photo by spider (@lesbian.equipment)
Velvet goldmine / naked on your chainI’ll be your King Volcano / right for you again — David Bowie, “Velvet Goldmine” (1971/1975)
“We have a very modest goal for this film…to turn every gay person straight and every straight person gay.” —director Todd Haynes on his film Velvet Goldmine (1998)
Succumb to your filth / and your rotten point of view / life is too short, and there’s nothing else / you can do— Julia Pierce “Devout 2U”
Last night the virtual movie group I’ve belonged to since peak Covid days screened Todd Haynes’ Velvet Goldmine, a “glam fantasia” with heavy emphasis on polymorphous perversity and calculated artifice that’s been called the best and most timeless queer film of its era riffing on the cultural connections between David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Oscar Wilde, Citizen Kane, and queer theory…
…and not having seen Velvet Goldmine in very many years I was impressed anew not only by the weirdly sublime or or is that sublimely weird musical set pieces (the soundtrack is tragically not on streaming services) or the cast of soon-to-be-internationally-known thespians in full-on “oh you pretty young dudes” form (Christian Bale, Jonathan Ryes Myers, Ewan McGregor a.k.a. Obi “Wang” Kenobi—watch it and you’ll understand) but also by how resonant and relevant to the current moment this ‘70s-glam-heydey-via-late-‘90s-Cool-Britannia movie feels today…
…cuz it feels like we got our own little velvet goldmine goin’ on right here night after night in the assorted grimy, dimly lit grottos of Cool Bushwickia And Beyond in these the halcyon days of wine and poses that we’re calling The New Theatricality cuz we love making up labels and also cuz the film’s Bowie/Bolan/Jobriath pastiche Brian Slade character offers one aphorism after another that could easily be applied to the scene including “rock and roll is a prostitute, it should be tarted up, performed” one assumes via a stable of shifting personas, genre defilements, and gender fluidity…
…and at the forefront of this New Theatricality are a clutch of not-for-the-pearl-clutching-crowd “peacock punks” with Tits Dick Ass being Exhibit A, T & D of the new wave of full-throttle, trans-fronted (no one’s quite sure about the backs but all backsides are pretty much the same anyway) punk bands, in this instance, fronted by high femme vocalist-guitarist Julia Pierce who has lamented elsewhere how safe and defanged rock music has come to be with a mission statement for TDA “to be part of something dangerous” as a potential remedy…
…an attitude that certainly comes across live whenever TDA takes the stage, between drummer Tom Person’s Cambridge Rapist-esque bondage gear and bassist Seth Sosebee’s uncannily evokes the glost of Sid Vicious smashing his ghost bass over the heads of anyone lodging in Room 100 of the Chelsea Hotel (plus he can actually play bass!) meaning that TDA taken together are like if Divine-as-Babs-Johnson were to form a band with her chicken-loving son Crackers and sausage-flashing “filthiest person alive” rival Raymond Marble…
…plus the whole “politics of filth” thing., i.e., violating the nice, neat lines of clearly-demarcated categories of whatever kind and here’s the thing that muddies the waters even more and only further bolsters the theory of a New Theatricality and that’s the nearly stealth release of Julia Pierce’s debut solo album about a month ago on Bandcamp and this taking place before TDA has even dropped their debut album Fuck and what’s more the album is called Rebirth and if I were to see Julia walking on the street with Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble tucked under her arm I wouldn’t be so surprised…
…a record about which Julia says “Yes, it is a rebirth. We’re always recreating ourselves as we make sense of the world around us, which is constantly changing. I want to strip away any sort of veneer and just be myself as much as I can be while I do the thing I love. Nothing brings me more joy that to see one of my songs through from start to finish. There is an endless sea of expression in all of us and I hope that my solo project can be a home to any and every idea this universe threads into my ear. My music is my mirror”…
…and if Tits Dick Ass are like the Sex Pistols of the New Theatricality scene (adhering to Stanislavski‘s method from the quote above?) then it follows that Rebirth is perhaps something like Public Image Ltd cuz much like early PiL the debut of Julia’s side project is an adventurous, experimental exploration mashing up genres and styles ranging from shimmying death disco to sprawling eight-minute mesmeric epics of dirge-pop introspection which taken together is totes “punk rock” in its very anti-punkness with a lead-off single “DEVOUT 2U” that sees Julia moving to the opposite side of the dom-sub divide that she inhabits in TDA…
…where, again in Julia’s own worlds, “DEVOUT 2U is a about submission. Anyway you slice it. Sexual. Spiritual. Emotional…what is it like to lose yourself to someone or something in the name of love? For the sake of pleasure?” and on that note it’s notable how simply losing yourself can actually take a great deal of effort to achieve so why not let Julia Pierce and her new single do the heavy lifting cuz all that’s required on your part is to get lost in the scopophilic pleasures of the New Theatricality and surrender to her gaze… (Jason Lee)
Julia Pierce is an American singer, songwriter, performer and poet. She fronts and plays guitar in NYC-based punk band TDA (Tits Dick Ass) and does poetry readings KGB Bar in the East Village. She was a former publicist for London-based designer Vivienne Westwood (2017).