Sam Benjamin's Blog, page 6
November 2, 2011
I think it's part of my job as an ex-pornographer and...
I think it's part of my job as an ex-pornographer and officially unemployed person to post cool audio clips from the sleaze movies I watch on a daily basis; this clip is from a "Midnight Blue" from the early 90's, where Al Goldstein and "lesbian love monster and continual masturbator, Siobahn!" debate the relative merits of Dr. Bronners as a lubricant.
October 30, 2011
Chaucer's Books, Santa Barbara
Chaucer's Books, Santa Barbara
Chaucer's Books, Santa Barbara
I'm here with my...
Chaucer's Books, Santa Barbara
I'm here with my friend Mike Tolento, who works at Chaucer's. Mike and I are old friends, dating back to the zine days, when Mike had a comic zine called "Empty Life," as well as a review zine called "Assblaster." He reviewed a comic that I did in college called "Supersad" - or was it "Masturbating into a Sock"? - and from there we became friends and something like penpals. Mike has always been a model to me of a person who does his own art in a rather stubborn, "fuck you, I'm working!" type of way that I find both hilarious and inspiring.
October 28, 2011
A Love Story About Sex
A Love Story about Sex: Sam Benjamin's Memoir Details a Brief Career in the Adult Video Industry
by Holly Willis on October 26, 2011 5:41 PM 
"I had a real soft spot in my heart for sex videos," writes Sam Benjamin in American Gangbang: A Love Story (Gallery Books), his decidedly hardcore chronicle of a four-year stint trying to become an artistic pornographer here in Los Angeles. Benjamin's "soft spot" sustains the book, a memoir that's at once a spiritual journey, dizzying exercise in twentysomething narcissism, and stark confessional designed to challenge readers to reckon with the origins and implications of our own often deeply buried sexual proclivities.
The book opens with a road trip as Benjamin, fresh out of Brown University in 1999, drives from the east coast to Santa Cruz, where he spends several months doing odd jobs and pondering his future. Recalling the dramatic hijinks of artists such as L.A.'s Chris Burden that he'd studied in college, the 22-year-old clearly admires artists who use their bodies in visceral ways, and even admits to some success in his undergrad video art classes. But he rejects the art world as a future home. "It felt phony and unreal to me, a playground for rich kids," he writes. "Porn, on the other hand — that was relevant."
Why is it relevant? Benjamin pursues that question for 320 pages, trying to fathom his own desires, juggling confusion and pleasure. He performs in a bisexual video and relishes the feeling of total powerlessness; he tapes himself doing something unique with a banana peel, then tries to sell the results online; he dances at a gay bar in Silver Lake, despite having "wide hips and minor scoliosis"; and then he starts making videos with well-endowed actors, one of whom boasts a black belt in karate, a collection of Anne Rice novels, and a boa constrictor named Baby who lives in the bathroom.
So begins the odyssey at the heart of the book as youthful get-rich-quick schemes materialize, but at the cost of artistry. Benjamin ends up in a beach-side mansion surrounded by skin, sex, cameras and money. He gains a goofy sidekick and eventually even finds a really nice girlfriend. As the raucous scenes Benjamin once shot with loving attention to framing and performance become increasingly degrading — or in professional parlance, nasty — Benjamin slides into ennui.
Uneven and quirky, the story is best when Benjamin is either entirely frank or amusingly passionate. He occasionally veers into ardent lectures detailing the aesthetic history of his chosen medium, for example, celebrating the videos of the '80s, which he describes as predigital but postfilmic, "produced at a moment that fell between the Portapak and the Handycam." Indeed, halfway through the book he pauses to reflect on shifts in visual style and music decade by decade, dismissing the nostalgia-tinged recollections of the '70s "golden era" when films were shot on celluloid, ran for 90 minutes, and screened in real theaters, saying that they feel as if they had been written "in a single afternoon by some half-smart 14-year-old boy." In contrast, the videos of the '80s embody their moment and ethos. Yes, the stories are worse, but, explains Benjamin, the synthesizer music is great. "To me, the retarded computer-generated loopings actually work, complementing videotape's bleary, vacant resolution to perfection."
The often lurid memoir owes more to Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions than something like Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love; the emphasis is less on mystical transformation than on revealing what most of us prefer to keep hidden. Like Rousseau, Benjamin doesn't hesitate to detail personal pleasures, and he pushes himself to examine what he likes and why. His blunt affection for a particularly discomfiting tape called Slap Happy is nothing to be proud of, but he lays it out for us, describing the scenes and, through the writing, striving to glean their appeal to him.
In another particularly riveting scene, Benjamin takes us through an encounter that careens from sumptuous desire to monstrous violence, and, again, he tries to understand the vicissitudes of sexual power and transgression. Granted, he never writes in such boring terms, and the book never really achieves meta-level cultural analysis. Benjamin also often backs away — his relationship with his surprisingly tolerant parents is quaintly cartoonish. However, as the final third of the book grows increasingly detailed in its graphic descriptions of young women getting pounded by big men, the hierarchy of sex scenes to narrative flips upside down. The chronicles of each repetitive tangle of bodies become tedious, then unbearable, and you race along instead to the snippets of reflection. Will he muster the strength and wisdom to bear witness to his own soul? Is the requisite fall really going to come? Can there be redemption after so much filth?
We all know the genre too well not to know the answers, and Benjamin gives us a tidy memoir. It's clear that, for better or worse, Benjamin missed out on the porn debates that took place just before he was in school, when scholars such as Constance Penley, Linda Williams and Laura Kipnis cheerfully dissected hardcore pornography. Indeed, Kipnis' 1993 essay "(Male) Desire and (Female) Desire: Reading Hustler" surpasses American Gangbang in its unctuous descriptions of bodies bound and gagged. But it finds in the violation of taboos a threat to dominant cultural norms, and it makes us query our own feelings of disgust. Benjamin, on occasion, provokes that reflection too. And that's why I kept reading. Really.
October 24, 2011
How to Get Your Memoir Published
The irrepressible David Henry Sterry hooked me up with an interview in the Huffington Post: How to Get Your Memoir Published. Read it!
This is a fantastic and hauntingly beautiful loop from...
This is a fantastic and hauntingly beautiful loop from "John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut" (1994! Directed by Ron Jeremy!). It sure to make everyone's day a bit brighter.
October 19, 2011
I Went into a Barnes and Noble and my BOOK was there!
I had a class at 7 PM in Santa Monica - I'm taking "Writing Your Life" with Ann Randolph; she is a damn genius - and I'd parked north of 3rd Street. I had an extra few minutes, so I wandered down the Promenade. By chance, I saw a Barnes and Noble - I wandered in.
"I wonder if they'll have a copy of my book," I thought to myself. I walked through the aisles, checking out the new magazines. Looking for New Arrivals.
"You dumb goblin," I mumbled to myself, "they'll have no such thing."
But they did! They had six copies! And I signed 'em all. Pretty hilarious. Or earthshattering. Not sure which. It was with a grey ball point pen, just some crappy Bic.
I was actually trembling - kind of weirded out. But very grateful for the way things have turned out.
…
Brad Siskin is still hard at work for me, producing wacky video trailers. This is the latest.
October 17, 2011
One Day and Counting
It's funny to deal with the knowledge that my book is going to be in stores (supposedly) tomorrow.
I started writing this story in 2006. It's actually sort of awful to think that it took that long (at that rate, I'd only have about five more books left in me before I die … which is probably pretty accurate, unfortunately). Books take too fucking long to write. Books are for suckers.
Meanwhile I'm working super hard on my lecture … it's sucking up all my time and energy, but I am finding some superb clips. The latest is "Party at Kitty and Stud's," which I think I mentioned last time I checked in here. All I can say is, "Sylvester Stallone" and "Sexploitation. And then the next thing is "fantastic genius."
The :49 sec mark is a nice place to start on this li'l turd. It's actually interesting to see how awful an actor Stallone is. That makes me happy. He got way better, didn't he? (There's hope for us all!) My favorite Stallone movie, just in terms of performance, has to be First Blood. I think he may have only two to three spoken lines in that film, but he's just gripping to watch. First Blood is a borderline exploitation film, in that you come for the action sequences, you come for the guns … but it actually delivers on what it proffers, and I guess that's the difference. Exploitation films don't really deliver on their promises. Maybe that's what makes them what they are. Maybe that's what makes them great. You are allowed to read them across the grain; you are allowed to witness the camp.
Failure is what makes this particular genre of films great.
Books, sadly, have no such fallback plan.
October 14, 2011
John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut
Got a nice "recommended" mention in yesterday's Vulture.
As the release date for my book nears, I'm still struggling to prepare for my lecture, "A Brief History of Porn." The process entails sifting through a ton of films, and trying valiantly to find those special moments. Happily, yesterday yielded quite a few gems, among them "Italian Stallion," the Stallone sexploitation movie (filmed in 1970, under the title "The Party at Kitty and Stud's", then re-released as "The Italian Stallion" in the late 70's, after he'd become famous). It's kind of the first celebrity sex tape.
Then I jumped ahead about thirty years and watched "Screeched," which is Dustin Diamond's sex tape. It was quite freaky. Screech has a giant dick.
The best tape by far of yesterday, though, was "John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut." Absolutely fantastic. It might even be my new favorite film, ever. Ron Jeremy directs. Wow.
By the way, here's a random clip of Bobbitt in 1998, still trying to cash in on his fame, taking part as a handler of pro wrestler Val Venis. Skip to the 5:01 mark for some prototypical dumb-Marine Bobbitt-style sleazy weirdness.
October 12, 2011
One Week and Counting!
Well, my book's going to come out on October 18th, and I'm psyched . . it's been a long time coming. You could cook up seven human babies in the time it took me to write and then publish this tome. I started working on it in the spring of 2006, and boy, what a fucking idiot I was: I figured I would write it in about four or five months, sell it straight away, and then my first book would be on the shelves in, like, spring 2007. Well, four and a half years late isn't bad, I suppose …
My friend Brad Siskin and I have been working on some absurd "trailers" for my book. Check out this one, if you like. It's SFW.
