GIP (+ rambling)

March 30th, 2009 5:18pm by rusty-halo | 16 Comments »

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!

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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.)

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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.)

Anyway, Human Traffic was pretty awful. It’s about a bunch of loser kids in Cardiff who escape their dead-end lives by going on drug-addled binges on weekends. Except it’s not as dark as it sounds; it’s more of an implausible romantic comedy between characters I didn’t like and couldn’t relate to. On the plus side, John Simm was hot. It’s really only worth watching when in the height of a John Simm infatuation, or if for some reason you’re desiring insight into the Cardiff club scene. (The main thing that struck me was how, for all these kids lived for these “amazing” drugged out club experiences, said experiences were actually incredibly dull and pointless from the outside. There was nothing intellectually or emotionally stimulating about them. I can relate to the desire for transcendent, meaningful, moving human experiences [I always seem to reach for them via concerts, or theater, or travel], but … taking drugs is such a stupid way to grasp at them. Even in the film, the really meaningful thing is not the drugs but the two friends who fall in love–their actual joy seems far superior to any drug-induced state.)

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Nostalgia after watching that recent Highlander reunion clip inspired me to watch the Highlander episode “Methos” again this weekend. There are several things deeply wrong with this episode, among them:

* Methos’ five-thousand year old diary in the form of, literally, one continuous book, going back to “Sanskrit and Ancient Greek,” but in bound format and somehow not crumbling to dust. And that he leaves it sitting out for anyone wandering into his house to peruse at will.

* Duncan MacLeod wandering alone through a dark fog-ridden Paris tunnel at night … reading Sartre. “I’m so existentialist I don’t need light to read words”? WTF? Stupid pretentious faux-sophistication–it’s concentrated essence of Duncan MacLeod.

It’s just, I try not to laugh, really, but it’s the fatal flaw of Highlander. They’re going for something interesting, but they can’t resist cranking it up past the breaking point into cheese and melodrama, so they end up drowning in a self-created sea of cliches. I end up wanting to pat them on the heads and tell them it’s cute that they’re trying.

Still, Peter Wingfield is lovely.

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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!)