People tend to be most open-minded about trying new things when they are first being romanced. For example, most people are extra-likely to taste a new food or listen to a new band then they start dating someone new. By this scientific equation, I hope that readers perusing the erotic portraiture of BlueBlood.com will be feeling extra-receptive to new ideas.

One of the most important messages I would like people to internalize from Blue Blood is that having purple hair or a tattoo or a pervy wardrobe in no way makes a person a second class citizen. You are entitled to the rewards of the larger society. You are entitled to the same love as anyone, whether or not your sex is a bit kinkier than average.

The ancient Romans celebrated Lupercalia on the Ides of February by whipping hot girls with portions of sacrificed goat. (The Ides is the 15th day of a month, for those of you who have repressed your Julius Ceasar studies.) Historians can’t agree on the origins of Lupercalia or precisely which gods the festival honored. They are pretty solid on the format for the party though. If you wish to throw a Lupercalia event, you will need a variety of eligible maidens, two goats, and a dog. The idea is to sacrifice the animals and then hit the girls with pieces of them in order to ensure fertility, painless childbirth, and general sensuality. A match-making lottery is optional but considered to be part of the tradition. Sort of the bloody pagan version of a 70’s key party. Blue Blood is not really down with the animal sacrifice portion of the show because we love our dogs and goats far too much for that.

In non-ancient Roman and non-70’s times, having an unusual piercing or wearing your lingerie in public can mean that your love life is limited to brief conversations with strangers off MySpace you message for 2am threesomes. But it doesn’t have to. There is no rule that thinking for yourself, owning your sexuality, and dressing flamboyantly equals eschewing all sentimentality and always feeling alone on Valentines Day. So I’m thinking I know more people who celebrate Valentines Day than Lupercalia.

Historians appear to be even more confused about the origins of Valentines Day than they are about the origins of the older Lupercalia. There are three different dudes various factions present as being the patron saint of romance. Most folks these days celebrate Valentines Day February 14th with hearts and flowers and, of course, sentimental greeting cards in both digital and paper form. Some scholars argue that the match-making lottery tickets of Lupercalia were the first Valentines. I feel that a date lottery ticket is no more a Valentine than the keys to some guy’s Porsche (unless maybe I got to keep the car.) The medieval Xtians appear to have come up with a variety of different mythologies and rituals in attempts to co-opt and dilute the pagan Lupercalia rites. Difficult to discern which one was the most successful, but, by the 1700’s, it is well-documented that there was a thriving Hallmarkian industry which created pre-made cards for Valentines Day and produced books with suggestions of how to express one’s love.

So flowers are pretty and an obvious gift, but how did hearts get associated with Valentines Day? Cadbury, founded in 1824, is credited with producing the first heart-shaped box of chocolate. Perhaps it is because of the way one’s heart beats when aroused or in love. Not that a heart shape is shaped much like a human heart. There are vaguely disgusting treatises on how what we consider to be heart-shaped is more similar in structure to a cow’s heart than a human heart. I’m not sure if those who study this are proponents of cattle-fucking or what.

Whether you prefer pieces of sacrificed animals or pieces of chocolate, there is someone out there who is the perfect match for you. If you have already found them, Valentines Day is the perfect holiday to celebrate your good fortune. As part of Blue Blood’s Valentines Day greetings to all of you, Forrest Black and I photographed a professional piercer, the lovely purple-tressed Natalie Addams, cutting out her own heart, gift-boxing it, and sewing up the “wound” with quite genuine play piercings. The Cadbury chocolate boxes of the mid-1800’s were made with velvet and mirrors. So we just had to say Happy Blue Blood-style Valentines Day with a bloody heart in a spooky ornate gift box! We’re traditional like that.

Happy Valentines Day!

I’m not generally a fan of anything which uses the expression “white trash” because I’ve lived in the American South. Pig ignorant people there will generally excuse racist nonsense by explaining that they also have issues with “white trash” like being bigoted on the basis of class, as well as race, is somehow more reasonable than being merely racist alone.

Due to the humorous intent of the occasion, I made an exception, however, for Miss Kitty’s White Trash Ball at Dragonfly this past weekend and, damn, but I had a good time. My homeboy Lange and I hit the Cat and Fiddle beforehand. Having been a fisherman in Alaska after art school (yes, like the TV show), Lange is not such a big fan of crab and raw fish, so I felt it was high time I chose a restaurant with cooked non-seafood items on the menu. The Cat and Fiddle is a music industry hang which bills itself as an English pub in Hollywood, although I am personally partial to the New Orleans fare like their uber-buttery crab fingers. In fact, I ate brussel sprouts and crab fingers and I was thinking that this would be a kinda healthy meal without the butter and Stella Artois. Kind of representative of Los Angeles really, something which looks healthy on the surface, but something just underneath which could probably kill you. Fun fact to know and share: Parts of Casablanca were filmed at the Cat and Fiddle location. When I first saw Casablanca as a teenager, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick was not pretty enough for my taste, but, these days, I have enough pretty in my world that I’m more impressed by force of personality and strength of character.

Major Strasser: What is your nationality?
Rick: I’m a drunkard.
Captain Renault: That makes Rick a citizen of the world.

Despite my best efforts to alternate with water, the Stella theme continued at the Dragonfly where my friends kept plying me with high quality beer and low quality water. Given a choice between sparkling Voss and Stella, I will generally choose the water over the beer. Given a choice between Stella Artois and flat Arrowhead, the beer is going to win most of the time. I would like to particularly point the finger at Lange and Blue Blood hottie Joel Awesome for enabling my wayward ways. When Scar called Lange an enabler, totally independent of having heard me call him one, he claimed not to know the meaning of the word. I am skeptical on this point, but was happy to give him the benefit of my otherwise useless over-education.

The really cool thing about the evening was that people dressed really tongue-in-cheek. Instead of being all doing their little turn on the catwalk (on the catwalk, yeah, on the catwalk), everyone was dressed silly and laughing and having a good time. The only difficulty was recognising everyone I know under tooth black or without makeup. Perish, who I once shared a house with for a month, generally dresses like the demon prince of elfland (or at least a fetish-y goth boi) so I didn’t recognize him at all in his faux beard and flannel and jeans. Embarrassingly enough, not even when he hugged me and said hello. I was all faking like how’s it going and he totally knew and told me who was under that hair. I was very entertained. The winners of the costume contest were a gentleman dressed as a farmer with a date dressed like a sheep. Ya gotta love any event which involves sheep-fucking. My costume was blue eyeshadow and a limited edition Alabama stagehand T-shirt I got for working for the band about a million years ago, in a land far far from here. Although I know the band has had a couple dozen #1 hit songs, Alabama fans who are impressed by my collectible T-shirt will be less impressed when they find out that my best guess at what a song by Alabama might be was “Sweet Home Alabama” which, according to the interwebs, is actually a Lynard Skynard ditty. (I also kind of think Alabama has done a song for Sesame Street.) That’ll learn me not to guess.

My knowledge of things a person could put in her cunt is far more extensive than my knowledge of Southern fried rock and country music. Thus, I was pleased to impress my friends when a gentleman named Craig wandered in wearing little besides a towel and a gigantic fake cock. “Ask him if that is the Dick Rambone,” I told Scar. “What?” she said. “Ask him if that is the Dick Rambone.” “Is that, uhm, the Dick Rambone?” Indeed it was the dildo modeled on legendary 80’s pornstar Dick Rambone. Dick Rambone has one of the largest cocks ever to appear in porn, so the Dick Rambone plastic cock has little real world application. I used to manage an adult boutique where I often fantasized about beating shoplifters (and a prudish wife who came in to complain about her husband’s female-orgasm-inducing-oriented purchases) with our larger plastic appliances. Apparently the knowledge from that particular weird job has stuck with me better than the knowledge from my gig as a stagehand for Alabama.

Other Blue Blood hotties in attendance included Kitty Von Klau, Damon Knight, Tassy Pink, and Nikki 666, who told me that her outfit, like mine, was just kinda what she would normally wear to kick around work, as opposed to go out on the town. I’m only posting a small gallery of pictures from the festivities because, for some reason, most of my photos appear to just be of people’s asses. Also of people’s asses being spanked. One of the great truths of life is that sometimes what looks hot as fuck in photos is sorta off in person and sometimes a really hot live sex show watched while tipsy doesn’t totally translate to snapshots. Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world, people with appealing and frequently visible asses tend to walk into whichever one I’m at.

I only met Rozz Williams once.

A bunch of the Blue Blood crew were in Los Angeles, celebrating the release of Blue Blood #5. That was the first full color issue of the magazine. I’d used a comic book printer who did high quality art repro and had no problem printing depictions of nude women. Heck, they actually also printed tons of publications involving sexualized eviscerations of women. (Yes, we were doing cross-promo with Glenn Danzig’s extreme Verotik at the time and he used the same printer.)

But the printer had had some concerns about Blue Blood’s content. First, they were very concerned that there was bestiality. I was like, WTF? They are holding up printing my magazine because they are concerned about the bestiality? Where do they think I have bestiality? Then I realized that I had written a fiction piece about the drummer in a dykey industrial band who gets with a werewolf. I was proud of the story and it was illustrated with elegant photographs by the famous Gunter Blum. I was thrilled that someone as huge as Gunter Blum wanted to be in Blue Blood. I really didn’t want to remove the werewolf piece and I really wanted to get my magazine printed. So I call the printer ready to do battle.

It turned out that the werewolf erotic fiction was not the problem at all. NOFX had sent Blue Blood a blow-up sheep. At the time, NOFX was unpopular with a lot of music journalists because they didn’t like to do interviews. I thought sending me a Love Ewe (get it?) was a billion times cooler than any interview could be, so I thought they were totally cool. Forrest Black shot me using a strap-on on the NOFX Love Ewe and we ran a picture of it, as part of a piece on NOFX, in Blue Blood’s bits and pieces entertainment section. Just looking at the film, the printer had thought this was actual bestiality. After the magazine was printed and shipped, the printer told me they were very concerned that I had male nudity in the magazine. That was undeniable and not about to change, so I only printed one issue there.

The issue came out, despite the printer’s reservations, and it looked great. So the Blue Blood crew headed out to Los Angeles to celebrate. On Rozz Williams night at the Probe on Highland in Hollywood, California, we were all feeling really good about having gotten the magazine hot off the presses, against so many obstacles. We were meeting so many interesting new people. We were thrilled to be among our own, among people who wouldn’t be pussies about something as funny as fucking what was essentially a punk rock balloon animal.

I went over to where Rozz Williams was holding court and gave him a copy of the new issue. He was shy and sweet. He thanked me. He told me he had enjoyed the earlier issues and did not have this one yet. Maybe he was just being polite, but the thing which sticks in my mind is that he took a moment to be kind. But, when I walked around the club, there were all these people saying the most terrible things about Rozz Williams. I don’t mean they were criticizing him for being a little too into Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer or something. I mean, people were just tearing the man down, saying he was past it, he was old, he looked ugly, his music didn’t matter, and on and on.

In point of fact, as an unbiased visitor from out of town, I feel qualified to say that Rozz Williams looked ethereally beautiful. I don’t recall what he was wearing. My attention was drawn to his face and the encounter was brief, but his makeup was deft and creative for a man to be wearing. He looked timeless, not old. His music had made a difference to a large percentage of the people in the room. Even to people who were not big fans of Christian Death or Shadow Project, Rozz Williams was an important creative driving force in the West Coast deathrock scene and his influence helped launch so many bands and so many cool creative people.

Fast forward a few years. Rozz Williams has committed suicide. Nightclubs in Los Angeles throw mournfests for him and they get good turnout. People speak his name reverently, they press fist to chest and say, “mi hermano.” I’m probably spelling the Spanish incorrectly, but you get the idea. (They might not be pronouncing the Spanish either.) I remembered the crush of people running Rozz Williams down. Although the Probe was one of the biggest nightclubs I had ever been to and they thought the man was worth throwing a night for, while he was still alive, most of their patrons couldn’t support someone who’d made such a difference . . . not while he was still drawing breath.

People often ask me to pin down precisely who Blue Blood is for. Gothic, body modification, deathrock, punk, fandom, glam, rivethead, ad infinitum. Really, Blue Blood is for people who have moved through a lot of subcultures. For people who have that maverick something different. Who feel a certain attraction in a lot of those scenes, but who do not feel wholly satisfied in any particular one. Blue Blood is for people who enjoy exploring and experiencing the creative fringes, and the cultures which thrive there, but don’t want to cram themselves into some cookie-cutter mold.

In the deathrock scene, it is rare that the people who have accomplished a lot get very much credit for it. The thing which made me think of Rozz Williams was noting that a link to BlueBlood.net was removed from Wikipedia’s woefully incomplete and slanted entry on deathrock. Someone had complained that Blue Blood was porn and thus did not belong. First of all, if deathrock is supposed to be for gothic folks with balls, what is anyone doing whining about smut practically designed for them personally? The multitalented Jeremy Meza’s late lamented deathrock mag Ghastly described Blue Blood as “It’s the one you’ve been waiting for! Death rock porn! Punk smut!” (For years, I used to run that quote with an ellipses in place of the word porn because I am troubled by the semantics, but that is a subject for another article.) Secondly, BlueBlood.com is where the naughty pictures are. BlueBlood.net is where we run lots of free articles and free forums and free promo tools for the scene. Blue Blood magazine in print had both deathrock music press and erotic photo sets in the same place. Glad I could clear that up for anyone that all was not patently obvious to. A bizarre percentage of the Wikipedia entry is on the Long Beach club Release the Bats. Blue Blood were huge early boosters of that club night. We shot tons of photos there. At great personal cost, I might add, as we were using film. We hyped Release the Bats both online and in print. Release the Bats was kind enough to host the re-launch of BlueBlood.net party. Whether someone thinks Blue Blood is the best thing to happen to deathrock since Sex Gang Children and 45 Grave or not, the deathrock connection is undeniable. At some point, perhaps I may attempt to list all of the luminaries, of the deathrock world, Blue Blood has done something with. I’ll include Jeremy Meza and Ghastly, although neither is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for deathrock. Viva Britannica.

There are a lot of appealing things about the deathrock scene. I love a non-wussified gothic look with yummy torn fishnet and leather and Alien Sex Fiend has smacked me from the stage with an obscene balloon. (Recurring motif. I guess there is something about me which makes bands want to press lewd balloons against my flesh.) The appeal of deathrock is why so many of us have spent time figuring out the hair products needed to create a devil lock or ordering expensive import CDs. But the problem with that scene, like many others which remain subculture, is that the nail which sticks out gets hammered down.

Blue Blood is for the nails which stick out.