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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!'"
sculpture-props simulating virtual reality
You get the sense that someone doesn't quite grasp the basic concepts.
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.
Sasha Grey plays a vitol role in some of the documentaries that we so love to watch in our cellars - that is why.
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.
R.U. Sirius has been writing for years, and was the editor of Mondo 2000 magazine during the '90s, as well as co-author of Cyberpunk Handbook:: The Real Cyberpunk Fakebook with St. Jude. So yes, it's very real (and not the first time his work has found the convergence of cyberpunk and porn, either...)
The first time I had ever seen Sasha Grey was in The Girlfriend Experience. She was awful, probably ruined the film (if it wasn't the writers who ruined it first). Anyway, it was a complete snooze fest. Also who hires a pron star to play a prostitute and has her keep her clothes on for 99% of the film?
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.
Why is this on slashdot?/quote
Sasha Grey
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.
I've staged War of the Worlds in my living room with my cats as the aliens, but it didn't make it onto Slashdot.
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
When you take into account the mindless sex-doll career of the character Molly, Sasha Grey is an apt choice for the part.
How about if you are a middle class "black" guy doing reasonably well in 1993?
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
trolling trolls trolling trolls.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Lol.
What is missing from most porn (old and new) is the seduction.
I've never found people screwing to be erotic (even if both are female). There was one I saw back in the late 80's/ early 90's tho-- I think it was directed by a female (back before females became so much more masculine) and she had two people, fully dressed, standing talking in front of a fireplace for about 5 to 10 minutes that was one of the most erotic things I've ever seen. Both were good but average looking without makeup.
They went from casually talking to credibly aroused and there was the electric moment when both realized they were going to do something. I can't even recall the sex scene after but I still remember that scene two decades later.
Sex is usually about rubbing one spot a lot. It often looks goofy. The seduction is the part that is interesting to me.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.