Vaughn Belak is – in this respect – a son of our times: a talented artist that, half a century ago would have had to settle for commissions or take another road entirely, and that now – instead – is allowed to show us his creativity and skill. The dark, gothic themes are brought forward with an effective use of black and colours, mixing media with no regard to academy but only to his personal twist on fairy tales and pop imagery. To be published by BlueBlood, this is a kickstarter that has the content and timing to make it under this year’s Christmas Tree.

When I was 19, my girlfriend was leaving town for a month and she had an idea. This was a time before sexting and Skype so she bought me a plastic Barbie Polaroid camera and told me I could take naked photos of her before she left so that I wouldn’t cheat on her. These photos were some of the first naked photos I ever took and those early memories created a lifelong love for nude photography on instant film.

I soon started photographing all my friends, girlfriends and lovers nude on Polaroid. This was a documentation of my nascent sexuality and some of the most exciting photography I was doing (at the time I was mostly photographing bands). I switched from the Barbie cam to my mom’s old Spectra and eventually to the Polaroid 600, which I used until Polaroid stopped making Instant film. I had photographed hundreds of women nude on Polaroid and I didn’t want to stop.

“I made a bit of a career out of what I love and I feel really really fortunate to be able to do that.”

I know I’ve raved about BlueBloods before. Well, really I do that every time I see a set by them but for good reason! Today, I found another reason. Alarm Audra is in the process of putting out a kawaii inspired coffee table book. Yes, it includes nudes. And so much other cool stuff including her own artwork! You know what else is cool? Forrest Black is going to be helping, which means that the same designer who has helped Dandy Warhols, Radiohead, and Everclear is helping with this book! How can it not come out awesome? It just makes me even more excited to check out.

All my fangirling aside, this is a really cool project. As an artist I love seeing other artists thrive and I love seeing them follow their passion. And the truth is, I have no doubt this is going to be a really cool book, which is why I’m encouraging you all to check out the Kickstarter page, even if it is just for more info, but donating not only gets you the book, but also gets your name in the book and other swag like T-shirts, fan signs, character sketches, and even a chance to chat with Alarm Audra. Check out Kickstarter for more info and the cutest sexy video. Watch to the end for cake naked.

Gorgeous hardcover coffee table book. A whopping 172 pages of deathrock gothic punk portraits with intense personality and viscerally saturated colors.

From the introduction: “Since the mid-1990’s, Forrest and I have been setting up full blown location studios in all sorts of unlikely and underground places. We’ve set up lights and backdrops in wind-blown theater parking lots in the middle of the night, while bands played their shows, in co-ed strip clubs, and crammed behind the pool table in the back of noisy dive bars. Sometimes it’s a real challenge, but this is how we shoot our personal work. We like to capture the moments in their real environments. For this compendium, we chose only images which were actually shot in California. Some of the deathrockers in this volume grew up here and some are transplants and some were just passing through. Forrest and I had a lot of debates, while hunched over a contact sheet with loupes in hand, over whether a particular photo was really more deathrock or more Gothic, as we needed a methodology for honing down what to share. When we started shooting, there were very few photographers who would ever shoot anyone gothic or punk or tattooed or pierced or fetish and the few who did approached the subject matter in a gritty unattractive purely anthropological manner, like they were going to the zoo. We wanted to create respectful and celebratory work. We wanted to capture the joy and tribal sense of community which we experienced in the various subterranean worlds we documented. We wanted the flamboyant beauty we saw to resonate with other people the way it did for us. We wanted the people we photographed to look the way they looked in our minds’ eyes when we recalled the excitement of nightlife at midnight.”

Backstage Passes is a bit of a who’s who of the first wave of paranormal romance. After reading Nancy A. Collins’ depraved and romantic Demon Lover story in this book, I placed an order on Amazon for pretty much everything she has ever done and she has written a lot of books with vampires and werewolves and other sexy monsters. I would characterize editor Amelia G’s Dreamgirl and John Shirley’s When Enter Came as also extremely enjoyably depraved and romantic. Cecilia Tan is probably one of the most famous writers of paranormal romance, but, in this collection, she serves up a real world story, Rock Steady, of bandmates who can’t keep their hands off one another. Another real world story I enjoyed was Blue Blood model Sarah McKinley Oakes’ Accept No Substitutes tale of a boy with a mohawk who doesn’t know what is good for him, until it is almost too late. I first really took note of Will Judy’s byline, when I came across the BlueBlood.net article Fuck You: A Brief History of the Mohawk. His mohawk history made me laugh out loud, but the longing in his Backstage Passes story Temporary Assignment brought tears to my eyes. APN’s own Thomas S. Roche contributed a rollicking fun story called Sticky Fingers which is all badass backstage shenanigans, predatory bisexuality, and delicious rough sex.

The Backstage Passes book is available as a paperback or ebook. I read the paperback, but it is available digitally from iTunes and Nook and all those Kindle kind of places. You can go to BlueBloodBooks.com to find links to buy Backstage Passes from Amazon and Barnes & Noble etc. Information about contributing to a Backstage Passes sequel is also available on the Blue Blood Books site.

The first chapter chronicles Zak Sabbath (then named Zak Smith) falling for Joanna Angel (weirdly called Joanna Divine for the purpose of this book) while painting her. In the first chapter, Zak describes his date with Joanna Angel with a self-deprecating but knowing sense of humor. He is smitten and she has sex with some other guy in the restaurant bathroom in the middle of their date and then cries at the table and the table is shaped like a bed. New York seems to have weird restaurants where you can spend a Valentines Day in bed at a restaurant. This was a creatively very productive date, as Joanna Angel and Burning Angel got the Fuck Me in the Bathroom DVD and site out of it and Zak got the kickstart for his We Did Porn book out of it.

The books goes on to chronicle what Zak seems to view as his descent into porn. He points out his fine art cred in a way which is funny and entertaining to read, but it also kind of seems like he is trying to suggest he is somehow better than many of the other people working in porn. He credits some porn people as sharing his love of author Thomas Pynchon and stuff like that, but there is the sense that he mentions the exceptions. It is possible that, because his focus is altporn, he really is talking about the exceptions.

It is hard to explain, but it is like the book gets less smart once Zak starts making porn and not just painting pornstars. Like, in the part where he talks about dating Joanna Angel, he has analogies from other forms of media and he seems really self-aware and like he knows what’s what and is speaking to universal truths. In the part where he talks about making porn, there is a lot of stuff which just does not ring true. Like Zak keeps talking about how porn is the biggest business in the whole world, when I don’t think you have to know that much about business to know that can’t be right. Blue Blood‘s Amelia G did a whole comparative breakdown of complex industry benchmarks to demonstrate how wrong it is to say porn is the hugest industry, but, although understanding what a market capitalization is might be over my head, I still knew while reading We Did Porn that what Zak was saying about how rich porn makes everyone had to be wrong. Zak says he is bad at doing porn, so maybe it would make sense that he is not rich from porn, but most of the people he writes about do not seem rich either, so I do not know where he got the idea. Everybody makes mistakes, but, when I see one super wrong thing where someone is supposed to be expert, it makes me question everything else I read there.

I think that the other thing which made the later parts of We Did Porn harder to read was the way everyone had a fake name. I think most porn performers use a stage name or a bunch of stage names to begin with, but Zak calls almost everyone by a second fake name. Maybe the book publisher didn’t want to give like Burning Angel publicity, so it had to be called Divine Things with Joanna Divine or something like that. It makes it harder to read though because every page had me trying to figure out who I was reading about. This is probably not so much of an issue for someone who knows nothing about altporn and doesn’t care who Joanna Angel is or for something who is really expert in altporn, especially video altporn, and can easily tell who all the fake stage names are referring to.

One of the biggest porn films Zak Sabbath performed in was Hospital (called Medical in Zak Smith’s memoir). APN’s Domina Doll wrote up Hospital when it came out. I can’t seem to find much Zak Sabbath porn since Hospital was shot at the end of 2008. I know the title of the book is We Did Porn and not We Are Doing Porn, but I wonder if he quit or was forced into retirement. I am curious as to what the altporn video industry response to the book was. The book was favorably reviewed by Blue Blood, Penthouse, Fleshbot, and Girls Gone Wild Magazine. I didn’t know there was a Girls Gone Wild Magazine. Anyway, of those media companies which gave We Did Porn favorable reviews, none were mentioned in the book and I wonder what the people he wrote about think.

So I am on the fence about this book. Parts of it are hard to read and not very enjoyable and parts of it are easy to read and laugh out loud funny.