“I think of it as a Resse’s Peanut Butter Cup of Porn,” said Matt Zane, the person to thank (or despise) if the recent wave of tattoos and piercings, a punk aesthetic, and the presence of musicians and “alt” in porn don’t seem as revolutionary as publicists would have you believe.
Zane is a pornographer, musician, suspension artist, and “Trascendental Satanist.” I checked this last job against the IRS’list of occupations and couldn’t find it, yet another example of how our government discriminates against Satanists. Who has always been there when the phone rings at 3 a.m.? Satan has.
Zane, born Matt Zicari, is a second generation pornographer. His father, Chuck, is a producer and distributor and his cousin, Rob Zicari, runs the obscenity-skirting Extreme Associates under the alias Rob Black. His younger brother, Mark, is also a porn performer.
Zane’s new project is the Tattooed And Tight series, involving women getting tattoos and fucked at the same time (most of the images on this page are from Tattooed And Tight 3, starring Scarlett Pain, Tera Wray, Nadia Styles, Jandi Lin, and Tricia Oaks). Though Zane has been in and out of the porn business for more than a decade, his current work is topical in that it reflects our need to multitask, even when having sex.
“I can only couple with women who are talented in that way,” I told Zane while channeling the Prince of Darkness. “As I service them they often send and receive text messages, run away, and burst into flame.”
Zane grew up in upstate New York and became a musician, forming and touring with bands around the United States. He now fronts Society 1, what Rapture theorists call the Anti-Stryper.
When Matt worked for his father, the two eventually disagreed about the type of porn they should produce, and how it should be released.
“I was the youngest director in porn at the time,” Zane said. “It was 1996, I was 21, and there was rock and roll and tattoos in my movies (like the Backstage Sluts series) and I was pushing to release DVD and VHS at the same time, back before that was a burning issue.”
Zane saw the rapper-turned actor Ice-T in a Melrose Ave. store, lending his visage to clothing for an MTV spot.
“I thought, ‘Porn can go this way, too,'” he said.
And in the late 90’s Zane was the alternative face of porn, even as companies like Vivid and Wicked were defining the contract system and developing high-end features, Zane was pioneering a porn style that incorporated fast-editing, music that he and his friends were making, handheld cameras, and a grunge/punk aesthetic similar to that filtered through MTV.
“I saw a hole where things could go,” Zane said. “And applied that synthesis.”
And now, Zane says, “nobody knows who I am.
“I quit for a while and went on tour,” Zane said, “and ran out of money, and got money, and ran out of it again. And when I came back there were people showing up at the AVN show like Dave Navarro and Gene Simmons and people were talking about tattoos in movies like tattoos had just been invented.”
Zane is the type of pornographer who fights porn’s inherent disposability.
“And I don’t want to be one of those old fucks who say, ‘You don’t perceive my level of importance? Don’t you know who I am?‘ But I’m at the AVN show and they won’t let me walk down the red carpet….I’ve just been gone a few years!”
Zane is also shooting Radium, a series that incorporates rock and porn. Like Tattooed and Tight, Radium stars Tera Wray. One of Wray’s duties in Radium is to interview bands.
The porn ideal has always gone hand in hand with rock (unless you’re Peter Cetera) and, like Joanna Angel does with Burning Angel, Kentucky Fried Wray only makes these bands look cooler.
“Tera is a hot rock chick who gets it. She likes the bands, she knows what to say to them,” Zane said.
For publicity, “Anything we can do outside of porn we utilize,” Zane said. “MySpace, Youtube, Bizarre Magazine, tattoo parlors…”
I asked if Zane was going for what would sell or what would interest him, and if he wondered if the two were exclusive.
“If Porn was the only thing I did,” Zane said, “I’d slit my wrists. But if you look at any other industry, they all respect their history. The snot-nosed kids in punk respect Iggy Pop, all the metal kids know Slayer.
Why does everybody in porn think it started with them? They think they’re these ground-breaking geniuses. Not knowing what came before you is native to the porn industry for some reason.”
So many things work against Porn having a sense of its own history. Only fans can, and their memory is selective. If talent stays in the business, on average, for less than six months, if the workload required values quantity over quality – and the budget for both is the same – and since Porn is an industry where a much larger than average portion of its own employees seek a way to deny their involvement in it, of course there aren’t many jobs for Porn Archivists.
This is why Zane relieves stress by hanging from hooks.
“I didn’t set out to be a suspension artist,” he said. “But it’s fucking great.”
In January, Zane beat by 18 minutes a record previously held by “Mind Freak”‘s Cris Angel. Zane hung out in the middle of the AVN convention in Las Vegas for six hours, suspended by four hooks. I saw him during this time. He refused my request to pose as if he were inviting people to a barbecue.
“I was in a special space at the time,” Zane said. “I hope you understand.”
“Now I understand,” I said.
“Four hooks,” Zane said. “Angel had eight hooks.”
I considered this for a few seconds, thinking that eight was better than four.
“…four hooks hurts more,” Zane added. “because all your weight is on fewer points to distribute it.
“It took me a whole month to go back to the gym and do yoga again,” Zane said. “But the suspension is more than a body feeling. It’s more about psychological distress.”
But even in hanging from hooks, Zane got other things done.
“There was a lot of pain over those six hours,” he said. “I was going insane. But then I felt a mental split. I was fully aware of two people.”
Tattooed And Tight 3
Previously: AVN: The only numbers you can trust; Images of heaven (that take me to Hell); “You’re not one of us”: a steveporn odyssey
See also: Matt “The Lord” Zane
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