Re: <nettime> Sodom Blogging - "Alternative porn" and aesthetic

[lotu5@resist.ca]

Thanks for the interesting article. I found it to be a great overview
touching on lots of interesting topics...

> But punk, thus dressed up as leftist radicalism, disowned its roots
> in fetishism, or rather displayed its other side, traced already in
> the late 1970s' rivalry between punk and disco by Spike Lee's movie
> "Summer of Sam", with punk culture - dominated by heterosexual white
> men - nursing its resentments of the poly-sexual, gay-dominated and
> multi-ethnic disco culture. German polit-punk band Slime's disparaging
> refrain of 1981, "Samstag Nacht, Discozeit / Girls Girls Girls zum
> Ficken bereit [Saturday night, disco time / girls girls girls ready to
> fuck]", expressed an attitude which, six years later, at the apex of
>

Is your point about punk being dominated by heterosexual white men
ignoring bands like Crass? The Penis Envy album with heavy feminist
themes, came out in 1981, the same year as the Slime album you quote. I'm
no punk history expert, jsut clarifying and trying to avoid smothering
difference for the sake of argument... I mean, clearly some punks were
more than just dressed up as leftist.

> With this personalization and psychologization, Indie porn is making
> the logical next step in a progressive unmasking of the pornographic
> actor that began in the 1980s with the switch (recounted at epic length
> in the movie "Boogie Nights") from 35 millimeter porno-theater flicks to
> cheap video, continued in Gonzo anal sex porn, and culminates in Internet
> pornography. Gonzo porn is even more subversive and transgressive than
> Indie pornography in that it subliminally satisfies and thus installs
> gay desires within the heterosexual mainstream: anal barebacking, women
> styled like drag queens, and - in contradistinction from most 1970s and
> 1980s porn - offensively sexualized male stars, like Rocco Siffredi, in
> the camera's focus. What Gonzo stages as a radical poiesis and white-trash
> body performance in the vein of "Jackass", is turned in Indie porn into
> a sentimentalized confessional discourse before a paying audience cast
> as voyeuristic confessors, with constant assurances of the bourgeois
> normalcy and, irrespective of its rating, the playful harmlessness of
> the sex on view.
>
...
> Just as Indie pop is a specious alternative to the music industry's
> mainstream, and in reality based on the same business model, which is
> being protected by ever more absurd copyright laws, preventive technology,
> cease-and-desist notices and searches of homes, Indie porn is not at
> all "independent" but in fact commercialized and sealed off from free
> channels, even positioned in opposition to them: precisely because the
> mainstream merchandise is easily available on peer-to-peer exchanges,
> pornography, just like pop music, now sells only by virtue of difference,
> including difference from itself.
>

Its interesting that you don't mention nofauxxx.com at all in your
article, and then you come to a conclusion that seems overly simplified.
nofauxx is not an example of some kind of psychological unmasking or
confessional, as it is more an extension of an existing community in
olympia, wa where most people looking at the site already know each other.
also, nofauxxx includes models from lots of sexual and gender orientations
and doesn't adhere to the same kond of normalcy that suicidegirls.com
does, which is often just like playboy with tattoos and piercings.

The business model discussion here seems like an afterthought mostly
unrelated to the rest of the article, but I don't think that claims like
all indie porn is specious hold up. There have to be finer shades within
indie porn that can be identified to make useful claims, imho.

  lotu5


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