Our big communal thing was the X-Files, as it aired.
That's another piece of contemporary pop culture I just completely missed. My mother loved their golem episode.
I love that Tanith Lee wrote for it! Some people don't like her eps, but I love them, their weirdness and the fact that the B7 universe is wide enough to encompass that.
May I take it you've read Lee's novel Kill the Dead (1980), then?
It's one of those things that's been influential enough to make it worth it, even if it doesn't live up to expectations.
I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it! I just don't want to make promises about when.
This is kind of me the last few years, hence my disappearance down the old telly rabbit hole.
Totally understood. It sounds like the rabbit hole is treating you well, anyway.
It's just that if I want to talk about all but the most well-known stuff, I have to do a tiresome amount of evangelism first!
For whatever it's worth, I don't generally find it tiresome to read people enthusing about things they love. It doesn't help me figure out whether I would agree with them if they can't articulate why, but that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
but it has three episodes by Ben Steed, that are so misogynistic nobody knows how they got there. The only debate in B7 fandom on them is whether or not they were so obviously misogynistic they were meant as a parody.
Is this a situation where word of God would help or is God either dead or been hiding from this question for years?
Oh no!! (The thought of it is too distressing! I can't even look.)
It was terrible! There is a reason I have never seen Psycho (1960) and it's that I want to see it for the first time on film and the theaters around here only screen it for obviously ironic occasions like Mother's Day or Halloween and there is no way I'm doing that to myself or the movie.
And I know - it's fair enough if people don't want to watch older things or can't get into it. Life's short and unless it's for study, why on earth should they bother? But if you do, then take it on its own terms!
Exactly! Or rent it with your friends and have a rifftracking party, but don't inflict it on people who bought tickets expressly to see the movie.
Also, it's a kind of time travel and that's a value in itself
Seriously.
it's been possible for a while, but it's the internet and DVDs that have made it so much more so.
One of the most interesting books of film criticism I have ever read was Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985/2015) because it was more like internet fandom than any criticism I'd read before the rise of the internet. He has favorite actors; he thinks they are hot; he is going to talk to you about them in appreciative, sometimes excruciating, often hilarious detail, generally inspired by running into one or the other of them on late-night TV. In the process he says any number of sharply intelligent things about sexuality and Hollywood and social constructions of gender, but also sometimes he just shows you a picture and explains why its subject is the best. It is wonderful stuff.
no subject
That's another piece of contemporary pop culture I just completely missed. My mother loved their golem episode.
I love that Tanith Lee wrote for it! Some people don't like her eps, but I love them, their weirdness and the fact that the B7 universe is wide enough to encompass that.
May I take it you've read Lee's novel Kill the Dead (1980), then?
It's one of those things that's been influential enough to make it worth it, even if it doesn't live up to expectations.
I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy it! I just don't want to make promises about when.
This is kind of me the last few years, hence my disappearance down the old telly rabbit hole.
Totally understood. It sounds like the rabbit hole is treating you well, anyway.
It's just that if I want to talk about all but the most well-known stuff, I have to do a tiresome amount of evangelism first!
For whatever it's worth, I don't generally find it tiresome to read people enthusing about things they love. It doesn't help me figure out whether I would agree with them if they can't articulate why, but that doesn't seem to be an issue here.
but it has three episodes by Ben Steed, that are so misogynistic nobody knows how they got there. The only debate in B7 fandom on them is whether or not they were so obviously misogynistic they were meant as a parody.
Is this a situation where word of God would help or is God either dead or been hiding from this question for years?
Oh no!! (The thought of it is too distressing! I can't even look.)
It was terrible! There is a reason I have never seen Psycho (1960) and it's that I want to see it for the first time on film and the theaters around here only screen it for obviously ironic occasions like Mother's Day or Halloween and there is no way I'm doing that to myself or the movie.
And I know - it's fair enough if people don't want to watch older things or can't get into it. Life's short and unless it's for study, why on earth should they bother? But if you do, then take it on its own terms!
Exactly! Or rent it with your friends and have a rifftracking party, but don't inflict it on people who bought tickets expressly to see the movie.
Also, it's a kind of time travel and that's a value in itself
Seriously.
it's been possible for a while, but it's the internet and DVDs that have made it so much more so.
One of the most interesting books of film criticism I have ever read was Boyd McDonald's Cruising the Movies: A Sexual Guide to Oldies on TV (1985/2015) because it was more like internet fandom than any criticism I'd read before the rise of the internet. He has favorite actors; he thinks they are hot; he is going to talk to you about them in appreciative, sometimes excruciating, often hilarious detail, generally inspired by running into one or the other of them on late-night TV. In the process he says any number of sharply intelligent things about sexuality and Hollywood and social constructions of gender, but also sometimes he just shows you a picture and explains why its subject is the best. It is wonderful stuff.