zaksmith

contents:

1My Paintings (SawaCharlieRavenVoltaireSean)

2--Yes This Entry Is Long But It Involves Porn, Caddyshack, Ninja Weapons, Punk Rock, Modern Art, And A Metric Ton of SuicideGirls

3--Frquently Asked Questions

1-My Paintings removed and stuck above

2-Yes, This Entry Is Long But It Involves Porn, Caddyshack, Ninja Weapons, Punk Rock, Modern Art, And A Metric Ton of SuicideGirls

Where the fuck am I?

This always happens in LA: I get to the airport while the sky's still dark. Someone drives me to someone's house and
then I sleep.

(The last thing they said to me before I went to sleep "We got your test, you're clean")

I wake up, and the person goes to work and I've got hours to kill in an empty house and I have no idea where I am.

"Hmmm...It appears to be some sort of upscale suburb...There are birds and trees..."

yeah, so it's like that--but I always end up in Hollywood

LA is fucked up, man, I'm sitting here at this internet cafe on Hollywood Boulevard (a-fucking-gain)

11 pm

and this metalgoth in the fucking full-on clive-barker evening ensemble comes in and says to the counter guy

"Hey, I got this pair of sai and I just moved into a new building where they don't allow weapons and I'll sell 'em to ya for 10 bucks" and I think

"Jesus fucking shit, this kid is just wandering the boulevard from business to business trying to sell a pair of fucking ninja daggers? what the fuck kind of town IS this?"

and then, dig this, the old indian dude behind the counter comes out, takes one of the sai in his hands and starts doing all this fucking ninja shit with it, spinning it and doing curliicues and shit and goes

"This weapon is made in a stupid way, the balance is not good, easy to disarm,"

and he tells the metalgoth to fucking come at him with the other sai and the old dude fucking catched it with his sai and pulls it out of his hand in one totally solid movement.

If this is what LA is like before the urban-nuclear-zombie-apocalypse, god knows what it'll be like after.

And then there's just the mildly surreal shit that is like wall-to-wall in Hollywood, like I go with Voltaire to pick up her paycheck at her new non-stripper job and this black-haired office chick walks by in a full-on hospital-white medical corset outside her clothes.

I mention this to Voltaire--"Oh yeah, she hired me. I don't know what's up with that thing, but it's hot."

Since everyone here has to go to work all the time, Hollywood Boulevard has become my main residence--I have the following conversation a lot--

Gutterpunk: "Spare any change for brass knuckles and heroin?"
Zak: "Oh, yeah, here ya go."
G: "Fuuuuck dude, thanks. Say, what's your name?"
blah blah blah
G: "So what are you doing in LA"
Z: "Fucking some skinny goth chick for a porno movie."
G: "Duuuuuude. So are you like hung like a motherfucker?"
Z: "Uh...maybe. Say, if you're from ______ do you know _____?"
G: "Naw, dude, do you know _______ over at _______?"

and like that for 3 more hours until the kid's whisked off by a pack of other gutterpunks (All of whom recognize me by this point) or I get whisked off by some pornographic individual)...

They all seem to do little else but walk back and forth along the Boulevard for hours--not that I can say I do a hell of a lot more.

If I didn't have to write this fucking mammoth journal entry I'd basically give up and start paying the Hollywood Internet cafe rent.

So a LOT of things have happened between now and the last time I updated, where do I start?

-I could start here at the SG store, where they're selling posters of my Sawa and Charlie paintings for like super cheap.

And all the money I make off it goes to anarchists who feed people, so fuck off.

-Ok, porn, I'm making porn with Eon_McKai. Eon crept through a baffled crowd watching a baffled band with a rented camera while I fingerfucked Pixie Pearl during some poor bastards' set. Now he's in porn.

Now they are all in porn. Everyone who went to that show is now in porn, or at least their shoes are. Tomorrow lots of sex.

So it's tomorrow--right before the scene, I'm bent over Pixie in a draped La-Z-Boy that I've kicked and examined from all angles to make sure it won't like overturn and slaughter us all while we're at work and Pixie says something to the effect of like how tiring it is to do a fuck scene yesterday and then get up all early for another one today and

Eon_McKai is all:
"...And Pixie here wants to be one of the pros."

And I say:
"Go easy on Pixie, man, 'cause you know there's pros--and then there's poetry."

Meanwhile all this unforgivable sleaze is being filmed by AJ Schnack.

Schnack is a documentary filmmaker whose subject is, for some reason, my goofball ass.

Me and before me Kurt Cobain and before that They Might Be Giants. Believe me when I say this is just as weird to me as it is to you.

-For Eon, you try to look like some callow, arrogant punk that would get to fuck Pixie Pearl in a porno

-For Schnack, you try to look like some intelligent, reasonable, earnest human being with a sense of humor about being paid to look callow and arrogant and fuck Pixie Pearl in a porno.

-Problem is they film at the same time, from different parts of a crowded room...

-Poor AJ Schnack, I say to Pixie, on my lap between scenes on the punk rock couch, he looks so lonely over there when his camera's turned off--and earlier the diy place's 7-foot-tall aging not-actually-a-trannie blonde beast ex-pornstar bouncer (only in LA, dude) and her blimptits decided completely arbitrarily with no introduction that AJ was her bitch.

"Young man can you break the ice for me? Good, now put it in my glass! NO, Just. The. Small. Ones."

And he didn't get to film any of it...

Nor did he get my friend Tommy the surgeon patiently explaining "See, if the aliens get the AI then they just chase down all the information on it and fucking mega-efficiently-annihilate all the humans, so they..." before justfuckinglettingmeplayHalo2already!

Nor did he (or anyone) get to film that threesome in the hotel last week...

It's tough being a documentary film maker, I guess.

It occurs to me that my life has become so strange that its narrative cohesion is actually disintegrating. Like, these things don't make sense any more.

I install my art and am standing in an absolutely deserted San Francisco Museum of Modern Art looking at something Alexander Calder made of wood called "Apple Monster" and I get a cell call from Eon telling me he'll immediately fly me out of Oakland Airport (totally post-apocalyptic like pipes and wires instead of a ceiling, all chrome, grown men and whole families sitting on the floor between Tensabarriers waiting for a sea of delayed flights) to Burbank (picked up by a woman who reviews porn on the radio in a car that is--legally speaking and to all appearances--completely totalled) in time to sleep on the 5-girl-orgy-couch at his house then get up, put a bunch of things on his cat, take a picture of it, and then go fuck for money for his new film tentatively titled "Girls Lie".

That makes no sense. That's not a person's life, that's like a late-era JG Ballard novel or some shit. And poor AJ has to film this occuring, and convince people we're not all just actors.

This is on top of what else?

The posh, glassy lobby of the pointlessly luxurious W Hotel
(laundry service 8 bucks per shirt, my room's telephone book stored in a thick oak box firmly labelled "telephone book" with a silver plaque--all paid for by the clearly out-of-its-mind SFMOMA) completely drowned in punks and ex-Yalies all flown in for the occasion from Berlin, NYC, LA, Milan, D.C. which then drains itself (I sign the bill for gallons of 6 dollar beers on the way out) out onto the street and then up into the museum elevator to bumrush the before-the-60-of-us-got-there-sparsely-attended art opening where I politely introduce the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune to Frederickschain gutterpunks and my mom and rising porn stars while all around my people look at pictures of themselves and their pets sharing the museum and its walls with Andy Warhols and the Marcelino Goncalves and Tim Gardner (the other two guys in the show) smile at Schnack and his film crew and the freak parade I brought with me and it's kind of embarassing for a second.

(Did they demote the curator for opening the floodgates to all this madness?--The next day he was seen wandering the permanent collection, sent out on an errand to make sure some Clifford Stills weren't hung upside-down...)

Minutes later people disperse in a knot of taxis, and the microphone AJ Schnack hid on me is recording Temper and I cursing all the streets and addresses of San Francisco, abandoned by all cabs, trying to find the dinner we're supposed to go to, then showing up and being served rich foods on gleaming platters (with vegan options for Charlie) and talking geography and politics respectively with gleamy gold-braceleted people who like know senators and have valets and stuff.

Then a crowded taxivan ride with the greasy-blonde-haired prone body of an Ivy-league professor stretched across the laps of half the cab's inhabitants to a gay leather-daddy bar.
Why?

Apparently Sawa and Albertine thought this was a good idea. Remember, none of this makes any sense.

(Why did we let Sawa and Albertine pick the place?--no fucking clue.)

And pity, also, the poor W Hotel.

Here is an axiom of contemporary anthropology--Zak Smith's presence in any structure outside New York City for more than 3 consecutive nights invariably results in females of his acquaintance inflicting at least 2 nude photo-shoots and innumerable blood stains* on the edifice in question.

This is not to mention our general vicious Led Zeppelining of my room in particular and the hotel staff in general--

Charlie, Luci and Temper using the champagne glasses as ashtrays, Albertine forcing impressionable young women to run naked through the hallways and elevators for the sake of her bizarre and questionable art, vile remarks to the desk clerk about the poor selection in the CD library, unmentionable debauchery with the door wide open for improved air circulation, constant and unmet demands for more toliet paper and european-to-american voltage adaptors, half-eaten candy bars drooling sticky into the carpet, and, of course, our consistent refusal to allow the staff to, as they put it on their snippy little while-you-were-out card "style the room". Oh, and all the punks and rainbow-haired fetish models with their weird ratty luggage fucking up the ambience in the lobby at all hours for days on end.

We also watched Caddyshack with the sound off.

(And during all this shit I'd have to intermittently do things like go lecture at UC Berkeley or dash down the block to the museum cafe and have a biscuit and a coke with some random long-lost fragment of my family or get a Moroccan cabbie to drive me off to some half-abandoned strip mall in Oakland for an adult-industry blood-test.)

Oh, and in all the chaos and confusion and nudity-for-pay somehow Albertine ended up shooting a bunch of pictures of me.

I think it will be called "Dumb Slut On The Stairs With His Shirt Off Nervously Glancing Down Taye's Hallway To Make Sure Nobody Sees Him Making An Ass Of Himself".
And no, none of it was for SuicideBoys, you perv.

And now, kids, Temper Theatre--

She gets off the plane from Berlin and she has to go find a hardware store because the airport security people apparently felt that one of the steel chains she packed was somehow more dangerous than the half-dozen others she brought and confiscated it (along with half her underwear[?]).

Personally, I would've taken the 11-inch fabric shears too, but what do I know? I'm surprised they let the Frederickschain punks within 50 feet of the airport--bristling as they were with the full-on mad max style. Fucking war on terror man, come on!

More Temper theatre--
2-year old girl walks up to me in the lobby, about to hand me a pepperidge farm goldfish, then takes it back and eats it.

Temper (Eyes slit at the two-year-old with old-world weariness and contempt) "She's so egocentric."

Temper theatre finale--
My married-with-a-kid suburban surfer pal Leo invites my friends and I out to Marin for dinner--now dig Temper walking into this shiny pristine NorCal house after an hour of waiting in the cold in Golden Gate park waiting for the hippie and hippietruck that fucking stoner-ass-Leo finally remembered to send to go get us--Temper with her fucking jaded-as-fuck Berlin chain-smoking-never-awake-during-the-day-Berlin-trashpunk style walking over to three blondes perched on a fluffy white carpet in the gleaming sun who are all "Hi I'm Karri and this is Kelli and that's Terri!"--and Temper just sorta nods and tries to smile and squint enough that her eyes don't just fall out of her face--it made no sense at all.

Believe it or not however, all the sunshine and smiley-faces of San Francisco eventually started working some hexcraft on Temper and by Friday night she was actually being nice to people.

One day she actually had a friendly casual conversation with an old woman--I took a picture just to make sure I wasn't dreaming--the cheerily shrivelled asian lady--looking not unlike Yoda--strectching an arm past a smiling Temper toward a place where she could score some cheap cigarettes.

It was eerie, man.

All it took was 24-hours spent fucking a few people, eating veggie burritos and watching some feminist hardcore (I Object--at Gilman Street--they rocked) and the girl was actually seen, in public, walking around during the daytime with a smile on her face--insane.

More notes about how I'm a dumb slut:

Schnack just filmed me watching the rough cut of my first movie (after an hour of watching the movie's behind-the-scenes footage--and what a mirror-master-ego-mindfuck that was--being filmed for a documentary about yourself while watching a video of yourself talking about a movie you star in--some fucking "Being John Malkovich" shit that is)--it's the first time I've ever seen anything I did, pornographically speaking.

(And also one of the first porno movies I ever watched all the way through)

I was pretty nervous--I thought "Ok, here is where the world learns I suck at porn and was in a dumb, clunky porno movie that will be released by Larry Flynt purely out of spite and attached to my name and art life forever and this moment of gruesome revelation will all be captured on film by the Schnack and this will be the dramatic 'oh-my-god-I-can't-believe-they-let-him-film-this-shit' turning point of his little documentary on me."

But, unfortunately for AJ's dramatic arc, Barbed Wire Kiss is one of the most kickest-assest things ever and all I did was stare at the screen, and stare at the director and go "Whoa, Benny, how'd you get that?"

How good is it?

Ok, it's this good: I am a professional painter with a respectable art career and of course I was all worried in the beginning about those articles and things saying "Now artist Zak Smith is doing porno movies" (wrongly implying, y'know, that now I make movies instead of paint) BUT now that I've actually seen the movie, I wouldn't mind for a second if people (incorrectly) assumed that I was responsible for the whole thing.

I hope they don't, 'cause Benny Profane directed it and he deserves to be recognized for the genius he is. But, point is, the thing is good.

And y'know how like porno movies are dumb because the white people look all fleshy and sweaty and orange and flooping around like uncooked hot dogs given meaty, unholy animal consciousness and it's not hot?

Well the way Benny shot it, it's not like that at all. It's end-to-end stylish and there are shots I wish I coulda thought up.

And y'know how like porno movies are dumb because there's like some story and it's kinda lame because you know that the whole thing has to keep switching from story to sex and back again and the plot seems like some vile torture inflicted on your intelligence as punishment for watching strangers fuck?--well it's not like that either because Benny included this clever (and fucking hilarious) device where the people who do all the talking are also fucking the whole time they talk and it's totally deapan and hilarious.

Like Carolyn Pierce is all "Your wife died? Gee, that must've been really tough on you..." while she's bent over a table getting nine pierced inches from behind in a black corset.

(And, in a stroke of marketing genius, Benny also includes an all-fucking, no dialogue version on the DVD, so yeah, if you're a boy and/or you have no sense of humor you can watch that).

So, yeah, it is a fine product, I approve, go get it, May 30th.

(And of course the rumor is that Hustler is bloodred with rage that they somehow bankrolled a movie which involves attractive male talent and no fake tits and lots of eyeliner and wants Benny fired and wants my head on a pike and the crew's homes burnt to the ground and sewn with salt, ash and silicone so nothing will ever grow there again, but whatever--if you guys buy it we'll be fine--"win the crowd and you win your freedom" as they say in Gladiator)

So after that, Benny Profane and Zak Sabbath sit in the kitchen and plot out the next porno movie and a few hours into the conversation, after I've said something like "Well, the idea of independent
autonomous anarchic subversion zones needs to be more explicit if we're going to create enough thematic tension to carry us from the Japanese-schoolgirl-fetish scene through the threesome to the rooftop blowjob", Benny says:

"You realize we've probably spent more time talking about the script to this movie than people have spent actually writing all the plots of all other porno movies ever made put together."

"Yeah, but if we don't, who will? The revolution is in our hands, y'know?"

"Indeed."

"Indeed."

____________________________________________
*Warning: Too much information follows.
Intriguing but distasteful explanation of the W Hotel blood stains:

"Hey it's ViquiV, your posters are up in the SG store!"

"Awesome, hey, I just made a scientific discovery--you know how girls who all live in the same dorm all get their period at the same time? Well talking to everybody up here it appears that all SGs have their period at the same time,too."

"Well then maybe I'm an SG because I'm on my period! Hey Dez! Are you on your period?"

"Yeah!"

"Hey Zak, everybody in the office is on their period, too! It's true!"

circa the 20th--be aware.


3-Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Where can I see your stuff?

A: In New York, I am represented by these peopleask them. I currently have a show at the San Francisco Museum Of Modern Artit'll be up for a few months.

Q: Do you have any shows coming up in [some place where the member asking the question lives thats not New York or San Francisco]?

A: No.

Q: What are your paintings made of?

A: PAINT. Acrylic paint on white paper. Drawn freehand. That's why they're called paintings.

Q: Where can I get your art book?

A: Well if you are too impatient to order it through the sg store then try going to a book store.

Q: Can I get a print of one of your paintings?

A: Posters of the Charlie and Sawa paintings are available in the sg store.

Q: When/Where can I get your porno movies?

A: When VCA/Hustler puts Barbed Wire Kiss out be sure I will make a BIG DEAL OUT OF IT. Should be out MAY 30th!

Eon_McKai's flick with me won't be out for a few months--it'll be with Vivid-Alt.

When they do come out, a good place to look for them would be in some sort of Adult Video Store. I mean, call me hopelessly idealistic, but thats where Id look.