“It Is A Very Lucky Bed”
Just another night chez Violet Blue. Invite a few friends over, then before you know it, there’s a porn shoot going on in your apartment:
On friday I got a couple of emails from Jiz Lee and Courtney Trouble saying that their planned location for a porn shoot had fallen through at the last minute, and could they use my living room? As if I’d say no. But to sweeten the deal, they told me I’d not only be able to hang out and take photos but that it was okay to blog the experience – plus, I told them, I had a few friends who were going to be hanging out with me that night, and they said that it was cool for my friends to be there too. Bonus!
…
It was all girl-girl, and I think four girls fucked each other in my bed.
I now have a love-hate relationship with my own bed. It is a very lucky bed. Remember the New Years’ incident? That damn bed gets way more action than I do, and I never seem to be in the room when it happens. Even my laptop was in a scene. The one I’m writing this post on.
As one of my non-porn friends night said that evening, “Everyone wants to be a piece of Violet’s furniture.”
And to think that six years ago (Six? really? Tempus fugit!) we were having fun with the idea of a RealDoll orgy at Violet’s place. I still think it’s a shame that never happened. But I’m struck, as I read those old blog posts, by how much has changed in six short/long years.
Even if the RealDoll orgy had gone down as contemplated, it would have had a strong 20th century flavor about it: mechanical participants, corporate sponsorship, marketing angle, careful planning, strong focus on ten grand worth of lovingly-fetishized products. This “got a few emails from some friends and before I knew it an excellent porn shoot broke out in my bedroom” is, both socially and economically, much more 21st century. It’s Bruce Sterling’s White Fungus, “architecture of participation” stuff. Who needs a studio when you’ve got a cell phone and a sufficient network of cool friends? Or, turning it to better place the emphasis where it may belong, how do you make a porn movie when what you’ve got is, not a studio or a thriving business model that can front you the studio lease, but a cell phone and a network of cool friends? Growing up soon after Depression 1.0, my mom called this “making do with what you’ve got.” If she’d had a cell phone, she would have been dangerous.
Shorter URL for sharing: http://www.erosblog.com/?p=3371
As a further aside about marketing in the 21st century, I’m struck by the bait-and-switch that Beyond magazine employed to get attention and net-love from Cory Doctorow. The BoingBoing link to Bruce Sterling’s White Fungus story went, when “Patadave” sent it to Cory and when Cory published it on April 17, to a full PDF of the story in question, which I read with enjoyment.
Now, a short 2.5 weeks later, the same link goes to a PDF containing a sample chapter, which you only discover when you read to the bottom of page seven and find the link to the shopping cart where you can buy the magazine.
That’s clever marketing. Cory, I’m guessing, is a lot more likely to link to a free story than he is to a commercial pitch for a story; so, publish the story free to the first flush of Boing Boing traffic, then quietly switch the object out for your sales sample after the link has gone sufficiently stale that it’s unlikely to be noticed by the guy who gave you the free publicity.
To my eye, this suggests a marketer who “gets” the internet, understands how to get attention to his product, but still totally fails to comprehend what it takes to be a long term success at internet marketing. As Seth Godin would tell you if you asked him or failed to run away fast enough, marketing is a relationship, and unless you only ever plan to sell one thing, burning your best contacts for short term gain is hella stupid. If Cory ever does happen to notice the switch, it could get a lot harder for Beyond to ever get Boinged again in future.