Colin Marshall

Vital stats:
Format: one-, two-, three-hour conversations presided over by a painter and a pornstar
Episode duration: 1-3h
Frequency: twice weekly, at least

I started downloading DVDASA [RSS] [iTunes] knowing only that it involved a pornstar — and I didn’t even know the pornstar. Not to say that a known pornstar would have held out much promise; Caleb Bacon, now host of Man School, demonstrated the severe conversational limitations of pornstars the hard way on his previous show The Gentlemen’s Club. Sit even the supposedly “creative” and “smart” pornstars now in vogue down for an interview, and you soon find out that those labels indicate the somewhat less impressive “creative and smart by pornstar standards.” Still, pornstars lead unusual and thus fascinating careers, especially now that the democratization of media technology has dramatically altered, and will more dramatically alter, their very role in the culture. Now that anyone can potentially get naked before the camera for an audience of thousands, the professionals have to bring something extra to the table. Even pornstars almost entirely lacking the gift of verbal expression can shed at least a little light on what that feels like.

Asa Akira, DVDASA’s porn-starring co-host, doesn’t lack the gift of verbal expression, although read between the lines of what she has to say about the demands of stardom in the modern-day porn business, and it all echoes what David Foster Wallace wrote in his 1998 report from the Adult Video News awards: “The more acceptable in modern culture it becomes, the farther porn will have to go in order to preserve the sense of unacceptability that’s so essential to its appeal. As should be evident, the industry’s already gone pretty far; and with reenacted child abuse and barely disguised gang rapes now selling briskly, it is not hard to see where porn is eventually going to have to go in order to retain its edge of disrepute. Whether or not it ever actually gets there, it’s clear that the real horizon late-’90s porn is heading toward is the Snuff Film.” Until that time arrives, she joins David Choe, DVDASA’s non-porn-starring co-host, twice a week for one-, two-, three-hour conversations about sex, race, relationships, food, flying first-class, and crapping in Starbucks cups. (And sure, they sometimes talk about porn, but by now the novelty of Akira’s pornstardom seems to have worn off.)

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun.