Dirty Looks

Blending artist video, porn clips and experimental music, Dirty Looks’ Bradford Nordeen leads a visual lecture exploring the recent re-emergence of the bathhouse in queer culture. From the reissued sex soundtracks of Patrick Cowley and Coil, musicians like Ruth Mascelli and Jake Muir bring techno and vaporwave into the steamroom to ply new forms of embodiment. Videos by Oat Montien spin archival art by Patrick Angus, Alvin Baltrop James Bidgood and Jimmy Wright into their own digital utopias. These emerging artists gape the capacity for the bathhouse to create alternative strategies for pleasure that resound Cowley’s sacred pools while squatting them, revising that pearled white tile with a queer politics of the future.

It was recently discovered that some advertising listed the incorrect start times. The correct timing is as follows: Doors at 7pm | Start at 7:30pm. Sorry for the inconvenience and we look forward to seeing you there!

Dirty Looks' Bradford Nordeen will lead a visual lecture of images and clips from Cookie Mueller's always fervent and sometimes-fleeting roles in the films of John Waters, through No Wave New York classics and in 1980s art videos. With a like flair for the anecdotal and in the collage spirit of Chloé Griffin's Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, Nordeen will present stolen moments and larger scenes from her diverse body of work in "the blessed profession."
 
Cookie Mueller was a firecracker, a cult figure, a wild child, a writer, a go-go dancer, a mother and a queer icon. A child of suburban 1950s Maryland, she made her name as an actress in John Waters' films, including Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble, and then as an art critic for Details magazine and a columnist for the East Village Eye. She was also a writer of hilarious and shockingly wise stories, the ‘cure for a bad party,’ and a maven of New York’s downtown art world. Her writings, especially the collection of autobiographical stories Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (Semiotext(e), 1990) have inspired and amazed many and gathered a kind of cult following.
 
Cookie lived an independent and wild life, going from Provincetown, where she kept a circle of romantic crack-pots and poets around her, to New York City where she collaborated with No Wave and avant-garde filmmakers such as Amos Poe, Eric Michell and Michel Auder, published her writing, and became a star of the nightlife and art scene. Cookie also lit up the stage at the Performing Garage alongside other NYC luminaries such as Taylor Mead, John Heys, Gary Indiana and Sharon Niesp.
 
Although she died from AIDS in 1989, Cookie has become a counter-culture icon, adored by those who have discovered her work.
 

Jonesy, Fiend, Super 8 on HD, 3min., 1992
Greta Snider, Hard-Core Home Movie, 16mm, 5min., 1989
Jill Reiter, Birthday Party, 16mm on video, 9min., 1993
G.B. Jones, The Troublemakers, super 8 on DV, 20min., 1990
Scott Treleaven, The Salivation Army, super 8 and video, 22min., 2001
Rick Castro, “3. Dr. Chris Teen Sex Surrogate” (from Three Faces of Women: a feminine trilogy), VHS, 25min., 1994
Greta Snider, Our Gay Brothers, 16mm, 9min., 1993

Purnell's audacious and hysterical hit novel, 100 Boyfriends, leaps off the page through a series of madcap “mixtape” films. Blending performance styles, film footage, dance videos and hardcore porn, Purnell blends his chaotically queer art practice with slices of life in the age of social media. What the fuck is a film? Expect live interruptions and only the unexpected.

German film enfant terrible Rosa von Praunheim trained his lens on the trans and gender-defying Americans who sought refuge in Berlin’s 80s club scene, catching some of the most honest and alarmingly prescient intergenerational dialogues about trans life ever dedicated to celluloid in the process.

Dirty Looks has dug deep into documents of trans history to assemble a program of archival trans portrait films that spool from experimental cinema of the 1970s, activist video, and personal portraiture. Spanning an early decade of production, illuminating (lost?) queer histories and liminal spaces across America, The Girl Can’t Help It screens poignant testimonials and early rhetorics of trans-femme ideation.