I’ve been looking forward to Zombieland since the Comic Con Zombie Walk sponsored by the movie. Finally got to see it and it did not disappoint. Zombieland is not destined to be the kind of cult classic Shaun of the Dead is, but it is still damn funny.

Sure, it is a horror movie and has a lot of black zombie blood spilled, so it is not for the squeamish, but Zombieland is really more of a comedy than a scarefest. A very gory disgusting blood-splattered comedy with very funny makeshift weapons. Woody Harrelson’s badassery and Jesse Eisenberg’s fearfulness play off one another to laugh out loud effect. There is a cameo in it that was almost as awesome as Tom Cruise in Tropic Thunder, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise, so that is all I’ll say on that.

Here is a fun fact to know and share: Jesse Eisenberg, who plays the most frightened person on earth in Zombieland is menaced by a zombie clown in the movie. I think that is some sort of internet double whammy getting clowns and zombies in the same place. The amusing trivia on that, though, is that Jesse Eisenberg’s mother worked as a professional clown for twenty years. Hopefully not a zombie one.

Zak Smith’s memoir We Did Porn is beautifully-produced by Tinhouse Books and it is a beautifully-written, readable book, featuring entertaining aphorisms and some sex stuff which might be titillating to people who are not me. A peculiarity of the book is the juxtaposition of absolutely brilliant cultural insights about the art world, the educated world, California, and the larger society . . . with really off-base gullible claims about the porn business.

Memoir is usually the process by which the writer imposes story on his or her life. In Los Angeles, memoirists depressingly often impose the tale of their descent into and return from addition as an overlay on their life stories. Zak Smith apparently does not particularly partake of the cocaine he mentions is pervasive in Porn Valley, so his memoir does not fall into the twelve steppers rewrite of existence and that is a plus for any Los Angeles memoir. Zak Smith makes it clear in his anecdotes about his experiences as a successful painter in New York that he doesn’t really like employing narrative structure in his art and he is aware of it. He seems to anticipate that someone might note the lack of narrative structure in his memoir. One of the most interesting things about the book is that Zak Smith does porn partly as artistic exploration and he is very aware of the meta nature of doing the thing to write about the thing.

Like me, Zak Smith (Zak Sabbath to his porn fans) comes out of the DC punk scene. Maybe this commonality is why his comments about California really resonate with me, but I feel like he has at least a really good East Coaster grasp of Cali. Zak Smith writes, “It’s not easy to know what’s going on in California . . . The people in charge are often trained actors, and two of its biggest businesses are aerospace — which is secret — and movies — which is lies . . . I’m from DC. DC punk bands are known for refusing to play ball. In New York, they’re known for trying to play ball, and failing, and then going back to not playing ball. SoCal bands are known for playing ball and being good at it and liking it and laughing at you. And then being on cable TV shows where they get tattooed.” Too true.

In We Did Porn, Zak Smith also writes about the peculiar mood society was in during the “zeroes” at the turn of the millennium. The best art explains something the viewer believes deeply to be true and expresses it in a way the viewer had not previously considered. Zak Smith’s deconstruction of the millennial culture of whiny BS is art; the first thing I thought reading it was that other people needed to read this too. He talks about how politics and news had gotten to the point where the disparate versions of reality presented were utterly incompatible with one another. He points out that the internet facilitated the creation and dissemination of antifacts. Zak Smith postulates that this cynical time lead to a sense that reality was slippery and indistinct, with blurred cause and effect. He writes, “People’s essential hopelessness made everything seem boring and they only talked about a topic if everyone could agree that it was stupid. Wit consisted of coming off as the least bitter complainer.” He describes reality television as offering “the thrill of finding yourself a victim of electoral fraud without the disappointment of realizing it might matter.” Most poetically, Zak Smith ruminates on zombie popularity, “In movies, zombies were the most popular monster. They are unusual, among monsters, for being inferior to their victims and winning only by weight of numbers, and for having no brains, but wanting to eat them.” A lot of the descriptions in We Did Porn reference this sort of slippery reality, stating maybe it is A or maybe it is not A, and this really works for the material.

The most amusing water cooler fact in the book is that the British Secret Intelligence Service used to use semen as disappearing ink. “Happiness writes white”, he says. I hope the semen thing is not an antifact because it is awesome.

Okay, I know the book is called We Did Porn and I haven’t really mentioned the porn part yet. The porn part is really odd to me. Zak Smith writes with wit and self-knowledge in so many areas, and I hesitate to call a memoir wrong in any way, but he just has many of his basic facts wrong on porn. Zak Smith effortlessly sees through the surfaces in the art world, but it is like he swallows whole every nonsense bullet point Porn Valley wants him to believe. When obviously intelligent people spew implausible marketing claims, I tend to assume that they are simply part of the astroturfing effort, but Zak Smith comes across more sincere and genuine than that. It’s just that some of his keen insight is blunted, when it comes to the porn industry, because it is predicated on faulty assumptions.

Most notably, he claims that porn is bigger than the mainstream movie industry and bigger than the automotive industry. Okay, a while back, an adult industry magazine told a newspaper reporter that the adult industry accounts for fourteen billion dollars of business gross every year. Many sources have repeated that the porn industry accounts for ten to fourteen billion dollars in the United States and fifty-seven billion dollars world-wide. Every year. First of all, these numbers are fictional. Playboy has a market cap of a hundred million and grosses about three hundred million a year. Even if you figure that Penthouse, Hustler, Vivid, and Private all do much bigger numbers than those, there is no way porn accounts for that much financial activity.

But let’s say, for some reason, we believe that porn moves $14 billion in the USA annually and $57 billion globally. Toyota has a market cap of one hundred thirty billion and an annual gross of more than two hundred billion. Ford has a market cap of twenty-three billion and grosses around a hundred fifty billion annually. Porn biz is not even a blip compared to the auto industry. It is more difficult to determine precise numbers for companies which produce non-porn movies, as many also sell alcohol or other fairly unrelated products, however I think Box Office Mojo is an excellent source for how movies are charting. They estimate around an average of ten billion in box office yearly and their site explicitly states that, “Box office tracking refers to theatrical box office earnings. Additional sources of revenue, such as home entertainment sales and rentals, television rights, product placement fees, etc. are not included. All grosses published reflect domestic earnings, i.e., United States and Canada, unless otherwise noted.” Heck, all told, with everything factored in, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen alone might do more dollar volume than the entire global porn industry.

So the statements about the size of the porn business are the wrongest ones, but Zak Smith’s explanations of why people do porn are the oddest. He is not totally off-base on many of the motivations, some are insightful, and I’ll probably even write an article later about his intriguing statement that some people like to get paid for sex to evade responsibility for their actions. I laughed out loud at his awesome description of inviting a friend to BBQ and watch a samurai movie in his chapter entitled, “How do your friends talk to you after you start making porn?” This was familiar to me from how friends from school or other areas of my life sometimes treat me. (I’ll spare you all the porn vs. erotica, mainstream Porn Valley vs. independent counterculture debate for the moment.)

The book opens with Zak Smith writing about a disastrous Valentines Day date where the girl he is with has sex with someone else in the bathroom during their meal and then weeps extensively without explaining why and then posts about it online. He says that he loathes the uncertainty of dating; he hates not knowing what is going to happen. I saw Nina Hartley speak at a feminist conversation series a while back and she pointed out that the biggest attraction of porn for her was negotiated sex scenes. She likes to know what is going to happen and found that porn allowed her limits and activities to be comfortably defined beforehand. I don’t know Zak Smith, so I could be wrong, but I think he has the same reasoning as Nina Hartley on that motivation. Narrative structure would require that, having introduced the gun of hating dating in the first act, it would go off in the third act when explanations for why people perform in porn videos are offered. But narrative structure is not Zak Smith’s thing.

Full disclosure: To this day, Zak Smith and his girlfriend Mandy Morbid remain the only people to ever cite working with SuicideGirls as a reason they could not work with Blue Blood. People that Zak Smith and Forrest Black and I know in common, such as Voltaire, had mentioned a number of times that Zak Sabbath wanted to meet us. So I was surprised when Forrest Black and Zak finally met at the Young Hollywood party for Carlos Batts and then Zak said SuicideGirls wouldn’t let him do anything on the list of things I’d assumed he wanted an introduction for. Forrest Black and I actually shot and went to lunch with Voltaire during one of the stays at her home that Zak Smith mentions in his book, but Voltaire was irritated that Zak was trying to get her to do porn, when she’d already said no, so she didn’t invite him to lunch.

So I had an oddly wistful reaction to the We Did Porn memoir. A lot of it resonated with me and made me want to discuss parts of it. Zak and I both got liberal arts educations from high end New England schools, which we then turned to creative output, over-intellectualizing pop culture and underbelly. We both spent some formative years in the DC punk scene. I like the aesthetic he and Mandy Morbid present. But there is also a chasm of differences. All the big American mainstream porn video companies Zak Sabbath has worked with have asked me to direct for them and I’ve chosen not to do so. In fact, although there are certainly differences in our interests, despite the commonalities, the Venn Diagram of who he hangs out with and who I do still has surprisingly few people in common. I guess he plays for a different team.

When I started publishing Blue Blood in 1992 from the DC suburbs in Maryland, maybe I was just too new or too far away from Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco to realize there were teams. Maybe the teams arrived with the internet. I don’t know. At the time, however, the best part of doing Blue Blood was the enormous access it gave me to interesting people. It makes me feel a bit melancholy that now doing Blue Blood sometimes throws up a wall instead. I don’t really understand how the teams are delineated or chosen. I think they handed out the rulebooks in Hollywood and I was in Rockville at the time and missed it. I don’t know if I ended up on the wrong team. Or Zak ended up on the wrong team. But he doesn’t seem like the sort of person who should be on a different team from the one I’m on, so I feel like somebody did something weird with the draft picks.

I feel like the lines must have been drawn all wrong. If someone would show me the map people are using, I think I might be able to figure out the flaw in the cartography.

I know that, with Twilight and True Blood and Being Human and the onward march of more and more sexy vampires, nonconformists are hoping for a different monster to idealize. It is always vaguely uncomfortable when the supposedly appalling, unique, and individualistic thing you are into becomes commonplace. For a while, those who loved monsters but did not want to jump on the vampire bandwagon made do with werewolves. The thing is that werewolves represent rage, not sexual rage, just mad-as-hell out-of-control blind rage. And that is ultimately not that hot for most people. Although I confess to having had one or two stories published where I did write some werewolf sex or romance in there, in my defense, one was written on assignment and one was written partly to match accompanying illustrations already selected. At any rate, werewolves just plain don’t have the sexual magnetism of vampires and werewolf costumes are really difficult as heck to put together.

Zombie costumes, on the other hand, are pretty easy to put together. You just need to look decaying and injured and you can even make a sexy zombie costume by distressing your zombie wardrobe. A costume which is easy to do is good for group activities. Getting a bunch of people to dress up as monsters and go out on the town together is fun. Fewer people have sort of cannon ideas of what a zombie must be, as opposed to what a vampire or werewolf must be, so there is more freedom in costuming for zombie parties. But zombies are still ultimately kind of leprosy monsters. You and fifty comrades chanting “brains, brains, brains” in your torn underwear in a public place is awesome. But the actual zombie concept of a shambling stupid corpse with parts falling off is not so hot, Julie notwithstanding. And, although I forget which company it was, one of the big media corporate giants ran a zombie walk at Comic Con last weekend. So, after co-option, nobody really tends to get individuality points for being into zombies over vamps any more.

So I was looking at this half naked photo series by Ivan Hidalgo which featured sexy zombies and it brought the vital question to mind: Are zombies sexy or do they just make for good costumes?

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.

As part of the Halloween festivities, a series called spiderwebs, featuring Natalie Addams shot by Matthew Cooke just posted to the Blue Blood VIP members area. (I actually meant for it to post tomorrow, but I’m a little distracted with the Halloween holiday celebration, so y’all get it a day early.) Natalie Addams busted out the gothic cobwebs beautifully for this. These sexy spooky images are the eighth Blue Blood set of Natalie Addams and mark photographer Matthew Cooke’s first set for Blue Blood. Forrest Black and I have shared a house with him before, but this is his first Blue Blood appearance, although you should expect many more. Let’s make him feel welcome! Although I promise Natalie is delightfully nude on BlueBlood.com, we can’t show you any nudity here on BlueBlood.net, but you can check out a very hot preview in this free Natalie Addams Halloween gallery. Some of Natalie’s other credits include magazine appearances in Marquis, Sonic Seducer, Rue Morgue, Bizarre, Gothic Beauty, Tattoo Savage, DDI, Drum Pro, and Secret. Blue Blood superstar hotties do tend to get immortalized in print. And now, I’d like to share the sensually artistic Natalie’s thoughts on Halloween with you all.

Amelia G: What are your favorite kinds of Halloween treats?

Natalie Addams: Vegan Candies!! peanut chews, pumpkin pie.

Amelia G: How do you like to spend Halloween in general and do you have any special plans for Halloween this year?

Natalie Addams: I love dressing up, and of course halloween seems like it’s everyday to us goths ;) I usually like to go out and strut my costume on halloween, and see everyone’s costume creations. This year I am in New York filming some amazing zombie footage for the SMack! Halloween party. Hope to show you the photos and video footage soon :)

Amelia G: Last year, you were a sexy marionette. What are you wearing for Halloween this year?

Natalie Addams: I am wearing a rad zombie costume featuring a amazing waist cincher by Eirik Aswang, lots of latex, blood, gore, medical crosses. Kinda a medical barbie doll/giesha gone horribly wrong.

Amelia G: What are your favorite holidays?

Natalie Addams: ^v^Halloween!! by far!! An excuse to dress up and make even crazier outfits!

Both the Hollywood movie industry press and the porn industry press have been falling all over themselves trying to explain why it is somehow a different piece of crossover news that award-winning writer/director Steven Soderbergh cast award-winning pornstar Sasha Grey in his upcoming Marc Cuban-financed film The Girlfriend Experience. She plays the role of, in case the title was no tip-off, a high-end callgirl of the variety who provides what enthusiasts refer to as the total girlfriend experience.

Pundits trying to explain how Steven Soderbergh casting Sasha Grey is more ground-breaking than Jenna Jameson’s career explain that lots of pornstars have been able to crossover to horror, but The Girlfriend Experience is legit. They are wrong on a few fronts. First of all, why exactly do horror movies not count? Have they not looked at box office receipts for the past few years? Secondly, Jenna Jameson and Sasha Grey are both successful and it is not a contest of some sort, just because they are both famous, both beautiful, and have both had sex on camera. Acting like the two should face off somehow reminds me of playground debates over who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman. (Obviously Superman, unless Batman got the jump on him with kryptonite, which is admittedly likely with Batman’s penchant for science gadgets.) Jenna Jameson loudly proclaimed that she would “never spread [her] legs” for the adult industry again, before going on to mainstream crossover fare like, uhm, Zombie Strippers where she strutted her acting chops in the role of, uhm, a zombie stripper. When Kobé Tai played a stripper/escort in Very Bad Things, the role was not on the face of it particularly different, and the world did not appear to tilt on its axis due to her mainstream crossover. Discussions of mainstream porn crossover inevitably also turn to Dita Von Teese, quickly followed by debates over whether she has ever done hardcore and thus whether she counts or not. The answer is that, over the years, Dita Von Teese has done less and less explicit work. If you care, I believe she has never done boy/girl on-camera sex, but she has most definitely been penetrated by women on camera. Dita Von Teese certainly did a great job on her recent Wonderbra campaign and her live performances indicate she should be castable in more. I actually think it is a tremendous waste that Dita Von Teese has not been cast in more things, but I have no idea if she can actually act.

Pretty soon, audiences everywhere will get to see whether Sasha Grey can really act. I hope she can. Sasha Grey is the youngest ever winner of AVN’s Female Performer of the Year award. Steven Soderbergh is the youngest ever winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. I’d like to take this opportunity to point out that Steven Soderbergh won for a little film called Sex, Lies, and Videotape which primarily featured sexy James Spader masturbating to intellectual homemade porn. Which the ensuing record-breaking box office and awards indicated was something people wanted to see. I know I did. So, uhm, yeah, Steven Soderbergh is like totally mainstream and Sasha Grey is like totally porno.

The writing team of Brian Koppelman and David Levien penned the script for The Girlfriend Experience, which hopefully means Sasha Grey has some good material to act in. I mean, Steven Soderbergh and this particular writing team might have minted money with the Oceans franchise (remakes of remakes), but, when he really directs art, it is work like Sex, Lies, and Videotape, The Limey (Terrance Stamp on a badass rampage!), Traffic (Drugs!), Out of Sight, and Erin Brockovich that audiences and critics really get excited about it. Brian Koppelman and David Levien were responsible for a bunch of the good stuff on ESPN’s late lamented gambler serial Tilt, the excellent Matt Damon and Ed Norton vehicle Rounders, and the fun wannabe gangster Knockaround Guys. So I have high hopes for the quality of this project. The folks involved clearly know how to make good stuff when given the opportunity and Marc Cuban reportedly gave Steven Soderbergh a six picture deal including a lot of creative freedom.

The thing I love about Sasha Grey is that, the moment she got cast in something more Hollywood, she didn’t turn around and say that anyone who every masturbated to her videos or pictures was gross. She didn’t diss the industry which made her a star in the first place. I think there is every reason to believe she will continue doing a variety of projects which interest her and pay enough.

Perhaps I bristle at the word mainstream because, from a punk perspective, mainstream is a pejorative term, an insult, something you would really prefer not to be called. So Sasha Grey being directed by Steven Soderbergh should not be considered the mainstreaming of porn. It should be considered the freedom to do whatever you want, if you are good enough, and truly own who you are.

Although The Girlfriend Experience is going to be Sasha Grey’s first starring turn in this sort of feature, she also has parts upcoming in a couple of other interesting-looking films. Actually, she has a fairly significant role in Lee Demarbre’s Smash Cut, but I guess it has already been established that horror does not count. She also has a small role in Dick Rude’s forthcoming Quit. Dick Rude currently directs folks from The Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Clash, but is of course is best known for co-writing the punk cult classic Straight to Hell and appearing in a variety of acting roles in seminal punk films. Dick Rude played the part of Duke in one of the best punk movies of all time, Alex Cox’s Repo Man. So, in conclusion, let’s all go do some crimes. Instead of eating sushi and not paying, I’m thinking about creating art without putting defective and limiting labels on it, which include the words “mainstream” or “legit” anywhere.

Sasha Grey is simply a star. No modifiers necessary.

Until The Girlfriend Experience hits theatres, we have a Sasha Grey photo gallery to hold you.

I am fascinated by the idea of exploring how comic book style superpowers would impact real world human beings. In literature, last year’s Soon I Will be Invincible from Austin Grossman is the reigning champion of this sub-genre. I kind of felt sorry for David J. Schwartz having his novel Superpowers come out around the same time as Soon I Will be Invincible. He probably sold some extra copies via Amazon “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” recommendations, but comparing a pleasant enough light read with the brilliance of Austin Grossman’s book seemed almost cruel.

So it was in the television world with Tim Kring’s Heroes and The 4400 from René Echevarria and Scott Peters, but that is about to change. I found The 4400 because of the Netflix “Enjoyed By Members Who Enjoyed” feature. The first season of Heroes featured a set of interlocking stories about people from different walks of life who suddenly discovered they were special in a superpowered kind of way. Season One of Heroes was elegantly written. A politician discovers he can fly. A cheerleader discovers she can regenerate almost any injury. A uniform beat cop discovers he can read minds. A low level cube employee working at his father’s company discovers he can bend space and time. An artist discovers he can paint the future while shooting smack. A homecare provider discovers his empathy allows him to pick up abilities from other superpowered indivduals. A watch repairman discovers a method for killing people and absorbing their abilities into his own roster of skills. There is a shadowy Company trying to keep it all contained. There is a morally ambiguous and conflicted Company employee who also has a superpowered adoptive daughter. Season 1 of Heroes has a complex yet elegant and well-structured storyline where the tales of each of the many characters are interwoven into a satisfying whole piece with a logical conclusion.

The basic concept of The 4400 is that all the alien abductees from the past upmty-ump years are returned by their futuristic UFO captors all at once. None of them have aged and many seem to have developed extraordinary abilities. The 4400 started off with two special agents as the sort of center of the show. Tom Baldwin is the action-oriented agent played by Joel Gretsch who is no stranger to either law enforcement or SF roles. His partner Diana Skouris from the CDC is played by Jacqueline McKenzie. (Incidentally, that would be the Jacqueline McKenzie who played the Gabe character in Romper Stomper, doing full nudity fucking multiple skinheads and her father, and it doesn’t appear to have hurt her acting career one bit.) Although there are some overarching story arcs, each episode of the early episodes of The 4400 centers more around new characters discovering new abilities which are investigated by this lead governmental team. The show features in particular an interesting exploration of how the government would respond to finding a sudden influx of missing persons with superpowers. There is also quite a bit of variety in how different returnees react to having extraordinary abilities. On The 4400, scientists find that something in the blood called Promicin appears to be responsible for the various abilities people develop and, as the seasons progress, ways are found to give many people Promicin-catalyzed superpowered abilities. As with many television shows, however, as the seasons go on, the show’s writers try to keep it fresh by having many of the characters start acting . . . well, out of character.

Compared to the new season of Heroes, however, The 4400 had a deft touch. Not only that, but the current season of Heroes is blatantly riffing on ideas from The 4400, down to casting some of the same actors including Chad Faust. If you are, for some inexplicable reason planning on watching Season 3 of Heroes and you have not already watched the first few episodes, I recommend you stop reading now as spoilers are forthcoming. All right then.

So Milo Ventimiglia’s empathic Peter Petrelli from earlier seasons now has multiple versions of himself, all of whom are unsympathetic. He is a talented guy normally, but it is like he totally forgot how to act. The rumor mill says that he and Hayden Panettiere, who plays the cheerleader Claire Bennet, are or were romantically involved, so maybe that explains why, when she shoots one of his many versions, she says she always loved him and it comes across as creepy and incestuous. But actors should be able to play uncle and niece so that it does not seem like they are fucking, even if the real life actors are. Ew.

I guess heroin is no longer okay on a show about heroes and heroines because now lots of characters can get inaccurate visions of the future, without the bother of shooting up first. Now they can drink fictional African drugs, which is like totally more socially responsible.

So the serial killer from Season 1 of Heroes is now supposed to be a good guy. Maybe it is a trick and that is why his acting seems so bad, but long scenes where actors are acting like people acting badly are never a good idea. Plus serial killer Sylar or Gabriel or whatever the Heroes writers are calling him today has the most messed-up looking eyebrows ever. He had really thick eyebrows in the earlier seasons, but they look freaking drawn on in this one to a really distracting extent. (It was so distracting that I researched it and apparently he is playing Spock in the new Star Trek. He actually makes a kinda hot Spock, which just proves gothic eyebrows are sexy.)

Zachary Quinto’s eyebrows notwithstanding, one of the most jarring things about the current season of Heroes is that it is like all the actors decided they wanted to look more like movie stars than like their characters. Some characters have future versions of themselves who wear leather pants. The male actors all look like they have been passing the steroid injections around and spending all their time at the gym. Nothing wrong with wanting to be fit, but it is just implausible that all of these characters would be uber-buff. The styling on the show used to be really convincing and realistic and now it just seems like they are not even trying. Well, if the characters were all playing high end Hollywood escorts, I would consider it to be putting effort in, if they were all hellbent on working out and wearing designer clothes and too much expensive makeup. Seems less like trying when we are watching a fandom show which is supposed to feature characters from different walks of life. Even the good-guy scientist academic looks bizarrely ripped and spends most of his screen time with his shirt off. Then again, he is also either serial-killing or using spider powers to imprison people to function as lab rats. Or both.

Season 3 of Heroes brought in two of my favorite actors from The Wire and it still sucked. The talented Andre Royo who plays sympathetic junkie Bubbles on The Wire comes in as a mistreated and unjustly imprisoned vortex-making superpowered guy and it is obvious from his first moment on screen that things will end badly for him. Sexy badass Jamie Hector who played hard up-and-coming drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield on The Wire is a cool bad guy, with fear-fueled superpowers, on Heroes, but having the bad guys be the only cool characters is sorta off for a show which used to be about trying to do the right thing.

Masi Oka’s Hiro Nakamura, who used to be one of the characters the largest number of viewers could relate to, has been described by many media critics as the moral center of the show, the character from whom the themes spring. Well, this most recent episode featured Hiro stabbing his best friend Ando, played by James Kyson Lee, in the heart. I don’t care if the writers come up with a lame way to excuse it as not being real or some such nonsense. If the guy most bent on being a good guy has turned into a condescending prick who would stab his best friend, then I am done watching this show. I wish I had stopped watching after the wonderful first season. There is so much to dislike in this current third season that I could just keep going.

The Cardinal Rule of writing science fiction is that a universe may be incredibly fantastical, but it should be internally consistent. At this point, Heroes could not be more inconsistent if the writers all had a bar bet going for who could introduce the most inconsistent plot point or character action.

The only plus of the current season of Heroes is that they brought back David Anders’ charmingly chaotic neutral and essentially immortal Adam Monroe character, who, as forum readers know, is my first choice for who I would want by my side during a zombie apocalypse. But, even his engaging screen presence can’t save a show which has lost both its moral compass and any logic whatsoever. There is even a long scene where Hiro bullies Adam who he has been torturing for a long time by burying him underground in an airless tomb where he repeatedly suffocates to death and then regenerates back to life. I know the theme of the current season is “Villains”, but it seems more like it ought to be called “Assholes”. I guess they would have Kevin Smith Zack and Miri Make a Porno problems putting “Assholes” on their bus stop promos though. The characters are not evil masterminds; they are just jerks; assholes, if you will.

Heroes is officially canceled from my TiVo queue. When the Nielson’s for time-shifted (TiVo and web) viewing came in for the beginning of this season, it really raised the show’s ratings. I’m guessing that, after last week’s ridiculous episode, there won’t be any more numbers like that, although you can watch the season so far for free on the NBC site. The first season of Heroes was a rare and special flash of network television brilliance and I still recommend watching it on DVD or Netflix Watch Instantly. But, if you enjoy themes of ordinary people with extraordinary abilities, The 4400 wins for quality longevity over the long haul.

Still, critics seems to pretty universally agree that Knight Rider is the worst new show of the current television season. So, of course, fans desperate to defend Heroes: Assholes Villains are at pains to tell any critic to go watch Knight Rider if they no longer love Heroes. The kind of hilarious irony here is that I don’t think most of them realize that Heroes creator Tim Kring got his start writing for the original Knight Rider series back in 1982.

A long long time ago, in a land far far from here, I found myself in abrupt need of a place to live. After approximately five years in Connecticut, my parents convinced my lovelorn and underemployed self that I should come stay with them for a while in part of Northern Virginia which is really a suburb of Washington, DC. I think they maybe thought I would get into some kind of government work, which, in a way, I eventually did for a while. But one of the problems with being a prodigy is that you are never quite on the same playing field as everyone else. I graduated from college without being legal to drink in America. When I got to the DC area, I thought I might apply to work for the FBI. I liked the idea of a job which required intelligence and education, which also involved learning how to use all sorts of weaponry and getting paid to stay fit. Only I did not meet their minimum age requirement. I signed up to take the GMAT for entrance to business school, but my father was pissy that day and wouldn’t drive me. After getting into an accident years prior, I was not on their insurance, so I couldn’t drive myself. I often wonder how different my life would be now if I had just figured out how to put together the seventy bucks or whatever a cab would have been and taken the test. It hadn’t seemed like the sort of activity I could have asked a friend to help with in the early morning.

The sort of activity I could get a ride to was generally a science fiction convention or a punk show. There was a guy named Steve who I met at a con and got to know largely because he lived in the same area as my parents and was willing to drive me places like that. He and I always had a great time together out on the town and quickly became friends for real. So, when my parents abruptly suggested I move within the next day, he was who I called to help me. I was nursing a terrible cold with the hope of getting entirely well in time for a New Years con. My mom had received word that she would be stationed in Brazil and a snot-spewing daughter with an inappropriate wardrobe and funny-colored hair seemed like it might be nonideal adornment for selling their house. It probably didn’t help that, because they had taught me to be unashamed, I never thought to hide my inappropriate reading material kept in shelves in the garage. I think my dad had decided not to buy some house, partly because they’d had a kid around my age lying around in a way he found unappealing. To this day, although I am close with my parents, I do not know if they actually intended me to get out of their house in 24 hours or if they simply lacked the faith that I could meet a reasonable deadline. They certainly offered me extra time when Steve and I were clearly going to manage to get all my stuff into storage within the day. I was blowing my nose with one hand and packing boxes with the other, but we made it. Steve and I made it to the New Years festivities too.

So I went to sleep on the living room couch at Steve’s place and we set about looking for a great house to live in. It was surprisingly difficult to find a place which would rent anything decent to unrelated individuals. As time dragged on without us finding a place, my friend Johnny gave me a room he was sort of renting to stay in. I say sort of renting because he had agreed to live there but decided he wasn’t really nuts about who his housemates would be and the location was kind of far out from the city. So he had paid without moving in. My friend Julia from college was paying rent on a super-expensive place in Washington, DC proper and found herself suffering trying to afford it. Even though all four of us were gainfully employed, we found that most landlords in the area would not even show places to unrelated groups of people. It seemed to me that what was functionally a four income family ought to have been a better bet for landlords than a single income one with kids, but people who owned rental properties did not see it my way.

So, like the main characters in the BBC America show Spaced, the four of us eventually pretended that I was engaged to Steve and my cousin Julia was engaged to Johnny and we were serious couples. I don’t recall exactly how Julia and I were supposed to be related, but, after coming up with this egregious fiction, we quickly found a spacious and easily affordable townhouse. Best of all, the landlord was a futurist who, for sexually harassing the previous tenants, had been court-ordered not to visit his own properties.

If you have not seen the incredibly entertaining BBC comedy Spaced yet, I deeply suggest that you rectify the situation. Blue Blood readers are probably all familiar with actor/writer Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead. Simon Pegg and actor/writer Jessica Hynes together created Spaced. In fact, Simon Pegg got the idea for Shaun of the Dead while working on an episode of Spaced where his character plays a zombie-killing video game. Simon Pegg has described the Spaced show as “a cross between The Simpsons, The X-Files, and Northern Exposure.” Despite numerological references to the X-Files and a lot of pop culture references in general, the show most reminded me of a more realistic, modern version of The Young Ones.

The basic storyline revolves around comic book store assistant manager and aspiring artist Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg, and perennially fired employee and aspiring writer Daisy Steiner, played by Jessica Hynes. The two of them meet in a coffeehouse, read the housing listings together, and eventually pose as a professional couple in order to get approved for a lease on a comfy apartment at a great price. Their new place is ninety pounds a week. (In current dollar terms, I think the conversion rate would place this price at around $33,000 monthly, but the show first aired in 1999.) Their new home comes with the tortured artist Brian downstairs and the lonely boozy landlord Marsha upstairs. There are frequent appearances from Tim Bisley’s best friend Mike, a military fanboy and aspiring soldier, and Daisy’s best friend Twist, a dry cleaner clerk and aspiring fashion designer. Bike messenger and night club king Tyres bicycles through from time to time as well.

The show is laugh out loud funny, but it is also about a time in your life when you are in the process of becoming. Pretty much everybody, except for the divorced landlord with lost Olympic dreams and a daughter who hates her, is an aspiring something. And who gets their dreams and who settles and who enjoys their personal outcome is still all in the future. This series will speak, on many levels, to anyone who has ever done anything creative and lived in a group situation.

When my faux-fiancee Steve and my faux-cousin Julia and her faux-fiancee Johnny and I moved in together, we were all at that stage. I was a stagehand and aspiring writer. Johnny was a plumber and aspiring sex symbol. Julia was a production artist and aspiring graphic artist. Today, I am a writer, although I’ve certainly missed a lot of milestones I set for myself. Johnny was a sex symbol, at least in the DC punk and fandom scene of the time. If reality shows had existed at the time, he would have been global. I’m in touch with Johnny today via LiveJournal and, even though he was badly injured in an accident last year (he was hit by a cop), I’d still cast him now, if I were putting together a reality show. I’m in touch with Julia today via Facebook and she got additional degrees in architecture and works in a field which is one of the highest forms of graphic arts today. Oddly, although I would have described Steve as my closest friend in the group at the time, I don’t really know what he is doing now and I can’t think of what, if anything, he wanted to be when he grew up. From his well-decorated leather jacket to his obscure music collection, he seemed very cool and creative to me at the time. I remember thinking he should aspire to do stand-up comedy, but he never agreed on that point.

Some of the humor on the show Spaced comes from the fact that Tim Bisley and Daisy Steiner have told their landlord they are a long-time couple. But they are not. Only Daisy is more and more interested in having the story be true. For a long time, I thought that Steve eventually couldn’t be friends with me because he (and admittedly many of our friends) had thought he and I would eventually be engaged for real and not just to get a place to live. I did ask him once if he thought we should sleep together. His response was to drop acid and, while still tripping, tell me he was too worried about jeopardizing our friendship which was the most important thing to him. In retrospect, I realize that he was also really freaked out that I started Blue Blood magazine in print. He was one of the coolest guys I knew in DC, but all of a sudden I was meeting all of his heroes. I wanted his approval very much and had thought I was celebrating things he was interested in and would be excited about. Worse, I think he actually had some Puritanical objections to the erotic subject matter. He started freaking out about bizarre things like being afraid I would invite “clients” to house parties and expect him to be nice to them. We’d had a great run, but the party was going to have to move. Maybe I should have asked Steve to drive me to take that GMAT test after all, even if it was boring to him and early in the morning, and my whole life would be different.

I enjoy the show Spaced partly because it makes me remember some extremely fun times I had at a very carefree and adventurous point in my life. Spaced is one of the most real shows I have ever seen, in terms of my own personal life experience. It is very rare that I see characters on television or in movies who seem exactly like people I would actually know. Spaced is that rare exception. I highly recommend picking up the new Spaced DVD set or adding BBC America to your cable lineup.

I interviewed Kristin Tercek back in 2006 when she was first starting her Cuddly Rigor Mortis line. Since then, she has had a number of her designs mass-produced and distributed. She currently has a series of one-of-a-kind voodoo plushes available and going fast. We’ve got a gallery of her amazingly spooky-adorable voodoo dolls and I caught up with her for a quick chat about talismans for animistic deities.

Amelia G: What was the inspiration for your voodoo doll series?

Kristin Tercek: An awesome collector of our plushes wanted a voodoo doll (in our style) for his wife for Valentine’s Day. After a bit of sketching, Ed [Mironiuk] and I (well it was all Ed, really) came up with a basic pattern — mismatched button eyes, feathers on head and stitching. Then I spent a couple of days putting together different combos of colors and fabrics until one just hit. I liked having some freedom to not have to worry about whether or not I could source enough fabric or buttons for a lot of one specific character, but simply go and buy what I liked. Besides, who can resist a rainbow of feather colors to choose from?

Amelia G: Who are your voodoo dolls most suitable for torturing or do you not recommend sticking pins in them?

Kristin Tercek: I did some research on voodoo dolls and found that the ‘real’ ones are not for torturing or seeking revenge on anyone. They are really good luck charms and there should be 7 different colored pins representing different things like spirituality, health, repelling negative engery, etc. I put actual 3″ needles with different buttons on top into each plush so you can ’stick them’. But it makes it a bit easier to set them free into the world hoping that they will be used for good and not evil ;)

Amelia G: Which of your designs are available in mass market versions now and where can people find them?

Kristin Tercek: Devil, Zombie and Skeleton are the first three to be mass marketed. They are pretty well sold out of Hot Topic where they were introduced but you can buy them directly from the licensor at Net Sales Art for the Masses.

Sean Abley is working on a series of interviews for a possible book project entitled People Who Are Cool. The theme is, as you might suspect, people Sean Abley knows who are cool. You can read the two part interview he did with yours truly online now here and here. It is a two parter because, as Sean says, we are a couple of chatty bitches. Seriously, it is very in-depth and his questions were really interesting and unusual and I answered a lot of stuff I don’t usually talk about in interviews. This is going to post to Dark Blue Films in approx six weeks, but you all get the inside-skinny on where to read it pre-publication.

Socket writer/director Sean Abley writes:

“Somehow Amelia G and I became blog friends about 8 years ago. I’m not really sure how that happened, and when we’ve discussed it, neither is she. But somehow one of us surfed into the other’s Live Journal account and friended same, and we’ve been reading each other’s stuff for years now.

When I first started reading her blog, I was immediately struck by the photographs she’d post, taken either by her or her collaborator, Forrest Black. These were semi- (or not so semi-) naked shots of Goth chicks with beautiful lighting, styling and makeup. As I say further down in my interview with her, “[She] took two things I have no interest in – Goth culture and naked girls – and photographed them so I can’t turn away.”

Soon I realized Amelia had a mini media empire based on this subject matter, the hub of which is (are) http://www.blueblood.com and http://www.blueblood.net. Start there and you’ll find yourself winding down internet corridors full of fetish photos, films, music and art. And none of it feels exclusionary. Less “Butt out, square!” and more “Hey, we’re awesome! Check us out!” I would encourage anyone reading this to do just that. Amelia and Forrest’s work is pro and punk at the same time, and never boring.

When I decided to interview Amelia, I did some research and found out she has a crazy interesting past, from living in a punk/goth group house in D.C. to moving in the industrial music scene, to founding a magazine . She is also the kind of feminist that I love, e.g. one that doesn’t think a naked girl is being suppressed just because she’s having her picture taken. She’s also a workaholic, as evidenced by the sheer number of projects, websites, and events she has to attend to in any one week.

Although we live mere blocks from each other in Hollywood, I conducted this interview via email, which probably lead to us be much more verbose that we would in person. (I hate transcribing, so I tend to keep it short in person).

How did the daughter of a diplomat and an attorney become the reigning Queen of Goth Erotica?

Please give a warm welcome to Amelia G!”

The interview kicks off with:

Sean Abley: I read that you’ve lived all over the world and the States. Army brat? What’s the scoop on your childhood?

Amelia G: When I got to college, it was my twelfth school in twelve years. My mother’s a diplomat. My father’s an attorney. Two of the schools I went to when I was fourteen to sixteen had a lot of army brats, so some of the experience is similar.

Funny, I moved around quite a bit as a kid, although it was mainly within the same town, Helena, MT, with one two-year chunk in Carbondale, IL. But even within the same town for a little kid it means changing schools and friends, so even now I hate moving.

I get wanderlust really easily, but, if I travel enough, then I don’t itch to move as much.

What subject were you awful at in school?

Even though I rode a purple three-speed bike everywhere in ninth and tenth grade and was very fit, I never got into gym. I especially loathed dodgeball. Only I would get picked pretty early. I think because I was great to have on a team because I hated getting hit by the ball so much that I would never get tagged out. This might seem like a good trait, except that I practiced the Golden Rule and did not wish to do unto others as I would not have them do unto me. So a dodgeball game could be this endless purgatory because I wouldn’t tag the other team out either.

I actually loved dodgeball because it was the one of two sports I was actually good at as a kid (the other being volleyball). I was very agile, and I think the opportunity to nail the popular jocks with those big, red, rubber balls imbued me with an unfailing eye and super human strength.

Those are good superpowers to have for playing dodgeball.

It seems like you really made your mark first in D.C. What were you doing in D.C.?

Living in a punk rock group house, throwing legendary parties, trying to be a writer, doing as many peculiar day jobs as possible, tying up unsuitable suitors in the back seat of a car which was a parting gift from my unsuitable college suitor, discovering ramen cuisine. I still think of ramen as the flavor of poverty.

I actually bought dollar’s worth of ramen . . .

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