Postcards from Oz - AU Edition

Anyone else watching The Haunting of Hill House on Netflix?

The show is a very smart, atmospherically intense reimagination of both the Robert Wise’s 1963 black and white genre classic The Haunting as well as the original Shirley Jackson novel.

Somewhat sceptical at first whether any modern day TV adaption could pull off the same level of psychological horror and deeply intense fright, I was soon taken in by the effective story telling (seemingly non-chronologic and elliptical, but in fact revealing itself to be perfectly concentric in a dark, twisted dream logic kind of way).

Also, intriguing characters, well-nuanced and coming with fascinating dynamics. (If you are familiar with their Robert Wise versions, names and depictions will be a sheer delight!)

The show’s ensemble cast is as female-dominated as it is superb.

I figure it’s high time I started to kick off the new year journaling-wise, if only just to wave at folks and say “Well, hi! I’m still hanging out here, having a good time :)”

TV Shows I’m currently watching or have watched just recently:

• The Crown
• Mindhunter
• Star Trek: Discovery
  
• Bates Motel (only season 1 so far, but definitely planning to catch up on the rest)

Movies

Nothing worth writing about at the moment. Well, during our New Year’s holiday, Cavendish and I ended up seeing Victoria & Abdul (2017, directed by Stephen Frears) at the Spiekeroog island cinema. However, we found ourselves so frustrated by that movie’s amount of kitsch and gross diminishing of British colonial crimes that we almost would have got up and left. (We probably would have left if it hadn’t been raining so strongly outside. Both of us were without umbrellas.)

Hard to believe Victoria & Abdul came from the same director who did such a smart and brilliant film as The Queen back in 2006. But then again, The Queen’s screenplay was written by Peter Morgan.

Books

selenak

Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. Revised and updated 2017 edition.

Over the last couple of weeks, I got quite a good dose of Sci Fi. New Star Trek, new Blade Runner, plus the first one and a half seasons of The Expanse, a show that I had never heard of until Netflix rather successfully marketed it to Cavendish, who decided to give it a try, watched the pilot, and then, on the very next day, decided to watch said pilot again, this time together with me.

And wow, am I glad that he asked me to join him, because already said pilot left me speechless due to spoilery plot stuff that best remains untold so you can view for yourselves .Not only does the show offer a complex, well-developed and richly detailed universe (you can tell The Expanse is based on a series of novels), it also features nuanced characters and probably the most diverse cast I’ve seen in ages, characters and actors of various ethnic backgrounds and various age groups.

Just a bunch of loosely connected and highly subjective observations.

Cavendish did not want our OuaT viewing experience to end with that feeling of irritated frustration left by season 6, so he talked me into going back to the show’s very beginnings when all still felt fresh, new and considerably less convoluted. So far we have progressed up to ep 1.08 “Desperate Souls” and watching those early episodes is quite an eye opener.

• Much slower narrative pace.
• Almost every episode contains a whole lot of camera shots portraying Storybrooke not as a sterile set, but as a real town populated by all sorts of people. Far more background action going on in any of the street scenes.
• Much more time spent on establishing or exploring narrative or visual clues, small stuff that might turn out important a little bit further down the road. S1 basically teaches you to pay attention to even the tiniest aspects and actually rewards that attention by providing you, step by step, with an ever more complete picture of what’s going on. In S6, on the other hand, paying attention is something viewers actively get punished for, because none of the individual pieces seem to fit together or make sense anymore.
• All in all, much fresher and happier seeming actors. While Parilla’s portrayal of Regina strikes me as relatively consistent throughout the show, there are worlds between the S1 and S6 performances of Robert Carlyle and Jennifer Morrison.
• More complex and nuanced characterisations, characters seem far more well rounded, in particular Snow.
• Cavendish actually squeed with joy when he saw how keen Rumple still was on contracts.
• Oh, Graham, I miss you.

The first, the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning novel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, strikes me as being the most gentle, most benevolent vision of a (post)apocalyptic society I have seen in while, since Mandel depicts the human need for company, art, civilisation and, yes, also technology in a way that feels optimistic yet at the same time weirdly authentic. Beautifully written, though rather stylised in parts. Plus, in my humble opinion, best use of a Star Trek:Voyager quote ever.

The second piece is a bit of Nice Guys fanfiction that I almost wouldn’t have clicked on because of its straight “E” rating on AO3, which I assure you much is higher than anything I would feel comfortable reading under normal circumstances. However, well…

*takes a deep breath*

It was late at night and some of the story’s tags, good grief, some of the tags just seemed too good to ignore. “Families of Choice”, “Religion”, “California History” and “Christmas”, only to list a few of them. Now, writers usually do not describe their work along these lines if they haven’t got anything to tell that goes substantially beyond whatever their piece got its “E” rating for.

Thus, I kind of trusted the tags and proceeded. If you are remotely interested in Nice Guys fic you might want to inquire which story it was that made me climb over that yellow AO3 warning bar. So here comes the link:

make the rougher places plain by Greywash.
Atmospheric, poignant, intense and touching due to its own kind of melancholia.

Below the cut follow some of the passages which really did me in as a reader. I can only bow to anyone who can write something like this on the basis of one silly movie.
 

Fool’s Wisdom (The Things We Don’t Tell) by Bimo (AO3 link), 2442 words
Summary:  When Jackson Healy is left alone to deal with an elderly client, quite a few things fall into place
Characters: Jackson Healy, Holland March, Holly March
Genre: Character Study, Aftermath of a Case
Rating: PG-13, Teen and Up Audiences on AO3
Thanks to: The wonderful Ineptdetective (Gotyerback), for fantastic beta and encouragement :)
Author’s Note: I couldn’t write hardboiled detective fic if my life depended on it, so I’m not even pretending to. Please make of this whatever you want and enjoy!

So I decided to take the plunge after all and posted on AO3, after an interesting talk with Cavendish.

His logic: Well if there are only 73 stories for that fandom, there certainly should be more than enough room for my little oddball. Also, how on Earth was I supposed to meet new people to play with if I didn’t go out there… ;)

So, here we go. Posted with a gazillion of caveats, just to see how it floats:

Non Sequitur by Bimo (1567 words, AO3 link)
Oh, Holland March, what on Earth have you stumbled into this time? Just when everything seems lost, Holland March gets a visit from the patron saint of all hopeless causes.

I’ve been re-reading a lot of Highlander fan fiction from the heydays of “Seventh Dimension”, “HL Quill Club” and Mary Galasso’s excellent “Voices” anthology lately, all of these stories being old favourites of mine that I’ve been able to track down, retrace and locate.

The infrastructure of first wave HL fandom collapsed sometime during the 2000s, which essentially means that if an author didn’t transfer their works to AO3, or if you, as a reader haven’t kept up with writers’ changing pseuds, the stories are gone. Even with a good memory for titles and pen names, you’ll have an incredibly hard time finding an accessible online version of *that* particular fanfic ever again.

So I figure the first, rather unsurprising lesson learned from my experience can be summed up as: If you care about a certain story, save it on your hard drive and make sure to create regular back ups, just in case you would like to revisit it someday for whatever reasons.

The second lesson, however, is actually more of a subjective observation.

By the time I first encountered stories such as Kat Allison’s  Last Set Before Closing, Parda’s Down to the Bone, or selenak 's Death and the Maiden in the late 1990s (to name only a few, also both Parda and Selena were still writing under their real names back then), I was still a comparative youngster finding herself in fanfic heaven, because, good grief, were those stories amazing. The premises, the characterisations, the imagery, the language… . In short, all those qualities which make a piece of writing pass the test of time with flying colours. No wonder I had expected those stories to age well. What I hadn’t reckoned with, however, was how much my perspective on them and therefore also the reasons for my appreciation would change and grow over time.

Just to give you a few examples:

It’s February 2017 now, which means in real life we must almost have reached the very palpable future depicted in Last Set, since the story is set roughly twenty years after the last HL episode takes place and deals with Duncan visiting his aged friend Joe Dawson at a retirement home. The predictions that Kat Allison made regarding technological and social developments are plain intriguing, because while not every detail is perfect, they hit frighteningly close to home if seen as a whole.

Revisiting  Down to the Bone and Death and the Maiden, I couldn’t help noticing how much more susceptive and aware the older me, turning forty-two in a couple of weeks, has become regarding the underlying psychological dynamics and depths, so finely-tuned and hidden between lines of powerful, evocative writing.

Re-watching Highlander while simultaneaously re-reading the latter books of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series made me wonder about potential house affiliations and sorting dilemmas :)

Easy Cases:
Duncan MacLeod: Gryffindor
Richie Ryan: Hufflepuff
Amanda: Gryffindor