#la johnjoseph

[ignatzhoch]

Illustration for Charlie by La JohnJoseph

[dazeddigital]

LA JOHNJOSEPH

The novelist talks about his scandalous Pynchon-esque debut.

[halfsunkboat]

Boy In A Dress: Review

Now that I'm home and sitting down in front of my laptop I can finally tell you about the best show I've seen at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival this year. Entitled "Boy In A Dress", this wonderful theatre piece tells the autobiography of La JohnJoseph and his tales of gender, society, home life and growing up. To me personally I found parts of her life relatable and it just seemed to draw me into the whole thing more. 

The one "professional" review I found that summed it up most accurately is: 

Transdrogynous polymath succès de scandale La JohnJoseph scores a hit with this high-heeled, low-living clusterfuck of sex, class, religion, gender, identity and ideology. It’s an elegant and propulsive piece distilling three earlier memoir shows about the threat and thrills of cross-gender glamour, a conspicuously shabby Liverpool upbringing and an ill-fated but rather fabulous sojourn in New York.

-TimeOut

I feel that in order to get the whole experience you should see the show for yourself. They are currently on at the Fringe until Sunday night then are planning on showing it in London in the Autumn for a while before touring it 'round the country next spring.

Along with the show, they also do outreach workshops to go along with it. I was the only one to attend all three dates that they had for these, but they are worth the time. During them there were discussions of gender (our own, steryotypes, how to tackle transphobia, etc), talks on different types of activism, and some arty things. They were willing to let us choose what we did in the workshops but we did what they had planned or some adaptation as 1. We were rather reluctant to make a decision and 2. Were interested to see what they had planned for us. 

Overall it was a fantastic experience I'm glad to have had. They are some of the nicest people ever and super interesting. If you have the chance then please go see the show if you can. I promise you will not regret it.

[earldax]

La JohnJoseph performing as part of Weimar New York at the Spiegeltent in NYC.  This must be 2008?

[earldax]

Another overcast day in Berlin.  I feel so at home here... just as I feel at home in Mexico City, San Francisco and Brooklyn.  Just as I felt at home recently in New Orleans and points in between - the radical faerie communities in Tennessee and Seth Garrison's family home in rural Mississippi... 

Comfort in motion.  The comfort I feel riding the subway uptown when I can grab a seat.  My most focused reading occurs in a two-ton bread box clanking and shaking beneath the asphalt and steel overhead.  Nowhere to go because I'm already going.  The same comfort I feel on a plane.  Stillness as I'm hurling through the air at 500 miles an hour.  Perhaps, like the molecules and atoms that comprise my flesh, bones and blood, I am meant to be in perpetual motion.  Moving so fast the illusion of something solid is created.  An illusion that has reality in the world of things.

What I typically think of as 'wanderlust' has always seemed at odds with my desire for 'community,' but as I give myself over to the former it seems less and less at odds with the latter.  Dalston Superstore is a neighborhood bar off the L train, and JohnJoseph took the J/M/Z from Berlin.  I meet Patrick Wolf at Pork, and he's just wandered down the road from Rawhide with Mx. Justin V. Bond.  The Spank boys arrive to London as I'm leaving for Moscow, and we meet up at the Joey Arias show I'm presenting in Berlin.  A bee hive, and we are the bees busy making honey.

* Image: Honey Soundsystem