Video Out

Heirs to a Felt Fortune

In HEIRS TO A FELT FORTUNE, I have taken a found 8mm black and white (silent) porno-loop fron the late-1960 s, framed it with footage my mother shot of the Pacific Coast Highway (circa 1969), and added a voice-over reading of a long poem. The poem, read in a detached voice, provides an imagined back-story narrative (it also acts as a subsitute for the phonographic musical tracks that often accompanied these films at smokers). This back-story is an attempt to address questions I frequently ask myself when viewing pornography: Where do these people come from? What are they thinking about while they are performing? Where do they go once their work is done? (Indeed, questions such as these are necessarily raised by critics of pornography in order to be answered in such as way as to serve a moral imperative, thereby outfitting a further narrative that is used to bolster the legal basis for outlawing the production and distribution of this cultural/artistic form.)