Omorka's Lair — LiveJournal

11:21 pm - Another Rare LJ-Only Post!

I just went through and purged every journal I could clearly identify as a dead journal (in two cases, literally - yikes!) from my friendslist. My criteria were: if you haven't made a post in over two years, the journal's probably dead. If I unfriended you and you're still around reading and commenting, just not posting very much, feel free to ping me and I'll add you back.

08:38 pm - One for here, rather than DW

Hey, not sure if anyone's still following this journal here or not. Most of the action happens over on DreamWidth these days, although I crosspost a few things (almost all friendslocked). A lot of it is pseudo-personal Pagan stuff. I'd love to do fannish discussion over there, but most of my fandoms are poorly represented on DW, more's the pity. If you're over there and we haven't followed each other, ping me.

If you've followed my fic journal over here, it's probably going to go away by the end of the summer. Its DW echo will remain active, but I'm unlikely ever to add anything more to it except possibly pointers to AO3, which is my permanent fic archive now and will remain so for the forseeable future, so if you need to keep bookmarks to individual fics, use either DW or AO3. My username is the same here, on DW, and on AO3 for my main fandoms (and yes, the Monkees/HP fusion will get finished, hopefully by August - I know where it's going, now).

Also, for those of you who know I live in Texas and might have been worried, we made it through the flooding okay (so far - it looks like this is going to be a very wet first summer [Texas has first summer, which is usually fairly rainy, and second summer, which usually isn't unless we have a tropical storm]). I posted some photos of the local bayou on Tumblr, which is good for photos and bad for the kind of fannish stuff I enjoy, but has more active fans on it, so it kind of evens out. Yes, same username there, too; if you're over there and haven't found me yet, feel free.

Anyway, you're unlikely to see much from me here that isn't crossposts from DW, but feel free to reply over there or DM me at either site. I still exist, or more accurately exist again after a very tough year at work where I kind of withdrew from social media for a while.

07:58 pm - First Cicada!

The dirge of summer, starting at 7:50 on August 18. A little late this year. (I'd heard a just-emerged one doing the warm-up buzz a few days ago, but not the actual dirge-drone.)

Wow, he's loud, too.

(Also, I started the song in the music tag for the line "Summer is over, I can count the cost," but I haven't listened to it for over a year, and I'd forgotten how good a song it is. Squeeze is just awesome, man.)

05:15 pm

Proposed: One of the central themes of Pacific Rim is "If you go it alone, it will tear you up."

Not necessarily that you will fail, but that whether you fail or succeed, the cost will be much, much higher than if you do it together with at least one other person. It happens at multiple levels of the story, multiple times.

It's an odd (and interesting) message for a giant action movie. I think I like it.

01:29 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 5 Episodes 57 & 58

And here we are at the end of the series. It's been a fun little ride.

( The last two episodes Behind The CutCollapse )

So, that's the series. Head riffs on the series but isn't canonical. 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee barely even does that. There is a 1997 special, written and directed by Nesmith with input from the others, that is their idea of what an episode would have looked like if the show had continued through the '90s, and which probably ought to be canonical, but which is impossible to find anywhere.

And now that I have their onscreen adventures well in my head, off to find what they've gotten up to in the wild, as it were.

06:37 pm - Comic Books and Pop Music Are Bubblegum Kid's Stuff

Except, of course, when they aren't.

Behold: an article that argues that the Monkees - more specifically, their Monkeemen alter egos - exist in the DC universe, at least in the Kingdom Come future dystopia.

I made the spouse find our copy so I could look at the image in context. They're not just in that one image; they're standing behind Red Robin for that whole scene (clearly visible in about four frames), and the one you can't see in that image because he's too short is recognizably Davy in the one right before it.

I also have to say, Dolenz is infamously hard to draw (it's the combination of otherwise delicate features and that ridiculous chin and jaw, I think), and that Alex Ross got him perfectly recognizable there in the far background of a scene is damned impressive.

05:28 pm - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 4 Episodes 54-56

Closing on the end, now. Five episodes left, two of which I regard rather highly in memory, three not so much. Alas, those are the three for this installment.

( The dregs of Season 2 Behind The CutCollapse )

So, one out of continuity, one that's not great but certainly not bad, and a real stinker. Two more to go, both of which are examples of the wildest excesses of Season Two. And we may do Head for Movie Night, although obviously that's out of continuity.

10:03 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 4 Episodes 51-53

I kind of stopped doing these for a few days because (a) Tumblr and a couple of fics ate my brain, and (b) I was sort of terrified of getting to Episode 52 and finding out I didn't like it as much as I remembered right before seeing the boys live. Going from the concert last night back to the show tonight was an interesting gear shift, although I was sort of amused to note that Tork's and Dolenz's body language has barely changed in 45 years.

Anyway, onward ( Behind The CutCollapse )

A good one, the best episode in the series, and a clunker. Next we have one I really didn't get on first watching, another 'shouldn't this have been in the first season?' goofy plot, and a Comedic Drag episode. Joy. (There are two more after that, both of them involving mind-controlled Peter, which means I'm looking forward to them even if they're not the best scripts.)

08:13 pm - Another Post About A Different Band

So Adam Ant played at Warehouse Live last night. I'm not a huge fan, but I always liked his hits, and the Spouse was interested in seeing the show (and is more familiar with the back catalog), so we went.

Getting there was interesting; I think this is the first time we've tried to go to Warehouse Live when there's been a soccer game at the stadium, and not only was parking difficult, so was just driving around. At one point, we passed what used to be the Meridian, and its parking lot was full of food trucks. We ended up parking about three blocks away, but paying far more than we'd intended.

The opening band was a group called Prima Donna that I knew nothing about. They were a five-piece, with a drummer, a bassist who sang backup vocals on a couple of songs, a guitarist, a keyboard player who also played saxophone on the first song and did some backup vocals, and a lead singer who also played second/rhythm guitar on most of the songs. The first thing the singer said was a compliment on the local beer. They played what I described as a combination of roots rock and hair metal; I couldn't understand any of the lyrics, but they were more than competent and had the right vibe for the crowd.

Adam Ant's current backing band is a bassist, a guitarist, and two drummers, each with a full kit. Everyone in the band was tight and had great timing, but the drummers were especially impressive; at one point they did a nearly-two-minute-long accelerando in perfect synch without looking at each other. They also had very different styles - the male drummer was of the "I'm gonna beat the crap outta these drums" persuasion, while the female drummer was more of a "These drums will never know what hit them" type. It made for good stage presentation. I do wish they'd had a keyboardist with them, if only to fill in the horn parts on some of the songs - "Goody Two Shoes" sounds strange without it.

Adam himself started out looking stiff, as if his back were hurting him, and a little disconnected. However, somewhere halfway through the second song of the evening, he started flirting with the whole first row at once, and he took a moment to stretch during the intro to the next song, and after that everything was fine. His voice seemed to be just as good as it ever was, and while there wasn't a lot of stage banter, what there was was fun. I never quite shook the feeling that he needed an aspirin, but

I'm not a huge fan of Warehouse Live as a venue, because every time I go there some dudebro spills beer on me and half the time I get shoved or groped or both; the only time none of that has happened was during the Polyphonic Spree show, and that's largely because Tim DeLaughter is the best dang High Priest I've ever seen work - that show was church/ritual and the audience treated it as such. Also, the sound system isn't great and their in-house sound guy tends to mix very flat, which on that system tends to mean muddy. This was better than average for the venue, and I hate to say it, but I suspect it was because this is the first time I've seen the crowd there at gender parity - most of the shows we've seen have been sausagefests (the worst offender was the Devo show there, which I'd guess at about 75% male or more). The worst I had to deal with was three drunk dudebros who were clearly fans, and having a great time - but one of them felt like he had to explain what a great time he was having to his friends, rather than actually experiencing the show, and the friend he usually had to explain it to was built like a brick workshed, so they kept forming a wall that completely blocked my view. The shed also managed to spill beer on me, but not much.

Overall, good show, with some minor frustrations. Mostly nostalgia value for me, but obviously there were some far more passionate fans in the crowd.

Current Mood: okay

09:33 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 3 Episodes 48-50

(OMG, it just started raining. Yay!)

We're now at a five-episode stretch that I remember as the really good part. These were all done during the part of the second season when the guys had felt their oats - they'd stared down Kirshner, done Headquarters all by their lonesomes, and drawn screaming crowds everywhere they'd gone - but before they'd started the process of making the movie and lost all interest in filming the show. Let's see if these hold up to my memories, shall we?

( Nostalgia, ho!Collapse )

So, one pleasant surprise, one that could use a better restoration job but is still very strong, and one mild disappointment. Up next, IIRC, we have a strong episode, the best episode of the series, and one that throws us back to the worst cheese of Season 1. (If Zero disappoints me, I'm going to be pissed.)

08:55 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 3 Episodes 45-47

Not much to say for this one.

( Reviews Behind The CutCollapse )

One episode that would have been good if they'd actually finished the plot, one good-but-not-great one, and the holiday special, which suffers from an excess of schmaltz but still feels like a Monkees episode (and Mike's musings on love as the spirit of Christmas might foreshadow his later, better speech on the topic five episodes from now). The next one is a fan favorite and has commentary from Nesmith and Tork (I think it's Tork; it might be Jones again). Eleven episodes to go.

09:33 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 2 Episodes 42-44

"Goin' Down" is a really strange song. I mean, the first half is basically a first-person narration of a suicide attempt, and the second half, where the narrator has decided that's a bad idea, is either their hallucination when they finally have gone down for the last time, or the weirdest happy ending ever - Huck Finn without a raft, almost. And the song is really ambiguous about which it is. On top of that, you have Micky's rapid-fire, manic presentation, completely at odds with the lyrics.

It's a good song. I actually like it a lot. But it's strange, and probably would have sounded even stranger to a teenybopper audience at the time.

( Let's see if I can get through three episodes tonightCollapse )

Okay, so two better-than-average episodes and one frantic, funky one that is at least partly new to me - and fabulous, if a bit sad in one spot for external reasons. This is Season Two as I remember it, and I think the next two episodes are about the same as this one (the one after that is the Christmas special, which is sort of its own thing). After that we get a run of five that I'm really looking forward to, ending with "The Devil And Peter Tork," which is widely considered the best episode of the whole run. Then there are four I remember being less than the top of their game, including a comedic drag ep, and then the last two, which are two more Fetish Fuel entries for me. I don't know if I'm going to bother with the post-show special, "33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee," as it's not part of the canon and it's generally considered to suck.

Oh, and Micky is wearing white Converse sneakers in some of these episodes. I can't see whether they're hightops or normal sneakers because the bellbottoms cover his ankles, but now I'm tempted to see if I can still get a matching pair. Maybe we'll get a better view of them in another episode; I know we get several shots of his feet in Episode 49, but I don't remember if he's wearing the same shoes or not.

08:18 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 2 Episodes 39-41

Some dudebros on Facebook got miffed about women running fanpages and called them "c*nts" last night - in the Monkees fandom. WTF, guys? This is, like, the original boy band here. Of course there are going to be female-run fanspaces! What is this, classic rock dudebroism?

( Reviews Behind The CutCollapse )

One episode that isn't bad but doesn't have much going for it, and two solid eps, but no standouts in this batch. Looking at the next three titles, I remember one of them as pretty good, one of them as meh, and I can't place one of them.

At this point, I do have finishing the set before the show as a goal, so I suspect it'll be a fairly quick march through the rest of season 2.

Current Mood: okay

08:44 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 1 Episodes 36-38

I had forgotten how weird the Rainbow Room sequences are. For the most part, Mike is fingersynching with a look of intense concentration, and everyone else is goofing the heck off. (There are exceptions, but that's the general rule.)

Onward ( Behind The CutCollapse )

Three good, solid episodes; these are some of the ones I'm thinking of when I say the second season is stronger than the first. I kind of hate all the variations on the "Davy falls in love" plot, so any episode that isn't that, I think I cut a little more slack than I otherwise would. That might just be because episodes that aren't that usually have more Micky and Peter in them, though.

04:58 am - Project Rewatch: Season 2 Disc 1 Episodes 33-35

On the one hand, we definitely have a great deal of Problematic '60s Crap going on here. On the other hand, both the writers and the boys seem to be more on their game in these episodes.

Three episodes ( Behind The CutCollapse )

Whoo, Problematic '60s Crap Ahoy! The first and third episodes have individual bits that transcend the problematic set-up, but it's all sort of shadowed - and they all have sexism problems. That two of them are effectively Davy episodes doesn't help, although by now even the one-member focused plots have more ensemble work than they did originally. Moreover, the guys are more on their game, which helps distract from the problematic crap.

The next three episodes are Mike-centric, Peter-centric, and Micky-centric, which should also help.

09:55 am - Project Rewatch: Season 1 Disc 6 Episodes 31-32 (plus extras)

Haven't listened to the Plastic Symphony EP in ages (It's really two solo singles from 1965 that someone squished into an EP sometime in the CD era). Aw, Micky, honey, what are you doing? Poor thing sounds like he's scared to actually try to sing it straight, so he's doing his "goofy voices" thing instead. If this is what he sounded like before Boyce and Hart got hold of him, I understand now how the Missing Links could possibly fire one of the great pop voices. (And, because I don't have shuffle on at the moment, iTunes transitions into his cover of "Good Morning, Good Morning" from Remember, and oh, gods, if there were ever an argument for mature experience over youthful enthusiasm . . . .)

---

This is the final disc in the first season, and it's only two episodes long, one of which is the "concert video" episode. However, there are plenty of extras and three commentary tracks (all on that latter episode) to talk about, so here we go ( Behind The CutCollapse )

One pretty good episode and one that's outside of continuity for my purposes. Overall, Season 1 had some surprisingly strong episodes, but only a handful I could point to and say they're among my favorites. I said before that I remember Season 2 being better; next time we'll see whether my memory betrayed me or not.

Current Mood: pleased

08:55 am - Project Rewatch: Season 1 Disc 5 Episodes 28-30

This cover song (the one in the music tag) exists. To get an idea of the tone, imagine that someone has taken the original Archies song, and proceeded to stuff every drop of the attitude of Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" into it. I have never heard anyone make the word "dextrose" sound this dirty. *faints*

Another three episodes ( Behind The CutCollapse )

One thin ep and two okay ones. Two more to go in the season, one of which is the concert footage episode.

Current Mood: disappointed

08:26 am - Project Rewatch: Season 1 Disc 5 Episodes 25-27

The sound on this video isn't great, especially with the whole freaking audience singing along, but damn, Dolenz sounds pretty good here. Still got pipes.

It's odd - here are these three guys and a ghost, touring 47 years after that song hit the airwaves for the first time. They're still around, and they still draw audiences - but they don't seem to take anything away from the hot, hip, young artists that get radio airplay now. There are radio stations that only air what's on the top 40 now, now, now, and there are radio stations that don't play any songs that couldn't drink, and everyone who makes it to the corporate level seems to make their dime all right, piracy be damned. So why is it that the movie and video game industries have so much trouble making money off of new stuff? Is it just the price of entry, that making a 3:30 pop song is that much cheaper than a 90-minute movie? I guess a 45" single or a song off of iTunes is an easier sell than an $8 movie ticket or a $60 video game - and hell, at least you get to keep the song and the video game; maybe I should be comparing the $20 DVD instead of the movie ticket. (And I suppose concert tickets are more expensive, and the experience just as ephemeral.) Still, the balance of old and new stuff for movies and video games seems off, compared to music.

Not that I mind. I'm spending my birthday check from my folks on a ticket to the Houston show (and probably some concert swag). I don't think they'll mind at all.

On the next-to-last disc now. Three more episodes ( Behind the CutCollapse )

One problematic dud flanked by two pretty decent episodes with some character development. We've got five more episodes to go in the season.

07:06 am - Project Rewatch: Season 1 Disc 4 Episodes 22-24

If the Powers That Be (I'm going to adopt Dolenz's own term for them here) had "cast" the four Monkees in a manner consistent with what they already knew musically, then - well, if they'd gone with "who can play this instrument best," they'd have had Tork play everything, but slotting him into what he was best at and going from there, the lineup would have been: Tork on lead guitar and occasional backing vocals; Nesmith on bass, second guitar, and lead or harmony vocals where appropriate; Jones on drums, lead vocals, and harmony vocals; and Dolenz on rhythm guitar and lead and harmony vocals. The only place I can think of where this lineup actually occurs in the show is in the "Words" video, although I'm given to understand that Jones and Dolenz did occasionally swap places in the live shows so Dolenz could show off in front of the audience.

I've not yet found a source that explains why the PTB put Tork on bass instead of lead guitar. It's not like there wasn't a very popular four-piece band around the same time where the bass player sang and wrote lots of songs for the band. However, there does seem to be a consensus why they put Dolenz on the kit instead of Jones; the PTB thought Jones would disappear behind the crash cymbals, and at the time they assigned the parts, they were thinking he'd be the lead singer for most of the songs. It wasn't until they bundled the boys into the studio and laid out "Clarksville" that they realized they'd stuck their best singer behind the kick drum.

Three more episodes ( Behind The CutCollapse )

Again, three decent episodes; the last one is pretty strong, although of the three it's the one I remember least well from my first watching of the shows. By this point, the writing staff have a good grasp of the characters and the feel of the show, and the guys have their comedic rhythm down. The next one is the second doppelganger episode, and the first Micky-centric episode (25 shows in, and he finally gets to headline!).

06:59 am - Project Rewatch: Season 1 Disc 4 Episodes 19-21

I ordered a copy of Dolenz's autobiography (written in '89 or so originally, with a final chapter that's everything from then to the mid-naughts from his biographer; the rest of the book is written in first-person) on account of I'd read a library copy of it twenty years ago and remembered bits of it being interesting. I was right; he's a process theologian - and gives a pretty good layman's description of it in the chapter when he mentions it. (That same chapter makes me think it is very, very important that he and Dan Aykroyd never, ever be allowed to get drunk together; we would end up with a dimensional rift for sure.) It's also somewhat disconcerting, in that Micky-the-character might as well be the authorial voice; every third sentence is either a joke or a reference to something else. I don't particularly mind reading 190 pages of him goofing around (I am a fangirl, after all), but only the parts about his family come across as anything less than his public-persona-as-defense-mechanism. The upside of the author-as-harlequin is some screamingly funny descriptions of bits of the celebrity life. For example, his description of the last time he dropped acid:

I ended up sitting in the living room , watching the walls breathe and my hand turn into a snake, impatiently looking at my watch thinking, "Here goes the old hand-into-a-snake routine. I wonder when I can get out of here and go home to work on my gyrocopter?"