We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings
Blending memoir with Smith's own drawings and paintings, We Did Porn will do for alt porn what Hunter S. Thompson did for motorcycle gangs and Tom Wolfe for psychedelica.\ Punk artist and icon Zak Smith made a name for himself by visually re-creating Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and drawing pictures of girls in the "naked girl business." His artistic pedigree and acute observation landed him in high-profile shows from the Whitney to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Somewhere...
Search in google:
Zak Smith is equally comfortable in the fine art scene, the literary scene — and filming a scene. A porn scene, that is: Smith’s alter ego Zak Sabbath is a renowned alternative porn actor. In this illustrated memoir (graphic in more ways than one), Smith describes his shift from New York's high-end art world to the seedy adult entertainment underbelly of Los Angeles, offering readers an inside understanding of the industry, its players, and its audience. Smith narrates his own foray into pornography and gives his readers a new understanding of the industry, its players, and its audience. Best known for his series of illustrations entitled Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, Smith is an artistic and storytelling force that cannot be ignored.Publishers WeeklyVisual artist and recent alt-porn star Smith-known in the adult film world as "Zak Sabbath"-takes readers on a frenetic journey from the New York art scene to pornography-saturated Los Angeles. Interspersed with his drawings, which have been displayed at MoMA and the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Smith's memoir is more a series of linked vignettes than a chronological account of his foray into alt-porn. As distinct from mainstream hardcore porn, alt-porn tries to do with sex "the kinds of things ambitious young filmmakers might try to do after graduating from art school." It was Smith's collection of illustrations for Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that first attracted the attention of "pirate porn" director Osbie Feel. As Smith puts it, "I ended up in porn because one day I sat down and decided to draw one picture for every page of a very thick book no one I knew had read." In addition to attending the Porn Film Festival Berlin and the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas-and having sex with countless women with names like Tina DiVine and Trixie Kyle in countless warehouse sets-Smith is also a cultural critic, dissecting everything from Valentine's Day to the grammar in antipornography laws. Just as porn, alternative or otherwise, has its fans, Smith's memoir is an acquired taste and will appeal to those who like things a little kinky. (July 1)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
\ Publishers WeeklyVisual artist and recent alt-porn star Smith-known in the adult film world as "Zak Sabbath"-takes readers on a frenetic journey from the New York art scene to pornography-saturated Los Angeles. Interspersed with his drawings, which have been displayed at MoMA and the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Smith's memoir is more a series of linked vignettes than a chronological account of his foray into alt-porn. As distinct from mainstream hardcore porn, alt-porn tries to do with sex "the kinds of things ambitious young filmmakers might try to do after graduating from art school." It was Smith's collection of illustrations for Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that first attracted the attention of "pirate porn" director Osbie Feel. As Smith puts it, "I ended up in porn because one day I sat down and decided to draw one picture for every page of a very thick book no one I knew had read." In addition to attending the Porn Film Festival Berlin and the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas-and having sex with countless women with names like Tina DiVine and Trixie Kyle in countless warehouse sets-Smith is also a cultural critic, dissecting everything from Valentine's Day to the grammar in antipornography laws. Just as porn, alternative or otherwise, has its fans, Smith's memoir is an acquired taste and will appeal to those who like things a little kinky. (July 1)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.\ \ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsIntelligent, frank and often hilarious meditation on the author's dual career as an artist and actor in adult videos. The two career tracks are not unrelated for Smith (Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, 2006, etc.). Known in the art world for his visually complex drawings of strippers and other women in the sex industry, many of which are reproduced here, Smith attracted the attention of makers of a subgenre of adult films known as alt porn. Though Smith refrains from giving a fixed definition, alt porn might be described as the work of would-be auteurs whose films are artistically ambitious and thematically personal, while maintaining the standard sex-to-story ratio that enables them to be distributed as commercially viable pornography. Its filmmakers tend to shun surgically enhanced bodies in favor of other body modifications like dyed hair, piercings and tattoos. While chatting with a director who wanted to use one of his works in a movie, Smith semi-seriously suggested a trade-use of his art for a role in the film. Suddenly he was exchanging the New York art scene for the adult-video playground of Los Angeles, using the name Zak Sabbath. But not all was well in the alt-porn kingdom. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Smith saw that most of the problems with the industry were the result of the hypocrisy and moral confusion of the convention-arbiters themselves. In particular, Smith points a finger at the Republican Party, which he says is confused about porn because the two wings pulling on it-the God wing and the money wing-have entirely different agendas and attitudes about human freedom. But Smith also lambasts porn critics likeTyra Banks, who want to end the discussion of who makes porn and why, in order to keep it-and prostitution-separate from, and beneath, the kind of body selling that fashion models like Banks make their living from. The pleasure in this book comes not from living through the author's atypical experience, but in being taken deeper into areas of thought commonly perceived as taboo-a wild, entirely worthwhile ride.\ \
