About Last Night

The great fifth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will be available soon on DVD. You can make a case for any of the seasons between the second and the fifth being best. Put me on the spot and I’ll squirm and equivocate, and in the end take the fifth.

The fifth season begins and ends with two great, jaw-dropping surprises. Although the second surprise is bigger, the first one is gutsier; it’s completely disorienting, yet (eventually) satisfyingly accounted for. (It won’t be obvious what’s so surprising about it unless you’ve watched the previous seasons.) In between, the Slayer faces her mightiest opponent yet. True, every next Big Bad has to be tougher than the last, but by the fifth season the show had just about topped out in terms of magnitudes of villainy–there wasn’t much of anywhere to go after Glory’s high-heeled predations. Actually, the sixth season came up with a resourceful and potent solution to this built-in dead end; unfortunately, the individual episodes had become uneven and unreliable by then, lurching from classics like the musical “Once More with Feeling” to terrible clunkers about mystery meat.

If you’re like many friends of mine who missed out on Buffy during its run, but want to see what all the fuss was about, I have some advice. Start with the second season. The first season has its charms, but it’s different in character from the following seasons and is not the best introduction. Plotwise, there’s nothing you can’t follow in the second season without having watched the first. If you like the second season, go back and watch the first before you pick up again with the third, and then it’s smooth sailing ahead for a good sixty-some episodes before things start falling apart.

About Last Night: you ask, we deliver. Particularly if you ask in verse.

I just sliced a chunk out of one of my right-hand fingers on a soup-can lid. It’s now wrapped tight and I’ve mopped up the blood (there was quite a bit of it!). The finger in question, amusingly enough, is the one with which I type “I.”

Funny what that does to your blogging. Heeeeelp, OGIC!!

BuzzMachine is wicked on the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston Middle East peace initiative, tossing off a pair of sentences I desperately wish I’d written:

That’s what the Middle East needs: a laughtrack.

And that’s the wonderful thing about stars: They have no idea how stupid they are and they have no one to tell them.

(He really should have spelled Aniston’s last name right, though, even though the original story doesn’t.)

Lileks, whom I wish would write about cultural stuff more often, knocks it way out of the park with today’s fugitive essay on Fantasia:

When I look at the great animation of the past, I have the same reaction I have when I see a skyscraper from the end of the Jazz Age boom. Magnificent, utterly American – and for all the machinery involved, it all comes down to the movement of the human hand.

The hand behind the mouse creates something different than the hand behind the pen. Better and worse and worse and better. Classical animation is dead, I think. Frescos, meet oil.

I know he’s right. I wish he weren’t.

Finally, don’t read this story about “earworms” (the technical term for songs that get stuck in your head) unless you want to have your whole day ruined.

You’re tempted now, aren’t you?

If I’ve been scarce around here, you can blame my recent initiation into the fine American art of tailgating. The rumors are true; I gave over my entire Sunday to football and associated activities. You have to hand it to the diehard fans out there every Sunday in the parking lots of America with their grills and coolers; they really know how to turn a football game into a mere occasion for more important pursuits. Never let it be said, pace Oscar Wilde, that they don’t take meals seriously; in this respect, at least, there is nothing shallow about them. I’ve only lately recovered from yesterday’s demonstrations of their depth.

Like I said, this was a first for me (and, for a while at least, a last). On the strength of my native sympathies with the Detroit Lions, I was invited to the Lions-Bears game here in Chicago. Read: sacrificial lamb. The Bears fans who brought me even provided a honolulu-blue Barry Sanders jersey for me to wear, the better to be picked out by the orange-and-navy-clad multitude as an object of pity and curiosity, if the Bears prevailed, or–well, I didn’t find out what my role would entail in the unlikely case of a Lions victory. All for the best, I’m sure.

Left in relative peace thanks to the Lions’ harmlessness on the field, I was able to enjoy the $3,000 view from inside the architectural b

As I was washing the blood off my computer keyboard (now there’s a sentence I’ve never before had occasion to write), I managed to knock the “B” key off. Have you ever tried to reinstall a key on an iBook with nine fingers? Or ten, for that matter. I finally had to give up and seek outside help.

I am not having a good day.

P.S. For those who asked, yes, it’s the finger.

New to “Sites to See” as of today is Cup of Chicha, of which (whom?) Our Girl and I are both fans. Click here or in the right-hand column, as you like it.

We urge you to troll through the roll, by the way. Not all the sites will be equally to your liking, but all are at least worth an irregular peek, and I check out most of them at least once every other day. Right now I am especially fond of Household Opera and Pullquote, and of course life without my daily doses of Maud, Old Hag, and You-Know-Who
would scarcely be worth living.

OGIC has her own favorites, which overlap substantially but not completely with mine. I’ll let her fill you in.

Did I mention that we are members in good standing of the Cool Lit Club? And that you’re not?

I don’t know about OGIC, but I’ve answered just about all of my mail. (I understand she’s tailgating today. Harrumph! No doubt she’ll tell you all about it….)

I’m heading into a four-deadline, two-play week, by the way, so you won’t be hearing as much from me as usual, but I promise not to disappear even close to completely, and Our Girl has plenty of stuff on her mind. We’ll keep you fed and happy.

In the meantime, here’s a playlist. I recovered nearly all my data after that horrendous hard-drive explosion, but one thing I did lose was my mp3 files, every last one of them, arrgh. The good part is that I’ve been ripping lots and lots of CDs in the course of the past couple of weeks in order to reconstitute my Lost iTunes Jukebox, and my listening has been nicely eclectic as a result. Here’s what I played (and ripped) as I answered your mail this evening:

1. Elgar Introduction and Allegro, performed by Benjamin Britten and the English Chamber Orchestra (one of the most underrated of all string-orchestra masterpieces, conducted by a great composer to boot).

2. Coldplay, “Yellow”

3. Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, “Swing 42” (I can’t hear this record often enough, for some reason)

4. Paul Whiteman, “Dardanella” (arrangement by Bill Challis, solo by Bix Beiderbecke)

5. Gerry Mulligan and Zoot Sims, “Davenport Blues” (in honor of Bix, obviously)

6. Luciana Souza, “Doce de Coco” (from Brazilian Duos, a CD you must own)

7. Faur

By way of The Corner, this letter to the editor of the Rocky Mountain News: