Years ago, when Kevin Smith and I were both guests at DragonCon, he and I had a brief conversation about porn. Now that his Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie hits theaters this Halloween, I wish I remembered any of the details of it. As I recall, Senior Blue Blood writer Will Judy was there, but I don’t think it wise to interrupt his regularly scheduled obsessive Sunday puttering to check if anything important was said.
When DragonCon gave Blue Blood a ballroom for a panel, I had to have a team of people check ID at the door to make sure our standing room only crowd was all of age. It kind of sucked, but it was necessary. I’ve spoken on many panels where we did not discuss adult topics and I’ve spoken on many panels which did not include visual aids and I’ve spoken on many panels which were not in Georgia. But this particular DragonCon panel did have those stats and it just made sense to be sure the entire audience was of age. Would more than two thousand people have come to hear what Forrest Black, Sarah McKinley Oakes, and I had to say, if there had been no naughty aspect planned for this particular presentation? Probably not.
In some respect the adage about sex selling is true, but the part no one mentions with this is that distribution is a bitch. It would be nice if there were better distribution channels for actual quality products, with serious budgets, which tackle sexually-oriented topics. Even IFC will put a giant black box covering up John Leguziamo’s sock-clad cock when they run the movie Spun. The best thing about the internet is that I can sell a BlueBlood.com Blue Blood VIP membership without having to go through the same sort of stodgy distro channels as I did with Blue Blood magazine in print. Not that Google does not still make it harder to find adult sites than non-adult sites by penalizing adult sites in the SERPS. It was relatively easy to get a magazine featuring naked people into adult newsstands, but Blue Blood’s audience was shopping the music and zine shelves. The main ways I addressed this were by having no nudity on the cover of Blue Blood magazine, trading ads with zines, and buying ads in magazines like SPIN and Rolling Stone. The ads made clear what someone would be buying, without presenting any material which could be objectionable. I don’t think artists should be limited in what they can create and express, but I do think it should be clear to people what they are getting into before they have to see something they do not want to. Mind you, there were zines like Carpe Noctem (which featured horror nudity and sold to an all ages audience) who would either take my ad money or my barter and then not come through with what they owed, citing their concern with the erotic nature of Blue Blood.
I still have dimwits trying to claim that BlueBlood.net must be a porn site because BlueBlood.com (a different site on a whole different domain) features erotica. There are people who think that, because I sometimes come across naked people in my professional life, somehow everything Forrest Black and I shoot features models who are secretly naked underneath their clothes. Doesn’t matter what the actual topic or venue is. Heck, there are people who think that, because I sometimes come across naked people in my professional life, I must owe them sex, if I want to be their friend. There really is such a thing as an appropriate place to do certain things and an inappropriate one and I’m capable of being appropriate, thanks.
So Kevin Smith will indubitably get some bonus viral marketing from doing his Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie, but he will also indubitably run into some of the same distro and advertising difficulties that anyone with a sexually-oriented product is going to run into. Zack and Miri Make a Porno, however, is advertised on the sides of buses, but I have not seen one single solitary advert for it on an actual adult site where the ad would have had to have content besides whining that they couldn’t show their titillating content there. Whining about titillation is pretty much the ad campaign for Kevin Smith’s new flick. Now obviously Kevin Smith is about a gajillion times more talented and cool than that knob who the MPAA spanked for putting the nicely lit torture porn on the Captivity billboards a while back. But I could get really sick of people who think they are “mainstream”, whatever the eff they think mainstream is, who whine that they can’t put porn on billboards. Obviously, I think it is just fine that media is created which features human sexuality. I even prefer it when people make quality media about such topics.
Is Kevin Smith seriously waging an ad campaign about how unfair it is that, in a few markets, somebody had the sense to forbid him from writing PORNO in giant billboard letters in public places? Yes. What is wrong with him? This is exactly the kind of irresponsible nonsense which opens the door for real censorship. I believe that nobody should stop Kevin Smith from making a movie about any topic he pleases. I do, however, believe that the viewing public should have a choice in whether or not they see the movie or are exposed to its content. Should anyone really have to have their kid say, “Mommy, what’s a porno?” while shopping in a regular neighborhood?
I personally love cussing. I loathe puns, unless they are porno puns, and then I think they are just dandy. I love the trash talk in Kevin Smith movies. Kevin Smith is a genius with foul-mouthed realistic dialog. Despite making Jersey Girl, a movie about how awesome it is if your wife dies and your family undermines you, Kevin Smith is still one of my favorite writer/directors of all time, albeit no longer one whose work I have to see the second it hits the screen. Chasing Amy was brilliant. I even enjoyed Mallrats.
Kevin Smith’s first Clerks film is in my top favorite movies of all time. The scene where Randall is on the phone ordering appalling ass video titles in front of a mother looking for something about a scrappy happy something or other pup is hilarious. At the time that movie came out, I and many of my friends were somewhat underemployed in various awful jobs, many of which involved retail. So Clerks really spoke to us extra. Nonetheless, if one of my Mr. Unstable pals got fired from a job for yelling the names of porn vids in front of a suburban mom and her kid, I might have thought it was funny, but I would not have thought they were right.
Freedom of speech gives you the right to express yourself, but it is not supposed to give you the right to yell “porno” in a crowded public place.
PS If Jason Mewes does full-frontal nudity, it will be fine to put that on billboards all over my neighborhood. I mean, I live in Hollywood, so it is all degenerates who want to see that here anyway.
As you all have no doubt noticed, we’ve been working on some video stuff on BlueBlood.net here. It is still in beta, but we are making it live for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to point out anything which is not working perfectly yet, because we know Blue Blood TV is in beta.
We’ve been really enjoying putting together our first segments and I’m really excited to share them with you all. For the most part, Forrest Black has been directing and I’ve been producing. We’ve mostly been taking turns shooting, kinda the same as we do for still photography. We’ve gotten some behind-the-camera assists from the always enjoyable Michelle Aston as well. We are fortunate enough to have the incredibly talented Tim Skold on board for the project to do the Blue Blood theme music. As this is Blue Blood, you probably all know who Tim Skold is, but I’ll give you a quick overview, just in case. I first came across his work when he was in a band called Shotgun Messiah, which I thought was a great name for a band. Other bands he has been in include Kingpin, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson, and Skold. His eponymously titled Skold album is one of my favorite CDs of all time, one of those rare records I can play all the way through, enjoying every single song over and over again. Anyway, I’m really thrilled about doing this video series thang, and the way it is all coming together, and feeling very creatively inspired.
Our video section is just starting out, so, when it becomes a fabulous gigantic internet phenomenon, you can say you were in-the-know when. We’ll be both highlighting videos we think are interesting and bringing you original programming. I just posted our Deathrace Jason Statham interview and Deathrace director Paul W. S. Anderson interview. Coming up this weekend, I interview musician Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist. Forrest Black interviews writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel about her Cupcakes Take the Cake blog (and sex.) Forrest Black and I (and a lot of our unsavory pals) attend the Coilhouse magazine launch party and I interview editor Nadya Lev. And there is tons more to come. Feel free to message me or Forrest Black directly or in public (or sidle up to one of us in a nightclub and whisper) about what you’d most like to see us do because we are just getting started.
I know, I know, some of you were probably assuming I was about to announce the launch of a giant adult video section, probably in the members area over on sister site BlueBlood.com. Over the years, just about every major mainstream adult video company, both in Porn Valley and beyond, has pitched yours truly and Forrest Black to do the pr0nz vidz for them. I’m not saying that nobody could ever make me an attractive offer on that front, if we really were on the same page with a company which wanted to make something great. But it has been my experience that these huge multimillion dollar companies will come at us saying how much they want something gothic or punk or alt or tattooed, and then turn around and say that they figure the budget can be small because they can underpay talent with tattoos or black lipstick.
One of my personal rules is that I will work for free or cheap for someone who does not have an office, if I like them and I believe in their project. If someone has a big ol’ office, I expect a pro rate and I expect the same for those I work with. If someone owns one or more buildings, I expect them not to start being cheap when it comes to my subculture and my friends and my collaborators.
But, honestly, it really boils down to art. The thing about artists is that they do not always do what is the commercially perfect thing to do. Artists do what they feel like doing. What I really felt like doing was discussing the meaning of alternative culture with Nadya Lev and what appalling horror movies are fun to sample with Andy LaPlegua.
I hope you guys like what we’ve been making because I enjoyed the creative process and I’d like to make you more videos soon.
A while back, I asked the Blue Blood boards Have you ever been fired from a job? It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that most of our members are extremely talented and conscientious and hardworking, yet have personality, err, quirks which make it hard to always fit in at a job.
I know my personal experience of working in other people’s offices was that everyone always adored me for the first two weeks. I did a lot of contract design work where I would get called in when everyone was crashing on deadline, and horribly behind, and I think I got love for saving the day with my efficient work processes. Unfortunately, after about six weeks in any of these offices, I would start contemplating the fact that I wouldn’t have to go to work if I drove off the road on the way. I also had the tendency to have trouble with some of the social portions of work.
Running my own media empire, I have become more reserved over time, but I did not used to really have any comprehension of corporate culture. I mean, I could wear a suit and twist the colored parts of my hair under and pin them down, but I was still me. I would cheerfully explain to my coworkers that I thought health insurance was the big lie the overculture used to force us to live small lives. I would explain how I lived in a punk rock group house with a dozen other people, so my occasional corporate paychecks went really far, and I could afford to spend a lot of my time having adventures. I would bring in copies of first my antisocial punk rock humor zine BLT aka Black Leather Times and then later early issues of Blue Blood in print. Occasionally, I would work for a client like MTV who would specifically request back the girl with the “wild zines”, but, as most of my work was Federal contracts, government presentations, management consultant graphics, and such . . . well, I think the experience can be summed up by saying that, when I worked for EDS for a full three months, they really wanted me to work there permanently, but they also totally freaked out when I wore red stockings with a Brooks Brothers suit one day. And I’d thought I looked both especially conservative and especially attractive that day and usually I felt like I only hit one metric or the other.
I could never quite seem to match up my abilities and education with a job which really fit and challenged me and gave me room to grow. I know this is a very familiar frustration for most folks here. Sometimes the jobs which were obviously intended for trained monkeys were the most comfortable to do, more pleasant than the ones which were a whole step up from trained monkey where they expected me to be grateful for the low-end nonsense I could do in fifteen minutes and had to pretend took all day.
Forrest Black, in his quest for the perfect cheeseburger, came across the Serious Eats site. Serious Eats featured a funny article about a hot tattooed punk guy who got fired from Burger King for bathing in the kitchen sink . . . and posting it on MySpace and YouTube. The hilarious video posted above lead various Serious Eats readers to opine that he was trying to get fired.
They just don’t understand. I suspect he did not particularly care if he got fired. I suspect he has a skill set which should allow him to do something a heck of a lot higher end than work at Burger King, but somehow he never quite plugged into the right position. I think probably half the people I know, probably including myself, never quite slotted into something challenging and inspiring and really the right fit for their personality and capabilities. Sure, some people are lazy. But it takes a certain amount of effort to do your hair, take a bubble bath in the workplace, have someone videotape it, and post it all over the interwebs. So that is not laziness. It is not trying to get fired either. It’s just not having, fitting into the corporate culture, high on the to-do list, at a low-end job. Doing something amusing was higher priority. If you have ever been there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, maybe it is still a head-scratcher.
According to 2News WTDN, the Xenia, Ohio NBC affiliate, Mr. Unstable’s BK bubble bath kind of sucked for the shift manager Karen Cragg, who apparently has only held fast food jobs and was fired, along with the bather and pals. She feels that Burger King corporate mistreated her by firing her when she didn’t even know about the incident until the sink was already punk rocker soup. She might be able to cope with some of that frustrated rage by doing something appalling for fun at her next job.
On my birthday, two days ago, Anders Manga released X’s & The Eyes, his fifth studio album on Vampture Records. The first single “There Will Be Blood” is doing well on the European charts already. I swear I am moving back to Europe one of these days, just for the music.
In the United States-based events department, Anders Manga will be kicking off the U.S. tour with a co-headlining show at Dracula’s Ball in Philadelphia with a band called KHZ. Some people erroneously seem to believe that the regular Dracula’s Ball event is not happening this year, but it absolutely is happening. The record label Dancing Ferret Discs, also managed by Dracula’s Ball promoter DJ Ferret, will be shuttering its doors in November, but the events will continue. Hope that clears up any confusion.
Go check out the Anders Manga show and more, if you are in the Philly area. It is important to support creative people who actually come out of the scene.
It has been a while since we had a contest, so here is a new one.
About our beloved sponsors:
Squishable
A couple years ago Zoe and Aaron were backpacking around Southeast Asia doing some volunteering and being bums. They ran into their first fat, fuzzy piggy in Hong Kong and bought it as a tribute to gothic comic book artist Jhonen Vasquez. When they got back to the United States, their huggable pig was immediately kidnapped by rabid fans. And so the Squishable company was born. Their stuffed octopus just wants to be friends, so we’ve got their extra-friendly alligator for one lucky winner.
Lost Boys 2 The Tribe
The movie Lost Boys 2: The Tribe is out on DVD this week. Somewhere between a sequel and an homage to the original 1987 Lost Boys movie where Kiefer Sutherland’s character led a band of vampires, his half brother Angus Sutherland takes up the vamp responsibilities this time around and the flick features references to and cameos from many of the characters from the original. The piping hot fresh DVD has one of those nifty multi-picture hologram covers, a featurette about the movie’s stunts, alternate endings, and music videos.
Blue Blood Boutique
The Blue Blood Boutique features a growing variety of Blue Blood branded swag, including plush hoodies, high quality pins, and large waterproof stickers. The primary hoodie designs were conceptualized by Blue Blood art director Forrest Black. Forrest tapped longtime Blue Blood contributor Ed Mironiuk for the store launch to do a redesign on the traditional Blue Blood royal skull. Previous Blue Blood swag has featured work by James O’Barr, Trevor Brown, Slash, Jeb Huffman, and of course yours truly and Forrest Black. Perfect attire for all your club-hopping, con touring, coffeehouse lounging, and before and after sex needs.
Although I have lived in California now for longer than I have lived anywhere else, I am not originally from here. Earthquakes still seem like magic to me. Like an amusement park ride or some other thing where what you feel is interesting but without consequences. When some of the East Coast portions of my family first started going West, my maternal grandmother was certain every New Yorker who defected to California was going to fall into a crevasse and die. Eight feet of snow, she felt safe in. But earthquakes seemed horrific beyond all measure.
Native Californian Forrest Black tells me that a 6.0 earthquake is when buildings start falling down. The earthquake I just experienced was, at most recent estimate, a 5.8 in Chino Hills. That places the epicenter at around twenty some odd miles from where I am in Hollywood. This quake was so strong that, according to my twitter friends and my pals on the internet professional forums, the shaking was felt as far away as Las Vegas.
My mother was stationed in Israel during the Lebanon War. Then too, I had Stateside friends and family who thought it must be terrifying and dangerous to live in a warring part of the world. At the time, my only awareness that anything unusual was going on was that I had to set bric-a-brac away from the edge of countertops or it could be knocked off by the sonic booms of war planes flying overhead. I never saw an injured person or an explosion.
In much the same way, I have never seen the earth in California open up and start swallowing humans or their homes. I have never seen anything more than a crack in plaster, items fallen off a shelf, or a rolling mini tidal wave in a swimming pool. And it is not like earthquakes happen weekly in Los Angeles. So I don’t usually even think about avoiding placing things near the edge of counters.
This earthquake was a bit of a reminder that there really are serious fault lines on the West Coast. There are now piles of documents all mixed up together all over my office. Stacks of flyers are hopelessly jumbled. Photographic backdrops came halfway down. Anything lightweight like a CD or DVD went flying off the shelves. Pictures came off the walls. This included an original Cherry Poptart illustration by Larry Welz where he drew Cherry in a leather jacket specifically as a gift for Blue Blood. I am very relieved that the glass on the frame did not break on that.
And the iced latte on my desk fell off and soaked my chair. I’ll trade coffee butt for safe original artwork any day though. Nice to have a considerate earthquake. The quivering ground still seems fictional to me and, in the midst of a quake, I can never remember if you are supposed to get in the door frame or avoid the door frame.
Rachel Kramer Bussel has a new collection of stories out. This Cleis Press anthology is called Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica. Rachel is an extremely accomplished anthologist of erotica and a vocal enthusiast of spanking.
Although Rachel’s books sell well in their category and she generally has a couple of them charting on Amazon, she hoped to increase her visibility and sell more copies of Spanked. So she commissioned an outfit called What That Noise Productions to make her a book promo video. She posted the video to a number of sites and Vimeo and Flickr both removed it. Although the subject matter is a bit naughty perhaps, there is no nudity or anything like that in the video. At the time of this writing, Vimeo had simply responded to her queries by telling her she violated their terms of service. Flickr had not responded at all.
I know, from personal experience, that Flickr seems capricious at best. There is some truly terrible photography on Flickr, of some extremely explicit material, posted purely to promote quite pornographic sites. I spent a lot of time browsing Flickr before making Blue Blood profiles on there. I was very careful to precisely conform to the way other regular posters placed their photographs on Flickr. The BlueBlood.com profile quickly grew to have more than three thousand friends. Flickr sent a warning, but they refused to clarify what exactly Blue Blood was doing that wasn’t fitting with the Flickr community standards. Eventually, after failing to answer multiple emails from us, Flickr deleted the entire BlueBlood.com account, despite the fact that clearly thousands of Flickr members liked what Blue Blood was posting there just fine.
When someone polices unevenly, it is always difficult to discern the reasons for sure. I don’t know if Flickr and Vimeo are just money-losing propositions for their corporate parents and can’t afford to have anything on there use serious bandwidth. I don’t know if more popular posts are simply more likely to get attention, good or bad. I don’t know if they just make most normal uses officially against the rules just to allow them to have an excuse to remove whatever they feel like. Whatever their lame internal rationale for this bit of unfairness is, you can view the book promo video for Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Spanked: Red-Cheeked Erotica here now.
Since 1992, Blue Blood has been about encouraging people to think critically and not just go along with the herd. My hair is purple and red at the moment. But the hair color is a signifier, not the endgame. What I mean by this is that all of us who fought the battle to convince the world that someone with primary-colored hair or tattoos could be beautiful or sexy, we can all pat ourselves on the back and go home, if that was all the whole thing was about. That battle is won. But the point is that the physical appearance was supposed to be about being a maverick and living on your own terms, about marching to the beat of your own drummer. If mohawks become trendy, then having one does not necessarily signify that one is a nonconformist. You can still aesthetically enjoy very tall hair, but the most important body part in the battle against conformity is slightly lower — your brain. You need to have an evolved intellect to avoid being a bah bah sheep conformist.
I’m about to tell you all the most important lesson of a liberal arts education and it is not even going to cost you a hundred grand or whatever higher learning is priced at these days. I was less enamored of the lessons I learned in school, while I was paying off the tab, so here is the most crucial stuff for free. My parents certainly deserve most of the credit for my brain, but my education really helped ingrain some of their lessons.
In order to have an intelligent and human approach to the world, you must learn to be analytical and think critically. Some people are born more or less disposed to having these abilities, but they are definitely learned skills. The direction culture is moving, driven by technology, does not nurture skills in analysis and critical thinking. First television advertisers, and then internet marketers, found that people respond most primally to sound bites and slogans, as opposed to actual data. As a result, a lot of modern debate, especially online, sounds like the old “Tastes great!” vs “Less Filling!” argument. A person capable of analysis and thinking critically would look at that argument and realize that a discussion of Miller Lite probably entailed a beverage which did not taste good at all to most people and which would indeed be less filling because fewer people would drink much of it.
Which is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that you need to make up your own mind. When you are presented with a debate or controversy, you need to deconstruct what is actually being discussed. What are the sides of the issue? What is each side actually trying to accomplish? Who are the people presenting the sides of this issue? What, if anything, do these people stand to gain from one or another outcome? Are the people debating a particular side anonymous?
Politicians and salesmen will frequently present their own viewpoint as the side that all people of a certain type will be on. This is to induce everyone who is that type of person to side with them. For example, “if you care about children, you have to donate to my campaign.” Or, “if you are artistic and independent, you have to buy my product.” You need to analyze what the actual issues are and what the actual qualities of a product are. If you do not, then you are doomed to sheepdom.
Once you figure out what the actual issues and values being presented really are, as best you can discern, you need to think critically about them. You might love children and think of yourself as very artistic and independent. But that does not mean you need to buy what a politician or salesman is selling. Thinking critically means deciding for yourself, being able to process new data as it becomes available for your analysis, and determining for yourself how the real issues actually fit with your personal values. Thinking critically means not just wholesale swallowing whatever the last person you talked to told you to think. It means questioning authority and thinking for yourself.
I am often asked why I permit dissenting opinions on the Blue Blood boards. How can I permit people to disagree with me, with the only rule being that they have to be capable of explaining and supporting what they say, preferably without sloganeering or name-calling? So many forums online censor what can be posted in order to make sure as many people as possible will eat the sound bite argument and site owners will not have to back up what they say. So I try to provide a venue where people from many different walks of life can come together to exchange their varied points of view.
Thinking critically combined with being analytical means being able to find the real answers which are best for you, means being your own person. Even if some of your tastes and decisions end up being common ones, coming to your conclusions via critical thinking and analysis means being a nonconformist inside your own gray matter. Where it counts the most.
I believe there is nothing more important than individual liberty. Black eyeliner and glitter lipstick might be ways of expressing your love of freedom, but they will not make you free. Only application of your unfettered brain can do that.
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 to your guns and succeed, every little thing ever will probably haunt you. Just thought y’all would like to know.
For everyone in San Francisco and the surrounding environs who is searching for what to do this coming Monday night, I am excited to let you all know that Forrest Black and yours truly will be shooting more beautiful pictures and hanging out and generally having a blast at Death Guild at The Glas Kat aka The Trocadero at 520 4th Street and Bryant. We’ll be picking out just a few club-goers who represent the feel of the night and photographing them. With a dose of introspection as we kick it olde skool with some folks who have earned their stripes (or big boots as the case may be.)
Forrest Black and I are going to be on Night Calls for our third or fourth appearance Friday, April 25, 2008. The show runs from 4pm to 7pm and is broadcast live, so you can phone in and ask impertinent (sexy) questions if you dial toll free 1-877-205-9796.
Our hosts for the day are going to be Christy Canyon and Vanessa Blue. This will be my first time meeting Vanessa Blue, but last time adult legend Christy Canyon gave me some interesting insights. Among other things, we were chatting about what it was like being . . . unusual in the Washington, DC area. At the time Blue Blood was founded, a person (okay, one of my unsavory pals generally) could be thrown out of Springfield Mall for having a nose ring. Christy Canyon told me that it was much more progressive in Los Angeles and somewhat surprising to Angelenos that being able to express yourself even by wearing a painted leather jacket is definitely not always easy elsewhere. And that went double in the early 90’s.
Forrest Black and I are in the second guest time slot and will be going on around 5pm. Forrest Black and I will be chatting with Christy Canyon and Vanessa Blue about BlueBlood.com in general, about our photography in specific, and, if experience is something to go on, we will definitely be talking about sex. Our friend Darklady from Portland will, through an odd bit of synchronicity, be on in the 4pm slot, and it is a good show, so I recommend tuning in from the start. Darklady will be promoting her upcoming Masturbate-a-thon (yes, you read that correctly) and I bet I have a lot more to tell everyone about it after tomorrow, so watch this space for more on that.
Darklady was just in town and she and Forrest Black and rainmaker Brian Gross and I went to eat sushi and talk about life, the universe, and everything. Humorously, although I have known Brian via snail mail, telephone, and email for around fifteen years, and he now lives in the Valley maybe half an hour to forty minutes north of me in Hollywood, it took a mutual pal from out of town to get us together in person.
Years ago, when Kevin Smith and I were both guests at DragonCon, he and I had a brief conversation about porn. Now that his Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie hits theaters this Halloween, I wish I remembered any of the details of it. As I recall, Senior Blue Blood writer Will Judy was there, but I don’t think it wise to interrupt his regularly scheduled obsessive Sunday puttering to check if anything important was said.
So Kevin Smith will indubitably get some bonus viral marketing from doing his Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie, but he will also indubitably run into some of the same distro and advertising difficulties that anyone with a sexually-oriented product is going to run into. Zack and Miri Make a Porno, however, is advertised on the sides of buses, but I have not seen one single solitary advert for it on an actual adult site where the ad would have had to have content besides whining that they couldn’t show their titillating content there. Whining about titillation is pretty much the ad campaign for Kevin Smith’s new flick. Now obviously Kevin Smith is about a gajillion times more talented and cool than that knob who the MPAA spanked for putting the nicely lit torture porn on the Captivity billboards a while back. But I could get really sick of people who think they are “mainstream”, whatever the eff they think mainstream is, who whine that they can’t put porn on billboards. Obviously, I think it is just fine that media is created which features human sexuality. I even prefer it when people make quality media about such topics.
