I finished "Fevre Dream" yesterday. As I read it, I kept getting flashbacks to the "Beauty and the Beast" episodes that George R.R. Martin wrote. Flowery, lavish prose, even bedecked - as it often was - with garlands of feces and festoons of blood. It was FANCY feces and blood.

When I finished, I flipped to copyright page. "Fevre Dream" was written in 1982 -- what I read was a reprint. This is YOUNG Martin writing. That makes SO MUCH SENSE. "Saga of Fire and Ice" is far more mature. And totally has awesomely more awesome women.

Not that I've ever, myself, written anything BETTER than "Fevre Dream." Or as good as. Point is, Martin has. So I don't have to be disappointed, really. Just fascinated. And it WAS a good book. Hurrah.

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Cool interview with Amal El-Mohtar here:

http://charles-tan.blogspot.com/2009/12/interview-amal-el-mohtar.html

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Is that crazy squirrel eating STREET SALT???

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This week is mad. Socializing practically every night. Balancing on knife's edge of paycheck. Enough of this nonsense! I'm giving up people for the New Year! Or, um. You know. As much as possible. Out of LOVE, friends. Love.

And thrift.

And concern for my mental health.

Monday, I start revising the Big Bah-Ha.

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Oh, I'm in a solo show. Just wrote my piece on train this morning. It's about bunnies. And how I'm scared of them. Sort of.

And I'm reviewing TWO shows this month FOR MONEY. A children's play called LAST OF THE DRAGONS and a... not-children's play called KINK.

Ha!

***

Other than that, I'm boring today. Go amuse yourselves.

Fiona Apple photographed by Terry Richardson.

by Bryan Sheffield

by iloki on Flickr

Our "Room With a View" Feud (view COMMENTS section) continues nicely, with Mr. bigbadwolfboy throwing in his grimy and verdigris-riddled cents, bless his black heart.

bigbadwolfboy is new to LiveJournal. Let us welcome him. He is a grand friend, one of the pillar members of our erstwhile Chicago Writers Coven, and a writer who will make you wet your pants. Whether in terror or fits of hysteria, I cannot say. Both, usually.

***

Today I walked through a big, beautiful gust of wind. It shook the snow from the treetops and rooftops and across the street and onto me. It made me grin with all my frozen face.

I am reading George R.R. Martin's FEVRE DREAMS. It is a good book. A good vampire book. Kind of a sausage fest (to use the vulgar term), but I expect I shall ignore that this time. What I like about it is the river journey. I have recently listened to Huckleberry Finn, and Bujold's Sharing Knife tetralogy is near and dear to my heart. The writing is very strong, of course, and lavish. And the details! About how bricks in a certain quarter were made by mud and crushed oyster shells - such things make me want to bounce a little as I read them. The bad guys are Very Bad (typical vampiric megalomaniacs) and the good guys are compellingly ambiguous. It will not be my favorite book by this author, or in my top fifty of favorite books ever, but it might be in my top five vampire books. "Sunshine" by Robin McKinley, of course, keeps the blue ribbon for that genre. And Kim Newman's "Anno Dracula" runs a close second.

I am also beta-reading Cat Valente's DEATHLESS. I shall have to summon all elegance and articulation merely to relay coherently how passionately I am enjoying it, how it is my favorite thus far of her writings (I have not, admittedly, read as much as I probably should. But that will be remedied over the years, I hope.), and how glad I am that I have chapters and chapters and chapters yet to go.

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Also, I have watched the first three episodes of CRANFORD. (YAY NETFLIX!!!)

Also, at our Marilyn Monroe Festival yesterday, I saw ALL ABOUT EVE, which was... I kiss my fingers at it! I fell in love with George Sanders, worshipped at the altar of Bette Davis, and had a lot of fun watching Anne Baxter play that poisonous little animal, whom I occasionally admired and feared very much. How uncomfortable she made me. It was very refreshing to see a love story between adults, with all the fears inherent about aging and identity. And you know, it was also refreshing to watch a male character NOT being seduced by the Sweet Young Thing, to watch him be faithful (though not submissive) to his older lover whose love for him made her lash out at him most of all!

But mostly... George Sanders. I looked him up on Wikipedia. I shall watch more movies featuring his baritone.

I'm glad we started with "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," because it was such a lovely, light movie with music and sequins -- but also because it was about friendship between women. There was no cattiness. All squabbling derived from concern. It was not sappy or sentimental, but tough, and quick-witted, and it had THIS in it:

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Dorothy Shaw: I've been wondering, what's your line, Mr. Malone?

Ernie Malone: My line? My most effective one is to tell a girl she has hair like a tortured midnight, lips like a red couch in an ivory palace, that I'm lonely and starved for affection. Then, I generally burst into tears. It seldom works.
***

After those two movies "Some Like It Hot" was... pretty good. Pretty good, but not my favorite of the three.

1.) Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (HI-LAIR-EE-OUS)
2.) All About Eve (practically perfect in every way)
3.) Some Like It Hot (we have yet to see... starting in a few minutes...)

I had a strangely coincidental moment when two independent searches led me to the exact same moment in a movie.

The first wasn't surprising at all; I was flitting about TVTropes.org and found the entry Ultimate Blacksmith. It's a trope used in the Kalevala, a 19th century collection of Finnish mythology, known to MSTies as the source material for The Day the Earth Froze -- it's the literary origin of the Sampo. I was interested if for no other reason than I've seen and enjoyed (with a little help) a movie based on the story. Anyway, the Ultimate Blacksmith is a character who, like Ilmarinen in the Kalevala, is the only smith in the world who has the training and ability to make the powerful device, be it a sword, a sampo, or, according to one example, a miniature arc reactor. That's right, the last example on the page read, "Tony Stark built one IN A CAVE! From a BOX OF SCRAPS!"

When I first saw Iron Man, I didn't think anything of this scene. Jeff Bridges's character was upset and frustrated at his engineers' inability to reverse engineer something Tony built out of spare missile parts. It struck me as reasonable and at the same time, a solid attempt to illustrate that Tony is just that much smarter than everyone else. It wasn't until I started playing around on TVTropes that I noticed the internet thinks that line of dialogue is comedy gold. Meme theory is the only explanation for why I now find this funny.

Later that day, I was writing yesterday's post, and went to the imdb quote page for the full verbage of the Red Ryder BB Gun. While I was there, I thought, "what's Peter Billingsly up to?" So I went to his page. He's a producer these days, but he does a little bit of acting. In fact, in 2008 he played "William Ginter Riva" in Iron Man. Who is "William Ginter Riva," you ask? Why, he's the scientist Obadiah Stayne was yelling at when he said, "Tony Stark built one IN A CAVE! From a BOX OF SCRAPS!"

Independent of that line of thought, grown-up Peter Billingsly is a nice-looking guy. I have no sense of how good an actor he is -- I've only seen him as a child actor, a class which is almost universally unremarkable -- but I can't help but think it's a shame he's not performing much anymore.

by Sappymoosetree on Flickr

Of Anna May Wong

Of Carole Lombard