Dard-e-disco

Youtube hasn't got it. My iBook won't play it. Have the producers put some special jinx or digital layering into the DVD of Om Shanti Om so that it can't be uploaded?

But, hah, judicious clicking and looking did get me a not-great-quality but nevertheless-great clip of the fabulous over-the-top disco number with Shah Rukh Khan topless and flexing his six-pack (which is, as more judicious googling revealed, totally real, omg).

Title of song: Dard-e-disco
Meaning of title: Pain in the disco.

Yes, it's about pain and love angst in the disco. With semi-nude babes. And SRK's hard nipples, dripping with water. And a Village-People-worthy miner's outfit. And cheesy eye-scissoring. And oiled man-torso. And man licking his thumb and running it down the length of his naked torso (!!). And a reversal of usual item songs (I learned this term last night!) where it's a semi-nude girl doing the dancing and the boob-wiggling, but here it's hot dude Khan and sexysexy.

http://www.dailymotion.com/relevance/search/dard-e-disco/video/x3jsrz_dardedisco-oso_music

There's also an interesting reversal of the familiar-to-us tropes of Orientalism here. Instead of a white guy surrounded by exotic black and brown babes, we get a brown guy surrounded by exotic white and blonde babes. Occidentalism, nipple-Khan and teh groovy disco beat with Persian undertones: What more, I ask you? What more?

Enjoy! Guten Appetit!

( an attempt at embedding )

Wraith island

In other news: I spent three hours today, revising my wraith fic, Ichor. Sheppard/wraith fic, I should say.

I have never spent as much time revising any fic. This is the seventh or so draft. It's been through four betas and 2 1/2 years of writes and re-writes.

Some bits read (to me) incredibly smoothly and needed hardly any revising. These are the bits I wrote most recently. No wonder, in a way but also interesting: how living with a text for so long will actually hone your style and oil the writing.

Some bits read more clunkily (to me), and they are inevitably those written very early on in the process (interestingly, not the ones written first). So now I'm thinking: egads, I thought this was the penultimate draft but do I need yet another re-write??? Or do I just leave those bits in? (None of the betas queried them. Am I perfectionising too much?)

There is a certain joy and satisfaction to be had in revising. I was in a kind of trance with it today. I had my Oxford Concise next to me (not the Shorter this one, but my old, frayed, covers-fallen-off 1970s edition Concise) and my Roget's Thesaurus next to it, and I scribbled lines I wanted to use on post-its and kept notes of repeated words and phrases.

I've read this fic so often now I could possibly recite it in my dreams...