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Amelia recently lured me to a dark alley to discuss the counterculture and get cranky. Eros Zine: You recently brought all of your sites together under the Blue Blood umbrella. What was behind that choice and how did it come about? Who would you say is most active on Blue Blood? Are you seeing a lot of folks you've known from the scene over the years, is it new blood or is it mixed? Amelia G: When I founded Blue Blood magazine in print, I had a cohesive and powerful vision of how I wanted it to be. I created Blue Blood with the intention of reaching out to all the cool eclectic people, like myself, who had passed through multiple subcultures. People who took those little bits which appealed to them from each subculture they explored and made them their own. I love being a catalyst for cultural cross-pollination, and Blue Blood was conceived to achieve that goal. Blue Blood's BarelyEvil.com, Blue Blood's GothicSluts.com, and Blue Blood's RubberDollies.com are extremely successful projects, each in their own right, and I love all the beautiful sexy photography and such on each of them. As individual projects they always get high praise and people really enjoy them. But, to truly achieve Blue Blood's goals we came to the conclusion that ultimately we had to combine them, in order to expose each of their audiences to the full and diverse vision which is Blue Blood. As far as audience goes, I had originally taken a lot of flack for my offbeat constellation of interests. At the time, I had thought I was more alone than perhaps I was. Blue Blood has obviously allowed me to connect with kindred spirits all over the world, and foster a genuine sense of community. Even early on, the outpouring of letters to Blue Blood really blew us away. There were so many people who had thought they were the only ones into both bondage and RPGs, rap and industrial music, tattoos and science fiction, or whatever their personal mix was. The key to Blue Blood was that they picked that mix based on genuine personal taste and not just trying to be cool or fit in.
Now that Blue Blood has been around for nearly fourteen years, our members and participants span the gamut from old school stalwarts to new initiates and are a truly diverse and creative collection of cool creative accomplished free thinkers who enjoy a huge range of interesting and inspiring subjects and we're really proud to be at the core of that kind of community. Eros Zine: What's different about the site, compared to the magazine? Amelia G: One of the best things about publishing on the web is being able to give the audience more. In print, a photo set could have forty great images, but the limitations of the medium require an editor to select only a few of those. As an artist, I want people to see what I create, so I love being able to share more with my members for the same price. On BlueBlood.com, we currently showcase more than three hundred hotties, depicted in more than 65,000 images. In addition to an amazing collection of original work including couples pictorials and writing and more, BlueBlood.com members receive all of the great content from Barely Evil, Gothic Sluts, and Rubber Dollies. Of course Forrest Black and I shoot a lot of Blue Blood's photography and I write a lot of the words on the sites, but I also really love publishing like-minded creative people. Some of the artists profiled by Eros Zine who I have worked with include Sean McCall, Carlos Batts, Kelly Lind, Nelly Recchia, Christine Kessler, Jim Groves, Justice Howard, Ed Mironiuk, Ashley Fontenot, Chad Ward, and more. We've also recently been working on bringing back some of the original erotic fiction which Blue Blood in print was so known for. Although it is nice to work with established artists because it tends to be more efficient, I enjoy working with everyone from big coffee table book fine artists to club kids shooting their first photo set. To me, the passion and striving for the unique and original and beautiful is the most important aspect. Experience points are secondary.
Amelia G: With my shooting partner Forrest Black, I have shot dozens of magazine covers and more than 600 magazine pages. I think we have a back catalog of around 300,000 images, counting rock, fashion, fetish, erotic, and portrait photographs. Still, in many ways, I think I will always consider myself a writer first and foremost. Mostly, I like to helm creative projects. Blue Blood is a content producer, packager, and publisher. In the past, this has meant magazines, books, and web sites, some published by Blue Blood, and some created for other publishers. As media evolves, I'm sure Blue Blood will evolve along with it, but the high quality standards and messages remain the same. Eros Zine: Just today I saw a Rolling Stone poll from earlier this year that said 68% of music listeners think music is getting worse, and only something like 18% think it's getting better. What are you listening to nowadays? How do you think changing music culture affects what you're able to do with erotica on the web? Are you finding that your "alternative" models listen to a different kind of music than they did ten years ago? Amelia G: A band like She Wants Revenge might be marketed in a more cynical fashion today than Sisters of Mercy once was, but someone who likes one, in an honest moment, will admit they like the other as well. I think that the current marketplace does tend to squeeze out the bands in the middle though. It is possible for top bands to sell unimaginably huge record-breaking numbers of units, but this has lead to careful crafting and artificial manufacture of most of the top charters. On the other end, it is very easy for anyone with a computer to put their recording of their cat meowing on a MySpace band page. So there is more music available. There is probably just as much good music. But it is a smaller percentage and has a smaller likelihood of success. Eros Zine: What's your favorite trait to find in a model the first time you work with her? Is it looks, guts, individuality...?
Eros Zine: Since you started Blue Blood in the early '90s, you've been associated with gothic and punk erotica. What do you think of the flood of alt porn on video? Was it just an idea whose time has come, or is alt porn not particularly punk rock any more? Amelia G: Altporn was never punk rock. I do not now, nor have I ever, made altporn. Call what I do punk rock. Call it counterculture erotica. Call it subcultural erotica. Call it fringe. Call it edgy. Call it subversive. Call it artistic. Call it late for dinner. But, as far as I understand it, altporn was a term created by a web guy with the initials SS and a video guy with the initials RH and while, as an artist, I can not always control who I will inspire, I would not object to a wrinkle in time which allowed me to make it so the coiners of that term had never seen my work. I appreciate the shoutouts they gave Blue Blood in the first movie marketed as altporn, but their relentless attempts to either co-opt me or punk me or both make it impossible for me to feel good about anything they do. Altporn is quite deliberately commercial work which riffs on the rhetoric of many creative people who genuinely care about what they do. It is obvious that altporn tends to be disrespectful to the deeply-held beliefs of genuinely activist counterculture artists. It is perhaps less obvious, but no less the case, that the smarmy anti-erotic irony typical of altporn is also disrespectful to porn itself. Some of it may end up visually appealing. Time will tell. But I find all the buzz and hype spouting concepts of sex positive feminism and punk rock depressing; sex positive feminism and punk have both been huge influences on my life that it pains me seeing them defiled by people who at best don't understand what they are saying and, at worst, do know and get off on clowning the culture.
There is nothing punk about working for a big corporation with notoriously rigid guidelines and then complaining that any failings in your creative output are due to corporate meddling. If you cash the corporation's check, I think you are morally obligated to do the job they are paying you for. Otherwise you are neither punk nor honorable. That said, I think there are some talented people working on movies now and I'll be interested to see which of them produce work I enjoy. Eros Zine: Christopher Lee, Bela Lugosi, and Gary Oldman are all having parties in West LA, but too far from each other to party hop. Whose party do you want to go to? Amelia G: I RSVP for all three parties, thinking I will somehow figure out a shortcut to make it to at least two. I wear something spooky but upscale designer, so that way I'll be wearing something appropriate for whichever ones I decide to hit. Something black with ruffles and cleavage from a department store. (Remember the part where I said Blue Blood was for people with an eclectic constellation of interests? It is only my balls-out and straight-up approach which is punk.) I put on makeup and blow-dry and flatiron my hair, in between cell phone calls from friends who are trying to decide which party to go to. I meet up with some of the friends and we get some coffee and debate the merits of the various parties, in between cell phone calls from other friends who are either en route to one of the parties or at it. We discuss the reports on which party seems like it will be the most fun. The coffeehouse closes at two am and we head over to someone's house for an afterparty. Various people who actually went to one of the parties stop in and say they weren't quite a waste of makeup, but traffic and parking sucked and they didn't stay that long. Forrest Black says he would go to Bela Lugosi's shindig because Bela Lugosi is the mack. Happy Halloween and please stop by BlueBlood.com!
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