Hollywood Downtowner
The Hollywood Downtowner Motel in Hollywood, Calif. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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What I'm (Looking Forward to) Watching: Orwell 2+2=5
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Flowers in Brooklyn
Flowers (Adult Movie Set) framed and on its way to the Don’t Be a Square group art show at Shag in Brooklyn.
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WWYD?
Estate sale, Toluca Lake, Calif., 2023 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
“What would you do if you discovered an adult movie was being filmed in the house behind yours?” Read it.
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Entitled
Yesterday I went to see the It Smells Like Girl show at Deitch in Los Angeles. The standout piece of the show was Nadia Lee Cohen’s Entitled. A giant box contains a virtual girl who gyrates, flirts, and appears to track your movements as you move before her. Poke the screen where her body is and she stumbles, drops, and develops bruises. It reminded me of Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0. Devastating and moving.
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I Get Email
Illustration by Susannah Breslin
Name:
[redacted]
Email:
[redacted]
Subject:
The porn industry, escorting industry and patronage
Message:
HI Susannah,
English is not my first language, some words might be off. I was asked by an old friend in his early 80s to research "what has become of" and if I could find her. He knew her back in the late 90s under her real name. Well, I found her. She worked as a porn actress and escort. She quit the business, went for a short while in a real job. However, nowadays she lives under the patronage, possibly of one of her former clients a possible UHNW individual. For such a self-determined and really independent woman to go down that route, it feels a bit irritating to see her in such a relationship. During my research, I was more shocked honestly not of what became of her, but about the hobbyist networks. The escorts circle back to porn to show that they are available, expand their clientele or show what is on the menu with them. That porn and the adult industry is basically a loss leader for them and just advertisement.
If you are interested in her individual story or my insight in the hobbyist networks, please contact me. Her story is really fasicinating and bold. It is not a story about my neighbour steals cable. It spans two continents, failed business endeavours, entrepreneur spirit and resilence but also hard truths. I will meet the old man that has asked me to find her soon and I still don't know what I will tell him. By the way, he is a Dutch liberal who has his experience with sex workers, I just hope it won't make him sad.
I don't want journalistic credit or financial compensation. Just someone to share my research with.
Kind Regards
[redacted]
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Bride of Frankenstein
A Bride of Frankenstein in the Fairfax District in Los Angeles. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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Topical Matters
I’m happy to share that a new short story I wrote, “Topical Matters,” has been published on failbetter. This story was inspired by a visit I paid to an adult movie set last year. The story line involves a sexagenarian in the San Fernando Valley who discovers that an adult movie is being filmed in the house behind his house.
Here’s how it begins:
“Stuart should have known something would happen on that day when he opened the door in the morning to retrieve the newspaper and noticed a religious tract had been left on the porch. He bent over, winced from the pain in his back, and scooped up the pamphlet. What is the Mark of the BEAST, read the cover. All the words were white except for the last word that was an alarming red. From the stormy sky behind the message, a bolt of lightning reached down to strike a building that was half the Vatican and half the U.S. Capitol.”
Read the rest here.
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What I'm (Looking Forward to) Watching: Slow Horses Season 5
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Books I Read in August: Favorite and Least Favorite
This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In August, I read four books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite was Susan Meiselas’ Mediations: “a wonderful overview of her career, development as a photographer, and efforts to rebalance the power dynamics between photographer and subject.” My least favorite was Johnny Ryan’s Porn Basket: “the artistic equivalent of watching a child play with its own feces.”
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I Mean ...
Come See Allycin, Hollywood, Calif., 2000 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
"I mean, if you want to see porn, go watch a porn movie." Read my newsletter and subscribe to get it weekly.
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Fuck You, Pay Me #25: What Doesn't Kill You
A still from a stag film
This is part 25 of Fuck You, Pay Me, an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
One of the books I’m writing is a nonfiction book about the adult movie industry. Here are a few things about it:
The title. The working title of this book is When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. The main part of the title is a nod to When We Were Kings, the 1996 Academy Award-winning documentary directed by Leon Gast. The film focuses on The Rumble in the Jungle, the 1974 heavyweight championship boxing match between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali that was held in Kinshasa, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo). The book’s subtitle, through its use of “A,” points to the fact that this is but one take on a complex, ever-evolving, largely misunderstood, and often vilified business.
The cover. Because this book is a work in progress, there is no cover at this time. If it were up to me, the cover would feature a photograph from the late photographer Larry Sultan’s The Valley series. This photo of actress Sharon Wild sitting on a mattress is my favorite. Sultan, who grew up in the San Fernando Valley, shot adult actors on adult movie sets from 1997 to 2003. There’s a video from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art about this incredible project here. And there’s a book which you can buy second-hand for several hundred dollars.
The epigraph. If you’re not aware, an epigraph is a quote that appears at the beginning of a book. The epigraph I’ve chosen is from feminist theorist Camille Paglia’s 1994 essay collection Vamps & Tramps: New Essays: “Far from poisoning the mind, pornography shows the deepest truth about sexuality, stripped of romantic veneer.” I love this quote, how it points to the value in seeing, really seeing, not just looking at, pornography. If you do that, you can learn a great deal about what drives people on a base, libidinal level.
The structure. The structure of this book is straightforward and simple. It is comprised of three parts. Each part is made up of seven chapters. There are a total of 21 chapters in the book. The first part of the book is occupied with the history of the business, including my personal relationship to it, including the first time I found myself (word choice of “found myself” intentional) on an adult movie set. The second part of the book is geared towards examining the mechanics of production in the manufacturing of adult content. And the third part of the book zooms in for a closer look at the key players and how they navigate this space.
The length. When it’s finished the book will be somewhere between 300 and 400 pages long. Each chapter is around 5,000 words in length, so the final manuscript will run approximately 100,000 words. In other words, this book will be my doorstop. I mean, it’s not William Gass’s 1995 novel The Tunnel, which I read some years ago and runs over 650 pages, but it’ll have some heft to it. This seems fitting since I’ve been writing about this subject for nearly three decades.
The theory. What is my take on pornography? What is my theory of pornography? What is my opinion on pornography? Historically, I have sought to evade these sorts of approaches to this provocative topic. I mean, do you really care what my take is? Aren’t you only really interested in yours? Please, let me get out of the way and allow you to do that. I’ve long compared my relationship to writing about the porn business as I’m Virgil to the reader’s Dante in Dante Alighieri’s fourteenth century narrative poem Inferno from his three-part The Divine Comedy. (That means porn is hell, but that’s another conversation.) Want to see how I do this? Read my 2009 long-form investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult movie business: “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?”
The pictures. It is highly unlikely this book will contain any images. No photos, no pie charts, no graphs, no drawings, no movie stills. I believe using imagery would detract from the story I’m trying to tell, locate the narrative within a time period that’s limiting, and run the risk of creating a situation in which the reader’s scopophilia supersedes their capacity for intellectual insight. I mean, if you want to see porn, go watch a porn movie.
The breadth. There will be a great deal of breadth in this book. The story will range from stag movies to the Golden Age of Porn to the rise of online porn. Stylistically, it will interweave narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, and reported memoir. The characters will include producers, directors, crew, performers, writers, and theorists. In addition, I’ll take a look at the future of pornography, how smut might look, feel, and be delivered at a future date. Speaking of which, the other day I came across a story on AVN.com about this masturbation device in the shape of a brain. My mind is blown.
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The Maniac
Today I wrote a short appreciation of Anton Chigurh for a website. I’ll share a link to the piece when it’s online.
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What I'm Watching: Almost Perfect
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Everything He Knows About Self-publishing
Kevin Kelly has an exhaustive post on everything you’d ever want to know about book publishing. (via Kottke)
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Mirror Stage
A selfie from 2011, when I was living in Austin, Texas. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Books I Read: Porn Basket
I regret spending money on Johnny Ryan’s Porn Basket. It’s the artistic equivalent of watching a child play with its own feces. The child thinks it’s hilarious; you shake your head. Ryan seems chronically stuck in a reflexive need to attempt to offend, but his work is uninteresting and redundant. I like art that offends; I’ve created some of it myself. But this is merely dull. If you’re an eight-year-old boy, you’ll love this book.
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Post-Traumatic Porn Disorder
“It’s possible, I suppose, I was the first woman to set out to acquire Post-Traumatic Porn Disorder.” Read here.
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Climbing the Fence
Purple flowers climbing over a fence in Magnolia Park. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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What I'm Listening to: Gelli Haha's "Normalize"
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