Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

New issue of Tattoo Teasers is on newsstands now. This issue features two super long layouts from BlueBlood.com shot by yours truly and Forrest Black. The set we shot of Bella Vendetta which graces both the masthead page and a seven page layout was at the home music studio of good friends of Bella Vendetta’s. The current issue of Tattoo Teasers also includes a second huge seven page layout Forrest Black and I shot of Rachel Face at the most excellent bar Plan B in Portland.

This edition of Tattoo Teasers includes an interview with my fellow Wesleyan University alum Tristan Taormino. Long time Blue Blood readers will probably recall that we published Tristan Taormino’s erotic fiction and wrote up her delightful tome The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women. Although she and I have sometimes, alas, had missed connections, Tristan Taormino will always have a soft spot on my heart for getting me my first book deal when she worked at Masquerade Books which published my Backstage Passes: Rock and Roll Erotica from the Pages of Blue Blood Magazine anthology.

The cover of this issue of Tattoo Teasers, along with a five page feature inside, features pornstar Joanna Angel from web site Burning Angel, which I mentioned here before in my AltPorn Rankings article . Joanna Angel also appears in various photos here and there on Blue Blood and she got her Escalade stolen at Erotica L.A. this past weekend. I guess I am pretty glad Blue Blood chose not to exhibit at Erotic LA this year. What a messed up thing to happen at a convention with thousands of people around. I hope she gets it back undamaged.

There is some filler in there too, but there is so much cool stuff because the Tattoo Teasers magazine is edited by his Satanic Majesty Bob Johnson, editor of Old Nick Magazine and author of Corporate Magick: Mystical Tools for Business Success. I actually first met Bob Johnson at an adult internet industry convention back when he was at Playboy and had taken note of Blue Blood’s early forays into satanist erotica over on BarelyEvil.

Whoo-hoo! Agent Aeon just alerted me about being on the cover of Star Magazine this week. A few days ago, a charming editor from Star (who knew they had nice peeps over there?) contacted me about the sexy blue photos Forrest Black and I shot of Adam Lambert. He also interviewed me about my impression of Adam Lambert, formed while shooting him at a Blue Blood-sponsored event, that I wanted Adam Lambert to win American Idol, etc. Mostly, we talked about Led Zeppelin (both fans, although only he has a Zoso tattoo) and booze (for excess, he prefers red wine and I prefer beer, he likes Pabst Blue Ribbon, I like Stella Artois, and we both like Shiner Bock.) I knew there was going to be a feature in Star, but I didn’t realize it was going to be a cover feature.

I am really happy, just tickled pink to have photography in Star without adjusting shooting style at all. The photographic work that Forrest Black I produce is very much about shooting individuals who, whether or not they are celebrity famous outside of their immediate circle of acquaintance, have enormous star quality with an alternative unusual aesthetic. Even in a room full of sparkling people, Adam Lambert shines extra bright. The night we photographed him, there were actually people who were pissy that Forrest Black and I took our time with someone like Adam Lambert and didn’t just shoot any random rude person who made no effort getting into costume yet felt entitled. When we shoot at an event, or select who to book for anything, we look first and foremost for quirky, unique, larger-than-life personalities. At an event, we also focus on people who really embody the spirit of the event. So, to anyone still holding a grudge that we took extra time for people like Adam Lambert, I’d just like to point out that maybe, after this many years, we’ve got a good eye for raw stardom.

Adam Lambert got more of our time and attention because he deserved it. I knew I wanted to shoot Adam Lambert the moment I laid eyes on him. Even on an extremely competitive show like American Idol, they do not get many people with an Adam Lambert level of gracefully powerful presence. I’m watching AI this season and rooting for Adam Lambert to win. It is not just that he has rockstar appeal, but that he stands out even next to other really fabulous people.

Also Pete Wentz from Fallout Boy parties with tattooed strippers, Britney Spears might have sex with Kevin Federline on purpose, and Bruce Springstein is named as the other man in divorce papers. Star Magazine hits newsstands tomorrow.

The new issue of Marquis is hitting European newsstands now. This makes twenty-seven or twenty-eight issues in a row of Marquis, the highest circulation glossy fetish magazine in the world, which have featured work by yours truly and Forrest Black. As you probably know, Forrest Black and I of course do the Big in America column.

For Marquis No. 45, Big in America was a spotlight on fetish photographer Larry Bradby. I first met Larry Bradby at the Richmond, Virginia home of fetish model Mistress Kali. Mistress Kali modeled back when everyone was still shooting film, so her name is perhaps not as known outside of the DC/Baltimore/Richmond corridor, but she was very compelling. In my own personal experience, a photograph Forrest Black and I shot of Mistress Kali ran in Tattoo Savage and readers wrote in to say they were getting our photo of her inked permanently into their flesh. That is how compelling Mistress Kali was. If digital photography and the internet had really been around then, she would definitely be even more well known. Larry says of Mistress Kali, “I owe my fetish photography success to her. She was the one that pushed me into fetish photography. Being a very good friend, I took her advice and put all of her ideas on film with my Pentax ME Super.”

Larry Bradby’s first big photo credit was, poetically enough, when he won the Marquis readers contest back in Marquis No. 11. Blue Blood has just inked a deal with Larry Bradby to run a huge number of erotic sets by him on BlueBlood.com. You all can expect the first one of sexy Nicotine, who you all know from the forums, to post this week.

I kind of like this year’s female pop sound, but, for some reason, all the top-selling pop artists this years seem to sound oddly similar. Moreso than usual for such things, which is saying something. I don’t think that normally Britney Spears, Pink, Christina Aguilera, Rhianna, etc. all have nearly identical voices. I think this is one of those occasions where, if I knew more about how the female pop sausage is made, it probably boils down to just a few writing teams and just a couple of producers.

This year, barring visual cues, I can’t tell any of these chicks apart from their singing. The new Britney Spears single “Womanizer” is predictably stylish and expensive-looking. It is in the format of one of those videos where the girl wears a whole passel of different outfits to appeal to a larger variety of demographics. Britney Spears has always been marketed somewhat like this, but this vid kicks it up a notch.

There is even a sequence where Brit is all done up with a reddish pinkish bob for hair and fake tattoo sleeves. Basically, the scenario has her done up as a waitress who would have a lot of “friends” on MySpace. The temporary tattoos are what feel like they put it over the top, although certainly, as the meaning of having ink has changed, tattooed hotties like Masuimi Max and Kellie LaPlegua are getting their ink lasered off. So maybe there is no true permanence in counterculture beyond what is in your heart. The look can always be co-opted, often in ways which are glossier than the original.

They will gobble up fashion as fast as the underground can produce it, although genuinely individual and independent spirit is the part mainstream wants to leave behind. But, like, America’s favorite trainwreck Britney Spears is, like, sorta naked in the “Womanizer” video.

Edit: So apparently, although this video has been uploaded about a billion and a half times to YouTube, it is not embeddable the way most vids from there are. Blue Blood has a policy against linking pirated content, but Antiquiet has the Britney Spears Director’s Cut video and I’m linking that, despite Kevin Skwerl’s FBI arrest and indictment because him once again having special materials means that either (1) it’s all effing astroturf and thus the copyright holders want it approached this way or (2) Kevin Skwerl takes stuff from work.

I love music, or at least I used to, but the music industry sure makes me sick.

(Thanks to our beloved advertiser Busted Tees for the photos in the graphic. Please do not blame them for the lewd linguistics lesson which follows.)

Will Judy: Coffee had better be the answer right now, because there’s nothing else going.

Considering initialized knuckle tattoos. Right hand: ROFL, Left hand: TLDR

Amelia G: I am not sure you are jovial enough for an ROFL knuckle set. What is TLDR?

Will Judy: “Too Long; Didn’t Read”

Shittiest, most smugly dismissive response to a post possible, worse than “Id hit it” or “tranny?”

Amelia G: It is probably good for the world that I didn’t know what that stood for and, perhaps solely as a result of this, had not noticed it before.

This conversation reminds me that I need to start a “Would you hit it?” thread somewhere.

As a linguistically informed individual, how would you deconstruct (deconstruct is my word of the week) the hit it expression. What is one hitting? Is the usage that one will smack one’s privates against another’s? Is it a more general colliding of human beings in a sexual context? Is hitting it something one does *with* someone else or *to* someone else? Is the usage supposed to apply only to men hitting women (e.g. tap that ass) or also to women hitting men (as it certainly is used in common parlance)?

Will Judy: Etymologically speaking: One of the many theories explaining the word “fuck” traces it back to the Olde Englishe verb “fokken”, “to strike”. Fokken in the sense “to strike” is still in use in German, although there is a separate word, fichen, for “to fuck”.

I think the current usage of “hit that” traces back to “hitting skins”, late 80s slang conflating beating drums (drumskins) with having the vigorous sex. “I’d hit skins with that fine thing” boiled down to “I’d hit that”.

There’s also the whole thing of shouting “Hit it!” to get something started, which goes back to time immemorial.

Amelia G: You have no idea how much pleasure and relief I am currently receiving from your explanation. Can I repost this? (with credit/blame of course)

Will Judy: You have my freely given permission.

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!

The vibrant Michelle Aston, as photographed by Blue Blood photog Justice Howard, adorned a giant sign in the front of Meltdown Comics as part of the Dangerous Toys art show. There was appropriately a tattoo shop next door, which you can see in my snapshots of the event. Dangerous Toys was a joint art show collaboration between photographer Justice Howard and toymaker and painter of toys Jim Koch.

I really liked Jim’s toys which seemed perfectly suitable for dressing up one’s cube at work. There were complex original pieces on display at the Dangerous Toys art show and Meltdown Comics also featured some semi-mass-produced versions of his design.

Jim and Justice worked on a few joint pieces, such as a skateboard with Justice’s photos worked into the textured design. I’d never want to skate on it, though, because they are so beautiful.

Justice decided to forgo framing her individual pieces for this particular show in order to be able to display more work. Although this creative decision, in some respects, made individual pieces come across as less important, I personally enjoyed it because I love Justice’s work, but I am very familiar with it. So getting to see so many different pieces was a pleasure. (more…)

Tattooed and corseted wishes for a Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

This September 19th holiday was founded by two guys named Mark Summers and John Baur, with assistance from their friend Brian Rhodes and boosting from one of my favorite humorists, the talented Dave Barry. And Blue Blood celebrates it, yarrr.

Although our Blue Blood discussion boards here are known for their intelligent and rational conversations on hot button topics, we all are also familiar with the long-running pirates versus ninjas battles. Critical thinking is vital, but being good at pirate lingo is always a plus. So, for International Talk Like a Pirate Day, we just had to feature a photo set of Halloween Jen Vixen. Famous corsetmaker Isabella Costumiere donated black pirate pantaloons and a white corset for the cause. Jen already had her own eye patch with a skull and crossbones on it. Now that be a fine lass, yarr. Ms. Vixen is now featured on BlueBlood.com in a dozen sets with a whopping 611 photographs lensed by yours truly and Forrest Black. Reminder: In addition to images of the beautiful tattooed Jen Vixen, membership in the BlueBlood.com mega site includes an additional 80,154 pictures, of 348 other incredibly gorgeous hotties, shot by a variety of cutting edge photographers, quality fiction from established genre authors and Blue Blood’s world famous signature couples photo sets.

When you think about it, the Blue Blood skull does have a hint of the Jolly Roger about it. Avast, all scurvy dogs, prepare to be boarded!

Andy Laplegua is a busy man. In the past year alone he has released three full length albums. Icon of Coil, his most popular band in the US, did Machines Are Us, Combichrist, a noisier EBM project, did The Joy of Guns, and Panzer AG did This Is My Battlefield, a darker, more goth/industrial album. Andy Laplegua is the frontman of Icon of Coil, but Combichrist, and Panzer AG are his solo projects.

He has produced a track for Apoptygma Berzerk, and done numerous remixes for bands such as VNV nation, Funker Vogt, Apoptygma Berzerk, Hocico, De/Vision, Mesh, and just about any other electro project you can think of.

I caught up with him after a Combichrist show at Das Bunker in Los Angeles. He was still covered in blood from a photo shoot with Amelia and Forrest earlier in the day. Heres how it went.

Kellie: Great show. Nice fake blood by the way.

Andy: [laughs] Thanks.

You usually wear latex on stage. Are you into the fetish scene, or just the fashion?

I’m not so much into the fashion itself, I love the look and feel of it. I am very much into the fetish scene. I love rubber.

What other fashion do you like to wear?

House of Harlot, Skintwo, Marquis, Cyberdog, DSL, Lipservice. And anything else I see that I like.

What are you drinking?

Jack Daniels.

Straight?

On ice.

I see you have a Johnny Cash tattoo.

I got this tattoo by a great artist named Deacon at Holy Mother Tattoo in Atlanta, Georgia. He actually did this whole half sleeve. It’s a tribute to Johnny Cash, when he died. He is one of the most important artists to me, the whole reason to do music. The way he was a story teller, a great inspiration to all artists. Always the man for the little man. Always true to what he did.

What other music do you listen to at home?

I listen to a lot of cock rock, and real industrial. Not the shit that’s mostly played in this scene. Everybody seems to copy each other in this scene. I go out of this scene to find inspiration. Turbonegro, Manowar, Nitzer Ebb, Klinic, Backyard Babies. You know, they play Backyard Babies at the Kentucky Fried Chicken here in Germany.

KFC huh? You live in Germany now, right?

Yes. Everyone I am working with and everyone I want to work with is in Germany. I’m closer here than anywhere else in Europe. It’s a music metro. And Hamburg has got a great red-light district. You can do what the fuck you want, and no one will bother you.

You’re from Norway though. Do you know the guys from Zeromancer, or Apoptygma Berzerk?

Sure, they are all good friends of mine. We all started making music at the same time, going in total different directions. But ironically enough, we all ended up in the same scene. Being quite successful.

So, all you rock stars hang out together regularly?

We hang out as often as we can, we have an unbelievable time together. I hang out with Ronan from VNV Nation, Eric from Catastrophe Ballet, and Bjoern from Fortification 55, mostly, since we all live near each other. But when we go out, it’s everyone together. Suicide Commando, Dimmu Borgier, Mayhem, Hocico. Good times.

What are your immediate plans for the future?

A new Icon of Coil single is coming out. A new Combichrist EP is coming out in October, the same time I’ll be doing my Icon Of Coil US tour. The new Combichrist album should be out by January. I will be playing a lot of festivals this summer. WGT, Mera Luna, Industrial for the Masses, Infest, Summer Darkness.

You’ve got a very sexy accent. What languages do you speak?

Norwegian, Swedish, English. My German is Okay.

Say something hot to me in Norwegian.

Noe Varmt paa norsk.

What does that mean?

[laughs] I could show you.

And last, besides anyone here, who is your favorite Gothic Slut?

Hmmm…what’s the girls name with the blonde dreads and the tattoos from her arms to her legs?

Voltaire.

Yes, yes. Shes hot. They’re all hot. You want to introduce me to some? Then maybe I can give you a better answer. [laughs] I’d love to see more of the
Rubber Dollies site. I’ve only gotten to see what comes out in Marquis every month.

Thank you for the interview, the show was great. Everyone seemed to enjoy it. I look forward to seeing you live again.

No problem, thanks to you too.