Recs for ramble meme, and other fannish things
Whee! My stocking went up on fandom_stocking, which I had fun doing last year and decided to do again.
Also (as you might notice in the stocking), I finally took the plunge and got myself a (totally empty for now) AO3 account. At some point I will actually need to upload some of my doggerel there (that's basically why I got it).
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December ramble meme, day 7: anonymous_sibyl prompted: rec me a book, then a movie, then a show, then a piece of music (not tailored to the specific person, but give the things that most signify you)
Book:
The book section is the trickiest, because the books that most define me are a) not exactly unknown (Lord of the Rings, Discworld) and/or b) books I tend talk about all the time anyway (e.g. Vorkosigan Saga, Rivers of London). So for this, I'll try to stick to works that don't fall in those categories, even though they may not be as foundation.
Books that are pretty fundamental to me that I don't talk about as much but that I do heartily recommend to people (if you can find a decent translation) are:
- Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita: I read this book when I was 10 years old, because my parents were reading it, and I fell in love in a way I hadn't with a book before. Not only was I fascinated by the characters (mostly in the Devil's party; they really are a very fun bunch), but I really loved the very structure of the novel, the interlacing stories and where they brush up against each other. I vaguely remember this myself, but my mother corroborates that I was graphing which characters appear in which chapters in different colored pencils and stuff. Of course, as a ten-year-old (even a precocious one) a lot of things went over my head, but the characters and quotes have stayed with me ever since, and it remains one of my top 3 books.
- Strugatski's Monday Starts on Saturday: Another book I read when I was a kid, but in this case because it is a kids' book. It is about a magical research institute, and may well be at the root of my love for magic school stories. Except that unlike something like Harry Potter, we're not talking ten-year-olds learning to wave wands; we're talking grown-ups doing magic-as-science with equations, inter-departamental bickering and equipment wars, liasing with the public and bullshit publications, etc. It's basically academia (Soviet academia, but deep down there isn't all that much difference, it turns out) but with magic. There are adventures and mystery-solving and some Morals about what it means to be a Scientist Mage and a Human, but to be honest I love it most for the academia hijinks. I've been trying to get B to read this book for AAAAGES, even had a good translation (by Andrew Blomfield, now sadly out of print) shipped over from Amazon UK so that he could read it properly, but so far I'm the only one who's read that one. I did read the book (in Russian, of course) to L when she was little, and one of my proudest moments as a parent was when she correctly made an allusion to one of my favorite lines from the book, very naturally :D
So I do have an actual offer for this one: if you (general you on my f-list) want to read it in the good translation, I will figure out a way to share the book with you -- photocopy and mail, or maybe scan it (not sure how well that would work, but I'm willing to try)
Books the are less fundamental to me, but that I frequently recommend to people (not tailored to their tastes specifically but as more general I-read-it-and-loved-it-you-might-too recs):
- Emma Bull's War for the Oaks: I don't care about music and I've never been to Minnesota, but I loved this book which is steeped in both of those things, for the foundational urban-fantasy-with-fairiest that it is. It's a sub-genre that really appeals to me, done very well, and it seems not nearly well enough known for how good (I think) it is. The book also features what I think is my favorite Faerie Queen depiction, hitting that "beautiful and terrible" balance just right, making her just the right degree of alien. I really like the way it depicts Faeries in general: sufficiently inhuman to be believably dangerous yet fascinating, sufficiently well-drawn to be sympathetic when they should be.
- Pamela Dean's Tam Lin: I came across this book at the absolutely perfect time -- just aabout a year after I graduated from college, after all the stuff I'd been fed up with about Cal had evaporated from my memory and I was starting to miss the feel of the place, my spooky tree (Old Man Willow) and people hanging out on the lawn reading text books and classes about literature and the quirky college town vibe. By virtue of the title, it also reminded me of one of my favorite classes with one of my favorite professors, where I'd first encountered the Child ballads and "Tam Lin" specifically. So, it was a perfect book for me at a perfect time. But not just for me -- I've gotten a few other folks to read it, at similar points in their life to where I was when I first encountered it, just graduated from uni and missing it, or pre-emptive nostalgia in their final semester, and it worked for them just as well as it did for me (I think). This is another book that is undeservedly obscure -- I don't even know why I managed to stumble across it randomly in the Powell's annex at PDX of all unexpected places -- so I try to rec it to people who I think will respond to the dreamy, cozy-with-creepy-things-lurking-beneath feel of it whenever I can.
(More recently, Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead, which I read this year, gave me similar vibes; not as masterfully written (I think it's the author's debut novel?), but capturing a similar feel in a rather different setting, and I wish this one was more widely read, too.)
- Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, consisting of Leviathan, Behemoth, and Goliath. I don't even know how this series ended up on the list iwth the rest, because it's a fairly recent addition to my own reading, but it was just so much fun. The series is a historical AU of WWI, with opposing Clanker (steampunk-y) powers standing in for the Triple Alliance and Darwinist (gene-punk? they genetically engineer whatever they need, like hydrogen-breathing whale airships, strafing hawks, and flechette bats) powers equaling the Triple Entente. The AU spin is neat, there are appearances from several historical figures (most notably Tesla) and descendents-of-historical-figures, and I really love one of the co-protagonists, Deryn Sharp, who pulls a Sweet Polly Oliver (a trope that I love) and enlists as a midshipman on a British whale airship -- and things develop from there.
Movie:
Actually, this one's very easy. The Soviet Three Musketeers musical. It's kitschy and frequently ridiculous, but god, so much fun, and I love it, and it's actually a pretty faithful adaptation of the Dumas novel. I grew up on this movie, singing the songs with bits of French in them, wanting to learn how to fence, wearing my plaid poncho because it looked like the musketeers' cloaks, playing at being Athos with my friends, and I still loved it 25 years later when I tracked down a copy to share with the rodents (who really enjoyed it, too).
Not long ago I was linked to a subtitled version and linked to it here. Here it is again: Three Musketeers (link to first of 3 episodes), with English subtitles.
Oh, actually, since I'm doing foundational Soviet movies, I have to also mention Tajna tret'jej planety/Mystery of the Third Planet, which was an animated sci-fi movie, based on Kir Bulychev's stories about the adventures of Alisa, the daughter of the director of Moscow's Cosmo-zoo. Unlike the Three Musketeers movie, I don't think it plays to sensibilities honed to Western animated movies as well, because it feels rather slow, but it is still a lot of fun, and I can probably recite a quarter of the dialogue, if I tried.
There's a subtitled version of it as well: Mystery (Secret?) of the Third Planet (link to 1 of 6 parts). The subtitles take some odd liberties with the Russian text (I have no idea why they needed to change Kolya's grandmother to Kolya's aunt when it makes zero difference, and some things are changed so that they don't actually make sense -- like, Alisa is talking about attending a soccer match, not playing in one, but fine, whatever).
Anyway, I thought this was bad, but while looking this up, I came across something I had no idea existed: apparently, here was a US release of this cartoon in 1995, dubbed/adapted and everything. Alisa Selezneva becomes Alice Newton, Zelenyj becomes Jones, Gromozeka is Grambo (I think?). Certain scenes are cut out -- the tortik one with Kolya's grandmother is simply dropped, for instance. There's a lot of stuff added too, probably to keep things synched up. I'm not sure what justifies the terrible and totally extraneous, made out of whole cloth, voiceover from "Alice" -- other than possibly thinking American children are too dumb to follow things without a voiceover. What they've done to Zeleny's voice is a crime against humanity. And what is with the Yoda dialogue from the snail seller with the indicator? And random nursery rhymes from "Clara" (the skliss), which is just O.o And what the fuck is up with Alice constantly mentioning Chris? What is that even FOR? And why did they think the govorun needed a name? And such a stupid one at that. Also, they spelled "seagull" wrong when translating the name of the ship. Though, OK, I'll admit to cracking a smile at "Jones"'s "There is something very unkosher about this guy" about Veselchak U (or whatever he's called in this dub).
There is apparently also a "Dollar Store" version which is even worse. Even the 'normal' names are changed (e.g. Alice is Kristen now O.o), Seleznev is Adam Steele (O.o), but at least Zeleny gets to stay Commander Green. The narration is even more present (and pointless, and occasionally just plain wrong), but at least it's not Alice's voiceover, so it doesn't ruin a character I like -- it's just some random idiot talking. Kolya's babushka becomes Zeleny's mother, which... Like, what is the problem with having her just be a random lady sending her grandson (who never appears) a cake? The dialogue is very different from the original, and I only made it through 1 of 7 parts before I had to stop.
Anyway, if you're not familiar with the original, DEFINITELY DON'T WATCH these dubbed ones, either one of them. If you love the original as much as I do (possibly just danny_li2, heh), you can take a look and weep along with me.
Do I have a non-Russian language movie that I rec to people? I'm not much of a movie person, so I'm really not sure there is, and all my favorites: Lord of the Rings, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Galaxy Quest tend to be really well known already. Maybe Big Fish, which totally surprised me with how much I enjoyed it? But it's definitely not on the same level.
TV show:
OK, this one is legitimately easy, because there is only one TV Show that I love enough to recommend to people consistently, and it does tend to be fairly obscure, so chances are fairly high that people I rec it to haven't seen it: Babylon 5. I have written rather a lot about it as I've been doing a rewatch with the rodents over the last several years, but here goes:
So, when I rec Babylon 5 to people, I'm fond of telling them it's "Lord of the Rings IN SPACE". This is mostly because I tend to rec it to people who are hardcore LotR fans (although I know people who love B5 and merely like LotR, or who discovered B5 before LotR and loved it). It's definitely not retelling the story, the plot and characters are entirely different, and the, mmm, morality of the universe is different as well (which I think is to be expected, since the morality of LotR was shaped heavily by Tolkien's religion and JMS, the author of B5, is an atheist). But what they have in common is an epic sweep, dealing with great, universe-changing matters, but looking at the way the individual and small choices end up shaping the great, universe-changing "destinies". There are common themes and aesthetics, too -- the passing of an age of wonders, the way one is changed irrevokably even when one survives a great quest, temptation and redemption and what it does and doesn't buy you.
I called JMS the "author" of B5 up there, and that's a word used advisedly. More than any TV show I know, B5 was the creation of a single mind. While other people wrote and directed episodes too, of course (there's one written by Neil Gaiman, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison), JMS wrote 92 of the series' 110 episodes, and had the series full arc planned out from the very start: he envisioned it as a five-season "novel for TV", and it does really play like that, except for some vagaries inherent in casting your "novel" with real people for characters and needing a network to deliver it to the public. But the way of handling these vagaries is pretty seemless in the first four seasons, which is actually impressive as hell in retrospect. Season 5... well, he did the best he could.
It's a sci-fi show made in the mid-90s, and the CGI and special effects were revolutionary at the time. Now, of course, they are 20 years old, but it actually did not age as badly as I was afraid it might have, even though some things are quite ludicrous from this vantage point, like print-on-demand newspapers in the 23rd century. The first season is not the strongest, but it was also not as bad as I thought it might be when I rewatched it with the rodents: with the exception of one or two episodes, it's actually quite fun, and also rewards rewatching -- there are some very neat things set up/foreshadowed that are echoed later. Seasons two through four are really, really strong. I'm not sure season 5 actually needs to be watched, except for the series finale (which had originally been filmed after season 4, because it was not clear until the last moment if B5 was going to GET a season 5, so the main story had all been compressed to wrap up in the fourth season, and then they got the green light for s5 after all). The people I know who got into the show recently stopped without watching s5, and I honestly don't think they're missing a whole lot. Oh, and there's a pilot movie, "The Gathering", which definitely should be skipped -- it uses the same setting but a lot of the main crew is different, and let's just say it's a good thing we got Ivanova and Franklin and not these guys.
The recent rewatch reminded me how much I love these characters, too. There are some really amazing arcs here (and some I don't care for so much, but even some of those are impressive). The quality of the actors varies some, but from season 2 onwards I think they are almost entirely good or great, and the range of emotion some of them can manage to project despite silly alien hair or pounds of reptilian make-up is amazing.
B5 used to be on Hulu (for free?) for a while, but not any longer, it seems. Amazon does have it on streaming, but it's actually considerably cheaper to just buy the DVDs if one is going to watch more than a couple of episdoes. And I'll just leave this here: the intros give me a shiver even all these years later...
Music:
I'm even less of a music person than I am a TV show or movie person. There is one artist that I do genuinely love, who is absolutely foundational to my taste in music: Vladimir Vysotsky, a Soviet bard. But the strength of his songs are the words, not the melody, and he is fiendishly hard to translate -- as in, I've not seen any Vysotsky translations I've been happy with. I think it's true that in order to translate poetry well, you need to be at least as good a poet as the original author, and I guess there are not many people of that caliber who would spend their time translating popular songs rather than the "true classics" of Russian literature, which is a real pity. I've linked to some of my favorite Vysotsky songs in this old December meme post, and all the videos are still active (wonder of wonders!), so I won't re-embed them here.
But this is the only kind of music I actually like, where the words are clever and important, and the guitar is just there to carry them. The closest I've been able to find to that in English is actually Jonathan Coulton. His themes don't always work for me -- the obsession with monkeys and zombies is kind of not my thing, and it's definitely a different flavor of words-first music -- very self-consciously geeky rather than... IDK, more raw and rooted in the real world. But there's enough there to work for me -- I think because his songs, too, are about telling a story, often from unusual POVs and/or unexpected subject, and with a lot of humour. My favorite of his songs is "Skullcrusher Mountain":
I keep forgetting to link back to the prompts post, here. There are still a handful of non-Hawaii days left, if you want to give more prompts. Not necessarily looking to fill all days, but if you want me to ramble more.
Also (as you might notice in the stocking), I finally took the plunge and got myself a (totally empty for now) AO3 account. At some point I will actually need to upload some of my doggerel there (that's basically why I got it).
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December ramble meme, day 7: anonymous_sibyl prompted: rec me a book, then a movie, then a show, then a piece of music (not tailored to the specific person, but give the things that most signify you)
Book:
The book section is the trickiest, because the books that most define me are a) not exactly unknown (Lord of the Rings, Discworld) and/or b) books I tend talk about all the time anyway (e.g. Vorkosigan Saga, Rivers of London). So for this, I'll try to stick to works that don't fall in those categories, even though they may not be as foundation.
Books that are pretty fundamental to me that I don't talk about as much but that I do heartily recommend to people (if you can find a decent translation) are:
- Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita: I read this book when I was 10 years old, because my parents were reading it, and I fell in love in a way I hadn't with a book before. Not only was I fascinated by the characters (mostly in the Devil's party; they really are a very fun bunch), but I really loved the very structure of the novel, the interlacing stories and where they brush up against each other. I vaguely remember this myself, but my mother corroborates that I was graphing which characters appear in which chapters in different colored pencils and stuff. Of course, as a ten-year-old (even a precocious one) a lot of things went over my head, but the characters and quotes have stayed with me ever since, and it remains one of my top 3 books.
- Strugatski's Monday Starts on Saturday: Another book I read when I was a kid, but in this case because it is a kids' book. It is about a magical research institute, and may well be at the root of my love for magic school stories. Except that unlike something like Harry Potter, we're not talking ten-year-olds learning to wave wands; we're talking grown-ups doing magic-as-science with equations, inter-departamental bickering and equipment wars, liasing with the public and bullshit publications, etc. It's basically academia (Soviet academia, but deep down there isn't all that much difference, it turns out) but with magic. There are adventures and mystery-solving and some Morals about what it means to be a Scientist Mage and a Human, but to be honest I love it most for the academia hijinks. I've been trying to get B to read this book for AAAAGES, even had a good translation (by Andrew Blomfield, now sadly out of print) shipped over from Amazon UK so that he could read it properly, but so far I'm the only one who's read that one. I did read the book (in Russian, of course) to L when she was little, and one of my proudest moments as a parent was when she correctly made an allusion to one of my favorite lines from the book, very naturally :D
So I do have an actual offer for this one: if you (general you on my f-list) want to read it in the good translation, I will figure out a way to share the book with you -- photocopy and mail, or maybe scan it (not sure how well that would work, but I'm willing to try)
Books the are less fundamental to me, but that I frequently recommend to people (not tailored to their tastes specifically but as more general I-read-it-and-loved-it-you-might-too recs):
- Emma Bull's War for the Oaks: I don't care about music and I've never been to Minnesota, but I loved this book which is steeped in both of those things, for the foundational urban-fantasy-with-fairiest that it is. It's a sub-genre that really appeals to me, done very well, and it seems not nearly well enough known for how good (I think) it is. The book also features what I think is my favorite Faerie Queen depiction, hitting that "beautiful and terrible" balance just right, making her just the right degree of alien. I really like the way it depicts Faeries in general: sufficiently inhuman to be believably dangerous yet fascinating, sufficiently well-drawn to be sympathetic when they should be.
- Pamela Dean's Tam Lin: I came across this book at the absolutely perfect time -- just aabout a year after I graduated from college, after all the stuff I'd been fed up with about Cal had evaporated from my memory and I was starting to miss the feel of the place, my spooky tree (Old Man Willow) and people hanging out on the lawn reading text books and classes about literature and the quirky college town vibe. By virtue of the title, it also reminded me of one of my favorite classes with one of my favorite professors, where I'd first encountered the Child ballads and "Tam Lin" specifically. So, it was a perfect book for me at a perfect time. But not just for me -- I've gotten a few other folks to read it, at similar points in their life to where I was when I first encountered it, just graduated from uni and missing it, or pre-emptive nostalgia in their final semester, and it worked for them just as well as it did for me (I think). This is another book that is undeservedly obscure -- I don't even know why I managed to stumble across it randomly in the Powell's annex at PDX of all unexpected places -- so I try to rec it to people who I think will respond to the dreamy, cozy-with-creepy-things-lurking-beneath feel of it whenever I can.
(More recently, Karen Healey's Guardian of the Dead, which I read this year, gave me similar vibes; not as masterfully written (I think it's the author's debut novel?), but capturing a similar feel in a rather different setting, and I wish this one was more widely read, too.)
- Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan trilogy, consisting of Leviathan, Behemoth, and Goliath. I don't even know how this series ended up on the list iwth the rest, because it's a fairly recent addition to my own reading, but it was just so much fun. The series is a historical AU of WWI, with opposing Clanker (steampunk-y) powers standing in for the Triple Alliance and Darwinist (gene-punk? they genetically engineer whatever they need, like hydrogen-breathing whale airships, strafing hawks, and flechette bats) powers equaling the Triple Entente. The AU spin is neat, there are appearances from several historical figures (most notably Tesla) and descendents-of-historical-figures, and I really love one of the co-protagonists, Deryn Sharp, who pulls a Sweet Polly Oliver (a trope that I love) and enlists as a midshipman on a British whale airship -- and things develop from there.
Movie:
Actually, this one's very easy. The Soviet Three Musketeers musical. It's kitschy and frequently ridiculous, but god, so much fun, and I love it, and it's actually a pretty faithful adaptation of the Dumas novel. I grew up on this movie, singing the songs with bits of French in them, wanting to learn how to fence, wearing my plaid poncho because it looked like the musketeers' cloaks, playing at being Athos with my friends, and I still loved it 25 years later when I tracked down a copy to share with the rodents (who really enjoyed it, too).
Not long ago I was linked to a subtitled version and linked to it here. Here it is again: Three Musketeers (link to first of 3 episodes), with English subtitles.
Oh, actually, since I'm doing foundational Soviet movies, I have to also mention Tajna tret'jej planety/Mystery of the Third Planet, which was an animated sci-fi movie, based on Kir Bulychev's stories about the adventures of Alisa, the daughter of the director of Moscow's Cosmo-zoo. Unlike the Three Musketeers movie, I don't think it plays to sensibilities honed to Western animated movies as well, because it feels rather slow, but it is still a lot of fun, and I can probably recite a quarter of the dialogue, if I tried.
There's a subtitled version of it as well: Mystery (Secret?) of the Third Planet (link to 1 of 6 parts). The subtitles take some odd liberties with the Russian text (I have no idea why they needed to change Kolya's grandmother to Kolya's aunt when it makes zero difference, and some things are changed so that they don't actually make sense -- like, Alisa is talking about attending a soccer match, not playing in one, but fine, whatever).
Anyway, I thought this was bad, but while looking this up, I came across something I had no idea existed: apparently, here was a US release of this cartoon in 1995, dubbed/adapted and everything. Alisa Selezneva becomes Alice Newton, Zelenyj becomes Jones, Gromozeka is Grambo (I think?). Certain scenes are cut out -- the tortik one with Kolya's grandmother is simply dropped, for instance. There's a lot of stuff added too, probably to keep things synched up. I'm not sure what justifies the terrible and totally extraneous, made out of whole cloth, voiceover from "Alice" -- other than possibly thinking American children are too dumb to follow things without a voiceover. What they've done to Zeleny's voice is a crime against humanity. And what is with the Yoda dialogue from the snail seller with the indicator? And random nursery rhymes from "Clara" (the skliss), which is just O.o And what the fuck is up with Alice constantly mentioning Chris? What is that even FOR? And why did they think the govorun needed a name? And such a stupid one at that. Also, they spelled "seagull" wrong when translating the name of the ship. Though, OK, I'll admit to cracking a smile at "Jones"'s "There is something very unkosher about this guy" about Veselchak U (or whatever he's called in this dub).
There is apparently also a "Dollar Store" version which is even worse. Even the 'normal' names are changed (e.g. Alice is Kristen now O.o), Seleznev is Adam Steele (O.o), but at least Zeleny gets to stay Commander Green. The narration is even more present (and pointless, and occasionally just plain wrong), but at least it's not Alice's voiceover, so it doesn't ruin a character I like -- it's just some random idiot talking. Kolya's babushka becomes Zeleny's mother, which... Like, what is the problem with having her just be a random lady sending her grandson (who never appears) a cake? The dialogue is very different from the original, and I only made it through 1 of 7 parts before I had to stop.
Anyway, if you're not familiar with the original, DEFINITELY DON'T WATCH these dubbed ones, either one of them. If you love the original as much as I do (possibly just danny_li2, heh), you can take a look and weep along with me.
Do I have a non-Russian language movie that I rec to people? I'm not much of a movie person, so I'm really not sure there is, and all my favorites: Lord of the Rings, Monty Python's Life of Brian, Galaxy Quest tend to be really well known already. Maybe Big Fish, which totally surprised me with how much I enjoyed it? But it's definitely not on the same level.
TV show:
OK, this one is legitimately easy, because there is only one TV Show that I love enough to recommend to people consistently, and it does tend to be fairly obscure, so chances are fairly high that people I rec it to haven't seen it: Babylon 5. I have written rather a lot about it as I've been doing a rewatch with the rodents over the last several years, but here goes:
So, when I rec Babylon 5 to people, I'm fond of telling them it's "Lord of the Rings IN SPACE". This is mostly because I tend to rec it to people who are hardcore LotR fans (although I know people who love B5 and merely like LotR, or who discovered B5 before LotR and loved it). It's definitely not retelling the story, the plot and characters are entirely different, and the, mmm, morality of the universe is different as well (which I think is to be expected, since the morality of LotR was shaped heavily by Tolkien's religion and JMS, the author of B5, is an atheist). But what they have in common is an epic sweep, dealing with great, universe-changing matters, but looking at the way the individual and small choices end up shaping the great, universe-changing "destinies". There are common themes and aesthetics, too -- the passing of an age of wonders, the way one is changed irrevokably even when one survives a great quest, temptation and redemption and what it does and doesn't buy you.
I called JMS the "author" of B5 up there, and that's a word used advisedly. More than any TV show I know, B5 was the creation of a single mind. While other people wrote and directed episodes too, of course (there's one written by Neil Gaiman, David Gerrold, Harlan Ellison), JMS wrote 92 of the series' 110 episodes, and had the series full arc planned out from the very start: he envisioned it as a five-season "novel for TV", and it does really play like that, except for some vagaries inherent in casting your "novel" with real people for characters and needing a network to deliver it to the public. But the way of handling these vagaries is pretty seemless in the first four seasons, which is actually impressive as hell in retrospect. Season 5... well, he did the best he could.
It's a sci-fi show made in the mid-90s, and the CGI and special effects were revolutionary at the time. Now, of course, they are 20 years old, but it actually did not age as badly as I was afraid it might have, even though some things are quite ludicrous from this vantage point, like print-on-demand newspapers in the 23rd century. The first season is not the strongest, but it was also not as bad as I thought it might be when I rewatched it with the rodents: with the exception of one or two episodes, it's actually quite fun, and also rewards rewatching -- there are some very neat things set up/foreshadowed that are echoed later. Seasons two through four are really, really strong. I'm not sure season 5 actually needs to be watched, except for the series finale (which had originally been filmed after season 4, because it was not clear until the last moment if B5 was going to GET a season 5, so the main story had all been compressed to wrap up in the fourth season, and then they got the green light for s5 after all). The people I know who got into the show recently stopped without watching s5, and I honestly don't think they're missing a whole lot. Oh, and there's a pilot movie, "The Gathering", which definitely should be skipped -- it uses the same setting but a lot of the main crew is different, and let's just say it's a good thing we got Ivanova and Franklin and not these guys.
The recent rewatch reminded me how much I love these characters, too. There are some really amazing arcs here (and some I don't care for so much, but even some of those are impressive). The quality of the actors varies some, but from season 2 onwards I think they are almost entirely good or great, and the range of emotion some of them can manage to project despite silly alien hair or pounds of reptilian make-up is amazing.
B5 used to be on Hulu (for free?) for a while, but not any longer, it seems. Amazon does have it on streaming, but it's actually considerably cheaper to just buy the DVDs if one is going to watch more than a couple of episdoes. And I'll just leave this here: the intros give me a shiver even all these years later...
Click to viewMusic:
I'm even less of a music person than I am a TV show or movie person. There is one artist that I do genuinely love, who is absolutely foundational to my taste in music: Vladimir Vysotsky, a Soviet bard. But the strength of his songs are the words, not the melody, and he is fiendishly hard to translate -- as in, I've not seen any Vysotsky translations I've been happy with. I think it's true that in order to translate poetry well, you need to be at least as good a poet as the original author, and I guess there are not many people of that caliber who would spend their time translating popular songs rather than the "true classics" of Russian literature, which is a real pity. I've linked to some of my favorite Vysotsky songs in this old December meme post, and all the videos are still active (wonder of wonders!), so I won't re-embed them here.
But this is the only kind of music I actually like, where the words are clever and important, and the guitar is just there to carry them. The closest I've been able to find to that in English is actually Jonathan Coulton. His themes don't always work for me -- the obsession with monkeys and zombies is kind of not my thing, and it's definitely a different flavor of words-first music -- very self-consciously geeky rather than... IDK, more raw and rooted in the real world. But there's enough there to work for me -- I think because his songs, too, are about telling a story, often from unusual POVs and/or unexpected subject, and with a lot of humour. My favorite of his songs is "Skullcrusher Mountain":
I keep forgetting to link back to the prompts post, here. There are still a handful of non-Hawaii days left, if you want to give more prompts. Not necessarily looking to fill all days, but if you want me to ramble more.