TIERLEXIKON

The 8th Anniversary of the Vagimule doll’s award winning performative film series Rising Stars, Fallings Stars at Arsenal Institut fur film und video kunst was thunderous with a gallant crowd of lovelies eager to see the gay shame of Louse Brooks starring in GW Pabst’s 1929 silent classique Diary of a Lost Girl which also features the legendaire lesbian firebrand Valeska Gert. Sticking around after the screening to enjoy vino, Polisch dainties and candy corn: Handsomemest man of all Europa Uli Ziemons of Forum Expanded filling in for Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Ms. Davis co-conspirator Daniel Hendrickson the Scandinavian Muzlim and special guest Eunice Martin who is the only person on the continent who can properly accompany Diary and fill out the drama with non linear musical flourishes. Eyeing each other with suspicion the folk singer Josh Ritter and big muscle tittied baby diaper of the Hidden Cameras Joel Gibb back in Berlin from Los Angeles where he was working with a black gospel choir with the handsome and lovesexy Polisch sculptor extroidinaire Przemek Pyszczek, Israeli artist Ann Oren, former prima ballerina and fabled beauty Trixie Schoenherr aka Beatrice Cordua who has moved from the Schiller kiez of Neu Koelln for new digs in KreuzKoelln along with her filmmaker husb Ludwig “Peter” Schoenherr. Escorting Trixie was Johannes Mueller the theatre director of the much discussed new production of Salome at the Sophiensaele, the odd pair of American humourist Colin Jost with the Noble Group’s CEO Yusuf Allreza, handsome bubble butt choreographer Assaf Hochman who will be traveling to the US with his juicy greek passiv tyro filmmaking lover Lil Alex Telemachos to work on a project with Catherine Sullivan, fearless leader of kollectiv CHEAP Susanne Sachsse getting ready for New York and The Magic Flute with her hunky beau the debonair film scholar Marcuse Siegelstein of the Goethe Universitaet plus an assortment of young cute University students including a bevy of stylish kids new to Berlin from Russia.
Was invited to a lovely formal dinner party for Bruce “Judy”LaBruce who is in Berlin for an entire month working on an assortment of new projects. Judyline was looking pert and suave as she has been doing yoga hyper religiously and has retained her former modern dancer body from the 1980s and 90s. The movie making lady auteur is still 100% Judy Judy Judy. Having a young Afro Cuban husband with a 14 inch penis also helps in keeping Ms. Judy LaBruce’s spirits aces high!
My former Malmo Art Akademy Norweigan student the beautiful Stine Omar of the popular indie synthe band Easter along with her gorgeous German lover Max Boss the hier apparant to the multimillion dollar Hugo Boss clothing empire and Charlie Roberts will be presenting the latest video art episode of their long running series Sadness is an Evil Gas Inside of Me Nov 4th 7pm at Galerie Koal Leipzeger Strasse 47in Stadtmitte. The Vagimula contributed to the narration vocals as this version of the serial was filmed on location in Los Angeles while Easter was touring North and South Amerikkka.

Das Leben Studieren Die Welt Erforschen

The poor Vagimule doll has been sidetracked by an attack of gout which couldn’t have come at a worse time as she is in a frenzy getting ready to assault the US for a month of appearances is her birth country including the installation of The Magic Flute and her solo offering Come On Daughter Save Me at Invisible-Exports.  Sunday is the 8^th year anniversary of Rising Stars, Falling Stars at Arsenal Institute fur film und Video Kunst so come on down to see a rare screening of G.W. Pabst Diary of a Lost Girl starring Louise Brooks with a rollicking wine reception after the screening.  Below is the link to the radio broadcast with la diva and Manuel “Vicki Baum” Schubert of the Taz.

 http://bit.ly/1LHIrKx

Here is the latest cute missive from that extroidinaire young artiste Elly Clark:

Camden Encounters & Sergina: Memories, Collaboration & Drag

This year I have focussed on two projects: Camden Encounters, a 12-month long commission from Camden Council in celebration of 50 years since the formation of the Borough in its current form, and #Sergina, a drag queen character I have developed over the past few years, who sings and performs songs about love, sex and cell phones - alone and with others.

Whilst Camden Encounters involves very physical interactions and negotiations with the city in order to gather people's 'Sticky Memories' from nooks and crannies of Camden through a series of face-to-face encounters at the sites of these memories, Sergina's collaborations tend to happen mostly online. For my upcoming multi-performer, multi-location performance entitled Sergina's Stimulatingly Sexy Simultaneous Simulation of Herself, which is taking place on two consecutive days in November, (at the opening of RIGHT HERE/RIGHT NOW at The Lowry on 11th and at SHOUT festival in Birmingham on 12th,) I have the great honour (and pleasure) to work with an array of massively brilliant people in a variety of cities, without whom this performance would not be possible.

Performers for Sergina's Sexy.. include Liz Rosenfeld (Berlin), Kate Spence (Birmingham), Raul de Nieves (Brooklyn), Vladimir Bjelicic (Belgrade). Plus I have Roseanna Velin doing makeup, Patricia Muriale on costumes and Kanchi Wichmann and Trevor Pitt are both helping to lick songs into shape. 

From The Lowry on 11th November the performance will be live streamed via This is Tomorrow, so you have the chance to watch it on a screen near you, from wherever.

For Camden Encounters, the end destination is the official Camden50 website, to which I am uploading the edited interviews one-by-one. Last month I gave a live presentation of the project at The Roundhouse, along with three of my participants: Ruth Ingram, Hannah Morris, Ubah Egal and Gill Watson (going online next week!). On 30th November the commission will be brought to a close with a public presentation in Camden Town Hall.

Other news includes the (first ever cinema) screening of 3 Sergina films at the Scottish Queer International Film Festival (#SQIFF2015) in Glasgow next weekend, as part of a shorts programme called 'Anxiety Sucks.' And, for those in Berlin, I'm doing a (solo) performance on 25th October, in Bethanien, at the Finissage of 25 Karat by this year's Goldrausch Künstlerinnen programme participants.

More info about dates & places of all these is below.

Thanks for reading and I hope to see you at one event or the other before long!

Best wishes,

Elly

--
ellyclarke.com / georgerichmondproject.com / camden50.co.uk / 
@elly_clarke / #Sergina

Jauch Fuert 50-cent-Frage Ein

The Vagimule doll is overwhelmed with sadness. I don’t know exactlyhow to write about the recent passing of Mrs. Michael Glass in Los Angeles. Jeffreyland Hilbert his good friend and guardian angel has taken great care of him in the last decade. Mrs. Glass had been in bad health for a very long time having suffered several strokes and heart attacks even though he was quite young being only middle aged in his mid 50s. His death is one of those Los Angeles tragedies that could have easily befallen me had I stayed in the southland.

How or why I started calling Michael Glass Mrs Glass is unclear to me now. It just seemed to fit his personality, and he didn’t mind and somehow the nickname of Mrs. Glass just stuck and everyone started calling him that which is the usual case that tends to happen when I re-name a person. My relationship with Mrs. Glass is unusual in that I had been aware of him for many years in the peripherals of the punk and post punk scene but we didn’t become close friends until the late 1980s during the explosion of the queer zine movement when he was working at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Being that there are few African Americans in the punk and post punk scene we had of course noticed each other, but I believe we were both suspicious and gave each other a bit of shade like saying , “who does she think she is” . . . I first was aware of Mrs. Glass in the early 1980s as a figure around Exene Cervenka of the punk band X. At that time I figured that Mrs. Glass was most likely a snow queen and wouldnt appreciate seeing another black person around who could possibly snatch the white dick out of her mouth. Through mutual friends Mrs. Glass actually got a hold of my telephone number when I was running my home art space the Hag Gallery on the Sunset Strip and called me and made an appointment to view the artwork on display. It was very sweet of her to use that as an excuse to get to know me better, and we wound up spending hours chatting away about innumerable subjects. Mrs. Glass had a great fashion sense and dressed very much like a member of a black soul group from the early 1960s with her hammer shaped curvatis haircut, Vneck sweater shirts and peg leg gabardine pants. Mrs. Glass was also an impressive DJ with great taste in music and was the ultimate black intellectual with a mind as sharp as James Baldwin. Mrs. Glass was a major force in the success of Amok Books and their Dispatch series as well as editor of some of their most inspiring and influential books galvanizing the apocalypse culture movement. Not only that but Mrs. Glass was a genius contemporary artist who collaborated on several art photography projects with his Cal Ats colleague Nancy Barton. Because Mrs. Glass wasn’t a careerist he didn’t become an art star but he should have been one in a more just world. Mrs. Glass grew up in the same part of Watts that my family lived in when they first came to Los Angeles during the great migration, so we had oodles in common. His father was a Baptiste preacher and I believe Mrs. Glass is survived by an estranged brother. He told me more about his family but those facts have somehow vanished in my memory banks. Now of course I wish I had written some of it down as he was a fascinating character. Mrs. Glass remains an enigma and a bit of a mysterious figure to many. Like many blacks with roots in the American south he was deep down a very private figurine. I will always remember seeing him dance along with Nancy Barton and some other scenesters in a Robert Alton style production number at one of Jack Zinder’s tiki style underground nightclubs in the mid 1980s. He really had some mad terpsichorean skills. When he was the manager of the Amok Bookstore location on Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz Village he would grandly hold court with a myriad of visitors seeking audience with him. Included in this informal salon was writer Dennis Cooper who lived around the corner and a teenage Leonardo DiCaprio who lived on the same street as Mr. Cooper. Mrs. Glass was also a fantastic country comfort food chef and would make the most divoon Thanksgiving and Christmas Turkey I’ve ever eaten with exquisite mashed potatoes, dressing and stuffing, (African American Style)and his sweet potato pie was religious in its ecstatic delight. When I produced the 3rd Annual Judy Garland Parade & Festival on the one block street in WeHo Melrose Place Mrs. Glass created an incredible float featuring Uppers and Downers medication bottles prescribed to Miss Garland aka Bruce “Judy” LaBruce by her doctors Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer. What a hoot that was.

Went to Haus Der Kulturen der Welt or the Pregnant Oyster in the Tiergarten to see fearless leader of CHEAP kollectiv Susanne Sachsse perform in the lecture performance by Judith Raum, Am of the Opinion Strike is Useful for the festival 100 Years of Now. I found the material concerning Deutsches Bank and the Anatolian Railway timely, but I felt it would have come across with a little more oomph if there had been a soundscape accompanying the nice reading of the text material especially if you are utilizing the supreme talents of someone with such perfect diction as La Sachsse---she isn’t a classically trained actress for nothing. With a sound carpet functioning as another character it would have enhanced things but of course the artiste Frau Raum who has a background in philosophy, art history and psychoanalysis choose the typical tuetonic approach where kunst with music is felt to diminish the seriousness of the text.

The opening lecture called Europe, Racialization, Coloniality: The Problem of the Present for Future Scenarios by the Slovinian philosopher Marina Grzinic was quite brilliant. Ms. Grzinic has a wonderful throaty voice that made her sound like Medea crossed with a lesbian vampire of Sodom. I am all wrapped up in her terms and pronouncements :

the necropolitical injunction of neoliberal global capitalism is “Still too human”,

One is the category which I will name biopolitical citizenship (the EU “natural” nation-State citizens)

Deading life is a procedure employed to supress, reduce,diminish,impoverish, ruin life, but it is not death.

Its so funny whenever I go to any big art event in Berlin things here always feel a bit forced and even when the ideas behind the festival are important and pivitol the people attending all seem to be going through the motions and are somehow still disconnected and joyless. Maybe its because there isn’t a real audience here but just middle class industry professionals as spectator mixed with academics and students.

Auf Mutti Folgt Gutti

Rising Stars, Falling Stars last Sunday evening was very sex majikal as we screened the Jonathan Demme concert film Stop Making Sense that features The Talking Heads. Lots of internationally celebrated celebutants in the audience including UC Riverside scholar extroidinaire Dr. Jennifer Doyle with gorgeous surfer bodied Catalan multimedia artist and experimental filmmaker Adria’ Julia’ who is in Berlin till the end of the year on a prestigious residency at the American Academy in Wannsee. Adria’ use to live in Berlin in the 1990s but now calls my old hometown of Los Angeles his numero uno. Chatting vigorously with the tight bodied Senor Julia’ the divine Arsenal Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus back from her world travels building artistic bridges,graphic designer Christophe Holzky, German TV star with the popular crime drama Tatort, and living legend Zazi de Paris looking fabulously young and slinky, supermodel Karli Kloss without her BFF Taylor Swift,  my former students now turned junior art schtars Acme Singt, Christophe DeRohan Chabot, Scandinavian Muzlim jihadist Daniel Hendrickson playing an experimental version of “Take Me To the River” on klavier,Uli Ziemons and his lady faire the ginger haired curator Anja Lueckenkemper, projectionist Anselm Heller, Forum Expanded lesbiana Israeli crew leader Noam Gorbat and her exceptional gal posse that includes Cat Barich noted cat & dog whisperer, with music genius girlfriend Liane Hall,the noted songstress Fine Freiberg and Dalia Neis filmmaker, artist and musicologist.

Was treated to a hearty breakfast Sunday morning at the Schwartzer Café on Kant Strasse by the wonderful Anna Muelter formerly of Hebbel am Ufer now a senior curator at Sophiensaaler. Got a chance to see some world class big leggy and muscle thighed runners after breaky doing their thing at the Berlin Marathon and it was the perfect day for a jaunt with clear blue Bing Crosby Irving Berlin skies.

Along with fearless leader Susanne Sachsse and Marcuse Siegelstein the lady Vagimule ventured to the pretty East German city of Leipzig to catch a performance by Jamie Stewart and his band Xiu Xiu doing their take on the Twin Peaks score of David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. Susi borrowed the luxurious automobile of Yael Bartana and off we went for a day and night trip. Thank goodness Leipzig is only about 2 hours away from Berlin as I don’t like being in a car for a long period of time. The music venue called the Nato was perfect for the sublime and masterfull sounds of Mr. Stewart and his deliciously sexy and talented female musical comrades. Jamie is a true genius freakazoid so of course we are naturally born to an alliance.

I missed Jamie’s last performance in Berlin as it was at the same time I was doing Rising Stars, Falling Stars. Jamie is collaborating with Susi and I on our performative installation of the Magic Flute in New York City this Fall creating the musical score. It was divoon to get to see Jamie perform again as the last time was when he was quite young on the Sunday afternoon stage of my punk rock beer bust Club Sucker at the Garage in Silverlake when he was in the bands Ibopa and Ten the Swear Jar.