This electronic ankle bracelet keeps your pal Gram from getting out of Porn Valley much, but a call from tortured, misunderstood wunderkind Eon McKai and diminutive, Lovecraft-loving Joanna Angel, like the blood of Christ, compelled me to the exotic cities of Vernon and Huntington Park this weekend, driving past 66-cent stores and Repo Man-reminiscent locales to watch the shooting of Kill Girl Kill 3.Those of you reading for the first or final time might wonder what attending a porn shoot is like. Well, it’s a dream-come-true. It’s magical.
Were it not for the weapons-grade truss I wear for just these occasions, I would continually re-break my nose with my powerful erections.
That, the copious supply of Power Bars, and the off-chance that I might see Heidi Pike-Johnson are the things that keep me coming back despite clinical priapism and my painful social awkwardness.
Anyway, Eon McKai, the Burning Angel group, Benny Profane, and various other youngsters who make porn that features non-traditional-looking hotties, hotties wearing band-aids and sporting black eyes and bloody noses, pale, perhaps heavier, covered in tattooes, or otherwise looking like the women I dated in college (in college, we called these women “sullen”, “crazy”, and/or “morose”, but today’s politically-correct atmosphere demands we label them “hot like fire”) belong to an altporn world that is getting a great deal of press, laudatory and dismissive.
Apparently there was a New York Times story about altporn that VCA publicist Sean Carney called “smarmy and mocking”,
and then a New Republic piece that was less about altporn than it was about the smarmy and mocking tone of the New York Times article. I have not read either of these items because I feel that, by the time something gets beyond a grass-roots level to heights such as those, it’s best to fall back on the fact that you can actually have sex with someone rather than reading about what the NYT thinks about your aesthetic.
“We would send e-mails to Burning Angel and they wouldn’t respond,” said Malachi Ecks, McKai’s producer.
Now with BA starting to release DVDs (their first, called Burning Angel.com: the DVD for some reason, came out in April, and their Cthulhu-porn Re-Penetrator will go on sale in two weeks), the shoe is on the other foot. In addition to filming a scene for someone other than herself, Angel and partner Fontaine are getting the lowdown on how to shoot a porn movie, studio style.
Fontaine said that constrictions of location and money required creative solutions to shooting porn in New York. “We had to find other ways to make shit look hot,” he said. One recent solution was “Schoolbus Bitches”, in which various Angels fuck their way through Williamsburg in the back of a short schoolbus that was purchased and refitted by yet more friends in bands.
They’re like the expatriates of the 20s without the pressed linen fetish and cigarette habits. They’re like the various elements of King Crimson if that band produced videos of anal sex with girls on crutches.
“She would have disowned me by now if she didn’t like it,” he said.
Eon McKai was shooting stills in an adjacent office. McKai, who claims to have a mainstream job as a video editor, has found himself being approached for porn-lite mainstream projects as his porn persona, including the recent Louis XIV “Paper Doll”
video on Suicide Girls.
“The pseudonym thing gets difficult after a while,” he said, “but the identity stays the same.”
Because I needed to feed the monkey, I couldn’t stay all day, and so I only hung around for the stills. San Nicolas outfitted Angel with some boots and fishnets. She posed in the panelled office with scene partner James Deen. He had been grousing all day about his representation in the KGK2 trailer. “I ‘m just grabbing my package,” he said.
“Better be careful of what the camera picks up,” McKai said.
My favorite McKai quote goes something like, “It’s like getting all your friends and making a porn film.” I think that’s more important and impressive than whether or not porn is alt or alt is good.
For people who actually watch porn (rather than just the culture that surrounds it), altporn isn’t really a big deal or, save for the trappings, talent, and attitude, much different from any other kind of porn. That its purveyors believe in it is what sets it apart.
Gram Ponante is America's Beloved Porn Journalist
