The second stop on a two-week European tour featuring NYC-based talent including DJ Lady Miss Kier of Deee-Lite! and Gio Black Peter, plus local heroes Cora Frost, Dickey Doo, Alexander Geist and many more…

“This is a party with serious art chops…”
- New York Times

“One of the coolest, most uniquely blended crowds around—pussies, faggots, dykes, trannies, you name it.”
- Time Out New York

Following a presentation of Joey Arias In Concert last fall at Heimathafen, Brooklyn-based curator and producer Earl Dax returns to Berlin with his acclaimed NYC performance art party PUSSY FAGGOT! Part of a two-week European tour, the Berlin edition is presented together with Expatriarch, one of the city’s leading queer forces as a trifecta of radio, bookings and event production.

PUSSY FAGGOT! Berlin takes place at Monster Ronson’s with headlining DJ Lady Miss Kier (of Deee-Lite! fame), plus additional NYC talent including performing artist Gio Black Peter, a star of Bruce LaBruce’s Otto or Up with Dead People; countertenor, pianist, composer and songwriter M. Lamar; soulful pop singer/producer Adam Joseph, gay dance music artist Shane Shane; and multimedia performance artist Colin Self presenting an excerpt from Elation, an operetta about the rise of feminine consciousness in the 21st century.

Rounding out the evening are local stars including DJ Dickey Doo, cabaret star Cora Frost, DJ Joel Gibb of The Hidden Cameras, electro-hip-hop duo Scream Club, avant-folk singer Mary Ocher, Pork promoter and performer Brian Tennessee Claflin, and the evening’s host, Alexander Geist.

About PUSSY FAGGOT!: Encompassing performance art, spoken word, dance, drag, live music, DJs and video art, PUSSY FAGGOT! is fiercely contemporary even as it harks back to the legendary East Village scene of the 80s and 90s when art, fashion, performance and club culture collided. Internationally, PUSSY FAGGOT! has presented at festivals in Manchester, UK and Zagreb, Croatia. Back in the United States, the party has traveled everywhere from Philadelphia to New Orleans – and even a rural farm in Tennessee! The site-specific nature of PUSSY FAGGOT! has lent itself to successful iterations in a range of venues including nightclubs, dive bars, art galleries and barns.

”You have to admit, ‘Pussy Faggot’ is a catchy title for a party. It pairs male and female, straight and gay, and as an epithet it’s pleasantly jocular. It’s so extreme it’s funny.”
- New York Press

Event: PUSSY FAGGOT! Berlin

When: Wednesday, 2 May 2012, 22:00

Where: Monster Ronson’s, Warschauer Str. 34, 10243 Berlin, Germany

Lineup: Lady Miss Kier, Alexander Geist, Gio Black Peter, Cora Frost, M. Lamar, Dickey Doo, Joel Gibb, Shane Shane, Scream Club, Adam Joseph, Colin Self, Mary Ocher, Brian Tennessee Claflin

Category: Club night, LGBT, Cabaret, Live music, DJs, Alternative

RSVP on Facebook here.

At long last, it is our great pleasure to present the second Berlin Femme Show!

You are invited to Lido for a fabulous evening showcasing the very best of queer femme creative talent! The evening begins in a relaxed and elegant way with a spoken word salon complete with delicious femme catering by Ohlàlà Tartes-shop, followed by a breathtaking & sexy cabaret! After the cabaret will be DJs and dancing late into the night.

This event is also a fundraiser & launch party for Dressed Like That zine: feminine voices on sexism in the queer community.

Performances by: Alexander Alvina Chamberland, Annie Good, Margaret Steenblock, Lady Gaby, Marsmaedchen, Candy Tricks, Mimi Monstroe, Rosebutt, Emy Femme, Hedi Mohr, Liad Hussein Kantorowicz, Goldie Dartmouth, Lipstick Terrorist, Mademoiselle Kla, Yvette Bathory, Kay P. Rinha, Glittertrash, Lyndsey Cockwell, Femme Fraktionen and more!

Plus djs:
Marsmaedchen
Very Serious
Lisalotta P
MC Xuparina

Where: Lido, Cuvrystraße 7, Ubahn: Schlesisches Tor
Spoken word show: 7pm
Cabaret Show: 10pm
DJs & Dancing: 00.30
Cost: Sliding scale €4-€8 (Please give what you can!)

http://margretsteenblock.com/en/who.html

http://www.myspace.com/liadland

http://lipstickterrorist.wordpress.com/

www.emmacorbettashby.co.uk/

The song, or more the video, that caught my attention was “In Your Face” that the Hungry Hearts declared as the international lesbian anthem. Starting and ending the video with a synchronized dance arrangement in the snow called “Hazuki-dance” it then moves into bits of live performance as well as filmed sequences that both go along with the story of the song.
Not afraid of using explicit lyrics like “I want your pussy in my face, your fingers up my arse, your lips around my clit, your hands on my tits” and “I just wanna fuck you on the floor until your pussy’s sore” they tell the story of two women meeting and while one is falling in love, the other one just wants to be friends. Leaving the first one heartbroken, they meet again after a while and even though the latter one is there with a new girl, on seeing the girl she broke up with, she realizes that she is the person she really want’s to be with and should have never let her go in the first place.

Instead of calling this a typical lesbian way of starting (or screwing up) a relationship let’s just say that falling in love always bears a lot of complications, reciprocity is not easy to achieve, things that work on the first try are not easy to find, and that this is a picture that the Hungry hearts painted quite colorfully.

I was thrilled by the song being so in your face and danceable at the same time that I just had to contact them, ask them if I could use their song for djing (and you can also buy it [here]) and where they met and how the idea of starting The Hungry Hearts came about?

So, here you go:

Growing up I (Tonje) played football and the Hammond Organ. I am married to Edith, the lead singer of “In your face», who I met when studying fine art in a very rainy town called Bergen in Norway. Edith has a special calmness and stillness. Edith is a dedicated person, about to finish her PhD in Nursing Science. She also has the ability to keep a posture for a very long time.

All the members of THH bring different characteristics of the female soul, attitude and body into the group, shown for example by Edith’s fine frail calmness and the Persian touch in Mona.

Ingeborg, I discovered at a club where she stood with her back against the wall dressed in strange clothes. I thought she was trying to make a fake facade, like a wolf dressed in sheep’s clothes, so my first words to her were: “Your head doesn’t match the rest of your body”. Ingeborg did not know me, so she did not understand that this was a compliment…
But some years later, just after we had established THH in an evening of frustration, when everything had gone wrong, Ingeborg turned into “The Pantyhose Lady” or found her self – as I see it.

Line also studied fine art in Bergen, and we played in the same school band at the academy. In Stamsund theater-festival, Edith, Pantyhose Lady and I met her again when she participated in a performance called “The Star Saloon”, and knew we right away that we needed this tiny talker to join our new project: The Hungry Hearts. Line can be quiet for a long while, but suddenly her red little lips starts talking – telling stories, and when she begins her story, you get many small side stories within the main story.

Mona is a friend from when I played football – First I thought Mona was a mute girl with very observant eyes, but after a while Mona actually spoke some sentences. She is a Medical Doctor, but has a natural talent for lyrics and installation art, and after a whisky or two she gets this gift of talking about specific themes. She also has a special way of how to explain things both by talking and by using her expressive body in different ways. In the last months we also discovered that in her full blood body there is a full deep vocal and choir voice.

Edith discovered Henriette when they studied Nursing Science together. First I wanted Henriette to join us in a performance wearing just pantyhose and a bra, like Pantyhose Lady and walk across the stage, but she didn’t want to at that time. She later accepted to be in the music video for “In your face”. And now she is asking me all time “Oh Tonje maybe I should walk around just in pantyhose and a bra“ – so actually we have to lead her thoughts off that all the time. Henriette has a person inside her that becomes very dominant when she drinks gin and tonic and sings karaoke…

I’d like to say thank you very much for these deep insights to Tonje!

quEAR, the Transtonal Ear Festival presents audio plays, oral performances, and sound installations with a “Trans*, Inter, Queer“ theme. There will also be Workshops. Call for performances: Please submit artistic contributions to audio(at)quear.org by mid June, 2011. This is a DIY Audiofestival.
quEAR is new in Germany. The intent is to create a forum for artistic exchange and discussion. It presents us with the opportunity to explore how sound as a multi faceted medium can be used for artistic and political expression. quEAR supports networking. The festival is free of charge. The festival is accessible to people with limited or no vision, wheelchairs, and other disabilities. Performances will take place out doors, on open air stages, in tents or containers.

quEAR is a word creation combining the two terms „queer” and “ear.” In this context, the meaning of “queer“ is not limited to “gay lesbian” or “gay lesbian bisexual transgender.” Queer is to be interpreted as “different from the norm” and thereby challenges and questions the boundaries presented to us by heteronormative society. The term “queer” is intended to encourage activity that goes beyond sexual orientation or individual identity. It is more than the negation of prohibitive or unbearable conditions. Politically, “queer” refers to a utopian space that may not yet exist but that can be defined and described and that we must continuously strive to create. Room for trans*inter und queer lifestyles and practices can not be taken for granted. Their space must continually be renegotiated. Discrimination and violence are not isolated incidents. They are the result of institutional, structural and cultural power struggles and thereby have a heightened political relevance.

www.quear.org
audio(at)quear.org

Girls to the Front – The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus caught my interest from the first page on. Starting off with her personal story of feeling alienated and isolated by the people around her and experiencing threats from boys, she found out about Riot Grrrl in 1992 through a Newsweek article that marked an important point in the history of Riot Grrrl. Happy to see that there were other teenage girls who did not feel comfortable with society’s treatment and expectations of females, she then began a journey of finding out who these Riot Grrrls were and how she could become one of them. Sooner or later she too started a band and wrote her own zines, and eventually also experienced the movement’s decline.

More than ten years later, afraid that this important time in her and so many other people’s lives might not be documented with the necessary acknowledgement and respect, she once again set out to track down the original Riot Grrrls. While spending the last five years doing research and writing, conducting over 150 interviews, she created a book that captures you from beginning to end.

The last week, while reading Girls to the Front, I could hardly think of anything else. There were these first moments of enthusiasm and then so much disappointment. The characters all became so real to me that I kept wanting to know what was going to happen next, even if it would disappoint me. Sara Marcus managed not only to document this important part of history and made it come to life right in front of me, but she was also able to describe all those psychological barriers that you have to face once you start something new and possibly great. There were people like Kathleen Hannah, who seem to be natural leaders, people that put the common goal before anything else and that were then being disliked for wanting too much attention. But who else would have done it if not her?

I will leave out the details of the events and characterizations here as to not spoil the story: how Bikini Kill got together, how REM changed the lives of the members of Heavens to Betsy and why Bratmobile finally broke up. You will have to explore that for yourselves. I can just say that Girls to the Front brought together all the bits and pieces I had heard and read about Riot Grrrl before and made it become a cohesive yet multifaceted story.

There were two points Sara Marcus made that I especially liked and that have a high importance, not only looking at Riot Grrrl but also other youth- or subcultures. And even though they might not seem new, they hardly ever seemed so evident. The first one is that even though a scene is considered to be a musical scene, it does not only consist of the musicians, but also all the people around them: the fans as well as zine makers, the people who set up the shows – they are all equally important because none of them could keep the scene going without the others. And this symbiosis also leads to the second point, because this kind of a community based scene is something that can inherently only work on a subcultural level, where at least in theory, all people are equal. Even though the book shows in detail how complicated and maybe impossible it is to actually keep such a system going, how there are always disagreements and power struggles, it is also clear that in the mainstream you can only find “ultra-homogenized and über-marketed holographic projections” of the underground, but never the actual thing. And this is something we have to realize and keep in mind and learn from the experiences the first Riot Grrrls made. A Newsweek article, a nation-wide TV coverage or other documentations by outsiders might transport some of the original ideas and help spread progressive values, but it also leads to the absolute breakdown as it only shows the “sellable” parts and therefore creates an imbalance within the community and furthermore leads inevitably to an identity crisis. If you create something very personal, something that is in opposition to the mainstream media, as soon as it enters that context, it gets blown out of proportion and most important the control is taken out of your own hands.

In 1989 three young students in Olympia decided to form a band so that their voices would be heard. While touring they experienced the need for an approach to feminism that was more appropriate to their age group, and the possibility for girls to support one another. The first weekly mini-zine under the title riot grrrl was published in Washington DC in the summer of 1991 and was followed up by a meeting that should start a new grrrl revolution. From the first Riot Grrrl chapters in DC and Olympia to Portland, Omaha and so many other places, the New York and DC chapters were the ones that held up til 1996. But even though the regular meetings stopped and the initial bands broke up, Sara Marcus makes clear that the movement did not stop. It goes on through self-organized festivals like the Ladyfest or Homo A Gogo, the people who once belonged to the different Riot Grrrl chapters might have chosen different names, but the idea of self-empowerment never died.

Starting off twenty years ago as a movement that gained attention through word of mouth propaganda, the internet makes communicating a lot easier nowadays and information more accessible, not only in the US, but also in a global context. And we should take advantage of this powerful tool. The ways girls and women, and also so many other people who are not white male heterosexuals, are presented in magazines or TV shows and treated by their parents and society in general has hardly changed.

I sincerely hope that you will read and enjoy this book as much as I did and use the energy that you will gain from doing so in a creative way and start telling your own stories, founding your own zines, bands or radio shows, because there is still so much to fight for. It’s in your hands.

This is what Kathleen Hanna says about the book:

First Banjo Or Freakout have recorded a christmas album that you can download here.

Then The Knife have also recorded a song called Christmas Reindeer.

My favourite song is Christmas On The Dancefloor by Sophie Rimheden and Sofia Talvik though.

So, I hope you’ll have a nice paryt tonight!

“It’s Christmas. Can you hear the beautiful contradictions in the air? Love it while you hate it. Hate it while you love it. At this time of the year we’d like to ask: Why can those elusive moments of joy and peace not be absolute. The answer is the same as ever: it’s the system. There is no right life in the wrong one. But, hey, it’s Christmas and all that social and emotional stuff it drags along: Meeting old friends, wearing your best shoes, smoking some dope, singing some songs, smelling some old smells, getting close to it (whatever it is). It’s all so very nice. The context of total delusion is coming over for turkey and presents you with the great new Jonathan Richman album. Thanks a lot, have a seat, would you like to have some gingerbread eggnog latte frappuccino? The context of total delusion smiles, takes a deep drag from the new hash-pipe and for a while he forgets about his day-job fooling people.
We wanted to have our own Christmas song focussing on what Christmas means to us: it is something great and campy and gay and big and stuffed and fragrant and crowded and delicious but still untrue. But we know what we’ve got to do to make this Christmas come true. Check the great chorus for what that might be.
This is a reinterpretation of an old classic by pre-monochrom section Bamberg artgroup Die Winkelwurst which had The Ernst Neger Revival Band (from Chicago) for a musical subdivision. It was first released in 1999 on „Weihnachtshit-Sampler“, a compilation of DIY Christmas songs.
And, yes, it was inspired by the title of the great but reactionary sampler “Killing Capitalism With Kindness” by New Zealand-cult-label Xpressway. Its title of course triggers that old bourgeois belief that it will be a special form of (social) media which is going to “heal-the-world-make-it-a-better-place”. Be nice, be niche, be needed by a handful of people. But anyway it’s a great reference to what Christmas is like. This is our personal way of kissing King Rocko Schamoni’s feet and of smashing Harald Schmidt’s face. US Americans won’t know either of the two, but maybe they can cry about Vietnam a little!”
text is from here

Everthing is one big Christmas Tree
and
Mr. Mistletoe