Gadjo Disko was a notorious dance party that first took place at the Rhizome Collective in Austin, Texas in April of 2008. This past Saturday, we bade a sweaty, sparkly farewell to this be-spangled cavalcade of devoted Diskovites. Miraculously, our fake eyelashes stayed adhered despite our tears!
Miss Valerie Hemming (aka. Vas ist Das) and Wanda Kruda boogie down at the second Gadjo Disko.
Gadjo Disko was born from the restless minds of four storm-tossed former New Orleanians (myself, Mack Henson, Chesley Allen and Sarah King) who found ourselves part of the growing diaspora in Austin after Hurricane Katrina. We had put on extravagant events in New Orleans inspired by the Dada Balls of yore: Cabaret Revoltaire was a balls-out, full-contact, total-participation party that combined art, dance and performance without the restrictions of a passive audience. After the vagaries of the storm, we decided to pare it down and just do “a simple dance party”. Little did we know then what a behemoth our baby would become!
Tash Kouri of The Gyronauts.
Our Otesánek grew and grew until it encompassed and surpassed the boundaries of age, gender, ethnic background or cultural milieu. I’m not sure where else you might see 66 year old grannies (our amazing friend Beth, who danced at every single Disko) getting down on the dance-floor next to depraved trannies!
Sometimes coming up with an ensemble for the evening can prove challenging. When in doubt, go without! We always provided free entry to completely naked people.
I’ve traveled far and wide enough to know how rare it is to find a party that transcends any one scene, where burners, hipsters, nerds, punks, queers, goths and all the beautiful and (thankfully) unclassifiable freaks can get together without the least trace of pretension or scorn…
Just a cute little video for a cute little techno song: a budget version of the Sofia Coppola’s Antoinette cast engulfed in a messy food fight for a video called “Lightworks” by the Acid Girls – a band consisting of these two mustached dudes. What’s interesting about this video is that it was paid for by Toyota Scion. As part of their marketing efforts, Scion pours tons of money into the arts. But most of the artists in Scion’s stable always struck me as rather safe, rather dull. This music video isn’t “transgressive” by any means, but there’s something genuine about it that I found missing from many of the other artists on Scion’s A/V site. The word I’m looking for may not even be genuine, but silly. I mean that in a good way.
Lee Evil and Dougy Gyro in his “Nautilus” costume.
The tenth Edwardian Ball crept up upon us unawares, while we were still sleepy from holiday overeating and adjusting to our regular work schedules again. All of a sudden everyone seemed to say “This weekend? But I haven’t a costume!” And thus began the yearly scramble, with last-minute runs to the fabric store and safety pins carefully tucked away inside as-yet unfinished garments. The Edwardian Ball is one of those rare events where everyone–not just the performers and regulars–dons a costume. For some of us this means little more than our everyday wear, while others brainstorm for weeks.
Just in case you missed this announcement elsewhere, Zo is selling these gorgeous contoured vinyl stickers of her original artwork over at her site, Biorequiem! There are two designs: Cumulus Confection, which appeared as one of the Coilhouse section headers in Issue 02, and Poke, an artwork that Zo released as fine-art print some time ago. The stickers are coated with a UV finish, making them resistant to discoloration over time. Get ’em before they’re gone!
A French carving, pharm dating from the 1700s, designed to look like a human molar. At 10.5 centimeters in height it depicts inside its two halves, “The tooth worm as Hell’s demon” an explanation of the toothache as a battle occurring with the mythical tooth worm. The legend of the tooth worm apparently dates back to 1800 BC Mesopotamia and even has its own creation myth:
“When Anu created the Sky,
the Sky created the Rivers,
The Rivers created the Valleys,
the Valleys created the Swamps,
the Swamps created the Worm,
the Worm went to Samas and wept.
His tears flowed before Ea.
“What will you give me to eat, what will you give me to such?”
“I’ll give you a ripe fig, apricots and apple juice.”
“What use are a ripe fig,
an apricot and apple juice to me?
Lift me up! Let me dwell ‘twixt teeth and gum!
I’ll suck the blood from the teeth
and gnaw the roots in their gums.”
“Because you have said this, O Worm, may
Ea sink you with his mighty hand!”
The idea of a tooth worm was finally put to scientific scrutiny in the late 18th century by both Pierre Fauchard — “the father of modern dentistry” — and Philip Pfaff — who was dentist to Frederick the Great of Prussia. Pfaff seemed loathe to totally commit to such a position however (or was, in fact, a wonderfully sarcastic man), writing that, while he himself had never personally come across a tooth worm, he did not wish “to dispute the observations of learned doctors.”
All but her belly buried in the floor;
And the lewd trounce of a final muted beat!
We flee her spasm through a fleshless door…
Then you, the burlesque of our lust — and faith,
Lug us back lifeward — bone by infant bone.
— Hart Crane, “National Winter Garden,” (1930)
“Jo Boobs” Weldon is Headmistress of The New York School of Burlesque, whose home at The Slipper Room is just a few blocks from where Lydia Thompson’s “London Blondes” brought burlesque to America and a stone’s throw from where Minsky’s original National Winter Garden made burlesque part of the American vernacular. Minsky’s notoriously established Gypsy Rose Lee as an icon synonymous with striptease, and launched the careers of Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers and Robert Alda before being closed in the name of public morality.
Houston Street Burlesque by Mabel Dwight (1928)
Is burlesque – a word which refers to turning things upside down – still able to subvert morals and mores? In a popular culture where the use of sexuality to sell consumer goods is banal, pornography of nearly every stripe is freely and instantly available, and sympathetic gay and lesbian characters are commonplace, is the self-conscious performance of gender merely campy fun or does it still have a liberating capacity? Can sex work, titillation, gender play and masturbation undermine heterosexual monogamy? Whose moralities and identities might they challenge?
Catherine MacKinnon argues that sexualized depictions of women in patriarchal societies reinforce misogyny to the point of constituting a form of violence. Do sexualized performances by women lead to their individual and collective debasement? Is stripping a phenomenon where women who appeal most to men are degraded whereas burlesque liberates women who stand outside the norms of beauty as prescribed by male desire? Considering stripping and prostitution, I ask whether everyone sells their bodies at every job? Further, when men pay a high premium to be with a woman or just to look at one, whose body is exploited? More specifically, does it make sense to import 20th century standards of judgment to a 21st century United States whose educational system produces more female post-graduates than male and whose career women earn 94.2% of the income of their male counterparts? Despite shifts in income and status, why do so few straight males study burlesque or work as strippers?
Jo Boobs and I met at the basement headquarters of her school on the coldest evening in recent years to explore questions of gender, activism, and whether she and her ilk are gender traitors or gender busters. She even stripped down to fighting gear for an intimate performance caught by our unblinking digital eyeball. (See above!) In June 2010, Jo will publish The Pocket Book of Burlesque (with a forward by Margaret Cho), a volume whose slender design can slip under the inspector’s prying gaze. The New York School of Burlesque is in sympathetic affiliation with Miss Indigo Blue’s Academy of Burlesque in Seattle and Michelle L’Amour’s Burlesque Finishing School in Chicago as well as programs in Washington, D.C and elsewhere. When will someone open a campus in Tehran?
COILHOUSE: How does burlesque differ from stripping? JO BOOBS: To understand the difference, look at it from the audience’s point of view. If someone goes to a strip joint, they usually go in whenever they want, they pick the performer they want, they negotiate how they interact with them, they interact one-on-one, and they leave. When they go to a burlesque show, the show starts at a [predetermined] time, they pay a cover (not the performers), they watch the show, there isn’t usually any one-on-one interaction, and they leave when the performance is over.
Please welcome Ales Kot, a writer hailing from the igloos [or was it bear caverns?] of the Czech Republic and now residing in Angel City, USA. In early fall, agent Kot conducted an interview with apocalyptic sculptor Kris Kuksi. This interview was initially meant for Issue 04, but we’ve decided to publish it here instead, in order to give more print real estate to Kris’ incredible work.
Dharma Bovine
COILHOUSE: Your website biography opens with a Lord Byron’s quote: ”When falls the Coliseum, Rome shall fall; And when Rome falls – the world”. What’s your opinion on the current mass fascination with various visions of the apocalypse? KRIS KUKSI: Mainly because we’re at a tipping point in humanity and I really wonder if we’re going to figure out how to save ourselves from such things as climate change, religious fanaticism, peak oil, and overpopulation. There is much to be learned from history – there are always cycles of growth, prosperity, decline and fall. Right now we have advanced more than ever before and yet we may be beginning to see indication of decline. There certainly is resistance to confronting it with how humanity has set up governments and education. There is a maze of laws and legislations to navigate in order to change things in the world. I believe there is always a dodging of responsibility when it comes down to saving this planet. Rome fell for many reasons and one of those reasons was its involvement in the Middle East, its attempt to conquer and colonize it, with subsequent economic deterioration as a result. Thereafter, barbaric invaders and the rise of religious changes further contributed towards the fall. Do we see parallels in history today? I think it’s obvious.
In the past, you’ve stated that humanity is a “silly, ongoing, short-term memory machine that fails to learn from the past”. What are your thoughts on ways to change this? Can the machine be repaired, and if so, how can it be done?
It certainly can and the word of the day is “choice”. We have all the power in our hands, minds, and might to educate and and learn and remember what history tells us. There is a decline in education in the industrial world because man has to answer to the machine before inquiry. We have based our lives on serving these machines of industry and forget to observe the results, which are those things that harm life on the planet in many ways.
These images, created by conceptual art/illustration/photography unit Neon O’Clockworks, appeared in the Japan/Victorian issue of Yaso Magazine. (Yaso, a Japanese-only art magazine published in Tokyo, has issues with themes like “doll,” “vampire” and “Svankmajer” – more about this incredible publication, with pictures and reviews of specific issues, later this week!) The series that these images come from is called “Timeless Prelude,” subtitled “Victorian Period & Huge Head” – click here to see the entire project. The artists write that the series was inspired by the huge wigs of bygone eras, along with Japanese geisha makeup. The result is a nostalgic, Sarah Moon-esque atmosphere that dips into the 1700s and the 1900s, Kabuki stylings and German expressionism, East and West. Not to be missed on their site are some of the other projects: the Kragenedechse installation (make sure you see the room of silence and the exhibition’s window display!), the Japan Avant-Garde portraits and the Dressed/Naked book.
“Unfortunate little tumbleweave that met an unhappy end on V Street, hospital NE Washington, shop DC. Tumbleweaves thrive here in DC, their numbers are great. She was one of the unlucky few.” – Urban Tumbleweave
A tumbleweave is the part of a hairstyle that, once mature and dry, disengages from the host and tumbles (rolls) away in the wind, seeking its own fortunes. The tumbleweave habit is most common in urban areas, such as PHILLAY. However, the ripe specimen of tumbleweave pictured below was sighted by intoallthat in Baltimore. Some thorough scientific analysis yields the following theory: “possibly originating continents away in a proto-religious Eurasian hairletting ritual, [this tumbleweave] found itself hopelessly and aimlessly clinging to a patch of concrete in downtown Bowtimo. Possibly looking for a cameo on The Wire.”
The blog Urban Tumbleweave seeks to further chronicle tumbleweaves discovered in Philadelphia, West Oakland (“the Philly of the West Coast”) and beyond. Each tumbleweave is like a snowflake, representing a particular genus, such as the exotic Synthetica Prolifera. Tumblewave sightings can also be submitted to this excellent Flickr pool.
