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 This is Gram Ponante with Your Porner's Almanac, Number Nine.
The big news this week after Thanksgiving was the announcement of the AVN nominations. Since the early 1980's, Adult Video News has been the main trade publication for the adult industry and people interested in it, and its awards have been getting more comprehensive every year, as new niches become popular and more and more companies and performers enter the market.
AVN has long dominated the adult industry, but of late it has received stiff competition from other companies horning in on its piece of the adult publishing and trade show markets. And while people do complain about AVN, its January trade show and awards in Las Vegas have been an annual reunion of adult video and Internet workers for more than two decades.
AVN announced a whopping 120 categories with as many as 15 nominees per category. To the casual observer many of these categories overlap, and to the jaded veteran many of these categories seem to be an attempt to please every last advertiser with a reward or nomination.
It is actually somewhere in the middle. It has been pointed out that the AVN Awards, often called The Oscars of Porn, are the only popular awards show hosted by a trade magazine; the Oscars aren't given out by Variety and the Grammys aren't presented by Rolling Stone, so you can see the conflict of interest.
Really, the AVNs are the Vibe Awards of Porn with less gunfire but similar clothes. The 25th annual AVN Awards will be held at the Mandalay Bay Events Center in Las Vegas on January 12.
The most nominated movie for the 2008 awards is Upload. You can see a review on Gram Ponante.com. Made for $375,000 by the producing team of Eli Cross, Kylie Ireland, and someone calling himself Belial, the Other Dark Prince, Upload is a very dirty, very involved movie with a lot of thought behind it. While there are some parts where the special effects are a little cheesy or where the acting is wooden, Upload is above everything a great porn movie that, aside from well, you know, the sex, would fit right in on the Sci-Fi channel.
Here's a blind item. Sort of. Christopher Jack Reid, aka Jack Venice, is free on bail after turning himself in to police in Pullman, Washington for a September incident in which the porn actor was allegedly involved in three burglaries in the first degree and one rape in the second. The incidents occurred on the campus of Washington State University.
A little more information: According to a spokesman for the Pullman police when I asked him what items were burgled, the charge of "residential burglary" in Washington can be any incident in which someone enters a residence without permission and with the intent to commit a crime. In this case, that crime was rape, and the burglary charge was attached afterward. Venice's case has been continued to early Spring.
Venice appears in a movie I just watched in which he was dressed as a priest and was jerking off to porn displayed on, of all things, a 17' MacBook Pro. The film was shot long before the events of this September, but I pointed out in my review how fraught with information it was that this man was in a priest's garb, jerking off to porn, using Apple products, and out on bail for rape. Someone involved with the film called me and said, "Why'd you have to mention the rape?"
The Porner's Almanac is brought to you with help from the Internet Adult Film Database at IAFD.com. For all of your pornographic and pornotextual needs, visit Porn Valley Observed at http://www.gramponante.com. Until next time, find out what computer platform your member of clergy uses to jerk off.
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Labels: avn, eva angelina, jack venice, legal
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Stop your sobbing; more knobbing
 This is Gram Ponante with your Porner's Almanac for the week of November 4, 2007.
In porn circles, the term for anything that doesn't involve having sex on camera for much less than Chloe Sevigny got for that blowjob in The Brown Bunny is mainstream.
What happens when someone who used to work in porn wants a mainstream job?
Well, many people in porn have pseudonyms, or noms de porn, but Geoff Mena, aka Chef Jeff, was a guy who worked on the fringes of the adult industry. He ran websites, dated various porn stars, worked as a Porn Jockey on KSEX Radio, and now and then performed in what is called a POV scene, in which viewers saw, from Geoff's point of view, sex acts being performed on his person.
Well, Mena decided to hang up the glamorous lifestyle and return to his first love, tennis, this year. He sold off a few of his websites and generally divested himself of the trappings of professional pornography to get a job as an administrator and a tennis pro at a community recreational facility in Surprise, Arizona. Though Mena's boss knew of his porn past, he was hired anyway and, according to Geoff, did very well at his job. After all, he'd been a tennis pro for 12 years before getting into the porn business.
One day, so the story goes, a tennis student decided to Google Geoff's name and found references to his porn past. A letter was written, a few calls were made, and Mena was fired. The letter said that the anonymous writer didn't want to bring his daughter or her friends to take tennis lessons with someone involved in the pornography business.
You can read the letter and an interview with Geoff Mena at my site, Gram Ponante.com.
What do you think? Does getting fellated on film every now and then make one a bad community recreation center administrator? Fry cook? U.S. Senator?
I have to say that I thought the fact that George Bush being president meant, at the very least, that pornographers could be tennis instructors without fear of their qualifications being questioned.
This week's movie recommendation is Teravision's Broken, starring Sasha Grey and directed by Dave Navarro. Navarro has been hanging around porn for the poast few years, the former guitar player for Red Hot Chili Peppers and perennial guitar player for Jane's Addiction has put together a very watchable porn movie with a revenge theme and, of all things, a twist ending. Though it starts with Sasha Grey masturbating while sobbing, which an informal poll in the Silverlake/Glendale/Los Feliz/Burbank area reveal is physically impossible if not a waste of time, the movie gets better.
In other news, a man from Florida was convicted of being a dumbass blowhard on the Internet. I can only imagine this is the first of at least 100,000 such convictions.
Michael Williams was convicted of pandering this past week, professing in a chatboard conversation that he had child pornography. Williams was in a flame war with an undercover FBI special agent and, more or less on a dare, put his money where his mouth was, posted several links to child porn, and was promptly arrested.
In standard porn circles, where special effort is made to make sure everyone is at least 18 and medically cleared, where variations tend to run only as far as number of partners and their races, child porn is very rightly a taboo subject. But Williams' style of buffoonery, exclusive of the images he had on his computer, would be right at home among porn valley chatboard denizens.
This week's birthdays include
Audrey Hollander 28
Brittney Skye 30
Chavon Taylor is 20
Annie Cruz 23
Amber Rayne 24
Roxy DeVille 25
Eli Cross 40 - also directed "Lezervoir Dogs"
Your Porner's Almanac is brought to you with the help of The Internet Adult Film database at IAFD.com. For all of your pornographic and pornotextual needs, surf on over to Porn Valley Observed at Gram Ponante.com. Until next time, if you are sobbing hysterically, put down that dildo.
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Labels: amber rayne, audrey hollander, eli cross, legal, sasha grey
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 This is Gram Ponante with the Porner's Almanac, October 24, 2007.
2257 86ed
Every pornographer knows that the statute that governs recordkeeping requirements is better known as 2257. Larger porn companies have 2257 record clerks, smaller companies and individuals often use the 2257 services of larger companies.
Whenever performers engage in sex, on camera, for pay, they must provide the producer of this content with their aliases, their personal information, and two copies of identification - which includes the performer's real name; you didn't really think that woman's parents named her Strokahontas, did you?
In recent years, proposed amendments to the federal 2257 law have sought to make recordkeeping requirements more stringent, all in the name of protecting children. The argument goes that only by securing all this personal information, and replicating these records wherever anyone posts still images or videos of these performers, can children be safe. In other words, even if a performer is clearly pushing 40, everyone who posts images of her in a sexually provocative, nude, or debatable pose must keep records of her identity at the ready so that visiting FBI operatives can determine she's not 15.
Naturally, people interested in free speech, as well as those using the free speech argument to continue selling Dirtpipe Milkshakes, are concerned that the individual freedoms of performer and consumer alike are being compromised by these stringent measures.
Yesterday in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, a 12-year-old case originally brought forth by a swingers' publication that did not want to demand IDs from people who'd placed ads was finally decided, and the 2257 federal record-keeping laws were declared unconstitutional for several reasons, including that they did not regulate conduct, such as child abuse which is already illegal, last I heard, but actually regulated free speech.
This decision applies only to the 6th District, which includes Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Michigan, and it could be reversed on appeal, but it sets a hopeful precedent with regard to individual liberties. This does not mean that you can go into the dressing room of the Gap you work in and publish photos of women trying on their 545s. Although that would be hot.
See story here.
I wanted to share with you a scene from a movie I watched recently called Tough Love 12 from JM Productions. The scene involves Otto Bauer and Dana DeArmond. This scene involves an excellent example of I Don't Give A Fuck acting. In porn, there are a few schools of thought vis a vis acting: there is bad acting, which is most of it, and eventually writers and producers must realize that it is unfair to make most performers memorize dialogue. There is a new kind of acting which I've identified in certain steveporn movies called pornmodernism, in which the performers want you to know that they are better than the script all the while they are somehow not good enough to be on Scrubs. This is also called Bad Acting. There is Good Acting - I guess, and there is my favorite style of porn acting, which is a blend of improvisation and confidence called I Don't Give a Fuck, which I think captures the zeitgeist of good porn; actors have not forgotten this is a porn movie but they still remember that their job is to entertain and delight.
Dana carries a cup of calming tea to Otto, who is frustrated with his unresponsive lawnmower.
[insert scene]
Bravo.
Birthdays this week include that of Nautica Binx, who is 23. I'm pretty sure Nautica Binx is actually her real name. It is also the birthday of VCA legend Veronica Hart, who will be 51. Hart still appears in non-sex roles in a lot of movies, including Wicked's "Delilah".
My movie recommendations this week include two movies that will appeal to people who prefer relative innocence to experience. They are Hustler's "Barely Legal 75" and Digital Playground's "Babysitters". Neither movie gets bogged down in politics, free speech issues, or the sad march of time. Instead, there's a lot of natural or weapons-grade boobies sticking straight up in the air. (It's a living.)
The Porner's Almanac is brought to you with the help of the Internet Adult Film Database at IAFD.com. For most of your pornographic or pornotextual needs, surf on over to Porn Valley Observed at GramPonante.com. Until next time, Go Red Sox.
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Labels: 2257, dana dearmond, legal, otto bauer, veronica hart
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This is Gram Ponante with Your Porner's Almanac, Number Nine.
