Peggy C, The Other Half

It’s been brought to my attention that I haven’t updated this thing in a while. “A while” being the euphemistic term for…oh, 8 months? ::looks around sheepishly::

In my defense, I can only plead that I really am more of a geek than a mouthpiece. While Tony is perfectly (some might say too, but that wouldn’t be me, no way!) comfortable out there blasting away, I’d really rather be squinting at my screen, pulling apart code and figuring out how to get the new store up and running and things like that.

Speaking of the new store, I’m pretty psyched about it. But, um, not the color scheme. Let’s call that “transitional,” shall we? See, I’m actually working on redesigning the whole enchilada here at casa Comstock, the main Web site and our blogs too, but until it’s all ready to go, we figured we should keep using the old color scheme at the new store as a temporary unifying element so that people wouldn’t be disoriented and wonder where the hell they’d clicked off to.

But anyway, aside from the temporary color scheme, the new store is so much nicer and easier to use than the old one, and best of all, we’ve finally got everything in-house with our own super-spiffy secure server and digital certificate and everything. We can, like, sit at the grown-ups table now!

Yes, it’s sad. I really do get excited about this stuff. But on the plus side, I look much nicer in a dress than Tony does, and I can spell!

Okay, evidently I kind of suck at this whole blog-keeping thing. Mostly because I don’t have the kind of philosophical fire in the belly about what we’re doing here at Comstock Films that Tony does. I tend to be on the more practical end of things here, and I think I get caught up in the details of that (as one tends to with work) and it feels mundane and not really anything worth writing about.

But I have to say I’m pretty excited about the upcoming screening of Damon & Hunter at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, not only because of the screening itself (because, like, duh, of course I’m excited about that!) but because I got to design the poster promoting the screening, and…it came out pretty freaking cool if I do say so myself.

I know you’ve probably already seen this on Tony’s blog… but I don’t care! There appears to be some genuine buzz brewing down in Melbourne over this thing and it’s been fun to be a part of it.

As promised last week, I’ve uploaded a gallery of 15 yummy stills from the Matt & Khym shoot to their film page.

I hope you enjoy them!

What do women want, especially in terms of porn (or *koff* “erotica” but don’t let Tony hear you use that word)?

Good question.

Actually, it’s always struck me as kind of an odd question, but it’s one I come across so often. Why…I mean, I guess this is just me bristling at the notion that half of the human population can be easily swept into one monolithic category: women.

Don’t get me wrong, I get that people want a hook for their story or thesis or whatever, or they’re trying to understand a heretofore underserved market… but… No. Just no.

“Women” want everything and nothing. They want romance, and hardcore, and kink. They want to see parts, they don’t want to see parts. They want soft focus, they want gritty verite. They want beautiful idealized models, they want “normal” looking bodies. They want fantasy, they want reality. They want violins and true love, they want anonymous zipless fucks with strangers. They want…yeah–that too, whatever it is.

And that’s just me! I mean, what about the other 2 1/2 billiion women out there. God only knows what they want.

As we dig in on the editing for Matt & Khym, one of the things I’ll be doing this week is adding a gallery of stills to the film page (like the ones we have for Xana & Dax, Ashley & Kisha, and Damon & Hunter.

Looking over that footage with Tony, I have to say, the light in Matt & Khym’s film is gorgeous. We shot them in the morning and there’s a really wonderful, languid can’t-quite-get-out-of-bed feeling to it. Really suits them well.

It’s kind of hard to explain the tension over the last few weeks, waiting for Damon & Hunter to finally get here already. Definitely a learning experience, that’s for sure. And it really makes me happy to see how patient and good-willed our customer base has been for the most part. There were a few grumblers here and there (I’m surprised there weren’t more, frankly!) but the vast majority of people have been amazingly supportive of our efforts and understanding about the difficulties we ran into.

So, you know, to put it more formally: Comstock customers rule, dude!

Now I’m mostly in a state of nervous excitement, waiting for people to receive their copies of the film, and to see what they think of it. I hope you’ll let us know.

Okay, enough celebrating…back to Matt & Khym…

Battling referrer log spam. Oh joy. Because I really don’t have anything better to do with my afternoon than figuring out why our site’s access logs are clogged with hits from bogus sites about horny Russian teenagers with webcams. (Although, to be fair, the party poker and online casino sites are just as bad with this practice.)

As I was muttering curses under my breath researching this phenomenon, it also made me think about the place of porn in our society — how sad it is that sexually explicit material treads almost exclusively in the gutters and bad neighborhoods of our awareness, presenting itself like a marginally criminal enterprise even when it’s perfectly legal. Vice. I realize that for some people, the illicitness is part of the thrill, but when it’s always like that? All the fucking time??? It gets old.

I’d like to be able to tell people what I do, what Tony and I do without it being met with suspicion. I’d like to not be assumed off the bat to be a merchant of sleaze — see Tony’s recent experience on the Ovusoft bulletin boards (Hard times at Ovusoft) for an example that left me seething.

If there’s going to be a revolution, can it start already? Huh?

p.s. for anyone curious about the referrer log spam thing, I found the following article helpful — Proposal on referrer spam with some recommendations for bloggers to help make this practice less appealing to spammers.

Long time, no blog. I’m still not used to having this thing. I’ll try to be better going forward!

One of the things that’s been occupying my thoughts now that Damon & Hunter is done, is a long (long) needed redesign of the Comstock Films Web site.

Are there any features of the current site you feel strongly about one way or another? Things you wish we did that we don’t? Things you really wish we’d stop doing? Drop me a line, either here in the comments, or via email (peggy@ the domain here) and let me know! I’d love to get input from people who actually use the site.

I have to confess that I’m feeling a little unsure where to begin with this blog. See, Tony’s got the whole burning hellfire zealotry thing going (and yeah, he’s like that at home too!) which… I don’t quite share. In fact, if I had to describe in one word, my feelings on the subject of porn*, it would be “ambivalent.”

I don’t find most porn offensive nearly so much as baffling. Shuttling through an award-nominated gonzo release with Tony not long ago, the thought actually crossed my mind that I might be an alien from another planet. Seriously. It would go a long way toward explaining how utterly removed and distant I feel from the portrayals of sexuality I see in the world around me.

I just don’t get it.

Since getting involved in Comstock Films with Tony, and learning more about the technical aspects of production, it’s become easier to see some of the things common to porn that build toward that reaction. Sometimes we pick things apart like John Madden with a telestrater — Tony will pause a DVD mid-scene and we’ll play “what’s wrong with this picture” (it’s a really sad commentary on the state of porn that I find that much more entertaining than anything happening between the performers grunting and banging away on the screen.)

And while it’s helpful to have some handle on the more concrete, or technical aspects of what’s lacking in porn, I know that those things are merely physical manifestations, symptomatic of a far deeper and more entrenched problem with how we as a culture deal with sexuality. I don’t really mean that in a flaky utopian “oh, if only we could all just grow up and be enlightened and shit” way, either.

I’m not entirely sure what I mean by it, frankly. Maybe I’ll use this blog to try and figure it out.

*I’m talking about moving image porn, now, not written smut which I quite often love — but that’s another post for another time.

Don’t mind me, I’m just having a minor geek-gasm over here having just installed the Brian’s Threaded Comments plugin. I suppose it’s from having a lot of personal friends who do their “blogging” over on LiveJournal where whole mini-conversations frequently crop up within the comments of someone’s initial post. When I came over to Blog-land, I have to admit I thought it was kinda lameass that threaded comments were not the norm!

Anyhoo, I’ll try to post something with actual, you know, content next time. Right now, I’m just doing my little Snoopy-dance of “it worked!” glee.