bironic

WTF?

( Spoilers )

1. The melody, harmony, vocal quality and especially the chord progression in Hero by Family of the Year bring me right back to growing up listening to the radio in the '80s. Probably reminds me of Phil Collins' and David Crosby's* own Hero. Maybe even the simple, earnest song that ended the second Care Bears movie, Forever Young by Carol Parks (not the same as Rod Stewart's).

2. Finished S6 of True Blood. Because of... stuff... I went back and rewatched The Scene with Godric (YouTube; spoilers) from S2's "I Will Rise Up." It's still excellent. I still love it in a way that's hard to articulate. The blood tears, the raw emotion, the ancient relationship, the slipping between languages. The unremarked-upon homosexual overtones. The crack in a favorite character's persona. Eric has never been so beautiful, kneeling there with his voice breaking. And enriching it all is the echo of Marius/Armand.

3. Mostly, though, lately I am too full of things. Emotions all over the place. It took longer than it should have to realize that the inability to write so much as an email or concentrate at work or sit still long enough to add clips to a vid, and the general irritability toward anyone asking me for something, arose from my trying to stuff too much into the week. Concentrating on nutrition and exercising, planning travel (more on that soon, it is going to be super), doing chores, consuming media, trying to make fannish things, balancing work and social events, worrying about budgets, worrying about health things, fighting poor sleep... Wish that habit of keeping too busy to brood were easier to fix. :/

4. Happy Easter, Easter-celebrating friends. Happy two-days-left-of-matza, Passover-celebrating friends. Happy Patriot's Day/Marathon Day tomorrow, running friends. My officemate is running. The heart of the city has been on its sleeve the past week, marking the anniversary of what happened last year.

*Trying to identify a young, long-haired singer in the background of a sessions shot with David Crosby on YouTube led to the startling discovery that Neil Young was good-looking back in the day! In the latter shot especially, he's got a lovely Hugo Weaving brow going on. Thumbs up. Most of the time, though, it seems he looked like the lovechild of Hugh Laurie and Joel McHale. Y/Y?

Life

Feeling nostalgic for last September. Autumn is a nostalgic season anyway, and a year ago this month roga was visiting; we listened to the beautiful songs of Rosh Hashanah like R'tzei and Sim Shalom and had apples and honey; I wrote the Inception/SGA crossover; and I tried out a new dance school after taking several years off. This year I do not have a roga and will probably not be going to high holy day services, although those recordings are still online to listen to.

But life is not at all bad. The weather is cooling off. My freelance job from June finally paid me. I went back to dance class last night for the start of the new semester, and it went well, despite a gap of five months and my concerns about being in a too-advanced class. Hard shoes make me happy. Happy enough to keep going to class when it doesn't end until 10 p.m., which is when I'm normally winding down for bed. Tuesdays will now = zzzzz.

Vidding/Ficcing

festivids is gearing back up, hooray! I am working on internalizing the fact that there is little chance of matching last year's experience, i.e. 1 bazillion comments and 5 con showings. It should still be more than enjoyable, though. Am finalizing my film/TV nominations list and starting to brainstorm ideas. If only my music repertoire were larger...

Have been a bit blocked on this SGA vid—the last one I need to finish my Kink Bingo line by the end-of-month deadline—and hope to break through it forthwith. It's a structure thing. Namely, there isn't much, and it's leaving me at a loss as to how to fill a bunch of gaps. Ugh ugh.

The stories I've tried to write lately have felt flat and old/repetitive. :/ That will surely come back with time and rest, too.

In the meantime, media consumption:

TV: True Blood had a pretty good season for a cracktastic show but ended with increasingly irritating misogyny and a teeeeease for what could be a (dys)functional threesome, deelaundry has almost caught me up on House, and I've really been enjoying this season's Project Runway. …That's it, unless you count occasional Ace of Cakes, Monk and Iron Chef reruns.

Books: Best American Sports Writing 2008, another excellent Borders find. (Wah, Borders is gone!)

Movies:

• Tambien la lluvia (Even the Rain), a well-made and very pretty movie (Gael Garcia Bernal, Luis Tosar and Juan Carlos Aduviri, for example) with the unfortunate framing of having a couple of privileged guys on a film crew learn about The Struggles of the Poor in Another Nation and Come to One's Rescue;


• Empire of the Sun, a Westerner-in-Eastern-land movie with a Hollywood story structure and music, but some interesting facets, like how the main character's love of planes and flying transcended national identity even in the midst of war, and in which I shockingly did not hate John Malkovich or baby Christian Bale, who both actually emoted;


• In Tranzit (ugh), in which Malkovich was his more typical monotone, bland self, and the talents of Vera Farmiga, Thomas Kretschmann and Daniel Bruhl were all somehow completely wasted;


• Stranded (I've come from a plane that crashed on the mountains), a patient, respectful and sometimes creepy documentary/reenactment of the 1972 Andean plane crash where the survivors had to resort to cannibalism and most managed to last 70+ days before securing rescue. The interviews with several survivors in 2006 when they brought their children—now the same age as they were when they crashed—to the mountain were particularly moving.

…And that's quite long enough. Fic recs will keep for another little while.

People are battening down the hatches here, waiting for the storm they're saying will dump a foot and a half of snow by tomorrow evening. It'll be our third storm in a week. I am loving this winter, and not just because I get to telework so much. Wednesday morning dawned with an otherworldly landscape: branches coated with wet snow, lit yellow-white against the blue-gray clouds, a pale disc of sun visible behind them.

As the first flurries are falling, here are three things that cracked me up yesterday:

1. An email confirming that I got a spot on the White House tour (yay!) instructed me as follows: "Please be in line at 12:45 p.m. and don't forget your id." I'm surprised they encourage such wanton behavior, since things like purses, pens, "personal grooming items," stun guns and martial arts weapons are forbidden. I'd wondered if I could even bring my apartment keys, but apparently they do allow those in.

2. This indescribable political ad, found via this Slate article. Skip the middle if you want, but be sure to tune back in for ~2:20. Just. *hand flail* The pedestal and the drama and the demon sheep. It is brilliant in its self-aware cheesiness. The fact that most of it is narrated by Robert Davi just makes it all the more awesome. KOLYA DOES NOT APPROVE OF HYPOCRITICAL FISCAL CONSERVATIVES.

3. Eric calling children "teacup humans" on True Blood. (Here is the scene - gets best after 1:10. The kid's delivery of the Jesus line is equally fantastic. Warning for a Sam-related spoiler from season one, a spoiler about the villain in season two, and a season two spoiler in the title of another clip that shows up in the sidebar and in the main window when the video finishes. You can avoid the first two if you skip to 1:10.) I love him so much, and am so glad he got more screen time.

Okay, back to work.

I've been swinging between highs and lows this week as winter session sputtered to life and I've made myself go back to work so my thesis doesn't kick my you-know-what in the next couple of months (which it will anyway). I haven't wanted to post during the lows—er, except Monday, when the misery wanted company—and I've been doing work during the highs, which made for rather a dull week in this LJ. But in the last day I've given in to the weekend, and:

- Saw the SGA series finale,
- Watched 11/12ths of True Blood,
- Trekked out in the cold to the Boston Celtic Music Festival closing concert,
- Had some delicious frozen yogurt (not the familiar kind that's almost like ice cream, but a semisweet kind that tastes like a container of vanilla yogurt has been frozen), and
- May have been chatted up by a mathematician on the bus ride home, which honestly never happens to me, so I'm not sure. The being chatted up, I mean, not the fact that it was a mathematician. He gave me his email address at the end, in any case.

Also, the leading edge of the promised snowstorm has arrived, and tomorrow morning there will be pancakes.

The music at the concert was foot-tappin' good, and the dancing energizing. They organized it as a tour of Celtic regions, including Scottish Highlands, Irish, Cape Breton and Appalachian solo and group performances. A troupe of students from my dance teacher's advanced class performed their own choreographed number that stole the first act. Inspiring stuff.

True Blood continues terrible, but it's addicting nonetheless, and good to watch all in one go. It's not episodic but instead like watching a very long movie. A movie that is basically the vampire/Mary Sue story I wrote when I was 13, only the characters who're telepathic and unable-to-be-telepathied are reversed. And there's more South. And serial killing. I've never read or seen Twilight, but I suspect True Blood is Twilight for a slightly older set. Parts of the score are nice, though, with a cello and guitar. And there's this one senior vampire, Eric, of the tall blond and Nordic sort—who's the only attractive one on the show other than a temporary character and Anna Paquin, who's been ruined by blonde hair and an on-again off-again Southern accent and a space between her front teeth, no offense to blondes or Southerners or people with spaces between their front teeth—and so when I'm done I might go off in search of Eric/Sookie or Sookie/Bill with Eric watching or Eric/Bill with Sookie watching. Mm, vampire noncon. Or riffs on Sookie and Bill's first time.

Since the show has left me thinking with a Lousiana lilt: How're y'all?