Wild

     Okay, this is going to be a weird one.

    Yesterday, my brother and I were at my parents' house.  Nothing big going on, we just end up over there at least once a week, because...well, because.  It's the sort of thing that maybe didn't feel so weird when we were in our twenties, but is starting to feel decidedly abnormal now that we're both in our forties.  (Heck, I'm almost to my fifties at this point.)  On the other hand, it typically includes a free meal, so...

    Anyway, there we were, at our parents' house, and they wanted to watch something.  Rather than the most recent episode of Doctor Who, it was suggested that we watch a movie.  And my brother had been wanting to get the rest of us to watch the Jack Black movie School of Rock since none of the rest of us had seen it.

    So that's what we watched.

    A bit pat in places, and I disliked the stereotyped depiction of the gay boy, but it was overall fun, and I appreciated that despite the "date" and stuff they didn't do a standard Hollywood forced "romance" between Jack Black's lead and Joan Cusack.  (As an aroace person, I'm particularly rankled by forced romances in movies.  Let people stay single, ya jerks!)

    Anyway.  What I wanted to talk about was my double-take moment during the end credits.

    There were, naturally enough, lots of song credits at the end.  And one of them was for the song "T.V. Eye."  Listed right after songs by Marc Bolan and David Bowie, just where you'd expect to see Iggy Pop, right?

    Only the reason I did a double-take, the reason I forced my father (who always handles the remote, even at times when it 100% does not make sense for him to do so) to rewind so I could look at the song's listing again, was that the "performed by" credit didn't say "The Stooges" or "Iggy Pop and the Stooges" or whatever else you would expect it to say.

    It said "Wylde Ratts."

    That's one of the names Curt Wild's band goes by in Velvet Goldmine.

    More importantly, it's the "performed by" credit for Curt's songs in the end credits of the movie, and the "performed by" credit on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack for "T.V. Eye."  (Sadly, the soundtrack does not include "Gimme Danger," so when I did an expanded soundtrack for Velvet Goldmine (for my own personal use only, ofc) I had to get my brother to grab the audio off the DVD of the movie and prepare it as an .mp3 for me.  Wish I could have done the same thing for "T.V. Eye," actually, since the performance in the movie is better than the one on the soundtrack, but unfortunately there's a huge chunk of dialog over the guitar solo.)

    Meaning that they didn't use Iggy Pop's recording of the song, they used "Curt Wild's" recording.  So that if they had used the vocals (they obviously didn't, 'cause I would have noticed that!) then that would have been Ewan McGregor's voice.

    Which is epic.

    I went to IMDB and looked all over the place on School of Rock's page there, to see if there was any mention of the Velvet Goldmine connection, but there wasn't.  Which is kind of disappointing.

    Anyway, I just felt like that was the sort of thing I ought to share with the world. 😅  It's not crucial, deep or meaningful, but I, personally, found it interesting.

    And wild.

A to Z: Strangely Superfluous S

 

    Again, my writing is weirdly low on S-named characters.  It's not that there aren't any, it's just that somehow they fail to be significant.  (This is made all the more frustrating because apparently "Sally" is my go-to random female name the way "Freddy" is for random male names; I found at least four of them just in looking over everything I had written in the last 10-12 years, and I'm quite sure there were more I just didn't stumble across.)

    So, like I did with Q, I thought today I'd just provide some quotes and tidbits about various S-named characters.  For whatever reason, they're all fan fiction characters.  Not sure why my original works don't feature any major characters with an S-name, but...🤷🏻‍♀️

    Anyway, the first S-named character I can talk about is Shannon Hazelbourne from Velvet Goldmine, about whom I ought to have a lot to say, yet somehow I don't really?  (Doesn't help that it's hard to treat her consistently...)  Any discussion of Shannon is going to be rife with spoilers for the movie, so tread carefully beyond the "read more" tag!  (After Shannon, there are MDZS characters (and spoilers) to be found...)

A to Z: Curt Wild

(If you're looking for today's IWSG post, it went up right before this one.)

    Today's post is the first time I'm posting about someone else's character.  Which is to say that today I will be talking about my fan fiction writing. 😅  That will happen a lot this month, I'm sorry to say.  (It will mostly be swapping over between my Greek mythology addiction and my recent addiction to a particular fandom...but that fandom's characters don't get the spotlight in these posts for a little while yet.  And there's one totally original character between now and then!)

    Anyway.  Back on topic, who I want to talk about today is the character of Curt Wild from the 1998 movie Velvet Goldmine, written and directed by Todd Haynes.  The movie is a fictional reimagining of the early '70s glam rock scene, told in flashback from a mildly dystopian 1984.  Curt Wild is the movie's equivalent of Iggy Pop, only much hotter because he's played by Ewan McGregor. 😍

    Curt is a complicated character to work with because he doesn't talk much, plus he spends most (or all) of the 1970s portions of the film struggling with a crippling heroin addiction.  We also don't get to hear his take on events, unfortunately.  The movie follows the Citizen Kane format of accompanying a journalist as he interviews people for a story on a controversial figure:  in this case, glam rock star Brian Slade, Curt's former lover.  The journalist, Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale!), interviews Brian's former manager, Cecil, and his ex-wife Mandy, but doesn't get to interview Curt, so we only see the Curt/Brian relationship from the outside, from Mandy's perspective and from Arthur's own memories of being a glam rock fan at the time.  We do get to hear a little from Curt about everything that happened, but not the full story as he saw it.  So despite how much time he has on screen, he's also something of a mystery to the audience.  (Though in truth the same could be said for Brian, and he has more screen time than anyone else.)

    Consequently, writing for Curt is always a challenge for me, especially since I don't really know much about popular music, and I have never used drugs or even known anyone who used them.  And, actually, seeing as he also seems very sexually motivated, my asexuality probably makes it hard for me to connect with him as well.

    So why would I write about him at all?

    Well, two big reasons.  While I am asexual and aromantic, I do have some minor romantic/sexual interest, though it's all interest that I have less than no desire to act on physically.  In other words, I kind of like thinking about love, but only so long as I'm not involved.  Um.  Okay, no matter how I describe it, it keeps sounding creepy.  There's actually a term for it, as a subsection of asexuality, so let me just borrow the definition as set out by people better at defining things than I am.

Aego (also known as Autochoris) is an orientation prefix where one's attraction is centered around individuals other than oneself.^[1][2] The prefix aego is deriven from the Latin words a- meaning without, and ego meaning myself, resulting in the combined meaning of "sexual/romantic without myself".^[3][4][5]

The exact definition of this label is imprecise and has evolved over time. Definitions include:

• experiencing a disconnect between oneself and one's object of attraction;^[2]
• only experiencing attraction in vague third-person fantasies;^[6]
• enjoying relationship-related activities in media/fantasies without desiring to be a participant;^[7]
• only experiencing attraction to situations that does not involve oneself.^[8]

Aego individuals often use this term because they feel alienated both from the idea that the absence of attraction implies the absence of fantasies regarding relationships, and the idea that the presence of fantasies implies the possibility of attraction. Aego individuals' fantasies generally do not involve themselves, only other individuals.^[6][9]

(Definition quoted from the LGBTQIA+ Wiki page on the Aego orientation.)

    In my own case, rather than getting idle crushes on actors or singers, crushes never intended or expected to be acted on, I get crushes sometimes on fictional characters, specifically in the context of their romance with some other character.  (This has been the case ever since I was a small child:  my first crush was Han Solo, but it was always in the context of his romance with Princess Leia (even before The Empire Strikes Back came out!).  Of course, since then I have lost my tolerance for hetero romance...)  So, long story short (too late!), watching Velvet Goldmine gave me a crush on Curt Wild, with his partner in the crush of course being Arthur Stuart.  (I promise it makes sense in the context of the film.)  And when I get crushes on fictional characters, I like to write about them.

    But that's only part of it.  The other part is because I first saw the movie on Netflix in late 2015.  If I hadn't had Velvet Goldmine fanfic to write, with the heroic journalist exposing the corruption festering in the White House, all while he's having a very gay love story with a gorgeous rock star, I'm not sure how I would have survived 2016-2020.  It wasn't just fan fiction, it was also reassurance and even mild therapy.

    Okay, so enough background, let's talk about how I've handled the character!  There are a lot of things inconsistent from one of my Velvet Goldmine fics to the next, and how I characterize Curt has definitely been one of the inconsistencies.  But I can't really talk about any of that without talking about certain spoilers for the movie, so I'm going to put in one of those lines that cuts off the post from the main page before going on. 😅