Welcome to Filthy Dreams
Well hello there! Welcome to Filthy Dreams, a blog that analyzes culture through a queer lens. Rather than jumping right into new content, we thought it best to introduce ourselves and our aesthetics with our Trash Manifesto
Latest Entries
If He Felt He Had To Direct You, Then Direct You Into My Arms: More Items I Would Steal From “Stranger Than Kindness: The Nick Cave Exhibition”
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
Man or Myth?: “Stranger Than Kindness” Is a Portrait of Nick Cave through His Many Obsessions and Influences
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
Montreal’s “Barbie Expo” is Kitsch Heaven: A (Mostly) Photo Essay
“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
Daemonic Compulsion in Sarah Ortmeyer’s “SPORTS CLUB NEW YORK”
Stepping closer to inspect the rouged cheeks of an otherwise black-and-white photograph of Nico, I neglected to notice Sarah Ortmeyer’s diminutive DIABOLUS (PROTECTOR), a cast aluminum sculpture roughly three inches in height, kicking it on its side. Continue reading
Barbara Kruger Is Just Preaching to the Choir
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
Sex by a Thousand Cuts: David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future”
David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future presents us with a decaying modern civilization seamlessly coinciding with the moldy wear and tear of contemporary Athens — a fitting shooting location for a sci-fi dystopia that forgoes the polished surfaces, spacefaring, and multiverse traversal that other sci-fi dystopias depict. This version of the future offers up a … Continue reading
9 Elvis Impersonators To Make You Say Glory! Glory! Hallelujah! This July 4th
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 Know Where Temptation Lies (Inside of My Heart): The Items I Would Steal From “Lou Reed: Caught Between the Twisted Stars”
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
Filthy Dreams’ Monkeypox Pride Playlist
Happy Pride, Filthy Dreamers! These past few Prides have been a chore, right? We’ve had to wade through the goo-goo muck of internal queerer-than-thou community infighting, anti-corporate Pride, and kink shaming discourses. That’s why we here at Filthy Dreams welcome a return to form with the emergence of monkeypox. A disease that has somehow infected … Continue reading
Cries & Whispers: Every Label Tells a Story (But Why?)
Hey there, Filthy Dreamers! So when Rod Stewart posed the musical question, “Da ya think I’m sexy?,” I must admit, I said no. But, “Every picture tells a story, don’t it?” Well, heck, I’ll drink to that, Rod. Yes, technically every picture does tell a story. But you know what shouldn’t tell a story? Food … Continue reading