compounded

My Next Project

2008-09-21T16:20:15Z

Once I'm dong with XF up to season 7 (a nice season, I remember it being sort of funny and sweet and the producers totally told the leads to act like they'd been a hot item for years), I'm going to start my next project: a Millennium re-watch. Millennium is everything XF was either only occasionally or not at all - virtually humourless, violent, filled to the brim with absolute dread. Its brand of paranoia was mythical and epic in scope, but also local, tensely positioned between the fight and the flight in the face of the evil that humans do.

It, too, collapsed under the weight of its mythology and finished with a tepid third season. But what I love about Millennium is that it was so unafraid - unafraid to dispose of essential characters when they needed to go (and it shocked me, every time), unafraid to show the Devil without excuses or redress. The ten-minute sequence of somebody seeing the Apocalypse and snapping, really badly, in real time, set to Patti Smith's "Land", remains a milestone in my TV-viewing career. So is most of "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" a fine screwball comedy penned by everybody's darling Darin Morgan. If you've "never heard of the work of Bobby Wingood", it's time to start now.

And it was terrifying. The pilot's ruthless juxtapositions of hideous crimes and a fragile family moving into a sunny, yellow house, made me choke on my toast. I can still feel that. It'll be good to see Frank again.

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2008-06-25T04:39:26Z

Not feeling like sleeping tonight, so I thought I'd let you in on something going on back in my third home (Cardiff? London? I miss you.)

Our friends over at the Heinz condiment company decided to launch their new line of dressings, Deli Mayo, with a television ad with the following premise:

Two young children come into the kitchen one morning and talk to their mum. To everyone's surprise, it is revealed that "mum" is in fact a Robert De Niro-lookalike wearing a food service-employee's emblematic NYC deli outfit: white shirt, a bit dirty, and one of those hats I used to see on till ladies in Soviet grocery shops (before supermarkets, of course). Enter dad, getting ready for work, hurriedly saying goodbye to mum who's just made the kiddies THE MOST AWESOME SCHOOL LUNCH EVER by spreading some of that tasty deli mayo on their sarnies. Mum, in a gruff voice reminiscent of "______________" (insert Italian-American male in media) asks if he's not forgetting something. Dad pecks mum on the lips and leaves. "It's like having your own deli in the kitchen", raves the advert.

Oh yeah, here it is:

This shit got banned from television after some 200 complaints from... hell, I don't know. Maybe they were from Robert De Niro, he wants his wages! The message seems to be: we cannot show this filth to our children because mayonnaise is a filthy, fattening French condiment FAR ourshone by brown sauce, and gays are gross.

That's right, what got this ad banned was the "homosexual relationship." Papers are writing about it - is the point of it to portray a gay relationship, or is it a semi-clever and somehow faintly offensive play on the housewife (this product is so good it can turn any old mum exciting)? Personally, I'm not too crazy about the ad, but it did make me chuckle.

I can't help but be struck by the absurdity and wasted energy of it all. 200 do not represent 66 million, but here, across the pond, 15 can easily speak as if in the name of 300 million.

Mast week, two of my good friends saw the Westboro Baptist Church picket the wedding of the elderly founders of the contemporary lesbian movement. The thought of that makes me want to cry.

Okay, bedtime.

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2008-06-10T14:09:32Z

So Livejournal is telling me I last updated 20 weeks ago. That's kind of a long time. Just thought I'd check in :)
I'm here in DC over the summer, working on a couple of projects (one of which is more exciting than the other). I use some specialised equipment in my work, and originally I had thought that I'd have to set it up in my room at my house... now, I don't mind working rom home, but at the moment there's just too much distraction and it wouldn't have been healthy. But AWESOME as I am, I managed to sweet-talk my way to an office! Its regular occupant, a professor in my department, is on sabbatical, so it's mostly being used as a storage space. Having organised a huge conference earlier this year, I now find myself sitting among the leftover reception booze and coffee creamers, the inventory for which I took, and which I really want to drink right now.

Here is a photo of me at not-my desk in not-my office. It's good to have a space of my own. And yes, that's her doctoral gowns on the door behind me!

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2007-10-31T13:28:14Z

WHY did I not think to be Dana Scully for Halloween? It's too late to get a wig now :( Instead I'm wearing my martial arts uniform and hoping that the gods of jiu-jitsu don't take offense. What are you lot doing for Halloween?

ps I'm kind of scared to go to campus... with all those dorms around, it'll be like free pass slutty dress heaven today.

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2007-06-21T15:32:20Z

My name starts and ends with A and this is my new journal. Deleting the old one was something I'd thought about for a while, and it feels pretty good. But I don't want to lose touch -- I do still read your entries and sometimes even comment!

I'll post here very sporadically as I'm entering into something pretty all-consuming and won't really have anything interesting to talk about beyond that for a while.

So go on, don't be an emo frog, friend me!