somniloquence

This year I made a vid for The Wire, for anoel, which was a pretty awesome assignment: someone I know and really like makes it a whole lot easier to work on a vid! I have had this piece in mind for a long time for The Wire, and it spoke to me as an Omar vid in a lot of ways. For years, I've avoided making any Wire vids, I've been daunted by trying to tell any of those stories because the show is just so damn good and so complex that vidding feels like a huge challenge. But Festivids felt like a good time to try to do it. A million thanks to killabeez and sdwolfpup for their encouragement and tossing around the topic with me; their own Wire vids were hugely inspirational to me in making this.

I think the streaming version of this really looks bad, but I'll put it up here anyways. The DL is a lot better.

Soul Survivor
Artist: Young Jeezy with Akon
Fandom: The Wire
File: 32MB Divx avi
Streaming: http://www.viddler.com/v/576e71c4



And my lovely gifts were made by Zhailei and Killabeez! You should totally go check them out -- the supercool Middleman vid is awesome, and I didn't know the vidder before, so yay, new vidding pals!! It's cool to see people being enchanted by Killa's wonderful vid for Catch & Release, too -- more people to check out this lovely movie of my heart!

So, last day of the 30 days of TV meme! Today is

Day 30 - Saddest character death

Hm. I had to think about this one for a while and I still haven't decided. I expect a lot of people would peg Joyce's death on Buffy as the one that would get me the most, because it came so close on the heels of my own mom's death. But I really didn't like The Body; I found it stagey and preachy and full of annoying and precious, twee actorly moments. I was a lot harder hit by the episode after The Body, which felt much more real and accurate and heartbreaking to me.

And I don't watch a lot of the shows that have big, Emmy-nom-targeted death scenes, so that affects choices, too. I would probably pick Wesley's death on Angel except that it just pisses me off too much. I have no objections to a good character death -- I actually like it when it's done well -- but once again, I felt like we were set up so baldly that it left a bad taste in my mouth (not that I didn't cry like a baby when it happened). And the... characters on The Wire who died were all sad, but in the scheme of things, you kind of had to expect them, so I don't know if they can qualify as saddest (well, okay, ( except for ). And then there is ( Deadwood's )

So that leaves...( I'm sure this would surprise people )

Today I started my very first real honest to gosh freelance job. It means I won't get my unemployment moolah for the week, of course, but I'm much more interested in getting clients and word of mouth. It's not much, just a proofing job, but it's for a coffee-table style niche magazine for guitar geeks published here. I'm about halfway through, just finished the longest article, and it's really a gorgeous book. I looked at a newsstand copy a while ago and was very impressed with what they did, but most important for my music-geek soul, I'm reading about all these guitar legends and the behind the scenes things like building specialist guitars and other fretted instruments, and one of the articles in this issue is on Les Paul. I mean, my first lil' "I'm trying a new career path" job involves reading about Les freakin' Paul!

I've established a domain and email account for business, and am writing blurbs for the various groups I belong to so I can get listed in all the freelance places. I need to prepare copy for a web site and really get the resume in good online order, but overall, with my "do a thing a day" plan, it's going okay. Hopefully I can get some momentum going, though getting ready for spring quarter class will kind of throw a spanner in those works.

Blues and Olive still can't get along. Every time I think there will be a thaw, and Olive starts to lick him (she's a licking kitty), he smacks her, the little doofus. And the rest of the time, he's trying to get her to pay attention to him, so she's smacking, hissing, snarling, and growling at him. I just. Cats. But it's so fun to watch him racing around the backyard like a maniac. He's such a dork, and still growing into his feet. He's utterly fascinated, too, by the computer, and I took some pics of him while I was vidding that I'll try to put up.

Speaking of vidding, my Keen Eddie vid for Pacificon is going well. I like it so far, even though it really doesn't have any sensible storyline or anything. It's just one big goof, a collection of clips that are just silly examples of the perfection of the Monty/Eddie relationship.

And I have been avoiding talking about The Wire's final season, because in some ways it was letting me down, and also, I have been so far behind everyone else that I felt foolish talking about it. I'm only up to 8, and everyone's talking about 9, but I have read most of the spoilers so I have an idea of what's going on.

( A season of ups and downs )

For my Wire fan friends, I thought I'd share this little bit of Joy with you that I found when I was capturing clips for a vid for Escapade. Clarke Peters, who plays Lester Freamon in The Wire, and who is one of everyone's favorite characters, suddenly popped up on screen in the least likely place I could have imagined -- The Professionals, the beloved British TV series from the late 1970s. At first I was all, "Is that Lester??!! and then the more the episode unspooled, the more amused I was. He's very young! And he plays the president of an African country who's under threat of assassination, so Bodie and Doyle are trying to protect him. Never would these two series have connected in any way. I just love seeing familiar faces in old things!

( See Lester as a baby actor! )

And also, someone gave me baby lamas!! There are two of them! And hugging teddy bears! Thank you, anonymous giftee giver.

I'm in a monstrously grumptastic mood today, and one of the things I was thinking about this morning while grumbling through getting ready for work is how annoyed I am by the disappearance of conversation in my fannish life, how few people want to actually talk about anything and how the disparity between the fannish consumer and the fannish producer has grown even more pronounced and how much I hate that (the idea that because someone isn't a writer or vidder they have no intrinsic value sends me into a frenzy of anger), and mostly, how much I resent the fact that I have no more shows to review. That was the defining thing for me in starting this LJ: the chance to write the meta, generate discussion (even if sometimes the discussions haven't been pleasant), review and critique and dissect, and I have nothing to do that with anymore. Because of the asshat executives who cancelled both Firefly and Angel, the best shows -- the Jossverse -- for reviews are gone, and there is nothing currently airing that I either enjoy, or that is the kind of show worth reviewing. Much as I love Gilmore Girls, for instance, it's not a reviewy show the way Buffy, Angel, and Firefly were for me.

I don't like Lost (mark my words, JJ Abrams will only bring you heartache and misery) and only endure it for Naveen Andrews, and even with Alias and some new eps of Spooks/MI-5 and 24 coming up, I doubt there will really be anything reviewy there either. The only things I've had the slightest passing interest in this year are Kevin Hill (watchable solely for the luscious Taye Diggs), and Veronica Mars, but it doesn't always hold my interest, and isn't so far a review the next day type show. I miss the discussion, the analysis, the whole... fun of picking things apart and looking for deeper meanings. It makes me grumpy that I haven't got anything like that. The Shield will also be coming up, but... they lost me a while ago and now I watch more out of loyalty than anything. I loathe and despise the crime procedurals with the white hot fury of a thousand burning suns, but have to watch the despicable and cretinous CSI:NY for my favorite actor, Gary Sinise. The only procedural I give a crap about is Without a Trace and it's more a tribute to that cast and the personal storylines than anything else.

The best things are all on pay cable, which I can't afford. I will be waiting for the S2 discs of Dead Like Me, for a while, I'm sure, but look forward to seeing it; can't wait to watch Carnivale on something better than the horrible rainbowed dark and murky tapes we saw first season on, and eagerly await the ability to view the second season. The idea of more Deadwood is thrilling, too. But none of these are shows I can sink teeth into because I often won't see them for months and months and months after they air. One of my favorite discoveries so far is The Wire. I really like this series and am only to episode 5. I wish I'd had the chance to watch this series as it aired; it would have been interesting to review, especially because I have no idea half the time what's happening. I can't keep about 2/3 of the characters straight, and especially the different gang street wars confuse me, as do the relationships of the hateful, venal cops that McNulty battles with. (Plus, crime! While I'm writing a crime-based WIP, it's enormously helpful as research material.)

But when I get what's going on, what a wing-ding of a show it is. It's also one of the few shows I've seen that deals with homosexuality on a fairly realistic basis and challenges assumptions about its acceptance in these very tough, often discriminatory worlds. Not they don't also play it for a little prurient interest, as well, but it's fairer than most other shows could hope to be. Omar, the one criminal character who seems to be on opposite sides of the Barksdale group, in particular fascinates me: his elaborate cornrows and his cool facial scar; his obvious tender love of his boyfriend in a world where a homosexual man is most decidedly not welcome; his sarcastic wit and wary perspicacity; his amusing idiosyncracies such as not wanting his boyfriend to swear because it's uncouth and his friendliness to the cops... I could watch him alone on this show and be happy. I've never seen a young black male character, especially a drug-dealing homicidal thug, portrayed like this, and I'm mesmerized not just by the role but by the actor (and his boyfriend, as well). I have a bad feeling subsequent episodes will bring bad things for him, but I'm enjoying these, anyway.

I also like the lesbian cop McNulty works with, whose name totally escapes me right now. The actress is up and down, not always on top of the role, but the character has a really unusual background and relationships with people that I've never seen before, especially when most shows would just have her be the dyke cop in the background. Anyway, I have quite a few more S1 discs to get through, and am looking forward to seeing Aiden Gillen when he arrives. But this is the first show that feels rich enough in characters and story arcs to be a review-worthy outside of Deadwood, but like Deadwood, I'm seeing these so much later that I never have the chance to get down and dirty with them. I miss that, a lot. Most of the time I don't miss the grind of movie reviewing, but sometimes I do, and have been feeling the loss of writing my little post-ep TV reviews in LJ a lot this fall. The Wire is definitely a series worth that kind of attention. I'm almost thinking of investing in the discs becuase it would make such a great vidding show, as well, but I'll have to think about that.