(no subject)
Aug. 19th, 2013 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* The Conservative mind at work. "Oregon's GOP Chair Wants to Sprinkle Nuclear Waste From Airplanes:" http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/08/oregon-gop-art-robinson-nuclear-waste-airplanes
* "New Hot Zones now cover 5% of Earth; Only Fix is Halting CO2:" http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/earth-halting-lazare.html
* "Victor Hugo’s theory for why the rich resent the poor:" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/08/18/victor-hugos-theory-for-why-the-rich-resent-the-poor/
* Best line from last night's game session was during the OOc pot luck bit at the beginning:
Me: The cupcakes I made are caffeinated.
New Player: What wizardry is this!
Clearly the New Player is going to be an asset.
* Everything took way longer than it needed to today. Hector woke me up two hours early, and as there was little chance of me getting back to sleep, I went with having a read and then easing myself slowly upright. I made it out with what I thought to e plenty of time to handle today's bureaucracy. I was wrong. When I went to deposit the check the young ladies at the branch near the Realtor panicked. I was aware that withdrawing a massive amount in cash can be a drama, but it never occurred to be that depositing too large a check could cause similar trouble. Apparently, one is supposed to go to bank of origin Wells Fargo and pay fees to get them to write a cashier's check and deposit that. I stood my ground with the lawyer's check, as I was pretty sure they were required to honor it. (My sister didn't have this Drama when she cashed hers. just saying). It took most of an hour for them to reach someone at the main branch willing to authorize them to take the check. There is a week long hold on full transfer, but they will release more than enough for my immediate needs by Wednesday. I then went and paid the ernest money at the Realtor. I warned them to want until Wednesday morning to cash it. The amount was tiny compared to the final cost of the condo, but way more than I could cover out of my regular funds.
I'd spotted a flooring place on the way to the Realtor's, so I stopped for estimates. The scab colored bedroom has a bright white carpet. I am picturing the cats covering it with indelible orange vomit. I was thinking laminate would be easier to clean and better for my allergies. The room is small; I had hopes of laminate being affordable. It looks like it is, but I got estimates for discontinued wood and hard wood flooring anyway. Hard wood looks right out, but the size of the room means I might be able to get away with the discontinued stuff as it's only twice the cost per foot. I'll need to do precise measurements and do out the maths. Putting in smooth flooring before we start moving makes way more sense than waiting.
I was buy the cheap grocery at this point and I needed nuts and dried fruit for meds time snacks, plus bocas and coconut milk. It being in the same lot with the first place I needed to drop off bureaucracy, I did those two things next. Bureaucracy took three times longer than expected and I discovered a document was missing. Shopping used up most of my legs, but I remembered I was having no luck finding the particular type of vitamins I need to offset my meds close to home and I knew the Co-op had them. There was the Co-op secondary branch across the street. They often don't have what I need, but in this case, their vitamin section was enough like main branch to rescue me. Unfortunately, this is where my legs started to go, though at least I didn't fall. Then I looped north to pay next month's storage unit rent, since I like to do errands in that section all at once to save gas. I barely made it back in time to switch over the car to Squirrel.
This means I still need to do another two bits of driving around town bureaucracy, bureaucracy phone calls, and the library. Sigh. My spine was considering joining my legs in the land of glitch by the time I got home, which is always scary. I've been doing the necessary things in tiny slices with a lot of rest in between, because I can't trust my ability to control anything from the top of the damaged section of my spine down when I'm standing up. (I can drive just fine as there is less pressure on the damaged sections when I'm sitting and the simple up down movement of the pedals doesn't require fine control of the smaller muscles one needs for balance to do things like stand and walk). It's days like this when I really ought to be in a wheelchair. I have a manual chair, but I'd have to wrestle it up the horrible stairs with my crappy balance and with my upper body muscles as borked as they are today.... yeah. One of the many improvements the move will bring is me being able to use the wheelchair on bad days. I ought to add an electric to my list of things to see if there is money for after this is all over.
* Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Two productions compared (TW: Some discussion of violent gay bashing and sexual assault is required):
I admit to having last read the play the Winter between my first and second Master's Degree programs, and am just generally way more up on the history than the play. Do not take me as any sort of expert on Mr. Marlowe's work or this play in particular. I thought it would be interesting to watch both the 1969 Sir Ian McClellan version that shocked the world with it's gay male kissing and the early '90's Tilda Swinton version, what with them both being fascinating actors and the productions being so different. You might think I'd watch the more traditional '69 version first, but Ms. Swinton's turned up first via ILL, while the library opted to purchase the McClellan, causing an extra month's delay for processing. They were really different, being both products of their time.
The Swinton version was very spare and modern, with striking visuals, and a rather heavy handed political overlay. The Swinton was made not only during the Plague, but in a time of particularly nasty right wing anti-gay backlash. They tried a little to hard to use the play to talk about that and the whole thing didn't quite work, though it was a old attempt, and there were some things it did very well. On the plus side, they stripped it down in a way that made it coherent and accessible. Ms. Swinton was brilliant, and as someone who is more focused on the history, her interpretation spoke way more strongly to me than the more traditional interpretation of Queen Isabella. Thirdly, the place their more horrifyingly realistic gay bashing actually better fit what actually happened to them. The gruesome sexual nature of the executions was in reality that homophobic. As incredibly tough as it was to watch, this was the place where the attempt to tie it in to modern politics worked best, even though I'm not convinced putting that on the screen is ultimately a good idea. There is fundamental question as to whether filming something that violently homophobic is helping by showing just how horrible the violence directed at gay men is, or if it's just torture porn. The merit of their approach is particularly called into question by the way they depict male sexuality throughout the film. The film is extremely stylized, remember. The sex is choreographed to look like dance and the dance is choreographed to look like sex. The result is that the male sexuality, while fairly explicit looks mechanical and passionless. Drained of passion, Edward and Peirce look like manic, possibly cocaine addled sex addicts, which undermines the other attempts to make a pro-gay message. The result is, it's deeply unsettling and dehumanizing to sexual minorities while still running around pretending it's pro-gay with a lot of surface messaging such as the Silence=Death protest. It's... not good. This despite me preferring Ms. Swinton's performance to any other I can imagine. This despite it leading to all sorts of thinking thoughts on how living through all this might have affected Edward III. (Seriously, Edward I-III is some fascinating history just generally. It's a shame Hollywood makes such a botch of it when they attempt it).
Anyway, the sir Ian McClellan version's been a whole other sort of complicated for me. This is a filming of a stage version, and while it was done with multiple camera angles, it is theater acting instead of TV or movie acting. This means that it's much broader and less subtle because it has to carry to the back row. Filmed plays just generally tend to look overacted and exaggerated when watched on a small screen. This version of Edward II was no different in this respect, though some of the actors were significantly better at striking a balance than others. This was no nearly the problem that the costumes were. *facepalm* How to describe the costumes? To be fair, the cardboard armour would likely look ten times better to the theater audience than it does in closeup, and I was totally giving them a pass on that. No, it was the court costumes that were the issue. See, they were doing your early 14th century inspired designs with modern fabrics, and trust me the use of tie die and ombre was a terrible, horrible, no good idea. The stripey polyesters probably worked fine at a distance for theater audince, but ombre and tie die? No excuse. While this was coosistantly distracting it was as nothing to the codpieces. No really, you'd have to see them to believe them. No, we aren't talking the "black russian" from Black Adder I. While they were inordinately large, their shape was a more reasonable bag shape. No, gentle readers, it was the fabrics. Imagine poor Sir Ian McClellan in his handome, youthful rime, dressed in a lack tunic with metallic points and matching flat black cloth tight with a massive shiny black vinyl(? Satin? Maybe something else supper shiny?) codpiece catching the light so that his crotch periodically appears to be almost glowing. Here he is enacting love and grief with what amounts to a glowing neon sign on his crotch. Talk about distracting. I'd stare in puzzlement as his crotch as he lept about and would routinely forget to listen to the words and watch his face.
That's right, poor Sir Ian McClellan was upstaged by his crotch.
No one should have to write a sentence like that, especially abut a talent of his caliber.
It wasn't just Sir Ian McClellan's crotch either. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop. While Peirs' crotch blended in slightly better with his tights pattern, in some lights it also appeared to be glowing. They weren't the only ones either. Spencer and some of the guards had glowing crotches. Did no one notice they put flaming cod pieces on the gay characters? WTF?!?
Anyway, down to the meat of the issue. The relationship between Edward and Peirs was so much better in this. This was performed the year of the Stonewall riots, remember, and homosexuality was only legalized in England two years previously. Even one chaste kiss would have been revolutionary, but what we got was so much older. We got multiple kisses, each expressing a different emotion: a gentle kiss showing deep love, a passionate kiss full of desire, a desperate kiss full of imminent loss. Not only that, there was all this casual affectionate contact. The embrace or stand arms around each other and as they separate, Edward's hand lingers, reluctant for even a small separation, sliding down an arm. There is something so beautifully open and vulnerable about McClellan's Edward, even through the occasionally slightly too broad stage acting. This was so much more powerful than the more explicitly homoerotic production made later, because in this version, Edward and Peirs seem to genuinely love and desire each other. Because they are framed by the acting as two star crossed lovers with an intense romantic and sexual bond, they read like other heterosexual couples in Elizabethan drama and are sympathetic in a way that the other production never managed. In the '69 production, they are a grand tragedy like Anthony and Cleopatra or Romeo and Juliet, and it makes the case for equal treatment of us QUILTBAG folk much better through simply treating them equally to other tragic Elizabethan couples without showing the explicit historically accurate gay bashing of the Swinton version.
I am not generally in favour of whitewashing the ugly out of history, but Marlowe and Shakespeare weren't writing history. They were talking about human truths, but the historical trappings were mostly scenery in their plays. I could have lived my whole life without watching a deadly sexual assault/execution played out for entertainment. The word description of the event has always been more than enough to outrage me. I genuinely did not need to see it to know it was a terrible thing to do to a person. That doesn't mean that they hadn't a right to film it or that it didn't have a particular power as presented. The '69 also includes the sexual assault/execution, but it's a bit less intense. I just think, I'd have rather seen the best parts of both these productions in one. I'd love to see a romantic and passionate Edward and Peirs go up against a calculating Swintonesque Isabella. I'd like it to be a true tragedy played out with strong visuals and good editing. (The 69's pacing was off and the Swinton visual design/costumes/photography/lighting kicked '69's ass). Somewhere in this play is a brilliant movie and no one has made it yet, though both of these failures were powerful and interesting.
* League of STEAM Commercial:
* Dragon Cave:
* "New Hot Zones now cover 5% of Earth; Only Fix is Halting CO2:" http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/earth-halting-lazare.html
* "Victor Hugo’s theory for why the rich resent the poor:" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2013/08/18/victor-hugos-theory-for-why-the-rich-resent-the-poor/
* Best line from last night's game session was during the OOc pot luck bit at the beginning:
Me: The cupcakes I made are caffeinated.
New Player: What wizardry is this!
Clearly the New Player is going to be an asset.
* Everything took way longer than it needed to today. Hector woke me up two hours early, and as there was little chance of me getting back to sleep, I went with having a read and then easing myself slowly upright. I made it out with what I thought to e plenty of time to handle today's bureaucracy. I was wrong. When I went to deposit the check the young ladies at the branch near the Realtor panicked. I was aware that withdrawing a massive amount in cash can be a drama, but it never occurred to be that depositing too large a check could cause similar trouble. Apparently, one is supposed to go to bank of origin Wells Fargo and pay fees to get them to write a cashier's check and deposit that. I stood my ground with the lawyer's check, as I was pretty sure they were required to honor it. (My sister didn't have this Drama when she cashed hers. just saying). It took most of an hour for them to reach someone at the main branch willing to authorize them to take the check. There is a week long hold on full transfer, but they will release more than enough for my immediate needs by Wednesday. I then went and paid the ernest money at the Realtor. I warned them to want until Wednesday morning to cash it. The amount was tiny compared to the final cost of the condo, but way more than I could cover out of my regular funds.
I'd spotted a flooring place on the way to the Realtor's, so I stopped for estimates. The scab colored bedroom has a bright white carpet. I am picturing the cats covering it with indelible orange vomit. I was thinking laminate would be easier to clean and better for my allergies. The room is small; I had hopes of laminate being affordable. It looks like it is, but I got estimates for discontinued wood and hard wood flooring anyway. Hard wood looks right out, but the size of the room means I might be able to get away with the discontinued stuff as it's only twice the cost per foot. I'll need to do precise measurements and do out the maths. Putting in smooth flooring before we start moving makes way more sense than waiting.
I was buy the cheap grocery at this point and I needed nuts and dried fruit for meds time snacks, plus bocas and coconut milk. It being in the same lot with the first place I needed to drop off bureaucracy, I did those two things next. Bureaucracy took three times longer than expected and I discovered a document was missing. Shopping used up most of my legs, but I remembered I was having no luck finding the particular type of vitamins I need to offset my meds close to home and I knew the Co-op had them. There was the Co-op secondary branch across the street. They often don't have what I need, but in this case, their vitamin section was enough like main branch to rescue me. Unfortunately, this is where my legs started to go, though at least I didn't fall. Then I looped north to pay next month's storage unit rent, since I like to do errands in that section all at once to save gas. I barely made it back in time to switch over the car to Squirrel.
This means I still need to do another two bits of driving around town bureaucracy, bureaucracy phone calls, and the library. Sigh. My spine was considering joining my legs in the land of glitch by the time I got home, which is always scary. I've been doing the necessary things in tiny slices with a lot of rest in between, because I can't trust my ability to control anything from the top of the damaged section of my spine down when I'm standing up. (I can drive just fine as there is less pressure on the damaged sections when I'm sitting and the simple up down movement of the pedals doesn't require fine control of the smaller muscles one needs for balance to do things like stand and walk). It's days like this when I really ought to be in a wheelchair. I have a manual chair, but I'd have to wrestle it up the horrible stairs with my crappy balance and with my upper body muscles as borked as they are today.... yeah. One of the many improvements the move will bring is me being able to use the wheelchair on bad days. I ought to add an electric to my list of things to see if there is money for after this is all over.
* Christopher Marlowe's Edward II, Two productions compared (TW: Some discussion of violent gay bashing and sexual assault is required):
I admit to having last read the play the Winter between my first and second Master's Degree programs, and am just generally way more up on the history than the play. Do not take me as any sort of expert on Mr. Marlowe's work or this play in particular. I thought it would be interesting to watch both the 1969 Sir Ian McClellan version that shocked the world with it's gay male kissing and the early '90's Tilda Swinton version, what with them both being fascinating actors and the productions being so different. You might think I'd watch the more traditional '69 version first, but Ms. Swinton's turned up first via ILL, while the library opted to purchase the McClellan, causing an extra month's delay for processing. They were really different, being both products of their time.
The Swinton version was very spare and modern, with striking visuals, and a rather heavy handed political overlay. The Swinton was made not only during the Plague, but in a time of particularly nasty right wing anti-gay backlash. They tried a little to hard to use the play to talk about that and the whole thing didn't quite work, though it was a old attempt, and there were some things it did very well. On the plus side, they stripped it down in a way that made it coherent and accessible. Ms. Swinton was brilliant, and as someone who is more focused on the history, her interpretation spoke way more strongly to me than the more traditional interpretation of Queen Isabella. Thirdly, the place their more horrifyingly realistic gay bashing actually better fit what actually happened to them. The gruesome sexual nature of the executions was in reality that homophobic. As incredibly tough as it was to watch, this was the place where the attempt to tie it in to modern politics worked best, even though I'm not convinced putting that on the screen is ultimately a good idea. There is fundamental question as to whether filming something that violently homophobic is helping by showing just how horrible the violence directed at gay men is, or if it's just torture porn. The merit of their approach is particularly called into question by the way they depict male sexuality throughout the film. The film is extremely stylized, remember. The sex is choreographed to look like dance and the dance is choreographed to look like sex. The result is that the male sexuality, while fairly explicit looks mechanical and passionless. Drained of passion, Edward and Peirce look like manic, possibly cocaine addled sex addicts, which undermines the other attempts to make a pro-gay message. The result is, it's deeply unsettling and dehumanizing to sexual minorities while still running around pretending it's pro-gay with a lot of surface messaging such as the Silence=Death protest. It's... not good. This despite me preferring Ms. Swinton's performance to any other I can imagine. This despite it leading to all sorts of thinking thoughts on how living through all this might have affected Edward III. (Seriously, Edward I-III is some fascinating history just generally. It's a shame Hollywood makes such a botch of it when they attempt it).
Anyway, the sir Ian McClellan version's been a whole other sort of complicated for me. This is a filming of a stage version, and while it was done with multiple camera angles, it is theater acting instead of TV or movie acting. This means that it's much broader and less subtle because it has to carry to the back row. Filmed plays just generally tend to look overacted and exaggerated when watched on a small screen. This version of Edward II was no different in this respect, though some of the actors were significantly better at striking a balance than others. This was no nearly the problem that the costumes were. *facepalm* How to describe the costumes? To be fair, the cardboard armour would likely look ten times better to the theater audience than it does in closeup, and I was totally giving them a pass on that. No, it was the court costumes that were the issue. See, they were doing your early 14th century inspired designs with modern fabrics, and trust me the use of tie die and ombre was a terrible, horrible, no good idea. The stripey polyesters probably worked fine at a distance for theater audince, but ombre and tie die? No excuse. While this was coosistantly distracting it was as nothing to the codpieces. No really, you'd have to see them to believe them. No, we aren't talking the "black russian" from Black Adder I. While they were inordinately large, their shape was a more reasonable bag shape. No, gentle readers, it was the fabrics. Imagine poor Sir Ian McClellan in his handome, youthful rime, dressed in a lack tunic with metallic points and matching flat black cloth tight with a massive shiny black vinyl(? Satin? Maybe something else supper shiny?) codpiece catching the light so that his crotch periodically appears to be almost glowing. Here he is enacting love and grief with what amounts to a glowing neon sign on his crotch. Talk about distracting. I'd stare in puzzlement as his crotch as he lept about and would routinely forget to listen to the words and watch his face.
That's right, poor Sir Ian McClellan was upstaged by his crotch.
No one should have to write a sentence like that, especially abut a talent of his caliber.
It wasn't just Sir Ian McClellan's crotch either. Once I noticed it, I couldn't stop. While Peirs' crotch blended in slightly better with his tights pattern, in some lights it also appeared to be glowing. They weren't the only ones either. Spencer and some of the guards had glowing crotches. Did no one notice they put flaming cod pieces on the gay characters? WTF?!?
Anyway, down to the meat of the issue. The relationship between Edward and Peirs was so much better in this. This was performed the year of the Stonewall riots, remember, and homosexuality was only legalized in England two years previously. Even one chaste kiss would have been revolutionary, but what we got was so much older. We got multiple kisses, each expressing a different emotion: a gentle kiss showing deep love, a passionate kiss full of desire, a desperate kiss full of imminent loss. Not only that, there was all this casual affectionate contact. The embrace or stand arms around each other and as they separate, Edward's hand lingers, reluctant for even a small separation, sliding down an arm. There is something so beautifully open and vulnerable about McClellan's Edward, even through the occasionally slightly too broad stage acting. This was so much more powerful than the more explicitly homoerotic production made later, because in this version, Edward and Peirs seem to genuinely love and desire each other. Because they are framed by the acting as two star crossed lovers with an intense romantic and sexual bond, they read like other heterosexual couples in Elizabethan drama and are sympathetic in a way that the other production never managed. In the '69 production, they are a grand tragedy like Anthony and Cleopatra or Romeo and Juliet, and it makes the case for equal treatment of us QUILTBAG folk much better through simply treating them equally to other tragic Elizabethan couples without showing the explicit historically accurate gay bashing of the Swinton version.
I am not generally in favour of whitewashing the ugly out of history, but Marlowe and Shakespeare weren't writing history. They were talking about human truths, but the historical trappings were mostly scenery in their plays. I could have lived my whole life without watching a deadly sexual assault/execution played out for entertainment. The word description of the event has always been more than enough to outrage me. I genuinely did not need to see it to know it was a terrible thing to do to a person. That doesn't mean that they hadn't a right to film it or that it didn't have a particular power as presented. The '69 also includes the sexual assault/execution, but it's a bit less intense. I just think, I'd have rather seen the best parts of both these productions in one. I'd love to see a romantic and passionate Edward and Peirs go up against a calculating Swintonesque Isabella. I'd like it to be a true tragedy played out with strong visuals and good editing. (The 69's pacing was off and the Swinton visual design/costumes/photography/lighting kicked '69's ass). Somewhere in this play is a brilliant movie and no one has made it yet, though both of these failures were powerful and interesting.
* League of STEAM Commercial:
* Dragon Cave:
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-20 08:56 am (UTC)I gather the problem is that they are worried about someone depositing the huge amount (into an account they plan to close anyway, or into an account which isn't actually theirs) and then convincing the clerks to give them more of it than they ought to before it clears, which it then doesn't, but the policy never really made much sense to me.)
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-20 11:30 am (UTC)If I were trying to deposit and immediate withdraw I'd want them to be asking questions, honestly. Tht does sound like identity theft behavior.
BTW, I need to finish up and mail in surgery paperwork. It should be a go, but I wanted a better framework for the move before scheduling. It is possible Scarpia player and I'll be in San Fransisco area a weekish in the late Fall/early Winter. I'll let you know when it's likely and I have a date. I'd still like to hang out if you all are free.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-20 08:12 pm (UTC)November might be possible, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-08-21 01:06 am (UTC)Congrads to your brother!