Friday scatblogging — pornworld edition

Let’s just jump right to the facts:

Next month, Ira Isaacs, a 57-year-old Los Angeles–based video director, will sit center stage at what may be the most extreme obscenity trial in U.S. history.

There's no question the titles are extreme: Laurie’s Toilet Show, Mako’s First Time Scat, Gang Bang Horse (Pony Sex Game), and Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7 — the last of which Isaacs directed himself — feature coprophagy and bestiality.

So, is this “art,” or even if we aren’t that charitable…

Meanwhile, that’s not just a head, that’s art that Radar has to lead off the story. (If you don’t believe it’s art, read the artist’s name that’s part of the photo URL.)



(If you don’t believe it’s art, read the artist’s name that’s part of the photo URL.)

But, the bottom line is …

Is it free speech? (Isaac’s videos, that is.)

Hell, yes.

The government dropped two counts that Isaacs didn’t properly document the age of people in the films. So, it’s just over what is “obscene.”

Frankly, the whole “(no) redeeming social value” criterion is obsolete from where I sit.

First, what social group or subgroup are we talking about? Can Isaacs claim that a jury of his peers should consist of likeminded hardcore porn producers?

Without agreeing that what Isaacs produces is “art,” I don’t doubt that what he produces makes money, enough money to show there’s a fair-sized social group getting some sort of “redeeming” value from it:

There was a guy who shit in a can and sold it for the price of gold. [In 1961, Italian conceptual artist Piero Manzoni canned his feces in 90 tins and sold them for the price of their weight in gold.]

About when he got busted:

There’s FBI all over the place. But I’ll tell you, they were very, very pleasant people. They were really nice. Those guys would rather be fighting terrorism than being the sex police. The FBI guy was as curious as you are. He asked me, “Off the record,” he asked me, “How do you convince girls to do this kind of stuff?” I said, “I do it very well.”

I am laughing my head off at some Mormon FBI agent from BYU or University of Utah (the FBI explicitly recruits both campuses) taking notes, and a “Hmmm” moment hitting the back of the frontal lobes of this straitlaced Mormon brain.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors know they don’t have much of a case, I guess:

They offer me a plea deal. I met with them at the beginning of March [2007]. They say, “Take a year and half.” I said no. Then they call me up, and they say four months in prison and four months house arrest. And I turned that down.

Shit, they’re begging, just to get a conviction for some BushCo U.S. Attorney to mail back to D.C. and Alberto Gonzales (at that time).

And, Isaacs has irony:

The only thing I regret is not putting Bach in the background.

I agree that the feds will have a hell of a time trying to convict him in LA.