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Joe Gallant
Revolutionary Smut
Joe Gallant has recently been jetting between the coasts, filming his
unique brand of pornography. But it may be argued that the man’s past
is even more fascinating than his ever-so-extraordinary present. Avant
musician, East Village auteur, Hell’s Kitchen rebel and now bi-coastal
award-winning director, Gallant is a multi-faceted man in possession of
a panolopy of kinky proclivities. In other words, he makes great
editorial – and a damned interesting interview. Here, he shares some of
his intriguing insights with ErosZine.
ErosZine: I'd bet no one who knows you only from the adult
entertainment world has any idea you're a musical genius! Tell us about
that side of your life.
Joe Gallant: Music is my sonic diary. My writing to this point has been
largely defined by my passion for late 20th-century string quartet
writing, large-ensemble orchestration, avant-jazz, improv and noise.
I’ve been playing bass (upright and electric) for 35 years, been
actively composing for 30. Thousands of gigs, big and small, lotta
stateside and Euro tours. I founded my 18-piece orchestra, Illuminati,
in 1982. It was a trio in its nascency and evolved rapidly to its full
configuration as the writing grew more dense and variegated. Illuminati
gigged/recorded relentlessly for 20 years and I plan on reactivating it
later this year.
ErosZine: How the hell did you wind up making porn?
Joe Gallant: I’ve had an interest in it since I was a lad. Back in the
mid 60s, the porn I had access to—the Swanks and Playboys, the old 8-mm
fuckflicks—seemed to me like a vaguely tattered contraband ship that
sat low in the water off the mainstream coast, and from the shore it
looked like a lotta seedy, debauched dirty fun, crewed by strange
offbeat characters. Those were the “golden age” years, decades before
Stern/Viacom/mainstream cleaned, co-opted and veal-penned porn as their
personal cash cow.
I answered a “looking for film talent” ad in Screw mag in ‘80, 8th
floor of the Show World building on 42nd and 8th. [I] didn’t get any
gigs but, ironically, the guy who owned that little production company
became a great friend of mine, 20 years later. He’s a reeeeal old-timer
in the biz, knew everybody.
I dated a legendary 90s porn star for a while, named Trinity Loren. We
met when I asked her to be the voice on one of my orchestra pieces and
we really hit it off. That was the beginning of the Black Mirror story.
We were about to start doing some scenes together a start of her
comeback, but she died of a brain hemorrhage in ‘98. I started Black
Mirror shortly after, as an umbrella company for XXX films,
experimental stuff, etc., with an eye toward setting up some kind of
scholarship fund for her daughter. It’s all been a very interesting
experience, so far.
ErosZine: So do you compose the music for your films?
Joe Gallant: Yeah. I’ll bring a combination of small ensembles, string
quartet or my horn guys into the studio, or work with various
musique-concrete elements and solo material at home, depending on the
mood of the film. Lately, their backgrounds have been getting as
detailed as my mid-90s large-orchestra CDs, particularly on Avenue X.
So as the films get bigger, I’m more inclined to match their story and
energy with good scoring. Ultimately I’ll be making non-XXX indie films
and scoring them in similar ways. I’ve also been chipping away at a
chamber opera for five voices and octet, which I started in ‘92 and
would like to finish at some point.
ErosZine: Your stuff is what most people, even within the industry,
consider to be a bit outré, to put it politely. Or Frenchly. Are
you making an artistic statement or are you just a kinky motherfucker?
Joe Gallant: I’ve simply tried to make the types of flicks that I personally would shoot big jizzy sock-loads to.
ErosZine: Nice! How's the work for VCA going? I can't imagine you
having enough creative license under the yoke of such a big porn movie
company.
Joe Gallant: I worked as sound designer on network soaps for 20 years,
so I’m no stranger to the corporate mindset. I can certainly make
something any “client” would be happy with. But the odd thing about all
these Valley behemoths is that each one has strangely different
restrictions: one’s okay with anal but no ATM, one says ATM’s okay but
no spitting, another says spitting is a go, but NO ENEMAS!!, another
says ENEMAS OK! but not while...spitting!! and no ROUGH LANGUAGE!!
(shades of Catholic school). As if their shared shelf-space is
attracting extremely fine-tuned demographics. guys just want STUFF, and
the harder, more intense and cum-splattered the better. I think that’s
why “the Valley” reminds me of Edwardian England. Big sea-shifts are
upon us, restructuring the entire way we think about and receive “porn”
as available information, but the big playas still think their empires
are unassailable, particularly in aesthetic terms.
ErosZine: What's your fascination with Patty Hearst all about?
Joe Gallant: Actually, it’s not so much Patty herself who’s interesting
within that whole event, rather it’s the SLA, who many believe were
agents provocateur, created by the CIA to put a final discrediting
mid-70s spin on the Left—which proved its positions with the oppobria
of Nixon and Watergate—in the same way that Manson could be seen, if
you follow the timelines, players and money.
The mid-70s played out on two tectonic culture-plates against a
background of Military/Big Oil hungry to reclaim the control they lost
during the ascendance of the counterculture. The election of Ronnie
Ray-gun, General Electric’s puppet since the 50s, guaranteed the
complete end of the era—at least in this country. These are matters of
huge cultural importance, but their lessons seem quite obviously lost
on this culture and time, as our handlers intended.
I’m using various elements of the Patty saga as the architecture for
Atomic Skullfuck Orgy, which tells the tale of “Paris Olson,” who’s
kidnapped by rebels while jogging in New York City. I shot half of
Skullfuck two years ago and will get back to it later this year.
ErosZine: Tell us about a few of your other proclivities?
Joe Gallant: Bondage is exhilarating and haunting, as I’ve been playing
with an eager gal whose eyes roll back in her head at the mention of
it. I go through periods of digging blonds, then black chicks, then
Asian cuties. Dark-eyed brunettes are a mystical challenge, almost
impossible to bring into my life, not sure why, though they are
probably my fave. I am a freeeek for underarm hair on girls,
from10-o’clock shadow to black wisps matted down with workin’-all-day
sweat. My DNA seeks its twin strand, and she will have wisps, I am
certain. John Stagliano has often complained to me about my seeming
lack of obsession with shooting big rolling butt-cheeks. “I thought you
were supposed to be a BUTT man!” But I’ll say here that I’m more
completely a RECTUM man. I consider vag sex to be foreplay. I could
savor a winking butt-eye all the day long, and fortune smiles whenever
a “classic 13” comes into my life. I always count the little wrinkles
around a girl’s sphincter and invariably the best and most worldly of
them have had 13 pronounced little pouty rectum-wrinkles. All the women
in my family have them, and its remarked upon as a sign of good
breeding and classic taste in some British literature, rather like
recognizing a Barnard girl by the books in her knapsack. Urine tastes
like popcorn to me, but not older,
sitting-on-the-kitchen-counter-all-day-getting-cloudy urine; that’s
just nasty. Brown moments, when available, provide the hearth beneath
the mantle.
ErosZine: Dude, you are true Renaissance man! So, you lived in the East Village in the early 80s. What was that like?
Joe Gallant: Well, every story that’s been told about the city in those
days is true. My East Village years were basically between ’75 and ‘85,
and I’ve lived in Hell’s Kitchen for the last 22 years, so as a young
old-timer I can tell ya that this town was tough, dangerous,
dead-serious, funny, unspeakably artistic, joyous, wise... New York
City in the ‘70s and early ‘80s was truly a “cracked diamond, darkly
glowing.” It was the fuckin’ best. I recently thought about the first
rock concert I ever saw, The Band at The Academy of Music on 14th
Street, 1971, a night that blew me wide open. Hippies, man...wild,
erotic vibe in the air...patchouli and pot and gorgeous hippy chicks
and cool longhair dudes. Everybody got it, everybody was linked to this
wild blue light subtle thing, like the best church in the world...real
bottom of a fish tank mysterioso stuff, like the scary organ at the
start of “The SHADOW knoooows...” And the band tore the roof off the
place, they played like their life was in the balance, elegant and hard
and timeless. I was 14, and that was it. I never looked back.
But, back to the dawn of the ‘80s. Everybody I hung with was damaged
and brilliant, mad dark electricity crackling around everybody. A lotta
COMMITTMENT. Everybody fed off each other’s experiments and there were
a million lofts, storefronts and clubs to ply your Art in. And,
realize, of course, that the eras before this were just as mad and
true—60s hippies, post-war beatniks, 30s writers and painters—everybody
who was considered a freak/outsider out there in the world could find
kindred spirits here. That’s what Manhattan was FOR, see, a place to
bring your weirdness and turn it into your truth. Well...
Also, it was cheap to live there back then, cuz east of First Ave.
looked a bit like Dresden. I had a two-bedroom place on 9th Street for
$175 a month. My Mott Street butcher-shop storefront was $250 with the
barest trickle of tap water and a toilet next door, with my dragged-in
street-mattress bed stuffed into the meat locker with meat hooks on the
walls, foot-thick refrigerator door and iron-grate blood-vents in the
floor. My last downtown pad was $250 for a huge flat in what was mostly
a shooting gallery on 5th street, and when I moved to Hell’s Kitchen
the rent was $140 a month in a neighborhood that nobody wanted to live
in. It was a blazing era with cool, strange, unique people, some now
famous, some long gone, and every alchemista had black seeds growing in
the alembic. You ever see Brian de Palma’s flick, Hi Mom, starring de
Niro? Everybody I knew lived in a place like de Niro’s apartment.
Quick porn-related story: I played a gig with the David Peel Band on a
cable show called The Underground Tonight Show on cable channel D, in
October ‘75. The show had moved from its home at the Cafe Wha? up to
22nd Street, into a fucked up funky loft with a buncha broken wood and
debris all over. I’m sitting at the AVN awards in 2004, talking to
legendary director Roy Karch, and the show came up in conversation.
Guess what? Roy fuckin’ Karch DIRECTED that series, and totally
remembered that particular show and most details about our band’s set.
Thirty years later! Who would’ve known what the future held for both of
us?!?
ErosZine: And how did that wild era inspire your work?
Joe Gallant: Fuck, how could it not? It was like Berlin in the ‘20s.
Made me what I am today. The culture was just a lot more intense and
interesting back then, because the city was like a cross between the
Wild West and Amsterdam. Everybody was WORKING ON SOMETHING, everybody
had BIG OPINIONS, people TALKED all night, REAL SHIT HAPPENED. And so,
sadly, it seems like we’ve got a whole new infestation now, since the
city’s been made safe for the Viacom/Time Warner kids, quite by design.
Vast mono-frequency’d waves of smug 20-30-something cultural vampyres,
soulless and brittle, who dress, behave and speak in ironic, TV-cute
ways like the casts of Seinfeld, Friends and Sex and the City, or like
the young folks in all those “contemporary young-couple
romantic-comedy” flicks that pop up regular as clockwork like control
events on the Mayan calendar, all using the same pop-culture phrases,
propagating the same dating/sex neuroses like Manchurian Candidate
control-memes in big calculated feedback loops. All designed to keep
young men and women from truly maturing, while offering them big daily
ironic feel-good sucks on the carefully-landscaped “new media” tit.
See, without a young generation to QUESTION any of the obscene lies
they’re being fed, 1950s “new cold war” obedience and conformity are
back in vogue, but shellacked in a veneer of “edgy” Comedy
Central/YouTube irony, all of which is, oddly, quite conservative at
its core. Like watching Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca doing post-war
schtick on Your Show of Shows, but instead, it’s endless variations of
“office-type” spoofs made by “indie film” hipsters, who learned the
codices from years of the same shit on SNL/Letterman/Late Night. Every
other “cool new video” on MySpace is a spoof or parody of a movie
that’s essentially a spoof or parody. What the fuck happened? Well,
it’s all RIGHT ON TIME! So PAY ATTENTION to all the celeb sites as
Paris enters her 10th day of jail time, and don’t look behind the
curtain. The haughty click-click of dead-voiced “kybds” like dry wings
gathering ominously at the window... “Whereere did Time Out say that
bar was??? I just texted that bitch like fiiiive tiiiimes.” Children
shouldn’t play with dead things, as the flick says.
ErosZine: New York City has a manic energy all its own and it has
served well as a backdrop for most of your movies. How does filming
here differ from the Valley?
Joe Gallant: I’d question the manic energy thing. [It’s] currently more
like Red Bull nation than true manic-cool. But just ‘cause the streets
are filled with media’s demon-spawn doesn’t mean that it’s not a great
place. The vistas and shadows are still dazzling and cinematic, the
streets and neighborhoods filled with detail. You can never really
outgrow New York City. It’s too big a challenge; it’s got way too much
of the best of everything. But I’ve been really digging LA, though. I
shot half of Avenue X and all of Skin Trade there, and I’m completely
seduced by it on all levels. I had planned to relocate there last year
for a six-month tryout and I’m a bit behind schedule. Soon though. I
used to think LA was a flat environment in the psychic sense, but I was
just ignorant about it. It’s got huge waves of sex, power and
desperation radiating off of it, which you can see like bony neon
fingers from up on Mulholland Drive. Also millions of great places to
shoot guerilla dialogue, and it’s the best place to initiate an adult
film, because the whole industry is there. Both towns have their
strengths, obviously.
ErosZine: With Crack Whores of the Tenderloin, the locations were in
San Francisco. How does that city measure up to contemporary Manhattan?
Joe Gallant: On all levels, it’s like comparing an obsidian hammer and
20-year-old pussy. New York City is sharp, gnarly and abrupt with
blunt-trauma money-agenda’d purpose. San Francisco is warm, wet and
inviting, with a cute squishy romantic streak mixed with old-soul
grace. It also smells and tastes a lot better! San Fran is mystical.
the ghosts of Gold Rush whores and iconoclast American
transcendentalists still make their good energy known there.
ErosZine: Your NYC Underground: Times Square Trash Vol. 2 won a 2003
AVN Award for Best Pro-Am or Amateur Tape. Did you thank God? Your
parents? What'd it feel like to be a winner?
Joe Gallant: It stunned me into silence, to see my home-made
punkcollageArt xerox VHS box cover projected 25 feet tall as the winner
was announced. I’ll never forget it, ever. I won the next two years as
well, in the same category, and those were exactly like that first
time. I won an Emmy in ‘96, after like eight years of nominations, and
that felt great. But the Emmy vibe is daylight crisp and clean, she’s
got her big art-nouveau wings and her atom, all TV and science, while
the AVN statues are black and clear, a little nocturnal-tacky like the
“reception area” of weird little Lexington Avenue Russian-chick
cathouses. AVN mag seemed to really get what I was doing from the
start, and that early sincere support made me want to develop my craft
and push it all forward. Still does.
ErosZine: You've worked with infamous underground filmmaker Nick Zedd. Any long-standing collaboration going on there?
Joe Gallant: Nick plays the government pornographer in Avenue X and I’m
writing him a good solid acting role in my summer film. I’ve also
helped him out on his Electra Elf cable series. I think Nick is heroic
and amazing on many levels. His early stuff is profound, as he was
right there in the gutter completely nailing the Lower East Side
earth-node. If seen as pure documentation of a time and place
long-gone, his films should be in the Smithsonian. Some people think
he’s stand off-ish or aloof, but he just really seems to have little
patience for bullshit. Nick is honest and hard-working, and that’s
a-okay with me.
ErosZine: You've also cast Angel Baby, another New York City landmark,
in a number of your films. I love her. No question there, really. Maybe
you could comment on your favorite female porn stars?
Joe Gallant: Angel Baby, Erika and Lucy were a constant part of the
early stuff. All of them appeared in all three of my Manhattan cable
series on a regular basis, and they gave a lot of time helping shape
Black Mirror’s direction. There’s been a lotta great Valley girls
blazing through the lens recently, since I’ve been working for LA
companies over the last two years, and that’s been interesting. I
really dig Sasha Grey, she’s very bright, very astute, wry in subtle
natural ways, a true poMo art chick pornExplorer. Kimberly Kane is
really great, a thinker and party chick, by turn, a natural director
who could probably take on mainstream in a heartbeat. I love Ashley
Blue ‘cause she’s big-hearted and fun and old-school wise. Kelly Wells,
another deep clear-blue chick whose “crazy” persona is a good velvet
rope protecting her Swiss-watch mind. Lexi Bardot is a sweetheart,
she’s wacky and edgy-girl but real smart, very generous of spirit. Sara
Jay’s been in a buncha my stuff. She’s classy and low-key, and our
friendship is very important to me. There’s a new East Coast gal making
strong, interesting stuff, named Brina James. She’s really down to
earth and together. I must confess a crush on Victoria Sin. She’s like
beautifully colored broken glass. Yipes!! Beautiful jagged Berlin vibe.
I really dig her…directed her in two scenes and she tore the places
apart. There are many cool people out there. All these girls I
mentioned are doin’ it for real, no self-worshipping hype, no frantic
24/7 publicist noise, no hipster minions. Just them doin’ their thing,
in a culture that’s both porn-obsessed and sexually self-loathing.
ErosZine: What's cumming up next for Black Mirror Productions?
Joe Gallant: I’m writing a screenplay for the summer that will star
Sasha, Kimberly, Gia Paloma and others. very disturbing, powerful. I’m
saving my paper-route money to make it happen. Also working up more
string writing, with an eye to recording some quartet material as a new
CD. I’m aiming to get Illuminati playing again soon, maybe by summer’s
end. That, and reading some of the books that are piling up all over
the place here.
ErosZine: We’ll look forward to all that! Any final advice, or comments?
Joe Gallant: It cracked me up that Don Imus’s words—ONE PHRASE, spoken
on ONE DAY—brought big ol’ untouchable zombie-eye-logo CBS literally to
its knees, CAVING to Sharpton and the advertisers like a two-dollar
crack whore. Imagine if a few hundred thousand folks started hangin’
‘round the capitol steps every day—like what happened EVERY DAY in the
Vietnam era—demanding, in no uncertain terms, the immediate
investigation and impeachment of this pathetic two-bit thieving pack of
Death-Machine jackals, or an IMMEDIATE NATIONAL HEALTH CARE PACKAGE,
funded by ONE WEEK’S worth of the Iraq Lie? See, they now count on a
well-meaning but basically lazy populace making ALL their life-choices
online. When you can “e-protest” and feel good about it, it changes the
entire rules of engagement. European and Latin American countries
historically know a few things about getting BIG CROWDS OUT IN THE
STREETS to affect change. POWER hates BIG SWEATY SERIOUS LOUD FOCUSED
CROWDS. It always scares ‘em. And, since these imperious
stolen-election motherfuckers are still basically our EMPLOYEES, it’s
high time to treat ‘em like that again.
ErosZine: Thanks, Joe! Readers, to find out more about Joe and his current projects, visit www.blackmirrorproductions.com.
[Written June 2007]
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