Big Con Chicago Clubhouse Meeting

Tomorrow night, Thursday, February 7 at the University of Chicago's student film society, Doc Films—one of the towering accomplishments of human civilization, if you ask me— I'll be introducing two films in Doc's "Lust Without Caution: Down 'n' Dirty Sexploitation Cinema" series. The flix: Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963) – shot on a miniscule budget but ambitiously conceived as a vaguely Oriental vision of pansexual paradise – which played in underground venues but attracted police intervention nevertheless, and Tricia's Wedding (1971), a burlesque on Tricia Nixon's nuptials, starring the Cockettes, the San Francisco drag troop. I'll be explaining—this is the Big Con tie-in—how these productions drove the American right berserk (and how the first figured in the successful right-wing plot to scuttle the nomination of liberal Abe Fortas as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court), and how that helped (and helps) drive the surreal political environment this blogger has termed "Nixonland."

There's also a third pic on the bill, Lisa Craft's Desire Pie, which I don't know anything about, but is described in the program as "a polymorphous pornographic cartoon."

It's at 9:00 PM at the Max Palevsky Cinema in Ida Noyes Hall, 1212 E. 59th St.

As always in these Chicago dealios, I'll buy a beer afterwards for anyone who identifies themselves to me as a Big Con reader.

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