xaephan reblogged
xaephan reblogged
4/20 related post that I forgot to make yesterday.
Edit- "stopped for some reason" includes job, reliable access, a home environment that allows it, sobriety, etc.
xaephan reblogged
Got to see Hadestown for the first time ever today (and it was amazing oh my god I had no idea what I was missing) and I'd just like to give a shout out to the poor soul in the audience who had clearly never heard the myth of Orpheus before, because when Orpheus turned around at the end the audience was dead silent except for this one very audible gasp of "no!" from somewhere in the crowd. And after Euridyce was gone and Orpheus dropped to his knees in grief, all anybody --cast, audience, the uncaring gods, etc -- could hear was muffled weeping from the same person
#i got tickets to see hadestown in may#i haven't seen a musical/stage play in aaages#i think the last one was in high school#we used to have (self-paid) trips to see shakespeare plays and stuff#i got first row balcony seats#no idea if it's better than the lower level but tickets aren't refundable so eh!
xaephan reblogged
Yue Qingyuan is a fun character because depending on what angle you look at him from, he is either surprisingly well-adjusted or surprisingly unhinged.
If you're looking at Yue Qingyuan, the composed, reasonable, ever-polite sect leader, you will probably be taken aback by how much of that is just smoke and mirrors. And not just like one layer, either, it's not simple like "beneath that smiling facade he's actually an ambitious asshole" or something, no, beneath the first layer of smoke and mirrors there is another one, and then another one, all piled up and twisted together over a core that is a terrified and starving child. He's like one of those old English pubs where the wood rot is so thorough that it's actually what's keeping the roof from collapsing.
But if you're looking at the former slave child who had to be the biggest, most responsible of a gang of neglected and traumatized urchins, who ran away to become a cultivator only to make a wrong choice that got his entire body and spirit taken apart and put back together again, only to lose the one relationship that mattered to him, then the fact that he's anything other than a weeping mess on the floor is genuinely impressive.
xaephan reblogged
(Bruce Wayne voice) I’m Bruce Wayne, from Gotham City, I’m participating in Nailed It! because for years I’ve tried to learn how to bake to impress my father [cuts to old pic of baby Bruce trying to whisk in a bowl, wearing a crooked chef hat, Alfred trying to help him with a really loving look on his face], and- (someone in the background yells LIAR!!) (Bruce covers his face, the background music stops) fine I lost a bet to one of my kids and they thought it would be hilarious for me to participate because I’m terrible in the kitchen [cuts to picture of grown Bruce with a pan on fire, looking absolutely frantic, sad trombone sound] [the people behind the camera laugh]
First challenge is recreating justice league cake pops, the camera zooms into Bruce who has the biggest forced smile ever on his face as he holds a cute green lantern pop.
Bruce: nailed it!
Nicole: (cackling as the camera zooms into the ugliest cake pop her eyes have ever laid on) WHAT IS THAT!
Bruce, as the camera pans into the details of the mess of a pop: personally I think it’s an accurate depiction of green lantern
The cake challenge is making a giant cake with ALL the known batvigilantes in Gotham.
- As bruce whisks in a bowl midway the process, if you edit the clip to make it loud enough you could hear him muttering under his breath why the fuck did I adopt so many kids
- Nicole: and I genuinely don’t know what mr wayne is doing over there (cackle) (camera cuts to Bruce frantically counting the figures before adding them to the final cake as he knows if he forgets any of them they would never let him live it down)
- Nicole: oh I love the purple you chose for spoiler’s Cape! / Bruce: it’s actually eggplant but thank you nic!
- Jacques: as….. lo…vely as this cake looks.. I can’t help but notice.. you forgot to add batman to it
- Bruce: (huge bleep)
Bruce: [makes a paper towel cowl and puts it over his face] Bruce: [stands behind his cake and sort of looms there] Bruce, as foppishly as possible: I’ll be being Batman. [doing the growly voice really badly] I’m Batman. Voices behind the camera: [all laugh]
Paper Towel Batman goes viral in gif form.
(Also Bruce, cutting out Nightwing’s emblem in fondant: I want the vigilantes of Gotham to know that I am making these in a manner designed to be efficient, and not in order of how much I love them. Host: That’s…nice?)
xaephan reblogged
only-tiktoks
The girls are exeeerrrcising
don't hide your tags bestie this is so cute
xaephan reblogged
yeah so that’s sid’s laugh and sid who’s filming. mister stark i don’t feel so good.
xaephan reblogged
To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)
Dir. Beeban Kidron
This was such a formative movie
This shit was revolutionary for the mid-90s. Among other things it helped me understand that transgender and cross-dressing were completely separate things.
To this day, I am in awe of the fact that Patrick Swayze not only campaigned hard to get the audition, not only auditioned in dress and makeup, but spent most of the day leading up to the audition walking around LA in dress and makeup.
This was a man who could sing, dance, act, ride a horse, fight, and walk in heels, he had nothing to prove to anyone, and he is MISSED.
Okay, I’m not done feeling about this.
If you’re younger, you may not know Patrick Swayze; he was Taken From Us in 2009. But Patrick Swayze was an icon of masculinity. Men were willing to watch romantic movies because Patrick Swayze was in them.
Patrick Swayze was fucking beefcake.
And this man didn’t just agree to do a movie where the only time he’s not actually in drag is the first three minutes, which involve stepping out of the shower, doing make up, and getting Dressed. He has ONE LINE that is delivered in a man’s voice, and it’s not during those three minutes.
And if you watch those three minutes, you see a stark difference between his portrayal of Miss Vida Bohéme and Wesley Snipes as Noxeema Jackson. (I am not criticizing Snipes’ performance. They were different roles.) Noxeema was a comedy character. Chi-Chi was a comedy character. But Miss Vida Bohéme was a dramatic role, played by a dramatic powerhouse.
When Vida sits down in front of the mirror, she sees a man. And she doesn’t like it.
Then she puts her hair up, and her face lights up.
“Ready or not,” she says. “Here comes Mama.”
And while Noxeema is having fun with her transformation (at one point breaking into a giggling fit after putting on pantyhose), Vida is simply taking pleasure in bringing out her true self. And when she’s done, she sees this:
And you can FEEL her pride.
All of this from an actor who, up to this point, walked on to the screen and dripped testosterone.
impossiblemonsters
the fact that some of you history-ignorant children in the notes are trying to shit on groundbreaking historical queer cinema because it doesn’t meet 2021 standards is infuriating. sit down, shut the fuck up, and listen to the elders in the room for fucking once
darkshrimpemotions
This. If you have never lived in a world where queerness was universally pathologized and criminalized to the point that even IMAGINING a world where it wasn’t constituted a radical and potentially dangerous act, you don’t have any business judging those of us who have for how we survived it and how we found (or still find) comfort in the few imperfect representations we got.
You don’t have to like it. You probably aren’t capable of “getting” it. And to be honest, I don’t want you to! I am glad that young queer people will never know exactly what it was like “back then.” But what you also will not do is refuse to learn your own history and then shit on everything that came before you, because like it or not what came before you is the reason you will never have to get what it was like back then.
On Wesley Snipes’s role Noxeema and John Leguizamo as Chi-Chi Rodriguez.
“I grew up in the ‘70s and even within the street culture, there was a lot of flamboyancy,” Snipes told TODAY of his perception of drag before filming. “Pimps wore the same furs as theprostitutes wore.
“Some of the great musicians of the world, like Parliament-Funkadelic, were very androgynous. So it wasn’t really new for me to see men dressed as women or men dressed as drag queens.”
Snipes attended the famed LaGuardia High School of Performing Arts and then State University of New York at Purchase. He wasn’t a dance major, but most of his friends were. “That exposed me to the world of glam, vogue, drag, transgender and gay people, LGBTQ… but it wasn’t in fashion those days. But it existed and I was around it.”
Not only did “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” pave the way for “To Wong Foo,” so did films like the 1968 documentary “The Queen” and “Paris Is Burning,” the 1990 doc that chronicled ball culture of New York and the various Black and queer communities involved in it.
Even though he was known for his action roles, Snipes’ portrayal of Noxeema wasn’t the first time he played a drag queen. In 1986, he made his Broadway debut in the play “Execution of Justice,” playing Sister Boom Boom, a real-life AIDS activist and drag nun who acted as the show’s voice of conscience. Snipes pointed out, “Sister Boom Boom did not have Noxeema’s makeup kit.”
On whether he got any pushback for stepping into Noxeema’s pumps, he said, “Not so much professionally but the streets weren’t feeling it, and there were certain community circles. The martial arts community… they were not feeling it at all.”
“In fact, when the movie came out and they would come down the street, I would see them in Brooklyn sometimes, they started listing all my movies. I noticed they would always skip that one. I would correct them, ‘Now you don’t got the full count!’”
Lesser-known than his co-stars at the time, Lequizamo didn’t really anticipate becoming a transgender icon, but he did know that they were working on something special when they started filming.
“Drag didn’t really exist in movies,” Lequizamo, who was nominated for a Golden Globe for his portrayal, told TODAY. “There were straight men pretending to be women to get out of trouble or into trouble but this was not that. I was trying to make Chi-Chi a real life trans character and Patty and Wesley were trying to be real drag queens.” Never fully articulated in the film, Chi-Chi Rodriguez has always been perceived as transgender, something that ending up making an indelible mark on LGBTQ people in the late ‘90s as trans representation in media was limited.
“Chi-Chi was a trans icon, but she also showed us that gay men and trans women can both perform and work in drag side by side, and that those relationships are symbiotic,” Cayne explained.
“It was a powerful thing. I get lots of fan mail from LGBTQ teens telling me how my character helped them come out to their parents,” Leguizamo said. “They didn’t feel like they were seen, so that was a beautiful gift from the movie.”
Lequizamo also articulates that if “To Wong Foo” were cast today, a trans actor should be cast in his role. (And that just may happen, since Beane is developing a musical for Broadway.) “Anybody can play anything, but the playing field is not fair that way,” he said. “Not everybody is allowed to play everything. So until we get to that place, it is important for trans actors to get a chance to act which they don’t. In the project I’m doing, I’m making sure that the person playing trans is a trans person so we can make it legit, make it real. That just needs to be done right now.”
a monumental film in the library of queer history.
it was formative for modern society, too.
there are a lot of action fans out there who learned from their idols that respect doesn’t cost a damn thing to give. i know plenty of people who aren’t queer saw trans women and drag queens presented as people to them for the first time in wong fu. suddenly, strange and foreign queer identities that had only been presented to them as jokes if they’d even heard of them, seemed a little more relatable, and very human.
we’re all just people.
snipes, swayze, and leguizamo were willing to play people a lot of their fans didn’t respect yet or didn’t even know how to respect and demand they figure it the fuck out.
It’s also worth noting Leguizamo has gone on the record to say he brought his own experiences to the role; Chichi is wearing makeup too light for her natural skin tone through most of the movie, and swearing to stop doing so is part of her growth. Leguizamo based this on observation of his own female family members growing up.
“It was all about accepting my ethnicity in it. I had my face done really light all the time. I have family members who have issues with self-hate and race and so their skin will be five times lighter than the color of their neck, and that always tripped me out, so I wanted to put a little bit of that into it,” he said. “At the end of the movie, my neck and my face matched. My face is much darker. So that was the arc. Chi Chi becomes polished but accepting of herself, mature, romantically grows. Instead of a taker, she becomes a giver.”
sleepwithgiggli
Important tags:
Dec 16, 2023
xaephan reblogged
That last reblog reminded me of a quite old drawing of mine I did a long time ago, and I thought, why not share them on here too!
xaephan reblogged
if someone irl found ur blog how long would it take them to confirm it was you. i think it would take 1 singular second for me
xaephan reblogged
Sketch I did for aokkun on instagram
xaephan reblogged
I'm gonna link to the animations in case y'all either don't remember or have never heard of some of these.
A quick note: these were made in the 2000s. Comedy is subjective, there's some strong examples of dark and/or "lolz teh random" humor in these. Maybe some cultural blindness, too. That said, enjoy a time capsule of stuff made before/during the birth of Youtube, now hosted on Youtube.
Man this takes me back
I'm suddenly remembering all the flash animation I watched in my late teens/early 20s
xaephan reblogged
Going Merry 🌊
xaephan reblogged
be running up that road // be running up that hill // be running up that building
it's DIRT
unmute for comically aggrieved farmer
xaephan reblogged
genobest
A surprising photo appeared online this spring: Malkin is lying on the floor, cuddling with a huge lion. “Did my son buy it?” asked Evgeni’s father in a trembling voice, after we told him about the photo. Now Evgeni himself explains the story behind it.
It’s an old picture, Malkin smiles. From Magnitogorsk. At that time Zapashny brothers’ circus came to the city. It’s their pet lion. There’s nothing scary about it.
It doesn’t exactly look small and harmless.
You’re right about its size, but I heard it’d been living in Zapashnys’ apartment with them for ten years. It’s very kind.
Did you take a picture with it because your star sign is Leo?
No, it was just an interesting thing to do. Even kids took pictures with it. I was born in the year of the tiger, so does it mean I should now climb into their cages? No.
Does your personality match your star sign?
Not 100%. But I have a difficult personality. When I get mad, I scream and go an a rampage like a lion. So there is some similarity.
nebulia13
CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW VLADIMIR MALKIN’S FIRST REACTION TO THIS PICTURE WAS ‘DID MY SON BUY THAT ANIMAL (for me to raise, oH GOD)’
