On July 12, adult entertainer
Stormy Daniels was arrested at
the strip club Sirens in Colum-
bus, Ohio, for violating the
state’s “Community Defense
Act.” A police report said Dan-
iels put “both hands on [an
undercover] officers buttocks”
and “then put her breast in offi-
cers face.” I’d seen Daniels do
the same while she performed
at the Cloakroom club in Wash-
ington, D.C., two nights earlier.
No one seemed to mind.
Daniels was in the midst
of a national “ Make America
Horny Again” tour that capi-
talized on her legal troubles
involving President Donald
Trump. She says the then-
businessman pursued and
slept with her in 20 0 6, then
paid her to keep quiet about it
10 years later. Still, her perfor-
mance in D.C. was, blessedly,
not direc tly political. Before
taking the stage, she worked
the room with verbal charm
and explicitly welcomed
some patrons’ heads into her
bosom. The show began with
her sashaying out in a Marilyn
Monroe–inspired pink get-up
to “Hey, Big Spender.” The set
followed with “Diamonds Are
a Girl ’s Best Friend ” and was
overall more vintage vamp
than vulgar.
But in Ohio, nude or semi-
nude workers at sexually ori-
ented businesses by law cannot
touch customers or themselves
on the butt, breast, or naughty
bits at all. Daniels’ arrest “was a
setup & politically motivated,”
her lawyer, Michael Avenatti,
tweeted afterward. Columbus
police called the bust “part of
a long-term investigation into
allegations of human traffick-
ing” and “other vice-related
violations”—one of the more
absurd extensions of oft-
abused “human trafficking”
laws. The charges, however,
were dropped quickly against
Daniels and two other women
arrested the same night.“Be suspicious of simple
answers,” warns Frank Turner.
“ That shit ’s for fascist s and
maybe teenagers.”
B e More Kind, the latest
studio album from Turner, the
prolific B ritish post-punk /
folk singer who occasionally
let s his self-professed classi-
cal liberal views slip into his
songwriting, is an intensely
political record suff used with
a sophisticated understanding
of the current moment on both
sides of the Atlantic.
As in his excellent previous
work, Turner’s witty songwrit-
ing is his best trait. He’s wink-
ing even while being pissed
off at everything around him
on “1933,” the album’s best
track. On “Make America Great
Again” (yes, really), he gives
bits of advice from an “igno-
rant Englishman” who wishes
America’s president and his
role in the world were “a bit
less significant.”
But Turner isn’t interested in
lecturing so much as trying to
actually understand the current
moment. The answer, he sug-
gests, is to tune out the chaos.
If the world is losing its collec-
tive mind around you, control
what you can. Be civil and kind,
as the title track suggests, and
use common sense.
Turner sings of walls being
raised, both on international
borders and “in our heads,
between the things that can
and can’t be said.” Division
and discord permeate the
album, but there’s also
a sense of hope in little
things that makes it an
apt tonic for the present
moment.In 2009, Amanda Stott-Smith
dropped her children off a
bridge in Portland, Oregon.
Her 7-year-old daughter lived,
screaming until she was fished
out of the freezing river by a
good Samaritan. Her 4-year-
old son drowned. Writer (and
occasional Reason contribu-
tor) Nancy Rommelmann read
about the story the next morn-
ing over a cup of coffee, then
spent the next seven years
chasing down every detail. The
result is To the Bridge: A True
Story of Motherhood and Mur-
der, a reported work of non-
fiction that is both as beautiful
and as true as possible, given
the circumstances.
As a writer, Rommelmann’s
defining attribute is an appar-
ent willingness to gaze long
and hard at the very things
most people would rather look
away from. Her previous book,
a novel called Bad Mother, fol-
lows a cluster of street kids in
L.A. as they make catastrophi-
cally bad choices. In both
works, the storytelling is equal
parts horrifying and lyrical.TELEVISION
POSESCOT T SHACK FO RDMUSIC
BE MORE KINDERIC BOEHMPERFORMANCE
STORMY DANIELSELIZ AB E TH N O L AN B ROWNBOOKTO THE BRIDGE
KATHERINE MANGU-WARDSet amid the New York Drag
Ball culture of the late 1980s,
Pose, from FX, provides histori-
cal perspective to our current
cultural interest in the lives of
people who don’t conform to
typical gender norms.
Television producer Ryan
Murphy populated the show
with transgender performers—
both in front of the camera and
behind the scenes as writers.
The first eight-episode season
tells a fictionalized story of
the foundation of a “house”
of young transgender women
and gay men attempting to
compete and win balls, a scene
popularized by the 1991 docu-
mentary Paris Is Burning.
The show is a family drama,
albeit one where the “fam-
ily” is a group of people who
choose to come together and
help each other survive New
York City during the AIDS
crisis. The gay men struggle
with attraction and affection
at a time when sex had poten-
tially deadly consequences.
The transgender women dealwith heterosexual men who
are attracted to and eroticize
them but cannot seem to treat
them like real people. It sounds
like a harsh life, but Pose also
manages to winningly portray
the joy its characters find in
performance.Photo: Stormy Daniels; ToCover: To the Bridge; Amazon Publishingglenn/Wikimedia (^) REASON 69