A Comics Comment
Have you seen my comics? They’re online here, and they’re available in various anthologies, including here.
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A History of America's Most Notorious Business
Single mannequin, Hollywood, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
One of the book projects I’m working on is a nonfiction book about the adult movie industry. The working title is When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. The book interweaves narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, and reported memoir. While the story’s primary concern is the adult business, from boom to bust to boom again, the narrative also includes my own backstory. In other words, it explores how I came to spend a great deal of time considering the manufacturing of pornography and what the means of production of explicit content and its product say about us as a society and a culture.
Currently, I’m reading Linda Williams’ Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, which I’m embarrassed to confess I’ve never read. (You can read her New York Times obituary here.) Today I ordered Jacques Lacan’s Desire and Its Interpretation, as I haven’t read Lacan since I was in college and feel it will be relevant to some of my ideas about desire and the Other. I’ll probably also re-watch Brian De Palma’s Body Double, which is a marvelous interrogation of seeing and the sexual object and features Melanie Griffith as the adult actress Holly Body.
Probably the most challenging aspect of this book—outside of revisiting Lacan, ha-ha—is bringing to the fore how my background led me to the San Fernando Valley and the indisputably most interesting thing about it. (To quote the late Evan Wright, in his devastating “Scenes From My Life in Porn”: “I would come to joke that the porn video is indigenous Southern California folk art.”) Both my parents were English professors doesn’t exactly suggest one will grow up to write about the porn business. But maybe being raised in a house that was emotionally chilly and in which intimate relationships appeared to be one way but were in fact another might.
One early scene I chose to include near the beginning of my book is something I’d never written about before. I grew up in a two-story pink stucco house on a steep single-block street in the foothills of the Berkeley Hills. My second-floor bedroom was the smallest bedroom. A set of windows faced the street to the east, and a single window faced the neighbor’s house to north. Sometimes at night I would open this side window. Below, there was a small courtyard off our dining room in which tall bamboo grew, and I liked to listen to the rustling the leaves of the bamboo made. In the darkness, I would watch the bamboo list in the wind and crane my neck so I could see the Moon or Orion tracking across the night sky.
At some point, the neighbors moved out, and, as I recall it, someone else moved in. The new neighbors included a man who may have rented the bedroom across the driveway from my room. He seemed to have a lot of girlfriends. Every weekend there was a new woman. There was a ritual to it. The man and this new woman would appear. They would go in the bathroom and reemerge in burgundy bathrobes. They would kiss and then … slip from my view. I had a sense of what they might be doing, but it was vague. I was witnessing a kind of transgression, I surmised.
Revisiting that scene made me wonder if that was a kind of cinematic experience of the erotic. As in a movie theater, I was in a dark room. In the darkness there was an illuminated frame. Within this frame, people upon whom I was spying acted out a drama of intimacy. When I was writing this part of my book, it reminded me of what an adult movie director once said to me about why he had gotten into the porn business. He was a fan of horror movies as a young man, he explained. But what he really wanted to see on the screen was what happened in the pivotal scene when the knife raised, the woman screamed, and the camera cut away. That was porn.
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Books I Read: Trulee Hall
I bought a copy of Trulee Hall, a monograph about the artist, after seeing her work at MOCA. I was blown away by Witch House, which is insane and amazing. The book features essays and commentary and an interview. If you’re looking to embrace your inner ick or wade in the goo of sex or shift your ideas around the kinds of art women can create, this book is a good place to start. Hall: “I don’t differentiate between high and low and right and wrong, but I’m more likely to gravitate to something ‘low’ and ‘wrong.’”
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The Young Voyeur
“Revisiting that scene made me wonder if that was a kind of cinematic experience of the erotic.” Read it here.
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What I'm Listening to: Emily Allan's "Steps to Destruction"
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LAPD Estate Sale
Estate sale of a Vietnam War vet and retired LAPD officer. For more of my photos, follow me on Instagram.
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What I'm Watching (Next): Magic City
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Books I Read: I Made an Accident
Kevin Sampsell’s I Made an Accident dazzled me with its beautiful, mysterious collages and pried my brain open with its curious, dreamy poems. I really loved how the art and prose play together, suggesting new connections, making a meta collage of images and words in book form. Accidents never looked this good. Delightful.
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Sunset Boulevard, Today
A model on an ad on Sunset Boulevard, taken today. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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What I'm Listening to: Baby Rose's "Landslide"
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Tarzan(a) Is Calling Me
“I wanted to see this house because it was the house where Thelma Dickinson’s character in Thelma & Louise lived.” In my latest newsletter, I explore Tarzana in the San Fernando Valley. Subscribe to get it every week.
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Books I Read: Mediations
I really loved Susan Meiselas’ Mediations. It provides a wonderful overview of her career, development as a photographer, and efforts to rebalance the power dynamics between photographer and subject. I particularly enjoyed the essay by Eduardo Cadava, which manages to be both personal and theoretical. Recommend.
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The Audition, Cont.
A panel from My, My American Bukkake Too, 2004
As I wrote on my blog previously, I pitched a story about the most extreme, out-there thing I’ve ever seen in all my years writing about the adult movie industry to a popular podcast. This podcast tends to explore topics on the outer limits, so I thought this may be a fit. They responded, letting me know they were interested and requesting a 10-minute audio audition. Because these events had happened some years ago, I spent quite a bit of time going over everything I’d written about this particular subject over the years. Last Sunday, I created an abbreviated version of the notes I’d taken during my re-research. Last Monday, I made a list of 10 bulleted points and sat down to record. For this podcast, you can have notes and bullet points, but in terms of telling the story, you must do so off the cuff. In any case, my goal was to record the audio in one take, which I did; I figured my first go at telling the story would be the strongest. Then I sent the audio recording I’d made to the producer with whom I had been in touch. Now, it’s a wait-and-see game. We’ll see what happens next.
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When Pornographers Were Kings
Adult actress in the grass, Los Angeles, Calif., 2001 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
One of the books I’m working on at the moment is a book-length work of narrative nonfiction. The title is: When Pornographers Were Kings: A History of America’s Most Notorious Business. More to come soon …
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The Collagist
A collage I made on my kitchen bulletin board, under a painting I bought at a San Fernando Valley estate sale.
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Fables of the 818
Image via Wikipedia
One of the books I’m working on at the moment is a short story collection. The title is: Fables of the 818. The interrelated stories take place in the San Fernando Valley—at strip clubs, porn sets, and massage parlors.
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What I'm Watching: Deichkind's "Keine Party" (Featuring Lars Eidinger)
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Fincher, Tarantino, and Pitt
Blush & Bangs, Highland Park, Los Angeles, Calif., 2005 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
David Fincher is filming the Quentin Tarantino penned spin-off to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, The Adventures of Cliff Booth, starring Brad Pitt, so they transformed a section of Highland Park into the 1970s.
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Were You Brave?
The Glendale Room, Glendale, Calif., 2005 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
“Generally, my question for myself in life is pretty simple: Were you brave?” Subscribe to my newsletter here.
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I'm Revealed
Tonight, at 7 p.m., I’ll be a storyteller at Revealed, where people share true and personal stories about the “comedy and complexity of being human.” The show is at The Glendale Room, and the tickets are $8.
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