Last month, Blue Blood made a submissions site live for models and photographers and writer/photographers to submit to various Blue Blood projects, mostly BlueBlood.com and, to a lesser extent, BlueBlood.net. Blue Blood enjoys publishing a variety of body types, both male and female and in between. The most important thing for modeling for Blue Blood is that someone have that certain something, star quality, individuality, passion of personal expression to put in front of the lens. The original Blue Blood magazine in print featured exclusively interactive pictorials of people who were lovers in real life, who would be doing what they were doing, whether or not a camera was present. Non-feature photos in Blue Blood in print were generally related to specific entertainment news or how-to articles.

BlueBlood.com features pin-up and interactive erotica photo sets where all the images in a particular gallery will be of a person or couple, in one setting, in a series, which generally tells some sort of story. BlueBlood.net, of course, features articles and galleries about cool events, genre movies, goth-industrial music, punk nightclubs, interesting clothes, and similar fun stuff i.e. BlueBlood.net publishes photo galleries which are about a particular topic of interest. You would think that more photographers would shoot entertainment news, fashion, and music work than shoot nudes, but apparently that is not really the case. I’ve found that the most common question I get from interested photographers is what the galleries on BlueBlood.net should be about. Somehow, once the naked aspect is removed, many of them don’t know what the photos are about, other than that there is a photographer who happens to take pictures. I am baffled that there are people who consider themselves Photographers with a capital P and have no idea what their work is supposed to be saying.

I entirely understand, however, why many models are confused by the submission process and gunshy about asking questions. Running a site can be stressful and there are never enough hours in the day, but I’m genuinely kinda weirded out by how many site operators or model coordinators hate to answer questions from models. I’m always happy to answer anyone I might work with’s questions beforehand. It makes me ballistic when people try to go back on their word, once they have made an agreement, but, to me, that just means everything should be entirely clear from the beginning. The most common question I get from interested models, once they have read the Blue Blood Photo FAQ is almost the opposite of the most popular photographer question. Models are puzzled by the whole nudity vs. clothes thing. Some models don’t seem to get that they have to keep their clothing on for BlueBlood.net editorial. By the same token, any model who has even considered modeling for a membership site besides BlueBlood.com wants to double-check precisely what she must do on camera and what she must not do. This is because of the way these models have been pressured to do either less (nice girls only do conservative nudes) or more (all the cool girls give strangers blowjobs) by sites they have considered working with. I really don’t get the thing where some sites feel like everyone has to be fully nude but nobody is allowed to (heavens to Betsy!) insert anything or where some sites have the attitude that anyone who hasn’t fucked everyone else on it shouldn’t be allowed in the clubhouse. It really bothers me that there are models who go along with this conformity BS and peer pressure other models to only do exactly what they have decided is okay for them personally, no matter whether other models personally prefer to be more conservative or more extreme. These are not decisions which should be made via groupthink.

If everybody on BlueBlood.com was doing the exact same level of nudity or naughtiness, with the exact same amount of explicitness or lack thereof in presentation, that would be as antithetical to the point of Blue Blood as if everybody looked exactly the same. (You are not required to have tattoos either; they are optional and only a plus if you got them for a meaningful reason or they are quality ink or ideally both.) Of course, all publications have to have some sort of structure, a certain promise to the reader of what they will find inside. However, any pay site with a bunch of chicks who look the same and apparently all want to get the exact same amount naked is just pandering to a fetish and it is not punk and it is not about freedom.

Many of Blue Blood’s photographers and writers and models, and certainly your truly, have fetishes too and naturally they are more likely to be represented in the variety of BlueBlood.com content than kinks various creative team members are less into, but Blue Blood doesn’t have all the hang-ups so many of the sites seem to about nudity. The whole point is that it is about individual expressions of sexuality and sensuality. Individuality is key. If all a photograph does is hit a format, that is not art, just commerce. If a photo utterly fails to hit any format, that is not art either, just wanking. For photography to be art, it must both express something and communicate something.

The $1 BlueBlood.com sale is going to be coming to a close in just a few days.

With the inauguration of Barack Obama and the new administration, the world expects the economy to pick up. He could do nothing different and people’s expectations would help the economy. So much of how paper and digital money works has to do with trust and faith.

So we have faith that, pretty soon, everyone is going to be able to afford more than $1 for a BlueBlood VIP membership. There has never been a Blue Blood sale this discounted before, and there very likely never will be again, and this one is almost over.

The site currently featuring tens of thousands of photographs of 387 hotties and counting. From punks who like to smash things to ethereal gothic beauties to fetish deities, Blue Blood features the most stunningly and uniquely beautiful. A battalion of coffee table book and nightclub photographers have contributed to BlueBlood.com. Not to mention erotic fiction from some of the top names in genre writing and just a dab of video. The BlueBlood.com megasite offers excellent value with all the content from the multigirl gothic, punk, and rubber subsidiary sites produced by Blue Blood, as well as the world famous signature couples content, and the erotic fandom science fiction and fantasy content. And your BlueBlood VIP memberships pay to keep BlueBlood.net free.

And right now, you can check all that out for one dollar. Channel your inner Bixby Snyder and say, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” (Robocop references optional.)

If you want exposure for yourself or your projects or you are seeking expertise, then it matters how busy or influential a web property is. There are many third party tools to assist internet professionals in ascertaining a site’s true size, beyond its hype. As a site surfer, most people respond to how interesting the site is to them personally, taking into account aspects such as ease of use, subject matter, quality, wit, visual appeal, production values, and just how generally entertaining or informative a site strikes them as being. For getting the word out there and for believing what you read, it is important to consider the source, not just for agenda, but for overall accuracy and reach. The bigger a site’s audience, the more I feel it has a responsibility to present quality journalism.

When I hear a new idea, I like to familiarize myself with the source, so I can assess the extent to which I should integrate that new idea into my own worldview. Every time I’ve been a guest speaker at the SXSW festival, I’ve also attended a ton of other speakers’ interactive media panels because I love learning and part of the point of professional conventions is to become even more expert in one’s field. SXSW is fun for me, not only because a lot of friends of mine are there, but because it has exposed me to a lot of interesting new ideas and people.

When there was a panelist speaking or site mentioned I was unfamiliar with, I felt the itch of a phantom limb, wanting to check out the stats on sites he or she was presenting as examples. When I work online normally, I have an array of professional tools at my fingertips to research a source and assess how popular and influential a particular site is. A lot of people do SXSW with laptops or extremely web-enabled cell phones (I just have a regular Blackberry I am not a power-user of.) and look stuff up online constantly and this is probably one of the reasons why.

Now none of the dozens of tools for checking how popular a site is are perfect. Each one is helpful to a point and they tend to each weigh different factors. While none should be taken as gospel, utilizing multiple benchmarks tends to give an excellent ballpark metric for size of audience. Realistically, even if you had a login to a particular site’s stats, you still only get a ballpark idea because different log analyzers parse unique visits, raw visits, types of data viewed, and referrals differently. Back in 2006, Beeker the StatsNrrd, over at AltPorn.net started doing an Altporn ‘A’ List Alexa Rankings chart. Over time, as some sites went under and some were added to the chart, that list grew to twenty-some-odd sites. It is not precisely the list I would select in a Sesame Street game of “Which one of these things is not like the others?”, but it is a pretty good resource for comprehensive accurate measures of sites within the altporn genre. Sometimes I wish APN would count all of Blue Blood’s sites aggregated together because I feel that would better demonstrate Blue Blood’s market position, but the way APN does it is certainly reasonable. I wish a site like BrokenDollz were higher up in the rankings because I like chatting with webmaster Judas, but the numbers just are what they are.

As a longtime reader of the Fleshbot sex blog, I know that, like me, Fleshbot is familiar with the AltPorn.net list because they have referenced it. So I was surprised when new Fleshbot editor, and former That Strange Girl webmaster, Lux Alptraum picked up the most bizarre toplist of altporn sites by someone named Sean Adamz whose site ranks . . . well, the numbers just are what they are and the site Fleshbot pulled the list from ranks low. Honestly, I was surprised that anyone at Fleshbot would use such a poor source, but I was shocked that Lux Alptraum would. Although I understand Lux Alptraum’s major at Columbia was urban studies, Columbia does boast one of the finest journalism schools in the world. So Lux must know better than to source information that way and she either, having recently started a new gig, didn’t realize how seriously people take Fleshbot, thought everyone would read the fine print and just view it as humorous, or, as some disenchanted Fleshbot readers commented on this article, maybe she was having an off day. Perhaps she was busy packing for her trip to Vegas and just had a word count she had to meet; Fleshbot’s increasing focus on quantity over quality may be reducing . . . quality and accuracy.

The term altporn didn’t come about until 2001, nine years after Blue Blood launched. I believe the expression was coined by SuicideGirls CEO Sean Suhl and some porn video director, who had shot for SG and for Killshot’s EroticBPM, or perhaps an unheralded PR rep of theirs came up with the altporn term. I prefer the term counterculture erotica to altporn because I founded Blue Blood in print in 1992 and I feel the cohesive lifestyle aspect is larger than the sex aspect. (What I like is erotica; what the other guy likes is porn.)

So I hesitate to call anything I do altporn, but, if everything were still on dead trees and a magazine distributor asked me what publications to shelve Blue Blood with, I would be familiar enough with the marketplace to know the answer is to rack Blue Blood with SuicideGirls, EroticBPM, GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and Burning Angel. A funny thing about web browsing vs. bookstore or newsstand browsing is that, although a journalist writing on the topic of altporn should be aware of all these web properties to be credible, many BlueBlood.net readers may have never heard of any of those sites.

I am not classifying these sites necessarily as a recommendation but as simple basic understanding of genre. From an artistic or punk or feminist activism standpoint, I feel Blue Blood is the polar opposite of some of these sites. There are a few sites by individual photographers I might like more and prefer to recommend, but a photographer site is simply a different niche, in the same way a photo book would be shelved in a different part of the bookstore, and, like it or not, this is what the same shelf holds from a marketing standpoint. A Blue Blood print reader would have most likely also been familiar with On Our Backs, Skin Two, O, Tattoo Savage, Taste of Latex, Future Sex, Propaganda, Ghastly, and the various other demographically similar mags, such as boing-boing or Axcess, likely to be shelved next to Blue Blood. The structure of print caused related products to be viewable together.

If there were not enough magazines in a genre, then there was no rackspace for them, so it was desirable not to be the only one. If an adult newsstand or liquor store didn’t really stock alternative press, then Blue Blood got shelved with the Hustler publications, Swank, Club, Penthouse, Playboy, and suchlike. But it sold through best in locations where the other magazines had more in common. Fast forward to the online world and there seems to be a bit of a Highlander mentality where many people who run sites seem to believe there can only be one site of any particular sort. Because of the way web media is structured differently from printed media, it is actually possible for someone who loves one “altporn” site to be utterly unfamiliar with another. Coming from a magazine background myself, I have a decidedly inclusive and non-destructive bias in my approach to the marketplace.

Some of the impetus for this feature article on web traffic rankings in altporn stemmed from what should have been a really minor interaction Forrest Black had on Twitter. Having been involved with Blue Blood from the beginning and actively involved since the third print issue, Forrest Black is familiar with the reasons for being aware of genre. Feel free to call Forrest Black Blue Blood’s CTO or Art Director, but he is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and he sometimes plays on Twitter when he doesn’t feel like working on all that. So, because someone named Sean Adamz had friended Forrest on Twitter, Forrest noticed the initial flawed toplist authored by this Sean guy and immediately pointed out that he had only included one of the Blue Blood sites and had entirely left off GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM. Sean replied that he counted Blue Blood as a network (even though he had only listed the stats for GothicSluts), continued to leave serious players GodsGirls, DeviantNation, and EroticBPM off his list, got surreally aggro, and then messaged Forrest asking for instructions on how to do the stats on aggregating a network. Apparently Forrest had been generous with answering questions from this guy in the past, but I really don’t think someone should put together a purportedly definitive list if they just don’t have the skills or expertise to do so.

Speaking of Twitter, one of the people I first became acquainted with at SXSW is Weblogs entrepreneur Jason Calacanis who has pretty much the most entertaining Twitter on the site. Now I don’t need to see the specific benchmarks to have an idea that any project Jason Calacanis is involved in is probably influential. He is best known for selling the blog network he co-founded to AOL for $30 million. But, lest anyone think that the world of “altporn” is somehow more bitchy or petty than other areas of internet business, some of his recent Tweets regarding quantifying site popularity read:

“techcrunch please stop using Comscores bulls$%^t numbers. Quantcast Quantified numbers speak–everything else is sample based garbage. can people please stop quoting comScore’s b.s. numbers–they are garbage. Quantcast’s quantified program is the only accurate one out there. Alexa, Comscore, and Compete are sample based,gamed & totally inaccurate–do NOT use them please. put Quantcast on your site or zip it! :-) also,why doesn’t google analytics let you publish/certify some of your stats like Quantcast does? that would put an end to comscore nonsense.”

Full disclosure: I do not feel I am biased by Jason Calacanis having plied me (and a lot of people) with beer and pizza. I think all of this would be a lot more fun if everyone got together more often for beer and pizza. Or water and sushi for the carb-conscious. Or just more things which are IRL and friendly or at least professionally cordial. People get all spun out and just plain wrong on the internet 24/7. Then again, I could be at the adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas right now, but I decided that the ROI, on $9,000 worth of beer for the press coverage and affiliate marketing teams and business associates, wasn’t really good enough.

At any rate, the initial Sean Adamz posting nonsense to Twitter would have just been a situation where one expresses an informed opinion, has a 140 character conversation, and/or removes a troublemaker from the Twitter read list and forgets about it, except high traffic website Fleshbot reprinted the flawed list as Your Definitive Guide To The Web’s Top Ten Altporn Sites. The source list was so poorly-researched that it failed, even from a data entry perspective, transposing digits on the SuicideGirls ranking to make SG appear to be a few hundred slots less popular than it is. Now Fleshbot’s Lux Alptraum was quick to point out that she thought this was in no way a definitive list and, unlike the original author of this inaccurate list who had no words or explanation with his chart, Lux, being an actual writer, wrote something about each site and included sample pictures she selected from each one. (One slightly off-topic note on this is that (a) there is no period after the G in my name and (b) although Forrest Black and I did shoot the particular image selected, Blue Blood has published dozens of awesome photographers and I wouldn’t want anyone to think Forrest Black or I were trying to take credit for all photos Blue Blood ever put out, when Blue Blood has published practically a who’s who of such work, including Chad Michael Ward, Kelly Lind, Lori Mann, Christine Kessler, Justice Howard, Gunter Blum, Ashley Fontenot, Jim Hancock, Carlos Batts, Roman Sluka, Richard Kadrey, and many many more.)

I asked the folks who were left out for their thoughts on the matter, as well as the folks at AltPorn.net. APN could not be reached for comment, possibly because they are all getting drunk doing business at the aforementioned adult industry trade shows in Las Vegas this week. Scott Owens aka Killshot of EroticBPM was somewhere between resigned and sanguine, saying:

“It’s no big deal. I see it kinda like how kids these days try to make lists of all time greatest bands but don’t include anything before 1990. Ebpm is just like the classic rock of alt porn”

Chad Grant of DeviantNation hadn’t seen the article yet and thus had perhaps a bit more of a visceral gut reaction, as he initially said some rather unprintable things but expressed a desire to avoid “drama” with the potentially unbalanced. I would generally agree with him, but I had dismissed the original Sean Adamz altporn toplist as not worth a lot of attention and then it got picked up by Fleshbot which, according to web traffic benchmarks mentioned here, appears to have a lot of readers. I’m a big believer in education and sometimes I feel it is important to bring accuracy. DeviantNation’s Chad Grant made the important point that the concept of alternative is going to mean different things to different people, saying:

“i dont really see those other sites even remotely relevant because they’re so late to the party and non existant in terms of an actual site (community, members and content) . . . we all have very different interests though, we’re in a very wide group of “alt porn” but that means different things to everyone . . . DN obviously conveys what we think “alternative” should stand for, but that doesnt mean we are better than anyone else that wants to have their interpretation of it. its a very all encompassing word . . . The author it is attributed too Lux … that’s the old owner of “That Strange Girl” that claimed her alt site never made [it] for every reason under the sun except her or it’s own shortcomings”

In initial response to the Fleshbot piece, annaliese nielsen of GodsGirls had feelings largely similar to my own, telling me:

“i did see the article and i think it was pretty irresponsible of fleshbot to post that piece. i know that godsgirls is still the new kid on the block in the eyes of many long time producers such as yourself and maybe i am being a conspiracy theorist but i felt that that list was nothing but an attempt by sean to make himself look far more relevant than he is and to make us look irrelevant. i saw that the editor wrote that the title was intended as comedy and if that is truly the case i don’t think that was clear at all. as a long time fleshbot reader who often links to their articles i feel a little bit insulted that sean’s piece was published there, to be frank.”

As I actually do have the skills to aggregate traffic data to ballpark a network, I’m going to share the actual rankings with you all here. Keep in mind that these are rankings which are current this week but likely to change if you are reading this article in 2010. The web is always shifting traffic patterns. An “altporn” entity generally consists of a number of component parts, including a members area with photos and sometimes video and sometimes erotic writing. There is also a community, a news section of some sort, a way for models and possibly other contributors to apply, one or more tours, an affiliate program for professional webmasters to use to get paid for linking, and sometimes a merch shop. It is possible for all these components to be on one domain or spread out across many domains. For example, GodsGirls might put their model application on their primary domain, while Blue Blood has it on BlueBloodPhoto.com. Burning Angel might put their community and entertainment news on the same domain with their primary adult content, while Blue Blood splits the non-nude news and community aspects off to BlueBlood.net and keeps the NSFW stuff on other domains. GodsGirls keeps all their video on their primary domain, while BurningAngel breaks it out onto multiple domains. Although Blue Blood and EroticBPM both run solo girl sites distinct from the primary membership areas, I did not include those in the overall stats for Blue Blood or EroticBPM, but I did count the Joanna Angel solo girl site in benchmarking the BurningAngel network because I feel like that is more integral to their branding. Because it would not be possible to isolate just the relevant data, I did not count billing processors such as CCBill or MerchLackey in these stats. I also did not count personal portfolios or sites such as SpookyLinks (produced by Blue Blood) or MakeOutClub (produced by 3Jane) which may have some of the same ownership as what is being benchmarked, but are really distinct web properties.

According to Alexa Reach rankings, the serious players in this currently rank as follows:

1. SuicideGirls .00913%
2. Blue Blood Network .006866%
3. BurningAngel Network .005989%
4. GodsGirls .00203%
5. DeviantNation .00066%
6. EroticBPM Network .00062%

Alexa Reach numbers are an extrapolated percentage of all global web traffic, sampled from a combination of ISP data and toolbar users who have visited a site during an average day. To give you a couple of comparatives, according to Alexa, MySpace gets 5.717% of global internet users in an average day. Google receives 28.092%. Or to put it another way, Lux, who had a certain journalistic responsibility writing for a site with a reach of .0198%, sourced the egregiously misleading list she posted from a site with a reach of .0003%.

Another measure I like to use of a site’s importance is how many other sites link in to it, according to an aggregation of data from most popular search engines. I prefer to combine data from all major SERPS, but Yahoo appears to be in crazy flux today, and I don’t want to drown you all in numbers, so I’m only going to attempt Google which is not currently dancing and counts links the same with or without the www. This ranking is an example of how quickly the web changes. Last time I ran these numbers the Blue Blood network was solidly in the #1 position and by today, January 9, 2009, when I am running these numbers, it has slid down to the #3 slot. Here are the current rankings by this measure for Google:

1. SuicideGirls 2,220
2. BurningAngel Network 713 (Good job, Alex Chechs!)
3. Blue Blood Network 620
4. GodsGirls 406
5. EBPM Network 88
6. DeviantNation 42

Blue Blood’s server stats show no major difference. If anything, traffic is up, but that doesn’t matter because this is just an example of how third parties can benchmark website traffic. Blue Blood could stay exactly the same for number of visitors and links in and another related site could go up and that would change the rankings. That seems obvious to me, but I felt it needed to be spelled out if anyone could attempt to make a definitive list which left off kind of more than half the major players. A more comprehensive list than this is possible and AltPorn.net has done many of them, but this is a list of the top of the field in terms of traffic. I do not feel that anyone else’s success diminishes my own, so feel free to point out if you think there are any serious players I forgot. I want to stress that I am using standard industry tools to measure who the players are and I am not leaving anyone out here.

Aside from truth and accuracy, why is it important how many visitors a web property gets? I know that, whenever someone wants to publish my writing or photography, unless it is a heck of a paycheck, it is more important to me, as an artist, to know that my work will be seen. Even for mainstream models, modeling is very much about exposure, about the joy of being fabulous in front of the right people, about being remembered in great photos. For anyone who cares about either exposure for something they do, or responses from the most basic acknowledgement to of course real fame online or IRL, it really does matter how many people are looking. Sending a book or CD for review to a site with three visitors a month isn’t going to be very helpful to an author or a band, but a positive write-up from a site with three million readers can make a real difference. Modeling for a site with a lot of eyes on it can lead to magazine covers, television appearances, dating rock stars, and various other enjoyable activities, desired by people with mohawks, tattoos, multi-colored hair, and unusual modes of dress. Experience points and paychecks count too, but a well-informed creative person also wants to know who is watching and how many people are watching.

To recap, it is grossly inaccurate to leave certain sites off any definitive list of web properties in the goth, punk, altporn, counterculture erotica or whatever-you-want-to-call-it genre. If such a chart in 2009 does not include most of the Blue Blood network and does not include EroticBPM, GodsGirls, or DeviantNation at all, it is simply a defective chart and one has to wonder about either the expertise or the agenda of whoever created it. Even if calling a defective list definitive in the title is intended to be facetious, it is irresponsible for a high traffic site not to perform due diligence on the facts it presents. It would also behoove anyone attempting to start a site to learn to crunch these sorts of numbers. It would be a plus if those, with no idea how to quantify site data, did not mislead audiences by putting out toplists, before learning how to do so. Numbers are not a matter of opinion.

BlueBlood.com will be finishing up 2008 with a celebratory balloons set of the lovely Voltaire, lensed by yours truly and Forrest Black. Nothing says “party” like balloons on a hot naked tattooed girl. Well, maybe other things say “party” like that, but balloons on a hot naked tattooed girl are still very festive. Blue Blood’s New Years gift to all of you is the opportunity to try a BlueBlood VIP membership for only $1 and, when you sign up, you will be given the option to add a membership to Erotic BPM as well, also for only a dollar.

My best NYE ever did involve a trip to Las Vegas where they blew up a building to celebrate the start of a fresh year. New Years Eve Vegas-style featured fireworks and dynamite and police and drunk people in the street and everything. Perhaps some contemplation was involved as well, but it’s hard to top that, even during subsequent Las Vegas NYEs. Although admittedly I frequently stay in on New Years or spend it with just a few close friends and family members. Ringing in the New Year and celebrating my birthday are primarily my bi-yearly personal performance evaluations. Basically, I like to use those dates as opportunities to reflect on how I am doing at achieving what I’d like to and I usually set goals on the New Year.

This New Years, I recommend avoiding a hangover and curling up with access to both all the BlueBlood VIP sites and ErotiBPM for $1 each. You can always have a champagne brunch tomorrow with what you saved. Just sign up on the BlueBlood.com sale page and check the box for EroticBPM when you enter your info. Never done an intro price this low before and probably never will again. Year long half price memberships are available too, so please resolve to check it all out in 2009.

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.

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.

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 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!

Speaking of Rachel Kramer Bussel, some of you who get various newsletters already know this, but Rachel did a really kickass interview with yours truly for the October 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations. It was a really good interview because Rachel asked really thought-provoking questions.

Oddly enough, you can order a subscription to Variations through Amazon, but you need to hit the newsstand in the next couple of days to get the October 2007 issue with the BlueBlood.com photos and Rachel’s and my brilliant words. Due to the way newsstand distro works, November starts the first week of October. Sort of. Then again, if you end up with the November 2007 issue of Penthouse Variations, then you will have the lovely Justine Joli on the cover and that is always a good thing too. The October edition says “DEEP INSIDE BLUE BLOOD’S CUTTING EDGE GOTH SCENE” on the cover, though, so you should be able to pick it out okay.

Just in case no one picked this up from all the pinstripes and shotgun-themed photo sets on BlueBlood.com or the fact that I roll in a Lincoln Town Car:
Yes, I have a mobster fetish.

Triad Election is actually the second in a series of Hong Kong mobster from action director Johnnie To, but it is the first to be released stateside this month. It has been well-received on the festival circuit, partly for its perceived anti-commercial (or at least anti-big business) message, but the salient points of interest here are gangsters, issues of honor and competition, and lots of gunplay.

Trailer after the Read more » jump below.

Diana Cage and I most recently worked together when she had me and Forrest Black do a Bettie Page-themed shoot of writer/actress Guinevere Turner and Blue Blood hottie Smokin Mary Jane. Guin was a screenwriter on The Notorious Bettie Page, which was about to come out at the time, so Forrest’s and my photographs ran both in Girlfriends Magazine and on the cover of the late lamented On Our Backs. Diana was totally on it through every step of production, making sure everything went just right.

I’m looking forward to chatting with her again. Tonight, she will be interviewing me for her show on Sirius Satellite Radio for her show on Sirius OutQ Channel 109. I am scheduled to go on at 11:13pm Eastern/8:13pm Pacific. If you already get Sirius, then you are set, but you can also sign up for a free three day trial on the Sirius site and listen online.

We will be talking about BlueBlood.net, BlueBlood.com, and Blue Blood magazine in print. And, naturally, that conversation will include us chatting about beautiful imagery, tattoos, looking at women, booking models, and what turns us on.

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Diana Cage
Weekdays 10 pm – 1 am ET
The author of Girl Meets Girl, Box Lunch, and other sex and dating guides, Diana gets down and dirty with talk about relationships, gender politics and all things personal. Diana blasts stereotypes with an irreverent and smart look at GLBT lives and culture.