I went to a fashion show soiree last night. My friend writer/gadfly Clint Catalyst organized the event for designer Jared Gold. Clint and I are both eclectic individuals and we have kind of a lot of random points of intersection. And we’ve both been doing what we do for a while.

So the most unsettling part of the shindig was trying to place who people were. This is difficult when a person could be someone I photographed nine years ago and haven’t seen in between. Or the person could be someone who did my hair once. Or the person could be someone I’ve only seen in media. There is always a risk when greeting someone on dim non-specific facial-recognition alone because they could turn out to be someone you’ve only watched on television or MySpace or someone you would shoot (not with a camera) if you had a license to kill. But a significant portion of folks there are people I know and like but may not have seen recently. So it was like a real life wetware version of one of those aging programs they use to find missing children.

One person at the event I saw and could not place was artist/designer Elizabeth McGrath. I attended her Broken Dolls fashion show in like 2002 or 2003 and featured it in our SWAG project. But I’d seen her in sort of business mode and not in-person in the intervening years (I think.) Clint Catalyst re-introed us and, when I said her hair was different now, she laughed and pointed out that she was wearing five or six hairpieces stacked up on top of one another. Normally, I don’t like wigs, but what Liz McGrath was wearing was much more complicated and high-end than a plain wig and she looked fabulous and she probably designed it herself like the spiffy In the Year of the Pig Fish piece pictured above.

At any rate, we’ll have video coverage of the actual fashion show posted some time soon. Forrest Black and I had front row seats (three sets of them actually as they kept redoing the seating chart), so you’ll get to see it all. We ended up next to World of Wonder’s Thairin Smothers, cool Party Monster author (and snappy dresser, even if he had to go with his second choice outfit) James St. James, and Danny Franzese who has curated at the Royal/T gallery which I’ve been meaning to check out, so our final seats ended up being more entertaining than our starting ones, even if Thairin and I had to be very cozy. I say you’ll get to see it all, but I admit that we’ll have to cut a lot of boobage. I never get why people make a big thing over something being about fashion and then have totally not street-legal outfits that a lot of venues can’t even run pictures of. Maybe it is just because I will absolutely wear outlandish couture that I think runway looks are supposed to be wearable.

My questions for the day are twofold. First, would you be comfortable strutting down a catwalk (outside of a strip club) topless? Second, how do you handle it when you see someone you recognize but can’t immediately identify?

In this week’s episode of AMC’s Mad Men, the Paul Kinsey character, ably played by Michael Gladis, throws a party in his hipster Montclair loft. I’m not sure what Montclair is like today, but, when I was in school in Connecticut, I recall Montclair being mostly nice suburban homes. Definitely no longer hip and outlying. In the 1962 time of Mad Men, however, it is a transitional neighborhood which is home to its original have-nots and the adventurous vanguard of hipsters who are the frontline shock troops in any gentrification.

Paul Kinsey has invited people from all different areas of his life, hoping they will mingle with one another happily, and think better of him for throwing such a fabulous interesting party. It is a bit scandalous that, as an aspiring writer, Paul has snarfed a typewriter from work and left it on display where his guests can all see it. Some of the people from the Sterling-Cooper advertising office where he works feel uncomfortable, uneasy and unsafe in his neighborhood. Some just feel threatened by the strangeness and feel compelled to assert their alleged superiority. Paul’s ex-girlfriend, the sexually predatory office manager Joan Holloway, refuses to acknowledge that his new girlfriend is an assistant manager at a supermarket, calls her a checkout girl, makes a thing of her being black, and accuses Paul of basically trying to hard to be interesting. One of Paul’s collegiate chums fails to close the Peggy Olson character because he can’t wrap his head around the notion that a woman is a copywriter like his friend and not a secretary or receptionist. It is a very satisfying moment when she tells him that she is not going home with him because she is in the persuasion business and his presentation was unimpressive.

Damn but I have had that party. I always want to meld all the areas of my life into one. I don’t want to have to present a different face to each group of people I know. I want everyone to know the true me and somehow this feels like it means that everyone I know should be able to enjoy one another as much as I enjoy each of them.

I invited many of my friends from university and from the science fiction convention circuit to shindigs at my old punk rock group house Cambodia. Some of my school friends thought it was a great opportunity to bang a piece of strange, but they would also talk amongst themselves about what a waste it was that I was doing this instead of working for a management consulting firm or investment bank or something. Some of my punk rock friends failed to bang a piece of what would have been strange for them because it never occurred to them that someone in a buttoned down shirt could, for example, be gay. I still cringe when I remember one of my favorite people from sf fandom telling me he had the single worst time he had ever had at any party ever at Cambodia.

I thought that putting the different groups of people together would expand their horizons in an enjoyable way. My university prided itself on its diversity and I believed that diversity was simply good. Sometimes, for some people, my cross-pollinating shindigs did work out the way I hoped and intended. Writer Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, calls people like me connectors for introducing those who might otherwise not meet. Sometimes it is stimulating and invigorating being a connector and sometimes not so much. I try to make Blue Blood an entertainment haven for people like myself, who have wandered through many subcultures, never finding just one which was wholly who they are. Living that way, a person is likely to avoid believing the common lies people tell themselves, a person is likely to avoid believing things which are simply not true. There is a purity to this, but there is also the very real possibility of ending up feeling like a person without a country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just had a bit of a DC/Baltimore flashback weekend. Photographer Carlos Batts planned to do a gallery show/video release party at the combined studio locations of Federico Zignani and Apollo Starr. Normally such an event would be on my calendar in pen, but the damn date of this particular shindig kept changing. And then seminal DC industrial band Chemlab was playing the Knitting Factory. Due to the requirements of Murphy’s Law, both events were the same night.

Being the plucky Los Angeles denizen that I am, I managed to hit the Chemlab show, the Carlos Batts party, and the cool hot dog stand. (Yes, in LA, we have hot dog stands ranked by factors like cool and celeb client list.) Afterwards, Forrest Black and I took Carlos Batts and his gigantic entourage home in my limo. Passersby never can be sure how many people are behind tinted black glass and Carlos was all plotting mischief we could get into.

Anyway, in addition to his coffee table books and lots of other accomplishments, the fabulous Carlos Batts has shot a whole lot of erotic photo sets currently on BlueBlood.com and you should expect to see a whole lot more from him there. He has just released a video, two years in the making, starring April Flores, called Voluptuous Life and you should expect to see more about that here as well. Interview about the release party and gallery show now:

Amelia G: What was the special printing process for the images displayed on the wall?

Carlos Batts: The images on the wall were R prints mounted on sentra.

AG: What made you decide to do your party at that location?

CB: I shoot a lot of my commercial work there including fashion ads and music videos. The owner of the studio has parties there and is a good friend.

AG: The date of the party kept moving around; what was up with that?

CB: We were trying to plan around the holidays to make it work for everyone.

AG: Where did you and April Flores get your fabulous premiere outfits?

CB: We got them from our good friend Oskar de la Cruz’s store Luxe de Ville. It’s this really great store on Sunset in Echo Park. Oskar styles us for all our major events.

AG: How many people do you think it would be possible to fit it a limo and who would you most like to surprise with an angry mob exiting one?

CB: I think 20 people could squeeze into a limo and I would have to say I would want to surprise George Bush with the angry mob.

There are a lot of people in Los Angeles who get decked out in full regalia every day, just in case. By this, I mean that they blow dry their hair or put product in it or put makeup on and make sure they are wearing something versatile but hot. Every day. Because you never know, in this city, when fabulosity may strike. A lot of actors and models and so forth end up getting discovered because they happened to already be ready to go, in the split second the iron was hot here.

The thing is that it tends to be a split second of hot opportunity. Because, due to a combination of flakitude and being on the forefront of cell phone technology, most party plans here are made at the last minute. If someone phones to tell you to look off your balcony because their car is outside, you can be relatively sure they will not flake before you get across your lawn. I pretty much only use the phone to (a) say I’m running late, (b) ask where to park or (c) compare notes on the party I am at with the party someone else is at. The last minute thing is also because everybody, who already has the hookup, works long and unpredictable hours. The various entertainment industries may yield fun jobs, but work is still work and tends to come first for anyone committed to what they do. Which is an awfully high proportion people in this city. I know I can’t be ready to go all the time because I work way way way too much and I have a lot of days where I end up having to put out unexpected fires. (Flame is the official metaphor for this feature article.)

So there is this really excellent raw foods place which has opened up near me. Real Raw Live has great smoothies, super cool and friendly people, and the best cashew burgers in the universe. So I’ve been telling my pal J that he has to check it out and he keeps almost making plans to do so and then flaking. Which is totally normal for Hollywood. So we are supposed to go over there and get delicious raw food smoothies and J, who is also a photographer, calls me on my cell, with his cell, to tell me that actually the Corbis photo agency is having a party that night and he doesn’t think he got an email on it, but Corbis called his cell to remind him and the shindig is at The Cabana Club, which is pretty close to me. He asks if we could shift the plans around a little. I tell him I have a headache and I’m tired and I’m going to flake.

Then I remember that I made a birthday resolution to get out more. The resolution was simply that I realized it was too difficult to pick the specific most perfect events to attend in such a vibrant city, so I resolved to just say “yes” to more of the invitations I get from all of the interesting people I know. And I do know an interesting and diverse cross-section of the population. This might seem like I resolved to take the path of least resistance, but, believe me, the path of least resistance for me is just to work through all waking hours. I’d already showered and my hair looked fine, so I surprise J by hitting him back on his cell and saying that I was going to keep my resolution and I was going to go to the party with him after all (after I got my raw smoothie.) He says he was thinking about flaking, but so long as we don’t get there ten minutes before it is over, it should be cool. He tells me he should come get me in about a half an hour. I tell him I’ll need a half hour more than that to get dressed. We agree on an hour. We finally hook up after an hour and a half. Traffic is insane because apparently some band is playing at the Hollywood Bowl.

J and I and actress Sydney Lauren all head over to The Cabana Club. Sydney Lauren had to get dressed in the dark because, ironically enough, her roommate spaced on her electric bill and is now unreachable on her cell because she is at the bad traffic-inducing concert at the Hollywood Bowl. We park in a parking garage up the street and there is this bizarre collection of things in there with a whiteboard sign behind them, bearing the legend: The CAGE RETURN ALL ITEMS TO WHERE YOU FOUND THEM. This seems like a suitably surreal start to the evening and it does not occur to me until later that the garage is near a film school and perhaps doubles as storage for filmmaking props. It does not occur to Sydney until later (after the open bar) that maybe she should do a dance with the wooden Jesus on a chain she finds amongst the props. I convince her not to take it with her. Since when am I the voice of reason? J is unconcerned about the unconventional shape of the parking spot as he is driving a rental care because his BMW SUV has been in the shop for the past month because of, I kid you not, a safety feature. But that is a story for another time.

So we end up walking the red carpet and being photographed by Frank Trapper who has photographed a veritable who’s who of Hollywood over the past decades. Frank Trapper’s packager Welcome Books is one of the goodie bag sponsors for the party and, during the party, they did a couple of giveaways of his book Red Carpet: 20 Years of Fame and Fashion, edited by Katrina Fried. Welcome Books is, like Blue Blood, both a publisher and a packager. What this means, in their case, is that they put books together and sometimes they publish them in-house and sometimes other people publish them. When someone else is the publisher, we call that packaging. I believe Welcome packaged the Red Carpet book, but Random House is the publisher. The goodie bags also contained the coffee table book Cinema By The Bay, by Sheerly Avni, published by George Lucas Books, but also packaged by Welcome Enterprises. The book is about the specific sensibilities of big San Francisco-based filmmakers. I got a nifty new shirt from Royal Guard. The absolute best and most inspired swag of the evening was the Corbis Rubix cube with photos by Corbis photogs on it. J and I wheeled and dealed for which of us would get which color shirt and which tote bag. I ended up with the lavender Royal Guard shirt and the green Welcome Books tote, which smells like a new car, only weird. The Corbis tote bag was black, but I felt I could part with it because most goodie bag events I go to have black totes and there are only so many black canvas book bags any person needs.

So comedian Chris Wylde texts us a series of barely intelligible and totally unrepeatable (but funny) messages from the Viper Room. As Chris Wylde is always a blast (and the open bar is over), we head over to the Viper Room. I’m pleased to run into Casper again there and he is rocking a sort of riverboat gambler look. He generally is wearing the season after next’s fashions today, so I’m hoping this is an augury of things to come because that is a nice look on a man. Apparently, Viper Room security, although pleasant and polite, would prefer it if no one took snapshots at the bottle service tables, even if they are sitting there. Who knew? Chris Wylde points out that he says “great things” so we should probably go somewhere less loud.

After a comedy of errors, where six of us managed to switch who was in what car more times than should have been mathematically possible, most of us eventually ended up at Snake Pit. We meet up with Brian Walsh aka Forty from the Chris Wylde Show (although I don’t place him until some time about five minutes before typing this.) We end up debating all manner of things that I probably can’t repeat here, not only with our table, but with neighboring beer patrons as well. It is that kind of bar. Although I’ve been told by multiple people that Slash, of Guns ‘N Roses and Velvet Revolver fame, owns this pub, I’ve never seen him there nor seen any verification I would trust. Regardless, it is a very barlike bar, with a lot of good microbrews, and that is nice and harder to come by in Los Angeles than one might guess.

And all I wanted was a smoothie. The moral is that, in Los Angeles, like in the Boy Scouts (like I’d know), it is always good to be prepared because you never know what might come up.

Fun Fact to Know and Share: Although Chris Wylde is probably most familiar from his role as the hot funny guy on Julie “Earth Girls Are Easy” Brown’s Strip Mall TV show or his more recent turn as the horny beast in the Del Taco Feed the Beast commercials, he also had a bit part in the movie My First Mister. There is a scene in a sex shop in My First Mister where a number of blasphemous dildos are on display. Blue Blood traded beer to the person responsible for props on said major motion picture there. In return for said dildos. Yes, I traded beer for blasphemous sex toys. Which I then ran through the dishwasher, to be on the safe side, and then Forrest Black and I used them in photo shoots for some of the BarelyEvil sets on BlueBlood.com. Even Blue Blood sex toys are famous. And, no, I am not going to Hell because I stopped Sydney Lauren from stealing the wooden Lord and savior from the film students. Although, come to think of it, Lord knows what they will do with it.

I’ve been meaning to go to one of the Media Bistro shindigs for media professionals, like yours truly, for ages. After seeing Laurel Toby speak, I even moved the post-it reminder a bit higher up on my monitor. I finally managed to roll over to one a couple of weeks ago. Horror author and poet Maria Alexander and I rolled over to the Luxe Hotel on Rodeo Drive, which is a fairly swanky, if odd, location for a book party. Aside from just hanging out being, you know, media-like, the Media Bistro party was also to celebrate the release of Gabe Rotter’s first novel Duck Duck Wally. Maria and I missed the hotel the first time we drove by because it is a boutique hotel and thus not very hotel-looking, so it blended into the landscape. I almost always stay in boutique hotels when I travel. The service and the suites always feel more personal than in like a Hilton or whatever. And there are usually bowls of green apples, no matter which boutique hotel it is. As I live in Los Angeles, I don’t stay in hotels here and neither Maria nor I had been to anything thrown by this particular organization before. We both went with mildly dressy professional and black. I know the color scheme is a shocker. When I saw that the hotel was actually next door to the Michael Kors store on Rodeo, I thought it was perhaps some sort of weird psychic flash which had caused me to just buy a bunch of black Michael Kors clothing this season. A good omen.

The party was fun. Maria and I chatted with a variety of interesting people. It seemed like the screening process for the guest list had not done much to weed out PR folks, but everyone was nice, if a bit aggressive about what everyone else’s writing credits were. People at the party kept grilling me on various resume points and I kept having to answer, yeah, I’ve done that too, until even I noticed that maybe I’ve accomplished one or two things. I had the epiphany that I’ve been published kind of a lot. I sort of thought I would have written the Great American Novel by now. And I haven’t. So I don’t usually think of myself as someone who gets my words out there as much as I guess I do. I didn’t meet the Media Bistro hostess Michelle Thatcher even though I’d Googled her photo beforehand, but the man of the hour, author Gabe Rotter, was gracious and pleasant. Maria found him smug, but I like that in other people. I aspire to be more aware of the good stuff in my own world, so I feel smug people are onto something there.

I just finished reading Duck Duck Wally and it is a brisk and entertaining read. The basic story is about a guy who gets caught up as collateral damage in an extortion plot after years ghost-writing lyrics for an extremely popular rapper. It is a funny and clever book with a humorous cast of characters. The book was probably intended to be more earnest than it comes off, but it is an enjoyable read.

Not everyone shared my take on the book, although, let’s face it, the blogosphere does not exactly have a dearth of people willing to write up books they have never read. Someone named Josh over at Gawker started a thread which objected partly to the style of PR used to hype the book and objected most strenuously to the racial stereotyping. I think Josh is the nick for Gawker’s After Hours Editor Joshua David Stein. Gawker commenters point out that they believe they have seen fake rave reviews of the book around the net before it was even released. Apparently publisher Simon and Schuster is really behind the book and handed out fake gold chains as promo at the East Coast launch party for the book.

“That the book tells the story of a short white Jewish dude who ghostwrites rhymes on the DL for a rap artist named Oral B only somewhat excused the charged racial implications,” Gawker’s Josh writes, “Like the novel’s protagonist, its author Gabe Rotter is a short Jewish guy himself. Yesterday we got a “tip”—probably just deep cover publicist shill—that though the book was sold as a novel, “The rapper in the book is based on a few of the MAJOR rap stars, who really do have some fat white Jewish dude writing most if not ALL of their rhymes.””

First of all, I’ve said it before and I’ll most likely say it again, but the music industry needs to deal with its obnoxious attempts to pass off one person’s work as another’s. Maybe it takes more than one person to make a good record. Duh. There is nothing wrong with that and I am sick to death of the music industry’s attempts to belittle the contributions of most members of any team that actually puts something good together.

Secondly, I honestly was made a bit uncomfortable by how hard the author hit his ethnic characterizations of Indian, Jewish, Black, etc. characters, but they did all mostly have characterization beyond race or heritage and I didn’t find any of them terribly unrealistic. I was able to overlook it because I enjoyed the writing, but, in general, I find people who go on too much about their background tiresome. I don’t care if they are Daughters of the American Revolution or just have a second cousin once removed who is a famous actor. I am interested in the person and what the individual does and I don’t think background counts for either much extra credit or a get out of jail free card.

Lastly, the notion that Duck Duck Wally is somewhat autobiographical is obvious, but that it is wholly autobiographical is kinda silly. I mean, Gabe’s bio says he comes from Long Island and his character is from Westchester. (For those who have never lived in New York, this is a joke; for those who have not, it’s not like a really big belly laugh or anything.) Duck Ducky Wally is entertaining enough to stand on its own without some publicity flack trying to convince the world that Gabe Rotter secretly writes for 50 Cent. Apart from everything else, in the real world, this sort of thing is done with contracts and NDA’s and overcontrolling press access. It is not done with shoeboxes of cash and mini-uzis. Publicity BS which tries to push the idea that maybe Gabe Rotter really is the protagonist Wally Moscowitz kinda messes up some of my enjoyment of the fiction, because it makes me start thinking about which areas were not 100% realistic. For one thing, I’ve stood right next to Gabe and, I admit he was not naked, but, if he is fat, he is one hell of a dresser. I hope that, in real life, Gabe Rotter owns a dog and loves it as much as his character loves his. I’m not going to ask him, though, because the expression of dog love in the book should be a work which can stand on its own.

The Luxe Hotel, by the way, is no exception to the rule that all boutique hotels must feature bowls of green apples. I took one for the road on the way out. Oh, and it turns out that, when I was choosing between black dresses to go in, the dress I actually chose was Alfani and not Michael Kors. Good thing I don’t put that much stock in omens.