zvi likes tv

I only asked for one thing for Christmas—tickets to a Caps-Pen game—so I was pretty upset last Wednesday when I had a killer light sensitive headache the day of the game. (It was so bad I had the lights off in my office and I wore sunglasses.) I was able to resell my tickets via Ticketmaster.

This totally caused a lightbulb in my brain, I looked at the rest of the schedule for the week, and on Sunday morning I bought a pretty cheap, pretty good ticket for the 1 p.m. game against the Flyers. I went to lunch at b and I had a burger salad that was pretty decent.

The Caps had a pretty slow start (why is this a chronic issue? This is going on four years, guys. Start playing hockey from minute one) but they demolished the Flyers and chased Mason. Wo-oh wo-oh. Wo-oh wo-oh! As we hit goal 5, I realized I had made a strategic error. I was wearing my (second) Girl Gang cap (first Girl Gang cap, lost to bus travel, RIP), and two players had scored two goals. What would I do if a hat trick occurred? It turned out okay, no one scored any more, and the Flyers were practically in tears, so all was well.

Afterwards, I watched Fences, since the Phonebooth is right next door to a movie theater.

Troy is a really great role, but I feel like Denzel was a little bit indulgent in playing him. I'm just not sure that directing yourself in the lead role is a good idea. He was good, but with just a hint of scenery chewing. (To be fair, that was, like, 80% the character? Troy is one of those big people who sucks up all the life in a room.)

Viola Davis is a fucking national treasure and we do not deserve her. She was so great, with great passion and also great restraint. There were several beautiful reaction shots. She was very clear in communicating the relationship she had to each of the other characters and how she was feeling about her life at any given time. I really loved this performance and this role, and she so deserves an Oscar nod.

I'm not necessarily sold on the movie as a whole. I don't feel strongly about it one way or the other. I certainly don't regret going to see it, but it was mostly a story about a man's relationship with his sons, and my interest in that is limited right now, even for a black man.

So, the weekend was pretty great.

This week has been an ongoing trial. DC is being fenced in to prepare for the inauguration, and getting around near my office was getting more and more difficult. Tuesday, I saw the U.S. flag on the Capitol, and it felt like a threat. The bus I catch lost most of the DC part of its route on Wednesday, and I didn't get the alert, although some people on the bus said that they had gotten one belatedly. It lost all of the DC part of the route today. D: The fences make the Mall etc. feel like a cage. And today, there were all these god damn white people wandering around in fucking MAGA hats. Thankfully, my office is closed for the inauguration, because I would lose my mind if I had to go in for that bullshit.

I have comforted myself by reading volume 5 of Sunstone, which was great, but also the end of that story. /: I think I have to reread all five volumes to see how I feel about it as an ending, but it was great to sink into that world again and it was definitely as beautiful as the previous volumes. I feel like, even though the same face was still there, the faces were less same-y somehow. I can't explain, because they weren't exactly more expressive, just more distinct. I think I liked it. Sejic is promising more stories in the same world. I'll probably actually pick up Alan and Anne's story, because I like Alan, but I'm not sure about the other couples. Too much straightness.

Tomorrow, I'm going to catch up on my comics (I will finally deal with the nightmare that is Civil War II) and watch the new season of Voltron: Legendary Defender.

I couldn't get off my ass this morning, it just took forever to get out of the bathroom, get dressed (even though what I was wearing was already laid out), and get out the door. So I missed the 7 am bus, even though there were two of them (6:45 bus was late again.)

Then the 7:20 bus didn't arrive until almost 7:40, and there was traffic getting into DC, so we were 20 minutes late on that end, and, therefore, despite waking up at 6:30, I didn't get to my office until just after 9. D: And since I had gotten up at 6:30, I was dressed in my gym clothes, with the expectation that I would bike half an hour, shower, and dress in work clothes, which got cut to just dressing in work clothes, so I felt vaguely grimy all day.

I made oatmeal for breakfast at work, but I ate it cold and it just felt crappy to eat, even though it had peanutbutter and banana, which I normally like a lot.

I couldn't get my act together to actually accomplish much until the very end of the day, when I wrote 3 pages of notes for Christine about how much she sucks. D: (She doesn't actually suck, they just don't know everything for their job yet, but it felt like what I was doing.)

And I ended up leaving work later than I wanted to, about 5:50. D:

But I went to Whole Foods and had ramen (double vegetables, double pork belly) and macaroni and cheese for dinner, then I went to the Kennedy Center and watched Danish Dance Theater perform Black Diamond.

It was a really beautiful piece, very stylized, and it had a lot of things I like: echoing between performers, callbacks to earlier in the piece, a dude being lifted repeatedly, performers making sound with their bodies, both fluid and staccato movement, and choreography that very clearly and playfully interacts with the music. Some things I am less wild about, too: movement suggestive of hip hop but not performed with hip hop skills, which I find really annoying. Either foot the bill for a dance master to come teach you guys about sharpness and power strikes and fucking actual synchronicity (why do contemporary dancers not want to actually make the same movements at the same time? Forever I'm seeing people choose different angles, different scope of movement, different force, different quality of movement when two people have clearly been given the same movement to perform) or GTFO. Also, the slightly gendered costume and breaking the corps up into gendered groups in a piece which is not actually about gender and seems to speak more to our relationship with technology and the mediated world than our romantic or familial relationships. By slightly gendered costume, I mean things like putting the women in fitted bandeau tops and the men without shirts, but everyone is wearing a great coat and dancers of both apparent sexes are wearing skirts or pants. Like, we actually could have put everyone in fitted bandeau tops?

Also, it did this thing at the end which I think was supposed to be uplifting, but actually struck me as deeply fucky creeping. ( sexual assault-ish )

That said, though, I really enjoyed Black Diamond and would recommend going to see it!

Also, while I was faffing around at work, I signed up for holly_polly! And I've made a journal entry for the first time in a while.

So, it started bad and ended well.

P.S. How do I not have a dance icon?

There is a comment meta post at fem_thoughts, which you should look at and see if you have thoughts (any kind of thoughts! Of whatever length or thoughtfulness!) about femslash and things around femslash.

Some threads of interest to me:

• Word Choices in Smut
• femslash production
• Defiance and Sex
• Favorite Tropes as Applied to Femslash
• The women of White Collar squee fest
• The limits of "encouraging" femslash
• changing fannish boundaries

I posted two things there that I wanted to pull into my journal, which are not really about femslash or the topics above. Point 1, about my favorite narrative OF ALL TIME

I don't know if it's a trope that we see in fandom so much, but it's definitely common in the source material, and it's the Breakfast Club/Beauty & the Beast, where people who wouldn't choose to be together are thrown in with one another by circumstances beyond their control, and they then have a shared understanding of the world that can't be really explained to outsiders.

Also, I have just figured out why I am so gaga for Teen Wolf, JFC.

Point 2, about women on Teen Wolf

The thing that I find extremely frustrating about Teen Wolf's approach to gender is that you have a lot of Minority Police Captain syndrome going on, where women are named as being in charge, but then for various story reasons are effectively powerless.

• Laura Hale is a dead body who was the Hale pack alpha before the series started.
• The Argents claim that women are their war leaders, but Victoria Argent wasn't introduced in the series until several episodes after her husband Chris in season 1, and is immediately undercut by her father-in-law Gerard when he appears, and Allison functions as titular leader for a handful of episodes while always dancing to her grandfather's tune.
• Last but not least, we are repeatedly told that Lydia Martin is a queen of the social scene, but we never see her wield that power over anyone except Jackson and Stiles, and, by the time we see her attempt to use it, her juice has evaporated because of that one time when she was assaulted by a psycho at prom and then ran away from the hospital and wandered the woods naked for, like, two days.

Fall 2012 TV Schedule

	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Sunday	Whenever
8 PM	The Voice	The Voice	Arrow	Last Resort	Scandal	Once Upon a Time	Whitney
9 PM		Castle	Criminal Minds	CSI	Elementary	666 Park Avenue	NCIS: Los Angeles
10 PM					Haven		Community

Timeshifted shows are emphasized.

I'm not 100% sure that 666 Park Avenue is going to stay where it is, and I'm not sure I'm going to watch CSI. I don't think I watched a single episode last season. But this is pretty close to the plan, and it has the TV off by 10 p.m. every night except Friday, so I can sleep!

---

As far as this summer is concerned, TV has been rather…trying.

I think I'm done with So You Think You Can Dance. They lean too heavily on a couple of choreographers I don't think do particularly good work (Tyce, Travis, Stacy Tookey), some of the choreographers whose work I enjoy seem stuck in ruts this season (NappyTabs, Sonya Tayeh), the camera work has always been atrocious, and the judges are more obnoxious than insightful. It also doesn't seem as if these seasons dancers are as good performers as previous seasons, although they may be technically as gifted. Frankly, I've always felt the talking to dancing ratio was way off, and the little training sequences have had less and less dancing and more tomfoolery. I used to like it because it was the only place to see a lot of dancing at once on TV, but I think I'm just going to pay more attention to Ovation on Demand. I've stopped watching this season because I don't care.

I also feel like Project Runway has run its course. When I thought that the constant one day challenges were an artistic decision, i.e. had the potential to be reevaluated and reversed, I was willing to hang in there, because I assumed that someone would point out the obvious: the clothes are not as good because the designers don't have time to make mistakes or to edit their work. I have now come to the conclusion that the one day challenges are a budgetary issue, and that's never going to get fixed. Also, Bunim-Murray continue to edit in such a way to make the drama centered on personality conflicts rather than the making of clothes. Do. Not. Want. Sticking it out to the end of this season, but then I'm done.

Drop Dead Diva is a show that completely flubbed the dismount. ( spoilers for this season )

I can't decide if I'm just going to skip season five of Drop Dead Diva all together, or if, like a trainwreck, I must catch every single second of terribleness.

The shows that delighted me this summer were The Closer and Major Crimes. I love all of the actors, I love that the way The Closer wound down was simply the chickens coming home to roost for all of the improper actions Brenda had taken over the course of the series, I love Mary McDonnell as the lead of her own show and I love Provenza as Raider's antagonist. I…actually think Rusty is the best execution of a poor artistic choice. I do understand their feeling that Raider needed a non-police foil to humanize her, and I approve of not making it a romantic relationship so that Raider is clearly not Brenda Lee. But I think they missed the chance to include another woman on the show by giving Raider an adult female friend, maybe someone in the DA's office or a religious figure, someone on whom Raider could reasonably lay heavy stuff but who could also reasonably make demands of her. But even though I think giving Raider a pseudo-child to humanize her and I think Rusty is kind of a dick, I think they've done a great a job writing that relationship, sketching out Raider as a mother, and turning Rusty into a real boy.

Leverage has been something more of a mixed bag. Actually, I take that back. Except for the looming threat of Nate's manipulation turning the whole season arc into a long meditation on the ways Nate is made sad by the betrayal of a cruel world and the inability of alcohol to cure all his ills the greatest, this season has been very good. I've liked the development of the relationship between Parker and Hardison, and the Sophie and Nate stuff has been a pleasant frisson without too much information. The one thing the show lacks, I think, is the sincere feeling that our heroes could fail this time. Victory is too assured, so the tension is never that high. But there's a joy in watching a well-oiled machine go to work, and plenty of laughs (including Hardison's geekery and Hardison and Eliot bickering.) It's not quite as good as The Closer/Major Crimes, but it is quite good as its own thing.

What are you looking forward to this fall?