Mixed Bag O' Shite Updates: Part Two! Last Blog Before Christmas

Tom of Finland Christmas

Things have felt rushed and chaotic since Autumn 2012. First DJ’ing at Bestival, followed by a long weekend in Paris in September 2012, then two weeks in Canada (I got back 2 November). A couple of draining weeks of jetlag and cold ensued after that.  Next thing I know, we're hurtling towards Christmas!

My mind has felt fogged-over and distracted lately, but there is a backlog of stuff I want to blog about. So this entry will be a bit of an epic catch-up about various random (schizophrenic?) things that have preoccupied me over the past few months.

/ Gee: Do you think he dresses to the left? /

Friday 19 October 2012 was the opening night launch party for an exhibition of the red-hot 1950s beefcake / physique pin-up photography of John Palatinus at the Space Station Sixty Five gallery in London. Needless to say my friends and I were there. I’ve long been an admirer of Palatinus’s work, and photos of naked men and free booze are two of my favourite things in life. As a bonus, Palatinus (now an impressively dapper 83-year old) and his curator and archivist Alan Harmon were there in person (and very articulate and affable they were, too). Anyway, the party was a blast.

/ Photographer John Palatinus and curator Alan Harmon /



/ Christopher and I in front of one our favourite shots /

Palatinus’s 1950s bodybuilder rockabilly pin-ups may be slathered in baby oil and virtually naked except for engineer boots or a sailor's cap, often with ropes or chains coiled around them, but they still retain a sweetness and naivety which would be impossible to capture today.  (This is the same quality that also makes mid-century female cheesecake photos of, say, Bettie Page or Jayne Mansfield so beguiling. It’s hard to define: an un-ironic lack of self-consciousness?).

More examples of Palatinus at his best, all taken circa the late 1950s

I find this model (apparently named Bob Ireland) particularly heart-melting. He looks so au courant with his sexy, scruffy little beard. If he rocked up to The Joiner’s Arms or The George & Dragon in Shoreditch looking like that, he wouldn’t be buying his own drinks all night

Palatinus was arrested on obscenity charges in 1959 at the height of the McCarthy witch hunt era. Most of his work was seized and destroyed. What was especially fascinating about the exhibit (which closed on 18 November 2012) was its inclusion of contemporary newspaper articles covering Palatinus’s arrest: the press didn’t just publish his name and home address – it also detailed the full names, addresses and occupations of his mail order clientele! It makes you shudder thinking about the shame and destroyed lives of these presumably closeted men all over the US in the repressed 1950s, for something so innocuous. We’ve come a long way, baby!

Afterward, my friends and I continued the party at ultra rough, old-school boozer The Little Apple nearby in Kennington. Christopher embraced the spirit of things by donning a sailor cap. (The cap is actually mine! I lent it to him; Christopher was going to be playing a sailor in a pop video).

 

Read more about John Palatinus on his official website. Alan Harmon's V-M-P Vintage Male Physique blog is a real treasure trove; I highly encourage you to check it out. You can see more of my photos from the night on my flickr page.

I avidly follow Decaying Hollywood Mansions  in all its manifestations (it's a Facebook group, a tumblr page and a blog). Think of it as a guide to the haunted, eerie and crepuscular subterranean underbelly of Old Hollywood, in the vein of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. A few months ago they posted some intriguing photos of the actress Merle Oberon in the long-forgotten, very kitsch-looking 1946 Technicolour exotica oddity A Night in Paradise. (It looks like the cinematic equivalent of Yma Sumac's delirious music). 

Merle Oberon in A Night in Paradise (1946)

I hadn’t thought of Oberon in ages and it reminded me of her strange, secretive life story. Her exact origins will always be clouded in mystery, but it appears the Anglo-Indian Oberon was born in 1911 in Bombay of mixed race heritage (her mother was Indian, her father British). For the entirety of her life (she died aged 68 in 1979) Oberon denied her biracial background and “passed herself off” as white. When her dark-skinned and sari-clad mother eventually moved with Oberon to her Hollywood mansion, Oberon told everyone she was her maid! Oberon was widely regarded as one of the great beauties of her era; apparently even Marlene Dietrich was jealous of her. To modern eyes, she certainly looks like an exquisite Asian woman (film historian John Kobal would accurately describe her exotic beauty as “jasmine scented”).

Nonetheless, it wasn’t until years after Oberon’s death that her secret was unmasked in a biography I remember reading as a teenager. (In this regard, her story echoes that of musician Korla Pandit's).

An almost scary 1930s portrait of Merle Oberon. The lighting makes her look like an escapee from a Josef Von Sternberg film

Who are we to judge? In the 1930s miscegenation was strictly taboo; a biracial race actress could never have become a mainstream star. Oberon emerged from an impoverished background and apparently had a steely determination to succeed. It could be that Oberon was a far better actress in real life than she ever was onscreen. The great irony is that if Oberon is remembered at all today (she’s mostly not, except for playing Cathy opposite Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff in the 1939 adaptation of Wuthering Heights), it’s not for any of her film performances but for being the half-Indian actress who painstakingly concealed her ethnicity – the one thing she didn’t want anyone to know about!

The great Self-Styled Siren film blog devoted a whole entry to Oberon’s story a while back, comparing her to the doomed and conflicted mixed race character Sarah Jane in the 1959 Douglas Sirk melodrama Imitation of Life. It’s the balanced and ultimately sympathetic account that Oberon deserves.

Coco and I at my mother's place. Re her green-ish paws: my brother-in-law had just mowed the lawn, the grass was damp and Coco ran through it

Since moving to London twenty years ago now, I make an annual trip back to visit my family in Canada. I usually aim to get there around the beginning of September when "peak season" is over but the weather is still relatively summer-y and I can swim (my mother lives walking distance from the beach). This year the airfare was so prohibitive I had to wait until late October (I was there 22 October – 1 November), which meant I was home for Halloween. I divided my time between my mother’s place in Norway Bay, Quebec and my sister’s in the suburbs outside Ottawa, and spent most of it sleeping (averaging 11 hours a night), eating (I’ve gained about ten pounds), playing with my nieces (Maya, 10 and Miranda, 8) and getting to know their new dog – an adorable Shih Tzu called Coco.

My mother and I

I’d forgotten what a big deal Halloween is in North America. Check out my flickr page for how elaborately the people of suburban Ottawa decorate their houses for Halloween (and loads of shots of the many moods of Coco).

Vampire princess Miranda in her front yard on Halloween night



Miranda and I




Maya and I. (Her costume was "bloody nurse")



Portrait of Warhol drag queen Jackie Curtis by Leee Black Childers. No one documented the iconic Warhol drag Superstars (Curtis, Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling) better than Leee

On 5 December 2012 my friends Christopher, Mari and I went to the launch party for Leee Black Childer’s book Drag Queens, Rent Boys, Pick Pockets, Junkies, Rockstars and Punks at The Vinyl Factory (a chi chi art gallery in South Kensington). In case Leee needs any introduction: In the 1960s he was one of Andy Warhol’s assistants; later on he was involved in the management of the music careers of the likes of David Bowie, Iggy and The Stooges, The Heartbreakers and Levi and The Rockcats. Throughout, he was photographing everything: the Warhol Superstars, the whole decadent Max’s Kansas City and Chelsea Hotel milieu, glam rock, and the emergence of punk on both sides of the Atlantic. A natural raconteur, in the essential oral histories of punk (like England's Dreaming and Please Kill Me), Leee is always interviewed as one of the key witnesses and scene makers. His wonderfully grainy, gritty and evocative portraits of the Sex Pistols and Warhol drag queen Superstars in particular are like cat nip for me.  (Obviously there were other photographers documenting the Warhol scene at the time, but Leee’s photos of Curtis, Candy Darling and Holly Woodlawn have a real intimacy and rapport). I’ve known Leee for several years now via mutual friends and usually wind up seeing him when he comes to London (he’s based in New York). It was really gratifying to finally see his work get the deluxe coffee table book treatment (and accompanying exhibit) it merits.

Needless to say, I snapped a few shots on the night.Before heading to Leee’s party, we assembled for Happy Hour drinks at Simmons Bar in Kings Cross (great place; I highly recommend it. It has a skull-shaped disco ball!). They had a lurid hot pink (or should that be fuchsia?) acrylic Christmas tree in the corner that transfixed us. So artificial! So Jayne Mansfield! And so futuristic: it was like a Space Age Barbarella Christmas.  



Christopher and the glamorous Mari

Christopher and I



Mari and Leee




Leee, Mari and novelist / journalist Rupert Smith




Leee and I way back in September 2008 at Cockabilly at The Moustache Bar in Dalston




I can claim to actually have been photographed by the great Leee Black Childers myself, once! He took this shot at the club night Polari at the sadly now defunct Trash Palace bar on Wardour Street. This was also taken in September 2008. Left to right: Rupert Smith, Christian Rodrigues and me

Check out photos from the last time Leee Black Childers was in town on my flickr page

I held my annual Christmas cocktail party on 5 December. As promised (threatened?) on the Facebook events page:

Right: Am thinking of having another intimate Christmas cocktail party chez moi again this year. For those of you who came last year, you know what to expect: I live in a shoe box! Seating is minimal, so you will have no choice but to stand and mingle for the most part (or sit on the floor). The couch represents the elite VIP area. Kitsch and abrasive 1950s and 60s Christmas music will be cranked up LOUD (my CD player is fixed!). I don't "do" food, so eat beforehand, although there will be olives and crisps! (I make these things sound so tempting, don't I?). I will be making snowballs, but I only have one bottle of Advocaat and I ain't buying another one, so if you want snowballs, arrive early to avoid disappointment. After the snowballs, am thinking oceans of icy Cava and maybe Prosecco!

Anyway, the party really swung. In fact it rocked! A week later I was still finding stray bits of broken glass, wasabi peas and roasted peanuts under the sofa bed. Here are a few shots from the night (there’s loads more on my flickr page). Look at these and try to imagine how hung-over I felt that Sunday. Then multiply that by ten.


Paul smoking his head off




Sally and Paddy



Lauren and I, Part 1



Lauren and I, Part 2




Marlene Dietrich, Eric and Divine: all in one shot




Eric and Sally




Christopher and Lauren. They are in a band together called Spanking Machine, by the way, destined to be big in 2013. (Don't you love how the red dumb bells in the corner match Lauren's dress perfectly? What's that about?!)




Dez and Paul. I love this shot of Paul: at his most louche, gesticulating wildly, smouldering cigarette on the go

Right: I’ve pretty much brought things up to date. There was no Dr Sketchy at all this month, so I didn’t DJ any Christmas music which felt a bit sad. The most exciting but nerve-wracking bit of upcoming news is that I’m launching my club night Lobotomy Room on Saturday 29 December 2012! It’s happening at Paper Dress Vintage in Shoreditch. The organiser / promoter Steve is going to be away that weekend, he had nothing scheduled for that night and offered it to me, to launch my night in a low-key, no pressure way. (I know it’s very likely loads of people will be away for the holidays. London can be quiet the week between Christmas and New Years). Fingers crossed, if this goes well Lobotomy Room will become a regular monthly occurrence in 2013. Wish me luck: I’m shitting bricks / sweating bullets / having kittens trouble-shooting all the things that could go wrong! Hopefully my next blog will be posting the set list from the first night of Lobotomy Room.

Lobotomy Room ... it's coming!

Anyway, this is almost certainly my last blog before 25 December, so Merry Christmas to everyone! I know I post this pic of Jayne Mansfield every year but it never gets tired.

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at Meltdown Festival 10 August 2012

Kembra Pfahler of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black onstage at The Queen Elizabeth Hall during Meltdown Festival. All live photos by me

New York glitter-punk outfit The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black began life as a near-death experience. Shortly before forming the band in 1990, front woman Kembra Pfahler was strangled in a brutal mugging and almost died. While recovering, battered and zonked on painkillers, she watched the 1975 horror movie Trilogy of Terror on television. The film stars Karen Black, the quirky cross-eyed actress whose wildly erratic career encompasses everything from some of the key American films of the 1970s (Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Day of the Locust) to mainstream Hollywood schmaltz (Airport 1975) to obscure straight-to-VHS exploitation/horror dreck. In Trilogy of Terror’s best known segment, Black is stalked by and eventually possessed by a cursed malevolent Zuni fetish doll which has come to life.

* SPOILER ALERT * It concludes with a final jolting image of the now-crazed and murderous, knife-wielding Black grinning blank-eyed and maniacal to the camera to reveal a mouthful of razor sharp teeth identical to the Zuni doll’s.

Karen Black in Trilogy of Terror (1975). You can watch Trilogy of Terror in its entirety on Youtube here

(Later, when asked about the significance of Karen Black Pfahler would reply, “She’s a very compelling cinematic figure,” keen to emphasise the name is an homage and not intended as satirical or ironic. Karen Black herself is ambivalent about the band).

In her traumatised state, that savage and disturbing image -- combined with almost dying-- made a powerful impression on Pfahler. Inspired, she would blacken-out her teeth, conceal her natural fine-featured beauty under cadaverous make-up and take to the stage clad in little more than a pair of thigh boots and a coat of body paint. Pfahler’s look can suggest a character from a John Waters film given an “ugly make-over”: think of Divine as the acid-scarred Dawn Davenport in Female Trouble (1974), an image which seems to anticipate TVHKB’s twisted glamour. Like Divine before her, Pfahler shaves off her eyebrows and shaves back her hairline to accommodate her extreme eye make-up. “I want to be both very beautiful and very repulsive,” Pfahler would explain to The Toronto Star in 1994.

Pretty, pretty? Divine as Dawn Davenport in the 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble

Pfahler’s minimalist dress code would appear to be informed by LeRoy Neiman’s Femlin cartoons from 1950s Playboy magazines

In the great tradition of husband and wife-fronted punk bands like Lux Interior and Poison Ivy (The Cramps), John Doe and Exene Cervenka (X) and Jon Spencer and Cristina Martinez (Boss Hog), Pfahler formed TVHKB with her then-husband and artistic collaborator Samoa Moriki (who’s from Hiroshima; he invested his knowledge of Noh and Kabuki theatre into TVHKB). Before forming TVHKB the duo had concentrated on performance art and making their own no-budget Super 8 experimental films together (described as “surrealistic fetish films”). Pfahler also appeared in films by key Cinema of Transgression auteurs Nick Zedd(War is Menstrual Envy, 1992) and Richard Kern (Sewing Circle, 1992). Like Catherine Ringer of French art-punk band Les Rita Mitsouko, Pfahler dabbled in specialist hardcore porn, playing dominatrixes in wrestling-themed fetish films. Legendary underground filmmaker George Kuchar (or his brother Mike Kuchar, depending which account you read) had already described Pfahler and Samoa’s art work as “voluptuously horrific” – hence the name.

This may all sound quite macabre or Goth, but TVHKB is in fact a scream: think of them as in the tradition of bands for which every day is Halloween (Alice Cooper, The Cramps, Siouxsie and the Banshees) crossed with a theatrical troupe / carnival freak show. Their songs are joyously trashy and campy, powered by the towering, ominous hard rock riffs of virtuoso guitarist Samoa (who’d previously played in a Japanese rockabilly band and sometimes cross dresses), over which Pfahler belts out her mordant lyrics (about subjects like alien abduction and plastic surgery) in a grating, bratty sneer (like all the best punk vocalists, she sings just well enough).

TVHKB’s cheap’n’cheerful infamous live shows, with each song a performance piece involving kitsch no-budget cardboard props and loadsa nudity, recall everything from The Addams Family and The Munsters to the cinematic oeuvre of Ed Wood Jr (a relevant comparison, considering Pfahler is surely the spiritual daughter of his Plan 9 from Outer Space leading lady Vampira). “It’s a demented school play,” is how Pfahler defined their stage shows to The Chicago Tribune in 1994.


"Mr Twilight" video from TVHKB's debut album A National Healthcare (1993). Who could resist that black-toothed smile?

Commanding attention at the centre (flanked by her semi-naked, body-painted showgirls, the Blackettes) is Pfahler, whose decaying glamour ghoul image is incredibly vivid. Her signature look – simultaneously seductive but repellent - is timelessly weird and alluring. It can evoke everything from killer zombie, to Linda Blair in The Exorcist, to voodoo doll or devil girl, to one of LeRoy Neiman’s Femlin cartoons, to horror movie scream queens (not just Karen Black, but Barbara Steele), to the sexy blue or green-skinned alien chicks that Captain Kirk used to make out with in 1960s episodes of Star Trek. “We try to concentrate on fun – the glamour, the pageantry. We like to think of ourselves as Ann-Margret, the glamour, the simplicity,” Pfahler told The Chicago Tribune in 1994. Indeed Rolling Stone would call Pfahler “a cross between Ann-Margret and Elvira.” Certainly Pfahler’s daintily mincing sex kitten-gone-berserk / go-go dancer stage moves recall camp icon/sex symbol Ann-Margret at her most wigged-out in the 1975 Ken Russell film Tommy.


TVHKB performing "Underwear Drawer" and "Sick Bed" in New York, circa 1996. They played both of these songs at Meltdown. Note Samoa's pristine platinum blond quiff worthy of Billy Fury

Unlikely as it sounds, long before this, Pfahler (born in 1961 in Hermosa Beach) had been a sun-kissed California girl. Her father was celebrity surfer Freddy Pfahler (he’d appeared in the 1958 surfing film Slippery When Wet) and her family had show business connections. Growing up in Malibu close to the beach, Pfahler’s neighbours included Shelley Winters and Barbara Streisand. As a child Pfahler was a gymnast, modelled and acted in some TV commercials (like Jody Foster before her, she once appeared in a Coppertone suntan lotion ad).

A conventional acting career seemed like a certainty for Pfahler. As an alienated and rebellious teen, though, Pfahler felt stifled by Californian conformity, in particular the narrow conceptions of physical beauty for women. She found solace in the feral Los Angeles punk subculture, then at its height. When she ran away to New York in 1979 aged 17, her imagination was already fired by LA punk (especially Exene Cervenka of X), Diamanda Galas, The Cramps, Lydia Lunch and the No Wave movement. Upon arriving, Pfahler befriended and sang with doomed scatological punker GG Allin. She also had a brief stint of heroin addiction, which she quickly got out of her system.

In the ensuing years after forming TVHKB, Pfhaler established herself as an iconic downtown New York art and music scene figure and a paragon of alternative glamour. The latter was made official in the mid-90s when she was photographed by Steven Meisel for an ultra-hip “heroin chic” Calvin Klein ad campaign, which also featured quintessential rock chick Anita Pallenberg, former Warhol star Joe Dallesandro, Jennifer Herrema of Royal Trux and Theo Kogan of The Lunachicks.


The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black 'Bring Back The Night' from Bijoux Altamirano on Vimeo.

"Bring Back the Night" from the 2010 album Home of the Brave. The song is not particularly representative of TVHKB’s sound but the video – filmed in Claude Monet's Gardens in Giverny, France – is exquisite. (If you get an error message, refresh the page. The video does work)

(As a side note: TVHKB used to perform regularly at the outrageous, now sadly defunct nightclub Squeezebox!; my old friend Jayne County used to urge me to go to Squeezebox! if I was ever in New York, that I would love it. She almost certainly said it was “faaabulous.” I only managed to make it to Squeezebox! once, in 1999 and it more than lived up to Jayne’s claims. Pride of place on one of the walls was a giant framed photo of Kembra and Marilyn Manson embracing).


TVHKB performing “Shopping Spree” at a gig promoting the documentary Squeezebox! The Movie in 2008

In recent years, though, TVHKB appeared to grind to a halt. I remember reading about Pfahler and Samoa breaking up. (There would be a line-up of TVHKB with Adam Cardone of The Toilet Boys replacing Samoa). Their website is now yanked down and TVHKB’s Myspace page – remember Myspace? – has not been updated since 2010. All three of their CDs are now long out of print and virtually unobtainable. A new CD called Home of the Brave apparently came out in 2010 but seemed to promptly vanish without a trace (just try to order it online!). As a long-term fan (I'd written to TVHKB directly to order their self-released debut CD in 1995, and Samoa wrote back. I still have his letter), I’d always hoped TVHKB would come to London, but it was clearly never to be.

Or was it? Flash-forward to 2012 with the announcement that Antony Hegarty would be the curator of the 2012 Meltdown Festival. His line-up of concerts was bound to be interesting, with the promise of the elite of NYC’s downtown avant-garde (the milieu Hegarty himself had emerged from) coming to London. Sure enough, when Hegarty’s roster of acts was unveiled it included maverick extreme talents like Diamanda Galas, Joey Arias, Marc Almond ... and TVHKB! It looked like they temporarily re-formed just for Meltdown (with Samoa back in the band). My friend Christopher Raymond and I snapped up tickets as fast as we could. I’d given up on ever seeing TVHKB – and now I was!


The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black at Meltdown

The gig on 10 August 2012 was a blast: good-natured, raunchy fun and everything I could have hoped for. Stalking to the stage, Pfahler and her lookalike Blackettes were like walking pieces of freaky art come to life. The band (a stripped-down trio) was awesomely tight, but the show itself was appealingly loose without being shambolic. (Most of the Blackettes were actually local London girls recruited for the gig; the budget obviously didn’t stretch to TVHKB bringing over their regular NYC-based dancers. You could sometimes sense they hadn’t rehearsed quite enough. It only added to the fun). It’s tempting to say they blasted through a 90-minute set of their greatest hits, but TVHKB never actually had any hits, so let’s say their “essential statements” instead: “Am I Blue?” “Neighbourachie”, “I Believe In Halloween”, “Water Coffin”, “Sick Bed”, “Shopping Spree”. Pfahler dedicated “Honky Tonk Biscuit Queen” to Antony Hegarty. For big finale “Alaska” one of the Blackettes pelted Pfahler with white feathers to simulate snow (the feathers stuck to her sweat and body paint; it looked like she’d been tarred and feathered).

The show felt wonderfully like a freaked-out soul revue: think of a perverse, Satanic nightmare inversion of the Ike and Tina Turner Revue in Las Vegas, with Pfahler and Samoa as Tina and Ike, and the Blackettes as the equivalent of their Ikettes. Pfahler’s fright wig (a massive jet black matted punk-bouffant haystack dusted with red glitter) started malfunctioning almost from the start, wobbling and threatening to fall off. Unperturbed, she began tearing clumps of hair from it and hurling it into the audience (Christopher caught a hank of it; bobby pins were still attached to it. Handling it, we both got covered in red glitter). Finally she asked, “Is this really necessary anymore? It’s really hot up here” and continued the rest of the concert wig-less.


Kembra's malfunctioning wig


Kembra and Samoa: The Ike and Tina Turner of punk performance art

The climactic moment was indisputably when Pfahler stood on her head, spread her legs and one of the Blackettes cracked paint-filled Easter eggs onto her vulva. It was a surprisingly solemn moment; it felt primal and timeless, like watching the re-enactment of an ancient Pagan or Mayan fertility ritual. I’d been waiting breathlessly for the egg-cracking segment and it didn’t disappoint. My friend Julian was seated in row B (Christopher and I were in row D) and I told him his view would be gynaecological (it was; and also proctological). Even before TVHKB took the stage, Julian turned to me to point out there was a carton of eggs in the corner of the stage. (Alongside Edith Massey in Pink Flamingos, Kembra Pfahler’s name should forever be associated with the word “eggs”). When one of the Blackettes emerged with a clear plastic tarpaulin and spread it centre stage, Christopher elbowed me in the ribs. It was time...







I could kiss whoever filmed this clip and posted it on Youtube. Experience it for yourself!



Christopher, Pfahler and I post-show. She was sweetness personified and twined her arms around us for the photo. I told her I’d loved TVHKB since their first CD in the early 1990s and she said, “Yes! We’re still alive.” I told her to come back again to London sometime soon, don’t leave it so long and she replied, “Oh, probably not ...” I think they re-formed just for Meltdown


My friend Emma (aka DJ Elma Wolf of Twat Boutique, Club Lesley and Saturday Night Fish Fry) and Pfahler

(It’s essential I mention TVHKB’s opening act, a band called Tenderloin from Berlin. I’d never heard of them before. My friends were indifferent about even checking them out, but I figure we’d paid to see them and they were bound to be interesting at least if they were chosen by Antony Hegarty. We took our seats a few songs into their set, and I was awe-struck to see their lead singer was Vaginal Davis! I’ve long been an admirer of Ms Davis (I swear she used to be called Vaginal Crème Davis, but she must have lost the “Crème” at some point). Alongside Canadian filmmaker Bruce LaBruce, Davis virtually invented the Queer-core (or Homo-core, if you prefer) punk movement in the early 90s and therefore made life one helluva lot more interesting. For anyone unfamiliar with Davis, the self-described "controversial black woman" is a towering African-American drag queen (seriously: he’s built like a brick shithouse), zine writer, punk musician, nightclub promoter and all-round provocateur. Like Pfahler, he emerged from the fertile Los Angeles punk scene (they’ve been friends since the 1970s); in recent years he’s re-located to bohemian Berlin. Anyway, Tenderloin was brilliant: minimalist, strange, stark but danceable, with Davis declaiming lyrics seemingly inspired by the film Christiane F – often in German – in a high-pitched voice, channelling Tina Turner and Whitney Houston in a tousled auburn wig, billowing white mini-dress and killer heels. Mindblowing! And in a foreshadowing of TVHKB, when they left the stage we realised Tenderloin’s fit hottie of a drummer had been playing stark naked the whole time; we’d just assumed he was shirtless! Read an interview with Tenderloin drummer Joel Gibb on the Butt website. Tenderloin is definitely divisive - I loved them, but most of my friends didn’t. But that’s probably true of all interesting bands and artists).


Tenderloin (feat. Vaginal Davis) from Earl Dax on Vimeo.

Brief fragment of Tenderloin performing in Berlin. This gives you a pretty good flavour of their Meltdown performance (Davis is even wearing the same wig and dress combo)

The following day, my friend Emma and I returned to the Southbank to see Pfahler give an intimate, low-key onstage lecture about the concepts and manifestos behind her work, chiefly availabism, anti-naturalism and future feminism. It was pretty sparsely attended (just a handful of devotees). Pfahler was endearingly nervous, she complained of jetlag and her lecture was a bit rambling: “slick” is not in her vocabulary, but slick is overrated. Out of her stage drag and close-up Pfahler is stunningly beautiful with a delicate face, tiny (5’2) and (at 51 years old) eerily ageless. She wore a floor-length white crocheted dress through which was visible her black bra and panties underneath. Her daytime look isn’t exactly neutral or low-key: her heavy black eye make-up was pure Bride of Dracula.

Some of the highlights of Pfahler’s lecture: she discussed onstage nudity and explained she carefully advises her dancers about it first (wearing a g-string is definitely optional). “Going bottomless will ruin your life; no one will ever take you seriously again. You will never get a job,” she cautions them. Asked about her most notorious film Sewing Circle directed by sleaze-meister Richard Kern, in which Pfahler temporarily sews her vagina shut, she explained she was making a statement about re-claiming herself after an abusive relationship. (Funnily enough, in the 1990s I interviewed Richard Kern and we talked about Sewing Circle). An audience member asked her about taking risks and Pfahler replied, “Risk is all I had.”

(As a nice postscript, Vaginal Davis was sitting directly behind me during Pfahler’s lecture, and afterwards we spoke briefly. I told him how much I loved Tenderloin and that I’d been following his work since the 1990s. In fact, at one point in the 90s I wrote to him requesting one of his zines and he wrote back. Davis exuded warmth and sweetness. My next art project is conniving how to get Tenderloin to return to London for another show).

(This nice anecdote from a Guardian article about Hegarty’s Meltdown line-up concisely illustrates Pfhaler’s theory of availabism – using whatever comes to hand for your art: “One day in 1979, a few weeks after her arrival in New York City, artist and musician Kembra Pfahler was invited to perform in a club on the Lower East Side. "I decided I would stand on my head and crack an egg on my vagina," she says with disarming matter-of-factness. "Just because my body was available and I had eggs in the refrigerator.")

"I wanted to be as unpopular as possible ... and that happened." This brief clip (just over three minutes long) offers a great summary of Pfahler’s philosophies and inspirations. It’s also fascinating to see her interviewed in her stark, compact New York apartment (I can’t tell whether it’s a studio or a one bedroom). Every surface is painted the colour of dried blood.


Bonus track! Sadly they didn't perform this at Meltdown, but it's too good not to include. TVHKB give "My Heart Will Go On" (the love theme from Titanic) a savage mauling. It's enough to give a Celine Dion fan a coronary.



Further reading:

See the rest of my photos from the Meltdown gig on my flickr page

At Home with Kembra Pfahler!

Nice thoughtful interview with Pfahler in The NY Times from June 2012

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black discography:

A National Healthcare (1993)
The Anti-Naturalists (1995)
Black Date (1998)
The Home of the Brave (2010)

Wild Thing DJ Set List 18 July 2012

I found myself DJ’ing at The Retro Bar for vintage trash queer club night Wild Thing again on 18 July 2012. It was a last-minute gig: my friends Christopher Raymond and Paul Kennedy were meant to be guest DJ’ing alongside Joe Pop (the brains behind Wild Thing) that night, but Paul had to drop out at short notice. I was planning to go just to hang out, anyway, when Christopher texted me asking if I’d be interested in co-DJ’ing with him. To paraphrase the late, great Gore Vidal (a timely reference! RIP), I never turn down the opportunity to have sex, appear on television or DJ – so I quickly packed my DJ bag and rushed to the venue.

If the set list below looks exceptionally short, it was because our set was only an hour long and we “alternated” as a tag team, me on CDs and Christopher on vinyl. (I don’t have Christopher’s tracks to add to the set list, but his were more modern / post-punk: I definitely recall some Boss Hog, Holly Golightly, The Cramps, Babes in Toyland, “Atomic Bongos” by Lydia Lunch, "White Mice" by The Mo-dettes). The partnership worked well, and the flowing pints of icy lager only added to the inspiration. Both of us chose Link Wray for our opening tracks, which meant back-to-back Link Wray songs – but how can you possibly have too many twang-y, ominous Link Wray instrumentals? (Mine, “The Shag”, is of course the opening theme tune to John Waters’ Pink Flamingos – ensuring it will always hold a special place in my heart).

/ Black T-Shirt Convention: Christopher and I (double chin alert) photographed at The Retro Bar on 18 July 2012. Une photo originale par Joe Pop /

As ever, I endeavoured to pack in a varied selection of urgently sleazy music: some punk (X, Sid Vicious), hillbilly (Hasil Adkins), surf (The Fender Four), titty-shaking stripper instrumentals (The Hustlers), cooing / purring sex kittens (Ann-Margret, Mamie Van Doren) and weird Satan-worshipping voodoo shit (Esquerita).

I also worked in a mini-tribute to Kenneth Angers’s 1963 experimental / avant-garde homoerotic short film Scorpio Rising. I know I bang on about this film a lot, but I saw it at an impressionable age and it definitely had a transformative effect on me – it contributed to making me the twisted fuck I am today! I frequently dip into the songs Anger used on the soundtrack to Scorpio Rising when I DJ as a bit of an homage to the master - on this occasion, Elvis’s “Devil in Disguise” and Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In.” Which is a nice excuse to post a photo of Ricky at the height of his beauty. (Sigh).

Here’s a tantalising fragment of Scorpio Rising to whet your appetite: you just hear the tail end of Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In” before the music fades into “Wind Up Doll” by Little Peggy March. Now make it your mission to track down Kenneth Anger: The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle on DVD (easy enough on Amazon). You will thank me later.



Christopher has also asked me to point out he spun a track off a weird Halloween novelty compilation record on the Crypt label entitled Monster Rock’n’Roll, with truly inept but heartfelt “outsider art” cover art of Frankenstein jiving with a pony-tailed girl in a graveyard (I think it was done by a violent psychobilly prisoner in solitary confinement. See for yourself here).

Afterwards, while Joe Pop himself DJ’d I caught up with my work colleague, American ex-pat Eric. We bonded by reminiscing wistfully about our mutual all-time favourite rancid dive bar in the world: The Hole in the Wall in San Francisco. (Eric used to live in San Francisco). By then I was very drunk.

OK, enough of my wittering. Time for naked vintage beefcake – and I’m not feeling particularly “safe for work” today. I’ve mentioned before how Joe Pop’s designs for Wild Thing flyer images are nice mini-masterpieces of pop art. Unsurprisingly, gay icon / Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro is a frequent source of inspiration.

/ In the shower with Little Joe: a relatively un-corrupted (pre-junkie, anyway) teenage Dallesandro in his nude modelling days /



The Shag - Link Wray and His Ray Men
She Said - Hasil Adkins
Little Boy / Little Girl - John and Jackie
Fools Rush In - Ricky Nelson
Devil in Disguise - Elvis Presley
Oh Lonesome Me - Ann-Margret
Somethin' Else - Sid Vicious
Dancing with Tears in My Eyes - X
8 Ball - The Hustlers
Go Calypso - Mamie Van Doren
Ballad of Thunder Road - Robert Mitchum
Big Bounce - Shirley Cadell
Esquerita and The Voola - Esquerita
I Stubbed My Toe - Bryan "Legs" Walker
Margaya - The Fender Four
Stranger in My Own Home Town - The Earls of Suave

/ I don't blame him. I wouldn't be able to stop staring, either /