Blue Blood Contest Sponsored by Squishable and Lost Boys 2 The Tribe announcement from Amelia G
Australian DJ Clint Rexx models Squishable Alligator in Hollywood exclusive Blue Blood photo gallery, photographed by Amelia G and Forrest Black, shot on location at Mann’s Chinese Theater and the Hollywood Boulevard Walk of Fame
(Image Courtesy of Blue Blood)
by Amelia G : July 30th, 2008
Blue Blood hottie April Flores is on the cover of the new issue of Bizarre. First, Topco does a mold of her to make a lovedoll and now this! The curvaceous cutie writes in her blog:
“I woke up to wonderful news that I am on the cover of the latest issue of Bizarre Magazine!!! What a wonderful honor it is especially since I’ve been a fan of that magazine for the past 7 years. 🙂
I can’t wait to see the pictures inside. Bizarre was wonderful to me! They flew me out to Montreal to shoot with photographer Martin Perreault. The theme of the shoot was all things sweet. I loved it! They had various candies and lollipops for me to suck on and play with. There was a wall of pink and blue balloons, and another set up with bubbles flying all around me. My favorite set up was with me laying on the floor with 6000 candies covering and surrounding my body! It was like a little girl’s dream come true and I kept getting distracted by the cuteness of it all.
I’ve been waiting to see this issue for months now and I am just bursting with excitement. I am off to my local newstand to buy a copy….. YAY!!!”
One thing I have to admit I am troubled by, however, is what a big deal so many people make about April’s weight. It doesn’t take an open-minded person to find April Flores hot. She is hot. So I am kind of sick of folks congratulating themselves for finding her hot even though she is plus-sized. It just still strikes me as prejudiced for someone who is not particularly kinked for big girls to make a gigantic . . .
( Read more )
Internet coming in sporadically. Photoshop batch processing. Can’t hit email server. Getting off computer now.
by Amelia G : July 29th, 2008
Although I have lived in California now for longer than I have lived anywhere else, I am not originally from here. Earthquakes still seem like magic to me. Like an amusement park ride or some other thing where what you feel is interesting but without consequences. When some of the East Coast portions of my family first started going West, my maternal grandmother was certain every New Yorker who defected to California was going to fall into a crevasse and die. Eight feet of snow, she felt safe in. But earthquakes seemed horrific beyond all measure.
Native Californian Forrest Black tells me that a 6.0 earthquake is when buildings start falling down. The earthquake I just experienced was, at most recent estimate, a 5.8 in Chino Hills. That places the epicenter at around twenty some odd miles from where I am in Hollywood. This quake was so strong that, according to my twitter friends and my pals on the internet professional forums, the shaking was felt as far away as Las Vegas.
My mother was stationed in Israel during the Lebanon War. Then too, I had Stateside friends and family who thought it must be terrifying and dangerous to live in a warring part of the world. At the time, my only awareness that anything unusual was going on was that I had to set bric-a-brac away from the edge of countertops or it could be knocked off by the sonic booms of war planes flying overhead. I never saw an injured person or an explosion.
In much the same way, I have never seen the earth in California open up and start swallowing humans or their homes. I have never seen anything more than a crack in plaster, items . . .
( Read more )
by Amelia G : July 18th, 2008
Finding great new music is always a good thing. It seems like it should happen all the time in this glorious digital age we are living in. I mean, artists can go straight to fans without the intervention of stodgy labels and, because everybody can post their opinion online, the fans can be the ones to say whether they like something or not. That is the utopian ideal there anyway.
When people actually go looking for music today, I think it is actually often more difficult to find what one likes. Somehow modern distribution has made it so that a very few recording artists sell record-breaking amounts of swag and tunes. Many thousands of musicians who would once only have been heard by friends can now get out to hundreds of people who appreciate what they do. But the midlist bands seem to have disappeared. Where are the solid enjoyable bands, in the genres I enjoy, who once could definitely have charted high, but maybe wouldn’t be #1 on the charts?
Without major label support, mid-sized high quality bands can get really lost in a sea of user-generated content on sites like MySpace and YouTube. MySpace, for example, allows fan profiles, so NIN shows up five times on the first page of top industrial bands on MySpace. I enjoy Nine Inch Nails, but what if I am looking for similar bands I am not familiar with yet? More on YouTube in a moment.
Given how popular music magazines once were on the newsstand, why are music websites not more popular online? I know one thing I personally do not like is that most sites devoted to music are owned by one or another record label. While I realize that there are only really six significant media companies in the world and all, . . .
( Read more )
by Amelia G : July 27th, 2008
I think Mad Men was probably my favorite television show last season. The show name Mad Men is derived from the ad men who worked on Madison Avenue in New York. The first season of the show revolved around the lives of people who work at a fictional ad agency called Sterling-Cooper in 1960. Despite the fictional nature of the agency depicted, the modern ad industry trade magazine Advertising Age put together a whole fictional issue with news bites, interviews, and profiles of fictional industry professionals. That is some mighty creative marketing.
Don Draper, the primary character on the show, is always quick with a clever word and a creative approach to marketing at work and coming up with the best personal presentation personally. In describing him, one of the his coworkers says, “nobody has ever turned over that rock; he could be Batman.” So his carefully-constructed persona has worked for getting his dream job and dream house and dream woman and dream family and a number of spare dream women, but the people he knows both professionally and personally sense that Don Draper is holding back to the point where he is somewhat unknowable.
Show creator Matthew Weiner also wrote a dozen episodes of The Sopranos and produced thirty-three episodes of The Sopranos, so it should come as no surprise that his baby Mad Men is about a lot of things with interlocking multiple storylines and complex and deep characterizations. It is always difficult to make a period piece come across as both convincing and relevant, but Mad Men succeeds brilliantly. In addition the the snappy dialog and strong set design, Katherine Jane Bryant’s costume design is nothing short of amazing in its variety, beauty, and . . .
( Read more )
by Amelia G : July 26th, 2008
When the feminist publications like Feministe and the rock publications like AntiQuiet, and the news overlords like MSNBC all agree on something, it is safe to assume the topic is something as definite as the sky is generally blue. In this instance, pretty much everyone agrees that famous homophobe Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” video is a lot like a tremendously sucky version of a Girls Gone Wild set up.
More than a decade ago, Jill Sobule sang a bouncy tune, of the same name, about a woman who is titillated and unsure and excited about the new experience of having kissed another woman. Neither video shows a lot of lip-locking because both were intended for MTV airplay and, as a society, we tend to still view same sex kisses as potentially unsuitable material for kids. I think there will come a time when the idea of two women kissing being scandalous is as quaint as the idea of two people with different ethnic or racial backgrounds kissing is now. Massachusetts, where gay marriage is legal, recently had to work on their legislation because they had some old laws on the books to prevent black/white couples from other states from using Massachusetts to legitimize their otherwise illegal unions.
Because progress really can and does happen on so many fronts, the lameness of third wave feminism never ceases to disappoint me. If Katy Perry thinks it will turn guys on to tell them that she had a dream about kissing a girl, but, like, ew, not that she’d ever really do that . . . well, it probably will turn guys on.
Most guys I know, who would freak if their girl made out with another guy, think they will be just fine with it . . .
( Read more )
Full season two preview vintage clothing photo gallery on BlueBlood.net now, courtesy of AMC.
(Image Courtesy of Blue Blood)
Must have felt grim when updating Netflix. Romper Stomper #1. Swapped in 4400. We came to wreck everything, and ruin your life. God sent us.
by Amelia G : July 24th, 2008
I loved the Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller film adaptation of Sin City. It was an aesthetic triumph. I recently re-watched it when Forrest Black and I went clubbing in Portland with DJ Mohawk Adam and Sin City is still fun when re-watching it on a large screen in a goth-industrial nightclub.
Truthfully, the actual comic book Sin City turned me off though. Frank Miller was instrumental in getting me into comics with his Dark Knight re-envisioning of Batman in a much grittier world. But, when I got to the part of Sin City where the chick is all freaking out about how the bad guy made her watch while he ate her hand, I just rolled my eyes and pretty much gave up on reading comics. I didn’t mind giving Sin City a chance to entertain me as a movie because there was no fond memory of a book it could destroy.
The other major factor in me becoming less satisfied with the comic book medium was that I read Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Watchmen is the most perfect comic anyone anywhere has ever done. It is hauntingly emotionally beautiful, vividly memorable, philosophically and politically insightful, and still a great action tale. Once I had read Watchmen, nothing else in the field could really compare.
Because Watchmen was an important work, I feel like it is news that the trailer for the long-rumored Watchmen movie has been released. I post it here, if you’d like to view it.
It has been widely reported that author Alan Moore is not happy with the film adaptation of his seminal graphic novel. If it turns out that Alan Moore in fact does not like it, then I will personally almost certainly avoid seeing the movie.
Yes, I know Alan Moore should not have taken the movie . . .
( Read more )
by Amelia G : July 23rd, 2008
Okay, this is just plain awesome and entirely made my day. I am mostly familiar with Kerrang! for being the well-written and well-photographed hard rock magazine which used to cover a lot of the bands who played Taime Downe’s late lamented Pretty Ugly nightclub in Los Angeles. Apparently, on the other side of the pond, Kerrang! also does radio and television and such. One of their on-air personalities is Nick Margerrison who does a show called The Night Before.
I’m not sure what astronauts have to do with hard rock, but I guess MTV’s early call sign video interlude involved the moon landing, so maybe it all just fits together in some secret cosmic way. At any rate, Nick Margerrison was interviewing astronaut Edgar Mitchell, on Kerrang! Radio, when the famous astronaut casually pointed out that life definitely exists on other planets and aliens have visited earth. The obviously usually-smooth Nick Margerrison is kind of like ha, ha, wait are you serious? He sort of sputters and says wow a lot, while waiting for his interview subject to admit he was kidding.
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell: “We’re not alone in the universe at all . . . The UFO phenomenon is real, although it’s been covered up by our governments for some time.”
On-air personality Nick Margerrison: “I’ve had crazy UFO nuts before, but I’ve never had Dr. Ed Mitchell, the 6th man to walk on the moon, a respected scientist in his own right, announce to me that we’ve been visited by aliens from other planets and they definitely are out there and there’s no debating it . . . I’m just wondering if I’ve stumbled on astronaut humor and in a couple minutes you are going to . . .
( Read more )
Any of my Los Angeles pals a big Spaced fan?
by Amelia G : July 22nd, 2008
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 . . .
( Read more )
by Amelia G : July 21st, 2008
So why would a video of a mildly overweight toddler dancing badly receive 518,448 views on YouTube? It immediately comes to mind why a toddler dancing very well might be popular. It immediately comes to mind why a spectacularly cute toddler dancing badly might be popular. I wish this were not the case, but it also immediately comes to mind why a grotesquely overweight toddler dancing badly would make for a popular YouTube video. No, this toddler is not related to any star of stage or screen either.
The answer is that the video is controversial. The child’s mother Stephanie Lenz videotaped her kid attempting to dance to Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” which was playing on a nearby boombox. Universal Music Group, which owns the copyright for that portion of Prince’s catalog asked YouTube to take the video down because “Let’s Go Crazy” could clearly be heard on it and they felt this infringed on their copyright. YouTube took the video down and that would have been the end of it, except the EFF took on the mom’s case
So Stephanie Lenz and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sued Universal for wrongly asking that the video be taken down. Today, Ars Technica, a site about the “art of technology”, posted the latest in a whole series of interesting articles on the case and its implications for all video makers. The short version of what went down is that Universal defended by claiming the EFF was using the court system to bully them out of their rights and using meritless lawsuits to further their own agenda. This is ironic for so many reasons, I don’t even know how to start to enumerate them, so I won’t. The way everything shook out, judges determined that, yes, the EFF can bring a suit . . .
( Read more )