Archive for June, 2009
June 28th, 2009
Arriving in Pisco.
June 24th, 2009
Corduroy Bop vs. Synthed-Out MIDI-DeathThrob: ’70’s Porn Music takes on its Reagan-Bush Counterpart
What follows is an adaptation of an interview I did recently with Mark Allen of wmfu.org - for the original, including hilarious pictures Mark found, as well as some amazing source sound files, go to http://tinyurl.com/nkhlav .
So you think the opinion that 70’s porn music is the “peak” of the genre is a myth?
Yup. To me, 1970´s porn music is basically the cinematic incarnation of a nightmarish high-school band performing a soundtrack to a disco musical that never existed.
I think of ’70’s porn-fuck-funk as one of the best-known examples of the “it´s so bad, it´s bad“ phenomenon. Fender Fuzz, wa-wa pedals, and toothpaste-bass somehow became the instruments of choice for expressing juvenile male wonder at the what had to have been some of the hairiest filmed pussies in the history of mankind. It´s like if you took the worst genre in the history of contemporary American music (disco, narrowly edging out big-pants trance for sheer lack of imagination and brazen reliance upon the fact that 90 percent of the audience is too busy engaging in an expensive urban mating ritual to complain how bad the melody sounds) and paid a group of mustachioed degenerates sixty bucks apiece to “jam” for a couple of hours so you could give your badly-lit, badly-shot, ill-conceived glorified stag film some non-diegetic musical punch it didn´t need in the first place.
How did this happen? Movie-music is all about establishing mood. Yet the mood that was established time and time again in your typical 1970´s porno, regardless of plot point, was what I like to call “corduroy bop”: a cheesy, sleazebag, cornball vintage that´s amusing once, but insufferable any more than that. (I particularly hate how the words “bow-chicka bow-bow” have become synonymous for “let´s get it on” in our contemporary culture.)
Yet 1970´s porn music isn´t a failure just because it´s bad. All aspects of porn, from the faked orgasms to the terrifically sub-literate scripts, have always been “bad.” (That’s what good about porn.) No, the music fails here because it doesn’t match up with the visual register of its movies. Directors were working with film in the 1970´s, occasionally 35 mm, but for the most part 16 mm reversal - blotchy, grainy, and orangey, shot by guys for whom keeping in focus and avoiding giant patches of shadow were massive accomplishments. The dialogue was often dubbed in later, like in a terrible Italian horror movie, or just tossed off in a “one take is for damn sure all you get, Johnny!” way.
Porn, the myopic, mysterious, bastard child borne of the 1970´s, wanted equally strange sonic accompaniment. A truly ideal porno soundtrack would have been one part Frank Zappa at his most satirical, two parts Jello Biafra at his most nasal, three parts Stevie Wonder at his most seductively braided, and twelve parts Gil-Scott Heron taking a naked black power shower with R. Crumb and Al Goldstein at the same time.
“…Whitey on the Moon”
But Porn-disco failed to rise to the occasion. It failed to ironicize - or even complement - the first acts of public copulation broached on a grand scale in the history of American civilization. ‘70´s porn, given the right backbeat, could have invoked all that was dead and dying and wrong with the “Me” decade: the slow, stagnating crumble of the hippie movement, Kissinger´s violently engineered overthrow of Socialist Chile, the crushing depression that was Yankee baseball, the feathered weirdness of Joni Mitchell, Jimmie Walker’s methamphetamine-spiced exclamations on “Good Times,” DDT, Edsels, Charley Hustle, leisure suits, feminism, Dylan’s wacko Christian period, Billy Beer, O.J. Simpson running like a crazed gazelle through airports, bearded Scorcese running off a string of incredible movies, Kesey doing acid in Eugene all by himself and staring at his hands sadly, the ominous rise of the corporate Reich.
Instead, we just got the leisure suits.
So what do you like about 80´s porn music?
Nothing. That’s my whole point. 1980´s porn music reeks of repetition, stupidity, loneliness, unoriginality, and unrelenting sadness. Yet because of the instrumentation used, it works. ’80’s soundtracks actually speak to the visceral experience of masturbation itself: it´s like the dull, throbbing death-beat of your heart in your head as you forsake real life and real partners for yet another unhealthy, scared wank.
‘70´s porn music is busy; conversely, ‘80´s porn music is solitary. The advent of the analog-synth movement meant that one lonely loser could score your whole movie for you, and with the exception of anomalies like Greg Dark´s 1984 masterpiece “New Wave Hookers,” (the precursor to today’s alt-porn fad), that’s exactly what happened. By the middle of the decade, you had almost zero live accompaniment in porn. No hairy-forearmed California funk-rednecks getting together to polish off a rack of beers and “jam”; instead, you got the director’s sweaty cousin visiting Reseda on vacation from junior college sitting in a room with a carton of Virginia Slims and a giant MIDI hooked up to an Apple IIe hooked up to a Betamax mixing board hooked up to a Grass Valley switcher patching six-second compu-bonk-loops designed to make Randy Spears and Danielle Rogers’ urgent groanings and moanings a fundamental property of the score itself. And it worked, if for no other reason than butt-rock and “Press Your Luck” did: this was the Reagan ’80’s, and the collective appetite for mindless conspicuous consumption was well-nigh insatiable.
Just as importantly, ’80’s porn-tunes were kosher on the visual tip, complementing videotape’s bleary, vacant resolution to perfection. The one-two punch of synth and Super-VHS embodied all that was sad, plastic, and hopeless in our culture. And happily, the pumped-up physiques of the actors followed suit. The women, for the first time, bore false tiddy; many black men sported memorably immense, almost unusable members that took over half an hour to engorge. Does anyone besides Clarence Thomas remember “Long Dong Silver?” It was a decade of shiny ego, useless excess: Nancy Reagan on Diff’rent Strokes, death squads in Honduras, Q-bert-dominated Colecovision, Keith Hernandez hitting line-drive triples off the wall in right, Savings and Loan crises, and your dad trying to grow a moustache one summer that looked terrible. Porn, more than any other form of expression, reveled in the abject poverty of human connection - triumphant in the majestic cheapness of its medium.
So what’s the upshot of all this? Where do we stand today, at least in terms of porn-music?
Well, as is always the case with porno, it’s a question of technology. Nowadays, adult film´s got the stain of the internet all over it: the viewing process brings with it a tinge of computer-screen radiation, an insane amount of procrastination-guilt, and the taste for multifarious conquest (i.e., having three or four clips playing at the same time and having a wank to all of them simultaneously. Or maybe that´s just me.)
My sense is that the internet has both perfected and murdered the genre at the same time. It gets right to the point, like an efficient little monster, but there’s no chase left in it. No one makes films anymore; why should they? No one watches films. People watch scenes. There’s hardly even a star system to speak of - why would you bother to watch Jenna Jameson for the bazillionth time when there’s this random new hot girl from MoFo’s who’s right up in your face?
Likewise, the music’s lost its purpose. Oh, you can still find music in internet porn, at least some of the time - there will always be porn music, for people like to throw in a beat when the action devolves into pure, animal rutting - but it’s hardly the must-have that it once was. Scores on the internet are quite beside the point, and in their fragmentation and mismanaged authorship the music that does exist lacks the dumb grandeur of previous days. But let’s not weep for our fates, for nothing stays the same forever. Bonafide perfection is rarely achieved mulitple times in any one epoch.
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June 22nd, 2009
hare hare hare hare hare om.
Sunday June 21st.
It’s time for me to be movin’ on, I think.
One Krishna week was all fun and good, but a man’s got to eat something other than starches or he just might go crazy and shoot someone. Also my sweet little bachelor pad just got invaded by an Argentinian and a Greek, and this place is hardly as cool with roomies. No place is. Hairy-chested Spanish words are flying around my head. It is time to leave.
They took us into town on Friday night to sell whole-wheat bread and propagandize for vegetarianism.
I truly never thought I would be that guy: you know, the Krishna chanting and hopping his way through town with a blissful look around the eyes, a fistful of prayer beads and Hare Om Hare Om on the lips. But then, there I was: carrying my tray of bread like a proper disciple, singing along because there was nothing better to do, in the end.
The townspeople didn’t blink. They dead-eyed us, and I knew then that we were recognized, a familiar sight. A few approached and asked specifically for the bread; but most of our sales came when tired people just pulled out their coins to make us go away. I walked through the streets of Huaral chanting Hare Om Hare Om, secretly eyeing the deep-fried, seductively-breaded chicken breasts with dark, desirous eyes. Aji-spiced corazon-on-a-stick is heartmeat, a rubbery, smooth, black delight, three stickfuls for a single dollar, washed down with a yellow Inca Cola, then followed by a furtive Caribe, watch the grey-smoke cloud unfold. A man can get horny for other than sex.
We got back late, exhausted, the monotonous chant ringing in my ears, a cold hole of hunger like a cave in my stomach and there was just cold tomato soup for dinner.
It’s peaceful, tranquil, and dangerously boring here. Today a spiritual master came from Chile to spread his benedictions, but I could not be asked to sit through his lectures. I skipped silently through the potato fields, pushing aside the dark earth, and tramped my way up to the main road, where cars whizzed by me, their honks vigorous and mean. All my underwear is dirty and unusable, all have been worn at least four days apiece and must officially be burned or at the very least washed by someone who is not me. I must leave here . . . but to go where? The money is a horrible problem.
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June 18th, 2009
When Money Gets Tight, I Turn to Hare Om.
Been in South America for three months now, and as of late I´m hovering near the thousand dollar mark - which means it´s time to hit the panic button. Or, it´s time to start doing weird things which cost almost no money.
In past travels, I´ve been able to make my way quite affordably by living at yoga centers and/or working on organic farms. I spent three weeks at the Kripalu Center for Health and Yoga in the winter of 2006, and gained a lot of sanity in the process. Not to mention I kicked it with great people eating amazing food and falling in love with a skinny ayurvedic black-haired raven delight for the grand total of like fifty bucks all said and done.
Later that same year I spent a month at the Salt Spring Center of Yoga and washed my share of floors, stacked my share of firewood, took my share of midnight naked saunas in the British Colombia October rain.
I’ve worked on organic farms in Israel, Italy, Laos and New Zealand. Every experience was a fresh and delicious one. Work-exchange is a great way to see cultures, make odd friends, eat live foods, and see, taste, and smell and fart in real nature.
It is also an excellent way to meet Peruvian Hare Krishnas, in this weird incarnation I call my 32nd year of life.
. . . I found this place, which is called “Eco-Truly”, on-line when I punched in “Peru” and “organic farm” (or, it might have been “peru volunteer yoga”, I can´t remember) . . . and it didn´t say a single thing about “you will get up at 6:00 in the cold drizzle and eat potatoes while odd men dressed in orange gallavant about muttering “hare bo!” and “hare om!” in the most pleasant way possible and you will grin and bear it and in fact enjoy it, knowing that there is no fucking way on god’s green earth that while using your pitiful little Spanish you could explain that seven years ago today you were moving your corduroyed porno possessions into a 12-room mansion in the Malibu sunshine hills and readying yourself to reap the benefits of a different kind of subculture, yet one no less dedicated to baffling group-think and weird customology. . .
The architecture here is baffling and beautiful . . . we are in some sort of arid desert region that is also by some weird stroke of luck by the beach, which is to say we´re in Huaral, or Aucallama, or some town that is one hour north of Lima as the crow flies, winding dusty desert roads that dropped me off with my backpack and shoulderbag and a pile of dirty laundry and bit of white soap in a plastic sac into this freakish oasis wherein old Peruvian troubadors from the hills came to work the fields and craft insanely textured round buildings which shoot up your meditative energies straight to Krishna, if that´s what you like to do.
I´m living inside of one of these weird tunnels, having solid black sleepy dreams, sitting by myself in the cold mysto-dark on a hardis mattress thinking about girls and time gone by. There´s much quiet in the ashram, a quiet only disturbed by the dinging of a bell that tells us it´s time to eat potatoes - again.
Last night two women, wearing orange robes with noses painted white, dots on the center of their forehead, opening up to god, entertained around the campfire, late at night. Two women from Spain. They played a guitar and an accordian lovingly. I had never heard an accordian that sounded good before last night. The Spanish Catalan voices and the orange spark glowing embers, in the background the roll of the beach, waves crashing against the shore.
And I was freezing but I couldn´t leave because their voices sounded so thick and swollen with joyful death and in the space of three days I had not known either of these rather serious women to smile but last night while the darker-haired of the two played guitar she would not stop smiling and while the silkener-haired of the two pushed the folds of her accordian together she would not stop smiling. They sat fifteen feet apart and the fire separated them from one another, but they shared something between them. I stumbled off to bed and thought about them both for a long time until my scratchy blanket turned soft on me and I was asleep.
They expect four good hours of out of me of work every day, and I will give that willingly. We are building some sort of chicken-coop roof. I am not exactly sure what it is going to be, to be honest. But I am not much for construction. I am not much for hammering, gardening, painting, cooking, or listening to informational talks about Hare Om in Spanish. I am more into wandering, walking, sitting by myself, and feeling the mysterious desert breeze. But I am working on this chicken coop roof with two new compadres, one 34 years old and handsome, with the paint of Krishna on his face, the other 50 and tiny and skinny and rat-like complete with the whiskers, a good man from Lima who is not one of them. He is here to escape something and be somewhere safe, like me. We are working on this coop roof every morning for four hourse. And to be honest I´m starting to care about how level it falls.
This whole trip I´ve been keeping to myself, sitting in rooms that have as few people as possible, sticking my head behind a computer . . . I’ve not tried to flex my Spanish skills and neither have I made too many friends. The friends I’ve made were drunken Irishmen with indecipherable wild eyes and honeyhaired English girls from Essex and Nottingshire and Israelis smoking Caribes eating ceviche on broken beds. This is my first taste of really traveling, getting to know a singular strange culture, and I have to admit that I’m digging it. I feel alive, for the first time in a very long time.
I am heading to Pisco in one week, to volunteer in a spot that was hard hit by a 2007 earthquake. More construction, I will share my neglible talents. But I gather that they can use all the grunts who want to be there. Bad food, cold weather, stale sweat: I will taste of you. Hare Om.
June 11th, 2009
An Open Note to Hollywood Producers: We Want a Lohan.
As Sasha Grey’s fifteen minutes of fame dilate to a good half-hour — mostly due to the massive exposure and largely favorable reviews garnered by Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience – porn producers the world over are pursing their lips in consternation. And with good reason: given one more “mainstream” success, one of the most remarkable smut stars in recent memory could conceivably vault over the fabled Maginot line that separates the wank leagues from Hollywood — and despite all declarations to the contrary on the part of Ms. Grey, there’s no guarantee she’s coming back.
Thus we — the disgruntled directors, flustered fans, and irate woodsmen of the adult film industry — are banding together as one, swollen member to clamor for our retribution. Which is to say: it’s time to play tit-for-tat.
1. If you get Sasha, We Get a Lohan.
This is just patently fair. Dina Lohan would be fine for a start: she’s half-crazy anyway, and this one-time Rockette is fairly screaming for the chance to “go public” with her brand of rangy, cougarish cum-lust. While it’s easy to imagine Dina stringing together an exceptional run of MILFin’ for Brazzers or some cheap, garden-variety equivalent, she’d also make a fine rum-fueled dominatrix, face-sitting and pee-taunting aging deviant losers in San Francisco fetish films that you used to have to hide from everyone you know – except this time you don’t, because it’s Dina!
The big prize, of course, would be Lindsay herself. No one knows better than we - the general internet-addicted public, who, amongst other things, comprise a massive, loosely-organized band of internet pussy inspectors — that Lindsay Lohan posesses all the natural exhibitionistic tendencies that a girl needs to score big in porn, and then some. Her string of 1,956 bare-snatched nights out in paparazziville has established an international record yet unequaled even by the likes of selfish hag Paris Hilton. Yet anyone who’s been watching Lohan scrupulously for the last couple of years has begun to detect a glimmer of boredom in her taunting displays. It’s just gotten too easy for her — both manipulating the media to further her own weird legend and opening up her incredible legs to show just the right amount of cooter. She needs an outlet: I’m saying it could be porn.
2. Consolation Package
If for some reason LiLo is unavailable (read: she dies of alcohol poisoning) we’ll settle for Lauren Pope (model-DJ who Lohan employed at a recent birthday bash to make Samantha Ronson jealous — ooh!), Ronson herself (or J.T. LeRoy, whoever comes first; and neither if they happen to be the same person), and the No. 2 pick in the fall 2010 American Idol draft. This is not negotiable. And don’t try to sweeten the pot with some lame celebrity sex tape. I can’t and won’t sit through another two-hour night-vision fiasco like the P. Hilton/Rick Salomon “shocker” without a massive snifter of peach-flavored LSD to splash into my eyeballs. We want real meat on the bone: and yes, I’m talking Scarlett Johannsen, in a full-color, hi-definition, two-camera shoot, with good background music and a non-disgusting guy. Period. (Note: does anyone besides me remember Rick Salomon simpering “I got the prettiest girlfriend in the world,” when he’s first filming Paris in her hotel bathroom? Good stuff, Ricky! Apparently, that’s the kind of snappy line that lands you marriages with Elizabeth Daily, Shannon Doherty, and Pamela Anderson. Go, boy, GO!)
And please don’t tell me that Scarlett doesn’t want to show the world how she has sex - of course she does. Hell, that’s what that awful Woody Allen film was about, wasn’t it? Yet Woodster, at the last possible moment, pulled back from what could have been a very entertaining and fully pornographic ménage à trois between Penelope Cruz, Johannsen, and weird Spaniard Javier Bardiem and chose to give us nothing. Look, guys: it’s not a big deal. Marilyn Monroe did it. Marilyn Monroe absolutely made a sex tape. She also posed nude for Playboy and about a million cool calendars that 50’s guys used to keep nailed to clubhouse walls. And it was all very relaxed. She got buck naked, showed her amazing tits, and then nobody cared and she went on to become a national icon, mostly for her acting and then later for fucking the president.
Scarlett, a child star, never got the same chance. I’m giving that to her now.
3. Oh, You Wanna Play Hardball? I can Play Hardball.
Okay: so you won’t send over LiLo, or DiLo, or ScarJo, or even Anne Freakin Hathaway (who would be really, really cool in porn, by the way). I guess we’re gonna have to get rough: we’re taking the boys. Yep: the A-List. Damon, Pitt, Cruise, and Depp. Can’t happen, you say? Hell it can’t.
No, we’re not offering $20 million a movie ($300 and all the Cool Ranch Doritos you can eat is more like it; plus, you should bring your own towel if you want to use one that’s free of dried, matted cum) - but goddamn, man, those kids don’t need more money! In fact, that’s the last thing on their minds. No, what Depp and his ilk need more than anything else is variety. (Counter-point: Cruise, well-supplied with adequate flat-chested bisexual blood-drinking Scientological concubine action, is probably pretty safe here.)
Let’s look at Brad Pitt for a closer examination. Why did he break up with Jennifer Aniston? Here’s a legitimately funny, great-looking woman who doesn’t carry a vial of blood around her neck and happens to have the body of a twenty-year old dancer at Jumbo’s Clown Room. The answer, of course, is variety. Monogamy, pretty much the shittiest plan drawn up in the history of modern humanity, with the exception of the Magic playing J.J. Redick serious minutes at the end of game 2 of the NBA Finals, is a Puritan scourge of the highest order and guys cannot deal with it. They do, because they want to fit in, but I’ll tell you what, they sure don’t like it.
Consider Pitt’s situation. He’s basically been given every power a mortal man could want. He earns an insane amount of money, he’s doing fun, engaging work that basically anyone and everyone would die to do, and he has the ear of most Democratic politicians at a moment’s notice. He’s what you call empowered. Were he single, he could quite literally have any woman in the world at the snap of his fingers; yet due to some rather questionable decision-making, he’s been with Angelina and Angelina alone for more than four years. Sure, the sex was smokin’ the first 700 times or so; but by now, he’s got to have porked Mrs. Smith upside down, backwards, and every way he can think of. Yet he’s in way too deep to back out. For Christ’s sake, he’s got three biological kids with her, not to mention about twelve adopted children and a non-binding agreement to take Anderson Cooper to the park for ice cream cones every other Sunday. He can’t fuck and run, like he did to Aniston.
My sense? 2009 Brad Pitt’s sweating. But if someone were to come to him and suggest that he take on the thespian’s challenge of porn-fuckery — more to challenge the ideals of middle-class American culture than anything else (he can crib this speech from Soderbergh if need be) — then perhaps, just perhaps, he could have his cake, and eat it too.
Oh, you fucked up, Hollywood. You fucked up big-time. And you know what? You brought this on yourself. You shouldn’t have gone sniffin’ where you didn’t belong.
You took Sasha Grey. Now we’re going to steal something of equal value from you - something that you used to love.
June 10th, 2009
The Gregory Brothers.
June 8th, 2009
