Watching yesterday's episode of Dollhouse, "Belonging", I kept thinking:

- the actors are great but Enver is fabulous. How cute Victor is!!!!
- where's Tahmoh? Do handlers get a day off when their dolls don't have any engagement?
- if Joss Whedon is not God, he is really an unconscious Catholic! Well, sort of.

Because now we know that, no matter how paradise-like the place may look and how painful the engagement may turn, the dollhouse is neither Heaven nor Hell, it's just a Purgatory. Yes, after the palimpsest on Chaucer's tales, now the show plays on Dante's territory. Once and again, it's all about the journey.

( Belonging )

A few days ago, I heard about Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles' fate as I was finishing Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2, and I watched Caprica pilot thanks to the Internet fairy.

When I first heard that there would be a the spin-off, I was rather skeptical. I didn't really see the point of telling the story of what happened some fifty years before the Cylons destroyed the colonies, so I wasn't sure I would watch the 82 minute movie, less alone like it, but I thought I could give it a try, and honestly I did enjoy Caprica. It is quite different from BSG even though there are connections through Bear McCreary's music, the Adama family (William isn't Bill yet but he's there as a young boy) and the "birth" of the first "cybernetic life-form node" that is a CYLON. The line "A Cylon? Interesting." was a killer.
I spotted flaws here and there, and yes there was some stuff that bothered me but I was left wanting more, wanting to know what would be going to happen next. I guess it's a good thing given that Caprica is a prequel! The Greystones are really intriguing and touching, especially Daniel. Eric Stoltz was simply amazing.

Also looks like Ron Moore and Joss Whedon keep giving nods to each other's work. I couldn't help noticing that two characters have names that connect them to Buffy: Cyrus Xander and Clarisse Willow! It can't be a coincidence! Or was it Jane Espenson's wink at her former boss?

So I recommend Caprica to anyone who likes intelligent Sci-Fi. You don't even need to have seen BSG in order to understand it. But it's better to see to pilot, unspoiled!


( Spoilers )

Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2  is terrific. I loved it. I can't believe that there isn't a lot more fans of Powers out there. He is a genius and manages to move me every time (I cried reading certain pieces from The Time of Our Singing!). For anyone interested, Galatea 2.2 tells the story of a writer anmed Richard Powers, who's going through a life crisis and gets involved by acognitive neurologist in a crazy project: building an intelligent machine, a machine who can read and comment on the readings in question. Here is what I wrote about the novel on my Goodreads account.

No this isn't a post about Buffy but the answers to the Music Quiz I did yesterday since 5 songs have remained unguessed. Those 5 were difficult though. Answers are linked to youtube videos and I explain in bold the "Buffy" or "Dollhouse" connections.


1. "Moonlight Mile" by The Rolling Stones (from Sticky Fingers). One of their best songs ! 
2. "Sao Paulo Rain" by Tom McRae( from his debut album). A song Xander listens to after the wedding fiasco in season 6. The youtube vid is a Buffy/Angel one but I shall bear some Bangel just for Tom...;- )
3. The dance of the puppets /The rusted chains of prison moons..."In the Court of the Crimson King" by King Crimson
5. "Always on My Mind" by Elvis Presley (of course!) . Ah Elvis' voice.....
6. "Life On Mars?" by David Bowie. Tom did a cover but I prefer David's version.  
7. "The Crystal Ship" by The Doors
8. "Pavlov's Bells" by Aimee Mann. She sang it in "Sleeper" during BTVS season 7.
9. "I Wanna Be Sedated" by The Ramones. Spike hums it in "Crush", season 5.
10. "All I Know" by Art Garfunkel. It's a lovely song and if you watch Nip/Tuck you must know the track for it was used in the wonderful ending scene of the season 2 finale . One of the greatest tv twists ever.
11. "Wuthering Heights" by Kate Bush . When I was a young teen I prefered "Babooshka" though and wanted her outfit from the video! I loved that song and played it all the time driving my family nuts. Ah the 80's !!!!
12. This is what you get/ this is what you get. It's "Karma Police" by Radiohead!
13. "Fantasy" by Earth, Wind & Fire
14. "Mad About You" by Sting
15. Waking to these sounds again / I wonder how I'll sleep "Over and Over" by Morcheeba (Big Calm)
16. Holding hands/Skipping like a stone/On our way/To see what we have done "Burn the Witch" by Queens of the Stone Age (Lullaby to Paralyze).
17. I'm coming up only to hold you under/ I'm coming up only to show you wrong "The Funeral" by Band of Horses.
18. "Children of the Revolution" by T-Rex(Marc Bolan singing). 
19. "Behind Blue Eyes" by The Who. Giles sings it at the Bronze in BTVS season 4, and  Willow swoons over his voice.
20. "I Go To Sleep" by Sia (written by the singer of The Kinks, but it's The Pretenders' cover is the most famous). Sia's cover can be heard at the end of the 4th episode of Dollhouse.

I know Sia since she keeps borrowing the marvellous Oli Krauss to play with her. Oli is the cello genius that has been touring with Tom McRae for years.

By the way Tom is 40 today. Happy Birthday dear Tom !!!!

LJ is very quiet in my corner these days but I'm totally stealing stormwreath</lj>'s idea of music meme !

Can you guess 20 of songs(in English) that I often play on my computer, from the first two lines (or the first two lines of the chorus if the title appears int he first two lines of the song)? Gimme the title, the artist and if possible, the album.

Turns out that four of them are Buffy-related and one is Dollhouse-related!

1. When the wind blows and the rain feels cold /With a head full of snow
2. There's always a party on a funeral row, where the cross flashes red to the street.
3. The dance of the puppets /The rusted chains of prison moons
5. Maybe I didn't love you quite as good as I should have, maybe I didn't hold you quite as often as I could have,
6. It's a god-awful small affair/to the girl with a mousy hair
7. Before you slip into unconsciousness/I'd like to have another kiss
8. Oh, Mario,/Sit here by the window;
9. Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go/just put me in a wheelchair, get me on a plane
10. I bruise you, you bruise me/we both bruise too easily
11. Out on the wiley, windy moors/Wed roll and fall in green.
12. this is what you get/ this is what you get,
13. Every man has a place, in his heart theres a space/And the world cant erase his fantasies
14. A stoness throw from Jerusalem/ I walked a lonely mile in the moonlight
15. Waking to these sounds again / I wonder how I'll sleep
16. Holding hands/Skipping like a stone/On our way/To see what we have done
17. I'm coming up only to hold you under/ I'm coming up only to show you wrong
18. Well you can bump and grind/ If it's good for your mind
19. No one knows what its like/To be the bad man
20. When I look up from my pillow/ I dream you are there with me


ETA - songs already guessed are in italics.

So yesterday I spent 4:30 hours (including two interludes) at the opera. I did enjoy that Lohengrin even though I wasn't always convinced by Carsen's mise en scène. The voices were great. Waltraud Meier was a vibrant and flamboyant Ortrud and Mireille Delunsch's performance as Elsa was more than just credible. Ben Heppner sang well too but I must say that he's not very convincing as the young and handsome Swan Knight. He looked a bit ridiculous in his armour, and was still heavy and clumsy in his suit.

Lohengrin isn't my favourite opera but the famous ouverture with the violins is sublime, and so is the prelude before the last Act. Also what I like is the fact it's based on a fake suspense and somewhat of a misunderstanding. The big secret of the Swan Knight that he reveals only in the end is his name...which happens to be the title of the opera!

Of course the secrecy that surrounds the Swan Knight, Elsa being saved by him but not being allowed to question him about his origins and her blind faith in her fiancé/husband is an allegory of Christian's faith since Lohengrin is Parsifal's son and the Knight of the Holy Grail.

Also the opera is more about Elsa and Ortrud than about Lohengrin himself. The two women mirror each other. One is mystical, quite hysterical actually, the other is a calculator, plotting her revenge. One is good and innocent, the other is evil. I can't help thinking of Shakespeare there. Ortrud is to Elsa what Iago is to Othello. She's perfidious but she may be there only to represent that part of Elsa that cannot die...the side that still calls upon the ancient gods (Wotan and Freia), that side that keeps doubting. Ortrud never gave up, she doesn't bow and she's still alive in the end.

What's the connection with Buffy? Well, when BTVS was on and I was posting on the BC&S spoiler board one of my hobby-horses was to seek and point out links to opera works. I found many and I may post someday, on LJ, a compendium of all the opera stuff that we can find on Buffy but until I get around to writing it...

Buffy was supposed to want normal...but liked a monster in her man.

Spike was anything but normal, because he just didn't fit in the norm, no matter how much he wanted to belong. Being an anomaly, as David Fury put it during Ats season 5, was his destiny. William looked like a freak among his Victorian peers and even sounded like a freak through his poetry.Vamp!William wasn't better. Angelus, Dru and probably Darla (and above all William himself!) tried to make the young vampire fit in his new life but he kept behaving in an abnormal way...seeking Slayers when he should have tried to avoid them. The Spike we met in season 2 wasn't a normal vampire, he obvioulsy stood out and Buffy's instinct recognized the anomaly, making the most of it.

From season 4 to season 6, we got a chipped Spike that couldn't fit anywhere. He could no longer be a vampire, but he was still a freak to the human beings. He could never have been one of the Scoobies.

And of course choosing to get his soul back was quite a freak thing to do. Once again souled Spike didn't seem to fit the norm, a norm that had been set by Angel. The Scoobies weren't that suprise btw...Why? Because by then they were used to Spike's oddity.

 

A post by jamalov29 made me ponder what evil Spike did and the sort of vampire he was.

I do think that we can't "understand" vampires in BTVS without keeping in mind that they worked as metaphors, and that the special vampires' journeys told us things about mankind, hence my comments on Caroline's journal. I've always seen Angel as the metaphor of every man. 

Because in the Jossverse if  girls have the potential to become strong women and must achieve it like "Chosen" showed us, every man has the potential for both good and evil, hence the two personas of the Angel character on screen: Angel the Champion who did remarkable things and Angelus the evil bastard. That personality split was nothing but an allegory. BTW I really liked season 5 because then Angel became really human, a complex human being with shining moments and horrible flaws, and no longer the vessel for two different personalities.

So yes vampires were convenient to tell a story about relationships, about living in a violent world, leaving teenage and accepting adulthood (Spike in BTVS). But that doesn't mean that all vampires are alike or even equal (ok this sounds a bit Orwellian!).

In Autumn 2004 I read a friend's thesis before the viva voce in Lyon, helping her to correct a few things. Her thesis was about exorcism in Middle Ages, a topic I didn't master but that was close enough to my special field, medieval inquisition.

I do miss the academic work.

Just found an essay I wrote then, about alienation and possession in the Buffyverse.

I've been on a low-Internet diet this week. Too much work, too little time...and to be honest I kind of suffered from an indigestion of all things Internet. It happens.

So instead I actually worked and in the evenings I started reading the new Mankell's crime novel I had bought. As I'm downloading Lost, I think it's time for a meme.

Nicked from both mary5958 and alwaysjbj.

( Hey Lynn, two C words at once!)

Just saw a post by st_salieri and it made me wonder if I had celebrity crushes...

Does the fact I'd watch almost any movie if either Sean Connery or Richard Gere or John Malkovich is in it mean I have a crush on them? BTW it used to be true for Harrison Ford a long time ago, but too many bad films broke the rule in regard to him. And yes I may go to see Slither just for Nathan Fillion !

Do I have a crush on Tom McRae? His music, the way he sings, his poetry move me a lot and I've been known to behave like a fangirl once or twice on LJ...

Honestly I don't know. It's hard to have a crush on someone who isn't really a real person for you, you know. 

I definitely have celebrity fantasies though. Because let's be honest, their talent aside, the actors whom I mentioned do have sex-appeal or are just so pretty and charming like James Marsters! They are meant to make us fantasize, they are the stuff dreams are made on...

But I think that to have a crush on someone that person somehow must have become a familiar while a fantasy is something that is merely based on an image you have and on your own projection. So yes those celebrities took my fancy. 
Knowing a lot of personal stuff about a celeb can destroy a fantasy, but I guess it also can create an illusion of familiarity that would make someone develop a crush on them.

As for me, I guess that I rather have crushes on real people living around me (which includes Internet people) or on fictional characters.

I've had crushes on characters from novels, from comic books, from cartoons, from movies, and mostly from tv shows...Those are the ones who usually become the most familiar for they stay with us for a while, so they are big on the crushometer !

7 seasons of BTVS and 1 season of Ats turned my crush on Spike into a huge infatuation, but I still have crushes on Giles, Ethan and, to a certain extent, on Wesley.

Perhaps we I read fanfictions because of those crushes...

I love our French cable because they show reruns of BTVS all the time so I often come across an episode. It was "Spiral" this time, and since they also showed "The Weight of the World" and "The Gift"  in a row, I got to re-watch them as well.

And I still find new stuff to ponder!

Listening To Fear:

Xander: I still don't get why we had to come here to get info about a killer snot monster.

Giles: Because it's a killer snot monster from outer space. (Pauses) I did not say that.

I sooooooo love Giles!

I found this through whedonesque so you may have seen it already. It's from HERE

Here are some funny entries:

A fandom is a strange thing. I would have never believed I could be part of one 5 years ago...Yet here am I.

I remember it well. I got hooked on BTVS as they showed season 5 in its original language on the French cable 

Until then I had only watched it from time to time  (mostly because Giles first and Spike afterwards caught my interest) but I wasn't an avid fan and hadn't realized how good the writing was (it was dubbed in French ! ). I was already supporting Spuffy and hoped it would happen so I went to look for spoilers on the Internet while watching reruns of season 4 (a season I hadn't fully seen  at the time!). I found the Slayer Spoiler site that led me to the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board. Season 6 was running in the States then. I started downloading episodes, and when I couldn't get one, fortunately we had Leoff's wildfeed !

So basically I came to the fandom in the middle of a 'shippers war. I lurked for a couple of month and in February 2002 I dared to post for the first time...coming out as a Love's Bitch during a bet on whether Spike was evil or not. The Spike haters thought they had won when Seeing Red aired, but Grave and Spike winning his soul back ended the bet...

Despite showing up at the worst time (a lot of posters were Spike fans so the anti-Spike were very virulent), I found that board very exciting because everyone was speculating on what would happen or parsing the previous episodes. And shadowkat67 used to post her essays over there then. Somehow, probably because of the time zones, I managed to miss all the nasty stuff, and even became friends with people who weren't necessarily Spuffies.  Then the Daily 'Shipping News thread was created and we could have fun while supporting various 'ships, without fighting each other. Those were silly days and we played a lot on Spike Mountain...

In June 2002, Jane from thehappyblog made me read fanfictions and porn in English for the first time in my life! On her list of links, you could find Laure Alexander,  sabershadowkat and nautibitz... I learnt a lot of new vocabulary during that summer! Then I became a member of a fanfic reading club and I found it was very cool...Do you remember, pjzallday, how you and I used to give the lowest marks to the fanfictions we were supposed to grade? I found herself_nyc 's stories and  kantayra's "Double Spiked" then!

I can't believe it has been 4 years.!

   ETA: I posted in a hurry and left for the movies...so now I'm fixing typos....

I used to think that "Buffy vs Dracula" was poor and mattered only for its final scene and the nice twist of Dawn's entrance but the episode may have had some qualities after all...It echoed a lot of stuff from "Restless".

Among them, the Willow/Giles scene that pointed out the special bond the two of them had, something thta Giles' dream already showed in "Restless". And I liked this line:

Willow: Just call me the computer whisperer.

Later Willow and Xander are chatting and Willow mentions a secret, and we get again an echo of "Restless" about Willow's fears and Xander's fantasies:

Xander: News flash, Will. Everybody knows.
Willow: No, thi-this isn't about me and Tara.
Xander: Oh. Well, not that I wouldn't be all ears if you wanted to tell me a secret about you two. Even if it was very, very naughty.


Also Xander's behaviour as Dracula's butt-monkey reminds me less of Reinfield and more of Glory's minions!

Speaking of foreshadowing stuff, I think that Buffy reading a book on the crusades at the beginning of "The Replacement" (that I'm currently watching) was kinda a clue.....announcing the Knights of Byzantium !

BTW  some lines are priceless : 

Buffy: If Xander kills himself, he's dead.

And I still love "Real Me", Harmony is just so funny. And Spike blowing a kiss to Mort cracks me up every time and at the same time sexy rowrrrrrrrrr !!!!

I'm doing it again because I screwed up with the colours and the lj-cut is driving me mad!

After reading rahirah 's entry I went to dig in my archives and found that essay on William/Spike I wrote for the Buffy Cross and Stake Spoiler Board...Some people from my flist may already know it (so sorry to bother you with old rambling of mine), but many don't. So here's my thoughts on Sweet William.

First off here is a background…which is quite normal concerning William but there is more…Once upon a time, I got involved in an email "war" (ok I may have started it actually….) with/against some friends, about William, during summer 2002, so I gathered here some stuff from that “debate”. Rosalind, Hansel, Emma, ARN and AnInstant from the C&S were the other protagonists in the conflit mostly based on my favourite episode, Fool For Love, and on the William/Cecily scene. We actually fought over the line "They are not like you and I" and what it meant about William. Basically it was a friendly war on grammar and interpretation!

My "Ode to William" was nothing but a summary of my points...Here I've just added some stuff about the season 5 of Ats to my old post.



( Remembering William )

I watched  Battlestar Galactica 2x 19, kinda anti-climatic after Downloaded, but it was to expect and now there's one week to wait until the finale...By the way does anyone remember how Baltar called Six on Caprica before the attack in the miniseries?  I'm pretty sure we heard her name then but I can't recall it. 

Secret/hidden names is an old plot device in literature and of course it was used in the Jossverse, obviously in Ats with the Jasmine arc and  a bit more subtly in BTVS with Anne and with Dawn and the Key arc, which was foreshadowed in Buffy's dream in Restless but also, according to me, in Willow's deam when Tara and Willow wondered about the kitty and her name, a name she hadn't told them yet!

Weeks ago I read a thriller by John Katzenbach, The Analyst, that besides being a good mystery novel, made me remember AT LAST a fairy tale from my childhood I'd been trying to recall for months. I think I even asked syderia about it once, although in such a confusing way that she couldn't help me. 

The Analyst  is about Dr. Frederick Starks , a psychoanalyst who receives an anonymous letter one day from a villain who calls himself Rumplestiltskin. Starks is given  30 days in which to guess the villain's identity. If he can’t guess it, Rumplestiltskin will begin killing off people close to Dr. Starks, and he’ll keep killing, unless Starks kills himself. 

The  fairytale was written down by the Grimm Brothers. Because I'm lazy, here's a summary from Wikipedia:

In order to make himself appear more important, a miller lied to the king that his daughter could spin straw into gold. The king called for the girl, shut her in a tower room with straw and a spinning wheel, and demanded that she spin the straw into gold by morning or be executed. She had given up all hope, when a dwarf (or mannikin) appeared in the room and spun straw into gold for her in return for her necklace; then again the following night for her ring. But on the third night, with nothing left, the strange creature spun straw into gold for a promise that the girl's first-born child would become his.

The greedy king was so impressed that he married the miller's beautiful daughter, but when their first child was born, the dwarf returned to claim his payment: "Now give me what you promised". The queen was frightened and offered him all the wealth she had if she could keep the child. The dwarf refused but finally agreed to give up his claim to the child if the queen could guess his name in three days. At first she failed, but before the second night, her messenger overheard the dwarf hopping about his fire and singing:

"Today I bake, tomorrow brew,

The next I'll have the young Queen's child.

Ha! glad am I that no one knew

That Rumpelstiltskin I am styled."

In case you wonder to where I was leading you...I wrote this whole entry just to justify post something I nicked from beanbeans, a meme about what your name means !

Find there

( My Result )

First off, I found an interesting article about Brokeback Mountain fitting in the pattern of tragic loves in literature: Cowboys in love.
The author mentioned Denis de Rougemont's famous analysis of romantic love in L'Amour et L'Occident which was a book I had to study a long time ago when I was in Highschool!

Because of jamalov29 's last entry, I kept on thinking of romantic love and Spuffy today...finding out the article was a sign that I had to write something about it! This is an answer to your post, Caroline, well kind of...

( Love in the Western World...the basics you need to know )

( Spuffy as THE ultimate romantic love in BTVS )

I posted this on lateseasonlove.

The world might be a stage, but life has stages too, and BTVS has always been about a journey, about growing-up, female empowerment and resilience. The two last seasons showed us the last stages of Buffy's journey.

I remember that when season 7 opened, we got some spoilers telling that the BB was to come, and that what we called then the shapeshifter wasn't our Big Bad.  I think it was pretty accurate (and yes it suits my theory about the First Evil! ;- )). Caleb was to come. And he was really the anti-Buffy, the ultimate Big Bad.

( Caleb vs Buffy, the extremes of the scale )

( other stages... )

I joined a new community lateseasonlove for the BTVS fans who actually liked season 6 and season 7. Season 6 is one of my favourite seasons, and I don't think that season 7 sucks as much as some fans said...I've just made my first post over there, about my theory concerning the First Evil and how I read the writing of season 7.

Some of you, from the C&S, already know my theory. Others may not. If you don't care about essays on BTVS, skip this post, but if you are curious, click on the link and join the fun!

I'm getting ready to go to the restaurant now.