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 the morning thing that was not happening for me. I usually start work at noon.

Speaking of the location for the event, I had not realized that the West Hollywood Book Fair is held outdoors. The outdoors features sunshine on days like this. More on the sun in a moment.

So the first panel I went to was Horror in Short Bursts: Crafting Stories for the Horror Anthology. It was moderated by Del Howison who runs a beautifully-appointed horror store called Dark Delicacies which has hosted signings for many friends of mine. Dark Delicacies sells primarily collectible books and spooky housewares. The other name on the panel I was familiar with was Jeff Gelb. Jeff is best known for editing the Hot Blood series of erotic horror short stories. I just checked Amazon and apparently he is up to a whopping thirteen volumes in the series. I guess I’ve missed around ten volumes, but props to Jeff for having edited material like this as far back as the late 80’s.

I have successfully sold 100% of the short horror fiction I’ve written over the years, so I wasn’t expecting to learn a ton from the Horror in Short Bursts panel, but I thought it would be enjoyable. Unfortunately, the panelists insisted on pontificating on the subject of the internet, which is apparently something they know less-than-nothing about. A panelist named Lisa Morton started going off on how she thinks it is somehow telling that stories from Gothic.net have been stolen and stories on another webzine she is familiar with have not. Now, Blue Blood has hosted Gothic.net for many many years, so I am intimately familiar with Gothic.net’s traffic statistics. As an internet professional, I normally would have a good ballpark guess on the number of visitors to any site, but in the case of the site Lisa mentioned, I actually know precisely that they only get around 700 visitors a month. I know this because this site copy/pasted the HTML from Gothic.net to their own site and accidentally hotlinked one of the graphics. As a result, I can see precisely how many times a visitor hits one of their pages. I do not know what Lisa thought she was implying about Gothic.net’s stories getting stolen, but I’ve spent a lot of legal time making sure that every single instance of content theft from Gothic.net got shut down. I even gave free legal lessons to a number of horror writers so that they would know how to better protect their own work. In point of fact, the reason that Gothic.net fiction gets jacked more often is simply that Gothic.net receives about as many visits in an hour as this other webzine gets in a month. A certain percentage of people will steal, so more readers equals more theft. If a writer wants their work to actually be read, I can certainly tell them which site will give them more exposure. The WGA writers’ strike is all about writers looking to share in web revenue, so I was truly shocked to see writers and editors presenting like the internet should not have writing on it or something.

I was excited, however, when the amzingly multitalented author and editor Thomas S. Roche popped in to the horror panel. Among many other things, Thomas edits Eros Zine and previously worked on the web arm of Good Vibrations, so he is web savvy. I always like seeing Thomas and this made running into him even better. I had realized he was going to be at the Fair when I saw him in the program guide. I had posted a thing online the day before asking who I know in Los Angeles who likes books. Thomas saw me post it, but he told me at the Fair that he’d assumed that I had some old books to give away, rather than that I was looking for who might like to hit the Fair with me.

So, anyway, Thomas S. Roche, Forrest Black, and I wander around the exhibit booths and start working on our sunburns. We stop by the Dark Delicacies booth where Del and Jeff are hanging out. We all say hello and then Thomas chats briefly with Jeff who wants to get a story from Thomas for his next anthology. While we are waiting for Thomas, I am thrilled when Gary Phillips ambles by. I admit I gushed a little when I told Gary how much I really love his work and he can have his publishers send over press releases and I will give him coverage and did I mention I really love his books. At which point, Jeff Gelb interrupts me telling Gary Phillips how awesome I think Gary is and claims that I just told Jeff the exact same thing. Gary’s face falls and I’m left totally speechless that Jeff would think it was funny to tell a straight up lie that takes a heartfelt compliment away from someone else. Gary Phillips also has a really quality author web site and Jeff may or may not have registered his name as a domain.

At this point, the sun is getting kinda brutal and Forrest, Thomas, and I decide to head over to the Queer, Hot, and Avant Garde Pavilion. We pass by the Daedalus booth where BDSM educator and writer Midori has a dark hidden little space in one corner where Fair visitors can get out of the sun and whisper a fantasy they have. Midori then writes down the fantasy and posts it on a fantasy wall. Someone, who may have been me, asks if the secret to her innovative setup is really just getting out of the sun. But Midori is – unlike me, unlike Forrest, and unlike Thomas – prepared for the event; Midori has sunscreen. Not only that, but Midori is a merciful and generous angel who shares her sunscreen with the less prepared. Thomas says he thinks it is too late to save him, but I still manage to shoot off a funny snapshot of him with Midori’s sunscreen all over his head.

I am happy that we catch the end of the Literary Foremothers: A Lesbian Tradition panel. The very talented Myrium Gurba is on this panel and talks about the conflicts between presenting and celebrating both ethnic background and sexuality. I have never met Myrium in person before, but she wrote up my sites Gothic Suts and Barely Evil for the late lamented On Our Backs magazine, so we sort of know each other and I’d been wanting to meet up in person. Myrium is also smokin’ hot.

It is nice to stay semi out of the sun as the panel Thomas is on is in the same Pavilion. He is speaking on Fictional Sex – The Good, The Bad, and the Never to be Done Again which is moderated by Christine Louise Berry and also features Thomas S. Roche, Jenoyne Adams, Midori, and Rob Roberge. Apparently there is some kind of yearly award thing for the worst sex scene in a “mainstream” novel. So the panel is mostly this group of talented writers reading reading really awful anti-erotic passages by less talented authors. Midori actually acts most of them out, whether or not she is the one reading. It is immensely entertaining, although I can’t help feeling that I would have liked to hear them all just reading their own quality work.

To this end, Forrest and I finish the day at the performance tent of WordPlay: A New Spin on Storytelling. I don’t always like spoken word. I’m a bit inhibited about reading myself and I think sometimes words just seem different when read versus heard. WordPlay is really fabulous spoken word though. The authors featured are hip and funny and fun and all seem very skilled in the reading in public department. Taylor Negron’s tale of catching a burglar was particularly entertaining and insightful and hopeful about the world. When I look up WordPlay, it appears that they do regular shows, so it makes sense that their readers have really honed their performances.

I go home happy and tuckered out and only a little bit sunburned. Hurray for books in West Hollywood.

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 doing on a profoundly spiritual level. My Mother was a model and an artist and is one of the most beautiful loving people the world could ever know. So, I kind of grew up with radicals, revolutionaries, and rock stars. We were very close friends with the Grateful Dead and one of my earliest memories was going to the Oakland Cow Palace with several busses chartered by the Hells Angels to go see the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I went to kindergarten with a Free Sonny Barger shirt on.

Growing up surrounded by all that clearly instilled a certain libertine perspective and appreciation for counterculture philosophy, art, and politics that is so deeply ingrained in me, I can’t imagine who I would be without it. Blue Blood was never really a career choice for me, it’s deeper than that. So, some of the trends in adult industry to use some of the labels and terminology of current counterculture in their bid for a certain cool credibility or whatever can occasionally get under my skin, but I am aware that it’s not something that needs to be taken too seriously.

Eros Zine: BB’s tagline is “the trade mag of cool,” and you’re known for having a lot of fans and supporters in the music industry, especially where you might most expect ‘em — goth, metal, industrial, etc. Back in the print days, the most radical thing about BB was that it totally blended the cultures of rock ‘n’ roll, horror/sci-fi/fantasy/noir, BDSM, and porn. It was kind of a great big orgy of all the things you and your friends were into. Now that BB’s long since made the move (like just about everyone else) onto the web, how much is that still true? Are you able to incorporate into BB every part of entertainment and culture that you dig, or are there ways in which it’s harder to make that connection now that BB and its associated properties are online?

Forrest Black: Some of the original objective with Blue Blood was to celebrate all the things that were good and beautiful and enjoyable and meaningful from within the context of a counterculture lifestyle. The various scenes we were involved in, or had visibility to, and in many cases grew up with, were full of interesting eclectic creative people, none of whom were textbook examples of one narrow cultural buzzword or another. But there was a certain commonality of experience and perspective, and we felt like we understood it well enough to create a publication that seemed to color outside the lines but made perfect sense to the right kind of people and quickly became a powerful tastemaker across the board.

Casting that wide a net, collecting up the coolest gems from the worlds of music, literature, street fashion, gaming, art, and pop culture, with an eye to expressing what was good and sharing what was quality with our audience has always been an immense undertaking. In some ways the internet has helped and in some ways it’s been a bit of a challenge. I love being able to run as many pictures as I like from a great photo shoot, no longer being limited by page count and format constraints. I can even post video to compliment the layout as well. But, on the entertainment writing side, it’s possible to become so micro-niche specific these days that it becomes very difficult to know sort of what level to stay at. For example, what once was an entertaining little 150 word bit on a certain industrial fetish esthetic now has seven to ten active blogs and communities dedicated to just that.

To deal with transitioning to the sort of unlimited depth of the internet format, Blue Blood has kind of gone two directions online. On the one hand, like you mentioned, we have a lot of sites, each of which has it’s own more specific focus. While on the other hand, the central sites, like BlueBlood.net are in many ways more focused on sharing the essential unifying ideas of our counterculture as well as building a community of mature diversely opinionated free thinkers.

Eros Zine: How did you get involved with Blue Blood the print magazine? How early in the life of the mag was it? Were you involved with its predecessor BLT? . . .

You all will just have to pop over to Eros Zine to read the whole thing. It is a really extensive and interesting interview. It takes a talent like Thomas Roche’s to get Forrest Black really talking, but he has a lot of interesting things to say. There is also a photo gallery of some of Forrest Black’s and my photography. Be sure to click on the header graphic when you get to Eros Zine, in order to see the whole thing. Blue Blood hotties featured in the sexy spread include, in alphabetical order, Dana DeArmond, Darenzia, Eva Klench, Jax, Justine Joli, Kellie LaPlegua, Michelle Aston, Miso, Miss Conduct, Nikki Vega, Roxy Contin, Sara X, Scar 13, Stephanie Slaughter, Sun Karma, Superna, Verotika, Vima, and Voltaire. Please check it all out. Thanks so much for the support, Eros Zine and Thomas!

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 overculture chews up subculture.

I’ve been debating with myself whether or not to mention what got edited out of the most recent interview Eros Zine did with yours truly. I appreciate what Eros Zine does for a variety of scenes and I adore EZ’s editor Thomas Roche who did the interview. And I very much appreciate the support (and fun times!) both have given to both me and Blue Blood over the years. I’ve decided to mention part of what was expurgated because I feel like this one small piece was important. Before I do, however, I want to make it very clear that publications such as Rolling Stone and the LA Weekly, with presumably larger legal budgets, have also cut pieces about the world of supposed altporn apparently due to legal concerns. So it is not unusual that Eros Zine’s legal department insisted on cutting a number of comments. (I promised Thomas I would be clear that it was legal and not editorial who required the cuts.) Journalists always want to know my opinion about adult video and the so-called altporn sites I’m supposed to consider competitive. But apparently what I have to say is just too dangerous to actually print.

Assuming that Eros Zine’s lawyers are essentially sensible, I just want to post for posterity the portion which was cut which contained shoutouts to people who deserve some credit. The rest can remain on the cutting room floor for now.

Some of the directors who might object to the current shameless pretension that punk art porn was just invented are Gregory Dark, David Aaron Clark, Nick Zedd, Justice Howard, Michael Ninn, Antonio Passolini, Stephen Sayadian, Richard Kern, and I’m really just scratching the surface with that list. (VCA and Vivid will be trying to get them all under exclusive contract by this time tomorrow. If they want to thank me for the suggestions, they can send checks payable to Blue Blood at 8033 Sunset Blvd #4500, West Hollywood, CA 90046. Or show me some quality product. Screeners are accepted at that address as well. My mind is open and I’m still a journalist.)

I worried about being potentially helpful to outsider corporations by giving shoutouts to people who deserve them, but I decided that I wanted to take the high road because I think it makes one a better person to give credit where it is due. Unfortunately, the legal folks worried about my commentary on my concerns about said corporations using my shoutouts as free consulting.

The biggest challenge of having sort of imperialist types come into a community is, not just to keep them from pushing out the native peoples, but also to keep the native peoples from simply becoming assimilated by the invaders. I’m certainly not immune, although I guess I’ve got more of a rebel/revolutionary mentality than many. I don’t think anyone is immune. (I just came from visiting a Native American art history museum, so please forgive the analogies.) I’m not personally what anyone would consider left wing and I definitely don’t believe cashing a check from a large corporation is intrinsically bad.

Full disclosure: Hustler owns VCA. I’ve not only worked for Hustler, but I’ve stated in public and in writing on numerous occasions that I felt they were the best of the big adult publishing houses, all of which I have done projects for. Vivid does not, to the best of my knowledge, do magazines, so I’ve never worked with them, but there are plenty of photos floating around the net featuring yours truly drinking and eating with with people who work at both Hustler and Vivid. I really like some of those people and think they are good folks.

I’m not sure precisely where one ought to draw the line, but I definitely think it should be drawn before invaders get to assume control of our opportunities, re-write history, and take away our language. There is nothing wrong with doing a lucrative gig for a large corporation. So much the better if the gig is something fun and interesting. But there really ought to be some wiggle room between accepting some money and accepting total annihilation of one’s self-actualization, culture, and ideals. I guess I’m just an optimist.

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!

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 fiction convention, partly because my pal (and Blue Blood writer) Thomas S. Roche from Eros Zine was in town to go, and partly because I feel like I could really explore West Coast fandom much more.

So the multifarious nature of my interests leaves me feeling always left out and off-track. I think this is kind of a normal way for people like me to feel. If you are not a narrow person, pretty basic exploration of the world around you quickly becomes crushingly too much.

Which brings me to my point. It is difficult for me, as an editor, to determine how to best serve you all on BlueBlood.net. With the hundreds of thousands of you who visit this site every month, I feel like I ought to have more to say. I feel like I ought to be publishing a whole lot of like-minded authors again too.

Not that I don’t have a lot to express. But I’ve always written and edited for an audience in the past. Even with the very first issue of Blue Blood in print, when I wasn’t sure how many people with much in common with me were out there, I was still selecting what to share with the audience based on who I hoped was out there. Even, when I was in college, and founded a sex-positive feminist adventure magazine, I knew the audience was going to include some pissed-off people, but I kept them in mind when editing the publication.

So, anyway, I feel a little lost in the cacaphony of the web. If you are like me and have moved through many subcultures and areas of interest in your quest for self-actualization, then I bet you feel a little drowned as well. If you’ve got subjects you’d like to see covered more on BlueBlood.net, I’d love for you to post suggestions here or send me a message or submit your own articles on what you feel would be of interest to everyone here.

At the end of the day, for better or worse, I still think of myself first and foremost as a writer. Sometimes, between spending so much time online and living in glittering bookless Hollywood, I forget. But I always come back to it. So expect to see a lot more of my words in the near future. And, if you feel like the subject matter is too eclectic and you need to get your mind opened up a bit more, you can always head on over to BlueBlood.com for high quality erotic art photography and other sexy stuff.