(no subject)
A belated happy birthday to voleuse and thomasina75!
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I survived the parental visit--a little more touchy, a little less patient than I wanted to be, spending more time talking myself down than I would have liked, but it was more or less a good visit (though mostly Internetless, since the wireless adapter in my laptop is on the blink and I could not handle surfing the web with my mother hovering over my shoulders at all). I have also mostly survived the nasty cold and sinus problems that followed, or possibly I'm just floating in a numb cloud of Sudafed side effects. I am really enjoying this being able to talk to people without having a nervous breakdown or coughing fit thing that I have going on today; it's the little things in life, really.
The weather was beautiful last weekend, achingly bright sunshine and air with just a hint of cool wind to balance it out, and we did some fun touristy things. On Saturday, we went to the Ferry Building and took a ferry to Angel Island and hiked about a quarter of the perimeter. The return ferry only stopped at Pier 41, by Fisherman's Wharf, and my cunning plan for us to take the F streetcar back to Market was foiled by the tens of thousands of people lined up along the water at Fisherman's Wharf to watch the Blue Angels' air show. I sort of forgot about Fleet Week--whoops! From the ferry, we had a wonderful view of the planes maneuvering right above us over the bay; after we landed, we had a long-ass walk back to Market. I took pictures, which I will hopefully at some point actually pull off my camera. And on Sunday we met some of my parents' friends from their long-ago days on the faculty at William & Mary for high tea at Lovejoy's Tea Room, and I am super annoyed at myself for never having gone there before, because it was lovely and is literally a fifteen minute walk from my house.
Ultimately, whatever is going on with my moods and my job and my existential angst and my phlegm, it's not such a big thing. I know some of you are grappling with some serious issues, and I wish there was more I could do.
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Partial TV roundup:
Chuck continues to charm me more than it probably should, considering that it still has tone problems, but this week's episode felt more in balance. The Nerd Herd, the petty politics at Buy More, and Chuck's family and friends and co-workers ground the show, and interact with each other in a way that feels messy and solid. I continue to really enjoy Chuck's relationship with his sister, and the way Captain Awesome is both ridiculously "awesome" to someone with Chuck's sensibilities and also a pretty stand-up guy; the tango lessons were hilarious, and obviously based on Captain Awesome's genuine desire to help Chuck on his date, and of course Chuck learned the girl parts of the dance. The show does a fair amount of playing with gender roles, though not always successfully: Chuck is aggressively not-macho, even as he begins to develop some real survival skills; Sarah is aggressively capable, though often in a way that's filmed as overtly objectifying (including, this week, a catfight); the scary international arms dealer is a girl, and that trips up a lot of people who made unconscious assumptions. I especially loved Chuck's "I'm sorry guys--and Anna," and the way the show both mocks and points to the gender imbalance in tech jobs and the assumptions a lot of women who do work in tech have to put up with.
I'm enjoying watching Katee Sackhoff be evilish, even though some of her lines are terrible, but am about ready to kick Bionic Woman to the curb because it's just not good, and the problems are fundamental and structural. Last week, I found myself getting far more interested in Ruth and the teenage girl who survived the massacre of her town than I was in Jaime Sommers (and that episode actually had one great line, "We're from the agricultural department," delivered by Ruth in an excellent deadpan). This week, Sarah Corvis pretty much stole the show, because Sarah Corvis has an actual potential emotional arc and some conflict; set next to her struggle with what other people have made of her and what she's going to do with it, Jaime's whining about the camera eye and bribing her little sister with expensive jeans in the hopes that she won't notice her weird behavior are just an annoying distraction. And that's a real problem. Michelle Ryan just has no presence; Katee Sackhoff does. The writing is awful too, but the fundamental emotional underpinnings of the story are being brought to life by the wrong bionic woman, and I don't see how they recover from that.
Stargate Atlantis seems to be taking everything I disliked about the latter half of Season 3 and doing more of it, and I've already ranted enough about that, so I will just say that Elizabeth's send-off, while not involving exploding tumors, did not sit well with me, especially since I know that Rodney won't face any consequences for what he did to her. (And, I'm sorry, but John rightly argued, and she herself said, that she would rather be dead than part replicator, and the chain of events Rodney set in motion by overriding her wishes because he always thinks he knows best led to her being abandoned on the replicator planet, and that is a terrible thing to do to someone, whether or not some good came out of it. If I thought Rodney would struggle with what he'd done or learn from it, that would be one thing, but this is Stargate Atlantis.) But the main thing I took out of the episode was--what happened to the Athosians? Did I blank out on the part at the end of last season where they were evacuated to a nice new planet with a stargate before Atlantis came under attack? Or did Our Intrepid Heroes just take the stargate and leave them on a partially lasered planet, completely cut off from the rest of the galaxy? Because I would hate to think they--especially Teyla--did that, but I don't trust these writers at all.
I was not as over the moon with the Pushing Daisies "Pie-lette" as a lot of people on my flist were; it was a little too quirky for me, and I found the narrator a little too omnipresent, and while I enjoyed it, I had some serious doubts about the show's ability to carry that premise through on a weekly basis. Plus, I was reasonably confident that ABC would cancel the shit out of it after two episodes, because we all know what happens to unusual, quirky, interesting television shows. But I guess the ratings have actually been pretty good, and last night's episode put a lot of my doubts to rest by moving Chuck and Ned's romance to the ongoing B-plot and moving the mystery of the week to the foreground. It gave the characters a purpose, and gave them interesting ways to interact, and gave me a much better sense of Ned's gift and the way, as macabre and borderline scary as it is, he's using it to help people. I don't know how the musical number worked, but it did--Olive's self-aware, and she talks to herself and to Digby, and bursting into song seemed like the next natural step. And I think the show is doing a good job of showing the spectrum of quirk--the ways people can be strange and wacky in both funny and sad ways--although I don't think the marketing girl's bulimia was handled particularly well, and having Chuck chide Ned and Emerson that it was a serious issue didn't erase that.
Also, Emerson knits! (Although dear TV people, please do not tell us that he's purling a row when he is clearly knitting. It's distracting to know that's wrong.)
Also, someone (I can't, I'm sorry to say, remember exactly who right now) vidded the obscure Canadian/South African 20-episode show Charlie Jade for Vividcon this year, and sdwolfpup showed me that vid in Atlanta, and I came out of it thinking, "I have no idea what's going on, but it sure does look cool!" And then when laurashapiro showed me the first episode, I still thought, "I have no idea what's going on, but it sure does look cool!" I love me some futuristic dystopia. So I went about acquiring the rest of the show, and spent the past two days of illness mainlining half of it, because somewhere around episode 3 it ate my brain.
1. It is a really beautifully made show, with a lot of attention to cinematography and themes and some interesting original music, and I recommend it for that alone--it's stunning. And because it was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, it's full of alien (to my American eyes) landscapes and settings.
2. It is a genuinely ambitious and detailed piece of speculative fiction. Sometimes its ambitions exceed its execution, but I get the impression that it was planned as a self-contained series of 20 episodes, and all of the little interlocking pieces of the story unfold in a careful and measured way. The premise is that there are parallel universes, and that a corporation called Vexcor has found a way of bringing people and things between them. Exactly what the corporation is doing is the mystery at the heart of the show. Aside from the clunky voiceover in the first episode, it is mostly left up to the viewer to figure out what's going on from the clues, and things are often more complicated than they first appear to be.
3. The first episode's main flaw is the excessive use of melodramatic noir detective voiceover, but that goes away almost immediately in subsequent episodes. The other thing that really bugged me at the beginning was that everyone seemed to be saying the name Owen strangely, but it turns out that the guy's name is 01.
4. I have some thinky thoughts about what it means that 01's name is 01, and about the spectrum of possible social organizational systems represented by the different universes, and about the depiction of female characters, and about the racial dynamics, and about resource wars and new kinds of corporate colonialism, but at this point (a) I'm afraid half of what I think will turn out to be wrong, because the show is twisty like that, and (b) nobody else I know has seen more than one episode that I know of, so I'm just going to have to think them to myself.
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Dorris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Golden Notebook made a huge impression on me when I read it at 25, drifting after college and trying to figure out how the various parts of myself fit together. She's the 11th woman to have won the prize.
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I survived the parental visit--a little more touchy, a little less patient than I wanted to be, spending more time talking myself down than I would have liked, but it was more or less a good visit (though mostly Internetless, since the wireless adapter in my laptop is on the blink and I could not handle surfing the web with my mother hovering over my shoulders at all). I have also mostly survived the nasty cold and sinus problems that followed, or possibly I'm just floating in a numb cloud of Sudafed side effects. I am really enjoying this being able to talk to people without having a nervous breakdown or coughing fit thing that I have going on today; it's the little things in life, really.
The weather was beautiful last weekend, achingly bright sunshine and air with just a hint of cool wind to balance it out, and we did some fun touristy things. On Saturday, we went to the Ferry Building and took a ferry to Angel Island and hiked about a quarter of the perimeter. The return ferry only stopped at Pier 41, by Fisherman's Wharf, and my cunning plan for us to take the F streetcar back to Market was foiled by the tens of thousands of people lined up along the water at Fisherman's Wharf to watch the Blue Angels' air show. I sort of forgot about Fleet Week--whoops! From the ferry, we had a wonderful view of the planes maneuvering right above us over the bay; after we landed, we had a long-ass walk back to Market. I took pictures, which I will hopefully at some point actually pull off my camera. And on Sunday we met some of my parents' friends from their long-ago days on the faculty at William & Mary for high tea at Lovejoy's Tea Room, and I am super annoyed at myself for never having gone there before, because it was lovely and is literally a fifteen minute walk from my house.
Ultimately, whatever is going on with my moods and my job and my existential angst and my phlegm, it's not such a big thing. I know some of you are grappling with some serious issues, and I wish there was more I could do.
* * * * *
Partial TV roundup:
Chuck continues to charm me more than it probably should, considering that it still has tone problems, but this week's episode felt more in balance. The Nerd Herd, the petty politics at Buy More, and Chuck's family and friends and co-workers ground the show, and interact with each other in a way that feels messy and solid. I continue to really enjoy Chuck's relationship with his sister, and the way Captain Awesome is both ridiculously "awesome" to someone with Chuck's sensibilities and also a pretty stand-up guy; the tango lessons were hilarious, and obviously based on Captain Awesome's genuine desire to help Chuck on his date, and of course Chuck learned the girl parts of the dance. The show does a fair amount of playing with gender roles, though not always successfully: Chuck is aggressively not-macho, even as he begins to develop some real survival skills; Sarah is aggressively capable, though often in a way that's filmed as overtly objectifying (including, this week, a catfight); the scary international arms dealer is a girl, and that trips up a lot of people who made unconscious assumptions. I especially loved Chuck's "I'm sorry guys--and Anna," and the way the show both mocks and points to the gender imbalance in tech jobs and the assumptions a lot of women who do work in tech have to put up with.
I'm enjoying watching Katee Sackhoff be evilish, even though some of her lines are terrible, but am about ready to kick Bionic Woman to the curb because it's just not good, and the problems are fundamental and structural. Last week, I found myself getting far more interested in Ruth and the teenage girl who survived the massacre of her town than I was in Jaime Sommers (and that episode actually had one great line, "We're from the agricultural department," delivered by Ruth in an excellent deadpan). This week, Sarah Corvis pretty much stole the show, because Sarah Corvis has an actual potential emotional arc and some conflict; set next to her struggle with what other people have made of her and what she's going to do with it, Jaime's whining about the camera eye and bribing her little sister with expensive jeans in the hopes that she won't notice her weird behavior are just an annoying distraction. And that's a real problem. Michelle Ryan just has no presence; Katee Sackhoff does. The writing is awful too, but the fundamental emotional underpinnings of the story are being brought to life by the wrong bionic woman, and I don't see how they recover from that.
Stargate Atlantis seems to be taking everything I disliked about the latter half of Season 3 and doing more of it, and I've already ranted enough about that, so I will just say that Elizabeth's send-off, while not involving exploding tumors, did not sit well with me, especially since I know that Rodney won't face any consequences for what he did to her. (And, I'm sorry, but John rightly argued, and she herself said, that she would rather be dead than part replicator, and the chain of events Rodney set in motion by overriding her wishes because he always thinks he knows best led to her being abandoned on the replicator planet, and that is a terrible thing to do to someone, whether or not some good came out of it. If I thought Rodney would struggle with what he'd done or learn from it, that would be one thing, but this is Stargate Atlantis.) But the main thing I took out of the episode was--what happened to the Athosians? Did I blank out on the part at the end of last season where they were evacuated to a nice new planet with a stargate before Atlantis came under attack? Or did Our Intrepid Heroes just take the stargate and leave them on a partially lasered planet, completely cut off from the rest of the galaxy? Because I would hate to think they--especially Teyla--did that, but I don't trust these writers at all.
I was not as over the moon with the Pushing Daisies "Pie-lette" as a lot of people on my flist were; it was a little too quirky for me, and I found the narrator a little too omnipresent, and while I enjoyed it, I had some serious doubts about the show's ability to carry that premise through on a weekly basis. Plus, I was reasonably confident that ABC would cancel the shit out of it after two episodes, because we all know what happens to unusual, quirky, interesting television shows. But I guess the ratings have actually been pretty good, and last night's episode put a lot of my doubts to rest by moving Chuck and Ned's romance to the ongoing B-plot and moving the mystery of the week to the foreground. It gave the characters a purpose, and gave them interesting ways to interact, and gave me a much better sense of Ned's gift and the way, as macabre and borderline scary as it is, he's using it to help people. I don't know how the musical number worked, but it did--Olive's self-aware, and she talks to herself and to Digby, and bursting into song seemed like the next natural step. And I think the show is doing a good job of showing the spectrum of quirk--the ways people can be strange and wacky in both funny and sad ways--although I don't think the marketing girl's bulimia was handled particularly well, and having Chuck chide Ned and Emerson that it was a serious issue didn't erase that.
Also, Emerson knits! (Although dear TV people, please do not tell us that he's purling a row when he is clearly knitting. It's distracting to know that's wrong.)
Also, someone (I can't, I'm sorry to say, remember exactly who right now) vidded the obscure Canadian/South African 20-episode show Charlie Jade for Vividcon this year, and sdwolfpup showed me that vid in Atlanta, and I came out of it thinking, "I have no idea what's going on, but it sure does look cool!" And then when laurashapiro showed me the first episode, I still thought, "I have no idea what's going on, but it sure does look cool!" I love me some futuristic dystopia. So I went about acquiring the rest of the show, and spent the past two days of illness mainlining half of it, because somewhere around episode 3 it ate my brain.
1. It is a really beautifully made show, with a lot of attention to cinematography and themes and some interesting original music, and I recommend it for that alone--it's stunning. And because it was filmed in Cape Town, South Africa, it's full of alien (to my American eyes) landscapes and settings.
2. It is a genuinely ambitious and detailed piece of speculative fiction. Sometimes its ambitions exceed its execution, but I get the impression that it was planned as a self-contained series of 20 episodes, and all of the little interlocking pieces of the story unfold in a careful and measured way. The premise is that there are parallel universes, and that a corporation called Vexcor has found a way of bringing people and things between them. Exactly what the corporation is doing is the mystery at the heart of the show. Aside from the clunky voiceover in the first episode, it is mostly left up to the viewer to figure out what's going on from the clues, and things are often more complicated than they first appear to be.
3. The first episode's main flaw is the excessive use of melodramatic noir detective voiceover, but that goes away almost immediately in subsequent episodes. The other thing that really bugged me at the beginning was that everyone seemed to be saying the name Owen strangely, but it turns out that the guy's name is 01.
4. I have some thinky thoughts about what it means that 01's name is 01, and about the spectrum of possible social organizational systems represented by the different universes, and about the depiction of female characters, and about the racial dynamics, and about resource wars and new kinds of corporate colonialism, but at this point (a) I'm afraid half of what I think will turn out to be wrong, because the show is twisty like that, and (b) nobody else I know has seen more than one episode that I know of, so I'm just going to have to think them to myself.
* * * * *
Dorris Lessing has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. The Golden Notebook made a huge impression on me when I read it at 25, drifting after college and trying to figure out how the various parts of myself fit together. She's the 11th woman to have won the prize.