Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

It seems to be confession time again, so here are my current sources of guilt, shame, and guilty pleasure: ( Read more... )

3) I'd much rather be continuing to try to put together or distill down to something remotely relevant my reflections on the past two weeks' "Angel" episodes (I sense that there's some stuff in there that's really relevant for my "Slayage" conference paper, which I need to present at the end of May) than to do the rewrites of my dissertation proposal that I said I would have to show my advisor by this Friday. But I guess I'll manage somehow.

4) Instead of finishing up my Anthro. grading this afternoon (so I wouldn't be running into this same problem again, being late or nearly late turning in the rest of my work next week), I chose to spend my time writing stuff like this in responses to responses to responses to LJ posts from a week or two ago:

I confess, I DO love and have on tape almost every episode of "B5" and "DS9" and "Alien Nation" and several key episodes of "Xena," "Farscape" and several other "Trek" series, in addition to my absolutely complete (with redundant copies, wherever possible) video-tape and growing DVD library of "Buffy" and "Angel" episodes. And I AM intimately acquainted with every science fiction-ish show produced during the 'wilderness years' of the 1970's and 80's.

That was "In the beginning" (subjectively speaking -- since my science fiction fandom and my earliest memories of having a love which the rest of my family might not even understand, much less share, began with obsessively watching and re-watching for the umpteenth time every original 'Trek' episode in syndication). That was back in the days when you watched a genre-related series, no matter how bad or good it might be, because you were damn lucky to get ANY science fiction on TV, and most of the time you had none (and these kids today, they don't know how spoiled they are, 'cause in MY day you had to walk five miles through the snow to see a "Star Trek" re-run, and ... oops, there I go again, lapsing into curmudgeonliness).

In the beginning there was re-runs of "Star Trek" (which was good, though sexist) and imports of Japanese animation and British 'super-marionation' series, but all the rest of the television landscape was without form and void of interest. Then, over the next two decades, behold, there came in fits and starts series like "Planet of the Apes", "Man from Atlantis", "Fantastic Journey", "Logan's Run", "Battlestar Galactica" and "Galactica 1980", "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century", "Wonder Woman", "The Bionic Woman", "Misfits of Science", "V", "The Phoenix", "Wizards and Warriors", "Voyagers", and the British imports of "Dr. Who" and "Blake's 7" on PBS. And whether they were unsung masterpieces, guilty pleasures, or memories-I'm-now-trying-hard-to-repress, I watched them all, as religiously as I was able in the dark days before VHS and cable and Tivo.

And then the universe smiled upon us, and there was CGI, and it was good and less expensive to produce and so genre series didn't need huge ratings to survive. And there was J. Michael Straczynski, and he was good (and he begat Sheridan and Delenn and G'Kar, who were very, very good), and there were story-arcs on a "Trek" series set in the liminal gray areas of a space station somewhere between reason and faith, and then there was "Xena" and she was good (especially when she was being bad), and then there was Joss Whedon and "Buffy", and lo, it was very, very, VERY good.

And on the sixth (well, more than that, but who's counting?) sentence starting with "And" I rested.