(Click image at the end of the article to view video)

Funny or Die is the first site in a network which hopes to leverage the celebrity of people famous in old media into celebrity in new media. Your hosts at Funny or Die are apparently Will Ferrell, Judd Apatow, Adam McKay, and Chris Henchy. I came across the site today because I heard that Paris Hilton had made a campaign ad about John McCain because John McCain had made a campaign ad about her and Barack Obama. Searching on YouTube, I mostly only found about a lot of new pages promising something to do with Paris Hilton and porn. I never searched for Paris Hilton before, so maybe there are a couple hundred new pornographic entries about her on YouTube every day. It wasn’t very helpful anyway, so I went over to Live.com search and found what I was looking for on on the Funny or Die site.

I don’t live in America, so I don’t have an opinion on the upcoming election, but I still think this video is funny. I guess the John McCain campaign made an ad where they said Barack Obama is a celebrity, like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton, but does that mean he is ready to lead. Paris Hilton is one of the many heirs to the Hilton hotels fortune and a number of her family members donated to the McCain campaign. So her whole family was angry about her being in the ad and she made a response video for the Funny or Die web site.

The moral of the story is that one should always try to avoid insulting good-looking bitchy club kids with trust funds. The least of them will make it their mission in life to get retribution for imagined slights. For an actual slight, the most successful of them will make a comedy video for a celebrity-driven web site and more than four million people will see their video dis.

So why would a video of a mildly overweight toddler dancing badly receive 518,448 views on YouTube? It immediately comes to mind why a toddler dancing very well might be popular. It immediately comes to mind why a spectacularly cute toddler dancing badly might be popular. I wish this were not the case, but it also immediately comes to mind why a grotesquely overweight toddler dancing badly would make for a popular YouTube video. No, this toddler is not related to any star of stage or screen either.

The answer is that the video is controversial. The child’s mother Stephanie Lenz videotaped her kid attempting to dance to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” which was playing on a nearby boombox. Universal Music Group, which owns the copyright for that portion of Prince’s catalog asked YouTube to take the video down because “Let’s Go Crazy” could clearly be heard on it and they felt this infringed on their copyright. YouTube took the video down and that would have been the end of it, except the EFF took on the mom’s case

So Stephanie Lenz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued Universal for wrongly asking that the video be taken down. Today, Ars Technica, a site about the “art of technology”, posted the latest in a whole series of interesting articles on the case and its implications for all video makers. The short version of what went down is that Universal defended by claiming the EFF was using the court system to bully them out of their rights and using meritless lawsuits to further their own agenda. This is ironic for so many reasons, I don’t even know how to start to enumerate them, so I won’t. The way everything shook out, judges determined that, yes, the EFF can bring a suit like this; yes, the video could be reposted to YouTube; yes, Universal acted in good faith when asking that the video be removed; and, yes, it is a murky area of the law where fair use is concerned.

Comments on the YouTube dancing toddler repost seem to illustrate that many YouTube users have no idea who Prince or the Artist Formerly Known As Prince are. They also indicate that Universal acted with Prince’s approval and support. Given that, years ago, Prince changed his name to a pretty much incomprehensible symbol and wrote slave on his face because he hated his label so much, it is also ironic if it is true that the music label here was acting with his full agreement.

But Prince has not done so well without a music label. His allegedly official 3112 web site has been dark since June 2007. Prince was a huge artist who believed the web would take power away from the evil record companies and put it back in the hands of the artists where it belongs. Truthfully, the changing cultural landscape has moved much power from the hands of powerful media conglomerate corporations like Viacomm and Universal and transferred it to the hands of newer powerful media conglomerate corporations like Google and Live Nation. A lot of people hate music labels and the music industry, partly because of the efforts of musicians like Prince to expose their wicked ways, but most do not seem to notice that they are exchanging one master for another one with a different business model. Although we have certainly not traded slavery for freedom, it could still be a better and more enjoyable new business model for all concerned. Whether this is the dawning of an awesome new renaissance in human existence or a new dark ages remains to be seen.

As a society, we are all struggling with how to handle the explosion of amateur media and how to deal with what this all means for everything from copyright to the very existence of creative professionals. As a media creator who wants to do the right thing, I am looking forward to legal clarifications on what constitutes fair use. Fair use is very clearly defined in written works and I know it inside-out there, but, when it comes to something like digitally distributed video, the answers are harder to come by. If there is a song playing in the background at a nightclub where Forrest Black and I are shooting still photography and someone like say Michelle Aston videotapes it, do we have to dub something else over the music or is the music incidental, serendipitous, and no replacement for the original and thus just fine? Obviously, I am not asking idly. I have legal counsel out the wazoo and I don’t know the answer on this sort of thing. I know there are times when people repurpose my photographs into tribute videos and I’m not sure they have the right to do so, but I don’t ask them to stop either. I do wish they would all be good about giving credit to their sources though. If there are people on YouTube who had never heard of Prince, a popular toddler video could have made at least a few dozen of Stephanie Lentz’s friends more familiar with the Artist. I’m not sure of the legalities on some of this because nobody knows the answers on those laws until more precedents have been set. I’m honestly a little fuzzy on what I feel would be right and what would be wrong on some of these issues.

I hope that, however it shakes out, our culture is a place where creativity and artistic pursuits are more encouraged and not less. I can’t figure out if the EFF or Stephanie Lentz got any money out of this long lawsuit or just the right to repost the video of toddler Holden dancing. I’m not really a toddler person, so I hope some of you find him adorable and her creative contribution to society has a positive impact.

Sometimes the internet can be very isolating. We sit at home and, in a way, we feel connected to so many people. But not very connected. It is overwhelming and difficult to deeply connect with anyone. Sometimes this causes us to to put in-person human interaction up on a pedestal and forget what it is really like.

Now, admittedly, I went to school in Belgium for a while and none of my classmates were like the angriest Belgian gamer ever, as depicted in this video. Athene says he is the best paladin in the world. I always thought paladins were supposed to rescue virgins and helpless townspeople and such, always on the side of good, but I’m not a big World of Warcraft gamer. Maybe paladins are different in WOW. Athene appears to be sponsored by WOW gold farmers, so he must be doing something right.

Athene is equal opportunity and spices up this gaming clip with a cute shirtless guy on one side and a girl with lots of very lovely cleavage on the other. He swears really a lot. I mean, I looooooooooooove to cuss and Athene cusses way more than I do. I find the non-stop English swearing with a Belgian accent charming. Your mileage may vary.

Most importantly, Athene and friends let you experience via video what it would be like to have your unsavory pals playing video games in the living room. I still sometimes miss living in a punk rock (or other) group house where there is always a party, but I’m not missing it right now. Because I watched this video.

The other day I posted a Trash Factory at Devil’s Point fashion show photo gallery and my Fashion Show in the Champagne Room write-up of the evening. Now I’d like to share a video of the night shot by a gent named Sean Strauss and pointed out to me by the very cool Portland photographer Circle 23.

The vid features interviews with designer Rachel Face and model London Lunoux. You will see in the interview with Rachel that she definitely uses the word stripper bunches when talking about this project. (Etiquette note to the boys in the audience: You are still safer in cities which are not Portland, if you go with the word dancer, rather than stripper.) You can spot me shooting the aforementioned photo gallery in the video and see Forrest Black’s back over by our video camera. And, of course, you can see some of the stripping dance routines, as the models show off the clothes.

Yes, I know that Rachel Face is called Rachael Reckless in the video and you all can ask Voltaire yourself why she is called another name. Sometimes strippers will dance under different names at different clubs. Sometimes models will use different names on different sites. Sometimes the punk rock nickname someone is using in 2001 or 2002 might evolve into something else by 2008, as they get new tattoos. This is all normal. Like the bard says, a Briar Rose by any other name will still smell as sweet.

Note to RIAA: I have no idea whether the songs used are licensed and, although Blue Blood did shoot some video that night, this is all Sean Strauss and hosted by YouTube, so all credit goes to him.

The biggest problem with the astroturfing style of marketing is that it makes everyone very skeptical of everything; it makes it very difficult to believe in anything. If a star willingly gets naked on camera, there will be some puritanical types who will think ill of them for it. Yet most people who enjoy being in the spotlight and being immortalized have a hankering to be in the spotlight and be immortalized even when they are, ya know, doing it. I have frequently run into famous people who want me and Forrest Black to shoot artistic nudes of them, but who do not want anyone to see the finished work. As an artist, it is important to me that people actually see what I create, so we have, to date, declined private commissions of this sort. A combination of following the various sex tape scandals, and my own personal conversations with people who wanted to get naked on camera without the social repercussions, has lead me to assume that most sex tapes are released with the knowledge and consent of the parties involved. That way, they can get the erotic attention and the victim sympathy.

The problem with this is that some people actually want their private lives to be, ya know, private. I have come to believe that actor Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy is being invaded with the current sex tape clip making the rounds and, at the request of his manager, I am having the honestly barely PG-rated clip removed from BlueBlood.net.

Late this evening, I received an email from someone named Ray Hughes who said that Verne Troyer was his client and who attached a PDF of what appear to be court documents pertaining to a temporary restraining order or TRO. A TRO is something issued by a judge to stop something potentially damaging from continuing while the court determines whether that thing is actually damaging. I couldn’t find any web references connecting anyone named Ray Hughes to Verne Troyer and I actually couldn’t find anyone named Ray Hughes listed as an attorney in Los Angeles. I could easily have blown it off until Monday and spent the evening watching a canceled science fiction series on DVD with pals, as planned. Instead, I read the court documents, which seem to be from a suit against Kevin Blatt, Sugar DVD, and TMZ and sent the following email back:

Hello Ray,

Although I may have shaken Kevin Blatt’s hand at a party, it could have been his brother’s hand, as I sometimes get the Blatt siblings confused. That’s as close as I’ve gotten to Kevin Blatt, TMZ, or SugarDVD, so I don’t think I could easily be characterized as falling under the category of agents, servants, employees, officers, directors, representatives, attorneys, successors, or assigns of Kevin Blatt, TMZ, or SugarDVD, or those acting in concert with them. The video I have displayed is embed code from YouTube which runs off of the YouTube site. Beats me whether the TRO would apply to my situation or not and 10 o’ clock on a Friday night is not the ideal time to get legal advice.

Nonetheless, acknowledging that I have not had benefit of legal counsel and admitting no wrongdoing and waiving no rights I may have, I will express my initial gut response to your request. I believe that my article on BlueBlood.net was respectful to Verne Troyer. It was certainly intended to be respectful of him and his accomplishments. If Verne Troyer genuinely feels his privacy was invaded, I will cause the references you request to be removed and issue an apology. It is difficult, in today’s virally-oriented marketing environment, to ascertain who truly wishes to keep their sex life private and who deliberately released their naked ass to the public and just pretends concern so no one dings them for being naughty.

I guess it might be possible to figure out contact information to verify via the court on Monday, but, if you could please forward me your response from an email for a recognized law firm before then, my opinion, pre-counsel, is that I can probably accept that as sufficient proof that Verne Troyer is truly concerned about invasion of his privacy. When you email me from an official email address, which I’m assuming you will, can you please advise me whether it is the YouTube video clip embed or the link to TMZ or both which you wish to have removed.

Best, Amelia G
http://www.blueblood.net

Ray Hughes emailed me back a hour later, explained that he was Verne Troyer’s manager (not attorney as I’d assumed) and that he always did business from his Gmail account, but he did CC an email which appeared to be for a Tracy B. Rane at McPherson & Associates, although he indicated that he’d just as soon not involve the attorney. I guess Verne Troyer’s lawyers don’t work on the weekend either. However, the court documents attachment references McPherson & Associates as where to send whiny-ass reasons why it is vital to the public interest to be able to keep naughty Verne Troyer video live on the interwebs. Verne Troyer is listed on the McPherson & Associates web site as a client. I popped over to TMZ to see if they had any mention that they were, ya know, being sued and found the following:

Verne Troyer has filed a $20 million lawsuit, claiming TMZ violated his rights by publishing and airing portions of his sex tape.

In the suit, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in downtown L.A., Troyer claims TMZ violated his privacy rights and infringed on his copyright and trademark by running portions of the tape on TMZ TV and TMZ.com. He also alleges TMZ violated his right of publicity and misappropriated his name and likeness.

Troyer says the tape was stolen and ended up in the hands of Kevin Blatt, the guy who distributed “One Night in Paris.” Blatt is also named as a defendant.

In addition to damages, Troyer wants an injunction prohibiting further dissemination of the video.

Calls to TMZ were not returned.

I know that a lot of people are inclined to flip any papparazzi from TMZ the bird and nobody wants to pick up the phone to give TMZ a comment. Apparently, TMZ won’t even answer a press query from TMZ.

So anyway, the sex tape video clip has been removed and my sincere apologies to Verne Troyer for any distress my post may have contributed to. I want to be clear that I may not be legally required to remove the clip embed and I am definitely not legally required by any law or settlement to apologize for posting the video. I want to apologize because I feel very strongly that someone who wants their privacy should be allowed to have it, unless there is news which is important to the public interest. It is rarely vital to the public interest that we all be able to watch other people have sex. Not that watching other people have sex can’t be perfectly entertaining, when all parties consent.

Today, Blue Blood’s design czar Forrest Black and I rolled over to band manager Jason Fiber’s lovely Hollywood Hills home to do some press on the always-charming and fun Andy LaPlegua. Andy is touring in supporting of the forthcoming Frost EP from Combichrist. So, uhm, naturally, we drank beer and Jason brought up that there was a new sex tape potentially coming out starring Verne Troyer.

I confessed that I already knew this as I’d started my day reading the adult industry trades mags, who were all abuzz with the info that SugarDVD had started the bidding on the Mini-Me sex tape. SugarDVD CEO Jax stated publicly that he would only be into distributing the celebrity sex tape, if it were possible to get proper performer releases from both the actor Verne Troyer and his naked co-star.

I gave my opinion that a Verne Troyer sex tape would be very marketable, but the one I really want to see is where the drug dealer club kid (or whatever he was) allegedly tied up Joe Francis of Girls Gone Wild fame and made him confess his love of receiving anal on video, and then left him in the trunk of a car. Upon reflection, I don’t really want to see a naked Joe Francis being abused, but the karmic justice of it appeals to me.

In the unlikely event that you do not know who Verne Troyer is, he is best known for his role as Mini-Me, the bad guy’s smaller doppelganger protege from Mike Myers’ Austin Powers. He has also appeared in everything from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone to rap videos and Apple commercials. Really Apple commercials tend to be sorta like viral sex vids for marketing anyway.

What would make a Verne Troyer celebrity sex tape so marketable is that he is famous, good-looking, and thirty-two inches tall. Which is a pretty rare combo. Fun facts to know and share: Verne Troyer was prom king in high school and is also an accomplished stunt man, the latter partly because nobody else would be the right build to body double for his stunts.

Warner Bros. subsidiary TMZ released a teaser from the video, pictured above, and it does indeed appear to actually feature Verne Troyer. The mere fact that Warner Bros. owns the gossip and scandal site TMZ really says something about the nature of fame and celebrity today. Apart from anything else, it points out that Warner is more on top of their approach to the online world than most media megacorps. Manager Jason Fiber was president of Cordless Recordings, the digital record label or “e-label” subsidiary of Warner Music Group. Today, Jason, whose background clearly shows he knows something about internet marketing, was joking that he was going to have to add consulting on celeb sex tape strategies to the list of what he did for clients.

I report that Jason was joking, but Verne Troyer’s STARmeter on IMDB is up 90% since last week. So, uhm, yeah, joking. Whether or not anyone ever sees Verne Troyer naked on video, he will definitely appear in this summer’s blockbuster from Mike Myers called The Love Guru.

Yesterday, R. Kelly was acquitted of charges for child pornography which have been pending for nearly six years now. If I believed he were innocent, I would think it was a real travesty to have such horrible accusations hanging over his head for so long. Now, the extremely witty Josh Levin over at Slate and the highly respected Bill Wyman over at Hitsville have both been covering the R. Kelly trial and associated tribulations with exceptional thoroughness and panache. If you want to know way too much about R&B singer and producer R. Kelly and his penchant for underage girls, I definitely recommend the work of both of these writers. I’m going to try to break it down for y’all here though.

First of all, I think the irony police need to be called. This week Max Hardcore was handed a criminal conviction for making videos of adult women dressed youthfully and engaging in consensual extreme sex acts, most likely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which Max Hardcore had full documentation that the women were legally adult and consented to appearing on video and having said video distributed. The same week R. Kelly got excused for making videos of allegedly underage women engaging in arguably consensual extreme acts, definitely including watersports (not the jet-ski kind), videos for which R. Kelly could produce no documentation that the women were not underage or had consented to have their image recorded and shared in this way.

I feel sorry for R. Kelly. I truly do. I suspect he is not competent to handle his own affairs, yet, being rich, he is surrounded by people who apparently regularly take him for as much money as they can carry away. Even the star witness for the prosecution stated that R. Kelly would not continue with making a sex video if she was visibly upset and she admitted to taking advantage of him financially over and over. The testimonies in his recent trial are, in fact, rife with descriptions about how various people in positions of trust did everything from extort payments from him to stealing jewelry and, yes, homemade videos. According to GQ magazine, R. Kelly was sexually abused by an adult male neighbor as a child. Given that R. Kelly’s brother told Vibe that the singer never gave their mother a dime because she refused to divorce his stepfather, I would hazard a guess that the man was probably abused by his stepfather as well. R. Kelly also personally told Vibe that he is functionally illiterate. Members of his entourage further assert that R. Kelly is unable to do basic addition and subtraction. I’m guessing that someone with a bunch of multi-platinum albums could afford a reading and mathematics tutor, so it’s fairly likely that this means R. Kelly is deficient in the brain department. He probably is not mentally on a level above his young sex partners.

This still does not excuse competent adults for leaving their children with a grown man of R. Kelly’s well-documented predilections. He has settled multiple cases with families of allegedly underage girls he allegedly had inappropriate sexual relationships with. He has been caught with videos and pictures of his misdeeds over and over and is apparently not savvy enough to stop creating new evidence against himself. He married his protege Aaliyah when she was fifteen-years-old. This is not someone who is smart enough to cover his tracks. Apparently, her family was sufficiently on-top-of-things to get the marriage annulled and prevent Aaliyah from ever seeing R. Kelly again. Somehow, during the preceding three years it took for R. Kelly to work on Aaliyah’s multiplatinum debut Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number, it never occurred to her family that leaving her alone with a guy who likes young girls was not necessarily the best idea. The name of the album didn’t give anybody pause? Given that he actually tried to marry the girl, I’d view him more as retarded than ill-intentioned. I don’t mean retarded in the sense of schoolyard taunts, but, in the literal sense, R. Kelly may be a musical savant, but, he appears to be extremely developmentally delayed and not at all bright. Multiple sources report that the man even has trouble remembering to bathe himself.

I started off laughing out loud at the coverage of the R. Kelly trial. I mean, dude, if you are going to have an inappropriate and totally illegal sexual relationship with a teenage girl, maybe you shouldn’t, ya know, videotape it. Especially, if you’ve been busted out and/or had to make blackmail payments/legal settlements for this sort of thing in the past. And R. Kelly’s defense team’s arguments seemed so ridiculous when they claimed that it wasn’t R. Kelly on the videotape in question and it didn’t even look like him and, if it did look like him, then that was because of special effects, and, if it was not special effects and it was R. Kelly on the tape, then the girl must be eighteen. As R. Kelly hands the girl in the video money on camera at the beginning of the tape, the defense attorneys even argued that it would be mean to find R. Kelly guilty because that would be tantamount to calling the girl in the vid a whore. Funny stuff.

Now, to be totally frank, I don’t really think it is generally appropriate for a forty-year-old to have an ongoing sexual relationship with a teenager of legal age either. There are, of course, exceptions where people with a huge age difference can have a great relationship, but I’d say that, on average, that’s not ideal. I think the older the people involved are, the less an age difference matters. Is a fourteen-year-old mature enough to know she is participating in an extortion plot against her inappropriately aged lover? Probably depends on the fourteen-year-old, but everything about that is certainly illegal in every respect in the State of Illinois.

Aaliyah’s uncle Barry Hankerson was R. Kelly’s manager for many years. In point of fact, he remained R. Kelly’s manager for many years after Aaliyah’s recording with R. Kelly, marrying him, and subsequently getting that marriage annulled. When R. Kelly and Barry Hankerson parted ways professionally, Barry Hankerson wrote a letter to the record label saying that he felt R. Kelly needed psychiatric help for his compulsive pursuit of young girls. Well, yeah. The guy is obviously psychologically off. But, what I want to know is, when exactly did his manager figure out that R. Kelly had a problem there? How many settlements with the families of teenage girls did it take? How many incidents did he personally witness working closely with the singer/producer? How many years of thinking about it, after his own fifteen-year-old niece Aaliyah married R. Kelly, did it take for it to occur to him that maybe teenage girls should not be left alone with R. Kelly?

Reading about this case, it appears that, over and over again, people with a professional or otherwise fiscal interest in R. Kelly put junior high school-aged girls in his presence, knowing full well what R. Kelly was like. The more I read, the more it looked like a bunch of criminal opportunists basically taking advantage of the mentally handicapped.

Now one could argue that rock and roll has a long history, stretching from Elvis Presley to Tripp Eisen, of musicians dating young girls. But that is one for the philosophers or at least another article. In the here and now, we have decided, as a society, that it is against the law for grown men to have sexual relationships with fourteen-year-old girls. Whether or not they pee on them. So long as that is the rule, I think we also ought to have a law against profiteering friends and family who put young girls in harm’s way by leaving them alone with men like R. Kelly. Adults are supposed to protect their young, not cash in on their suffering.

On the plus side, I learned a new vocabulary word. According to Slate freelancer David Tuller, ephebophilia is the word for guys who do not like actual children but who have a more R. Kelly post-puberty pre-legality taste. So everyone go forth and try to use your new vocab work ephebophilia in a sentence some time this week.

I’d like to take a moment out from my busy schedule of rolling around on the floor laughing at the recent obscenity prosecutions in the United States, in order to comment on them. Veteran adult video performer and producer Max Hardcore was just found guilty of obscenity in Florida. For those who are unaware of his oeuvre, Max Hardcore was the first guy on the extreme-hardcore-with-teens bus. Whether or not you really want to see gaping anal or watersports or puking in a sexual context or even naked chicks who look younger than twenty-two, Max Hardcore certainly deserves both credit and responsibility for bringing such things into the popular culture. Apparently, along with credit for his ground-breaking work in rough sex on camera comes an attempt by the State of Florida to nail him on 20 counts of distributing obscene materials through the mails and internet. Now I have it on good authority that various government agents have been so anxious to bust Max Hardcore over the years that one such over-eager and nervous gent once accidentally discharged a firearm in Max’s house, during a study of paperwork, such that repairs were needed. Now, don’t get me wrong, Blue Blood magazine in print used to get screeners of Max’s movies way before they got as extreme as they supposedly are now. And I couldn’t sit through one then. At the time, I was just like, how did some construction worker manage to parlay an interest in sex into this huge career?

Now Blue Blood art director Forrest Black and I used to enjoy going to all the adult industry trade shows. We attended the adult video shows in Vegas since the pre-Internet times when the adult video show was a little room in the Sands which was part of CES, the Consumer Electronics Show. The very first time I encountered Max Hardcore in person, we shared an elevator at one of those shows and Max told Forrest he liked his fun fur coat. That was about the extent of the interaction and it was still enough for me to be blown away by Max’s charisma. Max Hardcore has that kind of rockstar thing where you stand next to him and he just exudes hotness. He has perfect manners, only you just know he is nasty as all get-out in the bedroom. He has that total Madonna in the living room and whore in the bedroom thing down and he is just very appealing on a basic lizard brain level. Everyone knows a guy where chicks do things with him that they would normally never do. Max Hardcore is one of those guys.

So the State of Florida indicted him on a robust 20 counts of being bad without artistic, literary, or scientific merit and determined that a jury of his peers would have to sit through five of his films back-to-back in a room full of strangers. This sounds like some surreal form of torture out of Brazil (The dystopian science fiction movie by Terry Gilliam, not the country where the unwise film porn movies of HIV-positive tranny hookers.) If “Fist of Fury 4 — Euro Edition” and “Pure Max 19” are not your thing, they are probably really not your thing. If they are your thing, can you imagine having to watch many hours of your specific personal taste in porn, while fully dressed, in a room packed with people you do not know, for hours and hours? Ouch. The defense felt, reasonably I believe, that showing only part of the videos could allow the prosecution to, err, cherry pick only the most appalling scenes and leave out the parts which defense attorney Jeffrey Douglas described as “substantially more light-hearted.” So there was quite a lawyerly tussle over how much of the movies in question to show.

Max Hardcore is no stranger to the legal hot seat, but the bizarre thing here is that he actually got convicted of ten counts and his company got convicted of ten. I’m not sure how it works if a corporation has been naughty, but whatever. One of the freakiest things about this case was that jurors have actually come forward and said that they found against Max because of how the law was explained to them, but they felt he deserved to go free. A jury of his peers felt that the law was unfair and Max was doing no wrong. The State of Florida was actually trying to take the man’s house in California and the jury was having none of it. Full disclosure: I have been a guest at said house and enjoyed Max Hardcore’s hospitality and, yes, that is a photo of me with him at a bar, but, unlike the unfortunate jurors in this case, I have never been forced to watch one of his movies all the way through. I remember when I was a wild girl, but now I am a total prude because I draw the line sexually way before I start vomiting on someone’s cock. This has really messed with my sense of self, but I digress.

Now, of course, Max Hardcore will be appealing the ruling against him. I think he stands a good chance of winning because (a) he always wins this sort of thing, (b) the charges are ridiculous, (c) he just really does not come across as a bad guy, and (d) if even the jurors in Florida were sympathetic to him, the higher up the legal chain he goes, the more likely I think things are to go his way.

A number of adult industry chicken littles (Sky-is-falling ninnies not to be confused with Paul Little aka Max Hardcore aka Max Steiner.) are all aflutter about how this means the end of adult video and adult internet and freedom of speech etc. etc. etc. They are quick to point out that people who live in more liberal parts of the country such as California should be freaking the fuck out because of the Ira Isaacs case starting this month. Round about now, you are probably asking, who is Ira Isaacs? I know I’d never heard of him.

Apparently Ira Isaacs makes bestiality and scat videos. Inside the United States. It seems that nobody ever pointed out to this Ira Isaacs guy that there is a reason there are countries like Holland. According to adult industry publication XBiz, the titles in question in the Ira Isaacs case include “Gang Bang Horse — ‘Pony Sex Game,’” “Mako’s First Time Scat,” “Hollywood Scat Amateurs No. 7,” and “BAE 20.” I’m not even going to ask what BAE stands for, as I previously thought it stood for Best America Erotica, a fine series of book anthologies, edited by Susie Bright, which I have been published in. And I’d like to keep thinking of BAE that way.

Now, while poor Max Hardcore was found guilty for distributing videos of consensual heterosexual human sexuality in Florida, the Ira Isaacs case had to be halted yesterday. Because the Los Angeles Times reported that the judge in the case had a personal website with naughty materials on it: “Alex Kozinski, chief judge of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, granted a 48-hour stay in the obscenity trial of a Hollywood adult filmmaker after the prosecutor requested time to explore “a potential conflict of interest concerning the court having a . . . sexually explicit website with similar material to what is on trial here.” In an interview Tuesday with The Times, Kozinski acknowledged posting sexual content on his website. Among the images on the site were a photo of naked women on all fours painted to look like cows and a video of a half-dressed man cavorting with a sexually aroused farm animal. He defended some of the adult content as “funny” but conceded that other postings were inappropriate. Kozinski, 57, said that he thought the site was for his private storage and that he was not aware the images could be seen by the public, although he also said he had shared some material on the site with friends. After the interview Tuesday evening, he blocked public access to the site. Kozinski is one of the nation’s highest-ranking judges and has been mentioned as a possible candidate for the U.S. Supreme Court. He was named chief judge of the 9th Circuit last year and is considered a judicial conservative on most issues. He was appointed to the federal bench by President Reagan in 1985.”

So, just to recap, a sexy and well-known guy who gets chicks to consensually do crazy stuff on camera has to spend bank on attorneys because of a ruling in Florida that even the jurors do not agree with. An obscure bestiality and scat aficionado in California can’t get a fair trial because the State is having difficulty finding a judge who does not collect bestiality-related porn pics. In California, it is apparently acceptable to post a repository of same to the internet, provided you think the content is “funny” and are not tech-savvy enough to know that people can, ya know, see things which are posted to the web.

You just have to see the humor in all that. To keep from weeping.

So, I think Madonna is pretty awesome in general, but I’m vaguely baffled by her message to YouTube video. In it, she is supposedly vacuuming the set for her 4 Minutes video because apparently other people didn’t take care of it. Then she tells the world of YouTube good job on making tons of videos for her 4 Minutes single. To date, her thanks for making essentially fanfic versions of 4 Minutes video has received 3,175,135 views on YouTube.

The actual official Warner Bros video for Madonna’s 4 Minutes has only received 846,562 views. It opens with a little rap from Timbaland and most of the song is a duet and coordinated dance moves from Madonna and Justin Timberlake. Madonna and Justin Timberlake take off some of each other’s clothes during their choreography and, unlike Janet Jackson, I guarantee Madonna won’t apologize or pretend that her clothing flying off is a wardrobe malfunction.

A search on YouTube for +”4 minutes” +madonna yields 2,860 results, including both the fanfic (or whatever YouTube people call this sort of thing) vids and multiple copies of the official video and various video responses to the go ahead and make videos based on the video video. This sort of viral marketing is all very meta. Will encouraging people to do more of what they were going to do anyway work to Madonna’s benefit? Will it sell more of her music, raise her stock for endorsements, or otherwise make bank?

I don’t know the answer and I’m really interested in hearing what other people think about how this will work as a marketing effort. Do you enjoy fanfic videos? Regardless, you should watch the real official video because it’s fun candy and Madonna and Justin Timberlake dancing is way hotter than most porn.

And, to the desperate, sell-out assholes who will say that Madonna’s boots in the video mean fetish is crossing over to mainstream, I have a couple of things to say. First of all, why do you hate yourselves so much? What, besides self-loathing, could make someone put huge effort into being a fetish star while believing that being somehow mainstream would be preferable? Lastly, Madonna is successful, not mainstream. I’d be pleased to help anyone who thinks success=mainstream or mainstream=success in busting out a dictionary.

For those I need not whack with the legacy of Noah Webster and those more familiar with Justin Timberlake, I’d like to leave you with some vintage Madonna sex music video. Her Express Yourself video on the official Madonna channel has only received 6,440 views to date, so I thought y’all might feel like giving it a boost.

So right now FUSE is playing a block of Nelly videos. I find Nelly ridiculously hot. Hot like sexy, not hot like kindling. I’m not even sure if I like his music, but I certainly enjoy his videos. They’ve got productions values! (Bonus cool points to anyone who gets the movie reference there.)

So I was sitting there, letting the purple hair dye set in my hair, watching the Hot In Here video, and I suddenly realized that at least part of the video was shot inside a particular nightclub on Hollywood Blvd. Specifically, it was shot inside the Basque nightclub a couple blocks from me which burned down a day ago. Holy firemen of irony, Batman!

I was all trying to go to sleep at like six in the morning and I couldn’t figure out WTF was up with all the helicopters. I mean, my neighborhood has been a little weird lately, but this was just ridiculous. Turned out they were all the news copters shooting the fire and the literally two hundred and ten firemen and countless arson investigators and other officials dealing with the fire. Apparently, the building’s core was super old and had like poisonous resins or something on some of the burning wood. Not the best air quality where I live in Los Angeles for the past day.

But I really think the copters should have been blasting Nelly singing Hot In Here while they flew over my place. That would have totally made it all okay.