Combining camp pop-culture, faceless corporations and gay subcultures, the work of Michael Pybus sits on the border between sculpture, graphic design and painting.
Catch Fire presents
-
In April last year artist Stefan Mosebach designed this beautiful shirt for us to celebrate Catch Fire’s first anniversary. This year we continue this tradition, although the second birthday of the blog already has passed by. But there’s another occasion that’s gotta be celebrated: The posting you are reading right now is officially the 1.000th post in the history of this blog!
I’m really proud how the site has changed from my very personal little dumpster for stuff I like into a platform for queer arts and culture with awesome new contributors and a lot of new regular readers. And it makes me even prouder to tell you that NYC based artist J.Morrison, whose work I love and who has done great designs for Xiu Xiu in the past, has designed a gorgeous new shirt for us that I hope you all will like.
The shirt is from Americal Apparel and comes in black with a gold/silver print, it will be limited to 100 pieces. It is $15 + shipping (US $5, worldwide $10) and you can order it right below this preview. So celebrate with us and support the blog and the artist! And thank you guys so much for all your great feedback over the last year!
UPDATE: The shirt is no longer available.
We’ve mentioned Justin Kelly here quite a lot already, for good reasons: he’s a filmmaker from San Francisco and responsible for a whole bunch of great music videos of queer artists from the Bay area such as Gossip, Hunx And His Punks, the Younger Lovers, Hey Willpower and Alexis Blair Penney (check out his website Den Of Hearts for more about his work as a director). For Catch Fire he has put together a list of his five favourite YouTube moments, which have in common that they make you smile and feel awkward at the same time, although the qualities of awkwardness differ. Thanks Mr. Kelly!
1. “I Gorilla Press 100 lbs while ‘Strange Currencies’ Plays in the Background”
“I can’t remember who sent this to me but… I’m obsessed. This man ‘coordinated his movements with the music somewhat in a way that is somewhat pleasing to him.’ Um, okay, cool. I feel you. Note to self: check hair immediately after a workout.”
I first witnessed Vienna’s Crazy Bitch in a Cave perform last year in Berlin and have been a fan ever since — her pop creations and stage persona are truly queer, like a Muppet electro-opera staged in a tropical junkyard. Her debut EP On Top (backed with a remix from Hard Ton) earned a number followers, including Peaches who bought a 12″ after catching the same show, and that number is about to exponentialize with the September 16th release of her first album, titled Particles. Til then, she’s posting daily on her tumblr, showing off her 100% natural Rapunzel-length hair, and her label Comfortzone is streaming the lead song “Amazing”. Click on for the Particles artwork and more photos.
Designer Holly Fox-Lee has gradueted in fashion print at London’s Central Saint Martins College in 2009. Her pretty awesome graduate collection centers on the street dance krump, which she discovered during an internship with Jeremy Scott in Los Angeles in 2007. Check out Spot On: Textiles for pictures and more background information about the collection and let me know if you know what Fox-Lee is doing in 2011 (couldn’t figure it out online myself). Pictures by Marc Hibbert (from an editorial called “Warriors“), video below by Eldar Bayburin.
+++ Hercules And Love Affair‘s Andy Butler and Jason Kendig have just released the stream of a new track called “Give It To Me”, which will be released on Butler’s Mr. INTL label on September 5th (via Beatport). Listen to the track here and download a new mix by Kendig on FACT. And if you haven’t heard it yet you should also check out Hercules member Shaun J Wright’s solo track “Forever More”.
Andrew Butler/Jason Kendig – Give it to me by casio1988
+++ Lemonade are currently working on a follow-up to their “Pure Moods”-EP and have just released a nice new free track called “The Place Where You Belong”. The song is a cover of an R’n B tune by Shai released in 1994. You can download it right here, for more info check out Lemonade’s tumblr.
The Place Where You Belong by LemonadeMusic
+++ Stream Magnetic Fields singer Stephin Merritt‘s new album “Obscurities” on Paste Magazine. The album was released last week via Merge Records. +++
+++ Oakland’s Brontez Purnell has not only just released a new video with two new songs of the upcoming The Younger Lovers album “Rock Flawless”, but also this gorgeous short film of a performance of his very own Brontez Purnell Dance Company. The piece is called “Free Jazz” and premiered at the Berkeley Art Museum in February, read more about it here.
Punk Start My Heart began in Portland, OR as a booking collective dedicated to setting up shows for women, people of color and queer identified musicians. As PSMH started doing more and more shows, it became increasingly obvious that there was a collective desire to create more of these spaces.
This ultimately led to the creation of the Not Enough! Festival: a 2-day music, art, and film festival showcasing new collaborative-based work of Portland’s diverse queer community. For most of these bands, it was their first show, which happened in an extremely supportive community environment and many of them chose to keep playing this last year. We decided that in order to further support these bands we could create a record label, with a focus on queer and feminist artists, releasing vinyl records and assisting with promotion.
We are currently running a kickstarter campaign to help get our record label off the ground. There’s only a few days left to help us meet our goal!
For more information visit us on www.punkstartmyheart.com, notenoughpdx.tumblr.com, or on facebook.
Each month the B. Calla LQQKS Project presents an ensemble of designer clothing, embracing lots of contrast in colors, patterns and textures, including frequent use of digital printing for a synthetic club kid feel (with occasional undertones of Burner and granny). Items can be purchased directly through their site, eschewing that darn middleman.
Film by Kate Kunath and Sasha Wortzel
“Founded on a principle of non-discrimination in 1959, the Starlite Lounge was a cherished meeting place for people of all walks of life and famous for being the oldest Black-owned bar in the heart of Brooklyn. Throughout enormous social change over five decades from civil rights to gay liberation to AIDS activism, the Starlite Lounge has been a fixture and central space in these movements. Just as the Starlite community has been deeply affected by these waves of change, the bar has also felt the impact of rapid gentrification in central Brooklyn. By following the eviction of Brooklyn’s oldest black owned non-discriminating establishment, Starlite illustrates the importance of social spaces in marginalized communities, examines the complexities of gentrification, and demands that the needs and desires of these communities are represented in the redevelopment of their neighborhoods.” From their website where you can also donate to the project (still in development): www.thestarliteproject.com
Video editor Tijana Mamula has watched all ten seasons of Friends in search of gay jokes in the show. And she not only gathered 90 minutes of homophobic moments in the sitcom, but also found a lot of other not-so-funny aspects to it: “I noticed all sorts of other problematic content, some of which I found even more upsetting, like the place of women and foreigners… You could do a whole series of videos, like Misogynistic Friends and Xenophobic Friends.” Mamula who works at an Assistant Professor of Communications at the John Cabot university in Rome and got her Ph.D in Film Studies at King’s College, London, in 2010. This is the 50-minutes version of her original 90-minutes video. More about the project on Queerty and Bitch Magazine. There’s also an Italian version of the film on Mamula’s Vimeo account.
From the album “Figure It Out” out on Paper Bag Records. Directed by Colin Medley.
http://www.myspace.com/psiloveyouband
Album “Walrus” is out on September 23 Staatsakt. Performance by Uzrukki Schmidt, directed by the Jolly Goods.
http://www.jollygoods.net/
