hot action

~~ When I was a kid there used to be a late-night television show called "Bleu Nuit." It was known for broadcasting a lot of dirty French movies. "Bleu Nuit" was pretty softcore as I recall, but there was always a chance you'd get to see boobies and that was exciting.

My earliest encounter with hardcore video porn happened at a friend's house, also late at night. They had cable at their house and my friend was scanning through some channels with really high numbers, like 56 or 57 or something. Some of these channels were showing scrambled porno movies.

He whispered, "Sometimes it comes in clear for a while, and you can just see everything."

Sure enough, every now and then the signal would come through and you'd get a glimpse of a heaving breast or a thrusting buttock. Then the screen would lapse back into the wavy black lines of interference.

I found the movies just as fascinating when they were scrambled. Naked female flesh rippled and pulsed across the screen in random, abstract patterns. The video had a strange sharp quality that didn't look like anything else on television.

I felt hypnotized, as if the patterns on the TV were telling me everything, transmitting a message that would allow me to decode the mystery of sexuality.

~~ Lately I've been keeping pretty busy with videoblogging. My new project is a vlog called Destroy Hot Action.

Videoblogging has only recently started to take off but we all know that video on the Internet has been around for a while now. As I am sure is the case with many people, my first exposure to video on the web was via the crappy little porn clip.

The free-porn clips that you're likely to find on the net all have certain characteristics. They start and end abruptly. They are short in duration and are unsatisfying. The sound and picture quality suffers greatly when the video is compressed down to MPEG format.

Most of these clips are probably taken from cheesy porno flicks that didn't have much plot to begin with. By the time they reach the web, all context has been stripped away. What you are left with is a few detached seconds of a sexual act.

You can download the clip to your computer if you feel like it. You can blow it up to full screen and watch as the low quality causes faces to come apart in harsh squares of pixelation. You can also set the clip to play back in a loop.

Ignoring the repetition might allow you to persuade your brain that you are watching an ongoing encounter. But the illusion quickly breaks down.

Like a word repeated to the point where it loses its meaning, the looped porno clip takes on a quality of the bizarre. Certain details rise to prominence and overshadow the action: a weird angle of the actor's leg, for example, or a short squeal that becomes more ridiculously noticeable each time around.

If you remove sex from its context, and then strip the sexuality from sex, what are you left with? Absurdity. And yet the brain responds to it. Pornography is compelling when it seems like there's no other action to be had.

You might claim to have no idea what I'm talking about; fair enough. But for millions of people, I'm describing the erotic landscape of their lives.

I've lived in isolation and felt the effects of porn addiction. I've written about it before. You can spend all evening clicking around, clicking and waiting, always two clicks away from the hottest thing ever.

Then you look at the time you've wasted trying to do something simple like get yourself off. It can make you feel a little bit sick.

And the absurdity stays with you. The images rise to your mind unbidden, at the worst possible times.

When it gets to be too much, it pisses me off. I want revenge. That's the meaning behind Destroy Hot Action.

The plan is that my mind will ruin pornography, instead of the other way around.

I'm going to pound these pixels to a pulp and save my penis for other things.