I approached Zak Smith’s memoir, We Did Porn, lightly. While I find his drawings extremely attractive and meticulous, they never do much more for me than that. You may know of him from his earlier project depicting graphically what happens on every page of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Or you may have seen Smith walking around Chicago, looking exactly like one of the drawings he exhibited a few years ago at Kavi Gupta Gallery, like I did.

Strangely it was his Pynchon project that directly led him into the adult entertainment industry. According to the book, Smith was already working on portraits of strippers and porn actresses when a director told him it would mean a lot if he could use Smith’s drawings in an upcoming movie. Smith jokes back, “It’d mean a lot to me if I could fuck some girls in the movie.”

I assumed the book would be as entertaining, gritty and light. Especially as it is about his sojourn into porn and specifically aimed at the hip and the young, it seemed like a good guilty pleasure. We Did Porn, however, is much more than that. It is entertaining, but not in an erotic way. The drawings don’t titillate, unless you’re into really good line work and handling of materials.  The prose isn’t porny, it's good writing draws you in, and it is full of interesting asides and quips.

We Did Porn does stumble in some places. It is often hard to figure out exactly what is happening, due to its conversational style.  The current editorial trend seems to be profoundly against commas, but if you have complex sentences with lots of clauses, digressions and pauses, it is important to indicate where we as readers need to stop.

The construction of narrative and the order in which things unfold as Smith relates events is clever and well constructed. His biting and punchy commentary is also entertaining to read. He frankly speaks not only of his sexual exploits, but of life as a young artist. Giving context to the time period, “the zeroes,” he offers up excellent, slow burning rants on everything from the proliferation of Law & Order and CSI dramas, to Hurricane Katrina, to Christo and Jean Claude’s Gates in Central Park. All of which are never mentioned by name, but referred to in a descriptive way that you either instantly pick up or don’t.

I imagine an alien reading this and not having a clue as to what is going on but still being engrossed. After all, that is the experience of reading many a Kurt Vonnegut novel, “on the most popular police show, machines solved everything (in a spin-off, machines solved everything and there were bikinis.)”  Or in describing the Sudoku craze, “even the dullest people were affected–they began to spend their time with puzzles of numbers instead of puzzles of words, so awful was the shadow of meaning.”

The biggest surprise is the breadth and quality to the terse but well-worded cultural criticism Smith engages in. He astutely and baldly dresses down our culture. Amazingly it doesn’t come from a position of judgment, superiority or youthful angst. “Frankness” is the descriptor I keep coming up with. That, plus it is a first hand account of the porn industry; you know you want to find out all about it.

--Erik Wenzel