douqi: (Default)
There's a phenomenon in at least three major British cities where the gay district is located right next to Chinatown. I mused on this as I finished my breakfast at a Hong Kong-style cafe in Brick Lane and crossed the street to the queer bookshop.

But there, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So despite all my resolutions about not letting work take over my life, work unhinged its jaws wider than I thought them possible and swallowed me whole, and now I'm only just managing to briefly resurface because things have slowed down for Easter. I'm already dreading the return to work next week. Down with capitalism, etc.

ANYWAY I managed to get down to London last week to see Cynthia Erivo's one-woman performance of Dracula and also to eat things. Dracula was fun mostly as a spectacle. I'm not sure it really holds up without that element, especially given the odd decision to have Cynthia Erivo straight-up narrate the letters/diaries from the novel itself instead of adapting them as dialogue.

Perhaps equally (or more) interesting, food pictures (I was mostly hanging out in Brick Lane/Shoreditch, hence the selection).

pictures under the cut )
douqi: (Default)
Am currently watching this random k-drama, mainly because I saw some homophobes getting mad about it. But also its studious avoidance of anything actually queer is colliding in weird and occasionally wonderful ways with, well, the central premise, which has female lead Kim Ji-eun waking up one morning and finding out that she now looks like a strange and objectively very attractive guy (this, so far, has been attributed to very handwavey genetic reasons).

Anyway, in the last episode I watched, Ji-eun's best friend, a webnovelist called Yu-ri (who we're supposed to believe is unattractive, presumably because she wears cute round glasses), has been invited to a Mean Girl frenemy's birthday party, where she gloomily anticipates being the target of pointed remarks about her eternal singleness. Ji-eun (still in attractive guy form) decides to turn up, pretend to be Yu-ri's boyfriend, and help Yu-ri get her ultimate revenge on the Mean Girl frenemy. The writer truly missed a trick by not having Ji-eun snatch a glass of something cold out of Yu-ri's hand and declaring, 'She shouldn't be drinking anything cold this time of the month, do you have any ginger tea with brown sugar?'*

The writer missed an even bigger trick by not making this a (stealth) GL, because Ji-eun's relationship with Yu-ri is currently about ten times more compelling than her relationship with her increasingly tiresome boyfriend.

*The ideal beverage to drink when one is on one's period, according to a whole shedload of c-media.
douqi: (Default)
I just think there's no reason why Shakespeare's Richard II couldn't be staged as a drama set in imperial China. It's even got all the son of Heaven stuff in it.
Page generated Apr. 11th, 2026 10:50 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios