Still from Subvertising at the OK Cafe

Subvertising at the OK Cafe (4 mins 53 sec, 2002) is a short D.I.Y. video about subvertising and stencilling, which shows you how to create stencils from ordinary materials you can find at home.

I made this video about a subvertising and stencil graffiti workshop at the OK Cafe in Manchester in 2002. The OK Cafe was the name of an ongoing squatted social centre that moved from squat to squat over the years, run by different collectives. Workshops, parties and meetings etc. were held in this incarnation of the OK Cafe – an old pub near Deansgate.

Memorably, at one squat party (scene of my first ever dj set) there was only one toilet that worked upstairs, so another was constucted using an old-style red phonebooth and a bucket. Partygoers had to pop into the phonebooth just off the dancefloor to relieve themselves during the night. The party was really fun, my friend Alex pulled out a drumkit into the middle of the dancefloor for my set and drummed along to the tunes (a mixture of punk, riot grrl, electroclash and rnb as I recall). It was an all-girl d.j. night, my friend Hazel also played an amazing set the highlight of which was the crowd going wild to Joan Baez’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and Jo Banana played a steamy set of northern soul.

Anyways, I digress, the workshop was by a couple of excellent local graphic and stencil artists who were also responsible for great political posters and whatnot. This video was made for BeyondTV, the video distro site I was working on at the time, played in the Melbourne Underground Film Festival in 2003.

For now you can view the video here.

Sex Wars the Musical Workshop at Camp Betty

Sex Wars: The Musical or… Which Side Story (work-in-progress performance/ rehearsal/ audition/ history lesson) In the 1980s and 90s, lesbian communities grappled with a whole heap of arguments around sex and power. What is feminist sex? Does pornography cause rape? And what about consensual violence, where did that fit in? As sex-positive lesbians faced off against radical feminists and anti-pornography activists things got vicious and new lines were drawn: which side are you on? The Lesbian Sex Mafia! Dastardly alliances with Christians! Daggy leather vests! Now what better material could you have for a musical? Drawing on writings from those involved in the sex wars in the US, England and Australia the writers want to bring to life those heady days and investigate the legacies of the time – in song!

At the “Sex Wars – The Musical” workshop at Cloud City in Melbourne for Camp Betty (a weekend of radical sex and politics) Tanya and Esther introduced key debates of the time and the major players. We were given an exclusive sneak preview of the musical – this is a clip of Sammy singing “Nancy” her composition and impromptu performance.

Poster for Camp Betty

Queer film is not just about re-interpreting straight storylines to accommodate ‘gay’ characters – it’s an excuse to play with more than gender and sexuality… super 8, chroma key, sci-fi storylines about aliens and androgynous bisexual nymphomaniac fashion models and remaking Soviet propaganda into a transgender revolution were all examples in the Camp Betty Cinema film programme of how queer film can play with you, and cinema too.

Camp Betty (a weekend of radical sex and politics in June 2007) crowds came along for queer shorts, a performance by Gaylourdes invoking the film theory spectre of vagina dentata in song and dance, 2 minutes of infamy for queer film makers and a screening of the cult 80s sci-fi movie Liquid Sky.