Today’s SF Chronicle Column: Eon McKai; Special Gallery

dollund.jpgNo, the special gallery isn’t in Teh Chronic! Eon sent me a bunch of stills from his next film The Doll Underground, and we’re running them as a Fleshbot exclusive along with my column about altporn (and interview with Eon) today. Yay! Will altporn fare better in the long run than “alternative rock”? We’ll see… snip from Eon McKai’s Altporn Liberation Army:

“Soon enough, like corporate rock and alternative rock in the 1990s, corporate porn smelled a cash cow in the making and was eager to milk it, snapping up directors like L.A.-based Eon McKai (eonmckai.com) and alterna-hottie starlets willing to sign contracts to do formula porn but decorated with hip tattoos, music from MySpace and a hint more style. But now big porn studios slap striped socks on a starlet and title the videos ‘punk rock’ or make a shopping trip to Hot Topic and call their starlets Goth.

McKai is a clear-eyed participant in all this, and while he’s directing porn films for the biggest corporate porn studios around (right now he’s with behemoth Vivid, under his own label, Vivid Alt), he’s doing so decidedly without a map and on his own terms. When McKai sent me a text message Friday night trying to lure me to the Mission District’s Beauty Bar for cocktails with a gaggle of altporn stars in town for promotional signings, I balked. A bunch of hipster pornsters in a hipster bar seemed like a recipe for irony overload and way more white belts and emo haircuts than I could take. My Sunday coffee option was no better: I suggested hacker hookup coffee shop Ritual on Valencia, but when we met out front, we realized it was all wrong. Tall, pale, nerdy glasses, soft-voiced and self-conscious, McKai looked inside and said, ‘I have enough of that already.'” Link.

* Here are three cute photos I took of Eon that day; here is a photo from last night of me mugging with Eon’s last film, Girls Lie. Also — ha, I see today that someone at SFGate changed my line “we also talked plenty of shit about people we know.” to “we also talked plenty of trash about people we know.” So silly!

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