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Hell No, I Won’t Go
September 19, 1989 At last the government has achieved something it hasn’t managed since the height of ’50s anti-Communist hysteria—enlisted public sentiment in a popular war. The president’s invocation of an America united in a holy war against drugs is no piece of empty rhetoric; the bounds of mainstream debate on this issue are implicit […]
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Starbucks’s Favorite Ladies Ride the Road to Hack-Rock Glory
These long-tressed Long Island folk-rock ladies call their touring vehicle Vanna White. It’s a van, see, and it’s white. So: Vanna White. This is indicative of where Antigone Rising are at lyrically on From the Ground Up, the quintet’s sold-at-Starbucks acoustic disc. In “Hello,” which opens Ground (when coffee is brewed, the beans become what […]
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Film
Ultimate geezerfest and rock-doc holy grail, Festival Express presents the long-lost footage of a forgotten Woodstock on wheels—the money-hemorrhaging summer-of-1970 bacchanal in which a pair of 22-year-old entrepreneurs contrived to place the Grateful Dead, the Band, Janis Joplin, and a half-dozen other acts on a chartered train across Canada. The magical mystery tour stopped only […]
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NY Mirror
The breathless call came in from Sweetie: “You’ve got to come to the Park Side Lounge to catch Steve Friday, a straight cross-dresser who does cover versions of ’80s hits as Lisa Jackson.” Enough said, darling: I promptly put on my finest Bangles and got ready to Go-Go. The act? Sporting a diagonal dress and […]
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NY Mirror
Bad news for the stuff-and-tuck crowd: The next Wigstock drag festival is being billed as the last! Insiders tell me that the all-day prance-o-rama is becoming rather daunting to mount (much like myself) and the result always comes out even more in the red than Lady Bunny‘s nails. So let’s polish those pumps for one […]
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Theater
Tom Waits in the Toilet Tom Waits, as embodied in a chain-smoking foot-high puppet, introduces a new episode of his kids’ show, Tom Waits’ Enchanted Public Restroom. As special guests scuttle in and out of the stalls, Tom gets misty-eyed thinking about who he does it all for: the children. “This makes me think of […]
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The Memory of All That
With the barking fervor of the fanatical televangelists he loves to parody, Mark Dendy prepares his latest work for the opening of the Joyce Theater’s three-week “Altogether Different Festival” on January 10. Aided by choreographic oracle Phyllis Lamhut, Dendy orders his dancers to give him “heavy testicles and heavy ovaries” as they slink into a […]
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A Tune for the Misbegotten
Sandra Bernhard—faultlessly dressed in short-short blouse, tight-tight jeans, and knife-sharp stiletto boots—makes her claim as the hardest-working woman in showbiz. “I do whatever I have to,” she drawls, “to keep myself in fine fashions, beautiful women, handsome men, European moments, espionage.” Poor little bitch girl. But don’t start crying for Miss B. just yet. As […]
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Dead or alive
As one half of the Grateful Dead’s Rhythm Devils drumming tandem, percussionist Mickey Hart has caused legions of dancing Heads to search out their tribal roots and immerse themselves into altered states via rhythm. In his third book, Spirit Into Sound—The Magic of Music, Hart has compiled hundreds of quotes about music by everyone from […]
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Janis in Wonderland
Because Janis Joplin’s recording legacy doesn’t live up to her performing legend, because she’s a symbol of boomers’ hegemonic hold on cultural history, because as a rare and extravagant female in a male world her meaning has been stiflingly overdetermined, because, dammit, we never saw her live, it’s hard for those of us who have […]