Being Boring

Dirty Looks Kickstarter!

2011-07-29T13:37:00.000-04:00

This weekend on Technicolor Island (and adjacent burrough)

2011-05-16T21:25:00.012-04:00

It was a week of open studios in New York, starting with ISCP and rolling over to LMCC. I wasn't that attentive at ISCP, I must admit, other than a video that D joked that I just liked because it looked like the fabulous Narcissister video I'll be screening at the next Dirty Looks, I wasn't taken to too much of what I saw, but there was very little moving image-based work . After a mull around the studios, I headed over to my pal Mark Golamco's studio to drink some beers and watch Vaginal Davis' Fertile La Toya Jackson "Akshunist Video Magazine." Which left the two of us in tears - to say the least. I will be including her Barbi Twins skit in the next DL also, though it pains me to leave out the wonderful opening sequence in which Vag plays a t.v. host, over-emphasizing every line, every feminine gesture, with a painfully wide white smile. Then Mark gave me this fab striped Diane Von Furstenberg jumpsuit that he's had for years and I felt very lucky, indeed, to have such good friends.

Shana (L) and Rachel

The next evening we headed over to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council for their open studios as my friend, Rachel Mason was performing with the fabulous video artist Shana Moulton. We got there en retard, as they say, and Rachel was knee deep in her song, 'Mrs. Eyes' - and people! I had to crane my head through the door just to get a peep. Not a very gracious thing to do, I suppose when you're prone to wearing hats. Once Rachel finished her song, some people cleared out so I made my way in to view the remaining performance. Moulton, whose imagery is culled from more California hippy sects, launched into a great projection based piece in which she is instructed to gaze deep into one of those horrible posters from the early 90s - Magic Eye, google informs, which I could never even see with young eyes. Anyway, Moulton slits the projection scrim and dives into the poster itself where she's joined by animated animals who wave at her and in the grand tradition of Southern California artists (a segment to which I marginally include myself - I always wave at dogs) she waves back. After the performance we made our way around the other studios where we ran into Molly Dillworth, Lillian Gerson and Roddy Schrock. I ran into a certain gallerist who maintains a gallery upstate and he started to extend an invitation to go up there but then... kind of changed his mind mid sentence. I smirked at the awkward moment and talked full-stop as I'm apt to do. I was feeling anti-social so I made my way home, only diverted by the intoxicating odors from Goodburger.

The following day I played host to a Eurovision party! But, in rare form, I had to dash to Gladstone to see the rare program of Jack Smith films that Penny Arcade was presenting. It was great to see all of these wonderful children gathered to take in Jack's work (but enough with the fucking iphone snaps mid-film, thanks). Penny was very good and humble in her Jack tirades (the best of which involved Jack's complete devotion to ice cream and an upstate jaunt on which he regaled a confounded truckstop creamery staff by granting them the perfect recipe for a malted). The first film, The Yellow Sequence (1963) was obviously shot during the filming of Normal Love featuring the mongol child who dashes all of the cake creatures in the latter film, cavorting with yellow flowers and a particularly made-up creature perched in and atop a car. Befittingly the predominant color pallet was... yellow. The film gave you such a rich understanding of what a specific and meticulous compositionalist Smith was, with layer after layer of bead, glitter, lace, parasol, flower upon flower. Only 3 or four people might occupy the outdoor garbage heap, closely cropped in Smith's camera, but it feels like the world. Film number two was Jungle Island AKA Reefers of Technicolor Island (1967), which Penny informed is footage used for performance backings. God knows why. This was the standout of the program by miles, though it doesn't appear in Hoberman's book on Smith's cinema for some reason. For me, with Jungle Island Jack achieved his dream to make a Maria Montez movie without the petty confines of narrative. Clutter, fountains and muck makes up the exotic island of the films title, again in closely cropped, carefully studied shots - sometimes double exposed in a less aesthetic level than Rice's Chumlum. Mario Montez is on on the tropical revelry, of course, looking majestic and statuesque. And she's got a love interest of sorts who wears about as many pearls and scarves as she. But the real pleasure to be had is just the investment in the flowing imagery, which builds as densely and gorgeously as any Universal flic. In the final sequence Mario and mate are roofside, cropped in so close you can feign for a moment some tropical fantasia until you catch glimpse of a water tower behind them. Then an airplane careens above head. It's a truly exceptional film, ripe for rediscovery. Two more treat included I Was a Male Yvonne DeCarlo for the Lucky Landlord Underground (1967-70s), a self-mythologizing film where Smith cavorts and autographs a midget/small child's glossy of that most famous photo of him with the dagger. Before this, however, we see some of this most lusciously shot, smokey images of creatues, sprawling in a kitchen, decorated with headdresses so big I thought to myself, "now this is what Where The Wild Things Are should have been." Hot Air Specialists was a document of a kind of drag performance that Jack enacted in his huge red wig.

Then I had my Eurovision party where we really didn't watch all that much of Eurovision due to Brooklyn internet blackouts. But we made due and thanks in large part to the wonderful creatures that spilled into every corner of the not-all-that-large apartment (without spilling their drinks, bless!) the night was a blast.

(Sunglasses as morning-after armor, particularly during a poetry reading)

However, the day after.... I nursed on a Mildred Pierce screener (Meh-ldred, it shoulda been called) and eventually made my way to the launch party for the newest issue of Adam Shecter's print project 2Up at SilverShed (where DL will take up residence July and August) where Adam (who just curated a show about the apocalypse at Eleven Rivington gallery with a sure to-be-fab show that will open on the day the world is meant to end) bared his bicep for me and showed off his AMAZE photorealist David Niven tattoo. Swoon. Joe Winter was one of the artists contributing to the poster and he liked my new Red Sonja bracelette, which is nice of him. I had a nice long sit down with Glen Fogel where we talked about karaoke and phallices. Then I made it over to Eyebeam for this Design Week Moleskin event with D and his friends Roddy and fellow curator Sally Szwed where we pilfered these really overtly organic carroty things and green dipping sauces called things like goddess. At least they had prosecco that killed the final pangs of alcohol-related morning sickness. I had fish and chips for dinner at some bullshit fish place on Graham ave back in Brooklyn and turned in early from lack of sleep the night prior.

NYC Gallery Week vs. New Ideas

2011-05-09T10:59:00.013-04:00

It being Gallery Week in New York - and the New Museum's Festival of New Ideas (or something like that) there was a great deal of to do making this weekend in the city. It all began (as most things tend to) with Jack Smith - or rather, the opening of "Thanks for Explaining Me," a rather dubiously titled first public showing of Smith's work since his material was bought up by Barbara Gladstone gallery. Curated by Neville Wakefield, the show was a predictably scrubbed endeavor. Uniform gallery framing contained the beautiful and explosive color and black and white photography, collages and, in a darkened room, a uniform projection of two videos and two slideshows. The show brought out a crowd of Smith champions - Augusto Machado, Penny Arcade, Jerry Tartaglia, Jack Ferver, MM Serra, Josh Lubin Levy (who introduced Smith's No President at the last Dirty Looks), George Chauncey and his partner in queer historiography Ron Gregg (who will present Taxi Zum Klo at our next screening) as well as the "celebs" - I spotted Marina Abramovic. The wall of collages was strangely suspect as the assortment of works characterized Smith more as self-mythologizer - in a seeming selling tactic on the gallery's behalf, where Smith's use of his own image, pasted into fantastic landscapes and drawings here contextualizes to a vie for celebrity (rather than aesthete), a PR progeny rather than assemblage artist. But more on that later After moving through the throngs at Smith's pedagogical facelift, my performer/sculpture artist friend Rahel Mason and I moseyed on to Zach Feuer gallery where her friend Frank Benson was exhibiting work alongside Ken Price and Dasha Shishkin. I had had very little to eat that day, save the two tequila grapefruit juices I'd savored at happy hour with my friend Libby, who just picked up some shifts as an "exotic" dancer at Pumps - the Bushwick hipster strip club. So, after hanging for a bit with the artist Mark Golamco, joined by my producer friend Derek Marks, I scurried off to Trailer Park for a burger, where we ran into Gabourey Sebide - who was really set up in the front booth, in full performance mode. A man in line for the toilets lamented at the Precious few roles in Hollywood for the actress. I tried to contest, but he shot me a look like who you kidding and I guess he was right. We ended up being seated next to our friend Jessica Beyers for dinner. Later, the boys from Mirror Mirror poured in too. After dinner we met back up with Mark and Rachel - much to my dismay. I had hoped to attend Night of a Thousand Stevies - the yearly Stevie Nicks impersonators convention, but again this year, it was not to be. So we joined our friends at the after party at Zach Feuer's house, which was quite pleasant enough, an intimate affair where we nibbled on tastefully arranged pesto pasta and chatted with artist Robert Melee who is about to install his SEVENTH show at Andrew Krepps gallery. After a while we headed out to the Metropolitan with sculpter Michael Queenland and sat out back in the brisk spring air. Saturday saw a slew of performance events, but first I dashed over to Park Slope for film writer friends Dan Callahan and Keith Uhlich's MAYHAM. Yes, every year Keith's mother sends him a Virginia Ham, so we gorged on ham and attended as Dan put on Orson Welles' The Immortal Story from 1969 where Jeanne Moreau plays a 17-year-old virgin(!) and a Jennifer Jones movie titled (alternately) The Cult of the Damned and Angel, Angel, Down we Go. Their parties are a hoot because these two film writers are basically pals with all of the other film magazine critics and bloggers in New York and many turn up for their affairs to kibitz and laud forgotten gems (like Angel, Angel). We then headed over to Participant Inc. for their partnership panel with Visual AIDS timed for the Hunter Reynold's exhibition Survival AIDS. The panel, comprised of Julia Bryan-Wilson, David Deitcher, Nathan Lee and Anthony Viti was interesting, though the more seasoned panelists attested better to the cause than a more distance and conceptual attitude of the younger speakers. Sadly, Hunter's performance started immediately after the panel, which I had to dip out of during the last paper to attend Dawn Kasper's performance for Human Resources at the Collective Show's room at SCHOOL NIGHT, an evening of performances and exhibitions at OLD SCHOOL, a converted... school in NoLiTa. Dawn's performance was really quite intense and layered. There was a narrative about how she hated school - even made a pact with a neighboring drug dealer who pretended to be her father on days when she couldn't face the class any longer and played sick for the nurse. Then Dawn removed her shoes, withdrew a powertool and began to assault the teacher's desk at which she was seated. This found her precariously perched atop the lopsided surface, at one point (after she had hacked off one of the legs), without shoes and dangerously bisecting the desk with her saw. No toes were lost but the threat was palpable. We ran into Scott Kiernan from Louis V E.S.P. there and Patrick Meagher - who runs SilverShed, the rooftop venue that will be hosting Dirty Looks summer screenings. Also, this was the big coup for our friend Molly Dilworth, who painted the courtyard of the school with her now signature geographic shapes, designed to be viewed via Google Maps. The rest of the exhibitions were a mixed bag. PPOW had some really great work installed in their room, though director Jamie Sterns was MIA when I went looking for her. I quite enjoyed David Lynch's installation, a smoke, strobe and balloon filled room which blared 50s dance and doowop as a ghostly girl danced languidly in the center. Basically, it was a physical manifestation of that scene from Fire Walk With Me in the red-lighted bar. And there was Koolaid in the corner and candy. Everyone thought the girl was unnecessary, but I was into it. We ran back to Hunter's performance only to catch the tail end. Hunter is an HIV+ gay man who enacts physically rigorous and constricting performances - typically involving mummification. Here, he was mummified and guided by a surrogate arm - as the artist's left arm is not fully functional due to an infection. The artist was then cut out of his fluorescent duct tape bindings and he enacted a ceremonial performance with the attending viewers. We hung out afterwards and visited with Ethan Shoshan and Diana Puntar. All the galleries were open late for the festival and Lia kept Participant open til midnight, so we stayed and had a drink, catching up and looking over Hunter's wonderful newspaper collages, photoweavings that feature HIV-related headlines. Then we went to the Boiler Room for a night cap. Yesterday D and I walked through the Lower East Side, looking at galleries. I was quite fond of the expectedly Homophillic exhibition at Invisible-Exports: Notes on Notes on "Camp". The exhibition contained work by Johgn Waters, Vaginal Davis, Brent Owens and some really beguiling vintage photographs by Bob Mizer. Peering through other galleries found varying degrees of success. Noteworthy for their irritating art world attitude, CANADA's clan sat devouring smelly chinese food on porcelain plates whilst we poor plebians showed up for their opening. They spoke of the gallery goers as if we couldn't hear them. Whatev. Then I met up with some friends and attended the Original Plumbing mother's day bash Your Mom! which, in truth, could have been much better attended. Outdoors at the East River Bar, it was nice to chat amongst the crew and pose for the "Dress Like Your Mom" contest. Trans men dressing like their mothers - now that's what I call layered. I chatted a bit with Amos Mac, the bewilderingly hot founder of OP. Someone was walking around with a pet rodent perched on his shoulder and, at his behest, I allowed the mouse to lap at my beer. "He really likes booze," he explained. "Show him your tongue." So I did and that rat went to town on me, much like the recent Carolee Schneemann video Infinity Kisses: The Movie - only with a small white rat in lieu of a cat. So, that was my weekend. From Jack Smith to rat kisses.

Something Special

2011-04-09T12:15:00.002-04:00

Out Monday with an album following suit. Oh, this is Sally Shapiro's producer. And Sally Shapiro, as you may or may not know, is my god.

Where Teardrops Fly

2011-04-08T10:15:00.008-04:00

In my unending quest to revel in and understand the progression of the woman's picture, I watched one of the biggest hits of this century, in that regard, anyway - The Notebook. It had been in my Que for some time and I had flirted with the idea of torturing D with it, but last night, I found an opportunity to indulge.

Of course it would be moot to regale the film with its conservative trappings. It's a contemporary melodrama, and as Peter Brooks clearly states in The Melodramatic Imagination, melodrama is fundamentally conservative since it stages a returning-to of conventional or conservative values that have been marred or transgressed. It's still peculiar in certain aesthetic decisions how this conservativism is played out. The most surface qualm is the film's treatment of black figures. In the film's past (most of it takes place in the early 40s), the black maid adopts a mammy voice and countenance. There's a scene in which Ryan Gosling engages in a jig with a little poor black kid. This scene is obviously intended to indicate the abject poverty that Gosling maintains. You can placate yourself by reminding that, "this is the past and this is how they choose to represent it." But then when you flash forward to the nursing home, where our elderly couple (James Garner and Gena Rowlands) are looked after by an exclusively black staff, things become a tad less tidy.

Besides this blaring faux pas, there's little by way of conflict. The film struck me as decidedly post-modern in the way power roles are delineated. The adorable Ryan Gosling is cast merely to brood, a projection of some female fantasy in which boys gestate in abeyance for their lost ladies, ever hoping they'll return. He refurbishes this big, stately white mansion (see, it's ALL about reparation), to such a degree that he event claims at one point that his efforts borderline madness. And in his large white house he longs for Rachel McAdams.

There's lots of women's picture conventions being tossed about here - summer flings, wicked parents, stolen letters, pining. But it's odd that the ultimate weight of the film is carried by our elderly couple. Really, the historical story is about as milquetoast as its actors and, when they just sort of end up together for the rest of their lives with little fuss, you're like "Where's the story there?"

There isn't one. The story rests in their older incarnations who are fighting a failing heart (in the strong body of the man) and dementia (ah, the pathology of woman). She shouldn't come to at all, but every day he reads to her from this book of their life together. She wrote it before the onset so he could remind her. And, as if by miracle (a rather poorly rendered miracle by cinematic conventions, I must say), she returns to him for little stolen periods - five or so minutes at best. And let the teardrops fall.

Which they did. I'd be lying if I told you I didn't cry. But as I did, I posted on facebook something I said to myself, "Me, crying: And it wasn't even a compelling story!" There's a lot of theory about there about crying at movies - most of which I've read. What struck me as really bizarre here, and inept despite my waterworks, was how death or finality as this looming phobic enterprise is the impetus for all of this sobbing. This narrative of a couple who spend their entire lives together moaning because they must part. It's not a big stretch to feel not sorry for them. This is no Peter Ibbetson in which the dreamland and, ultimately, heaven is the only space in which they can be together. No, what is really the crux of all this drama is just finality and death. All things end. Which seems really moot and unimpressive on paper, but I suppose it still works. And here, it's spiritual moment of attainment is not even plausible. There's all this talk floating around about miracles, about how, when Rowlands recalls her life-long love in her breaks from dementia, it's "a miracle." While I'm sure it's really wonderful, these moments of reparation, director kin de Cassavetes embellishes these scenes with no pomp or flourish, so that they read on film more banal than divine. Cause without these elements, the film's close, where the couple lay side by side and decide that their love is strong enough to lead them off this mortal coil in unison, you just don't buy it. Nothing has prepared us for this rowing finale. Except, of course, our hope that even in death we are full of life.

As I type, across the street, a funeral procession is going with two white horses, like the scene from Imitation of Life. Initially I cynically wondered to myself whether the funeral directors didn't have an Annie package. But then I realized that this person, dying in 2011, could possibly have seen Annie's funeral and that this could be an approximation. Perhaps it's not. But it's a haunting idea considering the obsession/fear with and of death that The Notebook parades as the romantic comedy of the decade.

April Fool...

2011-04-03T13:51:00.009-04:00

Well another Dirty Looks under the belt. This event saw an amazing turnout, with something to the tune of 80 people showing up for Ulrike Ottinger's Madame X - An Absolute Ruler. f.p. boué's exhibition currently up at Participant featured a black and gray ziggurat on which folks perched for the film. There to introduce, Gary Indiana shared some amazing insights in our dialogue. Gary's really a lovely individual, it was great to have him come out (and great to see him read new work the night prior at St. Mark's books). Filmmakers Larin Sullivan and Adam Keleman showed up, as did curators Buzz Slutzky, Joseph Whitt, Bryce Renninger artists Mark Golamco, Aryn Zev and writers Louis Jordan and Masha Tupitsyn, to name but a few. People seemed genuinely entranced, though at 2 1/2 hours, I fret that some attested to the Time Out blurb on the event, that Madame "will delight the converted and annoy the mighty fuck out of everybody else." It's tricky to program an epic lesbian pirate adventure on a school night and not have some drop off. That factor, the drop off, is understandable, especially given Dirty Looks educational focus, but it's still something vexing that I am grappling with as a curator.

The next night I had early evening (happy hour, I suppose they call it) drinks with a new friend, writer Louis Jordan, who is hard at work on an article surrounding Tuesday Weld. An apt subject. I sipped on Lime Rickies at Julius as Louis regaled me with the details of her life. I shared with him the sordid details of these wacky, mildly related recent finds, The Mafu Cage and The Manitou. And of course I built up the new Britney. We drifted over to the home Mr. Jordan shares with Wilson Kidde to watch a Maria Montez movie that I had never seen! For shame. In this one, Gypsy Wildcat, Maria's a gypsy. Black hair never suited her that well, though she does have a marvelous dance with a tamborine and turns in some very potent acting. "She moves and acts in this one!" I hollered. But the bootleg dvd stalled midway and I had to move on. I really couldn't get over the transition from exotic sands to gypsy caravans also, to a probably annoying tune.

I met up with friends at a Marc Jacobs party. My pal Hayley works there. We drank some free specialty cocktails that somehow all tasted like amoxicillin. But they were free. Which always gets me into trouble. Too many people remarked vaguely at my plaid baseball cap. A long and turbulent night began that found us at the Triple Canopy party at NP Contemporary Art Center then over to Urge and the Boiler Room, where I finally had to resign. On my trip back home, I slipped on the wet subway stairs and landed on my tush, a fall that's left me in great pain for these past couple days, and left an imprint of the zipper teeth to my Commes Des Garçons wallet in my ass. At first there wasn't a bruise and I complained to Lia at Participant that if I was witnessing the pain, I would prefer that there be visual proof. The next day, I got my wish.

On Friday, I attended the benefit for Birdsong Micropress at Brooklyn Fire Proof, which featured a performance by my friend Zan's band Little Victory. It was good to see the ever ravishing Tommy Pico, who just returned from a Southern road trip. I talked about Dodie Bellamy (who was just in town reading from her fabulous new book, The Buddhist) and Radical Fairies with Max Steel and Daniel Sander outside, both of whom contribute to the Birdsong zines under noms de plumes. When I got home around 1 or so, D was watching Alien 3, you know, the super nihilistic one that starts with the autopsy of her surrogate child, so I went into the bedroom to watch some Drop Dead Diva and promptly passed out.

The weather smiled on us this New York weekend, so I took to the streets, well, galleries, with D and my curator friend, Herbert Mendoza. I actually like taking a back seat when we do these gallery hops. Both Herbert and D make little maps and I let them show me around. Never before have I been in such a place of such little investment in visual art. Maybe it's a lack of interest in the community. Cause I always have something to say.

We sipped margaritas in the tacky little Mexican place on 23rd thinking through the shows afterwards - three shows in particular that seemed to dash totemic issues consumerism and colonialism, all installed in high end gallery spaces. Does the moneyed environs of a space like Yvonne Lambert dismantle some of the charge behind Nick Van Woert's drip busts? In the pieces, Woert (an American artist despite the Euro airs of his name) drizzles colorful, plasticine materials on the backs of classical busts. The goo collects in a gratifying pool, which, when placed vertical, become somewhat glorious circular whorls. There a kind of clever material iconoclasm at work in these pieces (Woert's other sculptural objects in the main room are decidedly youthful endeavors that showcase an excitable artist in need of some editing skills) though the delicious fetishism of the shiny plastic tends to undercut the conceptual disavowal that these pieces tend to suggest. Josephine Meckseper's exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation continues her reign of great shows, installing vitrines, mirrored pedestals and mirrored wall racks that offer sexy objects, total signifiers of 80s consumption all with a kind of hoaky Claire's Boutique quality to them. Mecksepers work just radiates sexiness, seducing the viewer into this courtship of objects. But how much is this representation of erotic consumer sensibilities destabalizes consumerism and how much of it just hitches a ride on the object's potential for fetishistic gratification? I LOVE Meckseper's shows, her aesthetic is startlingly confident, though the critical potential of these works, which are sold before they even leave her studio, lurks in a more uncertain space for me.

Surely the most heated topic over our frozen margaritas was the colonialism sent up in Folkert de Jong's installation at James Cohan Gallery. Operation Harmony employs Styrofoam and polyurethane to mold sleek, Disney-esque creatures, Dutchmen and monkeys. The title piece, which borrows from Mondrian and Jan de Baen’s painting “The mutilated corpses of the de Witt brothers, hanging on the Vijverberg in the Hague” from 1672, graphically pierces the black bodies of these brothers with severe, modernist pink foam. The Dutchmen in the front room brandish booty in the form of tacky blue plastic pearls. They smile grimly. How effective is expensive art aimed at making buyers feel bad about their own colonial history. That was the question at the table. It seems like many of the artists to take to task colonial history in the contemporary art world, are also some of the most blazing new big money art stars. Thinking to the 2005 piece written by A. O. Scott for the New York Times ("The Discreet Masochism of the Bourgeoisie") that observed a cinematic trend for targeting art house (bourgeois) cinemagoers with "feel bad" movies (like Caché or Maderlay) aimed at their own political involvements or histories. I argued that the representation of this colonial shadow renders that guilt in a commoditizable, which is to say, abstract form. And it stultifies the charge of the original guilt. Which may be somewhat cynical of me. They did not have very good guacamole at the restaurant.

We visited a fete staged by Zane Louis, who was recently included in a Whitney exhibition timed for the groundbreaking of their Meat Packing District space. Guess what it's called? "Groundbreakers." After some white wine was sipped, we dipped over to our friend, Mark Golamco's studio in the same building, where he was preparing a new woodcarving piece and got into a heated debate over, oh, you know, everything. I left somewhat early and watched Kylie Minogue videos into the early morning.

Fatale Attraction: Oh, the new Britney!

2011-03-29T10:37:00.012-04:00

Summer found its jamz early this year. Always a tricky proposition – the summer dance record. Of all the figures on the horizon, I find great surprise in offering that Britney Spears may have beaten any followers to the punch. Spears has turned in a new album brimming with contemporary dance floor marvels that sound more aimed at the shores of Ibiza than her older demographic, currently reigned by Nicki Minaj. Femme Fatale is a near flawless collection of pop-dance songs, with blinding production and a crafty redirect of Spears’ dubious public image. The new Britney’s as polished as ever, but it’s clear that in her newfound frankness there’s but one thing on her “dirty mind”: sex. Fucking, burning, hit me one more time, baby, turn me “inside out.” And for what feels like the first time, it’s all forefront. No nuance. No shame. Listen to the album’s most impressive moment, the Bloodyshy and Avant produced “How I Roll,” as Spears purrs most casually “I could be your fuck tonight.” It’s a lyric that really makes you track back in your iTunes to make sure you heard right. In part because she’s so matter of fact about the statement. Amidst the whirring digital blips and blops of the song this sex sounds excitingly banal. Where most pop starlets would deliver such a lyric like wasn’t-that-very-bold-of-me? Spears attitude echoes the overall agenda of the album. Which has all the fun in the world, arranging a litany of sex scenarios and drunken encounters, with no error found in such behavior but – more importantly – no real zeal in it, either. It’s, like, just good sex. Ya know? There’s no crazy Rihanna sex as metaphor / isn’t sex a mindfuck songs. Spears’ sex sounds so wonderfully pragmatic, terse in the way that only a truly great pop albums can achieve.

To me, the contemporary benchmark is still Kylie Minogue’s Fever album. Whether it was club thumper (“In Your Eyes”), trance number (“Love Affair”) or ballad-esque (“Fragile”), all the Fever songs were processed with the same tin-y tone, as though the album came out fully articulated, crafted like resin. A friend once described the sound favorably like thanksgiving cranberry sauce that, once served, still shows the ridges of its can. As the video for her smash hit “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” suggests, the Fever sound was post-disco pop that came from a fictional, futuristic city of filled with dancing hot robots. What’s more it was a modest album, concise. It doesn’t attempt at epic proportions, but maintains a consistency, a genericness, even. Like the CG city in what was likely Minogue’s most expensive video, it all seems a little cheap, but “cheap” like the Euro pop idiom from which the album emerged. Pitchfork Music tried to be all highfalutin when it came out and reviewed it as a new brand of adult pop music, some kind of lite contemporary fodder. Which is bull because that album was the same brand of euro dance music presented every year at Eurovision but, unlike most of those bombastic eye-rollers, these tunes showed commendable restraint or rigor. It’s generic sound was a finely tuned tone. As is the case with Femme Fatale, Fever came on the back of a startlingly successful comeback album, Light Years, in which Kylie shimmied back into the hearts of the British public in skimpy hot pants. That record was camp disco. Recorded and released over a year on the back of those pants, Fever was the expediently honed result of a finely-tuned market product and creative team.

The team behind Britney’s current endeavor is nothing new either. Longstanding heavyweight Max Martin (who fashioned Brit’s first hit, “…Baby One More Time” and recently breathed thrilling trills into Robyn’s “Time Machine”), “Toxic” hitwriters Bloodshy and Avant (who’ve worked with Spears since 2003) and relative newcomer Dr. Luke – who appeared on Spears’ prior album Circus. The only brand-new producer strikes out, the disappointingly ubiquitous will.i.am, whose “Big Fat Bass” continues his malodorous brand, which casts the artist as without a subject space, instead as a mechanical “MegaNigga.”

Like any convention, pop has its systems of logic and structural principles. It can be tricky to work within the idiom, since originality must also conform to certain formulae in order to produce a pleasurable listen for the consumer. What’s delightful about Femme Fatale is how it unpretentiously ropes in underground musical styles and theatrical arena pop to blend perfectly with its lyrics. Those lyrics which have evolved from the youthful follies of teen Britney, given the greater allowance for sexual explicitness from mainstream artists like Ke$ha and Rihanna, so that Britney now brings to the fore what was always subtextual in her music.

Femme Fatale pack inevery relevant variety of dance music available, every de riguer sound. All of the effects and innovations that you’ve heard for months, all funneled into one taut pop gem. Bless Gaga for making the typically Euro-phobic American audiences fine with the trashier depths of this sound. And bless Spears for removing Gaga’s pretense. The most surprising ground broken here is the use of Dubstep, a South London underground club music style brought to the mainstream by La Roux and currently popping up in the sounds of Rihanna and Ke$ha. This grimey DIY genre gives an impressive edge to Spears – the round depths of dubstep’s warbling bass and the emphasis on churning treble seems to flesh out the sultry lyrics. Which is not to say that it’s a dubstep album. No, these producers spear the appealing elements of dubstep and set them loose on otherwise catchy pop tunes. With all of these genres floating about, it’s a testament to those producers that Femme Fatale is startlingly consistent from start to finish. It’s a seamless album that marvels at its own mass produced dexterity. My boyfriend frowned in disappointment when he saw the cover, a really stylized headshot of Britney with her blond hair spilling all over the place. “Safe” was the word he used to dismiss the image, but that’s the rule of the game, the whole reason in the Spears product. Now she can inflect her glossy tunes with hoodwinks as an imperfect diva, but the vehicle must show no signs of breaking, is so obviously beyond “her” at this point.

First breath of the album was breathed in a weighty teaser campaign that featured fourteen 10 second youtube clips for Britney’s lead single, “Hold It Against Me,” a song that bears so many entendres that it nearly spirals out of control, in a reverse movement from the Comet Britney that crashes to earth in its kitchen sink promo video. Of course, the song is a smart appeal to an audience that might have grown weary of this popstar’s pop music in the wake of her VERY public breakdown and marital woes. She peers into the camera, planefaced, imploring her lingering fanbase, “Would you hold it against me?” as clips from her past videos play on a Matrix-y column of Sony monitors. All the Britneys that have come before writhe and remind of more idyllic, devoted Britney. But that thought slips away like a lace nightie once she admits that, “you feel like paradise and I need a vacation tonight.” Brit’s obviously got more carnal thoughts in mind, “so if I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?” Of course, a dirtier mind could also take a hint from the album’s erogenous tone and question to what she is actually referring with the song’s titular “it.”

The video features 6 outfits and basically there’s an edit on every beat of this high-octane number. There’s a Britney that models her product placement brands in a gesture just as forefront about the consumer demands of a popstar as she is about her sexual rapaciousness. The video serves as a frank cross-promotional ad for her perfume, a cosmetics line and Sony monitors. Then she’s in a two story tall white dress, suggestively spewing neon paint from the tips of her paint-gloves. The dubstep breakdown before the surging final chorus is a moment of rupture in the song’s pulsations. Top loading the tune with remarkably gratifying dance clichés, this breakdown is not merely kitchen sink, it showcases an adept use of style and timing. In the video Britney battles with her inner demons, literally sparring in stilettos with her double. The final chorus delivers pure Brit, a concert video-esque straight-forward powerdance with a crew of ripped black-leather-clad male dancers. Smoke cannons shoot plumes skyward and confetti rains down as Britney works her body triple time in muscularly choreographed undulations.

The second single, “Till The World Ends,” which opens the album, is perhaps a tad more predictable. Ravey with a wordless chant chorus, Brit promises to “get you off with a touch dancing in the dark” and to “blow your mind tonight.” More dubstep bass lines bring thrill to the table in a song strictly about “dancing” (till the world ends, of course). The delicious “Inside Out” is about being unable to break up with your boyfriend because you keep having really good break up sex every time you meet to break it off. “Let’s just give it up and get down. Won’t you give me something to remember? Baby shut your mouth and turn me inside out.” It’s a loose, low-tempo song, obviously penned for Brit, since it features references to two of her earlier hits “Crazy” and “…Baby One More Time.” “I Wanna Go” brings the pulse back up with a buoyant chorus that confesses “I wanna go all the way taking out my freak tonight. I wanna show all the dirt I’ve got running through my mind.” While “How I Roll” features the signature barrage of varied sounds that Bloodshy and Avant pour into their productions. Champagne corks pop and an auto-tune duets with Britney’s tequila (on the rocks!) induced trip “downtown, where my posse’s at. Coz I got nine lives like a kitty cat.” It’s a youthful, breezy song that glitters perhaps more brightly than any other moment on the album.

The dubstep continues on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful,” produced by Benny Blanco and Ammo whose obligatory female rap vocal (provided by Sabi) has a welcomed 90s tinge to it. Like Monie Love’s rap on Whitney Houston’s “My Name Is Not Susan,” it kinda feels more like a box being checked than necessary, thought it doesn’t detract, none. It gives Britney a personality to play off of as the two chuckle and cat call men, “your body looks so sick I think I caught the flu.” "Trip To Your Heart" is a smartly produced album track by Bloodshy and Avant that echoes their song for Kylie Minogue from the X album, “Speakerphone” in its listing of bodyparts (eyes, arms, lips, tongue). Though Britney never names the sex parts obviously on her mind here, the constant tease is fun. The low-fi sound of “Gasoline” is a nice diversion (her heart “only runs on supreme”), though the album ends on a slightly off note. The low-tempo “Criminal” is something of a grower. I’ve taken to the tune, and there’s an obviousness star textual element to the track in which Brit appeals, “Mama, I’m in love with a criminal but this kind of love isn’t rational, it’s physical.”

It’s SUCH an easy listen and a delight. Femme Fatale never shoots for epic stature and because of it Brit’s produced one of her most accomplished records to date. iTunes informs me that I’ve sped through the rounds nearly 40 times now, and I’m sure there’s tons more where that came from. Beach time jams and soundtracks for my tequila on the rocks. This is the most manufactured and professional type of ribaldry I can think of. Can you hold it against me?

Madame X - An Absolute Ruler

2011-03-23T13:14:00.008-04:00

Notes for Madame X – An Absolute Ruler Screened March 30, 2011 at Dirty Looks

We heard you’re going to Madame X. What are your reasons?
The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, incites that called on us but we, the masters, were not home…

No, that’s not it.

I’m tired of the harsh light of success that rewards me with the revelation of my own mediocrity. I wish to escape from a crystallized identity, from the responsibilities of a canny maturity, which tells me to make the right moves at the right time. I wish to escape from the imperative of the next logical step in the upward mobilization of my talent and material expectations. All this in the name of a historical process that proliferates its refinements as some kind of inevitable social artistic progress. I am tired of the cycle of work, recognition, and more work imposed on me in the name of this progress. Perhaps you will say, “She has lost faith in her creative impulse.” Yes, of course that follows, for does not the product of this impulse also reflect a misguided faith in artistic progress to say nothing of the opposite side of that progressive currency – a despairing sentimentality and sense of loss. Read paragraph bottom in Sentimental Education:

“Having helped certain contemporary masters at the outset of their careers, the picture dealer, as a man who believed in progress, had tried to increase his profits while at the same time maintaining his artistic pretentions. His aim was the emancipation of the arts, the sublime at a popular price. All the Paris luxury trades came under his influence which was good in small matters but baneful when larger issues were involved. With his passion for pandering to the public, he led able artists astray, corrupted the strong, exhausted the weak and bestowed fame on the second-rate controlling their destinies by means of his connections and his magazine.”

Aaa… why kick a dead horse?

Let me go on: I can no longer accept public recognition for work that has been produced in the utmost desperation. And finally, I wish to escape from the oppression of a love that in itself has served as a distraction from the vicissitudes and discipline required of creative work. I have tried to immerse myself in erotic passion as a substitute for creative disillusionment. I had become bored and empty. I looked to passion. I LOOKED TO PASSION TO FILL ME UP AGAIN. And this time I felt a kind of recklessness. I didn’t want to think about the outcome or that my ardor might have painful consequences for all three of us. So I am fleeing from all this. From the obligations of a profession that no longer interests me, from a passion that could not consume me, and from my own emptiness. I don’t care where the ship goes. Satisfied?
-Josephine de Collage played by Yvonne Rainer

Ulrike Ottinger’s films are thrilling. Madcap and absurdist, they compile bizarre costumery, corny sound effects, oblique narratives and vaduvillian acting styles to create strange worlds of sexual intrigue. Surrealist histrionics might seem a peculiar platform for second-wave feminism. The crew aboard Chinese Orlando strikes a defiant tone, but the arbitrariness or impulsive nature of Madame X’s narrative progression can appear at odds with the earnest reasoning that characterizes the second-wave for most. In this sprawling feature, in which performances explode and quell and scenes seem scripted on the fly, where are the staunchly organized arguments and political tracts evinced in other feminist plights of the era?

In an issue of Afterall dedicated to Ottinger, Hildegund Amanshauser observes how Ottinger’s films “resist linear readings” instead “interweav[ing] multiple layers of meaning.” Instead of causal storytelling – the narrative tactic of dominant cinemas – Ottinger’s movies exist on a plane where meanings intersect, where cultural rituals, social conventions, and even time itself spills from one climate, one gender onto another in an echolalic narrative zone. Characters die and then reemerge in the following scene, sets shrink before their obvious, real-life settings, outfits steal entire scenes. This fluidity of meaning and anti-hierarchal structuring is Ottinger’s most exciting political tool. Dashing normative expectations for a straight-forward story arc, Madame X is a playful remedy to hegemony. And it’s all the more thrilling that Ottinger employs humor to engage her politic.

Cause it’s funny; Madame X is absurd. And that’s intentional. It’s something that gets lost in the translation to Ottinger’s obvious heir, Matthew Barney, where the patriarchal value systems that Ottinger so fiercely opposes, come flooding back with a vengeance. There’s a incredulous joy to be had when watching the star-headed Omega Zentauri performing a ritual dance in her silver wings and whirligig hat, as the crew prepare to slaughter a troupe of bourgeois boaters who have invited Madame X onboard for a bemusing sideshow. Zentauri bobs up and down, flapping her silver wings at the self-serious member of the leisure cruise, who turns his back on her in fatigue. Of course, the joke is on them and Madame X partakes in a murderous plundering of their luxurious means, retribution for their haughty insolence.

Madame X creates a new kind of sadistic dictatorship aboard the Chinese Orlando. She is the erotic enforcer, an architectural menace. An embrace could lead to sexual jouissance or dismemberment depending upon her animalistic mood. Such are the ways of power structures, Ottinger intones. But this new matriarchy is designed to ring beyond the bows of her ship. As Karsten Witte writes, “This film shows not a trace of fearfulness. On the contrary, it is calculated to evoke fear in those who put up resistance against the fascination of this ritualized and totally aestheticized power.” Like each of these women who respond to Madame X’s printed proclamation, it’s easy to become swept up in these thrilling exploits. The impulsive behavior of actors, script and scene frees up the film, creating a cinematic space no longer ruled by normative structuring principles. The film itself becomes a vibrant throes to become lost in. It dashes most formal devices employed by narrative feature filmmaking – including, in large portions, sync sound. Without a masterful understanding of structure, the viewer becomes lost in the film’s rhythmic unfolding of scenes, as if riding the waves that crash against Chinese Orlando.

Rejuvinating Aesceticism

2011-03-10T15:56:00.006-05:00

okay, so SO much has happened in the last week that I have paid about as much attention to this blog as that family in Oklahoma did to their kids. The past week was The Armory Show week in New York, with its proliferation of off-shoot art fairs, so my ass hustled a week-long blog for TheFanzine.com. After that, I was understandably exhausted. I made a lot of friends but the last thing I wanted to do come Monday morn' was talk to folks, and so I engaged in the kind of recharging that always helps to get me back on my feet. I watched five movies. Mostly from bed.

1. It Came from Kuchar. Still high off of (amongst other things) the Volta exhibition of George Kuchar's photographs - the booth bestowed with the Golden Fag award (aka best in show) by Art Fag City - I settled into Jennifer Kroot's 2009 documentary about the fabulous brothers, George and Mike, who made loving 8mm approximations of the Hollywood pictures they encountered growing up in the Bronx. It's a very well assembled documentary that even plays up the brothers' propensity for repeating themselves; one scene intercuts between a singular story recounted nearly verbatim by either brother. It's a situation mirrored by my recent attendance at a panel discussion between George and curator Ed Halter. George told many of the stories contained in the film, with less reserve. But, at the end of the day, the film is great to just watch George work with his students at SFAI as they toil on their yearly creature feature.

2. Did You Hear About the Morgans? Industrial filmmaking at its most dire. Lazy, thoughtless and chemistry-free, Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker play off their hum-drum star texts (cheating Brit and Uptown power Jewess, respectively) to produce little fizzle in this clunker. Then fairytale ending, which combines pregnancy, a thus redundant adopted Chinese baby and a palatial Central Park West apartment spins a fantasy narrative while sickening, far more honest and original than any of the preceding hour and twenty minutes.

3. The Manitou THRILL OF THE NIGHT. I can't help but recount the premise of this true delight to everyone I've wandered across since my viewing. A woman discovers that the cyst on her neck is actually a fetus that contains the reincarnation of a Native American medicine man! AMAZING. And there to make it more amazing is Tony Curtis! Circe 1978 Tony Curtis playing a cassa nova. MORE AMAZING. The ending must truly be seen to be believed when, after the medicine man is born, rational white man magic is used to defeat the midget witch doctor when channeled through the palms of its topless... mother?

4. Red Sonja What's there to say?

5. Disclosure I have to say, Disclosure is a really disturbing film. From it sputters the death rattle of popular feminism. When Demi Moore's disarming leads to a final victorious ain't-life-grand close-up of Michael Douglas, as his white face beams privilege from his corporate office, and this is the projected "happy ending," with accompanying revelry music, I was more than unsettled. But by then it was 2:30 and I just slumped off to bed.

Driven, angrily and otherwise...

2011-02-28T17:02:00.012-05:00

I can't even begin to describe the madness that was this past week. And, it being art week in NYC, there will be no rest for the wicked this week. On Tuesday I attended the QT series that Nicholas Boggs curates, where Wayne Koestenbaum was reading alongside Ronaldo V. Wilson. In truth, I have not read Koestenbaum's work. His Jackie Under My Skin has been sitting on my to-be-read pile since D's parents gave it to me for Christmas last year. He read a poem commissioned by the Viennese gallery Coco called 'Didactic Poem.' We were treated to a visual accompaniment, a projected slide-show of Koestenbaum's own vibrant recent efforts in painting and digital image grabs. Sal Mineo dominated most of the non-painterly textual and visual imagery. Koestenbaum invaded the Didactic format - one which he himself proclaimed no affinity for. Sliding surprising and incongruous images upon one another in unlikely couplets, the reading was a fascinating one. After that, I drifted with my fellow attendees - curator Joseph Whitt, writer Frank J Miles and artist Anthony Thorton to what would be the first of a seemingly week-long Boiler Room residency, marveling at the back to back play of extended tracks by Miss Sophie Ellis-Bextor.

Wednesday was, of course, the newest installment of my monthly screening series, Dirty Looks. There was no blizzard this time (though that hardly held them back before) and fifty or so attendees descended upon Participant Inc. for this admix of experimental cinema and pornography. Fred Halsted's The Sex Garage was received very warmly by the cold crowd (we only have space heaters at our disposal, in lieu of central air - an effect which Zach Cole later suggested transported these dirty lookers back to the underground film screenings of yesteryear, where these films were projected in second-run theaters and dingy basements). Well, William E. Jones' Finished followed. It was, in fact, the first time I'd even seen a print of the film - having always engaged with this marvelous title on video. Special thank yous to our wonderful projectionist Sarah Halpern and to MIX NYC master Stephen Kent Jusick for his generosity. I shared many great conversations afterwards with writers Masha Tupitsyn and Robert Smith, Next Film Fest director Bryce Renninger, and artists Roddy Shrock, Mark Golamco, Jake Davidson, Annie Yalon, Chad Dilley and Aryn Zev. Participant director Lia Gangitano confessed to me that The Sex Garage contain a first for her - she'd never seen a man fuck a motorcycle before! In truth, this was a surprise for anyone familiar with Lia's curatorial tastes. As always, I'm happy to oblige. When all was said and done, we reconvened on the Boiler Room for round two of antics - less the Bextor, sadly, who I could not find on the large smart-phone-shaped jukebox. I just could not be more pleased that people are coming out to engage with this work.

The following day I woke up and spent the morning in bed with Gary Indiana's new collection of early writings published by Semiotext(e), Last Seen Entering the Biltmore. I spent some time attempting (in vain) to secure the next title for Dirty Looks but then dashed out of the house. I had to clean up, return the film, do a little shopping. I had one of those charming New York afternoons just drifting about the city and stumbling into people I know. At 6pm I went over to Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, where D was co-hosting Welcome Artists, a curatorial project with Sally Szwed. The gist is that we're all bushy-tailed when we show up to this sometimes-very-difficult city, so these curators devised a social atmosphere in which newcomers can be introduced not only to their peers, but to curators, institutional directors, writers and the like. Well I liked the delicious wine provided by BOE in Brooklyn... and a handful of artists of course. I may have gone a little overboard with the confetti - hurling it at artists and curators, alike - but really, isn't that what a fete is for?

The following day we hit up a matinee for the UTTERLY LOVABLE NEW NICOLAS CAGE MOVIE. My god was it good. The thing was made for people to like it, for folks to reel and get swept up in the drunken swagger that is its tone. Drive Angry launches at you, in full 3D the tale of a daddy who busts outta hell to avenge the death of his daughter and soon-to-be sacrifice of his infant granddaughter at the hands of none-other-than the peoples' temple leader, Jim Jones. Well... it's not really Jones by name, but by image there is no denying. Amber Heard does a very sufficient job in her teensy shorts and there's a fabulous scene in which a fully clothed Cage kills and army of Satanic peoples' templers mid-fuck with a floozy blond, one finger on the trigger, the other curled around a bottle of JD. Yes. In truth, the film flags slightly in the middle, though it's brought back to life - heh - by the final death sequence in which Jones is hoisted up, á la Messiah, and... implodes into a afterlifeless void as rendered by stoned college freshmen?? It truly must be seen to be believed. In 3D.

We saw the matinee because one of D and my good friends, Scott Kiernan - who runs the gallery Louis V E.S.P. at which we've both had shows (I recreated Luther Price's Meat installation there last May) and at which I hosted that recent television show E.S.P. TV - had a solo show, Once Around the Block (Twice), at Nurtureart in Bushwick. The opening was great, even though there was some last minute drama in which Scott's paintings wouldn't fit through the door. Then we went to see Max Steele and Daniel Sander's band B0dy H1gh perform at Clump at Bushwick's Beauty Bar. Or am I supposed to use their performative pseudonym's Billy Cheer and Daniel Portland? One never can tell

I really wanted to make it out to the new Pin Ups launch for "Seth" at Printed Matter, because Christopher Shultz who publishes the thing is such a supportive dear-heart, but a boy can only do so much. After an afternoon coffee with an exciting upcoming artist for Dirty Looks, I headed over to Millenium Film Workshop where my former mentor, Lewis Klahr, was screening his recent series, Prolix Satori, more cut and paste collage works. The screening was really great - a fortunate technical foible saw Lew screen the two films he showed at last year's Views from the Avant-Garde, in lieu of his (immaculate) False Aging. While that's a totally heartbreaking film, I'd only seen the others the once and settled in for this treat. He finished his night with the 20-minute narrative (ish) film Lethe a really stunning film (which I sometime wish he'd bring to the front of the program). This, he explained was what he had set out to make when he picked up the super8 camera some 32 years prior. Lethe is a very intricate film, dipping and out of narrative coherence. The plot is (literally) torn from the pages of a 40s comic with scientists in lab coats and one blond-haired vixen. Everything goes horribly wrong in their affairs, though it's never quite clear what is allegorical and what "actually" occurs. Not that mimesis is ever the point. The room was full of great filmmakers in their own rights - Peggy Awesh, MM Serra, Abigail Child, Ken and Flo Jacobs and Views curator Mark McElhatten. Lew even plugged me when Abigail asked about one film, explaining how in a studio visit I made comment about his use of the Velvet Underground's "Pale Blue Eyes" that is was too loaded, and so it drove him to create a new film with the identical imagery but a brand new soundtrack. I blushed.

Later that night D and I met up with our friends Herbert, Chad, Mark, Jessica and Roddy and we danced the night away at a party called Gayface. All started out alright, but the music quickly drifted. By the time they played 'Party In the USA' for a second time, it was clear that the party was, in fact, elsewhere to be had. So we bumped into some kids at Metropolitan where my tired ass did not relent until 4-ish, knowing, all-the-while that I was meant to play host to a crew of friends the following morning for my signature bearded french toast (that's french toast with crushed up cornflakes). Well, everything got made and we quickly scurried over to Dan Callahan and Keith Uhlich's Oscar party with my roommate, filmmaker Adam Keleman and friend - who also happens to be a filmmaker named Adam - Adam Baran. See, Keith and Dan are some widely published film folks so the air was thick with anticipation and ire for these awards. The whole ceremony was just appallingly boring, don't you think? And it didn't help that Dan goaded me on that I'd just missed Sharon Stone's red carpet traipse when I arrived. Not once more would that heavenly face grace the screen that evening. Instead we had Anne Hathaway. Well then... I did meet some delightful folks and ate some very yummy macaroni and cheese that I swear someone poured truffle oil into. So all was not lost, even if you're Annette Benning.

This week stay tuned to The Fanzine where I will be covering Art Week, NYC 2011 beginning tonight with the opening of Salon Zürcher, an alternative individual-minded approach to the whole art fair thing. More soon...

Finished Symphony

2011-02-21T10:56:00.011-05:00

It was one of life's uncanny moments. William E. Jones' experimental documentary Finished was and continues to be a key movie to my aesthetic development. One of those films that is at once shockingly new but so great a fit that it comes only naturally, like, some strangely reminiscent text. I was still laboring at an art career when Jones' film was recommended to me by a friend who had curated it into a series. He told me of its premise - a first-person account from a man who becomes enamored with an ill-fated porn star's image, obsessively mulling over the details of his short life, squinting into the dots of his print matrix and at the fuzzy analogue video image in an attempt to get closer to the "real" Alan Lambert, should such a thing exist. It was probably another year before I saw the movie, itself. And I saw it on video. I kind of can't imagine it in any other format. Released for home consumption by Facets, the tape, which combines source 16mm footage with carefully edited clips ripped from Lambert's porn titles, reminded me of the bootleg tapes I would dupe - New Queer Cinema titles, mostly - in my teenage basement in Missouri. The cassettes would be labeled with a piece of tape, or sometimes just black marker on black plastic. As Lucas Hilderbrand has beautifully observed in his book on the medium, there was feeling of "inherent vice" to the analogue format, something licentious and pirate, and Jones' Finished seemed to epitomize that furtive quality. Like the audio cassette, VHS felt far from finite. Not only does Jones rip Lambert's image from the films, but he takes them for a ride, building a personal narrative, a political investigation around market sex and the rhetoric of his images. Further, the VHS format, in Jones' case, made this cinematic diary feel more intimate, a direct address to the singular viewer. A confession on stolen hours.

I've since become very familiar with the whole of Jones' ouevre, but Finished maintains this wonderfully intimate quality, for me. Finished showcased how the personal essay format could open out to include a seemingly infinite number of topical issues, vital to both the filmmaker and viewer. In the film, Jones uses his obsession to address issues as diverse as a Southern ban on interracial sex sequences, theories of consumerism, the crippling physical expectations of porn actors and the power dynamics that these stagnant roles bolster. It's a touching movie, cause you can tell it was really love, but also one of loss and, ultimately, disappointment as Jones finds out that his fantasy creature is not just something of a wack job, but in a decidedly 90s dance around mediatized images, that the Alan Lambert that he fell for never really existed at all. It's the disappointment latent in pop consumerism, where that ecstatic face promises more than it could ever really yield. Lambert's eventual occult underpinnings only highlight more prolifically the divide between the figure and ideal.

The film was important to me as a text, since it embraces irrational obsession with an analytic mind. I was a video artist dallying in the essay format at the time and this visual approach towards information struck a chord. Jones' inquiry yields an abundance of information, presented in logical, but also haphazard ways. Jones' narrator is quick to find value in coincidence, as evinced by the counter-text of the film, Meet John Doe. Finished is a bittersweet movie totally of its time. It's unsturdy, too experimental for the indie film scene, but with a distribution pattern that distanced itself from the artworld of its period. I like to think of the film as emerging in that wonderful moment where subversive film titles were being released on home video and giving their avid consumers tastes of something thrilling, experimental and more expansive than the traditional capitalist products that were out there. It was this weird dissemination of a protest ethos, where charged titles could be picked up by isolated viewers the nation over, and transmit the thrill of their counter-narrative. As Jones did in Lambert, I found a counterpart in Jones who thought through his impulsive desires, yearning to discern the point or source of this fan frenzy. But unlike Jones' narrative, my subject has never disappointed.

Finished will screen with Fred Halsted's The Sex Garage at my screening series, Dirty Looks Wednesday, February 23rd at 8pm. Participant Inc. 253 E. Houston.

Nova, finally.

2011-02-21T10:20:00.001-05:00

watch it large.

"At Moments Like This He Feels Farthest Away"

2011-02-17T17:02:00.006-05:00

Once you get past the rather irksome security check point a wonderful treat awaits you at the Fales Library and Special Collections gallery. On display until April 29th is a wonderful realization of a window installation commissioned by NYU's Grey Gallery in 1983, then censored before its completion. At the time, Tim Dlugos was a young poet on-the-rise in the Manhattan poetry scene and Philip Monaghan was a trained painter serving as artistic director for fashion haus, Fiorucci. Beginning with Dlugos' crowd fave, "Gilligan's Island," a personal poem which mashed-up imagery from the namesake T.V. show, the Kennedy assassination, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds and Dlucos own memories of angsty queer teen longing, Monaghan was to create a space that embodied and expanded Dlugos work in painting. As it turned out, the Grey deemed Dlugos' two-line mention of masturbation entirely too much for 1980s public consumption, and shuttered the whole idea, until now.

Entering the gallery through the narrow corridor, you're met with a rather unfortunate homage to the text. A wall-sized shiny plasticine reprint of the poem bubbles and crinkles on its matching grey wall. With light grey type on a dark grey backing, there's too little tonal distinction between the back and foreground. Impossible to read, the gesture is further troubled by an ipod shuffle deck mounted on the wall, where Dlugos (I presume) reads the piece aloud. I, for one, cannot read a text while someone else is talking at me. Perhaps a better choice would have been to privilege the audio, a more precious fragment from our recent past than some badly reproduced wallscreen.

Passing the peculiar larger-than-life photograph of a goofy Dlucos in suit and tie, you enter the gallery and suddenly everything comes into focus. Over 54 uniform panels (18" x 24") Monaghan covers all of the wild imagery that Dlugos wearves through his poem. Images where Jackie O mounts The Professor. Ginger - or is that Tippi - looks on, in total fright. The Gilligan's Island logo is trained in the same site as that limousine. Time has afforded an additional process to convey the assemblage nature of this narrative. Beneath the surface of Monaghan's vibrant and youthful painting strokes are inkjet prints of images mostly ripped from the T.V. show, swathed in the candy hued-paints that create this gay teen psyche.

The paintings are installed uniformly, positioned somewhere between comic book panels and salon-sytle hanging. Their excitable imagery thankfully shies from direct representation, more striving to evoke the ethos of Dlugos wonderful poem. I'm not so familiar with the particulars of Gilligan's Island, but Dlugos mines key sequences, presenting them as gospel, as if their momentous importance is etched into an entire pop subconscious. "From the water comes a thick and eerie tropical silence," near the end of the poem. "The famous conversation is about to start." There's a flippant self-reflexivity to the language that situates us in the space, but just as quickly careens us out to the loveseat, to the red velvet of the theater. Elsewhere, "Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedren are totally concerned. They realize that something terrible is happening. Each has been savagely attacked by a wild songbird within the last twenty-four hours. Outside their window thousands of birds have gathered in anticipation of the famous school-yard scene."

Devoid of medial mimesis in the 1960s, these queer role models and erotic icons were stolen, adopted, projections. Tippi, Jackie and Ginger are Dlugos, are Oedipal mothers. And The Professor is the dream lover. Is our dream lover. The trauma begotten by the assassination, stirring in the allegorical heart of The Birds, is a ripe one for any a teen faggot, wetting his hand and rubbing one out in daydreams of the boy two rows back in government class. It's like Michael Moon, writing about gay children from earlier generations who took delight in the gendered excesses of Maria Montez and Jayne Mansfield, only in Dlucos swirling cosmology, these figures that inspire a shared breathlessness ebb a bizarre 1960s-brand of pop normalcy. Each figure seems, to me, stoicly banal. Instead, their wildness is in these juxtapositions. Monaghan's works are the hyroglyphs for this rag-tag manner of collective dreaming. And the paintings depict the beautiful and uncanny shock at the realization of a shared gay experience. That the fantasy of one isolated faggot in Dallas, TX is gripping another thousands of miles away. "I realized that I had always had the same feelings," Monaghan writes in the sensational complimentary catalogue that accompanies the show. His paintings are raw, exciting, loving. I'm not sure I'd find them enchanting individually, outside this setting, but as an installation, Monaghan's work is dazzlingly successful. It's a glimpse into a creative space drunk on the erotics and kindred devotions of this shared subconscious fantasy. This firey island where teens of the particular moment that the poem recalls - 1964 - had to read through popular fictions, inserting themselves in the cracks of these sources.

ALL KINDS OF SUNDAY MORNING AMAZING

2011-02-13T11:56:00.001-05:00

how do you spell Queen?

2011-02-12T16:09:00.005-05:00

Tuesday. Two shows, on neighboring blocks but worlds apart. On some bed ridden week-day chatter with a friend a few days prior, I was sent a mildly pornogrpahic image of two boys occupying the same fashion-y white dress, one giving the other a blowjob. She'd (my chat friend) just come across the image and didn't know it's maker. She found it way hot. We guessed at the nationality of these boys - I guessed French or German while she was way off the mark with British. Well, it turns out the boys over at Gayletter knew - of course! - and recommended Luigi and Luca's (Italian, duh) exhibition at Leslie/Lohman Gay Art Foundation on Tuesday night. The exhibition was the sort of affair you're meant to just accept given the "Foundation's" self-designation as a venue for thriving gay culture, but I could barely keep my cool in a room flanked by lusty collectors ogling fashion photographs of a hot couple fellating each another and shelling out cash for the sake of "art". The economic arrangement of the show assured that all (most) tastes and price-ranges were accounted for, with a hot-lighted vitrine displaying more edition oriented formats as opposed to those larger works that also graced the walls. And boi was stuff selling. Everything, I know, has its place, and if the "gay community" would like to perpetuate this material being exhibited as its chosen "fine art," than so be it. I'd prefer to call the work ephemera of visual culture. This preferential treatment of commoditizable desire (aka, where desire for the subject becomes equated with the overall value of the work) was what drained the life out of queer cinema in the 90s, so I have a particular axe to grind. To me, the work on the walls was decorative accents, collectables towards the construction of A-Gay lifestyle. I'd imagine it was an art opening those boys on the Logo show A-List would attend. And maybe there's something way positivistic to say about the ability to establish and sustain a kind of gay capitalism for the furthering of gay image production and visual culture. As the Gayletter boys tweeted at the show, there were a great number of NYC queer art mavens on parade - my friend, Max Steele and his counterpart Daniel Portland from band B0dy H1, Gio Black Peter, and, of course, those darling Gayletter boys themselves. Still, I felt completely at odds in this "community" affair as the foundation would have it, atomized apart from this market segment.

So, I guess I headed over to "my" show, which was a total mind-fuck. The Swiss Institute - hot off their Chris Kraus reading - was opening with photographs by Karlheinz Weinberger, a Swiss photographer who took physique pictorials in the 1950s and documented a 1950s counter-cultural trend in Switzerland - gangs who took up American iconography with a polyamorous ferocity: Little Richard, Elvis, James Dean, Hells Angels, Nazism - well, I guess that's not really American. Like the Bikers in Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, the subjects of the exhibition, "Intimate Stranger" work with loaded visual signifiers in an echolalia of attitude. Not only do the counter-culture carnies in Weinberger's photographs tote these cultural referents, they fashion their own rag-tag regalia by pasting magazine cut-outs on 7" brass belt-buckles, self fashioning horseshoe codpieces and lacing screws through the flies of too-tight jeans. The fandom on offer here isn't a kind of fidelitous obsession, it's an immediate and beautiful kind of devotion to a mythical foreignicity, a lifestyle that in America was really only an ideal, never a possibility. When Kenneth Anger returned from an 8-year stint in Paris, he made Scorpio Rising because he discovered an alien America, an America driven by these new rebel images that (particularly in Anger's work) flirted like a pop-cultural Thanatos. There's a palpable mix of femme eroticism and violence in Weinberger's images, as these tough guys with swastika armbands and facial scars, pout and pose like drag contestants before a backdrop. The Institute was smart to offer cans of Budweiser for the opening and the hipster attire of various crowd members made the show feel immersive. I met filmmaker Theis Ulrik Jessen in the lobby and also wrangled a press copy of Rizzoli's accompanying catalogue: Rebel Youth with a forward by John Waters. Review forthcoming. THE SHOW IS A MUST-SEE.

On Wednesday I showed off my culinary skills to some lovely writers and film folk for my first formal dinner party at our E Williamsburg abode. Yes, girl, I tried my best to expand these Bachelor cooking techniques to include chicken and dumplings and pumpkin pie - and from scratch! Well, I came away with a laundry list of movie recommendations... though most mysteriously involve actresses having sex with monkeys.

On Thursday I had a beautiful New York day. Just having received the flyers for the upcoming William E. Jones / Fred Halsted edition of Dirty Looks, I went to go flyer my life away, all over town. It's very icy here, but when you're on the move, it don't feel that bad. First stop, I picked up some new black jeans that I was having altered and walked them to Participant, where Lia Gangitano was revving up for a the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston's College Art Association reception. CAA is having their mega-conference in New York right now and I'm not going. I even worked there last year, so getting in on a dime wouldn't be an issue. I'm just in a really oppositional mood to academia at the moment - which filmmaker and queer ambassador Ira Sachs chided me over later that night - but I'm getting ahead of myself. I changed into my new jeans in the Participant bathroom since the holes in my uniform black jeans were really getting dire and popped out only to run into Photi on the street, director of Callicoon Gallery. He's so nice. I dropped flyers off at the Quad, at Kim's video. I tried Anthology but they weren't open. Basically, I walked across town on a brisk but lovely sunny Thursday, stopping by Zürcher Studio, to chat up the gallery assistant about their impending art fair alternative, Salon Zürcher, a more individual response to the Armory Art Fair week. Popping into various other institutions to drop off my cards, I finally settled into a cafe in the West Village where my friend works and we kibitzed for an hour or so until I made way to the opening of I <3 Boy a new book launching at The Powerhouse, in Dumbo. The opening was sufficiently mobbed and I was able to catch up with Timmy Pico, tireless harbringer of Birdsong Mag. Tommy's moving to Paris - lucky - for the summer, to beat the heat (and hopefully some Parisian boys while he's at it). I think tommy's micropress efforts with the zine are great - and will only improve with an international ratchet on the belt.

Attending with my friend Herbert, he convinced me to go back to Julius cause I read an invite wrong and though that the CAA Queer Art Caucus social was Thursday night. So we went and had burgers, trying to figure out who was CAA. None were. It was Friday night. Silly me. But we were joined by my friend Chad and a present surprise found Ira Sachs and his lovely BF, artsist Boris Torres, who I've heard so much of but never met, stopping by. I had a lovely chat with Ira, who I've been quite fond of ever since I wrote a piece on his Charles Ludlam evening at Queer/Art/Film. A truly staunch supporter of queer community politics, Ira's always a great conversationalist and very supportive. Suffice to say, what was meant as a quiet evening ended at 4 am.

Which left me a wreck for Friday. Though I was able to make it to my friend, Zackary Drucker's presentation with Flawless Sabrina of Zackary's new film, 'At Least You Know You Exist' and the 1968 documentary starring Flawless, The Queen alongside Joe Jeffrey's 'The Queen: After Party Outtakes.' The West village LGBT center, which hosted the event, was PACKED. Hundreds of people turned out for this event. Attending the screening, you're privy to a kind of kindred love affair between Zackary and Sabrina. To me, true queens are the ladies who don't shut themselves off inside a role, but are constantly changing, learning and teaching, which is something that Flawless highlighted in her conversation. Zackary's film looked immaculate shot in 16mm on a wind-up Bolex. It's more a rumination too, and the difference between Flawless' performative hijinx and Zackary's high-gloss modeling does stand out. Like many contemporary artists, Zackary's body (and body of work) has become more a platform to discuss a queer (trans) history and how that has shifted over the years. It's become decidedly more marketable as a cultural product, a trait always in evidence through Zackary's haute couture stylings. But to deride this is missing the point, which is celebratory and educational - like William E. Jones, Zackary is manning an archive and attempting to work these personal histories into his film, performance and photographic practice. A highlight of the evening came when a question emerged from the audience regarding Zackary's nude performance in the film. "That was so erotic," a female commentator asked, "is that the first time you've been nude in film?" Ever the performer, Zackary allowed a slight pause to become pregnant before extolling, "It's not the first time..." "And hopefully it's not the last," cooed Flawless.

The straight-forward doc couldn't help but make me think of Rupaul's Drag Race, which is really very good this season. I've been joking recently that I don't know how I know life without it! But The Queen exists as both a cultural artifact while conversely showcasing how quite a bit seems rather unchanged. Of course, the idea of pageantry is really conservative, so the almost identical format from this 1968 Town Hall performance to Ru's stage presentations is not a huge shock. There's a pretense towards agency in Ru's show, where the girls must exhibit creativity in overcoming challenges, though it's frequently thwarted, as in the case of that odious winner last year, who displayed the same kind of flaccid "realness" mimicry that Queen winner Harlot exhibited onstage. In street footage, Harlot was fascinating, but the kind of messy identity politics that are frequently bubbling under popular drag contests still exhibit some ugly shadows of hetero envy 40-some-odd years later.

Body Talks

2011-02-06T10:28:00.010-05:00

Sometimes when life hands you a wild juxtaposition, you just have to play it as it lays. On Friday night, I attended my friend Larin Sullivan's 30th birthday party - it was Love Boat, or rather Lez Boat themed. Perhaps more importantly, it was literally two blocks from home so I spent much of the evening working on projects. Then D reminded me that Netflix came. I rushed to the little red envelope, knowing its contents. Tearing it open I popped on our evening's entertainment: The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. Now, I'd seen the last one a while back, even wrote of it on these pages. I'm no fan to the series, really. Never read the books, but as someone deeply invested in pop cultural forms, I'm more than happy to follow Bella and her occult posse into the dimmest Pacific Northwest forest and back.

It seems difficult to fathom, but things have become decidedly more industrial this go-around. And it's tricky to pinpoint why, but the kids are remarkably less sexy. Orbiting in their own cosmologies, these actors don't even seem to be participating in a film, but revealing their make-up and hair perf forms for a worldwide mirror. Perhaps its because the respective frankness and pop-existentialism that characterized these poorly fleshed out male love interests have become more punchlines than signatures. Constant in-jokes riddle the script, which jibes at hottie werewolf Jake, "don't you own a shirt?" so apt is this actor to parade his lupine physique. When Bella braves frostbite, Jake cuddles up to warm her, even though she's betrothed to the vampire because, "you know I'm hotter than you."

And he's right; R Pat has never looked so uncomfortable and pained. His Edward displays nothing but a desperate, whiny devotion to this all-important Bella (one must ask oneself why everyone goes to all this trouble for one maudlin little brunette). But these in-jokes save the day. These jokes reach beyond the bizarrely connect-the-dots script. Oh, Eclipse is a surprisingly enjoyable watch, it's absurd as hell, but I was riveted. It's really Soap logic - and that I adore. But these jokes, almost Shakespearean in their address to a world beyond the diegesis, hood-wink a thriving international audience of tweens to whom this conservative cosmos has become gospel. They create a metatextual layer on this series so that it becomes participatory, so that giggles can run though the audience, giggles that acknowledge space beyond of the dour perimeter of the Pacific Northwest.

The following evening, I engaged in a different participatory event, no less rabid or targeted in its market (way gay). She's come a long way since last summer's gig at Webster Hall, whose bill she shared with Kelis, but Swedish pop diva Robyn sold out the Radio City Music Hall, delivering to a packed homophilic house - the largest, she beamed, that she's ever drawn, by herself. Everything was bare-bones in an endearing way. Her two opening acts were solo performers, one of whom sang exclusively to a tape (the meh Natalia Kills). Two large pinwheels were Robyn's sole decoration. But she brought the crowd roaring to its feet as she entered the stage in a doctored fireman's jacket and platform Timberlands, launching into her Max Martin-produced 'Time Machine.'

Of course, the thrill of the night was the stellar single, 'Dancing on my Own,' which, as in last July's performance, came very early on in the set. I imagine it's what opening night at Eclipse felt like. The entire crowd just swills together on the thrill of hearing this, their song. It's a loner song, so it's your song, which makes it feel all the more ecstatic when 5 or so thousand people tap into this with you, sharing your unmitigated delight. And Robyn works hard to make her set feel all about you. She has the rare quality of a performer who can address an audience and make it feel direct, intimate. Diana Ross has that, too. She takes every opportunity, 3 or 4 times a song, to visit with the front row, dipping her hand in or slipping down into the pit. Last night she tore up the rafters alongside the theater, all the way up to the balcony, throwing herself into the gaping arms of those fans who only made it second tier. She don't care!

In truth, it was a slightly less taut show than the one that she performed with Kelis. Her performance style is nothing short of buoyant - she jumps, runs, dances like a little Swedish she-devil, all without missing a note (last night she even toppled over, falling on her butt during 'Call Your Girlfriend' - there too without a second's lag). But she's also been touring an entire year now, and there's a mild fatigue there. She's performing material, mostly culled from the Body Talk series, with all of Part 3 on offer. She sounds good, looks good, but, as in Eclipse, it's the moments where she dips outside the idiom and just revels at her accomplishments with her fans that makes the evening so memorable. Her smile cuts through the music, this dancing and joy feels like the point, the music a platform for it.

Winter Doldrums

2011-02-04T12:45:00.009-05:00

A week of icy eventage. A combination of mild warmth and ice rain makes every surface here glazed in a swath of silvery white, resembling either marshmallow fluff or a Cocteau Twins album cover. It's beautiful when you're not falling on it.

On Sunday I went to the Swiss Institute where Chris Kraus read with Jeremy Sigler in celebration of her new book "Where Art Belongs." She read the last piece which had some startling connections to D - in the piece she weaves a fantasy narrative around a boy jerking off in a photograph. His name is Derek, she decides, and she's reading the same William Gibson novel that D read last summer - while we were in similarly sunnied climes. Just one of those momentary things. There were lots of people there and I FINALLY got a chance to talk to Chris face to face, afterwards. We've been emailing one another for years now. She was shocked that I had the original edition of I Love Dick, the one with her hilarious glamor shot on the back cover. We got a brief coffee and kibitzed about hating London and changes in the LA art scene.

A coffee followed the next day with curator Joseph Whitt (whom I adore) and we decided to collaborate with me writing a chapbook for his new micropress, T.M.I. Love it. Later that night, I went over to the Half King to listen to poetry and lust over issues of Bomb, now that we've let our subscription lapse. Justin Taylor, Dorothea Lasky, Ben Mirov and Luke Degnan read, and I was particularly taken with Lasky's work. She looked out to the crowd, for some reason isolating me when she asked "I hope you like Sylvia Plath." I do, but didn't respond to such a generally issued question. She took this as a no and delivered some stand-up comic retort. Then we scuttled over to the Annie O Music series at the Cooper Square hotel for an evening hosted by the gallery that I am curating Dirty Looks for, Participant Inc. Death Vessel played - a decidedly more country outfit than the name might suggest. Eileen Myles, Matthew Higgs, Gary Indiana were there and I chatted up Conrad Ventur about - what else - Warhol cinema and had a brief chat with Photi Giovanis, who runs Callicoon gallery in Callicoon New York. Participant director Lia Gangitano looked great - not wearing her fur vest and leather jacket uniform, but a strappy dress. The view up in the main sweet of the Cooper was really amazing.

It's ice raining here, so I didn't leave the house on Tuesday. I was meant to have plans but they fell through and I got a take-out burrito and watched Joan Crawford and Clark Gable roam the jungles in Strange Cargo which was kind of not that great. The next night I got sushi with a friend and set up shop at the Boiler Room, running into friends and strangers.

Last night I headed over to NP Contemporary Art Center to meet up with a crew of curators - Joseph and Herbert Mendoza - to check out Thomas Dozol's show. See, he's Michael Stipe's boyfriend and there was Michael, in attendance, and wearing some rather scraggly facial hair. John Giorno was also present WITH KIM CATRALL. Sadly, like that time I ate a burrito for an entire meal sitting next to Paul Rudd at El Conquistador in LA and never noticed, I totally missed Kim. But thems the ropes. We hung around long enough to find out from gallery director Wesley Stokes that my new thrift store shoes are made by Pharrell. Though here in the photo, D models them. Then we headed over to P.P.O.W. to see their new space in the Yancey Richardson/Electronic Arts Intermix building. We were promptly given the tour by director Jamie Sterns who was SO in her element, whisking us about abruptly with an energy level that was never short of amazing.

Jamie and Joseph

Grabbing a slice at the new Artichoke pizza, we cabbed it over to Julius for a new party Stache Bash where we were given surrogate staches which I modeled for the remainder of the evening. We parted ways with Herbert, since we were on a mission - see, Joseph had never been to Nowhere or Phoenix, New York gay bars that I suppose are "alternative" (whatever that means) but have always been a part of my NY landscape even on visits. So we probably drank too much and courted a visitation from a drunken mary at every bar, to the tune that I joked with Joseph this morning that our night was something like A Christmas Carrol. Jewelry designer Blue Bayer was by far the most endearing - or maybe I was just so far gone at that point. I can recall his calm loving demeanor this morning, so I guess that says something.

D, Herbert and Joseph

Isn't the internet a beautiful thing?

2011-02-01T18:13:00.000-05:00

Hostess Updates

2011-01-29T12:40:00.026-05:00

More snow and still we trudge on. Last Tuesday, my friend Christopher, aka Lonely Christopher whose collection of short stories, "The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse" has just been published on Dennis Cooper's imprint on Akashic books, had a reading at St. Mark's books with none other than Genesis P Orridge. Despite feeling well under the weather, I attended on a "warmish" day with my artist friend, Jake Davidson. Chris came in late and confusedly b-lined to my familiar face. "I don't know where to go?" "Don't worry," I hugged, "Just walk back there and tell them you're Lonely!" Christopher gave a heady reading, not from his book but from a play accounted by pre-Stonewall homos. Very semiotic based stuff. Then Genesis gave a "reading" from her "The Psychic Bible," which basically meant we were serenaded by Genesis' off-the-cuff accounts of communal living, creative insights and incitations. As is usual, she was fabulous and inspiring. I still want to join a commune! Though, I kind of did before Gen, ever since I saw that final scene of Rosa Von Praunheim's Nicht der Homosexuelle ist pervers, sondern die Situation, in der er lebt (that's It Is Not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse, But the Society in Which He Lives to all of us non-German sprechters). So, cute agit gay-boy communes, my email is contactbeingboring@yahoo.com. I'm so there.

Then the snow turned to rain and Wednesday rolled around. That's right, it was the inaugural screening the monthly experimental series I am organizing, Dirty Looks! Given the weather and a swarm of last minute text message regrets, I was certain that the outcome looked bleak, but out folks came and in droves. Leading the discussion after the Films of Curtis Harrington, Bruce Benderson showed up, and many friends did pop in: playwright Brian Bauman and his beau, Christo Allegra, curators Joseph Whitt, Adam Baran and Herbert Mendoza, artist Mark Golamco, Robin Newman and his writer BF Max Steele came with Daniel Sander, journalist Suleman Anaya and the fabulous Julie VS. As a curator it's particularly rewarding to see an array of strangers in the audience - that the program you've assembled brings people out of the woodwork. And out they came. We ran out of chairs at Participant Inc. so director Lia Gangitano, Earl Dax and I had to stand for the program! Apologies to those in attendance for the frosty interior. A common complaint from the crowd of the otherwise fabulous Participant (as Lia too well knows) was its lack of heating. A real downer in January. But the films screened and everyone seemed very keen. Even the exhibition, a video installation by artist Glen Fogel, went with the Dynasty screening to the t. All in all, a great evening.

On Thursday, I had to return the films to Filmmaker's Co-op where I found MM Serra and her staff outfitting Video Barbie with a transexual beard which they'll premier at the Underground Superstars' closing party at the Gene Frankel theater tonight. "She needs a dick!" MM started. I named her Video Barney in lieu of her Video Bert. They agreed. Somewhere in there, I found the time to turn in my recommendation text about Johnny Guitar for the upcoming issue of Little Joe, out April 5th. Later, D and I skedaddled over to BAM for the premier of the new Gregg Araki film - as you no doubt have seen from the prior post. Kaboom was great. Gregg was in attendance - actually he held up the screening since he was coming straight form JFK! Robin and Max were there so D and I saddled up next to them and ate some free popcorn ("Courtesy of Chase" - well, I'm already a fan of Chase, thanks, for recently depositing $125 into my new checking account!). We ran into Marc Arthur who was bummed to have missed Dirty Looks. But then we had to run over to Louis V E.S.P., to meet up with my performance partner Hayley Blatte, where we did a screen test for Friday night's taping of the pilot episode of E.S.P. TV. I created a character based around a joke - see, they needed a host for this public access video show they were doing and that D was participating in and I quipped off-handedly, "Well, I'd do it, but only if I can be cable access sex-Queen, Robin Byrd!" To which the ever-savvy director, Scott Kiernan, said "Done!" So I invented this character - Mary Boom! - a mix of Robin, Mary Boone (obv) with a little bit of Ann Liv Young's Sherry thrown in there for snarky criticality.

Apparently I was so good at that some asshole at the taping "complimented":
"You're so good, you're out of your element but it seems like you mastered it!"
"Excuse me?"
"Well you know, it really seems like you get the art world," he talked down to Mary - like every fag in a wig is some total twit. Attending to these (primarily hetero) experimental performance pieces, this fucker couldn't get that Mary could be a critical performance, too, a sex-worker allegory for the art world. Sternface thought that I was some tranny wreck hired for hilarity.
"Listen fucker," I told him from the bathroom line, "I am a curator!" He stammered.

Of course, Mary Boom! did not ebb art world sophistication - but that was entirely the point. The whole taping was a hot mess in the fabulous way that early public access broadcasts typically are (minor tech foibles, aside). Mary was the medium specific glue that bricolaged the diverse performances and/or videos by KUNSOLE, Elbis Rever, Dana Bell, Victoria Keddie, Sam Mickens, Colby Bird, Kate Gilmore, Jennifer Sullivan and Andrew Steinmetz, Katrina Lamb, Erica Magrey, Sophia Peer, Brian Zegeer, Derek Larson, Ganjatronics, Jonathan Phelps, Andre Prkowski and Rachel Mason. Like this VIP art fair, which seems to be suffering even more technical glitches than our humble outfit, Mary opened her stable to give the Manhattan Neighborhood (!) Network a taste of what was hot, and with her resident artist, Coco (Hayley) we interviewed my roster in much the same way Byrd would, flirting with the Ganjatronics boys and dishing about enemas with Elbis Rever. Of course, the whole thing dissolved into one big dance party at the end, with even the live studio audience joining us on "stage" for Mary's theme song: "Boom Boom (Let's Go Back To My Room)" by Paul Lekakis.

In the dressing room

Kunsole

Dana Bell and Kitten Miller

Ganjatronics

Coco

After that busy week, tonight - my ass is staying in. I gotta get some rest, but believe you me, I'll be seeing you tomorrow at the Chris Kraus' book launch at the Swiss Institute. I'm a total slut for all things Chris Kraus and she's ever so nice to reference my book Fever Pitch in artschool grad crits and Australian catalogue essays. Why don't you just go buy her new book, "Where Art Belongs" now!

(Photo from an LA Lit Reading)

Back in the High life, again.

2011-01-28T12:01:00.012-05:00

I was sitting at BAM last night for the New York premier of Gregg Araki's new film Kaboom realizing that I was never quite the age bracket that Araki's most coveted films depict. Happening upon The Doom Generation in my way-early teens, I was drawn like a moth to the flame by a post-it on the vhs rental box that read: You must be 18 years or older to rent this! I knew the store crew, who had already rented Pink Flamingos to me out of their porn section, so I didn't and watched it at my rather impressionable age (12 or 13?). Nowhere, too, came out when I was in junior high, the mess that predates all of Araki's characters' college-year crises. More a hormonal soup than an identity blitzkrieg. Then he dropped out of that mission for a while with the threesome movie that coincided with his surprising affair with star, Kathleen Robertson and, after the failure of his unaired MTV pilot, This Is How The World Ends, nothing materialized until 2004's Mysterious Skin. My prime teen years faced a dearth of new teen traumas from the harbringer of the Teen Apocalypse Trilogy. Where was Gregg when I needed him?

Watching Kaboom last night made me realize there's no teenage neo-realism, here. My teen cultural moment was never documented by Araki, but then, I don't think any really is. Even though Kaboom sports Lady Gaga references, his new teen dream is more like his depiction of Los Angeles: a moribund place of technicolor limitlessness and impending doom. Araki's teens are a total fantasy state, serving up the best of the best (sex) and the worst or the worst (death).

Kaboom is being heralded as a return to his roots, it's a teenage Twin Peaks sex fantasy that takes a lot from the format that Araki found his greatest success in - straight-to-video 90s releases. Movies with loose ended plots, sexy children, familiar scenarios and neon VHS box covers. Smith, an *ahem* 19-year-old film studies major, hops from boy bed to girl bed and in between somewhere witnesses a horrible murder by animal-masked men. Unable to recall specific details of the night before (he'd inadvertently consumed a laced star-shaped cookie), Smith searches for the red haired girl who was knifed and evades the dangerous figures who lurk behind every open door. Oh, he has loads of sex too. With Kaboom, Araki reminds of his reputation as an adept cinephile. It's a terrifically fun watch and completely aware of all of its generic referents and stolen formulae. It's also a terribly beautiful film, awash in the rich candy hues for which Araki is well know. Now, though, as Dennis Lim suggested in his recent NY Times article, "Young and the Restless Never Get Old", the warmer tones reflect a more optimistic sensibility, in contrast to the acidic pop tones of his nihilistic yesteryear. Of course, underneath The Doom Generation and Nowhere beat a loving and endearing pulse, clued in to more than the sardonic dismissiveness critics frequently mistook his cinema for. It's been luscious pinks and blues since Mysterious Skin and that suits the filmmaker.

He's always been a closet romantic. James Duvall's Dark yearns for love in Nowhere with a kind of fundamental innocence that can't help but infect the overstimulated spectator. Here, there are similar moments. Araki was making movies before the commercial onslaught of coming-out films of the late nineties and it was particularly heartwarming to see teen gay affections rendered on VHS. My heart warmed to find that Kaboom still finds room for this kind of glee. A cutie named Oliver that Smith spied at a party shoots him a flirtatious email video message and the smitten smirk that crawls across the recipient's face is totally believable. It captures the ecstatic potential of youthful flirtations, a kind of fairytale longing that is less existential than Araki's former incarnations. And on the upside he no longer feels the need to make the lover explode into a giant bug nor does he shear him of his manhood. They oggle one another and grin across the interweb, locked into this sexual current that seems to pulse through the air of Araki's campus life.

Kaboom is definitely independent and it showcases this frugality in its slim cast. But while endless cameos were his way around budgetary restraints of yore, it's nice that Araki trusts in the good dozen actors cast in lead roles. Kaboom came out of Araki's attempt to pen an MTV series. A pilot was shot for This Is How The World Ends, but it was way to reiterative of Nowhere, replaying jokes, scenarios and characters from that far more successful venture. So, like David Lynch with Mulholland Drive, Araki got a check from the French (bless 'em!) to turn this serial into Kaboom. That probably explains the presence of Catherine Breillat veteran Roxanne Mesquida, who plays a crazy lesbian girlfriend with occult powers. It also explains the abandon with which Araki hurls into comic book situations. He explained in a q&A after the screening that, since the French were footing the bill, he didn't conform the narrative to a appealing American product, but top-loaded the text with everything that he would want to see in a movie. There's loads of CGI on display here and wild plot turns display an assured what-the-fuckness that is really awesome (prepare yourself for an exhilliratingly wooden and high-octane exchange between James Duvall, who plays a stoner RA, and the quirky lesbian best friend, Stella [Haley Bennett] in the final minutes of the film - a scene so ecstatic in its b-movie timing that I audibly convulsed with pleasure, startling cinemagoers in my adjacent seats).

There's kind of a bad ending, but there's ultimately nowhere for the movie to really go. It's a retread, a reinvention, an explosion of Araki's past that's both dazzling and meta. Not that you need to know his prior work to enjoy it. This is what Araki's done best all along. Hopefully some ignorant tween will find this on thepiratebay (or some more egalitarian screening site) and revel in the contours of its sugary angst over stolen midnight viewings. Hopefully this blast of jouissance and outsider freedom will clue them into the alternative lifestyle options that Araki's cinema has always championed.

"Masquerades and Hysteria" at [2nd Floor Projects]

2011-01-17T14:25:00.001-05:00

In commemoration of Burlesque's Golden Globe...

2011-01-17T14:00:00.008-05:00

You’ve seen Burlesque already. Maybe you haven’t walked down the street and saddled up to the ticket booth, announcing your guilty intent to the judgmental ticket salesperson. But you’ve seen it. Burlesque comes from a long lineage of movie/musicals like Chicago, Moulin Rouge, Chorus Line, Fame and, yes, Showgirls. Some were successful, others… not so much. Yet on what basis? Every sour review of Burlesque (and there were many) ridiculed its unoriginal storyline, its paint-by-numbers screenplay, its recycling of familiar forms. Manohla Dargis hilariously called the film “a savvy combination of a Disney tween program and a Lifetime weepie.” But on what canon is one really supposed to judge a film like Burlesque, anyway?

Once upon a time, dear critics, there was a long stretch of Hollywood studio system that churned out more-or-less the same genre films every year. The same character actors filled the scenes and once stars got stuck on a thematic track, they were probably there for the run of their contract. This filled viewers with a sense of expectation, nostalgia and security. In a year that, to these critical eyes, has not yielded much by way of originality, I ask you, dear critics, “why you gotta hate on a perfectly adequate movie like Burlesque?” It functions on its own kind of economy, much like 2008’s Mamma Mia!. That movie was ravaged by critics but went on to become the most fruitful film in England, EVER. Burlesque also divides critical and audience camps. Receiving 34% from accrued reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, that same film garnered an A- approval from viewers on CinemaScore the week of its release. What’s really at issue here is the fulfillment of pleasure, so let’s get down to brass tacks.

Burlesque sports a narrative so banal that it’s beside the point to even go into it here. Blond girl in Iowa… aspirations… Los Angeles… Cher. And it moves along quite like that, aware, and in everyone’s best interest. We know the story and it’s not what we’re here for. It’s the motions! The film replays the opening to crowd-pleaser, Chicago, finding a blond shyly gazing into the limelight. The scene also proves that it is, in fact, more pleasurable to see Cher on stage than that Catherine Zeta Jones. Cher will later sing the (GOLDEN GLOBE WINNING) Diane Warren song “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me,” á la Jennifer Hudson’s “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going.” Veronica Mars actress Kristin Bell lipsyncs like Moulin Rouge’s rehash of the showgirl showstopper “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend.” It's all familiar. You get the idea.

This is the much-publicized first acting effort from Christina Aguilera, who does just fine in her few dramatic moments. She’s game as hell and a cipher to the T, all baby-faced and blond. Cher and Bell are entrusted with most of the histrionics, graciously leaving Christina to belt out five remaining musical numbers from her (to quote the film) “mutant lungs.”

Many critics blasted what they felt was the film’s patchwork format, how these scenes, bolstered between so many aural eruptions, felt like mere vignettes. They’re neglecting a musical mode currently more relevant than the traditional musical. The night before I attended my screening of Burlesque, I, by fortunate happenstance, watched Kylie Minogue’s Showgirl: The Homecoming Tour dvd. Now, in arena spectaculars such as Kylie’s, favored hits are strung together with sensational sets and a light-handed nod at narrative sequencing. Each thematic episode lays siege on the most conventional storylines and recognizable touchstones of contemporary culture. These mammoth events, now the norm for pop divas the world over, are well-oiled machines, purely professional arrangements to inspire fits of ecstasy throughout a sea of international attendees.

Burlesque, which is directed by the man who brought the Pussycat Dolls to our small screen for the reality show Search for the Next Doll, seems more akin these such Vegas-style vehicles than more traditional narrative efforts like Cabaret, Sweet Charity, or Moulin Rouge, even. So driven to please in the most perfunctory fashion, Burlesque is something of a fascinating symbiosis between these forms. Its drama is mild, never reaching beyond what’s required to bring us to the next showstopper. So being, it never achieves the kind of narrative prowess that makes fabulous messes in films like Striptease and Showgirls. But that’s because the film is too pop, or amenable to cause that brand of surprise. Its story doesn’t thrill, but brings a satiated grin of delight to the lips.

This expansive approach towards the musical is not that far from Mamma Mia!, the play-then-film that was begotten from a handful of ABBA songs. The production leaned on its recognizable score and famous, non-singer cast, haphazardly assembling dizzying production numbers with a shimmering gaudiness that befits Greece in June. Mamma Mia! made all of that British money from hen parties; ladies who love the songs of ABBA assembled to sing along to their favorite tunes; karaoke mammas who find Pierce Brosnan’s lack of singing talent a humanizing trait, as though he were taking part in their shenanigans.

I saw Burlesque in New York’s Chelsea, which turned out to be something akin to seeing Mamma Mia! in London’s West End, surrounded by screaming and swooning gay men in lieu of crooning hens. It’s immersive. Like Mamma Mia!, Burlesque is an event film. Released on Thanksgiving, it’s tailor-made for the kind of escapist diversions that characterize holiday entertainment. It’s flashy, fulfilling and utterly predictable.

I’m the target audience this time around, it seems. Though, I’m not sure if that’s intentional. I’m sure the studio would prefer the film as a post-turkey family destination. And yet it sports a similar sensibility to other recent mainstream offerings aimed at women and helmed by openly gay men. Just like this year’s Sex and the City 2, Burlesque doesn’t feel so much like a film for or about women as it does a kind of ecstatic gay role play; or, what Lindy West hilariously calls it, in her Stranger assault on the former film, “essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls.”

Burlesque parades an aesthetic that’s at once hyperbolically glitzy, like a Cher Farewell Tour, but also somehow low-budget, like West’s “home video” or Dargis’ “Lifetime weepie.” The scenes are sweet and go down easy due to their complete conventionality and the men sparkle like confections. Fortunately, Antin has set to work a crew of very competent actors in his gingerbread parlour (joining Cher, Aguilera, and Bell are Stanley Tucci, reprising his Prada role, Peter Gallagher, Eric Dane and Alan Cumming, doing his best Justin Bond imitation) and its nice to see them carry on in the well-worn grooves of the showgirl tradition.

‘Cause, let’s face it, since the apex of this universe is a danceteria on the Hollywood strip, the ambitions of the film are nothing short of modest. Burlesque doesn’t invent a wholly different genre of musical. It evinces the evolution of the genre in the wake of chart-topping Beyoncé concert DVDs and retread musicals like Moulin Rouge, Mamma Mia! and Hairspray. It pastiches elements from every point in showgirl history, finessing a new blend of same-old, and achieving its goals in the most satisfying manner. It’s in this capacity that Antin’s film resembles more modest musicals from the old studio system, where ticket-buyers would pay to see their favorite stars in parts reminiscent of prior pictures (Cher) or popular singers making their film debut (Xtina). It also plays out like VH1 storytellers. Set on a sparkling, but humble stage, Cher and co. deliver the goods this holiday season by reflecting on past triumphs and redecorating them with a polite flourish of glitz and glamour. You may not be able to turn back time, but sometimes it’s awfully sweet to retread it.

Ryan Robles is at it again!

2011-01-17T12:18:00.000-05:00

Bless.

Another 48 hours

2011-01-15T12:33:00.008-05:00

CULTURE CULTURE CULTURE! In the thick of winter and all of these goddamn snow storms that Mother Nature's hurling our way, these last couple days were like a storming of the fort. Children were out on the street in droves and every event was booming! Thursday night I attended Light Asylum's premier for their first-ever video, "Dark Allies," directed by Grant Worth. Shannon Funchess, the group's masculine lead, repeated over the hordes filling that weird back bar at NP Contemporary Art Center how the video was shot for free by the Worth, a video artist. They were handing out EPs in black envelopes and raver day-glo crosses to those who came, all of which were long gone by the time my late ass made it there. Light Asylum's music is nice, dancey and well structured, though I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say "Dark Allies" is catchy. After two listens, it sort of misses the lyrical hook that could drive the tune home. I happened upon a director friend of mine Larin Sullivan and we discussed the video, which you could only barely make out over the heads of the throngs. Too much rainbow, we decided, though it's way stocked with attitude. It also takes some cues from Grace Jones' recent "Love You To Life" video; Funchess is constantly compared to Jones, a fact that's based almost exclusively on aesthetics (or, per Larin's observation, racism), since her delivery (while singing, in particular) is quite different from Jones'. Maybe Skin, the lead singer of 90s Brit sensation Skunk Anansie, is a better comparison, since, to these ears, there's a lyrical reference to their "She's my Heroine."

Up front in the gallery space, Robert Smith hosted "The Death of Brother, My Lover." It wasn't really an end, as such, as much as an intermission. Mother Flawless Sabrina was in attendance to work her magic, reading from a new book-in-progress. After the reading, I shuffled over to Bushwick and attended the first Kitty, a Queer Weekly at the Wreck Room since my friend Zan aka La Rubia was DJing the thing. They had cheap plastic rings for the take and indulge I did. And how can you resist this flyer?

Then yesterday, QuORUM inaugurated their "week and a half of FREE workshops, skillshares, screenings, performances and parties to be held in queer homes around the city" with a Pop-Up Museum of Queer History. It was a wonderful project, held in a Bushwick loft (Starr, if that means anything to you). See, I had to go on the front end of the night which opened at 5pm. There was a wonderful little screening room, showcasing essential gay cinema from Un Chant D'Amour, to Barbara Hammer and beyond. This is in a loft bedroom, mind you, projected on a sheet (by MIX NYC executive director Stephen Kirk Jusick). It was intimate and kind of wonderful, sitting on a bed with perfect strangers and watching these films projected. Outside there was a gingerbread house replica of Stonewall, a vigil dedicated to the Sister of Perpetual Indulgence and a monitor playing pre-AIDS queer documents. As is the case with many such home-spun events, some works were quite craft-y, but an overall academic sensibility in texts orchestrated by Hugh Ryan and Buzz Slutzky gave the event real poignancy. I look forward to checking out more QuORUM events.

I dipped over to the opening of Ridykeulous' READYKEULOUS The Hurtful Healer: The Correspondance Issue at Invisible/Exports which was just absolutely PACKED! But then why wouldn't it be, with an exhibit showcasing works by Ali Liebegott, Allyson Mitchell, Bernadette Mayer, Carolee Schneeman, Catherine Lord, Chuck Nanney, Daniel Feinberg & Rhyne Piggot, David Wojnarowicz, Dr. Weeks, Eileen Myles, Gary Gissler, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Glen Fogel, Harmony Hammond, I.U.D. (Lizzi Bougatsos & Sadie Laska), Jack Smith, Jibz Cameron aka Dynasty Handbag, K8 Hardy, Kara Walker, Kathe Burkhart, Kathleen Hanna, Kathy Acker/Dennis Cooper, Laura Parnes, Leidy Churchman, Louise Fishman, Mike Albo, Nao Bustamente, Nicola Tyson, Simon Fujiwara, Tobi Vail, William Powhida, Zackary Drucker, Zoe Leonard …and other special selection from the patriARCHIVES?! Swarming with every amazing art world power lez imaginable (Eileen Myles, Saddie Benning, Dynasty Handbag, to name but a few), a dressed down Genesis P. Orridge rocked a most memorable beenie which read "FUCK CANCER". It took me 20 minutes to move from one end of the tiny Lower East Side gallery to the back where they were serving up refreshments. I partook but had to split to make it to my next event. On the way out I was fortunate enough to pass by Pam Tietze and Annie Rossi. Least to say, I was not able to see much of the work, though, like a bloodhound, I happened upon a wonderfully wordy letter from Jack Smith to Jonas Mekas. Another handwritten Smith artifact lingered above, a Lotusland fragment. Must return to see this fantastic looking collection of queer ephemera.

Instead, I made my way to Brian Christopher Bauman's play ATTA BOY. I have known Bauman (and his work) for some time. ATTA BOY culls texts from various sources: Noam Chomsky, youtube posts, blogs from the Concerned Women For America and Family Research Council, Bauman's own expansive and perverse brain. The action centers around a middle-aged Pakistani man and a not-quite legal twink who meet in a seedy motel to extract sexual fantasies from social traumas. 9/11, Columbine, homophobic attacks are the sources for this erotic psychodrama. The young Jason Zeren gives a remarkable performance as Matthew. Bauman's found an archetypal twinky body and an adept performer who can incant the vicissitudes of adolescent anguish. For the amount of times this boy strips down to his cherry-red wrestling suit (and ultimately one shy moment of blue jock-strap), the desirous body is the powerplay in these love games, and Matthew is allowed the upper hand written for him through this livid performance. There's lots of wonderfully shocking moments and surprisingly effective uses of choreography, if it does take the play a moment to gain in momentum, it does so with a vengeance. ATTA BOY runs for one more night at The Wild Project. GO SEE IT!

(Irreconcilable) thoughts on Charlie St. Cloud

2011-01-11T23:44:00.007-05:00

What is Charlie St. Cloud? As a vehicle for the tween porn face of Zac Efron, it seems rather ill suited. Or rather, it functions, but only to the effect that it offers ample opportunity to peer at that bizarrely perfect mug for an hour and a half. The narrative is built around a 5 year passage of time, which accounts for the age that is (already?) beginning to creep up on that modern marvel. But the assumed schmaltz that might overwhelm the studio flick never quite arrives, trading instead for some head-scratching premonitions and turgid naturalism. Which is not to say that the whole thing doesn't still look like a Thomas Kincaid painting.

Charlie St. Cloud tells the story of a high school sailing champ (Efron), who receives a Stanford scholarship only to defer and waste away 5 years of precious surf-time tending the grounds of the local cemetery. See, he was behind the wheel when a drunk driver took the life of his younger brother but a sworn oath brings said bro back to play catch with our hero, every day one hour before sunset. Charlie almost died too in that car crash but he was miraculously brought back from the dead by a divine ambulance driver named Florian (Ray Liotta). And there's a girl too, but she and Charlie's divine powers of perception come in later.

Charlie St. Cloud was adapted from the best-seller called The Death and Life of Charlie St. Cloud which explains why certain things feel a tad rushed. I'll freely admit to watching this film twice. Two days in a row. I had to make sense of it. The first time, as first impressions of this article might evince, I saw nothing but the face of Zac Efron and those perfect blue whorls that he calls eyes (I'm convinced there's post-production involved, there). On the second sitting I was even more flumoxed by a narrative that was not melodramatic but paranormal - with many of those generic trappings in tow. Of course, we must remind ourselves that Efron doesn't have his hand in the Twilight pot, but this bid at an approximation feels too Hallmark for that reader/viewership. Charlie's death and resurrection make him prescient and he can converse with the dead, see. Play ball even, as he does with Sam for 5 years of his life, EVERY DAY. Putting in an utterly unmemorable performance as a girl who (on second viewing) is clipped into every shot of film before she is introduced (but is somehow still never familiar), Amanda Crew plays Charlie's spiritual savior, a girl with gumption who aims to sail around the world. They share a beautiful day at the cemetery (which, I'm sorry, but for Efron is both implausible and creepy) and she pushes him to pursue bigger and better things. He courts her, eventually making love. Until he realizes >SPOILER ALERT< she's actually lost at sea.

None of this takes on the level of paranormal head-scratching that found fleeting moments of bewildering satisfaction in The Lovely Bones nor is it really set up for a kind of ta-da reveal a la (of course) The Sixth Sense. It feels like a severely edited miniseries that's not enough Hallmark Channel, not kooky enough to be science fiction and not balls out enough to just be religious. It never mounts to the tacky kind of sensationalism such a loopy plot would cater to. It never really amounts to much more than... Oh, Zac Efron's face! But it's weirdly aging. Putting him next to a deliriously overblown Liotta doesn't help matters at all, particularly once the "Five Years Later" has its way with the narrative and whisks Charlie's mother, Kim Basinger, back to Malibu... er... Portland (she later phones in). I have a feeling I'll watch it again. Maybe alongside the Keanu Reeves / Sandra Bullock reunion vehicle, The Lake House. Could this be a new genre of cinema? But that implausible tale of time travel is frenzied by its utter inability to make sense of out its set-up. While Charlie St. Cloud is never quite as frantic or jazzy as all of this, you still have that archetype of a face, that mug of perfection that resembles not a boy who has died and been given a second chance. But one that's been plucked, straight out the box.

As an addendum, I would like to note that before seeing this film and even exiting my repeated sittings, I have no crushy affiliation towards Mr. Efron. Such is the power of cinema.

Dirty Looks NYC!

2011-01-08T09:59:00.003-05:00

I'm pleased to announce a roaming monthly series that I will be organizing - Dirty Looks, a platform for queer experimental film and video will begin Wednesday, January 26th at 8 p.m. Hosted by Participant Inc. the first screening will bring together three disparate works by the avant-garde filmmaker Curtis Harrington, whose varied career saw him collaborate with Kenneth Anger in the 1940s and direct episodes of "Charlie's Angels" and "Dynasty" later on in his career. The program will contain the following works:

'Fragment of Seeking' (1946) 16mm
'On the Edge' (1949) 16mm
"Dynasty" Episode 4.7 'Tracy' (1983) DVD

Please go to the website for Dirty Looks to find out more or Like us on Facebook to keep up-to-date with all of the dirty developments.

Fairy Tails

2011-01-06T16:07:00.006-05:00

Why, dear god, do I find Willem Dafoe so darling? I may never know. In celebration of Anthology Film Archives' fabulous series Abel Ferrara in the 21st Century, I thought I would put down my two cents on his recent (undervalued) Go Go Tales. Ferrara has sadly been on something of a losing streak lately, with two large feature films with noteworthy cast members (Juliette Binoche, Forest Whitaker, Asia Argento, Marion Cotillard, Dafoe, Matthew Modine, and, sure, Heather Graham) going totally unnoticed by American distribution companies. Well now the dust is unsettled from these wonderfully peculiar films and Go Go Tales (2007) is receiving the presidential treatment over Mary (2005) in the series. On this single evening in Ray Ruby (Dafoe)'s Paradise Lounge, a bordello for high-minded strippers and dancers, all is not right and the flagging earnings present a crippling hurdle for Ruby to overcome. So he turns to the lottery.

Ferrara is the master of masculine hysteria. There's a creeping sleazy dread coursing through the veins of the strip club goons who run the proceedings (a crew which includes the implacable Bob Hoskins). Ruby's anxious gambling streaks help none to settle the tone. But as the final descriptive word of its title suggests, Go Go is more fairy tale than some of the seedier ruminations of Ferrara's past (which most famously include Bad Lieutenant, King of New York and the sublime The Addiction). Cause Ruby wins the fucking lottery, of course (18 million), but loses the ticket. The rest of the film is a frenetic free-for-all, as Ruby dives between his role as demur MC, scouring the club for the missing lotto ticket, avoiding his irate and unpaid strippers, and braving the ravings of his landlord, a delicious Sylvia Myles, kvetching as only she knows how.

Almost all the ink that's been spilt on Go Go Tales is over Argento's infamous smooch with her pooch. The scene, in truth, is here and gone. History if you bat an eye. And really, how scandalous is a tongue kiss from a rottweiler, these days? It's Dafoe's charisma and campy brand of unselfconsciousness that wins out in the end. His final monologue is equal parts wacky and heartfelt. As J. Hoberman attests in his Village Voice review, "no amount of writhing pulchritude or gutter language can conceal this movie’s essential innocence." Basically, Go Go Tales is batshit crazy in the way that one has come to expect from a film by Ferrara, but it's also a wide-eyed, loving movie, with an erratic little war torn heart.

Failings and Feminisms

2011-01-03T14:06:00.007-05:00

Brain bursting. I recently read Eileen Myles new book Inferno (which you can't buy at amazon, dears, you have to go to O/R books website - which is either an amazing or really limiting way of distributing, of course we hope for the former). In it, Myles maps out a most productive period of writing in which she spent time at a denizen's country house. There she would rise at 8:30 and heavily caffeinate. Around 9 she would read until she felt full, which she admits to typically achieve in under an hour. Then for a run, two laps around the land. Then an hour of... not meditation per se but a time to clear thoughts and attempt to think at nothing (though, after the run, Myles admits much of her thoughts centered around breakfast). Then the breakfast she was holding out for. Then, and only then, would she sit down to write. If this schedule was interrupted in any way she would not feel confident in the afternoon's writing and the day, while not wasted, became somewhat more dubious.

I've been trying to do this type of routine lately. Of course, given my hatred of all things athletic, I nix the workout portion and I've been too voracious to allow for just 1 hour of morning reading. Basically, I am failing in such formulaic attempts at a morning routine since I get to bound up in step 2, reading. I'm trying to cut out internet as much as possible, so I sit in bed for 2 sometimes 3 hours a morning reading. Today I turned back to my first love: psychoanalytic film theory and now my head hurts, swimming in a sea of castration anxiety and feminine as masquerade. I'd never actually read Mary Ann Doane's "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator" (which is an embarrassing admission with a masters in Cinema Cultures - though I've read her book The Desire to Desire a couple times) so I did a bit of that this morning before sitting down to work on a catalogue essay for Margaret Tedesco's upcoming show at [2nd Floor Projects] of ephemeral work by Marco Vassi and the Daughters of Houdini. Doane served a good counterpoint. The Daughters of Houdini are great since they use the zine format to send up phallocentric pathology. Wonderfully crude drawings accompany texts like "Jesus, I'm glad I don't have health insurance So's I'm not tempted to support the medic patriarchs!" while one comic traces the hysterical letting loose of their lesbian wombs. They fly off into the sunset, only to be scrutinized and netted by ornithologists! More on the daughters soon...
(Eileen photo by Claude Peck)

Impressively Tidy Grit

2011-01-02T15:44:00.007-05:00

True Grit is winning big in the holiday box office. I suppose that's right just. It's a magnificently conventional little action movie whose humble make-up is the best thing going for it. It seems strange to me these days when movies like True Grit garner year-end placement and Oscar buzz. Grit's perfectly economic nature reminded me of all the yay-sayers that surrounded David Chronenberg's last picture, Eastern Promises, which, like True Grit now, was nearly flawless in its resemblance of a 1940s B-movie.

There's nothing unnecessary in True Grit; each shooting, hanging and precautionary ritual lend to the formulaic unfolding of a beautifully generic western narrative. The cast is selected for their legible faces (drunk and gruff Jeff Bridges; mean Josh Brolin; paunce-y Matt Damon) and they perform their perfunctory star roles well, before the hungry eyes of the excitable newcomer, miss Hailee Steinfeld. As many critics have observed, Grit lifts its fantastic childlike wonderment more from Night of the Hunter than the original John Wayne vehicle. The closing, star-filled nighttime race is almost directly transferred from Laughton's Manichean masterpiece (in a feat of nice-timing, that film was recently given the prestige treatment of a Criterion release) while the haunting dirge that Mitchum's menacing preacher sings over and over tramples onto the Cohen brothers' soundtrack by way of lush Hollywood orchestration. This youthful quality complicates the movie's M.O. in some delightfully surprising ways - since Steinfeld's Mattie Ross is fourteen, her bloodthirst is not as quelled by anger or the explicit finitudes of murder (which is to say, Mattie's vengeance feels more robust). She lusts for retribution with wide-eyes, as opposed to the standard carnal tunnel vision.

It's beautiful, thrilling and none-too nihilistic, which is to say, the Cohens kept the hands on their holsters for much of the movie - and thankfully. Oh there's some requisite snark thrown mostly by Bridge's Rooster, but the Cohens' have taken an amiable step to produce a taut little flick that's not some fatuous Oscar-flavored allegory, but a rather straight-faced adventure, a well-cleaved tale that's more Goonies than Unforgiven.

The Nina Diaries

2010-12-30T18:23:00.008-05:00

('Seems I've Never Tired Lovin' You,' a 2003 video diary about Nina Simone)

From the script: I've been playing 'Pirate Jenny' lately. It's so frightening. It's about a woman who works as a maid, but dreams of the day her black ship will come sailing in and she will be on top again, killing everyone who had stood in her way. At the close of the song, nina half whispers half screams the warning, "That'll learn ya!" I sit in my room, with my record player. I just bought a CD transfer of 3 of Nina's European political albums. She talks between the tracks, and I can't help but feeling like she's right here. I should be embarrassed at the way I carry on, singing at the top of my lungs, "To Be Young Gifted and Black." A little white guy belting out the National Anthem of the Civil Rights Movement. Even Nina said "This is not a song for white people, though it does not put you down in any way, it just simply ignores you." Mmm... but it doesn't.

Over the holidays, I received the 3-cd boxset, "To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story" from D's parents, a very sweet gift. I was most keen on this collection for its DVD compendium. There are few film documents of Nina at her peak which (depending on who you ask) was roughly 70-75. Thing's were sloping away from the Jazz or standard interpretations and shifting to a kind of wild politicality. Things were messy, but in a really good way. I watched the doc contained in the set on Christmas day in that afternoon fireside lull. It was made for television in 1972 (though I can't really imagine it on any kind of middle American set at the time) and, as Nina tends to, it inspired me with a kind of rapt fervor. Possessed me. I tapped out these words in a 5-minute surge:

What I didn't understand about Simone (or maybe I understood it, but I didn't know how to think it) her great accomplishment was this feeling, this quelling emotion that even she knew she was at a loss for words to describe. She paints a crystal clear picture of a kind of ecstatic... not interconnectivity, perhaps, but a kind of surging passion, a lost-in-the-throesness that her music inspires in listeners. She talks it too in interviews, but she doesn't know how to talk about it, because you can't. She just sobs, throws her hand non her head and balks as interviewers use words like free. Have you ever read her memoirs? They're kind of painful. she doesn't really do her music any justice, but it's amazing because it's a document of this thing that's just burning in her and all she's trying to do is either get it out or share it. She accounts on her writing of Mississippi Goddamn that she found herself filled with an instant rage, a drive that drove her into the garage, working until she'd assembled a zip gun. She wanted to kill people. Either she decided or her now-opportunistic ex-husband, Andy Stroud, told her to not kill people, rather put that energy into song and that's what she always did. In this teevee documentary from the 60s, she says she has known freedom a few times on stage and you buy it. She has that way, she just skirts the ineffable through combining religious fervor with a kind of selfishness - a kind of self assurance, like, the issue isn't Christ but if you imagine another passion insane immense enough to infect, spread. Like someone with a really good laugh but for longer and they generate something more profound in you, some kind of out, some kind of alternative option, a sturm and drang. That's her politics. She was shocked when all the black panthers had her records, and naturally - as someone with records to sell - she really thought long and hard about that group of people. Passionate people. In the sixties (and early seventies) you had politics, but really, politics isn't the realm of passion any longer, its the sad sick realm of (alleged) reason. There's no reason in Nina and it's better for it. It's burning ire, it's live wire. It's angry but not whiny. Sometimes she can't even speak onstage. that's the kind of shit it is. and that she was and that was her contribution. you can rope it onto a number of formless sensations, but still, she's the patti smith before Patti, she doesn't even need the poetry. She's wearing High Priestess headdresses and it's not for spirituality's sake, it's for power influence ire/ She was the original or not the original but she flowed through in a way that few manage.

Unusual Xmas treats...

2010-12-24T10:50:00.006-05:00

10. While She Was Out. I found this movie while I was in the thick of my Master's dissertation. Kim Basinger's turn in a low budget neo-noir Christmas ethno-slasher did a lot to relieve some of my building academic tensions. The abused Della runs out of wrapping paper on Christmas eve and runs headfirst into a circle of goons at the mall. They haunt her into a mid-construction housing development and Della snaps, deploying her toolkit to kill all of the baddies. While not Christmas throughout, you do receive a stirring rendition of "I'll Be Home For Christmas" from a suitably shaken Basinger by film's end.

9. Remember The Night.

Not an entirely light-spirited movie, Ms. Stanwyck is arrested just before Christmas only to meet Fred McMurray, whose untarnished reputation as a prosecutor brings him to the stand for some final justice before the Christmas break. The trial is postponed and Babs has nowhere to go, so of course she follows him to Ohio for his family Christmas. This was the first pairing of McMurray and Stanwyck who would go onto co-star in Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow and, of course, Double Indemnity. It's a rather sober film, with an ending as untidy as they come...

8. Holiday Affair. TCM is apparently the only one able to offer this charmer which stars Robert Mitchum, who turns the attractive widow, Janet Leigh, into the cops for comparison shopping(?). Well, she gets him fired, but, nevertheless, seasonal warmth spreads and there's some really great footage shot in the Central Park zoo. If memory serves me well it all ends in the courtroom again, for some reason. What was it with the forties?

7. Imitation of Life / All That Heaven Allows.

Why on earth would Douglas Sirk leave something glittering and formal as Christmas alone form his signature critical lens - especially when aiming to dismantle celebrity and high society? Well, Christmas isn't really at the forefront of Imitation of Life, there's only the scene early in the film in which a cold-hearted Lana Turner turns away John Gavin (the gall!) and leaves his seasons wishes to the warm ear of Miss Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), her "maid." Icicles for on everything Lana touches (scroll to minute 8, here). Christmas is much more malignant in All That Heaven Allows, since it spells desolation for Carrie, the widow who leaves her younger lover (Rock Hudson) because of her kids' selfish want for the appropriate image of status. So they buy her a television to keep her company, and there she sits, framed in the black hole of culture, with only a Christmas tree to keep her company.

6. Christmas In Connecticut.

A total charmer with Stanwyck as a phony Connecticut housewife/columnist. She's all Martha Stewart, but in truth she can't cook rice and lives in a small New York City walk up. Trouble ensues when he boss wants her to cook him Christmas dinner... in her Connecticut abode! There's baby swapping and carriage stealing in this wonderful screwball comedy.

5. Female Trouble.

4. Meet Me In St. Louis.

3. Night of the Hunter.

Nothing says Christmas like Lillian Gish with a gun. Robert Mitchum, again, but slightly less fuzzy as he was in Holiday Affair. This is actually one of the best movies, ever, in my opinion. And the Christmas is one of the most Manichean that you'll find. True melodrama

2. Fireworks.

What? There's a Christmas tree in it!

1. Grace Jones on Pee Wee's Playhouse Christmas Special.

Thek Butt

2010-12-23T19:49:00.002-05:00

Head over to Butt to read my mixed review of the Whitney Museum of Art's handle on the wonderous Paul Thek. A whole review without a mention of Death of A Hippie, Mike Kelley or Chris Kraus! But don't worry, I threw in some Jack Smith for good measure...

vlog

2010-12-14T16:50:00.002-05:00

smitten since the thing streamed on their website back in spring...

And, also, I'm sorry, but doesn't this look like the best use of the newfangled 3D technology so far? V Excited

She's lost control... again...

2010-12-13T15:18:00.009-05:00

The arty world is abuzz over the new offing by culty director Darren Aronofsky. "It's amazing!" "It's great!" Critics throw their hands up. I went. I saw. But after settling in to her feathered embrace, Black Swan left me filled with little but ruffled plumage.

The critical majority suggests that Black Swan is the feminine heir to The Wrestler. Where that film used Mickey Rourke's beautiful, abused face and a catheter to signal the crippling ideals of American masculinity, Miss Portman's demented perfectionist narcissism is supposed to do the same here for... what? certainly not American femininity. Wasp culture? Gender is the issue here, and, sadly, we still cannot claim that all men are created equal. While Rourke flooded all the pathos in the world into that beleaguered face, his "Randy" maintained the dignity required of tragedy. See, in tragedy, the fate of the primary figure is sealed from the start. It is, therefore, not ultimately on account of the hero's actions that the fatal flaw is set into motion, but a kind of predetermination that was carried out, without hope for reversal. Think Oedipus.

Now, Miss Portman, dear Miss Portman. Actually, Aronofsky has the angel of casting on his side. No one else could have played the mechanical Nina Sayers with such perfection. Portman is a body actress and can only be depended on for the most plasticine forms of emoting. Her Nina is trapped in a wholly different web, that of her staid eroticism, her inability to let her hair down. Surrounding her are sexy beasts: Vincent Cassel, Mila Kunis and Winona Ryder. But she's trapped in the age old lady space: the land of the pathetic. Pathetic as in pathos. There's no depth of tragic feeling for Portman's character, as I found reflected in the vaguely apathetic response of the viewers with whom I attended the screening, because, unlike Rourke's Randy, Nina seems a victim of her own determination, rather than someone locked on a fatal track. No, set up here is a simple Manichean struggle. I mean, for god's sake, the literal struggle is between the black and white swans. As Linda Williams writes on the pathetic form, "unlike tragedy, melodrama does not reconcile its audience to an inevitable suffering. Rather than raging against a fate that the audience has learned to accept, the female hero often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially questions." It is in attempting to adopt the dark side to which all other figures of Black Swan belong, that the too-pure Nina loses her grasp on reality, ultimately bringing about her eventual (*SPOILER*) swan song.

As a lover of melodrama, I'm always shocked when I find myself irate at the use of melodramatic screen action. But the provokers of my cinematic contempt are almost always the Oscar-grade liberal movies that would purport to not tug at your heart strings, the movies that feign a sense of realism. Which is not Black Swan by a long shot. The film's (not quite) saving grace is its woozy topple into discordant (low) genre forms. Gleefully, the film stumbles from Pi to Argento's Opera and back again without missing a beat. In these moments, the film has time to breathe, is aired out and feels comfortable, likeable, even. But just as quickly, a return to gendered norms renders this high-minded art film a nugget of flaccid storybook formula. Despite (or perhaps, precisely because of the contrast provided by) the high-brow grainy hand-held shots that swoop in, dip, and dive with our diva, there's the same old story with its conservative values, casting damsels as innocent darlings and (French) wolves as their corruptors. The Wrestler, too, was an age-old story, a formulaic western that set that formula to critical work on the wrestling industry and the kind of hyperbolic virility that it engenders. Set in the upper tiers of society, the allegorical potential of Black Swan, feels as constricted as Miss Portman's pornographically hampered feet.

Celebratory Sounds Abound

2010-12-01T10:34:00.006-05:00

It's hard to believe, but Being Boring has been live for 5 years today. I started this page straight out of undergrad, as a vehicle to promote regular writing, to keep a log of my regular viewing and thoughts. Funny things happen when you keep a space as long as this. You get older, better (one hopes), while people continue to comment on older posts, deriding you for your pugnaciousness, youth, bad taste. They hurl insults at you in comments that sound aggressive and mean-spirited, but, with time as a poignant buffer, you can do nothing but completely agree with them! I love pouring over old criticisms. About a year ago, I changed the format of Being Boring so it is more of the moment, rather than the original, encyclopedic review format. So, on this fifth birthday, I wanted to share the best thing that has come out of Being Boring.

For this week, I will be offering my 2008 book, Fever Pitch as a free e-book download since it was born out of various immediate, Being Boring posts that seemed worthy of expansion. As one does, I've kind of grown against the book; I'll only stand by the first half of the essays included. But, like this blog, I'm proud that Fever Pitch captures a moment. A personal moment, of my progress as a writer and thinker. This book was published before moving to London and continuing my studies. But, I like to think that Fever Pitch also captures a cultural moment. Thanks for reading and don't stop. There's already lots in development for 2011!

[Click the cover to download Fever Pitch]

Review: Robyn's Body Talk series

2010-11-30T16:54:00.010-05:00

Perky Swedish popstar, Robyn, made a lot of new friends this year by reinventing the wheel with her Body Talk series. After a slew of electro-pop releases, she’s funneled all of this hard work into a new record that plays like a year-end best-of, cheekily challenging the standard album structure in the process.

In the arena of popular music, the album is a troublesome format. In an industry that only splurges on big producers for a handful of singles, few listeners wade through the mire of same-y album tracks. Instead, piecemeal downloading is de rigueur, snatching up singles on itunes then making playlists out of the amassed nuggets. This compiling was predated in the 1990s by the compilation CD, commercially exemplified by the ‘Now That’s What I Call Music’ series (currently in its 36th stateside incarnation, 77th in the U.K.), which clustered various chart busters onto one disc. That series got the balance right, basically serving up radio (or TRL) in CD form, ensuring that all of that season’s songs were present and accounted for. There, the CD became something of a time capsule.

With Body Talk, Robyn embraced such behavior from the start, releasing numerous affordable installments throughout the year. Fans on message boards and blogs assembled makeshift compilations out of those early recordings, live appearances and single versions, awaiting a third release to expand this omnibus album. Relying on online hype channels, timely remixes, and two stellar 8-song pop records released in tandem, what lands in our laps today assembles those best tracks alongside some new cuts. Like the countless online playlists, this third installment listens, as Robyn puts it, like a “turbo version of the Body Talk album.”

By this point, the mini-Body Talks have grown on attuned ears through club play, t.v. appearances and online downloads. The songs from Body Talk parts 1 and 2 certainly became my soundtracks to summer and fall, respectively, beckoning from just about every music site and tastemaker blog. As good popular music does, these tunes expanded in these contexts, becoming ensnared in popular (not to mention personal) memory. A year-end round-up does not merely make the most of a festive buying season, but listens like a collection of signature tunes, amassing the best of Robyn’s output in a new deluxe package. Some new beside the tried and true. Robyn, who runs her own label, Konichiwa Records, has explained her desire to include fans in the recording process, generating a more open-ended creative period, “to try and figure out a more organic way of making music. A way that is unbiased and has it’s starting point in what feels logical to me, but also to the listeners.”

First known as a cross-over artist, the teen Swede brought her oh-so-1997 “Show Me Love” to every international radio chart imaginable. But Robyn parted ways with her megalabel after they tried to pin her as the next Christina Aguilera. She had more electronic aspirations in mind, see. Without the marketing bucks of a big label, the resulting LP [Robyn] made use of hype and the delay of international release dates to attain commercial and critical success. Breaking through at #1 in Sweden in 2005, Robyn did not find a UK release until the singer had added more single-worthy tracks by 2007. After sweeping that territory with her #1 “With Every Heartbeat,” Robyn skipped across the pond to release an EP of material preceding Robyn’s 2008 US release, in which it rounded out the Billboard top 100.

This February, Robyn broke news of her auspicious plan to release 3 albums in 2010. “I got all these great songs so why not?” she wrote on her blog. “It’s been 5 years since Robyn and I didn’t want to wait with a release until they are all recorded, so I decided to start putting them out right away.” Reintroducing herself to the pop market, a new tune was leaked each month leading up to the June release of Body Talk Pt. 1. By the time her first proper single found its way to DJ booths, she was no longer another past pop darling but a burgeoning sensation. And did the single help! “Dancing On My Own” is still the chosen track on television spots (Gossip Girl) and promotional performances (Nobel Peace Prize Awards, MTV’s Video Music Awards).

That song epitomizes the Robyn canon. Like past hits “With Every Heartbeat” and “Be Mine!” “Dancing” plays on the contrast of a slow-burning, minimal beat with an emotional, heavy-hitter delivery. Disco lasers catch tears in her eyes as she spies her crush/ex stepping out with someone else. “Stilettos on broken bottles / I’m spinning around in circles / I’m in the corner watching you kiss her / I’m right over here, why can’t you see me?”

Body Talk Pt. 1 already felt kind of like a collection. 4 of its 8 tracks had been leaked or serviced to itunes as singles, and its range of genres only built on this feeling. Techno-funk, Disco, Dancehall, Rap, and Ballad, Body Talk Pt. 1 is aggressively appealing, spinning through many popular styles (and demographics) in its trim 30 minutes. To seal the deal, both Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 closed with acoustic renditions of the following album’s lead singles, “Hang With Me” and “Indestructible.”

The acoustic “Hang With Me” was a skipper, in my opinion. But when the video landed online, it was over. I was hooked. The beyond-endearing promo for this second single opened in her hotel room, showcasing Robyn’s live tour and assuring that it would be a pleasure to “hang” with the polite and diminutive star. “Leave it to Robyn,” writes Ryan Dombal on Pitchfork Media, “to take a tired video concept – the "on-the-road" clip – and turn it into something worthwhile.” Released in September, Body Talk Pt. 2 was a much more consistent album, wowing critics less (they were still quite favorable) than the previous gathering of single-ready tunes. Still, it landed Robyn her best US charting to date (#41). I was on assignment at the time, staying in San Francisco’s Castro district, and that CD was in EVERY shop window.

But the baiting system that Robyn developed for her singles somewhat backfired with her third [and current] promo. “Indestructible,” a fan (and personal) favorite in its acoustic form on Body Talk Pt. 2, did not quite translate into a dancefloor delight. “Hang With Me” was above-and-beyond its acoustic rendition, so expectations were high for this already-very-good tune. The single sits uncomfortably between slow-burner and club anthem, never quite differentiating itself from the acoustic version enough with an odd instrumental interlude that sounds, to these ears, like the Dynasty theme.

Perhaps a better choice would have been the new, Max Martin-produced “Time Machine.” A killer pop track, the song cleverly re-pairs Robyn with the producer that shot her to fame in 1997 with “Show Me Love.” It also literally refers to a DeLorean the singer wishes she could hitch, to take back a fit she threw at a lover. This and the dazzlingly mature “Call Your Girlfriend” (a song that basically says, “this is how you respectfully break up with your current girlfriend in a loving, supportive and adult manner now that I’ve walked into your life”) are the standouts on this final installment of the series, which, despite good intentions, does feature some filler towards album’s end (“Get Myself Together” and “Stars-4-ever”).

Assembling the best picks from the crop, the now-familiar songs fare well, side-by-side. And ultimately, it is in Body Talk’s best interest to play like a compilation, embracing the frequently varied production process of pop records. Most big albums enlist a roster of heavy hitters for a few sure-fire singles, generating a heterogeneous feel, incidentally. Literalizing that process and keeping me engaged – or better yet, guessing – for the better part of a year, Robyn has succeeded in creating a forward-thinking event album, a string of hit tunes and a self-reflexive post-modern pop trilogy. Further still, the final result is a carefully constructed record that assembles the wealth of songs that played throughout the past year, with personal favoritism opening out the known material and ensuring a product that is both familiar and thrilling. It speaks droves that the experimental release pattern has found her with the most successful campaign of her 20-year career. Revitalizing the popular album format and breathing life into an otherwise staid commercial market, it’s truly fabulous that Robyn can live up to her boast on the Snoop Dogg collaboration, “U Should Know Better,” that “the whole industry knows not to fuck with me.”

Talking Pictures...

2010-11-21T12:16:00.013-05:00

Goodness. It's been a busy week with screenings and assignments. In an extended Claire Denis orgy staged by IFC to excite for the release of the fabulous White Material, I attended Wednesday's screening of No Fear No Die with artist, Jake Davidson. The film, one of Denis few unavailable on domestic shores, is a sparse account of two brothers from Benin, Africa, who preen and coach roosters in the basement of a restaurant for rounds of suburban Paris cockfighting. No-Fear-No-Die is the name of one such cock who doesn't heed this message for long. While there's a mildly precious air to the manner in which Denis treats the special relationship that brother Jocelyn (Denis' constant collaborator, Alex Descas, from Trouble Every Day, 35 Shots of Rum) has with his preferred cocks, by keeping her camera trained solely on the bare-bones narrative, there's an ugly and tortured heart at the center of the package, and its not easily explained away by narrative circumstance of individualism. The movie mounts to a claustrophobic confrontation in the cockfighting ring, between Jocelyn and the men that swarm the abandoned building of this distant banlieue. There is, of course, far more at stake than the life of his beautiful white cock. And the drunken venom that he spews, addressing the crowd as pigs, while swaying in this makeshift circle, ends in the only way it ever seems able.

We were in the wrong theater, it seemed, since downstairs, Yony Leser, a kid who Jake and I knew from undergrad art school, was presenting his documentary on William Burroughs: A Man Within. Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was also there to talk about her experiences with Burroughs. After our screening, we ran into the curator of NP Contemporary Art Center, Wesley Stokes and his partner in crime, Pamela Tietze, in the lobby who were headed over to the Jane hotel. But my tired ass headed home.

I was on assignment for a review of Robyn's new Body Talk album, which will post on The Fanzine in the next couple days. Such an amazing album. Between edits, at the suggestion of poet Nathan Austin, I watched this lovely (if not somewhat bleak) Christmas-themed film, Remember That Night (1940). The film was the first pairing of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurry who would get all teary in Douglas Sirk's There's Always Tomorrow (the poster of which hangs over my computer) and all bloody in Double Indemnity. A very stirring film, though I'm increasingly offended by non-Hollywood endings, and the moral ramifications of this one were admirably messy for a studio picture.

It was a slightly quiet weekend, even given my reading at Brother, My Lover. In truth, I was surprised at the lack of boisterousness exhibited by the crowd. The piece, "Schooled," is a gabby farce, only intended to be taken half-seriously. Perhaps, as D suggested, it was too much an indictment of Southern California culture, too pointed. Whatever.

Oh, and we saw the New Photography show at MOMA (D's parents were back in town for a 24-hour stint). Elad Lassry exhibited some lovely images, works that uncannily recall advertising photos but each isolated image seems encrusted in its own aesthetic hermeticism. The work is funny; extremely self conscious in terms of coloration, the individual images seem to close in on themselves with frames to match their vibrant colors, but it is in the cluster of their small frames that they gain in meaning. The works are sized as magazine spreads, with obvious gay references and aesthetics, reformulating slightly random images in a strangely accumulative space. Amanda Ross-Ho, rather ineptly included in this photography show, has taken her aesthetic as far as it can go. I championed her earlier work, in which she brought the studio wall, itself, into the gallery, smeared with paints, thumb tack holes, and gold leaf. Exhibited as a secondary wall for context or even as art objects themselves, this early model had a fascinating charge, an indexical quality that worked. But now, in her art superstar role, these gestures only evince a hyper-aesthetic, are antiseptic and moot. Her work stood out here as incredibly banal. I would like to like Alex Prager's work cause, on the surface, what's not to like? These images are juicy, colorful and pretty. A wall text describes her devotion to Hitchcock, Douglas Sirk and The Red Shoes, but reiterations are dull unless they bring something to the table. The MOMA installation crew slyly delivers the death blow by allowing Prager's immaculately staged pop pulp to be spied from the adjacent gallery where a Cindy Sherman centerfold can be visually compared in the same sightline to these Pragers, showing, ultimately, who's boss.

And finally, Kelis is trotting out a new single from Flesh Tone with a quite-classy video, so, of course, I'll post that here...

Oh, Mariah!

2010-11-17T11:02:00.002-05:00

For better or worse, the new Mariah Carey christmas album, Merry Christmas II You, is on at my house, nonstop. Meanwhile, the Annie Lennox Christmas album, Christmas Cornucopia, is something of a dud.

The Face(s) of Genesis

2010-11-16T11:03:00.006-05:00

I attended last night's Queer/Art/Film screening of If... presented by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Gen, who now lives in New York, has been getting around a lot lately. She is, of course, part of some seminal noise institutions (Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, the latter of which will be hosting a Xmas-timed show this year in Bklnd) and exhibiting a great deal as a fine artist (with a recent show that opened at Invisible Exports last year on my birthday). I saw her stint on Vaginal Davis' live talk show "Speaking from the Diaphragm," a performance in which Gen held her own since Vag couldn't hold her liquor. That night was a beautiful collision of styles. Vag swaying on the floor, literally so drunk she could not stand up, and Genesis taking the reigns of this self-imploding variety show.

Last night was a tad different. The event was very much a place of worship (and catharsis) for and of Genesis, whose major project in the wake of her Industrial acts, is a physical fusion of Gen with his recently passed wife, The Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. In life, the two used plastic surgery and affected behavioral tactics to become, physically, the singular soul they felt they embodied in two parts. Now that their bodies are separated, indefinitely, Gen takes it upon herself to house the souls, referring to herself as "we" and answering for the Lady Jaye as quickly as for Gen (or so I understand it; there was a charming disclaimer at the evening's start that Gen had just begun referring to herself as we and, should she slip up, it is only on account of the tyranny of habituation). The film seemed a slice of life with which I was none-too impressed. But no one was there for If..., really, and that was for sure. Instead the event focused on Genesis' recountings of bullying and conflict in British Public (which, there, is our private) school systems. It seemed something of an exoneration or cathartic scene for Gen who stuck little to the accounts in the film, intermixing her lived experience with the narrative strife that the picture depicts.

The accounts wore on and, from where I was sitting, I could only make out Gen's face in profile as she answered questions, expounded on her bullied experiences and explained her self-designated gender formation with the Lady Jaye, pandrogeny: "Pandrogeny is not about defining differences, but about creating similarities. Not about separation but about unification and resolution." I've seen Gen a few times since moving to New York and I don't hold the same Holy opinions of her that some of my dearest friends (and some fiercely in-vogue art gays) do, and have been mildly skeptical about the devotion she inspires, but once she turned to address some questions on my side of the room, I found myself lost in the contours of her face. It might seem shallow or silly, that after very poignantly worded manifestos of the project on her pretty great website, it takes a face for me get drawn into the project. Perhaps it was a contact high from the devotional energy that clouded through the room. Genesis is very good at commanding a room and ensuring that the logic that she spins around her endeavors is not only sound, but gospel.

And perhaps I'm still slightly skeptical, but in that moment I was overtaken by a particular beauty, an evident and remarkable success in the fusion of these faces. Perhaps I got totally ruined by my obsessive use of Walter Benjamin's chapter "Allegory and Trauerschpiel" from The Original of German Tragic Drama in a Grad school essay on Maria Montez, but to facades and faces, I can't help but read the passage of time there written as allegorical, a kind of index to the tragic and momentous events there witnessed. Benjamin finds the apotheosis of this evocative quality in the ruin or, better yet, the facies hippocratica (the face of death) whose wizened dessicated countenance exists as an associative link to the entire narrative that has contributed to this present mask. These surfaces are narrative, not merely surfaces but physiognomic, moral spaces. This was the wave that I became swept up in, marveling at Gen's work last night. It's all written there and, as her manifesto on Pandrogeny attests, this life is a work, a very successful work, if I am to take her body, her beautiful and telling face as the primary medium of this life as art.

(Photos by my friend, the fabulous Celebrity photographer Greg Garry)

Various Updatedness

2010-11-15T14:31:00.007-05:00

Consider this a revamp. Being Boring will soon be changing form. More a platform for culture and ideas than encyclopedic, check in for daily musings and leave with a nugget or two.

Today, I have slight bits of news to report. One of which being a lovely surprise which I discovered when putting my 'All the Lovers' 7" picture disc single on for the first time. I forgot to switch my player to 45 from 33 1/3 and came up with a new wave goth version of Kylie's recent hit.

In more pressing news, I will be reading a Cookie Mueller inspired piece called 'Schooled' at this month's Brother, My Lover. And by Cookie Mueller-inspired, I guess I mean, I-was-reading-CM-and-thought, "gosh, why don't I have cool life stories to report like Cookie's" and-then-thought, "well, there was that one time..." 'Schooled' is an art school farce about group sex and black face. NP Contemporary Art Center 131 Chrystie Street Friday, November 19th, 8 - 10PM.

Until then...

Overstimulated

2010-10-04T16:11:00.014-04:00

What a busy weekend!

Back in New York for less than a week, and just in time for the 14th Views for Avant-Garde. I wasn’t the faithful cinephile that I perhaps could have been. I attended 5 programs in all, one on Saturday and 4 yesterday.

There’s a transient feel to all of my interactions with outside stimuli cause I’m well… transient at the moment. In between homes, is a rather peculiar space to take in an intense event like Views (and some of the other programs I’ve attended).

Friday started not with Views, but with a really lovely screening, Raw Stock: No Wave films from Downtown New York 1976 – 1984, at Scott Keirnan and Ethan Miller’s loft/gallery Louis V E.S.P. Those boys sure no how to bring in a crowd (they sure did for me back in May when I hosted my screening of Luther Price's Meat in their space). Well, their weathered brick loft space was a really perfect locale to take in the two super8-to-video transfers that we watched in the PACKED space. Tina L’Hotsky’s Barbie was lighter fare, and as D joked, after swallowing a lifetime of first-year Barbie artwork, it is difficult to approach any feminist critique of gender stereotypes when the tried (tired) and true Barbie is paraded out for one further go around the physiognomy arena.

The second film, She Had Her Gun All Ready by Vivienne Dick, was far more luxurious. Lydia Lunch and Pat Place sit at a grimy Lower East Side kitchen table in a kind of attitudinal stasis. For a while, all Lunch delivers are repetitions of the prying demand, “What are you gonna do?” It’s all awash in red gels and slanty cameras. Then the scene moves outside and the narrative (somewhat sadly) begins. There’s a stalking and a murder, which takes place on the Coney Island rollercoaster, the Cyclone. Lydia meets her maker in an impeccably shot murder scene (shot on the Cyclone) where Place wraps a scarf around her neck a la Isadora and takes Ms. Lunch on the last thrill ride of her life. This whole affair was a primer for the January release of the trio of presenters’ documentary, Blank Cinema: New Cinema, New Wave, New York.

The following morning I attended my first Views program: Mirror of Shadow and Cinders (sounds kind of like a CINdYTALK song, doesn’t it?), a real hodge-podge of techniques from strictly film documentary (Manon de Boer’s Dissonant) to digital animation and manipulation (Karen Yasinky’s Marie). Viewers seemed to really respond to the latter work. Me, I like the idea in the encyclopedic program notes: a faithful line-drawn reanimation of Marie’s stoic confession scene in Au Hasard Balthasar. But interrupting (intervening, perhaps the filmmaker would argue) the vibrant black-on-white-plane digital squiggles of lines were color pixels and frenetic explosions that didn’t strike me as all that necessary outside of formal parameters. The soundtrack of digital blips and whirs would be a premonition of the proceedings, an understandable, if not rather conspicuous trend in current avant-garde practices, conjoining with its cousin practice, the, perhaps more art-world-friendly sound art.

Lewis Klahr (full disclosure, the man who taught me everything I know about watching avant-garde film some 7-years back when I was a bratty Calarts student) presented the finest of his 3 Views offerings, A Thousand Julys. Klahr is best when he frees up the comic book clippings that compose his cut-and-paste animations from their iconographic platitudes, either by way of affective narrative techniques (see False Aging) or by formal intervention. Here, he takes the latter road (though, not without a trace of the former) layering the sheets upon a lightbox, so that both sides of the story shine through with filmy opacity. Lines of the face overwrite lips and figures layer, one upon the other in psychical configurations. A gorgeous luminosity breaks through the sheets of newsprint, lulling like the backwards-then-faithful pairing of a tune by (if I am correct) Françoise Hardy.

The other standout of the program was SHU (Blue Hour Lullaby) by Phillipp Lachenmann. In this 12-minute static shot of a Southern California correctional facility (CCI, the program informs, a state of the art, solitary confinement unit). A slow smattering of goofy-white CG stars begin to fill the twilight sky. As the light dims, and the assortment of inserted stars accumulate, growing nearer, and a rewarding reveal clarifies them, not as stars, but a technical insertion of overhead aircrafts. I could do without the program details that these planes were documented at various international terminals across the world. I’d rather dream of this space where interaction is forbidden playing host to a barrage of nightly overhead visitors, come “blue hour.” An indexical desire for factuality, for sure. That seeminly documentary nature was what made me so filled with awe. But maybe I’m just being whimsical.

In the evening we checked out Greenpoint’s kickstarter bred Bring to Light: Nuit Blanche, a streetfair that purported to recreate Paris’ famous fete, but instead made me feel like I was trapped in an extended Future Sounds of London music video. “Yes, the nineties are most certainly back,” I remarked to my friend Joe as we I passed by a Jaguar blaring Jungle music, parked across from a frozen parking construction site, onto which was thrown some video straight out of MTV’s Amp.

The open studio that participated did nothing to rescue me from befuddlement. Though Scott Chasse was nice enough to offer assorted mini Hershey’s treats. I walked into his space because I thought his pop masculine-ideal paintings were reuniting Sylvester Stallone and Brian Dennehy. I left dejected, however, after the artist’s girlfriend informed me that it was not Brian Dennehy, at all, but William Shatner. Some strategic planning with the fabulous Renata Espinoza, fashion blogger extraordinaire and member of the Kate Bush Dance Troupe, and an assortment of Greenpoint bars later, I found my kind of (still 90s) projected light in some Skinny Puppy performance videos, writ large on a bar screen.

The next day, I made it over to Views to catch Dani Leventhal out front. We chatted about her upcoming projects and her parent being in town. She could only attend her Views screening because of it. Her Hearts are Trump Again was her now-signature, astute blend of video diary and assamblage. The charming Fern Silva’s In The Absence of Light, Darkness Prevails. Silva, who has just earned his graduate degree from Bard, shot his rather ruminative piece on a recent trip to Brazil. The film begins rather metaphysically then becomes much more a tourist film, until returning to a kind of preternatural point at the films close, burrowing (literally) down an existential rabbit hole (okay, snake hole) and blending beautifully his documentary footage with more mechanical light renderings.

The program, Landing on the Edge, was sort of set up as the Stephanie Barber show. Barber, who has been achieving much interest as late having just published a book/dvd of her scripts and assembled her works for a Anthology retrospective, showed an extended collaborative work that she made with Xav Plae called razor’s edge. Plae looks as hipster as his name, and this detracted from the film which truly picks up when the camera starts to emphasize Barber in a dual role, in lieu of Plae’s penis in obnoxiously tight polyester pants. The film is a remake of Sumerset Maugham’s The Razor’s Edge, or rather, an adaptation of the bits Barber retained, having read the book 10 – 15 years prior. They decide to reenact these rememberances, and, unsurprisingly, the film becomes an extended play of impressional hyperbole. Instances that were probably slight reactions in the book (which I have not read) extend into long, repetitive scenes. These scenes are affective, again particularly when played by Barber, who has a commanding sense of her own dexterity of physical performance.

Barber began the next program, Séance, about which I can regretfully say very little other than: DEAR MICHAEL ROBINSON, WHO ARE YOU AND HOW HAVE I LIVED ALL OF THESE YEARS OF MY LIFE WITHOUT YOUR CINEMA? I AM TRULY BOWLED OVER. YOURS ALWAYS, BRADFORD NORDEEN.

These Hammers Don’t Hurt Us recasts Cleopatra-era Elizabeth Taylor as Michael Jackson’s mother and spiritual guide, shepherding him into an afterlife of neon pyramids and ice ballet routines. I sat transfixed, my jaw slack, as the opening sequence exhumed a diamonte Jacko outfit for scrutinous speculation and digitally animated wizardry, with Taylor (or as Robinson reminded us before the screening, “DAME Elizabeth Taylor”) reciting a most uncommon prayer in voice-over. We’re then hurled into a Pharovian disco of the dead, something that Kenneth Anger might have done if he had taken ecstacy instead of all those darker drugs that fueled his 1970s productions. Liz peers through a peephole and catches Jackson in his Egyptian dance-number for “Black or White.” Robinson’s film is truly noteworthy because of the avant-garde’s (unfortunate) disinclination to explore figures of popular culture. Everyone has their tastes. Some people prefer the formal basis of the program that followed, Song Cycle, with its expertly executed exposures, a fetishistic handling of filmstock and mildly Thureauvian sentiments. Me, give me Elizabeth Taylor and Michael Jackson, shining like the two sparklers stuck in Robinson’s digitally animated pyramid. If these are the gates to wherever Michael went, take me there too!

Rounding out the festival was a program called Fatal Attraction: An introduction to black and white magic. Deborah Stratman started things off right with her usual gusto, with These Blazeing Starrs a free-form rumination on astrology or, as she puts it, “ice-covered fireballs and their historic ties to divination.” It was very good. (but, again with these aural blips!) A couple star-centric films followed. Then Luther Price showed his new film Sorry, a crowd favorite, which interjects a banal Christ film with abrupt splices from an informational reel about the health hazards of the parasitic housefly. Martin Arnold was up to his signature, stuttery tricks, playing a rather crude joke on an already-suggestive vignette featuring Mickey Mouse and Goofey in bed. A sex act of Arnold’s making, the staccato repetitions of Mickey’s laugh translated into “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck”s and Goofey writhed in various positions of sexual gratifications, jerking, sucking and fucking in Mickey’s lap. Similar mechanical interventions (of a more optical printer type) met Peter Tschekassky’s found, commercial reels of product pushing models. The best chapter in Coming Attractions, “Cubist Cinema No. 1” was thrown into a state of eruptive jouissance, a treat to behold. But the most shocking and memorable film on offer here was Pawel Wojtasik’s Pigs, which, yes, documented pigs. The intense soundtrack mounted in a wall of beastly cries that will leave me in gulping screeching visceral nightmares for years to come. Not since Jurassic Park have creatures been so vocal, vicious and overexpressive. These pigs, in what I’m sure is probably a quite quotidian occurrence, felt way avant-garde.

Dear New York,

2010-09-25T12:41:00.013-04:00

Save the Date: October 21, 2010

Not only is this day a mere 3 days after my "23rd" birthday, but it is also the date that sees the touring program 'What Is Life Without The Living?' screened at the Lower East Side destination NP Contemporary Art Center (formerly Envoy Enterprises) (131 Chrystie Street). The program has gained some components as it's traveled. For instance, my introduction has become longer. But on the plus side, the SF screening expanded with the hilarious piece (see below) from Kevin Killian to contextualize the Margot Kidder film. If youtube isn't enough, we'll go ahead and screen that before the program. "A special introductory message by author and critic Kevin Killian."

What Is Life Without The Living?

David Scheid, Margot Kidder 2005, 13 min, video

Luther Price, A 1995, 60 min, B&W and Color Super8mm (screened on DVD)

Thursday, October 21, 2010. 8pm

Envoy Enterprises

131 Chrystie Street

(Gabbin with Margaret Tedesco of [2nd Floor] Projects)(the great Kevin Killian)

California Adventures!

2010-09-21T12:54:00.009-04:00

So excited about the upcoming San Francisco screening of What Is Life Without The Living at Artists' Television Access in the Mission. The first screening was smashing and people really took to the films. I'm sure San Francisco will be no exception! I've teamed up with local legend Kevin Killian who has written this great piece to coincide with the screening of David Scheid's 'Margot Kidder.' You can see the vid below:

I have a nice ghostly image from the LA screening with more sumptuous images to come (once I find that damn cable in my post-travel lull). In other news, the X-TRA launch that preceded 'What Is Life Without The Living?' went beyond my wildest dreams. It was a wonderful family affair with D's friend Zoe Crosher presenting source material for the artist project contained within the current issue - footage that was edited by my dear friend Jason Underhill. Also in attendance were Mandrake co-owner and feted artist Vishal Jugdeo (on whom I have a more than mild crush) tending bar and, oh, a good 60-or-so others.

We missed out on much of the gallery scene in LA as everyone was on install for the upcoming (now past) weekend. In San Francisco, we were able to check in with Kevin K and Dodie Bellamy at the indefatigable Margaret Tedesco's local institution [2nd Floor Projects], where Kevin was presenting an edition he wrote for the artist Bruno Fazzolari. We met some lovely folks. Then I drank a few too many g&ts and tried to impress some friends at the Phone Booth with my own, unique take on Left Eye's rap from 'No Scrubs.' Oh dear. A slightly more debilitated self was toured through the San Francisco Art and Design mall the following day by Lauren Marsden for her piece in a rotating exhibition curated by Chris Fitzpatrick and the Post Brothers. Marsden's piece "With Love from Mabel (ongoing tours of the SFADM)" was performative, and led D to lean over and expound in a whisper "I feel like we're being led through Last Year At Marienbad," (i.e. not the worst place to be trapped). I bought a postcard of Dolores Del Rio, but really coveted this way overprice original poster for Curt McDowell's Thundercrack!

Last night Kevin whisked me off to the swanky book-launch/fete for the release of Secret Historian a biography of Samuel Steward where I met Christopher A Trout who just penned a nice article on Steward for Butt. After waxing lyrically about Steward (a subject of whom I sadly knew very little), narcissism and the Wachowski brother/sister's new gay Iraqi love story, Cobalt Neural 9, I begged off to go shoot the above video.

WHAT IS LIFE WITHOUT THE LIVING?

2010-09-01T05:38:00.008-04:00

*Updated*(something of an update whilst I'm being boring in Spain. There are a few upcoming events of note. Two screenings to be held in LA in mid-September, one (September 12th) of the Ludlam films 'Museum of Wax' and 'Gooseflesh' at the X-TRA launch event and the following day (September 13th) I will screen from a program I've devised entitled 'What is Life without the Living?' WILWTL will see a San Francisco screening co-hosted by the wondrous writer Kevin Killian at Artists Television Access on September 23rd with a New York screening Envoy Enterprises in October! Keep checking in, dear reader...)

WHAT IS LIFE WITHOUT THE LIVING?

Monday September 13, 8:00 – 10:00pm
Mandrake Bar 2692 S La Cienega Ave LA, CA 90034

Thursday, September 23, 8:00 - 10:00
Artists Television Access 992 Valencia Street San Francisco, CA 94110

Program:
David Scheid, Margot Kidder 2005, 13 min, video
Luther Price, A 1995, 60 min, B&W and Color Super8mm (screened on DVD)
This Los Angeles screening is free (in SF a mere $6) and will be accompanied by a complimentary publication of images, illustrations, an essay, and artist writings.

The program title misremembers the opening lyric to the theme to Imitation of Life. The tune hauntingly floods Luther Price’s A (1995). Alongside David Scheid’s video, Margot Kidder (2005), these works reconstruct Hollywood from a space of queer fantasy, creating private narratives from popular fiction. The event is curated by moving-image scholar Bradford Nordeen.

Named one of the top-20 living avant-garde filmmakers in Film Comment’s recent poling, Boston-based super-8 filmmaker Luther Price has been frequently likened to Jack Smith, Karen Finley and Matthew Barney for his raw, visceral cinema. In 'A' Price concocted the most narrative tale of his 25-year career: a cyclical feature in which a faded starlet (Edie) courts suitor after suitor and fades into an alcoholic Lassie-laden haze. Price portrays the heroine as she spirals deeper into destructive delusions, turning on her lovers like an amped-up Jeanne Dielman. Edie is also a ghostly, childhood memory, based on Price’s mother and her obsessive viewing of woman’s pictures.

David Scheid is a video artist whose work addresses pathology and obsessive compulsive disorder. 'Margot Kidder' meticulously reconstructs 3 films from the actress’ golden period to illuminate Kidder’s peculiar personal narrative. Scheid infers that Kidder’s infamous downfall was present all along in these fragile performances. 'Margot Kidder' throws these clues into plain view, presenting a dismaying decoding of these otherwise commercial films. Like Price’s work, the film also serves as an intimate portrait of a male fan’s obsession with a female star. The 13-minute found-footage film is an alarming depiction of the filmmaker’s arousal, disdain, compassion and compulsion towards the eponymous subject.

“Roses and Red, Blood is Black…A is a relentlessly rancid alcoholic and drug-induced journey through which Edie, a washed-up and broken movie starlet finds herself alone and ugly with only glittering memories of her silver past.” Luther Price via Canyon Cinema

Chales Ludlam film screening at the X-TRA Launch

2010-09-01T05:17:00.005-04:00

I will be hosting a the screening of two "lost" Charles Ludlam films at the forthcoming launch for Volumer 13 No. 1 of X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly on September 12 at the Mandrake. The issue contains my review of the films. At the event, I will screen Museum of Wax and play continuously the non-narrative Gooseflesh. The films were restored digitally by Ira Sachs and Adam Baran, screened for their series Queer/Art/Film in February, though they have since been taken up by OutFest's legacy project for more cohesive restoration. I hope to see you there!

2692 S La Cienega Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90034
(between Venice Blvd and Washington Blvd)

Review: The Lost Films of Charles Ludlam

2010-08-18T14:39:00.003-04:00

Head on over to X-TRA Online to read my recent article on 'The Lost Films of Charles Ludlam', which screened in the Queer/Art/Film series at IFC in February. The article will be printed in volume 13 number 1 of the Los Angeles based contemporary art quarterly hitting stands in September.

"Mimesis is missing the point, which was pleasure, all along. Revising narrative based, normative cinema, Ludlam produced a revelatory sensation-based cinema without counterpoint in the breadth of avant-garde cinematic production."

carmen

2010-08-05T09:26:00.005-04:00

It’s the look you believe (in?)
And that sort of nose
Ordinariness is the hallmark of the star
But here, that’s inverted
To like fantasy, an empathic
Relatability. There’s little I feel
In common with Denise, except perhaps
The ire.

Ahem

2010-07-27T14:16:00.001-04:00

What?

At least it's better than that Third Reich shit he's been peddling

Surprisingly unhungover...

2010-07-23T09:42:00.015-04:00

So much to catch up on!

Thursday boasted an art crawl which was slowed by an accidental after work nap. I had nothing but ambitions about the Lower East Side gallery thing, even if it wasn't entirely too clear what it was (in hindsight it was something to the tune of MOCA's Contemporaries, read: young bourgeois would-be collectors hob-nobbing, read: something that strode out of a Nicole Holofcener movie). As I got to my first destination, Participant Inc., my confusion was affirmed by their utterly fabulous director, Lia Gangitano. "You pay to walk about and get booze." "But, isn't that just an opening?" My question was met with a shrug and cigarette break and I was left to fend for myself with some delicious Michel Auder video work.

Auder's output dates back to the early portapack years of video. Since then, he has used the medium to document his daily life (which is of great interest when you happen to have been married to both Viva and Cindy Sherman). Well, Viva was on high (or just high) in the Participant exhibition "Keeping Busy: An Inaccurate Survey of Michel Auder," occupying more than one of the carefully positioned monitors sculpturally stacked to greet as you walk into the space. The back which typically serves as the screening wall (Lia's been screening amazing and challenging works for years, previously at Thread Waxing Space) is an on-demand space, set up with a catalogue of Auder's plethoric output for perusal - including his recent A Feature, which had a week-long run at Anthology. Some patrons with great taste selected a tape featuring Viva and Taylor Meade cooing over a young Gary Indiana. Indiana, Taylor informs us, came from a very rich family. So rich they started the state of Indiana. But they only give him money if he keeps the right company. Assuredly Viva and Meade would not be the "right" company in the eyes of these fictitious barons, but they kept me in the gallery for some time, listening to the pedantic ululations on offer from Auder's fine videography. (The other noteworthy snippet came as Viva lamented her inability to discern cultural heritage. "I can't even tell if someone's high, let alone Jewish.")

Next up was Envoy Enterprises, which has made quite the name for itself as a gay social space. The whole art craaawwl doubled as a marketing opp for alcoholic sponsors and Envoy's greatest piece was the collection of one-sip Pernod glasses jetisoned at the door to the gallery. I seriously thought the floor was the bar! Sure, Pernod is not for everyone, but this is free booze, here, people. Forgot my phone or else you would TOTALLY have a snap of that. Amazing.

We then stumbled upon DCKT Contemporary which showcased a rather noteworthy exhibition by a friend of D's from SF: Brion Nuda Rosch. I'd seen Rosch's work at the Pulse fair last Spring, and, at his strongest, the work is really something special. Rosch works with cut out retro pages from photography books (D joked he got a residency at Adobe books). Rosch cuts slits and other geometric patterns out of the nostalgic images and allows them to hang by the top of these slits on a nail in the gallery wall. Gravity turns these flat pages into frowns as they relax. There's an elegiac simplicity to the pieces, as they linger like battle flags of a forgotten war, suggesting a cognitive relationship with the banal imagery that is not specific, per se, but completely evocative. Rosch's decision to throw some color into the mix (turquoise walls and thin floor linings that drift farther onto the gallery floor, from time to time) is quite well played, adding a lightness to the graphic base of his work. But perhaps the time was not right to commit to both gallery spaces as works like Monument Struck Cactus and Past Laid out Before Us are somewhat clumsier and less confident the real zingers in the back room. And the sculptural objects are totally unnecessary.

And finally, we drifted into Zurcher gallery to be met by its director, Gwenolee Zurcher, sunnily perched amid the gallery. She smiled on as I walked in, the only one at the time. It felt odd in the arid NYC art climate. "Are you closed?" Zurcher's attitude is refreshing i.e. she's open. We had a nice chat about the rather strong, minimalist work on show by Sarah Rapson, a Dorset artist who works old-school art world references into her sleek, yet earthen sculptural works. There is a lot of seventies going on here, and she includes old art articles about Lee Lozano and other period references like the austere image that is rather unfortunately used to represent the show: an attempt to recapture a photograph by Robert Frank of a suit strolling down Lombard street. In the show, its enshrouded in a structural piece. As a card, it's isolated to the image and becomes another cold art object. And Zurcher is noteworthy for not being that type of gallery. The video in the back room, East Cliff is the most melodramatically concise, a grainy black-and-white film that depicts the artist lugging some Sisyphean suitcase away from the oncoming tide. It's at once hilarious and poignant. Maybe my read is one-note. Zurcher pretended like she didn't hear me when I made a comment about "the baggage" in the video. But, at the end of the night, all I wanted to do was kick back with Gwenolee. So nice, I hope one day we'll brunch.

Friday I went to this new-ish roving party that Sean B of Spank is throwing called Xanadude. It's was fun, alright, but ladies, I'm getting mighty sick of Public Assembly. Let's imaginate more please. Danced to some "Bad Girls" which got me shouting "Toot toot! Beep Beep!" for the rest of the evening which didn't last that long. They have this annoying dance-off with judges who eye you judgementally as you're just trying to let loose. So we went home.

Saturday, well... that you can read about HERE. (Empire Live Blogging!!)

Sunday:Yes.

And last night, I hung out with my filmmaker friend, Adam Keleman, and the lovely Sam Ashby (of Little Joe) again after Adam Baran (with whom I did Saturday's liveblogging) and Ira Sachs' Queer / Art / Film screening series. Last night was Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! presented by Joe Gage. I haven't seen that movie in years, and does it hold up! Funny, though, the girls lost the cartoon edge that I maintained from my youthful viewing and were much more acidic this time around. Fabulous lines abound and I can hardly believe I forgot the scene in which Varla fucks the Vegetable to death with her car. That's truly one of the most sexually overcharged moments of any cinema. Gage, a porn auteur, was right; every single shot of the film is immaculately composed and considered. Really, a treasure. I didn't know this, but just like Samuel Fuller, Meyer was a war photographer (in Korea). Me, I've never seen any of Joe Gage's films (Kansas City Trucking Company) but after an insightful Q&A it made me want to go check some out.

As is the custom after Q/A/F, we convened at Julius', the oldest gay bar in New York, for some (read: too many) lime rickeys. We oggled the new Mattachine party poster which features Rock and Dorris kicking back, which led me to goad Adam K. to see my favorite Doris Day thriller Midnight Lace (1960) for the umpteenth time this week. I'll miss this Mattachine (the party thrown at Julius by PJ Deboy and John Cameron Mitchell - who was there last night and almost wacked me in the head whilst pointing out some photograph he had restored that now lurks on the dark wood walls of Julius, he is quite invested in that bar) which I would be sad about if I wasn't going upstate ALL WEEKEND! Haven't been out of the city in 6 months and it's driving me crazy. But before I go packing my mosquito netting, I'll leave you with a handy little just-learned lesson. No matter how much you drink the night before, down a gallon of water before you go to bed (not too fast, mind you). I should have woken up hating the world, I breezed into that morning meeting with style, class, and charm!

oh, I know you've already seen it, fag, but one more time, cause it's just SO darling

Never Forget

2010-07-23T09:41:00.001-04:00

Now, if only they wouldn't forget about us.

Diamante

2010-07-16T10:09:00.006-04:00

I really need to learn to start getting to things on time. Was hanging out with Sam Ashby who is stateside long enough to pollinate zine stands with his beautiful new fag film mag, Little Joe. Then I ran into Glitter Nation in an attempt to hear Genesis and the Lady Jaye Breyer P. Orridge spin a yarn at the new museum about cut-ups and Brion Gysin. No dice. Sold out. So sad. So instead I ate crab pizza and drank g&t's into this less-than-sweltering (now - thank GOD!) weather.

Mostly I write about movies but I've got this alternate persona that just wants to listen to pop music 24/7. I try to fight it! I try to listen to what the cool kids listen to. I download Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti. My boyfriend likes ceo/The Tough Alliance (which, alright, the latter is still pop). I bought that Fever Ray record. But back I plunge into the abyss of fabricated jouissance. After the cross-over hit of La Roux's 'Bulletproof' and Kylie's clocking in the top 20 here, Marina and the Diamonds have been giving the US a good deal of attention. She's hit the somewhat coveted position of Morning Becomes Eclectic. She's Welsh and she writes all of her music via piano, see. She can get away with doing stripped down versions of her songs better than Little Boots, who dropped in the UK one year prior to Marina (when I was living there), was tipped to become the next big thing, then... didn't. I guess Marina's been doing pretty well. She's been touring like mad both here and abroad. I saw her at Poisson Rouge earlier this year, but in a moment, she'll be at Webster Hall again. Too bad I'll be in Spain then.

But, you know what, it looks better like this:

That video would be directed by the same team who brought little life to Kelis' poor Flesh Tone which just opened with 7,833 album sales count in the states. Sorry Kels. Oh yeah, and Marina's trying to cash in on the whole Gaga thing in the states with her new single, a once-album-track I had on repeat for a long time. I don't really like session writer Greg Kurstin (Little Boots, Kylie, Dagonette, Sophie Ellis-Bextor), but he seemed to work well for this one:

And then, just because it's popped up again ever since she dropped the ball with a "Director's Cut" that surfaces for, like 13 hours on the production site Why Not? (who did Gregg Araki's second two Teen Apocalypse movies). Well... Grace Jones' new video has emerged again. You get to see her in the nude! As if we haven't seen that enough already. Enjoy. Especially those over in Istanbul and London for her performances - particularly you bastards at Loveboxxx. I am Jealous.

I saw the new Todd Solondz film at a screening on Wednesday. At least his other, recent works Storytelling and Palindromes angered me, but Life During Wartime merely bored me. There's a stellar cast (Allison Janney, Shirley Henderson, Paul Reubens, Charlotte Rampling) doing imitations and floundering (although, Rampling's press-on nails do turn in a truly brilliant performance!). Just not really amounting to anything. And then the film just ends. Mostly I've just been getting to sleep too late from watching Skins on Netflix after I get home. I avoided the show when I lived in London, but man, I'm just blown away, episode after episode...

We Are Family?

2010-07-14T09:30:00.012-04:00

Two different pictures, one strident message. I’ve watched, in the past few days, two summer movies that could not be more disparate in origin and form that sadly categorized a contemporary ethos of moral conservativism and family values. I sat dumbfounded but affirmed before Sex and the City 2, after the cloud of bile and hatred had more or less rendered the thing a quivering Carrie-on, beaten like a schoolchild who well deserved it. After a watch, I’d lend a blow too. Stirred in my critical rage, I related to friends repeatedly in the following days the sort of moral aggrandizing that Carrie and co. now parlayed. While most reviews tended to favor economic aspects which ridicule and goad our current impoverished climate, it was the very sex from which the film takes its title from (or perhaps I should say once took, it now seems more burdened by its moniker than defined). The matrimonial arrangements that began working into the show mid-life have changed its attitude to one of chaste judgements and privileged American condescension. When, in this sequel, one of the two gay characters divulges his extra-marital arrangements on the eve of his Connecticut wedding, “I get to cheat” is received with alarming abjection in the eyes of our “girls.” It’s no shock that Charlotte York is appalled. That’s been the long-riding humor of her character: her culpability. But Carrie too, the character who, on first introduction, was keen to have sex like a man, peers out at the flamboyant pederast, hand over mouth, with a jarring disbelief. Then Charlotte names the words that linger on America’s lips, “but this is marriage!”

Then Saturday I was shocked to discover reverberations of this mores in the swimmingly reviewed (and eagerly anticipated on my end) new offering from Lisa Cholodenko, The Kids Are All Right. A fabulously written, superbly acted, subtly executed picture that dissolves into a message of wholesome values, that render the "progressive" image of lesbian parenthood that purports to be the film’s primary subject all-but coincidental. This message is about family. The nuclear family. And all else is, quite literally, shut out in the cold. My shock arrives from these vehicles status as seemingly leftist (perhaps even progressive?) entertainment. A picture about lesbian moms who aren’t losing, beating or molesting their children can still only come from one camp, right? And yet the message hardening these summer affairs seems more at home in right-wing rings. The Are Kids All Right is a disheartening picture because of the finality of its claims. There is no space for alternative familial structures (or lifestyles) despite the whole lesbian mom scheme that would suggest a film about progressive community construction or open minded childrearing. Cause, Annette Benning, with her close cropped hair, money-earning-ness, alcoholic, domineering ways is offered in place of a father figure. Nic, the character, is a lesbian, but the role is the same. Plain and simple. Which leaves Julianne Moore’s Jules to be the free spirit, the housewife who secretly smokes cigarettes and dabbles in whimsical business deals with daddy’s money but ultimately can’t put her finger on anything long enough without fingering it then traipsing away. Both films confine their protagonists to heterosexist conscriptions of monogamy and guilt and structure their infidelities as earth shattering events, moral trespasses that threaten the sturdy and conventional lives they blissfully lead.

There’s a (smart) laugh a minute to be had in the film, until you see where it's headed. As with Cholodenko’s other films, there’s an amiable brew of messy issues and emotions that are - at least – dealt with. Which is more than one can say about most other contemporary films. I’m just so disappointed in where we end up. I was complaining in the previous post about straight white people writing about “alternative communities” but shit, apparently they need to because the “alternative communities” seem to be peddling values so steeped in tradition. It comes as no shock with Sex and the City 2. For so long that show has been about gay men writing for a large constituency of middle-to-upper-class straight white women. Which is to say, they write fantasy. Or, more particularly, the structure is a platform for a kind of masochism where the gay writers, directors, and aesthetes generate a world in which they would prefer to function as something other than themselves, a world which, very frequently, excises, derides or finds punch-lines in gay men such as themselves. Lindy West, in her hilarious and oft-quoted Stranger review describes the film as "essentially a home video of gay men playing with giant Barbie dolls."

But the problem with The Kids Are All Right runs deeper. It scares me more. Cholodenko's film doesn't need the placating formula of commercial consumer fantasy that SATC2 does (though it's kinda there in these expansive modernist and craftsman houses owned by even the slacker contingency). It's an independent film. It premiered at Sundance and will likely make under 10 million dollars in its theatrical run. It's a purpose film, adult cinema - the sort that used to be made in droves but is now reserved for "important" or daring voices. But there's a tremulous pitch to Cholodenko's "daring" tone. "[H]ad it been made in 1970," writes J. Hoberman in the Voice "it might have been an Echo Park Teorema, with everyone winding up in bed together." Instead, distributor Fine Line Features has launched an e-campaign that insists the benefits of bringing your children to The Kids. The cynic in me wants for the exploit of families in this campaign. Child ticket prices added onto the parents', like those pesky 3-D surcharges that exponenitally swell current Blockbuster fare. But what's worse is that, after watching this film, the campaign seems right at home. That you can bring your kids to The Kids so that they see just what lesbians are really like. They'll be assured to see that the Moms can do just as well as Mommie and Daddy. They'll see that they have the exact same longings, the exact some ups and the exact same downs. They'll see that lesbian identity, when layered upon the family unit is eclipsed by the roles there required. They'll likely think, "gee, they're just like us!"

Until that Later Date...

2010-07-10T13:21:00.002-04:00

There's three posts swimming in my head right now. Let this suffice until then. Should have been a performance of 'Get Outta My Way' ('When Dress Takes Over')...

I'm also really loving this song at present. In a summer that's really showing a dearth of good music, this has been on heavy rotation...

And cause I haven't posted this yet. I think, perhaps all future output should resemble this. I think this performance shows some of the most provocative (and productive) uses of popular culture that I've seen in a LONG LONG time. It's terrifying. It really makes me lose sleep. But my god, is it amazing...

Sickly Games

2010-07-08T11:13:00.000-04:00

I'm ill and using that as an excuse to let my mind wander all over the place. It's a good manner of thinking that is only further enabled by this swealtering heat all of New York (and other neighboring regions, I suppose) is being subjected to. I love illness for this reason, sitting in bed with movies playing and countless books piling up in sweat covered sheets. There's an image!

I've watched some rather delicious films lately, in my state of immune system innebriation. In an attempt at using my brain, I hit Sally Banes' Greenwich Village 1963: avant-garde performance and the effervescent body, a book I am truly interested in and have recently picked up from the library. But the chapter at hand was about community and family and there's just something that didn't sit right about (assumedly) straight academics writing about queer sociality and community building. So I tossed the book to the sheets after a dozen or so pages and found true delight in the William Castle / Joan Crawford re-pairing, I Saw What You Did, a tale about 2 bratty 60s girls in pants who prank call the wrong house. John Ireland has killed his wife, see, and is pestered to reenter matrimony with his neighbor, Ms. Crawford. But the real star of the film is the woodlands that surround Libby Mannering's (Andi Garrett) house. Her parents are away and the fog rolls in. It's all rather Night of the Hunter in that delicious, black-and-white studio-production-of-outdoors kind of way. Though, given the 60s teen slant, it's kinda like Gidget's being chased by Robert Mitchum/John Ireland. There's some swell music that punctures the tension with its pop-goofiness, and the closing shot/line is beyond priceless: "The window can be fixed but I don't think we'll be using the phone for a long time!"

I've been musing about writing something on Curtis Harrington for a while, so I watched one of his big-budget studio pictures, Games. It's a sleek little thriller. Jennifer Montgomery (Katherine Ross) is rich and beautiful and so, she should have known something was awry when she went and married poor Paul (James Caan). And you know its double trouble when Simone Signoret faints on your doorstep! She's a medium who likes to play games which leads to some pre-Shyamalmdksdjaglan plot twists. Blood's shed and there's a nod to long-time Harrington producer Roger Corman's Bucket of Blood when a corpse is covered in plaster and exhibited as a sculpture - or is he? Harrinton's movies are intersting because they don't hold up as Hollywood features, per se. He went to film school with Kenneth Anger and made avant-garde films before turning to large productions, and the latter efforts carry through the oneiric quality of his earlier trance films. His films are heavy on atmosphere and alien, dream sensations, but lite on the kind of causality that usually runs a major motion picture. This film works in quite a few plot points that enable Harrington to bring to the mainstream some fo the imagery and Occult content that Anger trafficked in with Inauguration of the Pleasuredome (in which Harrington performs) and Invocation of My Demon Brother.

Then, I tried watching some AWFUL movie with Ashton Kutcher and Michele Pfeiffer about some post-grief-counseling humping, but it was just tepid, so I switched gears. I'm not sure if it was inspired by noticing a chapter on Jarman in the new Dennis Cooper non-fiction collection Smothered In Hugs that I'm mulling over in my state of sickly stupor or if it was just a coincidence that I hit that chapters minutes after finishing the film, but I put on Edward II which I don't think I've watched since I was 16. I'm wary of Jarman. He was an early influence and a kind of transitional figure for my love of avant-garde cinema. You could get him on video and his pictures maintain a feature length format that allows for distribution, but his aesthetic culls from the avant-garde endeavors of Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos. After discovering that avant-garde, I dashed my teen idol for a good half-decade. I think I still very much like the ethos and aesthetic that surrounds Jarman. Cooper had some very insightful things to say - with regards to allowing the moments of pomp and pretense. Edward II is VERY heavy handed, but at a time when being heavy-handed felt necessary, important. It's a delicacy that has not survived in this era of film production, hell, of thought in general. The allegorical elements with the ACTUP-esque group that emerges in Jarman's film felt palpable at the time, I'm sure. Now it kind of feels strained, but I'm not sure whose the worse for it, me or the film.

I just hope I'm better in time for Predators

Good Stuff on Kelis over at Fanzine

2010-07-08T00:50:00.000-04:00

Drift on over to the Fanzine to read my epic re/overview of Kelis' career, including her recent stint as dance dive on the just-released Flesh Tone. The following quote, which I found today on MTV.com (I think?) didn't make its way to me in time to be part of my claim, but I think it speaks to the piece - and to Kelis' particular strength amid the other popstars out there. "I recorded it at home and I recorded it, like, literally laying on my couch. It's just the most comfortable way to possibly record an album with, like, snacks next to me," Kelis laughed. "It was awesome."

And as a nice little personal/geek out anecdote, I walked past her on the street today! All the stars felt well in alignment like in that John Cusack movie...

Love in July

2010-07-02T12:24:00.000-04:00

Strolled the Chelsea openings last night, mostly headed for Christmas in July show at Yvonne Lambert gallery. From the opening window with a whirling xmas tree that trashes is ornaments as they fly across the room, the show did not disappoint. Given the present climate of the artworld, it felt like Christmas was precisely the remedy to the malaise. Few Santas, surprisingly but a lot of trees and lights. Some gestures were forced than others (the red and green Lynda Benglis became a melted tree, or as d questioned "the wicked witch?" Not so much). We popped into Narcissister's neighboring performance in an exhibiition entitled Sirens, mid-go. I'm short and could not make out all that much beyond the wall of homospectators, but the palpable energy and wild gestural grace that we have come to expect from her were well intact. I became aware of her only recently through her fabulous, I'm Every Woman video in which she removes articles of clothing from her birth canal and slinkily slips them on. All to Chaka Kahn, of course. My only available sight last night - Ciss hurling herself against an adolescent bedroom set plastered with teenage male hearthrobs and a pin-up of her own plasticine presence (she wears a plastic mask and tits). She was undulating like a spastic stripper against these fliers, smoothing her fingers over her printed image, then later, over a rubber mask. I can't speak to the nuances of the content, precisely, but her performative agility was remarkable. Other Chelsea treats... not so much. I found myself remarking at one 27th street gallery, "Oh, I forgot... It's July!" Still. There's no excuse.

Hopped over to Envoy Enterprises' Troll group show dedicated to works of art on trolling long enough to hear someone ask if "that's a Francis Bacon?" Then I had some dumplings.

Headed over to Sunshine cinema for the new Tilda Swinton movie, which didn't get very good reviews but looked sumptuous and was described as a remake of Pasolini's Teorema of sorts. This ponderous movie didn't so much irk me as leave me wanting. First-time feature filmmaker Luca Guadagnio knows how to close in on sumptuous objects like food, couture and jewels(or Tilda and her male costars), but he doesn't possess the grace for this glorious meditation on objecthood to amount to much. The film has some rather obtuse ideas about philosophy best summed up in a sequence that Fred Halstead did 10 times better in his LA Plays Itself (1972). Tilda and her truly beautiful beau make love in the wilderness. See, she's tethered to this family rooted in commerce (they're benevolent fabric factory owner) and he's a chef who brings out the essential flavors of earthy foods like eggplant. So when they fuck, Guadagnio's camera looms close on Tilda's imperfect form and white flesh, contrasted with images of the delicate creatures of nature, beetles, bugs and lovely things frolicking amongst the sunkist soil. Brooks run and grass sways. And then we cut to a business deal done over the London skyline. It's a cut so abrupt (though welcome from the plodding editing of the love scene) and obvious in its message that you lose interest in much of the auteur potential of the film, since all of the issues are handled with this clumsy literalness.

The bulbous ending has something of affect to it, but it SO wins this year's A Single Man award for attempting to employ OTT music to do the work for you. Swinton scampers up to the house, not unlike Laura Betti in Teorema, and there's some interesting energy exhibited in the film's closing, but the divide between these rose-tinted figures of emancipation (who clutch palms to their love-filled bellies as a solidarity pact) and the stoic Italian family is an argument placed in such obvious terms that it nullifies any of the pseudo-lofty ideas about love that Guadagnio might have. It made me yearn for the Carringtons, who, contrasted with this flic, did keep it all in the family - Blake and Crystal were at once both these things. Leaving Tilda to vanish into a gold-hued carpet as if a glint of love, herself, rematerializing, yes, literally, in the cave of love with her amore. Love love love...

New Min

2010-06-25T09:28:00.000-04:00

I tried to go to openings last night but it was rather hot and quite crowded. Easily thwarted, I decided to partake in that recent Twilight movie, New Moon. This attempt at immersion in a viable phenomenon was (pleasantly) interrupted midway, by a phone call from Bruce Benderson. We gabbed about hustlers and movies then I got back to Bella and that man with the chest. The Twilight movies do a very good job at world creation, I must say. Watching them, one embodies this alienated and disenfranchised ethos that is the heart of teen adolescence. For the cashcow that it is, it's really cheap looking. Those wolves are SO cg! I've got to think that it lends to the world creation in some way, as if the digital sheen that washes the film creates a membrane on the filmworld or something, that colors everything in that Pacific Northwestern town a hue more mysterious than ours. Actually, emergence of the wolves (at the Hour 1 marker!) was as far as I made it. Interrupted again by a text from d, I opted to go to Mattachine, PJ Deboy and John Cameron Mitchell's party at the wonderful bar, Julius. As I dressed for the outing I put on 'All the Lovers (Fear of Tigers Remix)' - perfection - and disocvered that the entirety of Kylie's new opus Aphrodite had lept out from its clamshell, onto the interweb.

'Get Outta My Way' made my soundtrack as I weaved the streets to the party. I 'Put [My] Hands Up' as I crossed 14th. Since there wasn't enough time to listen in full on my walk to the bar, I was understandably preoccupied; I excused myself to Adam from Butt by explaining that I had written a book about her, afterall. So, after a dance to Divine's 'Walk Like a Man' record, d and I raced home and engaged in a listening party, eating taco truck tacos in bed and writhing with euphoria (Okay, perhaps I was the only participant in the latter activity). d irked me a tad when he questioned Aphrodite's albumness. Calling it "12 stabs at a hit." While there's some very good stuff on there, when I woke up this morning, I lamented that there wasn't anything that felt like X's shining moment (for me, Kevin Killian disagrees, finding no charm in) 'The One': contender for lead single but released in a half-assed 4th position. I love 'The One' with its surging Italo beats. There's nothing quite as heavy on this album (strikingly minimal is perhaps a better way as describing it, since I think few would go so far as to call a moment on any Kylie album but Impossible Princess heavy).

Pop albums of this sort expand as they soundtrack your personal moments, collecting them like flystrips. And then you're hooked. Aphrodite is open enough for this. It's VERY consistant, perhaps too. (There's a perfect irony in my exposure to both Min's new opus and New Moon in the same evening, as these pop products are colored with a kind of austere gloss that crystalizes them.) After a couple run throughs already, I'm feeling 'Illusion' which sounds very much like a Fever album track (and I could bestow no greater compliment than this). d made me turn off the album, for its Hi NRG sound well into its second rotation (during the aptly named surger, 'Too Much'). Time for bed. It remains to be determined how well this album will hold up. Hype is such a beast to see through. But, just like the Richard X tune that closes the album, at present, I 'Cant' Beat the Feeling.'

Failuretics

2010-06-24T09:35:00.000-04:00

I failed in both attempts at culture last night. A boy's got to get to events early here. Which is tricky when said event starts at 6pm! Missed: The Autobiography and Sex Life of Andy Warhol with panel by Brigid Berlin, Gerrard Malanga, Taylor Meade, Bibbi Hansen, and friends. Full capacity house. Actually the NYPL people graciously opened the doors for the hangers-on, but my other attendee was not game to peer through said frame (god knows I would have been - peering through an ajar door, what better way to attend to old sex gossip?). Alas, I suppose I'll have to read the book (it was a launch afterall). But no problem, cause I also wanted to see Brett Easton Ellis read from his new nihilism-fest in Brooklyn (I skipped the Manhattan Barnes and Noble reading because B&Ns make me wanna throw up). Hopped the train which got stuck in the tunnel. After passing some SERIOUSLY Bret Easton Ellis boys on a street bench outside the bookstore (foppish, immaculately coiffed, despondent, gorgeous), I discovered a gaggle of people so tightly packed into a small indie bookstore that there was no point in staying there. I was sure not to see anything and the whole space seemed ill-equipped with regards to PA systems. Missed: Brett Easton Ellis reading Less from Zero 2 (fine... Imperial Bedrooms).

Gained:

On Being Made High

2010-06-23T13:59:00.000-04:00

The new Kelis vid dropped last week and it's a swell one. It's a tad cheesy but in a really game and inclusive way. The rave lights move towards the end trigger surpressed and frightful highschool memories that would best be left untouched. Leave it to Kelis. I'll be publishing a lengthy Kelis over/review soon at The Fanzine, but what better way to tide you over than the thing, itself?

"...The highlight of the album is its new single, '4th of July (Fireworks)' which comes on like a mid-90s dance song in its use of repetition. It's surprising at first, but with precious few words [60] and a 6-minute length, this one really takes you in for a spin, if you let it. It's a ballsy move, being this formally futurist-retro as to quote from a format that defined a rather recent counter-cultre. But it pays off..."

Pause for the Jet

2010-06-22T11:25:00.000-04:00

I'm thinking about Kate Bush, lately. Contributing to a new piece that D was working on in a casual way - maybe it was laziness or disinterest, but don't many of the more interesting endeavors start off so flippantly? He's working on these new xerox pieces and this one was a whorl. Big and black, an amorphous cloud in the center of a frame. A text block was reserved for the as-of-yet determined text. I had put on the record for 'Hounds of Love' and it sat adjacent to D's work station. He asked me to dream up some copy for the box, and I sat blankly, attempting to come up with some "deracinated" language that refers back to its meaning construction - lends to the whorl in a way that creates tension in our understanding of this, that, and the Other. My eyes wandered from the screen and there she was with her hounds, peering out from her purple pool. I typed in "hounds of love" and he liked it.

I'm interested in Kate Bush. I'm interested because I know very little about her. In an effort to vary my endless project of fanatacism towards popular forms, I'm interested in Kate because there are those who have encyclopedic knowledge of her, she's one of these "hugely influentual" people that folks go gaga over and she's got a huge following. But I know precious little. What is Kate and why does she inspire this interest? I'm wanting to instigate a project around this disparity of knowledge, in lieu of my usual immersion. Traipse Kate, and the power that her conotations hold over others. Mention 'Hounds of Love' and you've got a terrific amount of baggage for some. It's a tidy tactic for harnessing feelings, cues that trigger responses. But this time, I'm keen on not having access to all of those tools. I'm interested in the economy.

(Kevin Killian's favorite Kate-inspired performance)

I don't even know the product of this project at present: this serves as initial notes and jottings. There's an interest in Kate because she's artful. She's Yoko Ono-y but arguably more successful (in her musical capacity, anyway). And then there's the matter of national pride. I think my interest in Kate arrives from how I feel the need for all of this contextualization in order to make sense of her career and output. The first time I saw the 'Wuthering Heights' video, someone put it on my Myspace wall and I though it was another clip from Stairway to Stardom, this Canadian public broadcast series that was popping up on youtube at the time, which I traced religiously. That this wild performance (which, I will admit, I found embarrassing without said context) would have ensnared a nation in 1974 is something that confounds me to this day. It's that narrative, that sell, perhaps that intersts me. There's this construction and understanding of the popular sound and song of the time. It seems like a really laborious thing to create now, a space that I have to fantasize harder at than someone like Bowie or The Supremes. Perhaps this challenge is what many find interesting in her work. (that German girl who won Eurovision pops up in my head in a really superficial way and I entertain a thesis about Europe and artfulness, challenge... But if there's anything I learned in Grad school, it's that the mention of a similarity between the UK and Europe results in a slap in the face).

Let the project commence. No easy answers so far... Be prepared.

Boom!

2010-06-14T14:46:00.000-04:00

Before I pieced together the various seedling articles that would become my book Fever Pitch, I had this “really good idea.” I wanted to pull together a collection of writings called Bad. ‘Bad’ would have collected my writings on films that most deem… well, bad. I don’t have the documents in front of me now, nor did I finish the article that would have capped off the collection (a treatise of a film that has somewhat slipped from my favor of not bad, but good: Cat People). I love “bad” films. But my fear now was that these essays would have partaken in the worst thing about bad movies: people like me who hold up these offerings as fetish objects of failure. There’s a ridicule in branding something “Camp”, which is the gesture I most loathe at rental shops. Basically, when they say camp, they really mean fail. Camp is very many things, indeed and, in part, something that does fail. But there’s something to believing in “bad” that I find much more freeing than giggling at something that falls down in front of you.

Last night I watched Boom! with my boyfriend. Boom!, for what we mean when we say it, is bad. Overly long, long winded and terrifically miscast, Boom! is a bit of a chore to sit through. Bless my boyfriend’s heart (mostly for having to live with my cinematic obsessions), but he gets bored in some of the older movies that I subject him to on a too regular basis. Not that 1968 is old compared to a Sternberg silent, but the leisure hours for which he allots “movie time” do not allow for much arduous viewing – and he makes terrifically oblique art! The true greatness of bad cinema is its offer of a counter-narrative or counter-format. Cause really, when we say “bad” we mean, something that “doesn’t align to the registers by which we define good taste.” Of course, this is problematic, too. In differing hands, Douglas Sirk is comedy to my tears. Jack Smith famously looked to Maria Montez and saw self-confidence and world-creation, where most saw bad acting and a bountiful girdle. I appreciate most films which create enough of a cinematic space (film scholars call this the diegesis) in which the traditionally “bad” elements can hold up. If there’s a sense to the nonsense, not only am I there, but I really appreciate the ride. Sometimes I get bored if the project is just “bad” as in it fails to do this, generate a new order (or chaos) but there are plenty of skilled craftsmen that forge projects too wild, too hair-brained, too contranormative to fit in the proper pecking order of things.

I got annoyed when D got bored with Boom! I was having fun. Some of that fun lies in an excitable viewer jouissance found in the excessive sets and lifestyle lavishes (monkeys, headdresses, 1968 intercom systems). These can be thrilling and add to the overall continuity of the piece, but it’s annoying to me when people forge “camp” readings solely on this kind of titillation. And so frequently, this betrays a nauseating impulse to maintain traditional ideologies (as with people who applaud a "bad" film for its abject failures). When a movie grows long and begins to feel drawn out, I hope it’s doing this for a reason, like replicating a blanched /drunk / near-death experience. It’s long and disastrous, but then, in the case of Boom!, so is the content. It’s about excess and indulgence and the lasting effects of this sort of existence, so why not let it fester and flow between scenes of tepid (and frequently pithy) dialogue. “Boom.” I give myself over to the turgid moments in the hopes that they convey something to me; my boredom is not coincidental, is, in fact, a kind of pathetic viewer feeling arrived at to correspond with the scene.

Sometimes it’s not that. But Boom! felt like a success in that way. To me.

ATL

2010-05-17T11:32:00.000-04:00

I love it, quite a
mature sound! Its got No 1.
written all over it.
I just love it!!!!
It sounds incredibly beautiful!!!!!!
Love it. Best Kylie song
for years and nice
for Kylie just to be herself
I adore it!
I am so happy and
can't wait to
discover the video, then the album.
Kylie is back!
LOVE IT!! I am so glad
I held off listening
to the LQ clips going around.
It helped build the excitement.
Was worried it wouldn't live
up to the hype.
But even after first listen the chorus is in your head.
yeah, chorus def keeps going
round and round
your head afterwards
It's amazing how I didn't
like the original loop that was put
on .com
as the announcement and now it's the BEST part of the whole song!!
Playing it on repeat
it get's better with each play!!
Definitely a grower!!
Love it, too.
It's like Ultimate
all in one song!
Classic Kylie, classic POP!
Big thumbs up from me
Great track!
Totally adore it!!
Such an amazing song!
THe chorus is absolutely
STUCK in my head atm!
It's one of those songs,
that the words are easy to memorise,
so not only can you hum it,
but you can sing it,
str8 after first listen!
CATCHY! AND DEFS WORTHY OF A NO. 1
Love it!

its great but
it won't braek any of CGYOOMH records
i think
I just adore it.Beautiful and a real anthem.
Can you imagine in a club or party
when the orgasmic 2 minute point kicks in?
Can anyone confirm when we can actually download it?
I really, really like it.
BUT...
I'm not an insane fan of the synthetic sound
we got in the teaser which is the build up.
When you listen really loud at the song
it becomes noisy and actually annoying
(maybe I'm just old).
Everything else is just wonderful.
I love the lyrics, the feeling, the vocals
(could be stronger even)
and the general tone of the song
Freaking love it...
I wanted another IBIY and
I got it...
exactly! thank god
i didn't listen to that lq version!
Can't wait for the album
now,
its gonna be a ripper!
Let's call a spade a spade.
It's fucking brilliant.
When can we actually download it?
I shall wait until it's official.
+1
such an emotional
pure kylie pop anthem !
Absolutely wonderful- a beautiful
(and more mature sounding)
love song set to a great dance track.
It's as good as the hype suggested,
possibly the best of her Parlo years!!

Today, Kylie has made us all very proud
ATL lovers will be No1
if we all stick togever
and buy it :-)
mmm Don't know,
I prefer ATL than CGYOOMH.
This song can be her new anthem i'm sure
Wish I had held off
from listening to the LQ as
that gave me goosebumps.
So it lessened the impact
of the first play
but I LOVE IT even more.
Ripped onto itunes already
but will
of course
download on the 13th June too
OMG
it is absolute magic,
there is no other
way to describe it!
The anticipation now
for aphrodite
will kill me!
Cannot get over it!
It's just SOOOO good!
Not just saying that 'cause it's Kylie
because there's loads of her stuff
I don't like
but this?
Is BRILLIANT.
I love every part of it,
the whispers,
the part from the original announcement,
the chorus,
the vocals,
the lyrics,
the end,
EVERYTHING!
Cannot wait for some amazing remixes,
and the sure to be gorgeous video!
Practically bursting with excitement,
still!
Just having the song has not made me content,
definitely made me want the album MORE!
Just amazing.
It's fresh,
it's hypnotic,it's beautiful vocally.
The middle 8 is perfect and then
it literally is an eargasm as it explodes.
I actually LOVE it.
Roll on the rumoured* Stuart Price preview mix of the album tomorrow.
* as in I just read it somewhere!
Fabulous,
already ripped onto itunes.
I can't wait to the 13th June.
But I will download it then
officially
and buy the single
(as I ALWAYS have).
Loving it.... !
Loving it.... !
Its fantastic!!
It really is emotinal pop
as Kylie says,
it kind of grabs you
in the way IBIY did and
"With every heartbeat" from Robyn
Love it.
hope its Kylies FORTH decade
with a number one
I think it's a very,
very pleasant song.
However,
it's let down by the lack
of a proper middle eight
and I can't help but shake the feeling
that it's just
missing...something.
It's also far too similar to
"I Believe In You", yet not as striking.
Popjustice, Jake Shears, Dannii et al
can blather on all they want about how
"amazing"
and "earth shatteringly brilliant" it is,
but at the end of the day,
it simply *isn't*.
It's just a good Kylie song.
Far from her worst, but crucially,
far from her best also.
I hope I'm proved wrong,
but I genuinely don't think this is going to be
the "smash hit" they think it'll be.
It's far too understated and polite.
It's a pefectly lovely album track,
or 4th single even,
but a big comeback single?
Yikes.
7 out of 10
What can i say?
It's already a Kylie classic <3.
I think i actually experienced
an involuntary orgasm while listening to it .
Can't stop playing on YouTube!!!
Love it!!!
IBIY 2??
Loves it!!!
I like it but wasn't blown away.
It's been ridiculously hyped
on here.
It couldn't live up to it.
I think it will be a grower
but massive number one???
I'm not sure
Truely amazing,
better than expected, the best part
is the spoken part that leads into that great instrumental
It's wonderful...
you know within the first 5 seconds
that it's going to build into the room-shaking anthem
that it is.
A perfect return to form...
and her voice is sounding great.
Number 1 for sure.
Agreed.
I am so sick of sites like Popjustice
hyping songs up
to a completely unreal extent.
Then you hear the song and just think
"Oh...is that it?".
They've got to try and reign in their hyperbole
a bit
and keep it only for songs
that truly deserve it.
One of the best things about it.
Is that you can't tell it's a Stuart Price production.
Hopefully the rest of the album
is as good.
Can't wait to hear
the WAWA mix.
It's amazing, isn't it,
think I've played about
10 times already...
Still, can't get into the chorus,
but the verses are catchy as hell,
and that middle 8 breakdown
with the build up after it.
It will be a big radio hit in the UK and Europe,
I can feel it.
Whether it will be a hit on the charts
is another question all together,
it's all up to the video now.
Remember that in Kylie's case
videos have always been
50% percent
responsible for the actual success of the track.
BRILLIANT!!!!!!!!!
INSTANT LOVE!!!
This has got to be one
of the most euphoric days
in Kylie Fan Kingdom!!!
LOL!!!!
It's quite good.
The vocals are excellent.
The lyrics reasonably substantial.
The production is great
except for that irritating "I Believe In You" type
of recurring synth-y melody which
REALLY spoils the track for me.
Again it's got that kind of
fluffiness about like I Believe In You
(one of Kylie's worst singles IMO)
Certainly nothing outstanding,
unless it hopefully grows on me.
I pretty much agree with you
completely,
that sound IS annoying
Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv it!!!!
Aren't you glad we
didn't ruin it with
LQ clips beforehand?
I almost caved a few times,
but so glad I waited
Its amazing
i love it reminds me
of made of glass
Couldn't agree more.
The hype amongst certain people
has been so OTT.
SO GLAD!
So very very glad
lol.
I nearly caved...
ridiculously,
it was this morning!
But I made myself busy
and stuck it out.
SO WORTH IT!!!
Well done to you too!
And Kerrie and
all the others that waited

*Pats on back*
Meh!
But I will reserve further judgment
until I see the video!
I thought CGYOOMH was crap
until I saw the video and then
I absolutely loved it!
But instant reaction = Boring,
must try harder.
Thought it was meant to be
Classic Kylie????
At least 2 Hearts had
a bit more bite!
It's totally and utterly divine...
As Louis Walsh on the X Factor might say,
a MILLION per cent yes. :-)
Love it!
Its good on first listen
and utterly great on the 20th listen.
Its lush and smooth
and groovy and mature pop..
love the textures.
Cant wait for the awesome video!
Love it --
it's very euphoric and
I love the sentiment behind it.
Her voice sounds great
not being so high
(a la Wow)
too
love it~
even my mom love it~
no1 written all over it~
congrat to kylie
m loving it.
Its a grower.....
well after 5 listens anyway.
It will be nice to listen
to drunk in a gay bar.
Love it!
It's so catchy,
it gets stuck in your head
even after the first listen.
My favourite part is when
everything's stripped away
and it's just her voice
and a piano... gorgeous!
now I can say it was very emotive
to listen to the premiere.
Love the track is 100% Kylie.
I'll admit that I was exactly
the same as you Kane.
I hadn't listened and was
a tiny bit worried
that it wouldn't live up to the hype but I
I find it to be sooooooo infectious
and grows with each listen.
The remixes are going to be awesome!
Not bad but
not fantastic either.
It just doesn't soar for me
as I think it should
Great. Love it.
What's the WAWA Mix?
The LQ didn't ruin anything
for me,
I'm still really stoked about the HQ.
Disappointed
they talked so much over it,
but I understand why,
lol.
It's like they've taken
the U/K era and extended it.
A great leading single!
Hopefully the video will work its magic and make the song
the huge #1
you all say it is.
Love it,
can't stop playing it!!!
Fab single from our girl!
I don't know if it's the best song from the album,
but IMO
it's great as a lead single.
Again I totally agree with you
WONDERFUL ..
but the song needed 2 chosus before the end ..
to keep the momentum...
It's one of the official remixes of the song.
Apparantly it's being premiered
at G-A-Y tomorrow night.
Just plain brilliant.
I love that they have stayed true
to what Kylie does best.
They haven't followed
any trends or borrowed
from what's hot right now...
it's unmistakeably Kylie.
I couldn't imagine anyone else
singing it.
And.....that part straight after the bridge...
is freakin' euphoric pop at it's best.
perfection

use and abuse of then part
wen theres almostno sound
and then the music bacK again
with that infectuous synth
I LOVVVVVVVVVVVEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE IT!
But they put it out there
on Parlo's YouTube site to enjoy.
I can't stop playing this song,
so much comes out
each time i hear it, up to 20 ?
times now.
And an image is building in my mind
of the video
thanks to the stills we have seen.
I bet In_the_Mood_for_Love
can say what a killer video it will be.
Don't underestimate Kylie's natural charm.
PS its jsut a song
that makes you want to have
an experience with someone
and share something
with a crowd of people!
SUNNY SUNNY DAYS PEOPLE!
First of all,
Tommy, my compliments
for the strikingly beautiful image
of my beloved Gillian Anderson.
I think she is a goddess
and soooo beautiful!
Talking about another goddess,
I am happy we finally
managed to hear
Kylie's new single!!!
The wait is over!!!
I am a bit disappointed,
in the sense that All The Lovers
sounds like I Believe In You's little sister...
A bit like Dannii is to Kylie...
In part it's a good thing,
of course,
since I LOOOOOVE I Believe in You.
Don't get me wrong,
ATL is a great song.
I love the lyrics
(really poignant for a change!)
and the tones in Kylie's voice,
at last she doesn't try too hard
or use her horrible nasal or breathy vocals!
WELL DELIVERED KYLIE!
I'm sure I'll grow
to absolutely adore the song,
but it simply doesn't live to
the fucking incredible hype
it received.
It is a very good Kylie song,
back to Light Years gloriousness!
But it's more of the same
and not at all innovative.
The main problem I have
is that it is almost a ballad.
Let's not kid ourselves here,
it is a mid-tempo number
and it's not a hard-core dance song.
I'm sure the remixes will be excellent
and will deliver a much stronger
dancey version of the song, but
at the moment it is not very current.
My favourite Kylie single still remains Confide In Me.
But that was a ballad with a punch:
she really delivered an incredible and
(at the time
absolutely unexpected performance!
All The Lovers is just another
I Believe In You without
the very high and impressive notes.
And unless they speed it up
and add a HUGE bassline,
you can't really dance to it...
So all in all, it's a mixed reaction,
even though I DO like the song a lot.
And it will be massive!
Because it's Kylie.
Strangely enough,
I find so many similarities
with Sophie's Bittersweet:
the same
old-school 80s
melancholic feeling,
same flatness and lack of punch,
same low-register chorus
(no very high notes).
It's funny how most of you slated that song,
when it shares so much with Kylie's new effort!!!
I love it,
but I don't like how it's edited.
I hope this is just the Radio Edit.
FANTASTIC.

end of.

(All text taken from the Say Hey Messageboard, and edited minorly for flow not grammar.)<

Being Hated So Much Right Now

2010-05-04T11:30:00.000-04:00

I need to stop eating red meat before bedtime. I had a dream about Kelis last night. She was pumping gas - or was I? I think she was riding in a tour bus or camper van. It was a dark tan color. I had a similar moment as one which I shared on the phone recently with avant-garde filmmaker Luther Price. I started talking about his film on which I'm basing a project (Luther, who has never done any kind of home distribution and doubtfully ever will) and he asked me how I'd seen it. I had to leave this long pause (it was a bootleg). Stuttering, I told him that I had acquired it from someone who collected video art (leaving out names) and he listed on a hand the people who could have "leaked" it. The experience was vaguaely mortifying, especially since it was one point of discussion that had never crossed my mind. And based on a deeply personal event for Price that was now in an endless stream of illicit reproduction online.

Last night I was critiquing Kelis' new album 'Flesh Tone' based on the 5 leaked tracks so far. I wasn't sure about Flesh Tone cause I'm not convinced from what I've heard thus far (a problem since the 5 surfaced tracks leave only 3 cuts unheard). I was spinning this criticism TO KELIS. And there was this similar horror. How would I know if I hadn't engaged in such non-egalitarian behavior? She shot me daggers with a look that made me blush. This truly skin-crawling dread resurfaced when I remembered the dream the next morning.

(I'm covering that album for Fanzine later in July so I want to excise/articulate some of this anticipation before I sit down to narrativize my decade-long lovefest with Kelis. Call this a free-form sketch. I'm also thinking of the form that Dodie presented at the Ugly Duckling Press / Kitchen event last night. She read from Barf Manifesto and her seemingly-effortless barfing is so inspiring, though so difficult to pull off adeptly.)

My oneiric Kelis is looking at me with how-dare-you eyes. And it's a desert gas station. Retrospecutively, I'm wondering if the deserted location has any significance on the anxiety the moment is producing in me. Why this Hills Have Eyes setting for this, my fanatic confrontation? My verbal fuck-up.

Deric was asking me recently who wrote about smooth space and I remembered it was Deleuze and Guattari, but not from reading them (for a film study post-grad, I've read criminally little Deleuze), from Laura U Marks, a writer who always seems better in theory, then I go to her and can't quite find much productive to use outside of the context she creates for her arguements. This one's called 'Touch: Sensuous Theory', or some such thing. So, of course she goes on about smooth. She's looking at textiles and grainy video art and Deleuze's smootheness and spinning into a new theory of "haptics". It's like phenomenology without the sticky idealisms of early 20th century philosphy. She became famous (in film studies circles) with her book 'The Skin of Film' (a line Luther just spoke to me over the phone to much great excite).

The desert stretches out around Kelis and she just leers at me. There's just this photo-shoot paper like monochromatic landscap stretching out but going nowhere. I got into a fight with Deric about the meaning of this space. See, for D&G smooth space exists in oposition to striated space which is, in laymens' terms, formless or freed conception of space (or concepts) and organized, grid-like spaces (which connotes progress, science, culture). Think desert versus city. Popular music, my D argued, cannot be smooth because it's rooted in capitalism (an organizational principal best suited for the striated). But, in my seemingly lifelong effort to argue for the liberatory elements lurking in (the monetarily nefarious popular) pop music, I feel that the groundless, welling and invasive euphoria that good pop music builds at its core and the clandestine counter culture of fanatacism that this engenders frees up some of the stickier implications to marketing tactics and moneyed interests. Smooth space is the space of nomads, and I can think of no more nomadic of a space than the fan chatroom. Perhaps this desert of my dreams reflects the space I've forged for Kelis in my heart, a sensuous relation to these songs that drift in leak form, song by song. Smooth space is too-close, which any fanatic is, of course. I'm never embarrassed by this subjectivity. It's always a project.

There's not really a narrative to the Kelis dream. It was a moment - a moment of ardor, anxiety and panic, which is to say, a fleshed-out moment, one in which I'd created a causality around Kelis. Rationally dreaming about this kind of exchange? This is the comedy behind fanatacism. Perhaps in my dream I sensed that the likelihood of such a confrontation is so slim and moot; the gravity seems so hyperbolic, too. Still, you wouldn't want Kelis mad at you. It was a weird distillation and fever dream. Too much red meat and swedish fish. I want all of this to make sense. I want it to add up to a larger narrative or significant moment. I want to force this language to impart meaning on the moment and make it as significant as that feeling which emerged when I was reminded of it today in one silly wave of gravity. I love popular culture because it creates these huge public excitements across platforms. It feels communal. I've participated in a Kelis concert (as in, gone). I've been slowly downloading this album for 6 months now and the album only has 8 songs. Remixes, videos, wallpaper, scandals, speculation, announcements, waiting. It makes futility a form of productive and rewarding projection.

Kelis made me wait for 3 hours when I saw her last month. Kelis is not Grace Jones. I did not take to this lightly. Now I'm waiting again, inventing instances of hype, self-implicating confrontations between a mirage and this self that she's made of me. She's in there too. 'Saving All My Love' just played on my coworker's radio station. She turns it up and we have a moment. I harbor its big feelings, this pathetic tendency of good pop that probably inspired my fever dream in the first place. But it's prone to taste, too. Cause Beyonce comes on next and ruins my moment. As always.

Docu Drama

2010-04-29T11:15:00.000-04:00

Watched Fabulous! The Story of Queer Cinema last night. I suppose I can't be too surprised. I've been on a documentary kick lately (which is atypical) and I can't help but furrow my brow at the sloppy handle of recent narratologies. Linnearity is a hard thing to discern when you're painting broad strokes of a subject that spans years - much like the film last night which runs from Fireworks (1947) to Tarnation (2006)[a gamut that actually showcases little cinematic progression if you get to the heart of these titles' tactic of performativity] or my other recent watch, the leaden Chris and Don: A Love Story. Decades slip by without any narratorial address or reference (Fabulous all but bypasses the 50s) or leap back and forth 2004, then 1998, off to 2006, but don't forget 1999.

I don't watch documentaries because of their artlessness. Ever since television began dictating the format of factual entertainment, I've frequently regarded most documentaries as either an A&E special that I have to pay to see or a visual equivalent to an audio book - a historical account cut down to the nuts and bolts.

Perhaps this is what most offends me about these cinematic accounts. Watching Fabulous!, a film about a movement in which I hold great stake both experiential and academic, the elision of so many important details occasioned many a wince. The film engages in a tidy narrativising of events like the censorship case around Flaming Creatures bypassing a mention of Jack Smith or the film's actual content (Fabulous! seems to take at surface value the nudity that the Supreme Court found so objectionable). Smith is a seminal figure in this movement toward Queer self-representation and performativity. They naturally transition from Smith (or, rather, the seemingly autonomous Flaming Creatures) to Warhol, and, as usual, Warhol gets all the credit. There's no Boys in the Sand, no Rosa Von Praunheim, no Bruce LaBruce, even. Marcus Hu has to bring up Barbara Hammer, but even that feels tacked on (at the film's end they flash a poster for Nitrate Kisses when discussing contemporary documentary output!).

These elisions of political content are further problematized by the elision of recent, straight-to-dvd or on-demand gay narrative features. Eating Out is not mentioned and, sad as it is, films like Eating Out and Latter Days are hugely influential films to the development (deterioration may be a better word) of contemporary gay cinema. Fabulous! ultimately feels like naive fantasy. Or it feels like a filler piece, a social vanity project to warm up to the politics of the gay festival circuit that has crushed the life out of gay themed film by taking it to market, selling personal narratives out to appeal to product sponsors like Absolut. Just glance at successful contemporary gay products. Only Rupaul's Drag Race springs readily to my mind. There, week after week, sponsors are fatuously plugged and absolute elixirs are consumed in the interior illusions lounge.

Mention Eating Out. It's an embarrassment, but its a necessary point if this object is meant as a tutorial, or - better yet - a call to affect change. B. Ruby Rich cheers on the new school of queer youths going through Filmmaking programs with a hopeful eye towards the future. But perhaps the narrowed eyes of the Outfest representative, who chimes in about the normative rom-coms that swelled after the ponderous pictured offered through the New Queer Cinema in the late 90s. He sites Don Roos as the promising future of queer cinema. If that's the case, or if this movie has any indication of the way we engage with or learn from our collective past, we're all in trouble.

MEAT Screening and Installation May 7

2010-04-28T18:33:00.000-04:00

MEAT an installation by Luther Price

Opening Reception Friday May 7, 8:00 – 10:00pm

Louis V E.S.P.

140 Jackson St, #4D Brooklyn, NY 11211

Louis V E.S.P. is excited to announce the installation of MEAT and a screening of the 60‐minute film at 9pm, on May 7th. Meat (1990, 1991) is comprised of film, performance documentation, slide projections and sculptural ephemera in which Boston‐based filmmaker, Luther Price restages a surgical nightmare he endured in the 1986 political uprising in Nicaragua. Shot at close range, his scarred body is a product of that singular traumatic event, repetitive medical routines, and a total revision of self‐consciousness. The single‐channel film is comprised of found surgical footage, gay pornography, performance documents and collage interventions. Luther Price’s work hosts a psychology all its own, a state that the viewer enters into, totally affected by this heart (and gut) wrenching body horror. The project followed Price’s most renowned work, SODOM (1989), an assemblage film that addressed AIDS by juxtaposing gay pornography and biblical catastrophes.

"MEAT is viscerally consuming in its sterile, antiseptic and static giving over of the flesh. Poked, prodded, pinched and disgraced, the humiliated body is sacrificed and the metamorphosis begins ... the fly becomes the shit ... the maggot becomes the bone ... the bone becomes the food ... the food becomes shit and the body becomes the wound ... the institution becomes teeth ... throat and stomach." Luther Price via Canyon Cinema

The installation, organized by Bradford Nordeen, will be accompanied by a complimentary publication of images, illustrations, an essay, and artist writings.

Homecoming Queen

2010-03-03T16:45:00.000-05:00

William E. Jones is proving to be one of Queer cinema’s most stalwart voices. But we've known that for some time, haven't we? In a period where gay narrative cinema has drifted to the on‐demand circuit and left lonely mainstream voices like Tom Ford to peddle conservative gay ideologies, an older student film like Jones' recently screened Massillon can sound a chord, reminding one of the potential for cinema to be (progressively) political. Perhaps, as Jones suggested when speaking at Anthology Film Archives last Friday, Massillon is a film trapped in its time (the film analyzes the 1986 upholding of an anti‐sodomy law overturned in 2003). But perhaps not.

Jones has recently fashioned a name for himself by appropriating archival gay pornography. In these films, the materials exhibit a sociological function; old porn scenes plumb the dearth of historical gay (self)representation, while more contemporary productions smuggle cultural trends in the most mundane details (most prolifically in The Fall of Communism as Seen Through Gay Pornography). Massillon emerges from an earlier, documentarian period in Jones' practice. To this day, I get goosebumps when I think of his follow‐up, Finished (1997), an unnerving and utterly flawless examination of fetishism and obsession. It served as an apt introduction to Jones' oeuvre. Massillon, very much a student film in its fascinating mixture of earnestness and breeziness, was made while Jones attended California Institute of the Arts. The prints of film professors James Benning, but more significantly, perhaps, Thomas Anderson are strongly pressed into this sumptuous work.

The film divides its first two parts, like those subjects of this statute’s persecution, into private and legal sectors, cleverly cordoning the personal from the political. The private segment, which recounts Jones’ childhood in Massillon, OH, tells of his burgeoning homosexual experiences ‐ from first inklings to a Genet‐worthy description of anonymous sex in a pit‐stop outhouse. The monotone vocal delivery, performed by the filmmaker himself, is less revealing as a performance of clinical psychodrama, than as a bitter and powerfully ironic challenge to the legal decisions illuminated in part two. The stoicism of this voice, as it recounts heartfelt tales of adolescence, echoes, retroactively, with the disheartened rage directed at this opinion that deems such innocent experiences a “crime against nature.” Jones takes the best parts of Anderson’s epic documentary narrations (most famously deployed in Los Angeles Plays Itself [2004]) and fashions them into something all his own. The static footage that Jones plays to his deadpan delivery has not yet reached the level of sophistication employed in his later works. At moments, the choice of visual tableau is seemingly arbitrary and too reminiscent of Benning’s meditative frames, at others, Jones' juxtapositions are cutting and purely wicked.

The filming of Massillon allows Jones to expound on the nostalgia that lurks in every ornament of small‐town suburbia. This outmodedness layers upon the attitudes the radio evangelists and supreme court judges bring to their understanding of and ruling over homosexual rights. Jones allows one such preacher a healthy stretch of time to make his opinion heard, then clicks off the radio as the sermon begins to stutter. Part two (“The Law”) traces each of the rhetorical implications and judicial precedents that contributed to the decision to uphold sodomy laws. This includes fascinatingly articulate definitions of the terms thus employed: bugger, sodomite, etc. and the (surprise!) influence of religion on the historical introduction of a an anti‐sodomy legislation by King Henry VIII . Jones then wittily trains his camera at the land development project located in Valencia, CA (where CalArts is located) in part three, and plays a potent visual metaphor for “crimes against nature” off the fabricated villages and their feigned promise of idyll and heritage. If the classification of homosexual did not exist before the 19th century, Jones demands, then how do the preservation of heritage and traditional values even factor in these proceedings? Jones engages in a carefully analytic form of pathos to write the personal as innately political and Massillon offers an exacting glance into a sharp and furious mind. A single man with a great deal more to say.

The Films of William E Jones continues through the week at Anthology.

I also have to admit any cleverness this title exhibits was thoughtlessly torn form the title of Martin Dines new book 'Gay Suburban Narrative in American and British Culture: Homecoming Queens' (phew!) which was just released on Pallgrave Macmillan Press.

The Burnt Sight

2009-10-08T11:11:00.000-04:00

I wanted to like them. And, really, what subject is more perfect for a subjective study than an inkblot? Last night, at the closing program for Anthology Film Archive’s ‘The Walking Picture Palace’ series, new abstract works by Luther Price came alive upon the screen. The idea is simple enough and in-no-way unprecedented within Avant-Garde film. Price’s hand painted works, not prints but each unique objects, run before the beam, casting amorphous shapes onto the screen: seething, creeping, flashing, the cinematic durations manage to convey the unfathomable dread upon which Price has constructed a career.

(Portrait of Luther Price, 1992) Luther Price’s cinema is a nightmare dreamscape of melancholia and turmoil. In the past, I have written of the slippage his dirtied film-images encounter; through his unnerving juxtapositions of distorted sight and sound and in the degraded or abjected appearance of his early, Super8 films, his loaded signifiers (ice cream cones, floral bouquets, birthday cakes and clown poppets) buckle, transform and access a less tidy or familiar space of emotions, divesting the cliché nature of many of his images. In the Inkblot series, the iconography is gone (mostly) and all that remains are the abstract hints at horror that elude representation.

Price's tremendous variation in the timing of this series allows for periods of languor and those of assault. Being inkblots, of course, they are what you make of them. In the hurling frenzy of the strongest film (The Burnt Night, I believe) my only visual point of comparison were the ticky-tacky possession scenes of contemporary Hollywood. The brown and golden CG clouds that fog up the screen when contemporary hack horror maestros can’t think of any better imagery to hurl at the audience but a dervish of Sanskrit scribblings and barely glimpsed beasties meets its match in the uncanny and off putting ink Price spews upon his leader. Contemporary horror makes these flaccid scenes affective merely for their frenzied and unintelligible nature. Here, that sensation takes on an elegiac organicalness; glimpsing the fleeting and intangible celluloid images that must have been pressed into a mere two frames of this reel (or were they even?), the result implicates the privatized thoughts in which we conceive abstract sensations. Synesthesia is a de rigueur word that is happily thrown about in similar cinematic experiences, as is haptic. But Price’s blots transcend the tactile nature of these bodily centered phenomena. They access, like his degenerated film-images, states and forms of psychosis, here physically transcending the bodily altogether.

Curator Mark McElhatten told of the obsessive nature in which Price has produced these works. 40 or so currently exist. With each pass through the projector gate, the pocked strip is marred, tugged, torn and flayed. Each screening is a singular experience and shapes the film for future viewings. The projector too takes a reciprocal beating as the ink bleeds and chips off, staining the apparatus, making the nightmare job of projection that Price’s assemblage films propose even messier, as now they involve an elaborate clean-up process.

I wanted to like them. But, in truth, I only really liked one. The second black-and-white film (The Night Before, perhaps – there are no title cards and the screening took place out of sequence) seemed more a formalist experience. The indexical nature of the drafting process presupposed any of the fecund naturalness of the former film. In The Night Before, the reduced and (ultimately) modernist nature of the palette was a stumbling block the adept editing could not transcend. The umber hues of The Burnt Night intoned the putrid state typical of Price’s films. Decay, decomposition, the runes of this celluloid permitted a haunting suggestion beyond the compositional patterning of the The Night Before's swirling stamps and glops. Or, perhaps these inkblots functioned as inkblots should. These amorphous forms merely reflected the thoughts I threw into them. I wanted to like them, and so Price created a space for that desire to be repeatedly fulfilled.

I think not. I think that the uncertain shapes that writhed and pulsed within the murky whorls of ink contained filmic images, interlayed by Price. Abstracted. Obscured. I saw things in there moving. Objects and figures with matter and form. But then, these personal takes - subjective psychological reactions to the images on display - have always ultimately been the objects of Price’s films. Do these Rorschach films offer the absolute ideal to this filmic tendency? Your view is as good as mine.

My Boyfriend is Right

2009-08-19T13:15:00.000-04:00

All of my recent buys and reads have had purple covers with white font (mostly). What does that say, I wonder?

I have not neglected this page. I have been sweating and toiling over a thesis. Perhaps portions of it will appear here later. There's a Whitney Houston article that's half finished and looks at the haters surrounding her comeback - everyone who mentions the crack when listening to her new, bawdy ballads fearing the outmoded. Hopefully that will post soon.