 |
Productions & Events
Beer Garden, Low Tea, Middle Tea, High Tea, U Party, Melt!, Porsche, Pavilion, Soaked!…
NY TIMES: Blow Up “At a 60s Flick, Mod Reigns”
2010-07-20 | Posted in Around Town • Buzz • Productions & Events | By Vance
Congrats to everyone who helped make Blow Up a huge success!
July 1, 2010, 9:31 AM
Nocturnalist | At a ’60s Flick, Mod Reigns
By SARAH MASLIN NIR
Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times
It was a mod night when Future Cinema, an English company that screens films, celebrated its New York opening at the Shangri-La Studio on Sutton Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
Up a candlelight-flickered staircase, through a darkroom cobwebbed with clotheslines bearing ruby-lit pictures, past a writer’s desk strewn with photographic proofs, guests at a film screening in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, stepped into the past on Wednesday night: a Swinging ’60s photo studio where a Britpop band rocked out while a gaggle of actors with Twiggyesque doe eyes struck poses in the center of the room, vying for their moment in front of a photographer’s lens.
It was the New York opening of Future Cinema, an English company that screens films, and it was held at at the Shangri-La Studio on Sutton Street. The film was “Blow-Up,” the 1966 film by Michelangelo Antonioni, set in London and starring an Austin Powers prototype — an ennui-ridden fashion photographer named Thomas (David Hemmings).
The intent was for guests to feel as if they were models at a casting. As the line to enter stretched down the sidewalk before doors opened at 8 p.m., guests said, a vintage British car pulled up, spilling forth a live-action “Thomas” followed by a cluster of screaming girls, who would later become the mod models in the photo-shoot-turned-party. [Read more...]
Thank you About.com!
Vance Garrett
Meet the Black Party Director and Scenarist
By David Sokol, About.com Contributing Writer
“A shrine of pillar candles and pictures of lost revolutionaries sits in one corner of the room. The trail of roses leads the men upstairs into the big room. We discover an unfamiliar cavernous hall. Glimpses of bars, ropes, candles, and petals appear in the distance, but a scene at the very center of the room illuminates the whole space…For about one hour, we see one gorgeous, impeccably dressed man dancing the tango, alone. He uses prison bars as his partner…”
This is just one of the scenes in Vance Garrett’s remarkably thorough treatment for the Black Party. The 13-page document also describes walls plastered with revolutionary paraphernalia and ticked with the chalk marks of a prisoner tracking his cell time. And of nuns muttering a blessing to the Virgin Mary — probably begging her for forgiveness — as each Black Party attendant checks his belongings at the door.
Garrett has been working for The Saint at Large since 2005, with increasing responsibility for the look and feel of the Black Party. Today he is its director and scenarist — this year mixing Argentine culture, the political upheavals of the Infamous Decade, leather and bondage, and high camp into one coherent, stimulating, storytelling dance party. (Read more…)
Revolutionary Cell Block Tango :: The Saint At Large Presents Rites XXXI: The Black Party
by Mark Thompson and Robert Doyle
EDGE Contributor
Sunday Feb 28, 2010
GOLPE! reads one headline. There’s anger in the air. Revolutionary fervor. Another headline reads:GOVERNMENT DEMOLISHED. NEW BLACK PARTY APPEARS.
Taken from the Spanish term “golpe de estado,” golpe means coup d’etat: the sudden overthrowing of a state government-which means that, once again, this year’s Black Party invite has caught the American zeitgeist and the revolutionary zeal in the vox populi with uncanny prescience. The Great Recession, with its discomfiting parallels to the final years of the Weimar Republic, has unleashed the demons of debauchery and decadence, with a burning desire for a totally new order-and that’s where Black Party XXXI commences.
With a twelve-page backstory narrative, this year’s Black Party celebration of the arrival of the vernal equinox reads like an amalgam of Kiss of the Spider Woman meets “Cell Block Tango” in 1932 Buenos Aires, where a militaristic regime with a penchant for roses and rough tango has seized control. Matadors and masochists commingle with sadists and Santeria. It’s the black of night and totalitarianism-and the red of blood, roses, martyrdom-and saints.
Ever since Bruce Mailman opened the original Saint in 1980, and celebrated the vernal equinox with a two-night Black Party (hence the reason for the 31st Black Party thirty years later), men from around the world have congregated in New York City to celebrate an annual rite that echoes the ancient Druids. With the enforced closing of the Saint in 1988 (due to the burgeoning AIDS crisis and city crackdowns), and the untimely passing of Mailman in 1994, the Black Party, for the past nineteen years, has been helmed by Stephen Pevner, the extraordinary visionary behind the Saint-at-Large, and his exceedingly gifted creative staff, all of whom work to explore the darker side of Dionysian, sybaritic revels. Recent incarnations of this blackest of nights have included such all-encompassing themes as Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, Lucha Libre, free wrestling, and the underside of NASCAR-as well as The Dangerous Black Party For Boys, all of them immersing patrons in theatrical environments that withstand comparison to Vegas, Cirque de Soleil, and les egouts de Paris. (Read more…)
December 9th: Laugh Out Loud
2009-12-03 | Posted in Around Town • Productions & Events | By Vance
Nov. 16: GMHC FASHION FORWARD
2009-11-11 | Posted in Around Town • Productions & Events | By Vance
Tim Gunn Returns as Master of Ceremonies
7 PM Cocktail Reception
Hors d’oeuvres - Open bar
9 PM Runway Show by Saks Fifth Avenue
featuring Resort 2009 Collections for men and women by:
Burberry, Diesel, Dolce & Gabbana, Gucci, Michael Kors, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, Vince and more
Can’t make it this year? Help GMHC share its message with your friends by inviting them to Fashion Forward…
To purchase tickets, please visit www.gmhc.org or call 212.367.1389
Spare Times
By ANNE MANCUSO
Published: October 22, 2009
CLUB PURGATORIO
Feel free to insert your own joke about the frightfulness of New York night life, but the owners of the Box, the downtown club known for its extravagant, lascivious stage shows, may have the last laugh.
For the first time, Simon Hammerstein and Randy Weiner, partners in the Box, have opened a haunted house: a 15,000-square-foot, three-story, adults-only haunted house, in the old China Club in Midtown. The idea, Mr. Weiner said on a preopening tour last week, was to amp up the traditional Halloween experience. (Read more…)
|
|
   
|
|
