MEDIA COOL
Pornography is one of those things that many people have trouble talking about rationally— attitudes toward sex and sexual display are so emotionally fraught, so intermingled with fear and loathing that both pro and conners tend to talk in the absolutist terms of salvation and degradation.
MEDIA COOL
This Month’s Media Cool was written by Bill Holdship and Richard C. Walls
TALES OF TIMES SQUARE
by Josh Alan Friedman
(Delacorte)
Pornography is one of those things that many people have trouble talking about rationally— attitudes toward sex and sexual display are so emotionally fraught, so intermingled with fear and loathing that both pro and conners tend to talk in the absolutist terms of salvation and degradation. Which is why the most impressive thing about this collection of articles, many of which originally appeared in Screw, is its sanity. Friedman takes an unflinching, unromanticized look at the workaday world of porn “stars” and consumers, focusing on that mecca of mutants, Times Square. His Iam-a-camera approach is largely non-judgemental, though the gross extravagancies of porn often arouse his sense of absurdity—-just as the surviving shills and ex-vaudeville fringe characters, bewildered and abandoned by that ol’ Pig City de-evolution from the delicate titillations of yore to the blunt punchlines of graphic porn, brings out his latent sentimentality. Highly recommended.R.C.W.
TRICK OR TREAT
(DeLaurentiis Pictures)