Posted on

NYC: Katz @ CUNY Grad Center on Hide/Seek 1/12

On Wednesday, January 12th, Jonanthan D. Katz, author of Hide/Seek, will be speaking about the recent Smithsonian exhibit.

Where & When:
The Graduate Center, 365 5th Ave, Rm 9204
6pm-8pm

Jonathan D. Katz and the Omission and Censorship of Queer Art

Despite 30 years of scholarship from him and other experts, Katz says that most major institutions gloss over gay and lesbian sexuality in their collections – which is why Hide/Seek is such an important show. “Punishing the one institution that broke the blacklist will enable all the other institutions to sit on their hands,” says Katz. “My goal in doing the show was not simply to do the show, but also to make it safe for other institutions to do the show. We have been falsifying art history for decades.”

Here’s an interview with Katz, where he talks about the decision by the Smithsonian to pull the exhibit, & about the artists who have pulled their art and/or funding in response.

Exhibit Link

From the Smithsonian Newsdesk

I’d go if I were in NYC, that’s for damn sure.

Posted on

Two (or Four, or Seventeen) Tune Tuesday

This is more like a four-tune Tuesday, or a 17+ tune Tuesday, depending, but I found this lovely list of 2010’s best queer indies and thought I should share it, but I also wanted to share some cool stuff I’ve discovered this year as well. So in addition to those, here’s a preview of some tracks by one of my favorite discoveries of the year: British Sea Power. You can hear some of the tracks, but it’s the Zeus EP I’ve been loving – “Kw-h” in particular. If you like The Kills, definitely check them out, too.

Thank you, Ben Harrison, as always, for tuning me in. His band Etc. has a super(hero) track out, too.

Posted on

Cartier-Bresson

Henri Cartier-Bresson died in 2004, and for the first time since then, MoMA has launched a retrospective of his work. There are slide shows on both MoMA’s site & on CNN, where I found this info, via Fareed Zakaria (whose show I love, as it’s one of the only shows that is actually international in perspective, as opposed to being Here’s some stuff abotu some other countries, now back to the US, true center of the universe).

I’m sorely tempted to get to NYC before it ends in late June in order to see it. Here are a few of my favorites:

Posted on

Egg Nog Made With Romulan Ale

Happy Christmas Eve! Check out this amusing post from 2004 about the 10 Least Successful Christmas Specials. Here’s my favorite:

Ayn Rand’s A Selfish Christmas (1951)

In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts — and therefore Christmas — possible. Prior to broadcast, Mutual Broadcast System executives raised objections to the radio play, noting that 56 minutes of the hour-long broadcast went to a philosophical manifesto by the elf and of the four remaining minutes, three went to a love scene between Santa and the cold, practical Mrs. Claus that was rendered into radio through the use of grunts and the shattering of several dozen whiskey tumblers. In later letters, Rand sneeringly described these executives as “anti-life.”

Posted on

Egon Schiele

Courtesy Bilerico & Gloria Brame, a lovely YouTube slideshow of the erotic works of Egon Schiele. I’ve long been a fan.

Posted on

LGBT Athletes & Soldiers

I missed it, & maybe you did too, but here’s Jeff Sheng’s Fearless photography series, which is a collection of photos of out LGBT athletes.
I discovered it via The LA Times’ blog and Sheng’s new series called Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
= Amazing work.

What amazes me particularly about the first set is how images of LGBT people tends to focus on white people in particular, & then too on men. Gathering their photos based on this other part of their identity – their atheleticism – gives a much larger range of racial & ethnic identity, & a much larger range of genders, too.