Porn Valley Dispatch

While the adult industry's business model might be described as Machiavellian, and my own relationship with Kami Andrews strictly Platonic, the porn world doesn't go in for that philosophy stuff too much, unless it is wondering, as Wittgenstein would, if there is a significant difference between MILF and MILTF. Proceed, then, to Vena Virago's uberporn of "Nietzsche Bangers" after the gap.- G. Ponante

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Talking with Vena Virago, aka "Pornstar Pets" documentarian Margie Schnibbe, is like that freshman conversation you had with the hot senior girl who turned her off-campus apartment into an opium den and proceeded to freak you out until graduation.

"Pornography is political," she said, describing "Nietzsche Bangers", a porn scene she shot on spec while art-directing "Neu Wave Hookers" for Eon McKai. Veronica Jett and Tyler Knight trade Nietzschean epigrams like some God-killing Hepburn and Tracy.

I asked her if the whole altporn thing hadn't just gone too far already, what with people rattling off "Truth is Being" before a popshot and all. "If no porn company buys it," she responded, "I can use it in an art installation. As long as I get to show it."

A former New York City dominatrix, a 'zine publisher, a practitioner of Edward Gorey-esque line drawings, and now a Silverlake pornographer (Virago, 40, wearily admits that, yes, "some British guys at the AVN convention asked me to be in their MILF movie"), Virago isn't putting together "Nietzsche Bangers" for an ironic laugh, as a Gen-Xer would, or to seem cool, as a Gen-Yer might, but because she actually believes in the sentiment.

"It's performance art," she says, adding that Tyler Knight "probably has some theatrical training." "Who knows if it will sell?"

"Nietzsche Bangers" (preview, venavirago.com)
Vena Virago's line drawings (babyhans.com)

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Previously: Pornstar Pets, Porn Valley Dispatch Archive