Riffing on Eight Songs for a Mad King by Peter Maxwell Davies and The Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at Kings College, Oxford – eight lessons for a queer king is an ongoing set of observations on places & performances from the ancient to the modern, across a range of mediums, and experienced live.
The unschooled accounts by of the Impertinent Fool is not that of a graduate of music college, theatre school, art college or a school of journalism. They did not study level 9 piano as a teenager, act in the university theatre productions or give well received shows at Edinburgh. When music did make an appearance in their childhood it was St Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band played on repeat or McNamara’s Band. Reading was encouraged, as well as board games, playing outside and watching films on tv.
As an adult, this Impertinent Fool has stumbled upon, accidentally blundered into and curiously tiptoed toward a range of culture from Bollywood to (English) folk, opera to ballet, orchestral and chamber music to shakespeare, theatre to (arthouse) cinema, as well as ballroom dancing, music festivals and performance poetry, along with one memorable evening where on the spur of the moment they volunteered to be a competitor in a grime battle. From such arid beginnings, this journey has taken in the absurd and the exquisite, beautiful and depressing, the painful and the ecstatic, the erotic, appalling, and expansive, the challenging to the banal.
Eight Lessons for a Queer King is an ongoing account of their visits, experiences and thoughts on their cultural excursions. But this is not wikipedia, there will be no #spoilers, it is not usually a blow-by-blow commentary but neither is it an insiders take from the professional. And this Impertinent Fool usually sits in the cheap seats, up in the gods, down with groundlings – because that’s all they can afford. Far more Fool to your Lear than Aristotle to your Alexander, this Impertinent Fool has walked out on plays, operas, and out of galleries without apology. Although like all blogs, they acknowledge the (wishful) conceit that someone out there is actually reading this and, perhaps, even cares about what they think.
However, from the plush deep carpets of the opera house, the rarefied air of the art gallery, the complexities and niches of the museums, the concrete brutalism of the barbican and the south bank, to the upstairs room above a pub and the repurposed bodge of a squat in Hackney, the court of the queer king could be anywhere and the lessons presented could be almost anything.
Their only hope is they can do them justice.