» Posted By omg team On Tuesday, August 27, 2024 | category: Music, Q&A
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Photo by Zuleyma Prado
Quarterback Baby might just be our next big pop star. Fka Quinn Bates, the singer isn’t trying to reinvent the pop wheel: In a sea full of corporate sounds, algorithmic politics and family-friendly images, Bates wants pop to be the raunchy and authentic self it used to be. With their recent release, Hypersexual Heartbreak, Bates navigates the ups and downs of a breakup, and how sex and identity intertwine through that journey.
Bates has never been shy about bringing their personal experiences to the forefront, being vulnerable and… well, real. Inspired by icons like Britney Spears, Peaches and Gwen Stefani, Bates’s aim has always been to be a provocateur.
It’s beyond shock: It’s about making a mark musically. At times, the industry feels like chaos, and in Bates’s words: watered down and not pop in its truest form.
Sitting at a coffee shop, dissecting the music scene in Canada and being a queer artist, Bates spoke with us honestly about what it means to be a pop star in the making.
» Posted By omg team On Friday, August 9, 2024 | category: Art, Q&A
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This summer saw the US release of documentary filmmaker Kevin Hegge’s latest feature TRAMPS!, which looks at the dissolution of the UK punk movement and how fashion and art transformed in the early ’80s via the flamboyant movement that became known as the New Romantics.
In addition to streaming, this month also marks the release of special edition Blu-ray release of the film, stacked with special features, including an unedited interview with fashion stylist and iconoclast Judy Blame, who’s passing in 2018 left a cavern in London’s fashion scene.
The New Romantics movement gave rise to gender-bending pop stars such as Boy George and performance art drag-terrorists like Leigh Bowery. Tramps! charts how this motley crew of club kids took the anti-establishment ideologies formed by punk while swapping out ripped rags for ostentatious glamour. Using the clubs as their catwalk, the New Romantics traipsed through a post war London looking like queens, but living on the dole.
Although the movie looks at youth culture in the early ’80s, Hegge’s documentary translates to any era of young creative people, struggling to make ends meet and create art in an increasingly aggressive and precarious economic world that we live in.
Tramps! was met with rave reviews. Website Loud and Clear says about the film:
“The closing film at this year’s BFI Flare Festival, TRAMPS! is less a documentary and more an audio-visual whirlwind. Right from the beginning, composers Matthew Sims and Verity Susman (and the film’s exemplary sound department) produce a blistering wall of sound. It’s electric and almost industrial, correlating with the synths later used in the 1980s to generate synthpop and conquer America. But it’s also loud and abrasive, as radical as the strong, flamboyant and charismatic personalities that Hegge focuses on.”
Also a long-time OMG.BLOG contributor, Kevin Hegge interviewed LaBruce back in 2021 for the release of this twincestuous feature Saint Narcisse, so we thought we’d flip the script and reach out to get the legendary LaBruce to chat with Hegge about the film.
Its a busy time for LaBruce as well, whose newest book The Revolution Is My Boyfriend was published in June. Meanwhile, BlaB’s latest salacious film, The Visitor, which was met with rave reviews, is being distributed by Utopia’s label Circle Collective in the UK, the US and Canada, and will be released this fall.
TRAMPS! was released June 18 in the United States via Good Deed Entertainment, and is now available to stream on your favorite platform. You can find the Blu-ray edition here.
Read on after the jump for the full Q&A between Bruce LaBruce and Kevin Hegge!
Notoriously controversial, infamously banned, utterly hilarious and totally fearless, Kathy Griffin requires no introduction. But following Kathy’s six years away from the spotlight where she took a trip to hell and back, her re-introduction is long overdue.
After stealing the show in beloved 1990s productions like Suddenly Susan and Seinfeld (where Jerry dedicated an entire episode to Kathy’s real-life beef with him), Kathy became a reality-television pioneer with My Life on the D-List, which went on to win the GLAAD Media Award for Best Reality Program. Now available to stream on Peacock, My Life on the D-List is a literal time capsule of the who’s-who in early aughts Hollywood—definitely worth revisiting for the nostalgia-fuelled romp down memory lane and all the Kathy face-time.
Kathy’s accolades and accomplishments don’t stop there: She won two Emmys and a Grammy, she penned Official Book Club Selection: A Memoir According to Kathy Griffin, which debuted at number on the New York Times Bestseller List, and she co-hosted CNN’s New Year’s Eve broadcast with Anderson Cooper for years.
Perhaps what we admire most about Kathy (when she’s not making us laugh) is her conviction in advocating for the LGBTQ+ community, women, and other disenfranchised groups, a commitment that’s earned her the Human Rights Campaign’s Ally for Equality and GLAAD’s Vanguard award.
But it hasn’t all been rainbows and sunshine for Kathy. In 2018, misfortune decided to come for her in more ways than we can count. She was diagnosed with lung cancer, resulting in the removal of half of her lung and a permanent change in the sound of her voice. She developed an addiction to pills that led to a suicide attempt. She lost her mother. She filed for divorce from her husband of four years. And, last but certainly not least bizarre, she was investigated by the US government as a terrorist following her Trump photo scandal, which left her on the no-fly list and unable to work.
Kathy is living proof that when it rains, it pours!
Now, nearly four years sober, cancer-free and cleared to fly, we are happy to report that Kathy is back in action with her new stand-up show, My Life on the PTSD-List. Keeping in step with her broader comedy oeuvre, it’s a candid look at her life, including some of the foibles she’s been through with the A-list friends she’s made along the way (hi, Paris Hilton!). She’s bringing the show across North America this year (get your tickets here).
We caught up with Kathy to find out how she copes with life’s ups and many downs, why she never regrets sticking up for herself, and what it was like whoring it up with Christopher Meloni.
Read the full Q&A with Kathy Griffin after the jump!
» Posted By omg team On Monday, February 26, 2024 | category: Art, Q&A
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Torn Self Portrait by Ryan Van Der Hout
When you wander into the Toronto Sculpture Garden right now, you’ll find New York-based Canadian interdisciplinary artist Ryan Van Der Hout’s To Reflect Everything – an outsized mirrored sphere that recalls both a disco ball’s joyful character and a satellite’s transportive enticement.
The concept and composition of Van Der Hout’s piece, which is on view in the Sculpture Garden until mid-May, navigates notions of queer utopia, identity, and transcendence. And it invites visitors to pause in contemplation via literal and metaphorical moments of self-reflection, highlighting the impact of our fragmented selves and environments in relation to the idea of incompleteness in belonging.
To Reflect Everything And Show Nothing by Ryan Van Der Hout
To Reflect Everything nestles nicely into Van Der Hout’s oeuvre, a compilation of photographic, public and sculptural works which explore vast themes including grief, queer becoming, and nostalgia; their piece To Reflect Everything And Show Nothing from 2022 is an interesting companion to the larger sculptural piece currently on display in Toronto’s downtown core. The photo is a compellingly abstracted portrait of the artist, who is sporting drag makeup, refracted through the showy grid of a disco ball’s surface.
Begging the question “Who is that?”, Van Der Hout’s image reveals so much about the human condition’s preoccupation with identity definition and construction through a camp lens, which ultimately reveals tantalizingly scant information. In the Toronto Sculpture Garden, Van Der Hout allows us all to step into a similarly fractured, albeit fantastical, world to consider this question of ourselves.
I was eager to have Van Der Hout further illuminate the inspirations behind To Reflect Everything and dig deeper into the depths of his practice for this Q&A. Dive in after the jump!
» Posted By omg team On Wednesday, December 20, 2023 | category: Art, Q&A
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I first met the artist Kyle Meyer in the spring of 2022 in New York City. A friend of mine had posted on Instagram about a must-see artistic happening in Greenwich Village: Meyer had “wrapped” an enormous amount of fabric around the interior of an empty 19th century carriage house that was about to be demolished, and dripped dye of all different colors on it.
After arriving at the address Meyer provided to me through DM and texting his number, the artist bounded out from the building and began giving a tour of the space—which was now a phenomenal display of hues and textures (informed by whatever structural elements, such as a fireplace, was behind the fabric). Completely gobsmacked by the gorgeously transformed interior, I had to know more about this creative and what compels him to keep innovating his practice.
Prior to this project, Meyer had explored the connection between photography and fiber arts through a number of works, perhaps the most striking of which are the pieces in Interwoven. Here, Meyer photographed gay men he had befriended while living in Swaziland, a country with a hyper-masculine culture and where homosexuality is illegal. Meyer fashioned head wraps—typically worn by women—for his subjects, and after their image was made, he utilized the skills he was acquiring through a local textile apprenticeship to weave these photos into large-scale textile art pieces.
A piece Kyle Meyer’s Interwoven exhibition
More recently, Meyer collaborated with Willie Norris, who in addition to helming an eponymous label is also the design director at Outlier. In the brand’s seasonal collection reveal this past September, two outfits featuring the dynamic dye work of Meyer appeared—and your spring wardrobe won’t be the same without it.
Outlier x Kyle Meyer
Meyer, who spends summers on Fire Island, has also made use of its surroundings (another part of his practice sees him burying pieces of fabric to discover how the land modifies it) and in other instances, its inhabitants to develop an aura reading-esque assemblage of pieces. For this, willing subjects select a series of colors from question prompts and are then shrouded in fabric and coated in those colors. The fabric is eventually cut and woven into an abstruse work of art.
“They’re somewhat portraits,” Meyer muses. “Portraits of people who have asked to participate in this work. I’m not soliciting participation. I could never just say, ‘I want to dye you’ – someone has to be compelled and want to do it, because it’s an intense and intimate process.”
Given the temporal and varied expanse of his work, I was excited to speak with Meyer about the Outlier collaboration, and what it’s like living and working on Fire Island.
» Posted By omg team On Thursday, August 17, 2023 | category: Fashion, Q&A
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DJ and music producer Fat Tony is currently enjoying the continued success of his award-winning best-selling memoir, I Don’t Take Requests. A harrowing depiction of his addiction and recovery journey peppered with humor and vivid accounts of some of the most creative eras in fashion and music, the book catalogues Fat Tony’s travels, tribulations, and friendships with the likes of Boy George and Leigh Bowery. It also shares details about his drag performance as Dusty Springfield in a London Fashion Week show for the line Joseph in 1986.
Check out this newly surfaced clip of that moment:
Style is like a secondary character throughout the memoir, with Fat Tony delving into fond recollections of what he and pals were wearing during their most debauched exploits in great detail (while other memories are expectedly fuzzy, if able to be conjured at all).
When describing the rise of the club night Kinky Gerlinky, Fat Tony recalls that “People were over drugs and back into fashion”, and name drops cult labels like BodyMap as readily as Vivienne Westwood and Versace. At one point in his book, Fat Tony spills about Donatella Versace shouting to him as he DJ’d a fete for the Italian brand: “Aiii, Fat Tony! No K, NO PLAY!!” –apparently a catch-phrase during his more wanton moments.
“There are certain dates I couldn’t remember what I was doing, but I could remember exactly what we were wearing,” Fat Tony says of why fashion is so integral to his life story’s plot. “That narrows [details] down, almost perfectly pinpointing a certain era or a certain time.”
In 2020, Fat Tony founded his own London-based label Arrogant Hypocrite; his partner, Stavros Agapiou, has since pushed the designs into streetwear territory as its Creative Director. We love the TNUC tee, which launched in June along with an assortment of casual looks. Musician Mnek and artist Tracey Emin are both fans of the brand.
Mnek and Tracey Emin model the TNUC T-shirt by Arrogrant Hypocrite
On the music front, Fat Tony has been bopping around the U.K. and Europe playing gigs from intimate (like extended sets in the “Wild Room”, a dancefloor-meets-bathroom in the famed Hï Ibiza nightclub) to massive, like the Ministry of Pride event he played in July.
His devotion to lewks makes it obvious why Editor-in-Chief of British Vogue, Edward Enninful, asked Fat Tony to be Vogue’s resident DJ, and why he continues to be the name of choice for events thrown by the likes of Kate Moss.
We caught up with the DJ, producer and meme lord in between gigs to find out more about Arrogant Hypocrite, bringing back his bitch tracks, and why Ibiza still has his heart.
» Posted By omg team On Tuesday, April 11, 2023 | category: Books, Q&A
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Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu
Jamie Stewart’s debut novel Anything That Moves begins with an author’s note. It reads:
“If we are related, please, for the love of God, do not read this book.”
The book charts the more notable sexual exploits of the author’s history across 31 chapters. It’s true that familial dysfunction, self-flagellation (of the non-erotic variety), and moral chaos take as much as part of the narrative as the expanse of sexual tales do here.
Those familiar with Stewart’s band Xiu Xiu will have their sea legs in their distinct ability to confront the terror of mortality and the irony of the underwhelming thud of life with a blunt humor that reads as tongue-in-cheek as it does eviscerating in its honesty.
Jamie Stewart has made a career of inhabiting this space, and with their debut book Anything That Moves, Stewart very much takes the throne there.
Xiu Xiu songs are often packaged in pummelling power electronics and vocals delivered with an emotional intensity that leave you hoping they aren’t in fact autobiographical. Ranging from the earliest sexual awakenings of their youth to the depths of sexual depravity years into being on the road with their band, these personal accounts leave no question of the brutal reality of their origin in Stewart’s life.
Like some sort of a post-MTV Marquis de Sade, Stewart’s stories are at once horrifying, hilarious, tragic, and often just fucking disgusting. Anything That Moves is a visceral read that you can take to the beach. The stories are frequently quite hot, but this is not erotica—they veer bareback into extremely uncomfortable territory. That discomfort takes many forms—and although heavy, Stewart navigates the thud of life with a refreshing candidness.
It should be mentioned that the book does explore some of the more unsavoury aspects of sexual self-discovery that crosses into (and for the most part remains in) some potentially, if not likely triggering territory for its readers. The following interview may do so as well (this is your content warning)!
Earlier in the month, Xiu Xiu released their album Ignore Grief (stream the album right here):
We talked to Jamie about the parallels between their work as a musician and their newfound role as an author, how the horror of sex can make you a better person, and the origins of unforgettable pick up lines such as, “Hey, little mommy, let’s fuck.”
If there’s a seat belt in your sex sling, its most definitely time to buckle up for this negligently naughty must-read book of the summer.
Experience our very raw conversation with Stewart interspersed with spicy excerpts from the book, after the jump!
