MetaFilter posts tagged with drag

Mr. Showmanship

Artw — Wed, 29 May 2013 10:08:10 -0800

"Behind the Candelabra" and the Queerness of Liberace

Let's big dance!

Nomyte — Sat, 30 Mar 2013 21:31:43 -0800

Are you still confused by Ukraine's 2007 Eurovision entry? Trashy, consumerist, loud, countryfied, super-sized, Gogolian, Verka Serduchka is, to some approximation, Ukraine's Vicky Pollard. Created by character comic Andrey Danilko (b. 1973, also Andriy Danylko depending on language of choice), she is a tapestry of ugly stereotypes, a story of rags to riches, the target of both repulsion and admiration, and an enduring female media personality. Reportedly, Danylko was born to a poor family in Poltava, in eastern Ukraine (wiki; some local flavor via a travel blog). Danylko was raised by his mother after his father died of lung cancer in 1980. Shy and a mediocre student according to his schoolteachers, Danylko applies to study music and pedagogy, but is rejected, only managing to finish a year of trade school. In the early 90s, Danylko tours Ukraine and western Russia with a character comedy act in the tradition of much-beloved, older, cruftier Soviet character comedians (e.g. in Russian and Danylko's version). An early version of Verka is among Danylko's character sketches, as are a number of other male and female caricatures (e.g. and more and stuff like this). Crash course in linguistics: many Slavic languages offer speakers a bevy of choices for diminutives (TVT, sorry) and augmentatives (wiki). For the armchair experts, here's Learn Russian the Fun Way on diminutives. "Verka" is a crude, childish augmentative from "Vera," faith. "Serduchka" is an augmentative schoolyard nickname from a typical Ukrainian surname (Сердюк → Сердючка). In 1997, Verka begins appearing as the host of her own comedy chat show. Verka, in character as a train conductor lady, is visited by various media personalities. The show migrates from Ukrainian TV to Russian TV. The show looks like this. The show runs for a long time. It's vaguely reminiscent of Graham Norton's schtick. (In the aftermath of Eurovision, Danylko would incoherently call in to Norton's show.) Linguistics crash course, part 2: aside from Eurovision, Verka speaks a kind of broadly Russified Ukrainian… or, perhaps, Russian with a broad Ukrainian accent… or, maybe, a crazy in-between dialect flavored with occasional Ukrainian. Whatever it is, it's ridiculed by Russians, derided by Ukrainian linguistic nationalists, and widely spoken (using various proportions of Ukrainian to Russian) by swaths of people living in Ukraine, inluding Danylko's native Poltava. (Kennan Institute explains surzhyk. Contested Tongues, Laada Bilaniuk's ethnography of Ukraine's contemporary language culture has a lot on Verka and her language, but this PDF manuscript has lots of interesting sociolinguistic detail as well. Languagelog reports on Russian vs. Ukrainian.) What's a megastar to do but sing? Before long, Verka embarks on a musical career. Widespread acclaim arrives with her fourth album, Kha-ra-sho! (i.e., khorosho with a broad Russian accent). The album is full of cheap, tinny-sounding music and becomes very popular. Several music videos appear:

Гоп-гоп ("Hop-Hop," brimming with Ukrainian kitsch)
Контролер ("Ticket Inspector")
Пирожок ("Pirozhok," namely)
Все будет хорошо ("Everything Will Be OK")
Here's a live performance of Verka's bee song.

More albums and music videos follow. Verka often works in collaboration with VIA Gra, a popular band whose name is a cheap three-way Russian-Ukrainian-English pun:

Чита-дрита (Verka visits her backward country relatives, singing starts at 2:35.)
Тук-тук-тук ("Knock-Knock," Verka takes her backward country relatives to a fancy restaurant.)
Я попала на любовь ("I Stumbled Into Love," Eurokitsch nosebleed.)

Around the time of the Orange Revolution (Foreign Affairs PDF), Verka begins to sing in unaccented Russian:

Трали-вали
Хорошо красавицам ("Pretty Women Have It Easy," featuring some chimps.)
Бери все (что у меня есть) ("Take Everything (I Have)," which appeared in the runup to Eurovision. Lots of ethnic stereotypes!)
А я смеюсь ("And Yet I Laugh," pretty in pink.)

Nor is Verka absent from the screen, appearing as a supporting character in a variety of TV productions alongside other well-known entertainers. In 2003, Verka appears as the ugly sister Brunhilda in a musical version of Cinderella (representative sample). Here's a musical number: Я не поняла ("I Didn't Get It"). In 2005, she appears as the shrewish and commanding Khyvrya (Хивря) in a televised pop-music version of Gogol's "The Sorochinsky Fair," a quintessential Ukrainian farce from his collection of Dikanka tales. (There also exists an opera version of this story, in part due to Mussorgsky, but I doubt it has strong connections to this one.) Note that the historic village of Great Sorochintsy is in the vicinity of Poltava, Danylko's hometown. The musical offers a torrent of Ukrainian folk kitsch and musical atrocity. A couple selections: Ти напився як свиня ("You Are Drunk Like Pig") | ending This was not Verka's first Gogolian excursion. Several years prior she appeared (sample) as the village moonshine brewer in a musical version of Gogol's Night Before Christmas. (There is also a classic film version of the story, featuring this amusing scene.) Danylko, rather than Verka, appeared as Cherubino in a trashy TV version of Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro, appearing alongside a variety of trashy aging stars like Filip Kirkorov and Sofiya Rotaru. A bit later he also appeared in a musical based on Hans Christian Andersen's "The Snow Queen," playing alongside Kristina Orbakayte, Layma Vaykule, Gennadiy Khazanov, and Natalia Vetlitskaya. Perhaps most importantly, he (as Verka) appeared alongside Alla Pugacheva, the dowager queen of Russian popular music, in Chase After Two Hares (Catch Neither) (a remake of a musical Ukrainian farce, previously filmed in 1961). I promise that all of these people were big in the USSR. Trust me. In 2007, Verka appears on Eurovision with Dancing Lasha Tumbai. You already knew that. Verka's selection as Ukraine's Eurovision representative was not without controversy: among other things, she was burned in effigy (UKR news coverage). Verka's career, already an intensely politicized sociolinguistic act, takes a hit because the nonsense phrase "lasha tumbai" sounds like "Russia, goodbye!" to people who don't speak English. The Russian St. Petersburg Times covers the controversy. Elsewhere, the press echoes it back and forth. Here's an interview with the artist in UK's free daily Metro. And here's a post-Eurovision summary in PRI's The World. Here's some informed, though not impartial cultural criticism of the Verka phenomenon. Verka was awarded the title of "people's artist of Ukraine" by then-president Viktor Yushchenko (himself no stranger to controversy). To complicate things, here's Verka dancing with Belarusian dictator Sergey Lukashenko. Partisan news organ RT reports on Verka's post-Eurovision bid for Ukraine's parliament. Here's a post-Eurovision music video, EVRO VISION QUEEN. Here's a concert version of the more recent Dolce Gabbana. Verka's albums can be streamed from this shady Russian site. I'm sure you can also buy them somehow, somewhere. Since the Eurovision incident, Danylko has had a few TV roles (here as a female genie in "Aladin's New Adventures" and here as Little Red Riding Hood). Generally, his trajectory seems to have stabilized. Verka makes regular TV appearances and also periodically goes on concert tours, taking her Eurovision schtick to the US and Canada. In repetitive Russian and Ukrainian interviews, Danylko himself appears tired, defensive, and muted. Here's a recent interview in English (PDF). Notably, while English Wikipedia devotes a page to Verka, the analogous Russian and Ukrainian pages are specifically about the character's creator first and the character second. The Russian page is significantly more detailed than the Ukrainian. NME reports that, earlier this year, Danylko bought Queen vocalist Freddie Mercury's Rolls-Royce at auction and apparently intends to donate it to a museum. (previously)

Cox Models and Drag Queens

Westringia F. — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:53:08 -0800

A survival analysis of RuPaul’s Drag Race. Alex Hanna and colleagues at the social science statistics blog Bad Hessian have analyzed the past 4.3 seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race using Cox proportional hazards regression to investigate what -- other than Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent -- predicts a Queen's survival. Complete with downloadable data, succinct explanations, and relevant R code, it's an eleganza extravaganza of survival analysis.

1-800-DIP-DIP-DIP-DIP

Ennis Tennyone — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 06:19:36 -0800

Hollywood Nailz - Episode One, according to the youtube description is "a nail-biting extravaganza of mostly useless products and pansexual hijinks!!!" Created by Seth Bogart (aka Hunx) and Brande Bytheway.

THE resource on the net for the history of GLBT music

showbiz_liz — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 11:20:33 -0800

Queer Music Heritage is a sprawling website about the history of queer music. You can listen to twelve years' worth of monthly radio shows (link goes to the first year, 2000); take a look at the Queer Music History 101 overview; check out the extensive photo galleries in the female impersonators section; or read through the blog, which features interesting tidbits from gay musical history, like this overview of the Sissy Man Blues. And a shoutout to the book Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. I found Queer Music Heritage by googling some of the songs listed in this book- almost every one of them has a page on this site.

Art is a drag

Isadorady — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:33:12 -0800

San Francisco Drag Artists recreate iconic Cindy Sherman portraits. A retrospective of Sherman's photographs is now at SF MOMA.

Two Sides To Every Story

gman — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 06:54:02 -0800

Half-Drag is photographer Leland Bobbé's series capturing both the 'male and the alter-ego female side' of a person's face in a single image.

"I'm an artist and I don't f---ing have to answer for my work."

modernserf — Fri, 29 Jun 2012 11:02:48 -0800

Drag queen Sharon Needles, winner of RuPaul's Drag Race, has lately been facing a lot of criticism for their transgressive act: "Eli Kuti, a bartender at Lawrenceville's Blue Moon, where Needles often performs, recalls one performance in which Needles and another drag queen donned one-piece bathing suits emblazoned with swastikas. The two 'were hailing Hitler' and calling crowd members racial epithets, Kuti says." Sharon describes an altercation with one of her detractors, who accuse her of hipster racism: "The other night me and a couple of my friends went out to have a good time, and there's this young thing. I call her a "thing" because, you know, I don't know how to tip-toe around gender rules or queer politics. I'm 30 years old, rich, and famous; I don't have to deal with that shit anymore, you know what I mean? So we'll just call them "him"/"her"/"thing," whatever. And you know she really finds my shows offensive. ... So anyway she got upset that I paint myself brown, that I would use language that she found offensive. ... She made me an unnecessary poster child for post-racial change." "A woman threw a brick at me through a window of a car — I was sitting in the passenger side and it clocked me in the back... She spray-painted "racist" on my house, broke its windows, put superglue in my locks. There's like four ticked-off lesbians convinced Sharon Needles is a writhing racist who thinks the Holocaust never happened — because I use a swastika or reference Hitler ironically." Sharon faces her critics directly (and out of drag) before a show in Atlanta: "When you're wearing a Nazi costume and you're performing a Disney number, you're bringing up the very true ideas that Walt Disney was involved in nazism; when you're doing the song "Because I'm a Blonde," which is this ditzy 80s song referencing how blonde-haired blue-eyed [girls] get away with -- theres a line in it: "get away with murder" -- and you put that into Nazi iconic uniform, its not just this blatant uses of imagery... we're telling a story."

I WAS OFF MY FACE ON TARO CHIPS SO I DIDN'T KNOW RIGHT FROM WRONG

The Whelk — Mon, 25 Jun 2012 10:42:36 -0800

Gayle is a short weekly web-series about the hyper-competitive upper-middle class mom Gaye Waters-Waters and her relentless attempts to dominate the local chapter of Mothers Against Road Head. Episode one with links to the latest ten. NSFW audio.

The Divine David

GallonOfAlan — Thu, 31 May 2012 14:26:19 -0800

David Hoyle (born 1963) is an English performance artist, avant-garde cabaret artist, singer, actor, comedian and film director. In the 1990s he developed an extremely strange, extremely gay "anti-drag queen" character called The Divine David and produced two series for Channel 4, back when that channel was still unafraid of pushing the boundaries. These were:

The Divine David Presents (SLYT)
The Divine David Heals (SLYT)

He also appeared in the video for the last single released to date by Faith No More - I Started A Joke of course being a Bee Gees cover - which is unaccountably set in a northern English working men's club.

...terminal exhaustion and a wardrobe full of expensive disguises.

latkes — Thu, 31 May 2012 10:06:11 -0800

Model Behavior: A Laurie Penny essay on gender presentation, anorexia, neoliberalism, capitalism, queerness, gender, drag, media, America's Next Top Model, and a few other things.

watch those hems, boys!

flapjax at midnite — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 21:14:24 -0800

Moments before the annual St. Patrick's Day Parade in the small town of Padua, Minnesota was about to begin, a truck fire broke out at the end of the block. Fortunately, the all-volunteer firefighting crew from nearby Sedan, Minnesota was on hand to celebrate their 125th anniversary, and to raise money to pay for their new fire hall and truck. One of their members was set to drive the new fire truck in the parade, and the others were on a float, dressed in drag to entertain the crowd. Firemen in Drag Put Out Truck Fire.

Even dykes say "Yay!"

Lou Stuells — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 10:09:58 -0800

Chick-Fil-A is known as much for supporting anti-gay organizations as it is for its tasty chicken. Nevertheless, drag queen divas assure you it's okay to Chow Down (at Chick-Fil-A).

Wigstock: New York's other Labor Day tradition (while it lasted)

filthy light thief — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 12:57:34 -0800

"I know you are out there, just wanting to put your wig on, just like me. And I know you're just waiting to have a good time. Just put a little ball earring on, a little bad sunglasses, and a big, bad wig on, 'cause it's good. It feels good, works, it does." It is, or was, Wigstock, an annual outdoor drag festival held in NYC, starting in 1985 by "Lady" Bunny and friends. Each year the party grew, moving to Union Square in 1991, then to Christopher Street waterfront in 1994 to deal with the expanding crowd. 2001 was supposed to be the last year, but the party came back in 2003, in conjunction with the annual HOWL festival. That carried the tradition on for another two years, and Wigstock's official website is stuck in 2005, a reminder of the festivities that were. You can reminisce with Gawker, or take a short journey back to 1987 with Wigstock: The Movie (part 1 of 4), not to be confused with the longer film of the same name, capturing Wigstock 1995 (part 1 of 8).

I caught the darkness baby, and I’ve got it worse than you.

timshel — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 00:58:12 -0800

...this particular technicolour trench coat is stitched together from black leather, and fastened with a lot of safety pins and zippers: its sinister sounds are both haunted by the past, and haunting us toward the something-to-be-done. Like the saying goes: the darkest hour is just before the dawn. Our traumatized collective unconscious - the victim of social, political, cultural, and environmental shocks - is not a blank slate, but rather a pile of rubble that requires considerable rebuilding. There is much work yet to carry out. And really, why be blank when you can be bleak?

The New Bleak: Trauma, Haunting And The Cultural Obsession With Darkness

"Liberal, Pretty, and Pro-Titty"

hermitosis — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:23:02 -0800

GOOGLE RUPAUL . Drag superstar RuPaul (whose reality show "RuPaul's Drag Race" returns later this month) has enjoyed piles of free publicity thanks to name association with presidential canditate Ron Paul (NY Times). The drag artist has dabbled in politics before, posing as both Obamas for a 2008 Christmas card. According to RuPaul (as explained to Arsenio Hall in 1993), the most powerful thing a citizen can do is "become the image of your own imagination." Some background on drag as an art form: The 1990 documentary "Paris is Burning," presented it as a natural byproduct of marginalization and oppression, enabling poor black people to explore both male and female roles of a culture which invited them to observe but never truly participate. An incredibly diverse art form in its own right, drag reminds us that gender is a performance, and identity an illusion. These performances may comment or play on sex and gender stereotypes, or pay sincere tribute to female icons. Some are purely creatures of sexual fantasy. Some are raunchy clowns. Some are performance artists, dancers, spokespersons, activitsts, you name it. There are many drag kings and faux queens as well; everyone is welcome to the table.

Orgy of the Dead

Bunny Ultramod — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 12:13:41 -0800

Ed Wood's Sleaze Paperbacks. Ed Wood’s sleaze fiction is also as strange, idiosyncratic and out of step with his times and mores as his infamous movies. Wood would write porn inter-spliced with lengthy philosophical, sociological and psychological discourse, he’d write first person narratives of life as a transvestite in the buttoned up America of the 1950’s. He’d riff on psychosexual themes, and unleash his id, his ego and his superego in turn, sometimes in the same chapter. He’d write about sex and the human condition without veneer or filters, offering up the damaged and anguished voice of a desperately soul-searching drunk with a sense of self-worth that would stand in dichotomy to his self-pity. Little-known fact: Glenda, the milquetoast, suicidal transvestite from Wood's "Glen or Glenda" (available in entirety online, starting here), started out as a murderous hitman in drag.

Let's Start A Movement!

hermitosis — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 07:48:45 -0800

Drag star Varla Jean Merman is the new spokesmodel for Fleet enemas. Her commercials: Part 1, Part 2, cabaret version. Previously: Varla's Schoolhouse Rock.

I never heard that she had any other Name than the Princess Seraphina.

Mooseli — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:04:23 -0800

Princess Seraphina was an 18th Century cross-dresser who brought a thief to court for stealing her clothes. Her trial provides a brief glimpse into the life of queer men in 18th-Century England.

Get Based! Instrumental cloud rap with Clams Casino

filthy light thief — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:05:42 -0800

The name Clams Casino has been floating around for a while, whose production was likened to a castle floating in the clouds by the BasedGod himself, Lil B [prev]. But recently, 24 year old Mike Volpe has shot up from relative obscurity to being dubbed a "visionary beatmaker" in Rolling Stone. You can hear the start of the north Jersey bedroom producer's ethereal sound in his 2006 remix of Mobb Deep's "Get Twisted", which has carried forward into tracks for Squadda Bambino, Lil B, Havoc (of Mobb Deep), and Soulja Boy. Clams Casino has since released a free mixtape of his instrumental production (streaming) to glowing reviews. A couple months back, he had some good interviews with the Village Voice blog and Space Age Hustle, and Clams made a general hip-hop mix for Fact Magazine (which will go offline in 2 weeks). Clams Casino also has an EP out on Tri Angle (er, TRI▼ANGLE), the label by 20 Jazz Funk Greats [prev] blogger Robin Carolan, home to witch house or drag artists [prev, ish]. So what do you call this sound? Cloud Rap is one title (with a mixtape), though Clams Casino is generally considered part of Lil B's Based Music world. Fun fact: Mike Volpe has not had Clams Casino, at least when he discussed it in some of his past interviews.

Lulu Farini, cannonball in drag

Gordafarin — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 14:27:09 -0800

The world's first human cannonball was a performer who went by the name of Lulu the Flying Artist. Flying up to 40 feet in the air, she gained a good deal of acclaim, even inspiring the Lu Lu Waltz. And yet, Mlle. Lulu was not what she seemed - He was a young man named Sam, who had previously performed as El Niño Farini. Trained by The Great Farini, who first devised the human projectile act, Lulu was born in Maine as Samuel Wasgate (or Wasgatt) in 1855. The boy was adopted by Farini at a young age (his name changed to Sam Hunt) and began performing at the age of 11 on the trapeze and tightrope. Under Farini's care, young Sam was mistreated, forced to perform, and relocated to England. In 1870, Lulu was debuted in Europe - 'the Beautiful Goddess of the Air'. Her first US performance was at at Niblo's Garden in New York in 1873. At one fateful Dublin performance in 1878, Lulu's springboard malfunctioned, causing a leg injury which required her to be sent to the hospital - and revealing her to be him. Cross dressing circus performers are not unprecedented - a male performer impersonating a female could potentially draw in a larger audience. Lulu had many admirers during her short career as a woman -- after the reveal, Samuel continued to perform with Farini, but with a man's haircut and moustache.

Drag, Witch House, Rape Gaze

filthy light thief — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 11:18:18 -0800

There was a brouhaha around the name of a particular micro-genre, tossed out amongst other titles for a new genre variant: rape-gaze. The discussion started with a listing of genre names applied to the band Salem, a band whose debut album ranked high in some year-end charts. That specific genre title was coined by the group Creep, who chose the label themselves as some alternative to the more prevalent "witch house" genre title. More music and music pondering inside. Creep rid themselves of that title when there was increased discussion of the term, and according to their MySpace profile, now classify themselves as "trip-hop." While Trip Hop has it's own noisy history, none that evoke the same gut reaction as "rape gaze". For some, the genre name has stuck, with the genre setting off a list of worst genre names ever (though that list seems to have been compiled by genre title alone, not listening to the actual music):

10. Happy Hardcore (sample track) 9. Zolo (sample track) 8. Paisley Underground (previsouly; sample video) 7. Glitch-Hop (sample video) 6. Furniture Music (sample of a live performance) 5. Chillwave (recently on the Blue) 4. Grebo (sample track) 3. Hi-NRG (sample live video) 2. Hard Bop (sample track) 1. Psybient (sample track)

If you'd like to hear a bit more of the drag / witch house / crunk shoegaze, Pitchfork has a sampler of tracks. If you're trying to follow the bands now, some of their names have changed from awkward series of symbols to names of letters, like the change of /// ▲▲▲ \\ to Horse MacGyver (Vimeo link). More videos: Creep's YT collection currently includes 3 videos: Intro, Jessica King, and Hot Shit (which is actually a remix of a Baghdaddy track) YT user cyclop2121 has a handful of videos made by Cosmotropia de Xam, focusing more on the distortion of noise (and video) than the Salem sound. For some middle ground, there is oOoOO, who also get into soft pop realms. If the idea of gothic influences and southern rap blending together sound strange to you, check Salem's remixes of Gucci Mane. But Salem isn't only focused on the durrty south, as seen with their remix of Radiohead and Röyksopp.

Shaqueeta on tape, at last

schroedinger — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 00:50:12 -0800

Shaq in draq lip-synching to Beyonce. He calls himself "Shaqueeta." Yes, it's actually Shaq. That is all.

Oh, to be in England!

IndigoJones — Sat, 02 Oct 2010 09:57:46 -0800

'Mrs Shufflewick is a dirty old woman. She is 60, maybe 70, weak-willed and easily led." "She has usually just had a few, you can tell by her big red conk and boss-eyed way of walking. She loves a gossip but can never stop long in case her next gin gets cold on the counter. Everybody laughs at her. They call her 'Shuff', they whistle and poke fun and cheer when she hoicks up her skirts. They always shout for more, though she doesn't need encouraging. She is a terrible show-off, whether she is tiddly or not. There is no holding her when there are sailors around: she has a weakness for the Navy. The last sailor she met was French, he kissed her on both cheeks. She was doing up her laces at the time.” Deserving of a proper biography, and now has one. To get full bore audio experience, well, listen and learn.

2010 Miss Universe national costumes

arielmeadow — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:46:33 -0800

2010 Miss Universe national costumes. "Because there is nothing more cracktastic than the national costumes portion of the Miss Universe Pageant. It makes competitive figure skating costumes look understated and minimalist."