The pleasure in this book comes not from living through the author’s atypical experience, but in being taken deeper into...
Intelligent, 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 like Tyra 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.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-9802436-8-0
Page Count: 488
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.
Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths.
Readers of the first volume—and followers of the related site on Facebook and elsewhere—will feel immediately at home. The author has continued to photograph the human zoo: folks out in the streets and in the parks, in moods ranging from parade-happy to deep despair. He includes one running feature—“Today in Microfashion,” which shows images of little children dressed up in various arresting ways. He also provides some juxtapositions, images and/or stories that are related somehow. These range from surprising to forced to barely tolerable. One shows a man with a cat on his head and a woman with a large flowered headpiece, another a construction worker proud of his body and, on the facing page, a man in a wheelchair. The emotions course along the entire continuum of human passion: love, broken love, elation, depression, playfulness, argumentativeness, madness, arrogance, humility, pride, frustration, and confusion. We see varieties of the human costume, as well, from formalwear to homeless-wear. A few celebrities appear, President Barack Obama among them. The “stories” range from single-sentence comments and quips and complaints to more lengthy tales (none longer than a couple of pages). People talk about abusive parents, exes, struggles to succeed, addiction and recovery, dramatic failures, and lifelong happiness. Some deliver minirants (a neuroscientist is especially curmudgeonly), and the children often provide the most (often unintended) humor. One little boy with a fishing pole talks about a monster fish. Toward the end, the images seem to lead us toward hope. But then…a final photograph turns the light out once again.
A wondrous mix of races, ages, genders, and social classes, and on virtually every page is a surprise.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05890-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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