Sam Benjamin

Despite constant feel of "braggery," I have to say I liked Sam Benjamin's memoir. However, there are times in the book where it feels like he's trying to paint himself as a nice guy. There are times when he repeats almost like a mantra that he's going to quit the job, but continues to pick up the camera. Then there's the whole lust for the complete and utter degradation of a female. It's hard to see him as anything other than what he really is/was, a pornographer. Also, a lot of the dialogue feels scripted. I understand that he was working off memory and paraphasing, but at times it's like he's writing for a sitcom rather than something honest. His cautionary tale isn't anything new - man goes into porn thinking he's going to change the way it's done, but it changes him instead. I'm not surprised by the story in linear, but it's very much worth the read. Ignore the negative comments by readers who couldn't look passed the ugly to see the story for what it is. Read it yourself, instead. Make your own opinion about it. Read my full review here.… (mais)

This is a book I received as part of the Goodreads: First Reads Giveaway program.

I'm not sure how to explain how I feel about this book. I both really like it and think its weird. American Gangbang is the memoir of Sam Benjamin who graduated from Brown University and went into the porn business. His intention is to make movies and art, but finds that to be a hard goal to achieve.

The book has an easy, humorous feel to the writing that I really enjoyed. Even when giving the lowdown on the business and the chaos surrounding him, I was never bored while reading the book. Some of it can get pretty hard to read since he pulls no punches when relating things that happened. That is also one of the best parts of this book, at no point did I feel that Sam was keeping anything back. It was all very truthful which I appreciated. He wasn't afraid to seem like an asshole either and that was refreshing.

The descriptions of the porn was hard to read, but that may just be my reaction to an industry I don't really like or understand.

Overall, I really liked this book. It was a quick, fun read and the issues I had with it were minor.… (mais)

Liberal, affluent, middle class white boy goes to Brown and then wants to do something deviant after graduation. He moves to L.A. and becomes a cameraman filming black on white hetero porn for the owner of an internet porn site. Unfortunately, he can't shake off his middle class morality so eventually sees everything he's doing as empty and exploitative and quits porn still mentally trapped in the symbolic world of middle class conventionality. The book ends with the author in Thailand undergoing deep colonics atoning for his imagined sins.

In a world devoid of redemption, I found his sense of guilt over his occupation quaint. The writing isn't bad although at times formulaic. The book really says more about the author and his value-system than about the people he filmed who remain props for his angst riddled ruminations.

That being said, I enjoyed reading it. The author writes honestly about his feelings. Although it wasn't the best book I ever read, it wasn't the worst either.… (mais)

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

So before anything else, let me get a big disclosure out of the way: that about a decade ago, I did some writing and design work for the website JewishCheerleaders.com, online home of the now defunct alt-porn production company once owned by Sam Benjamin, although let me make it clear that I've had no contact with him since those days; and that's important when it comes to this review, because his hilarious, filthy and touching new memoir on the subject, American Gangbang: A Love Story, is not really about Jewish Cheerleaders per se (although bizarre stories about its formation make up the bulk of the book's first third), but rather how this quest to make smart alt-porn eventually led him to working full-time in the legitimate mainstream porn industry, waking up one day to realize that he was now living in one of the bedrooms of a Malibu mansion that served as a 24-hour drug-filled shooting location for the production company he was now making tens of thousands of dollars a month from, his personal life by definition now becoming complexly intertwined with the abusive interracial group-sex scenes he was now in charge of organizing and shooting on literally a daily basis.

And indeed, in a larger sense what this book is really about is the grand tragedy of the entire "alt-porn" industry of the early 2000s in general, and the dispiriting lesson that nearly all of us who were involved with it back then eventually learned -- that no matter how noble your intentions, no matter how refined your pedigree (Benjamin, for example, had studied semiotics at Brown before getting involved in the industry), the combination of drugs and cash and douchebaggery and exploitation and desperation that automatically comes with any instance of sex being exchanged for money is bound to dirty and sully anyone who comes into contact with it, no matter how peripherally they're involved or how little that person thinks they're being affected. And so in Benjamin's case, as he found himself surrounded more and more by the kinds of deeply dysfunctional fringe dwellers who normally populate the trillion-dollar adult industry of southern California, he also found more and more of his hipster postmodern high-mindedness slipping away from him, slowly turning more and more into the kind of person he used to make fun of and with there being an increasingly blurry line between his fantasy life, the outrageous concepts being created for his porn shoots, and the way he dealt with women on just a day-by-day nonsexual basis.

I mean, not that this is a dour book by any means; in fact it's laugh-out-loud funny for nearly its entire length, with Benjamin having the courage to cast himself as the self-deprecatory foil of most of his own anecdotes, whether talking about his disastrous night while young and broke as an unpopular go-go dancer at a gay club, starring in a strap-on reverse-bisexual shoot for revered San Francisco company Good Vibrations simply for the hell of it, or later darker stories of becoming obsessed with ultra-abusive "gonzo" porn and having it bleed into his non-porn love life. And make no mistake, Benjamin puts his college degrees to good use here (he also has an MFA in Critical Studies from the California Institute of the Arts); this is not only one of the best-structured personal memoirs I've ever read, but Benjamin pulls off the neat trick of giving his stories a general appeal precisely by making them so specific, making this not just a naughty tell-all about sometimes some fairly famous people in the industry (although it's that too) but also a bigger and grander examination of an entire sorry little era in Generation X's history, when literally thousands of spoiled, overeducated young intellectuals thought they could change the very essence of exchanging sex for money simply because they were determined to, only to have the entire effort mainly end up biting them in the ass. I'm obviously too personally associated with the proceedings in this case to give anything even close to an "objective" review, which is why American Gangbang is neither receiving a score today nor will be eligible for CCLaP's best-of lists at the end of the year; but it nonetheless comes strongly recommended, one of the best historical documents out there to help future generations understand (for example) how a place like Suicide Girls could go in a single decade from a darling of third-wave feminist hipsters to a nearly universally reviled codeword for misogyny and cruelty. When read in this spirit, I'm confident that most people will find it utterly riveting.

Out of 10: N/A… (mais)