Vampire Diaries is most likely the single worst program I have ever watched an entire episode of. No close second place.

Longtime Blue Blood readers are probably aware that I find vampire legends so compelling that I wrote my thesis on how they function as a paradigm for human sexuality. You are probably also aware that I thought Twilight was great. I have no objection to either love or wholesomeness and most of the people who hate Twilight soooooooo much haven’t seen it. So the pain in my temples produced by watching Vampire Diaries had nothing to do with any problem with vampires being teen fare or not being sufficiently horror genre or anything like that.

Vampire Diaries sucks because, first of all, all the characters read too old to be in high school. It is impossible to keep track from casting, styling, or acting which characters are supposed to be younger or older than one another. They are all extremely poised, perfectly coiffed, and apparently have no parental supervision or annoyance of any kind. Their main hangout looks like a bar. The female characters all approach sex like aging cougar divorcees or at least very very very jaded twenty-somethings.

When I was in high school, not only did I run with a fast crowd, but most of us had diplomatic immunity and knew that there would be no legal consequences for our actions. Although I found Twilight’s approach to relationships refreshingly positive, I have no objection to teens drinking, drugging, and having either fabulous or poorly-managed sex in literature, but I prefer it be a bit, ya know, plausible. I was, in point of fact, legal to drink in most of the countries I lived in during high school and my friends’ favorite hangouts actually were bars. But, for a teen show, set in the United States, the main teen hangout should probably have set design which looks more like a Denny’s and less like a liquor establishment or, if it is a bar, that needs to be explained.

Adding to the weird anachronism of Vampire Diaries are the pop culture references. The most painful one is when one of the cougar teens tells another that her ex is clearly pining for her because he is acting cool on the outside (he’s not), but you just know he is continuously listening to Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. How hard would it have been to come up with something vaguely contemporary? I mean, I know Vampire Diaries is based on books from the 1990’s, but, for slightly past sappy lovesick music, surely the CW could have hired a writer who had heard of say Dashboard Confessional or Bright Eyes. I consulted the internet and Air Supply’s Greatest Hits came out in 1983. I’d like to say this is before any of the actors on Vampire Diaries were born, but some of them are really old to be playing teens. It is, however, obviously before any of the teen characters were supposed to have been born.

Paul Wesley, the male vampire romantic lead Stefan Salvatore, who was indeed born before Air Supply’s Greatest Hits was released, looks oddly like a misshapen Robert Pattinson, who played the male vampire romantic lead Edward Cullen in Twilight. He was obviously cast for the comparison, but the gambit doesn’t really work. He is a nice-looking guy and only looks deformed because of the context making it feel like he should look like someone else. He is also kind of beefy to make a convincing vampire. Or a convincing teenager for that matter. In all fairness, Vampire Diaries is based on books by L. J. Smith which predate the Stephanie Meyers Twilight Saga, so the execs at the CW could have chosen to riff less directly on Twilight.

The special effects are pretty hokey too, although more convincing than the teenaged status of any of the actors.

Full disclosure: Vampire Diaries advertised with a number of sites I work on. I probably watched the pilot in its entirety because of this and I definitely postponed mentioning its suckage until now out of deference to an advertiser.

I did think the posters and ad creative were really sexy though. There are still some big billboards up in Hollywood with some sexy photography and graphic design on them. So they have that and trending on Twitter every Thursday going for them.

I went to a fashion show soiree last night. My friend writer/gadfly Clint Catalyst organized the event for designer Jared Gold. Clint and I are both eclectic individuals and we have kind of a lot of random points of intersection. And we’ve both been doing what we do for a while.

So the most unsettling part of the shindig was trying to place who people were. This is difficult when a person could be someone I photographed nine years ago and haven’t seen in between. Or the person could be someone who did my hair once. Or the person could be someone I’ve only seen in media. There is always a risk when greeting someone on dim non-specific facial-recognition alone because they could turn out to be someone you’ve only watched on television or MySpace or someone you would shoot (not with a camera) if you had a license to kill. But a significant portion of folks there are people I know and like but may not have seen recently. So it was like a real life wetware version of one of those aging programs they use to find missing children.

One person at the event I saw and could not place was artist/designer Elizabeth McGrath. I attended her Broken Dolls fashion show in like 2002 or 2003 and featured it in our SWAG project. But I’d seen her in sort of business mode and not in-person in the intervening years (I think.) Clint Catalyst re-introed us and, when I said her hair was different now, she laughed and pointed out that she was wearing five or six hairpieces stacked up on top of one another. Normally, I don’t like wigs, but what Liz McGrath was wearing was much more complicated and high-end than a plain wig and she looked fabulous and she probably designed it herself like the spiffy In the Year of the Pig Fish piece pictured above.

At any rate, we’ll have video coverage of the actual fashion show posted some time soon. Forrest Black and I had front row seats (three sets of them actually as they kept redoing the seating chart), so you’ll get to see it all. We ended up next to World of Wonder’s Thairin Smothers, cool Party Monster author (and snappy dresser, even if he had to go with his second choice outfit) James St. James, and Danny Franzese who has curated at the Royal/T gallery which I’ve been meaning to check out, so our final seats ended up being more entertaining than our starting ones, even if Thairin and I had to be very cozy. I say you’ll get to see it all, but I admit that we’ll have to cut a lot of boobage. I never get why people make a big thing over something being about fashion and then have totally not street-legal outfits that a lot of venues can’t even run pictures of. Maybe it is just because I will absolutely wear outlandish couture that I think runway looks are supposed to be wearable.

My questions for the day are twofold. First, would you be comfortable strutting down a catwalk (outside of a strip club) topless? Second, how do you handle it when you see someone you recognize but can’t immediately identify?

I feel like I know a surprisingly large number of people who claim to be afraid of clowns. I think some folks I know only get uneasy if they go to the circus or something and some get full-on nightmares about being chased by axe-wielding harlequins or crushed to death in a small fuel-efficient vehicle with too many clowns inside. Coulrophobia is the technical term for extreme fear of clowns (in case you were looking for a vocab word of the day.)

Of course, by corollary, if there is something which makes some people crazy, I will also know people who love that thing largely because of the maddening impact on others. So I know a surprisingly large number of people who claim to be turned on by clowns. The extremely fabulous sex educator Dr. Ducky DooLittle even has a Knockers the Clown performance art character she does and I admit just last week I came across film proving I once bought a cake for the sole purpose of seeing Ducky stick her ass in it (a la pudding on MTV’s The State.) Entertaining though Ducky’s performances all are, I can’t say I am kinked for clowns.

People often take their children to circuses where there are clowns or invite clowns to perform at kids’ parties. Sad clown makeup used to trouble me, but it did not frighten me. I never found clowns remotely funny or scary as a child. I was going to say most physical humor misses me, but I find comedians like Steve Martin and Chevy Chase hilarious and there is a certain amount of physicality to what they do. So I guess I am just kind of unmoved by clowns specifically.

So I was looking at this half naked photo series of model Apnea for Apneatic and Deviant Nation which featured clown makeup and balloons and other tropes of soubrette clowning and it brought the vital question to mind: Are clowns scary or sexy or are they sexy because they are scary?

The Kelburn Castle and Estate fully opens to the public on Easter and maintains regular hours from Easter until November second. Although Kelburn Castle has many historical and architectural features of interest, the aspect people tend to find most notable is the graffiti-covered portion.

A couple of years ago, it was determined that parts of the concrete rendering were probably going to need to be replaced in the relatively near future. Concrete rendering or plastering is the surface placed on the outside of stone or brick walls for a combination of weatherproofing and texture. In this case the harling or pebbledash was applied to the walls primarily because soft sandstone requires careful weatherproofing to last. David and Alice Boyle, the children of the tenth and current Earl of Glasgow, thought it might be fun to use upcoming renovations as an opportunity to have famous graffiti artists paint a portion of the castle.

So the family commissioned a team of Brazilian painters called Nina and Nunca and the duo Os Gemeos or, translated from Portuguese, The Twins, who are known for their yellow figures and ability to garner establishment regard for what some might view as vandalism. This team of four graffiti artists were invited to do their thang on a castle wall legally, instead of guerrilla style. MTV competition-winning audiovisual artist and music festival scenester luminary Elliot Thomson of Preamptive and the multi-pronged artist group the Novak Collective produced a time lapse video of The Graffiti Project. The project was undertaken in residence and completed in early summer 2007, but, despite the fine reputations of all the artists involved, a debate still goes on over whether this was a desecration of a beautiful historical landmark or pretty much the coolest thing ever.

I don’t think I can think of any dwelling I would get more of a kick out of than a castle fortress with beautiful colorful graffiti painting on it. How often does one get to like something for both hipster and medieval reasons at the same time?

It probably comes as no surprise then that I think the graffiti art is a cool idea. I also think it is in keeping with how such fortresses tend to be extended in different styles over time. Lord Glasgow states:

“Kelburn Castle, unlike most grand houses in Scotland was not planned by an eminent architect like Adams or Lorrimer. It simply evolved over a period of some 700 years. As the family became richer or more important, it grew organically. Over the years, various Earls of Glasgow, or more probably their wives, changed sitting rooms into bedrooms, partitioned rooms to make extra corridors, altered staircases, raised the level of floors and ceilings, mover kitchens from one end of the house to the other and changed the front door from the north to the south side of the house and then back to the north again. The result is that Kelburn is an eccentric half castle, half-house, constantly in use and still very much lived-in.”

Some of the concept of painting part of the castle was consciously to unite urban art and rural canvas. Looking at the history, though, the whole thing is very much in keeping with the origins of the estate. It is always odd for Americans, with our comparatively brief national history, but the Europeans really track where things come from for centuries, although there are always those who contend that some of European genealogy and history is at best excessive in detail.

At any rate, Kelburn began as a Norman Keep when the de Boyville family, who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066, moved to Ayrshire in 1140. It is estimated that the Norman Keep edition of the building on the Kelburn Estate was completed by 1200ish. Some time in the following centuries, the de Boyvilles evolved their family name to Boyle, which lead to cultural confusion over whether that was a proper Scottish noble name or an Irish name. Because Europeans care about such matters, the Boyles, despite their seven or eight hundred-year-old estate and titles, are often left off various lists due to their lack of an official tartan and a suspiciously Irish-sounding name. Technically, their name is Norman invader and many families have invented official tartans to get in on the whole uniforms and team colors culture. From an American perspective, I’ve spent time in Scotland and I’m probably more educated than the average American and I probably could not differentiate between Scotland and Ireland on a map with a vintage traditional broadsword to my head. Whether or not the threatening broadsword had creative graffiti on it.

In 1581, a more impressive castle was built around the original stone structure. During the following century, the Boyles got very paid in shipping and shipbuilding and, ahem stamping out smuggling in service of Customs & Excise. The Boyle family was rewarded for their public service in 1703 with the title of Earl. When he received his title, the first Earl of Glasgow had recently completed construction on Kelburn House, a mansion built to address the difficulty of castles being considered unfashionable at the time. If the first Earl was so concerned about what people might think, he is probably turning over in his grave over the idea of graffiti adorning Kelburn Castle, but it really is in keeping with updating with the times the same way he did. In the 1800’s, the fifth and sixth Earl of Glasgow caused the size of the Kelburn Estate to dwindle, the fifth through a fabulous fashionable gambler scenester lifestyle and the sixth through endowing churches. In between being seen at all the best parties and religious events, they did manage to put a Victorian wing around one of the 1581 towers.

In 1977, the current and tenth Earl of Glasgow and his wife Isabel were culturally generous enough to open the grounds and buildings of their family home, of many generations, as a park and museum for part of every year. You can now visit the incredibly beautiful and storied Kelburn Estate from Easter through November second.

Interscope recording artist Lady Gaga is an entertaining answer to the reams of pseudo-indie forgettable hipsters who put so much effort into looking like they are not trying at all. When a ballet dancer makes a pirouette look effortless, that is impressive. When a band backed by a mega-corporation makes it look effortless to get beamed into millions of households while being a humble dork in a Cheeto-stained ironic T-shirt, that is just stupid fake.

Lady Gaga is not afraid to look like she put some effort in when she got dressed today. She appears to come out of the same New York city nightlife culture which first gave birth to Madonna. MTV bleeps the word “muffin” when Lady Gaga touches her genital region in the “Poker Face” video, but Fuse TV leaves it in. Make of that what you will. Watching the “Poker Face” video makes me feel like it might be coming around to time for it to be fun to get dressed up to go out again. I appreciate an artist who can un-ironically perform with jewelry glued to her face, while somehow seeming like she includes her audience. A Britney Spears will get dressed up, but one always has the sense that she is from some other planet and she is there to perform and not to really get anyone else’s ass down on the dance floor. Lady Gaga makes you want to show what you got. At the very least, “Poker Face” is some lovely eye candy directed by the brilliant Ray Kay and produced by Jill Hardin. Lady Gaga and songwriters Nadir Khayat collaborated on the songs adorable lyrics.

I wanna roll with him a hard pair we will be
A little gambling is fun, when you’re with me (I love it)
Russian Roulette is not the same without a gun
And baby when it’s love, if it’s not rough, it isn’t fun

The song is about strutting your stuff in a sexy way, while not revealing whether you are sexually available or not. Remember, I loathe puns, but I make an exception for the sex and porn puns. Especially if they have fabulous style.

Forrest Black’s LiveJournal friend GloomCookie has the best streaming cam on the web. It features 24/7 live streaming video of six Shiba Inu puppies. This is what the internet was invented for. At least, this is what the internet should have been invented for. Right now, while I’m watching, someone (presumably GloomCookie) is playing with the puppies and they are all trying to get into her lap at the same time. It’s pretty much the most pleasant and adorable thing I’ve come across all day. Not that I’ve had a total cakewalk of a day, but still. These cute little doggies even have adorable cute plush toys.

There are three female pups named Autumn, Ayumi, and Amaya. There are three boys named Aki, Akoni, and Ando. I don’t know if Ando is a common A alliterative name for Shiba Inu dogs or if GloomCookie is a big Heroes fan.

I got all my writing done for today and I got all the necessary photography formatted and posted to BlueBlood.com and wherever else it was due. Most importantly, I got to watch puppies! Now I feel refreshed and ready for a fabulous weekend night.