Thursday, October 11, 2007

I Know It When I See It and This Is That


On a cold morning in January, FBI agents converged on a modern brick office building in Koreatown in a mission conjured up at the highest levels of Washington: to rid the world of adult films by an obscure niche producer named Ira Isaacs.

From his 12th-floor suite above Wilshire Boulevard, Isaacs, a stout, fast-talking 56-year-old Bronx native with a short ponytail and a lopsided "soul patch" of black hair under his lip, sent out some stomach-churning porn...

Specifically, it raises a question of whether increasing public acceptance has shifted the legal standard of obscenity--once aimed at the works of such authors as James Joyce, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs--so that only the most extreme margins of porn can be stopped. --Los Angeles Times