Sheree Rose is the kinky grandmother I never had but always wanted. Featured in the seminal and groundbreaking 1997 documentary SICK alongside her late partner, supermasochist Bob Flanagan, Sheree was the woman behind the curtain acting as Bob’s Domme and a massive force in helping him achieve greatness through performance, poetry, and promiscuity. All smiles and as candid as it gets, she gleefully divulged the breadth of her sexual awakening and the hardships in getting there. She is a punk, a pervert, and a pioneer — a true libertine — warm hearted yet strict and opinionated, which is why I was initially drawn to her. She is most written about in the context of Bob (“an exotic endangered species,” as she calls him), and while that relationship was undoubtedly important to her and performance history, Sheree stands alone as a remarkable and fascinating woman who waxes poetic on the state of femdom, feminist practice, and sex in the contemporary time — “out of the bedroom and into real life — explicit not just implicit.” On September 11th, we met at the ONE Archives at USC to discuss her role in the BDSM and D/s scene in Los Angeles during the 70s and 80s, the importance of choice, questions about male sexuality, and our shared love for guiding slave boys into the matriarchy. Click here to read the full interview.
Balkan Pank Explores the Underground Punk Culture of Yugoslavia In The 1980s
Balkan Pank is an original view of ex-Yugoslavia counterculture during the 1979-89 decade, an underrepresented period of punk attitude without the uniform in a non-aligned Communist country, a group of people escaping a dictatorship through their own set of rules. Jože Suhadolnik started this project when he was 13 year old. He was an insider of the 80s punk and squat movement and also an extremely promising young photojournalist, drawn to counterculture, alternative ways of living and genuine rebellion, his curiosity lead us to the hidden corners of in underground labyrinthic squats and illegal gigs where he started documenting the vibrant energy of the nights when bands with names like The Bastards and VideoSex used to play. “We used to travel from what was then Yugoslavia twice a year to Trieste on the Italian border to buy jeans, Brooklyn chewing gum and 20 rolls of Tri-X (they were worth an absolute fortune and lasted at least a few months), and a Yugoslav custom officer stopped you at the border and humiliated you for the next hour. I’ve been to about 1,600 concerts on my count; at my first, Siouxsie and the Banshees in 1981, I was able to walk near Siouxsie on the stage! Can you imagine that today? On the other hand, people were arrested just for wearing a Sex Pistols badge” Click here to purchase the extremely limited first edition of Balkan Pank by Joze Suhadolnik.