Amos Mac and Rocco Katastrophe, the founders and editors of the Brooklyn based trans male culture magazine Original Plumbing, have big plans for 2013 – and I’m not talking about the flashy 2.0 edition of their “Original” snapback that they’re selling online right now (see picture to the left by Amos with model Neon Ladosha). The duo has just launched a crowd-funding campaign to revive and extend the magazine’s website, which they’ve turned into a regularly updated web zine and online community platform for trans male culture over the past two years. With the growing amount of blogs posts and articles by great contributors or video projects such as the “Talk About It” campaign the site has now reached a point where according to its makers it not only needs a new coat of paint, but has to be rebuild and restructured from scratch + needs new editors to maintain it. Furthermore, Amos and Rocco are planning to extend the website into a platform that is able to represent the trans* community in its entirety, which would make it even more important than it already is. The relaunch is scheduled for April.
If you want to support this ambitious make-over project please donate generously via Indiegogo and you will be rewarded with great thank you gifts such as one-month free access to queer/trans* related video portals, collectable stickers of pop icons, the sold-out 1st edition of OP, handmade shirts & bags, a personal dance lesson by Jessica 6 choreographer Georgia Maxine Sanford or a private dinner with the OP makers. And if all of this doesn’t convince you, I’m pretty sure this official campaign video will:
Sleepless Knights is the first full-length feature film by German directors Stefan Butzmühlen and Cristina Diz and was shot in 2011 with amateur actors from the virtually unknown area of Spain’s Extremadura region. The world premiere took place during the 62nd Berlin Film Festival in the section „Forum“, since then the film has been has been shown at film festivals around the world such as the San Sebastian International Film Festival in September 2012 or the Gothenburg Film Festival later this month. The film has it’s official start in German cinema’s next Thursday and will be shown in the following theaters (Spanish with German subtitles): FSK Berlin, Filmhaus Nürnberg, Werkstattkino München, Filmpalette Köln.
For more information about the movie plase download this press sheet (PDF), which contains the storyline and a statement from the directors in English and German. In addition, here’s one of three beautiful teasers for the film, for the second and the third one please visit the YouTube page of the GayFilmnacht (Gay Film Night) Berlin.
Photographer and writer Ren Hang was born in Changchun, the capital of the Jilin provinc in northeastern China. Today he lives and works in Beijing, where he has just recently graduated from the Advertising Department of the Communication University of China. His playful, bold and often grotesque photographs of nudes are currently featured in the exhibition “Secret Love” at the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities in Stockholm, Sweden. The exhibition runs until March 31 and highlights the work by contemporary Chinese artists, focussing on questions of identity and sexuality. You find more of Hang’s photograpy on his Tumblr and on his website, where he also publishes his poems and where you can order his self-publisehd books. For a short portrait of the artist by “Secret Love” curator Si Han check out the museum’s website. All pictures posted below where shot in 2012 and are published here with the kind permission of the artist.
“Bullying is a national sport in Lebanon. You can’t walk down the street without getting catcalls and snide remarks. The way I see it, there’s no sense in being melodramatic about it. Buy a pair of noise canceling headphones, raise the volume on your Mykki Blanco mix, and keep walking.” (Hamed Sinno, singer of the lebanese band Mashrou’ Leila in the current issue of My.Kali magazine. “Fasateen” can be found on the band’s self-titled first album from 2012)
Thanks to everyone who took part in our poll for the best music video 2012! I’m happy to announce that the winner of the award is artist Alex Anwandter with his beautiful video to his single “Cómo puedes vivir contigo mismo?”, which got more than 70% of the votes: A clear result, which shows that Alex has a strong fan base in his home-country Chile and around the world. To get a little more information about the video, which was shot in a club in Santiago, I’ve done a little Q&A with Alex in which he speaks about the background of the song’s lyrics and the idea behind the clip. Here’s the interview:
As far as I know the lyrics of the song are responding to a brutal crime against a gay man in Chile, which happend recently. How does the video relate to this?
That’s somehow inaccurate. The lyrics are based on a personal experience of mine: someone was passing judgement on me and the lyrics are about how certain types of folk go through life doing this, judging others. As I wrote the lyrics, however, I realized that they worked well as a metaphor for discrimination (“Even though they say it’s a sin, I feel like I’m in heaven” goes one line), especially towards sexual minorities.
On Christmas Day the New York Times has published a not very flattering review of artist Justin Vivian Bond‘s new winter show “Snow Angel” by music critic Stephen Holden. The article, which consistently emphasizes the “freakishness”, “harshness” and “troubledness” of the Justin’s show and her personality, reveals more about the author’s obvious problems with a self-confident transgendered person on stage than about the actual event. It feels strangely disconnected, like it’s written by someone who’s horizon of experience with stage shows of any kind is stuck in the Sixties or Seventies. Someone who seems to think that “transgendered” is just a modern word for “drag”. MORE >>>
When I interviewed Abdu Ali Eaton aka Abdu Ali about his “Eat On This” blog earlier this year, he had already released his first song “Banjee Musick” and told me that he was working hard on his career as an artist and performer. Since then, a lot has happened: Abdu has released his first (free) EP “Invictos” with steamy tracks by Schwarz, DJ Lemz, and JLamar, successfully merging influences from Ballroom culture, Witch Hop and Baltimore Club. He has also played a couple of debut gigs in his hometown Baltimore and New York in the last few weeks and has just recently released a new video for the EP track “360″, which pays tribute to his Baltimore community and is a great visualization of his musical approach. New Yorkers will have the chance to see him live in a few days alongside House of Ladosha and Cakes da Killa at the GAZE 4 DAZE New Year’s Eve party at Public Assembly (check out the event on Facebook).
For Catch Fire Abdu has prepared a commented picture series of his five favorite places in Baltimore and gives us a little insight on different aspects of his everyday live. It is the second contribution to our new “Favorite Places” section, which was started by Berlin based artist Rodeo a few weeks ago. Picture on top by Holly Miller.
Zine culture has been a little underrepresented on this blog in the last few months, but this doesn’t mean we haven’t kept our eyes and ears open for exciting publications from around the world. Here’s what we’ve found. To keep us updated about new online and print magazines and interesting zine projects feel free to contact us via contact@catch-fire.com!
Berlin based duo EASTER (Stine Omar Midtsaeter and Max Boss) are about to drop their second album this Thursday and will be celebrating the release on at Luzia, Oranienstr 34 in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where they will perform all songs of the new record. The new yet untitled album”The Softest Hard” (prelisten via Bandcamp) is the follow-up to the duo’s heavily synth-based slow-pop debut “Ur A Great Babe”, which was released in July last year. The songs “Rabbit”, “Alien Babies” and “Champagne 121212″, which have been pre-released during the last few weeks came with the beautiful no-budget videos I posted below (for more check out Stine’s YouTube page).
Since the character of EASTER’s music, lyrics and videos is rather intuitive I wanted to avoid doing a formal q&a with the duo and instead send them a couple of words that popped up in my head while I did my research. Here are Stine’s associations:
Another suggestions for a nice weekend activity if you’re in New York: The next three days are the last days to visit the solo exhibition of Berlin based drag legend Vaginal Davis at Participant Inc. The show, which Artforum describes as a “fun-house tableau full of dizzying, pervy revelations”, is a tribute to the original HAG Gallery, which Vaginal opened in L.A. in the early eighties. It shows some of her most recent work such as the “Various Hags” glamour girl paintings (see picture on the left) or her totemic bread sculptures of contemporary pop stars such as Ryan Gosling or Justin Timberlake. If you can’t make it: You find pictures of the show on the Huffington Post, on the blog of Diane Pernet (who has taken pictures of the opening and of her next-morning breakfast with Vaginal) and on Art in America.
I’m not a big christmas fan, and I assume that most of you out there aren’t either, but this sounds like fun: Bradford Nordeen, curator of the queer screening series Dirty Looks NYC has co-organized a very special christmas special entitled ”Mary Boom! Christmas Special” for the upcoming Saturday, December 15. The revue style event hosted by his drag Persona Mary Boom and inspired by classic Christmas Specials like “RuPaul’s Christmas Ball,” “Pee-Wee’s Christmas Special,” “The Divine David Presents…,” and “The Kate Bush Christmas Special”, will feature a nice line-up of downtown NYC artists, performers and living legends such as Justin Vivian Bond, Dynasty Handbag, Geo Wyeth, Nicholas Gorham, the Kate Bush Dance Troupe, Nicholas Buffon and Jennifer Blowdryer. The evening will also serve as the launch for the video of Mary’s debut single “White Christmas!” directed by Josef Kraska (aka performance artist Narcissister) and co-starring Colin Self and Monica Yi you can see parts of the clip in this teaser, watch it right here: MORE >>>
