AWL WEEKEND BLOGGING ALERT! During this evening’s presentation of Hollywood’s salute to Hollywood, a couple of frequent Awl contributors-specifically Olympics columnist Katie Baker-Bakes (who may very well be preemptively irritated by the whole thing) and frequent moviegoer (and food-eater) David “Awl Publisher David Cho” Cho-will be on hand to discuss the proceedings. Please do stop by. I may even make an appearance myself. Anyway, let’s say 7:30 or so? Excellent! See you then.

by Brian Montopoli

Tom Byron, who used to fuck Traci Lords for money and also date her, lives on a nice suburban street in Granada Hills, in the San Fernando Valley. Recently he was directing a scene at his house for the latest installment of Seasoned Players, recognized as “Best MILF Series” at the 2010 Adult Video News Awards.

Nina Hartley was getting into makeup when I showed up. A 50-year-old self-described sex-positive feminist and venerated industry veteran, Hartley was dressed for the shoot in a long black skirt, puffy white top, high heels and Sarah Palin glasses.

Hartley loves musicals, but nothing that’s come out in the last few decades — just the classics. She went to high school in Berkeley, at a school with an impressive theater program, but she was too scared to appear before an audience. She did stage crew. Now she speaks at colleges, often at women’s centers, where her brand of empowered porn stardom garners enthusiastic applause. She talks to doctors about proper care for sex workers, about the importance of not judging. She says they don’t know anything.

We ordered Chinese food. Then Byron and Hartley and the cameraman went to the garage to shoot stills, for web promotion and maybe the cover of the video. This was a low-budget situation, suited for the small-margins era of XTube. A large white sheet was laid out on the ground along one of the walls, and Hartley stood on it and against it, opening and closing her mouth, smiling seductively, pushing her ass out. Sometimes she got on her knees, and she complained that they hurt on the concrete. I stood by the door, terrified that I’d accidentally lean on the garage door opener behind me.

Byron wore a basketball jersey that said “Hustler” on the front and “Flynt” on the back. He had a gold watch on his wrist and a large dragon tattoo on his right bicep. He was down on the floor, on his stomach, taking pictures, giving directions. Hartley took off most of her clothes, revealing black and red lace panties, a garter belt and matching bra. The part of the panties that covered her crotch was detachable, and she removed it, exposing her shaved vagina. Then she screamed and put her hands over her crotch.

“Oh my God,” she yelled. “My agent did not tell me about this part!” Then she started laughing, and smiled at me. It was totally convincing. A minute or so later, in a new position, she massaged her fingers into her vagina. “Wakey, wakey,” she said. As she stuck her ass out and turned back to face the camera, she and Byron joked about how frustrating it is when the labia won’t stay put.

Sean Michaels showed up a few minutes later; he would be doing a scene with Hartley. Michaels is 52, black and Brooklyn-born. Another lifer, a thousand movies between them. He’s over six feet, strapping, and he was in a suit and the sort of overcoat that evokes a businessman but wouldn’t quite be worn by one. A Yankees helmet sits on his shaved head; he looks 30. When he went over to greet Hartley, they hugged and air kissed on both cheeks, like socialites, not actually making contact between lips and skin. “The last time you fucked me, nine years ago,” Hartley said, grinning, “you fucked me in the ass too.” Byron took a couple more shots, with Hartley almost naked, and Michaels still wearing his overcoat. Then we went inside and the food arrived.

Michaels went to Boys High School in Brooklyn, before it burned down. He described the industry as “racist” but improving. He said he’s lucky he gets to do what he loves. “I get to fuck Nina Hartley,” he said, with enthusiasm. He said he has a five-year-old daughter, and that he doesn’t get back to the east coast much anymore because he doesn’t like to travel, because travel means being away from her.

A friend, Michael Friedman, brought me to the shoot. Along with his theater group, the Civilians, he’s working on a play about the industry. The Civilians make reported, nonfiction theater, essentially, and they have been researching for months. Michael said that porn houses are always the same: the bed sheets, the leather couch, the television that’s always on, the smell of stale weed. He’d met most of the inspirations for the characters in Boogie Nights, including Rollergirl, who is actually a makeup artist. Sometimes, he said, you’re in and out of a shoot in an hour, everyone a professional, and sometimes they drag all day, until everyone is drunk and stoned and finally gets on with it.

Byron, who is 49, still performs, though these days he mostly directs. Last year he was in a remake of Deep Throat, which was meant to be dark. He won an AVN award for that, and he keeps it on his mantle, above the fireplace. He said that he had been banned from the AVNs for three years, but he’s vague about the reason. Something about suddenly being a millionaire, and being an asshole because of it. He wants to write a book. His old business partner, Rob Zicari, is doing a year in a prison for obscenity due to his film Forced Entry, which featured simulated rapes. Zicari went on “Frontline” and challenged John Ashcroft to come after him, and Ashcroft did.

We left Byron’s house not long after lunch. Things were moving slow, and also Michael said there was a reverse bukkake shoot going on fifteen minutes away that needed to be seen. Michael said that the sex is the least interesting part of all this anyway.

We drove over through a downpour. The shoot was on a traditional set, not a house. A dozen girls in underwear and bras of varying color were in front of the camera. There was also one guy, who was wearing a suit and tie. The girls aren’t porn stars, though they want to be. They get called “talent.” They’re getting $400 for this, someone said, pretty good money since they don’t have to have sex.

The director explained the setup: the women were to be guests on a talk show, but the host doesn’t believe that reverse bukkake-that is, a girl squirting large amounts of ejaculate on a guy’s face-is possible. As the movie progresses, the host learns that he’s wrong.

The effect is created using turkey basters. There was a tray of them off to the side of the set. The women, most of whom looked to be about 20, masturbate on camera, and then off camera they shoot water into their vagina, using the baster. Then, again for the camera, they shoot the water onto the host’s face. Some of them pee a little, too.

They shot some stills. The women were reaching for the talk show host, standing on and around a ratty old couch, as the host pretended to be trying to get away. A sign above them read “The Len Giny Show,” which the director said they had just came up with. “You’re grabbing, you’re pulling,” a guy in a sideways cap told the girls as he took pictures. During the break, he massaged one of the girls’ butts when she walked by him, and she giggled.

The girls took off their clothes. All of them are shaved, and most have tattoos. They took direction pretty well, moving to one side or the other of the host. A girl, in an effort to be helpful, notified the director that another girl was being blocked out of the shot.

Earlier, before we’d left Byron’s house, Hartley talked about how the young girls today don’t know how to suck a dick, how they don’t know how to do all sorts of things. It sounded a little bitter when she said it, the veteran’s lament, but I believed her. The stars of The Len Giny Show were fragile in their undress, slight and tiny as the men moved around them and the lights shined down. They had no business in this business.

Brian Montopoli has written for The Awl about the Iowa Straw Poll and the Mormon Temple.

Okay, here’s the full-length trailer for the forthcoming The Runaways, starring Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and the girl from Twilight as Joan Jett. Does this count as mumblecore? [Via]

“The principal of a South Los Angeles elementary school has apologized after some children carried photos of O.J. Simpson, RuPaul and Dennis Rodman in a parade celebrating Black History Month…. Youngsters carried the photos during a parade last week. Three white teachers have been suspended while the school district investigates.”

“He visited the brother in the WH. No telling what our house looks like now. He’ll let any body in it seems. I hope there’s something from our past left by the time he parades all these thugs through there.”
-Say what you will about anonymity, blog comments and the Internet: when Jay-Z visits Obama at the White House, it’s only in the comments sections where you really learn how things truly are. (MEANWHILE, nobody’s saying nothing about Beyonce or heads will roll…. even though she spent the day with Mike Bloomberg?)

We know that humans-especially popes-are fallible. Any logician worth her adorable sweater vest will tell you that random philosopher p endorsing premise x affects a deductive conclusion in the amount of not one whit. Still, debaters are happy to hang their hats on dusty quotes and arguments from authority, the nastiest result being a communal tolerance of sickly ideas propped up by rhetorical parlor tricks. If only there were some credible source (preferably dead and/or otherwise unable to clarify himself) to which you might ascribe your toxic viewpoint… what? No, sorry, God is taken. But here are a few other ways to make the fallacy take wing; all remain facepalmingly common and resonant in the right echo chamber.

The Misappropriated Founder
AKA The Bumper Sticker Wisdom. If there’s one thing that unites most tax-hatin’, gun-and-bitterness-clutchin’, not-in-their-own-self-interest-votin’, until-recently-Scott Brown boosters, it’s a predilection for dubious Thomas Jefferson quotes overlaid on a crying star-spangled eagle in a font that would make your average design geek slit their wrists or become an i-banker, whichever is more painful. It goes without saying that we needn’t take every statement from a long-departed slave-owner at face value, especially given that he couldn’t have anticipated more than 0.001% of the current geopolitical circus. But because wingnut foot soldiers are the gift that keeps on giving, many of these quotations are bloodless. One that has found its way onto many a T-shirt-”The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not.”-is, according to The Jefferson Encyclopedia, “not found in any of the writings of Thomas Jefferson” and first appeared in print in 1986. If the tea partiers can’t whip a Reagan-centric conspiracy theory out of that fact, then we’ve truly overestimated them.

The Overwhelming Fan Consensus
I hesitate to pick on a popular tumblr that often makes me smile, but the collection of canonical Simpsons stills, quotes and .gifs that is Eye On Springfield bears a sneering self-description that has the hollow ring of fatigued groupthink: it is, succinctly, “a retrospective of Simpsons hilarity spanning from seasons 1 to 9, when it was still funny.” The blog’s architects can put it this simply and unapologetically because the idea-that if you really loved The Simpsons, you would have jumped ship long ago-is received fan wisdom, pre-approved by whichever Gen X burnout first unthinkably dissed the show. Which isn’t to say that its quality hasn’t fluctuated, just that critical histories need to be more nuanced than collective absolutism allows. Otherwise you might miss the episode where George Plimpton tries to bribe Lisa into throwing a national spelling bee with promises of a full college scholarship “… and a hot plate!” That’d be from the outstanding season 14, if you’re looking to catch up.

The Borrowed Moral Imperative
Andrew Sullivan is nothing if not meticulously contrite, hence his recent Daily Dish post concerning George Orwell’s Nazi-era anxiety that “Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.” Sullivan, who cited the line in what he describes as his own “shameful” defense of the Iraq war, reveals that Orwell himself later backpedaled from the notion. Surely Sullivan does not mean his argument was shameful because it appealed to the wisdom of a political luminary who later wobbled on his words-it was shameful because it was ultimately wrongheaded regardless of who he namechecked. Which makes me wonder: why bother bandying about these wicked little ideological fragments in formulating a policy position if they neither weaken nor strengthen your case? They shade in the author’s particular worldview while doing nothing to justify it. It would probably be more instructive, before enshrining a sound bite, to delve beyond what somebody said and into what they said it about. I’ll come running to Orwell if and when we encounter a Quisling problem.

The Untouchable Artistic Gospel
AKA The Strunk & White. There are plenty of tips out there for being a good stand-up comedian, or painter, or musician. Most help the aspirant to hem in that paralyzing freedom, lay a groundwork of productive habit and then to polish middling material. Most do not pretend to be a priori truths, except those provided by Robert McKee. Still, the essence of creativity is not to be strictly bound by prescriptive ideals, right? Wrong. Here comes a New York Times user comment deploring an article’s split infinitives, immune to the fact that this is an artificial solecism cooked up by prudish Latin-lovers centuries ago to suppress an evolving English vernacular. Here comes Chuck Klosterman to inform us that F. Scott Fitzgerald would disapprove of the exclamation points peppering our interspace, because I guess an alcoholic crack-up artist I read in ninth grade should get the final say on web 2.0. What Klosterman can’t bring up is how Kurt Vonnegut gravely insulted the semi-colon; I myself could do without periods. Buried titans have plenty to teach us about aesthetic and craft, and tower with influence besides-must we be shackled by their pet peeves as well?

The Useful Tautology
When the shit hits the fan in America, just dig up a pungent cynicism from Upton Sinclair or Hunter S. Thompson or Mark Twain to drive home your despair. Maybe a bleak koan from Nouriel Roubini if the market is having a disastrous week. This way, no matter how bad it gets, a prophet saw it coming. The country never changes-it has always been exactly what we claim to abhor. We are a nation of dangerous lunatics, fueled by pure id but controlled by the insoluble forces of greed and vanity. It is what it is. And in the absence of hope, which we never truly had, we will not even have to try. We are excused from action. It’s a comforting fatalism, no? So I guess we can hold on to this one, since it’s gotten people through some dark times. My only request is that The Wire’s Omar Little become our patron saint of blanket, timeless, trenchant insight. You can cover all your bases with a gem like “all in the game, yo, all in the game.”

Miles Klee knows all about this game you’re running.

by Ian Retford

A well-chewed bit of conventional wisdom holds that cultural conflagrations find no better accelerant than a Supreme Court opinion. Under this theory, smoldering social divisions explode into Samuel Pepys territory when the Court short circuits the democratic process and moves definitively to settle a social issue. Exhibit A is typically Roe v. Wade, which, in attempting to remove abortion from the realm of political controversy, instead visited upon us several decades of incessant yelling and pictorial craziness (think sonograms, bloody fetuses and snowflake babies).

This theory is about to get its biggest test in a while. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments [PDF] in what will be, in all probability, the most important gun rights case ever. If the Court holds as expected, every state and local gun regulation will be subject to Constitutional challenge, and a recently-dormant wedge issue might reassume its place among gays and babies as a preeminent locus of social controversy. Only this time, the loudest yells might be coming from the left.

Our story begins in the waning days of the Bush administration, when the Supreme Court held — in a 5-to-4 opinion [PDF], and for the first time ever — that the awkwardly constructed and haphazardly punctuated Second Amendment gives citizens a right to own guns. In so holding, the Court struck down several of Washington D.C.’s gun laws, which, in Catch-22-ish fashion, outlawed both the possession of any unregistered firearms and the registration of handguns.

In McDonald v. Chicago, the case argued on Tuesday, the Supreme Court considered the constitutionality of Chicago’s gun laws, which are nearly identical to the ones struck down in the Washington, D.C. case. The additional issue posed by McDonald is whether the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms from intrusion by states, as opposed to the federal government. If you’re confused about how rights that can be encroached by state governments are rights at all, you’ve hit upon one of the most pronounced and least-publicized deficiencies in the Constitution as ratified.

The Founding Fathers’ one big fumble (apart from that 3/5ths thing) was this: originally, the freedoms guaranteed by the Bill of Rights — e.g., freedom of the press, the right to a jury trial, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures — were only enforceable against the federal government, not the states. In other words, although the Constitution forbade the U.S. government from locking you up for writing a saucy pamphlet, there was nothing to prevent, say, Georgia from doing so.

This has been a real problem for a Union with a lot of crazy states. At the time of the country’s founding, the greatest threat to civil liberties might have been a Leviathan central government. But the civic history of the 19th and 20th centuries is in great part a tale of insane and restrictive state laws, written by a retrograde social order attempting to dig in its heels, often in defiance of a more progressive federal government.

To solve the problem of overbearing state legislation, courts got creative and looked to the Fourteenth Amendment, which in part forbids states from depriving citizens of life, liberty or property without due process of law. Starting in the early 1900s, the Supreme Court held, amendment-by-amendment, and sometimes clause-by-clause, that portions of the Bill of Rights were “incorporated” into the Fourteenth Amendment’s due process clause and thus enforceable against the states.

You might be discomfited that your Constitutional rights rest on this textually questionable bit of Mobius-strip logic. But the process of “incorporation” has worked pretty well. Flash forward to 2010, and most rights in the first ten amendments have been held applicable against the states, with the glaring exception of the Second Amendment. That’s the question presented by McDonald.

Based on Tuesday’s oral argument, the Court seems poised to hold that the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms against intrusion by the states. Scalia, Dick Cheney’s hunting buddy, vocally supported the NRA’s side, throwing in references to “homosexual conduct” and “abortion on demand” for good measure. More crucially, Kennedy, typically the swing vote in close cases, was also supportive of the position of gun rights advocates. The Court’s four moderate/liberal justices, meanwhile, were left basically talking amongst themselves. Stevens reminded everyone that he’ll turn 90 in April by asking a question containing the phrase “jot and tittle.” Breyer proposed an interesting doctrinal solution to the problem of incorporation, which he explained like this: “Step one is, make my chart.”

By the time the Supreme Court term ends in June, expect an opinion holding that the Constitution forbids states from infringing on the right to bear arms. Although such a decision will, pardon the pun, declare open season on state and local gun regulations, this is not something to fret too much about. There’s no reason to believe that a pro-incorporation opinion will effectively sweep aside the nation’s gun laws. Yes, there will be many Orly Taitz-type lawsuits that argue that a ban on rocket launchers violates the right to bear arms. But courts will likely dismiss most of these attacks and hold that Second Amendment rights, like most rights, are subject to caveats and reasonable regulation.

Even if the challenges of gun rights advocates are occasionally successful, liberals should resist the urge to protest on the Supreme Court plaza with graphic pictures of fetal victims of gun violence. The sometimes-uncomfortable truth is that the Constitution bestows a bundle of rights, many of which we might personally enjoy, some of which we might think are the refuge of the paranoid or the depraved. It hardly advances the cause of liberalism to advocate stingy interpretations of Constitutional freedoms. Lefties have lots of rights to celebrate. Would it kill you to give the Ruby Ridge crowd just one?

Ian Retford is the pseudonym of a lawyer in New York City.

“In Starcrossed, which brings Greek tragedy to high school, a shy Nantucket teenager named Helen Hamilton attempts to kill the most attractive boy on the island, Lucas Delos, in front of her entire class…. The murder attempt does have an upside though, as it ultimately leads to Helen’s revelation that she and the local heartthrob are, in fact, playing out some version of a weighty ancient love affair…. So Helen, like her namesake, Helen of Troy isn’t going crazy, she’s destined to start a Trojan War-like battle by being with Lucas. This then begs the unfortunate question: should she be with the boy she loves even if it means endangering the rest of the world?”
-WELL? SHOULD SHE? Josephine Angelini just got paid in the seven figures for this three-book series. ON THE PLUS SIDE: no fucking vampires!

Never have I seen the ethos of an entire city so perfectly encapsulated by a 50-second segment of local news. Oh, Seattle. Don’t ever change.

Can you spot the problem with this one? “Harry Reid’s big government health care plan will raise taxes, put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor, weaken Medicare, kill jobs, push us further into debt. I’m Sue Lowden and I approve this message because government run health care is wrong.” [Via]