No Such Thing as an Act in Vain: The Golden Age Appreciation Fund

This world is many things. In the splendor of life, this existence can be beautiful, harsh, strange, sad and wondrous. For many artists, life is all of this times nine. There's no 401K plans and financial instability will more often than not, be an ever constant presence and yet, it is this blood-born drive to create, to express, to scream, to whisper and to be seen that drives you to create even when your more financially pragmatic loved ones and friends are shaking their heads and asking when are you going to get a “real job.”

The only true shame in being an artist is the number of those who have dedicated the prime years of their life to expression, and still end up having to struggle in their later years. In the 50' and 60's it was the bluesmen who laid out the blueprints for a large part of modern music and yet, rarely, if ever, saw a dime for their hard work and toil. All that despite the fact that there were definitely people making an obscene amount of money off of them, meanwhile the artists themselves often lived in near poverty.

There are too many sad variations of this tale in all the arts, but one area in particular involves the men and women who took creative, personal and societal risks and forged new ground in the adult film industry. A sad but true factor is that our society is still devolved enough to shame consenting adults whose only “transgression” has been to have been naked and having a fairly good time on camera. When you think of all of the real atrocities that happen on this planet every single minute you breathe, consensual adults having sex should really be nonexistent on the list of things to be offended by.

Luckily, a trio of kind souls have started a new non-profit entitled The Golden Age Appreciation Fund. Founded by Mark Murray, whom along with his lovely wife Miranda, organized the original Golden Age fundraiser back in 2013, Ashley West whose work, both as a writer, an up and coming documentarian and the primary force behind the groundbreaking and essential The Rialto Report and Jill Nelson, who is the tremendous author of the quintessential biography on John Holmes (A Life Measured in Inches), as well as the definitive tome on women in Adult film (Golden Goddesses). These three have come together and created this organization, in which 100% of the donations goes directly to the artist that they are aiding.

In a world where artists and performers who have earned others millions of dollars and given countless joy to a world wide audience, they should not have to worry about basic necessities in their later years. So if you're a fan of the classic era of this genre or just someone who wants to support artists who are having to go through the harder aspects of life, please check out the Golden Age Appreciation Fund. 

Copyright 2015 Heather Drain

Mondo Roundup: Going to the Theater Edition

There is something achingly beautiful and yet flat out achy when it comes to decayed movie theaters. Once upon a time, not that long ago in fact, going to the movies was an epic and occasionally glamorous thing. Even when I was a little girl in the 80's, with the glory days of the palatial, gilded frame movie houses being long, long gone, the theater was still a magical place. Sure, the movie theater in question was realistically a ratty dollar theater attached to a strip mall, probably built in the early to mid 70's, but for a kid, it was the closest thing I had to a living remnant to an era of film that I only knew via large film books with yellowy pages.

Of course, it helps that this was right before the stinky hand of commercials had infiltrated the movie going experience and even at a pee-stenched theater whose glory days were dubious from inception, the stained red curtains parted like the red seas when the trailers began. It's a seemingly small gesture but it was all part of the dingy majesty for me. 

The small town I grew up in actually did have a proper, non strip-mall attached theater too. The Apollo Theater, nestled in the historic and semi-neglected as long as I can remember historic downtown area, was always there. Doing research, they were showing kids films when I was a toddler and before then, adult films. Before that? I'm not sure, but what I do know is that it is still there. All but practically condemned and rotting from the inside, the Apollo now has all the appearance of waiting to die. Which is a shame. Beyond a shame but the structure, still there after decades of growth and Appleby's, gives a faint shadow of hope that maybe someone will rescue it. Just because something is neglected, doesn't necessarily mean it has to die. 

 

The other night, as I was trying to work on the above passage, I got sucked into one of the most recent episodes of The Rialto Report and their fantastic interview with Veronica Vera. There was something about this particular interview that, by the end, hit me emotionally. Here's this amazing woman, who is so classy, smart and someone who has made an incredible thumbprint in this world by being so open to new frontiers, both in terms of sexuality, as well as writing and gender. We live in a culture where the accepted image of someone being open and outside the status quo fray is “Dharma & Greg” or whatever “manic-pixie” mainstream dream machine you want to invoke. Accepted risks are buying a faux African-patterned skirt from a store at the mall. But Vera, along with many of her peers and the subjects of Rialto's other interviews, took real risks.

It's incredibly weird to me that it is 2014, a number so Jetson-sounding in its futurism, that things like “slut shaming” and overall stunted attitudes towards human expression involving sexuality are still alive and well. Kind of like that small militant army of cockroaches that live underneath your kitchen sink, outdated morals refuse to die in our culture. And that's part of why I do what I do. Outdated mores tend to blind people to art. A chaste female nude is considered auto-art by some, but yet the moment that nude gets to derive pleasure from something more than just the male gaze, it's smut and therefore, not deemed respectable or worth examining. This is beyond ridiculous. Attitudes like this should be relegated to the same kind of snickering we save for things like medicinal leeches and the belief that the devil is tied to mental illness.

With our culture, it's not just simply about out-moded puritanism but classism too. It eternally mystifies me that guys like Gerard Damiano, Cecil Howard or Stephen Sayadian are all but labeled pornographers but their European/Asian counterparts like Oshima, Breillat and most recently, “Nymphomaniac” director Lars von Trier are deemed artists. And you know what? They ARE artists but so are Damiano, Howard and Sayadian. But the key difference between the latter three and the former is that the latter are not only American, but worked in a milieu that is considered to be the bottom rung of the bread and circuses ladder. The more lower-class a medium is perceived, the more derided, if not flat out neglected, it is. Which is strange. Shouldn't this be the enlightened age? It's okay to have a film display raw human sad emotion but sexuality is still taboo? 

 

Now, speaking of the tawdry, you can check out my latest for Dangerous Minds, covering the ultra-obscure Russ Meyer film, “Fanny Hill..” It is tame for the master of bosmania but that said , still a lot of fun and looking better than it ever has, thanks to the hard work of the folks at VinegarSyndrome.