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 clich. 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 nave
   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 nave 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 nave 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