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

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

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

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

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

Since 1992, Blue Blood has been about encouraging people to think critically and not just go along with the herd. My hair is purple and red at the moment. But the hair color is a signifier, not the endgame. What I mean by this is that all of us who fought the battle to convince the world that someone with primary-colored hair or tattoos could be beautiful or sexy, we can all pat ourselves on the back and go home, if that was all the whole thing was about. That battle is won. But the point is that the physical appearance was supposed to be about being a maverick and living on your own terms, about marching to the beat of your own drummer. If mohawks become trendy, then having one does not necessarily signify that one is a nonconformist. You can still aesthetically enjoy very tall hair, but the most important body part in the battle against conformity is slightly lower — your brain. You need to have an evolved intellect to avoid being a bah bah sheep conformist.

I’m about to tell you all the most important lesson of a liberal arts education and it is not even going to cost you a hundred grand or whatever higher learning is priced at these days. I was less enamored of the lessons I learned in school, while I was paying off the tab, so here is the most crucial stuff for free. My parents certainly deserve most of the credit for my brain, but my education really helped ingrain some of their lessons.

In order to have an intelligent and human approach to the world, you must learn to be analytical and think critically. Some people are born more or less disposed to having these abilities, but they are definitely learned skills. The direction culture is moving, driven by technology, does not nurture skills in analysis and critical thinking. First television advertisers, and then internet marketers, found that people respond most primally to sound bites and slogans, as opposed to actual data. As a result, a lot of modern debate, especially online, sounds like the old “Tastes great!” vs “Less Filling!” argument. A person capable of analysis and thinking critically would look at that argument and realize that a discussion of Miller Lite probably entailed a beverage which did not taste good at all to most people and which would indeed be less filling because fewer people would drink much of it.

Which is a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that you need to make up your own mind. When you are presented with a debate or controversy, you need to deconstruct what is actually being discussed. What are the sides of the issue? What is each side actually trying to accomplish? Who are the people presenting the sides of this issue? What, if anything, do these people stand to gain from one or another outcome? Are the people debating a particular side anonymous?

Politicians and salesmen will frequently present their own viewpoint as the side that all people of a certain type will be on. This is to induce everyone who is that type of person to side with them. For example, “if you care about children, you have to donate to my campaign.” Or, “if you are artistic and independent, you have to buy my product.” You need to analyze what the actual issues are and what the actual qualities of a product are. If you do not, then you are doomed to sheepdom.

Once you figure out what the actual issues and values being presented really are, as best you can discern, you need to think critically about them. You might love children and think of yourself as very artistic and independent. But that does not mean you need to buy what a politician or salesman is selling. Thinking critically means deciding for yourself, being able to process new data as it becomes available for your analysis, and determining for yourself how the real issues actually fit with your personal values. Thinking critically means not just wholesale swallowing whatever the last person you talked to told you to think. It means questioning authority and thinking for yourself.

I am often asked why I permit dissenting opinions on the Blue Blood boards. How can I permit people to disagree with me, with the only rule being that they have to be capable of explaining and supporting what they say, preferably without sloganeering or name-calling? So many forums online censor what can be posted in order to make sure as many people as possible will eat the sound bite argument and site owners will not have to back up what they say. So I try to provide a venue where people from many different walks of life can come together to exchange their varied points of view.

Thinking critically combined with being analytical means being able to find the real answers which are best for you, means being your own person. Even if some of your tastes and decisions end up being common ones, coming to your conclusions via critical thinking and analysis means being a nonconformist inside your own gray matter. Where it counts the most.

I believe there is nothing more important than individual liberty. Black eyeliner and glitter lipstick might be ways of expressing your love of freedom, but they will not make you free. Only application of your unfettered brain can do that.

I was going to make a post about the usual New Year’s resolutions, but I realized that my main goal for this year is improved communication.

Communicating on the internet is daunting because too often scope is difficult to define, words are stolen, honest journalism is undervalued, tone is misunderstood, and readers will be oversensitive to their own feelings and wholly insensitive to the feelings of others. I’m not one to shy away from a formidable task, though, so this year I aim to cut through the internet culture’s impediments to real communication.

If there is anything you have been wanting to know about Blue Blood or Blue Blood philosophy and how Blue Blood fits into the world around us, or even the world around Blue Blood, please feel free to respond to this post with your question. Feel free send your question via Personal Message to me or Forrest Black on the BlueBlood.net forums or any of the other sites Blue Blood or its reps are on. If you ask via a less public method, please mention how/if you would like to be credited for what you’d like to know. Each month, we will answer some of the most intriguing questions. If you ask a question which is chosen, we might even send you cool swag from the Blue Blood Boutique.

Over the coming weeks, I also plan to write about each of the issues which I think cause a lot of great thinkers to be silent online. I plan to report honestly on newsworthy topics, even if, heaven forfend, I step on a few toes. I’m going to look for the good in everything, but I’m going to tell it like it is and so are other Blue Blood writers. Expect more funny anecdotes, interesting insights, news coverage, and penetrating perspectives in 2008. Expect us to call out plagiarizing scum and other people who would cause me, and people like me, to communicate less.

I look forward to encouraging intelligent critical thinking and bursting the bubble on groupthink. I hope to skewer a lot of truthiness. Expect a high level of genuine truth.

PS I resolve to eat better and go to the gym more often in 2008. How about you?

I never trust any woman who lists Sixteen Candles as one of her favorite movies.

The most fundamental flaws with society today can all be traced back to 80’s teen movies, specifically the work of John Hughes. I hoped, when I moved to Hollywood, that I would someday get the opportunity to tell him so in person. I’ve been here a while and haven’t run into him yet, so I thought I would post it on a nice busy site and wait for him to find it while ego-searching.

The message of pretty much all John Hughes movies is that you should hate successful people, while coveting what they have and having the exact same sucky values that the people you hate have. If you hate someone, why would you aspire to be like them? I understand that sometimes one can take a wrong turn in life, but who actually wants to become something they themselves hate?

Let’s start with The Breakfast Club. Although Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful are so much worse, I’m going to try to go with chronology. The basic conceit of Breakfast Club, for those fortunate enough not to have seen it, is to place a group of dissimilar and unrealistically stereotyped students in a room where they are not allowed to leave and see how it all turns out. The results are an implausible and thoroughly unjoyous exersize in unhelpful group therapy. Anthony Michael Hall’s character blubbers and actually gets sympathy from fellow high school students trapped in detention with him. Molly Ringwald’s character takes the poetic and sexy character played by (much hotter) Ally Sheedy and gives her a makeover that would qualify her to play the ugly friend. You know how lots of pretty girls like to have an ugly friend to go places with them, prop up their low self-esteem, and cock block as needed? Yeah, like that. Emilio Estevez (who is great in every other movie role) did Breakfast Club fresh off the classic, brilliant, unconventional flick Repo Man, which is still one of my favorite movies to this day. Estevez is supposed to be the jock with, if memory serves, a violent abusive father (although that might have been Judd Nelson with the psycho dad) and it only takes one day in a room with losers for him to pour out his heart that he is suffering and not all that. Judd Nelson is not even hot as the long-haired stoner who Molly Ringwald makes out (totally unerotically) with. I have now saved you all from the miserable fate of having to actually watch Breakfast Club to find out what it was all about, except for the ending. At the end, these five totally different people with totally separate social lives, who are supposedly high school students, agree that the day is not a beautiful and transcendant moment, but rather a complete change in all their lives. Yeah. That makes sense. Just misbehave on the same day the prom queen has detention and you will totally get to be her boyfriend. Does anyone actually identify solidly as Prom Queen, Jock, Stoner, Geek, or Psycho, with a capital letter, in high school? I know I didn’t, although I sure spent a while trying to determine which I’d been, after I saw John Hughes movies. (I saw them quite some time after they came out.)

Sixteen Candles is really really nauseating, but easier to summarize. Molly Ringwald plays the dorky unpopular girl in this movie. There is this guy Molly Ringwald’s character likes. But the problem is that her crush has a popular girlfriend. Only you are supposed to hate the popular boy’s girlfriend because she is pretty and she knows it and she cares about social status and that her boyfriend is good-looking and from a family which is financially well-off and she expects her boyfriend to pay attention to her and treat her with respect. The upshot of this is that the loser girl blows off someone who is hot for her but not popular, and goes after the popular boy, even though he has a girlfriend. The girlfriend ends up getting her hair cut off by a drunk person because her fickle boyfriend isn’t there to take care of her. So this pouting little girl, who resents her own sister getting attention for her wedding and who has spent the whole movie expecting the world to stop turning on its axis because it is her birthday, well, she steals the other girl’s boyfriend and you are supposed to cheer for her. Maybe because it was supposed to be a longshot for her to get him? Even though she looks like Molly Ringwald. Underdog or not, however, the unpopular girl still has the exact same terrible values as the popular girl. She doesn’t know the dream guy’s soul. She also cares about social status and that her crush is good-looking and from a family which is financially well-off. Shallow-a-rama. There is also some racist humor sprinkled through the movie. Ew.

Pretty in Pink is also dismal and equally easy to summarize. Molly Ringwald plays the funky unpopular girl in this movie. There is this guy Molly Ringwald’s character likes, but he is rich and popular. The upshot of this is that the loser girl blows off her really cool and supportive friends, one of whom has been into her forever (played by a very appealing Jon Cryer), and goes after the popular boy. I don’t remember if he has a girlfriend already, but he probably did. They all did.

I don’t remember the distasteful Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that well, other than that the normally charming Matthew Broderick plays a guy who is totally horrible to his friends and destroys his friend’s father’s Ferrari. This is supposed to be good because in John Hughes Teen World, anyone who has something – girlfriend, boyfriend, car, etc. – deserves to lose it.

This discussion would not be complete without eviscerating Some Kind of Wonderful. Eric Stoltz plays a boy with artistic inclinations and a desire to . . . wait for it . . . get with the good-looking popular girl. So he does what any intelligent person would do and takes his college tuition money and spends it on renting the Hollywood Bowl and buying a set of diamond earrings and assorted other sundries intended to impress the popular girl played by a very young and cute Lea Thompson. (Molly Ringwald turned down the gig, apparently much to the enragement of one John Hughes.) Mary Stuart Masterson plays the tomboy best friend of Eric Stoltz’s character. There is a twist in this John Hughes movie because the popular girl is not actually rich, although her boyfriend is. So the upshot of all this is that Lea Thompson’s character shoots the boy down and gives him back the diamond earrings his tomboy friend helped him pick out. So now he can go to college, right? Wrong. Now he gives the earrings to his best friend and it turns out she is shallow and materialistic and was hoping to get them for herself the whole time she was shopping with him and pretending to be a good friend. The movie closes with them walking off together into the night and Eric Stoltz ‘s character telling Mary Stuart Masterson’s that she is wearing his future. Hello? If this girl is the one with good values who doesn’t just care about money and social status, then surely she would want the man she loves to be able to get an education and enrich his mind, more than she would want diamond earrings? Apparently not.

Oddly, I just popped over to IMDB and, while I’ve mentioned the teen movies people generally associate with John Hughes, he also wrote and directed Weird Science which is a much more light-hearted flick where the characters are much nicer to one another. Go figure.

People often speak reverently of John Hughes, of how much he had his finger on the pulse of the 80’s. I think that gives him both too little credit and too much. I don’t believe people were really the way he presented them, venal and shallow and differentiated only by haves and have-nots. However, the appalling values of his most popular teen movies now afflict us as a culture because they were so influential on young minds. So a lot of people now feel like it is normal and just behavior for a have-not to complain that a have is materialistic and lacking in depth, yet these same people are materialistic and lacking in depth.

In case y’all were wondering, I don’t think people should be forced to feel bad for being successful, but I also can’t stand shallow people who are always trying to check out someone else’s wallet. Don’t covet what your neighbor has. Grow some self-esteem and work on both who you are as a person and more tangible success. And, Mr. Hughes, I hope you’ve made enough moola by now to stop envying the boys with the nice cars who can get the pretty girls.

So, I’ve told my web pals and reminded those with us since the print days about why I like eclectic content.

But there is a dark side to this approach when the internet is thrown into the mix and it knocks me totally off-kilter on what sorts of information to select to share with you all. The net is overwhelming.

There are so many people. So many of them probably have cool and interesting and good aspects to them. But there are only so many hours in the day. Once you have done your work, your art, and your laundry, how much time can you truly devote to getting to know other people in a meaningful and genuine way?

There are so many sites. The smallest micro-niche of an interest probably has a site devoted to it. Want a site with photos of women who are both goth punk-looking and wearing rubber? Got one.

So, if you have broad interests and a true curiosity about the world around you, the options quickly prove boggling and paralyzing. I used to feel like it was possible for me to be aware of, and have an opinion on, every goth-industrial music act around. But, now that there are bands across the globe with MP3s on MySpace and thousands of other sites, I don’t feel like I could even sift through just that one genre.

Over the course of the past week, I got tons of cool and creatively-satisfying work done and went out on the town and had some fun as well. I also meant to go to a big fashion convention with Forrest Black and Blue Blood hottie junk princess this past weekend, but I just kinda spaced on it. The weekend before, I wanted to go to a big science fiction convention, partly because my pal (and Blue Blood writer) Thomas S. Roche from Eros Zine was in town to go, and partly because I feel like I could really explore West Coast fandom much more.

So the multifarious nature of my interests leaves me feeling always left out and off-track. I think this is kind of a normal way for people like me to feel. If you are not a narrow person, pretty basic exploration of the world around you quickly becomes crushingly too much.

Which brings me to my point. It is difficult for me, as an editor, to determine how to best serve you all on BlueBlood.net. With the hundreds of thousands of you who visit this site every month, I feel like I ought to have more to say. I feel like I ought to be publishing a whole lot of like-minded authors again too.

Not that I don’t have a lot to express. But I’ve always written and edited for an audience in the past. Even with the very first issue of Blue Blood in print, when I wasn’t sure how many people with much in common with me were out there, I was still selecting what to share with the audience based on who I hoped was out there. Even, when I was in college, and founded a sex-positive feminist adventure magazine, I knew the audience was going to include some pissed-off people, but I kept them in mind when editing the publication.

So, anyway, I feel a little lost in the cacaphony of the web. If you are like me and have moved through many subcultures and areas of interest in your quest for self-actualization, then I bet you feel a little drowned as well. If you’ve got subjects you’d like to see covered more on BlueBlood.net, I’d love for you to post suggestions here or send me a message or submit your own articles on what you feel would be of interest to everyone here.

At the end of the day, for better or worse, I still think of myself first and foremost as a writer. Sometimes, between spending so much time online and living in glittering bookless Hollywood, I forget. But I always come back to it. So expect to see a lot more of my words in the near future. And, if you feel like the subject matter is too eclectic and you need to get your mind opened up a bit more, you can always head on over to BlueBlood.com for high quality erotic art photography and other sexy stuff.

I had a master plan when I included an eclectic mix of articles and other content in Blue Blood in print.

Some people pick out their persona like flash art off a tattoo shop wall. Blue Blood is for people who construct themselves out of a myriad of sources, always seeking to get closer to the core of their true selves. There are people who decide to “be goth” for example, and they will then attempt to only do and like and wear and say “goth” things. To me, there is nothing less conformist about that, than someone who wants to be an investment banker, and attempts to only do and like and wear and say “country club” things. The only difference is that the investment banker probably at least gets paid for his or her conformity.

I created Blue Blood to reach out to all the other people, like myself, who passed through multiple subcultures, who took that little bit from each which spoke to them, that little bit which fit their insides. I often took flack for my offbeat constellation of interests. At the time, I had thought I was more alone than perhaps I was. From the outpouring of letters to Blue Blood, I found that I had kindred spirits all over the world. There were so many people who had thought they were the only ones into both bondage and RPGs, rap and industrial music, tattoos and science fiction, or whatever their personal mix was. The key to Blue Blood was that they picked that mix based on genuine personal taste and not just trying to be cool or fit in.

Now, of course, Blue Blood featured both erotic pictorials and erotic fiction by big name genre authors. This is where the master plan part comes in, in terms of being able to publish articles on such a range of subjects and give them a common thread.

You know when you are first going out with someone. And you are intrigued and excited and want to figure them out. You will listen to a band they like with a much more open mind than you might normally have. You will give something new a fair tryout.

Because I knew people were likely to feel some of that kind of romantic and sensual excitement paging through an issue of Blue Blood, I was able to take that opportunity to show readers quality and enjoyable bits and pieces of many worlds. The open-minded state of arousal could allow for a certain kind of cross-pollination which could not have thrived otherwise.