We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings - Softcover

Smith, Zak

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0980243688 ISBN 13: 9780980243680

Verlag: TIN HOUSE BOOKS, 2009

Inhaltsangabe

Blending memoir with Smith's own drawings and paintings, We Did Porn will do for alt porn what Hunter S. Thompson did for motorcycle gangs and Tom Wolfe for psychedelica.

Blending memoir with Smith's own drawings and paintings, We Did Porn will do for alt porn what Hunter S. Thompson did for motorcycle gangs and Tom Wolfe for psychedelica. Punk artist and icon Zak Smith made a name for himself by visually interpreting Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and drawing pictures of girls in the "naked girl business." His artistic pedigree and acute observation landed him in high-profile shows from the Whitney to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Somewhere along the line, Smith went from the observer to the observed, from the guy in the corner with a sketchpad to the guy on-screen doing the unnamable for anyone eighteen or older to see. We Did Porn follows Zak Smith (or Zak Sabbath) from the New York art scene to Los Angeles's seedy, yet colorful, underbelly—the world of alt porn. Smith narrates his own foray into pornography and gives his readers a new understanding of the industry, its players, and its audience.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Zak Smith was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1976. In addition to theGravity’s Rainbow illustrations, which were shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and are now in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Smith’s recent projects include the multipanel painting 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses and an ongoing series of portraits of friends and acquaintances in the sex industry entitled Girls in the Naked Girl Business as well as a number of stand-alone paintings and drawings, abstract and otherwise. His work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide and is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He is a frequent contributor to several independent comics and zines, including Papingand See How Pretty, See How Smart. His first monograph, Zak Smith: Pictures Of Girls, was published in 2005.

Zak Smith was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1976. In addition to theGravity’s Rainbow illustrations, which were shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and are now in the collection of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Smith’s recent projects include the multipanel painting 100 Girls and 100 Octopuses and an ongoing series of portraits of friends and acquaintances in the sex industry entitled Girls in the Naked Girl Business as well as a number of stand-alone paintings and drawings, abstract and otherwise. His work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide and is held in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He is a frequent contributor to several independent comics and zines, including Papingand See How Pretty, See How Smart. His first monograph, Zak Smith: Pictures Of Girls, was published in 2005.

Zak Smith's two previous books are Zak Smith: Pictures Of Girls and Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (Tin House Books). He is a frequent contributor to several independent comics and zines, includingPaping and See How Pretty, See How Smart. His work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide and in many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an artist and performs in adult films.

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We Did Porn

By Zak Smith

Tin House Books

Copyright © 2009 Zak Smith
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9802436-8-0

Chapter One

At first, the only noise is coming from trucks washing over a nearby road, and this sounds like it does at night-like enormous things going on underwater. I feel small. I'm in a car parked on a nowhere corner where no one lives and what light there is, from the gas station, wedges itself in around the air pockets where the tinting hasn't stuck to the windows, making shapes. My knuckles are cold. All of this is normal for people on Valentine's Day. This is years ago-before I had done porn, or ever thought I would. At eight o'clock on every Valentine's Day there are people who wait, and who don't know what's going to happen. In Europe there's a time difference, so it's already happening, whatever it is. In Japan, it's called a "chocolate obligation" and they are now sleeping off, or waking up next to, whatever it's done for them. I hope it does something for them-you hear things can be hard, romantically speaking, for the Japanese. In Brooklyn, people are still waiting in the backseats of cars. Some are tired, scared, or bored. Some think they're going to ruin everything-some are right. Some have flowers or headaches or both, some are going to cry, some are taking pills or rehearsing what they'll say, some have skin problems that have just gotten started, some don't care but are doing it anyway and don't think much about it, some are doing it but don't think it'll work, some will never do it again but don't know that yet, some will go home on a train and swear into the reflection on the other side of the train-car that they will spend every night from now on alone in front of a TV flipping to any show where anyone is talking about anything as long as it isn't them or maybe just watching static. And they'll eat whatever they want from a bowl and drink tea even after it gets cold and not care forever until everyone forgets that they ever lived. Some want to call ahead and ask the Japanese how it'd gone. I'm in the backseat of a car. Punks are not supposed to have to do this kind of thing, and, maybe because I never have before, now that I'm here I feel hyperaware of all the other lone people who must also be waiting in the dark all over the rest of the hemisphere. "I never realized," I say to them in my head, at the beginning of my date. "The conditions here are awful. You all should unionize or something-collectively bargain, like." The hired driver of the hired car had stopped and gotten out without saying why. Is this what happens when you pay people to drive you around? Thinking how things sometimes are over faster if you don't ask questions, I didn't ask questions. For a while, there is just the noise of traffic and dead air from a road I can't see and the usual blinking in the black and in the distance, like we're in the electronics deparment after hours-but at some point something in the car begins breathing. When you're strangely dressed and worrying it feels like anything anything might be a big cold night-snake ready to ambush and fuck you. So what's this breathing? Is it just a sound made by this kind of car? Did he go to get it fixed? Isn't the Rumblers' garage just over ... No, it's breathing. Someone's mouth is valving gas around this car for sure. This isn't a limo, there isn't room for some secret person. Is a person in the trunk? Why did the driver leave me alone on Valentine's Day with a person in the trunk? That isn't normal. Will I have to solve this? Fuck this Day. The driver comes back, opens a bag of chips, gives them to a totally unexpected Puerto Rican boy in the passenger seat in front of me, gets back behind his wheel, and pulls back onto the road. The driver says, "Thank you." I say, "No problem." Then no one says anything. Brooklyn spins around us, windows reflecting intersections and storefronts and forty-year-old abandoned cars. We almost kill someone on a bicycle. My instructions are, basically, to act stupid. My porno date wants to be taken someplace where she might see Puff Daddy. This is our first date, so I have to try to act like someone who someone who would want to go somewhere where she might see Puffy would want to be at that place with-until I figure out how she really is and can act some other way. I'm scared. I'm also happy and lucky. I breathe and hear my own breathing and am glad to hear it still sounds like me Trying not to overprepare, I watch the Brooklyn usual go by to the tune of Godflesh songs I'm playing in my head: an ad for gum; capsized strollers; the grease-smeared hotbox of a shallow- fronted take-out place full of fizzing Chinese; tiny kids in coats alone outside delis; bikes chained with every kind of lock and missing every conceivable combination of parts like a forensic display on methods of bicycle decomposition; the tags of world-famous street-art geniuses and of people who never tagged again; the stoic, eaten globe of a broken subwaystop pole casually decapitated for the thousandth time; JMZ trestles casting piano-key shadows; Fat Albert's Warehouse; whole blocks that haven't heard English in decades; a restaurant that used to be a hat shop; a church that used to be a furniture store; a nothing that used to be a theater; dogs tied to anything vertical; stained busses like rotten fridges shoving themselves up the lane from red light to red light; a pile of televisions and fans half covered in plastic-expecting rain; and pizza places painted the colors-red, yellow, green-of the pizza-version of the Italian flag. These things feel good and familiar. Tonight, nothing else will be both. I'm starting to think the kid in the front seat might somehow work against me on my date, so I'm relieved when we get to the girl's place-on a warehousily empty street-and she says-through the speaker-to let the car go while she finishes getting ready. So none of that mattered. Breathe some more. Move smart in your embarrassing black Valentine's getup. Good-bye, car and kid. You were okay. You got me this far. * * *

The first sign is good-Tina DiVine is more nervous than you'd think a porn girl about to go on a date with some painter would be. The dark dots in her eyes roll all over their twin whites, pushing her nose and mouth around, as if she's just gotten her beautiful face and is trying to discreetly test it out. She is a little person with a vanilla-and-butter complexion. She has a big loft whose nonoffice end has almost nothing in it except a titanic television that turns on with a sound like a sucking rupture in space-time and a chair shaped like a big, sexy shoe. She asks me to sit in the sexy shoe while she goes off to a corner that's leaking pink plastic and accessories into the main room and gets dressed. I try to look casual in the shoe and try to use the remote casually. Shiites won the Iraqi elections; we have a new attorney general; and Arthur Miller is dead. In a window behind the TV, the city now seems frozen and quiet. She comes out in something black that looks like it tried as hard as it could to crawl over her but gave up halfway across her chest, and she says how exciting it is to get to wear it somewhere other than a strip club. It is exciting. There are swollen and then falling and then swelling-again curves and spaces between them that the dress has clearly and promisingly been totally unable to negotiate. I call us a cab. * * *

The place we go, in Manhattan, is-well...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TIN HOUSE BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2009
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0980243688
• ISBN 13: 9780980243680
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Zeichner: Smith Zak
• Anzahl der Seiten: 480
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarien