Last week, I shared a few suggestions for making a good self-vid. None of it was rocket science — just a bunch of simple, common-sense tips I’ve picked up over a lifetime of avid viewership. What can I say? I take notes.

I was going to post the rest of my suggestions the following day, but then Liz Taylor died, and I wrote about it, which made all the sex talk slightly uncomfortable and awkward — even though, to the best of my knowledge, Liz was not an avid reader of this site, nor did she ever make a sex tape. More’s the pity.

But whatever. That’s behind us now, so for those of you still bound and determined to share your smutty side with complete strangers, here are the rest of my ideas — including my #1 super-serious most important rule of all time. Don’t say I never gave you anything.

P.S. Remember: Xtube embeds are iffy. If something’s not loading, click it to watch it in its original milieu.

P.P.S. Yes, mom, you can stop reading now.

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I feel like all I’ve done the past 48 hours is write about Elizabeth Taylor — partially because it’s true — but I need to write just a little more.

You see, Liz was fundamental to my college education — the social part of it, anyway. It was in college that I learned how to communicate with people, how to carry on a real conversation, how to make friends and be a friend in return. I didn’t get any of that high school, with its cliques and peer pressure and the nonstop bible verses being thrown my way and the incessant fear of being outed as a boy-kisser.

In college, I began as an unknown. Only a couple of my high school buddies went to Millsaps — which was, and is, a college for nerds — so I reinvented myself. And when I recast myself as the person I wanted to be, I discovered who I really was. (Not surprising, really.) Once I had that part cleared up, I could be honest and open around friends — real friends who liked me for the real me.

One of my first real friends, Estus, was a freak for Liz Taylor movies. Most nights of the week, we’d crack open a case of beer and fire up the bong (it may have been nerdy, but Millsaps was still college) and watch whatever he had on hand. And more often than not, what he had on hand was a film called The Driver’s Seat.

The Driver’s Seat is a novel — a novella, really — by Muriel Spark. It’s the story of a spinster from northern Europe who goes to Italy for…well, for various reasons.

The novel isn’t that good. Spark has an unusual writing style that flattens out time, simultaneously describing events of the past, present, and future. Unfortunately, for a suspense story like The Driver’s Seat, Spark’s approach spoils the ending pretty quickly.

In movie form, however, it’s very, very different. Even though director Giuseppe Patroni Griffi tried to incorporate Spark’s time-flattening storytelling technique, The Driver’s Seat (or Identikit, as it was known most places) remained a fairly suspenseful film. And in typical early-70s style, it was quirky to the point of being nonsensical, but it was a feast for the eyes. Given my mental condition during those get-togethers, visuals were all I really cared about. I couldn’t get enough of it — or her.

Someone’s been kind enough to post the entire film to YouTube, but sadly, it’s not embeddable. Here’s a great clip from the middle of it. The scenes with Liz and Mona Washbourne — whom she befriends on her trip — take place in the past; the others take place in the present. I’ll let you guess which scene is my favorite.

Self-pics are a bitch.

To create the requisite combo of cool + interesting + saucy, you have to hold the camera at arm’s length and hope you frame the shot just right. More often than not, you crop off an eye, or you notice something hideous in the background that you hadn’t seen before, all because your phone doesn’t have a front-facing camera, thankyouverymuch, Steve Jobs.

Of course, you could take a shot in the mirror, but that feels like cheating to me. (NB: why the hell do folks who take mirror pics always stare at their viewfinders? Look up, people: we can see you.)

All told, the ratio of bad self-pics to good is about 10:1. If we agree that duckface is a bad thing, it’s more like 50:1.

Last year, the New York Times ran a semi-helpful feature on how to take a flattering self-pic. Given my work on Lurid Digs [thoroughly NSFW], my friend Tyler suggested that I write a follow-up piece on self-vids. You know, the sexy kind. And I thought, “What makes you think I’d know anything about dirty movies?” And then I thought, “Okay, fine.”

Before we get started, however, I should mention a couple of things. First, I freely admit that smutty is in the eye of the beholder, and I know that everyone has his or her own turn-ons, but there are a few tried-and-true rules that apply across the board, no matter what your kink may be. (Unless your kink is terrible videography, in which case, you’re on your own.)

Also, I should point out — though it’ll be obvious very soon — that all of the following clips are of guys because that’s what I tend to watch, but again, the rules are more or less the rules, no matter what Skittle you diddle. And last but not least: Xtube embeds are notoriously janky; if something below doesn’t load, just click the video to watch it on Xtube proper.

And so, for what it’s worth, my short list of self-vid DOs, with a few DON’Ts thrown in for good measure — all after the jump.

P.S. Mom, if you’re reading this, maybe you should stop here.

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Stuart Sandford, Cumface #6 (stuartsandford.co.uk)

Just so you know: love is a terrible thing.

It’s a distraction, like pornography.

It’s all-consuming, also like pornography.

In fact, love is a lot like pornography, except that love makes you worry, and porn doesn’t, unless you’re the sort of person who worries that you’re eating up too much space on your hard drive with videos organized into handy folders labeled with acronyms like ATM and ATOGM and MMMMFFT, in which case, love is totally, 100% EXACTLY like pornography.

Maybe the only way that love is NOT like pornography is in its gift of empathy.* Love has the unfortunate side-effect of making you identify with complete strangers, including fictional characters. Inside your love-addled brain, love reshapes the movies that you see, the TV shows, the commercials, casting you and your paramour in the roles of hero and victim. Love makes every zombie film a story of you and your honey, cheating death, every sweet undead goodbye a stab in your heart.

Love is even worse when it comes to newscasts of real-world tragedy. They’re almost unwatchable. I usually opt for Family Guy reruns, which don’t have the same effect at all, thankfully.

And yet: love is something that most people aspire to, while only a sliver of the population aspires to porn stardom. Seems like a conundrum to me. Perhaps more people would find love if they opted for careers in the adult entertainment industry. I should talk about that more next week….

* Actually, I once wrote a seminar paper arguing that pornography depends on empathy: it assumes that the viewer will identify with someone in the scene. But then I got distracted (not with love, but with hatred for my advisor) and moved on to other things, so I think I’ll drop the argument.

I think something’s wrong.

By now, I should be covered in glittery residue, reeking of booze and sweat. I should have made a fool of myself at least once and, ideally, made a fool of someone else, too. At the very least, I should’ve paid homage to the corner of Bourbon and Dumaine, sneered at drunk sorority girls on their way to karaoke bars, pondered a meal at Clover Grill and quickly decided against it.

But none of that. I’ve seen no parades, nothing. I did go to the Society of Ste. Anne ball, which is always amusing. But even there, I spent most of my time in corners, talking to friends I haven’t seen in a while.

I outgrew xmas ages ago: it became an ordeal, a gauntlet of social obligations. Carnival doesn’t feel that way — it’s a vacation with pals, really — but something is different. Maybe it’s the length of this year’s season — one of the longest possible. Maybe I’m distracted with work. Maybe I’m older and more worried and less carefree. Or maybe I’m annoyed by the huge crowds, especially the huge crowds in our neighborhood.

Whatever the reason, I’m feeling grouchy this year. The suddenly cold weather isn’t helping. Hopefully I’ll perk up by the time guests arrive for this morning’s open house. And if not, well, at least there’s king cake and the knowledge that it’ll all be over at midnight.

Gallup released some interesting poll numbers last week — state-by-state figures on President Obama’s approval rating, which averaged around 46.9% in 2010.

It wasn’t the ratings themselves that I found surprising; it was the ups and downs they’ve seen over the past two years.

The map at left shows where Obama has gained and lost on the approval front. Shades of red indicate that he’s slipped more than six percentage points since being elected in 2008. Shades of blue indicate a loss of less than six points. And in the eight darkest-blue states — Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas — Obama has actually gained in popularity.

Which is weird and not-so-weird, all at the same time.

You could argue, of course, that Obama lost the most ground in states where he received the most initial support. After all, he’s had to compromise on a lot of issues, which has made many of his ardent fans angry. Conversely, in states like Mississippi, where Obama’s score was already modestly low, there was almost nowhere for him to go but up.

But personally, I like to take a more optimistic view. Specifically, I like to think that my fellow Southerners are finally beginning to understand how fundamentally screwed-up certain elements within the Republican party are. Sure, there are plenty of sensible Republicans roaming the Capitol, but they’re not the ones who get airtime. That’s given to the extremists, many of whom still sound like they’re fighting to keep America lodged in the 1950s.

I know the Dems are also flawed, and I know there are plenty of extremists on the left who are just as shrill and bothersome as Mike Huckabee and Michele Bachmann. But frankly, I’d rather put my faith in people looking forward than people trying to hang on to an America that hasn’t existed since the Joseph McCarthy was alive — if it ever did. Maybe sensible Mississippians are finally catching on, too.