I’ve written about writer/director/producer Sean Abley’s Socket movie here before, when it first hit the festival circuit. Now the movie is out on DVD and available from TLA Video. TLA Releasing put out Socket and the TLA media empire is descended from the Theatre of the Living Arts experimental theatre group in 60’s Philadelphia.

A couple of days ago, Sean Abley and a couple hundred of his closest friends got together at MJ’s Bar in Silverlake to celebrate the release of Socket on DVD. The event was hosted by promoter Jovy Janolo and producers John Carrozza, Doug Prinzivalli, Matt Mishkoff, and of course Sean himself. The VIP goodie bags included an interesting-looking DVD of a spooky movie called Amnesia, a coupon for a discount on TLA releases, and a pass for thirty free minutes of VOD which promise to “put the HARD back in hardcore DVD.” Blue Blood’s Forrest Black had the honor of receiving the final goodie bag of the night. The doorman apologized to me and told me he guessed I’d be re-gifting because the stuff in there was for, you know, jacking off. I was expecting the DVD and such to be more like what I would get at a regular business convention for web professionals, but TLA in general and Socket and Amnesia in specific appear to be for the purposes of movie movies and not jack off vids. Then again, I couldn’t get the VOD site to load, so maybe my tender sensibilities would have been scalded. Oh, and I’m a chick, so I guess I’m expected to care whether fictional characters romance and fuck exactly who I would personally want and be able to romance and fuck. Or not. I’m a fan of quality, so you know I’m a pervert. Polite of the doorman to warn me, just in case, though.

I’ve already praised the fun story and killer funny dialog in Socket and I’ve already told y’all you should see it, so I’m just going to mention an awesome factoid about the film, which can only now be revealed. Velvet Candy Entertainment and Dark Blue Films are so resourceful that the whole flick was made for $45,000. Sean Abley says that it was very difficult to have people judging his baby like it cost many times what it did, when he and his team were really very clever about how they did things. The filmmaker says, “I’d learned through my previous producing projects that you should never reveal the budget of your film until you’ve sold it. “Well under a million dollars” is the standard response. So while Socket was making its way through the film fests and then on to the release date, being reviewed by every internet and gay rag critic on the planet, we kept our mouths shut and took the hits.”

My view of Sean Abley and Socket is that I know indie is usually just a buzz word, but this is truly what independent filmmaking and DIY are supposed to be about.

I’ve known Blue Blood Photographer Carlos Batts for what seems like a few lifetimes at this point. Our paths first crossing in the pre-internet zine scene, East Coast comic book conventions, and a million other points of common reference in the sexy cool artistic realm along the way since then. Looking back, some of those scenes seem like different worlds these days. We both live in Hollywood now, coincidentally a few blocks away from each other to be even more specific. But, maybe it’s not coincidence at all. A lot of interesting cool creative types end up in Hollywood. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoy it out here, being such a sort of heaven for eclectic creative types driven to document and enhance or otherwise decorate their public existence.

There are always a million things to do in Hollywood and it’s rare (or unfortunate anyway) to do everything within one sort of scene. Instead, people tend to party hop, swinging from velvet rope VIP to drug addled loft gatherings, trekking from inspiring artistic exhibits in every media imaginable to legendary dive bars to see the latest and hopefully greatest bands before they break big or break up.

Carlos’s latest video project, Young Hollywood, presents the cacophonous meld of cool glam youth and seedy glitz, the edgy music mixed with erotic pop art and nightlife craziness that is the young Hollywood experience today, all through the eyes of an artistic pornographer. The party to celebrate it’s release very much reflected this jumbled elemental mix as well, and although I couldn’t party quite as long as I would have liked, everyone seemed to be having a really good time. The shindig was held at the relatively new Safari Sam’s venue, which I mostly remember as it’s previous incarnation, a relatively spacious non alcohol serving full nude strip club that smelled oddly like laser tag. But, it has more recently been impressively transformed into a pretty cool punk rock venue with a good stage and well designed and roomy layout for attendees. I really should get over there more often.

It was great to see Carlos and the always gorgeous April Flores, whom you should remember from our sexy Blue Blood Holiday Cheer wishes, along with the fun cast of characters involved in the production. I was pleased to meet super sexy Mandy Morbid and although Kimberly Kane gets top billing for the movie, in my opinion Mandy and Lystra really steal the show. Punk porn provocateur Zak Sabbath was also in attendance and it was nice to finally talk to him for a bit as so many of our mutual friends have been trying to get us together for some sort of mayhem for a long time now.

All in all, it was a fun party for a fun and sexy project and a lot of the people involved are cool folks. Young Hollywood should be available for order and instant download very soon.

As a holiday, St Patrick’s Day has dubious origins but fabulous iconography.

Although the holiday tends to serve as both an expression of Irish pride and an excuse to get thoroughly blotto (Hi Funkatron), the origins of Saint Paddy’s are neither in drunkenness nor Ireland. Although observation of the holiday in the Americas was recorded as early as 1737 in Boston, the first serious St Patrick’s Day parade took place in New York City on March 17, 1762 as a celebration for Irish soldiers in the British military. That would be the British military whose asses we kicked in order to become a sovereign nation and pursue happiness and freedom and stuff. Nonetheless, over the years, the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City grew into a bigger and bigger event. A lot of the first Irish immigrants to the New World were Protestant, but the 1845 Potato Famine lead to an influx of Catholic Irish population. Although grisly prejudice against the Irish in general and the Catholic Irish in particular lead initially to negative media coverage of the parade, when President Harry Truman attended the festivities in 1948, many people felt that prejudice was really something that the US of A was finally putting behind it. This was perhaps overly optimistic, but still a step in the right direction.

Actually in Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was celebrated as a religious holiday, even though St Patrick was a pretty lame saint. Patrick was essentially a trust fund baby from the 400’s. He was kidnapped from his parents’ estate and held captive for six years, during which time he, go figure, got kinda religious and started hearing voices. When he escaped, he is said to have walked 200 miles to freedom in England. He studied religion there for many years, before returning to Ireland to minister to Christians already practicing there and to work on converting pagans. Some accounts credit him with introducing Christianity to Ireland, but this has been pretty resoundingly debunked. He is, however, credited with thinking of dressing Easter up with Pagan rituals to make it more appealing to those he was trying to influence to convert. There is also some stuff about banishing snakes from Ireland, but it is sort of silly and also considered by most to have been debunked.

The thing about St Patrick’s Day being a religious holiday in Ireland was that this meant all the pubs were closed. This was not relaxed until the 1970’s. Not a lot of consumption of green beer going on there. That was a strictly American and primarily New York, err, tradition. In 1995, the Irish government decided that, if anyone was going to have a killer St Patty’s Day party, it should darn well be them. Pretty reasonable really. Ireland upgraded it from a “Day” to a “Festival” and now puts on four days of merriment, enjoyed by an estimated 1.2 million revelers at last count.

I went to high school in Germany for a year and every German holiday is an excuse reason to get tipsy in the street. So I feel I can safely say that I might enjoy the modern Saint Patrick’s Day Festival in Ireland, except that a lot of traditional music sounds like filking to me. I realize that filking is actually based on folk music, and not the other way around, but the discomfort lingers. SF fans will know what I am talking about and, if you are not familiar with filking, trust me, you do not need to be.

Leprechauns are also based on Irish folklore, but they were not associated with Green Beer Day until 1959 when Disney released the movie Darby O’Gill & the Little People. Somehow the Irish heritage aspect of St Patrick’s Day meant that leprechauns and their tricky pots of gold then got to be thought of as part of the holiday as well. It really seems like I should be kidding at this point, but I’m not. Makes you wonder what weird future impacts modern media will have on world celebrations.

Oh, and the shamrock? Yeah, the first recorded mention of one was around a thousand years after the death of Saint Patrick. The shamrock or seamroy was sacred at the time as a symbol of the rebirth of spring. The utilization of the shamrock in a Christian holiday is another example of the co-opting of Pagan culture, but not one which is apparently directly attributable to Saint Patrick. The meaningful clover symbol was later further co-opted for Irish pride under English oppression.

So . . . Happy St Patrick’s Day and enjoy your green beer. (The original color associated with the holiday was blue.)

What if you threw a fetish party and nobody new came? The same rugged stalwarts from the last five years were present, sporting hardened and stained latex wardrobe, silicone lubricated, lipoed, botoxed expressionless and very drunk. BDSM and drugs/liquor don’t mix but its Hollywierd and the weirdo onlookers, unhappy married couples, and pervy old white dudes in black leather were all in attendance. At least there weren’t any melancholy hipsters or smelly hippies. Then again they know how to party and should have been there.

My editor sends me a mysterious online message about a job should I choose to accept to cover it, a fetish event in said Hollywierd, wedged between X-Mas and New Years. I opened the message on myspace on my nearly defunct once puzzling newfangled phone that will let me navigate online but only in something smaller than 8 pt. font. I ventured to the address via the Red Line at the Hollywood and Vine Station and I was really ready to see something interesting whether it be puke or piss.

The club was situated at The Henry Fonda Theatre and has been known to deny entrance to those that have been placed on the list before, but I was miraculously let in, and my bag barely inspected. I should have smuggled a flask. It was cold out. So I was wearing something odd, not latex, but one of my fav old drag queen outfits from someone that had a much bigger bust and ass than me, that I scored in a Silverlake thrift store. Twas pink satin, and about 8 sizes too big, but I pinned it to my leotard with safety pins and felt fabulous. Underneath my skirt I had two pairs of stockings, and leg warmers, and I was wearing a Blue Blood hoodie, 2 scarves and a cashmere overcoat. Fuck fetish, I had just got over a nasty cold few weeks prior and I was not looking to score.

Most of the fetish miscreants were there, just not many of the promised advertised ones. Some it seems, or most were skinny and lacquered a bit too tight with corsetry. God forbid someone should sneeze. I overheard one fake eyelashed missy hiss to the other, “wearing thisss feels like you are being squeezed by a nice long python.” I couldn’t eavesdrop much more since the carpeted stairs made it tough for me to get down in high heeled boots and I had work to do.

On the main floor Master Syrus applied long beautiful feather needles for a fantastic scalp piercing, and a bosom piercing. Some of the old crows watching were more glassy eyed than others, but when you are wearing 2K in latex couture everything else seems to pale in comparison. Sadly the Mistress of Ceremonies Masuimi Max, Mistress Aradia, and a slew of purported others were not seen during the time I was there, and I missed the performances by Midori and Kumi, although I did see Kumi in a white wig briefly.

Watching Mistress Genevieve 2.0 wait in line to get in was priceless: with brown hair, possibly meth fidgety and frozen overdrawn lipped smile in brown, opening and closing her phone, muttering where is she, jumping up and down in impatience like she had to pee, all of a sudden spins around and bluntly asked me why did I cut my hair. I looked her dead in the eye with bemusement, and said because I was tired of it, but secretly because I didn’t want to look like everyone else, especially her. I still have nightmares of getting my eyes nearly enucleated by her during the production of “Scuba Squirters 3.” Now I know better and I kept my distance from her talons while I waited in the short VIP line.

The fashion show highlighted the fashion of Syren and Stockroom in typical black/white combos. The best event was the two leather hooded chick bunnies with tits marked by black X marks, sparring away in boxing gloves and adorable mens boy shorts. One was in black the other in red. The dark bunny won in a lovely spray of red glitter.

This was nothing like the other great fetish venues such as Skin Two Rubber Ball in London, Fetish Evolution in Essen, or the Black and Blue Ball in NYC. This was the first year of the West Coast Fetish Ball and it was a cold day, so of course it was going to be sparse, and although the VIP area upstairs has a tent cover and kept things more warm, it was basically a total ripoff, charging ten bucks for a shot of booze was ridiculous and to laud it as such a big fetish venue with so few hardcore and featured performers around, I felt bad for anyone that shelled out good beer money for a total letdown.

It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.

I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?

Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.

It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to more vanilla smutsters, Los Angeles has seen tattooed hotties doing BDSM once or twice before. In point of fact, the club is essentially a tent erected by where the Coconut Teazer nightclub used to stand. So that very location has probably been host to more than its share of tattooed hotties with fetish gear over the years. The most ground-breaking aspect was probably that it is unusual for a movie to not screen at its own premiere.

Anyway, both the MPAA, which rates movies, and a variety of watchdog groups have objected to Captivity’s presentation well before they started planning a premiere. After Dark Films pulled thirty of their billboards from Los Angeles and more than fourteen hundred taxi cab adverts, the creative for which featured the slogan “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.” over very beautiful stylized photos of a very small portion of a scene involving a woman. I can’t emphasize enough how great the color scheme of those advertisements was. Meanwhile, the MPAA jerked the movie company around on when the film was even going to be rated. After Dark Films co-founder Courtney Solomon claims the MPAA rigmarole with Captivity is just about the MPAA maintaining their position of power. “They needed a whipping boy. They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.” The upshot of this was that a schedule May 18 release date became a July 13 release date. While releasing a horror flick on Friday the 13th is always nifty, any organization which can keep audiences away from a product is scary. And not scary in an entertaining way, scary in a bad way.

A quick history lesson: The Motion Picture Association of America was founded in 1922 as a trade association. Although the initial industry concerns it dealt with had more to do with copyright and contract standardization, over the years, it has become almost synonymous with the ratings system it devised. Many industries choose to police themselves, partly out of decency, and partly out of a desire to take care of it internally before outsiders do it for them. So the MPAA ratings board determines whether a movie will receive wide release as a PG flick or the financial death knell of an NC-17. Representatives of the six major studios sit on the board. These studios includes Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers.

Now, the opening weekend gross for Captivity was only a bit over a million bucks, which is pretty terrible for a major studio release and brought the movie in at a ranking of #12 for domestic releases that weekend. In all fairness, the flicks Captivity was beaten out by were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Ratatouille, Live Free or Die Hard, License to Wed, 1408, Evan Almighty, Knocked Up, Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Had the movie been able to open as planned, if the MPAA had not hung them up, then it might have been able to do better against the movies opening that weekend. Although a $1.4 mill opening is lackluster for any theatrical release, especially a heavily advertised one, had Captivity opened May 18 with the same total, it would have ranked #8. Then again, maybe it would have gotten its ass kicked by Shrek and Spider-Man, just like everybody else.

Part of the difficulty I have parsing out my feelings on the brouhaha is that it is difficult to figure out whether an After Dark Films release counts as a major motion picture or a plucky little guy trying to make it. Captivity is “co-released” by Lionsgate, but Lionsgate leaves all the responsibility for potentially problematic promo on After Dark’s doorstep. I’m not sure what “co-releasing” means exactly, but Lionsgate has a market capitalization of one point three five billion dollars and an estimated four hundred full time employees. Which I would not categorize as small or independent. I think it is important to note that the distro on a partner-produced movie like Captivity is a microscopic portion of the business of a behemoth like Lionsgate, which is responsible for very enjoyable and successful projects such as the Academy-award-nominated The Cooler and innovative DVD packaging and distribution for projects ranging from cutting edge fare like Weeds to cult classics like King of New York. Then again, if you inflicted the Care Bears movie on your kids, that is partly Lionsgate’s responsibility too.

According to the New York Times, Courtney Solomon, who put himself on the map by optioning Dungeons & Dragons and parlaying that into a much-lambasted directorial turn, “persuaded the director of Captivity, Roland Joffé, the much-honored filmmaker behind The Mission and The Killing Fields, to undertake reshoots. These added explicit torture, including a so-called “milkshake” scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it.” Both to the New York Times and in other media outlet, Solomon chortles about what a freakshow his premiere is going to be and how upset he hopes women’s groups get about his movie. The National Organization for Women said, on the record, that they were not going to protest to give him press.

So, having delved into the issues involved, here is my summary take on it. First, if After Dark Films is looking for a modern audience for their movies, it is a bit antiquated to act like BDSM and tattoos are outrageous fringe culture. I’m sick of this sort of marginalizing nonsense from people who would like to make a dollar off of my scene. Secondly, because of the major studio makeup of the MPAA, I feel it can’t really be objective. I like having ratings on things as a viewing guide, but I dislike the way the ratings system leads to unwarranted limitations on distribution and I particularly dislike the way the current rating system encourages violence against women in place of human sexuality. It will be a chilly day in Hellywood before I deliberately view torture porn like Captivity, but I don’t think a project like that should have its success determined by whether or not its producers can convince a half dozen really biased businesspeople that violence against women is appropriate viewing for teens. Thirdly, although I kind of liked the Captivity billboards, I was personally revolted by the Saw signage at the San Diego Comic Con and I think movie producers, and everyone really, should pay attention to what they put in an advertisement people will not be able to avoid. I do not want strangers telling me what I can see in my media. I deeply believe that that becomes a slippery slope to total destruction of the free speech rights granted to all Americans by the First Amendment, but I also do not want strangers forcing me, or forcing children, to see things they do not wish to see or should not see. This means that adverts, in public places, for potentially upsetting products, should be honest about what the products are, without ramming the product down the throats of the unwilling.

I admit that, although I loved Elisha Cuthbert’s performance and character in the surprisingly awesome The Girl Next Door, I loathed her Kim Bauer character she played on 24. I thought about kicking off this article with a joke about how I thought Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer should have just let her be kept captive and tortured. Heck, that was probably the inspiration for Captivity. For me to want to watch that, however, it would really have to be one of the dungeons on Fucking Machines, where the action is consensual and female pleasure might actually be involved too.

DJ Xian likes to throw big events for big dates. Halloween is coming up, so you know she’ll be throwing another Hex Hollywood bash. Along with the venerable Panpipes, Blue Blood sponsored the last Hex Hollywood bacchanalia on 06/06/06. In honor of the date, the theme was Angels, Devils, Saints, Sinners, Undead, Nuns, Priests, Gods, Monsters, Virtues, and Vices. Costumes turned out heavy on the angels and devils. A highlight of the evening was the performance by the crew from CORE, Constructs of Ritual Evolution. A low point of the evening was when we broke a lens. As it turned out, the gentleman, who tripped over the cord attached to our camera, was gallant enough to kick in a few bucks towards a new one and then Samy’s gave us a truly godlike deal on a replacement, so it ended up not being so bad after all. In this series of some of the hottest looks from the night, you’ll see where we change lenses and backdrops, so now you won’t have to wonder why. All in all, Xian’s “three levels of pleasure and pain” was a huge extravaganza, packed with people who really did it up, and had plenty of fun.

Hex Hollywood Pictures by Forrest Black and Amelia G

Hex Hollywood Site

Universal’s Accepted Keg Party Photo Gallery

Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.

Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.

So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly fast-moving line for food, I was standing a couple of feet from James Duvall. While I wouldn’t talk to someone at my local supermarket, I’m generally in outgoing and friendly mode at a show like that. So I’d normally have told him that I like his work, but all of a sudden I got this horrible mental flash of the appalling scene where he’s castrated in Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation and I didn’t want to encourage my brain to keep going in that direction when I was about to eat.

The burgers and hot dogs were shockingly good and generously handed out. There was water and soda, in addition to beer, despite the kegger theme, but I think vegetarians might have been stuck with cheese and toppings. There might have been veggie burgers too, as I admit I was pretty transfixed by the yumminess of my own carnivorous fare.

The party had a fun and light-hearted vibe. A nicely straight-up rock band, called The Ringers, with a pleasingly sleazy sound kept the energy level up. I got bashed in the head when some of the actors from the movie got up on the stage and started throwing free T-shirts into the crowd. The gentleman who hit my noggin gave me the T-shirt he’d just caught, though, so it was all good. It says, “Ask me about my wiener.” Because I didn’t have enough lewd shirts already.

The trailer for the movie looks humorously promising and Lewis Black who I love from Comedy Central’s Daily Show is in it. If Universal knows how to throw a fun keg party, odds are good that they know how to make a fun movie. Best theatrical release promo ever.