She has done it

This is Kylie Minogue’s 25th year in show business. So far, to celebrate she has undertaken a fan-favourite “anti tour” of Australia and the UK. She will release a surprise new single next week (to be called “Timebomb”) and perhaps most impressively – she has finally made a great movie. At least according to many. What a coup.

“Holy Motors” is a bizarre new film from French cult director Leos Carax, in which the singer features (together with Eva Mendes). It got a stunned five star review in Britain’s Guardian and rousing applause at the Cannes Film Festival and is now considered by many to be a leading contender for the festival’s top prize.

Others were not so kind though, declaring the movie confusing. Even its supporters have used adjectives like “bonkers”, “insane” and “balls-to-the-wall crazy, beautiful and undeniably strange”.

The only thing tempering my excitement at this point is that is by the same director – and seems to feature the same annoying character – as one part of the disappointing “Tokyo!” film omnibus. I frankly hated that.

Still, Kylie as a depressive flight attendant – and the few seconds of the lovely song she sings – is enough to raise my hopes again!

I can’t wait to see it and decide for myself.

Francois Sagat goes to Hell

NSFW

Francois Sagat has gone to hell his new and very, very French musical project (it was only a matter of time), Hades. He is joined on the journey by former supermodel of the 1980s, Sylvia Gobbel (who was apparently a model and muse of Helmut Newton). All very Euro-chic.

Endless Summer. I feel ….

Although few would dispute the greatness of this song – released the year I was born! – Donna Summer’s career has now come to a tragic end. Its especially sad that her final decades saw her dogged with accusations of cruel homophobia which alienated her from her natural fanbase (see the video above).

Whether the infamous anti-gay comments she was rumoured to have made were true or not, I still remember the exciting rush of gayness I got watching this grainy video on late night Australian television as a teenager. It has not dated well  (with its preposterous 90s hairstyles and utterly superfluous female security guard)  but I still remember what it made me feel back then – not love, but gay.

This song, with its futuristic beats and enveloping vocals and handsome splashing men getting ready for their date, opened up a door for me back then that I eagerly walked through. So I’ll always thank Donna for that.

RIP

Amazing

The other day I was wondering what Francois Sagat had been up to. He seemed to have been on a bit of a lower profile than before. Little did I know this gem lay in wait for –  as far as I am concerned, possibly the highlight of his extraordinary sex-art-fashion career to date.

Presenting: FS as cyber callgirl in a Japanese phone-in arcade game. And hold on to your hats.

What has Francois Sagat been up to lately?

  

Oh, just the usual….

Bjork loves to love

In an article in today’s Guardian Bjork lays bare her current obsessions, including (but not limited to) Titica, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Latin culture generally  (“Overall, I really enjoy a lot of South America’s take on modernity and nature”), Easter Island and coconut water.

I was gratified to see the substantial overlap with this blog! I wonder if Bjork is a regular reader?

I had read a similar “Bjork’s favourite things” article ten years ago where she listed the Thai curry dish tom kha gai and Brazilian singer Elis Regina as inspirations; they are also two of my faves.

I guess now I’d better run out and buy “The Hearing Trumpet” by Leonora Carrington, a novel she heartily recommends and check out the artwork of Brazilian Ernesto Neto (below) which yes, upon discovery, I do quite like:

  

Cheers for the tip, Bjork.

Kylie’s Anti Tour footage

I’ve always loved that song. Below, B-side “Cherry Bomb”:

Anti-tour setlist suggestions

To the casual observer, Kylie might be the queen of frothy disco pop, but she has actually worked with a surprising range of collaborators, from UK indie rock bands to Japanese electro DJs. Just some of her overlooked gems:

“I Know”, which emerged from the Scissor Sisters sessions but never released:

The very 90s-house sounding “No Better Love”. Its origin is unclear and it was never released:

The “Fever” era’s “Tightrope”, a Japan-only bonus track

This beautiful duet with Aboriginal singer Jimmy Little from an album called “Corroborations”, featuring collaborations between black and white Australian artists on the theme of national reconciliation.

The lilting and understated “Light Years” era “Ocean Blue”

And her second collaboration with Towa Tei (after the classic “German Bold Italic”), “Sometime Samurai”:

And her very Motownish 1960s sounding album track (recorded with the Manic Street Preachers), “I Don’t Need Anyone” from the ill-fated Impossible Princess album:

Always underrated, I thought.

The Big Bang continues to expand…

The last of Big Bang’s new “concept” pictures (see here and here) see G-Dragon with this-album’s-theme (gasmasks) in the first example, and chained to a block of ice in a very K-Pop hat in the second. Bring it on!

Apparently the album will have no less than six (!!) kick-off singles!

Two generations of Sampa soul

There is no love in Sao Paulo

There is no love in São Paulo.

It is a  ‘mystical maze’

The street art is the voice for the people,

You can’t explain it in a beautiful phrase,

A postcard cannot describe the São Paulo’s agony, with a pretty sentence…..

Something happens in my heart
Only when I cross Ipiranga and Sao Joao
When I arrived here I knew nothing
Of the hard concrete poetry of your corners
Of the discrete inelegance of your girls
Of Rita Lee; your most complete translation
(Rita Lee was a then-teenage singer with punky psychadelic band called “Os Mutantes”, the mutants)

Something happens in my heart
Only when I cross Ipiranga and Sao Joao

When I was confronted with you and did not see my face
I called it bad taste what I saw, bad taste, bad taste
For Narcissus finds nothing beautiful that is not a mirror
And the mind cannot understand what is not yet old

Here there was nothing of what was not before,
When we were not yet mutants

You were a difficult start
I drew back from what I did not know
and he who comes from another happy city dream
quickly learns to call it reality because you’re the opposite of the opposite of the opposite.

Of the people oppressed in the lines
In the villages, slum quarters
Of the force of money that raises and destroys beautiful things
Of the ugly smoke that goes up erasing the stars
I saw appear your poets, De Campos, spaces, your forests of workshops, Your gods of rain, Pan Americas, of África, Utopia
The tomb of the samba,
More possible new quilombos of Zumbi,
And new natives from Bahia go by in your drizzle, your flurry
And new natives from Bahia can like you just fine.

 

He’s got seven seconds to save the world…

Youssou N’Dour is running for president in next month’s Senegalese elections. The former child star of “Super Etoile de Dakar” and leading light of mbalax music (no, I don’t really know either) will be opposing current president Abdoulaye Wade. He has accused the current leader of corruption and wasting state funds on projects like Wade’s towering North Korean-built monument and personal money-spinner in the Senegalese capital. Fair enough.

In tangentially related news, one of my great idols is planning a return. Neneh Cherry has a new album out in March to be titled “The Cherry Thing”. There was a time when this would have been immensely exciting news to me. Like many of Neneh’s fans, I always felt such strong admiration for the singer that I would champion everything she did. Lately though, that has been harder and harder to do. The first leaks from the new project sound…exactly like she sounded ten years ago.
the-cherry-thing-i

The Tokyo Incident – over.

Tokyo Jihen (the Tokyo Incident) have announced that they will disband. This is good news because it means that vocalist Shiina Ringo will be free to pursue her infinitely more exciting solo career. Although the band had its moments, and undoubed visual flair, it was frustrating to see one of the great stylists of Japanese music floundering behind a wall of bog-standard J-rock.

Sometimes a little bit of ego does not go astray. The Tokyo Incidents are dead, long live the queen!

She looks amazing here.

The Men of 2011: The boys of Arisa

Tel Aviv “Oriental” gay club Arisa burst on to the world’s consciousness this year thanks to a stream of amusing youtube videos starring the party’s two charismatic leading men, Eliad Cohen and Uriel Yekutiel. Together, the two friends blazed a brave and very timely new trail for gay men everywhere. Eliad was over the top muscle-bound butch and Uriel looked oddly like Freddie Mercury in drag and together they were fabulous  - butch, funny, sexy, stylish, playful and political – masculine, feminine, Israeli, Arab and red-hot.

 

They exemplified a trend worldwide for “androgynous masculinity”. Rather than dowdy old drag queens in blond wigs lip syncing to Doris Day these men flashed stylish and fashion-forward feminine selves as well as overtly masculine personas and danced to dirty electro. They wore beards with their miniskirts – and looked great doing it. While Francois Sagat arguably kickstarted the trend, with his buff bod and unashamed penchant for artful camp, Azis represented this year in Bulgaria, Gene Kasidit swirled through Bangkok and New York’s Andre appeared on the cover of Vogue, no-one seemed to be having as much fun with the movement as the Israeli twosome.

They took their party on tour across Europe and to Brazil, and Yekutiel appeared in a series of videos for Israeli band the Young Professionals.

And along the way they reminded the world of the original spirit of the gay rights movement – not equality to be the same, but liberation – and the right to be different.

Kylie X neon violins = gay wedding song

Man who stole a leopard

What a great song! Duran Duran featuring Kelis (!) with a surprisingly effective fan-made video using footage from 1960s abduction thriller ‘The Butterfly Collector’ (based on the book of the same name that I remember studying in high school).

I have never listened to Duran Duran before though. Maybe I should start?

 

Arisa no Brasil

My favourite Israelis, the guys behind Tel Aviv club night “Arisa” are currently on tour in Brazil. My friend was going to attend their party last night in Sao Paulo and report back to me, but sadly it turned out to be “guest list only”.

Modern day monsters

Photographer Rankin and artist Damien Hirst, two of the leading lights of Britain’s elite cool/creative scenes, have collaborated on an inspiring new exhibition titled “Monsters & Myths”. The high fashion reworkings of mythical figures are currently on show in London and (soon) L.A. and can also be seen in the current issue of “Dazed and Confused” magazine.

 

Kylie is in Kiev

… and a redhead again!

New…

Daisuke just got an iPad. The first app that he (we) downloaded to celebrate was Bjork’s ‘Biophilia’; an “app suite” of games, interactive musical exercises and animations to accompany each song of the new record. You open the application to find David Attenborough’s voice intoning about nature and technology over a swirling 3-D rendering of a constellation. Once you click onto the the brightly coloured stars representing the songs, you are sucked in, and the fun begins.

I had not really grasped the scope or brilliance of the project until I saw and interacted with it. It feels like something completely new, something that does not come by often – maybe once in a generation. A chance to change everything.  Here was a chance to refashion the way we experience music, a whole new way to buy, make and appreciate the artform, dwarfing in significance say, the switch from record to CD. Bjork has always lead the way with music videos but now she had taken one step further, rendering them obsolete altogether. I suddenly felt quite awed that she had seen the possibility of the new technology and made it real before most of us had even dreamt it existed. In five years will non-app albums even exist anymore? Will video clips still exist? Will this change everything?

Perhaps my mood was enhanced by the fact that I just finished watching the ‘Social Network’ with its thought-provoking line: “Once we lived on farms, then in cities, now we will all live on the internet”.

It is true that some of the ‘game’ applications are quite basic, not unlike eighties computer games. But look how far these have come in the last twenty years, and here we are right at the beginning.

Also disappointing: this much-talked about remix by sixty-something year old Syrian artist Omar Souleyman is not included:

Mammoth East Meets West music update

Is it just me, or is the second half of the year just exploding musically? I’m scrambling to keep up. Beirut, Blood Orange, Brown Eyed Girls, Kimbra and now….

Shiina Ringo returns as a solo artist!

Plus, in other J-pop news, the great title track from Kaela Kimura’s new (eighth? already?) album 8eight8:

Meanwhile in Thailand, single number 3 is due for Palmy’s comeback album “5″, which is out on October 28th.

..and in L.A trip hoppish slow beats from Korean-American DJ Tokimonsta:

And on another note entirely, a supergay video for Bulgaria’s flaming (yet bearish) crossdressing star, Azis ( I just became aware of his existence. This is, after all, rather eyecatching with man candy and simulated masturbation set to jaunty Turkish beats):

And finally, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit it but I’ve been listening to this song all week. Its just so darned catchy. It comes from the talent show “The Voice” which we have been watching here on cable (although its intended audience is fairly transparently the American MIdwest and its fairly awful. Still, who can deny the little whistle in this?)

An odd tidbit

The world learned this week, much to its surprise, that Kylie and Dannii Minogue have been meeting clandestinely with Salmon Rushdie  - to play Scrabble . And it has been going on since 2003!! The image of the beseiged wordsmith gloating over a triple word score with the Minogue sisters, for close to ten secret years, is a truly bizarre one.