Not that long ago, I read something that said Brazzers was in Burbank. Brazzers, if youāre not aware, is an adult production company, and I live in Burbank. I had a hard time believing that Brazzers was based in such a sleepy part of the San Fernando Valley. Historically, adult production companies were nestled in the northwest sector of the Valley, at the base of the Santa Susana Mountains, places like Northridge and Canoga Park. With some googling, I figured out that MindGeek, which owns Brazzers, has (had?) office space in Burbank. MindGeek is one of the biggest porn companies in the world; in 2015, revenue was $460M. In a sidenote, the last time that I referred to MindGeek as a porn company, in a Forbes post, I got a complaint from one of their employees, who asked me to change what Iād written because, he said, they werenāt a porn company, they were a technology company. When I replied that this was not the case, that they were, in fact, a porn company, and, no, I wouldnāt change it, he didnāt respond. Anyway, apparently the MindGeek offices are (were?) located around 2.4 miles from my house, and when I looked up the building on Google Street View, I could see that this was a building Iād driven past many times, on my way to Target or wherever I happened to be going that day, and Iād never noticed the sign on the front of the building that read MINDGEEK. This was around the time that the smoke from the fires was just starting to accumulate, but it wasnāt super bad yet. So I got in my car and drove to see the building. I parked nearby and walked around to the front. There was no longer a sign that read MINDGEEK: It had been removed. I could still see the faint outlines of the letters, though. Awhile back, I wrote an article for The Atlantic about the ghosts of Porn Valley past. Sometimes Iāll be going to the grocery store, and Iāll see the place I went to porn star karaoke. Or Iāll be driving to an appointment, and Iāll see the offices that used to house what was once the adult industryās top agency through which aspiring porn stars funneled on the way to wherever their career was heading. One time, a long time ago, I had lunch with Nelson George. At the time, I was doing a fair amount of appearing on TV, shows like āPolitically Incorrect,ā and at one point, he said: āTV is like ether.ā And then he waved his hand in the air like smoke disappearing into the atmosphere. Thatās what the adult industry is like, too. Thatās what adult content is like, too. One minute itās there. The next, itās gone.
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