Sam Benjamin's Blog, page 7

Talkin' Literature

 

I ran into this champ with my homegirl Abby in late September. It is my opinion that North Hollywood is and always has been degraded. Even in its heyday, NoHo was host to a band of drunks, johns, and drooling crooks. Here, we do little to class it up.

How Does A Writer Write?

I enjoyed this interview with mystery writer Tammy Kaehle on the interview-based website Travels of John. She talks at length about the creative process, and about what's needed when writing genre fiction.

I think formula and cliché are different beasts … Knowing there was a formula when writing my first mystery was comforting, because I knew how to structure the story from the beginning. I knew I needed peaks and valleys of rising tension. I knew I needed to unfold clues over time, and I knew [the main character] Kate needed to have some crisis and be in some physical danger at the end.

Read more!

A Brief History of Porn: Looking at Andrew Blake

  I'm starting to get down to business on my lecture "A Brief History of Porn," which attempts to track the evolution of my favorite genre.

Today I'm watching a lot of tape, in an attempt to find special clips that'll fit into my talk, and the first entry is Andrew Blake's "House of Dreams," from 1990. The clip above is current Andrew Blake, but really, our talented director has changed hardly at all since the first adult film he ever made (Wikipedia has him listed at beginning his career circa 1989).

Blake's music is pretentious, but unfortunately, it's not bad enough to be funny. Same thing with the visuals, to a tee. This guy is a talented person - and both his soft-core and hard-core scenes read like a high-end slick come to life. The lighting is excellent, his ladies are fine, and the cocks are always thick. 

Yeah, this is fucking mindless. My main bone to pick, and the reason Blake won't ever capture my heart, is that characters mean nothing to the man. Story means nothing. In my version of what the porn industry aims to be (there are many versions of the porn industry - we all have our own), I want characters. I need demented, awful acting that is revelatory in its very failure. means there is nowhere to hide. The fictional dream in my ideal porno is foiled, by the worthlessness of the acting, the shooting, the script, and the lighting

Essentially, the "real porn star" is laid bare. The technique is at base a kind of Brechtianism - laying the artifice bare - but accidentally: it is Brechtianism that issues forth because of lack of talent. Which I find adorable.

No, Blake does not fit into the version of the porn world I am trying to convey. The man has too much technical talent, and even worse, there's no pathos in his films - no humor, a la Gregory Dark. Sadly, Blake's films actually ARE erotic; they are sexy, in a way. But while he succeeds at eroticism, he also fills us with boredom and a certain lack of joy. Everything a human could find loveable about porn - its failed narrative, its rank amateurism, its doltishness that invites any and all to come and play - is disappeared in Blake's Leni Reisenstahl-esque vision of the sunkissed labia.