sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2021-04-17 01:54 am

I was trying so hard to be cool

With the brief exception of my father's birthday observed, this entire week has been medical every night and twice on Sundays. Actually, one day we had three appointments, only two of which were planned. Three out of four occupants of the household are involved in this mishegos and if anything happens to [personal profile] spatch, I may just deliquesce. Have some links.

1. I love this entire series of vids for Singin' in the Rain (1952), all set to covers by Postmodern Jukebox, but I am predictably fondest of the Cosmo-centric OT3 "Umbrella." The wall flip is perfectly timed.

2. I can't remember where in print I ran across this word to recognize it, but it remains intensely relatable.

3. I know the Ever Given is decades behind us in twenty-four-hour news time, but I didn't know about the Great Bitter Lake Association's 1968 Olympics.

4. I just really enjoy seeing the internet stan Conrad Veidt.

5. Πλούτων: the rich one, the wealthy, one of the euphemistic names of Hades in whose house of black earth minerals and metals lie like coins on the eyes of the dead and the seeds of the reaper's harvest reach for the light. The Deadlands has passed $15K in funding and we may now share with you some of the treasures of its unseen country, from new reward tiers and regular necromancy to copy editing and candles and more besides. The deeper you dig, the more you find. And there's always further down to go.

(I tiredly mistyped Deadlands as Deadlads and the ensuing chain of thought ended naturally in The Invention of Love.)

Of the recently acquired WWI fiction I have been reading, I loved A.D. Gristwood's bleakly modernist The Somme also including The Coward (1927) and would like to write about it sometime when my critical faculties return from the doctor's. W.F. Morris' Behind the Lines (1930) is more of an adventure novel and I feel consequently more equivocal toward it, but I have to admit it is not the book's fault that at a tense moment when the hero and his companion in the scrounging shadow-life of no man's land, trapped in a deliberately collapsed dug-out, have to fire their rifles up the chimney in order to unblock it for air, all I could think was "Never blaspheme the aspidistra. It's very unlucky."
niqaeli: cat with arizona flag in the background (Default)

[personal profile] niqaeli 2021-04-18 01:53 am (UTC)(link)

I'm not even disagreeing, but is your elsenet argument accessible to me?

There were multiple places I flailed at folks, but the easily linked to one is here on Twitter. I didn't really expand on the thesis much there, though. To explicate slightly further: so, I mean, the Tom Holland lip sync battle takes the wholesomeness of Singin' in the Rain and then goes left at Albuequerque and straight into queer dirty dance routine! Which is AMAZING, and I love it. By contrast, Postmodern Jukebox took Rihanna's Umbrella and made it Ye Olde Timey and Wholesome As Fuck, with integrated tap routine, with Singin' in the Rain in mind. And the vid then takes that wholesome adorableness and goes straight for Cosmo-the-dorkface and the OT3 few can deny.

I dunno, it's just that they're two opposite and yet also apposite aspect of queerness, two sides of one coin as it were; I am equally delighted to see each side being appreciated.

Singin' in the Rain was the first movie I ever saw. In hindsight, it seems probable that Cosmo was one of the ways I learned to be human.

I don't actually know what the first movie I ever saw actually was, to be honest, but--Singin' in the Rain was one of my grandmother's absolute favourite movies. I saw it any time she caught it on TV; I honestly didn't retain a lot of the plot, so young, and only came to appreciate all of the actual relationships and story as an adult, but the imagery and music are rather burned into my mind!

Edited 2021-04-18 01:54 (UTC)