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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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.
This was originally written for my newsletter. Subscribe to get it every week in your inbox.
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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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