Daily Archives: June 28, 2021

Here we are in my dreams, sings a figure in glowing, purple light. Her voice, lilting over a chorus of low electronic tones, is filtered through vocal effects that tune her voice to an uber-high octave, like an angelic bionic woman. Shes dressed in all white, wearing a leather corset, lace-up platform boots, a petticoat, and a visor face shield with metal points. Androgynous dancers wearing medical masks and precious little else revolve around her. Here we are in my dreams. Nothing ever as it seems. I can be who I want here.

This is the creative world of p1nkstar in her live music video, Girls Like Us. Its a vision of boundary-pushing pop that centers trans women, non-binary folks, and trans artists of color. p1nkstar, a fixture of queer nightlife in Austin, is known for events where she invites audiences to join an otherworldly party and bask in a queer utopia. Girls Like Us, her latest release, was livestreamed in January as an hour-long concert with a high production quality but a low budget. The video featured her music, and that of six other young trans artists from across Texas.

Since moving to Austin from Mexico in 2014, p1nkstar has become an LGBTQ+ icon in town. Her music proposes a science fiction-inspired future in which trans people live freely and joyfully. In addition to making music, p1nkstar, along with her main collaborator and life partner, Y2K, advocates for queer and trans artists of color and inclusive spaces within Austins predominantly white and straight music scene. By producing her own events, pushing promoters for better pay for performers, and bolstering more bookings for trans and POC artists in Austins venues, p1nkstar has pioneered a sort of advocacy work thats as scrappy and DIY as her productions. Sometimes, when she hosts an event, she pays musicians out of her own pocket, she says.

Fans flock to her because shes a spectacle; a maximalist; a fun, exciting performer. Her music is difficult to categorize, bouncing between American pop, electronic music, reggaeton, underground Latin pop, and hyperpop (an increasingly popular genre exemplified by artists like Charli XCX, Dorian Electra, and SOPHIE). And her persona has always been an ambitious experiment: Becoming an icon was part of the plan.

While her stage presence can be a force, p1nkstar, 26, is bashful and giggly off stage, with her eyes often cast downward and her mouth in a constant soft smile. Ever since she transitioned, her friends simply call her Pinky. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2018, where she designed her own honors bachelors degree called Queer Performance and Online Media. She was still mostly experimenting with digital and performance art within the classroom when a mentor, performance artist Emily Lowe, encouraged her to start performing at parties. During her last two years of college, she says she was living a double life: school during the day and performances, DJ sets, and raves at night. Thats when she crystallized the persona and style of p1nkstar.

I had always been interested in stardoms, she says. She bills herself as ur fave electr0nic pop superstar, and says ur is the key word there. Especially in American pop culture, the pop superstar is like a saint or an icon, almost superhuman, she says. How would a hyper-queer pop star exist in the world as an everyday person? She wanted to know what that person would do, where they would go, what they would wear. So she stepped into the role. Things just kind of happened, and I became a pop star.

The persona was initially a rebuke to her community and culture in her hometown of Tampico in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas, a port city about 300 miles south of the Texas border. At the beginning it was a big fuck you to all these values and standards I grew up around, she says. [People] thought it was pretty scandalous. Rebelling against homophobic and transphobic machista values, p1nkstar says the new persona felt like a form of protection from a harmful ideology. I was using the idea of the pop superstar whos beyond human as a shield, she explains. Its art, its pop, its not interacting in the same world as other people.

Over time, however, as p1nkstar got to know more creatives and queer people in the Austin area, her new community became her primary audience. That didnt happen overnight, and it happened out in the city more than within UTs walls. It was hard for professors to understand what I was doing, she told me, noting that she never had a Latinx professor and had few queer professors. I was speaking to a culture that no one in the department understood except for me.

Yet in other areas of academia, the rich tradition of queer nightlife is considered an entire subject of study. p1nkstars work is part of the research of Mac Irvine, a PhD candidate at Tufts University who received their masters degree in gender studies from UT Austin. Queer spaces are so important to peoples lives and peoples livelihoods Pinky is really invested in making those other spaces, and puts in the work to do it, Irvine says. According to Y2K, A lot of our work is creating these whole new worlds where we [trans folks] thrive and you really see that in her work.

The sudden halt of live music in Austin last year because of COVID-19 was tough. I spent like six months mourning, p1nkstar says. I get so much inspiration from seeing all these beautiful queer people celebrating each other and spending time with other, and this vibrant community that we have in Austin. Its hard to not have that.

Before the pandemic, p1nkstar sported a mustache, which she described as an intentional visual nod to gender nonconformity. But in the last year, she says shes been sticking to more traditional gender norms. If you go to the club, and youre gender nonconforming and beautiful, people appreciate it, but if you go to Wal-Mart, people dont appreciate it, she explains, laughing. Masks, since they obscure her face, sometimes help her feel safe. I just want people to not stare at me when Im buying groceries, like, its fine, yall!

Being noticed in public can be dangerous for trans folks, and is the reason queer spaces have historically come to life after dark. Trans people, and specifically trans women, have always been living at night, just because its safer, she says. Im a person who doesnt really exist in daylight.

Currently in the middle of her own transition, she hasnt minded hibernating a bit this year, though. Shes hoping to release new music in 2022. For the rest of this year, her main goal is to keep working on technical skills with sound, and she jokes, to get really hot.

Read this article:

Austin Performer p1nkstar Is Creating New Worlds as a Trans Musician - The Texas Observer

I want that!

Three words youve been saying, out-loud or quietly to yourself, ever since youve been able to talk. Because, of course, you want things, treats, toys, and other accoutrements of humanness. You want them, and you wont take no for an answer even if, as in the new book Electric City by Thomas Hager, there are big hurdles.

If you can imagine a jagged, goofy smile from east to west across the top of Alabama, then you can envision the Tennessee River. Its an area filled with welcome vistas but in the late 1700s, when settlers began showing interest in living along the bottom loop of the Tennessee, they were met by unwelcoming Natives. After Andrew Jackson removed those Natives from the area, called Muscle Shoals after the mussels found in its waters, he allowed development there.

Ninety years later, in 1921, Henry Ford was invited to take a look.

Just decades prior, Thomas Edison had stunned the world with electricity and the possibilities it offered, and developers wanted in on that. Two of them, Frank Washburn and J.W. Worthington, landed government support to build large dams across the Tennessee River first, as electricity generators and secondly, to make nitrogen fertilizer for American farmers. Crews worked feverishly on the project until the end of World War I, when officials realized that new, better technology had already made its factories obsolete.

Muscle Shoals, as a project, was done.

Towns that sprung up to house factory workers disappeared and the government was stuck with buildings for which they had no use. Meanwhile, in Michigan, Henry Ford began construction on new facilities for Model T manufacturing; officials noticed and Ford was invited to view the Muscle Shoals compound, for which he shrewdly made a bid.

But it was a weak one, complete with half-promises and vague assurances and Ford dug in his heels, convinced hed win. Repeatedly given the chance to change his bid, he stood firm. Ford was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of guy.

And certain government officials were inclined toward the latter

Tell your average toddler no, and youd best be prepared to do battle in a dozen ways. They wont go down quietly and neither did Henry Ford. Some may admire him for his perseverance, or for his vision, or read Electric City, and you might call it folly.

Or hubris, as author Thomas Hager shows in his account of Fords many attempts to prevail and the political contention that thwarted him and the utopia he foresaw. Hager tells of government officials and the public taking sides and readers will, too, perhaps paralleling modern opinions on wealth and privilege. Hager writes tantalizingly of an early-twentieth-century President Ford, leaving us to imagine a big what-if, and he brings readers current.

So did Ford deserve to get his way? And was Edison, who seems to be a peripheral character in Electric City, really as supportive as he appeared at first? Find out by reading this fascinating, widely-sweeping slice of Americana. If you love history, yeah, you want that.

c.2021, Abrams Press $28.00 / $35.00 Canada 296 pages

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Electric City: The Lost History of Ford and Edison's American Utopia by Thomas Hager - Winchester Sun - Winchester Sun

Jessica Bellamy 14, now a masters degree candidate at USC Roski, uses paint and paintbrush to make sense of the dystopian utopia of Los Angeles. [5 min read]

When shes not rollerblading by the beach, you can find alumna Jessica Bellamy painting in her studio while listening to public radio station KCRW. (Photos: Courtesy of Jessica Bellamy.)

Los Angeles most beautiful sunsets usually occur when a forest fire is raging. The sky flares orange, hot pink and lavender as smoke drifts across the L.A. basin. Instagram feeds fill with shots of the neon sky as news reports tally up the acres burnt.

These are the sunsets that Jessica Bellamy finds most inspiring. For Bellamy, who graduated from the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 2014 with a degree inpolitical science, the beautiful sunset of a disastrous fire is part of the dystopian/utopian experience of living in L.A.

Much of her work as she now pursues a master of fine arts degree at theUSC Roski School of Art and Designexplores the tension of living at the edge of a tenuous paradise. For instance, fire followers the lush plants that thrive after a fire sweeps through an area make an appearance in a recent painting that also recorded a fires devasting march in real time.

I did a bunch of etching marks into the bottom panel of the painting for how many fires burned 1,000 acres during the time I worked on this, says Bellamy. By the time I finished, I think it was close to 100 marks.

The art of politics

Bellamy enrolled as a political science major at USC Dornsife with the intent of eventually becoming a lawyer. She had taken art classes since she was a child, and both of her parents like to work with their hands her mother as a landscape designer and her father in construction so she decided to add classes from theUSC Roski School of Art and Designto her schedule as well.

Her coursework at USC Dornsife helped her get more comfortable during the critiques occurring in her art classes, where students provide feedback on their classmates artwork. She cites the class European Thought II (POSC 371) withAnthony Kammas, associate professor (teaching) of political science, as particularly helpful in finding her voice.

Early on in college, I was a little bit shy and I wouldnt speak unless called on. But, as soon as I started taking classes at Roski, all of those political science discussions from his class really came with a different relevance. I felt comfortable sharing and critiquing, says Bellamy.

An internship with the Hammer Museum while an undergraduate solidified her realization that her place was in the arts rather than law. She added a minor in fine arts painting to her political science degree. After graduation, she got a job as an arts partnership and events coordinator at public radio station KCRW in Santa Monica, California.

A modern artist

Jessica Bellamy will graduate with an MFA from USC Roski in 2022.

After finishing her shift at the radio station, Bellamy spent her evenings painting. She worked at her kitchen table, where obliging roommates would cook around her, and sold prints online.

Bellamy picked up commissions from major brands. She painted a mural live for Google Pixel at Coachella and painted custom sneakers for guests at a party hosted by Kenneth Cole. Eventually, she tallied her income as an artist in a spreadsheet and realized her side job, and the time spent on art projects, was adding up considerably.

She also realized that she wanted more community: You don't really get that when youre working full time and then trying to also be involved in the art world, says Bellamy. You dont grow as fast on your own.

After such a positive USC experience her first time around, applying for the masters degree program at USC Roski was a no-brainer. Her first year of school has been mostly online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but she was already well-versed in the positive side of virtual connections: The gallery that represents her found her on Instagram.

Shes upgraded from the kitchen table, however, and with the easing of restrictions, shes now receiving friends and clients at her art studio.

USC Dornsifes influence

Even though shes switched to a different school, USC Dornsife is still sparking inspiration. She recently attended an event hosted byUSC Dornsifes 3rd LA projectthat celebrated the 50th anniversary of Reyner Banhams influential bookLos Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies.

Banhams 1971 book defined L.A. as made up of four distinct areas: surfurbia (the beach environs), Autopia (the citys freeways), The Foothills (its surrounding hills), and the Plains of Id (the flatlands outside the core of the city). His work is a major inspiration for Bellamy who plans to depict her own interpretations of L.A.s core identities as part of her masters thesis.

Im trying to come up with new ecologies based on my own experience in the city. Im looking at the built and natural environment, but also at pollution, smog and light, sort of updating his vision, says Bellamy.

Shes hoping to enroll this fall in a USC Dornsife class, Los Angeles: A Polymathic Inquiry (CORE 450), to help develop her thesis further.

Apocalypse now

Bellamys painted sunsets are also layered with L.A. iconography: palm trees, chain link fences, a Lakers player dunking a basket. Clippings from theLos Angeles Timesare a particular obsession both as inspiration and as physical material. Its archives generate a constant reminder of her works theme.

Even when Im searching [the archives] for keywords like immigration. itll show up next to an op-ed thats about smog or what California needs to do in the future to survive, as if were going to have an apocalypse here every year, says Bellamy. By embedding clippings physically into the art, I think the politics lens is coming out in a different way.

When Bellamys not in the studio or browsing the archives, she can often be found in surfurbia, rollerblading along the Dockweiler Beach path sidewalk a hobby honed during the recent quarantine. Behind her gliding figure will perhaps be a vivid, California sunset, one shell likely lay down later on the canvas.

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A political science alumna speaks her mind on the art canvas > News > USC Dornsife - USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

HBO Max has a slew of new originals and highly anticipated releases heading to its library in July. First and foremost, Space Jam: A New Legacy will hit the streaming service the same day as theaters on July 16. The new take on the classic 1996 film stars Lebron James and his son Dom who get stuck in a cartoon. The film follows in the footsteps of the original Michael Jordan version with a high-stakes Toons vs Goons basketball game to help the father and son duo get back to the real world with the help of the Bugs Bunny and the gang. The film really has an all-star cast including Michael B. Jordan, Jim Carrey, Zendaya, Anthony Davis, Kyrie Irving, and more. Note, Warner Bros. new releases including this one are only available on the $14.99/month Ad-Free HBO Max plan.

In another blast from the past, Gossip Girl is taking us back to the Upper East Side with a new generation of private school kids being surveilled by the mystery blogger. There will be lots more secrets, MET stairs lunchbreaks, and high fashion moments but probably fewer headbands this time around.

Judas and the Black Messiah and Tom and Jerry are both returning to the streaming service this month, plus newcomers including Warner Bros crime drama No Sudden Move, the season one part two finale of Genera+ion, season two finale of Full Bloom, and season two finale of Betty will all be available to stream in the month.

Exact Dates to be Announced:

FBOY Island, Max Original Season 1 Premiere

The Immortal (Gomorrah Film), Max Original Film Premiere

Romeo Santos: King of Bachata, 2021 (HBO)

Romeo Santos Utopia Live from MetLife Stadium, 2021 (HBO)

July 1:

Come! (aka Eat!), 2020

8 Mile, 2002 (HBO)

All Dogs Go to Heaven 2, 1996 (HBO)

All Dogs Go to Heaven, 1989 (HBO)

Behind Enemy Lines, 1997 (HBO)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes, 1970 (HBO)

Bio-Dome, 1996 (HBO)

Black Panthers, 1968

Blackhat, 2015 (HBO)

Brubaker, 1980 (HBO)

Cantinflas (HBO)

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, 1972 (Extended Version) (HBO)

Cousins, 1989 (HBO)

Dark Water, 2005 (HBO)

Darkness Falls, 2003 (HBO)

Demolition Man, 1993

Dirty Work, 1998 (HBO)

Disturbia, 2007 (HBO)

Doctor Who Holiday 2020 Special: Revolution of the Daleks, 2020

Duplex, 2003 (HBO)

Escape from the Planet of the Apes, 1971 (HBO)

Eves Bayou, 1997

Firestarter, 1984 (HBO)

First, 2012

For Colored Girls, 2010 (HBO)

For Greater Glory: The True Story of Cristiada, 2012 (HBO)

Full Bloom, Max Original Season 2 Finale

Gandhi, 1982

Ghost in the Machine, 1993 (HBO)

The Good Lie, 2014 (HBO)

Gun Crazy, 1950

House on Haunted Hill, 1999

Identity Thief, 2013 (Extended Version) (HBO)

Ira & Abby, 2007 (HBO)

Joe Versus the Volcano, 1990

Judas and the Black Messiah, 2021 (HBO)

Laws Of Attraction, 2004 (HBO)

Lucky, 2017 (HBO)

Maid in Manhattan, 2002

Married to the Mob, 1988 (HBO)

Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, 1997

Mississippi Burning, 1988 (HBO)

Monster-In-Law, 2005

Mousehunt, 1997 (HBO)

My Brother Luca (HBO)

No Sudden Move, Warner Bros. Film Premiere, 2021 (Available to stream in 4K UHD, HDR10, and Dolby Vision on supported devices)

Planet of the Apes, 1968 (HBO)

Pleasantville, 1998

The Prince of Tides, 1991

Project X, 1987 (HBO)

The Punisher, 2017 (HBO)

Punisher: War Zone, 2008 (HBO)

Rambo, 2008 (Directors Cut) (HBO)

Reds, 1981 (HBO)

Reservoir Dogs, 1992 (HBO)

The Return of the Living Dead, 1985 (HBO)

Return of the Living Dead III, 1993 (Extended Version) (HBO)

Rounders, 1998 (HBO)

Saturday Night Fever, 1977 (Directors Cut) (HBO)

Scream, 1996

Scream 2, 1997

Scream 3, 2000

Semi-Tough, 1977 (HBO)

The Sessions, 2012 (HBO)

Set Up, 2012 (HBO)

Snake Eyes, 1998 (HBO)

Staying Alive, 1983 (HBO)

Stuart Little, 1999

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 2003

Tom and Jerry in New York, Max Original Series Premiere

Trick R Treat, 2009 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys Daddys Little Girls, 2007 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys Diary of a Mad Black Woman, 2005 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys I Can Do Bad All by Myself, 2009 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys Madea Goes To Jail, 2009 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys Madeas Big Happy Family, 2011 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys Madeas Family Reunion, 2006 (HBO)

Tyler Perrys Why Did I Get Married Too, 2010 (HBO)

The Watcher, 2016 (HBO)

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, 2007 (HBO)

Westworld (Movie), 1973

White Chicks (Unrated & Uncut Version), 2004

The White Stadium, 1928

Wont Back Down, 2012 (HBO)

Zero Days, 2016 (HBO)

July 2:

Lo Que Siento por Ti (aka What I Feel for You) (HBO)

July 3:

Let Him Go, 2020 (HBO)

Nancy Drew, Season 2

July 7:

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'Space Jam: A New Legacy,' 'Gossip Girl,' and More are Coming to HBO Max in July 2021 - Cord Cutters News