Twisted Spinster

Since I haven’t received my last check from work (it wasn’t in the mail box today, so I guess I’ll get it Monday) Update: the check came in — I thought I had seen the mailman turn down our street, but he seems to have a bizarre and circuitous route and must have come in later — but I’m still going to be staying close to home this weekend. (Or maybe not. We’ll see.) Oh well, that will give me a chance to clean this place up and make it homelike for the brief time I’ll be here. Right? Right… I did throw out some old art class junk that I’d been lugging around, and some other items that I knew I wouldn’t use and didn’t need. I’ve gone through some of my clothes — I want to get them down to what I can stuff in my suitcase, which by the way I bought in Woolworth’s in London in 1981 and I will not throw out until it crumbles in my hands. It’s one of my few souvenirs of England, a country it looks like I will probably not be able to visit ever again no matter how much I want to. It’s just too painful to see it go even further to the chavs and Muslim fanatics. Well, I’ll always have Doctor Who.

Speaking of Doctor Who, I watched the “classic” episode “The Invasion of Time” recently, thanks to Netflix. In fact, I haven’t returned it yet. (I also have Shaun of the Dead and four Firefly episodes still to watch — I just haven’t been in the mood.) It wasn’t bad for an old episode — there is a great scene near the end where the Doctor (in his Tom Baker incarnation) is carrying around a Big Fucking Gun, and he gets to use it too (and on a Sontaran, one of the more annoying of Doctor Who villains; really, I can’t stand those big toes in space suits, whoever came up with them as a tedious metaphor on militarism — ooh, they even have “stiff necks!” — needs to be slapped several times). After having endured David Tennant’s shell-shocked pacifist take on the Doctor this is unbelievably refreshing. (And in another Tom Baker episode, “Planet of Evil,” the Doctor gets to sock a guy in the jaw. Awesome.)

Anyway, the episode isn’t perfect, but it has its moments. It’s the companion Leela’s swan song from the series — the actress playing her got sick of being a piece of dumb eye candy — so I guess that’s why throughout the whole show she wears her tiniest outfit yet, a kind of tankini made of what looks like ivory silk (but is probably polyester). She’s definitely there “for the dads,” as the saying goes, and I’ll bet the dads loved this episode. There’s her entirely gratuitous scene where she’s swimming around in the swank pool in the Tardis, and then there’s this one scene where she’s bending over the Doctor, who’s been knocked out by some Time Lord thing, and you can see right down her cleavage all the way to France.

If I have one complaint about this episode it’s not the cheap special effects (that’s considered a feature, not a bug, for Doctor Who) but the fact that the Time Lords and Gallifrey just aren’t alien enough. I don’t suppose they could have come up with much on their budget of fifty pounds or whatever, though, but there could have been subtle things they could have done. See, for example, the Vulcans as portrayed in the “Amok Time” episode of the original Star Trek series. That show may have had a slightly higher budget but what made the scenes there more “alien” was really the way the characters were portrayed. And there was nothing like that cheesy organ music, or whatever the hell that was that played when the Doctor was going through that ceremony to make him class president or whatever. It’s things like this that make you realize that Doctor Who is really just about an Englishman who travels through time and space and otherwise gets to do things that residents of staid, old Blighty aren’t allowed to do. But on the whole, watching it was better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Speaking of aliens, I never reviewed Buckaroo Banzai. Well. I remember when I saw it in the theater thinking “that’s something I’ve never seen before.” It was unique in my scifi movie watching experience: a hip, ironic, comical, yet serious science fiction movie. Or so I thought at the time. Remember, most science-fiction in the sixties and seventies was either serious, didactic, cautionary stuff that picked up on the whole “the world’s gonna end” of something (whether nuclear armageddon, a life-crushing ice age — the notion of global warming back then would have brought mostly sighs of relief — or uncontrolled pollution) fears running through society, or else straight “action adventure” like Star Wars that was basically nostalgia with space ships. This was different: a movie showing eccentric people who, however, weren’t too different from some of our nuttier school pals or even us (at least in our dreams) dealing with aliens from some weird other world who also seemed to have personalities and a hint of background. Now after enduring over two decades of hip, ironic, meant-to-be-serio-comic nonsense coming out of the film factories, not to mention a more varied science fiction output, Buckaroo Banzai has lost much of its burnish. It was still fun, however, and if the dvd appears in the bargain racks somewhere I might pick it up. Peter Weller was kind of blank as the hero, Jeff Goldblum once again played himself (as he always does), and Ellen Barkin was more irritating now than she was when I initially saw her, but there isn’t much she could do with the part as written, which is a neurotic take on the standard damsel-in-distress. But there are all those bright 80s colors, John Lithgow, all those guys from Quincy, M.E. in bit parts, aliens giving each other the finger and sitting around bored watching tv when they are supposed to be fearsome and evil, the “nest,” etc. The plot was confusing so I won’t go over it here (something about aliens trying to take over the world and free themselves from another dimension, Peter Weller is some sort of singer-neurosurgeon-kung-fu-master… I dunno). A great party movie when you don’t really need to pay attention to dialogue and stuff.

More later. I watered my tomato plants, so of course rain clouds are advancing, and I need to go to the store for a couple of things I forgot. Be back later. Oh — and thanks to everyone who has contributed to my fund so far. You all deserve a personal email, but I downloaded the Paypal alerts with your emails in them to my laptop and then my laptop died. When (if) I get it fixed I’ll send you all a thank you note — for now this will have to do.

PS: I revamped my main gateway page with links to all my old websites — or as many as I could still link to. A couple of my early blogs are gone due to server crashes or incompetence on my part. But if you are at all curious about My Past on the ‘net (at least from 2001 to today), you can have a look.

Update: I forgot to mention one of the inadvertently funny moments in the Doctor Who episode I talk about above: the Doctor asks where one of his fellow Time Lords is — they had taken him into the Tardis to hide from the invaders — and Leela says “in the bathroom.” Now if you’re American and don’t know that “bathroom” to the Brits means a room where you take a bath — in other words, the room with the swimming pool I mentioned — you’ll have a vision of the character, meant to be a crusty old super-dignified sort, sitting on the commode.