Trough London

London continues to get down, err, under with the second installment of Australian-originated gay party Trough hitting soon. According to their website:

TROUGH, named after a vessel pigs drink out of, was founded 10 years ago in Melbourne Australia. Over the years TROUGH has amalgamated jocks, bears, hunks, beards, queers, twinks and in-betweeners into one pretty mess on the dancefloor inside Australia’s biggest and boldest mens cruise venue, CLUB80. As broad as the crowd is, so is the music with DJs slamming Berlin-esque (m)anthems, deep house, sexy beats and throbbing baselines to a dark room of a sweaty pit. After 10 years TROUGH is now ready to sow its seeds in international soil to give the rest of the world a good dose of the T_OUGH love. TROUGH is also internationally renowned for its visionary photographic imagery and video art promos, all produced and art directed by TROUGH founder Nik Dimopoulos. Each campaign explores different sexual practises and fetishes as themes, combining both the sexual and the sometimes absurdist nature of fetishised ideas and attractions using everyday found objects and DIY crafting. It is fused together with the ‘hot talent’ sourced from the events themselves. Combined with mantastic multimedia / performance / installation / laser and projection spectacular, TROUGH firmly puts the ART back into dance pARTy!

The – needless to say – very NSFW promotional video is below:

https://vimeo.com/218623259

And meanwhile, back in Oz:

https://vimeo.com/217361746

The King of Sydney

Marc Etherington’s loving portrait of fellow artist Ken Done, whose bright and breezy style epitomised the Australian eighties. Done’s design work for Japanese magazine Hanako and his colourful, commercial images of Sydney Harbour, often looked down upon as tourist kitsch, now seem boldly beautiful.

Summer fun

As Summer spreads around the Northern Hemisphere, New York house club Body & Soul touched down in Hong Kong (pathetically, I didn’t go), Taiwan is hosting a gay beach party in the first week of July and Tokyo is gearing up for its “Bear Week”at the same time with a bonus visit from Francois Sagat to the FancyHim party on June 25th.

 

Down under meanwhile, the Vivid Festival has been lighting up Sydney with its now trademark projections onto the Opera House, plus a storming DJ set from Bjork and an equally storming actual storm, which saw monster waves sweep over multi-million dollar harbourside mansions. One woman’s marble swimming pool was washed out to sea. An acerbic Facebook friend of mine remarked, “Where will she keep her diamonds cool in the summertime now?”

 

Sydney parties

The Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, an iconic celebration which lost its way dangerously in the last decade, seems to be on the way back. Last weekend’s event drew a sold-out party, rave reviews and more than one hundred thousand people to Oxford Street on Saturday night.

It was a throwback to the glory days of the 1990s, before the event spectacularly fell from grace, teetering near bankruptcy and conspicuously downsizing.

But this week showed that despite the continued steady decline of Oxford Street itself (and Sydney nightlife in general), the city still knows how to throw a party.

Perhaps the most meaningful part of this year’s events though were the apologies – from Parliament and the police – for the arrest of the very first Mardi Gras attendees in 1978. The Sydney Morning Herald – which outed many of the demonstrators, and published their names, addresses and employers on its front page, also apologised in a welcome sign of how far society has come.

Jack Colwell has got the gay blues

I first became aware of Aussie singer Jack Colwell when he appeared in a charming little series of youtube videos called “the Grindr guide” discussing the experiences of a cross-section of attractive Sydney twenty-somethings with the omniprescient gay hookup app.

Jack came across as sweet and fun and slightly neurotic. I was quite surprised then to see him pop up again as a supercool Iggy Pop-esqye baritone in his great single “Cry these tears.”

Strange weather

An Apocalytic-looking storm breaking over Sydney last week (the week after Mardi Gras).

It was perhaps the weirdest, wildest weather the city has seen since it woke to a hazy red dawn a few years ago due to dust storms.

Sydney – no Opera House

Despite the much-discussed Melbourne-Sydney rivalry, I have always enjoyed the ‘Emerald City’ (as you can read in previous reports here). I love the hedonism of it – always a fun place to recharge in new scenery for a few days of sun, surf and city life (with a dash of seediness) and enjoy the slightly faster pace. Sydney feels infinitely bigger than Melbourne – which its not – but it has the confidence (arrogance?) to pull it off. Here the buildings are taller, the lights are brighter than anywhere else in Oz and the people are in some ways a little more hardened.

In fact it was interesting to visit with a travelling companion who is not Australian, but still based in Melbourne. Almost as soon as we had got off the interstate train he remarked that, “the people are dodgier here.” Before adding, “I like it”.

He also said that “there are not so many white people – but more gingers”, and commented on the relative cleanliness and modernity of the city’s public transport compared to Melbourne’s, before adding that the city was sleazy, humid and less organised, with poor service in restaurants; “more like Colombia”.

In fact one of the most interesting things on this trip for me was seeing Sydney through a new lens, from a Latin perspective. On a train to Kings Cross one morning, half the carriage was speaking Spanish. We stumbled upon a Latino grocery while wandering to stock up on achiras and guarana, and heard Brazilian tourists on the beaches and in the inner city streets. Wherever we went Andres would confidently point out people whom he thought – usually with success – were fellow Colombians. Its not Miami or New York, obviously, but the Latin element added a new tint to Sydney’s Asian and Middle Eastern mixing pot and is hard-drinking Euro/British backpackers.

Look who is in town!

Solange, in town for the Fuzzy Field music festival in the Domain Park on New Years Days with Wiz Khalida and the London Grammar. Sounds great. Unfortunately that was the day I flew out.

Summer in the city

It was a hot balmy week the whole time we were in Sydney. But other than one trip across the glittering harbour to the beach at Watsons Bay and The Gap, where thundering cliffs mark the entrance to the harbour and the beginning of the wide expanse of the Pacific, we stayed in the Eastern suburbs.

We were crashing at a friend’s apartment in Rushcutters Bay, right next to the park, where every evening huge flocks of flying foxes would wake up from their roosts to fan out over the city. We would see them as we headed out for dinner or drinks on Oxford Street,  a loop that repeated itself for several days – wandering from business in the city (picking up lost phones, following up on missing credit cards, and shopping in Kinokuniya) back home through the hot, quiet residential streets of Darlinghurt and Kings Cross, before heading out to Oxford Street in the evening, and back again. Rinse, repeat.

Everyone on the street was in mid-thigh length shorty shorts and tanktops, looking stylish and summery. Despite its sometimes poor reputation for fashion, I thought Sydneysiders projected a nuanced and desirable version of casual chic – everybody looked like they lived a life of painfully hip leisure.

The inner city suburbs themselves were gorgeous too, with quiet streets of expensive Victorian townhouses and flowering trees. On street corners there were funky little stores and hip-looking restaurants – many of them brightly coloured Mexican places a big trend in Australia last year (although the Peruvian wave which was popular in the States and even reached Hong Kong and Bangkok does not seem to have made much of an impact).

Some of my favourite discoveries were:

Messina, a brightly tiled gelateria where Arabs in swooshing white gowns lined up with local hipsters for what is claimed to be Australia’s best gelati – I had the coconut pandan, and pistacchio.

Dust: a poky corner store run by an eccentric French man piled high with ceramic skulls, javanese wedding dresses , kitsch artwork and period costume jewellery with this piece de resistance in the window: a real tiger skin moulded over a wooden tiger model, displayed with a pink wooded icy pole in its mouth. It was 350 dollars and I was tempted.

Comparing fasion footwear – and “shoe size” – at the Beresford

The Beresford. This formerly legendary gay pub was known for its raunchy Sunday beer marathons  before closing for a very long time, and finally returning as a far more upscale straight bar – while retaining its Sunday afternoon gay slot. The super-Sydney crowd of beautiful people in expensively casual tanktops clinging to their intensively worked-out pecs pours in for happy hour in the lovely courtyard before drifting off to the upstairs dancefloor or elsewhere (as full drink prices are steep). After one such afternoon, we found ourselves invited to dinner at a nearby Japanese restaurant with an impossible-to-find toilet three flights down a locked door on the next block, and then a tres-gay house party on someone’s outdoor terrace, where the men talked about cooking and the women snorted amyl in lowcut party dresses.  Sydney.

Oxford Street nights: your disco needs you

The beach

The beach at Watson’s Bay – best known as the home to the harbourfront seafood restaurant Doyles and a pretty little family beach looking out to the city skyline, popular with hot Arabic locals (on the day I was there) and backpackers from South America and Europe.

But a little walk further along the waterfront takes you to “Lady Jane” the officially nude and unofficially very gay beach shielded by cliffs in a little cove, where naked boys sitting smoking joints on the rocks.

MOCA

The Museum of Contemporary Art at Circular Quay was hosting a retrospective on Yoko Ono, with pieces like her all white chess boards – designed to confused opponents into immediate surrender – and installation pieces of various degrees of obscurity and effectiveness.

By far the highlight was a small perspex labyrinth containing at its core a mirrored room with a single phone – which occasionally, when it she was in the mood, Yoko herself would call and whoever was there would answer.

Needless to say, it didn’t ring for me.

Other than this though, the most striking piece in the gallery was not by Yoko but by the Chilean-Australian artist Juan Davila, known for his super-sexualised reworkings of Australian historical events. The painting I saw merged folk hero outlaw Ned Kelly with gay porn icon Tom of Finland, with nods to the work of Marc Chagall and Aboriginal body painting along the way. Interesting.

About face

An image from “About Face”, a book of male portraits by Australian photographer Keo Lin showcasing the ethnic diversity of the country’s gay (and straight) community.

Modern life: the Grindr guide

The Grindr guide is a surprisingly sweet youtube documentary series about a bunch of inner city dudes in Sydney and their experiences on grindr. It discusses the pitfalls and benefits of the game-changing phone application that has revolutionised gay courting (and mating ) habits. It is nice to see something that is often sneered at, dismissed (or feared) – yet so ubiquitous – treated in such a frank manner, and with such a light touch. I wonder how long it will be before grindr (and its less successful straight imitators) becomes a standard part of high school sex ed classes?

Talking trees 3D

An amazing art project in Sydney; these ‘talking heads’ are projected onto trees in the city’s Hyde Park. It is a homecoming for Aussie artist Craig Walsh who has shown his “human nature” installations in cities around the world.

 

More at the creator’s project website.

Japanese gay: Me and Moriuo

Me and Art, the Sydney gallery specialising in Japanese gay erotic art is hosting an exhibition of the work of illustrator Moriuo, known for his iconic illustrations for Tokyo gay magazine, Badi. The exhibition runs from October 11th to 17th.

Although best known for his cute portraits of couples, which tug at the heartstrings with their innocent depictions of gay domestic bliss, the artist has recently branched out into the raunchier material for which Japanese gay illustrators are so well know. Racier pics after the jump. Several of these will be on show, and on sale, at the Sydney show.

Two beautiful Ethiopians in Sydney

I recently came across this odd headline on the website of Sao Paulo fashion rag, FFW. Apaprently the photographer had stumbled on to his two street models in the bacstreets of Sydney hipster neighbohood Newton and approached them to be photographed. When they challenged him ‘Why because we are black?” he replied, “No, because you are beautiful”.

Although the headline seems to confirm their first suspicion at least partly?

Funny that the country with the world’s largest black population outside Africa should see fit to source its melanin-enriched beauty from – of all places – Australia!

Light opera

Stunning light projections on the side of the Sydney Opera House; making it appear to crumple and wave before the appearance of a giant dancer. And meanwhile Janelle Monae was playing a concert inside! Heaven! It all happened as part of the city’s Vivid avant garde arts festival.