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?

Los Angeles can be a difficult city to make deep connections with others in. I know literally hundreds of people who I genuinely like and enjoy in Southern California, but I can’t say most of them know me particularly in-depth or vice-versa. Sometimes I find it difficult to escape the feeling that every interaction is somehow tainted with business. And not in a cool getting-neat-creative-projects accomplished sort of way. A lot of people get a certain kind of bone marrow level lonely in Los Angeles and turn to drink, drugs, or specific religion.

I’ve said for years that, if I stayed in Los Angeles for long enough, I would need to end up either in AA or the Church of Scientology. I live walking distance from the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center and this may mean I am required to become a Scientologist because I have a few problems with Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.

There are a few traits AA and NA folks tend to pick up, which I would really be disappointed to find in myself. AA people are always simultaneously telling you that they are more virtuous and goody two shoes than you and more wild with fuller and more exciting lives than yours. This is rude, but a potentially unavoidable side-effect of working the program.

Secondly, AA and NA people always make their struggle with addiction the whole narrative they hang their existence on. I know some amazingly accomplished Hollywood artists who believe the story of their lives is how they got addicted to something and then dealt with being addicts. The books they have written, music they have performed, and people whose lives they have made better are all footnotes; the real story for AA folks is the road to and from addiction. Even though most addicts relapse at least occasionally, so this self-view does not even really work from a literary narrative structure perspective.

My largest obstacle to joining AA or NA is that I don’t have a particularly addictive personality. I mean, I’ve been enjoying my iced soy lattes made with gourmet, fair trade, artisan-roasted coffee bean espresso, but it wouldn’t kill me not to have them. I love beer, but, most of the time, a beer looks too much like twenty soul-sucking minutes on the elliptical to me and I’d rather spend the calories on something else. Maybe if cocaine and heroin came in tasty beverage form, I’d look into getting addicted to one of those, but I can’t imagine the bother involved with getting into an actual habit of reverse picking my nose or sticking pins in myself. I have enough trouble getting into the habit of working out. I mean, I feel good after I exercise and picking up heavy objects and putting them down again is much less annoying than most of the modes of ingesting addictive drugs.

But I digress. The important thing is that goofy sign generators are fun. Now you can each make your own Church of Scientology sign, hit the upload option, and be sure to use one of the “Hotlink for forums” code copy/paste snippets to share your sign here.

Happy Repeal of Prohibition Day! So a Dewar’s ad pointed out to me that we should all celebrate the Repeal of Prohibition on December 5. I thought to myself that that was a great idea, but wondered if it would catch on. On December 2nd, Fleshbot did a feature on December holidays which included a New Years photo Forrest Black and I shot of Miss Bunny and which also put “December 5: Repeal Day: The 21st Amendment ends Prohibition” in their sexy calendar.

I got drunk for the first time at the Baptist Mission in Israel. Yes, the Baptists send missionaries to the Holy Land and so does everyone else. And my friend Elisabeth Bjerreaugaard-Pederson (who I would love to find me via Google) and I thought some of the missionaries’ kids were hot and so we drank with them, having no idea what we were doing. I got my real drinking merit badge drinking with Marines in Germany at age sweet sixteen. Blue Blood is sweet sixteen now, but Blue Blood has a curfew. Unlike sixteen-year-old me. To be honest, I’m a fan of water and, although I enjoy going drinking very occasionally, I feel the most important thing about today’s holiday is the celebration of freedom. I just don’t like being told what to do in my personal life and the Repeal of Prohibition was a win for personal liberty.

I thought it would be fun to celebrate the day with (besides drinking of course) some free sexy barroom photos Forrest Black and I shot of Rachel Face. I seem to have spent a lot of time in bars with Rachel, sometimes shooting and other times drinking. One of the things I enjoy about her is that she always comes up with fun bars to shoot in or go to.

Blue Blood has been working with Rachel Face since 2001/2002 or thereabouts, but the most recent sets shot in 2008, were at a Portland gin joint called Plan B. Plan B is pretty much awesome incarnate. It is owned by punk bass player Jeff Truhn of Straitjacket fame and it has the best bacon dogs on the West Coast, maybe the best bacon dogs anywhere. The actual bar in the bar has all sorts of collectible records inset along its glossy surface. Apparently this was the hard lemonade made from a hard lemon of a breakup with the sort of punk rock girl who scratches all your favorite records on her way out the door. With today’s update, there are now 11 sets of Rachel Face available on BlueBlood.com in their entirety.

A bit of history for the history buffs not already viewing Rachel Face in the buff. (Sorry, I loathe puns . . . except for sex puns. We all have our foibles.) On December 5 in 1933, Americans got back the right to legally sell and drink alcohol. During the period from January 16, 1920 to that date, some of the saloon culture, the so-called drys were up in arms about, did decline. Drys was the slang of the time for teetotalers, axe-wielding beer barrel smashers, and other temperance advocates. Strangely there was (and purportedly still is) a Prohibition Party, so the temperance movement could run candidates likely to oppose the sale and consumption of demon rum, alcohol, booze, intoxicants, alky, canned heat, cocktails, drinky-poos, firewater, beer, hard stuff, hootch, moonshine, whiskey, rotgut, sauce, spirits, tipples, tequila, hot juice, that sort of thing.

In all fairness to the drys, there had been more saloons than the population needed and the law of supply and demand forced saloon-keepers to maintain sidelines in girls, gambling, and other mind-altering substances. Not that the more profitable early saloons did not also feature such things, but there was a feeling in America than the problems were getting worse by 1919. At the same time, during Prohibition, more traditional drunkard customs were replaced by the world of the speakeasy. Speakeasies tended to draw previously respectable types into a more criminal and more sexually open environment. And of course Prohibition made a lot of wealth move around, most notably out of the government’s pockets and into a few bootlegging families everlasting fortunes.

So have a drink today to celebrate freedom of vice and pursuing happiness and making money the American way.

By next week at the latest, I plan to stop compulsively watching political news for a while and get back to morbid and funny vampire and angst television, fall movies, non-political social commentary, entertaining misbehavior, music and hot naked counterculture. This week, however, even South Park is still hyped up about politics and the election. South Park tonight featured adults partying drunk in the street with beer kegs and Stan and Kyle calling in a noise complaint to the cops. The expressions on the two kids’ faces and the appalling soundtrack the grown-ups select is priceless.

It featured a kinda dumb riff on Oceans 13. After fast-forwarding through parts of Oceans 12 before determining it to be unwatchable, even at high speed, I passed on the movie they were spoofing, which left some entertainment value out for me there. South Park’s emergency room scene was amusing, with suicidal McCain supporters and Obama supporters who partied too hard.

I think having both the presidential election the USA just had and the referendums we just had, the country is at least either a little hyper-adrenalized or a little hung-over. I’m really hoping that, when California finishes tallying up all the provisional ballots and suchlike, the moronic Prop 8 will somehow not have passed. In general, the results of the referendums are all a little surprising. It appears that pro-life/anti-abortion measures all failed. It appears that anti-gay measure all succeeded, including referendums on both marriage and adoption. I’m sure kids bouncing from foster home to foster home are thrilled that they won’t be getting taken in by any loving families which are not 100% traditional. Or not. Additionally, marijuana got a lot more legal in a number of states. And Washington appears to have legalized doctor-assisted suicide.

So it is a weird morning and it probably makes sense that everyone is feeling a little jumpy today, no matter how overjoyed they were last night, as the results came in. At any rate, you can watch the most recent episode of South Park for free online now on at this link.

In this original Blue Blood interview, Combichrist frontman Andy LaPlegua and I are drinking beer in, err, Mexico. I interview Andy LaPlegua about his Frost EP Sent to Destroy. We talk about horror movies, fetish, and what a dead hand smells like. How cute we look can be credited to Forrest Black who directed the video.

So apparently, while I wasn’t paying attention, best-selling author Tucker Max challenged Nick Denton’s huge blogging empire’s flagship Gawker to a $10,000 bet over the likely domestic gross of his upcoming movie and Gawker declared Jihad on Tucker Max over everything. Not in that order.

Full disclosure: I have drunk beer with Tucker Max and I’ve shaken hands with one of the Rudius Media bloggers. I have partied in Vegas with large portions of the Gawker staff, enjoyed Gawker’s hospitality in Austin, and shaken hands with Nick Denton. I think it is fair to say that I don’t have a horse in this race because I genuinely like and enjoy the work of people in both camps.

Now, Fleshbot is the main Gawker blog I read with any regularity, although, given that I quoted ValleyWag earlier today, obviously it is not the only one I read. So I don’t know how I missed the Gawker flagship’s 20 entries this month about how much they loathe Tucker Max. I worried that I might be being too rough on Joshua Todd and Buckcherry earlier this week, but, damn, compared to Gawker, I am sweetness and light and the personification of all that is gentle.

I wrote a thing a while back where I praised Tucker Max’s writing and general brilliance, but I mentioned that he was coy in his stories about use of cocaine. Tucker Max is very sensitive to people having misimpressions of him and he explained to me that it was important to him that he was about hanging out with beer and hot chicks and not about hookers and blow and that he felt beer and hot chicks were more fun. I’ve never been big on choosing just one scene, if more than one has something to offer, and there was probably more blow than beer in the room we were standing in, so I told him I’d have to contemplate that. I then printed a retraction of my implication that he might do drugs. And Tucker was still stressed out that I might not have been clear enough.

At the time, I thought he was being more sensitive than he needed to be, but, having read through some of the Gawker articles where everything the guy does is put under such a microscope, it makes more sense to me now. Wikipedia, which almost never takes any responsibility for how badly someone is being falsely maligned or lauded, actually locked the Tucker Max entry about a week ago. If Wikipedia actually makes any effort to control the rampant wikiality of an entry, then you know it is serious. Either that or Tucker Max has superpowers. In addition to pointing out that editing Tucker Max’s Wikipedia entry must be a full time job, on their site, Gawker assassinated everything about Tucker Max from his writing to disgruntled former employees to what swag he gave away at his movie’s wrap party to how cutesy he is with his dog to entries friends of his have written about him during arguments and since removed from the web.

As a big fan of Tucker Max’s book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, I don’t get what it is about him that drives some people into a complete frenzy of hate and disgust. Folks who are allergic to him generally complain about frat boy something or other and refer to his work as fratire, but Tucker Max says he has never belonged to a fraternity and I believe him.

I’m not excited about I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell being made into a movie. I recently watched the Augusten Burroughs Running with Scissors flick on TiVo and it was painful, even mostly fast forwarding. The problem with bringing memoir to the big screen is that the aspect of high quality memoir which is most interesting is the memoirist’s perspective. I have read almost all of Augusten Burroughs‘ books and enjoyed them, but the Running with Scissors movie was wretchedly unwatchable. And Running with Scissors had Alec Baldwin, Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Evan Rachel Wood in it.

Tucker Max quotes Eminem’s lyrics “I love being hated, it’s great, let’s me know that I made it” when talking about the Gawker month-long hatefest. Maybe I’m just a sucker for a sociopath. The line between self-actualized individual and sociopath is soooooooo thin. But I think being vilified bothers both Tucker Max and Eminem, especially being vilified inaccurately. People always like to laugh about the idea of someone getting upset over something on the internet, but we live in a digital age and everyone needs to get their heads around the fact that what happens on the internet is real life now. You can step away from the keyboard, but something that tens of thousands of people read is still going to have an impact.

Sometimes you just have to live your life on your own terms and deal with the fallout. In this case, Tucker Max says that his film needs to do about $20 million gross to definitely be in the black. He has invited Gawker to wager what they feel will be the movie’s earnings and they win if it comes in beneath their bet and Tucker wins if it does better than they gamble. I’d say that a 20 entry media blitz on Gawker might be worth a few grand, but Hamilton Nolan and the rest of the Gawker crew write too well for a hostile deconstruction from them to equal good publicity. I’m very curious to see if Gawker will accept Tucker Max’s wager, all proceeds to be donated to charity of course. After that, I’ll be very interested next spring, when I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell is released, to see who wins the bet. I hope I haven’t offended any of the involved parties, but, if I have, I’m okay with dealing with the fallout.

When I was a little kid, my compatriots would frequently use the expression “I don’t care”, but I was always careful to say “I care, but not enough to change my behavior.” Everybody likes a smartass, right?

I have had a lot of fun in Portland before and I’ve shot a bunch in Portland before. So I was down for a trip, a few weeks ago, when long-time Blue Blood hottie Rachel Face called me up and said that she’d been designing disposable clothing made out of trash and she was having a fashion show she’d love me and Forrest Black to come up and do some press coverage on. She had messaged me online about shooting some new sets for BlueBlood.com and I often enjoy shooting trips more if there is an event to shoot. Rachel invited me and Forrest Black to stay at her place, but we figured she would be crazed getting ready for her fashion show, so we stayed at EroticBPM HQ instead.

It’s not that Rachel didn’t tell me excitedly about how there would be all these strippers there. Hot girls who dance in Los Angeles usually prefer to be called dancers, but Portland cuties throw the word strippers around all the time. Yet I hadn’t quite grasped the nature of the venue. The Trash Factory fashion show was at a club called Devil’s Point. Portland peeps are probably starting to smirk now, as it occurs to them what I did not know. Never having been to Devil’s Point, I had assumed the Trash Factory fashion show venue would be a nightclub with maybe some go-go dancers or maybe a place full nude dancers went to get a beer . . . when not actually, ya know, nude.

Humorously, I had not realized it was an actual strip club. Doh! Nonetheless, the Devil’s Point people were helpful and nice and the photography did turn out awesome, if I do say so myself. Check the photos out here and check the club out when in Portland.

How do you hack a hangover? Apparently this is one of the most viewed recent YouTube videos in the how-to section. Well, if you don’t count all the ones related to achieving erection, orgasm, or conception. I haven’t watched any of their social relations vids, but, if the advice is as terrible as this hangover advice, I’d recommend steering clear.

Personally, I’ve found that the most effective way to avoid feeling awful in the morning is to sleep late after a night of not drinking to excess. Then start the day with a delicious iced soy latte, a little sunshine, and a well-balanced, high-protein, low-carb, low-glycemic-index breakfast.

Failing that, I never remember to take those RU-21 pills when starting the night, but they are moderately effective. I am a very big fan of alternating beer with sparkling water during the evening and drinking the Function brand Urban Detox beverages before bed.

How do you like to start your day?

As a holiday, St Patrick’s Day has dubious origins but fabulous iconography.

Although the holiday tends to serve as both an expression of Irish pride and an excuse to get thoroughly blotto (Hi Funkatron), the origins of Saint Paddy’s are neither in drunkenness nor Ireland. Although observation of the holiday in the Americas was recorded as early as 1737 in Boston, the first serious St Patrick’s Day parade took place in New York City on March 17, 1762 as a celebration for Irish soldiers in the British military. That would be the British military whose asses we kicked in order to become a sovereign nation and pursue happiness and freedom and stuff. Nonetheless, over the years, the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City grew into a bigger and bigger event. A lot of the first Irish immigrants to the New World were Protestant, but the 1845 Potato Famine lead to an influx of Catholic Irish population. Although grisly prejudice against the Irish in general and the Catholic Irish in particular lead initially to negative media coverage of the parade, when President Harry Truman attended the festivities in 1948, many people felt that prejudice was really something that the US of A was finally putting behind it. This was perhaps overly optimistic, but still a step in the right direction.

Actually in Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was celebrated as a religious holiday, even though St Patrick was a pretty lame saint. Patrick was essentially a trust fund baby from the 400’s. He was kidnapped from his parents’ estate and held captive for six years, during which time he, go figure, got kinda religious and started hearing voices. When he escaped, he is said to have walked 200 miles to freedom in England. He studied religion there for many years, before returning to Ireland to minister to Christians already practicing there and to work on converting pagans. Some accounts credit him with introducing Christianity to Ireland, but this has been pretty resoundingly debunked. He is, however, credited with thinking of dressing Easter up with Pagan rituals to make it more appealing to those he was trying to influence to convert. There is also some stuff about banishing snakes from Ireland, but it is sort of silly and also considered by most to have been debunked.

The thing about St Patrick’s Day being a religious holiday in Ireland was that this meant all the pubs were closed. This was not relaxed until the 1970’s. Not a lot of consumption of green beer going on there. That was a strictly American and primarily New York, err, tradition. In 1995, the Irish government decided that, if anyone was going to have a killer St Patty’s Day party, it should darn well be them. Pretty reasonable really. Ireland upgraded it from a “Day” to a “Festival” and now puts on four days of merriment, enjoyed by an estimated 1.2 million revelers at last count.

I went to high school in Germany for a year and every German holiday is an excuse reason to get tipsy in the street. So I feel I can safely say that I might enjoy the modern Saint Patrick’s Day Festival in Ireland, except that a lot of traditional music sounds like filking to me. I realize that filking is actually based on folk music, and not the other way around, but the discomfort lingers. SF fans will know what I am talking about and, if you are not familiar with filking, trust me, you do not need to be.

Leprechauns are also based on Irish folklore, but they were not associated with Green Beer Day until 1959 when Disney released the movie Darby O’Gill & the Little People. Somehow the Irish heritage aspect of St Patrick’s Day meant that leprechauns and their tricky pots of gold then got to be thought of as part of the holiday as well. It really seems like I should be kidding at this point, but I’m not. Makes you wonder what weird future impacts modern media will have on world celebrations.

Oh, and the shamrock? Yeah, the first recorded mention of one was around a thousand years after the death of Saint Patrick. The shamrock or seamroy was sacred at the time as a symbol of the rebirth of spring. The utilization of the shamrock in a Christian holiday is another example of the co-opting of Pagan culture, but not one which is apparently directly attributable to Saint Patrick. The meaningful clover symbol was later further co-opted for Irish pride under English oppression.

So . . . Happy St Patrick’s Day and enjoy your green beer. (The original color associated with the holiday was blue.)

What if you threw a fetish party and nobody new came? The same rugged stalwarts from the last five years were present, sporting hardened and stained latex wardrobe, silicone lubricated, lipoed, botoxed expressionless and very drunk. BDSM and drugs/liquor don’t mix but its Hollywierd and the weirdo onlookers, unhappy married couples, and pervy old white dudes in black leather were all in attendance. At least there weren’t any melancholy hipsters or smelly hippies. Then again they know how to party and should have been there.

My editor sends me a mysterious online message about a job should I choose to accept to cover it, a fetish event in said Hollywierd, wedged between X-Mas and New Years. I opened the message on myspace on my nearly defunct once puzzling newfangled phone that will let me navigate online but only in something smaller than 8 pt. font. I ventured to the address via the Red Line at the Hollywood and Vine Station and I was really ready to see something interesting whether it be puke or piss.

The club was situated at The Henry Fonda Theatre and has been known to deny entrance to those that have been placed on the list before, but I was miraculously let in, and my bag barely inspected. I should have smuggled a flask. It was cold out. So I was wearing something odd, not latex, but one of my fav old drag queen outfits from someone that had a much bigger bust and ass than me, that I scored in a Silverlake thrift store. Twas pink satin, and about 8 sizes too big, but I pinned it to my leotard with safety pins and felt fabulous. Underneath my skirt I had two pairs of stockings, and leg warmers, and I was wearing a Blue Blood hoodie, 2 scarves and a cashmere overcoat. Fuck fetish, I had just got over a nasty cold few weeks prior and I was not looking to score.

Most of the fetish miscreants were there, just not many of the promised advertised ones. Some it seems, or most were skinny and lacquered a bit too tight with corsetry. God forbid someone should sneeze. I overheard one fake eyelashed missy hiss to the other, “wearing thisss feels like you are being squeezed by a nice long python.” I couldn’t eavesdrop much more since the carpeted stairs made it tough for me to get down in high heeled boots and I had work to do.

On the main floor Master Syrus applied long beautiful feather needles for a fantastic scalp piercing, and a bosom piercing. Some of the old crows watching were more glassy eyed than others, but when you are wearing 2K in latex couture everything else seems to pale in comparison. Sadly the Mistress of Ceremonies Masuimi Max, Mistress Aradia, and a slew of purported others were not seen during the time I was there, and I missed the performances by Midori and Kumi, although I did see Kumi in a white wig briefly.

Watching Mistress Genevieve 2.0 wait in line to get in was priceless: with brown hair, possibly meth fidgety and frozen overdrawn lipped smile in brown, opening and closing her phone, muttering where is she, jumping up and down in impatience like she had to pee, all of a sudden spins around and bluntly asked me why did I cut my hair. I looked her dead in the eye with bemusement, and said because I was tired of it, but secretly because I didn’t want to look like everyone else, especially her. I still have nightmares of getting my eyes nearly enucleated by her during the production of “Scuba Squirters 3.” Now I know better and I kept my distance from her talons while I waited in the short VIP line.

The fashion show highlighted the fashion of Syren and Stockroom in typical black/white combos. The best event was the two leather hooded chick bunnies with tits marked by black X marks, sparring away in boxing gloves and adorable mens boy shorts. One was in black the other in red. The dark bunny won in a lovely spray of red glitter.

This was nothing like the other great fetish venues such as Skin Two Rubber Ball in London, Fetish Evolution in Essen, or the Black and Blue Ball in NYC. This was the first year of the West Coast Fetish Ball and it was a cold day, so of course it was going to be sparse, and although the VIP area upstairs has a tent cover and kept things more warm, it was basically a total ripoff, charging ten bucks for a shot of booze was ridiculous and to laud it as such a big fetish venue with so few hardcore and featured performers around, I felt bad for anyone that shelled out good beer money for a total letdown.