It's been ages since my last update because I have been abroad for some time now. I was planning on taking my laptop with me and writing whenever possible, but decided to share my girlfriend's ailing Macbook instead. I rarely have access enough to do anything beyond essential email checks and am only posting this now while she sits applying bandages to her ravaged feet.
Since I wrote for Fest a couple of years ago, the magazine has begun to pay its contributors. I was too late to apply for a position last year, but am due to return to the fold in just over a week's time. I've never been paid to review anything before and it is very strange and exciting to be in this position.
Anyway, Fest recently asked me to produce a brief bio that could serve as part of an online reviewer's profile. Uncomfortable with writing about myself, I commissioned my friend and mentor CCL to come up with something. What I received was not only beautifully written, but really got to the heart of who Lewis Porteous is. It wasn't fit for submission and I had to tend to the task myself at the last minute, but I've come to regard CCL's work as the definitive record of my existence to date. What follows are the surly New Yorker's own words in We Have the Technology's first ever guest contribution!
Before abandoning amateur status to join the pro-leagues at ‘Fest’, Lewis Porteous was Edinburgh’s top unpaid reviewer. His fearless style – characterized by Gore Vidal as ‘undoubtedly what it is’ – has graced the pages of numerous publications, both in print and online.
Lewis’s favourite review of all time is Paul Morley’s cryptic, pseudo-modernist blow-job-in-print profile of electro-indie waif Patrick Wolf. Lewis carries a copy of Morley’s review with him everywhere he goes as a reminder of how not to write.
Lewis is the black one from ‘The Wire’
Lewis’ glossy lips pass over big red strawberries nearly every day. That gentle but firm fruity give on the teeth, it’ll slay you.
It dawned on him recently that his sexual awakening began not as he’d always maintained(and believed himself) with Katie Holmes’ portrayal of emoting virgin Joey Potter in ‘Dawson’s Creek’ but in fact with Holmes’s co-star Joshua Jackson’s performance as Charlie Conway in the Mighty Ducks trilogy. Lewis would have been about seven at the time, and uneasily conceptualized his confusing feelings as some sort of strong heterosexual admiration for the young Jackson, but those nuggety little seven-year-old erections can’t be denied, and anyway, it’s fine now, he gets that sexuality is an elastic, amorphous, what have you type-thing.
Lewis Porteous ate a big bun and now his belly is sore. Lewis intends you great harm.
Lewis is known for his unconventional negotiation techniques. In an opponent-disorientating tactic he calls ‘Needful disquiet’, he begins high-level board meetings by burying his face in the entrails of roadkill and slurping greedily. ‘I always get what I want’, he remarks, ‘& it has to be this way, that we might all prosper.’
Lewis is a proponent of Objectivism, and is perhaps best known for his affair with the senescent Ayn Rand.
Lewis wears lacey things. Lewis collects adorable little tchotchkes that he ships from home-to-home with him
Lewis has very itchy legs.
Lewis has enormous sweat-glistened thighs that shudder with every UH HUH sassily barked into the mic.
Lewis makes frequent reference to his own ‘ineluctable modality’. If Lewis were a woman or less conventionally gendered, he’sd wear cute/fun polka dot dresses.
Lewis wants you to blow him, because he earned it.
