Fantasy And Obsession—Wonderland, A Roving Beast
February 16, 2010 by Clint Catalyst · 9 Comments
At Royal/T Café, Store and Artspace
8910 Washington Blvd, Culver City CA
The evening of February 4th, 2010
was a hare-y sitch for photographer Dirk Mai, as captured by Polite In Public.
har, a hardy-har har—Umm, YEAH. (How ’bout I spare you guys the slab of Velveeta? Sound like a plan?)
That’s what I thought…
Chubby Bunny (L) and Yume Ninja (R) of Bubble Punch brought cosplay Correctness for us to look upon,
Whereas Lenora Claire —another ‘repeat offender’ on this humble Dot Com—fully LET US HAVE IT with a mind-melding, retinal-shattering, hot hot hottt hairstyle!
Oh! But what have we here? An adorable Kat Lee , per chance?
As a matter of fact, yes: yes it is, indeed… and in the haus with her band mate and business partner, the multi-talented Kaila Yu (L)!
Our exploration of Correct Culture continues
with burlesque beauty Courtney Cruz sandwiched between an Alice duo… ♥
(while pssst! Here’s a little “JSYK,” if by chance you’re in the No instead of know):
The estimable Miss Cruz presents “tassle-twirling with a spin” at her once-a-month installment of The Devil’s Playground at Bordello bar. Described by journalist Erin Broadley as “Beyond traditional fan dancing and martini bathing,” the Devil’s Playground “integrates pop culture and niche fan favorites with the classic art of the striptease, modernizing burlesque with cleverly themed, character-driven performances like Video Game Girls, Comic Book Vixens and…Tails From the Crypt.” Known most recently for creating a disturbance in The Force for her Star Wars-themed bump-and-grind, it’s no wonder the L.A. Weekly deemed this Busty Storm Trooper’s resident troupe as Best Burlesque Club of 2009.
Here, Cruz exercised control with chanteuse Jessicka Addams and Mia Vixen, one of The Devil’s Playground performers.
Wait a minute. I mentioned this was an art opening; didn’t I?
Oh-Kay.
Unfortunately, the gallery ran out of catalogs—so I can’t even credit the Kunstler responsible for the creation pictured above. That being said, please allow me to segueway back to other deep and meaningful content, such as
the photo booth fun I had myself…ditto, Ela Darling and The Dirkulous Maximus.
Caught here on the other side of the camera is “Nightranger’s intrepid reporter Lina Lecaro,
whose years of fearless ventures—from immersing herself deep in the trenches of trannies werkin’ the merkin to ravers wielding glow-sticks as if they were num chucks—have garnered her quite The Reputation.
Incidentally, Lecaro “dipped into the population” this eve not only for the sake of a newspaper word count, but also to celebrate the completion of her first full-length manuscript. (No, people: I didn’t say script. Leave those to your dental hygenist, who’ll likely have “something for you to look over” before the luxury of another kind of script gets written. Oy.)
By manuscript, I mean book—of which her debut is titled
Los Angeles’s Best Dive Bars: Drinking and Diving in the City of Angels. Its release date is May 1st, 2010
but why not go ahead and pre-order the betch? Assuming you remembered to close out your tab at the bar last night, that is! Such a hassle, retrieving one’s 16-digits on plastic The Day After. Isn’t it? [AHEM!] I mean: So I’ve Heard.
“Besides: it’s not like I had a hang-over or anything! It was more like…a lean-over.” Yeah. That was it—
The Visual/The Verbal: Speaking In Hieroglyphics (Grabbing Language By The Throat)
February 16, 2010 by Clint Catalyst · Leave a Comment
Though your MySpace page tells us “all we need to know,” Mia—your photography exposes a vulnerable intensity. The beauty inherent is that which remains unspoken: those subtle nuances, the vocabulary of the heart that extends beyond logic & its parameters. It’s none of what a viewer “need[s] to know,” yet it’s everything.
The ability to send the blood rushing—to thaw hearts as impenetrable and cold as marble—through a glacial striptease?
This is what it is to cast spells: not of the premeditated chanting from a back-room magick book, none of the hackneyed “add this herb; follow these directions; do it THIS WAY, no THIS WAY, no THIS WAY.” There is no guide book for psyche-penetration, no recipe by which one can be taught how to affect the human condition effectively.
It just it what it is: a medium that for some, is a camera lens; for others, a paint brush & a canvas stretched to its limits; others still, a pen hungry for pages on which it can conduct, gather all the energy from the soil on which we stand to mustering up the truth tucked deep inside us, an honesty of whom we really are versus how we present ourselves or what others perceive us to be—and it’s in the marrowbones, the core of our beings.
And what it is?
Something raw and real and imperfect. Something greater than I can assign nomenclature—let alone fully comprehend. It’s a force that travels through us yet belongs not to us; it’s those “accidents” that happen when we don’t set out To Create but seem to create themselves for us all the same…those inexplicable pieces of perfection for which we somehow feel we weren’t responsible, or perhaps can’t pinpoint with specificity. Can’t name a technique or place in this space, a state of being I won’t pretend to understand though have heard referred to as La Duende, the spirit of evocation, a state of possession : vox popula. Vox populi—a sense of I can’t tell you ‘How I Did It’ when it feels as if I wasn’t even at the wheel
yet
what we see, what we discover is credited as ‘ours,’ what we feel equal parts distant from as well as intimately involved—it’s when our limbs jangle and that four-chambered metronome pounds against our sternum, and the eyes and voices and fingertips of others respond, pounding sentences out in a quicksilver frenzy. It’s when an image you took has the power to peel back the ribs of a stranger, or near-stranger, or incite the syllables and consonants that come rushing out at 1:31 a.m. to be ‘strange’ enough, strange enough;
It’s when all the odds are stacked against your viewer, yet he throws every ounce of his being down along with his better judgment. All bets are off in moments like these, in a moment like this, when your brow is furrowed & mouth hangs open in disbelief and the little voice nestled in your skull asserts “This is insane!” in a whisper, the words scalpels…
And yeah: insane it is. Would you opt for the blandular instead, the khaki-clad with lips pursed for air kisses and ass kissing? Would you rather have the safe-yet-soggy response that’s the verbal equivalent of a microwave pizza box lining? Because in three minutes I may splash faucet water on my face, feel the shock as I regain physicality and shrug off this rant of a reaction. In three minutes I may very well glance back with a deep-throated laugh and ask myself “Seriously, What. The. Fuck?”
But three minutes is a long time. Don’t believe me? Set your alarm; then hold your breath.
What the fuck? Seriously: because I live for this madness, I live for the spine-snap urgency to bound down the staircase and haunt my neighborhood streets—Micheltorena, Sunset Blvd., Alvarado—to dig my fingernails into the raw evening, to tear down the sky and polish the stars. I live. I live for.
I live for these unforeseen moments of inspiration in which I feel alive alive alive…
They’re how I know I exist: the flames lapping at the backside of my corneas like the backlash of a furnace blast. The sensory overload. The feral fervor. I live for this severity that destroys any sense of severity, no matter if when or how much I feel it siphoning the life force out of me.
While you may not be poisoned with the same ‘unnamed ‘which wears me down to an angry frazzle, I’m drawn to some irrational spirit of artistry I intuit is chambertombed to you, to your need to search and to see and to leave something lasting, some body of work that no longer has to be searched for, as it’s already found; as it’s already found you; it’s found you,
found it’s you.
