Riffing on Brent Scott Riffing on Socrates (was Meeting with BS)

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Meeting With BS, Part 5

Props go to M. Yu at The Jade Gate for breaking the news of Barbara Bell and Anna Lorentzon's documentary on the Insex phenomenon, Graphic Sexual Horror.

In previous postings on this subject I have been circumspect regarding Barbara's identity and especially that of Insex's resident mad creative, pd, or Brent Scott (BS). With the release of GSH I can relax. Better still, I can share more openly.



When I returned to NYC after sojourning here and there I fell upon the notes I'd made about meeting Brent and my impressions of his peculiar genius, much of which comprise my extant ramblings here on the subject. In them were particulars on the TransHudson Gallery and its proprietor in 1995, whom I don't believe is mentioned in the GSH film, and is certainly not (yet) on the GSH website, so I'll refer to him simply as J. A little filtering in Google netted me a small number of contacts to dial up.

On the second try I landed the very person I'd been seeking, who in reply was polite and quite clear that he had been the one to book Brent at the gallery. He remembered the show as short-lived but utterly fascinating and almost certainly doomed to failure owing to the bombast of its artistic intent and the expense of mounting it. He noted to me several pieces of memorabilia in his possession, and would be happy to show any and all.

We met shortly thereafter and I spent a very pleasant afternoon comparing notes and discovering a fellow patron of the arts, one whose constitutional inclinations diverged sharply from the Brent Scott vision, but who nonetheless recognized profound talent when it landed in front of him. J. spent a ramshackle career from the 70s to the 90s as an impressario, bon vivant and, from the looks of his home decor, a groovy dresser.

I came away from that meeting with not only a better appreciation of Brent Scott before the fall, but pleased to have made the acquaintance of a fellow dilettante, a non-artist with an gnawing, insatiable need to be mixed up with the creative moment. J. sent me along with a stack of aging VHS tapes (including Brent's personal document of man.INFESTation), a copy of the show poster (posted previously) and other records of the event, all of which pointed to Brent's aspirations being not at all dissimilar at the time of man.INFESTation to those of all artists I have known.

Owing to the sloppily laid plans of various reactionary authorities, the creative history of Brent Scott is inscribed as a short, intense record of revolutions, against respectable bourgeois propriety right up the demonization scale to, literally, imputations of terrorism. In 2005, as you'll learn when you see GSH, Insex was forced to close under threat of prosecution for violations of the Patriot Act, namely suspicion of bagging money for terrorist organizations. Thus did Insex become a casualty of our era's cheif mania: Cynical political manipulation. Brent may not have been sentenced to drink the hemlock, but I don't think the parallels between his case and that of the great ancient corruptor of youth are at all lost on him:

"If you won't allow me to teach your children, then I will corrupt them."

Brent Scott, riffing on Socrates

In matters cultural it is in the nature of governments to work at 180 degrees to the foregone conclusions of any great cultural shift. Government is always last to lead. In 1995 it was possible, if one was looking closely, to visit the future of porn, and possibly of art, in the short-lived gallery career of rejected academic Brent Scott. Within the ten year history of Insex, from its formative moment to its manufactured demise, sex would become exponentially more defused throughout culture and sadomasochistic signifiers would begin infiltrating the popular consciousness. When most BDSM was still the provenance of Farmer's Daughter BBS, through the then-experimental Vivo player Insex loosened the stopper from the full-motion dike and inaugurated the end of the passive era in media, as well as affording a first look at fearlessly expansive, deeply disturbing and displacing forms of play known previously to very few.

While I have in my own life and play gone to very few of the precincts regularly visited by Brent Scott at Insex, I'm indebted to the appaling grandeur and devastating sweep of his vision, and to his ultimate faith in the fortitude of the women (and later the men) with whom he worked. Over the years I've met many of those models and to a one they recall their visits (often multiple) to Insex as the hardest and most rewarding bondage modeling gigs they'd ever landed. When I visited, when Insex was young, the world of hard-core questers, pain-sluts and contortionists was beating a path to Big Worm Productions. The payoff for performing may indeed have scaled according to depth of ability and/or consent, but there was always an out, a safeword, so in the final analysis the bottom reserved control and the deprivations suffered were ultimately elective.

Incentivizing with bonuses to get better performance, all for the sake of selling...what? Mortgage derivatives? Credit swaps? Economy busting, life-ruining, reputation raping, history changing swindles?

No... just sex.

Seems quaint in light of the scorched earth the partisans of righteousness were engineering while they drew their long knives on Insex, habeas corpus, the Geneva Convention and The Constitution. Reactions to art have always given a clear warning that human rights are in the cross-hairs, and I don't think it overreaching to consider for a moment the history of any art labeled "degenerate" by politicians - as it was by the Nazis (the Entartete Kunst and Entartete Musik exhibitions of 1937), or, more recently in my own fair city, the pogrom against degenerate art and the NEA staged by then-mayor and former Presidential candidate Rudolf Guliani along with the right-wing minion of representatives Jesse Helms and Al D'Amato.

I bring this last example up for those who think that I am perhaps overreaching for comparing the shuttering of Insex to government demagoguery against art - the anti-NEA cabal of the late 1980s is now well understood to have been an opening salvo in the anti-gay, anti-sex war on culture by the religious right. As Insex succumbed in 2005, the economic, cultural and political carnage of the Bush occupation forces was becoming apparent; remember Terri Schiavo, privatizing Social Security, New Orleans, Tom DeLay, "Duke" Cunningham, Harriet Miers, warrantless wiretaps, etc., etc.

When the moralists and the clean-living get vocal, sensible folks watch their rights and their wallets, the latter of which I'll be opening as soon as Graphic Sexual Horror screens in New York.

Meeting with BS 4

Much has transpired since my last entry on Insex and BS.

The lovely, well-connected and ever helpful Barbara Nitke, as it happens, is a close friend of BB, a former writer for Big Worm Productions - Insex's minuscule nom de camouflage that once marked their DUMBO warehouse door here in lil' ol' Bklyn. She arranged a dinner at a perfectly extraordinary little place on the LES (Mexican food / French technique / 22 seats) where we all met and regaled each other with our respective experiences of Insex and BS. I had read BB's 2000 literary opus (available on Amazon) a couple of years ago, a rangy and popular thriller with a carefully considered BDSM theme, and had been moved by her unsentimental traverse across the some of the uglier congruencies of our favorite pastime. I was eager to meet her.

I won't speak out of school here*, but suffice it to say that I was sorely impressed not merely by BB's heartfelt interest in the ways of BDSM (as opposed to the usual uninformed or academic - so characteristic of (often wrong-headed) portrayals of BDSM in a popular context), but with the many dimensions of her intelligence and the ecology of her life as a writer. While she had provided Insex with a great many of its more legendarily scenarios she had been quietly digesting her experience into a documentary script for a more gimlet-eyed exploration of Insex and, more specifically, the cult of the mad genius behind it, BS. Being a work in progress, it is as such subject to all of the usual detours, funding difficulties and creative slog any work of its scale would be, but it promises to be masterful when it comes out. BB believes it will be well received in European markets and Japan, where people better understand the distinction between analyticity and porn than they do in our electively sex-conflicted culture.

I surprised myself by having information I would have guessed BB to already possess regarding BS's foray out from conventional middle class propriety. It was while in the walled garden of academe, well before the veil would be lifted from the eyes of the first Insex subscriber and BS would fulfill the mandate of those who had convinced themselves that he was a corrupter of youth.


When he and I first met BS had recounted to me the beginning of his fascination with digital media in the 1980s when he was living in Buffalo and appended in some fashion to SUNY Buffalo. It was there that BS began experimenting with realtime interactivity using machine interfaces and video. By the early 1990s BS was at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, having taken with him some of his more promising protégées from Buffalo, encouraging new acolytes and continuing to build a reputation in interactive digital media. Consider this former student, and for an even clearer harbinger of what was to come (including perhaps the character origin of the renowned Insex model Liz Tyler) click here.

At about the time Bruce Sterling and Tom Maddox teamed up on the breakthrough Snake Eyes (a live-action cyberpunk drama wherein actors controlled computer generated graphics with bodily movement) in Austin, TX, BS was organizing his first interactive performance art / installation outside the university setting. The piece, titled manINFESTation, debuted at the TransHudson Gallery in Jersey City in June of 1995. I remember BS said that the press showed up but did nothing with it, although I would learn later that some positive reviews did come of manINFESTation's one (expensive) gallery exhibit.

The following quip from the press release presages the elaboration of BS's career in art and media, and had it not been written for manINFESTation could easily have been applied to Insex.

"This work raises questions and concerns about control and power. It explores relationships and responses to the spectacles of society. These spectacles are recontextualized in images and performances intended as visual hyperboles."

In their reaction to consideration of BS's theory and practice of art, the predeceased right, the hysterical left and the timid administration of a major eastern university satisfied themselves that faculty member BS was a danger to their young charges' well-being and moral probity. He was summarily discharged and several other factors arrayed themselves against his quiet enjoyment of life. Thus began the plunge into the woods that ended with the founding of Insex.

*By the way, all the clues about BS left out in the open throughout these essays are entirely intentional. A little googling around would net you all this and more, and with the screening of BB's documentary all of this coyness of mine will be moot anyway. I'm just being respectful for the time being.

Meeting with BS 3

Returning now to matters more pleasantly esoteric...

***

Since a live feed had happened just the previous night the space was given over largely to sets and the scattered paraphernalia of what appeared to several womens' torture. The chair (the one desk chair that has ever appeared in Insex media) was positioned prominently, a mop leaned upon it and several coils of hemp rope stacked in its seat. Beneath the chair was a bundle of plastic wrap or bags shot through with black PVC tape, several latex gloves and other matted, damp-looking bits of detritus. Before the chair stood two Sony cams, partially disassembled with open cases between them. Emptied light stands and a boom were arrayed to one side and behind these a long table held piles of leather goods, rope, tape in various colors and widths, wooden and metal devices and copies of what I would come to learn were scripts. In a tall stock pot at least one insertable item presumably awaited boiling.

Shelves positioned back and away from the set overflowed with raw materials of all descriptions – wooden planks, wire, medical supplies and entire sides of latigo leather spilled off the upper reaches, while the lower slots held tubs of Neats Foot Oil, isopropyl alcohol and racks of hand tools. These later were clearly intended to be used in the darkest corner of the room where a lathe, a small band saw and a couple of other machine tools had been pushed together temporarily. On the lathe was the beginnings of a wooden pear gag which, when he showed it to me, PD allowed he was considering having manufactured in volume, likely as a plastic casting. The part on the lathe was an element of a prototype; the other bits stood carefully arranged on a nearby work stand, the hand-carved leaves impressing me greatly in their uniformity and excellent finish.

We talked throughout, PD throwing off references to authors and artists whose work he admired and from whom he took his inspiration. I observed that the pear reminded me of something I’d seen on Jeff Gord’s site and my host steered me immediately to another shelf containing dozens of volumes of the Gor series, a score of cheap Japanese trade shibari books (the first I’d ever seen), obscure Italian and French editions (Glittering Images?) on John Willie Coutts, Bettie Page, a army field surgical manual from the 1950s, a copy of Research (#49) featuring Fakir Musafar, and, most relevantly, a number of graphic books featuring the works of Simon Benson, Eneg, Jim and others. He flipped one open to a bookmark and pointed out a Benson image by which he and Jeff had likely been similarly inspired. PD heaped praise on House of Gord, the evil genius of its master and what he assumed must be Jeff’s minion, given the profligacy of mannered abominations issuing forth from that site, especially in the area of fornophilia. (editing note: I would later visit the Gord compound outside Seattle on a similar mission and learn that Jeff Gord does engineers and machines all the designs appearing on HoG almost entirely on his own).

Inspired upon learning of my interest in fornophilia, PD dropped the Benson book and made for a terminal. He opened a browser and typed in the URL www.b****s****.com and loaded the very first ShockWaved website I’d ever seen. A grid map of a gallery with an insect icon crawling around in it came first to the screen, and links opened into a crude virtual tour. It was very impressive.

“That’s you? You're BS?”

“That’s me, formally, maybe formerly.”

Feelings, Nothing More than Feelings...

My notes on Insex are still scattered hither and yon, so while I enslave appeal to my erstwhile adjutant to get things properly ordered I present here the next bit of thread in the developing 20 questions yarn; I am most appreciative of your kind indulgence...

• How did you feel about yourself when you first started having BDSM interests?
  
  
• How did you feel about yourself once you started engaging in BDSM behaviors?
  
  
• How do you feel about your current BDSM interests?
  
  
• What do you feel are the positive and/or negative aspects of BDSM, if any?

I remember quite clearly having standard issue American shame with respect to sex generally, and since my earliest BDSM inklings (however uncategorized as such) were definitely erotic, they were tainted by association.

I don't attribute my youthful sense of shame to my parents' influence so much as to the callous treatment of intimacy in our culture. While American culture, with its emphasis on the individual, descends from a kernel of puritanical reactionaryism, my home life as I came into my adulthood was socially fairly progressive. My father was a psychiatric social worker (M.SW) and my mother holds advanced degrees in biology and instruction (M.S., M.Ed). Both my parents descend from the Nordic race and are otherwise pure Yankee of the rock-ribbed variety. My mother's tribe dates back to the founding days of the Rebublic and turns up in Gateway Families (the Library of Congress' gigantic flow chart of American familial lines that predate the Revolution), and my father's forebears date back only two generations prior from Sweden (what would become in 1905 Norway). Both mother and father had from their own upbringings every impetus to embrace conservative (even primitive) values; they strayed, staging their own reaction, as it were, and their parents, my grandparents, were not happy about it.

That fact was something of which I became aware only upon entering my teen age, when certain disjuncts between the dispositions of generations other than my own became apparent. Discussions of human spiritual, psychic and physical functioning was de rigour and often very frank at the family dinner table, whereas my parent's counsel was always to temper our youthful enthusiasm when visiting their parents. Notwithstanding, both of my parents were economically conservative much like their elders and in my idealistic years we were wont to have fairly robust disagreements. For the usual reasons young people believe such things, I thought it more just that the state balance its citizens' checkbooks (a belief I did not abandon entirely until my taxpayer status changed to self-employed, and ironically I now live in the triple-tax oppressed City of New York (quadruple, really, for in addition to paying NYC's income tax I pay the unincorporated business tax as well).

Anyway...

Thus were my parents very strongly in favor of their children and people generally being free (and responsible) to pursue their own happiness as long as such happiness did not interfere with others' freedoms to do the same. In the same frame, however, they both promulgated to their kids a sense for social cohesion and political responsibility that by itself would yield advantages to the whole as well as the individual, i.e., a well ordered and functional social unit is capable of accomplishing more than scattered individual self interest.

With the exception of the "birds and bees" conversations in which both mother and father participated separately and together, sexual subjects in our household were treated objectively or theoretically. One's own proclivities one did not trot out to polite company, less so because of the possibility of giving offense (as I recall mostly from my father's political constitution) than because tipping one's hand sacrificed certain tactical advantages. This I think is characteristic of WASPishness generally, although all of the good poker players I know are either Catholic or Jewish. I myself am merely scratch.

The keeping of my sexual consciousness to myself dovetailed, however, very neatly into received American attitudes about sex and personal revelation. I have considered that shame is a very effective means of treating prophylactically the vulnerability implied in the absolutist form of individualism that underlies our American moral and economic life. In the American/puritan Weltanschauung, there is no group to mediate one's application to God for salvation; you're on your own, so to speak, and completely vulnerable to failure (and damnation - I mean, imagine the lot of the early Calvinists). If we do not show ourselves completely, we preserve the power we have and which we believe to be otherwise scarce. Shame works in puritanical cultures because it enforces conformity and prevents cultural dissipation. In a way I bought into this, but less through the mechanism of shame than through a consciousness of the fact that keeping my business to myself afforded me an advantage. This is abundantly clear to me in my roll as a top.

Meeting with BS, 2

“Mac! You’re early, fucker.” That much I remember verbatim. (The next bit I don’t think I’m making up, but I scribbled down something to the effect of) “Too bad about last night. You would have been a good distraction for the girls.”

In any case, for openers he didn’t do half badly.

PD stepped back, took my hand in a surprisingly weak but perhaps just early-morning grip and ushered me into his vaulted atelier of dangerous ecstasies. Directly in front of me was an impressive video editing suite, the screens of which were variably papered with images of (enslaved.com’s) Paige White’s extremities sunken in the sands of Muir Beach with driftwood occupying both her ends of her alimentary canal, and a terminal set-up with less obviously interesting data scrolling lazily upward. I would learn two things shortly; first, how to make an anal hook and a bit gag from found objects (and how the two relate), and second, Insex’s rate of customer acquisition.

Before becoming educated, however, PD and I exchanged pleasantries, starting with the disarming mutual admission that the matter of how to handle my interest in investing in Insex was a mystery to us. I allowed that I’d never done anything like what I was proposing, and PD allowed that neither he nor his partners had ever imagined taking in outside capital. We were both immediately more at ease since there were no longer any expectations of a right way to go about our business, should it happen we would end up having any to do together. His suggestion for the time being was to “fuck that’ and show me around the space, which was more compact than seeing it on screen had led me to expect. For a New York studio it was still substantial, but PD’s inventiveness and the place’s own rustic qualities had impressed me remotely as endless. Just another trompe-l'œil of which I’d learn there were legion.

(As the critic Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Marlene Dietrich, the art is in the seeming)

Meeting with BS

I was reminded recently by a correspondent and fellow blogging top of an episode from a few years back by which I shifted from being solely a supporter and patron of other people's creative aspirations to my current evolutionary phase - that of responsible agent.

It's very much in vogue to refer to erotic rope bondage as an art these days, and to pin the sobriquet "artist" on those who do the tying. I was reluctant for years to assume that mantle, other than as an expedient for what ever else I might have called my ropework, and in order to escape acknowledging myself as an artist. I was (and am) very caught up in complex ideas about art, art making and aesthetics, and am arrogantly wont to discount received wisdom about such subjects or to distance my ideas and works from inclusion under their rubrics, up to and including reflexive references to my creative output as art or myself-as-maker an artist. Not that I have anything like a fully formed rubric under which to cast my own creative impulses, but I thought I did at least know that no one else's were any good.

In 1999 I met someone who in his own accomplishments and disposition toward rope evinced to me that my self-righteousnessness was not only self defeating, but utterly contrary to the spirit of erotic bondage. The spirit... that was a new idea to me. My fellow top made no grandiose pronouncements nor observations regarding his or my own attitude; I inferred the possibility of a spirit of bondage from what he conveyed to me through his works, which were by that time not inconsiderable and had taken many forms in many venues. The latest of these venues was a wildly successful website. Others had included gallery shows and academic installations, both of which had, in the public reaction to them, apparently driven him out of a respectable middle-class existence and onto the web.

Of course I resisted what I was learning and it was some time after that meeting that I began to see the convergence of my own passions into something like a unified field of endeavoring, which I had learned from the example of this man was possible. 1999 was when I started to get over my own preciousness and out of my own artistic way. It would still be many years before I would be able to completely swallow that I was doing art.

I'm not much for keeping diaries or journals, but I did spend the entirety of a train trip from New York to Albany penning notes about my meeting with this fellow, which I have transcribed and augmented in the following posting and some several to come. I'll take a break from the interview transcripts for the time being and log the content of these near-decade old notes, if for no other reason than to get them on the record. My initial purpose, in fact, in writing this blog was to provide myself a linear structure in which to organize and refine these stray inspirations concerning the experience of beauty and its intersection with my erotic will.

***

The trip up from Princeton was mercifully fast and in my fatigue I was still able to distinguish between Penn Station in Newark and Penn Station in Manhattan, detraining at the former. Having been out of NYC for all these years had only enhanced the anxiety even a long experienced traveler might feel when embarking with the city’s mass transit from an unknown corner. Finding the PATH train in Newark to the WTC in New York to then switch for a quick uptown jot on the A or C was as good as navigating in a foreign language to me.

It was 11p when I came up in the World Trade Center’s soaring atrium and asked a guard for the nearest public phone. I dialed the number PD had given me via email and got him after a couple of rings. There was clearly audible activity in the background (of the sort I recognized from watching Insex Livefeeds) and I suddenly felt very privileged. Where others had to upload their interaction using kludgey dial-up connections, I was on the Batphone. PD was enthused for my call and suggested that I come immediately to the studio. It was, he said, just across the river. With a feeling of regret (that has only grown over the years) I begged off. Finding my friends’ apartment in the mid-night abandoned lower reaches of Manhattan would be about as much as I thought I could handle – more subways, more rivers, Brooklyn, of all places… when I had left New York in the mid 80s, nice people did not venture into Brooklyn in broad daylight, much less in the middle of the night.

I got directions on the F line out to York Street for the following day. PD and I determined to meet at the highly unreasonable hour of 9a, for he would have a shoot to prepare for in the afternoon. We would have breakfast, talk money, look at figures.

When finally I bedded down on my friend’s creaky vinyl couch at midnight my last thoughts were of my due diligence and whether I’d be able to write the check the next day if I were sufficiently convinced. Did I have enough ready capital for the percentage I needed in order to make it worth getting involved? I knew from my own participation in Livefeeds that Insex had a big, rabidly active following, and that what they were doing was revolutionary (pornographically, erotically and even sociologically). I imagined membership in the hundreds, monthly cash flow to be in the tens of thousands and margins to be pretty healthy. What sort of financials was it reasonable to request of a porn operator if you’re thinking of investing in their operation?

I came above ground at York Street and marveled at the weight of the Manhattan Bridge over my head, turned right and followed the span down into the then still disreputable district called Dumbo. I was just a bit early and so I walked around the giant, sagging warehouse where I was to seek out the Big Worm Productions buzzer, once, that is, I had found the main entrance. There were innumerable decrepit steel doors girded round the building, none of them marked or particularly distinguishable as a main entrance. As I passed by one with more than its fair share of band stickers a woman emerged from behind the battered metal and I ducked in behind her. I clambered my way first over bags of garbage and then up several flights of a decaying stairwell to where a small paper sign with “BWP-Intersec” scrawled on it marked the landing I wanted and pointed me around the peripheral hall to a corner door. I buzzed, waited, buzzed again, heard some shuffling and was presently greeted by a bespectacled, berobed and bed-faced visage I took a moment to recognize.

“Mac! You’re early, fucker.”