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.
So, after knowing each other for nearly a decade, and working together on multiple projects, over many years, I finally finally got to meet Scott Owens of EroticBPM fame in person! We once almost met in the flesh when he got stuck at LAX on a layover, but I’d just finished being somewhere one good friend of mine was attempting to sleep with the husband of another good friend of mine and having to give a police report on some psycho who was incoherently threatening me outside a nightclub for firing a girl she just met and barely knew but had a crush on or something. So anyway, I didn’t think I’d be at my charming best when I got to LAX, which also happens to be my least favorite California airport.
Anyway, Forrest Black, who is in charge of the look and feel of all Blue Blood sites, and I visited Portland and stayed with Scott and his charmingly negative head coder Antisocial and his beautiful bride (who, in a flash of small world, turned out to be a model from some of the earliest naughty sets I published from photographer Tom Hunscher.) We had an amazingly good time just hanging out in their gargantuan Pacific NW headquarters with them and their three very cute and almost disturbingly friendly and well-adjusted cats.
We also got to see old friends from our DC stomping grounds. We shot new stuff of the always fun Voltaire and of Rachel Face. Rachel has a new clothing line and we shot that, as well as a whole passel of new hotties. Parts of the trip were really bizarrely and gratuitously stressful, but most of it was really super nice. Portland is so beautiful and the air is so clean and we got to go up on the volcano which is the largest within city limits in the USA.
But the point I really must make here is that, when I wanted to connect to the internet from EroticBPM HQ, one of the networks was named Quark. I asked Anti if this was after the software, the TV show, or the actual thing. Having a background in particle physics, he didn’t mean the software or the show, but I told him I was going to pull his Dork Card for being unfamiliar with the show. Rather than having to resort to such extreme measures, modern technology allows me to share the show with you all.
I first saw Quark on the US Military television stations while living in Germany, on either ACTA I or ACTA II I believe. Basically, the Department of Defense at least used to provide American television channels to US servicemen and diplomats abroad. I wasn’t really allowed to watch TV, so I didn’t see much, but I did catch some re-runs of a sort of Star Trek spoof called Quark which struck me as absolutely hilarious at the time. I admit it doesn’t really stand the test of time and might seem a little, err, dumb now. Anyway, without further ado, I present Quark for your viewing pleasure and personal edification:
To a current sensibility, the BBC’s Hyperdrive is really probably a better bet.
Forrest Black and I are going to be on Night Calls for our third or fourth appearance Friday, April 25, 2008. The show runs from 4pm to 7pm and is broadcast live, so you can phone in and ask impertinent (sexy) questions if you dial toll free 1-877-205-9796.
Our hosts for the day are going to be Christy Canyon and Vanessa Blue. This will be my first time meeting Vanessa Blue, but last time adult legend Christy Canyon gave me some interesting insights. Among other things, we were chatting about what it was like being . . . unusual in the Washington, DC area. At the time Blue Blood was founded, a person (okay, one of my unsavory pals generally) could be thrown out of Springfield Mall for having a nose ring. Christy Canyon told me that it was much more progressive in Los Angeles and somewhat surprising to Angelenos that being able to express yourself even by wearing a painted leather jacket is definitely not always easy elsewhere. And that went double in the early 90’s.
Forrest Black and I are in the second guest time slot and will be going on around 5pm. Forrest Black and I will be chatting with Christy Canyon and Vanessa Blue about BlueBlood.com in general, about our photography in specific, and, if experience is something to go on, we will definitely be talking about sex. Our friend Darklady from Portland will, through an odd bit of synchronicity, be on in the 4pm slot, and it is a good show, so I recommend tuning in from the start. Darklady will be promoting her upcoming Masturbate-a-thon (yes, you read that correctly) and I bet I have a lot more to tell everyone about it after tomorrow, so watch this space for more on that.
Darklady was just in town and she and Forrest Black and rainmaker Brian Gross and I went to eat sushi and talk about life, the universe, and everything. Humorously, although I have known Brian via snail mail, telephone, and email for around fifteen years, and he now lives in the Valley maybe half an hour to forty minutes north of me in Hollywood, it took a mutual pal from out of town to get us together in person.
“Forrest Black is best known as the Creative Director of Blue Blood, a network of sites that showcases gorgeous chicks in explicit gothic, punk, well-armed and counterculture erotica. More recently, Blue Blood has launched BlueBlood.net, a source for community where freaks of many stripes can post on everything from politics to music to sex to travel.
Born into a hippie household in Northern California, he’s lived since in the DC area and Atlanta, and now lives and works in Hollyweird, where he hits the cool parties and meets some of the world’s freakiest and hottest chicks to pose for him and Amelia G. We caught up with Forrest at the recent West Hollywood Book Fair for a chat about the Hells Angels and well-armed women.”
The interview kicks off with:
Eros Zine: OK, let’s go way back to the beginning: Where did you grow up — and how do you think it influenced your choice of career, and your attitude toward the industry?
Forrest Black: I was born in Northern California, in a room full of candles, incense, and revolutionaries. It was in a beautiful home with thirteen black cats and the ghost of the previous owner. The property had previously been a boys camp which had been converted by my parents into the sort of hub of my Father’s business. He was the leader and sort of project manager of what was later described as one of the largest drug smuggling operations of the time. They had planes and trucks crossing borders North, West, East and South. Among many other things, he was a major supplier of Ergot to the famous LSD houses of psychedelic era San Francisco, and he believed in what he was doing on a profoundly spiritual level. My Mother was a model and an artist and is one of the most beautiful loving people the world could ever know. So, I kind of grew up with radicals, revolutionaries, and rock stars. We were very close friends with the Grateful Dead and one of my earliest memories was going to the Oakland Cow Palace with several busses chartered by the Hells Angels to go see the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I went to kindergarten with a Free Sonny Barger shirt on.
Growing up surrounded by all that clearly instilled a certain libertine perspective and appreciation for counterculture philosophy, art, and politics that is so deeply ingrained in me, I can’t imagine who I would be without it. Blue Blood was never really a career choice for me, it’s deeper than that. So, some of the trends in adult industry to use some of the labels and terminology of current counterculture in their bid for a certain cool credibility or whatever can occasionally get under my skin, but I am aware that it’s not something that needs to be taken too seriously.
Eros Zine: BB’s tagline is “the trade mag of cool,” and you’re known for having a lot of fans and supporters in the music industry, especially where you might most expect ‘em — goth, metal, industrial, etc. Back in the print days, the most radical thing about BB was that it totally blended the cultures of rock ‘n’ roll, horror/sci-fi/fantasy/noir, BDSM, and porn. It was kind of a great big orgy of all the things you and your friends were into. Now that BB’s long since made the move (like just about everyone else) onto the web, how much is that still true? Are you able to incorporate into BB every part of entertainment and culture that you dig, or are there ways in which it’s harder to make that connection now that BB and its associated properties are online?
Forrest Black: Some of the original objective with Blue Blood was to celebrate all the things that were good and beautiful and enjoyable and meaningful from within the context of a counterculture lifestyle. The various scenes we were involved in, or had visibility to, and in many cases grew up with, were full of interesting eclectic creative people, none of whom were textbook examples of one narrow cultural buzzword or another. But there was a certain commonality of experience and perspective, and we felt like we understood it well enough to create a publication that seemed to color outside the lines but made perfect sense to the right kind of people and quickly became a powerful tastemaker across the board.
Casting that wide a net, collecting up the coolest gems from the worlds of music, literature, street fashion, gaming, art, and pop culture, with an eye to expressing what was good and sharing what was quality with our audience has always been an immense undertaking. In some ways the internet has helped and in some ways it’s been a bit of a challenge. I love being able to run as many pictures as I like from a great photo shoot, no longer being limited by page count and format constraints. I can even post video to compliment the layout as well. But, on the entertainment writing side, it’s possible to become so micro-niche specific these days that it becomes very difficult to know sort of what level to stay at. For example, what once was an entertaining little 150 word bit on a certain industrial fetish esthetic now has seven to ten active blogs and communities dedicated to just that.
To deal with transitioning to the sort of unlimited depth of the internet format, Blue Blood has kind of gone two directions online. On the one hand, like you mentioned, we have a lot of sites, each of which has it’s own more specific focus. While on the other hand, the central sites, like BlueBlood.net are in many ways more focused on sharing the essential unifying ideas of our counterculture as well as building a community of mature diversely opinionated free thinkers.
Eros Zine: How did you get involved with Blue Blood the print magazine? How early in the life of the mag was it? Were you involved with its predecessor BLT? . . .
You all will just have to pop over to Eros Zine to read the whole thing. It is a really extensive and interesting interview. It takes a talent like Thomas Roche’s to get Forrest Black really talking, but he has a lot of interesting things to say. There is also a photo gallery of some of Forrest Black’s and my photography. Be sure to click on the header graphic when you get to Eros Zine, in order to see the whole thing. Blue Blood hotties featured in the sexy spread include, in alphabetical order, Dana DeArmond, Darenzia, Eva Klench, Jax, Justine Joli, Kellie LaPlegua, Michelle Aston, Miso, Miss Conduct, Nikki Vega, Roxy Contin, Sara X, Scar 13, Stephanie Slaughter, Sun Karma, Superna, Verotika, Vima, and Voltaire. Please check it all out. Thanks so much for the support, Eros Zine and Thomas!
I perused TuckerMax.com upon my return from Austin, to see if there was any vital news I should include in my article about Tucker Max and his writing and his SXSW panel. There was nothing which really jumped out as necessary for an introduction piece. But, what the heck, I’ll give you all the lowdown on what he has coming up.
He is currently working on a series for Comedy Central. He envisions the show as being a 100% scripted half hour comedy with no laugh track. Something like The Office or Entourage or Tucker suggests one “picture a Sex and the City for guys, done in the vein of my stories.” I’ve never seen Sex and the City, so this doesn’t evoke much for me, but maybe it will for other folks. At any rate, a fictional comedy half hour with the feel of a Tucker Max adventure sounds entertaining to me, so I’ll be putting the key phrase “Tucker Max” in my TiVo for whenever the heck the long-ass cycle of television production produces an actual show. I just used the word heck twice in the same article. Don’t get me wrong, I like the word heck, but I think this means I am jet-lagged.
A fun factoid is that apparently one of the producers of the upcoming Tucker Max show is former ABC president Jamie Tarses, the first female entertainment chief in the industry, who is reportedly the inspiration for the character of fictional sensitive-but-tough network president Jordan McDeere on the Aaron Sorkin-written, Thomas Schlamme-directed, star-studded, and shockingly disapppointing NBC show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.
The Tucker blog announces his SXSW appearance and mentions that the show might be a bit pricey just to hear him speak, but caveats: “If you are a hot girl in or around Austin, well, you don’t need to pay to hear me speak. Just send me an email and we’ll get drinks. Or just we can just skip the pleasantries and you can come over to my hotel and fuck, whichever you prefer.”
The most recent entry in Tucker Max’s blog announces that he is going to be co-writing a book with Paul Wall. I told Forrest Black this and his first response was to ask if it was going to be called Stuff in Your Mouth. He then immediately posted this thought to his Twitter account. Twitter, although you can use it in your browser or instant messenger client, is essentially like short attention span LiveJournal for your Blackberry or Treo, and it was this year’s hot site to, err, twitter about at the 2007 SXSW Interactive conference. If you are feeling digitally trendy, you can find my Twitter account at http://twitter.com/AmeliaG and the still kinda undeveloped Blue Blood Twitter account at http://twitter.com/BlueBlood. Ya know, I just popped over to Twitter, preparatory to making this post and the two most recent posts were Forrest saying “Coffee is a good thing” and Halcyon saying, “trying to find a balance between SXSW inspiration and despair.” There may be a certain sort of odd haiku quality to Twitter.
So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.
If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.
Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:
Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path? Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”
Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.
I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.
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. 
