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Style and substance
May 25, 2006
Coming back to New York after being away always pulls at my heartstrings something mean. Tonight, descending in on the city I smiled down at the Belmont track, Prospect Park, Madison Square Garden, Yankee Stadium, abstract as they are from the ground, they are perfect shapes from a vantage point in the sky.
One of the most exasperating things about coming home is arguing with the cab driver about the best route – this is the poetry of New York, as we make our way through Brooklyn I get pissy because he has determined that Flatbush Avenue is better, even though I insisted on the BQE. It’s a philosophical argument really, resting on chances of traffic and other New York oddities, and any way you cut it, it seems to take about the same amount of time to get anywhere, no matter what your destination and starting point are, no matter your route.
The book I ordered is on my kitchen table when I get home: Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style. My marked up college copy of the book gone, loaned out long ago, I need to reread it for reference and inspiration for the anthology chapter I am writing in five. four. three. two. one.
Subculture and style, and I’m thinking the lyrics to Youth Brigade’s “All Style, No Substance,” and also remembering my shock the first time I saw a picture of the Dead Kennedys, seminal punk band of my heart, looking decidedly un-punk (my imagination-punk: purple mohawks and spikes and sass), Jello Biafra’s black on black. Drag out the vinyl and the needle on my turntable is fucked up, years of neglect and not caring, my uncool shining through.
“Beauty is on the inside” ‘they’ say (the accusative word ugly, under the breath at the end of that clichéd phrase) – but what if you want to match your outside to your inside? What if that matching doesn’t look the way other people think is the best way to look?
And so I’m thinking about alt porn, and bigger than that “alt” sub/culture in general, sitting down to write about it for academic eyes, thinking it over for myself and for the whirl of projects and things I want to make, while making good, doing right by myself and others. Practically a plain skin myself, I pass easily in the straight world – until I open my mouth, letting out that stuff from the inside – beauty and spikes and sass lodged deep in my brain (subversive element, it says so on my business card).
So how important is it to represent that difference, the outward choices that people make about their bodies as a way to represent their inside, link up with a subculture, bend and shape – is it all style, no substance? The whole alt porn thing is based on the desire to see pretty people with tattoos and piercings – an alternative to orange-skinned balloon-titted mainstream porn. But often it seems that the alternative falls flat on its face and fails to push boundaries in other respects – full of pouting and posturing, the sex remains droll and dry, oral on each partner, three positions, pop on the girl’s face. Not a real alternative, just the same old thing in a different package. But its porn, and just maybe the package is everything, or at least the hook and line, if not the sinker.
Posted by Dacia at May 25, 2006 11:18 PM
Comments
Wait a sec (typo: sex - ha!)… where did you go?
Btw, I will hereby publicly state that I’ll get your blog back-end (heh heh) issues figured out as soon as humanly possible.
Posted by: Amber at May 26, 2006 12:04 AM
Alternative subculture really is about style. There are no coherent ideas behind the whole thing. They might be a little bit more liberal than the larger world out there, but that’s about the only below-the-skin difference. It’s just the collection of stuff that’s not marketable through the mainstream. (And I’ve seen the label abused much, as if anyone with a visible tattoo qualifies as “alternative”. What if you were in the Marines?)
Some people are proud of the alt-subculture designation, and flaunt it. Alt-porn is very much like that; their significance comes from the fact that they push the stylistic envelope, and stretch very far the idea of what one would call “porn.” And that’s how they strongly market themselves. Yet in the end, alt-porn is still about fornication and sexualization. They might have a strong audience of people who don’t like the existing mainstream styles of porn. But it’s only porn with a different look. A woman who gets sexy by getting her whole body covered in tattoos is not really different from the woman who gets breast implants. There’s also no difference at all between producers, or in the consumer profiles.
Feminism is one example of a sexual (I know it covers more than that) movement that’s strongly idea-powered, and it is much more so than alt-porn.
Posted by: BrianVan at May 26, 2006 08:51 AM
“But often it seems that the alternative falls flat on its face and fails to push boundaries in other respects”
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, follow the money.
For whatever stylistic or substantive differences might be found in ‘alt porn’, it still is playing by more or less the same economic rules as any other genre of porn.
Some of these rule are external, some (it seems to me) are self-imposed. But either way ecomonics are as powerful a factor as anything else, perhaps more so. That playing by more or less the same rules yeilds more or less the same result isn’t surprising.
Posted by: Tony Comstock at May 26, 2006 12:01 PM
There is no definitive manifesto on alt.porn. Is there? What would be true alt. porn is porn that is free to anyone who wants to view it—no money exchange, a true threat to the porn world and society as a whole.
Posted by: Bruce at May 27, 2006 02:31 AM
True “alternative” porn, or should I say the NEXT alternative porn = when people of color will be able to perform without the added “benefit” of their ethnicity or nationality as a tagline thrown into the mix, such as “tight Asian pussy/whores,” or “big Black cock, etc…most particularly, it’ll be TOTALLY alt when Asian men who aren’t Jordan Chan or gay get front billing!
When that day arrives, it’ll be so “alt” that people will have to start REALLY reaching and sell African bush pygmy porn just to be “alt-hipsta edgy.”
Posted by: Irezumi Kiss at May 28, 2006 04:42 PM
