Worth watching just for the commercials.

The most expensive body in the world, starring in perhaps the most glorious video on the planet. The legendary camp cultivator David Lachapelle directs Amanda LePore as the poster girl for MAC makeup’s collaboration with New York club-grown brand Heatherette, in a five minute darkly humorous commercial. The video itself, made in the year of the new millennium, plays on tropes of the Hitchcock, the Stepford Wives, putting Amanda front and centre as the perfect vision of iconic womanhood, with a gloriously maniacal twist. From painting herself pink to escaping across country on a blue Transam, LePore’s beautiful nude body in motion imagery of a trans woman’s body around the world. As camp should, the commercial both celebrates and undermines the obsession with capitalism, with beauty, with perfection a brand like MAC might be known for. It’s a feast for the eyes, guaranteed to make some viewers uncomfortable. While it’s an ad for a pink lipstick, it’s actually so much more. Tom Rasmussen

A conversation with the late great "Godfather of House" Frankie Knuckles about the impact of Paradise Garage.

An audiophile look with DJ David Mancuso and renowned sound engineers on the history of club sound and DJ equipment

From streets to clubs, a raw look into the world of the club dancers.

In his own words, a conversation with one of the original dance legends, Tee Scott.

A look at the Chicago House Music legend and mentor Ron Hardy with Robert Williams

Never before seen footage of the closing weekend of the Paradise Garage (1987), commented by Larry Levan`s close friend, videographer Michael Sampson

In 1928, the Russian inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen – known in the west as Léon Theremin – demonstrated a shockingly futuristic new sound during a performance with the New York Philharmonic. When he patented it later that year, it was dubbed the “theremin”: an electronic instrument that could make music literally out of thin air. Termen, a gifted scientist who had built his own home laboratory by the age of 17, had used his knowledge of electromagnetic fields to build a portable instrument consisting of two oscillators and two antennae. By moving his hands between the antennae, he conjured up ghostly, quivering tones that sounded like alien communications – an effect later used by the Beach Boys on ‘Good Vibrations’ (although on an updated version of the instrument, the Electro-Theremin). But the theremin wasn’t only admired for its radical new sound. Termen had been sent abroad not only to show off his new invention, but to gather information on the latest developments in American industrial technology. When he returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, he was accused of being a counter-revolutionary and imprisoned – but rather than being left to rot in a Gulag, he was brought to Moscow to develop bugging devices used to spy on foreign embassies. One listening device, called The Thing, was hidden in a gift presented to the U.S. ambassador in 1945 by a group of schoolchildren. The device intercepted private conversations in the ambassador’s office for seven years until it was accidentally discovered. Chal Ravens

For all our literary and cinematic imaginings about the future – flying cars, robot helpers, clone armies, pre-crime – it seems the reality, when it gets here, is always more mundane. Self-driving Ubers. Drones delivering Amazon parcels. And the new chattering class: AI-driven personal assistants, eavesdropping on our every word. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s (nameless, perhaps soulless) Google Assistant are compliant fembots ready to take orders at any moment – ideally from a human, but also, it seems, from each other. There are numerous YouTube videos documenting interactions gone awry, including several attempts at creating an endless loop of “conversation” between the voice assistants. That’s one way to distract them from collecting your data. This is only the beginning, however – Amazon executives have said they want the devices to be able to “speak” to each other properly in the future, so that Alexa can give Siri instructions, and vice versa. Soon they won’t need us at all. Chal Ravens

Worth watching just for the commercials.

The most expensive body in the world, starring in perhaps the most glorious video on the planet. The legendary camp cultivator David Lachapelle directs Amanda LePore as the poster girl for MAC makeup’s collaboration with New York club-grown brand Heatherette, in a five minute darkly humorous commercial. The video itself, made in the year of the new millennium, plays on tropes of the Hitchcock, the Stepford Wives, putting Amanda front and centre as the perfect vision of iconic womanhood, with a gloriously maniacal twist. From painting herself pink to escaping across country on a blue Transam, LePore’s beautiful nude body in motion imagery of a trans woman’s body around the world. As camp should, the commercial both celebrates and undermines the obsession with capitalism, with beauty, with perfection a brand like MAC might be known for. It’s a feast for the eyes, guaranteed to make some viewers uncomfortable. While it’s an ad for a pink lipstick, it’s actually so much more. Tom Rasmussen

A conversation with the late great "Godfather of House" Frankie Knuckles about the impact of Paradise Garage.

An audiophile look with DJ David Mancuso and renowned sound engineers on the history of club sound and DJ equipment

From streets to clubs, a raw look into the world of the club dancers.

In his own words, a conversation with one of the original dance legends, Tee Scott.

A look at the Chicago House Music legend and mentor Ron Hardy with Robert Williams

Never before seen footage of the closing weekend of the Paradise Garage (1987), commented by Larry Levan`s close friend, videographer Michael Sampson

In 1928, the Russian inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen – known in the west as Léon Theremin – demonstrated a shockingly futuristic new sound during a performance with the New York Philharmonic. When he patented it later that year, it was dubbed the “theremin”: an electronic instrument that could make music literally out of thin air. Termen, a gifted scientist who had built his own home laboratory by the age of 17, had used his knowledge of electromagnetic fields to build a portable instrument consisting of two oscillators and two antennae. By moving his hands between the antennae, he conjured up ghostly, quivering tones that sounded like alien communications – an effect later used by the Beach Boys on ‘Good Vibrations’ (although on an updated version of the instrument, the Electro-Theremin). But the theremin wasn’t only admired for its radical new sound. Termen had been sent abroad not only to show off his new invention, but to gather information on the latest developments in American industrial technology. When he returned to the Soviet Union in 1938, he was accused of being a counter-revolutionary and imprisoned – but rather than being left to rot in a Gulag, he was brought to Moscow to develop bugging devices used to spy on foreign embassies. One listening device, called The Thing, was hidden in a gift presented to the U.S. ambassador in 1945 by a group of schoolchildren. The device intercepted private conversations in the ambassador’s office for seven years until it was accidentally discovered. Chal Ravens

For all our literary and cinematic imaginings about the future – flying cars, robot helpers, clone armies, pre-crime – it seems the reality, when it gets here, is always more mundane. Self-driving Ubers. Drones delivering Amazon parcels. And the new chattering class: AI-driven personal assistants, eavesdropping on our every word. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s (nameless, perhaps soulless) Google Assistant are compliant fembots ready to take orders at any moment – ideally from a human, but also, it seems, from each other. There are numerous YouTube videos documenting interactions gone awry, including several attempts at creating an endless loop of “conversation” between the voice assistants. That’s one way to distract them from collecting your data. This is only the beginning, however – Amazon executives have said they want the devices to be able to “speak” to each other properly in the future, so that Alexa can give Siri instructions, and vice versa. Soon they won’t need us at all. Chal Ravens