Posts tagged: thomas s roche

The West Hollywood Book Fair has received a California Park and Recreation Society Award of Excellence for three years in a row now. The Fair deserves it for throwing such a successful literary event year-after-year in the somewhat arid soil of Los Angeles.

The West Hollywood Book Fair features panels, workshops, performances, and exhibitor booths including local bookstores, small presses, literary non-profits, literary journals and arts organizations. My favorite part of the Fair was getting to see authors I know speak and discover authors I didn’t know.

The panel discussions and such were sectioned off into various niche pavilions. The pavilions of most interest to me were the Mystery, Crime & Suspense Pavilion, the Comics/Sci Fi/Horror Pavilion, and the delightfully-named Queer, Hot, and Avant Garde Pavilion. I missed the LA Noir: Crime Fiction Close to Home panel I wanted to go to in the Mystery, Crime & Suspense Pavilion. I was mostly interested because the brilliant Gary Phillips was scheduled to be speaking. I adore his gritty crime novels with characters so vibrant and real and frequently badass you want them to succeed, even as you note the ways they may destroy themselves. He co-edited a pretty cool cocaine anthology too. I’d like to give some really great reason why I missed this particular panel, like maybe traffic was so congested from the hugeness of the event that it took a while to find parking. But, let’s face it, a reading even in Los Angeles, even an awfully big one, is going to lay on tons of free parking and the location for this event is a really easy location to drive to. It was just the whole getting up that early in …

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Eros Zine editor Thomas S. Roche writes:

“Forrest Black is best known as the Creative Director of Blue Blood, a network of sites that showcases gorgeous chicks in explicit gothic, punk, well-armed and counterculture erotica. More recently, Blue Blood has launched BlueBlood.net, a source for community where freaks of many stripes can post on everything from politics to music to sex to travel.

Born into a hippie household in Northern California, he’s lived since in the DC area and Atlanta, and now lives and works in Hollyweird, where he hits the cool parties and meets some of the world’s freakiest and hottest chicks to pose for him and Amelia G. We caught up with Forrest at the recent West Hollywood Book Fair for a chat about the Hells Angels and well-armed women.”

The interview kicks off with:

Eros Zine: OK, let’s go way back to the beginning: Where did you grow up — and how do you think it influenced your choice of career, and your attitude toward the industry?

Forrest Black: I was born in Northern California, in a room full of candles, incense, and revolutionaries. It was in a beautiful home with thirteen black cats and the ghost of the previous owner. The property had previously been a boys camp which had been converted by my parents into the sort of hub of my Father’s business. He was the leader and sort of project manager of what was later described as one of the largest drug smuggling operations of the time. They had planes and trucks crossing borders North, West, East and South. Among many other things, he was a major supplier of Ergot to the famous LSD houses of psychedelic era San Francisco, and he believed in what he was …

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I see it as, not only a given, but maybe even a goal that things I enjoy in a fringe environment will be picked up by the larger society. The problems come when the overculture, in the process of co-opting something cool, tries to destroy the naturally existing subculture and the people most dedicated to that culture, in order to replace it all with something more easily managed and controlled. The problems come when the marketing shifts from spin to bald-faced lies. The problems come when no one appreciates art without a backstory and the market becomes used to the perfection of fake backstory. It seems like modern press is often more comfortable presenting a tidy and wholly false PR tall tale than presenting something real and true. Part of the reason for this is that modern audiences are often more comfortable reading tidy and wholly false PR tall tales. Real life tends to be more complicated and harder to get your head around.

I could like Avril Lavigne if she were presented as essentially a cute blonde actress in a larger movie. Instead, her managers insult everyone’s intelligence by getting a stylist to put Avril in a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt and having her publicist tell the world the actress is inspired by David Bowie (but neglecting to tell the girl playing the precocious punk songstress role that Bowie does not rhyme with Maui.) Just try and find music magazine press presenting anything remotely true about the teamwork creation of Avril Lavigne. I don’t know if the magazines fear lack of access to stars their audiences want to read about or if they fear legal reprisals or if it is all just some sort of gentlemen’s agreement, but certain specific pieces of truth have more trouble getting out there as …

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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 …

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So, I’ve told my web pals and reminded those with us since the print days about why I like eclectic content.

But there is a dark side to this approach when the internet is thrown into the mix and it knocks me totally off-kilter on what sorts of information to select to share with you all. The net is overwhelming.

There are so many people. So many of them probably have cool and interesting and good aspects to them. But there are only so many hours in the day. Once you have done your work, your art, and your laundry, how much time can you truly devote to getting to know other people in a meaningful and genuine way?

There are so many sites. The smallest micro-niche of an interest probably has a site devoted to it. Want a site with photos of women who are both goth punk-looking and wearing rubber? Got one.

So, if you have broad interests and a true curiosity about the world around you, the options quickly prove boggling and paralyzing. I used to feel like it was possible for me to be aware of, and have an opinion on, every goth-industrial music act around. But, now that there are bands across the globe with MP3s on MySpace and thousands of other sites, I don’t feel like I could even sift through just that one genre.

Over the course of the past week, I got tons of cool and creatively-satisfying work done and went out on the town and had some fun as well. I also meant to go to a big fashion convention with Forrest Black and Blue Blood hottie junk princess this past weekend, but I just kinda spaced on it. The weekend before, I wanted to go to a big science …

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