FT

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  performance May 11, 2022

  Waiting for Argot

  TIP THE IVY,  the latest stage work by Colin Self, is an opera about language. First performed last year at Halle für Kunst Steiermark in Graz, Austria, it recently had a three-night run at Performance Space New York, which cocommissioned the piece. Like many of Self’s productions, Tip the Ivy is heavily collaborative, this time featuring Bully Fae Collins, Cornelius, Dia Dear, and Geo Wyeth as well as a choir, or “XOIR.”

  More specifically, Ivy is an opera about the sociolect of queers, sex workers, and entertainers in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, known as Polari (also spelled

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  slant December 07, 2021

  Mass Appeal

  ASKING WHETHER NYC needs another big Warhol show is a little like asking whether a university English department needs cheap wine and Costco cheese after a guest lecture: That’s just how we do things here. But “Andy Warhol: Revelation,” up now at the Brooklyn Museum after opening at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2019, has two great strengths. It has a fresh focus—the religious dimensions of his art—and curator José Carlos Diaz has dug deep into Warhol’s enormous archive to find rarely seen and lesser-known work (associate curator Carmen Hermo organized the presenation in Brooklyn).

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  music November 02, 2021

  Scream Queen

  DIAMANDA GALÁS’s FIRST ALBUM, The Litanies of Satan (1982), was reissued last year, and now her second LP, Diamanda Galás (1984), is finally available again after being out of print for thirty-seven years. In high school, I traded a pen pal an Einstürzende Neubauten concert bootleg for a hissy nth generation cassette copy of the two albums, one on each side; these vital reissues, beautifully remastered by Heba Kadry, restore the recordings to crystal clarity. Both albums are a testament to how fully formed and relentlessly radical the American singer’s creative approach and vision were from the

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  music April 24, 2021

  Astral Traveling

  PROMISES, a new collaboration between American free jazz legend Pharoah Sanders, British electronic musician and composer Floating Points (Sam Shepherd), and the London Symphony Orchestra, made me wish I was holding the sleeve of a 12" LP instead of squinting at a digital thumbnail. Even without the multiplex cover art by Julie Mehretu, there are only so many names you can squeeze onto one album cover before it threatens to buckle. I was not without trepidation when I first hit play: The easiest way to disappoint is to promise too much. Fortunately, Promises more than delivers.

  Though it’s the

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  slant February 2020

  MIRACLE WORKER

  IN 2017, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was diagnosed with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia. Since then, P-Orridge has slowly transformed h/er Instagram (@pandrogyne) into an astonishing living museum of h/er many incarnations. The posts are sporadic, but when they flow across my feed, they are immediately recognizable—alien, astonishing, yet clearly linked. Sometimes it’s a blurry, sepia-toned Polaroid of two androgynous youths dressed in period clothes from a period that never existed. Sometimes it’s a straightforward and evidently recent pic of friends hanging out. Sometimes it’s a shelfie packed

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  music December 03, 2019

  Sentimental Duration

  WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL, dreaming about New York and reading weeks-old issues of the Village Voice, the extended and even epic creative moments were the ones I most wanted to experience: La Monte Young playing the music he famously refused to release in recorded form; Lou Reed or Patti Smith performing multiple nights in intimate venues; spending a whole day at the Guggenheim watching Andy Warhol’s Sleep, 1963, or Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster Cycle,” 1994–2002. Before YouTube and file sharing, these adventures couldn’t be accessed secondhand; you just had to be there, which I wasn’t. I remember