Events | Mr. Pink's Blog

Filth on the Canvas

The 16th annual Dirty Show wrapped up in Detroit this week, closing out its week-long celebration of all things explicitly sexual, intensely erotic, and outright carnal. After being graced by the endlessly entertaining and enlightening John Waters and seeing performances from all kinds of (performance) troupes and (military-fetishizing) troops, Dirty Show 16’s doors closed for another year. The painters, sculptors, photographers, and printmakers exhibiting in the Dirty halls this year included notable International guests as well as national and local artists. Here we present a small selection of highlights from Dirty Show 16 and hopefully bring to your attention, dear reader, some new artists worth keeping an eye on.

Renowned horror filmmaker Clive Barker contributed this painting entitled The Wolf Behind the Flame that, although tucked away in a corner and easily missed, stopped everyone who passed it dead in their tracks. (Although perhaps Barker’s name was the reason.)

Cult favorite comic scribe Grant Morrison has said of Gail Potocki that she “conducts seances on canvas.” Bringing to Dirty Show 16 a piece directly recalling Adolf Ulrik Wertmuller’s masterpiece Leda and the Swan, Morrison’s interpretation is more than understandable.

Billy Norrby kept his model mostly clothed and instead exposed her not to our eyes but to the swirling energies of the cosmos. Sky Cathedral elevates transcendental self-love to the level of universal, even cosmic love.

Portrait of the Artist Entering her Blue Period by Scott G. Brooks placed his model before a glory hole in turn surrounded by messages scrawled into the wall, messages possibly addressing the kneeling, sticky-handed woman, her hair bundled into a pair of classical buns and adorned with (you guessed it) pearls.

By far the most whimsical piece we spotted on the exhibition walls (or, more accurately, in a cabinet) was Jason Levesque’s gastropod mollusk whose wanderings have left a trail of “grool” in its wake. Surely, that tasty-looking critter is the ultimate overqualified paperweight for the desk of yours truly.

John Waters Blossoms Amongst Filth

Detroit’s annual Dirty Show, a celebration of erotic art in all its myriad forms, welcomed the crown prince of deviancy and master of bad taste, Mr. John Waters, to the Motor City to enlighten attendees on the finer points of, well, being dirty. Not that the audience really needed much help. Dommes, daddies, and heavily-inked degenerates of all kinds swanned about the Russell Industrial Center’s exhibition hall in various revealing or suggestive outfits, really only settling down for Waters’ performance, a revised version of This Filthy World the filmmaker and raconteur claimed was “dirtier, filthier than before.”

Waters regaled the audience with anecdotes of his early filmmaking years, from how he got Divine to eat dog shit on camera to which drugs resulted in the smoothest productions, and aside from a few left wandering the exhibition, had everyone listening with rapt attention. He also discussed my very stock in trade, pornography, calling out the hetero porn industry for rendering even the most filthy vulgarities quite bland. (Case in point: anal prolapses are called “blossoms” in gay porn, “rosebuds” in straight.)

Looking around Dirty Show 16, it seemed Waters was onto something. The more outlandish and adventurous works hanging on the exhibition hall walls were not predominantly heterosexual. Where the female form was used (from a clearly male view point) it was as an object of distant appreciation, an almost abstracted lust that no longer produced a physical reaction in the viewer, just a gentle appreciation of the form before them. Following Waters’ line of thinking, it’s not greater video definition, hotter or younger women, or more “intense” schtupping that straight porn needs, but that obscure element of genuine filth that could reinvigorate what many regard as a floundering industry and (yes) art form. Whether this filthiness can be found in the throng of recent step-incest movies or Kink & Co’s consistently taboo-smashing aggro-fetishism remains to be seen. If you ask me, though, it’s far more likely to spring from a figure like Dana Vespoli (arguably the most sour-looking woman in porn yet a fan- and critic-favorite for her truly adventurous performing career and boldly individual and highly inventive work as a director). With female performers launching themselves as directors after Belladonna, Bobbi Starr, and Ms. Vespoli paved the way, and with the 2015 AVN Award for Best Director going to a woman, Mason, it seems women are only gaining more strength and, we can only hope, bring a decidedly filthy and blazingly original element back to porn.

And, no, unfortunately we can’t hold out hope for Mr. Waters’ foray into mainstream hetero hardcore, which he considers about as sexy as open heart surgery. And besides, the man William Burroughs called The Pope of Trash is trying to get the financing together for a long-gestating family-oriented film.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Photos by John Froelich, Detroit Free Press

Post-Valentine Porno Pick-Me-Ups!

Last weekend saw amorously-minded folks around the world celebrate love, affection, romance, and lust in the commercially-perverted name of St. Valentine, but, as much as we’d hoped it wouldn’t be the case, some of us didn’t see our gifts and gratitude returned in kind. Rejection hurts, dude, and there’s no shame in admitting that. There is, however, great shame in letting even the most personally disappointing Valentine’s Day pass by without fapping furiously to the hottest V-Day porn available. So, in honor of broken hearts and flaccid dicks everywhere, here are Mr. Pink’s picks for the best of 2015’s Valentine’s Day offerings.

– Everyone’s favorite short-and-skinny blonde slut with a penchant for anal, Dakota Skye, enjoyed a relaxing bath before her boyfriend brings her roses, plucks her from the water, then lays her down for a tender seeing-to of his own over at Passion HD.

– Pure Mature introduced a brand new MILF to its viewers this Valentine’s: Bella Maree, a busty brunette who makes her porn debut in this body-worshipping and thoroughly erotic gift from one of the ‘net’s premiere MILF sites.

– Over at Babes.com, sultry, curvaceous Frenchwoman, Anissa Kate receives a gift from her boyfriend and promptly slips them over her slender legs and gives him a peek. He can’t resist and neither can she, so they mess around on the sofa before heading to the bedroom where more gifts more adventurous and risque await.

– Scoreland hit it big (literally) with two titular Valentine babes: Demmi Valentine and Jenna Valentine (no relation). Demmi, for her part, got an early start with a pre-V-Day office tryst while pale burlesque-styled beauty Jenna performed a lusty striptease for the occasion.

– Kasey Warner and Samantha Rone finally stopped in the name of love, headed for Web Young, and gave viewers a glimpse of budding teenage lesbian love taking hold.

– The incomparably beautiful Nicole Aniston basically offered herself as the nation’s Valentine, shooting a thrilling POV scene for Naughty America’s Housewife 1-on-1 that sees her holding your gaze like a demon in heat!

– X-Art commemorated the cinema release of 50 Shades of Grey with a kinky and submissive turn from Caprice, who, tied up and blindfolded, gives herself completely to her lover in the ultimate Valentine’s gift.

– Of all the US studios to offer Valentine’s Day porn, not surprisingly it was Brazzers that fared the best, serving up a steamy scene with lingerie-clad Nadia Styles and, against all odds (including the star’s brief retirement), the second installment of St. Valentine’s Day Assacre, the anal-heavy Jynx Maze-starring storyline started on Valentine’s Day, 2014.

Auteur Miley In/Out of Film Fest

How does an upstart film festival in the already over-saturated market of New York City make a name for itself before ever flicking on a projector or dimming the theater lights? Schedule a screening of an erotic short film made by and starring one of pop music’s most controversial (and sexually provocative) young women, that’s how!

The first ever NYC Porn Film Festival, set to take place between February 27th and March 1st in Bushwick, Brooklyn, announced earlier this month that it would screen an four-and-a-half-minute bondage-themed short film shot by director Quentin Jones for Miley Cyrus’s 2014 Bangerz tour. The festival program had ‘Miley Cyrus: Tongue Tied’ schedule to screen in the same block as ‘Tila Tequila: Backdoored & Squirting’ but mere hours later, the listing for Tongue Tied had disappeared from the festival website.

In a statement, festival organizer Simon Leahy told Buzzfeed that they had removed all mention of Cyrus and her film from their website and promotional materials. “We hoped the film screened alongside great artists such as Amalia Ulman, Bradford Kessler, Richard Kern, Beth B, James Franco, Narcissister, would create a bigger discourse around art, sexuality, gender and pornography,” read a statement issued by the festival office. For her part, Miley’s camp insists neither she nor Jones were ever directly involved with the inaugural NYC Porn Film Festival, only that “Miley was proud to make a film with acclaimed filmmaker Quentin Jones.” (At least there’s still you, Tila Tequila.)

Miley Cyrus: Tongue Tied can be viewed below (via YouTube) and is likely to be included in the upcoming Bangerz Tour DVD due for release on March 24th.