moon at the window and the bird on a pole

[ashlyme]

Back in Birmingham. I miss cybermule . I miss the West Country. We watched Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive midweek and it's the only vampire film I need. I love Tilda Swinton's Eva so much: otherworldly, deep in love with the world; able to tell the age of a guitar at a touch, knowing the Latin name of each living creature she encounters. The echoing wrecks of Detroit are gorgeous. I just wish there'd been more of John Hurt's Kit Marlowe in it. Spent a happy forty minutes in Gloucester's Quayside Books and came away with Liz Berry's Black Country as a gift for H, Wu Ch'eng-En's Monkey (I've got vague vague memories of the Japanese live action series being broadcast in the early eighties, though I'm pretty sure the English overdubbing would just make me hurl now) and a book on Chinese puppet theatre by a Soviet puppeteer; reading these last two alongside Frances Horovitz's collected poems. H took me on a drive around the hills above Stroud and we had beer and sandwiches at Laurie Lee's local pub. It doesn't seem so high up there until your ears pop with a cellophane-y sound. Three Chinook helicopters whirled over the fields.

The new Doctor Who is going from strength to strength. What a pity Peter Capaldi should go now. The Doctor (for me, anyway) is always best as a subversive and last night Twelve was giving deep-space capitalism the middle finger. I love him, his not-so-post-punkness, the mixture of gruff kindness and intellectual detachment, the unobtrusive velvet coat and hoodie. I love Bill. They've come up with a gay WOC companion and managed to not sexualise her. Can we have her stay on, please?

Comments

[sovay]

I just wish there'd been more of John Hurt's Kit Marlowe in it.

I love that he is not a young Marlowe, so you know that whatever circumstances led to his vampirehood, they had nothing to do with—and do not explain—whatever went down in that tavern in Deptford.

I love him, his not-so-post-punkness, the mixture of gruff kindness and intellectual detachment, the unobtrusive velvet coat and hoodie. I love Bill. They've come up with a gay WOC companion and managed to not sexualise her.

I am desperately sorry the show has managed to get itself together only in the home stretch as it were: I was looking forward to Capaldi incredibly when he was cast, and then the first season of Twelve was so frustrating and disappointing that I bailed. The combination you describe—especially with the politics—sounds like something I personally would watch for years, only it isn't going to get them.

[ashlyme]

*The combination you describe—especially with the politics—sounds like something I personally would watch for years, only it isn't going to get them.*

I meant to respond a day or so back. There are a couple of significant scenes in the third episode Bill and the Doctor are in Regency London and she comments that the period's blacker than the books told her. The Doctor responds, "So was Jesus. History's whitewashed." It calls him out a bit on his own colourblindness - it doesn't occur to him how that time might react to his companion until she points it out - but it also allows the Doctor to punch out an aristocratic racist too, so.

[sovay]

The Doctor responds, "So was Jesus. History's whitewashed."

Nice!