ameliag

When I was around five-years-old, my father took me to the Easter Egg Hunt at the Harvard Club. Everything was colorful and I loved the puzzle of looking for all the hidden things. It was like hide-and-seek only better. When my father pointed out that I could find more foil-wrapped candies by...( Read more )

Students at University of Arizona are reading about BLT for class. This is definitely one of the more amusing things I found while doing research on Black Leather Times for the BLT Kickstarter (less than 48 hours left, eep!) For one of his courses, Professor Malcolm Alan Compitello at University...( Read more )

As I’ve been working on the BLT Kickstarter, I’ve been doing some deep searching in Google and Bing/Yahoo. For those just tuning in, BLT was the zine I started before Blue Blood and it is very funny, if you have ever lived in a punk rock group house, gone to goth-industrial clubs,...( Read more )

Forrest Black and I are so happy with how the California Deathrock party at La Luz went. Blue Blood funded the production of the book via Kickstarter, so it was initially only available to backers of the Kickstarter and people actually in the book. To celebrate the launch of the book to the...( Read more )

Okay, this could easily be one more thing destroying pop culture touchstones of my childhood. Like that Star Wars sequel with Jar Jar Binks and cutesy young Darth Vader or whoever etc. (I’d like to point out that I somewhat presciently said at the time that it looked like George Lucas was...( Read more )

Happy holidays, everyone! I'm eating cookies and drinking cocoa (well, mocha, but that's how I like it) and I hope you all are too.

Forrest Black and I photographed cute elfin Scarlet Starr chewing on a candy cane in a Bah Humbug Santa hat, with some candy cane striped stockings, and a good dose of red and green and silver tinsel Christmas decorations. I just love holiday sets. These two images are safe for work (not that you are probably working today, but you know what I mean) but none of the links I'm about to give you are. There are some very nice naughtier free pics of Xmas Scarlet Starr in this free BarelyEvil gallery. The whole series appears in the Blue Blood VIP and on Barely Evil :-)

Forrest Black and I first met Ducky Von Ghoulie from the Fuzzbats and his lovely bride Chachie at the old school deathrock club Release the Bats in California. The setting for this shoot is Ducky and Chachie's real life living room. Ducky says he collects all the horror films and models and posters and other memorabilia in his impressive collection because it turns him on. What better reason! This is some of my favorite sort of work to shoot and Forrest Black and I really enjoyed creating art with Ducky and Chachie. Whole series in the Blue Blood VIP as always.

Kumi posted a blog entry where she talks about not viewing fetish and alt-modeling as related at all. I both agree and don't. I guess in theory, I disagree, but, in practice, what she observes is often dead-on how this currently goes in the real world. I wanted to share a quick thought of mine on the topic and also direct folks to what she wrote: Alt- vs. Fetish

I discussed this with Michelle Olley years ago, when she was at Skin Two, and we were both trying to promote having models with unusual haircuts and tattoos and dramatic makeup and such in fetish areas. And meeting with resistance. Looking punk or goth-industrial or whatever and showing up to the BDSM party was not always the way to elicit the friendliest welcome in those days. The handcuffs on my leather jacket at the time were fully functional and one of the reasons I founded Blue Blood was precisely to celebrate an aesthetic which resonated with me sexually. 17 years later, I am less impressed by a daring hairstyle than I once was, partly because it takes less courage to rock one in a post-internet world, but I'm still enough of a fetishist there that I will look at two people with the same basic level of appeal and think the one with the mohawk is way hotter.

Something which troubles me deeply is that a lot of people have reinterpreted alt to be where girls (not women) who do not make the grade can put on wigs and LARP like they are modeling. These are generally girls who do not want to have to develop their minds or even their cooking skills, but they do not want to hit the gym either. So they call themselves altmodels and you are supposed to like them for their looks alone, without requiring them to look good.

Certain corporate players in the marketplace have aggressively attempted to de-sexualize alt. But a few more loathsome humans in the overall society doesn't make liking music and subculture-influenced looks not a fetish.

AmeliaG.com Launches

by Amelia G : July 28th, 2009

So I registered the domain for my name a while back, when the internet still had a bit of that new web smell. I’d been doing work more and more in the digital space for a few years then and I would end up having to pay off a cybersquatter for the BlueBlood.com domain, so it seemed sensible to register everything near and dear to me. Then nine more years went by. Some of my favorite sites have grown out of Forrest Black registering domains while drinking beer and then me feeling that, once it was registered, the domain had to have a site on it. For a long time, I just had a link to a hosted journal on AmeliaG.com, but now seemed like the time to actually put a proper site on there. Today it officially goes live.

The site has the Amelia G bio with just the broad strokes. There is a more detailed sidebar with just 2009 news about press appearances and where my writing and photography has appeared this year. I considered including a page with a gigantic lists of places I’ve been published, but, after doing thousands of pages of editorial, not to mention radio and television stuff, it just seemed like it would be a bit of a laundry list. Plus, oddly enough, when I was doing research for the site, I discovered that some of my work had been reprinted without me even knowing it. I’ve moved less as an adult than I did as a kid, but sometimes it is still possible to lose track of compatriots with moves and all on everyone’s part.

I hope people enjoy the Photography Portfolio section of Forrest Black’s and my work. People always ask to see my online portfolio and I always was reluctant to put one together before. When I say “reluctant”, I mean that the notion of editing together only forty of my favorite images, out of everything we’ve ever shot, made me effing hyperventilate. I forced my brain through its discomfort and editing a selection of images from over such a long time period turned out to be really . . .

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Do you hate to see people like you succeed — Why Adam Lambert might not win American Idol
by Amelia G : May 18th, 2009

If you are alt-identified, yet want Kris Allen to beat Adam Lambert in this week’s American Idol finale, then you are complicit in your own oppression. Rebels who want Adam Lambert to lose must just hate themselves.

People like to fuss about sex and sexuality, but the place where Adam Lambert is actually unusual is that it is rare to see new musicians with serious larger-than-life star quality in the spotlight today. I just watched a top 20 video countdown and Eminem was just about the only one who would turn heads in a room he walked into, on force of presence alone. So it is exciting to see someone who has the right counterculture vibe with a mix of subcultures gothic, punk, hard rock, rockabilly, emo, scene and more blended together for something unique and compelling. To anyone who states people like Adam Lambert are a dime a dozen and FOX is just not in-the-know, I have to say there are a lot of people with some of that general sort of style, but not a lot with that vibe and that level of both charisma and musical talent.

To receive the same kudos as someone who comes across more normal and mainstream, I often feel like I have to work at least twice as hard and produce work which is twice as good. I would be fine with this, except for the part . . .

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