I have written sex columns, relationship advice columns, humor columns, music and movie reviews, and literary essays for publication on and off the web. Here are some samples of my non-fiction work. If you are interested in buying content for your site or hiring me as a columnist, email me at lily@lilylit.com.

Sex

These Q&A columns originally appeared at Rouze.com, a now defunct sex site that got bought, then eaten and digested by Playboy.com. 

Dear Lily,

I recently divorced after twelve years of marriage. I’m ready to start meeting new women, but it’s been a long time since I tried to “pick up chicks” and I don’t want to do the club and bar scene. Where can I meet women?

Love, Fresh Meat

Dear Fresh,

Why doesn’t anyone returning to the dating pool ever want to do the club and bar scene? Is this the fault of Hollywood and all those pouting ingenues saying in movies how they just don’t want to do the club and bar scene? Listen, clubs were specifically designed for picking up chicks – they’re dark, drunken frenzies of sexual flaunting where men can stand moodily along railings and pick their prey from gyrating hordes of females on the dance floor. If you don’t use these venues for the purpose for which they were intended, people will start wearing cardigans to clubs and buying cappuccinos in bars. Wait, this already happens. Well, I guess you do have some other options.

First, get thee to the produce department of your local supermarket. Then, become confused. Stand in an aisle deliberating between two honeydew melons, or two types of lettuce. Keep deliberating until a female comes along, and then request her assistance. The magic of picking up girls in supermarkets is that you get to use pickup lines that most of us haven’t heard before. There are a million variations on the “I must be in heaven because you look like an angel” motif, but how many of us have been picked up with “Are these beans fresh?” Be warned, however, that it is still possible to pull a real floater, even in the uncharted territory of supermarket chitchat. Do NOT say, “Hey, nice melons!” or “Does this zucchini look familiar?” Stick with sincere questions that might actually sneak by a girl’s pickup radar without alerting her to the fact that she’s being hit on. All this of course leads up to “May I cook you dinner?” or “May I take you to my favorite restaurant?”.

This same technique works in computer stores, bookstores, and department stores – anywhere there’s a product to be discussed. Key fact: Girls love to shop, and they love to help you spend your money. Try the “I have to find a gift for my mother – do you have any suggestions?” technique. Then follow up with the “I’m so grateful – let me buy you a cup of coffee!” routine. Got tickets to a concert? Visit the “Rock & Pop” aisle at your favorite music store. Want a brainiac date for a cocktail party? Check out the “Philosophy” section at Borders. Keep in mind that club rules do not apply in other public places. If you choose not to avail yourself of nightclubs and all the freedom they afford, you will NOT be able to grab your girl’s ass mere moments after meeting, and you’re probably not going to get as good a preview of her tits. But, go your own way. If you must shun the meat market, good hunting in the deli!

Love, LILY

Dear Lily,

I love going down on my girlfiend and she loves it when I do.  The problem is she has never returned the favor. How do I tell her that I want her to give me head without sounding like a pig?

Mr. Piggy

Dear Mr. P.,

First you must say this mantra to yourself, seventeen times, in a loud confident voice: There is nothing wrong with me wanting oral sex! Oral sex is good and right and honorable! Oral sex is not an imposition! It pains me greatly to see how you have been trained to think that your desires are wrong and chauvinistic! There is no sexual activity that is inherently wrong, as long as all parties consent. Wanting oral sex does not make you a pig; it makes you a normal, normal man. I hereby absolve you of all guilty feelings you might have had implanted in you by some pious relative or some icky feminist girlfriend of yore.

Now that you’ve said your mantra and purged your guilt, approach your girlfriend with a healthy attitude of frank curiosity. You are not a dog crawling to its master looking for treats. You are just a guy who wants a little reciprocity. Don’t go overboard and konk her over the head with a monkey wrench, but do ask her sincerely and kindly why she has no interest in smoking your love pipe. It could be that she has never given head before, and feels inadequate and unprepared. If this is the case, you might have to wade through a little knee-jerk defensiveness to get to the solution. After all, she was probably programmed by the same feminist you were, and thinks you asking for head is tantamount to you asking her to make you a chicken potpie. Just be patient and work through it. Last I checked, asking for things was not a crime. As long as you don’t shriek “Bitch, slurp my wank!” from across the room, you won’t be a pig in my book.

Love, LILY

Music

God Lives Underwater: Live Concert Review
At the Metro in Chicago
February 17, 1998
With Low-Tek, Maintenance of Order, and Fluoroscein.

I put my hair in ponytails, even though I knew that was probably a mistake. My date said, “How does the immortal creator feel about a bunch of little fucking kids giving away his address?” We sat in the balcony, where the pierce freaks in black capes were lurking, fingering the rail road spikes in each others’ chins.

The local opener, Low-Tek, was a standard three-piece, a little too melodic to rock, but a little too rockin’ to host a sing along. The cruel, unforgiving gallery of little boys in the balcony (it was an all ages show) berated them while they were onstage, calling them “girls” and asking how they managed to score backstage passes. Well, the lead singer was wearing a little pink velvet shirt that reminded me of something I would have worn out to a club in 1993, so perhaps the little boy gallery was leveling just criticism. I enjoyed Low-Tek, but would have preferred the lead singer to have pushed the hair out of his face just once, only once, so that we could see if he was really the singer from the Black Crowes, or if he just prayed to be every night by the side of his bed.

Maintenance of Order wore BLACK VINYL and COP uniforms, which was apparently supposed to convince us that they were excruciatingly hard core, and very much bad-assed. Other efforts to support this desired effect were strobe lights, stage fog, and heavy distortion on the vocals, but unfortunately these only contributed to my irritation that yet another industrial band was trying to be Nine Inch Nails and failing miserably due to lack of stage presence. Putting a wire brush down your throat does not make you Trent Reznor. Some languid and self-conscious chicks were onstage dancing, with weird square butts, metal bras and panties, and some prop that looked like it was supposed to invoke S&M fantasies. May have been a whip. May have been a black kleenex all shredded and used. Maintenance of Order brought big shiny inflated metallic balls for the crowd to toss around. It’s regrettable that they don’t have any attached to their genital regions.  

Finally, the very seriously lethargic industrial band vacated the stage and Fluoroscein came on. May I say that the dorky lead singer of Fluoroscein, with his dumb shirt and his stumpy body, had more stage presence and musical inventiveness in his nose hair follicles than the preceding bands could have produced in a year full of stage effects and screaming. Fluoroscein rocked. They had a good sense of melody and counter melody, like very hard Cracker and good Toad the Wet Sprocket, but with more bottom end, more axed-up choppy chord changes. Even with an accountant-looking lead singer and absolutely minimal effects and glitz, they knocked the shit out of me. Plus, they actually checked the tuning on their guitars, which I took as a very good sign early on. In the bathroom, the toilet overflowed. “One of those naked chicks, probably,” said my date ambiguously. The room (now packed) geared itself up for the arrival of the headlining band.  One girl stepped on another girl’s too-big boy-pants and fell over.

Apparently, all you have to do to be the headliner is be bored and depressed to the point that the audience doubts you have a living pulse. The blonde, emaciated lead singer of God Lives Underwater played a completely irrelevant tambourine and sang listlessly and off-key while his band ground through song after song: slow grooves, slower grooves, and the slowest grooves physically possible. The lead singer apologized for his lack of voice, saying that he had the flu. You know, it’s not like we’re asking for volume, or for calisthenics, but a modicum of accuracy would be nice in finding the pitch. The saggy presentation lurched on through impossibly hard-to-follow lyrics and dry marching vibes. It’s sad to see someone concentrate so much (or appear to concentrate so much) and still miss the mark. What distracted the lead singer from hitting his notes? It wasn’t stage acrobatics – he hardly moved. It wasn’t the other members of the band – they didn’t move either. As he pulled up his pants slowly for the umpteenth time, I was struck with the desire to give the entire band a series of B-12 shots. The guitar player could be really awesome, if supported by any energy at all from the band. Unfortunately, God Lives Underwater slouches onstage with the weight of the world on its shoulders, and fails to carry off anything like an exciting live performance.

At least the singer from Maintenance of Order wore pigtails, and made me feel slightly more happenin’ with mine. The evening’s best moment was Fluoroscein’s entire set. That band is spectacular. However, God Lives Underwater was an enormous disappointment: flabby, boring, and insincere.

Henry Rollins: Think Tank
Originally published in Alternative Press

“Think Tank” is a double shot of Henry Rollins’ brand of spoken word. Instead of spewing poetry from between a black beret and a carefully tended goatee, Rollins delivers comic narratives off the cuff, and rants conversationally on pop topics. With one foot in stand-up comedy and one foot in the traditions of spoken word, he manages to evade the trite idiocy of the former and the uncomfortable sincerity of the latter, striking a tone that is abrasive but friendly, making the audience cozily complicit in his act. However, despite his spread-legged pose, Rollins isn’t pissing in the gene pool anymore. In fact, his performance is fairly tame.

The first CD, recorded live in Chicago, covers familiar territory on easy topics like irritating airports, silly homophobia, and stupid television. Picking off the sitting ducks of the mainstream media, to appreciative screams of the crowd, Rollins knocks classic targets like Michael Bolton and Baywatch with a pious claim that people aren’t really that stupid, and deserve better entertainment. How nice. Later on in the disk, as if to prove his finger is firmly on the zeitgeist, Rollins reports, “There’s nothing wrong with being gay.”

Rollins’ smartass piety is, however, at times honest and bright. The second CD, recorded live in Australia, is full of rock stardom narratives, from knocking himself out on stage in Brazil to prank faxing the throat doctor he shares with – you guessed it – Michael Bolton. These stories are funny and engaging, a self-deprecating glimpse into his psyche. He calls himself an “aging alternative icon,” and perhaps this primal scream is muted appropriately to correspond with fading tattoos and a bad throat.

Movies

Here's my review of Darren Aronofsky's first movie, Pi, and someone's bad idea, Dancer Texas Pop 81. These originally appeared at TNT Roughcut.

Pi

In this movie, a brilliant mathematician with a high glowing forehead hurtles through a grainy black and white city and a pounding techno soundtrack, trying to resolve the chaos of the universe, eliminate human error and frailty, and get rid of his headaches, all by finding a predictable pattern in the seemingly random numbers on a stock market ticker. The movie succeeds in positing nature and all natural systems as scarily vast and unknowable and mysterious, even if the math involved is not very rigorous and ultimately unsatisfying for the purists in the crowd. Real math aside, our hero Max’s obsession with orderly systems extends from the words of the Torah to the decimal places of Pi, and even to leaves blowing in the wind, allowing us to see, if only through his eyes, that the universe is driven by complex patterns just beyond the reach of our understanding. The only problem with the movie is there is no rest from the relentless “tortured genius” behavior. The camera loves his perplexed and aching brow, lingers on his long precious eyelashes, and captures every nuance of his sour, pious, prim, cringing demeanor. Comparing this movie to everyone’s favorite mathematical-genius-movie, Good Will Hunting, you can see the value of the scenes where Will was “out with the guys,” which contextualized all the tortured psychology in a real persona. Max, on the other hand, has no other side. Even his relationship with his mentor is strained by their mutual pursuit of Pi’s mysteries. It’s an intense, unforgiving ninety minutes of fear, frustration, and uncertainty, visually abrasive, emotionally raw.

Dancer Texas, Pop. 81:

An Infomercial from Small Towns and America Youth (STAAY)

"Dancer Texas Pop 81." is about four Smurfs who decide to leave Smurfette and the Smurf Village, and travel to the big scary city. Actually, it’s not really about Smurfs – that’s just the cast and the audience the screenwriter seemed to be visualizing. Actually, it’s about four boys who have made a “solemn vow” to leave their tiny hometown, and the movie begins two days before their scheduled departure. Of course, as we are told, a lot can happen in two days. As we are told, you live your whole life in a town and you think you know it, but you don’t know it until you are about to leave it. As we are told, some people belong in small towns, and some people belong in big towns. If you’re wondering whether Hollywood has any morals left, go and see this movie. It is one big moral after another, along with a magical scene featuring wild mustangs, scenery, and several wacky old men, all accompanied by a soundtrack that should be titled, “The Dear Baby Fawn Learns to Walk.” The movie has no sex appeal (despite many dusty dungarees), and no swearing (although I think I heard someone say “darn”), and as with all Smurf narratives there is a happy ending. I’ll leave you to guess how many (if any) of the four boys make it onto the bus, but be assured that everyone learns a great big fat lesson, including me. My lesson? Any day is a good day to leave Dancer, Texas (Pop. 81).

Contact: lily@lilylit.com