sovay: (Rotwang)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2015-05-31 02:50 am

Some may recall the singing of the sirens lured in the sailors who'd wreck and drown

1. Last night I fell asleep before four in the morning and I stayed that way until shortly after one in the afternoon. In between, for the first time in months, I had detailed, narrative dreams in two distinct phases. I was watching a television play and participating in it at the same time: the killing of a king in something like a Shakespearean history, filmed with all the grey skies and chapped faces and damp wool of modern adaptations. There might or might not have been a plot with a pretender. The speeches should have been in verse, but I can't remember if they were. I fell in love with the youngest of the killers, the one who got the death-blow in, a thin, cowled, gender-ambiguous person with straw-spiky hair and a round face with too many bones in it. They were quick-spoken, taking little nervous breaths halfway through phrases; they were gentle and political and I knew they would be betrayed. We never did more than hold one another, briefly and longingly. I had to watch them found out and torn apart, long after the point where the frame of the play had blurred into something that was really happening. Quartering sounds neat as mathematics, I remember thinking; bodies aren't stamps with dotted lines. After the coronation, I pushed through the gallery of spectators into the backstage that had not existed since the first moments of the dream and found them in modern dress, scarf pulled down around their neck like a cowl, packing a knapsack. They burrowed against me instantly. Later I learned that their name was Filipe and their gender identity was "boi" and we went out to dinner with a bunch of other actors and dancers they worked with (at a restaurant near Fresh Pond that hasn't existed since I was a child, though I didn't remember that until after I'd woken) and it wasn't that the events of the history play had never happened, or that we were living in some kind of metatheatrical region between dreams, but dying and going out to dinner were apparently not mutually exclusive. It was not an idyllic dream, which interests me from here. Not all their friends liked or approved of me; I hadn't introduced them yet to any of mine beyond [livejournal.com profile] rushthatspeaks and [livejournal.com profile] derspatchel. It must have been colder where we were or earlier in the year, because I remember trees breaking into flower above our heads, white and pink petals all over the sidewalk. I remember how they fit into my arms, a little shorter than I was and much skinnier. I missed them when I woke up. Those are unusual dreams for me these days.

2. I spent much of this evening with [livejournal.com profile] sairaali and M., watching Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001). It turns out that the pilot and the second half of the two-parter with the Borg Queen are not a good introduction to Voyager, but being shown four favorite episodes (and one chosen to showcase a character I was interested in) by someone who really likes the series is great. Robert Picardo continues his streak of fantastic character acting, because the Doctor was my favorite character almost at once. Her figure-hugging jumpsuit is idiotic, but Jeri Ryan's Seven of Nine may be coming in second. I am interested to see a show running two very different narratives about how to be human—or not—simultaneously, without putting them in conflict with one another. Will gladly watch more episodes as recommended. Also, Kate Mulgrew has an amazing voice. The last person I heard who sounded like her was Katharine Hepburn.

(I stand by my original assessment of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–2005), however: it was terrible.)

3. I should cook fruit more often. The braces and other health concerns have made eating most raw fruits difficult, but the baked-down plums and nectarines really worked.
kore: (Default)

[personal profile] kore 2015-05-31 08:12 am (UTC)(link)
Kate Mulgrew actually played Hepburn! http://www.playbill.com/features/article/great-kate-kate-mulgrew-plays-katharine-hepburn-in-tea-at-five-110473 I adored her (first FEMALE captain, aww yeah) and stuck with the show as it disintegrated til the bitter end just to see her. It was one of the first times I really got representation, that amazing kick of seeing yourself on the screen, pow.

I loved Seven too. Jeri Ryan later does awesome work on one of my favourite series ever, Leverage.
yhlee: Drop Ships from Race for the Galaxy (RTFG)

[personal profile] yhlee 2015-05-31 12:40 pm (UTC)(link)
I met a younger guy once at the game store who told me he insisted on watching all of Voyager, even the bad bits, because it was the only Star Trek show who had a captain who behaved like a real captain. (He had family who was British military.) I also had a (female) physics professor who really liked Voyager. I didn't get to watch enough of it to form an opinion.
heavenscalyx: (Default)

[personal profile] heavenscalyx 2015-05-31 02:33 pm (UTC)(link)
We saw that play when it came to Boston! (With the local Bryn Mawr Club, of COURSE.) She was amaaaazing.
yhlee: Fall-From-Grace from Planescape: Torment (PST FFG (art: maga))

[personal profile] yhlee 2015-06-01 12:48 am (UTC)(link)
You might enjoy it! The heists are ridiculous if you know anything about security engineering (I had to research it for hexarchate purposes, although the hexarchate is also ridiculous in this regard), but it's fun. I find two members of the gang, Nathan and Sophie, terribly dull, which is especially sad as Sophie's concept (grifter who can act superbly when she's grifting but is terrible as a "regular" actress) is hilarious but the actress just doesn't pull it off. (I have a friend who really likes both characters, though, so YMMV.) The trio of Hardison (hacker), Parker (...ninja-style thief?), and Elliott (bruiser) is really great, however.

I divorced the show during its single episode where the gang pretend to be teachers at a school and are, predictably, really bad teachers, because apparently it offends my sense of professionalism, when actually I should have carried on as the show doesn't repeat its episode premises. One or two episodes from S1 should tell you whether it is your thing in rapid order.
yhlee: Alto clef and whole note (middle C). (Radch ship (John Harris))

[personal profile] yhlee 2015-06-01 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
His explanation was that a captain wouldn't run around doing all the low-level tasks personally, they would delegate this stuff to all the lower-ranks whose job this is. Now, it's been a very long time since I was reading books about the origins of ST:TOS (I was very into Trek when I was younger) and I don't remember the source, but I think this was originally a deliberate narrative choice on the part of the creators--you get a very different dynamic having the main characters at the top being personally involved in Adventures as opposed to telling the stories of rotating (and frequently expendable) redshirt-composed away teams. Which is true if I'm remembering this correctly, but does look weird from a military perspective (never mind that Starfleet is supposed to not be primarily military, they're using a military-style chain of command).

One thing that messed me up recognizing this myself was a confusion stemming from early in childhood that an army captain is very different from a navy captain, instead of being the "same" rank! It wasn't until researching Ninefox that I looked at rank charts and had confirmed for me that a navy captain is basically a colonel (I dunno, the navy is weird to me even if I have a second cousin who went to Annapolis). The other thing that Star Trek messed up for me in my early conceptions of what the military looks like is that Starfleet doesn't seem to have noncoms. There could well be a perfectly good worldbuilding reason for this and I'd be happy to find out what it is, but it sure confused me for the longest time.

[identity profile] nineweaving.livejournal.com 2015-05-31 08:27 am (UTC)(link)
...dying and going out to dinner were apparently not mutually exclusive.

I love that you're having such amazing dreams.

Nine

ST:E

[identity profile] lauradi7.livejournal.com 2015-05-31 12:52 pm (UTC)(link)
Many people (including me) felt that Enterprise would have been OK, overall, if the two final episodes never existed. In fact, I remember someone claiming that those episodes were meant as "F you" to loyal fans, a result of the producers' peevishness at being cancelled.

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2015-05-31 12:57 pm (UTC)(link)
Andrew and I had accepted the belief that Voyager is weak, and assumed we simply had a knack for stumbling across good individual episodes on tv, but it's likely there were more good episodes than anyone admitted at the time (a bunch of us used to turn the sound off and improvise dialogue -- our alternate version of the show had its own continuity, character names and silly/treacherous relationships.)

Kate Mulgrew has played Katherine Hepburn in a one-woman stage show.

[identity profile] cucumberseed.livejournal.com 2015-05-31 02:16 pm (UTC)(link)
Jeri Ryan consistently does good work with minimal roles. She's really quite good when she shows up in Leverage, mostly in season 2.

[identity profile] asakiyume.livejournal.com 2015-05-31 02:38 pm (UTC)(link)
had to watch them found out and torn apart, --how awful. And yet your subconscious decided that was too harsh, and rescued you--and Filipe--into the metastory, where that was just a play. And yet Filipe seemed to have a sense, maybe, of what they'd been saved from...

Re: Voyager, I really *loved* Seven of Nine's exploration of humanity, and also of what it was like to be part of the Borg. She was my favorite character in that show.

Star Trek Enterprise took some for-me morally wrong decisions in the first season, and I had to give up on it.

[identity profile] ladymondegreen.livejournal.com 2015-05-31 03:32 pm (UTC)(link)
I am so glad you had real sleep. I wonder if the dream was your body's way of fighting the insomnia by giving you a narrative hook you couldn't let go of? The death and life of doomed love is a pretty hefty narrative and plays right into Dybuk territory, even if your dream allowed for bodily resurrection.

It does occur to me to wonder whether there would be extensive scarring, or eerie smoothness on Filipe's skin. It puts me in mind of the end of Norman Jewison's take on Jesus Christ Superstar (among other things, including a bunch of variations on the "don't crack the bones" stories, though I don't think quartering, especially if there is dragging or drawing is likely to leave someone's bones intact).

I wonder whether the symbology of Filipe's thinness meant that your feelings of love and peotectiveness were increased by zir perceived fragility?

I am glad you were able to reconcile and even start relationship talks before the dream ended, even if you have been sundered by the sleeping/waking divide.

If it causes you to get good sleep, I hope you are reunited.
gwynnega: (Mary Ryan)

[personal profile] gwynnega 2015-05-31 09:48 pm (UTC)(link)
That is an amazing dream.

I love Kate Mulgrew (who started her career on Ryan's Hope in 1975 and already had that voice as a young woman).

[identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com 2015-06-01 12:59 am (UTC)(link)
I was the person who played the Kate Mulgrew role in our improv version of Voyager, and we actually ended up calling her character "Captain Hepburn." If I recall some of our adventures correctly, I once pimped our version of Harry Kim out to an entire alien race in return for tech, had a plastique skeleton, could real people's minds with my hair (or thought I could), and at another point identified whatever we were looking at on the viewscreen as "the planet of Breastia, with its capital, Nippleopolis." So...all that said, it would take a lot to convince me of the actual Voyager's relative entertainingness in and of itself. But I'm also pretty much sure that almost every pilot episode often turns out to be the worst possible way to be introduced to a given series, at least when produced for network TV.

[identity profile] moon-custafer.livejournal.com 2015-06-01 01:48 am (UTC)(link)
Our versions of Harry Kim and Tom Paris were named "Lieutenant Friend" and "Ensign Friend." Ensign Friend was exceedingly stupid -- there was an episode where he tired to increase his intelligence and "Doc Rimmer" (the hologram doctor) pleaded with him not to, because as things stood he was the one person on the ship Doc figured he'd never have to kill (everyone else was constantly plotting mutiny.)

[identity profile] handful-ofdust.livejournal.com 2015-06-01 01:53 am (UTC)(link)
My absolute favourite Ensign Friend line remains that time he was taking tricorder readings on a planet, knelt down and announced, cheerfully: "Hey, guys? Down here? It's lower."
ext_104661: (Default)

Robert Picardo

[identity profile] alexx-kay.livejournal.com 2015-06-01 03:07 am (UTC)(link)
I notice you've been mentioning Robert Picardo a lot. He happens to have a tiny part in my all-time favorite movie, "Get Crazy" (1983). It may not be to everyone's taste, but it's possibly the silliest movie ever. It's about a New Years Eve rock concert, which an evil real estate magnate (Ed Begley Jr., with his minions played by former teen pop idols) tries to sabotage. Also features appearances by Paul Bartel, Mary Woronov, Malcolm McDowell (channeling Mick Jagger), and Lou Reed (as not-Bob Dylan). It's never come out on DVD due to complicated rights issues, but luckily they're not the kind of issues that get it taken down from youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrIRmMNi800

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