Why is Roman Polanski’s arrest such a cause celebre? I’m not an expert on the case, but I have read the grand jury testimony of Polanski’s thirteen-year-old victim, and it is pretty convincing and pretty damning. I understand that Samantha Geimer (then Samantha Gailey) publicly requested leniency for Roman Polanski, in the hopes that he could collect his big deal Oscar and she and her family could avoid the pain of being bothered again about something which was now decades in the past.

A lot of people seem to think that the intervening decades Roman Polanski spent in France were some kind of hardship equivalent to prison. First of all, Roman Polanski was a filmmaker in Poland in the 1950’s, but he left for France and then began making movies in the UK in the 1960’s. So the fact that he was making movies in the United States in the 1970’s does not mean that it was a hardship for him to then go make movies in another country. That was something he tended to switch up anyway. And he fled to France allegedly because he thought there was a chance that, instead of just getting the 42 days of time served, the judge might sentence him to a whole 90 days, minus the 42, for a total of 48 days behind bars.

What does anyone think the punishment would be today for a 43-year-old man who got a 13-year-old girl alone, plied her with booze, and then just brought her home after speaking about inappropriate subjects with her. Now add illegal drugs, forced sex, and introducing the girl to her very first anal rape. A new commission of a crime like this would get a long sentence of the sort where he might be killed by fellow inmates.

I understand that Roman Polanski has managed to achieve some great things in the face of horrific hardships. He lost his mother to the Holocaust and he lost his wife to Charles Manson and The Family committing the Tate-LaBianca murders. His wife was his eight months pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate. I do think it makes sense to consider how many forty somethings anally rape junior high school kids without having also had hard lives themselves.

But he still managed to direct Chinatown, a movie about California’s shady water rights history, and make it an interesting noir. Then again, Chinatown also benefited from the talents of the brilliant writer Robert Towne on the job and two actors widely considered to be some of the best of both their own generation and many others, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It is generally agreed that Roman Polanski got into such heated debates with Faye Dunaway on set that he even pulled out pieces of her hair. So, not a stranger to violence against women.

A lot of people, who aren’t me, also liked Rosemary’s Baby, so I accept that was an accomplishment, even though not entertaining to me. And a lot of people found The Pianist very poignant. The Pianist could have been from the heart or the tale of the talented Jewish musician trying to continue to create under the shadow of the Third Reich could have been a cynical ploy to get an Oscar and get to be self-righteous about not being able to come to the Academy Awards because of fear of arrest.

I’ve lived in Europe and most Europeans agree that France is a wonderful place to live. In point of fact, the Germans have invaded France every chance they got throughout history in pursuit of the best living. Hence the German expression for the best the world has to offer: Leben wie Gott in Frankreich. Roman Polanski has been married to the beautiful actress/rocker chick Emmanuelle Seigner since apparently 1989, when she was twenty-three. Or, to put in another way, there are even more years between her age and Polanski’s than between him and his 1977 victim. But it’s just different when you go after a twenty-three-year-old versus a thirteen-year-old.

So Roman Polanski’s big hardship is that, he couldn’t serve 48 more days in the loony bin ward of the prison (not the main population) and this meant that it is now, thirty some years later, terribly inconvenient for him to go to all the galas honoring him and his achievements. He was arrested on his way to receive a special award at a Zurich film festival when he was detained by Swiss authorities, who are perhaps less sexually open-minded than the French.

It honestly strikes me that Roman Polanski was going to get just a slap on the wrist for a pretty serious acquaintance assault because people felt sorry for him for having had bad things happen to him and maybe enjoyed his work. It seems like he might have gotten at least a few of his awards for the same reason because it seems peculiar that Americans go on and on about his greatness as a filmmaker without being able to name ten things he has done.

And does good art entirely excuse really bad behavior?

Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

Is it likely that a bleach blonde with fake tits who worked for Playboy appeared in a Playboy pictorial? Is it likely that a millionaire reality show contestant would murder his bleach blonde girlfriend and think he was going to get away with it by chopping off all her fingers and pulling out all her teeth but not removing her serial numbered breast implants? Is it likely that, if someone were so horribly cruelly disfigured, either just prior to being murdered or post-mortem to incompetently prevent identification, that TMZ would buy a death photo from someone in the coroner’s office and post it on the internet? Well, the only part of the the Jasmine-Fiore-murder-followed-by-death-photo story being reported which is not true is that the victim posed for Playboy. Full disclosure: Jasmine Fiore may have had a bit part in the horror movie The Abandoned which was an advertiser on this site and others I work on, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t bias me on this. I’m pretty sure I would find this story simultaneously ghoulishly hilarious and horrifically tragic regardless.

One Ryan Alexander Jenkins was indeed thwarted when one Jasmine Fiore was identified by the serial number on her breast implants. Apparently Ryan Alexander Jenkins recently finished taping on VH1’s I Love Money 3. I don’t really know what that show is about and I can’t imagine the prize dollars are anything significant to anyone already a millionaire, but I can’t quite bring myself to look it up either. Gawker’s Jezebel reports that, since Ryan Alexander Jenkins became a person of interest in the murder of Jasmine Fiore, VH1 has pulled all mention of the Megan Wants a Millionaire show he was a finalist on. Jezebel further reports that the murder suspect may have actually won the grand prize on I Love Money 3. Jezebel goes on to commend VH1 for their sensitivity in removing the MWAM content from the VH1 web site (juicy bits helpfully archived by Jezebel.)

I have also never seen Megan Wants a Millionaire, which was apparently canceled fairly early in its run. A while back I covered the Charm School reunion show where Sharon Osbourne and this Megan Hauserman ditzy blonde self-professed gold-digger got into a cat fight, although I admit I’ve never seen Charm School and only watched the cat fight vid on the VH1 web site when it became a hot topic.

At that time, Megan’s claim to fame was that Poison frontman/insecure meanie/embarrassment-to-aging-rockers-everywhere Bret Michaels rejected her on Rock of Love. Is being rejected by a guy who was okay-looking in 1986 really a resume item? Apparently so, as Megan Hauserman was given her own show Megan Wants a Millionaire. The Superficial reports, “You know what the most fucked up part of this story is? There’s a reality show where millionaires compete for the love of a self-proclaimed gold-digger with fake breasts. That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.”

It seems that, immediately after being rejected by Megan Hauserman on camera for VH1 in March, Ryan Alexander Jenkins went to Vegas and married his girlfriend of some time Jasmine Fiore. Wouldn’t you be pissed if your significant other went on television to humiliate themselves pursuing someone who is not you? Certainly would not spell wedding bells to me. According to Jasmine Fiore’s understandably bereaved and distraught mother Lisa Lepore, Jasmine Fiore had the marriage annulled in May, but law enforcement can find no record of this. One Robert Hasman got a series of text messages from his ex-girlfriend Jasmine Fiore over the two days before her death. Then he got just one cryptic message, well after her estimated time of death, which just read “suck it“. In other post-mortem commentary news, What Would Tyler Durden Do reports, “Jasmines roommate says their relationship was “on the rocks”. She also said that Jenkins told her he was “done with the relationship” and that “he couldn’t take it anymore”. This was one day after Jasmine was found in a dumpster . . . She’s not very attractive, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill her. Legally, I mean.”

Ryan Alexander Jenkins is Canadian and is believed to have fled to Canada, although his father, a wealthy architect, developed a resort on an island in Honduras and owns at least one plane. The Huffington Post reports that Canada has agreed to extradite Ryan Alexander Jenkins if he is apprehended in Canada because the State of California has promised not to pursue the death penalty in this potentially capital crime.

Judging from video of Ryan Alexander Jenkins singing “I love my wife” to Jasmine Fiore in Vegas which he posted to his MySpace page (and TMZ helpfully archived), Jasmine Fiore was brunette at the time of her death. So bleached blonde and naked for Playboy = false. All the ridiculous stuff (including VH1 choosing not to profit from tragedy) = totally true.

If you live on the West Coast like me, it is not too late to get free ice cream from Ben and Jerry’s today. Southern California has been having a crazy heatwave. I confess to worshiping at the alter of frosty central air conditioning, but I had to leave the house yesterday to get espresso beans for iced lattes and was stunned at how fast it has gone from chilly to insanely hot this year.

I guess this is the part where I should probably deconstruct the ways in which all strata of counterculture are marketed to disingenuously most of the time. I could talk about how people think there are these two hippies Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield who built an ice cream empire subsisting on a shoe-string budget, making strongly flavored ice cream according to their own personal quirky stoner tastes, and serving it in an old gas station. I could talk about the ferocious rivalry between Ben and Jerry’s and Häagen-Dazs and how Häagen-Dazs attempted to keep Ben and Jerry’s out of their distribution channels and Ben and Jerry’s repeatedly sued Häagen-Dazs and started a whole PR campaign with the slogan, “What’s the Doughboy afraid of?” If you are wondering where that slogan came from, the answer is that Häagen-Dazs is owned by Pillsbury, or at least was at the time, and Ben and Jerry’s was this indie force fighting The Man. Of course, Ben and Jerry’s sold to Unilever in 2000. The multi-billion dollar Unilever is the largest ice cream manufacturer in the world and owns, not only Ben and Jerry’s, but also Breyers, Popsicle, Slim Fast, Klondike, and dozens of European subs of Heartbrand. Hippie Ben and Jerry’s now are to corporate ice cream what marketing tool female mascots are to corporate so-called “altporn”, in that they make public appearances and do the occasional press junket, but it’s just for show and they don’t actually have any, ya know, business role in the company. Oops, I digress. I mean, FREE ICE CREAM!

The original founder’s of Ben and Jerry’s purportedly marked their first anniversary of struggling to stay in business by giving away free ice cream cones for a day. Today the company turns thirty-one years old and almost all Ben and Jerry’s locations are giving away free cones. I’m guessing they really have celebrated their important anniversaries by giving away free ice cream cones.

So, really, the point here is just a public service announcement: free ice cream, free ice cream, free ice cream!

So we posted the whole sexy series of Superna serving a couple pounds of weed in the BlueBlood VIP some time ago and, in honor of 4/20, we posted a free 420 photo gallery here. What we have not been able to share with you all, because her and Individual’s case was still pending, is that her home was raided shortly after this. Superna is someone who just lights up a room. In my experience, Superna makes everyone around her smile, so I am shocked and appalled that someone would do this to her. She always radiates a certain beautiful infectious joy and it broke my heart that she had to go through this. I guess I should probably also have been freaked out that Forrest Black and I shot this photo set at her home, actually during the time period her house was under surveillance, but at least the photos had nothing to do with her arrest.

Superna: Oh my god.. .it was like a movie! 20 swat officers with machine guns at 7am.. my 2 roommates were there, but Individual and I were in Louisiana . . . They kicked in the door while Willie was watching FOX News getting ready for work.. they also kicked in the two fences to the back yard. They expected a HUGE bust, which did not happen, so they looked like idiots! When we got back to Cali . . .. they arrested me and Individual there to save face for all the cash they spent on their “huge drug stakeout”. My roommates took a deal with the DA and have to do drug classes and probation for 16 months, Individual and I are still battling it in court because we are actually innocent (even though that term doesn’t really mean anything once you’ve been arrested. It’s like guilty till proven guilty). Because it was our name on everything we are the ‘alleged’ big drug lords of the universe with 18 plants. Funny thing though, they got less than an ounce total off of all those plants :) Our house was supposedly under surveillance when our car was stolen too. Cops didn’t help with that one… we lost our house while we were in jail and . . . Individual told them he was innocent and won’t do any . . . drug classes because he did nothing wrong… so they told him he couldn’t stay in the house over night. He is now sleeping in a tent in the back yard !! (heeeee) .. so …. carless… homeless… broke …. and I still can’t be stopped !! Someone has it out for me bad though. The police report is all based on testimony from a “confidential informant” who called the cops . . . HATERS!!! The best revenge will be my triumphant success!! . . . I love you.. and I can’t wait to see those shots of me and Individual’s jizz fest at our former house ;) . . . I’ve been out of touch while in the slammer ;)

[Fast forward many moons . . .]

Amelia G: What finally happened with your case?

Superna: After the State of California spent thousands dollars trying to make a “case” against us, the case was DISMISSED :)

Amelia G: After smashing your totally cool living situation, did the State of California determine that actually you should have a pot prescription?

Superna: Yes we both have physicians recommendations for the use of medical cannabis, and the federally approved synthetic TCH “Marinol” (which is available in every state and at every Wal-Mart pharmacy in the country by the way). As a matter of fact, when we were drug tested every week during our probationary period, we were allowed to have THC in our system because the state of California recognizes the use of medically prescribed cannabis (prop 215), and the state and county judicial system is required to adhere the laws of the state. If this were a federal matter, it would have been handled differently.

Amelia G: You have such a sunny and warm personality all the time around other people. You always make everyone smile. Do you feel smoking at one point in time can make you more positive at another or is your sunny disposition mostly philosophical?

Superna: I think it is definitely a philosophical point of view, also a CHOICE to be happy at all times. I think for its medical use, it can help someone with easing anxiety, stress, boosting creativity, relieving physical pain… Let me put it like this : If you are a naturally easy-going person it can help you to be a “really” easier-going person. Likewise, if you are an extremely paranoid person, it will also enhance your paranoia. Sort of a mood enhancer, but also with dozens of other medical applications.

Amelia G: What do you personally find good and/or bad about smoking?

Superna: Personally, I don’t find smoking to be good, I find it to be great. Seriously, it helps so much with stress and anxiety, appetite problems, stomach disorders, high-blood pressure, tension, insomnia.. on the other hand, it is also a creativity enhancer – making creative endeavors flow with much more ease from the source. Every medical study that I have reviewed on the subject shows it to be non-addictive with no lasting or permanent unwanted effects. A natural remedy, as opposed to the chemical cocktails in the pills that are created artificially in a pharmaceutical laboratory with life-threatening side effects. As far as the “bad” aspects, its definitely hard being coined a “criminal” for choosing a homeopathic route as opposed to the so-called “legal” drugs peddled out of your local pharmacy and hospital. It boils down to it not being as popular yet with the general public…and they aren’t making any tax dollars off of the home grown remedies, so they push what will make them (and the lobbyists) the most money.

Amelia G: Do you think the rest of the country will eventually legalize all smokables or at least medical use?

Superna: I hope so. I think as everyone progresses in their thinking (away from the antiquated religious dogma),medical use will become more accepted, as will other choices of a personal nature. Things are changing so fast right before our eyes, and I have a very positive outlook for the future. Happy 4:20 :) Thank you, and remember to love one another!!

Blue Blood hottie Serena Toxicat recently mentioned that she would be showing thirty of her art pieces at the Blow Gallery in Berkely, California. If you are in that neck of the woods, you can stop by 2112 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704 for an evening of hotties like Serena Toxicat, art, and possibly some free booze. Most gallery shows have free booze. I try not to examine why too closely. Here you can examine the conversation Serena Toxicat and I just had about art.

Amelia G: What first got you into creating? Were you always creative?

Serena Toxicat: Apparently as a 5 year-old my painting looked like pointillism. My 1st grade art teacher raved about the stuff. After my dad saw how much I liked to color and paint, his best friend bought me a set of acrylics and I never looked back, except to kick my own ass to make more. I do so many things in the world of art and performance that my productivity in any one area tends to ebb and flow.

Amelia G: What are your favorite media to create in and how to you feel writing vs. visual arts compare for expressing yourself?

Serena Toxicat: I love acrylic and just developed a system whereby I draw in marker over an acrylic base. I also like making sculpture with found objects and occasionally indulge in photography. I made some mixed media pieces, with b&w images of my pointy little Isis as the central focus. Most intriguing might be my channeled oracular pieces. I close my eyes and let the spirits paint with my hands. You should feel the energy coming out of those things!

Creating is creating, and if I’m happy with a piece of art I feel the same sense of completeness I do with my writing. Usually the visual stuff goes faster. Well, compared to a book it does!

Amelia G: Who is curating the Blow show and how did you get involved? Does it have any particular theme?

Serena Toxicat: Amy O’Rourke, one of the stylists, curated the last two shows. It is very eclectic – everything from artistic nudes to hanging paper sculpture – and she is quite happy about that!

Amelia G: Is it true that the Blow gallery is actually a hair salon? If so, how does that work? Do they get the sort of clientele where the art and hairstyle work have good synergy and complement one another?

Serena Toxicat: Yes! And they do great hair. It seems to work well for them, this meeting of the aesthetic worlds. The clients appreciate it and many come to the shows and buy or just enjoy. Blow has a new opening every 10 weeks with fantastic catering. They have been combining hair and showing art for as long as I can remember. I discovered them while searching for a colorist. When I found David, who has since moved, we developed a relationship based on bright horizontal stripes (in my hair) and mullets (as material for many a delirious joke).

Amelia G: When to when can people see the show? Anything in particular, specific art piece of yours, event feature, other artists showing with you, whatever, which you think people will extra enjoy?

Serena Toxicat: It starts Sat. 4-4 and closes June 7. I’m really excited about my bright green and orange pieces. They address important issues, like depression, anxiety, eating disorders, etc., and feature multicultural female (so far) subjects dressed in gothy striped frocks.

I also hope people get off on my socially conscious and poetic propagand[iv]a video. I play a newscaster and talk about everything from Bush and Obama to animal activism and being nice to hookers. Jim Stipovich has been showing his nudes since the 70’s. I’m sure he’ll bring out his following out of the proverbial woodwork and make many new fans! I also love Shaista and Kelly’s stuff. Fun!

Los Angeles can be a difficult city to make deep connections with others in. I know literally hundreds of people who I genuinely like and enjoy in Southern California, but I can’t say most of them know me particularly in-depth or vice-versa. Sometimes I find it difficult to escape the feeling that every interaction is somehow tainted with business. And not in a cool getting-neat-creative-projects accomplished sort of way. A lot of people get a certain kind of bone marrow level lonely in Los Angeles and turn to drink, drugs, or specific religion.

I’ve said for years that, if I stayed in Los Angeles for long enough, I would need to end up either in AA or the Church of Scientology. I live walking distance from the Church of Scientology Celebrity Center and this may mean I am required to become a Scientologist because I have a few problems with Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous.

There are a few traits AA and NA folks tend to pick up, which I would really be disappointed to find in myself. AA people are always simultaneously telling you that they are more virtuous and goody two shoes than you and more wild with fuller and more exciting lives than yours. This is rude, but a potentially unavoidable side-effect of working the program.

Secondly, AA and NA people always make their struggle with addiction the whole narrative they hang their existence on. I know some amazingly accomplished Hollywood artists who believe the story of their lives is how they got addicted to something and then dealt with being addicts. The books they have written, music they have performed, and people whose lives they have made better are all footnotes; the real story for AA folks is the road to and from addiction. Even though most addicts relapse at least occasionally, so this self-view does not even really work from a literary narrative structure perspective.

My largest obstacle to joining AA or NA is that I don’t have a particularly addictive personality. I mean, I’ve been enjoying my iced soy lattes made with gourmet, fair trade, artisan-roasted coffee bean espresso, but it wouldn’t kill me not to have them. I love beer, but, most of the time, a beer looks too much like twenty soul-sucking minutes on the elliptical to me and I’d rather spend the calories on something else. Maybe if cocaine and heroin came in tasty beverage form, I’d look into getting addicted to one of those, but I can’t imagine the bother involved with getting into an actual habit of reverse picking my nose or sticking pins in myself. I have enough trouble getting into the habit of working out. I mean, I feel good after I exercise and picking up heavy objects and putting them down again is much less annoying than most of the modes of ingesting addictive drugs.

But I digress. The important thing is that goofy sign generators are fun. Now you can each make your own Church of Scientology sign, hit the upload option, and be sure to use one of the “Hotlink for forums” code copy/paste snippets to share your sign here.

By next week at the latest, I plan to stop compulsively watching political news for a while and get back to morbid and funny vampire and angst television, fall movies, non-political social commentary, entertaining misbehavior, music and hot naked counterculture. This week, however, even South Park is still hyped up about politics and the election. South Park tonight featured adults partying drunk in the street with beer kegs and Stan and Kyle calling in a noise complaint to the cops. The expressions on the two kids’ faces and the appalling soundtrack the grown-ups select is priceless.

It featured a kinda dumb riff on Oceans 13. After fast-forwarding through parts of Oceans 12 before determining it to be unwatchable, even at high speed, I passed on the movie they were spoofing, which left some entertainment value out for me there. South Park’s emergency room scene was amusing, with suicidal McCain supporters and Obama supporters who partied too hard.

I think having both the presidential election the USA just had and the referendums we just had, the country is at least either a little hyper-adrenalized or a little hung-over. I’m really hoping that, when California finishes tallying up all the provisional ballots and suchlike, the moronic Prop 8 will somehow not have passed. In general, the results of the referendums are all a little surprising. It appears that pro-life/anti-abortion measures all failed. It appears that anti-gay measure all succeeded, including referendums on both marriage and adoption. I’m sure kids bouncing from foster home to foster home are thrilled that they won’t be getting taken in by any loving families which are not 100% traditional. Or not. Additionally, marijuana got a lot more legal in a number of states. And Washington appears to have legalized doctor-assisted suicide.

So it is a weird morning and it probably makes sense that everyone is feeling a little jumpy today, no matter how overjoyed they were last night, as the results came in. At any rate, you can watch the most recent episode of South Park for free online now on at this link.

So I just got back from voting. I went to the polling place where I voted in the primaries and I wasn’t on the roster. They gave me a provisional ballot, but I find those things alarming. They also gave me a slip of paper with a list of phone numbers to call to find out what was up with my voter registration. I thought that perhaps my polling place had been changed to my work address from my home address or something like that. Basically, I did not want to submit a provisional ballot, if I could drive across town to another polling place and do a normal one.

The poll workers told me that I did not need to call because my vote would absolutely, definitely, no-question be counted. I called the registrar election day number anyway. A nice woman named Karen went over everything and told me that actually she couldn’t find me in the voter rolls. She gave me a more official State of California Registrar of Voters number to call and told me I should definitely call next week to get it all straight, but that it was doubtful I’d get through calling today.

I was literally shaking at the idea that my vote might not count, so I was going to be sitting in front of the polling place, with one eye on my ballot inside and the other on my finger hitting redial on my Blackberry, until I got through. There was no cell phone reception inside the polling place and it is illegal to remove the ballot from the polling location. Happily, the voice prompts and wait time for the California number were user-friendly and pretty prompt, given that it is election day.

Another nice woman named Whitney helped me this time and she told me that actually I was not currently active in the voter rolls because my registration was flagged for lack of birth location. I had changed something minor on my registration before the primaries, so there was a recent registration form, even though I’ve been voting in the same district for approximately eight years. I actually voted at the same polling place in the primary, but, at that time, they had not processed the new info on my new registration. Of course, I did fill out my birthplace when I registered again, but I was born overseas to American parents, so it is probably that whoever was doing the data entry just did not feel like looking up how to enter a European birth. At any rate, Whitney updated my information and activated my voter registration.

The significant thing here is that, because my registration had been flagged, my vote would not have been counted, if I had not gotten through to the registrar. So, for those of you with the polls still open, please call your local voting registrar, if there is anything off about the way you are or are not listed in the voter rolls. The poll workers will assure you that your vote will be counted, but it may take a little extra effort on your part for that to be true. Please make it.

As a bonus, lots of American businesses are offering presents for those who vote. Here are a few links to free stuff for Americans who perform their civic responsibility:

Ben & Jerry’s will give voters a free scoop of ice cream today between 5pm and 8pm. Krispy Kreme will give those with I Voted stickers a free star-shaped doughnut today. And from now until November 11, Babeland will give those with proof of having voted a free sex toy. Starbucks is giving away a free brewed coffee to anyone who tells them they voted. I don’t think they are requiring proof, like the other vendors, so I guess you can just claim to have voted there, but you really should vote and they do have a kind of inspirational commercial.

I’m going to be honest and say I love coffee, but I love an iced latte with organic non-dairy milk and artisan-roasted gourmet beans. The ice cream site has a nifty store locator feature right on the election promo page, but the nearest location is in the Valley and I’m in Hollywood. Also, I remember when everyone was excited that they opened one of those ice cream shoppes near my college and I found their ice cream overly sweet. One of my neighbors owns a doughnut shop across the street from where I live, so, if I feel like eating high carb and high glycemic index, I think I’ll just give him the few cents a doughnut costs. A sex toy seems like a better gift, but I get tons of cool sex toys free for product placements and reviews as is. So none of the free stuff is really jumping out at me.

I voted because it matters to me as a patriotic American to vote, because it is my responsibility as a citizen. And I did the follow-up necessary to make sure my vote would be counted for the same reason. I voted.

So apparently the great state of Kentucky wants to get into the gambling biz. Times are tough all over and I totally understand being open to new opportunities in these difficult economic times. Adult trade journal XBiz reported yesteray that Kentucky “Gov. Beshear was elected on a platform that included bringing gambling to the state.” Okay, so far, no problem, right.

Well, Kentucky filed suit to seize 141 gambling domains, including, according to The Washington Post, some very active huge money-making concerns such as UltimateBet.com and FullTiltPoker.com. Kentucky Judge Thomas Wingate is presiding over this legal fiasco. Registrars eNom and GoDaddy have apparently complied with Kentucky’s request and handed over those gambling casino domains registered with them. Most other US-based registrars are bizarrely expected to follow, although, as a domain-consumer, I’m certainly noting which registrars roll over first and easiest on this.

Now I understand that some people feel gambling is immoral and they believe in legislating morality. If Kentucky totally outlawed gambling and had technology initiatives to block gambling sites from being viewed in Kentucky, I would think that was their right. I would also think it was the right of their residents to pick up and move to some place more pleasant like California. It is, however, legal for residents of Kentucky to gamble online with real money. In fact, although U.S. banks have been legally barred from processing online gambling payments for a couple years now, Washington state is the only one which made it illegal for residents to place online bets for actual cash money. Basically, the law would be akin to making it 100% legal to buy drugs and 100% illegal to sell them. The results, naturally, are that a lot of American gamblers will renege on their online gambling debts because online casinos have no legal recourse. The results are also that many overseas banks benefited from this law when they got all the U.S. gambling business. But I guess banks in the United States are doing fine and certainly don’t need any more major customers with phat accounts. Those super rich online casinos can just take their money out of the U.S. economy because we sure don’t need any of it circulating on our shores.

The really sleazy thing about this whole circus is that Kentucky does not outlaw gambling. Kentucky just wants to get into the gambling business at home, without having to worry about competition from established gambling concerns such as online casinos. I’m appalled that they were able to find a judge who thought it was reasonable for a new business to randomly seize the assets of multiple existing ones.

When I was in high school and my mother was stationed in Israel, I dated a guy from Kentucky. Before his stepdad was transferred to the Holy Land, he had thought Jews had horns. Not in a bigoted way, he just literally believed that, having grown up in Kentucky. So, if Kentucky wants to legislate to its own special beliefs, they can just keep those laws within their own borders and we are all good. But they really need to not overstep. The reason we have individual states is partly to allow those with differing views to live the way they wish, while being part of the greater United States of America.

At this point, I vote that we make Puerto Rico a state and kick Kentucky the heck out. This way we won’t have to change the flag.