Angie Jackson was the first to do what we all knew was inevitable in the age of social media and exhibitionism: she tweeted her abortion live on Twitter.  From the Daily News:

In an attempt to “demystify” abortion, the 27-year-old shared her experience on Twitter, YouTube and her personal blog.

“I’m doing this so other women know, ‘Hey, it’s not nearly as terrifying as I had myself worked up thinking it was.’ It’s just not that bad,” Jackson said on her YouTube video.

According to Jackson, she has received a negative response.  From an interview with the woefully misnamed website (for this story) Frisky:

A lot of them are sort of these throwaway statements in the comments of conservative blog and things like that. “Someone should put a bullet in her,” or “If the whore can’t keep her legs closed …” People have threatened to call Child Protective Services and take [my son] away from me because [of the abortion]. They’re either calling me a killer or calling me a monster, which is their right, but … I think we need to say quality of life matters. I don’t think an embryo gets to trump the life of my live son. I see this as risking my life.

Tonight I was watching the premiere of The Cleveland Show, the new Family Guy spin-off, and there was a joke in there about Gene Hackman being gay (because gays are smart and his gay smartness helped him memorize so many lines – lol).

I didn’t know much about Gene Hackman’s personal life, so I wondered if there was some Gerbil-esque rumors floating around.  There aren’t.  It was just a joke.  Hackman’s had fruitful marriages, according to Wikipedia:

Hackman’s first wife was Faye Maltese. They had three children, Christopher Allen, Elizabeth Jean, and Leslie Anne, but the couple divorced in 1986 after 30 years of marriage. In 1991, Hackman married Betsy Arakawa. They live in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Betsy is co-owner of an upscale retail home-furnishing store in Santa Fe, called Pandora’s, Inc.

It’s funny how rumors start; I’m not often at the forefront of them.  This reference made just a few nights ago on a television show within a day had people demanding a Yahoo answer on Hackman’s sexuality; this blogger also was receiving these hits for a random post.   His only ‘gay moment’ was after a fender-bender:

The other driver got out of his car and into Hackman’s face. They exchanged heated words until the other driver used an anti-gay epithet. That’s when the 71-year-old actor slugged him, getting in a half-dozen blows before the Volvo passenger kneed him in the groin, dropping Hackman to the ground.

Gene Hackman: not gay.

MacFarlane’s humor is particularly biting satire on American society, and his insertion of this joke on Cleveland had to be designed to show how quickly, and easily, a rumor can spread about anyone, even butch, married Gene Hackman.  It could also be a mirthful poke at Hackman for reacting so violently when he was ostensibly called a fag.

If you, like me, searched for this information, consider yourself played.

Last week I posted a list of the most-pirated movies on the Internet tallied by TorrentFreak that revealed the sappy Australia starring Hugh Jackman made it in to the top 10.   Surprisingly, this week TorrentFreak reported that it moved up one notch to No. 6.   Then out of nowhere, Quantum of Solace rocketed to No. 2.

For the week of 3/15, here are the most-downloaded movies (and their positions last week):

1. Twilight (1)
2. Quantum of Solace (new)
3. Bolt (5)
4. Punisher: War Zone (new)
5. Role Models (2)
6. Australia (7)
7. Far Cry (new)
8. Transporter 3 (8)
9. Valkyrie (4)
10. The Day the Earth Stood Still (10)

Downloading movies illegally is wrong, but a report last week by the RAND Corporation stating that organized crime and terrorist groups have moved into the pirated movie racket seems improbable:

“Given the enormous profit margins, it’s no surprise that organized crime has moved into film piracy,” said Greg Treverton, the report’s lead author and director of RAND’s Center for Global Risk and Security. “The profits are high, and penalties for being caught are relatively low.”

Enormous profit margins?  Most pirated movies are downloaded for free over the Internet, and living in New York City I can tell you that the street vendors of illegal films have all but disappeared from the landscape.  I never see a person selling illegally-copied movies anymore.  It’s difficult to figure out how crime rackets are profitting so handsomely off of something that most people do from their computer for free.

But last August the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft went so far as to say that pirated movies are more lucrative than heroin:

While heroin had a mark-up of 360 per cent from Iran to the streets of western cities, pirated DVDs had profit margins of 1000 per cent, minimal start-up costs and less risk.

That said, webites like MegaVideo, which is one of the most-visited websites in the world and also one of the top sources for pirated movies, last year switched from an open-access business model to a subscriber-based model.  It is one of the prime sources for pirated movies.  It’s difficult to see how they will survive, given that not only does it make them more attractive to go after legally, but the change also angered many of its users.

According to TorrentFreak, the following list of movies were the most downloaded movies in the last week using BitTorrent, which is one of the most common protocols for sharing large files, and by some estimates it accounts for about 35% of all traffic on the entire Internet.  It is, essentially, the way people download pirated movies.

The most illegally downloaded movies this week are:

1. Twilight
2. Role Models
3. Slumdog Millionaire
4. Valkyrie
5. Bolt
6. Gran Torino
7. Australia
8. Transporter 3
9. The Reader
10. The Day the Earth Stood Still

Baz Luhrman’s Australia received particularly mixed criticism, with Salon.com’s Stephanie Zachrek writing that, “Luhrmann’s attempt to pull off a wartime weeper… is so aggressively sentimental that it begins to feel more like punishment than pleasure.”

For a long time now I have received a stream of e-mails from people based upon my photography on Wikipedia.  Sometimes they mistakenly think I am the subject of one of my body illustrations (they are of a model friend); other times it is because they want me to contact a celebrity I have photographed.

These e-mails sometimes creep me out.  Sometimes they are windows into naive hopes that are built out of media illusions.  Take this one I received because I photographed “Reverend Run” of Run DMC, Joseph Simmons, at the Brooklyn Book Festival (right):

Hi my name is [REDACTED],
I have read where you have done a piece on Joseph Simmons of runs house. I am having such a hard time with getting my daughter who is 15 years old heard, and when I say heard I mean:Shes a singer, very blessed by God above. I live in Alabama and have no means of finding her someone to work with her. Everywhere I go people want me to pay them to work with her. I was told that managers work with her and get her ready and when things start happening for her they get paid as well. My financial status is not that good its only enough for us to get by. I no she has what it takes if I can only get someone to give her a real chance, not someone who will rip her off. The reason I picked Mr. Simmons is because he say he’s a Godly man, and I feel he wouldn’t take advantage of her. I really need your help, I’m tired of dead ends. I have been doing this for years and haven’t made it to far. No resources, no help, um growing tired, but this is my child and I’m trying so hard, but all I see i
s the devil trying to stop her from using this gift God has blessed her with. [REDACTED] is her name, and has never had singing lessons. I don’t want the streets to get her, that’s why I’m coming to you to see if you can use your resource to help me. This is no game, pray if you have to on this, follow your heart, just no that your decission to help her or not lay in your hands, until I hear from you God bless.

E-mails like this creep me out for a few reasons.

First, it shows the unrealistic notions people have about how the media works.  I have been asked to give Drew Barrymore messages like, “your new body looks really good” and to contact people to pass along screenplays and manuscripts.  Simply because I have photographed Martin Scorsese or Sam Raimi.  I have been told unsubstantiated gossip about people; read diatribes against their work; and been asked to help people out.  Photographers rarely form relationships with their subjects.  When I am in a private room with people like Madonna and Mariah Carey, nothing but the most canned professional chatter transpires.   No lasting relationships are formed.

Second, it shows the unrealistic expectations people have in what it takes to “make it.”  It does not matter how talented this 15 year old girl is, Joseph Simmons is never going to fly down to Alabama and make this underage kid a star.  Besides her age, he has so many talented people banging on his (and his brother Russell Simmons’s) door.

Lastly, I can’t imagine ever approaching someone I know based upon an e-mail like this.  Nobody hands you success and opportunity.  You have to go out there and create it for yourself.  It has to be chased.  It does not come to you, no matter how good you are.

It wasn’t a new question.  It was asked on the “Proust questionnaire” and in Vanity Fair‘s on-going appropriation of it.  Since humankind could think and observe it has contemplated its mortality (well, all of us except Senator Sam Brownback).  Socrates said to fear death is hubris, because to say you fear it means you know what death is, and you do not.

I often asked about death in my interviews.  When I was thirteen I found a suicide in the woods.  It was a boy my age who shot himself in the had on New Year’s day.  The movie Night of the Living Dead terrified me beyond belief as a kid, and it still effects me.  I have experienced five moments in my life where I realized that at that very moment, I could die.  Several weeks ago when I suddenly collapsed unconscious on the street I garnered a sense of what it must be like to just drop dead.  I live in a city of more than 8,000,000 people; I wonder why I don’t see more people drop dead.

Below are some of the conversations I had about death and dying in my interviews.

Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas and then-Presidential candidate
If you could choose your manner of death, how would you die?

SB: I hadn’t thought much about that….

It’s a Marcel Proust question.

SB:  Gosh, I don’t know. I more just–I want to be prepared to die, that I would pray at that point in time that I’m ready to meet my Maker, that I have a clean soul, that I’ve done what the Lord would have required of me and have lived as loving and caring a life as possible.

But you’ve never thought about how–if you could choose how you’d prefer to die?

SB: No, that’s–

It seems like such a basic human thing to contemplate, one’s mortality. I mean, I believe you, but–

SB: I’ve contemplated my mortality a lot. Because I had melanoma eleven years ago, and I thought a long time about my mortality. But what it did to me, it didn’t make me think about how I wanted to die; it made me think about how I was living. And I just wasn’t happy with how I was living.

Antje Duvekot, Singer-songwriter
If you could choose how you die, how would you choose?

AD: Not freezing to death, and not in an airplane, because I’m afraid of flying. Painlessly, like most people. In my sleep when I’m so old and senile I don’t know what hit me. I’d like to get real old.

Vivien Goldman, author, NYU professor, historian
Have you ever been in a situation where you feared for your life, where you thought, this may be the way I go?

VG: There was a lot of violence in the punk times and I got beaten up in street brawls. I particularly remember once in Nigeria… I was there to make a documentary for Channel 4 about Fela Kuti. He was in jail at that time and he wanted to draw attention to his plight to showcase what was going on in Nigeria. It was hard to get through customs because my guides weren’t there to meet me. I found them hiding in the carpark because the police were after them. We went to Fela’s house where I was going to stay; we went to the shrine and it was amazing. The whole house was covered in people sleeping. I was woken up by this little girl very early in the morning, only about two hours later. She was tapping me on the shoulder and when I looked around there was nobody there, whereas it had been covered in people. She said, “Come! Come! The army is here!” I went outside and there was the army arresting everyone. People were lined up against the wall. Pascal Imbert, a French guy who was managing Fela, was already on the truck and they were about to take him away. There were all these really serious, heavy Nigerian soldiers with machine guns around. Not friendly, more like stone-faced Belsen guards. It was like that Bob Marley song Ambush in the Night: there were four guns aiming at me. They all turned their guns on me and said, “What should we do with her?” From the truck Pascal shouts out, “Leave her alone! She’s my wife! She’s just arrived from Paris! She doesn’t know anything!” The combination of the words “She’s my wife, she doesn’t’ know anything” were enough. Of course, I had neither arrived from Paris nor was his wife. But they just left me alone; they thought I was just some stupid woman. That time sexism worked in my favor. [Laughs] She doesn’t know anything! They were about to take Pascal away and I rushed up to the head guy very bravely—Pascal always gives me props for this—and I said, “Where are you taking my husband?!” They were actually taking him to a secret jail.

Frank Messina, Poet
How would you choose your death?

FM: Either in battle or laying in bed with family around me.

Have you ever had a moment where you saw your death?

FM: Yes, a couple of times. Once I was on one of those small planes flying to Pittsburgh last year to see the Mets, actually one of those 25-seat airplanes flying out of Newark in a lightning storm. We had ascended over Newark and the plane was struck by lightning. There was no panic on the plane at all, but something, we knew, was terribly wrong. I saw a flash of light when it hit the plane and a fellow across the aisle said, “Did you just see that?” and I said that I thought we were struck by lightning. He said it felt like something got ripped off the plane. There was so much turbulence. The stewardess came out with one of the co-pilots, who announced we were struck by lightning, but that we were going to continue the flight. There was a moment there, I think a good 30 seconds, where I was certain the plane was going to break apart.

Did you have any realizations?

FM: I thought, this is it. This is it. There was acceptance. When my father was diagnosed with cancer in June of 2005 and I got to see a man who accepted his fate. He died two months later. He was like the Captain of the Titanic. My mother was also calm. I was the one freaking out inside. I saw someone who had acknowledged his own demise, accepted it, and died at home. He was a tough old guy. It takes a lot to accept that, it takes a very strong person. In this culture we value life very much, and some people look at death as a failure, but it’s going to happen to all of us. My theory is to help yourself, and help others in life.

Michael Musto, Gossip columnist, author
How would you choose your own death?

MM: I probably would like to die while RSVPing to a party. And then I just want to be put into a Hefty bag and leaned against a garbage pail. I don’t want a lot of fuss because I’m not going to be here to enjoy it.

Alex Nechochea, Musician, Bang Camaro
If you could choose your own death, how would you die?

AN: [Laughs] I would want to steal what I heard a mutual friend of ours said. He said when he died–it’s not how he died, but this is what I heard–he said when he’s dead, he wants his corpse to be dressed up like Superman and thrown out of an airplane. I thought that would be fitting. But I’m not ready to think about death, not just yet.

Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo of The Raveonettes, Musicians, singer-songwriters
If you could choose your own death, how would you die?

Sune: Oh, man.
Sharin: I would just like to go to sleep one night and not wake up. I’m definitely scared of pain and diseases; I wouldn’t want to wither.
Sune: I’ll go with Sharin.

You wouldn’t want to experience it?

Sharin: No way.
Sune: No.

What is fearful about it?

Sune: It’s because if you are a creative person it’s the fear you can never be creative again. It’s a terrifying feeling. I don’t like it all. I think about it sometimes, where I think about, “One day you are going to die, you are never going to be here again, you’re never going to do this…” and a whole weird feeling comes down through the body. It’s the only experience you can get when you think about death. It’s a crazy feeling, but obviously something draws me to it sometimes to experience to really get into my mind frame and think, “I’m really going to die, I’m never going to be here, I’m never going to get up again, I’m really going to die!” It’s scary.

Especially at a young age, but if you are creative and have an imagination, it makes it that much scarier.

Sune: But I had a near-death experience when I was in Hawaii. I almost drowned, and I came to a point where I accepted my own death. So, in a way now, when I think about death, that comforts me a little bit, even though it was such a scary experience at the time, it comforts me a little bit that you can actually accept your own death and actually feel comfortable about it. Because I wasn’t frightened at the time. I was basically just comfortable that this it, you know, that this is the end. And I was very relaxed, actually. So I guess that’s pretty cool.
Sharin: Were you? I would probably be…
Sune: No, at that point my body just gave out, I was completely relaxed and I was just like…that’s it.

Sharin, did you ever have a moment where you confronted your own death?

Sharin: When I was nine years old I was definitely close, but I wasn’t aware of how dangerous it was. When I think of it now I’m like, “Wow! That could have been it.”

What was it?

Sharin: I was living in the countryside and there was a well with urine from the cows, and it was open, and I fell into it. My neighbor caught my hand, so I was hanging in the well with my feet in the urine. And then afterwards, my parents were freaked out. It was really lucky that my neighbor was right there and he caught me, because I would have died immediately. You fall into that urine in a well, that’s it! [Laughs]
Sune: [Laughs] That’s it!

[Laughs] That would have made a great end to the interview!

John Reed, Novelist
How would you choose to die?

JR: How would I choose to die? I don’t know. Most men stop being afraid of dying. Then, when they have kids, suddenly they’re afraid of it again. But not for themselves, for their kids. So I don’t really care, just as long as my kids are provided for.

You think that most men, pre-parenthood, lose their sense of mortality and their fear of it?

JR: I think you just get tired of being afraid of it.

Were you ever afraid of it?

JR: Yeah, I was afraid of it in my early twenties; and as a kid, I just remember being really, really afraid of dying, and it being incomprehensible and depressing.

Did that affect your behavior?

JR: Well, my daughter, too. We had a lizard die, and that was a big deal. She was asking these questions, “Is it gonna be another lizard?” You know, she has all of these–

“Where does it go?”

JR: Yeah, she has a lot of really valid questions. I don’t know; I also don’t feel that we understand everything. For all the people who praise Shakespeare, Shakespeare is still really quite extraordinary. The sense that I have of Shakespeare is he does understand that on some level, we as human beings, our bodies, are like the top of an iceberg that you can see. Then there’s all this other stuff under the water that you can’t see. That’s my feeling about it. I’m not that afraid of it anymore because I feel like there’s all this other stuff under the water. But it does worry me–

An afterlife?

JR: I don’t know if it’s in those terms, exactly, but there are a lot of things we don’t understand. We’re all part of the same thing. For various Gnostic reasons, saying that there’s this thing that existed before all of us, that we’re all part of it, and that each of us is made up of a piece of this thing–it’s appealing to me.

Al Sharpton, Civil rights leader
If you could choose how you die, how would it be?

AS: I would probably choose doing something active. I would either be leading a march or preaching a sermon. I don’t want to die old and incapacitated. I’d rather die in the firing line.

Nadine Strossen, President of the ACLU
Should suicide be legal?

NS: Absolutely. The idea of government making determinations about how you end your life, forcing you, which could be considered cruel and unusual punishment in certain circumstances, and Justice Stevens in a very interesting opinion in a right-to-die raised the analogy. But you said before you turned on the tape that you typically ask people how they would want to die, which is very interesting. I mean, of the zillions of questions I have been asked, nobody has ever asked me that! It’s very rare I am asked a question that I have never been asked before.

So how would you like to die?

NS: Well, the first thing that occurred to me was: I want to have the choice. That was the very first thing that occurred to me, because I know how through personal experiences, through vicarious experiences, through reading the complaints in our law suits where we have challenged the absolute restrictions on compassion and dying, people are essentially tortured. And I don’t want that to happen. And I don’t want my loved ones tortured by watching that happen.

You wouldn’t want a Terri Schiavo situation?

NS: That was an ACLU case; we represented her husband there. It has to be consenting, but there are measures we can take, and precautions we can take, so there it should be regulated. I say the same thing about drugs. You wouldn’t want to have regulation the way we do for food and alcohol, but absolute prohibition is completely inhumane and counter to the most fundamental autonomy of who you are.

So you have the choice, what is your choice?

NS: My choice would be to take a sleeping pill, I guess, or maybe morphine would have the same effect, to peacefully pass from this Earth when I have made a decision that I can no longer live in this state of comfort and dignity that makes life meaningful to me.

Gay Talese, Writer and journalist
How many times have you seen your own death?

GT: Well, sadly, my best friend was killed this year. David Halberstam. We were brothers. I was his first friend when he came to New York to join The New York Times. He lived in this house when he first came. He lived upstairs. When he got married to his present widow, who I was with last night, I was the best man. That was the late 1970′s. And the last year we traveled together as a foursome, his wife and mine. Then he gets killed. Jean calls me up, “Some student in San Francisco…he got killed just like that!” So that’s a death! Now that is horrible, but that’s not so bad. I wouldn’t mind dying like that. The way I would not want to die…every time I go flying I see the porters by the plane waiting for some old crippled person to get off the plane and then they roll them through the airport. I don’t want to go like that. I’d rather go like Halberstam.

You wouldn’t want to be a Terri Schiavo.

GT: I don’t even want to be a cripple who gets pushed across the airport! Forget brain damage. I’m just talking about infirm, getting along and can’t walk.

John Vanderslice, musician, singer-songwriter
Do you believe the only philosophical question is whether to commit suicide?

JV: Absolutely. I think the rest is internal chatter and if I logged and tried to counter the internal chatter I have inside my own brain there is no way I could match that.

Billy West, voice actor (Ren & Stimpy; Futurama)
Were you at a point where you didn’t necessarily want to die, but you just didn’t care if you lived?

BW: That’s pretty much it, yeah. You put your finger on it. There is a point that you can reach in your life where you don’t want to live but you haven’t made the decision to die.

Whatever happens happens.

BW: Yeah. You let the wind blow you around.

Edmund White, Writer and Princeton University professor
How would you like to die if you could choose your own death?

EW: A heart attack in my sleep. That’s the most beautiful death. You’re not conscious of it, the pain, and you’re gone in a second. It’s no fuss for anybody else, either.

What about dying consciously makes you uncomfortable?

EW: Nothing, except that usually if you’re conscious you have a long, lingering disease.

You could be hit by a train.

EW: That’s fine, but I that would be more painful than dying of a heart attack. Maybe not, that might be good. A lot of times when I’m in a storm in a plane, I think I wouldn’t mind if it goes down.