Open up your mouth, but the melody is broken
Only a day or two late, I saw a classic new moon in the old moon's arms as I walked around the neighborhood just after sunset, the reflection-white crescent and its charcoal-colored cradle like an eclipse in monochrome. The sky was its usual clear apple-blue in the east and then sank. I am not sure I have ever had this much difficulty with the early dark between the clocks falling back and the solstice. I am awake most of the days and there still doesn't seem to be any light in them.
I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.
Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college.
I really appreciateasakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.
I slept last night. I would like not to have to record it as a milestone. It feels a little unnecessarily on the nose that I was woken out of some complex dream by a phone call from a doctor's office. Most of them lately have some unsurprising insecurity in them: slow-motion cataclysm, as if it makes much difference from being awake. Last night, something about a house with tide-lines on its walls, as if it regularly flooded to the beams.
Describing the 1978 BBC As You Like It to
spatch made me realize how few of Shakespeare's comedies I have actually seen when compared with the tragedies, the late romances, the history or the problem plays. A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night would be the predictable exceptions in that I am verging on more productions of either than I can count without thinking about it, but I am three Winter's Tales to zero Comedies of Errors. I've seen Timon of Athens and not All's Well That Ends Well. One Richard II and neither of the Two Gentlemen of Verona. It begins to feel accidental that I caught The Merry Wives of Windsor in college. I really appreciate
asakiyume sending me Hen Ogledd's "Scales Will Fall" (2025) and ashlyme alerting me to the trans-Neptunian existence of the sednoid Ammonite.
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asjdf;ldjsk ETA: i just realized this whole conversation was kicked off by describing an As You Like It. I can read normally, I'm just extremely jetlagged
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I haven't slept, it's fine!
I would have done a hell of a lot more with the gender of it all than the BBC did in 1978, but I very much enjoyed its Rosalind (Helen Mirren), Celia (Angharad Rees), Oliver (Clive Francis), and Jaques (Richard Pasco) on the levels of both characters and performances. I feel for the director who wanted to shoot the production over three-quarters of a year from winter into summer for the psychotropic scenery of the thing and could only get the filming dates for May, which at least on the forested grounds of Glamis Castle looked intermittently cold. I had not actually read the play in ages and remembered the general lineaments without a lot of the timing and possibly due to sleep deprivation as well as extra-diegetic factors was inappropriately entertained by the land speed record of Oliver and Celia's courtship, to the point of Orlando actually checking in that it makes any damn sense which is not a level of reality most characters in Shakespeare are tuned in to. A lot of the comic pastoral counterpoint in this version did not particularly work for me and if you are going to have literal Hymen manifest as the deus ex silva, the numinous quotient needs to be a lot higher than a pretty dude in a chlamys. I have not seen another version unless you count the fifteen minutes or so of Theatre@First in 2011. Do you have recommendations and/or opinions?
[edit] Extra-diegetic factors: earlier this month I finished the first series of the 1975 Poldark which features Angharad Rees and Clive Francis and in the intervening weeks watched both the one available episode of the 1968 BBC Middlemarch and the complete serial of the 1971 BBC Sense and Sensibility which taken all together made it clear that Francis' brand in this era of television was what I described to
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I've never seen anything that did what I wanted with the gender of it all but I also have not yet exhausted the possibility of my little hoard of Rosalinds gathered as a bonus after receiving this Festivid a few years back; I've only watched the Melbourne as of yet, which was also not as much Gender as I wanted but had an incredibly funny Arden-as-rock-band-Lothlorien energy, but I have high hopes for several of them and I would be glad to share the bounty for any that strike interest. (Unfortunately the RSC 2013, from whence comes the incredible shot of Rosalind and Orlando sharing a cigarette, does not appear to be recorded in full ANYWHERE.)
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I KNEW THEY WERE BOTH IN IT BUT HAD NOT PROPERLY UNDERSTOOD IT WAS AS THE FUNNIEST POSSIBLE PAIRING
(
my little hoard of Rosalinds gathered as a bonus after receiving this Festivid a few years back
That vid is amazing.
(Unfortunately the RSC 2013, from whence comes the incredible shot of Rosalind and Orlando sharing a cigarette, does not appear to be recorded in full ANYWHERE.)
What the hell! It must exist. I've seen recordings of theirs from years earlier. I wonder if it's a situation like the National Theatre's The Habit of Art or Collaborators where I actually wrote in 2010 and 2011 to ask if it would be possible to purchase DVDs of the relevant broadcasts and was told not, among other reasons because of prohibitive rights agreements. (At the time I was given encouragement that it might become possible in future given more interest than just mine, but instead they came up with National Theatre at Home. I don't know if that means they worked out the rights issues or if they differ sufficiently between discs and streaming that the question became irrelevant. I still want a DVD.) Please do share any other productions you manage to get hold of. As noted below to
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interjecting just to say: correction:
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That's a relief!