Wesley: Perhaps the whole point of this experiment is hair. Gunn: I vote he's not in charge.

'The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco'


Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


beth b - Mar 05, 2010 10:01:37 am PST #11071 of 28348
oh joy! Oh Rapture ! I have a brain!

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls. Good book


Frankenbuddha - Mar 05, 2010 10:01:57 am PST #11072 of 28348
"We are the Goon Squad and we're coming to town...Beep! Beep!" - David Bowie, "Fashion"

There's also To Be or Not to Be, one of the few Jack Benny movies (and the woeful Mel Brooks remake).


-t - Mar 05, 2010 10:03:44 am PST #11073 of 28348
I am a woman of various inclinations and only some of the time are they to burn everything down in frustration

Infinite Jest, I suppose.


JZ - Mar 05, 2010 10:07:30 am PST #11074 of 28348
See? I gave everybody here an opportunity to tell me what a bad person I am and nobody did, because I fuckin' rule.

and the woeful Mel Brooks remake

Though I have a small soft spot even for that - I saw a short Mel Brooks TV biography right after the remake came out. In one scene, he sat in a screening room and played the bit where he and Anne Bancroft sing "Sweet Georgia Brown" together, and he talked about watching the rushes from the first couple of days of filming and boggling all over again at how gifted and extraordinarily beautiful and elegant she was, and how he'd never known just how great her singing voice was, and how nobody would ever believe someone like her could play the wife of someone like him in a movie. He was just moony over her beauty, and agog at her talent, and awestruck that out of all the people in the world she'd chosen him as her life partner.


Polter-Cow - Mar 05, 2010 10:08:37 am PST #11075 of 28348
What else besides ramen can you scoop? YOU CAN SCOOP THIS WORLD FROM DARKNESS!

What was the name of the Doctor Who ep with Shakespeare? That was great, with the Doctor and Martha dropping Shakespearean quotes, and Shakespeare saying "That's good--I'll have to borrow that one!"

"The Shakespeare Code."

Neither a borrower nor a lender be

Wiess College at Rice puts on Hello, Hamlet! every four years. It's a hilarious musical with filked versions of showtunes like "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Ophelia?" And Polonius has a song that begins something like this:

Climb every mountain
Cross every sea
Neither a borrower
Nor a lender be

The production they put on while I was there was so great I saw it twice. They included Statler and Waldorf puppets.


ChiKat - Mar 05, 2010 10:30:05 am PST #11076 of 28348
That man was going to shank me. Over an omelette. Two eggs and a slice of government cheese. Is that what my life is worth?

Opera and ballet versions of Otello, Romeo & Juliet.

Buffy! We few, we happy few. We band of buggered.

Kiss Me, Kate

A bunch of tween/teen plays:A Midsummer Night's Midterm; Omelette, Chef of Denmark; Romeo & Harriet; Romeo & Winifred; Shakespeare's Inferno; The Taming of Katy Lou; The Taming of LaRue

Prospero's Books


Barb - Mar 05, 2010 10:33:33 am PST #11077 of 28348
“Not dead yet!”

Oh, a middle grade book, A Girl Named Hamlet.


DavidS - Mar 05, 2010 10:36:47 am PST #11078 of 28348
"Look, son, if it's good enough for Shirley Bassey, it's good enough for you."

Most excellent suggestions.

(None of you mentioned Wise Children by Angela Carter, though. C'mon! I left that one sitting right there for you.)

Any other songs which do more than just allude to a line but rather examine a character or scene?

Peter Brooks most famous productions were on my mind, but I'd also include the Comedy of Errors with the Flying Karamazov Brothers that played once on PBS. (It can't be released because of rights issues but it was on YouTube last I checked.)

Another notable performance (for me at least) is Ian McKellen reciting Sonnet XX (the gay sex one!) backed by a rock band (The Fuzztones playing in the style of the VU) on Andy Warhol's cable access show, on Valentine's Day. It's awesome. Also it's up at Buffistarawk if anybody needs it.

How about other poets specifically going back to Shakespeare like Keat's "Before re-reading Lear."

Oh look! There's a King-Lear.org! Heh.


Toddson - Mar 05, 2010 10:37:49 am PST #11079 of 28348
Friends don't let friends read "Atlas Shrugged"

Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres was, indeed, a take on King Lear and the movie followed fairly closely.

And in The Goodbye Girl, Richard Dreyfuss is playing Richard III (in a very , um, ODD production).

And there was Ian McKellan's own version of Richard III, done as a fascist state.

Peter Brook's Midsummer Night's Dream

I saw it ... and have fond memories of it.


Dana - Mar 05, 2010 10:39:07 am PST #11080 of 28348
I'm terrifically busy with my ennui.

Natalie Merchant's "Ophelia"? That's more a metaphor, though.