What’s up sluts,
Today’s newsletter is going to be a really fun, media-heavy, image-heavy offering as I sip my echinacea & elderberry tea (yum).
Friday night I was having one of those “I know it’s really late but I’m “not tired” yet so let me go on youtube and watch music videos” nights (or as DD called it: the gay witching hour). I had “911” by Lady Gaga stuck in my head so I started there and was NOT disappointed.
Something strange (for me) is that I didn’t really have my moment with Chromatica until a few months ago. Born This Way is still big-time one of my favorite albums that I come back to like comforting soup time and again, and I felt really disenchanted with (and sort of betrayed by) Ms. Mother Monster’s hard turn away from the fun, theatrical, overtly queer pop music and her focusing more on being a “serious artist” and chasing an Oscar (we know you wanna be Barbara babe, who doesn’t?) I was really slow on the uptake of coming back around to giving her newest album a chance (I could write an entire newsletter at another juncture about one-sided relationships with pop stars), but once I finally did I felt the loving embrace of new GOOD Gaga, which is a pop gift like no other.
It’s safe to say that she’s my One, the diva that defined my teenage years. I had a poster of her on the ceiling above my bed in high school, ran a fan blog on tumblr about her, and once got detention for skipping gym class to sneak to the computer lab so as not to miss the world premiere of the ‘Born This Way” music video. Seeing her live in 2009 was a formative moment for 14 year old me, and Chromatica feels like such a gift, like embracing my inner queer child and feeling at home. Pop music can really do so much for you!
Onto the “911” video: Daniel can attest to how rapt I was when I realized that not only were we jumping into a gorgeous video, we were jumping directly into a delectable homage to one of my favorite films of all time, The Color of Pomegranates (1969). I was literally on the edge of my seat looking around the room as if I was surrounded by other people potentially having the same lightning bolt moment I was having, I ended up just stammering to Daniel some half-intelligible exclamations.
I’ve written before about The Color of Pomegranates, but in short summary it’s one of my favorite films, and to me one of the most important films ever made. Directed by Sergei Parajanov (who also directed another of my favorite fever dreams Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors from 1965), the film tells the life story of legendary 18th century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova in a very fittingly poetic way, mostly taking place in gorgeous tableaux that show scenes illustrating the poet’s life from childhood to death.
Every detail in this film is so meticulously planned out and gorgeous, I would really highly recommend giving it a watch, it is streaming on the Criterion Channel and available to rent on YouTube. Sergei Parajanov is an important culturo-historical figure for me, born in Tbilisi, Georgia to Armenian parents in 1924, he worked mostly in Ukraine, and put himself on the map of international cinema with 1965’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, still largely considered the crowning jewel of Ukrainian cinema. In a 1988 interview he said of making Shadows,
“That’s when I found my theme, my field of interest: the problems faced by the people. I focused on ethnography, on God, on love and tragedy. That’s what literature and film are to me.”
After making and releasing more avant-garde and surreal films exploring these themes, including Pomegranates, Parajanov was arrested in 1974 and sentenced to five years in prison by Soviet authorities for deviating from socialist realist themes, “leaning towards homosexuality”, and “inciting suicide”. He was arrested and imprisoned again in 1982 for similar charges, which coincided with the first release and large success of Pomegranates in Parisian theaters. It took decades for his work to reach larger, international audiences, and in a big way his work is only now coming into another wave of appreciation with a new audience, hugely exciting! Parajanov died in 1990, but his brilliant films live on, RIP to a real one.
Upon looking further into the production of the “911” music video I found that it was directed by Tarsem Singh, who also directed an early favorite film The Fall (2006) (which tragically is not available to stream anywhere, but is really worth a watch if you can get your hands on it somehow). It makes so much sense that Tarsem would be influenced by Parajanov’s cinema and create this gorgeous homage to his work. It just warms the heart!
🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨 New Drag Race 🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨
We have a new season of straight ahead RuPaul’s Drag Race with SIXTEEN new queens to be obsessed with, how blessed are we???
I watched the hour long pre-season ~Meet the Queens~ special twice ✌🏻 on youtube and for weeks I had this clip playing on a loop in my brain:
Anetra did not disappoint and is one of my clear favorites right out of the gate! I can’t express how excited I am for this season, so much drama seems imminent but also the level of the makeup and looks on that runway are going to be delicious I can just tell. Okay also hold up, there are FOUR queens from Connecticut this season….. why.
Real quick shoutout to NJ girlie Luxx Noir London for being so dumb (I mean this so lovingly) and giving me my favorite quote of this week’s episode: “I love a statement hat, people don’t wear hats enough…. or maybe they do, I don’t know, I’m not paying attention.” She was so right for that.
I saw Corsage which made me want to make a movie of a similar style about Simone Weil (don’t steal my idea). Saw this one with Nat & Barrett at the Philadelphia Film Society, and something that we all loved about the film was how it showed this contentious historical figure in a non-judgemental, very human way. There are points when you see how strange she is, how much of a dick she is, and other times when I couldn’t help thinking “she’s right”.
I think as a genre, costume drama period pieces have really shifted (we marked it as post-Coppola-Antoinette) into a genre of self-reflection, holding a mirror up to the fascination that audiences have with Royals in general, and some directors (certainly not all) have taken the opportunity to break open the façade surrounding the elites of yon. I felt like for the type of narrative director Marie Kreutzer was working within, both this period drama, but also the sort of insider’s look at the mental deterioration of celebrity, she pulled everything off with such gorgeous subtlety (both in the narrative and in the style, like having little to no makeup on any of the actors), it was lovely.
A bonus for me was that the film wove in and out of German, Hungarian, French, English, and Italian which was a sexy little buffet for my ears. Vicky Krieps is so hot and so smart, I love her. Another highlight for me was that the director used all of these crumbling palaces and manors, I don’t know if this was a choice to show a more realistic, less shiny version of how wealthy people were actually living in the late 19th century, or if it was meant to sort of mirror the moral degradation/the crumbling of the aristocracy, OR if she just went to these locations as-is and didn’t opt for the better-maintained palaces usually used for film sets for another reason, I will be looking into interviews with the director for that aspect.
I started watching the Eagles game and now I can’t concentrate on anything else so au revoir, go birds!