I live in Los Angeles, so it is probably no surprise that a lot of people I know are making resolutions to either become stars or achieve bigger stardom.
It doesn’t seem like it is much fun to be famous in 2008 though. Entertainment Weekly’s entire year in review issue was all about how much it sucks to have the eyes of the world on you. When I recently went to my OB/GYN, I was reading either Esquire or GQ in his waiting room and there was an interview with Michael J. Fox. The interviewer asked him what his thoughts were on like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or maybe all three. Michael J. Fox was a young Hollywood star in the 80’s, but he still has a pretty squeaky clean rep. Perhaps because he played a wholesome character on TV for a while. At any rate, his response was that he was soooooooooooooo glad the whole tabloid and paparazzi thing did not exist when he was young because it was his opinion that he did a lot of the same dumb things and they just were not recorded for posterity.
When I was a teenager, I lived overseas, mostly in countries where (a) it was legal for me to drink and (b) I had diplomatic immunity so what was legal was not that much of a factor. I am pretty certain that I would cringe at photos and video taken in many of the situations I got myself into. But there aren’t any. Actually, I wish there were more photos of me growing up. But the point is that I could be young and experimental and even a little wild, without it going down on my permanent record.
It feels weird to type, but I suppose I used to be at least a local celebrity within certain geographies and certain scenes. My personality was generally turned up to eleven. I thought shirt was spelled L-I-N-G-E-R-I-E. My writing was getting published all over. And no one had ever seen anything quite like Blue Blood Magazine at the time. I signed a lot of autographs in the 90’s. Maybe I still am some variety of celeb, but I hope not. I want a private life. I want to get to occasionally say something stupid without being haunted by it forever and ever. I want the freedom to be imperfect and the ability to be personal one-on-one. I will never tell a friend to read my LiveJournal or most recent press release or magazine interview to find out what I’ve been up to.
I know I have the juice to make other people pretty famous is certain circles, but it doesn’t really seem like something I want to do as often as I once did. Most people think they crave the attention, but they can’t handle it at all. They simultaneously get addicted to being on magazine covers and completely melt down that they can no long just move to the next town and be totally invisible. And then, of course, they illogically lash out at everyone around them.
Situation gets rough
Then I start to panic
It’s not enough
It’s just a habit
Hey kid you’re sick
Darling this is it
You can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back I can see them stare
They’ll hurt me bad but I won’t mind
They’ll hurt me bad they do it all the time
Yeah yeah, they do it all the time
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record
2007 was officially the last year anyone should have even halfway contemplated wanting to be famous for the sake of being famous. I predict that reality TV will grow in 2008, not just because of the WGA strike or economics, but because most people can only handle any modicum of fame for so long. I think a thirteen week reality show is about the right length of time to be in the public eye before snapping, driving your car into someone who could help you, shaving your head (or letting your hair grow in, depending), or passing out on a Hollywood sidewalk.
Three very deviant ladies whose work I know well just perked up my holiday season like a handful of little blue pills and a mason jar of Alabama moonshine.
This may come as a shock to those who don’t know me, but the holiday season and I are not exactly sympatico. (Those who know me, however, are rolling their eyes: “We know, we know!”) I’m not sure at what point during my misspent childhood I turned into a Grinch, but knowing me it probably involved finding out that the Thompson submachinegun I’d just received under the tree wouldn’t, you know, kill anyone or anything. In fact, the damn thing was made of plastic.
Since then, I’ve developed less and less of a taste for the holidays every year, especially after working in the sex toy business where budgets lived and died based on the number of Class V Mister Fuck Double Dongs you move before December 24. I understand it’s the same with plasma televisions. The advertising blitz designed to make you cough up your hard-earned for that new sweater, or in recent years The Next New Shiny Thing, used to begin the day after Thanksgiving; then it was some nebulous date in early November; nowadays, the pumpkins are shredded in storefronts across the nation in the desperate race to get the damned Christmas trees up. “Bankrupt yourself,” the ads seem to say, “Or your Wife/ Husband/ Girlfriend/ Boyfriend/ Kids/ Dog/ Gynecologist won’t like you any more.” It’s Guilt Trips for Jesus, and I’m havin’ none of it.
The only thing that gets me through the holidays is all the Christmas themed smut that’s out there. I will admit, I am a sucker for the irreverent trope-orgy satisfaction of a themed photo shoot or dirty story, and three Blue Blood hotties just got to the heart of holiday happiness, with a dose of nasty Santa Claus and a succulent suck on a candy cane that’s been somewhere your pastor wouldn’t approve of.
First there’s lovely April Flores; now there’s someone whose spunky style is begging for the Blue Blood treatment. Curvy & gorgeous, April is the muse of photographer and videographer Carlos Batts; she is the main subject, in fact, of two of his erotic DVDs, Alter Ego and Voluptuous Life both of which which showcase her pouting, preening, dressing up, dressing down, having decidedly deviant fun with various people and generally looking amazingly hot. An extended cut of Voluptuous Life is out from Adam & Eve’s DVD sublabel Bad Seed — Carlos’s first major DVD distribution. I just got the disc today, in fact. I’m betting it’s even dirtier than the awesome indie-underground version.
In this Amelia G & Forrest Black shoot, April is dressed up like a candy cane and every bit as scrumptious. Bright red hair, silver gloves, red stockings and candystriped dress are enough to keep Santa happy (and off my roof!), but what every girl wants for Christmas is a pair of silver heels like these. Things get more interesting when April shows just how skillfully she can lick a candy cane, and let’s just say the dress, nice as it is, doesn’t last long and neither does the candy cane’s innocence.
Matching April’s candy cane and raising her Saint Nicki and a pervy lesbo elf are Michelle Aston and Aiden Starr. I had the pleasure of meeting Aiden Starr at the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last year, and since then I’ve made strange howling noises every time I think about her. Petite but naturally curvy, she’s an intoxicating mixture of sugar and spice, the sugar being honey the color of her shimmering blonde hair, and the spice being deadly nightshade with a hemlock chaser — just to my taste. If you don’t believe me, look at the wicked glint in her eyes: she loves to hurt people, you know it. Or maybe I know it, because she told me, and I’m fairly confident she was not blowing smoke up my ass given her sadistic bent showcased in about half a dozen BDSM flicks I’ve seen.
Who better than Aiden, then, to frolic as a green lipped corseted elf to Michelle Aston’s stiletto-heeled Santa? The answer is none, none more better. In these shots (also by Amelia & Forrest), things go from playful to PLAYFUL if you know what I mean, and if two dirty girls are having fun then it’s these two.
I love two particular things about this shoot. First, Aiden’s corset is not some schmantzy leather but what looks from this angle like down-to-business cream-colored number like what your tweaked-out gramma wore when she smoked reefer with Mitchum and did him and all his friends back in the ’50s. That, or it’s medical grade support fabric, which I don’t even want to think about — it gives me goosebumps. Anyway, I also love that Michelle has been practicing in the mirror, I think, between playing scenes from Sid & Nancy on repeat — she’s got her sneer down pat. If she didn’t chase each erotically derisive lip curl with the that slutty little thing she does with her tongue, I might think she didn’t like me.
You are never going to see two hotter women getting it on in holiday costumes, I guarantee it. After some luscious shots detailing these two beauties’ very special attributes, they get delightfully busy, and strategic portions of both Santa’s and elf-girl’s wardrobe go bye-bye along with my holiday gloom, and probably yours too if you’ve got any taste in the ladies.
I have a new guru. I just watched the Katt WilliamsPimp Chronicles Pt. 1 on HBO. Well, specifically on my TiVo of an earlier HBO broadcast. Anyway, I have this impediment to increasing my personal success as briskly as my work ethic should guarantee. Specifically, every time my accomplishments start coming really fast and furious, in a way which is visible to others, the haters come out. I would like to claim I am immune to haters and their low end bottom-feeder tactics, but I’m not.
I do what I do from a place of love. It sounds corny, I know. But, as I’ve said many times in the past, the initial print issues of Blue Blood were in many ways a love letter to the scene I had become a part of. The DC scene of the early 90’s was this vibrant nexus of punk, fandom, and cyber cultures. In that part of the world, we were less concerned with the genre-quibbling of bigger entertainment business cities. Goth-industrial music was identified as sort of a subset of punk there. Knowing who both Gary Gygax and Wendy O. Williams were was a plus.
The city produced both Chemlab and Fifth Column, and Fugazi and Dischord, and Henry Rollins and 21361 Publishing. Although I was born in London and have lived on three continents, in half a dozen countries, and a whole bunch of states, in many ways DC is the city which most created me as an artist and, as an extension of that, created Blue Blood. I knew all these incredible, artistic, fabulously creative people who just needed a venue to showcase their brilliance. And I was determined to give them that platform. When I first arrived in the DC scene, I had the most intense sense of having come home to where I had always truly belonged. From my heart, Blue Blood was a sort of love letter to a world which had welcomed me and made me feel whole and right at a time when my education and expectations had left me feeling adrift.
Well, it turns out that being able to decorate one leather jacket with paint and rivets and being able to tell one great fantasy of an alternate life to a fuckable chick does not equal wanting an actual platform for success or recognition of any kind. I found that quite a number of my amazing and talented compatriots wanted to be able to fantasize about how cool it would be if they started a band, wrote a novel, opened a dungeon, ran a nightclub, got a short story published, deejayed a big party, designed clothing, became an international sex symbol, etc. Although I will engage in conversations about wouldn’t it be cool if, I have a tendency to then go forth into the world to make it so. I think I’m wired that way naturally and my upbringing only hammered that into me more. I was both shocked and deeply hurt when I found that a lot of the DC scenesters I counted as friends were angry at someone giving them a chance. They wanted to be able to get credit for their brilliance without having to actually come through with, ya know, work. It had never occurred to me that there were people who did not want opportunity to come knocking.
So I ended up in this odd circumstance where I was getting kind words for my work on Blue Blood from people who were huge heroes of mine. Only parts of my primary support structure were just really kind of pissy. HBO would come to my house to do a special, but I couldn’t get some of my supposed closest friends to stop by. William Gibson would tell me I was “courageous” and John Shirley would buy me coffee and DC scenesters who had built whole events based on Gibson and Shirley’s writing would make my participation a pain for me. I didn’t know the word “hater” then, but it sure would have helped if I had.
Even today, I find I have to remind myself really strenuously to keep moving forward when the haters come out. I now plan to watch Katt Williams, my new guru, whenever I start feeling like maybe I should slow down a bit because everybody loves people who do less. So, if you are a hater, I am going to try to let you do your job (hating) and I’m going to do mine. You are now cordially invited to sit there and say my hair ain’t luxurious, when you know that it is, bitch.
For everyone searching for one of the most spectacular Halloween events Southern California has to offer, we’ve always had a great time at HEX Hollywood, and this year is even bigger than ever. Blue Blood is proud to once again sponsor this epic Halloween holiday party and we will be in attendance, shooting more beautiful pictures and generally having a blast.
This year, Hex Halloween is taking over the spacious historic Avalon theater, located directly across the street from the world famous Capitol Records building. This theater was the first venue on the West Coast ever played by The Beatles back in 1964 and is even rumored to be haunted by quite a collection of interesting ghosts and spirits, so I know a spooky good time is in store for us. There has even been one regularly spotted on the balcony where Amelia G and I will be taking pictures.
The list of performers, activities, and attractions brought together by promoter Xian and her dedicated staff is truly impressive. There will be five DJ’s accross several dance floors, a full program of individual talented performers including Zombie Girl, Inure, the debut of Hex/Rx, Monastic, and even a full Butoh-a-Go-Go show by the Corpus Delecti Butoh Performance Lab. I’m also personally looking forward to seeing the collaborative performance Aesthetic Meat Front (AMF) and Constructs of Ritual Evolution (CoRE), all of whom have been our friends for a long time and always put on unforgettable shows.
Upstairs, in the Avalon’s Spider Club, there will be magicians, contortionists, hypnotic hoop twirling performances, and much more, all to the sounds of Gothic Darkwave Synthpop from some of the best spooky DJ’s the West has to offer. And, it wouldn’t be Halloween without a cash costume contest. Scariest, sexiest, and most creative creations go home with hundreds of dollars in their pocket.
Blue Blood will of course be hanging out with all of our degenerate pervy friends Masters of Fetish and Bondage Arts in the Theatre Masoch, located on the haunted balcony. Come surround yourself with erotic demonstrations and spectacle from the likes of Michael Manning and Dee Manning, sub Ann, with exciting visuals from Avi and Master Aryn, plus performances by a litany of wicked Mistresses and Masters. The trick for me is to not go home with a ton of the sexy furniture being provided for the event by Sonny Black Dungeon Furniture. I really love their sexy stuff! You are encouraged to come watch and/or participate, so I’m sure we’ll all be having a really good time up there.
There is tons more going on, I haven’t listed the half of it here. You can check on all the event details at the Hex Hollywood website. Come party with us, and don’t be shy. We love getting to meet all our online friends in person.
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 with our longtime pals at RTB and photographing them for posterity. Right now, we’re posting the photos Forrest Black and I shot at the Release the Bats Deathrock Prom to give you all an idea of how spectacular it is going to be. If you are anywhere in Southern California, I recommend you come on out to Release the Bats at Que Sera in Long Beach this Friday. We’ll be shooting a few of the most over-the-top deathrockers there and there will be a whole lot of drinking and rejoicing, if you are into dressing up or drinking or celebrating. Dress to be caught dead!
“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 doing on a profoundly spiritual level. My Mother was a model and an artist and is one of the most beautiful loving people the world could ever know. So, I kind of grew up with radicals, revolutionaries, and rock stars. We were very close friends with the Grateful Dead and one of my earliest memories was going to the Oakland Cow Palace with several busses chartered by the Hells Angels to go see the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I went to kindergarten with a Free Sonny Barger shirt on.
Growing up surrounded by all that clearly instilled a certain libertine perspective and appreciation for counterculture philosophy, art, and politics that is so deeply ingrained in me, I can’t imagine who I would be without it. Blue Blood was never really a career choice for me, it’s deeper than that. So, some of the trends in adult industry to use some of the labels and terminology of current counterculture in their bid for a certain cool credibility or whatever can occasionally get under my skin, but I am aware that it’s not something that needs to be taken too seriously.
Eros Zine: BB’s tagline is “the trade mag of cool,” and you’re known for having a lot of fans and supporters in the music industry, especially where you might most expect ‘em — goth, metal, industrial, etc. Back in the print days, the most radical thing about BB was that it totally blended the cultures of rock ‘n’ roll, horror/sci-fi/fantasy/noir, BDSM, and porn. It was kind of a great big orgy of all the things you and your friends were into. Now that BB’s long since made the move (like just about everyone else) onto the web, how much is that still true? Are you able to incorporate into BB every part of entertainment and culture that you dig, or are there ways in which it’s harder to make that connection now that BB and its associated properties are online?
Forrest Black: Some of the original objective with Blue Blood was to celebrate all the things that were good and beautiful and enjoyable and meaningful from within the context of a counterculture lifestyle. The various scenes we were involved in, or had visibility to, and in many cases grew up with, were full of interesting eclectic creative people, none of whom were textbook examples of one narrow cultural buzzword or another. But there was a certain commonality of experience and perspective, and we felt like we understood it well enough to create a publication that seemed to color outside the lines but made perfect sense to the right kind of people and quickly became a powerful tastemaker across the board.
Casting that wide a net, collecting up the coolest gems from the worlds of music, literature, street fashion, gaming, art, and pop culture, with an eye to expressing what was good and sharing what was quality with our audience has always been an immense undertaking. In some ways the internet has helped and in some ways it’s been a bit of a challenge. I love being able to run as many pictures as I like from a great photo shoot, no longer being limited by page count and format constraints. I can even post video to compliment the layout as well. But, on the entertainment writing side, it’s possible to become so micro-niche specific these days that it becomes very difficult to know sort of what level to stay at. For example, what once was an entertaining little 150 word bit on a certain industrial fetish esthetic now has seven to ten active blogs and communities dedicated to just that.
To deal with transitioning to the sort of unlimited depth of the internet format, Blue Blood has kind of gone two directions online. On the one hand, like you mentioned, we have a lot of sites, each of which has it’s own more specific focus. While on the other hand, the central sites, like BlueBlood.net are in many ways more focused on sharing the essential unifying ideas of our counterculture as well as building a community of mature diversely opinionated free thinkers.
Eros Zine: How did you get involved with Blue Blood the print magazine? How early in the life of the mag was it? Were you involved with its predecessor BLT? . . .
You all will just have to pop over to Eros Zine to read the whole thing. It is a really extensive and interesting interview. It takes a talent like Thomas Roche’s to get Forrest Black really talking, but he has a lot of interesting things to say. There is also a photo gallery of some of Forrest Black’s and my photography. Be sure to click on the header graphic when you get to Eros Zine, in order to see the whole thing. Blue Blood hotties featured in the sexy spread include, in alphabetical order, Dana DeArmond, Darenzia, Eva Klench, Jax, Justine Joli, Kellie LaPlegua, Michelle Aston, Miso, Miss Conduct, Nikki Vega, Roxy Contin, Sara X, Scar 13, Stephanie Slaughter, Sun Karma, Superna, Verotika, Vima, and Voltaire. Please check it all out. Thanks so much for the support, Eros Zine and Thomas!
I was super psyched to see notable writer Gram Ponante join the Blue Blood forums this week. His writing cracks me up. I was also super psyched by his recent press mention of Blue Blood where, among other things, he said:
“Part of the 1300th photoset hosted on pioneering punk erotica site Blue Blood.com, the photos of Sara X remind me that I really need to watch my diet.“
Gram made the interesting point that he feels labels have to constantly be defined and re-defined because of the human “tendency to aggressively misunderstand.” This was primarily apropos of whether or not I could talk about feminist issues which matter to me and not have my existence become unmitigated hell.
But Gram has, for quite some time now, been promoting the notion that the annoying altporn terminology should be changed to steveporn because steveporn is a term which comes without the baggage. Now, it is my impression that some of the support for the steveporn terminology comes from the same divisive, art-destroying, and scene-damaging camp which coined the altporn terminology in the first place, and that the main point of using the term steveporn is in the hopes of mollifying famous director and writer David Aaron Clark. DAC’s objection to altporn is complex. I should probably have him explain it here some time, but perhaps his view can be summed up as generally feeling that, as an adult video genre, it is neither an alternative to anything, nor particularly quality pornography, nor generally being produced by the best that industry has to offer.
I’ve known David Aaron Clark for many years and I adore him and I respect his opinions. I agree with him on many things and enjoy debating the topics on which we do not agree. And I feel qualified to say that dressing up the same problem with a new name is not going to fool DAC.
Nonetheless, I am entertained by Gram’s blog and his suggestion that perhaps altaltporn could be termed steveporn. Sadly, a rose by any other name and all that.
In recent years, I realize I have shied away from talking about certain topics such as feminism or sexuality or even actual products. This is kind of odd as these were certainly pretty cornerstone issues which were, not only covered in Blue Blood in the past, but were instrumental in why I wanted to do it in the first place.
I feel like feminism on the net, particularly when associated with the site genre dubiously dubbed altporn, is pretty much a mockery. The language has been so co-opted by people who don’t mean it, or even understand it, that the whole thing pretty much makes me sick. It definitely makes me want to disassociate myself from the whole thing, but do I really want to change my life and who I am because someone fake pretended to be like me? Probably not such a good idea.
One of the difficulties involved with feminist politics in 2007 is that it seems to be in vogue to attack people on a personal level, rather than to debate the issues. I see that most people deal with personal attacks by either defending their personal lives or correcting misimpressions about their personal lives. I think that people should pay attention to and debate the actual point and not deconstruct details which are merely specific to the person bringing a broader feminist or other issue up.
I think any artist has to give of themselves, to a certain extent, in order to create. But the global communication networks we live with today make it so difficult to maintain the slightest shred of privacy. Reality show programming and tabloid journalism put into the zeitgeist the notion that the world is entitled to know really personal things about anyone remotely famous. This makes me want to, not only avoid being famous, but move to a farm in Montana. The main thing which prevents me from doing this is the knowledge that it is terribly cliche for a Los Angeles person to buy a spread to get away from it all. That and the simple fact that pretty much no place today is really remote enough to truly get away from it all.
But it is difficult to talk about sex in this type of media climate while maintaining one’s personal privacy and avoiding becoming a public figure. But sharing any private moments in this world is like entering into a BDSM relationship with a room full of strangers who don’t believe in safewords. Sometimes, I believe a person should be entitled to say, hey, this is just for me and not the public. I believe in a fundamental right to privacy.
Lastly, various marketers have disseminated the notion that, if anyone you’ve heard of either endorses or slags a product, then they must be corrupt and inaccurate. These are marketers who of course utilize something called WOM or word of mouth marketing. Just one example of what this often boils down to is a solitary lonely dude posting two hundred reviews on Amazon, with sixty different usernames, of a dozen books, not one of which he read. But, if someone with an actual journalistic pedigree gives an opinion, it is often dismissed as envy because they also wrote a book or some such nonsense. Note to the world: known journalists really do tend to have more valuable opinions than anonymous posters. For real.
I could probably have written three long treatises in place of this article. My primary point here is that feminism, sexuality, and pop culture products news and reviews used to be the main things I wrote about. The current media environment is one where the producers have become cynical and manipulative and the audience has become jaded and betrayed. It is difficult to express true and heartfelt opinions, knowing that marketers may be rushing to either pirate or discredit what is said and readers may be looking for spin in all the wrong places.
So, if I sounded like a feminist, would you hold it against me? If I talked about sex and sexuality, would you feel compelled to pry beyond my comfort zone? If I reviewed products I like, would you assume it was just for the advertising dollars? If I reviewed products I don’t like, would you believe that I was just envious?
I used to be above it. Now I’m down in it. But I don’t really want to lose my voice.
Maybe I should post it here whenever Blue Blood gets a press mention, but I usually don’t. You all were great when I was feeling sad about one mean press bite, so I also wanted to share that I’ve been really happy about a mention we got on Dark Side of the Net recently.
Anyway, Carrie Carolin, the seemingly indefatigable editor of all things dark recently culled and updated her Dark, Goth and Horror Zines section and here is what she wrote about Blue Blood:
“BlueBlood.net – Highly recommended! The paper magazine is legendary, and its amazing companion website is worth visiting every day or two for new content. High quality articles and photos on fashion, music, and literature. Blogs, community postings, and a newswire, too. This is pretty much the center of the goth universe as it stands today. Extremely professional and high quality. Their MySpace page is here.”
I’m not sure precisely how long editor Carrie Carolin has been collating the best dark links on the web, but it feels like three reincarnations at least. I just checked and when I wrote her site up for Playboy in 1999, I referred to it as “Carrie Carolin’s respected and long-running Dark Side of the Net,” so it was already the gold-standard then and the site was hosted on Gothic.net before that and I think somewhere else before that, maybe a couple somewhere elses. So it is lovely to get positive coverage like that and that much more meaningful coming from such an esteemed source.
So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.
If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.
Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:
Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path? Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”
Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.
I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.
