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shadowkatWell, my cable is back. Apparently they suffered an outage at their hub - due to a voice/audio upgrade for digital phone. (Which personally I think is not worth the savings they brag about. I don't have it and never would.)
LJ question - describe your sense of humor in five words or less? Dry Wit.
That was easy. Speaking of humor,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
shapinglight's summary of the plot of the Bill Willingham Angel Comics had me in stitches. She reads it so we don't have to, not only reads it, but summarizes and with humor! I'm not reading the things, please. But...if you analyzed or watched the Angel series at all - you have to read this plot.
1.
Okay, so the big news in this issue is that James, the so-called real
angel introduced in the execrable Aftermath story, is unmasked by Angel Investigations' newest member, the ex-Watcher Laura K Weathermill as no such thing. Instead, he's some kind of demon prince with multiple titles who is looking at Earth with a view to buying it from his sister, who, in Willingham's version of the Buffyverse, has apparently owned it all along.
So all these years, the god of the Angelverse or Buffyverse is well a demon chick? And Jasmine, WRH, et all were hostile takeover attempts? And we thought fanfic writers came up with wonky ideas. Silly us.
And...that's not all!
Meantime, Angel's detached hands and feet have dusted and new ones are growing back.
(As an aside, Angel isn't the only vampire who can accomplish this feat, Spike grew back a leg two issues ago after it dusted. And oh, it is apparently a side-effect of LA going to hell and back. Nice side effect. Reminds me of that creepy Angel S1 episode I Fall To Pieces that I find impossible to watch. So does this mean that cutting off a vampire's head - doesn't kill him anymore? It will just grow back? LOL. )
I'm not sure, but maybe Willingham has confused continuation of canon with parody? Oh well, at least it's funnier than Meltzer's arc which was just offensive. It's really hard for me to take these comics seriously any longer or to consider them an actual continuation of the series. I mean come on, the fanfic we've all written is closer to the original story thread on tv than either Dark Horse or IDW's stories are.
Thanks to shapinglight for summarizing and reading, so I don't have to!! And doing a great job on the summarizing bit.
2. Still reading Terry Gross's interviews from the NPR series Fresh Air. Made it through the whole bit on creating hip hop, funk, DJ track skipping from experts such as George Clinton, Grandmaster Flash, and Bootzy. Now working my way through interviews with Paul Schrader and Jodie Foster on the making of Taxie Driver. Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver.
But what I want to share are two things - this bit from an interview with Nick Hornby, the writer of High Fidelty and About a Boy. I read the former - it was one of those pop culture guy books that we passed to each other back in the early 1990s as a must read, while we were drinking cosmos etc. Saw both as movies, the latter was a better movie. And...a bit from Paul Schrader regarding unreliable narrators.
Here's the first - which I found insightful and gave me one of those rare "a-hah" moments.
Terry Gross: I think it's true that men want to be the mentor in a relationship, so they'll seek out a woman who's younger, or less experienced or less educated.
Hornby: Yes. I think it's very representative and very common male behavior. In High Fidelty, Rob Fleming spends a lot of his time making compilation tapes for women that he meets. In a rather unpleasant way, it's like dogs and lampposts; it's marking out your territory. Virgin ears are very important to that kind of man.
[This is the opposite of Milan Kundera's characters in Unbearable Lightness of Being - who are hunting for equals or people who can complement their knowledge. Kundera also discusses music but as an equalizer, something that brings common ground and allows understanding or a barrier that doesn't.]
Terry Gross: Tell us more about the compilation tapes your character Rob Fleming makes and how he uses them.
Hornby: Well, they are a means of seduction. He meets Laura, who's the other central character in the book, at a club where he's a deejay, and he offers to make her a compilation tape of the music that she's been listening to, and dancing to, in this club. It becomes very important that he has introduced her to all sorts of things. Later on, he meets somebody else, and he finds himself making a tape for her, too. Laura sees him and knows exactly what he's doing.
Terry Gross: I have to tell you, I've always found that male urge to mentor a girlfriend kind of irritating.
Hornby: Yes, I should think it is, actually.
Terry Gross:Yes, it's somebody who doesn't want an equal, someone who doesn't want to share an interest, but wants to teach it.
Hornby: Yes, you're trying to turn the other person into a female version of yourself, which kind of defeats the point of the relationship.
And here's the Paul Schrader bit:
Terry Gross: What are the tricky issues you have to deal with when the main character is narrating his or her own story but is clueless about what's really happening to their life?
Schrader: You've just touched on something that I really love doing, which is the unreliable narrator, because narration works sort of like intravenous feeding. You're getting nourishment but you don't taste it, so it seeps into your consciousness and therefore you assume that your narrator is reliable. When he's unreliable, it creates a nice little frisson between what you're seeing and what you're hearing. It goes back to Taxi Driver, my first script, where you have an unreliable narrator who's telling you how the world works and you are seeing that world and it isn't working the way he was telling you it worked.
If you haven't seen the film Taxi Driver - I highly recommend you do. Brilliant film.
LJ question - describe your sense of humor in five words or less? Dry Wit.
That was easy. Speaking of humor,
shapinglight's summary of the plot of the Bill Willingham Angel Comics had me in stitches. She reads it so we don't have to, not only reads it, but summarizes and with humor! I'm not reading the things, please. But...if you analyzed or watched the Angel series at all - you have to read this plot.1.
Okay, so the big news in this issue is that James, the so-called real
angel introduced in the execrable Aftermath story, is unmasked by Angel Investigations' newest member, the ex-Watcher Laura K Weathermill as no such thing. Instead, he's some kind of demon prince with multiple titles who is looking at Earth with a view to buying it from his sister, who, in Willingham's version of the Buffyverse, has apparently owned it all along.
So all these years, the god of the Angelverse or Buffyverse is well a demon chick? And Jasmine, WRH, et all were hostile takeover attempts? And we thought fanfic writers came up with wonky ideas. Silly us.
And...that's not all!
Meantime, Angel's detached hands and feet have dusted and new ones are growing back.
(As an aside, Angel isn't the only vampire who can accomplish this feat, Spike grew back a leg two issues ago after it dusted. And oh, it is apparently a side-effect of LA going to hell and back. Nice side effect. Reminds me of that creepy Angel S1 episode I Fall To Pieces that I find impossible to watch. So does this mean that cutting off a vampire's head - doesn't kill him anymore? It will just grow back? LOL. )
I'm not sure, but maybe Willingham has confused continuation of canon with parody? Oh well, at least it's funnier than Meltzer's arc which was just offensive. It's really hard for me to take these comics seriously any longer or to consider them an actual continuation of the series. I mean come on, the fanfic we've all written is closer to the original story thread on tv than either Dark Horse or IDW's stories are.
Thanks to shapinglight for summarizing and reading, so I don't have to!! And doing a great job on the summarizing bit.
2. Still reading Terry Gross's interviews from the NPR series Fresh Air. Made it through the whole bit on creating hip hop, funk, DJ track skipping from experts such as George Clinton, Grandmaster Flash, and Bootzy. Now working my way through interviews with Paul Schrader and Jodie Foster on the making of Taxie Driver. Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver.
But what I want to share are two things - this bit from an interview with Nick Hornby, the writer of High Fidelty and About a Boy. I read the former - it was one of those pop culture guy books that we passed to each other back in the early 1990s as a must read, while we were drinking cosmos etc. Saw both as movies, the latter was a better movie. And...a bit from Paul Schrader regarding unreliable narrators.
Here's the first - which I found insightful and gave me one of those rare "a-hah" moments.
Terry Gross: I think it's true that men want to be the mentor in a relationship, so they'll seek out a woman who's younger, or less experienced or less educated.
Hornby: Yes. I think it's very representative and very common male behavior. In High Fidelty, Rob Fleming spends a lot of his time making compilation tapes for women that he meets. In a rather unpleasant way, it's like dogs and lampposts; it's marking out your territory. Virgin ears are very important to that kind of man.
[This is the opposite of Milan Kundera's characters in Unbearable Lightness of Being - who are hunting for equals or people who can complement their knowledge. Kundera also discusses music but as an equalizer, something that brings common ground and allows understanding or a barrier that doesn't.]
Terry Gross: Tell us more about the compilation tapes your character Rob Fleming makes and how he uses them.
Hornby: Well, they are a means of seduction. He meets Laura, who's the other central character in the book, at a club where he's a deejay, and he offers to make her a compilation tape of the music that she's been listening to, and dancing to, in this club. It becomes very important that he has introduced her to all sorts of things. Later on, he meets somebody else, and he finds himself making a tape for her, too. Laura sees him and knows exactly what he's doing.
Terry Gross: I have to tell you, I've always found that male urge to mentor a girlfriend kind of irritating.
Hornby: Yes, I should think it is, actually.
Terry Gross:Yes, it's somebody who doesn't want an equal, someone who doesn't want to share an interest, but wants to teach it.
Hornby: Yes, you're trying to turn the other person into a female version of yourself, which kind of defeats the point of the relationship.
And here's the Paul Schrader bit:
Terry Gross: What are the tricky issues you have to deal with when the main character is narrating his or her own story but is clueless about what's really happening to their life?
Schrader: You've just touched on something that I really love doing, which is the unreliable narrator, because narration works sort of like intravenous feeding. You're getting nourishment but you don't taste it, so it seeps into your consciousness and therefore you assume that your narrator is reliable. When he's unreliable, it creates a nice little frisson between what you're seeing and what you're hearing. It goes back to Taxi Driver, my first script, where you have an unreliable narrator who's telling you how the world works and you are seeing that world and it isn't working the way he was telling you it worked.
If you haven't seen the film Taxi Driver - I highly recommend you do. Brilliant film.
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no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 02:42 am (UTC)Anecdote time: Some years ago (ok, a long time ago) a TV station here was in serious financial troubles and everybody thought it would go bancrupt. While the whole "will it survive/not survive" thing was hanging in the air, the station made a kind of "poor man's program", re-showing old soaps and generally not doing anything expensive. Every night at midnight, for 3 month straight, they showed "taxi driver". Talking about education. ;-)
Oh, and thanks for pointing me in the direction of shapinglight - that's really funny.
no subject
Date: 2010-06-11 07:10 am (UTC)Uhhh, I thought the whole point of Hell-A reset was that while everyone retained memories, all the physical changes were rendered moot. :-/
While I'm all for making the angel not an angel (thought it was stupid for Armstrong to introduce that), the demon sister overload again sounds stupid. Saying she owns Earth better be more like she has delusions of grandeur. That'd work for me. A lot of people would be arrogant enought to say that. I guess it's kinda like Rygel on Farscape except he actually was a former ruler.
I'm over here giving this plot the *massive eye roll*
no subject
Date: 2010-06-12 06:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-06-14 01:38 am (UTC)Or Angel comic?
The comics bear little to no resemblance in my opinion to the story in the tv series and do not come organically out of the series. If anything they appear at times to run counter to the themes and mythology established in the series, at times to the point of parody. I do enjoy aspects of the comics, and I did like most of Whedon's issues. But, I liked them as a version of what might have happened, not what logically makes sense as having happened. I see too many gaps in logic.
So for me, it is very hard to take either comics seriously. Meltzer's arc felt like a commentary on Superman and Wonderwoman comics. Sort of like injecting Star Trek commentary into a comic version of the BSG universe. Just does not work. The two universes are not compatible. X-men works a bit better, because Whedon always made references to the X-men...but not Superman. Meanwhile, Willingham's arc - feels like a parody of the tv series. Both writers are making the mistake of making fun of tv and vampire novels that came after Angel and Buffy, and are counter to them.
It jars. Although will state that I find the Buffy comics at the moment readable, Willingham's Angel comics - not so much.