Deli Spoon, my home away from home in Marigot, SXM

My family has flown back home, which leaves me free to hang out at the cafe, nursing a drink for hours french-style and checking out what’s new on the internet.

And what do I get for my trouble? Yesterday I saw that someone is marketing vulva dye, which promises to “restore women’s sexual confidence” by pinking up their pussies. Naturally this dye is available in a variety of colors with names reminiscent of famous porn stars.

I can’t quite figure out why this bothers me so much. After all, I rather like lipstick and other affectations and artifices of femininity, so why should pussy make-up get my panties in a bunch?

But as I look to my draft of unfinished essays, I see there’s a rather long one about Betty Dodson, her online “this is what vulvas actually look like project” and the effect of 2257 on people’s ability to express themselves anonymously.

The right and ability to dissent anonymously is fundamental. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was published anonymously. The Federalist Papers were publish anonymously.

But if Betty can’t put up annonymously offered (but clearly “of age”) pictures of women’s vulvas without running afoul of the law, that means that the images that most people see most of the time are going to be commercially produced images; which for a variety of reasons are going to fall into a very narrow range. So while everyone knows perfectly well what the lips on a woman’s face look like sans cosmetics or cosmetic surgery, our vision of what the lips between a woman’s legs should and do look like is informed by images that are fantastically constrained by the laws and economics that dictate what can and cannot have free, unfettered access to the market.

I’ve explored some of these issues over at TheIntentToArouse.com, but they might best be summed up by the OFLC’s dictum that if a photograph of a woman shows “excessive genital detail” then a magazine with such photos must be wrapped in plastic and kept behind the counter.

Of course this isn’t good for sales, so people who want to make money in Australia selling magazines with pictures of sexy ladies photoshop “excessive genital detail” out of their magazines; and leave trading on “excessive genital detail” to those who are satisfied with the more meager returns of being relegated to the ‘porn ghetto’.

And then the whole thing feeds on itself. Making beautiful images of vulvas is like making beautiful images of food; whether it’s a big bowl of steamed fruti di mar, or a vulva, wet and plump and in full bloom, rendering a photograph that does justice to the subject is hard work; and if you don’t pull it off, the photo stands a good chance of actually look revolting.

But while there’s good money to be made in food photography (I used to do a little, and 20 years ago I assisted one of the best food photographers in New York) the returns on specializing in “excessive genital detail” are meager.

Which turns the whole thing further back on itself. What does a beautiful sexy pussy look like? Trim and pink. The OFLC says so. The DA in Utah says so. And so does any company with a “no pornography” clause in their TOS. And no matter what Alison Croggon thinks, or what Violet Blue thinks, is where the rubber hits the road on the Art vs. Porn or Erotic vs. Porn question. Period. Paragraph. Page.

—

Meanwhile, one of the reasons I decided to make this trip was to try and figure out what’s next for me. My “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex” films are produced with keen awareness of what the limits of the market are, which has meant either transcending the limits in cunning ways (shooting film for example) or accepting those limits in cunning ways (for example, developing a format that works without music.)

But in a very similar way to how shooting on consumer photo/video gear has a profound impact on the sort of images you can make, or like making the desciiion whether or not to show “excessive genital detail” has a profound impact on where and how you can market your films (thereby limiting the the sorts of films you can make) the decsssion to “go naked” (sans music) influences creative decssions in a fundemental way.

—

Let’s loop it out a little more.

One of the reasons I moved from making films like A Generation of Hope or Fair Winds/Uncertain Future or Sudden Shock to making a full-time commitment to my erotic work was because taking on and trading other people’s pain was simply taking too big a toll on my mental health and even my physical health. Back in 2003,  when I got back from Kenya I had terrible stomach problems, and figured it was a bug I picked up in the bush.

Nope.

Turns out it was just stress. The stress of wallowing in other people’s misery and trying to make good films and a good living out of it. Ironically, I realized this because shortly after I got back we went on a family vacation to the Canadian Maritimes and ended up in Peggy’s Cove on the 5th anniversary of the Swiss Air Crash, and CBC Radio had a radio-doc on the lasting effects of the crash on the community, including (wait for it) a big up tick in “unexplained” stomach problems. (It all came clear as our overloaded Volvo wagon hit yet another chuckhole in Nova Scotia’s not so well maintained roads, pressing the lap-belt against my stress-cramped guts.)

And the feeling I get when I read about labiaplasty and vulva dye is about the same. My stomach tightens. I lose my appetite and I want to make somebody pay.

—

This is no way to live a life. Nor is missing fine surf or a day of good clamming (fruti de mar indeed!) because Google has over-tweeked their anti-spam algorythms and dissapeared your company.

Neither is making films without music anyway to make films. Before “Real People, Real Life, Real Sex” my productions were known (in my little NGO world) for using music well.

I could do this because when you have $25K, $50K, $150K to make a film that might only be 5 or 10 minutes long, you have the money to pay real composers and real musicians to make real music. I could do this because when you make films about people showing that even under the most terrible conditions, our better nature will out, you can negotiate good rates to use well-known musics

So where as I once got rights for 8 different Ennio Morricone tracks from The Mission for only $4,000; pennies on the dollar for the “going rate,” I had zero success trying to get rights to use even small portions of any of the artists that Damon and Hunter referenced in telling the story of how they fell in love. (I thought it might be nice over the closing credits.)

—

So anyway, I promised tools, right?

Previously on this blog I’ve gone on (at some considerable length) that the tools used to make sexual images have a huge effect on what we think sex looks like. I see this as hand in glove with the way “excessive genital detail” and “no pornography” TOS, and obscenity laws effect what we see. (In fact, the second, yet to be written half of TheIntentToArouse.com is concerned with film theory and filmcraft, and how differently most of the explicit erotic images we see are made and in turn how they effect us differently.)

One of the  things I promised myself I would do with my free time down South was dig into digital music making tools. Back when dinosaurs walked the earth, I was a promising music theory  and composition student. But I didn’t (and still don’t) have keyboard skills, an that was a huge handicap in studying traditional four-part harmony based composition and arranging.

But right about the time I was deciding that photography was a better path for me, the very first of the Macintosh/MIDI based music composition, arrangement and transcription tools were coming online. I’ve always wondered how things might have been different if those tools had been available to me just a little sooner.

Which is all a long winded way of saying I’ve been fooling around with GarageBand, and in sort of the same way that a Canon Elf will make all your erotic photographs look more or less like IShotMyself.com, GarageBand is making everything I try to do come out more or less like Trent Reznor:

NtheSludgeWithU.m4a

Anyway, tools, sounds, images and dissent. A friend who masters records for artist like Carlos Santa and Aretha Franklin says these days people prefer the sound of compressed audio; that since the advent of the iPod, people think that’s the way music is supposed to sound and they don’t like it as much when they hear uncompressed versions of the same song.

I guess whether that’s more or less panty-twisting than designer-vagina labiaplasty and cunt-blush depends on what you care about; and I guess it’s just my bad luck that I care about both…

From the love scene in BRETT AND MELANIE: BOI MEETS GIRL

You would think that after 15 years, a dozen studies and half a dozen well-liked films that it would get easier, that I would start to feel like I know what I’m doing.

And in some ways it has.

When I get stuck, I can remind myself that in many ways, whatever the current couple might be, the approach has proven to be artistically and commercially successful, and there stands ever good chance that whatever I’m stuck on will give way, and ultimately I will find myself with another entertaining and erotic film.

But there is a flip side.

The approach is so very spare, so unaffected, that there’s precious little place to hide. In answering their own self-posed question “Why did we do this?” Brett and Melanie answered almost unison, “Fucking is easy, this (meaning the interview and the overall intimacy) is the hard part.”

Indeed.

With every successive film I become more and more aware how laid bare I am in this work. Maybe not to viewers, whom I hope are caught up in the words and bodies of the films’ subjects, but to myself.

—

For those of you who have been reading this blog for a while, perhaps you’ve noticed a shift in the tenor in the past year or so. An uncertainty has replaced gumption. Too often generosity has given way to bitterness. 10 years after all the promise the internet seemed to offer for a real change in how sexuality and image-making might be understood, I look around and to me it looks like meet the new boss/same as the old boss; and I find myself making vows that I won’t get fooled again.

Then while I was in Bermuda, this:

Dear Mr. Comstock,

I’m just writing to you to thank you for changing my life. Okay, so that’s a bit effusive, but also true. In addition to simply growing up in our sexually insane society, I’m an abuse survivor. For all of my life, sexuality has been a harsh contrast between what I’ve secretly imagined it could and ought to be, and what a profound source of trauma it’s actually been. You make films that dare to show the former; that say “yes, this truly exists in the world, it is not just a fairy tale, and ordinary mortals can aspire to achieve it.”

Your artistic courage and conviction have deeply inspired me, and I hope in some small way I can inspire you in return. You’ve blogged about your frustrations with the porn industry, Google, and… well, just about everyone, in a culture that doesn’t understand what you’re doing. Please don’t forget that you aren’t doing this for them. I don’t know how many others actually write to you to say this but I feel certain that I’m not the only one for whom your vision of sexuality has been, or will be, desperately needed in today’s world.

Keep fighting the good fight.

S.W.

I read S.W.’s words tucked in the v-berth of INTEMPERANCE and was shaken to my core. I wrapped my arms around myself, holding on tight as I sobbed great heaving sobs and tears and snot streamed down my face. Six weeks earlier, at NYU Film School I compared myself to that immortalized Korean War Marine corporal, out of ammunition and options and shedding brave and and frustrated tears, still willing to fight, if only he had the means.

But that was not me in Bermuda. Means gone. Will gone. Nothing left but anguish that S.W.’s life had been so deeply wounded, that it fell to my meager little films to provide comfort, and shame that after all my good fortune, I didn’t know if I had the strength to “keep fighting the good fight.”

—-

BRETT AND MELANIE is locked. I am now working on getting a good encode, and from there making the DVD. Serendipitously, just a couple of days ago I received an e-mail from the Cultural Affairs Officer at the New York LGBT Center (where earlier this year Ashley and Kisha had two very successful screenings) asking if they could hold the World Premiere. I happily agreed. It’s nice to have my work acknowledged. It’s nice to know that the film will have an opportunity to play in front of an appreciative audience. It’s nice to know that at least sometimes, the film’s the thing, not who made the film, or why they made the film; but whether or not the audience will feel their time’s been well spend watching the film. I think I still have the will to fight that fight - to make films people enjoy seeing.

Last Friday I did an interview with Yacht Blast’s Gary Brown in the cockpit of INTEMPERANCE whilst anchored in Simpson Bay on the dutch side of St. Maarten. Gary wanted to ask me what it was like to be a first time skipper on the non-trivial passage from New York to the Caribbean via Bermuda, and I was glad to share my experience with Gary and his listeners; not because I’m an expert offshore sailor (far from it!), but because I’m an expert on what I did.

Through out my (so called) career as a documentary filmmaker, that’s always been my philosophy in how I tell stories. Yes, occasionally I talk to experts, (mostly for context and exposition) but I am primarily interested people who are actually living the story. In 2000, when I went to Zimbabwe to make a film about the phenomenom of child-headed households in the wake of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, I talked to a few experts, but mostly I talked to the children, some as young as 10 years of age, who were left to look after their younger brothers and sisters after their parents died. Not so many facts and figures, but a lot more humanity; at least thats’ the way I see it, and that’s what interests me; not facts and figures, but real human stories.

It is precisely for this reason that the label “educational” chafes a little. Yes, I understand the role that our films can and do play in educational and theraputic situation. It’s unbelievable that after more than 100 years of cinema, it falls to yours truly to provide a simple, normalized view of sexuality; and I’m told that my films are found to be useful in situations as divergent as the rehabitation of sexual criminals to providing reassurance and encouragement to couples experiencing intimacy problems, to a simple “visual/emotional aphrodisiac” for couples how are already experiencing a robust and satisfying sex life. But my films are decidedly not “how to’s”, and more than that, I think there’s a real danger in how-to’s

Bill (of Bill and Desiree) touch on this in this passage from near the end of Love is Timeless.

And I had some further thoughts about education vs inspiration and the surfing concept of “stoke” in my post from last year titled “Not Everything Is Mt. Everest (Selling Sexual Dysfunction)”

As I related this to Gary, he told me about backing his way into telling the story of how he and his wife survived being capsized in the Bay of Biscay, and how important it was that his experience not be contextualized as expertise.

“The sea is different for everyone, and what worked for us in that situation might be the exact opposite of what would work in another situation. ” said Gary, and my mind flashed on the woman with whom I had a serious relationship while I was just out of collage, particular how different how she enjoyed cunnelingus was from how my wife enjoys it.

“Laura” liked it hard. I mean really hard. I mean I had a callous on the inside of my lower lip from using it as a pad to keep my teeth from cutting into her. She liked my chin pushed into her. I’d contrive ways to cantalever myself so I could bring the weight of my body to bear on the task.

By contrast, Peggy likes such a light touch, I nearly have to make a game of *not* touching her. Save the fact that it’s my mouth and a women’s vulva, I’d scarcely call two undertaking by the same name. Against these divergent realities, what constitutes expertise? Like Gary and his wife, fighting for their lives in the Bay of Biscay, and ultimately surviving, what more is their to say beyond, “This worked for me in this situation, but mostly you have to listen, mostly you have to pay attention.” Like the sea, sex is different for every person.

—

Once I made the decision to make the trip from New York to the Caribbean, I scoured the internet looking for material that would give me an idea of what it might be like to be “out there”, but mostly I was disappointed. The stuff written by experts was laden with, well, expertise. The stuff on YouTube, while convincing in its authencity, was under produced (for all the promiss of this new DIY media age, making a good video still requires more investment in time than most amateur efforts can afford to invest.)

Before we left for our passage, I had had the thought I might shoot some footage along the way and produce a video, something along the lines of “Bluewater Sailing: I did it and so can you!” but I spent most of the trip either hanging on for dear life (New York to Bermuda) or simply soaking in the experience (Bermuda to St. Maarten.) I don’t think I took more than 10 minutes of footage the whole trip, and what footage I did take is decidedly unprofessional looking. Some more rumination is in order on whether I have anything to offer the sailing world in the form of a film…

In the mean time, here’s a photo of where I am now — Marigot Bay, working on Brett and Melanie, and anxiously awaiting the arrival of my wife and daughters.

INTEMPERANCE lying at anchor in Marigot Bay, SXM

A 12 pound mahi mahi on it’s way to becoming the best lunch I’ve ever had.

Nine days.

That’s how long it took us to sail from St. George’s Harbour in Bermuda to Simpson Bay in St. Maarteen. Some highlights:

I beat a fish to death with a winch handle and ate it for lunch.

I swam in 15,000 ft of water in conditions so calm that at night I could see the reflection of individual stars in the ocean.

I got sea sick for only the second time in my life. (The first being
Montauk to Bermuda)

I sailed for four days with a light wind on our port quarter and hardly touched the tiller once.

I (finally) satisfied 30 years of curiosity and longing to find out “What
is it like out there?”

In total the trip from Montauk to St Maarten was 16 days at sea and 10 days waiting in Bermuda for weather. We sailed about 1800 nautical miles covering a point to point distance of about 1500 miles. I saw things I’ve never seen before, including things I hope to never see again (my mainsail triple reefed being one of them.)

I feel changed. I’m not sure exactly how, but I feel changed. It’s something about covering a great distance at five knots, but also about the vastness. Writing to our trip’s godfather, I said it was “magically mundane” and he seemed to think that was as good a description as he’s heard in all his voyages, but we both agreed it doesn’t do the experience justice.

What comes next, I don’t know. Some very nice people helped me make this trip by pre-ordering Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl, so I’d guess I’d better get it finished up. I got it more or less finalized while waiting on weather in Bermuda. Now just a little polishing and it’ll be done. It is a *very* sweet story, real lump in my throat tear in your eye stuff, which is not something you hear about films that feature giant black strap-on dildos.

Anyway, I can check my e-mail once or twice a day, so I guess I am now officially back in contact. Many thanks to all who sent well-wish or kept us in your thoughts. It was much needed and much appreciated!

Swimming next to INTEMPERANCE on a calm day, in thousands of feet of water and hundreds of miles from the nearest land.

Peggy Comstock, on the set of DAMON AND HUNTER, burning through her first 1000 feet of Kodak 16mm filmstock.

Peggy and I met on the old  NYC cyberpunky BBS and ISP Mindvox about six months before they started offering IP service, so the first poking around the internet we did was on programs like gopher and telnet.

One day a new program appeared in the applications list: lynx. I tabbed down and the next thing I knew I was poking around the website of the National Wildlife Forencit Lab in my hometown of Ashland OR. (One of the thing they do at the lab is certify bald eagles as roadkill, which then allow Native Americans to use the feathers without violating the endangered species act. If you hang around the Ashland post office you’ll see little bald eagle sized cardboard coffins coming and going from the lab.)

Anyway, that was my first experience with the World Wide Web, and I sent a note to Peggy saying, “Hey, have you checked out this links thing? It’s pretty cool.” and she did, and within a few of months Mosaic came out, Peggy had taught herself HTML, put up a couple of award winning personal websites, and gone from being an administrative assistant to a producer/designer in her company’s new online division.

Of course it wasn’t long before basic format tags weren’t enough to get the job done, so as needed Peggy taught herself some java script, and PERL and CGI.

Then she dug into Photoshop and Illustrator and all the other tools and skills that an interactive designer needed in pocket to keep up with the times. She learned how to wrangle WP blogs and Zencart e-commerce; all while developing her own design aesthetic (which are house and garden benefit from as well!) She knows how to manage servers.

When I realized that the way I wanted to shoot sex was build on sports and sit-com style cinematography, Peggy learned how be a camera operator; first on video and then on Super16. “Women love real sex.” is Peggy’s line. So is “Learn through love.” Peggy designed our trade show booth and the show sponsors always ask if they can take a photo to show other small businesses that you can make a really nice booth without spending thousands and thousands of dollars.

And of course while this was all going on, Peggy carried, birthed and has been a mother to our two children. And oh yeah, somewhere in there she found the time to write a book that was published by Barron’s. And the three months of being first mate boat with a neophyte time skipper, two children, a dog and a cat; even though before that she had never spent more than four hours straight on a boat.

I’d reckon if you took the above criteria — knows designing, building and running websites inside and out, shoots award-winning erotic films on both video and film, published author, mother, and all the rest– you’d end up with a venn diagram describing a region with exactly one inhabitant – my wife. I don’t reckon there’s anyone who’s done as many different things and done them as well as my wife has.

She’s a great cook and a hell of a bargain hunter too. Most years we manage to put at least a little in savings, which let’s me do crazy things like make my movies the way I want to make them, or sail across oceans, or tell HBO to go to hell.

Earlier this year Peggy got interested in on open-source coding project centered around fan-fic/fair-use issues, the only problem was to be involved she need to know how to code in Ruby. So she started downloading tutorials and teaching herself Ruby. Now she’s a lead programer on the project and taking online courses from MIT. And learning Python. (I don’t know that that is but it sounds scarier than Ruby!)

I’m telling you this because she won’t; it’s not her way. She’s shy. She doesn’t like to talk about herself. And besides, she’s too busy walking the walk to talk the talk.

Six days out, I’m showing a little wear and tear

Our first erotic documentary film MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY was shot in one afternoon in the bedroom of my and Peggy’s Hells Kitchen apartment. Marie and Jack made love in and then were interview sitting on the edge of the same bed that Peggy and I slept in and made love in ourselves.

In fact, when the day was over, I wasn’t so happy about the shoot. The lovemaking was fantastic and I knew it was going to be wonderful, but the interview had drifted away from their relationship with each other and more toward their relationship with “the industry” than I had really wanted, and included too much testimony that was unsupportable with the footage we had (and the time I was still very much hung up on the interview/b-roll idea and hadn’t yet discovered how much room their was for anecdotes to breathe inside of my films. Someday I’ll take another pass at MARIE AND JACK, shaping it more like subsequent films.)

At any rate, I resolved to edit the lovemaking, which after fiver years of test-shooting was the first model release lovemaking footage we had shot, and use that to show perspective subjects how my approach to documenting sex was different from what people usually see.

Then a couple of months later, on 9/11 my and Peggy’s world was turned upside down, along with everyone else’s. Suddenly I had time on my hands.

Another month after that I was at a book launch party that was within smelling distance of “The Pile”. I’m not kidding when I say smelling distance. The Pile had a queer, unforgettable odor that I hope I never smell again. I still remember being able to look down the street from the club where the book party was being held and seeing the great heap of smoldering debris lit up in the bright blue white of the work lights, and how they contrasted with the yellow of the sodium vapor of the regular street lights.

It was at this party that my life took a fortuitous turn. Inside their were how to find your g-spot demos, and how to use cut open condom for a dental dam demos and all manner of other sex positive hijinx. But the thing that caught my eye were the monitors that were set up showing the very best of the sex-positive videos I had read about at places like Good Vibes and Toys in Babeland.

Of course I had been too cheap to actually buy them, so I only knew them from the glowing write-ups in catalogs and in the various books that constituted the sex-positive cannon at the time. This was my first chance to actually see them with my own eyes.

And they were terrible.

I know, that’s not a very nice thing to say, but they were really bad. And I thought to myself, “If this is the cream of the cream, then I have to finish MARIE AND JACK.”

And I did. In one month of 12 hour days I finished MARIE AND JACK right around Halloween, and when it was done I decided that it wasn’t so bad after all, in fact it was pretty good; certainly the film could hold it’s own when compared to other things I had seen, and I began (what turned out to be the very hard) task of trying to get people to watch it.

Good Vibrations? Too short, too much talking, no one will buy it. Toy in Babeland? We review every film we sell and have not gotten to yours yet. Libida? Same is TiB. Xandria Catalog? No one answers the phone. Freddy and Eddy? Yeah, it’s around here somewhere. (A few years later Freddy and I laughed about all the crap people would send them and how low he and Eddy’s expectation were of yet another ‘amateur porno”.

Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was pretty discouraged. So I decided I’d spend the next year doing everything I could think of to try and get MARIE AND JACK seen and sold and if after a full year of banging away I’d concede that “everyone” was right and that while MARIE AND JACK was a great little film, it wasn’t commercial and that my vision of what sex and cinema could be wasn’t commercial either.

As it turns out, my vision of sex and cinema was commercial. Not so commercial that Peggy and I make as much money as we did before Comstock Films, but we make enough (so far) and we’ve put something in the world that we think makes the world a little bit better.

- - - - - - -

Bermuda is quite lovely. During the day it’s about 72 degrees. At night it’s about 68. The water is 74 degress day and night. My crew just came back to the boat and brought rum, ice and Coca Cola. A 125 foot cutter just came in, crew wearing matching togs.

For what I spent on things like life-raft, ditch-bag, flairs and all the other crap I needed to make INTEMPERANCE ready for an offshore passage I could have flown down here with my family and staying in a nice hotel for a week, seen all the sites, and left nice tips.

Instead,  I sailed over in what some of the more experienced skippers are saying were some pretty nasty condition (triple-reefed beating across the Gulf Stream would be a clue). I’m anchored out with two guys, eating our meals off a campstove (though truth be told, Darius is an excellent cook, and I’ve never eaten better in my life) making repairs to the boat and watching for a fair weather chance for the next 700 miles of our voyage.  That busted knuckle is still busted because I keep banging it into things.

- - - - - - - -

I described this trip as “a midlife crisis, minus the convertible and the age-inappropriate girlfriend.” But sitting here right now, on my boat that is now in better shape than when it left New York 10 days ago, with the smell of another fine dinner wafting up the companionway, and reflecting on the way I seem to like to do things, it might be midlife, and it might be crisis conditions getting here, but it’s not a midlife-crisis. I just seem to like doing things the hard way.

And I guess I’m just going to have to get used to that. Because I reckon that if all goes right, I’ve got another 30 or 40 trips around the sun I have to make before I can finally take a break.

Captain Comstock enjoying a hard-earn rum and coke in St. George’s Harbor, Bermuda

Intemperance laying easy on a calm October evening

Right now the airport near where my boat is anchored is reporting winds of 22mph, with gusts to 33mph and I can hear the wind moaning in the trees around our house. It rained buckets all day long, making our last day of preparation a soggy and cold undertaking.

But the forecast has the rain stopping sometime around midnight, and the winds starting to slack around day break. By noon it should be a fine day for sailing, and we’ll shove off. With a little luck we’ll make the ~250 needed to clear the Gulf Stream before the next wintery blast. From there it’s another few days to Bermuda. If we’re tired, scarred, hurt, or broken, we’ll stop; otherwise once we pass Bermuda it’s another 700 or so miles South, till landfall somewhere in the Leeward Islands.

In case you’re wondering, no this is not a family trip. Peggy and the kids are staying here. I’m going with two friends, and my family will catch up with me (by airplane) later in the year.

If you’d like to follow along, you can go to our SPOT page, which will have updated position reports overlaid onto Google maps. As long as the dot keeps moving along, you’ll know we’re okay. There’s nothing there now, but by the afternoon tomorrow the page should show our little boat making its way into the Atlantic. By this time tomorrow we should be 50 miles out and hopefully be settling into life aboard our little home on the ocean.

Of course I am nervous; and excited too. I love adventures. This one feels like it’s going to be a good one!

Back when I used to do whitewater rafting and kayaking, we would talk about being “on the tongue”—that point when you’re not actually in the whitewater rapid, but you are on the fast moving green water upstream of the rapid—as being the crucial time, the time when the battle is won or lost. Here’s why:

First of all, whether or not you have a good run through the rapid depends in large measure on where you are on the tongue. The tongue is where you set your line, and this is important because once you’re actually in the whitewater, staying on the right line is a hell of a lot easier than trying to get off the wrong line.

The other thing is that once you’re “on the tongue” you really have to make a commitment to running the rapid. Once you’re on the tongue, trying to bail out is more likely to put you on a bad line then actually keep you from going down the rapid, so you’re better off just setting your line and going for it, even if you’re scared, even if you realize at the last moment that you’ve got no business being there. Once you’re on the tongue, hesitation is just going to make it that much more likely you’ll get your ass kicked.

Right now I feel like I’m “on the tongue” of my upcoming sailing trip. The big decision has already been made, to torture the metaphor a little more, I’ve already picked my line. But now there are a thousand little decisions to make, little corrections and adjustments to try and stay on that line. To make sure that my boat and my crew arrive in the Caribbean safely, of course, but also (hopefully!) feeling like we want to do it again. After all, what’s the point of running a Class V rapid if when you get to the bottom you never want to do it again? It’s supposed to be fun, right?

But in case it all goes pear-shaped, a couple of things.

From time to time, I’ve mentioned that the second couple Peggy and I ever did a test-shoot with enjoyed some pretty novel bedroom play, including acts that generally find their way onto lists of things that, if depicted photographically, are obscene. Only a handful of people have ever seen that film, but not for fear of prosecution. It was a private study, made with the explicit understanding that it would not be distributed.

When it comes to the threat of obscenity prosecution, a long time ago Peggy and I decided that we would do nothing to court such a prosecution, but neither would we make any concession in our work to that threat, either in what we depicted, or in where we distributed our work. We have no “do not ship” list. We believe that if you are an adult, you have the right to buy our DVDs and the right to watch them in privacy. We ship to Utah, we ship to Alabama, and a hundred other zipcodes that most businesses that sell sexually explicit DVDs will not ship to.  This is a conscious act of defiance on our part. A conscious decision not to give in to the chilling effect of obscenity laws, not to have our voice muzzled by fear.

But now I think I’m ready to up the ante.

The night before last, I registered TheFistingProject.org. Should I survive my upcoming trip (I’m pretty sure I will) and not decide to simply sail off into the sunset (I’m not sure I won’t) when I get back in the saddle, this is where I’m going to put my energies. I’m going to take everything I’ve learned about love, filmmaking, search, distribution, marketing, promotion, law, commerce, distribution and all the rest and pour it into, as the tagline says, “a provocation exploring the limits of intimacy, obscenity, and art.”

The landmark obscenity case US v One Book Called Ulysses was orchestrated by Random House in order to challenge obscenity laws and clear a path for the publication of James Joyce’s masterwork. The three films that brought down the Hays Code – The Pawn Broker, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf, and Blowup – were produced and distributed by the biggest studios in Hollywood and featured some of cinema’s greatest stars.

So who’s fighting the battle now? Girls Pooping websites, and video recordings of women shooting milk out of their asses, and dog fighting videos. With these as freedom’s champions, no wonder that since the 1972 Miller decision the reach of obscenity prosecutions has expanded; from photographic depictions to now include drawings, and even mere writing.

Maybe with The Fisting Project I can do a little better. We’ll see when/if I get back…

Also against the possibility of mishap at sea, I’m posting a link to a work-in-progress version of Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl. But before I give you the link, a few provisos:

1) If you made a discount pre-order and I end up in Davy Jones’ Locker, you’ll get a refund.

2) If you made a discount pre-order and now  you’re pissed of that I’m putting up a quarter-screen WIP version, send us a note and we’ll give you a refund. Of course if you do that, we might not let you buy the DVD version when it comes out.

3) The interview is still in two camera split screen; you know, one camera showing both Brett and Melanie side by side, and the other as a single-person close-up. That’s not the way it’s going to be in the final DVD. If watching it that way is going to bother you, then don’t watch! Wait for the DVD.

4) Color and audio on this version ARE NOT FINAL. Close, but not final. Good enough for someone to knows how to watch a work in progress, but if watching it that way is going to bother you, then don’t watch! Wait for the DVD.

5) There are no interstitials, you know, those little peaks at the lovemaking to come that I put in between the interview segments. Again (say it with me now!) if watching it that way is going to bother you, then don’t watch! Wait for the DVD.

6) Yes, you can share it, trade it, send it to your friends! There are already people buying our DVDs and loading our films onto torrent sites and fuck all if I can stop them, so I’m certainly not going to get cheesed if you share something that I purposely put online and asked you to download. You guys know the score. Comstock Films is me and Peggy. Selling DVDs is how we pay our bills. If you want more films, you need to give us money, otherwise we have to do something else. You give us money and we’ll give you DVDs of the best films we know how to make. So far it’s worked out pretty good for us. I hope you’re all happy with your end of bargain too!

But enough with the TOS bullshit. On to the film!

Brett and Melanie: Boi Meets Girl, A free, downloadable, quarter-screen work in progress version.

There might be another blog post or two before I go, and probably a few tweets, but mostly consider this “aloha”.  You can’t imagine how grateful I am to all of you for your support and for helping me make my dreams come true. I could not have done it without you.

Thank you everyone, and I’ll see you on the other side!

Back to the American Scene again, where conservative cultural critic and Reason Magazine editor Peter Suderman muses on how the next generation might be as comfortable expressing themselves music and video has his generation is with blogs and other text-based forms:

To me, that’s a potentially huge shift. And I frequently wonder if, perhaps even more than the social media revolution, it’s a shift that could produce huge changes in the way people communicate. We may end up seeing a generation as able and comfortable with audio production and video editing as my cohort is with web-browsing, blogging, email, and word processing.

In service of his post, Peter posted a little Garage Band ditty to show that new cheap digital tools let folks express themselves musically with sufficient polish that you don’t get bogged down in whether or not they can play, or how well it’s recorded.

       

MakingMusicIsEasy - PETER SUDERMAN

Perhaps not surprisingly Peter got jumped on right out of the gate (because no one is so brave, cruel and wise as when they are leaving anonymous comments on the internet):

Dude. It’s pretty late at night. You can take that down right now and no one will notice. Remember when Friedersdorf made some observations in the style of A Movable Feast? This is worse than that. Seriously, man. Nothing good can come of this.

It’s an easy swipe isn’t it? Someone puts their music up for the world to see, complete with provisos that it’s not to be taken seriously. But deep down we know that no one does that if they don’t think the music they put up sounds okay. It’s an easy target, a pinata, take a swing. Break it open and we’ll all dive in for the candy.

Except Peter’s right. As I’ve banged on time and time again, new tools change how people do things, and even changes who does things, and you never know where that’s going to lead. Mashing up a couple of the comments I left on Peter’s post:

My first major was music, composition and guitar performance (well actually my first major was math, but for the sake of this let’s say it was music.)

I was an okay guitarist, but I was a way above average theory and composition student. Freshman year I was in the second year class. 80% of the students washed out. The next year was just the four of us who survived, so it was like mini masters class. Awesome.

Except I can’t play keyboard. This is a big problem for anyone who wants to have a professional life in music, but especially a problem if you think you want to be a composure. I could get close with theory, plunking out lines one or two at a time. But I don’t have that “I can hear it all in my head thing” so I never really knew if I had written what I wanted until the teacher played it back. Sometimes it was pretty good, especially if I was staying inside well established rules of four-part harmony. Sometimes it was, well, experimental. Just writing this now I’m time traveling to a particular assignment that my professor was genuinely unsure if it was a piece of accidental avante gard genius or the worst music ever written. (the jury is still out.)

My guitar playing hit a wall, and I quit. But right about the time I was leaving I remember the school got a computer that was hooked up to a keyboard. You could play one line at a time and it would play back all the lines at once. Better yet, it would print out sheet music in parts. Awesome. If only they had had that machine two years earlier I might have stayed in music, there would have been no Tony Comstock, and think how much better the world would have been for that…

The absences of technology saved you all from me as a composer, but end up inflicting me as a filmmaker upon the world. But not digital media technology — digital word processing.

After getting rejected for a loan, I got on my roommate’s Mac SE30 and pounded out an angry letter to the president of my credit union. If I had been on a typewriter it never would have gone further than that. But because i was on a word processor I was able to remove typos and misspellings, but also tune and refine my argument — the first time I had ever done that.

Long story short, within 6 months the declined $400 loan had become $15K in loans so I could buy cameras, lights, stands and a car to carry it all in. I was in business. The rest, as they say, is history.

That letter wasn’t the last time I’d use new technology to get around a roadblock in my career path.

Not long after I met Peggy, I bought a Radius Videovision card and the money that made me on my next project was enough to make a down payment on our apartment. Not long after we got our apartment, I got a Media100, and the money that made me on the next project was enough to make a down payment on our house.

But it’s not just about the entrepreneurial side of making art. New tools can be amazingly powerful in unleashing new ideas and new approaches.

I was one of the first people in New York to buy a Sony PD100a, in fact I bought two of them because in the process of doing the studies for what became Comstock Films I realized that cheap DV cameras could be used in a way that would bring cinematography in documentary filmmaking closer to a “one-camera” feel, without tipping over into the “three-camera”/sitcom feel usually associated with multi-camera video-camera productions. Those are the cameras we used to shoot Marie and Jack and Xana and Dax, as well as most of my NGO documentaries.

But Peter’s post isn’t really about all that, it’s about new technology changing the way that people communicate in their everyday lives, and that’s not without significance to a working artist either. Back to my comments:

When I was a upper-level undergrad and BFA student, we used to say the best place to crib ideas was from second term photo students. Enough craft and confidence, but not yet ruined by thinking they know “the right way” to do it. Most of the art I look at these days is made avocationally. It’s like being able to go to a second term crit any day of the week. Lots and lots to steal from. Making a living? Well that’s harder in some ways. It’s hard to make money doing something that anyone can do, so you have to find a way to do something that anyone can’t do. Same as it ever was, right?

And somehow this morning, this all seems tied back to the last post, about learning something new about how things work – boats, film, music – and then having the courage to seize the opportunities that new knowledge presents. The FinalCutPro suite comes with an amazing array of tools, including Garage Band’s big brother, Sound Track Pro and some other fairly powerful sound tools.

25 years ago, back when I was a struggling music student, I would have sold an eye for something like Sound Track Pro; and reading Peter’s post I remembered that after finishing Damon and Hunter meant to reward myself with a little playtime with the program. IIRC, I meant to give myself a month or six weeks to figure out how it works and just to enjoy making some music after so much time away.

Well you know how it is with intentions, good and otherwise, I made a couple of tracks and then got caught up with something else and haven’t had the program open since.

But I thought it was actually pretty brave of Peter to put his GB track up where all his TAS fellows could pounce on it (or maybe worse, ignore it completely.) Inspired by Peter, here are the couple of tracks I made:

Ain’t It Funky Now

Stroke It

I don’t know where these tracks fit into my own personal taxonomy of effort. Maybe they’re like that letter to the credit union I wrote that changed my life. Or maybe they’re like the studies that Peggy and I used to do, not really meant for public consumption, but not without value. Maybe they’re just embarrassing.

Or maybe they’re like those second term photo-student works that used to inspire me – just enough skill and confidence to be interesting or charming without being ruined by being self-conscious. Maybe I can start stealing from myself!

I started writing this last May, but wasn’t quite sure where it was taking me. I got as far as Kenya and then laid it aside. Today I think I’ve finally got my bearings on this post, and know how I want to finish it off.

———-

In 1998 we got a Newfoundland puppy and a year later my wife got the idea that we should get a rowboat to teach the dog water rescue work. Being an incorrigible DIYer I thought I’d give building the boat a try, and a friend of mine suggested I look up Harold “Dynamite” Payson, and through that I found “Instant Boats” and the work of Phil C. Bolger.

 By the later Summer of 1999 we were taking our freshly painted Teal out for it’s first sail — by “we” I mean Peggy with our first child in her belly, our (now full sized) Newfoundland dog, and me — gently gliding across the nearby bay. I celebrated the birth of our daughter by beginning on a Bolger “Light Scooner”, which had it’s maiden voyage on October 1st, 2000 with wife, now hatched daughter, the dog, and me. (That me , the dog and the scooner circa 2001 in the picture.)

Through boat building I also met Bob Wise, who along with his wife Sheila, built the “ultimate instant boat” in the form of the Loose Moose II, a plywood sharpie sailboat big enough for them to live aboard and capable enough to cross an ocean.

Phil Bolger’s instant boats work so well (cheap and fast to build, capable for their purpose) because they strip away the pretense of what a boat is suppose to be, and get to the heart of what it needs to do. They use materials in novel and efficient ways. They don’t cleave to romantised forms.

I built my Teal on my patio in a couple of weekend for a couple hundred dollars. Bob and Sheila built the LMII in about a year in an aircraft hanger at Charles De Gall airport for less than most people spend on a new car. Bob and I began corrisponding, mostly me asking him questions about the reality of making a big boat.

In the Fall of 2002 I got a commission to make a promotional documentary about an NGO relief program in Afghanistan. I knew Bob been had in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance during the offensive against the Taliban earlier that year, so I asked if Bob had any advice for me. What he sent back was this:

1) Grow a beard.

2) Get good kevlar.

3) Get really warm long underwear.

4) Can I come?

A couple months later we were in a bar in Belgrade, Serbia, having just finished 10 long days with a stubbornly unhelpful Russian guide. (The story of how we ended up in Serbia instead of Afghanistan we’ll save for another day.) Bob was talking to me about shooting film, and I was having trouble hearing him. He was telling me my work was good enough to shoot on real cameras. I was hearing him say that because I shot on video my work wasn’t real. I remember being near tears as he (patiently) explained to me all the things that shooting on 16mm would let me do that I couldn’t do on a Sony handicam.

Bob persisted. When Bob got back to the Caribbean (he and his wife live there on a boat) he sent me a link to a camera on eBay, and the next thing I knew I had a Russian-made Krasnogorsk K-3. From the first shot I saw come out of that little wind-up camera (Kiko Martin as the trigger man) I realized Bob was right. My work was good enough for film, and I was just been to scared to hope that shooting film would actually make a difference.

Another half year later and Bob and I were sitting in Jomo Kenyata Airport in Nairobi. We had just spent a month in the parts of Keyna where the tourist don’t go; the parts that are people, and cattle, and poverty. Kiko had gone back to New York a week earlier with 30 precious spools of film, and Bob and I spent another week on Lake Victoria making a short film about fishermen and boats.

 
Fair Winds/Uncertain Future: The Fishing Dhows of Lake Victoria

Having already sold me on shooting film, Bob was on to what to do after the film was made. He was talking about Bruce Brown and Warren Miller and four-walling, he was talking about short-run digital printing, he was talking about pitching production stories to industry trade magazines. This time I wasn’t resisting, I was taking notes.

At the time Marie and Jack was finished but virtually unseen by anyone. There were fewer than 200 hand-made copies in the world. Six years later, we’ve done six or seven commercial pressings of the Marie and Jack DVD, and we have five more of our erotic documentaries completed, all of which have been financially and critically successful and three more in post-production. There are literally tens of thousands of copies of our films in the world, and all of this is in no small measure due to taking Bob’s advice and running with it.

Bob also helped me when I decided it was time stop waiting until I had enough time to build a big boat and just to buy a good old plastic boat and get on with it; and for the last couple of months he has been helping me get ready for my impending trip from New York to the Virgin Islands (or where ever we eventually fetch up.)

So why back to this post today?

Back in 2002, when I asked Bob why he, a person with way more film experience than I had wanted to come work on one of my ULB docs, he said, “If you get it about Bolger, you probably get it about making films, ” and I guess that kind of turned out to be true. I’ve been able to take an unconventional approach to the idea of putting sex on film, come up with some novel technical solutions, and put that all in service of an objective, instead of a form. 

But the thing that’s on my mind today is what happens when someone shows you that many of the obstacles to making the boat you want to make, or making the film you want to make, or living the life you want to live are all in your imagination? That your reasons you can’t are really excuses, conceived in doubt and nurtured by fear?

Over at TheAmericanScene.com a commentor asked me the following:

Tony,why the hell can’t I find anyone who wants to pay me to think up great ideas? It’s like they all want me to work them out, write them down, edit and polish the bastards until they shine like the sun. And even then most of them won’t pay! What gives?

I know he was asking (half) in jest, but it made me remember something I wrote about boat-building right around the time I was first getting to know Bob:

That may be the most seductive aspect of Phil Bolger’s work. When you look at plans for any of his oversized “instant boats” you can actually imagine building them. Sit down with a pad a of paper and a calculator, and you can actually imagine being able to afford to build them. You start to believe you could actually have the boat of your dreams for less than a Korean station wagon. It’s tremendously exciting. It’s even a little scary…

There’s nothing so awful as the moment you realize your dreams are within reach. I have literally been reduced to tears by the sudden epiphany that the only thing standing between me and living the life I want is the doing. When I look at the plans for the the Loose Moose II, or Illinois, or Wyoming, or Breakdown Schooner, I am faced with the terrible knowledge that they are all within reach; that if that’s what I really want, it’s something I can do; that my day of reckoning has arrived.

But what I’m realizing today is that day of reckoning arrives over and over again. That everyday presents the opportunity to decide to do what you want to do, and with that, the opportunity to make excuses.

Does that mean the glass is half full or half empty? I’m not sure. I guess it depends on what you want.

(Between my starting this post on May 18  and finishing it today, Philip C. Bolger chose to end his life rather than allow Alzheimer’s to take away his ability to decide when it was no longer worth living. In the early morning hours of May 24  Phil rose from his bed without waking his wife, went to a secluded spot in the back of their property, put a pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. Phil’s solution to this last terrible “design brief” was as bold, ruthless, and rigorous as any of his most celebrated boat designs. He is survived by his wife and long-time collaborator Susanne Altenburger, and legions of fans, who feel as I do, that his designs and the philosophy for living that he expressed through those designs, left a powerful and positive mark on our lives.)