Remember personal websites and how excited people got about them? Well, pornographer and hirsute male about town JACKtheZIPPER (JtZ) has put together more than a decade of his seriously arresting art prints, videos, and assorted merchandise for the revamped JACKtheZIPPER.com, in addition to debuting his Faster Babylon podcast.
“It was all the witchy women who did it for me,” says JtZ (I’m going to call him “Mr. theZIPPER”? No thank you). “Ladies around the neighborhood. Ladies you knew were up to something. They’re here in porn, too, but you’ve got to look for them.”
His own history and porno-funding a fascinating story on its own, JtZ’s baker’s dozen movies for various Porn Valley studios are noteworthy not only for their hardcore filthiness mixed with the kind of exuberance you might remember from the time you said, “It might be cool to punch through this window,” but also for the fact that they were noble experiments on everyone’s part, but never quite fit in with Porn Valley’s need to serialize, replicate, and formulize “content” to break even.
“So I never stayed with one place very long,” he says.
But that doesn’t mean that each of his full-length movies isn’t a goddamn pornographic gem and that his collected scenes — now part of a $29.99-a-month paysite called Fornicopter — aren’t some of the edgiest. Not only that but — and perhaps this is because he’s not yoked to a studio but a mysterious cabal of investors — JtZ’s ability to get a performance and a look out of talent that she may never deliver for anyone else, is unparalleled.
JtZ’s podcast interviews with porn legend Jeannie Silver and porn byproduct Gram Ponante are insightful, intriguing, and entertaining. They are part of the Faster Babylon section of the site.
I ask JtZ why a website, why now.
“Because if people like my stuff,they need a place to find it. And until now there hasn’t been one central location.” This is true: His 2014 film “The Killers” is no longer available at the retailer I reviewed it for.
As artists of all types moved away from personal websites when those things began paying less and less, only to find that the content aggregators they fled to (Gawker, The Huffington Post, Conde Nast, Hustler, ad infinitum) similarly didn’t pay a living wage, one of the many side effects was that there was no longer a clearinghouse for an artist’s increasingly decentralized body of work. I hope website relaunches like JtZ’s become more common. Maybe the personal website is the new vinyl.
One of the early documentarians of the phenomenons that became Sasha Grey, Stoya, and Charlotte Stokely, JACKtheZIPPER is a trustworthy pornographer. If I had a time machine, I’d replace all that weak shit I found in the woods behind my junior high school with JtZ pictures. He’s saying, “This is what’s sexy to grown-ass adults. It’s weird, it’s creepy, it’s tragic — it’s the thrill that’ll wreck your life.”
Previously on Porn Valley Observed: Witchy Women, JACKtheZIPPER, and his goddamned sacred geometry of filth
See Also: The New JtZ
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