bironic

Title: She Walks In Beauty
Fandom: Let the Right One In
Pairing: Eli/Oskar
Music: by Sissel Kyrkjebø and Nicholas Dodd, adapted from the poem by Lord Byron
Length: 2:07
Summary: All that's best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Content notes: Blood, brief gruesome injury, underage relationship.
Thanks: To anoel for cheering me on on Twitter, even though she didn't know this was the vid I was struggling with.
Physical notes: I don't think any.
A/N: A treat for quizkwatsh for festivids 2016-2017. I'm sorry this turned out more Eli/Oskar than just Eli. Originally posted here.

This vid took four or five tries to make, including a couple of afternoons where I was ready to throw the whole thing out the window. Despite that, and even though I hadn't expected the middle sequences to feature so much linear narrative, I'm glad it finally came together; I'd been wanting to set this source to this song for a while and to try to play up the haunting quality of the refrain, the mix of horror and allure bundled together in Eli's character. I wonder if it worked for people, since the original post didn't get much feedback.

Personal favorite parts are the opening clip, Oskar making up his mind and hugging/accepting his new vampire friend as the music swells, and the cute "grr"s at the end. I had hoped to make that arm-stroking clip quite long, overlaid on the attacks, but I couldn't figure out how to do it the way I envisioned. Oh, well.

In other news, I thought this vid had "bironic" written all over it, but no one guessed me for it at the guessing post. Or rather, no one took a guess at all for it. Maybe because few people watched it? IDK. Stealth achievement unlocked?

( eli )

Very busy lately, preparing for Impending Life Change and taking care of miscellany. Apologies to people I was supposed to beta for over the last few weeks, and to people who are looking for betas now. I hope I'll have time for it again if/when things start to settle down, but until then, please don't take it personally if I don't come by to read your posts.

Gah, and writing, forget it. I've already flaked out on two of four 'fests. This weekend is supposed to be for writing Remix. I can't figure out what to do. My assignment is tough this year. *scrunchy face*

On to more serious things. Last Saturday, my mom, my sister and I drove down near Philadelphia to visit my 90-year-old great-aunt, my mom's aunt, who's been ill, but is recovering, since falling and puncturing a lung (and subsequently developing a strep infection) a few weeks ago. We had to suit up to go into her room: gowns, gloves, masks. She has a trach tube and is on a ventilator, and she can't speak although she can move her lips, and her are wrists restrained so she doesn't pull out the tube, so she mostly lies there and looks uncomfortable; that was difficult to watch and imagine what she's going through; but her face just lit up when she eventually recognized us. Even if she doesn't remember we were there, she was happy that morning.

The Romantic scholar, slash writer and icon maker Atara S---- (astarte59) passed away one week ago yesterday. Although I knew she was ill with Multiple Sclerosis, she was young still, and I had no idea she was so sick; she was blogging with her usual enthusiasm just the week before. It's terribly sad news. Her essays on the Byronic hero helped solidify my thesis topic at school, and her other essays on, say, Picard/Q slash were just plain fun reads (even if they ran just a little too far with the argument sometimes). I have her book on the Byronic hero in film, fiction and television, which is another fun and interesting read. She was a House fan, too, and posted sometimes in the meta comms. ... We corresponded for a little while a year or two ago, and I was supposed to write her an email-letter about my academic path and how she'd played such an integral part in it. I never got around to it. I wish I had; she should have known about it. Now, I think the best I can do is tell all of you.

All is not grief in the land, however. For instance, there are still minor celebrities to ogle. Case in point: a recently posted black-and-white portrait photograph of Joe Flanigan, care of sheafrotherdon. I keep going back to study it some more. He's not the most immediately attractive of men, at least not for me, but the more I look, the more I ... want to keep looking. At the asymmetry of so much of his face—under his eyes, beside the base of his nose, his eyebrows and the muscles above and between them, his nostrils, his nose itself, the crease in his lower lip, the curve of his five o'clock shadow, his hair. At his narrow shoulders (so obvious in the zip-up fleece Sheppard wears, yet often concealed by his bulky military gear, biceps and weapons). At his eyes, of course, which, as many people over at that post have pointed out, gaze at you with far more startling, haunting presence than most or all of the other people included in the photographer's online gallery. Perhaps it's attributable to JF being an actor, able to expertly school his features so that even a neutral expression is compelling. Because it isn't "neutral." Can that expression be captured in a single emotion or phrase? What would you call it?

There are some fics I've managed to read over the past week or two, but I can't remember them right now. I'll come back at some point to rec 'em.

The BBC miniseries "Byron" that aired a couple of years ago in England has (finally) arrived here, which is exciting, even if it's on BBC America, which Basic Cable doesn't carry; it's only a matter of time before PBS picks it up. Here is one of my favorite passages from Alessandra Stanley's review in the NYTimes today:

"Byron" begins in 1811 when the young British aristocrat (Jonny Lee Miller) is on a seigneurial sex tour of the Mediterranean, sprawled next to his tent caressing a half-naked Greek boy as his manservant and companions discreetly avert their eyes. "I should not believe what they say then, that in your land true pleasure is forbidden, only women are allowed?" a sultanlike Ottoman governor of Athens asks his foreign visitor over tea. "Customs vary," Byron replies.

Later on in a list of latter-day Byronic icons Stanley mentions that John de Lancie based Q in part on Byron. I didn't know he or the screenwriters did that consciously, even though you can easily see the poet's influence on the character: arrogant, subversive, seductive, omnipotent, ambiguous, effeminate, willful, etc. He looks the part too, with his pale skin, dark curly hair and sinuous movements.

I remember reading all about The Byronic Q in some articles of Atara Stein's (one of which focuses on Picard/Q slashiness) back in the day, and I hear she has a section on him in her book, The Byronic Hero in Film, Fiction and Television, which wasn't out when I wrote my paper at school but is available now. I ordered it from Amazon or e-Bay a couple of days ago after I remembered that it had a publication date in late 2004. Found it for pretty cheap, too. I also picked out about 6 or 7 other books during the week, mostly texts I used at school, biographies about Byron and histories of the vampire in literature and other such stuff. Because nothing says Productivity like glutting yourself on literary criticism purchases. Now I can pencil the margins to my heart's content without worrying about library reprimands or late fees.

Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers is next on the wish list, but that's for another project entirely. It's going to have to wait anyway because I've gotten so much this week and I have trouble spending money all at once when I don't have a budget. Plus synn and chalcopyrite and I are spending the day in the city tomorrow inclusive of a ballet matinee, two meals and train fare. Totally worth it to see David Hallberg on stage again.

P.S. Go listen to Steven Lynch's Halloween song if you haven't heard it yet.

Conversation just now with my cubicle neighbor:

J: So this friend of mine found a stray cat the other day and fed it. And it kept coming back. Long story short, my friend has a new cat.
Me: Funny.
J: You would totally love this guy, too. He was a high school and culinary school dropout but he's read more books than anyone I know. His apartment's got books everywhere. Guess what he named his cat.
Me: Something literary?
J: Yeah. It's some obscure poet. Or maybe not a poet. Someone obscure.
Me [thinking of possible obscure maybe-not-poets]: Um, dunno. What?
J: Lord Byron.
Me: YOUR FRIEND NAMED HIS CAT LORD BYRON?
Half the office: Turns around.
Me: Lord Byron is one of the most famous poets ever.
J: Oh. Cool.

* * *

Operation: Resensitize chugs along.

I listened to BBC World News on WNYE on the way to work again today, and was struck as always by how much more aware the rest of the world is about -- well, the rest of the world, and how intelligent and incisive the interviews and commentary are, and how much time the program allows for measured discussion of the issues on hand. And I mean "measured" in two senses: balanced, usually with one voice in support of and another against a topic, such as last week's talk about the benefits and detriments of supplying food aid directly to starving nations as opposed to sending money, or this morning's conversation about the announcement that the Nobel Peace Prize has gone to an agency that may or may not be setting the stage for a nuclear disaster; and calm, with an articulate anchor (do they call them anchors in England?) or reporter taking his or her time to explain the situation, its context, its history and possible consequences. I swear a person will learn more "macro news," and understand it better, from an hour of BBC World than from 24 hours of CNN or CBS News. I wonder how NPR's or PRI's straight-news programs compare.

In a wholly different kind of news, an interesting photo graced the Yahoo! home page in the Buzz Log box this morning. ( The photo. )

...which is doubly remarkable because the related searches didn't mention homosexuality, only the stars themselves -- and it got me wondering whether there are closet slashers working behind the scenes. Surely anyone who knows stuff about either actor has seen this shot before (it's dated 2003 from WireImage), but I hadn't, and found it especially intriguing after having read an essay off metafandom last week by thevixenne and rotpunkt on why women enjoy slash, focusing on the Viggo Mortensen/Sean Bean pairing and citing the former's penchant for kissing his male co-stars on the lips and posing with them in suggestive positions. For those of you who are curious: "You're asking for it, Mortensen..."

(Oddly enough, girlyboy Bloom was in my dream last night, which again involved Lestat [I don't understand it either]; this time we went to see the real show -- row A 101, but shortly into the performance we realized the seats were in the second orchestra section, not the first -- and the cast included Mr. Bloom and an actor named Paul A---* who could have stood in for Robert Sean Leonard in any of his Pert Plus-and-glasses roles. The entire audience cheered when one of the [male] vampires started kissing another [male] vampire. Also the few rows to our left were kept empty for the actors & actresses to use when they weren't onstage, and various members of the audience kept coming over to talk to them. That's as close to Orlando Bloom as I ever need to be.

*I recognized his name at the time, as well as when I woke up, and couldn't place him, and discovered when I looked him up that he's not an actor but one of our clients. This is what things have come to.)

Saw my mother and her S.O. last night. No boat this time: We played a few games of pool in their poor decrepit Moose Club (soon to be fixed up, he promises), during which I found out exactly how much I've forgotten since taking that billiards P.E. class in college and playing at Jillian's every few weeks, but redeemed myself when Wheel of Fortune came on the bar TV.

The S.O. is growing on me. Maybe he was drunk and depressed the first few times I met him -- well, no question about the drunk --

     "A last word, Mr. Darnay: you think I am drunk?"
     "I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton."
     "Think? You know I have been drinking."
     "Since I must say so, I know it."

-- which made him rather boring, hence my sister's ready adoption of the nickname Captain Cardboard -- or maybe I've gotten used to his different brand of sarcasm, or maybe we just needed time to warm to each other, but these last few months he's been funny and quietly generous and eager to offer help and advice where possible, which makes it hard to continue disliking him. He still makes fun of me for things like not always wanting to drink when we go out, though, which I find more annoying than endearing.

This week's Media In Review:

• ( Serenity. )


• ( Boston Legal. )

In closing, it's nice to have a television in the kitchen here so I can sneak bits of DS9 during lunch when everyone else isn't watching Jerry Springer or Mad About You. Am still such a dork.