On Friday night, drag queens and their admirers once again gathered in Tompkins Square Park to kick off the annual Drag March to Stonewall Inn. This year’s festivities honored Gilbert Baker (aka Busty Ross), the artist, activist, and rainbow flag creator who died earlier this year. We spoke to participants like Brian Griffin (aka Harmonie Moore Must Die), who helped start the march with Baker in 1994. Watch that video above, and then play the video below for a taste of Sunday’s official NYC Pride March.

More →

Crispin Glover during the Q&A. (Photo: Daniel Maurer)

The two films Crispin Glover made in the mid-aughts have long been the holy grail of midnight movies. The notoriously eccentric actor-director has kept a tight grip on their distribution, so the only way to see them is during the occasional screenings he hosts. During two of those screenings this week at IFC Center, the audience got an even more special treat. Dressed in a vest and tie a la PT Barnum, Glover broke out his laptop and showed a preview of his next film, which he wrote for his father Bruce Glover, an actor best known for playing a Bond villain in Diamonds Are Forever.

As with much of Crispin Hellion Glover’s work, the impressionistic trailer was hard to describe from memory; there was a veiled woman, top-hatted men, a baby doll floating down a river, and some tommy gun fights. The as-yet untitled work had the sort of noir tinge that you’d expect from something that was filmed in a 17th century Czewch castle.
More →

Simone and Amedeo Pace (at left) with their band at the conclusion of their performance, 6/21/17. (Photo: Nick McManus)

Brendt Barbour kicked off the 17th annual Bicycle Film Fest the same way he has kicked off all the others– by leading the crowd at the San Damiano Mission in Greenpoint in a call-and-response chant of “bikes rock.” After the chant finished echoing off the saints painted on the church’s domed ceiling, it was time for Blonde Redhead members Simone and Amedeo Pace to perform a live score for the acclaimed bicycle race documentary A Sunday In Hell. For 90 minutes, the two musicians and their band brought orchestral accompaniment to a film in which a symphony of 25 cameras covered the 1976 running of the Paris Roubaix bicycle race.

More →

Make Music New York returned yesterday, bringing hundreds of performances to city parks and streets. We hit the Joe’s Pub Block Party at Astor Place, where this year immigrant artists were front and center. Watch the video to hear from Haitian soul pop singer Hervé and other New York music-makers.

Video by Jennifer Cohen and Julie Forrest

Non-profit Chelsea bookstore Printed Matter is now stocking the latest suite of protest signs from Lower East Side-based indie art publisher Badlands Unlimited. Inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church’s infamous “God Hates Fags” signs, these, however, have messages like FAGS HATE TRUMP, GOD HATES TRUMP, and TRUMP DOOMS AMERICA.

“The signs are really meant to be carried out into ongoing protests and rallies,” said Micaela Durand, director of Badlands Unlimited. “They’re inspired by the Westboro Baptist Church signs; we wanted to subvert that speech.”

More →

A few years ago we had the privilege of sharing some of the concert footage that video artists Pat Ivers and Emily Armstrong compiled between 1977 and 1980, when New York’s punk and No Wave scenes were at their peak. Back then, NYU Fales Library had just acquired and was digitizing their vast Nightclubbing archive, comprised of 82 bands and 115 shows, and the filmmakers hooked us up with a trove of rare video and photos from one of the golden eras of NYC rock.

More →