Hard to believe it’s been a year since I went down to San Francisco and posed for the renowned photographer Craig Morey. But it has been, and I’m thinking it’s about time I did another serious shoot. The trouble is I can’t decide what to do.

I could certainly go back to Craig again, I liked him and his work is great, and now that we know each other, we might do even better work together.

Tommy Edwards is right here in Seattle. He does lovely, lovely work, he’s a consummate professional, and he’s easily the best photographer I have ever worked with in terms of communicating what he wants you to do. That’s an important consideration for a model.

But…everybody in town has Tommy’s photos. (By “everybody”, I mean all the up-scale sex-workers.) It’s a little too much of a good thing, you know.

I know there are lots of local people, who aren’t necessarily as famous as Craig or even as Tommy, who can produce good images. I’ve seen some cool art by those folks. This isn’t about snubbing them. But doing this type of photo shoot is a big investment of time, money, and effort. Frankly, I want a photographer who is the professional equivalent of me: trained, equipped, experienced, a full-time professional who will guarantee to deliver the goods. They need to have the studio, have the set, have the system, and have a CD to me in a week or less, boom.

You see, I know exactly what I need, and I also know it’s probably not the most interesting thing to shoot. Photographers like to play and be creative, and I do not need creative. No artsy black-and-white. No high-contrast, back-lit, out-of-focus images. No funky crops, no extreme angles, no close-ups featuring six square inches of my left thigh, no masks or figure-obscuring outfits.

And I don’t need photos of me wearing a corset and a sneer, brandishing a crop. Can you say cliché? I have a hard drive full of those, and they are stale and boring, and they don’t reflect anything about what I’m really like.

What I need is color, with soft even lighting, a lot of full-length shots, with a setting that doesn’t pull focus or confuse the viewer. I want warm, sexy, glamorous images – portraits, really, with a sense of personality and a touch of humor.

So I’m clicking around, wondering who to go see. It’s tough to find someone who’s the perfect fit. I thought about Ken Marcus, but he seems to have retired from commercial glamour and is only shooting for his bondage website.

There’s this man: Ken Banks. He seems to have a good resume and do good work. I like that he seems to use a lot of natural light, but I’m afraid he might not be edgy enough.

There’s this outfit down in LA. But wow, they are very…LA. Still, it might be worth talking to them.

So I’m shopping. Have a suggestion? Drop me a note.

Okay, this is how not-techie I am. I took pictures on the camera on my phone today, and I have no idea how to get them to my computer. Any suggestions? It’s a Verizon LG5300. (I suppose I could read the stupid manual, couldn’t I? Arg.)

I need to buy an inexpensive little digital camera and just leave it at the dungeon all the time. This is twice now that I’ve really wanted a camera - and mine was at home. (Yes, you were the other time, Musical Man.) Feats of cock and ball torment always make me want to take a photo, and I do hate have having my artistic urges thwarted. And I’m in a shopping mood anyway, recession be damned. I’ll singlehandedly prop up the economy. Isn't that nice of me?

So speaking of politics, it looks like McCain for the Republicans, doesn’t it? I’m almost sorry. He seems like the most reasonable of them all. (Except for being pro-life, bah.) Mitt Rommey? That guy is an empty suit with nice hair. He’s an android. I think they wind him up every morning with a giant key in his back. Huckabee is a Baptist minister, and that’s pretty much all one needs to say about that. I didn't hate Rudy Giuliani, based on what very little I knew about him. You have to like a man who’ll do drag. And at least he has a history of being pro-choice. But I’m told he’s an utter fascist – and that was the opinion of someone who'd lived in South Africa and knows something about fascists.

So I’m almost sorry because I will, of course, be voting Democrat, and I sort of hate to see an even somewhat-reasonable guy on the Republican ticket. The way this administration has slashed and burned the country, it’s hard to imagine the Republicans winning the presidency, but it’s not like the Democrats couldn’t screw this up. No one tops Democrats for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

And I’m pretty on the fence with Clinton versus Obama. They both have their strengths and weaknesses. There’s nothing exactly wrong with Hillary Clinton in my eyes, I just…don’t think I’d like her, if I met her. (I liked her husband, though. Mrrow!) Still, I don’t have to like someone for them to be a good president, so if she gets the nomination, I’m fine with that.

I like Obama, I think he has great vision and passion, but I worry about his inexperience. Hillary knows her way around the track. I think he’d make a great vice-president for her – she’d keep him realistic, he’d keep her idealistic – and he’d be better positioned for the presidency down the road. But that’ll never happen. I kind of like John Edwards, actually, so I hope whoever gets the nomination taps him for VP.

Of course, if the Democrats nominated a brain-eating zombie, I’d put on a full-face motorcycle helmet and cast my vote for a rotting corpse, come November. Anyone but that monkey boy and the Death Merchant we have in there now. I am a pretty moderate Democrat, but as long as the Republicans are bed with the religious right, they will never get my vote for anything. I dislike nanny-state liberalism, but if that’s what it takes to get a secular government, I’ll take it.

No Sex Please, We're British

From a story in the Daily Mail:
Carrie Jones hasn't had sex with her husband Hal, a City banker, for the past four years. Nor does she want to. Sex is something she can no longer summon the effort to endure - with the man she married, at least.

Sex workers love women like this. We should. Their husbands comprise a large chunk of our clientèle. Her man Hal will probably be joining the club soon, if he hasn’t already. If she thinks her husband is going to go, oh, ten years without sex? Well, he might be an unusual guy, but I strongly doubt it. If she’s lucky, he’ll just see escorts and stay married to her until their kids are grown up, which is what she says she wants.

But is it really? Actions speak louder than words sometimes, and this woman has published a book saying she’s planning to never have sex with her husband again. And put her photo with it. That’s not exactly a subtle hint. Jesus, lady, way to embarrass and emasculate your helpmate there. As far as I’m concerned, she might as well write “Divorce Me” on her forehead. Kids or no kids, if a partner of mine did that, I’d be out the door. She thinks it's better for children to be raised in a stable loving environment? Yes, I’d agree with that. However, if you’re publishing a fucking book about how much you don’t love your children’s father, and how you planned to cheat on him, I really don’t think anyone is going to mistake you for Ward and June Cleaver. And your kids are nine and eleven – if you think you’re going to fool them into thinking Mommy and Daddy really love each other, you’re dreaming. They’re old enough to be onto you, even if they can’t articulate it. All you’re doing now is setting them up for a lifetime of therapy and messed-up relationships as they unconsciously replay this situation with their own partners.

I think this is an extreme case, but I think the basic premise is pretty common. The majority of the guys I have met through sex work told me the same story. “My wife is a wonderful woman and I love her, but we haven’t had sex in a long time. She doesn’t want it, but I have needs." Since I'm polyamorous, I can totally relate to the idea of having different people in your life that fulfill you in different ways. But I think expecting your partner to go without sex is selfish and dumb. And publishing an unflattering book about your intimate life with him, without even telling him about it first, is astoundingly cruel.

As I said, having her husband go to a sex worker is the best outcome Mrs. Jones could hope for. You see, sex workers don’t break up marriages. Most clients of sex workers could absolutely find non-professional girlfriends on the side, if they wanted them. They avoid that because they know that women in relationships like that make emotional demands. (And justifiably so.) But sex workers don’t do that. So if Mrs. Jones wants to stay married, she should be diverting some cash from the monthly budget into an "entertainment fund" for him. Because if kind, sweet Hal falls in love with a woman who wants him to leave his wife, Mrs. Jones could be freed up to pursue her old boyfriends a lot sooner than she planned.

In the spirit of last week's column, another one from the "Inexplicable Emails" file.

i lo you for the ideal look with sexy and class
I propose you to give me a chance to be the duo to make v i p week end and one new pills to sell in all over the world
Do I have chance to make contract relation avec femme ayant look for give the boy like me shows for have cerebral orgasme with no tuch. tell me what to do for try to serve and love you with no lies but full trust

Yes, that's the way it was formatted in the email, too, all over to the right. I have no idea why. The email came from a net.il address, so maybe this is the hip thing in Italy, I don't know.

So, as brief as it is, there's a lot of messages in this email. The first line is straightforward enough. Grazie infinite, caro.

In the second sentence, though, he's lost me. Does he want to be my slave, or my client? Or does he want to enroll me in an affiliate program for counterfeit Viagra, or does he want to be a male pro dom and come co-top with me? (The "duo" reference. )

Third sentence: What? The word contract - okay, I know what that means. Shows? Yeah, okay, but what's with this French in the middle? And cerebral orgasms? Sounds like another definition of a stroke to me.

With the last line - all right, we're back on familiar territory here. But wow, this letter reads like it was written by two different people. I wonder if Italian boy has a split personality - one who wants to bottom, and one who's a budding sexual entrepreneur.

EDIT: An alert reader has pointed out that the email actually came from Israel, not Italy, and remarked "... which also explains the right-bound formatting quite nicely." Duh, of course! Thanks for clueing me in!