Ernest Hardy

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Amazing Grace

Ernest Hardy
Deniece Williams, Emotions at Sunset Junction, Saturday, August 18 It was the bitterest of ironies. Deniece Williams opened her Sunset Junction set with an a cappella version of “God Is Amazing,” punctuated with sista-girl testifying, only to tumble from the stage in a fall that left her lying on the......

Amazing Grace

Ernest Hardy
Deniece Williams, Emotions at Sunset Junction, Saturday, August 18 It was the bitterest of ironies. Deniece Williams opened her Sunset Junction set with an a cappella version of “God Is Amazing,” punctuated with sista-girl testifying, only to tumble from the stage in a fall that left her lying on the......

Docuweek

Ernest Hardy
The programming in this year’s DocuWeek is incredibly strong. Of the nearly dozen titles made available for press screening (including short films), there wasn’t a dud in the bunch. Jessica Yu’s Protagonist dazzles most in its masterful usage of marionettes, clips from the TV series Kung Fu and the classic......
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Dorian Wood: Beautiful Losing

Ernest Hardy
“It’s a rewarding challenge to ignite visuals in the listener’s head and to bring out specific emotions,” says Glassell Park–based singer-songwriter-producer Dorian Wood, speaking to the L.A. Weekly from the middle of a promotional road trip. “A great deal of strategizing is involved in making this happen. It’s almost a......
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Kiss the Boys

Ernest Hardy
Un beso. A few weeks ago, during his hot-ticket performance at London’s gay nightclub G.A.Y., hetero heartthrob and erstwhile Latin pop “It” boy Enrique Iglesias freaked his signature stage bit where he plucks a female fan from the crowd and serenades her with his hit, “Hero,” a cookie-cutter I-will-be-your-white-knight pledge......
Getting up close and personal with the youths of One to Another (Strand Releasing)

A Queer State of Affairs

Ernest Hardy
Watching most contemporary queer movies, particularly the American ones, is to see art reflect the downside of the progress achieved in the culture wars, in gays and lesbians securing that much-coveted “seat at the table.” It’s the same banality of vision that so often follows even the slightest triumphs of......
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Sarah Schulman’s The Child: The Toxic Machine

Ernest Hardy
In 1997, 15-year-old Sam Manzie sexually assaulted and murdered 11-year-old Eddie Werner. Those are the bare facts. Shrouding them, however, are complex, interlocked issues: queer teen sexuality, pedophilia, homophobia in macro and micro forms, and the explicit and insidious ways that the state, mainstream culture and families can converge to......

Music Videos

Ernest Hardy
In MTV’s halcyon days, before pimped rides, real worlds and big-budget awards shows, the videos they programmed often gleamed with a joyful ineptitude. Music-clip formula was far on the horizon, and naiveté was conjoined with a gleeful raiding of experimental-film history and art-student precocity. Though the “ineptitude” and “naiveté” showcased......
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Björk and Ryan Shaw Go Genre Bending

Ernest Hardy
I have lost my origin/and I don’t want to find it again . . . —Björk, “Wanderlust” Genre is drag. Embedded in musical genres are all sorts of projected, culturally inscribed rules and expectations about race, gender, sexuality . . . authenticity. Musicians fucking with genre, working across their established or expected boundaries, is a......
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Mavis Staples Joins the Fight

Ernest Hardy
A few weeks ago, while tinkering with her MacBook en route to speak at the Porter Colloquium — an arts conference for black visual artists — at Howard University in D.C., art historian Phyllis Jackson weighed in on the then-raging Don Imus controversy. “The fact that those girls [the Rutgers......