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Director Joe Gallant has recently been jetting between the coasts, filming his unique brand of pornography. But it may be argued that the man's past is even more fascinating than his ever-so-extraordinary present. Avant musician, East Village auteur, Hell's Kitchen rebel and now bi-coastal award-winning director, Gallant is a multi-faceted man in possession of a panolopy of kinky proclivities. In other words, he makes great editorial -- and a damned interesting interview. Here, he shares some of his intriguing insights with Eros Zine. Eros Zine: I'd bet no one who knows you only from the adult entertainment world has any idea you're a musical genius! Tell us about that side of your life. Joe Gallant: Music is my sonic diary. My writing to this point has been largely defined by my passion for late 20th-century string quartet writing, large-ensemble orchestration, avant-jazz, improv and noise. I've been playing bass (upright and electric) for 35 years, been actively composing for 30. Thousands of gigs, big and small, lotta stateside and Euro tours. I founded my 18-piece orchestra, Illuminati, in 1982. It was a trio in its nascency and evolved rapidly to its full configuration as the writing grew more dense and variegated. Illuminati gigged/recorded relentlessly for 20 years and I plan on reactivating it later this year.
Joe Gallant: I've had an interest in it since I was a lad. Back in the mid 60s, the porn I had access to -- the Swanks and Playboys, the old 8-mm fuckflicks -- seemed to me like a vaguely tattered contraband ship that sat low in the water off the mainstream coast, and from the shore it looked like a lotta seedy, debauched dirty fun, crewed by strange offbeat characters. Those were the "golden age" years, decades before Stern/Viacom/mainstream cleaned, co-opted and veal-penned porn as their personal cash cow. I answered a "looking for film talent" ad in Screw mag in '80, 8th floor of the Show World building on 42nd and 8th. [I] didn't get any gigs but, ironically, the guy who owned that little production company became a great friend of mine, 20 years later. He's a reeeeal old-timer in the biz, knew everybody. I dated a legendary '90s porn star for a while, named Trinity Loren. We met when I asked her to be the voice on one of my orchestra pieces and we really hit it off. That was the beginning of the Black Mirror story. We were about to start doing some scenes together a start of her comeback, but she died of a brain hemorrhage in '98. I started Black Mirror shortly after, as an umbrella company for XXX films, experimental stuff, etc., with an eye toward setting up some kind of scholarship fund for her daughter. It's all been a very interesting experience, so far. Eros Zine: So do you compose the music for your films? Joe Gallant: Yeah. I'll bring a combination of small ensembles, string quartet or my horn guys into the studio, or work with various musique-concrete elements and solo material at home, depending on the mood of the film. Lately, their backgrounds have been getting as detailed as my mid-'90s large-orchestra CDs, particularly on Avenue X. So as the films get bigger, I'm more inclined to match their story and energy with good scoring. Ultimately I'll be making non-XXX indie films and scoring them in similar ways. I've also been chipping away at a chamber opera for five voices and octet, which I started in '92 and would like to finish at some point.
Joe Gallant: I've simply tried to make the types of flicks that I personally would shoot big jizzy sock-loads to. Eros Zine: Nice! How's the work for VCA going? I can't imagine you having enough creative license under the yoke of such a big porn movie company. Joe Gallant: I worked as sound designer on network soaps for 20 years, so I'm no stranger to the corporate mindset. I can certainly make something any "client" would be happy with. But the odd thing about all these Valley behemoths is that each one has strangely different restrictions: one's okay with anal but no ATM, one says ATM's okay but no spitting, another says spitting is a go, but NO ENEMAS!!, another says ENEMAS OK! but not while...spitting!! and no ROUGH LANGUAGE!! (shades of Catholic school). As if their shared shelf-space is attracting extremely fine-tuned demographics. guys just want STUFF, and the harder, more intense and cum-splattered the better. I think that's why "the Valley" reminds me of Edwardian England. Big sea-shifts are upon us, restructuring the entire way we think about and receive "porn" as available information, but the big playas still think their empires are unassailable, particularly in aesthetic terms. Eros Zine: What's your fascination with Patty Hearst all about? Joe Gallant: Actually, it's not so much Patty herself who's interesting within that whole event, rather it's the SLA, who many believe were agents provocateur, created by the CIA to put a final discrediting mid-'70s spin on the Left -- which proved its positions with the oppobria of Nixon and Watergate -- in the same way that Manson could be seen, if you follow the timelines, players and money. The mid-'70s played out on two tectonic culture-plates against a background of Military/Big Oil hungry to reclaim the control they lost during the ascendance of the counterculture. The election of Ronnie Ray-gun, General Electric's puppet since the '50s, guaranteed the complete end of the era-at least in this country. These are matters of huge cultural importance, but their lessons seem quite obviously lost on this culture and time, as our handlers intended. I'm using various elements of the Patty saga as the architecture for Atomic Skullfuck Orgy, which tells the tale of "Paris Olson," who's kidnapped by rebels while jogging in New York City. I shot half of Skullfuck two years ago and will get back to it later this year. Eros Zine: Tell us about a few of your other proclivities?
Eros Zine: Dude, you are true Renaissance man! So, you lived in the East Village in the early '80s. What was that like? Joe Gallant: Well, every story that's been told about the city in those days is true. My East Village years were basically between '75 and '85, and I've lived in Hell's Kitchen for the last 22 years, so as a young old-timer I can tell ya that this town was tough, dangerous, dead-serious, funny, unspeakably artistic, joyous, wise... New York City in the '70s and early '80s was truly a "cracked diamond, darkly glowing." It was the fuckin' best. I recently thought about the first rock concert I ever saw, The Band at The Academy of Music on 14th Street, 1971, a night that blew me wide open. Hippies, man...wild, erotic vibe in the air...patchouli and pot and gorgeous hippy chicks and cool longhair dudes. Everybody got it, everybody was linked to this wild blue light subtle thing, like the best church in the world...real bottom of a fish tank mysterioso stuff, like the scary organ at the start of "The SHADOW knoooows..." And the band tore the roof off the place, they played like their life was in the balance, elegant and hard and timeless. I was 14, and that was it. I never looked back. But, back to the dawn of the '80s. Everybody I hung with was damaged and brilliant, mad dark electricity crackling around everybody. A lotta COMMITTMENT. Everybody fed off each other's experiments and there were a million lofts, storefronts and clubs to ply your Art in. And, realize, of course, that the eras before this were just as mad and true -- '60s hippies, post-war beatniks, '30s writers and painters -- everybody who was considered a freak/outsider out there in the world could find kindred spirits here. That's what Manhattan was FOR, see, a place to bring your weirdness and turn it into your truth. Well... Also, it was cheap to live there back then, cuz east of First Ave. looked a bit like Dresden. I had a two-bedroom place on 9th Street for $175 a month. My Mott Street butcher-shop storefront was $250 with the barest trickle of tap water and a toilet next door, with my dragged-in street-mattress bed stuffed into the meat locker with meat hooks on the walls, foot-thick refrigerator door and iron-grate blood-vents in the floor. My last downtown pad was $250 for a huge flat in what was mostly a shooting gallery on 5th street, and when I moved to Hell's Kitchen the rent was $140 a month in a neighborhood that nobody wanted to live in. It was a blazing era with cool, strange, unique people, some now famous, some long gone, and every alchemista had black seeds growing in the alembic. You ever see Brian de Palma's flick, Hi Mom, starring de Niro? Everybody I knew lived in a place like de Niro's apartment. Quick porn-related story: I played a gig with the David Peel Band on a cable show called The Underground Tonight Show on cable channel D, in October '75. The show had moved from its home at the Cafe Wha? up to 22nd Street, into a fucked up funky loft with a buncha broken wood and debris all over. I'm sitting at the AVN awards in 2004, talking to legendary director Roy Karch, and the show came up in conversation. Guess what? Roy fuckin' Karch DIRECTED that series, and totally remembered that particular show and most details about our band's set. Thirty years later! Who would've known what the future held for both of us?!?
Joe Gallant: Fuck, how could it not? It was like Berlin in the '20s. Made me what I am today. The culture was just a lot more intense and interesting back then, because the city was like a cross between the Wild West and Amsterdam. Everybody was WORKING ON SOMETHING, everybody had BIG OPINIONS, people TALKED all night, REAL SHIT HAPPENED. And so, sadly, it seems like we've got a whole new infestation now, since the city's been made safe for the Viacom/Time Warner kids, quite by design. Vast mono-frequency'd waves of smug 20-30-something cultural vampyres, soulless and brittle, who dress, behave and speak in ironic, TV-cute ways like the casts of Seinfeld, Friends and Sex and the City, or like the young folks in all those "contemporary young-couple romantic-comedy" flicks that pop up regular as clockwork like control events on the Mayan calendar, all using the same pop-culture phrases, propagating the same dating/sex neuroses like Manchurian Candidate control-memes in big calculated feedback loops. All designed to keep young men and women from truly maturing, while offering them big daily ironic feel-good sucks on the carefully-landscaped "new media" tit. See, without a young generation to QUESTION any of the obscene lies they're being fed, 1950s "new cold war" obedience and conformity are back in vogue, but shellacked in a veneer of "edgy" Comedy Central/YouTube irony, all of which is, oddly, quite conservative at its core. Like watching Sid Ceasar and Imogene Coca doing post-war schtick on Your Show of Shows, but instead, it's endless variations of "office-type" spoofs made by "indie film" hipsters, who learned the codices from years of the same shit on SNL/Letterman/Late Night. Every other "cool new video" on MySpace is a spoof or parody of a movie that's essentially a spoof or parody. What the fuck happened? Well, it's all RIGHT ON TIME! So PAY ATTENTION to all the celeb sites as Paris enters her 10th day of jail time, and don't look behind the curtain. The haughty click-click of dead-voiced "kybds" like dry wings gathering ominously at the window... "Whereere did Time Out say that bar was??? I just texted that bitch like fiiiive tiiiimes." Children shouldn't play with dead things, as the flick says.
Joe Gallant: I'd question the manic energy thing. [It's] currently more like Red Bull nation than true manic-cool. But just 'cause the streets are filled with media's demon-spawn doesn't mean that it's not a great place. The vistas and shadows are still dazzling and cinematic, the streets and neighborhoods filled with detail. You can never really outgrow New York City. It's too big a challenge; it's got way too much of the best of everything. But I've been really digging LA, though. I shot half of Avenue X and all of Skin Trade there, and I'm completely seduced by it on all levels. I had planned to relocate there last year for a six-month tryout and I'm a bit behind schedule. Soon though. I used to think LA was a flat environment in the psychic sense, but I was just ignorant about it. It's got huge waves of sex, power and desperation radiating off of it, which you can see like bony neon fingers from up on Mulholland Drive. Also millions of great places to shoot guerilla dialogue, and it's the best place to initiate an adult film, because the whole industry is there. Both towns have their strengths, obviously. Eros Zine: With Crack Whores of the Tenderloin, the locations were in San Francisco. How does that city measure up to contemporary Manhattan? Joe Gallant: On all levels, it's like comparing an obsidian hammer and 20-year-old pussy. New York City is sharp, gnarly and abrupt with blunt-trauma money-agenda'd purpose. San Francisco is warm, wet and inviting, with a cute squishy romantic streak mixed with old-soul grace. It also smells and tastes a lot better! San Fran is mystical. The ghosts of Gold Rush whores and iconoclast American transcendentalists still make their good energy known there. Eros Zine: Your NYC Underground: Times Square Trash Vol. 2 won a 2003 AVN Award for Best Pro-Am or Amateur Tape. Did you thank God? Your parents? What'd it feel like to be a winner? Joe Gallant: It stunned me into silence, to see my home-made punkcollageArt xerox VHS box cover projected 25 feet tall as the winner was announced. I'll never forget it, ever. I won the next two years as well, in the same category, and those were exactly like that first time. I won an Emmy in '96, after like eight years of nominations, and that felt great. But the Emmy vibe is daylight crisp and clean, she's got her big art-nouveau wings and her atom, all TV and science, while the AVN statues are black and clear, a little nocturnal-tacky like the "reception area" of weird little Lexington Avenue Russian-chick cathouses. AVN mag seemed to really get what I was doing from the start, and that early sincere support made me want to develop my craft and push it all forward. Still does. Eros Zine: You've worked with infamous underground filmmaker Nick Zedd. Any long-standing collaboration going on there? Joe Gallant: Nick plays the government pornographer in Avenue X and I'm writing him a good solid acting role in my summer film. I've also helped him out on his Electra Elf cable series. I think Nick is heroic and amazing on many levels. His early stuff is profound, as he was right there in the gutter completely nailing the Lower East Side earth-node. If seen as pure documentation of a time and place long-gone, his films should be in the Smithsonian. Some people think he's stand off-ish or aloof, but he just really seems to have little patience for bullshit. Nick is honest and hard-working, and that's a-okay with me. Eros Zine: You've also cast Angel Baby, another New York City landmark, in a number of your films. I love her. No question there, really. Maybe you could comment on your favorite female porn stars? Joe Gallant: Angel Baby, Erika and Lucy were a constant part of the early stuff. All of them appeared in all three of my Manhattan cable series on a regular basis, and they gave a lot of time helping shape Black Mirror's direction. There's been a lotta great Valley girls blazing through the lens recently, since I've been working for LA companies over the last two years, and that's been interesting. I really dig Sasha Grey, she's very bright, very astute, wry in subtle natural ways, a true poMo art chick pornExplorer. Kimberly Kane is really great, a thinker and party chick, by turn, a natural director who could probably take on mainstream in a heartbeat. I love Ashley Blue 'cause she's big-hearted and fun and old-school wise. Kelly Wells, another deep clear-blue chick whose "crazy" persona is a good velvet rope protecting her Swiss-watch mind. Lexi Bardot is a sweetheart, she's wacky and edgy-girl but real smart, very generous of spirit. Sara Jay's been in a buncha my stuff. She's classy and low-key, and our friendship is very important to me. There's a new East Coast gal making strong, interesting stuff, named Brina James. She's really down to earth and together. I must confess a crush on Victoria Sin. She's like beautifully colored broken glass. Yipes!! Beautiful jagged Berlin vibe. I really dig her…directed her in two scenes and she tore the places apart. There are many cool people out there. All these girls I mentioned are doin' it for real, no self-worshipping hype, no frantic 24/7 publicist noise, no hipster minions. Just them doin' their thing, in a culture that's both porn-obsessed and sexually self-loathing.
Joe Gallant: I'm writing a screenplay for the summer that will star Sasha, Kimberly, Gia Paloma and others. very disturbing, powerful. I'm saving my paper-route money to make it happen. Also working up more string writing, with an eye to recording some quartet material as a new CD. I'm aiming to get Illuminati playing again soon, maybe by summer's end. That, and reading some of the books that are piling up all over the place here. Eros Zine: We'll look forward to all that! Any final advice, or comments? Joe Gallant: It cracked me up that Don Imus's words -- ONE PHRASE, spoken on ONE DAY -- brought big ol' untouchable zombie-eye-logo CBS literally to its knees, CAVING to Sharpton and the advertisers like a two-dollar crack whore. Imagine if a few hundred thousand folks started hangin' 'round the capitol steps every day -- like what happened EVERY DAY in the Vietnam era -- demanding, in no uncertain terms, the immediate investigation and impeachment of this pathetic two-bit thieving pack of Death-Machine jackals, or an IMMEDIATE NATIONAL HEALTH CARE PACKAGE, funded by ONE WEEK'S worth of the Iraq Lie? See, they now count on a well-meaning but basically lazy populace making ALL their life-choices online. When you can "e-protest" and feel good about it, it changes the entire rules of engagement. European and Latin American countries historically know a few things about getting BIG CROWDS OUT IN THE STREETS to affect change. POWER hates BIG SWEATY SERIOUS LOUD FOCUSED CROWDS. It always scares 'em. And, since these imperious stolen-election motherfuckers are still basically our EMPLOYEES, it's high time to treat 'em like that again. Eros Zine: Thanks, Joe! Readers, to find out more about Joe and his current projects, visit www.blackmirrorproductions.com.
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