So right now FUSE is playing a block of Nelly videos. I find Nelly ridiculously hot. Hot like sexy, not hot like kindling. I’m not even sure if I like his music, but I certainly enjoy his videos. They’ve got productions values! (Bonus cool points to anyone who gets the movie reference there.)
So I was sitting there, letting the purple hair dye set in my hair, watching the Hot In Here video, and I suddenly realized that at least part of the video was shot inside a particular nightclub on Hollywood Blvd. Specifically, it was shot inside the Basque nightclub a couple blocks from me which burned down a day ago. Holy firemen of irony, Batman!
I was all trying to go to sleep at like six in the morning and I couldn’t figure out WTF was up with all the helicopters. I mean, my neighborhood has been a little weird lately, but this was just ridiculous. Turned out they were all the news copters shooting the fire and the literally two hundred and ten firemen and countless arson investigators and other officials dealing with the fire. Apparently, the building’s core was super old and had like poisonous resins or something on some of the burning wood. Not the best air quality where I live in Los Angeles for the past day.
But I really think the copters should have been blasting Nelly singing Hot In Here while they flew over my place. That would have totally made it all okay.
I’ve known Blue Blood Photographer Carlos Batts for what seems like a few lifetimes at this point. Our paths first crossing in the pre-internet zine scene, East Coast comic book conventions, and a million other points of common reference in the sexy cool artistic realm along the way since then. Looking back, some of those scenes seem like different worlds these days. We both live in Hollywood now, coincidentally a few blocks away from each other to be even more specific. But, maybe it’s not coincidence at all. A lot of interesting cool creative types end up in Hollywood. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoy it out here, being such a sort of heaven for eclectic creative types driven to document and enhance or otherwise decorate their public existence.
There are always a million things to do in Hollywood and it’s rare (or unfortunate anyway) to do everything within one sort of scene. Instead, people tend to party hop, swinging from velvet rope VIP to drug addled loft gatherings, trekking from inspiring artistic exhibits in every media imaginable to legendary dive bars to see the latest and hopefully greatest bands before they break big or break up.
Carlos’s latest video project, Young Hollywood, presents the cacophonous meld of cool glam youth and seedy glitz, the edgy music mixed with erotic pop art and nightlife craziness that is the young Hollywood experience today, all through the eyes of an artistic pornographer. The party to celebrate it’s release very much reflected this jumbled elemental mix as well, and although I couldn’t party quite as long as I would have liked, everyone seemed to be having a really good time. The shindig was held at the relatively new Safari Sam’s …
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, …
I live in Los Angeles, so it is probably no surprise that a lot of people I know are making resolutions to either become stars or achieve bigger stardom.
It doesn’t seem like it is much fun to be famous in 2008 though. Entertainment Weekly’s entire year in review issue was all about how much it sucks to have the eyes of the world on you. When I recently went to my OB/GYN, I was reading either Esquire or GQ in his waiting room and there was an interview with Michael J. Fox. The interviewer asked him what his thoughts were on like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or maybe all three. Michael J. Fox was a young Hollywood star in the 80’s, but he still has a pretty squeaky clean rep. Perhaps because he played a wholesome character on TV for a while. At any rate, his response was that he was soooooooooooooo glad the whole tabloid and paparazzi thing did not exist when he was young because it was his opinion that he did a lot of the same dumb things and they just were not recorded for posterity.
When I was a teenager, I lived overseas, mostly in countries where (a) it was legal for me to drink and (b) I had diplomatic immunity so what was legal was not that much of a factor. I am pretty certain that I would cringe at photos and video taken in many of the situations I got myself into. But there aren’t any. Actually, I wish there were more photos of me growing up. But the point is that I could be young and experimental and even a little wild, without it going down on my permanent record.
I’m not generally a fan of anything which uses the expression “white trash” because I’ve lived in the American South. Pig ignorant people there will generally excuse racist nonsense by explaining that they also have issues with “white trash” like being bigoted on the basis of class, as well as race, is somehow more reasonable than being merely racist alone.
Due to the humorous intent of the occasion, I made an exception, however, for Miss Kitty’s White Trash Ball at Dragonfly this past weekend and, damn, but I had a good time. My homeboy Lange and I hit the Cat and Fiddle beforehand. Having been a fisherman in Alaska after art school (yes, like the TV show), Lange is not such a big fan of crab and raw fish, so I felt it was high time I chose a restaurant with cooked non-seafood items on the menu. The Cat and Fiddle is a music industry hang which bills itself as an English pub in Hollywood, although I am personally partial to the New Orleans fare like their uber-buttery crab fingers. In fact, I ate brussel sprouts and crab fingers and I was thinking that this would be a kinda healthy meal without the butter and Stella Artois. Kind of representative of Los Angeles really, something which looks healthy on the surface, but something just underneath which could probably kill you. Fun fact to know and share: Parts of Casablanca were filmed at the Cat and Fiddle location. When I first saw Casablanca as a teenager, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick was not pretty enough for my taste, but, these days, I have enough pretty in my world that I’m more impressed by force of personality and strength of …
There are a lot of people in Los Angeles who get decked out in full regalia every day, just in case. By this, I mean that they blow dry their hair or put product in it or put makeup on and make sure they are wearing something versatile but hot. Every day. Because you never know, in this city, when fabulosity may strike. A lot of actors and models and so forth end up getting discovered because they happened to already be ready to go, in the split second the iron was hot here.
The thing is that it tends to be a split second of hot opportunity. Because, due to a combination of flakitude and being on the forefront of cell phone technology, most party plans here are made at the last minute. If someone phones to tell you to look off your balcony because their car is outside, you can be relatively sure they will not flake before you get across your lawn. I pretty much only use the phone to (a) say I’m running late, (b) ask where to park or (c) compare notes on the party I am at with the party someone else is at. The last minute thing is also because everybody, who already has the hookup, works long and unpredictable hours. The various entertainment industries may yield fun jobs, but work is still work and tends to come first for anyone committed to what they do. Which is an awfully high proportion people in this city. I know I can’t be ready to go all the time because I work way way way too much and I have a lot of days where I end up having to put out unexpected fires. (Flame is the …
I think it’s unfortunate that one of the down sides of living in pretty much any interesting area or city is that, if you are there long enough, the notion that it just isn’t as cool and fun as it used to be is nearly inescapable. It’s really difficult not to fall into a bit of a rut when you see stores you used to enjoy close down, clubs you used to have a great time at are gone, friends that used to be the life of the party have settled down or just become such monumental losers that you don’t want to see them anyway. It’s hard not to feel like you should just uproot yourself and move to greener pastures sometimes. I know I’ve felt like that in a number of areas I’ve lived. Lately, a lot of my Los Angeles friends have been sharing their general ennui on this subject as well. So, I thought I might share one technique that I’ve found that can kind of help shake things up a little. Just pretend you are visiting. Give yourself a week to do all those things you’d only do if you were actually from out of town. Read the local weekly paper and actually go to everything that piques your interest. You’ll be surprised at just how much fun is actually going on right around you.
Just the other day I was feeling kinda bleh and decided I better just get off my butt and take a walk around my own neighborhood and I ended up having a really fun time. Stopped by the Frolic Room on Hollywood Blvd. and had a beer with their usual crazy assortment of odd characters. …
Since a bunch of folks really enjoyed the fun Hex Hollywood gallery we recently released, I thought it would be enjoyable to catch up with Xian and give everybody a bit of insight into the mind and motivations of the creative force behind these events. Xian is dedicated and involved in the Los Angeles underground scene as an active and energetic promoter, DJ, coder, community host, and much more. In addition to the Hex events, she is also involved in or responsible for an impressive array of cool clubs and projects, including Malediction Society, Disko Nekro, The Darkroom, Perversion, and even the monthly goth industrial deathrock skating excursion that is Wumpskate. And when there is some spare time, she even runs the LADead.com community website for the Los Angeles underground scene.
She took some time out to share her thoughts and perspective on Los Angeles club life with us.
1. Given just how many clubs and events you are involved with, we get the impression that you don’t sleep much. Tell us what an average week schedule is like for Xian?
Ugh, this could get complicated, so I’ll try to keep it simple:
Summed up, I am DJing 3-4 nights a week these days, meanwhile holding down a full time web development job (40-50 hours). Non club nights I clock in about 2-3 hours of web work, promotions, and graphics design, and during the day on weekends this jumps to about 4-5 hours. Unless there is a special event coming up, then it jumps up significantly. As far as sleep goes, I probably get anywhere from 4-5 hours of sleep on week nights and 7-8 hours of sleep on weekend nights.
A bit crazy I realize, but I got more tired of sleeping my …
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 …
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.
I think it’s unfortunate that one of the down sides of living in pretty much any interesting area or city is that, if you are there long enough, the notion that it just isn’t as cool and fun as it used to be is nearly inescapable. It’s really difficult not to fall into a bit of a rut when you see stores you used to enjoy close down, clubs you used to have a great time at are gone, friends that used to be the life of the party have settled down or just become such monumental losers that you don’t want to see them anyway. It’s hard not to feel like you should just uproot yourself and move to greener pastures sometimes. I know I’ve felt like that in a number of areas I’ve lived. Lately, a lot of my Los Angeles friends have been sharing their general ennui on this subject as well. So, I thought I might share one technique that I’ve found that can kind of help shake things up a little. Just pretend you are visiting. Give yourself a week to do all those things you’d only do if you were actually from out of town. Read the local weekly paper and actually go to everything that piques your interest. You’ll be surprised at just how much fun is actually going on right around you.
Since a bunch of folks really enjoyed the fun 
