Sexytime - La Videotheque Du Bis

Foreword by Joe Niem

My story opens with an assemblage ofbikini-clad girls, a few greased-up studs, and an oversized veiny, rubber-suited monster. Your mind may conjure a ·Caligula Has Risenfrom the Grave XXX feature, but I'm recounting a musical tribute to The Horror of Party Beach performed circa 2004 at the Werepad (San Francisco's underground cinema-lounge). The key player/co-writer/director is future pornoisseur, Jacques Boyreau. Jacques and I are just beginning to develop a hustler-to-hustler connection. Despite his persistent attempts to involve me in his projects, I remain cautious, though he does persuade me to take photos of the event. A mere month is spent staging and rehearsing this ambitious musical before the curtains rise to a packed house, including guest of honor Del Tenney, director of the original 1964 horror classic. The production goes far beyond the source material and nothing could have prepared us for the wildly hallucinatory trip that was to follow. B-movie bikers, beatniks, disturbed artists, witchcraft, familial dysfunction, evil corporations, lost girls, and that eight-foot-tall fish-beast - all distilled into a delirious spectacle spiced with dexterous dialogue and catchy musical numbers. Trash and art blur before us. By the third curtain call, I spy a tear in Del Tenney's eye. My mind is blown. There is no interaction between Jacques and me during the performance, as I'm busy snapping pies and he's busy being in charge. When the

evening shifts into party mode, I find him retreating into the dark of his room. Seeing he is near-catatonic (unsurprising, considering the pace he has been keeping), I let my admiration slip with a succinct, "I love you, man." A beleaguered stare punctuates an uncomfortable pause before he responds with a rhetorical, perhaps even existential - "You love me?" Later, while driving home, I consider what door I have accidentally opened and what screw I might have loosened. The next day, Jacques leaves a few words on my answering machine: "Last night you said that you loved me. Then let's start fucking. And by fucking, I mean work."

*** The Werepad is dead. Having ended a 12-year run in '06, it remains the stuff of local legend. I will always remember 2430 3rd Street as a factory setting where ideas got started and shit got done. In terms of getting busy, Jacques is the most single-minded individual. Not one to rest on achievements, a masochistic urgency forever beckons the next thing. Welcome to the next thing. With Sexytime, Mr. Boyreau rediscovers a lost civilization of femmetasmagoria that will whisk you into a long- ago cultural renaissance of porn, a golden age imbued with the distinct essence of those who truly loved their work. And by work, I mean fucking.

Photographer/ filmmaker Joe Niem makes his home in Oakland, California.

Cold 11e11m.el\.t OI\. a ot Day Some people believe that all the important programming of your mind occurs by the age of seven - that your attitudes about sex, race, religion, country, and right and wrong are set by that age and the rest of your life is just a lot of tinkering with those settings. As the Jesuits are said to put it: "Give us the boy until age seven and we'll give you the man." If this is so, then our cultural dials, including porn receptors, are in play by the second grade. Undeniably perversely - porn can access history and holds sway over personal origins. Certainly any talk aligning formative childhood and hardcore inputs is rife with colliding T.N.T. but I think we can blame Freud for signifying the "primal scene." And what is porn if not the primal scene for culture? The Primal Spectacle. Media dispenser of mysterious trauma, lifelong hang-ups, visions of body parts. Like fractured fairy tales tripping in a bottomless pit of fuck, porn is a never-ending story of The Primal Spectacle. We are all victims of assassin-cocks and terrorist-pussies performing a jihad against romantic love. To say: porn is paved with some of the worst intentions. For Sartre, hell is others. For me, porn is what others do. However puritan or warped that seems, it remains keener to observe that porn is important, cynical, radical, and, at rare turns, a source of absolute turn-on and beauty. Porn is like Darth Vader - if you know him as a passionately closed system protecting a chaos, then you might agree porn keeps hell in a container. Factor another keeper from Freud regarding how "fear" is a crowing duality of "horror" and "veneration," and you can dig how naturally our porn-revulsion and porn-awe shrive together. Which furthers the insidious, intimate, and accepted entry into ourselves through which porn achieves an indestructible position. Porn is the "fuck you" of the sex drive. If I were Dostoyevsky, I'd call this book Crime and Disgustingness - a lightning war of phallic will detonating sugar walls in a wake of meat. The political outcry of yesteryear - feminist outrage, parental injunctions, deconstructive rants about porn's collaboration with predatory capitalism - seem opportunistic and ill-advised before the more tumultuous question: What do we do with this non-degradable landfill of Primal Spectacle? Hence, I propose here in Sexytime, a bizarre recycling, a mentality of "post-porn." Without doubt, I am referring to my own desire to attain such. Post-porn does not seek the comforts of ambiguity by separating healthy versus unhealthy porn. Nor am I talking about a porn-less world. Post-porn is, above all, a rebound from the clawing heap of polemology about porn.

In his history of porn, The Secret Museum, Walter Kendrick famously said, "Pornography names an argu ment, not a thing." Except when an argument is perpetually stagnant enough to become a thing, as is the case with almost all current discussions about porn. The post-ness of petroleum oil is literal (it is running out). The post-ness of porn has no literal lack. If anything, it is due to porn's bull market (which I suppose makes for a sort of a 'lack' in the Yeatsian sense of "the center cannot hold" - the centrifugal spread of porn content has sucked away the core rituals). But while post-petroleum man's efficacy must adhere to precise recognition of new data, whatever paradigms post-porn men erect will be ascribable solely to the misrecognition of fantasies. Yup, this is some confusing shit all right. So, an aside. I may be a pornoisseur. A renaissance wad man. I cum, therefore I cum. I try not to think too much about how zombie movies have prepped us for cannibalism. Instead I seek 'porntraits' of pink insight. Did you know when they marketed Stallone's vehicle, The Expendables, they bought super cheap ad space on over 100 pornographic websites? Truth out: Sex may sell but porn sells other shit. Part of being a pornoisseur is that you appreciate cold assessments on a hot day. You err on the turf of the aesthete. Camille Paglia told the aesthete: You live off the eye. You remember a 1970s when a movement called Porn Chic took big pink shits of fuck all over the place. It was a miasma of freedom. It wore many hats. Porn chic electrified the art scene - e.g., William Copley's "Matisse-sleaze" New York City shows in 197374. It left records of probably the greatest blowjobs man will witness. It set the stage for the day when our children can watch heinous acts on demand if that's what they want. And porn chic made the posters in this book. So I'm suggesting: why don't we try to misrecognize them a little bit? Misrecognition is the innate rebelliousness of the aesthete who lives off the eye, not just through the mode of "seeing is believing" but rather "curating is seeing." In other words, your seeing is someone else's doing - or your doing. "Misrecognition" is the idea that unintended side effects emerge from unacknowledged mistakes - which speaks to the disruptive potential of visuals curated from one set of eyes to another and how the bonding agent of uncertainty makes us "belong" to our goofs. Misrecognition offers structure to error (or sin). It operates intuitively as damage control against certainty. It bullies known quantities, received notions, and rote umbrage. It is a bullshit detector playing Russian Roulette while on a mission to rescue Subjectivity.

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It's like laughing for no reason. Said the great Irishman, David Patrick Kelly in The Warriors, "I just like doing things like that." With the help of a (mostly) never-before-seen collection of porn poster art, Sexytime offers visually specific terms for a transformation of porn consumption. It's been said that a good idea is one that is simple enough to act upon. The idea of Sexytime is that these posters are more satisfying than the movies they advertise. A step further: they are actually more pornographic, with their emphasis on design - pornographicdesign. The peculiar freedom of these posters' no-holds-barred innuendos and rehashed figure studies of classic art-flesh is a bit of a perfect crime. They do not sell a ticket to the general public yet they are meant for the general public to see. As such, they occupy a public vortex, a space alive with all the possibilities of misrecognition, including the 'error' of wanting the poster without wanting the movie. Not content to merely pimp product, there is a Situationist drift around this signage, as though these posters were already far away from the movie, in a seditious postporn place of reassembly. And if a path of porn posters forms into a heart prosthesis out of this choppy cosmos, maybe you want it. In Roland Barthes's analysis, he advises a photo image to be filled with total obviousness and one key "disruptor" - the punctum. Sexytime has a lot of "puncta" - female faces all, excessed with design, enthralled by agenda. They gaze amok with hunger and slaggy wasting fevers. And variety prevails: the hauteur of Defiance, the great hair day of Loose Times At Ridley High, the jut of Female Moonshiners, the maternal Hungry Mouth, the Poe orbs of Naked Afternoon, the coke-whore confident Foxy Lady, the pigcheeked Female Chauvinists, the vagina-unstoppable New Wave Hookers, the freckled beastiecunts of Teenage Sex Therapy ... Sexytime puts O.D. back in Goddess. John Berger writes, "(the European oil painting) model is not so much a framed window open on to the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited." I'd like to say yes, after several books, I am aware I ferry a distinctive take on things and (this should mollify evil nerds who like to schleprok me) it stems from being aware that writing per se does not sell books such as this. I am tangential, but an author nonetheless. I'm a Lester Bangs fan so I recall Greil Marcus's epiphany that Bangs's dumpster of rock reviews might kick out some literature. (If only Greil could have stayed gonzo, we might all be lipstick traces!) So with that disclosed, hear me superfucking well when I tell you that not only will every drop of you be turned on by Sexytime but that these outrageous pieces might even fuck you up. And I don't mean this book is raping you like some Kurt Cobain premature scream. Because Sexytime is far too beautiful to tend that trap. But it will, I think, reignite the concept of Fucked Up By Art. What navigation do I offer? Here's what. Kid, old man, whoever, whatever, remember: Turned On and Fucked Up are not the same. But even if they are - you're in luck. You still came to the right place . -Jacques Boyreau

Editors: JACQUES BOYREAU PETER VAN HORNE Editorial Liaison: GARY GROTH Associate Editor: MICHAEL CATRON Designer: JACOB COVEY Production: PAUL BARESH, JOE NIEM, DARREN ABOULAFIA Associate Publisher: ERIC REYNOLDS Publishers: GARY GROTH KIM THOMPSON

Sexy time: The Post-Porn Rise of the Pornoisseur is copyright ©2012 Fantagraphics Books, Inc. Introduction copyright ©2012 Jacques Boyreau. Foreword copyright ©2012 Joe Niem. All rights reserved. Permission to quote or reproduce material for reviews must be obtained from the publisher. Fantagraphics Books, Inc. 7563 Lake City Way E Seattle WA 98115 To receive a free catalogue of more books like this, as well as an amazing variety of cutting-edge graphic novels, classic comic book and newspaper strip collections, eclectic prose novels, visually stunning art books, and uniquely insightful cultural criticism, call (800) 657-1100 or visit Fantagraphics.com. Follow us on Twitter at @fantagraphics and on Facebook at facebook.com/fantagraphics. Distributed in the U.S. by WW. Norton and Company, Inc. (800) 233-4830 Distributed in Canada by Canadian Manda Group (800) 452-6642 x862 Distributed in the U.K. by Turnaround Distribution 44 (0)20 8829-3002 Distributed to comic book stores by Diamond Comics Distributors (800) 452-6642 x215 First Fantagraphics Books edition: June 2012 ISBN 978-1-60699-553-2 Printed in Singapore