Work, rec, play
LOL, today at the office I played David Cook's cover of Billie Jean on my laptop. The conversation I expected to have:
Anyone: Oh, hey, that's cool. Who is that?
Me: It's a cover from American Idol, and I am not going to apologize for that.
Conversation that actually happened:
Girl across from me: OH MY GOD is that DAVID COOK? If you put Always Be My Baby on I will CRY.
Indie Rocker Dude: You know he copied Chris Cornell's version, right? Chris does it better, but damn, that's a hard song to sing. *sings along to David's version perfectly*
Religious Dude: You should put David Archuleta on next.
...Just. LOL. Considering that AI isn't aired on any of the main channels here and wasn't really that popular, I am both heartened and impressed.
*
Fic rec: So I basically spent the entire weekend reading But Not This Song, and yeah, the verdict is definitely rec. It's Bandom, centering around Panic but full of plenty of others as supporting characters, 200k of really satisfying slavefic, the kind that felt really nostalgic to me in a well-written-old-school-fanfiction kind of way, the kind that I've seen people lamenting over recently, and I think anyone who's been craving that kind of fic will probably enjoy it a lot (despite the fact that it's not drowning in porn). There are boys-who-are-slaves and boys-who-used-to-be-slaveowners-who-are-now-slaves and boys-who-free-slaves and lots of boys who keep risking their lives for one another, even when they don't know each other well. There are boys pining and boys thinking they're unworthy of each other and some light jealousy and lots of boys cuddling for comfort. There are lots of daring rescues and a plot that keeps driving both the story and the relationships forward, and the politics never get, in my opinion, tedious, which is what I was afraid of. And it's long and well-written and so easy to just sink into, so that when I was done I had that really full but also slightly achy feeling you get when you finish a good long story or novel, of wanting to spend just a little more time in that universe. (There are some codas, actually, so yay for those.)
Also -- honestly, I put off reading this for so long just because I wanted to set aside the time to read 200k words in one go, but I probably would have read it a lot sooner if I'd known that this fic included a) BABYSITTER!BRENDON <33333, or close enough :D, and b) a scar-kissing scene. Guys, I cannot tell you how big my kink for scar-kissing scenes is *__*. You know, the ones that are all slow and intimate and detailed? SEE ALSO: me falling headfirst into TWW fic during season 2. Hello, Joshua and your war wounds.
The pairings listed in the main post are a little misleading -- the main pairing of the fic is permutations between Brendon/Spencer/Ryan/Jon, leading to OT4. I do think that even if you don't know these guys at all, the fact that the fic follows their first meeting and them gradually getting to know each other makes it easy enough to pick up either way :-)
*
I went to The Cherry Orchard tonight and really enjoyed it! I'd never read the play and had no real clue what I was in for, and it's weird, because I'm not too used to going to classic plays and not knowing what the ending's going to be, I'm always prepared somehow. Considering that the only other Chekhov I've ever read was Uncle Vanya which I found kind of bland, this was both more lighthearted and sadder than I'd expected. It reminded me a little of Tennessee Williams' plays/characters with the the dying of old (self-proclaimed, or not) aristocracy and nostalgia for the way things were. The ending was so sad, though, and Fiers almost made me cry because, well, basically whenever you have old-men and old-women characters doing anything it makes me want to cry.
The thing that drove me crazy was the gun, which -- I don't think this counts as a spoiler, right? So this dude shows off his gun in the first act and I'm like HEY. THE GUN IN THE FIRST ACT. THIS IS GOING TO END IN A MURDER/SUICIDE ISN'T IT. Because the gun! And it was a Chekhov play, and Chekhov's the guy who invented the gun in the first act rule, right? So I'm waiting and waiting and I spend half the play ON EDGE just WAITING for the moment, even though a random shooting really doesn't fit the atmosphere of anything else, and then just -- NOTHING HAPPENS. NO SHOOTING. The gun isn't even mentioned again.
...and then I looked it up and it turns out this is the only Checkov play where the gun's mentioned and not used in the end. WTF. I was looking forward to being so self-righteous about getting that right! I was ~mentally preparing. Ah well.
The production itself was well acted -- the costumes were beautiful, all cream-toned draping fabrics that looked so soft, and the actors were great except for Luba (Liora Rivlin UGH I HATE YOU AND YOUR FREAKY BABY VOICE). And oh, so many women! Like, FIVE (over a third of the cast), two of whom actually got monologues! It was so great, because -- as much as there is to complain about female representation in the movies, it's nothing compared to how bad it is in theater. Like, seriously. Especially since, I think, theater is an art that bases itself much more on the classics than TV/Film -- in film, newer is better, in theater, the opposite, and it's really hard for a modern play to work itself into the classic repertoire (let alone internationally). So what you get is the same old plays being produced over and over, and female roles there, the SUCK SO MUCH. When I was in high school I had to perform a monologue, and I remember the despairing search for something to perform. Because sure, there are a few "classic" female monologues, and they're the same ones girls do every year, and it's such an effort to find something new. For weeks and weeks I walked into every bookstore and library I ran across and a few theater archives, going through all of their play texts, skimming for female monologues. And every play has like, 3-4 monologues, and once every ten or twenty texts you'll find one that was given to a girl.
It might be more pronounced here because the only texts I could go through were plays that were either translated or local, which meant they were about 85% classic internationally acclaimed theater, 5% current day internationally acclaimed theater, and 10% Israeli theater, so there's not really much variety, but... it brings home the point.
All of which is to say, it was really great to see so many women have lines and even monologues in this play. Seeing that always makes me happy :-)
(A play in which I did not, for example, enjoy the women, was A View From the Bridge, which I saw I think a month ago, and enjoyed neither the production nor the text itself, which is weird because I saw a different production a few years ago and liked it. Dear locals, if you are considering going to a play these days, you can absolutely pass on AVFTB. /PSA.)
Man, there are so many plays I want to see right now, though. There are two (two!) different productions of Romeo and Juliet, which I have never seen performed, both of which look awesome. And there's The Caucasian Chalk Circle which I went to twice last time it was on, it was so good, and the new production's supposed to be good too, and there's an award-winning Moliere, and Sasha Damidov is playing Don Juan, and to somehow balance all the classics I also want to see the new play by Edna Mazia... this is already about 1000 shekels by now, LE SIGH /o\ And I'm worried they'll all go down by the time I can get tickets. Gah.
*
And tomorrow morning I will hopefully be able to catch Panic's new very steampunk \o/ music video (LOL Brendon ACTUALLY HAS a robot claw arm, I KNEW IT) before work. And I will have new fic to read on the train yay :D
ETA: LOL, I just read the headline Female Coach Turns High School Around and saw her name is Tina Wiggins and for a second thought Yahoo were for some reason writing a girl!Tim Riggins AU.
comments on Dreamwidth.
Anyone: Oh, hey, that's cool. Who is that?
Me: It's a cover from American Idol, and I am not going to apologize for that.
Conversation that actually happened:
Girl across from me: OH MY GOD is that DAVID COOK? If you put Always Be My Baby on I will CRY.
Indie Rocker Dude: You know he copied Chris Cornell's version, right? Chris does it better, but damn, that's a hard song to sing. *sings along to David's version perfectly*
Religious Dude: You should put David Archuleta on next.
...Just. LOL. Considering that AI isn't aired on any of the main channels here and wasn't really that popular, I am both heartened and impressed.
*
Fic rec: So I basically spent the entire weekend reading But Not This Song, and yeah, the verdict is definitely rec. It's Bandom, centering around Panic but full of plenty of others as supporting characters, 200k of really satisfying slavefic, the kind that felt really nostalgic to me in a well-written-old-school-fanfiction kind of way, the kind that I've seen people lamenting over recently, and I think anyone who's been craving that kind of fic will probably enjoy it a lot (despite the fact that it's not drowning in porn). There are boys-who-are-slaves and boys-who-used-to-be-slaveowners-who-are-now-slaves and boys-who-free-slaves and lots of boys who keep risking their lives for one another, even when they don't know each other well. There are boys pining and boys thinking they're unworthy of each other and some light jealousy and lots of boys cuddling for comfort. There are lots of daring rescues and a plot that keeps driving both the story and the relationships forward, and the politics never get, in my opinion, tedious, which is what I was afraid of. And it's long and well-written and so easy to just sink into, so that when I was done I had that really full but also slightly achy feeling you get when you finish a good long story or novel, of wanting to spend just a little more time in that universe. (There are some codas, actually, so yay for those.)
Also -- honestly, I put off reading this for so long just because I wanted to set aside the time to read 200k words in one go, but I probably would have read it a lot sooner if I'd known that this fic included a) BABYSITTER!BRENDON <33333, or close enough :D, and b) a scar-kissing scene. Guys, I cannot tell you how big my kink for scar-kissing scenes is *__*. You know, the ones that are all slow and intimate and detailed? SEE ALSO: me falling headfirst into TWW fic during season 2. Hello, Joshua and your war wounds.
The pairings listed in the main post are a little misleading -- the main pairing of the fic is permutations between Brendon/Spencer/Ryan/Jon, leading to OT4. I do think that even if you don't know these guys at all, the fact that the fic follows their first meeting and them gradually getting to know each other makes it easy enough to pick up either way :-)
*
I went to The Cherry Orchard tonight and really enjoyed it! I'd never read the play and had no real clue what I was in for, and it's weird, because I'm not too used to going to classic plays and not knowing what the ending's going to be, I'm always prepared somehow. Considering that the only other Chekhov I've ever read was Uncle Vanya which I found kind of bland, this was both more lighthearted and sadder than I'd expected. It reminded me a little of Tennessee Williams' plays/characters with the the dying of old (self-proclaimed, or not) aristocracy and nostalgia for the way things were. The ending was so sad, though, and Fiers almost made me cry because, well, basically whenever you have old-men and old-women characters doing anything it makes me want to cry.
The thing that drove me crazy was the gun, which -- I don't think this counts as a spoiler, right? So this dude shows off his gun in the first act and I'm like HEY. THE GUN IN THE FIRST ACT. THIS IS GOING TO END IN A MURDER/SUICIDE ISN'T IT. Because the gun! And it was a Chekhov play, and Chekhov's the guy who invented the gun in the first act rule, right? So I'm waiting and waiting and I spend half the play ON EDGE just WAITING for the moment, even though a random shooting really doesn't fit the atmosphere of anything else, and then just -- NOTHING HAPPENS. NO SHOOTING. The gun isn't even mentioned again.
...and then I looked it up and it turns out this is the only Checkov play where the gun's mentioned and not used in the end. WTF. I was looking forward to being so self-righteous about getting that right! I was ~mentally preparing. Ah well.
The production itself was well acted -- the costumes were beautiful, all cream-toned draping fabrics that looked so soft, and the actors were great except for Luba (Liora Rivlin UGH I HATE YOU AND YOUR FREAKY BABY VOICE). And oh, so many women! Like, FIVE (over a third of the cast), two of whom actually got monologues! It was so great, because -- as much as there is to complain about female representation in the movies, it's nothing compared to how bad it is in theater. Like, seriously. Especially since, I think, theater is an art that bases itself much more on the classics than TV/Film -- in film, newer is better, in theater, the opposite, and it's really hard for a modern play to work itself into the classic repertoire (let alone internationally). So what you get is the same old plays being produced over and over, and female roles there, the SUCK SO MUCH. When I was in high school I had to perform a monologue, and I remember the despairing search for something to perform. Because sure, there are a few "classic" female monologues, and they're the same ones girls do every year, and it's such an effort to find something new. For weeks and weeks I walked into every bookstore and library I ran across and a few theater archives, going through all of their play texts, skimming for female monologues. And every play has like, 3-4 monologues, and once every ten or twenty texts you'll find one that was given to a girl.
It might be more pronounced here because the only texts I could go through were plays that were either translated or local, which meant they were about 85% classic internationally acclaimed theater, 5% current day internationally acclaimed theater, and 10% Israeli theater, so there's not really much variety, but... it brings home the point.
All of which is to say, it was really great to see so many women have lines and even monologues in this play. Seeing that always makes me happy :-)
(A play in which I did not, for example, enjoy the women, was A View From the Bridge, which I saw I think a month ago, and enjoyed neither the production nor the text itself, which is weird because I saw a different production a few years ago and liked it. Dear locals, if you are considering going to a play these days, you can absolutely pass on AVFTB. /PSA.)
Man, there are so many plays I want to see right now, though. There are two (two!) different productions of Romeo and Juliet, which I have never seen performed, both of which look awesome. And there's The Caucasian Chalk Circle which I went to twice last time it was on, it was so good, and the new production's supposed to be good too, and there's an award-winning Moliere, and Sasha Damidov is playing Don Juan, and to somehow balance all the classics I also want to see the new play by Edna Mazia... this is already about 1000 shekels by now, LE SIGH /o\ And I'm worried they'll all go down by the time I can get tickets. Gah.
*
And tomorrow morning I will hopefully be able to catch Panic's new very steampunk \o/ music video (LOL Brendon ACTUALLY HAS a robot claw arm, I KNEW IT) before work. And I will have new fic to read on the train yay :D
ETA: LOL, I just read the headline Female Coach Turns High School Around and saw her name is Tina Wiggins and for a second thought Yahoo were for some reason writing a girl!Tim Riggins AU.
comments on Dreamwidth.