UPDATED: There's a 200,000-square foot, 1912-vintage, Moorish-accented armory in San Francisco's Mission District that's on the National Register of Historic Places. Long shuttered and in disrepair, developers have unsuccessfully tried to convert it to apartments, offices, and even an Internet switching hub. But now, in the city where a fondly-recalled era of gay leather fetishism spurs scholarly exegesis and cultural tourism events, the armory has met its highest and best use. As a dungeon to be used in pornographic films.

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

Its windows are broken and boarded up, its walls covered with graffiti, and its dungeonlike basement is peeling, chipping, rotting and moldering. Nothing wrong with that, say the pornographers. A real, ready-made dungeon is just the thing for filming bondage movies. Filming could begin inside....as early as next month. To get ready for that happy day, (director James) Mogul wandered the crumbling corridors of the enormous dark and dank basement, scouting locations. "I see tied-up girls, right here,'' Mogul said, standing in what was the soldiers' gymnasium. "You suspend them from these arches. This will be very cool.''

In the boiler room, Mogul said, the possibilities are endless. "You could put a girl right inside the boiler,'' he said. "Why not? It's a nice little chamber. You wouldn't have to change anything. It's already formidable looking. You don't have to build a fake dungeon; this building is already a dungeon.'' The boiler room and an adjoining room with a giant industrial fan were arousing Mogul's artistic impulses. "I see erotic whipping,'' he said. "I see all kinds of kinky things going on in here. It's wonderful to put soft human flesh next to ugly, industrial machines. That's what we call juxtaposition. The possibilities are endless.''

The porn distributor has outgrown a filming facility elsewhere in the city; and has 70,000 subscribers paying at least $25 per month to view one of the company's nine Internet sites. Which like the whole online porn industry itself, tells us quite a bit about sadness, fear, placebos and alienation. Not that I'd make adult porn illegal. I wouldn't.

Although, if I could wave my magic wand (so to speak), I might require porn honchos to bone up (damn, there I go again) on American history.

....Peter Acworth, the fellow who bought the armory.....(said perceived vulgarity of porn is) all relative. The building's original purpose, he pointed out, was to train soldiers to kill people. "That's obscenity,'' he said. "What we plan to do is nothing compared with what this building was intended for.''

So let's see here. The armory, built in 1912, would likely have been used to train American soldiers for World War I, for fighting Nazis in World War II, and battling North Vietnamese Communists in the Vietnam War.

I think we're all - even including Peter Acworth - fairly clear on Nazi Germany's extermination of six million Jews, and about just exactly where that, and the U.S. defeat of the Nazis, each fall on the "obscenity" scale.

Now, one can debate whether the U.S. should have gotten involved in Vietnam, but let's be also be clear about the Vietnamese Communists. Let's gauge how "obscene" what follows sounds, versus U.S. intervention intended to stop the Vietnamese Communists. As the landmark "Black Book of Communism" points out, in the first half of the 20th Century, they systematically exterminated landowners, political opponents, and Vietnamese women married to Frenchmen; then later carried out another 50,000 executions of Vietnamese in the countryside; imprisoned between 50,000 and 100,000 Vietnamese; compelled at least 600,000 Vietnamese Catholics to flee from the North to the South; and "re-educated" half a million to a million Vietnamese. Presently, despite a developing economy, freedom of speech and political expression remain badly constricted today in the former South Vietnam, at the behest of the ruling Communists. Not that anyone in the United States today cares, of course - except Vietnamese refugees.

What's really "obscene" is not pornography for sad losers who can't form and sustain real intimate relationships; but that Peter Acworth's glib moral relativity surely passes for informed social critique to most of San Francisco, and to the San Francisco Chronicle.

TECHNORATI TAGS: SAN FRANCISCO, ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, ARMORY, PORNOGRAPHY, OBSCENITY, WORLD WAR II, VIETNAM

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 14, 2007 11:48 AM

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