mu

A perfectly nice girl. Historical RPF 'n' stuff, would prefer if minors didn't follow me

[muined]

It's been several years since I made this but I still like it!

[muined]

The Death of Stalin is a wish-fulfillment fantasy about what if there was a group of nice established older folks who wanted to help out with elder care and estate planning? Wouldn't that be cool

[muined]

Best of my own 2021 Catch-22 liveblog

[laughlaughatme42]

[muined]

Chapter 29

"Well, it's pride month, Danby. I expect you know what that means."

"Do...do you want us to create a gay roadblock, Colonel?"

[cctinsleybaxter]

seasonal comic

[cctinsleybaxter]

Top five celeb teeth. Sets of teeth, that is. Y'know, chompers

I've never thought about this in my life.

[muined]

Not to be presumptuous, but I think he has thought about it ATP

[muined]

Environmental storytelling

[muined]

Another fun(?) Death of Stalin fact: we can see in footage and photos from Stalin's funeral that the real Vasily Stalin didn't have a mustache at that time, but he seems to have grown one at some point during his seven-year prison term (1953-1960):

[muined]

your svetlana and beria fic had genuinely altered my brain chemistry a few years ago... just reread it because of my "twenty letters to a friend" uni assignment, and it hit me as hard as it did back then. you nailed svetlana's complex character spectacularly well, and i cannot help but feel for her. my setanka! :(

Thank you so much! I feel lucky to have received a lot of thoughtful and kind comments on that fic over the years - despite it being pretty out there. The movie just provides such a good jumping-off point for fic, because, like, what exactly was the intention of the Svetlana/Beria/Kapler subplot...? What was meant to be conveyed about these characters...?

I recently came across a 2019 novel called Red Daughter which covers some of the same territory as my fic - the author trying to imagine what it would be like to have Lavrenti Beria as a Friend Of The Family, a constant presence in one's childhood. (The script for tDoS actually goes so far as to define Beria as Vasily's godfather, which has no historical basis but does sorta describe the dynamic.) Anyway, this book, Red Daughter by John Burnham Schwartz:

There's some evocative sensory details here, but why is Beria, like, beefing with this nine year old? Why is he plotting on her downfall? He's comically sinister like this throughout the novel. I get what the author is doing - he's trying to explain why Svetlana has so much venom for Beria, individually, in Twenty Letters and Only One Year.

WHICH makes me really appreciate Iannucci & Schneider's characterization choices in The Death of Stalin, because they're a *better* explanation of why Svetlana singles Beria out as uniquely evil, in her memoirs - she was genuinely closer to Beria than to the other ministers, so she felt deeply betrayed upon...finding out more about his character. Felt more motivated to condemn him. In the film, she, like, doesn't entirely trust him, but still finds him more tolerable to be around than the other ministers, because of their shared aversion to bullshitting, share forthrightness, shared outward cynicism. She looks to him when reacting to nonsense playing out in front of her. It's crack to me! I love it!

Here's a photo from one of the Black Sea holidays described in the fic, which really is, like. The Dzhugashvi-lings have chosen their sides in the Abzhazia-Mingrelia conflict. (Scanned from Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, by Miklós Kun)

Further reading: Nami Mikoyan, daughter of Terror-era Kavkaz politician Astashas Geurkov, who ended up marrying into the Mikoyan family, has given several interviews in which she talks about...what it was like to be a kid and hang out with Beria, who was fully getting his Lewis Carroll on.

[corrode-in-repose]

The Death of Stalin, 2017 dir. Armando Iannucci

[muined]

I found the Death of Stalin meeting scene room

[muined]

So, The Death of Stalin (2017): set decorator Charlotte Dirickx, production designer Cristina Casali. I've wanted to write this post about the various ministers' apartments for literal years.

The Khrushchev apartment's kitchen/dining space is dingy, earthy, lived-in - human, in a word. There's discolored wallpaper and fading paint, a half-cut lettuce on the counter, a fly on the bread loaf, and a chess game in progress on the side table. Everything practical, function over form. Rustic. It's just perfect for Khrushchev, and it sorta communicates that Khrushchev's salt-of-the-earth schtick isn't just a gimmick, it's who he really is. I love the touch of the Soviet hammered copper souvenir plate on the wall.

Blue and gold are the main colors - the movie's sets have a cool-lit blue/yellow thing going on in general, to contrast with all the red in the foreground. The *characters* in the film with a blue/gold color scheme going on are Maria Yudina and Zhukov! I don't think this was necessarily intended, but the color language here foreshadows Khrushchev's entanglement with both of them, or something?

Molotov's apartment is characterized by hard, cold, green tile - queasy green bathroom, somber green marble floors. The foyer is dominated by a desk; Molotov, a bachelor since Polina was imprisoned, lives for his work. It's dark, with no windows that we can see. Molotov has successfully shut himself off from the outside world, detached himself from reality. As for the decor - between that fabulous pendant shade and the picture frame, at least to my eye it leans sort of artsy and cute. That's Polina's modishness, presumably, and/or the lovable quirkiness that Michael Palin brings to Molotov. He's scarier for it, in the end.

Beria has a townhouse, and it's spacious, bright and well-appointed, with a lot of antiques including Georgian touches like the Khevsurian swords hanging in the guest room (pointed toward the guest, lol, poor doomed Vasily - "I sometimes wonder if he's meant for this world")

The hallway is stark white, in literal contrast to the dimly lit and cramped apartments of the other ministers. Tasteful and a little clinical, museumish. Unlike the others, Beria doesn't care about playing at proletarian - he wants to show his status. The clean whiteness of it speaks to secrecy, a hidden life: indeed, twice we see him stay overnight in his "dungeon," and near the end a victim is freed from his secret attic prison. Not a subtle film. Anyway, Svetlana is more or less the only person that Beria bothers hiding his true self around, so it's appropriate that we get to see her in this space curated for guests.

The Lubyanka really is depicted as more a real home for him than his house.

We see what are presumably family photos on Khrushchev and Molotov's walls, but not on Beria's. That makes the exclusion of Beria's wife Nino and son Sergo feel more like a deliberate choice than exclusively a concession to the runtime - I'm not saying this to cry j'accuse at Iannucci and Schneider, clearly, I love this movie more than life, but Beria does end up being a sexual deviant villain without a nuclear family, played rather flamboyantly by a gay actor. That's my fascination with him, I guess.

[muined]

Bonus: Malenkov's apartment, seen very briefly in the Deleted Scenes. We know it's Malenkov's apartment, not Mikoyan's, because the scene is this goofy moment in the script which plays on the fact that Khrushchev and Malenkov lived in the same Granovsky Street apartment block in these years:

So, I'm extrapolating from just the curtains, here, but clearly the earth-toned vertical stripes echo Malenkov's suspenders. I like the consistency of drab earth tones for pre-makeover Malenkov, to contrast with the dazzling white of his later glam look. Pottery Barn-ass curtains. They sorta lead me to imagine that the apartment is a little overdecorated, a little trend-following and matchy-matchy. Also, the wall we see is painted a dark olive green, which we also saw in Khrushchev's bedroom. Maybe the apartments came like that? Presumably it shares the same layout as Khrushchev's apartment.

[muined]

Cathcart

[muined]

Mr. Egoyan, I think you and I understand each other.

[lordansketil]

thank you to @muined for reccing me 'The Old Man and Me' by Elaine Dundy. finally some heterosexual may/december that hits like the finest toxic yaoi

[muined]

It is a PRIVILEGE to be taken up on the rec! I'm so chuffed that you liked it, I love this book so much, and I *do* feel a fannish frisson about the central relationship, which, yeah, is kinda rare for a trad-pub'd novel (from 1964!) that foregrounds a heterosexual love story (of sorts). I think the comparison to toxic yaoi - i.e. a slash ship in which neither characters nor author are trying for delicacy or taste, not trying to *sell you* on the relationship *working* - is apt. The Old Man & Me is free from those constraints. It's such a special depiction of a straight relationship specifically because Dundy does not resort to...cultural shorthand about what a straight woman is supposed to find sexy. She's just incredibly forthright about what this particular woman (and, ahem, the author, considering C.D. is partially inspired by her real affair with Cyril Connolly) is moved by. And the whole book is suffused with this sensuality while being very, very funny.

Or, like, I've phrased it this way before - Honey and C.D. are hitting each other over the head with Looney Toons mallets, strapping each other to rockets, etc. They're doing Tom & Jerry shit to each other, psychologically and physically, throughout the book.

[muined]

There are many good reasons to read Catch-22. Slash fiction is only one of these reasons. But if you're following me and you like slash and you haven't already, please read Catch-22 with shipper's goggles and talk to me about it

[cctinsleybaxter]

Milo/Yossarian Playlist That Causes MORE Psychic Damage

Playlist - Milo/Yossarian Playlist That Causes MORE Psychic Damage - 33 items

In honor of what would have been Joseph Heller's 103rd birthday I bring you a B-side to the infamous playlist of (A)MV-worthy Milo/Yossarian songs. Every single song I left off the original- whether because I forgot, it was too long, I hated it too much, liked it too much, wasn't on my radar, etc.- is here so it's a real slurry, but a somewhat thoughtfully arranged one. Enjoy or don't!

Spotlfy links here and here