As you all probably know, the HBO series True Blood, based on the Charlaine Harris novels, was one of my favorite new shows this past year, maybe my very favorite. The new season is kicking off with fun altmodel cam boy and local vampire blood dealer Lafayette Reynolds possibly in trouble and more murderous whodunit and more surprisingly well done and extended sex scenes. I’m not sure the first True Blood Season 2 teaser pics and True Blood Season 2 promo photos really do the show justice.

I am sure that a bunch of the product placement tie-in billboards and suchlike around Los Angeles are a bit cringe-inducing. There are billboards for motorcycles, cars, automotive insurance, and and Gillette razorblades and other not terribly vampy products. (I don’t necessarily want to give tons of bonus exposure to silly things advertised this way, but I have to give Gillette a shout-out because years ago I worked the product launch for the Gillette Sensor and it was the most awesome and creative technical theatre gig I ever saw.) Pale-skinned dark-haired vampy femme fatale Dita Von Teese says, “I don’t understand this vampire bandwagon. Just saw a billboard advertising razors that “vampires prefer”. Vampires don’t have to shave!” I could get into a dissertation about the necessary equilibrium between enjoying the success of what you love verus avoiding having what you love co-opted. But really this brings me to another much more pressing and vital concern about the new season of True Blood.

What is up with vampire hair on Alexander Skarsgaard? In the season opener, big wig vampire sheriff and nightclub impressario Eric Northman, played by the always charismatic yet unsettling Alexander Skarsgård had foils in his hair. Like he was bleaching highlights in. It appears that he will be wearing shorter hair for Season 2. It is too early in this portion of the series to get into much philosophy of prejudice, or presentation of sexuality and sensuality in media, or the nature of the erotic, so I can’t help turning over and over in my head whether I feel like vampires should have to deal with hair growth. It would suck to have hair chopped off in a battle with another vampire if it could not grow back. If no regrowth were the case, then all vampire altercations would look like hair pulling catfights. It would suck to be turned on a day your hair dye was not fresh or you hadn’t shaved your shavable parts. Hair and nails do grow a bit after death, but not much. Would vampire hair just regrow to the length and/or shade it was at time of death?

Should the fictional undead require hair dye and razors? How do you want your media to handle vampire hair growth?

Do you feel having loved ones makes you stronger of more vulnerable? In “Grilled”, episode 202 of Breaking Bad, hopped-up tweaker drug lord Tuco tells high-school-chemistry-teacher-cum-meth-chemist that he likes doing business with a family man because there is a lot of collateral. My immediate thought is that the fastest way to conquer Tuco would be through his wheelchair-bound beloved uncle Tio. Walter White feels vulnerable and motivated to go along with the abusive drug dealer Tuco, largely out of a desire to protect his own family and his former student/drug dealing partner Jesse Pinkman. He has cancer, so he is less fearful for his own life.

Regarding the cancer, Walt did not want to undergo chemo and such, but he agreed to the unpleasant treatments because most of his loved ones asked him to do so. He may live longer and even better knowing he is loved and wanting to take the time to build a nest egg for his wife, son, and baby on the way. He may live longer and even better for undergoing the chemotherapy.

Walt keeps a second cell phone, one his wife is unaware of, for the purpose of conducting his drug business. He keeps his wife in the dark, partly out of a desire to protect her, and partly out of a desire to appear to be who she sees him as. On the one hand, his wife’s love sustains him and gives his life meaning, but, on the other, his relationship with her leads him to deception and perhaps lead him to a place where he was a high school chemistry teacher eking out a living and not a high rolling research scientist. Perhaps his love for his wife and family lead him to a place where he is manufacturing and selling brilliantly flawless methamphetamine.

I think that a person should choose who to love, partly via an accounting of who, on average or on overall accounting, makes them a better and more fulfilled person than would otherwise be the case. Love makes a person vulnerable in some areas, but real love should make a person stronger in the final analysis. I think.

I’m really looking forward to tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad on AMC.

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.

Okay, Flavor Flav is officially off my TiVo queue. For those of you who haven’t been following his post-hip-hop reality television career, here is a quick recap. Flav appeared on the TV show The Surreal Life. I’ve never seen it, but apparently they picked oddball assortments of celebs such as Vince Neil and Gary Coleman and the not-dead dude from Milli Vanilli and did stuff like send them shopping at my local grocery store. Leggy blonde bombshell Brigitte Nielsen appeared on the show the same season as Flav and they had a relationship, at least while the cameras were on, and this spawned a spin-off show called Strange Love, which I’ve only seen clips of on Flav’s newest venture Flavor of Love.

Full Disclosure here: I usually limit my reality show viewing habits to The Apprentice, but I watched the entire first season of Flavor of Love (and the first couple of America’s Next Top Model so long as I’m letting it all hang out.) The basic conceit in that eighteen or twenty chicks go to a house where Flav supposedly lives alone and lonely but for his extremely competent butler and maybe whoever drives the stretch limo SUV. They compete for his love because all he wants is to really connect with someone real. The episode where Nielsen visits shows how ludicrously more chemistry he has with her than any of the contestants. At the end of the first season, he chose the game-playing girl he supposedly hadn’t banged yet, but who had given him some non-penetrative threesome shower action. Apparently he then banged her, didn’t hit it off with her, and they parted ways, except for a contractually obligated and tepid season reunion.

The first season of the Flavor Flav-produced Flavor of Love show, I was kinda buying the story that he was looking for love in a singularly modern and peculiar way, but doing it genuinely. This season, it comes across way more like he is just a typical womanizer in love with being in love but no way willing to be with one woman in a real give and take relationship, no matter how many times he proclaims his love and deep emotional connection.

But tonight took the fucking cake. (Actually, I think the show first ran a couple days ago, but VH1 was coming through sort of static-riddled, so my TiVo only just picked it up again.) This season, Flav supposedly chose the girls himself and he has some kinda fucked up but interesting and egalitarian taste in women. So I expected to be even more entertained. Now Flav likes slutty women and clearly prefers girls who are down for getting busy with him and one or more other girls at the same time.

So he gets this one girl nicknamed Toastee and this other one nicknamed Nibblz (because they have to blur out her nipples in most shots) to curl up and spend the night with him. Toastee says she doesn’t like to share, but mentions casually to some other girls later that she got the impression Nibblz gave Flavor Flav some manual satisfaction. Now, if you took a general sampling of the female population, a decent number of them would give a member of a seminal group like Public Enemy a hand job without a lot of provocation. Narrow that sampling down to a chick competing to be his girlfriend or wife on a reality show and I kind of think less of any of them who wouldn’t take the opportunity.

So, because this is reality TV and has to have conflict above and beyond even interweb drama, Nibblz swears to the other girls that she didn’t jack Flav off and blows a total gasket and goes and tells Flav . . . wait for it . . . not that Toastee is spreading lies about their sexual canoodling . . . nope, (probably because Toastee knows a jerk-off when she hears one) instead, Nibblz tells Flav that Toastee is a pornstar and can be seen naked online on Barely Legal and on “VHS”. Who the fuck makes movies for VHS any more anyway? I mean, I have a player, but I don’t even know if it works at this point. Mind you, Nibblz has already told Flav that she has modeled nude and has a stripper pole in her living room and the implication is that her day job is dancing.

So Flav goes and asks Toastee if she specifically has done “boy/girl porn” and she says she has modeled and modeled nude, but, no way, no how has she ever done anything she would consider “boy/girl porn”. So, to cut a story longer than I intended a bit shorter, Toastee says she wants to quit the show and Flav tells her that she should stay, so long as she is telling the truth. Flavor Flav finds a solo nude shot of Toastee, tries to humiliate her by holding it up in front of all the contestants, and refuses to let her speak before leaving. He might not have personally liked that specific image. They blurred it out, so I don’t know. But he totally lied to that Toastee girl. He told her unequivocally that he would keep her on for at least another episode so long as she was telling the truth and it turned out she was telling the truth and he still booted her. If he doesn’t like wild girls who like to get naked, he needed to choose a whole different line-up of women to compete.

So, in conclusion, I generally applaud anyone with a strong and unabashed personal style. When my homeboy Lange and I met Flavor Flav in Vegas, he was gracious and pleasant. I know that a lot of what happens on reality shows is more scripted than real. But, as Flav gets top producer credit, real or scripted, I hold him responsible for presenting himself as a double standard-having, sexist liar. And, because I thought he was cool, I’m disappointed. Flavor Flav’s got problems of his own. And he needs to fix himself before he is ready for a real relationship with an honest and real, threesome-loving, fast food-eating, non-materialistic, and non-jealous woman.