We Did Porn: Memoir and Drawings

Blending memoir with Smith's own drawings and paintings, We Did Porn will do for alt porn what Hunter S. Thompson did for motorcycle gangs and Tom Wolfe for psychedelica.

Punk artist and icon Zak Smith made a name for himself by visually re-creating Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and drawing pictures of girls in the "naked girl business." His artistic pedigree and acute observation landed him in high-profile shows from the Whitney to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Somewhere along the line, Smith went from the observer to the observed, from the guy in the corner with a sketchpad to the guy on-screen doing the unnamable for anyone eighteen or older to see. We Did Porn follows Zak Smith (or Zak Sabbath) from the New York art scene to Los Angeles's seedy, yet colorful, underbelly—the world of alt porn. Smith narrates his own foray into pornography and gives his readers a new understanding of the industry, its players, and its audience.

Zak Smith is equally comfortable in the fine art scene, the literary scene — and filming a scene. A porn scene, that is: Smith’s alter ego Zak Sabbath is a renowned alternative porn actor. In this illustrated memoir (graphic in more ways than one), Smith describes his shift from New York's high-end art world to the seedy adult entertainment underbelly of Los Angeles, offering readers an inside understanding of the industry, its players, and its audience. Smith narrates his own foray into pornography and gives his readers a new understanding of the industry, its players, and its audience. Best known for his series of illustrations entitled Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow, Smith is an artistic and storytelling force that cannot be ignored.

Publishers Weekly

Visual artist and recent alt-porn star Smith-known in the adult film world as "Zak Sabbath"-takes readers on a frenetic journey from the New York art scene to pornography-saturated Los Angeles. Interspersed with his drawings, which have been displayed at MoMA and the 2004 Whitney Biennial, Smith's memoir is more a series of linked vignettes than a chronological account of his foray into alt-porn. As distinct from mainstream hardcore porn, alt-porn tries to do with sex "the kinds of things ambitious young filmmakers might try to do after graduating from art school." It was Smith's collection of illustrations for Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow that first attracted the attention of "pirate porn" director Osbie Feel. As Smith puts it, "I ended up in porn because one day I sat down and decided to draw one picture for every page of a very thick book no one I knew had read." In addition to attending the Porn Film Festival Berlin and the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas-and having sex with countless women with names like Tina DiVine and Trixie Kyle in countless warehouse sets-Smith is also a cultural critic, dissecting everything from Valentine's Day to the grammar in antipornography laws. Just as porn, alternative or otherwise, has its fans, Smith's memoir is an acquired taste and will appeal to those who like things a little kinky. (July 1)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Zak Smith's two previous books are Zak Smith: Pictures Of Girls and Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow (Tin House Books). He is a frequent contributor to several independent comics and zines, including Paping and See How Pretty, See How Smart. His work has appeared in numerous publications worldwide and in many museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. He lives in Los Angeles, where he works as an artist and performs in adult films.