Big Game 7:00 PM
Big Game formed in the fall of 2008 when keyboardist/vocalist Erik den Breejen and drummer/vocalist Colin “Baby Rue” Ocon from Acid Canyon joined forces with bassist Mathias “Uncle T” Sias. The trio found common ground in their love of heavy psychedelic improvisation and catchy rock songcraft and the startling juxtapositions these two forces could create. “Humble Pie” and a reworking of The Who’s “The Dirty Jobs” best capture the early stages of Big Game, as these tunes provided ample opportunity for extensive jamming that was later honed and refined. Though their songs are structured and arranged, they allow room for spontaneity and improvisation. Most solos are never played the same way twice. Vocally, the band has a flair for the dramatic, singing sweetly one moment and screaming the next in service of creating an emotional urgency that runs throughout the music.
Friday, November 20th
Perfect Wieners and Butts 7:00 PM
It’s lucky for you that I’m in love with you [I’d] probably never speak to you again. –Terry Griffith
Continuing their musical examination of the hermaphroditic, Perfect Wieners and Butts address life’s most perplexing dilemmas with minimal resources: “you got a problem, you get in drag.” Pop cultures role in the changing attitudes towards transvestites and drag royalty can be attributed in part to the “mistaken identity” and “role reversal” genres within 20th century TV and cinema. PWB have been studying films like Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire and shows like Bosom Buddies.
PWB’s latest show at Winkleman Gallery, THRILLS, is an adaptation of 1985’s gender mutable high school classic Just One Of The Guys, directed by Lisa Gottlieb. In the film, budding reporter Terry Griffith is a high school student who writes an article competing for an internship at a local newspaper, but her work is overlooked by her chauvinistic journalism teacher and boys are chosen for the job instead. She enters the competition at a nearby high school, disguised as a boy to investigate if she will succeed. She does finally write about her experience as a man, and wins the internship. PWB have taken their own dog-eared and de-magnetized-by-the-viewing VHS copy of the flick, removed the sex, illusionism, and sentimentality, and reordered the remains; leaving a scant stud frame and unmade bed.
These are the posts and props where the Wieners and Butts drape their undergarments, raise their fag-flags, and tuck-in their prosthetic totems and tumors. The, ahem, Perfected site of THRILLS is where our surrogate heroine, Perfect Wieners and Butts, sets out, with Just One Of The Guys’ newly renovated landscape as her starting point, on a saga of self-obsessed, self-discovery, set to a Perfectly dismembered song cycle.
Tunes from the film are pulled apart, freed of their tacky synthetic conceits, then reassembled; minimally held together with bubblegum and scotch tape. Recorded in one take, these songs will be a vacuum-sealed sonic environment where the members will interact with the soundtrack – in playback – for a house-of-cards performance piece. Otherwise clichéd theatrical signifiers – lights, fog, sets, and costuming – act as a box-spring loaded bed-frame setting where fictive, pre-recorded, cinematic time is grafted onto natural time, allowing impossible interactions to happen real-time.
The strange and varied approach of previous PWB performances has provoked accusations of charlantry or lack of serious intent. SKEPTICS TAKE NOTE! There are active taste buds on that tongue and they are mining that cheek for new flavors.
No comments:
Post a Comment