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ravenI keep wanting to make a giant post of What I'm Reading and What I'm Watching, but I... don't. I blame my job, which is hard, right now, in both senses of the word. (A passing word from a distant colleague, last week, delivered with austere kindness: "You can try, but you can't hold back the tide.")
Quite.
So I'm reading and watching stuff and hanging out with friends and the part of my brain that writes has the lights turned out but that's okay, for now. I'm trying to be kind to self. Last weekend I went to![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
vidukon_cardiff and while I had a lovely time, I don't actually have a lot to say about it. I hung out with people I love; I drank cocktails with double cream; I enjoyed Welsh bilingual signage; Iwatched some vids; I came home happy. I enjoyed a lot of the premiering vids - two of my favourites were "Uptown Funk" by such_heights (it's Parks and Recreation, by which I mean, it's the show, it's my show) and "Touch The Sky" by cosmic_llin, a delightful multifandom vid about young girls and women - but the one that really, really stayed with me is "Wasteland", by amnisias. This is a simple, linear vid for the ITV show, Grantchester, to a lovely slice of bourbon-laced Americana (which is a lot more relevant to a sleepy drama about an English parish priest in the 1950s than you might think, at first). It's a beautiful vid and as a result of it I have watched the entire show in the last few days and it's made me so uncomplicatedly happy, so I'm here to tell you about it.
Show! It's basically a step-by-step of things that are relevant to my interests, but, y'know, my interests are some of your interests, so. It's 1953 in a small village just south of Cambridge. Sidney Chambers, who is the Anglican parish priest for Grantchester, suffers from a surfeit of people telling him things. Which is how he ends up looking into the alleged murder of one of his parishioners; and then how he ends up investigating murders in general with one of the local policemen, Geordie Keating.
And that's... kind of it? Not a lot happens. They drink pints in pubs. They investigate crimes in a low-key sort of a way. They live in the perfect eternal summer I remember from being an undergraduate; this is a Cambridge where it never rains. Sidney has a piano in his front garden for a while and plays it very badly. They play cricket and go punting. Everything is starkly and bleakly and vividly beautiful. They drink more pints. Nothing happens. And of course I love it desperately. I love the writing style and wish I could write like it: everything is interstitial, everything happens in the cracks. I love the characters. Other than Sidney and Geordie, there's Mrs Maguire, Sidney's hilariously disapproving housekeeper; also his best friend, Amanda, whom he's not so secretly in love with; also a full chorus of villagers, policemen, and jazz musicians. By episode 2 they've gained a puppy and a live-in queer curate called Leonard, who's an adorable heap of awkward, and everything is delightful and they all love each other a lot.
And - because I did mention this is the kind of show I like - it's terribly sad, but in a distant and English sort of way. The point of the show is the post-war landscape, both literal and internal: so one the one hand there are these beautiful, sparse, heartbreaking shots of the Cambridgeshire countryside, all those fields unfolding towards the sky. (And in some ways that's the world I know - the flat water and rushes, the same landscape that I rattle through every morning on my way to London - and then in one episode, Sidney has a run-in with a local property developer, and I sat up straight, because they're talking about council houses, northern estates; they're talking about building the house I live in.)
So that's part of it, the literal post-war landscape at the beginning of fifty years of change, and on the other hand there's the other one, the internal one - so ghosts of race and especially class inhabit the cosy little mysteries, harbinging change - and Sidney is charming and charismatic and kind, and rather seriously depressed and life, as with all such things, goes on. This is my hands-down favourite thing about this show: it's the carefully compassionate way it's depicted, the way Sidney isn't to blame for his depression and those around him love him; but at the same time, he hurts people very badly sometimes and it doesn't let him off the hook for that. (And always with such wit and humour. Leonard says some kind things to Sidney about his black dog - and hastily clarifies he doesn't mean his actual black dog, who is looking up at him with adoring eyes and a wagging tail.) And in the end, it's always in the background - as one hopes it ought to be - of all the beautiful things. I guess it's a very me sort of show? But, you know, you love what you love. It's sad and it's hopeful and I really do love it a lot.
Wow that is quite a lot more than I meant to write. Er: in brief, it's a beautiful show, the writing is beautiful, the scenery porn is beautiful, the cast is preternaturally beautiful (bisexualists of the world unite) and if you spend the first two episodes wondering where you've seen James Norton before, the answer is possibly on his knees before the Empress of Blandings, yelling, "Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!"
In the meantime: it's 9.48pm and there's enough light in the sky to read by. I'm still here.
Quite.
So I'm reading and watching stuff and hanging out with friends and the part of my brain that writes has the lights turned out but that's okay, for now. I'm trying to be kind to self. Last weekend I went to
vidukon_cardiff and while I had a lovely time, I don't actually have a lot to say about it. I hung out with people I love; I drank cocktails with double cream; I enjoyed Welsh bilingual signage; Iwatched some vids; I came home happy. I enjoyed a lot of the premiering vids - two of my favourites were "Uptown Funk" by such_heights (it's Parks and Recreation, by which I mean, it's the show, it's my show) and "Touch The Sky" by cosmic_llin, a delightful multifandom vid about young girls and women - but the one that really, really stayed with me is "Wasteland", by amnisias. This is a simple, linear vid for the ITV show, Grantchester, to a lovely slice of bourbon-laced Americana (which is a lot more relevant to a sleepy drama about an English parish priest in the 1950s than you might think, at first). It's a beautiful vid and as a result of it I have watched the entire show in the last few days and it's made me so uncomplicatedly happy, so I'm here to tell you about it.Show! It's basically a step-by-step of things that are relevant to my interests, but, y'know, my interests are some of your interests, so. It's 1953 in a small village just south of Cambridge. Sidney Chambers, who is the Anglican parish priest for Grantchester, suffers from a surfeit of people telling him things. Which is how he ends up looking into the alleged murder of one of his parishioners; and then how he ends up investigating murders in general with one of the local policemen, Geordie Keating.
And that's... kind of it? Not a lot happens. They drink pints in pubs. They investigate crimes in a low-key sort of a way. They live in the perfect eternal summer I remember from being an undergraduate; this is a Cambridge where it never rains. Sidney has a piano in his front garden for a while and plays it very badly. They play cricket and go punting. Everything is starkly and bleakly and vividly beautiful. They drink more pints. Nothing happens. And of course I love it desperately. I love the writing style and wish I could write like it: everything is interstitial, everything happens in the cracks. I love the characters. Other than Sidney and Geordie, there's Mrs Maguire, Sidney's hilariously disapproving housekeeper; also his best friend, Amanda, whom he's not so secretly in love with; also a full chorus of villagers, policemen, and jazz musicians. By episode 2 they've gained a puppy and a live-in queer curate called Leonard, who's an adorable heap of awkward, and everything is delightful and they all love each other a lot.
And - because I did mention this is the kind of show I like - it's terribly sad, but in a distant and English sort of way. The point of the show is the post-war landscape, both literal and internal: so one the one hand there are these beautiful, sparse, heartbreaking shots of the Cambridgeshire countryside, all those fields unfolding towards the sky. (And in some ways that's the world I know - the flat water and rushes, the same landscape that I rattle through every morning on my way to London - and then in one episode, Sidney has a run-in with a local property developer, and I sat up straight, because they're talking about council houses, northern estates; they're talking about building the house I live in.)
So that's part of it, the literal post-war landscape at the beginning of fifty years of change, and on the other hand there's the other one, the internal one - so ghosts of race and especially class inhabit the cosy little mysteries, harbinging change - and Sidney is charming and charismatic and kind, and rather seriously depressed and life, as with all such things, goes on. This is my hands-down favourite thing about this show: it's the carefully compassionate way it's depicted, the way Sidney isn't to blame for his depression and those around him love him; but at the same time, he hurts people very badly sometimes and it doesn't let him off the hook for that. (And always with such wit and humour. Leonard says some kind things to Sidney about his black dog - and hastily clarifies he doesn't mean his actual black dog, who is looking up at him with adoring eyes and a wagging tail.) And in the end, it's always in the background - as one hopes it ought to be - of all the beautiful things. I guess it's a very me sort of show? But, you know, you love what you love. It's sad and it's hopeful and I really do love it a lot.
Wow that is quite a lot more than I meant to write. Er: in brief, it's a beautiful show, the writing is beautiful, the scenery porn is beautiful, the cast is preternaturally beautiful (bisexualists of the world unite) and if you spend the first two episodes wondering where you've seen James Norton before, the answer is possibly on his knees before the Empress of Blandings, yelling, "Pig-hoo-o-o-o-ey!"
In the meantime: it's 9.48pm and there's enough light in the sky to read by. I'm still here.