Adventures from the List of Craig

So, I’m currently house hunting here in Los Angeles, and I found this adorable house on craigslist that I thought would suit me and my roomie-to-be just right. Sure, it looked like it had been decorated bySmurfs on some first-quality blotter, but that was the charm:

So I went to see this house. First, I was met by a very cute cat named Oishi. I asked jokingly if Oishi came with the house, and was told, not jokingly, “yes”. Ok, well, I can handle a cat. Fatdog could use the company during the day. But I was pretty no on the fact that the central heat was busted (you do actually need that in the winter here) and that the bedrooms shared a wall (really? That’s just a bad idea with grown-ups.).

Then i noticed something that is just out of the frame in the photo. A bright orange trapdoor in the living room floor. The landlord hadn’t mentioned it, so I had to ask “So I see you have a trapdoor in the living room floor…”

“Yes”, said the landlord “that’s where I live.” I really thought the man was kidding. Until he opened up the trap door, and underneath it was what had once been the garage. It was now a tiny one-room apartment, accessible only through the trapdoor.

WTF?

Who in the world is OK with their landlord living in a hole in the floor like some kind of wacky troll? Popping up at all hours to use the kitchen or the crapper?

SRSLY. WTF?

VISA Goth: Hot in the City

Welcome to the VISA Goth summer footwear special. Like most of the spooky kids, I’ve pretty much stayed away from anything that could be considered summer footwear for many years. However, I just moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. Suddenly, my fairly ridiculous collection of over-the-top platform boots and unwalkable fetish heels seemed incomplete. There was nothing in any of these boxes that would allow me to traverse the million-degree Los Angeles pavement AND let my feet breathe! Gasp! A footwear conundrum for which I had no answer! Thankfully there is the Internet, which solves pretty much all of life’s problems.

So, if you’re the kind of girl who won’t be caught dead in Demonia (yes, they have some options. I’ll leave that to be your own dirty little secret), here are the best things I’ve found that stay gothy, fabulous, and cool- and you can still walk in them (well, kinda).

New Rock Platform Sandals, $55

WINNER! (which is to say, I bought ‘em):

New Rock Platform Sandals

Comfy, airy, and they have a big giant metal skull on the front. How can you beat that? These don’t seem to be available on the New Rock site,

but I picked mine up new on eBay for $55

Shoes USA Thienna Platform, $289

WINNER! (Which is to say that Vampirabat bought them):

Shoes USA Thienna Platform

An awesome wedge without all that nasty cork shit everyone wants to stick on wedges these days. Yes, they come in black. Matte or patent. And burgundy. With variable heel heights.

A bit on the pricey side at $289, but they seem sturdy and well-made. We’ll test them out and report back!

Runner Up: (which is to say, I stand a strong chance of buying them if I actually get any work in this town any time soon)

Steve Madden Open-toe Bukled Boot, $99.95

Steve Madden Open-Toe ‘Bukled’ boot:

I admit I’ve been displeased with quality of Steve Madden before- my last boots from them blew up in one hard night’s wear. But damn, these are cute.

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Office Wedge, 15 pounds

Special Mention: these super- affordable “WOW” wedges from Office

are a little on the plain side, but they’re also Hella on Sale and with a little bit of satin ribbon at the ankles, could be turned into something pretty cute.

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Check in next time, when I go hunting for a proper parasol…

The Great Comic-Con Tragedy of 2008

So last week I went to Comic-Con. It was my very first Comic-Con, and totally lived up to my expectations. I was there mostly to promote The Wizard of Gore, which is out on DVD on August 19th. As it turns out, Wizard is being released under Genius Productions, which also happens to be releasing Hell Ride, which I think I’m in for all of fifteeen seconds.

Anyhow, my job was to wear creepy contact lenses and stand around getting my photo taken and drumming up press. Which worked great. Except that this photo was picked up by Reuters and made MSNBC, Yahoo!News, and the NewYork Times online- and says I’m promoting “Wizards of War”. Wow. That’s some rock-star journalism, guys.

Nixon Suicide/ The Wizard of Gore

For a quick peek at what you missed, check out Fearnets’ Girls of Comic-Con video.

Nixon Suicide at the Genius/Dimension Extreme booth

I’m Batman!

nixon_3

Originally uploaded by suicidenixon

For those of you not paying attention, the big hubbub in the world of online naked chicks right now is San Fransisco startup Zivity.com. With a reported seven million dollar investment to get the off the ground and a pretty smart idea: a social networking base, with naked chicks (so far, similar to Suicide Girls), but with a vote system whereby the viewers are totally in control of not only which models and photographers are popular, but how much they make, Zivity is poised to explode when they go live at the beginning of the year.

I first found out about Zivity through my long time best friend, LeEvil, who models for them. Zivity is currently in Beta testing, so I got myself a Beta account and started snooping around the site (you can get a beta account, too). Imagine my surprise when I discovered that one of the photographers was none other than Missy Suicide! Discovering that the two sites were on good terms, I decided to see if the Zivity crowd could handle a few tattoos.

My first set goes up this week. Oddly, I’m the postergirl for the private Zivity prescreening of “Batman: The Dark Knight” (although I have yet to see the poster). While the event is private, open to models and photographers first and members second, there are (or were, depending on when you read this) a few free tickets available thorough Laughing Squid for those of you in the Bay Area, and there will be an afterparty at the DNA Lounge.

VISA Goth: Utilitarian objects

Welcome to the first installation of the fashion section of my blog: VISA Goth.

The current fashion trend in utility belts gives me pause. Sure, they’re convenient. But I grew up in the 80’s, and I fear the fanny pack. I’m small and girly, and I don’t want to be swamped by a huge belt. I don’t want to look like I’m wearing a cop costume, pretending to be a cowgirl, or doing construction. It can’t be to steampunk, too burner, too butch. Nonetheless, I want one. And, while I haven’t found my perfect match yet, I thought I’d share a few of the good ones I have found in the search

Wild Card

So far my absolute favorites, it figures that these are the most expensive of the bunch.

Alienskin utilty belt

Alienskin fabric utility belt with Velcro closures is a Vegan alternative to the leather belts, and comes in a wide variety of colors.

Persecution utility belt

Persecution’s “Mata Hari” belt is available on Etsy.com. There are actually several belt makers selling there, but Persecution definitely has a unique look I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Lip Service also made a canvas utility belt for their “Beyond the Thunderdome” line. These also zip or snap onto other pieces of clothing from that line.

Find a better belt? Make a better belt? Let me know, and I’ll pass on the word.

Breathless

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Originally uploaded by suicidenixon

Shooting on film has become such an oddity these days that when it happens, it’s a bit of an event. Remo Fioroni of Fine Arts Erotica is one of those oddballs that shoots almost exclusively on film, and I love the challenge. Suddenly I’m no longer posing for 300 or 600 shots in a sitting, but a tenth of that number, and they need to all be good.

Besides, Remo has a sense of humor that I work well with- witness me in the mermaid outfit with a series of water heaters, or me in the silver shorts perched atop a fuzzy old TV set like a pair of rabbit ears.

Towards the end of the shoot, we tried shooting with an old Polaroid Land Camera. However, the film was old and all stuck together, and came out of the camera in chemical-smelling chunks that bore little resemblance to anything at all. So we abandoned the Polaroid and shot with a second camera, leaving the spent and satisfied Polaroid in the shot. Turn your Flickr Safe search off to see what ended up being my favorite shot of the day. Why do you have that thing on, anyhow?

Photos at Flickr

Alice returning

Nixon-brambles

Originally uploaded by suicidenixon

I am Alice returning to Wonderland, heading back to American Canyon. I love this place, and I fear that like I fear with all such places that are a bit too wild, it will fall unexpectedly to a bulldozer between one trip and the next. Things have changed since my last visit, even though it has been only a few weeks. There are signs of human activity- the road has been bushhogged, and there are tents set up in one of the back rooms, the floor littered with beer bottles.

Nature has changed, too. The lush grass has burned brown under the early summer sun, the nettles are blooming purple everywhere, and the blackberries are huge and sweet, and I regret not taking any home to bake with. I bring with me the little praying mantis I’ve been raising - at about two inches long, I think he’s old enough to fend for himself. It is a little like an offering, turning him loose into this place.

My companion for the trip this time is Conan Sorano from Addicted Image, one of my favorite photographers. It is his first time here, and within a few minutes he is already helping lower me into one of the cement holding pits to rescue a garter snake trapped there.

We were, of course, here to take pictures. These are destined for upcoming site Zivity.com, which is currently beta testing. I’m a little extreme for a Zivity model, so we aim for softer, more romantic shots. Conan loves wigs, and the combination leads these to look a little bit Wuthering Heights. (We also shot some in a Marie Antoinette wig, which I ‘ll post later).

More on Flickr

Through Broken Walls

006Originally uploaded by suicidenixon

Halfway between San Fransisco and Napa, in the town of American Canyon, lie the abandoned ruins of a cement factory that closed in 1978. Since then, the walls have crumbled and the ceilings have fallen in. Foxes run along the roads and a Great Horned Owl circles in the empty rooms, the tiny bones of a thousand dinners crunching underfoot.

It was to this incredible spot, accessible with only a little breaking and entering and a bit of a hike, that Adam Gross of Benaiah Art Photo took me a few weeks back. The lighting was perfect, and I refrained from chasing Western Fence Lizards long enough to capture a little of the wonder of the place.

There is something so incredible about a world where nature has reclaimed her own, rising up in revolt against things as seemingly solid and timeless as these imposing walls. It is a vision to me of what is to come, the world returning to balance in the absence of humanity. Here are some postcards from after the apocalypse, notes from a future of rabbits and blackbackberries, of birdsong and the sound of iron rusting into dust.

Flick Gallery

On the Subject of Calendars…

Yesterday I mentioned the difficulty involved in calendars, as WordPress does not support iFrames. There seemed to be a lot of hoopla about the difficulty involved in embedding a Google calendar onto WordPress. I tried a couple of the suggestions, but they were pretty convoluted, and I failed.

Then today I went to embed said Google calendar into my Myspace, only to discover a button on the same site that said “add to wordpress”.

So, for anyone in the same boat:

-Get out of Firefox. Safari worked fine.

-Go to your Google calendar and set the preferred view to “Agenda”. Go into “Calendar settings” (hit the pull-down menu by “My Calendars”, and get the XML calendar address.

-Go to Feedburner.com and sign in. Copy the XML from your google calendar into the box. Follow the instructions. There are a couple of tricks- in the “optimize” tab, click on the “Event Feed” link. This will give you the option to “choose only events in the future”. For most people, that sounds good.

-Now, under the big “Publicize” tab, choose “Headline Animator”. Futz around till it looks good, then hit “activate”. Now there should be a pull-down menu beside a red cros that says “Add to my Myspace, Typepad, etc.”. There’s a WordPress choice. 

-Follow their instructions for putting it in the text widget (UNDER the line, BTW).

Ta-Da!

 

For the Technologically Impaired

OK. This website-building thing is like trying to make a Lego aircraft carrier with two sailboat kits and some Lincoln Logs

However, I’m learning a lot, in my standard hunt-and-gather way. So in the interest of being nice back to the internet, I thought I would share a little bit of what I’ve found, for anyone else currently tring to fight their way through building a site on iWeb with a blog, a calendar, galleries, etc

The first thing I’ve learned is that iWeb is really easy. Except when it’s not.

For example, say you get everything set up all pretty and enable your hyperlinks- only to discover that they all turn a bizarre and unexpected color? Perhaps even turquoise? Think you could fix that, right? Hells no. In iWeb, those are built right in to the template. Your options are two. You can go in and rewrite the code for the template. That fixes the problem all around, in theory, but I had some trouble making it go. Alternately, you can change the code for each page, which is easier but more time-consuming. Of course, either way you aren’t going to get a little color wheel to pick out what you want, so unless you want to just guess by typing in random words and numbers, here’s a chart for RGB, CMYK, and Hex colors.

Some things were surprisingly easy. As my website contains nudity and adult themes, I wanted to make sure it was designed to be easily filtered by parents. I’m a firm believer in the adult community policing themselves and being model citizens, as it helps keep the censors from having any more fuel to add to the fire. Plus, it’s just polite. And I’m still a Southern girl at heart. This turned out to be one of the easiest things I did all day: the nice folks at ICRA provide a simple questionnaire about what exactly is on your site.  You fill out the form, and they will either send you the pre-formatted labels to put in your code, or you can give them your FTP information and they’ll even do it for you. All for free. (These labels are what parental-control software picks up, so it’s important to have them).

Speaking of nudity, I live in an internet so rife with the stuff that I sometimes forget that there are places that don’t want it around (other than Myspace, of course). But I had just assumed that Flickr didn’t allow nudity- especially as I’d had some friends have problems with it. But, in fact, Flickr DOES allow nudity, assuming that it is properly tagged as such. The problem is that the button to tag things as ‘restricted’ doesn’t come up automatically like it does in, say, Model Mayhem. There is an Advanced Upload function that lets you tag things. You just have to look for it. And now I know how to set my Flickr so I can see everyone else’s nudity. Which is a good thing.