ATTA BOY follows Homer, a middle-aged Pakistani-American engineer, and Matthew, a surly teenaged outcast, as they meet for secret rendezvous at a local holiday inn. This is no ordinary affair.
The play is a collage performance, and incorporates original writing with re-appropriated transcripts from contemporary journalism, youtube videos, conservative christian weblogs, torture theory and practice, and popular cultural representations of the Columbine Massacre and the attacks at the World Trade Center in New York City in 2001. ATTA BOY conflates the xenophobia/homophobia in the national responses to these traumatic historical moments, and maps a creepy topography of vulnerable desire.
Tickets are $15. To reserve your seats, email brian@perfectdisgrace.com Continue reading →
Cosmic Rockstar presents “WASTED”, a documentary on a merry band of dumpster-diving anti-consumerists called Freegans! Check it out: Freshness guaranteed!
We’re busy getting our end of the year lists together for all of you lovelies. In the meantime here’s a little stocking stuffer for you, my favorite Christmas song, Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby, Please Come Home):
Cheers everyone and may your holidays all look like just like this:
This winter, more than 150 composers, songwriters and performers re-defining contemporary music come together for collaborations exploring the fertile terrain between classical and popular music. The 15-concert festival kicks off with a FREE 7-hour marathon on Monday, January 17, 2011 (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) from 2-9 pm. You can get subscription good for the entire event or purchase single tickets.
Artists like Dan Deacon, Owen Pallet, and Nico Muhly have committed to playing the festival + so many more! We are really honored to get the pleasure of covering the event, and obviously hope those we hold dear are able to join us as we celebrate the diversity of music and the joy of song. JT has been trying to get me to a Dan Deacon show for ages and ages, and I’ve wanted to go, but something has always prevented me from being able to go. Surely this time I will make it to the show! The Ecstatic Music Festival is pushing artists to offer audiences something artists don’t normally get the chance to do, experiment. This isn’t just another night of parroting one-hit-wonders, nope, this will be an experience to remember. Continue reading →
She has fucked 2000 men in ten states.
5 have committed suicide
3 have gone entirely mad.
every time she moves to a new city
10 men follow her.
now she sits on my couch
in a short blue dress.
and she seems
quite healthy and chipper
even looks innocent.
“I lose interest in men”
“as soon as he begins to care for me.”
I refill her drink
as she pulls her dress up,
shows me her black panties,
“Don’t these look sexy?” she asks.
I tell her that they do look sexy,
she gets up, walks across the room
through my bedroom and into my bathroom.
soon I hear the toilet flush.
her name is nana and she has been living
on earth for the past 5000 years.
We here at minorprogression are very fortunate for many reasons. Not only do we get to bare witness to great happenings in the art and music worlds and share those events with you, but we also happen to live in a city that caters non stop to our tastes and interests. Both Stephen and I live in Bushwick, Brooklyn and it is the first time since high school that both of us have lived in the same place at the same time.
Bushwick is a great neighborhood to live in for many reasons; it’s convenient to major public transportation, the rent is relatively cheap compared to other New York neighborhoods and the it has the feeling of an actual neighborhood instead of a region re-zoned, or imagined by real estate companies. When I say this last bit, what I mean is that Bushwick, unlike anywhere else I’ve spent a great deal of time in the city, feels sort of like a universe unto itself. Because it is relatively small and still in fairly early stages of gentrification, there are only a handful of places to hang out and the people that frequent/work at and those places fill your days with a sort of familiar neighborhood pride. When a new business arrives here, it is always met with equal parts anticipation and skepticism. While we clearly want things around us that we find valuable and unique, we don’t want to be priced out of our neighborhood by the pretentious or the generic. New businesses that support both the positive and negative aspects of our outlook have come onto the scene since our moving here, but if there is one business that we unabashedly love, respect and frequent more than any other it is unquestionably Little Skips, a coffee shop, cafe and art gallery that opened a little less than a year ago on the corner of Willoughby and Myrtle Avenues.
My love: you have never wanted to shape yourself
as my divine love has devised.
Remain in the Host,
blind and impalpable,
the way God exists.
If I have sung a lot, I have cried even more
for you — oh my sublime parable of love!
Remain in the brain,
and in the immense myth
of my heart!
It is faith, the forge where I burned
the earthy iron of so much woman;
and on an unholy anvil I wanted to refine you.
Remain in the eternal
nebula, there,
in the polyessence of a sweet nonbeing.
And if you have never wanted to shape yourself
into my metaphysical love emotion,
let me flog myself,
like a sinner.
The past few weeks have been pretty emotional for me… I learned that my friends’ ex boyfriend in Southern California was shot and killed by police officers after wrongfully being accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and I watched as Julian Assange has been stripped of everything human because he tried to set the world free and I can’t help but feel this winter is going to be extremely cold and extremely dark and I plan on doing a lot of reading because reading is an empathetic act, the engaging person is able to speak directly to people of all walks of life and many points of history. With the advent of the internet and self publishing and blogs, the truly voracious reader can wander into the nether reaches of the human experience where gate keepers never dared to allow readers to go in the past. With the world around me falling apart, I feel now is the time to try hardest to be strong, cast psychic spells, engage in magic and keep the spirit of those great humans fully alive. But yeah, life is fucking difficult, especially considering people like this guy exist… Thank god for amazing people, like The Growlers and David Wojnarowicz…
Fans of David Wojnarowicz – painter, photographer, writer, filmmaker, performance artist, and activist – should be aware of the unfortunate news I awoke to this morning, the Executive Committee of the CAA Board of Directors adopted the following statement on December 7, 2010:
The College Art Association regrets the removal of David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in My Belly (1987) from the exhibition Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture, on display at the National Portrait Gallery. It was taken out on November 30 by G. Wayne Clough, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in response to outside pressure. CAA further expresses profound disappointment that the House speaker–designate, John A. Boehner of Ohio, and the incoming majority leader, Eric Cantor of Virginia, have used their positions to question future funding for the Smithsonian Institution. CAA applauds the National Portrait Gallery for its groundbreaking exhibition, which presents the long-suppressed subject of same-sex orientation. Furthermore, CAA commends the thorough, pioneering scholarship and the challenging curatorial judgment made by the organizers of Hide/Seek—David C. Ward, a historian at the museum, and Jonathan Katz, director of the Visual Studies Doctoral Program at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. That the work of everyone involved has been heedlessly compromised is deeply troubling. The pressure brought to bear on the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian sounds a familiar note from 1989, when direct federal funding to artists was ended due to political pressure. Then as now, CAA strongly protests such tactics. Continue reading →
