AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FICKEN

Had a wonderful time in Frankfurt am Main teaching an intense workshop at the Goethe Universität. I was expecting no more then 15 students to sign up for my course but over 30 did and there was actually quite a heavy retention. Usually after the first day of class I lose quite a bit of students who realize my teaching methods are just too unorthodox for them, but that didn’t happen this time. Of the 35 or so who signed up I only lost two. Marcuse Siegel the Film Historian who teaches at Goethe invited me and we had a lovely time together. Marc took me to eat at some wonderful eateries including a nice quiet Italian boite and a Japanese restaurant called Sushi, Sushi at Grüneburgweg 78 where I stuffed myself silly.  I was put up at the cute and comfy boutique Hotel Bristol. My assistant with the workshop was a handsome strapping young man named Julian Scherer who was just a delight and we immediately fell madly in love with each other. I also had in my class the lovely beauties Miriam and Clare who were part of the tyro curating team working with MMK Museum and Goethe U who brought me to Frankfurt in the Fall for the Helio Oiticica intervention. Also wonderful Louise from VD is SFTD at Mounsouturm also made a guest appearance. I am completely exhausted from the activities so I will end the report here as I have to now start going into hyperdrive for my New York City appearances which will happen in less then a week. I don’t know how I got the energy to attend the special Clemens von Wedemeyer event at Arsenal Inst für Film und Video Kunst on Sunday. I promised Arsenal Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus that I would be there and caught the end of the screening of Frau Unter Einflus with the brilliant Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. I hadn´t seen the film since 1979 and had forgotten so much of it. It was nice sitting in the dark with handsome Markus Ruff the expert production coordinator at the Arsenal and also klatching with kasse girls Frieda and Nadja. Before I left Empress Stefanie and I sang a song to the Forum Expanded kids Uli, Nora and Nanna Heidenreich who have been working non stop with Stefanie preparing the catalogue. Stefanie and her crew are the hardest working filmprogrammers in the universe.

DAS KOENNEN WIR ACH SELBST

Post birthday breakfast for Muslim Daniel Hendrickson Sunday at Peri the piss eleganzaTurkish boite on Potsdamer Strasse with Daniela Haji’s handsome husband the Italio/German fashion designer and love god Piero Bellomo. We had the place mainly to ourselves since it was a Sunday morn 10am and no one is up that early except our little gaggle.

I believe in supporting local businesses so ever so often I catch a flicker at the corner kino Xenon that usually screens gay oriented fare. Went to see a little movie called The Happy Sad because I liked the male couple on the poster two pretty blatino looking boys. Too bad the movie wasn’t as charming as the two young actors who star in it. The film is set among the non problems of Brooklyn’s Milleniums a black on black pair of lovers and a caucasion seemingly hetero couple whose psycho sexual delimnas are pretty predictable. Yawnza! For those of you visiting Berlin below are two things happening that maybe of interest to you so check it out. Wish i could write more but I am in Frankfurt doing my performance art workshop Framing the Freakazoid at the Goethe Universitaet and i only have a few minutes before i have to prep the room for class.

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Liebe, liebe Freundnnn,

Wir laden euch herzlich ein zu MANY LIVES ein Party im Kotti-Shop.
Diesem Samstag 18. Januar 2014 ab 20:00

MANY LIVES feiert Nai's Geburtstag, Kotti-Shop's 5 Jahren & das Tomi der Kater seinem Sturz vom 4. Stock überlebt hat!
Und das neue Jahr und das neue Leben und ...


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Dear, dear friends,

You are cordially invited to MANY LIVES a party at Kotti-Shop.
This Saturday January 18th 2014 from 20:00 onwards

MANY LIVES celebrates Nai's Birthday, Kotti-Shop's 5 years & of course Tomichi Balaton the lil red cat's survival!
And the new years and the new life and ....


Come Let's Dance the old year away, it's the day for a new shiny collective skin!


PERFORMANCES:
An Action of Missing by Tim Greaves.
A song that screams a cat has fallen by Boris Azemar and Anne Kohl.
This Will Also Pass by Amelia Bande.

We will have amazing 5 euro feline products at the SupermerCAT!





2014 is starting off with a bang! I'm so excited that Politaoke will finally have its Berlin premiere. I hope that you can make it! This show will focus specifically on internet and privacy politics (Deutsch and English) and also include a selection of greatest hits from both the North American and Israel shows.



Politaoke will be at the Netzkultur Konferenz



taking place at the
Haus der Berliner Festspiele, January 18th at 9 PM



Tickets are available here. Bloggers/Twitters can email netzkultur@berlinerfestspiele.de for a Blogger Ticket.

Politaoke is non-partisan political karaoke project in which participants can respeak real contemporary political speeches from local, national and international politicians. Founded in 2007, Politaoke is a project by Diana Arce.



Please feel free to forward, tweet, follow and all the things the kids are doing these days!



#MeineRede | #SeiKandidat | #YouForOffice

Diana Arce

Founder and Chairwoman

Homepage | About | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram | Flickr

THE POLAR WHORETEX

Just received this note from my friend Aztec Warrior in Los Angeles. So glad I don’t live in that tired city anymore.

      I overheard the following conversation:
     Ass Hole says: I used to make fun of HIV+ gays, and now I'm Positive. I can't handle it. I used to   be an Actor but the rejection was so hard for me. Now I'm a Casting Director and I get to reject people.

I wanted to kick this mother fucker in the mouth.
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Will be teaching a workshop soon in another German city. Not going to tell you the name of the town till after its over as I have some aggressive stalkers. Attended the birthday soiree of Scandinavian Muslim Daniel Hendrickson at his Neu Koelln compound. The food was delicious and the drink was forever flowing. I hardly drink alcohol anymore but I did imbibe a bit of French Champagne. The guest list included Arsenal Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Nanna Heidenreich, Chloe Griffin who has written a book on Cookie Muehler, Marc Siegel and his lady fair Susanne Sachsse, Senol Senturk, Uli Ziemons whose birthday is also Dec 8th and has just turned 32, kJohnny Blue and his beautiful Italian girlfriend who will soon be his wife. The hot couple just returned from visiting the Blue Klan in Portland Oregon during the holidays where kJohnny’s older brother Tim just turned 52. Tim and burlesque queen Kitty Diggens were both born on the same day Dec 30th. Send them presents.

Received a nice missive from the fabulous British artist and curator Elly Clark:

Dear Friends & Colleagues,

I'm delighted to report that I have been awarded a grant of nearly £15,000 from Arts Council West Midlands to take my ongoing George Richmond Portrait Project to the next stage. A documentary photo & audio piece that I have been working on since 2010, the project involves my tracing family portraits by Victorian portrait artist George Richmond RA (1809-1896) to private homes in order to photograph both the portraits and their current guardians (descendants of those portrayed) in situ, and to interview my subjects about what they know both of the portraits themselves and the people portrayed.

As someone interested in the place and role of the physical object in our increasingly digitally-experienced and mediated world, (explored through my art and curatorial projects alike), here I am focussing upon family portraits three/four/sometimes five generations down the line. George Richmond produced more than 3000 portraits during his lifetime, of which 200 are in the National Portrait Gallery in London, but most remain in private collections, many never officially recorded. The artist is my great-great-great grandfather.

A separate website will be launched at the end of the month, which will host more detailed information about the project in progress. In the meantime you can see some of the images and audio gathered so far here.

I have two fabulous assistants working with me on this project - William Davie and Julie Tsang. But I could not have kept going for so long were it not for the support and encouragement of friends, fellow artists, curators and family, as well as of my participants.

To make room for this, Clarke Gallery activities will be slowed down for the time being. (Although plans to take FRAME_ to other places are still quietly afoot and will be announced in time..)

To receive updates on the George Richmond Portrait Project and other non Clarke-Gallery specific activites I'm involved with, please sign up to my artist mailing list: http://eepurl.com/LZKsf.

Finally may I take this opportunity to wish you all a very Happy New Year and all the best for 2014.

With best wishes,

Elly

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To all my New York Tri-State area fans I will be performing at MoMa PS I on Jan 26th as part of Girls Against God event featuring Bianca of Coco Rosie and Joanna Constantine and on Jan 28th at NYU I will present a version of Vaginal Davis is Speaking From the Diaphragmn this time called Physique Tutorial: VD’s BM- Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Perinium. My co-host is Billy Miller of Straight to Hell Magazine in conjunction with the exhibition Devotion-Excavating Bob Mizer curated by Billy Miller and Jonathan Berger.

SO JUNG UND SO ERFAHREN

Received a lot of emugs asking me what I did for New Year’s Eve. Well I hate New Year’s Eve or Silvester as its called here in Germany and when I say Silvester I am not referring to the disco singer of the classic song “You Make Me Feel Mighty Real” This year I spent the evening in quiet contemplation and working on my apartment which is still in disrepair from my electric heater explosion back in November. The fireworks and cherry bombs went into hyperdrive from 11:30pm till almost 5 in the morning. The Berlin government has allowed fireworks to be louder and more destructive. About 500 people are injured every year on New Year’s Eve. The only thing better about the holiday in Berlin as oppose to Los Angeles is that people here don’t shoot firearms. Lately I have been getting foreboding thoughts of a pending world battle as its now 2014 a century after the first world war. I would not be surprised if this becomes a reality. Add to war, pestilence, and plague. The general outlook for this planet of ours is not pretty. Sorry to be such a Debbie Reynolds Downer, but the Cybelle soothsayer demanding gonads to make a necklace of testicles in me is one Whoracle et Delphi that can't be silenced.

HEFTIGE SAUGSPIELE

The Vagimule doll is only keeping her giant Vesuvius Flytrap of a mouth shut when she is stuffing vast quantities of food particles into it. Such was the case being treated to an upscale Chinese Feast of Perconius at Restaurant Ming Dynastie at the Jannowitz Center at Bruecken Strasse 6 across from the Chinese Embassy. Joy and more joy was the festive results of being in the hallowed company  of the great Susanne Sachsse, semetic studkin Marcuse Siegel, radiantly electric Empress Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, Muslimaic principal Daniel Hendrickson and the gifted Nanna Heidenreich. Earlier in the day I received a post Christmas gift package from Dr. Professor Jennifer Doyle (on an academic fellowship in Prince Harryland of England) which included her newest tome, Hold It Against Me-Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art which I immediately started reading and can’t put down. There are some brilliant essays examining glossy new perspectivas on artists like big Daddy Love God Ron Athey Jr.,David Wojnarowicz, Thomas Eakins, Carrie Mae Weems and the young and spirited beauty Aliza Shvarts who I had as a guest on my award winning talkshow/installation Vaginal Davis is Speaking From the Diaphragm back in 2010 which was the first time Ms. Shvarts publically talked about the scandal that ensued when she was a student at Yale University. Dr. Doyle also sent me Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood, Halstead Plays Himself which is about legendary gay porn/art filmmaker and gorgon Fred Halstead written with a strange tone to it by the nebeshy art cineaste William E. Jones and The Morrissey autobiography which from the opening pages is a literary gangbangular.