According to about a zillion sites, Lady Gaga supposedly stated in an interview that she is a hermaphrodite. The following quote is attributed to her, but not one source I saw was able to name what interviewer she allegedly said this to or what publication or show it was for or what production company or publisher might supposedly have been involved.
“It’s not something that I’m ashamed of, just isn’t something that I go around telling everyone. Yes. I have both male and female genitalia, but I consider myself a female. It’s just a little bit of a penis and really doesn’t interfere much with my life. The reason I haven’t talked about it is that it’s not a big deal to me. Like come on. It’s not like we all go around talking about our vags. I think this is a great opportunity to make other multiple gendered people feel more comfortable with their bodies. I’m sexy, I’m hot. I have both a poon and a peener. Big fucking deal.”
At around ten seconds past the one minute mark in the video above, Lady Gaga hops off the motorcycle and some people feel she was not wearing underwear and what was dangling there was a cock. Given that, according to Rolling Stone, she hangs out with Marilyn Manson who tried to promote Mechanical Animals by wearing breasts, which maybe contributed to me being the only person who really loved that album, but still nobody believed he was actually a hermaphrodite. As a former adult boutique manager, I can state categorically that getting flesh panties with a bit of dangly is not difficult, although I’m entirely fine with it if she does have an actual penis, even a small hermaphroditic penis. I did hang out with her boyfriend a fair amount when I first moved out to Los Angeles and I’m guessing, based on that limited knowledge, that the hermaphrodite thing is a publicity stunt. An effective publicity stunt.
What do you all think? Is Lady Gaga a hermaphrodite?
Last week, I started seeing all kinds of links in to Blue Blood from American Idol sites. As I have not been watching American Idol this season and have never covered American Idol on this site before, this seemed peculiar until we started receiving emails with subjects like Adam Lambert Nude, Adam Lambert Gay Kiss, Where can I find naked pics of Adam Lambert? and suchlike. Actually, this still seemed a bit peculiar until People Magazine got in touch with us and emailed us the photos we shot which everyone was talking about.
Now, of course I recall Forrest Black and yours truly shooting American Idol finalist contestant Adam Lambert. He is pretty memorable. I have also photographed guys before. Naked guys even. This does not mean that every single person, out of the thousands I have ever pointed a camera at, has stripped down at some point in the shooting process. In case this is not already blindingly clear, allow me to state categorically that we photographed Adam Lambert and Cheeks at a costume event sponsored by Blue Blood and promoted by Xian. Everybody at the event was clothed and most were even costumed. There was nothing scandalous about Adam Lambert being dressed up glam; he looked great and it was a costume party. So, no, I do not have any naughtier pictures than the portraits in this Adam Lambert gallery.
To all the ignorant prudes who hide their own bigotry behind platitudes about what “other” people in “flyover states” will think, I don’t think a few sexy images have exactly hurt the careers of any modern (like post invention of photography) musicians. Anybody heard of David Bowie, Keith Richards, Marilyn Manson, Twiggy, Madonna, Deborah Harry, Slash, Jeff Beck, Lily Allen, Katy Perry, Tommy Lee, Siouxsie Sioux, Steve Jones, Zack de la Rocha, Tom Morello, Jared Louche, Eddie Vedder, Dave Navarro, Flea, or Anthony Kiedis? These are all performers who have been immortalized on camera either nude or kissing someone of the same gender or, in most cases, both. Do any of these smug I-am-open-minded-but-what-about-the-middle-America-frauen people seriously think that nobody from say Iowa ever bought an album by the Rolling Stones, Motley Crue, Pearl Jam, Rage Against the Machine, or the Red Hot Chili Peppers?
Discussing the existence of photos of Adam Lambert kissing, Access Hollywood Dish of Salt interviewer “Laura [Saltzman] mentioned she had never been [to Burning man], Adam gave her a wicked little smile and said, “We are going to the Burning Man– I might kiss you too!”” Additionally, in the interview, Adam Lambert said, “You know what, I have nothing to hide. I am who I am. And this is about singing… nothing else.” So he can sing, he’s gorgeous, he has remarkably impressive presence, and he owns who he is and makes no apologies. I like that and I hope everyone reading this likes those traits in a person too.
Last week, the American Idol Judges had the following comments on Adam Lambert’s performance of “Black or White” (The theme of the episode was Michael Jackson.): Man-in-charge Simon Cowell said, “That was in a totally different league than everyone else.” Performer Paula Abdul said, “You’ve got the whole package going on.” Producer Randy Jackson said, “You could make a record right now and it would sail right to the top.” And the new judge songwriter Kara DioGuardi said, “I hope Michael Jackson was watching you tonight.” So I kind of think the good guy has a good chance of winning, having what it takes to be a star and deserving it and all.
If you happen to feel like tuning in to American Idol tonight, it would be awesome if some of the tens of thousands of people who read BlueBlood.net could cast some votes for Adam Lambert. Tune in Tuesdays 8pm/7pm central and Wednesdays 9pm/8pm central on FOX.
Gidget Gein (born, Bradley Anne Stewart) lived his life to the fullest,and touched countless people with his art, music, and multi-layered persona. He was a dear friend, and a close collaborator, who gave his all to projects but never lost his remarkable sense of humor. I met this amazing man just shortly after he moved to Los Angeles. Our mutual friend, Lenora Claire, introduced us when I was interested in casting him in one of my films. I was immediately struck by his whole aesthetic and by his humble personality. From that moment on, I was smitten with him and we grew to become friends and created some art together.
Gidget was best known to most people out there for his contributions to the band, Marilyn Manson, and more specifically Marilyn Manson and The Spooky Kids. He performed bass and wrote music, but it was his authentic style and aura that would later become so vital to the whole Manson aesthetic. All internal band politics and hearsay aside, his creativity would peak later and in all honesty, it was in his solo work that he would craft his own voice.
Fueled by pulp novels, blaxploitation, B-movies, pop art, drag queens, pornography, religion,and racism, Gidget began painting, silk-screening, and drawing amazing art that would become an essential part of the underground UnPop Art Movement. He played in his own band, The Dali Gaggers, for quite awhile, and also recorded solo musical projects, designed his own clothing line, Gollywood, and so much more.
His acting was amazing and his quirks made him all the more endearing. The two roles he played in my films are eerie to me now, for apparent reasons. I was very proud of him for embracing the acting bug, and more than anything else for the fact that he was clean for 9 years or so. He had been so strong and no matter what, always remained a bright and powerful force. He could always make me smile. His sense of humor was sick and twisted, but also very innocent. He was such a tender and sensitive soul. Any trouble or pain just drove more negativity into his heart, and there was apparently more hurt there than anyone could imagine.
There is no forgetting Brad. There is no way to sum up his influence or magic. There is no way to let him go. Gidget Gein is art. He is rock and roll. He is a dear friend and a cultural icon.
As you all have no doubt noticed, we’ve been working on some video stuff on BlueBlood.net here. It is still in beta, but we are making it live for your viewing pleasure. Feel free to point out anything which is not working perfectly yet, because we know Blue Blood TV is in beta.
We’ve been really enjoying putting together our first segments and I’m really excited to share them with you all. For the most part, Forrest Black has been directing and I’ve been producing. We’ve mostly been taking turns shooting, kinda the same as we do for still photography. We’ve gotten some behind-the-camera assists from the always enjoyable Michelle Aston as well. We are fortunate enough to have the incredibly talented Tim Skold on board for the project to do the Blue Blood theme music. As this is Blue Blood, you probably all know who Tim Skold is, but I’ll give you a quick overview, just in case. I first came across his work when he was in a band called Shotgun Messiah, which I thought was a great name for a band. Other bands he has been in include Kingpin, KMFDM, Marilyn Manson, and Skold. His eponymously titled Skold album is one of my favorite CDs of all time, one of those rare records I can play all the way through, enjoying every single song over and over again. Anyway, I’m really thrilled about doing this video series thang, and the way it is all coming together, and feeling very creatively inspired.
Our video section is just starting out, so, when it becomes a fabulous gigantic internet phenomenon, you can say you were in-the-know when. We’ll be both highlighting videos we think are interesting and bringing you original programming. I just posted our Deathrace Jason Statham interview and Deathrace director Paul W. S. Anderson interview. Coming up this weekend, I interview musician Andy LaPlegua of Combichrist. Forrest Black interviews writer/editor Rachel Kramer Bussel about her Cupcakes Take the Cake blog (and sex.) Forrest Black and I (and a lot of our unsavory pals) attend the Coilhouse magazine launch party and I interview editor Nadya Lev. And there is tons more to come. Feel free to message me or Forrest Black directly or in public (or sidle up to one of us in a nightclub and whisper) about what you’d most like to see us do because we are just getting started.
I know, I know, some of you were probably assuming I was about to announce the launch of a giant adult video section, probably in the members area over on sister site BlueBlood.com. Over the years, just about every major mainstream adult video company, both in Porn Valley and beyond, has pitched yours truly and Forrest Black to do the pr0nz vidz for them. I’m not saying that nobody could ever make me an attractive offer on that front, if we really were on the same page with a company which wanted to make something great. But it has been my experience that these huge multimillion dollar companies will come at us saying how much they want something gothic or punk or alt or tattooed, and then turn around and say that they figure the budget can be small because they can underpay talent with tattoos or black lipstick.
One of my personal rules is that I will work for free or cheap for someone who does not have an office, if I like them and I believe in their project. If someone has a big ol’ office, I expect a pro rate and I expect the same for those I work with. If someone owns one or more buildings, I expect them not to start being cheap when it comes to my subculture and my friends and my collaborators.
But, honestly, it really boils down to art. The thing about artists is that they do not always do what is the commercially perfect thing to do. Artists do what they feel like doing. What I really felt like doing was discussing the meaning of alternative culture with Nadya Lev and what appalling horror movies are fun to sample with Andy LaPlegua.
I hope you guys like what we’ve been making because I enjoyed the creative process and I’d like to make you more videos soon.
Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.
When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?
Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.
Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, these record label-run music sites seem to only cover what is on their own labels. I do not know whether they think it would be unethical to seriously comment on music from multiple labels or whether they are competitive, but there are rarely reviews. There are independent exceptions to this, but most of them are very limited in reach. Generally, the only music news is about who is sleeping with who, who is in rehab, and who is having legal problems for their temper. If anyone has any good recommendations for music sites, I’d love to see them.
I admit that I usually come across new music in one of three ways. Number one, I get a press kit about a band. Number two, said new music is done by a friend of mine or occasionally a friend of a friend. Number three, I see a band play live with another band I already like or found out about via getting a press kit or a friend being in the band.
Today, I thought I’d cruise around YouTube to see if I could find some new bands to enjoy. I quickly discovered that there is no goth-industrial category on YouTube. The options, are rock, pop, indie & alternative, rap & hip-hop, R&B & soul, country & folk, blues, electronic, jazz, classical, world music, religious, and lastly more/other mostly for random soundtrack stuff and nonspecific lip-syncing. It is not terribly uncommon for there to either be no goth-industrial category or for a site like MySpace to have one category for gothic and another for industrial. But YouTube has no punk category either and that seems pretty odd.
So I guess the indie & alternative category is the one goth-industrial music videos would fall under. When I look at the most popular indie & alternative music videos of all time on YouTube, Marilyn Manson does make the front page with “Heart Shaped Glasses“. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” goth, then I would hate Marilyn Manson and say his music doesn’t count. Yes, I know that if I were a “real” Manson fan, then my favorite Marilyn Manson album would not be Mechanical Animals. Yes, I’ve heard that Marilyn Manson may have a bug up his butt about Blue Blood for not covering him way back when or something, but sometimes a PR agency called Nasty Little Man won’t get on everyone’s good side and I really did not care for the first track on Smells Like Children. I would have checked out the others, but NLM sent me a cassette instead of a CD at a time when CDs were the norm. But I digress. If one wishes to debate whether Marilyn Manson’s artistic and political motivations come from the same creative place as Nine Inch Nails and Ministry and Combichrist, that is certainly a discussion and a half. But I’m pretty sure that finding Manson in the indie & alternative category on YouTube means that is the cat where goth-industrial bands would be, if they had any traction on YouTube.
Clocking in higher-ranked than “Heart Shaped Glasses” are My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Boys Like Girls, Boys Like Girls, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, and Good Charlotte. For me, My Chemical Romance has their moments and I like some of the later styling on their lead singer, and Lord knows not enough bands dress like that today, but I would never have expected that the most watched indie & alternative music video ever would be a song about fearing teenagers by Warner Bros recording artist My Chemical Romance with 54,130,096 views. I occasionally slow down the TiVo fast forward on video countdown shows on FUSE to watch Fall Out Boy videos. I find the stuff by Universal Music Group recording artist Fall Out Boy much more visually interesting than most of what plays on those shows, but they seem to view the world as a bleak place where nobody has anybody else’s back so you’d better just look out for number one. I find Fall Out Boy’s worldview negative in a depressing way. I’m not familiar with Sony recording artist Boys Like Girls. I enjoy Sony recording artist Good Charlotte. I’ve been ironically amused watching them evolve from “Lifestyles of the Rich and the Famous” not understanding how any successful musician could complain in the Rolling Stone to “The River” where they realize that Hollywood tinsel is not genuine precious metal.
I suspect that, if I were to go down the whole all time countdown for indie & alternative on YouTube, I’d be seeing a lot of Warner, Universal, and Sony. This is not to say that tools like MySpace and YouTube can not greatly increase the social and professional reach of the individual and the little guy. They can and they do. They just also increase the reach of the big guy.
I’m okay with this. I’ve worked on a lot of successful web sites and magazines, so it makes sense that I’ve learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful with future media projects. A record label which has worked on a huuuuuuuuge number of successful bands has probably learned some things along the way and would be likely to be successful launching future bands.
But I am troubled by the big guy pretending to be the indie little guy to make sales. Sometimes fans seem to have the notion that, because modern emo music deals with themes of feeling like the underdog, then emo bands must all be underdogs. I know that, in the movies, audiences are supposed to want the person who has worked hard all their life and always been successful to fail and the longshot who just started training to succeed. News bulletin: Warner Bros, Universal Music Group, and Sony BMG are not longshot underdogs looking for their first big break.
Maybe, if consumers did not ask large media conglomerates to be misleading and present faux underdogs, then they would not. Maybe it would be helpful if record labels and bands approached music press like professionals. Maybe it would be helpful if music journalists behaved like professionals instead of like envious gossipy children or corrupt businesspeople. Then it might be easier to find new good music. Or maybe humans are just evolutionarily incapable of adapting to the intense infostream of the internet and we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs and get extinct now.
Sorta felt like listening to some cool new music tonight. Oh well. I wrote this instead. (Note to illuminati: it might be advisable to send me some good new stuff to enjoy (or a gold parachute), before I give all the secrets away.)
It seems newsworthy to mention that an online video for Marilyn Manson’s new music video is apparently going to be online for only another day or two. The new single is called “Heart Shaped Glasses” and features romantic lyrics about erotic cutting and Manson looking like he is feeling his inner rockstar. Most coverage of the video has been rather frantic speculation on whether Marilyn Manson and actress Evan Rachel Wood are actually having penetrative sex in the opening scene of the seven plus minutes long vid. It is totally irrelevent to the final product whether or not his penis was actually in her vagina, as neither is visible, but the two manage to communicate wonderful chemistry between them on screen.
When I saw the movie Seven, I kept wanting them to turn the damn lights on. It seems like it would have been much more obvious that Kevin Spacey was the killer if they hadn’t been doing investigation and forensics with flashlights, when there were perfectly good light switches nearby. I felt a little bit like this during much of the video for “Heart Shaped Glasses” when I watched it on the German video sharing site ironically enough called Sevenload. The actual Marilyn Manson site links to an IP with no real site on it and a much higher resolution version of the video. Everything is much clearer in the version on Manson’s site, although the lighting is still colored and moody. The interface on the Sevenload version is much more user-friendly though.
The video kicks off on Sevenload with the artist introducing the clip and, linked off his site, it goes straight into Manson and Wood writhing around and kissing passionately. This is pretty hot for around two and a half minutes. The initial makeout scene includes some very light choking. Somehow I think iTunes still won’t have any problem billing for the music video download down the line. The video is then interrupted with one of those talky interludes that musicians who want acting roles like and nobody else enjoys. The two of them are in a car and she tells him to drive faster and he takes altporn style polaroids of her with a kitchen knife and a schoolgirl skirt. This scene is where the heart shaped glasses referred to in the song’s title first appear. They then move to a club scene where Manson is rocking it old school and a sorta normal looking girl in the audience is watching from behind her heart shaped glasses and touching herself with hands covered in interestingly incongruous driving gloves. This I believe is Wood in a sort of fifties looking good girl dress. I don’t think she’d be good casting for the part if she weren’t Manson’s paramour, but the chemistry between them is so powerful that it more than makes up for it. I think the moody lighting, which might otherwise be a bit much, makes her come across a bit darker too.
The main concept of the video revolves around, aside from hipster sunglass, romantic cutting. So the club scene, err, cuts back and forth to a blood-drenched black bed and shots of a sort of heart shaped tattoo with a lightening bolt S on Wood’s thigh. I don’t know if the tattoo is real any more than I know if the fucking is real. Doesn’t matter because it works for the video. Oh yeah, then they drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. I loved Thelma and Louise so much that when my friend Blue Blood writer Shariann Lewitt and I saw it, Shariann told me that maybe one of us needs to learn to drive better. As Wood steers with her foot in Manson’s video and they still drive off a cliff, I think Shariann was mistaken about the requirements.
Anyway, the song is okay and I like the flow of the lines:
she’ll never cover up what we did with her dress, no
she said, “kiss me, it’ll heal but it won’t forget”
When I am elected Benevolent World Dictator, there will be a lot more videos in this vein and they will be available for more than a week.
