Mike Judge’s Office Space is a hysterically brilliant piece on the soul-sucking nature of certain sorts of employment. The scene where they smash the fax machine is one of the most inspiring moments in American cinema ever. Viewpoint character Peter Gibbons, played with perfect comic timing by Ron Livingston, decides that, rather than quitting his job, he will simply stop going. He and his next door neighbor Lawrence, played with deadpan humor by Diedrich Bader, discuss what they would do if they had mad money. Lawrence’s only unrealized ambition is to have a threesome with two chicks.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.

Mainstream porn overflows with girl/girl sex, but it is all of the sort where the women are supposed to be into it because they are just soooooooo overheated and no man is handy, not because they like women. The male consumer can fantasize that all he has to do is show up with a taste of the real thing (i.e. cock) and that would just make those ladies’ day.

I find the whole issue difficult. On the one hand, I know that site members often enjoy girl/girl pairings, even if the women pictured would not normally have sex with one another in the natural course of events. So there is certainly money in shooting lesbian sex, but I suffer from the punk rock problem of not being particularly fiscally motivated. Something which puts even more social pressure on me to shoot faux lesbian interactions is that many altmodels believe that their ticket to fame and fortune is being photographed fondling the breasts of a model more internet famous than they are. You might be shocked at how much static I have received from mostly straight models for declaring a moratorium on fake lesbian shoots for BlueBlood.com. If two people want me to photograph them having sex, as an artist, I am only really inspired to shoot them if I believe they are truly into each other and would be making love whether or not there was a camera in the room.

When I was fourteen and had a youthful fixation on heterosexual couplings, I was troubled by the mainstream porn my friends were able to get ahold of in Israel where I went to ninth grade, because there was always some sort of lesbian scene in every flick. I have the vague notion that porn movies may have been illegal in Israel, so this probably limited what my underage unsavory pals were able to get their hands on, but I still viscerally recall my discomfitted response to the chick in Flesh Gordon being forced to eat hairy muff. Yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons and watched science fiction porn. (Probably no surprise there.)

As an adult, my take on sexual orientation is . . . let’s just say different from what it was as a teen. I really don’t care about whether someone’s genitalia are innie or outie; I just want something real, something genuinely passionate, something with a true human connection.

Back in the early 90’s, when I would be interviewed about Blue Blood magazine in print, I would always say it was erotica and not porn and point out that I was a woman and women can only produce erotica. I thought I was kidding. But there is a certain oddness to the approach mainstream porn has to human sexuality.

Every year, AVN or Adult Video News, has an awards show for porn videos and porn performances from the preceding year. The first time I ever came across this particular awards show was some time after fantabulous writer-cum-video-director David Aaron Clark had written the first issue of Blue Blood in print up for the late lamented Scew newspaper. Forrest Black and I went to meet him and Mistress Shane after they finished up at the AVN awards show in Vegas. DAC and Shane were mostly being entertainingly curmudgeonly about the enormous breasts in teen prom dresses wandering around the casino, but I was un-jaded and wide-eyed at the time. I’ve still never actually attended an AVN award show. Admittedly, I don’t particularly care for that variety of video media, so much of it would really go over my head. But I’m still fascinated by the culture which surrounds it.

Yesterday sexpert blogger Violet Blue covered Syd Blakovich and Madison Young’s red carpet walk at the AVN awards. Now a good-looking pornstar can generally get work if she is willing to have sex with other females on camera, even if she will not have boy/girl sex that way. There is almost the sense that a pornstar who only does women is somehow more of a nice girl than one who does men in films. Offhand, I can’t think of any major video porn star who has sex exclusively with men on camera.

So you’d think that people would just find it hot if Madison Young brought Syd Blakovich as her date to the AVN Awards. The talented Julie Simone shot some stuff of Madison Young which will be appearing on BlueBlood.com soon and I already covered extremely sexy badass Syd Blakovich’s Ultimate Surrender triumphs on here. So you can pretty much take it as a given that I think Syd Blakovich and Madison Young dating would be hot.

Violet Blue reports that AVN apparently didn’t want Syd Blakovich, in her cool steampunk outfit, to walk the porn red carpet with Madison Young. WTF? Someone would have to check with Summer Cummings and Skye Blue to see if this is actually the first time a girl/girl couple has attempted to take that red carpet stroll together, but, whether this is the first or the zillionth time a woman has brought another woman as her genuine date, it is messed up that an industry which insists on girl/girl sex would balk lest anyone think it was genuine girl/girl sex.

I mean, is it really excessively feminist to request that Porn Valley not whine if the women, they want to fuck each other, actually enjoy fucking each other?

PS I’ve seen a bunch of sex blogs, Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles included, posting pics of Gianna Lynn and her AVN awards dates. With how much some folks yammer on about porn crossing over to the mainstream, as though sex were somehow totally separate from all other areas of life, you’d think somebody in smutville would have noted that Gianna Lynn’s dates were UFC contract winner Ryan Bader and former Arizona State University
 classmate and fellow MMA fighter CB Dollaway.

“Most of us are just living a lie
That’s why we get fucked up every night”
–Buckcherry, “Too Drunk To Fuck”

Please forgive me, but I like to fantasize that my dirty glam rockers are never too drunk to get it on. Well maybe occasionally, if it makes a really good story. But I can’t help wondering if Buckcherry don’t have some kind of problem with women. I don’t mean that I suspect they might not be thoughtful feminists. When, circa 600BC, I masturbated approximately 80,000 times to the “Welcome to the Jungle” video, I never once fantasized that Axl Rose would be perfect for a relationship. Or even an interesting dinner conversation.

The reason Motley Crue did an album like Girls, Girls, Girls is that the job of properly utilizing a pole while dancing is very similar to the job of being a dirty glam rocker. They felt an affinity. Whatever else one might think about the Crue, I don’t think anyone wondered whether they feared the vagina dentata, or worse yet, were frightened of the boobies. As a teenager, I saw Vince Neil ask the New Haven Coliseum (it could have been the Hartford Civic Center, but I think it was New Haven) who was the best piece of ass in the building. I was vaguely unsettled when the biker next to me appeared to be offering up his girlfriend and I went back to my dorm room and wrote an ethnomusicology term paper about how I wouldn’t fuck Vince Neil with someone else’s pussy, but, damn, that was some fine showmanship and entertaining rock and roll.

The thing is that good music should transport one and good musical showmanship should go even further towards that goal. I think the only Motley Crue video I ever masturbated to was “Looks That Kill” (and that was really more about the chicks than the band members), but, as a frontman, Vince Neil had more than a good rock and roll voice and a cute outfit. Vince Neil could rock a stadium because he could sell the fantasy. As alcohol is reportedly Vince Neil’s poison of choice and he has done time for drunk driving and all, I would guess he has had occasion to be too drunk to fuck. But he doesn’t sing about it. The dirty glam rock fantasy is one of a party which never ends, where the titans of rock are always down for one more round. I’m sure Vince Neil has also caught a cold before and been too feverish to get out from under his blankie. But he doesn’t fucking sing about it.

This is why, no matter how expensive Joshua Todd’s ink is and no matter how many sit-ups he does, he will never be as cool as Vince Neil. What kind of emo ridiculousness is it that the record labels are trying to sell Buckcherry as raunchy current hard rock and they turn around and try to foist this whiny nonsense on us? Do the record labels really understand that little about what rock fans look for in a band?

If you are wondering why I actually watched a Buckcherry video on purpose, I confess it is because I heard that Blue Blood hottie Bella Vendetta was topless in it. Don’t bother pushing play on the YouTube version, though, because apparently the part with the breasts is only on Playboy. I thought nudity in a video like this would be pushing the envelope, but I was just disappointed. The naked girls are actually never once in the room with the band and the dressed girls are frankly also pretty far away from the musicians. In fact, the house party Buckcherry are playing in for the vid appears to be quite the sausagefest. All put together, there are only maybe half a dozen females anywhere in the building. They try to get some alt-y MySpace cred by having a somewhat scene-looking girl as the viewpoint character in the video, but she shows up with a homely dude who passes out on her, and I assure you that that is no girl’s erotic rock and roll fantasy.

Apparently, the nude parts of the video were shot in a hotel room far away from the guys in Buckcherry. I know at least one person who has had sex with a member of Buckcherry and didn’t hate it. I’ve photographed this Buckcherry-boning individual naked, so I can affirm that she has girl parts. But what band avoids being present when the video babes are shooting? It is part of the job, when fronting a hard rock band of this stripe, to at least be able to fake like you enjoy the rock and roll party.

Director/pornstar Joanna Angel gamely offers up a press quote about the directors of the Buckcherry video being nice enough to let her shoot some of the breast footage. Now I don’t follow adult film closely, but I’m 100% positive that Joanna Angel has won AVN awards for either her porn direction or her porn performances or both. In my opinion, she is the one doing Buckcherry’s lame directors a favor by providing them with footage of boobies, including her own. Unfortunately, whoever edited the topless bits into the original cut of the “Too Drunk To Fuck” video, didn’t really include anyone’s faces. For example, I am familiar enough with Bella Vendetta’s body that I can assure you she is in the video, but her head is cut off in every shot. WTF? Who directed this this anti-rock, anti-woman, sex-negative video screed anyway?

I don’t generally mind it when dirty glam rockers dehumanize women. They are supposed to be about a certain sort of wild sex fantasy and not necessarily about progressive thinking. But, if they are both shallow and sexist and unable to keep the party going, what is the point?

I handed Gene Simmons his laundry once. This was more than ten years ago, so my memory is a bit murky, but, as I recall, I may have both handed him his clean laundry and picked up his dirty laundry to run back to the stadium. It was one of my last gigs as a stagehand. I was a runner. A runner is someone who will work for stagehand wages but has a working and ideally presentable car. At the time, I had already mostly transitioned into doing contract design work, corporate presentations and that sort of thing which paid better. My car actually was not terribly presentable, but some of the staff for the KISS tour recalled a nicer-looking (but less reliable) car I had owned at the time of an earlier gig and they liked me. I took the job because they had specifically requested if “the girl with the kinky zines” was still available. Plus working at a rock stadium was generally pretty sociable and fun, especially at a job which, unlike many I’d done there, was unlikely to cause injury.

I was never a member of the KISS Army or anything and my parents felt the KISS logo was unacceptable Nazi regalia and boys who wanted me to like KISS (and them) had always played me “Beth”. I guess guys always think the chick will like the power ballad better than the rocker, but it always struck me as really ill-conceived to try to seduce a girl with a song about blowing off your girlfriend. (Talk about “Lick My Love Pump” being in the saddest key!) I did think KISS had some fairly listenable music, but I was not crazy familiar with them either.

So, when my runner job afforded me the opportunity to watch part of a KISS concert, I didn’t have a ton of expectations, except that I’d vaguely thought they wore their makeup different. I missed the whole trauma the hardcore KISS fans endured when the band went from monster makeup to hair metal makeup. They are probably the only band in the history of the universe to get less pussy after donning hair metal makeup than they got without it.

Regardless, the thing which struck me most when I worked for KISS was that there were ridiculously hot unfamiliar girls at the show. Like super hot and super into the band. And, at the time, I was at least minimally acquainted with a pretty high percentage of the hot sluts in the DC/NoVa/Baltimore area. So it was surprising to have so many incredibly hot metal chicks at a KISS concert and not recognize any of them from other events I’d been at. I commented on the anomaly at the time to everyone I mentioned the show to, but I didn’t understand what the likely reason was that there were such hot girls there who I’d never seen at shows by Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Poison, Aerosmith, Warrant, Kix, Child’s Play, and countless good-looking national and local bands in related genres.

I joked at the time that the band must bring the girls with them or something. This went way beyond just what a band bringing groupies from the last city would entail, but it didn’t occur to me that it really would be beneficial for a band like KISS to in fact hire a hottie crew. A lot of their fanbase was homophobic, but there were persistent rumors that their lead singer Paul Stanley was homosexual or bisexual and Gene Simmons had this demon fuckmonster persona where he lived out fans’ male adolescent fantasies, so, from a PR perspective, it really would have made sense for them to cast some amazingly hot women as enthusiastic fans and pay them to come on tour at cheer them on. I mean, sports teams have cheerleaders and that is kind of the same benefit. The only difference is really that cheerleaders have uniforms and everybody knows what their roles are, but hired rock fans are kind of more disingenuous. The first time I photographed someone who made rent pretending to enjoy The Rolling Stones in concert, it was like I found out Santa Claus was a lie. Actually my parents never lied to me about Santa Claus, so I think I got that childhood trauma at a later age, when I realized that rock n’ roll was kinda dishonest.

The music industry has a long history of putting fake publicity out there. The habit greatly pre-dates rock and roll. It is ironic that the internet has put such a damper on music sales. On the one hand, the web has made it so much easier to disseminate dishonest presentations of self, but it has also made it easier to steal the music industry’s primary product. So, the industry is taking a huge hit to the wallet at the same time that its PR machine has destroyed any trust music fans might have had. Their disingenuous behavior makes it hard for anyone to feel much sympathy for the record industry.

It seems obvious to a teenager that a squeaky clean band might have a dark secret life, but it is less obvious that someone might be drinking apple juice out of a Jack Daniels bottle on stage. At this point, I pretty much disbelieve anything stated more than twice in any press release. I figure whatever they are trying to sell me is probably a lie. I used to listen to music every day and base large portions of my life around music and music-related events. But I’ve lost my faith.

So a site calling itself Gene’s Secret launched this week with a seven or so minute video purporting to be of Gene Simmons fucking some blonde. A couple of clips from the video have also been circulating the web and blog empire Gawker received a cease and desist from Gene Simmons’ attorneys for running them. If you care, the sex is not particularly inspired or emotional and the blonde actively avoids kissing the KISS bassist and they are apparently doing it to the dulcet tones of Steve Perry. Gawker feels the clips are sufficiently newsworthy as to not require them to comply with the C&D. Now I could go off about celeb sex tapes and Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and Fred Durst and why these types of videos tend to have unappetizing sex and why our Puritan society refers to anyone in one as B list and what is wrong with a society which invades people’s privacy like this. But I’m not going to because I, perhaps cynically, believe that the whole thing is an orchestrated publicity stunt. I have no faith that this is a real stolen video or that the subjects did not know they were being recorded or that any of what is being presented is remotely as real as WWF.

At first glance, some people felt the Gene’s Secret Gene Simmons sex tape was a hoax and utilized a lookalike. I mean, there are an awful lot of KISS cover bands, so I can understand how people would believe it would not be hard to find a Gene Simmons demon lookalike. Through the Manatt law firm, Gene Simmons confirmed the authenticity of the sex tape but denied that anyone but Gene Simmons’ Allied Industries corporation should be able to profit from it. Nonetheless, the video is still live on the Gene’s Secret site, which one would assume would be the first target for a C&D. If this reminds altporn fans of when a site called SuicideGirls unsuccessfully pretended it was not really them licensing their content when they decided to resell unretouched versions of photosets they had promised models they would not resell . . . well, it reminds me of that little fiasco too. (Full disclosure: At the suggestion of SuicideGirls head honcho Sean Suhl, Blue Blood has previously consulted with the law firm of Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips.) Both scenarios feature a lawyer letter which purports to be trying to stop the distribution of the content, while simultaneously giving the content authenticity. Of course, this is the internet, so Gawker promptly posted the C&D on their tech industry blog Valleywag under the heading “Gene Simmons lawyer confirms sex tape’s authenticity“. While this may prove that the man in the video is in fact the tongue-wielder from KISS, it doesn’t prove that the whole thing is not a hoax.

The Gene’s Secret site features the following copy:

“This isn’t Shannon, this isn’t the same Family Jewels that you can catch on late-night cable. This is Gene giving you his best on screen performance yet! Find out all the benefits of being the spokesperson for a the latest energy drink, Frank’s Energy. Although it looks like Gene would rather gulp done one of Frank’s Energy Girls! . . . What is Gene’s Secret? Actually, it’s a WHO, and she is a hot little Austrian babe, named Elsa. She is a model, and one of the Frank’s Engery Drink Girls, a brand which Gene endorses (apparently to fuel his sex drive.) Elsa and Gene party like rockstars, and we have it all here, EXCLUSIVELY on GenesSecret.com.”

Now, I’ve never heard of this energy drink before, but I’m guessing a lot of people, who never heard of it before, have now heard of it. Most of the copy on the membership site tour is about how Gene has a reality show called Family Jewels and he uses this beverage. Celebrity sex tape site tours usually have a lot more text about how you just have to see this video and you should sign up now now NOW! This tour seems less interested in making sales and more interested in telling everyone about projects Gene Simmons gets paid on. Gene Simmons keeps his shirt on during the video and most people prefer to get naked for sex or at least don’t pay attention to the clothing they have on, but a video of an older guy having sex is less embarrassing if he is wearing a smoothly adjusted T-shirt for the whole thing. A publication called AVN, which is primarily about mainstream Valley porn video, puts on an award show for pornstars every January. Last year, Gene Simmons was a presenter at the AVN awards show and AVN was apparently the first to break the news about the Gene’s Secret celebrity sex tape. Coincidence or evidence of the occult? You be the judge.

When something like a celeb sex vid scandal happens, it is hard to parse out the truth, so people tend to partly believe the whole thing is fake and partly believe the whole thing is real. So many things like this have been presented to people in the Digital Age that most people carry constant cognitive dissonance around in their heads 24/7/365 now. No wonder prescriptions for antidepressants are so common. Cognitive dissonance is painful. It is bad for society when people suffer from constantly having mutually exclusive ideas in their heads. Aside from the mental health costs, when people are used to the puzzle pieces in their brain not fitting, then they become much less able to make decisions, less able to run their own lives well, less able to vote for candidates who hold their values, less able to form lasting relationships. People may think they are just doing internet marketing, but they are causing real world damage.

I wish I believed that hot chicks, who can really strut, just want to rock and roll all night. I wish I believed that some callous big titty whore tricked a genuinely promiscuous and wild rock star into starring in his own porn video, blackmailed him, and then cashed in anyway. I wish I believed that Gene Simmons was a victim here. That might all be true, but the music industry has cried wolf too many times for me to believe any of it. They’ve put too many snake oil salesmen behind the pulpit. I wish I believed that anything in music culture was real now. Viral marketing has destroyed any trust music fans, or people who would otherwise have been music fans, might have in music or musicians.

Viral marketing might get the word out, but it has destroyed my faith.

Snaspshots from Erotica LA 2006:
- Friday Snapshots
- Saturday Snapshots
- Sunday Snapshots

I now have clean laundry, but I may not be able to wear it too many places. Allow me to explain.

This past weekend was Blue Blood’s and my first year exhibiting at Erotica LA. Back when Forrest Black and I were doing a lot of writing and photography for AVN’s various print publications, we sort of meant to go to their Erotica LA show, but we never quite got around to it. I always had the impression that it was probably more Porno with a capital P than I’d really be into.

I decided to try out getting a booth this year because, for 2006, the Erotica LA crew really went after both women and the couples market, spending a reported $300,000 on promo for the event. This made me feel like this could be a good event to promote the imminent official Independence Day launch of BlueBlood.com Apparently 40,000 people attended Erotica LA in 2005 and this year a whopping 50,000 people were expected to attend. That sounds pretty accurate to me. The event was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center which is HUGE and foot traffic to our booth was constant throughout the three days of the show.

The sordid reason I now have clean laundry is because, over the past few days, in addition to trading SpookyCash shirts for swag from Bang Bus, Phukit, and Sex Search, I also got T-shirts from Porn on a Stick and Rodney Moore. Unfortunately, I went to get a professional (legit/no happy ending) massage the day after Erotica LA and they were kinda nonplussed that my shirt said “I heart sex.” I have to go to the dentist tomorrow, so maybe I should be doing laundry now, instead of writing this. Oh well. It’s punk rock to vaguely perturb people who are about to put sharp implements in your mouth, right?

I was really happy about the Blue Blood booth placement. We were facing down a whole long aisle, which made us visible clear across the convention center, so that people had an easy time finding us. Our next door neighbor was the charming John Stavros of PMP Studios, Vision Girls and the Armed Forces of Love. His ass has been photographed by Andy Warhol and may even have its own fan club. Actually, I think the fan club is for his entirety, but he was giving us a booty shake while explaining it, so I might have missed some details. John and I took turns complaining about stuff at the beginning of the show. He took weird smells and smoke and I took noise. (If you are the folks who were blasting the possibly unlicensed Genitorturers sample, followed by a repeating brief loop of horrible-sounding sex, and you are wondering who among the legion of annoyed people complained, it was me. I was very impressed that AVN had a sound meter, so they didn’t have to rely on a judgement call.) Anyway, John had the spooky Lady Pandora and Maxine in his booth, so we were kinda Gothic central in our area. Admittedly, we did have a hardcore DVD booth across the way from us and I just kept re-reading the slogan on one of their posters which said, “Why can’t these girls get enough butt love?” Try saying it aloud with different inflections after three days of convention center food and it’s pretty funny. Trust me on this.

My Blue Blood booth was always convenient to both stages and the seminars area, so we got to keep track of the action and when good stuff was about to start. I also got to see a long restrospective presentation by the wonderfully prolific Justice Howard. If every photographer who worked on Blue Blood in print had been as fabulously fun to hang out with and as fabulously creative as Justice, then I don’t know that I ever would have bother to pick up a camera, because it would have been unnecessary. Nonetheless, I like shooting now and Justice was definitely a personal inspiration. It was really great to see a mix of new and old work in Justice Howard’s presentation. I think some of her Q&A answers to some of the audience members frightened them, but, hey, sometimes art does that. It was great to see her.

I had a virtual reality encounter with Taylor Wane at CES in Vegas around 1994ish and then wrote it up in Blue Blood in print, but Erotica LA was the first time I met her. She just did a movie with Mary Jane and so both hotties were signing in the Taylor Wane booth and anything featuring Mary Jane has got to be cool. The three of us discussed what sorts of massages we would likely get after the long weekend. I wonder if either of them wore T-shirts which bothered the personnel at their preferred providers. (Taylor did skip out the last day to do a shoot with Billy Idol, but that seemed like a quality excuse for her absence.)

Erotica LA was very cool for meeting a variety of people I generally only know from the interweb. It was awesome getting to chat with so many of the people we mailed from the Blue Blood MySpace profile. I sure like that site better since FOX took it over. Avant garde director Ramzi Abed and I have been aware of each other via various media for some time, but it was a pleasure to meet him in the flesh. I’m looking forward to the premiere of his Black Dahlia movie. I was aware of Dick Delicious of Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles fame partly because he has been nice enough to link to some of my naughty membership sites, but he was super charming and interesting in person. I got to meet the gent behind the Ferguson Fine Arts Gallery where Blue Blood photog Lori Mann and many other cool artists have shown. Mario Sabljak of Flavour Furniture is best known for his sexy and whimsical furniture designs, but, in our booth, he was known for taking his shirt of and showing off his nice ink.

One of the highlights of the weekend for me was meeting Sugar and Tatdude from Healing Art. Some of the wonderful work they and the other artists in their extended family do for breast cancer survivers includes using tattoo artistry to cover scars and create areola repigmentation i.e. make nipple areas look more like nipples. This might seem like something minor in the face of possible death, but how you feel about yourself and your world makes a huge difference. Someone very close to me underwent breast cancer surgery last month, so this was an especially nice group for me to come across.

Another highlight of the show was the polework competition. This was exactly what it sounds like. Some of the most accomplished dancers in Los Angeles showed off their moves (nonnude) on stage in an audience-judged competition. I didn’t totally follow why there were judges on stage if it was all about the crowd response, but some of the lap dances the judges got were entertaining to watch. The winner was the gorgeous and flexible mohawked Sin. I’ve thought she was amazing for ages. She and I have exchanged cell phone numbers and email addresses at 4am at the Dead Girls Corp studio over and over again, but somehow such scraps of paper never quite end up filed right. And I’m sorta shy on the telephone. I swear we are going to get around to shooting for real soon, but you all can at least see some examples of her flying around the pole and in our booth in the gallery which accompanies this article.

The other abortive shoot hottie there was Ms Genevieve who is broadcasting with KSEX. I went to her place to photograph her because she has a cool dungeon setup. Only my car got vandalized while I was looking for parking and we all decided that the creative energy was going to be nonideal after filling out police reports. Plans are in the works to make that happen soon too though.

It was very nice at Erotica LA to run into pals of mine as varied as Joey Strange and Kayla Quinn and best of all David Aaron Clark. When Dave wrote up Blue Blood issue #1 for Screw in late 1992 or early 1993, it was the first full feature on the mag. I’d gotten press mentions a lot of places, but they tended to be stuff like a capsule reviews in a deathrock zine like Ghastly saying Blue Blood was cool or a blurb in Hustler’s Chic saying contributing writer Amelia G (that’s me!) had created a publication they found most bizarre. But David Aaron Clark did a full-on feature-length deconstruction of the mag which included a sentence that caused us to call one of my friends a “hair farmer” for years afterwards. Dave also welcomed me and Forrest into his home in New York City and gave us the grand BDSM tour of the town years ago, and we thank him for that experience.

Forrest got to snap a few shots of Dave in the Blue Blood booth this weekend at Erotica LA with Superna. And can I just say Superna rocked the Blue Blood booth like she rocks the mic, high energy and full throttle. Even at the end of the looooooooong day on Saturday, she kept all our energy levels up with her own enthusiasm. Eva Klench was awesome too, even battling rush hour traffic in a corset to be with us on Friday and still looking gorgeous and good-to-go upon arrival. Vima spent the day with us on Saturday before heading off to check out Margaret Cho’s performance that night, as she will be collaborating with Margaret Cho on a new burlesque act. Even with something that important to do that evening, Vima hung out with us for as long as possible to fill in as Dahlia Dark was a little stressed by the large crowds and Voltaire had the flu. Representing for the boys, we had in attendance new Blue Blood hottie Omen and OG Blue Blood boi Astrovamp Daniel Ian who rumor has it is about to marry the girl he posed for Blue Blood with in 1996. Big love to all my crew on this one. You all made the show so much fun!

There are tons of cool people I’m leaving out right now, I know it, but the best thing I can say about Erotica LA is that the whole Blue Blood crew had fun,and I came home with a list of people I want to do something cool or fun with, who I either met or was reminded about at the show. And those are the two most important things to be able to say after any convention. Really, we all had a blast and I came home with a porcelain box decorated with kanji on the outside and stuffed with business cards on the inside, but the concept is the same.

I guess I better go do laundry now.