#extremely handwaved version of my high school experience there

[transienturl]

I guess a good web design project for me to do would be an illustrative chart of all of the models for cpus, gpus, etc, with responsive design for mobile so you could reference them in a store setting. there are two tough things about that, though. one: while I think I'm decent at poking holes in an obviously bad user story, I'm not any good at design. and two: this is another one of those "the data is the product" projects, in which your project is pointless if not kept up to date, and it's tough to do that and remain committed to it especially as a solo project... and I've never really had the experience of having a friend quite as into computer hardware in quite the same way I am.

(I'm definitely lucky to have my dad as someone who's interested, and he does keep up on a good portion of the desktop chips market nowadays, but there's another level of, like—I dunno. I can't actually imagine it. I would lament not hanging out with more of the cs kids in high school except for the fact that I really liked the theater kids and the cs kids were mostly, to a first order approximation, kind of annoying, so why would I have.)

[impalementation]

spike, angel, buffy & romanticism: part 2

part 1: “When you kiss me I want to die”: Angel and the high school seasons

* 

“Love isn’t brains, children”: Enter Spike as the id

For all that I’ve just discussed all of the ways that the first three seasons subvert the romance of Angel, it’s also true that the writing still fundamentally takes him—and Buffy’s relationship with him—seriously. To some degree it has to. Because Buffy is the show’s emotional anchor, if the writing didn’t take her emotions seriously, the audience wouldn’t either. It needs to be sympathetic to her (regardless of whether it endorses her, per se), or else it would run the risk of losing all pathos. Making fun of Buffy and Angel makes for a great gag in “The Zeppo”, and fits with the general way that season three undermines the romanticism of them, but if that was the show’s attitude the whole way through, it would come off as simply meanspirited. It would seem like it was making fun of Buffy for being a stupid teenage girl in love, instead of sympathetically depicting the human experience of being caught up in big, tempestuous emotions.

But at the same time, if the writing were to only take romance seriously, that wouldn’t feel very true either. Or fit with the general Buffy ethos, which loves to flip between serious and silly moods in order to capture all sides of whatever it’s exploring. And therein is the magic of Spike’s addition to the chemistry of the show. Practically from his introduction, Spike parallels Buffy’s romantic storylines, except unlike Buffy, Spike is allowed to do the comic or morally incorrect thing. His status as a soulless vampire means that the show is free to use him to point out both the sillier and darker sides of romance, without tainting Buffy’s heroism or the seriousness of her emotions.

In “Becoming, Part 2” for example, Spike is free to explicitly say that he’s saving the world because he wants Dru back, and leaves Buffy to die once he’s gotten her. Whereas Buffy, despite also wanting the person she loves back, ultimately chooses to save the world rather than keep him. Spike allows the episode to show what Buffy’s, or anyone’s, romantic id might want, without Buffy herself going through with it. He also allows the episode to show the ridiculousness of the romantic id, by giving him comic moments like “Didn’t say I wouldn’t”, or “God, he’s going to kill her”, or beating Angel with a tire iron, or any of the times that Buffy makes fun of him (“The whole earth may be sucked into hell and you want my help ‘cause your girlfriend’s a big ho?”). All of which is in contrast to the tragic seriousness of Buffy’s heartbreak. Spike in season two is not a character without pathos; in fact, he has quite a lot of pathos that parallels Buffy’s--think of the tortured close-up on his face as Angel and Drusilla taunt him in “I Only Have Eyes For You.” But neither is he limited or defined by that pathos.

He plays a similar role in both “Lovers Walk” and “The Harsh Light of Day”. In “Lovers Walk” he’s devastated by the loss of Drusilla, as Buffy was devastated over Angel in “Anne”, yet the way they get out of their respective depressions is very different. Tonally, “Anne” plays Buffy’s misery extremely straight, and when Buffy decides to stop moping and become an agent in her own life again, her version of “agency” means getting in touch with her leadership and heroism. Whereas for Spike, agency means a love spell, or torturing Drusilla into liking him again. The romantic id tries to re-possess the object of its desire, whereas the ego or superego is able to set that desire aside, whether or not it wants to. More obviously, Spike in “Lovers Walk” parallels all of the other characters and their romantic situations. All of them are behaving somewhat selfishly or self-destructively in their love lives (Xander and Willow cheating, Buffy and Angel torturing themselves with friendship) but are in denial about the fact that they’re doing so. And then Spike blazes in with his version of love that is selfish, scary, grandiose, charming, pathetic, genuine, and absurd by turns—and suddenly, everyone’s romantic weaknesses are out in the open. It makes perfect sense that Spike finishes the episode gleeful and optimistic, because “Lovers Walk” as a whole represents a triumph of the romantic id over the romantic ego, if only temporarily. And it’s all handled with a brilliantly whiplash-y mix of comedy and tragedy because at the end of the day, the power of the romantic id really is ridiculous. The way that Spike turns on a dime between being scary and pathetic parallels the way it’s at once absurd, and kind of frightening, that your id would make you, say: cheat on your wonderful high school boyfriend, just to have a chance with your childhood crush.

Because Spike is often treated as the show’s romantic id, the writing’s relationship to his romanticism gets complicated. Like Angel, there is something romantic in his aesthetic and behavior, even if he doesn’t look like Angel’s conventional Byronic hero. He wears a long, dramatic coat, poses rebelliously with his cigarettes, and dotes on his paramour with the elaborate attentiveness of Gomez Addams. But unlike Angel, he is not just a romantic symbol or object, he is also a romantic subject. That is to say, Spike’s romantic storylines tend to emphasize his romantic desires, and use those desires as motivation. By contrast, Angel’s storylines don’t really have much to do with whether he’s “gotten” Buffy or not—instead they have to do with whether Buffy has gotten him. The fact that Buffy and Spike are both treated as romantic agents in this way is a key indication that the two characters are meant to parallel each other. Angel’s side of the Buffy/Angel romantic storyline has to do with whether he can control himself around Buffy, whereas Buffy’s has to do with whether he likes her or wants to be with her. Similarly, Spike’s romantic storylines hinge on the status of whether Drusilla or Buffy want him. 

Not only is Spike a subject when it comes to romantic relationships, he’s also a subject when it comes to Romantic thinking. He is a character practically defined by his romanticism. He aspires to romantic things, and therefore can be used to poke at romantic outlooks. Despite his grand love for Drusilla for instance, she still cheats on him, and he still has to knock her out, do a love spell, or torture her to get her back. Or he’ll make grand pronouncements that are immediately followed by things like getting tasered by the Initiative or falling into an open grave. Because of this, Spike is able to parallel Buffy’s Romantic thinking as well, not just her romantic desires. Notice how in “The Freshman”, when Buffy is feeling out of touch with her Romantic Slayer self, that she has a scene where she’s treated like Spike--she delivers a dramatic threat and then falls through a ceiling. Or in “Some Assembly Required” when she obeys her id and hotly demands that Angel listen to her, she falls into an open grave. This kind of comedy has a lot in common with the deadpan Angel humor discussed in the last section, but notice that the target of that humor is Angel’s romantic objecthood rather than an outlook Angel has. Angel’s role, when it comes to romanticism, has to do with how Buffy and the audience sees him, whereas Spike’s role (at least in the early seasons) has to do with how Spike sees, period.

The show doesn’t just poke at Spike’s outlook though, it also uses him to poke at other people’s romanticism. In season two, for example, Spike is the one who gets impatient with Angel’s grandstanding, sarcastically explaining that “we do still kill people, you know” and “it’s a big rock.” In “Lovers Walk” he’s the one who cuts through Buffy and Angel’s drama, reducing it to “googly eyes” with a dismissive handwave (while also building it up in his projection-y “you’ll never be friends” speech). In “Something Blue” he points out that Willow is barely holding it together. In “Pangs” he’s the one who brings the debate over the Chumash nihilistically back down to earth, and in “The Yoko Factor” he schools Adam on Yoko not really splitting the Beatles apart. In other words, Spike attempts to see both the romance and the reality of things. He is the avatar of both, which I would argue makes complete sense, because in many ways romance and reality are really two sides of the same coin. Poetry and stories are fake and bigger than life, but you use them to tell truths. But being the id, his point of view can be hypocritical and biased as much as insightful, just like anyone’s gut reactions and poetic notions can be. After all, you can use poetry to tell lies, too. 

Lastly, on a meta level, there is a tackiness to Spike that undermines his romantic qualities better than making him dangerous ever could. Spike likes Passions and Dawson’s Creek (in contrast to Angel reading La Nausée by firelight). He lives in a crypt, but the vibe is more “homeless” than “Dracula” (in contrast to Angel’s tastefully decorated apartment). Spike may act like a romantic, but what does it say about how romantic romanticism really is, that the romantic things he likes can be so unrefined? And with the chip, he’s rendered impotent and pathetic. To me, there’s no more perfect image of how the writing uses Spike than the image of him in his black coat, red shirt, and big, leather boots, blasted under the fluorescent light of his Initiative cell. Light that makes his aesthetic seem suddenly fake and silly and surreal. For all that the writing subverts Angel, he is still the kind of character who gets to disappear mysteriously into the shadows, because he is the romance that Buffy has been forced to abandon. Whereas Spike is left with no place to hide. 

If Angel represented the idea of binaries, then Spike represents the lack of them. There is a reason that Spike invites so many queer readings. He is a vampire, but he loves. He is an object, but he’s a subject. He tells the truth, but he lies. He is a villain, but he is a hero. He is masculine, but he is feminine. He is insightful, but he’s a fool. He is pathetic, but he is sympathetic. He is on the outside of the Scoobies, but he is on the inside. These aspects of him are not split between different personas, but exist within him simultaneously. It is telling that the show introduces human, mythos-bending vampires like Spike and Dru in a season about disillusionment, and it is telling that Spike’s role in the show becomes ascendant in the seasons after Buffy leaves Angel and his split personality behind. As Buffy begins to reckon more deeply with her id, and her dualities, she will begin to reckon with Spike.

part 3: “Something effulgent”: Season five and the construction of Spike the romantic

[maraschinocheri]

A novel no one needed on the Les Mis filmed concert: 1,800+ words of stuff and nonsense.

The first thing that jumps into my head is that I am so glad the concert run is over, and the second is that it’s a very strange feeling when the strongest vocal performances on stage seemed to belong to Enjolras, Eponine, and … Cosette. But let’s get the rest of it all over with first.

• Alfie Boe’s acting has improved since he last played Valjean, thankfully, but good lord, he really needs to not get involved in any even moderately extended run of anything, because he clearly cannot hack it physically or vocally. And while it may seem churlish to say so, I am so bored of his Valjean. Warble warble warble, seeming so out of place with everyone else’s voices, and just. Enough. He looked lovely, of course, and I’m sure his fans truly enjoyed this repeat of him in the role, when … he was actually there, but he sounded absolutely exhausted. I’m afraid I spent a lot of his performance wishing I were watching JOJ on film instead.

• Michael Ball’s mention during the encore that this was his last performance as Javert seems a fair thing; he is not—and never was— meant for this role on any level (I maintain he has all the threatening menace of Snidely Whiplash), though Stars was not bad, especially because he left himself, you know, sing and not bark or growl or spend so much damn time and energy trying to not be *~MICHAEL BALL~*. The gritted teeth “m’sieur! mayor!” was just a boring choice, the Confrontation was a muddy mess, the Intervention played too much for comic effect (though MASSIVE POINTS for bringing back the original why the hell did he run? instead of why on earth did he run?), the barricade scenes had too little punch, the Sewers had so much potential that disappeared, but … 

But. While Ball’s is not my preferred style of Javert and never could be, I have to take a deep breath and blinkingly applaud his wild leaping commitment to batshittery in the Suicide. I mean, if you’re going for full on batshit at that point, you have to really sell it, and with any luck make it a different range of batshit than previous batshit Javerts, and he did. My dad, the sole member of my family not much prone to show commentary, said “That was excellent.” firmly after the Suicide, and a part of me grudgingly agreed. But please, never again, Michael. Honestly I think he’s relieved it’s done.

(Also honestly, the most amusing moment of the entire concert experience for me was my mother’s interval exclamation that she had “a new boyfriend!” Assuming she meant Bwadders, I laughed and asked oh really, who? And she said … Javert. After I recovered myself, I reminded her that Javert was Michael. Ball., who has been at one stage or another my—and everyone else’s—mother’s boyfriend since 1985. She had entirely forgotten he was playing Javert in the concert and was bizarrely fooled by wig and costume, but assured me that even now, she “could swim in his dimples.” My mother, everyone.)

• Shan Ako was a marvelous Eponine, and I loved her On My Own. She’ll be great fun to watch in the actual production, I think, and I so appreciated a tough cookie Eponine with old school vocal power but newer school technique and touch and oh my god subtlety without losing anything in characterization, even given the limitations of a concert performance. Houchen’s Marius wouldn’t have deserved her, anyway.

• Speaking of Houchen. You know, I was fond of Rob while he was in his actual run as Marius, but he’s absolutely checked out of it mentally and emotionally, and it shows. He still has a lovely voice that really works as Marius sometimes, but there’s nothing … there underneath the pretty sheen, and after the few years’ distance since his proper run, I’ve seen enough Marii who enjoyed the role and found substance in it that the lack of depth in Rob’s take was disappointing. However, I acknowledge that some of Marius’ actual-show chances of showing range don’t happen in the concert version, and perhaps if they’d been included my opinion would change. He knows he’s aged out the role now, however, and I highly doubt he’d ever want to do it again even if invited to do so. But who knows.

• I walked into the concert film with no opinion of Lily Kerhoas’ Cosette other than knowing she could sing it beautifully, but I was actually impressed—and sort of want to sit nearly every principal Cosette of the last, oh, decade in front of her performance and say, see you’re allowed to act; it can actually work—and I look forward to her work in the proper show as well, especially if they get her some costumes that actually fit and don’t look made of tissue.

• God, I hate Matt Lucas. The end.

• Katy Secombe has added some different touches to her Madame T, some good, and some—obviously Lucas-influenced—bad. It’s unfortunate that some of the Thenardier ~comedy absolutely cannot work in a concert setting—the wedding was awful—but she made a decent hash of a bad deal.

• Which brings me to Bwadders. Oh, Bradley. He’s just so very, very good at Enjolras, and always has been. This concert!jolras, however, had one very different vibe from his run’s take on the role, which was … a hopefulness, maybe? A joy and breathless hope running beneath the passion passion PASSION that’s always been there, and it was beautiful to watch in his eyes and mannerisms. The concert contained Bradley somewhat, in that his strong physicality wasn’t allowed to sort of fill the room (and barricade) as it had at the Queens, and I missed that. Also—and there is no getting around this, sadly, for me—that manbun still ain’t it. (Gingerfather—whose fave character in the show is Enjolras—just sighed heavily and said that there should’ve just been one of the Ponytails of Yore instead, and you know, he’s not wrong.) Bradley also nailed two of the three Big Notes, but his until the earth is free was done differently from how he approached it during his real run, and not for the better (the Ghost of THAXTON giveth, and it taketh away). And yet … it didn’t matter. It truly didn’t. He was the best of the principals, and at least for me would probably have been even if he’d bollocked the other two Big Notes as well. Anyway, Bwadders. A thrill to watch, and alive with energy so much of the show otherwise lacked.

• You will note no mention yet of Fletcher. I refer to the point above re: Matt Lucas.

• The Amis, as one. I am aware that many, many people adore Raymond Walsh’s Grantaire, and I entirely understand why. He was fine. Craig Mather’s Combeferre and Niall Sheehy’s Courfeyrac both allowed both actors to show off some real oomph in their voices, though I’m still much too rattled by a Courfeyrac wearing Joly’s clothes. I love Vinny Coyle because he’s just so obviously, thrillingly in love with the show, but he’s also a fabulous Feuilly, and I merrily handwave the not-so-great we’ll be therrrre because a) it’s a horrendous note few people can carry well, and b) I’ve seen and heard him do it brilliantly so many other times when he was covering Feuilly as a swing. And it was delicious to see Will Jennings as a background onstage SwingAmi. Everyone else was just sort of … there, though all very pretty. It was extremely clear who had been in casts properly educated and invested in the show, but that’s a record I’ve played enough.

• I will never not love seeing Sarah Lark, Jo Loxton, and Tamsin Dowsett. I also deeply appreciate seeing Oli Brenin doing everything, everywhere, all the time.

• It is never not wonderful seeing Earl Carpenter bishoping, but my god EARL WHAT EVEN with that Bamatabois. What even. There was active squeaky recoiling happening in my row.

• Gavroche was excellent and adorable and GINGER. Full marks.

• And so to the encores. The only point I could see to the coat handover from Michael to Bradley was to give Michael a Moment along the lines of the Valjeanfest, as it’s not like the role of Javert is new to Bradley. However, I was fascinated by the strangeness of the harmonized Stars, and I think I need to watch and listen to it again about a thousand times to really confirm my proper opinion. I know Bradley doesn’t sing Stars that high for real—and certainly doesn’t need to—and what they did here doesn’t really … show his approach to the role, but it was interesting, and I give them credit for the try. (I did attempt to imagine others—let’s be real, I was imagining THAXTON—even being asked to make a go of this, and my imagined Thaxtonic response will make for excellent nightmare fuel.)

• Then, then, then. All Valjeans all the time, including some Potato in a tour costume that still has me hissing at its wrongness. Anyway! Leaving aside Alfie—whose section just really sounded like jesus christ I cannot believe I have to do this again; I just want to lie down for a thousand years and block Cameron’s number from any further contact with me put to music—I found the whole thing much more palatable than the 25th anniversary Valjeanfest, perhaps mostly because of my fave part of the whole concert—the whole two lines JOJ and Killian shared—but also because the four Valjeans not actively praying for their own deaths all seemed to have physical, emotional, and vocal respect for the role, the show, the audience, and each other. It was a strange joy to watch.

Which, truly, this concert was as well, in enough places to ensure that I will buy the inevitable DVD. On some occasions I may even start its playback before Look Down (Paris). Maybe.

(One more small thought, though, on this concert and why I am glad it’s over: I know the run sparked a lot of joy for a lot of people, but if I saw one more bitchy tweet from the cast members I might have screamed. Are some audience members dickheads? Absolutely. Then enforce the fucking rules. Train and allow your FOH to go after those people (and force the management to back the FOH staff up!), remove them, throw one of the old pest catcher boxes from under the Queens seats at them, whatever. But shut up. I don’t even follow any of the whingers I saw! Twitter just enjoyed throwing their tweets into my feed like a toddler’s wall-splattering food. #blessed)

Anyway. That’s that done. The show’s world turns, though obviously it no longer revolves.

[fursasaida]

ask meme: something about visual art? I think of you as someone who posts about interesting artists -- what kind of work do you like/seen anything good lately/do you have a fine arts background/whatever you'd like to talk about

Hmm, this is interesting! I haven’t really thought about My Relation to Art in a long time.

I do not have a fine arts background in any formal sense. I drew a lot in middle and high school and I was pretty good! But not so good that it really made sense to pursue it in a serious way. (I did freehand a sort of mini-mural in watercolor and highlighter on the wall of my dorm room freshman year of college that the maintenance people preserved and the kids who moved in the next year liked, which still makes me smile to think about.)

I do have sort of an ad hoc art…history and theory background, I guess, in that I was raised by people who care about art a lot and who brought me to museums and galleries all the time. My dad tells a story about being at some sort of Renaissance art exhibit and me, age 4, asking to be told a ghost story, so he looked around and told me the Passion of Christ, lmao. I also had a sort of godfather figure (family friend, not an actual godfather because we’re not…Christian) who is very active in ~the art world~ and to whom it made sense to take me to the Whitney Biennial for my 15th birthday as like a nod to a quinceañera (he’s Cuban). So I grew up viewing and critiquing art as kind of a matter of course?

As for what I like, I think that’s tough to pin down. Sometimes it’s a color palette. Sometimes it’s a mood. Sometimes it’s a conceptual angle. There are definitely times when the ~concept~ really overwhelms the work, which pisses me off. (if I can’t make any kind of sense of this without reading your statement, or if your statement seems like a bunch of verbose handwaving concealing the lack of an idea, then I will very often be completely turned off. I don’t know how many times I’ve looked at something and thought “cool! interesting! intriguing!” and then read the title and gone “oh, lord, never mind.”) But I also tend to struggle with art that doesn’t seem to have much of a concept. “Concept” doesn’t have to mean a super-specific idea, just, like: why did you make this. I always have a soft spot for things that seem to be complicating the notion of representation, which usually means either problematizing the apparent “real”-ness of whatever is depicted, or problematizing the medium (I really couldn’t care less about most of Picasso’s work, but some of his early sculptures are clearly trying to mess around with the question of where the line is between a painting and a sculpture–screwing with the picture plane itself rather than its perspectival illusion–and I love those).

I think this is why I’m drawn to things that present light as almost a solid object, a volume or substance; things that suggest hidden recesses or depths; installations that suggest different kinds of realities or spaces interacting with “normal” spatiality through temporal disjuncture or spatial collision; some exercises in surrealism and abstraction; things that mess with the illusion of objects or bodies as singular, solid items/presences that have a natural order. So, for example: Damien Hirst is tough for me because a lot of his ideas are in line with my interests, but his stuff feels so conceptually overblown and pretentious that I’m always kind of torn. Jeff Koons pisses me off because it’s like all concept and nothing else; his stuff feels so ironic and full of knowing distance that I’m like, fuck off, your heart isn’t in this, you are risking nothing and your art is incapable of moving me. Because I suppose what I like about art that messes with these ideas is that usually it communicates something about how that person sees the world or struggles to understand it. I think that’s why so many people find Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro so fascinating and affecting–it conveys something about his experience or way of seeing and thinking. I simply do not believe that balloon animals really preoccupy Koons in that kind of way. (I have a less intense version of this problem with Warhol.) Whereas I find kind of love expressed in this Ralph Goings interview not only very moving but also evident in the supposedly photorealistic nature of his paintings, the attention to detail and the evident care with which they were made. This is also why I like artists’ studios and/or homes-as-art-projects. But I can’t explain, for example, why I like Kandinsky so much. That’s just like, you know, #aesthetic.

At the same time, I’m a geographer, and geography has a very intimate relationship with the visual, so there are certain forms/concepts that show up in art a lot that are directly relevant to my work: the (supposed) division between nature and culture; landscape; the city; maps; scale (here and here). When I’m working on an idea, aspects of what I’m thinking about naturally pop out in everything I encounter or see, so I often end up sort of making accidental moodboards for a given project by virtue of reblogging things and tagging them a certain way (I did this somewhat on purpose for my MA thesis, but it happens anyway whether I mean to or not–though the contents aren’t only art). I guess you could say I think with images as well as words or concepts; my thinking moves back and forth between different kinds of registers (academic, artistic, pop-cultural, etc), which I think is extremely normal but becomes a particular practice of mine through the way I produce this archive that is my tumblr. For example, I really didn’t give a fuck about intimism until I’d watched Black Sails, at which point the underlying values/ideas in intimism became very interesting to me, and so now in turn I’m interested in intimist art or art that feels related to that now-abandoned movement. And of course therefore the ways in which intimism is related to those core interests I elaborated above are now evident to me. I’m interested, going forward, in trying to do this in a more conscious and organized way and thinking about it as a possible teaching tool.

ETA: I think in some ways the whole thing I’ve written here could be summed up with my interest in memes, which I maintain are not only politically important (this is no longer controversial, given…Everything) but also have a special kind of logic of how the visual interacts with the representational and communicative. Hence this a-joke-but-not-a-joke tag.