Violet Blue’s podcast OPEN SOURCE SEX is in the running for the Weblog Awards Best Podcast of 2006. Not best sex podcast. Not best women’s podcast. Not best DIY podcast. Best Podcast 2006. Period. Full stop.

Vote for her here. Vote for her NOW!

Violet Blue says:

Oh, good porn — what a fantasy! Good porn is pretty much the opposite of most of what’s most widely available on the market. Good porn has real people who are attractive; it has performers that are so hot for each other they practically tear each other’s clothes off (or savor every minute and every inch); good porn looks good and is thoughfully lit and edited; in good porn, no one “goes through the motions.” Good porn makes you want to get off ASAP; good porn doesn’t treat its audience like they’re stupid, wrong or perverted for wanting to watch it. Good porn is believable and has context. Good porn knows the failures of bad porn; good porn never fakes it. Emphasis added.

More of what Violet has to say here.

Violet Blue is hard at work editing the 2006 edition of Best Women’s Erotica, and today on her blog she writes:

“I don’t know, but I have to say that I’ve noticed a huge difference in the way that previous generations of women have edited erotic anthologies in comparison to my generations’ attitudes about sex. We don’t think that “literary” erotica, especially women’s erotica, needs to be somehow qualified by sadness, anguish, pain or suffering… A message to the publishers and editors (and filmmakers) who imbue the hot fuck with a moral: you’re not relevant anymore… I’m running totally sexually fucking amok with BWE ‘06. I’m tossing OUT all the fucking depressing submissions I’m getting. I want erotica that totally turns my head around, and makes me want to fuck.”

While it’s relatively easy to write a “Penthouse Letters” stroke story with happy ending (no pun intended), it’s no small trick to keep a more substantive story about hot sex from veering into “sadness, anguish, pain or suffering”. Drama requires elements like balance and consequence. Never mind steamy sex, if the characters in a story are having too much fun riding bicycles, you can be sure that someone’s going to have a bad wreck. That’s just the way that story-tellling works. (I think we have the ancient Greeks to thank for this.) Add to that our deep cultural suspicion of pleasure (sexual and otherwise), and it adds up to a lot of stories about people having really great sex, but paying for it in the end. (Let that be a lesson to you, dear reader!)

How then can you tell stories about good sex that don’t end badly? I’ve had some success avoiding sadness, anguish, pain, and suffering by employing the “slice of life” device. In my “hardcore love stories” the much needed sense of drama and consequence comes from constantly being aware that the people on screen are real flesh and blood human beings; that their friends and neighbors and family might see them fucking; that by choosing to share themselves with us in such an intimate way they are, in fact, taking a very real risk.

Of course this “real life” approach is a limited way to explore both sexual pleasure and story telling, and as long as we’ve been doing this work, Mrs.C and I have also been throwing around ideas for how we could produce fictional sex films that wouldn’t tumble off the sadness/anguish/pain/suffering cliff. Between story-telling considerations, audience comfort, and the ever-present constraints of low-budget filmmaking, it’s a tough nut to crack, but I think we’ve laid a good conceptual foundation, and we’ve even got a couple rudimentary of treatments we’re working on. After Violet’s proclamation this morning, I’m very eager to see Best Women’s Erotica 2006. I want to hear more stories about people having good sex and not having to pay for it in the last reel!

Speaking of good sex and happy endings, I’ve got a new tease for you; the first from last February’s San Francisco Bay Area shoot:

Barely out of their teens when they first got together, Matt and Khym spent many years generously taking care of others instead of concentrating on themselves. Now in their thirties, Matt and Khym have taken the time to rediscover the joys of married life and married sex. In this clip, Khym and Matt talk about their first encounter and their first impression of each other, and Khym reveals a surprising secret…

Matt and Khym: Better Then Ever

I think you’ll find this clip utterly free of sadness, anguish, pain or suffering, and hopefully it will make you want to fuck too!

-T.C.

Last February, when we were on location in the Bay Area, I had a chance to spend some time with Violet Blue and Carol Queen talking about porn as a part of Neighborhood Public Radio’s series on indecency.

It was my first time on the radio and my first threesome, so I count myself very lucky to have two women as gentle and experienced as Violet and Carol to pop my cherry. Violet’s just posted an .mp3 of my “first time” to her pod cast site; you might enjoy listening to it:

Tony gets tag-teamed by Violet and Carol

-T.C.

I just got off the phone with Violet Blue. She was one of the first people to put the full weight of her reputation behind our first film Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story by naming it one of her top five films of 2003. Violet’s also just the sort of friend you want to have when you need a good bull session, which is what we just had.

Violet also asked me to be a guest on a radio series about indecency she’s hosting throughout this month on a San Francisco pirate radio station. I’ve never been on the radio or TV before, and am not so sure that I’m ready to have my opinion broadcast to the world without the benefit of revisions. There are things you say in the heat of a conversation with someone you trust (like Violet) that might not be quite ready for the general public. But after warning her about all the impolitic or off-color things that I might blurt out before thinking, and receiving her assurance that she’ll keep me on track so that I’m not a total bore or a complete asshole, I’ve agreed. If she’s willing to make a promise like that, Violet must have a pretty high opinion of herself as a radio host. For all of our sakes, I hope she’s right. In any case, once it’s over we can all go out to dinner. Violet will have a chance to meet my wife and my cinematographer.

In the world of porn, there seems to be some confusion over the difference between a director, a cinematographer (aka director of photography), and a camera operator. The impression seems to be that directing, cinematography and camera operation are all things the director should do. It’s not that one person can’t do more than one of these things; there are directors who operate (Kubric being a famous example), and DPs often operate on low-budget independents. But outside of porn it’s rare that you hear of a director/cinematographer/camera op. Over on ADT I often read posts that say “so and so isn’t a real director, he doesn’t shoot his own stuff.” If actually looking through the lens is the measure of a “real” director, then there are very few directors outside the world of porn.

I think this point of confusion comes because when a movie is done really well, as the audience you have no real awareness of how many people, (all experts in their respective arts and crafts,) it actually took to create the utterly transparent experience that is the gold-standard of Hollywood filmmaking. Sure they have all those credits at the end, but I suspect a lot of people think most of those people are on the job because somebody knew somebody, because the union says you have to have five guys, even when you only need two. I mean come on, do you really need one guy called the Director of Photography and then another person to operate the camera? Well yes you do. It helps to have an A.C. and a loader too!

We won’t have an A.C. or a loader when we’re out in San Francisco later this month, and our director (yours truly) will be pulling double duty as our A camera operator. But we will have a cinematographer. If you like the way our films look, the credit belongs to him.

-T.C.