This week Art and Labor is joined by Vera Drew, director of The People’s Joker, history’s most anticipated queer-coming-of-age indictment of the contemporary comedy landscape through the lens of Batman’s Rogues Gallery. We yak it up with Vera over the stunning consistency Ben Folds has to the queer experience, the tenderness of her relationship with David Liebe Hart, and the powerful kind of art that can be made when truly focused on being a collaborative venture that centers community. Cannonballing into the fantastical and sentimental, it’s a movie we need and deserve when reactionaries of all types are actively attempting to destroy queer joy. #FreeThePeoplesJoker
Warning for live human shit, sexual trauma, suicide, anger, and misery. We had a night on the town to see the new off Broadway production “while you were partying” by Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey with Brian Fiddyment at Soho Rep! Its a fantastic new play for the irony poisoned, N64 modding, suicidal incel poster psyche of many an “ordinary American” cursed by the internet age. As usual, the NYtimes has no idea what’s going on, but fret not dear reader, we’re just the floating voices that do, and that’s the art and labor promise! Poem, prayer, meme: you decide.