Is it likely that a bleach blonde with fake tits who worked for Playboy appeared in a Playboy pictorial? Is it likely that a millionaire reality show contestant would murder his bleach blonde girlfriend and think he was going to get away with it by chopping off all her fingers and pulling out all her teeth but not removing her serial numbered breast implants? Is it likely that, if someone were so horribly cruelly disfigured, either just prior to being murdered or post-mortem to incompetently prevent identification, that TMZ would buy a death photo from someone in the coroner’s office and post it on the internet? Well, the only part of the the Jasmine-Fiore-murder-followed-by-death-photo story being reported which is not true is that the victim posed for Playboy. Full disclosure: Jasmine Fiore may have had a bit part in the horror movie The Abandoned which was an advertiser on this site and others I work on, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t bias me on this. I’m pretty sure I would find this story simultaneously ghoulishly hilarious and horrifically tragic regardless.
One Ryan Alexander Jenkins was indeed thwarted when one Jasmine Fiore was identified by the serial number on her breast implants. Apparently Ryan Alexander Jenkins recently finished taping on VH1’s I Love Money 3. I don’t really know what that show is about and I can’t imagine the prize dollars are anything significant to anyone already a millionaire, but I can’t quite bring myself to look it up either. Gawker’s Jezebel reports that, since Ryan Alexander Jenkins became a person of interest in the murder of Jasmine Fiore, VH1 has pulled all mention of the Megan Wants a Millionaire show he was a finalist on. Jezebel further reports that the murder suspect may have actually won the grand prize on I Love Money 3. Jezebel goes on to commend VH1 for their sensitivity in removing the MWAM content from the VH1 web site (juicy bits helpfully archived by Jezebel.)
I have also never seen Megan Wants a Millionaire, which was apparently canceled fairly early in its run. A while back I covered the Charm School reunion show where Sharon Osbourne and this Megan Hauserman ditzy blonde self-professed gold-digger got into a cat fight, although I admit I’ve never seen Charm School and only watched the cat fight vid on the VH1 web site when it became a hot topic.
At that time, Megan’s claim to fame was that Poison frontman/insecure meanie/embarrassment-to-aging-rockers-everywhere Bret Michaels rejected her on Rock of Love. Is being rejected by a guy who was okay-looking in 1986 really a resume item? Apparently so, as Megan Hauserman was given her own show Megan Wants a Millionaire. The Superficial reports, “You know what the most fucked up part of this story is? There’s a reality show where millionaires compete for the love of a self-proclaimed gold-digger with fake breasts. That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.”
It seems that, immediately after being rejected by Megan Hauserman on camera for VH1 in March, Ryan Alexander Jenkins went to Vegas and married his girlfriend of some time Jasmine Fiore. Wouldn’t you be pissed if your significant other went on television to humiliate themselves pursuing someone who is not you? Certainly would not spell wedding bells to me. According to Jasmine Fiore’s understandably bereaved and distraught mother Lisa Lepore, Jasmine Fiore had the marriage annulled in May, but law enforcement can find no record of this. One Robert Hasman got a series of text messages from his ex-girlfriend Jasmine Fiore over the two days before her death. Then he got just one cryptic message, well after her estimated time of death, which just read “suck it“. In other post-mortem commentary news, What Would Tyler Durden Do reports, “Jasmines roommate says their relationship was “on the rocks”. She also said that Jenkins told her he was “done with the relationship” and that “he couldn’t take it anymore”. This was one day after Jasmine was found in a dumpster . . . She’s not very attractive, but that doesn’t mean it’s okay to kill her. Legally, I mean.”
Ryan Alexander Jenkins is Canadian and is believed to have fled to Canada, although his father, a wealthy architect, developed a resort on an island in Honduras and owns at least one plane. The Huffington Post reports that Canada has agreed to extradite Ryan Alexander Jenkins if he is apprehended in Canada because the State of California has promised not to pursue the death penalty in this potentially capital crime.
Judging from video of Ryan Alexander Jenkins singing “I love my wife” to Jasmine Fiore in Vegas which he posted to his MySpace page (and TMZ helpfully archived), Jasmine Fiore was brunette at the time of her death. So bleached blonde and naked for Playboy = false. All the ridiculous stuff (including VH1 choosing not to profit from tragedy) = totally true.
I went to a fashion show soiree last night. My friend writer/gadfly Clint Catalyst organized the event for designer Jared Gold. Clint and I are both eclectic individuals and we have kind of a lot of random points of intersection. And we’ve both been doing what we do for a while.
So the most unsettling part of the shindig was trying to place who people were. This is difficult when a person could be someone I photographed nine years ago and haven’t seen in between. Or the person could be someone who did my hair once. Or the person could be someone I’ve only seen in media. There is always a risk when greeting someone on dim non-specific facial-recognition alone because they could turn out to be someone you’ve only watched on television or MySpace or someone you would shoot (not with a camera) if you had a license to kill. But a significant portion of folks there are people I know and like but may not have seen recently. So it was like a real life wetware version of one of those aging programs they use to find missing children.
One person at the event I saw and could not place was artist/designer Elizabeth McGrath. I attended her Broken Dolls fashion show in like 2002 or 2003 and featured it in our SWAG project. But I’d seen her in sort of business mode and not in-person in the intervening years (I think.) Clint Catalyst re-introed us and, when I said her hair was different now, she laughed and pointed out that she was wearing five or six hairpieces stacked up on top of one another. Normally, I don’t like wigs, but what Liz McGrath was wearing was much more complicated and high-end than a plain wig and she looked fabulous and she probably designed it herself like the spiffy In the Year of the Pig Fish piece pictured above.
At any rate, we’ll have video coverage of the actual fashion show posted some time soon. Forrest Black and I had front row seats (three sets of them actually as they kept redoing the seating chart), so you’ll get to see it all. We ended up next to World of Wonder’s Thairin Smothers, cool Party Monster author (and snappy dresser, even if he had to go with his second choice outfit) James St. James, and Danny Franzese who has curated at the Royal/T gallery which I’ve been meaning to check out, so our final seats ended up being more entertaining than our starting ones, even if Thairin and I had to be very cozy. I say you’ll get to see it all, but I admit that we’ll have to cut a lot of boobage. I never get why people make a big thing over something being about fashion and then have totally not street-legal outfits that a lot of venues can’t even run pictures of. Maybe it is just because I will absolutely wear outlandish couture that I think runway looks are supposed to be wearable.
My questions for the day are twofold. First, would you be comfortable strutting down a catwalk (outside of a strip club) topless? Second, how do you handle it when you see someone you recognize but can’t immediately identify?
I enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could exchange info and continue getting to know one another. I was extremely bugged, however, when I started seeing people out at night and I’d ask them how they were and be told to read their LJ. Why bother leaving the house if you refuse to have a conversation? Over time, people started taking LJ more and more seriously. This meant that, first of all, that, if I complained about work on there, some dick would take it as uber-personally and big deal as if I had sent out a press release and posted “I had a hard day because blah blah” to every high traffic site I operate. Secondly, there started to be too many people on my LJ list for me to keep up with what everyone was up to. Most disappointingly, treating LJ as a publishing platform rather than a diary meant that other people started writing less and less personal entries and more and more press release-like entries which had more to do with how they wish to be perceived than who they truly are.
At first, I hated MySpace because it seemed like a service whose only application was to allow other people access to my Rolodex without having to say “thanks for the introduction”. Then I also hated MySpace because it seemed to pull audience from LJ, which I had enjoyed the interactivity of, and MySpace didn’t really seem to have any way to get to know people. MySpace is like this menu of people who seem like, in another life, I might have really enjoyed knowing them, but MySpace gives just enough of a taste to feel weird about people, without really enough to know them at all. Partly, MySpace is so terribly public that one really ought to keep anything private off there, but this means that there are always aspects of a person left off there which would be important to know if you were truly meeting them. And, if you are forthcoming with someone who has a popular MySpace account, you can’t trust that they will know to keep private things private, libel laws or no. Who wants to spend all their time in legal battles? It is easier to just be really private and closed off. I hired people to handle my MySpace accounts for me because MySpace filled me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness. There are certain sorts of MySpace messages, I enjoy answering personally. (If you got a message with my name signed to it, I wrote it.) For the most part, though, every time I’ve thought a Los Angeles person I met on there seemed like someone I’d want to know, they ended up digitally booty-calling me. Part of me thinks I should be flattered by this, as I generally am motivated to converse with people who are accomplished, intelligent, talented, creative, famous, etc. But it just makes me ache inside. Do human beings no longer meet in person for anything besides sex?
Then, one of the years I spoke at SXSW, the big interactive launch of the season was Twitter. Everyone was all a-twitter over this new ADD version of LiveJournal. Instead of having to read long transcripts of arguments someone had with their mom or extensive deconstructions of the merits of macaroni with and without cheese, Twitter only leaves room for 140 characters in a post. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone or similar cell phone, it is easy to update your Twitter even while driving in traffic. (Not that I recommend this, as I’m pretty sure it might be illegal or dangerous or something most places.) Because of the SXSW launch and general tech community culture driving the initial Twitter world, I had mostly people I knew from that part of my life on my read list and I felt like I actually was getting to know some interesting and accomplished people a bit better on there, seeing cool links as news broke, and generally getting to enjoy a new Web 2.0 property. I’m not sure if there was a panel at the recent adult trade shows in Vegas where everyone was told that Twitter is great for interacting with fans or getting traffic or what, but I’ve recently had a couple hundred new people add me to their Twitter follow lists. Although early on, I just had my assistant add back all new follows on Twitter and I’d just remove the boring or annoying ones later, I now prefer to check out each new follow personally. This means that now, when I think of posting what delicious things I am consuming for breakfast (iced soy latte and smoked salmon on low salt sprouted grain bread), I feel guilty like I should really get on checking out all those new accounts which have expressed interest by following my account. Only then I have to wonder how many followed my Twitter because they are interested in me and how many followed because they want me to be interested in them? And, of course, I recently got to discover that 140 characters is not too few for someone to start drama, but it is too few to explain one’s point diplomatically enough to get them to chill.
Although I was an early adopter on Twitter, I came to Facebook late. Partly it had trouble with my name and partly I had to get alumni email stuff set up for it to be useful in finding former classmates. Plus the places in Germany, Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland where I went to school in my teen years were not listed and the system seemed to be set up for fewer high schools. Facebook tech support is impressively by far the most responsible and effective of any of the social networking sites and I eventually did get an account properly set up there. On Facebook, I used a different rule of thumb for friending people or approved friend requests: I only wanted friends on there who I would deliberately have a meal or a tasty beverage with. If the person is someone I’d be pleased to get a dinner or drinks invite from or a person I’d be likely to extend a dinner or drinks invite to, then I’d approve them. If the person is just someone who would like me to take their photo or who would only be interested in dining with me if I brought important (to them) or fuckable (by them) people with me, then that would be a no. I find it unfortunate that my morbid college friends can’t shut up about my two friends from that time period who died tragically. If the deaths of those two people saddens my living friends half as much as me, I’d expect they would want to think about it a bit less often than daily. My Facebook friend add process is slow because when a new person adds me who I want to add back, I like to write a personal note to them and I do keep up with my friends status feeds and such. I update my own Facebook status with Twitter and import notes from my LiveJournal, so my Facebook friends probably get a mildly more complete view. But tonight, I logged onto Facebook thinking that maybe I would do something sociable and just felt a wave of social anxiety. Although there are five or six pending requests on there I was really really looking forward to approving and interacting with, there were also a hundred I was kind of stumped by. Lots of women I’ve known have naturally changed their names. Lots of people I’ve known by fannish names or punk rock nicknames and I don’t recall what their mamma called them, even if I knew once. Remembering multiple names for every person becomes really hard once one has met enough people. I recognized some of the add requests as people I’ve photographed but don’t know and some as people who dated friends of friends of friends or who were otherwise tangentially part of social groups I was in. Not people I dislike at all, but not all people I’d be inclined to hang with if I were in town for a weekend or vice-versa. Some people ring a bell and I agonize over where I know them from, but don’t want to offend by asking. My time is so limited that I’d really like to have just one social platform where everyone on my list is someone who might actually care if I had a death in the family. Or at least enjoy getting coffee with me on a good day.
Actually, although I still minimally participate in LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, I find that, for me, all the new Web 2.0 modes of interaction feel great for a few months and then feel kinda ache-inducing. If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected? The only web interaction sites which tend to consistently be enjoyable for me are forums. This is why it is so important to me that the BlueBlod.net boards be a place where people from varied backgrounds can exchange different viewpoints in an intelligent and real way, without tonal BS bulletpoints, without flame wars, without being unable to back up what they say.
But, every once in a while, it just all fills me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness, I pine for the days when I used to just drop by friends’ houses and vice-versa, when it felt worth getting dressed up to go out, whether or not photos would be taken. I realize this is the internet age equivalent of longing for the times when people dressed up to go visit the town square. I remember my grandparents talking about country clubs taking the place of the town square or something along those lines that a child’s mind couldn’t quite grasp. A country club is too geographically local for today’s mobile world, though. I wish I could take a year off and just travel and write and eat right and visit people from different times in my life and different areas of my interests and see who I really connect or re-connect with and who is just a pleasant memory. The country club of Web 2.0 is just simultaneously overwhelming with the constant clamor of thousands of apparently potential friends and lonely with lack of anything real enough to feel . . . well, real.
If you want to win a pair of free tickets, either post in this thread or message privately here or on MySpace or VF. Your post or message should include your thoughts about the band or one of their songs or a personal anecdote about Sisters of Mercy, such as the one I told about me and my friend Jeanne at the Sisters of Mercy show (which she recalls being in DC.)
I kind of like this year’s female pop sound, but, for some reason, all the top-selling pop artists this years seem to sound oddly similar. Moreso than usual for such things, which is saying something. I don’t think that normally Britney Spears, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Rhianna, etc. all have nearly identical voices. I think this is one of those occasions where, if I knew more about how the female pop sausage is made, it probably boils down to just a few writing teams and just a couple of producers.
This year, barring visual cues, I can’t tell any of these chicks apart from their singing. The new Britney Spears single “Womanizer” is predictably stylish and expensive-looking. It is in the format of one of those videos where the girl wears a whole passel of different outfits to appeal to a larger variety of demographics. Britney Spears has always been marketed somewhat like this, but this vid kicks it up a notch.
There is even a sequence where Brit is all done up with a reddish pinkish bob for hair and fake tattoo sleeves. Basically, the scenario has her done up as a waitress who would have a lot of “friends” on MySpace. The temporary tattoos are what feel like they put it over the top, although certainly, as the meaning of having ink has changed, tattooed hotties like Masuimi Max and Kellie LaPlegua are getting their ink lasered off. So maybe there is no true permanence in counterculture beyond what is in your heart. The look can always be co-opted, often in ways which are glossier than the original.
They will gobble up fashion as fast as the underground can produce it, although genuinely individual and independent spirit is the part mainstream wants to leave behind. But, like, America’s favorite trainwreck Britney Spears is, like, sorta naked in the “Womanizer” video.
Edit: So apparently, although this video has been uploaded about a billion and a half times to YouTube, it is not embeddable the way most vids from there are. Blue Blood has a policy against linking pirated content, but Antiquiet has the Britney Spears Director’s Cut video and I’m linking that, despite Kevin Skwerl’s FBI arrest and indictment because him once again having special materials means that either (1) it’s all effing astroturf and thus the copyright holders want it approached this way or (2) Kevin Skwerl takes stuff from work.
I love music, or at least I used to, but the music industry sure makes me sick.
A while back, I asked the Blue Blood boards Have you ever been fired from a job? It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that most of our members are extremely talented and conscientious and hardworking, yet have personality, err, quirks which make it hard to always fit in at a job.
I know my personal experience of working in other people’s offices was that everyone always adored me for the first two weeks. I did a lot of contract design work where I would get called in when everyone was crashing on deadline, and horribly behind, and I think I got love for saving the day with my efficient work processes. Unfortunately, after about six weeks in any of these offices, I would start contemplating the fact that I wouldn’t have to go to work if I drove off the road on the way. I also had the tendency to have trouble with some of the social portions of work.
Running my own media empire, I have become more reserved over time, but I did not used to really have any comprehension of corporate culture. I mean, I could wear a suit and twist the colored parts of my hair under and pin them down, but I was still me. I would cheerfully explain to my coworkers that I thought health insurance was the big lie the overculture used to force us to live small lives. I would explain how I lived in a punk rock group house with a dozen other people, so my occasional corporate paychecks went really far, and I could afford to spend a lot of my time having adventures. I would bring in copies of first my antisocial punk rock humor zine BLT aka Black Leather Times and then later early issues of Blue Blood in print. Occasionally, I would work for a client like MTV who would specifically request back the girl with the “wild zines”, but, as most of my work was Federal contracts, government presentations, management consultant graphics, and such . . . well, I think the experience can be summed up by saying that, when I worked for EDS for a full three months, they really wanted me to work there permanently, but they also totally freaked out when I wore red stockings with a Brooks Brothers suit one day. And I’d thought I looked both especially conservative and especially attractive that day and usually I felt like I only hit one metric or the other.
I could never quite seem to match up my abilities and education with a job which really fit and challenged me and gave me room to grow. I know this is a very familiar frustration for most folks here. Sometimes the jobs which were obviously intended for trained monkeys were the most comfortable to do, more pleasant than the ones which were a whole step up from trained monkey where they expected me to be grateful for the low-end nonsense I could do in fifteen minutes and had to pretend took all day.
Forrest Black, in his quest for the perfect cheeseburger, came across the Serious Eats site. Serious Eats featured a funny article about a hot tattooed punk guy who got fired from Burger King for bathing in the kitchen sink . . . and posting it on MySpace and YouTube. The hilarious video posted above lead various Serious Eats readers to opine that he was trying to get fired.
They just don’t understand. I suspect he did not particularly care if he got fired. I suspect he has a skill set which should allow him to do something a heck of a lot higher end than work at Burger King, but somehow he never quite plugged into the right position. I think probably half the people I know, probably including myself, never quite slotted into something challenging and inspiring and really the right fit for their personality and capabilities. Sure, some people are lazy. But it takes a certain amount of effort to do your hair, take a bubble bath in the workplace, have someone videotape it, and post it all over the interwebs. So that is not laziness. It is not trying to get fired either. It’s just not having, fitting into the corporate culture, high on the to-do list, at a low-end job. Doing something amusing was higher priority. If you have ever been there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, maybe it is still a head-scratcher.
According to 2News WTDN, the Xenia, Ohio NBC affiliate, Mr. Unstable’s BK bubble bath kind of sucked for the shift manager Karen Cragg, who apparently has only held fast food jobs and was fired, along with the bather and pals. She feels that Burger King corporate mistreated her by firing her when she didn’t even know about the incident until the sink was already punk rocker soup. She might be able to cope with some of that frustrated rage by doing something appalling for fun at her next job.
Astroturfing is the word of the week. My brother just told me that one of his model/starfucker friends just called him up to chortle over the word astroturfing. This tells me that it is officially part of the internet lexicon and everybody needs to know the expression.
The term is, like the term spam, derived from an actual product. AstroTurf is the leading brand of fake grass ground covering. Developed in 1964, AstroTurf has been a particular boon for major sports arenas in areas where real grass is not easily grown or cared for. AstroTurf takes their products very seriously and promises to provide whatever is needed for every possible sport:
” The broad range of AstroTurf products ensures that there will be a synthetic turf system engineered to meet the demands of your team’s sport. Whether it’s a field hockey team that prefers the hydrophilic properties of AstroTurf 12™, or a soccer team that prefers the high-density fiber of AstroTurf PureGrass®.
Whatever sport your team plays, there’s an AstroTurf product ready to take the field.”
Grass roots support used to be what you called it when a band or political candidate had a lot of people who believed in them, whether or not the record labels or political machine did. Astroturfing is the act of faking grass roots support.
For example, if you see a point being made over and over again on MySpace or LiveJournal or in forums, and the point is usually made by people who nobody knows in real life, who tell you nothing plausible about themselves, and who do not have known online nicks, then you are probably looking at astroturfing. This means that, when you see certain points made over and over again, by potential sock puppets presenting what they supposedly think in a bullet point sort of structured way, you are looking at astroturfing or fake grass roots support. It is my understanding that often dating sites and sites which sell music street team services to bands are the two types of organizations which most commonly set up fake profiles. Astroturfing is not the only function of a fake profile, but it is a favorite. A non-digital example of astroturfing would be when the news media found out that the enthusiastic fans waiting in line to buy various products when they first came on sale . . . were not really enthusiastic fans. Many bands, when either touring or showcasing, hire good-looking girls to come cheer in the front row, but traditionally one at least had to find real live good-looking girls to be willing to act like they supported the band. Now they can be wholly fictional.
Astroturfing has become popular for three primary reasons. Firstly, the current younger demographics have been bombarded with traditional advertisements for so many years that a certain immunity to them has resulted, forcing marketers to be creative. Secondly, because the internet was initially (ROFL) supposed to be a noncommercial environment, a lot of marketers came up with innovative (and icky) ways to circumvent people’s resistance to blatant and honest commercial presentation. Thirdly, artists and politicians who have actual grass roots support are very hard for the corporate world to entirely control, so corporations prefer popularizing something fake through astroturfing to having to deal with individuals who have personal power.
Now everyone go use the term astroturfing in a sentence this week.
People tend to be most open-minded about trying new things when they are first being romanced. For example, most people are extra-likely to taste a new food or listen to a new band then they start dating someone new. By this scientific equation, I hope that readers perusing the erotic portraiture of BlueBlood.com will be feeling extra-receptive to new ideas.
One of the most important messages I would like people to internalize from Blue Blood is that having purple hair or a tattoo or a pervy wardrobe in no way makes a person a second class citizen. You are entitled to the rewards of the larger society. You are entitled to the same love as anyone, whether or not your sex is a bit kinkier than average.
The ancient Romans celebrated Lupercalia on the Ides of February by whipping hot girls with portions of sacrificed goat. (The Ides is the 15th day of a month, for those of you who have repressed your Julius Ceasar studies.) Historians can’t agree on the origins of Lupercalia or precisely which gods the festival honored. They are pretty solid on the format for the party though. If you wish to throw a Lupercalia event, you will need a variety of eligible maidens, two goats, and a dog. The idea is to sacrifice the animals and then hit the girls with pieces of them in order to ensure fertility, painless childbirth, and general sensuality. A match-making lottery is optional but considered to be part of the tradition. Sort of the bloody pagan version of a 70’s key party. Blue Blood is not really down with the animal sacrifice portion of the show because we love our dogs and goats far too much for that.
In non-ancient Roman and non-70’s times, having an unusual piercing or wearing your lingerie in public can mean that your love life is limited to brief conversations with strangers off MySpace you message for 2am threesomes. But it doesn’t have to. There is no rule that thinking for yourself, owning your sexuality, and dressing flamboyantly equals eschewing all sentimentality and always feeling alone on Valentines Day. So I’m thinking I know more people who celebrate Valentines Day than Lupercalia.
Historians appear to be even more confused about the origins of Valentines Day than they are about the origins of the older Lupercalia. There are three different dudes various factions present as being the patron saint of romance. Most folks these days celebrate Valentines Day February 14th with hearts and flowers and, of course, sentimental greeting cards in both digital and paper form. Some scholars argue that the match-making lottery tickets of Lupercalia were the first Valentines. I feel that a date lottery ticket is no more a Valentine than the keys to some guy’s Porsche (unless maybe I got to keep the car.) The medieval Xtians appear to have come up with a variety of different mythologies and rituals in attempts to co-opt and dilute the pagan Lupercalia rites. Difficult to discern which one was the most successful, but, by the 1700’s, it is well-documented that there was a thriving Hallmarkian industry which created pre-made cards for Valentines Day and produced books with suggestions of how to express one’s love.
So flowers are pretty and an obvious gift, but how did hearts get associated with Valentines Day? Cadbury, founded in 1824, is credited with producing the first heart-shaped box of chocolate. Perhaps it is because of the way one’s heart beats when aroused or in love. Not that a heart shape is shaped much like a human heart. There are vaguely disgusting treatises on how what we consider to be heart-shaped is more similar in structure to a cow’s heart than a human heart. I’m not sure if those who study this are proponents of cattle-fucking or what.
Whether you prefer pieces of sacrificed animals or pieces of chocolate, there is someone out there who is the perfect match for you. If you have already found them, Valentines Day is the perfect holiday to celebrate your good fortune. As part of Blue Blood’s Valentines Day greetings to all of you, Forrest Black and I photographed a professional piercer, the lovely purple-tressed Natalie Addams, cutting out her own heart, gift-boxing it, and sewing up the “wound” with quite genuine play piercings. The Cadbury chocolate boxes of the mid-1800’s were made with velvet and mirrors. So we just had to say Happy Blue Blood-style Valentines Day with a bloody heart in a spooky ornate gift box! We’re traditional like that.
Maybe I should post it here whenever Blue Blood gets a press mention, but I usually don’t. You all were great when I was feeling sad about one mean press bite, so I also wanted to share that I’ve been really happy about a mention we got on Dark Side of the Net recently.
Anyway, Carrie Carolin, the seemingly indefatigable editor of all things dark recently culled and updated her Dark, Goth and Horror Zines section and here is what she wrote about Blue Blood:
“BlueBlood.net – Highly recommended! The paper magazine is legendary, and its amazing companion website is worth visiting every day or two for new content. High quality articles and photos on fashion, music, and literature. Blogs, community postings, and a newswire, too. This is pretty much the center of the goth universe as it stands today. Extremely professional and high quality. Their MySpace page is here.”
I’m not sure precisely how long editor Carrie Carolin has been collating the best dark links on the web, but it feels like three reincarnations at least. I just checked and when I wrote her site up for Playboy in 1999, I referred to it as “Carrie Carolin’s respected and long-running Dark Side of the Net,” so it was already the gold-standard then and the site was hosted on Gothic.net before that and I think somewhere else before that, maybe a couple somewhere elses. So it is lovely to get positive coverage like that and that much more meaningful coming from such an esteemed source.
So I’m recuperating from the corisone shot I mentioned last week. I asked my BlueBlood.net friends, my 60,000+ Blue Blood MySpace friends, and my LiveJournal friends. Apparently I have a lot of different site-specific friends. I was surprised to only get five responses on BlueBlood.net. In my personal journal, I received eleven responses, ten of which were from people I have interacted with extensively, ranging from interfaced with digitally a whole lot to stayed up late with at science fiction conventions to lived with, and nine of which were from people I know in real life in different cities. It is nice that the journaling service helps me keep in touch with people from different places and times in my life, although sometimes the chasms between the different folks on there seem odd, given that they all intersect with me.
I would have expected my personal journal to have had the most responses, given that it seems most likely that the folks on there would be the most interested in what is going on with me personally. Not how it went. More than 250 people on MySpace responded, including people I have known for many years, people I have just met, people I have made art with, people I have worked with, people I have partied with, people I’ve met once, people I hope to meet someday, and people who seemed interesting but I’ve never chatted with before. More than 250 MySpace friends were generous enough to share their experiences to make mine a more informed one. I was both stunned and touched. MySpace sure has gotten to be about 680 million times cooler since FOX bought it. At any rate, it seems that my friends who have received cortisone injections are most likely to be women who have worn extremely high heels and/or performed very vigorously onstage and men who have participated in some form of UFC-type fighting and/or performed very vigorously onstage. Your more traditional sports such as baseball, football, and gymnastics came in second place for both genders. I’m not sure what that says about the demographics of who I like. The general consensus of the general demographic seemed to be that cortisone shots are unmitigated hell to get but work magic for healing.
At any rate, when I went for the shot, I was scared and I brought the Mummy given to me by the wonderful artist Kristin Tercek of Cuddly Rigor Mortis. My doctor was entertained by the name of her company, but he told me I really didn’t need to worry and that he had a reputation for being good with a needle. I laughed nervously and he explained that there are three things which make it so a cortisone shot is not that awful. If I recall correctly, the three things were (1) spray the skin with topical anaesthetic but not an injected one, (2) use a very thin needle, and (3) don’t muck about. I asked him what he meant by don’t muck about. He explained that many doctors inject lidocaine or something similar to numb the area before they inject the cortisone, but he couldn’t see how two shots would hurt a lot less than one, and he suspected that many doctors did it that way because they lacked the experience and confidence to get in there quickly in the right spot and get out fast. A numb patient won’t notice the doctor feeling his way and a numb patient is likely to go overexert their injured area immediately afterwards.
I seriously get sick after getting blood drawn, so I was very nervous about the shot. It was totally nothing. The doctor was super fast and precise. It didn’t hurt at all. There was a peculiar burning sensation in my ankle for a while afterwards, but it was not painful, just odd. Afterwards the doctor said something about hoping he didn’t come across as arrogant. I told him that I’m just fine with my doctor being arrogant, especially when he is right.
Then me and Mummy went home to play with the awesome new Royal Gimp Kristin made for Blue Blood in Blue Blood purple.
So, in conclusion, I sure do like Kristin Tercek. I sure do like my doctor. I sure do like people who are accurately arrogant. My ankle hurts way more now than before the shot and I’m a little grumpy, but that is all apparently a normal precursor to feeling miraculously better. I just want to be able to go to the gym and drive like normal. And, fuck me, but I think I just may like MySpace.
Is it likely that a bleach blonde with fake tits who worked for Playboy appeared in a Playboy pictorial? Is it likely that a millionaire reality show contestant would murder his bleach blonde girlfriend and think he was going to get away with it by chopping off all her fingers and pulling out all her teeth but not removing her serial numbered breast implants? Is it likely that, if someone were so horribly cruelly disfigured, either just prior to being murdered or post-mortem to incompetently prevent identification, that TMZ would buy a death photo from someone in the coroner’s office and post it on the internet? Well, the only part of the the Jasmine-Fiore-murder-followed-by-death-photo story being reported which is not true is that the victim posed for Playboy. Full disclosure: Jasmine Fiore may have had a bit part in the horror movie The Abandoned which was an advertiser on this site and others I work on, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t bias me on this. I’m pretty sure I would find this story simultaneously ghoulishly hilarious and horrifically tragic regardless.
