Adventures in Nerdliness

grammymuseum

Forty years of pop and couture history - and it’s on display right now. 🖤

Madonna’s 1990 Blond Ambition World Tour outfit, designed by Jean Paul Gaultier, is on view on the 4th floor of the Grammy Museum. The same look she wore during the HBO-broadcast finale. The same cone bra that changed fashion forever.

Her new album is out today. The icon never stops. ✨ Get your tickets at the link in bio!

Tallulah Bankhead

By Eugene Robert Richee

For Thunder Below (1932)

“Boom! The shock of each moment of still being alive!” YES! For my debut Lobotomy Room cinema club in the Art Deco splendour of the Rio cinema in Dalston, I’m hijacking their weekly Pink Palace queer film club and presenting bizarre “failed art movie” (and Pope of Trash John Waters’ all-time favourite film) Boom! (1968) starring cinema’s hard-drinking then-married show biz royal couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton on Thursday 6 August! As Waters himself has enthused, “Boom! is beyond bad, the other side of camp – a film so genuinely beautiful and awful that there is only one word to describe it: perfect.”

From the windswept high solitude of her villa on the edge of a cliff on a private island on the Amalfi Coast, terminally ill ageing hedonist Flora “Sissy” Goforth (Taylor), the much-married, drug addicted richest woman in the world (and possibly the most irritating woman in the world) distracts herself from her imminent death by dictating her memoirs into a tape recorder and directing her diva’s wrath at her long-suffering servants in fractured Italian (“Shit on your mother!” she screams at a maid who displeases her). "I need myself a lover," Goforth growls to her secretary. Sure enough, she is visited by the enigmatic Christopher Flanders (Burton), a poet turned gigolo notorious on the international jet set as an ambiguous and parasitic “Angel of Death” who emerges whenever a wealthy woman is about to die. The ensuing film is overblown, absurd, undeniably beautiful, frequently spellbinding and more frequently unintentionally hilarious.