Mr. Pink's | Mr. Pink's Blog

Remembering J. Stephen Hicks

Reports began circulating yesterday of the passing of Digital Desire’s chief photographer, J. Stephen Hicks and were confirmed by Hicks’ business partner and fellow lensman, Jay Allan, who sent AVN a note in tribute to the man he called mentor and friend.

“[Hicks] was a true pioneer in the adult industry,” Allan wrote. “At a time when there were only about a doze photographers worldwide shooting for the adult magazine market, J. Stephen Hicks’ work stood out as exceptional. It still does today.”

Anyone familiar with Hicks’ work for Digital Desire, or his earlier print work for Penthouse, Hustler, Club, Gallery, and High Society magazines, surely recognizes the enormous talent he had. Not content with only seeing his later work online, in 2004 Hicks even published a hardcover Digital Desire book containing nearly 200 pages of his finest work. He followed this release with another hardcover collection, Superbeauty, in 2010. Both the printed and digital versions of Hicks’ photography offer prime examples of what Allan calls “the beautiful natural light and calculated composition that his images always contained.”

“Stephen taught his team to always put 100 percent of their creative energy into every image and video and to try to make everything as artistic and beautiful as possible,” Allan continued. “As a photographer he had no equal and took every step to artistically and creatively make every girl we shot look her absolute best. I am very lucky to have known and learned from the best and I am at least comforted by knowing that his legacy will live on and his amazing body of work will always be here for us to enjoy.”

Digital Desire, which most recently received a thoroughly impressive 91% approval rating from Mr. Pink’s back in July of ’12, will continue to showcase Hicks’ work and legacy, albeit with some new blood taking the photographic reigns, a group Allan calls “an amazing teanm of artists who will carry with his beautiful erotica the way he taught us since we were young.”

Allan’s final words on his departed friend and mentor could easily have come from any one of Hicks’ devoted fans and followers, “I will miss him dearly.”

Kevin Moore’s Hooker Experience

Although not as acclaimed or popular as Manuel Ferrara, Jonni Darkko, or John “Buttman” Stagliano, Kevin Moore occupies a crucial chair in Evil Angel’s directorial stable. Moore celebrates the curvaceous asses of porn’s best and brightest in his Panty Pops, Latex Loads, and Crack Fuckers series, and is even attempting to revive a 1970s-style appreciation for sub-baked women in his new Tanlines series. But now he’s tackling an even more vital pornographic niche: prostitution. While selling your body for sex might still be outlawed in California, but with the success of Tonight’s Girlfriend and Moore’s latest release, The Hooker Experience, it’s clear “escort porn” is back in a big way.

Placing the viewer in the vicarious position of being able to buy any sexual experience with almost any woman they desire, The Hooker Experience follows Moore’s other POV efforts in bringing you five of porn’s most scintillating women in the kind of sultry hotel room seductions only lots and lots (and lots) of money can buy. Gia DiMarco, Jada Stevens, India Summer, Maddy O’Reilly, and Yurizan Beltran are Moore’s working girls in what we can only hope will be a continuing series, and each performer visits our surrogate (Moore himself) in a lavish suite fit for a king, tycoon, or rock star. Literally throwing his money at them, Moore is given a thorough working over by each girl, never letting the camera drop from its perched position on his shoulder, no matter how hard they suck or how tight they clench.

The Hooker Experience can now be viewed at Evil Angel’s website and is available for purchase at adult retailers everywhere.

Dana Vespoli Turns to Evil

San Francisco native and intrepid sexual adventurer Dana Vespoli might’ve disappeared from screens for a while there, but not only is she back in full force, shooting thrilling scenes for Bang Bros’ MILF Soup and Monsters of Cock, and Brazzers sites Dirty Masseur and Hot & Mean, she’s now landed herself one of porn’s most esteemed gigs: directing for Evil Angel.

Joining her fellow female performer/directors Bobbi Starr, Belladonna, and Francesca Le, Vespoli will take her bold, aggressive performance style behind the camera for John Stagliano’s company, beginning with her Evil Angel feature debut Forsaken. To ensure a memorable viewing experience for the fans and to make the strongest first impression possible, Vespoli tapped young talent like Ash Hollywood and Michael Vegas, calling the former “beautiful and amazing” and noting she was “blown away” by the latter’s acting and sexual abilities; Manuel Ferrara and Samantha Ryan round out the cast and give Forsaken a reliable backbone upon which to hang its (kinda terrifying) plot. Ash Hollywood comes to in the woods wearing a bloodied dress, but without wounds to explain the stains. Flashbacks ensue and introduce the audience to “creepy characters” that might help explain her current predicament. And, hey, if they just fuck her senseless along the way, I’m sure that’ll be great, too.

Vespoli is already planning on performing in some of her directorial efforts for her new studio home and her follow up to Forsaken, a lesbian POV anal movie starring Karlie Montana, is already in the works. Clearly excited about this new direction for her career, Vespoli promises variety and debauchery in equal measure, telling AVN “I’m going to incorporate bondage, medical themes and various other fetishes I have.” The personal made pornographic entertainment; the perfect playground for one of porn’s most under-appreciated performers and directors, female or otherwise.

Viva la Chiva!

When online translation tools failed to give me a satisfactory English rendition of the phrase “chiva culiona” (the title of a Culioneros site) I turned to that last vestige of seemingly reliable knowledge: human contact. After calling a friend fluent in Spanish and conversational in Portuguese, I was still left with no translation. Could it be slang? Could it be a completely made up title that means essentially nothing? Nope, it just referred to public transportation.

The Chiva bus (also called Escalera [ladder] Bus) are brightly decorated artisan vehicles found in rural Colombia and Ecuador that transport residents around the towns and villages of the mountainous Andean region. Painted blue, yellow, and red like the national flags of the two countries that spawned them, these double-decker buses have remained an integral mode of transportation for the area, becoming a cultural icon in more recent years. (Hell, even Lucy Liu, Drew Barrymore, and Cameron Diaz arrived at a New York Charlie’s Angels premiere atop a Chiva bus.) The unique structure of the Chiva bus allows for varying use: a roof rack supports luggage and goods, the usual absence of doors allows for quick boarding and alighting, and the intricate, hand-painted text and graphic designs give each bus a personal, communal touch rivaled in the United States by only one vehicle: the infamous Bang Bus.

It’s not just the elaborate hand-drawn designs and high occupancy that Chiva buses and the Bang Bus have in common: they’re both mobile porn studios that see the hottest, easiest women in Colombia and Florida, respectively, climb aboard to earn some money fucking random strangers. Chiva Culiona brings dozens of many-wheeled hardcore hookups your way in a distinctly Latin fashion, while the Bang Bus we all know and love keeps its wheels turning as it cruises around with an incredibly lucky guy or adventurous pornstar babe in tow for guaranteed adult entertainment gold.