Friday, March 25, 2011

Imitation Of Life Part 1/13



You can see Douglas Sirk's Imitation of Life on YouTube--in 13 parts. Many consider it the greatest Hollywood melodrama of the sound era.

Imitation of Life (1959) - (Original Trailer)

All That Heaven Allows



"Life's parade at your fingertips." What is sadder than substituting television for passion with Rock Hudson down at the old mill?

All That Heaven Allows



Ron's debut at The Club, featuring the horrible Mona and the revolting Howard. Disaster ensues.

Love was not gentle with these two . . .



The trailer for All That Heaven Allows.

Saturday, March 12, 2011

Check This Out

AA Bronson, who was part of an influential artists' collective, General Idea, has been in the headlines recently because he requested that his work be withdrawn from the National Portrait Gallery's "Hide/Seek" exhibition after David Wojnarowicz's "Fire in My Belly" video was removed. There's been a major retrospective of his work in Paris recently, and his contributions to art were recognized with a knighthood by French culture minister Frederic Mitterand.
Now Bronson has curated a series on Queer Cinema for the Museum of Modern Art, featuring some filmmakers we'll be looking at later in the semester: Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Scott Treleaven (and including Bronson's own film, with one of the greatest titles ever, Shut the Fuck Up). You can see some of it if you're in New York during spring break.

Queer Cinema from the Collection: Today and Yesterday

March 11–17, 2011
View related film screenings
In conjunction with the Museum’s current exhibition Contemporary Art from the Collection, AA Bronson, an artist, writer, curator, and member of the artists’ group General Idea, curates a small and idiosyncratic selection of queer cinema and AIDS-related films and videos, drawn from and inspired by the Museum’s collection.

AA Bronson offers these thoughts about the program: “Toronto, February 17, 2011, 7:59 am: I am sitting at my computer, feeling rather jet-lagged, and anticipating my return flight to New York several hours from now. Let’s say I am feeling queer: I have just come from Paris, where a 25-year retrospective of General Idea brought huge lineups to the opening night. That exhibition circulates around ideas of queerness, and especially General Idea’s queerness, the means whereby we queered whatever we touched, including concepts of the artist, the audience, the museum, the media, and the work of art. I am even later than usual in providing this text, and I am not sure exactly what it is I want to say here. I know that I do not know, and that is already a kind of queering. The films and videos that I have chosen represent a loose narrative of my own history; there is a story to go with each one. The story begins in the mid-sixties, when I screened a double bill of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures at the School of Architecture where I was studying. Both films had been banned, and that was reason enough for me to present them, in a long evening that eventually became rather rowdy, ending in some sort of happening, with wet noodles and nudity. I include Anger’s Eaux d’Artifice for equally personal reasons: in 1970 a friend who was working at a film distribution house stole a copy of this soulful work, so moved was she by its beauty. We played it again and again in our rather cold and barren General Idea loft, stunned into (stoned) silence by its cold blue luminosity. Our loft was situated on the third floor of an old office building in the heart of the financial district of Toronto, and I remember that blue light flickering through the night, reflecting off the sea of desks that presented itself so mesmerizingly in the building facing ours. Each work in this series carries memories for me and perhaps I will be able to tell stories as we proceed. I have included one program of General Idea film and video, because those carry the most memories of all. And I begin with some new and younger talent, because as far as queerness goes, we are only just beginning.” All film descriptions are by AA Bronson.

Organized by AA Bronson, with Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Alfred Hitchcock Geek


Found a blog I didn't know before - check the list to the right for a link to Alfred Hitchcock Geek -- where Portland hipster Joel Gunz posts really insightful personal essays on Hitchcock's greatness, usually emphasizing the distinctive, charged atmosphere of sexual repression that makes them unique. Gunz gets it.

Friday, March 4, 2011

The More You Know . . .


Extracurricular Sex Toy Lesson Draws Rebuke at Northwestern
By JACQUES STEINBERG
March 3, 2011

The president of Northwestern University said Thursday that he was “troubled and disappointed” by a psychology professor’s decision to present his students last week with a demonstration outside class that featured a couple engaging in a live sex act using a prop.

The demonstration had been arranged by J. Michael Bailey, whose Human Sexuality class has an enrollment of nearly 600. On Feb. 21, after concluding a lecture at a university auditorium about sexual arousal, Professor Bailey brought onto the stage a man whom he had invited to participate in a discussion of “kinky people,” according to an e-mail the professor later sent to his students that was reprinted by The Daily Northwestern.

On the way to the stage, Professor Bailey wrote, the man, Ken Melvoin-Berg, the co-owner of a business called Weird Chicago Tours, “asked me whether it would be O.K. if one of the women with him demonstrated female ejaculation using equipment they had brought with them.”

After receiving what the professor called “explicit” warnings of what they were about to see, about 100 students watched as the woman was penetrated by the device.

Professor Bailey, who has taught at Northwestern for two decades, said in his e-mail that the presentation was part of an informal series of events — each “entirely optional” and “not covered on exams” — that had previously featured “a transsexual performer, two convicted sex offenders” and “a swinging couple.”

In his statement, Morton Schapiro, the university president, said: “Although the incident took place in an after-class session that students were not required to attend, and students were advised in advance, several times, of the explicit nature of the activity, I feel it represented extremely poor judgment on the part of our faculty member.”

Mr. Schapiro said the university would “investigate fully the specifics of this incident, and also clarify what constitutes appropriate pedagogy, both in this instance and in the future.”

In his e-mail to his class, Professor Bailey expressed no regrets.

“Student feedback for this event,” he said, “was uniformly positive.”