Soviet Film Preservation Project-- ready to roll!

Comrades in Berkeley CA today loaded a U-Haul truck with what had been the film library of the Berkeley, CA 'Soviet-American Friendship Society' for transportation to New York City, where they will be preserved, digitized, and distributed under the auspices of the U.S. Friends of the Soviet People, the Northstar Compass, and the International Council for Friendship and Solidarity with Soviet People. This project has also benefitted from the comradely support of both leadership and membership elements within the Communist Party USA.



Truck driving provided by yours truly :-) Watch here or at my Faceborg for updates from the road, insh'allah...

By the way... in the course of today's efforts, I found a video cover to 'Hunt for Red October,' which is now a dashboard icon!

"U.S. Friends of the Soviet People" Commits to Soviet Film Project, Fundraising

Last December [2008], comrades in the San Francisco Bay Area regained possession of what had been the film library of the Berkeley branch of the Soviet-American Friendship Society (SAFS), consisting of some 300 16-millimeter films. About a third have been exposed to open air for a long time, and are seriously degraded as a result. The rest are in good condition. A SAFS catalog from 1986 indicates a representative sample of all film categories exists in the Berkeley cache.

The goal of this project is to save these Soviet-era films from disintegration, and to produce DVDs and online content from them, assuring them life well into the 21st Century. New York-area FSP members have committed to take on this work, and comrades in Toronto have pledged an initial $4000 towards transportation, digitization, and related costs to see this project through to completion. This is about half of projected total costs, the rest of which has yet to be raised. Comrades in San Francisco will be raising funds as well.

In order to successfully complete this project, USFSP is also seeking an inexpensive or donated space in which to conduct the work, as well as volunteers willing to help run the machines. Please contact us if you can assist us in any of these ways.

The USFSP has committed to a sustained fundraising drive in its newsletter in support of this project. Your donation now will be critical to the success of our collective efforts to preserve these memories in film of the USSR! Please see the last page of this newsletter for information on sending funds to the USFSP, and please be sure to mark your donation as intended for the Soviet Film Project.

The USFSP has committed to a sustained fundraising drive in its newsletter in support of this project. Your donation now will be critical to the success of our collective efforts to preserve these memories in film of the USSR! Please see the last page of this newsletter for information on sending funds to the USFSP, and please be sure to mark your donation as intended for the Soviet Film Project.

How to contact USFSP:
U.S. Friends of the Soviet People
P. O. Box 140434, Staten Island NY, 10314-0434
Phone: 718-667-4740

LGBT Social Progress in China Braves Muddled NYT Coverage

According to today's NY Times website, Chinese Contestant Enters Worldwide Gay Pageant. His name is Xiaodai Muyi and, I would add, he's hella cute!



The contradictions in the NYT article are, however, dizzying. They've really been stressing that the Chinese government closed down the Chinese pageant, yet X.M. was obviously allowed to fly to Norway to compete for the global title. Also, according to the same article, China decriminalized gay sex in 1997-- years before the USA did. The article also discusses how X.M. is muslim, and more or less a professional gay activist in Xinjiang, where his main obstacle is not politics but religion. But isn't the official story that the Chinese Communists oppress religion?

It sounds to me like social progress is being made on LGBT stuff in China, comparable to that being made in the USA, both of which lag behind Europe. It also sounds to me like we've been fed a lot of bullshit on China for a long time, such that reporting of reality conflicts with and has to be shoehorned into the official narrative framework.

All that said, and for the record, I stand ready to heed the call of duty, and personally investigate the situation faced by gay Chinese hotties looking for dates in various parts of China, the moment funding is secured. Ni hao, comrade! :-)

Latest in my mini-Garrelfest: Les amants réguliers (eng: Regular Lovers)

This one is far less... sexually transgressive than Louis Garrel's other works discussed on this blog, dear readers-- which is okay, because: 1. his dad Philippe is the director, and that would be really weird; and 2. this film makes up for it in high-quality French-leftie content. Think of it-- hot, brooding French men and women stare at each other, and the camera (and that means you, dear viewer), in long, lingering shots. Street battles from May '68 in Paris are lovingly recreated, anarchists and communists make common cause in basement meetings and smoke opium together in art lofts. For three screen hours! Never mind the 90 minute rule-- in this case, the rule is meant to be broken-- just like that one about looking directly at the camera-- and all in glorious black and white!

I wondered aloud, elsewhere I think, what relation this would have to Bertolucci's I sognatori (eng: The Dreamers, also starring Garrel with Eva Green and that kinda-cute white boy who played Tommy Gnosis in Hedwig and the Angry Inch)-- which covered pretty much the same subject, but in a much more interiorized setting and presentation, if somewhat more perversely. Much to my delight, P. Garrel has a main character directly invoke not only Bernardo Bertolucci, directly to the camera by name, but also, the sacred name of Pasolini rolls directly off Louis Garrel's romance-language tongue. Cinegasm!

All of that is a lot of satisfaction, from both a political and a cultural view, and shih! The only thing that could have made it more perfect, reality notwithstanding, would have been anachronistic soundtrack contributions by Noir Désir.

Here's a dream-sequence clip from the film:

Kostja Ullmann

I first noticed smoking-hot German actor Kostja Ullmann in the queer-twink-jock classic, Sommersturm (eng: Summer Storm), playing the ultimately sympathetic but meanwhile knee-jerk "I'm not a fag" best buddy/unrequited-lover. You can see the trailer here:



Obviously, Ullmann is of this new, probably "straight" but certainly not "narrow" variety of, well, whatever passes for an up-and-coming star, anymore. So, as is my wont, I went looking for whatever else he's been in, and today this hidden gem arrived from Netflix, called Verfolgt (eng: Punish Me).



You can expect the same, narrowing semi-slander in the reviews you see creeping into coverage of Ma mère. Punish Me is less transgressive in content, but perhaps even more so in conception. 16 year old Jan, a Jimmie Dean type truant with Sal Mineo's drop-dead looks, is released from punkdom to the tutelage of 51 year old probation officer Elsa (played by Maren Kroymann). She's supposed to teach him a thing or two, but it turns out the bridge transports both ways. In a plot twist reminiscent of Teorema meets Ma mère, somewhere between tasteful and boundary-pushing, Jan seduces Elsa into a sadomasochistic relationship in which the precise meaning of the title not only becomes apparent, but also is actively explored in several of its sociological ramifications. As a true depiction of paraphilia (which is to say that sexual arousal becomes separated from actual sexual activity, in the form of a "fetish,"), no actual sex occurs-- this film is about internal life, not pornography. Though I can't help but add, the full rear nudity of Ullmann certainly lends adequate prurience, sui generis, to enter this one in the "Perv away!" files.

Trailer:



PSes: Oh, did I mention: 1. glorious black and white!; 2. the kid, i.e. the masochist, emphatically initiates the whole thing; 3. bigotry and oppression vs. harmless but transgressive sexuality figures prominently in the story... just like in Sommersturm. Also, Kostja is devastatingly hot, and obviously cool.

Extra credit: what is the nature of the system in which this kind of relationship makes sense?

Hey, there be a comments section, discuss.

Hadouken! in Manhattan, 2/8/10....

You can find pix of the show by clicking through here. The html isn't willing to display pix here from FB, so until I work something out @Photobucket or whatever, the click-thru will hafta do.

It was an early show at the Mercury Lounge, on Houston St. in Manhattan, and the first time I'd been there since breaking my ankle at the Germs show last summer. It was good to be back :-) The opening band was hand-distributing CDs whose cover design clearly showed some New Order aesthetic influence, which I didn't particularly note in the music itself. They were okay, but not enough of a distraction to prevent figuring out how to get a tab at the bar.

Hadouken!, though fresh off the plane from their surging popularity in the UK, were clearly a bit nervous about gigging the USA, according to James due to our immense national geographic size. Maybe they're just friendly anyway, but it certainly put them in the mood to be super-nice to their audience. So, if you catch them on this tour, you've a good chance of getting to say 'hi' and hang out with the band for a bit.

It was a lot of fun to see how excited they got as audience members sang along with some of their songs, like "Turn the Lights Out" and "Get Smashed Gate Crash." The latter in particular is worth noting for those of you who think you're still too punk to enjoy music with electronics in it, as the chorus goes something like "Welcome to our world / We are the wasted youth / And we are your future, too..." Dude. It's like an 80s synth band had a love child with Black Flag, or something.

A good time was had by all-- and I even met another visibly-lefty fella, who'd come all the way up from Baltimore, in this weather, to catch Hadouken!'s maiden tour of the USA. Who know what the future holds, but it reminded me of all those stories about some dozens of people at those first Sex Pistols show. Don't be one of the thousands claiming you were there later, because it turned out to be a significant moment in pop-musical culture, just because you were too lame to go out on a Monday night. Bring a buddy, s/he will thank u later.

In short, it was the best $10 show I've been to in quite a while. Good times!

PS: Hadouken! has a new album out, Hadouken! For the Masses.

Coming up next.... Hadouken!

...in one of, if not their first-ever US shows, tomorrow night, NYC!

Here's some thing to look at:

Oh those wacky, wacky, transgressive French....

I've shamelessly been developing my... infatuation with French film-star hottie
Louis Garrel-- and not just for the dark curly hair and the sexy moles. Though, the royal we must insist, none of that's the least of it, either.

No, there's much more to this one, as becomes immediately apparent in his work opposite
Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet and
Ludivine Sagnier, among other hotties, in Chansons d'Amour (or Love Songs, if one simply must have it en anglais). See the trailer here:

As if a Parisien-Bretagne menage-a-lot weren't enough to, um, pique the prurient interest (and it is, dear reader), my subsequent inquiry into his work, much but not all of what I could find for typically-leftie-French-intellectual director Christophe Honoré, turned up perv gold!

Ma Mère, based on a book by 20th century sex-and-philosophy frekazoid Georges Bataille (and you know what happens when the French start mixing that kind of stuff together), finds Garrel not only playing the (often naked) (frequently cumming) school lad returned to his pervy parents' summer home out on some island. Mom, as referenced in the title and played stone cold by
Isabelle Huppert, decides it's time her son weren't so. damn. innocent. But she (and several others) get more than they bargained for, and sexual Bolshevism and its attendant psycho-sexual degeneracies ensue. Good times!

Don't let reviewers' preoccupations with, um, the sins of Oedipus fool you, this-here's a many-course feast of the French tendency to, as one wag put it, philosophize in the bedroom.

Extra special mention, before the trailer: Garrel, as Pierre, doing poolside pushups in only short-shorts and his Vans!
Sweet twinkie Jebus, a visual feast!

Now available on Netflix! So, okay, perv away:

Celebrating the proto-5th International-- in short, the Best. Blog. Ever.

Don't know much about Latin America, but yer sick of all the noize about little brown 'Commie' nations hating our freedoms? Never fear! The Bolivarian Revolution is reaching out to you... at BoRev dot net.

Oh don't worry, this isn't some preachy, pedantic site filled with bespectacled 'expert' whities and mind-numbing statistical tables. Just painfully plain facts reasserted every time the lie machine spits out more garbage, and all the snarkasm you can endure.

Really, I've spent hours and hours reading through the archived months, and it remains funny, spot-on, and even kind of... daresay, liberating.

That number again! BoRev dot net... check it out.

(h/t Peter for the clue)

Yeah... blogging.

It's like, postfaceborg, except from years ago...