Don't Forget To Write!

FUNds

2012-01-16T05:55:00.000-08:00

My new hit show "Boy in a Dress" opens in just over a month, we have raised £12,000 towards the production so far, but still we are just over £500 short of our financial targets. And so I have put together this fundraising page in the hope that we can bet the clock and pay the bills!

Visit http://www.indiegogo.com/La-JohnJoseph-Boy-in-a-Dress and please contribute if you can, and circulate if you can't.

Here's some info on the show itself;
Autobiographical, raucously political, and accidentally profound, Boy in a Dress follows the life story thus far of La JohnJoseph, a third-gendered, fallen Catholic, ex-fashion model from the wrong side of the tracks as she moves from the council estates of Bootle to the strip clubs of San Francisco.

Catholicism and drag, public sexuality and body dysmorphia. La JohnJoseph brings together an outrageous but heartfelt slew of true-life tales studded with her own reworkings of iconic songs from wide ranging artists such as Leonard Cohen, Justin Vivian Bond and Cole Porter.

Boy in a Dress is a frank and almost charming triptych uniting all three of La JohnJoseph’s solo memoir shows: I Happen To Like New York, Underclass Hero and Notorious Beauty, in a ’retrospectacle’ exploring the intersection of class, gender, religion and identity formation from a somewhat unique cultural perspective.

Maariv

2012-01-04T04:43:00.000-08:00

Alexander took a shopping trip with photographer Iwajla Klinke, and Israeli newspaper Maariv made it into an article. I don't read Hebrew but the pictures are cute.

And here's what the Pet Shop Boys have to say.

Ru Paul's Christmas Ball

2011-12-16T16:06:00.000-08:00

Oh how I love this! I love that there's a whole new generation of people discovering Ru Paul thanks to her TV show. Those of us who missed out on her full force in the early '90s get to dive in to a whole back catalogue of elegance and hilarity thanks to the wonders of youtube. This Christmas special is really amazing, with cameos from a fake Liza, a real Elton John, Nirvana and the Queen with a Jersey accent, plus NY drag leg-ends GALORE (Linda Simpson, Sherry Vine, Tabboo) it is a seasonal must for the whole family. Oh, and try the tic-tac diet, it really works.

Highlights

2011-12-11T04:03:00.000-08:00

Alexander toured the magical lands of Portugal and the Czech Republic last month, and here's the proof. If this was art I would say "documentation".

Pictures by Jakob Frey, Charlotte Thiessien and Emilie Gouband.

There is a new interview up on Glass Magazine, in which such fascinating things as, "I don’t see any reason why pop music has to be apolitical or vapid, and that is not to say that it has to be didactic either," are said. You can read the full thing here in full.

New Text

2011-11-27T05:15:00.000-08:00

You’ve gorra laugh with Dot though, she’s always been a bit barmy. She tells people we’re sisters. I don’t mind because over the years she’s been better to me than me own sister was, and that’s for sure. She’s always going on about Joe, ‘er ‘usband who she’s been married to for forty years, saying that they never have sex anymore and how she needs it, and though she might be a grandmother but she’s still a woman. She got it into her head last Christmas that she was going to divorce him and she dragged me down to Southport crown court to get the papers. We went into Debenhams for
a coffee first of all like, her Tracey’s behind the Chanel perfume counter there so we get a discount in the café. I prefer M and S I must say, but Dot’s a pretty determined sort of character. Anyway, after a bit of a wander in Debs, we get to court, and she storms up to the registrar like a woman possessed - I’d told ‘er not to have two shots in her latte. She says to the poor woman behind the desk, “I want a divorce!” and the woman looks up and says, “Darling we’re not even married yet,” which I thought was quite amusing but Dot chose not to hear. She said, “I’ve been married to him since 1969, I’ve served my sentence, I want my freedom!” like she’d rehearsed it, which she probably ‘ad, and the woman at the desk said, “Oh. Oh,” she said, ”And
whose fault is it?” “HIS,” said Dot, “I haven’t had sex in five fucking years!” Well, now, the woman at the desk took it on the chin, but the old fella behind us who’d come about renewing his vows turned a terrible shade. She said Joe had been suffering from erectile dysfunction for the past few years, which was hardly surprising given that he was playing in a Status Quo tribute band. It’s not the music that does it she told me, but all the drinkin’ at the shows, you know?

I said to her, “Dot, what on earth are you gonna do without ‘im? You’ve been together for a very long time.” And she just said, “Get meself a new man, from the internet.” And I said, “Dot you can’t just put a bid in on ebay on new fella.” And she said “I know that, I’m joining E-harmony. I’ve already started on me profile.” An’ I said, “Dot! At your age?” And then, do you know
what she said? The cheeky cow, I could’ve murdered her! She said, “Elayne, I only look the same age as you!” Well, I could not believe it! She’s 67, an’ I’m only 48, she’s twenty-years older than me the cheeky bitch. She said, “An’
I’m a size 12 an’ all now, like you.” She’s a bloody 16-18 if she’s anythin’. She said, “I lost all that weight off me hips in pilates, but I didn’t loose anything of me chest. I’ve still got great tits Elayne!” Well what do you say to that? In British Home Stores during the Chrsitmas rush of all places? I just said, “Dot I think you’ve spent too much time on the sunbeds, girl” and I ‘ad a root on the buy one get one free underwear rail. Well, she decided not to divorce Joe for time being, she said they’d got the kids and the grand kids to think about, and the e-harmony membership was £15 a month.

She does look good on it for 67 though I’ll give ‘er that. Well she should, she won the lottery, you know, secretly, about five years ago and never told no-one. But I guessed. She started shopping at Sainshurys, when she’d always been devoted to Morrissons and then she went on a couple of cruises an’ all. And then, she had a face lift, she went to Poland for it and ‘ad
to stay there for four weeks. She’s never been to Poland before and I thought, what a funny experience. To go and visit another country for the first time and all you see is hospitals and waiting rooms, and when you do get to go sightseeing your face is all bandaged up, with surgical tape and compression masks, in case your whole gob falls off. She said, “Our Tracey didn’t even
recognise me when she picked me up at the airport when I got back,” and I said, “Well Dot, that’s because your Tracey’s got astigmatism and she won’t wear her spectacles in public. She doesn’t know what she’s lookin’ at half the time.” It’s true. She went and picked her son up from nursery once and it wasn’t until she got halfway up the Formby bypass that she realised she
had someone else’s child in the back of the car. A little girl, called Britney as it turned out, and it’s only because the mother was manic depressive in an upswing, that Tracey didn’t end up with a suspended sentence.

Anyway, long story short, I do not look the same age as Dot, and we are not the same size. I’ve lost two stone this year, working this new job and living a generally healthier lifestyle. I’ve always had quite a sweet tooth, and I used to eat all kinds during the day, I was always snackin’ on biscuits or crisps. But now, I just have a piece of toast, with a tiny, tiny bit of marge on it
at breakfast and then I’ll have the same again, about six o’clock once the kids have ‘ad their tea. An’ I do ‘ave some coffee durin’ the day like. If I’m honest I found it really hard in the beginning, dietin’. But then Jessica, my second oldest girl, told me that she ‘ad this slimming powder and she said it really helped her not to feel hungry all the time. So I tried that and it really worked, it gave me terrible ‘eadaches, but I lost weight dead quick like. And it wasn’t for about a month that I realised I was actually taking speed. Our John, my eldest lad, said “Mother, what the Hell are you putting in your five alive?” And
I said, “It’s just that stuff our Jess gives me, it’s a weight loss powder.” Well, he snatched the bag off me and gave it a look over. It was a really cute little bag actually, tiny with little red lips on it, and he said, “Mother! No dietary
preparation on the market is called pink champagne – this is speed! You’ve been taking amphetamines!” And so I was. But I tell you what, it didn’t ‘alf ‘elp with the weight loss, and the whole house was immaculate.

Well, I didn’t mention the speed to Dot, she’s got a thing about drugs, she used to be a traffic warden you see. She wouldn’t even take HRT when she went through the change, which might explain why she’s so sex crazed now. You know, when she came up here last time she was going on and on about this bloody rampant rabbit of hers, and our Jessica’s sitting there,
mouth wide open in shock. Of course I thought she was talking about a pet, and it wasn’t until we were in the café – Tiffins café it was, where we always go because I’m obsessed with the egg custard – it wasn’t until we were there that I realised that Dot was talking about a bloody sex toy. I just thought, “Here we go again, Dot’s having one of her post-midlife crisis pep
talks,” and I ordered me egg custard. Only when the waitress comes by, she doesn’t shut up about her bloody vibrators like anyone normal would, she just keeps rabbitin’ on – so to speak. And the waitress is all agog trying to write down our order but really just too entranced by the rendition of the Joys of Sex Dot’s delivering to our Jessica, who looks like she could die of shame at any minute. So, off the waitress goes, desperate to tell all the girls in the back what she’d just heard, I could just tell from the look on her face, and Dot starts off about love gels. Well, now our Jessica, who’s 21 mind, so she’s not a
baby, is tryin’ her hardest to pretend she has no idea what Dot’s talking about in the vain hope that she might shut ‘er up, only Dot doesn’t take the hint and tries ‘er very hardest to overcome the communication barrier. She says to Jessica, “You know, you put the gel on before you use the vibrator. You know, on your bits.” And Jessica just looks at her blank faced though I can tell she’s imploring Dot to say nothin’ else. And of course, just as the waitress comes over with the tea an’ my egg custard, Dot goes, “Oh for ‘eaven’s sake Jess! You rub it into your clitoris to give you more sensation in your orgasm!” Well, our poor Jessica nearly fainted. I thought it was all very funny meself, well you’ve got to laugh aven’t you? Especially when Dot’s around.

Anyway, all that sex ed , it must be working because she has left Joe. She was having a fling with some fella from Texas she found on a Bay City Rollers message board, and they’d never met but she was all for flying off to Texas and leavin’ Joe and ‘is erectile dysfunction behind for good. Only before she could leg it there, her virtual online lover who she’d never met, was stolen by her virtual online best friend who she’d also never met. So she blocked them both - and I thought, well that’ that, she’s stuck with Joe for good now. She put a few more of those big plastic butterflies up on the wall outside her bungalow to cheer ‘erself up. Our John says the place looks like it was done up by Jeff Kooks, and I said “Well she is a bloody Kook isn’t she!” But then
clear out of the blue I get a message from her, on me facebook wall, I don’t think she really gets the difference between sending a message and writing on your wall, but anyway, I get this message that just says, “Hi Elayne, met a new man called Mark online, fell in love, and moved to Brighton with him, for good! Text me.” Text me, just like that. Of course what lover boy doesn’t know yet is that, although in her mind Dot may look the same age as me and be the same dress size, she’s actually 67 and a size 16-18 if she’s anythin’.

Cute

2011-11-25T04:23:00.000-08:00

Mimzy playing with Dean Wareham and Britta at Casa da Musica (and wearing Versace with her Alexander t-shirt, no less).

Myself and Dita Von Teese babeing it up in Time Out.

Sunday Girls

2011-11-23T08:15:00.000-08:00

Come one, come all to this star studded early evening of performances at Ovalhouse featuring home made baked goods and starring the talents of:

Scene queen JONNY WOO

Malevolent Maestro DAVID HOYLE

Tranny with a fanny HOLESTAR

New York City´s ENYA BUTTOX

The acerbic and astute MYRA DU BOIS

Chanson Icon DUSTY LIMITS

Perennial pervert OPHELIA BITZ

Reigning Miss Alternative World FANCY CHANCE

Transdrogynous globe-trotting starlet La JOHNJOSEPH

Contemporary composer JORDAN HUNT

Surreal Sex Bomb ANNA LEWENHAUPT

Dark Dramaturge JEFFREY GORDON BAKER

.....with more acts to be announced!

Funds raised go towards staging the upcoming "retrospectacle" of my solo theatre work at Ovalhouse in Spring 2012.

Tickets are £10 and can be bought on the door or via the theatre - 020 7582 0080 |www.ovalhouse.com

Picture Credit: Anna Mimouni

You can RSVP here: http://www.facebook.com/events/170118349748166/

Alexander Abroad

2011-11-08T14:39:00.000-08:00

Alexander goes to Portugal this month for three shows, culminating at the Casa da Musica Festival in Porto.

Some things that have pleased me this week

2011-10-29T05:20:00.000-07:00

Inexplicable heap of trash that I walk past each morning at 4.30am on my way home. Quite beautiful in a way.

My band mate Mathi looking like a total babe backstage this week.

Sophie's birthday party.

A cardboard cut out of Dracula decorating the window of a liquor store.

Count Chocula cereal commercials

And also, an amazing demo that Joey played me which I wish I could link to but I can't because he'll kick my ass.

Podcast

2011-09-29T09:12:00.000-07:00

Electroqueer Berlin 2011 is the title of this hit mixtape from the cultural pump house that is Expatriarch. My disco alter-ego Alexander

is very pleased to be sandwiched in there between Aérea Negrot and Steffi. Hit it!

#MIXTAPE016 - Electroqueer Berlin 2011 by Expatriarch by Homoground on Mixcloud

You´ve got lip synch on your teeth.

2011-09-21T15:56:00.001-07:00

I watched Cher´s hit film "Burlesque", needless to say it was dreadful with the only real narrative action coming from Christina Aguilera´s arsenal of Halloween store wigs.

But, it really got me thinking about the fine art of lip synching. As in all movies, the singers lip synch their parts to pre-recorded tracks to make editing easier, only in "Burlesque" we´re watching two of the paragon´s of lip synch culture at work, that is to say the ladies lip synchers the world over move their mouths too. And both of the leading ladies, it must be noted, are really working a high drag look. Pop will eat itself. The supporting cast in the movie lip synch onstage to the voices of other legends (Marilyn Monroe et al) which gives the movie a cute sort of cut-price glamour, but really it could be said that the whole movie lip synchs.

I mean isn´t it the most blatant "Cabaret" re-do? Scene for scene, theme for theme shot for shot, move for move, Fosse´s ´70s masterpiece is bled dry. Rakish millionaires, sexually ambiguous room mate love affairs, chorus line pregnancies - it´s all rented. (And what isn´t taken wholesale from "Cabaret" comes bit by bit from "Showgirls", itself a compression of a couple of decades worth of low rent cinema). Alan Cummings in his role as door host is the most clear example, reprising as he does his role as the Emcee in the stage version of "Cabaret" with more than a dash of Joel Grey in the movie version. In effect our dear Mr Cummings is lip synching his role too.

Sadly though the movie´s budget is so astronomical and obvious that there is never room even for a moment for any amount of magic to happen. That beautiful gap between the body and the voice is barren, there is nothing at work in that no-man´s land to suggest that the movie is sitting all the way through. Where every good lip synched drag show goes is to a place of deliberate suspension of disbelief, into a place where the pleasure is choosing to believe in the sorcery you see onstage, to revel in the Emerald City and not reveal the mundane nature of what is behind the curtain.

"Burlesque" however is a wonderland so woefully heavy-handed in explaining every minor, irksome plot detail that a person cannot help but feel insulted and deprived of the wonder of projecting themselves into the story. Surely half of the thrill of a movie is feeling as though the circumstances onscreen have some definite impact on your own well-being? For me "Burlesque" is all about the lip synching, and the knowledge that as yet I have not been so decimated by Hollywood tragedies like this one, that I can no longer crowbar my way into the horrors of contemporary culture and find a way to explore.

(With thanks to Joey Hansom for the title of this post).

"Fuck what you heard - she´s a vegan!" - Max Steele, 2008

2011-09-12T14:47:00.000-07:00

During a conversation on language with my polyglot boyfriend he informed me that whilst in English pronouns (and some nouns) are gendered (he/she, actor/actress), and in German the articles are likewise (the notorious der, die, das), in Hebrew the verbs actually are too.

That is to say, the parts of speech that refer to the actions of a person or that person´s state of being, are also gendered. For example הוא רץ, היא רצה (he runs, she runs) with "רץ" representing the masculine running and "רצה" the feminine. This, I found fascinating, if at first a little bleak and inescapably essentialist - as if it wasn´t bad enough being referred to by one´s assumed gender, one also has to literally "act"accordingly.

I was however further informed of the possibilities in Hebrew to move beyond the limitations I had so quickly assumed, in that it is possible for you to deliberately say "היא רץ", ie, "she runs (in the masculine)." It hardly sounds poetic in English but can be very innovative in Hebrew, in a slangy subcultural way, which let´s face it is the only way. In English one can of course deliberately "misuse" the pronouns to come up with phrases like, "David is late, she is such a lazy bitch," but that is hardly an equivalent.

Then I thought about the high queenly habit of referring to oneself as "she", as in "She likes a heel" (where "She" replaces "I" - excuse me if I am over-explaining this). It counts as a refashioning of one´s own sense of self, almost outside of one´s self, sitting alongside one´s self and in dialogue with her. The interior personality refers to the exterior socially coded, gendered persona as "she", another person apart.

Obviously it´s meant first and foremost as campy and grandiose posturing, but I think that it also represents a definite and ironic strategy in resisting fixity, and furthermore mocks the strategy by which people are forced into gender conformity. It says "That which you make of me, is not me." Another identity is created out of nothingness, to house the personality, projected onto the air, called into being by naming (if we´re going to get all Heidegger about it - and frankly why not?) all of which refutes any notion of the naturalness of gender. Gender can´t really be sealed up in nature if it can simply be fabricated with a few words at any given moment, you see, it is always fabricated, that´s why we need gendered language, to keep pushing us back in line.

And isn´t it interesting that the only real way to regender English is to put it in the third person? The third person for the third gender - she loves a lingustic theory.

It's a hit

2011-09-01T04:26:00.000-07:00

This is the first footage from Alexander's studio Session at Orange Ear last month, and it is a duet with the Boobalicious Mary Ocher.

On The Cover of a Magazine

2011-08-31T02:51:00.000-07:00

So there you go, fame at last.
Alexander plays Trou aux Biches in Paris on Sat Sept 2nd and the Queer Noises Music Festival in Berlin on Sept 7th.
See you there lovers.

Queer Noises

2011-08-22T07:39:00.001-07:00

Alexander has been invited to play the Queer Noises festival in Berlin on Sept 3rd, which is very exciting indeed. As part of the run up to this I shot a cover story for Siegessaeule with the other bands from the festival. The shoot took place at a tranny brothel in the ever so elegant neighbourhood of Charlottenburg, and was as much fun as you might imagine. I was also upto my eyeballs in cold and flu medication, as you can witness in this behind the scenes video.

In This Shirt

2011-08-07T08:04:00.000-07:00

My dear friends The Irrepressibles are going international with the release of their first single outside of Europe, tomorrow August 8th! There´s a new set of remixes form Hercules & Love Affair, and Zero 7 too.

Here´s the video, it´s been everywhere for the past six months, and interestingly enough was made without the band´s input. It´s a meeting of minds or some such.

On the RECORD

2011-08-02T14:36:00.000-07:00

Amazingly my hit disco alter-ego Alexander now has a full record "demoed" as "they" say in "the business", and moreover all 13 songs will be performed this Saturday in Berlin for the first time ever. It´s the album´s debut and I´m really quite excited about it, so excited in fact that I traipsed the length and breadth of Germany to day to find a dry cleaner that can press my suit in time. You can find the event details here and then tell me if you think the cleaners did a good job.

And in case you haven´t seen it, here´s the video for "Bad Language."

New Favourite Genre

2011-07-31T12:26:00.000-07:00

Currently I am really feeling Fin de siècle sexy social climber novels, the kind of tale that focuses on young women facing social disadvantage who turn on the charm and scramble up (and sometimes back down) the hierarchy of late nineteenth century fortunes.

Edith Wharton´s "The House of Mirth" is the funniest, Theodore Dreiser´s "Sister Carrie" is the saddest, Emile Zola´s "Nana" is the filthiest. All three are fascinating, and give a intriguing look at unattached women trying to strike for independence, personhood and financial stability in the pre-emancipation West. They talk about the economies of sexuality, the hypocrisy of heternormative society, the overwhelming drive that is desire, and the impossibility of being everything one is required to be in an industrial, consumer focused, sexist and sexphobic, puritanical, duplicitous landscape.

All three are by turns tragic, amusing, raucous and sardonic, and figure into a long lineage of novels that explore a women´s place in the world in very graphic terms, a lineage that runs on into novels like "Breakfast at Tiffanys" and "The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Else." If you are any kind of feminist they are essential reading, and if you´re any kind of mentally functioning humanoid you should chuck out your summer beach bonk buster and get stuck into the great tarts, villains, aristocrats, and social climbers of these works because really you are missing out.

You better work, nineteenth century naturalistic novels.

Sophie in her own words

2011-07-15T03:02:00.000-07:00

My friend, Berlin based painter Sophie Iremonger, just did this little audio interview for ArtStars - check it out!

Off-the-record: ArtStars* interview with Sophie Iremonger - artstarstv.com by ArtStars*

CASINO: a piece by Max Steele, extracted from SCORCHER

2011-07-07T04:32:00.000-07:00

Max Steele's zine Scorcher, has just come out in its sixth incarnation, and this is my favourite story from it, reproduced with kind permission of Max at www.fagcity.blogspot.com

"It’s early summer and friend my Lola and I are going out. Lola’s sister Sophie is visiting from out of town. Suburban blonde soft femme lesbo softball player, and just 16. Lola and I are taking her to a queer glam dance party. We tease our curly hair and put on eye makeup, drink warm underage vodka with sweet diet cola and put on bright tight outfits. New in town our slutty little hearts beat hot wet and fast underneath neon spandex.

(RINGRINGRING)
“Um, hello?”
“Hello?”
“Luck? Is that you?”
“Yeah, hi. Billy? What’s up?”
“Luck? Let’s be ladies tonight.”

Stomping through the West Village, pausing to smoke weed and check our reflections in store windows. Lola is a condescending, salty, sage and sarcastic older sister to Sophie. Rolling her eyes, calling her “kid” and secretly protective. I’m so jealous.

“But Lola,” Sophie whimpers, trailing behind us, “do you think they’ll let us in? I don’t have an ID or anything.”

“Sure.” Lola says. “You just have to… go in. Just show them that you know that you belong inside.” She nicks a breadstick from an outdoor table at a bistro, and chews on it like a cigar. Waiting for a stoplight, Lola absent-mindedly fingers her breast through her bodysuit. She catches me staring at her.

“What?” she asks, “I want my nipples to be hard when we get there.”

Outside the nightclub, Lola flirts with the girl at the door, a fat goth dyke in crusty pink pigtails, braces, acne and a spiked dog collar. “How many are you tonight, Lola?” she asks.

“Just three!” Lola bats her eyelashes and takes me and Sophie by the hand. We make Sophie go check our coats while we buy rum and cokes. We like the sugar and caffeine, it helps us dance. We each slam the first and sip the second, force little Sophie to do the same, and head to the dance floor.

We dance in circles, facing inward. Real furiously not caring if anyone sees us, Lola and I are just getting in touch with our own bodies, together, to the beat. Eventually I get distracted, through, the mirrored ceilings make me excited, nervous. I spy a bleach blonde boy in a tight black t-shirt dancing by himself, and I see he notices me too and we smile. I wanna go dance with him but I don’t want to be rude. Sophie whispers something to Lola, and puts her hand over her mouth like she’s gonna puke, and Lola rolls her eyes and leads Sophie outside, to the bathroom line I guess. I lean against the wall and stare at my shoes. I’m drunk all of a sudden, and out of breath. The boy is staring at me and smiling and still dancing by himself. When the song ends, he comes over to say hi.
“What’s your name?” he asks.
“Billy, what’s yours?” I say.
He says “Charlie.” and “Can I buy you a drink?”

We get more rum and cokes and are dancing together this trendy song about math called “Love Is A Number” it’s fake retro-sounding, synthetic and sick. I have a tummy ache. I think I might be hungry. Or else it’s anticipation. He’s sweating, but he smells like expensive deordorant. Something not human, but wet and exciting. He’s wearing a little bit of black eyeliner and has glitter in his hair and on his face. Fat pieces of gold foil. We’re dancing really close, pressing our pelvises together, I can feel his cock getting hard through his jeans, rubbing up against mine. He stares deep into my eyes and then looks down to where we join, where we’re rubbing up against each other, and then back up at my eyes and he smiles.

“You’re a really good dancer” he says. I’m so flattered.

Huge black radical drag queen MC steps onstage getting ready for the show, dancing to trendy house music and waiting for the DJ to turn on her microphone and turn the lights on. Lola appears on the dance floor and commands the Queen’s attention. They know each other and she invites Lola to come up onstage and dance with her. The lights on the stage come up on Lola and the MC.

(KIKI is a word for when two drag queens are attracted to or hook up or have sex or fall in love with each other. It is also a word for MAGICK.)

“Is that your friend?” Charlie asks.
“Yeah” I say. Lola and the Queen are doing the freak.
“She’s crazy.” Charlie says. Lola is humping the floor, making sexy faces. The crowd is egging her on and the Queen is spanking her as she humps the floor.
“Yeah, I know.” I say. I want Charlie to know that I am friends with the craziest girls. We’re wild, out tonight, looking for trouble. I’m just trying to impress him cause he’s cute.

Charlie runs his hand down my chest. Feels me up underneath my tanktop. He has rough fingertips. I inherited this tank top from my girlfriend Cotton when he stayed with me last summer. It’s falling apart, there’re holes in it, but he said it was lucky and he’s right. I’ve been wearing it every day and I’m gonna keep wearing it until it falls apart. Don’t take off my luck. Charlie asks me how old I am, and when I tell him he rolls his eyes and says “Figures. I always like the young ones.” I ask him how old he is, and he’s only a few years older than I am. Odds, stacked up.

It’s time for the show! The MC asks for volunteers, and brave drunk punk boys to come up on the stage, strip naked and have a dick-size contest. She judges their bodies and invites Lola to help her, introducing her as: “My fierce, cunty girlfriend Lulu!” Everybody on the dancefloor cheers. “Lulu’s LUCKY. She’s gonna help me pick a winner TONIGHT!” Everybody goes wild.

I’m super-focused on my new date. In it to win it. Chris is dressed like a rock star magazine ad, fake poor tight ripped cotton. Distressed. Man-handled. He’s such a poseur. I appreciate the posture, though, and take it personally. He hangs an arm around my neck and starts kissing my cheek, all sweet. “Do you wanna go somehere” he asks, “more private?”

We go upstairs to the lobby. Red plastic couches in low lighting near another. Charlie sits me down next to him and starts rubbing my hip bones. Across the room from us, in a slimy unlit corner, I see Lola’s little sister, Sophie. She’s making out with a man in a business suit. She’s straddling him and grinning. She’s in big trouble, she’s getting in trouble right now. Lola and me are in trouble too, for taking her here and letting her get drunk.

Like church, people go to a casino to confirm a hunch. The thing about going out, and gambling, is that you never know what is going to happen. You never know this, really, in life, ever. But you go to a casino to be reminded that the world of possibility is gigantic, that chance is infinite, you never know. It’s almost four a.m., Charlie asks me where I live and asks if I want to hail a take a taxi there right now. He’ll pay.

Lola stumbles downstairs, her curly pontytail coming half undone. She grabs Sophie by the wrist, out of the lap of the guy in the suit, and drags her to the door. I leap up to kiss her goodbye. Lola is wearing a green lycra bodysuit. “It split!” she says, “Onstage. Right at the crotch.” She bends over and shows me. I can see her dark curly pubic hairs. “Can you believe it?” She asks. “Everybody totally, like, saw my pussy or whatever.” She catches her breath, “Plus: Sophie was making out with a guy! We’re leaving, do you want to come?”

“No,” I say, gesturing behind me to Charlie. He’s sitting on the couch staring at me and biting his fingernails. Lola chuckles.

Charlie and I get into a cab, it’s getting late. He and I both feel excited, we’re in on an adventure, but the ride home is taking it feels like forever. We don’t even know each other. Being in transit is unlucky. Gambling is an indoor crime.

In bed Charlie and I strip, kissing hot fast and desperate like we’re dying. He’s wearing a bunch of ball-chain necklaces, and one blue rabbit’s foot, damp with sweat. He drops them in a pile at the foot of the bed and takes off my lucky tank top and his tongue is rolling around my mouth. I’m thinking about how high-rollers get pretty girls to blow on their dice. It’s a sweet ritual. I bite Charlie’s left nipple.

Charlie asks if I have a condom, and he unrolls it onto me and starts jerking me off, staring at me real hopeful, optimistic and I think superstitious. There’s a moment of calm, silence as I squeeze into him, but then suddenly we’re fucking really fast and hard, athletic, to prove something. Charlie says, smiling, straddling me “Whoa, you’re even better at this than you are at dancing.”

I blush. “Shut up” I say.

“Wait” Charlie says, “get behind me”. He gets turns around, sticking his ass in my face.
crouching on all four. Petit four in my face. “Do it,” he says “like this”. I start fucking him from behind, slowly at first, smooth like cards up your sleeve for the right moment. “like this…” Charlie’s voice trails off, in a groan.

“I want you,” he says “to really feel it”.

TWO POINTS HERE:
A) VYGOTSKY’S THEORY OF THOUGHT AND SPEECH: Words and their attendant meanings (THE LAW, WHICH IS LANGUAGE) do not exist apart from the physical acts thereof. Words have no meaning until we can conceive of saying them. Imagine how they sound coming out of your throat, being articulated by your pretty chipped little teeth and tongue. Then they are alive, animated and exist. Every thought word feeling is empirical, generated by the body. It’s where language comes from.

Thought is not merely expressed in words; it comes into existence through them.

B) Here is who wins at slot machines: only good people win slot machines. People who deserve it. Here is who else wins at slot machines: everybody, sometimes. Here is who loses at slot machines: only good people lose slot machines. People who deserve it. Here is who else loses at slot machines: everybody, sometimes.

To say it makes it real. Give it a name, like a casino, a dedicated space, in which to gamble. A casino is safe, actually, cuz at a casino you always lose, eventually. The house always wins. Gambling is what you do when you don’t care about what you’ve got. Besides, who ever got rich by gambling? The language of chance gives birth to chance.

Charlie and I are fucking even faster. He wants me to really feel it. And I want to know what it feels like to say that We’re fucking and in between kissing the small of his back I mouth the words “really feel it” silently behind him. He pulls me out of him and flips onto his back, we jerk off together and shoot onto his stomach, kissing furiously and breathing hard through our nostrils. We cum really hard happy and clear. Having narrowly escaped something and the thing which we have just avoided is losing. A result. I pass out next to Charlie having gotten lucky.

In the morning he wakes me up, to ask if he can use the shower. When he comes back, he puts on a pair of clean underwear, which I guess he’d had with him in a black backpack that I didn’t notice before. He was prepared, I guess, for any eventualities. Charlie apologizes for having to leave so early, but he has plans to go horseback riding, he says. At the racetrack."

You can order your very own copy of "Scorcher" from the Birdsong micro press, here http://www.birdsongmag.com/zines.php

Eroteme

2011-07-05T06:57:00.000-07:00

Genius stylist and art director Oleg Mitrofanov created this outrageously beautiful new set of tarot cards, as recently featured on AnOther Magazine's site. Co-starring myself and a whole slew of beauties including Sue Tilley, Velvet D'Amour and Anna Lewenhaupt, the cards where shot over two days in London earlier this year and investigate the theatricality of opera as a metaphor for the function of fashion in contemporary visual culture. Word is the US Vogue will be featuring the cards this Fall, so big things are on the way for Mr Mitrofanov, who is also junior editor at Acne Paper.

PLUS! Today is his birthday, so happy birthday to you old darling!

You can see the full set of cards here, before the world goes crazy for them: http://www.olegmitrofanov.com/info/eroteme.html

Alexander meets Max Steele

2011-06-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

Alexander met Max Steele on behalf of Out There magazine, for the fifth in what is becoming a deeply compelling interview series. See for yourself.

The unbearable glamour

2011-06-28T13:55:00.000-07:00

Here's a clip from the Tranny Hotel project, with thanks to the Exchange Radical Moments Festival

Chat

2011-06-17T10:47:00.001-07:00

Alexander has a new interview up now, with UK queer zine Out Spoken. Here's a brief extract:

What achievement are you most proud of?
I won a Blue Peter badge when I was a child, that was really something. The only thing that I am more proud of is reading The Sound and The Fury all the way through without even throwing myself out of the window once.

What advice would you give your younger self?
Just because Madonna does it, doesn’t mean it’s cool.

And here's the full thing: http://outspokenuk.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/behind-the-scene-alexander/

Köln

2011-06-12T05:24:00.000-07:00

L-R Mandy Romero, Joan Crawford, Regina Fiz in Köln

Literally, just back from Tranny Hotel in Köln, which you can watch back at http://11moments.org/live/ in fact. There were many challenges in presenting English language texts to a German audience, in what transpired to be a Catholic guest house adjoined to Church - St George by coincidence. The hotel insisted that the art come off the walls at specified times when the priests would be in that part of the building, and some of the less open minded members of staff threw out the fliers.

Of course it wasn't just the kind hearted Christans, the local trans community were apparently horrified by the publicity images (previously posted on this blog) especially of Regina Fiz slumped next to a urinal, and Bridge Markland's taped nipples. The community felt it didn't represent the image they wanted to project - but, honestly who ever said it should? The images represent individual artist's and their output. None of us ever said we stand for anything other than our own opinions. So, yes, controversy.

Local magazine "Flash" wrote us up under the gorgeous headline "Hollywood meets Freakshow!" which is sort of amusing and sort of makes me want to take up arson.

Aloysius and I read the evening news

I did however have a great time performing, it was very inspiring, very challenging but very fulfilling. The tech was bare bones, there was very little preparation time and the performance space itself was a touch unsuitable but nonetheless it was a very worthwhile experience. The feedback was so incredible, really touching, I think people really got something from the stories and songs, I can't express the relief I felt when I realized that people were actually enjoying it! Even after so many years of doing this, I am still so deeply nervous when it comes to presenting work in an unfamiliar context, but I am so glad I did.

One final thing, organizer and performer Mandy Romero said something that really caught my imagination during the final show. She said that in a digital age everything is 0 and 1, that that is the basis of computer language, something is either on or off, apparently. She argued that trans people and trans art was a way of rebelling against that either/or mentality, and resisting a potentially dangerous binary in which everything is either compelled or forbidden.

Yes, lover, we are the last vestige against fascism.

Jesus has no gender now.

2011-06-09T16:27:00.000-07:00

This is a new monologue which I will debut tomorrow in Köln, as the end segment of my performance. I thought I'd share it with you.

Picture by Joshua Kristal from Notorious Beauty, NYC, 2008

UPDATE: http://11moments.org/live/ will stream the performance at roughly 8pm (C.E.S.T) on Sat 11th June and for a short while afterwards it will be viewable on their site.

"I wake up sometimes and it’s on my mind, I think about it all of the time, my failure to surrender, my victory sustained at such cost, 'Kiss Me Hardy.' I remember lying next to you in bed, early in the morning, not long before dawn, and kissing you, and you saying to me, 'I don’t think I want this anymore, I don’t think I want this. I need someone who is more of a man.' More of a man, then? Less of a woman, then? And I remember other times, other lovers who have embraced me, whom I have embraced, and I hear their voices played back too. How often have I been told, 'I’m really sorry but, I only really date real girls.'

What is a real girl, what is the measure of reality anyway? Some miniscule chromosomal difference, some reshaping of nerve endings, some designated parking area. I can’t be that, I have no fixity, I am only a person.

And did I ever say I was anything else? No. It was you who imagined me a gender, and it is you who have disappointed yourself. I never said I was any kind of man, I never said I was any kind of woman, I barely claim to be human, I hardly know if I exist. But you somehow believe that because I am neither exhibit A or exhibit B, that I am less than a man and less than a woman, without realizing the tragedy of your logic. I am not less than either, I am more than both. I am the interface, Ich bin Zwillinge, I am all of your strengths and all of your weaknesses, so if you want to slander me then go ahead. I can take it, and more, I am a saint coated in the filth of this world, which has given me a radiant sheen, and all of your ignorance is washed away with the rain. You are no more than poster paint on marble, you wipe clean, I am immortal. I was here first and I will be here last, because we are God’s people, Jesus has no gender now.

Get up, go home, be gone. I don’t meet the expectations you want to force on me, I’m too tall, my breasts are too small, I don’t smell right, well I don’t apologise for any of that and as the door closes behind you, all I have to do is leave my physicality behind, on the shore, and step into the boat. 'Hello Charon.' "

2011-06-08T09:09:00.000-07:00

Gary Farrelly of New Obsessive

Art and culture movement New Obsessive have a new interview with Alexander up right now. Interviewer Gary Farrelly is something of a right-wing sex bomb, so the results are, interesting. Here's a highlight:

GF: Do you remember our first encounter? What was your first impression of your interrogator?
A: I remember it well, you had an erection. Actually, so did I.

GF: How are you liking the 21st Century? Do you feel at home in 2011?
A: To put it bluntly, no. I can’t help feeling that all the interesting people are either dead or have gone into hiding. Wilde put it perfectly when he asked, “Why was I born with such contemporaries?”

And the rest is here: http://newobsessive.blogspot.com/2011/06/interrogating-alexander.html

Köln

2011-06-08T06:08:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to be off to Köln on Friday to take part in the Exchange Radical Moments Live Art festival, as part of Mandy Romero's project, Tranny Hotel. I'm showing extracts from my three solo shows, a preview if you will, of the theatrical retrospective I'm putting up in Feb 2012 in London.

Full details on Tranny Hotel are here: http://exchangeradicalmoments.wordpress.com/about/

Alexander and Light Asylum

2011-06-07T10:29:00.000-07:00

The fourth interview in an occasional series for Out There Magazine by Alexander, this time with the darkly incroyable Light Asylum. Enjoy.

In Sedes

2011-06-07T01:04:00.000-07:00

Alexander has a 4 week residency at The Silver Future in Berlin, throughout July with special guests Mary Ocher, Nikolaj Tange-Lange, G-dmother and Ralf Thießies.

The artwork "Portrait of Alexander as a Faberge Egg" is by Stevie Hanley and the full dates are here: http://www.thisisalexander.com/live

M and M

2011-05-27T03:19:00.000-07:00

Well, lovers, I had to share this captivatingly odd conversation between scouse sex bomb Margi Clarke and Morrissey because it's so charmingly morose.

Happy DRAG Mother's Day

2011-05-08T09:02:00.001-07:00

Since it's Mothering Sunday I thought I would celebrate the wonderful tradition of drag mothering, as a way to say thank you to the fine ladies who taught me how to tap into my inner glamourpuss. Unusually perhaps, my drag mothers were real gurls, sparkling cis-gendered ladies from whom I learnt a lot of amazing tricks. And all yanks too.

My first drag mother was Gigi Giuffre, who was the first person to ever shave my legs, and it took FOREVER. She dressed me up as Lucille Ball once, and was the first person to play me Judy Garland Live at Carnegie Hall. Canonical.

Ready for The Glammy Awards

New Years Eve in Times Square

When I lived in New York my dear friend Legs Malone helped me broaden my horizons and helped me distinguish the good quality drug store cosmetics from the bad. She bought me my very own liquid eyeliner too!

The Golden Pasties Ceremony

Backstage at Galapagos

And then there was Darlinda Just Darlinda, who was probably more of a drag sister, but STILL. She kept the old Cockettes glitter and tits aesthetic alive, and introduced me to iridescent cream powders as a base for glitter.

Late one night on Hope ST

Theatre for the New City

And a special mention of course to Enya Buttox the mother of The House of Box, whose eternally disorganised cupboard kept me clothed through many cold nights in the gutter.

Boxing Day in NYC

Make Out

2011-05-04T13:12:00.000-07:00

Alexander plays the Make Out Magazine benefit on Friday lovers.

Queer Zagreb!

2011-04-30T11:23:00.000-07:00

Alexander is in Croatia having a wild old time at the Queer Zagreb festival. Last night the infamous Pussy Faggot! party rolled into town with Earl Dax, Penny Arcade, Joel Gibb and A Man To Pet . It was a cosmic evening, I think we were a spark to the powder keg of something wild and wonderful.

I really felt that I was seeing something happen, there was no cynicism only enthusiasm and a real joy that something as mad and beautiful as this could happen in a country in which being gay is HARD WORK. People are afraid to be themselves, attacks are not uncommon, I heard several sad stories about homophobic violence last night told with courage laced through them and the hope that together we can change our world.

Here's a little pre-show chat from the opening night of the festival (video one) and another clip which shows the ABSOLUTE INSANITY the party descended into (the last 2/3s of the second clip.

Also, and quite bizarrely, there are Alexander pin badges on sale here for a rather modest 10 Kuna. Cheap at 'alf the price.

Easter

2011-04-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

In celebration of Easter there's a new Alexander track streaming for the rest of the weekend. It's called "Raised a Christian" and it's a collaboration with Snax, you can hear it below:
Raised A Christian by thisisAlexander

Poem

2011-04-23T08:18:00.000-07:00

The phosphorescent gleam
of
Supermarkets in summer.
When the shelves are silent and the air is welcomingly cool
And one can almost swim
through the aisles.
The relief is palpable,
lebensmittel amiable
and coins seem to roll so much further.

Alexander in Berlin PT.2

2011-04-20T04:17:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview between Alexander and Stevie Hanley for the culture blog at Out There Magazine.

Anna Lewenhaupt

2011-04-13T14:12:00.001-07:00

Amazingly a moment of spare time was just gifted to me by the universe, and I decided to spend it musing on the multitudinous talents of Anna Lewenhaupt. She's a visual artist, a performer, a model and a speaker of five languages, why she hasn't written her memoirs yet I don't know. Maybe she's still too young, that must be it, she certainly has enough stories to tell.

Once she and I went out on a rampage in ball gowns and fake blood only to end up completely lost and wandering the streets terrifying passers by. Eventually we found a party, neither of us were sure if it was the party we were actually looking for but by that point we didn't care. We entered what looked like a derelict brothel, walked about calling out to anyone who might show us in, but the only person we saw was a rather robust and panicked looking tranny who burst out in the corridor from a locked door insisisting, "No, no, nothing's going on in there!" We didn't argue, or look for evidence to the contrary, but rather continued further on into the bizarre labyrinth we had stumbled into. On the top floor we finally found signs of life, in the form of a purple lit room with a man asleep in a sex swing and another collapsed on the bar. In the background the tranny from the corridor was slow dancing with a dowager, generally the whole scene had us convinced we were on the set of a David Lynch film.

So maybe that's where she gets her influences, for her cinematic, sculptural, psychosexual illustrations. But I say, see for yourself lover, http://annalewenhaupt.blogspot.com/

Back in Town

2011-04-11T09:09:00.000-07:00

Lovers, Alexander plays his next show this Thursday, April 14th at Südblock in Kreuzberg, alongside UhOh. Come along, there'll be two new songs debuted.

Also, there's a new interview with Alexander on Catch Fire this week. Here's an extract:

If “Alexander” were preceded by an article in German, would it be “der”, “das” or “die”? How does the concept of gender fit into your art, or life in general?

I think gendered articles and pronouns are tiresome, it’s like constantly being squeezed into a corner with every sentence. My friend Theo (Adams) came up with the great idea to say “tree” instead of he or she – isn’t that great? As in, “Tree looks great in that Ryan Trecartin video but tree still owes me five euros, and tree’d better cough up SOON.” My own attitude to gender is basically, “must we?” I feel like I’m humoring the less capable by playing along, so I don’t.

My artistic output is always about gender in one way or another, from lyrical references to adopting a somewhat satirical, pose on stage. Stage shows require you to be a little Heideggerian I think, you chose one thing to be to the exclusion of all other things, and become it. Onstage I have a specific gender but offstage I have many.

And the full thing is here.

Billy Cheer

2011-04-02T11:47:00.000-07:00

You can read the desperately exciting conversation between Billy Cheer and Alexander at the Pussy Faggot website. Here's a little snippet:

Alexander: Pizza or ice cream?

Billy: Pizza, but that’s like choosing a parent, or something. Cats or dogs?

Alexander: Cats—no contest. What’s worse to be kept awake by: someone snoring or lousy music?

Billy: Lousy music, ugh! What’s your favorite color?

Alexander: Lavender, with duck egg a close second. Showers or baths?

Billy: Showers solo; baths are for lovers. Favorite smell?

Alexander: I love the smell of rose, it’s so grandiose. Favorite porn star?

Billy: Carolee Schneemann. Favorite city?

Alexander: I couldn’t chose from any of the places I’ve lived, so I’m going to say the Emerald City. Faith or Listen Without Prejudice?

Billy: Faith, weirdly enough. What’s for dinner?

Alexander: I wish it were avocado something, but none of mine are ripe yet. THEN or NOW?

Billy: Always. Did you see anything you liked at the Fall fashion shows?

Alexander: Andrej Pejic.

Hop on over

2011-04-01T09:06:00.000-07:00

My dear friend Alexander has taken up a post as blogger for Out There magazine, reporting from Berlin on cultural events. His first assignment was to cover the opening of Iwajla Klinke's "Ritual Memories" at Styx gallery. He spoke to the artist about grave robbery, Liz Taylor and of course, her work, he tells me it was fun. You can read the full interview betweeen Iwajla and Alexander here.

Elizabeth Taylor

2011-03-24T05:22:00.000-07:00

An incredible woman died yesterday, and I am missing her already. As a small but very well intended homage I wrote this piece for The Guardian film blog:

"Elizabeth Taylor: the icon's icon: Her tenacity, adventures in immorality and profound talent made Liz Taylor the star other stars wanted to be associated with.

Elizabeth Taylor died on Joan Crawford's birthday: a wholly fitting date. The two leading ladies met on the set of Torch Song in the early 50s, a movie Crawford was filming with Taylor's second husband, Michael Wilding. And they did not hit it off; Crawford could see the future, and it was Taylor. When the younger actor declined to treat Crawford as the movie queen she was, the star branded her "a little bitch" and threatened to teach her some manners. Taylor rebuffed her with typical nonchalance, saying how lucky Wilding was to play a blind man in the movie and therefore be spared the horror of looking at Crawford.

If anything sums up Taylor's personality it's probably this meeting of minds, for it perfectly encapsulates her fierce independence, her rebellious nature, and her complete acceptance of her magnificent good looks. In refusing to kiss Hollywood arse, in throwing caution to the wind and her white-hot sexuality in the face of a public often as aghast as they were thrilled, Taylor bucked and redefined modern movie stardom.

She was a child of the studio system, making her debut at 10 years old in the golden era of Hollywood, but she was by no means ruled by it in the way that a generation of stars who came before her were. She lived through the collapse of the old system of movie-making and came through it as the last bearer of its glory and simultaneously as a gloriously liberated standard-bearer for independence and a newly emerging feminist politic. The first woman to be paid $1m (£618,000) for a movie (Cleopatra, 1963) Taylor was representative of the swinging 60s, of female emancipation, of sexual liberation. Yet at the same time she was the last great movie star, a role that traditionally came with a very different set of values.

While some movie stars (perhaps Garbo or Hayworth) may have rivalled her for glamour and looks, and some for that "don't give a fuck" attitude (Bankhead and Hepburn for starters) no one did it so well and so simultaneously. It was exactly this mixture of glamour and "so what?", this incomparable work ethic combined with her legendary party-girl spirit that made her what she became. Liz Smith, the famed gossip columnist, wrote that what excited people about Taylor was, "her vulgarity and her arrogance [as well as] the money". Taylor was a monarch and a rebel at once, this was her unique streak, she rewrote the rulebook and became an icon to icons.

Most famously perhaps, Taylor's lifelong friend Michael Jackson spent his life changing his own looks in imitation of the Hollywood beauty. He also made her the co-star of his hit 1989 music video Leave Me Alone. The video featured vintage footage of Taylor inside a funfair of tabloid rumours, sending up the insane scrutiny both stars had faced during their careers, and positing her as the avatar of celebrity itself. Likewise, one of the 20th century's key iconographers, Andy Warhol, was an avid Taylor fan, drawing on her persona for one of his most famous silk screens, 1963's Liz, which sold for £11.4m in 2007. Warhol used Taylor just as he used soup cans, as shorthand to re-evaluate popular culture, because she encapsulated it.

Throughout her life, Taylor was the star stars wanted to be associated with. When David Bowie first met her in Beverley Hills, in 1975, he was quick to pose with Taylor for Terry O'Neill in a series of suggestive and deeply charismatic pictures. In doing so Bowie conferred some of Taylor's legendary sex appeal on his own personality, and staked his own claim as a superstar equal to the legend.

Things are no different today, as countless Facebook profile pictures and Twitter tributes prove. Everyone from UK glamour puss Paloma Faith to reality TV star Kim Kardashian is claiming her as an idol of beauty, longevity and strength. Nor is it solely mainstream starlets who pay homage to Taylor today, tributes come from the underground, too (including her first posthumous interview on Max Steele's fagcity blog), from artists who respected her dedication to Aids fundraising and her position as outsider on the inside.

What is truly fascinating about Taylor's persona is that in spite of what seems an endless run of ill health, the image that remains of her is that of a virile, devastating screen siren, not that of the frail, bloated old lady unable to walk she has been for the last two decades. The true strength of her iconic image is exemplified by the fact that even the wheelchair-bound reality of her situation could not undermine it. Attending hospital in sunglasses and diamonds, she remained to the last a glamorous symbol of selfhood, a woman who didn't care for convention, who played it as it came and accepted the consequences. Her tenacity, her adventures in immorality, and her profound talent made Elizabeth Taylor the icon other icons mimic, the test they must pass, the bar they must raise if they are to be acknowledged in the same breath as those who were truly great."

Joan Crawford at the airport, 1968

2011-03-22T14:40:00.000-07:00

I MEAN COME ON! I spend a lot of time in airports and I am never as glamorous as Joan though I strive everyday, I really do. Isn't she just the best? Accompanied by random children, drunk as a skunk in a great big pink hat, gawped at by bubble gum chewing teens and photographed by proto-paparazzi. FULL JOAN. It's her birthday on Wednesday, and may God rest her soul.

House of DJB

2011-03-18T06:08:00.000-07:00

There's a nice little bit on this blog today about Alexander with the fantastic pul-quote "reminiscent of pop music's greats, Regina Spektor, Lady Gaga and Pete Burns." I quite like that actually.

Interview

2011-03-12T17:16:00.000-08:00

Here's a hit interview I did for So So Gay

Alexander by Cezary Zacharew

For the past few years the musical press has been gurgling about ‘the return of women in pop music,’ heralding the rise of the likes of Florence, Marina and Jessie J as though it’s been one big feminist takeover from a male-dominated music industry. But if you think about it, that’s a load of balderdash. While it’s fantastic that the leading figures in British popular music at the moment are mostly women, there wasn’t exactly a male popstar monopoly to break.

Despite the efforts of Patrick Wolf, Frankmusik and (maybe) Mika, there hasn’t been a really preeminent male solo artist since Robbie Williams and before him, arguably, Morrissey. This is because mainstream society still doesn’t know how to market heart-on-sleeve male sexuality. That’s not even considering anything other than heterosexuality: the fact is record executives find it far easier to package an attractive woman singing about love than a bloke. It’s about time for some style and sex under a male persona. Enter performance artist La John Joseph under his new moniker, Alexander. Promising ‘part Morrissey, part Giorgio Moroder, melodramatic and wry lyrics sung baritone over a late-Seventies disco soundscape’ it sounded like just the kick up the backside that male-fronted music needs today. We decided to give him a ring and find out more.

SSG: What are you up to right now?

La John Joseph: I’m busy in in central London, shooting a deck of Tarot cards for a friend. I’ve been dressed up as all kinds of creatures, my favourite is probably Caesar as he’s the most serious out of all of them.

Do you believe in Tarot?

I believe in everything! If you believe in something, it makes it real.

Tell me about your childhood

I never wanted to be a performer as a child - I wanted to be a priest. Until I left Liverpool aged 16 I seriously considered it. But soon I was dating a guy and moved…a tale of ‘hitch a ride on someone else’s credit card’ if you will.

So were you encouraged to be creative from a young age?

We were definitely encouraged in our reading, there were always lots of stories of dragon princes and ice queens – and Catholicism. My personal favourites were reading Greek tragedy and Shakespeare, and there was pretty much no television. It was all about the lyrical .

What kind of performer would you describe yourself as?

Laurie Anderson says that the best kind of performance can be anything, and to me the definition of performance is a genre that allows you to do anything so long as you contexualise it – and that’s what I’ve done. Until now, with my music project, Alexander, I’d wanted to make music but never played music. I was always fascinated by pop personas rather than movies when I was growing up. I first started performing when I moved to London around the same time as being signed to a modelling agency. I hated modelling so much, it made me feel like a piece of furniture, not a person. I like to be a human being, not a mannequin! Performance casting, on the other hand, gave me kicks.

Gender identity features strongly in your work – what do you have to say that is unique as a performer around this subject matter?

My stance on it is deconstructionism. I don’t think anyone comes into this world as a man or a woman. It’s a fabricated notion about whether you should or shouldn’t wear a dress. You’re not born a man or a woman, you’re made a man or a woman. True performance can show just how much of an experience gender is and if you can construct it, you can deconstruct it. On the new EP (Dandylioness) I feel more like a drag king! I’m wearing suits and ties which feels lot easier than performing in dresses, where you feel like you’re exposing yourself. There’s something more sponanteous, as you’re not worrying about your clothing slipping off or possibly being unflattering. It feels sexy in a different way. When I did more female roles or personas I felt like a demanding Joan Crawford diva, now I feel a bit more sleazy. It’s good.

What music by other people do you enjoy listening to?

I like a bit of old Bowie, Roxy Music and Dusty Springfield. I also enjoy listening to soul music, glam rock and some techno. And of course Morrissey! In terms of newer material I like Paloma Faith, as we’re from the same background, and a fantastic band called Rambunctious.

In what direction can you see the arts evolving?

At the moment it’s definitely going to be about surviving the cuts, which are absolutely ridiculous. I was at the State of the Arts Conference the other day and one of the things I learned was that for every one pound invested, six pounds are returned from our arts. It’s catastrophic and idiotic: arts have been around for as long as humanity has. On the other hand, when times get hard people get more creative. In a time of economic instability, when people are pushed to the limit, it can be more innovative. Look at the Lower East Side of New York in the Seventies and Eighties

Asides from being a performer, what other jobs have you done?

I’ve had many jobs, but never a bad one. Aside from modelling, I was a stripper for a bit. I’ve been mostly lucky. My main job since I was 16 has just been doing what I’ve wanted to do. I’ve been pressed for time and money but I’ve always made the work I wanted to do a priority. If a job doesn’t inspire me I’m happy to starve instead. I’m a bit of a stubborn and determined person!

Which city or venue have you found the best to perform in?

That’s a tough one! At the moment I’m really enjoying Berlin. It’s such a classy city, and although the Germans aren’t known for being great dancers they’ve got minimal techno, which is great as I’m making a dance record. New York also has the most over-the-top people in the world. They’re permanantly over-emotive, which is better than performing to a dead room - something I find soul destroying. But it’s never like that in New York: everyone wants to be entertained. Alexander has been nearly around for 2 years but I’ve been dipping in and out of other projects. But now we’ve mixed the tracks and come up with a feasible live show and done bookings at festivals since September.

With Alexander it’s been entirely different to anything else I’ve done before. Less ‘dictatorial’ than previous projects as it’s an ensemble effort. It started when I met one of the collaborators, Malcolm, in New York who said, ‘Let’s make a disco record.’ So I gave him some lyrics and he programmed it. I then met a friend of a friend in Berlin who was a dancer who got involved. And then I met a friend who was a painter who became involved in our make up. Someone else became a backing singer. It all just came together organically. Everyone fulfils their role and we’re all very invested in it. What’s great is, for every show we do we get to do another. I really enjoy singing baritone as a sort of Morrissey and Georgio Moroder combination.

Who do you like and dislike in mainstream popular culture today?

I don’t pay much attention to contemporary culture. I was in Berlin for a while so tabloid culture was lost on me there. I’m definitely a fan of actresses like Fiona Shaw and Tilda Swinton. I met Tilda at a party held by AnOther Magazine and it was like meeting the Archangel Gabriel. Who else do I like? Vivienne Westwood…Julianne Moore. Basically glamorous redheaded ladies! And my nieces. They range from one to five years old and give me style advice whenever I need it.

What achievements are you most proud of?

I’m proud of still being in one piece. Nobody’s shot me yet! I’ve had so many hair-raising moments. I’m proud to be both still alive and not in jail. I would like to be free to have the time and resources to fulfil myself with the projects I want to do in 10 years. I’d also like Alexander to still be going in 10 years – it’s the archetype of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Posh English boy morose and Edwardian with a touch of melodramatic celebritiy. Being an archetype is something I’d always tried to avoid. I never felt like a quintessential Brit but now I’ve decided that if you can’t beat them, join them.

What upcoming projects do you have planned?

Most importantly I’m concentrating on Alexander. The EP is currently streaming and will be for sale in the spring. It’ll first be available at shows and further bookings. I’m talking to several labels at the moment, but I don’t want to get screwed over by some leviathan. A friend of mine just signed a deal, it was a lousy deal but she signed it anyway. I would like to avoid that. It’s been good to see The Irrepressibles, a 10-piece baroque pop orchestra, do well for themselves on their own terms, so I’d like to be similar to them as all their hard work has paid off. I did the same course as Paloma Faith at Central Saint Martins and look where she is now.

As always, I’m collaborating with other people on their projects. I would like to write a full libretto and I’m talking to a friend about that, hoping it comes to pass. There’s something marvellous about overcoming reality shows. I’m interested in opera as a bombastic genre. Nobody has used it to capture the spirit of the time since Benjamin Britten and there’s definitely a vacuum in the art form. Maybe that’s because over here it’s just for the rich. Over in Germany opera is so much more affordable, which we should definitely adopt.

For more information and to stream the Alexander EP, Dandylioness, visit www.thisisalexander.com Alexander performs at Eastern Bloc in London on March 17.

Review 2

2011-03-10T09:44:00.000-08:00

From Cliff Joannou at QX

"LONG BEFORE THE arrival of chav couture and the rise of council chic, La JohnJoseph was unwittingly piecing together his latest theatrical offering through the every day life stories of his family and friends. Once upon a time the ‘council house community’ was ﬂippantly sidelined by the snooty middle and upper classes of England as
the embarrassing underbelly of our Great Nation, deemed as having little or no contribution to UK culture (thank you Mrs Thatcher). Today we are well aware that some of the most inﬂuential cultural movements, from fashion to music, have all come out of what would once have been dismissively tagged as the ‘working classes’.

Step up La JohnJoseph, Liverpool's own council house hero with a pink tinge! Possessing masterful use of language and through subtle invocations in his voice and movements, JohnJoseph welcomes us into his early life. One of eight children, with a
mother who married ﬁve times, his childhood was expectantly fraught with unsuitable role models, a sexually invasive step father, and a search to ﬁnd identity in a home life that was neither stable nor at ﬁrst supportive of a young, effeminate gay man.

It’s through this social environment that La JohnJoseph dissects the most extraordinary
moments of his youth into a curious spotlight on family, friendship and how some of the most seemingly unsuitable scenarios can carry the most poignancy. His acute imitations are the strength of the performance here, from his ﬁrst experiences
of the Liverpool gay scene and the local drag queen that imparted sage advice on a young JohnJoseph, to the moment he stumbles back home in the early
hours to ﬁnd his mother sitting on the front door step, locked out of her own home.
The humour here is not always explosively hilarious with every punch line, instead JohnJoseph executes a subtle and sincere observation of the beautiful and bizarre nature of everyday life.

A true star in ascendance, La JohnJoseph has a stratospheric future ahead of him."

Review

2011-03-09T16:38:00.000-08:00

Here's a hit review of last week's show by Martin Perry at Out There.

"In the middle of a small dark theatre space, lit by a single spotlight knelt the androgynous figure of La JohnJoseph, dressed in an electric blue shellsuit, head bowed, hands clutched as if in prayer. The wall in front of him was decorated with reflective shards of mirrored paper resembling a large arched stained glass window, or perhaps the head of a huge penis or is a bishops hat? Shiny silhouettes of rats rush up towards its centre.

Over the next hour we are taken on a journey, beginning with the Pope's first visit to UK in 1982, an event that also marked the date of our Underclass Hero's birth into a life of poverty in a Liverpool housing estate. Punctuated by iconic indie torch songs the formative years of La JohnJoseph are recounted, often surprising, sometimes funny but always poignant and unshrinkingly candid.

La JohnJoseph's studied delivery of his own exacting prose transported the audience into a vivid world of childhood turmoil, multiple house moves, an unending stream of 'stepfathers', of child abuse, a wayward mother, Catholisism and uplifting adolescent sexual explorations in the most ungodly of locations.

La JohnJoseph's haunting singing voice accompanied by violin and harmonium was the perfect tool to convey the mixture of melancholy and pathos. The makeshift screens, hung either side of the stage faintly reflected scenes form Thatcher's Britain subtly adding historical context to La JohnJoseph's monologue. By his own admission part Noel Coward, part Joan Crawford, part Penny Arcade, part Quentin Crisp La JohnJoseph owns the stage and brings vivid light and shade and not a little charm to what must clearly be a painful, yet cathartic story to tell. A story which on paper could sound depressing, but the overall effect of the show created the complete opposite effect. It was both life-affirming and heart-warming and I urge anyone with an interest in contemporary queer performance to seek out the next (as yet unannounced) performance from this most talented of orators.

Underclass Hero is the third of a trilogy of monologues, and I was left wishing I'd seen the other two. I'll certainly be first in the queue as and when La JohnJoseph's next sermon is delivered.

Underclass Hero was written and preformed by La JohnJoseph and directed by Jeffery Gordon, set design was by Stevie Hanley and musical accompaniment by Jordon Hunt on the Violin and Jack Tame on the harmonium."

Friday

2011-03-06T03:25:00.000-08:00

And so we reach closing night, sold out again, and with a very intensely reflective audience. Not so uproarious as Thursday night but listening carefully all the same. For me it was a long slog of a show, but the audience didn't seem to feel that, the feed back has been amazing, the people I've met after the shows or who have emailed me in the last few days have had really wonderful and heartfelt things to say. I'm glad it touched so many people as it has, and I'm glad that we had the tenacity to keep going with the production when it seemed entirely overwhelming.

I am extremely grateful to Jack, Jordan, Stevie and Jeffrey for all of their work on the show, it really has been a group effort and they all went above and beyond the call of duty. Thanks to the Oval House for having us and to everyone who wrote about the show and who came to see it. No shout outs however to slacker hipster drama queens who hassle you for free tickets and then don't show up...thank goodness for box office returns, eh?

Hit set designer Stevie Hanley with his mosaic stain glass rat disco window arch

Hit director Jeffrey Gordon Baker sets the props

Friday

2011-03-04T15:51:00.001-08:00

Tonight we changed the last third of the show around, switching scenes and giving it a more definite ending. Of course I tripped over the scenery at the climax, but such is life. The house was totally full again tonight, the audience responded quite differently as is their want, and I felt really quite calm. I'm not drinking before shows anymore which is not full Joan I know, but seems to be working for me. I could even say I enjoyed performing the show, which I never imagined I would since it's so laboriously gruesome. I'm glad I kept the section about Catholic relief workers, as Stevie suggested, because it really does lift the show and forms a nice counterpoint to a lot of the bleaker material. Stevie also took this hit picture of the musicians and I - aren't I lucky to work with such handsome men? Not to mention their talents! Neither of them have any, so let's not.

Thursday

2011-03-03T16:23:00.001-08:00

Tonight was opening night and we were pretty much full, a lot of familiar faces abounded and a lot of journos too. Performance wise we were pretty on the money, though poor old Jack had to leave twice to throw up! You can keep your jokes about my rendition of Playboy Mommy being enough to make anyone puke to yourself thanks very much. We had a brief Q&A after the show in which a few interesting points were raised, mainly about my tracksuit. So yes, off to a great start. FULL JOAN.

Stevie Hanley's beautiful set in all of its glory

Jack, Jordan and hit director Jeffrey Gordon Baker sharing a moment.

Exclusive backstage picture

Hit dressing room

Wednesday

2011-03-03T02:50:00.001-08:00

Wednesday is ruled by Mercury, my key planet. The show finally felt like it was coming together, and not a moment too soon, we even ran it in entirety. It is now lit, the set is more or less finished, the tech is set and things have calmed down on an interpersonal level between the team. However the script has to be edited again and things are still falling from the ceiling so we aren't finished with preparations quite yet.

Jack and Jordan lend a hand in the making of the mosaic, as Stevie looks on from various vantage points.

Tuesday

2011-03-01T14:44:00.000-08:00

There always comes a point in the process when you feel that the wheels have fallen off and that you are headed most definitely into a brick wall. And there is no choice really but to keep going, having faith in the talents of the people you are working with. Today was that day, tomorrow I believe, will be the day in which it all turns around and all of our hard work comes together. Yes, indeed.

Hit musicians Jordan Hunt and Jack Tame

Hit set designer Stevie Hanley

Beginnings of the hit mosaic stained glass archway to parallele universe

The theatre

2011-03-01T04:51:00.000-08:00

We're blogging the construction, rehearsal and performance of "Underclass Hero" as it goes up in London this week. I'll post a picture each day, as it all comes together. Watch this space.

LDN

2011-02-27T06:12:00.001-08:00

Hello lover, here I am in jolly old England in some sort of demented rehearsal downward spiral which has obliterated what little sense of perspective I ever had. Today a funny little old man invited me to his house for a cup of tea and some McDonald's, which was odd but sweet, especially at 11am on a Sunday. Yesterday I had a less pleasant experience.

At the historic First Out Cafe in Soho, a place I don't often frequent, I was hanging out with Stevie and talking over designs for the show. I went to use the bathroom, as I do every ten minutes or so, being a well-hydrated, naturally anxious person. As far as I could see there was only one bathroom, with one cubicle. In NY and Berlin I have become familiar with gay cafes having mixed use bathrooms, so I used the cubicle on offer, and nothing particularly unexpected happened. Until I came out, at which point I was confronted by a very aggressive woman who said to me, "This is the ladies, yeah? For LADIES!" and slammed the door. It wasn't as Little Britain as it sounds actually, and I was rather shaken by her tone.

I use the bathrooms of both genders, and in both instances cause a bit of confusion. Often in the gents men will say, "I'm sorry, is this the men's?", sometimes they can be a little rude or make a silly joke at my expense, but I have never been in a situation in which someone has actually shouted at me for using (as she presumed) the wrong bathroom.

I waited until she came out and said, "Excuse me, I really didn't mean to cause you any upset..."
To which she replied, "Don't you even talk to me!"
At that point I lost my temper and shouted back, "Have you ever heard of transgender people? This is a queer place, I'm obviously not here to harass anyone!"
She looked sort of confused, sort of upset and said, "Can I hug you? I didn't realize. I am sorry, I thought you were a tourist. We just feel like we can't come in here anymore."

Who is "we" I wonder? Londoners? Women? Technically I'm neither, but I'd like to feel that "we" can all go to places like First Out and not feel like "we" might spark a fistfight when peeing. Do I need to wear a little placard that says "TRAN" on it? I thought the blue nail polish and the red purse might offer SOME indication. Maybe I should start pissing in the streets? Pissing in a river? Here's a bit of Patti Smith.

SCREEN face

2011-02-13T08:18:00.000-08:00

Hello lovers, ALEXANDER shot a showreel in Berlin last week, with the gorgeous Ms Diamonds and Ms Champagne of The Crystal Tits. It was directed by Alex & Marc at The Centre for Endless Progress and you can see the full thing on the website under video. For now, here's some screengrabs.

With thanks to Sophie Iremoger for the make-up and The Centre for Endless Progress.

Alexander LIVES

2011-02-03T03:58:00.000-08:00

I'm so happy to say that Alexander finally has an online home here: http://www.thisisalexander.com/

You can stream the Dandylioness EP and see our live schedule, plus next week we will have video content. See you there lover.

She Walks in Beauty

2011-01-31T05:51:00.000-08:00

This is the full article I wrote for Out There magazine, considering beauty from the vantage point of trans/third gender. It appears in the current issue of Out There as "The Beauty of the Third Sex" but was originally titled "She Walks in Beauty". You can buy the magazine online or from stockists in the US and Europe, I'm not sure if it's distributed further afield yet. Anyway, here goes:

Karis Wilde by Jaime Baker

Beauty is a nebulous thing, it is indescribable, it can’t be captured, though that hasn’t stopped millennia’s worth of artists, writers and thinkers from trying. Baudelaire called beauty, “A sphinx no mortal knows,” yet, we know it when we see it. Of course it differs from every viewer’s vantage point, but that is the beauty of beauty; its consistency in tandem with its fluidity, its interchangeability and fixity, its permanence and its mutability. How one thing previously unremarkable, can be transformed by a stray ray of light, into the purest representation of perfect aesthetics, sometimes only for a moment.

Plato spoke of an ideal world, beyond ours, where there exist true forms, which appear in our world only as copies. Beauty is one of these ideal forms, what we see physically before our eyes (if our eyes can be believed) is only a representation of true beauty, a shadow cast by it. That’s maybe why we see it in so many forms, what we’re experiencing is only a reflection of the ideal of beauty, shining from the a beyond. Seeing beauty is like catching a glimpse of the moon’s reflection, it’s there, in every reflective surface, but it is only a copy, only a physicalization, sign posting the existence of beauty. A beautiful person (object, landscape, or emotion) is never beauty itself, but rather a souvenir of beauty.

Since Plato, beauty has been bound intrinsically with symmetry, the equal size and shape of both sides of the face and body. It is a value that has fed into phrenology and Renaissance portraiture, eugenics and ballet, nineteenth century Italian gardens and Art Deco architecture all equate symmetry with aesthetic achievement. Likewise, today’s highest paid professional beauties have almost perfectly symmetrical faces (Kate Moss being perhaps the prime example) and beauty is still for the most part seen in terms of balanced proportions. But more so, these most celebrated lookers represent another kind of symmetry, that of a balance between the modes of being we call “male” and “female”. Models, muses, movie stars, span the most beautiful qualities of “both” genders. Isn’t there always something very masculine, or at the very least boyish, about the most beautiful women of history? Elizabeth the First, Joan Crawford, Agnes Dean. And without even emphasizing the feminine connotations of the word “beauty”, the world’s most gorgeous men, from Alexander the Great, to James Dean, have all had a most definite prettiness to them. After all, if beauty is symmetry, then what can be more symmetrical than a beauty spanning both sides of the gender divide we currently insist on?

What makes symmetry so beautiful to behold is not purely the aesthetics of geometry, it is not just pure rational mathematics, curves, lines and angles which capture our attention. What makes symmetry transcendent and indeed beautiful is its rarity. The universe is basically asymmetrical, as are we. If it blossoms on our bodies in pairs, it will likely be asymmetrical. Balls, breasts, feet, eyes, limbs, all unequal in size and shape, represent the central trait of an existence that is askew, not square on. The very rareness of symmetry in our world makes it dazzling, because for better or worse we prize uniqueness, be it in jewels, animals or people. Often this lust for the unusual leads to fetishism, violent skirmishes and the formation of a psychological starvation economy, but to the positive, the desire for the different shows that there is still hope for individualism in a world defined by conspicuous conformity.

The twentieth century’s most mundane re-thinker of beauty, Andy Warhol, said, “I have never seen a person I couldn’t call a beauty.” Though not a common thing, you can find beauty in just about anyone if you try, lover. But, when you do find it, when you do strike upon beauty, you realize that it is never that which is most expected, homogenous or everyday about a person which makes them beautiful, never something High Street or immediately recognizable, but actually, the reverse. It is the things which marks out a person as unusual, that marks them out as beautiful. A unique blend of features signaling a blend of ethnic heritages, a sense of style informed by imagination not commerce, odd-colored eyes, a gap toothed smile, shoulder length hair in contrast with a gymnasts musculature. The unique is beauty, the incandescent and intangible strangeness of something wholly original is beauty, self-possession is beauty, uniqueness is beauty, non-conformity is beauty, the other is beauty.

It is that which we consider different which we also consider beautiful, and vice versa, what we consider beautiful we consider different. That which marks a person as gorgeous marks a person as strange because there is something uncanny too about beauty, because of its symmetry and perhaps, to speak in Freudian terms, its suggestion of mirrors, doubles and supernatural replications. This goes some way to explaining the threat some people feel from truly radical, unfettered beauty. Humans are not know to embrace the strange immediately and with open arms, the unusual and unexpected scare us. Ask any person who has come to be acclaimed as beautiful (through no achievement of their own) and they will usually recount tales of being terrorized for their height, hair color, gender performance, weight or skin color. Because true beauty can be a terrifying thing, it can overwhelm. It can actually approach the sublime, that sensation of terror which Edmund Burke actually marked out as in opposition to beauty; writing that it caused fear not pleasure. It is unsurprising then that beauty is always on the defensive, protecting itself, its delicate, transitory and whimsical nature. Be it Diana turning Acateon ito a stag or trannies carrying flick knives, beauty has learned how to handle herself.

Beauty then is a quality not a quantity and as such its physicalization, is complicated by attempts to categorize it. Husserl wrote that we can never experience consciousness directly, that it is always mediated to us by act and objects in that consciousness. When we see beauty this is in fact a communication with the essence of beauty. There is then, no fixed beauty is there? At least not one we can know, because it comes to us in many shifting forms. We all know what we mean by the sentiment of beauty, but each of us would draw a different picture in describing a personal ideal example, wouldn’t we? And beauty would be the common ground, the essential behind each exponent, the last thing we have when we had abstracted everything else.

Surely then the ideal proponent of beauty would be likewise as unfixed as beauty itself. A person of fluidity, mutability, interchangability, a person who is sealed neither into the category of male or of female? A person who can encompass not just both genders, but all genders, and simultaneously eradicate the use of categorization by sex. Surely the prime examples of beauty in human form are third gendered beings. Is it safe to say then, that beauty itself is third gendered?

When I say third gendered I want you to be clear that I am not talking about some undecided, passive, default position for those who can’t make up their minds whether to be boys or girls. I am talking about an active state of being in which inhabitants have decided most definitively to live beyond the limits of traditional genders; “That shimmering gray area, where anything is possible”, as Justin Bond calls it. The third gender is not an excess option for those who are not male or female, it is not a halfway house, rather it engulfs both sides of the divide and then some. It is not choice C for those who aren’t A or B, rather it is D, F, G,4,5,6, X.Y,Z. The third gender is possibility, it’s potential, it’s limitless, it is not based on definition, it is in fact, an essence like beauty itself. If we try to line it up in a similar manner to the position of bisexuality in respect to sexual preference, then it will not serve anything other than a reinforcement of the predominant duality. We must look at the third gender as everything that is not fixed, everything that refuses to be fixed.

The third gender is beautiful in that it puts forwards the most powerful expressions of both sides of this prefabricated gender divide we labor under, and then offers yet more contributions, combinations, synthesis, and indeed provokes the undoing of that dichotomy. But beyond that, beauty is itself third gendered; limitless, essential, indescribable, palpable but always fluid. Husserl’s pure consciousness and Plato’s ideal forms both speak of forms beyond our sensory world which appear to us through mediation. These forms I believe are much in the vein of love as described by St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, or as string theory as described by new physicists; a universal, mysterious, inherent but not fully known binding principle that spans the universe, and is furthermore ungendered – third gendered. The third gender is a way of being that evokes absolute freedom of choice and expression, it is beauty, and it comprises a radical rethinking of unimaginative socio-biological restraints, a super intelligent approach to conceptualizing categories of existence. I guess that’s why Wilde was so adamant when he wrote, ”Beauty is a form of genius.”

LDN

2011-01-28T02:50:00.001-08:00

Well, I'm off to the yUK for six weeks of hit shows, all of which are listed below.

I'll be popping up around town at other people's shindigs too but the main impetus of the trip is to present my play "Underclass Hero" for three nights at the Oval House theatre. Incredibly you can book tickets HERE now!

I'm very excited about UCH this time around, I have two live musicians working on a soundscape and a new set design, all of which I intend to reveal as they come together. I'm going to really blog the process. "Blog the process", best t-shirt slogan of 2011, already, right?

Feb 10th: David Hoyle Lives at the RVT

Feb 15th: Boom Boom Club

March 3/4/5: Underclass Hero at Oval House

March 19: Duckie

Casting

2011-01-19T02:45:00.000-08:00

Image by Alina Rudya

Hello lovers, we're casting for an Alexander music video filming in Berlin Jan Wed 26th. We need people in good looks to be part of our audience, so if you're interested email thatboyalexander@gmail.com

Isadora

2011-01-16T04:01:00.001-08:00

I wrote this for Fat Zine late last year, the zine has subsequently gone out of circulation so I'm putting it up here, for your consideration.

So you've been around the world once or twice in your homemade dresses, and no, short hair really doesn't suit you but yes, you were emaciated in your teens. When you were younger you wore braces and you listened to the Dead Kennedys and now all your memories smell like health food, because Jonathan left his multi-vitamins behind, and they wound up at the bottom of your box. You have always looked tired and immortal, you have worn a lot of silly outfits, you seem like you were forever looking to the horizon for the end of the world. You have always gravitated to beaches, to seascapes, to sunsettings over waves, where you waiting for me?

I didn't have the money for iced coffee, and in June it's too hot to drink it hot, I wasn't prying but I was lonely and lost and bored. I hoped I would find a quarter or even a sentimental dollar bill crushed in a corner, but I didn't. I found yards of your acrylic hair and I found photographs that made me bitterly jealous and I found letters I had written you and letters that you had never mailed me. Will Rebekah be your loud college roommate? Yes, nothing else. And Nick will be that trip to Mexico? Yes, nothing else. And Brooke will be that party in her underwear. Yes, nothing else. Some of us were born in the digital age and won't even suffer the mercy of photographic prints; we will remain lost on a hard drive or hang suspended on some forgotten blogspot mid-air. It was what you do when your grandmother dies or your lover leaves, it was intrusive I know but I missed you so.

I am alone you know, I have nothing but one silver dollar and the very sleepless fear of a cold hand on my freckled shoulder.
I am a very old woman now, I spend my countless days in dusty reverie and old newspaper articles, I stretch out time between unnecessary meals and bleary cups of tea. I think about jewellery and I grow agoraphobic, a visit to the bodega downstairs may as well be a day trip to a carnival for me. I talk out loud but not always to myself, most often to you. I make resolutions, I plan out my life with great precision and I calculate airfares, laughing to myself that I will be quite fine. I am quite resigned; either I will die as I am or I won't, and neither option is particularly appealing. I sign in and out of my email account just as a way to tick off the hours. Occasionally I speak with someone, somewhere else for a little while and I feel deeply jealous. I envy her for her free time and her financial stability, I would take up baking if I was bored, but I myself can not afford an apple to bake or a tin to bake it in. Would that it were just mercury in my fillings! Some minor detail that could be realigned. But no, I am treading poisonous water, thick green disinterested water that cares not to hear what I say. I might drown, yes, I might float on, yes, and then there are numerous other options that I would not like to bet on; I am not a gambling man and probability was never my strong suite. Corpses float when they begin to bloat.

We're in an awful mess, and the ground beneath our feet is not even thick mud, not even cracked yellow earth; it's a gum splattered sidewalk without poetry, and that is our great tragedy. To have come to the end of the world together, to have looked over and still to be stoned by mere mundanities; food and water and shelter and subway fare, it's a bloodless death but a cruel one. It's Calvary, the road of the cross, a long walk of humiliation, only I wouldn't dare suggest that the path leads to anything other than self-preservation at best. More degradation at worst.

Am I abandoned? I can't help but feel it so. Should I wake up and acknowledge myself for the weight I am, the nuisance I present, the added pressure on a sinking rat's back? Should I be a gentleman for once and withdraw, without drama, and let you take to your grey veils and very black eyeliner? I have never been a heroine, why start now? It's stupid to think I could help you, it's pointless to think I have anything to offer you, and if I did your bleak ingratitude, your distaste for it all would suffocate me again.

Know this though dear, my dear Isadora, I have tried. I am loyal to my last teardrop and I have rolled with so many punches that I am dizzy now. I have weathered great callousness, I have weathered indirect aggression and direct cruelties, I have weathered storms of passion and long, long silent empty weeks. I never would have left you, I would have nursed you in the gutters of Harlem rather than seek my own safety in the Village. I never would have left you. I would have slept with you in subway stations all through Brooklyn rather than lived as a lover in Bushwick. And yet. I now find myself alone but I went nowhere. I find myself alone Isadora dear, but I haven't moved at all. I am at the mercy of food scraps again, again I am at the mercy of someone who is merciless and not through brutality, but lack of experience. I am at the mercy of a privileged sadist with a credit card and well-heeled parents and paperwork and a therapist and candy coloured sprinkles who wants me to fuck him. I find it pleasurable, I am no martyr and I pray to St Judas, who fell from a vending machine for fifty cents, for forgiveness, that he may absolve me for the numerous horrible acts of selfishness I have perpetrated; a guilt ridden back catalogue I would rather delete. St. Judas betrayed Christ, born of necessity, and still he wears a tongue of holy flame above his head. Surely then, surely there is another fresh start for me?

Iwajla Klinke

2011-01-13T10:21:00.000-08:00

New images by Iwajla Klinke, whose work can next be seen on display as part of a group show at The Centre For Endless Progress next month.

Alexander 2011

2011-01-10T08:25:00.000-08:00

Lovers, Alexander is back in business, this Thursday at Chantal's House of Shame. Very excited, that crowd is always ready for a party, and let's not forget how entertaining the proprieter herself is.

Now, here's a little flashback to his first ever appearance in 2009 in Berlin, alongside everyone's favourite cookie Max Steele.

Photos by Luigi V

Year in pictures: 2010

2010-12-29T10:33:00.000-08:00

Well, what a year this has turned out to be. It started with a Derek Jarman marathon and ended with a nice little hat trick of features in Out There, Tetu and Attitude. Along the way I've visited Warsaw, Cornwall and Edinburgh for the first time and spent a lot more time in Berlin that I had expected. I had some rather hair-raising moments (running the gauntlet between the Nazis and the Catholics at EuroPride in Poland was no fun), some rather lovely ones (holding my new nice for the first time), some rather huge arguments and some entirely unexpected tenderness. The Winter was contemplative, the Spring was constructive, the Summer was unfeasibly busy, and Autumn brought me great satisfaction - all in all a solid year.

En route to Chantal's House of Shame, Berlin (by Gerry Visco)

Vogue.com, street style, Manchester

Onstage with Alexander, Berlin

Halloween

Shooting in the snow, Berlin

Zohar's birthday

Dressing for the Tranny Olympics

Onstage for "Good Morning, This Evening!", London

Pet Cemetery, Cornwall

Backstage at the Barbican

Thurnham Hall, Lancashire

Hauptbanhof, Berlin

POP magazine, Spring Studios

Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Time Out Live, London

Tete a Tete Opera Festival, London

"Underclass Hero" at the Hot August Fringe

Out There magazine (by Adrian Lourie)

Eat Your Heart Out, Camden People's Theatre

With Bruce Benderson on set for Tetu

Berlin Fashion Week

Backstage in Warsaw (by Stevie Hanley)

Bodypainting session with Scottee in Camden

Charing Cross (by Earl Dax)

Christmas Day

Leaving the Attitude birthday party, London

Next year, God willing, the music of Alexander will FINALLY be out there in the big bad world. Plus "Underclass Hero" is getting another showing in London, and I'll be back at the Summer festivals. See you there!

Last show of 2010

2010-12-16T03:31:00.000-08:00

Tonight, Berlin, we are filming the extravaganza that is the Dandylioness Winter 2010 Tour!

21st Century Queer Artists Identitify Themselves Vol.3

2010-12-14T07:21:00.000-08:00

I'm super thrilled to be a part of Darin Klein's latest opus, the zine after which this post is named. In it the work of 100 queer artists comes together in a manner half catalogue, half telephone book, with each supplying a sample of their work and their contact details. Isn't that such a great idea? An exciting act of community and inspiration circulation? Of course I have my dearest darling Max Steele to thank for the connection (what'up gurl?). I submitted the above schwarz und weiß bilder, by Fussy Lo Mein, and this extract "Monologue for Divine", which is taken from my new play "Kill Everyone Now":

“Power that’s what it all comes down to, that’s what it always comes down to. Knowledge is power, know thyself and rule the world. That’s why I cause such a scene at the grocery store – because I’m a very powerful person! This va-va-voom body in this skin tight gown, my bombastic tits, my outrageous hair do, well, it makes everyone else feel, insignificant. There they are with their wimpy little stalks of broccoli clasped to their emaciated little bodies, all chewed up in mock horror, standing on at the cheese counter, disgusted at the very sight of me. Horrified and simultaneously sexually electrified by my mere presence. Oh sure, the battle lines have been drawn up and I’m outnumbered 100-1 but they all know that I’m winning this one. My very appearance in amongst the cucumbers, in the heartland of their commodified universe is confirmation that I’m the superpower in this supermarket. That I’m inching forward step by step, through the no-man’s land of moral ambiguity and tarmac and into, actually into, their neat little back yards. That I’m dancing in amongst their geraniums like a wild pagan love goddess, and I’m stamping on their patio furniture, kicking over their ornamental fencing, and grinding up their planters, their urns and their all-weather vases with the heel of my cha-cha shoes. I’m coming down the drive and they’re apoplectic.

You see, really, people don’t care what I wear. They don’t give a shit! They barely care what they wear themselves! I mean, have you seen how people dress? Absolutely no self-respect, no pride. They don’t care that I’m wearing a dress, they don’t care that I have on high heels, they’re upset that I’m not playing by the rules. When I dress like this it upsets people, because they feel as though I’m trying to fool them , that I’m trying to trick them into believing that I’m a real woman, or that I believe I am a real woman, or that I believe such a thing as a real woman exists. They hate me for not abiding by the rules, because they hate the rules. Only they don’t realise this, or they’re too stupid or too cowardly to admit it, because they’ve built up their whole self-worth, their whole identity, their whole stupid morality up on those rules, and if they go and start investigating it now, well who knows what they’ll find? Who knows how deep the cracks run? Your whole value system is based on an arbitrary set of images that you stumbled upon in magazines in the doctor’s waiting room, and you don’t even know it. You’ve never thought about it for one second have you? Why you believe what you believe and about whom. Why do little girls wear pink ribbons in their hair? Why do little boys like to play with cars? Admit it, the most complex debate you ever had with yourself was which toilet roll to buy.

There’s this unspoken set of rules to follow and nobody really wants to follow them but nobody really bothers to question them, so everybody just forgets they exist and agree to pretend that they’re spontaneous, natural, predetermined orders. People hate that, and they see me, flaunting it all, throwing all that out the window, flushing it all down the john – and they’re mad. They’re pissed, because nobody wants to wear black nylon trousers and sensible shoes , nobody wants to leave their home and family at 7am, 5 days a week, with the only light at the end of the tunnel being that festival of debt you call the weekend, but they somehow all got together and collectively decided that it’s the right thing to do. And then you see me, and clearly I’m not working an office job, clearly my only master is bation, and it’s just too much.

The only rules that need exist are the ones we make up for ourselves, and hold onto for as long as we find them useful, then we discard them with all the other floatsam and jetsam of modern life. We don’t cling to fax machines do we? We don’t hold on desperately to daguerreotypes or typewriters, or dial-up internet, or powdered egg do we? No. People need something to cling to, anything, I see that, or else why would there be so many speed freaks and alcoholics out there in the audience tonight?, but, the uninvestigated life is not worth living. Don’t cling to it just because it’s there. You see girl? I’m a self-made woman. And if I get bricks through the window? Well, I make a rockery.”

Tetu

2010-12-13T04:42:00.000-08:00

From the new issue of Tetu, a piece by Bruce Benderson on Berlin's provocateurs and party kids. It was a marvellous experience meeting Mr Benderson, a man of immense knowledge and an outrageous sense of humour, combined with an inquisitive nature and a keen eye for contextualization. Okay yes, I'm a fan. And here's what he had to say about us all (click on the text to see it bigger):

At it

2010-12-06T12:46:00.000-08:00

Well lover, what do you know? The nice people at Attitude asked me to contribute something on pornography to their sex issue, so I did. I wrote it on Halloween, in a face full of vampire make-up - bit of context for you there. For those of you who live in places where the magazine is not stocked, here's the piece in full:

"Porn can really teach you a lot about yourself, it can educate you on your own sexuality and desires by showing you things you probably wouldn’t ever see otherwise, acts and images you most probably didn’t even know existed. I remember watching lesbian porn for the first time and encountering the term “high femme top.” That was such an “A-ha!” moment for me, I think it informed my sexual identity more than any other experience, cinematic or otherwise.

Porn can almost act like a magic mirror in that sense, it shows you such unexpected aspects of sex, it can teach you a lot of new tricks. From a queer standpoint that’s powerful because so much of our experience is hidden in shame and obscured by a society that is so uncomfortable with its own sexuality. To reveal images so provocative and opposed to mainstream thinking is an act of liberation.

I think it’s important though, to remember that what you’re being shown in porn, is a fantasy. Even with “amateur” porn what you are seeing is most often a staged, edited and carefully constructed daydream whose codes of behaviour, though exciting, need not necessarily be a template for your own. Morality and responsibility are weighted differently on film, there are no repercussions inside the porno flashbacks. What’s hot onscreen is not necessarily safe, desirable, or even pleasurable in the non-cinematic world. The fantasies of pornography are a privilege we enjoy in this particular, epoch, the ability to revel in graphic images charged with such potency is as a marvellous thing, but as with all privileges it entails responsibility. Noblesse oblige, lover."

Freiheit

2010-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

The question arose this week if linguistically, in English, you can attach singular or plural articles to the word "freedom" e.g. "a freedom" or "my freedoms". The German speakers were determined that you could not, the British were not at all sure, the North Americans were insistent that you could. I thought about how you can (without any argument) say; "I have the freedom to wear what I want", but realised this is not quite the same as saying "The freedom to wear what I want is just one of my freedoms." It sounds wrong to all but North American ears, and even some of those listeners find it strange, but why so? Moreover it is not just awkward to hear, but unsettling, a thorny concept.

When you make freedom an object, by applying an indefinite article to it, it enters into an economy of commodity and exchange, it becomes a product. As with all products in advanced capitalist economies, you are require to buy or trade for it and this is exactly what is happening, right now. The linguistic newness of "a freedom" and "my freedoms" are a central part of this era of terror, it's a marketing ploy which highlights exactly how far the language of counter-terrorism has affected the lexicon and capacity for thought in the US and Europe. All of the post-9/11 language, of "terrorists hating our freedom" put such a focus on the concept of freedom and with concurrent sleight of hand, changed the meaning of freedom.

Singular and plural freedoms, in stark opposition to definite freedom (the freedom) allow for freedom to be treated like a multipack of liberties. Freedom is broken down into units (freedoms), so we notice less when they're removed from us. It's not our freedom (our liberty, our rights as human beings) that is at stake, we argue, we are just trading certain freedoms (specific privileges) for protection against some semi-fictional force that wants to wipe us out. In this logic, since we are not losing our access to facebook, or our cars, or the ability to buy new jeans, we don't seem to notice that all we are being left with is the most empty kind of freedom. We have governments who rule almost totally and openly in the name of the rich, who have no qualms in waging wars against the better judgments of the people, who set-up teenagers as scapegoats, and deliberately stir up fear to stimulate support for their insane policies, backed by a masochistic media which kneels to lick their boots.

Breaking freedom down into freedoms allows for this, it suggests to us in its very language that we can pick and chose, that some freedoms are more equal than others, that we can drop some and trade them for something else. We are no longer concerned with liberty for all (wo)mankind, but rather protecting these few fake freedoms we're still holding onto (to all intents and purposes "a lifestyle"). In short it is the end of the Enlightenment, the death of idea that everyone should be free, the grave of Martin Luther King. Only now the epitaph has been deface, it no longer reads "no man is free until we are all free" but "Souvenir postcards $15.99". We are now entering the middle-ages again, we are all becoming serfs again, because we have forgotten what it was that led us so briefly out of servitude - collective struggle and an honest belief that the world could be made a better place. All we have now is cynicism, greed, irony and fatigue, and in this state we are allowing ourselves to be stripped bare.

Literally.

Witness the new US airport regulations which have brought controversial full-body "naked" scans into major airports. The German government looks likely to follow suit next year. Not only is this a horrible violation of privacy and a miserable windfall for the cyborgs who make these machines (already $247m from US airports) but drastically increases psychological paranoia in an already thoroughly traumatised population. Now terrorists are even further advanced than technology! And the only people who can save us are our beloved leaders, who really have our best interests at heart. It was Benjamin Franklin who wrote, "He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither," I think.

And meanwhile we have the CIA training a teenage Somalian boy for almost two years, in how to plan a mass impact suicide bombing. At a Christmas market in Oregon he was arrested only 20 minutes before detonating his (fake) bomb, which is a rather brilliant PR coup for the CIA, since it allows them to simultaneously say "Look! You need us!" and "Don't worry we know everything!" It posits them as an omnipotent God, in some Cartesian paradox in which they rescue us from what they put into motion themselves. The German newspapers are full of terror alerts also, warning that terrorists planned to hit "soft targets" at Christmas markets. Not long ago wikileaks shared information with the world that this exact tactic (of putting terror plots into the media) had been discussed by the US government as a way of increasing support for its unpopular foreign policy within Germany. Or rather, I should say that these stories were all over the news, now the news says we must go shopping at the Christmas markets because if not (You guessed it!) the terrorists will have won.

And now 19 year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud, will go to prison for a long, long time, probably forever, because one of the world's most powerful, best resourced, most advanced institutions found him when he was 17 and persuaded him to take up the role of this year's would be festive slayer.

Merry Christmas.

New Hit Reading Series

2010-11-28T07:10:00.000-08:00

I'm excited about this! Travis is reading some of his work, Evelyn is reading her Bitch Magazine article and I'm going to do one or two of the monologues from "Kill Everyone Now". Plus Mary Ocher's performing a special live set. See you there lover!

This week with Alexander

2010-11-26T11:48:00.001-08:00

And if you visit everyone's favourite psychedelic scrapbook fagcity, you'll find a brand new Alexander image. It's like a treasure hunt, lover.

It isn't in our blood.

2010-11-16T03:45:00.000-08:00

Mary Ocher at Immer Gern, Nov 2010

Last night I finally had the pleasure of seeing Mary Ocher, one of my favourite songwriters, perform live. It was a fairly intimate gig, as it often goes on a chilly Monday in Berlin, but Ms Ocher presented a set of ten wildly colorful, deeply melodic, wonderfully emotive, altogether batty, original songs delivered in a soaring, swooping, confident voice channeling the blues, folk, riot girl and even, dare I say it, pop music. Confrontational at times, frequently obtuse but nonetheless captivating for it, Mary brought to mind a fascinating combination of Kate Bush, PJ Harvey, Diamanda Galas, Regina Spektor and Leonard Cohen. Those references are of course misleading because all of her influences are collaged in a marvelously off-kilter manner and become her own thing. As Taylor Mac herself said, "Comparison is violence", though sometimes it's useful in hinting at, if not defining.

Mary's record comes out in Spring 2011 and she will be touring Europe to promote it, so check her out at http://www.myspace.com/maryocher for a full list of her upcoming dates.

Picture by Stevie Hanley

P.S. Alexander and Mary will be performing together on Dec 5th at The Silver Future, but more on that later.

Alexander this week.

2010-11-15T07:05:00.000-08:00

This week's Alexander show is aptly on Alexanderplatz, at the City Boy party in celebration of Stevie Hanley's latest exhibition "Many Dogs Run Wild In The City...." which opens at The Centre for Endless Progress on Friday November 19th.

And here's a little peek behind the scenes of last week's show.

Alexander with the Crystal Tits

Jaime Diamonds of the Crystal Tits giving some showgirl realness

It's a very light-hearted working environment.

Photography by Evelyn Krampf International.

The Queen at Breakfast

2010-11-14T09:36:00.001-08:00

I saw this rather lovely painting of The Queen by her husband Prince Phillip a few months ago and have been thinking about it on and off since. It's a surprisingly good painting isn't it? I mean, WHO KNEW? The informality is very charming, and the style in no way showy, it's a terribly modern sort of portrait and very unexpecte. It's very unusual to have the monarch eating toast somewhere in the background, not even looking at the viewer. I wonder if the dear old D.of.E made more, or if this was just a one-off? I hope not.

The Queen is very young in this picture, I imagine there is a whole history of images from the interior of her life, running parallel to the images we see of the exterior of her life. She hasn't spent the best part of a century simply shaking hands with diplomats and waving at crowds in floral dresses. (Which prompts another question how did a woman so chic in the 50s become so, not so? How quickly does one descend into the cheerful hell of pastels?) Rather she has lived a life of nudity, fireplaces, emotional outbursts, child birth, heartache, excitement, illicit moments, unthinkable privilege and soft, even intimacy. If the Duke of Edinburgh has captured any of this, anything of the woman behind the throne it will be a hundred times more interesting than any amount of official portraits; those images that forever tell only one thing "This is the Queen."

I'm put in mind of Hemmingway and Dietrich's great, unconsummated, love affair and the letters they wrote to each other until the writer's suicide. They tell a very different story from that which we know. Hemmingway is revealed not as the alcoholic womanizer of popular mythology, but as a deeply depressed and very shy man who confesses to Dietrich that his sexual encounters have in fact been few. Dietrich meanwhile is shown to be more capable of romantic feelings, and considerably less megalomaniacal than would be believed. She called him "Papa" and he called her "My Little Kraut" - cute, right? Sort of.

Their love affair (partially due to it's unrequitedness) is amongst my favourite love stories, up there with Marlon Brando putting his cigarettes out on James Dean. Yet, I love to daydream about how Marlene and Ernest may have brought things to fruition, he femme butch, she butch femme, at it in the Imperialé suite at the Ritz. An alcohol fueled flight into self-destruction, the incomparable narcissism, bottles smashed and tears wept, panic, lust, cigarette smoke, and then, curtains. She would leave him bruised and hungover, a plane to catch a commitment on some other continent, and he wouldn't have the words to say goodbye. She would write to him often and think about him oftener, and he would nurse his wounds, she would send him trinkets and he would keep them in his pocket as he walked out into his garden in Idaho, shotgun in hand.

Ich must besser deutsch lernen.

2010-11-08T11:13:00.000-08:00

I'm currently learning German, I have class at 9am every morning, at a language school which has been rather conveniently placed at the end of my street. I am however late everyday, and in my early morning rush to class, am often reminded of Gerry Visco telling me that she takes a taxi to work everyday but is still always two hours late.

Learning a foreign language in a formal setting is infantalizing, not just because the text books look as though they were designed for nine-year olds and the listening exercises revolve around the sort of situations normally never seen outside of Postman Pat. You find yourself totally without verbal access to your thoughts, unable to express anything but the most basic (and usually unconnected) ideas. A limited vocabulary and little understanding of tense, means you find yourself thrashing about like a fish on deck, with access to only cocktail party language. Talking about objects one might see at the train station, activities for the weekend, or who has lost their ball. To be permanently caught in the present - I go, you go, she goes, they go - never even able to consider she has gone, I will go, or he would go, is maddening. Time shrink wraps you, all you have is the moment you speak, and the struggle to express that moment.

And of course, my teacher is demonically chirpy. Her enthusiasm is so intense, I sometimes ponder if she isn't in fact a speed freak. I doubt it though. To paraphrase Anna from Crystal Tits, she has the kind of enthusiasm that only evangelical Christians have, maybe she's doing God's work. I don't know, I'll ask, but there is something most definitely religious about the experience, being thrown together with strangers, all of whom have one focus, one aim, one belief - German. From across the world, we come, from different countries, professions, communities, age groups, and social strata, speaking no common language, all gathered in the belief that we can learn German if only we truly believe, if only we follow the scriptures. I am often put in mind of the Churches I attended growing up, when we run through verb endings, en mass and aloud. In the monotonous chanting Ich bin, du bist, sie ist, er ist, es ist, Sie sind, wir sind, ihr seid, there is no escaping how similar it all sounds to a congregation intoning a prayer together. That flat, unchanging intonation, the low register the group adopts, the obviousness of anyone who falls out of time, making the experience wonderfully close to that of uttering the Hail Mary, or answering the priest (altogether now); "And also with you."

Occasionally I see how tired our lecturer looks, how much older than her years. All of that pantomiming and manic energy really take their toll. She seems sad, behind her happy grimace leers a dark dissatisfaction, yearning to express more than my bag, your bag, her bag, our bags, is that all there is? And from amongst all the simple insistences, questions regarding "Who's suitcase is this?", she will from time to time let slip something accidentally poignant. Taking the role of one of the many horribly drawn text book characters, she will announce, "Ich bin allein. Menschen kommen und gehen." And even though we know it's not true, she's happily married, we all know it's true.

Of course, the most notable experience for me in beginning German, has been learning a gendered language - and sitting right at the front of the class. Several times a week I am the example in the formation of such sentences as "Is das eine frau? Nein das ist keine frau, das ist ein mann!" It's a little awkward to say the least. The entire class is conducted in German and I am yet to reach the level where I can ask; "Is Judith Butler translated into German?" So, I'm sort of suffering in silence, being shoe-horned into the good old binary. And of course, the text books and exercises are horribly heterocentric, every other page requires you to decipher some inane letter between Sara and Jan, or asks you to pair "frau" with "mann", "mädchen" with "jungë", and bind the apparent opposites together in perfect insidious naturalness.

German, however is further gendered, objects are either feminine, masculine or neutral, not just people, meaning that it's pretty inescapable. There's a strange sort of muddying effect with objects inhabiting the same genders as people, which is kinda cosmic on one hand, but on the other, very constraining because you always come back to der, die and das as though it's the root of being. At least there's the option of the third (ie neutral) way, huh? Only that's even more depressing - who wants to be neutral (neutered, neutralized) EVER? Exactly. Plus of course, to have a third option doesn't in anyway shake up the strangle hold of the other two, it actually justifies them in giving an alternative.

However, German, like French and all the other modern Indo-European languages (besides English of course), has a formal form, Sie, which can maybe help me in some small way to overcome linguistic social stratification. I have decided to address everyone as Sie, as though I were always talking to a learned scholar, a priest or royalty. That way I shall elevate everyone to a status of respect in a simple, personal way, a little off-center perhaps, but so be it. In my own way I shall defy the conventions of gendered language by always talking to everyone, everywhere as though they were a queen.

Stills from "Edward !!"

2010-11-07T11:26:00.000-08:00

A set of pictures by Marcello from our video piece based on Christopher Marlowe's play "Edward II", shot in August.

Alexander

2010-11-03T15:32:00.000-07:00

New hit flier for new hit shows.

Overdressed and overeducated

2010-11-02T15:33:00.000-07:00

I wrote this during the Summer for a now defunct German magazine, but I thought it deserved an airing - no?

London’s hippest neighbourhood, Hoxton, has gone and got itself something of a bad rap. It is mocked for being the centre of all things try-hard, its inhabitants taunted for their fashion sense, and its hang-outs slandered for their extortionate prices. As such it is a magnet, for what New Yorkers would call “the bridge and tunnel crowd”. At the weekend the area is awash with drunken suburbanites looking for cultural kudos to compliment their pitchers of mysteriously colourful cocktails. The streets are full of hen and stag parties brawling in the middle of the road, puking in doorways and screaming homophobic abuse at the area’s earlier residents (artists and performers) who now make their way further afield to parties in territories as yet unspoilt. The visiting revellers are arguably some of the worst dressed people on the planet, skin tight high street party dresses, and murderously orange sunbed skin, accessorised by neon tutus and sunglasses worn as an ironic laugh at the Hoxton trend from 5 years ago, for 90s rave inspired looks (itself of course ironic to begin with). Like Kreuzberg or the Lower East Side, raucous new arrivals force the previous occupants out, and the cultural landscape changes again. Call it gentrification, call it evolution, call it capitalism’s sickest joke yet, nothing is stable.

On sunny days in Hoxton Square, a ruptured square of grass behind Old Street, a crowd of a sixty or so people gather to enjoy the afternoon’s glow. In twos and threes they are chic twentysomethings who work in the area (at one of the many bars and restaurants or design firms) or students returning from art school, stopping off on the grass on their way home. They are all dressed in that specifically London way, that unmistakable transhistorical, borderline outrageous look. It’s too vulgar to be French, too impractical and immodest to be American, too gaudy to be Belgian and too grungey to be Italian, it’s a style that can only be British.

The girls wear super short denim shorts with turn ups that graze their upper thighs, leaving long acres of flesh exposed. They walk on sky high platform heels, they wear scarves in their hair and studded leather jackets and oddball vintage sunglasses. Vermillion red lips and ghostly white skin, tattoos, and enormous handbags of expensive fabrics. Their hair is platinum blonde or cinder brown, either lustrously long or viciously short å la garconne. The boys themselves (and yes, the gender disparity is that blatant) are a lot more understated, sporting a look comprised of the French Rivera, geek chic and a very bourgeois nod to hip hop. They wear baseball caps with flat brims, oversized spectacles, deck shoes with no socks, plaid shirts or pastel polo shirts, and skinny jeans. Likewise the hair is almost always identikit, short through the back and long on the top, varied in contrast and shape depending on how bold you care to be. From a limited menu of acceptable options the British fashionista puts together a look they would like to call “individuality”, which underscores vividly how in such a developed capitalist economy, choice is always an illusion.

They lounge in the sun, glad to be free from the drudgery of the classroom, or their entry level job, flipping disinterestedly through classic American novels (say what they will, the British are deeply enamoured by American culture), discussing last weekend’s adventures, drinking cans of cider and planning next weekend’s adventures. The pose is that of slumming it, the scene reminiscent at once of an alfresco music video casting, Manet’s Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe and a zoological garden. Satiated by relative economic stability, distracted by an unprecedented flow of technology, and subsidised by a constant influx of material goods produced in foreign sweatshops, this is the most apolitical generation of the past hundred and fifty years.

In the mid-70s this very same spot, the exact same square of grass in the sun now populated by mid-afternoon daydreamers, the infamous British fascist movement, the National Front, would square up with the local black youth. On Saturday mornings, the two sides came face to face at a designated time, and gathered as though on a medieval battlefield, they lined up and fought it out hand to hand. They fought for control of the East End, for the shaping of the capital and the country, to see whose ideology would rule. They fought bloodily with broken bottles and improvised instruments of violence, with absolute conviction, but before they did so, before the first punch was thrown, combatants from both sides of the lines spent time admiring the ensembles of their enemies, complimenting the cut of each other’s jackets and the leather of their boots. The same boots that would soon be biting deep and hard into their opponent’s face. One of East London’s most knowledgeable long time denizens, Beverley Whispers, told me, “It was two tribes, more about style than hate.” In a decade of massive political upheaval and soaring unemployment, Londoners literally wore their heart on their sleeves. The white skinhead National Front combatants wore boots and braces, super cropped hair. The black youth wore flares, double denim ensembles inspired by Bob Marley, and afros replete with combs jammed in the front. As a teen Beverley knew not to go near Hoxton, now she runs the Joiner’s Arms one of the pubs that has defined
the new East End scene, and the National Front have moved out to Dagenham.

It seems that the afternoon picnickers, lovers, and Kerouac readers have absolutely no idea however of what happened right here, beneath their feet, before they ever arrived. If they are cognisant of those events, they show no signs of it, no-one discusses it. It’s as though Hoxton Square were newly created specifically as a destination for weekday afternoon lounging. But such is the prerogative of each successive generation, to be bored by the recent past. Perhaps it is for the best that such violent scenes as the clashes between the NF and the BP have been condemned to the dustbin of history. Maybe we don’t need to be further traumatised by such memories. But I can’t help thinking that it’s important to know where we came from, that we should be aware of how the freedoms we take for granted came to be. Civil liberties weren’t just handed out by benevolent governments, people fought and died in the streets for them whether that was in fist fights with fascists or at the hands of the police (and often one can discern little or no difference). Interestingly the boot boy style of the skin head National Front members is once again en vogue; witness the re-emergence amongst the fashion forward, of the Doc Marten boot, stonewash drain pipe jeans and braces over white graphic t-shirts.

Thankfully the politics of the look have not been resurrected with the ensembles. It is provocative, exciting even to see such a loaded look reappropriated by wearers with a very different political bent, especially when (as can be seen in Berlin today) left-wing punk skin head activists rub shoulders in the streets with right wing militants, and all are dressed the same. The code is broken, and re-written, power is reclaimed from the iconography of fear and transferred. But without knowledge of what is being reworked, the purely fashionable, apolitical wearers run the risk of ignorantly digging up bloody visuals from the past, and unwittingly parading themselves zombie like to through the parks and gardens of Europe’s metropolises. To paraphrase performance artist Penny Arcade; “You are the most informed generation in history but you lack context.” And that is the postmodern danger, without knowing our history, without a Penny Arcade or a Beverley Whispers, we all become billboards – loaded symbols unaware of our content.

- JJ Bibby, Summer 2010

Shows

2010-10-28T13:54:00.000-07:00

Here's a lovely flier for the first Alexander show of the Winter in Berlin. It's a fundraiser, which doubles the need for you to be there.

And here's a lovely article from Bang Bang Berlin

"Sodom can come disguised in many forms, is it that man lurking behind the bushes in Tiergarten? Or possibly it's the lady who measures bra sizes in underwear shops? Who knows... But Ladies and Gentleladies I have sodom in a much richer, riper form for you... Yes, The next installation of Sodom into our hearts comes in the form of a very witty, very enigmatic English young man.

You may be thinking about me, but no, unfortunately not, This fiery redhead goes by the name of La John Joseph.
I saw John Joseph perform many months back now at homo-house "Chantals House of shame." I, like everybody else in the room, was hideously captivated by not only this lovely chaps mirmaid-esque luring voice but the lyrics and the way he works the crowd, Already I was bitten by the John Joseph wasp and craving for more venom, So it was only the other week when I got news around the bush that La John Joseph has now moved to Berlin... Score. What makes it even better my pretties is that he has some gig dates coming up... Double score. In venues across Berlin such as smash hit Karaoke bar "Monster Ronsons" along with King Kong Club and Neukölln based lesbian leftist heaven "Silverfuture". This man is on fire, make sure you are there to see the fire display, It is something no short of a spectacular evening to be had, not quite the sodom you were expecting, no dark rooms this time, no hefty hangovers or names in your phonebook the next day which contain numbers and punctuation due to you being so drunk.
No, This time you are going to experience some real homosexual hugging, captivating cabaret talent who's lyrics are not only witty but politically, geographically and life affirmingly accurate to todays lifestyle. But don't take my word for it, there is an endless list of compliments from the homo-press just gagging to say lovely things about him."

Cake Bush

2010-10-27T16:26:00.000-07:00

There's a great story which I remember reading, about Kate Bush in the late '80s finding herself under pressure from the record company to cut a new album. After various attempts to persuade the powers that be, that her family had taken precedence and that she just wasn't ready to make another album, Kate was forced to call a meeting with them in order to keep the peace. Unhappily she invited the record company people to her house, agreeing to show them what she had been working on. When they arrived Kate produced a tray of fairy cakes and said; "This is what I've been working on."

On a similar note, this is what I've been working on.

Oh, and learning German, filing my taxes and preparing for the 5 Alexander shows in Berlin. But, mainly baking.

Radical Gay (s)Elves

2010-10-19T13:06:00.000-07:00

This was in "L'Espresso" today, made me miss New York.

Geburtstag

2010-10-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Back in March I blogged about the upcoming Joey Arias shows in NYC, produced by my dear pal Earl Dax. At the time they were fundraising to cover the costs of such an expensiver production. Well, now the show has debuted, to rave reviews and I feel so proud that Earl made it happen, against such great odds as always! The New York Times ran this great feature on Joey's birthday celebrations, doesn't it have such a fin de siecle feel? Don't you want to be there? Click on the image to view the story lover.

Alexander Strikes Back

2010-10-06T14:46:00.000-07:00

Everybody's favourite disco alter ego returns to Berlin for three shows this November. Expect petulance, full Windsors and new dancers. See him at:
Monster Ronson 12/11
City Boy 20/11
Crack Baby 27/11

Documentation

2010-09-26T04:53:00.000-07:00

From last month's "Lustgrotto" installation by Marianne Vlaschits at Styx, London.

grotto from marianne vlaschits on Vimeo.

POP

2010-09-23T08:19:00.000-07:00

The current, entirely missable issue of POP magazine features yours truly, in a story about boys wearing Fall-Winter womenswear. It's about as exciting as it sounds, i.e. not very. But here's a picture of a picture, taken by Jordan Hunt in WH Smiths last week (probably).

XVI

2010-09-16T11:47:00.000-07:00

To mark the Papal visit to the UK (which I am mercifully not in the country to witness) I have decided to share a scene from my new play Kill Everyone Now with you, lover. I have been working on it on and off for two years and today finished the first draft of the textual components. So, have at it.

Joan Crawford; talking to her partner above the general noise begins a monologue, turning outwards to address the audience as she does so. The tone is melodrama, silver screen acting, glamour as tough as nails, she has a lit cigarette.

I wonder, I have always wondered, where do communion wafers come from? Who bakes the body of Christ? Those paper-thin discs, the heavenly host, those wafer like slivers of immaculate flesh, tasting oddly of polystyrene.

“Do this is memory of me”, He said at the last cocktail party, but darling where does one buy them from? I’ve looked all over Harrods, Fortnums, Ka De We and Gristedes but all I can ever find are blinis. Are they by special order? Are those tiny slices of snow white bread cut from holy loaves? Tended to lovingly by devout monks in the highest hills of Umbria? Are they carried one snowflake at a time for inspection by a wizened but beautifully radiant Father Abbot, each and every one? Are they packaged up in baskets woven from wheat and decorated with bright white flowers to be carried down the mountainside on the backs of blessed donkeys, to the port where ships sailed by celibate seamen carry them o’er the water and on to the lips of the devout?

No. I rather expect they come from dour factories, housed in the Mid-Western regions of the United States, that they’re churned out mechanically by hair netted, carcinogenic grandmothers hacking their lungs out over the conveyor belts as they go by. That they fall in their hundreds of thousands through mundane pipes and cylinders, shredded ignorantly by ever duller whirring blades and then embossed with the holy seal, as though each one was a collectable Texas Rangers sticker pack, destined for a tube of potato chips. Forced fed into a vacuum pack and shipped off on the back of a hulking twelve-wheel truck, through the driving grey rain of a freeway at midnight.

Yes, and from time to time the driver, delirious in his exhaustion (he hasn’t slept for 36 hours and he’s hallucinating little green men at the window) the driver from time to time confuses his deliveries and turns off too soon from the freeway. His monstrous truck feels a part of him, like an over full bladder and all he can think of is release. Barely cognisant anymore he spins the wheel in the wrong direction, mixes up his deliveries, and leaves the communion wafers at the McDonalds up on 42nd street, and then unwittingly continues on to St Patrick’s with the frozen fast food.

Now, with the lightning quick commercial brainpower that has made the brand a global powerhouse of misery and misinformation, McDonalds quickly sell on the mysterious tasteless wafers (that no-one can account for) as their new low-cal, low-carb air burger – the healthy option – and for two Tuesdays in June it is their biggest seller. And on Sunday, as the Arch Bishop turns the key in the lock of the tabernacle, raw minced beef slides out and onto his immaculate shoes. Steak tartar. Body of Christ.

This is my sister

2010-09-13T06:58:00.000-07:00

Isn't she giving you some straight up Christina Hendricks, mid-century bombshell realness? Also, all those toys in the background - love it.

Good Morning, This Evening

2010-09-10T17:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my last show in London before the big move to Berlin on Sunday. I was a special guest on David Mills' hit chat show, "Good Morning, This Evening", at the RVT and sang Tom Waits' hit dirge, "Time" accompanied by the right honorable Jack Tame on the keys. My longtime lover Anna Lewenhaupt, fresh back from a summer of being an absolute tart in Sweden and France, took these lovely pictures to commemorate the occasion.

Backstage with Mr Mills and Mr Tame respectively

Ms Lewenhaupt shoots in the mirror

Grammar of the heart.

2010-09-08T15:33:00.001-07:00

I looked
through a window
onto a stranger's pain.
And it
was like
a mirror
for my own.

Of course I do.

2010-09-05T06:06:00.001-07:00

The Other Woman

2010-09-03T11:11:00.000-07:00

Portrait of Alexander as a Faberge Egg

My dear friend Stevie Hanley (and subject of many a blog post) has just started showing work at
September Gallery , on of Berlin's best art spaces. He is part of a group show "Thema Frau", which has it's private view tonight, so if you're in Berlin you should check it out.

One of the pieces he is showing is the above portrait of my disco alter-ego, Alexander, and it's available through the gallery for the bargain price of 700euros. You're not really supposed to talk about money and art are you? Oh well.

I'm really interested in the title of the show (Theme Woman), especially in "appearing" as part of it. I've been musing on using the title of "The Other Woman" for a project, and so this is all wonderfully serendipitous isn't it? Especially as I consider Alexander to be my drag King persona, me dressed up as a boy and crooning disco songs. I like to reconfigure the multitude of possible poses within humanity, you see lover. Being The Other Woman is obviously about being someone's secret mistress, but also, about being the other form of woman. You could be reductivist and say, "the other form of woman is man", but that would miss the point.

I am the other woman, not a woman, but I am not a man either; my atomic substructure is virtually identical to both of those more traditional forms of being but it is not experienced as either. Here I am, regardless. I could easily be The Other Man, only then there's no pun involved (at least in English) is there? We understand the other woman, in terms of extra-marital relations, as so, by first accepting that a man already possesses one woman, and the second is the added extra. In declaring myself as The Other Woman I'm acknowledging my peripheral status as on the fringes of both gender and, more often than usual, other people's relationships. And maybe also putting forth the case for further options.

Toke

2010-08-31T13:06:00.000-07:00

Fred Butler, never knowingly underdressed.

Last week psychedelic hotpot Fred Butler asked me to contribute an image of my most treasured ornaments for her hit blog, and like any good cosmic collaborator I did so. See the results (amongst selections from a slew of other glitter fiends) here. Plus there's a new hit picture of yours truly by photograher du jour, Marcello.

Knock! Knock!

2010-08-27T15:24:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had the pleasure of being installed in one of Marianne Vlaschits' pieces at the private view of her joint exhibition (with Eric Holmes) Knock! Knock!

I spent a few hours, fairly drunk, as a nymph inside Marianne's cartoonishly (homo)erotic baroque grotto - part R. Crumb, part Carlone. I flirted with the gallery attendees, pondering my very own being (perhaps inspired by the Heidegger I've been reading) and chatted with Marianne, earning myself one of her paintings in the process.

And that my friends is officially the end of my Summer.

Pictures by Marcello

Edinburgh

2010-08-25T05:44:00.000-07:00

Don't Just Stand There

2010-08-24T06:57:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year I was in Manchester with producer Earl Dax for a gig with my disco alterego ALEXANDER, at a party Earl was curating. We had a fairly interesting time of it, including a Sunday afternoon stroll which was documented by style blogger Charlotte Gush and which has now turned up on the Vogue website. The shirt and tie are from Burberry Prorsum years ago, and the football shorts are my little brothers. Sadly I left them in a bush in Warsaw last month - literally heartbroken.

Golden Years

2010-08-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: As promised here is a video overview (including interview with myself and Jordan) of week two at Tete a Tete, the hit opera festival.

Tête à Tête - The Opera Festival 2010 - Week 2 review from Bill Bankes-Jones on Vimeo.

Here's a rather avant-guard edit of a bootleg video of the show.

And here's a review from nobody's favorite weekly,
The Stage. Yes, really.

"In Jordan Hunt and JohnJoseph Bibby’s straightforwardly comic Golden Years, aging soprano Lavinia Greengarden - effectively Hyacinth Bouquet cast as a parochial opera starlet - has a violent intolerance of pre-show bonbons, causing her apparently to pop her clogs just before a crucial performance for the local light opera society in the presence of the local arts-funding tsarina. At the last minute, Lavinia’s faithful friend Toots Mulholland is thrust into the limelight, later joined in a triumphant duo as Lavinia recovers. Jordan Hunt sets the quick-fire text with skill, taking Britten as his benchmark. While in some ways unambitious, the piece is well executed and genuinely, if lightly, entertaining."

Gee thanks guys.

Sarah Kershaw as Toots Mulholland and Katherine Broderick as Lavinia Greengarden

My hit libretto "Golden Years" finally got what it deserved, a full staging at the Tete a Tete festival. The masterpiece that I created with composer/performer/biohazard Jordan Hunt, had been shown previously in a horribly butchered form, but this time it really shone - in the way that only an operetta about grandmothers eating too many dolly mixtures and feeling a little queer can. And here's the evidence, as seen by Claire Shovelton.

Olivia Duque as Nora Queensway

Working on this project, in a directorial capacity was a very new, very different challenge for me. We had very little time, and obviously absolutely no resources. Luckily we were given rehearsal space (in a primary school, which I thought was most fitting) and we had a cast of absolute gems to work with in Sarah Kershaw, Katherine Broderick, Olivia Duque, Karen O'Novak and Jordan Hunt himself. Not only were the performers beautiful singers, actresses and musicians, but they were a total delight to work with, accommodating, inventive, flexible, diligent.

If I'm honest I didn't expect to enjoy directing, I am horribly impatient and can barely watch a show without deconstructing it, let alone sitting through the same show for four days! However, I quickly became enamored of the process, the capacity to oversee the piece from such a point of objectivity I had never been able to hold when putting together work which I was to perform. In the director's role one becomes a sort of fixer upper of disjointed movements and unclear stage dressings, and it's super exciting to spot those problems and know that you can fix them.

I was nervous to begin with but the cast showed such a charming confidence in what I was doing, that, even though they are by far more experienced in this type of production than I am, I felt totally capable of saying what I really thought should happen. No bruised egos, no demanding divas, just dedication and professionalism regardless of the almost total lack of financial remuneration, and in spite of the fact that really the whole piece is ever so slightly absurd.

Toots and Lavinia with Jordan Hunt as Jeremy Patent-Leather

Of course the whole project was so markedly different from the show I'd been performing in myself this month ("Underclass Hero"), and I think that contrast was probably very helpful in dealing with the post-show fall out. Moving onto something light hearted and fun, after such a dark, heavy piece was a good way to regain equilibrium.

Jeremy and Toots bring it home

Tete a Tete were also very helpful, as were the staff at the Riverside Studios, and as always Jordan was marvelously prescient in his multi-tasking. There was a lovely family feel to it all by the time the show was actually on the stage for the first time, and dashing about to get Sarah's pre-show Dutch courage, or having a last minute sprinkle of talc on someone's wig, I felt really a part of something. Watching the show both nights I thought to myself how lucky I was to have this experience, to watch what I'd written float off into orbit like that. It was one of those occasions when one can hardly believe that this is actually one's own life. There's now talk of this piece going to a very prestigious venue (like, the most prestigious) this Autumn, and if that happens I'll probably die laughing.

Hit photographer Claire Shovelton with the hit composer and the hit librettist.

There's an interview and footage coming soon, so stay posted for that lover.

Only Kylie knows how I feel

2010-08-13T08:42:00.000-07:00

Hello Lovers,
As if my hit show "Underclass Hero" and hit opera "Golden Years" wasn't enough for one month, I'll also be doing all of this later this month.

Edinburgh Fringe with Eat Your Heart Out Aug 19-22nd
Look here: EYHO

EROTIC at the Barbican on Aug 26th
Look here: Barbican

And the private view of a show from Berlin's STYX Gallery Aug 27th
Look here: STYX

Literally, put yourself in my place, I dare you.

Coffure et chapeau.

2010-08-07T17:29:00.000-07:00

I'm working in the medium of new hats and hairdos right now. Here are some highlights.

Scotee and Kate

2010-08-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

Promotional images from Scottee's Cognitive (2010)

Well now, it has been a busy old week of buying handbags and drinking rose martinis on roof terraces around London, but fear not lover, I've been bearing witness to art in the interim. As part of the RVT's Hot August Fringe performance protagonist Scottee presented a new one-on-one installation occurrence called "Cognitive", in which the (singular) audience member is invited into a recreation of Scottee's teenage unconscious, lovingly (and rather minimally) staged in the upstairs bedroom of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern itself.

Stills from a performance of Cognitive.

The room has something of a dream quality to it, painted as it is entirely white, with accents of looped white handwriting (the kind of text junior school children call "joined up" writing") sharpied on the walls. Being apparently alone in the room before the performance begins is both a calm and sinister moment. In the corner is a bare white bed, stripped and without linens. Scottee emerges, part chyrsalis, part amorphous Croenenburg shape shifter, from the folds of the somewhat grubby duvet, to the mellow sounds of the Mamas and The Papas, the first of several nostalgic musical pieces which soundtrack the performance. The image, in its off-whiteness, is reminiscent of both Tracey Emin's "My Bed" and Benjamin Smoke's "Clean White Bed"; although this is a piece ostensibly about childhood reverie, there is no rose tinting, nothing of Bachelard about the poetics of this space. Instead what we have is a very intimate, strangely hallucinatory, unsanitized (though specifically shaped) exploration of that indescribable area, the waking dream. But it is also a thoroughly emotive examination of performance itself.

My Bed, Tracey Emin (1999)

The lone audience member watches Scottee in a mirror, for the most part the performance happens behind the viewer, giving the room an uncanny, psychologically dysphoric atmosphere, a sense of watching yourself being chased through a nightmare. And of course the audience member is actually , literally watching herself because her face is actually present in the mirror that presents the performance. The whole set up is one of dislocation, genuinely hypnotic, almost akin to the startled and confused rush to locate oneself felt upon the first encounter with that famous floating face behind the barmaid's head, in Manet's Bar at the Follie Berge.

Bar at the Follie Bergere, Edouard Manet (1882)

Cognitive requires the audience member to participate, not in a demanding or pressured way, but rather the intimacy of the situation, and the directness of Scottee's requests for secrets and white lies obliges one. There is a moment in the piece when Scottee and the audience member, sat next to each other, join together to stare at themselves and try to make themselves cry, all to the strains of Nina Simone singing "I love you Porgy." If it sounds a little sentimental, it is, but it's beautifully affecting, and this participant most certainly welled up. I was left with the feeling that I had vacated my body for a little while, it felt as though I'd finally succeeded in astral projection. It also made me muse on the meaning of performance. Who is the performer? When are they the performer? How does it change the performance when one performer (myself for example) becomes the audience? Performance is a nebulous thing, there are some qualifications as to what can be considered a work of art, and the extent of what is performance has some limits but, to quote Saki, "The trouble is that the limits are not always in the same place."

Likewise Kate Pelling's new video piece The Proxy Hypothesis takes a rather psychological slant on the topic of performing and perfromers and where the line between the two is drawn. Ms Pelling is, like Scottee, an omnipresence at the RVT, hosting the door, showing work, feeding back on the work of others, generally being a community participant. For this new work she has chosen five of the RVT's most loved performers, Ophelia Bitz, Fancy Chance, Nathan Evans, Michael Twaits and David Hoyle, and placed them individually, alone in a room with a camera and a microphone. Guess what they talk about? Themselves, and brilliantly.

David Hoyle in a still from Kate Pelling's The Proxy Hypothesis (2010)

They dissect their egos, their personae, their racial make-up and their roles as artists, often with great pathos. Burlesque dancer Fancy Chance exploring her status as a Korean-American is sweetly straight forward in her observations, and the near silence of cabaret chanteuse Ophelia Bitz, after discussing her on-stage/off-stage dichotomy, is disarmingly intimate. A lot of the magical introspection is down to Kate's smart editing, which leaves the viewer with the isolated performer for just long enough to start to feel their squirming boredom, but then jumps to moments of revelation and campy showing off, before it becomes tedious, and then back again for more awkward huffing, stammering, a bit of raving, a bit more tense silence and the occasional profound hiccup of genius, such as David Hoyle announcing: "When I'm not possessed I can feel very much like an empty husk, there's really no point to my existence, other than when I'm onstage."

Both The Proxy Hypothesis and Cognitive do strange and wonderful things to the notion of performer and performance. They are both intimate looks at the psychological processes that an artist works through when creating for the public's consumption and both of them fill us in on certain aspects of the performers backstory. In isolating her performers (all of whom come on camera as "themselves", somewhat if not entirely removed from their stage persona) in a room, alone with everybody so to speak, Kate Pelling creates a sort of mad house on camera, forcing her performers to stare into themselves and forcing us to watch them do so. And there is no escape, because the video is mesmerizing and deeply entrancing. It's a coincidental replication of the experience one has staring into the mirror and watching Scottee perform (alongside one) in his bedroom during Cognitive.

It's a probing, there's something most definitely existential about it, but charmingly cracked, quirkily dream like, undeiably druggy about both pieces, sort of like watching someone trip too hard and running to their bedroom and talk to the walls for hours, whilst you do your best to babysit them, from a safe distance. Of course, the unanswered question is, "can a performer ever not be a performer?" Is it in their DNA? Even when requested to come to a video shoot with no prepared material, without make-up, can a performer ever stop mugging? Will they always have an anecdote up their sleeves or a clever way to word a thought? The performers in Kate's video never quite seem sure if they are giving a performance, or just talking, or rather what's the difference, and the confusion leaks out into the realm of the audience too. Of course, if this isn't a performance are the audience actually just voyeurs? The meaning of what is performed changes what it means to view. Likewise when a performer is required to sit quietly through another artist's work(during which they are presented with their own reflection) can that performer ever lose their sense of performing? Perhaps I was performing the role of Engaged Audience Member #1 during Cognitive.

Can a person (any person, performer or politican) ever shake off the weight of being, the knowledge that they're always performing themselves? Can we ever just be? I think it's fair to say that living on fault lines of body/work, male/female, acknowledged artist/DSS payments makes a person more aware that they are performing at all times, that it's inescapable, I suppose the trick is not to let it drive you totally mad. If you have less of an awareness of yourself, if you believe that the body you are in, the clothes you are in, the life you are in are purely natural, unremarkable, and fixed then perhaps you are freed (somewhat) by that in-ness from regarding yourself, critically, from the outside, examining your existence once removed. I'm not entirely sure that this is a good thing to lack this strain of objectivity, though it maybe an easier thing, I've never really believed that ignorance is bliss. But I do think that it is one of the decided differences between people who perform (in situations framed as performances) and people who don't. And the attended body drama is just a bonus.

Nathan Evan's in a still from The Proxy Hypothesis

You can see Kate Pelling's The Proxy Hypothesis at her website http://www.katepelling.com/ whilst Cognitive by Scottee will return for more showings this Fall. See http://scottee.co.uk/ for more.

In Review

2010-08-04T05:16:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: A second review added.

Here are the first reviews from the debut performance of my new hit show "Underclass Hero".

This is from theatre website remote goat

"La JohnJoseph: Underclass Sans Irony"

There was a small portion of the audience in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern at La JohnJoseph's show on Tuesday night, that were disrespectfully chattering for most of the hour. Probably leftovers, lost on their way out of the inane comedy acts that went on beforehand. But the several times I glanced around the room during the performance of Underclass Hero, the self-proclaimed 'Transdrogynous' performance artist's new full length solo work, at least 90% of faces were staring back with a look of - albeit slightly perplexed, almost puzzled - fierce concentration. I think they were searching for irony.

It must be said, La JohnJoseph is simply a bizarre creature to behold. You never quite know what you are looking at, the remarkable thing being that what you see seems to shift right before your eyes. You would swear he was a drag queen, and he was wearing a bit of sparkly eye make-up above his impossibly high cheekbones, but he was dressed in what looked like a bargain store tracksuit and trainers. His facial features are so naturally grandiose and expressive, in most contexts he could pass for a Grand middle-aged (or even older) woman, but there is a little boy hiding behind the long-lashed sleepy eyes. And it is certainly the tragicomic, if at times brutally blunt, portrait of a youngster that he tells in the meticulously crafted text of Underclass Hero.

The curiously focused looks of the audience I put down primarily to the mesmerising candour of La JJ's story, but also to the aforementioned lack of irony. Perhaps the only ironical elements to the work are a few sardonic snarls on the part of the storyteller, or the gender disorientation and expectation on the part of some, that they would be seeing a proper drag show. I guess a case could be made for there being some inherent contrast between Tina Turner's We Don't Need Another Hero, the statuesque opening number, and the bleak descriptions of council estate life that follow, but a close examination of the lyrics reveals this, like all of the other well-chosen numbers, to be pretty much straightforwardly illustrative of the hard-knock-yet-hopeful tale he tells.

The brave-faced and chipper way La JohnJoseph speaks of narrowly escaping being handed in to the Family Services office by his mother, like so much broken merchandise, commingles with the strains of Guns & Rose's Sweet Child O' Mine so poignantly that the song could have been written for the piece. During the bridge of another song, when he sits down in a gangly-teenager posture to the side of the stage, and watches a long string of spit unceremoniously slide out of his rouged lips onto the floor, its simply an effective way to emphasise how he felt the first time he was the victim of a hateful slur and gesture. Indeed, it is in these moments where he sort of gives up 'performing', that the piece is the most moving. A couple of times he disappears altogether, continuing his narration as a disembodied voice, a powerful metaphor for the adolescent invisibility upon which his performance art seems to be a direct assault.

Comparisons have been made between La JohnJoseph and Bowie and there is something to be said for that visually and perhaps vocally, but I am put more in mind of Johnny Cash - 'a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction' - or Bob Dylan, storytellers of legendary proportions, but who lack the ostentation of less intelligent counterparts. The piece does seem to be a written work first, diligently recited - at times as though he were reading off of the inside of his droopy eyelids - but oddly no less engaging for this. This is apparently a work-in-progress and he could use some work on the confidence of his delivery. On occasion I wanted to scream for him to just stand still and talk, instead of punctuating every second word with a gesture and nervously prowling around the stage. But the ornate poses he sometimes struck, the spell of which was often broken by throwaway shrugs, gave off a child-playing-in-his-mother's-clothes quality that sweetly suited the material. In all, you'll be hard pressed to find a more effective spinner of True Tales - '…entirely true (even the bits I made up)' as the programme boasts.

At the end, in an unnecessary and perfunctory attempt to neatly wrap up the themes of the piece, La JohnJoseph pays homage to a list of some of the stalwarts of post-Punk Queer performance art. Most of the artists he lists I've seen perform more than once, some of them many times. The pastiche and brassiness of his style I suppose owes a debt of influence to this group, and most of them are probably more polished and poised as performers, but I promise you, none of them is as honest.

This is from the esteemed cultural junkyard that is Loserville.

"LV was feeling pretty thirsty at this point, so we chugged down more of the good stuff and then made ourselves comfortable for the arrival of Liverpool’s own La JohnJoseph, whose Underclass Hero began with our transdrogynous (I can’t take credit for this word) titular starlet channelling Tina Turner from a table in the front row. Let it be said here and now that we just don’t hear “We Don’t Need Another Hero” anywhere near enough these days – any song that manages to squeeze in the lyric “all we want is life beyond the thunderdome” deserves undying admiration.

An hour later, as La JJ (ably supported throughout by The Desperate Housewives on keyboard and guitar) finished things off with a rousing rendition of Bowie’s “Heroes”, LV reflected on what had been a roller-coaster ride of emotions – there had been laughs, there had been quiet reflection, there had been an amusing segment where La JJ addressed the audience from the toilets. The rabble at the back, who chatted throughout, may not have noticed, but the RVT had just played host to a quite beautiful cabaret-monologue which not only erased the memory of Lembit Opik’s grinning mug, but also thoroughly distracted LV from the lure of the bar – this achievement can not be overstated!"

Images from the show by the one man creative industry that is Christopher Auf Der Sutton.

Inspiration

2010-08-02T16:38:00.000-07:00

“Limited by the world, which I oppose, jagged by it, I shall be all the more handsome and sparkling as the angles which wound me and give me shape are more acute and the jagging more cruel.”

– Jean Genet, “The Thief’s Journal”