The friends I never knew have died

[alexsarll]

Still reeling from John Crowley's 'Great Work of Time'* when I headed out yesterday, not quite into the past but into a nineties night. Some quibbles over what counted as Britpop, but Hell, they made better My Life Story selections than My Life Story did on Thursday. And Spearmint! Younger Younger 28s! The really rubbish stuff like OCS for which I fled the stage but it wouldn't have been the same without it! I do hope they have another one soon, I like pretending I'm still young.
(Though I'm convinced my Geneva t-shirt slowed down my service in the pubs beforehand, presumably because I looked like a tourist or a footballist rather than because London's barstaff are all still bitter about the second album)

Weird watching Near Dark again post-Heroes, seeing Nathan Petrelli as a hot young cowboy. Or after Big Love, given I now think of Bill Paxton as Mormon paterfamilias rather than a punky vampire. Lance Henriksen, though - well, I don't think I've seen him in any new roles since I first saw this, and I think he came out of the womb looking like that. It does remind me that at some point I should watch more Millennium, though - another good show screwed over by UK schedulers, just as I note Entourage, having been pushed back and back in the schedules lately and losing its repeat, is now disappearing mid-season (over christmas? We don't know, the continuity announcer was waffling on about unconnected programmes rather than telling us when this one would be back) lest it show up the rest of ITV's output as the dross it is.
But yes, Near Dark. Stands up very well, on the whole, aside from the sappy undercurrent of the family plot. And I don't think I noticed the first time I saw it that it doesn't once use the V-word.

Another V-word: Vegemite. I may have mentioned before how the health food shop where I normally get it is hopeless, only ever getting two pots at a time and almost always selling out before resupply, when it's not as if this is a perishable item. Well, Tesco now has whole trays of the stuff, and for about half the price, while also being much more convenient for me. Note to small local shops: the reason supermarkets are massacring you is that they don't suck.
(Similarly, even though I prefer to do my christmas shopping in the flesh - in the (apparently forlorn) hope that it might get me into the festive spirit - when I'm looking for a pretty recent, pretty big SF book, and one big central London bookshop doesn't have it at all, and another only has a slightly knackered copy, and I'm being sent vouchers to discount it online where it is already cheaper than in the physical shops, well then yes, I'm going to buy it online, aren't I?)

*"I have seen the real world gradually replaced by this other, nightmare world, which everyone else assumes is real"? I can sympathise with that. I wasn't going to buy a paper yesterday - I didn't need the TV listings, I've got a Radio Times. Should have stuck to the plan.
ETA: and with that thought fresh in mind, what should I find but a plug for a pseudoscientific modern restatement of 'everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds'. Note to self: never underestimate the human desire for consoling lies, even ones that absurd.

Comments

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Just you wait, I'm sure we'll get Bishop Berkeley with added 'science' soon enough. But yes, it is utterly mental. One could almost think that monotheists are desperately, wilfully deluded loons with putty for brains!

Re: icon - isn't there a case for considering the whole JNT era fanfic too? And I reckon Tom Baker would sign up to that interpretation.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Surely a couple of directors have carried over? Not to mention Sladen, Leeson and a few actors in smaller roles? And if you're hanging any kind of *anything* on Terrance Dicks, you're in trouble - the man is the very exemplar of a hack!

Ainley's Master was the weakest link. I mean, in The King's Demons even the Doctor takes the piss out of the sheer rubbishness of his scheme. Comparatively speaking, the whole Saxon plan was, if you'll pardon the expression, a masterstroke.

Although, for this and all other continuity gripes, I love the hypertime rip-offs deployed in Zagreus and The Gallifrey Chronicles.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Agreed up to a point: there's something to your RTD/Johns comparison, though unlike Johns RTD has occasionally been as good as he thinks he is. But in Moffat, I think Who finally has its Grant Morrison. Hell, if they'd just let Lance Parkin on to the TV show, it would have its Alan Moore as well. And I'd rather have that than Wolfmans or deFalcos or the sort of Who writers who, even on the best of the old series, made most stories twice as long as they needed to be.
(Now there's a thought - in many ways Who and comics run in parallel. Terry Nation = Stan Lee, I've known that much for years. We're talking about the mixed results when the fans come up and start writing the new stuff - at times you get new highs, and at others you get either bad pastiche or embarrassing attempts at Kewl. But what has only just occurred to me is that the axis of decompression runs in opposite directions. Those interminable eight or ten-parters could almost be by Warren Ellis at his padded nadir, if you swapped his Red Bull for soothing cocoa and cut the swearing)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Queer as Folk seemed better at the time, before the TV renaissance and before one became aware of RTD's tics and started looking for them. It's still pretty good, though.

'Tooth & Claw'? Really? I thought that was horribly forced and basically a bit boring. When I heard about the original draft (werewolf kills Victoria, thus setting in motion the alternate timeline we see in the Cybermen episodes) which he'd ditched for being 'too science fiction', I wanted to throttle him, because that sounded much better. The finales of the first and third seasons, though - even the first christmas special - I thought were great. And a lot of his stories seem to have pretty minor problems which a decent script editor would be able to iron out. I think the big problem is not that he's writing for Who, it's that he's *head* writer.

I agree that anything is better than middlebrow - but I don't think new Who is any more prone to that than the original (remember all those 'racism is bad, mmmkay?' stories?). We're just less inclined to forgive it now, because we're older and we've seen HBO.