It seems like it should be unnecessary to point out that models are human beings, but a lot of people seem to have difficulty with this. Nobody is as beautiful as their best photo or as hideous as their worst. Ugly may go to the bone, but beauty is still only skin deep. All true.

The nature of digital interaction makes the relationship of humans with their images more difficult. Once upon a time, my unsavory pals and I could hang out at our punk rock group house and, if someone said a model in some of the trannie porn in our living was not feminine enough, nobody’s feelings were going to get hurt.

Today, a lot of people seem to be polarized in their responses to imagery, in particular in their responses to sexual imagery. On the one hand, there are people who callously and casually critique a model’s weight or body parts in public, even though the human being in those photos is going to see those comments. On the other hand, there are people who, on some deep lizard brain level, feel that, if they have seen someone’s hoo-ha, even someone who was paid to show it to them, that person is practically their mate.

It does not make you respectful and/or feminist, if you pathetically slavishly agree with everything someone ever says or posts because you have seen naked pictures or video of them, especially members of your gender of preference.

It does not make you intelligent/ and/or nonconformist, if you aggressively criticize all erotic media and the people who appear in it, especially members of your own gender.

Someone can appear in updates on your favorite website or the boxcover of your favorite DVD or the cover of your favorite magazine. You can appreciate their work and that is awesome. But they probably are not rich for life off of the work you enjoyed (or didn’t). The world has enough pain in it. Don’t be cruel to someone who was generous enough to share their naked selves with you. Just don’t be a lapdog either. You know that whole rather walk beside me and be my friend thing? Treat models like human beings.

In the internet age, most of us become somewhat reduced to our avatars and how we come across when typing. Nonetheless, models are still human beings and no more or less human, no more or less right, no more of less deserving, for having had more pictures taken of them than the average person.

A lot of models are afraid to go interact in public because people online can be so critical and most models know they are not as beautiful as the best photos where they were lit well, made up just right, dressed in clothing they may not own, shot with good composition, and post processed to perfection. In real life, people tend not to say the sort of rude things they write when in keyboard warrior mode. But, after seeing one’s best efforts nit-picked to death online, not just models, but most creative people find it more difficult to interact IRL.

Photos of models or real world parties or whatever are posted here from time to time. If you have something nice to say about them, by all means do. If you don’t have something nice to say, please don’t fake it, but don’t go out of your way to be a dehumanizing cruel jerk either.

Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

69 Eyes have released a video for the debut single off their forthcoming Back in Blood album. The video is called Dead Girls are Easy. It is sort of an 80’s sleaze rock video homage where the 7/11 clerk fantasizes about the hot gothic girls who prance through his store in the midnight hour. In his fantasy, the goth chicks turn out to be vampires who take him for a ride in their black as night car (a 70’s boat style Cadillac), gangbang him, and of course turn him into a vampire. Oh yeah, and the 7/11 clerk turns out to have a slammin’ bod hidden under his horrible orange uniform and he looks much hotter under blue light. Really, everyone looks hotter under blue light (See The Matrix, Underworld, and probably around a quarter to a third of my own photographic body of work.) Then the clerk wakes up and is it a dream or isn’t it? Sort of classic rock video/fairytale storyline.

For some reason, the Dead Girls Are Easy video has been released exclusively for Playboy so far. There is (alas) no nudity in the video, so I assume other outlets would have no problem with it.

Dead Girls Are Easy is directed by Bam Margera. I am embarrassed to say I had to do a search on his name, but he is an awfully accomplished guy. Bam Margera is a pro skater who most notably co-created Jackass and appeared as a primary character in Tony Hawk’s Underground video game from Activision.

I feel like I won back some awareness points, however, when I read the Playboy article about the 69 Eyes video and some of the accompanying text read, “The band may be from Helsinki, but their sleaze-rock sound is straight up Hollywood—think GN’R or L.A. Guns plus the cartoon horror of the Misfits. For the lyrics on the new LP, the 69 Eyes drew inspiration from vintage vampire soft-porn classics by directors like Jean Rollin. Their obsessions come to fruition in Bam’s video, an undead spin on the concept of ZZ Top’s “Sharp Dressed Man.”” I’m absolutely with them on the Sharp Dressed Man comparison, but, uhm, Hanoi Rock anyone? Hanoi Rocks was incredibly influential on the Hollywood hair metal or sleaze rock or whatever people want to call it this week’s scene. And, yes, Hanoi Rocks originally hailed from Helsinki, although it was the drunk driving death of their drummer Razzle in a car crash with Motley Crue’s Vince Neil at the wheel which most pundits agree kept the band from superstardom. Hanoi Rocks’s lead singer Michael Monroe was so ridiculously hot that I once had a girl at a solo performance rock show he performed try to fist fight me for being closer to the stage than she was. In point of fact, at a time when America is primarily marketing ironically uncool altrock and faux wholesome pop, Scandinavia is keeping the homefires of rock and roll and rockstar incandescence burning properly.

Anyway, 69 Eyes. Dead Girls Are Easy. Vampire gangbang sex.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.
Lawrence: Well, what about you now? what would you do?
Peter Gibbons: Besides two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Well, yeah.
Peter Gibbons: Nothing.

I was going to edit one of the awesomest exchanges in the very awesome Mike Judge movie Office Space to reflect the fantasy of four vampire chicks at the same time, but I figure you all get the concept.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a Kevin Smith romantic comedy starring Seth Rogen and Elizabeth Banks, just came out on DVD. I hear there may have been some difficulties getting an R rating which caused some of the trash talk dialog I expect and love in Kevin Smith movies to be toned down. Now it would be easy to focus on how flawed the porn video business concept in the movie is (The whole business plan is to market to an email list they do not own.), but the point of the movie is really to be a lewd When Harry Met Sally. A recurring theme in Kevin Smith movies is realizing that the woman a man should love and appreciate most is perhaps right in front of him. So the movie is fine as a romantic comedy. It is not as hilarious as Clerks or as emotional as Chasing Amy, but it is solid enough.

The really remarkable thing about the movie is that Kevin Smith is good at making porn. It is no secret that I tend not to care for most video porn product. (This oddly gets me many job offers to make mainstream adult video product. Porn Valley is weird.) But I did say that I would excuse almost any obscenity if Jason Mewes did full frontal nudity and, although I would have preferred it if he were visibly hard, Jason Mewes is indeed nude through quite a bit of Zack and Miri Make a Porno, including a full frontal nude scene. The DVD has an extended version of the more appealing (not involving excrement) sex scene between Katie Morgan and Jason Mewes. Most of the rest of the cast is transfixed watching them have sex on the coffeehouse counter. And it is honestly surprisingly hot.

During the scenes where Jason Mewes’ character Lester is supposed to be banging the strip club waitress Stacey cast for the Zack and Miri’s porn movie, it certainly seemed like they were actually having sex. I had to look up who the actress playing Stacey is and it turns out she is Katie Morgan. Katie Morgan has excellent comic timing. Or perhaps Kevin Smith can just direct the heck out of a blonde big titty porn chick. At any rate, her acting is at least as entertaining and nuanced as anyone else in the movie, but Katie Morgan is apparently best known for having been in a couple hundred porn movies. Is that cinema verite?

The other really hot moment in Zack and Miri Make a Porno is when the two stars, Seth Rogen’s Zack Brown and Elizabeth Banks’ Miri Linky, are supposed to be doing it for the camera. Only they have a real moment. When Elizabeth banks says she is going to come and invites him to come with her, it is a really believable and beautiful piece of film-making. Genuinely hot and sexy and I would give any porn flick with a scene like that two thumbs up.

So go figure. A cautionary note: If a porn star named Brandon St. Randy, played by Justin Long, at your class reunion tells you he makes $100,000 a year, there are a few things to keep in mind. First of all, a pornstar who once got paid $1,000 for a scene will do special pornstar math and decide that means he or she makes $365,000 a year because there are 365 days in the year. For the very physically fit or twink dynamite, gay porn pays on-screen talent infinitely better than straight porn. Transsexual porn pays even better, if you are pretty enough. There is a lot more to making dough from smut than just having sex with your best friend at your place of employment, but isn’t finding love a better outcome anyway?

PS The merch for Zack and Miri Make a Porno is really inspired.

The 2009 version of Last House on the Left bears the tagline: If bad people hurt someone you love, how far would you go to hurt them back? The 1972 version of course famously had a tagline which became a catchphrase: To avoid fainting, keep repeating it’s only a movie, only a movie, only a movie . . .

Well, Last House on the Left was initially intended to be an envelope-pushing 70’s porn feature and its legacy as a movie has been far beyond that of the average only a movie flick. There is the notion that the current spate of torture porn horror movies is something new, but people like Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham pioneered the genre more than three decades ago. Wes Craven, most famous for Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, wrote and directed the original Last House on the Left and Sean S. Cunningham, most famous for Friday the 13th, produced it. Before you even take into account the legions of movie-makers influenced by Craven and Cunningham, the legacy of Last House on the Left is huge simply for how its creators built on their own work. For the 2009 Last House on the Left, Craven and Cunningham both serve as producers. The director of 2009’s version is Dennis Iliadis whose main previous credit is the movie Hardcore, about two prostitutes who fall in love.

The initial torture porn grew out of 1970’s porn porn. At the time, partly because video not being used yet, any porn flick more involved than a tiny stag loop tended to be approached as a feature. A lot of the underground creative work at the time was about exploring taboos, so there was not as much differentiation in which taboos could appear in which medium. Today, if you want to feature nonconsensual sex acts in your work, you must put the violence in an R-rated movie for theatrical or DVD distribution. You may not put nonconsensual sex acts in material distributed in adult industry channels. This is not solely because the government might crack down on you if you repeatedly dare them too like Rob Black of Extreme Associates; the primary issue is that major trade publications and video distributors will not accept adult videos which feature nonconsensual acts (yes, even when it is just acting, even if it is bad acting) and companies which process payments for adult websites will not accept credit cards for material which features nonconsensual acts. Exploitation cinema is not something new for the new millennium. Where the violence and horror end up in the marketplace and where the sex and nudity end up all boils down to the restrictions of varied distribution channels.

Nonetheless, in the original Last House on the Left, most of the forced boy/girl sex and forced girl/girl sex and watersports all got left on the cutting room floor and the violence stayed in. The violence was still shocking to theatrical audiences at the time and reviewers tended to express . . . well, horror. Last House on the Left features horrible chainsaw brutality before Scarface or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Here is how you know Wes Craven is an original creative mind: He acknowledges his influences. He looked to Ulla Isaksson’s script for Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan or Virgin Spring for the plotline for Last House on the Left. And Wes Craven is a strong enough and secure enough creative person that he can say where he got the idea without diminishing himself.

Living in Hollywood and working on the internet, I am often exposed to people who try to come up with tricks for success. These tricks are the creative person’s version of get-rich-quick schemes and just as likely to fail. Some of these desperate tricksters come up with all these little rules about how the best way to succeed is to get inspiration from someone more innovative and deny where the inspiration comes from. Which is right up there with the notion that anyone who has ever done anything for mature audiences must be somehow crossing over and rising up if they do anything for a different distribution channel or that doing anything adult means one must be consigned to exclusively producing adult material.

Wes Craven’s oevre ably demonstrates the only two unmalleable requirements for creative success: Be really good at what you do and work at it.

SXSW is upon us once again. This reminds me that I meant to post the podcast of a panel Halcyon and I and this camgirl Seska did at SXSW. Halcyon is the king of coming up with humorous, lurid, and otherwise catchy panel titles. This means that, like me and like most web professionals, he has about a billion funny site domains. His main home on the web is currently CockyBastard, although Pinkgasm is listed in the SXSW credits. I’ll spare you all full bios, but SXSW edited my bio to say “Amelia G holds the titles of editor, writer, and photographer who founded Blue Blood” instead of just saying I’m an editor, writer, and photographer. My title on my business cards says chick-in-charge and writer and photographer are not titles. SXSW is a fun conference and they felt very strongly this particular year that it was vital that they refer to those things as titles, so I rolled with it and who knows what process they used for deciding how to specify site or company for each guest speaker.

At any rate, here is the MP3 podcast of our panel:

Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Moderator: John Halcyon Halcyon Styn Digital Explorer, Pinkgasm
John Halcyon Styn Digital Explorer, Pinkgasm
Amelia G Chick in Charge, Blue Blood
Seska Lee Sajnet

As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services can types of sites are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.

My work with the SpookyCash B2B affiliate program, which allows people with high traffic sites to get paid for sending members to pay sites, is probably most relevant to what we discussed. So I gave away like a gajillion SpookyCash T-shirts to folks I chatted with after our panel. One of the people who came up after we spoke introduced herself as the ex of Kevin from the cover of Blue Blood #5 in print. This intro was a little nerve-wracking, but she turned out to be cool and Kevin assures me their relationship is amicable. What I make as a content producer is not porn, but the panel was really a discussion of the pay-for-content business model which primarily works for naughty membership sites.

The other big sex panel at SXSW that year was:

Sex and Computational Technology
Moderator: Amanda Williams, University of California at Irvine
Amanda Williams University of California at Irvine
Violet Blue Blogger, Open Source Sex
Johanna Brewer University of California at Irvine
Kyle Machulis Engineer, Nonpolynomial Labs
Cory Silverberg Author & Educator, Come As You Are & About.com

Computer technology has moved off the desktop and into homes, cars, pockets, and urban streets, in support of human relationships casual or intimate. Sex is an important facet of human experience, something that intertwines with intimacy, domesticity, mental health, play, and many other areas of our lives. Sex + tech is more than lots o’ internet porn. Let’s talk about teledildonics, virtuality, intimate interfaces, assistive technologies, and more.

The Sex and Computational panel was a lot of fun and it did not take long to figure out that the exuberant Kyla Machulis was qDot from SlashDong. SlashDong is a site I discovered via Molly Case’s SexyFandom which is all about pimping out electronics for orgasmic purposes. If you have ever wondered what would happen if you hooked a sex toy to pretty much any other device in existence, SlashDong probably has your answer, along with technical diagrams. For this SXSW panel, qDot brought a number of entertaining little devices and just lit up the room with his personality. To shine on a panel with so many big personalities on it takes some serious oomph. Hopefully, this comes through on an MP3 podcast the same as it did in person. After this panel, everyone from the various sex panels except for Halcyon who was MIA all went for dinner together, and we got to have a spirited debate about sex workers rights and exploitation and eat pretty tasty SouthWestern. I told Kyle Machulis how I had first come across his site and we talked about how SexyFandom had not updated in a while, but Molly Case said she’d be getting back to it real soon (hint, hint).

Austin has good SouthWestern cuisine and requires a lot of eating and drinking. UT Austin was my safety school and all I have to say is thank goodness I did not end up going there or I would have had liver failure before my sophomore year. Not that it would not have been an entertaining journey to liver failure.

You can check out a number of SXSW podcasts which are not sex-related on the podcast page of the SXSW site.

Mike Judge’s Office Space is a hysterically brilliant piece on the soul-sucking nature of certain sorts of employment. The scene where they smash the fax machine is one of the most inspiring moments in American cinema ever. Viewpoint character Peter Gibbons, played with perfect comic timing by Ron Livingston, decides that, rather than quitting his job, he will simply stop going. He and his next door neighbor Lawrence, played with deadpan humor by Diedrich Bader, discuss what they would do if they had mad money. Lawrence’s only unrealized ambition is to have a threesome with two chicks.

Peter Gibbons: What would you do if you had a million dollars?
Lawrence: I’ll tell you what I’d do, man: two chicks at the same time, man.
Peter Gibbons: That’s it? If you had a million dollars, you’d do two chicks at the same time?
Lawrence: Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too; ’cause chicks dig dudes with money.
Peter Gibbons: Well, not all chicks.
Lawrence: Well, the type of chicks that’d double up on a dude like me do.
Peter Gibbons: Good point.

Mainstream porn overflows with girl/girl sex, but it is all of the sort where the women are supposed to be into it because they are just soooooooo overheated and no man is handy, not because they like women. The male consumer can fantasize that all he has to do is show up with a taste of the real thing (i.e. cock) and that would just make those ladies’ day.

I find the whole issue difficult. On the one hand, I know that site members often enjoy girl/girl pairings, even if the women pictured would not normally have sex with one another in the natural course of events. So there is certainly money in shooting lesbian sex, but I suffer from the punk rock problem of not being particularly fiscally motivated. Something which puts even more social pressure on me to shoot faux lesbian interactions is that many altmodels believe that their ticket to fame and fortune is being photographed fondling the breasts of a model more internet famous than they are. You might be shocked at how much static I have received from mostly straight models for declaring a moratorium on fake lesbian shoots for BlueBlood.com. If two people want me to photograph them having sex, as an artist, I am only really inspired to shoot them if I believe they are truly into each other and would be making love whether or not there was a camera in the room.

When I was fourteen and had a youthful fixation on heterosexual couplings, I was troubled by the mainstream porn my friends were able to get ahold of in Israel where I went to ninth grade, because there was always some sort of lesbian scene in every flick. I have the vague notion that porn movies may have been illegal in Israel, so this probably limited what my underage unsavory pals were able to get their hands on, but I still viscerally recall my discomfitted response to the chick in Flesh Gordon being forced to eat hairy muff. Yes, I played Dungeons & Dragons and watched science fiction porn. (Probably no surprise there.)

As an adult, my take on sexual orientation is . . . let’s just say different from what it was as a teen. I really don’t care about whether someone’s genitalia are innie or outie; I just want something real, something genuinely passionate, something with a true human connection.

Back in the early 90’s, when I would be interviewed about Blue Blood magazine in print, I would always say it was erotica and not porn and point out that I was a woman and women can only produce erotica. I thought I was kidding. But there is a certain oddness to the approach mainstream porn has to human sexuality.

Every year, AVN or Adult Video News, has an awards show for porn videos and porn performances from the preceding year. The first time I ever came across this particular awards show was some time after fantabulous writer-cum-video-director David Aaron Clark had written the first issue of Blue Blood in print up for the late lamented Scew newspaper. Forrest Black and I went to meet him and Mistress Shane after they finished up at the AVN awards show in Vegas. DAC and Shane were mostly being entertainingly curmudgeonly about the enormous breasts in teen prom dresses wandering around the casino, but I was un-jaded and wide-eyed at the time. I’ve still never actually attended an AVN award show. Admittedly, I don’t particularly care for that variety of video media, so much of it would really go over my head. But I’m still fascinated by the culture which surrounds it.

Yesterday sexpert blogger Violet Blue covered Syd Blakovich and Madison Young’s red carpet walk at the AVN awards. Now a good-looking pornstar can generally get work if she is willing to have sex with other females on camera, even if she will not have boy/girl sex that way. There is almost the sense that a pornstar who only does women is somehow more of a nice girl than one who does men in films. Offhand, I can’t think of any major video porn star who has sex exclusively with men on camera.

So you’d think that people would just find it hot if Madison Young brought Syd Blakovich as her date to the AVN Awards. The talented Julie Simone shot some stuff of Madison Young which will be appearing on BlueBlood.com soon and I already covered extremely sexy badass Syd Blakovich’s Ultimate Surrender triumphs on here. So you can pretty much take it as a given that I think Syd Blakovich and Madison Young dating would be hot.

Violet Blue reports that AVN apparently didn’t want Syd Blakovich, in her cool steampunk outfit, to walk the porn red carpet with Madison Young. WTF? Someone would have to check with Summer Cummings and Skye Blue to see if this is actually the first time a girl/girl couple has attempted to take that red carpet stroll together, but, whether this is the first or the zillionth time a woman has brought another woman as her genuine date, it is messed up that an industry which insists on girl/girl sex would balk lest anyone think it was genuine girl/girl sex.

I mean, is it really excessively feminist to request that Porn Valley not whine if the women, they want to fuck each other, actually enjoy fucking each other?

PS I’ve seen a bunch of sex blogs, Violet Blue’s Tiny Nibbles included, posting pics of Gianna Lynn and her AVN awards dates. With how much some folks yammer on about porn crossing over to the mainstream, as though sex were somehow totally separate from all other areas of life, you’d think somebody in smutville would have noted that Gianna Lynn’s dates were UFC contract winner Ryan Bader and former Arizona State University
 classmate and fellow MMA fighter CB Dollaway.

Both the Hollywood movie industry press and the porn industry press have been falling all over themselves trying to explain why it is somehow a different piece of crossover news that award-winning writer/director Steven Soderbergh cast award-winning pornstar Sasha Grey in his upcoming Marc Cuban-financed film The Girlfriend Experience. She plays the role of, in case the title was no tip-off, a high-end callgirl of the variety who provides what enthusiasts refer to as the total girlfriend experience.

Pundits trying to explain how Steven Soderbergh casting Sasha Grey is more ground-breaking than Jenna Jameson’s career explain that lots of pornstars have been able to crossover to horror, but The Girlfriend Experience is legit. They are wrong on a few fronts. First of all, why exactly do horror movies not count? Have they not looked at box office receipts for the past few years? Secondly, Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey are both successful and it is not a contest of some sort, just because they are both famous, both beautiful, and have both had sex on camera. Acting like the two should face off somehow reminds me of playground debates over who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman. (Obviously Superman, unless Batman got the jump on him with kryptonite, which is admittedly likely with Batman’s penchant for science gadgets.) Jenna Jameson loudly proclaimed that she would “never spread [her] legs” for the adult industry again, before going on to mainstream crossover fare like, uhm, Zombie Strippers where she strutted her acting chops in the role of, uhm, a zombie stripper. When Kobé Tai played a stripper/escort in Very Bad Things, the role was not on the face of it particularly different, and the world did not appear to tilt on its axis due to her mainstream crossover. Discussions of mainstream porn crossover inevitably also turn to Dita Von Teese, quickly followed by debates over whether she has ever done hardcore and thus whether she counts or not. The answer is that, over the years, Dita Von Teese has done less and less explicit work. If you care, I believe she has never done boy/girl on-camera sex, but she has most definitely been penetrated by women on camera. Dita Von Teese certainly did a great job on her recent Wonderbra campaign and her live performances indicate she should be castable in more. I actually think it is a tremendous waste that Dita Von Teese has not been cast in more things, but I have no idea if she can actually act.

Pretty soon, audiences everywhere will get to see whether Sasha Grey can really act. I hope she can. Sasha Grey is the youngest ever winner of AVN’s Female Performer of the Year award. Steven Soderbergh is the youngest ever winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that Steven Soderbergh won for a little film called Sex, Lies, and Videotape which primarily featured sexy James Spader masturbating to intellectual homemade porn. Which the ensuing record-breaking box office and awards indicated was something people wanted to see. I know I did. So, uhm, yeah, Steven Soderbergh is like totally mainstream and Sasha Grey is like totally porno.

The writing team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien penned the script for The Girlfriend Experience, which hopefully means Sasha Grey has some good material to act in. I mean, Steven Soderbergh and this particular writing team might have minted money with the Oceans franchise (remakes of remakes), but, when he really directs art, it is work like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Limey (Terrance Stamp on a badass rampage!), Traffic (Drugs!), Out of Sight, and Erin Brockovich that audiences and critics really get excited about it. Brian Koppelman and David Levien were responsible for a bunch of the good stuff on ESPN’s late lamented gambler serial Tilt, the excellent Matt Damon and Ed Norton vehicle Rounders, and the fun wannabe gangster Knockaround Guys. So I have high hopes for the quality of this project. The folks involved clearly know how to make good stuff when given the opportunity and Marc Cuban reportedly gave Steven Soderbergh a six picture deal including a lot of creative freedom.

The thing I love about Sasha Grey is that, the moment she got cast in something more Hollywood, she didn’t turn around and say that anyone who every masturbated to her videos or pictures was gross. She didn’t diss the industry which made her a star in the first place. I think there is every reason to believe she will continue doing a variety of projects which interest her and pay enough.

Perhaps I bristle at the word mainstream because, from a punk perspective, mainstream is a pejorative term, an insult, something you would really prefer not to be called. So Sasha Grey being directed by Steven Soderbergh should not be considered the mainstreaming of porn. It should be considered the freedom to do whatever you want, if you are good enough, and truly own who you are.

Although The Girlfriend Experience is going to be Sasha Grey’s first starring turn in this sort of feature, she also has parts upcoming in a couple of other interesting-looking films. Actually, she has a fairly significant role in Lee Demarbre’s Smash Cut, but I guess it has already been established that horror does not count. She also has a small role in Dick Rude’s forthcoming Quit. Dick Rude currently directs folks from The Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Clash, but is of course is best known for co-writing the punk cult classic Straight to Hell and appearing in a variety of acting roles in seminal punk films. Dick Rude played the part of Duke in one of the best punk movies of all time, Alex Cox’s Repo Man. So, in conclusion, let’s all go do some crimes. Instead of eating sushi and not paying, I’m thinking about creating art without putting defective and limiting labels on it, which include the words “mainstream” or “legit” anywhere.

Sasha Grey is simply a star. No modifiers necessary.

Until The Girlfriend Experience hits theatres, we have a Sasha Grey photo gallery to hold you.

Years ago, when Kevin Smith and I were both guests at DragonCon, he and I had a brief conversation about porn. Now that his Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie hits theaters this Halloween, I wish I remembered any of the details of it. As I recall, Senior Blue Blood writer Will Judy was there, but I don’t think it wise to interrupt his regularly scheduled obsessive Sunday puttering to check if anything important was said.

When DragonCon gave Blue Blood a ballroom for a panel, I had to have a team of people check ID at the door to make sure our standing room only crowd was all of age. It kind of sucked, but it was necessary. I’ve spoken on many panels where we did not discuss adult topics and I’ve spoken on many panels which did not include visual aids and I’ve spoken on many panels which were not in Georgia. But this particular DragonCon panel did have those stats and it just made sense to be sure the entire audience was of age. Would more than two thousand people have come to hear what Forrest Black, Sarah McKinley Oakes, and I had to say, if there had been no naughty aspect planned for this particular presentation? Probably not.

In some respect the adage about sex selling is true, but the part no one mentions with this is that distribution is a bitch. It would be nice if there were better distribution channels for actual quality products, with serious budgets, which tackle sexually-oriented topics. Even IFC will put a giant black box covering up John Leguziamo’s sock-clad cock when they run the movie Spun. The best thing about the internet is that I can sell a BlueBlood.com Blue Blood VIP membership without having to go through the same sort of stodgy distro channels as I did with Blue Blood magazine in print. Not that Google does not still make it harder to find adult sites than non-adult sites by penalizing adult sites in the SERPS. It was relatively easy to get a magazine featuring naked people into adult newsstands, but Blue Blood’s audience was shopping the music and zine shelves. The main ways I addressed this were by having no nudity on the cover of Blue Blood magazine, trading ads with zines, and buying ads in magazines like SPIN and Rolling Stone. The ads made clear what someone would be buying, without presenting any material which could be objectionable. I don’t think artists should be limited in what they can create and express, but I do think it should be clear to people what they are getting into before they have to see something they do not want to. Mind you, there were zines like Carpe Noctem (which featured horror nudity and sold to an all ages audience) who would either take my ad money or my barter and then not come through with what they owed, citing their concern with the erotic nature of Blue Blood.

I still have dimwits trying to claim that BlueBlood.net must be a porn site because BlueBlood.com (a different site on a whole different domain) features erotica. There are people who think that, because I sometimes come across naked people in my professional life, somehow everything Forrest Black and I shoot features models who are secretly naked underneath their clothes. Doesn’t matter what the actual topic or venue is. Heck, there are people who think that, because I sometimes come across naked people in my professional life, I must owe them sex, if I want to be their friend. There really is such a thing as an appropriate place to do certain things and an inappropriate one and I’m capable of being appropriate, thanks.

So Kevin Smith will indubitably get some bonus viral marketing from doing his Zack and Miri Make a Porno movie, but he will also indubitably run into some of the same distro and advertising difficulties that anyone with a sexually-oriented product is going to run into. Zack and Miri Make a Porno, however, is advertised on the sides of buses, but I have not seen one single solitary advert for it on an actual adult site where the ad would have had to have content besides whining that they couldn’t show their titillating content there. Whining about titillation is pretty much the ad campaign for Kevin Smith’s new flick. Now obviously Kevin Smith is about a gajillion times more talented and cool than that knob who the MPAA spanked for putting the nicely lit torture porn on the Captivity billboards a while back. But I could get really sick of people who think they are “mainstream”, whatever the eff they think mainstream is, who whine that they can’t put porn on billboards. Obviously, I think it is just fine that media is created which features human sexuality. I even prefer it when people make quality media about such topics.

Is Kevin Smith seriously waging an ad campaign about how unfair it is that, in a few markets, somebody had the sense to forbid him from writing PORNO in giant billboard letters in public places? Yes. What is wrong with him? This is exactly the kind of irresponsible nonsense which opens the door for real censorship. I believe that nobody should stop Kevin Smith from making a movie about any topic he pleases. I do, however, believe that the viewing public should have a choice in whether or not they see the movie or are exposed to its content. Should anyone really have to have their kid say, “Mommy, what’s a porno?” while shopping in a regular neighborhood?

I personally love cussing. I loathe puns, unless they are porno puns, and then I think they are just dandy. I love the trash talk in Kevin Smith movies. Kevin Smith is a genius with foul-mouthed realistic dialog. Despite making Jersey Girl, a movie about how awesome it is if your wife dies and your family undermines you, Kevin Smith is still one of my favorite writer/directors of all time, albeit no longer one whose work I have to see the second it hits the screen. Chasing Amy was brilliant. I even enjoyed Mallrats.

Kevin Smith’s first Clerks film is in my top favorite movies of all time. The scene where Randall is on the phone ordering appalling ass video titles in front of a mother looking for something about a scrappy happy something or other pup is hilarious. At the time that movie came out, I and many of my friends were somewhat underemployed in various awful jobs, many of which involved retail. So Clerks really spoke to us extra. Nonetheless, if one of my Mr. Unstable pals got fired from a job for yelling the names of porn vids in front of a suburban mom and her kid, I might have thought it was funny, but I would not have thought they were right.

Freedom of speech gives you the right to express yourself, but it is not supposed to give you the right to yell “porno” in a crowded public place.

PS If Jason Mewes does full-frontal nudity, it will be fine to put that on billboards all over my neighborhood. I mean, I live in Hollywood, so it is all degenerates who want to see that here anyway.

Last week I had the curious privilege of seeing Pirates 2: Stagnetti’s Revenge on the big screen at the posh Orphium Theater in downtown Los Angeles. For those of you who don’t know Pirates 2 is the biggest budget adult movie ever made. Produced by Digital Playground and directed by Joone it features a cast of A list adult talent and a bevy of Hercules: The legendary journeys grade special effects. I was a guest at the premier because I and my girlfriend Kitty were extras in the movie. Being an extra in the biggest budget adult film ever made is kind of a strange honor and a little bit surreal. I had this opportunity because a good friend of mine was the assistant casting director on the film who one afternoon sent me a text out of the blue asking; “Do you have any pirate gear?” Of course I did. He wanted to know if I wanted to make a few bucks and be in a movie, so of course I said yes. He told me after I agreed what I had signed up for which only made me more stoked. The first day I was on set I was crazy. I had driven up from San Diego to Van Nuys for filming kitted out with my pirate gear and when I showed up was told that they needed 18th century-ish British Sailors. I’m fine with changing what I’m wearing but at the time my hair was two tone black and platinum and my nails were half an inch black acrylics which sent the costume director into fits. After I was hatted and be gloved (I think I just verbed two nouns) I was sent in to the set for filming. The set was absolutely the best thing ever. It was a life size mock up of a pirate ship up on scaffolding in this huge green screened sound stage. I then spent the next few hours driving the boat through a storm on the opening scene. Look in the background between the bishop and the young man. That fuzzy back of head? That’s me! That young man awkwardly asked me if I was one of the people who would be “taking their clothes off.”

I wound up briefly meeting Katsuni who was pleasant and Evan Stone who wasn’t actually filming that day but had come to play pranks and get into mischief.

Later in the filming I went up with Kitty as the scene we would be filming that day called for female extras for the crowd in the Pit fight with the giant slug thing. You can see kitty and I pretty clearly for a few seconds in this scene. Can you guess which one I am? This day was a tough one for me as my two favorite adult entertainers; Belladonna and Sasha Grey were on set together and in the scene with us. Both of these ladies are absolutely adorable and Belladonna was smart and fun. Unsurprisingly Kitty and Belladonna hit it off during the filming with light flirting back and forth. Later one of the male actors was flirting with Kitty and lifted her skirt and was so impressed with what he saw that he called Belladonna over to inspect. Belladonna told my girlfriend “You have a beautiful Ass and Vagina; you should join my porn family.” To which my girlfriend said no. I didn’t really catch much of what happened after that as I was too stunned to take anything in. My girlfriend said no to Belladonna. I’m still not sure I’ve forgiven her.

So filming is over. I’ve been on set several days and in front of the camera a fair amount and made enough money to make the excuse to come to LA more than worthwhile.

A few months pass and I get an email from Digital Playground inviting myself, Kitty and two guests to the premier. I call up my friend the Assistant Casting director to find out what his plans for the evening are. Turns out that he is renting a party bus which he’ll be taking from Long Beach to Downtown and he asks if we’d like to join. Something in the back of my mind tells me that this is a horrible idea but I go along with it anyway. My friends and I drive up to Long Beach and hop on the Party Bus which was supposedly stocked with alcohol only to find a half a liter of Popovs and 6 coronas. I start to get a bad feeling. The other guests pile on and it’s 18 guys and 3 girls. I’ve got a really bad feeling. One of the guests asks if we can detour into Hollywood at 7 o’clock on a Saturday night to pick a “Hot” girl up. I have a Star Wars scale C-threepeo flying into the Deathstar bad feeling. We get to the Orphium at 9:30. Showing starts at 9:30. We get in have no time to socialize and have to find seats almost immediately. Happily I ran into the assistant Physical Special Fx artist from film who happens to be a cute redhead to whom I am attracted. I find seats for my group which now includes redhead and a date that she is less than pleased with and we sit through the movie.

This was my second experience watching Porn on the big screen. It’s been really weird both times. The first time was “Lollypop Girls In: Hard Candy in 3-D” complete with John Holmes in your face 3-d moneyshot. This time I’m in the fucking movie, which was pretty good by the standards by which you judge adult content. The sets were cool, the dialogue funny, the acting actually pretty freaking good, and the special effects were hokey in a fun way. The only thing I had a problem with was the amateur Foley effects, and the horrendous editing of the sex scenes. It was also weird to be watching porn and have it be inappropriate to masturbate or fuck. It was like going to a buffet and watching other people eat while you’re hungry.

So the movie is over and credits roll and there’s Joel Awesome (thanks Amelia for the lamest Porn name ever) and Ashley Fields (Kitty used her real name for some reason). Seeing my name in the credits was a surprisingly big thrill. It was the first time I’d ever seen my name on the big screen. Ok, the silly name Amelia gave me, but still it was cool.

So the movie is over and we mill around in the lobby for a bit trying to figure out what were doing. I’m keeping an eye out for the talent because I’m now working for a San Diego based Halloween Prop and Sex toy maker. One of the products we’re developing is a life sized sex doll that utilizes technology to make exact replicas of people and my boss wants me to pitch being scanned to the girls. My girlfriend meets Jenna Haze and flirts with her for awhile and secures us an invite to the afterparty at an upscale LA club a few blocks away. My plan is to start the dialogue on licensed products at the afterparty.

We pile into the party bus and somehow the driver manages to get us lost for 20 minutes when we were only going 4 blocks. It was downhill from there. Apparently the party bus was only reserved for 6 hours, which put our Times-Up at 1:45 am. We arrive at the afterparty at 1:00 am. We were all told by someone onboard that we had the bus all night.

My friend Elvis (everyone should have a friend called Elvis) has some pull in the LA bar scene and scored us a 10 seat table with two bottles -for free- that we wound up not getting to use because we had to leave as soon as it was ready for us.

I had already started the ball rolling on the introductions to the girls from running into Ron Jeremy who at a previous party had fallen asleep on my shoulder (long story). THEN some idiot drunk somehow managed to drive his car through the gate in front of the club, and when he realized that he was driving in a walkway gunned it into the velvet ropes and tried to drive away down a blind alley. He clipped two of my friends with his bumper (no real injury) and was then caught and cuffed by security. The Owner of the club comes out and offers us more free drinks and better accommodations than what we’ve already got as an apology just as we find out that we’ve got to go. This would have been fine if the return destination hadn’t been in Long Beach. It took about an hour for us to get back to our vehicles and by then we were too exhausted and irritated to contemplate going back for more. Lesson learned. Do not take a party bus unless you are going from somewhere fun, to somewhere fun, and back again and make sure you have it rented for the entire time you might want it, not just the time you need it.

It was a fantastic experience and I hope that I have many more opportunities to do more crazy shit like it and Belladonna if you’re reading this, I’ll happily join your porn family.