So be easy and free when you're drinking with me

[sovay]

I woke this morning and the light looked like autumn for the first time all summer. selkie has reminded me that it is nearly Storrow Drive truck season. The air conditioner is off for the first time in weeks.

I dreamed of watching a movie or miniseries starring Alex Jennings as a nineteenth-century schoolteacher or clergyman who accidentally involves himself in a feud with the local fairies and gets the worst of it until it becomes first creepingly and then unavoidably clear that he is himself a changeling and as terrifyingly inhuman as any of his tormentors under the right conditions, about which he is fairly certain he should feel worse. In the meantime he goes on looking like a tallish, vague-ish middle-aged man with one of those awkward, slightly too open faces, so that every social bobble or personal remark comes up like a slap; he is easy to like and hard to take seriously and he turned one of his opponents' bones to oak-wood without thinking twice. On waking I feel my brain just ripped off Susanna Clarke and/or Gemma Files, but in the dream I was incredibly impressed with the production design for Fairy and its denizens because it was right out of Sylvia Townsend Warner or Richard Dadd, everything matter-of-fact and just a half-tone off from ordinary human strangeness. You could never tell that people were doing magic from the color of the air or music that wasn't part of the score, you could just see what it was when it was done.

poliphilo has done some great song-sleuthing. Make sure to check out the footnote.

Comments

[moon_custafer]

I wish we could film our dreams.

On a more ridiculous note, Andrew dreamt a trailer for a December release starring Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Christina Ricci, Christopher Lloyd, Chris Pine and Chris Pratt; the tagline for which was “DECEMBER 2019 – CHRISSES MASS.”
The actual title was Sex Zombies of the Swiss Alps. The only non-Chris in the cast was Samuel L. Jackson as “The Yelling Man” (“I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THESE @#$%! NUDE ZOMBIES!!”)

[sovay]

I wish we could film our dreams.

I am fascinated by the number of mine that come with frame-stories: books or movies or TV. I do just dream things that happen, but there's a lot of meta-narrative in the rest of them.

If I could have filmed this one, I could have found out how it turned out. I don't know the ending because I was woken by a phone call and when I got back to sleep, I had nightmares about my phone dying in a way that lost me stories in progress and cut me off from contact with people and in no way resembled the workings of my actual flip phone.

The actual title was Sex Zombies of the Swiss Alps. The only non-Chris in the cast was Samuel L. Jackson as “The Yelling Man” (“I HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THESE @#$%! NUDE ZOMBIES!!”)

That's rather magnificent.

[moon_custafer]

Also, it played much less spookily, but someone once did a Robin of Sherwood that gave Friar Tuck a backstory in which he was the result of his nominally-Christian father praying to the Old Gods of the Forest for himself and his wife to finally have a child, and Tuck being pretty much the last person to figure out he belongs to both teams.

[sovay]

a Robin of Sherwood that gave Friar Tuck a backstory in which he was the result of his nominally-Christian father praying to the Old Gods of the Forest for himself and his wife to finally have a child, and Tuck being pretty much the last person to figure out he belongs to both teams.

Whoa.

I have never been able to tell if that show was any good as a version of Robin Hood, but it has always sounded very definitely like something that the pagan fantasy boom of the '80's would produce.

[nineweaving]

...in the dream I was incredibly impressed with the production design for Fairy and its denizens because it was right out of Sylvia Townsend Warner or Richard Dadd, everything matter-of-fact and just a half-tone off from ordinary human strangeness.

I long to see this film! Your subconscious is getting to be my favorite auteur.

Nine

[sovay]

I long to see this film! Your subconscious is getting to be my favorite auteur.

I am afraid that the only way to show people what I dream is to write it into stories, which at the moment feels like it would require a near-infinite amount of not being exhausted and stressed. Or a production company that could afford Alex Jennings.

[rydra_wong]

Thank you for describing it for us anyway! Alex Jennings is such perfect casting here, in particular.

[sovay]

Thank you for describing it for us anyway! Alex Jennings is such perfect casting here, in particular.

You're very welcome! I can take no conscious credit for his presence, but I'm so happy he or his relevant counterpart took the job.

[rydra_wong]

Seconded! I am interested in your ideas and wish to subscribe to your brain-cable.

[thisbluespirit]

Alex Jennings as a nineteenth-century schoolteacher or clergyman who accidentally involves himself in a feud with the local fairies and gets the worst of it until it becomes first creepingly and then unavoidably clear that he is himself a changeling and as terrifyingly inhuman as any of his tormentors under the right conditions

Well, that sounds like fun and very apt casting!

[sovay]

Well, that sounds like fun and very apt casting!

I really enjoyed it! I wish I hadn't been woken before it ended, but I think this is a common failure mode of dream-films.

[lilysea]

I dreamed of watching a movie or miniseries starring Alex Jennings as a nineteenth-century schoolteacher or clergyman who accidentally involves himself in a feud with the local fairies and gets the worst of it until it becomes first creepingly and then unavoidably clear that he is himself a changeling and as terrifyingly inhuman as any of his tormentors under the right conditions

I mis-read this as Alex Kingston, and thought "I would TOTALLY watch that!"

[sovay]

I mis-read this as Alex Kingston, and thought "I would TOTALLY watch that!"

That would be very different, but I would also watch it!

[tree_and_leaf]

That sounds like a mashup of Lovecraft and Buchan's "Witch Wood," which I would watch the hell out of.

[sovay]

That sounds like a mashup of Lovecraft and Buchan's "Witch Wood," which I would watch the hell out of.

So I should read Witch Wood, is what I'm getting out of this?

[tree_and_leaf]

Yes! I think it's hands down Buchan's best book, although it might require consultation of the glossary, as a fair bit of the dialogue is in Scots.

[asakiyume]

The schoolteacher/clergyman himself being a changeling is an excellent touch, sure to add juicy complications and possibilities. Nice touch, Sovay's Unconscious!

everything matter-of-fact and just a half-tone off from ordinary human strangeness. --NICE

[sovay]

The schoolteacher/clergyman himself being a changeling is an excellent touch, sure to add juicy complications and possibilities. Nice touch, Sovay's Unconscious!

I just wish I could get my unconscious to write the rest of the book . . .

[selkie]

I slept five hours, missed my bus stop again, and had to walk from the Russian embassy. It is definitely my dreams' fault this time. It is going to be autumn.

*borrows your polydactyl cat for a work nap*

[sovay]

*borrows your polydactyl cat for a work nap*

My support panther is your support panther.

[selkie]

SUPPORT PANTHER. (I have never seen a cat like the pictures of Autolycus. He's superb.)

[selidor]

Someone should really give you charge of a large film budget. I went on a Game of Thrones locations tour last Saturday (a keen friend was visiting), and I was intrigued to learn that it wasn't so much the director, as I'd thought, but primarily the locations director who sets the look of a film. They get presented with photos free of actual geographic information, and pick according to their mental image of visualizing the script.

Perhaps oak-boned people go and live with the dryads.

[ethelmay]

Is turning bones into wood a known folk-tale trope?

[sovay]

Is turning bones into wood a known folk-tale trope?

Not so far as I know. I think my brain extrapolated from the threat made by the Fairy Queen in "Tam Lin," that she would have taken out his fine grey eyes and put in "twa een o tree," or replaced his heart of flesh with a heart of stone.

[sovay]

I was intrigued to learn that it wasn't so much the director, as I'd thought, but primarily the locations director who sets the look of a film. They get presented with photos free of actual geographic information, and pick according to their mental image of visualizing the script.

I didn't know! That's wonderful.

I would love a large film budget. I would try not to screw it up.

Perhaps oak-boned people go and live with the dryads.

Okay, can I request a poem out of that?

[ethelmay]

[Make Love Not] War with the Oaks?