Year: 2008

The geekiest pornography store ever

As we move farther and farther into the internet age, the idea of a pornography store in general is beginning to sound just a bit anachronistic. Le Salon on Polk Street, though, was the pornography store to end all pornography stores. I’ve never seen anything comparable, before or since.

To start with, there were no booths. Le Salon was strictly a takeout operation. It was obvious that their mission was to concentrate on the actual videos rather than the, ummm, incidentals that come with the standard sodomite porn emporium. In other words, there was no shagging in the back room.

But man, did they concentrate on the video. This place was huge, they had everything, and it was all organized: by fetish, by studio, and even by director. They even had cross-reference cards. It really inspired the future librarian in me, and it also really allowed me to develop my collection of pirated porn on VHS.

Le Salon closed around 1997 or 1998 as I recall. Apparently, the owner of the building had a much purer vision of some proposed Lower Polk renaissance that didn’t include a big, geeky pornography store. I was reduced to using the rather lackluster outlets on Folsom Street near my apartment, and video smut was never quite the same for me again.

Videolog: Gone Daddy Gone


Violent Femmes
Gone Daddy Gone, 1983

You’ve never lived until you’ve heard this song performed in a small club across the street from a mid-size college in North Carolina, without the xylophone, because it was apparently lost in transit.

A few years later I saw a different band, the Flaming Lips, in Charlotte without their drummer. He, too, had apparently been lost in transit.

Public art

What is this obsession Charlotte has with vaguely ridiculous-looking disc-shaped public art projects? First, there was the giant sand dollar thing at Trade and Tryon, then the interlocking onion rings at Wendover and Randolph, and now this new (cough) installation, which can only be described as some sort of cubist primitive version of Stonehenge on South Boulevard: Charlotte’s own mysterious homage to the mythical power of the contact lens.

It’s really bad. There are like eight of these things spaced along two sides of the new light rail line in a particularly ugly stretch of South Boulevard. Suffice to say, they add nothing whatsoever to the aesthetics other than to offer passing commuters a little chuckle thinking of the swindler who got paid for the damned things.

I’d like to think these projects are maybe rooted in some sort of resentment of public art requirements, but I fear that’s not the case. Even more, I fear that someone actually took this merde seriously.

Advisee alert

Spotted this in an elevator on the way to class last night. Are professors actually advertising for advisees now? Or is it just that this Dr. Westervelt believes she’s so bloody fabulous that there will be that much competition for her services? It just struck me as rather odd.

Of course, the inappropriate “decorative quotation marks” are another story entirely.