The makers of New York City’s successful queer monthly screening series Dirty Looks are currently preparing a very exiting and ambitious new festival, that will take place throughout July and seeks to celebrate the historical roots of the city’s vibrant queer scene by rediscovering forgotten queer sites and venues. Dirty Looks: On Location is planned as a month-long series of interventions in New York City spaces: Films and video works selected by a group of curators will be installed in former queer spaces like shuttered bars, bathhouses or cruising spaces, one piece will be presented in a different location every night throughout July.
You can currently support the festival and its organizers by donating via Kickstarter through June 2, 2012 (official video on top). Donators receive awesome thank-you gifts, such as an exclusive Mike Kuchar poster, a postcard-book with all the venues, shirts designed by Curt McDowell and Luther Price or and beautiful works by a whole bunch of contempory artists such as Adam Shecter, Jonathan VanDyke, Dani Leventhal, A.L. Steiner, Gary Indiana, Gavin Lambert, Michelle Handelman or Liz Magic Laser.
UPDATE (2 June 2012): The project was successfully funded!
I ♥ this. THEESatisfacionare Seattle based duo Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White, who have already contributed to Shabazz Palaces’ 2011 awesome “Black Up” album and have just released their own debut “awE naturalE” via Sub Pop. You can currently stream the whole record on the label’s YouTube site (German’s have to hide their IP) and buy the album via Itunes & Amazon. The beautiful video to their single “QueenS” was directed by Dream Hampton.
British artist, shaman and !WOWOW! founder Matthew Stone does amazingly beautiful artwork such as editorials for fashion magazine (check out the ones for I-D we’ve posted here and here last year) or his music videos for These New Puritans (“Attack Music”) or S.C.U.M. (“Amber Hands”). His first photo book “The Body Beyond” was released in January in a limited edition of 1.000 and is still available on the artist’s website.
The following five works – all of them photo prints on birch plywood - were parts of an installation entitled “Optimism as Cultural Rebellion” shown at NYC’s The Hole gallery in December 2011. For more pictures of the full exhibition as well as a video tour through the installation, please check out Stone’s website, too. The official gallery text released in conjunction with the show can be found on the gallery’s website.
As this year’s “Artists in Residence” Bianca und Sierra Casady aka CocoRosie have curated a very special series of live shows for year’s Donaufestival in Krems (Austria) this year: The series is called “Ungewöhnliche Hochzeiten” (“Unusual weddings”) and teams up artists from different backgrounds. My favorite collaboration is Antony + Sissy Nobby, who’ve done a slow piano version of Nobby’s 2009 awesomely explicit single “Lay Me Down” and have beautifully covered Madame Gaynor’s “I will survive”, followed by Laurie Anderson and Light Asylum and Nomi Ruiz (Hercules & Love Affair, Jessica 6) and the new post Hip Hop superhero Busdriver. Here are some blurry fan videos of the performances so we who couldn’t attend at least get a certain impression. Via Nomi Ruiz’ tumblr.
“Tom Boy” by French director Céline Sciamma premiered at the Berlinale last year and won the film festivals queer Teddy award. The film shows the summer of Mikhael, who has just moved to the suburbs of Paris with his family, and dresses and acts like a boy, while is born a girl. Sciamma follows Mikhael’s experiences with his family (his mother refuses to accept his boy identity), his new friends and his awakening of love for a girl named Lisa. She depicts the adolescence of the child and its sometimes complicated relationships in a very precise, gentle way without an overdramatizing perspective, which makes it really worth watching. Especially since the kid played by actress Zoé Héran is adorable. The only disappointing part of “Tom Boy” is its end, which weakens the rest of the movie in a rather awkward way, but I don’t want to give too much of the story away. The movie is in German movies from today, here’s the (unfortunately rather tacky) trailer:
“Every Night I Say A Prayer” is a track from Little Boots‘ upcoming album, released in conjunction with the “Record Store Day” in a one-off limited edition vinyl and now available as a free download. The track was written and produced by Andy Butler (Hercules & Love Affair) and Little Boots, you can download the song on our last Music Ticker from Sunday (just scroll down a bit, it’s the fourth Soundcloud wave).
The video was directed by artist Zaiba Jabbar, who writes the following about the it on her blog:
“Initially inspired by Paris is Burning we wanted to draw on the performance element and make a more london, and abstract version. In this realm we wanted to create a more conceptual take on a music video. Moving into more of a dance:performance video.”
So it seems like 20 years after Madonna’s take on the NYC ballroom culture and after artists such as Hercules & Love Affair’s Kim Ann Foxman, The Miracles Club and others have prepared its comeback visually and musically (see “Creature” / ”Light Of Love”) during the past two years, voguing has now officially diffused into the white mainstream culture again. Is that a good thing? I put this up for discussion.
Frank Ripploh’s vibrant and refreshingly raw and honest movie “Taxi zum Klo” (‘Taxi To The Toilet”) from 1980 is not only one of the few classics of queer cinema made in Germany, but also one of the few really hilarious comedies the country has to offer. The partly autobiographical film was shot in Berlin in the pre-Aids era and depicts the contradictory live of a gay teacher, who tries to combine his job and relationship with a restless and adventurous sex live. Despite a couple of very explicit sex scenes (real cum shot, golden shower etc) it surprisingly got a 16 classification in Germany, but was banned in a couple of countries such as Austria and the US. In case of the UK it was denied an uncensored release, and it took until 2005 to finally get it an 18 classification. “Taxi zum Klo” is now re-released in the UK via Peccadillo Pictures in a fully remastered DVD version and also currently shown in a couple of UK cinemas – a great opportunity to rediscover it more than 30 years after its first release.
Here’s the (new UK) trailer:
On Tuesday a new production of Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo” will premiere at Hebbel am Ufer theater. The main character Orfeo will be played by Peaches, who will have her second appearance in an opera at HAU after her auto-biographical play ”Peaches Does Herself”. But while PDH was a pretty campy material battle with the format of a revue, the “Orfeo” production directed by Daniel Cremer seems to have the same rather minimalist approach – at least that’s what the very promising preview video suggests, that was just released and that I posted below. The clip documents the work of Olof Boman, the conductor of the opera, which by the way is performed completely in Italian (German subtitles)
“L’Orfeo” was one of the first operas ever written, it’s from the early 17th century and focusses on the life of Orpheus, singer of Greek myths, who charms all living things with his singing and tries to save his wife from the underworld. According to the introduction text on the website, the HAU production will especially emphasize questions of gender and sexuality in the play, building up a “queer-emancipatory utopia against the paralyzing presence of death”. Peaches will sing alongside six Opera singers and the musicians of the Kaleidoscope Soloists ensemble. For tickets and more information please visit the HAU website – I just checked, a few tickets are still left.
+++ I’m completely in love with “All Hell”, the beautiful debut album of singer / songwriter Daughn Gibson, which was recently released via Mistletone. You can stream and download the album track “In The Beginning” right here – more about the 31 year-old Carlisle, Pennsylvania resident, who also happens to work as a truck driver, on Pitchfork:
+++ NYC rapper Le1f, the guy on top of this post, has finally released his “Dark York” mixtape, and it’s as amazing as I hoped it would be. Stream and download it right here:
+++ Also finally out: Light Asylum‘s self-titled debut album. Here’s the stream for the complete record:
The following photographs are taken from San Francisco based photographer Parker Tilghman’sfirst publication “Introduction”, which he has self-released at the beginning of April. The book includes a series of portraits taken during his studies at the California College of Art (a lot of then during his stay in Berlin in 2011), an older body of work called “Aeon” and installation images from his thesis exhibition. “Introduction” has 80 full color pages (most of the images are black and white) and can be ordered it via blurb.de ($35 / €26 + shipping). To preview the entire book just scroll down to the bottom of this post/page, for more of Parker’s work check out his website www.parkertilghman.com.
For those who don’t know: This thursday will begin an exciting series – Talking Eyes – in Berlin exploring certain marginalized perspectives in visual culture. For an overview, click here.
During the first event, held at C/O Berlin (Oranienburgerstr. 35/36) this Thursday, April 26th, the professor Jennifer Evans, from Carleton University, will explore the tensions between high and low – between the museum and the street – as a fundamental feature of efforts to queer the gays/gaze after Stonewall. The lecture starts at 19:30 and will conclude with a small toast to celebrate the opening of the series.
