We’re gearing up for a busy couple of days around here, because the two-day bondage intensive Max is teaching this weekend. (Not to be confused with the regular bondage class May 7th, "Bondage For Sex.) The intensives are a lot to orchestrate – registration, space, caterers, equipment, et cetera. But you know, I’m really proud of Max and how he makes things happen: these two-day events, and the regular monthly bondage classes. All the teaching he does is a responsibility, but he’s good at it, and I’m pleased by the fact that a lot of people acknowledge that and look up to him for what he does. I’m a very driven, achievement-oriented person myself, and that’s something I really respect about Max. My work (and there are a lot of different activities that fall under that umbrella) is important to me. I need to have that in a partner. (Roman is this way as well.) I’m always sort of puzzled by people who don’t seem to have any goals. They don’t necessarily have to be the same type of goals I would have – but shouldn’t we be striving for something?

Speaking of goals, here’s the weekly column.

Another smart, driven woman - who happens to be a pal of mine - would be local pro domme Mistress Lydia. She apparently gets emails that are just as stupid as some of the ones I get.

I am eBaying, BTW. Just clothes and shoes at the moment – and I don’t mean used panties, I mean real clothes. I need to go through the toy closet at the dungeon, too, though, I’ve got boxes of stuff just sitting there.

Have a lovely weekend, everyone…

Men, unless you are a serious metrosexual, this entry will probably bore you. It’s mostly about clothes.

I’ve decided my closet needs an overhaul. Time to get rid of the things I don’t wear, and get some new outfits. I’ve bought stuff on eBay, but I’ve never actually sold anything there – however, I think the time has come. I’ve got an armful of dresses and such I don’t wear and they’re too cute to give to Goodwill. So today I’ll get out the camera, snap some pics of what I’ve got, and see if I can get rid of it. I’m told it’s easy, but if any of ya’ll are veteran eBay sellers, feel free to give me tips.

Meanwhile, I’m lusting after summer dresses. Isn’t this cute? And this one, too. And you can’t go wrong with Diane von Furstenberg, can you?

Look who’s giving Rose Algren a run for her money: Norma Kamali. Okay, not really – for thing, it’s not PVC, and no easy-access zippers. But still, it’s a sexy catsuit and I definitely want one.

For shoes, though, I’ll wait a bit – my mom lives in Atlanta, where there are many, many designer shoe outlets, and I’m going to visit her soon. I’ll just bring a spare suitcase.

But I'm not totally lost to vanity and fickle fashion today. I'm also eagerly anticipating reading this book, which I'm told is stupendous: A Writer's Life, by Gay Talese. "Thy Neighbor's Wife" was a fascinating, if meandering, examination of the swinger and sex work culture, far ahead of it's time, and I'm interested to see what Talese has to say about the experience of writing.

A woman who I have known casually for a few years has recently become involved in the local BDSM community. Of course I always knew she was kinky, but people have to be in the right place in their lives to act on things. And Scarlett is now, apparently, which is good. In a recent email she mentioned an incident that happened a couple of years ago at a non-kinky cocktail party…

"…some mutual (vanilla) friends of mine and Matisse’s were throwing a party, and Matisse came with Max and Jae and I forget who else, and oh, what a scene got created that night...when it came time for Matisse and Max to leave I threw a fit and wouldn't let Matisse up off the couch (she was sitting next to me) and Max took that as invitation to threaten to cut my stockings off with a large serrated bread knife (from the kitchen), and then one of the other vanilla guests went berserk. (Editor’s note: we had all had a few cocktails, which perhaps led Max and I to be slightly less discreet than we might have otherwise. Oh well.)
The rest of the story wasn't as funny but, you know, there's a reason why neither Matisse nor myself hang out in that crowd anymore... I sometimes think you can find more crazies at a vanilla party than a kinky party any day of the week."

Yeah, it seems that way sometimes. No one could have thought that Max was seriously threatening to harm Scarlett, but lord, that other girl absolutely freaked out. Of course, if that girl had seen some of the things Scarlett's been up to lately, I’m guessing she’d flip out even more.
Not that all vanilla people are uptight or anything. But it’s one reason why kinky people tend to stick to their own social circles. What seems like mild, innocent flirtation to us seems to induce full-on PTSD in certain other people.

Well, I had a nice weekend. Roman’s lovely wife was out of town, so he and I decided to take advantage of that to do something unusual: spend a weekend together. We rarely get two nights in a row together, and it was perfect in that it fell on a weekend where neither of us had any pressing social obligations.

It’s one of the nice fringe benefits to living with a partner but having a separate house for my professional space – I have a place where Roman and I can be together on our dates. (Roman has a lovely house, but he also has a sweet, friendly, furry dog to whom I am so very allergic.)

And I like my new house so much that I’m happy to spend time there. My old place was okay, but it was a charming older house with some really uncharming features like inefficient heating, capricious plumbing and the occasional four-footed visitor. I didn’t want to be there very much. My new place is a happy place to be.

So Roman and I just hung out together, ate yummy Stellar's pizza, lazed in the benevolent sunshine on my deck, cuddled in bed and watched two excellent movies (A History Of Violence, and The Ice Harvest) and just generally had a delightful weekend together.

Oh, what - you want to hear about the sexy parts? What makes you think we did anything sexy? Ah, yes, I suppose you have a point. Well, we did do some other, less innocent things as well, involving rope and clothespins. And we conducted a little electrical experiment – purely educational, really – in which we discovered that if you put one sticky pad on one person’s naughty bits and the other sticky pad on the other person’s naughty bits and you put those naughty bits together…you’ll get a tingle. A very noticeable tingle.

We like tingling.

Hey, Blogger is back up, cool! Here's this week's column and calendar. Now I have a hot date with my hairdresser, so - Happy Friday, everyone. Bye!

Okay, ready to find out how well you guessed? Here we go.

AA Model 1
Yep, sold this one, even though one of my strobes didn’t fire half the time, totally screwing up some of the shots. Slide film is not a forgiving medium. So not my best work by any means, and I’m sure they had to tweak the images a lot, but she just had a look they liked: very all-American, slim, long hair, kind of a Jennifer Garner type.

AA Model 2
No. She was actually my first shoot, and they didn’t like the couch/floor setting, said it was too boring. They were right - it wasn’t very good. But jeeze, look at the abs on that girl, and such a nice smile, too. She was extremely – ahem - enthusiastic about the more intimate parts of the shoot, too, really got into it.

AA Model 4
Oh yeah. They thought she was great. Who wouldn’t? She’s lovely. And no, that’s not Sarah Blake, although this girl had done a fair amount of modeling and it’s not impossible you’ll see her somewhere else online.

AA Model 6
No, they declined. She’s only model I ever took a chance and booked a shoot with sight-unseen, because she worked at a strip club, and I thought, okay, she has to be cute. And she is, definitely – but when I saw her, I had a feeling they’d decline. They didn’t like the Goth/alternative thing, and they felt she was just a little too curvy for NN - although of course she’s too slim for the voluptuous girls mags. Caught in the middle. But she had such amazing, glamorous eyes and a sexy energy that I thought it was worth a try.

AA Model 7
No, they turned her down without really saying why. I was surprised, I thought she had a great, sort of gawky/adorable young girl look. But the weird thing is: I found out later she’d already been in one of the Hustler “young girl” magazines! So maybe they recognized her and didn’t want to present her as an amateur.

AA Model 10
Yes. They loved her. (Which why I was baffled by them declining Stevie, who I think has a very similar look.) And this lady has actually gone on to be quite the busy porn model. I’m fairly sure I was one of the first to shoot her, though, and that tickles me.

AA Model 12
Yep. I had her do a cute bathtub scene shaving her legs…and et cetera, and they liked that. I think this model has a lovely, Bambi-like quality on camera, which is amusing since in real life, she’s not the delicate, vulnerable type at all. She’s sweet and all, but oooh, don’t piss her off. Nosiree. I was at a club with her and a bunch of other people, and some stupid guy was being rude and physically intrusive, and Bambi-girl here turned around and ripped him a new one just like that. He slunk away and we all went “Wow.”
(Bonus points if you recognized this model from my fetish video, Inflamed, which was her first first adult modeling experience ever. She was great. )

So now you’ve played photo editor. If any of you ever start your own porno mag and want me to shoot for you, you just let me know. I’m good at getting women to take their clothes off for me.

Porn Shoots, Part II

Okay, here’s the game. These are all models I shot for a porn mag. Some of them sold, some of them didn’t. To give you better odds, I’ll show you two images of each model. You submit your guesses and Wednesday I’ll reveal the facts.

A clue: do not be misled by what you think is the technical quality of the photo. For one thing, as I said yesterday, my scanner isn’t very good, and my Photoshop skills are fairly basic. A set is 180-200 transparencies, and the magazine often uses only half a dozen of them. If they like the model and the concept, they can almost always find 6 shots and magically tweak them, no problem.

One last remark: bear in mind that these women are real people, with feelings, and it’s not impossible that they might come upon their picture and your comments about them. So be polite.

With two exceptions (because they're just too beautiful) I have elected not to put any of the more revealing pictures here. But nonetheless, as usual: Not Work Safe!

AA Model 1, and 1a

AA Model 2, and 2a

AA Model 4 and 4a

AA Model 6 and 6a

AA Model 7 and 7a

AA Model 10 and 10a

AA Model 12 and 12a

Porn shots I couldn’t sell….

I was looking through the stack of porn magazines that I have work in the other day. (And by that I mean, photos I’ve taken, not photos I’ve modeled for.) I miss shooting, and I had a pretty good little system going for a while with finding amateur girlie-porn models, shooting them, and selling the sets to one particular magazine that specialized in amateur ladies. "Naughty Neighbors"- isn't that a great name for a magazine? It's so British-sounding, somehow. Even the total newbies felt comfortable working with me, a female photographer, and I found it an interesting sideline to being the Mistress.

But my luck took a turn for the worse when NN got a new art director, because after that, they began to inexplicably reject about a third of the sets I’d done. Since I was just a freelancer, this would leave me stuck footing the bill a model fee and the processing costs for five rolls of film. Not like I was going to starve to death, but annoying, because having shot it according to their particular guidelines, I had nowhere else to go with it.

Sometimes I knew a model was a gamble when I shot her, but sometimes I was completely mystified as to why they would turn down a certain girl.

(Note: Pictures not work safe, obviously. Also, these are scans of slide film, and my scanner is only so-so. Just saying.)

Take this girl: Elizabeth. Okay, yeah, she’s got a few tattoos, but jesus, she had a tiny little waist and beautiful (real) breasts, and she’s a natural redhead. I was knocked out when they said “No thanks”.

And Danielle – slim, long hair, and unshaved, everywhere – that’s a whole little fetish in itself.

Kendra: another petite, eighteen-year-old cutie declined. Inconceivable!

It was when they turned down Stevie that I decided to quit. Slim, blonde, big breasts, I shot her splashing around in a kiddie pool, and they said no? I just had to go back to a universe where things made sense again. See, that’s one of the good things about being a writer: if an editor says no, you can always rewrite it and send it somewhere else.

Happy

Last night Roman and I went to The Frontier Room and once again, I devoured delicious barbeque. It makes me happy.

Also - my taxes are not going to exsanguinate me quite as badly as I feared. Yay, tax-preparer man!

Here's this week's column and calendar. Plus, thanks to two alert readers who sent me two funny kink-related cartoons...... One here, and one here.

I was talking to a blog reader recently who asked when Roman and I were going to post some more video clips. We should, really. (And I did hear a rumor about him shooting some educational footage... But not yet.)
So until he and I get the time to shoot some more, enjoy the blasts from the past here, hosted on OnFuego...

Ring Ring!

Me: Hello?
Caller: Hi, Mistress Matisse?
Me: Yes, this is she.
Caller: Uh, I was wondering where you were located?

This isn’t the best way to start out talking to me. I’m not like The Lusty Lady, you can’t just drop by. I certainly do not give out my address to anyone who calls and demands it. But I’ll give him a few more seconds before I write him off.

Me: I’m in Seattle, about four miles from downtown.
Caller: I mean like, where exactly?
Me: No, I don’t tell you that unless you have an appointment. And you don’t.

And he probably won’t, based on my instinct about such things. The idea that this caller’s main criteria for choosing a dominatrix seems to be based on whether she’s in The U-District or Seward Park does not auger well for him. There are many important characteristics of a Mistress that should feature more heavily than whether you have to travel ten minutes more or less to reach her.

Caller: Well, I’m in Northgate.
Me: I see.

No, I don’t, actually. But hopefully he’ll get to the point.

Caller: Do you ever come here?
Me: No, I do not do outcall, sorry.
Caller: No, I’d want to come to your place.
Me: Okay – then why did you ask me if I came to Northgate?
Caller: I was hoping you could come pick me up.

Oh, good lord, what am I, the dominatrix taxi-driver?

Me: Pick you up?
Caller: Yeah, and take me by the bank. I’d need to get some money for you.

Amazing. Simply amazing. I consider pointing out that, uh gee, he could take a cab since that is, in fact, what they are for. Cabdrivers and I have a deal – I don’t drive strangers around in my car, and they don’t spank people. (Although I’m told they occasionally do a little verbal humiliation. And come to think of it, I had a cab ride in Manhattan that was truly a Fear and Terror scene. But I still don’t drive strangers around in my car.)

Also, while I think he means his, “I’d get some money for you” to be enticing, what comes into my head is the fact that many ATMs have a two-hundred dollar limit on cash withdrawals per day, and my fee is two-fifty. I can just see how this would go already. “Oh, gee, I’m sorry, this is all I get, could we just go do a quick session?” No. Oh, so very no. That’s not how I operate.

Me: No, I won’t do that.
Caller: But I don’t have any way to get to you.

Thank god for that, at least. Anyone who is so lacking in intellectual resources that he cannot cope with this problem is not someone I want naked in the same room with me.

An interesting essay about how to get over being jealous.... The whole site is worth exploring, if you haven't already done so.

Me? I have a favorite guy and a lovely lady friend of his coming to visit me today. So imagine me wreaking a bit of erotic havoc with them, and then going out for a decadent dinner somewhere. All of my vices in one day, oooh.

Bye!

So Roman and I keep toying with the idea of doing some kind of informal "personal profiles" on our blogs. By that I mean, we both know people, in our personal circle, who are looking for playdates, and we both get emails from readers talking about how they’re looking for people to play with, and it seems like a shame not to do something about bringing these two groups together. I admit I have a slight match-making fetish, but it wouldn't be personal ads per se, as much as “Here’s a cool person I know, if you want to meet them, write them here…”

Granted, most of the people we know personally are not looking for true love as much as kinky fun and games. And a lot of the letters I get are people who want a primary partner. (Although I do know one nice male rope-top who’s single, so there's that…) So that’s not perfect. But, still, there’s no reason you should sit at home until The One comes along, right? My mother always used to tell me that the best way to get dates was to go on dates, if you follow me.

I don’t really know how effective this would be, though. A lot of the people in the personal-friends category are straight men, and conventional wisdom says that women don’t usually answer personal ads. But perhaps it might be different with a reputable third-party endorsing them and guaranteeing that they are (like, probably, I’m pretty sure, I’m sure I’d notice if they were...) not a serial killer.

Just off the top of our heads, Roman and I thought of two straight guys, both rope-tops (one single guy and one poly, in-a-relationship-but-not-married guy), who are open to new partners and who might be fun people to profile. There is a female switch whom I see playing with a lot of people these days, but I don’t know if she’s actively looking for new partners. And I know a cute lesbian bottom (who switches a little), who’s single and interested in meeting fierce femme tops for whatever. Not boys, though, sorry.

So, hypothetically, would any of you local kinksters pay any attention to such things?

***

On another subject completely: Max has asked me to note that his two-day rope bondage intensive on April 29th/30th is filling up fast, so if you’ve been waffling about going, screw your courage to the sticking place. He’s capping it at 25, and 19 slots are already filled. Interestingly, we’re going to have a very heavy female attendance at this class, bigger than we’ve ever had. Look for a fresh deluge of hot woman rope-tops in the wake of it. w00t!

Enter It On The Line Where It Says, "Yeah, Right".

Tax stuff is very much on my mind right now. Of course, making jokes, in public, about the IRS is a lot like wisecracking about bombs in the airport - they have no sense of humor about that shit.

But still, I laughed when I read this:

Publication 525:
Illegal income. Illegal income, such as money from dealing illegal drugs, must be included in your income on Form 1040, line 21, or on Schedule C or Schedule C-EZ (Form 1040) if from your self-employment activity.

I think I should not say any more about exactly why I find that so humorous. But it's definitely amusing.

Bribes. If you receive a bribe, include it in your income.

Huh. I wonder if Tom Delay's H&R Block guy knows that?

Last night Max and I went to see The Pillowman, a play at The ACT Theatre. It’s an interesting examination of the responsibility of the artist for his art. What I mean is: if I write about, say, piercing, and someone reads it and then sticks needles in themself, or someone else, what responsibility do I have for that? It's easy to say, "Why, none whatsoever." But is that really always true?
The performances by the actors were good, but the playwright painted his points in rather broad strokes. And it could have been thirty minutes shorter without sacrificing anything important. Definitely a bit self-indulgent.

Nothing like having a word count to keep one’s writing tight – it’s good discipline. Here’s the latest column and calendar.

Postscript: I just heard that Jan Lyon, one of the founders of the National Leather Association, died recently. I'm sorry to hear that. I haven't seen Jan in years, but once, oh, a very long time ago, when I was living in Tampa, she and I hooked up through the NLA newsletter (yes, the kind that came in the snail mail, this was pre-internet) and had....an intimate evening together. She was just in town for one night, and I didn't run into her again for a long time. But the baby kinkster that I was had a lot of fun with her. Godspeed, Jan.

I got permission from my friend Rossi to link to her pictures and journal entry about getting huuuuuuge needles stuck in her at Kinkfest two weeks ago. I mean, I've stuck a lot of needles in people, but these thing looked like barbeque skewers. All who saw her were quite impressed. She's just a little slip of a girl, but she's high-capacity.

Of course, my partner Max, never one to let an opportunity go by, graciously volunteered to thump on the needles a bit - okay, a lot - while they were in. Rossi agreed to this. She's such a generous girl. I was there when Max took the needles out, and damn, they were pretty bowed. Talk about making paper clips.

Obviously, if needles squick you, don't go look here. (And kids, do not try this at home.)

Ring ring!

Me: Hello?

Caller: Um, hello, I was ordered to call you?

Oh, damn, I hate it when guys do this. This caller, who has kind of a snarky, frat-boy sounding voice, is trying to draw me into a role play with him. I’m supposed to say something like, “Oh, you were, were you? Do you need to be punished?” Or something like that. Then he'd respond with some story about his wife or his secretary giving him this number because they were mad at him, and gee, he doesn’t understand what it’s all about, but they said if he was punished they’d forgive him, so…. Do I punish people? What would I do to him?

This kind of thing is fine as a role play once we’ve laid down a baseline negotiation. But that’s not how you start a conversation with me. If you call me up to talk about booking a session with me, you talk to me on the phone like a regular person, no games, no protocol, no “kneel on the floor while you’re on the phone with me” stuff. For one thing, I think BDSM is more piquant when you start out as equals - and then I tie you up and have my evil way with you. For another, a lot of time these guys are just looking for free phone sex, and I don’t provide that.

Besides, there’s the small matter of consent, and I haven’t consented to do a verbal role- play with this guy. Let’s see if we can redirect him.

Me: Are you calling about having a session with me?
Caller: Uh, gee, I was just ordered to call you.

He’s sticking to his line. We’ll try a different tack.

Me: Who ordered you to call me, and why?
Caller: (Pause) Someone gave me this number and told me to call.

He’s not really thought this out well, has he? I wonder what I’d have to say to get a different answer out of him.

Me: Look, if you want to talk to me about a session, then talk. Otherwise I’m hanging up.
Caller: But I was ordered to call you!

Click. I hang up. I am way too busy for pointless conversation.

High point of my day yesterday: an amazingly yummy lunch at The Frontier Room on 1^st Ave. I used to go drinking there (back when that seemed like fun to me) when it was the old Frontier Room, for you Seattle folks who remember that delightfully trashy dive. It was a little odd to walk in the door and smell the enticing aroma of smoked meat, as opposed to stale spilled booze and cigarettes. But for Yankee barbeque, the pulled-pork sandwich was pretty dang good.

Low point of my day yesterday: an appointment with my tax preparer. Oh, it’s not going to be pretty, boys and girls. For the next few weeks, the Federal Government is going to be my pimp. I am so Uncle Sam’s bitch until I write that check on April 14th. Ouch.

How fitting, then, that I get to have a little fun at the Fed's expense in this week’s column.

See you at the Bondage Class and Party!

Dominatrii In The News!

Geeze Louise – three hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars? That's sort of depressing. I am obviously doing something wrong…Although I'm guessing the Mistress in question is now getting a veritable tsunami of extremely annoying phone calls.

But this (relatively work-safe) little video clip is delightful…Leave it to the Brits to make a sexy ad about global warming. (Google video, 44 seconds)

Back From Kinkfest

Well, I had a very good time at Kinkfest this year. But then, I’ve never had a bad time there. I saw lots of friends, went to some good classes, and Max and I had fun at the dungeon parties.

The dangerous part about going to kink conventions, though, is that I invariably see new toys I want. I was so busy socializing this year that I didn’t get to shop the vendor area very effectively. So now I’ll have to order stuff, because I definitely saw some things I'm now lusting for.

I’ve been meaning to get a saline inflation kit and have a nurse-pal of mine give me a refresher session on that technique, because it’s big fun. Really, really big, if you use enough saline – a man I know inflates his balls to the size of a melon. But that’s a bit extreme - normally one puffs up the balls (or the nipples, or the labium) just enough to make them extra-sensitive. The sterile water is absorbed safely into the body within a relatively short time and it’s all good.

I was thinking one had to use a largish IV bag for this, but at KF I learned that you can actually buy cute little syringes pre-loaded with saline, all sealed and safe, for small infusion scenes. How convenient!

And I was reminded that I really need to get a surgical stapler. They seem fierce, but in fact, the staples don’t even go as deep as needles. You can use them almost anywhere, too. So there’s a call to my friend Bruce at KinkyMedical.net in my near future.

The medical stuff won’t set me back a whole lot. But then, damn, I saw one of these: The PES Samurai. Woot! I want one. (They say it's just for girls, but...heh. That's what they think.) It's not cheap, though - electrical stuff never is. Even going to the PES site is dangerous – I want another buttplug from them, too, and I need some new scrotal straps. I swear I could max out my Visa without even breaking a sweat.

I did get one fun new toy, though, from Seattle kink-artist Scott Paul. Many of us think of Scott Paul as “the cage guy”, but he actually makes a whole line of stuff besides cages, and it’s all beautifully designed and lovely to look at. He certainly has some very imaginative gags. And I imagine this little instrument will be delightful to wield.

Kinksters will recognize it as a variation on the classic medical Wartenberg Wheel, but sharper and meaner. I can’t wait to use it. Volunteers, anyone?