Posts tagged: costumes

Special occasion nights in Hollywood generally involve a lot of party-hopping. Sure, there are the people who have to get back in their car and go to the next event every twenty-six minutes because that is how long it takes for the last bump of cocaine to wear off. But it really does make sense to hit as many shindigs as possible in an evening. First of all, Los Angeles is such a vibrant city with so much going on at once, at any given time, especially on a holiday like Halloween. I know I don’t want to miss a thing. The hardest thing about going out at night in Los Angeles is blow-drying my hair. And the whole having to wear pants when outside of the house thing. Once I’m not naked and I’m wearing eyeliner, I feel like I might as well get full value out of having gotten dressed and a lot of my fellow Angelenos feel the same way.

Los Angeles tends to have a dress code where it is important to look good but not to look like you tried too hard. This means club-goers do not dress up as much here as I might enjoy. Happily, when it comes to any special event like Halloween, the dress-down rule goes out the window and everyone is encouraged to really do it up.

For this past Halloween, Blue Blood sponsored a whole lot of parties, in a whole lot of cities, in addition to doing a full on media sponsorship arrangement with the Hex Halloween event in Hollywood. My old housemates Perish and Eden Muse (pictured above and in our Halloween picture galleries), were the flyer models and Perish’s costume concept was to embody the future. “For …

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I’m not generally a fan of anything which uses the expression “white trash” because I’ve lived in the American South. Pig ignorant people there will generally excuse racist nonsense by explaining that they also have issues with “white trash” like being bigoted on the basis of class, as well as race, is somehow more reasonable than being merely racist alone.

Due to the humorous intent of the occasion, I made an exception, however, for Miss Kitty’s White Trash Ball at Dragonfly this past weekend and, damn, but I had a good time. My homeboy Lange and I hit the Cat and Fiddle beforehand. Having been a fisherman in Alaska after art school (yes, like the TV show), Lange is not such a big fan of crab and raw fish, so I felt it was high time I chose a restaurant with cooked non-seafood items on the menu. The Cat and Fiddle is a music industry hang which bills itself as an English pub in Hollywood, although I am personally partial to the New Orleans fare like their uber-buttery crab fingers. In fact, I ate brussel sprouts and crab fingers and I was thinking that this would be a kinda healthy meal without the butter and Stella Artois. Kind of representative of Los Angeles really, something which looks healthy on the surface, but something just underneath which could probably kill you. Fun fact to know and share: Parts of Casablanca were filmed at the Cat and Fiddle location. When I first saw Casablanca as a teenager, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick was not pretty enough for my taste, but, these days, I have enough pretty in my world that I’m more impressed by force of personality and strength of …

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The following are the top three definitions of Halloween, as voted on by the users of Urban Dictionary:

”(1) An annual excuse for girls to dress like sluts and get away with it.

Girl 1: I’m going to be a ______ for Halloween.
Girl 2: What’s your costume look like?
Girl 1: I’m wearing my ______ underwear and _____ bra and heels.

(2) celebration where little kids dress up and get candy, teens dress up, get drunk, and go get candy, and adults dress up, get drunk, and give out candy, funny how things all work out.

im dressing up as a farmer for halloween. im so cool.

(3) the day that makes the other 364 worth living.”

For a lot of people Halloween is the one day out of the year that they can truly be themselves. It was always my favorite holiday and then one year it seemed like almost a let-down, like it wasn’t really any different from any other day. Which, in a way, meant that I guess I’d made the right life choices to get to be who I wanted to be all the time, but, since then, I try to pull out the stops when October rolls around, so it still feels special. Sometimes trying to pack so much into one short time period makes me melancholy and high strung around Halloween, but I generally end up feeling good about it, after all is said and done.

As usual, this year, Blue Blood is the media sponsor for a ton of events. The ones Forrest Black and I will be personally shooting at include the just passed Release the Bats Nine Year Anniversary and the upcoming Hex Hollywood Halloween 2007. You can see what we shot …

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All I have to say is, “woot!” Well, really I’m going to say a bit more, but my cell phone and email have been blowing up with pals who assume I am at the San Diego Comic Con. But I am not and I am quite pleased that I am not. We had a lot of fun last year and I didn’t want to criticize in advance because I didn’t want responsibility for people deciding not to go, but . . .

The cons I initially loved were these amazing (at least for my teenage self) events. Authors and artists I looked up to would share their wisdom on panels during the day and hang out and socialize at night. There were masquerade balls for really doing it up, but lots of people, myself very much included, would run around in crazy costumes all weekend. There was a sense of fun and community and I met tons of new people every time. Occasionally, a convention hotel would give me less than stellar service for wearing (hypothetically) nothing but pins with clever sayings on them over my nipples or not peace-bonding my weapon. But there was always a chick in a corset and elf ears or a guy in painted black leather with a mohawk to agree with me that the hotel was totally unreasonable. Friends of mine who worked con security may recollect slightly differently, but only slightly. The important thing was that the events were extremely social. There was always a dealers room with unusual hard-to-find (especially pre-internet) wares. Eventually, I acquired a lot of items I treasure from exhibitors and BLT and Blue Blood both exhibited at many of those conventions, so I don’t object …

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