The recent Vampire-Con in Hollywood featured Vampirella’s Ball as the closing event. Comic book vampire Vampirella celebrated her 40th anniversary at the vampire convention, so I think it seemed only right to name the closing party after her. We have video coverage of the whole convention coming up soon, but the portraits we shot are exclusively from Vampirella’s Ball.

Forrest Black and I of course photographed Countess Lotti and Wendi Mirabella, the successful event mavens who made the whole weekend happen. Nella, who won the Vampirella look-alike contest kicks off our Vampire-Con photo gallery. We shot event MCs Count Smokula and the delicious Scarlet Rose (who also played a prostitute on my favorite Western of all time Deadwood.) You will find longtime friend of Blue Blood editor Pam Keesey in our portraits from the event. Other luminaries you will spot include gothic musician Andra Dare, horror actor Stephen Wozniak, and more.

I have to confess that the awesomest bit of our vampiric shooting adventure was most unexpected in context. This guy comes up to where the Blue Blood location studio is set up and he has kind of a long capsule intro. In Los Angeles, it is really really really a good idea to be able to state in a brief paragraph, while shaking hands, who you are and what you do and why who you are meeting should care. I suck at this on my own behalf. But I’m listening to this particular VIP guest of the convention give me his capsule intro and I am just racking my brain for where I recognize him from. At Blue Blood HQ, we sometimes call the frantic race to place someone as “work/TV/housemate of many years”. He has tremendous personal magnetism, piercing blue eyes, and the loudest blue shirt in the building, complete with rhinestones. So I’m mentally running through the face directory from the many conventions for internet professionals I have attended, spoken at, and exhibited at in my work for SpookyCash. No idea.

Finally he says his name and I’m just like OMG! Dennis Hof! If you’ve been living in a cave for the past gajillion years, Dennis Hof is the charismatic owner of Nevada’s best known legal brothel the Bunny Ranch. Forrest Black says that Dennis Hof is clearly a vampire because it just makes sense and, if Forrest were a vampire, he would definitely wear that shirt. Dennis Hof tells me that the Bunny Ranch can accommodate vampire roleplay for patrons. The two extremely sexy girls he has with him are a blonde Hayden Brooks and a brunette Phoenix James.

Dennis Hof says that Phoenix James is from Transylvania. I feel like a Transylvanian hooker is pretty much the ultimate accessory to bring to a vampire ball. Her bio says she grew up in Bucharest, but that is still Romania and close enough for rock and roll. And vampires.

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

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

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

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

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

The other big sex panel at SXSW that year was:

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

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

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

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

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

My pal editrix Abby Ehmann always knows where the good party is. (Often she is the one throwing it.) A few years back, the Blue Blood crew exhibited at the late lamented BondCon event in Las Vegas. (BondCon was purchased by the fine folks at Kink, so hopefully they will relaunch it.) The BondCon show was held overlapping the same time as the Adult Entertainment Expo, which Forrest Black and I have occasionally attended over the years to do press coverage on happenings in the adult video world. Immediately prior to these two shows was the Internext show, which SpookyCash sent us to. (SpookyCash is far and away the leading affiliate program in its niche and facilitates people with popular sites being able to make some dough promoting naughty sites from Blue Blood and friends.)

So anyway, after a couple weeks in Vegas, I was all tuckered out, but Abby Ehmann told me that Paul Nathan was hosting a suite party and I really needed to go. This coming weekend, on Saturday August 30 and Sunday August 31, Paul Nathan will be emceeing Perry Mann’s Strippers & Hustlers Ball in Las Vegas. Perry Mann has been throwing the Exotic Erotic Ball in San Francisco for nearly three decades now and this month his crew is headed for Vegas. The weekend’s festivities include performances from Scooter & Lavelle, Drummer KC, D’Amato, all-female Motley Crue cover band Girls Girls Girls, Gen XX (a sort of stripped down electronica version of The Genitorturers), and Gilby Clarke. (Everyone always mentions that Gilby Clarke was in Guns n’ Roses, but I played his Kill for Thrills Commercial Suicide CD endlessly when it came out and recommend picking that up to all.) Of course, a Strippers & Hustlers Ball would not be complete without stripping competitions, so they will be having those too. This may be tricky as Vegas venues can be bitchy about nudity, but I’m sure they’ve got a plan to make it hot no matter what. The Ball web site claims they are planning the “world’s largest girl-on-girl pillow fight” just for the occasion. So you’ll be seeing one for the record books, if you head out to Vegas for Labor Day Weekend.

I’ve written about the aforementioned Paul Nathan-hosted Vegas suite party before, so I won’t do a full report. There was one anecdote which comes up a lot socially, but which I did not tell in print previously. The very talented and always impressively-costumed (and fully-functional) Tara Emory was at the party, dressed as a cheerleader. Tara can do the entertaining party trick of pissing through a hard-on into her own mouth. Naturally, I took a number of snapshots of this. As Tara was sitting on the posh bathroom counter in front of a mirror to perform said party trick, the images show brief flashes of me and my pals Bradical and Scar 13 reflected in the mirror. Looking carefully, one notices that Bradical has his hands on his face like McCauley Culkin in Home Alone. Not that anyone has teased him about this. Well, maybe a little.

I had not previously ever thought of Labor Day as a really big holiday, just a fashion season demarcation. It seems like a ton of people are taking trips for it this year though. If you are in Las Vegas for Labor Day Weekend, you just might need to dress like a stripper or hustler and get yourself over to The Orleans Arena in Las Vegas. The event hotline for Perry Mann’s Strippers & Hustlers Ball is the extremely awesome (702)-804-STRIP. I appreciate it when someone even takes care of the details down to their phone number.

And don’t forget to stop wearing white shoes by next week. Don’t want to be gauche.

So it has been crazy busy in the Blue Blood compound this week as we ready ourselves for the 2007 SXSW extravaganza in Austin, Texas. Gotta paint my nails and make sure my purple hair dye is fresh and, oh yeah, make sure BlueBlood.com and its associated sites will be updating in our absence. Blue Blood hottie Halcyon will be moderating the panel I am speaking on. Halcyon and I are returning speakers and I’m looking forward to meeting long-time camgirl Seska, who will be joining us this year. Forrest Black will, of course, once again be doing press photography of the whole shebang and some editorial afterwards.

If I remember to bring them in all the hullaballoo of modern air travel, I will also be giving out some free SpookyCash T-shirts. They are 100% cotton black T-shirts with kickass original artwork by the incomparable Ed Mironiuk.

Here are the details of my panel for those who wish to stop by, reap the fabulous benefits of my wisdom, and say howdy:

Panel Title: Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?
Panel Location: Room 9AB, Panel Date: Saturday, March 10th, Panel Time: 5pm-6pm
SXSW Panel Description: “As the public becomes more comfortable paying for premium content and services, what can we learn from the pornographic trailblazers? What billing models and payment systems are working online in porn that would successfully crossover to mainstream? What types of content and services are ready for the Porn Path of Pay to Peruse? The panel will include veterans in the online adult industry discussing relevant trends and lessons learned.”

Despite the lurid title, the main topic is essentially a discussion of the pay-for-content business model (which allows Blue Blood to give back to the community with all the free goodies you all get to enjoy.) I’ll have more to say on the SXSW panel and I’ll probably post more here later, but, in brief, SpookyCash is the Business2Business affiliate system by which people with high traffic websites can make some beer money by linking to some of the membership sites we support. I’ll explain more later, but that is the core of it.

I’d also like to state for the record that Halcyon totally came up with the name for our panel. I don’t make porn and I tend to be suspicious of people who really segregate their sexuality from who they are as human beings. For example, if you like light bondage and you also like Nine Inch Nails (Thanks for advertising again, Trent.) then you would ideally seek a partner who enjoys both. I think porn porn tends to isolate the act from the personality and I find that really lame. But “Pay Up! Should Publishers Choose the Porn Path?” is a catchy title. Last time we spoke, our panel got one of the highest ratings of any panel at SXSW and I’m hoping Halcyon’s inflammatory title will incite even more interested souls to attend. Hopefully, despite the raunchy title, our audience this year will be as interesting and friendly as last time.

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.