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Suicide Girls Must Die Premiere

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SuicideGirls premiered their groundbreaking reality horror movie last night at the Downtown Independent, in DTLA. Those who came out to witness the sexy fun/terror of Suicide Girls Must Die included members of the cast and crew, alongside We Live In Public director Ondi Timoner and Jeremy "Wizard of Gore" Kasten.


Suicide Girls Must Die is unabashedly documentary in its lowest (and funnest) form. When SuicideGirls co-founder Missy and photographer / filmmaker Sawa invited 12 of their favorite Suicide Girls to a remote cabin in Maine to shoot a calendar video, none of the girls had any idea they were going to be a part of SuicideGirl's first feature length horror movie.


When models Bailey Suicide and Evan Suicide go missing, the idyllic working vacation quickly degenerates into a chaotic nightmare for the calendar girls. As more girls vanish, those who remain wonder who'll be the next to disappear - and if their calendar shots will come out OK.


Suicide Girls Must Die is the ultimate feel-good horror movie. After this, all other horror movies will seem way too overdressed!


SuicideGirls Top 10 Life lessons from Suicide Girls Must Die


1. Best misunderestimation:
"Nothing can go wrong."


2. Most debatable statement:
"Humans are a bit more important than a calendar."


3. Best health advice:
"An apple [bong] a day keeps the doctor away."


4. Best model advice:
"Make the blow job face - you know what I'm talking about."


5. Best fashion/face furniture advice on what not to wear when you accidentally find yourself in the middle of a real-life horror movie:
"It's always the cute girl with glasses that gets axe-murdered."


6. Most positive job performance assessment under adverse circumstances:
"All I have to do is make sure the models are happy. They're all happy, they're just lost."


7. Best offer you've had all day:
"Let's have some champagne, get drunk, and I'll make out with you in the Jacuzzi later."


8. Ultimate self-preservation evaluation:
"I'm not missing. I don't give a shit."


9. Best rallying advice after 80% of your friends have gone missing:
"Do you wanna sit and mope all night?"


10. Famous last words:
"I'm not going to fucking die."


No Suicide Girls were harmed in the making of this movie.


Check out the HD trailer at SuicideGirls.com/MustDie/.

Manifesting Equality

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Was Manifesting Equality on Saturday night.


Hope it works!


Can't believe anyone can be pro-Prop H8te in 2010.


That kind of philosophy is so last century, never mind last decade.


It's about time primitive minds evolved.


Thanks to Jon Stern for the images.

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I caught up with artist Camille Rose Garcia at the opening of Down The Rabbit Hole, an exhibition of the original art from her latest project, a reimagining of the illustrations that accompany the text of Lewis Carroll's classic children's book, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


Though the March Hare, the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse were unable to attend the party at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles on Saturday night in person, Hollywood funnyman Robin Williams did make a somewhat unexpected appearance.


Earlier, I'd spoken with Garcia for an in-depth interview which can be found at SuicideGirls.com. After talking about the visual vocabulary and inspirations behind her Alice illustrations, our conversation turned to a core SuicideGirls topic: body art.


Here is a previously unpublished outtake from this interview in which Garcia talks about her own tattoos and her art as it appears on other people's body parts.

Ondi Timoner: We Live In Public

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At a time when, however deliberately or consciously, we live our lives in public online, access to our privacy is the new currency of value. Just because you can keep track of your friends via Facebook, post and tag photos on MySpace, and spew out your every waking thought on Twitter - all easily and for free - it's easy to assume it's a good thing. Josh Harris is a man who made a similar assumption.


Described as "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," Harris carved a high profile career out of being an instinctive World Wide Web visionary. Before the web was very worldly or wide, he founded Jupiter Research, a company which sold technology trend and impact information to corporations that barely understood what a website was. Harris then rolled the dot.com fortune he made there into Pseudo.com, a New York based Internet TV station that went live when most of America was still on dial up.


Serving as both business manager and creative director at Pseudo, which webcast multiple channels of original content, Harris reinvented himself in the frame of a digital performance artist during his tenure at the too-far-ahead of its time company. As the millennium loomed, Harris was forced out of Pseudo, and he subsequently invested a large amount of his considerable fortune ($80 million at its peak) in a series of two very controversial digital media social experiments.


The first was called Quiet, though it was anything but. For the project which was intended to mark the turn of the millennium, Harris built an ambitious - and expensive - fully wired environment, which housed 100 guests / experiment subjects 24/7 for a period of 30 days. The claustrophobic underground bunker featured pod bunks for sleeping, communal toilet and bathing facilities, a dining area, and a poorly insulated gun range where residents could blow off steam. There was also an onsite interrogation room.


Potential residents had to sell their pixilated souls in order to gain entry to Quiet. There was an intense intake program that involved an intrusive questionnaire, those that passed this initial test had to agree to subject themselves to random interrogations, among other dehumanizing things. All activity in the bunker was caught on camera and microphone, and relayed for the entertainment of Quiet's residents to their in-Pod TVs. Privacy was non-existent, and individuals were reduced to being "channels" for the entertainment of others - suffice to say the sate-or-the art society Harris had created was far from utopian.


For his next experiment / performance art piece Josh took things a step further, and took on the roles of both puppet and puppet master. He installed 30 motion-controlled surveillance cameras and 66 high sensitivity microphones in a New York loft, and moved in with his new girlfriend, Tanya Corrin (who had previously worked with Harris as a presenter at Pseudo). The pair were the first couple to broadcast their everyday home lives live on the Internet, and viewers could post their comments in real time via the project's associated chat rooms. The stunt garnered much mainstream attention, and fed Harris' growing need for 15 minutes of fame - per day. But as life in public unfolded, and not in the way either of them had planned, Harris and Corrin realized a little too late that perhaps the most valuable thing online might be privacy. It's a lesson we all may want to take note of.


To this end, renowned film director Ondi Timoner set about assembling and editing footage she'd shot of Harris over a 10-year period. The resulting film, We Live In Public, which Timoner describes as "a cautionary tale," is both thought provoking and shocking, having a profound effect on all who open themselves up to it. The documentary won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2009, making Timoner, whose previous film Dig! was also a winner at the festival (in 2004), the only director ever to be given the honor twice.


I caught up with Timoner ahead of We Live In Public's March 1st DVD and VOD release.


Read my interview with Ondi Timoner at SuicideGirls.com to get an exclusive retrospective tour of the Quiet bunker, and an insight into the mind of its maniacal master.

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Growing up in the shadow of Disneyland, artist and illustrator Camille Rose Garcia spent a lot of time contemplating the reality of fantasy and the fantasies that make reality palatable.


Just as the white paint flaked and the wood decayed in the once-perfect picket-fenced suburbs that surround Disney's Orange County Fantasyland, on canvas and in print, Garcia's brightly colored fairytale tableaus are juxtaposed with darker elements, as real world forces impinge on her perfect dream worlds.


Much of Garcia's work explores the lie of the American Dream, the loss of it, and how the masses are self-medicating to deal with the aftermath. Though these themes are adult in nature, the on-the-surface beauty of Garcia's art appeals to a younger audience on a more basic level. So when Harper Collins decided to revisit Alice's Adventures in Wonderland amid renewed interest in Lewis Carroll's curious tale (which was first published in 1865), Garcia was a natural choice to re-imagine the visual element of the book.


I spoke with Garcia to find out what she saw when she followed Alice and a certain well-dressed (and very late) White Rabbit down Carroll's most unusual rabbit-hole.


Read my exclusive interview with Camille Rose Garcia at SuicideGirls.com.

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SuicideGirls were among the winners of the LA Weekly's 2009 Web Awards. The groundbreaking pinup and social media company was honored for being LA's Sexiest Site.


Co-founder Missy and model coordinator Radeo (pictured above) braved the chubby rain to pick up SG's plaque at a soiree held at Bardot on Thursday night. Other winners in SuicideGirls's extended family included SG columnist Wil Wheaton, who won Best Personal Blog, and SG photographer Zoetica and SG designer Courtney Riot, who picked up Coilhouse's prize for LA's Best Designed Site Aesthetic.


Hit my photo gallery for more images from the night.


Thanks to the LA Weekly's Erin Broadley for organizing and hosting the event -- and for making sure the open bar was open as soon as we arrived.

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After interviewing Dita Von Teese for SuicideGirls, I caught up with her in the flesh at ReVamp in Downtown LA. The burlesque star was at the boutique, which specializes in limited edition vintage recreations, for an event to promote her new mini flip-book set Stripteese.


During a Q&A session which followed the book signing, Dita let slip that she'll be doing a secret preview of her new show at West Hollywood's Roxy sometime early in 2010.


I've posted more images of Dita and her fans (including mini-socialite Paris, of LifeWithParis.com) in a photo gallery at SuicideGirls.


Those that want to see Dita in person however should head out to Hollywood's Daily Planet Bookstore, which will host another book signing event starting at 7pm on January 6th.

Dita Von Teese: Stripteese

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Dita Von Teese is one of the world's most dazzling women. The Swarovski-adorned mistress of striptease has done more to preserve and promote the hallowed art of burlesque than any other performer alive today. Her sexy and spectacular shows feature stunning costumes and larger-than-life props, but are always grounded in the purity of the classic art form. Thus they have an innate dignity that never relies on the kind of bump and grind sleaze that many of Dita's contemporaries mistake for erotica.


In a league of her own, the Michigan born and Orange County raised girl, who once had aspirations of becoming a ballerina, is an international glamour icon. Celebrated both for her performance art and her impeccable vintage style, her world-class status was sealed in October 2006 when she became the first ever featured headlining guest performer at the legendary Crazy Horse in Paris. She returned to the prestigious cabaret club in February of this year for a limited two week run which was so successful that she was immediately booked again for another series of shows the following month.


The hottest ticket in town, Dita's run at the Crazy Horse attracted such luminaries as Jean Paul Gaultier, Kanye West, Kylie Minogue, and Stephen Spielberg, among others. Her performances are as rare as they are exotic however, in part due to the time and expense they take to conceive. Fortunately those who are unable to witness Dita in the flesh have two new options. The first is a DVD of Dita's Crazy Horse show. The second is Stripteese, a set of three miniature flip-books books which capture individual facets of her repertoire and come packaged together in a deluxe gift box.


We caught up with Dita to find out more about the books and DVD, her new Opium Den set which was 4 years in the making, her plans for shows in Paris and Vegas in 2010, and her life in the romance capital of the world.


Hit the link to read my exclusive interview with Dita Von Teese at SuicideGirls.com.


Meet Dita at her two Los Angeles book signing events: Friday December 18 @ Hennessey and Ingalls at Space 15 Twenty (7 PM), and Sunday December 20 @ at Revamp Vintage (2 PM).


For more information on Dita's appearances, performances, books, DVDs and lingerie go to Dita.net.

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Went to see Art of Bleeding's Spirits of Safety Show at the Institute of Abnormal Arts in NoHo on Sunday night. The cabaret of the absurd led by former Cacophony Society leader Al Ridenour offered somewhat dubious healthcare advice and accident avoidance tips dished out by mascots RT the Robot Teacher, Dr. Moody, and Abram the Safety Ape.


A host of naughty nurses were also on hand in case emergency treatment was required. During the show Nurse Jezebelle (pictured), who specializes in breast examinations, gave a detailed demonstration of her skills, as did testicular cancer inspector, Nurse Alena. But it was perhaps Nurse Vulnavia's enthusiastic, hands-on kiss of life tutorial that proved to be the most popular of the evening's lessons. Wonder if Art of Bleeding offer HMOs? It'd sure beat my current plan.


Click HERE to view my Art of Bleeding photo gallery.

Shepard Fairey: Purveyor of Hope

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Having been harassed and arrested by agents of the United States' government as he perpetrated his graffiti art from coast to coast, Shepard Fairy has since earned the respect and gratitude of a future American president. Using the visual vocabulary of popular revolution, the humble DIY poster and sticker maker-cum-revered gallery and populist street artist used his graphic skill to transform Barack Obama from a presidential hopeful to a visionary icon.


But now that the future leader of our government is one of his choosing, Shepard Fairey is questioning his own message of dissent. In essence, what does a rebellious artist do when the central entity he was rebelling against is controlled by a commander-in-chief he helped elect?


SuicideGirls called Shepard at his Los Angeles studio to find out. In our interview he also talks about his Obama image, the psychology behind it, how he had to make a unique version that hadn't previously been distributed by illegal means for use by the official Obama campaign, and how he self-funded his own campaign of Hope for which the artist printed up a staggering 300,000 stickers and 500,000 posters!


Click HERE to read.