Years ago, a photo Forrest Black and I shot of Malcolm Jamal-Warner was almost published by Vibe. At the time, Malcolm Jamal-Warner was starring on Malcolm & Eddie with Eddie Griffin, but still best known for whatever it was he did on The Cosby Show. (I can’t speculate because I’ve never seen The Cosby Show, although I have seen a Chris Rock spoof of it.) I admit that I was interested in shooting him mostly because he was a charismatic guy with the world’s largest diamond tongue ring, at a time when tongue rings were still, ya know, radical. Vibe expressed interest and held onto the print for months. I was really excited to appear in such a large circulation music and lifestyle magazine then, but, alas, they eventually passed and sent my stuff back. No idea why to this day.

But now I know Vibe will never be on my list of credits because effective today, the magazine has ceased to exist. Staffers were in the middle of work on a Michael Jackson tribute issue when they received a memo, from CEO Steve Aaron, telling them they could basically go home. Vibe was hit hard by a combination of lack of access to venture capital and the huge decline in advertising, especially in Vibe’s bread and butter automotive and fashion categories, due to either recession belt-tightening or companies plain going out of business. I’m not a huge fan of venture capital because I feel it puts the banking people in control over creative, while allowing companies to spend vast sums on overpriced parties and coders and real estate in a way which can make otherwise viable businesses unable to compete in an environment where the venture capital-funded businesses will soon also go under due to irrational business plans. Nonetheless, I’m not thrilled that the taxpayers bailed out the banks but not really the automotive industry and this means companies like Vibe have to be shuttered.

I would think the Vibe web site would be an asset with some value, and the closing memo says digital did well for them, simply not well enough to counterbalance the rest in this economy, only apparently it is not for sale, so it may have too many liens from venture capital folks on it or something along those lines. At any rate, the issue of Vibe on the stands now, with Eminem on the cover, will be its last and the web site will stop updating immediately and be closed in the next month. I love magazines and it saddens me to see this rash of magazines folding.

A while back, I asked the Blue Blood boards Have you ever been fired from a job? It probably comes as no surprise to anyone that most of our members are extremely talented and conscientious and hardworking, yet have personality, err, quirks which make it hard to always fit in at a job.

I know my personal experience of working in other people’s offices was that everyone always adored me for the first two weeks. I did a lot of contract design work where I would get called in when everyone was crashing on deadline, and horribly behind, and I think I got love for saving the day with my efficient work processes. Unfortunately, after about six weeks in any of these offices, I would start contemplating the fact that I wouldn’t have to go to work if I drove off the road on the way. I also had the tendency to have trouble with some of the social portions of work.

Running my own media empire, I have become more reserved over time, but I did not used to really have any comprehension of corporate culture. I mean, I could wear a suit and twist the colored parts of my hair under and pin them down, but I was still me. I would cheerfully explain to my coworkers that I thought health insurance was the big lie the overculture used to force us to live small lives. I would explain how I lived in a punk rock group house with a dozen other people, so my occasional corporate paychecks went really far, and I could afford to spend a lot of my time having adventures. I would bring in copies of first my antisocial punk rock humor zine BLT aka Black Leather Times and then later early issues of Blue Blood in print. Occasionally, I would work for a client like MTV who would specifically request back the girl with the “wild zines”, but, as most of my work was Federal contracts, government presentations, management consultant graphics, and such . . . well, I think the experience can be summed up by saying that, when I worked for EDS for a full three months, they really wanted me to work there permanently, but they also totally freaked out when I wore red stockings with a Brooks Brothers suit one day. And I’d thought I looked both especially conservative and especially attractive that day and usually I felt like I only hit one metric or the other.

I could never quite seem to match up my abilities and education with a job which really fit and challenged me and gave me room to grow. I know this is a very familiar frustration for most folks here. Sometimes the jobs which were obviously intended for trained monkeys were the most comfortable to do, more pleasant than the ones which were a whole step up from trained monkey where they expected me to be grateful for the low-end nonsense I could do in fifteen minutes and had to pretend took all day.

Forrest Black, in his quest for the perfect cheeseburger, came across the Serious Eats site. Serious Eats featured a funny article about a hot tattooed punk guy who got fired from Burger King for bathing in the kitchen sink . . . and posting it on MySpace and YouTube. The hilarious video posted above lead various Serious Eats readers to opine that he was trying to get fired.

They just don’t understand. I suspect he did not particularly care if he got fired. I suspect he has a skill set which should allow him to do something a heck of a lot higher end than work at Burger King, but somehow he never quite plugged into the right position. I think probably half the people I know, probably including myself, never quite slotted into something challenging and inspiring and really the right fit for their personality and capabilities. Sure, some people are lazy. But it takes a certain amount of effort to do your hair, take a bubble bath in the workplace, have someone videotape it, and post it all over the interwebs. So that is not laziness. It is not trying to get fired either. It’s just not having, fitting into the corporate culture, high on the to-do list, at a low-end job. Doing something amusing was higher priority. If you have ever been there, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, maybe it is still a head-scratcher.

According to 2News WTDN, the Xenia, Ohio NBC affiliate, Mr. Unstable’s BK bubble bath kind of sucked for the shift manager Karen Cragg, who apparently has only held fast food jobs and was fired, along with the bather and pals. She feels that Burger King corporate mistreated her by firing her when she didn’t even know about the incident until the sink was already punk rocker soup. She might be able to cope with some of that frustrated rage by doing something appalling for fun at her next job.

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.

Maybe I should post it here whenever Blue Blood gets a press mention, but I usually don’t. You all were great when I was feeling sad about one mean press bite, so I also wanted to share that I’ve been really happy about a mention we got on Dark Side of the Net recently.

Anyway, Carrie Carolin, the seemingly indefatigable editor of all things dark recently culled and updated her Dark, Goth and Horror Zines section and here is what she wrote about Blue Blood:

“BlueBlood.net – Highly recommended! The paper magazine is legendary, and its amazing companion website is worth visiting every day or two for new content. High quality articles and photos on fashion, music, and literature. Blogs, community postings, and a newswire, too. This is pretty much the center of the goth universe as it stands today. Extremely professional and high quality. Their MySpace page is here.”

I’m not sure precisely how long editor Carrie Carolin has been collating the best dark links on the web, but it feels like three reincarnations at least. I just checked and when I wrote her site up for Playboy in 1999, I referred to it as “Carrie Carolin’s respected and long-running Dark Side of the Net,” so it was already the gold-standard then and the site was hosted on Gothic.net before that and I think somewhere else before that, maybe a couple somewhere elses. So it is lovely to get positive coverage like that and that much more meaningful coming from such an esteemed source.