Zak Sabbath Did Porn, Fun Insight, Shifting Ground

Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

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Posted by Amelia G on September 26, 2009. Filed under Blue Blood. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry