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You'll never give up, never give up, never give up that ship
Last night I dreamed I discovered a previously unknown and probably nonexistent biography of Ralph Richardson. I also dreamed my front teeth fell out like popsicle sticks. One of these dreams was better than the other.
This afternoon![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I met sairaali and M. at the A.R.T. for The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville, starring Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac. It was lovely. It's more or less what it sounds like: a relationship after the end of the world, described and explored strictly through gesture, mime, and music. Songs utilized include a post-apocalyptic update of Eddie Lawrence's "Old Philosopher," the best cover I have ever heard of the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," and a subversively straight reading of "Another National Anthem" from Assassins. I grew up on Patinkin's singing (and Spanish accent), but I had never seen him in person before; he plays the older, dourer, more damaged of the pair, a tattered hermit who may or may not have been born in a trunk, but is living ferally in one when Mac's impish baggy-pantser rows a junk-cluttered lifeboat up to his shore. Mac turns out to remind me sharply of Donald O'Connor circa Singin' in the Rain, at least with a bowler hat on, a sprightly knack for physical comedy, and a mercurial talent for extracting everything from a picnic supper to a fifth of gin from the remote regions of judy's trousers. I have discovered that I am no longer the target audience for strobe lights—I didn't get a migraine, but I watched the storm sequences with one hand over my eyes. Eighty minutes with no intermission. If you can snag the tickets, it's worth your time.
So I have this relationship with the film of Stargate (1994), where I know it's a total brain-optional chariots-of-the-gods B-picture with almost certainly a white savior problem and in the days when I lived in a house with a television, I watched it every time it came around, because there are very few movies where a dork with a knowledge of dead languages saves the day. (To this day, even after Crash (1996), Secretary (2002), and Age of Ultron (2015), I am always faintly surprised when James Spader is not playing a sweet-natured nerd. Also, Jaye Davidson as Ra is ridiculously beautiful, even if the bass reverb voice processing is kind of unnecessary.) I knew about the television sequel and its multiple spinoffs; I never paid any attention to them because I couldn't see the point. People who watch more genre television than I do: are any of them any good? This question brought to you by vague curiosity upon realizing I lived through an entire sci-fi franchise without interacting with it almost at all. I mean, I've only seen the pilot of Farscape, but I've seen it.
This afternoon
derspatchel and I met sairaali and M. at the A.R.T. for The Last Two People on Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville, starring Mandy Patinkin and Taylor Mac. It was lovely. It's more or less what it sounds like: a relationship after the end of the world, described and explored strictly through gesture, mime, and music. Songs utilized include a post-apocalyptic update of Eddie Lawrence's "Old Philosopher," the best cover I have ever heard of the Pogues' "Fairytale of New York," and a subversively straight reading of "Another National Anthem" from Assassins. I grew up on Patinkin's singing (and Spanish accent), but I had never seen him in person before; he plays the older, dourer, more damaged of the pair, a tattered hermit who may or may not have been born in a trunk, but is living ferally in one when Mac's impish baggy-pantser rows a junk-cluttered lifeboat up to his shore. Mac turns out to remind me sharply of Donald O'Connor circa Singin' in the Rain, at least with a bowler hat on, a sprightly knack for physical comedy, and a mercurial talent for extracting everything from a picnic supper to a fifth of gin from the remote regions of judy's trousers. I have discovered that I am no longer the target audience for strobe lights—I didn't get a migraine, but I watched the storm sequences with one hand over my eyes. Eighty minutes with no intermission. If you can snag the tickets, it's worth your time. So I have this relationship with the film of Stargate (1994), where I know it's a total brain-optional chariots-of-the-gods B-picture with almost certainly a white savior problem and in the days when I lived in a house with a television, I watched it every time it came around, because there are very few movies where a dork with a knowledge of dead languages saves the day. (To this day, even after Crash (1996), Secretary (2002), and Age of Ultron (2015), I am always faintly surprised when James Spader is not playing a sweet-natured nerd. Also, Jaye Davidson as Ra is ridiculously beautiful, even if the bass reverb voice processing is kind of unnecessary.) I knew about the television sequel and its multiple spinoffs; I never paid any attention to them because I couldn't see the point. People who watch more genre television than I do: are any of them any good? This question brought to you by vague curiosity upon realizing I lived through an entire sci-fi franchise without interacting with it almost at all. I mean, I've only seen the pilot of Farscape, but I've seen it.
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I couldn't stand the Stargate series but I was a Farscape fangirl and those shows were actively pitted against each other, to the point of SGA poaching John and Aeryn, so.
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I think I saw it at the right age to imprint whether I liked it or not. It's in permanent storage now. I regret nothing.
I couldn't stand the Stargate series but I was a Farscape fangirl and those shows were actively pitted against each other, to the point of SGA poaching John and Aeryn, so.
Someone over on LJ mentioned that! I was not a Farscape fan, so it may not give me a problem. What a weird development, either way. Weren't both shows on Sci-Fi?
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Understood. I watched friends go through the same.
It was similar to the Babylon 5/Star Trek slapfights.
I don't think I spent time on slapfights: I just loved Babylon 5. Discounting childhood shows like The Muppet Show or Fraggle Rock, it was the first television series I actively followed; I came in at the end of the first season and fell in love. In hindsight I can diagnose all kinds of problems, from JMS' variable success with different registers of dialogue to the intermittent development of even the main cast to the fact that, look, even the future of the mid-'90's should not have been as white or as straight as all that, but you will never talk me out of a deep and abiding affection for all things Centauri and the bisexual Russian Jewish badass that was Susan Ivanova. I stayed with that universe through the aborted spinoff of Crusade and all the TV movies, which was more than most of the TV movies deserved. I wrote fic for Babylon 5.* I didn't even do that for Red Dwarf.
* My only foray into online fandom until 2011, when I wrote some flash for Lackadaisy as a present for