Now and then I think, "If they'd but lived long enough for Dr. Taylor's Catarrh Cure in 1867, many of the ancient Ponante relatives would not have expired from Gleet."
This occurred to me when I saw a bunch of porn stars at a comic book store last night.
If women not disinclined to like sex also liked comics thirty years ago, imagine how sane R. Crumb's family might be.
But we shouldn't dwell on it. Think, instead, about Justine Joli frolicing across Melrose Avenue, Dana DeArmond cradling little Aiden Starr's head in a frame of gang signs, and Bobbi Starr goosing the Silver Surfer at last night's launch party for the 2009 Nerdcore calendar.
I know it will raise howls of protest from some, who would wish a Dr. Manhattan-like character to teleport me from the room, but all comic book stores look the same to me, as if each were squeezed from the same tube of Oxy 10. That is not to say that they aren't pleasant places. Melrose Ave's Golden Apple was filled with people hoping to catch a glimpse of the likes of gray-eyed Georgia Jones, who appeared in the calendar as Princess Leia.
But not everyone at the event appeared in the calendar, sadly. Dana DeArmond, here seen arguing a finer point of Captain America's patriotism with her boyfriend, Daniel, would have made a great Athena in a 1977 Battlestar Galactica tribute, but it was not to be.
Ditto for Aiden Starr, whom I've always imagined as a filthy, filthy Jawa. Maybe in 2010 (The Year We Make Contact).
Bobbi Starr compared the movie version of Hellboy 2 to Evil Dead 2, where the sequel was both better and less serious than the original. It was not like Gallagher Too.
As I left, Justine Joli was standing in the middle of the street.
"In my dimension, this is a field," she did not say.
Nerdcore: All the naked girls are nerds these days
I'm spending more and more time in comic book stores, which is weird, because I wouldn't be caught dead going into one when I was younger (I am now 23) for fear of becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. I'd imagine people seeing me and saying, "Well of course."
But now being a nerd is cool, and nerds are surrounded by nudes.
Well, nerdy men are still not cool but, just like with everything else in that 30-year stretch between 15 and 45 in which they can do no wrong, women can be nerds whenever they feel like it.
That is the appeal of Nerdcore, the 2009 calendar that will launch tomorrow night at Melrose Ave.'s Golden Apple Comics. Models in attendance will be Justine Joli, Kimberly Kane, Karlie Montana, Zoli Suicide (I thought all the Suicide Girls had been exiled; it will be fun to see one), Georgia Jones, Sara Brinsfield, Sarah Levis, and covergirl Crystal Klein.
Visitors will get a free mini-poster of the above image of Justine Joli's take on Capricorn One.
Bobbi Starr, who adorns the calendar in a Westworld motif ("the Telly Savalas version," she said, "not the new one") will also be in attendance. I have been asked to not display the image yet because it is so hot it would make Elliot Gould rise from the grave.
Grace Kim isn't easy, but the bass part is Or: How much is that Blondie in the window?
While many porn fans lead double lives as anti-porn crusaders, an easier transition is made by those who spend hours surfing Internet porn and who then cool down by playing videogames.
That is why the concept of attractive naked women who also play videogames is something like the Holy Grail for these fans.
"Would that I were Sir Percival," they would say, doing that snorting thing as they absently picked at their faces.
So imagine their joy as Playboy's Miss November 2008, Grace Kim, is revealed as a Guitar Hero aficionada in this video from G4TV:
Watching Kim interpret Blondie, G4's Frank Meyer is like the man who tries to beat back the ocean with a straw:
"So enjoy this Playboy-tastic look at Guitar Hero World Tour courtesy of Grace Kim and try to keep it in your pants, boys!"
Don't tell Pazuzu: Charlotte Vale is about 1/20th their age, collectively
Charlotte Vale nobly takes on what appears to be an art gallery full of er, docents in the fifth installment of She Is Half My Age, one of the only porn titles that accurately captures what most people think when accessing free porn on the Internet.
(That was artistic license - there is no free porn on the Internet.)
But if you are generous and say the average age of the 15 guys in the room is 29, making their total age 435, and assuming she is about 20, then the age difference really is shocking.
Not so shocking, however, as the near-perfect Exorcist imitation Vale does. If Pazuzu were visiting that art gallery, he would probably say that it is Charlotte Vale who sucks cocks in Hell.
I don't normally write about contests (competition is for the weak), but Adam & Eve has launched a $25,000 holiday giveaway that offers the delicious possibilities of an Adult Entertainment Expo lunch date with Bree Olson (and I don't think it will be at the Krispy Kreme cart outside the convention hall, either), a Vespa scooter (just like the one in Quadrophenia except without the homosexual overtones or Sting), sex toy shopping sprees, cash, a vacation, AVN Awards tickets, and a Nintendo Wii.
Here are the details, with exclamation points supplied by someone else and Fuck!s added by me:
Week 1 (November 9–15) offers over 40 chances to win a romantic dinner and an Adam & Eve Pictures’ movie. One lucky winner this week will receive a Nintendo Wii and Rock Band Bundle! Fuck!
Week 2 (November 16-22) gets even hotter with one person chosen to party with Adam & Eve contract star (and AVN’s Best New Starlet) Bree Olson at the biggest adult event of the year! Adam & Eve will fly you to Las Vegas in January to visit the 2009 Adult Entertainment Expo, lunch with Bree and attend the AVN Awards! Fuck!
Week 3 (November 23-29) provides seven lucky winners with a $300 shopping spree at adameve.com! Fuck!
Week 4 (November 30-December 6) revs up with one chance to win a stylish Vespa LX50! Fuck!
Week 6 (December 14-20) is the grand prize: your ticket to paradise! One lucky winner will receive a trip (or $5,000 cash equivalent) to the destination of his or her choice! Fuck!
The company says that no purchase is necessary to enter the contest, though only by ordering something from adameve.com can one be entered. That said, Adam & Eve is an honest company and you can be assured that they've got that Vespa already purchased and waiting in their Hillsborough, NC compound for the eventual winner.
The secret to longevity as a male porn performer is to be a ham. Here Evan Stone steals focus from the centerpiece of the scene in O2: The Surrender of O.
"I didn't mean to upstage her ass," Stone did not say (though I'm confident he might have), "I just thought it looked like the scene from 2001."
Service providers such as strippers are providing more for less in the current economy, as you will see in this video from the horror collective Fewdio.
The protagonist of Door 17, written by Drew Daywalt and directed by Paul Hungerford, patronizes a peep show in which the dancer goes the extra mile.
In fact, she goes so many extra miles that she passes into another dimension entirely. A non-Euclidean dimension, if you know what I mean.
Marilyn Chambers was signing autographs at a Girls And Corpses magazine event at Sunset Blvd.'s Meltdown Comics Saturday night. Having never seen one of her movies (1972's Behind the Green Door is the most famous), I know her more as an Ivory Snow model and proud native of the State of Rhode Island.
But I know her cultural impact so I wanted to talk with her. She was surrounded by younger men (one resembled a Bat Out of Hell-era Meatloaf), all of whom had blogs about comics. As comics fans are more often than not also porn fans (it is less often the other way around), I deferred to the prevailing geekery until I really had to go.
Knowing that younger porn performers are often labeled as having a false sense of self, I wanted to get a feeling of how Chambers had grown out of this.
Chambers said she lives in Porter Ranch (a community at the north edge of Porn Valley) "and Beverly Hills" and that she was about to sign a contract for an upcoming off-Broadway show. She couldn't tell me anything about it, but said the news would be listed on her website.
A fan came up and said that, growing up, he would see Jamie Gillis and Joey Silvera watering their lawns in Porter Ranch. Unlike the porn starlet Faye Reagan, who was flitting about nearby, Chambers seemed past interested in the sort of attention young men with cameras historically provide.
She didn't seem particularly attention-seeking, but she would have been forgiven for this if she had been. This was Marilyn Chambers, after all. She had a table of her own, apart from the seats where younger porn stars would be signing issues of Girls And Corpses. Chambers and they didn't interact with each other.
(Nina Hartley, on the other hand, seems to actively seek out the younger performers, if anything to make sure they're saving their money, getting enough sleep, etc.)
A porn star in a comic book store is not unheard of, but the amount of roving media (if you think porn bloggers are a suspect group of people, you should have seen these guys) necessitated Chambers' use of a handler. Chambers' handler doubles as a Los Angeles court mediator, so she was pleasant. I dutifully approached the handler having been directed thereto by Chambers and told the handler that Marilyn Chambers had said it was OK that I took Marilyn Chambers' picture, but needed permission from the handler, who was three feet away. The handler said OK, and then Marilyn Chambers asked me if the handler had said it was OK, and I said that the handler had said it was. So I took her picture with a Wonder Woman comic.
Then a guy came up and took a couple of pictures of Chambers without permission. Chambers asked where he was from, and he very clearly lied when he answered "Us Weekly." I've seen the guy at porn events before. I thought, "Is he in the Porn Media Guild? Does he have a laminated badge?"
I asked Chambers if she had "written it all down," and she said Yes, and I felt bad I did not know about the book. But there is no book, she said; she is writing it. She also appears in the independent film Stash with Saturday Night Live alum Tim Kazurinsky.
Like Hollywood, Porn sometimes seems filled with people who feel compelled to tell you about the irons they have in the fire, probably because not having irons in the fire is like showing up somewhere on the bus.
Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge arrived today in a simple cardboard box with a four-disc Extended Edition of the movie (spoiler: Katsuni plays the Mouth of Sauron), a hat, and a t-shirt.
Can I imagine rolling in my 6-4 down to Orange Julius with my Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge hat and my Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge t-shirt with Jesse Jane on the back? You know I can.
The fact that I wear Pirates 2: Stagnetti's Revenge-branded clothing lets passersby know that I have had sex with each person depicted on that shirt, and that our carnal shouts drowned out the banging Grandma made on the floor with her cane.
Also in this picture is Loaded Digital's Surrender the Booty, which rips off the Pirates 2 cover in the same way that Pirates ripped off Pirates of the Caribbean. Luckily the porn world cares as much for nuisance lawsuits as it does for intellectual property.
I wonder if Vivid-steve is going to rip off the Surrender the Booty cover with its upcoming Alt Pirit Bodays Fukking LOL.
Whilst considering earlier today whether or not I should blow my head off (I decided against it - I wouldn't want to be any trouble) I found Photoshop's excellent Mosaic tool within the application's filters.
I would oblige you (though weeping silently inside) were you to scoff and say that everyone knows about the Mosaic tool, but I, up until 15 minutes ago, thought the ancient and venerable art of obscuring genitalia on websites and Japanese porn was something meticulously performed by learned craftsmen, Masons, and the Illuminati.
But what does the choice of obscuring technique say about the image it obscures? I offer that, the greater the obfuscation, the more likely it is to influence the viewer's perception of that which it obscures.
Observe Carmen Luvana and Randy Spears from 2002 in this series of the same photo. How does the digital pastie make us perceive the naughty bits beneath? How does it influence our understanding of the picture's non-obscured areas?
(Don't bother thinking about it yourself - I'll tell you.)
Here the standard cockblocker, a yellow Hummer 2, states that the cock is small but you still won't be able to get at the pussy.
The Mosaic reduces the genitalia to look like the tiling on my bathroom floor. It says, "I would like to have Carmen Luvana on Gram's bathroom floor."
The Mesh disguise makes Carmen's parts appear to be seen through a Mossad operative's nightvision scope. Why would he be doing that? Isn't the West Bank enough?
The Wind tool is pretty impressive; it suggests that life is fleeting.
Imposing the Constitution's Bill of Rights tells the viewer that I am a First Amendment Patriot disgusted with my country's censorship of Carmen Luvana's Puerto Rican vagina.
Nothing says Vagina Dentata like Cthulhu.
Reversing the genitalia of the participants is an obvious ploy for the attention of this site's massive transgender audience.
Upstairs/Downstairs with Tatiana Kush and Nicki Hunter (and these dudes)
In a gated community among rolling hills to the west of Porn Valley lies Bell Canyon. Just weeks ago I went to a barbecue down the street from the house in which I now stood watching the near-translucent Tatiana Kush get doubly-penetrated by the international team of Marco Banderas and Tony DeSergio.
I haven't yet reached a point of otherness where I have forgotten what it would be like for the likes of a Tatiana Kush or Nicki Hunter to accompany me to the type of barbecue I attended down the hill. Bloodshot and frumpy women would gaze at the porn starlets sullenly. The menfolk in their blousy Polo shirts would fondle their chin folds. I would be murdered in the driveway. That's how it would be.
But not today. The elegant McMansion belonged to Claudio, a courtly older gentleman whom I first met on the set of a Denis Marti movie a few years ago. The common areas were strewn with muscle and high-end car magazines and Macchiavellian self-help tomes. Near-naked women in bits of porn garb padded barefoot on the low-pile carpeting, munching tidbits from Costco vegetable platters.
The shoot was an as-yet-untitled project for London's Harmony Films, producers of such fare as Slam It In A Slut and the Young Harlots series. I am a big fan of Harmony director Gazzman who hails from Scotland. He and partner Dave West, from Chicago, were shooting stills of the delicious Nicki Hunter downstairs while Kush writhed like a bug on a pin upstairs. Hunter herself would be shooting her first (D)ouble (P)enetration scene in more than 18 months when Kush was through.
"I'm a little nervous," Hunter said. She was diagnosed with lymphoma in late 2006 and now, in remission and looking great, has returned to the adult business slowly, still displaying her full-tilt no-nonsense aggressive style, just not doing it seven days a week.
Hunter, not-dressed in bright yellow lingerie and looking especially vibrant and curvy, always makes me wish I had living World War II veterans in my family, because she looks like the type of girl they'd want to paint on the nose of a plane. But even in the Manila brothels of their whispered war stories they wouldn't be able to imagine the things Hunter can get herself up to.
And yet she was a little nervous.
"I haven't been D.P.'d in almost two years," she said. "It should be pretty interesting."
Try not to kill them, Nicki.
Tatiana Kush is a different story. She is as pale as Stoya and more slight. She is from Portland, OR and is wide-eyed and impish. She looks like she would absolutely destroy her mother's vice-presidential campaign.
"I'm 22," she told me, "and I love it in the ass."
"I'm Gram and I won't take work away from these foreigners," I said.
The foreigners were Tony DeSergio of North London and Marco Banderas from out Barcelona way. Before I met Banderas nearly two years ago, I used to think he was the devil. His teeth are so much whiter than mine. But he is like the Spanish Evan Stone, an unapologetic ham actor guaranteed to have a long career simply because he takes the work just seriously enough.
The scene involved Kush lying on the bed and Banderas and DeSergio emerging from behind some frosted glass to tag-team her.
Q. Grams, these men's penises are centimeters away from each other as they share this girl. Does that get weird for them? Does it make them gay? A. Etiquette is required when you are one of a pair of double-penetrators or part of a gangbang squad. Touching another dude is inevitable but, as Jack Fountain, gangbang participant and husband of Darryl Hanah, told me, "you're not allowed to get creeped out if another guy brushes against you; it's just when the touching gets vertical that you start moving away." If you think of all porn as an invented scenario, with people doing things in front of a camera and a crowd that (most) people would not do with the lights off in a windowless room and only their One True Love in attendance, then it is understandable to think that one's actual sexual preference is irrelevant in the face of getting the job done. (Plus, these guys are from the European Union. They've got co-ed bidets over there, and people swap wives with the same blase attitude with which they pay $12 for a gallon of gas.)
Gazzman crept forward with his HD camera and halo light. Wherever this scene appears on DVD, Kush will look like a very sexy ghost.
"What SPF do you use?" I asked.
"I don't," she said. "I'm a nerd. I stay inside and play videogames."
(Marriage proposals may be sent to her MySpace page.)
I was embarrassed to have not met Kush before, as she has been in the porn industry for a year, but in a business built of crisp white sheets she is almost invisible.
During breaks in shooting I went downstairs. Poppy Morgan was there to visit. Morgan, the de facto hostess of Porn Week, which Gazzman launched with Dave West, is in L.A. for the summer until her work visa expires in early September, at which point she returns to Manchester, England.
Then the Porn Week crew goes to the Czech Republic where lucky and deep-pocketed vacationers get to interact with porn performers from around the world.
I wondered if Morgan and West could tell me if there was one thing they'd say characterized a European performer.
"I can always tell when a Czech girl is fucking upstairs," Morgan said. "It's mechanical."
"How do you handle that when you have to wrangle girls for a shoot?" I asked.
"Well, I'm just a twat to them," she said.
There does seem to be a difference between Porn Valley performers and the lithe and stern ice princesses of Ukraine and Prague that show up in porn shot by European countries.
"I don't want to say they're robotic..." said West, who just shot former Private contract performer Priva in a scene that he said was "unlike anything you've seen her do before" (i.e. under water).
Upstairs the DP was 23 minutes along. Kush was being passed between Banderas and DeSergio like a towel in a racquetball game.
"Are you nasty?" demanded DeSergio of Kush. I think it was pretty obvious, but we are often reminded that we need to say "I love you" even we think it is obvious.
In America we have the tendency to ascribe class and nobility to anyone with a British Isles accent, so when Gazzman leaned over Banderas and said "Don't cover her nipples," it sounded like an ancient proclamation, like something William Wallace might say.
I had to go. I wished Hunter luck on her historic return to having both nether holes filled simultaneously by carbon-based life forms (I didn't actually say it that way), and was sorry to have not signed up in time. But then, neither had anyone at the barbecue.
"Life is old there," Courtney Cummz didn't explain of her return to West Virginia to dance tonight. "Older than the trees."
Cummz headlines tonight at Divas Club in Kearneysville, on a country road between Virginia and Maryland, and also between the Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.
Tomorrow she will sign autographs at Bunker Hill's Sensual Nights so that all your memories can gather 'round her.
Cummz is an oiled and dangerous Zero Tolerance contract star who loves meeting her fans.
"I am also delighted that the ghost of John Denver has reached from Hell across the centuries to bestow his icy finger of favor on me," she most certainly did not say.
Most porn movies are horror flicks only unintentionally, but Carlos Batts' Kiss Attack, which he made for Adam & Eve and which comes with a 16-page comic book which Batts co-designed with Albuquerque artist Nathan Carlisle, is supposed to be scary.
"Andy Warhol got to make his 'Dracula,'" Batts said of his porn vampire movie, "and Kiss Attack is my Dracula movie."
Kiss Attack stars Sasha Grey, April Flores, and La Cholita.
Performers and bands featured in Kiss Attack will perform during Comic-Con at the Casbah Club in San Diego.
Batts, who has been attending Comic-Con for 14 years, will be at the Last Gasp booth giving out tickets.
Jenny Hendrix is neither Miley Cyrus nor the ringer bait in this dating site ad.
"thats def not me... LOL," Hendrix told me as we forked pate onto each other's Triscuits at an elegant dinner party.
I assume the woman in the dating ad is a ghost; what the Sioux call Jee'bi . My assumption is based on theory and conjecture, and my purpose is to suggest some possible explanation -- but not necessarily the only one -- to the mysteries I examine.
Tentacular Canadian Mandy Morbid (TCMM) is visited by the chief of The Old Ones in a new video on her site, shot like it's Abraham Zapruder's student film from Miskatonic University.
"It's more hot than gross," claims director Zak Sabbath, but you be the judge. The tentacles were upholstered with a series of black condoms and their issue, Sabbath said, "is a proprietray substance."
Morbid needn't feel ashamed about the attack. It's not like she was asking for it, even sleeping in the provocative way she was; when the tentacles come, there is nothing you can do.
Sasha Grey talks about Colecovision like it's porn but otherwise doesn't talk about porn at all in a refreshing article in the Gamers' magazine Giant Realm.
"It would be pretty dope to be a Tomb Raider, or Resident Evil type-character. Fuck it, let's go all the way: why not put me in the Grand Theft Auto universe somewhere? But I'd have to be able to kick some ass...strapped with two MP5K's and a black and grey skintight outfit," Grey says.
Grey is also featured in a wholesome video by The Roots, "Birthday Girl," in which her facial expressions say everything.
I think the Doozers will have to build a Geek Retaining Wall around Jandi Lin, because I can see incoming slobber on Dradis.
Lin. tattooed star of David Aaron Clark's No Man's Land: Asian Edition 6 attended a recent Star Trek exhibit aboard Long Beach's Queen Mary with Clark and the sensually elfin Aiden Starr.
Lin knew that the Defiant was on Deep Space Nine and that Harry Kim would never incite mutiny against Tuvok. She executed a flawless "Live long and prosper" gesture and, more importantly, didn't disintegrate when being teleported.
