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Telewitterings: diamonds and décolletage

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First: Squee! Tonight we all get new Doctor Who!! And over the next month, many other good things will head back in our direction: here at Chez Dua, we’re stoked about Revenge (no, really!), Smash, and a new trio of Wallanders.

But in the meantime, we’ve been scraping the sides of Netflix.ca, and what we’ve found most recently is Damages.

Damages, like Revenge, Like Smash, is–as we put it at my house–chickly. Its alpha character is Glenn Close, who is a fierce litigation lawyer with an apparent zest for righting the wrongs of very rich men. The bright-eyed questy character, played by Rose Byrne, is a first-year lawyer named Ellen Parsons. Like Sidney Bristow of Alias, she starts off the pilot with a handsome doctor boyfriend fiancé. Like the would-be Mister Sidney, he’s gonna end up in the same place. Pretty much exactly the same place, now that I think of it.

Alias, I think you’ll agree, isn’t about much beyond “Yay, Jennifer Garner is dangling from a harness in pursuit of an improbable artifact, wearing a skimpy outfit and a new wig and fighting with her father and her love interest on comms! Go Jennifer go!” Believe me when I saw, I was all for that. And Revenge, mostly, is about opera-scale dramatics–rich-people fighting at fancy parties, wearing pretty dresses and threatening to claw each others’ eyeballs. It’s pretty much Kraft Dinner with diamonds and décolletage.

Damages, Smash and Political Animals (a recent mini-series starring Sigorney Weaver as a Hilary Clinton type), on the other hand, are all exploring the idea of women with ambition. Men, naturally, are allowed to have ambition. Nobody much questions it when some fellow wants to grow up to be a billionaire captain of industry or the star of a musical about Marilyn Monroe or a Joint Chief of Staff or leader, as they say, of the free world. It’s barely worthy of note, really, unless he’s MacBeth and ready to kill and kill again just for the throne of Scotland. But the characters in these shows I’m watching now have big dreams. The undercurrent of the story is: go for it, ladies, but do expect to pay. Your relationships will fail, your kids–if you’re silly enough to attempt to nurture life–will hate you, you’ll make enemies and move through a world full of people looking to chop you off at the knees. All for having the temerity to reach.

I’m not saying there’s never been a show that dug into this before, but this seems like a bit of a surge. Are there others on now? Are you watching any of the above? What do you all think of this?

It’s okay if the answer is Mmmm, pasta.

Chillin’ with the polliwogs @vangarden

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One of the great delights of this year has been having membership to the Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. We like the walk through Strathcona to Chinatown and Gastown (not to mention the impeccable coffee to be had at Revolver) and being able to stop in on the garden on the way is a marvelous luxury. It’s peaceful and gorgeous, and you can just sit and take in the splendor, or even read. I keep meaning to go there and write under the trees, but that hasn’t happened yet.

What did happen, though, was polliwog sightings. Tads, turning into frogs with tails! Transformation in action! Does it get any cooler than going from this:
Two visits to Sun Yat Sen

To this?
Two visits to Sun Yat Sen

Unclear on the concept of Tuesday

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Disruption and discombobulation – I am packing up the office as thoroughly as I can while still working in it, the better to patch the walls and paint them. Kelly and I left them as they were when we moved in because the office is so very full of me being busy all the time, and full of the stuff, including a billion books, related to that. But it’s time to stop putting up with the various small things that annoy us about this place. The kids who were raised here put literally hundreds of small holes in the office walls with a blue ballpoint pen. They’re dirty, they’re dingy, they’re severely perforated and it’s been eleven bleeping years. And paint is cheap.

Looks like moving, but no. Packing up the office so we can paint.

It doesn’t much matter, but yesterday’s book post was supposed to go up today. I spaced, yesterday, on what day it was. The only part of the day when I knew it was Tuesday was when I was on my way to or actually facilitating my mid-day mentoring gig.

I’m sure my blogging schedule is of limited interest to anyone but me, but anyway–oops!

The Buffy Rewatch Graduates on @Tordotcom

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And… I’ve now rewatched all of S3. The Graduation Day 1 & 2 rewatch can be found here. Next week Buffy starts college, which is uncanny timing given that September’s wafting its chilly breath all over us.

Are You My Mother? Yes, I #amreading Alison Bechdel

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Like a lot of fortyish lesbians, I’ve been reading Alison Bechdel’s stuff since I was in my twenties. Dykes to Watch Out For was, at one time, just about the only decent fictional mirror of my own life to be had in pop culture. Watching Mo, Lois, Toni, Clarice and all her other characters grow up and change, week by week–or, more often, in the annual cartoon anthologies–was an often pleasurable, always funny, and occasionally painful experience.

And, like a fair number of Bechdel’s fans, I was wowed by Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic when it came out a few years ago. Bechdel’s cartooning and her writing style lend themselves beautifully to memoir, and the book is incredibly intimate. If Dykes to Watch Out For is a mirror, this graphic novel creates the experience of actually being the super-powered fly on the wall, of seeing an intimate family drama play out, while remaining unseen. It’s powerful stuff, and the story is wholly compelling.

Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama her newer memoir, is tougher going. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic is about Bechdel’s father, and his suicide, and as such it’s a messy, difficult tale. But mothers and daughters are even thornier subject matter, especially since Bechdel’s mother was alive and well as she was writing it. The story here reflects that murk and difficulty very faithfully. It’s honest to such an extreme that much of it feels like TMI, and all that wriggle-in-your-seat discomfort was compounded, in my case, by the sense of having known this author for so very long, having that illusion of . . . not of being buddies, obviously, but of having a long acquaintance. (All on my side. I’ve never met her.) The light it shines on mother-daughter relationships in general means this is not a book that leaves the reader feeling easy or relaxed.

It’s an extremely good memoir and it ends remarkably well–which surprised me. But it’s a hard book to love. Or perhaps I should say, it’s hard to love without reservation. Are You My Mother? is one of those books you want to armor yourself against. All this really means is that you probably shouldn’t do that.

Read it, absorb it, take your lumps and do something frivolous afterwards–that’s my advice. Here’s the cover: