#and is inspired by drag kings and cabaret and stuff

[namarikonda]

more sultry firbolg for ya! (he/she)

[salingley]

Inspired by my friend @rumpelree:

Meet the Artist: Sal Edition

The Stuff on Tax forms:

Birthday: May 4th

I’m from the US

Hellenist Pagan

Disabled through Mild Hemiplegic Cerebral Palsy

Soon to be college student (I am afraid of that day-)

British English user

Horror fan

Eccentric sideshow act reincarnated as a drag king. The gods gave up on making me a Satyr and didn’t bother to fix my hairless goat leg.

My Favourite Bands/Artists:

Tally Hall

Will Wood

Jack Stauber

Squirrel Nut Zippers

Daniel Johnston

Oingo Boingo

Layton and Johnstone

The (Petrojvic) Blasting Company

Tom Lehrer

The Good Stuff:

Showbiz Pizza animatronics

Naps

1920s-1940s Men’s Fashion

Australian Rugby

Pizza, salami sandwiches, french toast, and chicken tacos

Lukewarm morning/afternoon tea

Good books (like The Road and House of Leaves)

Creature Features/Horror monster designs

FNAF lore

Autism headcanons

The Worst Toxic Sludge Ever:

Peppers (texture)

Dogs’ tea kettle whine

Pop country music

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

People asking about my limp

Overstimulation

Modern Disney Movies (the bad/lazy ones)

My Favourite Artists:

Keith Haring

Daniel Johnston

H.R Giger

Zdzislaw Beksinski

Ethel Hays

Louis Wain

J.C Leyendecker

Conrad Felixmüller

Greta Wagner

My Favourite Movies:

Napoleon Dynamite

Lake Michigan Monster

Mack the Knife (1989)

Chicago

Cabaret

Little Shop of Horrors

The Shining

UHF

Spaceballs

Elvira: Mistress of the Dark

Inspirations:

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

”Storm Drain” from VHS 94

Circus Sideshows

1920s Queer History

Fallout New Vegas

So-Bad-It’s-Good media (My Immortal, The Room, Sonichu with friends).

Cryptozoology

Art for fake games

Murder Mysteries from the perspective of the killer

Fire Emblem-type fantasy/epics

1920s Newspaper Comics/Illustrations

[me4ttzar]

From the 1995 press release of Shag Tobacco

Gavin Friday begins 1995 with one of the most startling and inspired albums you will hear all year, Shag Tobacco. Friday has created, with partner Maurice Seezer and producer Tim Simenon, a 21st century neon cabaret, where spirits of Leonard Cohen, Marc Bolan, Jacques Brel and Scott Walker collide in a vision of thirties Berlin decadence transposed to a Las Vegas of the future.

The unusual characters that inhabit this album are both real and imaginary: Mr. Pussy, the glamorous drag queen hostess, the living “Dolls” of New York’s nightlife, and glittering, androgynous “The Slider” (resurrected from the T-Rex back catalogue), meet the housewives from suburban hell and the star-crossed lovers of the title track.

“As we come to the end of the century, everything’s going ballistic,” notes Mr. Friday, “and a lot of stuff is being cleared out from under the carpet. When I went to work on this album, I had this thing of being obsessed with the Twenties, Thirties, and Forties, the fascinating, between-the-Wars era when decadence was tempered with darkness, and transporting that into the Nineties.

Mr Pussy who appears in person on the track written in his honor, is a major celebrity in Dublin A former friend of Judy Garland and Johnny Ray, Mr. Pussy was the hostess of Gavin’s own now-defunct cabaret cafe, the celebrated Mr. Pussy’s Cafe Deluxe a place where passing glitterati ate egg and chips and played bingo at three in the morning. “The cafe was very much a wedding banquet on acid vibe,” enthuses Friday, “It’s like a cross between a brothel and your granny’s bedroom. Really mad trannies went there, ones who looked like your da in drag; farmers in stilettos, mingling with your clubbers, your nighthawks and your down and out drunks.” But it’s not just the glamorous to whom Gavin turns his attentions on Shag Tobacco – real people also fill his music with their passions and their pain.

“Kitchen Sink Drama” documents the decline of a suburban housewife, who is “anaesthetized by mundanity, has given everything up for her husband and family and whose only companion is the ‘Angel’ Valium,” the author explains. “In the end she can’t cope, and the last line has her going out to “the sweet smell of butane.” And “The Last Song I’ll Ever Sing” is a tender but defiant paen to a friend who died of AIDS; “The biggest way you can get fucked over in love is to die of AIDS,” Friday points out. “The song is a tribute to the divas and crooners who have nothing to give except for the everything that they put into the last song they ever sing, and about the light that burns twice as brightly, burning half as long.” The album’s closing track, “Le Roi D’Amour,” meaning “The King Of Love,” is for Gavin, “like the grand finale, the curtain going up and the credits rolling.”

Not surprisingly, the singular Mr. Friday is dismissive of the moribund musical climate into which Shag Tobacco is being released. “Music is not a business,” he states, “it’s a way of life. The Virgin Prunes were me growing up in public, they were fueled by a lot of anger and frustration and I suppose I’m still an angry man – happily angry. Real music is when you don’t really know what you’re doing – it’s just your instincts at work. I love that. I love going in at the deep end and struggling and fighting and hopefully coming out… into the light.”

[sparkles-rainbows-severed-heads]

Nazi-Hating, Bisexual King, and German actor, Conrad Veidt (1893-1943) whose performances inspired the creation of Edward Scissorhands, Jafar from Aladdin, and The Joker, was a gem in real life. Be like Connie. Do it for him.

Here’s some information on how great he was:

https://aikainkauna.tumblr.com/post/41163268378/ten-reasons-why-you-should-love-conrad-veidt

“In honour of Conrad Veidt’s 120th birthday, let us present you with a list of reasons why you should love him. Because, let’s face it, he kicked more arse than you ever will. While wearing your great-grandmother’s dress.

1. He was an awesome actor who could hypnotise the screen in both the silents and the sounds. He could do amazing things with his body language, his eyes and his voice and move like an actual cat. Oh, and he was Method before it became popular. To the point where his friends and colleagues would get worried because his entire body language and way of speaking would change. He genuinely believed he was possessed by some greater spirit when he was acting. And it shows. 2. He was an amazing human being—everybody loved working with him because he was incredibly polite and jovial and charming, but he was even more amazing off the screen. Let us tell you why.

3. This guy starred in the first gay rights movie ever and played the first explicitly-referred-to-as-gay character on screen, and the first sympathetic gay character on screen. In a movie that said it was okay to be gay and that some people were just born that way. In 1919. The makers of the film and Connie himself were flooded with death threats from the far right. They would arrange riots in theatres and release gas and rabid rodents into the aisles. But the makers of the film stood their ground. Later, the Nazis tried to burn all copies of the film but over half of it still survives and a reconstruction can be seen here.

 4. Oh yeah, and this guy also starred in an early pro-choice film, had a high opinion on women (with some progressive views for his time, when the right to vote and to wear trousers were still seen as new and scandalous things) and was a fierce campaigner for human rights and a vehement anti-Nazi for his entire life. Speaking of which… 

 5. In the Thirties, he starred in two British movies sympathetic to the plight of the Jews. While still a German citizen. Hitler sent him personal hate mail, Goebbels tried to persuade him into doing propaganda films for the Nazis instead and he told them to go stuff themselves. This was after some of his Jewish and gay friends had already been killed by the Nazis, too, so he knew exactly the sort of danger he was in. Oh, and they imprisoned him and tortured him with sleep deprivation and put him on the Gestapo hitlist. Guess what? He didn’t budge. He never raised his hand in the Heil Hitler salute, once. And when, finally, the British authorities helped him escape to England, he never went back to Germany again. Also? Despite being Protestant, he identified himself as Jewish on official forms as a form of protest. In. Nazi. Germany. I’m sorry, but Conrad Veidt’s balls»»»>yours. 

 6. He spent a huge amount of money supporting the British war effort and personally smuggled people out of the hands of the Nazis. Including driving his third wife’s Jewish parents out to Switzerland in his car under the cover of night after much bribery and passport shenanigans. In the Forties, he participated in a fund helping fellow Europeans escape Nazis and settle in the UK and the US. One of the people he helped was his Casablanca co-star, Paul Henreid. By the time Henreid had reached the UK, the war was in full swing and he was treated as an enemy alien. Connie (who had managed to acquire British citizenship just before war broke out) personally rang the British authorities and vouched for him until Henreid could finally cross the Atlantic to safety (with some monetary assistance from Connie himself). So, kids, when you watch Major Strasser menacing Laszlo in Casablanca, remember this guy actually helped him escape the Nazis in real life. 

 7. While living in London in the late Thirties, he and his wife would regularly shelter war children at their house. When the air raid sirens came on, he’d rather run back home to be with the kids rather than stay safe at the studio’s bomb shelter. No, really. And even when he’d left for Hollywood in the 40s, he would do stuff like this for the poor kids of London huddled in bomb shelters. You might need tissues. 

 8. He was made of actual sex on and off the screen. He possessed an amazing, androgynous sexual aura that would take no prisoners. He could be feminine without being effeminate, seductive and possessing and powerful without being gruff or macho, incredibly catlike and soft without being weak. Despite being skinny as hell and 6’3” tall, he was as graceful as a dancer, gliding around so smoothly it was uncanny, slightly unnatural (when Disney were making Aladdin, they deliberately based the cartoon Jafar on his performance in The Thief of Bagdad and told the animators to make him glide like Connie did. Yeah, that’s right, Disney villains were based on him. No wonder. No, really, look at that). From the Thirties onwards, he was repeatedly described as pantherlike. He had a sensuous, cruel mouth (always a little more red and open and wet than it should have been in order to be decent), large, pale blue piercing eyes (oh yeah, he was well-read in hypnotism and occultism, so he is actually hypnotising and possessing you for real), finely manicured fingernails (sometimes filed into sharp points) and a voice to melt knickers off anyone within a five-mile radius. When he smoked, it looked like he was giving oral sex to a woman and a man at the same time. Watch A Woman’s Face, The Thief of Bagdad and Dark Journey for good examples of this amazing man’s slinking, slithering, purring charm. 

 9. Oh yeah, speaking of the off-screen sex… Merle Oberon said “he would have sex with a butterfly”, Anita Loos quipped “the prettiest girl on the [Berlin] street was Conrad Veidt” and he was a major gay icon in 1920s Germany thanks to the aforementioned gay rights movie and his androgynous looks and style. Let us remember this guy spent his youth in Weimar Berlin and its cabarets, a modern Babylon where “anything goes” was an understatement. Drugs, wild parties and sexual diversions of every sort imaginable were the done thing in those days. You were considered unfashionable if you didn’t dress in drag and experiment with bisexuality. In that, he was hardly different from his peers (like, for example, his good friend Marlene Dietrich). But then again… there were people who experimented and there were people for whom it was all a phase, but according to numerous sources, he was a natural, voracious bisexual and so in love with everything feminine he genuinely loved to dress as a lady. And apparently he would fall in love all the time, so the Twenties were… busy years for him, especially when his second marriage had started to fall apart. Just don’t ask what he did to Olivier. And according to a couple of sources, Gary Cooper. Oh, and his first wife left him after she found him wearing her dress (her loss). Most of the time, his friends would describe him as a ladies’ man during the day, and going after the men as well after he’d had a few drinks in the evening. He seems to have calmed down a lot in the Thirties after he found genuine happiness with his third wife and escaped the Nazis to the UK, but apparently he was still an incorrigible flirt with both sexes until the end of his life. If you think he looks seductive and deliciously perverse on screen, that’s all real and then some. So, yep, this was a guy who was a genuine saint and an amazing human being and a naughty, naughty man at the same time. How often do you hear of both sides coexisting in the same person? 

 10. He was, basically, the last lingering sigh of Romanticism as a genuine cultural movement. On screen, he played the Gothic, Byronic hero to the hilt (The Student of Prague being one of the greatest examples of the type). In the silents, he played degenerate dandies, tortured painters and pianists and violinists, cruel yet seductive tyrants, men haunted by their doppelgängers, possessed creatures wanting to crawl out of their own bodies, sleepwalking and twitching and writhing on the screen, turning everything into a dark, exquisite ballet. In the sound films, he turned that demonic energy outwards and would pin people down with his gaze as he cursed them, would undress women with a flick of his pitch-black lashes, would curl his long fingers around their arms in a sadomasochistic, erotic stranglehold. He never completely lost his accent, but he compensated for it with pitch-perfect softness and tone, speaking very slowly and quietly when everybody else would speak loud and fast. His voice in The Thief of Bagdad was compared to poisoned honey. The MGM bosses were surprised at the mountains of fanmail he received from women in the Forties, even if they had never given him a starring role, only supporting, villainous ones. And the ladies wanted this villain, oh yes. A woman moviegoer (presumably after seeing his performance in A Woman’s Face) described him thus: “Conrad Veidt has wicked eyes, a sinister mouth, strange hands and a half-man/half- woman quality about him. His walk is frightening. There is something not quite normal about him. And yet, he was totally fascinating, charming and appealing to me at the same time!”

So, there you have it. There are many more reasons to love him, but it would take forever to try and list all of them. I suggest you watch his movies and read up on him yourself, because he deserves to live forever.”

[shakespearesglobeblog]

Voices in the Dark: Pride, Then and Now. 

How relevant are Shakespeare and his contemporaries today? That is the question we ask in Voices in the Dark, an ongoing festival of events and performances that run alongside our main-stage productions.

Voices in the Dark examines the nature of Shakespeare’s transformative impact on the world through an ongoing dialogue, a call and response, between today’s artists and Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

This spring in our latest iteration of the Voices in the Dark festival, Pride, Then and Now we respond to After Edward, in itself a response to Marlowe’s Edward II - a play that is rare in its depiction of a gay relationship on the early modern stage.

Moll and the Future Kings Kicking off proceedings in spectacular style on 30 March is Moll and the Future Kings -  an hour of late-night drag king cabaret and improv, by candlelight.

Moll Frith, also known as Mal Cutpurse, fascinated her 17th-century audiences when, in 1611, she appeared on stage during a production of The Roaring Girl, Middleton and Dekker’s play about her life. An improvised moment involving rude jokes, songs and smoking, this is the only known professional playhouse performance by an English woman.

Performed by members of the Through the Door course, this work-in-progress, this experiment, this conversation with our queer early modern past celebrates Moll the cross-dressing performer, criminal and trickster and all those like her.

Curated by Sarah Grange with Clerkinworks, and supported by Shakespeare’s Globe and Improbable. 

Hear more about Moll and the Future Kings from event curator Sarah Grange and drag king Wesley Dykes in the latest episode of our podcast. Transcript available.

Buy tickets for After Edward in the same transaction and save £2 on tickets for Love is Love and Moll and the Future Kings.

Wanton poets and pleasant wits: Edward II now On 4 April, following the 7.30pm performance of After Edward, join us for a free post-show discussion chaired by our Research Fellow Dr Will Tosh.

Bringing together some of today’s most exciting queer thinkers and writers, we will reflect on the legacy of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II.

This event is free to ticket-holders for that evening’s performance of After Edward and also, subject to space in the auditorium, everyone else who is interested in attending without seeing the preceding performance.

Love is Love On 6 April London’s a cappella LGBT+ choir, The Fourth Choir, returns to the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in June 1969.

In a celebration in words and music of LGBT+ lives and loves, Love is Love roams through nine centuries taking influence from Hildegarde of Bingen in the 12th century to jazz legend Billy Strayhorn in the 20th.

Coupled with music by composers such as Poulenc, Tchaikovsky and Rufus Wainwright, Love is Love brings to life hidden histories: the woman put on trial in 18th-century Germany for marrying another woman; history’s most extraordinary bisexual love triangle; the famous composer who liked to wear drag; and the Stonewall Warriors themselves.

Buy tickets for After Edward in the same transaction and save £2 on tickets for Love is Love and Moll and the Future Kings. 

Image credit: Ellan Parry

Sarah Grange, curator of Moll and the Future Kings and drag king Wesley Dykes discussed the inspiration behind the show on our podcast, Such Stuff .