caroline contillo

the north end of halifax, originally uploaded by ccontill.

went to halifax, nova scotia for the obey fest this weekend. 3 and 1/2 days of awesome/experimental music/film etc. I caught a cold by the end and slept through the zine fair as a result, which was a bit of a bummer. but it was awesome to be in halifax again. i freaking love that place. it’s like some manner of shambhala for me, a hidden city where I can feel tranquil for a modest sum of money.

let’s face it. i don’t update this thing often enough. however, i have begun making use of twitter on a regular basis now that i’ve figured out how to phone it in. literally. i literally phone it in.

here is my twitter profile.

also, i’m doing stand-up next tuesday, May 19th, at Sweet-Ups bar in Williamsburg, for Giggles comedy night. i’ve never done stand up before so things could get really messy. come out and participate in the carnage.

here is a link to the specifics.

oh hey, i did the cover art for sarah’s new solo record!

you can buy it at her website, here.

One night I was watching Grey Gardens with my friend Alana. Alana said, during the scene where Little Edie Beale comes down the stairs in order to dance around with an American Flag, “It looks like she’d dancing to Madonna.” So I made a video wherein i spliced scenes of Grey Gardens together and set it to Madonna’s song Hung Up On You. I posted the video on Vimeo. Somehow Perez Hilton found it and blogged about it, and all of a sudden it was all over youtube with millions of views. My mom even forwarded it to me, thinking i would find it funny. She didn’t know that I was the one who’d made it. After Grey Gardens hit broadway, there was increased interest in the film, and suddenly my video was mentioned in Entertainment Weekly. I posted it on my own youtube account, only to be accused of not being the actual creator. Blogs lauded the “young gay man” who’d put it together. It spawned numerous imitations. That halloween a group of women appeared at a local bar, each dressed as little Edie, in their ‘best costume for the day.’ When I told them I’d made the video they all collapsed into fits of surprise. It was really my shining moment.

Since then, Madonna’s people have taken down the Youtube incarnations of Hung Up On Grey Gardens, my amazing little mashup. My moment in the sun. Ungrateful assholes. Couldn’t they see I was doing that irrelevant woman a favor? Anway, it still exists on Vimeo, so here it is, linked, since I can’t embed it any more: Hung Up On Grey Gardens.

So, about the HBO verson. Listen, anyone who holds Grey Gardens as some sort of sacred cow is missing the amazing opportunity for extended campification via Drew Barrymore’s janky method acting. That’s really all there is to my excitement. The original Grey Gardens is pretty much the Susan Sontagian definition (or lack thereof) of ‘camp,’ and this meta-version of the two Edies’ story is like camp cubed. I can’t wait to see it.

CN Mystic Pizza Sign.jpg, originally uploaded by corvar.

So I filmed a spot for the show Cinematherapy, where Chuck Nice from Best Week Ever therapizes women on an inflatable couch, using a classic chick flick as a jumping off point. I lucked out and got Mystic Pizza as my film, and ended up talking with Chuck about scented candles and revenge. If you’d like to see what will probably amount to about 30 seconds worth of my face, framed by a shirt that is buttoned incorrectly, then here are the deetz for my televisation debut:

Mystic Pizza
Women’s Entertainment Channel
Thursday, April 23rd, 7pm & 9pm

For those of you who might be, for example, a relative who googled my name in an effort to figure out just what exactly it is that I’m doing in New York, allow me to provide some updates, academic and otherwise.

I’m currently wrapping up my my Junior year at Hunter. I’m taking five courses this semester, including a colloquium on the Science and Politics of Climate Change. This summer I’ll be going to Germany for a month to study German in Kassel, then taking a few other classes at Hunter when I return. I just interviewed for a program in which I would intern for a government agency or non-profit. I specified that I wanted to work in either environmental conservation or sustainable development. Architectural preservation would be OK with me, too. So, hopefully I’ll be doing that program for the entirety of the next academic year, while also wrapping up my Creative Writing major, which will include some upper-level fiction writing workshops and seminars.

On the non-academic front, I’ve been helping out with Evolver.net, where I’m also blogging. I also just filmed a spot for WE Cinematherapy, and will post the air time when it becomes known to me.

The above video is “space seeing - space hearing” made by Valie Export in 1973, and i have been hypnotized by it in the halls of galleries twice now. First, at the feminist performance art exhibit at the academie der kunst in berlin, and more recently as part of the here is every exhibition of contemporary art at MoMa. The oscillating sound that changes according to the distance of valie’s body from the camera reminded me of an article on boingboing.net from a few days ago regarding ‘cross-modal interaction,” where input from one sense (touch, for example) is heavily influenced by input from another sense (hearing, for example).

Valie Export was a pioneering feminist performance and video artist, and in one of her early guerrilla performances Action Pants: Genital Panic she “entered a porn cinema in Munich with her hair in disarray, wearing crotchless pants, and carrying a machine gun. Striding up and down the rows of theatregoers, she brandished the weapon and challenged the male audience to engage with a “real woman” instead of with an images on a screen.” (from Wikipedia.)

Leila Waddell (1880-1932), Crowley’s most famed Scarlet Woman, is a powerful historical figure in magic and Thelema in her own right. Immortalized in The Book of Lies and the Confessions and familiarly addressed by Crowley as Laylah, she was a writer, magician, musician, daughter of Irish immigrants to Australia, mother, and founding member of the original company of the Rites of Eleusis. She was also, arguably, Crowley’s most powerful muse, inspiring numerous poems.

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