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.

In his Slate column about a Dove TV spot, Seth Stevenson writes:

[T]his Dove ad is just atrocious. It uses a cheap video camera and murky lighting, and stars an average-looking woman being filmed as she takes a shower. The result bears a queasy resemblance to amateur pornography—though I’m told that even bargain-basement porn features flashier production values and more compelling actresses.

Please note, Seth doesn’t watch “bargain-basement porn”, but someone close to him does. Also note that in using the word “porn” to put down the ad and the woman in the ad, Seth hasn’t really told us anything about the ad, but he’s told us a little, maybe too much, about him about himself.

I’d also like to get a look at Seth’s porn stash. If he’s got a cache of porn that’s a lively, fun-loving, and easy on the eyes as this Dove spot, I’d like to borrow it!

Today Newsweek’s asking Hard Times for the Porn Industry?

“The adult film industry is unlikely to be worth as much as it claims—and the Internet that made porn so pervasive is driving a sales slump.

“Contrary to the popular maxim, what happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there. Like the two big stories that emerged from the Adult Entertainment Expo in Sin City last month: 1) the adult film industry is large enough to potentially be the deciding factor in the battle for format dominance between Blu-ray and High Definition (HD)-DVD, and 2) the adult film industry may be in its worst sales slump in recent memory. Taken together, the two just don’t add up.”

Time for a dip into the Comstock Films archives. From July 1, 2005

The Porn Monster

“Omagawd! Now we’re going to see that pornstars have pimples and razor burn!”

Apparently that’s news enough for the New York Times to run yet another late to the party, misinformed and disinforming story about porn. Again I’m left wondering just what sort of porn the article’s author has been watching that the fact that you can see razor burns, pimples and celulite is news. Again I’m left with the suspicion that this in more of the mainstream media freebasing porn with precious little interest in the real story, or even the basic facts.

Let’s back up.

That HD is a bitch is not news. With the strong backing of the Japanese electronic giants, HD came roaring in the film and television industry about a half dozen years ago promising “almost as much resolution as film” but without the cost associated with shooting photo-chemical emulsion. But along with the convenience of a magnetic cassette form-factor, HD came with a host of production gremlins that started vexing people from the start.

Skin
Yes, HD video is higher resolution than SD video, but it’s still video. And guess what? Video doesn’t render skin very well. That’s why professional programs that are produced on video come in three basic varieties: a) the heavily made up, low-contrast world of the telesion studio (think nightly news, soap opera, or Cher infomercial, or b) the world as it happens of ENG (that’s electronic news gathering,) and, c) sports.

The harshness of HD doesn’t really matter in ENG and sports (except when they show the sportscasters). Sports and ENG are the world as it happens. If HD renders Quarterback’s or insurgent’s furrowed, wrinkled, sweaty, bleeding brow in ultra detail it just looks like more, not worse. And while HD cameras are on the heavy and expensive side to bring into a war zone (not that it doesn’t happen) HD is great for sports, and that’s where HD has had the biggest successes so far.

HD in the televison studio is another matter. Right off the bat, everyone from set designers to make-up artists were distressesd by the way HD rendered their world. But where set designers could do easy things like start using real wood and real metal instead of plastic veneers and tin-foil, make-up artist were stuck with the same flesh and blood upon which to practice their craft, there in lies the problem.

The problem is that video, whether it’s SD or HD, hates flesh and blood. If you want to make someone look terrible, there’s no better way to do it then to level a video camera at them. Where film is warm and lustrous, and takes pleasure in rendering the details that make each of us individuals, video hates skin, video hates people.

In fact, when you shoot people on video, you don’t actually shoot them at all, you cover them up with powders and lotions and pastes. With video, you don’t shoot people, you shoot their make up.

(It takes my make-up artist about easy 5 minutes to get our subjects ready for the parts of our films that are actually shot-on-film (the sex), while it takes her 30 laborious, very detail-oriented minutes to get the ready for the shot-on-vidio interview portion of our film. And while she leaves the set while we shoot the rough and tumble, sweaty, make-up smearing sex, she sits right on my shoulder during the interviews, dashing in and touching things up throughout. That’s why, despite the fact that 35mm film has vastly more resolution that HD video, there’s was never a zit and wrinkle crisis on the set of Fraiser and other shot-on-film productions.)

This fact that video (both HD and SD) sees the make-up, not the person has given rise to entirely new techniques. Brushes and puffs are too course for the all seeing eye of HD, so where photographs used to be airbrushed, now it’s the make-up is applied with an airbrush. The cost, both in time and money, for the ultra-high-end make-up you need just to make things look credible is one of the reasons I tell ultra-low-budget filmmakers they’re better of shooting film.

But it’s not the only problem with shooting HD, and maybe not the worst.

Back Focus
Michael Mann is one of the Hollywood directors who has been experimenting with HD. COLLATERAL was a hybrid production, shot on a mix of HD and film, and MIAMI VICE was shot entirely on HD. But if you know how to read between the lines, you can see how much cinematographer Dion Beebe struggled with shooting in HD.

When you combine the intense heat generated by CCD in HD camera with the ultra-critical back-focus tolerances that are part and parcel of shooting with a camera with a small focal plane, and the low-resolution view-finder, it’s hard to actually know if your keeping your image in focus, and critical viewers will notice that about half of MIAMI VICE is slightly out of focus.

Depth of Field
But even if you get the make-up right, and even you get critical focus on all your footage, the same short focal length lenses that have such critical back-focus, have nearly unlimited depth of field. Why does this matter? Because cinematography is (among other things) an excercise in controlled depth of field. Any DP’s kit includes a complete set of neutral density filters so that even the longer lenses used in 35mm cinematography can be set to wider f-stops to get the (usually) more pleasing effect of shallow depth of field. But the HD lenses used on normal and especially wider angle of view shots are so very short that even wide open they have nearly infinite depth of field

What this means is that instead of the background being pleasingly soft behind the subject, everything is razor sharp (if you haven’t lost back focus!) What that means for Michael Mann’s production is that incongruous elements in the background that could be ignored now half to be art-directed and designed.

(”Deep Focus” was a fast lens/fast stock fad cinematography style in Hollywood in the film-noir era, and in interviews Beebe did a good job of playing up how much he enjoyed working with Deep Focus, but scuttlebutt from the set says otherwise. It’s more time, it’s more money, it’s more hassle, and it still doesn’t look as good as shooting on film.)

So if all these HD headaches aren’t new, why is it suddenly news in the world of porn? Why is the Times writing about it now? The answer comes in the form of a camera that you can buy at any electronics store for $3,500.

HDV isn’t HD
For the last several years some very few porn higher-end productions have been shot on HD, and they’ve struggled with the same HD gremlins as the rest of the film and television industry. But the $1000/day it costs to rent an HD camera package was out of reach of 99% of porn productions. 99% of porn is shot on a $2,500 DV camera, like a Sony PD150 or similar. With no bargain basement imaging tool to ply their trade, the vast majority of pornographers were stuck in SD land while the rest of the film and television world marched steadily toward HD.

But in 2006 something happened that saved their asses.

In early 2006 Sony released the Z1, the HDV successor to the Sony VX1000, the $3,500 DV camera that launched a thousand extra shabby, shot-on-video porn productions. Like the VX1000, the Z1 is a $3,500 hobbyist camera dressed up to look a little like its professional siblings that cost five or ten or 20 times more, and it’s marketed to people who want to have the latest and in consumer electronics, and a veneer of professional features, but aren’t really in the market for a professional camera. (In the bizz the category is known as “prosumer”.)

The porn industry couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Z1. Porn directors snapped up the Z1 and overnight “shot on HD” started appearing on boxcovers. (The ‘adult industry’ has never been shy about putting misleading or false information on their boxcovers.)

The problem is that the Z1 and other HDV handicams suffer from most of the same limitations at the VX1000 and it’s decendents (PD150, DV100, etc). They have the same tiny focal plane with the attendant back-focus and depth of field problems, because it’s video, it sees make-up not skin, etc. By and larger, footage produced on the Z1 is indistinguishable from footage produced on similar SD video cameras like the PD170 or DVX100. Because the cameras used are virtually the same, and the people using the cameras are the same, these HDV-shot porn films are practically indistinguishable from their DV-shot counterparts.

Except when they’re worse.

HDV is not HD. In fact, it’s no wherenear HD. Because the HDV codec only has as much bandwidth (25 mbps) as the DV codec to try and fill the HD pixel matrix, HDV is compressed six times as much as DV. Like the DV codec, the HDV codec has massive spacial compression, but in addition it also has massive (and not very effective) temporal MPEG compression, that has to be done in real time, in the camera. The only way to achieve cheap, real time MPEG compression in handicam is to sacrifice quality.

Compounding the HDV codec’s low-quality compression, the Z1 uses a “witch’s brew” of field doubling and interlacing to achieve 24fps footage. (The same frame rate as film and real HD cinematogphy.)

What this means is that high motion footage (like people having vigorous sex) will often have more (highly visible) compression artifacting than equivalent DV footage. It’s bad when HDV acquired footage is shown in SD, and even worse when HDV acquired footage is shown in HD-DVD or BlueRay, which you can expect to start happening soon.

No one outside of porn (except apparently the NYT) regards HDV as HD. No one outside the porn industry confuses HDV with HD. And just as cheap DV handicams have overwhelmingly been the tool of the porn trade, cheap HDV handicams will weapon of choice as the porn world moves from DVD to HD-DVD and/or Blueray.

But you won’t read that in the Times article. The prospect of titillating their readers with “serious reporting” on razor burn on pornstars’ pussies and pimples on pornstars asses is too much for even the Old Grey Lady to resist. Even my buddy Andrew Sullivan couldn’t resist.

Now, thanks to the Old Grey Lady’s porn habit, 99% of the public thinks that porn is on the very cutting edge of imaging technology, while the fact is that 99% of “HD” porn is shot on a hobbyest HDV camera – a camera that is more or less the same as the one your uncle pulls out and embarrasses you with at any and all family functions. (The exact same if your uncle is one those people who has to have the latest and greatest consumer electronics gadgets.)

Who wins? Well the Times wins. Their porn articles are well-read, and that’s more ad dollars. The “adult industry” wins; thanks to the Times it’s now on the record that porn is on the cutting edge yet again. And the consumer electronics companies win. Go Get Your HDTV Now!

Who loses? Well maybe nobody, or at least nobody who matters.

There’s no saying for sure how fast player prices are going to come down, but if I had to guess, I’d say our films will be available on Blueray and/or HD-DVD by next year. Next to shot on these HDV or even HD productions, our shot-on-film/mastered in (real) HD films are going to look better than ever!

Maybe the only person who loses is the viewer who goes out and gets a 42 inch plasma screen and HD-DVD player, loads up the latest HD(V) porn production, and then wonders why porn looks worse than ever.

Yep, it’s yet another unexpected search string from the ComstockFilms.com referral logs.

As it happens, yesterday I was talking to Freddy of FreddyandEddy.com, a website devoted to helping couples navigate the (often intimidating and off-putting) world of commercial sex products. One of the things we talked about was that while the world of sextoys have really come of age, and there’s now a wide variety of truly lovely, truly well-made dildos, vibrators, sex-furniture, lubes and other fun things to use on your or your lover’s body, the world of things to watch is still characterized by videos that mostly range from embarrassing to downright insulting. It’s not hard for me to imagine that the same woman who would be delighted if her husband came after her with a full compliment of Njoy pleasure tools would be disinterested, or even vaguely disgusted by porn.

Overwhelmingly porn simply is not respectful, let alone celebratory of the things that most people understand to be wholesome and pleasurable about sex, and the problem I have with typical pro-porn retort of “it’s just harmless fantasy”, is it always seems laden with the implication that if you, the offended viewer, can’t help but see through the thin coating of “harmless fantasy” spread over top down to the retrograde attitudes about sexuality and shabby production and generally crummy values expressed in porn, then you’re the one with the problem. Time and time again, I see people , especially women, tell other women that the reason they don’t like porn is because they’re prude, uptight, or “not that advanced sexually”, and I just think that’s wrong. I know too many women who are absolutely uninhibited about sex, but are left totally cold, or even off-put by porn.

I will say this to the woman who finds herself upset by her husband’s porn viewing habits: the fact that your husband watches porn that seems as if it was made by a not too bright, misogynistic 15 year-old boy doesn’t mean the porn he’s watching represents his secretly held views about sex and women, any more than a wife fucking herself with a Fun Factory toy means she secretly wishes that her husband was some sort of cyber-vibrator-droid.

(Of course there are a lot more permutations. For whatever reason, plenty of women seem to buy into the idea that they’re most important role in their marriage is as the sexual gatekeeper, slowly starving themselves, their husbands, and their relationships of pleasure and intimacy. A woman like that probably should be concerned about her husband’s porn viewing habits, though likely not for the reasons she thinks. And plenty of guys are insensitive dickheads who don’t think twice about how the the porn they watch makes their spouses feel.)

Judging men by the porn they watch is sort of like judging women by what they had to stuff in their snatches 15-20 years ago. But the only thing the vaguely cadavorous dildos and hard white plastic vibrators that used to characterize sex toys said about women is that when it comes to taking care of yourself sexually, a lot of time something is better than nothing, even when that something is pretty crummy. Thankfully there has been some progress since the days of the white plastic dimestore vibrator. Standards and expectations have been raised, and rather than being silly and embarrassing, today’s best sextoys are beautiful statements about the importance of sexual pleasure.

Will that ever happen with porn? I don’t know. You can’t prototype a movie. All your R&D goes into making the final product, which makes the entire undertaking riskier. And as our recent misadventure in Australia points out, sexually explicit movies still don’t have access to the market place that sextoys do, so while Njoy can put just as much into making tools as a company that make surgical tools puts into theirs, a the budget of a sexually explicit film has to be scaled against market barriers. The result? Even Shortbus, the most lavishly funded sexually explicit film to date, is still a low-budget indie.

Meanwhile, if your otherwise mostly wonderful husband watches porn and it has your panties in a twist, have a little compassion for the poor guy that there isn’t something for him to watch that is as lovely as Eros Bodyglide is for basting your naughty bits. In fact, chances are pretty good that he is embarrassed by what he strokes to.

And if you’re a guy whose wife feels wounded by the fact that you watch porn, take another look at what you’re watching, but this time after you’ve blown your load. Chances are you’ll feel a little more sympathetic to her point of view too.

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.

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.

On her journal, DTG asked me a question to which I spent the better part of this morning crafting a witty and self-important reply. But when I went to post my answer, I discovered I had exceeded the 4800 character limit for comments. So I’ll answer her here. A little context:

DTG quotes Laura Lipnis, a professor of media studies at Northwestern University as saying:

“….Pornography manages to penetrate to the marrow of who we are as a culture and as psyches….pornography understands that amalgam of complexes, repressions, and identifications we call ‘me’”

I responded by quoting Ms. Lipnis saying:

“”Pornography grabs us and doesn’t let go.”

and added “From my vantage point, Ms. Kipnis gives porn too much credit.”

DTG asked me “why?” Here’s my answer, by way of a lot of boasting and little self-disclosure:

Why? Well since you asked…

I wasn’t always an artist. Before I was an artist, I was an art student, and and art student with next to no interest in art history classes; and I wasn’t going to be able to graduate because I didn’t have enough art history credits. (I was too busy taking physics and chemistry and math and music to be bothered with reading and writing about art.) Partly because of the sort of work I was making at the time, and partly because I’m an argumentative smart ass, during my BFA year I was allow to enroll in a graduate art history seminar on post modernism, even though it was on the second art history course I had taken.

I didn’t enjoy it very much and spent most of my time in class making angry cartoon doodles in my notebook (before and since my doodles have always been geometric). I did little of the reading and none of the writing, and at the end of term I told the professor, “I really need the art history credits for my degree, but I think I’d shoot myself before writing a paper about this stuff.” He gave me an A for 3 credits 500 level independent study.

The point is, I’ve never been particularly comfortable with the study of art, especially by people who don’t make it. Although I’ve been making sexually explicit images for more than 20 years, and selling sexually explicit images for more than 10 years, I’ve only recently begun to write about my own work (sometimes helpful), and you may be disappointed to learn I’ve never read any academic critiques of porn (well at least not past the first page while browsing in a bookstore, or an excerpt in a magazine.)

I think a reason for this is people who don’t make art often have wild fantasies about the process, and no where is this more evident than in porn. This why between the ballyhooing our good reviews, and bitching about labels, I make posts that are about the nuts and bolts of the process.

For an example of a what I’m talking about, we need look no further than Virgin-Slut’s recent dissection in “The Top Stays in the Picture”. VS gets so close, but when she realizes that the top that won’t go away might be concealing something, she jumps to liposuction – a costly vanity surgery that allows those with means to push the standards of beauty beyond the reach of the rest of us. In fact, what’s being concealed is a c-section scar (no guarantee, but I’ll be dollars to navy beans). Look at the poses and coverage. In all four images, the one part of the model’s body that is always hidden is her belly just above her pubes.

Now please don’t think I’m holding VS as a fool, that’s not my intention. What I’m trying to say is that we’re willing to believe almost anything about porn, even something as ridiculous as the idea that it’s a $52 billion/year industry. And if we’ll believe that, or course we’ll believe that the model had liposuction rather than a difficult delivery. Of course we’ll believe that porn is more mainstream than ever, when in fact it has become more and more marginalized for the past 30 years. But just because we’re willing to believe these things, it doesn’t mean porn is important or powerful. It means our doubts, fears, and desires are important and powerful.

No more speculation, no more sophistry. Some facts:

It’s easy to get confused. Porn comes in the same amaray case as Master and Commander, and if you want to get an idea how powerful that is, buy a dozen cases, make up a mock cover, and then stack them up so all you see is the spine. The effect is remarkable. (Just think how ligit I feel when pallet-loads of my titles arrive by truck.)

When you buy a porn video you peel off the wrapper and put it in the same machine you use to play back the deluxe edition of Terminator III, and it comes up on the same screen as the nightly news. It can’t help but seem important. (You’d be impressed if I told you I sang at Carnegie Hall – until I told you how I got there.)

So when I say that Ms. Kipnis over-estimates porn when she says “Porn grabs us and doesn’t let go,”, what I mean is that she’s found and become fascinated with a remora, and then gone on to confuse it with the shark. She’s guessed lipo, when it’s really a c-section. She’s seen a huge shadow cast on the back wall of the stage at Carnegie Hall, but hasn’t realized it’s only a mouse passing in front of the footlights.

-TC