“Yeah, yeah,” Carlos says, playing it off. “All my guy friends are like, ‘Wow you get to shoot that all the time?’ But there’s a lot of shit that goes along with it. Straight up, I never fuck any of my models. If I was into fucking them, I wouldn’t have a book deal at 28. I’d be a hack photographer. OK, the girls are naked, but how’re you gonna shoot 15 rolls of film when you’re trying to score? There are other things on my mind — like paying rent. I take my craft very seriously. I don’t want it to be Jerry Springer.”

Indeed, this month Carlos, whose garish, goth-inspired images of feral feminine sexuality have appeared in everything from Taboo and Nugget to Vibe and While You Were Sleeping, celebrates the release of his massive, coffee-table tome “Wild Skin,” a 224-page fetish smorgasbord from the German publisher Edition Reuss. Better known for such sticky-finger specialties as “Fetish Theatre,” “Shaven Angels” and my favorite, “100 Naked Girls on a Chair,” Edition Reuss has spared no deutsche mark producing a sleek collection of Carlos’ own version of the Rainbow Coalition. There are white-trash chicks with tats, Asian girls in see-through garb armed with scythes or butt-nekkid and wrapped in greasy tire chains, black gals with bodacious ta-tas and plus-size Latin lovelies that look so tasty and Rubenesque they make you want to sign up for Español as a second language.

The book reflects almost a decade of work, from the time when Carlos was starting out as a photographer for local punk/hardcore groups back in his native Baltimore to his current crop of pro and semi-pro honeys here in Los Angeles. Carlos moved to the West Coast about two years ago, but back in the day, the girls he photographed (for the most part) had never modeled before. They were either friends he’d met in the local clubs or girlfriends of his buds, which sort of explains the various body types Carlos usually fixates on.

Instead of the usual boring Bambis and Ashleys, the blond or brunette wet-dream visions of perfection most erotic photographers go after, Carlos’ women are more likely to be the girl-next-door in Baltimore, a blue-collar mix of skinny, flat-chested freaks and full-figured hoochie-mamas in too-tight bustiers. Granted, they’re all hot, but these women aren’t the first choices of the often Wonder Bread-and-mayo eatin’ photo editors Carlos has had to deal with.

“Of course, I am black,” Carlos explains when I ask him about his rather eclectic aesthetic when it comes to the ladies. “And in Baltimore, I grew up with all kinds of people. White girls weren’t all that. But that’s the downside to having white frat boys run all of the porno magazines. There are African-American, Mexican and Asian guys that want to see naked girls. Everything can’t be a derivative of Marilyn Monroe. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy out there, but a lot of the major erotic white photographers seem devoid of culture. Coming from a middle-class black family, I can’t even approach shit the way a white photographer would. When I look at a girl with a big ass and thighs, it’s normal to me. My mother’s fat, all my aunts are fat. I was raised by fat black women. So when I see a fat black or Korean girl coming down the street, I’m not thinking, Oh, yeah, you need to lose weight.”

He adds, “And don’t even bring up Jennifer Lopez to me. People are always talking about J.Lo’s bootie, and it’s not even that big!”

See, Carlos is all about Pam Grier, ’70s porn and Venus and Serena Williams. Actually, he’s even more about masked Mexican wrestlers, the Incredible Hulk, duct tape, old-school horror flicks like “I Spit on Your Grave” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and serial killers like Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer.

He has dreds and wears black T-shirts and shorts with black tennis shoes and black socks, and he likes folks to call him Batman or Blacula. Basically, though he won’t like me saying this, Carlos is a geek — a geek after the manner of Kool Keith, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman and everyone in the band Metallica. He reminds me of all the guys I used to sit with in the lunchroom in junior high or share copies of Mad Magazine or National Lampoon with on the bus ride home from school. If you ever attend one of those Comicon conventions, the ones where all the future Kevin Smiths of the world congregate to share news about whether Nicolas Cage is going to play Ghost Rider, then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Still, it’s been my experience, coming from a similar tribe (i.e., “the pervs”), that the geeks often have something interesting going on in their noggins. And they can certainly have more imaginative and original takes on human sexuality than your average latter-day Hugh Hefner-wannabe-hipsters. Perhaps that’s why Carlos is a better photographer of erotica than most. Personally, I could never get my mind off the pussy, but Carlos would rather be sketching the storyboards for the sci-fi flick he’s working on. That’s how he detaches from his subject and creates something unusual.

“It’s not like I set out to be a pornographer,” he tells me as he fixes himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the Hollywood flat that doubles as his studio. “I had a friend who worked over at LFP, who I knew from going to the horror conventions. He said, ‘Hey, why don’t you work at LFP?’ That’s when LFP had all of these diverse magazines, like Blunt, RIP and Rap Pages. So I went to L.A. and met with all of the editors. They told me they were starting this new magazine called Leg World. I had never really thought about it. I’d shot a lot of pictures of naked people and people doing weird stuff, but it didn’t occur to me to try to get into fetish. I had an outtake of one girl, and they said, ‘What about her?’ That’s how I got started. That was in ’97, I think.”

And so a career was born, and Carlos began to apply to the wonderful world of sleaze all of the photo techniques and eccentricities he had developed while shooting video box covers, CD art and his own sci-fi “Heavy Metal” fantasies. For instance, Carlos employs a somewhat trashy, run-down Baltimore look in his photos — brick walls with peeling paint, kitchens with faded yellow wallpaper, bathrooms stripped clean of adornment or dingy brown doorways and musty old couches as banal as any crime scene on “Homicide: Life on the Street.” These are the backdrops for fat-assed white girls with dirty feet or some vampish Latin mama squirting urine all over the place.

His colors are a lot “warmer” — that is, gaudy, yellow and overlit on purpose — which lends his work a seedy, run-down aura. And his props — like headgear for car accident victims, World War II-era gas masks, straitjackets and T-balls (worn in the mouth) fashioned from painted doll’s heads — have more to do with his obsession with the horror genre than with sex. Even the adult tapes he’s directed — “Girl Trouble” and “Love Hurts 1 & 2″ — appeal more to morbid than prurient interests, what with all the power tools and emergency-room bandaging in them.

George Pitts, director of photography at Vibe, hits it on the head when asked to describe what marks Carlos’ style as distinctive. Pitts, who hired Carlos to shoot rock diva Nikka Costa, refers to Carlos’ Baltimore steelo as the perfect counterpoint to fetish shutterbug Richard Kern’s New York punk brio.

“Well, Baltimore is the home of David Byrne, and most visibly John Waters,” says Pitts. “Maybe trash is part of the general regional culture of Baltimore for all I know, and maybe that came [to Carlos] without much deliberation. Kern seems almost WASPy by comparison to Carlos. What with Carlos’ ethnicity and his rather unpopular expressionistic aesthetic, he’s going against the grain of the prevailing styles of photography.”

Carlos digs Waters, but he’s never been crazy about the comparison to the Pope of Trash, which he’s heard before. Still, like Waters, he’s mostly been self-taught, and he has a weird sense of humor that makes you wonder what they put in Charm City’s tap water. Whenever he tells the story about his old girlfriend back in Baltimore getting p.o.’d because one of his models shaved her pubes and left behind a pile of hair in the john, or the time one of his skankier models told him she was willing to do an anal scene to get enough dolo for Xmas presents, it never fails to crack me up. Though he’s quick to point out that most of his models weren’t like that.

“The girls I mainly shot with in Baltimore were regular girls who wanted to be in some cool pictures, and that was it. Whereas out here in L.A., there’s a whole industry for that. There’s a whole plethora of different kinds of girls who want to be in print because it’s a tear sheet for something. It’s all more career-oriented, and there’s good and bad to that. In Baltimore, there were only a couple of times I came across girls who were a fucking pain in my ass. Unlike L.A. On the other hand, out here, if I want a midget with breast implants, I can make a phone call. I guess I’ve moved to another level.”

Like they say in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons, “Eh, it’s a living.” Maybe I’d have the same attitude if it’d been in my face 24-7 like it has with Carlos, but I doubt it. As good as he is as a pornographer, you can tell Carlos is rarin’ to move on to designing alien spaceships and three-headed Martian cyborgs. I don’t think I’d be in such a hurry to exit stage left.

“Look, the book is awesome, it’s great,” he says. “And I want to do another one similar to it with different ideas, but I hope that my next project heads off in another direction. I mean, I’m not complaining. But I have a lot more things I’m interested in.”

OK, Carlos, whatever you say. But until the day you leave porno for good, think you could use me as a light man?

The author of the image, and its gender-bending model, was the French surrealist photographer Pierre Molinier, a suicide at age 76 in the Year of Our Lord 1976. Molinier, a sorcerer of self-portraiture who longed to be a lesbian and who created hundreds of pictures wherein he explored with great sensuality his own transvestism, titled this particular photo “Le Chaman” (“The Shaman”). There’s also a variation of this picture in which the same shaman stands before us, but this time with a full erection as well as large breasts. They’re a peculiar pair of prints amid the perverse panoply of Molinier’s work — an oeuvre rife with fetish shots of Molinier by himself, in heels and stockings, fucking himself with a dildo or sucking his own cock. His was a sexuality turned on itself, yet still primarily heterosexual. The shaman was the projection of what he wished himself to be.

Why a shaman? In “Sexual Personae,” Camille Paglia defines the shaman as “an archaic prototype of the artist, who also crosses sexes and commands space and time.” She gives, as an example, the blind seer Tiresias from Greek mythology, whom T.S. Eliot describes as an “old man with wrinkled dugs.”

Molinier was more old man with wrinkled dugs than he was a creature commanding space and time. A small, funny looking fellow, he always had the countenance of an elderly man, even when he was younger and in the army. Certainly, he was dangerous (he once shot at his cousin and did some time for attempted murder), but you wouldn’t know it by seeing him. Rather, you’d take him for the village pervert, the one with a pocket full of candy and drool running down his chin. This same Molinier dreamed of being beautiful, powerful and a deadly practitioner of the black arts: a shaman. In the world he created for himself, he became one.

Molinier, whose work has been compared by commentators to that of Man Ray and Hans Bellmer and who would after his death be honored by a major exhibition of his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, lived for more than 40 years in the same pigpen of an apartment in Bordeaux. The apartment served as Molinier’s dwelling, his studio and his photo lab. It was also his cum-stained temple of narcissism. Mirrors lined the walls and the ceilings. Dildos, self-made sex toys and handcrafted love dolls shared space with Molinier’s box camera and his bizarre inventions for developing film, his techniques for which remain shrouded in secrecy.

There were female masks to hide his face in, and an endless array of fetish clothing and sexual prostheses — like some odd matrimony betwixt Frederick’s of Hollywood and “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” In the middle of his main living space, there was his filthy altar of self-abuse and sometime stage: his bed.

The writer Jean-Luc Mercie in the monograph “Pierre Molinier: Une retrospective,” as published by the Galerie Kamel Mennour in Paris, quotes Molinier as stating his three passions in life to be “painting, women and guns.” Like Man Ray, he begins his artistic career as a painter only to later relinquish its primacy in favor of photography. Many of his paintings bear a striking resemblance to the effects he was able to achieve through cutting and pasting the legs and buttocks to his creations and photographing them over and over again so that they have the seamless quality of paintings. Some of these use the faces of female models or of his female masks as centerpieces, such as the photos “Hanel Sechs,” “L’enfant homme,” “Toi, moi” and “L’etoile de six.” The result is similar to some modern approximation of the Hindu god Shiva, the destroyer of worlds. With so many legs twisted about, it could be a black widow with a woman’s head.

Molinier was equally obsessed with feminine pulchritude and his own frenetic onanism. According to Mercie, he fathered two girls, one legitimate, one not. He lusted after one, and prostituted the other in a bar/whorehouse he owned. (Molinier claimed to have slept with them both, but at least one of them denies this occurred.) He was married, but his wife eventually abandoned him to his life of masturbation. Yes, he did take lovers, both female and male, yet he’s been famously quoted as stating, “I would have liked to have been a woman, but lesbian.”

Nevertheless, one suspects that Molinier could only find satisfaction in self-induced climax. In many of his photos, he manipulates shots of himself in near-drag so he is sodomizing his double. On the masked face of the “dominant” Molinier in these pictures, he seems to be cackling with delight.

According to legend, Molinier would collect his semen in a stocking and varnish his paintings with it. (He never stopped painting completely, it’s said.) When Andrè Breton hailed him as a fellow surrealist, Molinier said he was more of a magician, and the idea of Molinier hoarding his own milky discharge for use in his secret rites of photography is an occult conception on par with witches using menstrual blood in casting a spell. There’s no evidence that I’ve seen that Molinier believed in or worshipped Satan, but he transgressed taboos to such a degree that he might as well have. There’s a biography of him in French that translates as “A Life in Hell.” That title calls to mind the cry of Milton’s Satan that “myself am Hell, and in the lowest deep a lower deep still threatening to devour me opens wide.” Molinier created his own Hades wherein he was his own Morning Star.

I believe this was the source of his madness and his genius. Georges Bataille posits in his book “Eroticism: Death and Sensuality” that eroticism is a solitary activity. For the most part, it was for Molinier, who seemed to embody Bataille’s explication of the contradictory nature of eroticism: “On the one hand eroticism is the solitary fault, the thing which saves us only by separating us from everybody else, the thing which saves us only in the euphoria of an illusion, since when all is said and done that which in eroticism bears us to pinnacles of intensity also lays the curse of solitude upon us.”

Molinier’s “euphoria of an illusion” came only after hours and hours of transmogrifying his image into a thing of great beauty — a creature both masculine and feminine, a Penthouse Pet with a stiff weenie. His effort was essentially a failure. One need only compare Molinier’s likenesses to those of actual women to see this, or to note that his most arousing artistry occurs in his photographs of the fleshy transsexual SkinDo, whose plump, curvy body reminds one of the harems of Ingres. But SkinDo has the body and the face to pass for a chick. Molinier had neither, really, though he did have nice legs for an otherwise ugly old man.

Maybe that’s why Molinier, in his 70s, finally stuck a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger: the fact that he could never really cross that Rubicon and become the woman he wanted to be. There’s no satisfactory explanation for his suicide, save the theory that prostate cancer had robbed him of his precious virility, and Mercie says that’s apocryphal. Of course, his father had committed suicide when Molinier was 44, which might have planted the seed. But the message he left scrawled on his door suggests that he merrily threw himself into the abyss: “I’m bloody bored of living,” it said, according to Mercie. “And I am killing myself voluntarily! And having fun doing so.” What an odd little madman/magician he made. How astounding the product of his twisted life.

All images appear courtesy of Galerie Kamel Mennour “Molinier: Une retrospective.”

MacGowan’s gargantuan exploits in the realms of substance abuse have been well documented by admirers and detractors alike. Apparently, he was fired from the Pogues, the legendary, London-based Anglo-Irish rock group he co-founded in the early ’80s, after his band mates decided in 1991 that they could no longer abide his missing tour dates because he was incapacitated by drink. In doing so, the Pogues signed their own death warrant. MacGowan, the apotheosis of the inebriated Celtic rebel, was the one the crowds wanted.

It was his whiskey-inspired antics and his snarling delivery they craved, and every gig he missed only added to the mystique. I remember a Pogue show at Manhattan’s old Beacon Theater where Joe Strummer of the Clash filled in because MacGowan was “sick.” The experience was lackluster, to say the least. But to MacGowan’s devotees, such disappointments were part of the package. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, it was common to be in an Irish pub in New York and hear the often-told myth that MacGowan had six months to live. So when he missed a gig, we were all just happy to hear that he was still alive the next day.

“I’m just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life,” MacGowan explained in 1997 to British men’s magazine Loaded. “Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure.”

MacGowan wears pain and pleasure on his sleeve, along with beer stains, cigarette burns and the remnants of some long-forgotten curry. In Chicago, he once threw up onstage in midset fronting for his new band the Popes, and resumed singing without a hitch. When he broke up with the Pogues, U2′s Bono, one of a passel of celebrity admirers that includes Bob Dylan, Johnny Depp and Nick Cave, let him dry out at his Martello tower in Dublin. Just over a year ago, the Guardian reported that MacGowan was admitted to a fancy rehab facility after his pal, Sinéad O’Connor, called the cops on him — allegedly because he was hooked on heroin, a rumor MacGowan later denied after he was ejected from said dry-out program for reasons unknown. O’Connor told reporters that she feared for MacGowan’s life, but MacGowan shrugged off the whole incident as if that sort of thing happens every day in his world. “I might as well clear up the fact that she [O'Connor] has made out that I was lying on the floor in a coma,” he told the Guardian. “Whereas in fact I was sitting on the sofa having a G and T and watching a Sam Peckinpah movie, ‘Cross of Iron.’”

MacGowan has often made the point that his alcoholism is inextricably linked to his creative output — and it certainly seems to work for him. The bulk of the best the Pogues had to offer during their seven-year run from 1984 to 1991 came from MacGowan’s pen in whole or in part. Indeed, MacGowan co-wrote with band mate Jem Finer the Pogues’ most famous song, the one that’s still played incessantly in the bars and pubs of England, Ireland and New York throughout the Christmas season, “Fairytale of New York,” which he sang on their 1988 album “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” in a duet with the late Kirsty MacColl.

It’s a song that could not have been written by a teetotaler. In it, MacGowan’s frog voice cracks to MacColl:

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I’ve got a feeling
This year’s for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you, baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

The idea of some drunk, not unlike MacGowan himself, cooling his hindquarters in the New York drunk tank on a Christmas Eve and wishing his woman the joys of the season is at once pathetic, amusing and poetic. Perhaps because the poet has wished upon himself the indignities of the overly bibulous, he has a natural affinity for the downtrodden. But there’s also something to the ancient idea of mind-altering substances being used to unlock the creative process. This is not to say that every writer must be an unrepentant boozer, or that every drunk necessarily has a little bit of Dylan Thomas flowing through his veins, but it does give a writer something to write about.

MacGowan’s fondness for firewater is nearly congenital. According to his recent stab at autobiography, the aptly titled “A Drink With Shane MacGowan,” which he coauthored with his wife, writer Victoria Clarke, MacGowan began hitting the sauce at age 5 — his Uncle John in Tipperary would slip him two bottles of stout after stumbling home from “the boozer.” Around the same time, he got ahold of his first bottle of whiskey, which he guzzled down midday in a farmyard. What followed was a hallucination wherein nearby geese spoke “gobbledygook” to the young MacGowan. And it was all downhill after that.

Born in England to Irish parents, he was raised in Tipperary for most of the first six years of his life. Afterward, his family settled in London, where he still lives part of the year, the rest of his time being spent in Dublin. A literary prodigy, he was an avid reader of Irish lit, and at age 14 he won a coveted scholarship to the elite Westminster public school. But Westminster booted him out a year later for drug abuse. He eventually found punk, began calling himself Shane O’Hooligan and led an infamous band called the Nipple Erectors. Later he met up with a ragged crew of ne’er-do-wells into traditional Irish music, and Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for “Kiss my ass”) was born. Since some folks at the BBC knew what that meant, the group shortened the name to the Pogues.

MacGowan was the soul of the group. He wrote and sang a large portion of the songs, and his defiant, drunken truculence quickly made him an idol to legions of Irish, nearly Irish and wannabe Irish. MacGowan retains that status to this day, though his current notoriety in no way matches those bygone days of Pogue popularity. Still, his admirers are doggedly loyal. None other than legendary Irish singer Christy Moore has referred to him as a great poet. It’s MacGowan’s verse — steeped in an Irish la vie de bohème — that keeps them coming back.

MacGowan’s penchant for the literary always hits a high note when he pays tribute to fellow writers, such as tippler, novelist and quadriplegic Christy Brown (immortalized by Daniel Day-Lewis in the film “My Left Foot”), whom MacGowan sang of in “Down All the Days” on the 1989 “Peace and Love” album:

Christy Brown a clown around town
Now a man of renown from Dingle to Down
I type with me toes
Suck stout through me nose
And where it’s gonna end
God only knows

Down all the days
The tap-tap tapping
Of the typewriter pays
The gentle rattling
Of the drays
Down all the days

You cannot hear that song without wanting to write, preferably with a bottle of Guinness next to you. Or there’s the more solemn, dirgelike “Lorca’s Novena” on the 1990 Pogues effort “Hell’s Ditch,” the last the band would make as a coherent unit. The song eulogizes the Spanish poet’s execution at the hands of fascist soldiers during the Spanish Civil War, and the effect is mystical, as if MacGowan had himself pierced some veil of time and darkness through a vision brought on by the combination of liquor and narcotics:

Ignacio lay dying in the sand
A single red rose clutched in a dying hand
The women wept to see their hero die
And the big black birds gathered in the sky

Mother of all our joys, mother of all our sorrows
Intercede with him tonight
For all of our tomorrows

The years went by and then the killers came
And took the men and marched them up a hill of pain
And Lorca the faggot poet they left ’til last
Blew his brains out with a pistol up his ass

(Refrain)

The killers came to mutilate the dead
But ran away in terror to search the town instead
Lorca’s corpse, as he had prophesied, just walked away
And the only sound was the woman in the chapel praying

(Refrain)

One imagines this song being played at MacGowan’s funeral, which one hopes is several decades in the future. MacGowan has an alcoholic’s fervent symbolism, one interlaced with his Catholicism and the unusual fact that he was born on Christmas Day nearly 44 years ago. And he has an Irish Republican’s devout allegiance to the cause of the oppressed. On his second CD after leaving the Pogues, 1997′s “The Crock of Gold,” there’s a song titled “St. John of Gods” — inspired by his stay in a detox clinic — that describes a “crushed-up man” who “doesn’t seem to see or care” and who repeats to himself “F’yez all, F’yez all.” But, MacGowan tells us,

Once he stood, in a bar room brawl
With a broken bottle in his hand
Screaming “F’yez all, F’yez all.”

The coppers came
Dragged him away from his crucified Lord
Beat him up in a meat wagon
And they stood him up in court
And all he had to say was “F’yez all.”

In 1998, when I interviewed MacGowan, he said that the song described a man he saw while attending the dry-out program in Dublin. “He looked like a saint,” he told me in his thick brogue. “But he was a drunk. He never said a word. He had been crushed by society.”

“St. John of Gods” is a perfect example of the union of MacGowan’s life and his lyrics. The title is also the name of the program MacGowan was in, one he describes in his autobiography as “a loony bin for alcoholic nutters.” Apparently, MacGowan was on a particularly nasty drunk and blacked out after drinking “Long Island iced teas, Dublin Airport style.” When he came to, he was in the midst of attacking a man who was trying to make his plane. But it was when he fell headlong into an old woman and her groceries that the police arrested him. In a classic “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” scenario, MacGowan was given a choice between getting sober in the “loony bin” or jail, and he chose the former. Once in, he was committed until he could prove that he’d mastered his demons. And it was there MacGowan saw the muse of his song, the crushed-up old man — his “St. John of Gods.”

When I asked MacGowan if the old man was symbolic of Ireland, he agreed that was one possible interpretation: “He’s a figure of defiance through everything. That could be a metaphor for Ireland.” But he denied that he saw himself in that old man, saying, “I’ve had an easy ride.” Of course, I suspect on some level he did see himself in the man, having been recently arrested and committed. And it was his ability to empathize deeply with this fellow — the sort that so many of us pass on the street and ignore on a daily basis — that facilitated MacGowan’s song. Certainly he is not the first to discover the spiritual in society’s lost, but his song seems far more authentic because of the marriage of his talent and experience. Imagination is best when fueled by reality.

Granted, MacGowan isn’t for everyone. Many hold their noses when they hear of his delight in the sewer, his peculiar Irish chauvinism and the bottomless hole in his jar of bevvy. But at least he takes you on a journey to places most writers today are too prissy to venture, whether physically or imaginatively. The Guardian reported recently that MacGowan’s next album, tentatively titled “Twentieth Century Paddy,” will be about Irish Republican Army men, solitary Irish farmers who hang themselves for want of a spouse, overdosed junkies and so on. Without a new Shane MacGowan album to look forward to, life would certainly be a hell of a lot more boring — as it already is without Bukowski. But for the time being, we have MacGowan’s offer from the “Crock of Gold”:

It’s more pricks
than kicks
That’s what it is
I’m a scumbag,
a lout, that’s the way
things are

But if you name me a street
Then I’ll name you a bar
And I’ll walk right through Hell
Just to buy you a jar

Shooting up, playing with guns and sex: This is what the teens in Clark’s low-life American almanacs were shown doing — all of it long before the likes of Nan Goldin and Gus Van Sant exploited such grimy gutter pearls for art’s sake. But Clark was not off to the side with a camera. He was living the life. After “Tulsa,” the National Endowment for the Arts awarded him a grant toward his next project, the even more explicit “Teenage Lust,” but that had to wait while Clark did a stretch in Oklahoma’s McAlester Penitentiary for a 1976 parole violation.

His troubled life and the fractured lives of his friends provided his first material, and he’s been working the same disturbing vein for decades now, though he’s moved from art books to cineplex fare. In “Teenage Lust” Clark reproduced a typewritten passage (all lowercase), signed “1974 Larry Clark,” in which he recalls,

i always wished i had a camera when i was a boy. fucking in the backseat. gangbangs with the pretty girl all the other girls in the neighborhood hated. the fat girl next door who gave me blowjobs after school and i treated her mean and told all my pals. we kept count up to about three hundred the times we fucked her in the eighth grade. i got the crabs from babs. albert who said “no i’m first, she’s my sister.”

At the back of “Teenage Lust,” in a 24-page stream-of-consciousness biography, Clark describes getting in a fight at a card game after he’d shot speed (“Do you like to fight?” his attackers ask him. “I don’t mind,” he responds) and then being handed a .22 Ruger pistol by his girlfriend:

So she gave me the pistol. I held it on them, and then I pistol whipped the main guy. I pistol whipped him across the house and he fell into the bathroom and fell on the shitter. And I shot him. In the arm. I just went … I could have just as well gone through his head. So the other guys split.

Clark’s struggles with heroin addiction, gunplay, sex and the dark side seem ever present. In a recent interview with the art journal Coagula, he asked: “Everyone gets their first blowjob, why can’t you photograph that?” He finds beauty, or at least fascination, in the illicit and even the depraved. Perhaps film was a natural and safer progression for one with such a ravenous gaze.

Following “Kids,” a brutal, elegiac tale of skateboards, sex and substance abuse, Clark could do no wrong in the eyes of the teens and art-house types who embraced him. But many others simply found his lurid visions of teenage intercourse, spliff smoking and random violence exploitative and voyeuristic. And who can blame them? Clark delights in serving up crotch shots of girls who look like your babysitter, or tableaux vivants of skate punks ingesting poppers by the bowlful. With Clark, there’s no middle ground: either you think he’s aqualung in the park eyeing the tykes, or he’s an artist on par with Robert Mapplethorpe, Lou Reed and Cindy Sherman.

Clark’s foray into the slightly more mainstream realm of Hollywood-style crime drama produced the funny but uneven “Another Day in Paradise” (1998). Now he’s back with “Bully,” the true story of a group of bored Florida teens who turn on the neighborhood terror, stab him more times than Caesar and leave him for gator bait in the Everglades. Clark makes the local Pizza Hut look like an Edward Hopper painting and gives this pack of sex- and drug-addled ruffians the full-out “Macbeth” treatment. Start squirming — “Bully” is the mirror you don’t want to look into.

In “Bully,” the parents come off as completely clueless. Do you think that’s specific to this story, or do you believe that is generally true of American parents?

There’s that thing in this country where we just want our kids to be happy, and there’s the tendency to avoid confrontation. These kids are in their rooms; the parents are in the den watching TV. The kids will get up, go make a sandwich, grunt and go back and slam the door — just being teenagers, you know? I guess if they’re in their rooms, at least the parents know where the kids are. Maybe they don’t want to know what’s going on in there.

In America, it’s all about the kids. In other countries it’s not about that — it’s all about struggle, and putting food on the table. Only in the wealth of this country do you have the opportunity to lay around and smoke pot all day, go surfing, hang out and so forth.

You make that world look so appealing that there’s a real element of voyeurism involved. It’s so lush that you just want to dive in.

That’s the dilemma of growing up in this country. That’s why it’s tough on kids today to have the ambition to follow their dreams. It’s so much about money now. The biggest fear of kids today is not having $3 million by the time they’re 22 years old. It’s really bizarre. I don’t think it used to be that way.

These parents seem so oblivious, yet I suspect that when they hear politicians saying stuff like “Hollywood needs to clean up its act or we’ll clean it up for them,” they’re probably all for it.

Yeah, you’re right. Don Murphy, the producer who did “Natural Born Killers,” first told me about the book. He had some good studio money to do the film with; then Columbine happened, and everyone dropped out and said, “No, no, no — we can’t make this film.” I would think it would have been very topical then. But I guess the studios took the position: “We can’t make this movie because it’s about kids killing kids. Columbine just happened. We’re afraid [Joe] Lieberman and these people will attack us. If we put it out there, and some more kids get killed, we’re gonna take the heat. And Congress is going to pass laws against us. And blah-blah-blah.” So they backed off, and when I decided to do the film, it was almost impossible to raise the money. Nobody wanted this film made because of the social climate. I would think it would be the opposite. Certainly, the issue is topical. Since I made the film, there has been a rash of high school shootings where it was all about being bullied. It’s on the tip of everybody’s tongue.

There’s a lot of denial out there. People don’t want reality; they want the sanitized version of your film, without the sex and drugs — where everything’s wrapped up in a neat little package with a moral at the end.

Exactly. Those are the films they’re so proud of themselves for making. Take a movie like “American History X,” which was like an after-school special. There’s plenty of that stuff out there. So why can’t I make my little movie? It’s really difficult to do these films and not do this Hollywood take where everybody gets off the hook.

So what’s the argument for being true to this story, and damn the consequences?

Maybe it’ll open some fucking dialogue about what’s really going on. Maybe all the subtext in the film will make you start thinking and hit you on a different level — not dropping an anvil on your head and giving you such an easy way out. Film’s an amazing form for that. It’s almost limitless. I’m just trying to make a good film.

Why is “Bully” being released unrated?

We couldn’t get an R. The MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] shot us down. We asked them, “What do we have to do? What’s your advice?” They sent back this fax (I’ve still got it), which says, “Our advice to America is: Hide your children.” Can you believe that?

Maybe I’m a marked man because of “Kids,” but it’s a studio system rating, it’s not the government’s. If you have a big-studio movie with big-name actors, you can get away with murder, you can buy any rating you want. It’s only the small, indie films like this that they pick on. It’s ridiculous, it’s corrupt and it’s bullshit, but that’s what we have to deal with.

Will the fact that it’s unrated hurt the film?

It’ll keep us out of a lot of venues, sure. When we did “Kids,” we broke new ground. We got in the malls and the theater chains — they’d never played an unrated movie before. So you have to struggle. The MPAA says, “You don’t have to take the rating if you don’t want it.” But if you don’t get the rating, you can’t play in most of the theaters.

What about NC-17?

You can do NC-17, but no one’s going to play an NC-17 movie. Unrated is better than NC-17. A movie can play in more theaters that way.

There’s a lot of nudity in the film, but you shy away from male frontal nudity. Why not just go for broke if you have to release it unrated anyway?

I was trying to get an R, so I shot it that way. If you show male frontal nudity, you never get an R. My old girlfriends are always calling me up and complaining: “You never have any frontal nudity. You never show ‘the gun’ — the penis.” I tell ‘em, in my next movie, “Ken Park,” there’ll be more penises than you guys can swallow. But in “Bully,” I didn’t even shoot [male frontal nudity] because I was supposed to have an R rating. Fortunately, [the folks at] Lions Gate [which produced the film] are such good people that they’re releasing it as is. Fuck the MPAA.

What’s “Ken Park” about?

It’s about parents and children. You’re gonna meet the parents and learn as much about them as you do about the kids. It’s really a good film. I’m very proud of it. But one baby at a time, you know?

Bobby Kent — the bully in “Bully” — was a real bruiser in reality, what we expect a bully to look like. Why did you choose Nick Stahl, who’s pretty thin and not that buff, to portray him?

I was originally looking for an ethnic actor, because Bobby is Persian. But I couldn’t make that work. I met Nick, and I said, “Gee, this kid’s got something. I bet he could pull this off.” Nobody else thought so. You wouldn’t believe the heat I got from everyone involved in the project. But I wanted Nick. Not only is he effective as a bully and menacing, but he humanizes him. You’re hating this kid and thinking that whatever he gets he deserves. But when it happens, Nick turns it around, and you feel for him. Nick makes Bobby a real person.

You also leave things ambiguous when it comes to the central relationship between Bobby and Marty (Brad Renfro). Why?

I don’t think anyone knows completely what was going on, and Bobby and Marty’s relationship was so strange. They were doing all these different things together. They had been best friends since they were 5 years old. They were out hustling gays in the clubs, making gay porn with some of the people they picked up — ostensibly to sell it and make money. They posed as a gay couple, with Marty doing gay phone sex and dancing in these clubs. No one saw them have sex, but there was certainly some kind of sexual tension there. But they also had sex with girls, group sex — all kinds of stuff.

Did you speak to any of the actual kids involved?

No, they’re all in the penitentiary. And once you’re in the penitentiary for seven or eight years, you change so much. You’re just trying to get out. And they’ve all got their stories down — they think they didn’t do anything wrong.

Is the generation gap you portray in the film unbridgeable? You have two teenage children — how do you know what they’re doing? Or do you want to know?

I do want to know who they’re hanging with, what they’re doing and what they’re thinking about. I just try to open up that communication and talk to them about everything. That’s what needs to be done. You don’t want to blame everything on bad parenting. But that’s probably the core of it right there.

What is it about youth that intrigues you?

It’s such an important part of our lives. It forms us and is so key to later in life. All my early work was about me and those years. It’s interesting to see the differences between how kids grow up today vs. when I was a kid. The information these kids have at an early age is totally unlike the way I was brought up, where you weren’t told anything. That fascinates me. I guess I’ve been doing it for a while now. I seem to be not bad at it.

How do you know you’re getting it right?

I’m not sure I am. I’m trying the best I can. I talk to people that age and ask them if I’m getting it right. And if I’m not, you know, maybe I’ll do better next time.

Well, you know, because of “Kids” you’re a huge hero to members of that generation.

With “Kids” I thought I got it right. I worked hard on the film. I hung out with kids all the time. I got the idea and the story for the film from hanging out with kids. Then I found a kid to write the dialogue. And I learned so much from “Bully” that there’s another film I want to make now about being ethnic and growing up in America. I wasn’t really able to explore that in this film — being first-generation American with immigrant parents.

In “Bully,” the actors you use may be older, but they’re portraying teenagers having sex. How do you respond to those who would label that borderline child pornography?

I wouldn’t know what to say to them. I think they’re crazy. The actors are all of age in the movie. What about “Romeo and Juliet”? Aren’t they 14 years old or something? They should go after that film. Didn’t they have sex in that movie? So go after Shakespeare. It’s ridiculous!

The film, cast with Leigh and Cumming’s friends and shot in a glass house (metaphor alert) in the Hollywood Hills, is trenchant, sexy and tragic all at the same time — a movie for grown-ups. Recently, Leigh discussed “The Anniversary Party” over a glass of iced tea.

“The Anniversary Party” reminded me of a good Robert Altman film. You’ve worked with Altman before — has he been an influence on you?

He’s been a huge influence my whole life, my whole career — and [John] Cassavetes and Woody Allen. They’ve all made a mark. But certainly Altman in terms of how to make actors feel safe and welcomed. When you’re working on an Altman film or an Alan Rudolph film, there’s no place you’d rather be. There’s so much trust and freedom that it’s an absolute pleasure. So that’s something that I understood firsthand, those experiences.

What did you do to put the cast at ease?

I cast friends. Everyone’s playing friends, but they actually are all friends. I think on a certain level the film works because there’s this real familiarity between people. We had no motor homes. Everyone would come to work and get made up at the same makeup tables. We had really good food. The women who played America and Rosa (the housekeepers) cooked these incredible gourmet breakfasts every morning. Then we’d go to the set and work all day. When they weren’t working, people were hanging out on the lawn or sleeping in hammocks. Kevin Kline would play piano, and Michael Panes would accompany him on violin. It was an extraordinary experience.

Was everything scripted in the film?

Yes, but there was a little improvisation in the scene where Alan and I are toasted. I sat down with all the actors and talked about the characters’ relationships to each other and things that they might know about us and want to talk about. We asked them to go off and write it so we’d have the experience of being surprised, and hearing it for the first time. And they would have the experience of giving it to us for the first time.

In the segment where everyone’s doing charades, that was scripted, but to get to that state of heightened frenzy and aggression we had each actor go through the entire charade, and everyone was allowed to throw things in and go through the clue to its completion. Then in the editing room, we edited it back down to exactly what we had scripted. That gave it a life force it wouldn’t have had otherwise.

The film also made me think of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

Yes, that’s our kind of humor, that’s what we love. In fact, [John Benjamin] Hickey and I once read through “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” together when we were doing “Cabaret.” It’s such great writing. I love that kind of brutal, scathing humor. That’s something I’m definitely drawn to.

How did the collaboration with Alan Cumming come about?

Alan and I were hanging out with each other after our time in “Cabaret.” I had just finished being in “The King Is Alive,” which was shot using digital video, and I told him how exhilarating it was, as an actor, to work like that. And how cheap it was. We were both talking about how we wanted to direct, and we thought we’d do it together — write about something we care about, and write for our friends.

We started with who we wanted to be in it, and began to play with it. It just kept growing and growing. Then we started pitching it. We sold it to Fine Line, and then we had to write a script. By that time we had talked about it so much that we knew every scene very well. Then it was just a matter of writing and rewriting.

How did you make that work, co-directing with Cumming?

Alan and I were really on the same wavelength. I guess we were lucky in that we share a lot of the same tastes and opinions, and we had this incredible intuitive understanding of each other. That helped a great deal.

We were also very disciplined. We only had 19 days to shoot, and ended up with 40 hours of footage. On “The King Is Alive,” which also used digital video equipment, they had 120 hours of footage. It took them a month just to make the selects of the dailies. We had a budget of $3.5 million, so that forced us to be sparing in how many takes we did. Usually we did three, working with three of these state-of-the-art digital video cameras.

You thank your mom, screenwriter Barbara Turner, in the credits. How did she help you?

Oh, she was enormously helpful. She was our harshest critic on the script and helped us make it sharper, funnier and smarter. That’s why it says “A big ‘less words’ thanks to Barbara Turner,” because she kept saying to us, “Less words. Less words.”

I know you’re a private person, and you’ve expressed your distaste in the past with publicity. Did that make exposing your personal life as you do in this film painful?

It’s like what Alan’s character says in the movie about his book: “It’s a novel.” You draw on stuff that’s personal. But that’s the great thing about it. As an actor you’re always doing that, you’re just doing it with someone else’s words. To do it as a filmmaker is really incredible. The only time you feel exposed at all is talking about it –like right now. But actually creating the work is the most enlivening, enjoyable and gratifying thing. There’s nothing else like it.

Where’s the line between your character, Sally, and yourself?

There are many things that are similar, but many things that are different. When this first came about I was going through a breakup and trying to recover from that. All my creative energy went into things that had to do with breakups, getting back together or both. You become the most creative during the saddest times. It’s also a time where you reach out to friends a lot. So it was such a perfect thing, this film — and it came together easily because of that.

What appealed to you about a party being the catalyst for an investigation of relationships?

I like the idea of something taking place within a 24-hour period and all that can happen in that 24-hour period. A party symbolizes life and fun and hope and joy. The fact that it can completely derail and undermine this relationship it’s supposed to be celebrating is inherently funny and truthful to me.

Your character has a lot of issues with marriage and with the possibility of having children.

She’s in total denial about it because she’s so hopeful. She’s willing to completely efface herself for this marriage. She’s willing to uproot herself and move to London because that’s where her husband is happiest. She wants to be anything he needs her to be, so she can hold on to this marriage. Also, they’re both at that point, in their 30s, at which they have to decide whether they’re going to have children or not, and if they do, what that means for their work.

How does that apply to you, since you’re in your 30s?

I’d love to have children, and I think marriage is great, I really do. This movie examines all kinds of marriages. We examine so many almost microscopically. They’re all kind of flawed but they work. And there’s something beautiful about that. We know that every marriage in this movie has gone through some horrific nights and somehow managed. So maybe Sally and Joe will make it. I wanted to leave that as a question in the viewer’s mind.

Your film addresses the creeping paranoia people feel in Hollywood over the subject of aging, especially women. Why was it important for you to satirize that?

Not only are we satirizing Hollywood, we’re also indicting it. It’s a true thing about women aging in Hollywood — that suddenly there are no parts. But that’s the great thing about this movie: There are lots of great women’s roles. And that’s an exciting thing to bring to the table. I plan to write and direct more good parts for women, myself included.

Yet everyone in the film is lying about their age.

Yeah, even the youngest woman in the film lies about her age. But Kevin’s character lies about his age too. It’s the nature of the business. People equate success with youth. And if you haven’t had a certain amount of success by a certain time in your life, it’s never going to happen. There’s a fear about that. So people start lying about their age really young. I’ve never done that because I think it’s so insignificant. You are the age that you are, no matter what you say, and you look the age that you look. That’s why I can poke fun at it, because I don’t feel threatened by it.

Do you and Cumming plan to direct together again?

Oh, yes. I think Alan will do one on his own and I’ll do one on my own, then we’ll come back and do one together.

What draws you to the darker roles you’re known for?

Happier characters are usually pretty dull, unless they’re very funny and well written. The darker ones — like in “Georgia” or “Mrs. Parker” — are better parts. They’re more dynamic and challenging. I care more about them because their lives are so hard. But they’re really courageous in the way that they live. There’s something vulnerable and naked and daring about them. That’s what makes playing them more satisfying.

Some reviewers have said, “Oh, Leigh will never get an Oscar because what she does is too edgy.” Do those sorts of comments piss you off?

No, we joke about that in the film. For me it’s, like, can I keep working? That’s where my joy is.