In March of last year, Los Angeles was blanketed with some kinda misogynist-seeming billboards in promotion of a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You can check out a post April Flores wrote on the topic for an in-depth analysis of the ad campaign, but the gist of it was finding humor in being insanely hateful about an ex. Not insanely hateful with wit, just insanely hateful. I often find hostile humor funny, but this was just stuff on the cleverness level of “you suck” and “my mommy thinks you suck too”. So, at any rate, I didn’t bother to see the movie.

This weekend, I was feeling a little under the weather and I get free On-Demand, so I thought without much optimism that I’d give a comedy a few minutes to draw me in. I turned on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, fully expecting to turn it off within less than five minutes. Go figure.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is actually a really nice romantic comedy. The humor is done with great humanity and one of the most notable aspects of the movie is precisely that nobody is the villain. Kristen Bell might be the sadistic Elle on Heroes, but, as the character of Sarah Marshall, she plays the role in a fully humanized sympathetic way. Writer and leading man Jason Segal’s jilted Peter Bretter is precisely not the sort of guy who would be really horrible to an ex. Which makes the situation he finds himself in — at a resort where Sarah Marshall is hanging out with her new beau rocker Aldous Snow of Infant Sorrow, played by a hilarious Russell Brand — all the more humorous. Peter Bretter is very sympathetic and he is treated with kindness by front desk hospitality agent Rachel Jansen, played by a very beautiful Mila Kunis. I don’t want to include any spoilers, but the whole cast is amazing and everyone has just perfect comic timing. Maybe it is the writing. Maybe it is first time director Nicholas Stoller’s direction. Mostly, it seems like just a really nice alchemy of big talents coming together. Other notables are SNL’s Bill Hader and Liz Cackowski as the stepbrother Brian Bretter and his wife, Paul Rudd as a cute surfing instructor with limited short term memory, Jonah Hill as a waiter who is just a little too forward, and 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer as a religious innocent who gets honeymoon coaching from Aldous Snow. Plus more fun cameos and a killer spoof of CSI, which Jason Segal actually also had a recurring role on.

Two more fun things about Forgetting Sarah Marshall to endear it to me: First off, as many of you probably know, SLC Punk is one of my favorite movies of all time and the part of Mike, the angry fighting sort of Positive Force punk in the movie, was played by Jason Segal. Secondly, there are muppets by the actual Jim Henson workshop in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Vampire muppets.

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.

Long ago, in a land far far from here, I lived in a punk rock group house with a lot of fans of Steve Purcells’ Sam and Max characters and their unsavory pals. Sam and Max was a hilariously antisocial comic strip. Assuming one thinks punk humor is hilarious and freelance talking animal police are a good source of humor.

Some time later, LucasArts decided to make a game based on the Sam and Max comics. The internet tells me that LucasArts was Steve Purcells’ day job and Sam and Max were a long-running LucasArts in-joke, which is the sort of little fun fact to know and share that tended to be unknown pre-internet. I could comment on this more, assuming I read all of the background info (which I haven’t yet), but suffice it to say that LucasArts actually made a pretty pleasingly unsavory game based on Sam and Max. The internet also tells me that the characters were eventually made into a television show which aired on a secondary FOX channel called FOX Kids. Which is weird both because it is simply weird and because I’ve never watched it, despite my affection for Sesame Street and Back at the Barnyard.

I’m excited to report that the awesome old Sam and Max comics are all back in print now. Full disclosure: the source of the new mega-packs of Sam and Max comics, DVDs, XBox, swag, etc. is an advertiser on Blue Blood. I haven’t checked out the new game yet, but the printed stuff is definitely worth picking up. Watch out for the bunny.

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.

So I registered the domain for my name a while back, when the internet still had a bit of that new web smell. I’d been doing work more and more in the digital space for a few years then and I would end up having to pay off a cybersquatter for the BlueBlood.com domain, so it seemed sensible to register everything near and dear to me. Then nine more years went by. Some of my favorite sites have grown out of Forrest Black registering domains while drinking beer and then me feeling that, once it was registered, the domain had to have a site on it. For a long time, I just had a link to a hosted journal on AmeliaG.com, but now seemed like the time to actually put a proper site on there. Today it officially goes live.

The site has the Amelia G bio with just the broad strokes. There is a more detailed sidebar with just 2009 news about press appearances and where my writing and photography has appeared this year. I considered including a page with a gigantic lists of places I’ve been published, but, after doing thousands of pages of editorial, not to mention radio and television stuff, it just seemed like it would be a bit of a laundry list. Plus, oddly enough, when I was doing research for the site, I discovered that some of my work had been reprinted without me even knowing it. I’ve moved less as an adult than I did as a kid, but sometimes it is still possible to lose track of compatriots with moves and all on everyone’s part.

I hope people enjoy the Photography Portfolio section of Forrest Black’s and my work. People always ask to see my online portfolio and I always was reluctant to put one together before. When I say “reluctant”, I mean that the notion of editing together only forty of my favorite images, out of everything we’ve ever shot, made me effing hyperventilate. I forced my brain through its discomfort and editing a selection of images from over such a long time period turned out to be really fun, once I got into kind of the right headspace, because I got to look at all sorts of contact sheets with positive associations and beautiful unseen images. Because of the ephemeral nature of human life, there is always something intrinsically bittersweet about any good photograph, I think, but it still felt mostly good to go through everything.

Given the fiscal realities of shooting on film, there are all sorts of awesome images Forrest Black and I shot which nobody has ever seen because it cost so much to make prints, so we tended to just print whatever a magazine wanted to publish for a lot of shoots. So the photo portfolio I edited together on AmeliaG.com has quite a few exclusive images the world has never seen, along with some favorites you will probably recognize.

It was also really fun putting together the section with the Amelia G Personal Pics because I got to dig through hard drives of tons of random uncategorized galleries of digital nightlife snapshots and recall all sorts of enjoyable adventures. My mom looked at the pics and said it looked like I must go out every night. Really I’m a workaholic, so I just like to only venture out for really cool stuff and I try to make a night out count. I hope you all also enjoy my goofy snapshots of going to parties, conventions, and gallery shows, clubbing, travel, and just hanging out with pals.

The background photo is a promo shot Forrest Black was kind enough to do for me last week. I really like how it turned out. If you are interested in hairstyle matters, my haircut is by Thierry, blowout is by Youne Lee, and color is old skool punk rock style where my bathroom is purple now too.

Putting the Amelia G site together made me nervous as anything, but I’m really happy it is complete and I think it turned out good. I hope you all like it too.

Ashton Kutcher is the pretty much undisputed leading twit on Twitter. As of this moment, he has 2,839,413 followers, outflanking people like Barack Obama, Perez Hilton, Shaquille O’Neal, Britney Spears, and Oprah Winfrey, and even CNN and Twitter itself. He has held the number one spot for quite some time. So, when Ashton Kutcher tweets that his wife Demi Moore has gotten a mohawk, people listen.

I know an awful lot of extremely physically beautiful people, yet, even among celebrities, Ashton Kutcher is so freakishly good-looking that I remember him being in the movie Reindeer Games, even though I don’t think his character had a name. And I think his part was so small it consisted pretty much of stumbling into a bathroom or something at the wrong time. So I stop and think about it and realize that I can’t come up with any other movie Ashton Kutcher has ever been in. I know he was on a TV series called That 70’s Show which ran for a long time, but I don’t even know what network it ran on. So I go and check IMDB and I have actually never seen Ashton Kutcher acting in anything other than Reindeer Games. Yet he is clearly up there at the top of Mount Celebrity. I’ve apparently never really seen him act, yet I know that he dropped out of a biochemical engineering college program to become a male model.

Ashton Kutcher has managed to parlay a certain kind of famous access into something far larger than most. He is a perfect spokesman for digital cameras and micro-blogging services because he has managed to commodify certain parts of his existence in such a flawless and innovative way that, in 2009, the rest of society is panting to catch up.

The Punk’d reality show Ashton Kutcher co-created with producer partner Jason Goldberg at Katalyst Films took the Candid Camera genre to a whole new level. By playing pranks on recognizable people, Punk’d made the viewer feel much more invested in the show; it made the show feel ironically more real and most of the punked celebs more humanized. Maybe this makes some sort of statement about the alienation of modern man and how so many people feel more connected to famous faces on television and online than their, err, IRL peeps. Punk’d was spoofed on The Simpsons as the show Chop Shop with the pranked person crying out anguished “Why would you do that?” in response to their car being chopped for the purpose of filming their reaction for reality television.

Why would Ashton Kutcher do that? To get paid? To become a powerful producer? To be feared? To amuse himself? To get MTV to foot the bill for expensive pranks he wanted to play? To be able to have people to play pranks for him? To come across as more of a man’s man and less of just a pretty boy? To become that special sort of celebrity of the new millennium where he is nominally a famous actor, but the real description is much more complex . . .

So anyway, it appears that Demi Moore would look really hot with a mohawk. But the widely-covered haircut is just a photochop (Chop Shop!) Ashton Kutcher posted to his Twitter via TwitPic. Most of the news covering Ashton Kutcher punking the news media with what is not the most convincing photo manipulation say that Ashton Kutcher actually photoshopped the image. Never mind that minutes after posting the chop with the tweet ” wifey just got a new hair cut what do you guys think? I love it”, he tweeted, “@mrskutcher I”m just playing baby but I think you’d look great with that cut”. Which apparently was enough to convince a large proportion of the news media that Demi Moore actually had gotten a mohawk hairstyle. Because the Punk’d guy would never play the prankster in such matters. And apparently some pundits have poor reading comprehension. Which is ironic, given how many serious think pieces I have seen about Twitter decreasing people’s aptitude to comprehend complex thoughts. How much more complex than j/k are they themselves capable of? And what makes them think Ashton Kutcher did that photoshop job? Surely someone, who can pay other people to do pranks for him, has people for that.

When I started writing this article, a short time ago, the Demi Moore mohawk TwitPic had 179,571 views and now it has 181,371.

Webcomic JEFbot has a comic strip panel set where actor roommates JEFbot and The Cornfather discuss the embarrassing videos they have posted of one another.

As a kid, I recall being repeatedly told a story about how, when I grew up and brought dates home, I should expect that my family would tell really awful humiliating stories about me. The idea was that this would be humorous. I don’t know whether or not it would have actually been funny as, by the time I passed puberty, my family was indifferent to meeting my dates whether they were the offspring of sitting US Senators or international drug dealers.

I did, however, do a print zine called BLT ::: Black Leather Times where my unsavory pals and I would often post embarrassing things about one another. This was definitely very funny. Unfortunately, it has proven potentially either less hilarious or much much hysterical since the advent of the internet. See, when Forrest Black was teaching himself HTML, he practiced by creating digital archives of a whole bunch of issues of BLT. BLT’s editorial policy at the time was very punk and so there are some people where the number one search engine result for their name is an extremely witty descriptions of a sexual peccadillo from 1990 which they might prefer went forgotten. Now, these are all people who absolutely deserved whatever was said about them, or at least certainly deserved it in 1990. After the first year or so, BLT’s circulation tended to be 2,000 to 3,000 copies, so probably many people have print archives of all this regardless.

So does the internet actually make embarrassing ones compatriots, even in a humorous context, better and more fun or much much less of a good idea?

The Cornfather: The video I shot you being attacked by your ferret and hamster has already gotten 50,000 views on YouTube!
JEFbot: Awesome.

JEFbot: Last time I checked, that video I shot you doing your best Flashdance impression while playing Wii Fit was at 800,000 views.
The Cornfather: Cool.

JEFbot Remember when humiliation was a personal thing, shared only with family members and close friends?
The Cornfather: I know, it’s so much better now.

If you are alt-identified, yet want Kris Allen to beat Adam Lambert in this week’s American Idol finale, then you are complicit in your own oppression. Rebels who want Adam Lambert to lose must just hate themselves.

People like to fuss about sex and sexuality, but the place where Adam Lambert is actually unusual is that it is rare to see new musicians with serious larger-than-life star quality in the spotlight today. I just watched a top 20 video countdown and Eminem was just about the only one who would turn heads in a room he walked into, on force of presence alone. So it is exciting to see someone who has the right counterculture vibe with a mix of subcultures gothic, punk, hard rock, rockabilly, emo, scene and more blended together for something unique and compelling. To anyone who states people like Adam Lambert are a dime a dozen and FOX is just not in-the-know, I have to say there are a lot of people with some of that general sort of style, but not a lot with that vibe and that level of both charisma and musical talent.

To receive the same kudos as someone who comes across more normal and mainstream, I often feel like I have to work at least twice as hard and produce work which is twice as good. I would be fine with this, except for the part where the whole process plateaus early. Allow me to explain. In a way, simple badges of flamboyance and theoretical nonconformity, such as tattoos or unnatural hair color, have become fairly common by 2009. Someone who truly has an artistic and offbeat spirit is still likely to have to be better than the next guy to achieve the same recognition. Unfortunately, people, who identify as somehow alternative or creative or freaky, tend to want to root for the underdog. This means that, as soon as one of their compatriots is about to come over the top and succeed for real, they get an enormous backlash from former supporters. So I see all these people, who were super excited by Adam Lambert’s early successed on American Idol, who are now not into him because he is perceived as the obvious front-runner; they think maybe they like the other final two member Kris Allen because he is the underdog.

Kris Allen is an appealing enough performer. In particular, I liked his performances of “She Works Hard for the Money” and “Heartless”. I most likely would not flip the channel if a music video of his came on. I actually think American Idol fans got it exactly right for the AI8 final two to be Kris Allen and Adam Lambert. (Alison Iraheta might be more demographically similar to Adam Lambert, but Kris Allen is a more ready-for-primetime performer.) Kris Allen is not the underdog to win this contest because he is somehow disadvantaged and just needs a little love and support. Kris Allen is not some sort of stray spaniel puppy in need of a home. Kris Allen is the underdog to win the American Idol competition because Adam Lambert deserves it far far far more than he does. Some of the web chatter about the final American Idol vote suggests more that people want to vote against Adam Lambert for being successful more than they want to vote for Kris Allen for any positive reason.

Opinionated and forthright judge Simon Cowell has stated in interviews that he would like to see Adam Lambert win. Led Zeppelin does not normally permit American Idol to use their songs, but they gave permission for Adam Lambert to sing “Whole Lotta Love”. U2 does not normally permit American Idol to use their songs, but they gave permission for Adam Lambert to sing “One”. When Slash from GNR mentored the Idols, he posted to his Twitter that he was especially impressed by Adam Lambert. When Katy Perry performed on the show, the legend on the back of her Elvis cape read “Adam Lambert”.

It seems like if Simon Cowel, Paula Abdul, Robert Plant, Bono, Slash, Katy Perry, and a host of other notables all feel strongly that Adam Lambert should win American Idol, then he should be a shoo-in sure thing. But he is not. The reason he is not is that inexplicably hot people with smudgy eyeliner and leather jackets and big boots hate themselves. Now nonconformity does tend to get push-back from the overculture, so I understand why many bohemians do not necessarily expect to always get praise. Getting praise, however, does not mean that you lose your individuality merit badge. You should expect to be able to win people over, when they see what you are really like.

No disrespect at all to Kris Allen, but Adam Lambert deserves to win American Idol. Adam Lambert earned the win. I know, I know, rebels figured out that 19E and the powers-that-be want to have Adam Lambert win, so it would be (oi oi) rebellious to vote for Kris Allen instead. A good rebel is ready to take the power, not just cry like a baby over whoever seems to be an authority. Voting against Adam Lambert is not sticking it to the man; it is just building a glass ceiling for your tribe. Hopefully Wednesday night still ends up being a coronation for Adam Lambert.

The BlueBlood VIP just passed one hundred thousand images with a series Forrest Black and I shot of an OG Blue Blood hottie from the magazine days. Blue Blood began in print sixteen years ago in the suburbs of Washington, DC, in the basement of a Maryland punk rock group house called New Cambodia.

I had previously done the BLT ::: Black Leather Times antisocial punk humor zine in a Virginia punk rock group house called Cambodia and I was ready to do something glossier and with more reach than BLT’s 2,000 copy print run and mostly local circulation. I don’t think I realized how much I was biting off or that it would eventually take a whole two car garage to house all the Blue Blood subscription magazines for any given issue while a pizza party of my friends feverishly stuffed envelopes and boxes in our unfurnished living room. Perhaps I had faith that Blue Blood would get the attention is has in press from everyone from The New York Times, Penthouse, and Draculina to HBO, FOX, and MTV. But I certainly could not have expected the audience of tens of millions of people the internet has brought.

It was extra meaningful to me and Forrest Black to have OG magazine covergirl Cherry Jason and her real life lover Ledgrey featured in the brand new series which took BlueBlood.com over the 100k mark. That is a whole lot of beautiful on-topic images, by a lot of creative photographers, shooting a lot of flamboyant people. I naturally still have a lot of friends in the DC area and generally get back mostly for weddings and similar occasions, but it’s also fun to check out how the club portion of the DC scene Blue Blood came out of is doing. This time out, Forrest Black and I went clubbing with Cherry and Ledgrey and pals and shot them over at their place.

Cherry is a dancer and Ledgrey is a banker and their place is in pretty much the most perfect, sought-after, convenient location in all of Washington, DC. Cherry and Ledgrey have such a wonderful energy, so we ended up with a bit of a gothic punk From Here to Eternity vibe in this series and the overall feel is just what we all wanted it to be.

Of course, although we have a safe for work free photo gallery of Cherry and Ledgrey on BlueBlood.net, you’ll have to head over to BlueBlood.com and pony up a few bucks to see the naughty bits.

The original Blue Blood magazine in print always opened with an entertainment section where we covered music, events, books, and all sorts of cool stuff. Pretty much like BlueBlood.net. Then there would be a number of short stories from big name genre fiction authors and a number of photo sets featuring exclusively real life couples doing what they would genuinely do whether or not there was a camera there. Now that we have digital cameras and the internet, the world is a different place and so we’ve added solo hottie sets to the mix, but, where BlueBlood.net is the digital incarnation of the magazine’s entertainment section, the hot stuff which made up the rest of the magazine resides on BlueBlood.com now in the VIP section. This way each sort of content is in its proper place to be viewed most conveniently.

Although naturally the history is important for a brand founded in 1992 like Blue Blood, let me break it down with a bit less history. BlueBlood.com features more than 100,000 erotic photos, including our world famous signature couples sets, and erotic fiction by some of the best genre writers in the world. BlueBlood.net features nightlife galleries, babe galleries, social critique, music videos, interviews with interesting people, book reviews, movie tidbits, comics info, television news, and entertainment journalism in general. To break it down even more simply:

BlueBlood.NET = SFW entertainment site
BlueBlood.COM = NSFW erotic site

BlueBlood.net and BlueBlood.com are intended for the same sorts of intelligent, independent thinkers, who enjoy the road less traveled, with lifestyles which are flamboyant, offbeat, and beyond the average person’s experience. Blue Blood in print used to be called The Trade Mag of Cool because Blue Blood’s audience is unusual, made up of tastemakers, the first in each of their respective scenes to know about and share new things, people who are just going to be more cool and creative than the norm.

One of the times it first became really apparent to me that a Blue Blood audience is really above and beyond, we were hanging out in New Orleans and I offered comp copies of the magazine to someone who worked for Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. NIN’s album Pretty Hate Machine pretty much changed my life, so I was jazzed at the idea of passing along my work to someone like that. His assistant was all excited, but, when he looked at the cover, he was like, oh, Trent already has that issue.

After sixteen years, it is more difficult to get a rise out of me. I know a lot of rockstars and, at this point, I am often reluctant to interact in any way whatsoever with anyone whose work I love. My fear is that a negative personal interaction with the artist will reduce my pleasure in the art. At Blue Blood, we approach our shoots, especially our couples shoots, as a very collaborative process, so there is a lot of discussion of what will be shown. I remember the first time Forrest Black and I worked with Cherry Jason in the 90’s, she totally made us both blush. Shooting her this time, if anything, it was the other way around.

Sixteen years is a long time. Sometimes I rail against the things in the world which I either can’t change or haven’t changed yet. But I’m awfully happy with where Blue Blood is at sweet sixteen. As a big William Gibson fan, perhaps I could have imagined in 1992 what Blue Blood would look like in 2009, but I can’t say that I did. The plan was pretty much do a bunch of cool art projects for the community and wait for new technology to be invented to make the whole thing viable.

Sixteen years. Dozens of Blue Blood parties. Hundreds of stories. Thousands of articles. Tens of millions of readers. Getting to meet and work with so many cool people in so many walks of life. And now over one hundred thousand images in the BlueBlood VIP! Not that I didn’t work and sacrifice for it, but, on a good day, I am truly humbled and grateful for getting to have the life I have had so far. And today is a good day.

Anna Evans pointed out that Depeche Mode has a video out for Wrong, the first single off their new album Sounds Of The Universe. They debuted the song at, I think, this year’s Echo music awards in Berlin, Germany. The Echo awards are given out each year based on the preceding year’s sales for both a German band or artist and an international band or artist in each category. In addition to Depeche Mode, the 2009 Echo awards included live performances from the Scorpions, U2, Katy Perry, Udo Lindenberg, Paul Potts, Razorlight, Helene Fischer, Silbermond, Sasha, Amy McDonald, and Die Toten Hosen, the last of which I believed to be a fictional band one of my degenerate punk rock friends made up when I first of them. Something about the name.

At any rate, as Anna Evans asked, what do you think of the new single from Depeche Mode? I’m always entertained by a combination of gloom pop and bad driving myself.