dancefloorlandmine: Pink and blue neon-style lettering of 'The 80s Night' (80sNight)
dancefloorlandmine ([personal profile] dancefloorlandmine) wrote2025-07-26 08:47 pm
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[DJing/Setlist] The 80s Night, Friendship A.R.C., Whitby, Mon 28th Apr 2025

Having been required through force of circumstances to find a new venue and, as a result of Whitby's shortage of venues, a new day, too, Kat, Jaye, and I were running the night on a Monday for the first time. And also on the other side of the river for the first time, in the welcoming embrace of the Friendship Amateur Rowing Club (one of Whitby's two ARCs, which are confusingly close to each other). Some way up the cobbles of Church Street, and through a subtle doorway. A combination of April, Monday, and the new venue conspired to result in lower numbers, but those there seemed to have a good time.

The playlist is below ...

The 80s Night (1900-2300) )

Next event is Monday 3rd November, again at the Friendship ARC on Church Street.
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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-25 09:48 am

Monthly culture, June 2025

07JUN25: Siena: the Rise of Painting 1300-1350 -- National Gallery
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12JUN25: In Her Place (Alberdi, 2024) -- Netflix
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14JUN25: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare / Hytner) -- Bridge Theatre
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19JUN25: Sparks -- Eventim Apollo
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20JUN25: Fiddler on the Roof (Bock / Harnick) -- Barbican Theatre
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Also a round of appointments with spine consultant, culminating in aspiration of an L5 synovial cyst and a bracing dose of steroid nerve block.
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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-25 09:48 am
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2025/114: The Scandalous Letters of V and J — Felicia Davin

2025/114: The Scandalous Letters of V and J — Felicia Davin
...on the way over Aunt S said, “The people we’re about to meet may tell you shocking things about me.”
“Shocking things like how you’ve aided your niece-nephew in perverting the social order and defying nature itself?” I asked.
“Oh, is that what you’re doing?” Aunt S said. “The social order seems intact to me. And if it’s your goal to defy nature, you might have to put in a bit more work.” [p. 172]

A young person -- 'I'd rather be Victor than Victorine' -- is evicted from the family home, and moves to Paris with their Aunt Sophie. In a run-down boarding house they encounter art student Julien, who is also Julie and who doesn't want to be trapped into being 'one or the other when I've always been both'. 

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-23 07:38 am
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2025/113: Emperor's Wrath — Kai Butler

2025/113: Emperor's Wrath — Kai Butler
The sky was blue, and three ravens sat on the wall above me, each looking deeply judgmental.
“Poor showing,” Terror said.
“Is this really the one we’re putting our faith in?” Dawn asked.
“I ate the mother mouse,” Ratcatcher said. “Haven’t had time to tell you yet.” [loc. 2302]

Second in the 'Emperor's Assassin' series, which I discovered while reading this volume is a trilogy with the finale due in autumn 2025 (aargh). Airón and Tallu are married, and Airón is beginning to understand Tallu's plan -- and the fate awaiting the last Emperor.Read more... )

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-22 07:10 am
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2025/112: Betrothed to the Emperor — Kai Butler

2025/112: Betrothed to the Emperor — Kai Butler
I felt as taut as a bowstring pulled, ready to release the arrow and realizing that I had to build the target I needed to hit. [loc. 1690]

Airón, prince of the Northern Empire, has been raised as an assassin: his twin sister Eonai is to marry the Emperor of the fearsome Imperium, after which Airón will kill his new brother-in-law. He doesn't expect to survive, but the Imperium must be destroyed. Except it all goes horribly wrong when Eonai and Airón are presented to Tallu, 'a viper' reportedly responsible for the deaths of his parents and younger sibling. Because Tallu decides that he will, instead, marry Airón...

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-21 08:56 am
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2025/111: Return to the Enchanted Island — Johary Ravaloson, translated by Allison M Charette

2025/111: Return to the Enchanted Island — Johary Ravaloson (translated by Allison M. Charette)
He got sent to a cell... went before the judge, did three months of community service at the Garches hospital, was all the same spared extradition—a random impulse would never extinguish his luck.[p. 96]

Translated from the French, this novel is the first I have read by a Malagasy author. It interweaves Malagasy heritage and history with the story of Ietsy Razak, privileged son of a wealthy family, named after the 'first man' in Malagasy myth. Read more... )

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-18 08:40 am
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Friday Five!

5. Name five favorite movies.
- Amadeus
- Kind Hearts and Coronets
- Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
- Inception
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier

4. Name four areas of interest you became interested in after you were done with your formal education.
- Ancient Greek culture
- Music theory
- archaeology
- linguistics

3. Name three things you would change about this world.
- anyone hurting someone else non-consensually would feel the same pain
- no hoards over $1 billion.
- discovery of permanent solution to anthropogenic climate change

2. Name two of your favorite childhood toys.
- Escape from Colditz board game (endless games of this the winter my mother was in hospital)
- Martini, a small yellow plush rabbit (who now lives in a basket on my top shelf)

1. Name one person you could be handcuffed to for a full day.
Ewwww, people....
- Penelope of Ithaca (yes, I know she's long dead, that's the point).
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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-18 08:28 am
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2025/110: Mythica — Emily Hauser

2025/110: Mythica — Emily Hauser
It’s also cuttingly symbolic of our hunt for Late Bronze Age women that the eponymous lions of the Lion Gate have been systematically misgendered as male – when they’re actually a fierce and gorgeous pair of female lions. (If you visit Mycenae, I encourage you to annoy as many people as you can by pointing out that this is, in fact, the ‘Lioness Gate’.) [loc. 5624]

An examination of the role of women in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, and in the wider realm of Greek myth. In her introduction, Emily Hauser says she's exploring 'what new discoveries about the real women of history can do to help us understand Homer – not what Homer can tell us about the Late Bronze Age' [loc. 819]. And she points out that, although women are treated as secondary, as property, as lesser, they are essential to the stories. The Iliad begins with two men quarrelling over an enslaved woman (Briseis): the Odyssey ends with Odysseus going home (via Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa) to Penelope.

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-17 08:12 am
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2025/109: 1983 — Tom Cox

2025/109: 1983 — Tom Cox
At the end of the day, when the shops closed, the city felt like the bottom of a glass that too many people had been drinking from. [loc. 1830]

Set in a village on the outskirts of Nottingham ('the UK city where you're statistically most likely to be assaulted by a stranger') in the early Eighties, this is the story of Benji, an only child aged seven, who spends his time playing with the ZX Spectrum at school, building a nuclear fallout shelter in the woods, listening to The Teardrop Explodes and waiting for the aliens to come and return him to his home planet. (He glimpsed the aliens, which can shapeshift, during a hospital stay some years earlier.) 

Benji's parents are outsiders in the village, due to their Penguin paperbacks and modern jazz records, despite his dad having been born less than ten miles away. Benji, though he has plenty of friends and is happy at school, is a bit of an outsider too. He is aware of, though doesn't understand, the sense of social change and industrial decay, the rise of Thatcherism and the rage of the underclass.

But that's an undercurrent, considerably less foregrounded than the crew of shapeshifting aliens from the planet Vozkoz, who need to abduct a particular human whose essence is the only thing that can save their world. Another plot thread involves neighbour Colin, who builds robots out of scrap and whom Benji is convinced (after research conducted with the library's microfiche archive) is actually Bruce Lacey, as featured in the Fairport Convention song 'Mr Lacey'. (You can hear the robots at around the 2-minute mark in that video.)

Intercut with Benji's narrative are various uncaptioned photographs, and diverse other voices: Benji's parents, a headmistress, Benji's cousin, an alpaca, Colin, a drunken fuckwit, some daffodils... All contribute something to the story, though it's Benji's voice, and the events of that one year, that pull it all together. I enjoyed it immensely and nostalgically, and I loved Cox's inventiveness and the discursive winding of the story. The fantastical elements were (mostly*) cleverly woven in and, frankly, made just as much more sense as nuclear war or Margaret Thatcher. And there's a strong sense of affection blooming through the novel: a love of life with all its imperfections.

*I don't believe you could buy six blank cassettes for 49p in 1983, even in Nottinghamshire.

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-16 09:18 am
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2025/108: Code Name Verity — Elizabeth Wein

2025/108: Code Name Verity — Elizabeth Wein
I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can’t believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old. [p. 114]

Reread after The Enigma Game, which features a younger and considerably more cheerful Julie. (My review from 2013.) This is still a very harrowing read, even though I know what happens. 

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-15 07:22 am
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2025/107: The Enigma Game — Elizabeth Wein

2025/107: The Enigma Game — Elizabeth Wein
People being nice to you after someone has made you feel like a criminal or an enemy is just like sticking cardboard in your window after a bomb has blasted all the glass out of it. The hole is stopped up, but the glass is still smashed and you can’t see through the window any more. Everything in the room is uglier and darker. [loc. 2523]

Louisa Adair is fifteen and orphaned: it's 1940, her English mother died in the Balham bombing, and shortly afterwards her Jamaican father was killed when his merchant navy ship was torpedoed. (He couldn't enlist in the Royal Navy because he wasn't born in Europe.) She telephones to answer an advertisement for someone to look after an elderly aunt -- the advertiser, Mrs Campbell, can't tell from Louisa's 'polite English accent' that she's biracial -- and finds herself escorting the redoubtable 'Jane Warner' (actually Johanna von Arnim, a former opera singer) from an internment camp on the Isle of Man to a pub in a small Scottish village.

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tamaranth ([personal profile] tamaranth) wrote2025-07-14 07:38 am
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2025/106: Moira's Pen — Megan Whalen Turner

2025/106: Moira's Pen — Megan Whalen Turner
He should have recognised the danger when the king insisted on a formal introduction every time they met, forcing his sullen attendants to recite the diplomatic courtesies again and again, always with the pretense of never having heard them before, always with that same look of gleeful idiocy on his face. Beyond petty, beyond tedious, it was ridiculous. What kind of a king makes a mockery of himself? Melheret wished he'd seen the answer sooner... Only a king who was very sure of himself could afford to be laughed at. ['Melheret's Earrings, p.124]

A collection of short stories woven in and around the canon of the Queen's Thief series (which I have recently devoured and fallen in love with) plus maps, essays on archaeology and historical inspirations, and some beautiful illustrations. I'd read some of the stories and essays before, appended to the novels, but it is nice to have them all in one place. Even if that place is a hardcover book...

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