Pigeons are rarely bestowed a place of prominence in artwork. Doves? Sure. But those mottled rats with wings often get a comparably short shrift. Somewhat understandably. It’s hard to celebrate the pigeon. I almost stomp on one every morning when I run as they stare up at me blankly like they forgot they have wings. … Continue reading
Radical Perverts: Ecstasy and Activism in Queer Public Space, 1975-2000 at the Museum of Sex should come with its own scratch-and-sniff cards. Steal the patented Odorama technology used in John Waters’s Polyester–who gives a fuck. Dean Sameshima’s delightfully clinical series of four public restrooms, Untitled (South Bay Tearooms), which, much like Jimmy DeSana’s early series … Continue reading
“Distinctively different.” Isn’t that the exact response you want from relatives and friends this Thanksgiving, our dear Filthy Dreams turklets?! Why, we can’t think of a more ecstatic rave review! And neither, apparently, could the advertisers in the 1960s who were determined to convince the sugar-addicted American public on the most cloying of all holiday … Continue reading
The most shocking part of late French filmmaker Paul Vecchiali’s 1970 giallo The Strangler (L’Étrangleur), newly restored and given its first ever US theatrical release by Altered Innocence, isn’t baby-faced serial killer Émile (Jacques Perrin) pulling an endearingly quaint homemade-looking white knit scarf around the necks of lonely-hearted Parisian women and yanking. It’s his faithful … Continue reading
“Are you Elvis? Are you God?” So asks PJ Harvey on her astonishing new album I Inside the Old Year Dying. The song, titled “Lwonesome Tonight” in reference to Presley’s own “Are you Lonesome Tonight?”, sees Harvey sing from the perspective of the album’s protagonist, a “not-girl” named Ira-Abel, as she calls out to the … Continue reading
Crazy…. Crazy for feeling so lonely! Patsy Cline’s golden warbling voice echoed through the small exhibition space of the Patsy Cline Museum in Nashville, located right above the cheek-to-a-lot-of-jowl-packed Johnny Cash Museum just downstairs. Here, though, with Patsy, it was simply me and a particularly chatty gaggle of septuagenarians (I’m being generous), arguing over which … Continue reading
Can you be starstruck by a gravestone? Is a headstone just a more permanent headshot? Is an epigraph a forever form of autograph? I certainly believe so, given the thrilled tingle that shot down my spine while squinting at the layered names that cover Scott Covert’s searingly bright, near ocularly painful hot-pink painting, Pink Nancy, … Continue reading
“Lord help me, Jesus. I’ve wasted it so help me, Jesus. I know what I am but now that I know that I’ve needed you so…help me, Jesus.” Bellowing from an adjacent restaurant, Kris Kristofferson’s plea to Christ, “Why Me” swept me away while waiting for the elevator at my Nashville hotel. No, it wasn’t … Continue reading
“Paris is a cunt.” These four simple words, muttered in a preternaturally husky rasp by pinhole-pupiled Lindsay Lohan as she snickered in the strobe light glare and high-volume snapping of paparazzi cameras outside of the Roosevelt Hotel (which is now an overstuffed migrant shelter), perfectly encapsulate the gossip rag-driven cultural moment of the 00s (or … Continue reading
I am the KING! Slicing through a grotesque staccato sludge of clashing drums, atonal piercing guitars, and obscene throbbing bass, that’s the howl that kicked off one of the most berserk televised performances, at least that I’ve ever witnessed. Clashing against a Bauhaus (the design not the band)-inspired stage set for more respectable New Wave … Continue reading