K & I (along with Belial, Lexi Lamour, Ethan Cage and others) have been buried well past our enormous genitals (well, in my case, anyway... Lexi does not have enormous genitals) in helping out with the production aspects of my friend Ren Savant's big Adam & Eve epic, The 8th Day.

As is common with these shows, it has eaten our lives and spit out rancid pips of broken bodies and spirits in its wake. I've also been doing the final renders on Hillary Scott: ICON, my big-budget all-sex paen to SexZ Pictures' contract star which comes out in September. The movie turned out great, and I'll be posting the music video we did for it shortly.

Today, while distracting K through a migraine, I stumbled upon a website called Uncyclopedia. It bills itself as "The content-free encyclopedia," and it's brilliant. Like Wikipedia, it is a random collection of bullshit articles that bear little or no resemblance to the actual facts of any person/place/thing/event, but in the case of Uncyclopedia, that's the point.

Also, the articles on Uncyclopedia are extremely funny. And, since it's built on a fully-functional wiki engine, if you don't like the answers you find there, you can insert your own. Just like Wikipedia. I recommend strating with the article on Cheerios and going from there...

Oh, and I heard a great joke yesterday: "Sarah Palin!"

I'm pissing myself!

For the last two weeks I've been overcoming a bulging disc that's giving me nerve compression in my left arm. As a result, I have numb fingers and muscle cramps down my left arm 24/7, and almost no strength in my left hand.

Makes typing a real chore.

As a result, I've missed my chance at exulting in an event I've long waited for; the much anticipated death of North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. There are so many things I'd like to say about this bigoted, lard-faced hunk of human detritus, but the left hand just ain't up to it.

Still, I'm unwilling to let the moment pass unobserved. Paul Slansky of 23/6.com has done a fantastic Jesse Helms quiz that highlights many of the foulest moments from a spectacularly objectionable life. With no permission, I'm going to reprint it here, and lift my good middle finger to a bag of righteous pus so evil he made Strom Thurmond and Newt Gingrich look well-mannered and civil by comparison.

I mean, c'mon; I named my Senator in Corruption after the guy.

Fuck off right to Hell, Jesse Helms.

FROM 236.com:

1) In his 1950 debut in politics, Jesse Helms worked for segregationist North Carolina Senate candidate Willis Smith. Helms helped come up with this ad: "White people, wake up before it's too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? [Smith's opponent] Frank Graham favors mingling of the races." What else did Helms do to insure Smith's victory?

1.       He started a whispering campaign about Graham having fathered an illegitimate half-black child.

2.       He doctored a photograph to show Graham's wife dancing with a black man.

3.       He phoned people in the middle of the night claiming to be Graham and asked for their votes.

true: 2

2) What did New Yorker writer Rick Hertzberg say about the passing of Jesse Helms?

1.       "Far too late for it to do anybody any good, Jesse Helms has died."

2.       "Remember how exhilarating it was to hear that Jerry Falwell was dead? Here comes that feeling again."

3.       "My only regret is that he didn't live long enough to see the swearing-in of President Obama."

true: 1

3) As Steven A. Holmes put it so brilliantly in his New York Times obit, "Mr. Helms liked his art uncomplicated." What would be an example of the kind of art that was too "complicated" for Mr. Helms, and that prompted him to try to cut the funding for the National Endowment for the Arts for subsidizing it?

1.       A photograph of a man peeing into another man's mouth.

2.       A photograph of an anus with a bullwhip sticking out of it.

3.       Both of the above, and also a big jar of urine with a crucifix submerged in it.

true: 3

4) Which of these best sums up Jesse Helms's reaction to "complicated" art?

1.       "I wonder what the artist was trying to say there."

2.       "Okay, I don't get it but someone else might."

3.       "I can't figure it out so I hate it and no one should be allowed to see it ever again."

true: 3

5) Which of these assessments of Jesse Helms was ludicrously offered up by the increasingly widely despised George W. Bush?

1.       "Jesse Helms's legacy is one of hatred, homophobia and racism."

2.       "Senator Helms certainly was no bigot. He was a man, however, not into subtlety."

3.       "Jesse Helms was a kind, decent and humble man."

true: 3

6) What was Jesse Helms's nickname?

1.       "Senator No."

2.       "The Tar Heel Terror."

3.       "Jolly Jesse."

true: 1

7) How did Jesse Helms explain his 1993 vote against confirming President Clinton's nominee Roberta Achtenberg as an assistant secretary at the Department of Housing and Urban Development?

1.       "She's a damn lawyer. I think we already have enough lawyers running the country."

2.       "She's from San Francisco, one of those hippie Commies. Thank you very much, but I don't need some hippie Commie over at HUD giving houses away to Negroes."

3.       "She's a damn lesbian. I am not going to put a lesbian in a position like that. If you want to call me a bigot, fine."

true: 3

8) How did Jesse Helms describe the kind of lesbian that Roberta Achtenberg wasn't and the kind of lesbian she was?

1.       "She's not an easy-going lesbian. She's a trouble-making lesbian."

2.       "She's not your garden-variety lesbian. She's a militant-activist-mean lesbian."

3.       "She's not a closeted lesbian. She's an out-there-shooting-her-mouth-off, proud-to-be-perverted, probably-witchcraft-practicing lesbian."

true: 2

9) True or false? When 18-year-old Ryan White died of AIDS and his mother went to Washington to speak to members of Congress about the disease, Jesse Helms was one of the most sympathetic listeners.

1.       True. He took her under his wing and introduced her to almost two dozen legislators.

2.       False. Though she did meet with almost two dozen legislators, Helms was not one of them, as he refused to speak to her even when he found himself alone with her in an elevator. See, since Helms believed the disease came from "unnatural" and "disgusting" behavior - "There is not one single case of AIDS in this country," he said, "that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy" - it followed logically that he should be uncivil to the mother of a hemophiliac boy who contracted the disease at 13 from a contaminated blood supply. Yes, he really was that much of a dick.

true: 2

10) Complete Jesse Helms's 1965 observation: "It's all very well and good to talk about 'uplifting society,' but somewhere along the line we must face the fact that from the beginning of time a lot of human beings have been born bums, but most of them - until fairly recently - were kept from behaving like bums because work was necessary for all who wished to eat. The more we remove the penalties for being a bum, the more _________ is going to blossom."

1.       the welfare state

2.       sloth and laziness

3.       bumism

true: 3

11) Which of these statements is NOT true?

1.       Jesse Helms urged his fellow right-wing loonies to buy up stock in CBS so they could take over the network and "become Dan Rather's boss."

2.       Jesse Helms joked that President Clinton was so unpopular among the military that "he'd better have a bodyguard" if he visited Fort Bragg.

3.       Jesse Helms said in 1966, "The nation has been hypnotized by the swaying and the gesturing of the Watusi and the Frug."

4.       Jesse Helms said of anti-Vietnam war protesters, "Look carefully into the faces of the people participating. What you will see, for the most part, are dirty, unshaven, often crude young men and stringy-haired awkward women who cannot attract attention any other way."

5.       Jesse Helms referred to the University of North Carolina (UNC) as the "University of Negroes and Communists."

6.       Jesse Helms added an amendment to an appropriations bill forbidding the use of any funds for the benefit of "any cult, organization or other group that has a purpose, or that has any interest in, the promoting of Satanism or witchcraft."

7.       Jesse Helms said of the 1963 civil rights protests, "The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights. Mob action invites mob action; violence invites violence; lawlessness invites lawlessness."

8.       Jesse Helms said, "Scientists have still established no clinical link between smoking and, let's say, cancer. They have a lot of statistics but that's all."

9.       Jesse Helms said of protesters he encountered on a trip to Mexico, "All Latins are volatile people. Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction."

10.   Jesse Helms turned his back and walked away to avoid shaking the hand of South African president Nelson Mandela.

11.   Jesse Helms led the Senate opposition to making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday, attacking King for "action-oriented Marxism" and calling him a "man of tasteless immorality" (which is not to be confused with the tasteful kind).

12.   Jesse Helms sent out a fund-raising letter warning, "Your tax dollars are being used to pay for grade school classes that teach our children that CANNIBALISM, WIFE-SWAPPING, and the MURDER of infants and the elderly are acceptable behavior."

13.   Jesse Helms, in private, referred to all black people as "Fred."

14.   Jesse Helms wrote, "We need only examine the documents of time to see that even the estimable Pilgrim fathers had some alien ideas tucked away in their own baggage. You might even go so far as to say that Communism came over on the Mayflower," to which Boston Globe reporter Bella English added, "You might, if you were an idiot."

15.   Wait, never mind, they're all true.

true: 15

12) Complete Jesse Helms's 1991 statement: "There have been 248 different U.S. Senators in the eighteen years and five months I have been there. None has been more capable than __________________

1.       Bob Dole.

2.       Howard Baker.

3.       Dan Quayle.

true: 3

 13) Appearing on Larry King Live in 1995, Jesse Helms took a call from an admirer who said he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for what?

1.       "For being a watchman looking out for the unborn."

2.       "For the way you've run the Senate Foreign Relations Committee."

3.       "For everything you've done to help keep down the niggers."

true: 3

14) How did Jesse Helms respond to Larry King's caller?

1.       "Well, thank you, I think."

2.       "You, sir, disgust me."

3.       "Hey, Trent, don't you have anything better to do with your time?"

true: 1

15) True or false? Though clearly prejudiced against black people, Jesse Helms managed to keep those feelings out of his personal encounters with his black colleagues.

1.       True. Face to face he was unfailingly respectful and courteous.

2.       False. Once he ran into Carol Moseley-Braun (D-IL) in a Senate elevator and turned to his friend Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and said, "Watch me make her cry. I'm going to make her cry. I'm going to sing 'Dixie' until she cries," and began to sing. And there, ladies and gentlemen, in one quote, you have Jesse Helms.

true: 2

Time escapes me. There were a lot of things I was going to write about; Stan Winston dying; how Violet Blue (the writer) is a total asshole; our recent visit from our local Vice squad; the incredbily awful Incredible Hulk.

Then George Carlin died, and all that went out the window. There are an assortment of comics I like, but damned few I respected. I can use the past tense because every funnyman I respected is dead now.

A lot has been written about Carlin's life and career, and I'm not going to flog the dead livestock on the subject. For me, he achieved real brilliance around 1990 when he began to get seriously political. Even at his darkest, I rarely heard Carlin say something I disagreed with, even if I didn't have the balls to admit it.

My favorite of all Carlin's bits exposed ecology as an adventure in self-interest and arrogance. When he ranted, "The planet is fine. The planet isn't going anywhere. We are! We're going away. Pack your shit, folks, we're going away." I was sitting in front of the T.V. nodding like a convert at a revival meeting about to begin speaking in tongues.

George Carlin got it.

I met him once. It was 1988, and he was performing at the Celebrity Theater in Phoenix. A friend I did theater with was running the lights, and he got me in. After the show, we went backstage to say hello, and my friend embarrassed me by explaining that I did stand-up as well (I hadn't quit yet).

George shook my hand, cocked one eyebrow and said "You're not gonna ask me for advice, are you?" I said no.

"Good," he said. "I don't want to have to tell ya to get a fuckin' job."

I love that story. I'll miss him.

Okay, I don't normally do this, but voting for the F.A.M.E. Awards closes today. Hillary, Upload and yours truly are up for stuff, so go vote for us. 'Cause getting four Best Movie awards for Upload just wasn't enough!

Uh... please.

http://www.thefameawards.com/vote_email.aspx

Let's take a moment to discuss psychosis, shall we? It's axiomatic to state that there are a lot of crazy people in porn. In fact, when I ran AVN, I used to say that everyone in the industry fell into at least one of three categories: paranoids, neurotics and sociopaths. A rare few of us fall into all three (and perhaps more). Nobody gets into this business because they're normal and well-adjusted. So stating that there are "a lot" of crazies is actually an understatement.

Taken as a whole, porn biz nutjobs range from the harmlessly eccentric ("Really? You wanna lick my feet after I walked in the gutter? Really?") to the sphincter-clenchingly insane ("C'mon, what are ya gonna do? Hit me with the car? OH GOD MY PELVIS!!!")

Since I generally prefer to be the only certifiable maniac in the room at any given time, I try to avoid the truly scary lunatics, but once in a while one sneaks in. Today I was reminded of my brush with an emotionally-challenged Payday bar named Mae Victoria. I haven't thought about Mae at all for nearly a year now, but this morning she was top-of-the-pops doing an interview on one of the porn gossip sites blathering about everyone who's wronged her including -- to my bemused surprise -- Kylie & Derrick Pierce.

For those who haven't heard of Mae -- which I'll assume is all of you -- she's a D-list performer who rarely works for the same director twice. At the age of 39, you really couldn't describe Mae as a has-been; she's a never-was. She aspires to be a has-been. If the core of the industry is made up of stars and starlets, Mae Victoria would be... an asteroid.

As for the severity of Mae's crazy, I pity the man in her life because that poor bastard has a boiled rabbit waiting in his future, you mark my words.

What Mae was bitching about on the web was Kylie's MILF movie for SexZ, Mommy Rearest. In response to a question about what she's been doing lately, she went off on what horrible people Kylie and Derrick are. The irony is that Mommy Rearest was shot last September, so if that's what she's been doing lately, times must be really tough in the asteroid business.

In the interest of full disclosure, I shot camera on Mommy Rearest, which gave me plenty of time to sit back and watch the show. After all, I like a bit of cabaret with my porn production (as long as it's not my show), and when Mae Victoria walked in lugging her trunkful of nutso behind her, there was plenty of cabaret.

That's about all Mae brings to the table. Nice tits (that you can't touch) and a boatload of crazy. Oh, and bush. Lots and lots of bush. But I'll get to that in a minute.

On the day we shot Mae, she showed up three hours early. We assumed there had been some screw-up with the booking but she explained she was there early in case Kylie wanted her to shave off her huge red matted 70s bush. She explained she'd been doing a lot of hairy pussy web work, but was willing to shave.

We got the impression this was one of the first movies she'd ever done. And while she offered to shave, she made it really clear that she really didn't want to. Since Kylie had cast Mae as a white trash mom having her car repossessed, she decided the bush worked and let Mae keep it.

The next two hours were devoted to shooting Kylie's scene with Moxxie Maddron and Alex Sanders. We shot dialogue outside, and then the scene, and the entire time, Mae was wandering around like a bored kid getting pouty that no one would play with her. She plainly hated not being the center of attention, and kept lifting up her top getting every man on set to play with her tits.

Except, of course, she doesn't want anyone to touch her tits. At all. She made me think of Lucy van Pelt yanking away the football every time Charlie Brown went to punt. Because the crazy just rolls off of her in waves, like psychic B.O., Mae has all the erotic appeal of a burlap sack filled with dead rodents. But, she has a great rack, and does her best to get everyone to pay attention to it, and by extension, her.

A quick digression -- I had to laugh when Mae said Kylie had a "dog face" in her interview... that's why she has a legion of fans all over the world, babe, and you, uh, don't. Have any. But then what can you expect from a fruit rind circling the punchbowl when everyone drinks from the middle? Projection, much?

Sorry. So the tits. Derrick showed up after Kylie's scene, and was flirting with Moxxie who was still hanging around because we like Moxxie and she has a crush on me and desperately wants to have rough, violent sex with me but I'm toying with her affections.

Oh, right. Real world. Sorry. So Moxxie likes it rough and Derrick is pinching her nipples. He tweaked one and Moxxie offered the other telling him to even it out. Mae watched this, obviously seething that "her" guy was flirting with another girl (Derrick was still reeling from the crotch-forest revelation), and protested that he absolutely couldn't do that to her nipples. She went on to say that her breasts were so sensitive he couldn't touch them. At all. This scene was gonna be a real scorcher.

At this point, the idea had already been floated in private of dumping Mae and replacing her, or shooting the scene at a later date. We'd had three hours of her being squirrely, shifty, disappearing into the bathroom for long stretches of time, complaining about the fact that it was an anal scene ("how many minutes of anal are we going to shoot?") and alternately hitting on every guy in the room and talking about how disgusting the business is.

Hot stuff, to be sure. But Kylie decided to press ahead. We struggled through the dialogue, Mae giving Kylie grief about it at every turn, and finally got to the sex.

Which was a nightmare.

I've never felt so sorry for any performer during a scene as I did for Derrick Pierce that night. In her little online tirade, Mae talks about how rough Derrick was with her, but there's no doubt in my mind he was getting the abuse.

First of all, Derrick's not a rough guy unless the girl asks him for it, and he knows her well. He was anything but rough with Mae, though I'm sure he wanted to strangle her. I know I did.

First she tried to blow him as if she could do it without actually using her mouth. She'd flick out her tongue and kind of slide it near his cock, looking at the camera the whole time (which Kylie hates, and no matter how many times she said "please don't look at the camera," Mae just couldn't fathom that).

Finally, we moved into the sex after the lamest blowjob in history. Mae, who knows we're living with her tropical rainforest, but not loving it, keeps referring to it. "Oh, yeah daddy, fuck that hairy pussy! Bang that hairy pussy!" and every time she does, Derrick -- who's channeling into his happy place already -- has to close his eyes and really be somewhere else to keep it going.

Unfortunately, every position seems to hurt her. Mish hurts. Doggy hurts. If he sticks in more than an inch it hurts. And we're talking pussy, here. So we keep cutting for Derrick to get his edge back, and every time the cameras aren't rolling, Mae is all over him like a cheap suit. "C'mon, Daddy, fuck me for real! You can fuck me as hard as you want!"

Derrick, understandably, declines. Me, I'd rather jerk it, too.

Then... "Rolling." ...wiggle...squirm..."Ow! Ouch! Not so deep!"...wiggle...squirm...roll...

She tells him he can spank her. He does. She hates it. She tells him to bite her. He does. She hates it. She tells him to pull her hair... you get the idea.

We finally get enough footage to put together a scene, and then, bob help us, it's time for the anal.

I'd like to say right up front that I've got no problem whatsoever with girls who don't do anal. There are a lot of girls who either don't like it or who just can't relax enough that it isn't painful, and they make the wise decision not to do anal scenes.

Then there are crazy, two-dollar whores who are so desperate for cash they can't think past accepting the job to the moment of having to actually do it and to them I say if you can't do anal, DON'T DO FUCKING ANAL!

In the gossip column, Mae claims Derrick not only made her bleed, but that he did it intentionally. If only. Fact is, the only hemorrhaging was the crazy bleeding out of Mae's mouth. We shot about eight minutes of really lousy anal, and Derrick ran away to the bathroom to get ready for the pop.

My favorite part of the night was when he came back, Mae told Derrick, "C'mon, daddy, fuck me till you come." Derrick, seeing the finish line, shot back, "I ain't gonna fuck you, now just sit there and let me jerk off."

After a tough scene, you can't help but wonder how far down the guys are going in their heads to get to the pop. On a different occasion, Ren Savant and I were shooting camera when Anthony Hardwood was trying to come with a cut in his foreskin (which had snagged on Nicki Hunter's clit piercing). As we watched him concentrating, we joked under our breath "he's thinking about a girl getting fucked in the ass... now it's a nun getting fucked in the ass... now it's an underage nun getting fucked in the ass... now it's an underage nun getting fucked in the ass by a German shepherd..."

I was thinking about that as I watched Derrick concentrating like a motherfucker. But he popped, shot stills, and fled. And who can blame him. Unfortunately, after Mae had cleaned up and was ready to leave, we discovered that Derrick had grabbed her keys off the table without thinking.

For those of you -- like me -- who don't drive cars that are fresher than the eggs at the supermarket, let me teach you something that I recently learned. Lots of new cars don't have an ignition key. The fob has an encrypted bluetooth or RFID transmitter and the car simply recognizes that the key is near. You push a button and it starts. So Derrick had keys in his pocket and never realized that they weren't his. His keys were also in his pocket, so the car started. And he left.

By the time we got hold of him, he was nearly to LAX where he was picking up his girlfriend. He met up with one of his friends who brought the keys back, but we had nearly two hours of waiting with the readheaded nutlog. Every fifteen minutes she called a guy she was supposed to be seeing later that night to update him on her status. Eventually we found out that it was Adam Rifkin (Ron Jeremy had hooked them up).

I wonder if Adam had seen a picture, or if he just took Ronny's word? I know from the industry grapevine that Rifkin loves him the B-girls, but Mae seems a little low-rent, even for the director of The Dark Backward. I'm guessing he hadn't seen her as she doesn't photograph well. She groused online that we "cut her off the boxcover." Hon, you were never the boxcover. She also said we chose the worst pictures we could to make her look more white trash.

Yeah, that makes sense. SexZ wants to make their product look as bad as possible. Could it possibly be that those were the good shots? As for looking white trash, well, ya can't lie to the camera, babe. I guess self-realization is a game for the sane.

Mercifully the keys finally arrived, and Mae finally left to go see Adam Rifkin or howl at the moon or eat Scotch tape off the roll at Kinko's or whatever-the-fuck complete psychos do with their spare time. As I said, I haven't thought about her at all until today.

Next Halloween, I'm thinking of organizing a porno camping trip just 'cause Mae Victoria would make such a terrific fireside ghost story.

"Once there was a maniac porn chick with an inch-deep snatch, a tiny, atrophied asshole, a rotted pomegranate where her brain should be and a red, knitted hotpad sewn into her crotch!"

"EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKK!"

© Bryn Pryor, 2008

It's been a big month for disasters so far. I'm not just talking about the cyclone in Burma and the Chinese earthquake, though those are certainly impressive in the pyrotechnics-and-body-count sense. I just wish they'd been closer to home, say, maybe John Hagee's attic and wherever they keep Dick Cheney's coffin full of consecrated earth.

I don't mean to sound callous or cruel or heartless or unsympathetic, but I am so get over it. Y'see, I'm not all that enamored of humans as a species. I think Bill Hicks was spot-on when he described us as "a virus with shoes." If I could snap my fingers and erase mankind in toto along with all evidence we'd ever existed, believe me the last thing you'd ever hear would be a clicking sound.

But I can't. So I have to revel quietly when the Earth shakes off a few of the fleas that plague it. And while 150,000 is just a pittance when weighed against the global population of nearly 6.7 billion, as the old joke goes, "What do you call 500 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? An excellent start."

But, no, I'm talking about other disasters. West Virginia provided a disastrous reminder to the rest of the world that the real core American values are racisim, intolerance, bigotry and deeply-held pride that you're rock-stupid.

Disaster struck Hollywood in the form of Speed Racer, and the trailers for The Love Guru and You Don't Mess With the Zohan, both of which were so incredibly, execrably foul I literally couldn't close my jaw. Have things really gotten this bad?!?

A similar disaster struck London with the premiere of the Sex in the City movie. Personally, not being a forty-something woman with no sense of style, taste, humor or reality, and not being a gay man of any age or sensibility, I found this tragedy particularly entertaining. I'm hard-pressed to think of something less appealing that sitting through this movie.

A root canal would take less time, be far less painful, heal more quickly, and would, presumably, have a point. Getting the Bill of Rights tattooed on my cock (oh yes I COULD!) would at least result in something I wasn't ashamed to admit I'd done, and might prove useful if things continue the way they're headed in this country. Dangerous as it is, oil wrestling Oprah for a cheeseburger would yield a great story providing I survived the experience.

Sex in the City? I'd rather move to Burma.

On the bright side, I read that FEMA has emergency relief crews set to revive unsuspecting husbands with hours of recorded ESPN highlights, Girls Gone Wild DVDs, and several episodes of Weapons of War. And perhaps, when all is said and done, we'll finally be rid of Carrie... and... the rest. I dunno. Twatchy, Slutty and Cunty. Whatever their fuckin' names are. And maybe Kim Cattrall can finally give her poor, plastic face a rest.

Israel celebrated its 60th birthday, which was a disaster for the Palestinians, and the Retard-in-Chief opened his mouth in a foreign country which is disaster for everyone except al Quaeda.

All this and May's only half over. Next thing you know, we'll find out that Marvel Films pissed all the Iron Man goodwill down their leg by casting someone completely batshit wrong as Captain America. Like, oh, I dunno... Matthew McConaughy or somebody. I know, it's a ludicrous suggestion. They would never be that...

..oh..

I’ve been getting hit with little nostalgia tsunamis over the past few weeks. Being 40, I’m sure this is just going to become a more regular event as I get older, but for now it’s still a rare enough occurrence that I find it remarkable.

On the whole, I’m not a big fan of nostalgia. Ian Shoales once described nostalgia as a sucker’s bet, "just a memory that’s made in Japan," and I think he’s right. Nostalgia is irrational emotional detritus; the psychological equivalent of bubble-wrap. But today’s walk down memory lane is mild enough that I’m happy to sit and metaphorically pop the bubbles for a while.

A few weeks ago, Gary Gygax died. For those of you who played sports in school, Gygax was the guy who essentially created Dungeons & Dragons. And if you’re at all curious as to how big a force D&D was in my life, I still have my dice (a lot of them) and all my character sheets.

Once, in the early 80s, I actually played in a game that Gygax was running at GenCon. It was one of the more frustrating experiences of my life. No dungeon master in the history of D&D ever tried to apply all the rules, all the time. Except Gary.

In nine hours of play, I think we got through two encounters. He was surly, short-tempered and socially inept. In retrospect, I’m tinking Asperger’s might have been a likely diagnosis.

But it’s difficult to gauge the inflence Gygax had, not just on my life, but on our culture as a whole. Would we have had the resurgence in fantasy as a genre, or online RPGs like WoW without Gary Gygax and Chainmail, his tabletop minatures rules that spawned an entire empire he got almost no income from? I doubt it.

Also, Charlton Heston died today. I know he was a right-wing whacko, but Chuck Heston was a big part of my childhood. Like most kids, I thought I wanted to watch epics like The Ten Commandments (which is a horrible film) and Ben Hur (which is actually great until Jesus makes his way into the story at the end and the thing gets all sappy) when they came on around the holidays. But Heston also starred in a ton of the movies that passed for action and genre films in the 70s, and which played repeatedly on my local television station in the Saturday T.V. wasteland after cartoons went off.

I loved Heston as Richelieu in the Salkind Musketeer movies, not to mention the dozens of square-jawed heroes he played in numerous middling-to-bad movies I always watched if they came on, but never sought out; Soylent Green, The Omega Man, Earthquake, Gray Lady Down, Two-Minute Warning, Airport ’75...

But, of course, the jewel in the crown (for me) will always be Heston as George Taylor in Planet of the Apes. I can’t even realistically guess how many times I’ve seen that movie. 50? More? How much of my childhood was spent watching Chuck Heston enunciate around those false teeth?

Ironically, last week I watched all five of the Apes movies back-to-back. I’ve never done that before, and it was... interesting. Obviously, I’d seen all of them (I even saw Battle in the theater), but I hadn’t paid attention to any of them for a long time, the way you don’t with something that you know well; it becomes background noise.

So I’d forgotten that Planet was actually a quite good, interesting movie. I’d forgotten that Franklin Schaffner directed it. I’d forgotten that Taylor is a complete counter-culture hippie, and I found it curious to think that Heston probably regretted that role in his later years.

I’d also never realized that Roddy McDowall isn’t in Beneath the Planet of the Apes. Granted, Cornelius has maybe three lines in Beneath, and I suppose that’s why. And I’d forgotten how incredibly cheap the last three sequels are. They aren’t as bad as I remembered (though they certainly stink) but they really look like TV movies.

So, in honor of Chuck Heston, Roddy McDowall, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans, and all the other deceased actors from the Apes saga, I’d just like to say:

Damn you! God damn you all to hell!

Now that my Geek magazine interview is out (you can read the first page for free on Geek’s Homepage; to read the rest, go buy the goddamn magazine ya cheap bastards!) I thought it might be worthwhile to comment on the fact that I often feel like I’m a bad geek. Not bad as in "evil;" I would accept that as axiomatic. I mean bad as in "not a very good one."

Case in point: for the last two days we’ve had a mainstream film renting our loft. I could go on about the quaint way the quaint little B-movie girls with their quaint little "I-didn’t-make-cheerleader-but-I-was-in-the-flag-corps" actorette attitudes were horrified by the dungeon/porno/pervert accoutrements that make our place unique (in fact I think I did just go on about it), but that really isn’t the point.

The caterer on the show -- a young guy with spiky hair (didn’t get his name) is such a huge comics fan that he has an enormous, brilliantly executed tattoo wrapping his right calf of Batman, Catwoman and the Joker. But here’s the thing; the portraits are taken from photos of the actors from the Tim Burton movies, and all I could think was Jesus, couldn’t ya find source images from something that doesn’t suck ass?

See, the geek in me should have just gotten a chub over a Batman tattoo. But a functioning critical faculty is the death or true geekery. I realize there are people who love the Burton Batman, and even some who love Batman Returns, but I think those movies are shit. I fell asleep in Batman. And as a serious film, Batman Returns makes a fine camp sequel to the original 1967 Batman it’s such a fucking joke.

Yeah, I love comics, but I also realize that a lot of them -- most, in fact -- are really, really childish and stupid. I have a tattoo in Elvish, but it’s because I love the Tolkien books. I loathe Jackson’s films with such violent passion that if I ever get that fat Kiwi fuck alone in a room for ten minutes, one of us is going to need an ambulance.

Honestly, there are a lot of holy grails of geek culture I simply have no passion for. I hated what I saw of Buffy, basically disliked Serenity, and don’t think much of Joss Whedon in general. The Matrix films lost me the minute Kanoe-nu opened his mouth. Star Trek ended when Kirk died (in a really shitty movie). Star Wars ended in 1983. And don’t get me started on what I think about the upcoming Geriatric Jones and the Crystal Wheelchair

There are brief moments of light. Batman Begins was fantastic, and I have great hope for The Dark Knight. I have more tentative hope for Iron Man. But my normal reaction when I hear about some new genre-oriented project is not hope, but quiet, inward, groaning despair. This, I always presume, is really gonna suck...

Which doesn’t change the fact that I’m about eight years old emotionally, and I own a fuck of a lot of toys. That alone seems to be enough geek cred to get me in the magazine of record for those who have opinions about whether Deep Space Nine is better than Babylon Five. (My answer is C: They’re both utter shit.)

But enjoy the interview anyway.

The great thing about posting a blog only slightly more often than George Bush gets head is that so many things which would take hours to write simply fade into the background.

Here’s a little quickie update on our lives.

• The Blood of Virgins has been bumped back to September (tentatively) to accomodate its bigger scale.

• We’re currently prepping ICON, a big-budget Hillary Scott all-sex movie.

• I’m in a pissing match with another porn director over an upcoming project and I don’t really understand why.

• My interview for Geek magazine finally came out. It’s okay, but the editors cut so much (Rob sent me the full version right after he wrote it) I was a little surprised. I shouldn’t bitch, though... they only gave one more page to Jon Favreau. Still, I wish they’d kept most of what they cut and cut most of what they kept...

• I went to Porn Star Karaoke with K the other night. Thanks to Lexi Lamour and Ethan Cage and Gram and Joanne being there it was actually fun. Had I gotten the urge to sing, I can’t decide if I would have gone with Tom Waits or Bobby Darin.

• We finally have contractors working on the never-ending bathroom (that’s the little know third sequel where the Luck Dragon takes a whiz on a giant fire hydrant) and it’s kind of an adventure. Having moved as far away as I feasibly could from my white-trash roots in Apache Junction, Arizona I had almost forgotten what most of the rest of this country is like.

One of the guys working for the contractor is so reminiscent of all the dudes I went to high school with part of me wonders if I’m related. He’s s decent enough guy, I guess, but I really don’t miss these people. Y’see, rednecks are only funny in standup acts. And this ol’ boy is about as red as they come.

Bad cop mustache. Half-mulllet. Weird 80s-era Oakleys. Sings along with George Strait and Eddie Rabbit on the "Yesterday’s Country TODAY!" station they listen to when they work. Used the phrase "tree-huggers" in conversation with no sense of irony. At all.

I know this guy. I was surrounded by him for the first half of my life. Not only does this guy have a three-tree gun rack in his truck window and a sticker of a badly-drawn Saddam Hussein getting a missile with a US Flag up his ass, he would vote for Bush again if he could. He’s never heard that Al Quaeda and Iraq had nothing to do with each other until we blew the country to shit, nor would he care. I guarantee you this guy has, at some point in his life, used the term "camel fuckers" and the word "nuke" in the same sentence.

So I can’t help but wonder what he must think about us, and our home. Downtown L.A. warehouse-turned-loft complete with full dungeon, pictures of naked whores all over the walls, populated by cats -- CATS, for Christ’s sake -- a shaved-headed freak faggot with earrings and his slut girlfriend.

Someday he’s gonna talk about this job and the words "L.A. Freaks" and "nuke" are gonna get all cozy in the same sentence. I guarantee ya.

...tree huggers... jesus...

Well, it's been an interesting week. We've had a couple of rentals to deal with, K has been crazybusy running all over the Valley, we've all got far too many major projects hanging over our heads, and too little time to give any of them due attention.

Y'know, a normal week.

I've also been writing. Working on my rewrite of the script for the next big SexZ show. This is the one we're leaving next week to go look at locations for in eastern Europe.

Since -- to my amazement -- I've had a few people asking about what the next project is, here are the broad strokes: It's called The Blood of Virgins, and it's a story about the modern day descendant of Elizabeth Bathory. For those of you who don't know Elizabeth, she's the first mass-murderer (outside political rulers) in history.

Bathory was a countess in what was Transylvania, and during the early sixteenth century she ran a school for young girls. At this school she systematically tortured more than six hundred of them to death.

The title derives from the legend that Bathory bathed in the blood of these young girls believing it would keep her forever young. Half the movie takes place in the sixteenth century (Sandra Romain is playing Bathory), and half in present day, following Bathory's descendant as she becomes obsessed with her bloody ancestor.

Right now I'm trying to balance the sex & horror elements fo the story. It's a really fine line to walk; we don't want to cop out on the horror elements of the show, but we also don't want to turn people off with the gore, or present that as being the erotic element, other than in a very stylized, gothic sense.

Tough call... tough rewrite... tired, lazy old pornographer who hates writitng. Bad combination.