Love. It.

Love.



Love.



LOVE.



(I told you, I miss this smarmy reprobate.) 

A Distinct Sense of Accomplishment

Talking to my friends last week, I realized that I never posted these pictures, which I meant to do shortly after these mittens reached their intended recipient (as a Christmas present for Hanna). We noted in our conversation that academic work can often feel awash in a sense of dissatisfaction with one's work that never really achieves resolution, and I observed that part of what I enjoy about knitting and baking is that there's an end where you can point to something definitive that you've completed. This was the first big Fair Isle project I'd done, which made it that much more rewarding.

I watched a lot of British miniseries while I was working on these. Watching The Buccaneers convinced me that there's nothing I'd like to see so much as a Downton Abbey prequel where we go back to the days of Robert as the titled fortune-hunter and Cora as the rich American. Imagine - meeting the previous Lord Grantham, he of the Entail of a Thousand Problems! Violet at what I assume must have been the very height of her powers as the mistress of Downton! Young Carson!

*pattern from Debbie Bliss Knitting Magazine, Fall/Winter 2010*

Miscellaneous (Now Kind of Old-ish) TV Links

Getting this business back on track after the schedule-warping time drain of my Valentine's Day party last week.

- A Grantland piece on Skins upon the beginning of the sixth series in the UK - I particularly like that this essay credits the show for its unique handling of a played-out soap trope in Tony's recovery from his accident in the second series. I'm hoping that the fact that the fourth and fifth series have reached these shores without making a pit stop on BBC America means that it won't be too long before the sixth is available on Netflix or iTunes or somewhere. I wonder if they're sticking with the penultimate episode death for this generation of characters - the arc works with Chris' story in the second series, but Freddy's death in the fourth is one of the more absurd TV twists I've ever seen.

- An A.V. Club retrospective on Homeland - after I saw that the whole season was still available On Demand while I was home for winter break, I ended up watching all twelve episodes in about three days and loved it. I picked the interview segment with "The Weekend" because it was easily one of the best episodes of TV drama I saw all year. This is the first show that's ever made me want to subscribe to Showtime instead of just recording Showtime shows on my parents' DVR and watching episodes haphazardly whenever I'm home. (I'll also include a link to the fourth part of the interview because it has such a great picture of Carrie's rainbow timeline on her conspiracy wall. Maybe I'm over-identifying with  her crazy self, but I think there's probably an apt comparison to be made between academics and fictional characters attempting to unravel major conspiracies. Like, I've never had a corkboard wall, but I definitely have enough paper to fill one.)

- And another A.V. Club piece from Todd VanDerWerff on the pacing of watching seasons of television - particularly in speeding through shows versus watching week-by-week. Looking ahead to March, I started intermittently watching Mad Men over again from the beginning and on this rewatch I've become convinced both that Adam Whitman is more important to the show's mythology than most fans give him credit for, particularly in how Don relates to his kids in wanting to remain an active presence in their lives (which in turn is a major factor in the whole "Why is Betty still around when she's such a horrible person?" debate), and that he's also an easy character to overlook if you're watching the show too quickly.

Trailer Thoughts

I didn't catch the terrible name pun until my second viewing of this.

- On the Yahoo page I got this from, the movie was listed under Tyler Perry's Good Deeds, which, if that's how it's going to be marketed, is one of the most self-aggrandizing things I've ever seen.

- I'm going to go ahead and assume that my curiosity about the genealogical breakdown of that whole "fifth-generation Ivy League" thing won't be satisfied.

- This...doesn't look terrible? Thandie Newton was easily one of the best things about For Colored Girls..., Perry's a million times more tolerable when he's just playing a regular dude, and if the story doesn't depend on Gabrielle Union and/or Phylicia Rashad's characters being total shrews completely out of proportion with reality then I could be on board.

Idle TV Thoughts

Somehow, even though the person being sung to was wearing an eyepatch, that rendition of "Ben" still wasn't quite as whacked-out as I once hoped it would be. 

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Once Upon a Time

- So Archie's dalmatian is "Pongo," the magic mirror is actually the genie from Aladdin - I believe they've opened up a crazy world of possibility here. Is it not just fairy tales, but any property under the Disney umbrella that's open to reworking on this show? (Note: I'd kind of legitimately be interested to see them incorporate some aspect of their princesses and beaus from The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, since I feel like those haven't received enough love.) (Note: I would probably have an aneurism if they ever brought in Pocahontas.) Is that tea set in Mr. Gold's shop, say, going to one day show up accompanying yet another take on the Mad Hatter and the March Hare? Are we going to run through the studio's back catalog until we find ourselves in some fourth-season episode where we flash back to a Storybrooke resident's unknown past as one of the dancing hippos from Fantasia? The mind boggles.

- So here's what I don't quite get about this whole set-up: in the pilot, Regina states that the various denizens of the fairy tale world are going someplace where there are no happy endings - cut to our world, laughs abound. But...it doesn't really seem like anyone was getting a happy ending in fairy tale land to begin with? All the fairy tale stories actually seem pretty grim (no pun intended) upon each episode's conclusion.

- There's something that's starting to trip me up about this show - besides the overwhelming general cheesiness, that is - halfway into the season, there are no stakes. Sure, everyone involved is under the influence of a curse, but there's no clear path to how that curse gets weakened or dismantled and the person allegedly charged with breaking the curse still doesn't believe that it's actually her task to undertake. The more time passes, the more I think "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" did more narrative harm than good. At the time, it seemed good to see the writers show that they were willing to kill off a seemingly major character, but it made it seem like the path to breaking the curse might actually not be that difficult and also raised the possibility of having someone in the know working with Emma and Henry, then dashed it away,. As it is now, the scenes in Storybrooke aren't interesting enough to hold the show together without forward motion on the overall arc.

Idle TV Thoughts

I think at this point we can all agree that nothing Mr. Pamuk might have had in his bag of tricks could possibly be worth all this drama, right?

Quoted

"But Comfortable History is asymmetrical warfare it needs only a smattering of facts, and need not guard against a lack of context, presentism, or other facts that might undermine its arguments. Instead it breezily proceeds through hypotheticals and abstract thought experiments  which somehow satisfy our desire to be in possession of a dissident intellect. Comfortable History is like the computer virus that poses as the shield--it positions the espouser as a brave truth-teller, even as it infects us with lies."

- Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Crowd-Sourcing American History" from The Atlantic

Mood Music LXVII

Yeah, I've been listening to One Kiss Can Lead to Another recently.

Quoted

"It was very important for me—and for Tate—to not make this into a Civil Rights piece, but they were being infiltrated and hunted down for their color." - Kathryn Stockett (author)


"One thing that Tate wanted to make sure of was that kids under age 30 don’t really have any idea of where the Civil Rights movement was at its most violent and Jackson, Mississippi, was right in the middle of it. So it shows that for the women, writing this book is putting them in a life-threatening situation without beating it over our heads and having a noose in the tree." - Brunson Green (producer)


From "The Help: An Oral History" on The Daily Beast


Actually, the idea that somehow a story about black maids in Mississippi in 1963 can be understood as separate from "Civil Rights" explains a lot about the issues I had with this movie. And I would suggest that people being unfamiliar with a history means that they do need to be beaten over the heads with it to some extent, but that's just me. Independent of any depiction of "the Civil Rights Movement" under its narrowest definition, if people can't see the continuities where the movement is, at its core, about reacting to experiences like the ones depicted in The Help, then you're not making a substantive contribution to their understanding of how those things fit together.

Mood Music LXVI

OMG You Guys: Volume II, Part I

I'm slightly obsessed with this trailer.

- I love how the trailer touches on important moments from the book without feeling like it's giving everything away. Watching this made me dive back through a quick re-read of all three books, and I was particularly struck to see how some of the same moments that get highlighted here also get mentioned in Mockingjay when they're discussing how to make Katniss an effective symbol for the revolution:

"'I want everyone to think of one incident where Katniss Everdeen genuinely moved you. Not where you were jealous of her hairstyle, or her dress went up in flames or she made a halfway decent shot with an arrow. Not where Peeta was making you like her. I want to hear one moment where she made you feel something real.'

Quiet stretches out and I'm beginning to think it will never end, when Leevy speaks up. 'When she volunteered to take Prim's place at the reaping. Because I'm sure she thought she was going to die.'" - Mockingjay, p. 74

- The actress playing Rue looks so teeny-tiny! Ugh, I'm already envisioning unsightly public crying.

- I'm really interested to see more of how spectatorship functions in this movie, since this trailer makes it look like some of what we'll be seeing is how people in the districts watch the games as opposed to just staying inside the stadium. Adaptations from first-person books often suffer in translation, but here, for once, I can see potential benefits to getting out of the protagonist's head. It could be really vital to shaping the series going forward.


- Needs more Peeta. And Haymitch.

New Resolution!

Yes, already.


Looking back through my list of posts, I decided on an initial resolution: all drafts begun prior to January 1, 2012 will be posted or deleted. The over-two-year backlog (the earliest draft dates to December 19, 2009) will be over by the end of this month, one way or the other.

Idle TV Thoughts

I think I miss Pete Campbell. That sounds crazy, but I'm pretty sure it's true. 


There's a lot of media and pop culture stuff I'm looking forward to this year - Moonrise Kingdom, The Hunger Games, Anna Karenina, new (albeit delayed by months) Downton Abbey and Sherlock - but I'm pretty sure I'm going to weep when Mad Men comes back. Not because they traffic in tear-jerking moments, but because I miss all those awful people so much. I can't wait to watch them treat each other terribly again.

On Setting and Executing Goals

Looking back at the writing goals I laid down at the beginning of last year, I have to say that they're essentially unchanged for this year. While I didn't quite hit my desired minimum of 120 posts for the year, thinking about that goal throughout the year forced me to look critically at some habits I'd like to break going forward. This year, I'm going to work on writing and publishing things while I'm actively engaged in thinking about them, rather than letting drafts stew for weeks (and sometimes months) and then returning to them and finding myself unable to recall what specifically I found so interesting in the first place. Part of this might be switching up the style of some posts, especially the aggregate reflections on different media - if I constantly arrive at Thursday with observations of the TV week ending on the preceding Saturday still unwritten, then that seems to be a sign that I should break the week up differently or write on one show at a time. Hopefully, it will feel like an interesting way to challenge myself to write more, rather than a chore. We'll see.