DANGEROUS MINDS: Taped in the tiny Marquee Club on Wardour Street over the course of three days in October of 1973, the idea was to do a sort of artsy/futuristic variety show with Bowie’s first performance since “retiring” onstage at the Hammersmith Odeon earlier that year. The 1980 Floor Show featured guests Marianne Faithful (junked out of her skull and dressed as a nun dueting with the Dame on “I Got You Babe), The Troggs and Spanish flamenco glam act—yes, you read that correctly—Carmen. Amanda Lear introduced some numbers and Bowie serenaded her with a magnificent version of “Sorrow” in one of the show’s highlights.
The 1980 Floor Show was originally aired on The Midnight Special on November 16, 1973.
“Bowie’s cover of The Who’s “Can’t Explain” is KILLER… and his duet of “I Got You Babe” with Marianne Faithful is fucking hilarious!” – Sissydude
Documentary filmmaker Sara Lamm explores the life of the mental institute escapee, master soap-maker, and self-proclaimed rabbi whose all-natural soap would become a counter-culture cleaning product sensation and a staple of health food stores everywhere. In 1947 – after emigrating to the United States from Germany in order to escape the Third Reich and fleeing from a mental institution where he was forced to endure electroshock therapy – Dr. Emanuel Bonner finally realized his destiny. An experienced soap maker whose faith in humanity hadn’t been shaken by the fact that his parents died in the Holocaust, Dr. Bonner began producing a multi-purpose cleaning product that would bring people together while providing them with tips for living a better live. The labels on Dr. Bronner’s Soaps were filled with inspiring prose borrowed largely from Jewish and Christian sources, and his company was one of the first socially conscious organizations to mass produce a popular product. While Dr. Bronner himself may be long gone, his popular soap lives on. For viewers curious to hear the tale of a man who dedicated himself to the betterment of the human race through the use of all-natural cleaning products, this documentary presents Dr. Bronner’s stranger-than-fiction story in greater detail than ever before. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi
Maurice Vellekoop is Canada’s foremost gay comics author and illustrator, with work that sometimes runs in international magazines and other times shrink-wrapped and slapped with an 18+ sticker. Gengoroh Tagame is the undisputed master of Japanese gay erotic comics, in Toronto for the very first time to celebrate his first English book! Together, these two titans of erotic art have produced some truly amazing illustrations, and now for the first time their work will be exhibited together. with Chip Kidd.
To step into the world of Swiss photographer Karlheinz Weinberger is to fall down a rabbit hole of such a specific homoerotic fashion obsession that to crawl out would be a missed opportunity.
Zurich-based KHW was a lifelong factory worker by trade, but by nature he was a portrait photographer who zoned in on his erotic obsessions, consistently male, who changed along with fashion itself from teenagers to rockers to bikers as the decades progressed. In the early ’60s KHW began photographing the Halbstark, aka the Half Strong, and these are the images with which he is most closely identified as a photographer. The Halbstark were a tribe of denim-wearing, rock and roll fanatics who took the cliché of the new American phenomenon, “the teenager,” and turned it on its head with sly, deviant rock ‘n’ roll fashion rampant with homo-erotic overtones.
KHW’s was a world populated by feral, sly, outsiders, disdained by their conservative Swiss parents who fashioned their own “gangs” and wore their own “colors” consisting of uniquely customized jeans and leathers that proclaimed their counterculture allegiance. Wearing precious denim and leather, they were walking shrines to their American heroes with giant belt buckles emblazoned with pictures of Elvis and James Dean and Brando. They slung heavy industrial chains over their cowboy shirts and striped tees.
The male Halbstark replaced the zippers of their jeans with bolts and laced them with chains. The women teased their hair into ratty towers and downplayed their femininity with denim jackets and scratchy mohair sweaters. The Halbstark obsessed over and fetishized their trans-Atlantic icons as Weinberger obsessed and fetishized over them. As an observer and recorder of a weird, shifting youth culture, KHW’s images are fascinating. As a record of a twisted, crazy fashion movement they are priceless. READ THE FULL STORY HERE @ HUFFPOST GAY