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shadowkatIt's a cool day, considering either making pumpkin muffins or pumpkin bread via a paleo recipe that I discovered on the internet. (Feel I should define what I mean by paleo - no diary, no sugar, no grains, no glutens, no yeast, nothing that I'm sensitive to. Sort of similar to lactose or diabetic or gluten free. It has bananas, chai tea, pumpkin, coconut flour, eggs, spices..) Have decided to take the weekend off to vegetate in new apt. Still adapting to it. While it does get natural light - well in the bathroom and living room, and has a nice enough view of trees and houses and sky. It's not bathed in sunlight like my last apartment. But other than that - it is admittedly a huge improvement in various and sundry ways.
On a totally unrelated topic, we really do bring our own baggage to everything we watch, read, listen or witness - don't we? What astonishes me though is how unaware people are of this fact. I'll read a professional critical review - and think, whoa, we didn't see the same series of movies and you are reading a lot into that which I'm pretty certain was not intended. Entertainment Weekly, the guilty pleasure magazine that I can't quite bring myself to stop subscribing to, had two articles in it that seemed oblivious to this fact, yet ironically emphasized it. The first one was a television critic's take on Nolan's Batman flicks, and the second was a review of the Martin Scorcese documentary -The New York Review of Books - The 50 Year Argument, which highlights a 50 year fight between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal culminating in a verbal battle of words on the Dick Cavett Show regarding Vidal's review of Eva Figes' Patriarchal Attitudes (which isn't even by Mailer), in which Vidal stated that Mailer's analysis of gender politics "read like three days of menstrual flow", then went on to contend that Mailer, Manson (Charles Manson - the serial killer not Marilyn Manson), and Henry Miller were men who viewed "women as at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed." I have a feeling Gore didn't realize had hard this hit Mailer - until Mailer blew up at him.
Goes to show you - you need to be careful about critical reviews, and the most seasoned and successful of writers can get riled by them. It also demonstrates how we tend to view everything through our own baggage.
This week's Doctor Who - felt a bit silly to me. Not helped by the spider monsters, which I could have done without. I knew there were spider monsters - since everything was covered with cobwebs. Hint - where there are cobwebs there are spiders. Why the characters couldn't figure this out, I've no clue. When I saw the cob-webs, I thought, how can there be any cobwebs - there are no spiders on the moon? Then, dang it, this episode is going to have alien spiders.
Clearly I'm in the minority on both counts? The silliness of Doctor Who is what has kept me from becoming a true fan of it over the years. Well that and the monsters.
The trend continues...the Doctor is being portrayed as a misanthropic, cynical, curmudgeon. Who appears to have lost all faith in humanity, yet keeps testing humans to see if they will prove him wrong. Gone is the playful madman, or the world-weary/soulful god. Instead, we have a somewhat condescending and rather cynical lonely man, who is tired of being viewed as everyone's hero. And gleefully pokes holes in the concept.
And of course there's the conundrum - do we risk it, save a life at potential risk to our own - or, kill it outright? This is a popular theme right now in sci-fi, although not necessarily a modern one. If you watched any of the sci-fi flicks/tv shows of the past 50 years - you'd have seen it in various guises before. And it's often an either/or prospect - which I find somewhat naive. The better television series, movies, books - provide ambiguity. (We didn't get any here, sorry to say.) That either way - there's always huge risk and a sacrifice. Sort of like raising children - they don't necessarily turn out as we'd expect. There are sacrifices we make in having them. And while beautiful and wonderous, they may also turn out to be deadly. The bird that hatches from the moon, could go off and devour spaceships - doesn't make it any less wonderous of course. Or Oppenheimer - the scientist who figureed out the atom bomb. Personally, I was just relieved it was a bird and not huge spider. Also why all the spiders on the moon as the bird was hatching? Oh right, they were germs or fleas. Got it. And we needed something scary to frighten the kiddies (and arachnaphobes lurking in the audience).
I understand that part of the appeal of Doctor Who is that it is aimed at children and is at the end of the day, a family show. But there are days that I wish it were a bit more like Buffy - in addressing adult themes and the camp factor and less like Lost in Space.
On a totally unrelated topic, we really do bring our own baggage to everything we watch, read, listen or witness - don't we? What astonishes me though is how unaware people are of this fact. I'll read a professional critical review - and think, whoa, we didn't see the same series of movies and you are reading a lot into that which I'm pretty certain was not intended. Entertainment Weekly, the guilty pleasure magazine that I can't quite bring myself to stop subscribing to, had two articles in it that seemed oblivious to this fact, yet ironically emphasized it. The first one was a television critic's take on Nolan's Batman flicks, and the second was a review of the Martin Scorcese documentary -The New York Review of Books - The 50 Year Argument, which highlights a 50 year fight between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal culminating in a verbal battle of words on the Dick Cavett Show regarding Vidal's review of Eva Figes' Patriarchal Attitudes (which isn't even by Mailer), in which Vidal stated that Mailer's analysis of gender politics "read like three days of menstrual flow", then went on to contend that Mailer, Manson (Charles Manson - the serial killer not Marilyn Manson), and Henry Miller were men who viewed "women as at best, breeders of sons; at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed." I have a feeling Gore didn't realize had hard this hit Mailer - until Mailer blew up at him.
Goes to show you - you need to be careful about critical reviews, and the most seasoned and successful of writers can get riled by them. It also demonstrates how we tend to view everything through our own baggage.
This week's Doctor Who - felt a bit silly to me. Not helped by the spider monsters, which I could have done without. I knew there were spider monsters - since everything was covered with cobwebs. Hint - where there are cobwebs there are spiders. Why the characters couldn't figure this out, I've no clue. When I saw the cob-webs, I thought, how can there be any cobwebs - there are no spiders on the moon? Then, dang it, this episode is going to have alien spiders.
Clearly I'm in the minority on both counts? The silliness of Doctor Who is what has kept me from becoming a true fan of it over the years. Well that and the monsters.
The trend continues...the Doctor is being portrayed as a misanthropic, cynical, curmudgeon. Who appears to have lost all faith in humanity, yet keeps testing humans to see if they will prove him wrong. Gone is the playful madman, or the world-weary/soulful god. Instead, we have a somewhat condescending and rather cynical lonely man, who is tired of being viewed as everyone's hero. And gleefully pokes holes in the concept.
And of course there's the conundrum - do we risk it, save a life at potential risk to our own - or, kill it outright? This is a popular theme right now in sci-fi, although not necessarily a modern one. If you watched any of the sci-fi flicks/tv shows of the past 50 years - you'd have seen it in various guises before. And it's often an either/or prospect - which I find somewhat naive. The better television series, movies, books - provide ambiguity. (We didn't get any here, sorry to say.) That either way - there's always huge risk and a sacrifice. Sort of like raising children - they don't necessarily turn out as we'd expect. There are sacrifices we make in having them. And while beautiful and wonderous, they may also turn out to be deadly. The bird that hatches from the moon, could go off and devour spaceships - doesn't make it any less wonderous of course. Or Oppenheimer - the scientist who figureed out the atom bomb. Personally, I was just relieved it was a bird and not huge spider. Also why all the spiders on the moon as the bird was hatching? Oh right, they were germs or fleas. Got it. And we needed something scary to frighten the kiddies (and arachnaphobes lurking in the audience).
I understand that part of the appeal of Doctor Who is that it is aimed at children and is at the end of the day, a family show. But there are days that I wish it were a bit more like Buffy - in addressing adult themes and the camp factor and less like Lost in Space.
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Date: 2014-10-05 09:24 pm (UTC)I'd agree - while it makes a decent sci-fi short story, wasn't all that entertaining as television episode due to the execution.