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
I Heart Toxic Waste: Adrien Brody’s Art Is So Astonishingly Bad, It Might Actually Be Good
A thick, saliva-soaked globule of masticated green gum peeled off a spit-swapping chewing gum-covered painting and hit the shiny gallery floor with a sickening thwack. There, it joined another sopping ball of rapidly stiffening, increasingly pink, red gum, another fallen attempt to participate in Academy Award-winning actor-turned-artist Adrien Brody’s chewing gum painting, part of his … Continue reading
All That’s Missing From Krzysztof Strzelecki’s “Rendezvous” at Anat Ebgi Is the Smell of Urinal Cake
Tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle. Immediately upon entering Krzysztof Strzelecki’s solo exhibition Rendezvous at Anat Ebgi, my ears pricked up at the splish-splash of watery drippy-droppings trickling out at a heroically steady stream. The constant dribble sounded like some derelict crept into the gallery for a sneaky whizz in a corner. Unlikely, sure, but it’s not as … Continue reading
The Big Dream: A Table Saw and Other Items David Lynch Told Me He Wants Me to Have From His Estate Auction
I want a table saw. Badly. My yearning for this table saw is gnawing and relentless. I dream about its ceaseless whirring buzz, driving my neighbors to bang on the walls. I drift off daily at my computer, picturing wood dust floating about the air in my small apartment rather than the century-plus of collected … Continue reading
Trump Is Remaking the White House in His Trashy Image, Even the Public Tour
An employee of the White House gift shop (yes, there is a gift shop in the White House. Classy!) approached me and another tour guest, both of us gawking at an artwork that looked egregiously out of place, as if someone clandestinely snuck a flea market find into the hallowed halls of the National Portrait … Continue reading
The United States’ Natural Born Losers in Jordan Sullivan’s “Drinking Margaritas at the Mall”
Chain restaurants at the mall used to mean something in this country. Stand-alone restaurant storefronts just a short jaunt away from the mall’s irresistible gravitational pull did too. Or at least I thought they did. When I was a teen in suburban Pittsburgh during the early aughts, Olive Garden, TGI Fridays, Outback Steakhouse, Texas Roadhouse, … Continue reading
Sisters of the Moon: Pia Paulina Guilmoth’s “Flowers Drink the River” at CLAMP
Two deer stare, stunned, their ears perked nervously straight up. Their sweet brown eyes have turned zombie white, caught in a camera flash rather than the headlights of a speeding Ford F-150 barreling down a dirty back road at night. One looks like she’s about to bolt, her body tensed in the tall grasses in … Continue reading
I Went to Shen Yun
An operatic soprano, introduced by the night’s chirpy emcee duo as Haolan Geng, took the stage at the tony David Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, accompanied by only a young woman pianist in a floor-length black gown. Geng’s precise, soaring vocals belonged at the Metropolitan Opera House just across the way as she bellowed a … Continue reading
Nick Waplington and Lizzi Bougatsos Channeled 1990s Clubbing Chaos in “Before the Clean-Up”
Nightlife photography should be kinda bad. Technical perfection is for shut-ins with a studio or all those photographers making photographs of photographs. Nightlife photos should be out of focus and crappily framed. Heads should be lopped right off dancing bodies, fixating instead on torsos bumping and grinding into each other (and the photographer). Flashes of … Continue reading
Donald Trump (Hilariously) Sucks as a Portrait Subject
Trump is the master of the image. I know—I’m not the only one to point it out. LA Review of Books’ Gideon Jacobs did it before, whose perfectly titled essay “Trump l’Oeil” grabbed me, up until he used the word “ontology” in an essay about Donald Trump. But at this point, isn’t it a cliché … Continue reading
Cries & Whispers: Lack-Of-Intimacy Coordinator
Hey there, FDers! “Spring has sprung! The grass has riz! I wonder where the birdies iz?” That chant—hollered out on the playground once by a kid I knew in the fourth grade—pops into my head every time this year. Google tells me that while it’s often attributed to Ogden Nash, its origin is unknown. Now … Continue reading