Vampire Diaries is most likely the single worst program I have ever watched an entire episode of. No close second place.

Longtime Blue Blood readers are probably aware that I find vampire legends so compelling that I wrote my thesis on how they function as a paradigm for human sexuality. You are probably also aware that I thought Twilight was great. I have no objection to either love or wholesomeness and most of the people who hate Twilight soooooooo much haven’t seen it. So the pain in my temples produced by watching Vampire Diaries had nothing to do with any problem with vampires being teen fare or not being sufficiently horror genre or anything like that.

Vampire Diaries sucks because, first of all, all the characters read too old to be in high school. It is impossible to keep track from casting, styling, or acting which characters are supposed to be younger or older than one another. They are all extremely poised, perfectly coiffed, and apparently have no parental supervision or annoyance of any kind. Their main hangout looks like a bar. The female characters all approach sex like aging cougar divorcees or at least very very very jaded twenty-somethings.

When I was in high school, not only did I run with a fast crowd, but most of us had diplomatic immunity and knew that there would be no legal consequences for our actions. Although I found Twilight’s approach to relationships refreshingly positive, I have no objection to teens drinking, drugging, and having either fabulous or poorly-managed sex in literature, but I prefer it be a bit, ya know, plausible. I was, in point of fact, legal to drink in most of the countries I lived in during high school and my friends’ favorite hangouts actually were bars. But, for a teen show, set in the United States, the main teen hangout should probably have set design which looks more like a Denny’s and less like a liquor establishment or, if it is a bar, that needs to be explained.

Adding to the weird anachronism of Vampire Diaries are the pop culture references. The most painful one is when one of the cougar teens tells another that her ex is clearly pining for her because he is acting cool on the outside (he’s not), but you just know he is continuously listening to Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. How hard would it have been to come up with something vaguely contemporary? I mean, I know Vampire Diaries is based on books from the 1990’s, but, for slightly past sappy lovesick music, surely the CW could have hired a writer who had heard of say Dashboard Confessional or Bright Eyes. I consulted the internet and Air Supply’s Greatest Hits came out in 1983. I’d like to say this is before any of the actors on Vampire Diaries were born, but some of them are really old to be playing teens. It is, however, obviously before any of the teen characters were supposed to have been born.

Paul Wesley, the male vampire romantic lead Stefan Salvatore, who was indeed born before Air Supply’s Greatest Hits was released, looks oddly like a misshapen Robert Pattinson, who played the male vampire romantic lead Edward Cullen in Twilight. He was obviously cast for the comparison, but the gambit doesn’t really work. He is a nice-looking guy and only looks deformed because of the context making it feel like he should look like someone else. He is also kind of beefy to make a convincing vampire. Or a convincing teenager for that matter. In all fairness, Vampire Diaries is based on books by L. J. Smith which predate the Stephanie Meyers Twilight Saga, so the execs at the CW could have chosen to riff less directly on Twilight.

The special effects are pretty hokey too, although more convincing than the teenaged status of any of the actors.

Full disclosure: Vampire Diaries advertised with a number of sites I work on. I probably watched the pilot in its entirety because of this and I definitely postponed mentioning its suckage until now out of deference to an advertiser.

I did think the posters and ad creative were really sexy though. There are still some big billboards up in Hollywood with some sexy photography and graphic design on them. So they have that and trending on Twitter every Thursday going for them.

The brilliant Ellen Von Unwerth shot an extensive pictorial of Lady Gaga in vampire drag for Out. The exclusive Out feature is called The Lady is a Vamp. The shoot styling is credited to someone named Nicola Formichetti who is seriously talented and who Bing informs me is the creative director of Dazed and Confused and is responsible for some of the fashion in Vogue Hommes Japan, V, Arena Homme, and others, as well as of course out. Always fun to discover the work of creative people I have not come across before.

Out calls Lady Gaga “Pop’s newest — and gayest — superstar”. One of the things I like about Lady Gaga is that I feel she is someone post-orientation in her approach to sexuality. She has stated often in interviews that she is attracted to women physically but only has romantic relationships with men. I’m not sure if that makes her super-gay, but maybe I am just feeling cantankerous today about people being so bent on labeling sexuality. I do not feel that an individual’s sexuality generally belongs in a tidy little box with a label stickered on it.

Then again, from an editorial perspective, I’m pleased that Out indentifies Lady Gaga as gay, however she defines herself. Because this gave Out reason to publish a beautiful portfolio of images of Lady Gaga shot by Ellen Von Unwerth. They did a ton of different set-ups and have both black and white and color and a whole spectrum of spooky themes. Lots of vampire and gothic tropes photographed appealingly. Smoky dark eyes, coffin, sunglasses at night, blood, nudity (probably sfw nudity) fangs, and cute skeleton in combat boots. Definitely worth checking out.

What do you call a forty-five-year-old guy with a twenty-five-year-old girlfriend? Successful.

What do you call a forty-five-year-old chick with a twenty-five-year-old boyfriend? Cougar.

I’m just going to say right off the bat that I think most people are going to find the most compatibility for the long-term in someone who is around their own age. And, for the short term, I think the age differences are pretty irrelevant. Some sectors of society seem to be all in a tizzy over the idea that decades of women in the workplace have lead to the existence of less gender differentiation in approaches to mating. I don’t think men and women are really all that different naturally, so of course the more the cultural training to be different is removed, the more similarly they will behave.

Cougars are so much a demographic and part of the cultural consciousness today that there are sites for those who fantasize about being seduced by a cougar, Taco Bell ads about hitting on (or being hit on by) cougars, SNL sketches about cougars, and now there is a cougar convention. Goldstar listed something called the National Single Cougars Convention for Younger Men & Older Women put on by The Society of Single Professionals. Would you want to go to a cougar convention? Would you go identifying as a cougar, a younger man (is there a word for cougar-fucker?), or a bemused innocent bystander?

But what is a cougar? (I prefer definitions where people do not feel compelled to invoke Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher.) Having perused a number of articles on the topic, I see that apparently cougar is a term for an aggressive variety of MILF, generally one with some dough, between the ages of thirty and fifty, who is sexually predatory, noncommittal, and prefers to hunt men under the age of twenty five. In society circles in places like Washington, DC or Miami, an attractive young man who squires about ladies in their sixties or seventies (or the wives of men around those decades) is called a walker. A walker is not necessarily putting out and is expected to be well-spoken, able to dance, and know which fork to use. It appears nobody has a term yet for gents who are cougar prey. Cougar prey apparently has no requirements other than being youngish and doable by someone wearing champagne goggles.

The upcoming cougar convention has some extra requirements to be crowned Miss Cougar America: “To be eligible to win, the lucky Cougar must be present at the convention, legally single and at least 40 years of age.” (You can’t make this stuff up because truth is deeply stranger than fiction.) The upcoming cougar convention is in Silicon Valley, which is apparently the only city in America with a surplus of single men. (Is computer nerd the correct term for cougar bait then?) The event takes place on August 28 and includes an “Entertaining Keynote Address with author Francesca Gentille and Tahil Gesyuk, her romantic partner, who is 14 years younger.”

A lot of 80’s movies, such as Weird Science, featured an older experienced woman who showed a young man the ropes as part of his coming of age. That theme in movies seems to have fallen out of favor, but one kinda gets the point of that sort of thing in movies about growing up and gaining self-confidence and so-forth. If a chick bangs a guy who is fourteen years younger than she is (but of legal age) that just falls under dog bites man i.e. so commonplace and uneventful in 2009 as to not be news.

Incidentally, Francesca Gentille is a kama sutra and tantric sex expert. She is pretty, educated, sensualist, works out, and eats right. She has met lots of famous people, enjoys travel, and has diverse life experiences. She is known for her work on managing hormone levels and related body functionality for anti-aging and great sex. Who wouldn’t hit that?

People tend to be most open-minded about trying new things when they are first being romanced. For example, most people are extra-likely to taste a new food or listen to a new band then they start dating someone new. By this scientific equation, I hope that readers perusing the erotic portraiture of BlueBlood.com will be feeling extra-receptive to new ideas.

One of the most important messages I would like people to internalize from Blue Blood is that having purple hair or a tattoo or a pervy wardrobe in no way makes a person a second class citizen. You are entitled to the rewards of the larger society. You are entitled to the same love as anyone, whether or not your sex is a bit kinkier than average.

The ancient Romans celebrated Lupercalia on the Ides of February by whipping hot girls with portions of sacrificed goat. (The Ides is the 15th day of a month, for those of you who have repressed your Julius Ceasar studies.) Historians can’t agree on the origins of Lupercalia or precisely which gods the festival honored. They are pretty solid on the format for the party though. If you wish to throw a Lupercalia event, you will need a variety of eligible maidens, two goats, and a dog. The idea is to sacrifice the animals and then hit the girls with pieces of them in order to ensure fertility, painless childbirth, and general sensuality. A match-making lottery is optional but considered to be part of the tradition. Sort of the bloody pagan version of a 70’s key party. Blue Blood is not really down with the animal sacrifice portion of the show because we love our dogs and goats far too much for that.

In non-ancient Roman and non-70’s times, having an unusual piercing or wearing your lingerie in public can mean that your love life is limited to brief conversations with strangers off MySpace you message for 2am threesomes. But it doesn’t have to. There is no rule that thinking for yourself, owning your sexuality, and dressing flamboyantly equals eschewing all sentimentality and always feeling alone on Valentines Day. So I’m thinking I know more people who celebrate Valentines Day than Lupercalia.

Historians appear to be even more confused about the origins of Valentines Day than they are about the origins of the older Lupercalia. There are three different dudes various factions present as being the patron saint of romance. Most folks these days celebrate Valentines Day February 14th with hearts and flowers and, of course, sentimental greeting cards in both digital and paper form. Some scholars argue that the match-making lottery tickets of Lupercalia were the first Valentines. I feel that a date lottery ticket is no more a Valentine than the keys to some guy’s Porsche (unless maybe I got to keep the car.) The medieval Xtians appear to have come up with a variety of different mythologies and rituals in attempts to co-opt and dilute the pagan Lupercalia rites. Difficult to discern which one was the most successful, but, by the 1700’s, it is well-documented that there was a thriving Hallmarkian industry which created pre-made cards for Valentines Day and produced books with suggestions of how to express one’s love.

So flowers are pretty and an obvious gift, but how did hearts get associated with Valentines Day? Cadbury, founded in 1824, is credited with producing the first heart-shaped box of chocolate. Perhaps it is because of the way one’s heart beats when aroused or in love. Not that a heart shape is shaped much like a human heart. There are vaguely disgusting treatises on how what we consider to be heart-shaped is more similar in structure to a cow’s heart than a human heart. I’m not sure if those who study this are proponents of cattle-fucking or what.

Whether you prefer pieces of sacrificed animals or pieces of chocolate, there is someone out there who is the perfect match for you. If you have already found them, Valentines Day is the perfect holiday to celebrate your good fortune. As part of Blue Blood’s Valentines Day greetings to all of you, Forrest Black and I photographed a professional piercer, the lovely purple-tressed Natalie Addams, cutting out her own heart, gift-boxing it, and sewing up the “wound” with quite genuine play piercings. The Cadbury chocolate boxes of the mid-1800’s were made with velvet and mirrors. So we just had to say Happy Blue Blood-style Valentines Day with a bloody heart in a spooky ornate gift box! We’re traditional like that.

Happy Valentines Day!

It seems newsworthy to mention that an online video for Marilyn Manson’s new music video is apparently going to be online for only another day or two. The new single is called “Heart Shaped Glasses” and features romantic lyrics about erotic cutting and Manson looking like he is feeling his inner rockstar. Most coverage of the video has been rather frantic speculation on whether Marilyn Manson and actress Evan Rachel Wood are actually having penetrative sex in the opening scene of the seven plus minutes long vid. It is totally irrelevent to the final product whether or not his penis was actually in her vagina, as neither is visible, but the two manage to communicate wonderful chemistry between them on screen.

When I saw the movie Seven, I kept wanting them to turn the damn lights on. It seems like it would have been much more obvious that Kevin Spacey was the killer if they hadn’t been doing investigation and forensics with flashlights, when there were perfectly good light switches nearby. I felt a little bit like this during much of the video for “Heart Shaped Glasses” when I watched it on the German video sharing site ironically enough called Sevenload. The actual Marilyn Manson site links to an IP with no real site on it and a much higher resolution version of the video. Everything is much clearer in the version on Manson’s site, although the lighting is still colored and moody. The interface on the Sevenload version is much more user-friendly though.

The video kicks off on Sevenload with the artist introducing the clip and, linked off his site, it goes straight into Manson and Wood writhing around and kissing passionately. This is pretty hot for around two and a half minutes. The initial makeout scene includes some very light choking. Somehow I think iTunes still won’t have any problem billing for the music video download down the line. The video is then interrupted with one of those talky interludes that musicians who want acting roles like and nobody else enjoys. The two of them are in a car and she tells him to drive faster and he takes altporn style polaroids of her with a kitchen knife and a schoolgirl skirt. This scene is where the heart shaped glasses referred to in the song’s title first appear. They then move to a club scene where Manson is rocking it old school and a sorta normal looking girl in the audience is watching from behind her heart shaped glasses and touching herself with hands covered in interestingly incongruous driving gloves. This I believe is Wood in a sort of fifties looking good girl dress. I don’t think she’d be good casting for the part if she weren’t Manson’s paramour, but the chemistry between them is so powerful that it more than makes up for it. I think the moody lighting, which might otherwise be a bit much, makes her come across a bit darker too.

The main concept of the video revolves around, aside from hipster sunglass, romantic cutting. So the club scene, err, cuts back and forth to a blood-drenched black bed and shots of a sort of heart shaped tattoo with a lightening bolt S on Wood’s thigh. I don’t know if the tattoo is real any more than I know if the fucking is real. Doesn’t matter because it works for the video. Oh yeah, then they drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. I loved Thelma and Louise so much that when my friend Blue Blood writer Shariann Lewitt and I saw it, Shariann told me that maybe one of us needs to learn to drive better. As Wood steers with her foot in Manson’s video and they still drive off a cliff, I think Shariann was mistaken about the requirements.

Anyway, the song is okay and I like the flow of the lines:

she’ll never cover up what we did with her dress, no
she said, “kiss me, it’ll heal but it won’t forget”

When I am elected Benevolent World Dictator, there will be a lot more videos in this vein and they will be available for more than a week.