Author: JaniaJania

Throwback Thursday to Damian Lewis’ SAG-AFTRA Interview

525464194So desirous are we to learn about the elusive nature of creativity that we’ll watch and listen with bated breath when someone who has been successful at living life as a creative person has something to say about the process and the choices he’s made to get to where he is today. One of such moments was Damian Lewis chatting at the SAG-AFTRA Foundation in 2016 with New York Magazine’s Hollywood editor, Stacey Wilson Hunt, about his career as an actor.

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Throwback Thursday to a Lesson in Rhetoric: Damian Lewis as Antony

To be filed in the category of “This is a guy who makes you want to go back to school”, we learned and reported (on our lovely sister site damian-lewis.com) that Damian’s version of Antony’s funeral speech from Julius Caesar, for The Guardian’s video series Shakespeare Solos, was featured in a seminar on rhetoric. This wasn’t an avenue for literary criticism or drama theory, but a newsletter on effective public speaking.

How is speaking any different from writing and reading, you may wonder? Well, there are components to classical rhetoric, when dissected, can show you what makes one speech different from another. Such an analysis would reach your brain (or at least attempt to). Alternatively, we can talk about how a speech makes you feel. Granted we’re not seeing much great oratory from our current elder statesmen, so examples are few and far between. But, there was a time, wasn’t there? In our not too distant history, when a leader spoke, it did a heart good to hear, didn’t it?

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Homeland meets Billions: “Somebody That I Used to Know”

Damianista’s note: This fan fiction was originally written and published in  2017.

A lot of time has passed since the Brody era of Homeland graced our screens. October 2011, to be exact, was when the series first started. Every now and then we still run into folks on Twitter discovering those first few seasons for the first time. Homeland does have this “eternal” thing going for it, themes that transcend time and space, maybe. Which is crazy seeing as how it’s so driven by the news and politics of the day. Maybe even for current events, the idea of we’ve been here before and we’ll be here again still applies? Whatever the case, the show begs revisiting and will be written in whatever books they keep about these things as one of the best shows in television history. I still watch despite the fact there’s no Brody, mostly because I loved Carrie a good bit more than I loved Brody. I know that doesn’t apply to a lot of the readers (or writers!) of this blog. Alas, here we are.

Carrie’s back in DC in Homeland Season 7, so little to no chance of her meeting up with Bobby. But that’s exactly what I couldn’t help but imagine during the year she spent in NYC. What better time than now to revisit a wee bit of fantasy where Carrie meets Bobby Axelrod at a coffee shop in Manhattan.

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Anniversary of Bastogne

 

battle of the bulge, bastogne, band of brothers
Source: http://yalebooksblog.co.uk/2014/12/22/held-bastogne-2-americans-strike-back/

This week marks the 78th anniversary of the Siege at Bastogne, a pivotal confrontation in Battle of the Bulge, which saw the Allied forces assert their most courageous and bloody defense against the last big push by Nazi forces in WWII.

The Bastogne episode of Band of Brothers was arguably the most emotionally intense and beautifully filmed of the series. It was like watching a dream sequence through a filter of constant snow, a bitter cold that you could almost feel in your bones as you’re watching. Like an opera of bodies, bent over, running for cover, crouching near trees, or frozen solid to the ground. You could watch all the action without sound and still feel it viscerally.

Did anyone see the new Star Wars? The sight of the salt planet with the blood red soil under the thin layer of salt brought immediately to this viewer’s mind the red against white of the smoke grenades the soldiers in Band of Brothers set off to obscure their positions from the Germans. Such a visually poignant and memorable cinematic effect.

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Billions FanFic: Rubble

 

What to do until Billions is back on our screens? Why, imagine a couple of the lovely characters in a fan story, of course! Any time I mention fanfic to anyone who knows I like to write, I’m always greeted with a certain look and a sly “You mean like the versions of Twilight for Adults that became the Fifty Shades series?” No, I say, nothing smutty. Not only can I not write smut to save my life, I also cannot bring myself to imagine the characters I love, even when they’re nearly bearing it all on premium cable, in any of the smuttier situations common to smut. It’s too….common and a tad disrespectful, IMH puritanical O. Goes to follow then that nothing I’ve ever written in the fanfic world has ever been as popular or as potentially lucrative as the Fifty Shades stuff.

All those standard disclaimers on fanfic apply here. I love these characters a lot, but I own them not one bit. And, if it needs to be said, I earn absolutely nothing from this blog for anything I write. Nothing but readers, which to any writer really, are the real gold (albeit actual real gold is quite useful too, don’t get me wrong :)).

So, here’s an expanded version of the Billions fanfic I wrote before Season 2 began. Setting is a flashback to the time around 9/11, possibly a couple days, or maybe a week, after it happened. It’s an imagined bookend to the end of Season 2. Also, I should add, I’ve written this only because, I think, it is decidedly NOT something that’s going to happen on the show. I wrote it because someone had to go there. I figured, why not me? Enjoy!

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