About Naked Loft Party
It’s curious to think of all the human beings who live out their whole lives without feeling the need to make the slightest comment, the slightest objection, the slightest remark. Not that these comments, these objections, these remarks are addressed to anyone in particular, or intended to have any sort of meaning; but, even so, it seems to me to be better, in the end, that they be made.
Michel Houellebecq, Platform
I live in New York City, a sprawling human settlement of 8 million or so lost souls. I’ve been here over six years, through thick and thin, and in this time I’ve accumulated enough unusual experiences to last me several lifetimes. A while ago it occurred to me that I ought to get some of this stuff out of my head; that I ought to make sense of my own comments, objections and remarks.
Public writing is familiar to me. I used to produce a zine in the mid-nineties. It wasn’t as simple as click-and-publish: type had to be set, covers designed, physical pages printed, advertisers and distributors recruited. All this effort to reach a fraction of the readership that sees this site on a daily basis. I missed having an outlet, so after coming across a few online journals in the summer of 2003 I launched Naked Loft Party.
Why do I write about sex? Perhaps because it’s so volatile, so difficult to confront unflinchingly. Even now, nearly 50 years after this country lifted its ban on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, sex is still a dangerous topic. At the same time, sexuality is simply another lens through which we can appreciate human experience. As I noted in an old entry:
I could … flesh out my cosmos by writing a stream-of-consciousness narrative detailing every random thought had, every piss taken and every sandwich eaten. I could go on about everything under the sun, but that would be missing the point. Good writing is editing; it is leaving some things out so that we may see other things clearly. The aspects of my life that I choose to omit are no less real than those I choose to write about. But this is the subspace I have created—my experiment in sex-writing. Not Superstring Theory, nor Trite Observations No One Cares About, but the Naked Loft Party. You are sitting around the cathode-ray campfire and I am telling dirty stories. You dig?
This is my sandbox. These are my stories. You’ll find plenty of lurid tales and debauched moments. You’ll also catch me gazing at my navel from time to time. I write as regularly as my schedule permits, and I try to avoid the keyboard when I don’t have anything interesting to say.
Welcome to it.
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Naked Loft Party is powered by Dean Allen’s Textpattern, an elegant and lightweight CMS. I made a number of enhancements to the software which I may one day release in plugin form. Browser rendering is controlled by standards-compliant CSS and XHTML. The site is best enjoyed using a modern browser such as Firefox, but even half-assed browsers like Internet Explorer 6 should perform reasonably well. Various bits and pieces of this site were inspired by the numerous design examples that can be found at CSS Zen Garden and A List Apart. I take snaps using a Nikon D70s and a Fujifilm FinePix F30.
The author is powered by a powerful concoction of beer, hard liquor, coffee and Mountain Dew.
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