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Watch it Online: Documentary about “Club Kid” Michael Alig
The movie “Party Monster” (2003) featuring Macaulay Culkin, Seth Green and Chloë Sevigny was preceded by a novel called “Disco Bloodbath” (1999), providing a basis for the film. It tells the story of New York party promoter Michael Alig infamously participating in murdering his friend and drug dealer Angel Melendez. But even before that, a documentary took on this very subject – it’s also called “Party Monster” and was released 1998. You can watch the complete film – cheekily titled a “shockumentary” – on youtube.
DIY Rules: The Queer Zine Archive Project
The Queer Zine Archive Project, an online archive based in Milwaukee and run by a group of 6 anonymous people since 2003, is collecting queer zines from the last three decades and making them available online for free. I really recommend spending some time over there, since it’s a a really entertaining lesson in queer history full of real treasures such as a all issues of J.D., the legendary queercore zine by G.B. Jones and Bruce LaBruce from the late eightis/early nineties or hilarious zines by Vaginal Davis, such as “Evil Taco” or “Yes, Mrs. Davis”. They also have an “Calls For Submission” section in case you have you’re own zine and still search for contributiors or want to publish your own stuff. Here are a couple of my favourite covers of zines you can find in the archive, starting with my favourite one, the cover of the 4th issue of the “Queer Fuckers Magazine” from Salt Lake City, Utha, published in 1992. For mor of them click here:
Gordon Brent Ingram: Comrades & Lovers – Portraits of Men 1978 – 1998
The picture above and the following ones are taken from a photographical essay called “Comrades & Lovers – Portraits of Men 1978 – 1998″ by Vancouver based photographer and environmental planner & designer Gordon Brent Ingram. About his motivations to take these pictures he writes: “I came of age in a relatively pleasant and safe West Coast maelstrom spanning both Canada and the United States and cultures with English and French spoken and with links to a wide range of overseas communities. In this part of the world, recent decades have seen some of the most rapid cultural and social change in human history especially around the confluence of gender identities, sexuality and cultures. These transformations of communities and how individuals and networks of friends have made their ways through them, and in deed how we have been remaking ourselves, has been one of the sources of fascination for my photographic portrayals.” You find the whole essay on Imgram’s website. For more specific descriptions of the motives shown on the pictures check the file names.
Out Now: Death Magazine #3 (The Sex Issue)
Death: a magazine for the enthusiast and non-enthusiast alike is an open magazine project edited by Portland based graphic designer Forrest Martin. I can be fully previewed for free online on a nicely designed website, where you can also order a printed copy (available by tomorrow). The current issue, a sex issue features “sexy and/or deathy content from a variety of artists, in literal and figurative ways” (Martin) such as some writing and artwork by Slava Mogutin, a hand-stitched black on black panel by Joel Gibb, color-dense canvases by Clark Goolsby, a not-so-funereal funeral review by Anna Huff (Anna Oxygen/Cloud Eye Control), an intimate look at freshly tossed sheets by Chris Hornbecker, Jersey poetry by Sara Marcus (Girls to the Front), and Stephen Irwin‘s final interview before his fatal Christmas Eve heart attack. The cover art was made by John Patrick McKenzie. Check it out:
PICK 5: Kool Thing
Kool Thing is a Berlin-based band I already mentioned in the last music ticker a few days I ago. I contacted Julie Chance, one half of the duo (who also goes by the name Julie Fogarty, under which she works as a photographer), after falling in love with their self-titled debut EP, and she liked the idea of contributing to our PICK 5 series, for which artists pick out a couple of their favourite web clips and comment them. The result is really nice and offers a nice little insight in the duos’s creative sources. Check out Kool Thing’s bandcamp page for the EP and to check their upcoming live gigs in Berlin as well as their Myspace page for the new video their song “The Sign”. 1. David Bowie – Putting out the Fire (live) “The first vid is by David Bowie, we were in a record shop in Dublin and came across the sound track to the movie Cat People. We hadn’t seen the movie but the sound track was by Giorgio Moroder so we bought it and LOVED it. This is the title track ‘Putting out the Fire’ from David Bowie’s 1983 ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour” 2. Grizzly Bear – Shift (live) “Jon Dark loves Grizzly Bear, and this video stuck out because she found it just before she moved to Paris, and it takes place in a Parisian apartment. Its kind of absurd a band doing a concert in a bathroom, but somehow it works, and is a really beautiful version of the song.”
Doug Ischar: Marginal Waters / Honor Among… (Preview)
I strongly recommend the website Culturehall.com, an online platform for selected artists, which is especially interesting because of its “Feature Issues”, for which every two weeks people from the art scene select four artworks of contemporary artists. The current Feature Issue (No 60) curated by Brooklyn based photographer Tema Stauffer is devoted to the medium of photography. I was really excited when I saw that amongst the featured photographers is Doug Ischar, a photographer whose work I’ve always been interested in, but I’ve never really got the chance to see. Ischar is a Chicago based artist who is especially known for his photographies of gay culture in the Eighties. It looks like in the Nineties he retired from photography, since 1990 he works as an associate professor at the photography department of the University of Illinois. On Culturehall Ischar has a portfolio with around 40 pictures which are part of the two series “Marginal Waters” and “Honor Among…”. I’d really love to post all of them here but I guess this would be sort of ridigulous (and I guess illegal as well), so please check out Culturehall for more. Picture on top via Ischar’s Facebook profile. “Marginal Waters” (1985)
Good Blogs: Bangable Dudes In History
Wanna know who the gorgeous boy on the pictures is? Well, it’s a guy called Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili better known as Joseph Stalin. The dictator is amongst the list of the hottest historical persons ever which is presented on Bangable Dudes in History, a blog which not only carefully collects all these hot dead guys (submissions welcome), but also offers pie charts showing the best reasons why aside from their historical relevance these guys should be remembered as hot as hell. So if you ever asked yourself why Nikola Tesla was sexier than Thomas Edison or why Aisin-Gioro Puyi (the last Emperor of China) was a real cutie, you’re gonna love this blog. For more background information check out this interview with Megan B who runs the site. Via omg blog. http://bangabledudesinhistory.blogspot.com
Out Now: Garçons #5
Garçons is a Chilean queer (post-)porn magazine I regularly mention here because I think it’s a nice project. It’s one of the few zines that brings together pictures of people from different genders. Check out the current issue released in November.
Sholem Krishtalka: “LURKING”
“Lurking” is a web project by a Toronto based artist called Sholem Krishtalka. On his tumblr Krishtalka regularly publishes new works of a series of small sized drawings based on his friends’ Facebook picutures. He explains the idea behind the project like this: “The wide usage of Facebook has borne a new vernacular meaning for the verb ‘to lurk’. In this new coinage, ‘to lurk someone’ is to troll through their Facebook photos, to stalk them, to investigate their visual history. I found myself spending greater and greater amounts of time doing precisely this, and I wanted to make a record of it as a means of mapping my community, and also (perhaps less nobly) to in some way justify my Facebook procrastination.” Here are a couple of drawings from the “Lurking”-series, you find many more of them here and more information about the artists as well as works from other projects and writings on his website. Found on Colin Quinn’s tumblr (which I shamefully have forgotten when I did my list of my favourite tumblrs).
Good Blogs: Let’s Play
Let’s Play is the kinkiest, sexiest and most entertaining tumblr I stumbled upon in weeks. I’ve spend minimum half an hour now clicking myself though all 140 pages this site currently has and still feel like I could instantly start over again. Here are a couple of my favourite pictures I found on my journey, although they don’t really represent the collection on the tumblr itself which is a little more explicit. Please let me know if you own the copyrights of one of them. http://masternservant.tumblr.com/
Good Blogs: UrFunked
UrFunked is a great source for people like me who like experimental, playful, intelligent and expressive fashion approaches. As far as I can tell from its Facebook page it is run by a guy called Abdullah Al-Awadhi who is based in Kuwait (correct me if I’m wrong here) and presents collections and accessoirs of designers that obviously perceive fashion as a kind of art and as something that is more than just an instruments for individuals to express theirselves or distinguish theirself from others. I guess it also underlines the fact that fashion can be especially interesting and entertaining if the designer who creates it has a certain sense of humour and of course doesn’t care too much about the conventions of the field he works in.
