Keith Hennessy in collaboration...
Pop minstrels, corporate domination, and teenage puppets:
A quick look at the top 10 youtube hits of all time (as of Jan 1, 2011)
I just watched the top ten youtubes of all time so that you wouldn't have to. There's still DIY content available on youtube but the top ten is mostly a story of domination by pop cult machinery constructing and exploiting nearly every teenage click of global computer access...
Read moreOriginally written for Issue 2 of the Salt Lake City journal LEARNING TO loveDANCEmore: MANIFESTO.
Dance. Eats. Money.
by Ishmael Houston-Jones
“Imagine So You Think You Can Dance without the flashing lights, screaming fans and millions of TV viewers, and voilà: The A.W.A.R.D. (Artists With Audiences Responding to Dance) Show,” wrote Apollinaire Scherr in the Financial Times. From the first time I heard about the A.W.A.R.D. Show I have been uneasy with the idea...
The 1st annual Tiara Sensation avant-drag pageant was birthed into the world by the SomeThing team of VivvyAnne ForeverMore, dj down-E, and Mr. David aka Glamamore (pictured above). It was an only-in-San Francisco, queer-freaks-do-it-better, oh-no-she-didn’t, genius night out. As co-host Mr. David stated just before the pageant winner was announced, all the queens were gorgeous and gave fabulous performances. That wasn’t just generous, it was necessary. Experimental, messy, and postmodern drag in San Francisco (since the Cockettes, since Klubstitute, since Jerome Caja and Phatima at Uranus, since Kiki and Herb, since the early days of Trannyshack…) means that almost every queen or king invents her own genre of performance. That makes pageant judging either ridiculous, impossible, or ummm intuitive...
Read more2009 Bessie Award & Thank you speech
October 18, 2010
Symphony Space, NYC
After an intro by HT Chen and a short video of Crotch by Charles Dennis, Yvonne Rainer read this text written by Ishmael Houston-Jones...
The following text was written as part of expanded promotional materials or background stories for my solo performance
Because
Crotch
will soon be presented at Bluecoat Performance Space in Liverpool (Nov 12, 2010) and Shotgun's Ashby Stage in Berkeley (Nov 21, 2010), I'm posting these stories here.
Read moreI was asked to respond to the question, "Was there ever a Mission School?" for an upcoming catalogue accompanying Barry McGee's retrospective at Brooklyn Art Museum. When I told a few friends about my attempt to document some other Mission 'schools' it seemed that most of them were not aware of any aesthetic or market phenomenon called The Mission School, which was first named by art writer Glen Helfand to identify a certain 'neo-folk' 'urban rustic' hybrid under the influence of graffiti, comics, mural traditions, skate and zine cultures, recycled wood, sign painting, and SFAI art school painting concerns, that emerged in the mid-90s as a kind of Bay Area style, centered in the Mission neighborhood...
Read more