Bana's Brutal Autobiography
Bana Witt Performances
By Allen Whitman
Bana Witt shivers before a small audience in the dark echoing room. Her
breath catches early on, but she recovers, her composure sound. She tells
her stories, a couple of them. They're terrifying. Bana's performance is
scary and descriptive. Serendipitous meetings with co-workers from the
sex trade in the seventies. The ultimate emotional how-to guide for anyone
considering work in the sex trade. She reads in full control of her breath
and with complete involvement. The audience listens closely. There is
nervous laughter. This stuff is true. Yes it's absurd, absurdly funny and
absurdly horrifying, but it's the way it happened. No fiction could be as
amazing and Bana Witt tells her truth beautifully. From the thule fog in
the central valley of California, in Fresno, where America sleeps, to the
beating heart of porn for profit, Bana weaves her story...
Artie Mitchell the infamous San Francisco pervert...fucking on a grey limo
seat while driving across the Golden Gate Bridge at dawn, using paper
money to sop up menstrual blood, being whipped hard and painfully by a
man who only wants to inflict wounds, on-camera, until a co-worker on the
filmset yells "cut!"...invitations to fuck dogs for money...the tales continue,
told matter-of-fact and dispassionately.
She ends with a poem from the place that poems come from. That poetry
place. Her celebration doen't resonate with the same horrific urgency of
her life stories. She speaks of "sex like radar that wil never find me..." and
"pissing on bushes to know where I've been..." She says "cunt", the word
reserved for when you better fucking mean it. Suddenly it's clear. This is
erotic poetry.
But her autobiographical talk is brutal. Her relating of her stories of early
pornographic moviemaking, the angry, hurtling money-fueled powermad
sexual hysterics of a girl from the valley in the seventies....you only
thought stories like that were dreamed up by bored writers. No, they
really happened. Read 'em and weep. If it gets you off, think about that
while cleaning up after you're through.
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