Okay, I love the Shibuya kawaii aesthetic as much as the next Giant Robot subscriber, but I was shocked, shocked to find a line of eager shoppers a block long yesterday on Spring Street in Soho for the opening of the NYC branch of Tokidoki.
Oddly enough, I was on my way home after spending the afternoon working freelance at a Japanese agency where I sometimes find myself writing English language copy based on copy that's been translated from Japanese but that doesn't quite rise to colloquial English yet.
It was an amazing day. After all, it hit 70°F only 4 days after it had been a horrific 15° with a wind-chill that made me seriously consider snow bird status. So the streets were filled with New Yorkers throwing off the cabin fever of the winter, checking out the street art on West Broadway, and the shoes on sale at 90% off at a shop that, like so many, was going out of business. I had never heard of Tokidoki. But the crowd felt insinctively familiar. And the line, well, what New Yorker can resist a line. So I went over to check it out. In the window were Hello Kitty handbags. Soccer balls with Tokidoki designs. And inside was the founder and head designer of Tokidoki herself, the very Italian Simone Legno. Hence the crowds of admirers hungry for expensive totems of faux-asian coolness.
I have to admit though, I loved the stuff. Just like I love all the tchatckes you can find on Takeshita Doori. Of course, the stuff on Takeshita Doori doesn't command the prices Tokidoki does. Still, I had $150 to throw away, I'd love one of the soccer balls. However, given today's economic news, it's just not an investment I am willing to make. I'm just in shock there are still so many who can and will buy one.
You have only two opportunities to see a film about the most politically subversive and influential drag queen in living history (if not all history). Don't miss it — "Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story" will be part of the 18th Annual Jewish Film Festival, at the Walter Reade Theater on January 29th.
Uys is best known in the guise of his alter ego, Evita Bezuidenhout, the Most Famous White Woman in South Africa. During the later apartheid years, as Evita, Uys appeared regularly on television and in clubs satirizing the evil of the apartheid government. When people who spoke out and challenged the government directly were imprisoned or worse, Uys managed to speak truth to power without finding himself disappeared. Nelson Mandela himself has said that Uys is one if his heroes.
Allow me a tangential discussion of the Mattachine Society here, which Harry Hay named in honor of medieval buskers who appeared in masks and whose performances were often satirical jabs at the ruling classes. Jesters if you will, who have always had the ability to couch the truth humorously, for the most part without penalty. Clearly Uys is a living example of this tradition. And while the horrors of apartheid are over, as Evita Bezuidenhout, Uys continues to perform in schools throughout South Africa, teaching children about how to protect themselves from AIDS, something the ANC government, with an HIV denialist health minister, has most strenuously not done.
This documentary film follows Uys as he goes from school to school. It gives something of his life story (we learn half way through, just as Uys only learned as an adult, that his mother was a Jewish refugee from Berlin).
In some ways, the making of this documentary is also an amazing story. The director, Julian Shaw, a
native New Zealander, saw Uys perform on a trip to South Africa when he was 15 years old. He went up to Uys after the performance and said he was coming back to make a documentary film about him. Uys was nice to him, but didn’t think he’d ever see the boy again. Except that two years later, Shaw showed up, camera in hand. For the next two years he shadowed him, capturing footage in schools, performances and at home. Another couple of years of editing later, and the finished film has won honors at documentary film festivals in Australia.
Truth be told (though I am not in drag and you wouldn't want to see it) the film is far from perfect. But the story of Uys is compelling, as is the story of Shaw deciding to film him. I wish there had been more about Uys in the apartheid days, and more about Shaw’s life and his need to make this movie.
Quibbles. This film is a must see — and a mirror to what the gender clowns (this is meant very respectfully) in New York should aspire to. The closest we have is the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose true charity work is masked by the drag clowning and whose serious challenge to organized religion is made more acceptable by the fact that men have feminized themselves.
There are all kinds of questions I have: does drag take away a man’s power and thus make it safe for him to speak the truth. Or is it the taking on the the feminine power that enables them to speak the truth? What do you think?
What’s even more interesting to me as an advertising copywriter is Uys appearance in a recent commercial for Nando’s, a fast food chain in South Africa. In this clever spot, Uys as Evita delivers a sell for a special meal deal, while setting up a very pointed political barb that comes as a stinger at the end of the spot. While such a jab at the current government (Uys is an equal opportunity satirist) is no surprise coming from Evita, I am amazed that the advertiser was willing to chance government disapproval. Certainly no advertiser in the U.S. would make such an obviously negative statement about either the Democrats or Republicans in a commercial. The spot runs below:
...in the next stall. Okay, this ad is really for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and their Dinosaur exhibit. But I can't imagine what the creative team was thinking when they came up with this image to go with the campaign theme: "They're just waiting to be discovered." Well, maybe I can imagine, I just don't want to think about it anymore. Except that Joe reported today that Senator Craig (R-Tearoom) dropped his appeal of his own guilty plea. So there's no escaping the possibility that you might see feet like these in a wide stance inching into a stall near you soon.
Lake Superior State University in Michigan released its annual List of Words
to Be Banished from the Queen's English for Mis-use, Over-use and
General Uselessness. For those English professors who get to feel superior just because they live on a lake, I have two messages. First, in the United States the only people who speak the Queen's English live in West Hollywood or Chelsea. And second:
It’s that time of year again, New Year’s Eve, when pundits make lists and I take my staycation, not because I’m going green or want to reduce my carbon footprint. No, it’s simply that despite my desperate search for employment, I have not received a bailout. Clearly I live neither on Wall Street or Main Street, but on Madison Avenue, a street filled with copy monkeys posing as marketing mavericks, and the first dude you run into will try to pitch a game changing campaign for some iconic brand in the hope of not only getting a job, but winning five nominations for a Clio or Andy award.
There, I used every one of your damned banned words. 3 you!
Not many Americans have read the Hagakure, which is the book that became the code of the Samurai in Edo period Japan. Written in the early 18th Century, excerpts were popular during the 80s, when Japan's economic star was ascendant, giving American managers lessons in Bushido, the way of the warrior. Of course, what get left out were the queer bits. Yup, not unlike ancient Greece where a man had the responsibility of training a younger man in the arts of war, and love, so too in Japan. The Hagakure recognizes these relationships (within the larger context of family responsibility, not unlike Greece). But there was nothing like this:
Yaji and Kita: The Midnight Pilgrims is a wildlly surreal, genre busting musical road trip, somewhere between The Wizard of Oz and Kurosawa's Dreams on drugs. Lots of drugs, because KIta is a drug addict. And to heal him (and get out of town fast for reasons not revealed until late in the film) he convinces him to go on a pilgrimage to one of Japan's three great shrines, Ise.
Imagine if Brokeback Mountain had been a musical comedy. As if it had been invaded by Oklahoma. And then Blue Man Group.
So anachronisms abound, from the very start, when the two lovers leave Edo (what Tokyo was called until the late 19th Century) they jump on a motorcycle Easy Rider style, only to be hailed down by a cop for breaking dramatic narrative rules. Well. Giant babies. A local lord who requires people to make him laugh or face torture. A bar serving magic mushrooms straight out of Alice. Sword fights. Love scenes. Hip hop dance numbers. It's a very wild ride. Don't miss it.
Describing itself as a " not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites" this bizarre little site offers an odd selection based supposedly on requests from, uh, listeners. See, uh, hear for yourself.
Okay, perhaps that's a little dramatic, but then, this ad, from MixBrasil, the lgbt film festival in Sao Paolo features a hot gay couple poolside, staring at a woman that is clearly not human. Now this could perhaps be seen as homosexual gynophobia projected out visually. But the campaign speaks to the sense many queer folk have of being seen as alien, other. Thus, the theme line: What is weird for you? Obviously, to those of us who live very queer lives, suburban soccer moms can seem weird. It is all in who is doing the looking. And while that may be the point of the ad campaign, I am not sure how it works to get people to go to this film festival — or whether they are seeking an audience above and beyond the usual lgbt film fest crew. Perhaps some alients. Don't know. Or maybe Grace Jones, since I have to admit, the woman in this ad looks like Grace Jones to me, and I've always suspected she wasn't quite human. You can see the rest of this odd campaign at adsoftheworld.
Ruth is one of my heroes — New York lost when we didn't elect her mayor. But the world won, since she went on the lead a truly great humanitarian organization, American Jewish World Service.
I remember the first time I saw her, handing out leaflets outside Zabar's, running for City Council from a very left 3rd party. Of course, she didn't win in that race. But soon she was inside the Democratic Party and raising hell when she did get on the Council from my nabe, jewish left central, the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Ruth is 68 today. And I am sure the results of Tuesday's election was present enough for her. But best wishes from this old supporter and left handed/left headed queer Jewish Buddhist. Image credit: Chrystie Sherman
Yes, now men don't have to feel left out of when feminine hygiene ads run on TV. Manjunk promises fight odor causing bacteria that impede your sex life. Of course, you can be the auteur and create the TV commercial — Manjunk is sponsoring a video contest for the best ad, with winners getting a
tropical vacation where no doubt, it will be hot and humid, so that product use will be essential. Unless of course, you are of the opinion that the fresh fragrance of a sweaty crotch is a turn on.
My favorite visual on the MJ website is the eye, looking through what can only be described as a gloryhole. You can't make this stuff up and if only for this reason alone I would include it in my ongoing Queer Product Watch. I imagine if you work for a client like this, you can sure have a lot of fun. Unless you use the product.
Then there is the ad campaign for Balls underwear, which can be seen at their site. It features famous men, in scenes we recognize, except for the fact they are only wearing the undies. My favorite is the one of Errol Flynn, who was one of the sexiest men ever to grace the silver screen, in his signature role of Robin Hood. It's a very silly campaign, but I still love this ad. And I don't believe for a minute that Errol Flynn would be caught dead with Manjunk under those brief. He might be caught dead with an underage girl in a hotel room, which in fact he was, since when he died his girlfriend was 17. But Manjunk? I think not.
