In a cramped apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, members of a tiny film crew were busy transforming a cluttered living room into a makeshift set. All the furniture had been pushed against the walls, and the shades had been opened. Dirty dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. A thin, fit guy with tattoos who called himself Tommy Pistol was sitting naked behind a computer, videotaping himself with a hand-held camera and waiting for the real action to begin.
The borrowed apartment was being used to shoot a hard-core scene to be shown on BurningAngel.com, one of a handful of erotic Web sites that fetishize tattoos, piercings and the occasional Bettie Page hairdo along with the young women who wear them.
Known informally as alt-porn, this genre attempts to embellish pornography with a hip veneer by offering soft- to hard-core erotica next to interviews with members of appropriately cool and underground bands. The form first surfaced in 2001, when the West Coast Web site SuicideGirls began to offer erotic photos of young women online. Later, the site added interviews of artists and celebrities (from Woody Allen to Natalie Portman to the current hot band, Bloc Party) and then soft-core videos online. Imitators like fatalbeauty.com, brokendollz.com and more than a dozen others soon followed.
Joanna Angel, 24, started BurningAngel in 2002 as a hard-core alternative to such sites (which limit themselves to nude embraces) with her business partner, Mitch Fontaine. Now the pair intends to take the form to another level by producing DVDs; the first, BurningAngel.com: the Movie, was released for sale online on April 1 and sells for US$20.
Shot on a shoestring budget of US$4,000, the film, which stars Angel (her stage name), is a series of hard-core sex scenes strung together without benefit of a plot. It burnishes its hipster credentials by incorporating music by the Brooklyn band Turing Machine and Tim Armstrong of Rancid. Interviews with bands like Dillinger Escape Plan and My Chemical Romance are interspersed with the sex.
Holding up the DVD's cover, on which she appears with her back arched and wearing nothing but a few straps around her hips that suggest a thong, Angel described the BurningAngel ethos as "a unity of sex and rock 'n' roll," but she quickly qualified the statement: "Porn is more punk than most punk music," she concluded.
For Fontaine, 26, who does not appear on the Web site or in the BurningAngel video, the reasons he became a pornographer are less complex.
"We were sick of blond hair and breast implants," he said. "We wanted to put our sexual fantasies on video."
Hard-core pornography is obviously not the typical career choice for an English major from Rutgers University, but Angel, with a yearbook's worth of quotations tattooed across her 1.5m frame, from Kurt Vonnegut ("So it goes") to a paraphrase of Margaret Atwood ("Touch me and you will burn"), refuses to acknowledge any difference between what she does and composing poetry.
"Some people make music, others paint, I make porn," she said, though she admitted that she had never seen a pornographic video until Fontaine, a Rutgers classmate, suggested that they start a pornography company.
Still, Angel is in no way a pioneer in her field; there seem to be plenty of women who, rather than struggle to get published in The Paris Review or written up in ArtNews, have instead channeled their creative ambitions into erotica. One magazine, Sweet Action, was started by two women in January last year and features interviews with musicians and nude photographs of the scrawny bohemian boys typical of the alt-porn genre.
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