It seems newsworthy to mention that an online video for Marilyn Manson’s new music video is apparently going to be online for only another day or two. The new single is called “Heart Shaped Glasses” and features romantic lyrics about erotic cutting and Manson looking like he is feeling his inner rockstar. Most coverage of the video has been rather frantic speculation on whether Marilyn Manson and actress Evan Rachel Wood are actually having penetrative sex in the opening scene of the seven plus minutes long vid. It is totally irrelevent to the final product whether or not his penis was actually in her vagina, as neither is visible, but the two manage to communicate wonderful chemistry between them on screen.

When I saw the movie Seven, I kept wanting them to turn the damn lights on. It seems like it would have been much more obvious that Kevin Spacey was the killer if they hadn’t been doing investigation and forensics with flashlights, when there were perfectly good light switches nearby. I felt a little bit like this during much of the video for “Heart Shaped Glasses” when I watched it on the German video sharing site ironically enough called Sevenload. The actual Marilyn Manson site links to an IP with no real site on it and a much higher resolution version of the video. Everything is much clearer in the version on Manson’s site, although the lighting is still colored and moody. The interface on the Sevenload version is much more user-friendly though.

The video kicks off on Sevenload with the artist introducing the clip and, linked off his site, it goes straight into Manson and Wood writhing around and kissing passionately. This is pretty hot for around two and a half minutes. The initial makeout scene includes some very light choking. Somehow I think iTunes still won’t have any problem billing for the music video download down the line. The video is then interrupted with one of those talky interludes that musicians who want acting roles like and nobody else enjoys. The two of them are in a car and she tells him to drive faster and he takes altporn style polaroids of her with a kitchen knife and a schoolgirl skirt. This scene is where the heart shaped glasses referred to in the song’s title first appear. They then move to a club scene where Manson is rocking it old school and a sorta normal looking girl in the audience is watching from behind her heart shaped glasses and touching herself with hands covered in interestingly incongruous driving gloves. This I believe is Wood in a sort of fifties looking good girl dress. I don’t think she’d be good casting for the part if she weren’t Manson’s paramour, but the chemistry between them is so powerful that it more than makes up for it. I think the moody lighting, which might otherwise be a bit much, makes her come across a bit darker too.

The main concept of the video revolves around, aside from hipster sunglass, romantic cutting. So the club scene, err, cuts back and forth to a blood-drenched black bed and shots of a sort of heart shaped tattoo with a lightening bolt S on Wood’s thigh. I don’t know if the tattoo is real any more than I know if the fucking is real. Doesn’t matter because it works for the video. Oh yeah, then they drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. I loved Thelma and Louise so much that when my friend Blue Blood writer Shariann Lewitt and I saw it, Shariann told me that maybe one of us needs to learn to drive better. As Wood steers with her foot in Manson’s video and they still drive off a cliff, I think Shariann was mistaken about the requirements.

Anyway, the song is okay and I like the flow of the lines:

she’ll never cover up what we did with her dress, no
she said, “kiss me, it’ll heal but it won’t forget”

When I am elected Benevolent World Dictator, there will be a lot more videos in this vein and they will be available for more than a week.

So, as many of you gentle readers probably know, in addition to running general entertainment sites and multigirl membership sites such as BlueBlood.com, I also run a number of membership sites for individual superstar Blue Blood hotties. At the moment, we are just about to launch a new one. The design has been pretty good to go for some time. Forrest Black did an absolutely killer job on it and the hottie who the site is for is awesome sexy fun and I’m dying to unveil the site. But we are having some trouble with the banking people, although I am a professional so I’m going to do what is needed to make the site go live, I am having some feminist issues with it.

Essentially, in order to be able to accept credit card or check or phone payments online, a financial institution of some sort needs to facilitate the charges going through correctly for the correct product. There are a lot of different methodologies for this and different companies have wildly different policies, but the salient point for what I want to talk about is that the banking people can ask a site to make changes before the site will be able to accept credit cards and such. I have no problem with this in general. Obviously, it is good if there are people paying attention to make sure that it is difficult for criminals to make money from doing terrible things to women, children, animals, even men. But the banking people refuse to process credit cards etc. for a lot of perfectly legal and perfectly ethical and decent content as well, including even some things which could run on prime time network television without outcry. The rules are sort of specialized and idiosyncratic.

I do kind of have a problem with the cultural bias some of the banking people seem to apply. It may not be their fault, in that Visa or MasterCard or whoever really might have a problem with some of the types of content the banking folks fret about. The billers are supposed to essentially function as a liaison between a company like Blue Blood and a company like Visa. Visa, for example, does not deal directly with the people who accept their cards. So it is the billers’ job to fret about what will freak out the credit card and check and phone people and I do kinda pay them to do so. Nonetheless, it sometimes bothers me which things do and do not get approved.

In the case of Blue Blood sites, the main things the billing people have asked us to censor over the years are the actual real fantasies of women we shoot. Second place is actual real stories women we have shot have shared about their personal sexual adventures. Part of the problem getting billing approval for our newest solo girl site is that, to me, one of the really exciting things about this particular woman is that she is all about exploring her sexuality and pushing both her own boundaries and other people’s boundaries. It is kind of difficult to communicate this exhuberance in a censored interview. I am also just really troubled by trimming down a person’s answer to questions about what turns them on or what they’ve actually personally done. Most recently, the billers held up the approval process on this newest solo girl site for the third time because they ran across the expression “lite choking” in the text of the interview I did with the subject of the site.

Apparently, they felt it was too “extreme” to have a woman talking about being turned on by being choked just a little bit. Now, they process for all sorts of gag porn sites where women perform fellatio which is done so hard and rough that the women weep and choke until they literally vomit. And it is all captured in colorful video and pictures. So how is a text representation of choking fantasy different in a more problematic way from a video or photographic representation of choking fantasy where a performer really is being choked? It comes down to what is directed at the male consumer. Hands around the throat for a little bit of breath control or mild strangling is primarily about female pleasure and female orgasm. Brutal fellatio is about male pleasure and male orgasm. Hence, “lite choking” is “extreme violence” but puking on penis is acceptable.