More music from the London based band on Soundcloud, BandCamp and
Catch Fire presents
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+++ Light Asylum have just released an new 2-track single called “Shallow Tears” via Mexcian Summer (cover above). The duo’s debut album is due May 1st. You can stream “Shallow Tears” here, I also posted a nice & free remix of the song by Berlin based duo Kool Thing below. “Genesis”, the b-side of the single, can be streamed here.
Light Asylum – Shallow Tears by Mexican Summer
Light Asylum – Shallow Tears (kool thing Remix) by k o o l t h i n g
Leave It On The Floor
(Dir. Sheldon Larry)
Tickets still available for:
Tue Feb 14 22:30 Cubix 7
Tue Feb 14 22:30 Cubix 8
(English with German subtitles)
Keep The Lights On
(Dir. Ira Sachs)
Tickets still available for:
Feb 15 19:00 CinemaxX 7
Thu Feb 16 22:45 CineStar 3
Sat Feb 18 17:45 CineStar 3
(English/Danish with English subtitles)
London based fashion designer Christopher Shannon has launched a new line called KIDDA, which is sort of the little brother of his main collection and focusses on printed jersey pieces. The KIDDA spring/summer 2012 collection is entitled “My Heart Goes Bang” in reference to the Dead Or Alive song and the lookbook with model Todd Taylor photographed by Clare Shilland is pretty awesome. KIDDA will be available at ASOS from end of February, 2012. For more information check out this interview with the designer on Dazed Digital.
“The Night Is Still Young” is the title of a photo book by Los Angeles-based, Japanese photographer Tomoaki Hata. The book, which was published in November 2010 and is unfortunately sold out, documents the gay scene of Osaka and especially its drag culture. Here’s a collection of the photographs, I especially like the very intimate and sexy photo series “Ichi and Mi-kun” at the bottom of this post. All pictures courtesy Miyako Yoshinaga art prospects.
UPDATE (2 June 2012): Hata has also uploaded a video with all pictures a book a couple of days ago. You find it below the pictures.
On January 26 2011 Ugandan human rights activist David Kato, co-founder and advocacy officer of the organisation Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG), was murdered in his home – shortly after he had won a lawsuit against a tabloid newspaper called 
“Rolling Stone”. The magazine had published his name and photograph amongst the ones of another 99 supposedly gay people under the headline “Hang them”. Its makers were sentenced to pay 1.5 million Ugandan shillings plus court costs to Kato and the other injured persons in this case.
The activist, who had left Uganda in 1992 and after spending 6 years in South Africa came back to fight for sexual equality, was amongst the most visible opponents of the Anti-Homosexuality Bill, a draconian legislative proposal brought to Uganda’s parliament in 2009. 22-year-old Nsubuga Sydney, who was the prime suspect in the murder case, was sentenced to 30 years in jail in February 2011.
On Thursday, one year after his murder, more than 100 activists have paid tribute to Kato in his hometown Kampala. In honor and remembrance of his live and his achievements Jamaican LGBT and human rights activist Maurice Tomlinson will be the first person to receive the David Kato Vision & Voice award in London tomorrow.
Also, a new documentary entitled “Call Me Kuchu” pays tribute to the live and work of Kato and other Ugandan activists. The film project by US filmmakers Katherine Fairfax Wright & Malika Zouhali-Worrall was started in 2010, shortly after the Anti-Homosexuality Bill had been introduced in Uganda’s Parliament. “Call Me Kuchu” will premiere at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, February 11 and will have two more screening dates, which you find on the films website. The directors are currently seeking for support on Kickstarter to professionally finish the movie before the premiere and start a campaign for it. The donations will also cover the flights and visas for one of the Ugandan LGBT activists featured in the film, so that he or she can join the film team in Berlin. In conjunction with the anniversary of Kato’s death the filmmakers have also just released a short film, which gives a first insight on their recordings of Kato. You can watch “The Will Say We Are Not Here” on the New York Times website.
Here’s the trailer for “Call Me Kuchu”:
Great blog about the African LGTB rights movement: http://www.mask.org.za/
Since April 12 Gallery VeneKlasen/Werner is showing production photographs shot during the shooting of Fassbinder’s last film “Querelle” in 1982. The pictures were taken by Roger Fritz, a photographer, producer and performer, who worked on the film set as an actor and production documentarian. They were published in a book called “Querelle – The Film Book”, which was put out in conjunction with the film release, the exhibition is the first time they are publicly shown in a gallery space.
The 119 photographs are presented in three long “hanging blocks”, each consisting of three lines of photographs – an egalitarianism that makes it kind of difficult to focus on a single picture and doesn’t really take account of the different qualities of the pictures and their compositions. At the same time the show as a whole is a nice reminder of the beauty of this movie and its wonderful color compositions, so stopping by when you’re around the area of Checkpoint Charlie is definitely worth it. The exhibition runs until February 25 and gives visitors also the possibility to see “Querelle” in a little cinema space, where it is shown daily at 14:00. The film is followed by the rare Fassbinder documentary “The Wizard of Babylon”, which not only includes behind-the-scenes footage from the Querelle set, but also Fassbinder’s final interview (he died in Paris in 1982, a few month before the film was released).
Here are some more of the presented photographs, you find more of them on the gallery’s website. All of them are courtesy VeneKlasen/Werner.
+++ Kool Thing – “Light Games” ++++
By Claire Kurylowski. From their free “Light Games EP”.
“It’s all about the American Dream… I had two obsessions when growing up; going to America which is where the flag came from, and Minotaurs. First I took the sharpness and the composition of the stars, I’ve been obsessed with them all my career, and secondly I used the Minotaurs, who are half bulls and half human beings, for the prints.” (Riccardo Tisci, Dazed Digital).
There are good reasons to believe that 2012 could become the year in which Wakefield Poole, one of the pioneers of (post-)porn cinema and the sexual revolution of the seventies, is celebrating another well-deserved comeback. The revival is due to filmmaker Jim Tushinski, who since 2007 has been working on a documentary about the ex-Broadway dancer and choreographer Poole, who in 1971 decided to start over and shot “Boys in the Sand”, a low-budget gay hardcore feature, which became an instant porn classic. Tushinski’s “Dirty Poole” is completely financed through private donations and according to the movie’s website and will premiere at a couple of festivals this spring. Here’s a teaser for the movie (which I liked a little more than the official trailer):
For a little taste of Poole’s work I recommend the “Clips” section on the “Dirty Poole” website, which contains remastered scenes from legendary Pooley films such as “Boys In The Sand” and the beautiful “Bijou” (see picture on top via Flickr/mixnycqueerfilm), as well as the trailer and some clips from his beautiful bible adaptation.
