After dinner tonight I went with my friends Violet and Jonathan to another dinner with a few folks from the LA Erotica Film Fest where we'd spent a good chunk of the day prior to that. Actually Violet was on a panel about "alt porn" and I went to see what she and the others had to say about it. At this dinner someone was asking me for advice about starting a blog and what are some of the best practices and I realized while telling him what to do that I hadn't been doing a lot of that that myself recently. Things like posting regularly, posting what you are thinking, and not letting yourself talk you out of posting things - I'm guilty of breaking all of these, pretty regularly it seems but I try not to, and it's really late and I'm totally crashing but I'm posting anyway so we'll see.

The panel was really interesting to be honest. Violet talked about the porn industry being completely racist, Eon talked about main stream porn companies only understanding the cookie cutter mass production model of making widgets and profiting, Dana talked about the major differences between people who really are punk/alt and companies just dressing people up like that. Vena and Octavio also had great things to say of which I'm totally blanking on at the moment. I wasn't around for most of the rest of the fest but what I did see what enough to make you want to die. Quickly. I saw old grumpy stars of many years ago complaining about those damn kids today and how things will never be like they were back in the good old days. I saw brand new starlets beaming about how famous and important they are and oh my gosh how cool this all is and blah blah blah. It was fucking painful and all involved seemed to be taking themselves way too seriously. Luckily I had a few folks around me didn't, and joined me in my heckling which made it all worth while. Here's a few pics of all that...

The Panel:

Dana and Violet:

Jonathan:

Eon and Violet:

Porn fest aside, after riding out to Santa Monica Pier from Silver Lake the other night with a few hundred other wheeled LA posse members I think I've finally decided that I need a new bike. I love my Kona mountain bike but I've had it since before I moved to Los Angeles and it's really designed for a style of riding that I don't do any of at all these days. When I was in Florida and often riding through grass and dirt it made a lot of sense. In LA where 99% of the time I'm on pavement I think it's time to move to something a little more geared towards that. And speaking of gears, the fact that I didn't shift once on the entire 40+ mile ride the other night has also convinced me that it might be worthwhile to look into a single speed. I can't go fixie because I love coasting too much, but single speed might be doable. I've been drooling over this bike since I first saw it, and seeing n in person the other night didn't help at all. I guess we'll just have to see.

I've got a mountain of todo list items staring at me, meaning I'll be in the office all week trying to knock them out. More on all that soon. Thanks for reading.