Bruce LaBruce

Bruce LaBruce (born January 3, 1964) is a Canadian actor, writer, filmmaker, photographer and underground adult director based in Toronto, Ontario. His films explore themes of sexual and interpersonal transgression against cultural norms, frequently blending the artistic and production techniques of independent film with gay pornography.

Life and career

LaBruce was born in Tiverton, Ontario. He has claimed both Justin Stewart and Bryan Bruce as his birth name in different sources. He studied film at York University in Toronto and wrote for Cineaction magazine, curated by Robin Wood, his teacher.

He first gained public attention with the publication of the queer punk zine J.D.s, which he co-edited with G.B. Jones. He currently writes and photographs for a variety of publications including Vice, Nerve.com and BlackBook magazine, and has also previously been a columnist for the Canadian music magazine Exclaim! and Toronto's eye weekly, as well as a contributing editor and photographer for New York's index magazine. He has also been published in Toronto Life, the National Post and The Guardian.

Index Magazine

index Magazine was a prominent New York City based publication with in-depth interviews with prominent figures in art and culture. It was created by Peter Halley and Bob Nickas in 1996, running until late 2005. Covering the burgeoning Indie culture of the 1990s, index regularly employed such rising photographers as Juergen Teller, Terry Richardson, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Ryan McGinley, and featured interviews with figures including Björk, Brian Eno, Marc Jacobs, and Scarlett Johansson, mixing new talents and established names in music, film, architecture, fashion, art, and politics. In addition to famous personalities, the publication also featured a mix of interviews with not so-famous New York personalities such as Queen Itchie or Ducky Doolittle.

In 2014 they launched index A to Z: Art, Design, Fashion, Film, and Music in the Indie Era. The book a bible of indie culture was published by Rizzoli. index A to Z celebrates the uncompromising personalities, humor, and DIY brilliance of the indie generation and captures the spirit of the era. index A to Z showcases some of the most relevant cultural figures who were at that time young and often unknown, and who have since become cultural icons or celebrities, including Bjork, Scarlett Johansson, Alexander McQueen, Ryan McGinley, Wayne Koestenbaum, Aphex Twin, Jacqueline Bosnjak, Brian Eno, Christine Vachon, Maurizio Cattelan, Guinevere Turner, Ruth Ansel and Tom Sachs to name just a few. New interviews with founders Peter Halley and Bob Nickas, with and a historical overview by Wendy Vogel that offer further looks behind the scenes of the cult of Index Magazine.

Lana Del Rey

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Elizabeth Woolridge Grant (born June 21, 1985), better known by her stage name Lana Del Rey, is an American singer, songwriter, and model. Born and raised in New York, Del Rey embarked on a music career in 2005 and first received widespread attention in 2011, when the music video for her single "Video Games" became a viral internet sensation. Del Rey received further recognition after her major-label debut Born to Die peaked at number two on the U.S. charts and was the fifth best-selling album of 2012. A remix of its single "Summertime Sadness", produced by Cedric Gervais, peaked at number six on the U.S., and the Paradise EP followed that November, garnering Del Rey her first Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Album. Three of the EP's tracks were featured in her short film Tropico, which premiered in December 2013.

In 2014, Del Rey released her third studio album, Ultraviolence, to positive critical and commercial reception; it became her first number-one record in the United States. In 2015, following a North American tour with Courtney Love, Del Rey released her fourth studio album, Honeymoon, to further positive critical and commercial response; it had the fourth highest first week sales by a female artist in 2015. As of 2015, she is the most streamed female artist on Spotify in the United States, and the fourth worldwide. Her music has been noted for its cinematic style, its preoccupation with themes of tragic romance and melancholia, and its references to pop culture, particularly 1950s and 1960s Americana.

Film festival

A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upon the festival's focus, can include international and domestic releases. Some festivals focus on a specific film-maker or genre (e.g., film noir) or subject matter (e.g., horror film festivals). A number of film festivals specialise in short films of a defined maximum length. Film festivals are typically annual events. Some film historians do not consider Film Festivals as official releases of film, like Jerry Beck. The best known film festivals are the Venice Film Festival, the Cannes Film Festival, the Toronto Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, and the Berlin International Film Festival, the latter being the largest film festival worldwide, based on attendance. The Venice Film Festival is the oldest major festival. The Melbourne International Film Festival is the largest film festival in the Southern Hemisphere and one of the oldest in the world. A 2013 study found 3,000 active films festivals worldwide—active defined as having held an event in the previous 24 months.

Pierrot Lunaire

Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds "Pierrot lunaire" ("Three times Seven Poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire'"), commonly known simply as Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 ("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the Moonlight"), is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of 21 selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name. The première of the work, which is between 35 and 40 minutes in length, was at the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the vocalist.

The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style. Schoenberg had previously used a combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, which was a fashionable musical style popular at the end of the nineteenth century. The melodrama is in atonal form yet does not use Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique.