with Evie Wyld and Sam Lipsyte (by Gavin James Bower) and fiction from Niven Govinden, who’ll be reading […]
Tokyo Vice
The yakuza always have had a few politicians in their pocket. For a time, the Zengeiren, the national association of promoters of foreign entertainers, functioned as a human trafficking lobby, as did Kokusai Kogyo 21, an NPO, pressuring the LDP not to criminalize human trafficking. The Zengeiren used to hold meetings at LDP headquarters, up until 2006 or so. However, international pressure made Japan clean up its act, the LDP cut ties, and the number of foreigners trafficking into Japan as sex slaves has really dropped. However, there still remains in place a very dubious intern system which seems to allow for unchecked exploitation and virtual enslavement of foreign workers. Obviously, there are a few politicians getting kickbacks from it, and labor exploitation is a yakuza field of expertise.
Andrew Stevens talks to Tokyo Vice author Jake Adelstein about police, porn and politicians.