My mother’s generation had a saying about how you could go anywhere so long as you had a little black dress. I’ve been working on putting this to the test this September. Every year, I tend to feel kinda gothic during the summer and I perk up as soon as it is Fall. I don’t know if this is some sort of Reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder (Disorder is such a judgmental word.) or if I just really like school to be in session, whether or not I am attending it. My birthday is also in August and I tend to use my birthday and New Year’s as times to make adjustments designed to perfect my existence. This Fall, I’ve made a commitment to get out and enjoy what Los Angeles has to offer. So I bought a lot of little black dresses and have been trying new things and enjoying it a lot as it happens. The only weird thing about doing so much which is brand new is that it creates a bit of social anxiety.

The feminist blog/site Say Object referred to me saying,

“One of our favorite feminist thinkers, Amelia G of BlueBlood.net, recently weighed in on the “Captivity” billboard controversy, and some of what she says suprised us (plus, Girl clearly did her research).”

Writer/editor/cupcake fetishist Rachel Kramer Bussel and I were chatting about the Say Object mention and she told me they were having a party.

So Tuesday night, although I knew I was eventually headed to the West Side to help Blue Blood hottie Superna celebrate her birthday, I started all the way on the East Side at The Echoplex in Echo Park. The first event on deck was the The Conversation which was the opening act for Yo Majesty at Lady Party 911. Apparently comedians Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin do a weekly show called (I think) The Pages where they intellectualize tabloid fodder in a humorous fashion. The duo moderated The Conversation for this event where the topic was Punishing the Princesses. Basically the idea was to do a feminist deconstruction of why, as a society, we put people like Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsey Lohan on a pedestal and then knock them off it. The panelists were Tracy McMillan who I kind of think maybe writes for television, but I’m not sure. Then there was Jen Sincero who was apparently booked because she wrote The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks, although Don’t Sleep With Your Drummer is the books of hers I’m familiar with. It would be most accurate I guess to say I’m partly familiar with it, as I was enjoying reading it but was in the middle of it when Blue Blood exhibited at Erotica LA and a couple of members of Jen Sincero’s entourage stopped by my booth and acted so weird that I never got back to reading it. Rounding out the panel was Nina Hartley who, at least for me, I thought needed no introduction. For the event she was billed as Porn Queen Nina Hartley.

Jessi Klein and Jessica Chaffin were good moderators and kept The Conversation flowing. They have a sort of intelligent sex-obsessed vibe that strikes me as sort of Sex and the City, despite the fact that the closest I’ve come to seeing that show is watching a spoof of it on Saturday Night Live. Tracy McMillan says that she thinks masculine energy is all about going out into the world in a hunting sort of way and that feminine energy is about being receptive and gathering things in a powerful way. She says that she thinks Madonna has evolved from seeking masculine power and energy to seeking the feminine side. I think that I am secretly a man. Jen Sincero explained that she wrote her The Straight Girl’s Guide to Sleeping With Chicks because she found herself thirty-five-years-old and in a relationship with a woman for the first time. She said that she interviewed a lot of people for the book and that the people her own age she interviewed were very caught up with issues of sexual identity, but the younger people had more of the attitude of why wouldn’t you just sleep with whoever you feel like. Nina Hartley surprised me by being really awfully cool. I sort of thought I knew who she was in a general way, but she had really interesting insights. She is definitely not just another pornstar with an unconventional relationship and a publicist who claims she is smart. She is very well-spoken and was able to make interesting counterpoints all evening to an audience which was not necessarily porn-familiar or even porn-friendly. At one point, the panelists were talking about some reality show chick who had nude photos of herself posted to the internet and, while deconstructing whether the photos were more simply nude than prurient, someone mentioned that the girl was seventeen. Nina Hartley expressed horror and the other people on stage were like seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, what’s the difference? From a professional performer’s perspective the issue has to do with what is legal and I thought she handled that and other issues really well. The most interesting point she made was when they got to the topic of blowjobs. Apparently, some teen perv researchers recently did some sort of study (yeah, sure, a “study”) of how girls as young as twelve are just handing out the blowjobs these days and boys are not reciprocating. Nina Hartley said that, when she was fifteen, the notion of boys not reciprocating would have been totally uncool, but that she was interested in penises and would have been interested in giving blowjobs. However, she did not know that she could be alone with a boy and have limits on what she would do and she did not feel ready for intercourse.

Now you would think that, having had the site responsible for the event call me a favorite feminist thinker, I would not be experiencing any social anxiety, but that would be inaccurate. I figured I would be just kinda incognito and get to see other people talk. Only my good friend Lange kept hitting me on my cell during the talk because he had gotten to the club for the Superna birthday party an hour early. My cell phone is set so it is really loud when being turned off. It sings an entire song before powering down. I generally only think of how annoying this is at times when it would be even more annoying to play with the cell phone settings. So I just kept hitting mute and texted him where I was. I think the ringing makes the people sitting near me glance over at me and it turns out that one of them is Julia Rubiner with a super different haircut from the last time I saw her at a party at her house. Julia was kind enough to help write some Blue Blood About Us stuff when I was totally hyperventilating and blocked on writing it. I actually would have worked with her a bunch more, only all of her publicist pals were apparently part of the same pact to put a media blackout on Blue Blood projects. Whatever. It was nice to run into her.

Once The Conversation was complete, I got back in my car and drove like a bat out of hell, just long enough to get kind of turned around and lost in Echo Park. Fortunately, my cell phone features the primitive form of GPS where you call your friends and make them MapQuest where the fuck you are. I have nice friends.

I make it over to The Viper Room and meet up with the rest of the Blue Blood posse. The entire downstairs lounge is set for a Superna takeover and she is getting ready to play an all acoustic set with a new drummer. Uber-scenester Casper, of Coyote Shivers band fame, makes me and Forrest Black feel very welcome and we appreciate it. Last time I bought Superna shots, she vomited blood, so I don’t get her any birthday shots, but everyone else does. After her performance, she and Scar spend most of the rest of the night making out.

We hear that Fred Durst is filming a reality show in the upstairs of the club shortly. That seems like the perfect surreal end to the evening, so we all trundle upstairs. Fred Durst is gracious and nice, although I get the sense that, like me, part of him is really into being where he is and part of him is just crawling out of his skin with so many people around, looking and maybe judging. The band on stage for the reality show has a kind of an 80’s hard rock Pat Benetar sort of thing going and I like them, although security requests that I not shoot while they are on stage and I comply because I am considerate like that. When folks are nice to me anyway.

The thing people who are not extremely shy sometimes don’t get about me is that, it is already kind of painful to leave my house. Once I’ve exited the building, it is no more uncomfortable for me to talk to a rockstar than it is to chat with someone I vaguely know. It is all over the agony threshhold in a way and it is all interesting and stimulating in a way, so it is sort of all the same to me. I’m actually most comfortable with total strangers and with people I know very well. People I sort of know make me the most uneasy.

In closing her set, Superna mentions from the stage that people who want to see her naked ass (which must be everyone!) should go to BlueBlood.com. When I go into the bathroom, someone has put a Blue Blood sticker up in one of the stalls. I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to be able to maintain my anxiety level, if the universe is going to be so sweet to me. I hope my art doesn’t suffer.

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.

BlueBlood.com hottie Halcyon’s Cocky Bastard Vision from the Pink Broadcasting Company did two entertaining videos on the 2007 SXSW experience. Halcyon has been going to SXSW basically forever, has MC’ed more of the SXSW Web Awards than he hasn’t, and introduced me to the Interactive portion of the show when we did our “Turning Pink Into Green” panel back in 2005. We got to work and play together again at this year’s event and he is always a pleasure.

In the first interview video, Halcyon says his goal was to ask “a bunch of web visionaries what they loved most about the web.” My favorite answers were from web book author Derek Powazek who enthused about the internet’s ability to connect all different sorts of freaks and of course Forrest Black’s answer about how much he loves the creative exchange where he gets to directly connect with people when he makes media. Stay tuned after the credits for a little fellatio joke with yours truly. Halcyon’s pink microphone was just so darn alluring. He cut the part where I said something smart because (a) it was sorta similar to Forrest’s sentiments and (b) let’s face it, blowjobs are always more interesting than most other things.

After watching Halcyon’s slightly downbeat most recent video about his experience of the SXSW show this year, I feel kinda bad for not being a sketchy and lazy crack addict. In all seriousness, it is sort of odd for any internet professional to go into a high tech environment where a lot of people just take things like venture capital for granted. I would absolutely accept VC if I had a project which (a) would really benefit from it and (b) which I was really sure would benefit the angels investing in it. But one of the other things I love about the internet is the freedom it can offer the individual. I don’t really have to answer to much of anyone and that warms my punk heart. At any rate, both videos are funny and I am absolutely certain that Halcyon is going to do just fine.

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.

This feature was originally published May 18, 2005. With this year’s SXSW looming close, I thought it would be fun to bring it back.
–Amelia G

photography by Forrest Black

Every time I take a trip to some place which is not Manhattan or San Francisco, I start drooling at real estate. Property is at such a premium in Los Angeles that I can’t help it. On my recent jaunt to SXSW, the cab driver who picked me and Forrest Black up at the airport must have known this. He launched into the most amazing dissertation on the socioeconomics of the city of Austin. He told us that 120,000 of the city’s residents are students at any given time. The majority of cab drivers have at least a Bachelors. The city is the live music capitol of the U.S. and perhaps the world. Nightlife is hopping. Booze stops flowing at 2am, but some clubs stay open dry until 4am on weekends. Finding nightclubs which serve coffee should not be difficult. Panhandling is not totally uncommon. High speed wireless access is quite common. There was once a student at UT Austin who dropped out after his frosh year much to his doctor father and stockbroker mother’s dismay, but now he is one of the biggest employers in Austin and his name is Michael Dell, you might have heard of him. Forrest and I might even have gotten some tips on playing Texas Holdem as the cabbie was also a tournament poker player, but alas we arrived at the Hilton. I kicked myself for the rest of the week for not getting that first fascinating and wonderful cab driver’s phone number. Later on we kept getting this chick who must have bribed her way or something into being the main cab driver in front of the Hilton during the big SXSW convention and she was a total scammer who repeatedly claimed not to have change and snarfed an extra $20 from us when she dropped us off at the airport at the end. Regardless, being used to the cablessness of Los Angeles, it was kind of nice to be able to be driven places fairly easily.

The checkin guy at the Hilton was adorable and super friendly and nice and I headed upstairs to sack out. Due to loathsomeness on the part of American Airlines, which I will for the moment spare you all the details of, I sort of missed the first night of SXSW Interactive. It involved a talk about the success of Alien Hominid I think. My bed at the Hilton was tiny but the mattress was oh so very comfy and the sheets felt super nice to the touch. Apparently a prior guest had broken into my mini bar before I checked in. The Hilton folks were amazingly nice and friendly and told me that sometimes this happens with underage guests who they don’t give a bar key.

I ate at a place called The Boiling Pot my first night in town. Not only did they have crawfish which I expected, but they also served blue crabs which I had thought were something one could only get in the Chesapeake Bay area. The waitress was charming and friendly and discussed my beverage tastes with me. I couldn’t get sparkling water, but she recommended the local Shiner Blonde based on my preferences and totally steered me right. Shiner Bock by the same company is apparently more commonly consumed but is a bit darker craft beer.

I ate waffles and steak for breakfast the next day at the Hilton and the hostess was friendly and the waitress was so amazing she almost made me like morning. I kept waking up early and eating breakfast in Austin and then wanting to go back to sleep. Of course, I had panels and seminars and keynote speeches and such to go to most days, so I ended up a little sleep-deprived the whole time. I was not alone in this though. The panel I got up earliest for was the Blogging Software showdown which was totally worth losing a few zzzz for. It always makes me happy when something I enjoy is created by someone who is just as great as I would want them to be. Matthew Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, came across so passionate and brilliant that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy about loving his creation.

The second day Halcyon and Tassy swept into town. They had just participated in a reality show in Jamaica. They basically got to the airport in San Diego, pulled some things out of their bags, threw some clean things in, and headed back to the airport to hit Texas. Despite all this air travel, they looked tanned and lovely and once they arrived, the party got going in earnest.

Apparently famous cyberpunk author and futurist Bruce Sterling used to always give a party at his house during SXSW Interactive. But now he has succumbed to the siren song of Los Angeles. So Wired sponsored him throwing a shindig at an American Legion Hall where he ran around in pajamas demonstrating how a still works. Actually most of the parties were just as educational as the seminars because of the intelligence and curiosity about the world of the people partying. Ben Brown, the self-proclaimed Internet Rockstar, gave a bash at his Home for Wayward Boys which includes a hot tub and which a biker-looking cabbie told us was in a shifty neighborhood. Whatever that means. Looked great to me, although I guess the host did say something about bodies being dumped in the area. Then again, some folks just need killin’. Blogger gave a party and we got groovy baseball caps. Gawker gave a party at a bar which is one of an apparent 211 nightlife locations in Austin which chose to be smoking establishments. What this means is that patrons can smoke in side, but everybody has to be over eighteen years of age. I guess so second-hand smoke won’t stunt their growth or something. This bar didn’t have Shiner Blonde, so I had a Lone Star to keep with the local theme, but it wasn’t totally my thing, so I switched to Amaretto sours. I appreciate Gawker buying me the drinks but kind of wish I hadn’t mixed alcohols.

Halcyon, among other things, is in the process of launching a site called Pinkgasm with Tassy. He says it is going to be “love-infused porn” and I believe him. Jonno D’Addario is the editor of my favorite sex news site Fleshbot. Halcyon and Jonno are collectively two of my favorite people who move in online naughtiness circles. When I told Halcyon, who is a SXSW vet, that I wanted to go to the convention this year, he set me up to speak on a panel called “The Business of Pleasure: Turning Pink Into Green.” For the record, he named it, not me. The convention quite reasonably thought we should have a third person on the panel. Halcyon asked me who I thought would be good and Jonno was the first person I thought of. We both loved the idea of having him speak with us and happily the convention organizer agreed. I was a little bit worried that the panel would be such a lovefest that we wouldn’t be interesting enough for the audience. But we actually got together beforehand and planned and stuff and, although we all like each other, our viewpoints and experiences are not identical, so I think the panel actually went super well.

I’ve spoken in front of a lot of different audiences over the years, but this one was very different. I try to pay careful attention to audience response and see which topics I should spend more time on, according to what they seem most interested in. This was a new experience for me because the audience was so techie that many of them were blogging about the panel while it was going on or talking in IRC about the panel. The conference takes place in a convention center with wireless access in every nook and cranny. I definitely came home thinking that I crave all sorts of new tech toys.

Returning to eating which is my favorite thing to do, the Blue Blood contingent all lunched in Austin with a bunch of cool interesting people at a place with Asian food of some sort called Mekong Somethingorother which was pretty nummy. There were whole shrimps with the tail still on sticking out of my sort of egg roll and the lemonade was delicious. In the middle of the night, the always-open Magnolia Cafe supplied me with a taste of gingerbread pancakes and other folks with all sorts of Tex-Mex breakfast fare. No bottled water though. We ate pizza at a place which played death metal. Loudly. We ate pizza at a bunch of other places nestled in between clubs with different sorts of music emanating. We ate at a place called Jazz which specializes in cajun food and we got to eat beignets made from mix shipped in from Cafe du Monde in New Orleans and fried oysters. It seems like every place in Austin features raw oysters, so I knew they had to have fresh ones, but I like mine cooked thanks and was overjoyed to find such especially excellent fried ones on my last day. Technically, I guess I also had cooked oysters at Finn & Porter, the Hilton’s higher end restaurant, but they had some creative wasabi thing going which would probably be done better where I live, although the service was great and the steak was perfect and, unlike most every other place in Austin, they had some damn sparkling water for me.

It is really easy to get booze and coffee in Austin, but it is kind of difficult to get anything actually thirst-quenching. Juice tends to be high quality when found but not too common and sparkling water is just a fantasy. Austin is right off a river so it is much less dry than Vegas, but I got way more dehydrated there. Forrest opined that perhaps this dearth of hydrating beverages is the reason cowboys look like raisins. I tend to think this must be an accurate observation.

But I could be a pruney mofo with some damn affordable real estate in a great walking neighborhood with friendly if sometimes a little disorganized denizens. Then again, Bruce Sterling is a smart guy and he left Austin for Southern Cali. More research in the field is clearly called for. Now where should I check out next . . .

Blue Blood will be showing some of the counterculture erotica works of Forrest Black and Amelia G at The Black Heart Masque Valentine’s Day event in Los Angeles, Wednesday, February 14th. It looks to be an enchanted evening of the deadly and divine with a macabre fantasy arrangement of red roses, chocolates, sugar kisses, and delicate sin, with DJs Xian and The Baron spinning a decadent blend of gothic, etherial, darkwave, and dark synthpop melodies to hasten your pulse.

There will also be fortune tellers to scry future conquests, a very special dance performance by Hot Hips Bellydance performers Sherri & Medina, cello and harp music with Carol Tatum, of Angels of Venice, fun fire play with Ted Shredd from Vamphear Circus and Sockemonke, as well as the infamous night gallery, showcasing dark artistic creations.

Guests are expected to don their most seductive and exotic BLACK and RED finery for this heart’s filthy lesson. Neovictorian and fairytale costumes or formal evening wear (bowties and top hats) of circian themes are desired. Dark club wear shall be considered the minimum to enter. And masks are thoroughly encouraged.

The The Black Heart Masque Valentine’s Event will be held at The Monte Cristo, located at 3100 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles, CA 90010 (View Map)

For more details you can also see the event website: LaDead.com

When Kevin, from that shadowy organization known as The Brotherhood, asked if Blue Blood wanted to kick in to rent a double decker bus to tote 70 Santas around San Diego, I was definitely down. I already own multiple Santa hats. For some reason, I really really like Santa hats. My only difficulty was in getting some street legal (yet still slutty) lingerie for the occasion, but I prevailed. Forrest Black actually found the most awesome blue Santa outfit. He was like a cross between Santa and Cookie Monster! Superna managed to put pigtails through holes in her hat, which was adorable. The naughtier shots from our evening on the town will be posting to BlueBlood.com and I’ve got some less naughty snapshots and funny anecdotes, but, for now, this really shows how much fun it was.

The video features yours truly, Forrest, Superna, and Individual and some random guys from Google or Qualcomm who found the lure of the Santa bus too powerful to resist. (Yes, Lange, this is what we all looked like singing your Happy Birthday medley, complete with Individual’s degenerate footnotes. Is it wrong to plan to drunk dial someone? What if it is their birthday and they are in another city?)

Editor Thomas S. Roche writes, “As I’ve mentioned in previous memoirs, my unholy allegiance in the Tripartite Pact of genre fiction, erotica and death rock made, in 1992, for an instant monsterfuck between the salacious vamps of Blue Blood and my overwrought brain. Back then, Blue Blood was a sumptuous, slick print zine featuring dead sexy ghoul girls dry humping each other and their tattooed fuck boys with all the abandon of a European Ferret after three pots of French Roast, not to mention erotic science fiction, sanguine but not sanguinary vampire porn, and, yes, monsterfucking, plus opinionated reviews of everything from punk shows to hardcore porn to the new Thunder Five .45 Long Colt revolver, which got extra points because you could load it with .410 shotgun shells. This, surely, was the midnight Tom Waits-Skinny Puppy wonderland come to life, with fucking.

It’s been a lot of years, now, but Blue Blood is still going strong, with a huge website collecting the counterculture erotica from all of Amelia G and Forrest Black’s web sites, including Barely Evil, Rubber Dollies, and Gothic Sluts. What’s more, Blue Blood now offers an extensive array of message boards, turning it into a true online community.

Amelia recently lured me to a dark alley to discuss the counterculture and get cranky.”

Interview with yours truly and free gallery shot by me and Forrest Black at Eros Zine! Blue Blood hotties featured in the sexy spread include, in alphabetical order, Batty, Chaotika, Dahlia Dark, Dana Dark, Dana Dearmond, Darenzia, Justine Joli, Kellie, Lydia Lashes, Miss Trixie, Nixon, Sara X, Scar 13, Spyder, Superna, Tankboy, Vima, and Voltaire. Please check it all out. Thanks so much for the support, Eros Zine and Thomas!

DJ Xian likes to throw big events for big dates. Halloween is coming up, so you know she’ll be throwing another Hex Hollywood bash. Along with the venerable Panpipes, Blue Blood sponsored the last Hex Hollywood bacchanalia on 06/06/06. In honor of the date, the theme was Angels, Devils, Saints, Sinners, Undead, Nuns, Priests, Gods, Monsters, Virtues, and Vices. Costumes turned out heavy on the angels and devils. A highlight of the evening was the performance by the crew from CORE, Constructs of Ritual Evolution. A low point of the evening was when we broke a lens. As it turned out, the gentleman, who tripped over the cord attached to our camera, was gallant enough to kick in a few bucks towards a new one and then Samy’s gave us a truly godlike deal on a replacement, so it ended up not being so bad after all. In this series of some of the hottest looks from the night, you’ll see where we change lenses and backdrops, so now you won’t have to wonder why. All in all, Xian’s “three levels of pleasure and pain” was a huge extravaganza, packed with people who really did it up, and had plenty of fun.

Hex Hollywood Pictures by Forrest Black and Amelia G

Hex Hollywood Site

I only met Rozz Williams once.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blue Blood is for the nails which stick out.