AltPorn.net interviewer Beda Hoydenish writes:

“Everyone knows Amelia G runs the Blue Blood empire and also does some of the photography and writing for it. Here on APN, we’ve featured photographs she has shot for Blue Blood many times and we’ve mentioned her writing once or twice. (You can also see the interview we did with Amelia G five years ago — Ed.) I write for APN and I have all the old Blue Blood print magazines from the 90’s in plastic bags with cardboard backing, so I thought I was pretty aware and I still found a lot on Amelia G’s new AmeliaG.com site to both inform and entertain me. In addition to running the business end of Blue Blood and working as an editor for many projects, Amelia G has had hundreds of photo sets published and thousands of articles. Amelia G has done writing and/or photography for all the major adult publishing houses including Playboy, Penthouse, Flynt, Crescent, Magna, and AVN, plus niche magazines including Marquis, On Our Backs, Skin Two, Tattoo Teasers, Fetish, Extreme Fetish, $pread, and of course Blue Blood. Her fiction has appeared in Best American Erotica, Best S/M Erotica, and Best Women’s Erotica and dozens more books. But she still took time out of her busy schedule to give APN this exclusive interview.

APN: Blue Blood magazine in print was really ground zero for jump-starting the whole altporn genre and you’ve managed to maintain a top ranking for Blue Blood for more than sixteen years. To what do you credit your remarkable success and longevity?

AG: Thanks. I always hope the universe will smile on me for hard work and doing the right thing, and sometimes it does. A big advantage Blue Blood had in coming to the web is that the magazine was always subscription-driven and we had free sites for the community for years before we launched our first membership site. We actually had paid members before we had even actually launched the first pay site because we tested out a banner rotation for a few minutes and people saw it. I really appreciate the support we’ve gotten over the years and try to really put a lot back into the scene and into having . . .

Cool promo pic of yours truly by Forrest Black. Read the whole interview by Beda Hoydenish on AltPorn.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.

I’ve been trying (fairly unsuccessfully) to recall all of my science fiction writing credits. As a result, I’ve been ego-searching various strings like +”amelia g” +”science fiction” and +”amelia g” +”author” and so forth.

I was surprised to note the book SexCrime: an anthology of underground love and subversive erotica, edited by Cecilia Tan, had come out in a Kindle edition. I wish people would tell me these things. I’m not that hard to find. But it is still fun to find new credits, even if via search engine.

The book collects an assortment of stories on the topic of dystopian cyberpunk sorts of futures and gets its name from George Orwell’s 1984. I believe the story I have in this collection is one called “Rocket Queen”, which you will have already read if you have a vintage copy of Blue Blood magazine #3 in print with the Genitorturers on the cover. “Rocket Queen” also remains the only science fiction tale to ever be published in Thomas S. Roche’s celebrated noir crime Noirotica series.

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.

I enjoyed LiveJournal because sometimes I have fragments of ideas which are not ready to be an official article, but it is nice to be able to start giving the words shape. I also felt like I could actually get to know people on there. Like, if I met someone at a rock show, we could exchange info and continue getting to know one another. I was extremely bugged, however, when I started seeing people out at night and I’d ask them how they were and be told to read their LJ. Why bother leaving the house if you refuse to have a conversation? Over time, people started taking LJ more and more seriously. This meant that, first of all, that, if I complained about work on there, some dick would take it as uber-personally and big deal as if I had sent out a press release and posted “I had a hard day because blah blah” to every high traffic site I operate. Secondly, there started to be too many people on my LJ list for me to keep up with what everyone was up to. Most disappointingly, treating LJ as a publishing platform rather than a diary meant that other people started writing less and less personal entries and more and more press release-like entries which had more to do with how they wish to be perceived than who they truly are.

At first, I hated MySpace because it seemed like a service whose only application was to allow other people access to my Rolodex without having to say “thanks for the introduction”. Then I also hated MySpace because it seemed to pull audience from LJ, which I had enjoyed the interactivity of, and MySpace didn’t really seem to have any way to get to know people. MySpace is like this menu of people who seem like, in another life, I might have really enjoyed knowing them, but MySpace gives just enough of a taste to feel weird about people, without really enough to know them at all. Partly, MySpace is so terribly public that one really ought to keep anything private off there, but this means that there are always aspects of a person left off there which would be important to know if you were truly meeting them. And, if you are forthcoming with someone who has a popular MySpace account, you can’t trust that they will know to keep private things private, libel laws or no. Who wants to spend all their time in legal battles? It is easier to just be really private and closed off. I hired people to handle my MySpace accounts for me because MySpace filled me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness. There are certain sorts of MySpace messages, I enjoy answering personally. (If you got a message with my name signed to it, I wrote it.) For the most part, though, every time I’ve thought a Los Angeles person I met on there seemed like someone I’d want to know, they ended up digitally booty-calling me. Part of me thinks I should be flattered by this, as I generally am motivated to converse with people who are accomplished, intelligent, talented, creative, famous, etc. But it just makes me ache inside. Do human beings no longer meet in person for anything besides sex?

Then, one of the years I spoke at SXSW, the big interactive launch of the season was Twitter. Everyone was all a-twitter over this new ADD version of LiveJournal. Instead of having to read long transcripts of arguments someone had with their mom or extensive deconstructions of the merits of macaroni with and without cheese, Twitter only leaves room for 140 characters in a post. If you have a Blackberry or an iPhone or similar cell phone, it is easy to update your Twitter even while driving in traffic. (Not that I recommend this, as I’m pretty sure it might be illegal or dangerous or something most places.) Because of the SXSW launch and general tech community culture driving the initial Twitter world, I had mostly people I knew from that part of my life on my read list and I felt like I actually was getting to know some interesting and accomplished people a bit better on there, seeing cool links as news broke, and generally getting to enjoy a new Web 2.0 property. I’m not sure if there was a panel at the recent adult trade shows in Vegas where everyone was told that Twitter is great for interacting with fans or getting traffic or what, but I’ve recently had a couple hundred new people add me to their Twitter follow lists. Although early on, I just had my assistant add back all new follows on Twitter and I’d just remove the boring or annoying ones later, I now prefer to check out each new follow personally. This means that now, when I think of posting what delicious things I am consuming for breakfast (iced soy latte and smoked salmon on low salt sprouted grain bread), I feel guilty like I should really get on checking out all those new accounts which have expressed interest by following my account. Only then I have to wonder how many followed my Twitter because they are interested in me and how many followed because they want me to be interested in them? And, of course, I recently got to discover that 140 characters is not too few for someone to start drama, but it is too few to explain one’s point diplomatically enough to get them to chill.

Although I was an early adopter on Twitter, I came to Facebook late. Partly it had trouble with my name and partly I had to get alumni email stuff set up for it to be useful in finding former classmates. Plus the places in Germany, Belgium, Israel, and Switzerland where I went to school in my teen years were not listed and the system seemed to be set up for fewer high schools. Facebook tech support is impressively by far the most responsible and effective of any of the social networking sites and I eventually did get an account properly set up there. On Facebook, I used a different rule of thumb for friending people or approved friend requests: I only wanted friends on there who I would deliberately have a meal or a tasty beverage with. If the person is someone I’d be pleased to get a dinner or drinks invite from or a person I’d be likely to extend a dinner or drinks invite to, then I’d approve them. If the person is just someone who would like me to take their photo or who would only be interested in dining with me if I brought important (to them) or fuckable (by them) people with me, then that would be a no. I find it unfortunate that my morbid college friends can’t shut up about my two friends from that time period who died tragically. If the deaths of those two people saddens my living friends half as much as me, I’d expect they would want to think about it a bit less often than daily. My Facebook friend add process is slow because when a new person adds me who I want to add back, I like to write a personal note to them and I do keep up with my friends status feeds and such. I update my own Facebook status with Twitter and import notes from my LiveJournal, so my Facebook friends probably get a mildly more complete view. But tonight, I logged onto Facebook thinking that maybe I would do something sociable and just felt a wave of social anxiety. Although there are five or six pending requests on there I was really really looking forward to approving and interacting with, there were also a hundred I was kind of stumped by. Lots of women I’ve known have naturally changed their names. Lots of people I’ve known by fannish names or punk rock nicknames and I don’t recall what their mamma called them, even if I knew once. Remembering multiple names for every person becomes really hard once one has met enough people. I recognized some of the add requests as people I’ve photographed but don’t know and some as people who dated friends of friends of friends or who were otherwise tangentially part of social groups I was in. Not people I dislike at all, but not all people I’d be inclined to hang with if I were in town for a weekend or vice-versa. Some people ring a bell and I agonize over where I know them from, but don’t want to offend by asking. My time is so limited that I’d really like to have just one social platform where everyone on my list is someone who might actually care if I had a death in the family. Or at least enjoy getting coffee with me on a good day.

Actually, although I still minimally participate in LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter, and Facebook, I find that, for me, all the new Web 2.0 modes of interaction feel great for a few months and then feel kinda ache-inducing. If I’m so connected, why do I feel so disconnected? The only web interaction sites which tend to consistently be enjoyable for me are forums. This is why it is so important to me that the BlueBlod.net boards be a place where people from varied backgrounds can exchange different viewpoints in an intelligent and real way, without tonal BS bulletpoints, without flame wars, without being unable to back up what they say.

But, every once in a while, it just all fills me with such a deep keening sense of loneliness, I pine for the days when I used to just drop by friends’ houses and vice-versa, when it felt worth getting dressed up to go out, whether or not photos would be taken. I realize this is the internet age equivalent of longing for the times when people dressed up to go visit the town square. I remember my grandparents talking about country clubs taking the place of the town square or something along those lines that a child’s mind couldn’t quite grasp. A country club is too geographically local for today’s mobile world, though. I wish I could take a year off and just travel and write and eat right and visit people from different times in my life and different areas of my interests and see who I really connect or re-connect with and who is just a pleasant memory. The country club of Web 2.0 is just simultaneously overwhelming with the constant clamor of thousands of apparently potential friends and lonely with lack of anything real enough to feel . . . well, real.

Writer John Updike passed away this morning. I used to confuse John Updike and John Irving, so I was, as a child, afraid to pick up a John Updike book, for fear someone would get their penis chomped during a blow job. Of course, that was “The World According to Garp”, but I already said I was a kid when this confused me.

Most obituaries today will probably mention the Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom novels which won John Updike two Pulitzers. The series is Rabbit Run, Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, Rabbit At Rest, and Rabbit Remembered. I don’t really recall why I confused Rabbit and Garp, other than perhaps just the fact that both participated in somewhat unappealing grown-up sex I was too young to understand. I’ve seen a few obits today which refer to John Updike as a chronicler of small town life”, but only people from Manhattan think Ipswich, Massachusetts is small town America, John Updike wrote about the suburbs during a time when Americans were migrating from the cities to the burbs. On the topic of adulterers from suburban New England, John Updike once famously said, “if I have not exhausted it, it has exhausted me.” (Actually, I’ve seen that quote written a few ways over the years, so he once famously said something kinda like that which expressed that sentiment.)

For a writer, John Updike’s commitment to actually produce writing was inspiring. He was very candid about the fact that his prose writing paid the bills more than his fiction did, and that he liked the security of knowing that something along the lines of a book review would be published . . . and paid for. The Simpsons alluded to this in the episode “Insane Clown Poppy” where John Updike writes a Krusty the Klown bio called Your Shoes Too Big To Kickbox God. Your Shoes Too Big To Kickbox God is of about the same commerce/quality ratio as all Krusty endorsed products, which is to say it is comedically short and better for making money than whatever its stated purpose is. Krusty Burger, anyone? Delightfully, John Updike voiced himself on The Simpsons.

If, unlike me, your siblings don’t use Mr. Burns sound files as their custom ring tone for you, you would probably be most aware of John Updike as the writer of The Witches of Eastwick. The Witches of Eastwick is possibly the only time I saw a movie before I read the book and then didn’t read the book. (I saw Fight Club before reading the book, but I read it.) Ironically, the reason I didn’t like the movie enough to seek out the book was that the aforementioned witches conjure the perfect man and he is Jack Nicholson, who was not nearly femme-y enough for my taste at the time. Over the years, I’ve grown to appreciate Jack Nicholson more because, in adult life, fearlessness and force of personality are so deeply more important and enjoyable than sharp cheekbones and full lips. And I’ve grown to appreciate John Updike more because I am now more sympathetic to (or at least tolerant of) weakness of character, of the sort John Updike so deftly wrote about, than I was at age twelve. As a child, I thought that only bad people were imperfect. Part of growing up is accepting that nobody, including yourself, is as perfect as you wish.

Much is made of the fact that John Updike had one of his fictional characters win a Nobel Prize in Literature. The famous author did win a lifetime achievement Bad Sex in Fiction Prize. And, as mentioned, a couple Pulitzers. And a couple National Book Awards. And about a gajillion other honors. So I think his life can count as one well-lived, without the Nobel. I just looked at a listing of all the winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature from 1901 to the present. I’m pretty darn well read and I’ve only heard of maybe half a dozen of the winners from the past thirty years. You have to go back to Jean-Paul Sarte in 1964 before it is someone I’ve heard of, read, and thought was good. Sarte declined the prize. I took the ferry from Copenhagen to Sweden with a friend once and I feel that qualifies me to state categorically that playing yourself on The Simpsons is definitely cooler. Rest in peace, John Updike.

I would like to say that I was aware of Tucker Max long before he was ever in print. On account of how I’m such a spectacularly plugged-in girl on the interwebs. The truth is that there are massively high traffic sites which somehow never have audiences intersect. In actuality, I was stuck in the Phoenix airport when visiting my family and, strangely enough, the Phoenix airport actually has a pretty good Borders. Which even more strangely contained a book with a sleek black cover featuring a gentleman with an antisocial smirk holding, I believe, a bottle and a bottle blonde with her visage replaced with a Your Face Here sign. The title was the clever I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. I bought it along with a stack of noir novels.

Tucker Max’s I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell chronicles the author’s drunken and salacious exploits. He came of age as the offspring of a South Beach restauranteur. From his writing, I gather his taste thus unsurprisingly runs to big-titted blondes with fit but not skinny bodies. Mildly Southern demeanor potentially a plus. Too bad for him that his intelligence level is off-the-scale brilliant. Tucker Max has raised hitting on drunk human sluts to the art form, or perhaps sport, of a more advanced species.

He comes across to some reviewers as a misogynist. He does tend to refer to women as filthy whores and mention that they owe him a rib. The following excerpt from a tale of a horseracing tailgate party drinking contest is a pretty representative exchange from his book:

1:58: She raises the first shot and gives me a toast, “Give me chastity and give me continence – but not yet . . . St. Augustine!” All her little friends laugh and cheer. Amateurs.

Girl: That was really sexist.”
Tucker: No it wasn’t, it was a joke. If I had said that women are nothing but life support for pussy, now THAT would be sexist.”
Girl: “Excuse me?”
Tucker: “If I had called her a hot mouth, that would be sexist too. Or, if I said that the only thing going for her is that she’s 98.6 degrees and has two wet holes, that would be very sexist. But I didn’t say those things, did I?”
Girl: “WHAT?”
Tucker: “Uh oh! Did I piss you off? Are you going to write angsty poetry?!?”

Women in the stories Tucker recounts also tend to say things along the lines of, “I can’t believe how funny I think you are and I’m a girl.” It is my opinion that they are either (a) easily manipulated chicks or (b) missing the fucking point. I’m not delusional, so I’m well aware that some people look at my own work and aren’t aware of anything deeper than quality photos of punk genitalia and gothic boobies, although there is more to it. But I do understand that sometimes pervy sex is the common denominator for a reason. Sure, Tucker regularly points out how much pussy he has thrown at him 24/7 and how great he is at acquiring even difficult pussy. His writing career started when he first launched his site as a dating application. Some chicks will always be attracted to a guy they believe other chicks want. Some guys will be impressed by any dude who claims to have laid miles of pipe. Although I went through a phase in the late 80’s where I liked to tie up blonde boys from good families, that was a long time ago, so some people will undoubtedly be surprised that I am such a huge fan of Tucker Max’s writing that I told my panelmates at the recent SXSW confab that I’d be late getting to the green room for our panel because I was going to watch Tucker Max speak at his first. Then again, readers who really got BLT, the antisocial punk rock humor zine I did in DC, well, I think they will understand the Tucker Max appeal.

The point is not that Tucker Max is a hard-drinking vanilla guy who has frequent sex with varied partners. The point is that his writing is brilliant, articulate, painfully insightful, and totally fearless and he is able to find the humor in absolutely anything. John Hargrave of Zug.com, the moderator of Tucker’s one man SXSW panel From Blog to Book called the author “a promiscuous drunken Tolstoy.” To give you an idea of the Zug perspective, my horoscope on the site today suggests I “Call a hardware store and whisper “stucco” into the phone over and over. “Stucco stucco stucco stucco stucco.” If they hang up, simply call back.” I used to manage an adult boutique where callers sometimes attempted this sort of thing. They might as well have been saying “stucco” for all the impact it had on folks who sold lingerie and vibrators, although only the serious submissives called back to speak with the manager, once I got through with them. At the end of the From Blog to Book panel, John Hargrave was kind enough to pour healthy doses of something called Tucker Max Death Mix. The ingredients of which are apparently Everclear, Lemon-Lime Gatorade, and Red Bull. No wonder so many Tucker Max Drunk stories entail such copious amounts of vomit.

Tucker Max claims to have little formal idea how to write properly. This is debatable as he went to both U Chicago and Duke Law. Both good schools. But he assured his SXSW audience that he has no clue how to use commas, confuses forms of the word ‘too’, and doesn’t really consider himself a writer. He says he tries not to consider his audience when writing, to just concentrate on telling his story in his own authentic way. “I write in my authentic voice,” he says. Oh yeah, and then he works on trimming the fat from his work. But the authenticity is key.

According to Tucker Max’s business card, the name of his company is Rudius Media. According to the Rudius web site, “a rudius is a wooden sword, given by the Roman Emperor to a gladiator upon attainment of his freedom.” It may be happy coincidence that this is probably also a play on the word ‘rude’, but whatever. The best thing about Tucker Max’s writing is the sense of abandonment, the extreme freedom. He’ll tell you his ferocious opinion of some lesser person that himself and he’ll tell you his dick is average in size, although a bit large to put in a midget or a small girl’s colon. He may be coy about whether he has ever done cocaine in Vegas, but he’ll tell you how much hostile fun he is on absinthe. He’ll detail how he drove a mildly inconsiderate girl’s car through the storefront of a donut shop. He’ll pressure all the law firms in Silcon Valley into raising their salaries for summer interns by posting sock puppet conversations with himself on Infirmation.com. He’ll tell girls he is in a Christian rap band and coerce his friends into playing along. He’ll get accidentally pepper-sprayed during the sex act. He’ll bring friends in Special Ops to a politically left wing cocktail party. He’ll get thrown out of IHOP. He’ll get thrown out of Denny’s. He’ll get thrown out of Mickey D’s. And he’ll pretty shamelessly tell you – and everyone else – about it. Although his book has been out for more than a year now, he says it is still selling a remarkable 2,000 copies a week to people like me who are just discovering him. He says he designed the flawlessly appropriate book cover himself too. Tucker Max challenges the SXSW audience to check his numbers on Bookscan because everything he says is true and this is one outlandish tale which is verifiable.

And why, you may ask, was I at the airport, while visiting my family, buying noir novels and I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell? All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Actually, I have a pretty happy family, as these things go, but that just seemed like such an elegant literate way to close that I almost couldn’t help myself. Of course, now I fucked it all up with the disclaimer.