I'll wear the flowers through the sea
Today was spent almost entirely on the phone or on Zoom, which I suppose is normal for most people these days, but man, it makes me feel like squeegee water. Have some links.
1. I am gravely disappointed in the internet's inability to provide a clip of Lyda Roberti performing "It's Terrific (When I Get Hot)" from Million Dollar Legs (1932), if only because it's such a good illustration of the pre-Code spirit: you can do that on celluloid? Yes, Virginia, you can sing about asbestos pants in a skintight cut-out dress and an accent that sounds like the love child of Lobachevsky and Lili von Shtupp. If you want the full effect, start around 29:13 at the Internet Archive. If you want the full context, watch from the beginning; I can't promise it'll help. In any case, just about the last thing I was expecting to find when I went looking for Roberti was more than one cover of the song. I'm not complaining. The film it comes from is too weird not to be more widely known.
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
selkie: "The tomb of Marcus Venerius Secundio discovered at Porta Sarno with mummified human remains." Like everyone else in the article except, one assumes, the dead, I have no idea what he was doing out of a cinerary urn in the late first century CE, especially in a chamber with two normally cremated sets of remains. The latter was so nearly universal a Roman practice at the time, it feels like a person would have needed a strong anchor to a different tradition to contravene it. Because no one asked me, I'm throwing my hat into the ring for Etruscan: I know they are traditionally dated to have petered out as a civilization in the previous century, but there's a great indeterminate space between the assimilation of a culture and its actual demise; there's Oscan graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. The Etruscans practiced both cremation and inhumation, not uncommonly in the same tomb. I admit a sarcophagus instead of just a skeleton would make this argument a lot more convincing. Maybe he was Greek or just contrary. I still never expected to see pictures of a two-thousand-years-dead dude's hair. I look forward to reading more about his grave goods.
3.spatch in his thread on theater stuffs included a very nice picture of our chuppah.
I keep forgetting to mention that a card from my godchild arrived in the mail, weeks after they were actually at sleepaway camp. It was minimalist and delightful.
1. I am gravely disappointed in the internet's inability to provide a clip of Lyda Roberti performing "It's Terrific (When I Get Hot)" from Million Dollar Legs (1932), if only because it's such a good illustration of the pre-Code spirit: you can do that on celluloid? Yes, Virginia, you can sing about asbestos pants in a skintight cut-out dress and an accent that sounds like the love child of Lobachevsky and Lili von Shtupp. If you want the full effect, start around 29:13 at the Internet Archive. If you want the full context, watch from the beginning; I can't promise it'll help. In any case, just about the last thing I was expecting to find when I went looking for Roberti was more than one cover of the song. I'm not complaining. The film it comes from is too weird not to be more widely known.
2. Courtesy of
selkie: "The tomb of Marcus Venerius Secundio discovered at Porta Sarno with mummified human remains." Like everyone else in the article except, one assumes, the dead, I have no idea what he was doing out of a cinerary urn in the late first century CE, especially in a chamber with two normally cremated sets of remains. The latter was so nearly universal a Roman practice at the time, it feels like a person would have needed a strong anchor to a different tradition to contravene it. Because no one asked me, I'm throwing my hat into the ring for Etruscan: I know they are traditionally dated to have petered out as a civilization in the previous century, but there's a great indeterminate space between the assimilation of a culture and its actual demise; there's Oscan graffiti on the walls of Pompeii. The Etruscans practiced both cremation and inhumation, not uncommonly in the same tomb. I admit a sarcophagus instead of just a skeleton would make this argument a lot more convincing. Maybe he was Greek or just contrary. I still never expected to see pictures of a two-thousand-years-dead dude's hair. I look forward to reading more about his grave goods.3.
spatch in his thread on theater stuffs included a very nice picture of our chuppah.I keep forgetting to mention that a card from my godchild arrived in the mail, weeks after they were actually at sleepaway camp. It was minimalist and delightful.
no subject
Cool! It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the cinerary urns accompanying the interment. He doesn't have one of the nomina gentilica associated with Etruscan origins, but he started out as a slave, which means the name under which he was buried as a freedman really tells you the lineage of the man who manumitted him.
Funerary practices also strike me as particularly likely to stick around in the form of family tradition, even after the practitioners have forgotten the reason why.
I think a lot of rituals stick around even when the context is lost—it's a recurring theme in crypto-Jewish families, suddenly realizing the significance of the specially braided bread or the once-a-week candlelighting—but I agree that funerals carry extra weight: if nothing else, leave the world the right way.