I just got completely roasted by the rest of the chorus for saying that the only two movies I like Eddie Redmayne in were Les Mis and Jupiter Ascending
I am obsessed with fictional guys being really weird about each other. Hard at work in the plausible deniability mines. You know those pairings who would jerk each other off before they’d kiss
I know I said fictional guys but I want to be alone with the person who tagged this as mclennon. Like from the beatles
I think my favorite part of this post so far is the beatles fans in my notes 1. Acting like this is common knowledge & 2. Saying they got far weirder without elaborating. Alright
It also inspired the only good New York Post headline ever.
An evening for thanking theatre staff to be sure! (Every evening is an evening to be thanking theatre staff) the ushers, the house managers, security, custodial staff, box office, and so many more. We love you and none of this is possible without you. Please remember that next time you visit the theatre!
Chapters:
1/1
Fandom:
Doctor Faustus - Christopher Marlowe
Rating:
Mature
Warnings:
Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Relationships:
Faustus/Mephistophilis (Doctor Faustus - Marlowe), Faustus (Doctor Faustus - Marlowe)/Helen of Troy (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore)
Additional Tags:
Internalized Homophobia, Period-Typical Homophobia, Demon Sex, Codependency, Boring Academic Dinner Parties, Unhealthy Relationships, Sexy Flaying, Sexy Contract Renewal, Unconventional Writing Supports, Questionable Pastoral Care, Doomed Efforts to Pray Away the Gay, Doomed Efforts to Heterosexually Fuck Away the Gay, Easy to Spot Plot Twists, Religious Conflict, Religious Guilt, idk guys this thing got kinda weird I feel like I’m missing some warnings, Genderfluid Character, The Sex Isn’t Graphic But the Violence Is, (also the violence is sexier than the sex), Weird Relationship to Canon
Summary:
Faustus livens up a boring dinner party by summoning the spirit of Helen of Troy. It brings up some stuff for him.
Preview:
The candles in the room flicker as he rises imperiously from his seat; he raises a hand to motion silence, and all but one of them are suddenly extinguished. The room is filled with white wisps of smoke that give off, not the ordinary smell of soot and beeswax, but rather the sweet odors of myrrh and calamus, styrax and marjoram and, beneath it all, the intoxicating scent of roses. Above their heads drifts the sound of an invisible flute, a soft air in the Phrygian mode. Mephistopheles has spared no effort in setting a mood, Faustus thinks, with no small gratitude toward his obliging spirit—and then a moment later he has forgotten how to think. The dark, heavy air grows palpably warm and shimmers about them all; in the light of the single remaining candle, the trails of smoke swirl about their heads and gather in the center of the room, twisting and dancing about one another, bright and insubstantial as moonlight as they gradually take shape. A plume of smoke billows like the fold of a skirt, another like a glistening lock of hair, another like a graceful white arm—and then they dissolve into the radiant light cast by the seeming flesh-and-blood woman who stands before them all—who turns to Faustus then, and the rose-red curve of her smile, the piercing blue of her eyes, pulls the breath from his body and he stands helpless before his own enchantment.
Reblogging for the evening crowd!
Let’s do another reblog for the afternoon crowd because why not
unbelievably hilarious recced video on youtube. the weird af AI image. the fact that it’s supposed to be some kind of music showdown but the x makes it look like a 1h and 30 mins long shippy AMV. vivaldi’s longing look to paganini’s melancholic playing. the random flames of hell and red outfits. someone fed epic rap battles of history vivaldi vs paganin to an AI generator and didn’t pause for a second thinking about what they’d done.
Both extremes of the “is the Federation imperialist?” discussion get it wrong and (like far too many things in fandom) the whole discussion is needlessly polarized toward going for a hard yes or no when it is way more interesting to recognize there are elements of both interpretations going on, especially given that we are talking about an almost 60-yro franchise that has had a lot of different people working on it over the years to tell many different kinds of stories.
Like I think it’s ridiculous to act like (to quote one bad post from a few years ago by a person I think is no longer active in the fandom) “the Federation is EVIL EVIL EVIL,” or that it is an empire in the way the Cardassians/Klingons/Romulans/Dominion are, even in more critical takes on it like DS9. I think a lot of people doing that are just looking for the most radical left take they can make, or are not good at media analysis and not recognizing that you’re not supposed to take at face value what stalwart defenders of those autocratic regimes like Garak, Quark, etc. say about the Federation but instead consider there might be something a little self serving in their responses? (Then again, people are terrible at doing that with propaganda by irl authoritarian regimes so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.)
But that’s precisely because it misses the point of what DS9 and some other shows that have played in this idea sandbox are actually saying, which is that even a lot of seemingly benign, “normal” diplomacy from democracies can have an imperialist bent, in intention or effect. Yes, the Federation has declined membership before, but they told Sisko to get Bajor to join by any means necessary. Yeah, it literally reflects an org like the UN or EU more than any single country or their present or historical empires… but that’s focusing excessively I think on how it would work in a Watsonian way when the point here is the Doylist conversation: what real world politics it’s commenting on and what it’s trying to say about them, something Trek has focused on heavily from the beginning. Star Trek has generally always been a commentary on American politics and, in its relation to other powers in the galaxy, American empire and its foreign relations. You can see this in how it’s shifted as the political situation has changed: TOS for instance being a very optimistic 60s approach to a lot of that, ENT taking a lot of inspiration from post-9/11 politics, etc.
I think the whole point of Star Trek is that it gets you to ask hard questions like: where is the line between “exploring” the galaxy and imperializing it? Even Starfleet’s more exploratory missions often involve them meddling in local politics more than their supposed mission statement might expect. Is some of that to be expected when you end up being personally invested in the people in a particular place and their situation? To what extent is following a strict Prime Directive, despite being a supposed guard against imperialism, not reflective of its own somewhat imperialistic “noble savage” paternalism? Etc. etc. but I think the point of especially post-Cold-War Trek and especially DS9 is to get people to recognize that the lines for these are often fuzzy, and the situations involved are often complicated and not easily solved by platitudes. It’s easy to say that the Federation (and by extension, the U.S. or whatever Western imperial power you want to insert in here) shouldn’t intervene in another planet’s affairs until you see that planet’s “culture” used to justify human(oid) rights violations that the targeted section of their population desperately wants someone to help with, and doesn’t care who it is. And then conversely, you can say the Federation (and again, insert whichever real country you want here) should always intervene in humanoid rights crises… until you see it go belly-up from them intervening preemptively, with a lack of understanding of the particular political situation or culture or whatever in a way that just makes it all so much worse. With the beauty of science fiction where we can abstract it from real-world locations and all the baggage that come with them, so instead of calling the former case “Kosovo” and the latter case “Iraq,” we can assign them sci-fi alien names.
Anyway, I guess my point is that I think that the desire to go for a hard “yes” or “no” on some of these questions both flattens the discussion (I’ve seen this in action on Tumblr) and I think also kind of misses the point of what the show is trying to say.
Also, sorry I took forever to answer this - I think it was for an unpopular opinion meme or something? - but I put it in my drafts because I wanted to take time to lay out my thoughts and then forgot it was there, only saw because I looked in my drafts today!
Also at that conference was the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. During the next two days the three of us made two discoveries about one another.
The first was that each of us had attacked at least one of the others in print. I had dissed Eco’s book. Umberto had criticized Mario for being too right-wing. Mario had criticized me for being too left-wing.
The second discovery was that we all got on like a house on fire.
It was Umberto who suggested we should now call ourselves The Three Musketeers. (This, remember, was the time of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras.) I remember asking, “Why Musketeers? Why not, for example, The Three Stooges?”
“No,” Umberto insisted. “It has to be Musketeers, because first we were enemies and now we are friends.”
May I always have the happy grace of Umberto Eco introducting himself to Selman Rushdie after Rushdie called him bullshit in a book review.
Totally worth clicking through to Salman Rushdie’s Substack to read the whole thing. (The last sentence is a bit of an “oof” kind of punch, especially considering the events of the next year in Rushdie’s life.)
(Also depressing to realize that the last update in that Substack was less than a week before the nearly successful attempt on his life. Note to self: I should remember to buy a copy of Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.)
• "You are a benevolent angel of Richardbanging." – Aris Merquoni • "you are the mistress of depraved glittering asshole royalty" –fiftysevenacademics
lea | 45 | midwestern u.s. | she, her
I don't follow people under 18; I try to tag for common triggers and adultish content. (You can't make me use the citrus scale though.)
And with the shoutyng, whan the song was do That foules maden at here flyght awey, I wok, and othere bokes tok me to, To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey. I hope, ywis, to rede so som day That I shal mete some thyng for to fare The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare. – Geoffrey Chaucer, The Parlement of Fowles
reblogged from rendnotmyheart
