girl-shaped

I’ve been going back through some old images and this is one I’ve always liked.  I find that I prefer self-portraits that do not include my eyes or nose.  I like the anonymity.

‘pornography as therapy’

I’ve been doing google searches for any discussion of porn as something therapeutic or healing, because I’ve been thinking lately about sexual psychology and the ways in which one can sexually self-medicate.  There are a few things that have brought this up, so I’m starting to want to know what other people are saying about it.  There’s not terribly much out there, but it did put me on to this blog, which made me a bit keen to read other therapist blogs.  I think that’s a fascinating field and so private and mysterious in a lot of ways, so it’s nice to see it being represented in a medium like blogging where there are more opportunities to speak anonymously.

Have a look at Everyone Needs Therapy’s somewhat disjointed discussion of porn and particularly the choice to be in it, or any type of sex work.  Not a whole lot of credit given to those who make it, but maybe some good departure points for consideration.  And a peek at What Some People Really Do Believe.  The comments are worth a read as well.  I do think this is an interesting blog and I’ll probably get myself more familiar with it.

Schöne Schmerzen

PFFBerlin is on this week, marking my (and several other folks’) first appearance on the big porno screen.  When Bobby, Chica and I marched our cameras up the hill back in February, we had no intentions whatsoever beyond the creation of something pretty.  What we ended up with was the Hilltop Agony series, which you can see over at Beautiful Agony if you have too much on to make it to Berlin later this week.  We were so damned proud of its excellence that we decided that now was as good a time as any to start entering our stuff in international festivals.  I have been making porno for several years now for the same old audience, and that bores me sometimes, so I’m keen to start getting involved in what else is happening in dirty pictures worldwide.  In some ways Australia is culturally isolated – no one seems to think that anything comes from here so they don’t bother even looking down to our corner of the map – so I think the most effective way to still be able to participate in modern international erotic production is to get involved with the things that are far far away.  So Berlin is a tiny tiny step towards that, for me at least.

Schöne Schmerzen (Beautiful Agony) has three screenings at Berlin, and is being screened with In Search of the Wild Kingdom, a Pink & White production.  Pink and White is pretty well-known as some of the only decent and conscientiously-produced dykeporn out there, and while I don’t always care for their aesthetic or narrative choices, I respect what they do and feel going being attached to them in two screenings – I think the audience they will draw is a good one for exposure to what Agony does.

The other screening is in conjunction with  a lecture by a film theorist called Stephan Wolf entitled ‘The Privacy Of Porn: All Is Intimate, Nothing Is True.’ I’m quite sorry to be missing this, as it’s exactly what I’ve been thinking about for awhile now but have little suitable vocabulary to describe.  From the description on the PFFBerlin website:

Truth, but a deceiving one, authenticity, but a false one, all intimacy – ruined? What is left of “private” when there’s a camera around, some director or even some emcee to conduct? We may draw nonpoint lines of demarcation between private and public, between un-, semi- and commercial – and discard them again.

The company I work for produces things which are sometimes described as ‘reality porn’; the contributors to its websites are ‘not models’ or ‘not porn actresses’.  In many ways it depends on the demarcation between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ to exist, and as I think Wolf will perhaps argue, the whole concept (phenomenon?) of ‘private porn’, on the surface, facilitates that distinction.  But then there’s that problem presented by the camera, by a capturing device, by an awareness that someone else is watching or has watching or is going to watch.  So what does it mean to call something ‘private’?  How far can you really go to simply ‘capture’ something, to filter out all consciousness of the act of capturing, to make it so that anyone is ever ‘just watching’?  Wolf is open to suggestion: ‘But – perhaps we disclose hidden hints for some antitheses together?’, and I’d love to be there to give him a few.

But since I can’t, I will just say this: I’m proud that something which evolved so organically and experimentally ended up on an international screen.  I’m excited that a whole buncha people are gonna see something pretty we made.  And I’m encouraged by the fact that pornographic innovation is celebrated by things like Berlin, because I’ve got a whole lot more of it in myself, and I’m always trying to figure out exactly where to stick it.

up and away.

This was taken by bobbymiss, who is a most excellent picture-maker but needs prodding with a sharp stick to get her blog off the ground.  If you’d like to see more pretty things compiled by her, please do tell her so, over and over, even in stern tones of voice or as a short performance piece.

domestically upright.

twilight.

more of you should want to do me

Rhubarb and apple pie with cinnamon and walnut crumble topping. I'm back in the kitchen.

on the explicit

I’ve been working on a few things lately which are primarily or casually explicit.  I suppose this comes as a sensible statement for one who makes a living as a pornographer.  But, depending on who you ask, pornography is not ever and always explicit, and the explicit is not ever and always pornography.  I’ve been excavating some layers of thought about explicitness and how we talk about it and how it affects us.

For some people, explicitness is the problem with pornography – I hear regular complaints from the folks who don’t want to ’see everything’, who want some things left to the imagination, who are confronted in one way or another by the genital close-ups which grace your average RedTube video.  And that’s rightly grounded.  If our understanding of the explicit is shaped by our exposure to the gynecological approach taken by most mainstream sexual imagery, which is unsatisfying to a seemingly growing percentage of the porno-watching populace, it’s going to be difficult to create terms upon which the explicit can be freely enjoyed.

In some ways the explicit posits itself as truth.  You can see everything with you very own eyes, so it must be the most true way of seeing it.  There is no room for doubt.  But explicitness as it’s commonly presented to us seems to me to be a bit of a half-truth, and the empty space can be filled by other ways of creating and seeing the explicit.  Shining a light on something and moving closer to it are the methods by which we are taught to consider the explicit.  In my very recent experience trying to experiment with explicitness (mmm hmm), I’ve just sort of tripped over some new ways of doing and seeing it.

Sometimes you don’t actually see something until you turn off the goddamned light.  This is a basic principle of looking anyway – if you are accustomed to noticing looking you know this.  But that’s generally abandoned when we’re creating something explicit.  Maybe it’s one of those ‘forbidden’ things – because we’re generally not allowed to look at each other’s genitals we really clamor for those images when we have access to them, and we eat up as much of what we like about that image as possible.  Gobble gobble, as fast as we can.

We all have our own things we like about the explicit and what I’ve noticed with my own work of late is that I can dissect all of the elements of the explicit that are pleasing to me and play with ways to present them in ‘explicit’ detail.  Colour, size, shape – all of the things that compose the corporeal aesthetic – can be dealt with in ways that create emphasis but not obsession, that show you exactly what’s there without getting out the magnifying glass and the anatomical diagram.  There is more lust over large, plump labia presented in silhouette than on any ‘this is a tour of my pussy’ micro-study.

I will re-visit explicitness here, and work on collecting some images that show you what I mean, and if/when the things I’ve discussed above are released into the wild I’ll tell you where to go looking.  My own eye and head is ridden with contradictions about how I personally approach the explicit, and what I enjoy is not always consistent with they way I theorise about it – if it was I think my sexual consciousness would be much less interesting.

gravel.

Birrarung Marr, Melbourne. An ideal pedestrian experience.

An Open Letter to the Dickhead Who Rammed Into My Car on Sunday Night

Dear Dickhead,

What the fucking fuck.  You hit my car.  Really hard.  That’s a sizable dent, motherfucker, that’s a rear panel needing replacement.  I can’t believe what a complete scumbag you are for taking zero responsibilty for your idiocy – whether it was driving drunk or just driving at all, which clearly might not really be for you anyway.  That little car has given the world all it has ever been able to give, and it’s one of my few sizable possessions.  I take pride in it even with its scam-shaped hole under the tail light.  You have battered its wing and, with it, a little bit of my pride.  And a lot of my general feelings about Others.

The least you could have done, since you obviously were completely unwilling to be held financially responsible for what you did, would be an apology.  If you didn’t have a pen and paper, you should have written it on the windscreen in your own blood.  Just because it’s in front of the Brotherhood doesn’t mean you can kick it around like you do the rest of the shit in their driveway.  People who cannot own up to their own shit are the lowest motherfuckers on the planet.

Maybe you’re the same fuckwit who stole the table from our front stoop yesterday.  If so, fuck you and your fucking entitlement.  Hit-and-run.  You goddamned coward.

If people like you are permitted to roam about the earth in your impractical white cars, then karma is dead.  This drastically changes my outlook on the world, including my belief that street parking is just fine.

Fuck you and the white sedan you rode in on.

xo
bs