Hard rockin' amigo.

[Matthew X]

WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE

This promises to be dangerous ground for us both, dear reader. See, I used 
to bleed all over the page for a living - and those unfortunates 
recognizing the byline will know I'm being nothing but literal in my 
appropriation of that lame cliché. Let's just say there's a few hot goth 
psycho-bitchs out there who know the taste of me through more than one 
precious bodily fluid ...

As a weekly columnist for SCREW magazine and then a monthly rabble-rouser 
at the SPECTATOR, I turned my life in New York City and San Francisco into 
the gasoline for igniting reams of newsprint into endless bleats, rants and 
manifestos. Scooping and snooping my way into the most interesting - and 
educational - situations the sexual underworld has to offer earned me a 
certain amount of notoriety. Many wild and grim parties later, I even 
imagined myself owning the wisdom of Dante.

Then I moved to L.A., and learned, baby, learned (Porno Inferno).

Four years into this incredible voyage, this nerveless deathmarch, I have 
overcome that all-too typical smug East Coast native's naïve superstition 
that the city of Los Angeles is Soul Death; in all fundamental spiritual 
matters, indeed Hell on Earth.

No, after 48 months of nothing but forced research into my immediate 
environment, I have come to my own independent conclusion: Los Angeles is a 
moral, intellectual, and creative black hole, sucking the very life force 
from any man, plant or animal foolhardy enough to exist on its cursed soil. 
And oh yeah, it's Hell on Earth, as well.

You might say I'm wallowing in the perspective of the blind man yanking on 
the elephant's tail and pronouncing it a snake, what with immersing myself 
in the Valley-based porn video industry. "Of course it stinks when you're 
squatting in the outhouse, dummy," you might say. "You have to wipe your 
ass and come out into the living room with the proper folks!"

I ain't buyin' it. Common wisdom out here is that the only difference 
between the low standards of behavior over there in the "Big Town" (I love 
it - one aspiring Robert Evans doing time peddling DVD mastering services 
to the porn hoi polloi actually called it that in front of me) and the 
tawdriness of the porn industry is this:

Where in Hollywood the Sharks That Be will gladly sell your mother, their 
mother, anybody's mother to a drug-crazed cannibalistic white-slavery cult 
for the sake of "earning" many hundred-thousands and even millions of 
dollars, their counterparts in the porn industry will commit the same deed 
for the sake of, oh, a hundred bucks. We're a heinous lot, people, and it 
can't be whitewashed.

The PBS series "Frontline," in their latest breathless "expose" on the porn 
industry, doggedly skimmed the surface of our distastefulness, preferring 
the eye-rolling melodrama of the Spanky and Our Gang Play Manson Family 
antics of one flash-in-the-pan company that specializes in cartoonishly 
marketing childish shock antics to the less obvious but far more pressing 
issues dealt with every day by performers, shooters, graphic artists, 
warehouse workers, etc ... Hey, Frontline, how about a little 
data-gathering on the Redwood Forest of bad paper that gets passed to 
hard-working Jacks and Jills who are nearly always already working under 
the radar of state and federal fair employment laws? Or the flagrant 
subculture of bootlegging and "backdooring" that pops up like acne on a Max 
Hardcore starlet's face?

Believe me, as a former daily newspaper reporter, I know the answer. Not 
"sexy" enough. That's actually the trade lingo, you know, for determining a 
topic's commercial news value. Kind of puts the hypocrisy of the corporate 
information industry's stance on our little "Playpen of the Damned" in 
proper perspective, doesn't it?

Of course, I'm still a long way from being a defender of this industry. 
Having been exploited and humiliated by the same bottom feeders as many 
other naïve wannabes, and then having been exploited at arm's length by the 
ostensibly respectable big boys of corporate porn (but hey, at least their 
checks usually clear!), I find myself these days almost exactly where I 
began during my early days shooting art-fetish porn in San Francisco - 
doing it myself, the lowly smut equivalent of a struggling independent 
filmmaker with Something to Say that frightens the horses, as well as the 
limited imaginations of the Bean-Counting Porn Republicans.

Having made the transition from critic to director, I'm here to sell you 
the manifesto of a New Wave in porn, akin to the quantum leap made by 
Truffaut and Godard the day Jean Seberg went before their cameras in her 
pixie-cut and striped boatneck, hawking American newspapers and a romantic 
state of perpetual political, personal and sexual rebellion. This is the 
female muse I seek to have stripped bare by her grooms, even. Not your 
machine-made victim of a post-corporate sexuality, as defined my former San 
Francisco roommate, artist Rev. Steven Johnson Leyba in his amazing new 
book, COYOTE SATAN AMERIKA (Last Gasp Press):

"False advertising has abstracted sexuality into some distorted commodity 
to sell commodities. The sex drive is one of the strongest instincts, but 
the proprietors of government want us to be frustrated by the sex we can't 
have. Sexual unattainability helps keep the world economic machine going as 
we attempt to buy what we are told is a better way, life, style, etc. ... 
Pornography is constantly monitored and policed, not out of moral concerns 
but out of economic concerns ... All sexual images in the media are only 
used for economic strategies ... Sex and its image are policed to maintain 
an apolitical use. Any depiction outside of fucking seems to be a societal 
threat."

Whether the honesty is casual or profound, the only difficult thing I 
demand of my performers is the truth of their sexuality and the spirit 
behind it, whether for documentary purposes or to portray a character 
which, if I have my way, is usually scripted to reflect the performer 
portraying it. I don't need a cadre of bored "professionals" in front of my 
camera or at my back, milling about as part of an overpaid mercenary army 
of crew serving mostly to bolster some faux auteur's notions that he is 
indeed the General Domo of his own banana republic: there's no room for 
journeymen, snake-oil salesmen or bored traffic cops on this adventure.

Hey, believe me. I made the half-hearted attempt to sell out, for the sake 
of a comfortable niche, and a regular salary. In my last curtsey to 
corporate porn, I offered around a project earlier this year that is 
inarguably the best porn feature I've ever thought up. Which, considering I 
wrote the screenplays for 2001's three most-nominated corporate porn 
features, might make the naïve think I'd be knee-deep in Cuban cigars and 
Tokyo whores right now, finally preparing to shoot something with a decent 
amount of sheckels in the kitty.

But: Nah. This is the Porn game, fools, where anybody who thinks beyond the 
self-imposed box is immediately considered a threat to Life As We Know It. 
If they can't suck you in and housebreak you, they ostracize you - while 
reassuring you to Keep In Touch, especially if you have any new ideas to 
appropriate - ah, be pitched, that is ...

But that's okay. Revolutions are born out of disenfranchisement and 
repression, and so comes Serious Mirror Productions, not a belching factory 
of anonymously splattered revolving flesh, but a craftsman's workshop, 
where porn can be addressed as the true funhouse reflection of our society 
and souls that it is, whether in the sweat spots tumbling delicately off a 
slut's ass to explode against the floor, or the hypnotic, throat-gulping 
snake-dance of a deep-throat queen swallowing "sin"that tastes like life 
and perhaps anchovy paste, and offering some otherwise unenlightened mook 
back the blind, infinite joy of orgasm.

Funny, how when I first began shooting hardcore here in the valley, my 
Fagin-esque mentor admonished me against decorating my set with so many 
mirrors, since it slowed down the conveyor-belt pace of factory porn. I 
think maybe he was also afraid to pass in front of one, and reveal to those 
of us he was exploiting his own lack of any visible reflection.

Even funnier, when earlier this winter I discovered a novel by Ryu 
Murakami, the Tokyo author and filmmaker whose film TOKYO DECADENCE first 
convinced me a decade ago that the serious metaphysical issues ruling my 
own life could be addressed in erotically engaging, sexually explicit art. 
Visiting Suzi Suzuki, the first professional porn star I ever shot, and her 
husband in San Francisco for New Year's, I discovered that another recent 
movie that changed my life was based on a Murakami novel, AUDITION

(Directed not by Murakami but energetic pulp director Takashi Miike, 
AUDITION is a delightfully droll, disturbingly hilarious black comedy I 
recommend to anybody truly interested in the unsolveably brutal nature of 
art, exploitation and desire; skirt-chasing directors suffering from 
martyr's complexes are particularly advised to watch and learn.)

Suzi gifted me with an extra copy of the author's notorious-in-Japan first 
novel, ALMOST TRANSPARENT BLUE. Riding a Greyhound back down into Porno 
Inferno, I was so bemused and energized to read the narrator's grandest 
vision while sitting in the back of Burger King on the rest stop that I was 
almost stranded when I didn't hear the driver's all-aboard call:

"So I'd like to see a movie that cut out a little bit of the palace or the 
city in my head, like cutting up a cow, I think it really could be done.

"I think it would be a movie like an enormous mirror, a huge mirror, 
reflecting everyone who saw it, I'd really like to see that movie, if there 
was a movie like that I'd see it for sure."

So then, the gravity of serendipity has offered a final stamp of approval 
on this glorious pipedream. It's Serious Mirror time, ya'll. Don't look if 
there's something in you that you can't stand to see. This is nothing less 
than a true outlaw porn manifesto we're constructing, with the aide of 
collaborators you'll meet in future dispatches. Our work - never "our 
product" - is based neither on shock tactics and thoughtless brutality, nor 
psuedo-sophisticated marketing techniques. There's no room left for that 
sort of shit even in porn, now that as a race we have all actually entered 
into what could be the final struggle against the multinational corporate 
Illuminati (For real, chumps!).

In the chaos of sex and art the potential for revolution can never be 
extinguished, try and repress it as censors will, try and ignore it as 
greedy hacks might. The brutal, intimate truth of sex denies the lies we 
build fascist societies on, renounces the hypocritical values of an 
extinction-driven culture. It's the first peep of defiance and the last act 
of individualism. It's our damnation and/or our salvation, depending on 
which way we steer.

If you can't hang with that, click back to the press releases. Now.

-David Aaron Clark
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