The BlueBlood VIP just passed one hundred thousand images with a series Forrest Black and I shot of an OG Blue Blood hottie from the magazine days. Blue Blood began in print sixteen years ago in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in the basement of a Maryland punk rock group house called New Cambodia.

I had previously done the BLT ::: Black Leather Times antisocial punk humor zine in a Virginia punk rock group house called Cambodia and I was ready to do something glossier and with more reach than BLT’s 2,000 copy print run and mostly local circulation. I don’t think I realized how much I was biting off or that it would eventually take a whole two car garage to house all the Blue Blood subscription magazines for any given issue while a pizza party of my friends feverishly stuffed envelopes and boxes in our unfurnished living room. Perhaps I had faith that Blue Blood would get the attention is has in press from everyone from The New York Times, Penthouse, and Draculina to HBO, FOX, and MTV. But I certainly could not have expected the audience of tens of millions of people the internet has brought.

It was extra meaningful to me and Forrest Black to have OG magazine covergirl Cherry Jason and her real life lover Ledgrey featured in the brand new series which took BlueBlood.com over the 100k mark. That is a whole lot of beautiful on-topic images, by a lot of creative photographers, shooting a lot of flamboyant people. I naturally still have a lot of friends in the DC area and generally get back mostly for weddings and similar occasions, but it’s also fun to check out how the club portion of the DC scene Blue Blood came out of is doing. This time out, Forrest Black and I went clubbing with Cherry and Ledgrey and pals and shot them over at their place.

Cherry is a dancer and Ledgrey is a banker and their place is in pretty much the most perfect, sought-after, convenient location in all of Washington, DC. Cherry and Ledgrey have such a wonderful energy, so we ended up with a bit of a gothic punk From Here to Eternity vibe in this series and the overall feel is just what we all wanted it to be.

Of course, although we have a safe for work free photo gallery of Cherry and Ledgrey on BlueBlood.net, you’ll have to head over to BlueBlood.com and pony up a few bucks to see the naughty bits.

The original Blue Blood magazine in print always opened with an entertainment section where we covered music, events, books, and all sorts of cool stuff. Pretty much like BlueBlood.net. Then there would be a number of short stories from big name genre fiction authors and a number of photo sets featuring exclusively real life couples doing what they would genuinely do whether or not there was a camera there. Now that we have digital cameras and the internet, the world is a different place and so we’ve added solo hottie sets to the mix, but, where BlueBlood.net is the digital incarnation of the magazine’s entertainment section, the hot stuff which made up the rest of the magazine resides on BlueBlood.com now in the VIP section. This way each sort of content is in its proper place to be viewed most conveniently.

Although naturally the history is important for a brand founded in 1992 like Blue Blood, let me break it down with a bit less history. BlueBlood.com features more than 100,000 erotic photos, including our world famous signature couples sets, and erotic fiction by some of the best genre writers in the world. BlueBlood.net features nightlife galleries, babe galleries, social critique, music videos, interviews with interesting people, book reviews, movie tidbits, comics info, television news, and entertainment journalism in general. To break it down even more simply:

BlueBlood.NET = SFW entertainment site
BlueBlood.COM = NSFW erotic site

BlueBlood.net and BlueBlood.com are intended for the same sorts of intelligent, independent thinkers, who enjoy the road less traveled, with lifestyles which are flamboyant, offbeat, and beyond the average person’s experience. Blue Blood in print used to be called The Trade Mag of Cool because Blue Blood’s audience is unusual, made up of tastemakers, the first in each of their respective scenes to know about and share new things, people who are just going to be more cool and creative than the norm.

One of the times it first became really apparent to me that a Blue Blood audience is really above and beyond, we were hanging out in New Orleans and I offered comp copies of the magazine to someone who worked for Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. NIN’s album Pretty Hate Machine pretty much changed my life, so I was jazzed at the idea of passing along my work to someone like that. His assistant was all excited, but, when he looked at the cover, he was like, oh, Trent already has that issue.

After sixteen years, it is more difficult to get a rise out of me. I know a lot of rockstars and, at this point, I am often reluctant to interact in any way whatsoever with anyone whose work I love. My fear is that a negative personal interaction with the artist will reduce my pleasure in the art. At Blue Blood, we approach our shoots, especially our couples shoots, as a very collaborative process, so there is a lot of discussion of what will be shown. I remember the first time Forrest Black and I worked with Cherry Jason in the 90’s, she totally made us both blush. Shooting her this time, if anything, it was the other way around.

Sixteen years is a long time. Sometimes I rail against the things in the world which I either can’t change or haven’t changed yet. But I’m awfully happy with where Blue Blood is at sweet sixteen. As a big William Gibson fan, perhaps I could have imagined in 1992 what Blue Blood would look like in 2009, but I can’t say that I did. The plan was pretty much do a bunch of cool art projects for the community and wait for new technology to be invented to make the whole thing viable.

Sixteen years. Dozens of Blue Blood parties. Hundreds of stories. Thousands of articles. Tens of millions of readers. Getting to meet and work with so many cool people in so many walks of life. And now over one hundred thousand images in the BlueBlood VIP! Not that I didn’t work and sacrifice for it, but, on a good day, I am truly humbled and grateful for getting to have the life I have had so far. And today is a good day.

Last week, the Dead Kennedys announced an indefinite hiatus from touring, due to health issues suffered by bassist Klaus Flouride and drummer D.H. Peligro. Although I was fangirl-thrilled to meet East Bay Ray at a coffee shop a couple years back, I personally find it depressing when bands tour without key original members. A Jello Biafra-less DK would just bum me out.

Sometimes a group of people come together to make a great creative team, but only small portions of the group are really driving forces. The DK thing is not really one of those disputes. Drummers sometimes spontaneously combust and that never makes it seems like a band should hang it up. I think the thing which bothers me the most about Jello Biafra not exactly being in the Dead Kennedys any more is that you know there was a hot moment in time when they must have felt like a galvanized special unit in the war against conformity and oppression. There must have been a time when the Dead Kennedys felt like they could take on the world . . . together.

For anyone who is unaware of the legal squabble, the Dead Kennedys had a falling-out partly over whether or not their songs should be licensed to sell various things. Most notably Levi’s wanted to use “Holiday in Cambodia” in a Dockers commercial and Jello Biafra rejected their advances without consulting the rest of the band. Lawsuitarity ensued. Levi’s did not get the song, but Alternative Tentacles is no longer allowed to sell full length DK products. I am torn on how I feel about that. I have lived in not one, but two, punk rock group houses named after the “Holiday in Cambodia” song. Not like thirteen punks living in a townhouse had to get a license to call the place Cambodia, so maybe we only helped by buying cassette tapes and T-shirts, but we would not have considered Levi’s to be, ya know, punk.

On the one hand, I feel like there should be more benefit to artists who create important seminal works. On the other hand, I am uncomfortable with certain types of mainstream corporate interests co-opting and diluting counterculture. It seems like there have to be ways to monetize art without giving it to a company who would demean its original purpose. The Dead Kennedys MySpace page announced this spring that Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death had managed to go gold in both the USA and the UK, without major label support. Keeping in mind that Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death came out in 1987, I’m guessing it hasn’t been buying mansions in the meantime.

So maybe nothing pure can last without pain, but here is a video shot at a 1981 Dead Kennedys (with Jello Biafra) performance of “Too Drunk to Fuck” in Finland. And, as you probably got from Blue Blood board members Buster Friendly and Mr. Karl’s posts, if you did not know it already, the Buckcherry “Too Drunk to Fuck” is not a cover of the DK song, any more than the Katy Perry “I Kissed a Girl” is a cover of the Jill Sobule tune. The Finnish video may be amateur, but it is complete with punk rock snogging.

In this week’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the Paul Kinsey character, ably played by Michael Gladis, throws a party in his hipster Montclair loft. I’m not sure what Montclair is like today, but, when I was in school in Connecticut, I recall Montclair being mostly nice suburban homes. Definitely no longer hip and outlying. In the 1962 time of Mad Men, however, it is a transitional neighborhood which is home to its original have-nots and the adventurous vanguard of hipsters who are the frontline shock troops in any gentrification.

Paul Kinsey has invited people from all different areas of his life, hoping they will mingle with one another happily, and think better of him for throwing such a fabulous interesting party. It is a bit scandalous that, as an aspiring writer, Paul has snarfed a typewriter from work and left it on display where his guests can all see it. Some of the people from the Sterling-Cooper advertising office where he works feel uncomfortable, uneasy and unsafe in his neighborhood. Some just feel threatened by the strangeness and feel compelled to assert their alleged superiority. Paul’s ex-girlfriend, the sexually predatory office manager Joan Holloway, refuses to acknowledge that his new girlfriend is an assistant manager at a supermarket, calls her a checkout girl, makes a thing of her being black, and accuses Paul of basically trying to hard to be interesting. One of Paul’s collegiate chums fails to close the Peggy Olson character because he can’t wrap his head around the notion that a woman is a copywriter like his friend and not a secretary or receptionist. It is a very satisfying moment when she tells him that she is not going home with him because she is in the persuasion business and his presentation was unimpressive.

Damn but I have had that party. I always want to meld all the areas of my life into one. I don’t want to have to present a different face to each group of people I know. I want everyone to know the true me and somehow this feels like it means that everyone I know should be able to enjoy one another as much as I enjoy each of them.

I invited many of my friends from university and from the science fiction convention circuit to shindigs at my old punk rock group house Cambodia. Some of my school friends thought it was a great opportunity to bang a piece of strange, but they would also talk amongst themselves about what a waste it was that I was doing this instead of working for a management consulting firm or investment bank or something. Some of my punk rock friends failed to bang a piece of what would have been strange for them because it never occurred to them that someone in a buttoned down shirt could, for example, be gay. I still cringe when I remember one of my favorite people from sf fandom telling me he had the single worst time he had ever had at any party ever at Cambodia.

I thought that putting the different groups of people together would expand their horizons in an enjoyable way. My university prided itself on its diversity and I believed that diversity was simply good. Sometimes, for some people, my cross-pollinating shindigs did work out the way I hoped and intended. Writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, calls people like me connectors for introducing those who might otherwise not meet. Sometimes it is stimulating and invigorating being a connector and sometimes not so much. I try to make Blue Blood an entertainment haven for people like myself, who have wandered through many subcultures, never finding just one which was wholly who they are. Living that way, a person is likely to avoid believing the common lies people tell themselves, a person is likely to avoid believing things which are simply not true. There is a purity to this, but there is also the very real possibility of ending up feeling like a person without a country.