reposting courtesy~ douglas hovey
10/29/11
BLACK LOVE
TONIGHT @ ANTEBELLUM
BLACK LOVE will present a rare live performance...check them out-
Black Love makes primitive, disorienting hard rock. Founded in 2009 in Los Angeles and using basic instrumentation to create heavy and purposeful music about loss, the results exist somewhere between an Appalachian snake handling revival and a lighthouse crumbling and re-building itself in 4/4 time.
It's majestic break-up music, shot through with wretched, redemptive blues about annihilated love writ large with brilliant lyrics, blasting sunburst beats and soul-laundering bass.
Band members and instruments Anthony Cicero -
percussion and drums, bowed cymbals, claves; David Cotner -
words and vocals, Buddha Machines, Tibetan bells and vajras, Nepalese singing bowls, mule jawbones, whip, toy piano, airplane engine; Sergio Segovia - bass and electronics.
$5 cover
october 29th
9pm- sharp
ANTEBELLUM
1643 n las palmas ave
hollywood, ca 90028
323 856-0667
antebellum@earthlink.net
Black Love makes primitive, disorienting hard rock. Founded in 2009 in Los Angeles and using basic instrumentation to create heavy and purposeful music about loss, the results exist somewhere between an Appalachian snake handling revival and a lighthouse crumbling and re-building itself in 4/4 time.
It's majestic break-up music, shot through with wretched, redemptive blues about annihilated love writ large with brilliant lyrics, blasting sunburst beats and soul-laundering bass.
Band members and instruments Anthony Cicero -
percussion and drums, bowed cymbals, claves; David Cotner -
words and vocals, Buddha Machines, Tibetan bells and vajras, Nepalese singing bowls, mule jawbones, whip, toy piano, airplane engine; Sergio Segovia - bass and electronics.
FIRST ANNUAL GO-GO APPRECIATION DAY!
HAPPY GO-GO APPRECIATION DAY!
today is the first annual WEST HOLLYWOOD- GO-GO APPRECIATION DAY.. this promises to be a fun event that will just get bigger and bigger each year.
read this-
A street party with go-go dancing contests is planned on Larrabee Street, with many other businesses observing the day.
West Hollywood gets its Halloween festivities off to an early start on Saturday by celebrating go-go dancing.
The city has proclaimed Saturday as Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day in honor of the dance form that began here 47 years ago.
Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day is designed to create an event for locals who feel the city’s Halloween Carnaval, which attracts a reported half-million people, has gotten too big.
“It’s a chance for locals to play before the crowds come to town on Halloween,” said Councilman John D’Amico, who spearheaded the event. “We hope this will attract a few thousand people. It will never turn into an event that has 500,000 people.”
It’s also about helping boost business during a sluggish economy. “In recent years, people don’t seem to think of West Hollywood as a place to go,” said D’Amico. “I’m working to make West Hollywood a destination once again.”
Although Halloween and go-go dancing are not automatically associated, D’Amico says he chose to tie it to the spooky holiday, because go-go dancing is about wearing a costume and performing.
“Conceptually, [Halloween and go-go dancing] don’t belong together, but I love that two things that don’t always belong together end up coming together,” said D’Amico. “It’s meant to be tongue in cheek, but it fits better with Halloween than Easter or the Fourth of July.”
Street Party
Larrabee Street at Santa Monica Boulevard will be shut down as stages are set up for Go-Go Fest Street Party, which runs 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.
There, amateurs and professionals can both vie in a half-dozen different go-go dancing contests, including Hottest Jock, Best Bootie, Twink, Best Package, Muscle Stud and Amateur Go-Go Boy. Winners in those categories will then compete for the title of Mr. West Hollywood Go-Go and a $1,000 prize.
“This is a great opportunity for the gay community to get together and have a street party, especially before Halloween,” said Mary Anne, general manager of Micky’s, one of four businesses sponsoring the street party. “It’s a new event, which should bring people to town.”
Meanwhile, in the old A Different Light bookstore location, Block Party clothing store will be giving away underwear to anyone who will dance in their window for 15 minutes.
“Go-Go Day is an opportunity for us to highlight our great selection of sexy underwear,” said Block Party owner Larry Block. “This is more than just an appreciation of dancers in bars. It’s a celebration of our culture and an integral part of the gay nightlife.”
Two dozen other Boystown businesses have signed up to join in the celebration. Eleven nightclubwill have a choreographed show, “Evolution of Go-Go.” AIDS Healthcare Foundation will have its testing van there for Go-Go Get Tested.
“Clearly, the way the community has jumped on board has shown this will be a success,” said D’Amico, who denies rumors that he will be one of the people dancing in the contest. “The city is partnering with businesses in a new way and that’s exciting.”
Whiskey A Go-Go
While Boystown businesses are embracing Go-Go Dancer Appreciation Day, the Sunset Strip businesses do not seem to have jumped on the bandwagon so enthusiastically.
The only Sunset Strip venue that Weho Patch could find observing the day is the Whisky-A Go-Go, which is where go-go dancing had its birth in 1964. The Whisky will have go-go girls performing on Saturday night, as they do every weekend.
“Anyone who says ‘Go-Go Appreciation Day’ will get half off of their entry into the Whisky on Saturday,” reports Celina Denkins, the Whisky’s booking agent. “The Whisky A Go-Go girls will also dance in between sets, plus there will be a professional go-go girl troupe called Dirty Little Secrets performing at midnight.”
Snickers among residents
While many are excited about the day, others are snickering at the idea.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” said resident Jason Burke. “The city is spending all this money on go-go dancers. Why don’t they put that money toward helping the homeless?”
D’Amico isn’t surprised by the snickers. “This is government light. Of course they’re snickering,” he said. “It’s a way in which the city can have a sense of humor about itself and who we are as a city.”
here are some of the many contestants-
PORTRAIT OF PYEWACKETT
i did it first!
ok here is a photo i took of my longtime ago rommie-
JAMES JONES & my beautiful black cat~
PYEWACKETT~ circa 1994.
please note- my image has no photoshop whatsoever.
ok here is a photo i took of my longtime ago rommie-
JAMES JONES & my beautiful black cat~
PYEWACKETT~ circa 1994.
now this from beverly hills seer~ ASK JACKIEB
please note- my image has no photoshop whatsoever.
10/28/11
OCCUPY IS HERE TO STAY...WORLDWIDE
Occupy Wall Street Spreads Worldwide
| OCT 17, 2011 | 269 |
The Occupy Wall Street movement continues to grow and has now spread across the world, motivating thousands to voice their anger at financial and social inequality, and in some places merging with existing anti-government protests. On Saturday, a global "Day of Rage" was observed, and demonstrations took place in more than 80 countries around the world. Protesters took their messages and anger to the streets from Hong Kong to Fairbanks, from Miami to London, from Berlin to Sydney, and hundreds more cities large and small. The demonstrations were largely peaceful -- with the exception of some violent clashes in Rome. Collected here are some images from the past several days as the Occupy Wall Street message continues to resonate and grow.
"THE BEST QUOTE"
"GET YOUR PUMPKIN ON!"
said by my yoga instructor after class this morning @ 7am
(btw, this photo is not my instructor)
NO SAFE WORDS
NO SAFE WORDS- BY NOAM GONICK
The New Water Sports:
Totalitarian Aesthetics, Pride and the Cleansing of Queer Identity in Noam Gonick’s No Safe Words.
Totalitarian Aesthetics, Pride and the Cleansing of Queer Identity in Noam Gonick’s No Safe Words.
By Francisco-Fernando Granados
Noam Gonick’s No Safe Words is a multi-channel video installation that expands on a short film originally shown in large outdoor screens during the 2008 Toronto Pride Parade. The short film is contextualized by footage documenting the parade and the prominent participation of police forces in the festivities. Queer and politicized, the piece operates at the uncomfortable juncture where oppressive state apparatuses meet public expressions of non-normative sexuality. Appropriating the conventions and venues of mass media, Gonick uses contemporary and historical references to draw a link between the politics of totalitarianism and the aesthetics of sexual power-play that coincide in current North American culture. No Safe Words makes visible a kind of late capitalist gay identity that seeks to un-queer itself, obscuring the history of struggle for gay rights and creating a problematic dynamic that allows some queer bodies to pass as normative and achieve privileges while leaving oppressive hierarchical structures intact.
Gonick utilizes the aesthetics and channels of mass media to intervene in the logic of popular visual culture. No Safe Words recalls Sunday Night Football promotional spots, putting together electric guitar-driven music, animated commentary, popping captions and action shots commonly featured in sports advertising. But the conventions and the logic end there. The players are called “fudge packers.” Instead of famous NFL giants like Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson, the stars featured here are Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet. The teams in the scoreboard are Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Muscular young men, most of them white, cross the boundaries between the athletic and the erotic by engaging in light bondage and making each other wet with beer and water. This is not NBC, but it looks like it could pass. Placed in an outdoor mega screen, the film functions as a queer impostor, planted by Gonick as a means to address the lack of political awareness that is often encountered in contemporary pride parades across large North American urban centres. By creating a sequence that passes as a mainstream media form, the film gives its public something to recognize, but quickly twists this recognition by inserting a seemingly unrelated combination of references to gay male sexuality – “fudge-packers” being men who to anally penetrate other men – and totalitarian politics – Hitler and Pinochet being genocidal dictators.
While the relationship between homoeroticism and totalitarianism explored in the piece may not be immediately recognizable, there are a series of iconographic precedents in the history of Western art that link the two. Gonick shows one of the football players, shirtless, tied to a post; his long curly hair drips with beer poured on by his mates. “I think he likes it!” says the announcer, explaining the athletic young man’s open-mouthed smile. He is presented in ecstatic captivity, the sexual appeal of his body only intensified by the vulnerability of his situation. The open-mouthed smile grants an identity to the body. His pose and expression recall Il Sodoma’s 1531 work, Saint Sebastian. The painting presents the saint, almost naked, being pierced by arrows but with a rather orgasmic expression on his face. Gonick’s allusion to Il Sodoma provides historical context to his choice of subject matter.
Citing examples that range from Ancient Greek sculpture to early twentieth century photography in the racist American South, Stephen F. Eisenman traces the history of representations of violence as bliss. The “formula of beautiful suffering” (111) presents victims in rapture, as though their punishment transported them into a state of delight. The representation of such delight in punishment works as a legitimization of violence. The Christian civilizing mission of sixteenth century Europe frames the beautiful suffering in Il Sodoma’s image; Gonick’s critical iteration of the formula is framed by the politics of North American occupation in the Middle East. He restages the formula of beautiful suffering in No Safe Words, amplifying its scale and highlighting its persistence in Western culture.
No Safe Words recasts the images of (homo)sexualized torture that have emerged in the aftermath of North American intervention in the Middle East. In another scene, five bare-chested hunks, arms tied back again, kneel in line facing the camera. Rainbow coloured underwear is put on their heads by men dressed in dark gear. The men then pour bottled water on the captive’s heads. These are “the new water sports,” the voiceover says. The image of underwear covering a man’s features echoes one of the infamous photographs from the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture scandal in 2004. In those photographs, the victims of violence, who are all racialized, are exposed but cannot be seen. The violence of their facelessness denies them identity and thus humanity. Eisenman asserts that the (homo)sexualized violence in the Abu Ghraib pictures exists in an iconographic continuum with Il Sodoma’s painting (65).
Writing on the erotic fascination with Nazi imagery in the post World War II period, Susan Sontag remarks that “a utopian aesthetics […] implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers” (93). The idealized eroticism of Saint Sebastian thus resurfaces, as Eisenman argues (65), in the cruel and criminal power dynamic seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs. In both cases, the object of beautiful suffering is represented by and from the perspective of the master. Unlike in consensual S&M play between adults, there are no safe words that can turn the fantasy off in the Iraqi prison, as Gonick points out in an interview (Xtra). The paralleling of both allusions in No Safe Words visualizes the continuum of eroticized violence, historicizing the often-obscured connections between European colonialism and current Euro-North American international interventions. The use of Hitler and Pinochet as supposed football all-stars along with the references to prisoner abuse draws a link between totalitarianism and brutal sexual iconography. Showing the video in the outdoor screens names out loud the politics that structure the aesthetics, implicating and probing the audience. Through this public naming, Gonick’s iteration of the formula of beautiful suffering becomes a critical gesture. It allows for the problem embedded in the acts of torture referenced, as well as in the act of representing torture itself, to become part of a much-needed public discussion.
The aforementioned scene of collective sadomasochistic dousing in Gonick’s film questions the role of queers in the conservation of oppressive political systems. In No Safe Words, the new water sports are not a reclaiming of the abject space homosexuals have until very recently occupied. Instead of urine that soils them, the bottled water that is poured on the young men serves to wash their beautiful bodies. This symbolic washing can be said to illustrate the cleansing of a kind of gay identity that seeks to transform a vilified, outsider collectivity into a target niche-market demographic. The sanitation is manifested in the increasing corporatization of pride celebrations and exemplified by the prominent presence of police forces at the Toronto Pride Parade. Their participation occurs less than thirty years after raids on gay bathhouses sparked protests that served as a precedent for the parade itself (Gordon).
Footage taken by Gonick of a police car with a pride flag attached to the hood presents an idealized, harmonious relationship between queer people and the city’s police forces. Portraying uncomplicated harmony between the two groups aligns a particular sector of the GLBT community with authority and presents a lack of awareness of the history of police repression of sexual minorities in Canada. Such lack of awareness identifies what can be understood as a late capitalist gay identity. This identity keeps the contours of the Gay Liberation movement (the parade serving as a prime example), but leaves behind demands for social change, assuming that equality for sexual minorities has already been achieved. It supposes singular, linear and irreversible progress. These are not heterosexuals, but they sure would like to pass. The new water sports wash their bodies. What is then constructed is a gay subjectivity that seeks to un-queer itself, calling for a complete integration into dominant political and economic structures.
No Safe Words interrogates the role of mainstream gay culture within the larger socio-political landscape. It is important to remark that the task of examining and questioning dominant forms of homosexual identity does not undermine the legacies of the Gay Liberation movement in Canada. Those of us who benefit in our everyday lives from these legacies have plenty of reason to be proud of the activism of the pioneers who used visibility as a tactic to demand and achieve legislative protections for sexual minorities. Yet it cannot be said that an egalitarian utopia of liberation has been attained for all peoples, queer and otherwise. People in Canada who are recognized through gay rights are also touched by circumstances relating to their gender, race, age, ability, geographical context, culture and class, as well as migratory or First Nations status. In the face of a socially and economically conservative government, Gonick’s provocative gesture puts politics back into public gay discourse, maintaining the possibility of queerness as a platform for social change.
Noam Gonick’s No Safe Words is a multi-channel video installation that expands on a short film originally shown in large outdoor screens during the 2008 Toronto Pride Parade. The short film is contextualized by footage documenting the parade and the prominent participation of police forces in the festivities. Queer and politicized, the piece operates at the uncomfortable juncture where oppressive state apparatuses meet public expressions of non-normative sexuality. Appropriating the conventions and venues of mass media, Gonick uses contemporary and historical references to draw a link between the politics of totalitarianism and the aesthetics of sexual power-play that coincide in current North American culture. No Safe Words makes visible a kind of late capitalist gay identity that seeks to un-queer itself, obscuring the history of struggle for gay rights and creating a problematic dynamic that allows some queer bodies to pass as normative and achieve privileges while leaving oppressive hierarchical structures intact.
Gonick utilizes the aesthetics and channels of mass media to intervene in the logic of popular visual culture. No Safe Words recalls Sunday Night Football promotional spots, putting together electric guitar-driven music, animated commentary, popping captions and action shots commonly featured in sports advertising. But the conventions and the logic end there. The players are called “fudge packers.” Instead of famous NFL giants like Peyton Manning and Adrian Peterson, the stars featured here are Adolf Hitler and Augusto Pinochet. The teams in the scoreboard are Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Muscular young men, most of them white, cross the boundaries between the athletic and the erotic by engaging in light bondage and making each other wet with beer and water. This is not NBC, but it looks like it could pass. Placed in an outdoor mega screen, the film functions as a queer impostor, planted by Gonick as a means to address the lack of political awareness that is often encountered in contemporary pride parades across large North American urban centres. By creating a sequence that passes as a mainstream media form, the film gives its public something to recognize, but quickly twists this recognition by inserting a seemingly unrelated combination of references to gay male sexuality – “fudge-packers” being men who to anally penetrate other men – and totalitarian politics – Hitler and Pinochet being genocidal dictators.
While the relationship between homoeroticism and totalitarianism explored in the piece may not be immediately recognizable, there are a series of iconographic precedents in the history of Western art that link the two. Gonick shows one of the football players, shirtless, tied to a post; his long curly hair drips with beer poured on by his mates. “I think he likes it!” says the announcer, explaining the athletic young man’s open-mouthed smile. He is presented in ecstatic captivity, the sexual appeal of his body only intensified by the vulnerability of his situation. The open-mouthed smile grants an identity to the body. His pose and expression recall Il Sodoma’s 1531 work, Saint Sebastian. The painting presents the saint, almost naked, being pierced by arrows but with a rather orgasmic expression on his face. Gonick’s allusion to Il Sodoma provides historical context to his choice of subject matter.
Citing examples that range from Ancient Greek sculpture to early twentieth century photography in the racist American South, Stephen F. Eisenman traces the history of representations of violence as bliss. The “formula of beautiful suffering” (111) presents victims in rapture, as though their punishment transported them into a state of delight. The representation of such delight in punishment works as a legitimization of violence. The Christian civilizing mission of sixteenth century Europe frames the beautiful suffering in Il Sodoma’s image; Gonick’s critical iteration of the formula is framed by the politics of North American occupation in the Middle East. He restages the formula of beautiful suffering in No Safe Words, amplifying its scale and highlighting its persistence in Western culture.
No Safe Words recasts the images of (homo)sexualized torture that have emerged in the aftermath of North American intervention in the Middle East. In another scene, five bare-chested hunks, arms tied back again, kneel in line facing the camera. Rainbow coloured underwear is put on their heads by men dressed in dark gear. The men then pour bottled water on the captive’s heads. These are “the new water sports,” the voiceover says. The image of underwear covering a man’s features echoes one of the infamous photographs from the Abu Ghraib prisoner torture scandal in 2004. In those photographs, the victims of violence, who are all racialized, are exposed but cannot be seen. The violence of their facelessness denies them identity and thus humanity. Eisenman asserts that the (homo)sexualized violence in the Abu Ghraib pictures exists in an iconographic continuum with Il Sodoma’s painting (65).
Writing on the erotic fascination with Nazi imagery in the post World War II period, Susan Sontag remarks that “a utopian aesthetics […] implies an ideal eroticism: sexuality converted into the magnetism of leaders and the joy of followers” (93). The idealized eroticism of Saint Sebastian thus resurfaces, as Eisenman argues (65), in the cruel and criminal power dynamic seen in the Abu Ghraib photographs. In both cases, the object of beautiful suffering is represented by and from the perspective of the master. Unlike in consensual S&M play between adults, there are no safe words that can turn the fantasy off in the Iraqi prison, as Gonick points out in an interview (Xtra). The paralleling of both allusions in No Safe Words visualizes the continuum of eroticized violence, historicizing the often-obscured connections between European colonialism and current Euro-North American international interventions. The use of Hitler and Pinochet as supposed football all-stars along with the references to prisoner abuse draws a link between totalitarianism and brutal sexual iconography. Showing the video in the outdoor screens names out loud the politics that structure the aesthetics, implicating and probing the audience. Through this public naming, Gonick’s iteration of the formula of beautiful suffering becomes a critical gesture. It allows for the problem embedded in the acts of torture referenced, as well as in the act of representing torture itself, to become part of a much-needed public discussion.
The aforementioned scene of collective sadomasochistic dousing in Gonick’s film questions the role of queers in the conservation of oppressive political systems. In No Safe Words, the new water sports are not a reclaiming of the abject space homosexuals have until very recently occupied. Instead of urine that soils them, the bottled water that is poured on the young men serves to wash their beautiful bodies. This symbolic washing can be said to illustrate the cleansing of a kind of gay identity that seeks to transform a vilified, outsider collectivity into a target niche-market demographic. The sanitation is manifested in the increasing corporatization of pride celebrations and exemplified by the prominent presence of police forces at the Toronto Pride Parade. Their participation occurs less than thirty years after raids on gay bathhouses sparked protests that served as a precedent for the parade itself (Gordon).
Footage taken by Gonick of a police car with a pride flag attached to the hood presents an idealized, harmonious relationship between queer people and the city’s police forces. Portraying uncomplicated harmony between the two groups aligns a particular sector of the GLBT community with authority and presents a lack of awareness of the history of police repression of sexual minorities in Canada. Such lack of awareness identifies what can be understood as a late capitalist gay identity. This identity keeps the contours of the Gay Liberation movement (the parade serving as a prime example), but leaves behind demands for social change, assuming that equality for sexual minorities has already been achieved. It supposes singular, linear and irreversible progress. These are not heterosexuals, but they sure would like to pass. The new water sports wash their bodies. What is then constructed is a gay subjectivity that seeks to un-queer itself, calling for a complete integration into dominant political and economic structures.
No Safe Words interrogates the role of mainstream gay culture within the larger socio-political landscape. It is important to remark that the task of examining and questioning dominant forms of homosexual identity does not undermine the legacies of the Gay Liberation movement in Canada. Those of us who benefit in our everyday lives from these legacies have plenty of reason to be proud of the activism of the pioneers who used visibility as a tactic to demand and achieve legislative protections for sexual minorities. Yet it cannot be said that an egalitarian utopia of liberation has been attained for all peoples, queer and otherwise. People in Canada who are recognized through gay rights are also touched by circumstances relating to their gender, race, age, ability, geographical context, culture and class, as well as migratory or First Nations status. In the face of a socially and economically conservative government, Gonick’s provocative gesture puts politics back into public gay discourse, maintaining the possibility of queerness as a platform for social change.