(no subject)

[malsperanza]

For quite a while now I have been hating my job with a dedicated, focused, Grendelian hatred. For this and other reasons, over the last couple of months I have been sort of brainfried and thus it seemed the right time to fulfill a long-held promise to watch the entire Buffy corpus this summer. Yep, while the rest of my flist has been writing novels and works of scholarly nonfiction at an alarming rate, I have contributed to the greater sum of human knowledge by watching 7 seasons of a defunct TV show that took the town by storm a decade ago, made its mark, and faded from the scene. Go me.

I can see why my friends thought I'd love the angst and the hero torture; and indeed I did love the angst and the hero torture, and the humor and the subverting of myths and the games with language, and some other things. Two or three episodes were as good as Dennis Potter, which is to say, as good as anything I've ever seen on TV. There was lots I liked and quite a lot that made me want to perform a double ocular occlusion on myself with my thumbs. But it's odd to view pop-culture material after its Big Rush is over. I'm wondering who among youall is still talking about or watching the show, and what you think about it at this remove.

Meanwhile, the job? Still with the hating.

Comments

[executrix.livejournal.com]

There's an episodic_buffy LJ comm that indeed is going episode-by-episode. (However, it's not very active.) I just re-watched half of S7 because I miss Firefly so much that I just had to see Nathan Fillion even as someone else.

Bearing in mind that BtVS was, after all, a dumb TV show and not a guide to Right Living, I still think it was an excellent dumb TV show.

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

I started watching Buffy for the first time about three months or so ago - long after the Big Rush. (I still have season 6 and 7, plus 3-5 of Angel to make my way through.) Quite a few people out there (many of whom I have found and cleverly put on my flist) are still having interesting conversations, rehashing old arguments, and writing good fic. I'm almost happier that I'm exploring the series at my own pace, although I do wish I hadn't been spoiled quite as extensively (I didn't know I'd want to watch the show, so I never avoided spoilers, which are all over the web.)

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

You know my friend Lola Raincoat, right? She watched it for the fist time (other than one ep I forced her to watch, Clockwork Orange style, back in the gay 90s) last winter, and loved it. If you go back in her LJ you'll find some posts- or ask and she'll point you. Mostly about martial arts, IIRC.

Part of me would like to go back and watch it again. But that's a lot of tv.

I'm sorry about the job- really, yrrch. It *sounds* like a good job...

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Hey, I was just about to comment and say exactly that!

It was truly Clockwork Orange style in that I have NO MEMORY of this Buffy-watching ever occuring in the 90s. Or maybe it was Orwellian?

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

It's actually a very nice job; I'm just tired of doing it.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

Found your post on martial arts and Buffy's regendering as a masculine fighter through the style of the fight choreography. I'm not sure I agree, but I like the post. As an ex-shotokan shodan, I also was irritated every time she punched a heavy bag. Not to mention that she must have had some really sore wrists doing it that way.

After a while I began ff'ing through the fights, which got very repetitious and were shot with a lot of cuts (probably to save money and hide the stunt doubles). In the final season, when they brought in DB Woodward to play the principal, I started watching the fights again because he clearly did know some karate (visible backstance), and because Spike started fighting again, and had some good iai and kendo action.

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

Do you remember the time I drove down from Oakland to see you, when you were housesitting that gorgeous modernist palace in Silver Lake (I think), with the huge spider outside the window, and I was re-reading The Crying of Lot 49, and I made you a tape with a lot of disco and Scritti Politti, and we talked about Beck and I had the dream about my father and the Bible and the problem of "want," and I think there might have been bunkbeds in the room where I stayed? It was that time. We sat on the floor and watched an ep. It might have been 2000, actually.

[malsperanza.livejournal.com]

uh-huh... and which ep was that?

[idlerat.livejournal.com]

Oh that was to Lola :). She said she had no memory of me getting her to watch. I don't remember what ep it was.

But it would be a nice fake memory of you and me!