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  Patty Schemel with Hole, for Rolling Stone in the 1995 issue where she came out. From L Courtney Love, Eric Erlandson, Schemel, Melissa Auf der Maur For any rock fan who was a teen of the 90s Seattle grunge reigned supreme and Hole was its seat of feminine power. The seminal grrl grunge group was fronted but the unmistakable, if not always likeable, Courtney Love, wife and baby momma to the most well known grunge persoanlity of all time,, the late Kurt Cobain, frontman for Nirvana. But as big a personality as Love was, all the little baby dykes had eyes only for the lady behind the drums. Patty Schemel was a kick ass ginger drummer with heart, and she was gay.
She was also a drug addict, alcoholic, friend, and now wife and mother. Five years ago, at the beginning of her new sober life, she came across archival footage taken during Hole’s 1995 world tour and thought to digitize the memories. Instead, it became, Hit So Hard: The Life and Near Death Story of Patty Schemel a documentary of her amazing journey.
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  Scene from the stage production of 'Arias with a Twist' The dream of the 80s is alive in Joey Arias, or so it seems from the waxing nostalgic at the beginning of Arias with a Twist:The Docufantasy, Q Doc’s opening night documentary that follows Arias in his latest performance, a collaboration with classically trained puppeteer Basil Twist.
The first 20 minutes of interviews with Arias’ 80s hipster pals is tender, and I certainly sympathize with the sadness over the commodification of performance art, queerness and weirdness that has come about with the likes of Lady Gaga etc. Indeed, Joey Arias was already a brilliant Gaga-esque diva before Stephanie Germanotta was a glint in her parents eyes.
But as cute and tender as it is, it starts to get a bit tiresome. Luckily, the film moves on pretty quickly to its introduction of collaborator Basil Twist.
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  William S Burroughs William S. Burroughs, The Man Within. Directed by Yony Leyser screening Sat June 5th, 6pm
People must of thought I was a weird kid. I carried around a torn, stained copy of Naked Lunch in my backpack for months during high school in Utah. It was a difficult book to understand but the reading was made easier because I recognized the science fiction tropes he used and I forgave him the graphic, homosexual imagery. William S. Burroughs wasn’t someone just any young student could idolize. His prose was abstract and difficult. He was a junkie, and had been for forty years. He wrote about strange creatures that fed off the ejaculations of the human race. He developed avant garde methods of prose construction such as the cut-up technique. His influence reverberates through the generations. He inspired queers all over the world to rebel against a society that controlled and punished them. He was celebrated in his later years as the Godfather of Punk. How did this strange, queer junkie worm himself into mainstream American culture and become that dark renaissance man?
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