(no subject)
Feb. 4th, 2024 10:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsIt's been a week of gifts and delights for me! First, sophia_sol bound my story "Suradanna and the Sea" -- published online in The Fantasist in 2016, but never available in a print version -- into a couple of really beautiful physical books as their first bookbinding project, and sent me one of the copies, which arrived yesterday.
Up until The Iron Children, "Suradanna" was the longest thing I'd ever written/published and I think perhaps the best, and I am so unbelievably delighted that it will now get to live in my house and not just on my computer, and thatsophia_sol chose it of all the things that live on the computer to bind. I have just been Gazing at it all morning and will probably spend the rest of my Sunday doing so at intermittent intervals.
And, speaking of things that live on the computer: it's Festivids time and despite being a criminal who never actually posted my Festivids letter I have received not one but not two vids as gifts:
1. An Eye for An Eye -- this is a Romeo + Juliet (1996) vid that's using all of Luhrmann's symbolism to make a really interesting and thoughtful argument about the meta-arc and cosmology of the play; it's an extremely cool work of vid-as-essay and is definitely going to be living in my head whenever I watch the movie again
2. Boys Keep Swinging -- all I can say about this frankly is that my cross-production Twelfth Night fanvid last year walked so that this vid could RUN, I am just rolling gleefully around like Scrooge McDuck in my pile of Rosalinds, PLEASE go check it out, it's everything that I always want As You Like It to be!
AND, speaking of Shakespeare -- this last one is not a gift for me in particular except for all the ways that it is, but I have been having the world's best time with Emails from an Actor, a real-time readalong of various books published from Within The Experience Of Participating In the 1964 John Gielgud-Richard Burton production of Hamlet.
The two books in question are Letters from an Actor by William Redfield, a moderately famous actor who played Guildenstern in the show, and John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton In Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals, by Richard L. Sterne, who had more or less just graduated acting school at the time and was playing A Gentleman.
The joy of Redfield is that he has five million opinions about everything, especially his colleagues. He will drop into monologue at the drop of a hat and it WILL contain some of the wildest sentences that you have ever seen in your life. We are only one week into the project and I have already forced people to experience a number of Redfield quotes against their will, which I will give you a sampling of here:
For passion, in Brando’s dish-shattering hands, was a thrilling sight indeed. He has not matched it since. And on film he surely never will, for film cannot hold a great actor. Theatrically speaking, Brando was our candidate in the late forties (much like Kennedy, Roosevelt, or even Eisenhower)—he was American; he had brawn; he was beautiful; his head was shaped like a bullet; and he had guts. He would show those damned superior Englishmen with their rhetorical nonsense what acting could really be.
One hard truth: the very notion of Richard Burton not killing a man who stands in his way strains credulity. [....] Burton is direct. As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. So does Burton. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound. I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains. If the other arm be chopped off, he would use his feet quite a lot and do much butting with his head. He is a fighter. He will survive. But to imagine him hesitating to punish an incestuous fratricide is to imagine Beowulf bursting into tears because he misplaced his poleax.
The actor must be deep in his heart and quick with his hands, catch Pegasus by the heel while riding a tiger, have the soul of a fairy and the hide of a walrus, change himself from night to night and alter his psyche from year to year. He is a chameleon gone aesthetic; a shade with a purpose. A second-story man who breaks into your house not to take but to give. Actors who do not keep pace with today will go under. Like lemmings, they will drown even in the neap tide. For the actor, today is the future.
[on being elected Equity Deputy against his will by his other cast members while he was in the bathroom] When I protested their unfriendly and assassinatory action, Coolidge delivered himself of the following remark: “If you have the bleeding gall to accept star billing for playing Guildenstern, you can damned well be the deputy.”
The joy of Sterne is that, while his prose is very restrained and documentarian compared to Redfields, he SECRETLY SMUGGLED A TAPE RECORDER DISGUISED AS A BRIEFCASE with him into every rehearsal so he's putting down direct quotes. Many of these are just genuinely interesting thoughts and conversations about Hamlet staging but also sometimes they're completely different from the 'Gielgud said' as reported by Redfield, which is just a great time every time for me personally.
I know many of us at this juncture are burned out on email newsletter fiction but if you have any interest in Hamlet, in the actual process of putting together a theatrical production, or in wild and funny opinions held by B-tier theatrical actors in the 1960s, I cannot more highly recommend this experience.
sophia_sol bound my story "Suradanna and the Sea" -- published online in The Fantasist in 2016, but never available in a print version -- into a couple of really beautiful physical books as their first bookbinding project, and sent me one of the copies, which arrived yesterday. Up until The Iron Children, "Suradanna" was the longest thing I'd ever written/published and I think perhaps the best, and I am so unbelievably delighted that it will now get to live in my house and not just on my computer, and that
sophia_sol chose it of all the things that live on the computer to bind. I have just been Gazing at it all morning and will probably spend the rest of my Sunday doing so at intermittent intervals. And, speaking of things that live on the computer: it's Festivids time and despite being a criminal who never actually posted my Festivids letter I have received not one but not two vids as gifts:
1. An Eye for An Eye -- this is a Romeo + Juliet (1996) vid that's using all of Luhrmann's symbolism to make a really interesting and thoughtful argument about the meta-arc and cosmology of the play; it's an extremely cool work of vid-as-essay and is definitely going to be living in my head whenever I watch the movie again
2. Boys Keep Swinging -- all I can say about this frankly is that my cross-production Twelfth Night fanvid last year walked so that this vid could RUN, I am just rolling gleefully around like Scrooge McDuck in my pile of Rosalinds, PLEASE go check it out, it's everything that I always want As You Like It to be!
AND, speaking of Shakespeare -- this last one is not a gift for me in particular except for all the ways that it is, but I have been having the world's best time with Emails from an Actor, a real-time readalong of various books published from Within The Experience Of Participating In the 1964 John Gielgud-Richard Burton production of Hamlet.
The two books in question are Letters from an Actor by William Redfield, a moderately famous actor who played Guildenstern in the show, and John Gielgud Directs Richard Burton In Hamlet: A Journal of Rehearsals, by Richard L. Sterne, who had more or less just graduated acting school at the time and was playing A Gentleman.
The joy of Redfield is that he has five million opinions about everything, especially his colleagues. He will drop into monologue at the drop of a hat and it WILL contain some of the wildest sentences that you have ever seen in your life. We are only one week into the project and I have already forced people to experience a number of Redfield quotes against their will, which I will give you a sampling of here:
For passion, in Brando’s dish-shattering hands, was a thrilling sight indeed. He has not matched it since. And on film he surely never will, for film cannot hold a great actor. Theatrically speaking, Brando was our candidate in the late forties (much like Kennedy, Roosevelt, or even Eisenhower)—he was American; he had brawn; he was beautiful; his head was shaped like a bullet; and he had guts. He would show those damned superior Englishmen with their rhetorical nonsense what acting could really be.
One hard truth: the very notion of Richard Burton not killing a man who stands in his way strains credulity. [....] Burton is direct. As a tank is direct. Throw what mortar you will, a tank keeps coming until it is annihilated. So does Burton. I can imagine him fighting with a severe head wound. I can picture him with an arm chopped off fighting fiercely with what remains. If the other arm be chopped off, he would use his feet quite a lot and do much butting with his head. He is a fighter. He will survive. But to imagine him hesitating to punish an incestuous fratricide is to imagine Beowulf bursting into tears because he misplaced his poleax.
The actor must be deep in his heart and quick with his hands, catch Pegasus by the heel while riding a tiger, have the soul of a fairy and the hide of a walrus, change himself from night to night and alter his psyche from year to year. He is a chameleon gone aesthetic; a shade with a purpose. A second-story man who breaks into your house not to take but to give. Actors who do not keep pace with today will go under. Like lemmings, they will drown even in the neap tide. For the actor, today is the future.
[on being elected Equity Deputy against his will by his other cast members while he was in the bathroom] When I protested their unfriendly and assassinatory action, Coolidge delivered himself of the following remark: “If you have the bleeding gall to accept star billing for playing Guildenstern, you can damned well be the deputy.”
The joy of Sterne is that, while his prose is very restrained and documentarian compared to Redfields, he SECRETLY SMUGGLED A TAPE RECORDER DISGUISED AS A BRIEFCASE with him into every rehearsal so he's putting down direct quotes. Many of these are just genuinely interesting thoughts and conversations about Hamlet staging but also sometimes they're completely different from the 'Gielgud said' as reported by Redfield, which is just a great time every time for me personally.
I know many of us at this juncture are burned out on email newsletter fiction but if you have any interest in Hamlet, in the actual process of putting together a theatrical production, or in wild and funny opinions held by B-tier theatrical actors in the 1960s, I cannot more highly recommend this experience.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 04:42 pm (UTC)Very important info - they inspired a new play, which I haven't seen but about which I hear great things:
https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/whats-on/the-motive-and-the-cue/
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 05:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 07:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-06 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 05:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 07:20 pm (UTC)SIX HOURS
HIDDEN UNDER A TABLE
SO HE COULD RECORD A SECRET LOCKED REHEARSAL SESSION WITH GIELGUD AND BURTON ONLY
and when he eventually confessed this to them later, "both reacted favorably, surprised and amused that such a project had been carried out!!" presumably quite chuffed that their deathless opinions about Hamlet were going to be preserved for posterity!
no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-05 03:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-04 09:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-05 06:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-05 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-05 11:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-14 11:53 pm (UTC)Well who wouldn't fuck Marlon Brando if given a chance
The fact that Brando lost his passport FIVE TIMES
Sir, you are Marlon Brando, hire someone to keep track of your passport for you.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-06 01:08 am (UTC)omg, the letters sounds like such a blast. :D
no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-06 09:56 am (UTC)All this to say I've been forcing my father to listen to quotes, and getting tales of notorious productions of the late fifties and early sixties back.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-11 05:14 am (UTC)