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.
Season 6 of Ultimate Surrender just started, hot on the heels of this month’s Summer Vengeance Championship bout between ex-Marine Dia Zerva and sexy tattooed Syd Blakovich aka The Hungarian Nightmare. I guess I should back up a bit and explain what exactly Ultimate Surrender is.
Ultimate Surrender bills itself as a “competitive sexual female wrestling site”. Now there have been cat-fighting sites on the internet, pretty much since computers started vaguely being able to communicate with one another, but Ultimate Surrender takes it to another level. There have been sites where hot women wrestled, either naked or clothed. There have been Geocities compilations of stills from movies where chicks kick ass. But nobody really went all the way to do erotic combat right until the folks at Kink did it.
The thing I really like about all the Kink sites is that they really understand the fetishes they cater to and attempt to actually fulfill them. For example, their first site Hogtied did not just feature bondage and BDSM, but went the distance to show forced orgasms. And, let’s face it, it is not just the intricacies of the rope work which are hot, no matter how pretty shibari can get.
Kink started in 1997 with Hogtied and has since branched out with quite a number of sites, Ultimate Surrender launching in 2004. The basic concept of Ultimate Surrender features either two women or two teams of women getting in the ring, roughly wrestling one another either for real or an awfully convincing facsimile thereof, and the winners sexually dominating the losers. The format is three rounds of competitive wrestling followed by a fourth round where the winner gets to have her way with the loser. It is by having the fourth round that I feel Kink really demonstrates their thorough understanding of the fetish and their willingness to go all the way to deliver what its fans truly fantasize about.
BlueBlood.com and the Kink sites feature quite a bit of crossover of talent. In the Ultimate Surrender competitions, Ariel X actually has fought very successfully, season after season. Others like Justine Joli only appeared once in Season 3 where she got Ultimate Surrender viewer comments like:
“Justine is such a bad wrestler . . . That being said Justine is beautiful to the extreme, so at the end of the day she always knows she is gorgeous. Matt even tried to triple Justines pay if only she could get one lousy point . . . not even that worked. On the bright side Justine made really cute noises while Nina was mopping up the floor with her. Nina did the right thing not letting Justine cum in RD-4. Very funny post session interview.”
I think most or possibly all of the Kink sites’ scenes feature exit interviews. Basically, these are videos where they interview the girls about their experiences, what they liked, what they didn’t like, what they thought they would not like but loved, etc. This is partly smart for legal reasons, due to the extremity and roleplaying nature of many of their scenarios, but I think it is also interesting when, for example, I hated a male dom’s voice in a scene and the girl mentions that same complaint in her exit interview. Kink’s stated mission is to provide “authentic fetish entertainment that seeks to demystify alternative sexualities and inspire sexual adventurers” and I think they do a good job of this. Particularly, in the fetish world, a lot of fetishes have been almost entirely desexualized in their presentation and Kink really puts the sex back in kinky sex.
Tim Faulker at ValleyWag summed up the Hans Reiser trial best, saying, “There’s nothing funny about a murder trial. Unless there is.”
It has been a while since we did any sex trial coverage at Blue Blood, so I guess we’re due. So here is the set-up. Hans Reiser is a well-known but unpopular Linux programmer. Well, he is probably a Linux programmer, but there are bitchy San Francisco tech scene rumors that he actually hired cheap Eastern Bloc coders to do all his work for him. At any rate, there are some Linux file systems which bear his name, whether or not he earned it. And, let’s face it, the SF tech world has a rich history of dudes who take credit for other people’s work. I don’t think most of those people are murderers, so that is not, in and of itself, damning in a murder trial. Given that Hans Reiser went off to college after 8th grade, I’m thinking he probably at least supervised his Russian coding teams. I’d say that he was not on trial for whether he deserved his personal kudos, but he actually kind of was. His attorneys William DuBois and Richard Tamor repeatedly alleged that Han Reiser was only on trial because people hated his personality so much. Heck, his lawyers pointed out that they couldn’t stand the guy. I’m not sure whether I’d choose to be represented by counsel who disliked me so intensely, but Hans Reiser admits he is a little iffy in his choices on who to associate with.
Apparently, whether or not one wishes to mail order, Russia has bride catalogs where marriage-minded gentlemen can flip through and select the woman of their dreams. Hans Reiser started dating one Nina Sharanova who promptly became pregnant. Hans Reiser’s father, Ramon Reiser, told him that he should not marry the woman, partly because Hans says Nina conceived on their first night together and she was an OB/GYN by training and he felt a gynecological doctor could have practiced proper birth control, if she wanted to. Once Hans and Nina tied the knot, Ramon Reiser suspected his son’s Russian bride of using her new CFO position in the company to embezzle funds.
A gentleman named Sean Sturgeon was the Maid of Honor at the Reiser/Sharanova wedding and dressed in drag for the occasion. Sean Sturgeon was a childhood friend of Hans Reiser’s and loaned him the proceeds of a mortgage on his condo when Reiser’s company Namesys could not make payroll, possibly due to Nina’s embezzling. Sean Sturgeon and Nina Reiser do ecstasy together and Nina is irritated when Hans Reiser refuses to do it with her. According to endless court documents, Sean Sturgeon and Nina Reiser began a sexual affair which included lots of BDSM sex.
Hans Reiser accused Sean Sturgeon of everything under the sun. He said he didn’t need to pay his childhood friend back the bridge loan he had received. He said the man had MPD. Although he knew about the affair for three years before going into divorce proceedings, he said he was really concerned about the drugs and sadomasochism involved in his wife’s relationship with Sean Sturgeon. Why can’t San Francisco people ever just admit to plain old-fashioned jealousy? They always have to complicate the issue. You have to love legal papers which include the phrase, “lewd tattooed drug addicted BDSM pimp/whore” to describe someone’s oldest friend. Hans Reiser’s court filings made much of Sean Sturgeon having carved the word rage into his arm. Sean Sturgeon dismisses the incident, pointing out that Hans saw him cut himself at the time and it happened in the mid-90’s when lots of people were doing that sort of body modification where they lived.
The court documents in the custody battle also included the entertaining query, “Should the government be keeping me from showing my son how to direct brave goblin suicide bombers against their elven oppressors?” Apparently Nina had been freaking out at Hans for some time about playing Battlefield Vietnam and Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic with their young son Rory. Hans Reiser had well-reasoned thoughts on which games he allowed his son to play. For example, he felt that a game like Grand Theft Auto was unsuitable because there were no penalties for killing innocents. More creepily, he seemed to feel that it was important for a boy to develop his killer instincts and that these video games would assist with this and prevent the child from otherwise being made soft by his upscale suburban surroundings.
After Hans Reiser and Nina Reiser split up, she had a relationship with Sean Sturgeon for a while and told him that wolves mate for life and he was her wolf. A bitter custody dispute over the Reiser children Rory and Nio left Nina with primary custody and, after wholly-unsubstantiated and somewhat doctor-disproved accusations of sexual child abuse, Sean Sturgeon was not allowed to visit her when her kids were around. Eventually Nina and Sean mostly broke up, although Sean continued to give her occasional financial support and drove around with a decal of two wolves pathetically on the back of his car. For her part, Nina started a relationship with Anthony Zografos, a potentially richer dude who appeared more suited to raising a family.
Now this is the point where it would have just been a San Francisco divorce, had things stopped here. We could all have shaken our heads in dismay at the way the court system responds to reports of things we consider normal and commonplace, such as body mods or kinky sex or violent video games. Only things did not stop there. On Labor Day of 2006, Nina Reiser disappeared. Although no body was found and phone records show that Hans Reiser tried to call his ex days after her disappearance, the husband is always the first one police look at. He was arrested and held without bail for the past two years. That is a long time to be behind bars when the authorities can’t even produce the corpse. Law enforcement’s strongest pieces of evidence were very small amounts of sloppily-processed DNA evidence found in places where it really could have gotten there a number of ways and the fact that Hans Reiser had purchased two murder-related books in the week following his wife’s disappearance. The books were David Simon’s Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and Jonathan Goodman’s (no relation to Judge Larry Goodman) Masterpieces of Murder. I’ve never read either book, but, heck, I’ve watched every single episode of the Homicide: Life on the Streets TV show, as well as David Simon’s The Wire and Generation Kill. Seems like flimsy evidence. Especially when one considers that Rory and Nio’s grandmother spirited them off to Russia and there were questions of whether she would let them come back to the States to testify. Hans Reiser asserted that Nina Reiser, possibly abetted by a lover, stole from his company and then went home to Russia and had her mother bring her kids to her to neatly solve their custody dispute. Just to add to the confusion, in the middle of the proceedings, Sean Sturgeon confessed to being a serial killer. He placed his victim count at eight and a half because he was not sure whether the ninth victim had died or not. He swore, however, that he loved Nina and only murdered people who abused him as a child and was willing to take a polygraph or “truth serum” to prove his honesty.
The State of California felt there was enough to hold Hans Reiser on, but also felt that it was going to be a difficult trial and a long one with great expense to the taxpayers. So Hans Reiser was offered a plea bargain. The deal was that he would confess to killing Nina, tell them how he did it and show where he hid the body, so her loved ones could get closure. In return he would get three years with credit for time served while awaiting trial. He turned down the plea and a jury found him guilty and he was sentenced to 25 years to life. His attorney’s went around saying essentially that they were not allowed to introduce proper evidence that Nina Reiser was a dirty slut and that their client was just railroaded because he was such a thoroughly unlikable dickhead.
A lot of people in the open source community felt that Hans Reiser got a really raw deal. Sean Sturgeon swears he murdered eight or nine people and the police do not even arrest him, because there are no bodies. Hans Reiser swears he did not murder one person and is convicted, even though there is no body. Seems wrong.
Only this week, Hans Reiser made a new deal with Judge Larry Goodman to change his sentence to 15 years to life. Then he lead investigators to where he had deeply buried his wife’s body and gave a detailed account of how he punched her and then cut off the blood flow to her brain until she was dead. The only embarrassment he shows in his sworn testimony is that he felt he used a somewhat amateurish chokehold to kill her and that his old martial arts instructors might be disappointed in his murder technique. Doh!
“This is the typical behavior of a socialist, atheistic Open Source developer. When one has a lack of respect for intellectual property and God, then murder is sure to follow.”
–TurkBack, Wired
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!
It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.
I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?
Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.
It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to more vanilla smutsters, Los Angeles has seen tattooed hotties doing BDSM once or twice before. In point of fact, the club is essentially a tent erected by where the Coconut Teazer nightclub used to stand. So that very location has probably been host to more than its share of tattooed hotties with fetish gear over the years. The most ground-breaking aspect was probably that it is unusual for a movie to not screen at its own premiere.
Anyway, both the MPAA, which rates movies, and a variety of watchdog groups have objected to Captivity’s presentation well before they started planning a premiere. After Dark Films pulled thirty of their billboards from Los Angeles and more than fourteen hundred taxi cab adverts, the creative for which featured the slogan “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.” over very beautiful stylized photos of a very small portion of a scene involving a woman. I can’t emphasize enough how great the color scheme of those advertisements was. Meanwhile, the MPAA jerked the movie company around on when the film was even going to be rated. After Dark Films co-founder Courtney Solomon claims the MPAA rigmarole with Captivity is just about the MPAA maintaining their position of power. “They needed a whipping boy. They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.” The upshot of this was that a schedule May 18 release date became a July 13 release date. While releasing a horror flick on Friday the 13th is always nifty, any organization which can keep audiences away from a product is scary. And not scary in an entertaining way, scary in a bad way.
A quick history lesson: The Motion Picture Association of America was founded in 1922 as a trade association. Although the initial industry concerns it dealt with had more to do with copyright and contract standardization, over the years, it has become almost synonymous with the ratings system it devised. Many industries choose to police themselves, partly out of decency, and partly out of a desire to take care of it internally before outsiders do it for them. So the MPAA ratings board determines whether a movie will receive wide release as a PG flick or the financial death knell of an NC-17. Representatives of the six major studios sit on the board. These studios includes Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers.
Now, the opening weekend gross for Captivity was only a bit over a million bucks, which is pretty terrible for a major studio release and brought the movie in at a ranking of #12 for domestic releases that weekend. In all fairness, the flicks Captivity was beaten out by were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Ratatouille, Live Free or Die Hard, License to Wed, 1408, Evan Almighty, Knocked Up, Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Had the movie been able to open as planned, if the MPAA had not hung them up, then it might have been able to do better against the movies opening that weekend. Although a $1.4 mill opening is lackluster for any theatrical release, especially a heavily advertised one, had Captivity opened May 18 with the same total, it would have ranked #8. Then again, maybe it would have gotten its ass kicked by Shrek and Spider-Man, just like everybody else.
Part of the difficulty I have parsing out my feelings on the brouhaha is that it is difficult to figure out whether an After Dark Films release counts as a major motion picture or a plucky little guy trying to make it. Captivity is “co-released” by Lionsgate, but Lionsgate leaves all the responsibility for potentially problematic promo on After Dark’s doorstep. I’m not sure what “co-releasing” means exactly, but Lionsgate has a market capitalization of one point three five billion dollars and an estimated four hundred full time employees. Which I would not categorize as small or independent. I think it is important to note that the distro on a partner-produced movie like Captivity is a microscopic portion of the business of a behemoth like Lionsgate, which is responsible for very enjoyable and successful projects such as the Academy-award-nominated The Cooler and innovative DVD packaging and distribution for projects ranging from cutting edge fare like Weeds to cult classics like King of New York. Then again, if you inflicted the Care Bears movie on your kids, that is partly Lionsgate’s responsibility too.
According to the New York Times, Courtney Solomon, who put himself on the map by optioning Dungeons & Dragons and parlaying that into a much-lambasted directorial turn, “persuaded the director of Captivity, Roland Joffé, the much-honored filmmaker behind The Mission and The Killing Fields, to undertake reshoots. These added explicit torture, including a so-called “milkshake” scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it.” Both to the New York Times and in other media outlet, Solomon chortles about what a freakshow his premiere is going to be and how upset he hopes women’s groups get about his movie. The National Organization for Women said, on the record, that they were not going to protest to give him press.
So, having delved into the issues involved, here is my summary take on it. First, if After Dark Films is looking for a modern audience for their movies, it is a bit antiquated to act like BDSM and tattoos are outrageous fringe culture. I’m sick of this sort of marginalizing nonsense from people who would like to make a dollar off of my scene. Secondly, because of the major studio makeup of the MPAA, I feel it can’t really be objective. I like having ratings on things as a viewing guide, but I dislike the way the ratings system leads to unwarranted limitations on distribution and I particularly dislike the way the current rating system encourages violence against women in place of human sexuality. It will be a chilly day in Hellywood before I deliberately view torture porn like Captivity, but I don’t think a project like that should have its success determined by whether or not its producers can convince a half dozen really biased businesspeople that violence against women is appropriate viewing for teens. Thirdly, although I kind of liked the Captivity billboards, I was personally revolted by the Saw signage at the San Diego Comic Con and I think movie producers, and everyone really, should pay attention to what they put in an advertisement people will not be able to avoid. I do not want strangers telling me what I can see in my media. I deeply believe that that becomes a slippery slope to total destruction of the free speech rights granted to all Americans by the First Amendment, but I also do not want strangers forcing me, or forcing children, to see things they do not wish to see or should not see. This means that adverts, in public places, for potentially upsetting products, should be honest about what the products are, without ramming the product down the throats of the unwilling.
I admit that, although I loved Elisha Cuthbert’s performance and character in the surprisingly awesome The Girl Next Door, I loathed her Kim Bauer character she played on 24. I thought about kicking off this article with a joke about how I thought Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer should have just let her be kept captive and tortured. Heck, that was probably the inspiration for Captivity. For me to want to watch that, however, it would really have to be one of the dungeons on Fucking Machines, where the action is consensual and female pleasure might actually be involved too.
Editor Thomas S. Roche writes, “As I’ve mentioned in previous memoirs, my unholy allegiance in the Tripartite Pact of genre fiction, erotica and death rock made, in 1992, for an instant monsterfuck between the salacious vamps of Blue Blood and my overwrought brain. Back then, Blue Blood was a sumptuous, slick print zine featuring dead sexy ghoul girls dry humping each other and their tattooed fuck boys with all the abandon of a European Ferret after three pots of French Roast, not to mention erotic science fiction, sanguine but not sanguinary vampire porn, and, yes, monsterfucking, plus opinionated reviews of everything from punk shows to hardcore porn to the new Thunder Five .45 Long Colt revolver, which got extra points because you could load it with .410 shotgun shells. This, surely, was the midnight Tom Waits-Skinny Puppy wonderland come to life, with fucking.
It’s been a lot of years, now, but Blue Blood is still going strong, with a huge website collecting the counterculture erotica from all of Amelia G and Forrest Black’s web sites, including Barely Evil, Rubber Dollies, and Gothic Sluts. What’s more, Blue Blood now offers an extensive array of message boards, turning it into a true online community.
Amelia recently lured me to a dark alley to discuss the counterculture and get cranky.”
Interview with yours truly and free gallery shot by me and Forrest Black at Eros Zine! Blue Blood hotties featured in the sexy spread include, in alphabetical order, Batty, Chaotika, Dahlia Dark, Dana Dark, Dana Dearmond, Darenzia, Justine Joli, Kellie, Lydia Lashes, Miss Trixie, Nixon, Sara X, Scar 13, Spyder, Superna, Tankboy, Vima, and Voltaire. Please check it all out. Thanks so much for the support, Eros Zine and Thomas!
