Why is Roman Polanski’s arrest such a cause celebre? I’m not an expert on the case, but I have read the grand jury testimony of Polanski’s thirteen-year-old victim, and it is pretty convincing and pretty damning. I understand that Samantha Geimer (then Samantha Gailey) publicly requested leniency for Roman Polanski, in the hopes that he could collect his big deal Oscar and she and her family could avoid the pain of being bothered again about something which was now decades in the past.

A lot of people seem to think that the intervening decades Roman Polanski spent in France were some kind of hardship equivalent to prison. First of all, Roman Polanski was a filmmaker in Poland in the 1950’s, but he left for France and then began making movies in the UK in the 1960’s. So the fact that he was making movies in the United States in the 1970’s does not mean that it was a hardship for him to then go make movies in another country. That was something he tended to switch up anyway. And he fled to France allegedly because he thought there was a chance that, instead of just getting the 42 days of time served, the judge might sentence him to a whole 90 days, minus the 42, for a total of 48 days behind bars.

What does anyone think the punishment would be today for a 43-year-old man who got a 13-year-old girl alone, plied her with booze, and then just brought her home after speaking about inappropriate subjects with her. Now add illegal drugs, forced sex, and introducing the girl to her very first anal rape. A new commission of a crime like this would get a long sentence of the sort where he might be killed by fellow inmates.

I understand that Roman Polanski has managed to achieve some great things in the face of horrific hardships. He lost his mother to the Holocaust and he lost his wife to Charles Manson and The Family committing the Tate-LaBianca murders. His wife was his eight months pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate. I do think it makes sense to consider how many forty somethings anally rape junior high school kids without having also had hard lives themselves.

But he still managed to direct Chinatown, a movie about California’s shady water rights history, and make it an interesting noir. Then again, Chinatown also benefited from the talents of the brilliant writer Robert Towne on the job and two actors widely considered to be some of the best of both their own generation and many others, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It is generally agreed that Roman Polanski got into such heated debates with Faye Dunaway on set that he even pulled out pieces of her hair. So, not a stranger to violence against women.

A lot of people, who aren’t me, also liked Rosemary’s Baby, so I accept that was an accomplishment, even though not entertaining to me. And a lot of people found The Pianist very poignant. The Pianist could have been from the heart or the tale of the talented Jewish musician trying to continue to create under the shadow of the Third Reich could have been a cynical ploy to get an Oscar and get to be self-righteous about not being able to come to the Academy Awards because of fear of arrest.

I’ve lived in Europe and most Europeans agree that France is a wonderful place to live. In point of fact, the Germans have invaded France every chance they got throughout history in pursuit of the best living. Hence the German expression for the best the world has to offer: Leben wie Gott in Frankreich. Roman Polanski has been married to the beautiful actress/rocker chick Emmanuelle Seigner since apparently 1989, when she was twenty-three. Or, to put in another way, there are even more years between her age and Polanski’s than between him and his 1977 victim. But it’s just different when you go after a twenty-three-year-old versus a thirteen-year-old.

So Roman Polanski’s big hardship is that, he couldn’t serve 48 more days in the loony bin ward of the prison (not the main population) and this meant that it is now, thirty some years later, terribly inconvenient for him to go to all the galas honoring him and his achievements. He was arrested on his way to receive a special award at a Zurich film festival when he was detained by Swiss authorities, who are perhaps less sexually open-minded than the French.

It honestly strikes me that Roman Polanski was going to get just a slap on the wrist for a pretty serious acquaintance assault because people felt sorry for him for having had bad things happen to him and maybe enjoyed his work. It seems like he might have gotten at least a few of his awards for the same reason because it seems peculiar that Americans go on and on about his greatness as a filmmaker without being able to name ten things he has done.

And does good art entirely excuse really bad behavior?

Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

Blue Blood hottie April Flores is on the cover of the new issue of Bizarre. This is her second time gracing the cover of Bizarre. Only a few women, such as Masuimi Max, Bianca Beauchamp, and Aria Giovanni have been on the cover of Bizarre more than once, so April Flores is in a pretty exclusive club there.

Last month, you saw the video of the Topco April Flores Toy art show curated by Carlos Batts.

Photographer Martin Perreault shot this April Flores Bizarre cover as well.

April Flores is also starting work on designing a plus size sexy clothing line. She always has something going on.

Congrats to April Flores for making the cover of Bizarre yet again. Blue Blood girls are covergirls.

It has been reported far and wide that the most recent Hello Kitty license deal is with Beck’s Beer. Now Hello Kitty puts their cute characters on a remarkable variety of products. The Hello Kitty vibrator jumps to a lot of pervy minds, but you can also get everything from a Hello Kitty umbrella to an embossed Hello Kitty soup pot to boil your ramen in. So it is plausible that there would also be a Hello Kitty brand beer deal. Beck’s is not my favorite beer, but it is decent and I favor the pilsner of the various Beck’s brews.

Unfortunately there appears to be some evidence that Blingee or a similar online design service was used to mock up art for what appears to be a six plus one of Hello Kitty Beck’s beer. Which is too bad as Hello Kitty branded booze might make an entertaining party favor.

Anybody have any idea whether Hello Kitty beer is a fictional fantasy or an actually available Sanrio item for purchase?

The Kelburn Castle and Estate fully opens to the public on Easter and maintains regular hours from Easter until November second. Although Kelburn Castle has many historical and architectural features of interest, the aspect people tend to find most notable is the graffiti-covered portion.

A couple of years ago, it was determined that parts of the concrete rendering were probably going to need to be replaced in the relatively near future. Concrete rendering or plastering is the surface placed on the outside of stone or brick walls for a combination of weatherproofing and texture. In this case the harling or pebbledash was applied to the walls primarily because soft sandstone requires careful weatherproofing to last. David and Alice Boyle, the children of the tenth and current Earl of Glasgow, thought it might be fun to use upcoming renovations as an opportunity to have famous graffiti artists paint a portion of the castle.

So the family commissioned a team of Brazilian painters called Nina and Nunca and the duo Os Gemeos or, translated from Portuguese, The Twins, who are known for their yellow figures and ability to garner establishment regard for what some might view as vandalism. This team of four graffiti artists were invited to do their thang on a castle wall legally, instead of guerrilla style. MTV competition-winning audiovisual artist and music festival scenester luminary Elliot Thomson of Preamptive and the multi-pronged artist group the Novak Collective produced a time lapse video of The Graffiti Project. The project was undertaken in residence and completed in early summer 2007, but, despite the fine reputations of all the artists involved, a debate still goes on over whether this was a desecration of a beautiful historical landmark or pretty much the coolest thing ever.

I don’t think I can think of any dwelling I would get more of a kick out of than a castle fortress with beautiful colorful graffiti painting on it. How often does one get to like something for both hipster and medieval reasons at the same time?

It probably comes as no surprise then that I think the graffiti art is a cool idea. I also think it is in keeping with how such fortresses tend to be extended in different styles over time. Lord Glasgow states:

“Kelburn Castle, unlike most grand houses in Scotland was not planned by an eminent architect like Adams or Lorrimer. It simply evolved over a period of some 700 years. As the family became richer or more important, it grew organically. Over the years, various Earls of Glasgow, or more probably their wives, changed sitting rooms into bedrooms, partitioned rooms to make extra corridors, altered staircases, raised the level of floors and ceilings, mover kitchens from one end of the house to the other and changed the front door from the north to the south side of the house and then back to the north again. The result is that Kelburn is an eccentric half castle, half-house, constantly in use and still very much lived-in.”

Some of the concept of painting part of the castle was consciously to unite urban art and rural canvas. Looking at the history, though, the whole thing is very much in keeping with the origins of the estate. It is always odd for Americans, with our comparatively brief national history, but the Europeans really track where things come from for centuries, although there are always those who contend that some of European genealogy and history is at best excessive in detail.

At any rate, Kelburn began as a Norman Keep when the de Boyville family, who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066, moved to Ayrshire in 1140. It is estimated that the Norman Keep edition of the building on the Kelburn Estate was completed by 1200ish. Some time in the following centuries, the de Boyvilles evolved their family name to Boyle, which lead to cultural confusion over whether that was a proper Scottish noble name or an Irish name. Because Europeans care about such matters, the Boyles, despite their seven or eight hundred-year-old estate and titles, are often left off various lists due to their lack of an official tartan and a suspiciously Irish-sounding name. Technically, their name is Norman invader and many families have invented official tartans to get in on the whole uniforms and team colors culture. From an American perspective, I’ve spent time in Scotland and I’m probably more educated than the average American and I probably could not differentiate between Scotland and Ireland on a map with a vintage traditional broadsword to my head. Whether or not the threatening broadsword had creative graffiti on it.

In 1581, a more impressive castle was built around the original stone structure. During the following century, the Boyles got very paid in shipping and shipbuilding and, ahem stamping out smuggling in service of Customs & Excise. The Boyle family was rewarded for their public service in 1703 with the title of Earl. When he received his title, the first Earl of Glasgow had recently completed construction on Kelburn House, a mansion built to address the difficulty of castles being considered unfashionable at the time. If the first Earl was so concerned about what people might think, he is probably turning over in his grave over the idea of graffiti adorning Kelburn Castle, but it really is in keeping with updating with the times the same way he did. In the 1800’s, the fifth and sixth Earl of Glasgow caused the size of the Kelburn Estate to dwindle, the fifth through a fabulous fashionable gambler scenester lifestyle and the sixth through endowing churches. In between being seen at all the best parties and religious events, they did manage to put a Victorian wing around one of the 1581 towers.

In 1977, the current and tenth Earl of Glasgow and his wife Isabel were culturally generous enough to open the grounds and buildings of their family home, of many generations, as a park and museum for part of every year. You can now visit the incredibly beautiful and storied Kelburn Estate from Easter through November second.

Blue Blood hottie Serena Toxicat recently mentioned that she would be showing thirty of her art pieces at the Blow Gallery in Berkely, California. If you are in that neck of the woods, you can stop by 2112 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 for an evening of hotties like Serena Toxicat, art, and possibly some free booze. Most gallery shows have free booze. I try not to examine why too closely. Here you can examine the conversation Serena Toxicat and I just had about art.

Amelia G: What first got you into creating? Were you always creative?

Serena Toxicat: Apparently as a 5 year-old my painting looked like pointillism. My 1st grade art teacher raved about the stuff. After my dad saw how much I liked to color and paint, his best friend bought me a set of acrylics and I never looked back, except to kick my own ass to make more. I do so many things in the world of art and performance that my productivity in any one area tends to ebb and flow.

Amelia G: What are your favorite media to create in and how to you feel writing vs. visual arts compare for expressing yourself?

Serena Toxicat: I love acrylic and just developed a system whereby I draw in marker over an acrylic base. I also like making sculpture with found objects and occasionally indulge in photography. I made some mixed media pieces, with b&w images of my pointy little Isis as the central focus. Most intriguing might be my channeled oracular pieces. I close my eyes and let the spirits paint with my hands. You should feel the energy coming out of those things!

Creating is creating, and if I’m happy with a piece of art I feel the same sense of completeness I do with my writing. Usually the visual stuff goes faster. Well, compared to a book it does!

Amelia G: Who is curating the Blow show and how did you get involved? Does it have any particular theme?

Serena Toxicat: Amy O’Rourke, one of the stylists, curated the last two shows. It is very eclectic – everything from artistic nudes to hanging paper sculpture – and she is quite happy about that!

Amelia G: Is it true that the Blow gallery is actually a hair salon? If so, how does that work? Do they get the sort of clientele where the art and hairstyle work have good synergy and complement one another?

Serena Toxicat: Yes! And they do great hair. It seems to work well for them, this meeting of the aesthetic worlds. The clients appreciate it and many come to the shows and buy or just enjoy. Blow has a new opening every 10 weeks with fantastic catering. They have been combining hair and showing art for as long as I can remember. I discovered them while searching for a colorist. When I found David, who has since moved, we developed a relationship based on bright horizontal stripes (in my hair) and mullets (as material for many a delirious joke).

Amelia G: When to when can people see the show? Anything in particular, specific art piece of yours, event feature, other artists showing with you, whatever, which you think people will extra enjoy?

Serena Toxicat: It starts Sat. 4-4 and closes June 7. I’m really excited about my bright green and orange pieces. They address important issues, like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc., and feature multicultural female (so far) subjects dressed in gothy striped frocks.

I also hope people get off on my socially conscious and poetic propagand[iv]a video. I play a newscaster and talk about everything from Bush and Obama to animal activism and being nice to hookers. Jim Stipovich has been showing his nudes since the 70’s. I’m sure he’ll bring out his following out of the proverbial woodwork and make many new fans! I also love Shaista and Kelly’s stuff. Fun!

Last month, Blue Blood made a submissions site live for models and photographers and writer/photographers to submit to various Blue Blood projects, mostly BlueBlood.com and, to a lesser extent, BlueBlood.net. Blue Blood enjoys publishing a variety of body types, both male and female and in between. The most important thing for modeling for Blue Blood is that someone have that certain something, star quality, individuality, passion of personal expression to put in front of the lens. The original Blue Blood magazine in print featured exclusively interactive pictorials of people who were lovers in real life, who would be doing what they were doing, whether or not a camera was present. Non-feature photos in Blue Blood in print were generally related to specific entertainment news or how-to articles.

BlueBlood.com features pin-up and interactive erotica photo sets where all the images in a particular gallery will be of a person or couple, in one setting, in a series, which generally tells some sort of story. BlueBlood.net, of course, features articles and galleries about cool events, genre movies, goth-industrial music, punk nightclubs, interesting clothes, and similar fun stuff i.e. BlueBlood.net publishes photo galleries which are about a particular topic of interest. You would think that more photographers would shoot entertainment news, fashion, and music work than shoot nudes, but apparently that is not really the case. I’ve found that the most common question I get from interested photographers is what the galleries on BlueBlood.net should be about. Somehow, once the naked aspect is removed, many of them don’t know what the photos are about, other than that there is a photographer who happens to take pictures. I am baffled that there are people who consider themselves Photographers with a capital P and have no idea what their work is supposed to be saying.

I entirely understand, however, why many models are confused by the submission process and gunshy about asking questions. Running a site can be stressful and there are never enough hours in the day, but I’m genuinely kinda weirded out by how many site operators or model coordinators hate to answer questions from models. I’m always happy to answer anyone I might work with’s questions beforehand. It makes me ballistic when people try to go back on their word, once they have made an agreement, but, to me, that just means everything should be entirely clear from the beginning. The most common question I get from interested models, once they have read the Blue Blood Photo FAQ is almost the opposite of the most popular photographer question. Models are puzzled by the whole nudity vs. clothes thing. Some models don’t seem to get that they have to keep their clothing on for BlueBlood.net editorial. By the same token, any model who has even considered modeling for a membership site besides BlueBlood.com wants to double-check precisely what she must do on camera and what she must not do. This is because of the way these models have been pressured to do either less (nice girls only do conservative nudes) or more (all the cool girls give strangers blowjobs) by sites they have considered working with. I really don’t get the thing where some sites feel like everyone has to be fully nude but nobody is allowed to (heavens to Betsy!) insert anything or where some sites have the attitude that anyone who hasn’t fucked everyone else on it shouldn’t be allowed in the clubhouse. It really bothers me that there are models who go along with this conformity BS and peer pressure other models to only do exactly what they have decided is okay for them personally, no matter whether other models personally prefer to be more conservative or more extreme. These are not decisions which should be made via groupthink.

If everybody on BlueBlood.com was doing the exact same level of nudity or naughtiness, with the exact same amount of explicitness or lack thereof in presentation, that would be as antithetical to the point of Blue Blood as if everybody looked exactly the same. (You are not required to have tattoos either; they are optional and only a plus if you got them for a meaningful reason or they are quality ink or ideally both.) Of course, all publications have to have some sort of structure, a certain promise to the reader of what they will find inside. However, any pay site with a bunch of chicks who look the same and apparently all want to get the exact same amount naked is just pandering to a fetish and it is not punk and it is not about freedom.

Many of Blue Blood’s photographers and writers and models, and certainly your truly, have fetishes too and naturally they are more likely to be represented in the variety of BlueBlood.com content than kinks various creative team members are less into, but Blue Blood doesn’t have all the hang-ups so many of the sites seem to about nudity. The whole point is that it is about individual expressions of sexuality and sensuality. Individuality is key. If all a photograph does is hit a format, that is not art, just commerce. If a photo utterly fails to hit any format, that is not art either, just wanking. For photography to be art, it must both express something and communicate something.

Although I spent actual NYE contemplating my goals for 2009 and feeling pretty good for a change about how well I did on my 2008 resolutions, I did go to champagne brunch this morning. I haven’t quite determined all my primary goals for the New Year, but Blue Blood just turned Sweet 16, so we’re all pretty celebratory about that, so that should tie in with those resolutions somehow I think.

Although this is Blue Blood’s first and only Sweet 16, my friend Sabrina has a fabulous Sweet 16 birthday party every year. She is a brilliant event planner, so her events tend to be varied and fun. When I say she is a brilliant event planner, I don’t mean in the Cartman tea party fantasy way some people claim they are good at stuff, but in a she just got a hundred million dollar budget to plan events for 2009 kind of way.

Today’s festivities involved getting a whole bunch of us our own colonnade sectioned off from the beautiful Chateau Marmont patio. (I could tell what a colonnade was in context, but, if you were wondering about the precise definition, according to the dictionary, a colonnade is “a series of regularly spaced columns supporting an entablature and usually one side of a roof”.) Apparently Sabrina had to bump some other party of twenty for us. She explained the details of how this was accomplished, but, really, she just cannot be denied. We were all much better behaved for champagne brunch than we were at her birthday. Certainly, I was.

There were a few people at brunch who I totally had zero recollection of having met before. Hopefully they didn’t think I was being stuck up saying “nice to meet you” and asking for names. In my defense, we all drank so much champagne at Sabrina’s most recent Sweet 16 that we actually ran the dinner restaurant entirely out of champagne. Our party literally drank every bit of champagne in the restaurant and a couple of people had to make a supermarket run to replenish.

Afterward, we went to this surreal karaoke bar which fortunately (or possibly unfortunately for remembering everyone clearly) was still well-stocked with champagne. We did start out with Rotari and then move to Moet, which is kind of backward, but we did play a drinking game to see who could drink a split with no hands. (Apparently not me.)

The karaoke place seemed like something out of a gangster movie. It didn’t appear to have signage and was just on this particular floor of this Korean office building. There were these semi-private rooms with black stone floors and it just seemed very much like there should be a high level mobster meeting going on. (We had thought the rooms were entirely private, until the staff informed us that there were certain things we could not be doing in there, and it turned out the walls were one way glass.) I’ll try any weird food once, so I did eat some of a chicken thing which left a very peculiar taste in my mouth, but it was worth it for the adventure points.

I still have my place setting name tag. Sabrina made them out of these sort of Barbie style dolls and customized each one to the person they were a place setting for. As Chateau Marmont scolded us for taking pictures, allow me to share a crazed Barbie art gallery with you all, photographed by the talented Forrest Black. My seating tag doll had a mohawk and come on her mouth. Very elegant . . . in a Barbie with a mohawk and come on her mouth sort of way.

If I were in Portland for NYE, I can guarantee that I would be at Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure New Year’s Eve. If you’ve ever read the words in an adult publication, you are most likely familiar with Darklady’s work. She is a successful prolific journalist and sexpert and knows so much about so many of my favorite things. She describes her areas of expertise as “adult entertainment industry, free speech, internet technology, and alternative sexuality” and I’d have to agree that is deliciously accurate.

What you may not know is that Darklady Productions, Inc. also produces a series of good events for the perverse. We’ve got a little taster gallery of event photos from her Burlesque-a-thon themed 2008 Portland Masturbate-a-thon and her 2007 NYE Masquerade. I’m always down for wearing giant hoop skirts which knock everything over, although, because I don’t have a real hat head, sometimes crowns can be difficult to fit. Tiaras work fine though. Yes, I’m planning an outfit in my head for an Empire of Pleasure themed event I probably won’t be in town to attend; I work too much, but it sounds really fun. Darklady described the theme, saying:

“The snows are melting and Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure has physical, emotional and spiritual warmth to spare. Pay homage to empires past, present and future while lovingly indulging your senses in celebration of life and the coming New Year. Darklady’s Empire of Pleasure pays homage to days past, present and future that shape us. Whether your favorite “imperial” spreads like butter or starred Shaka Zulu, the Son of Heaven, the Chrysanthemum Throne, Imperium Romanum, Stormtroopers or genuinely Byzantine thinking, Darklady invites you to lovingly indulge in a celebration of the senses and New Year.”

They will also have giveaways from Big Teaze Toys, Topco Toys, Taboo Video, Stockroom and Astroglide too if you count the fact that Astroglide is sort of sponsoring the play room. They take their play seriously in the Pacific NW. Plus all you can eat Mediterranean buffet. Mmmmm.

You can get more info at Darklady’s site and RSVP to Darklady@darklady.com.

The sexy lead-off picture for our Darklady photo gallery is of her and Dale the Nail from this year’s Portland Masturbate-a-thon, photographed by Bryan Grimes. Darklady and I were chatting about her party and just random stuff going on and this photo made her think of a great story she shared:

“It’s so weird about Dale and I. We were punk teens back in the 70s/80s and hung out downtown — then dropped out of contact until after 2000 when we discovered I was writing throwing parties and writing about sex for a living and he was hanging from hooks and creating weird “guerrilla art.”

Nice to know we didn’t all grow up to become accountants and housewives.“

Amen to that, sister.

I’m going to admit that this year, like many Americans, I’ve been too caught up, either following election coverage or avoiding it, to properly celebrate Halloween. Sure, Blue Blood is sponsoring a few Halloween parties, most notably the Release the Bats decade anniversary. And I remembered to freshen up my hair color and play with squash a little. Some years, I get all freaked out about wanting to do too much for Halloween, but this year I haven’t even had my favorite holiday at the front of my brain most of the time. But I’ve been enjoying a bit of vicarious Halloween joy today, checking out the work of people like Dana Dark and Ray Villafane.

More on Dana Dark’s Halloween secrets later, but I want to tell you all about Ray Villafane now. He is an artist who primarily appears to work on sculpture for folks like Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys. In the unlikely event you are not familiar with those companies, they make collectibles for the horror, science fiction, fantasy, and general monsters and comic books realm.

But, wow, can Ray Villafane sculpt a pumpkin! Some people paint or draw on pumpkins. Most people just scoop out the guts and cut holes for features. I like to make jack o’lantern art at one step remove and have nude models scoop out the guts and cut holes for features. But Ray Villafane turns the pumpkin carving process into real sculptural works of art.

I’m feeling more buoyant about Halloween just thinking about it!