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.

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.

I see it as, not only a given, but maybe even a goal that things I enjoy in a fringe environment will be picked up by the larger society. The problems come when the overculture, in the process of co-opting something cool, tries to destroy the naturally existing subculture and the people most dedicated to that culture, in order to replace it all with something more easily managed and controlled. The problems come when the marketing shifts from spin to bald-faced lies. The problems come when no one appreciates art without a backstory and the market becomes used to the perfection of fake backstory. It seems like modern press is often more comfortable presenting a tidy and wholly false PR tall tale than presenting something real and true. Part of the reason for this is that modern audiences are often more comfortable reading tidy and wholly false PR tall tales. Real life tends to be more complicated and harder to get your head around.

I could like Avril Lavigne if she were presented as essentially a cute blonde actress in a larger movie. Instead, her managers insult everyone’s intelligence by getting a stylist to put Avril in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt and having her publicist tell the world the actress is inspired by David Bowie (but neglecting to tell the girl playing the precocious punk songstress role that Bowie does not rhyme with Maui.) Just try and find music magazine press presenting anything remotely true about the teamwork creation of Avril Lavigne. I don’t know if the magazines fear lack of access to stars their audiences want to read about or if they fear legal reprisals or if it is all just some sort of gentlemen’s agreement, but certain specific pieces of truth have more trouble getting out there as overculture chews up subculture.

I’ve been debating with myself whether or not to mention what got edited out of the most recent interview Eros Zine did with yours truly. I appreciate what Eros Zine does for a variety of scenes and I adore EZ’s editor Thomas Roche who did the interview. And I very much appreciate the support (and fun times!) both have given to both me and Blue Blood over the years. I’ve decided to mention part of what was expurgated because I feel like this one small piece was important. Before I do, however, I want to make it very clear that publications such as Rolling Stone and the LA Weekly, with presumably larger legal budgets, have also cut pieces about the world of supposed altporn apparently due to legal concerns. So it is not unusual that Eros Zine’s legal department insisted on cutting a number of comments. (I promised Thomas I would be clear that it was legal and not editorial who required the cuts.) Journalists always want to know my opinion about adult video and the so-called altporn sites I’m supposed to consider competitive. But apparently what I have to say is just too dangerous to actually print.

Assuming that Eros Zine’s lawyers are essentially sensible, I just want to post for posterity the portion which was cut which contained shoutouts to people who deserve some credit. The rest can remain on the cutting room floor for now.

Some of the directors who might object to the current shameless pretension that punk art porn was just invented are Gregory Dark, David Aaron Clark, Nick Zedd, Justice Howard, Michael Ninn, Antonio Passolini, Stephen Sayadian, Richard Kern, and I’m really just scratching the surface with that list. (VCA and Vivid will be trying to get them all under exclusive contract by this time tomorrow. If they want to thank me for the suggestions, they can send checks payable to Blue Blood at 8033 Sunset Blvd #4500, West Hollywood, CA 90046. Or show me some quality product. Screeners are accepted at that address as well. My mind is open and I’m still a journalist.)

I worried about being potentially helpful to outsider corporations by giving shoutouts to people who deserve them, but I decided that I wanted to take the high road because I think it makes one a better person to give credit where it is due. Unfortunately, the legal folks worried about my commentary on my concerns about said corporations using my shoutouts as free consulting.

The biggest challenge of having sort of imperialist types come into a community is, not just to keep them from pushing out the native peoples, but also to keep the native peoples from simply becoming assimilated by the invaders. I’m certainly not immune, although I guess I’ve got more of a rebel/revolutionary mentality than many. I don’t think anyone is immune. (I just came from visiting a Native American art history museum, so please forgive the analogies.) I’m not personally what anyone would consider left wing and I definitely don’t believe cashing a check from a large corporation is intrinsically bad.

Full disclosure: Hustler owns VCA. I’ve not only worked for Hustler, but I’ve stated in public and in writing on numerous occasions that I felt they were the best of the big adult publishing houses, all of which I have done projects for. Vivid does not, to the best of my knowledge, do magazines, so I’ve never worked with them, but there are plenty of photos floating around the net featuring yours truly drinking and eating with with people who work at both Hustler and Vivid. I really like some of those people and think they are good folks.

I’m not sure precisely where one ought to draw the line, but I definitely think it should be drawn before invaders get to assume control of our opportunities, re-write history, and take away our language. There is nothing wrong with doing a lucrative gig for a large corporation. So much the better if the gig is something fun and interesting. But there really ought to be some wiggle room between accepting some money and accepting total annihilation of one’s self-actualization, culture, and ideals. I guess I’m just an optimist.

Snaspshots from Erotica LA 2006:
- Friday Snapshots
- Saturday Snapshots
- Sunday Snapshots

I now have clean laundry, but I may not be able to wear it too many places. Allow me to explain.

This past weekend was Blue Blood’s and my first year exhibiting at Erotica LA. Back when Forrest Black and I were doing a lot of writing and photography for AVN’s various print publications, we sort of meant to go to their Erotica LA show, but we never quite got around to it. I always had the impression that it was probably more Porno with a capital P than I’d really be into.

I decided to try out getting a booth this year because, for 2006, the Erotica LA crew really went after both women and the couples market, spending a reported $300,000 on promo for the event. This made me feel like this could be a good event to promote the imminent official Independence Day launch of BlueBlood.com Apparently 40,000 people attended Erotica LA in 2005 and this year a whopping 50,000 people were expected to attend. That sounds pretty accurate to me. The event was held at the Los Angeles Convention Center which is HUGE and foot traffic to our booth was constant throughout the three days of the show.

The sordid reason I now have clean laundry is because, over the past few days, in addition to trading SpookyCash shirts for swag from Bang Bus, Phukit, and Sex Search, I also got T-shirts from Porn on a Stick and Rodney Moore. Unfortunately, I went to get a professional (legit/no happy ending) massage the day after Erotica LA and they were kinda nonplussed that my shirt said “I heart sex.” I have to go to the dentist tomorrow, so maybe I should be doing laundry now, instead of writing this. Oh well. It’s punk rock to vaguely perturb people who are about to put sharp implements in your mouth, right?

I was really happy about the Blue Blood booth placement. We were facing down a whole long aisle, which made us visible clear across the convention center, so that people had an easy time finding us. Our next door neighbor was the charming John Stavros of PMP Studios, Vision Girls and the Armed Forces of Love. His ass has been photographed by Andy Warhol and may even have its own fan club. Actually, I think the fan club is for his entirety, but he was giving us a booty shake while explaining it, so I might have missed some details. John and I took turns complaining about stuff at the beginning of the show. He took weird smells and smoke and I took noise. (If you are the folks who were blasting the possibly unlicensed Genitorturers sample, followed by a repeating brief loop of horrible-sounding sex, and you are wondering who among the legion of annoyed people complained, it was me. I was very impressed that AVN had a sound meter, so they didn’t have to rely on a judgement call.) Anyway, John had the spooky Lady Pandora and Maxine in his booth, so we were kinda Gothic central in our area. Admittedly, we did have a hardcore DVD booth across the way from us and I just kept re-reading the slogan on one of their posters which said, “Why can’t these girls get enough butt love?” Try saying it aloud with different inflections after three days of convention center food and it’s pretty funny. Trust me on this.

My Blue Blood booth was always convenient to both stages and the seminars area, so we got to keep track of the action and when good stuff was about to start. I also got to see a long restrospective presentation by the wonderfully prolific Justice Howard. If every photographer who worked on Blue Blood in print had been as fabulously fun to hang out with and as fabulously creative as Justice, then I don’t know that I ever would have bother to pick up a camera, because it would have been unnecessary. Nonetheless, I like shooting now and Justice was definitely a personal inspiration. It was really great to see a mix of new and old work in Justice Howard’s presentation. I think some of her Q&A answers to some of the audience members frightened them, but, hey, sometimes art does that. It was great to see her.

I had a virtual reality encounter with Taylor Wane at CES in Vegas around 1994ish and then wrote it up in Blue Blood in print, but Erotica LA was the first time I met her. She just did a movie with Mary Jane and so both hotties were signing in the Taylor Wane booth and anything featuring Mary Jane has got to be cool. The three of us discussed what sorts of massages we would likely get after the long weekend. I wonder if either of them wore T-shirts which bothered the personnel at their preferred providers. (Taylor did skip out the last day to do a shoot with Billy Idol, but that seemed like a quality excuse for her absence.)

Erotica LA was very cool for meeting a variety of people I generally only know from the interweb. It was awesome getting to chat with so many of the people we mailed from the Blue Blood MySpace profile. I sure like that site better since FOX took it over. Avant garde director Ramzi Abed and I have been aware of each other via various media for some time, but it was a pleasure to meet him in the flesh. I’m looking forward to the premiere of his Black Dahlia movie. I was aware of Dick Delicious of Dick Delicious and the Tasty Testicles fame partly because he has been nice enough to link to some of my naughty membership sites, but he was super charming and interesting in person. I got to meet the gent behind the Ferguson Fine Arts Gallery where Blue Blood photog Lori Mann and many other cool artists have shown. Mario Sabljak of Flavour Furniture is best known for his sexy and whimsical furniture designs, but, in our booth, he was known for taking his shirt of and showing off his nice ink.

One of the highlights of the weekend for me was meeting Sugar and Tatdude from Healing Art. Some of the wonderful work they and the other artists in their extended family do for breast cancer survivers includes using tattoo artistry to cover scars and create areola repigmentation i.e. make nipple areas look more like nipples. This might seem like something minor in the face of possible death, but how you feel about yourself and your world makes a huge difference. Someone very close to me underwent breast cancer surgery last month, so this was an especially nice group for me to come across.

Another highlight of the show was the polework competition. This was exactly what it sounds like. Some of the most accomplished dancers in Los Angeles showed off their moves (nonnude) on stage in an audience-judged competition. I didn’t totally follow why there were judges on stage if it was all about the crowd response, but some of the lap dances the judges got were entertaining to watch. The winner was the gorgeous and flexible mohawked Sin. I’ve thought she was amazing for ages. She and I have exchanged cell phone numbers and email addresses at 4am at the Dead Girls Corp studio over and over again, but somehow such scraps of paper never quite end up filed right. And I’m sorta shy on the telephone. I swear we are going to get around to shooting for real soon, but you all can at least see some examples of her flying around the pole and in our booth in the gallery which accompanies this article.

The other abortive shoot hottie there was Ms Genevieve who is broadcasting with KSEX. I went to her place to photograph her because she has a cool dungeon setup. Only my car got vandalized while I was looking for parking and we all decided that the creative energy was going to be nonideal after filling out police reports. Plans are in the works to make that happen soon too though.

It was very nice at Erotica LA to run into pals of mine as varied as Joey Strange and Kayla Quinn and best of all David Aaron Clark. When Dave wrote up Blue Blood issue #1 for Screw in late 1992 or early 1993, it was the first full feature on the mag. I’d gotten press mentions a lot of places, but they tended to be stuff like a capsule reviews in a deathrock zine like Ghastly saying Blue Blood was cool or a blurb in Hustler’s Chic saying contributing writer Amelia G (that’s me!) had created a publication they found most bizarre. But David Aaron Clark did a full-on feature-length deconstruction of the mag which included a sentence that caused us to call one of my friends a “hair farmer” for years afterwards. Dave also welcomed me and Forrest into his home in New York City and gave us the grand BDSM tour of the town years ago, and we thank him for that experience.

Forrest got to snap a few shots of Dave in the Blue Blood booth this weekend at Erotica LA with Superna. And can I just say Superna rocked the Blue Blood booth like she rocks the mic, high energy and full throttle. Even at the end of the looooooooong day on Saturday, she kept all our energy levels up with her own enthusiasm. Eva Klench was awesome too, even battling rush hour traffic in a corset to be with us on Friday and still looking gorgeous and good-to-go upon arrival. Vima spent the day with us on Saturday before heading off to check out Margaret Cho’s performance that night, as she will be collaborating with Margaret Cho on a new burlesque act. Even with something that important to do that evening, Vima hung out with us for as long as possible to fill in as Dahlia Dark was a little stressed by the large crowds and Voltaire had the flu. Representing for the boys, we had in attendance new Blue Blood hottie Omen and OG Blue Blood boi Astrovamp Daniel Ian who rumor has it is about to marry the girl he posed for Blue Blood with in 1996. Big love to all my crew on this one. You all made the show so much fun!

There are tons of cool people I’m leaving out right now, I know it, but the best thing I can say about Erotica LA is that the whole Blue Blood crew had fun,and I came home with a list of people I want to do something cool or fun with, who I either met or was reminded about at the show. And those are the two most important things to be able to say after any convention. Really, we all had a blast and I came home with a porcelain box decorated with kanji on the outside and stuffed with business cards on the inside, but the concept is the same.

I guess I better go do laundry now.