March 10 - MOTH CLUB Hackney

DEEPER INTO MOVIES 

is held at the Moth Club in Hackney 

Steven lovingly researches and puts on some great collections. 

He had to add extra shows for his presentation of NAN GOLDIN footage and documentaries.

The Moth Club has such atmosphere too. You enter through a corridor in back  of an old-fashioned pub.

It was a wonderful afternoon. You needed tissues and the fact that Hackney has a lot of lovely Vietnamese restaurants open on a Sunday was good to find out. 

If you don't know, NAN GOLDIN photographed her friends who were living mostly downtown and on the Lower East Side NYC in the seventies and eighties mostly artists, and drag queens, people who were gender fluid before the phrase existed and before any kind of helpful treatment existed. They were dark and scary times. 

Her photos of Cookie Mueller an actress and writer still haunt me. 

I happened to meet Cookie a few times with her beloved Vittorio before they were taken by AIDS. I went to a banquet thrown by Richard Hell when he was curating a series of Poetry Readings at the Poetry Project, one Thanksgiving. I was seated next to Vittorio and we laughed all night long. 

Nan knew that her photographs were important as THEY wouldn't deny what AIDS was cruelly devastating especially the artistic scene in NYC, even tho the government at the time didn't/wouldn't acknowledge it. 

David Wojnarowicz Writer and artist 

Cookie was in many of the films by John Waters. They were both from Baltimore originally.

I used to think I couldn't lose anyone if I photographed them enough - Nan Golden

Vittorio and Cookie get married

Vittorio September 1989

Cookie - November 1989

Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won't have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free. - Cookie Mueller

Nan Goldin 

Deeper Into Movies is a song by Yo La Tengo