I did not have a television for many years. Then, when I had one, it was only used to play videotapes; I didn’t even know for sure whether it failed to get reception or I’d never tried to get any on there. In the process of getting myself the Hell out of Georgia, I hocked the aforementioned television and used the proceeds for moving expenses (paying off a truck tow driver not to tow away the moving truck cab with almost everything I was moving inside.) I did not miss my hocked television.

But then they invented TiVo, On Demand, UnBox, instant download, renting DVDs by mail, and high quality TV shows with long, complex, and well-written story arcs. My two biggest objections to television in the past were always that (1) I couldn’t see planning my schedule around when a television show was on and (2) I’m not exactly the average person, so I was pretty sure that no show aimed at the lowest common denominator was likely to appeal to me.

The Sopranos sucked me in on DVD and I watched the first few years in an absolute orgy of television consumption. Even though The Sopranos often dropped whatever storyline had made me push play on the next episode, the show was still a whole lot of cuts above what I thought of television as capable of being. Prior to The Sopranos, my mobster fetish had only been satisfied by movies and real life.

Since then, I’ve come to strongly prefer the format of the long cable drama over all other video media. It’s funny that I don’t even really know what the name for it ought to be, but it is definitely a new structure for story-telling, one which allows for the communication of much more complex and interesting stories. Some of my favorite shows in this emergent form are the Weeds tales of a suburban widow-cum-drug-dealer who maintains her style of life and Dexter’s introspective serial killer and The Tudors with the sexiest retelling ever of the monarchy of King Henry VIII, all on Showtime. On AMC, I’m currently watching Breaking Bad which is about a middle-aged chemistry teacher who learns he has terminal cancer and starts cooking meth and I’m looking forward to the return of Mad Men about a poor Jewish orphan who reinvents himself as a WASPy philandering Madison Avenue executive. Don’t get me wrong; the complex cable drama has some wretched shows in that format too. The politico and mobster show Brotherhood on Showtime is so over-acted with such heavy-handed writing that it is painful to watch. HBO’s bigamist Mormons with sinister associations show Big Love is unwatchable unless you are far far more titillated by unconventional sexual relationships than I am. But, on the overall, this is a pretty awesome format.

And then there is The Wire. The Wire is pretty much the absolute perfection of the form. The first season was all about a successful street drug distribution organization. It was gripping and both police and gangsters were written, acted, and directed so well that the viewer truly felt like they were real people. Then they switched to the potentially less glamourous dockworkers the second season and they made it work, made that gripping too. Today is the last episode of The Wire. Creator David Simon, frequent collaborator Ed Burns, and the rest of the impressive Wire team have done such a good job up until now that I accept that the series was ready to come to a close. They told the story. It took five seasons to tell it, but, unlike a sitcom where nothing changes, the various characters have had their story arcs at this point. They’ve told us what they came to tell.

I’ve seen a number of bloggers jumping up and down about how The Wire deserves an Emmy and how everyone should tune in for the final episode. I have a couple thoughts on that. Firstly, HBO broadcast two half hour specials comprised of clips from the show and interviews with the cast and crew who were clearly supposed to be pushing the agenda of getting The Wire an Emmy. The show is brilliantly written and a cynical Angeleno might speculate that maybe their Baltimore shooting location has contributed to them not winning so far. Personally, I couldn’t tell you when the Emmies are or name three shows which have won one for writing. I bet the bloggers demanding an Emmy for The Wire couldn’t either. But it is good to know that HBO is taking care of their people after five seasons of excellence.

Lastly, if you have not been watching The Wire so far, do not start now. Or at least do not start with the finale. The thing about a complex story is that it can’t be told or comprehended in one hour. The last 59 episodes are not available for instant download or On Demand customers, but the first four seasons can be rented or purchased on DVD. I recommend starting at the beginning and getting the whole story. By the time you finish watching through the fourth season, with its focus on education, maybe the current season, examining the role of media, will be out on DVD.

I don’t usually like to schedule around television. Ever really. But I’m pretty sure we are now about a quarter of an hour into the East Coast showing of The Wire finale and my TiVo has been picking it up for me. And I want to watch it before the entire internet starts posting spoilers.

I handed Gene Simmons his laundry once. This was more than ten years ago, so my memory is a bit murky, but, as I recall, I may have both handed him his clean laundry and picked up his dirty laundry to run back to the stadium. It was one of my last gigs as a stagehand. I was a runner. A runner is someone who will work for stagehand wages but has a working and ideally presentable car. At the time, I had already mostly transitioned into doing contract design work, corporate presentations and that sort of thing which paid better. My car actually was not terribly presentable, but some of the staff for the KISS tour recalled a nicer-looking (but less reliable) car I had owned at the time of an earlier gig and they liked me. I took the job because they had specifically requested if “the girl with the kinky zines” was still available. Plus working at a rock stadium was generally pretty sociable and fun, especially at a job which, unlike many I’d done there, was unlikely to cause injury.

I was never a member of the KISS Army or anything and my parents felt the KISS logo was unacceptable Nazi regalia and boys who wanted me to like KISS (and them) had always played me “Beth”. I guess guys always think the chick will like the power ballad better than the rocker, but it always struck me as really ill-conceived to try to seduce a girl with a song about blowing off your girlfriend. (Talk about “Lick My Love Pump” being in the saddest key!) I did think KISS had some fairly listenable music, but I was not crazy familiar with them either.

So, when my runner job afforded me the opportunity to watch part of a KISS concert, I didn’t have a ton of expectations, except that I’d vaguely thought they wore their makeup different. I missed the whole trauma the hardcore KISS fans endured when the band went from monster makeup to hair metal makeup. They are probably the only band in the history of the universe to get less pussy after donning hair metal makeup than they got without it.

Regardless, the thing which struck me most when I worked for KISS was that there were ridiculously hot unfamiliar girls at the show. Like super hot and super into the band. And, at the time, I was at least minimally acquainted with a pretty high percentage of the hot sluts in the DC/NoVa/Baltimore area. So it was surprising to have so many incredibly hot metal chicks at a KISS concert and not recognize any of them from other events I’d been at. I commented on the anomaly at the time to everyone I mentioned the show to, but I didn’t understand what the likely reason was that there were such hot girls there who I’d never seen at shows by Guns N’ Roses, Skid Row, Poison, Aerosmith, Warrant, Kix, Child’s Play, and countless good-looking national and local bands in related genres.

I joked at the time that the band must bring the girls with them or something. This went way beyond just what a band bringing groupies from the last city would entail, but it didn’t occur to me that it really would be beneficial for a band like KISS to in fact hire a hottie crew. A lot of their fanbase was homophobic, but there were persistent rumors that their lead singer Paul Stanley was homosexual or bisexual and Gene Simmons had this demon fuckmonster persona where he lived out fans’ male adolescent fantasies, so, from a PR perspective, it really would have made sense for them to cast some amazingly hot women as enthusiastic fans and pay them to come on tour at cheer them on. I mean, sports teams have cheerleaders and that is kind of the same benefit. The only difference is really that cheerleaders have uniforms and everybody knows what their roles are, but hired rock fans are kind of more disingenuous. The first time I photographed someone who made rent pretending to enjoy The Rolling Stones in concert, it was like I found out Santa Claus was a lie. Actually my parents never lied to me about Santa Claus, so I think I got that childhood trauma at a later age, when I realized that rock n’ roll was kinda dishonest.

The music industry has a long history of putting fake publicity out there. The habit greatly pre-dates rock and roll. It is ironic that the internet has put such a damper on music sales. On the one hand, the web has made it so much easier to disseminate dishonest presentations of self, but it has also made it easier to steal the music industry’s primary product. So, the industry is taking a huge hit to the wallet at the same time that its PR machine has destroyed any trust music fans might have had. Their disingenuous behavior makes it hard for anyone to feel much sympathy for the record industry.

It seems obvious to a teenager that a squeaky clean band might have a dark secret life, but it is less obvious that someone might be drinking apple juice out of a Jack Daniels bottle on stage. At this point, I pretty much disbelieve anything stated more than twice in any press release. I figure whatever they are trying to sell me is probably a lie. I used to listen to music every day and base large portions of my life around music and music-related events. But I’ve lost my faith.

So a site calling itself Gene’s Secret launched this week with a seven or so minute video purporting to be of Gene Simmons fucking some blonde. A couple of clips from the video have also been circulating the web and blog empire Gawker received a cease and desist from Gene Simmons’ attorneys for running them. If you care, the sex is not particularly inspired or emotional and the blonde actively avoids kissing the KISS bassist and they are apparently doing it to the dulcet tones of Steve Perry. Gawker feels the clips are sufficiently newsworthy as to not require them to comply with the C&D. Now I could go off about celeb sex tapes and Paris Hilton and Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee and Fred Durst and why these types of videos tend to have unappetizing sex and why our Puritan society refers to anyone in one as B list and what is wrong with a society which invades people’s privacy like this. But I’m not going to because I, perhaps cynically, believe that the whole thing is an orchestrated publicity stunt. I have no faith that this is a real stolen video or that the subjects did not know they were being recorded or that any of what is being presented is remotely as real as WWF.

At first glance, some people felt the Gene’s Secret Gene Simmons sex tape was a hoax and utilized a lookalike. I mean, there are an awful lot of KISS cover bands, so I can understand how people would believe it would not be hard to find a Gene Simmons demon lookalike. Through the Manatt law firm, Gene Simmons confirmed the authenticity of the sex tape but denied that anyone but Gene Simmons’ Allied Industries corporation should be able to profit from it. Nonetheless, the video is still live on the Gene’s Secret site, which one would assume would be the first target for a C&D. If this reminds altporn fans of when a site called SuicideGirls unsuccessfully pretended it was not really them licensing their content when they decided to resell unretouched versions of photosets they had promised models they would not resell . . . well, it reminds me of that little fiasco too. (Full disclosure: At the suggestion of SuicideGirls head honcho Sean Suhl, Blue Blood has previously consulted with the law firm of Manatt, Phelps, & Phillips.) Both scenarios feature a lawyer letter which purports to be trying to stop the distribution of the content, while simultaneously giving the content authenticity. Of course, this is the internet, so Gawker promptly posted the C&D on their tech industry blog Valleywag under the heading “Gene Simmons lawyer confirms sex tape’s authenticity“. While this may prove that the man in the video is in fact the tongue-wielder from KISS, it doesn’t prove that the whole thing is not a hoax.

The Gene’s Secret site features the following copy:

“This isn’t Shannon, this isn’t the same Family Jewels that you can catch on late-night cable. This is Gene giving you his best on screen performance yet! Find out all the benefits of being the spokesperson for a the latest energy drink, Frank’s Energy. Although it looks like Gene would rather gulp done one of Frank’s Energy Girls! . . . What is Gene’s Secret? Actually, it’s a WHO, and she is a hot little Austrian babe, named Elsa. She is a model, and one of the Frank’s Engery Drink Girls, a brand which Gene endorses (apparently to fuel his sex drive.) Elsa and Gene party like rockstars, and we have it all here, EXCLUSIVELY on GenesSecret.com.”

Now, I’ve never heard of this energy drink before, but I’m guessing a lot of people, who never heard of it before, have now heard of it. Most of the copy on the membership site tour is about how Gene has a reality show called Family Jewels and he uses this beverage. Celebrity sex tape site tours usually have a lot more text about how you just have to see this video and you should sign up now now NOW! This tour seems less interested in making sales and more interested in telling everyone about projects Gene Simmons gets paid on. Gene Simmons keeps his shirt on during the video and most people prefer to get naked for sex or at least don’t pay attention to the clothing they have on, but a video of an older guy having sex is less embarrassing if he is wearing a smoothly adjusted T-shirt for the whole thing. A publication called AVN, which is primarily about mainstream Valley porn video, puts on an award show for pornstars every January. Last year, Gene Simmons was a presenter at the AVN awards show and AVN was apparently the first to break the news about the Gene’s Secret celebrity sex tape. Coincidence or evidence of the occult? You be the judge.

When something like a celeb sex vid scandal happens, it is hard to parse out the truth, so people tend to partly believe the whole thing is fake and partly believe the whole thing is real. So many things like this have been presented to people in the Digital Age that most people carry constant cognitive dissonance around in their heads 24/7/365 now. No wonder prescriptions for antidepressants are so common. Cognitive dissonance is painful. It is bad for society when people suffer from constantly having mutually exclusive ideas in their heads. Aside from the mental health costs, when people are used to the puzzle pieces in their brain not fitting, then they become much less able to make decisions, less able to run their own lives well, less able to vote for candidates who hold their values, less able to form lasting relationships. People may think they are just doing internet marketing, but they are causing real world damage.

I wish I believed that hot chicks, who can really strut, just want to rock and roll all night. I wish I believed that some callous big titty whore tricked a genuinely promiscuous and wild rock star into starring in his own porn video, blackmailed him, and then cashed in anyway. I wish I believed that Gene Simmons was a victim here. That might all be true, but the music industry has cried wolf too many times for me to believe any of it. They’ve put too many snake oil salesmen behind the pulpit. I wish I believed that anything in music culture was real now. Viral marketing has destroyed any trust music fans, or people who would otherwise have been music fans, might have in music or musicians.

Viral marketing might get the word out, but it has destroyed my faith.

I live in Los Angeles, so it is probably no surprise that a lot of people I know are making resolutions to either become stars or achieve bigger stardom.

It doesn’t seem like it is much fun to be famous in 2008 though. Entertainment Weekly’s entire year in review issue was all about how much it sucks to have the eyes of the world on you. When I recently went to my OB/GYN, I was reading either Esquire or GQ in his waiting room and there was an interview with Michael J. Fox. The interviewer asked him what his thoughts were on like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or maybe all three. Michael J. Fox was a young Hollywood star in the 80’s, but he still has a pretty squeaky clean rep. Perhaps because he played a wholesome character on TV for a while. At any rate, his response was that he was soooooooooooooo glad the whole tabloid and paparazzi thing did not exist when he was young because it was his opinion that he did a lot of the same dumb things and they just were not recorded for posterity.

When I was a teenager, I lived overseas, mostly in countries where (a) it was legal for me to drink and (b) I had diplomatic immunity so what was legal was not that much of a factor. I am pretty certain that I would cringe at photos and video taken in many of the situations I got myself into. But there aren’t any. Actually, I wish there were more photos of me growing up. But the point is that I could be young and experimental and even a little wild, without it going down on my permanent record.

It feels weird to type, but I suppose I used to be at least a local celebrity within certain geographies and certain scenes. My personality was generally turned up to eleven. I thought shirt was spelled L-I-N-G-E-R-I-E. My writing was getting published all over. And no one had ever seen anything quite like Blue Blood Magazine at the time. I signed a lot of autographs in the 90’s. Maybe I still am some variety of celeb, but I hope not. I want a private life. I want to get to occasionally say something stupid without being haunted by it forever and ever. I want the freedom to be imperfect and the ability to be personal one-on-one. I will never tell a friend to read my LiveJournal or most recent press release or magazine interview to find out what I’ve been up to.

I know I have the juice to make other people pretty famous is certain circles, but it doesn’t really seem like something I want to do as often as I once did. Most people think they crave the attention, but they can’t handle it at all. They simultaneously get addicted to being on magazine covers and completely melt down that they can no long just move to the next town and be totally invisible. And then, of course, they illogically lash out at everyone around them.

Situation gets rough
Then I start to panic
It’s not enough
It’s just a habit
Hey kid you’re sick
Darling this is it
You can all just kiss off into the air
Behind my back I can see them stare
They’ll hurt me bad but I won’t mind
They’ll hurt me bad they do it all the time
Yeah yeah, they do it all the time
I hope you know that this will go down on your permanent record

2007 was officially the last year anyone should have even halfway contemplated wanting to be famous for the sake of being famous. I predict that reality TV will grow in 2008, not just because of the WGA strike or economics, but because most people can only handle any modicum of fame for so long. I think a thirteen week reality show is about the right length of time to be in the public eye before snapping, driving your car into someone who could help you, shaving your head (or letting your hair grow in, depending), or passing out on a Hollywood sidewalk.

Before They Were Stars – Commercials courtesy of Metacafe

Special thanks to the Onion News Network for keeping us all appraised of this important issue.

The zombie threat!

I had dropped the luscious Michelle Aston off at Bar 107 in downtown Los Angeles before, but had never gone inside. For some reason, I had assumed it was a teensy hole in the wall dive. I figured I’d stop in anyway to help Julie Simone celebrate the 12th DVD Release by her company, Julie Simone Productions.

I was happily surprised when the inside of Bar 107 turned out to be larger than expected, with red plush booths and a small stage in the back. The bar could have had more of a selection, especially in the sparkling water department, but it was still very cool.

Julie Simone’s new flick, Audition, was playing on televisions mounted up high by the ceiling. I’m not sure if that violates some sort of zoning ordinance, but I always wonder about such things and the crowd was sufficiently naughty all on their own.

Luminaries in attendance included, of course, the woman of the hour in a black cocktail dress, the aforementioned Michelle Aston, Blue Blood art director and style editor Forrest Black, sexy Aiden, writer/director David Aaron Clark, KSEX and BaadMaster’s Dungeon host Mistress Genevieve, Music+TV and Aural Salvation host Rev Mitcz, and America’s Beloved Porn Journalist Gram Ponante.

Audition is written and directed by Julie Simone and features Gia Paloma, Master Liam, Krissy, Lystra, and, you guess it — Julie Simone.

Gritty nicely-distressed design movie promo bondage posters were on hand for revelers seeking a collectible keepsake. The promo poster implication is that Audition is like Captivity with less ick and more sex, but that’s just going on the nice marketing swag.

I realize that Glaxo doesn’t want to be associated with a person like Paris Hilton, but she’s being cheated out of a great opportunity to use her popularity for good, and to rehab her image a bit.

Yes, I think PH should become a celeb spokesperson for Valtrex, and should do public outreach on behalf of genital herpes sufferers.

(Seriously, it’s not like she has any sense of personal shame, and the jail thing doesn’t work for anyone. The last guy who came out of jail with his image improved was Mandela, and he went in a hero.)

I’m envisioning a very lo-tek trashy glam viral-style campaign, if you will, with street teams pasting up mysterious flyers that ask, “Is Paris Burning?”

Fueled by Ramen recording artist Cobra Starship is a very modern band. They are currently on tour, opening for Fall Out Boy, along with fellow openers Paul Wall, +44, and The Academy is . . . Cobra Starship’s name sounds like a cross between TheCobrasnake and late Jefferson Airplane. They’ve got a song on the Snakes on a Plane and the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie soundtracks, ringtones available, a Glamour Kills clothing endorsement, and impressively pimped out profiles on all the good social networking sites. They even (I’m sure ironically) cover Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” and Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean.” The CS site itself contains a sort of pseudo-ironic “typical” rockstar history, which is probably actually based on true events but liberally gilded. Band leader Gabe Saporta’s animal familiar-dictated mission is apparently teaching “hipsters to not take themselves so seriously and by telling emo kids to stop being pussies.”

I guess Cobra Starship’s genre is Self-Deprecating Post-Emo? I don’t know. The salient point for Blue Blood readers is that Xanthia Doll appears dancing her yellow-clad booty off in their new video for their long-windedly-named single “Send My Love To The Dancefloor, I’ll See You In Hell (Hey Mister DJ)” from their album, While The City Sleeps, We Rule The Streets. Xanthia says, “I’m so happy I’m in it! It was a lot of fun to be a part of! Just look for red hair and a bright yellow jacket and you’ll see me! Wheeeeeeeeee!!!!!!”

Xanthia’s positive attitude is a lot of fun, but I have to admit that I like my rockstars to truly own what they do. If I were more familiar with modern emo, apparently Cobra Starship’s Gabe tapped a number of big deal emo folks to work on the project. An emo allstar band slagging off emo kids for being pussies is, you know, emoriffically ironic. I’d be more versed in emo if it could stand up and be proud of what it is, instead of hiding behind irony, self-deprecation, and pretending they don’t really mean whatever it is they are expressing. Emo adults need to stop being such pussies.

But the video looks fun with Xanthia in it:

It seems newsworthy to mention that an online video for Marilyn Manson’s new music video is apparently going to be online for only another day or two. The new single is called “Heart Shaped Glasses” and features romantic lyrics about erotic cutting and Manson looking like he is feeling his inner rockstar. Most coverage of the video has been rather frantic speculation on whether Marilyn Manson and actress Evan Rachel Wood are actually having penetrative sex in the opening scene of the seven plus minutes long vid. It is totally irrelevent to the final product whether or not his penis was actually in her vagina, as neither is visible, but the two manage to communicate wonderful chemistry between them on screen.

When I saw the movie Seven, I kept wanting them to turn the damn lights on. It seems like it would have been much more obvious that Kevin Spacey was the killer if they hadn’t been doing investigation and forensics with flashlights, when there were perfectly good light switches nearby. I felt a little bit like this during much of the video for “Heart Shaped Glasses” when I watched it on the German video sharing site ironically enough called Sevenload. The actual Marilyn Manson site links to an IP with no real site on it and a much higher resolution version of the video. Everything is much clearer in the version on Manson’s site, although the lighting is still colored and moody. The interface on the Sevenload version is much more user-friendly though.

The video kicks off on Sevenload with the artist introducing the clip and, linked off his site, it goes straight into Manson and Wood writhing around and kissing passionately. This is pretty hot for around two and a half minutes. The initial makeout scene includes some very light choking. Somehow I think iTunes still won’t have any problem billing for the music video download down the line. The video is then interrupted with one of those talky interludes that musicians who want acting roles like and nobody else enjoys. The two of them are in a car and she tells him to drive faster and he takes altporn style polaroids of her with a kitchen knife and a schoolgirl skirt. This scene is where the heart shaped glasses referred to in the song’s title first appear. They then move to a club scene where Manson is rocking it old school and a sorta normal looking girl in the audience is watching from behind her heart shaped glasses and touching herself with hands covered in interestingly incongruous driving gloves. This I believe is Wood in a sort of fifties looking good girl dress. I don’t think she’d be good casting for the part if she weren’t Manson’s paramour, but the chemistry between them is so powerful that it more than makes up for it. I think the moody lighting, which might otherwise be a bit much, makes her come across a bit darker too.

The main concept of the video revolves around, aside from hipster sunglass, romantic cutting. So the club scene, err, cuts back and forth to a blood-drenched black bed and shots of a sort of heart shaped tattoo with a lightening bolt S on Wood’s thigh. I don’t know if the tattoo is real any more than I know if the fucking is real. Doesn’t matter because it works for the video. Oh yeah, then they drive off a cliff Thelma and Louise style. I loved Thelma and Louise so much that when my friend Blue Blood writer Shariann Lewitt and I saw it, Shariann told me that maybe one of us needs to learn to drive better. As Wood steers with her foot in Manson’s video and they still drive off a cliff, I think Shariann was mistaken about the requirements.

Anyway, the song is okay and I like the flow of the lines:

she’ll never cover up what we did with her dress, no
she said, “kiss me, it’ll heal but it won’t forget”

When I am elected Benevolent World Dictator, there will be a lot more videos in this vein and they will be available for more than a week.