No surprise, parasites of all stripe have attached themselves to the killings at Viginia Tech. If you feel like your blood pressure needs a boost, read Judith Reisman’s explanation “Cho’s Erototoxic Addiction”. For my money, this is her most dizzyingly offensive line:

“Sit him at the Internet every night, angrily lusting after naked young blondes who provoke his loins.”

Blonde-bashing, gynophobia, and erotophobia, all in one tidy sentence. And speaking of money, like most parasites, Reisman sees dollars signs at Virgina Tech:

“Meanwhile, a major lawsuit waits in the wings if Virginia Tech has been a pornographic/erototoxic tolerant environment.”

Porn addiction is real, and it’s dangerous, and there’s no telling what hideous, depraved, selfish act it will drive Ms. Reisman to next.

I’ve just finished reading THE CONVERSATIONS: WALTER MURCH AND THE ART OF FILM EDITING. Murch is wonderfully eloquent in explaining the role that chance or serendipity can play in making films, without coming off as some sort of flake who leaves things to chance because he’s not creative enough or craftsmanly enough to control his projects.

Well thanks to the serendipitous combination of Violet Blue’s writing, The Chronical’s mainstream status, and the ever mysterious Googlebot, I’ve learned about things today that I never would have imagined.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Filtering DVD Player

The combination of Violet’s copy, mainstream placement, and the Googlebot is some sort of idiot savant uber algorythm for data-mining for everything that is wrong with how our culture thinks about sex. I just called Purity Solutions to ask how I could submit my films to become a part of their filtered films database.

No one was there, so I left a message.

And to think that I sometimes worry I spend too much time thinking about beavers, shaved and otherwise:

PL Pubic Hair/Pubic Region Detectors.

(Don’t even ask me what I was googling for when I found this.)

Regular readers have probably noticed that of late posting has been a little spotty.

Partly it’s because it’s August and there’s nothing I enjoy more than being on the water with my kids. A few more weeks and it’s back to school time, so I’m trying to get in as many beach hours with them as possible.

It’s also because MATT AND KHYM is taking up a lot of my creative energy. The problem (if one can even call it that) is that they’re too good. Their interview runs well over an hour, and it’s all good. Charming, sexy, sweet, humorous; it’s been really hard to figure how to cut in down to a managable length.

Lastly, I haven’t been writing in the blog much because I’ve been having to do A LOT of correspondence in support of DAMON AND HUNTER. It is abolutely our most successful release so far, both in terms of recognition and units shipped, and it turns out that trying to take advantage of that success take a lot of time.

We’ve been especially please with the reception DAMON AND HUNTER has received in Australia. It’s been covered in a number of magazines and newspapers, including DNA, The Melbourne Star, B-News, MCV, and QMagazine.

In July it played to an overflow audience at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and went on to be named Best Documentary at the fest. From there we were invited to show the film at QueerDOC, the world’s premiere gay and lesbian documentary film festival, in Sydney this September. All great news, with lots of thank you notes to write, journalist to talk to, and of course, boxes of DVDs to send to Australia.

Then late last week, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification dropped the hammer on DAMON AND HUNTER.

On the 15th, QueerDOC received notification from the OFLC that screening D&H would be a violation of Section 8 of the 2004 Film Festival Guidelines. That’s right, in Australia the government can tell you what you can and can’t show at a film festival.

What will happen now, I don’t know. The festival has already distributed nearly 50,000 copies of the program, including two screenings of DAMON AND HUNTER (which the festival expected would sell out). We’ve already printed up hundreds of posters and flyers and made arrangements to have them distributed throughout Sydney. The festival is currently in negotiations with the OFLC to see if they can show DAMON AND HUNTER in some sort of edited form, and we’re trying to make an appeal of the ratings. (Winterbottom’s 9 SONGS, a film that featured explicit footage of straight sex received a reduced rating from the OFLC. But without the major distributor backing of a film like 9 SONGS, and the very short notice, I’m doubtful our appeal will be successful.) If I were a betting man, I’d bet that Sydney is not going to get the chance to see the film that Melbourne enjoyed so very much.

And then there is still the question of what might happen to the organizers of the Melbourne Underground Film Festival and the owners of the venue that had the audacity to show DAMON AND HUNTER on not one, but two screens. Each violation of Section 8 is punishable by a year in jail and a $20,000 fine. Perhaps I felt a bit histrionic when I said that MUFF and Glitch were doing something courageous by showing DAMON AND HUNTER, but I don’t feel histrionic now.

Of all the films the OFLC might target for censorship, DAMON AND HUNTER seems like a particularly inappropriate choice. Aside from the recognition the film has so far received as an outstanding work of cinema, it’s also been recognized for it’s value as a life-affirming and educational document. DAMON AND HUNTER is held in the Kinsey Library at the world renowned Kinsey Institute at the University of Indiana. It’s already being used by the Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York, and by the San Francisco Sex Information Hotline. Just this week it’s been being passed around by deligates at the 16th Annual World AIDS Conference in Toronto Cananda. Why? Because DAMON AND HUNTER is singular in it’s compassionate, humane, frank, and erotic depiction of gay love and gay sex.

And apparently that’s something that the government of Australia needs to keep the people of Sydney, especially the gay men of Sydney, from seeing.

Morning in Casa Comstock; let out the dogs, set water to boil for coffee, change the younger daughter’s diaper, check the overnight e-mail, rouse the older daughter from slumber, check the server stats, make breakfast. Are you dressed? Did you brush your teeth? The bus is coming, we’re going to be late…

Well this morning we are late, late because of comments left that Jen P left on my and Peggy’s blogs, and the post she made on her own blog. It doesn’t really excerpt, so here’s the entire post:

Embracing FleshLet’s talk about sex here folks. If you’re of the ilk that doesn’t like to read these things…then go, far, far away because I’m breaking some serious ice into my own issues.

A couple of times a month, I’ll get a note from someone telling me they were so moved by one of our films that they got a little choked up, or shed a few happy tears. I am of course delighted by these notes. I’m a sentimentalist, and for me, getting an authentic emotional response (laughter, tears, arousal) is the highest praise a person can bestow. Finding that gentle edge is a big part of why it takes me so long to make each film; and when it works, no one gets more weepy-eyed at my films than I do. (If I’m not laughing/crying/aroused, why would anyone else be?)

But today is the first time I’ve ever got choked up by what someone’s said about my work. Not just choked up, I feel unstrung by what Jen B wrote.

Don’t get me wrong, it feels good, it feels very good. But more even more than good, it feels a lot; it’s quite a bit more feeling than I was expecting straight out of the gate on a Monday morning, and I’m a little overwhelmed by it.

Last week the edit Matt and Khym got so hot it literally burned up the G5 we bought at the begining of the year and it needs to be replaced. The sun’s come back out and the lawn needs mowing. And my brain has been scrambled (in a good way, but scrambled none the less) by Jen B’s post.

I’m hitting “post” and taking the rest of the day off!

Since making my last post about Psychopathia Sexualis, I have had the very good fortune of chatting with Bret Wood, the film’s director and he was kind enough to send me an advance copy on DVD-R, which Peggy and I watched last night. Getting an advance copy feels extra-special, because unlike porn, which goes straight to DVD, Psychopathia Sexualis is going to have a nice little art-house run before the DVD becomes available. Watching a preview copy makes me feel like a trendy insider!

Since a few of the things I have to say about the film are provisional, let me start with this; the film is boldly experimental in its subject matter, its storytelling style and its filmcraft. The film provided an entertaining evening, followed by a full morning’s lively discussion with my wife. It’s an entertaining (strange word for something creepy and unsettling) movie, and it’s provocative art.

So then what is this Psychopathia Sexualis? Let’s start with the basic facts:

The film is drawn from the 19th century book of the same name, written by the German physician Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Krafft-Ebbing’s book is a collection of 238 case-studies of sexual perversion, classified variously as antipathic sexuality, homosexuality, lust murder, fetishism, unconscious sadism, lesbianism in transition to viraginty, symbolic masochism, and other “catagories” of psycho-sexual illness.

In a series of sometimes intercut vignettes, Wood presents a handful of these case studies in full period regalia. There is red velvet and red satin. There are muttonchops and tuxedos and horse-drawn carts. There’s a hell-hole asylum with patients in sack-cloth gowns. There are housemaids in black uniforms with white ruffled aprons. There are taxonometric diagrams and calipers. With nearly 100 players and at least a couple dozen locations, the scope and ambition of the film is impressive!

The photography and production styles are also period, recalling films like Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Shadows are long, in each scene the pallete washed hard by one muted color or another, complimenting the stylized creepiness and sickly tone of the proceedings.

Not all of it works. The actors speak in contemporary American accents, which while pointing out the silliness of the conceit of having actors inflect their lines with the native tongue of their characters, also points out that it’s a conceit that works well.

Like most truly independent productions Psychopathia is shot on video, and mostly looks quite excellent, but when it doesn’t, the video look clashes with the period tone worse than it might with a story set in comtemporary times. Some of the acting is off-pitch.

But there’s plenty that works well enough, and quite a bit works brilliantly. If you’ll forgive the film its few stumbles, you’ll be rewarded with lush depictions of kink, combined with an empassioned take on the meaning of “sexual normality”.

Starting with a truly horrific tale of “lust murder”, the “pathologies” of the vignettes become less and less foreign, ending with a middle-aged spinster who has lived her entire adult life in the absense of sexual pleasure because she craves the touch of other women.

In Kraft-Ebbing’s time it seemed perfectly natural for an educated person to place homosexuality in a collection of psycho-sexual perversions along with rape and sexualized torture and murder, and it’s easy to see Psychopathia as an indictment of the good doctor, his times, and his methods. But if you stop there, I think you miss the real power of this film. This film is not just about kink and quackery.

At its core, Psychopathia Sexualis challenges the pervasive assumption that sexual desire and sexual acts lie on some sort of continuum; with procreative sex between married partners on one end, and lust-murder at the other — and the fear that is wound into the very fabric of our culture that sex for pleasure’s sake is the first tiny step to erotic cannibalism or other terrors, that sexual pleasure is inherently transgressive, and that the pursuit of that pleasure is fundamentally corrupting and anti-social.

This erotophobic continuum is easily seen in the fundamentalist strains of our culture, but having seen Psychopathia Sexualis I now see this erotophobia in myself, and how it pervades even the most sex-positive segments of our culture. We are all so steeped in this erotophobia, this fear that in being corruptable, we are inherrently corrupt, that we are compelled to excuse and justify our interest in sex for pleasure’s sake, and that in each of us there’s a least a little fear that in pursuing our desire for sexual pleasure, we take a small, but inexorable step towards becoming Hannibal Lecter.

Psychopathia Sexualis explores, challenges, and then ultimately explodes this continuum. Yes, there are terrible monsters, and perhaps some part of that dwells inside each of us. But sexual pleasure is not a gateway to evil, it is not a dance with the dark side of our nature; and marriage or procreation do not (and thankfully need not) provide some sort of magical protection to us when we enjoy our own bodies and our lovers’ bodies. How strange and beautiful that this is the ultimate theme of such a dark, gothic film!

Psychopathia Sexualis begins a one week run at New York’s Pioneer Theater on June 8th; a part of the theater’s Mindfuck: Sex, Art, and Psychology series. There used to be dozens of theaters like The Pioneer in New York City, now there are just a handful, making the chance to see films like this on the big screen rare. And if you miss seeing it on the big screen, you’ll have to wait till early 2007 for the DVD, so don’t miss it!

Bret Wood’s Blog

Psychopathia Sexualis Website

Pioneer Theater Website

Other Upcoming Showings:

CHICAGO
Gene Siskel Film Center, Opens June 9, 2006

SEATTLE
Grand Illusion Cinema, Opens June 9, 2006

SAN FRANCISCO
Roxie Cinema, Opens June 16, 2006

PORTLAND, OR
Clinton Street Theater, Opens June 16, 2006

ATLANTA
Atlanta Film Festival Atlanta, Opens June 16, 2006

I console myself with music. Notable in the last few days:

THAT AIN’T NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY
Helen Reddy

READY FOR LOVE
Bad Company

ANYTHING GOES
Cole Porter

THE LADY IS A TRAMP
Rogers and Hart

RUSSIAN SAILORS DANCE (from The Red Poppy)
Reinhold Gliere

What’s on your play list these days.

Before I ever rolled a foot of film, before I ever made one video, before I ever took one picture of one naked lady I was a musician, or at least that’s what I thought I wanted to be. In high school I played in the band, sang in the choir, and even took the music theory course Mr. Winters was kind of enough to offer to the six of us who were interested. And after I graduated from high school I went to college and promptly declared my major as mathematics.

Yes, mathematics.

The same sorts of things that made music theory come easily to me also make math interesting and not too hard. Plus I had a high school math teacher who I adored and admired. Plus it was easier to imagine that studying math would bring me the comfortable middle class life style that I grew up in, and that I wanted for myself and the family I hoped I’d have at some point in the future. So for the first two quarters of my freshmen year I was a math major.

My career as a mathematician lasted til the begining of the third term, when there was a scheduling conflict between the math classes I needed to take and a small, but required part of the music major curriculum. (Still secretly longing to be a musician I was also taking all the required courses for a freshmen music major.) I begged the dean of the music school for an exception so I could take the third term of calculus, but he was unmoved. Forced to choose, I chose music.

Within a year music had given way to photography, but I kept taking math classes. I enjoyed the rigor, especially as a counter-point to the necessarily squishy aspects of learning about art and making art.

Had the music school dean relented, I’d like to think I might have ended up writing articles for a website like Stats at George Mason University, and in the company of people like Rebecca Goldin.

A lot of numbers get thrown around in the news, offered as proof of one position or another, and few people (and apparently least of all journalists) have the mathematical background to examine these “fact and figures” critically and rationally. This has given greater weight to the popular misapprehension that there lies, damned lies, and statistics. Figures lie, and liars figure, right?

This, of course, is nonsense.

The biases or suppositions of a statistical argument are more readily apparent and far more quantifiable than those of a rhetorical argument. But you have to have some familiarity and comfort with how numbers work to ask the right questions and understand the answers.

And an era where it’s possible, in fact common for an educated person’s math training to end with the quadratic formula, in an era where it’s social acceptable for an educated person to boast about their incompetence in math (can you imagine someone boasting they were illiterate?) it seems increasingly common for people who should know better to regard 2+2=4 as an assertion that just might yield to a clever argument or a well-turned phrase. (And I’m just talking about the progressive/liberal people I tend to find myself in the company of because I myself progressive and liberal. Let’s not get started about the assault on rationalism by religious fundamentalism.)

Myths and misperceptions swirl around pornography; some promulgate by pernicious and self-serving people, some a product of our collective imagination (both dark and hopeful) run wild. Getting to the truth about how big the business is, or how it help or hurts people is hard because when it comes to sex and money, nobody wants to tell the truth. We’re all quite sure we have too much or too little, and that everyone else is more satisfied and richer than we are. We’re all quite sure that we’re completely normal, except those little bits that we’d prefer that no one ever find out about us – ever.

Now I would be the last to suggest that we shouldn’t believe in things that cannot be quantified or measured. I believe in love, I believe in the family of human kind. Sometimes I even believe in God. But belief, (some might prefer faith) is not the same thing as superstition. And I don’t think it’s just happenstance that some of our most recent superstitious hysterias (Satanic Ritual Abuse, Erototoxins) have to do with sex. Superstition is fear’s handmaiden, and I believe that fear is the ultimate enemy of love.

But I also believe that love is more powerful than fear. This belief (perhaps ironically) solidified in me while the smell of fire and death hung heavy over my city. These few years later I am only more certain in this belief.

I make my films in the hope that they are ultimately about love, that they help push back the dark shadow of fear and superstition. But art is, of course, squishy. It cannot be proved with the quadratic formula, or by any other method. Judged, valued, accepted, rejected, but not proved. Making art and being moved by art is an act of faith that is very nearly my religion.

But I’d like to think that out there in one of those alternate universe, the ones we hear them talk about when my daughters and I watch the Science Channel, that there’s another me, another Tony Comstock. One who is an adored and admired math teacher.

Monday night at Golapagos I spoke about erototoxins, and other silly and sad ideas that some people *cough*Mike*Nichols*cough* have about what does or doesn’t happen when you make or look at a picture of a cock going into a pussy (or mouth or asshole, we’re not picky here). Well I guess we’ve caught the zeit geist(sp?) or it’s the phases of the moon or something.

Always eager to find a way to run “an important story about pornography” the AP and reporter David Crary have put their (dubious) crediblity behind the silly idea that porn is addictive. Nevermind that there is no scientific evidence for this, The AP knows porn=readership so lets run with it! Wheee!

But you know what’s even funnier than the addiction/erototoxin thing? Dig this:

“[40 year anti-porn activist] John Harmer is part of a cadre of anti-porn activists seeking new tactics to fight an unprecedented deluge of porn which they see as wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality. They are urging federal prosecutors to pursue more obscenity cases and raising funds for high-tech brain research that they hope will fuel lawsuits against porn magnates.”

Porn magnates? Are you fucking kidding me? There are no deep pockets in porn.

David Crary, if you can find me 50 people who make more than $1,000,000/year from porn I will blow you. (For comparison’s sake, each cast member of Friends got $1,000,000/episode for four seasons. Do the math.)

You can’t? What a surprise.

Consolation prize: Find me 50 people who work in porn with a networth of more than $10,000,000 and I’ll give you a handjob. Porn magnates. Give me a fucking break.

Of course that won’t stop Mr. Hammer from “raising funds”, or stop Crary from writing about it.

You know who’s addicted to porn?

The AP is addicted to porn. John Harmer is addicted to porn. David Crary is addicted to porn. They’re addicted to the money and attention and titilation they get by talking about porn, “researching” porn, “documenting” porn, and otherwise flitting around the edges and then wringing their hands over the growing porn crisis. They’re addicted the sloppy, slip-shot, or down right deceptive things that “tackling the important issue of porn” allows them. (Anyone notice this sounds an awful lot like what most pornographers like about working in porn?)

These people don’t want porn to go away. If it did, they’d have to report on real news. They’d have to find a new way to get themselves on the TeeVee. If it did they’d have to get a real job, or at least find a new scam to get people to send them their money.