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.
From Sylvester’s self-titled solo debut (produced by Motown / Mavin Gaye producer Harvey Fuqua). You should also check out the TV One documentary “Unsung” which can be found on the same YouTube account (unfortunately the quality is pretty bad) as well as the other nicely commented Sylvester classics posted there.
The picture above and the following ones are taken from a photographical essay called “Comrades & Lovers – Portraits of Men 1978 – 1998″ by Vancouver based photographer and environmental planner & designer Gordon Brent Ingram. About his motivations to take these pictures he writes: “I came of age in a relatively pleasant and safe West Coast maelstrom spanning both Canada and the United States and cultures with English and French spoken and with links to a wide range of overseas communities. In this part of the world, recent decades have seen some of the most rapid cultural and social change in human history especially around the confluence of gender identities, sexuality and cultures. These transformations of communities and how individuals and networks of friends have made their ways through them, and in deed how we have been remaking ourselves, has been one of the sources of fascination for my photographic portrayals.”
A little journey through last 3 decades of pop culture I just put together for a German music magazine. You can watch all the music videos after the jump, and don’t forget to click away the advertisement in the Dailymotion videos by using the cross in the right corner.
“Cracked Actor” is an unpublished BBC documentary by Alan Yentob originally made for an arts program called Omnibus. Yentob portrais the post-Ziggy-Stardust-Bowie on his “Diamond Dogs Tour” in 1974 – a time when Bowie had just moved to the US and due to cracks in his relationship with his wife Angie, business problems and his increasing cocain addicton obviously was at a difficult point of his life. It’s an encounter with a very edgy and vunerable artist who aside from his glamourous stage performances appears to be pretty lost, haunted by his own creations and constantly questioning his success and his ambitions. Watch it as long as it is still online.
I have a new favourite tumblr called Cruised Or Be Cruised. The blog (which I’m pretty sure is run by a German) by artist Dean Sameshima is only a few days old, but even at this early point the collection of pages you can click yourself through so far offer a pretty entertaining journey through the history of gay subculture, starting with John Rechy book covers and Hanky Code guides over works of contemporary artists to zine covers like the one on top of this post (it’s from a zine called “GSM” [gay skinhead movement] from 1991). The tumblr looks like the attempt to make a private collection of these kinds of artefacts accessible online, so if you have a tumblr yourself or don’t mind putting tumblrs into your blog reader this could be a good chance to take part in something nice.
This record is the perfect Hipster item: Garçons are the follow-up project of a French new wave group called “Marie et les Garçons” which was produced by John Cale. In 1979, after drummer Marie had quit the band, the rest of the guys started a disco project in collaboration with Michael Zilkha and Michel Esteban, the founders of the New-York-based post-punk/no-wave record label ZE Records. The awesome result of this collaboration was the mini-album “Divorces”, which got kind of forgotten in the following years and isn’t available anymore (except for the two YouTube uploads below). The only place on the internet I could find the complete record to is a semi-legal MP3 shop called vinylmp3.net which sells ripped versions of rare records (cheap, but the quality is rather moderate).
Via Gilles.
The following pictures were shot by a photographer called Jon Ericson for Torso Magazine in 1983. They show the interiours of the warehouses at the Hudson River Pier in New York City, a place that used to be a famoues cruising space in the seventies. I’ve discovered the portfolio on the blog The Sword, where you also find the original article that came along with the series and three pictures by photographer David Wojnarowicz who has done a shooting here five years before.
The New York City Downlow is “the world’s first travelling homo disco”, a mobile venue that seems to work like a soundsystem and is run by Block9, a set and environment design team from London. If I got this right, the whole thing started at the Glastonbury Festvial of Contemporary Performance Art in 2007 where the founders of NYC Downlow hat the idea of building up at replica of a bombed-out NYC tenement as a space for parties and all sorts of drag performances that were supposed to revive the spirit of the the disco culture of the late seventies (click here for a video from 2008 to get an impression). Since last year the team of the Downlow now also runs its own radio station The Downlow Radio which allows people to listen to and download a bunch of regularly updated and sometimes pretty amazing DJ sets. This month they are doing a special promotion for Valentines Day featuring sets by Tee Cardaci, Nacho, Horse Meat Disco, Filthy Luka and Schnezzy. Click here for the website.
