Saturday, December 19, 2020

TOTE HOSE

Berlin is in the midst of the second Pandora Pandemic lockdown where they actually cancelled Christmas. Smart move. No one needs those icky Christmas markets or that nasty warm gluhwein or mulled wine. Germany is a secular country anyway and just pays lip service to the Catholics and Evangelisches who still hold sway over the country because of tradition. The religiousity is stronger in Southern Germany. 

You know things were getting deep when Chancellor Angela "with a hard G'" Merkel got all emotional on national television. I don't have any attachment to the adopted Pagan holiday of Christmas. I didn't grow up celebrating Christmas, Easter or any holidays for that matter, and I don't celebrate birthdays either as my mother became taken with the Jehovah's Witness sect back in the mid 1950s though as a natural born rebel she wasn't consistent in following the Witnesses dogma. I've only had a birthday cake twice in my life.  The first was given to me by Robert Lopez aka: El Vez, the Mexican Elvis in the mid 1990's and the second by my gorgeous Berlin gallerist Isabella Bortolozzi early this year. 

I am so glad I never got taken in by the Christmas consumerism scam. I didn't see the Merkel broadcast as I don't have a TV set, but i certainly heard about it. 

Mother Nature has finally spoken and she says that the next serious pandemic will be an extraterrestrial virus emanating from the extremely dry and rank pussy of one offensive elderly lady known as Vaginal Davis Jr.

Which reminds me of Dirk Jager the Titan Media German porn studlet with the penis head shaped like the tip of a Concord Jet. The Belgian artist Christophe Chemin use to be buds with Mr. Jager who is very tiny but extremely muscular in that way that all blue movie kingpins adopt via steroid rage. Herr Jager is a classically handsome man, and I believe is most likely retired from the video screen, as he is a middle aged man now.  I'll always remember back in 2007 at the premiere party at the WAU Cafe for  CHEAP Blacky at HAU 2 that Dirk Jager made a beeline for Assaf Hochman the humpy dark haired Israeli dancer whose very voluptuous tight tuche was displayed quite provocatively on the stage. The two dimunitive men made a date, but discovered they were both Greek active and Assaf wouldn't even let poor Dirk  get a whiff of lest allow him the privilege of devouring his tasty treat garden salad.

Dirk Jager and the might famed Concord shaped appendage.



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My incredibly talented ex-student Maria Norrman is the rococo voice of her generation. Maria was one of my top students from my 2010 seminar at Lund University's Malmö Art Academy in Sweden.  Her thrilling drag persona Millennium Star  has been popping up all over Scandia.  The delightfully soft spoken Ms. Norrman is as beautiful on the inside as she is outside and super seven hundred prolific. You will be hearing a lot about her in the coming months. Mark my Jack Smithian flaming verbiage.

Check out her upcoming events here:

PORTALS
An online event of performance art to camera.
24 December 2020 – 1 January 2021

Eleanor Lawler (IRL) Rae Goodwin (USA), Maria Norrman (SWE), Quilla Constance (UK), Franics Fay (IRL), Katherine Nolan (IRL) John Freeman (USA)

To be viewed on the social media pages of:
Livestock Live Art and MART Gallery and Studios, Dublin, Ireland
https://www.facebook.com/Mart.Gallery.Studios
http://livestock-art.com/

Livestock invites you to pass through Portals, an on-line event of performance art to camera.

It seems like we are existing betwixt and between a past that is clearly gone and a future that is still uncertain.The current crisis is likely to prolong this undecided state for many of us. While frustrating at times, this inbetweenness also has potential as a moment in which we can imagine change. As Bill Bridges has written in Transitions, “We need not feel defensive about this apparently unproductive time-out at turning points in our lives … In the apparently aimless activity of our time alone, we are doing important inner business.”

This event presents responses from Irish and International artists that seek to reimagine the covid moment as a portal to something new. They will be screened online to lead us out of 2020 and into the new year that awaits.

Maria Norrmans drag persona Millennium Star embodies the current state of in-between, manifesting as a three headed triple deity figure. Millennium Star looks into the camera, with an ambiguous gaze. Their facial expressions and eye movements deal with the current state of our time, numbness, content, bored, forward gazing all at the same time.

Maria Norrman (b. 1987 in Sweden, lives and works in Malmö, Sweden) is an artist, curator and drag performer (Millennium Star.) Norrmans work explores our fantasies and images regarding history, gender and sexuality. Her main mediums are video and photography in combination with costume making and clothing, performance and installation.

www.marianorrman.net
Instagram: c.maria.norrman

Upcoming in 2021:

April
Jane Avril
Gallery Ping-Pong, Malmö, Sweden

A project 17 years in the making will be exhibited for the first time at Gallery Ping-Pong in April. Jane Avril is a project about my relation to French dance performer Jane Avril (1868-1943) who was a friend of the artist Toulouse-Lautrec. From the very first time I saw images and photos of her in 2003, I’ve felt connected to her personality and artistic expression.
The exhibition will include photographs, video, text and installations.

TBA
Drag Queen Story Hour

Millennium Star has been invited by the grand dames of Malmöian storytelling, Lady Busty and Miss Shameless, to read norm creative stories for children with them. Miss Rona, the virus on everyone's lips, will decide when this can be possible.

TBA
Residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris

Miss Rona (the covid-19 virus) strikes yet again - who knows when I can make this residency happen, but at least it's decided and there to grab once one can travel and move safely again.

Maria Norrman is Millennium Star



Thom of Elfland

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

DAS LICHT FLUTET DEM GIEBELFELD ÜBER DER TÜR

Billy Miller of Straight to Hell Magazine, also known as the Manhattan Review of Unnatural Acts, is one of the most fascinating people in the known world. Billy and I go way back and I absolutely adore him. He is 63 years old now and is still a major hotnik and boychild of the promised land. In his radiant youth he was a prized possession of the older men lucky enough to drink from his goldenen cupeth. He was heralded as one of the most coveted teenage concubines of the upper mid west during the 1970s. No one makes me howl louder and longer then Mr. Billy Miller. Billy is a guaranteed laugh riot who will leave you in veratible stitches bended in half. He's also a walking Encyclopedia Brown of arcane facts and figures. Only recently have we been shooting the proverbial breeze regularly on the telephone. Not many people like to chit chat on the phone these days. Those I gab with frequently are my longtime sister girlfriend Glen Meadmore aka: Penny Feathers of the Hot Horny and Born Again Kuntry Band, Karen Maria Jose Hector Martinez the Azteca Warrior top supporter of the Malibu Colony Surfer Community and Daniel Hendrickson, the Jewish Muzlim of Kollektiv CHEAP who also lives in Berlin. My infrequent klatch pals are my ex student Atte Pentinen the Finish young artist who was in my performance art seminar at the Kunst Universität Linz and Michele "Meesh" Mills the three time Emmy Award winning reality TV producer with RuPaul's Drag Strip. Meesh has such a busy insanely crazed schedule its rare that we get to talk, but when we do its very juicy and completely epic. Meesh use to be one of my rotating guardians of the gate at my performance art speakeasy Brickstops at the Parlour Club 2002-05 in the Russian Quartier of Hollywood. Meesh also was in Cholita, the Female Menudo and designed costumes, did makeup and helped edit a lot of my many video film projects from the last century. Now that Michele has broken into the industrial entertainment complex a lot of people try to hit her up for contacts and schmoozing. Of course its people who would have never given her the time of day in her pre TV success days. Well thats the very nature of the showbiz hactory eh?

But getting back to little Billy Miller, the other evening he calls me out of the blue and I start boring him with details about all my doctor appointments with rheuma specialists and orthopaedics and what not when Billy goes on about some gay bars in Detroit. One place in particular was a pub that was staffed by elderly women that was both terribly formal and downright sleezy if there could be such a mix. Half of the male clientele were middle aged men, the rest randy cornfed teenage boys. I can't go into specifics as its enough to make a jaded Madam blush suppositories, and I don't want to be accused of corrupting anyone's morals. Billy and his doctor husband are moving from New York to a small college town in Pennsylvania, but something tells me that Billy will find some scandalous adventures in his new hamlet home.
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Karen Maria Jose Hector Martinez the Azteca Warrior and great lover of Pepperdine Water Polo Team


Judy LaBruce of Toronto Canada

The genius genius of Kembra

Daytime Glamour






This note I just received from Judy LaBruce the Canadian auteur and Supreme Southern Death Cultist:

Hey Kids!! Tis the Season!!! My new "Death Book" from Baron Books makes the perfect holiday gift! Because nothing says Christmas like death!! Or just add it to your book collection! Destined to become a collector's item! Now shipping!!! Click below and order today!!! xxx BLAB

DEATH BOOK | baron-magazine
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Oh and this from the beauteous Lia Gangitano and her art gang at Participant Inc. in New York City

Untitled (Unintelligible ██████ ██████)
Organized by Serubiri Moses
Performed by Raymond Pinto

Friday, December 18, 2020, 7pm EST
participantafterdark.art
This performance will include open captioning

Untitled (Unintelligible ██████ ██████) combines research and performance—specifically drawing from archives and movement study—to enact processes of memory and commemoration around Black and sexually dissident experiences, past and present. The project takes two major figures, Assotto Saint (born Les Cayes, Haiti, 1957—died, New York, US, 1994) and Rotimi Fani-Kayode (born Nigeria 1955—died London, UK, 1989) as a starting point, and seeks to present an alternative art, literature, and performance history. The project is organized by Serubiri Moses and performed by Raymond Pinto, and includes research by both.

Assotto Saint and Rotimi Fani-Kayode were friends. They met in New York in the early 1980s. They exchanged letters, which have been archived at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. We know that Fani-Kayode photographed Saint, and that Saint went to London to perform an experimental theater work. Their friendship conjures meanings of solidarity across the Atlantic. The emphasis on Haitian Vodou, and Ifa Divination in each of their practices alerts us to their quotidian practice and wish for survival.

Research for this project, which started in 2019, primarily took place in New York, through the archives at the Schomburg Center, and through various libraries in the city such as the Library for the Performing Arts. It also included consultation with primary texts such as Saint's collection of poems Stations (1989) and Fani-Kayode's book of photographs Black Male/White Male (1988). The movement study was based on consultations with primary sources such as Dances of Haiti by Katherine Dunham, among others. Research on diasporic religion and sexuality included: Roberto Strongman's Queering Black Atlantic Religions (2019).

Specific figures of the 1980s gay and lesbian movement in New York have been elided by various historiographies of the time period. This alerts us to the necessity of commemoration in the present. However, a major question that is asked by South African art historian Ashraf Jamal is, "But, how to commemorate?" Avoiding a general commemoration of the ‘80s gay and lesbian movement with its official histories, the project pursues an artistic reflection rooted in contemporary art practices, establishing a space for memory. It aims at highlighting Saint and Fani-Kayode’s distinct approaches to notions of Black diasporic spirituality as well as African spirituality in relation to sexual dissidence. It also aims at enacting the illegible and the non-linear.

Untitled (Unintelligible ██████ ██████) follows the online event, Shrine: DJ Set, Poetry Reading, and Public Discussion, held in July 2020, which brought together curators and artists to celebrate Saint and Fani-Kayode. The speakers included: Raymond Pinto, Pamela Sneed, Jaime Shearn Coan, and Kojo Abudu, and the event was moderated by Serubiri Moses.

PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK is a virtual performance, screening, and event space launched by PARTICIPANT INC in October 2020. The site hosts artist projects commissioned specifically for the AFTER DARK web platform and remote viewing. PARTICIPANT invited artist Glen Fogel to design and develop AFTER DARK. Artists will work with Fogel through the Fall/Spring 2020-21 season, inhabiting the site and fully modifying it for their projects' specific needs. AFTER DARK is conceived of as a blank slate, removing as much institutional framework as possible. The site will only present current projects, and will often go ’dark’ in between events.

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That other woman of New York actresstocracy Kembra Pfahler is in the midst of some magnificent rumblings with her London Gallery Emalin. Kembra and I met awhile back online via some weirdo brainwaves that resulted in an unhinged Bitchcraft conversation.

https://emalin.co.uk/stories/story/kembra-pfahler-the-show-must-not-go-on










Sunday, December 13, 2020

MILKING TAG BERLIN GEILEN TYPEN DAS SPERMA RAUSG




Received a delicious packet from New York based writer and bon vivant Max Steele. Mr. Steele is a young, lean sex machine of a radiant youthquaker who I first met when he appeared on my talkshow/installation Vaginal Davis is Speaking From the Diaphragm back in 2010 at PS122 in Manhattan. Max and I were able to hang out a few times when he was visiting Berlin and he is mega charming and an utter delight. So excited to receive his latest chapbook of poetry called Epsilon on one side and Valence on the other. Max has a very unique way of expressing himself and I expect big things from him.

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This just in from Sherry Milner and Ernie Larson two of the world's most enigmatic artists:

FILM AT REDCAT PRESENT

_____Mon Dec 14 | 8:00 PM |
_____ONLINE
_____Jack H. Skirball Series
_____$10 [members $8]
_____To get tickets, visit: The Clamor of the Excluded

The Clamor of the Excluded
Seven films, six decades, seven countries
Voices and visions of peoples on the edge and over the edge

Co-curated by Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen

Starting with a first presentation at the 2008 Oberhausen Film Festival, Sherry Millner and Ernest Larsen—artists, filmmakers, writers, educators, troublemakers—have curated and exhibited multiple programs of short films that critically and/or actively represent resistance to power all over the world. Carried out over decades as the project Disruptive Film, the duo’s groundbreaking research demonstrates not only the variety of everyday resistance strategies, but also a surprising diversity of experimental approaches to short-form nonfiction media. Their second selection for REDCAT (since their presentation in 2016) includes Crowded by Alonzo Crawford (1978), shot in a Baltimore prison, Xochimilco 1914 by Los Viumasters (2010) from Mexico, Crude Living on Oil in Syria by Rozh Ahmad (2014), and their own How Do Animals and Plants Live? (2020) shot in a destroyed migrant squat in Greece.

In person: co-curators Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen

“Demonstrates the remarkable power of film to engage, move, provoke and contend.” - Bill Nichols

“One of the most notable aspects of the series is that it refreshingly views political documentary and experimental films as located on the same continuum.” - Chris Robé, Pop Matters

“A visual demonstration of the powers of film. Such a collection of rare and precious items from many times, places and conflict situations, not only provides a strong perspective about film history, but also transmits to us the practical energy to struggle with our present injustices.” - Nicole Brenez

“The love of cinema also means knowing what to do with images that are really missing.” - Serge Daney

Program

_____Alonzo Crawford: Crowded
_____1978, 10 min, USA

When the inmates of the grotesquely overcrowded Baltimore City Jail sued the city and state, African-American director Alonzo Crawford, on a budget of $400, documented conditions inside - and on the strength of that unyieldingly attentive visual evidence, the prisoners won.

_____Aryan Kaganof: Threnody for the Victims of Marikana
_____2014, 27 min, South Africa

On August 16, 2012 the South African Police opened fire on a crowd of striking platinum workers, killing 34 and injuring 78. This three-part film uses symphonic and other music, found footage, theoretical analysis, and irony to arrive at a new understanding, both philosophical and visceral, of how the massacre could have happened - under a government ruled by the once-revolutionary ANC.

_____Millner & Larsen: How Do Animals and Plants Live?
_____2020, 29 min, USA

While inquiring into the forcible eviction and immediate demolition of the self-organized anarchist-supported migrant squat Orfanotrofeio in Thessaloniki, Greece, in July 2016, this experimental video essay extrapolates on the proposition that “no one is illegal” in the renewed if fragile context of the common.

_____Rozh Ahmad: Crude Living on Oil in Syria
_____2014, 20 min, Syria

The journalist Rozh Ahmad - at a ramshackle roadside refinery - relentlessly portrays the terrifying despoliation of a village, a people, and a landscape all at once, caught in the pincers of an endless war.

_____Kamran Shirdel: Tehran is the Capital of Iran
_____1966, 17.40 min, Iran

This film, censored even before it was completed, sets affecting, often harrowing images of the discarded urban poor against recitations of official reports and schoolbooks. Shirdel’s searing vision was undoubtedly seasoned by study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. At considerable cost to his career, he inaugurated an Iranian version of neo-realism - a take-no-prisoners style of direction.

_____Zelimir Zilnik: Black Film
_____1971, 14 min, Yugoslavia

In a last-ditch gamble to “solve the homeless problem” in the workers’ state of Yugoslavia, the filmmaker invites six homeless men (ignored by the “socialist” government) into his own apartment … And lives to tell the tale.

_____Los Viumasters: Xochimilco 1914
_____2010, 4.5 min, Mexico

On the morning of December 4th, 1914, Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata met for the first time. An original stenographic record of their conversation, just hours before they took control of Mexico City, exists. A mere century later, this playful film animates the words of these revolutionary heroes and their historic repercussions.

The Filmmakers

Rozh Ahmad is a freelance journalist and videographer who reports on the Kurdish inhabited regions of Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Syria. Based in Paris, he was educated in England and has roots in Iraq’s Kurdish region.

Based in Baltimore, Alonzo Crawford, an avid proponent of the short documentary, co-founded and designed the graduate film program at Howard University. His other films include Gila Monster(2007), Sleep to Dream (2014), and The Making of Outrage (2016). The latter explores the tumultuous impact within the black community in Baltimore of the April 2015 death of young Freddie Gray while being transported in a police van. 

A poet, novelist, and visual artist, as well as a prolific filmmaker, Aryan Kaganof made the first feature film shot entirely on mobile phones, SMS Sugar Man in 2007. He also founded the music research project, The African Noise Foundation.

Based in Mexico City, the animation collective Los Viumasters has produced clips and videos for rock groups, documentaries and fiction films since 2009. Xochimilco 1914 won the Best Mexican Animated Short Film Award at the 13th Guanajuato International Film Festival.

A great pioneer of Iranian cinema, Kamran Shirdel, born in 1939, is also the founder and director of the Kish International Documentary Film Festival.

Based in Novi Sad, Serbia, an innovator of hybrid cinematic forms. particularly the docudrama, Zelimir Zilnik is among the most important of the politically engaged filmmakers in Europe. He initially gained fame first within the Yugoslavian Black New Wave of the 1960s and has made dozens of films and television programs during his long career.

Note From the Curators

We have been incubating this collection of short films for decades. We saw a few of them as far back as the late 1960s. They were projected on the walls of lofts or in funky theaters on the Lower East Side of New York City. The audiences were made up of hippies, impatient radicals, artists, and troublemakers—people who, like us, believed they were going to change the world. So the collection of films we are in the process of assembling is the distillation of our lifelong engagement with the intersection between the stirring histories of struggles for freedom across the globe and the wide-ranging, often surprising, history of short-form experimental non-fiction media… an engagement both passionate and critical.

These films make propositions – or “escape routes” – from exhausted classical documentary forms. They each employ critical interventions intended to contest, resist, or imaginatively overturn repressive conditions, stale culture, the violence of the state, patriarchy, racism, the rule of global capital.

We are aiming at a gradual construction of an alternative history – a history that has at times been blocked, repressed, censored or hijacked – of short-form radical experimental non-fiction media, from 1914 up to the present. The films that we selected address radical potentiality. They ask and often answer the complex question of how political resistance can be articulated in forms that are not only appositely representative of resistance but that also embody that shape-shifting force in their own diverse historical moments and contradictions.

Today or tomorrow any and all of us are very likely to be caught up in the crossfire of our era’s global upheavals and sudden revolts. The films shown tonight offer precise and often deeply affecting visions that evoke previously underexplored potential for common understanding of these unending crises.

According to the French critic and filmmaker Jean-Louis Comolli: “Defeating or overcoming the existing order of things requires the invention of forms that are different to those serving to repress our consciousness and our movements.” The requirement to which Comolli refers should, we feel, encompass the invention of forms of life, of politics, and aesthetic forms, as an intentional project that produces the conditions through which such revolutionary change could begin to be achieved. And the invention of such forms is always experimental.

Our search for these little-known and under-valued films continues… We hope that our archeological effort, which often meant dusting off, translating, and subtitling uniquely moving films never before seen by English-speaking audiences, will prove to be as much a discovery for the spectators as they have been for us.

The Curators

Sherry Millner and Ernie Larsen collaborate on film, video, photo-text, book, curatorial and other research projects. Co-creators of the collaborative video project State of Emergency (involving 20 artists), they have also produced several situationist films, two anti-documentaries redefining criminality, and a series of semi-
autobiographical videos focusing on authoritarian structures indispensable to capital.

In 2008, at the Oberhausen Film Festival, they co-curated Border-Crossers and Trouble-Makers, ten programs that aimed to rewrite the conventional history of experimental political media. They co-curated Disruptive Film: Everyday Resistance to Power, two DVD volumes of political/experimental short-form films and videos, for Facets Media. Their photo-text projects on Vietnam and on Greece have been published in Rethinking Marxism and online in Social Textand in e-flux conversations. Their collaborative book, Capital’s Greek Cage (Autonomedia), explores the immiseration of the Greek population by the EU and the related growth of fascism.
Millner produces installations, such as The Domestic Boobytrap, which exploits U.S. army manuals to demonstrate the radical instability of domestic space, and many photomontage series, currently including No Respirator Included. Larsen writes fiction and media criticism. His most recent book The Trial Before The Trial, an account of his experiences on a Manhattan grand jury, is available from Autonomedia Press.

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My West Coast gallerist Adams & Ollman are representing a new artist that you should check out:


NOW REPRESENTING
JESSICA JACKSON HUTCHINS

Adams and Ollman is proud to announce the representation of Jessica Jackson Hutchins. Well-known for her sculptures that often situate ceramic forms and vessels on found and dissected domestic objects such as a table, piano, sofa, or cushion, Jessica Jackson Hutchins (b. 1971 in Chicago, Illinois; lives and works in Portland, Oregon) continues to explore and push materials, media, and meaning. Composed of an array of everyday objects, some found, some personal, the artist’s works are accumulations of quotidian life and mundane rituals transformed into reverential objects that are as idiosyncratic as they are familiar. The artist's ongoing engagement with materials and forms is tactile and intimate. Through touch and accretion, Hutchins celebrates the meaning and emotion of relationships, time, and language.

Hutchins has recently had solo exhibitions at Columbus College of Art and Design in Columbus, OH (2016); the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum (2014); the Hepworth Wakefield Museum (2013); the Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, MI (2013); and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA (2011). Significant group exhibitions include Makeshift at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, where Hutchins first premiered her performance work; the 55th Venice Biennale, The Encyclopedic Palace (2013); and The Whitney Biennial (2010). Her work is included in the following public collections: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Margulies Collection, Miami; and the Portland Art Museum, Portland. Hutchins holds a BA in Art History from Oberlin College and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Adams and Ollman will co-represent the artist with Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen. An exhibition with the artist is scheduled at Adams and Ollman for Fall 2021.






The muse of CHEAP Kollektiv, the wise and beautiful Miss Hedy Lamarr








I am crazy about the late actress/singer and Disney Studios legend Annette Funicello. I am also a huge fanatic of Tim Considine and Tommy Kirk who were also part of the Disney cosmos of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Considine went on to star in the TV sitcom My Three Sons while poor Tommy Kirk who was the most gifted as a young actor faltered in Hollywood after being caught engaging in homosexuality and being blacklisted. He later became a regular Jo owning a business and was much happier because of it.