Community in the dark

I spent some hours of the last lump of days sitting in uncomfortable (er, I mean, vintage) seats at the Anthology Film Archives, watching dirty movies. It was a pretty incredible thing – LIsa Vandever put together a diverse and interesting mix of films from all ends fo teh sexual spectrum, which was refreshing to see. Movies about straight people and gay people and kinky people played side by side (or sometimes one film had characters in many different categories) And the thing is – sure, the hype around Shortbus is likely well-deserved (I still haven’t seen it, I know I know), but there are actually a lot of people doing variations on those themes of sexual freedom. You should go have another look at the Cinekink program, and you should make some notes on the filmmakers who were showing their work this weekend. They are the real deal, and there is a growing army of people with a sex positive vision making movies and struggling with the best ways to represent sexuality on screen.

Film festivals – especially when they are about the much-maligned topic of sexuality – have a strange community to them. In a conversation with Kirby Ferguson this weekend, he mentioned that he thought that there wasn’t much of a community at the festival, not because people don’t want to talk to each other, just because ofbeing in a dark room with our eyes trained to the screen so much of the time. Also, artsy pervy people are, to not mince words, kind of a strange bunch, in that most of us are used ot only having a handful of people to relate to, and when we’re in a room with like minds its a bit disconcerting. Its funny to me how socially awkard creative people can be, how many people I really respect leaned over to me during the festival and confessed, “I’m so bad at schmoozing. I never know what to say to anyone.” And I’m not going to name names – but let’s just say that probably everyone I know and admire, except for Joe Gallant (who is the smoothest dude ever – you must see it to believe it), has said this to me.

Anyway: my panel. “The State of Smut: NYC” went really really well, except that I lost my voice sometime on Friday night when I was hanging out in Williamsburg, drinking scotch and checking out the burlesque game This or That? with the Wet Spots and Kirby (who became an underwear clad contestant moments into the show). Anyway, I was (still am) somewhere between raspy and squeaky, but it didn’t seem to have too much of a negative effect on my strengths as a moderator.

The trailer for “The Bi Apple” was well recevied – or at least it was by the people who came up to me afterwards and asked when it would be for sale (vague answer: in the New Year). Most importantly (to me, anyway), it played correctly and sounded great. It was great to see the juxtaposition of the films of Joe Gallant, Candida Royalle, and Tony Comstock (with mine thrown in there too) – different styles indeed, but all made with an intense love (and some talent crossovers).

The panel started off as a bit of a loveletter to New York, but quickly became more complex than that. I didnt go into it with a rigid structure of questions I wanted to ask, but basically sarted off with the big questions of “What makes New York porn different?” and then scribbled notes and pushed different threads as people brought them up. I was especially thrilled that things moved in the direction of talking about the business challenges of making porn that’s outside of the mainstream, which are mostly: who is going to buy this? how are they going to find out about it? how are we going to distribute it to them?

Perhaps the most refreshing and awesome thing that the directors were all saying is that – its not easy to make good porn. When I first started getting really intense about the adult industry, I looked at porn and thought, shit, I can do better than that. Making porn is not hard. Making good porn is very very difficult – nowadays I’m not entirely convinced it can happen on a large scale.

Anyway, it was definitely a success, and it seemed that people definitely walked out of the room thinking.

Oh, and also, my book is up for pre-sale on Amazon. The cover isn’t up yet, but I tell ya – its awesome. According to Amazon my book is out at the end of May and is 260 pages long. So if you’ll please excuse me, I have some writing to do.