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 Visual artist and recent alt-porn star Smith—known in the adult film
world as Zak Sabbath—takes readers on a frenetic journey from the New
York art scene to pornography-saturated Los Angeles. Interspersed with
his drawings, which have been displayed at MoMA and the 2004 Whitney
Biennial, Smith's memoir is more a series of linked vignettes than a
chronological account of his foray into alt-porn.
As distinct from mainstream hardcore porn, alt-porn tries to do with
sex the kinds of things ambitious young filmmakers might try to do
after graduating from art school. It was Smith's collection of
illustrations for Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that first
attracted the attention of pirate porn director Osbie Feel. As Smith
puts it, I ended up in porn because one day I sat down and decided to
draw one picture for every page of a very thick book no one I knew had
read. In addition to attending the Porn Film Festival Berlin and the
Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas—and having sex with countless
women with names like Tina DiVine and Trixie Kyle in countless
warehouse sets—Smith is also a cultural critic, dissecting everything
from Valentine's Day to the grammar in antipornography laws. Just as
porn, alternative or otherwise, has its fans, Smith's memoir is an
acquired taste and will appeal to those who like things a little kinky.
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