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Saturday, September 14, 2002

There can hardly be a better way to spend a Friday night, after a long and crapulant week, than to flop on the sofa with single-malt and chips, and flip channels back and forth between Plan 9 From Outer Space and Women in Love. The mix of Ed Wood Jr. and Ken Russell is a particularly heady brew, causing far more brain-whirl than the Lagavulin.

It was odd to rewatch Women in Love; I hadn't seen it in--well, decades, but it was a formative influence on my burgeoning adolescent psyche, back in the day. (I was clearly destined for fannishness from early on; there were always a few books or films that I used to reread/rewatch innumerable times, obsessively, and in retrospect many of these clearly had at least a mild slashy current. As the twig is bent, etc.) The homoerotic subtext in WiL is not even "sub," of course, but pretty galumphingly right out there in the open, even in the Oxygen-sanitized version I watched last night, which cut out almost all of the famous nude wrestling scene. They did put up a little trivia-about-the-movie blip when they cut to commercial, helpfully informing viewers that Oliver Reed had to drink an entire bottle of vodka before he could do said scene, which made me laugh like a loon: (a) as if the guy ever needed a pretext to down an entire bottle of vodka; and (b) Ollie, you big wuss. Alan Bates was a very tasty package indeed, much more so than many of the skank-ho groupies you doubtless used to cavort with. Just get over your big butch self. (On the other hand, he was the one who talked, or wrestled, Russell into including the scene in the first place, so I give him props for that.)

And in other news, I do believe I'm coming down with a cold. Bleagh.

Posted @ 08:58 AM CST [Link]5 comments

Friday, September 13, 2002

Because I am an eeediot, I keep forgetting to link Zen's Livejournal, but have finally gotten it added. Holding off on much-needed overhaul of links list until I do my next redesign, though.

I am delighted to report that the generous and talented deejay, under the happy influence of HCL and a due South viewing marathon, has made a gift to us all of some gorgeous wallpapers. Yummy and inspirational <g>. Thanks so much, deej!

And Bonibaru passed along, from Rivka (how did I not know Rivka has a LJ? Arrgh... <adding another name to update soon, dumbass! list>) a link to Chilling Effects, which looks like an excellent and authoritative resource for info on copyright and intellectual property laws, with a whole subsection on fanfiction, and frequently-updated links to C&D cases. Well worth reading and bookmarking.

Posted @ 08:36 AM CST [Link]2 comments

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Merry has a recent entry in her LJ about her conversion to the sparkly side of the Force, and her apprehensions about friends' reactions to it. I've actually spent some time lately pondering the way that the boyband brushfire has swept through fandom and caught up some of the people I very highly esteem--Merry, and torch, and Julad, and Aral, and on and on ...

I guess my attitude toward the whole phenomenon can best be summed up as "benign bafflement." I've had people say to me, "Just give it a chance, just watch, and you'll be won over!", and I've watched a certain amount of concert footage, and have been left, if anything, rather less won over than I was before. I've had some immensely smart people give me very thoughtful analyses of Why This Grabs, and have had brief wavering moments of thinking Yeah, OK, theoretically I can see where this is coming from, and then the moment shimmers away again and I return to my original state of Huh???

All of which is really irrelevant; if others are happy, then I'm happy for them, is the baseline. It just feels odd, I guess; in the past, even with fandoms that held no visceral allure for me (Sentinel, Smallville), I was at least able to say, "Not my thing, but I can sure see how it could hook a person." But with boybands, even the nature of the hook is a total mystery to me. And though this is in no sense a problem--my esteem and affection for the people I esteem and like is in no sense affected by shifts in the objects of their affections--still, there's a certain minor sadness in it, a nibbling and likely self-centered sense of loss. It's like when your best buddy falls in love with someone you don't really want to spend time with. And there's the low-key but persistent frustration of being faced with something I just flat don't understand. But mazel tov to all who are happy--as I say, my bafflement is benign.

And in other matters, yes, today is Sept. 11th. I'm not participating in any of the various memorial activities going on, and I have no Deep Thoughts to offer, but I did take my coffee and go sit out on the back deck at 8:46 Eastern Time, breathing the fresh sweet air (it's a perfectly beautiful day, just as it was a year ago), listening to the crickets and to airplanes going by overhead. And after a while, most unexpectedly, Methos (who has not been much around these parts lately) popped up, and murmured in my head, Only the means change, you know. Humanity doesn't.

Posted @ 08:35 AM CST [Link]8 comments

Monday, September 9, 2002

. . . . gasp . . . . wheeze . . .

Just -- go here. Now.

::dies::

Ardent -- fucking brilliant.

Posted @ 09:15 PM CST [Link]4 comments