WHEN THE MUSIC STOPS

I discovered porn and hunting early in life. In the 50's if you must know. The so-called porn was tiny B&W booklets hidden in my old man's desk drawer. They were put out by PUP'S PARTS, an auto parts company. These quaint little tomes had busty babes in see-through nighties and racy cartoons, in various degrees of bad taste. Bird and I took every opportunity to sneak a peek. Smokie was too young. Hunting was tagging along rabbit, duck and pheasant hunting with the old man or lonely woodchuck hunting with an old long bow and target arrow. I eventually did get a chuck (cornered by my hound dog). The target points just bounced off. I literally had to knock it from the dog's neck with the bow and beat it to death. It sure wasn't pretty, but I think that still counts as a bow kill.
After puberty and the Vietnam years I soured on hunting as well as porn. In 1975 I was in the Mitchell Brother's SF. Nekid girls were everywhere. I got a job illustrating stroke books "in the style" of some dead illustrator. It was tedious work dictated to me by my boss, a homely Mafia princess in house coat and fuzzy slippers. "In today's story Nurse Nancy is giving Dr. Bones a sloppy blowjob. And Mike....." she said, singling me out from the Chinese gay guy and hillbilly from Florida. "Mike......please a little more graphic. Less artsy." I had a prudish way of squiggling over the nasty bits. The hillbilly, known for his giant, squirting dicks, just smirked. I got 10 dollars a drawing. On a good night I could make a C note. 8 hours of pouring through skin mags and putting the body parts together in a Frankensteinian approach to illustrative narrative was exhausting. At the end of a hard day, the last thing i wanted to do was go to a dirty movie.
Since I lived in the city and knew no one who hunted, I stopped hunting. Even when I visited back east, I took a less than serious approach. I borrowed gloves, coat, hat and gun from Bird, went up on his back hill for a couple of hours and then went back to the house to watch cartoons with my neices. VHS was yet to be marketed to consumers, but art students had half inch B&W video tape to play with. The first thing I did was video the wife and I getting busy. Tommy and Pam got nothing to worry about. (Don't worry #1. I taped over it.) Back in SF, my interest in porn started to heat up again.
The only place you could watch a dirty movie in bed was a motel. I decided to curated a series of artist videos that would air between the motel porn. The Motel Tapes were a big hit. I wasn't actually doing porn, but exploiting the already charged space around it. That's artspeak for I did the stuff that didn't turn you on. I thought about hunting again, but did nothing to get back into the woods. It wasn't until 1993, back in NY, that I took it up again. And when i did, I jumped back in with both feet. Typically, at first, pigeon holing it as art. I read magazines and replenished the gun cabinet. My first squirrels I skinned salted and stacked in cardboard ravioli boxes. I broiled the tiny critters with a little garlic. Mmmmmmm. Food, as well as art.
Now, some 15 years later, it's still art for me. But when the season's over I need new activities. I get my porn for free from the internet and my "hunting porn" on two cable TV channels- Versus and Pursuit. This quite bizarre line up of shows on chs. 603 and 608 is totally consuming me. There's Les Johnson, blastng coyotes at 600yards on PREDATOR QUEST. A hillbilly couple of champion archers on STAYING SAFE or the cute yuppy version DRIVEN. The later couple looks like they'd be just as comfortable hosting MTV's Spring Break House. Jello shooters on that dead buck anyone? There's a lot of product hype and Maxoderm and Enzyte hawking, but compared to Oprah or IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, it's no contest. The guests range from kids with cancer to CEOs of gun companys. WHITETAIL ADDICTION is my fave. It's do-it-yourselfer's show of giant buck kills. And all these shows are structured exactly like pornos.
First there's the set up. The plumber rings the doorbell. A little grunting and rattling from the stand. A pretty girl answers the door. A buck peeks out from behind a bush. Hmmmmm? Hmmmmm? In both hunting shows and porn the predictable plot proceeds with varying degrees of proficency, always accompanied by some horrible swelling music. Then.....AND ONLY THEN... when the music stops, and the camera zooms in for the money shot, death or ejaculation occur. Finally, two of my favorite pastimes combined as one. You'd think the animals would get hip to that music stopping.