(By the way, NSFW unless you work in my office.)

The In The Flesh Reading Series is hosted and curated by the fabulous writer and editor Rachel Kramer Bussel. It is a New York event, held the third Thursday of every month and features authors, of work ranging from erotic poetry to “down and dirty smut”, reading their work.

The upcoming event is on October 18th, 2007 at The Happy Ending Lounge. This is going to be Virgin Night and will include first time readers at the series and, hopefully, first time audience members. There will be fifty giveaways of first time reader Colette Gale’s debut novel Unmasqued: An Erotic Novel of the Phantom of the Opera. Gale’s book is, as you can probably surmise from the title, an extra erotic retelling of the story of the Phantom of the Opera.

The giveaways are due to the largess of the New American Library. NAL is a division of Penguin Group which publishes over four hundred books a year. NAL was more of less founded in 1948, spun off from the British parent that year anyway. NAL started off publishing work like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly’s Lover, so they are strong in the literary-yet-naughty department.

In addition to NAL author Colette Gale, first time readers for the upcoming In The Flesh night are scheduled to include Jasmine Clemente, Jane Lockwood, Sean Manseau, Robert W. Cabell, and Steven Padnick. The most recently past event included readings from Andrew Boyd (different Andrew Boyd from the one from BLT and Scurvy Dogs, Polly Frost, Marie Lyn Bernard, Todd Levin, Jessica Cutler, and of course the curator herself.

Due to the wonders of modern technology and YouTube, we kicked off here with the most recent reading by Rachel Kramer Bussel and I’m going to leave you all for now with the readings by Samara O’Shea and Todd Levin. None of us may ever need to leave the house again.

I only met Rozz Williams once.

A bunch of the Blue Blood crew were in Los Angeles, celebrating the release of Blue Blood #5. That was the first full color issue of the magazine. I’d used a comic book printer who did high quality art repro and had no problem printing depictions of nude women. Heck, they actually also printed tons of publications involving sexualized eviscerations of women. (Yes, we were doing cross-promo with Glenn Danzig’s extreme Verotik at the time and he used the same printer.)

But the printer had had some concerns about Blue Blood’s content. First, they were very concerned that there was bestiality. I was like, WTF? They are holding up printing my magazine because they are concerned about the bestiality? Where do they think I have bestiality? Then I realized that I had written a fiction piece about the drummer in a dykey industrial band who gets with a werewolf. I was proud of the story and it was illustrated with elegant photographs by the famous Gunter Blum. I was thrilled that someone as huge as Gunter Blum wanted to be in Blue Blood. I really didn’t want to remove the werewolf piece and I really wanted to get my magazine printed. So I call the printer ready to do battle.

It turned out that the werewolf erotic fiction was not the problem at all. NOFX had sent Blue Blood a blow-up sheep. At the time, NOFX was unpopular with a lot of music journalists because they didn’t like to do interviews. I thought sending me a Love Ewe (get it?) was a billion times cooler than any interview could be, so I thought they were totally cool. Forrest Black shot me using a strap-on on the NOFX Love Ewe and we ran a picture of it, as part of a piece on NOFX, in Blue Blood’s bits and pieces entertainment section. Just looking at the film, the printer had thought this was actual bestiality. After the magazine was printed and shipped, the printer told me they were very concerned that I had male nudity in the magazine. That was undeniable and not about to change, so I only printed one issue there.

The issue came out, despite the printer’s reservations, and it looked great. So the Blue Blood crew headed out to Los Angeles to celebrate. On Rozz Williams night at the Probe on Highland in Hollywood, California, we were all feeling really good about having gotten the magazine hot off the presses, against so many obstacles. We were meeting so many interesting new people. We were thrilled to be among our own, among people who wouldn’t be pussies about something as funny as fucking what was essentially a punk rock balloon animal.

I went over to where Rozz Williams was holding court and gave him a copy of the new issue. He was shy and sweet. He thanked me. He told me he had enjoyed the earlier issues and did not have this one yet. Maybe he was just being polite, but the thing which sticks in my mind is that he took a moment to be kind. But, when I walked around the club, there were all these people saying the most terrible things about Rozz Williams. I don’t mean they were criticizing him for being a little too into Charles Manson and Jeffrey Dahmer or something. I mean, people were just tearing the man down, saying he was past it, he was old, he looked ugly, his music didn’t matter, and on and on.

In point of fact, as an unbiased visitor from out of town, I feel qualified to say that Rozz Williams looked ethereally beautiful. I don’t recall what he was wearing. My attention was drawn to his face and the encounter was brief, but his makeup was deft and creative for a man to be wearing. He looked timeless, not old. His music had made a difference to a large percentage of the people in the room. Even to people who were not big fans of Christian Death or Shadow Project, Rozz Williams was an important creative driving force in the West Coast deathrock scene and his influence helped launch so many bands and so many cool creative people.

Fast forward a few years. Rozz Williams has committed suicide. Nightclubs in Los Angeles throw mournfests for him and they get good turnout. People speak his name reverently, they press fist to chest and say, “mi hermano.” I’m probably spelling the Spanish incorrectly, but you get the idea. (They might not be pronouncing the Spanish either.) I remembered the crush of people running Rozz Williams down. Although the Probe was one of the biggest nightclubs I had ever been to and they thought the man was worth throwing a night for, while he was still alive, most of their patrons couldn’t support someone who’d made such a difference . . . not while he was still drawing breath.

People often ask me to pin down precisely who Blue Blood is for. Gothic, body modification, deathrock, punk, fandom, glam, rivethead, ad infinitum. Really, Blue Blood is for people who have moved through a lot of subcultures. For people who have that maverick something different. Who feel a certain attraction in a lot of those scenes, but who do not feel wholly satisfied in any particular one. Blue Blood is for people who enjoy exploring and experiencing the creative fringes, and the cultures which thrive there, but don’t want to cram themselves into some cookie-cutter mold.

In the deathrock scene, it is rare that the people who have accomplished a lot get very much credit for it. The thing which made me think of Rozz Williams was noting that a link to BlueBlood.net was removed from Wikipedia’s woefully incomplete and slanted entry on deathrock. Someone had complained that Blue Blood was porn and thus did not belong. First of all, if deathrock is supposed to be for gothic folks with balls, what is anyone doing whining about smut practically designed for them personally? The multitalented Jeremy Meza’s late lamented deathrock mag Ghastly described Blue Blood as “It’s the one you’ve been waiting for! Death rock porn! Punk smut!” (For years, I used to run that quote with an ellipses in place of the word porn because I am troubled by the semantics, but that is a subject for another article.) Secondly, BlueBlood.com is where the naughty pictures are. BlueBlood.net is where we run lots of free articles and free forums and free promo tools for the scene. Blue Blood magazine in print had both deathrock music press and erotic photo sets in the same place. Glad I could clear that up for anyone that all was not patently obvious to. A bizarre percentage of the Wikipedia entry is on the Long Beach club Release the Bats. Blue Blood were huge early boosters of that club night. We shot tons of photos there. At great personal cost, I might add, as we were using film. We hyped Release the Bats both online and in print. Release the Bats was kind enough to host the re-launch of BlueBlood.net party. Whether someone thinks Blue Blood is the best thing to happen to deathrock since Sex Gang Children and 45 Grave or not, the deathrock connection is undeniable. At some point, perhaps I may attempt to list all of the luminaries, of the deathrock world, Blue Blood has done something with. I’ll include Jeremy Meza and Ghastly, although neither is mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for deathrock. Viva Britannica.

There are a lot of appealing things about the deathrock scene. I love a non-wussified gothic look with yummy torn fishnet and leather and Alien Sex Fiend has smacked me from the stage with an obscene balloon. (Recurring motif. I guess there is something about me which makes bands want to press lewd balloons against my flesh.) The appeal of deathrock is why so many of us have spent time figuring out the hair products needed to create a devil lock or ordering expensive import CDs. But the problem with that scene, like many others which remain subculture, is that the nail which sticks out gets hammered down.

Blue Blood is for the nails which stick out.

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.