Various Things

[thisbluespirit]

1. 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?

"Shakespeare's Sister-Stay" (Watch on YouTube)

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:

""Poker Face" - Julius Caesar 1979 (Brutus/Cassius)" (Watch on YouTube)

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.

Comments

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

Oh crikey. Very familiar with the video, but I had no idea what it was actually about! That somehow makes it all the funnier. How very eighties! Nowhere else would Death look like that. Good song, anyway.

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. :)

[thisbluespirit]

Well, I haven't looked it up myself, but that was what the requested had found somewhere - and it fits with what we see. (Well. Er. As much as anything does!) In the multifandom pantheon of anthropomorphised Deaths, none of them are as sparkly as 1980s Pop Death. Discworld Death finds it showy but secretly envies her that star tinsel crown. He wouldn't mind just one of those shiny stars where nobody can see it.

(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!)

[swordznsorcery.livejournal.com]

You did a post once that was all about David Collings posing in doorways, I think?! It's clearly something that he does particularly well, but he did look especially as though he was trying to be seductive there. Shakespeare is clearly a lot naughtier than they try to make us think in school. ;)

(And you were right - "Stay" was 1992).

[thisbluespirit]

Shakespeare is always a lot naughtier than they let you know in school! (They start confessing the truth by the time you do A-Levels, though. Yes, it is a rude pun. Obviously.)

[liadt]

As I said to Brutus in Ewar's 'Julius Caesar' 'You don't half pick your boyfriends don't you?' so yes?

[thisbluespirit]

Also, less flippantly, when I got an Arden Shakespeare edition of JC out of the library, I jotted this down from the intro, talking about love as a keyword of the play:

"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).