TBQ Tumbles

[darcylightninglewis]

The MET Gala is a fundraiser for The Met. Putting on the fashion exhibition is VERY costly. Has the politics, inflation, and bullshit gotten out of hand? Yeah. To give you an idea of how much this can cost, the collection I work for has 2 gowns from 1798 & 1809 currently being conserved and had mounts made for them so displaying them wouldn’t cause further damage. They were already in a solid B shape and cost more than 50k to conserve so the public can view them for 5 months each. They will then be reboxed (archival tissue and box) for a minimum of 10 years before they’re considered to be seen again. Oh, and archival material only lasts 10 years before it has to be replaced, whether or not it’s being considered for display.

Don’t like the gala? Support local museums with a textile or fashion collection, they get fractions of the revenue or publicity, and still aim to achieve a solid fraction of what the MET does. More collections are deaccessioning their textiles because they’re costly to maintain, large and need space. However, after big names artists like Van Gogh, Botticelli or da Vinci they get the most interest in from the public. The study of clothing is an opportunity to shine light on women & minority stories as well. Don’t let the fact that some of the guests suck and have more money than any of them need take away the importance of museums and dress study.

[victusinveritas]

Like this sort of thing? Follow sluttyprimarysource on Threads and think about reading Consider the Fork by Bee Wilson.

[thestuffedalligator]

I’m going to level with you. I have listened to The Devil Went Down to Georgia for most of my life. We were a country music household, this was a staple of my childhood along with Johnny Cash, Garth Brooks, and that one Chipmunks country album.

I have no idea what “Fire on the mountain run boys run/The Devil's in the house of the rising sun/Chicken in the bread pan picking out dough/Granny does your dog bite no child no” means and at this point I’m too scared to ask.

[dementian]

For once I can be of assistance.

Each of the lyrics comes from an old-time hickory song for fiddles, and is a lyric from that corresponding song.

"Fire on the Mountain" --> "Fire on the Mountain, run boys run"

Fire On The Mountain - Fiddle Player POV

"The House of the Rising Sun" --> "The Devil's in the house of the rising sun"

House of the Rising Sun

"Ida Red" --> "Chicken in the bread pan peckin' out dough"

Ida Red - Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys

"Granny Will Your Dog Bite" --> "Granny does your dog bite? 'No child, no'."

FTC #149 Granny Will Your Dog Bite

And for your furthered education, The Mountain Whipporwill.

Mountain Whippoorwill (aka How Hillbilly Jim Won the Great Fiddler's Prize)

[impossiblepackage]

this is the key part of the song, that a lot of people miss. people have this misconception that the contest between Johnny and The Devil is about who is the better fiddle player. but it isn't. its about who is the better fiddler.

in a time before things like radios and record players, every time you heard music was because there was somebody in the room with you playing an instrument. and many, many, many social events involved dancing, which requires music. so, if you're planning any kind of gathering in the american south or appalachia, you need to find a fiddler. and the fiddler's job is to play music that everybody knows and likes and can dance to.

the mistake The Devil makes in his bet with Johnny is that he misinterprets the contest as being about technical ability, so he has this big flashy song. he plays fast and impressively with a band of demons playing unfamiliar instruments in unfamiliar rhythms. he's definitely more skilled at playing than Johnny, and thinks he has it in the bag.

but Johnny wins because the contest is about being the best fiddler. the song uses these lines mentioned above as a shorthand for saying that Johnny is playing these songs. Johnny launches into a set of the most popular songs, played well, and that's what gives him his big win. A good fiddler knows all the hits, and can read the room to know what to play next. The Devil loses because he completely fails to read the room, and doesn't know the right songs.

[seralicetarrant]

It's likewise that the Devil's approach tags him as an outsider. Southerners are famously distrustful of anyone who arrives announcing they know better.

[tbqtalks]

Now keep this in mind the next time you watch Sinners.

[dropoutsource]

Jack Skellington stumbles into Pi Day Town

[romanceyourdemons]

interview with the vampire, the novel, treats homosexuality in a pretty bog standard way for 70s american media—a grotesquerie too unseemly to be addressed by name, whose practitioners are either helpless but still disgusting victims who rightfully want to die to kill the disease inside of them, or gauche, subhuman predators who reach grisly ends as a result of their perversion. it goes through the homophobic traits noted in chapter three of the celluloid closet like a checklist. and then not that long later the vampire lestat has a completely revised view of homosexuality, treating gayness and gay relationships with a kind of clumsy, eager voyeurism, titillation where before there was only artistry and disgust. something happened between 1976 and 1985 that resulted in anne rice’s fujoshi awakening

[romanceyourdemons]

was it star trek ii: the wrath of khan (1982)

[thevictrola]

It was likely the birth of her gay son Christopher in 1978.

[helloitsbees]

you’re suggesting that he came out of the womb and then immediately came out as gay

[oldtvandcomics]

No, only after watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982).

[tbqtalks]

Okay dusting off the cobwebs again:

First, Anne had an on again/off again relationship with Catholicism which directly influenced how comfortable she was with homosexuality in her novels. If you want to judge how it showed up in her writing, that's your touchstone first and foremost before anything else.

Second, it is a crime that newbie fans were not there for the glory of finding out that when Chris came out to her her response - which they talked about publicly in the media mind you - was "Are you sure you want to be gay? Read my book, Cry to Heaven."

"Read my book, Cry to Heaven!" was a meme for the ages back in ye olde VampChron fandom days, lemme tell ya.

Now back to my porch with my tea.

[bleachersgirl]

[july-19th-club]

it's a historic townhouse! new orleans famously floods and its gravesites suffer all kinds of turbulence! they literally did a whole documentary about this; they carbon dated the remains and they'd been there since at least the nineteen twenties, if not earlier. the running theory was that the neighborhood was built on an existing unmarked gravesite, or perhaps that the original owner ran a mortuary (because of the cremation oven). the vampire thing is a shtick. you don't have to like him or his music or his annoying habit of roping respected journalists into his over-the-top antics (although personally i think it's all delicious and his cover of concrete blonde's 'bloodletting' that they used in the doc is a must listen) but...you really think a man born in 1986 did this? be serious

[tbqtalks]

Again the things that get me out of lurking. I try to take a "You kids just have fun" approach to VampChron fandom these days. And I love what the new VampChron fandom is doing with pretending Lestat is real but y'all are killing me with the lack of basic New Orleans knowledge. Let your fandom elder help you out here:

"The neighborhood was built on an existing unmarked gravesite" - the neighborhood is the French Quarter which is the original city of New Orleans. There has been rebuilding since the city's start due to fires, but absolutely nobody would go "Gosh, what the heck was here before?" because the answer is, depending on the specific address, either "The previous building(s) that burnt down" or "The native villages that were here before the French" or "Fuck all else because this is swampland." There's no version of this where locals would wonder what had been there before. That'd be like you wondering was was in your sock drawer before you put socks in it.

We then get into "unmarked gravesite" which is also not a thing because New Orleans (as we define its geographic borders today) is below sea level. Now then, the French Quarter itself is a whopping six feet above sea level which is among the reasons why Bienville ignored everything remotely looking like common sense and said "Hey, this would be a super great place to build a city which won't ever suffer any problems from being in the middle of fuck all swampland at all!"

But that six feet above, much though it is by the standards of New Orleans nosebleed inducing high altitude, doesn't mean they would have buried bodies there in graves unmarked or otherwise because burying requires having dirt you can put stuff in. Which you cannot do in fuck all swampland because the ground is water. Nothing gets buried, up to and including tree roots which either hug the surface level of the ground or just give the fuck up and grow into the air because they have more common sense than certain French brothers did when looking for, as aforementioned, a great place to put a city.

And part of the reason why you know they didn't bury people underground in the Quarter, in addition to "No, really, we know what was here before because it wasn't fucking much" is that there's the giant fucking cemetery a few short blocks away from Louis and Lestat's flat. You know, the one they included multiple times in the show? The one with all the above ground graves? Yeah. Nobody's putting a house on a graveyard in the Quarter because there were none. You need dirt for that.

Finally, in what part of me almost doesn't want to tell you guys because you deserve the joy of discovering this on your own but on the other hand hey the show's been out for a while now and apparently you haven't found it yet so here ya go, have a Mardi Gras present: The final reason why nobody would scratch their heads at the discovery of bodies around Louis and Lestat's place is that they lived next door to the LaLauries. As in the real world place where actual bodies were found in their house. The joke in original book fandom was that of course Louis and Lestat got away with murder because their next door neighbors were actually worse.

I get that on the show the timeline is moved up but if the idea is "mysteriously discovered bodies" odds are high it's going to be assumed to be spillover from next door.

(All of which doesn't even get into my own personal peeve which is why would Lestat and Louis go through that much trouble when the Mississippi is RIGHT THERE and you could chuck an entire navy fleet of bodies into it and nobody would ever find them again but WHATEVER nobody asked me.)

(Ahem.)

Anyway, love y'all, glad you're having fun, and if you need help knowing how to write about New Orleans and Louisiana without giving away that you don't know anything about it, I did this writeup for Falcon and the Winter Soldier fans that applies for you guys too. I haven't looked but something tells me there's way too many hills (ie any) in your stories ;)

[redstonedust]

watching sinners with an inflation calculator open in a second tab so i can understand just what kinda money the smokestack twins are throwing around. nerdiest possible movie experience i think.

[tbqtalks]

Okay coming out of lurking for this because among the many great features of Sinners is you don't actually have to go outside of the movie to understand what kind of money they're throwing around. The movie tells you itself.

In the scene where Smoke teaches the young girl how to negotiate, they're standing in front of of a cafe. The shot of them negotiating is framed so that you see a sign in the cafe window advertising a Ham and Eggs breakfast - in other words, a full meal - for 25 cents. The editing makes sure to put that sign back into frame whenever the question of the value of money arises in their discussion.

Smoke offers her 10 cents a minute and asks if that works for her. She says yes. He says no, it does not and tells her to negotiate higher. The 25 cent sign is framed in the shot when he tells her no, reminding us *why* it's not a good value.

She comes back with 50 cents - which the sign has informed us is the cost of *two* meals. Smoke tells her that's too much and counters with 20, which is just under a full meal but we now know that's a fairly respectable price because we just got the high/low contrast of 10 being too little and 50 being too much.

The negotiation ends with her getting 20 cents per minute and we now know 1) 25 cents is the cost of a filling meal in this environment 2) This girl only needs to do five minutes of work to be able to feed herself for a over day (20 cents per minute times five is a dollar, which is four meals) 3) Smoke has the kind of money to throw around that over a day's worth of food for someone can be to him - as it is to our modern eyes - mere pocket change and 4) Smoke's the kind of person who can both be a violent gangster but also care about teaching this girl how to look out for herself so that one day maybe she too can throw over a day's worth of food around like pocket change.

Combined with 5) you can now use that 25 cents = a meal to do the math every other time money gets mentioned in the movie to understand just how much cash the Smoke Stack boys are dealing with.

And that's just ONE detail which, thanks to props (Hannah Beachler), editing (Michael P Shawver), and cinematography (Autumn Durald Arkapaw), told you almost everything you needed to know about how finances work in this environment. This movie is unfair to all other films in how fucking good it is.

[tiktoks-for-dead-pope]

[talesfromthecrypts]

Some things just so y’all are clear:

Anne Rice was not against fanfiction cause of gay sex. That is a bad game of tumblr telephone

The books have always been queer. Louis and Lestat are explicitly in love and kiss often

The last book ends with them explicitly endgame romantic

Anne Rice wrote a marriage between Louis and Lestat when gay marriage was legalized in the US

The main reason for the fanfic thing was that one of her books (I think it was Merrick?) was going to be released digital only in 2000 and her publishers told her fanfic would ruin the sales of her book

The show was produced by her and written long before her death so she isn’t “rolling in her grave”. She was an erotic novelist haha

[tbqtalks]

Whelp, let me dust off the ol' Tumblr since this is going around. Speaking as one of FOUR people who got the cease and desist from Anne Rice (we're still around, folks! you can just ask us!) let me clear up a few things here:

Correct it was not because of gay sex.

THE CEASE AND DESIST LETTERS DID NOT COME FROM ANNE'S PUBLISHER. They came from her own attorney. Which I know because I personally knew her attorney as well as many of the folks who worked with Anne in her company Kith & Kin. As such I knew her attorney's name and email address when the C&D came in which is also how I knew it was real.

Fanfic authors actually had a great relationship with Anne's publisher and both I and the keeper of the archive were reached out to by them to help advertise the books. This was part of why the C&Ds came as a shock to the fandom b/c we'd had implicit approval from her publisher going back to approx 1997.

I can't speak to this theory about Merrick going electronic being the cause as AFAIK the first I heard of it was last month when a reporter reached out to me for an interview and asked me about it. Which isn't to say it's wrong but unless somebody has proof (which maybe they do) I'd take that with a huge grain of salt. Especially since -

The C&Ds came October 13, 2000 and Merrick was published January 4, 2000. If Merrick's publication was the issue you'd assume they would have stopped fanfic authors prior to the book coming out, not ten months after.

What I can speak to is that it was part of a years long pattern of Anne suing anybody remotely attempting to do things with her work which coincided with when she got the legal rights back to make money off of it via things like t-shirts and the like. She also used fans as free market research for these projects (which were done via Kith & Kin) and then would shut them down once she had enough proof there was money to be made in it. Look up what happened to Talismanic Tours for the best example.

There were four people who got the first round of C&D letters from Anne's lawyer. FOUR. It was a small fandom and we all knew each other. There may have been others who came after us but side eye anybody who claims they were in that first round because it is a weird ass attempt at fannish fame.

I'm only here because a friend gave me a heads up about this so any replies I'm not going to see. But if you want to follow me around the internet I do have a newsletter so hey, come see me talk about things including probably the IWTV show once I get around to watching it!

https://www.tbqtalks.com/

[tbqtalks]

Loki Episode 3 Analysis: Lamentis

Loki's third episode gives fans of the character almost everything they could want but how does it do in terms of advancing the series? I talk about that as well as share a glimpse into corners of the internet that I am not going to be alone in knowing about and you can't make me.

Check it out at the link.

[tbqtalks]

Analysis on Loki episode 2: The Variant. Talking about what is the show trying to accomplish and what THAT reveal might mean for both the series and the greater MCU. Check it out.

[tbqtalks]

The success of In the Heights and a dive into how the history of Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jon M. Chu, and Christopher Scott help make the translation from stage to screen work so well. Read all about it here.

[tbqtalks]

The show's deft handling of reintroducing characters, how does it handle the issue of time travel, and speculation about whodunit. Read all about it here.

[fish-to-male]

one day some of you will actually go outside and go to pride and you’re going to meet old black queens who refers to themselves as femme, you’ll meet people from small towns who still use the word transsexual, you’ll see that your local activist organization set up a stall about your local LGBT history that includes leather bar’s history, you’ll see lesbians in groups refer to themselves as “guys” and “boys”, you’ll see someone with breasts and pasties and little else have “he / him” painted on his chest, and you’ll be so caught up with your terminally online attitude that instead of appreciating the wide diversity of people who exist in the LGBT community who are brave enough to share themselves you’ll just be formulating posts and tweets in your head for when get home about how “problematic” it all was and it’s honestly tragic

[saturnialsapphic]

Once, back when I worked in an LGBTQIA dungeon, I encountered a significantly older person who remarked to me that they hadn’t been to “this type of place” in decades. They struck up a conversation with me and told me how amazing it was to see an openly transexual youth such as myself. I asked them about their experiences with gender and they said “oh, well, I’m a bit male and a bit female. Men’s and women’s clothes, sometimes makeup in a suit, sometime fresh faced in a dress when I’m at home. You know, bisexual” Obv this puzzled me at first until I realized this person was using bisexual in a very, very, literal and old fashioned sense, as in, dual-sexed. Non-binary.

Y’all gotta understand there are generation gaps in the language we use and you open yourself up to a LOT of very interesting stories if you stop blocking off the past.

[tbqtalks]

Educated guesses and wishes about what the first season of Loki the series will include. (Spoilers for comic storylines)

[tbqtalks]

Is a Psychiatric Service Dog right for you? Read all about the good and bad aspects of working with a Psychiatric Service Dog to help mitigate symptoms of mental illnesses such as Depression and Anxiety.

[tbqtalks]

The Nevers says goodbye to Joss but doesn't give enough of a sign of removing his influence to make a strong recommendation on if it's worth watching. Read more at the link: https://tbqtalks.ghost.io/the-nevers-i-watched-the-first-six-episodes-so-you-dont-have-to/