journal Archive

On my way to a party which is (a) for something I think is super cool and (b) is probably going to be fun and (c) should be fairly low impact. Already dressed. Just need to put shoes on. But feeling anxious. There is zero reason to feel social anxiety right now, but apparently my endocrine system doesn’t like listening to reason.

I refuse to be enslaved by my own weakness, so I will be leaving the house, but I sure wish I felt less stressed. So far, the month since I got back to LA has been really wearing on me. I’d say I need a vacation, but the last one really pointed out how stressful and plain difficult my regular life is by comparison. Bleah.

Click Here for Muppet Scandal

I just found out that my favorite local coffeehouse (which is a retail outlet for national artisan roasters) offers free lessons with a purchase of a high end espresso machine. I am very excited about this and think I may go with the Rancilio Silvia now. Being able to barista is being able to do the Good Lord’s work.

Today is going to be a hard day though, so we’ll see.

Making bacon and eggs now.

Who here can barista?

Young Hollywood Party

by Forrest Black : March 29th, 2008

I’ve known Blue Blood Photographer Carlos Batts for what seems like a few lifetimes at this point. Our paths first crossing in the pre-internet zine scene, East Coast comic book conventions, and a million other points of common reference in the sexy cool artistic realm along the way since then. Looking back, some of those scenes seem like different worlds these days. We both live in Hollywood now, coincidentally a few blocks away from each other to be even more specific. But, maybe it’s not coincidence at all. A lot of interesting cool creative types end up in Hollywood. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoy it out here, being such a sort of heaven for eclectic creative types driven to document and enhance or otherwise decorate their public existence.

There are always a million things to do in Hollywood and it’s rare (or unfortunate anyway) to do everything within one sort of scene. Instead, people tend to party hop, swinging from velvet rope VIP to drug addled loft gatherings, trekking from inspiring artistic exhibits in every media imaginable to legendary dive bars to see the latest and hopefully greatest bands before they break big or break up.

Carlos’s latest video project, Young Hollywood, presents the cacophonous meld of cool glam youth and seedy glitz, the edgy music mixed with erotic pop art and nightlife craziness that is the young Hollywood experience today, all through the eyes of an artistic pornographer. The party to celebrate it’s release very much reflected this jumbled elemental mix as well, and although I couldn’t party quite as long as I would have liked, everyone seemed to be having a really good time. The shindig was held at the relatively new Safari Sam’s . . .

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My espresso machine broke quite a while ago. Much as there are very pleasant coffeehouses where I live, I really really want to be able to use beans of my own choosing (microroasts and such) and have an iced latte without committing a minimum of half an hour to the enterprise. Beats me what machine to get. I had a Krups and it died.

The specs I want are pretty much pump driven (rather than steam which I had previously), won’t break easily with moderate use, does not require effing pods. I prefer a brass or stainless steel boiler. Do not care if it froths well or heats milk well, as I prefer iced drinks or just espresso. Not a fan of pressurized portafilters but not deadset against them either. Do not need a built-in burr grinder. Do not need a built-in thermometer.

Anybody have an espresso machine recommendation?

I started off this month with the tail end of a mini East Coast photo and fun tour. It was really awesome and a lot of food for thought.

But I got back and it just felt like everything pretty immediately went to Hell in a handbasket. Sometimes I feel like everybody else is allowed to take a break, to make family and friends a priority, to go have crazy sex, to just chill for a while, but somehow I’m not allowed, somehow an awful lot of parts of my universe get pissed off if I fail to be wholly utilitarian. I need to delegate a bunch of stuff like three weeks ago, but I can’t seem to get my head above water for long enough to even get that sorted.

F is kind of badly injured and I wish I had a make-it-better wand.

Really I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff to post about when I’m feeling less harried, but feeling the suck right now. Just kind of in the headspace where I actually had a nightmare this morning about a dickhead thing some movie producer said at a party last Sunday, even though he apologized at the time and it was not that awful in the first place. Want to snap out of it. Need to snap out of it.

Shamrocks and Leprechauns and Green Beer

by Amelia G : March 17th, 2008

As a holiday, St Patrick’s Day has dubious origins but fabulous iconography.

Although the holiday tends to serve as both an expression of Irish pride and an excuse to get thoroughly blotto (Hi Funkatron), the origins of Saint Paddy’s are neither in drunkenness nor Ireland. Although observation of the holiday in the Americas was recorded as early as 1737 in Boston, he first serious St Patrick’s Day parade took place in New York City on March 17, 1762 as a celebration for Irish soldiers in the British military. That would be the British military whose asses we kicked in order to become a sovereign nation and pursue happiness and freedom and stuff. Nonetheless, over the years, the St Patrick’s Day parade in New York City grew into a bigger and bigger event. A lot of the first Irish immigrants to the New World were Protestant, but the 1845 Potato Famine lead to an influx of Catholic Irish population. Although grisly prejudice against the Irish in general and the Catholic Irish in particular lead initially to negative media coverage of the parade, when President Harry Truman attended the festivities in 1948, many people felt that prejudice was really something that the US of A was finally putting behind it. This was perhaps overly optimistic, but still a step in the right direction.

Actually in Ireland, St Patrick’s Day was celebrated as a religious holiday, even though St Patrick was a pretty lame saint. Patrick was essentially a trust fund baby from the 400’s. He was kidnapped from his parents’ estate and held captive for six years, during which time he, go figure, got kinda religious and started hearing voices. When he escaped, he is said to have walked 200 miles to . . .

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Sometimes there is nothing like a really wonderful trip and adventures to remind me how stressful and potentially overwhelming my day-to-day existence can be.

The End of The Wire

by Amelia G : March 9th, 2008

I did not have a television for many years. Then, when I had one, it was only used to play videotapes; I didn’t even know for sure whether it failed to get reception or I’d never tried to get any on there. In the process of getting myself the Hell out of Georgia, I hocked the aforementioned television and used the proceeds for moving expenses (paying off a truck tow driver not to tow away the moving truck cab with almost everything I was moving inside.) I did not miss my hocked television.

But then they invented TiVo, On Demand, UnBox, instant download, renting DVDs by mail, and high quality TV shows with long, complex, and well-written story arcs. My two biggest objections to television in the past were always that (1) I couldn’t see planning my schedule around when a television show was on and (2) I’m not exactly the average person, so I was pretty sure that no show aimed at the lowest common denominator was likely to appeal to me.

The Sopranos sucked me in on DVD and I watched the first few years in an absolute orgy of television consumption. Even though The Sopranos often dropped whatever storyline had made me push play on the next episode, the show was still a whole lot of cuts above what I thought of television as capable of being. Prior to The Sopranos, my mobster fetish had only been satisfied by movies and real life.

Since then, I’ve come to strongly prefer the format of the long cable drama over all other video media. It’s funny that I don’t even really know what the name for it ought to be, but it is definitely a new structure . . .

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I just had a really awesome day. I had a shoot with a new model and it was totally clusterfucked by the Oscars because her hotel happened to be directly behind where they are doing the Oscars, even though she had less than no interest in the celebration. She turned out to be uber-cool and super fun, so we ended up tripping around Hollywood and shooting in various places I’d scoped out. We finished with Pink’s hot dogs. So watch for some hot stuff coming up with Charlie.

So I just came back from Susie Bright’s birthday party. Sorta.

I got lost in the fucking dark of Silverlake and Echo Park and the rain. California streets are not lit well for rain because we don’t get that much of it and Los Angeles people can seriously not drive in the rain, so people kept cutting us off. I finally finally knew we were close, but we kept driving back and forth along Glendale Blvd looking for a mythical street called Earl. I finally called one of the two numbers for the hosts. They were people I don’t know because Susie doesn’t live in Los Angeles but was celebrating here.

The guy answers the phone and I tell him my name and location. I’m all chipper like I’m going to a party. The guy makes me repeat myself enough times that I assume I have the wrong number. “For the Susie thing,” I say. At which point he pissily (is that a word?) tells me that the Susie thing is over and was from 4pm to 7pm and they are in bed now. Is she five? Most people who write about sex and technology do not go to bed before midnight on a Saturday night when they are throwing a party. WTF? If someone is going to have a party at a totally bizarre time, it seems like it would make sense to answer all RSVP emails containing queries about the time. Maybe Susie gave him my email so he felt obliged to invite me, but he didn’t really want me to come. Maybe he didn’t like my story in Best American Erotica. Maybe I fucked his mom.

I was feeling a lot of social anxiety tonight too and I was proud of myself for getting out the door. And getting to go to a party for overcoming my fears.

My hair looks really fantastic tonight too. Tomorrow, maybe I will try to formulate my disappointment into a proper article. With a snapshot of my fabulous luxurious hair.

Viral Marketing Killed the Rock and Roll Star

by Amelia G : February 23rd, 2008

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 …

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Doll-like Natalie Addams and her puppeteer Nemo posed for this image shot by yours truly and Forrest Black. The puppeteer bar Nemo had to hold up was actually really heavy. I like that the images turned out sexy but vaguely disturbing at the same time. Tons more free at BlueBlood.net

(Image Courtesy of Blue Blood)