link of the current interview of FilmHighlights Magazine here: http://i.mixcloud.com/CBg1GD

WER'S GLAUBT WIRD SELIG

Had a delightful meeting with Andrew S. Blackley in the Tiergarten. Andrew is a young friend of Lia G. of Participant Inc. Gallery in New York. Of course any friend of the radiant and divine Miss Lia is a friend of mine. Andrew is a sweet and charming 26 year old and I took him on a little tour of the park and then the nearbye gayborhood of Schoeneberg. A delightful time was had by all. Andrew went to the Art Institute of Chicago where I will be visiting in the Spring of 2013. I haven’t been a visiting artist to the school since the mid 1990s so I am looking forward to making my return. Actually I haven’t been to Chicago since 2001 when I was on the Notorious C.H.O tour with Margaret Cho.

The sweet young art children of Invisible Exports Gallery in New York City are coming to Berlin in September to do a show at The Wye called Bloodlines. I will have some work in this show that opens on Sept 15th. I had some paintings in their show Notes on Notes on Camp last year and they sold quite a few of my paintings at that exhibition as well as at major art fairs. My other young child of high art Jonathan Berger is planning a very special exhibit with “The Doll” for next year but I am sworn to secrecy so I won’t say anything more about it, but its bound to be electric.

One of my juicy young artists from London’s Kings College where I taught a block seminar last year called Framing the Freakazoid with Jonathan Berger wrote this lovely review of the VHofKB show at Antony’s Meltdown. I think you will enjoy it.

http://graham-russell.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/the-voluptuous-horror-of-karen-black-at.html

WE THE LIVING

I am so tired of all this talk about Ayn Rand because of the new Republican Vice President nominee Paul Ryan----the tall square jawed tranny chaser that came on to me back in the late 1990s when I was making a visiting artist University performance in Milwaukee. The mainstream media has been trying to get me to comment about Mr. Ryan and have been badgering my web master trying to get ahold of me. I am not going to let myself be used by the media. Its funny how they send me emails saying they want to do a profile on my performance art career, but they are so not interested in my career just scandal fodder.

One of Tenderloin’s comrades in arms Andreas Stroiber is performing this Friday at Tannenbaum. Andreas is a cute, adoreable and very unique performer so please do yourself a favour and go and see him live. It will change your life. The info follows below:

Freitag gibt es Andreas Krach und seine Maschinen live zu sehen: Dubbig-lärmig im O Tannenbaum, Sonnenallee 27, um 21.30 Uhr. Im Anschluß: DJ Jerome & DJ Bankirai.

Und Samstag, ab 22 Uhr, mit Soul, Jazz, Funk und Discoplatten als DJ in der KIM Bar, Brunnenstraße 10.

Oh and here is the latest posting from Ernie Larsen who was just in Greece showing some films at some Anarchist Film Festival with his partner Sherry Milner. Ernie is an amazing writer, filmmaker and photographer. I wish I could post his fotographs as well because the text below refers to some things that he has photographed, but my blog posting skills are limited as I am a computer retard so that is why my blog remains olde school with just the text and nothing but the text, but I sure you can still follow what he is writing about. Enjoy.

Thessaloniki storefront: tautological graffito Taking nota ferry but a plane this time (mercifully), we returned from Crete to Thessaloniki a few hours before "It's the Political Economy, Stupid" opened at the Center for Contemporary Art, a government-supported museum which, as we were soon to discover, put together an impeccably-designed installation (mostly video projections) despite drastically reduced funding. Our friend N. was unable to accompany us to the port, where the museum occupies a renovated warehouse space: he was on overnight duty as part of a team of anarchists formed to protect immigrants against neo-nazi gang attack-an increasingly common occurrence. solidarity with immigrants a squat in Thessaloniki

At the airport we'd bought a good map of Greece, which would turn out to be very useful, a small Greek phrasebook which we never once consulted, and a small book of Greek jokes, none of them funny, nor identifiably Greek. However, our friend did tell us one anarchist joke. Two anarchists are sitting in a café in the Exarchia section of Athens. One says to the other:Let's go burn something down. The other answers: Great. Where and when? The first anarchist replies:Enough theory, already!

That night the museum director pointed out to us that very few, if any, Greek artists had so far ventured to take up representation of the crisis-or, as in our video,put the crisis in the now historical context of the December insurrection. She speculated that they were simply too close to it-- that it might take people like us who were equipped to see it from the outside in.

But later it occurred to me that it was precisely those artists who were closest to the everyday activities in social centers, in the streets, who participated in the immigrant hunger strikes, the self-organized parks and free medical clinics, who had produced the most visually engaged and engaging work. By this I mean the radical graphic artists directly involved in representing history as and before it happens (history in the present tense), through posters that publicized demonstrations, lectures, and festivals, as well as the abundant publication of books, manifestos,broadsides, journals, comics, etc.

in Thessaloniki... also in Thessaloniki collage from "Notes from the Steppe" Sherry's homage to the collage aboveThese artists (along with some graffiti artists) had at their fingertips available technical resources, a fully developed graphic language, political conviction, and the ability to get a poster, for example, out on the street, on virtually a moment's notice. Such an indissoluble ensemble of practices and resources, which typically abjure or ignore or collectivize authorship, amounts to an immanent critique of separation, a critique which tends to be minimized or pigeonholed after the fact (history in the past tense)-when the prospect of sudden radical change recedes for the time being and people are more or less forced to return to their customary roles. Though there are always a few who will never be reconciled.

Athens summer 2009

In August of 2009, we had photographed (tense past perfect history) in the streets of the Exarchia section of Athens, for our video, a number of posters-along with some graffiti. In the editing process we looked again and again at these images. As we thereby learned to see, the ephemeral works of these artists not only produced (and reproduced) many of the images that everybody still sees in the irreparably cracked rear-view mirror of memory but they continue to structure much of the visual representation of the ongoing crisis. Such images often frame and sometimes even displace memory-as we know from the graphic output of twentieth century revolutions (to begin with: Russian, Spanish, Cuban, May/June in France). However, only much later,when the heat of the moment passes, are they accorded aesthetic significance.Then they can safely be re-framed and displaced, their historical potential successfully fixed as art objects (commodities), which is to say, drained of their own specific and necessarily ephemeral powers of transformation. As should be obvious by now: these images get under our skin not in spite of the fact that they are ephemeral, of the moment-but precisely because they are Other people are more committed to the varieties of the religious experience of art(universality/immortality homogenizing history till it's as smooth as Greek yogurt) and/or to the necessarily abstracting varieties of exchange value and so they typically skip over, rudely delete, or simply flatten the flagrant grit of ephemera. And, if that doesn't do the job, there are the droves of popularizers who weep or sigh over the least idiosyncratic iconography-like that damned dove or that eternally clenched fist. We, on the other hand, can't help being drawn to the grit, to the more contradictory truth of friction.

DAFUER & DAGEGEN

With the end of Ramadan, the Jewish Muslim Daniel Hendrickson prepared a magnificent Cervical Cerviche Feast of the Magi that was downright delectable on all accounts. Not only the Mexican flavoured food but drink in the form of Tamarindo, and Horchata and the most scrumptious guacamole ever fashioned. The rest of the menu included various kinds of salsas: pico de gallo, ancho chili salsa, chipotle chili salsa, the ceviche came with homemade corn tortillas and a side of nopalitos. for desert there was prickly pear granita with melon and orange shortbread cookies.

The most shocking thing of the evening for the Muslim was the fact that almost all of his friends have decided to become tee-totalers en masse. There were 10 people at the dinner party and when he cleaned up in the morning, there were only 6 empty beer bottles!

Enjoying the gourmand delights, a radiantly tanned Arsenal Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus just back from a curator retreat in Massachusetts, Ulrich Ziemons being all handsome man from full head of thick curly hair to big barefeet and macho toes, the beautiful CHEAP collective fearless leader Susanne Sachsse who is about to start production on a new film, with her film historian beau Marc Siegel making everyone scream with Borscht Belt humour, the hot Gaysian academic Brigade, humpy Bolivian youthquaker Max Jorge Hinderer-Cruz and the delightful love sexyl Nanna Heidenreich.

Just heard that the first headlining female comic Phylis Diller died age 95. I adored the legendary Ms. Diller who I feel I grew up on watching her many appearances on TV in the 1960s and 1970s. The late great Ms. Diller and Joan Rivers are two of the most celebrated oldschool who are newschool female comiconsalias.

Spent a day in the Tiergarten being interviewed by Manuel Schubert of Filmhighlights Radio Magazine. Afterwards Manuel treated me to a late tasty breakfast at the Café am Neuen See. Later in the afternoon Manuel took me to see Steven Soderberg’s Magic Mike which is a most unusual film. Its obvious the director is smitten with his charismatic star Channing Tatum, who resembles a muscular jarhead and throughout the film is bathed in a golden light of desire. In some of Mr. Channings dance sequences he gives off the essence of the tragic mulatto, his physique is both top and bottom heavy and his thickneck asphalt cutiepieness is quite intriguing. I could see him developing into a good actor in the vein of a Rod Taylor or John Gavin. The British male ingénue Alex Pettyfer photographs nicely but has a bland screen presence. Matthew McConaughey as the burlesque impresario has the strangest role of them all, and the scene where he tutors young Mr. Pettyfer via a mock doggystyle fudgepack is downright creepy when it should be exhilarating. Mr. Soderberg has been working in Hollywood for way too long and seems to be dealing with issues via his filmmaking---I just hope crystal meth isn’t involved.