Season of the witch

HAPPY POGO HALLOWEEN!

WCBN's fabulous postpunk and new wave show, "Some Faraway Beach," did a Halloween theme on Sunday. There was no "Bela Lugosi's Dead" or "Death Disco," which was a shame (used in previous years, maybe?), but This Mortail Coil was inspired. Serene, quietly disturbing, a huge relief after the Misfits/Motörhead/DKs bludgeoning--total highlight of the set.

Robyn Hitchcock and the Egyptians, "My Wife and My Dead wife"
Virgin Prunes, "Lovelornalimbo"
Milkshake Melon, "What Did You Do with the Body?
Mx-80 Sound, Theme from Halloween
B-52s, "Devil in my Car"
Siouxsie and the Banshees, "The Killing Jar"
Front 242, "Tragedy for You"
Bigod 40, "The Bog"
The Misfits, "Halloween"
Motörhead, "Go to Hell"
Dead Kennedys, "Halloween"
This Mortal Coil, "Tarantula"
Ramones, "Pet Sematary"

Allegories of contamination

Not to put too fine a point on the devolution of this blog into a kind of Fag Hag's Digest, but:

1. Somebody could teach a really killer comp lit class on unsolved queer murder mysteries in Western history. It's a little on the fluffy side, for sure, but you could tether it to, say, Discipline and Punish in order to work the civic retribution and surveillance angles and call it "Unresolvable Deviance: Murder, Conspiracy and Queer Martyrology from Edward II to Pasolini." Spend at least a couple of days each on Christopher Marlowe, Tchaikovsky and Roger Casement. The syllabus writes itself!

2. Black White + Gray came out week before last. Patti Smith is a mensch, and you could zest a lemon on Robert Mapplethorpe's cheekbones.

Currying Canal Street

The greatest headline ever written?

MANCHESTER CURRY HOUSE HOSTS QUEER BED AND CHICKEN TIKKA CAKE ART

An art installation made out of a bed is now at a Manchester curry house, but it’s not by Tracey Emin.

Customers visiting Sangam Restaurant will wait to be seated on a ‘pink’ bed covered with incense and Urdu poetry, inspired by the artist's conversations with South Asian women who are lesbian, bisexual or transgendered.

It’s part of a project entitled Mixing it Up: Queering Curry Mile and Currying Canal Street, in which arts collective Sphere are combining aspects of Mancunian identity with places they are not normally associated with. The bed at Sangam (until October 12 2007) challenges the stereotypical view of Canal Street as white, male, and gay, and ‘Curry Mile’ as Asian and heterosexual... (Read more)

She should be so lucky

Since when does Kylie have the world's coolest backing band? It's like an all-star glam revival team recruited from Hedwig, Velvet Goldmine, Goldfrapp's "Ooh La La" video and Roxy Music c. 1972 as recreated by David LaChapelle. It's swell she can make a comeback and flop backwards over pianos and look just like Nicole Kidman and everything, but can we have some more of the band, please?

Retail oddity

For shame, Target! If you're going to encourage the youth of America to emulate David Bowie, mustn't you hawk wigs and frocks and codpieces and no-budge Crimson Obsession liquid eyeliner alongside fedoras and skinny ties? (For the record, P-Fork said it first). Or at least include a helpful male cosmetics sidebar sponsored by L'Oreal? The narcissism and commercialism are well aligned, certainly, but there's more to the man than the trench coat from The Man Who Fell to Earth and the hoodie from the cover of Low (itself a still from TMWFtE). And when did Bowie wear a parka vest? Show me Bowie wearing a parka vest and I'll show you Lawrence Welk in a dashiki.

What we're dealing with here isn't so much Keanan Duffty inspired by David Bowie as it is Keanan Duffty ripping off the bits of Hedi Slimane that were emulating pretty London hustlers who were inspired by David Bowie. Although speaking of, it was brave of Target to have its web site stream Jean Genie, a song that is clearly about a hustler/Jean Genet/something more than the corporate heterosexuality tacitly endorsed by the ghosts of Target lines' past.

Lytton Strachey as rutabaga

I'll be in Minneapolis for the next four days. If you've got a hot tip on a Twin Cities art show/music festival/new vegetable puppet opera based on the life of Dora Carrington, let me know. Sanden Totten, I'm looking at you.

A thousand words

This Towers of London album cover looks familiar somehow. The monochrome, the alley backdrop, the pink script, the scrappy boy-punk fraternity carefully posed to confront the world--it's almost like they're...referencing something through their iconography! Trying to mark themselves as inheritors of some kind of authentic legacy!



Right, then.

Das schlaue Füchslein

Radar: Your old guitarist, Cure frontman Robert Smith, is set to do a duet with Ashlee Simpson. Do you think he should be killed for treason?

Siouxsie Sioux: Who is Ashlee Simpson?

Radar: I love that you said that!

Siouxsie Sioux: No, really, who is he?

Black Magic Woman, cont.