The new issue of Marquis is hitting European newsstands now. This makes twenty-six or twenty-seven issues in a row of Marquis, the highest circulation glossy fetish magazine in the world, which have featured work by yours truly and Forrest Black. As you probably know, Forrest Black and I do the Big in America column. I write it and he and I shoot it.

For this issue, we featured Serena Toxicat, Nixon Sixx, Vampirabat, Eirik Aswang, and Antiseptic Fashion, and there are mentions of tons of cool pervy events and people including photographers, directors, painters, and designers. I first met author and pro-domme Serena Toxicat more than a decade ago when she slept in my living room, having come through my town as a new member of the gothic gypsy carnival which is the band Apocalypse Theatre. She has a book out now called Evangeline and the Drama Wheel, based largely on her travels and adventures with Apocalypse Theatre and partly on her personal passions and interests in sex magick. We’ve known the dangerously adventurous and itinerant Nixon Sixx since 2002 when she was living in New Orleans and Forrest Black and I were guest speakers at the ill-fated GothCon held there. We’ve had a lot of fun shooting in NOLA whatever events we came through for. Beautiful city which attracts beautiful people, but New Orleans is also a place I’m always glad to know I’ve got a plane ticket or car waiting to whisk me home. Forrest Black and I have only known Vampirabat since this past Fall, but I’m already thrilled with the images we’ve been able to create together. You can see a sneak peek in the NSFW comments on this article and expect to see sets of her posting soon to BlueBlood.com. We first met designer Eirik Aswang at the venerable Death Guild nightclub and, of course, everyone here knows the esteemed Antiseptic Fashion for both their fascinating clothing design and their threads about personal hygiene products which look like cum. It, err, comes to me now that perhaps I should have considered that before using the shower at their spacious San Francisco studio. Oh well, too late now.

The English edition of Marquis #44 will be crossing the Atlantic in a few weeks, so watch for it on American newsstands soon. NSFW preview after the jump.

Sean Abley is working on a series of interviews for a possible book project entitled People Who Are Cool. The theme is, as you might suspect, people Sean Abley knows who are cool. You can read the two part interview he did with yours truly online now here and here. It is a two parter because, as Sean says, we are a couple of chatty bitches. Seriously, it is very in-depth and his questions were really interesting and unusual and I answered a lot of stuff I don’t usually talk about in interviews. This is going to post to Dark Blue Films in approx six weeks, but you all get the inside-skinny on where to read it pre-publication.

Socket writer/director Sean Abley writes:

“Somehow Amelia G and I became blog friends about 8 years ago. I’m not really sure how that happened, and when we’ve discussed it, neither is she. But somehow one of us surfed into the other’s Live Journal account and friended same, and we’ve been reading each other’s stuff for years now.

When I first started reading her blog, I was immediately struck by the photographs she’d post, taken either by her or her collaborator, Forrest Black. These were semi- (or not so semi-) naked shots of Goth chicks with beautiful lighting, styling and makeup. As I say further down in my interview with her, “[She] took two things I have no interest in – Goth culture and naked girls – and photographed them so I can’t turn away.”

Soon I realized Amelia had a mini media empire based on this subject matter, the hub of which is (are) http://www.blueblood.com and http://www.blueblood.net. Start there and you’ll find yourself winding down internet corridors full of fetish photos, films, music and art. And none of it feels exclusionary. Less “Butt out, square!” and more “Hey, we’re awesome! Check us out!” I would encourage anyone reading this to do just that. Amelia and Forrest’s work is pro and punk at the same time, and never boring.

When I decided to interview Amelia, I did some research and found out she has a crazy interesting past, from living in a punk/goth group house in D.C. to moving in the industrial music scene, to founding a magazine . She is also the kind of feminist that I love, e.g. one that doesn’t think a naked girl is being suppressed just because she’s having her picture taken. She’s also a workaholic, as evidenced by the sheer number of projects, websites, and events she has to attend to in any one week.

Although we live mere blocks from each other in Hollywood, I conducted this interview via email, which probably lead to us be much more verbose that we would in person. (I hate transcribing, so I tend to keep it short in person).

How did the daughter of a diplomat and an attorney become the reigning Queen of Goth Erotica?

Please give a warm welcome to Amelia G!”

The interview kicks off with:

Sean Abley: I read that you’ve lived all over the world and the States. Army brat? What’s the scoop on your childhood?

Amelia G: When I got to college, it was my twelfth school in twelve years. My mother’s a diplomat. My father’s an attorney. Two of the schools I went to when I was fourteen to sixteen had a lot of army brats, so some of the experience is similar.

Funny, I moved around quite a bit as a kid, although it was mainly within the same town, Helena, MT, with one two-year chunk in Carbondale, IL. But even within the same town for a little kid it means changing schools and friends, so even now I hate moving.

I get wanderlust really easily, but, if I travel enough, then I don’t itch to move as much.

What subject were you awful at in school?

Even though I rode a purple three-speed bike everywhere in ninth and tenth grade and was very fit, I never got into gym. I especially loathed dodgeball. Only I would get picked pretty early. I think because I was great to have on a team because I hated getting hit by the ball so much that I would never get tagged out. This might seem like a good trait, except that I practiced the Golden Rule and did not wish to do unto others as I would not have them do unto me. So a dodgeball game could be this endless purgatory because I wouldn’t tag the other team out either.

I actually loved dodgeball because it was the one of two sports I was actually good at as a kid (the other being volleyball). I was very agile, and I think the opportunity to nail the popular jocks with those big, red, rubber balls imbued me with an unfailing eye and super human strength.

Those are good superpowers to have for playing dodgeball.

It seems like you really made your mark first in D.C. What were you doing in D.C.?

Living in a punk rock group house, throwing legendary parties, trying to be a writer, doing as many peculiar day jobs as possible, tying up unsuitable suitors in the back seat of a car which was a parting gift from my unsuitable college suitor, discovering ramen cuisine. I still think of ramen as the flavor of poverty.

I actually bought dollar’s worth of ramen . . .

( Read more )

So, I think Madonna is pretty awesome in general, but I’m vaguely baffled by her message to YouTube video. In it, she is supposedly vacuuming the set for her 4 Minutes video because apparently other people didn’t take care of it. Then she tells the world of YouTube good job on making tons of videos for her 4 Minutes single. To date, her thanks for making essentially fanfic versions of 4 Minutes video has received 3,175,135 views on YouTube.

The actual official Warner Bros video for Madonna’s 4 Minutes has only received 846,562 views. It opens with a little rap from Timbaland and most of the song is a duet and coordinated dance moves from Madonna and Justin Timberlake. Madonna and Justin Timberlake take off some of each other’s clothes during their choreography and, unlike Janet Jackson, I guarantee Madonna won’t apologize or pretend that her clothing flying off is a wardrobe malfunction.

A search on YouTube for +”4 minutes” +madonna yields 2,860 results, including both the fanfic (or whatever YouTube people call this sort of thing) vids and multiple copies of the official video and various video responses to the go ahead and make videos based on the video video. This sort of viral marketing is all very meta. Will encouraging people to do more of what they were going to do anyway work to Madonna’s benefit? Will it sell more of her music, raise her stock for endorsements, or otherwise make bank?

I don’t know the answer and I’m really interested in hearing what other people think about how this will work as a marketing effort. Do you enjoy fanfic videos? Regardless, you should watch the real official video because it’s fun candy and Madonna and Justin Timberlake dancing is way hotter than most porn.

And, to the desperate, sell-out assholes who will say that Madonna’s boots in the video mean fetish is crossing over to mainstream, I have a couple of things to say. First of all, why do you hate yourselves so much? What, besides self-loathing, could make someone put huge effort into being a fetish star while believing that being somehow mainstream would be preferable? Lastly, Madonna is successful, not mainstream. I’d be pleased to help anyone who thinks success=mainstream or mainstream=success in busting out a dictionary.

For those I need not whack with the legacy of Noah Webster and those more familiar with Justin Timberlake, I’d like to leave you with some vintage Madonna sex music video. Her Express Yourself video on the official Madonna channel has only received 6,440 views to date, so I thought y’all might feel like giving it a boost.

What if you threw a fetish party and nobody new came? The same rugged stalwarts from the last five years were present, sporting hardened and stained latex wardrobe, silicone lubricated, lipoed, botoxed expressionless and very drunk. BDSM and drugs/liquor don’t mix but its Hollywierd and the weirdo onlookers, unhappy married couples, and pervy old white dudes in black leather were all in attendance. At least there weren’t any melancholy hipsters or smelly hippies. Then again they know how to party and should have been there.

My editor sends me a mysterious online message about a job should I choose to accept to cover it, a fetish event in said Hollywierd, wedged between X-Mas and New Years. I opened the message on myspace on my nearly defunct once puzzling newfangled phone that will let me navigate online but only in something smaller than 8 pt. font. I ventured to the address via the Red Line at the Hollywood and Vine Station and I was really ready to see something interesting whether it be puke or piss.

The club was situated at The Henry Fonda Theatre and has been known to deny entrance to those that have been placed on the list before, but I was miraculously let in, and my bag barely inspected. I should have smuggled a flask. It was cold out. So I was wearing something odd, not latex, but one of my fav old drag queen outfits from someone that had a much bigger bust and ass than me, that I scored in a Silverlake thrift store. Twas pink satin, and about 8 sizes too big, but I pinned it to my leotard with safety pins and felt fabulous. Underneath my skirt I had two pairs of stockings, and leg warmers, and I was wearing a Blue Blood hoodie, 2 scarves and a cashmere overcoat. Fuck fetish, I had just got over a nasty cold few weeks prior and I was not looking to score.

Most of the fetish miscreants were there, just not many of the promised advertised ones. Some it seems, or most were skinny and lacquered a bit too tight with corsetry. God forbid someone should sneeze. I overheard one fake eyelashed missy hiss to the other, “wearing thisss feels like you are being squeezed by a nice long python.” I couldn’t eavesdrop much more since the carpeted stairs made it tough for me to get down in high heeled boots and I had work to do.

On the main floor Master Syrus applied long beautiful feather needles for a fantastic scalp piercing, and a bosom piercing. Some of the old crows watching were more glassy eyed than others, but when you are wearing 2K in latex couture everything else seems to pale in comparison. Sadly the Mistress of Ceremonies Masuimi Max, Mistress Aradia, and a slew of purported others were not seen during the time I was there, and I missed the performances by Midori and Kumi, although I did see Kumi in a white wig briefly.

Watching Mistress Genevieve 2.0 wait in line to get in was priceless: with brown hair, possibly meth fidgety and frozen overdrawn lipped smile in brown, opening and closing her phone, muttering where is she, jumping up and down in impatience like she had to pee, all of a sudden spins around and bluntly asked me why did I cut my hair. I looked her dead in the eye with bemusement, and said because I was tired of it, but secretly because I didn’t want to look like everyone else, especially her. I still have nightmares of getting my eyes nearly enucleated by her during the production of “Scuba Squirters 3.” Now I know better and I kept my distance from her talons while I waited in the short VIP line.

The fashion show highlighted the fashion of Syren and Stockroom in typical black/white combos. The best event was the two leather hooded chick bunnies with tits marked by black X marks, sparring away in boxing gloves and adorable mens boy shorts. One was in black the other in red. The dark bunny won in a lovely spray of red glitter.

This was nothing like the other great fetish venues such as Skin Two Rubber Ball in London, Fetish Evolution in Essen, or the Black and Blue Ball in NYC. This was the first year of the West Coast Fetish Ball and it was a cold day, so of course it was going to be sparse, and although the VIP area upstairs has a tent cover and kept things more warm, it was basically a total ripoff, charging ten bucks for a shot of booze was ridiculous and to laud it as such a big fetish venue with so few hardcore and featured performers around, I felt bad for anyone that shelled out good beer money for a total letdown.

Proving the power of going direct to the people, etailer and cataloguer Stockroom has been on a bit of an acquisition spree. A while back, Joel Tucker’s Stockroom joined forces with Syren, Andy Wilkes’ latex couturier. At the time, Syren was housed in a small space in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, an area known best for its good Jewish restaurants and photo and art supply stores. Stockroom has re-opened the Syren storefront in a large space in the Silverlake District of Los Angeles, an area known best for its young hipsters with trust funds and aging hipsters who might have given up on Hollywood ambitions but are still cool and craft-y. The new location for the combined Stockroom and Syren is 30,000 square feet. Customers enter the primarily fetish fashion retail area and can go upstairs to an area with a variety of BDSM gear and sex toys. There are print catalogs for people to take away which have a more complete selection of gear and toys. I hear that Silverlake may have some idiotic zoning ordinance which limits the selection of products which can actually be on disply, but I haven’t checked into the accuracy of this. The building also houses manufacturing, warehousing, business offices, and distribution for the company.

The grand opening of the new Syren store, in Stockroom’s new amalgamated location, drew a good-sized crowd. I ran into a bunch of people I hadn’t seen in ages, which was really cool. Luminaries in attendance included Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Blue Blood hottie Xochitl, photographer Jim Groves (who will be a Blue Blood photog once his pictures of Gia Primo post), rocker and adult film director Matt Zane, fetish model Ivy Blue, photographer Federico Zignani of Area 101, and many more.

Just in case no one picked this up from all the pinstripes and shotgun-themed photo sets on BlueBlood.com or the fact that I roll in a Lincoln Town Car:
Yes, I have a mobster fetish.

Triad Election is actually the second in a series of Hong Kong mobster from action director Johnnie To, but it is the first to be released stateside this month. It has been well-received on the festival circuit, partly for its perceived anti-commercial (or at least anti-big business) message, but the salient points of interest here are gangsters, issues of honor and competition, and lots of gunplay.

Trailer after the Read more » jump below.

It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.

I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?

Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.

It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to more vanilla smutsters, Los Angeles has seen tattooed hotties doing BDSM once or twice before. In point of fact, the club is essentially a tent erected by where the Coconut Teazer nightclub used to stand. So that very location has probably been host to more than its share of tattooed hotties with fetish gear over the years. The most ground-breaking aspect was probably that it is unusual for a movie to not screen at its own premiere.

Anyway, both the MPAA, which rates movies, and a variety of watchdog groups have objected to Captivity’s presentation well before they started planning a premiere. After Dark Films pulled thirty of their billboards from Los Angeles and more than fourteen hundred taxi cab adverts, the creative for which featured the slogan “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.” over very beautiful stylized photos of a very small portion of a scene involving a woman. I can’t emphasize enough how great the color scheme of those advertisements was. Meanwhile, the MPAA jerked the movie company around on when the film was even going to be rated. After Dark Films co-founder Courtney Solomon claims the MPAA rigmarole with Captivity is just about the MPAA maintaining their position of power. “They needed a whipping boy. They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.” The upshot of this was that a schedule May 18 release date became a July 13 release date. While releasing a horror flick on Friday the 13th is always nifty, any organization which can keep audiences away from a product is scary. And not scary in an entertaining way, scary in a bad way.

A quick history lesson: The Motion Picture Association of America was founded in 1922 as a trade association. Although the initial industry concerns it dealt with had more to do with copyright and contract standardization, over the years, it has become almost synonymous with the ratings system it devised. Many industries choose to police themselves, partly out of decency, and partly out of a desire to take care of it internally before outsiders do it for them. So the MPAA ratings board determines whether a movie will receive wide release as a PG flick or the financial death knell of an NC-17. Representatives of the six major studios sit on the board. These studios includes Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers.

Now, the opening weekend gross for Captivity was only a bit over a million bucks, which is pretty terrible for a major studio release and brought the movie in at a ranking of #12 for domestic releases that weekend. In all fairness, the flicks Captivity was beaten out by were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Ratatouille, Live Free or Die Hard, License to Wed, 1408, Evan Almighty, Knocked Up, Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Had the movie been able to open as planned, if the MPAA had not hung them up, then it might have been able to do better against the movies opening that weekend. Although a $1.4 mill opening is lackluster for any theatrical release, especially a heavily advertised one, had Captivity opened May 18 with the same total, it would have ranked #8. Then again, maybe it would have gotten its ass kicked by Shrek and Spider-Man, just like everybody else.

Part of the difficulty I have parsing out my feelings on the brouhaha is that it is difficult to figure out whether an After Dark Films release counts as a major motion picture or a plucky little guy trying to make it. Captivity is “co-released” by Lionsgate, but Lionsgate leaves all the responsibility for potentially problematic promo on After Dark’s doorstep. I’m not sure what “co-releasing” means exactly, but Lionsgate has a market capitalization of one point three five billion dollars and an estimated four hundred full time employees. Which I would not categorize as small or independent. I think it is important to note that the distro on a partner-produced movie like Captivity is a microscopic portion of the business of a behemoth like Lionsgate, which is responsible for very enjoyable and successful projects such as the Academy-award-nominated The Cooler and innovative DVD packaging and distribution for projects ranging from cutting edge fare like Weeds to cult classics like King of New York. Then again, if you inflicted the Care Bears movie on your kids, that is partly Lionsgate’s responsibility too.

According to the New York Times, Courtney Solomon, who put himself on the map by optioning Dungeons & Dragons and parlaying that into a much-lambasted directorial turn, “persuaded the director of Captivity, Roland Joffé, the much-honored filmmaker behind The Mission and The Killing Fields, to undertake reshoots. These added explicit torture, including a so-called “milkshake” scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it.” Both to the New York Times and in other media outlet, Solomon chortles about what a freakshow his premiere is going to be and how upset he hopes women’s groups get about his movie. The National Organization for Women said, on the record, that they were not going to protest to give him press.

So, having delved into the issues involved, here is my summary take on it. First, if After Dark Films is looking for a modern audience for their movies, it is a bit antiquated to act like BDSM and tattoos are outrageous fringe culture. I’m sick of this sort of marginalizing nonsense from people who would like to make a dollar off of my scene. Secondly, because of the major studio makeup of the MPAA, I feel it can’t really be objective. I like having ratings on things as a viewing guide, but I dislike the way the ratings system leads to unwarranted limitations on distribution and I particularly dislike the way the current rating system encourages violence against women in place of human sexuality. It will be a chilly day in Hellywood before I deliberately view torture porn like Captivity, but I don’t think a project like that should have its success determined by whether or not its producers can convince a half dozen really biased businesspeople that violence against women is appropriate viewing for teens. Thirdly, although I kind of liked the Captivity billboards, I was personally revolted by the Saw signage at the San Diego Comic Con and I think movie producers, and everyone really, should pay attention to what they put in an advertisement people will not be able to avoid. I do not want strangers telling me what I can see in my media. I deeply believe that that becomes a slippery slope to total destruction of the free speech rights granted to all Americans by the First Amendment, but I also do not want strangers forcing me, or forcing children, to see things they do not wish to see or should not see. This means that adverts, in public places, for potentially upsetting products, should be honest about what the products are, without ramming the product down the throats of the unwilling.

I admit that, although I loved Elisha Cuthbert’s performance and character in the surprisingly awesome The Girl Next Door, I loathed her Kim Bauer character she played on 24. I thought about kicking off this article with a joke about how I thought Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer should have just let her be kept captive and tortured. Heck, that was probably the inspiration for Captivity. For me to want to watch that, however, it would really have to be one of the dungeons on Fucking Machines, where the action is consensual and female pleasure might actually be involved too.

If you are in Hotlanta right now, you’d best be getting ready to strap it on tonight. Blue Blood board members have already seen some shots of Kellie and Scar (and Pika) getting geared up to party. There is a new fetish magazine in the U.S. called Buckle and they are throwing a shindig tonight.

I haven’t seen the magazine yet, so I can’t swear that it is great, but they’ve got some good people on board. Buckle’s first ish featured photographer Steve Diet Goedde. Blue Blood has shared exhibit space with Steve more than once and, more importantly, he was the first person (besides Forrest Black of course) to tell me that I really needed to set up a membership site. Steve’s advice has been terrific. Buckle’s second issue featured photographer Kelly Lind and his co-conspirator makeup artist Alex LaMarsh who are responsible for a whole lot of sets on BlueBlood.com. We’re very excited that issue number three of Buckle feature’s Blue Blood’s own Scar 13 on the cover. Blue Blood hotties are covergirls. The shot is by photographer Brian Bothwell who model Kerry Scarey tells me got his first magazine credit ever when I chose an image he shot of her to print in Swag magazine.

So it seems like Buckle Magazine should be of interest to Blue Blood folks. My only reservation about it, aside of course from not having seen it yet, is that I’ve seen a lot of statements online to the effect that Buckle is going to blow Marquis and Skin Two out of the water in the States. While I’m genuinely thrilled to see another magazine outlet for work and people I like, I’m not thrilled by hostile competition between people who should be working together for a common good. I’m biased perhaps because Forrest Black and I have provided content (photography, writing, columns, cover, etc.) for the last twenty issues of Marquis. I’m biased perhaps because, although my writing had already been published all over the world when Skin Two first published me, Skin Two was the very first magazine (besides Blue Blood of course) to publish photography by Forrest Black and yours truly. I’m hoping the competitive-sounding statements aren’t actually coming from the Buckle folks. Given who has been involved so far, I’m guessing and hoping that Buckle will have what it takes to be cool because it is cool and not because it is more something or other than existing major fetish publications.

So the jury is still out, but some hella hot babes are going to be performing at the Buckle Ball tonight. So go shake your booty at the Jungle Club right now, if you are in Atlanta, Georgia. Check Buckle out and watch for more coverage of what they are up to.