(Fannish) notes and queries:

[raven]

For some reason best known to itself, iTunes wants me to listen to Christmas music. I don't understand. Also, I hate Christmas. (That said, the Sarah McLachlan version of "The First Noel" is actually lovely; full of rising piano notes that do, indeed, remind me very much of last December.)

Anyway. I have finished making all the training contract applications I'm ever going to make and just in time, my industrial-strength painkillers are running out - I finished the last lot off at five o'clock this morning, having been woken up by a spike inside my head - and so, I return to matters fannish after a long time away. A lot of the time that I was in San Francisco, likethesun2 and I watched fannish television, because, for the first ever, we could. And naturally, this involved a lot of Slings & Arrows, because she introduced me to it in the first place, and well, it's... itself. The problem with it, as I keep saying, is that it ruins you for television. Just... all television. It's not perfect by any means - we were talking about how the last season leaves lots of hanging threads; how the ingenues and their boyfriends can get samey; how it's a little too heteronormative for a show set in a theatre - but... so close. And the first six episodes, as a self-contained unit, are perfect. The writing, the characters, the nutty black humour, the way it's critical and wry in its treatment of madness and redemption, but it lifts you up with it.

(It also, specifically, ruins you for Due South. You try and watch it, and you end up sitting there going, "But he's so clean! Why is he so well-scrubbed? Why does he not look like a HOMELESS PERSON?" And it is not as if Due South is not the most bizarre thing that has ever been on television, honestly. Quite apart from the fact it's a show set in America made by British people and Canadians, it's, welll... yeah. There's a bit in it, in the episode with the pirate ship, where they have to create a diversion. It's a cop buddy show. If I were writing a cop buddy show, how would I write in a diversion? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have Paul Gross decide apropos of nothing to launch into several choruses of "Barrett's Privateers".

And, later! Later, there are the episodes featuring the show's very own metaphysics. I explained to someone once, "That tunnel there? That represents the phase space between life and death."

Phase space between life and death. It's a show about people who fight crime. I say again, bizarre.)

(We also tried to watch Chasing Rainbows, which is an eighties mini-series featuring a very young Paul Gross hamming it up horribly and trying to put on an American accent and the acting is terrible and the script is terrible and the pacing is terrible and the music is terrible and everyone looks blue. And it is, as a consequence, ridiculously funny. We were sitting there giggling occasionally until there's a bit where he's asked where he's from and he tells the Prince of Wales, "Montreal. Which is in Quebec."

It's in Quebec, guys. Montreal is in Quebec. I have never before been reduced to hysteria by this fact.)

Anyway! Enough parenthesis. I promised recs.

Better A Fallen Rocket, Slings & Arrows, by likethesun2.
I betaed this one, in between spending a week on the author's sofa, so I am a little biased. But not much. This is a long, hypnotic, frightening story about Geoffrey Tennant going mad, and it's also a story about Oliver, and a story about the crawlspace beneath a stage, and about the layers and unravelling of madness, and about what's left of God's purpose when you take away God. I am actually not quite able to do justice to it in a one-paragraph rec. Go and read it, and take in the enormous scope and sweep of what she does with these characters and themes, and then go and cry because you'll never write anything as good.

Pawn Their Experience and a A Foolish Wit, Slings & Arrows, by petronelle.
petronelle is a one-woman fic-writing machine, and all of her stuff is good, but these two are my favourites. "Pawn Their Experience" is about Geoffrey and Oliver, picking up the thing in canon where there is a big gay backstory that we never got to see, and doing it with poignance and setting out the characters' cluelessness very well. "A Foolish Wit" is a story about Sloan. The guy with the motorbike, yes. He has his own ghost. He says "fuck" a lot. I love it far too much.

untitled wee ficlet by rillarilla, still S&A.
An old one that I never got around to reccing. Claire's gone away to better things. It's short and packs a hell of a well-written punch.

Other things, let me see. The first trailer for Half-Blood Prince, which looks - gasp - good. At least, it gave me the right sort of chills. I like HBP as a book very much - it's well-constructed, it's smart, it's gripping, it's funny - and I really hope the film captures what I like about it. At any rate, the opening bars of the music still make me happy.

And, lastly, one from rs_games, which is ridiculously good fun.

Horoscopes and How They Caused The Plague of Frogs [currently anonymous]
Remus gets a job as astrologer for the Quibbler. Lunacy (and sex) ensue. Not immaculately written, but I can forgive it much; it's long and silly and full of very funny touches.

Back to my very exciting day of eating coconut cake and moaning about the spike in my head. And, hopefully, editing 10,000 words of fic of my own, what is wrong with me, etc.

Comments

[thunderemerald.livejournal.com]

I desperately need to watch the rest of Slings & Arrows, just so I can read these fics. :)

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

YES YOU DO IT IS GREAT. :)