It's Christmas Eve, What Are You Doing?

Be Very, Very Quiet. I'm Hunting Toons!
Photo: Rhonda Bernstein 

For those of you not in the loop, my Birthday is exactly one week before Christmas, "Yes" it is December 18th, "Hi" I'm Michael Shinafelt and I'm a Sagittarius.

I turned 50 this year. Yeah, I am a half a century old and still kicking ass! So how I am celebrating this evening?

Continuing my well earned status as a survivor of Generation X by celebrating my Birthday even more. It started last week with an awesome excursion to Disneyland courtesy of Rhonda Bernstein. With co-stars Eric Bernstein & Angela Simone.

Seguing into the actual date with my BFF Brittney Alexander at the legendary El Coyote. The place where famed Hollywood starlet Sharon Tate had her last meal.

And so it continues into Christmas Eve with Scott Jacobs. Featuring Wine & Cheese and Frivolous Fuckery!

Shout out to Erik Rimmer!

Simply having a wonderful Holiday Season!

I Bring You Joy at: 
https://twitter.com/MShinafelt
www.imdb.com/name/nm4466735/
https://www.facebook.com/michael.shinafelt

Que Shiraz, Shiraz

Shiraz!
Gerard Butler, Salma Hayek & Adrien Brody

With Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur both falling in September well it's prime time for what else? Shiraz! You get some Shiraz, and you get some Shiraz, and you get some Shiraz!

How apropos that there is now a film that premiered at the Toronto Film Festival affectionately known as TFF titled: September of Shiraz.

On the completely irreverent side and off the wall state of things the after party was sponsored by Grey Goose Vodka. Yeah the wine companies that produce Shiraz really took a snooze on this promotional opportunity.

But hey it produced a really rocking image of  two totally hot and sexy stars and one very talented one - Gerard Butler, Salma Hayek and Adrien Brody combined to make a pretty compelling threesome at the premiere.

Hey, Gerard if you are going to be at any other film festivals in the near future please let myself and author M.E. Franco know, we're here for you!

See you in Toronto next year, Gerard !

http://tiff.net/   

Cheers To Kelly Clarkson!

Kelly Clarkson: Where's The Wine?
Photo: Michael Rozman/Warner Brothers 

Kelly Clarkson has always been the subject of ridicule about her weight. Even when she was on American Idol. 

Weight is such a boring subject and if it does not bother Ms. Clarkson why the Hell should it bother you? 

The Kelly bomb appeared on Ellen and got a resounding cheer from DeGeneres and the crowd, and didn't apologize about her gorgeous, curvaceous figure for one second. "I yo-yo," she said, "Sometimes I'm more fit and I get into kickboxing hardcore, and then sometimes I don't and go, 'Nope, I'd rather have wine!'"

Hooray Kelly, when in doubt wine should always win!

T.G.I.F! Have a toast with Kelly at:

https://www.facebook.com/kellyclarkson

https://twitter.com/kelly_clarkson

Dudley Saunders: "Monsters"

Independent: This is the adjective that best describes Dudley Saunders, and that's a good thing. 

From his performance art - to his activism, and first and foremost his music, Dudley could be a spokesperson for The First Amendment. 

I first heard of Dudley via his CD "The Billy White Acre Sessions" and saw him perform at Genghis Cohen in Los Angeles, CA. I was hooked. 

Dudley is a gifted storyteller, musician and thought provoker who stays true to his personal vision.

His latest CD: "Monsters" is no exception, Mr. Saunders is like wine, he gets better with age. 

For those of you out there who are familiar with Dudley, this will be fun! For those of you who aren't well here's your chance to really get to know him. I recently checked in with the man behind the music and threw 10 Random Thoughts at him, and "Yes" he answered...


MS: Performance Art 

DS: Uncomfortable. Find the place that makes you want to turn away, and you’ll know that’s where you most need to go. Then you create a brand new form that fits the shape of the uncomfortable thing, which then makes the audience uncomfortable, because they don’t know what to expect. This is very exciting to me as an audience, but most audiences prefer to be comfortable. The audiences that get excited the way I do usually turn out to be great friend material.

MS: East Village 

DS: Lost Home. A geographic location where challenge and opposition to traditional modes of expression, as well as traditional subject matter, were normal and the expected minimum. A time and place not meant to stand, and maybe too easy to mythologize. I try not to look back anymore.

MS: "Love Song For Jeffrey Dahmer"

DS: Hidden key. I can tell whether people will like me based on whether or not they want to engage this song. The not-think-about-it people don’t stick around me very long. Susanne Breslin did the best interview about this song, and was not much-liked for doing it:http://www.facebook.com/l/AAQFq8mLvAQEMvlN7GaMkZy-RjEKahMDBvbZ21wPvpv63PQ/trueslant.com/susannahbreslin/2010/04/19/a-love-song-for-jeffrey-dahmer/

MS: Rolling Stone 

DS: Immaterial: the magazine traffics so predictably in the mainstream and the “officially-sanctioned indies” that it reflects almost nothing of what matters to me (except for Matt Taibbi’s political reporting). I will be shocked if they ever mention my name, although maybe when I’m 80 they’ll call me “an underground legend” in some article squib. As if they hadn’t participated in making me “underground” by ignoring me. Talk to performance artist Penny Arcade and she’ll give you an earful on that media pattern.

MS: "American Horror Story" 

DS: Meta-fiction. Pile up enough standard gothic tropes and they become something more. You start to feel the darker fears and desires that undergird them. This show addresses these old narratives head-on where I just pull pieces of them into story-songs I don’t actually think of as gothic -- like in my song THE ROSEWOOD CASKET, where the murdered woman’s skull asks him to “kiss my skinless face”. I was a little aware that that might seem a little horrifying, but not as much as I now see it is. Really, nothing I write every seems that disturbing when I’m writing it; it’s just after the fact I get all these reactions and go ‘oh yeah ...’ But I wonder now if other people see a stronger connection between me and Ryan Murphy? Usually the artist has the most skewed perspective on these things.

MS: Storytelling 

DS: Untold. Most of the stories that matter to me - or would matter to me - go untold. And the heroic model of storytelling, where a hero learns and earns his just rewards, is primarily a lie we tell to assure the evil that they have a right to the things they’ve stolen. I’m drawn to lives with foreshortened narratives -- they get trapped too early, or are broken before they can get to redemption, or the trouble they face doesn’t make them stronger but breaks them into strange distorted shapes. A lot of pop songs just regurgitate the same old stories, and you can tell where they’re going halfway through the first line. That doesn’t make me feel anything. I think the untold people deserve their own melodies.

MS: Act-Up

DS: PTSD. My old ACT UP colleague Spencer Cox just died a few weeks ago. We met for lunch when I was touring through New York in October. We talked at length about how much untreated trauma there is in our activist generation. It was a great discussion, but it turned out he was more of an example of PTSD than I realized: he’d stopped his medication, and in December just couldn’t fight off an infection. It reminds me of something that the writer Sarah Schulman once told me, that the people who create change are rarely the ones who benefit from it. The drag queens from the Stonewall Rebellion mostly ended up poor and homeless and murdered while younger gay people experienced previously unimagined freedom. And so many of the AIDS activists who saved millions of lives are having trouble saving their own. But - and this is very ACT UP - we’ll probably do better if we pull together to save each other. 

MS: "Birdbones" 

DS: Exorcism. Rageful fragility. Wow, that’s a weird response! This was the performance art piece that got me the most attention, but it also marked a turning point. 

Back then, I made art because I had all these horrifying ghosts in the back of my head that I couldn’t quite identify even though they ruled my life. I was a completely tortured, haunted person, but if you asked me what was wrong I had no idea. So I used performance art to make those ghosts manifest themselves so I could see them, feel them and wrestle with them. I used a form I called “witnessing,” which was essentially me bearing witness to these surreal horror stories in the enraptured voice of a psychosexual evangelist - I think the Village Voice used that term. Anyway: like a lot of tortured people, I believed that the pain would literally kill me if I faced it. Which means performance art, for me, felt a little like a suicide mission - but for the purpose of saving my life. In retrospect, no wonder I was such a basket case.

Birdbones got the last of those ghosts out of me and probably saved my life. I also got great reviews, and if the right wing hadn’t decimated arts funding, I might have become an avant-garde art-world star. Maybe I’m glad that didn’t happen: a few years later, I made my first record, RESTORE.

MS: Rainy Days 

DS: Falling on the just and the unjust alike. Isn’t that in Matthew, in the King James Bible? It just means that when it rains we are all bound up in one common experience. It’s a gentle version of what happens in LA during an earthquake, or during a power outage in New York. It’s inconvenient but I love it - I’d rather be uncomfortable than disconnected.

MS: "Monsters"

DS: Unseen. Monsters that look like monsters aren’t frightening to me. Reagan’s charming face used to fill me with abject terror. Or the kindly gentle smile of Rick Warren now, filling us with uplifting platitudes while preaching anti-gay propaganda in Uganda that led directly to the deaths of gay people. Most monsters don’t believe they are monsters the way most alcoholics don’t believe they have a drinking problem.

"Monsters" are everywhere at: http://www.dudleysaunders.com/

Sylvia Tosun "World Keeps Turning"

Sylvia Tosun is a singer-songwriter to be reckoned with. The operatically trained vocal powerhouse has a big hit on her hands with the thoughtful and extremely danceable, “World Keeps Turning”.

She also owns Sea to Sun Recordings, her own record label that puts out all of her music as well as Traci Lord's current dance smash, “Last Drag”. Sylvia appears in the song's video and gets to make out with Traci.

A smash hit single, her own record label and in a music video making out with an icon….fluff up your pillow and dream, here comes Sylvia Tosun!

MS: Hey Sylvia, since 2011 was such a lame year, let’s kick off the beginning of 2012 with some fun!

ST: 2011 sucked, completely! S-U-X apostrophe D!

MS: Then let’s rock 2012!

ST: You’re on!

MS: Since the 411 is you were an opera singer, what is your favorite opera to perform?

ST: La Boheme.

MS: Which male rock star would you be if you could?

ST: Freddie Mercury!

MS: Awesome, I picked David Bowie.

ST: Oh, I’d take him too, anytime baby! (laughs)

MS: What else would you like to own besides a record company?

ST: A mansion and a yacht.

MS: Oh, good one! Name your favorite place to write music.

ST: In my head.
MS: That makes sense, I thought maybe you had a little tranquil room or place you might go to.

ST: It’s always tranquil in my head with enough wine! (laughs)

MS: Funny, I drink wine when I write too!

ST: Totally, with a bottle of wine I can sit in a corner anywhere and write.

MS: Do you sing in the shower?

ST: Never! Once in a while if I am in a hurry I will vocalize in the shower, but I never sing in it.

MS: Since you lock lips in the video for “Last Drag” with her, what kind of a kisser is Traci Lords?

ST: Oh My God, she’s great! She’s amazing, she’s gorgeous, articulate and extremely intelligent. Also she is a lot of fun!

MS: Thanks Sylvia, you rule!

Keep the fun flowing in 2012 and check in with Sylvia at:

http://www.seatosun.com/

http://www.facebook.com/#!/SylviaTosun