You never hear them sing, you never hear them scream
It is greyly pouring. My afternoon was just disrupted by the unannounced arrival of several handymen to disconnect our stove. (We have a new stove coming tomorrow. This is great in the sense that we haven't had a working broiler since December or a working oven since April and I have been in frequent communication with the property manager about it, but not so great in the sense that we were given no warning about the disconnection, it was dumb luck that I hadn't left the house for the day, we can't cook until the new stove arrives, and the property manager's husband has no idea when that will happen except tomorrow, when ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch is working and I had prior commitments.) I have plans to meet rushthatspeaks in the evening, but until then have some links.
1. I started this article with great trepidation; its title and its opening lines made it look as though it was going to be one of those sheepish appreciations where you have to spend as much time acknowledging that the thing you love really wasn't any good as defending why you love it anyway. It is not that kind of appreciation. I don't agree with every word of it, but I don't need to. It's a loving and thoughtful look at a show that was so important to me, I've almost never written about it: Jennifer Giesbrecht, "Babylon 5 Is the Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series."
2. I love the siren dynamics of Nibedita Sen's "We Sang You as Ours." (Shout-out to the Lovecraft Reread for pointing me its way.) Then I sort of accidentally chased it with Christopher Caldwell's "Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan." Now I really I miss the sea.
3. I was glad to read this reflection by Carly Pildis on carrying a Jewish pride flag at the D.C. Dyke March. "The final lesson is that we that we need to reject a paradigm where Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and those who seek to support them cannot be in a movement together without rejecting core parts of their identities."
4. On that note: "But for Seth Farber, the problem with a DNA test for Jewishness runs deeper than politics; it contravenes what he believes to be the essence of Jewish identity. There is a specific principle in Jewish law, he told me, that instructs rabbis not to undermine someone's self-declared religious identity if that person has been accepted by a Jewish community. The central principle is that when it comes to Jewish identity, the most important determinants are social – trust, kinship, commitment – not biological." What the absolute hell, Chief Rabbinate of Israel.
5. I can't tell if this is fanart for the Southern Reach Trilogy or the film derived from the first book, but I can't see what else it generally would be: Simon Clarke, "Annihilation."
spatch is working and I had prior commitments.) I have plans to meet rushthatspeaks in the evening, but until then have some links.1. I started this article with great trepidation; its title and its opening lines made it look as though it was going to be one of those sheepish appreciations where you have to spend as much time acknowledging that the thing you love really wasn't any good as defending why you love it anyway. It is not that kind of appreciation. I don't agree with every word of it, but I don't need to. It's a loving and thoughtful look at a show that was so important to me, I've almost never written about it: Jennifer Giesbrecht, "Babylon 5 Is the Greatest, Most Terrible SF Series."
2. I love the siren dynamics of Nibedita Sen's "We Sang You as Ours." (Shout-out to the Lovecraft Reread for pointing me its way.) Then I sort of accidentally chased it with Christopher Caldwell's "Canst Thou Draw Out the Leviathan." Now I really I miss the sea.
3. I was glad to read this reflection by Carly Pildis on carrying a Jewish pride flag at the D.C. Dyke March. "The final lesson is that we that we need to reject a paradigm where Palestinians, Israelis, Jews, Muslims, and those who seek to support them cannot be in a movement together without rejecting core parts of their identities."
4. On that note: "But for Seth Farber, the problem with a DNA test for Jewishness runs deeper than politics; it contravenes what he believes to be the essence of Jewish identity. There is a specific principle in Jewish law, he told me, that instructs rabbis not to undermine someone's self-declared religious identity if that person has been accepted by a Jewish community. The central principle is that when it comes to Jewish identity, the most important determinants are social – trust, kinship, commitment – not biological." What the absolute hell, Chief Rabbinate of Israel.
5. I can't tell if this is fanart for the Southern Reach Trilogy or the film derived from the first book, but I can't see what else it generally would be: Simon Clarke, "Annihilation."
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In the meantime, I would kill for a Blu-Ray transfer, but I think certain people still dislike JMS too much for that to happen. Not entirely without reason, based on his Twitter!
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I'm not surprised! I rewatched most of it about ten years ago and I still liked it then. I had seen it first when it aired; it was the first TV show I ever really followed and I had no ability at the time to evaluate how it resembled or differed from anything else onscreen around it (for example, I did not feel extraordinarily seen by Ivanova, I thought it was perfectly normal to have a bisexual Jewish character front and center in a narrative, whoops) and I certainly didn't notice the quality of the CGI or the props until years after the fact, when it occurred to me that most of Centauri Prime is technically drapes. What I really remember from the rewatch is how much more of the political shape of it I could see than I had been able to at age fourteen to seventeen, when I thought more in terms of Rome than Nazis. Or America.
In fact, quite a lot of it feels Too Real, especially after 2016.
—including that political shape, yes.
Someday I'll figure out how to vid it.
I'd love that. Babylon 5 remains one of the very few pieces of media for which I have written fanfic, albeit in 1999 and lost now to the demise of Geocities (and I will always feel a little bitter at the site owner for their unasked-for edits). You can read this numbers-barely-filed-off juvenilia if you really want to, though.
In the meantime, I would kill for a Blu-Ray transfer, but I think certain people still dislike JMS too much for that to happen. Not entirely without reason, based on his Twitter!
I don't interact with JMS at all on Twitter. (I never interacted with him on rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5.moderated, I just read. A classic lurker.) Do I want to ask?
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I sort of love that most of Centauri Prime is technically drapes -- it means when the Emperor visit B5, Londo and Vir just have to put up a lot of drapes to make him feel at home. Also, it sort of reminds me of how I, Claudius's Rome is mostly frescoes.
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You know, they may literally have hung a lampshade on that set-dressing problem.
Also, it sort of reminds me of how I, Claudius's Rome is mostly frescoes.
I feel fortunate to this day that I managed to discover and read (and then watch) I, Claudius right before Season 4 of Babylon 5. It was not intentional and I got so much out of Centauri Prime.
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But according to JMS Warner Bros. do still have the masters for the 4:3 film version they sent out to stations during syndication, and film is high definition. So they could, theoretically, go back and do a high definition transfer of the 4:3 version, and when the show went onto Amazon last year, there was some talk about asking for a rescan. Rescans cost money, even if you don't do color correction (and given how bad non-human supervised algorithmic color correction is, I'd honestly prefer they not do any color correction--the Buffy BluRay transfer is a nightmare for this reason), so it didn't happen. (And yes, it should be possible to do this for DS9 and Voyager for the same reasons.)
I suspect that a complicating factor for Warner Bros. is that while they own the rights to the TV series in perpetuity, and I believe all the existing movies, JMS holds the rights for future movie versions. And he can be very obnoxious on Twitter, and says that there are still executives at Warner who don't like him and don't like the show; I don't doubt him.
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If having digitized copies of the series would help, that could Be Arranged. Offhand, not sure how high the quality would be.
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???
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And if you don’t say something out loud, it turns out you don’t actually have a whole lot to say about it in the end after all. I find specificity more valuable the older I get. Yes, yes indeed.
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I hope very much that you enjoy it. It meant a lot to me. It still does. I still quote it, and not out of mere nostalgia.
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My Jewish descent comes to me down the maternal line as you know, but that doesn't make me Jewish (although according to the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, it clearly does).
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Do you not think of yourself as Jewish? (I don't actually know what religious traditions you practice if any, but Judaism being an ethnoreligion, practice is not the defining factor. Neither, however, is DNA.)
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Both the Jewish and the Romani ancestry were kept from me when I was young. Embarrassment? Concern over my finding out what happened to part of my family? I really don't know- and it all came out in my twenties when I got interested in my background.
Culturally Jewish I am not-I am such a mix that that's how I tend to think of myself- a mongrel.
But I'm fiercely proud of all the elements of that mongrelitude! :o)
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I wasn't surprised by the Chief Rabbi's policy.
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It was not wholly surprising to me because of their gatekeeping, but it was still so abhorrent that it was a shock. If this is how they do Judaism, in fact I think they are doing it wrong.
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It was for a long time my favorite TV show and in some ways it honestly may still be. It remains one of the very few shows I watched while it was airing, even if I had to set episodes to tape. I still use some of its metaphors.
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You're welcome! Where are you right now?
keeping Andrea Thompson and Claudia Christian (Talia Winters was my favorite character, and both Lyta Alexander and whoever replaced Ivanova never grabbed me), and replacing Bruce Boxleitner with Avery Brooks (who from my PoV did a similar character notably better).
But if you replace Boxleitner with Brooks, who would anchor DS9?
I agree that I'd have preferred to keep both Talia and Ivanova, but then I'd like a version of that timeline which included Lyta; I enjoyed her as a character. I never warmed to Lochley, but the actress had an impossible job taking over from Ivanova, and I can't blame her for that.
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I can see that. The nationalism leapt out at me just thinking about it two years ago: "I want it all back—the way that it was."
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*reads article* Wow, that's even worse than I thought.
The marker they use only shows up in Ashkenazim? Not Sephardim or Mizrahim or...? How very... Western of them.
And settles things tidily for me, I guess: according to their rules I am clearly Not Jewish, since my Jewish heritage, while Ashkenazi, yes, is patrilineal. (Even if they accepted patrilineal descent, it's only one grandparent.)
Oh wait, it doesn't settle things for me at all, or for anyone else, because fuck them. Fuck their simple and wrong answer to the always-vexed question of What Makes A Jew, fuck their bad science and fuck their worse politics and theology. I'll keep on being untidily not-Jewish but also not-not-Jewish.
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Are we surprised?
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Good call. It's bad Judaism.
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Putting aside the batshittery of all this, and the implicit racism in looking for a marker that only is present in Ashkenazi Jews, the grasp of statistics is utterly backwards. This marker may mean there's a 99% chance that you have Ashkenazi ancestry, but the question to ask is "What percentage of Ashkenazi Jews have this marker?" It is unlikely to also be 99%.
Bad math upsets me more than anything.
Also, I don't want to have an opinion on this, not being Jewish, but omg bad math.
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I suppose it helps that your non-Jewish opinion aligns with Jewish mine, but it is bad math.
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