As long as men have been sailing the open ocean, there have been tales of immense waves, waves much larger than the surrounding sea-state, looming up and devastating and even sinking large, ocean going vessels. Eye-witness accounts of these waves put them at 75-100 feet high, but for years, scientists dismissed these accounts as an extreme example of the sorts of exaggerations that fishermen are known to tell.

You see according to all scientific knowledge of waves, one of these giants, or “rogue waves” as they are known, could only happen once every 10,000 years in all the world’s oceans, making the sighting of one a statistical improbability. But despite this “statistical improbability”, eye-witness accounts continued, and large, ocean going vessels continued to be lost without a trace at a rate of about one a week. (These disappearances were blamed on poor maintenance, operator error, etc.)

Now as it turns out, there was one wave scientist, Al Osborne, who started with the premise that these eye-witness accounts and ship disappearances were actually happening, and began searching for a scientific explanation. Employing quantum mechanics, Osborne developed a wave model that, if valid, showed that these rogue waves might be far more common than the the once ever 10,000 years predicted by the standard model.

Osborne’s theory was dismissed.

Then on New Year’s Day, 1985, a monster that behaved exactly as predict by the Osborne model swept over an oil platform in the North Sea. More recently, advanced radar imaging of the oceans has shown that the “non-linear monsters” are quite common, roaming the oceans, where they all too often leave no witnesses to their devastation.

—–

My scholastic background is in science. Underpinning my BFA is a bachelor of science degree, with an emphasis on math and physics. I believe the development of the scientific method is one of the great steps forward in the history of the human race.

The scientific method begins with observation, so that in mind I’d like to offer the following observations:

In the wake of a devastating natural disaster that garners international media attention, a blogger claiming to command a $400/hour rate for internet consulting offers to donate the proceeds from a day of his services to relief efforts. Nothing further on this is ever heard.

This same blogger, still claiming to command $400/hour as an internet consultant, implores his blog readership to join in a fund-raiser to buy a handful of playstation memory sticks to provide portable pornography to US troops stationed in Islamic countries. Price of the memory sticks? About $100 each a J&R Music. Again, after the initial post, nothing more about this is ever heard.

This same blogger, while claiming to advise the highest levels of corporate America on internet strategy can offer as any evidence of his acumen only a string failed blog ventures and penny-anti domain name auctions.

—–

Human beings have the strange ability to ignore what is plainly observable when these observations conflict with how they think the world should be, or how they think the world ought to be. For years scientists managed to blind themselves to the huge body of evidence–indeed, the plain fact–of rogue waves because these waves didn’t fit into their own prejudices. These prejudices can be so blinding they can cause even the most acute minds to ignore or dismiss what is plainly in front of their faces.

An avalanche of traffic (second only to Google) from Spain yesterday, which it turns out traces back to an oblique two word link on the Spainish launguage blog Vicisitud y Sordidez.

The linking words were “tiempo real”, and linked back to a post titled Memo to Sienna Miller: Real sex does not have jump cuts that was half google-bait, and half a meandering riff on the way the passage of time is depicted in love-scenes.

Judging from the number of people who visited via that one little link, Vicisitud y Sordidez has a readership that would makes the world of sex-blogs, even top tier sex blogs, look pretty small. But my command of the Spanish launguage is barely sufficient to allow me to travel in Mexico and usually get on the bus to the right destination, or actually get what I want in a restarunt. It’s no where near sufficient to make heads or tails of what sort of blog Vicisitud y Sordidez is. Even with the help of the Google translator, I really don’t know either the post in particular, or the blog in general is about.

Whatever the case, I think it’s pretty nifty that six months after I made the “jump cuts” post, such a well-trafficed blog found a reason to link to it. But it still leave the question: Quien es Vicisitud y Sordidez? (Sorry, I can’t find the right key combination to put the upside-down question mark at the front of the sentence.)

I first became aware of Audicia Dacia when I began to see her blog, The Waking Vixen in our daily web-traffic reports. About Comstock Films Dacia wrote:

Nothing could make anti-sex crusader Anthony Comstock spin in his grave faster than a porn company named after him. Comstock Films used that as a jumping off point, and then started making gorgeous films featuring the sexualities of very real couples.

Having had all sorts of educated people, including a Pulitzer prize winning journalist ask me if I know about the anti-sex crusader Anthony Comstock, whether or a person gets the joke our name had become a fair indicator of how well we might get along. Immediately I knew Dacia and I were going to get along just fine!

Perhaps a year later, I found myself sitting across the table from Dacia Ray in a noodle shop on the Upper West Side. Dacia’s just come from her secret life as a Columbia University grad student, I’ve just from my secret life as a relief and development issues documentary filmmaker. Though we’ve talked on the phone a few times, this is the first time we’ve met in person. Dacia’s munching on a steamed dumpling. I’m (as usual) ranting.

“But when I started, one of the reasons I wanted to work with people who weren’t sex workers was because…”

“… because they’d show up on time!” Dacia blurts out, finishing my thought through a mouth full of dumpling. This is not the first time, nor the last, that Dacia and I will find ourselves, not only on the same page, but on the same sentence.

In the little more than a year since that first greet, Dacia has produced the widely acclaimed “Bi Apple”, (featuring notoriously marginalized male bisexuality,) received her masters from Columbia, and published her first book “Naked on the Internet”; all while tending her duties as $pread magazine’s executive editor, and being involved with (and often leading) a myriad of other events and activities. The phrase “force of nature” comes to mind.

NAKED ON THE INTERNET is far too wide-ranging for me try and summarize, and if you’ve been following this online book tour for the last several weeks, plenty of others have given a general idea of what’s to be found in it’s pages. So instead I’d like to take you to the last page, the last paragraph in fact (emphasis mine):

“As a researcher in the history of sexuality, I’ve spent hours in various libraries trying to piece together tiny yellowed fragments of throwaway culture from the nineteenth century that might give a better picture of the daily sex lives of people in that era. It’s hard to do, because until very recently, in the Western world, sexuality was not at all valued as an important key to human nature and nurture. Diaries of sexual behavior, if kept at all, were generally hidden or destroyed by family members; pornography and sexual heal information were often burned by agents of the state; surviving reports of sexual interactions are couched in obscure terms so as to rendered unintelligible to a modern audience. The Internet is changing all of this, and future generations will have a much clearer idea of what we were up to that we have about our great grandparents. Hopefully, the experience of the women whose stories shaped and informed this book will inspire other women to explore and think about all the possibilities the Internet offers and will empower women to challenge the ways female sexuality is represented.“

Dacia, you could have taken the words out of my mouth!

NAKED ON THE INTERNET, by Audacia Ray is published by Seal Press. It is available online at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and most other book sellers.

Blowfish is where I discovered sex didn’t suck. Or rather Blowfish is where I discovered that the sex business didn’t have to suck. It was in their online catalog that I first found things like Vixen Creations Dildos or the work of Jullian Snelling and started to wonder why there weren’t sex videos that were equally well made.

Blowfish was also the first American retailer to buy our first film, MARIE AND JACK: A HARDCORE LOVE STORY, so I’m always anxious to hear what they think of our films. It’s not that I think they’d hate anything we’d produced, but I hold Blowfish in extra high esteem, and I want them to be extra charmed with what we offer them. You can imagine the sigh of relief when I read this in the Blowfish weekly newsletter:

“We like Tony Comstock’s movies. He specializes in documentaries that all follow the same basic pattern: a long interview with a couple, mostly about their sex life but also about the origin of their romance, followed by a long sex scene. The end result is strangely intimate — having heard so much about their lives, it’s quite moving to watch these people have sex. In a field where sleaze and vulgarity are pretty much part of the atmosphere, Comstock’s films provide a welcome touch of class, and they’re often as much about love as lust.“Ashley and Kisha: Finding the Right Fit is Comstock’s first film devoted to a lesbian couple, and they’re wonderful subjects, funny and sweet and willing to laugh at themselves. (The fact that they’re totally gorgeous is a bonus.) Their story has the satisfying contours of a romantic comedy: Ashley the openly gay student athlete pursues straight college girl Kisha, who turns out to be not quite as straight as she’d always assumed. There’s even a cute meet, when Kisha barges into the bathroom at a party where Ashley is making out with her ex-girlfriend; Ashley confessed that, though she slept with her ex that night, she was really thinking about the glimpse she got of Kisha’s ass in the bathroom.

During his promotion of his film SHORTBUS one of the things John Cameron Mitchell said was, “We tried to de-eroticize the sex to see what kind of emotions and ideas are left over when the haze of eroticism is waved away…by the end if you’re thinking only about the sex, then you have a problem.”

Peggy and I watched SHORTBUS together, in bed, on a Friday night, after the kids were fast asleep, and I guess we don’t have a problem, because by the end of the movie we were not thinking about sex so much that we didn’t even have sex ourselves. Mitchell had so successfully “de-eroticized” the sex that SHORTBUS effectively squelched my usually rampant libido.

The problem that I do have is with the idea that arousal, that sexual desire, that erotic pleasure is some sort of haze that keeps us from seeing our better selves. This idea utterly pervades the discussion of sexual art – from The United States v. Ulysses, to Sir Quintin of the BBFC, to Mitchell’s strange pride that although “all the orgasms and all the semen in SHORTBUS were real…no one in the audience got a hard-on” – artists and audiences both are obliged to deny and devalue the the erotic, to say (true or not) that their interest in sex lies elsewhere.

Fine. Whatever. Not me.

I love exploring the erotic. I love hearing what turns people on, I love seeing what turns people on, I love seeing what people do when they are turned on. I love the idea that sex can be restorative, curative, and connective. I love that getting hard or wet or whatever is a part of falling in love, and being in love, and staying in love. And I love making films about it.

I love when people watch my films and laugh and cry and sigh, and most of all, I love when people watch my films and get turned on. I love hearing about the gushy wanks and lusty tumbles these films inspire. I love hearing about how, after watching our films, lovers trip down memory lane, recounting their own “hardcore love stories”, and then add another chapter right there and then!

Does that make me a romantic, or a recovering romantic or a delusional romantic? Yes, and I’m proud to be one, and proud and delighted to see another one of our films at Blowfish.com!

The oars are coming along nicely. Did some sanding on Monday, but mostly I sat in front of the computer, fretting about when the Oprah thing was going to come out, until my daughter’s classmate’s father called and asked if my daughter and I wanted to go sailing. That was much better than sitting and fretting. Not too long after I got home, Violet posted her pictures, which was exciting.

This morning I went down to the drugstore, put in my wife’s prescription for birth-control and bought two copies of the July issue of O. Then I walked across the way to the hardware store and got a quart of varnish. The humidity was high today, so even though I put the varnish on before noon, it was still tacky last I checked. I also did some work on the boats (pictured below) that these oars are for. The one on the left needs its shear-clamp replaced, (you can see the sticks for that task in the boat.) Both need new cleats for the oarlock sockets, and a fresh coat of paint.

Other than a Fleshbot mention and Violet’s post, and of course holding the magazine in my hand, you’d wouldn’t know the Oprah thing had happened. No sudden dramatic increase in traffic, no sudden flood of sales. After mentions in Time, Esquire, Penthouse, Jane, and few others, I’ve learned not to expect such things, but it doesn’t stop me from daydreaming!

Photo from Violet Blue’s TinyNibbles.com

Ten years ago I wanted to make a film that actually showed people enjoying sex that would be good enough that HBO would put them on the TV. Then Peggy and I actually met with the producer and the director of Real Sex and decided I didn’t care if my films were ever on HBO.

Five years ago I wanted to make a film that was fully intented to make people aroused that would be good enough that Sundance would play it in their film festival. Then Sundance played Destricted and I decided that I didn’t care if none of my films ever played at Sundance.

Two years ago I was talking with Freddy, of FreddyandEddy.com about how much the media loves the “nice normal couple, but omigod! they make PORN or they sell SEX TOYS” and how yeah, it’s an angle, but it’s an angle that kind of misses the point – that most of the time, sex is nice and sex is normal.

Then Freddy went on to tell me about how he and Eddy weren’t going to do anymore magazine interviews or TV appearances or any of that stuff, unless it was….and then I finished his sentence by saying “Oprah.”

The couple of stores that sell magazines in our town are already closed. I guess I’ll have to wait till tomorrow to see if they have the July issue of O magazine.

It wasn’t Italian GQ. It was “Affari Italliani” on the Libero.it website. Dig the lead:

“If he was Iranian, he’d be sentenced to death as a corruptor of the world.”

The machine translation of the rest of the article is pretty dodgy, but it seems flattering. Then the article ends with a quote from Sappho:

“My desire shakes my mind, like wind on the mount that whips through the oaks; twists the limbs and churns to them, bitter cake uncontrollable snake”.

Today the poetry of erotic love is made with images.

Am I reading this right. Did our films just get compared to the most famous erotic poet of all time? Cool!

In a comment on the recent “ASHLEY AND KISHA Ships! post the Always Aroused Girl asked, “Do you do nothing but watch people fuck?”

As it happens, she asked this question while I has enjoying my first Saturday off in over five years.

What I mean by that is this weekend is the first weekend since the Spring of 2002 that I have not owed someone a movie. In those five years I have produced the five erotic documentaries offered here, two commissioned docs (one on 9/11 and one on grass-roots relief work,) and one self-produced short doc about the indigenous fishery on Lake Victoria.

I tend to think of my self as a lazy(ish) person. I tend to think of myself as a person who wastes a lot of time worrying about things instead of doing things about things (because it’s true.)

But when I contemplate the fact that in the last five years I’ve produced, directed, and edited eight films, each well received, with a total running time of about 275 minutes–well my goodness, that’s something, isn’t it? Add to that creating, from the ground up, a distribution system for films that were (until we did it) regarded as “undistributable”, we’ll that seems like a bit of an accomplishment, doesn’t it.

Yesterday, on my first Saturday off in five years I went to the lumber yard and got a couple of planks and made them into a pair of oars. The boats I made them for need a little patching up before they’ll be ready for an outing. I might do that today. I might do it on Monday. The boss has given me the day off!

Italy is our #1 source of traffic today, sending us about 20 times more visitors than an average day. Visitors arriving at ComstockFilms.com on the search [tony comstock] are also up about 20 fold, making it our #1 search term today.

Conclusion? Somewhere in Italy, the words “tony comstock” have appeared in print, radio, television or other non-linked medium. GQ Italia? Sounds like a good guess!

It’s done! Yesterday we took delivery on several dozen boxes of ASHLEY AND KISHA DVDs, and after a marathon session, all of the A&K pre-order and back-orders are shipped. Right now hundreds of copies of ASHLEY AND KISHA are wizzing their way across the country and to the four corners of the globe.

Many many thanks to everyone who put their faith in us and pre-ordered ASHLEY AND KISHA, some of you even before the negative was dry! It took us a lot longer than we expected it would to finish the film, but it turned out better than we ever would have dared hope for!

And if that isn’t enough good news, have a look at ComstockFilms.com 3.0. Peggy’s given the site a complete redesign; new look, new navigational organization, lots of new features. My blog hasn’t yet been ported into the new design, but the rest is completely new, including a new Coming Soon page.

Shoot on over and get a first glimpse of our next four film: BILL AND DESIREE, BRETT AND MELANIE, BEN AND DESIREE (different Desiree), and TINA AND JENN. Four new Comstock Films titles that I hope will be every bit as sweet and sexy as the last five.

Thanks again from me and Peggy for continuing to support our work!