Posts tagged: april flores

I’ve known Blue Blood Photographer Carlos Batts for what seems like a few lifetimes at this point. Our paths first crossing in the pre-internet zine scene, East Coast comic book conventions, and a million other points of common reference in the sexy cool artistic realm along the way since then. Looking back, some of those scenes seem like different worlds these days. We both live in Hollywood now, coincidentally a few blocks away from each other to be even more specific. But, maybe it’s not coincidence at all. A lot of interesting cool creative types end up in Hollywood. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoy it out here, being such a sort of heaven for eclectic creative types driven to document and enhance or otherwise decorate their public existence.

There are always a million things to do in Hollywood and it’s rare (or unfortunate anyway) to do everything within one sort of scene. Instead, people tend to party hop, swinging from velvet rope VIP to drug addled loft gatherings, trekking from inspiring artistic exhibits in every media imaginable to legendary dive bars to see the latest and hopefully greatest bands before they break big or break up.

Carlos’s latest video project, Young Hollywood, presents the cacophonous meld of cool glam youth and seedy glitz, the edgy music mixed with erotic pop art and nightlife craziness that is the young Hollywood experience today, all through the eyes of an artistic pornographer. The party to celebrate it’s release very much reflected this jumbled elemental mix as well, and although I couldn’t party quite as long as I would have liked, everyone seemed to be having a really good time. The shindig was held at the relatively new Safari Sam’s …

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Three very deviant ladies whose work I know well just perked up my holiday season like a handful of little blue pills and a mason jar of Alabama moonshine.

This may come as a shock to those who don’t know me, but the holiday season and I are not exactly sympatico. (Those who know me, however, are rolling their eyes: “We know, we know!”) I’m not sure at what point during my misspent childhood I turned into a Grinch, but knowing me it probably involved finding out that the Thompson submachinegun I’d just received under the tree wouldn’t, you know, kill anyone or anything. In fact, the damn thing was made of plastic.

Since then, I’ve developed less and less of a taste for the holidays every year, especially after working in the sex toy business where budgets lived and died based on the number of Class V Mister Fuck Double Dongs you move before December 24. I understand it’s the same with plasma televisions. The advertising blitz designed to make you cough up your hard-earned for that new sweater, or in recent years The Next New Shiny Thing, used to begin the day after Thanksgiving; then it was some nebulous date in early November; nowadays, the pumpkins are shredded in storefronts across the nation in the desperate race to get the damned Christmas trees up. “Bankrupt yourself,” the ads seem to say, “Or your Wife/ Husband/ Girlfriend/ Boyfriend/ Kids/ Dog/ Gynecologist won’t like you any more.” It’s Guilt Trips for Jesus, and I’m havin’ none of it.

The only thing that gets me through the holidays is all the Christmas themed smut that’s out there. I will admit, I am a sucker for the irreverent trope-orgy satisfaction of a themed photo shoot or …

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I just had a bit of a DC/Baltimore flashback weekend. Photographer Carlos Batts planned to do a gallery show/video release party at the combined studio locations of Federico Zignani and Apollo Starr. Normally such an event would be on my calendar in pen, but the damn date of this particular shindig kept changing. And then seminal DC industrial band Chemlab was playing the Knitting Factory. Due to the requirements of Murphy’s Law, both events were the same night.

Being the plucky Los Angeles denizen that I am, I managed to hit the Chemlab show, the Carlos Batts party, and the cool hot dog stand. (Yes, in LA, we have hot dog stands ranked by factors like cool and celeb client list.) Afterwards, Forrest Black and I took Carlos Batts and his gigantic entourage home in my limo. Passersby never can be sure how many people are behind tinted black glass and Carlos was all plotting mischief we could get into.

Anyway, in addition to his coffee table books and lots of other accomplishments, the fabulous Carlos Batts has shot a whole lot of erotic photo sets currently on BlueBlood.com and you should expect to see a whole lot more from him there. He has just released a video, two years in the making, starring April Flores, called Voluptuous Life and you should expect to see more about that here as well. Interview about the release party and gallery show now:

Amelia G: What was the special printing process for the images displayed on the wall?

Carlos Batts: The images on the wall were R prints mounted on sentra.

AG: What made you decide to do your party at that location?

CB: I shoot a lot of …

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