TITLE: Backwards and Forwards 1/1 AUTHOR: juliet316 FANDOM: Doctor Who/Torchwood (One, Jack, Ten, and Donna) RATING: PG CONTENT: HUMOR, Slight Angst CATEGORY: VIGNETTE, HUMOR, slightly angsty SPOILERS: Set during Season Four of Who and Season Two of Torchwood, not canon compliant with The Stolen Earth/Journey's End/Exit Wounds/Children of Earth. SUMMARY: On a tour of Torchwood, the Doctor and Donna press a button and Jack has to deal with the consequences. Combination of two prompts on comment_ficby trinitydayDoctor Who, Doctor/Donna, A button that demands to be pressed, and Backwards DISCLAIMER: Doctor Who and Torchwood are owned by the BBC and the characters featured in this story were created by Russell T. Davies. I make no money off this story and no harm came to the characters in the creation of this story.
Don't the previews for next week look adorable! But I'll be in LA and probably won't see it until I fly home the next day as we're going out with friends from college on Wednesday night. But even so, I am so, so, so glad to have GLEE back!
And not just because a full season run for GLEE means that Fox has cut back its order to Past Lives from 14ish episodes to SIX, which is fantastic because that show is truly one of the worst things I have ever seen in my life. I ranted about it a bit when I saw the pilot at comic con, and I wish it were better because the cast members were all lovely but ( spoilers for the pilot ) I'm sorry, after an hour of focus on the details of what happened, and her really tragic and nightmare-inducing murder, I am glad that the show is not going to make it beyond six episodes.
Sorry, I'm in month five of having occasional nightmares based on that episode so it makes me a bit ranty. If you have any Kids In Peril triggers, do not watch the show or even read summaries of the first episode. Spare yourself what I put myself through. And yes, I know I put this bit outside a cut tag, because I think it's important that people know before any of the PR for the show begins.
Hell, Fox, why are you even going to air those six episodes instead of more, oh I dunno, Dollhouse. Which, yes, has its issues but they don't involve murdered kids.
As with Sarah Connor Chronicles, no sooner do I get into Dollhouse (it's come on Freeview) than Fox cancel it. So, what shows should I start watching next? What's long overdue for the Great Boxset Bargain Bin in the Sky? If you've got a curse, might as well use it for evil. Joss mentions pursuing internet ventures in his reaction, and Zack expected to move forward with Dr Horrible II once Dollhouse was done, so I'd say that's a lock. The Whedon-Bros-and-Maurissa team should work together more often, they're a talented family. From the chosen family stuff you'd think Joss wasn't close to his blood, but it seems not.
The Noughties Were Shit, proclaims one British blog, looking back with a jaundiced eye on the decade just gone. Personally, I paid zero attention to the celebrity chefs and crappy inventions the blog marshals as evidence of the decade's inherent excrementality. Any decade is going to look like rubbish if you pay attention to celeb chefs, let's face it. And complaining about things you nevertheless fail to switch off -- and even, in fact, switch on specifically to hate and slate -- is a key symptom of The British Disease, much more likely to perpetuate crap than end it.
I want, over a series of Click Opera posts, as we approach the end of the year and the end of the decade, to look back at my noughties, and specifically the five or six albums I released. If I had to conjure a single metaphor for how the decade felt to me, back in 2000, I'd liken it to a blank piece of paper. I felt as if there were no rules, no commercial expectations. Just as I was free to travel (I spent the decade in New York, in Tokyo, then, mostly, in Berlin), I was also free to "experiment", to make things up as I went along, to improvise, to develop a sonic grammar that was mine alone; an electronic folk-lieder aimed as much at the "salons" of Chelsea art galleries as the rock circuit.
So how did things stand with me, musically and stylistically, at the lead-in of this "fresh reel of blank tape" of a decade, the one we learned to represent with two zeroes? I think a key track -- and one I still like a lot -- is my 2000 collaboration with Dusseldorf band Kreidler, entitled Mnemorex. It's key to what comes later because, for a start, it proposes a new sort of electronic folk song:
As in the Bran Van 3000 song, I'm only responsible for the topline melody and the words and singing here, but this points the way forward -- my 2008 collaboration with Joe Howe is still very much on the same page:
Mnemorex also points forward in the sense that it's German, and references Japan (the Osaka World's Fair, also known as Expo '70), and I'll spend most of the 00s with a predominantly German-Japanese frame of reference. Even living in New York between 2000 and 2002, the records I was listening to were mostly made by Berliners like Tarwater, F.S. Blumm, Pole and Rechenzentrum. In 2000 I returned to Europe to tour Germany with Kreidler, who really deserve their own Click Opera entry; after a long absence they released a new album last month called Mosaik 2014:
I don't want to snow the blank sheet with too much data, so I'll close this scene-setting entry. Next in this series I'll cover the first proper Momus album of the new decade, my, ahem, folktronica album, Folktronic. In that entry, and the ones that follow, I'll be re-listening to my noughties albums, tracing their influences, intentions and themes, and recalling the times and places they were made in. And one reason I'll be doing this is that it's pretty safe to hazard the guess that nobody else will, though there'll no doubt be endless artistic explorations of, for instance, the UK's Top 10 bestselling albums of the decade. Here they are, just to set the scene:
James Blunt Back To Bedlam Dido No Angel Amy Winehouse Back To Black David Gray Wide Ladder Dido Life For Rent The Beatles 1 Leona Lewis Spirit Coldplay A Rush Of Blood To The Head Keane Hopes And Fears Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters
In Flanders Fields the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row. We cannot even count our losses, a generation scattered to the winds like seeds on stony ground. The flesh grew into leaf, to bud, to crimson petals (glibly signifying blood to other generations' poets), faces turned towards the sky. So many left, so few returned to tell us what the petals meant, the mud that silently obliterated, where it should have fed (perhaps, in better times) the growing seeds. Sharp retorts are laid to rest beneath soft mosses in Flanders Fields, where poppies blow, between the crosses.
The latest Attenborough series is so full of painstakingly acquired, excellent wildlife footage that it becomes impossible to appreciate each section - they're taken for granted because they're edited together. Like the Vienna Museum van Oudheden, a surfeit of excellence is underappreciated. The specialness of each species observation fragment, the effort it took to take is only glanced upon in the accompanying segment on filming - just only for one short section on one creature.
With 10 hours and 25 minutes to go, I am still no closer to anything approaching a decision.
It's like a seesaw. Which is most me? Which will make me happy? Which will...every question has two answers. Why am I such a dichotomy? Will my dreams bring the answer?
'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' 'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. 'I don't much care where----' said Alice. 'Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat. '----so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation. 'Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, 'if you only walk enough.'
My turn again, as no one else was guessing on vectorious's...
Hm. *thinks*
I am thinking of someone on my LJ friends' list
Try to guess who it is. You may ask me questions, to which I will respond "yes", "no" or (if necessary) "that's not a question I can answer"/ "I don't know"
If you get it right, if will be your go. You then have to pick another person (and can play it on your LJ or in comments here), but again it should be someone on my LJ friends list.
It feels a little like cheating to post a NaBloPoMo post which is predominately pictures, but if I'm the one blogging then I should be the one making the rules.
This is my most recent painting. I painted it the afternoon of the day Dangerous died so I think I will always end up associated with that and I perhaps won't ever like it. Like many of my paintings it ended up in a completely different place than it both started and I intended it to end up. In some ways I think that reflects exactly the way creativity functions - it can respond to prompts, it can be forced but ultimately, it is its own master.
Having the capacity to channel and direct creativity is, I suppose, the difference between artists and the rest of us. Being able to sit down to produce something which is exactly the production I envision when I first sit down to express my inspiration is The Dream.
I have much the same relationship with writing as I do painting - I sit down convinced the moment my fingers hit the keys perfectly chosen words will pour from me forming profound sentences and life changing paragraphs. I fantasise about subjects I adore being perfectly expressed and my passion oozing from the screen, fascinating all who read.
Unfortunately, my usual production is merely average. Frequently my sentences stumble, often the rhythm is all wrong. Do I ever like the end result? Rarely. Is it ever what I envisioned? Even less often.
So why continue? Why continue painting, why continue blogging? In the hope of a moment of revelation. In the hope that once or twice it comes together just right and is received better than you could have ever anticipated. The only gesture I have towards this is the odd painting I do which my friends adore, or a blog post which is inundated with comments.
Is this one of those occasions? I doubt it.
This post was originally made on dreamwidth and cross-posted here. If you would like to comment you can do so here on LJ or here, at the original post on Dreamwidth using OpenID.
A mixed bag of icons from these two fandoms. You'll find a few slashy ones amid the Torchwood icons. Check image file names for season and episode info for fandom icons.
30 Doctor Who Icons 9th & 10th Doctors
30 Torchwood Icons (some with slashy NSFW content)
Textless icons are not blanks, unless identified as such.
I have one ticket available for the Tegan & Sara show on January 11th at the Jubilee. I paid $25 (which is obviously what I'm asking for), and the seat is in the second balcony. If you're interested, you can email me (storkandowl@yahoo.ca) and we can figure something out :)
Torchwood Children Of Earth will be aired on NRJ12 at 8.30pm every tuesday. It will begin the 17th of November.
Though, as always on NRJ12, no original version will be available, only the dubbed one (but they dubbed the first 2 seasons very well imo) so nothing to fear :p
To celebrate its 30th Anniversary, I have decided to make available the "legendary" cassette "Definitive" by my band of the time, Drop. Copies of this cassette have been circulating for many years, Radio Cleveland played bits of it over the airwaves, Julian Cope raved about it and unsuccessfully tried to get us signed to Zoo records, and markhammonds probably still has a copy wrapped in cotton wool in his loft.
Drop coelesced out of my first punk band, The Silencers, and by the end of 1978, the steady line-up was-
Richard Sanderson - Vocals/Guitar Neil Jones- Keyboards Chris Oberon - Bass Andy Kiss - Drums
We played our first gig at The Wellington in Middlesbrough (alongside Basczax, The Barbarians and others) where, scared to death, we rushed through a 17 song set in as many minutes. We played about 6 more gigs, at various places including the Teessider and Marton Sixth Form College, before I left, after going a bit loopy, late in the summer of 1979.
I still feel a strong affection for these songs - all written when I was aged 16 to 18, when I didn't drink, and seemed to be in a fury of creativity. The influences are pretty obvious, and tend to come from what I was listening to on John Peel at the time, Joy Division, The Fall and particularly Wire are all pretty evident.
These recordings are not exactly hi-fi, they were recorded at my parents house on a mono cassette recorder. We were schoolkids, so going into a studio was pretty much out of the question, and portastudios were still a few years off. But the mix of instruments and voice is pretty good, and I've heard a lot worse quality bootlegs.
We recorded this tape to try to get more gigs, and it didn't succeed in that, but Larry Ottaway of BBC Radio Cleveland was very enthusiastic about it, and a single on his "Pipeline Product" imprint was mooted. Julian Cope, who I'd met at Middlesbrough Rock Garden on the same day I left school, was also terrifically positive about it - comparing it to (amongst other things) The Seeds and Soft Machine, neither of whom I'd actually heard at the time, and pushed a reluctant Zoo records to sign us. They didn't.
After I left (eventually to join Tick Tick as bassist, preferring a more collaborative role) the band Drop continued without me, with Chris Oberon taking over the front man duties, and they recorded a single, before changing their name to "Colour Nine".
So here is the entire "Definitive" cassette. Although all recorded on the same day, the songs range in age from 1977 ("Sinking") to just before the recording was made (the giving-the-game-away "New Direction") For those of you who use iPods and iTunes, I've transcribed the lyrics which you can now view, to my 49 year old self they range from the excruciatingly embarrassing to the liveable-with, but they're there and I wrote them.
All songs composed and (c) Richard Sanderson, except "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by The Stooges, and Instro, which was a group composition
Thanks to Neil, Chris and Andy - I know I wasn't always easy to work with, but your dedication and musicality carried me along. I would love to hear from you again.
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indescribable
silly
