hermionesviolin

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Remember how i watched the Buffy musical with Jonah and he fell in love? Well Sunday night he IMs me:

So Buffy is like the best thing ever. How could you not tell me that it was so wonderful. (I took out the first season on DVD from the library.)
It really amazing. It's so well-written and compelling, and the metaphors are creative and fresh and deal with teen issues so well. The dialogue and script is wonderful, and Joss Whedon seems like the coolest person ever.

I finally saw Y Tu Mamá También. What’s the big deal about that movie? (Sidenote: it reminded me a lot of Nico and Dani.)

Speaking of overrated. I read the in the most recent NYT Magazine and of course it mentioned "Art Spiegelman's groundbreaking" Maus. I finally read Maus recently and was almost bored. Am i missing something? (Note to self: must write Nancy Pearl and complain that Sandman wasn’t mentioned under Graphic Novels in Book Lust.)

Ellyn e-mailed on Monday saying they had free tickets to I, Robot, so i reread the Asimov book, which i had been meaning to since i saw the ads for the movie.

I realized that Chapter 2: Runaround, is what i think of as I, Robot. The ads remind me of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, which got turned into Blade Runner. Having reread the Asimov book, the ads most reminded me of “Little Lost Robot.” People on IMDb have suggested that the movie is likely aiming to be another I, Robot chapter -- in the spirit of Asimov’s world but not explicitly adapting any particular story.

Having finished the book i thought "Wow Asimov is brilliant" and decided i really didn’t wanna see the mutant hybrid of a movie. I might not have been allowed to anyway, actually. Jenny said Ellyn wouldn’t let her go. Maybe you had to be a mentor? (Neither of us are.) Bonding time with the girls or whatever. Blah.

TNG:

“Violations” (5.12) ... omg that was possibly the most disturbing episode ever.

“Conundrum” (5.14) ... gah! it’s the “Tabula Rasa” (BtVS 6.08) episode. (

ladyvivien: i’ve decided Ro Laren is Vash done right. Leaving aside the whole relationship part of it, that is. She has Vash’s attitude but i actually like her.)

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At the time Maus was published (the mid to late 80s, I think), very few people in America had conceived of sequential art as a valid form of self-expression to communicate anything other than 'BAM!' and 'POW!'. The very thought of describing the Holocaust in anything but plaintext or fine art was also controversial.

Ergo, 'groundbreaking'.

Personally, I found Maus to be fantastic (there are things that one doesn't always pick up on a first read), and I own a copy of the second half.

Okay, i'll validate the groundbreaking. It just feels like one of those things that while i can see why it was such a big deal at the time i'm just not that impressed by. Would you care to elaborate on what strikes you about it?

See the mutant hybrid of a movie; Alan Tudyk voices one of the robots.

Hah! I don't really like Laren...interesting, that. I wonder what it is that puts us off either character. 'Violations' is creepy as hell. Especially the part where JLP has hair *shudder*. One thing I did notice was that in 'Nemesis' and here, when they show the psychic rape stuff, the rapist takes the place of Will. I loved that flashback up until then though, interesting that she was the one who wanted it not to go further between them even though they clearly had feelings for one another.

Need. more. info.

Sorry, I can't remember what "Violations" is about and I wanna know. ...erm, please

It's the one with the aliens who can uncover memories in people's and one of them invades people's memories and sends them into comas. Ringing any bells?

*ponders and listens intently* No. No ringing yet. Oh well.

Hmm, you'd probably remember the flashbacks if you'd seen the episode. Riker pressuring Troi to sleep with him. Picard taking Beverly to see Jack at the morgue. Riker in engineering -- has to close the doors to prevent a leak from spreading, but there's still someone inside and a guy is yelling at him.

Well in that episode where Picard gets kidnapped by the aliens who want to study authority (what's the title of that episode?) Beverly tells the faux-Picard that she likes their relationship just the way it is, doesn't want it to go further.

'Allegiance' - I love the scenes with faux-Picard and Beverly in that episode. And the smirk she gives the real one at the end...

Yeah, poor guy, he's like "The not-me didn't do anything too bad, right?" and everyone's like "Um, who's gonna tell him?" and he's all "I look forward to reading your report, Number One -- at least, i think i do."

I can imagine the look on his face if Beverly ever told him...

*adds "rewatch entire Star Trek: TNG series" to her mental to-do list, then studies her mental schedule* Now, let's see... if I pair that one with the imaginary girlfriend endeavor and try to start both by sometime in September... well, the TNG bit might be done by December, assuming I can rent the series DVD's somewhere around here.

*closes both to-do list and schedule* I don't even have the time to schedule anything right now.

Takes quite a while to get through all seasons as they're 26 episodes a season (save S2: 22 episodes) and 7 seasons. One of the public libraries in my local network has them all, which has made me quite happy. I'm forever spoiled. I'm like "Rent? What, you want me to pay for something i'm just gonna return?"

Library? What's a library?

OH! The building with all the books and tapes and videos and stuff? I've been in a few, but I don't know that my local library has that much to choose from. I do, after all, live in a town with a population under 2,500.

I practically grew up in my local library and am a total library whore.

Interlibrary loan is one of the best things ever.

It's another one of those "one day, when I don't have a million other things to do" activities. I haven't been to a library in a while because I haven't had the time to curl up with a non-script book in a while (that and I'm still trying to get through some of the books I own).
I think that the last time I spent TONS of time in a library was when I was trying to stay in touch with Mm while I was sans computer. I was also trying to write an adaptation of O. Henry's "The Last Leaf" and "The Gift of the Magi" for a community theatre. I didn't get far, but it's a project I think I'd like to pick up again.

I know I'm not an lj friend but I couldn't resist responding to what you said about Maus. I too read it and failed to be blown away. That said, I do intend to try reading it again at a later point, and follow it with Maus II since reading that will probably make a difference. But I think my initial thoughts regarding Maus were that it came off, to me, as any other survivor's story, just set in comic form, except I couldn't see where the choice of mediums necessarily effected the story one way or another: I mean where the fact of it being in "comics" form actually "did something" for the narrative. I suppose one could point to the anthropomorphism, the visual play with the cat and mouse thing, but I couldn't see what was so great about that.

One thing that did grip me was the interplay of past and present: the son coming to terms with a father who really isn't a perfect man and with his horrific past. For example, when he breaks in with his old Underground comic about his mother's death. That's a case where the medium allowed Spiegelman to do something really visceral that couldn't have been pulled off in a purely written narrative. That was a case where the graphic medium was really propelling the story.

That's why I want to go back to Maus, so I can look for more like that. Otherwise, though, I'd recommend Persepolis as a case where the graphic novel aspect really holds hands with the narrative throughout the author's memoir, charging it with immediacy and starkness. For one thing, it's more introspective and the comic medium loves introspection because of the freedom of the human mind. Maus, while it certainly has it's moments, is largely "Just the facts, Ma'am" (except for when it stops being about the father's story and is the son's instead.)

I always welcome discussion on my LJ.

When i read Maus i made sure to get both I and II, so i have read the full work.

The interplay of past and present was quite interesting, but generally my feeling was, as you say, that it was just another survivor's story told in a different medium. As i said above, i validate the groundbreaking since it's a form still not taken seriously. I just don't think the work itself is, in and of itself, all that remarkable. I think it's tremendously difficult to write something new about the Holocaust. I mean, the stories are always horrific, but there's a certain sense of "If you've read one, you've read them all."

Okay, these are too F_____n obvious: (that's Freudian)

Says Tarmen, the older Ulian, at the beginning of "Violations:" "Sometimes, with a beautiful woman, I cannot help myself." (after his son has reminded him it's not allowed to read someone's mind without her permission--in this case, Beverley Crusher's)

Warf, when asked if he would like to explore a memory, "Klingons do not allow themselves to be probed."

It's almost Oedipal: Jev, the Ulian son, is jealous of his father who can easily probe people's memories. While his father generally does it by consent, his son starts doing it ("doing it") without consent and he schemes to get the father taken out of the picture (perhaps killed; the script only talks of extremely severe punishment).

The episode was a very clever way to provide backstory.

A bothersome science nit: Giordi tells Data that human memory is a continuous string of RNA (like a sort of super-film). But memory is not a recording of what happens in chronological order. It's a highly processed storage of some things that parts of the mind find important. And they are recorded in schematic form, often out of chronological order. What is considered salient is recorded and the rest isn't. Memories are then essentially reconstructed when they are brought into consciousness. The reconstruction is incomplete at best, and often is wrong. (this paragraph should probably be read in Data's voice.)

RAS

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"Violations"