Jesus Christ. This shit is fucking ugly. That’s the immediate thought I had upon clicking on the installation views of the current exhibition Painting in New York: 1971-83 at the two Karma spaces on 2nd Street. My eyes watered staring at squiggles of bold yellow paint resembling squirts of yellow mustard on a hot dog … Continue reading
Does an artist need to believe—or at the very least consider—the existence of God (or the divine, a higher power, or whatever it is you want to call it) in order to create transcendent work? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with ever since listening to an advanced copy of the audiobook for Nick Cave … Continue reading
I’d like to begin with a fact. A simple yet shocking fact. It is this—a floodtide of filth is engulfing our country in the form of obscenity and is threatening to pervert an entire generation of our American children! At least that’s what George Putnam said, finger-wagging in his Middle America-terrorizing introduction to the fear-mongering, … Continue reading
Two sultry gazes stare sightlessly from a weathered window or a picture frame as if stolen from the bedroom wall of a fanatical teenage girl in 1955. James Dean and Elvis Presley, icons of mid-20th century rebels without causes. Ripping it up, hip thrusting, jailhouse rocking, Vampira attracting, drag racing, they are double martyrs to … Continue reading
In his Last Will and Testament made in 1987, on view in the sprawling exhibition Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition, Nick Cave requested: “…money earned on records, both publishing and record sales, should be used to have and maintain a small but adequate room or rooms that will serve as the “Nick Cave … Continue reading
In the nebulous period of 1983 and 1984 between the drug-fueled dissolution of the trash can-driving, six-inch-gold-blade-slicing, zoo-music-girl-lusting, junkyard royalty The Birthday Party and the official designation of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Nick Cave played a smattering of clubs under a few different titles. There was Nick Cave and the Cavemen, which is … Continue reading
“I just want to be perfect,” says Karen Carpenter in the recording studio, played by a Barbie doll fashioned by director Todd Haynes in, what I would argue, is still his best film, Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story. Thanks to Haynes’s deranged casting choice, Barbie is a flawless proxy for Karen Carpenter, the wholesome clear-voiced … Continue reading
Tony Soprano. Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. Donald Trump. What do these three figures have in common? Is it their putty-like pudgy faces? How about Donald Trump’s wielding of Alfred E. Neuman as an insult against Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg? Or maybe the mob boss actions of our former ketchup-throwing, table cloth-swiping President who still … Continue reading
Why hello there, proud patriotic Filthy Dreams readers! What’s that? You’re NOT proud at all to be an American this year?! I know, I know. How DARE we even celebrate Independence Day? Look. Given these feel like our country’s last days, we better party now before the Supreme Court makes a decision on that too! … Continue reading
I once saw Lou Reed on a bicycle. No, it wasn’t a hallucination. That I’m aware of at least. It was 2007 and I had just graduated college. Unemployed with not much to do, I spent my time wandering aimlessly around the city while applying for jobs at the precipice of the 2008 subprime mortgage-induced … Continue reading