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Suddenly I’m seeing Bowie references everywhere. Magazine covers, movie titles, on and on. It’s like when you learn a new word and suddenly you start noticing it at every turn.

The commentary on The Man Who Fell to Earth is awesome. I think this is the only time in my life I’ve wanted to listen to a DVD commentary again. It’s all really thoughtful–art as an attempt to connect with other human beings, the imperfect nature of it, the final product as a result of the interaction of the creative piece with the person interpreting it and bringing all of their opinions and experiences. Plus Bowie manages to predict Twitter… in 1992. It’s really quite nifty!

I’ve been thinking about how the music I’ve been listening to over the past few years has led to my ability to appreciate Bowie’s work, which I doubt I’d have gotten into at any earlier point in my life*. As my initial WTF reaction to Station to Station reveals, my musical horizons still have a lot of expanding to do, but at the same time I can directly trace my ability to appreciate various Bowie elements to the bands I’ve been into most recently.

* It’s also because Bowie is dark and complex but less outright angry than most of what I’ve been into in the past. I find I have increasingly less patience with white/masculine/teenage rage as time goes by. Oh, god, I’m getting old.

( Common Rotation and Bowie's early folk music )

( sidetrack: Saviour Machine )

( PIG and generic experimentation )

( the usual weird personal babble )

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I’ve fallen head over heels for Bowie’s cover of “Wild is the Wind” which closes out Station to Station (listen here).

It’s a beautiful vocal performance, but what grabs me most is the contrast between the words and the vocal tone. If you read the words, it’s a love song, but if you didn’t understand English and just listened to the vocal performance, you’d think it was a funeral elegy. It sounds desperately sad, mournful, longing–whatever love this is about is either long gone or never was.

The other reason it works is the dark undertone of the lyrics. On one level it’s just your typical hyperbolic love song — “With your kiss my life begins / You’re spring to me / All things to me / Don’t you know you’re life itself?” — but on another level it’s the dark, obsessive, all-consuming, self-destructive side of love. What does it say about your own life if it doesn’t even exist without the other person? The forlorn, yearning vocal delivery particularly enhances the underlying darkness.

The other reason it works so perfectly as the closer for Station to Station is that (as I rambled yesterday) this album is all about searching for human connection and meaning to life. The song rather perfectly embodies both.

In other “Wow, Laura, you have a disturbingly obsessive personality” news:

( Read more... )

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The problem with music is that it inspires these deep, intense, profound emotions, but I have no outlet for them. It makes me want to do… something… but I don’t know what. Not be sitting in an office fixing typos on an academic publisher’s website, for one.

I was going to write up a thing about why Station to Station is brilliant, but instead I googled it and of course someone already has, in a far more thoughtful and articulate way than I would’ve.

I think this line in “Station to Station” gets at the core of the album: “Got to keep searching and searching / Oh, what will I be believing and who will connect me with love?” The rest of the album consists of various attempts to answer that question (”Word on a Wing” - Christianity, “Wild is the Wind” - romance)* or more uncertain “searching” (”Stay” which is such a Man Who Fell to Earth-esque articulation of how difficult it is for people to connect even when they want to). The whole album is this thin surface of numb disconnect under which brews a desperate, almost frantic search for meaning and connection.

* I don’t think I’d like either of these songs if they were didactic, but they work for me because they come across as questions rather than as answers.

For all the hoopla about Bowie’s artifice and ability to manipulate his public image, plenty of his actual music is perfectly heartfelt.

I was having a conversation with jaydk the other day about albums versus songs. I know the world is moving in the song direction thanks to the ubiquity of MP3s (and a lot of people have always approached music that way thanks to radio and singles), but I will always be an album person, and Station to Station is a perfect example of why. It’s more than the sum of its parts; each song is enhanced by its context, and none of them would be as rich on their own. Like, “Word on a Wing” would be still be a lovely hymn, but it gains so much darkness and complexity when seen as one of several attempts at answering the search for life’s meaning as articulated in the title track.

Also, thanks to my MP3 player battery dying, I found that you can listen to entire albums free (a couple of times) at Last FM. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, listen here.

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It is the same Nicholas Pegg. The dude who wrote the excellent David Bowie encyclopedia I’ve been marveling over is the same dude who operates the Daleks on Doctor Who. I think my brain just melted.

(See: Moths Ate My Doctor Who Scarf promo, Wikipedia explanation, Complete David Bowie interview.)

If it wasn’t for Doctor Who I wouldn’t even be into Bowie. To further the endless circles of “every British thing I like is connected,” here’s an excerpt from the Bowie encyclopedia that I was meaning to type up anyway. From the entry on the song “Starman”:

During an interview for Rolling Stone in November 1973, Bowie launched into a disquisition on the song’s place in his planned Ziggy Stardust stage production: “The end comes when the infinites arrive. They really are a black hole, but I’ve made them people because it would be very hard to explain a black hole on stage … Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman,’ which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village.” Bowie’s affinity with home-grown science-fiction permeates much of his work, and he has always enjoyed this Quatermass-style juxtaposition of the fantastic with the banal, of the mystical with the homely, of black holes with Greenwich Village. Remarkably, this account of “black-hole jumping” and of Ziggy’s ultimate fate (”When the infinites arrive, they take bits of Ziggy to make themselves real because in their original state they are anti-matter and cannot exist in our world”) is identical to the storyline of the BBC’s tenth anniversary Doctor Who special The Three Doctors, a high-profile reunion of the show’s lead actors which had been broadcast a few months earlier, while Bowie was in London recording Aladdin Sane.

[cut a bunch more about the song’s success and places it’s shown up in pop culture, then in conclusion:]

Bowie’s original recording cropped up as an appropriate background number following the crash-landing of an extraterrestrial spaceship in Aliens Of London, a 2005 episode of our old favorite Doctor Who.

And, Pegg thanks (among others) Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, and Gareth Roberts at the back of the book.

This icon could not possibly be more appropriate!

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Netflix won’t let me post a review because “This review contains one or more words that is larger than 25 characters.” First of all, WHAT? And second of all, I counted, and no it doesn’t. Assuming technical issues, I tried removing all quotes, dashes, and parenthesis, but it kept giving the error, so fuck it. I’ll post my 2-star review of this DVD here instead. :P

( posted for posterity because Netflix is stupid )

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“[Following 40 minutes of raving about the genius of Young Americans…] In Bowie terms, it worked remarkably well. It’s a really sharp pop record. But it’s quite difficult to enjoy Young Americans on its own merits without contemplation of the horrors that it went on to spawn. Because when I say that this is the record that Bowie went on to invent the 80s, the 1980s he invented was the 1980s of, y’know, men with padded shoulders and their suit jackets rolled up playing their stupid keyboards that you wore like they were guitars. Young Americans has a great case to answer in that respect. This album is to blame for Spandau Ballet.”
– Journalist on this DVD

THAT’S IT. I can’t get into this album because it reminds me of the stuff my parents listened to in the car when I was a small child. The stuff played on ENDLESS INTERMINABLE MIND-NUMBING SOUL-DESTROYING REPEAT when I stocked shelves at a drugstore in high school.

I know it’s not Bowie’s fault. That would like blaming Nirvana for Bush. Blaming Pearl Jam for Creed. Blaming Alice in Chains for Godsmack.

But still, having not been around in that era to see Bowie come first and be better than his watered-down imitators, it’s hard to get past my initial squick and appreciate the quality. (I’m working on it.)

BTW, this same music critic also blames the cover of Young Americans for the subsequent covers of “every John Hughes brat pack film.” Which… now that you mention it… yikes:

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An act of anti-sanity: staying up until 3am on a work night, watching The Man Who Fell to Earth. For the second time.

*feels out of it and is going to bed early tonight*

It was better on rewatch, but even more depressing. I just wanted to curl up and cry at the end. Plus jaydk and I got drunk beforehand and watched the first two Death Note movies. Kind of a dark-themed night!

Watching The Man Who Fell to Earth while drunk is extra-weird because it’s largely a movie about alcoholism. That’s not the theme that intrigues me–more just the way it captures social isolation and the inability to communicate. The way you can want so desperately to connect with another person and it still doesn’t work–that love isn’t enough.

*gets depressed again*

Meanwhile I’m trying Low. I’m kind of sad because I feel like I can’t viscerally appreciate the full impact of this music, just because it was so groundbreaking at the time. Whereas I was raised on stuff like The Downward Spiral and just take the industrial / electronic / ambient thing for granted.

Still, nothing can take away from the fact that this is really good. Although not as dark as I was led to believe–but then, see: raised on The Downward Spiral.

Maybe Bowie’s just dark in a more subtle way than Reznor. I can barely listen to NIN anymore because Reznor’s lyrics hit my embarrassment squick so badly. I like to think he just pulls them verbatim from the diary he kept at age 16; the possibility that he’s writing them fresh as an adult is almost too horrible to contemplate.

Although actually, this reminds me even more of PIG (whose lyrics thankfully are not embarrassing), particularly of the instrumentals on Sinsation.

Anyway, Low. Is nifty, and I will listen to it more.

Also I am throughly absorbed in this David Bowie encyclopedia. It’s great–it’s entirely about Bowie’s creative output and skips the trashy bio stuff unless it’s directly relevant to the art. It’s divided into different sections–an entry on every single song, album, music video, film role, etc. The guy writing it seems to have a good head on his shoulders–he explains the history of each song, describes the creative contributions of everyone involved, points out the allusions and references, peppers his commentary with direct quotes as much as possible and explains his speculations with evidence, and includes both a historical overview of each piece in addition to quotes from the major reviews of the time.

It’s really fascinating both as a look at Bowie and at one sliver of the world of the 1970s, which is this whole other intriguing thing for me–this is the first time I’ve been a major fan of someone working in a era I didn’t live through, so it’s almost a study of the time as much as it is of him. It really hits you how much artists are influenced by the time and place they work in. I suppose the closest I’ve come before is my Sergio Leone obsession, which led to this whole interest in post-war European perspectives on America (which is also an aspect of Bowie’s work… and of Raymond Watts’… I wonder why I keep being drawn to that).

Sorry, babbling.

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( incoherence )

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If you watch the Man Who Fell to Earth DVD extras right before you go to bed, you’ll have crazy dreams.

I tried listening to Station to Station on the way to work today. I kind of like the first song. I’m really trying to force myself to like the album, to find some intriguing aspect that will draw me in. It’s not really working so far. I don’t understand why Bowie started singing in that annoying low voice from ~1975 onwards. It sounds cheesy and affected and boring.

I should try Low, Heroes, and Lodger, I guess, but for now I’m going back to Ziggy Stardust before I get annoyed and burned out on trying to like something that I instinctively recoil from.

I did decide that I officially like The Man Who Fell to Earth, though. I’m going to buy the Criterion DVD since it has a commentary by Bowie and the director Nick Roeg which isn’t on the version I got from Netflix. Just… need to save up money first.

I also want to buy a frame for that Life on Mars MOMA poster–turns out it’ll cost $150 to decently frame a $10 poster. It needs a custom frame because it’s huge, and I want non-glare plastic or glass or whatever. I mean, I could just tack it to the wall, but it’s so pretty and I want it to last without getting torn up and dirty. So for now it’ll sit in a poster tube while I save up cash. Grrrr.

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I’m so out of it today. I was up until 3am last night watching The Man Who Fell to Earth, and before that I was at my friend Eva’s birthday party at V-Spot, where they had unlimited mimosas for $10. Me and my friend Anne’s boyfriend Nemo were competing who could get their per-mimosa cost lowest; I got to $2.50 (four drinks), he got to $1.66 (six drinks), but he cheated because he was sneakily sharing his with Anne. Then we went back to Anne and Nemo’s place to hang out in the back yard and eat cake and drink more mimosas. Basically there was a lot of drinking. And cake!

SuperVegan got linked from the NY Times City Blog. It’s always cool when that happens.

On Saturday I cooked enough to last (hopefully) the whole week: rice and beans, maple-cinnamon cream of wheat, scrambled tofu, vegetable uppama (an Indian dish from that weird Vegan Cooking for One book). I was going to make this really good Asian noodle dish with coconut milk, but I forgot to buy fresh ginger.

We had a long Writercon phone meeting on Saturday night, and then around 11pm I remembered that there was a new Doctor Who episode. Oh yeah, that.

( spoilers for this episode and spec for the future )

My mom has started Checkmate. I'm skimming along so that I can answer her questions as she goes. I'm really glad I got her the book of translations--I think Checkmate is the hardest to understand without them. I'm really excited that she's nearing the end and that we'll be able to discuss the entire series soon. I like Checkmate a lot better in retrospect, based on how excited I am to get to talk about all the passages that she's reading. Really the only book in the series that doesn't inspire joy is The Ringed Castle--it's definitely my least favorite overall. Although even it is growing on me over time, as they all seem to.

Oh yeah, and I watched The Man Who Fell to Earth last night. I liked it! Which is weird because I didn't expect to like it at all. It's strange and surreal and definitely has a lot of annoying aspects (the awful female characters for one) but it's also eerie and atmospheric and very interesting. And, okay, David Bowie is just so pretty to look at throughout. So, so, so pretty.

( embarrassing fangirlishness about David Bowie )

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My tolerance for muppets has not improved over the past twenty years. And I forgot that this is (ugh) a musical. Between the muppets and the songs, I could barely sit still through the thing. It’s more an infomercial to show off 1985’s muppet technology than it is a coherent film. And David Bowie’s songs are insipid pandering mainstream crap. This is the guy who wrote Ziggy Stardust? Really?

Okay, I’m being harsh. It’s a children’s movie. (But I hated it even when I was five!) And I do understand why it’s a classic; it’s got a resonant coming of age story and a couple of great scenes. Well, okay, one great scene specifically, which I’ll admit is awesome and looks like it comes from a far superior movie:

But that aside, it’s got endless cutesy muppets, and muppets singing songs, and Jennifer Connelly overacting (I don’t blame her–she was fifteen–but I don’t want to have to sit through it, either), and lots of wandering around through a boring maze, and jokes that aren’t funny, and cliched one-dimensional characters, and, yeah, it’s just not a good film. (I also have to admit that George Lucas’ involvement creeps me out. After reading this, I think my opinion of him is permanently tainted.)

Bowie’s kind of hot. I guess. But he’s barely in the movie and his character isn’t interesting. And he’s not hot in a way that appeals to me. His character is a manipulative “bad boyfriend,” all domineering traditional masculinity, “Fear me, love me, do as I say” (”and I will be your slave,” right). He spends the whole movie fucking with the girl’s head and trying to control her. Yuck.

The Bowie I find hot is creatively vital and sexually subversive. This is hot:

( 1972 photo of Bowie playing Mick Ronson's guitar with his teeth )

( Bowie with his hands all over Ronson on Top of the Pops in 1972; I think I ship them )

Also the Life on Mars music video, which I could watch all day without getting bored. [Stupid EMI won't let me embed it.]

And I don't think I'd like Bowie if he didn't have the harder-edged, darker songs. Today's obsession is the Ziggy Stardust movie version of "Rock N Roll Suicide." I wouldn't have expected this song to work live, because it's not your typical verse-chorus-verse rock song--it's more a piece of theater. But here they add in all these backing vocalists and musicians to give it layers, and what makes it truly spectacular is the theatricality and the merging of life and art. The audience actually does play their part--they run up on stage, they try to drag Bowie into the crowd. And Bowie both plays his part and lives his part--the song is Ziggy's death and the show itself is Ziggy's last, Bowie literally killing off the Ziggy character. The whole Ziggy idea is fascinating, Bowie becoming a rock star by playing out the Ziggy story in real life.

(Why, yes, I am trying to remind myself why I like still like David Bowie after sitting through Labyrinth.)

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Today’s obsession: the “Wild Eyed Boy From Freecloud”/”All the Young Dudes”/”Oh! You Pretty Things” mashup from the Ziggy Stardust movie.

I like how the songs are merged, the way the emotion builds, and the way the tone shifts from dreamy to anthemic to ironic. I like the eerie way its filmed, red-tinged Bowie emerging from the darkness, with occasional illuminations from the flash cameras.

And of course, I love Bowie’s voice and the charisma of his performance. He inhabits every character that he sings about, and every move he makes is riveting. Plus he’s got this way of smiling–it feels like he’s sharing a secret with just you, even though this particular “you” wasn’t even born until nine years later. (Also, huh. I don’t think I’ve ever been a fan of someone who smiles onstage before.)

Unfortunately it’s only on YouTube in two pieces, but watch both as the first leads into the next.

(Is this annoying? Am I posting too many videos lately? Should I cut-tag them? I’m totally lost as to what the current LJ etiquette is.)

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Doctor/Master made it to the final Writercon face-off–yay! The winning ship will be featured in the Dirty Drabbles reading at Writercon ‘09. Go vote for our guys!

***

I think I’m just going to have to accept that I’ll never be one of those people with wide-ranging, eclectic artistic tastes. I’ve always fallen into the pattern of becoming completely and utterly obsessed with one thing and of wringing every last nuance of meaning out of it for years on end–and of not being able to get into anything else until I’m finished with it. Forcing myself to watch/listen to/read things that I’m not passionately interested in has just adamantly not worked. I’m twenty-six, and this tendency is showing no signs of change, so I guess I just have to go with it.

On the plus side, the stuff consuming my brain these days is better, and a lot more wide-ranging and eclectic within its own boundaries. I’ve been thinking up this whole post about how David Bowie is similar to Raymond Watts (in terms of incorporating diverse musical genres and experimenting) and how both are much more interesting than what I listened to in high school. I’m not going to write it, because I’m lazy and I don’t think anyone would read it, but it’s percolating in my brain in interesting ways.

(One is that it’s reflected in the ways Bowie has influenced the artists I grew up listening to. Marilyn Manson stole a lot from Bowie, in very obvious and uninteresting ways. I’m noticing places where Raymond Watts was inspired by Bowie too, but always in far more interesting ways than Manson. [But then everything Watts does is more interesting than Manson.] I also kind of want to do a picspam of “blatant things that Manson ripped off from Bowie,” because I’m mildly annoyed that I grew up admiring a lot of things in Manson that he stole without really even putting his own unique mark on them. I have the weirdest relationship with Manson’s work–a lot of fond nostalgia for his concerts and genuine musical respect for Antichrist Superstar and Mechanical Animals, but a lot of disgust and irritation for his limitations as a musician and as a human being.)

***

I watched the movie Human Traffic this weekend, because I wanted to return it to Netflix so that I can get Labyrinth. (I want to see Labyrinth again because I’m wondering if I’ll finally like it. My dislike goes back to being five and hating muppets, so perhaps things have changed. Plus everyone says Bowie is ultra-hot in this movie and yet I have never seen the hotness. So we’ll see.)

( vague Human Traffic spoilers )

***

( Methos' first Highlander episode )

***

In pursuit of non-embarrassing David Bowie icons (not sure if I'm there, or if such a thing is even possible--I feel that there's kind of an inherently embarrassing teenage girl thing about LJ icons), I've come across lots of images from the film The Man Who Fell To Earth. Which I'm not sure I want to see--it sounds like something that's better in screencaps than it would be if I actually had to sit down and watch it--but then again, the icons are so pretty I'm kind of feeling like maybe it's necessary. I'll put it after Labyrinth in my Netflix queue, though based on my history it'll probably sit unwatched next to my DVD player for six months. Good thing I switched to the cheapest Netflix plan.

Also, OMG, icon makers, a link is not a fake cut! It's just a link! (And a drabble is exactly 100 words! And you damn kids get off my lawn!)

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The other thing I did this weekend was finally watch Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture, which is a film of Bowie’s final concert as Ziggy Stardust in 1973. I waited a few months to watch it because I liked having something to look forward to, and despite all my built-up anticipation, it turned out to be even better than I expected.

It’s one of the best filmed concerts I’ve ever seen–it’s so atmospheric and immersive that you feel like you’re there. And the performance is just… beyond words. The songs are brilliant, Mick Ronson is a guitar GOD, and most of all Bowie is perfect. His voice, his costumes and makeup, and his charisma, his ability to enthrall the audience, his entire way of moving, like every movement is graceful and deliberate and adds to the show… and that whole alien/otherwordly quality he has… it’s just stunning.

Here’s his cover of “My Death,” which I’ve been listening to all day:

This would be such a wonderful thing to watch in a dark theater with a huge screen and an audience of Bowie fans.

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I haven’t been posting much, because I’ve been stressed out and busy and tired, and who wants to hear about that?

I have, however, accumulated a couple of mildly interesting (I hope) things to post about.

( the Watchmen movie )

* Then the next night, jaydk and I saw Coraline. Proof that you don't need to be "edgy" to make a good movie: it was far better than Watchmen. Smart, funny, well-written, beautifully filmed--the 3D was absolutely lovely. The story was creative and intriguing and eerie, and the lead character was clever and brave. Why do childrens' stories do such a superior job of portraying three-dimensional female characters? Is it just that we've been culturally conditioned to be unable to fathom a post-pubescent female in a way that doesn't put her sexuality front and center?

* I'm seeing a lot of talk about Doctor Who finale casting spoilers. As far as I can tell, they're from a tabloid that regularly makes shit up, so why is anyone taking them seriously? Am I missing something? (This is a genuine question. Is there any reason to believe them? I don't want to get excited about something that's completely fabricated.)

* I'm reading Team of Rivals, Doris Kearns Goodwin's book about Lincoln and his cabinet. It's really interesting and I'm enjoying it, but I wish she'd stop spelling out what the reader is "supposed" to think. I can make up my own mind about what these guys did and why they did it; I don't need the author inserting her own explanation that so-and-so was arrogant and ambitious on every page. Still, it's mostly good. After being so absorbed in the 2008 election, it's fascinating to see how American politics worked 150 years ago.

* And I'm still in the middle of The Disorderly Knights. I'm going to finish it and then take a break from the Lymond series, since it's been less than six months since I re-read Pawn in Frankincense. Speaking of which, my mom just finished it and is in awe. In retrospect, I think Pawn is the best written and most moving book of the series.

( the Moonlight TV series )

Also, maybe it's just that I don't watch modern American TV anymore, but ... what is with the women? As in, they are all exactly the same: tiny, emaciated, sharp-featured, and young. No matter what character they're playing--boss, geek girl, random vampire--they are all pulled from such an incredibly narrow archetype of "woman" that it's just completely absurd. Watching a show like this, you'd never even imagine that women exist on planet Earth larger than a size four, older than thirty-five, and without those sharp facial angles that Hollywood defines as "beautiful." At least the men are allowed to have some diversity of age, size, and facial features, depending on the character they're playing, but every single woman first has to fit into this absurdly narrow definition of "attractive" before anything else is taken into account.

This is why I can barely watch American TV anymore. Once you step away from it for a while, you come back and suddenly it's like being hit over the head by how ridiculous it is. This narrow bunch of nearly-identical Hollywood model types plays pretty much every female character and the majority of male characters. Sure, an occasional talent pops through, but it's painfully obvious that these people are cast almost entirely for their looks with no regard for skill. You end up with a bunch of interchangeable Barbies and Kens running around posing as every variety of adult human being. How am I supposed to take any of it seriously?

* But speaking of American TV that doesn't suck, I have become completely addicted to The Rachel Maddow Show. It passes the Bechdel Test every night! Real women talk to each other about real issues! With none of the insipid concessions to what "women" are supposed to care about--no celebrity gossip, no plastic surgery, no cooking and baking, no fashion bullshit, just women as real individual human beings, with their own perspectives, who care about the world around them. (This shouldn't be such a shock and a rarity!) And Rachel is brilliant, witty, funny, sweet, and adorable beyond words. I know she's not perfect and I do disagree with her sometimes, but I always love watching her. She makes me wish Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would do less joking and more news--after I watch her show, I feel like I'm not getting enough content from them. (Don't worry, I still love them. Jon Stewart's smackdown of Jim Cramer was a thing of beauty.)

* Oh, and I'm still listening to David Bowie. Ziggy Stardust remains my favorite, but I've added Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane, and Diamond Dogs to the lineup and am enjoying them all. I tried to listen to Scary Monsters on the advice of my friend Jason, but aside from "Ashes to Ashes" it just totally didn't work for me. I don't understand what happened to Bowie in the 80s. It's like he went from brilliant and hot and amazing to ... just ... so boring and annoying and straight. Maybe I'll understand it better if I take each album chronologically. Or it could just be the Bowie draws from the zeitgeist of the decade, and the 80s was ... well, the 80s.

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( very mild spoilers for Philip Glenister's horrific new show Demons )

( why The Legend of Billie Jean is awesome )

( I just watched the first season of Queer as Folk US because Brian Kinney reminds me of Francis Crawford of Lymond )

( and I'm reading Queen's Play again )

Oh yeah and in Bowie world, I've thoroughly exhausted Ziggy Stardust and Hunky Dory, don't particularly like The Man Who Sold the World (except the title track) or Aladdin Sane, and am currently giving Diamond Dogs its chance. Did I mention that I went to see that all-girl Bowie cover band and it sucked? So sad. :(

I've been drinking wine as I wrote this--has it gotten less coherent as it's gone on? Apologies for rambling.

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* Um. There’s an Edward Cullen bedsheet set. This might be the most disturbing thing I have ever seen.

* I watched the two John Simm Netflix DVDs that have been lying around my house for the past six months. The first was a TV show called Cracker, in which adorable young Simm plays a deeply fucked up young killer who just wants to be loved. Awww. You kind of want to snuggle the poor darling… and then lock him up for life. It was fun to watch, but nothing new; pretty much the same thing he did in Chiller (which was more fun because of the gay subtext with his evil imaginary friend).

Then I watched Wonderland… or, I should say, the first half hour of Wonderland, before I couldn’t take it any more and had to fast forward to only the Simm parts. It’s apparently a movie about a bunch of incredibly boring, miserable people, who go about their boring lives being miserable. I guess it’s supposed to be “realistic,” but it was just pathetic. Admittedly I only got part way through… maybe it got better? Simm didn’t have much to do anyway; he played one of the many boring pathetic losers, basically Danny Kavanagh without the spark. I don’t understand why people make movies like this. Even if some peoples’ lives are this dull, who would want to watch a film about it?

Between Wonderland and The Devil’s Whore, I am beginning to doubt the conventional wisdom that John Simm has great taste in projects. At least we’ll always have Life on Mars and Doctor Who. And I still haven’t seen anything as bad as the crap I endured during my Sean Bean phase.

* I had a peculiar weekend.

( Saturday I got way too drunk at my friend Livi's holiday party )

Sunday I had to drag myself out of bed to go to the Museum of Modern Art, because I'd bought a ticket in advance. I got there at 3pm and it closes at 5:30pm; the world is just not made for night people. Or hungover people. >:( But thanks to coffee and tylenol, I managed to enjoy the Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night exhibit. I know it's a cliche, but it really is so much more incredible to see an actual painting in person. They had both of my favorites, Starry Night Over the Rhone and The Starry Night. Which I also know is also a cliche, but... they're really popular because they're really amazing! It's stunning how beautiful they are, and how vivid the colors are when you see them in person. The exhibit was actually pretty small--something like 40 paintings--with a focus on how Van Gogh captured the light and the "spiritual qualities" of night. It was definitely worth seeing; I'm glad I finally made it there. (If you're going, buy your museum ticket online in advance and you're guaranteed entrance to the Van Gogh exhibit; otherwise you have to get a timed entry ticket, which they might sell out of before you arrive.)

Then I went to the Looking at Music exhibit, which honestly just seemed to be a bunch of stuff from the 60s and 70s randomly thrown together based on what had been donated to MOMA. However, they did have Bowie's "Space Oddity" video running on constant repeat, and I watched it through a couple times because I couldn't get over the novelty of watching a music video I like at a big fancy art museum. I wish I had thought to the use the "It's ART!" justification when trying to convince my parents to let me watch MTV as a kid. :P Oh, and I rather optimistically bought two tickets for the Bowie music video screening on Friday night. I don't know what I was thinking; now I have to find someone to take the second ticket. But I'm really glad I got one for me. Even though it's just music videos, it's music videos on a big screen! At a museum! Sorry, I just find it really amusing, in a good way. :)

* I'm trying not to panic about the holidays. Trying being the operative word. There is nowhere in the world I'd less rather go than Southern Indiana, but I owe my parents for helping me move, so I'm going. Wasting time and money I really can't spare to go be miserable out in the middle of nowhere, while my cats are left alone with a catsitter I can't afford and I have nothing to do and no one to talk to and nothing to eat and... just... oh my god I don't want to go. *sigh*

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Have a type?

( Who, me? )

Bowie's hotter.

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* This just made me choke on my coffee. I think I enjoy The Meathead Perspective far more than I enjoy the actual band Nine Inch Nails.

* I’m not an Avatar fan, but I’m still upset by the blatantly racist movie casting. Just… what the hell? I’m glad to see that the fandom has already launched a letter writing campaign.

* This xkcd comic is awesome and totally nails the “nice guy” phenomenon. The wank it’s generated is severely depressing, though. “Women have nearly exclusive control over the nation’s sex supply, and that will never, ever change“???? *headdesk*

* jaydk and kalichan came over to my place on Saturday night for a very fun evening of wine and television. We watched the first episode of The Devil’s Whore, after which jaydk declared that she couldn’t stand to continue watching history be raped in such a blatant manner, so we switched to the first episode of Life on Mars (which kalichan had never seen!) to get the bad taste out of our mouths.

To be honest, I didn’t mind The Devil’s Whore–probably because I’m woefully ignorant about that period of English history, and because I was only watching for John Simm. He had his shirt off for a whole scene, so I got what I wanted out of the deal. :P

* This panel description has me dreading Gallifrey One. I think it might be best if I spend this convention drinking and chatting and avoiding most of the actual programming. >:( Still looking forward to seeing Phil Collinson, though. And hopefully to hearing interesting insights from the various new series writers who are attending.

* I’ve kind of reluctantly gotten into Spooks–I actually went out of my way to watch the season finale as soon as possible. I don’t love the show by any means. It’s pure genre, which makes it incredibly predictable; it never does anything that a spy drama wouldn’t do. But it’s quite a good example of a spy show, which makes it entertaining for what it is. Well, okay, mainly the entertaining thing is the lovely contrasts between Richard Armitage’s pale skin, black hair, and blue eyes. But occasionally he even gets to do some actual acting! And I kind of love the character of Ros–her competence and snark make her one of the more appealing female characters I’ve seen in quite a while.

* I’m re-reading Pawn in Frankincense despite myself. I forgot how funny this one is as it starts off! In fact, I think I forgot almost everything that happens except for the ending, which kind of blew the rest of it out of the water. It’s a totally different experience to read this series for a second time; everything makes so much more sense when you already know what’s going to happen. Dunnett’s style of keeping the reader completely in the dark for 90% of each book (and the series as a whole) is incredibly frustrating, but definitely rewarding if you’re able to put up with it. It also makes re-reading a whole new experience–you can actually appreciate the subtleties instead of just wondering what the hell is going on. It also helps that I’ve got a book of translations with me this time around, so I can figure out what the hell they’re saying when the characters suddenly switch to French or Latin.

* I’m resisting the urge to write a long song-by-song analysis of “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” I know that no one cares about my interpretation of a 35-year-old classic album that I’ve only been listening to for two weeks. Still. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. I haven’t even turned it off at night, because it’ll play in my head if I don’t have it actually playing from my speakers.

* 5years.com is an incredibly helpful website if you suddenly decide to get obsessed with “Ziggy Stardust” 35 years too late. Plus I’m learning all this stuff about glam rock–now I totally get that scene in Life on Mars where Sam meets Marc Bolan!

* I bought this Best of Bowie DVD. It’s all so totally totally awesome for about the first 50 minutes, and then… 1974 happens. Good god. I think maybe I’m a fan of Ziggy Stardust, not of David Bowie?

* I wish I’d gone to the Bowie Ball last weekend. I totally want to go see this all-female Ziggy Stardust cover band in January. And I want to go see this thing at MOMA even though I doubt 1) I can get tickets, 2) that it’s anything I haven’t already seen on the Best of Bowie DVD.

* I finally figured out how to connect my computer to my TV wirelessly. It’s a combination of this and this and it totally works! My TV is a second monitor and I can just drag video files over to it and play them. Now I should probably cancel my cable TV, but I’ve gotten addicted to The Rachel Maddow Show and now I kind of don’t want to give it up. I suppose I could just watch that online too. And I might actually continue catching up on more of those old Doctor/Master episodes now that I don’t have to waste CDs on burning them.

Although I might just watch lots of YouTube clips of young David Bowie instead.

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Oh, god. I love the internet.

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