Sorry for being quiet on here lately – been a busy boy lately with my PhD starting, trips to Sitges with Duckie and Lisbon for Queer Lisboa film festival, and various other things going on. But here are details on a couple of recent pieces for the Guardian. The first was an interview with Neil […]
In a post yesterday, I suggested that the direct political engagement with which we still associate Brecht, Weill and Weimar cabaret in general is harder to find on the current cabaret scene, even though we live in a world of war, division, oppression, inequality and exploitation scarcely less outrageous than that of the interwar period. […]
I used to be wary of describing myself as a critic. It just sounds mean, or like you know better than everyone else. But I’ve thought about it and these days, it’s a term I embrace: critic and proud! The reason for this is pretty much the same straightforward reason a lot of us still […]
I wrote a piece for the Guardian last week setting out a few of the ideas about recent LGBT cinema that I’ve been thinking about since BFI Flare earlier in the year – namely the idea of a ‘backward turn’ in which three types of film are increasingly prevalent: features with period settings; documentaries about […]
I’ve been a fan of Nathan Evans for ages – he’s a bit of a renaissance man whose interests intersect with many of my own, notably queer cabaret and film work. As a producer and performer, he’s worked on projects ranging from the RVT’s pioneering Vauxhallville variety night to making shows with David Hoyle, Fancy […]
It’s been more than a month since I lasted posted on here. This ends now! Not that I’ve been idle. Over the past month or two, I’ve been keeping BURN‘s monthly residency at Hackney Attic going (that’s the platform for moving-image work by cabaret artists I started in 2010), and doing a one-off mini-BURN […]
Dear me, it’s been way too long since I was on here. I know it’s a cliché about blogs that you start enthusiastically and then let them tail off, and in that respect I seem to have become a cliché pretty quickly. My excuse for such negligence is that I’ve been doing lots of other […]
Just a little heads up about a couple of pieces I wrote related to Alain Guiraudie’s terrific, unsettling thriller Stranger by the Lake, a naturalistic and intoxicating tale of sex and murder at a French lakeside cruising spot that was released in the UK this weekend. For Sight & Sound, I reviewed it as one […]
Gosh, but I love me some Paul Verhoeven. To my mind, the brilliantly perverse Dutch director is one of the greatest satirists in film history – certainly one of the finest ever to have worked within the Hollywood machine. He is consistently interested in wrongfooting audiences – challenging them to question their own engagement in […]
