In March of last year, Los Angeles was blanketed with some kinda misogynist-seeming billboards in promotion of a movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall. You can check out a post April Flores wrote on the topic for an in-depth analysis of the ad campaign, but the gist of it was finding humor in being insanely hateful about an ex. Not insanely hateful with wit, just insanely hateful. I often find hostile humor funny, but this was just stuff on the cleverness level of “you suck” and “my mommy thinks you suck too”. So, at any rate, I didn’t bother to see the movie.

This weekend, I was feeling a little under the weather and I get free On-Demand, so I thought without much optimism that I’d give a comedy a few minutes to draw me in. I turned on Forgetting Sarah Marshall, fully expecting to turn it off within less than five minutes. Go figure.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is actually a really nice romantic comedy. The humor is done with great humanity and one of the most notable aspects of the movie is precisely that nobody is the villain. Kristen Bell might be the sadistic Elle on Heroes, but, as the character of Sarah Marshall, she plays the role in a fully humanized sympathetic way. Writer and leading man Jason Segal’s jilted Peter Bretter is precisely not the sort of guy who would be really horrible to an ex. Which makes the situation he finds himself in — at a resort where Sarah Marshall is hanging out with her new beau rocker Aldous Snow of Infant Sorrow, played by a hilarious Russell Brand — all the more humorous. Peter Bretter is very sympathetic and he is treated with kindness by front desk hospitality agent Rachel Jansen, played by a very beautiful Mila Kunis. I don’t want to include any spoilers, but the whole cast is amazing and everyone has just perfect comic timing. Maybe it is the writing. Maybe it is first time director Nicholas Stoller’s direction. Mostly, it seems like just a really nice alchemy of big talents coming together. Other notables are SNL’s Bill Hader and Liz Cackowski as the stepbrother Brian Bretter and his wife, Paul Rudd as a cute surfing instructor with limited short term memory, Jonah Hill as a waiter who is just a little too forward, and 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer as a religious innocent who gets honeymoon coaching from Aldous Snow. Plus more fun cameos and a killer spoof of CSI, which Jason Segal actually also had a recurring role on.

Two more fun things about Forgetting Sarah Marshall to endear it to me: First off, as many of you probably know, SLC Punk is one of my favorite movies of all time and the part of Mike, the angry fighting sort of Positive Force punk in the movie, was played by Jason Segal. Secondly, there are muppets by the actual Jim Henson workshop in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Vampire muppets.

Vampire Diaries is most likely the single worst program I have ever watched an entire episode of. No close second place.

Longtime Blue Blood readers are probably aware that I find vampire legends so compelling that I wrote my thesis on how they function as a paradigm for human sexuality. You are probably also aware that I thought Twilight was great. I have no objection to either love or wholesomeness and most of the people who hate Twilight soooooooo much haven’t seen it. So the pain in my temples produced by watching Vampire Diaries had nothing to do with any problem with vampires being teen fare or not being sufficiently horror genre or anything like that.

Vampire Diaries sucks because, first of all, all the characters read too old to be in high school. It is impossible to keep track from casting, styling, or acting which characters are supposed to be younger or older than one another. They are all extremely poised, perfectly coiffed, and apparently have no parental supervision or annoyance of any kind. Their main hangout looks like a bar. The female characters all approach sex like aging cougar divorcees or at least very very very jaded twenty-somethings.

When I was in high school, not only did I run with a fast crowd, but most of us had diplomatic immunity and knew that there would be no legal consequences for our actions. Although I found Twilight’s approach to relationships refreshingly positive, I have no objection to teens drinking, drugging, and having either fabulous or poorly-managed sex in literature, but I prefer it be a bit, ya know, plausible. I was, in point of fact, legal to drink in most of the countries I lived in during high school and my friends’ favorite hangouts actually were bars. But, for a teen show, set in the United States, the main teen hangout should probably have set design which looks more like a Denny’s and less like a liquor establishment or, if it is a bar, that needs to be explained.

Adding to the weird anachronism of Vampire Diaries are the pop culture references. The most painful one is when one of the cougar teens tells another that her ex is clearly pining for her because he is acting cool on the outside (he’s not), but you just know he is continuously listening to Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. Air Supply’s Greatest Hits. How hard would it have been to come up with something vaguely contemporary? I mean, I know Vampire Diaries is based on books from the 1990’s, but, for slightly past sappy lovesick music, surely the CW could have hired a writer who had heard of say Dashboard Confessional or Bright Eyes. I consulted the internet and Air Supply’s Greatest Hits came out in 1983. I’d like to say this is before any of the actors on Vampire Diaries were born, but some of them are really old to be playing teens. It is, however, obviously before any of the teen characters were supposed to have been born.

Paul Wesley, the male vampire romantic lead Stefan Salvatore, who was indeed born before Air Supply’s Greatest Hits was released, looks oddly like a misshapen Robert Pattinson, who played the male vampire romantic lead Edward Cullen in Twilight. He was obviously cast for the comparison, but the gambit doesn’t really work. He is a nice-looking guy and only looks deformed because of the context making it feel like he should look like someone else. He is also kind of beefy to make a convincing vampire. Or a convincing teenager for that matter. In all fairness, Vampire Diaries is based on books by L. J. Smith which predate the Stephanie Meyers Twilight Saga, so the execs at the CW could have chosen to riff less directly on Twilight.

The special effects are pretty hokey too, although more convincing than the teenaged status of any of the actors.

Full disclosure: Vampire Diaries advertised with a number of sites I work on. I probably watched the pilot in its entirety because of this and I definitely postponed mentioning its suckage until now out of deference to an advertiser.

I did think the posters and ad creative were really sexy though. There are still some big billboards up in Hollywood with some sexy photography and graphic design on them. So they have that and trending on Twitter every Thursday going for them.

Friends keep pointing out that there is a bacon of the month club. Actually, I think there may be a number of bacon of the month club options.

The Pig Next Door comes up quickly in a search engine attempt to locate the bacon of the month club. The Pig Next Door offers artisan bacon from sustainably-farmed specialty breeds. If you are a bacon fan, and I am, this sounds pretty good and they offer six month and one year bacon subscriptions, priced according to just how special the pigs are. Speaking of pigs, my friend senior Blue Blood writer Will Judy has a really thing about cartoons of animals being used to sell meat products. He is offended by cartoon cannibalism. Although I did not come to this concern on my own, I always think of it when I see a comic strip style pig raising a trotter to vote in favor of bacon.

So I do a little more research and it turns out that The Pig Next Door is a Johnny-come-lately, started only a year ago, looking to cash in on the bacon of the month concept pioneered by The Grateful Palate. The Grateful Palate has been selling bacon and bacon-related products online for more than a decade. Ah, the joy of the internet age, when nothing is so esoteric a niche that it hasn’t been knocked off and repackaged by someone. In addition to what may be the original bacon of the month club, The Grateful Palate also offers pig noses and pig T-shirt memorabilia. You can always go with the less cannibalistic T-shirt option of showing off the “I got porked by the Grateful Palate” slogan across your chest. You get a shirt and a little rubber toy pig with your bacon club membership. You also get an official Bacon of the Month Membership Card, in case a bouncer ever asks you to show one. And you get a pig nose, in order to facilitate cannibal role play.

My friend writer/director David Aaron Clark once took me to BDSM club The Vault in New York, in its heyday. And there was the option for gents to be dominated while wearing pig noses or masks. I have trouble eroticizing rubber facial prosthetics shaped like pigs or like anything else really. Yet I love muppets, fun fur coats, and the bottom half of most furry costumes. Go figure. For those less specific in their tastes and needs than I am, there is always pet play. Bet you’ve never seen someone in a pig or panda head do that before. Or maybe you have. I’m going to go fry up some uncured, sustainably-farmed, artisan bacon now, even though I’m not yet a member of the Bacon of the Month Club.

It is no secret that I love the vampire genre. I received Honors at Wesleyan University for my thesis on vampire legends as a paradigm for aggressive human sexuality. And I would like the record to show that I will be speaking on exactly that topic this weekend at Vampire Con in Hollywood. I’ll be taking part in the panel programming Sunday afternoon, after the movie nights, and before Vampirella’s Ball (more on this in a moment.) I’m excited that Wendi Mirabella and Lotti Pharriss Knowles have put Vampire-Con together.

The panel I am on is called Hot-Blooded: Vampires & Sexuality and is at 1pm at the Henry Fonda Theater on Hollywood Blvd. It will be moderated by David J. Skal, Author of Hollywood Gothic and V Is For Vampire: The A-Z Guide Of Everything Undead. I’m especially excited that Pam Keesey, who I’m looking forward to catching up with will be on the panel. She is the editor of multiple anthologies of lesbian vampire tales, Women Who Run with the Werewolves: Tales of Blood, Lust, and Metamorphosis, and Vamps: An Illustrated History of the Femme Fatale. Pam Keesey has a very engaging personality, has published yours truly, and once gave me a tour of Forrest Ackerman’s memorabilia collection. Other panelists are Hal Bodner, author of Bite Club: A West Hollywood Vampire Tale, filmmaker Fred Olen Ray from The Lair, actress Celeste Yarnall, best known at a vamp convention for her role in The Velvet Vampire, but who has appeared in everything from Melrose Place to Star Trek, and best-selling author, comic book writer, and filmmaker Donald F. Glut who recently directed the Elizabeth Bathory-inspired movie Blood Scarab. And we’ll be talking about vampire sex.

That evening, at the same venue, from 8:30pm to 1am, there will be Vampirella’s Ball. The music will be provided by DJ Xian and DJ Gary Calamar, music supervisor of HBO’s True Blood and KCRW radio DJ. Vampire Con describes the appropriate attire saying, “Costumes are thoroughly encouraged – Vampires, Victorian, Edwardian, Steampunk, Bohemian, Tribal, Gypsy.”

Forrest Black and I will have a location studio set up to photograph people involved in the event, revelers who most exemplify the themes of the event, and our close personal friends (i.e. not everyone, but photographic subjects best for doing press coverage on Vampire Con.) If we know you from online, please come find us on the roof Sunday night (or at my panel during the day) and say hello and where we know you from. I’m looking forward to running into tons of cool people at this event. Our favorite photos from the evening will of course appear here on BlueBlood.net.

So I registered the domain for my name a while back, when the internet still had a bit of that new web smell. I’d been doing work more and more in the digital space for a few years then and I would end up having to pay off a cybersquatter for the BlueBlood.com domain, so it seemed sensible to register everything near and dear to me. Then nine more years went by. Some of my favorite sites have grown out of Forrest Black registering domains while drinking beer and then me feeling that, once it was registered, the domain had to have a site on it. For a long time, I just had a link to a hosted journal on AmeliaG.com, but now seemed like the time to actually put a proper site on there. Today it officially goes live.

The site has the Amelia G bio with just the broad strokes. There is a more detailed sidebar with just 2009 news about press appearances and where my writing and photography has appeared this year. I considered including a page with a gigantic lists of places I’ve been published, but, after doing thousands of pages of editorial, not to mention radio and television stuff, it just seemed like it would be a bit of a laundry list. Plus, oddly enough, when I was doing research for the site, I discovered that some of my work had been reprinted without me even knowing it. I’ve moved less as an adult than I did as a kid, but sometimes it is still possible to lose track of compatriots with moves and all on everyone’s part.

I hope people enjoy the Photography Portfolio section of Forrest Black’s and my work. People always ask to see my online portfolio and I always was reluctant to put one together before. When I say “reluctant”, I mean that the notion of editing together only forty of my favorite images, out of everything we’ve ever shot, made me effing hyperventilate. I forced my brain through its discomfort and editing a selection of images from over such a long time period turned out to be really fun, once I got into kind of the right headspace, because I got to look at all sorts of contact sheets with positive associations and beautiful unseen images. Because of the ephemeral nature of human life, there is always something intrinsically bittersweet about any good photograph, I think, but it still felt mostly good to go through everything.

Given the fiscal realities of shooting on film, there are all sorts of awesome images Forrest Black and I shot which nobody has ever seen because it cost so much to make prints, so we tended to just print whatever a magazine wanted to publish for a lot of shoots. So the photo portfolio I edited together on AmeliaG.com has quite a few exclusive images the world has never seen, along with some favorites you will probably recognize.

It was also really fun putting together the section with the Amelia G Personal Pics because I got to dig through hard drives of tons of random uncategorized galleries of digital nightlife snapshots and recall all sorts of enjoyable adventures. My mom looked at the pics and said it looked like I must go out every night. Really I’m a workaholic, so I just like to only venture out for really cool stuff and I try to make a night out count. I hope you all also enjoy my goofy snapshots of going to parties, conventions, and gallery shows, clubbing, travel, and just hanging out with pals.

The background photo is a promo shot Forrest Black was kind enough to do for me last week. I really like how it turned out. If you are interested in hairstyle matters, my haircut is by Thierry, blowout is by Youne Lee, and color is old skool punk rock style where my bathroom is purple now too.

Putting the Amelia G site together made me nervous as anything, but I’m really happy it is complete and I think it turned out good. I hope you all like it too.

This week BBC America ran the Torchwood miniseries Children of Earth one episode a night all week building to tonight’s epic finale. Sunday, they will run the whole Torchwood Children of Earth series with all five episodes back to back, so there is still time to catch it. Purely from an entertainment perspective, I recommend watching the first four episodes and skipping the fifth. Children of Earth has Torchwood’s usual style and panache and dark-edged fun. Captain Jack Harkness, played by the pretty John Barrowman, even has a couple of nude scenes which BBC half-heartedly fuzzed out for the American audience. One can always hope they will be censor fuzz-free on the Torchwood Children of Earth DVD release. The DVD comes out next week and it is pre-ordering at a #8 ranking for all DVDs on Amazon.

Torchwood is reportedly BBC America’s biggest hit ever. As usual, Torchwood has accompanying behind-the-scenes DVD extras segments with Children of Earth. The interviews in this one with show creator (and primary writer) Russell T. Davies are interesting and insightful. The BTS here is more about how the writer and actors feel about the subject matter, and less focused on the special effects the way earlier seasons of the show were.

My favorite aspect of Torchwood has always been that it is science fiction aimed at an adult audience and makes no pretense of being for children or being in any sort of YA genre. Torchwood Season 3 aka the Children of Earth miniseries asks a moral question: If an apparently unstoppable alien foe asked you to make an immoral and misery-inducing decision or face almost certain annihilation, what would you do? Do you give in to terrorists? Do you negotiate with terrorists? Do you accept physical destruction over psychological and societal destruction or vice-versa? Do you welcome your new alien overlord?

The Torchwood answer is that the people in charge in the U.K. would definitely go with immoral misery inducing over righteous probable immolation. Maybe this is accurate. We did fight a revolution and put together documents guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms to protect us from the government . . . because the founding fathers of the USA did not trust the British leaders.

A problem with this Torchwood season is that the British answer is sort of supposed to be the world’s answer and I think Russell T. Davies is dead wrong in his idea of how other countries would handle such a moral dilemma. I do not believe that all other nations would see that England had made a bad deal with a drug addict alien, and just lie back and get fucked, while thinking of England. Without giving too much away, I have to point out that the citizenry of a significant number of the world’s nations are armed and most people feel a core lizard-brain, bone-deep, biological imperative to protect children. Sure, there are people like me who are more likely to comply with an unreasonable polite request than a reasonable demand with a threat attached. But, when it comes to children, I think the urge to protect them goes beyond anything volitional for almost all people, even those normally subservient to authority.

As a science fiction hero, Captain Jack Harkness was inspiring because he was happy-go-lucky and knew how to have a good time, despite being tormented by immortality and all he had seen, a fifty-first century guy who knew all the ladies and gents were hot for him and saw gender as a quaint criterion for choosing sex partners. Captain Jack Harkness thought out of the box and saw solutions when everyone else was ready to give up hope. He was sometimes pragmatic and unsympathetic to the pain of mere mortals, but he did not tend to roll with acceptable losses because he was a guy who liked to win. It is so rare to see winners treated as good guys in genre fiction that the Captain Jack Harkness characterization was really refreshing.

I can’t tell if Russell T. Davies is sick of doing Torchwood. Certainly that is the conjecture of a lot of Torchwood fans who felt Children of Earth went a little too far off the hub. Given how big a record-setting hit the show is, I can’t see BBC just dropping it. I realize BBC has been beefing up their science fiction fare with Primeval, the new Being Human, and of course old stalwart Doctor Who, but I just don’t see the businesspeople dropping Torchwood from all future Supernatual Saturdays. In the BTS interviews, the Torchwood actors appear viscerally angry about the trajectory of Torchwood Season Three. Partly because parts of Torchwood Children of Earth are genius, it becomes very frustrating how many holes are in the plot and how out of character a number of beloved characters behaved. Gwen Cooper, played by Eve Myles, gets a lot more action hero and less kind and less determined. Gwen Cooper’s clumsily loving husband Rhys Williams, played by Kai Owen, suddenly gets all bad-ass and understanding. Ianto Jones, played by Gareth David-Lloyd, stops being the hot secretary Jack is banging and starts whinging about where is their relationship going. Russell T. Davies has had such a large and good impact on the genre and I always mean to use my psych degree for good instead of evil, but, for fuck’s sake, Children of Earth comes across like Russell T. Davies has either let success go to his head or used to be in love with whomever he based Captain Jack Harkness on and they just had a bad break-up or the guy got busted for child-molesting or something equally faith-destroying. As a Torchwood fan, I have to say I did enjoy the first four episodes of the miniseries, even though they seemed to somewhat violate the internal consistency of the Torchwood world, but the resolution leaves me feeling kind of angry and disappointed.

Which all leaves me with the question: How likely would you personally be to give in to threatening demands from a junkie from another planet?

The Telegraph informs me that legendary author J.G. Ballard has died. Though the Telegraph obit leads one to believe that he was best known for his biographical novels Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, in fact in my social set he was known as the author of perhaps the most bizarre, challenging, audacious, demented, and visionary apocalyptic fiction ever put to paper or pixels. Take, for example, his work “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race,” the title of which kind of speaks for itself. It was part of his larger work The Atrocity Exhibition, which I believe he originally wrote as a screenplay/multimedia presentation shown simultaneously on three screens. Probably his best-known speculative work is the absolute mindfuck Crash, which concerns the overriding eroticization of car crashes. It was made into what I considered a largely successful film by David Cronenberg, but the gaps of sheer vision between the film and the book are such that one viewing the movie hasn’t the foggiest idea what the book is getting at. It’s a work both bewildering, hilarious and utterly intoxicating. When it was published in 1973, people got kind of worked up about it.

About a year ago I went to see the Thrillpeddlers 2008 Grand Guignol program; as we entered, RE:Search Books publisher V. Vale, who has published many books about and by Ballard, was playing the piano. Before the program started, host Russell Blackwood held a contest, asking “What song was Vale playing when the lights went down?” The Hypnodrome fell silent: you could hear a pin drop.

I am an inveterate music geek. I waited politely to see if anyone else, particularly any of the weird precocious teens in attendance, was enough of a band nerd to have recognized it. Finally, I cried out: “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams!”

Applause! I had won. My reward? A copy of Vale’s RE:Search book Conversations, an amazing collection of interviews and dicussions with J.G. Ballard, handed to me by Vale himself and signed by the V-Man. What the HELL could be more appropriate than winning a J.G. Ballard book from V. Vale at a Grand Guignol performance for recognizing that particular song? It was eerie, I tell you. Eerie.

Upon reading it I said to myself, aloud, “Fuck a duck! I forgot what a motherfucking freak this guy is.” Which is my way of calling him a genius.

A year later, I change that “is” to “was,” and the world seems that much smaller. That’s the thing about getting older: the world gets small, not big. We soldier on toward the apocalypse, a doomsday vastly more mundane than any ever dreamed by J.G. Ballard. And without him, it just won’t seem the same.

Have you ever felt you should get a pass for misbehaving because of your extensive zombie experience? Heck, we’ve all felt that way. But Woody Harrelson is doing something about it, with his tried and true Mistaken for a Zombie Gambit. Allow me to illustrate.

Forrest Black and I photographed special effects artist André Freitas (pictured) in his AFX Studios by Atlanta, Georgia for a feature in Skin Two. At the time, his most current project was developing a scary wrestler character. His most recent project has been makeup on the scary special effects for a movie called Zombieland. The movie is directed by Ruben Fleischer and written by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese who previously worked together on the Joe Schmo show. Although Zombieland reportedly just wrapped filming, it is still technically in development, so the final cast list is still more rumor than confirmed. For sure, André Freitas’ special makeup effect must have been really damn scary.

It is known that Woody Harrelson is in the Zombieland movie. According to IMDB, Woody Harrelson plays a character named Albuquerque. According to the Sony Pictures publicity department, Zombieland will not be in theaters until a Halloween-ready release of October 9, 2009, but they believe Woody Harrelson plays a character named Tallahassee. It seems a safe bet that Woody Harrelson is at least somewhat in a movie called Zombieland and does play a character named after a city. Based on posts on the director’s site, principal photography for Zombieland took approximately two solid months and was completed the middle of this week.

According to Alan Duke reporting on CNN, Woody Harrelson finished shooting Zombieland on Wednesday in Atlanta, Georgia and he and his daughter landed at La Guardia Airport that night. I know that personally, if I had to make a list of times I would least like to be photographed, when I had just landed at an airport after working in Georgia would be very high on my list. Allegedly, Woody Harrelson broke a camera belonging to a photographer/videographer who was trying to film him and his daughter. After this alleged incident, the photographer went on to bust out a cell phone camera or some other smaller snapshot deal and shot more video of Woody Harrelson and his daughter. The photographer alleges that Woody Harrelson assaulted him in the ensuing scuffle. Although a police report was made, no charges against Woody Harrelson have been filed at this time.

Woody Harrelson did, however, issue a statement which I believe clears the whole thing up. The actor explained, “With my daughter at the airport I was startled by a paparazzo, who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.” Quite understandably. Mistook for a zombie. Could have happened to anyone.

CNN and others are reporting that Woody Harrelson plays “the most frightened person on Earth” in Zombieland. In point of fact, had any of them managed to check with Sony, they would have learned that Jesse Eisenberg plays the most frightened person on Earth in Zombieland. Jesse Eisenberg is perhaps best known for his role as Jimmy Myers in Wes Craven’s Cursed, where he spent the movie trying to escape werewolves. Apparently there is something about Jesse Eisenberg which makes monsters want to chase him. Then again, CNN used the usually reliable IMDB as their source and IMDB reports Jess Eisenberg’s character is named Flagstaff, while Sony Pictures publicity department calls him Columbus. Still, once again, both names are cities. Not that big a difference in a name.

The big difference is that Woody Harrelson’s city-named character is actually the bad-ass in the movie. to be specific, the Sony Pictures press releases on the movie states, “Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has made a habit of running from what scares him. Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) doesn’t have fears. If he did, he’d kick their ever-living ass.”

Given that anyone who has seen Natural Born Killers (which is everyone I know) can see what a convincing dangerous bad-ass Woody Harrelson is, I can only conclude that paparazzi don’t get to the movies much. Or read magazines. Apparently there is something about Woody Harrelson which makes paparazzi want to chase him. Another paparazzo is currently suing Woody Harrelson for allegedly attacking him outside Hollywood nightclub Element in 2006. (Although it might have changed ownership since then, the last time Forrest Black went to this particular venue, he complained of having to endure watching a performer flog a balloon, as opposed to a hot girl. But I digress.) At any rate, Woody Harrelson has made it clear that, like anyone, he does not love having strangers up in his face with cameras at all sorts of annoying times. Unlike just anyone, he has already made it clear that he is prepared to defend his privacy strenuously. Unlike just anyone, he is also the son of a man serving multiple life sentences for contract killing a Federal judge. Does a famous actor have to actually kill a paparazzo in self-defense before people back off?

Even if common decency fails to stop paparazzi from non-consensually photographing Woody Harrelson, you’d think common sense might kick in. As I don’t even like to lift a camera to my eye until a model release is signed, the whole paparazzi phenomenon really kinda baffles me. I don’t think harassing a man, when he is exhausted from gainful employment and travel in service of same, is what the founding fathers had in mind when they guaranteed us freedom of the press. There are areas of scandal where I feel the newsworthiness of a public figure is relevant, but I don’t get what is newsworthy about what an actor’s daughter looks like after a plane trip. Then again, Woody Harrelson is an activist for marijuana legalization, so maybe this will make the press take up his cause in the hopes that he will become a little more chill.

The real good that will come out of this unfortunate incident, however, is that, from now on, I am going to excuse all hostile behavior by explaining that I was startled by someone who I quite understandably mistook for a zombie.

Clint Catalyst has written for BlueBlood.net, Gothic.net, Permission, America’s Next Top Model, and a generally surreal assortment of publications. Manic D Press published a collection of his fiction called Cottonmouth Kisses. In partnership with Michelle Tea, he also edited the critically-acclaimed Chills, Pills, Thrills, and Heartache, which featured a fiction piece by yours truly.

Clint Catalyst celebrated his birthday this past weekend at Los Angeles’ Bootie Shake mash-up night at the Echoplex. Rony Alwin had a photo booth set up in the VIP area sectioned off for Clint Catalyst’s guests and he shot the little thumb here of yours truly and the birthday boy. (Yes, it was a lil warm inside the nightclub.) You can see a whole gallery of the photos at his web site Rony’s Photo Booth. Clint Catalyst’s well-wishers included a predictable assortment of the creative and fabulous. Luminaries in attendance included Sonja Teri of Swindle magazine, designer Tarina Tarantino, actors Tony Ward and Kat Turner, producer Suren M. Seron, spooky musicians including Luke van der Luke, Yvette Lera, Romak from Romak & the Space Pirates, and Tina Root of Switchblade Symphony fame, currently working on Tre Lux and Quiet Halo, and writer/director Matthew Mishory whose forthcoming project Portland Clint Catalyst has a part in. Happy 29th birthday, Clint!

The 2009 version of Last House on the Left bears the tagline: If bad people hurt someone you love, how far would you go to hurt them back? The 1972 version of course famously had a tagline which became a catchphrase: To avoid fainting, keep repeating it’s only a movie, only a movie, only a movie . . .

Well, Last House on the Left was initially intended to be an envelope-pushing 70’s porn feature and its legacy as a movie has been far beyond that of the average only a movie flick. There is the notion that the current spate of torture porn horror movies is something new, but people like Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham pioneered the genre more than three decades ago. Wes Craven, most famous for Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream, wrote and directed the original Last House on the Left and Sean S. Cunningham, most famous for Friday the 13th, produced it. Before you even take into account the legions of movie-makers influenced by Craven and Cunningham, the legacy of Last House on the Left is huge simply for how its creators built on their own work. For the 2009 Last House on the Left, Craven and Cunningham both serve as producers. The director of 2009’s version is Dennis Iliadis whose main previous credit is the movie Hardcore, about two prostitutes who fall in love.

The initial torture porn grew out of 1970’s porn porn. At the time, partly because video not being used yet, any porn flick more involved than a tiny stag loop tended to be approached as a feature. A lot of the underground creative work at the time was about exploring taboos, so there was not as much differentiation in which taboos could appear in which medium. Today, if you want to feature nonconsensual sex acts in your work, you must put the violence in an R-rated movie for theatrical or DVD distribution. You may not put nonconsensual sex acts in material distributed in adult industry channels. This is not solely because the government might crack down on you if you repeatedly dare them too like Rob Black of Extreme Associates; the primary issue is that major trade publications and video distributors will not accept adult videos which feature nonconsensual acts (yes, even when it is just acting, even if it is bad acting) and companies which process payments for adult websites will not accept credit cards for material which features nonconsensual acts. Exploitation cinema is not something new for the new millennium. Where the violence and horror end up in the marketplace and where the sex and nudity end up all boils down to the restrictions of varied distribution channels.

Nonetheless, in the original Last House on the Left, most of the forced boy/girl sex and forced girl/girl sex and watersports all got left on the cutting room floor and the violence stayed in. The violence was still shocking to theatrical audiences at the time and reviewers tended to express . . . well, horror. Last House on the Left features horrible chainsaw brutality before Scarface or Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Here is how you know Wes Craven is an original creative mind: He acknowledges his influences. He looked to Ulla Isaksson’s script for Ingmar Bergman’s Jungfrukällan or Virgin Spring for the plotline for Last House on the Left. And Wes Craven is a strong enough and secure enough creative person that he can say where he got the idea without diminishing himself.

Living in Hollywood and working on the internet, I am often exposed to people who try to come up with tricks for success. These tricks are the creative person’s version of get-rich-quick schemes and just as likely to fail. Some of these desperate tricksters come up with all these little rules about how the best way to succeed is to get inspiration from someone more innovative and deny where the inspiration comes from. Which is right up there with the notion that anyone who has ever done anything for mature audiences must be somehow crossing over and rising up if they do anything for a different distribution channel or that doing anything adult means one must be consigned to exclusively producing adult material.

Wes Craven’s oevre ably demonstrates the only two unmalleable requirements for creative success: Be really good at what you do and work at it.