Ho Ho HooooooooWHOAA! Hello there, cheeriest Filthy Dreams Christmas cookies! What’s that? What am I doing? Well, I’m just making a list and checking it twice. No, not my shopping list! Planning is for fools! And who wants to plot too far in advance about the gifts you’re giving to OTHER people this holiday season?! … Continue reading
I love museum gift shops. I know, I know–this isn’t too much of a surprise after I’ve continually admitted my undying love of the worst of late capitalism, including yes, corporate Pride. But unlike that rainbow colored free-for-all, which comes around only one month a year to tickle my frantic shopping spree fancy, museum gift … Continue reading
On Tuesday, I received a promotional email in my inbox (one of many I tend to ignore) announcing the theme of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute 2019 exhibition. To my shock (and horror), it was a theme familiar and close to my black little heart: camp! As a long-time denizen of camp, I … Continue reading
You can tell a whole lot about a film’s impact by the GIFs that remain peppered throughout the Internet even years after its release. For Lee Daniels’s gloriously trashy The Paperboy, its afterlife is preserved in slow-as-molasses, steamy grabs of heartthrob Zac Efron’s Jack Jansen languishing in itty bitty, tighty whities, flexing his tautly muscled … Continue reading
This week, i-D Magazine’s Amelia Abraham published a think piece asking, “Whatever Happened To Camp–Does It Still Exist?” Believe me, Mary, just that question made me recoil in horror. How DARE they wonder if camp still exists?! Why, as we’ve frequently shouted into the abyss here on Filthy Dreams, it’s more important than ever! In … Continue reading
Home can reveal so much about a person. Yes, this is an obvious cliché, but an individual’s architectural and interior design sensibilities–not to mention their cornucopia of tacky knick-knacks scattered around their existence–speaks volumes. This truism relates perhaps even more to queer individuals. Since, at the very least, the Decadents at the turn of the … Continue reading
Walking through Jade Yumang’s current exhibition My-O-My at School of Visual Art’s CP Project Space feels a bit like cruising. Curated by Jasa McKenzie, glimpses of bare flesh peek out of phallic-like tendrils hanging from thirty-two curious sculptures–a series titled Thumb Through–nestled in corners, hung on the walls and hidden in hallways. Yumang culled these fractured images … Continue reading
I’m a sucker for disco balls. There, I said it. If anywhere or anything includes a mirror ball, I’m immediately a fan. I’m like a moth to a shimmering, glittering flame.
But beyond my lizard brain fixation with shiny objects, disco balls can be harnessed as a complex symbol–a metaphor for community, excess, escapism, utopia, self-fashioned identity and even, safety in nightlife. Continue reading
“To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt,” says Susan Sontag in On Photography, who was one of many Downtown fixtures captured by photographer Peter Hujar. Present in Lost Downtown, an exhibition commemorating the devastatingly impressive … Continue reading
In Susan Sontag’s seminal, often quoted and equally maligned “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Sontag composes a list of examples of camp including Tiffany lamps, Swan Lake and “stag movies seen without lust.” While Sontag’s list is certainly limited, she surely would not have hesitated to include opulent lamps, gaudy glass chandeliers, shining streamers, clashing ribbons, dangling … Continue reading