The Academy of Boners

This year's nominees for the Academy Awards are out. They're frustratingly familiar names, Hollywood elite. Seriously, it seems just 10 actors shuffled around into new roles and gowns. I used to get excited. But now I am just bored with the whole thing.

"We pretty much all tune in, despite the grotesquerie of watching an industry congratulate itself on its pretense that it's still an art form, of hearing people in $5,000 gowns invoke lush clichés of surprise and humility scripted by publicists, etc.-the whole cynical postmodern deal-but we all still seem to watch. To care."

This, from the late David Foster Wallace in his '98 essay, "Big Red Son" (from Consider the Lobster). Wallace offers an alternative to the predictably overblown AAs for those of us craving something more...

"Every January, the least pretentious city in America hosts the Annual AVN Awards. The AVN stands for Adult Video News, which is sort of the Variety of the US porn industry."

Wallace's depiction of the predictably vulgar weekend in Las Vegas (that coincides every year with the International Consumer Electronics Show, or CES, starring Bill Gates and other notables in the world of Consumer Tech. Men who will surely take a shuttle bus over the "Adult Software Exhibition," to oh so awkwardly approach (if they've the guts) their favorite hard core porn stars. Women they've seen climax. Their buttholes.)

"Big Red Son" was a piece Wallace wrote for Premiere, suspecting the mainstream magazine would publish very little of it. Wallace details the events of the weekend from the point of view of "your correspondents," (Wallace pluralized? or supposedly a couple of journalists who are not adult entertainment journalists) as they're led around by real porn writers, "Harold Hecuba" and "Dick Filth."

I can't say much more. You all should read this essay (with its wonderful footnotes) because it is hilarious, surprisingly poignant, entertaining and yes, oh so filthy. Knowing my father reads this blog, I can't tell you just how filthy.

Ok one anecdote. But I'm warning you dad and other relatives, STOP HERE. If you keep going, it says more about you than me. It is your failing, not mine.



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Our correspondents find themselves in the hotel room of acclaimed Gonzo director, Max Hardcore, interviewing him and his crew. (Gonzo porn is popular, usually with a hand-held camera, usually with co-eds in some tropical locale. A seeming documentary, Gonzo connects some schmo to "real girls," really porn starlets, that are seriously sexually degraded while schmo's "buddy" gets the whole thing on tape.)...

Max "wants to show your corresps. something from this week's filming that he thinks will sum up his particular porn genius better than any amount of exposition could..." "What it is is we got this one little girl back in the [infamous MAXWORLD] trailer, and after some face-fuckin [27] and reaming her asshole and, like, your standard depravities, we get her to stick a pen—no, a what-do-you-call..."

Crewman: "Magic Marker."

Max: "...Magic Marker, stick it up her asshole and write all this...this stuff,"

holding up his notebook, opened to a page; again he has us pass it around:

[27] = fellatio? = very energetic French kissing?