On my birthday, two days ago, Anders Manga released X’s & The Eyes, his fifth studio album on Vampture Records. The first single “There Will Be Blood” is doing well on the European charts already. I swear I am moving back to Europe one of these days, just for the music.
In the United States-based events department, Anders Manga will be kicking off the U.S. tour with a co-headlining show at Dracula’s Ball in Philadelphia with a band called KHZ. Some people erroneously seem to believe that the regular Dracula’s Ball event is not happening this year, but it absolutely is happening. The record label Dancing Ferret Discs, also managed by Dracula’s Ball promoter DJ Ferret, will be shuttering its doors in November, but the events will continue. Hope that clears up any confusion.
Go check out the Anders Manga show and more, if you are in the Philly area. It is important to support creative people who actually come out of the scene.
Blue Blood’s SpookyCash webmaster affiliate program sent yours truly and Forrest Black to the XBiz Hollywood show. As the XBiz show was this past weekend, I was reminded that I had some entertaining snapshots to post of the fun we had. (Footnote: Webmaster affiliate programs are what people with sites reaching thousands of visitors use to, ya know, make money.)
The first night of the webmaster show, we went out to dinner with my friends Lange and Warren. I tried to convince them to go to a restaurant called Koji’s. Koji’s serves sushi and shabu and features pretty good food in a kind of weird mall setting. Some of the same folks who Disneyfied Times Square built a structure called Hollywood and Highland adjacent to the venerable Mann’s Chinese Theater and across from the Disney one and the historic Roosevelt Hotel. Hollywood and Highland features a variety of paid street performers dressed as costume characters and it is a mall, but Koji’s is tasty. Nonetheless, when Lange and Warren realized I was directing us through a mall, they nixed Japanese food and peer pressured me into going back across the street to Hooters.
I’ve never been to Hooters before, but there had been an open bar by the Roosevelt Hotel pool earlier, so I was feeling tipsy agreeable. At the time, we all thought our waitress was super hot. Warren offered to put her in Penthouse and she giggled and he was like, “no, seriously, I’ll put you in Penthouse.” It seemed like she thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Warren really does shoot for Penthouse. Actually, come to think of it, Forrest Black and I have both shot for Penthouse as well, but Warren has the uber hook-up there to the point where a party at his house isn’t over until the pool is chock-full of Penthouse Pets. Some place I have the snapshots to prove that too. But not at Hooters on this particular night. Now that I look at the Hooters snapshots, the waitress looks only okay. Maybe she smelled really great. Maybe Lange just had her keep the beer flowing to the point where I also thought Hooters food was surprisingly delicious. (More on this later.)
We went to a party after this at The Ritual Supper Club. I think the primary occasion for the party was the CyberSocket gay web awards, but Stella Artois says I may or may not be particularly specifically accurate on this point. The Ritual Supper Club has been known variously as Ritual, White Lotus, the local bus station, etc. and is a Hollywood hotspot where A-listers like Mark Wahlberg can go to bang porn stars cast for the next season of Entourage on HBO. Luminaries in attendance included Chi Chi LaRue, Anders Manga, Joanna Angel, Mario from Stockroom, Halcyon Pink, Ashley Steel, and of course Forrest Black and Amelia G.
XBiz then threw a really cool seminar with talented filmmakers Joone and Andrew Blake. I tend to be really turned off by most of what the mainstream of Porn Valley churns out, but Joone and Andrew Blake are seriously good at what they do and bring a real artistry to their work. Later there was a really painful speech from one of the guys responsible for the Penthouse acquisition. He was going on about his mainstream credentials and, although he has an impressive background in some respects, I just think of maintream as a pejorative. And I find it really tiresome when people make a huge distinction between what they perceive as their adult work and their “mainstream” work. I always wonder if they just think they can phone it in as soon as exposed breasts are involved. Monetizing media is monetizing media. The reason so few adult videos produced can touch Joone or Andrew Blake is that some people think they do not have to bring their A game if nudity is involved. Heck, some people even believe they should not. I’m personally a fan of doing a good job of whatever one does.
I certainly know some club kids who are fucking awesome at being fabulous club kids. Forrest Black and I ran into journalist Gram Ponante as we snuck out of the Penthouse keynote. We had a conversation about some of the more wannabe upscale webmaster events. I have started skipping this variety of velvet rope-oriented shindig, even though I adore some of my friends who attend and throw such parties. I’m fine with genuinely upscale and I’m fine with a real velvet rope whether it is glam rock disco or casino VIP, but I only enjoy such things if they are the real deal. I tell Gram that I like my club kids to be professionals and that watching internet professionals mack at being club kids is not my idea of a good time. This lead to me being horrifically misquoted, but, hey, at least I made the front page his site and it was kinda funny and we were all operating on not a lot of sleep.
For an example of an event I was definitely down for, Vic DiCara from the seminal Hindu-infused hardcore punk band 108 took a whole bunch of us out to dinner afterward and we had a really great evening. Ross Horowitz of Shoot Out the Lights fame drove me, Forrest Black, and his beautiful companion over to Koji’s. Now you all might be recalling that I mentioned walking to Koji’s at the beginning of the weekend. Yes, it was walking distance and, no, we were not that partied out, but Ross just bought a black Rolls Royce, so it was imperative that we drive to Hollywood and Highland. After making me go to Hooters, Lange of course was the first person I saw when we got to Koji’s and I gave him grief about it, but forgave him when he introduced me to photographer Chris Cuffaro whose band photography I had published in Blue Blood magazine in print years ago, but who I had never met in the flesh before. Unsurprisingly, given the proclivities of the guest list, we all talked about music most of the night. At one point, Vegas Ken from The Best Porn told an anecdote about working in an emergency room and maybe not being startled by the horror in the same way that probably no one at the table was startled by naked people any more. But mostly we chatted about music and music biz.
I forget whose party we went to after that, but the next afternoon found us at Hooters again. I had not been to eat at Hooters twice in my entire life. We had lunch with a plethora of cool folks on the various days of the XBiz webmaster conference, but Hooters made the buffet brunches at the Roosevelt Hotel seem yummilicious. And they were not particularly gourmet buffets. Hooters food is absolutely revolting if one has not consumed the proper number of refreshing adult beverages beforehand. The weird MSG-style flavor enhancers at Hooters made my tongue swell and the flavor of everything I tasted there seemed sickening. Forrest Black consoled his annoyed tummy after Hooters with the purchase of a stuffed Kuromi plush. In the unlikely event that you are somehow unaware of this, Kuromi is Hello Kitty’s new punk rock gal pal with the fetish hat.
In conclusion, after enough beer, Hooters chicken wings and shrimp are tasty and Hooters waitresses are delicious, but you really need serious beer goggles to eat that food. Well-prepared Japanese food, Rolls Royces, and Hello Kitty dolls may be enjoyed while entirely sober. I think this may illustrate some of the quintessential truths of the universe.
So I was chatting with my pal Anders from the band Anders Manga yesterday. I had just been looking at some snapshots of us partying together at a Hollywood hotspot just off Hollywood Blvd. When I say Hollywood hotspot, in this instance, I mean a place variously called White Lotus, The Ritual Supper Club, the local bus station, etc. where A-listers like Mark Wahlberg can go to bang porn stars cast for the next season of Entourage on HBO. At any rate, I’ll post the pics shortly and add a link, but Anders and I were just talking about this and that and he asked if I had heard from Jennifer of The Nuns recently.
Descended from Welsh royalty and initially known as Jennifer Miro in the earliest 1970’s incarnation of The Nuns as a seminal punk band in San Francisco, Jennifer steered the band in a more gothic direction over time and was variously known as Jennifer Anderson or Tiffany Tarantula or Maitresse Jennifer. The Nuns were huge in San Francisco and opened for bands like The Ramones and The Damned and were even on the bill for the very last Sex Pistols show. Jennifer also had a role in Dr. Caligari, the seminal cinema of transgression film from Stephen Sayadian and Jerry Stahl, who were also responsible for Cafe Flesh. However, Maitresse Jennifer or Mistress Jennifer is probably best known to members of the Blue Blood boards as the Blue Blood hottie who asked all the most interesting questions about love in the kinky tumultuous world of fame, wealth, and rock and roll.
[13:10] Anders Manga: hey have you heard from Jennifer? from nuns?
[13:10] Anders Manga: she vanished?
[13:11] AmeliaG: not in ages. I was in pretty regular contact with her, so I wonder if she got married or sex murdered
[13:11] Anders Manga: i heard her friend in the band was murdered in nyc
[13:11] AmeliaG: eep, forget I just said that particular conjecture
[13:11] AmeliaG: that’s creepy
I was just thinking that Jennifer, like a lot of superstar hotties, will disappear when she gets into a new Relationship and reappear when it ends or has trouble. I wish people would not exit their normal day-to-day lives and relationships when they are in love, but it is pretty common. That is what I had assumed had happened. Now that I’ve read a bit more about what was going on at the time, I’m kind of worried.
Apparently, in the fall, Mistress Kris who performed with The Nuns and appeared in many photo shoots with Jennifer was murdered at a hotel in Times Square. Times Square in New York City is supposedly gentrified to the point of Disneyfication. I think a Disney corporation even covered the financing on a bunch of the un-sleazing of Times Square. Nonetheless, the Hotel Carter still stands and is still open for business from vagrants and creeps. At least as recently as 1999, Hotel Carter was the sort of establishment where the front desk personnel might be killing one another with a knife or hammer, and housed the sort of nightclub that Sean Puffy Combs and Jennifer Lopez would have to flee after a shooting incident. In the 80’s, Hotel Carter was the place to throw a half-dressed bound woman out the window. I’ve always liked the word defenestration but not approved of the practice.
At any rate, a housekeeper found poor Kris’ nude corpse wrapped in plastic under the bed, after a guest named Clarence Dean checked out. Clarence Dean was already wanted in the State of Alabama for (a) failure to appear for a property theft trial and (b) a rape charge and (c) not keeping the folks who track convicted sex offenders aware of his whereabouts. Apparently the vile Clarence Dean had been found guilty of attempting to do horrible things to a nine-year-old girl in Florida, but he had not maintained his sex offender registration. He was also accused of meeting college girls via online dating sites and then raping them. According to the New York Times, Clarence Dean also had prior convictions in Texas and Tennessee for sex-related offenses. Apparently, Clarence Dean got to New York by stealing the car and credit cards belonging to the Tennessee woman he was supposed to be helping care for as a home health aide. (The only other person I’ve ever heard of stealing from the person he is supposed to care for, in this sort of situation, is one of the very worst people I have ever had the misfortune to meet.) Clarence Dean’s ill-gotten gains could only take him so far because he was forced to stay at the Hotel Carter because it was bargain-priced at only $99.23 a night before tax. Consider how expensive Manhattan is if $99 a night gets you a place described by the AP as “a threadbare accommodation that stands as a throwback to Times Square’s seedy past . . . for budget travelers who don’t mind insects, grimy bathrooms, stained furniture and broken telephones.”
So anyway, the whole thing is totally appalling. It appears that the perpetrator of this awful deed is probably standing trial round about now and may get the death penalty. Certainly, given his long rap sheet, Clarence Dean does not sound like a candidate for rehabilitation and no amount of remorse on his part, if he had it, would bring Kris back. To be 100% even-handed, I’ll mention that Clarence Dean’s brother apparently claims the guy is a simpleton who is being framed, but I can’t think what the motive would be for the New York City police to frame a fugitive serial sex offender for murdering a hot girl from a goth band.
At any rate, I hope Jennifer is okay. Does anyone know how she is doing?
