Multifandom: Les Miserables; Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812; Doctor Who; His Dark Materials; A Series of Unfortunate Events; Percy Jackson; Merlin; Lord of the Rings... etc etc - I often make comparisons between works whose only thing in common is that I happened to come across them at some point in my life.
it’s countryside summer and I’m watching insects like I’m Mr Rochester talking to an imaginary Jane, “Janet, Jane! look at what a fine specimen of dragonfly! one does not often see it this side of the Atlantic, effervescent. am I not so smart and attentive, Janet? Jane?”
I have no idea what the intention with the Olivier reveal was, and it upsets me that Philman felt like he had to give Lyra a biological brother to be some sort of companion at the end, instead of going for a sibling dynamic for Malcolm and Lyra, which would’ve been so much better than all that stress we had to go through thinking “will they won’t they”. And then if he wanted a half-brother, wouldn’t a child Asriel was not aware of make so much more sense? How can a previous pregnancy fit into Mrs Coulter’s life? I have no clue
That being said, I am OVERJOYED at Lyra’s character arc and all the theories brought in about the imagination and the windows. With Philman I know never to think too literally (what about the spectres now? What about Dust being dragged away? What is the truth?), especially when he’s telling it to our faces that he wants us to be able to hold paradoxical truths.
The conversation with the angel midway through made me ugly sob. So it had always been unfair! It had always been weird that Will and Lyra didn’t insist more! It had always been too mathematical to make sense within such an emotional context! And then… isn’t that what facing reality as a child feels like? When you tire out of fighting and just give in that the reasonable adult must indeed be right, and you have to live as they tell you? They were too young, too broken, too much yearning for a guidance they never had. They were left speechless before angels, after battling death. How many of us have known that speechlessness?
Lyra never fully voices whether she believes that things she’s learned will allow her to find Will, and I believe it was the perfect right call to let that remain silent. For one, it’d be to make her arc revolve too much around romance, when it’s been about her finding herself as an artist. Second, how many barriers must she have put up to convince herself there was no way of seeing Will again? It’ll take her a while to realise the maybe behind the alethiometer’s needle, and to have the bravery to try it without the existence of the tiniest of openings, as was the case when she did open a window. Third, it’s for the reader to decide. As a storyteller, Lyra is now conscious of what to leave in and what to leave out, as to make the audience pass by the greatest amount of emotion. I wonder if she herself will be tormented by the artist’s choice - try out real life, or treasure the idea? I believe she’ll wish to cherish the idea of Will a bit longer, and that will hold her from realising the possibilities too. But the possibility is already there in her subconscious, especially in how she cries at the old man and the old woman living their last days together. I guess the role of Malcolm as a possible romantic interest had a part in this too - somebody getting as close as possible to what she had with Will, all the unending parallels that made me sweat cold, but it just isn’t it. We who receive the artwork are better off left with the tragedy and the wonderings, but the philosophy of the books pushes her to give real life a try.
And then, the relationship with Pan… absolute chills thinking about all the parallels in the scene when they almost get separated in between worlds. When you think they couldn’t undergo worse fears of separation than what they’ve already faced, here’s yet another way, which is just the way they got cut from Will. The panic of undergoing it again - losing Will, leaving Pan in the shores of the dead, being under the blade in Bolvangar, and all of it at once, and all because they had separated in the worst and (now, perceived as dumbest) possible way, through the hatred for oneself.
Overall I’m not bothered by the amount of retconning that went into it, especially when it seems to me to reflect so much of how we grow throughout life. We learn to be silent, to make ourselves responsible for our communities, to accept how arduous it is to go by day by day. We learn to hate ourselves, until somehow new possibilities present themselves, showing you that you do not need to do all you thought you had to do when you were 12, while the harsh reality you did face back then has not actually changed. It’s you who has changed, who has been able to see things a little less in black and white. And you wouldn’t have gotten there if you hadn’t gone through pain, and one thing does not annul the other, you’re just able to live within the realms of uncertainty and possibility.
That’s it for now, I will have more to say later when I’ve gathered my thoughts.
like idk guys I just had a dream where I got to interview Philman re the rose field and he told me I’m absolutely right about everything and that ofc the intent was for it to be up to the reader’s imagination now whether Lyra will seek Will having all the means to do so (in the dream we also spoke about the “retconning” re spectres as a symbol for repression - what you repress in puberty for absorbing meanings grown ups handled to you as deadly, and later realise it was completely fine)
Shit y'all. I didn't realize it was behind a paywall!
Full article under the cut!
Lin-Manuel Miranda has a shocking secret. Or technically, his wife does. Vanessa Nadal, who’s married to the three-time Tony-winning composer behind In The Heights and Hamilton, does not like musicals. Actually, let Miranda rephrase: “She just likes good shit. We’ll be seeing a musical and they’ll repeat the chorus, and she’ll be like, ‘Why are they saying that again?’ She’s a logic monster.”
So when their friend Dave Malloy invited the couple to his off-Broadway chamber-choir musical Octet in the fall of 2019, Nadal’s review took Miranda by surprise. “Before the last song ended and the lights went up for the bows, Vanessa turned to me and said, ‘If you took me to more shows like this, I’d go see theater with you.’ That’s a three-star Michelin for my wife. That’s the best thing she’s ever said about a musical, ever.”
Seven years later, Nadal will be traveling to a different type of theater to see Octet, a feature film directed by her husband. It’s Miranda’s second directorial effort after his critically acclaimed 2021 adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s musical Tick, Tick... Boom!. But even during the editing process for that film, Miranda’s mind was on Octet. “If I get a chance to make another movie, what would I want to do?” he remembers thinking. “I couldn’t stop thinking about Octet.”
On paper, Octet is a bit of a tough sell, even for the most intense musical theater fans. Set entirely in a rundown church basement, the musical follows eight strangers attending an internet-addiction support group and sharing their struggles through songs about social media, memes, Candy Crush, Twitter discourse, Reddit threads, cancel culture, dating apps, incels, and porn addiction. There’s also no musical accompaniment: It’s entirely a cappella, filled with intricate, complex, and sometimes discordant harmonies. Perhaps that’s why Octet ultimately didn’t transfer to Broadway, despite winning a slew of Off-Broadway awards. “I was respectful of the journey that show was going to go on,” says Miranda. “When they started licensing the show, I raised my hand and said, ‘Can we make this as a movie?’”
So Miranda and Malloy got to work. “For me, this is sort of The Breakfast Club meets A Chorus Line meets The Matrix,” says Miranda. “It’s eight people in a room. But once they start singing, this technological world to which they find themselves inextricably bound shows up in unexpected and unsettling ways.”
A musical about the many horrors of the digital age might not sound like the most obvious choice for a man arguably best known for penning G-rated Disney bops like “How Far I’ll Go” and “We Don’t Talk About Bruno.” But if there’s one thing Miranda knows, it’s good writing.
“I don’t think a week goes by for me where I don’t hear someone saying something that Dave hasn’t already addressed,” he says. The rise of AI into the mainstream, which began after Octet debuted, also makes the show’s consideration of the internet—which its characters refer to almost exclusively as “the Monster”—feel more prescient than ever. “I was waiting for my flight this morning, and this Puerto Rican couple recognizes me, and we get to chatting. They said, ‘I don’t think our brains are wired to handle so much information from our phones all the time.’ That’s literally one of Jessica’s lines.’”
To pull off Octet, Miranda and his longtime casting director Bernie Telsey needed an ensemble with a particular set of skills. “I don’t just need theater kids: I need choir kids,” Miranda told Telsey. “I need people who can sing and listen at the same time.” Of course, Miranda was once a choir kid himself, so he knew what to look for. “You get to a point where you learn your hymns and your songs so well, you can have full-on conversations with your face while singing your tenor part,” he says with a laugh. “So, I knew that’s who I was after.”
In true choir-kid fashion, Miranda began by finding his sopranos. First, there’s Golden Globe winner Rachel Zegler, who will play the title character in Evita on Broadway next year. Zegler also happens to be a Dave Malloy superfan who reached out to Miranda when she heard he was working on the project. “She’s like a little musical theater prodigy,” says Miranda. “She can do anything.” In Octet, she plays Velma, the newest member of the support group.
Next came Emmy winner and Oscar nominee Amanda Seyfried, who plays the aforementioned, recently canceled Jessica. “It’s hard to tell from movie musicals whether someone can for real sing and blend,” says Miranda. “She’s been in some really big ones. Those Mamma Mia! movies are big. Les Mis is big.” What ultimately won Miranda over, though, was a 90-second clip of Seyfried singing “California” to Jimmy Fallon while accompanying herself on the dulcimer. “When I saw her on The Tonight Show singing Joni Mitchell—fully live, dulcimer, crushing it—I was like, Oh, she can really, really do this at an elite level.”
The altos are Phillipa Soo and Abbott Elementary Emmy winner Sheryl Lee Ralph. Soo broke through in both the original cast of Hamilton and as the title role in Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 Off-Broadway. “We share musical custody of Phillipa Soo,” Miranda jokes. “She’s my Bernadette Peters. As long as I’m writing music, I’ll be writing music [for her]. After the demo, Pippa’s usually my first phone call. There is nothing she cannot sing.” In Octet, she plays dating-app-obsessed Karly. Ralph, meanwhile, plays group leader Paula. Though she’s a musical theater veteran who originated the role of Deena in Dreamgirls, Ralph was a bit intimidated after realizing what she had signed up for. “She was nervous. She hadn’t done this in a while,” says Miranda. “She put her head down—it’s a lot of music. She’s extraordinary.”
Time for the tenors. Tony-winner Jonathan Groff stars as video-game-obsessed Henry; he’s also good friends with the show’s original Henry, Lucille Lortel nominee Alex Gibson. “When I talked to Jonathan about this, he was like, ‘I go to the same gym as Alex. That’s my honey,’” says Miranda. So that was a nice connection between the OG octet and the new one.”
Another IRL friendship played an important role in Octet. While sitting in on rehearsals for the recent Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd—directed by Miranda’s longtime collaborator Tommy Kail—Miranda saw Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo sing live for the first time. Theater actor Paul-Jordan Jansen was also in the ensemble of that show. Matarazzo, a tenor, stars in Octet as a nihilist who, like his Sweeney character, is named Toby; Jansen, a bass, plays incel-adjacent Ed.
Severance Emmy-winner and bass Tramell Tillman rounds out the cast as Marvin, a neurochemist questioning his relationship to faith and reality. “I’m the only person on earth who hasn’t seen Severance. But I had seen the clip of Tramell dancing with the marching band from season two of Severance, so I knew he was musical,” says Miranda. “He’s such an incredibly gifted and thoughtful actor. I just really wanted him in that room.”
Unlike the big-budget Disney films Miranda is accustomed to working on, Octet was independently financed. “We raised the money ourselves to make this film. We are looking for distribution. That was also new to me,” he says. “Rehearsal is cheaper than shooting. So, we rehearsed for five weeks. Then [had] 22 days to shoot.” By Miranda’s estimates, maybe 50% of the film’s vocals were captured live.
Why not more? “I’m not a Tom Hooper absolutist that it all has to be sung live,” he says, name-checking the director of the 2012 Les Mis film. “If you’re dancing, even Gene Kelly wasn’t singing live.” At the same time, “Dave has moments that are so vocally dense and verbally dense that it’s actually harder to lip-sync than it is to just get it live. You can’t do it. You’ve got to get it live.” The film’s opening number was shot live in one uninterrupted take. “The other thing I experimented with is, I have a lot of oners,” he adds. “A lot of complex stuff is happening, and the camera’s just not cutting.”
Now that he’s helmed two films, Miranda is more equipped to unpack the differences between composing and directing. “I love being a composer. I love being the guy to bring in the songs, and working with directors to unlock the songs and adapt the songs,” he says. “But weirdly, something I’ve discovered is that when you’re directing, you’re answering every question to every department. [So] the movies come out almost more personal than the ones you wrote the score for.”
Shooting Octet actually reminded him of a deeply personal experience: his wedding to Vanessa. “The thing I kept saying over the course of this shoot was, ‘I’m planning 22 weddings,’” says Miranda. In this case, no two weddings were alike. “Some days I have a civil ceremony, and it’s just the octet in the room all day. Some days I have really elaborate special effects. When you plan a wedding, every detail ends up being personal because you’re thinking, What do I want on a special day when I am filming this song, and it’s my only chance to get this song? The other thing that makes that metaphor work is, it’s your wedding. You can’t get bogged down in the details. You have to stay fucking present.”
At present, things are quite busy for Miranda. Disney’s live-action Moana hits theaters this week. His new musical Warriors will soon run on Broadway across the street from Hamilton, which is now in its 11th year. New York City Center is also honoring him by remounting In the Heights in October. The casts for both Warriors and In the Heights are being finalized as we speak. “I’m juggling, but the plates are in the air,” says Miranda.
But right now, it’s all about Octet. The power of film will allow the film’s audience to be transported out of that dingy church basement and into the worlds the actors are singing about. “How do we say this without giving anything away? The way in which they share their stories of addiction has a way of summoning the worlds they’re talking about,” he says. “The internet comes to them. Their addictions have a way of entering the space, and that changes and morphs over the course of the evening in startling and surprising and sometimes scary ways.”
Miranda won’t say whether he added any additional songs or music to Octet. Doing so might make sense; after all Miranda is just an O shy of the much coveted EGOT. When I ask whether he’s begun thinking about awards season, he laughs—then tells me a story. “Our last day was the outdoor shoot, and it was a night shoot. The last shot of the movie was Gaten, but all seven of the other actors stayed until two in the morning in fucking Yonkers,” says Miranda. “That’s the sign that your cast has really created an incredible bond. They were all wrapped, but they wanted to be there and celebrate together. Something really special happened with those eight, and I can’t wait to hold them up.”
it’s countryside summer and I’m watching insects like I’m Mr Rochester talking to an imaginary Jane, “Janet, Jane! look at what a fine specimen of dragonfly! one does not often see it this side of the Atlantic, effervescent. am I not so smart and attentive, Janet? Jane?”
listening to the lament of the rohirim on repeat like thank god I already got a tattoo for it, or else I’d have to get it again (maybe I should get another)
When I was a little boy, girls used to just do random cartwheels for no reason. Then one day, they stopped. Now that I am a man, no women randomly do cartwheels. This is because society is evil and killed the cartwheel impulse in their soul. They don't even spin horizontally anymore. It's fucked up.
I hate that thing some people do where it's like. "I left my wallet on the table to see if you'd say anything" or "I wanted to see if you'd wash the car if I stopped doing it"
Cause like
I dont know about anyone else
But I am perpetually hovering three inches above the strong subconscious belief that everyone knows what they're doing at all times except me, so if you change your normal patterns and I notice, then I will assume it is an intentional choice with a thought-out plan behind it and I will avoid interfering
And if I don't notice, because I won't, because why would I, because not much bothers me and if you don't say anything to indicate you are bothered then how would I KNOW
the two main misconceptions about Jane Eyre seem to be that 1) she’s your typical straight girl; and 2) she’s a “not like the other girls” girl
Incorrect, she’s in fact a lesbian who happens to be, somewhat begrudgingly, attracted to one single man, Mr Rochester. This phenomenon is not unheard of.
The one time Mr Rochester talks about her in this way, sirens go off in Jane’s head. She loves and admires and wants to be like 70% of the women she’s met, and pities the women Mr Rochester despises, knowing it was not for any fault of their own (other than being human)
It came to me in a dream the question, “why did Mr Rochester not tell Jane everything from the start?”, followed by the answer, “he wanted to make sure he’d die before she did”. I woke up trying to make sense of it - there’s no mystery that he hid everything for fear of losing her, so why had my dream insisted on it?
I reread then chapters 26-27 and was amused at Mr Rochester’s claim that, when he set out to find a wife in Europe, his original plan was to find such a woman that he could love and that would hear his story and understand that he was not indeed married, accepting his proposal. He does not explain to Jane why he took a different approach with her - self-explanatory, he could see from the start that Jane would not accept it. And then I started noticing how, despite his behaviour, speeches, and self-affirmations negating his married state, deep down he is a great prude. Like Jane notices, his “you’re different from other women” talk just pointed how, in the future, she’d be paired with the rest of them should she do what they did - be with him without the sacrament of marriage. I used to think that he was disregarding the seriousness with which Jane took religion because it did not matter to him, and so, he was justified in lying to her because her concerns were of an irrelevant nature anyway. I used to think that this minimisation of what was grave to Jane was his biggest fault. What the dream opened the door for me to see was the depth in which religion mattered to Mr Rochester too, in a subconscious level. Then it began seeming to me that he did not tell Jane from the first not for fear of losing her person, but for fear of losing her soul. Perceiving her “purity”, and admiring it, rather than dismissing it, to tell her everything would be to make her complicit and, thus, a heretic - for going against the church knowingly. Her soul would be lost even before his own. Not telling her, however, he made sure she’d not be guilty of heresy, since the misinformed are not at fault. Like this, I started seeing Mr Rochester’s omissions and lies less like the cruelty of one who doesn’t really care about the other, and more like a result of his own internal conflicts and self-illusions about what religion meant to him.
The impulse not to tell Jane from the beginning, then, when previously he had made up his mind to be completely open with whatever woman he chose, says less about his impression of Jane, and more about his internal, subconscious judgement of himself. Faced with love for her, he couldn’t kill her soul. That is, until despair made him attempt to kill it anyway. This reading also paves a clearer path for his reform at the end, and I would think that having been forced to do what his subconscious had told him would be the greatest crime, ended up being the main catalyst for his change and sacrifice at the end.
It came to me in a dream the question, “why did Mr Rochester not tell Jane everything from the start?”, followed by the answer, “he wanted to make sure he’d die before she did”. I woke up trying to make sense of it - there’s no mystery that he hid everything for fear of losing her, so why had my dream insisted on it?
I reread then chapters 26-27 and was amused at Mr Rochester’s claim that, when he set out to find a wife in Europe, his original plan was to find such a woman that he could love and that would hear his story and understand that he was not indeed married, accepting his proposal. He does not explain to Jane why he took a different approach with her - self-explanatory, he could see from the start that Jane would not accept it. And then I started noticing how, despite his behaviour, speeches, and self-affirmations negating his married state, deep down he is a great prude. Like Jane notices, his “you’re different from other women” talk just pointed how, in the future, she’d be paired with the rest of them should she do what they did - be with him without the sacrament of marriage. I used to think that he was disregarding the seriousness with which Jane took religion because it did not matter to him, and so, he was justified in lying to her because her concerns were of an irrelevant nature anyway. I used to think that this minimisation of what was grave to Jane was his biggest fault. What the dream opened the door for me to see was the depth in which religion mattered to Mr Rochester too, in a subconscious level. Then it began seeming to me that he did not tell Jane from the first not for fear of losing her person, but for fear of losing her soul. Perceiving her “purity”, and admiring it, rather than dismissing it, to tell her everything would be to make her complicit and, thus, a heretic - for going against the church knowingly. Her soul would be lost even before his own. Not telling her, however, he made sure she’d not be guilty of heresy, since the misinformed are not at fault. Like this, I started seeing Mr Rochester’s omissions and lies less like the cruelty of one who doesn’t really care about the other, and more like a result of his own internal conflicts and self-illusions about what religion meant to him.
The impulse not to tell Jane from the beginning, then, when previously he had made up his mind to be completely open with whatever woman he chose, says less about his impression of Jane, and more about his internal, subconscious judgement of himself. Faced with love for her, he couldn’t kill her soul. That is, until despair made him attempt to kill it anyway. This reading also paves a clearer path for his reform at the end, and I would think that having been forced to do what his subconscious had told him would be the greatest crime, ended up being the main catalyst for his change and sacrifice at the end.
What’s the main feeling that Andrei’s death gives you?
I was thinking today of its ambivalence. He reached a state of understanding he’d never reached before, he found out how to love. Would he have come to it were it not for the already-present death? An early death was always gonna be his end, but it still comes too soon, too pitiless, a scythe cutting the flower that had only just blossomed after many a winter.
So, what predominates for you? Satisfying character growth, a beautiful realisation of the self, or the final tragedy to a life that could not have ended any other way, tragic in how it came precisely when it should not, when he knew now what to do (did he)? (Remembering as a curiosity that Tolstoy had planned for him to die back in Austerlitz)
Is it Kate Bush’s “The Morning Fog”, or is it One Hundred Years of Solitude’s “races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth”?
The Morning Fog, lyrics:
The light
Begin to bleed
Begin to breathe
Begin to speak
D'you know what?
I love you better now
I am falling
Like a stone
Like a storm
Being born again
Into the sweet morning fog
D'you know what?
I love you better now
I'm falling
And I'd love to hold you know
I'll kiss the ground
I'll tell my mother
I'll tell my father
I'll tell my loved one
I'll tell my brothers
How much I love them
what does your soul say?
the morning fog
races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportun-
i feel like people always say dostoyevsky is really depressing compared to like, tolstoy. and i gotta wonder if we’re reading the same books. dostoyevsky will throw together the darkest plot points and conditions of the human soul to create like a verbal cathedral of light that shows you love is still real and good and beautiful and it can save you while tolstoy will take beautiful people and scenes and shatter everything to show you that everything is empty and you can only grasp at an ultimately fleeting and intangible meaning. idk i feel like dostoyesvky is not the depressing one here
it truly is the 26yo Prince Myshkin, to the 27yo “I have no money and no prospects, I am already a burden to my family, and I am frightened”, to the “Mrs Tilford, at 28, do you spend your life with other people’s children? No new clothes, working every night, nothing to look forward to but a summer vacation with Karen Wright?” pipeline for me, I’m afraid
but what if Dave Malloy composes a new song about AI for the octet movie and it wins the Oscar for best original song, what then (will the great comet come back???)
”He felt her tremble, and then under his hands the delicate bones of her back began to rise and fall and he heard her sob quietly”
like we all talk about the atoms speech but the way how it’s followed by them talking about the 1st time they met and mocking each other and then this. All within one single page. I never recovered and feel it in my skin constantly.
[It is evident that there is no end to the wicked imaginings of heretics and the blasphemous accounts they give of supposed ‘other worlds’.
There can be no compromise with heresy. It is to be extirpated wherever it is found, even in the mouths of babes and sucklings.
The magisterium has suffered reverses in recent times because of internal rivalries and arguments, some of them amounting almost to heresy themselves, and all detrimental to the great work. It is time to come together in a holy purpose and unite all our efforts under one banner. It is time for a holy war. Brother L]
The long baseline neutrino experiment in Chicago/Minnesota. A 130km beam sounds a lot but supposing they went right through the earth for 11,000km or so—to Australia or New Zealand—what is the diameter? Something like that—the DAQ system could serve the near and the far detectors in exactly the same way as it does for the MINOS project and dammit with all that magma and stuff in the way they’re bound to knock out a few more neutrinos even if those little monkeys are as slippery as they seem to be. I bet they could collim line it up if they wanted to.
Oh by the way I’ve found a new flat. Just a step from the lab—couldn’t be better—nice old lady owns the house—quiet, near the parks. Address as this letter. Spare room. Come and stay!
