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Born in 1953, Mark Kramer, a secular Jew, came of age in New York at the same time porno came of age - the late 1960s. While in ninth grade, he schtupped the sister of a porn star. During the early 1970s, Kramer appeared in numerous porn loops. Noticing many of his comrades dropping dead of drug overdoses and other forms of self destruction, he fled to Dallas, Texas in 1976. He returned to New York ten years later to write for Al Goldstein's Screw magazine.

Mark Does Manhattan

In the latest issue of the (Dec/Jan 2000) South African general interest magazine "SL," Mark Kramer recounts his adventures as a 1970s New York porn star. Kramer is better known to l-keford.com readers as Krash aka the author of all reports titled "l-keford.com Wire Services Ltd.:".

Alex Sudheim from Durban writes SL magazine: "I feel compelled to congratulate Mark Kramer on his fiendishly brilliant account of his insalubrious exploits in the spuzz-drenched netherworld of the 70s New York porn movie scene. His razor wit, wicked eye for detail and acerbic gaze through the splooge-covered fish-eye lens of irony made for an enthralling and hilarious read. Mixing autobiographical account and biting satire with undisguised glee, Kramer has produced a miniature work of comic genius. In line with the great literary innovators of an aesthetics of scatology such as de Sade, Bataille, John Kennedy Toole and Mark Leyner, Kramer's instinct for the deliciously delinquent elements of life held in timid opprobrium by society is rare indeed. A most penetrating piece of writing, 'I Was a 70s Porn Star' is every bit as voyeuristically thrilling as 'Boogie Nights', with its only disappointment its brevity. Get this man to write a book, or I'll sell my copy of 'New Loops' to Ster Kinekor."

SL mag introduces Mark's piece thus: "Finding himself unemployed and horny in 1970s New York, Mark Kramer joined the burgeoning porn industry and felt the rise of skin flicks first hand."

Here are excerpts from Kramer's article:

Terri and I awaited our cue to play a scene of 'bloody,' sexually-explicit psychodrama - intended by the film's director as an X-rated lampoon of the sexploitation thrillers then popular in many of the crumbling movie palaces lining New York City's once-notorious 42nd Street.

These were the days of commercial concupiscence - a time when libidos ran wild, if not free. I was being paid one hundred 1974 U.S. dollars by director Lech Kowalski, to commingle my flesh with Terri's beneath the 16mm camera's unblinking gaze. For an additional $100 Lech was also using my dreary Greenwich Village apartment as the film's location.

For me, this was nothing short of form following dysfunction. At 22 febrile years of age, I could not have imagined a sweeter gig. I was the product of an era when relentless sexual exploration was widely touted as the key to a better life. From earliest adolescence I had been transfixed by the interplay of dirty art and arty dirt and their visual power, unrivaled except by religious relics, to produce glandular responses.

Skin magazines celebrating an emergent pornutopia were turning up alongside Life and Time on suburban newsstands. Garish storefronts and marquees, with flame-red exteriors, seemed to sprout up overnight in virtually all of America's increasingly derelict downtowns and post-industrial outlands. The zeitgeistly message was 'Do it!' - closely followed by its corollary, 'f--- It!' Real estate was soft, penises were hard, morals were loose, and a lost generation of wayward young exhibitionists had converged on the metropolitan underbelly ripe for action...

Since this was before the age of music video and before New York City had even been wired for cable TV, porn was an accepted local mainstay of the professional filmmaking economy. I was enrolled in New York University's School of Film and Television at the time and porn offered one of the best forums for on-the-job production experience as well as the opportunity to make contacts...

Despite Director Lech Kowalski's blunt disinterest in orchestrating acts of arousal, as a Mafia subcontractor he was obligated to compile a certain amount of hardcore sex for theatrical exhibition. In the years to come, the enigmatic Lech would attain a certain global cultdom for his Sex Pistols documentary D.O.A.. In the meantime, he demonstrated a flair for eliciting scenes of maximum degradation from his 'talent,' as well as always bringing his pornos in under budget...

Also colonising this mis-en-scene was a clutch of carnal cosmopolitans including the highly recognizable and semi-legendary screen stud Marc "Mr. 10 1/2" Stevens - whose genitalia would be immortalized in at least one Robert Maplethorpe - and top-heavy temptress Darby Lloyd Rains, an expressive blond who went on to attain brief renown in the ponderously scripted crotch-opera Memories Within Miss Aggie.

Elsewhere in the apartment, lesser-known porners made themselves at home. In the kitchen, fixing herself a snack from the contents of my refrigerator was 'Supermax', a hard-living, late-30-something Jewess with maternally sagging teats who, because of, or despite, her robust appetite for fellatio, was usually cast by porn directors as a cheap source of tragi-comic relief. In the living room, a young toffee named Jimmy Sweeney had stripped down and was nonchalantly airing his weighty equipment on the sofa while smoking a joint - which I discovered later had been peculated from my carefully hidden stash, as was the small canister of coke from which "Mr 10 1/2" and Darby Lloyd Rains were taking liberal toots. Nothing was sacred here - not even the profane...

Kramer writes to me in the summer of 1999: "I was working on and in New York City porn in the early Seventies. Among the name porners I worked with were the late Marc “Mr. 10 1/2” Stevens and second-tier smut siren Darby Lloyd Rains. Even back then there’d be coke on the sets. It was Open City all the way.

"I suspect that I am among the very few writers working today to have immersed his flesh in this particular outpost of the Sexual “Revolution”--and then to resurface, almost twenty years later, as a subcultural chronicler and investigative humorist for venues ranging from New York Magazine, The Weekly World News, Screw and the recently defunct Spy to to the Montel Williams show and Inside Edition. Plus Paul Krassner’s The Realist--which, in particular, was a fulfillment of subversive writerly aspirations dating back to my youth.

"Back in the Sixties, growing up in New Jersey, I’d take the bus into New York City on weekends and sometimes on schooldays as a truant , and hang out in the East Village or take acid on the Central Park Great Lawn, where there always seemed to be a love-in or free concert in progress. On the bus ride back to Jersey--if I weren’t too drunk or tripped-out--I’d usually have an assortment of reading material purchased in the City....stuff like Screw, The East Village Other, Zap Comix, After Dark, and Paul Krassner’s The Realist.

"One of earliest stories in The Realist that tuned me into the coming pornocentricity that would ultimately engulf civilization was Ellen Sander’s “The Case of The Cock-Sure Groupies”--a profile of the now-legendary Plaster Casters, two midwestern groupie chicks who made dental-alginate penile casts of pop stars ranging from Jimi Hendrix to The Monkees. . By 1973, my subcultural longings somehow coincided with the downtown Manhattan porn scene--a very specific set of moments in the history of theatrically exhibited pornography,a period of perhaps two years during which it was still possible to refract youthful dreams of radical creativity through a feverish milieu of unbridled optimism whilst commingling one’s essences with total strangers beneath hot lights.

"One of the directors I worked with was Lech Kowalski, best known for the Sex Pistols documentary “D.O.A.” and the first inside-porn documentary “Porno Babies”, where porners were interviewed in their homes and suchlike. Fast-forward to 1976, at which time I’m working the midnight-to-8 AM shift in a 24-hour illegal bar on East Ninth Street called The Kiwi, with a sign in front reading “Warm Beer, Bad Food.” I’m living in a $90.-a -month craphouse on Avenue A. There were narcotics everywhere, muggings and other interpersonal crime were endemic, and the City’s sidewalks flowed like gutters with the festering excrudences of a decaying metropolis. And against this colorfully metrophobian backdrop, my earlier porn experiences represented only the smallest part of my investigations into the urban American underbelly. The intensity with which I lived and worked ultimately hit the wall of disillusionment---perhaps because, at age 24, I felt I didn’t have the intellectual skills or tools to process what was happening around me. So I moved to Dallas, Texas...and did not rematerialize in Gotham until 1986.

"My point being: I was f---ing beautiful Jewish coeds for the camera--and back then it was Arriflex BL--when David Aaron Clark was still enrolled in grade school. Ditto for all the pot-and-acid-drenched sexual hypocrites like Eric Danville and Abby Ehmann and penis amputee Joe Christ---all of whom used Screw, which supposedly celebrates authentic erotic experience, as their grudge-driven vehicle to blacken my name and reputation, or in the violence-prone David Aaron Clark’s case, maybe even blacken my eye. So maybe now you can see why I so much look forward to David Aaron Clark’s upcoming court appearance here."

Kramer returned to New York in 1986, at age 34, wanting to be a writer. After answering an ad in the Village Voice, he started writing for the New York sex weekly Screw in the Spring of 1987. "[Screw editor] Manny Neuhaus would run interference between Al [Goldstein] and I. Basically I was on notice that I could not talk to Al without Manny's permission. Yet, I was expected to be the voice of Al. I was Al's ghostwriter. It was ridiculous. It created this unnecessary additional step in the process of putting out the magazine.

"Gil Reavil wrote Al's editorials for about $500 a month. And to f--- this guy, Manny took it away and gave it to me… And it turned out that I made a great Al proxy… probably some f---ed up Oedipal thing. I really liked being Al and spending time around him. At editorial meetings, I enjoyed bubbling over with ideas. But Manny had this fast rule, that you couldn't say anything in an editorial brainstorming meeting unless you cleared it with him first. He would go around with a clipboard before a meeting and ask, 'what are you going to say?' His argument always was, if you say the wrong thing, Al might like it. And it will make a lot of work for all of us.

"This went on for years… So for years people were sitting there with great ideas… But if you told Manny an idea, he could and would appropriate it as his own. He felt that because he hired me, any of my ideas belonged to him.

"In my Spy story… I had gotten this media kit from a group called the Angry Inchers, a lobbying group for men with small penises. And of course Manny had a very small penis. And it developed that Manny was doing an article on penis size for Joe Weider's Muscle Magazine. His only published story since the Ford administration. I showed him this and he took it and presented it as his idea.

"During one editorial meeting, Al Goldstein said, 'somebody told me that the San Francisco Spectator is a better paper than Screw. Why the f--- is that?' Manny knew that I knew that in the face of Al's proprietary mania, Manny had been double dipping. He had been selling Screw reprints to the Spectator and Al did not know it. And Al still does not know it. And Manny had been publishing stories in Screw that had supposedly run in the Spectator. And these are supposedly rivals…

"Two stories by Manny's friend Larry Tritten appeared in both Screw and Spectator with out Al's knowledge and without acknowledgement… This is my first publishing job and I am seeing the mad arbitrariness of the things that Manny is doing. He's daring somebody to tell Al why some people are saying that the Spectator is better. Al would've gone on a Stalinesque purge had he known… Josh Alan Friedman was the best writer Screw ever had… But Al just left everything to Manny…

"Manny was an erotophobe, caught in an unpleasant marriage. He has no friends, no social life, no interests, no connection to a community…"

Luke: "What's the deal between you, Eric Danville at Penthouse (formerly with High Times and Screw magazine) and his wife Abby Ehmann?"

Mark: "They've been bad mouthing me all over… Eric dished me and my Joe Christ story in Screw… Eric was a Manny Neuhaus protégé and was very close with David Clark. Eric did Joe Christ's bidding. Eric's wife was badmouthing me at a zine conference…

"Someone did a magazine story called Fear and Loathing in Joe Christ's Pants. And this guy was at a zine conference, and Abby, in full earshot of all these people, went on and on about what a psychopath and a liar I am. And Nick Z, filmmaker, had to step in and say, 'whatever you think of him, Mark is a good writer…'

"David Clark wrote about ten things about Joe Christ in Screw… David Clark has written at least twice in books anthologized by Joe Christ's wife Nancy Collins. She paid him and she advanced his career. And yet, here is a guy who works at Screw magazine, supposedly the world's preeminent voice of unblinking candor, and truth, and investigative prurience…praising a guy who cut off his dick. Not only did Clark not investigate this, he appears in the movie with Christ, in which the missing dick appears. You can go to my site and see a picture of the stump.

"Joe Christ's wife, Nancy A. Collins, published the book SUNGLASSES AFTER DARK, a nouveau vampire genre…where the vampire is a punk. She then published several horror anthologies like Forbidden Acts, which included work by David Clark and other Screw writers. Who then wrote complimentary stuff about her hubby Joe Christ, who came out of bands in Oklahoma and Texas. In the late 1980s, in an amphetamine-induced state, he lost his penis, either by directly cutting it off or by shooting cocaine into his penis, it got gangrene, and had to be amputated. Joe Christ came to New York, where he shot sardonic videos with naked fat girls and lots of fake blood. Joe made a 1995 movie called Sex, Blood and Mutilation, starring Dave Clark and a dickless man, Joe Christ."

Luke talked to David Aaron Clark 7/6/98:

Luke: "Do you like to be dominated by women?"

David: "Some women. Fewer and fewer as I get older. I've had some unfortunate meetings with women over the past few years who've thought, 'this is the famous masochist David Aaron Clark. He's going to fall to my feet and kiss my boots.' A woman has to earn my respect and I haven't met anyone in a couple of years who's earned the right…

"Masochism was therapy for me. I dated a girl [Jean Leslie] when I first started at Screw who committed suicide by jumping out a window. She was also a singer in my band. She was a hooker. I was so devastated by her suicide. It came out of her drug problem.

"She moved out of my house into a womens only SRO - single room occupancy. She took up her speed and cocaine habits again after she left me. One night the police came to my house and said, 'will you please come identify this body.' She had jumped out the window. July 9th, 1993.

"Her death was devastating to me. I had dabbled S-M before that, but after her suicide, I got deeply into it, working out Catholic guilt issues and so forth. And I've worked out many of those issues. I no longer psychologically need to be abused.

"I look down my nose at people who get into S-M because it is fashionable. For me, it was visceral. It grew out of my life circumstances. It wasn't picking up Skin Two and said 'Damn, people look good in rubber.' Though I did get adopted by that crowd because I was flamboyant."

Luke: "That black outfit is disturbing."

David: "Only to little old ladies and you Luke."

Luke: "The glorification of death bothers me."

David: "I embrace life and death. I think everybody is dysfunctional. That is the price of consciousness. We are the only species to have a soul. We're blessed and damned at the same time. The chicks dig it. Especially the disturbed chicks."

Mark Kramer: "What distinguishes my case from that of Josh Alan Friedman--who threatened to throw Manny out Screw's 11th floor window-was that Neuhaus, who considered me his disloyal "discovery", encouraged my successors--Clark and Danville, both of whom penned in Screw unprovoked attacks on me--to blacken my name whenever the opportunity arose. This campaign was facilitated by the arrival of penis amputee Joe Christ on the scene--hungry for publicity and working hard to stay one step ahead of the severed-penis scandal.

"Ultimately Joe Christ's penopathy merged with David Aaron Clark's blood-fetish amid Manny Neuhaus' troubled, and possibly criminal, reign at Screw.

"This is trickle down economics. There was something going on [in the early '90s] in the world of comic book publishing. It was like a snake swallowing a small animal… You could see this blob of capital traveling through that world briefly. Dave Clark had books published. Joe Christ had a little thing going. The Pot Dealers and the Psychadelic Solution had a thing going. Joe Christ interacted with all these people, and because I'd written this piece in the New York press about penile mutilation, Joe Christ was on a fulltime crusade to defame me.

"I was living in a SRO (Single Room Occupancy) hotel room and publishing lots… I wasn't paying much attention to Clark's writing on Christ. I didn't hang out with these people. But when I published the blood story in Newsday, all the poison spewed out… The boil was lanced… David Clark told people that I had stolen his idea for the blood story.

"Here, approximately verbatim, is the copy I filed with Newsday on the blood article. Take note of how the following in no way reflects the two Kramer-bashing items Clark had written in the months that preceded it. Again, the Clark text was deleted by New York Newday editor Stanley Mieses, for both space reasons and because he, Stanley, adjudged Clark's blood-schtick to be less authentic than those of the artists that ultimately appeared in the finished piece. It was written in October of 1993."

"Pain without blood is like orgasm without semen", theorizes former SCREW staffer David Aaron Clark. Clark works both both sides of the blood/brain barrier-- in performances in which his lavishly tattooed thorax is offered up to the scalpel of his kittenishly consanguinous collaborator, Joanne Vargas. As the steely-eyed 19-year-old brunette, clad in leather panties and a studded halter, carves a cross into Clark's chest with surgical precision, his features convulse into a mask of genuine torment. With rivulets of blood transcepting his ursine chest, Clark intones, "Every time you force open a door between the sticky pores of my flesh, my body shudders with the headlong thrust of my spirit trying to surf its way on the pounding bloodwaves of my heart."

Clark recently elicited a flurry of tabloidal interest summarized in the New York Post headline "Porn editor all cut up after spat with kinky cutie". Ironically, the impromptu domestic knife play that landed the beefy, hirsute 33-year old Clark in St. Vincent's Hospital and kittenish 19-year-old collaborator Joanne Vargas in jail was richly reminiscent of their live stage act. In these cavalcades of consanguinity, the steely-eyed brunette , clad in leather panties and a studded halter, applies a scalpel with religio-surgical precision to Clark's lavishly tattooed thorax until his features convulse into a mask of genuine torment and rivulets of blood transcept his ursine chest. The remaining stations of the cross are then marked with such sacremental appliances as nipple clamps, dildos and the occasional branding iron.

"Not everybody is into the high art of it," admits Clark, a hopelessly lapsed Catholic, "Some people are just drawn to the sight of blood. I guess you could call it the Geek Factor..." Clark has declined to press charges against his alleged assailant-although their engagement is off for the time being.

***

Kramer remembers the day in 1994 when Clark, after Kramer had left him an obscene message about f---ing his late girlfriend Jean Leslie, punched him. The attack took place on December 14 at Psychadelic Solution, in the West Village, 33 West 8th Street. Mark was reviewing an art exhibition for New York magazine. The show was called "Finale," the gallery's final show of psychadelic art.

Mark: "Clark by this time had already published a picture of me jerking off a squirrel [1992]. He'd published a letter against me… "So I said to Clark, if you think I stole your story, then you also think that I didn't f--- your girlfriend for three bags of cocaine [Mark gave her three bags. He concluded later it was not worth it.] I left him a message saying that." Clark's hooker drug addict girlfriend Jean Leslie had recently committed suicide.

"Only reason I ever met her was because she was staying across the hall with a friend of mine named Char at 55 First Avenue. She leapt out a flophouse window--The Martha Washington Hotel-- in a speed-induced frenzy as cops broke down the door.

"Then I heard that Dave Clark was after me. He was going to kick my ass. I did not take it seriously. We're supposedly hard bitten pornographers. We deal in hyperbole. The whole world of Screw, underground comics, the whole world of pornography is all about dissing and slurring and disparaging… Come on man [Clark], you work for Al Goldstein, the king of f--- you.

"I basically forgot about it. I got this gig for New York magazine. I am all excited. So these hippies that time forgot, called me, and said, 'Kramer, get over to the Psychadelic Solution. There's a special reception.' So the setup began. I get over there and the first person I see is Joe Christ's wife. She runs to the back of the room to Joe Christ… "I go to work. I'm carrying my laptop. I'm drinking Cranberry juice. I've got a notebook and pen and I'm wearing glasses. And 15 minutes later, Dave Clark walks in, and comes right for me. He says, 'do you want to do it here or do you want to do it outside?' I said, 'Dave, I'm working.' He said, 'f--- your work,' and he hit me in the face and knocked my glasses off. Both my hands were filled. He got me in a headlock and people broke it up and that was the end of it.

"And Joe Christ came up to me and said, 'whatever you do man, don't call the police.' Because the place reeked of pot. And I'm no narc. I'm not going to get all these people arrested. "So at some point I leave. And there's Dave out there with a photographer, and a whole clutch of people from Screw including their news photographer Don Deczick. And at that moment, my new girlfriend shows up. She's famous. She's a serious person. She's not used to this scene.

"And there's Dave Clark, who says, 'if you don't apologize to me right now, I'm going to kick your ass. I don't care if I go to jail. I don't give a s--- about anything. So I said, 'I'm sorry. But hey man, you wrote a thing about me jerking off a squirrel.' "He said, 'I don't give a f--- about that. You better apologize to me or I am going to kick your ass.' "Hey, I'm sorry. And I left.

"And then Joe Christ writes a letter on behalf of the owner of Psychadelic Solution to New York magazine telling them that I am a crack head… That I was drunk and spilling drinks on people. Telling them that I picked a fight. And all this other s---. It was all false. And they just went ballistic at New York magazine and they never hired me again. They'd never received anything like this. And it hurt man. My career went into a tailspin."

Photographer Clayton Patterson also attended the reception. He writes: "Yes I was at Psychadelic Solution the night Mark Krammer was beaten up; well, at least was punched. Mark was struggling for his health at his time. He was very poor and was living in a crack invested hotel called the Jane West. Mark was not involved in the trade of the hotel. This hotel is at the bleeding end of the gay flesh market. Mark was, as always, working at writing. No matter how difficult the times, Mark, without question is a writer. We are talking about a seriously difficult struggle. Mark had slid off the boat into the ruff sea and was digging his stub bitten nails into the wood trying to pull his way back up to, at the very least , the plank. I admire the fact that he fought back. Fought back and won! Mark's survival is a miracle. Many a stronger soul has been lost in smaller storms.

"Mark is tough. In this his darkest hour there was a small reprieve, a tinny little light, off in the distance. He had an opportunity to write a small piece for the New York Magazine. He had the perfect gig. He know the gallery, he understood the sub text of the art and had a sharp pencil. Mark came early to the opening. He was oven cleaner clean. He was drinking cranberry juice straight up. No ice, no booze. Clearly focused. I had just finished speaking to Mark, and was headed towards the back gallery room. Suddenly, David Aaron Clark, a person who I had always known as a gentleman, thundered into the room. Mr. Clark, dashed his large chunky frame directly towards Mark Karma, lifting his 30 lb turkey breast fist and drove it into the side of Mr. Karma's head. Smack! Karma moved around, and proposed the question of what are you doing to me? People were shocked and wide eyed. This was suppose to be the palace of love. The toke filled happy hippies. This was a dark end to a very unique under ground art scene. Too bad. This place was the best.

"Mark felt that the most honorable thing to do was to leave. So he did. He went home fulfilled his a job obligation and wrote the Gothem article. Believe it or not, his luck got even worse. The Upper East Side yuppies at New York Magazine rewrote his piece in such a way as it would humiliate and outrage everyone that had been at the opening. The down your nose hostility made it to sound as if the gallery owner had a crack heads head, covered in oily dirty hair ( a man with especially fine, well manicured, curly thick Jewish locks, soaped and hand cleaned by pale Asian Virgins and cost $150 to be pulled back into a swish buckler pony tail) and was just plan stupid. Why would well educated, well paid, well bred, well situated, have everything people be so nasty to someone who was on the verge of life and death. These narcissists are not good people. This struggle has become Mark's life. It is a different path than I would have chosen. I would like to have seen peace made between some of these people over the years. So I differ from Mark on some of these points. However he did make it through and is still writing. I assure you with his dedication and pit bull strength I always want to stay on his good side. And yes, he is still writing. God bless him."

Kramer says about Screw: "These people were the custodians of porno culture… The self satirical thread running through this is that the guy who's fanning the flames all along has no dick. This is Screw, man. This is about getting your dick sucked. This guy only has a stump.

"Al was always exposing hypocrisy…press coverups… Saying, this is a lie. This is deception… And in the middle of all this, you have Joe Christ getting in Screw all the time. And Joe Christ gets in a movie… And in the movie he says, 'I cut my dick off to enhance my sexual pleasure. Women like it better.' It's an ode to genital mutilation.

"I've had heavy duty lawyers contact me from Joe Christ and Nancy Collins, threatening to shut down the site with my book on it, Dickless in Babylon: The Joe Christ Story.

"These hippies that time forgot invited some Spy [magazine] people to their pot dealing salon who described it in exquisite detail and just changed the names. And it is no different today than when Spy wrote it.

Kramer: "This is a weird glandular comedy of manners linked to the porn canon. When Clark attacked me in that gallery it set in motion a juggernaut of events that hurt my life. He skipped off to San Francisco, then John Bone and Extreme…

"Dave Clark must've known that Joe Christ had no dick but he covered it up in his own monetary interest. And that coverup took the form of an attack on me in a public place, a letter to New York magazine and other pranks that you would not believe. They called Tom Cruise's agent, saying they were me, trying to get me fired from The Globe [supermarket tabloid].

"I think Joe Christ had a side pot concession. And the pot dealers, the hippie couple who time forgot, writes for Screw. And ran the Screw pot concession. And Joe Christ was part of this small change pot operation. And Joe Christ worked at Psychadelic Solution. It's part of the function of whoever writes the Naked City column for Screw to beat the drums for the Psychadelic Solution.

"Christ has impressively has harnessed the machinery of priapism in pornography to create his myth while at the same time he has no penis. Which would be a private matter if he had not appeared in a 1995 movie with Dave Clark (two years after I wrote that he did not have a dick). And in the movie, there's a guy with a missing dick. We've given him every opportunity to drop his pants and prove he's got a dick… If he's so risque and bodacious, why can't he do that? Dave Clark drops his pants all the time."

Contacted for comment on this story, David Clark said 6/13/99, "I don't comment on crack heads. But yes, I did punch him."

Kramer responds: "As an avoidance mechanism, Dave Clark et al reduce the whole thing to "I don't comment on crack heads" lest they face the sad truth about how they squandered their opportunities in alternative cultures.. "I don't comment on crack heads": I'm sure that's what he'll say to the judge in court here when he's finally called to account for his criminality and asked why he punched a writer at an art-gallery soiree.... Luke, what happened didn't have anything to do with drugs. As I've told you, and this is fact-checkable, was that I was there for one reason only, and that was on assignment for New York magazine. Ultimately, I think that's what galled Clark...that a "crack head" had overcome the Screw stigma and was getting some real exposure for the ideas that porn operative Clark thought were "his"... BTW: There's a former Screw illustrator named Scott Cunningham whom Clark menaced with threats of violence in Screw workplace..."

Oy writes about the "Mark Kramer vs. David Clark Controversy":: BAM! POW! SNARF! And whatta slug-fest it WAS! Far fukkin OUT! Incidently, the hippie couple that David Aaron Clark is raving about bears a certain dead-on resemblance to Leo and Wendy in SPY's "The Hippies That Time Forgot." Here's an excerpt. As they say at "The World's Greatest Newspaper"--read it and wipe. HAW!

DYSPEPTIC PHILOSOPHER.

Leo's apartment-in the East Village XX Second Avenue; NY NY, of course, he told me over the phone--was like a little museum, jammed full of pop culture detritus from 1968: Marshall McLuhan's UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, Lenny Bruce op posters, Haight-Ashbury posters, dog-eared psychedelic postcards and dusty psychedelic record albums, freestanding dust, clay pipes, huge Ziplocs of marijuana and--could such things be?--plastic, proto-hippie troll dolls with the navels and blowsy hair and pug noses. On each of the two windows was a mandala decal. On the mirror a sheet of paper said "NOTHING" in giant computer type.

Leo (not, alas, his real name) has had the apartment since 1970 and had hung out there since 1968. The only more recent items I noticed were a lamp, minus the bulb, that had designed in the shape of a mushroom cloud, and a copy of THE TOWER COMMISSION REPORT. Only its conspiratorial subject matter kept the glossy TOWER paperback from being an anachronism. Leo has blond hair to his shoulders, a close-cropped grey-flecked beard, squinty eyes. His wife, Wendy (also a pseudonym) hair and black-framed futurama glasses. She knelt at a drafting board and injected an occasional comment into his rap. Its delivered in the simultaneously sardonic and earnest manner of the hipster of long ago: a stretched-out deadpan, dragged on and drawled almost to the point of parody.

Like so many of the never-say-die sixties creatures I encountered, Leo is a theorist stewing in his own musky intellectual juices, a social critic-cum-monologuist who is his own most respectful audience. One by one he picked out details of comtemporary life and shook them, bashed them, rejected them. SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE? "BAH. People enjoy jokes because they become acclimated to jokes, so they want jokes about the usual comedic modalities."

Complicated adult emotions? BAH. Today, with the conquest of disease and famine, he says, anyone's life is duller than the example given in movies...[so] everybody turns their lives into a soap opera. And the centerpiece of the sixties--rock 'n'roll. BAH. From the conservative point of view, there's no better phenomenon than rock'n'roll... A whole bunch of people yelled and screamed. But nothing's happened...STATISTICALLY.

After he had reviled and dismissed my present and left only his cache of hippie icons floating in front of me, groused about his sixties as well. "I ended up at Woodstock. I didn't bother listening to the music. It was too horrible to try and sit there. This whole hillside had turned into, like, this mud hill, and it had this REEK to it that was too much to take. It was really difficult. The place was crowded to the gills. The whole hillside was crowded with people, and you had to walk among them in this kind of muddy gook. And the stench was intense.

While we were talking a young man and a young woman were led in, the young woman in a dress, the young man in a button-down shirt. got the point. I suppose you're here for that wonderful blotter acid we had last week. It was 1966! Now as then, square kids from suburbia were beginning to filter into the Village to get turned on. SQUARE KIDS? I was mistaken.

"I want to say," the girl said, awestruck and shy, "that I had half a hit and it was just SO BEAUTIFUL." Leo nodded. And then he said what any acid head would have said 20 years ago in reply. "It's made," he announced, "by OWSLEY." Then he sold them his LSD at $5 a hit.

They handled the retail pleasantries and Leo was sardonic and the kids left. I had been hoping to find friendly, hopeful hippies with values I would find heartwarming and could condescend to. Instead, I just condescended. This permanent hippie had created no new worldview and kept no sustaining faith in the old one. I tried to maneuver him into saying that something was better than something else, to value some value. "I'm better at figuring out the inconsistencies if somebody wants this or that. That's how I criticize things... It's not the moral question, it's more of a logical question."

At last: a hippie logician. Not just logic, it turned out--hippie calculus, pure hippie research, M.C. Escher-ism run amok. "I'm a mathematician," Leo said finally, a little annoyed at my attempts to pin him down. "Here, look, tons of things. Here, this, tons of stuff, here!," he said, becoming excited for the first time, moving around the room, picking up handfuls of proofs and theorems and shoving them at me. "Little mathematical notes and things!"

He showed me a Rubik's Cube-like device shaped like a star. "Alexander's Star. See this? I invented that!...It was a great way to make money!" Finally he handed me a piece of graph paper on which a triangular design was drawn.. Would it, at last, explain the sixties? If you count the little triangles that are coming up in each column, Leo said, you get 1,1,2,1,3,2,3,1,4,3,5,2,5,3, 4,1,5,4,7,3,8,5,7,2,5,8,3,8,7.

Email to Luke: "Screw the "ordained" critics. Those of use who read your web site faithfully have learned the style of your writing and have adapted to it so we should enjoy your book. As for Joe Christ, the story I got is that he got wasted and put on a cock ring. These allow the blood to go in but not out much like a tournetkit (sp). Allegedly, Joe Christ/wasted fell asleep with the cock ring on and as with the tourniquet were you have to occasionally allow blood flow to prevent gangrene. This didn't happen so when Joe Christ finally woke up with a "talkingblue" dick he went to the hospital and was informed that there was not a pill to correct this. Since then he has been trying to transform this alleged drunken screw-up into an artistic statement. Don't try this cock-ring thing at home or while under the influence."

Email: "Luke, I checked out the Joe Christ site. I know he thinks he's being really edgy and it may shock some of your readers, however I found it to be a yawn. The whole cut-off-your-penis movement was happening in the early '90's, including normal straight guys who were telling us (females) that they would like to cut it off, not be bothered by it, not at it's mercy. It just seemed like another ploy to try to seduce us, since they were supposedly admitting to their sexism and patriarchal dominance. The fact that Joe actually cut his off at this time (early 90's) doesn't surprise me. At that time too there was a lot of gender-wars, transgenders were even considered "cool". At that time I found it distasteful, not edgy, but I was not shocked at the depths some guys would go to to seduce women. However, good for Joe Christ for having an audience, but to me it's boring, been there, done that."

Oy writes: "The Clark/Kramer/Christ kerfuffle kicks ASS! I'll bet you didn't know that the NEW YORK MAGAZINE editor who rewrote Kramer's Psycho Solution story, Kurt Andersen--author of this season's "hot" novel, TURN OF THE CENTURY--was the SAME Harvard hots--- who edited "The Hippies That Time Forgot" in SPY years earlier. Also, Sarah Jewler, executive editor of NEW YORK at the time of the PsySol dust-up, was dating a guy, Jay Kennedy of the Universal Features comics syndicate, who was a witness to the Psychadelic Solution attack--is a longtime pot customer of "Jacaeber", pot and acid supplier to "The Hippies That Time Forgot" and a financial backer of the Joe Christ video SPEED FREAKS WITH GUNS. What a tangled web they weave... Must be smokin' some good s---!"

Gene Suicide writes Luke: I read your piece PORNO APOCALYPSE (great title) and immediately thereafter dialed up Mr. Kramer who suggested that you'd be interested in a taking a peak, or possibly including, a drunken interview that took place on the upper West Side last March. Although drinking heavily, we managed to blaze a hellish path through the lost arcana of Kramer's past work with Lech Kowalski. Kowalski's new film, KING OUTLAW is about Johnny Thunders and the skag casualties who made up the whole of the Max's/CB's set in the late 70's. The film also concentrates on his circumstantially unresolved death.

Your article was ridden with fascinatingly obscure asides which have direct ties to the coincidentally interpersonal contact webs of both SEX & GUTS MAGAZINE and DEAD ON CAMERA. Most of this madness began with my first calls to/from Mark Kramer, who seems to have been orchestrating some kind of resurgent wave of underground energy ever since. What I refer to here involves a combination of chance encounters, word of mouth, internet intrigue, and other low level rumblings which further indicate a violent info-storm brewing somewhere south of Krameria, pulsing steadily outward from his confines in Hell's Kitchen. Your article has directly broached this like no other.

As "Gene Suicide", I started publishing SEX & GUTS IN 1996, covering the works of Lech Kowalski, Nick Zedd, Lydia Lunch et al. The second issue contained the article OUT FOR BLOOD, aka FEAR AND LOATHING IN JOE CHIRST'S PANTS. The article demystified the anomalous Joe Lindhart/Christ amputation affair, and instigated my awareness of a subterennean dimension obviously fecund for further franchisement. In the ensuing months, I had several conversations with people such as Eric Danville's insignificant other, Abby Ehman, scensters from Joe's home base of Lancaster, PA, and many others who have since become irrevocably shrouded in blackout and drug haze. Many of them were adamant about reinforcing Kramer's negative reputation, perpetuated through mouthpieces of contempt such as Christ and Dave Clark. Soon after, my pursuit of the story now known as DEAD ON CAMERA began. DOC is the chapter that Legs McNeil left out of PLEASE KILL ME, an alternate history to the myriad humdrum punk tomes we have seen carelessly dumped on the shelves of Tower Books in the last half decade.

I am currently at work on several other projects with Lech Kowalski, including an excavation of his 70's porno loops, and the cutting of the Thunders film trailer.

So, here is the interview with Kramer. I have tried above to specify a few of the passages in PORNO APOCALYPSE which I can provide further background detail on via my own research and coverage of several areas, namely in the form of this Mark kramer interview. Although he already sent you an unedited version, prone to frequent digressions I do not see fit for any publication, this is the final edit. The occasioanl notation is there to document background noise when it was relevant to the course of the interrogation.

MARK KRAMER interview 3.6.99 Mid-afternnon. Sports bar on 110th street.

MK: I don't want Lech to hear this. Lech had this relationship with Wendy Clarke, who was the daughter of Shirley Clarke, who was the director, one of the true doyennes of direct cinema...and Wendy Clarke was also a pioneer in video, and direct, confrontational video documentaries. Lech was...

G: So Wendy Clarke was an artist in her own right, she wasn't just Shirley Clarke's daughter.

M: Absolutely. And Wendy and Lech worked together for years.

G: How do you know about this?

M: I was there for the early video explorations, when they had a portopack, and they were trying to use the portopack as a means of...maybe...they were exploring early on the possibilities of the portopack, and the portopack as an alternative to 16mm, as a documentary tool...

G: So the portopack was being used for the porno films...that he was doing in 73 to 76...

M: But it wasn't exploitive...I don't think he was using the portopack as a means of heightening the prurience of his porno work...I think in a way he was using the portopack as a way of subverting the whole porno world then. He didn't want to be a mere panderer, he wanted to be somebody who was challenging as well as pandering.

G: And hence LOOPS OF VIOLENCE which was an art film cum porno flick.

M: Whenever we talked back then, the LOOPS OF VIOLENCE was gonna be the last or the first nail in the coffin of pornography. I remember that being talked up big time.

G: So where was LOOPS OF VIOLENCE being discussed and promoted...back then when there was no real market yet? Back when there was DEVIL IN MISS JONES and DEEP THROAT but still the beginnings of the hardcore porno formula.

M: Lech exploited this intersticial place between porno and documentary. Between porno and critique of porno.

G: He hadn't even made a documentary up until that point. I mean, SEX STAR was a result of his involvement with the porno scene. But he was known as a guy who was doing a very special kind of porno. A very self-questioning kind of porno. (later)

M: There was a guy making porno movies that were about more than mere arousal. This was Lech Kowalski. I knew he was trying to bring some irony and self-understanding to people that didn't exist. And towards that end he brought in a lot of sexually undefined personalities that were existing at the time in 1974. In and about Max's Kansas City, and Club 82 and the porno world as it was known.

G: So Lech drew people from the crowds at Club 82 and max's?

M: Yeah. mainly through the person of Mark Slater, the soundman. And they were drawing upon the scene unfolding at Max's and Club 82 as a source of I guess...as a source of...there was some kind of spiritual or aesthetic proto-punk affinity...in the era that was just prior to punk as we understand it today. Lech Kowalski was making these movies with a bunch of people who were drawing upon the punk scene...

G: Before there was a punk scene...

M: Yeah. Through their bodies and their willingness to participate in pornography.

G: You knew about this before anyone else did, and nobody really did to begin with. So how did you find out about it?

M: There was a world in which anybody was permitted and anybody could partake in...there were new resources that were suddenly available. Women's bodies, total license to do whatever you want. it was suddenly available to enterprising filmmakers like Lech Kowalski. You know why? Unrestrained possibility of the time. I don't think there was anybody like Lech Kowalski working with the available resources of the time, which was unlimited willingness of the mafia to pour money into pornographic enterprises. There was nobody like Lech who was willing to offer that alternative viewpoint, both within the conventions of pornography and questioning the conventions of pornography. And the case with something like THE LOOPS OF VIOLENCE...yeah, aggresively challenging pornography while at the same time enjoying the resources that pornography could offer that.

G: Have you seen LOOPS OF VIOLENCE?

M: I was in LOOPS OF VIOLENCE. LOOPS OF VIOLENCE was an attempt to address the primary impulses of pornography at a time when people weren't questioning it, but were merely consuming it.

G: At a time when the promary impulses couldn't even be properly identified within that scene, because they were so caught up in the idea of making money that there wasn't any aesthetic, there wasn't any artistic factor in doing it. M: Very well put. Only with the distance that we now have can we begin to examine what Lech was doing, what was happening in the marketplace, and what was happening, in a wider context, in America itself, as reflected in porno movies as they were attributed, and as porno culture was portrayed in magazines of the time.

G: What about porno magazines at that time?

M: Porno magazines at that time were really devoted to playing up any porno scenes that existed. You know, like going out to CBGB's and getting a bunch of f---in strippers to go in to do a f---in photo shoot...

G: So even at that point, the punk rock'n'roll scene was interconnected to some kind of porno milieau.

M: Well there was an overall impulse of anything goes, and porn people were really an embodiment of that ethos of anything going.

G: So, at some point, maybe not up until this time, a publically recognized point, the punk scenes and the porn scenes were interconnected.

M: Yeah. I think groupie-ism was a really accepted and acknowledged part of punkdom, and part of pornodom. I think a lot of the sexual favors and the whole environment of sexual permissiveness had to do with the connection between the porno personalities who were willing to offer up their assets and punk personalities to exploit it. The freedom already existed, and the porn scene, especially in regard to the Dead Boys and maybe the Dictators, found a convenient affirmational presence in punk. It was cool to be a gal who was offering herself up to whatever punk bands that were then happening.

G: There was no connection to the music in the films Lech was doing. LOOPS OF VIOLENCE , in that there was no punk soundtrack, there were no trendy Lower East Side looking people in the film.

M: Well, they were very much in the film but there was no music. Mark Slater was so much connected to Lech Kowalski and that started to bring in music, especially in regards to a band called LEATHER SECRETS, that Mark Slater, with respect to Lech Kowalski, was seeking to exploit for it's erotic possibilities. Especially, the connecton to club 82. And Club 82 in 73 and 74 was the place for glitter and punk rock. Especially Wayne County.

G: Anyone else, besides Wayne County?

M: The New York Dolls were kind of the dominant ethical, and aesthetic presence, the bass line by which everyone identified what was acceptable, what was possible. Yeah.

G: Do you think the New York Dolls had any effect on lech's logic, and sensibility in approaching porno films as a means of artistic expression?

M: Yeah, the New York Dolls mainstreamed the idea of bi-sexuality, and unlimited sexuality like no other NY band had ever done. The NY Dolls were about unrestrained pursuit of sensation and that the unrestrained pursuit of sensation would bring you to a higher level of cultural undrstanding. Yeah.

G: Did the Dolls' audiences comprehend that?

M: Completely. People were looking for a reason to make sense of all the pornography on the outside, and the music on the inside...and how did it all connect? And how did it all make sense. The New York Dolls were a nexus. The Heartbreakers were an essential nexus. They were a next step, an essential post Dolls next step...towards bringing all the slimy impulses then happening in the East Village with....I guess...the Heartbreakers were a breaking away from the institutionalized multi-sexuality of the Dolls into an exploration of other alternative sexualites.

G: Mainly heroin oriented sexuality. Heroin romanticism. M: Heroin romanticism, cafe romanticism, East Village romanticism...to tell you the truth, maybe it was the birth of a new romanticism in the bombed out precincts that were the East Village. The East Village was a distintly unappealing place in the 70's. People were drawn to a milieau that understood porn, that understood exploitation, that understood Russ Meyer, that understood thus far all the fring cultures that thus far had motivated people in the East Village to create punk. Yeah. So LOOPS was shot at 3 Jane street, and all those personalities from the world of mainstream porn at that time were present. Mark Stevens, Super Max...Darby Lloyd Rains, and some other people. They were all there, and they were all in the film.

G: So how did your apartment come to be used as the location for the shooting of that film?

M: The guy I lived with had worked with Lech on previous porno movies with Andrea True, who became a big personality at that time. She had a song called...Andrea True had a top 40 song because of her work with Lech.

G: What was your first encounter with Lech like?

M: I was living at 3 Jane Street, going to NYU film school...and my roommate had worked with Lech, and they said "we can rent your apartment out for a porno movie."

G: Who was your roommate?

M: A guy named Jeff Weinman. He had worked with Lech in a lot of pornos. That's probably how Lech broke into movies.

G: How was LOOPS OF VIOLENCE different? In what way did it signal a change for Lech as opposed to what he'd already done in porno?

M: I think Lech really thought that LOOPS was integrating all the current conventions of porn.

G: Which was basically like cocksucking, women on the bottom, 69, blowjobs...

M: I think Lech hoped to subvert and simultaneously affirm porn.

G: Why did he want to affirm it?

M: He wanted to affirm it because...it had been very generous to him, and trusting of him. He wanted to negate it because it was as disgusting as it was....ultimately, it consisted of man on the bottom, women on the top...ultimately affirm everything that was wrong with our culture. He was caught in the conflict within two cultures. It was good to him. Porn gave Lech everything it had to offer. It gave him money when he needed it. And that's it. Lech was like a pro. He knew how to take all these totally deviant forces and make them something that you could make money off of...theke them and create a budget out of them, in that work context. Lech said "you can f--- this girl" amd I said, "okay, fine." Her name was Terry, she was a known porno person, and I f---ed her. I was twenty years old, I woulda f---ed a woodpile if there was a snake in it. Gene, imagine the context if you were my age, age 20, he says f--- this girl, and okay. It went really well. Lech would say "lick her ass", and I'd lick her ass, and hear him laughing. Lech was laughing as he asked people to do these things. He was cackling. So I first saw it in an editing suite. It was down here [note: Lower East Side] and there was a Steenbeck, he put the film on and there was me with this girl. I said "fine". They cut it down, and there's me f---ing that girl. Then they showed it in a movie theatre, and there I was. [Lech] wasn't [in the editing suite]. Some guys who worked on it put it on, and it was no big deal. It was some stupid theatre, a bunch of porno people pull up in a limousine, they expect a reception that's not available, so this is the big premiere, and we see all the stupid s--- we did with Lech.

G: The premiere was a letdown.

M: Yeah.

G: How?

M: It was a premiere, we expected some big Hollywood premiere, and it was a bunch of guys in Passaic yelling out "Find new actors!". There was no dialogue, there was no action. It was a bunch of weird Lech Kowalski anti-sexuality being played out.

G: When there was no hardcore f---ing, and there was other interaction between the other girls, you, the guys, and the girls, what were you doing?

M: There were no scenes but hardcore f---ing. f---ing, haning people up by harnasses, f---ing them...there was no drama, it was just sick. It was an idea of using stupid sex as a- [GLASS SHATTERS LOUDLY.] [anonymous crowd responds with enthuisatic applause and laughter.] We got it covered. Transcribe this s---. Transcribe this, and we'll go to the next level. NOTE: up until this point, I have been barking at Kramer demandingly, slurring my words, and inexplicably drawing out the word "f---ing". "SO, YOU WERE FUHH-KINGGG THIS GURLLL. SO, YOU KNOW, LIKE....SO THEN, WERE YOU..." etc etc. I speak over his words and have been repeating the same 3 questions endlessly. Kramer is similarly blitzed, but reaches irregular periods of slow, easy eloquence. I sound like an enraged football hooligan; I am VERY drunk.

M: Far be it from me to presume what was the logic of 1974, and those who were hoping to cash in on what the impulse was then. I don't know. I did it because there was the incredible allure that was sex, at that time. Then there was a vision of utopianism...(long pause)

G: ...happening in cold water flats in New York.

M: Yeah.

G: The streets looked like s---, there was garbage everywhere, but you could reach that state just by indulgence.

M: Yeah, right. The whole world was in a f---ing shambles, but people were demanding sexuality on their own terms. And that was it. And Lech was an exponent of that. Lech was a manipulator. He was an exploiter.

G: How did you feel when you heard him laughing while you were naked in front of his cameras?

M: I felt like a jerk. I remember him saying "Lick her ass" and laughing. I thought, okay, I'm getting paid for the day, it's my apartment..I'll lick her ass. And I never licked anyone's ass! That was the first time I'd licked anybody's ass. And certainly, in public. Lech Kowalski took the idea of licking somebody's ass as the thing that people did it real time. And that was a first. I felt that I was doing something that was totally permitted by the parameters of the age.

[In the background, "Light My Fire" begins on the jukebox and the sound eerily seeps through the above sentence. The interview is over.]

Mark Kramer vs. David Aaron Clark

Mark Kramer writes: I was working on and in New York City porn in the early Seventies. Among the name porners I worked with were the late Marc “Mr. 10 1/2” Stevens and second-tier smut siren Darby Lloyd Rains. Even back then there’d be coke on the sets. It was Open City all the way.

I suspect that I am among the very few writers working today to have immersed his flesh in this particular outpost of the Sexual “Revolution”--and then to resurface, almost twenty years later, as a subcultural chronicler and investigative humorist for venues ranging from New York Magazine, The Weekly World News, Screw and the recently defunct Spy to to the Montel Williams show and Inside Edition. Plus Paul Krassner’s The Realist--which, in particular, was a fulfillment of subversive writerly aspirations dating back to my youth.

Back in the Sixties, growing up in New Jersey, I’d take the bus into New York City on weekends and sometimes on schooldays as a truant , and hang out in the East Village or take acid on the Central Park Great Lawn, where there always seemed to be a love-in or free concert in progress. On the bus ride back to Jersey--if I weren’t too drunk or tripped-out--I’d usually have an assortment of reading material purchased in the City....stuff like Screw, The East Village Other, Zap Comix, After Dark, and Paul Krassner’s The Realist.

One of earliest stories in The Realist that tuned me into the coming pornocentricity that would ultimately engulf civilization was Ellen Sander’s “The Case of The Cock-Sure Groupies”--a profile of the now-legendary Plaster Casters, two midwestern groupie chicks who made dental-alginate penile casts of pop stars ranging from Jimi Hendrix to The Monkees.

By 1973, my subcultural longings somehow coincided with the downtown Manhattan porn scene--a very specific set of moments in the history of theatrically exhibited pornography, a period of perhaps two years during which it was still possible to refract youthful dreams of radical creativity through a feverish milieu of unbridled optimism whilst commingling one’s essences with total strangers beneath hot lights.

One of the directors I worked with was Lech Kowalski, best known for the Sex Pistols documentary “D.O.A.” and the first inside-porn documentary “Porno Babies”, where porners were interviewed in their homes and suchlike. Fast-forward to 1976, at which time I’m working the midnight-to-8 AM shift in a 24-hour illegal bar on East Ninth Street called The Kiwi, with a sign in front reading “Warm Beer, Bad Food.” I’m living in a $90.-a -month craphouse on Avenue A. There were narcotics everywhere, muggings and other interpersonal crime were endemic, and the City’s sidewalks flowed like gutters with the festering excrudences of a decaying metropolis. And against this colorfully metrophobian backdrop, my earlier porn experiences represented only the smallest part of my investigations into the urban American underbelly.

The intensity with which I lived and worked ultimately hit the wall of disillusionment---perhaps because, at age 24, I felt I didn’t have the intellectual skills or tools to process what was happening around me. So I moved to Dallas, Texas...and did not rematerialize in Gotham until 1986.

My point being: I was f---ing beautiful Jewish coeds for the camera--and back then it was Arriflex BL--when David Aaron Clark was still enrolled in grade school. Ditto for all the pot-and-acid-drenched sexual hypocrites like Eric Danville and Abby Ehmann and penis amputee Joe Christ---all of whom used Screw, which supposedly celebrates authentic erotic experience, as their grudge-driven vehicle to blacken my name and reputation, or in the violence-prone David Aaron Clark’s case, maybe even blacken my eye. So maybe now you can see why I so much look forward to David Aaron Clark’s upcoming court appearance here....

David Aaron Clark writes: A few remarks and clarifications, take them as you will:

Though I'm trying not to participate in the internet gossip mill, and I have successfully managed to ignore Mark Kramer's active inclusion of me on his enemies list for the last four years, I will make my one and only statement on all this tiresome s--- he's been peddling on the Internet -- the only place he can publish his work anymore.

It takes a career crackhead like Kramer to see conspiracies where instead exists the natural flow of people meeting and working together. I knew and was friends with Joe Christ when he first came to New York, before he ever hooked up with Nancy Collins, who I had also met separately. No, she had nothing to do with my novels being published -- I would have enjoyed a much better publisher, if she had. Yes, she bought two stories from me for anthologies she was editing -- because that's what writers and editors do. The story in Forbidden Acts received praise from reviewers as one of the best in the book. No conspiracy there.

Kramer was sucking up to Joe at first -- their falling out came when Kramer stole Joe's 18-year-old girlfriend that Joe had brought to N.Y. with him from behind his back. Kramer was struck by one of my blood performances, and wanted to write about it. I told him to write about all the other people who either did it before me or were also doing it. That was the genesis of the Newsday piece. At this point I was the only friend Kramer had at SCREW; he was banned from the premises. Everyone else shook their head at me for giving him any respect; and indeed, I ended up burnt.

Yes, SCREW and I (at Al's editorial command) made fun in the pages of SCREW of Kramer for having engineered the bogus "crack-smoking squirrels in Central Park" story that made the rounds of the British tabs in 1994. To any sane mind, this is hardly tantamount to making a foul insult about a person's lover and friend who has passed away under tragic circumstances. Kramer's hands were not full when I hit him, and to the best of my memory he was not wearing glasses. But so what if he was.

The "hippie couple" who he keeps insulting and who he admits to trying to have busted by this time were his only friends in N.Y.C. In fact, they came down on Thanksgiving Day 1994 to bail the schmuck out of the Tombs when he was slapped in jail for punching his oh-so beloved girlfriend, who had been supporting him, since he has a tendency to be fired from whatever gig he gets once the editors figure out how wacky he really is. He repaid their kindness by deciding they were part of the "conspiracy," and must pay, pay, pay.

Kramer is a very good wordsmith whose talent has been derailed by his drug-fueled obsessions and paranoia. I have never met nor heard of a supposedly heterosexual male who was so magnificently and terribly obsessed by the "true status" of another man's penis. Obviously, Joe Christ's penis, like the sacred foreskin of Jesus Christ, must be an icon of untold power and fascination, since in Kramer's cosmology it is at the center of so many events in his own life.

I have never tried to cover up or make excuses for the bizarre circumstances of my own life. In fact, it fuels much of my work, inside and outside the porn field.

So there you go, Luke. More grist for your mill. Hope it fills up a few column inches for you.

Mark Kramer replies:

Fortunately, Clayton Patterson has a video that shows a fat pornographer slugging a guy who had pen and notebook in hand. Portly porner Clark can be sure that the factual and legal sorting-out processes begin next time he makes an appearance in New York State.

Also, I've never tried to have anybody busted. In point of fact, David Aaron Clark's public "crackhead" tirades down though the years and the letter Joe Christ wrote to New York magazine, filled with "crackhead" references, were, if not attempts to have me busted, certainly instrumental in losing me work. Ironic especially since several members of the Screw art department could be found snorting coke in my East Seventh St. apartment circa 1989-91. Especially former art director Kevin Hein. Evidently, behind their smarmy facade of appreciation for my East Village drug contacts and using my apartment as a convenient place to toot up -- they were seething with resentment that I continued to get prestige writing gigs....

The "hippie couple"--one of whom was a Screw columnist--were instrumental in setting up the attack at Psychedelic Solution. Moreover, they would milk the media opportunities that came along with the attack, e.g., one's picture turned up in the New York mag article; the other's name and work were plugged in the letter Joe Christ wrote to New York]--illustrative of how much these career felons value their low profile [in 1987, they were stupid enuff to allow Spy's Eric Kaplan to write a thinly disguised depiction of their apartment in an article "The Hippies That Time Forgot"]. Also, "The Hippies That Time Forgot" threatened my publisher, Shannon Larratt, with violence and 86ing from Web [email Shannon @ bme@freeq.com]....

They have also threatened my present girlfriend. Speaking of girlfriends, I never punched a female and Clark knows nothing whatever about the bogus case lodged against me by my then-girlfriend/Yale honors grad/psychopath Nancy Jo Sales--a big-titted, red-headed Jewess--who would later be appointed, not long after the Psychedelic Solution incident, a Contributing Editor of New York mag.

As far as my means of support--my personal foibles never stood between me and selling my work...until Joe Christ, David Aaron Clark and The Hippies That Time Forgot drove a stake through the heart of their own subculture by setting up an attack at Psychedelic Solution and then writing to New York magazine that I had *started* a fight. Temporarily this would reduce me to their level--but I’ve been fortunate in finding new markets for my work [obviously Clark missed my Feb. 99 piece in “P.O.V.” mag--”All The News Unfit to Print”--which tells the *true* story of the crack-crazed squirrel hoax.

Please excuse me for not getting "over it" regarding the profoundly degrading events David Aaron Clark's attack set in motion. I'm sure the upcoming spectacle of the suety porno careerist’s courtroom defence for his behavior at Psychedelic Solution on Dec. 14, 1994 will prove a healthy first step in the direction of my getting "over it"....

Also, I met Joe Christ in Dallas in the early 80s and later, circa '88, Christ barraged the Screw offices with promo materials once he found out I was there. In '90, Joe Christ's move to New York coincided with Josh Alan Friedman's book party. At the time I was established as a tabloid writer with cool East Village digs and a beautiful Jewish girlfriend--something else Clark no doubt resented, since it is that clear that only women who sold their bodies for cash took him seriously--so the "sucking up" idea is wide of the mark indeed. In fact, I *introduced* Joe Christ to David Aaron Clark at a party/exhibit for Madonna nudes at the Neikrug Gallery in spring, 91.

I have pictures of Clark from that evening, which, amusingly, was before he started dying his beard and other remaining hair, and had otherwise not yet adopted the arrogant, delusional rude-boy stance--evident to John Bone and others-- by which we know him today.

Talk about sucking up to Joe Christ: It turned out Clark was actually one of the no-talent penile amputee's earliest New York fans--and devoted many pages of Screw editorial to jump-starting Joe Christ's "career" as a "filmmaker" and "artist". Utility-wise, this lowered Screw's standards yet another notch-- in effect making Clark, who at Screw was the center of attention for the first time in his rumpled life, look like some reigning intellectual.

Also, this log-rolling on behalf of dickless weenie-wagger Joe Christ paid off by getting Clark his only mainstream writing credits *ever*...in collections by Joe Christ's wife, Nancy A. Collins, who was also on hand for the attack scene at Psychedelic Solution. Of course,*all*these folks are in the toilet now, as they were then, except this time they’re not being paid for their sociopathic drivel: Instead, they are *paying*...As well they ought to.

As far as the blood article went...there was nothing--nothing--stopping Clark from publishing his own article...except for the fact that only porn-related venues were accepting submissions from him. And anyway, it's so much easier to write and edit your own work for Screw and find a 19-year-old prostitute to praise your literary genius than it is shopping your work, as I have never stopped doing, to publicatons with more than Screw's 14,000 "readers". And on top of all this, David Aaron Clark *appears* in the movie "Sex Blood and Mutilation"--in which Joe Christ publicly unveiled his pubic stump for the first time. Form follows dysfunction, eh? Film at eleven.

6/22

Mark Kramer writes: "All of Joe Christ's endeavors are directly linked to the world of porno, at least NY porn. The fact that Screw adopted him as a kind of mascot only emphasizes the tenous boundary between sex and death that ruled there, mainly vis a vis David Aaron Clark. Thus through the unlikely person of Joe Christ, penile amputee, one is vouchesafed a unique window on Gotham porn culture... And the fact that David Aaron Clark stars in one Joe Christ movie, has appeared in public events with Christ, as well as in two of Nancy A. Collins' [Mrs. Joe Christ's] books only highlights the epistomological value of the Joe Christ inquiry."

Dallas Morning News music critic Tom Maurstad said in a Fall 1997 about Joe Christ: “.I guess in the sense that...self-promotion sums up the 80s, Joe Christ was . somehow an examplar of the 80s....Still, I don't know whether I'm eager or anxious to get involved again.....Joe rewrote a negative review I'd written on his band "G-Spot" ,in the Dallas Observer, taking out snippets of my statements and running his version in various alernative music mags of the time and made it laudatory... What I remember about it .completely based on listening to the "G-Spot" record, was approximately “What a monumental asshole”, a bombastic wash of punky guitar noise... A contemporary analog would be Marilyn Manson .. The one standing memory I have of Joe Christ was the rumor that is the most striking urban folklore --that in an amphetamine-driven frenzy he had one night.... while his girlfriend went out and scored.... and he was in the bathtub... somehow he ended up cutting his own dick off and flushing it down the toilet...I remember thinking that it was the perfect Joe Christ story... I think it was 87 or 88.. I never pursued it as a news story because Joe Christ was never as an important fixture..."

Joe Christ's wife Nancy A. Collins wrote 4/27/96 to the newsgroup alt.comics.alternative: "Everyone who knows us, knows how Joe started this rumor himself, years ago in Dallas, when he was running short on publicity.He thought a little bit of weird word-of-mouth would help him in some way.

"When TED Klein [famed horror author asked me about it, and said that your friend Margie had brought it up, I played along because that's what Joe asked me to do, back when we first met. (People do ask, since there WAS good word-of-mouth) Joe had told me that you believed it was true. TED: I'm sorry that I used you as part of Joe's little game to toy with Mark, but I only repeated what I was asked to by Joe.

"Even though we have an "open" marriage, Joe still comes first with me, and I with him. I'm still a fan of your work, and hope you'll forgive me for for making you part of this. I didn't mean to make you out to be a fool.

"As for the letter to New York Magazine, Joe was working for Psychedelic Solution Gallery, and wrote the letter in question, as told by his boss at the gallery, Jacaeber Kastor, who signed it. But I certainly had nothing to do with it. Whatever the case enough is enough! I think people want to get on with their newsgroups, and read about only the things relevant to their newsgroups. So, if Mark Kramer wishes to continue with his efforts, whatever. We won't be participating any further with it.

From: Philadelphia City Paper 2-7-97

"PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A NOT-VERY-WELL-HUNG MAN"

By Frank Lewis

Filmmaker, musician and one-time Texas gubernatorial candidate Joe Christ is the subject of an ongoing ezine series that contends, among other things, that Christ is the anonymous schwantz-less star of his own 1995 documentary, Sex Blood and Mutilation.

'Christ prankishly maintains that the penis missing from Sex Blood and Mutilation belongs to some other guy--purportedly a respected businessman leading a secret life as a post-penectomic personality,' writes series author Mark Kramer in 'Rebel Without A Dick', the first installment of 'Dickless in Babylon: The Joe Christ Story.' The entire epic--15 chapters and counting--appears in Body Modification Ezine, http://www.bme. freeq.com. (The headlines alone are worth a look: 'And The Gland Played On', 'Pud Simple', 'Urethra On The Bus Or Off The bus'; you get the idea. But be warned: part two, 'Uro-Trash', features a large color photo you may not want to see.)

Kramer, a New York-based arts writer, has been following Christ's career for years. About three years ago, he wrote an article on Christ for New York Press that included 'an oblique mention of the penis thing.'

'And astonishingly', says Kramer, '[in 1995] he makes this movie with a guy with no penis.' His face is not shown, and the voice is altered. Kramer says one of Christ's ex-girlfriends--Stacey Meador--and another independent source confirmed his suspicion that Christ is the memberless man. (The 1987 amputation was performed in Dallas’s Parkland Hospital emergency room, Kramer says, after a cock ring was left on way too long.)

Christ, a Philadelphia native who appeared Friday at The A-Space in West Philly, denies Kramer's charge. In various newsgroup postings, Christ has made light of Kramer's assertions, and described him as a 'tabloid journalist'--an apparent reference to Kramer's 1990 work for The Weekly World News. (Kramer points out that he's also written for the decidedly more highbrow Spy).

In a description of Sex Blood and Mutilation on his website (http://www.taoweb.com/666/joec/), Christ says only that he likes to call the misguided lad 'Les Johnson'. Kramer says he and Body Modification Ezine's publisher, Shannon Larratt, told Christ they would kill the series immediately if he would show them the goods, so to speak. He declined.

Kramer says his interest in Christ and his work are part of a larger mission. 'I am trying to decode the quasi-religions that have arisen in the wake of the Grateful Dead', he explains. Satirical movements never meant to be taken seriously, like The Church of The SubGenius--which Kramer says Christ was into--'have created a climate for things like Joe Christ['s work]--Hey, ain't murder fun? Ain't Charlie Manson cute?' He also feels that Christ's alleged loss has left him with a 'sexual rage' that explains the extreme violence and gore that defines his work. Notes Kramer, 'I know I'd be pissed off.' A Thumbnail History of Post-Modern Domestic Violence

Luke F-rd Wire Services, Ltd.

*****1951: Joan Vollmer Adams, common-law spouse of "Beat" novelist WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS, dies instantly in Mexico City when the visionary writer attempts and fails to shoot a highball glass off her head

DISPOSITION: Burroughs imprisoned for 13 days and released on $2312 bail; pleads guilty to arcane offense of "imprudenda criminal"; a year later, jumps bond and flees to U.S.

*****1960: Adele Morales, married for six years to NORMAN MAILER, is viciously stabbed by the celebrated author following an all-night party in Manhattan.

DISPOSITION: Morales refuses to press charges; Mailer given a suspended sentence.

*****1965: Two teenage girls allegedly molested and beaten in Cleveland by star Cleveland Browns running back JIM BROWN.

DISPOSITION: One girl eventually dropped complaint; Brown acquitted at trial on remaining charges.

*****1968: JIM BROWN faces attempted-murder rap when model Eva Bohn-Chin, Brown's girlfriend, is discovered semi-conscious under his apartment balcony in Los Angeles--following which the football great forearmed a cop trying to enter the premises.

DISPOSITION: Bohn-Chin, although severely injured in "fall", declines to press charges; Brown fined $300 for resisting arrest.

*****1985: Acclaimed artist Ana Mendieta, married to minimalist sculptor CARL ANDRE "falls" to her death from the 34th-story window of their Greenwhich Village apartment.

DISPOSITION: Andre aquitted of Mendieta's murder at trial.

*****1985: JIM BROWN--already convicted in 1978 for beating up a [male] pro golfer [DISPOSTION: One day jail time plus $500 fine]--is arrested, along with 22-year-old girlfriend, Carol Moses, for rape and sexual battery upon 33-year-old woman.

DISPOSITION: prosecutors drop matter for lack of evidence.

*****1986: Police officers responding to 911 call by Debra Clark-- another 22-year-old JIM BROWN girlfriend--find her bruised, shaking and holding a gun in the driveway of Brown's L.A. home; cops stand guard as she removes belongings from premises.

DISPOSITION: Clark is treated at hospital and later drops charges.

*****1987: Dallas-based punk crooner and former Texas gubernatorial candidate JOE [Linhart] CHRIST severs own penis in amphetamine-induced rage and flushes offending organ down toilet.

DISPOSITION: Christ released from Parkland Hospital on own recognizance when His alibi checks out.

*****1993: Virginia housewife Lorena Bobbitt severs husband JOHN WAYNE BOBBITT'S penis and is charged with "malicious wounding."

DISPOSITION: Mrs. Bobbitt, found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to mental health facility for 45 days; Mr. Bobbitt's penis reattached with zeitgeistly results.

*****1993: Time, Inc. staff writer Nancy Jo Sales [McCullough], while trespassing at Greenwich Village's Riverview Hotel, slashes [and knocks out tooth of] gossip writer and investigative humorist gossip writer and investigative humorist MARK KRAMER with razor-sharp "Protector" ring--custom-fitted for Sales' birthday two weeks earlier by heavy-metal fetish jeweler, and Kramer story subject, Axel.

DISPOSITION: Sales tosses bloody "Protector" ring, lies to cops, files fraudulent charges later enumerated in her January, 1995 Madamoiselle story, "When Boy Beats Girl"; assault charges against Kramer dropped after nine months when criminal-court judge rules that Kramer was denied right to a speedy trial [writing in Madamoiselle, "journalist" Sales refers to judicial finding as "a procedural error"].

*****1994: Nicole Brown Simpson, wife of Naked Gun co-star and former football great O.J. SIMPSON, dies, along with Hebraic boytoy Ron Goldman, in savage knife attack by the violence-prone Negro golf enthusiast.

DISPOSITION: Simpson acquitted at trial; found responsible for murders at subsequent civil trial.

*****1994: Suety smutster DAVID AARON CLARK incurs multiple knife wounds to the hand in his Manhattan apartment when attacked while asleep by his live-in girlfriend, sex-worker Joanne Vargas.

DISPOSITION: Clark withholds testimony in exchange for a blowjob; case dismissed.

*****1998: Hall of Famer JIM BROWN smashes 25-year-old wife Monique's car windows with a shovel in Los Angeles.

DISPOSITION: Brown sentenced to three years' probation and one-year driver's-license revocation plus a year of court-mandated anger-management counseling. Gushes Monique: "Based upon [the L.A. County D.A.'s] humiliating and shameful loss of the O.J. Simpson case, we are being used-- my husband is being used -- as an example to make a stand on issues that are not related to us."

Luke sez: We have nothing to blame but blame itself.