Clique haters alert: Those peeved by the insidery nature of certain segments of the Bay Area music scene may break out in hives if they even glance at this profile.

IT'S PROBABLY NO coincidence that days before I'm supposed to talk to Virgil Porter, primary mover of the little-more-than-a-year-old cable access TV show Burn My Eye!, my eyeballs are indeed on fire. The doctor diagnosed it as conjunctivitis and guessed I'd been playing in the dirt or swapping eye crumbs with my cat. But I blame it all on Porter, my pal and former coworker. He's that prescient. Or that powerful. Take your pick. Just keep your pokerful of hot bands away from my cornea.

Even if you don't know Porter, you've probably spied the guy around town. He's the one with the curly brown hair and chunky specs, in the plaid, pearl-button Western shirts, snapping pics of bands up front, co-organizing an exhibit of rock photos at Balazo/Mission Badlands Gallery, and getting his action shots of groups such as Arab on Radar, Glass Candy, and Unwound into sites and pubs ranging from www.playboy.com to Spin. He's volunteered as a "grunt monkey," as he calls it, at RE/Search, gone on tour as a roadie with GoGoGo Airheart and Replicator, and held down a 40-hour-a-week job as a night photo editor.

He's so tireless in his many multimedia pursuits that I'm certain one day I'll be proud to say I knew and IMed him way back when. During the indie rock years. He'll be the Ted Turner of art-damaged punk, and I'll creak back and forth in my rocker and wheeze about how we toiled in adjacent cubicles at an old editorial job. We went to the same shows – I to write about the band, he to shoot them. We traded tales of growing up in the far reaches of the country, in the most recent states in the union – I in Honolulu, he in the tiny fishing town Soldatna on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. I chatted about growing up amid rain forests and mall rats, white-sand beaches and Kill Haole Day. He talked about his gun collection and teenage taxidermy, being lost for days in the wilderness, and his "b-girl" aunts Butch and Tiddle.

So I was happy, burning eyeballs and all, to visit him last week at his Mission District digs and discuss the final, May 7 episode of Burn My Eye!, which included eXtreme Elvis and the Coachwhips. At that moment he hoped to have a "Best of" DVD, with off-the-cuff interviews and live footage of bands like the Locust, the Lowdown, and Deerhoof, done by the first week of June and in time to peddle at the Mission Creek Music Festival. When I stopped by, past midnight on a weekday, he was teaching himself to create "Easter eggs," those secret components on a DVD or a video game, sustained only by "M*A*S*H reruns and bong hits."

"I was going to pay someone to do it," he said, settling in front of his computer before a honking-big half-tone image of Glass Candy vocalist Ida No singing into a dildo. "But I knew I was going to have to deal with this in the future, so I might as well learn it."

That kind of frontier mentality is all over Burn My Eye!. Those looking for a slick, commercial music product can look elsewhere, though Porter admits he'd love to build his skills when it comes to camera work and sound. The handheld shots may be bumpy, the music may be tinny, and the band may look scary – as if they were lit by the grim reaper rather than by God – but where else are you going to get a video document of the past year's great local rock groups ?

Porter believes the series had a crucial function to fill – he swears it provided more than a "raw blow job." "That's a reason that San Francisco has garnered a little bit of attention in the last year or so. It's because there's an amazing set of bands and musicians, but it's many tiered," he said. "There's a second tier of people who, like me, are essentially playing janitor, mopping up and showing other people, and doing it of our own volition. It's one thing if you're a press agent and you have people street-teaming – it's a whole 'nother thing when you have a scene where people play different roles."

Burn My Eye! began once Porter's work shift changed to nights and he wasn't able to shoot concerts. He needed a creative outlet, so he signed up for Access San Francisco workshops. Other local music figures, such as MCMF organizer Jeff Ray, were in his orientation, but as he and other aspiring TV producers dropped out, Porter stuck to it, finding inspiration in the S.F. punk documentaries of Target Video and enlisting technical help from Bay Guardian contributors, such as George Chen and Josh Wilson, and others, including Matt Coté and Lucinda Rinaldo.

He landed a spot the first Wednesday of the month at midnight on Channel 29, debuting with a Pink and Brown-Blectum from Blechdom episode last year that can be painful to watch today, he confessed. "I've learned a lot. I learned, don't zoom," he explained. "Just because nobody can zoom, and nobody really can time it right, and it just doesn't look right. Get an image and stay with it. That's probably the number-one piece of advice to tell anybody. Break the fucking zoom thing off your camera."

These days Porter fields video requests and e-mails from as far away as Ireland and Brazil. He estimates about 50 people a day visit www.burnmyeye.com and watch videos of, say, a Numbers warehouse show where partygoers took hammers to the host structure (his favorite episode). But naturally his eye is wandering, and he's ready to move on to bigger, longer things – a teen exploitation movie perhaps – though he can't deny that the Burn My Eye! attention has been mind-altering.

"It's great – as soon as you try to do something creative, people are going to respond," he said, leaning against the frame of his kitchen door. "Especially with music. It's not like an ego thing, but Jay [Coleman, his roommate] was like, 'Dude, Virgil, everybody wants a piece of you,' as I was listening to my phone messages. And I was like, 'Yeah, dude, I've never been popular in my life. This is pretty cool.' "