Video – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2022-04-122022-04-27 by David Hughes

I’m Dreaming of a White Bicycle

While searching for half-remembered short films on the theme of public restrooms last month (see In the Can), I ran across a parody of “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” posted last fall as a commentary on the trans* bathroom con-troversy.

The performer, Christopher Trautman, explains:

This song was recorded in North Carolina. The only State in the United States that passed a law specifically directing that the restroom you use must be based on the junk you possess. It was later repealed after a national embarrassment campaign [led] by Comedy Central where they opened a food truck called Bone Brothers Barbecue in downtown Raleigh and discriminated against everybody who they determined to be gay… which was everybody.

That barbecue pi—er—bit, which aired on The Daily Show in 2016, was by Roy Wood Jr., assisted by Jordan Klepper. It’s hilarious and is, mm…, cued up below.

2022-03-222022-03-29 by David Hughes

In the Can

Public toilet, Yoyogi Fukamachi Small Park, Tokyo

My introduction to the public restroom would have been in kindergarten, 1960–61. There were issues.

2021-08-062024-03-26 by David Hughes

Friendship Band

Last time, I said I planned to toot the horn of a new songwriter (relatively speaking), but I will toot my own—and that of my wife Andrea Carney—along the way.

2020-08-082022-01-22 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 5: The People’s Panopticon

Yesterday my brother Richard remarked in our weekly transpacific Skype chat, that the cell phone camera has changed everything, from unmasked undistanced kids walking down a hallway in Georgia (I hadn’t yet seen it; he’s on Bangkok time) to gals getting their nails done getting zip-tied on the blacktop near my neighborhood. Continue reading “Everybody Dance Now 5: The People’s Panopticon”

2020-07-112022-01-21 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 4: Time/Travel

This fourth edition of Everybody Dance Now involves travel in space and time, beginning with a short from Arizona filmmaker and photographer Harrison J. Bahe of Navajo Joe Films. “Xibalba” comes from the soundtrack of The Fountain (2006) composed by Clint Mansell, which also accompanies Bahe’s film. Xibalba is the Mayan underworld, which figures in The Fountain, a once-and-future picture that weaves together Mayan and Hebrew mythology, featuring a Spanish conquistador astoundingly being recognized by a native priest as the First Father, the life source. Continue reading “Everybody Dance Now 4: Time/Travel”

2020-04-272022-01-21 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 3: Listen to Your Heart

It’s been a year since the last edition of Everybody Dance Now. Today we look at some movement-and-music videos as well as several music promos that feature choreography and companies. Continue reading “Everybody Dance Now 3: Listen to Your Heart”

2019-07-022022-01-21 by David Hughes

Stonewall, the Great Gay Migration and the Monumental Divide

Last Wednesday I watched a somewhat slimmed-down version of the new documentary Lavender Scare, based on the 2004 (!) book of the same name by David K. Johnson.¹ In the film Meryl Streep’s narration explains how the influx of homosexuals from rural to urban regions began in the 1930s, the start of the Great Gay Migration.²

Washington was a boom town. The government was creating thousands of new jobs to combat the Great Depression. Many of the young men and women who came for those jobs were homosexuals. They grabbed the chance to experience a new level of acceptance and friendship in a big city far from home.

I was reminded of a recent essay, “Forget Stonewall,” in the May/June edition of The Gay & Lesbian Review, by Yasmin Nair who reminds readers that the source of that influx still exists. Continue reading “Stonewall, the Great Gay Migration and the Monumental Divide”

2019-05-192022-01-22 by David Hughes

Make mine a La Croix

Listening to songs by The Royal Family and the Poor while writing my last post, I found myself comparing them with those of Scott Stapleton, who has created and contributed to music in various guises: solo, Virgin Forest, Phosphorescent, New Duo.

Phosphorescent Forest

I first became enamored of Stapleton when viewing the chipped silver laquer of his nails as he played pedal steel on Phosphorescent’s “Song for Zula” at Glastonbury in 2014. It’s just about all we see of him apart from a denim shirt. His picking is tasteful and ensemble (yes that’s an adjective) and contrasts with his keyboard work the year before on Phosphorescent’s “The Quotidian Beasts” at the SXSW music festival. There, he is flamboyant in a red T on the keys, practically conjuring the song’s lyrics as they are sung by Matthew Houck (aka Phosphorescent), with flourishes from his hands and arms.

Continue reading “Make mine a La Croix”

2019-04-132022-01-21 by David Hughes

Careless Whisper: Pansy Patois

In December while trying to verify the colloquialism in The Smiths’ song title “Reel Around the Fountain”¹ I noticed that the band’s singer Morrissey had employed a now-abandoned slang in his solo single “Piccadilly Palare,” sung in the character of a former street hustler. It was the lead track on his album Bona Drag, but I hadn’t really collected Morrissey records and skipped that one because it was a compendium of singles. I had, however, collected much Smiths, but I was confused by the band’s many, many compilations and 12-inch vinyl product. In fact “Paint a Vulgar Picture,” from the final album, can be seen as a commentary on this excess, as it laments a pop star’s exploitation in death but also questions the star’s complicity in life.

Satiate the need
slip them into different sleeves!
Buy both, and be deceived

Continue reading “Careless Whisper: Pansy Patois”

2019-04-012022-01-22 by David Hughes

Everybody Dance Now 2: Adansual

Read Part 1.

First, a couple of cartoons…

This second installment of movement musings begins (or rather ends…) below with a variation of a video sampling technique that I covered in “Knee, Sugar” of the last section of Everybody Dance Now 1 (Knee, Sugar, Hammer, Shame). I also look at what was suggested by “Shame”: what might be seen as anti-dance, or what I call adansual.

I first became acquainted with the Australian band Bumblebeez 81 via their suggestive “Pony Ride” from 2002. Five years later they released “Dr. Love,” the promo for which involves a parody of a dance music video that could have been shot on a smoggy day along the Los Angeles River. All the performers sport Sharpie-ed chest adornments: pushbuttons and keyboards, chains, phones and headphones, a bandolier, a mink stole, an LP, even sham shoes. Rapper Christopher Colonna is bedecked in markered bling, and his sister Queen ViLa, dons an eyepatch through which she easily sees. The promo’s coda reprises the song’s sonics with pushbuttons pushed and keyboards keyed, essentially A/V sampling.

Continue reading “Everybody Dance Now 2: Adansual”