SASHA GREY II

SASHA GREY from V Magazine on Vimeo.

"Shot on location at the John Lautner Chemosphere House off Mulholland Drive, the film showcases Sasha as a perpetually evolving figure. Costume designer Ellen Mirojnick (“Basic Instinct,” “Fatal Attraction,” “Wall Street,” “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps”) dressed Sasha for the part in an array of lingerie and military inspired garments to highlight the dual nature of her masculine / feminine persona. Looking over the roadside from the vantage point of one the most legendary residences in modern and cinematic history, Sasha reflects on her relationship to the San Fernando Valley landscape- the location of some of her most noted adult performances. Back inside the circular vortex of the Chemosphere, Sasha's inner dialogue projects an equally diaristic and imaginary self-portrait that pushes beyond the extremes of her past filmography and into her new future." [emphasis mine]

Remember kids, she's not a whore if she's an actress.
I'm actually not even being cynical here. This verbal specification of her "portrait" blew my mind as something between a grandiloquent psychic reconaissance (Lynchian?? one at that!)into her porn-star-turned-model-turned-crypic-icon-of-postmodern-feminity persona and, on the other hand, a thin promotion of supposedly bland acting career in her independent film pieces. But again, I'm a fan so I'm not going to be objective here and, quite honestly - there's nothing NOT to like in this video - the minimal plot which nonetheless might leave you wondering as to the level of private self-exposure, the musical background with the haunting drummings of Chelsea Wolfe's "Moses" (which in my opinion are to express Grey's emotional struggle between her public violently pornographic exhibitionist facade and deeply reflexive and calm (perhaps even religious in a mystical sense) subliminal self, the landscape and lighting which bespeak loneliness, the future exertions or perhaps an isolated act of redemption in the limbo of Chemosphere simultaneously negated by the half-attired body and the black make-up of an unrepenting sinner, the as always sphinxlike visage which all the same could be just an empty mirror of our materialistic desires..

"TIE ME UP"

There is an original music video to this song directed by Mike Figgis, heavily styled up for Agent Provocateur's lingerie commercial (although it's hard to tell with those stiletto shots and supine bordello atmosphere, or maybe it's easier, dunno). Anyway, the song has stuck in my head for some time now and I officially need to rehash the old BDSM flame so all the same why not with these mainstreamized vapors of bondage sexuality.

SEXUATION DEGREE ZERO

Some purely subjective musings on the dumbed down representations of mental and physiological development of children and adults that we are bombarded with in the media.


To extend Judith Butler's performativity of gender to the contemporary times, one'd have say that sexuality can be understood solely in the context of performance. Notice three modes of media-propagated sexulizations, or, to be more radical - sexuations - in the Lacanian meaning of the word as steering sexuality according to the emptying jouissance and not biology. Women are basically oversexualized as children[1-see below] and sexually CRYogenized as adults[2-see below]. Men are androgynized as children and infantilized as adults[3-see below]. Perhaps in the case of women, this is no news - women at all stages of development were treated as sexual objects (the only novelty is that grown women have gone from being artificially perfectified to simply being grotesque non-aging zombies or prematurely uglified role models - see Lady Gaga). However, I truly am devastated at how the notion of masculinity has retrograded to either patriarchal cavemen or sissy gynandromorphous abominations, not to mention that the institution of fatherhood has been debauched to the extent that neither Freud nor Nietzsche could have predicted (incest is the new word). Not that I'd vote for the propagation of 'normative' sexuality, whatever that means, but the all-out apocalypse of ANY norms and aesthetic categories has reached a level where heterosexual women might start to reconsider feminist agenda and post-civil rights movement freedoms (Yes, I sometimes miss barter sexual economics). The unforeseen peak of sexual revolutions is this - instead of gender egalitarianism, we live in an emasculated/pedophilic reality of age-based political incorrectness, and the one that is conspicuously exhibited in the sexual Grand Guignol on our screens.

[1]the popularity of teen hoes in general but especially teen hoes and their Negro pimps from Ark Music Factory - (or if you are too auricularly irritable to listen to Rebecca Black (though I'm pretty sure you already have), just see this prepubescent performance (or, since youtube finally removed this due to, I guess, paedophilically stimulating content, just enter "little girl sexy dance" on the same video hosting service - it's full of shitheaded, half-attired dancing brats)

[2]Lady Gaga and her unceasing spectacle of physical and spiritual teratology (audio-visually packed albeit symbolically empty) vs absurdly non-aging J-Lo and Katy Perry's teenage dreams, not to forget the reversely tik-toking biological and mental clock of Ke$ha in music videos where preposterously hulky male models prance on beaches/bitches or high school corridors to sensational lyricism and gaudy performance providing generated carnal fantasies for heterosexual women who neither have sex with hulky male models nor live near a beach/bitch or go to high school.

Guess which ones were "born this way".


[3] Justin Bieber, brainless gym junkies with hairless sculpted chests under half-uplifted shirts, and presumably small penises (those who have big penises get into porn business but mostly fuck other men, dispassionately, so that's somehow still within the framework of sexual apocalypse). Old slobs and underage prostitutes, the logical end to capitalist patriarchism. Filiarchy.

Now, don't get me wrong. In porn, and real-life situations which do not involve money, slavery and/or non-consenting sex I'd go for age disproportion anytime. Plus, I am in favor of all forms of pornographic expression for and with widely-understood "mature" audience, including gay porn, incest, midgets and barely legal teens (YET, as a recent excursionist in Deep Web, I'd be ..reluctant, to say the least, to include CP in this list). Where life is restrained by behavioral formulas, art is where the fantasies of transgression and defilement of beauty (if needed and always needed as Bataille claimed) can be realized. And, more universally, to paraphrase my previous post from Żuławski's bed-pot of wisdom: isn't the possiblity of innocence in life, as in mimetism, always already lost? Still, must everything be sleazily coated in money and boredom? As if everyone has lost the ability to marvel at the intimacy and pain of transgression, no matter how hard they stupefyingly salivate over their own mechanical physical reactions.

Hank Moody, waiting for somebody to pass him his Axe clicker.

Coming back to men. Compare the patterns of manhood from the pre-00s (back when being hulky and American had symbolic significance on political level) and patters of manhood today (how naive I was thinking back in the days that metrosexuality was just going to be a passing trend, a blind alley of sexual evolution). Yet, not all imagery of manliness falls into this trend. Take the handsome Hank Moody from the popular HBO show Californication. Moody is an aging boozer, a one-hit wonder literary celebrity and the epitome of modern family man whose repeated problems with the law and countless sexual relations with females of various ages are ascribed to the irresolvable inner conflict between the emotional retardation and cool inborn sexual prowess. Hank's best friend, for contrast, is a gutless overweight agent who, despite physical repulsiveness, also gets his share of pussy count (literally, that's a goal in the recent episodes). I've been watching the 1st season like a late-night soft-core porno with better dialogues and stronger character interaction. Recently though, the creators aim for an incongruous redemptive dramatic development as Hank, more and more estranged from the moral harbor of his homespace, is left at every second episode's emotional cliffhanger with depressingly long face of an alleged rapist, pussy wrecker and literary failure who brought shame on his daughter and impeccable wife Karen in whom he is still mutually infatuated. There goes my problem with mainstream mendacity of male movie characters. While Moody is neither saint nor demasculinized, he is bogus, like Axe commercials that'd attempt to sell melodramatically any remaining positive values of manhood. No wonder Hank presents a nearly unsolvable puzzle of godlike moral reserve combined with earthly sexual dirtiness to Polish men (http://www.film.org.pl/prace/californication.html) Despite a heavy dose of auto-ironic comic relief (like, when Hank takes a dump on his ex-wife's fiance's car - that hilarious retarded bastard "lol" - or having a penis hemorrhage while shaving your balls)this is a male fantasy of dubious marital monogamy enriched by threesomes, schoolgirl sex, revenge fucking, drunk behavior, cheating, casual sex, rock'n'roll, glamorous Cah-li-forh-niah girls waiting to suck your cock on every shop corner etc. Instead, I'd love to see a spin-off with Eddie Nero portraying Charlie Sheen, and where they let Moody's ex-wife have wild interracial sex and get her hair finally fucking rumpled for once.

NOCNIK

"[S]eks od dzieciństwa po przedwczesną śmierć na stosie usypanym z pizd i peruk, i bezwzględnego wykorzystywania dziecka w sobie, które się deprawuje nieodwracalnie. To już wpisało się w zmarszczuszkach, zmarszczkach, grymasach... Kolektywna nieświadomość kina, kino jest wiedną niewiedzą... Do kina zamiast do burdelu... Perwersjonowanie siebie jest szablonem wciąż tym samym. Nauczyć się go? Nigdy. Obserwować? Zawsze."

["sex, since childhood until the premature death on a pile made of cunts and wigs and the downright exploitation of the child in oneself, irreversibly depraved. It has been inscribed into the crinkles, wrinkles, grimaces... The collective unconsciousness of the cinema, the cinema as knowing unknowledge... To the cinema instead of a whorehouse... Perversifying of oneself is the unchanging cliche. To learn it? Never. To observe? Always."]

Andrzej Żuławski Nocnik, 88

DELIVERANCE

Having finally read the novel, after four decades of oblivion as to the masterful origins of backwoods horror, I nailed the tremendous importance of the staggering number of flicks figuring yellow-toothed, dirty-nailed, obnoxiously fiendish personages from "the Country of Nine-Fingered People and Prepare to Meet Thy God"[1]. The book reads like an eerie crossbreed of the early unpredictably surrealistic rural pornography[2]and horrifically suspenseful first Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) fused with the writing sensibility of Raymond Carver and unrelenting survivalist machismo. The sexual component is not so much prominently present in the novel, as merely hinted in abrupt inhales of menacingly unfamiliar country air or scrotum-cringing (albeit weirdly matter-of-factly erotic) moments of contact with the widely-understood nature. The portentous prediction of Lewis, the only survivalist maniac among the four urbanites in the story, that "the whole thing is going to be reduced to the human body"[3] is promptly fulfilled in the encounter with two inhabitants of Helms County who anally rape one of the friends, but more subtly during numerous organoleptic contiguities, initiated by the mystic interaction with "the gold eye" of the pussy-holding Kitt'n Britches model[4], and succeeded by the abject glimpse of slaughtered chickenhead in the river, the forced, sensuous crawling/"fuck[ing"[5] against/of moon-lit cliff performed by Ed, or the ambiguous meshing with the rapists themselves. Take the narrator's initial repulsion towards Stovall and his playmate, followed by a primal, nearly homoerotic fascination. This is the first description we get of the assailants:

They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth.[6]

The one that initiates the sodomic act is also identified as having a "sick-looking face"[7] or simply "whorl-faced"[8], which together with the country drawl makes for overly reprehensible yokelness. But passages later Gentry, the would-be rape victim, exhausted after his erotic cliff union and animalistically prepared for killing hunt, muses seconds before arrowing Stovall to death: "There was something relaxed and enjoying in his body position, something primally graceful; I had never seen a more beautiful or convincing element of a design"[9]. Strangely enough, the passivity and wailing of the raped Bobby during the assault is more reprehensible to the narrator than the physical appearance and inhumanness of malefactors, which is ostensibly shown when the former's manhood and his place in the group is invalidated in the following terms: "he felt tainted to me"[10]. Scened later, Gentry exhibits an apathetic acceptance of the ruthlessness of natural order and a kind of bizarre amity with Stovall:

I felt, in the moonlight, our minds fuse. It was not that I felt myself turning evil, but that an enormous physical indifference, as vast as the whole abyss of light at my feet, came to me . . . [i]f Lewis had not shot his companion, he and I would have made a kind of love, painful and terrifying to me, in some dreadful way pleasurable to him, but we would have been together in the flesh, there on the floor of the woods . . .[11]

It appears that Dickey was also the foreshadower of almost every backwoods slasher scene in which strayed young city-dweller(s) first irresolutely encroach upon the territory of the enemy. In the following passage, the four townees enter The Griner Brothers' Garage, seeking supplies and help in the downriver trip:

It was dark and iron-smelling, hot with the closed-in heat that brings the sweat out as though it had been waiting all over your body for the right signal. Anvils stood around or lay on their sides, and chains hung down, covered with coarse, deep grease. The air was full of hooks; there were sharp points everywhere - tools and nails and ripped-open rusty tin cans. Batteries stood on benches and on the floor, luminous and green, and through everything, out of the high roof, mostly, came this clanging hammering, meant to deafen and even blind. It was odd to be there, not yet seen, paining with the metal harshness in the half-dark.[12]

I guess what gives Deliverance its terrifying resonance on the level of subconscious urges is the minimal stylistic gradation of sexual horror, and its placement in a certain ideologically contorted territorial universe (the US South) where some forms of behavior might not be baffling or detestable for the persons involved. The behavior of the narrator seems to prove this porno semi-dystopic adaptive attitude. While the events unfolding are traumatic from the perspective of the habitual normalcy of social rules, some sort of tantalizing mysticism of encountered perversion is also involved. The factor that makes every pornography work for anybody is a (hidden) fetish. That the men-raping Benson has a wife adds an aspect of realism to a story that might be otherwise considered purely an exercise in pornographic evil sublime. That's what good pornographers try to achieve: to make the characters and their actions believable despite the setting and generic formulaicism. Relevantly, Samuel R. Delany aims at precisely such skewed realism when it comes to most of his protagonists;when Kidd discovers that the twenty-seven-year-old hunk Tak is sexually involved with a 15-year-old black boy, this is how he reacts: "[s]uch distortion tells me nothing of him, and is only terrifying because so much is unknown of myself"[13]. And much of the sexual iceberg seems to remain hidden considering Tak's bragging confession that he's "gone to levels of perversion" one might have hard time imagining[14], even in such a liberatory space as Bellona.

Nicely executed stroytelling, altogether.


[1] Deliverance p.227
[2] Farmer's Daughters (1976)is, IMO, the unavoidable classic of the genre with its half-retarded boychild, inbred sex coercion at gun-point, the motif of convicts trespassing on a family farm, the atmosphere of bizarro rustic pornotopia and sexploitation.
[3] D. p.40
[4] D. p.22
[5] D. p.151
[6] D. p.95
[7] D. p.95
[8] D. p.100
[9] D. p.161
[10] D. p.111
[11] D. p.154
[12] D. p.57
[13] Dhalgren p.423
[14] Dhalgren p.413

I.

"I am the sweeping tapestry of my sensory and bodily perceptions. I am their linguistic reduction and abstraction, delayed and deferred till they form a wholly different order, called my thought. I am, at the behest and prompting of all these, my memory which forms still another order. I am the emotions that hold them together. Webbing the four, and finally, I am the flux and filigree of desire around them all.

Perhaps, though, I am only the interpretation of all of them that I call reality. (Do I write with my pen? Does another daemon hold the pen and write with it?) Am I the sexual surge and ebb that cannot quite be covered by any of the above, but that impinge on all the others and often drown them? What of the bodily apparati in general, as they fall, pleasingly or painfully, into the net of myself? I am always an animal excess to the intellectual system that tries to construct me. I am always a conscious sensibility in excess of the animal construction that is I. And that is why I am another, why my identity is always other than I."

Samuel R. Delany Longer Views: Extended Essays. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 1996. p. 150

WILL THIS BE THE LAST IMAGE?

"Delay and Deferral: Body and Interface

[. . .]

It is important to note that a substantial difference between being a "member" of a pay porn site and simply surfing for porn on the Web; and regardless of the growth and gross income of porn sites, many (if not most) people who look at porn on-line are not members of pay sites. Thus, from the perspective of the average viewer, a primary experience of looking for, and eventually at, cyberporn is precisely one of frustration and waiting.[6] The premise of cyberporn is one of immediate gratification, yet the technological systems of the Internet, as well as the interfaces of cyberporn sites, necessitate delay: the delay of logging on, the delay of finding a site, the delay of "signing through" the initial contract, the delay of having the thumbnails load, and then, finally, the delay of waiting for the selected image, sequence of images, or video segment to appear. A high-speed connection may decrease this delay, but cyberporn constantly pushes the boundaries of bandwidth; as soon as the technology can immediately deliver full-frame images,
streaming video comes on offer, with slower load times. Even with a high-speed connection, there is still often delay on the side of the site delivering the content. The technologic of the computer forces these sequential acts of waiting and looking and waiting to become habit, and in so doing, it inscribes repetition and delay as pleasures of a different order. On some level, there is indeed a limit to what the viewer will willingly put up with in order to get what he or she wants, and as such, delay can become frustration. But Web surfing a telling term, offers its own pleasures, regardless of the frustration porn sites both understand and provoke; the structure of many porn sites seems to both direct and cater to the viewer's desires for delay and deferral by allowing the process of searching exist under the aegis of the goal of "getting what they want," but in excess of it. Specifically, the floods of images and the enormous range of selection on any given pay site are there for a reason , and the reason seems to be precisely this process.

One might see this delay as intensifying the pleasure of the eventual visibility of the object by causing the object to acquire an illusory inaccessibility. But it makes more sense to see the satisfaction as taking place in the deferral of satisfaction itself. Seen in this light, the goal exists in part to allow the subject, or a portion of the subject, to rationalize the pleasure of surfing. To imagine the goal, then, is to project into a moment of perfect satisfaction - and the obtaining of a perfect image, one completely adequate to the subject's desire. But in comparison to this imagined perfect image, every image will always remain inadequate, and so the "search" continues. Psychoanalysis generally, and Jacques Lacan's particular articulation of the impossibility of fulfilling one's desire [7],' articulates this point and its implications for subjectivity at some length. But common sense tells us that part of the pleasure in Web surfing is the pleasure of motion and movement either toward an unknown object or away from a boring desk job. The nearly perfect image,the one that comes closest to approximating one's desire - the group-sex shot with the not-too-busty redhead bent over in the front, perhaps still only offers momentary satisfaction; in fact, images close to one's desire can provoke anxiety because they might cause the end of Web surfing. The subject is faced with a choice-will this be the last image? Even if the viewer knows he or she is unlikely to find one better, he will often continue on, forgoing the pleasures of the known for the pleasures (often through frustration) of the unknown. The user constantly shifts on to new images-and in the process, new delays-in an endless slippage of desire in which part of the pleasure derives from habitual repetition and habitual deferral.[8]" (109-110)

from "Going On-line:Consuming Pornography in the Digital Era" by Zabet Patterson in Porn Studies. Ed Linda Williams. Durham, London: Duke University Press, 2004. 104-123

I totally agree with the author of this as to the common experience of pornography-viewing phenomenology, including the inevitable yet slick commercialization of psychoanalytical implications of fetish and pixelization of desire. I've never experienced the gritty adventurousness of porn theaters which inevitably failed as anything beyond secret, mostly befouled, homo-eroticism (or at least that's what chronicles tell me) and were the closest we came to the cultural pornographic guerrilla. I'd speak ill of the clean, insulating masturbatization of sexual imagery in home video screenings aimed solely at solitary gratification (which is how most people experience pornography and think about pornography). At its best, masturbation involves the ultimate fantasies of interpersonal freedom and "construction of . . . self"/ves[1], but prevailingly it's just that - purely physiological, manic tension release. Still, there is something wickedly subversive about the socially-revolutionary-satirical origins of pornography and how it has been turned into enslaving desire machine. Pornography, like all images, should feed appetites and prompt experimentation and this, unlike screen violence, does not presume imitative aggression, but in most cases imitative pleasure. It is in-between of those moments of deferral that should ascertain the productivity of our fantasies and sexual intrapsychic scripting. I don't see why women would desire pure eroticism and men pure gratified fantasy. I don't see why nobody would want communal rituals of sex images and pornographic shamanism.

[1]William Simon quoting Burke and Ferenczi, among others in Postmodern Sexualities. London and NY: Routledge, 1996. p.83