DO NOT MISS!: MATMOS SERVES UP THE SERVANT and more bragging/announcements…
So . .. budding director and movie fanatic Adam Baran has been
curating Queer / Art / Film, this really fantastic screening series in
New York City for a while now, and we’ve been admiring it from afar.
The setup is simple: various countercultural LGBT luminaries are asked
to cherrypick a favorite film of theirs and introduce it, in public,
to lots of likeminded cinephile perverts. Everybody watches it, and
then there’s a Q+A, and then people stagger out together for drinks
and more talking afterwards. We had the pleasure of attending Jonathan
Katz’s presentation of James Bidgood’s “Pink Narcissus”, with Bidgood
himself alive and kicking on site as well, and it was a hoot. It’s a
great honor to have been asked to take part in the series, but tough
too- how do you surprise people who’ve seen everything? how do you
“queer the queers”? Trying to up the ante of perversion but cutting
left, Drew picked Joseph Losey’s 1963 claustrophobic masterpiece THE
SERVANT, an ultra-tense, smoldering psychological drama of master and
servant roleplay starring the uber-dreamy James Fox and the equally
lush Dirk Bogarde.
Drew sez: “I’m a fanatic about this movie, its look, sound and
feeling: the brittle, creepy screenplay by Harold Pinter, the cameos
from UK folk icon Davey Graham and screenwriter Pinter himself, the
suffocatingly tasteful hairdos, clothes, and décor, the sound design
and music. Every time I return to this film I find something new in
these performances, and every time I return to this film I have to
think again about what it is that makes an artwork “queer”. I can’t
wait to be confronted by “The Servant” once more. Get ready for a dark
trip.” M. C. Schmidt feels, well, differently about this movie, and
you should expect some spicy Siskel-vs.-Ebert back and forth about its
merits and its limits when Q+A time rolls around.
Thanks to Adam, we’ll be screening a fantastic print of the movie at
the IFC Center at 3232 Sixth Avenue on December 19th at 8 pm. You can
get more info, and book tickets (which you should do, this stuff sells
out), at:
LESS IS MORRISSEY: DREW WINDS UP IN THE “BEST MUSIC WRITING 2011” PILEUP
A long time ago a very young Drew got very soggy and crushed out on
The Smiths album “Meat is Murder” and the song “Well I Wonder” in
particular. Twenty five years ago, in fact. The anniversary of this
seminal recording was celebrated by the music website Stereogum, when
Brandon Stosuy asked Drew to wax nostalgic / “critical” about this
meaty matter alongside lots of other folks. Drew’s effusions have been
selected by none other than guest editor Alex Ross to appear between
the pages of an actual book, the Da Capo press Best Music Writing
2011. It’s a tiny lesson in the difference between web scale and print
scale that his musings, which looked very longwinded in deed upon a
screen, feel cobweb thin when weighed against the far more substantial
other pieces included in this tome, which features some really
passionate, smart, and moving short and not-so-short responses to
music from various music writers that Drew is also crushed out on.
Though his contribution is on the slight end of the scale, it’s an
honor all the same to be sandwiched between Ian Nagoski and Nicki
Minaj (hot!). Drew thanks Brandon, Alex and Daphne Carr for the
invitation and inclusion.
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-9780306819636-0
BLOWING HOT AND COLD ABOUT THROBBING GRISTLE
On a related note of taking up space on the internet fulminating about
one’s musical obsessions, Drew was asked by the great and powerful
Pitchfork to weigh in on the recent revivification of Industrial
Records and the flurry of remastered Throbbing Gristle recordings. The
result is a 3,000 word blizzard of commentary / fawning / tire-kicking
about the legacy of these ascended masters. It was pretty
gut-wrenching to have to bestow numeric grades to records which are
all 10s in our hearts (Throbbing Gristle albums are many things but
they are not Olympic figure skaters), so please ignore the rankings
and just check out the prose. All shilling aside, we really do
encourage you to check out these remastered editions of five classic
TG platters; on our recent Thanksgiving vacation trip to California we
listened exclusively to these new versions, and they sound amazingly
present and powerful- especially when driving the highway 1 through
dense fog around hairpin turns that overlook deadly drops while
blasting “Beachy Head”.
posted by mcess at 7:53pm| Comments Off on DO NOT MISS!: MATMOS SERVES UP THE SERVANT and more bragging/announcements…
