I derive comfort from the oddest things sometimes. When I'm sick and/or miserable for an extended length of time -- which in fact I have been, and they have just given me another bottle of drugs which does not work correctly , and my next return appointment isn't until next week -- with no clear end in sight, I cope by grabbing onto something, and researching the ever-loving fuck out of it. My brain is the only part of me that keeps working right when I feel lousy. I had the honest-to-God flu once, the kind where you spend a few days wondering if you're going to die and the next two weeks praying that you will, and in those horrible waking hours between one dose of drugs wearing off and my next dose of drugs kicking in, I crammed the entirety of the sci.electronics.repair FAQ into my brain. I now know far more about resuscitating dead VCRs than I will ever conceivably get to use. Another bout of problems coincided with the Doctor Who Restoration Team inventing yet anoth...
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The cosmos are being helpful again. For some reason, whenever I suddenly develop an interest in someone, about 50% of the time they will suddenly turn up everywhere -- actors will be back on TV after a hiatus, people who have no idea what I've got my nose into will mention them, someone will express that they want a musician's new album apropos of nothing. In a particularly egregious display of helpfulness, it turns out that the US National final figure skating round winners-go-to-Sochi thing is being held in TD Garden this weekend. Johnny Weir and Tara Lipinski are doing commentary. I have severely mixed feelings about pestering celebrities who are not specifically doing meet-and-greets or signings.. but, on the other hand, Weir is generally nice about it, he freely admits he likes having fans, and his book did turn up in the mail a little bit ago. (It's very pink. And he's wearing one hell of a pair of shoes on that cover.) I'm slightly more tempted to go do...
I decided I was probably about $5 worth of curious about Johnny Weir, so I headed off to Amazon to find his book. Most of the reviews of this thing make a very big deal about him "coming out" in it. Is this some new definition of "out" that I had not previously been aware of? What do they think "in" looks like? The book came out in 2011, after he'd been to the Olympics twice. What the hell do they think he was doing before ? Self-delusion, as a force of nature, is slightly more pernicious than gravity, so I went looking around to find out if perhaps he was under the impression that this was news to anyone when he published it. Answer: No. Weir rolls his eyes at everyone who says that to him ("I was never in ," he explains, with more patience than I'd have after the first half-dozen interviews -- although he does use that specific phrase every time, so he's probably doing it by rote). It wasn't a case of everyone noticing and pre...
Top Gear is one of those things that's much easier to watch than to describe. You start out telling people, "It's about cars," and twenty minutes later you find yourself trying to explain why the BBC is sending an automotive journalist to the North Pole on a dogsled. They have used cars as a flimsy excuse to go to so many exotic places that Top Gear is now better at being the National Geographic Society than the actual National Geographic Society. The three of them have bickered like children in some of the most gorgeous spots on the face of the planet, usually while Clarkson is trying to fix his car with a very large hammer. Moggie has just finished her physics homework and needs something to stop the weeping, so I'm going to talk about Richard Hammond for a while. The bookseller from whom I attempted to order On The Edge somehow managed to be out of copies before they got around to shipping mine, so I'll just be doing my usual semi-baseless speculation...
I'm not a gearhead. Everything I know about cars, I learned from Car Talk and Top Gear -- so it's probably a good thing I don't drive. Both of these programs are nevertheless entertaining, so I keep up with them anyway. I watch Top Gear mainly because the three presenters -- Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May -- are hilarious. The show is partly scripted and partly edited segments of live camera commentary, which means both a lot of interesting ad-libs and a lot of interesting gag reels. The three of them do play characters, which have a sort of "based on a true story" relationship with their actual personalities; Clarkson is a bit of a curmudgeon, Hammond is a bit of a scrapper, and May is a bit of an obsessive geek, but it's exaggerated quite a lot for comic effect. They spend a lot of time dreaming up creative ways to be total cocks to one another without actually getting anyone killed -- pay attention and you'll notice that, while they ...
Before I go on with any more of the SPN stuff, I should probably do the whole listing-of-ye-biases and meta-commentary thing. This is 145% opinion, speculation, and personal orneriness, and should not be taken as the basis of anything. I was sort of aware of Supernatural before I started watching it. I hang out on the internets, after all. I had been told that Dean/Cas was a thing, although I had no idea who the hell they were at the time and I'd heard much more about the infamous "Wincest" people -- that happens to hit one of my personal squick buttons, and I was told it was prevalent, so I read no fanfic before I started prodding Netflix for episodes. I watched the first couple of season 1, then skipped to season 4, since I'd been specifically asked about Misha Collins. I've been a fanficker for a long, long time. I write it (no, you can't see it), I read it (don't ask me for recs unless you want things that are slashy or interesting), and I study it...
From time to time, I run into interesting people that I mostly fail to track down. Thus, I turn to you, the internet. There is an English character actor named David Collings who keeps turning up in things. He plays Silver in Sapphire & Steel, has had several supporting roles in Doctor Who (Poul in Robots of Death and Mawdryn in Mawdryn Undead , and one other I can't recall at the moment), and did the usual flurry of appearances on all those murder mysteries I watch, mostly in the '80s and '90s, that mean I've started to recognize his face. The most prominent thing he seems to have done on film was take the role of Bob Cratchit in the 1970 version of Scrooge. He's done a lot of Shakespeare on stage, including some that were filmed, but seems to do mostly radio these days. (He's done " The Dorabella Variation ". " A Question of Proof " and " Money With Menaces " for BBC Radio. I provide them here strictly because if there i...
Wow. Peter Davison was not kidding when he said he was quite shy when he was younger. Sometime in 1982, the This Is Your Life people managed to catch him, and good lord. He looks like he's sincerely trying to blush himself to death. Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 For those of you who are not familiar with stage and screen makeup, like most very pale people, when Davison's in studio as he is there, they've usually got him in pretty heavy foundation and matte finishing powder. This stuff is thick and opaque and specifically meant to cover flushing, among other things -- it can get really hot under stage lights, and you don't want your actors looking as though they're about to die of heatstroke, even if they are. It's pretty effective stuff, to the point where often when an actor does go all pink on camera, you can only tell when it hits their ears, which the makeup artist will usually skip as inconvenient and unimportant. You have to turn some really inventiv...
While I'm entertaining Moggie with this, I might as well write up a profile on the fellow who played Turlough as well. Mark Strickson is really amusing. The Doctors tend to have personalities fairly close to what they played on the show, but the companions are much more a mixed bag; some of them have a lot in common with their characters, some of them are just actors pulling things out of thin air. Strickson is playing almost entirely against type in that show. He is the very dictionary definition of voluble , in person. To say he talks with his hands is entirely too mild a phrase -- I don't know why he hasn't knocked over many more microphones, to be honest. One of the more entertaining bits I've seen is from a stage panel he did a few years ago ( part one , two , three , four ) where at one point he actually stands up and moves the chair so that he can give a proper acting demonstration down front, on the floor, in the spot. I did wonder if conventions made him ...
I find many things endearing about Doctor Who , both on screen and behind the scenes. Being on the show is apparently quite the experience, no less today than fifty years ago; along with the time crunch of working on weekly TV, there's also the budget crunch of working on an episodic show that needs new sets or location filming every week or two, and the technical challenges of working on effects-heavy sci-fi. Days are long, and shooting some of the scripts without any of the SFX creatures to act against can get bizarre. The show has run for so long and become such a cultural institution that the production crew has almost developed its own little society, complete with mores and customs all its own. One that is seldom if ever spoken of has to do with casting the Doctor. When selecting a new Time Lord, the production team does not generally look for an actor who has a proven track record of playing the kind of Doctor they want -- they look for an actor who in many ways is the ki...
Continuing on my theme of adoring people who dress like lunatics, meet Kerli: "Walking On Air" She's Estonian, and does a lot of very cute, very clubby europop. She has about 90% of the wardrobe insanity of Lady Gaga -- she thinks stuffed animals are completely valid fashion accessories, even when you glue them to your shoes, but I've never seen her pantsless or wearing meat -- with 0% of the pretentious batshittery. She's kind of a bubbly kid. "Army of Love" She's terribly optimistic. It's almost Beatles-y, in a way -- as if she thinks if you sing 'all we need is love' enough times, it'll be true. We're probably not that lucky, but it's a nice thought. Kerli is pretty dedicated to dressing like that at all times, if at all possible. It's a style she's dubbed 'bubblegoth'. She's also hardcore DIY about it -- if you go through her site , particularly her blog, she details where she gets all thi...
Jesus Christ, I feel like I've been drowning over here. Too many smaller things to deal with can be just as catastrophic as a couple of HUGE things hitting at the same time. Trying to cover a bunch of stuff I've missed over the past couple of weeks: Tabbiewolf was good enough to whip up a sketch -- and even color it! -- after I got curious enough to ask what kind of critter she thought I'd be. (Normally people go straight for 'fox', probably because of the red hair and va-va-voom.) Tabbiewolf is a freelance artist specializing in toonified critter avatars and the like, so if happen to be looking for one, head on over and ask about projects. She drew me as a bobcat, which is one I've never gotten before. Cute, non ? I sent her to my online portfolio for reference images, and I am amused to note that I apparently really am that busty. I don't tend to think of myself as top-heavy, especially since one of my best friends has knockers literally the size of he...
One of the stranger people on my playlist -- in an absolute sense, rather than in the contextual sense that I'm American and normally we're kind of blind to anything outside our national borders -- is Yoshiki. Yoshiki is... Well. Yoshiki is something. The best way to explain this is probably to point out that his initial claim to fame was as the drummer (and main composer) for the visual-kei metal band X Japan... "Dahlia" ...and his second claim to fame was as a classical pianist who was once invited to compose and perform a piece for the 10th anniversary of the Emperor's ascension to the throne. "Anniversary" There are a lot of echoes of the one in the other; he handles drums and piano both like he has about five hands, and the vocalist for X Japan up there is screaming some oddly poetic things at the top of his lungs. (Probably more obvious to English speakers in the ballad " Crucify My Love " -- also Yoshiki's doing, ...
Whilst I have been following people like Gackt for years and years, and am not always much for the new visual kei acts, a few of them are indeed interesting. One of these is exist†trace. The whole visual kei thing, as a coherent style, started out in the early 1980s in what were essentially heavy metal bands trying specifically to be outrageous. If you look at pictures of early X Japan, one of the first acts in the genre, their style can probably be best described as ' kabuki punk '. (Those are all guys, by the way. Androgyny has become a very big intentional part of the look in more recent times, but the Japanese standard of male beauty has always involved some amount of effeminate prettiness -- in Genji Monogatari , a serial romance novel from about a thousand years ago, one of the running jokes is basically that in a room full of stunning court women, Prince Genji is still the prettiest of them all.) One of the most consistent things is that all of the early bands wer...
One thing I did not get much flak for as a kid was being short. This is because I grew up in Phoenix. I don't know whether it's ethnic variation or environmental conditions or what, but a lot of Mexican women are itty-bitty, and Mexican men have been conditioned to expect that there is an inverse relationship between the size of the lady and the size of the lady's temper. You do not mess with the tiny little chicas if you value either your life or your cojones . Especially if she has her kids with her -- a sufficiently-enraged mamacíta is perfectly capable of turning around and just fucking killing you without putting the baby down. Shakira is one of these pocket-sized bombshells. She's something just shy of five feet tall, exact height depending on which bio you read. I first ran into her music in 1998 or so, while taking a Spanish class that I had signed up for because my high school required me to be on campus for at least half the school day, and they had comple...
More things unearthed from the depths of my music drive: Tokio Hotel. Tokio Hotel is one of those things that makes people tell me my music collection is full of unlistenable crap. It has nothing to do with the way they sound, so much as the fact that they started very, very young, and have generally been regarded as the kind of band obsessively followed by tweener girls. Pop-punk bands combine the slick production that makes artsy people look down on pop, with the lack of angry violence that makes hardcore punks look down on the rest of humanity, and as a result I get a lot of eye-rolls over Tokio Hotel and Paramore and the handful of Avril Lavigne tracks I like. I can't be the only person on the planet who actually likes their music. They've been racking up awards since 2005 without a break, which is especially impressive considering that they haven't had a studio release since 2010. (One's due out this year.) The entire reason I know who Russell Brand is in the ...
In which I try, and probably fail, to explain Miyavi
I mentioned before that Miyavi has a tendency to fold, spindle and mutilate language to suit his purposes; a lot of Japanese musicians do, particularly when they speak decent English. Gackt likes to spell things funny and use the LEGO method of building his own verbs, for one, and Amuro Namie flips back and forth between rhyming English words with either their native or their Japanese pronunciation. Miyavi is one of the worst -- or one of the best, depending on how you look at it. Below are the lyrics to a song of his called "Señor・Señora・Señorita". Right off the bat, you may notice that A) the title of this song is not technically in English or Japanese, and B) those dots in between the words do not exist in your boringly standard alphabetic font. (They're part of the full-width katakana character set, in the Windows IME.) This happens a lot. Miyavi is not actually incomprehensible, but he believes that typographical conventions are for boring people. The people who t...