Anthony Pignataro
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apignataro.bsky.social
Anthony Pignataro
@apignataro.bsky.social
400 followers 300 following 540 posts
Current journalist at the co-op @lbwatchdog.bsky.social, former MauiTime editor. My new novel The B Girls and new memoir Remembering Lahaina are now available. He/him.
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apignataro.bsky.social
The whole chapter on Chanel is incredible
Chanel was happy to exploit others to maintain her own wealth, eager to be seen as enterprising, glamorous, worldly, and in charge. She framed her products as worthy of whatever violence and danger it cost to produce such beauty. She was raised in a community of hatred, never sought out different frameworks, and was duly rewarded for her selfishness. It was a conscious choice, never to leave her gilded shell. And it makes sense, really, because power appears beautiful, and beauty makes time feel conquerable. Beauty makes cruel choices so easy.
November 18, 2025 at 5:33 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry by @arabellesicardi.bsky.social is the best book I’ve read in a long time.
Coco Chanel didn’t kill anyone. She merely slept with a spy who probably did—we don’t know. She only tried to get people she distrusted removed from positions she wanted herself. She only had meetings with people who could make that happen. Coco Chanel didn’t kill anyone, but she wrote letters to the people who could have made it happen. Coco Chanel didn’t kill anyone, but she lived in a hotel with the men who did and wrote letters to the men who did and paid for the publishing of a magazine that encouraged them to do it.
November 18, 2025 at 5:29 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
20 years ago, I attended a party at the Montblanc pen store on Maui, which I later wrote about. The fact that the company was selling jewel-encrusted Fitzgerald pens kinda told me rich people weren’t really reading Gatsby.
“It has a retail value of $20,000,” said boutique manager Leisa Abernathy. The Montblanc name is famous around the world for expensive, jewel-encrusted fountain and ballpoint pens. Its catalog is filled with limited editions, paying homage to men like Alexander the Great, Andrew Carnegie and chronometer inventor John Harrison. And, interestingly enough, F. Scott Fitzgerald. “Although Fitzgerald enjoyed the high-society life,” notes the current Montblanc special editions catalog, “in his outstanding works such as The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise he drew a subtle psychological portrait of the hedonistic America of the 1920s, which allowed the inescapable tragedy beneath the glittering surface to shine through.”
November 2, 2025 at 1:12 AM
apignataro.bsky.social
I’m always fascinated at the way Andor permeates left wing protest rhetoric.
Notice for an October 18 protest from Long Beach Indivisible that says, “We have friends everywhere” in large type.
October 10, 2025 at 6:20 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
This is a shattering indictment of Klein, but he’s paid what he’s paid to ignore it.
I found it interesting that Klein’s instinct after Kirk’s assassination was to “sit with (his supporters) in their grief” in an effort to see Kirk in the light that his supporters did. But when Coates, who is largely unsurprised by the political moment, relays a historical record that informs his views, Klein is unwilling to sit with that history to reach a similar understanding.
October 4, 2025 at 4:38 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
The violence is endless and it’s all self-inflicted.
In the last 24 hours, two 40-year-old white men, both former U.S. Marine Corps Iraq War veterans, committed mass shootings. One fired into a crowded bar in Southport, North Carolina from a small boat on the Cape Fear River Saturday night, the other drove a truck, decorated with American flags, into a Mormon church in Grand Blanc, Michigan during Sunday morning services and began shooting. Three dead, eight others wounded in Southport, about the same in Grand Blanc. Think of all this what you will, but please think.
September 28, 2025 at 9:37 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Of course Decker ends up having sex with the Ilia/probe.
He had decided to make love to the android replica if it became necessary… No, that was untrue. He began to hope that it would become necessary.
September 27, 2025 at 3:21 AM
apignataro.bsky.social
Decker gets a boner!
Decker found himself suddenly inna swirl of sensual arousal — he could catch just the faintest scent that always accompanied the wild excitants that Ilia’s body could do mysteriously and wonderfully manufacture for him.
September 27, 2025 at 2:45 AM
apignataro.bsky.social
Roddenberry spends an entire page lingering over Ilia/probe’s nudity when she/it first appears on the Enterprise. Also his constant use of exclamation points when referring to her being naked is deeply weird. Also, also: “hard-tipped”?
“This is not our navigator,” Spock said quietly. But it almost certainly was Ilia — except that there was some sort of a glowing light from the throat… Kirk found his eyes shifting from the tiny light glow to what seemed impossibly lovely, hard-tipped breasts, which were at this moment swinging around to point directly at him… damn! It had to be Deltan pheromones that were doing this to him! This meant Spock was wrong. She had to be Ilia!
September 27, 2025 at 2:27 AM
apignataro.bsky.social
Nothing to see here folks, just crew members making sweet, sweet love in the “extreme forward area of the engineering hull.”
As he entered, Spock’s ears caught the sounds of humans in love, which told him that privacy was still respected in this area of the ship.
September 27, 2025 at 12:53 AM
apignataro.bsky.social
I admit to being curious as to what Majel Barrett, who portrayed Christine Chapel in Star Trek’s original series and in the movie this book novelizes and was married to Roddenberry at the time he wrote this, thought of this description of Chapel’s appearance.
McCoy came into sickbay without a word, his beard scratching Chapel’s face during the one hug he gave her before he began to swear quietly at the look of the new medical equipment there. He expressed his unhappiness in enough detail for the tall, handsome woman to recover from the surprise of his entrance.
September 26, 2025 at 11:21 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Wait what
The moon Io had held some shocks for the first Earth scientists to land there, although not nearly as shattering as the earlier discovery that Earth’s own moon had once served as a base for space voyagers (their identity still a mystery)…
September 26, 2025 at 10:32 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Sulu gets a boner!
Sulu felt it hardly prudent to stand up at this moment. But unlike Kirk, he had no choice and therefore tried to seem to be bowing to her as he rose — and the tripped and then decided to pretend he was actually offering Ilia his hand. Then he immediately thought better of this, withdrew his hand abruptly, and quickly employed it in very busily punching out equations on her navigator’s console. “It’s all in the computer,” he mumbled. “You’ll have no problems…”
September 26, 2025 at 9:55 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Oh look, Gene Roddenberry is using a very old, very racist trope to describe Sulu.
“Never hoped to see you sitting there again, sir,” Sulu said. The grin made it clear that his very scrutable Asian helmsman was please to see Kirk back in the center seat.
September 26, 2025 at 9:41 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Here Roddenberry is describing the Enterprise’s new recreation deck. Um, crew members are having sex there?
Here the most vital of the ship’s mechanisms were kept in peak operating efficiency through music, song, games, debate, exercise, competition, friendship, romance, sex — the list was as endless as human ingenuity itself.
September 26, 2025 at 9:31 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
They’re actually talking about Kirk assuming command of the Enterprise here, and the whole passage makes me feel really icky.
“He wanted her back,” said Sulu. “I wouldn’t have wanted to be in his way when he went after her!” Uhura nodded. This was exactly what she had just felt in Kirk, too. He had also had that look which comes into some men’s eyes when they’ve just won a woman and she lies there ready to be taken. Uhura was not unacquainted with that look, but she was troubled at the amount of hunger she had seen there too.
September 26, 2025 at 9:17 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Though Gene Roddenberry often talked eloquently of the need for complete racial diversity throughout society, he was also astonishingly misogynistic. His sexism ran throughout every Star Trek property that he had creative control over.
Kirk understood completely. But he kept his expression blank. Your next words could brand you a whore, Lori. Nogura’s staff whore. I hope I’m wrong.
September 26, 2025 at 9:08 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Capt. Kirk gets a boner!
“Hello, Jim.” As always, her lips seemed to caress his name as she spoke it. He could almost catch the scent of her body fragrance, and he could feel the slight pressure of his genitals responding to those memories.
September 26, 2025 at 9:04 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
I was not prepared to find out that Capt. Kirk has a communicator implanted in his brain that lets Starfleet Command send him orders telepathically.
Chapter One. He felt a strange tingling coming from somewhere inside his head. It was as if some intricate mechanical pattern had started to firm there. Then that pattern became a memory, and he realized that he was receiving a Starfleet command alert signal. He did not like the feeling of it — and knowing that it came from a device implanted inside his brain made it even more annoying.
September 26, 2025 at 9:01 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
I’m sorry — “new humans”?
Some critics have characterized us of Starfleet as “primitives,” and with some justification. In some ways, we do resemble our forebears of a couple centuries ago more than we do most people today. We are not part of those increasingly large numbers of humans who seem willing to submerge their own identities into the groups to which they belong. I am prepared to accept the possibility that these so-called new humans represent a more highly evolved breed, capable of finding rewards in group consciousness that we more primitive individuals will never know. For the present, however, this new breed of human makes a poor space traveler and Starfleet must depend on us “primitives” for deep space exploration.
September 26, 2025 at 8:57 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
And the fun begins on page 1, with this little tidbit that the swashbuckling captain of the starship Enterprise was named after his mother’s “love instructor.”
Admiral Kirk’s Preface. My name is James Tiberius Kirk. Kirk because my father and his make forebears followed the old custom of passing along a family identity name. I received James because it was both the name of my father’s beloved brother as well as that of my mother’s first love instructor.
September 26, 2025 at 8:49 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
I know everything sucks but I recently saw a Reddit thread on how whack the 1979 novelization of the first Star Trek movie (written by show creator Gene Roddenberry!) was so I ordered a copy and started reading. Buckle up because it’s going to be a wild ride…
Book titled “Star Trek The Motion Picture” by Gene Roddenberry sitting on a blue cushion.
September 26, 2025 at 8:44 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
700 deaths! Instead of the usual 22,000!
As Scientific American reported in November 2020, the drop-off in flu numbers following COVID’s arrival was swift and global. Since then, cases have stayed remarkably low. “There’s just no flu circulating,” says Greg Poland, who has studied the disease at the Mayo Clinic for decades. The U.S. saw about 700 deaths from influenza during the 2020–2021 season. In comparison, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates there were approximately 22,000 U.S. deaths in the prior season and 34,000 deaths two seasons ago.
September 20, 2025 at 4:33 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Spot on
Between Stephen Miller retasking the federal law enforcement and military apparatus toward ethnic cleansing and Kash Patel remaking the FBI as an elite squad of coked-up podcasters, Charlie Kirk’s killer is much less likely to be brought to justice. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing for conservatives. When you find the killer, you wave the bloody shirt at the killer; when you don’t find him at all, you can wave it at anyone you want, which is why the right hasn’t waited for a single suspect and has already implicated Democrats so broadly as to put 80 million people on the wanted list.
September 11, 2025 at 10:32 PM
apignataro.bsky.social
Diego Luna portraying Cassian Andor, with the caption “The day before is always hard.”
August 3, 2025 at 7:49 PM