kagablog

At 21 years of age, Sasha Grey is living her dream of becoming all that she can be. Recently headlining director Steven Soderbergh’s (Traffic, Ocean’s Eleven) The Girlfriend Experience, a digital-age update of his ’89 indie hit Sex, Lies & Videotape, she’s buzzing across various media: The hungry focus of a Terry Richardson shoot; muse to Richard Kern’s recent, deliciously avant-garde Fashion spread in Vice magazine; appearing in music videos for The Smashing Pumpkins and The Roots; dropping guest-vox on Moby and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry tracks.. She fronts the band Atelecine, is the subject of two documentaries, and is penning her second novel. Mostly though, Ms Grey is something of a demonic force within the Porn industry. Touted as the next Jenna Jameson, she’s already notched up 140 films, but it’s not just her nubile velocity that’s brought both fame and infamy.

Appearing on a now-famous Tyra Banks Show episode, transparently entitled ‘Teenage prostitutes and porn stars’ in 2007, Sasha, a petite 18 years old, refused to submit to Tyra’s insistent labelling of her as victim, coolly asserting that she was doing exactly what she wanted to be doing, and calling the shots, which effectively threatened the message of that particular episode, and led to Banks visibly losing her cool. The enigma of Grey is a new phenomenon in the history of pornography, if only due to her audacious nature – she is the damsel consuming the dragon; if the knight wants to watch, that’s fine, if he wants to collapse into a morass of identity crisis and phallic alarm, that’s his deal. Her historical and philosophical precursor is the witch – long persecuted for enchanting and confounding the men-folk, for luring them away from their masculine obligations, and frolicking in content independence from their man-rules and man-authority. She threatens not only him, but is despised by his loyal, submissive women-folk (yes, we will be dipping into feminism later, no pun intended).

Sasha Grey’s mission statement (she has a mission statement), as outlined on her Myspace page, reads: “I am in the adult film scene for mainly one reason. On average, most of the xxx I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically, or visually. There is only a handful of adult stars that continue to push the boundaries of what women are supposed to like, or be like in bed. This entices me to be one of these young women, not to mention my lust for sexual creativity; I hunger for all modes of sexual perversity. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfils everyone’s fantasies.”
Most porn actresses operate along the same quick-in, quick-out deadline as models, going at it hammer and tong for as long as their bodies make the cut, only to be unceremoniously spewed out by the eternally hungry, apathetic machine when a fresh line of fleshbots arrive. The lucky few retain enough of a cocktail of all-out sexiness and mystique (read as: they put off going all the sticky way for as long as they can, keeping their fans glued in the suspended hope of eventually seeing them go anal, or triple-entry, or whatever the latest peaks of exposure are) to stake their own space in the industry, ala Jenna Jameson, whose Jennaworld was purchased by Playboy for a cool $17 mill in 2002. Grey’s vision of her future is vast by comparison. She sees herself as an artist, with pornography as her central canvas, thereby neatly turning the tables, in an unprecedented way, on the machine. Twirling through taboos even as she explodes notions of identity and power, Sasha Grey is queen of her universe.
Thing is, Porn is essentially a male construct – the titillation is aimed at getting Joe Sofa on the couch there to knock one out; and so you have beautiful ladies (that’s the idea anyway) performing acrobatic debauchery on generic variations of Joe Sofa. The point of the exercise, outside of showing Joe mounds of gleaming, quivering she-flesh, is to get him off on the idea of unattainable women begging for it.. so drunk on desire that they would do anything if only he would bless her with that magic wand of his. All of which, at the end of the day, is kinda sad for all involved. And kinda un-sexy.

One of the reasons Sasha got into the industry was because she felt there was so much more to be explored; specifically with regards female sexuality, which is all-but-absent from your average porn flick. “I don’t need to see genitalia up close; I don’t need to see a dirty yellow couch against a white wall. I want to see something different, like, this is not exciting to me.” Grey has rather eloquently put the ball in her court, so to speak – in most of her scenes she’s pushing her male co-stars into territories they weren’t planning, or intending, on visiting, effectively reversing the traditional power-dynamic. When folks are appalled at her craving for controlled violence in sex, and her turn-on for non-reproductive bodily fluids, she points out that it’s a matter of, ahem, taste – it’s about what gets her off; to those who cry misogyny, she reminds that she is a young, independent, successful woman, and relishes in the power she wields in her shoots – Sasha Grey knows that the power of the female is essentially her mysterious force of attraction, be it explicit or obscure.

A quick peek into her list of personal heroes says it all – Jean Luc Godard, David Bowie, Catherine Breillat, Miles Davis, Jim Morisson. Individualists who broke through the boundaries to spill into the unknown. A brave girl in a jaded universe - Long may she spill!

Porn star bridges gap to mainstream in Soderbergh film premiering at festivalBy Ewan Fergus

SHE’S THE most successful and extreme star of America’s porn industry. A self-styled pioneer of female sexual freedom; an existentialist with a love of Jean- Luc Godard; and now, in Edinburgh, she is about to achieve a world first: becoming the first actress to successfully cross over from hardcore movies to mainstream cinema.

Welcome to the world of Sasha Grey.

Grey, who hails from Sacramento, California, has starred in more than 150 hardcore films, including The Apprentass, Superslut and Fashionistas - the biggest-budget porn film ever made. Later this year, she will star in the new film directed by cult art-house auteur, Steven Soderbergh, of Sex, Lies And Videotape fame, which is to have its UK premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
advertisement

The film is aptly titled The Girlfriend Experience, an expression coined in the sex industry by male customers who pay for a prostitute to act like a girlfriend. To make the leap from porn to mainstream movies is all but unheard of, but to make the leap from porn to arthouse cinema with a world-class director is the Holy Grail for any porn star or starlet.

So how did Grey do it? “Actually, one of his Soderbergh’s writers contacted me though MySpace,” she said. “He said, We read an article on you and Steven Soderbergh would love to meet you to discuss a project. Obviously, it’s MySpace so I didn’t believe it, and I said, Well, how am I supposed to know this is really you and that you’re really affiliated with him?’. He said, I’ll have him leave you a voicemail.’ “And he did, so I met with up with him at the Warner offices, and he discussed the project. It was really simple, and a year and a half later we shot the film.”

The Girlfriend Experience was filmed on a comparatively tiny budget of just £1.15 million, on HD video using natural daylight. Most of the action was improvised by the cast and captured by a crew of just a dozen.

Grey plays Christine, a high-end Manhattan escort who goes by the business name of Chelsea.

The movie follows Christine’s professional life, the lucrative services she offers, and the impact it has on her struggling personal trainer and boyfriend played by Chris Santos.

Grey said: “The beauty of this film, in the way it was filmed, is that it allows the viewer to read into things. Coming from a person who acted in the film and was on set every day, I think to me that’s one of the je ne sais quoi’s about the film. But I think she Chelsea likes to separate the personal and professional, and she would rather not talk about the professional.”

So does the 21-year-old Grey appreciate the parallel lives of a porn star and a call girl?

“The difference between me and that character is that I don’t really see a difference between my personal and quote unquote professional lives,” she said. “A lot of people have said, My life is my art,’ and that’s the way I look at it. I don’t go home at the end of the day and kick off my heels and turn off the lights and go into another headspace.

“It’s all-inclusive, and I don’t look at it as just a career. I look at it as my life.”

Grey’s on-screen incarnations are noted for their extreme sexuality. She has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable even by the standards of American porn. As a porn star she represents herself, keeping control of her career, and has won numerous AVN awards - the porn equivalent of the Oscars. Her success, openness and flouting of the conventional view of porn starlets as victims has made her an icon.

Her MySpace biography says: “I grew up in North Highlands. It is a disenfranchised, lower-to-middle class neighbourhood. I never allowed myself to be a negative product of that environment. I used it as a source of inspiration to challenge myself.

“The acts I perform are always consensual. I am a woman who strongly believes in what she does - it is time that our society comes to grips with the fact that normal people, women especially, enjoy perverse sex.

“I am ready to take on any opportunities and challenges that face me as a woman, porn star, and artist.”

The Girlfriend Experience debuts at Cineworld in Dundee Street, Edinburgh on June 24

this article first published by the sunday herald (scotland)

Steven Soderbergh made his name as a director with his first film, sex, lies and videotape. He has gone on to win an Oscar for Traffic, but 20 years after his debut, he has returned to familiar territory with a film that could just as easily have been called sex, lies and the internet.

The Girlfriend Experience, a kind of art-house Secret Diary of a Call Girl, is about a week in the life of a $2,000-an-hour New York “escort”. It was made last October in the aftermath of the downfall of Elliot Spitzer, then governor of New York, who was forced to resign after being caught up in a high-class prostitution ring. An unfinished version of the film screened at the Sundance festival earlier this year; it premieres at the Tribeca festival, in New York, on Tuesday. “It’s a subject I’ve been totally interested in since the beginning of my career,” Soderbergh says. “This is a milieu I’ve never explored before.”

Between the two films bookending Soderbergh’s work, the world has changed, along with the format. sex, lies and videotape, in which James Spader’s character has to revive his libido by interviewing women about their sex lives while filming them, was about the distance between love, intimacy and sex, and the lies that are told because of it.

Two decades on, sex has been widely commodified. Prostitutes openly advertise their services and fees on slickly designed websites, and hardcore pornography is never more than a couple of clicks of a mouse away. In this world, the “girlfriend experience” is the pretence of intimacy some escorts offer and their customers pay extra for, including kissing and what may even pass for friendship. As one reviewer noted: “Soderbergh borrows one of Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite themes — prostitution as a metaphor for capitalism — and adapts it to an America in which the line between selling out and selling yourself has never been thinner.”

The film was shot — for only $1.7m — in 16 days, in a surprisingly sumptuous style, full of reflections and surfaces. It opens with the escort, Chelsea, on a “date” with a man who appears to be her boyfriend, but turns out to be one of her clients. We see her meeting a financial adviser and a sleazy internet reviewer of prostitutes, as well as her boyfriend, a trainer in a gym. While Soderbergh was shooting, the Wall Street he was depicting was having its last hurrah, a world where rich young brokers fly to Las Vegas in a private plane to spend time with high-class prostitutes while they fret about the stock-market crash.

Yet Soderbergh is nothing if not contrary. His first film dangled a teaser title before the audience, but showed little actual sex; The Girlfriend Experience features none, just one brief nude shot of its star, Sasha Grey, who plays Chelsea. Which is particularly intriguing — and deliberately so — because Grey, who was 20 when the film was shot, is one of the most notorious porn stars in the world. (All the other “actors” are nonprofessionals.) Soderbergh says he chose her because, like her character, she makes a good living selling sex and the fantasies surrounding sex. Since she started working in “adult entertainment” when she was just 18, Grey has made more than 150 porn films.

“Even though the film’s not very explicit,” Soderbergh says, “there’s a comfort level she obviously has from making all of those films that I think is difficult to fake. There’s a kind of attitude.” It’s an attitude of unnervingly unknowable blankness that works perfectly for her character.

Soderbergh clearly enjoys toying with the tension of our expectations, but there is an even more interesting subtextual tension in the choice of a top porn actress to star in an art-house movie directed by an Oscar-winner. It begs important questions. Pornography may now be pervasive, but how acceptable is it in mainstream culture today, how acceptable should it be, and how do we really feel about those who perform in it?

For Grey, those are not academic questions. She’s made it clear she hopes for a career beyond porn, something that has eluded most other actresses who have tried, including Marilyn Chambers, the star of the influential 1972 porn movie Behind the Green Door, who died recently at 56, penniless. “I’ve got to diversify myself,” Grey says. “Do I want to be 35, having sex on camera? No. I want to be sitting on a porch at my beach house with my own successful company.”

The question of mainstream acceptability is even more tricky, in Grey’s case, because of what she represents in pornography. The publicity material for The Girlfriend Experience portrays her as “an American actor, writer, photographer, porn star, transgressive artist and experimental musician. She declares a strong interest in the films of the French new wave and, before deciding on her present stage name, toyed with the name of Jean-Luc Godard’s ex-wife, Anna Karina”. This is no common or garden porn star. And if you take yourself to Grey’s MySpace page, what awaits in the list of what she likes is a compendium of the avant-garde and intellectually challenging: directors such as Antonioni, Bertolucci and Lars von Trier; writers such as Burroughs, Yeats, Baudrillard and Nietzsche; artists such as Donald Judd. Her occupation is described as “existentialist, porn star and artist”.

Maybe she’s serious, but this attempt at putting a high gloss on what she does for a living may not convince everybody. For Grey will find it hard to distract people from her tastes in pornography. Her appeal comes from the unholy collision between her youth and apparent physical innocence — she is petite, pale and small-breasted — and the extraordinarily extreme, violent and degrading acts to which she is subjected. Apart from what are now standard pornography tropes of rough sex and violent gangbangs, Grey is routinely abused and degraded in almost every conceivable and inconceivable way — to her apparent satisfaction. The only acts she will not undertake, she says, are those involving children or animals.

She insists that the control she feels she has over the performance of these acts, and over those who watch and pay for them, gives her pleasure. “Only a handful of adult stars continue to push the boundaries of what women are supposed to like, or be like, in bed,” she says. “This entices me to be one of these young women, not to mention my lust for sexual creativity. I hunger for all modes of sexual perversity.”

Whether she believes such sentiments, Grey’s porn persona has been tailored to satisfy the needs of today’s jaded consumers of pornography, dulled by what she describes as “vanilla sex”. “I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfils everyone’s fantasies,” she says.

As many as 1,000 young women arrive each year in the San Fernando Valley suburbs of LA, where most of the country’s pornography is produced. Grey, who left school at 16, arrived there three years ago from a working-class background in northern California and rapidly became notorious in the industry. She is the most famous porn star since Jenna Jameson, who wrote the bestselling autobiography How to Make Love Like a Porn Star. Jameson has become a role model for younger performers, especially after selling her company, ClubJenna, to Playboy for $16.7m.

Apart from working with Soderbergh, Grey has parlayed her notoriety into excursions into music and fashion — she has done vocals alongside Moby for the reggae maestro Lee “Scratch” Perry and modelled for the American Apparel clothing line. While she hopes these ventures will give her a career beyond porn, others are disturbed that they will legitimise her porn work. Tyra Banks, the former supermodel who now has a successful talk show, was extremely critical of Grey when she appeared on her programme, calling her “cold, distant and hard”, and a dangerous role model.

Grey insists she is “a sexually healthy young woman . . . I take pride in the liberation of female sexuality. As a sex symbol with an intellectual stance, I am and will continue to be vilified, and I am okay with that . . . In fact, I am content; it gives me the opportunity to shed light on the darker areas of sex and validate the insecurities of sexually repressed women. The days of victimised, disturbed porn stars and civilian women are fading away. I am the new breed.”

It is hard to know what to make of that. While Grey may enjoy being sexually abused and degraded, there is clearly a real danger that the men who watch her films will come to believe that their lovers might also enjoy such extreme abuse. Traci Lords, who began doing porn when she was just 15, and may be the only porn actress to have successfully moved into the mainstream, starring in films such as Cry-Baby, directed by John Waters, is now disturbed by the degree to which pornography has become legitimised, to some extent by her own work. “I hate to think I am a poster child for a business I loathe,” she says.

The Girlfriend Experience is, at least in part, a commentary on the appearance of power that prostitutes — and, implicitly, porn actresses — need to convince themselves they have. Soderbergh says it is “about someone who feels as though she is in absolute control of the way her life works and, over the course of a week, comes to realise that’s not true”. Is that a conclusion to which Grey will come one day, however rich her work as “a commodity that fulfils everyone’s fantasies” makes her?

The Girlfriend Experience will be released here later in the year

this article first appeared in timesonline.co.uk

By Chris Nieratko

January 2008
Sasha Grey

My ass makes my cunt jealous and that’s the way I like it. I like spelunking my butt hole more than a seasoned fag at a bathhouse in Turkey.

Winner at this year’s AVN awards for performer of the year, Sasha Grey has the porn industry in a maelstrom, and the rest of us in awe.

When I was 19 years old I had no direction, no clue of what I wanted to do with my life. I was getting by walking the line of both selling drugs and being addicted to them. It was a different time back then. The year was 1990 and colour television had just been invented. We were happy to just be alive. Teenage porn heroine Sasha Grey is infinitely smarter than I was at 19. She is well on her way to being an international cocksucking, ass-spreading superstar. She gets porked on film nearly every other day and is making over $100,000 a year doing it and she’s proud of it. Many have even begun to call her the next Jenna Jameson. Not Tyra Banks, of course, because Tyra is Sasha’s mortal enemy. I guess Tyra is allergic to butt sex. Or she’s just a big dummy. Either way, Sasha is our favorite 19 year old ever, this month.

You must get this a lot but do you feel at the age of 19 you’re too young to be in porn?

No… age doesn’t necessarily define maturity and what I think is really important is being able to make mature decisions, ie handle all the bullshit that can and does go on in this business, and yes I do get that a lot but hey… it comes with the territory. I’m a grown woman, I can handle it.

You just had your 19th birthday, what did you do to celebrate?

Yeah… I had to work so that sucked (no pun intended) other than that it was very relaxing… my fiancé surprised me with dinner (he’s a fantastic cook when he wants to be) and we relaxed, watched River’s Edge… it was a nice change of pace.

Was it always your childhood dream to be a porn star? How did you get into the business?

No, I don’t think anybody actually has that as a childhood dream… I’m a natural exhibitionist and provocateur so it fits an inner conduit pretty nicely don’t you think? When I was 17 I started doing lots of research reading interviews and watching porno at a feverish rate… There’s more going on than meets the eye, so I tried my best to understand it before I made a definitive decision, when I felt I was ready I drafted a mission statement, which is currently on display on my MySpace page and I got an agent who knows his shit and presto Sasha Grey is born!

Your first scene was an orgy with Rocco Siffredi for the movie The Fashionistas 2 by John Stagliano? How was that for a first experience?

It was a euphoric high that bent itself far beyond just an amazing sexual experience. Beyond words.

During your first scene, you requested that Siffredi punch you in the stomach. Were you pregnant and hoping for a free abortion? Or is getting punched during sex something you’re naturally into?

Yeah this comes up in a lot of interviews I do, I enjoy BDSM and rough sex what can I say and depending on what the mood and energy is I like a little power struggle every now and then, it’s intense, endorphins, you know, just like an athlete. And no, I wasn’t beaten as a child so I’m not “working issues out on camera” although it can be cathartic at times. I guess I got introduced to that kind of “stuff” by an ex-boyfriend but really I think it’s kinda predisposed. I think I’ve been into pushing boundaries all my life, sexual or otherwise and sometimes I really love it when those boundaries push back.

You also like to vomit on your partners?

Well, it’s kinda connected to the above question but really it’s about pushing boundaries, I mean it’s nasty and disgusting really and personally I do go through that effect when you’re so ultra turned on and sexualizing and fetishizing almost everything around you, it just works. It’s play too, you have to remember I’m not bulimic. I don’t do it all the time but to be intense, to be gross and raw I’ll eat a big Mac and then get faced fucked as hard I can, tah dah, McPuke on the cock.

Were you sad that you didn’t win the Best New Starlet award? Did you cry?

No, I don’t care. Awards are too political to be so wrapped up in besides its just another form of masturbation that I don’t need. I know I’m good at what I do, fans are happy, I’m happy so that’s my biggest award.

If you won, would you have thanked God and/or your mom?

No, that’s silly I would have said thank you and that’s it or perhaps pending my mood an overly dramatic pause and just … “Thanks”… courtesy of Boogie Nights.

I read in your first four months in the business, you shot 70 scenes. Did you sleep or take a break at all in those first months? How can you do so many scenes and not be sore?

Well I worked every other day sometimes with two days off rarely working back to back days – it’s not that bad. I mean I don’t “party.” Porn stars aren’t rock stars despite what some people think. You have to be good to your body, again like an athlete, I mean that’s really what we are sexual athletes so it wasn’t so bad I don’t think I would want that pace the rest of my career though.

You had sex with a man dressed as a teddy bear in one of your scenes. How was that? Did it turn you on?

It was my idea, so yes it turned me on. I’m a pervert. Is the picture becoming clearer?

I love that you put Tyra Banks in her place on her own show, even if it wasn’t aired. Can you tell that story and the bullshit editing that ensued?

Honestly I don’t think she even wanted me on the show. An executive from Warner Bros read the piece on me in LA Magazine and told her to put me on. I was originally supposed to be on the show with Jessica Drake and Savanna but I wasn’t available. So they brought on these two ringers just to have me on! Before going on the show I knew it would be edited for ratings and attempt to convey that I was a victim. Victims = ratings. Just think of the South Park episode, “Whateva I do what I want.”

Why did I do it? It’s free publicity, and people that were really interested would look me up and find out what I stand for and what my beliefs are. Now this is for everyone who underestimated me: When the camera would cut to my responses a majority of the time they were showing you a shot of me listening to Tyra’s questions (ie reaction shots), so it appeared as if I had nothing to say. Believe me, I had plenty to say. I started out by voicing my thoughts on the negative aspects of this business, I told Tyra she was judging me, I referred to Pasolini, Madonna, and Peaches. We (myself, Ian, and Mark) rebutted against the fat bitch at the end but of course only the original audience was able to view those responses. “Every edit is a lie” Jean Luc Godard.

The two things that pissed me off the most were: How they dressed me and did my hair/makeup. Tyra talks about exploitation but here she is saying I look like a middle school adolescent while they have me in a pink shirt and so much blush on it makes me look like I am about to shit out my nervousness (I was completely relaxed and at the end pissed). Now to mention the other girl who was a fucking hooker turned porn star. I have said this before and I will say it again, you cannot compare someone who led a destructive lifestyle to a responsible young woman who leads a conscious one. Boom.

Tyra predicted you would be wearing diapers by the time you were 30. Do you believe that?

No, that’s completely ignorant. If that were true more than half of the men in San Francisco would be wearing diapers, probably start a whole new fashion industry too.

Me and my friends used to have Depends Diaper drinking parties, where you had to pee in your diaper all night long? How does that sound to you?

That’s sexy as all hell, I just might have to try that. Do we get to have pacifiers too?

What do you think of a photo of you topless in Depends adult diapers, sucking cock, with a caption, “Tyra, I guess you were right.” ? You could sign it and mail it to her.

What if I sent it to you…?

I would like that. You and I are in agreement that most porn is very vanilla and boring. Yet your scenes are full of zeal. What is it that makes you so passionate about having such unbelievable filthy sex on camera?

The killer instinct. Mission Statement: I am in the adult film scene for mainly one reason. On average, most of the xxx I see is boring, and does not arouse me physically, or visually. There is only a handful of adult stars that continue to push the boundaries of what women are supposed to like, or be like in bed. This entices me to be one of these young women, not to mention my lust for sexual creativity; I hunger for all modes of sexual perversity. I am determined and ready to be a commodity that fulfils everyone’s fantasies.

On myspace one of your interests is your butthole. Certainly I enjoy your butthole, but what are your own personal thoughts on the topic?

My ass makes my cunt jealous and that’s the way I like it. I like spelunking my butt hole more than a seasoned fag at a bathhouse in Turkey.

What’s the strangest or most fucked up thing to happen on the set of a porno?

Well the strangest thing it would have to be that one time when all the people had their shit together. They knew what they were doing and were coordinated from the make up artist to the director to the male talent. Everybody was on time and they communicated everything in a positive and concise way and the scene ways really creative and fulfilling. That kind of shit was just crazy. Organization in porn, wow, there was a higher power in command that day. Wow.

You were in a DVD called My Daughter is Fucking Blackzilla 9, what is the plot of that movie and what was your role?

Plot…um…the plot is in the title that’s about it…I got the madness fucked out of me by a very large Afro-American penis.

And lastly, what do you want to be when you grow up?

A wrecker of civilization.

this interview first appeared on bizarremag.com

Saturday, November 8, 2008
Sasha Grey
I am a huge fan of porn and pornstars. I can’t help it. I like to look at pornographic sites and pictures and masturbate. I am a girl with needs. Sexual needs. I love Jenna Jameson. I adore Janine Lindemulder. And my latest obsession is Sasha Grey.
Posted by Whoa Pink! at 4:45 PM 0 comments

Kevin Smith recently cast the porn stars Traci Lords and Katie Morgan in his forthcoming comedy Zack and Miri Make a Porno. Now Steven Soderbergh has gone one “better”: his new film The Girlfriend Experience will feature adult actor Sasha Grey in the lead role, Variety reports.

Grey will play a high-class call girl in the low-budget feature, which looks like it might be one of the Oscar-winning film-maker’s frequent journeys into experimental territory. The screenplay has been penned by Ocean’s Thirteen writers Brian Koppelman and David Levien.

Twenty-year-old Grey professes herself to be a lover of the films of Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Catherine Breillat, and has already signed on for appearances in two other mainstream movies that will debut in 2009, Dick Rude’s independent film Quit and the Canadian horror Smash Cut. She was recently awarded the Adult Video Network’s (AVN) female performer of the year award and has no plans to leave the industry as yet.

The Girlfriend Experience is the second in Soderbergh’s six-picture deal with billionaire entrepreneurs Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner. Each will be shot on high-definition video and released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD and television.

The release model caused consternation in Hollywood when it was announced, with studio bosses decrying what they saw as an attempt to undermine the pre-eminence of cinemas in terms of release schedules. In the end, Soderbergh’s first film in the series, Bubble, performed poorly all round. Since then, no one’s been quite so worried.

“To have the opportunity to work for an Academy Award-winning auteur is truly a great honour,” Grey told AVN. “I’ve been an admirer of Soderbergh’s films for years, and I am elated that I have been given a leading role in a character-driven film.”

Rumours suggesting George Clooney is in talks to play a hunky plumber who turns up to mend Grey’s loo could not be confirmed at the time of publication.

this report first published on fluffertrax.com

thought produces and shapes our perception of reality. we see reality according to our thought. therefore thought is constantly participating both in giving shape and form and figuration to ourselves, and to the whole of reality. now, thought doesn’t know this. thought is thinking that it isn’t doing anything. this is really where the difficulty is. we have to get to see that thought is part of this reality and that we are not merely thinking about it, but that we are thinking it. there is a difference.

david bohm
on creativity

this image originally appeared on church.pornsaints.org

As pleasure ceases to be the response to the individual’s desire and excessively exceeds this desire, it simultaneously exceeds individual being and replaces it with a shifting - a kind of radiant, excessive suspense connected with a feeling of nakedness and entering into the open nakedness of the other person. such a state assumes nakedness as being present, as being absolutely there, and it does this by way of an innocent if skillful contact - although the skill i refer to doesn’t belong to hands or bodies. it seeks intimate knowledge of nakedness - knowledge of the wound of physical being - whose opening deepens with each contact.

georges bataille
on nietzsche

often a deranged beyond lacerates us while we’re apparently bent on lasciviousness. this is because a “beyond” begins with a feeling of nakedness. asexual nakedness is simply stupor taken to the limit. but as it awakens us to an awareness of physical touch (touch of bodies, hands, moist lips), it’s gentle, animal, and sacred.

since, once naked, we each open to more than what we are, and for the first time we obliterate ourselves in the absence of animal limits. we obliterate ourselves, spreading our legs, our legs opening as widely as possible, to what no longer is us but is something impersonal - a swampy existence of the flesh.

the communication of two individuals occurs when they lose themselves in sweet, shared slime.

georges bataille
on nietzsche

this is not an order
this is not a poem
this is not a man-
tra this is not a
list of recrimi-
nations this is
not a 12 step
program this
is not any-
thing this
is not me
this is
not
you
so no
stress now
baby i’m busy
anyway the truth is
if you’re going to live a lie
you have to do it very convincingly
and you don’t have to worry about my loyalty
i’m always loyal to me and you don’t have to worry
about timing i’ll know when it’s time to make the first mistakes
and if you’re afraid that i’ll debase you don’t forget a little debasement
goes a long way and i know that your mouth is a temple so open it
wider and i know that your eyes are portals to your soul so close
them. this is what i’m gonna do i’m going to uncontrol you
til your five senses ungovern you i’m going to unfasten
your seatbelt and watch while you float through the
windscreen i’m going to help pull you untogether
going to watch while you put off your face
so don’t be anybody don’t be somebody
don’t be a person don’t be a woman
don’t be a girl don’t be you
don’t be anything
don’t be free
don’t be me
don’t be

This is an all-ages poem
so I can’t mention
which part of
you I’d like
to suck
on.

who did you become?
that’s not anybody
i know wearing
your clothes
wearing
your
eyes
who did
you become?
who’s that wearing
your hair? wearing your
smile? who’s that trying so
hard not to wear your tears

Go down
go
down
where
you have
to and we both
know you have to

Go down
take off
your
clothes
for countless
strangers I won’t
stop you I know you
have to go down. There’s
a place in your eyes that’s empty

Go down
Fill it
Like
I
did
I went
down. Go
down, do what
you have to, and
we both know you
have to. Go down, I’ll
be here for you. Always.

southbound
go my fingers
southbound goes
my tongue. lie back
and close your eyes girl
i’m southbound
i’m southbound

one of the devil’s daughters called out my name
she said come here boy come here and play
so i went down and i played. i played love
with one of the devil’s daughters, but i
did not emerge unscathed. a powerful
death drive drove me. i tried to die
but i could not die. i tried to be
born but i could not be born
then i realized
don’t try
be

but i’m not ashamed of myself anymore
every beating i gave her was a begging
for forgiveness. every dark bruise on
her pale junkie skin was the gate-
way to a valley of light. and it’s
true she fucked around like a
two-stroke, but that’s what
devil’s daughters do. i
made the mistake of
not believing the
evidence of my
senses when
i heard her
whisper
my
name
my intuition
told me to run
away but my dick
stood up and yelled “charge”

there you are
lying in the grass
giggling while he stabs
you. his stabbing at first
stylized, and then faster faster
as if syncopating with your giggles
when suddenly there is a voice from
behind the video camera, it says “kick her”
so your stabber kicks you which gives you another
fit of giggles. i watch this all, bemused and detached,
i have become your web stalker, i have nothing left of you

except media

when you don’t fit in
you have to become your own genre
your own niche

and market that

Post festum - Pain at the decay of erotic relationships is not just, as it takes itself to be, fear of love’s withdrawal, nor the kind of narcissistic melancholy that has been penetratingly described by Freud. Also involved is fear of the transience of one’s own feelings. So little room is left to spontaneous impulses that anyone still granted them at all feels them as joy and treasure even when they cause pain, and indeed, experiences the last stinging traces of immediacy as a possession to be grimly defended, in order not to become oneself a thing. The fear of loving another is greater, no doubt, than of losing that other’s love. The idea offered to us as solace that in a few years we shall not understand our passion and will be able to meet the loved woman in company with nothing more than fleeting, astonished curiosity, is apt to exasperate the recipient beyond all measure. That passion, which breaches the context of rational utility and seems to help the self to escape its monadic prison, should itself be something relative to be fitted back into individual life by ignominious reason, is the ultimate blasphemy. And yet inescapably passion itself, in experiencing the inalienable boundary between two people, is forced to reflect on that very moment and thus, in the act of being overwhelmed by it, to recognize the nullity of its overwhelming. Really one has always sensed futility; happiness lay in the nonsensical thought of being carried away, and each time that went wrong was the last time, was death. The transience of that in which life is concentrated to its utmost breaks through in just that extreme concentration. On top of all else the unhappy lover has to admit that exactly where he thought he was forgetting himself he loved himself only. No directness leads outside the guilty circle of the natural, but only reflection on how closed it is.

Theodor W Adorno
Messages In A Bottle

An eponymous poem wrote itself.
A ballad fell down the stairs. A
lullaby hummed a hymn to
sleep. The anthem stood
up in a crowd of irreve-
rent ditties and made
every one of them
weep. Ah but
while all of
this was
going
on
I
was
watching
you, wondering
what your nipples
would taste like.

The dumb
waiters
served
the
striking
workers beer
but the workers
refused to drink. The
army was called in to keep
the peace but the referee mislaid
his whistle so what was blown up instead
was the evidence of a document that the judge
denied he’d signed twice. Now the Zebra’s crossing,
the Rhino’s horny, and the Crocodile’s tears are drowning
the Gefilte Fish. The Elephant’s memory forgot where Noah
parked the Ark and the Jericho trumpets were sent in for re-tuning.

Ah but what does all this matter,
‘cos I’ve been watching you,
watching you, take off
all you’re wearing.