I was not planning on having this book affect me as much as it did. I picked it up because I really just wanted something breezy that I could knock out and forget. This was not that book.
The book is about obsession and how media can change your life. It's also about our culture's need for violence and despair to power our lives.
A married advertising man eats his lunch in a run down porn theater, which used to be a movie palace. There he catches a film, Throat Sprockets, which grainy, edited, cut together with the narrative spliced apart focuses on women's necks. Seeing this film, the narrator is changed. First in his sexual desires, then in subtler ways which change him to the point where his wife leaves him. He develops new philosophies on life and he begins to think about the movie more until the hunt for the film becomes his only desire in life.
He captures another showing here, incomplete. Another chance showing elsewhere under a different name reveals different cuts, different scenes.
The hunt for the whole leads him to black market dupe culture (which is an almost unbelievable thing to think about now in the age of torrents) and importing video, where the author's knowledge of home video and film marketing really come to the forefront.
It seems that the film hasn't touched just him alone, and an entire near vampiric subculture has sprung to the mainstream where it leaves the world irrevocably changed in a really surprising coda.
I don't really want to say too much, but FIND THIS BOOK, READ THIS BOOK. You can find it for less than $10 at Amazon and Alibris.
Showing posts with label Throat Sprockets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Throat Sprockets. Show all posts
Monday, March 2, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
New Book: Throat Sprockets
I've been reading Tim Lucas's magazine Video Watchdog for over a decade now. Looking at their back issues online, I think it was issue 51, the May/June 1999 issue with 2001's Keir Dulla on the cover.
It was around that time that I was really getting into DVD and I was looking for reviews of films I should watch. Video Watchdog with it's coverage of "fantastic films" seemed to be exactly what I needed as it covered every genre imaginable. Each issue was an eduction in the obscure and the obscurities of the obscure with intelligence, clarity and most importantly passion.
When I was not able to reliably find issues on the stands anymore, I started a subscription, which aside from a brief bout with unemployment, I've kept fairly regularly.
One of the effects of having followed one man and one woman's passion for so long, you begin to be granted glimpses into their life. One of the things I learned was of a novel Tim Lucas wrote called Throat Sprockets, which started out in comic anthology Taboo (a book I would have loved to have read when it was coming out, but was always too expensive or too hard to find in those pre-internet days).
The book deals with an advertiser who sees an obscure erotic film and becomes obsessed with it.
It was around that time that I was really getting into DVD and I was looking for reviews of films I should watch. Video Watchdog with it's coverage of "fantastic films" seemed to be exactly what I needed as it covered every genre imaginable. Each issue was an eduction in the obscure and the obscurities of the obscure with intelligence, clarity and most importantly passion.
When I was not able to reliably find issues on the stands anymore, I started a subscription, which aside from a brief bout with unemployment, I've kept fairly regularly.
One of the effects of having followed one man and one woman's passion for so long, you begin to be granted glimpses into their life. One of the things I learned was of a novel Tim Lucas wrote called Throat Sprockets, which started out in comic anthology Taboo (a book I would have loved to have read when it was coming out, but was always too expensive or too hard to find in those pre-internet days).
The book deals with an advertiser who sees an obscure erotic film and becomes obsessed with it.
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