I’ve now had time to sleep on it and reflect on NASA bombing the moon and I think it is okay in an Armageddon sort of way. I mean, I can accept all sorts of awful hardships in my own life, so long as they make a good story later. Why should I hold nation states to a higher standard?

NASA decided it would be awesome to bomb the moon, because a circus clown told them it would be a green thing to do, as the world needs clean water. Not just any circus clown though. A circus clown who is into acrobatics and very very very rich. All totally logical. If a writer pitched Batman having to stop the Joker from putting explosives on the moon, the idea would be dismissed as too ridiculous. Allow me to recap: NASA IS BOMBING THE MOON BECAUSE A CIRCUS CLOWN TOLD THEM TO. To discover ice water humanity already knows is there. Toss in double digit unemployment, the meltdown of much of the world’s economy, record bankruptcies, record foreclosures, banks and insurance companies looting the United States Treasury among others, the hunting of albinos, and various atrocities around the globe and you’ve got a cyberpunk noir too dark and too implausible to sell to any publisher.

Speaking of water, the Mayans were innovators in plumbing, built ground level aqueducts, and are believed to have had the first conduit drainage systems on the American continent. Mayan astronomers worried that the solstice moon and the Milky Way seemed to get closer together each year. The Mayan calendar has the world scheduled to end in 2012.

Why is Roman Polanski’s arrest such a cause celebre? I’m not an expert on the case, but I have read the grand jury testimony of Polanski’s thirteen-year-old victim, and it is pretty convincing and pretty damning. I understand that Samantha Geimer (then Samantha Gailey) publicly requested leniency for Roman Polanski, in the hopes that he could collect his big deal Oscar and she and her family could avoid the pain of being bothered again about something which was now decades in the past.

A lot of people seem to think that the intervening decades Roman Polanski spent in France were some kind of hardship equivalent to prison. First of all, Roman Polanski was a filmmaker in Poland in the 1950’s, but he left for France and then began making movies in the UK in the 1960’s. So the fact that he was making movies in the United States in the 1970’s does not mean that it was a hardship for him to then go make movies in another country. That was something he tended to switch up anyway. And he fled to France allegedly because he thought there was a chance that, instead of just getting the 42 days of time served, the judge might sentence him to a whole 90 days, minus the 42, for a total of 48 days behind bars.

What does anyone think the punishment would be today for a 43-year-old man who got a 13-year-old girl alone, plied her with booze, and then just brought her home after speaking about inappropriate subjects with her. Now add illegal drugs, forced sex, and introducing the girl to her very first anal rape. A new commission of a crime like this would get a long sentence of the sort where he might be killed by fellow inmates.

I understand that Roman Polanski has managed to achieve some great things in the face of horrific hardships. He lost his mother to the Holocaust and he lost his wife to Charles Manson and The Family committing the Tate-LaBianca murders. His wife was his eight months pregnant actress wife Sharon Tate. I do think it makes sense to consider how many forty somethings anally rape junior high school kids without having also had hard lives themselves.

But he still managed to direct Chinatown, a movie about California’s shady water rights history, and make it an interesting noir. Then again, Chinatown also benefited from the talents of the brilliant writer Robert Towne on the job and two actors widely considered to be some of the best of both their own generation and many others, Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. It is generally agreed that Roman Polanski got into such heated debates with Faye Dunaway on set that he even pulled out pieces of her hair. So, not a stranger to violence against women.

A lot of people, who aren’t me, also liked Rosemary’s Baby, so I accept that was an accomplishment, even though not entertaining to me. And a lot of people found The Pianist very poignant. The Pianist could have been from the heart or the tale of the talented Jewish musician trying to continue to create under the shadow of the Third Reich could have been a cynical ploy to get an Oscar and get to be self-righteous about not being able to come to the Academy Awards because of fear of arrest.

I’ve lived in Europe and most Europeans agree that France is a wonderful place to live. In point of fact, the Germans have invaded France every chance they got throughout history in pursuit of the best living. Hence the German expression for the best the world has to offer: Leben wie Gott in Frankreich. Roman Polanski has been married to the beautiful actress/rocker chick Emmanuelle Seigner since apparently 1989, when she was twenty-three. Or, to put in another way, there are even more years between her age and Polanski’s than between him and his 1977 victim. But it’s just different when you go after a twenty-three-year-old versus a thirteen-year-old.

So Roman Polanski’s big hardship is that, he couldn’t serve 48 more days in the loony bin ward of the prison (not the main population) and this meant that it is now, thirty some years later, terribly inconvenient for him to go to all the galas honoring him and his achievements. He was arrested on his way to receive a special award at a Zurich film festival when he was detained by Swiss authorities, who are perhaps less sexually open-minded than the French.

It honestly strikes me that Roman Polanski was going to get just a slap on the wrist for a pretty serious acquaintance assault because people felt sorry for him for having had bad things happen to him and maybe enjoyed his work. It seems like he might have gotten at least a few of his awards for the same reason because it seems peculiar that Americans go on and on about his greatness as a filmmaker without being able to name ten things he has done.

And does good art entirely excuse really bad behavior?

I’ve been trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to recall all of my science fiction writing credits. As a result, I’ve been ego-searching various strings like +”amelia g” +”science fiction” and +”amelia g” +”author” and so forth.

I was surprised to note the book SexCrime: an anthology of underground love and subversive erotica, edited by Cecilia Tan, had come out in a Kindle edition. I wish people would tell me these things. I’m not that hard to find. But it is still fun to find new credits, even if via search engine.

The book collects an assortment of stories on the topic of dystopian cyberpunk sorts of futures and gets its name from George Orwell’s 1984. I believe the story I have in this collection is one called “Rocket Queen”, which you will have already read if you have a vintage copy of Blue Blood magazine #3 in print with the Genitorturers on the cover. “Rocket Queen” also remains the only science fiction tale to ever be published in Thomas S. Roche’s celebrated noir crime Noirotica series.

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 the morning thing that was not happening for me. I usually start work at noon.

Speaking of the location for the event, I had not realized that the West Hollywood Book Fair is held outdoors. The outdoors features sunshine on days like this. More on the sun in a moment.

So the first panel I went to was Horror in Short Bursts: Crafting Stories for the Horror Anthology. It was moderated by Del Howison who runs a beautifully-appointed horror store called Dark Delicacies which has hosted signings for many friends of mine. Dark Delicacies sells primarily collectible books and spooky housewares. The other name on the panel I was familiar with was Jeff Gelb. Jeff is best known for editing the Hot Blood series of erotic horror short stories. I just checked Amazon and apparently he is up to a whopping thirteen volumes in the series. I guess I’ve missed around ten volumes, but props to Jeff for having edited material like this as far back as the late 80’s.

I have successfully sold 100% of the short horror fiction I’ve written over the years, so I wasn’t expecting to learn a ton from the Horror in Short Bursts panel, but I thought it would be enjoyable. Unfortunately, the panelists insisted on pontificating on the subject of the internet, which is apparently something they know less-than-nothing about. A panelist named Lisa Morton started going off on how she thinks it is somehow telling that stories from Gothic.net have been stolen and stories on another webzine she is familiar with have not. Now, Blue Blood has hosted Gothic.net for many many years, so I am intimately familiar with Gothic.net’s traffic statistics. As an internet professional, I normally would have a good ballpark guess on the number of visitors to any site, but in the case of the site Lisa mentioned, I actually know precisely that they only get around 700 visitors a month. I know this because this site copy/pasted the HTML from Gothic.net to their own site and accidentally hotlinked one of the graphics. As a result, I can see precisely how many times a visitor hits one of their pages. I do not know what Lisa thought she was implying about Gothic.net’s stories getting stolen, but I’ve spent a lot of legal time making sure that every single instance of content theft from Gothic.net got shut down. I even gave free legal lessons to a number of horror writers so that they would know how to better protect their own work. In point of fact, the reason that Gothic.net fiction gets jacked more often is simply that Gothic.net receives about as many visits in an hour as this other webzine gets in a month. A certain percentage of people will steal, so more readers equals more theft. If a writer wants their work to actually be read, I can certainly tell them which site will give them more exposure. The WGA writers’ strike is all about writers looking to share in web revenue, so I was truly shocked to see writers and editors presenting like the internet should not have writing on it or something.

I was excited, however, when the amzingly multitalented author and editor Thomas S. Roche popped in to the horror panel. Among many other things, Thomas edits Eros Zine and previously worked on the web arm of Good Vibrations, so he is web savvy. I always like seeing Thomas and this made running into him even better. I had realized he was going to be at the Fair when I saw him in the program guide. I had posted a thing online the day before asking who I know in Los Angeles who likes books. Thomas saw me post it, but he told me at the Fair that he’d assumed that I had some old books to give away, rather than that I was looking for who might like to hit the Fair with me.

So, anyway, Thomas S. Roche, Forrest Black, and I wander around the exhibit booths and start working on our sunburns. We stop by the Dark Delicacies booth where Del and Jeff are hanging out. We all say hello and then Thomas chats briefly with Jeff who wants to get a story from Thomas for his next anthology. While we are waiting for Thomas, I am thrilled when Gary Phillips ambles by. I admit I gushed a little when I told Gary how much I really love his work and he can have his publishers send over press releases and I will give him coverage and did I mention I really love his books. At which point, Jeff Gelb interrupts me telling Gary Phillips how awesome I think Gary is and claims that I just told Jeff the exact same thing. Gary’s face falls and I’m left totally speechless that Jeff would think it was funny to tell a straight up lie that takes a heartfelt compliment away from someone else. Gary Phillips also has a really quality author web site and Jeff may or may not have registered his name as a domain.

At this point, the sun is getting kinda brutal and Forrest, Thomas, and I decide to head over to the Queer, Hot, and Avant Garde Pavilion. We pass by the Daedalus booth where BDSM educator and writer Midori has a dark hidden little space in one corner where Fair visitors can get out of the sun and whisper a fantasy they have. Midori then writes down the fantasy and posts it on a fantasy wall. Someone, who may have been me, asks if the secret to her innovative setup is really just getting out of the sun. But Midori is – unlike me, unlike Forrest, and unlike Thomas – prepared for the event; Midori has sunscreen. Not only that, but Midori is a merciful and generous angel who shares her sunscreen with the less prepared. Thomas says he thinks it is too late to save him, but I still manage to shoot off a funny snapshot of him with Midori’s sunscreen all over his head.

I am happy that we catch the end of the Literary Foremothers: A Lesbian Tradition panel. The very talented Myrium Gurba is on this panel and talks about the conflicts between presenting and celebrating both ethnic background and sexuality. I have never met Myrium in person before, but she wrote up my sites Gothic Suts and Barely Evil for the late lamented On Our Backs magazine, so we sort of know each other and I’d been wanting to meet up in person. Myrium is also smokin’ hot.

It is nice to stay semi out of the sun as the panel Thomas is on is in the same Pavilion. He is speaking on Fictional Sex – The Good, The Bad, and the Never to be Done Again which is moderated by Christine Louise Berry and also features Thomas S. Roche, Jenoyne Adams, Midori, and Rob Roberge. Apparently there is some kind of yearly award thing for the worst sex scene in a “mainstream” novel. So the panel is mostly this group of talented writers reading reading really awful anti-erotic passages by less talented authors. Midori actually acts most of them out, whether or not she is the one reading. It is immensely entertaining, although I can’t help feeling that I would have liked to hear them all just reading their own quality work.

To this end, Forrest and I finish the day at the performance tent of WordPlay: A New Spin on Storytelling. I don’t always like spoken word. I’m a bit inhibited about reading myself and I think sometimes words just seem different when read versus heard. WordPlay is really fabulous spoken word though. The authors featured are hip and funny and fun and all seem very skilled in the reading in public department. Taylor Negron’s tale of catching a burglar was particularly entertaining and insightful and hopeful about the world. When I look up WordPlay, it appears that they do regular shows, so it makes sense that their readers have really honed their performances.

I go home happy and tuckered out and only a little bit sunburned. Hurray for books in West Hollywood.

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 as I walked in, shadows in all the right places, like a queen of the underworld, then the design was right. I also studied at Parson’s in NYC, but that was mostly for photography.

AG: What are your favorite design materials and why?

TOW: Currently, I enjoy working with gauze. It’s got a lot of interesting implications, some obviously being morbid. Those implications appeal to me, I won’t lie. It is also really malleable. It can be stretched and twisted in the most interesting ways. I always get faint at the sight of the perfect wool pinstripe. I am having fun with my new dresses which incorporate charmeuse, linen and satin – very form fitting, seductive and naughty.

AG: What are your favorite fetish materials i.e. latex, leather, metal, satin, silk, corsets, boots, etc. and why?

TOW: I love buckles & straps – anything that binds. When you strap something it becomes more sexy; restrained, tragic and dangerous, like Joan of Arc at the stake. I love ripping straps and sewing them on everywhere. You can never be too safe when restraints are involved…

AG: What do you find inspirational from a design perspective? Other designers, music, books, movies, etc?

TOW: The shadows on the wall of my bedroom at night are great. Sometimes I look at them and see a serial killer, and sometimes I see a beautiful skirt. I am always hoping for the skirt. Inspiration is everywhere. I look at a lot of art, because sometimes people who draw come up with the most interesting designs. They don’t have to worry about things actually being worn by anyone, after all.

AG: What are your favorite fashion events?

TOW: Runway. I love watching a Tom Ford dress saunter down the catwalk. Heavy Red will be doing a runway show at some point in the near future, and it is going to be fabulous. It will be like going to the castle of the damned at the edge of the haunted forest for a huge party, with spectacular people and decadent clothing. It will be an event, and we will keep you posted on it.

AG: What sorts of occasions do you feel your designs are best-suited for?

TOW: When you would like to be noticed by someone, our clothes are perfect for that. They are dark and sexual, but elegant. We have evening gowns for haunted midnight balls in Paris. We have shirts and skirts for going out to gothic/industrial clubs and dancing, hanging out, or other devilish activities. We have corsets, waist cinchers, and other details for layering. Whenever you want to be the princess of a dark and spooky wonderland,that is the occasion for our clothing. Each piece is designed to be sensual, lush, and sinful. The designs are simple, flattering, and darkly delicious. I really want to make people look great, and get noticed by the person they would like to get noticed by.

AG: What celebrity would you most like to dress?

TOW: I would love to dress Marlene Dietrich. She was so fabulous, and it would be a challenge to see if I could design something for her. I don’t usually design with blondes in mind, so that would be another challenge. I would give anything to see her perform a song in something I had designed.

AG: What types of designs are you introducing now?

TOW: We are introducing our Winter line, and I am extremely excited. We are releasing an all new line of corsets that will make you drop dead with delight… All of the corsets are steel boned, fully lined (they look as gorgeous on the inside as the outside)with an extraordinary fit. Our dresses for this season are so luscious. They are fabulous, bold and dark. I can picture them on the Queen of Nightmare land. The skirts this season are very versatile. You can wear them to a club, to a funeral, or wherever. We also have deliciously tragic long sleeve shirts, new naughty girl gothic ties, men’s shirts, and other things that I may have forgotten.

AG: Any other fashion background or particular inspirations or news or anecdotes or promo whatever you would like to mention?

TOW: We are always striving to top ourselves. The designs rely on simplicity, and a focus on flattering the natural lines of the feminine frame. We have a classic fit for woman with curves and women who want to have curves. Elegant lines mixed with raw and tattered materials. Black, always black. There will be a lot of experimentation with different bindings and fabrics. So much fun stuff. You are going to love it.

TOW: We at Heavy Red are here to create a spooky dream world for your pleasure and ours, and it is a horribly beautiful thrill. I am honored to be part of the Gothic community and I love having the opportunity to dress you. The response I have had to Heavy Red has been stunning, and I just want to thank everyone. I am going to strive to continually make great clothing for all of my dark and tortured peers.

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 her tome The Geek Handbook: User Guide and Documentation for the Geek in Your Life, although she is also a contributing editor to Glamour and known for her It’s Your World–If You Don’t Like It, Change It book of advice to teens on how to engage politically. Unless there is more than one Mikki Halpin writing from New York City, in which case I feel less informed, but that doesn’t seem super likely. She once was on People’s Court because someone’s mom sued her for putting their picture in her zine. She says Judge Wopner threw it out because the woman was bringing son on national TV, only she didn’t mention what the nature of the photograph was.

Then there was Melanie Boyer who does a dating blog called About Last Night for the Alt Weekly from my old stomping grounds, the Washington City Paper. She has great hair and big jangley earrings and lists a nice writerly assortment of life credits ranging from a Masters in International Training and Education to being a Peace Corps volunteer. She was kind enough to give me a turquoise pair of her signature boy short panties featuring her bird logo on the front and the line “a little birdie told me, About Last Night, dispatches from the morning after” inside.

Next up was Emily Listfield who does the Sex and the Single Mom blog for Redbook of all places. For some reason, I was surprised to see that Redbook was technologically ahead of the curve in the magazinosphere. I found Redbook also annoyingly on top of their pop up advertising technology and keep in mind what far reaches of the web I, uhm, surf. Emily Listfield is best known for her novels which genre-wise fall somewhere between chick lit and noir and I definitely intend to check them out.

I’m less surprised to find out that Glamour has a dating blogger Alyssa Shelasky. After all, Glamour and Wired share a corporate parent. Prior to blogging about her dates for Glamour, Alyssa Shelasky was a staffer for Us Weekly and before that apparently was so impressive a PR pitchwoman that journalists not only wrote about the products she repped, but also wrote about how awesome she was at getting them to do so.

Now you all know the cast of characters, so what are the ethics of blogging about dating? Melanie Boyer, of The Washington City Paper, said she initially thought she would get permission from each of her beaus. She says she believes men think they know the score when they don’t. So now her rule is to tell them what she does immediately and then the gloves are off once she is not seeing them any more, although she never uses names and attempts to be minimal enough on details that her guys are not easily identified. Still, she has more or less accidentally busted out at least two cheating lovers with her blog. Alyssa Shelasky, of Glamour, says that she tries not to humiliate people and to be friendly, nice, ethical, and kind, but sometimes she finds herself saying, “I would have thought you’d be flattered by that and instead they hate your guts and they’re going to therapy.” Rachel Kramer Bussel, of Penthouse Variations, agrees that people tend to “freak about little things.”

In addition to the ethics involved with the responses lovers and potential lovers may have to being blogged about, there are possible repercussions for third parties and other people’s opinions can come into play. Alyssa Shelasky worries about her parents’ response, so she won’t write about more than kissing. She initially thought her readers would be impressed if she talked about partying with Paris Hilton, but she quickly understood that they wanted to see her vulnerable, emotional, human side. Then again, she says she pretty much quits her job whenever she gets hate mail, so being her editor is probably kind of hellish. Emily Listfield’s blog is precisely about being sexual and being a single mom, but Redbook readers apparently can get a bit perturbed about her having sex at all. She understandably feels that her thirteen-year-old daughter shouldn’t know about her mother’s love life and has her friends lie such that “it gets very complicated to have that many realities out there.” She jokes that when your offspring turns thirty is the appropriate age to tell your child you blog about sex. Rachel Kramer Bussel has the luxury of blogging more for herself and thus having more control and says she will remove comments which are just mean and not constructive. She explains that “people really personalize whatever you write about and then they get affronted” and feel like they have to defend themselves.

The combination of invading the privacy of a writer’s romantic partners and having to stand behind whatever is blogged in the moment can be painful. Pretty much everyone on the the Should You Blog on the First Date? panel said they either wish they had blogged anonymously or were considering blogging anonymously. Emily Listfield feels that the anonymity of the women who comment on her blog entries gives them the freedom to really share about themselves and she feels that is a wonderful thing. Having her own name on her words makes Emily Listfield feel that her blog may be “destroying her life.” Alyssa Shelasky explains that Glamour wanted a face for the blog, someone who could promote on television and so forth, so being anonymous was not an option. She did enjoy it, however, when she got a MySpace account, despite feeling like, at twenty-nine, she was too old for it, and was surprised by the really really personal messages she received privately from readers. She felt like it was almost a group therapy evolution which made her like her blog more. Melanie Boyer says that the paper wanted journalistic integrity, so she had to use her name. Although she got a thrill from the whole “there’s that fat nerdy girl from junior high and now she’s a sex columnist” thing, she has found having her name on her blog inconvenient. In almost the same breath that Melanie Boyer makes the very astute observation that “anonymity erases integrity,” she expresses her own longing for anonymity. She doesn’t say whether she thinks her integrity would stay strong in such a situation. Rachel Kramer Bussel has considered doing an anonymous sex blog because she made the interesting observation that her friends who blog more anonymously than she does can be much more detailed without the same fear of upsetting those they blog about. It “makes you reconsider what you say when your name is on it,” she explains.

Pretty much all the sex bloggers agree that the people they blog about tend to be bummed about it and that they don’t much care for being blogged about themselves. Rachel Kramer Bussell says it felt weird to be blogged about by a peer, a woman she was in the same anthology with. Alyssa Shelasky says she hated having one of her guys, BostonBoy, stating his perspective in her comments and she also hated Gawker slagging her. Then again, she says she did get called “dating whore of Conde Nast” which might be a little brutal. Although I couldn’t find that exact phrase on the Gawker.com site, I did find a place where they had re-posted Alyssa Shelasky’s engagement announcement from a relationship which obviously didn’t work out. Ouch. In fact, she says, the only guy in six months who she dates who loved the Alyssacentric blog was on drugs, a “raging cokehead,” and she also had no trouble with a semi-homeless guy she had a three week fling with. Because he had no computer.

At this point in the panel, I apparently passed Forrest Black, who was shooting the presentation, a note which read: “MY BROTHER SHOULD MARRY SHELASKY ONLY HER FACE IS NOT HEART-SHAPED.” (For the non-Luddite savvy, note passing is a sort of low tech Twitter.) My brother is not a homeless coke addict with no computer (and I love my brother) so I guess there is just something wrong with me. I just thought she was awesome, really adept at coming across sweet, but in a way where you could tell she could handle high pressure socializing. I made sure to get her cell number and email, but, alas, reading her blog upon my return from Austin, I discovered that she is already in a relationship. Drat.

Emily Listfield says that “strategy-wise” doing a date blog is very hard because some guys say they won’t read it, but she wonders if they can really avoid that. The panelists all agreed that dating involves a certain amount of deciding what to reveal when and blogging about it messes up the timing on revealing oneself bit by bit. Rachel Kramer Bussel says she finds it problematic that sometimes she is fine with blogging about really personal stuff which is at a deeper level that how well she knows someone she is dating. To be a good blogger, she feels it is very important to “go beyond the surface” and she points out that her favorite blogs to read are not necessarily written by people she would want to be faced with in person.

Melanie Boyer says “ I write every day and it has become like exhaling; it has become my way of processing things,” only reading her entries makes me want to shake her, tell her how good she looks, and give her a mirror where she doesn’t see her junior high face. But she is a little oblivious and apparently still cranky at men for slights which must be far in her past now. Once they opened it up to questions, all of the panelists, except Rachel Kramer Bussel, made some fairly sexist remarks about men and male insight. Most of them seemed to be agreeing on the preposterous claim that men don’t blog about dating, and certainly straight men don’t, until Rachel Kramer Bussel brought up Tucker Max. Perhaps realizing how they sounded, Melanie Boyer made an attempt at a partial save by pointing out that the members of the sex blogger panel all have the perspectives of totally heterosexual women. Except, just from data presented during this specific panel, this is patently not the case. Rachel Kramer Bussel says that “it’s really hard not to internalize stereotypes about sex writing” and that some people look at writing about sex as frivolous, but she disagrees. Alyssa Shelasky says “you have to own it to feel good about it, like anything else,” only one gets the impression that she isn’t planning on being a dating blogger for much longer.

So should you blog on the first date? Going by the experiences of this panel of bright female writers, I’d have to say you probably should not. The question is posed: Does a great writer have to not care what anyone thinks? Going by my own experiences, I’d have to say that is probably true. Ouch. Are all great artists destined to die alone? I guess that is a topic for another article.

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 not yet . . . St. Augustine!” All her little friends laugh and cheer. Amateurs.

Girl: That was really sexist.”
Tucker: No it wasn’t, it was a joke. If I had said that women are nothing but life support for pussy, now THAT would be sexist.”
Girl: “Excuse me?”
Tucker: “If I had called her a hot mouth, that would be sexist too. Or, if I said that the only thing going for her is that she’s 98.6 degrees and has two wet holes, that would be very sexist. But I didn’t say those things, did I?”
Girl: “WHAT?”
Tucker: “Uh oh! Did I piss you off? Are you going to write angsty poetry?!?”

Women in the stories Tucker recounts also tend to say things along the lines of, “I can’t believe how funny I think you are and I’m a girl.” It is my opinion that they are either (a) easily manipulated chicks or (b) missing the fucking point. I’m not delusional, so I’m well aware that some people look at my own work and aren’t aware of anything deeper than quality photos of punk genitalia and gothic boobies, although there is more to it. But I do understand that sometimes pervy sex is the common denominator for a reason. Sure, Tucker regularly points out how much pussy he has thrown at him 24/7 and how great he is at acquiring even difficult pussy. His writing career started when he first launched his site as a dating application. Some chicks will always be attracted to a guy they believe other chicks want. Some guys will be impressed by any dude who claims to have laid miles of pipe. Although I went through a phase in the late 80’s where I liked to tie up blonde boys from good families, that was a long time ago, so some people will undoubtedly be surprised that I am such a huge fan of Tucker Max’s writing that I told my panelmates at the recent SXSW confab that I’d be late getting to the green room for our panel because I was going to watch Tucker Max speak at his first. Then again, readers who really got BLT, the antisocial punk rock humor zine I did in DC, well, I think they will understand the Tucker Max appeal.

The point is not that Tucker Max is a hard-drinking vanilla guy who has frequent sex with varied partners. The point is that his writing is brilliant, articulate, painfully insightful, and totally fearless and he is able to find the humor in absolutely anything. John Hargrave of Zug.com, the moderator of Tucker’s one man SXSW panel From Blog to Book called the author “a promiscuous drunken Tolstoy.” To give you an idea of the Zug perspective, my horoscope on the site today suggests I “Call a hardware store and whisper “stucco” into the phone over and over. “Stucco stucco stucco stucco stucco.” If they hang up, simply call back.” I used to manage an adult boutique where callers sometimes attempted this sort of thing. They might as well have been saying “stucco” for all the impact it had on folks who sold lingerie and vibrators, although only the serious submissives called back to speak with the manager, once I got through with them. At the end of the From Blog to Book panel, John Hargrave was kind enough to pour healthy doses of something called Tucker Max Death Mix. The ingredients of which are apparently Everclear, Lemon-Lime Gatorade, and Red Bull. No wonder so many Tucker Max Drunk stories entail such copious amounts of vomit.

Tucker Max claims to have little formal idea how to write properly. This is debatable as he went to both U Chicago and Duke Law. Both good schools. But he assured his SXSW audience that he has no clue how to use commas, confuses forms of the word ‘too’, and doesn’t really consider himself a writer. He says he tries not to consider his audience when writing, to just concentrate on telling his story in his own authentic way. “I write in my authentic voice,” he says. Oh yeah, and then he works on trimming the fat from his work. But the authenticity is key.

According to Tucker Max’s business card, the name of his company is Rudius Media. According to the Rudius web site, “a rudius is a wooden sword, given by the Roman Emperor to a gladiator upon attainment of his freedom.” It may be happy coincidence that this is probably also a play on the word ‘rude’, but whatever. The best thing about Tucker Max’s writing is the sense of abandonment, the extreme freedom. He’ll tell you his ferocious opinion of some lesser person that himself and he’ll tell you his dick is average in size, although a bit large to put in a midget or a small girl’s colon. He may be coy about whether he has ever done cocaine in Vegas, but he’ll tell you how much hostile fun he is on absinthe. He’ll detail how he drove a mildly inconsiderate girl’s car through the storefront of a donut shop. He’ll pressure all the law firms in Silcon Valley into raising their salaries for summer interns by posting sock puppet conversations with himself on Infirmation.com. He’ll tell girls he is in a Christian rap band and coerce his friends into playing along. He’ll get accidentally pepper-sprayed during the sex act. He’ll bring friends in Special Ops to a politically left wing cocktail party. He’ll get thrown out of IHOP. He’ll get thrown out of Denny’s. He’ll get thrown out of Mickey D’s. And he’ll pretty shamelessly tell you – and everyone else – about it. Although his book has been out for more than a year now, he says it is still selling a remarkable 2,000 copies a week to people like me who are just discovering him. He says he designed the flawlessly appropriate book cover himself too. Tucker Max challenges the SXSW audience to check his numbers on Bookscan because everything he says is true and this is one outlandish tale which is verifiable.

And why, you may ask, was I at the airport, while visiting my family, buying noir novels and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell? All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Actually, I have a pretty happy family, as these things go, but that just seemed like such an elegant literate way to close that I almost couldn’t help myself. Of course, now I fucked it all up with the disclaimer.

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