#great British documentary photographers

[karingottschalk]

The Retrospective Show Of Documentary Photographs By The Late Chris Killip At The Photographers Gallery In London Is This Season's Must-See

The Retrospective Show Of Documentary Photographs By The Late Chris Killip At The Photographers Gallery In London Is This Season’s Must-See

‘Chris Killip, retrospective’, running from Friday October 7 2022 through to Sunday February 2023, is the must-see retrospective photography show for anyone interested in the long tradition of great British documentary photography. It is on show at The Photographers Gallery at 16-18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW with the nearest Tube station being Oxford Circus.  Chris Killip’s continued…

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#British photographers #British photography #Chris Killip #great British documentary photographers #great British documentary photography #The Photographers’ Gallery

[princesscatherinemiddleton]

The Princess of Wales’ Year in Review: December

December 5th - The Princess of Wales, Patron of Evelina Children's Hospital, opened the Children's Day Surgery Unit at Evelina Children's Hospital. Later, she joined her husband and the King and Queen at an evening reception at Buckingham Palace for the Diplomatic Corps December 6th - The Princess of Wales, Patron of the Royal Foundation, held a meeting at Windsor Castle. The Wales family were also seen Christmas tree shopping in Windsor Great Park December 7th - A short clip of the Princess of Wales promoting her Carol Concert was released December 8th - The Princess of Wales, Patron of the Royal Foundation of The Prince and Princess of Wales, held a Christmas Carol Service in Westminster Abbey. She was accompanied by her husband and children, and members of the British royal family and Middleton family December 9th - The Wales family Christmas card - taken by Josh Shinner in Windsor - was released December 11th - A video of the Princess of Wales, Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis volunteering at their local baby bank in November was released December 12th - The Princess of Wales, Patron of the Royal Foundation, held an Early Years Meeting at Windsor Castle December 19th - A short clip of the Princess of Wales appeared in an episode of 'Secrets of the Aquarium' - the footage was shot during in 2022 during Sail GP December 23rd - Kensington Palace released three photographs of the Princess of Wales with three inspiring people (Russell, Ray and Brenda) who have made a difference to the lives of young people. Footage from the meeting was aired during the 'Together at Christmas' Carol Concert December 24th - ITV aired the 'Together at Christmas' Carol Concert December 25th - William and Catherine made a personal Christmas tweet, alongside a photograph of their three children. That morning, the Wales family joined members of the British Royal Family at the Divine Service in Sandringham Parish Church. During the King's Speech, footage of the Wales family at work during the year was aired December 26th - Footage of the Wales family at the coronation rehearsal and the coronation appeared in the 'Charles III: A Coronation Year' BBC documentary December 29th - Kensington Palace released their own "Year in Review" video to end the year December 30th - Matt Porteous released a photograph of the Wales family at the Coronation Concert

#mine #royaltyedit #kate #yearreview #evelina london 23 #diplomatic reception 23 #meeting23 6 #christmas carol concert 23 #baby bank 23 #ey meeting 23 16 #xmas23 #charles iii: a coronation year

[maverickuk]

SWAG Workbench 2022 provides a platform to showcase what is new, old or just interesting in the modern Amiga scene. These meet-ups are organised by the South West Amiga Group (SWAG) in the South West of England who do a great job of putting together a packed day of talks against a backdrop of community mingling and various shopping opportunities.

One of the Amiga's talents back in the day was its use in professional video production through the Video Toaster and software such as Lightwave 3D. Exactly this combination of hardware and software are used by The Amiga Show to produce documentaries about the Amiga, by using actual Amiga hardware and software.

I learnt that the Video Toaster stores video in an analogue form, just like the laserdisc format. This enables the Amiga to work very quickly with the data, as it doesn't have the digital processing overhead.

We also had guests from Koch Media & Retro Games Limited to talk through the production of the A500 Mini, the plug'n'plug modern Amiga device.

It was interesting to hear the CTO Chris Smith talk about how he's the person who has undertaken all the technical work to create the software for the device. All the hardware design and construction takes place in Taiwan, with Chris and other collaborating on the process.

They also discussed the difficulties and costs of licencing, which is why there aren't any LucasArt owned games (e.g. Monkey Island).

The Sensible Software catalogue almost made it to the device, however when EA bought out Codemasters that unfortunately killed the deal.

Some of the Amiga Addict magazine team were present and spoke about their adventures in getting a UK based modern Amiga magazine published. Although there are several non-UK Amiga magazines in publication, the team felt there was room an Amiga mag with more British sensibilities.

It's easy to assume when such a glossy magazine is produced that it's an effortless process behind the scenes. However we learnt about all the spreadsheets and last minute tweaks to get everything together to hit the presses on time. Then the hands on effort required to stuff each envelope for each and every subscriber.

After 12 issues they've been able to get the magazine on sale in WHSmith stores, which is a impressive and heart warming achievement.

There's so much more I could write about the day, but instead I'll leave with a few more photographs and invite anyone in the area with an interest in Amigas (or just retro tech) to consider attending the next meet up.

#SWAG #amiga #hoffman #Amiga Addict #retro gaming

[natromanxoff]

Record Collector - December, 1996

Credits to Louise Belle and Queencuttings.com

NEWS FOR THE RECORD

COMPILED BY MARK PAYTRESS

MERCURY MULTIMEDIA

THE FREDDIE MERCURY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

THE FREDDIE MERCURY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

An exhibition featuring over 100 photographs of Freddie Mercury went on show at the Royal Albert Hall last week, to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the death of the Queen frontman. The display is drawn from both private and public collections and spans the singer’s life from his infancy in Zanzibar to his final, formal portrait, taken during his battle against Aids. The exhibition is free of charge, and is open until 11th December.

Turn to the feature elsewhere in this issue for more details, plus an exclusive selection of images from the show.

QUEEN GIVE US THE EYE

Queen Multimedia, in conjunction with Electronic Arts, have announced the launch of “The Eye”, an interactive, action-adventure computer game, based on the music and imagery of the band.

The game will be available in March 1997 as a five-CD-ROM set compatible with IBM PCs. Ninety minutes of original and remixed versions of Queen’s best-known songs have been aligned to “motion captured characters and real-time facial animatio”.

“ ‘Queen — The Eye’ will be the first music game of its kind,” claims Tim Massey of Destination Design, who created the package. “This resourceful vision makes the integration of Queen’s timeless appeal with the revolutionary audio and visual gaming technology a ‘must have’ product.”

Expect a flurry of promotional and advertising initiatives to tie in with the release of the game, including a ‘making-of’ TV documentary; a worldwide syndicated radio special; and at least three associated books, to be published by Boxtree. A price for “Queen — The Eye" has yet to be fixed, although the manufacturers estimate it will be in the region of £40.

STATUESQUE MERCURY

On 25th November, five years after the untimely death of Freddie Mercury, a 9ft bronze statue of the late, great singer was unveiled at the waterfront at Lake Geneva, Montreux, Switzerland, near to Mountain Studios where Queen recorded their final album, “Made In Heaven”. The statue was paid for by Freddie’s family and friends, and the patch of land on which it stands was donated by the commune of Montreux, who got to know Freddie during his final years.

The statue is the work of Czech sculptor Irene Sedliek, a fellow of the Royal Society of British Sculptors and a memory of the Society of Portrait Sculptors. The memorial was unveiled by opera star Montserrat Caballe, with whom Freddie recorded his “Barcelona” theme tune to the 1988 Olympic Games.

WIENER WILL ROCK YOU

Following screenings at film festivals in Venice, Cannes and London earlier this year, Queen’s “Made In Heaven: The Films”, is now available on a compilation video, via independent label Wienerworld, priced £10.99. Without Freddie as Queen's focal point, the band bypassed the traditional rock video medium and opted instead to commission eight short films from young directors via the British Film Institute.

“Queen were the pioneers of the promo and have reinvented it on many occasions. The project offered the opportunity to think hard about what has happened to the music promo, and how to invigorate a more dynamic relationship between pictures and sound,” said executive producer and head of the BFI Film Division Ben Gibson. “l think the results, which are films in their own right, vindicate everyone’s belief that the project has crossed new boundaries on short film-making.”

EURO GA GA

“Queen Dance Traxx 1” is a new album featuring sixteen Europop cover versions of songs made famous by pop's most flamboyant foursome. Issued on the Continent in October and in January in the U.K., the CD features dancefloor-orientated reworkings of Queen anthems like “We Will Rock You” (by Interactive), “Under Pressure” (by Culture Beat), “l Was Born To Love You” (by World's Apart) and “The Invisible Man” (by Scatman John).

“The first time I heard ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ I stopped what I was doing and just listened,” reports the Scatman. “As a jazz artist at the time, I knew I was hearing something special. Freddie Mercury’s knowledge of music, coupled with his vision, was clearly understood by the band… and there was a development and execution of that understanding that created music I felt was of genius. With this project, we’re aiming to bring a new life to the music of a past generation with sensitivity, with taste and with creativity.”

LASERS LEAD THE WAY

Two other Queen films, the “Champions Of The World” documentary and “The Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert”, have just been issued on Laser Disc, via Pioneer. The Laser Disc is the principal video format in the States, and is growing in Europe. The manufactures of these 12" diameter, double-sided discs claim digital sound and broadcast-quality pictures, plus the added bonus of compact disc-style indexing. On music titles this means you can key into favourite tracks without having to bother with out-moded ideas like fast-forward and rewind.

“Champions Of The World” is priced £24.99, while the double-disc “The Freddie Mercury Tribute” costs £34.99. Forthcoming Queen Laser Disc releases include “Greatest Hits 1 & 2” and “Wembley”.

FLASH!

THE FREDDIE MERCURY PHOTOGRAPHIC EXHIBITION

ANDY DAVIS INTRODUCES A NEW VISUAL CELEBRATION OF QUEEN’S MUCH MISSED FRONTMAN

It’s now five years since the rock music world learned of the tragic death of Freddie Mercury. In that time, the surviving members of the band have paid tribute to him by completing and releasing the final album they recorded together, “Made In Heaven”, and have sanctioned a whole host of projects by which fans can remember Freddie and the group he fronted with such astonishing showmanship for twenty years.

Now, to mark the fifth anniversary of his death, and to celebrate his extraordinary life, an exhibition featuring some of the best photographs of Freddie Mercury has just opened at the Royal Albert Hall. Sponsored by EMI Music, the exhibition was conceived by Queen’s manager Jim Beach, and is being put together under the aegis Of Freddie’s publishing company, Mercury Songs. One of its principal aims is to raise both funds and awareness for the Mercury Phoenix Trust, the Aids support charity established in Freddie’s name in the wake of his death. (To date, the Trust has raised around £4 million.)

The choice of venue — the circular corridor which runs around the inside perimeter of the Royal Albert Hall — is both unusual and prestigious, as explained by the exhibition’s curator, Richard Gray, who as Queen’s art director, has been the man behind all the band’s artwork for the last ten years.

“It took a long time to figure that the Royal Albert Hall might be the venue,” he reveals. “Exhibitions like this are usually something they don’t get involved with. But we wanted people to have access to the show without getting the feeling you can get, for example, in some art galleries, where the door has to be unlocked for you before you can even go in. The exhibition is free of charge, but there will be collection boxes on the site, and we hope that people will be generous!”

CUTE

The exhibition features over 100 colour and black-and-white images spanning Freddie’s life, from cute baby photos of the infant Farookh Bulsara just a few months old in Zanzibar to his final, formal portrait, taken by Richard Gray for “Greatest Hits II” in 1991. Each photograph has been enlarged to 20” by 16”, and has been carefully retouched where appropriate, and then finished using the most sophisticated imaging techniques available. In all, the show took over a year to complete.

“The big jump came when we were granted access to Freddie’s parents and his photo albums,” reveals Richard. “Initially, Freddie’s parents weren’t sure whether they wanted to open up their family albums, but once they’d made that decision they were happy for us to continue.” Because ofhis family’s co-operation, fans now have a rare opportunity to glimpse the man, the child even, behind the Mercury persona which Freddie spent much of his life cultivating. But what a persona!

Among the pictures Brian May contributed from his personal collection are a series of stereo photographs of Freddie taken the late 70s and early 80s. “Stereo cameras take two he shots of the same image and turn them into 3-D,” explains Richard. “They’re quite amazing. There are five stereo pictures on show in a special viewer, all of which feature Queen live on stage. Brian would lend his stereo camera to photographers covering the concerts, and there are others by David Burder, an expert in 3-D photography, who also happens to be a friend of Brian’s. He helped me get the shots together.”

Among the other images on show are pictures of Freddie at Ealing Art College in the late 60s, dozens of stills of him in Queen throughout the 70s and 80s, and a handful of Polaroids of the lakefront view at Montreux, which Freddie sent home to his parents. “It’s more the case of telling a story than just a photographic exhibition,” maintains Richard Gray. “There are lots of photos which you'll recognise, but others, probably about 25%, which have never been seen before.”

Another highlight for fans will be the only U.K. showing of the three-foot high plaster model which sculptress Irene Sedliek used for her statue of Freddie, recently erected in Montreux, Switzerland, and which appeared on the cover of “Made In Heaven” album. A smaller version of the statue, measuring about 12” in height, will be included in the exhibition when it travels abroad next year.

After a break for Christmas, the exhibition will move to the National Theatre in Paris for two weeks in January, followed by a season at the Cologne Philharmonie in Germany. Thereafter, it will undertake a two-year world tour, and there are plans for it to return home sometime in the near future, where it will be staged in various provincial British cities. Commemorative tie-in merchandising, including a set of six postcards, a poster, T-shirt, and a 20-page programme, is on sale at the exhibition, all profits from which will go to the Mercury Phoenix Trust.

All photographs reproduced by kind permission of Mercury Songs Ltd.

The Freddie Mercury Photographic Exhibition is open from 10.00am to 1.00pm until 11th December 1996 (excepting Thursday 5th December), at the Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, London SW72AP. Admission is free but by ticket only. 500 tickets are available in advance for each day of the exhibilion. A further 1,000 tickets are available each day to personal callers.

Telephone bookings/enquiries: Royal Albert Hall Box Office, 0171 589 8212, open 9.00am to 9.00pm every day.

Photo captions:

• Farookh Bulsara pictured at home in Zanzibar in spring 1947, as captured by a local Indian photographer.

• LEFT The young Freddie Mercury, snapped by his father in the family’s back garden in Zanzibar. He’s dressed for a blessing ceremony at a fire-temple, as a birthday celebration.

• ABOVE Freddie and his sister Kashmira, again photographed by their father, in the Indian village of Bulsar, from which the family took its name.

• The Hectics, Freddie’s first rock’n’roll group, at St. Peter’s School, Panchgani, India in the late 50s.

• ABOVE A Little Richard impression from Freddie and the Hectics. That’s the fledgling Mr. Mercury at the piano, of course.

• BELOW Young Freddie Bulsara and his St. Peter’s School classmates in the original “Bicycle Race” from the late Fifties.

• Freddie live on stage in America, during 1980 — playing up to drummer Roger Taylor while his audience watches adoringly.

• ABOVE Backstage during the South American tour, Freddie experiments with an acoustic 12-string.

• RIGHT Queen in the enormous Estadio Municipal at Mar Del Plata, in Argentina, during their 1981 South American tour.

• ABOVE An armed security guard greets Queen as they arrive via helicopter in Argentina in 1981. Within months, the Falklands War had broken out.

• BELOW Freddie and Queen enjoying the company of Argentina’s armed police motorcycle escort!

• LEFT A still from the unforgettable 1984 video for the “Radio Ga Ga” single.

• RIGHT Another video still, as Freddie catches up with the hoovering on the set of “l Want To Break Free”.

• BELOW Freddie in full flight during the band’s 1982 U.S. tour.

• LEFT The 1987 version of Freddie’s peacock suit first seen in “It’s A Hard Life” — an inspiration for Paul Weller’s last single, perhaps?

• ABOVE A candid portrait from Freddie's final years, used to promote Queen’s 1990 album, “Innuendo”.

• BELOW An official portrait for Freddie’s duet with Montserrat Caballe in 1988.

#queen #queen band #roger taylor #freddie mercury #brian may #john deacon #montserrat caballe #queen scans #queencuttings.com #record collector december 1996

[jimhair]

If you are near Oxford, there is an exhibition of ceramics by Lucie Rie until January 7 @oxfordceramicsgallery I’ve always admired the ceramics made by Lucie Rie and on my visits to England and Wales in 1987 and 1989 I stopped by her home and studio at Albion Mews. Lucie had a great sense of humor and when I showed her some of my photographs of artists (Beatrice Wood, Mary Holmes, Laura Andreson) she asked me with a wicked gleam in her eyes: “What is it with you and older women?” We did talk about her escape from the Nazis and I made this pensive portrait. Lucie Rie, Albion Mews, June 1987 🇺🇦💔🌎💔🌏💔🌍💔🇺🇦 #earth #human #london #1987 #dame #lucierie #british #potter #holocaust #shoah #documentary #artist #portrait #pottery #canon #35mm @kodak #kodachrome #transparency #film #photography #filmisnotdead #istillshootfilm #filmisalive #fromwhereistand #pdx #portland #nw #northwest #leftcoast #oregon https://www.instagram.com/p/ClhE_NkSZx7/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#earth #human #london #1987 #dame #lucierie #british #potter #holocaust #shoah #documentary #artist #portrait #pottery #canon #35mm #kodachrome #transparency #film #photography #filmisnotdead #istillshootfilm #filmisalive #fromwhereistand #pdx #portland #nw #northwest #leftcoast #oregon

[scarletunit6]

IRISH FASHION: THE THREAD OF CELTIC HERITAGE

24 juin 2020

As I wished to present yet another facet of fashion in the Celtic world, I could hardly ignore the outstanding TV series Snáithe conceived by the graduate of Irish and Celtic studies Ciara Nic Chormaic and presented by the fashion blogger Ciara O’Doherty. Shown on Irish channel TG4 in 2018, the six-part documentary is in Irish (Gaeilge) as the title Snáithe meaning “thread” indicates. However, one can easily switch on the English subtitles and enjoy that magnificent series of illustrated interviews on the history and impact of Irish fashion. I am fond of it because I share her general conclusion that modern fashion, in our Celtic countries, can be firmly rooted in cultural heritage.

Indeed, Ciara O’Doherty answers the essential questions that I have often asked myself when visiting friends in Ireland or welcoming them here in Brittany: have the Irish a distinctive fashion style? Is that fashion influenced by the Irish heritage? And what does fashion reveal about the Irish people?

The six episodes do not follow a chronological order but deal rather with themes enriched by archive footage and photographs to complement interviews.

As the historian of Anglo-Irish literature Declan Kiberd explains in the series Wilde supported the free bodily movement and he thought that man should nurture some femininity. He used to say: “All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does and this is his.”

He did encourage androgyny (including the divided skirt created with his wife Constance), understanding the power of clothes.

No doubt his homosexuality which brought him to jail, to ultimate isolation and death in Paris, powerfully played a role in his vision. But seen from our modern perspective he was a fashion pioneer.

Summarised in part VI of the film, the idea that prominent and powerful people supported the creativeness of designers, but also the textile industry, runs all along the series.

For instance, some of the famous Irish-made laces such as Limerick lace and Carrickmacross lace were taught in schools funded by benefactors. Tweed was brought to London especially by Alice Hart, the British philanthropist who, after a trip to Donegal, was dismayed by the utter poverty (after the Great Famine). Therefore, she decided to revive the Donegal tweed. She sent the locals examples of design from Scottish tweeds and helped them find dyes using local plants.

Designers were supported by upper class women such as Lady Dunsany (the wife of the writer famous for his fairy tales) who publicized the “peasant chic” look. This was especially done when women were shot by photographers in cottages in the West of Ireland. And there again the famous Red Flannel Petticoat from the Aran Islands was especially appreciated as traditional dresses as shown by two photographers of the Paris-based Kahn Foundation, Marguerite Mespoulet and Madeleine Mignon who came to Ireland in May 1913.

Pictures from the Kahn foundation in the West of Ireland (1913)

www.nolwennfaligot.fr. (n.d.). IRISH FASHION: THE THREAD OF CELTIC HERITAGE. [online] Available at: https://www.nolwennfaligot.fr/amp/irish-fashion. ‌

[dankusner]

RuPaul Doesn’t See How That’s Any of Your Business

The drag star brought the form mainstream, and made an empire out of queer expression. Now he fears “the absolute worst.”

By Ronan Farrow March 1, 2024

RuPaul wearing a black hat and black jacket holding up a red flower in front of his mouth.

“I’m up against the status quo,” RuPaul says. “There is pain in that.”Photograph by Danielle Levitt for The New Yorker

Recently, the drag star RuPaul Andre Charles has taken to falling asleep while watching the documentary series “Secrets of Great British Castles.” He’s seen every episode, knows every turn in the bloody histories of landmarks like Dover Castle and the Tower of London.

“The headline is: Humans have been horrible since the beginning of time,” RuPaul told me. “And the human ego can justify these terrible things that people do. You know, these kings, Henry VIII, and Edward II, and all these people who have just decimated hundreds of thousands of people because their feelings were hurt.”

RuPaul is braced for conflict.

“I’m fearing the absolute worst,” he said. “We are moments away from fucking civil war. All the signs are there.” He continued, “Humans on this planet are in the cycle of destruction. I am plotting a safety net.”

He was referring to a fortified compound being constructed on the sixty-thousand-acre ranch of his husband, Georges LeBar, in Wyoming.

“I wouldn’t call it a bunker,” he said. But it is designed to withstand calamity. “It’s a lot of concrete and a lot of things. I keep thinking about these castles that I’m going to bed to.”

I met RuPaul at the end of January in Britain, at a rented cottage in Windsor and at Pinewood Studios, nearby, where movie franchises including James Bond and Harry Potter have been filmed.

He was shooting “RuPaul’s Drag Race UK,” one of nineteen regional variations of his competition reality show, while promoting a memoir, which will be published this week, called “The House of Hidden Meanings.”

(The title comes from a friend’s comment during an acid trip. “After the drugs wore off,” he writes, “I realized it was nonsense.”)

RuPaul now hosts seven versions of “Drag Race,” a pastiche of competition reality-television tropes that follows participants, in and out of drag, through eclectic challenges including costume-making, lip-synching, and standup comedy (testing “charisma, uniqueness, nerve, and talent”—the resulting acronym is representative of the show’s bawdy sense of humor). He has taken an underground, subversive form and made it so mainstream that Nancy Pelosi has appeared as a guest on the show. The sixteenth season of the U.S. version, currently airing, has some of its highest ratings yet, and RuPaul recently won his fourteenth Emmy, making him the most decorated competition host and the most decorated person of color in the award’s history.

“Drag Race” often focusses on competitors who are profoundly marginalized. Almost all the drag queens on the show are queer, and many are people of color, who come from backgrounds where they faced homophobia, racism, or transphobia. For them, drag can be a lifeline, affording a sense of community and an opportunity to transmute stigmatized traits into something exuberant. “It’s armor, ’cause you’re putting on a persona. So the comments are hitting something you created, not you,” Jinkx Monsoon, who has won two seasons of the show, told me. “And then it’s my sword, because all of the things that made me a target make me powerful as a drag queen.”

Yet, as “Drag Race” has become mainstream, a burgeoning culture war has demonized its subject matter. In the past year, lawmakers in at least fifteen states have attempted to ban drag shows, part of a wider queer panic. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, more than four hundred bills that the organization identifies as anti-L.G.B.T.Q.+ are currently under consideration around the country, featuring provisions like curriculum censorship, facilities bans, and mandates that school staff out young people to their families. Drag performances, particularly for child audiences, have recently been cancelled in at least seven countries where “Drag Race” airs. RuPaul, sixty-three, is the world’s most famous drag queen, at the helm of one of the world’s most far-reaching platforms for queer expression. In conservative communities around the country and the world, he often serves as a way in to queer culture. And, for those set against that culture, he represents the dangerous spread of liberal ideas. “He’s seen the way people connect to the show. That’s the way for him to spread the rebuttal to what’s happening in the world,” Randy Barbato, an executive producer of “Drag Race,” said. “His way to ward off the enemy.”

One of RuPaul’s favorite responses, to anyone who asks how he’s doing, is “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.” This is a bit, but it’s also something of a life philosophy. “Ru, he is a study in the private and the public self,” Barbato said. “He’s a public figure. And he’s extraordinarily private.” I have twice appeared as a judge on the American “Drag Race” programs, but our interviews in England were our first substantive exchanges. In advance, I received anxious calls from mutual friends telling me how much RuPaul hates giving interviews, and when I met him, at Pinewood Studios, almost the first thing out of his mouth was “I fucking hate giving interviews.” (The actual first thing he said, after he noticed that I was on crutches, owing to a sprained ankle, was classic “Drag Race” standup: “Fisting accident?” Quoting a contestant on the show, I told him, “There are no accidents in fisting.”)

We sat in a small dressing room dominated by RuPaul’s hair-and-makeup collection, which covered four plastic picnic tables, and by the man himself, who is six-four but is often thought to be taller, probably on account of all the killer heels. (The celebrated drag queen Lady Bunny once described him as “a six-foot-seven monster-model-woman thing.”) RuPaul, on a break between shooting segments in which he would appear out of drag, was without the heels, and instead wore fuzzy gray slippers, a black Abbey Road hoodie, and black workout pants.

“I did not think this memoir shit through,” he told me, shaking his head. “It’s presumptuous that the interviewer can interpret my experience.” There’s some irony in this: like many reality shows, “Drag Race” is subject to complaints from competitors who feel unfairly reduced to archetypes. (“It’s nothing like what happened on set,” Phi Phi O’Hara, who was portrayed as hostile toward other contestants, told New York.) RuPaul once recorded a song about the complaints, “Blame It on the Edit,” singing, “You the one who said it, bitch / How you gon’ regret it.” To me, he said, “We’ve had kids come on the show, and we put a camera on them, which can be like a mirror, and they see the reflection of themselves and go, ‘Oh, no, that is not who I am. They must have done something to make me look like that.’ Like Blanche DuBois, they will not see it, then they will fight to the end to say, ‘I was tampered with.’ No, we don’t do that.”

RuPaul’s drag and out-of-drag personas on the show are, essentially, characters. In drag, he’s the candy-colored, Diana-Ross-meets-Bugs-Bunny-meets-Dolly-Parton character he’s built an empire around. (The drag looks featured in each episode take four to six hours to create. His makeup artist, a former contestant named Raven, said, “We do a little brush. We take a break. Coffee talk. O.K., let’s get back to it.”) In the show’s out-of-drag segments, where he introduces challenges or checks in on contestants, offering mentorship and advice, he plays a cheerful, avuncular, professorial type, complete with eyeglasses that he doesn’t really need. Both performances offer touches of ribald humor that pay homage to drag’s more transgressive roots, while sanding off the sharpest of those edges and putting a wholesome face on the form. “I went Disney when I went mainstream,” RuPaul told me. Drag’s evolution from edgy night-club revues to family programming has, predictably, spurred criticism. “What was once counterculture has simply become the Culture,” E. Alex Jung wrote, in New York, in 2019. “This has its benefits: Mainstream consumer culture has gotten a little less straight. But in the process, something—maybe the feeling that this was by us and for us . . . was lost.” RuPaul argued that the full spectrum of drag continues to flourish. The form, he told me, “doesn’t need defending.”

His onscreen personas pull off the trick of revealing—in the show’s monomaniacally branded universe, one would say “ru-vealing”—little about RuPaul himself. Even people who work with him closely can find him distant. His appearances on camera are executed like military strikes; he spends relatively little time with panelists and contestants. “I keep the boundaries,” he said. He mentioned a former colleague who worked with him for decades. “We kept a working relationship, we travelled the world together,” he said. “But sometimes I would hear her talking to a friend, and she’d be talking about her latest boyfriend. She never did that with me, because I’m her boss. And the truth is, I don’t want to hear about it. I don’t care about that shit.”

One of RuPaul’s foundational beliefs is that, as he said, “everybody’s playing a role.” At times, he plays a nurturing one. A staple of “Drag Race” is an interview that finalists have with RuPaul—it is often a “lunch” conducted over a bowl of Tic Tacs—in which they tell him their hopes and fears, and he dispenses therapeutic wisdom. It’s easy to dismiss these exchanges as superficial, but they can be a genuine source of strength for competitors. Jinkx Monsoon recalled that, during their lunch segment, “he was, like, ‘You don’t need to make yourself smaller for other people. . . . And he said that, and it was amazing, because it did make me feel like, Oh, I don’t have to feel guilty for being talented.” “Were shifting from literate discourse to talking about all the things that are wrong with our house.” “We’re shifting from literate discourse to talking about all the things that are wrong with our house.”

At other times, RuPaul can appear cold, a quality born of painful experience. “So much of our culture today, with young people, is centered around their feelings,” he told me. “Feelings are indicators, they’re not facts.” He went on, “Parents teaching their kids about safe spaces, and ‘I feel uncomfortable’ . . . It’s, like, You know what? The world is not a safe space. You have to find the comfort. It’s mostly uncomfortable.” He told me that he has never wanted children. “I don’t like kids,” he said flatly.

RuPaul was born in San Diego in 1960, the third of four children and the only boy, and brought up in a yellow three-bedroom tract house, one of four models in a housing development called Michelle Manor. According to family lore, before he was born a fortune-teller told his mother, Ernestine, that the baby would be famous. Ernestine introduced him to his aunts by saying, “His name is RuPaul and he’s going to be a star.”

“I was always anointed,” he told me. “I know it sounds obnoxious. But I knew from childhood I was the golden child.” His father, Irving, who worked as an electrician at an aerospace company, was a charming philanderer with a gambling problem. Ernestine, who was of Creole descent, was flinty and aloof, with an immaculate sense of style. Her eviscerating barbs earned her the nickname Mean Miss Charles among the neighborhood kids. “She was a mess,” one of Ru’s older sisters, Renetta, has said, referring to their mother’s temper. “Said what she felt, meant what she said, and you dealt with it.” The parents’ fights could be cataclysmic. At one point, Ernestine poured gasoline over Irving’s convertible, an Oldsmobile Delta 88, and threatened him with a matchbook. RuPaul told me, “They were embroiled in their own two battling nations, and I’m in the middle. So I learned how to be a diplomat and read the situation and go, ‘Oh, can’t say that. How can I say it? I’ll say it like this.’ It’s a dissociative thing that we do to protect ourselves, to not make it personal.” Advertisement

Irving and Ernestine divorced when RuPaul was seven, and afterward he didn’t see much of his father, whose absence he often describes as a primal trauma. Living with his mother, he witnessed her slide into depression and her sorrow at having allowed herself to be vulnerable enough to be heartbroken—a “softness,” RuPaul writes in “The House of Hidden Meanings,” that she viewed as an “Achilles’ heel.” The complicated and forthright portrayal of her in the book is one of its strongest aspects. “It’s my mother,” he told me, about his own guardedness. “She said I’m way too sensitive. And she was absolutely right. So my job for a lot of time has been to hide the fact that I’m too sensitive.”

Attempting to appeal to his mother, through her often Valium-laced distance, RuPaul would impersonate his favorite divas, wrapping a towel around his head to channel Tina Turner and LaWanda Page, who played Aunt Esther on “Sanford and Son.” (Page later featured on the closest thing RuPaul’s had to a mainstream radio hit, “Supermodel (You Better Work),” from 1992, providing the song’s spoken-word narration about a Black girl escaping from poverty into a life of glamour.) Performance soon became a kind of protection. “I never fit in,” he said. “I wasn’t one of the most desired things on the hit list.” Television offered an escape, and early affirmation of his belief that everyone, everywhere, was playing a character. He liked “Mission: Impossible,” with its complex nesting of disguises, each a layer of defense.

In 1976, when RuPaul was fifteen, he moved to Atlanta with Renetta, who was in her early twenties. They were part of a wave of Black newcomers seeking economic opportunity. He enrolled at the Northside School of Performing Arts, where he appeared in drag for the first time onstage, in the Tennessee Williams play “Camino Real.” After dropping out, he came into contact with the drag scene at a disco called Numbers, where he watched a queen named Crystal LaBeija lip-synch to Donna Summer’s “Bad Girls.” By the eighties, Atlanta was “drag heaven,” Lady Bunny told The New Yorker, in 1993. “Midtown Atlanta was a very gay scene. They had transvestite hookers all over the streets day and night. When we started out, the Southern queens were deadly serious, without a shred of humor.” But RuPaul embraced a genre of drag now known as “genderfuck,” a catchall term for aesthetics that are designed to poke fun at gender norms. In “The House of Hidden Meanings,” he describes the look as “mohawk-and-extensions, tribal apocalyptic Thunderdome.”

Drag brought RuPaul his earliest sense of community, uniting him with kindred misfits. But, with his striking height and confidence, and his new look, he also stood apart. “I thought he had, like, fallen out of the sky,” Larry Tee, the d.j. and club promoter, who was one of his close friends and collaborators during that period, later said. “I thought he was an alien.” In those years, RuPaul was in a constant state of creative self-promotion. He started a series of musical groups, first performing as RuPaul and the U-Hauls, then as Wee Wee Pole. (He made some of his earliest costumes on Renetta’s sewing machine—“tasteful ones,” he writes, “like leopard-print catsuits with fringe down the side.”) He began performing as a go-go dancer, then created his own avant-garde drag revues, which he brought to New York clubs like the Pyramid and Illusions. He advertised these appearances with posters bearing catchphrases like “RUPAUL IS EVERYTHING” and “RUPAUL IS RED HOT,” which he taped to telephone poles. “I have never met anyone in my life that is as driven as RuPaul,” the performer known as Flloyd, another friend from that era, later told a documentarian. “The first day I met him, we drank a whole bottle of Jack Daniel’s and I was laying on the couch going, ‘Uhhh,’ and Ru was, like, ‘Let’s go to Kinko’s! Let’s make posters of me!’ ”

The early performances could be political, and often framed drag as liberation from oppressive norms. He opened one show, at the Pyramid Club, as a slave on a plantation. “I hate being a slave,” he said, in a breathy, Marilyn Monroe stage whisper. Then he rose to his feet, swimming in mismatched oversized layers of leopard print, crimped hair wild, intoning in a baritone, “I’m a slave. And you’re a slave. And we’re just gonna break out.”

He put himself in front of cameras whenever he could; once, he wrote to an Atlanta public-access variety program called “The American Music Show” and insisted that, since he would soon be a star, he should be booked as a guest. The hosts of the program had never had anyone write to them before. RuPaul soon became a regular. With friends, including Lady Bunny, he made micro-budget short films on Super 8, among them the sexed-up slasher “Trilogy of Terror,” based on the anthology starring Karen Black. Another series of shorts, “Starbooty,” followed, with RuPaul playing a model turned spy in the mold of blaxploitation divas like Cleopatra Jones, reinterpreted in his “Mad Max” aesthetic. “Really, it was just an excuse to change clothes,” Jon Witherspoon, the director of “Starbooty,” later recalled.

In the mid-eighties, when RuPaul was making frequent trips between Atlanta and New York, he met Barbato and Fenton Bailey, who were in a pop act called the Fabulous Pop Tarts but had aspirations to be filmmakers. They have different memories of the first encounter. Bailey told me that he was in a car in Atlanta, and, turning a corner, was confronted by an indelible image: “in the headlights of the car, there was this extraordinary creature pasting these posters.” Barbato recalled meeting him in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis, in Times Square. “He had football shoulder pads on, thigh-high waders, you know, rubber wading boots, and he was dressed like such a freak,” Barbato said. “And it was like seeing a huge star. I was dazzled.”

RuPaul spent Memorial Day of 1986 with Barbato and Bailey in a studio in Manhattan, recording an album built around the “Starbooty” character. “Ru always, always had specific ideas of ‘I want this to sound like that,’ like, he knew music so well,” Barbato said. (“The House of Hidden Meanings” is, among other things, a love letter to RuPaul’s musical inspirations—the songs referenced throughout make up a playlist of about six hours, with cuts of classic rock, disco, and nineties R. & B.) A few years after “Starbooty,” Barbato directed the music video for “Supermodel,” which featured RuPaul vamping around New York, chanting “Sashay, shanté,” before having a slapstick nervous breakdown, replete with snarling and wig-snatching. The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s dance singles chart, and the video was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award for best dance video. (It lost to En Vogue’s “Free Your Mind.”)

RuPaul’s earliest collaborations with Barbato and Bailey are among their most winning. For Channel 4, in the U.K., the trio worked on a gonzo cable-news series titled “Manhattan Cable.” RuPaul served as a field correspondent. In one segment, he walked around downtown Manhattan, like Dan Rather in a faux-cheetah coat and platform heels, collecting the stories of sex workers. “The meat market is filled with transvestite hookers by night,” RuPaul tells the camera. And then, with a figurative wink: “Maybe I’ll make my rent money.” His exchanges with the sex workers are frank and sensitive. He likes them, and they seem to like him. As a punch line, he gets into a client’s car and drives off.

The team has continued to build projects around RuPaul ever since. After experiments in different genres—“The RuPaul Show,” a talk show he hosted in full drag, ran on VH1 for a hundred episodes from 1996 to 1998—in the early aughts they devised, with another producer, Tom Campbell, the idea that would become “Drag Race.” RuPaul was initially reluctant. “There was the meeting where Ru was, like, I’ll do anything but a reality competition show,” Bailey told me. But eventually he was won over. “Drag was perceived as some crazy novelty,” Barbato said. “Ru understood having the familiarity of a competition format would help us give something familiar to the networks.” Every platform they pitched passed on the show, except for the L.G.B.T.Q.+ channel Logo TV, where “Drag Race” ran for eight seasons, becoming the network’s most watched program, before moving to VH1 and then to MTV.

As RuPaul became more popular, he changed his look to a less challenging aesthetic that he refers to as “high-femme Glamazon.” He writes about the first time he performed in a more feminine costume, at a wedding-themed drag show, where he wore a white strapless dress with a Dior-style cinched waist. He felt “some energy shift . . . I was finally getting sexual attention.” The early forays into aggressive femininity represented his “Black-hooker phase,” he told me. “I don’t know if that’s politically correct . . . but that was my look. It was like a ‘Soul Train’ dancer.” By the time of “Supermodel,” however, he was moving away from such overt sexuality. The décolletage was becoming more modest, the gowns more polished. “I desexualized all the way,” he told me. The change was not universally welcomed. It “caused a bit of a tiff from the other drag queens who he’d come up with in New York. They kind of labelled it as ‘RuPaul goes to the mall.’ They were all angry,” Jimmy Harry, who co-wrote “Supermodel,” once said. “But I think that was necessary for him to kind of become a commercial entity.”

RuPaul’s rise has made him a target for criticism within the queer community. In an interview with the Guardian, in 2018, he wondered whether physically transitioned transgender women should compete on the show. “Probably not,” he said. “It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing.” The show has long featured transgender competitors, but early seasons were dominated by those who identified as gay, male, and cisgender. Gia Gunn, a contestant, told New York, “There were trans women who were putting their transitions on hold and purposely not taking hormones leading up to the show.” Another contestant, Monica Beverly Hillz, told the queer Web site Them that, after a struggle to fund her transition through sex work, “Drag Race helped me escape that world, but their world was never really made for me either.” More recent seasons have had transgender winners, including Kylie Sonique Love, Willow Pill, and Sasha Colby. “I didn’t have a single issue,” Jinkx Monsoon, who identified as transfemme during her most recent win on the show, told me. “Every season, it becomes more and more mindful of what’s going on in the actual drag world. . . . People want to call Ru transphobic. And I just think that’s really hard for me to believe, given Ru’s history.” In “The House of Hidden Meanings,” RuPaul describes a life in drag entwined with trans performers, a community he speaks of with apparent affection. But he has built a career on sidestepping gender norms in a way that involves ignoring identity labels, which can be in tension with contemporary discourse. He doesn’t much like to talk about the issue. “Gender is a concept that we come up with, in our minds and our egos,” he told me. “My genitals are male. But I can be whatever I can. I feel I’m everything. You are everything. You are male, female. Sometimes I feel more male than others.”

Criticism also followed an interview with NPR, in 2020, in which he suggested that fracking, an environmentally destructive practice used to extract fossil fuels, was taking place on his husband’s Wyoming ranch. RuPaul remains defiantly annoyed about the matter. “Do you buy gas?” he said to me. “Before you point the finger, smell it first, bitch.” He sounds weary when discussing these controversies. “There’s no combination of words I can put together that would soothe the mob,” he said.

Sam Lansky, a writer who helped RuPaul with “The House of Hidden Meanings,” told me, “He has been, in some ways, sort of misread in terms of his beliefs, or his politics,” contributing to “a world-weariness that he has, and this kind of pessimism that everything is gonna go bad.”

In the memoir, RuPaul treats most celebrities he’s encountered with diplomacy, if not reverence.

An exception is Madonna, whom he describes giving him a “snarl of contempt” at a club in the eighties.

“In aging, there is a natural flow,” he told me. “And, when you’re against the flow, it doesn’t look right, it doesn’t feel right. The energy around the Madonna thing—it feels weird, right?” He referred to “chasing arena tours and grills in your teeth.” He added, “I’m not interested in appealing to eleven-to-twenty-five-year-olds, I’m just not. I can, on a bigger level, as a mother. As Mama Ru. It’s a different relationship—I’m not trying to be them.”

At Pinewood, RuPaul emerged from a bathroom, decked out for a non-drag segment of the show in a Trina Turk suit with a swirling, psychedelic maroon print. Thairin Smothers, one of his producers, handed him a paper cup of hot water with lemon, then followed him into a TV studio. Under fuchsia lights, a set for “Snatch Game,” a sendup of “Match Game,” awaited. In the segment, a staple of “Drag Race,” a panel of contestants, each impersonating a celebrity, attempts to complete a phrase, trying to match answers provided by celebrity guests. The episode’s guests were Rachel Stevens and John Lee, of the pop group S Club. Opposite them sat drag renditions of Elvis Presley, Liza Minnelli, Marie Antoinette, a dragon, and other characters. RuPaul, cue cards in hand, set them up for witty comebacks to questions.

This was a light makeup day: for non-drag segments, RuPaul applies his own eyebrows, using four different products. Raven, the makeup artist, was nevertheless watching the monitors in case touch-ups were needed. She told me that she had worked with RuPaul on seven seasons of television in 2023 alone. “I literally fill a suitcase, go home, fill another suitcase, go again,” she said. Smothers corrected her. “Lingo,” a game show on CBS that RuPaul began hosting last year, had made a season, too. “It all kind of blends together after seventeen years,” Smothers said, watching the monitors. Many of the “Drag Race” staff have worked on the show for a decade or more. For all RuPaul’s boundary-setting, the atmosphere can be unusually familial for TV. Under the lights at Pinewood, the queen playing Liza Minnelli tried out an old standard, snapping, “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” and RuPaul howled with laughter.

A few days later, RuPaul woke up and performed his morning ritual. First, he stretched. “I’m older,” he said. “I have to make sure everything is doing the thing.” Then he prayed, saying aloud the words “Dear God, thank you,” followed by things for which he is grateful. That week, the list included the roof over his head, his access to running water, and Georges, his husband, whom he met while dancing at Limelight, in New York, in the nineties. After that, he meditated, a practice that can last anywhere from forty-five seconds to fifteen minutes. He lets the ideas drift through: “Oh, there’s my father. Oh, there’s Judy Garland.” His demons are there, too, but he claims to have befriended them. He put on another black hoodie and another pair of black workout pants and walked ten minutes to the nearest Marks & Spencer to pick up an apple turnover.

Soon afterward, we sat in the living room of his rental cottage, a modest, two-story structure with neutral walls and a tiny kitchenette to which he had added, as far as I could tell, nothing but a row of identical boxes of berry-flavored Special K. “I brought this in,” he said, pointing to an LCD monitor that sat, with his laptop, on an otherwise empty white desk. “And I moved this chair. That’s about it.” Yet he was crazy about the place—he liked the flow of the floor plan, and took pictures of it, to try to replicate it in Wyoming. Advertisement

RuPaul is, in profound ways, a loner. For much of his adult life, he had felt alienated from the easy intimacy of casual gay sex. “In my twenties and stuff, when I was meeting someone at a bar or something, I always would want to find some type of connection, but it was not there,” he said. “And I did not enjoy being with somebody I don’t have a connection to.”

His Black identity didn’t furnish much sense of community, either. “I come from a Black family,” he said. “But I always felt different. Not better or anything. I just felt like Ru.” In the memoir, he recounts a moment, two years after his move to Atlanta, when his father grilled him about rumors that he was having gay sex. “In the Black church, ‘gay’ represents something against the family, and the family is an extension of how Black people survived from slavery,” he told me. “So my existence becomes a threat to the family, because I’m other than.” I expected that he would suggest that he now relishes his role as a trailblazing celebrity in the Black community. “I’ve won fourteen Emmys. And you would think I’d have been on the cover of Ebony, if that still exists,” he said. “I don’t represent what the Black community wants to lift up. I never have.” His computer’s desktop showed a black-and-white closeup of Diana Ross. From an early age, he admired her ability to craft an image that was unthreatening to white audiences. “I went, That’s what I want to do. I want to be on a world stage and not be questioned, or make people feel threatened,” he said. “Most Black people in our culture have to not scare white folks.”

RuPaul told me that his social life is circumscribed, in some ways, by design. “I meet new people, but like, socially, do I go out to dinner with people, or meet someone and say, ‘Hey, let’s go on a hike’? Very rarely.” He and his husband have an open relationship. “It’s just realistic,” he said. “There’s no such thing as monogamy with men.” But, he said, because of his fame, there’s no longer “a circle of people that I can sort of rely on” for intimacy.

When Georges and he first met, Georges asked if he could floss RuPaul’s teeth. RuPaul, horrified, said no. But Georges eventually got past his guardedness. While I was with RuPaul, Georges FaceTimed him from a hospital room, where he was recovering from a minor medical procedure. “Oh, my God, look at you,” RuPaul said. “Did you get the morphine I told you to get?” And then: “I love you.” At one point, while we were talking, RuPaul mentioned his name, smiled, and then started to cry.

“I would love to have more fun,” he told me. “I would love to go to a fucking roller disco. Why aren’t there fucking roller discos? What’s the deal? People have lost track of what’s really fun.” RuPaul has his own skates, and he’s nimble. Occasionally, he will drive to a remote parking lot and skate by himself. But he finds the kind of night life he once loved to be inaccessible. “You know, at a night club or at a disco dance place, people are on their phones,” he said. “How am I going to be spiritual and in the moment, sweating, and take my shirt off, where there are people filming?”

Lansky, the writer, described to me what he thought of as RuPaul’s foundational beliefs: “Don’t take anything too seriously. Don’t treat anything as sacred. Stay in play, nurture your inner child.” For all its profitability, “Drag Race” still ropes contestants into campy, small-budget music-video shoots that mirror his own experiments on “The American Music Show,” in Atlanta: creations with little artistry and lots of cheap wigs and improv. Before he dropped out of high school, a drama teacher scolded him for caring about his precarious academic career, telling him, “RuPaul, don’t take life too fucking seriously.” The admonition has since become a mantra. “I’m always looking to play,” he said. “I want to be in that state all the time.”

RuPaul has been sober since the late nineties. In “The House of Hidden Meanings,” he describes years of alcohol abuse that he now views as an effort to “anesthetize” himself, and also his eventual decision to seek treatment, spurred by his effort to help Georges, who was addicted to crystal meth. But he remains a proponent of psychedelics, and told me that early acid trips provided essential perspective on the importance of being in a state of play. “That’s why hallucinogens are so wonderful. Because your self-consciousness is stripped away when you’re tripping your balls,” he said. The spiritual guru he finds most influential, he said, is “my fucking idol, Bugs Bunny. Who is a fucking Zen master.” His teachings: “Don’t take other people too serious. And stay ahead of their stupidity. If you have to, build a fucking compound somewhere, but stay ahead of their own self-destructive, ridiculous mentality.”

RuPaul has been trying to outrun that kind of thinking for a long time. He recalled an appearance he made, in full drag, on “The Arsenio Hall Show,” in 1993—a radical act, at the time. “In the moment, on ‘Arsenio Hall,’ I’m up against the status quo and the machine,” he recalled. “There is pain in that.”

He got up and served me the apple turnover. With his face shadowed by the hoodie and bare of makeup, he looked ascetic and almost otherworldly. He told me he’d been reflecting on his comment about not liking kids. “I would be a great parent,” he said. Though he would fear sending a child into a world he finds inhospitable and dangerous, he added, “I would love that kid so much.” The cottage is near a school. “The bell just rang,” he said. “You know, last year, when I took this place, I thought, Oh, God, the kids, they’re gonna drive me crazy.” Now, he told me, “I fucking love hearing their voices out there. It’s kind of this white noise of joy.”

This week, the drag queen RuPaul earned a rare New Yorker distinction, becoming one of the few figures profiled not once but twice by the magazine. (Other members of this exclusive club include Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso.) Ronan Farrow’s portrait captures RuPaul resplendent—and reflective—upon his throne, sixteen seasons, fourteen Emmys, and countless spinoffs into his reality-TV competition, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” a ratings hit that has become “one of the world’s most far-reaching platforms for queer expression.” The article also takes in the conservative backlash against L.G.B.T.Q. rights, which lately has targeted drag performers in particular.

When Monica Lynch, the president of Tommy Boy Records, which is primarily a rap label, was sent RuPaul’s demo tape, in 1991, she immediately signed RuPaul, theorizing that “there weren’t really any other drag-queen recording artists and we saw RuPaul filling a niche.” Although that niche would be hard to define, there is no reason to doubt Lynch’s instincts. Since RuPaul’s “Supermodel (You Better Work!)” made its début last November, at the designer Todd Oldham’s spring showing, it has become an immovable hard-core club hit, one of the videos most often asked for on The Box, a cable-television video-request channel, and a regular feature on MTV—a fact that in itself could make RuPaul the most famous man in a dress since Milton Berle. Early this month, the song moved into the No. 2 spot on Billboard’s dance chart. As it happens, the tune that kept it from the No. 1 spot was Whitney Houston’s cover of “I’m Every Woman.”

Over the years it took RuPaul to become a fixture in certain parts of Manhattan, his fans could often find him performing at the Pyramid, or the Palace de Beauté, or at one or another of the promoter Susanne Bartsch’s clubs or benefits or events, although what exactly RuPaul did by way of performance is open to debate. Dressed sometimes as a “surrealistic cowgirl,” sometimes as a Tibetan lama, sometimes as an incarnation of Krishna, sometimes as a Lincoln Tunnel hooker, RuPaul did not really sing or dance much, or lip-synch to records, or mimic the stars. Probably the last term RuPaul would ever use to describe himself is “female impersonator.” Even “drag queen” seems a wan phrase in the context of RuPaul. “When I say ‘drag,’ I don’t mean that a woman has to turn into a man, or vice versa,” Susanne Bartsch told Holly Brubach in this magazine. “I mean, get your goods out of the closet, you know? In England, it’s slang for dressing up.” RuPaul goes Bartsch one better by claiming that his role in drag is similar to that of a shaman. “A drag queen is like a priest or a spirit familiar,” he once said to me. “We represent the myths, the duality of the universe. We’re like little microcosms of the world.”

When I first met him, RuPaul was in his StarBooty phase. His wardrobe at the time favored patchwork leather miniskirts, tube tops, and platform-soled thigh boots, and his face was unfailingly framed by the curly nimbus of a huge Afro wig. Back then, RuPaul was given to uttering non sequiturs that might have been snatched from one of Pam Grier’s blaxploitation classics. “Don’t let your mouth write checks your ass can’t cash,” he might say, or “Go on with your bad self!” In those days (the late eighties), RuPaul liked to boast of having completed the third volume of an autobiographical trilogy, a book titled “Give It to Me One More Time.” In his telling, the first installment was “Your Guide to Health, Beauty, and Nigger Love,” succeeded by “New York Is a Big Fat Greasy Ho.” While none of these works actually existed, except as notions, they formed a part of RuPaul’s inventive résumé and, as such, were almost as good as real. “Self-invention is the essence of pop,” Fenton Bailey, one of RuPaul’s producers, once remarked to me. “It’s an extended exercise in surface. RuPaul has always invented himself as he goes along. It’s a reflexive thing. He gives you the recipe as he’s baking the cake.”

A young Oxonian who came to the United States in 1982 as a Harkness Fellow, Fenton Bailey is half of the Pop Tarts (a.k.a. the Fabulous Pop Tarts), a duo whose latest CD is called “Gagging on the Lovely Extravaganza.” The other half is Randy Barbato. Bailey and Barbato also direct the production company World of Wonder, and it was they who came up with the video for RuPaul’s début. The consensus among record-industry people is that RuPaul’s video will propel him out of the East Village demimonde and onto the main stage of American life. “The video proves that there’s really nothing he’s not capable of,” Monica Lynch says. “A variety show, a game show, a sitcom. We’ve even thought about RuPaul dolls, if we could decide whether to make them anatomically correct.” “Supermodel” is narrated by LaWanda Page, who portrayed Aunt Esther on “Sanford and Son,” and follows the trajectory of a young black girl’s giddy career as she arrives in Manhattan from Detroit and experiences overnight runway and editorial stardom, followed by encompassing world fame, a trillion-dollar modelling contract, some twenty costume changes, and six blond wigs, before suffering a theatrically necessary nervous collapse. Dressed at first in a cheesy fur car coat, RuPaul is seen posing for fashion spreads on car hoods, on rooftops, outside a Winnebago, and with a terrier, in the Pulitzer fountain near the Plaza, and is also seen playing basketball on a Houston Street court wearing a striped jersey midcalf sheath dress and patent-leather spike heels. In addition, he appears in the video as the cover model for magazines called Drague, Sashay, and Ms. Thing. With all its allusions to model-world bitchery and to the claw-your-way-to-success conventions of Grade B films, the “Supermodel” video could easily be seen as the apotheosis of a certain kind of camp if not for the fact that the spoof is at some level affectionate and the sentiments are heartfelt.

Among drag queens, it’s common to distinguish oneself with a word or a phrase; the phrase RuPaul uses on his hit—“You better work, bitch!”—is an unapologetic swipe from the vogue-ball queens. “When the kids at the balls saw something that was fabulous or something that was working their nerves,” RuPaul once explained, “they’d give a big finger snap and say, ‘You better work!’ ” When drag queens appear on a drag-ball runway, members of their claques will also sometimes shout encouragement in fractured French. The infectious refrain on RuPaul’s video is “Sashay, shanté.” It wasn’t until recently, when I came upon a local college hockey team singing “Supermodel” in the Eighth Street subway station, that I had any real sense of just how far in the direction of mainstream weirdness the culture had come. As the uptown R train pulled in, the goalie tossed his hands in the air and lisped, “Sashay, shanté.”

On a frigid winter evening, I find myself in a Varick Street loft that serves as the offices of World of Wonder. Earlier in the day, I accompanied RuPaul to the taping of a guest appearance on “Power Play,” an independent video show whose studios are located above a neighborhood bar in a grungy part of Newark. “Is this where they have the car jackings?” RuPaul asked as our driver, a Russian émigré, circled through the deserted streets in bafflement. No one seemed to know where we were, and when the driver finally agreed to lower his window and ask directions from a matron in an adjacent car, the woman took one look at us and hit the gas. “Maybe I should do a video about a gang of car-jacking drag queens,” RuPaul said.

Now, back in Manhattan, RuPaul has darted into a bedroom in order to change wigs and refresh his makeup for an interview with a gay-cable-news program. For a brief time two years ago, RuPaul worked as an on-air reporter for “Manhattan Cable,” a show that World of Wonder produced for England’s Channel Four. Fenton has promised to show me the clips. Sleepy-eyed and unhurried—despite the fact that he’s throwing his annual party at the loft tonight—Fenton cues up the three segments I’ve asked about: RuPaul interviewing the Rockettes, RuPaul reporting on black Barbies, and RuPaul interviewing the transvestite hookers on West Fourteenth Street.

“We always thought when we did the Pop Tarts that it would be great to have a drag queen at the top of the charts,” Fenton remarks as he fiddles with the VCR. “It’s iconoclastic in one way, but in another it’s perfectly pop. Ru was always the logical choice, because he’s media-ready, perfectly adapted to TV. Also, he’d been the queen of Manhattan for some time, and he was ready to take it someplace else.”

For anyone who’s ever met the drag RuPaul, a greater shock is encountering him dressed as a man. “People pass me right by without that wig,” he says. The drag RuPaul has a uniform caffè-latte complexion; wide-set eyes beneath brows that arch in perpetual question, and a set of large, ferociously even teeth. Beneath the volutes and tendrils of his many platinum-blond hairpieces, he is an ageless (he admits to twenty-seven, but friends insist this is years shy of the truth) and unquestionable beauty. Out of drag, RuPaul is just a pleasant-looking freckled bald man with an earnest smile.

The RuPaul who appears in two of the three taped clips resembles any number of male TV reporters—animated, and with a knack for filling the air, but ultimately forgettable. It’s only in the last segment, when he appears in drag, that he takes on an extra psychic dimension. With its scrambled voices, black-barred eyes, and grating pathos, the hooker interview may be one of the enduring clichés of network sweeps weeks. You would think the genre was utterly exhausted, and yet, as the tape runs, it becomes clear that RuPaul has found an honest new angle. His shimmering lips pursed in consternation, he brings to the enterprise an unusual sympathy for these street people, with their cheap wigs, their bad teeth, and their rabbit-fur coats. They respond to his questions with candor, revealing their ambitions, their terrors, their prices, their makeup tips. Several people who’ve been milling around the loft now wander over to the set and stand staring as RuPaul teeters across the cobblestone streets of Gansevoort Market, past the loading docks and the meathooks and the whores themselves, and onto the corner of Little West Twelfth Street, where the camera’s zoom lens catches him opening the door of a dark sedan as it pulls up to the curb.

“How many reporters would do that?” Fenton asks. He means put on a dress to get the news. The more pertinent question, of course, is: How many reporters would end an interview with transvestite hookers by going out and turning a trick? “That was entirely Ru’s idea,” Fenton says. “I don’t think he really went through with it. But he did get in the car.”

“I always say you’re born naked and the rest is drag,” RuPaul tells me one evening in late autumn. We’re sitting in a recording studio in the Battery Park City apartment of the producer Eric Kupper. One wall is papered with the covers from novelty albums by TV personalities (“Hogan’s Heroes Sing the Best of WWII,” “Goober Sings”) and comedians and people who, Kupper says, “should never have made a record in the first place.” The rest of the room is given over to blinking banks of recording equipment. RuPaul has on khaki trousers and a gray hooded sweatshirt zippered over a white button-down shirt. A green baseball cap is cocked at a jaunty angle on his freshly shaved skull. The faint pouches below his eyes are a result of a schedule that has had him in two cities a day for several weeks. (Last night was Toronto, tomorrow is L.A.) His bemused expression is a more or less permanent feature.

The only boy in a family of four children, RuPaul was born in New Orleans and lived in San Diego until he was fifteen. His father (a beauty-supply-store operator) and his mother divorced when he was six. Nine years later, he and his older sister, Renetta, moved to Atlanta. In Atlanta, RuPaul attended the Northside High School of the Performing Arts—“a ‘Fame’ kind of school, full of robot, Broadway-bound kids,” he says. “My life was very dimensional at home,” he goes on. “I was a middle child, a social studier. In school, I was kind of alien to every group. I wanted to be noticed, but I was perpetually an outsider. And I stayed an outsider until the day I decided to get into drag.” It seems odd now to suggest that there was ever a golden age of drag, but, if there was, it was the nineteen-eighties, and Atlanta was, by most accounts, the place. (There are, however, those who may remember with some fondness New York in the seventies, when Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, the Cockettes, the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, the Angels of Light, and Divine held sway.) “It was drag heaven,” Lady Bunny once told me. “In the early eighties, midtown Atlanta was a very gay scene. They had transvestite hookers all over the streets day and night. When we started out, the Southern queens were deadly serious, without a shred of humor. They were doing Top Forty songs and Melissa Manchester covers, or else they were these out-there redneck-type drag queens, with names like Brittany Fairchild and Sable Shepherd. Unfortunately, all that’s gone now. But that’s how Ru and all us Southern queens got our start—making fun of all that.”

Although Lady Bunny now refers to the style as “a Communist plot,” grunge drag was the preferred fashion among the “art kids” of Atlanta—a group that included RuPaul, of course, and also the promoter Larry Tee, and a drag queen called LaHoma Van Zandt, who styled himself after the dithering girl singers in the Swedish group Abba and was given to squealing “Yaay!” Along with LaHoma, Lady Bunny, and Larry Tee, RuPaul made a series of super-8 movies (“Terror,” “Terror I,” and “Terror II”) about an axe-wielding maniac who menaces an apartment complex; appeared on a cable-television show called “The American Music Show” (RuPaul wearing a Mohawk and dressed in a sailor suit); and appeared with a band called the Now Explosion, which, Larry Tee says, “tried to be black as we could make ourselves, which wasn’t very black.”

In 1984, the Pyramid, a dive on Avenue A that was a center of the East Village gay scene and a mecca for outrageous drag, arranged to have the Atlanta contingent come North to perform. Lady Bunny recalls that on the drive North, with RuPaul at the wheel, they decided to stop in Washington to hit the Goodwill thrift shops. Although Lady Bunny’s persona eventually chrysalized into a creature who favors garish spangled dresses and “I Dream of Jeannie” coiffures, in the early years he tended to dress down. “I was in gingham drag and these sorry little flats,” he says. “And Ru and everybody went off and told me to meet them at the van. The wind was blowing so hard my wig was about to fly off my head. I hadn’t discovered bobby pins yet. It’s a moment for my movie: Bunny alone in Washington, D.C., in gingham drag, in tears. I want Claudia Schiffer to play the part.”

The Now Explosion, with RuPaul as their guest star, played the Pyramid and the Limelight—“when Limelight was hip the first time,” according to Larry Tee—and became indispensable fixtures on the night-life circuit. “For a while, you couldn’t really have a club opening without them,” says Michael Musto, who relentlessly covered the drag scene in his column for the Village Voice. RuPaul made an appearance in the video of the B-52’s hit “Love Shack,” doing the Frug in a flowered minidress and a monster Afro at the “shaque d’amour.” He cut an album called “RuPaul Is StarBooty: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack” on the Funtone label. “Still,” Larry Tee explains, “the feeling about drag was you could do cameos, but you couldn’t get the concept across the finish line. That’s what’s great about Ru. He’s a drag queen straight people can enjoy.”

[creativecourse]

Candid Photography Skills Information Over 30 years Greg has developed a system for delivering great pictures in any scenario. The system is quick, simple and can be learned by anyone. What is it, and who is it for? An easy system for shooting great pictures with your phone or camera. It’s for anyone who is interested in quickly and dramatically improving their photography. Where does it happen? It’s an online program that consists of training videos (with subtitles in Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, French and Italian), homework and practical examples. How does it work? Watch the lessons and do the homework. Follow the process and you will very quickly see dramatic improvements in your pictures. Do I need a camera? This program shows that you don’t need professional or special equipment. Greg’s system can be applied to shoot great pictures on any smartphone or camera. What You’ll Learn In This Course? Welcome Greg Williams’ photographic career has taken him from war zones, to the North Pole, to becoming one of the most trusted insiders in Hollywood. Working with subjects Greg talks in detail about how to get the best out of your subject, drawing on tactics and skills he’s learned throughout his extensive career. Light Greg teaches you how to ‘read’ the light in any location, and teaches you the fundamentals of lighting in a way that can be easily, and practically applied. Exposure Greg explains the importance of having control over your exposure. He covers the fundamentals and looks at the situations where you should override auto‑exposure. Environment Greg discusses finding a photograph in any environment, and the advantages of working quickly. Composition Greg covers the fundamentals of composition and when to break the rules. He talks the rule of thirds, perspective and vanishing points and how to draw the eye to your focal point. Focus Greg deals with both technical and creative focusing. He talks about how to tell stories using focus when taking the picture and when editing. Editing Greg discusses the importance of authenticity, believability and imperfection when editing and explains how his candid photographic style guides his edit process. Storytelling The moment where everything that you’ve learned comes together and you can tell your stories in individual frames. Greg breaks down some of his favourite photos from the archive, and looks at the craft of storytelling in each case. About Author Greg Williams is one of the most trusted and acclaimed photographers in entertainment—his name and candid portraiture synonymous with authentic glamour. Greg established his reportage style as a photojournalist in the ‘90s—covering war zones in Burma, Chechnya and Sierra Leone. An assignment for the Sunday Times Magazine gave Greg his first access to the film industry and he has now shot ‘specials’ on over 200 movies, including four poster campaigns for the Bond franchise. Greg has also enjoyed exclusive access to BAFTA, the Golden Globes and the Oscars and is a regular contributor to Vanity Fair and British Vogue. In addition to his prodigious photographic output, Greg is also a filmmaker, principally with his first person, ‘moving reportage’ documentaries, and a product designer—Greg’s limited edition Leica Q2, in partnership with Daniel Craig, is Leica’s fastest selling large scale edition. His education platform Skills Faster, is home to his highly successful Candid Photography Course, with the intention of ‘democratising good photography’. After 30 years in the business Greg’s talent and brand relationships are second to none. He publishes exclusives to over 1M followers on Instagram and on gregwilliams.com where he also sells his products and prints. Greg Williams Photography operates from Greg’s studio/ gallery space in Mayfair, London. More courses from the same author: Greg Williams

[toughgirlchallenges]

Kalyani Lodhia - Visionary Explorer - A Freelance Photographer, Biologist, and Wildlife Filmmaker Uncovering Nature's Marvels.

In her own words:

“Hi! I'm Kalyani, a freelance photographer, biologist and wildlife filmmaker, born and raised in the city of Leicester, what felt like miles away from the countryside and the outdoors. 

With no role-models or influences in my life to steer me to the natural world, it's a mystery to my whole family how I ended up loving the outdoors and everything in it, but somehow I did. 

My love for nature fuelled me to pursue a BSc at the Royal Veterinary College where I studied a whole range of aspects of animal biology; from anatomy and physiology to behaviour and evolution. My research into kangaroo biomechanics and limb bone scaling was part of a paper published in the Royal Society Open Science in 2018. I then completed my MSc at Imperial College London, where I fell in love with science communication and story telling.

I first picked up a camera at 19 years old when my parents sent me to live in an ashram for 6 months (of course, as a teenager, I wasn't too thrilled at the prospect initially) and that's how I accidentally got into, and got hooked on, photography. I am self-taught and now specialise in travel and wildlife photography.

I love exploring the world, often travelling solo, and learning about different cultures beyond stereotypes. Having Indian heritage, I have a deep understanding of the need to look beyond imperialist and colonialist generalisations and I am able to truly connect with people around the world.

As a biologist, there's something so incredibly special about seeing the most breathtaking animals in their natural habitat and experiencing the sheer magnitude and magic of the world around us.

I have been fortunate enough to have been to the Kumbh Mela, the largest gathering of people on Earth, the forests of Finland to photograph brown bears and the depths of the South African ocean, surrounded by thousands of hammerhead sharks.

My photography work has been featured by UNICEF and the BBC and I have had the opportunity to have worked for Parmarth Niketan Ashram and Light for the World. I have also had footage featured on BBC AutumnWatch and one of my photographs was selected for the long list of the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. I work full time as a freelancer on science and wildlife documentaries, where I am currently working as a researcher for the BBC's Natural History Unit on a landmark natural history series for National Geographic.”

***

New episodes of the Tough Girl Podcast go live every Tuesday at 7am UK time - Hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss out. 

You can support the mission to increase the amount of female role models in the media. Visit www.patreon.com/toughgirlpodcast Thank you.

***

Show notes

Who is Kalyani

Her love for the outdoors and nature

Wanting to be a vet when she was younger

Being sent to India by her parents

Accidentally getting into photography

What did her daily life look like in the Ashram

The moment when it all came together for her and started to enjoy taking photos

Going back home and doing a 3-year science degree

Still unsure what she wanted to do

Getting her Master's at Imperial Science Media Production

Working in a restaurant

How did she get her first job in The Great British Bake Off

Starting out as a runner and what she does

Taking every opportunity that is given to her

How does she cope with the stress

Her trips to other countries and what was it like for her

Her main job as a wildlife filmmaker

Working on a big series for National Geographic

Interesting place in Africa called Mauritania

Doing a shoot for three and a half weeks with a small crew

Why she's less tired than many others and her exhaustion-coping advice

Biggest challenges she's faced and had to deal with

Kalyani's trip to Iceland and why it was one of the best wildlife moments for her

Taking a trip to Finland for her birthday

Diving in the South African ocean with the hammerhead sharks

Climate change and figuring out shoot dates

The reality of nature

Where to find more information about Kalyani

Top tips and advice

  Social Media

Website: www.kalyanilodhia.com

Instagram: @kalyanilodhia 

Twitter: @kalyanilodhia

  Check out this episode!

#podcast #women #sports #health #motivation #challenges #change #adventure #active #wellness #explore #grow #support #encourage #running #swimming #triathlon #exercise #weights

[lorenzavignalhncphotography]

Research and inspiration (part 2)

Anil Mistry

Anil Mistry is a British Indian director (and has been for the past 20 years) and photographer. He worked in many areas – TV, films, fashion, comedy, art, design, advertising and photography. He shoots with digital as well as with his collection of film cameras. He writes about photography. He, for example, wrote a piece for 35mms, emulsive.org and Ilford. Guested in multiple podcasts where he shared tips and thoughts on various aspects of film photography.

He is a fan of street portraits and documentary style photography. People say you can find him, during his free time, wondering the streets of Brighton with a bunch of cameras.

He has been running Photowalks in Brighton. He mentioned in an interview for Lomography that people from all over the country have come along to join in and thathe met many interesting people of all ages with serious knowledge and enthusiasm and made great friends. He shot with a LC-A 120 film camera for some Photo walks in Brighton and London and said in that same interview that it is by far the easiest, most compact and most “instant” 120 camera he’s used, and he loves the square format of the shots.

He was asked in that same interview ‘What is the appeal of film photography for you?’

to which he replied :

‘The unique look of shots...I enjoy the whole tactile journey that film provides and the fact that it forces you to slow down more and think.’

Des the Barber, Anil Mistry

This shot is a more complex but interesting in terms of composition.

You can easily tell the man photographed through the mirror is the barber thanks to the timing. you can see him in action. The viewer knows this is a barber shop by looking at the picture because we can see all the products visible in the frame too. This photograph has a real atmosphere to it. By looking at this picture I see a man who is passionate about what he is doing.

Portfolio, Anil Mistry

[mariacallous]

So this is what snowbound, strike-hit Britain needed on a Thursday morning: a rich and entitled couple living in agreeable circumstances in California bemoaning their treatment by the media, the royal family, courtiers, a woman in the crowd in Liverpool, Meghan’s father and even the Queen by implication. Assailed by “them” and “they”.

Yes, it’s the Harry’n’Meghan show on Netflix again, another two and a half hours in which the Duke and Duchess of Sussex back resentfully into the limelight to reveal once more their truth, complete with home movies of their son Archie and copious intimate photographs showing them intruding on their own privacy.

So, what’s new? Well, on this telling, they have been bullied and harassed out of The Firm they worked so hard for: five engagements in five days during their last week in Britain. And the cottage the Queen gave them in the grounds of Kensington Palace was really rather pokey. They made so many sacrifices for this country.

There are details about the negotiations with the Queen, Charles and William in early 2020, with his big brother shouting at him. They were denied the chance to be part-time royals bowing into and out of their duties. Perhaps that’s true; perhaps The Firm is behind the times on employment law.

They said William’s communications team briefed against them. That may be the case and it wouldn’t be the first time: old-timers remember Charles v Diana: the War of the Waleses and the dark arts of Charles’s communications chief, Mark Bolland, 20 years ago.

But they assign blame a bit too liberally. Some, though far from all, of the coverage of Harry and Meghan in some of the tabloids, particularly their bete noir, the Daily Mail, was pretty hateful – but it should be noted that many of the headlines flashing across the screen in the documentaries are not from the British media, but scandal sheets such as the National Enquirer in the US. The retaliation by Meghan’s friends – “the truth about Meghan” – was also planted, in People magazine.

As a former royal correspondent, albeit from some years ago, I find some elements of what they say jarring. I don’t recognise the “constant briefings” of royal reporters, and stories endlessly planted. I remember it being quite hard to get any information out of the palace and briefings about royal tours. The media picks things up: it quickly discerned that not all was well between the royal brothers, or with Meghan. Should they not have reported that?

So, as the final episode plays out, was it worth it? Will the series alter things for the royals? My feeling is not: monarchists here and around the world already know much of this stuff, and either discount it or tut and move on. Republicans, meanwhile, will merely be confirmed in their view of an outdated, antiquated and out-of-touch institution.

Was it worth it for Harry and Meghan? That depends what they were hoping for. In Britain, Harry’s approval ratings have sunk since he left the country, but it may give them the profile to mine lucrative celebrity elsewhere. He may, if he’s feeling uniquely hard done by, be comforted to see what the British public thought of his great-great-uncle Edward VIII when he abdicated for the woman he loved. The letters written to the palace in 1936, preserved in the National Archives at Kew, are quite as abusive as anything Harry and Meghan endured on social media.

So was it all worth it for Netflix? The streaming giants must be happy that last week’s instalments became its highest viewed documentary premiere and Britain’s most popular TV series of 2022. Presumably there’s a return to be made on that, for them and for the co-producers, the Sussex’s media company, Archewell.

But will there be more happy returns in the future? Have Harry and Meghan got more to say that will drive sales and damage the institution, or have they shot their bolt? That’s the cliffhanger now. The royal soap opera will continue; for all the uncertainties, that’s inevitable. The challenge for the US cast members will be finding ways to stay in it.

[terakopian]

What a fabulous evening! I was thrilled to have two of my fountain pen photographs shortlisted in the Commercial and Macro categories of the British Press Awards (along with another in the Documentary category). Alas, no wins, but great to make such a prestigious shortlist. [caption 1&2] Photographer Edmond Terakopian at the British Press Awards, where three of his photographs were shortlisted in the Commercial, Macro and Documentary categories. The Dorchester, Park Lane, London, UK. November 18, 2022. Photo: Andy Barnes. [caption 3] Life around the mine. Shift Manager Miner Colin Evans, who has been a miner for 40 years, prepares the safety paperwork for the shift. Aberpergwm Mine is the only the only remaining operational coal mine in the UK and the only source of high-grade anthracite in Western Europe. Aberpergwm Mine, Glynneath, Neath, Wales, UK. July 30, 2021. Photo: Edmond Terakopian [caption 4] The nib of a Montblanc Meisterstück 149 fountain pen with Montblanc Homer Greek Blue ink, is reflected in a mirror. London, UK. November 30, 2021. Photo: Edmond Terakopian. The Visconti Divina Matte fountain pen, with its elegant curved faceted lines, spiralling around the pen’s matte black acrylic resin body. London, UK. April 22, 2022. Photo: Edmond Terakopian. @britishphotographyawards #bpa2022 #britishphotographyawards @andybarnes.photos @visconti_italy @montblanc #viscontidivina #viscontifountainpen #montblanc149 #montblancmeisterstuck #shotonlumix #lumixs1r @lumix @lumixuk @lumixjapan @lumix_de @lumix_france @lumix_fotografia @lumix_italia #sigma105macro #sharemysigma @sigmauk @sigma_japan @sigmaglobalvision #awards #awardsceremony #thedorchester @thedorchester (at The Dorchester) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClKAXQ_II4s/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

#bpa2022 #britishphotographyawards #viscontidivina #viscontifountainpen #montblanc149 #montblancmeisterstuck #shotonlumix #lumixs1r #sigma105macro #sharemysigma #awards #awardsceremony #thedorchester

[greensparty]

Movie Reviews: Rebel Dread / Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

This week I got to review two music-based movies, one documentary and one scripted:

Rebel Dread

British musician, filmmaker, DJ and music video director Don Letts might not be a household name, but he has done so much in his life and career, it makes perfect sense that he’d be the subject of a documentary. He was in the right place at the right time in the late 70s for the British punk scene. As he was friends with many of those bands, he began filming them, making documentaries, then directing music videos (he did almost all of The Clash’s videos), and after Mick Jones parted ways with The Clash, he formed Big Audio Dynamite with Letts, who was in the band until 1990. When I was making my documentary Life on the V: The Story of V66 about the 1980s music video TV channel, I came upon a clip of Letts and Jones appearing on V66 in early 1986 and wishing V66 a Happy Birthday for their one year anniversary. I heard from some former V66 staff that they were among the nicest of the rock stars who stopped by, offering to take the crew out for lunch after their appearance. But I digress. Letts has been a rock and roll Zelig, a big part of the punk scene, the music video revolutionary and a filmmaker in his own right. Now he’s getting the doc treatment with Rebel Dread which arrives on streaming and rentals this week.

movie poster

Letts began running the London clothing store ACME Attractions in 1975. He soon befriended many of the burgeoning punk groups at the time. As a black man who befriended many white musicians, Letts later did many music videos in which he tried to show camaraderie among all people. Musicians like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Pretenders, and more were stopping by ACME and Letts began capturing the scene in photos and with his Super 8 film camera. The result was his 1978 feature The Punk Rock Movie. He introduced many punks to reggae. Soon he was taking Johnny Lydon to Jamaica, going to America with The Clash and getting hired to direct music videos for other artists like Elvis Costello, The Psychedelic Furs, Musical Youth (”Pass the Doutchie” was the first black music group played on MTV despite the history books saying it was Michael Jackson), Ratt (he’s responsible for the iconic “Round and Round” video), Bob Marley and more. But it was his friendship with Mick Jones that begat B.A.D. I remember seeing their videos for “E=MC2″ and hearing their song “B.A.D.” in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Once Joe Strummer began collaborating with his former Clash bandmate Jones in B.A.D., Letts scaled back and eventually left the band in 1990, hence their later music being released as Big Audio Dynamite II. Letts has since directed several movies and numerous music docs notably punk docs. He’s also become a media personality and hosts a BBC show as well as DJing.

Letts and Jones in Big Audio Dynamite

As a fan of the music and music videos Letts made, I went into this doc with the utmost respect and admiration for his contribution to music and music videos. But I thought there was a fascinating human interest element to this in that a guy was in the right place at the right time and gravitated to filmmaking and captured his worldview into his work. Letts is the featured interviewee telling his story throughout, but there were some other cool interviewees too like Lydon, Jones and The Clash’s Paul Simonon. What made this a great doc was Letts’ own archival footage and photographs. It’s as if he was making his own doc all along!

For info on Rebel Dread: https://www.rebeldread.com/

3.5 out of 5 stars

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

Earlier this year when I interviewed Jon “Bermuda” Schwartz, the longtime drummer for Weird Al Yankovic, he said “We have recorded as a band some songs for this biopic that should be out by the end of the year. It’s with Daniel Radcliffe as Al. They got actors portraying the band. No known actors playing us, but in other roles some known actors. Rainn Wilson is in it as Dr. Demento. Emo Philips does as cameo as Salvador Dali. It’s pretty fun! It’s not a true story by any stretch. A ‘mockumentary’ I guess, with a lot of drama and things that never happened. Band members saying things that we never said and never happened.” All of that is important to keep in mind when you watch Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, premiering this week on The Roku Channel. For those who don’t know, Weird Al is the biggest comedy recording artist of all time, he began releasing music that would parody popular songs with different lyrics as well as original comedy songs of his own in the late 70s and early 80s. When I was a kid, just getting into music, I became enamored with Weird Al. I discovered him around 1984 with “Eat It” (his parody of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”) and I kept buying as many of his cassette tapes as I could get my hands on. One summer my sister and I watched and re-watched the VHS tape of The Compleat Al every day (or so it seemed). His comedy was laugh-out-loud funny, without using a single curse word or offending anyone. In addition to The Compleat Al, which was a documentary parody about Al’s career up until the mid 80s, there was also the Behind The Music episode from circa-1999. In 2010, one of the funniest parodies on Funny or Die was a music biopic trailer Weird: The Al Yankovic Story with Aaron Paul as an exaggerated version of Weird Al. Now that short movie trailer has become a feature-length movie and the real Weird All is a co-writer, producer and cast member as record exec Tony Scotti. 

movie poster

Radcliffe plays Al, the accordion playing music parodist whose career takes off when he submits his demos to Dr. Demento and soon his band is taking the world by storm. Soon Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood) begins dating Al and leads him on a downward spiral. It is packed with loads of cameos, too many to name here but Al and Will Forte play the record executive Scotti brothers and it is insanely funny!

Radcliffe and Wood as Al and Madonna

By this point, the die hard Weird Al fans know his story inside and out: played accordion growing up, Dr. Demento, Michael Jackson parodies, yada yada yada. So in watching a music biopic of Al, you kind of don’t want for it to be accurate or comprehensive. You want it to be completely exaggerated and over-the-top. You want to see him as some crazy out of control rock star, which he wasn’t. It makes perfect sense that someone who made a career doing parodies of popular songs is now making his own story a parody of music biopics. The moments that worked best in this were the ones when it is honing in on the tropes of music biopics, i.e. a wicked parody of The Doors during a concert scene. Also good are those moments in music biopics where they treat it like it is something historic and groundbreaking...and it’s not really. The film doesn’t take itself too seriously and it does jump around (Al wasn’t doing “Amish Paradise” in 1985). This is not like Airplane where it is laugh a minute, there are some parts that are way funnier than others and it doesn’t come anywhere close to Al’s 1989 cult classic UHF, which parodied television. It is funnier than a lot of the movies released this year, but I think because it was Al I wanted it to be laugh-till-cry non-stop. Having said all that, if audiences who don’t know Al that much just want to have a fun movie spoofing the likes of Bohemian Rhapsody (this could’ve been called Accordion Rhapsody!), but not as ridiculous as Walk Hard, check it out.

For info on Weird: The Al Yankovic Story: https://therokuchannel.roku.com/watch/066097da82ed5762966888a59b151058/weird-the-al-yankovic-story

3.5 out of 5 stars

#rebel dread #william badgley #don letts #the clash #weird: the al yankovic story #weird al yankovic #eric appel #Movie Reviews #film geek #music nerd #documentary #music biopics #big audio dynamite

[disappointingyet]

God Said Give 'Em Drum Machines

Director Kristian R Hill Stars Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson US/Japan/Russia/South Africa/UK 2022 Language English 1hr 32mins Colour 

Useful intro to the history of techno/nostalgia fest for first-gen ravers

A documentary doesn’t always need a mission statement – it can simply be a story well told – but it can help keep things focused. GSGEDM is here to let you know electronic dance music didn’t start with white European dudes like Calvin Harris and David Guetta and consequently to give the ‘true’ pioneers of techno their due.

In this version of the story, it all starts in the early 1980s with three black guys at a largely white high school in Belleville, Michigan, pop. 3,991. Deep in the sticks, it was where their mothers had whisked them to protect them from Detroit’s urban disaster. So here we have the self-assured Juan Atkins, mostly interviewed in ridiculous sunglasses, chatty Derrick May and solid and sensible Kevin Saunderson. 

By the time of a scene-defining photoshoot for the British magazine Record Mirror in 1988, there were three others, although they were never a true collective. It’s soon apparent that Blake Baxter – the only one with pop star/frontman potential – was always the odd man out.

For someone like me who a teenager in the UK at the time, there’s something jarring when the photographer is identified as Norman Anderson, because for us he will always be Normski, the presenter of BBC Two’s Dance Energy back in the early 1990s. 

Talking of which, one of the fascinating things here is the footage of the studio audience dancing to Atkins’ early Cybotron singles on a local Detroit TV black pop show – seemingly nobody deemed this stuff too weird…

As an introduction to this slice of music history, I think this works. As a collection of Proustian triggers – Normski! knowing which magazine was being discussed by the page design! – this also worked for me even though other than Saunderson’s glorious UK hits (songs rather than tracks) as Inner City, this stuff wasn’t really my bag.

But I also found it quite frustrating – so much is brought up and then not explained or explored. That includes incidents within the film – I feel there’s more to the Baxter-May falling-out than I understand, at least. And presumably we’d be past the statute of limitations on stolen drum machines?

Beyond that, though, I wanted to know more about the relationship between the gay and straight club scenes: could straight dudes DJ at gay nights, for instance? And considering how much the Detroit guys talk about what they learned at the Paradise Garage in New York and the Warehouse in Chicago, was techno truly a separate genre or was it just a marketing angle conjured up with the British dude we meet here? 

On the race issue, the film presents the case for and against Richie Hawtin, a big techno star who is white and came from Windsor, just across the border from in Canada. Hawtin is interviewed extensively and argues he paid his dues. Others hint otherwise, but it’s left unresolved.

The late, great music critic Greg Tate

The appropriation issue is introduced with the oft-used clips of an electrifying Little Richard and a soporific Pat Boone singing their respective versions of Tutti Frutti. But if you’re at a rave or at a superclub, how do you identify the ethnic origin of the maker of the instrumental you are dancing to? I’m not for a second saying that racism isn’t a factor, just that what happened had to work differently than how it had with rock’n’roll, and that mechanism is not uncovered by this film…

One final quibble: very late in proceedings the film mentions that Derrick May – probably the person who gets the most speaking time in GSGEDM – has been accused of sexual assault by four women, which he denies. This should have been brought up earlier - the film feels complicit holding this information back from us.

I saw God Said Give 'Em Drum Machines at the BFI London Film Festival 2022

[seyoung230]

The Camera Obscura and Painting

Unit 9

Research  

Since the advent of photography, there has been a somewhat uneasy relationship between photography and painting. Even though the word, "photography" means "drawing with light" when translated from its Greek roots, many painters are reluctant to admit that they work from photographs. But many painters now use them as references, and some even work from them directly, by enlarging and tracing them.

Some, like well-known British artist David Hockney, believe that Old Master painters including Johannes Vermeer, Caravaggio, da Vinci, Ingres, and others used optical devices such as the camera obscura to help them achieve accurate perspective in their compositions. Hockney's theory, officially called the Hockney-Falco thesis (includes Hockney's partner, physicist Charles M. Falco), postulates that advancements in realism in Western art since the Renaissance were aided by mechanical optics rather than merely being the result of improved skills and abilities of the artists.

The Camera Obscura The camera obscura (literally "dark chamber"), also called a pinhole camera, was the forerunner of the modern camera. It was originally a darkened room or box with a small hole in one side through which rays of light could pass. It is based on the law of optics that states that light travels in a straight line. Therefore, when traveling through a pinhole into a dark room or box, it crosses itself and projects an image upside down on the opposite wall or surface. When a mirror is used, the image can be reflected on a piece of paper or canvas and traced.

It is thought that some Western painters since the Renaissance, including Johannes Vermeer and other Master painters of the Dutch Golden Age that spanned the 17th century, were able to create very realistic highly detailed paintings by using this device and other optical techniques.

Documentary Film, Tim's Vermeer The documentary, Tim's Vermeer, released in 2013, explores the concept of Vermeer's use of a camera obscura. Tim Jenison is an inventor from Texas who marveled at the exquisitely detailed paintings of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675).  Jenison theorized that Vermeer used optical devices such as a camera obscura to help him paint such photorealistic paintings and set out to prove that by using a camera obscura, Jenison, himself, could paint an exact replica of a Vermeer painting, even though he was not a painter and had never attempted painting.

Jenison meticulously recreated the room and furnishings portrayed in the Vermeer painting, The Music Lesson, even including human models accurately dressed as the figures in the painting. Then, using a room-sized camera obscura and mirror, he carefully and painstakingly proceeded to recreate the Vermeer painting. The whole process took over a decade and the result is truly amazing as seen in the trailer of the documentary Tim's Vermeer, a Penn & Teller Film.

David Hockney's Book, Secret Knowledge During the course of the filming of the documentary, Jenison called upon several professional artists to assess his technique and results, one of whom was David Hockney, the well known English painter, printmaker, set designer and photographer, and master of many artistic techniques. Hockney has written a book in which he also theorized that Rembrandt and other great masters of the Renaissance, and after, used optical aids such as the camera obscura, camera lucida, and mirrors, to achieve photorealism in their paintings. His theory and book created much controversy within the art establishment, but he published a new and expanded version in 2006, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters, and his theory and Jenison's are finding more and more believers as their work becomes known and as more examples are analyzed.

Does It Matter? What do you think? Does it matter to you that some of the Old Masters and great painters of the past used a photographic technique? Does it diminish the quality of the work in your eyes? Where do you stand on the great debate over using photographs and photographic techniques in painting?

https://www.liveabout.com/camera-obscura-and-painting-2578256

[outzenortiz12]

Burberry Builds Virtual Replica Of Ginza Retailer With Elle Digital Japan

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