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Saturday, March 30, 2002

God, having written the below, I'm now having all kinds of Twin Peaks flashbacks, and realizing that those were my feral-fan days. I was a first-time fan without a fandom to play in. My first time of falling in love with a show, and I had only one other person I knew who was also watching it, to babble with the next day. My first time of realizing that greatness and suckitude (e.g., the whole Donna-and-James plotline) can exist side-by-side; my first time of discovering that even the best shows inevitably run of out steam, run off the rails, and tank. What an innocent I was ...

The Twin Peaks quotation list is a great place for these nostalgic wanderings.

Cooper: Diane, last night I dreamed I was eating a large, tasteless gumdrop, and awoke to discover I was chewing on one of my foam disposable earplugs. Perhaps I should consider moderating my nighttime coffee consumption.

Truman: You saw a giant?
Cooper: Yes.
Albert: Any relation to the dwarf?

Cooper: This morning, I will practice an extra twenty minutes of yogic discipline, after which the pain is banished to a cul-de-sac in a remote suburb of my conscious mind.

Cooper: In the pursuit of Laura's killer I have employed Bureau guidelines, deductive technique, Tibetan method, instinct, and luck. But now I find myself in need of something new, which for lack of a better word, I will call... magic.
[Thunder & lightning!]
Ben: Would you like us to hum? A Tibetan chant, perhaps?
Albert (to Truman): I think it's going wonderfully well, don't you?

Giant: It is happening again. It is happening again.

Major: For starters, would you care to join me for an incredibly pleasant evening of night fishing?
Cooper: Aces!

Gordon: COOP, YOU REMIND ME TODAY OF A SMALL, MEXICAN CHIWOWWOW.

Log Lady: Shut your eyes and you'll burst into flames.
Truman: Thanks, Margaret.

Cooper: Diane, I'm holding in my hand a small box of chocolate bunnies.

Ahhhh . . . good times. Good times.

Posted @ 09:45 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Joining in on the indelible-TV-moments meme currently circulating ... I don't have older TV memories because I hardly watched any television in my youth; what really set my feet on the hell-bound path toward media fandom was Twin Peaks, and that's where my first indelible memories come from. The first sighting of Laura Palmer's body in the plastic. Truman and Hawk finding the abandoned train car in the woods (creeped me out of my skin). Albert Rosenfeld--every scene with Albert, but particularly him snarling "I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King! My concerns are global. I reject absolutely revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you, Sheriff Truman." (Yeah, I looked up the quote {g}). And most especially, the scene where Cooper explicates his theory of the case, with the blackboard and the references to Tibet and the rock-throwing at the bottles. I sat, jaw agape, thinking This is not television as we have known it.

A couple from X-Files: The end of Paper Hearts; wiped-out Mulder, exchanging a few sentences with Scully, then leaning against her, putting his head against her belly, laughing briefly, with an expression of rueful beyond-exhaustion defeat; and her holding him, staring off into space, face full of worry, compassion, fear. And then she moves away, and he's left sitting alone, as the spectral children's choir swells. Also, the ending of Never Again, that heavy lengthening moment of freighted and unbreakable silence between them.

And a few memorable firsts:

Homicide: I hadn't been watching the show, but one evening I clicked into it at random, and what was showing was the scene--can't remember episode title, but the one where Frank's in the box and extracts a confession from the guy who didn't do it. So intense that it frightened me, and it took me a while to get my nerve up to watch another episode.

Highlander: The first time I saw Methos, in The Messenger. I'd watched the scenes with Ron Perlman as the fake Methos, bewildered, thinking "Now hold on--this is the guy everyone's crazy about? What the--?" ... and then Duncan steps out of the elevator, and we get that sudden slanting-light almost gauzy vision of this glorious gorgeous long-limbed sultry being lounging on Duncan's bed ... and then the snark-gavotte that the two of them dance around the loft ... I was riveted. I was a goner.

Due South: Again, the first episode I saw, which was Mountie on the Bounty, and I was utterly hooked by the drawn-out shot of Ray's face, after he hits Fraser, and of Fraser's, after he hits Ray back -- the pain, the anguish, the sense of having destoyed something cherished, having fucked up inevitably and irretrievably. And then also two LaT mentions -- Ray sobbing in the car at the end of Ladies Man, and Fraser with the candles in VS. There's so many great funny/sweet moments in this show, but the pain is what hooks me. (duh.)

Posted @ 08:29 AM CST [Link]2 comments

Wednesday, March 27, 2002

Things that have caused me to do a 180-degree spin out of the maudlin today:

--It's actually springlike out there today! We broke 50 degrees! I mean, sure, we could get another big dump of snow, but we're probably done with the subzero windchill for another year.

--My annual review went very well; my boss told me he was giving me a significantly higher rating in a couple of categories than I'd given myself. This will not translate into much of an actual raise, to be sure, since the state and hence the University are staggering under an abyssal budget deficit, but what the heck. It's nice to get strokes.

--A really funny MSTing of a really appalling piece of fiction was posted to one of my small lists today, which gave me much evil (albeit slightly guilty) snickering.

--I had sent P. a grumpy e-mail about why the heck is it that UM-Morris (small branch campus) gets a cool mascot like Pounce the Cougar, and we at the big campus are stuck with the egregious witless buck-toothed inanely-grinning Goldy Gopher, and he sent me back a list of proposed new mascots, one of whom was "Disembowelly the Condor," which gave me many happy moments envisioning the costume. I love the boy, I really do.

--And I'm struck by how many people in the blog-circle are currently struggling with emotional malaise of one kind or another, which leads me to think that maybe we're all just suffering from sunspots, or a Harmonic Divergence, or something. This Too Shall Pass.

So. No more morose poetry-quoting for the nonce. I'm going to go out in the warm by-god-springlike sunshine, and gambol.

Posted @ 06:25 PM CST [Link]6 comments

Tuesday, March 26, 2002

The one where Kat goes all morose and self-pitying

This is the Blog of Bog tonight; I am bogged and befogged. Started another entry about the god-help-us weather, and then deleted, because after all, how fascinating is that? It's one of those evenings when I've compulsively surfed every link on my sidebar, and then started reading through everyone's "Friends" entries, because I figure the inside of anyone else's brain has to be more interesting than mine. My brain currently feels like one of those bargain store-brand trays of mac&cheese, the kind that doesn't use real cheese, just processed whey derivatives and guar gum, that's been semi-thawed in the microwave but not really warmed through, just crusty-sludgy with frost, as appetizing as a nice cup of phlegm.

I open up crap-in-progress, take a shallow breath, and shut it right back down again. I wade through flamewars on Metafilter. I snarl at the cat, who is bored and wants me to box with her. I play a jigsaw puzzle, then another. I click through the links one more time--surely someone's updated by now?--and then check e-mail. I peruse the TV listings, play another jigsaw puzzle, check e-mail, re-check links. Have another glass of wine, step out on the back deck and have a smoke, look at the full moon. Somewhere, under that same moon, people are living with verve and slapdash energy and intensity, burning their way through life, while I sit here in my tepid puddle.

And ... it's nothing, really. It's nothing. Just my life, that I'm pissing away, day by day. In another 494 days, I'll turn 50. Which is not a bad thing; I just don't know when this happened. When I got so old, and so blunted, and so trapped in the tedious cage of my own tedious head.

Randall Jarrell is, as a poet, sometimes sentimental, sometimes melodramatic, but when he's on, he's on:

Woman at the Washington Zoo

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
This print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—

Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas' grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears' bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as a man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

Posted @ 09:19 PM CST [Link]3 comments

Monday, March 25, 2002

Well, the Oscars show was actually better than I expected (although I bailed out somewhere late in the third hour and went to bed). Fewer of the groan-worthy interludes I recall from years past (banal singing-dancing numbers, etc.). I have a weakness for montage bits, and I really enjoyed the NYC one and the documentary one, perhaps because they reference older movies that I've actually seen and past times I've lived through.

As LaT says, Sidney Poitier pretty much defines "class act," and I'll add I don't think very many people could have actually carried off that speech of his. By that I mean -- well, the Oscars ceremony is really a fascinating study in rhetoric, the jamming-together of a number of very different styles and levels of discourse, heavy on giddy fluff and insider snark, interlaced with the raw stammering emotionality of acceptance speeches, and with a strong overlay of time pressure and visual glitz. Dropping into that mix a speech like Poitier's, which was slow, thoughtful, carefully crafted, formal, at a rhetorical level very much out of keeping with its surroundings, is a risky thing; you're courting a dutiful sort of eyes-glazed-over attention, concealing yawns and a wish to get back to the fun--which I think is often the reaction to the more serious, honorary-award or humanitarian-service speeches that get wheeled onstage at interludes every year. But I really got the sense people were held by that speech.

On the fashion front, I will merely say that getting to see Samuel L. Jackson in formal wear constitutes a good reason to tune in the show every year, and that Gwyneth Paltrow really should have rethought that bodice. And, uh, Sir Ian's boyfriend sure looked purty [g].

Posted @ 08:19 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Sunday, March 24, 2002

Well, I have managed to pizzle away the entire day (a) reading through archives of a list I recently joined, (b) rereading old fanfiction faves that I'm sure are much better than anything I'm currently grinding out, and (c) playing on-line jigsaw puzzles. (I'm not even putting up the link for the latter, because I do not want anyone else falling into this total and complete time-suck-hole.) I shall now proceed to pizzle away the entire evening watching the Oscars, vacant-eyed and munching chips and mumbling snappy put-downs at the screen. LaT, don't you do an annual scathing Oscars review? Wish you were here, or I was there, and we could snark in counterpoint. I don't believe I've seen a single movie that's been nominated for anything, except Memento, which Kalena, god bless her, dragged me off to see.

It's odd, this deep resistance I have to watching movies; as a teenager, I compulsively watched all kinds of stuff, good, bad, appalling, and even had fantasies about becoming a filmmaker. I think what bothers me about films, even (or especially) good ones, is what appeals about them to lots of people -- that sense of total immersion in a fictional reality. Because it always is followed by the jarring re-entry into one's real self at the end, as I stumble blinking out of the theatre, and the wambly period of groping my way back into my own head, and shaking off the movie-reality, which wafts lingeringly through my brain like a dream I can't quite get rid of. The video/audio/textual combined assault makes it hard for me to maintain my ego-boundaries with the degree of clarity I like, or seem to need; it's the same reason, perhaps, that I really don't much like getting stoned, and don't read very much fiction anymore. I worked too damn hard to get some sense of myself, and if I'm going to lose it in fantasies, I mostly want them to be my own. Pathetic, yes, I know.

Posted @ 05:32 PM CST [Link]2 comments