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.

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?

For some reason I have been having this discussion over and over lately, the most recent being with my buddy the truly awesome musician Dan Clark about the problems of getting your band booked. Based largely on my experiences touring with Ego Likeness, here are some of my thoughts on the whole business of getting booked . . .

There are several problems with bands getting shows.

1. The most obvious, yet the least talked about: The band needs to be desirable. Does the band bring *anything* to the table, do they have a fan base? Most of the time the answer is no. And on the occasions the answer is yes, it’s best to assume it is smaller than you think it is.

1a. Most bands are far more interested in playing shows than making fans. Many bands believe they are good, and believe that because they are good people will give them a chance, and give them shows. I see a lot of bands trying to go on tour that are just not ready for it. I mean you can do it, don’t get me wrong, but chances are you will play a bunch of random bars, for no one. You might score a hit here and there, but more than likely you will just bleed money.

So lets say they manage to book a show in an unknown market. No one shows up, because no one local knows who they are, and the promoter loses.

If the band is lucky the promoter might set them up opening for a good local act, and they might get a toehold in that market. But as there are a ton of bands vying for that position it is difficult at best to acquire.

1b. So how do you go about getting a toehold? SPEND MONEY!! Make a good CD, with good songs, then when you manufacture it, send out 20 copies to any general club that might book you. Send T-shirts, stickers, anything you can, as much as you can. So lets say you send out 1,000 CDs, out of those 1,000, 100 get listened to, but it is something. That is your toehold. I am not talking about press kits, or digital downloads; I am talking about physical free stuff. Everyone has free promo downloads, but no one is going to download something from some random band they have never heard of. However, some people will put in a CD by a band they have never heard of, particularly if that CD looks nice and is accompanied by other swag.

2. There are few actual promoters who understand the business. If a promoter loses money on a show, it is their fault, period. They need to have a realistic (not what they want) understanding of the draw of any given act. They need to put that act in a room of the appropriate size and the appropriate cost. If the band wants too high a guarantee, don’t take the gig. If the only available show date is a Monday night, don’t take the gig. If you do take the gig, because they are your favorite band, be prepared to take a loss.

Actually that is a good rule across the board, always assume that any show you have will lose money. If it doesn’t, bonus!

It is always better to pack a tiny room than play in a 200 person room to 50 people.

3. Bands on the other hand need to be realistic about their guarantees. It doesn’t matter how popular you think you are or how popular you should be, because you are you and you are good, dammit. The reality is that, unless you have been around a very very long time, or have had a documented club hit, you should not be asking for a guarantee over say $100, if that.

Let’s say you have a tour and the average guarantee you ask for is $100; that’s really low, and most promoters can make that back. Awesome! Because the next time, hopefully you can ask for more. However, if you are a promoter’s favorite band, and you take advantage of that by asking $500 and the promoter loses money, they probably won’t have you back. The idea everyone involved needs to embrace is longevity, not any individual show or tour.

4. Bands, if you cant afford to tour without getting $3-400 a show, and you do not meet the above criteria, DON’T FUCKING TOUR!! Or trim your machine down to the point where you can do it for $100-200 a show, less if you can. More people in your band does not make a better band, it just makes more mouths to feed and, and a higher cost. This scene in particular is very forgiving of two people and backing tracks (we know from experience) *IF* that is you can put on a good show with good songs. No amount of gear or number of bodies on stage will help you if your songs are not good or you don’t somehow connect with the audience.

The audience does not care about your gear or the number of people onstage. They care about the band that loves making music, and loves performing no matter how many people are there.

If everyone involved has a reasonable understanding of what to expect, then a successful show is much more likely.

I guess what it boils down to is this.

Promoters

Don’t book shows that cost more than you can afford to lose.
Always assume that no one will show up, and you are booking the show for yourself.
Never assume you know what kind of numbers a band will draw.
No matter who the band is, you need to promote the hell out of the show.
Don’t let bands take advantage of you. If a band wants a bunch of rare alcohol or whatever, fuck ‘em. Requests like that tend to be insulting to all involved.

Bands

Do not charge more than you are worth.
Do not ask for anything from the promoter except items required for a quality show.
Do not mistake internet popularity for actual bodies.
Just because you made something doesn’t mean its good.
You probably have too many people in your live act, get rid of some.
For that matter, get rid of anything that you take on tour that does not make you money.
When you are pricing your tour, do not forget that promoters also have to pay for sound people, PA’s, venues, promotion, food, etc. The cost of a show is not just your guarantee.
Always assume that no one cares about what you do, and plan on living off the bare minimum.

Then if you are wrong, everyone wins. But going into any business situation assuming you are owed anything is fatal for everyone involved.

One of my favorite quotes that kinda puts it all in perspective: “Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered”

If you are in Hotlanta right now, you’d best be getting ready to strap it on tonight. Blue Blood board members have already seen some shots of Kellie and Scar (and Pika) getting geared up to party. There is a new fetish magazine in the U.S. called Buckle and they are throwing a shindig tonight.

I haven’t seen the magazine yet, so I can’t swear that it is great, but they’ve got some good people on board. Buckle’s first ish featured photographer Steve Diet Goedde. Blue Blood has shared exhibit space with Steve more than once and, more importantly, he was the first person (besides Forrest Black of course) to tell me that I really needed to set up a membership site. Steve’s advice has been terrific. Buckle’s second issue featured photographer Kelly Lind and his co-conspirator makeup artist Alex LaMarsh who are responsible for a whole lot of sets on BlueBlood.com. We’re very excited that issue number three of Buckle feature’s Blue Blood’s own Scar 13 on the cover. Blue Blood hotties are covergirls. The shot is by photographer Brian Bothwell who model Kerry Scarey tells me got his first magazine credit ever when I chose an image he shot of her to print in Swag magazine.

So it seems like Buckle Magazine should be of interest to Blue Blood folks. My only reservation about it, aside of course from not having seen it yet, is that I’ve seen a lot of statements online to the effect that Buckle is going to blow Marquis and Skin Two out of the water in the States. While I’m genuinely thrilled to see another magazine outlet for work and people I like, I’m not thrilled by hostile competition between people who should be working together for a common good. I’m biased perhaps because Forrest Black and I have provided content (photography, writing, columns, cover, etc.) for the last twenty issues of Marquis. I’m biased perhaps because, although my writing had already been published all over the world when Skin Two first published me, Skin Two was the very first magazine (besides Blue Blood of course) to publish photography by Forrest Black and yours truly. I’m hoping the competitive-sounding statements aren’t actually coming from the Buckle folks. Given who has been involved so far, I’m guessing and hoping that Buckle will have what it takes to be cool because it is cool and not because it is more something or other than existing major fetish publications.

So the jury is still out, but some hella hot babes are going to be performing at the Buckle Ball tonight. So go shake your booty at the Jungle Club right now, if you are in Atlanta, Georgia. Check Buckle out and watch for more coverage of what they are up to.

In March of 2003 I wrote an opening editorial for the late lamented Swag magazine project. The editorial was about how a lot of freaks internalize the negativity the larger society has for them. It was about how punk was supposed to promise the allure of a classless society. It was about how we shouldn’t hammer ourselves down because we deserve the rewards of the larger society, at least as much as anyone. The mere existence of this editorial is ironic in so many ways. I have no idea how many people read this the first time around, though, so I’d like to share it online now.

You should also definitely read the piece on Swag, by my old school, zine explosion compatriot Scott Hefflon, which ran first in Lollipop in print, and is now reprinted on Lollipop online. Part of what Scott had to say about the content Forrest Black and I and our pals created was, “It’s really surprising how rarely you find something unique in these “alternative” times. So many things still tow the line, the line is just called something else . . . So yeah, on the surface, Swag could look like a Gothic fashion mag. Lots of scantily-clad vixens, most of them models for one of the sites under the Blue Blood umbrella, but seeing as Amelia G and Forrest Black are top-notch Goth/fetish photographers and have great taste in hotties as well as the few bits of clothing the models wear, that’s far from a bad thing . . . What makes Swag cool is what doesn’t become clear right at first. Style . . . It was fun, I learned a couple things, and there was no nostagia back-in-my-day shit or mindless bashing of how everything sucks now and everyone’s a sell-out. No, it was well-researched bashing – funny, but not hatefully hipster ironic – and it read like something I’d write, or something one of my friends’d write. I wanna buy the writer a drink and see what they say next. That’s good writing, right? Hell, I even read Amelia G’s one-pager about buying a fuckin’ car. Sure, I know she can write and all, but who the hell care what car she bought and why and what it means to her? By the end of her story, I did. Who knew? It was a little tough to read cuz the text was one column across the entire page, but I read the whole thing, liked it, and I wanna buy Amelia G a drink to see what else she has to say. (OK, maybe I just wanna get her drunk. Heh.) . . . All in all, a damn fine publication, and one quite unlike anything else out there. And it’s got layers, baby, cuz these are not stupid fuckin’ posers spouting hipster slogans, parroting some review they just read and passing it off as their own wit. There’s eye candy, there’s smart, attitude-laced editorial (without being needlessly vicious), and there’s coverage of topics you didn’t know you were interested in until you found yourself absorbed in the piece.” Go to Lollipop and check out the whole feature on Swag there.

And now for the promised editorial:

I admit that sometimes I get discouraged with my subculture lifestyle. I think to myself that I started down this path by choice and maybe it is not too late to change direction. I think that, now that I have finally paid off my student loans and gotten my brain out of hock, maybe I should go back to school. Maybe business school could beat the importance of money into my head. Maybe I should become an attorney like my father. Maybe, at a bare minimum, I should steer my photography and writing towards more mainstream subjects.

There are a variety of things which will make me spin out into the headspace where I think such things. Inconsistent friends pretty much top the list. We’ve all known people who were our friends one day and the next they were blabbing our confidences or talking trash and then the next day they thought they could just be pals again. I’m not talking about plastic Los Angeles fair weather friends. Those are honest in their fashion and all you have to do to keep them pleasant is to keep doing well. I’m talking about alterna-identified people who have such deep-seated unhappiness about where they are at that they strike out at those closest to them because they just feel upset and are sure it must be somebody else’s fault. One of my pet peeves is cool counterculture girls who get to a certain age and start obsessing on how classy they are.

I became the sort of person I am today partly because my parents raised me to be without prejudice of class, color, or religion. On the face of it, one might think that bringing a child up to be genuinely colorblind was a very virtuous act. I believe it was. Of course those are the values I was brought up with, so I am biased. But it certainly contributes to my sense of alienation because some of the artificial things that other people use to identify supposedly kindred spirits just don’t apply for me.

One of the things which first attracted me to the counterculture was the lack of class boundaries. It was up to the individual what impression to make. You could be cool whether your parents were rich or poor, educated or illiterate, prominent in the community or living in another country. The lack of boundaries also meant a rich cross-pollination of ideas because everyone had a different background and there was not a this-is-the-way-it-has-always-been mentality.

Okay, over time, I have realized that there is one hidebound idea which really bothers me but which is endemic to subcultures. There is the notion that freaks should not be successful. This self-defeating sentiment can be found throughout most of the counterculture, whatever the specific affiliation of the people involved might be – Gothic, punk, deathrock, rockabilly, fetish, hippie, altrock, etc. No matter what I believe intellectually, my inner punk rocker believes that, on some level, success equals oppression. No matter how hard you work for it. On some level, like any minority, I have internalized the prejudice of the mainstream. I’ve been told that my weird hair and my perceived sexuality and my leather jacket all mean I do not deserve to be successful.

Well, the point here is to tell my inner punk rocker that there are rewards for being cool. Being able to express yourself with your appearance and being able to enjoy unique cool stuff are important rewards for taking the road less traveled.

And I deserve those rewards. And so do you.

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.