If you can’t be great, at least be consistent.

If you can’t be great, at least be consistent!

No, I’m not enlightening the universe with my adult-film industry related clips, but I am damn sure bringing them on a semi-regular basis. And I want to challenge myself to bring them on a more regular basis. The world of blogs means that you give something new each and every day. I can do this.

Blogging’s a different world these days. It’s harder to harness that critical mass of readers than it used to be. Either that, or readers are shyer than they used to be; because I rarely get emails from people I don’t know. Hey: if you’re out there - - email me! Let me know that you’re into the site. Introduce yourself. Leave a comment. Take a chance.

I’m considering heading to Esalen for a month before I dust my heels off in Oakland. Esalen’s in Big Sur . . . there’s a program there called Work-Study where you can work like 32 hours a week, chopping vegetables and whatnot, and then in the evenings you study with a teacher on a subject like Buddhism or Thai Massage or Gestalt Psychology or whatnot. This guy Noah Levine is teaching in February on meditation. He’s a pretty cool cat. I read his book “Dharma Punx” about three years ago and enjoyed it. He started off a punk kid with drug problems in Santa Cruz, but eventually found meditation and healed himself through it. That’s the watered-down part of the story.

I’ve been meditating off and on since 2003, and it’s always made me happy when I can bring myself to do it. Basically, I want to be a happier dude. We all want this. I want to get rid of some of the impediments on my journey - shit I’ve been doing to myself that’s causing needless suffering. Eslane would cost $1100, but that’s not like a fortune or anything. So I might do it.

I s’pose there’s some sort of correlation here: I always focus on porn people who I find interesting (and not just degenerate); I’ve always been attracted to seeming opposites: like punks who meditate; or people who sell their body but remain pure of heart and spirit. I ain’t saying Ashley Blue is Noah Levine; or that she tries as hard as he does. But maybe there’s some connection: human: Levine: Blue: Benjamin: human: you: reading: blog: living: your: life.

“I really believe that punk rock and Buddhism are founded upon the same quality of dissatisfaction with the status quo.”

This clip’s pretty self-explanatory, although I think the music is a little bit weird . . . it was a late-night decision, and probably not warranted . . . well, almost definitely not warranted. Who the fuck cares, though . . .

I saw Gia last year when I was back in LA for a month. She was working behind the scenes, doing make-up on Billy Watson’s sets. She’s a very nice person whom I believe got married to a director and decided not to perform anymore. We lost a genuine freak; gained a make-up girl. Sounds about right to me.

It’s raining over this way, and I’m at the library, reading comics . . . Mark Beyer is my favorite comic artist ever, I think . . . he’s right up there with Crumb and Clowes and nutjob Ivan Brunetti . . .

From Beyer’s “Amy + Jordan“

I was at Max’s weird home in Pasadena in spring 2005 when this conversation went down. His place is painted yellow and blue, sort of looks like a McDonald’s, with all the primary colors (his famous yellow couch). They were going to shoot a scene for Ashley’s series “Girlvert,” which I think Max was going to cameo in (? Don’t remember. Oh, yeah: Max was going to guest-perform for the episode) but it ended up not happening . . . the girl didn’t quite “get” what Max was about until she was basically told and then basically decided not to do it.

I was following her around (she was just a flash in the pan, weighed about 99 lbs or less, she’s long gone, all of which I’m saying to just get around the fact that I can’t remember her name) and tried to follow her into the bathroom with my camera. She said, to get me away, “Um . . I’m about to do an enema . .  you don’t want to see THAT, do you?” I certainly didn’t . . . which is the moment I realized I was a bad documentary filmmaker . . . Steve James would have filmed the enema, and let the experience edify him. Anyway this girl went all the way to enema and then bailed. I would have too. I was never much for Maxie.

I was offered a job, way back when, editing for Max, actually. He was getting his stuff done through a female Vivid Director who ran her own production house, and I was begging her for work on a daily basis (well, not daily, but I was making a nuisance of myself - eventually she hooked me up with the Erotic Networks, where I became an on-set Behind-The-Scenes guy . . read it about it in my book) and she was like, “have you ever edited a feature before?” And I said sure, I’ve made a ton of my own movies. And she was like, “I need someone to do Max Hardcore’s movies.” I said thanks but no thanks. I was a total newbie then, excited to do any job that had anything to do with snogging for dough. But even I realized that taking a good look at Max’s antics for ten hours a day would make your eyes bleed and your teeth melt.

I’m not saying I never jacked off to the guy’s stuff. I’m just saying I was hit with a wall of sadness and blackness and semi-shame afterwards that gave even the worst stuff I’d ever seen a run for it’s self-loathing money. I have “respect” for Max, insofar as you can respect someone who’s so totally off his nut, because he simply does shit that he’s into. For a while, society said it was kosher; now he’s in jail. He’s still expressing himself with little to no regard for a filter or hiding his true feelings. Max Hardcore, nee Paul Little, never had much use for a superego . . .

I have a female friend who says she loves Maxie . . . loves him . . . I can see the attraction . . . not only is he totally honest, he’s an aggressive fuck . . .there’s a kind of freedom in his totally unapologetic albeit psychotic way of approaching the world. Let’s just say that Max admits trauma happened. He’s not addressing it so much as he is re-enacting it. He’s not dissecting it so much as he is recreating it. Max doesn’t solve problems, he eats them for dinner.

As for Ashley, she’s special as hell, and smart enough to know who her psychic brethren were in porno. She got hooked up with JM Productions for most of her career, and they took care of her well, giving her a contract, a blue BMW, and a good amount of artistic freedom, but for the most part they’re jokesters, particularly Jim Powers. A. Blue has the laughter inside of her but also the rage; and the cleverness to make her rage come out in the form of laughter, an S-shaped curve that smells like a bowel movement but contains the acrid fire of a grapefruit gone sour, drenched in tears dried hastily with a towel that smells like cum in the Valley. So she picked up some friends along the way, mostly men; aside from Mason, was there another woman who thought so much like a degenerate, forty-year-old man than Ashley Blue? Again, I don’t know if she’s still connected to porno, still making movies, but if she’s not, then it’s our loss, and Khan Tusion’s loss, and Max-in-jail’s loss, and Brandon-Iron-in-Canada’s loss : the smart and the damaged, channeling their psychic jones’ through a giant erect penis, erect through Max’s two blue Viagras dry swallowed and then chugged back with a chaser of beer, erect through plasticine dildos coming out of Ashley’s Girlvert backpack. The Gonzo of my day smelled bad, smelled like molestation and rubber and videotaped piss, but at least it had plenty of teeth . . .

One of the most important porn actresses of the past decade speaks about one of the most controversial directors of the Gonzo era, Khan Tusion, with characteristic restraint.

The time is summer, 2004, and the place is the set of “Ashley Blue, Cockstar,” a JM Production co-directed by Jim Powers and Ashley Blue. I was just getting started on a documentary that would never be finished, working at this point with my good friend Brad Stark, who would soon bow out. As you can see from watching the clip, Ashley wasn’t feeling too positive towards ole KT at this point, though I think those fences have been mended in recent years. At least, I hope that they have - Tusion and Blue being two of the more cerebral, boundary-pushing figures in porn.

From a heady day visiting the set of “Ashley Blue’s All-Girl Bukkake,” in December 2004: and a good time was had by all.

I’m not in touch with Ashley as much as I’d like to be these days, and hence, I’m not sure what her involvement is in the porn industry. Maybe she’s cut the cord and rarely directs anymore. I’m not sure. I do know that she was one of the performers/directors with a talent that far exceeded the limits of porno.  A while back Belladonna put out a Twitter post asking “who is the smartest woman in porn?” If Ashley were still around, then I’d have nominated her.

Sophia’s an interesting case, too. My friend Billy Watson apparently discovered her, way back in the day, coming straight out of Phoenix. I don’t think I “discovered” anyone in my tenure, aside from a few twinks I got off of Craigslist during the gay days; and they didn’t exactly blow up the spot.

“Discovering” “talent” takes a certain amount of charisma and deep belief in what you are doing. I had very little of the latter, and even less of the former, for the last three-fifths of my career. Rather, I preferred to track the demise of already-established stars who had reached the emotional peak of their journey three weeks in and then were on the long, slow slide into depression, monotony, and ultimately total discredition of their enterprise.

I’m considering moving to the Bay Area in the spring . . . thinking it over, mulling it over . . .