Posts tagged: blt

The first time I ever went to Death Guild was when Forrest Black and I were out in San Francisco for Bat of House of Usher’s Zine Slam. We were there promoting Blue Blood in print and also my antisocial punk rock humor zine BLT or Black Leather Times.

This was like more than a decade ago, so when Vampira Bat and Nixon Sixx suggested dropping promoter Decay a line, I was thinking he might not remember me. Pretty much the first thing he ever said to me in person was to give me grief for not publishing an article he wrote and submitted to my zine BLT. His article was fine and contained some punk education; it just didn’t fit the BLT format. So the first thing he emails back to me yesterday is his cell number and the pledge “I promise not to give you shit about the story I submitted to you guys in 1990.” So we are two veterans who do indeed remember each other.

As most Blue Blood readers probably know, we are celebrating our fifteen year anniversary this year. Death Guild is also celebrating their fifteen year anniversary. Death Guild DJ Margo was even a covergirl for one of the older designs of BlueBlood.net. The moral of the story here is that having perserverence and longevity means that somebody somewhere will always remember it if there was that one night you drank too much, that one person you said that thing to, the time you gave someone a mohawk you were not supposed to, that guy you threatened with a shotgun, or potentially the weird factoid about that person they always confuse you with. If you stick …

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As Blue Blood comes up on our fifteen year anniversary — wait a second, wtf? Did I just say fifteen year anniversary? It feels like it was only yesterday that I was sitting on the floor of my punk rock group house, folding issues of Black Leather Times with my unsavory pals, and talking about how I was thinking about trying something glossier and maybe more erotically-oriented.

Doing Blue Blood in print plunged me headlong into a world which included so much which fascinated and intrigued me. One of my favorite things was trading publications with like-minded zinesters all over the world, showing them what I made and getting to see what they created. I think it was trading zines with the late great Ghastly magazine which eventually led me to meet up with the multi-talented deathrock crew from Release the Bats.

Some of how the world has turned out is certainly not what I envisioned when I took the road less traveled, but I guess fifteen years and going strong means I chose okay. I hope. A funny thing about being a lean independent but workaholic organization like Blue Blood is that we always have a ridiculous number of projects going on at once and sometimes some projects happen bizarrely fast, while others get completed on a timeline that only seems natural to vampires.

Speaking of the undead, I have really enjoyed the photographic work Forrest Black and I have created shooting at nightclubs over the years. In current internet business terms, I guess Blue Blood is technically the media sponsor for the upcoming Nine Year Anniversary of Release the Bats. But really the Blue Blood crew is just going to be kicking it old skool …

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Eros Zine editor Thomas S. Roche writes:

“Forrest Black is best known as the Creative Director of Blue Blood, a network of sites that showcases gorgeous chicks in explicit gothic, punk, well-armed and counterculture erotica. More recently, Blue Blood has launched BlueBlood.net, a source for community where freaks of many stripes can post on everything from politics to music to sex to travel.

Born into a hippie household in Northern California, he’s lived since in the DC area and Atlanta, and now lives and works in Hollyweird, where he hits the cool parties and meets some of the world’s freakiest and hottest chicks to pose for him and Amelia G. We caught up with Forrest at the recent West Hollywood Book Fair for a chat about the Hells Angels and well-armed women.”

The interview kicks off with:

Eros Zine: OK, let’s go way back to the beginning: Where did you grow up — and how do you think it influenced your choice of career, and your attitude toward the industry?

Forrest Black: I was born in Northern California, in a room full of candles, incense, and revolutionaries. It was in a beautiful home with thirteen black cats and the ghost of the previous owner. The property had previously been a boys camp which had been converted by my parents into the sort of hub of my Father’s business. He was the leader and sort of project manager of what was later described as one of the largest drug smuggling operations of the time. They had planes and trucks crossing borders North, West, East and South. Among many other things, he was a major supplier of Ergot to the famous LSD houses of psychedelic era San Francisco, and he believed in what he was …

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All I have to say is, “woot!” Well, really I’m going to say a bit more, but my cell phone and email have been blowing up with pals who assume I am at the San Diego Comic Con. But I am not and I am quite pleased that I am not. We had a lot of fun last year and I didn’t want to criticize in advance because I didn’t want responsibility for people deciding not to go, but . . .

The cons I initially loved were these amazing (at least for my teenage self) events. Authors and artists I looked up to would share their wisdom on panels during the day and hang out and socialize at night. There were masquerade balls for really doing it up, but lots of people, myself very much included, would run around in crazy costumes all weekend. There was a sense of fun and community and I met tons of new people every time. Occasionally, a convention hotel would give me less than stellar service for wearing (hypothetically) nothing but pins with clever sayings on them over my nipples or not peace-bonding my weapon. But there was always a chick in a corset and elf ears or a guy in painted black leather with a mohawk to agree with me that the hotel was totally unreasonable. Friends of mine who worked con security may recollect slightly differently, but only slightly. The important thing was that the events were extremely social. There was always a dealers room with unusual hard-to-find (especially pre-internet) wares. Eventually, I acquired a lot of items I treasure from exhibitors and BLT and Blue Blood both exhibited at many of those conventions, so I don’t object …

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The Friday of the 2006 Comic Con, I only busted out my camera when really motivated because we’d gone on the Superhero and Supervillian-themed party bus the night before and, after a couple of days in the oppressive San Diego heat, I was slowing down. Still managed to shoot a nice little photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.

I was super-excited to get to see the very entertaining horror screenwriter and producer Sean Abley. Oddly enough, although he and I live literally across the street from one another, I met my neighbor online first and neither of us remembers precisely how. At any rate, he is a great wit and his Dark Blue Productions darkly humorous science fiction feature Socket is showing at the Los Angeles Outfest this Friday, so I highly recommend Angelenos stop by and check it out. (More on this later.)

Those of you who have been with us and Blue Blood since before the beginning will of course remember Black Leather Times, my punk humor zine, more affectionately (or hostilely) known as BLT. Drew “Vladimir Drakovich, King of Mars” Boyd wrote and, with Max Glick, co-wrote a number of humorous articles for BLT back in the crew’s DC days. I had the pleasure of running into Andrew Boyd in our booth at Comic Con and he hooked me and Forrest Black up with some kindly personalized Scurvy Dogs. Andrew Boyd’s publisher AiT/Planet Lar classifies Scurvy Dogs as a cult classic on their web site. This tale of pirates gone astray, co-written with Ryan Yount, absolutely deserves the status.

Sometimes I find conventions difficult because my …

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I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.

Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.

He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:

1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – but …

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