Andy Butler and crew continue to carve out their musical masterpiece in the latest video for ‘Painted Eyes’. Taken from the Blue Songs album – the video takes a more subdued visual compared to the last promo for ‘My House’. Low-fi 70′s visuals and hair flipping aplenty.
Toronto-based, minor-key-addicted Austra have blown up in such a short amount of time since the May release of their debut album Feel It Break, so it would be easily to dismiss them as hype — a video censored for nudity and a mention on Jay-Z’s blog couldn’t have hurt — but thankfully the quality of the music indicates otherwise. Their cold synth patterns and Katie Stelmanis‘s rich voice are a soft sell on melancholic ears, and their sound perfectly defines the Blacksmith Synth-Bop trend of 2011 (a micro-genre I coined just now).
Quite good interview with the amazing Alexis Blair Penney in Oakazine.
In a Western world where ‘gay culture’ seemingly melds into the candy floss of everyday pop music and is repackaged as a commodity of camp and fierceness, Chicago IRL is a refreshing take on the creativity of young queers. And it is a freshness that shouldn’t be geographically bound to the Windy City.
Shot by Olivia Parriott in 24 hours as part of the wiretapmusic.com “24 Hour Music Video Challenge”. The song can be found on Katastrophe’s “Worst Amazing” album released last year via 307 Knox. Katastrophe will be playing live at the Original Plumbing Summer Jam in Brooklyn on July 22. More on the magazine’s website and on Facebook.
Wali Mohammed Barrech is a third year student at the fashion department of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Antwerp, where he has studied under my all-time fashion hero Walter van Beirendonck. Barrech’s latest collection was recently presented at the department’s 2011 student show and deals with questions raised by the progress in modern medicine and the way pharmaceutical drugs affect our lives. You can read more about his intentions in this info sheet that accompanies the collection. Here’s the official shooting of “Reset”, I picked 9 of i think 13 pictures.
Rumi Missabu (picture above by Christelle de Castro) is one of the few surviving members of San Francisco’s gender-bending performance groupe The Cockettes. Fans of the troupe will know her especially from her hilarious performance as the “rebellious elevator girl” Maxine in the legendary Cockette movie “Elevator Girls in Bondage” from 1972 (picture (c) David Wise) – the film was re-released on DVD two years ago and can be ordered directly from Rumi by sending an email to cocketterumi@gmail.com ($27.95 incl. shipping/handling).
Today the Oakland based artist owns a huge archive of the group’s work and aside from her job as the official Cockettes archivist is still a very active performer: In 2009 she has been starring in the successful stage production “Pearls over Shang-Hai” at the Hypnodrome Theatre, San Francisco, in which she played the “Madame Gin Sling” (see video below by Ben Wa). She has also recently appeared in couple of independent movies such as “The Glitter Emergency” by Paul Festa, “Uncle Bob” by Robert Oppel and the Cockettes documentary “Children of the Cockettes” by Ben Wa.
Rumis most current project is the video to “Interior”, the new single by NYC duo Mirror Mirror (new album “Interior” due August 16), which is another proof that she is still an exciting performer.
In an interview with Opening Ceremony which was published on their website just a few days ago, Rumi has also announced that she will be touring New York this October, supported by artists such as Jean Franco and French singer François Chaignaud. The interview also features a couple of really nice pictures of the artist from the last few years, so go check it out.
Christopher Schulz is the inventor and maker of Pinups magazine. “Seth”, his book with fictional drawings of Canadian actor Seth Rogen, whom Schulz describes as his “ideal Pinups model” in this nice interview with Future Shipwreck, was released in February. In another interview with New York Press he explained the project like this: “I wanted the book to be something entirely different [than Pinups]. By drawing again, I kind of returned to a past love from which I’d been far removed over the years… So, when I decided to give it a go with drawing, I really embraced and enjoyed working with raw materials again. It was liberating in many ways. I wanted this book to embody these feelings: I had it printed on this rough paper and I hand wrote, in pencil, the copyright info on the front and back pages. But, of course, I had it digitally scanned and reproduced for the final product”. You can buy a copy of “Seth” on the on the Pinups website. And if you have a little spare time I also recommend Schulz’s fabulously weird porn collages on his “Mopping is Stealing” tumblr.
+++ Light Asylum: “A Certain Person” (“In Tension”-EP out via Mexican Summer) +++
+++ The Hidden Cameras – “Do I Belong” (10th birthday show in London tonight, Pet Shop Boys remix of “Colour Of A Man here)
Recently celebrated with a retrospective at the TIFF Cinematheque in Toronto, Canada, Portuguese filmmaker João Pedro Rodrigues is undeniably one of the most distinctive and innovative queer voices in cinema today.
In his youth Rodrigues wanted to be an ornithologist, but from the age of 15 ended up spending much of his time in the cinema. “My desire to make films came from watching films,” Rodrigues states, “and I learned to make films from watching films.” While he started studying biology, he made the move to film school as his passion grew, and his films exhibit these odd-couple origins: they have a certain clinical or analytical gaze married with a deep love of artifice and fantasy.
Rodrigues was particularly drawn to silent cinema – Erich von Stroheim, DW Griffith, Charlie Chaplin – and to the work of French postwar director Robert Bresson. “But,” Rodrigues cautions, “when I’m making a film I try to get rid of all my influences, because I don’t want to make films as this director or that director did, I try to find my own language.” Indeed Rodrigues’s films seem steeped in his devotion to cinema and its rich, century-old history, but rather than merely referencing the past, they build something utterly new from this foundation.
Fascinated by the extreme lengths that people will go to indulge their desires and pursue their obsessions, Rodrigues directed his first feature film, O Fantasma, in 2000. It follows Sergio, a brooding garbage man as he cruises the streets in the dead of night. Shot primarily in the dark, with only an ambient soundtrack, the film is suffused with a listless and violently narcissistic sexuality. Hunky Sergio is perpetually masturbating or fucking, but he is incapable of otherwise relating to people and remains trapped in a crippling solitude. He is virtually a beast, sniffing or licking furiously like some kind of nympho bloodhound. Increasingly frustrated by the un-conquerability of a man he encounters and then stalks throughout the film, Sergio dons a black, full-body rubber suit, transforming himself into an anonymous, post-human stain (or maybe a giant, shimmering black dildo). After kidnapping and brutalizing his prey, this creature flees to the edge of town, drinking from dirty puddles in a post-apocalyptic landfill straight out of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema or Porcile.
After this striking debut, Rodrigues became interested in “how to make a melodrama nowadays in Portugal with things that I’m connected to.” Drawing on Hollywood directors from the 1950s like Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, as well as art filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who revisited the melodrama genre in 1970s Germany), he directed the equally daring and darkly Romantic Odete (AKA Two Drifters), 2005, about Odete, a woman haunted by her gay neighbour Pedro after he dies in a car accident. The film plays out as a post-mortem love triangle of sorts: through their shared love for the song “Moon River” and their languorous kiss that opens the film, Pedro is eternally bound to his boyfriend Rui, so it is only natural that Pedro would find himself reincarnated – in Odete’s body.
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:
Good news via Facebook: SSION’s new record “BENT” is now free:
www.ssion.com (scroll down over there)
