Thelma Hill Performing Arts Center (THPAC) in association with Kumble Theater present: A Ramp to Paradise 2

A Ramp to Paradise 2 is a multi-media dance narrative of one night during the 1980s at the edgy, predominantly Black and Latino LGBT New York City dance club, Paradise Garage which featured the awe-inspiring DJ talent of the late Larry Levan, live performances by everyone from Luther Vandross, Jocelyn Brown, Patti Labelle, Grace Jones, Madonna to Sylvester. 

 

Ramp 2 is presented in commemoration of 25th anniversary of the closing of this memorable underground fixture of the New York club scene.

 

 

Tickets: $25.00
(Ticket prices includes performance and after party)

Thursday, November 08, 2012 at 7:30 PM
Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts
One University Plaza
Brooklyn, NY 11201
Phone: (718) 488-1624
Website: www.kumbletheater.org
E-Mail: info@kumbletheater.org

Madonna's New Single 'Girls Gone Wild"

The TRUE "Material Girl"

Madonna $1 Billion Vegas Deal being Offered

by Matt Clark

A recent Madonna Vegas deal could bring the singer a $1 Billion payday. This would give the "Material Girl" plenty of reason to consider moving to Las Vegas for the next five years.

According to The Sun UK, Madonna has been offered $1 billion to move to Las Vegas for five years. Other performers have done this before including Elton John, Cher, and Celine Dion. Madonna is already the fourth highest earning female entertainer in all of the world, but with this new deal she'd reach new heights, becoming a billionaire. Madonna most recently signed a big deal in 2007 worth $80 million to work with Live Nation.

This is obviously a great Vegas deal for Madonna, but what about the fans? Celine Dion has performed in Vegas for several years and will be returning for shows in 2011. Her ticket prices range from $55 to $250 a piece. How much will they charge for the all-time queen of Pop? Will the tickets be reasonable or astronomical to cover her billion dollar deal?

Fashion REVOLUTION the 20th Annual House of Latex Ball

ROSELAND BALLROOM

239 West 52nd Street
(Between 7th & 8th Avenues)
New York, NY 10019

SATURDAY, AUGUST 21, 2010
7:00PM - 4:00AM

PRESENTED BY

ADVANCED Tickets: $20.00 | General DOOR Tickets: $20.00

Music By: DJ Vjuan Allure
Commentators: Jack Mizrahi, Selvin Khan & Dashaun Evisu

ADVANCED TICKETS are now available for purchase at GMHC on Wednesdays,Thursdays, and Fridays from 12:00pm-7:00pm UNTIL August 19, 2010. CASH ONLY.

BENEFITS OF BUYING YOUR TICKET IN ADVANCE:

1. Guarantee your admission into the 20th annual Latex Ball. TICKETS WILL SALE OUT!

2. Receive PRIORITY entrance into the Ball, ahead of those who need to buy tickets at door.

*******************

Tickets can also be purchased at the Roseland Ballroom the night of the ball UNTIL capacity is reached.

The Fashion Revolution Latex Ball
Order of Categories

OTA BEST DRESSED: 2 Trophies Fashion Revolutionary

BUTCH FACE: 1 Trophy Fashion Rocks!!!

OTA OLDWAY VS NEWWAY: 2 Trophies Print It Out $

FEMALE FIGURE RUNWAY: 3 Trophies A Model’s Nightmare

TRANS MAN REALNESS: 1 Trophy GQ Man of the Year $

OTA ICON & LEGENDARY FACE: 2 Trophies

FEM QUEEN SEX SIREN: 1 Trophies La Perla of Hollywood $

DRAGS REALNESS REALNESS: 1 Trophy Anna Wintour’s Bitch $

WOMEN’S FACE: 1 Trophy Sadistic Beauty $

TWISTERS VS SISTERS: 2 Trophies Diamonds and Pearls $

BQ TEAM BODY & SEX SIREN: 2 Trophies The Poster Boys $

FEMALE FIGURE HEAD TO TOE BIG GIRL OVAHNESS: 1 Trophy The Size Issue

Grand Prize Designer’s Delight: The Fashion Show $$

OTA ICON & LEGENDARY PERFORMANCE: 2 Trophies

FEM QUEEN FACE: 1 Trophy The Ultimate Supermodel $

OTA BIZARRE: 1 Trophy A Tribute to a Creative Genius $

BQ RUNWAY: 4 Trophies The All American Couture $

OTA LABELS: 2 Trophies The Trunk Show (The Artistry of Peeling) $

MALE FIGURE TEAM REALNESS: 3 Trophies ‘The Realest Triple Threat’

FEMALE FIGURE PERFORMANCE: 3 Trophies Fashion Takeover Pop Stars $

BQ MODEL MAGAZINE FACE: 1 Trophy Explore the World of Vogue $

TRANS MAN SEX SIREN: 1 Trophy The Trans Modeling Agency $

DRAGS FACE: 1 Trophy Inside Pat McGrath’s Universe $

FEM QUEEN REALNESS: 1 Trophy Elle’s Sunday Brunch $

WOMAN’S BODY: 1 Trophy Sports Illustrated ‘The Couture Issue’

Your 10 Personal Favorite Michael Jackson Songs

By Waddie Grant

www.worldwidewaddie.com

With the one-year anniversary of the death of Michael Jackson, a.k.a. The King Of Pop, looming tomorrow, I wanted to share with you all my ten personal favorite songs of Mr. Jackson.

Above all artists, his musical has been one of the most influential as far as how I want to express my own creativity. His trend-setting, thinking outside-the-box and social awareness significantly affected the music industry positively, and my creativity has been affected as well. I admired his perfection. I feel the emotions he spews in my favorite tunes of his. The upbeat tempos bring up my spirits where I want to dance whenever I hear them. Ultimately, Jackson’s music takes me onto an imaginary journey where I visualized my own visual soundtrack to his music.

Thus, these ten songs below are the Michael Jackson tunes I will never grow out of loving.

10. “In The Closet” (Dangerous album, 1992)

I love the New Jack Swing era of Michael Jackson. That kind of rhythm with one of Jackson’s sexiest lyrics and music videos kept me jammin’ for a long time. Also, this song has that extended instrumentation that was popular in the 80′s and 90′s that keep us party people dancing.

9.”Heal The World” (Dangerous album, 1992)

…

8.”Break Of Dawn” (Invincible album, 2002)

When I first listened to Invincible album, I remember loving every second of the album because I was glad that Michael finally released new music since his 1995 HIStory album. Immediately after, I realized how dated the album sounded, but this song stood out to me. I remember creating this beautiful imagery in my head of a beautiful, sunny morning atmosphere with the one I would love.

7.”They Don’t Care About Us” (HIStory album, 1996)

There are many sides of Michael that I love, and his militant side is what I appreciate the most. His pro-Black and caring for the world approach in his music about social injustice makes his catalog of music stand out above all other artists. I love singing the lyrics of this tune when I feel militant-minded. I even love the music video with Jackson protesting with the poor residents of Brazil.

6.”Ain’t No Sunshine” (Got To Be There album, 1972)

Who knew that a 14 year old male pop singer could sing a song with so much soul as Michael did with this remake of this Bill Withers classic? His vocal dynamics of this heart-wrenching soulful ballad made me feel the melancholy anguish of the lyrics. His rendition outperforms the vocal talents of his contemporaries twice his age.

5.”Got To Be There” (Got To Be There album, 1971)

I first fell in love with Chaka Khan’s remake of this tune before I even knew that Michael was the original singer from a decade prior. When I learned that revelation, I’m thinking Chaka’s version had to make Michael’s forgettable. Fortunately, I was wrong. Like “Ain’t No Sunshine,” I could not picture a young male teen singing his soul out like a seasoned adult performer about such experience a teen may be too young to endure. At that point, I realized Michael was able to sing anything at any age.

4.”Scream” (Naughty Pretty Pella remix) featuring Janet Jackson & Treach (HIStory album, 1995)

The pairing of Michael and his equally popular sister Janet made me go bananas on this tune. I admit that I was enamored with the high-tech music video more than the song’s album version until I heard the official remix with Treach of Naughty By Nature. The rock and neo-soul groove of the remix is one of my favorite instrumentations I have ever listened.

3.”Billie Jean” (Thriller album, 1993)

What is not to love about this tune? The bassline beat is the hottest. Jackson’s moonwalk changed the game of stage performance and became a legend instantly. The subject matter was ahead of its time, especially for a R&B/pop singer. I didn’t even understand what the lyrics were about. I was seven years old at that time. Regardless, I enjoy the song now as much as I did then.

2.”Man In The Mirror” (Bad album, 1988)

The humanitarian in Michael Jackson is what I will always admire most about his legacy. I remember being in middle singing this song all the time and realizing for the first time how I could be more socially aware especially about communities and countries who really need the help and love that I have been blessed to have.

1.”Remember The Time” (Dangerous album, 1992)

Hands down, this is my favorite song to perform at karaoke. I remember at first listen when I was 15 years how this song made me want to dance. The song could never get out of my head either…and that was before the video came out with all that Black star power and the hottest choreography of that era. When I got the Teddy Riley extended remix of this song, I fell in love with this song much more. I wish I had the talent of dancing because I would create the hottest choreography for this.

From this list you would think that Dangerous is my favorite Jackson album, but Thriller is really my favorite. What are your favorite Michael Jackson songs and albums?

The Polaroid World of Gaga

I LOVE THIS GIRL!!!

We're not sure what Polaroid creative director Lady Gaga thinks of Polaroid's 300 camera, a chubby little device that was released late last year. And we're still waiting for the Gaga-branded camera that Polaroid promised when the partnership was unveiled at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show. So we were intrigued to see V magazine's gallery of Gaga-on-Polaroid pix, snapped by Gaga's creative director, Matthew Williams. Watch Gaga explain why she's working with the revived photography brand. Are you a Polaroid traditionalist?

Malcolm McLaren: An Appreciation

by James Sullivan

Malcolm McLaren concocted the Sex Pistols, yes. He also steered the New York Dolls toward their premature demise, brought hip-hop to London and nicked the drag-queen pose called voguing long before Madonna. The wily impresario, who died today at age 64 after a long bout with cancer, undoubtedly had his fingers in a lot of pies.

If pop in the 21st century is Andy Warhol's version of artistry -- reproductions, distillations, provocation -- McLaren saw it coming a long time ago. "Malcolm McLaren Invented Everything," blared the headline to a 2007 interview feature in Vice magazine. He surely appreciated the hyperbole.

If McLaren saw the Gaga world coming, it was because he worked in visual terms at least as much as musical. The co-proprietor with then-girlfriend Vivienne Westwood of an early-1970s London shop located on the Kings Road called Let It Rock, he kicked against the supposed ideals of the hippies -- "hippos," he called them -- by reintroducing the Edwardian fashions of the teddy boys of the 1950s, when rock 'n' roll in Britain was an anarchic reaction to the country's squalor and repression.

They soon renamed the shop Too Fast to Live Too Young to Die, which in turn became the bondage-gear boutique Sex and, finally, Seditionaries, where McLaren delighted in the fact that the place was so derelict there were rats running around beneath the cash register. To Westwood's distress, McLaren had a habit of changing the store's theme just as its underground loyalists gave way to a wider, more mainstream clientele. "Whenever it started making money, I closed it down," he recalled.

Managing the New York Dolls, McLaren had an idea that the glammy prepunk band would provide a forum for debating "the politics of boredom," a subject the Sex Pistols, the Clash (managed by McLaren associate Bernie Rhodes) and countless other punks would soon adopt as their own. He claimed he brought a new, confrontational look back to London from New York, the ripped T-shirts of a New York scenester named Richard Hell, who would soon co-found the bands Television and the Voidoids.

The Sex Pistols, who famously auditioned Johnny Rotten in the Sex shop, where he sang along to Alice Cooper's 'I'm Eighteen' on the jukebox, brought McLaren his own taste of fame when he was arrested after organizing the group's infamous boat ride down the River Thames during the Queen's Silver Jubilee. In the fictionalized documentary 'The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle,' released in 1980, two years after the Sex Pistols' implosion, McLaren gleefully played himself as the "Embezzler," claiming a Svengali role which Rotten, who would successfully sue his former manager, has loudly disputed over the years.

British music journalist Jon Savage, who wrote 'England's Dreaming,' the definitive book on the Sex Pistols and '70s British punk scene, said in learning about McLaren's death, "Without Malcolm McLaren there would not have been any British punk. He's one of the rare individuals who had a huge impact on the cultural and social life of this nation."

"Frustration is one of the great things in art," McLaren once wrote in a college notebook. "Satisfaction is nothing." Though his greatest achievement, the agitprop Pistols project, flamed out like the celluloid in 'Inglourious Basterds,' McLaren was just lighting his match. Whatever his indescribable forte was, it was not sitting still.


Watch the "Deep In Video" Music Video

In the early '80s, he created Bow Wow Wow -- installing 13-year-old Annabella Lwin as lead singer -- as a New Wave tribal-drum jump-rope crew, helped introduce hip-hop to London with his own 'Duck Rock' album (with artwork by Keith Haring), and dreamed up visual styles ranging from a pirate theme popularized by Adam and the Ants to the multilayered, bag-lady "Buffalo Gals" look named after his bubblegum hip-hop hit. He proposed himself as manager of the young Red Hot Chili Peppers, then backed out after seeing the band perform. He collaborated with Afrika Bambaataa, Bootsy Collins, Jeff Beck and Françoise Hardy.

In later years, he found other receptacles for his creative juices, threatening to run for mayor of London and co-producing the film version of 'Fast Food Nation.' And his own music, so often charmingly inept and pretentious, hung around: Eminem and the Coup were two of many rap acts who sampled his songs, and Quentin Tarantino, the music connoisseur, featured McLaren's 'About Her,' a woozy rip-off of the Zombies' 'She's Not There,' on the 'Kill Bill Vol. 2' soundtrack.

As of today, McLaren's otherwise empty homepage still says, "Malcolm will return shortly." For all we know, this master of pop orchestration may be just plotting his next move.