Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Erin Felgar

Inside of a heated teepee in Brooklyn’s Industry City, I am sitting across from Erin Felgar as she tells me about her work. Shortly, she will have to go into the office at Brick Shop Audio, where she is one of their resident voices of erotic audiobooks.

Erin started at Brick Shop at the behest of a friend a few years ago, and in the last year and a half it’s become her primary occupation. She reads a lot of erotica written by moms in Utah, she laughs, as well as others that are so good they may be written under pseudonyms of writers of fine repute. Some are great, some are not, and some are great because they’re not. There are tales of hockey players with inner turmoil and the female protagonist is the only one who can save them; there are others with mob bosses or varying levels of BDSM. She reads it all under a pseudonym--she would like it to remain private here; on the Facebook page for it, though, the profile photo is a black and white photo of a woman holding two bright red cherries in her mouth. The page has fans across the country, with suburban moms and truck drivers reaching out to say she makes them feel a little less alone. She’s happy to be an erotic audiobook narrator especially if she can do that, she says. She has authors reaching out to her specifically, who are so excited to have [her pseudonym] read their book; one even named a character after her actual name in their text.

It’s not something Erin anticipated doing when she graduated from the Yale School of Drama, but reading erotic audiobooks opened up a new world of performance to her. She’s currently interested in expanding her repertoire to vocal acting and voice overs and is working on a reel to submit. When Erin prepares each reading, she first reads the text, then prepares the voices of the characters. She records in a booth, reading from an iPad. When she’s working, she occasionally shares some of the really juicy stuff in her Instagram stories.

Today, I’m allowed to photograph her briefly as she reads aloud from a recent text in one of Brick Shop’s sound booths. “His gaze wavers slightly with emotion, and then he leans closer and devours my mouth in a kiss so consuming I’m left breathless,” she reads in a quiet, all-knowing purr. I giggle quietly.

Later, Erin and I head to her happy place--Bed, Bath, and Beyond--to get a humidifier. A man helps us who knows more than I thought it was possible to know about humidifiers and soon we’re off. We stop at Greenwood Park, a bar where Erin used to work and where she currently does the chalkboard art, for lunch and afternoon libations. Her purr as [pseudonym] fades away, but there are still traces of her sense of amusement and mystery in Erin’s smile as she sips a glass of wine.

Follow Erin on her personal Instagram and as Brooklyn Chalk.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.
Subscribe to Miss Manhattan Hangs Out.

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Untitled Queen

Untitled Queen answers the door in her glasses. She is pre-makeup, pre-costume. One of the reigning queens of Brooklyn’s drag scene, I had the pleasure of meeting her when I worked on a piece about the borough’s drag culture last year.
Before that piece, I saw Untitled perform only on video--a few years ago, I wrote about an art show in which a performance of hers appeared. To Judy Garland’s rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” wearing a wildly teased blonde wig and a ball skirt of sewn-together rags, she eviscerated my soul. I felt even then there was a deeper understanding of humanity that went into her work. And then when I saw her perform live at annual Brooklyn drag festival Bushwig, in makeup inspired by Japanese Noh masks to the Dirty Projectors song “Keep Your Name,” I knew how right I was. Onstage, she told a powerful story about what our hopes for love can be and how they can destroy us as we destroy each other. And recently, from the tiny screen on my phone, seeing her performance of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” made me audibly gasp. I was then as I am now not just watching a drag queen at work, but an artist.
It’s fitting, since Untitled has an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons. She started the program focusing more on visual art, later moving into performance art and attempting drag at the behest of a friend. Six years later, she is performing around the world, from Brooklyn’s Bushwig to Miami’s Wigwood to Vienna’s famed Life Ball. She has been featured in The New York Times, Refinery29, Out, VICE (by yours truly) and countless others. Untitled continues her visual art practice as well, exhibiting at galleries in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.
Tonight she’s hosting the event “Cakes” at Metropolitan Bar in Williamsburg for the drag queen Didi Disco’s birthday. She smudges her face with pink to make an even canvas for the thick white makeup she will put on top of it. Beating her face with a powder puff, powder flies gently away from her face, illuminated to ghostly proportions by the lighted mirror in front of her. She draws on graphic, nearly pop-art eyebrows and eyeliner, adding circles and later lipgloss to complete the equation. After closing up her corset and jumping into a pink and blue dress, she tucks her bald head into a flowery skull cap and presses on clear nails that make her already lithe hands look even longer.
Arriving at Metropolitan, Untitled knows everyone. She kisses hello, says hi baby, sips a cocktail, floating on her platform combat boots. Soon, it’s her turn to take the stage with her co-hosts. She’s a luminous, commanding presence. Queen after queen performs, then it’s her turn. While she performs Joni Mitchell’s “A Case of You,” her fingers curl in Joni’s pain and sweetness, her lip sync flawless. The audience sits in quiet awe then explodes in applause.
Follow Untitled on Instagram.
Buy Untitled’s work on Society6.
Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.Subscribe to Miss Manhattan Hangs Out.  

Miss Manhattan Hangs Out...with Danny Chavis

Danny Chavis and I are making fun of Mark Rothko’s paintings when he gestures to a blank white wall. See? It’s great! We laugh.

Along with his twin brother Daniel (yes…), Chavis is part of the band The Veldt, one of the pioneers of shoegaze music. With a sound Afropunk called “a three way tug of war between Prince, Echo and the Bunnymen and Jimi Hendrix,” The Veldt opened for The Jesus and Mary Chain, Lush, and the Pixies, and toured with the Cocteau Twins in the 1990s. After some clueless record labels tried to put them into boxes where they didn’t want to be--be Lenny Kravitz! they said--Danny and Daniel decided to just be themselves and departed from labels altogether. It’s like they didn’t know what to do with a black-fronted rock band, Danny says.

People who know good music know and love them, everyone from Public Enemy’s Chuck D, who hired them to perform at Lincoln Center for the 20th anniversary of Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing, to Modern English and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, both of whom they toured/opened for last year. Pitchfork also listed their 1994 album Afrodisiac as one of the 50 Greatest Shoegaze Albums of All Time. They’ll be headed to South by Southwest in March, and will be recording new music this year as well. You can buy their latest EPs, The Shocking Fuzz of Your Electric Fur: The Drake Equation and Thanks to the Moth and Areanna Rose, here and here.

Danny is also an artist, and designed the cover of Thanks to the Moth and Areanna Rose. He paints and is working on illustrations for a children’s book that will set the lyrics of a famous British rock band to life. He has lived in New York, in the East Village specifically, for nearly 30 years. He is kind and warm and says “C’mon, cuz!” when I’m slow crossing the street.

As we walk from Bleecker Street to that gallery in Chelsea, Danny’s friend, artist and musician Micah Gaugh, tells a story about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s, ah, unusual self-medicating habits. The East Village has changed so much, they say. There’s hardly any art anymore. There is art in Chelsea, though, albeit of a different stripe than the deliciously grungy 1980s-1990s East Village. That night there’s a swarm of people floating through the West 20s, flocking through each gallery’s standard pristine white walls. Danny and Micah are constantly pausing to say hello to people they know from their lives in the art and music scenes, people who ask them both how they are and where they’re hanging later.
One place they’re hanging later is Von, which we return to on Bleecker Street, their haunt of choice. Danny stands at the bar drinking first wine and later an iced shot of espresso. He talks about Japan (he speaks fluent Japanese), his family, women, style. Like many things about Danny and The Veldt, their power is magically individual. They just can’t be duplicated.
Follow Danny and The Veldt on Instagram.
Become a fan of The Veldt on Facebook.
Listen and Buy The Veldt’s music on Bandcamp.

Follow me on Instagram and Twitter.
Subscribe to Miss Manhattan Hangs Out.