Posts tagged: noir

The West Hollywood Book Fair has received a California Park and Recreation Society Award of Excellence for three years in a row now. The Fair deserves it for throwing such a successful literary event year-after-year in the somewhat arid soil of Los Angeles.

The West Hollywood Book Fair features panels, workshops, performances, and exhibitor booths including local bookstores, small presses, literary non-profits, literary journals and arts organizations. My favorite part of the Fair was getting to see authors I know speak and discover authors I didn’t know.

The panel discussions and such were sectioned off into various niche pavilions. The pavilions of most interest to me were the Mystery, Crime & Suspense Pavilion, the Comics/Sci Fi/Horror Pavilion, and the delightfully-named Queer, Hot, and Avant Garde Pavilion. I missed the LA Noir: Crime Fiction Close to Home panel I wanted to go to in the Mystery, Crime & Suspense Pavilion. I was mostly interested because the brilliant Gary Phillips was scheduled to be speaking. I adore his gritty crime novels with characters so vibrant and real and frequently badass you want them to succeed, even as you note the ways they may destroy themselves. He co-edited a pretty cool cocaine anthology too. I’d like to give some really great reason why I missed this particular panel, like maybe traffic was so congested from the hugeness of the event that it took a while to find parking. But, let’s face it, a reading even in Los Angeles, even an awfully big one, is going to lay on tons of free parking and the location for this event is a really easy location to drive to. It was just the whole getting up that early in …

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Sometimes I feel like I am just on vampire time. Something will be on my to-do list and I’ll feel like darn-it-some-time-has-passed. Only it will be more time than seems possible in my gut response. Anyway, it has been on my to-do list to bring you all more fashion coverage on BlueBlood.net. So I’m going to start checking this off my gigantic to-do list with this exclusive never-before-seen interview with Tyler Ondine Whitman of Heavy Red Noir Couture. Tyler and I had a good interview and I’m sorry it took so long to get it live. In my defense, the file was called blueblood-interview, so it was not super obvious what was in it, while it was sitting on my hard drive. Without further ado, I bring you the feature interview on Heavy Red:

AG: How did you first get into being a designer?

TOW: I love clothing that looks like it is straight out of a beautifully demented dream. I wanted my clothing to look like it was from a dark cabaret ball in a haunted estate at the edge of time. Eventually that led to designing and making gothic clothing for myself. Once I got started, well, of course it became an addiction. I am still making clothes for myself, as well as the ladies, gentlemen and other creatures of the night who attend the dark balls and walk the night as elegant, tortured souls.

AG: What is your fashion/educational background?

TOW: Gothic clothing is a style all its own, so the best way to learn it is by doing it and wearing the results. I would go to Perversion, or some other club or event, wearing something I had just designed. If I felt fabulous and dark …

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The sex blogger panel at SXSW was entertaining and provided food for thought, but I’ve been having trouble writing about it. I finally realized that the problem with writing about sex bloggers is the same problem bloggers have writing about sex: Specifically, sex and sexuality are very core to self, so even the most gentle critiquing of someone’s sexuality can be terribly hurtful. If any sex bloggers are wounded by what I say here, I apologize, but please keep in mind how you feel when you write about sex with a date who doesn’t like your review.

I attended the Do You Blog on the First Date? panel because Rachel Kramer Bussel was on it. With credits including Penthouse, Bust, and Punk Planet, I think of her more as a writer writer than as exactly a blogger, but she does blog very diligently about both her life and cupcakes, so she absolutely has blogging cred. Yes, I said she writes about “cupcakes” and that is not slang for some depraved sex act you are unfamiliar with. Sometimes a cupcake is just a cupcake and I can’t help loving quality food porn; it is hardwired into my system. And apparently I know now that I am not alone in my longings. Rachel Kramer Bussel’s writing is intelligent and raw. She manages to be very self-aware without injecting pounds of that fakey emo I-don’t-really-mean-it irony. No mean feat and a breath of fresh delight in the current online writing landscape. Especially in the blogosphere.

So I showed up to hear Rachel speak and found out about the other sex bloggers on the panel along the way. The moderator was Mikki Halpin who was a good SXSW selection because of …

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I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.

Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.

He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:

1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – but …

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Amelia’s Blue Blood Quote for Today: Murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle.

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