Slashdot Mirror
William Gibson's Neuromancer Staged With Porn Star
destinyland writes "Sunday night saw a reading of the William Gibson's classic cyberpunk novel featuring porn star Sasha Grey at a New York art museum, along with sculpture-props simulating virtual reality. Artist Brody Condon promised to combine 'Gibson's 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction,' but the editor of H+ magazine challenges that description. 'In a 1993 interview, Gibson himself told me: "I think my world looks dystopian if you're a middle class white guy doing reasonably well in 1993... There are so many places in the world today that are so much crappier than anything I'm writing about."' And earlier this month William Gibson shared his response to a blog post about the event. 'Gol' dang! It's news to me!'"
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Rats
I didn't RTFA, but from /. alone, I am unsure if this article is about porn or the film itself. My attention span stopped at...
/. (you get the idea).
I didn't RTFA, but from
Something witty.
sculpture-props simulating virtual reality
You get the sense that someone doesn't quite grasp the basic concepts.
.. is this on slashdot?
What's "Loser Porn"?
It's "I can't even dream of having sex with a girl as pretty and intelligent as Sasha Grey, so I'll just call her a skank and call her work 'loser porn'".
But the world looks utopian if you're a middle class white guy doing Sasha Grey.
R.U. Sirius
This can't be real????
Loser porn is like when the male role is played by a Slashdot reader living in his mother's basement. :-P
No, seriously, I think the parent is referring to Grey's like of consensual degradation.
Anyway, I wouldn't call Sasha Grey a "second tier porn skank." At one point she was pegged to be the next Jenna Jameson.
My blog
I was at the reading yesterday as part of my sojourns around Performa 09. No one else recognized her (that I could tell) in the audience, but it was a durational piece and I was only there a half hour. I was almost positive it was her, but she had these huge sunglasses on and I couldn't be sure...and it didn't seem like a good question to just ask a random chick at a performance piece while I was there with my gf...
this sig deleted by another sig
The world of _1984_ would look great to someone from Somalia or some of the other hellholes of the world. _Brave New World_ even more so. Yet they're still both considered dystopian. Same goes for Neuromancer.
Every "second tier porn skank" was "at one point pegged to be the next Jenna Jameson."
translation: I think I am Napoleon Bonaparte.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I respect pornstars - is that wrong?
Where do you get jobs like this? First there's the "MIT artist-in-residence" job where you can send messages into space that will never be received. Now this one where you can prattle on about dystopian piffle hoo-ha and people with higher educations will nod and shake their heads knowingly because they don't want to look unhip, or however you kids describe the squares these days.
Hey, I have some lovely post-post-post modern retro-reconstructionist works that would make a great display somewhere. They fractalize the repetitive nature of our increasingly vapid 21st century existences via surrealist digital sculpture and open mike poetry reads by fast fading reality TV pseduocelebrities.
That kind of uncritical asinine blather never ceases to tweak me. Middle class anyone, Gibson, you tool. It's amazing that people spout (and think) racist shit like this, and it is left bare, unchallenged, validated by silence thus tacit approval. Fuck that. The assumption is what? If you're middle class but not white that your perspective is different? GMAFB. If you're middle class and white, like me, you can't possibly know about destitution? (I came from it).
Idiocy.
It's a redundancy, like "sweet sugar".
You are welcome on my lawn.
I agree the race dropping was uncalled for, but he also was giving this response in an interview, where we can't always pick the perfect words for what we're trying to say. If he was just trying to draw a distinction between middle class in the privileged (and largely white) West versus the middle class in, say, India where by US standards you're still desperately poor, I don't think it's entirely illegitimate.
Yes, they're all considered dystopian in the context of the West, but I think his point is astute, that whether something is a dystopia is contextual. The people living in positions of privilege, i.e. the West, wring their hands over and work hard to prevent these various dystopias from occurring, even while they may be actually working against the interests of the majority of humanity.
What we have now, if it wasn't reality, could be easily portrayed as a dystopia in a novel. Worse, the people with power to change things (the powered and moneyed people who are citizens in the first world) are unwilling to consider a lot of possibilities that may be on the table because they seem worse than their own privileged positions, without considering how badly off the majority of humanity is under their current system.
the contrived outrage: well-played sir
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Every "second tier porn skank" was - at multiple points - pegged, repeatedly.
I've never seen any of her films, so I can't comment on whether or not it's "loser porn", but someone who sucks dick for money is certainly a skank.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
When you take into account the mindless sex-doll career of the character Molly, Sasha Grey is an apt choice for the part.
Glad to see some celebrities finally appreciating Gibson's work.
I mean - according to Wikipedia, roughly half of all famous people are porn stars, if you go by pagecount. There's something about that I haven't yet found words for.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You're only as old as the woman you feel. - W. C. Fields
When I was growing up porn stars were very rare.
Today they are very common.
The stigma is less but so is the cachet.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
How about if you are a middle class "black" guy doing reasonably well in 1993?
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I'll bite, who's a top tier porn star?
It isn't a "duck sound", she's got the guy's cock so far down her throat that she triggers her gag reflex.
As far as the annoying dirty talk, Sasha Grey videos are best enjoyed with the sound off. (Or so I've heard.)
trolling trolls trolling trolls.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Alternate explanation - a typo. He meant "looser" porn.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
They somehow never manage to survive the death of the body.
Also, they seem to thrive in a well fed and groomed body, and whither away at the slightest danger to body's existence.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
What definition of fame are you using?
if you go by pagecount.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
...which puts it roughly on professional par with a Community Theater production of Guys and Dolls in Toledo, except you don't leave the theater humming any of the tunes.
And I'm not just being snarky... I remember my last such show in SoHo: the second act began with the performer crawling out of a giant garbage bag (featuring real garbage), singing a song about former UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick set to the tune of "Mr. Sandman" (that's Chordettes, not Metallica, as in "bung bung bung bung BUNG BUNG bung bung BUNG BUNG bung BUNG BUNG...!").
Anybody -- ANYBODY! -- ANNN-NEEE-BODY!!! -- and I've dated more than my share, yet have somehow avoided therapy -- can have a "One Woman Show" in NYC (which looks great on a resume, of course); all you need to do is rent a theater (of which there are hundreds available -- it's a cottage industry) and, ummm, believe in yourself...
"Whenever someone (or some group) thinks they know what Utopia is, they try to force everybody down the same path."
Welcome to America! (i.e. The United States of). A bunch of bureaucrats and politicians develop the plans for their utopian society and then send out armed minions to impose that vision onto society. Doesn't matter whether it's rural Montana or downtown Los Angeles. The Federal solution MUST be implemented.
I checked out her picture and have to say Yuck. You spank to porn of someone like that when there's so much better looking girls to download?
- These characters were randomly selected.
I could stage a few events with Sasha Grey.. they would not be considered sci-fi (unless the props I were to use would be considered sci-fi... plasma powered "toys" anyone?)
STD's are actually fairly uncommon in the mainstream porn industry. Some performers wear condoms
Genital herpes is endemic and ubiquitous in the mainstream porn industry.
This thread is useless without pictures!
Or at least links to these better looking girls.
gb2/b/
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Translation: "I am Napoleon Bonaparte, and you aren't!"
You are welcome on my lawn.
How is this offtopic? TFA is about a Porn "Star" in a play.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
It seems that Adult Video Network have outdone themselves as contemporary culture critics... http://business.avn.com/articles/36788.html reads like a Sunday Times supplement, who would have thought?
Yeah, I know. I played Bioshock too.