Last week, superstar Dita Von Teese launched her Wonderbra special glamour collection. There was some scuttlebutt that her supposedly scandalous past was going to somehow mess up the deal. Personally, given that Dita Von Teese first became famous for her unique sexiness, I think the rumors that she might lose the Wonderbra campaign over it were either astroturf or more likely haters. Yes, that’s right, a beautiful woman who creates and really embodies her own individual style can go as naked and as naughty and as fetish as she likes and still have the world revolve around her. Dita Von Teese is simply a combination of someone who was special to begin with and also was willing to plan and work really really hard. Kudos to her. The video above has some info on the Sexy Science by Dita launch and the video below has the smashingly hot and fun commercial for the lingerie line. I haven’t tried any of it on yet, but I’ll keep y’all posted.

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 me,” he says, “it wouldn’t be computer parts and neon colors, rather, a personal functionalism mixed with individual ornamentation, recycled and re-articulated through experiences. Don’t throw it away just yet, turn it inside out and tell a story, the concept evolves.”

Forrest Black and I set up a location studio at the event and photographed literally more than seventy of our fabulous friends and compatriots (pictured in our Halloween picture galleries). DJ Xian, who was in charge of the event, is totally cool; it was just a new and gigantic venue and things were a bit snafued and the mix of people in the crowd just did not quite gel, so that there were also some kind of mean people there (not pictured) who made it a bit less fun than I would prefer. Fortunately, Area 101 with Federico Zignani and Apollo Starr had an incredibly awesome afterparty that most of the people pictured here were also at and so we all ended the evening on an up note.

When Forrest Black and I shoot an event, we seek to photograph the people who are the most stellar examples of whatever the event is about. For example, we are going to be looking for couture latex and corsets at a fetish event, tasteful use of sequins at a burlesque event, artistic original ink at a tattoo event, great costumes at a Halloween event, etc. And, like anyone with a camera, professional or amateur, we enjoy shooting our friends. Additionally, Forrest Black and I are artists so we need to be inspired. If we are just not feeling someone’s vibe, we are not going to be into photographing them. I mean, people do hire us to shoot things that might not be our first choice, but, when I am wielding my camera for art and for the scene, I just kind of expect people to be I just kind of expect people to be appreciative and cool and understanding rather than demanding and hostile and envious.

It is funny looking at these photo galleries because I remember it not being the most fun shoot I ever did, only the people we actually did photograph were the ones I feel warmly towards. So we’ve got some totally kickass pictures for your viewing pleasure. You may recognize a number of members from the Blue Blood forums and Blue Blood hotties Michelle Aston, Aiden Starr, Natalie Addams, Zoe Matthews, and Vima. If I did the complete luminaries in attendance list, it would be like a phone book. Suffice it to say that a real night on the town in Hollywood should always involve multiple events, but, if you picked the right shindigs, you will probably see some of the same usual suspects more than once in an evening. And that is generally a source of good fun.

I have a new guru. I just watched the Katt Williams Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1 on HBO. Well, specifically on my TiVo of an earlier HBO broadcast. Anyway, I have this impediment to increasing my personal success as briskly as my work ethic should guarantee. Specifically, every time my accomplishments start coming really fast and furious, in a way which is visible to others, the haters come out. I would like to claim I am immune to haters and their low end bottom-feeder tactics, but I’m not.

I do what I do from a place of love. It sounds corny, I know. But, as I’ve said many times in the past, the initial print issues of Blue Blood were in many ways a love letter to the scene I had become a part of. The DC scene of the early 90’s was this vibrant nexus of punk, fandom, and cyber cultures. In that part of the world, we were less concerned with the genre-quibbling of bigger entertainment business cities. Goth-industrial music was identified as sort of a subset of punk there. Knowing who both Gary Gygax and Wendy O. Williams were was a plus.

The city produced both Chemlab and Fifth Column, and Fugazi and Dischord, and Henry Rollins and 21361 Publishing. Although I was born in London and have lived on three continents, in half a dozen countries, and a whole bunch of states, in many ways DC is the city which most created me as an artist and, as an extension of that, created Blue Blood. I knew all these incredible, artistic, fabulously creative people who just needed a venue to showcase their brilliance. And I was determined to give them that platform. When I first arrived in the DC scene, I had the most intense sense of having come home to where I had always truly belonged. From my heart, Blue Blood was a sort of love letter to a world which had welcomed me and made me feel whole and right at a time when my education and expectations had left me feeling adrift.

Well, it turns out that being able to decorate one leather jacket with paint and rivets and being able to tell one great fantasy of an alternate life to a fuckable chick does not equal wanting an actual platform for success or recognition of any kind. I found that quite a number of my amazing and talented compatriots wanted to be able to fantasize about how cool it would be if they started a band, wrote a novel, opened a dungeon, ran a nightclub, got a short story published, deejayed a big party, designed clothing, became an international sex symbol, etc. Although I will engage in conversations about wouldn’t it be cool if, I have a tendency to then go forth into the world to make it so. I think I’m wired that way naturally and my upbringing only hammered that into me more. I was both shocked and deeply hurt when I found that a lot of the DC scenesters I counted as friends were angry at someone giving them a chance. They wanted to be able to get credit for their brilliance without having to actually come through with, ya know, work. It had never occurred to me that there were people who did not want opportunity to come knocking.

So I ended up in this odd circumstance where I was getting kind words for my work on Blue Blood from people who were huge heroes of mine. Only parts of my primary support structure were just really kind of pissy. HBO would come to my house to do a special, but I couldn’t get some of my supposed closest friends to stop by. William Gibson would tell me I was “courageous” and John Shirley would buy me coffee and DC scenesters who had built whole events based on Gibson and Shirley’s writing would make my participation a pain for me. I didn’t know the word “hater” then, but it sure would have helped if I had.

Even today, I find I have to remind myself really strenuously to keep moving forward when the haters come out. I now plan to watch Katt Williams, my new guru, whenever I start feeling like maybe I should slow down a bit because everybody loves people who do less. So, if you are a hater, I am going to try to let you do your job (hating) and I’m going to do mine. You are now cordially invited to sit there and say my hair ain’t luxurious, when you know that it is, bitch.