Voluptuous Life Release Party
by Amelia G : December 11th, 2007
I just had a bit of a DC/Baltimore flashback weekend. Photographer Carlos Batts planned to do a gallery show/video release party at the combined studio locations of Federico Zignani and Apollo Starr. Normally such an event would be on my calendar in pen, but the damn date of this particular shindig kept changing. And then seminal DC industrial band Chemlab was playing the Knitting Factory. Due to the requirements of Murphy’s Law, both events were the same night.
Being the plucky Los Angeles denizen that I am, I managed to hit the Chemlab show, the Carlos Batts party, and the cool hot dog stand. (Yes, in LA, we have hot dog stands ranked by factors like cool and celeb client list.) Afterwards, Forrest Black and I took Carlos Batts and his gigantic entourage home in my limo. Passersby never can be sure how many people are behind tinted black glass and Carlos was all plotting mischief we could get into.
Anyway, in addition to his coffee table books and lots of other accomplishments, the fabulous Carlos Batts has shot a whole lot of erotic photo sets currently on BlueBlood.com and you should expect to see a whole lot more from him there. He has just released a video, two years in the making, starring April Flores, called Voluptuous Life and you should expect to see more about that here as well. Interview about the release party and gallery show now:
Amelia G: What was the special printing process for the images displayed on the wall?
Carlos Batts: The images on the wall were R prints mounted on sentra.
AG: What made you decide to do your party at that location?
CB: I shoot a lot of …
In March of 2003 I wrote an opening editorial for the late lamented Swag magazine project. The editorial was about how a lot of freaks internalize the negativity the larger society has for them. It was about how punk was supposed to promise the allure of a classless society. It was about how we shouldn’t hammer ourselves down because we deserve the rewards of the larger society, at least as much as anyone. The mere existence of this editorial is ironic in so many ways. I have no idea how many people read this the first time around, though, so I’d like to share it online now. 
Cookie Monster was the first bad boy I ever loved. I adored his unfettered capacity for pleasure. He was deeply into consuming cookies and he didn’t care who knew it. If there were no cookies available, he would eat a cardboard circle if he had to. He would eat that cardboard circle with no shame. He was so ready for anything, he would eat the moon, if he could get to it. The scope of his desire was infinite and proud. He could see no 12 steps coming. He was Cookie Monster and he was prepared to shout his joyous desire aloud. If you baked him a flat crisp cake of sweetened dough, he would let you know how much he enjoyed it. You wouldn’t have to wonder whether he was experiencing pleasure because he would let you know about it and he didn’t care who was watching. Cookie was the kind of Monster where you had to understand he might take just as much joy from someone else’s baking. He wanted cookies and he wanted them from everyone he met. But, if you didn’t require monogamy of him, there was no one else with such contagious happy hedonism. CM’s turn as Alistair Cookie on the intellectual Monsterpiece Theater showed his smart side, but it was still his intense googley-eyed passion which inspired us all. Cookie just knew how to make people feel good. He embodied unrestrained id in its most beautiful and fulfilling form.
I never thought I would be a car person. I always spent all of what money I made on art projects. I drove an increasingly rusted out Camaro for years. When I used to take it on road trips through the deep South, I would be able to tell the depth by whether people at gas stations were asking, “hey, yew all wanna sell that car?” But then I moved to Los Angeles. I loved the city, but I was baffled by the car culture here. People who liked me would avert their eyes if they saw me in my Camaro. The Camaro might have been the ugliest car in the city, but it had a fast engine under the hood and most of the time it ran. Only I got parking tickets all the time. For parking violations I’d never even heard of. Basically, I think they all added up to, if you are going to park a car this ugly on our street, we will charge you accordingly.