Various Things
23 Oct 2015 05:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespirit1. One of the joys of Yuletide is stumbling over things you never knew about before. One this year that amused me muchly was the music video of Shakespeare's Sister's Stay. Now, this is a song that I recorded off the radio when I was a teenager (onto a tape, I'm a historical thingumy) and I was always fascinated by it - I reasoned that it was all one voice and maybe some fairy queen who seemed nice but wasn't (a la some Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer thing, because I had been reading Fire and Hemlock by that point), but NO. That is not what it is about!
As it turns out, voice one is a woman trying to get her dying boyfriend to stay with her and voice 2 is Death. Who in this wears a sparkly catsuit and does an outrageous dance because... er... um... it's an 80s music video? My favourite bit is Death's eye-roll at the end because, frankly someone's who's been doing a sparkly OTT catsuit dance like that has no grounds on which to eye-roll at people. Oh, and for some reason, it all seems to be happening in space because why not?
Anyway, I'm grateful to the requester because otherwise I would never have watched that and my life would have been the poorer for it.
2. Talking of amusing vids, it's been at least a year or two since I mentioned that Julius Caesar Poker Face vid, and every so often a person just needs to remind themselves that it exists and laugh themselves silly at the combination of Richard Pasco and David Collings and their ridiculously opposite faces set to appropriate-inappropriate pop music. Do not worry if you do not like Julius Caesar, 1970s BBC theatricality, Lady Gaga, or Brutus/Cassius. None of those things should come between you and it:
3. And now for something completely different, because otherwise I'll forget again, I wrote some more![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
runaway_tales:
Two in the same AU timeline:
Double Cross (PG, 4367 words. Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Rudy Graves.) Julia’s having nothing but trouble with men – her brother seems to be in danger and Mr Iveson’s trying to buy her off with sandwiches…
Not Just a Passing Phase (PG, 5262 words. Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Rudy Graves, Elizabeth Long.) The last thing Julia wants is for Mr Iveson to be lying dead in her kitchen with her brother to blame for it…
Faulty Connections (All ages, 1176 words. Anna, Liesa.) Liesa and Anna have the opposite problem when it comes to family.
As it turns out, voice one is a woman trying to get her dying boyfriend to stay with her and voice 2 is Death. Who in this wears a sparkly catsuit and does an outrageous dance because... er... um... it's an 80s music video? My favourite bit is Death's eye-roll at the end because, frankly someone's who's been doing a sparkly OTT catsuit dance like that has no grounds on which to eye-roll at people. Oh, and for some reason, it all seems to be happening in space because why not?
Anyway, I'm grateful to the requester because otherwise I would never have watched that and my life would have been the poorer for it.
2. Talking of amusing vids, it's been at least a year or two since I mentioned that Julius Caesar Poker Face vid, and every so often a person just needs to remind themselves that it exists and laugh themselves silly at the combination of Richard Pasco and David Collings and their ridiculously opposite faces set to appropriate-inappropriate pop music. Do not worry if you do not like Julius Caesar, 1970s BBC theatricality, Lady Gaga, or Brutus/Cassius. None of those things should come between you and it:
3. And now for something completely different, because otherwise I'll forget again, I wrote some more
runaway_tales:Two in the same AU timeline:
Double Cross (PG, 4367 words. Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Rudy Graves.) Julia’s having nothing but trouble with men – her brother seems to be in danger and Mr Iveson’s trying to buy her off with sandwiches…
Not Just a Passing Phase (PG, 5262 words. Edward Iveson, Julia Graves, Rudy Graves, Elizabeth Long.) The last thing Julia wants is for Mr Iveson to be lying dead in her kitchen with her brother to blame for it…
Faulty Connections (All ages, 1176 words. Anna, Liesa.) Liesa and Anna have the opposite problem when it comes to family.
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2015 12:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 Oct 2015 06:15 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 23 Oct 2015 07:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 Oct 2015 07:07 pm (UTC)*CACKLES*
*SQUISHES*
Also, also, when I read the title Faulty Connections, alas my mind conjured 'Fawlty'. It has been one of those days...
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Date: 23 Oct 2015 07:13 pm (UTC)80s vids are always an... er... inspiration? ;-p
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 12:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2015 02:47 pm (UTC)(Still one of my top fav scenes...I laugh every time I see it!)
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2015 05:42 pm (UTC)*Happy!Squishes*
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Date: 23 Oct 2015 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 Oct 2015 08:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 23 Oct 2015 11:05 pm (UTC)By the way, I have now seen The Wicked Lady (thanks for the Youtube link) and have The Lady Vanishes sitting on my desk. Entirely your fault, obviously.
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 08:06 am (UTC)By the way, I have now seen The Wicked Lady (thanks for the Youtube link) and have The Lady Vanishes sitting on my desk. Entirely your fault, obviously.
Ahahaha. *grins* I still haven't seen The Wicked Lady, but my Margaret Lockwood boxset has arrived & I'm looking forward to it, although I haven't quite decided on which of the films in it to try first. (I just went straight for rewatching my favourite bits of The Lady Vanishes!)
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 08:47 am (UTC)That other video is great too, in its different way. Are Brutus and Cassius supposed to be that flirty?! And I love that parade at the beginning. It's a constant stream of "Look! It's him! Off Thingy!" And Cassius posing in the tent doorway is a scream. :)
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 12:31 pm (UTC)(Or maybe it was 1990s, if I was recording it on tape?)
Are Brutus and Cassius supposed to be that flirty?! And I love that parade at the beginning. It's a constant stream of "Look! It's him! Off Thingy!" And Cassius posing in the tent doorway is a scream. :)
1978 BBC Julius Caesar is a thing of beauty for all these reasons plus some actual genuine awesome. I, er, don't know how flirty Cassius and Brutus should be, but in the 1978 one Cassius basically decides that Brutus is not paying him enough attention, so he will try and win him back with a proposed stabbing of his annoying friends he doesn't like because that will go well. Then they all die tragically, except for the guy who falls dead on Cassius the wrong way round, of course.
The posing in the doorway is... David Collings. :loL: (I may once when very, very ill have hugged my slimline DVD copy of this in gratitude for its mere existence and then fallen into a feverish doze and forever wrinkled its plastic as a result. My Julius Caesar DVD has thus been loved too well!)
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 08:09 am (UTC)(And you were right - "Stay" was 1992).
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 01:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2015 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2015 04:15 pm (UTC)"There is this love of Brutus for Caesar, of Caesar for Brutus, the love of Brutus and Cassius, Brutus and Portia, the mutual love between Brutus and Lucius and all his servants. Brutus is a centre of love wherever he goes."
And the great thing about this vid is that, wonderfully cracky as it is, it emphasises quite a bit of that in there, under the ridiculous. The BBC version does go all out for Brutus/Cassius and I don't think it was unintentional - the 1950 film is a far more edited interpretation that puts most of the focus on Antony, which changes a lot (although Brutus & Cassius are still pretty shippy).
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 02:17 pm (UTC)Lol, the JC vid is genius:) All I need now is Peter Cushing's Cassius to be released to in the wilds as a treat for Halloween (it's extant).
Btw I have the full sized DVD case - I feel I am the only one!
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 04:17 pm (UTC)It is pretty great, though, I agree.
I expect lots of people have the full-sized case. Do you know if it holds out better than the slimline under excessive hugging? You should find out, for science.
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 08:16 am (UTC)They didn't often have videos on that though. I think you needed the ITV pop show for them - I missed most of them as well. TOTP was mostly (mimed) "live" performances. And cheesy as hell.
(If indeed hell is cheesy - I have no clear data on this subject).
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 08:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 25 Oct 2015 10:50 am (UTC)Although it is nice to say hello to Peter Powell every once in a while.
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 04:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 25 Oct 2015 04:31 pm (UTC)(My BBC Shakespeares are very variable between the slimline and fat ones. I would prefer slimline because all this old TV watching is hard on the shelf space, but there you go.)
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 04:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 24 Oct 2015 06:20 pm (UTC)On the one hand, I always got that the modulated voice was a separate character from the primary female singing voice. On the other hand, like someone else has said, I still think that, "you better hope and pray that wake someday back in your own world," still implies she's more like the fairy queen you were imagining than Death. The voices being separate just make it more Tam Lin than Thomas because the male is just a figure caught between two female ones, like Tam Lin between Janet and the Fairy Queen. How was Fire and Hemlock? I've never been able to read it, but have always wanted to because I really enjoy Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer stories.
Also, I'm another American who gets the, "This video contains content from WMG, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds," message. I don't blame YouTube for it. I blame WMG. They've been stupid jackasses about the sharing of digital content since it first became possible, and apparently still haven't caught onto just how stupid they're being. If it was, say, Sony it wouldn't be a problem. WMG gets sue happy.
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 07:31 pm (UTC)I read Fire & Hemlock many times as a teenager (and since), as DWJ was my favourite author (and F&H my favourite books) so I can't really say - it's my growing-up book and my only Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer story I've read, really.
Yes, some of these people are just stupid about the whole copyright thing. Here's hoping that maybe they'll wise up sometime! Not that that helps you watch the vid now. It definitely wasn't blocked in the US last time I linked people to it, but that was a while ago.
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 08:26 pm (UTC)Heh, well, not like it's the first or last time I'm not in agreement with "official" canon, or fanon.
...I can't really say - it's my growing-up book and my only Tam Lin/Thomas the Rhymer story I've read, really.
Ah. I've read Tam Lin: An Old Ballad, by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Charles Mikolaycak (1990), Ellen Kushner's novel Thomas the Rhymer (1990), Tam Lin, by Pamela Dean (1991), and Winter Rose, by Patricia McKillip (1996). Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones (1985) is one of the related books I've heard about, wanted to read, but never gotten the chance to. Another one is The Perilous Gard, by Elizabeth Marie Pope (1974). At least now you know that Fire and Hemlock is on my "To Read" list? Howl's Moving Castle has been on it since I saw the Miyazaki film also.
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 08:38 pm (UTC):-)
And, hey, being at odds with canon is one of the states of being a fan!
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Date: 24 Oct 2015 08:46 pm (UTC)Howl's Moving Castle is wonderful, but I gather they changed a lot for the film, so you need to go in expecting something very different...
I'm very practiced at expecting differences between films and the books they were based on. I was telling someone just the other day the only time I made the mistake of going straight from reading a book to watching a movie was one of the James Bond books. The only things they had in common where the title and a few character names. It gave me a terrible cognitive dissonance headache. I learned my lesson.
...DWJ is much more stealth subversive than sweet, always.
Sounds like I might find I enjoy the movie more than book, but I'd still like to give the book a try sometime. If nothing else at least I'll know where Miyazaki started from.
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 08:27 am (UTC)I really still love her as an author, as you can tell - in my ways she formed a lot of who I am and how I think and was very light made me laugh at the same time. I never seem to get on as well with her adult novels (the Derkolm books and the Magids) but I love most of her YA stuff so much. (I bounce hard off the Dalemark Quartet, but a lot of people love those. She's always so different that I think most DWJ fans have at least one of her novels that happens with - and it's F&H for a lot of people.)
Howl's Moving Castle, though, is mainly just being subversive about fairy/folk tale tropes and turning them on their heads, filled with awkward and flawed people - it's one of her most fun. But I know someone else who loves the film who just hated the book because the characters were so different. (And, hearing that, and loving the book, I suspect I'd therefore get annoyed at the film, even though I know it's supposed to be quite good in its own right.)
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 10:24 pm (UTC)Complex isn't an issue. I was tested as reading at "college level" when I was 12, and have never stopped being a voracious reader. Dark might be more of an issue. I've just recently been discussing in my own journal with a friend how I tend to prefer stories that have if not a "happily ever after" end at least a hopeful end.
...adult readers can sometimes bounce hard off the child-adult romance in it.
Thanks. I can be sensitive to age differences in romance, but they aren't an automatic deal breaker. It's very much a combination of how the age differences are presented, and the romance itself is handled.
Howl's Moving Castle, though, is mainly just being subversive about fairy/folk tale tropes and turning them on their heads...
I suppose I should ask the basic question, "Do the books a) have female protagonists, who b) save male protagonists?" In Tam Lin proper Janet saves Tam Lin from the Fairy Queen, and in the film version of Howl's Moving Castle Sophie saves Howl by getting his heart back to him. I love fairy/folk tales, but not in the "Prince rescues princess" way people think of them from watching Disney films that seem to work that way. I like the stories where the girl rescues the guy, whether it's Tam Lin, the Beast, or the Frog Prince getting rescued. I have realized that I love the Disney versions of The Little Mermaid and Rapunzel because in those stories they have the protagonists rescue each other.
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Date: 26 Oct 2015 08:24 am (UTC)And, in answer to your question, oh yes! Sophie saves Howl in the same way, and Polly is the protagonist of Fire & Hemlock and tries to take her cue from Janet. DWJ is not much for the prince rescues princess sort of story. Those two both have a girl rescues boy theme (although mostly in her books, people have to rescue themselves, with some help, often by growing to realise the true nature of people close to them who aren't treating them well).
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Date: 1 Nov 2015 02:23 am (UTC)F&H does have a hopeful end...
Cool. That sounds good to me.
I just thought that if you didn't know much about it, it was worth saying that it has a lot of complex, messed relationships under the light surface of it.
I appreciate it. I mean, for example, while I was happy the first time I ran across a writer with a story about a teenage girl who was cutting, it wasn't because I thought of it as a sexy kink. I appreciated an adult exploring the behavior in a serious way, and not treating the girl as nothing but a freak. Complex, messed relationships aren't pretty, but if they're done well they seem very real.
And, in answer to your question, oh yes! Sophie saves Howl in the same way, and Polly is the protagonist of Fire & Hemlock and tries to take her cue from Janet.
Yay! That sounds very good to me.
DWJ is not much for the prince rescues princess sort of story.
Understood. I like a balance best, which is why I was pleased to realize that a couple of my favorite Disney animated fairy tales have it, but if it's going to be lopsided I prefer it if the girls rescue the boys.
Those two both have a girl rescues boy theme...
Keeping them firmly on my "To Read" list.
...although mostly in her books, people have to rescue themselves...
While I'm certainly not opposed to people having to rescue themselves, it tends to feel rather... lonely to me. I mean I like the mutual rescuing because it clearly says, "These people aren't alone. They have someone willing to rescue them." I mean I'm not the most Christian of human beings, but I do like the quote, "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. When two characters are willing to risk everything for each other and live to tell the tale that makes me very very happy.
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Date: 1 Nov 2015 08:44 am (UTC)I know what you mean. I'd agree, and I think maybe I just put it badly. There are usually a group of people who all end up coming together to fix stuff in her books (though it varies, it's not so, really in F&F and Howl), but it is frequently a theme that the protagonist has to come to a place where they realise they need rescuing and once they have often already hold some of the key to that themselves, but other people need to help them realise that (and then help them, generally). Cat and Gwendolen in Charmed Life are a good example of that, but it is something that comes up a lot. Her books certainly don't feel lonely - there are often a whole group of people coming together to sort things. Anyway, she's a very interesting and fun writer. I enjoy a lot of her YA standalones, the Howl series and the Chrestomanci series and am less keen for some reason on her adult books and her more straight out fantasy world settings. The Tough Guide To Fantasyland is also completely priceless, especially if you've ever read any 80s/90s fantasy!
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 06:31 am (UTC)You weren't lying about the sparkles. That was premium level eighties sparkles.
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 08:14 am (UTC)Actually, they were 1990s sparkles! I did lie! (By accident. I was dazzled by the sparkles enough to forget that I never listened to the radio and recorded songs till it was at least 1991.)
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Date: 25 Oct 2015 08:36 pm (UTC)♥
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Date: 2 Nov 2015 07:37 pm (UTC)OH, he said. DRAMA.
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Date: 3 Nov 2015 01:29 pm (UTC)