“What sets Bragg apart from the self-righteous bleaters and spewers is not just his stiletto wit but his incorrigible penchant for wading into the quagmire of the sexes. If his invincible idealism sometimes grates, his romantic vulnerability almost never cloys; whatever utopian nostrums he cooks up are spiked with the bitter pill that even the high-minded can be laid low by hormones. On Don’t Try This at Home, he makes a stab at having the twain meet with the radio-ripe single ‘Sexuality,’ an uptempo stomp that aims at putting the libido back into social liberation. The song is no sweaty come-on number à la Marvin (‘Sexual Healing’) Gaye or George (‘I Want Your Sex’) Michael — it’s an outright carnal anthem exhorting one and all to defy nay-sayers and nukes with some inspired nooky.”
Pride not prejudice | 20 years ago | September 9, 1986 | Neil Miller reported back from Gay Games II.
“There was plenty to distinguish the Gay Games from other large athletic events. At the opening ceremonies, traditional gay ‘camp’ sensibility put in an appearance: the New Orleans contingent tossed necklaces of fake pearls into the crowd; two men dressed up as nuns claimed to represent the Virgin Islands. Japan was represented by a mock Japanese tourist with camera in tow. Participants obviously couldn’t resist poking fun at the ‘straight’ Olympics — and at themselves as well. On the more serious side, there was an effort on the part of the organizers to de-emphasize competition: everyone was eligible to participate in the games, regardless of athletic skill. And there was the sense of being engaged in a political event as well as an athletic one: all participants took the oath ‘to uphold the principles of athletics’ but also ‘to celebrate the strength and unity of our community.’ ”
Fight club | 25 years ago | September 8, 1981 | Stephen Schiff reviewed The Decline of Western Civilization, a documentary about the LA punk scene.
“The fascination of Penelope Spheeris’s remarkable documentary The Decline of Western Civilization has something to do with the rubber-necker’s mentality — that urge beyond curiosity that draws people to the sites of traffic accidents and fires, or, alternatively, to soap operas and the National Enquirer. The movie isn’t an examination of disaster, really. It’s a look at the punk music scene in Los Angeles from December, 1979, through May, 1980. But it is also a scary, almost morbid contemplation of ugliness and despair, and it isn’t exhilarating in the way that even an elegiac rock-concert film like The Last Waltz can be. Again and again, producer-director Spheeris lets her camera be drawn to the dance floors of punk clubs like the Hong Kong Café, the Fleetwood, and Club 88, and again and again we are confronted with a single, iconic image: a high-angle view of the slam dancers, grim-looking kids, mostly men, ramming into one another, choking, punching, and kicking, hurling their bodies through the air like weapons. The club owners call it pogo-ing, but this is nothing like the bobbing and weaving that dominated the New York punk scene a few years ago. For one thing, the punks there were pale, scrawny creatures, and when their pogo-ing got aggressive, no one liked it much, but no one feared for his life. In LA, the pogo-ing is horizontal and enthusiastic, and the kids are broad-shouldered products of the muscle-beach culture. A lot of them are drugged (though the film scarcely acknowledges this), so that they feel very little pain — they don’t feel it when they inflict it and they don’t feel it when they receive it. But they want to feel it. They want to feel something.”
