My panel @ CineKink & some $pread stuff

September 28, 2006

Three announcements today (gawd, I need a mailing list):
“The State of Smut: NYC” - Panel Discussion
Saturday, October 21st – 4:30 pm @ the Anthology Film Archives (2nd street and 2nd ave) No longer the hub of porn production it was in the 1970s, New York City has become a haven for film directors who are forging new paths in adult entertainment.
Is it the city that inspires different visions? And how different are these movies from the ones produced in Porn Valley, really? Questions from the audience will be encouraged and film clips will be shown!

Moderated by Audacia Ray (Waking Vixen Productions), panelists confirmed to date include Tony Comstock (Comstock Films), Joe Gallant (Black Mirror Productions), Candida Royalle (Femme Productions), and Tony Dimarco (Lucas Entertainment).

I will be screening the trailer for my movie “The Bi Apple” at this event!!! Come for the first peek at my movie, stay for the scintillating discussion!

The full CineKink program is here.

Write for $pread!

One of the many things I do at $pread is that I coordinate and edit reviews of books, movies, etc etc. I have a few books that need reviewing for the winter issue - if you’re a sex worker and would like to write a 400-600 word review for $pread, email me and I’ll tell you what books are available. There’s no pay, but you get a nice tear sheet.

WORK WITH $PREAD
We’re currently looking for applicants for the following jobs and internships - including our first ever paid position!

Advertising Salesperson - paid on commission $pread is looking for a freelance, part time salesperson to sell ad space in our quarterly magazine. This position involves researching, contacting, and following up with potential advertisers by phone and email. Applicants must be reliable, self-motivated, and innovative, with a confident phone manner. Experience in advertising, publishing, or sales a plus. This is a part time position, requiring a time commitment of 10-15 hours a week, including daytime hours. Commission starts at 10% with the potential to increase over time.

Web Intern / Volunteer - unpaid $pread is looking for a web intern or volunteer to update our website on a weekly basis. Applicants must be able to use an FTP server, manage webmail, and have Dreamweaver or equivalent design experience, as well as patience and a sense of humor! It is essential that candidates have regular, reliable web access and respond quickly to instructions. This is an unpaid position, requiring a time commitment of 5-8 hours a week. College credit available.

Publicist / Event Planner - unpaid Help $pread the word! We are looking for an enthusiastic and creative new $pread member to promote $pread on a national level. Responsibilities will include researching and pursuing opportunities for press coverage, planning and promoting $pread events and projects, and finding unique new ways to get $pread noticed. This is an unpaid position with a flexible time commitment of 5-8 hours a week. College credit available.

Art Intern - unpaid Join the $pread Art Department! Art interns and volunteers will be responsible for photo research and retouching, and should be familiar with Adobe Creative Suite, especially Photoshop and In Design. This is a flexible, unpaid position with no specific weekly time commitment.

Applicants to any of the above positions should send resumes and cover letters to info@spreadmagazine.org, by October 15th 2006. Sex workers (current or former), people of color, and transgender people are especially encouraged to apply. If relevant, please tell us about your experiences in the sex industry in your cover letter.

Posted by Dacia at 10:35 AM | Comments (24)

Putting out

September 27, 2006

Since August 1st I have written almost 33,000 words of my book, more than 70 Fleshbot posts, a handful of blog entries, a few hundred emails, and miscellaneous other stuff. Also I’ve overseen the post-production on my directorial debut feature-length porno movie.

And today this was posted in the Recent Deals section of Publisher’s Marketplace: Sex writer and online porn entrepreneur Audacia Ray’s NAKED ON THE INTERNET: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploration, about women using the internet to explore their sexualities and identities, exploring topics such as hooking up, sex blogging, the nature of online sexual intimacy, and sexual entrepreneurship on the internet, to Brooke Warner at Seal Press (World).

I should feel successful. I don’t. I feel tired and miserable and poor poor poor for the foreseeable future. Usually I am cheerfully optimistic and self-deprecating about such things, but I’m just too worn down to be that way now.

I put up a post yesterday, about my miserable finances, about being owed thousands of dollars that I’ve been counting on and not having that money in my pocket now and feeling like I won’t have it ever. I pulled it down when I saw that Rachel Kramer Bussel posted about the Publisher’s Marketplace blurb on her blog, and that she linked to me, and that this post o’ misery would be the first thing people saw after reading this blurb and her congratulations. I pulled it down.

Because.

Because I’m ashamed that I’m in this position, that I can’t support myself.

Because I feel fucked up and bitter about the fact that by measures of press and buzz and book and movie deals I am flying high, but in reality I dug around my apartment looking for change yesterday and CRIED happy tears when it came to more than $100.

Because sometimes it all feels so smoke-and-mirrors – not in the way that everything felt awesomely unreal when I first started talking in air quotes about my movie, my book – that was an elated feeling. This is a bad feeling, like its all a trick and a joke, like my so-called fame is all I’m going to get out of all this time and energy and baring of everything.

It will get better, it can’t get much worse, I have the support and loans of friends to tide me over. But it’s not about the now anymore. I can survive lots, I am a tough motherfucker. This won’t kill me, and I won’t get tossed out of my apartment, I won’t go hungry but I can’t buy expensive ham right now.

I’m afraid that I won’t be able to make it happen – big picture. “It” being a living, not making it culturally or whatever – that I seem to be doing, and its not doing me back.

I am frustrated that maybe I’ve put out too much, put too much into the world, and it won’t come back to me, it’ll just get sucked away from me, devoured vampire-style. And to an extent I’ve made my peace with that idea, and its ok if unnerving that there are so many pieces of me out there. But it’s less okay if I’ve traded that for nothing.

Posted by Dacia at 12:43 AM | Comments (14)

Something to blog home about

September 18, 2006

Have you ever spent a day watching the porno that you directed with your boyfriend and your brother?

No?

You see, they’ve each been involved with the score and sound on The Bi Apple, so we had a little bit of a pow-wow today as the post production winds down and nears total completion.

I highly recommend this experience to others. It’s super weird, but oddly funny to quote the dirty talk from the movie back and forth at each other: “You want something bigger in your ass?” and “Mmmm, tight buns.” Plus we made up little songs about the scenes: “Its… man-love! Talking ‘bout – man-love!” And we put in fart sounds in strategic moments and then laugh for ten minutes – and then make sure to delete them.

Throughout the editing process, I’ve also been highly fond of shouting things like, “This is all part of my artistic vision!” – and that has keep me amused, as well as the other folks involved in post-production, who normally deal with mainstream and independent directors who lecture them on their artistic visions.

Fuck, I crack myself up.

I think I’m getting delirious with porno and writing and drinking cherry-apple juice.

Posted by Dacia at 01:18 PM | Comments (5)

Saturday night’s alright… for working

September 17, 2006

I think I have probably talked to five of my friends tonight, none of whom made even vague gestures to the question “what are you doing tonight?” because they, like me, are home working. Indeed, each of these phone calls has been work-related. The joys of freelance insanity.

As I’ve been interviewing people (at the rate of about two a day) and writing words to piece together my next book chapter, I’ve been thinking a lot about different issues the book brings up for me – not just the subjects I’m writing about, but also the metaimplications of the work I’m doing, and what I and my many interviewees can expect to get out of it.

Especially since I’m working on the chapter about sex work at the moment, I’ve been thinking an awful lot about story-telling versus life-living. This came up in the last chapter I wrote (on porn) too – my editor made note of the fact that sometimes I skimp on the personal details of the women I’m writing about. This is intentional – for example, one of the porn performers I interviewed made brief mention of being an authentic MILF, and so my editor wanted more details about her kids and family life. But – this just can’t happen, because the performer wants that information protected. This makes for a less interesting story, I know… but I really can’t justify pushing people past their comfort zone so I can get a good story.

This softness, this protective urge, could mean small death for my writing career and/or my porn directing career, or it could be my strength – or it could be something I get over. I really don’t know. But for now, I feel intensely in tune with the experience of being represented by someone else in the written word (and image), and how exhilarating and horrifying that can be. And so, I want to make sure that I take care of business, treat people fairly, all that good stuff.

Another thing I think about a lot, as I write a book about the internet, is this: why should this be a book and not a website?

Books, where URLs look unwieldy and the text isn’t searchable except in this old-fashioned thing called an “index,” are my first media-love, before movies or music or magazines or websites. It’s kinda cool to be writing something that when its done, could hurt someone if I threw it at them (hypothetically speaking, of course). And there’s an interesting air of legitimacy with a book. Maybe I’ll be taken “more seriously” (or whatever) when I have a book as opposed to a blog. After all, anyone can have a blog. But the funny thing about books is that while I don’t believe that they’ll become extinct anytime soon, they are increasingly less permanent than a website, as they go out of print. With projects like Archive.org, digital culture is becoming much less delete-able, the the internet is just plain more searchable and interconnected than books.

Reading about the process of making a porn movie was a lot more fun than reading about book writing, eh? Yeah yeah. Well, with any luck there will be more of the porno, so hold your horses while I’m typing away madly.

Posted by Dacia at 02:09 AM | Comments (4)

Final picture

September 12, 2006

Today, though I am tired and behind on my book writing (though not my book interviewing), I am pleased. I am pleased because my editor (of the movie, not the book) and I finalized the picture for “The Bi Apple.” As I write, it is exporting into Quicktime and then later it’ll be made into an OMF, primed for sound editing. By this time next week, my job will be done – unless there are quality control problems, which I don’t anticipate (but who knows).

The thing I am most proud of about this project – other than the fact that I wrote, produced and directed a feature film and stayed almost on budget and totally on schedule – is that I paid everyone involved. This whole project really marked the start of what I am determined will be a new era, an era when projects have budgets and I can direct money to people who I think are amazing and can contribute amazing things to my projects. And maybe I’ll even learn to keep some of that money for myself and not just put right back into my business. Yeah right.

Before “The Bi Apple,” I had never worked on a project with a real budget. Every project I’d been involved with – even (or especially) the big ones like the Museum of Sex had very little money, so the whole financial plan was basically “we have no money, get stuff for free or promises of future favors as much as possible.” $pread, which I’ve been working on for going on two years now, is very much built on the “we’ll scramble for money when we need it” model, though it is starting to become self-sustaining through subscriptions and advertising, supplemented by our parties. Hopefully someday we’ll have a real and not accidental operating budget, like one we can plan on into the future. I’m not really holding my breath on that one though, and $pread may persist in being my pet (and perpetual) pro bono project. It’s worth it as long as it doesn’t impede on my ability to make a living, which I think it has a bit in the past.

Certainly, I will likely work on new projects with no budget in the future, because I think they are worth doing, or I am crazy, or I love the people who are working on them and their ideas are brilliant. But in general, I’m saying – fuck that.

I want to make a living doing what I’m doing, and I’ve made huge steps in that direction this year – I’ve met my 2006 goal of “get paid to be awesome” but now its time to up the ante. Again? Yes, goddamn it. And I’ll probably be saying the same thing next year, and the year after that. I guess that’s what being a self-employed headstrong lady is about.

And the thing is – I have plenty of beefs with capitalism, and I’m trying as much as possible (with minor errors and growing pains of learning how to be a good boss) to do the capitalism ethically. But also, I don’t want to be shamed by anti-capitalist lefties, by people who think sexuality should always be fluid and not for sale, by people who have passions but don’t want to taint the passion with money and so have day jobs they hate. Fuck all that. It’s taken me a long time to chip away at the shame of asking for money for stuff I like doing anyway (and I don’t mean sex, that exchange came fairly easily), but I think it’s a pretty powerful thing.

Posted by Dacia at 10:26 PM | Comments (3)

Your predilections, revealed!

All right, let’s mix up the privacy and exposure discussion a little bit more. There’s been a lot of interesting stuff kicking around about the Craigslist Experiment (site often down due to massive traffic) in Seattle. Violet Blue blogged about it, and its brought up lots of interesting stuff about online privacy and to what extent people can expect it, specifically when responding to anonymous ads for casual sex on Craigslist. Just because you can get and publish someone’s private information doesn’t mean that you should. But is sending filthy missives and photos into the CL ether a trust thing? Or is the assumption that someone won’t post your intimate details the same as the assumption that someone isn’t going to yell “Fire!” in a crowded movie theater just for the fuck of it?

To complicate this a little bit more, while I was doing book research I found this really interesting site, Perverted-Justice.com, that links together a network of people who sniff out “wannabe pedophiles” on the web through chats. People who want to get all vigilante style go through training engineered by the website and then pose in chats as underage girls, chat with older guys and when/if the older guys make sexual advances or suggest a meeting, they verify his identity and turn the transcripts over to the police.

Ah, the democracy of the internet, turning morally outraged, merely bored or slightly vicious citizens into the deliverers of “justice.” There is definitely a difference between consensual (if not necessarily safe and sane) BDSM and potential pedophilia, but I find it intriguing that in both cases, the announcement of intentions is the damning evidence. For both types of folks – the line between fantasy and intention to carry out the act is completely eroded, and once words are typed, destiny is written. This is one of the things so fascinating about media of all kinds, but perhaps especially the internet, with its instantaneous publishing, linking and archives – once a thing is said, it is for all intents and purposes a real true thing, even if it isn’t.

Posted by Dacia at 09:26 AM | Comments (1)

Fits and starts

September 04, 2006

I apologize in advance if my writing here is a bit spotty over the next few months. This book-writing thing makes me want to do just about anything other than write when I’m not… uh, writing. Which means the blog may suffer, though perhaps I’ll make my intern take dictation while I sip scotch from an armchair. That sounds quite lovely, actually. Especially the part with the scotch.

This past week I drove to Massachusetts and spent four days with Bella Vendetta. It was like one long-assed pajama party, let me tell you. We laughed over and over about the fact that we’ve both been approached a number of times by reality shows and documentary film crews who think doing day-in-the-life stuff with us would be truly fascinating. The only way for us to make it fascinating would be to stage stuff, because when the excitement of the Bella Vendetta and Audacia Ray in their pajamas! factor wears off, all you’ve really got is two unkempt girls sitting in front of their computers, sipping tea and having one-way conversations with the cutest chihuahua ever. Probably the best part of the week, other than getting a lot of work done (I am now approaching 10,000 words on the chapter I’m writing), were our porno brainstorming sessions. The truly awesomest thing about laughing our asses off and coming up with ridiculous ideas for movies is that, actually, this shit could feasibly happen - and this feasibility only serves to make it that much funnier.

Its weird, but lately i’ve been getting kind of obsessed with normalcy - well, normalcy on my terms at least. Normalcy like hanging out with Bella in pajamas, or attending the weddings of my $preadsters that make me a little misty eyed, or having what my gentleman friend likes to call “dream dates.” For a long time, I think I’ve been striving so hard to carve out a different existence, one that challenges the fabric of society in a radical way, that sometimes I don’t really pay attention to what I want. And maybe what I want isn’t so radical after all - I want to share my life with good people who love me and make me laugh, I want to have a comfortable life with a little bit of bling, I want to someday own an apartment, and have health insurance and make enough money that I’m not considered poor by the state of New York. And I want to do it my way, which means a non-traditional relationship structure, an office stacked high with porno and sex toys (research, man!), and a bunch of other little things that mean the world to me. But somehow, that’s starting to seem less crazy and less radical, and more obvious and… easy? Really? Maybe that’s a stretch. But its something almost close to that.

Posted by Dacia at 11:33 AM | Comments (6)