Oh, pornography. Progressives still get turned around.
Does it victimize women? Reinforce impossible sexual expectations?
Cheapen intimacy? In his new book, We Did Porn, Zak Smith cuts
to the crux of the confusion: “The most hideous thing about
pornography, of course, is that it works. On you.”
The memoir/art book We Did Porn is not an apologia. (Nor,
despite the rather outrageous claims made on the book’s
cover—”will do for porn what Hunter S. Thompson did for
motorcycle gangs and Tom Wolfe for psychedelica”—is it a radical
gonzo interpretation of the way porn is created or consumed.)
It is, however, just the sort of thing that those progressives who
do enjoy entertainment of the naked variety occasionally require in
order to validate their consumption habits: An intelligent, funny, and
self-aware reminder that intelligent, funny, and self-aware people do
in fact choose to work in the porn industry.
Smith is an artist best known for an installation for the Whitney
Biennial that consisted of illustrations of every single page of
Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Then he moved to LA and
started doing alt-porn. We Did Porn makes the transition between
the New York art world and the LA porn world seem unnervingly
seamless.
Smith’s main function as a narrator is to report, and to
occasionally say something weighty. On Los Angeles: “The learning curve
for properly grasping human behavior and therefore the world’s workings
is that much more difficult in any environment where the answer half
the time is ‘Why? Because drugs.'” Stylistically, he specializes in
paragraph-long sentences punctuated by snappy one-liners, and wading
through his willfully convoluted prose can be nerve-wracking at
times—wondering if he’ll arrive, grammatically intact, at the
point for which he set out. (He mostly does.) The best parts of the
book are anecdotal ones, like his hilarious summation of porn star
Sasha Grey’s appearance on the Tyra Banks Show. “Tyra asks
[Sasha] why there is something cold, hard, and distant about her…
This, coming from Tyra Banks, is really, really, really, really funny.”
There’s sex, too, lots of it; and musing about why some people like
rape fantasies, and bitching about the art scene, and explaining what
can and does go wrong on a porn set. It is all incredibly interesting
and entertaining. If you’re into that kind of thing.