Rachel Manija Brown's Blog, page 81

Christmas Song Poll, Part II: Traditional

I love traditional Christmas carols. I especially love singing them. Yes I'm Jewish, I just really enjoy them as music.

Please link your favorite version of your favorite carols for my and others' enjoyment! This poll is very English-language centric; please link non-English traditional Christmas songs you love.

View Poll: #25014

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Christmas Song Poll, Part I: Modern

Today is the day you can share in my hatred for most modern Christmas music, or convince me with links that it's not all horrible! This is very America-centric and I would love to have my horizons broadened.

Please vote in the poll, and share links in comments to any songs or covers you wish to bring to my attention. Today is the modern poll. Tomorrow will be traditional.

Yes I'm Jewish, shhh.

ETA: If you're not voting for Dominic the Italian Christmas Donkey you really need to click this.

View Poll: #25011

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My goddamn genius cat

I've been packing and moving stuff into the car all week, but somehow Erin has figured out that today is the day I intend to move her and vanished.

I didn't touch the cat carrier. I didn't move any suitcases. She's just telepathic or something.

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The Seventh Bride, by T. Kingfisher

Wildly unpopular opinion ahoy: I didn't like this book.

I've really enjoyed what I've read of Digger, but all previous attempts to read prose by T. Kingfisher didn't get very far, as I was put off by the tone/prose which struck me as twee. This time I was determined to give it more of a chance.

The Seventh Bride also starts off pretty twee. It's a mashup of several dark fairytales - "Bluebeard," "Mr. Fox," and a couple others - told by Rhea, a miller's daughter who is fifteen but whose voice seems quite a bit younger. If I hadn't known she was fifteen, I'd have guessed eleven.

She lives in a fairytale world in which potatoes grow wings and fly away, gremlins invade the mill and make bread turn into flocks of starlings, a local witch provides charms from her flock of snow-white quail, and so forth. Magic tends to be small and domestic, but is a normal daily presence. It's also a world in which it is normal for marriages to be arranged between young teenage girls and much older men above their station.

This setup created a major source of distracting dissonance for me. Rhea is from a magical world. She deals with magic on a daily basis. And yet, because Kingfisher wants to riff on how illogical and weird fairytales are, Rhea is persistently disbelieving and snarky in the "this is totally illogical" sense when confronted with any magic that isn't the exact type she's previously encountered. She explains this by saying that she's used to small magic and this is big magic, only she also reacts this way to small magics like a non-talking but clearly intelligent hedgehog. I found this jarring and annoying.

She speculates that maybe the people telling her about resurrection magic are just crazy, despite the fact that she's already met some resurrected animals. Then she analyzes the chances of the people talking about magic being crazy by comparing them to a boy she knows who was taken by the fairies and driven insane. RHEA, YOU ALREADY SAW THE RESURRECTED CROW! YOU ALREADY KNOW OF THE EXISTENCE OF FAIRIES! WHY IS ANY OF THIS HARD TO BELIEVE?

I think she's supposed to come across as an audience stand-in commenting on the lack of logic and implausibility in fairytales, but she's not a portaled-in heroine from our world. She was born into and is literally living in a fairytale.

(I have a limited tolerance for humor based on "fairytales are illogical." They're not supposed to be logical; pointing out that they're not is like pointing out that the average poem lacks plot. This type of humor has to hit me exactly right, or it just annoys me.)

The other factor, which has the similar issue of Rhea being freaked out by something that is pretty normal in her world, is her reaction to her arranged marriage to a much older sorcerer. It's unusual for someone that much above her station to want her, and sorcerers are apparently a matter of myth unlike witches which are totally normal, but it's still not that different from what she's used to.

She keeps repeating, "This isn't normal, this isn't normal" about a billion times, way before anything that is actually abnormal in her context happens. This is Kingfisher providing a lesson straight out of The Gift of Fear. It's a very good and wholesome and necessary lesson, but the context makes it come across as weird and jarring.

Spoilers!

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A very frustrating book.

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Pandemic Packing

Have a slideshow OF HELL.

It's okay though, the cats are helping.

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Made Things, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

In a clockpunk city of magic, orphan thief and puppeteer Coppelia befriends some tiny, intelligent homunculi looking to carve out a niche for themselves in a world made for much larger humans. Heists, friendship, and really cool worldbuilding ensue.

This is a delightful story, full of satisfying tiny people action and worldbuilding and character development. In Tchaikovsky's typical manner of providing way more from a premise than you even knew you wanted, there are multiple types of tiny homunculi - wood and steel and wax and bone and origami - all with their own strengths and weaknesses, personalities, and abilities. They, along with the cast of golems, thieves, cops, witches, and aristocrats, all have their own backstories and motivations.

I particularly enjoyed the homunculi's approach to gender and gender roles - one of my favorites is a dashing steel Scull who goes by "he," wields a razor, wears a dress, and is attempting to bring a daughter to life by magic.

Made Things is entirely satisfying as a novella, and there's a short prequel I intend to read ASAP, but I could read ten fat volumes of it and still want more.

Leaning into premise: A+. It promises tiny made people in a clockpunk world of regular-sized meat people, and gives everything you want from that, plus a solid heist story.

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Split Second

This movie, which I watched because Rutger Hauer was in it, was the epitome of hilaribad. I was constantly bursting out laughing while watching it, and after a day of nightmarish packing to move, it was a balm to my soul. At points I literally cried laughing.

It opens with an ominous LONDON 2008 caption, followed by a crawl explaining that due to global warming and the US refusal to take it seriously, London is now flooded. Depressingly, this extremely stupid 90s movie was smarter about global warming than any US leadership to date.

We then cut to Rutger Hauer lighting a cigar with a miniature gun/flamethrower, then striding into a random bondage club where a woman violently shakes her tits before he discovers a heartless corpse in the most unrealistic blood splatter pattern I've ever seen - the entire bathroom is carefully painted in very close, very narrow blood-stripes. Hauer proceeds, with the utmost seriousness, to interrogate a dog. This sets the tone for the entire movie.

The movie is basically every stupid mismatched cop partners hunt a serial killer/monster cliche, only dystopian. More importantly, only absolutely hilariously terribly stupidly, and with everyone involved performing with utter seriousness despite the fact that nothing makes any sense on any level, and every single facial expression and line reading and prop is nonsensical or wrong. Also, it's doing a very half-assed Blade Runner impression. The result is amazing.

Rutger Hauer lives in a ridiculously cliche obsessed cop apartment consisting of an attic full of trashed machinery, a brand new motorcycle parked in the middle of the room, a hammock, a lot of pigeons, and several filthy refrigerators he stores his guns in. After a tragic sepia flashback to the ridiculous death of his partner, a pigeon lands on his head.

When he leaves his love interest alone in it, she wanders around, spots a bunch of either brown refrigerator magnets or disgustingly sticky chocolates stuck on to the dirty fridge door in the shape of a heart, and, smiling, eats one. Later, we see that they are all gone and only brown stains remain on the filthy fridge door BARF FOREVER.

The love interest is the ex-wife of his dead partner (this is explained early on, in a cliche monologue explaining that "He's the best at what he does" and also he's addicted to coffee and sugar), and is played by Kim Cattrall, who went on to co-star in Sex and the City. Her role in the movie, other than eating horrifying substances, is to take baths and showers in his filthy apartment, so the cop partners can repeatedly burst in on her naked. This happens at least four times.

Hauer is paired with another cop who keeps reminding us that he went to Oxford, and spouts dialogue like, "So the serial killer's DNA consists of the DNA of everyone he's ever killed and rats. He's like all serial killers rolled into one... The ultimate serial killer!"

(He's actually the Rat Creature from the Black Lagoon. No one ever even tries to explain anything whatsoever about this.)

The Rat Creature from the Black Lagoon kidnaps Oxford for about ten minutes. Rutger Hauer finds him tied up and releases him. They amble back to the gross apartment, where they chat before Oxford keels over. It is then revealed that Rat Creature from the Black Lagoon carved a giant, very complex occult symbol over his entire chest, quite deep, without him noticing! They proceed to compare it to a map of London without bothering to bandage his MASSIVE CHEST WOUNDS or with either of them taking notice of it, then go off to explore some sewers. This is never mentioned again.

There is so much more, but I will content myself with noting three more things.

1. Even basic stunts like falls and rolls are executed incompetently. People drop out of sight like they fell through a trap door, or their boots wave upside down in the air for much too long, or some such, always to inappropriately hilarious effect.

2. It is never clear whether dogs are intelligent or whether Hauer is just batshit. He interrogates more dogs, who always just stare at him blankly. Later he interrogates a child, in the exact same manner, who gives him the exact same blank stare.

3. After Oxford rescues him from the Rat Creature from the Black Lagoon, Hauer gives the standard dumb buddy cop line, "Took you long enough." Only he says it like he's doing a half-assed Bugs Bunny imitation.

I watched this movie with scioscribe and highly recommend it as a buddy watch to those who appreciate such things. Trust me, my description does not spoil anything.

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rachelmanija @ 2020-12-05T09:04:00

I have reached the stage of moving in which I regret owning anything.

I am also low-key panicking over the final stage of moving, in which people need to come into my apartment and move stuff around. I will have all the windows open and fans going and will insist that they wear masks and will stay outside myself as much as possible BUT STILL.

The other day my garage spring broke so I couldn't get into my garage. It took my landlord two days to dispatch his father-in-law, who OFC kept trying to get into my personal space and breathe on me. I had to literally wave my hands in his face to get him to move back.

The reason I'm moving is largely that it is nearly impossible to get people to wear masks and/or stand back and/or cover their noses when they do wear masks. This is true even when I have lengthy phone conversations in advance where I get them to promise that they will wear a real mask, not a bandanna, and cover their nose, and not take off the mask as soon as they arrive. Then they arrive and proceed to do exactly what they promised not to do. I have a feeling that this is also going to be an issue with the movers.

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The Stepford Wives, by Ira Levin

What’s the going price for a stay-in-the-kitchen wife with big boobs and no demands?

Joanna, a photographer, moves with her husband and two children to the perfect little suburb of Stepford, where she discovers to her dismay that almost all the married women in town have no interests but housekeeping and pleasing their husbands. When she does find a few women like herself, messy and alive, they start investigating why women arrive in Stepford with careers and interests and personalities and politics, then they lose all that, along with a few pounds that seem to migrate to their breasts, replaced with an extreme fascination with household cleaning products...

A taut, understated, horrifying little horror novel about what too many men really want in a woman. I am impressed that a man wrote this, and in the 70s no less, because it is so dead-on about gaslighting, condescension, men who want women to be nothing but an object of desire and a source of free labor, and the endless household labor that sucks up women's time and attention, preventing them from freeing themselves until it's too late.

I went into this knowing the premise, but it's well worth reading anyway. It's stripped-down, dead-on, and genuinely unsettling; a 1970s period piece that's not as dated as one might expect, and is most unsettling for the many ways in which it isn't dated at all.

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Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, by Benjamin Alire Saenz (Audio by LMM)

A lovely, sweet, sometimes very funny, sometimes heartbreaking (but mostly heartwarming) YA about two misfit Mexican-American boys living in El Paso in the 1980s. The prose and rhythms are very beautiful, which is unsurprising as the author is also a poet. It's as much a story about family as it is the relationship between the boys, and touches on a bunch of social issues while staying distinctly about two specific boys and their families, who deal with stuff as a part of their lives, rather than being a book about issues. I loved it.

I went in knowing it had some gay content but not recalling whether it was a romance, or a story about a platonic friendship between a gay boy and a straight boy, and consequently was in suspense for quite some time. Also, Ari's brother is in prison and his family won't tell him why. As a result of all that, I developed a Theory of Everything that turned out to be totally wrong, and I'm glad because I didn't like my theory. If you'd like some spoilers, read on. I don't think it's a book where being in suspense is necessary. The cut also describes some content-warning type stuff you might want to know about in advance.

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Audiobook read by Lin-Manuel Miranda. I highly recommend the audio version - he does a great job and is the perfect person to read it. His soulful, wholehearted, often very funny delivery is just right. Also he can pronounce all the Spanish.

You'd think correct pronunciation would be a prerequisite for a reading of anything but I recently had to give up on an audiobook of The Hare With The Golden Eyes, about a netsuke collection, read by a guy who couldn't pronounce netsuke. Not to mention the audiobook of my own Stranger, which is excellent except that it has two narrators who did not consult on pronunciation with the result that they pronounced many names differently including the name of the town in which all the characters lived.

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