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April Foolscap
I thought about putting in some joke, of course. Like about how I was going to shelve the noir for a while and try my hand at an *N Sync/Spike crossover that I've been secretly thinking about. But I scared myself. Latest story is almost done. Have already been dabbling at a scene for the next up, and sketching out plot arcs for the next three. Probably will be done very late tomorrow, or the next day. Did so little work at work today that I scared myself. I was so tired, though, that my brain simply refused to engage. Must go to bed now, so that I can do what I get paid to do, and be a productive member of society for many years to come. Staying up until two a.m. to write fan-fiction is not paying the rent, sad to say. Thought I'd add, re my comments on TWoP yesterday, that other bits of the add-a-sentence thread--the one I called 'unwholesome'--are quite funny. In fact, I didn't mean 'unwholesome' in a bad way, because I like unwholesome humor. It probably sounded that way, though, in the context of talking about bitter fans. I was singling out the bitfans. I flee bitterness. I am an emotional wuss, and it's hard for me to keep my head above water in waters like that. Oceans of salty fannish tears, you know? It's too easy to get sucked in. We're all susceptible. But I want to be happy fangirl for as long as possible. Look on the bright side of canon and all that. There's really not an ep in all the show's six years that I truly dislike, except for "As You Were." And even that has some good bits. I watch eps again and again and they make me feel things, brings me complex types of satisfaction and pain. If I'm a fluffy bunny, though, I think I have sleek black fur and squinty eyes. I'm the bunny Anya fears. The Drusilla bunny, rubbing my paws together as I glory in the twisted pain of it all. La la la. I've been talking about Buffy a lot lately, I notice. I wonder why that is. Cough. posted 4.01.2002 @ 11:55pm -- right-click here to grab a link Goodbye to You Well, it's confirmed. The end of "Once More with Feeling" can still make me levitate off the couch and wring my hands and give puppyish whimpers. So sad. I am so emotionally invested in seeing Spike and Buffy together that I can hardly be in the same room while on the screen; not without combusting. Am listening to "Goodbye to You" now on replay. (And no, I'm not getting eps confused again, thanks very much. End of "Tabula Rasa." So there.) Strange for this song to be more or less their song--a break-up song ushering in their romance. I guess that says it all, really. But you know, I just can't think about that. Too painful. I read something from Marti Noxon a few days ago that turned my optimism about the relationship to pessimism, but...I'm letting it go. Except to say: it's not as if I'm squeeing "theirloveissopure" but damn it, does it really have to compromise Buffy's solitary, heroic arc to have her in a committed relationship for more than a year at a time? And why did they spend so much fucking time, a fucking year, building up Spike's love for Buffy, if they're just going to end it with the stupidest, lamest, most dramatically unfulfilling break-up ever? Screw them, you know? I say that in a totally loving way of course. I try to stay away from commentary that might get me worked up, so I don't really read the TWoP boards too much, but I did read a page of posts on Spike / Spike & Buffy today, and discovered that there are some really brilliant fans out there thinking seriously and enthusiastically about the pairing, which makes me happy. On other, less wholesome threads, there are some seriously bitter fans out there who are seething and relentlessly homicidal about Marti Noxon. It's kind of alarming, really. I mean, I can see how someone's influence can derail the things about a show that we love, but people who take it so personally--it gets creepy fast, especially when it becomes this en masse tidal wave of public loathing. Jumping back to songs from Buffy, I rewatched "School Hard" recently, and thought it was fascinating what song they played when Spike first appears in the Bronze to check out Buffy. Apparently it's called "1000 Nights" by Nickel, but I don't care about that so much; I'm not rushing out to buy the CD. What struck me were the lyrics being sung when we really see him studying her: "I'm one step away from crashing to my knees / One step away from spilling my guts to you." People like to say of Buffy that they set things up well in advance; and they do. But I think it's clear they also go back and study their source a lot. I'm sure they have a show bible, but you can't help but feel they also rewatch their eps and riff when they can. I mean, otherwise, how can you explain these incredibly apt lyrics in early season two vis-a-vis Spike's recurring 'theme' of kneeling to Buffy three and four seasons later? He drops to his knees for her in "Fool for Love" and in "Once More with Feeling." It's a thing with him. That she's above him, that he's her willing slave, etc. Spike on his knees. That's just a a good thing no matter how you slice it. posted 3.31.2002 @ 10:47pm -- right-click here to grab a link Spring Is sort of in the air. I'm not doing a full spring cleaning but I have made inroads into my apartment. Literally, I mean. As in, now I can walk around my apartment, without picking my way through stacked books and huddled masses of clothes that have taken on sentient life. Progress is being made in laundry as we speak. Wrote all day Saturday, starting at around six in the morning and until late at night. On and off, but mostly on. I also watched "Becoming", both parts. I finally have the two parts straight in my head; the second is, I think, much more electrifying than the first. A lot of memorable moments. "I'm, uh...in a band." Heh. And you know, I'm suddenly a lot more bothered by the ret-con in "Normal Again." I guess that the cleverness of the plot won out over consistency; or maybe they just figured people could gloss by saying that Buffy wasn't remembering accurately--that she was so drugged by then, she didn't know what was real and what wasn't. That it was her fear of being institutionalized manifesting, not an actual memory. Hey...I just came up with that theory. Works for me. Also had a thought this weekend re Spike/Xander. I saw someone say once that this pairing was the single most unlikely one they could imagine, vis-a-vis canon, even more unlikely than Xander/Angel. And I have to say, nah. I mean, sure, now it is. But it could so easily have gone otherwise. Think about it: early Xander--well, even up through Riley--was written with some issues about sexual orientation. He made a lot of ambiguous comments over the years, and was really wound up about Larry. So, just take Willow's fourth-season coming out process and give it to Xander instead. How implausible is that? More implausible than Willow's? Not really. Now get rid of Anya entirely, and bring in Spike. Look at mid third season: right there we have "Lover's Walk" and "The Wish" back to back. Write out the whole Anya plotline, and give one to Spike in its place: he is the one who, with Dru out of the picture, becomes either human, or ensouled. Ensouled is better, I think. Now you have the set up. Take it through late third season and all through fourth, weaving in a Spike-Xander theme, building it up as slowly as Willow/Tara, but in a far different vein. Xander, ready to glom onto a guy friend, overcomes his knee-jerk hatred of vampires, won over by New Spike's angst and conflicted charms. Spike, reluctantly ensouled, goes through a whole process of character maturation, while remaining his snarky, anxious self--wanting to cling to his evil veneer, but increasingly unable to do so when it comes down to proof. Easy to see Xander and Spike hanging out. Drinking, watching bad kung-fu movies. Xander eating popcorn and snarking at the screen, while Spike offers a running patter of cheesy, MiSTed dialogue. Spike would scoff at Xander's fanboy juvenalia. Xander would constantly poke at Spike to better himself and let go of his overly glamorized nostalgia for violence. Sad to say, they'd probably riff off each other ten times better than Xander and Anya ever have. Spike, admittedly, would get a bit more 'boring' as a character, more normalized, as he assimilated to an approximation of life. At some point along the way Xander would drag him from his dank, unlivable crypt, and they'd get an apartment together. Odd-couple hijinks, amusement from the rest of the Scoobies. And you'd get domesticity, and Xander and Spike would have these in-jokes or mention of things that no one else really knew about, and the audience and Scoobies would get a sneaky, gradually building vibe that there's some other element to the relationship. You'd have to show all this, of course. It would take a lot of time. But it's not beyond belief, speculatively speaking. We'd have to see Xander bright eyed and ga-ga over the muscles and the pretty face, smitten by Spike's charisma and able to get in touch at last with his big gay self. And Spike would have to glom onto Xander as a life-line, the one person who actually gives a shit about his redemption, who enables it. Who puts up with him. Sexually, it's not difficult to buy a homoerotically inclined Spike. The man is sex on a stick, fey and perverse; and JM is very ready to play his chemistry off other males. Watch Spike hip-stroll into a scene, curl his lip, work those eyelashes and cheekbones at someone, at anyone who happens to be there, and just try to tell me this isn't a guy who's been on his knees. A cocksucker, oh yeah. Snarling and struggling and spitting laughter when he's on the bottom. A cheerfully vengeful cocksman when the tables are turned. Not difficult to read his swagger and mockery of "the poof" as retaliation for a problematic sexual history. This is a guy who can go both ways--males, females. No question. Anyway. Switching subjects, I realized that I twice fucked up my reference to Giles's singing--I had the title right the first time; we first see him sing in "Where the Wild Things Are" but the scene I was thinking of was, in fact, in "The Yoko Factor." So I remembered it wrong as the first time we saw him sing; but the emotional resonance is still greater for me, so I'll just leave my impressions as written. Make of them what you will. Back to cleaning, writing, car buying. Sunday. posted 3.31.2002 @ 11:49am -- right-click here to grab a link Indelible TV Moments Riffing from LaT. My memory isn't always so good, but there are some fragments that have stayed with me. I watched a lot of M*A*S*H when I was young, and Radar announcing Henry's death to the operating room in his broken voice, and the silence after, how they all had to keep working--that was brutal. Hawkeye and Hot Lips making out in that hut was a Big Thing when it happened. And the ep where Hawkeye shushed the mother with her chicken, which was actually a baby. (Funny, I want to remember it as a pig, a Wonderland sort of mind-bend.) I was also a huge Soap addict, and the storylines about Jody, the transsexual wannabe, were a relevation, with secret resonance. There were no other gay characters on TV at that time, really, and Jody, even as a figure of ridicule, managed to have moments of depth and pathos. Jody in the hospital bed, pre-op, angsting over his decision, his life, and then taking an overdose of pills--that sticks in my mind. This moment in Hillstreet Blues where a young cop is held trapped in an interrogation room, surrounded by his co-workers, and is forcibly 'raped' by a prostitute, while they all watch--the moment as the door closes on someone who could have stopped it. The cop later kills himself. The opening theme song of Star Trek, the original series. I know it sounds trite, but it was a religious experience for me. It was a ritual. I would watch the show each night with the lights off, the French doors to the living room closed against all intruders, stretched out prostrate on the ground. There are a lot of moments in Trek that stick with me: Kirk looking at Janice Rand and saying 'no beach to walk on.' Spock swinging from the tree and laughing in 'Naked Time' and then later, when Kirk insults him to bring him out of his drugged stupor, calling him a jackrabbit, etc, with such honed cruelty. Edith Keeler getting hit by the car, and Kirk's hard grief afterwards. The first time we see the mirror universe Spock with his beard. Spock being wooed by the Romulan commander. 'Amok Time' pretty much in its entirety, but especially that moment when Spock thinks he's murdered his captain, and later, the moment when he discovers he hasn't. The hugest, most devastating moment from Trek is of course not on television--Spock's death. I was toast. The X-Files pilot scene, where Scully goes to Mulder's hotel room and wants him to look at her back, to see if there are any abduction marks. And she takes off her shirt, and he inspects her clinically, and you realize they are going to be professional; they're going to be friends. That mutual respect kicks off right then, right there. And then they sit together, and Mulder tells her about his sister. The Mulder/Krycek kiss. Enough said. DS: 'Strange Bedfellows'. Another moment I've talked about endlessly; elsewhere if not here. Where Fraser and Ray sit together in Ray's car, having just dropped off Stella. She's stormed off, and they're sitting and suddenly Ray beats on his steering wheel. He's wound up with frustrated want and need, so much pain, and doesn't know where to put it. Fraser looks over at him quietly a moment. And they talk a little. Ray talks about Stella, how she's always in his mind, and that Fraser couldn't understand how it is to be with someone and to worry about them, to be thinking about them all the time. And we shift focus to Fraser staring at Ray, a naked gaze, ironical, and Ray doesn't see it, because he's staring off monomaniacally through the windshield, but we see how Fraser feels about Ray. It's a carefully triangulated, utterly slashy moment. I always remember it a little wrong, but it still kills me. In 'Fool for Love' when Spike is striding in power line-up slo-mo with the other vamps through the chaos of the Boxer Rebellion, and leaps over the crate in his path rather than going around it, to slowly descend, arms out in something almost like crucifixion, a fallen angel backed by fire. The attitude, the look on his face--it's the encapsulation of everything he is, in that one graceful and defiant gesture. I've written about it before, in loving detail. Somewhere in, cough, my archives. The first time I heard ASH, Giles, sing--in 'The Yoko Factor'--I nearly lost it. It was such an utter, breathtaking shock to my system. Just out of the blue, dumped on me with no prior expectation, this marvel of his voice taking sudden, brilliant flight out of this character who'd been fading into the background, who we'd nearly come to take for granted. It was riveting, as if something had been smashed open. An emblem of why I love the show. [Edited--I accidentally put 'Where the Wild Things Are' first. Ep titles! I suck!] 'Once More with Feeling.' Like above--that opening scene with SMG in the graveyard. The precise moment I signed my soul passionately over to BtVS for good was when Buffy stabbed the mournful demon, and he sang, "She's not even half the girl she...ow." My relationship with the show changed in a permanent way; it took dominion of my heart. A big duh here, but Spike and Buffy--they just kept blowing me away this season. Their first kiss at the end of OMWF, the second at the end of Tabula Rasa. Some intimate connection in my brain just shorted out at each of those moments--especially the second, because I couldn't believe they did that to us twice in a row, just gave us such a gift, a fucking beautiful gift. I staggered around after each of those eps, dazed and gibbering. And then of course the sex--the actual moment of penetration on screen. I mean, all of this seriously changed me. As in religious conversion. I was a diehard slash fan before Spike and Buffy, from the age of thirteen. And I mean diehard. The slash equivalent of a lesbian separatist. Twenty years. And with this ship I suddenly tacked, changed direction, discovered I could bleed and burn for a het romance. I mean, it's not as if I care about this distinction politically or philosophically or whatever, or that it's in any way binary, either/or. I'm still a very slahsy girl. Love my slash. But it amazes me nonetheless. This new door opening, with someone giving a big yell of "Surprise!" Heh. I feel like there were a lot of other moments from childhood that must have influenced me, but I can't remember them now, so how indelible were they, really? Moving on. posted 3.29.2002 @ 6:46pm -- right-click here to grab a link Restless And I can't sleep. Might as well post, since I haven't been very chatty in a few days; oddly coinciding with everyone else being restless and eager to read something, anything. And as Kat points out, the malaise is traveling around in blogland. Emotional, more than physical. Since recovering from my flu, I've been writing, watching Buffy, drinking. Sometimes not in quite the right measure. Well. That goes without saying, I guess. March has been 'fall off the wagon' month. Rewatched--since Saturday--School Hard, Lie to Me, The Dark Age, What's My Line, Innocence, The Wish, Lover's Walk, Pangs, Restless, and Wrecked. I had various motivations in choosing eps, but was mostly just looking for good ones I hadn't seen in a while. I was going to watch Becoming, but I was afraid I'd cry too hard at the end. I think I concur with some other people, at least right at this moment, that 'Restless' is the best Buffy ep. Just brilliant, and it even made me cry at one point. I can't remember at what. I was somewhat drunk at the time. 'Pangs' I just finished watching, at three a.m., having woken up hungry and made myself a burger. I think I'd put that one way up on my list--the things ME pulls off amaze me. All packed into one ep we have: Angel revisiting, Spike coming in from the cold, an A-plot with the Chumash warrior spirit, some fantastic Willow/Giles conflict, Xander naming Anya as his girlfriend, the funny syphillis, a constant interweaving of dialogue and desperate dinner-making, the giant bear, Spike the pincushion, and then that ending scene, which is greatness, and then that ending moment, when Xander lets slip that Angel was in town and everyone turns to stare at Buffy, Spike with that absolutely fucking evil smile on his face. God, I love it. And back to 'Restless' a moment--Giles singing. Man, if this ep isn't proof that I'd listen to Giles sing the phone book, I don't know what is. He's fucking singing exposition and I'm whimpering goo. What a beautiful, beautiful man. Random thought I just had in bed, which actually prompted me to get up and write this: what I love about Buffy; one small defining moment. It's that bit in OMWF when Xander says: 'Respect the cruller. And tame the donut!' And Anya walks by and says, 'That's still funny, sweetie.' I mean, that's it, right there, what I love: that these people exist outside the frame. You aren't walked A-B-C through contrived scenes with sharp edges, like dioramas, frozen in time, cut off from the ebb and flow of life. You see that ebb and flow, the little moments, and you know that when a scene ends, the characters still continue to putter around, doing their own things. I'm also thinking of the scene in 'Hell's Bells' with the family in Anya's and Xander's kitchen, and just about everything that ever happened at Giles's place. His apartment was the greatest--it felt totally lived in, and you could easily imagine Giles using it, even when the Scoobies cleared out. Like the set of 'Roseanne' it looked absolutely real, not shiny-fake and stiffly posed. Rewatching 'School Hard' is kind of squirm-worthy. Made me realize that JM did grow into his role. I loved that Spike, don't get me wrong. But he--early Spike--feels thinner to me now. A character that hasn't fully gelled. It's natural enough. The Giles and Buffy and Willow and Xander that we have seasons later have many more layers, too. Early Giles, I mean. Well. There were some elements of caricature there. And early Xander--that has been surprising me. (They're just into second season again in syndication.) There are times when it's as if he doesn't exist except to snark. Or not even snark, but to make goofy remarks. And they're quotable and all, but I still want to poke him and say 'Hey, where's your actual character, quip boy?' But then they do greatness, as in 'Prophecy Girl' and I'm all happy. It's weird--early on they were still feeling their way around, and you could see some rough edges. There were a lot of 'shiny bright high school' scenes where you could feel a sense of enforced perk, where the WB idiom was clashing a bit with the show's own sense of genre. But then they'd just slip the darkness to you. Like, I came in suddenly on 'Invisible Girl' during the Giles/Angel scene, in the library. And it was so strangely intense that I was mesmerized, and it was so right, because after all, hello, Giles is talking to a fucking vampire. He should be uneasy, tense, wigged out on some level. And they made apparent, with very claustrophobic camera work. Beauty. Sigh. I should go back to bed. What I want to do is write, because I barely got anything down last night. I'm well along for having just started the new story, but last night it was like, here's the Big Scene coming up next. And I was staring uphill. And then I was like, but is this the next scene? And when I started to question that I had to run away for a while. I got it started eventually though. With doughnuts. Not for me. But in the scene. It might have helped if I'd had some too, though. Respect the cruller. posted 3.28.2002 @ 5:00am -- right-click here to grab a link
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