GIVE ME SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT

So because watching so much TV lately has totally sucked the will to live from my brain and also made me feel totes crap about myself (THAT’S RIGHT, the difference between Jtul and a Stanford student is that they don’t binge out on supermarket  apple crumbles and watch whole seasons of bad CWB tv shows in one sitting) I am taking a month off watching ANYTHING. Admittedly I forgot this the last few nights and made my way through 2 eps of the BBC Pride and Prej. But who can feel guilty about breaking a TV ban when Darcy is there to glare and saunter around looking arrogant and amaaazing!

The supernaturalz are hitched.

Moral is I’ve been trying to procrastinate all day by blogging but have NOTHING TO SAY. Which is lame coz I’ve been reading my butt off in lieu of TV binging so I should have something literary to say about all that but I can’t because all my literature magic got used up today writing bad paragraphs about the narcissism of American culture in 1980s Knoxville.

The. Best. So hardcore in leather jckt! 

So whatevs – I could default and write about the Supernatural boys but I think that’s bad for a number of reasons including a) its not good to obsess over famous married people but more importantly b) as if they truly compare to Rupert Giles from BTVS. (That’s right folks, MR FLIPPIN GILES, the baddest librarian of all time who also turned out to be an unlikely father figure, a likely magic rehab sponsor, a gay rights advocate and evil-fighting fiend. It’s interesting to note his development over the 7 seasons of the Buff, from Englishy-stuttery guy in S1, to turtle-necked-slightly-cooler-has-gf-and-plays-acoustic phase, through to over all cool-magicky-returned-prodigal-father type deal at the end of s6. Didn’t we all get goosebumps when that happened?)

What I look like now. Almost.

And tell you what now my regrowth has been showing for way more than a year I’m looking more and more like Amber Benson aka Tara from Buffy every day. Which isn’t such a bad thing considering her amazing duet with Giles in Once More With Feeling, listen to it here, couldn’t find the clip! Most days I think Tara should’ve gone straight and had babies with Giles. But of course that would muck up a buttload of plotline up so I never wrote in about it. (BESIDES Amber is an AUTHOR NOW so we're bascially twins.)

Also, If anybody cares I’m on day 2 of this caffeine-free meat-free alcohol-free fast and my head feels like Giles just took it with a library book AND a cross bow so yeah, less coherent today than usual. So on top of being tv-less I also have the withdrawal symptoms from helaware AND have nothing but a carrot to eat (literally: my organic fruit and veg box didn’t get delivered though I have been going stir crazy waiting at HOME ALL DAY.)

SO THAT’S RIGHT: GIVE ME SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT WORLD. My head hurts but on the plus side my brother sent me a Dexter bobble head all the way from Australia so sometime the universe just sends it all back to you Oprah Style. (you know I don’t really believe that Oprah crap btw. But I do love how she asks every single interviewee if they’d made peace with God, including JK Rowling and Cormac McCarthy). Cereally, who can focus on their lit thesis when they could be writing about totally awesome supporting roles such as Rupert Giles from Buffy and can’t even have a cup of coffee? Now watch the clip and think of me!!! Apart from the whole dying and coming back to life thing of course!

BYEZ. 

PS. I really am a happy person :) I just wanted to write about Buffy but without coffee iz hard :(

      

the deaths of Dean Winchester et al

So whilst procrastinating I am watching Supernatural season 4. As much as everyone knows that Dean Winchester is the best thing that ever happened to sci fi TV (in fact, the best thing that ever happened to television in general, and potentially the best thing that ever happened to the entire world) what's with him dying, going to hell and being brought back to  life? The storyline shamelessly replicates Buffy seasons 3 AND 6, where Angel comes back from hell and Buffy comes back from heaven respectively. I'm getting tired of shows killing off main characters for dramatic effect and then bringing them back to life under mysterious circumstances so that the next 20 episodes can be spent determining "why they got brought back" which, inevitably, is because some cosmic superpower "has more work for them to do."

In Supernatural's defense, they had to bring Dean back because even the fictional death of the actor that plays him, Jensen Ackles, is a travesty to humankind that should never have to be faced by any living soul. The producers of cyber-punk sci-fi series Dark Angel obviously knew this too, because after Ackle's death as character Ben in Season 1, they brought him back as new character Alec in Season 2 (conveniently, Ben and Alec are genetically enhanced superhumans who share the same DNA, so were plausibly identical).

And of course EVERYONE who has watched any Buffy at all knows that Dawn should've died instead of Buffy at the end of Season 5 (anyone who says otherwise should have their TV taken away from them NOW). Angel coming back was alright, because I liked him. And his death really was moving, I still cry every time.

Some more acceptable instances of characters being ostensibly killed off and then brought back are
       - Han Solo coming out of his carbon freeze (Star Wars)
       - Westly revealing himself as the Dread Pirate Roberts (Princess Bride)
       - Aladdin nearly drowning and the Genie turning into a giant submarine and bothering to make
         siren noises before rescuing him (how hilarious is this by the way).

       - Jeremy having his neck broken by Damon but being protected by his magic ring (whoo
         hooo!!! Vampire Diaries s2 episode 1! Just started screeing in UK!)

Now I have to back to real study and write about Cormac McCarthy's '79 novel Suttree, in which lots of people die but no-one comes back. It's a bit more depressing really.

Dean Winchester, human extrodinaire

Buffy sacrificing herself for her sister Dawn, Buffy s5

Submarine Genie rescues Al.

some fun things

At first I was like, "it's time for a fun post not about dead bodies for once in my life, maybe I should write about Jane Austen" until I saw this-

- and got over it. Plus it would go really well with my other favourite two actions figures!

Faith from Buffy

Self-explanatory - and with 'glide action'.

                                                            

No pun intended with Faith's name, PS. Anyway then I realised that the last two books I read were Rupert Thomson's Book of Revelation (story of a man who gets kidnapped, raped and tortured by a group of women and then attempts to piece his life back together) and Corman McCarthy's Blood Meridian (yep, you guessed it, a story of brutal cowboys who gauge each others' eyes and brains out with broken whiskey bottles or their bare hands). Moral is, I don't have much to talk about except dead bodies these days.

The other reasonably exciting thing I remembered this morning watching Dexter was that I took this photo at my friend's beach house kitchen:

real knives.

Totes looks exactly like Dexter's knife case! Now that I feel kinda disturbed that I got excited about finding knives that resembled a serial killers, I'm over and out. I just found a musty and leatherbound copy of Agatha Christie's Nemesis and hope to Miss Marple it up later this afternoon. Hopefully this will soon give more of a female flavour to the masculine/blood/corpse-infused haze that seems to have settled over this blog. Bye!

justifying the vampire diaries

It’s time I went public about how much I enjoy watching The Vampire Diaries, possibly the most unoriginal and predictable television show ever created. It’s like someone put every vaguely successful vampire series ever produced into a blender, spread it over some HD film with a plastic knife, boxed it up with every American top ten single from past 18 months and sent it to some dude in Hollywood with too much cash to spare but brain enough to know that riding the vampire wave is the quickest way to billionairdom at the moment. And then everyone entered gazillionairdom when it not only became the CW Network’s most watched show last year, but the most watched show among adults (18-34 years). How this happened when the script is worse than Twilight and the main character’s (Elena) personality is so boring it took me all of the first season to remember her name, I’ll never know. Truth be told, the producer was originally uninterested in the show till he "began to realize that it was a story about a small town, about that town's underbelly and about what lurks under the surface.”1 Because of course this has never been addressed in TV show about vampires before. Does this guy even own a television?

And yet. I watched episodes 1-22 in less than three days. I couldn’t even stop to leave the couch, and hence ate the only food in arms’ reach which happened to be a friend’s pile of Easter chocolate (thankfully this was large enough to sustain me for a couple of days). I attribute The Vampire Diaries’ addictive nature to two things, in my case – its predictability, and its male actors.

In addressing predictability, the show is so plot-driven it may as well not even have characters, and the cliff-hangers are so shameless that Jayde (fellow vamp-fan and owner of aforementioned chocolate) and I paused after each episode to list what we thought would happen next, i.e. who would hook up, who would die, and who would kill them. We were right in every case! This not only gave us a warm bubbly sense of satisfaction, but confirmed our status as vampire-experts. ‘Ohh,’ we could sniff to one another, ‘please. As if that conversation wasn’t taken directly from Buffy Season 2 Episode 19 where Buffy and Angel have that conversation while they’re under the spell of the dead flute player.’ (Okay, so maybe it confirmed our nerd-status too). Not mention the dark-haired-brooding-journaling thing that the boy vamps have going on, a common theme from Buffy to True Blood to Twilight. The True Blood rip-off goes deeper, as the hot white girl has a hot black best friend, and just like Sookie Stackhouse, Elena’s BFF Bonnie can read minds. Twilight’s not far off either as Stefan, in true Edward Cullen style, repeatedly keeps his distance from, and returns to, Elena (who, of course, is begging to be made a vamp herself so they can spend eternity together ‘cause she like, loves him sooo much). Of course it’s here we state that Buffy Summers is the most intelligent girlfriend of a vampire ever as she never valued her relationship with Angel so much she wanted to be a vampire. But I digress. The first reason I loved The Vampire Diaries was because it’s great that such mindless and easy viewing can make me feel so high-brow and informed and literature-savvy. (YES, Buffy the Vampire Slayer is high-brow and counts as literature, that is not a discussion for right now.)

The other reason the show works so well is due to the good-looking-ness of its male characters, in particular, Damon Salvatore (guy on right in photo). Wowee, just like Supernatural, you could put this show on mute and not enjoy it any less (in fact, you may enjoy it more! No distractions!) While I rail against gendered objectification of any sort, and particularly the way it’s seen in teenage television shows, I found I just couldn’t help myself. I even had fantasies of moving to LA to do my PhD and running into Ian Somerhalder (the guy who plays Damon, incidentally also an underwear model) and marrying him. It was at this stage I realised that I had probably got a bit carried away and got over it, and now I fantasise about going to Scotland and eating deep-fried mars bars, which is more realistic. However, if a feminist and Christian like me who is all about inner value and respecting the opposite sex and respecting my own sex was taken in so easily, it totally explains why this show would be so popular with 18-34 year olds. I wonder if seeing the gender breakdown of that demographic would shed light on this – I’m pretty certain the viewers would be mostly female.

While VD adds nothing new to the vampire genre and in fact just does a bad job of reworking the old, there are a couple of notable elements. There’s some minor character development in Damon who goes from annoying-evil-guy to conflicted-evil-guy-that-everyone-has-a-soft-spot-for (again, following the trend of Spike from Buffy). Also, it was cool in the final episode of Season 1, when who we thought was Elena was actually the villainess Katherine, and she turned around and chopped Uncle John’s fingers off. Season Two comes out this fall, northern-hemisphere-wise. I’ll be freezing my butt off in Edinburgh by then and watching the next instalment of good-looking predictability on the advance DVDs Jayde sends me from Jakarta and ignoring the Indonesian subtitles. Can’t wait to see if all my predictions come true.
 
1 Hughes, Sarah (February 5, 2010). "The Vampire Diaries - Fresh blood for teenage vampire lovers". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/the-vampire-diaries--fresh-blood-for-teenage-vampire-lovers-1889840.html. Retrieved February 5, 2010.

FYI - Benzalicious

Here's JB as Darla like 15 years ago - nice face shame about the bleachy wig thing.

And NOW as Rita. HOW DID THIS WOMAN NOT AGE??!?