Saturday, September 10, 2011

No accounting for taste














Serving finger food would swell library coffers.

Needless to say, I was a little despondent about the melt down, but then, in the midst of my preparations for hari kiri, it came to me. It is possible to synthesize excited bromide in an argon matrix.

Sorry. Hangover.

Spiderman earns shekels for shutterbugging, Turkish Superman pines for bisection, Wonder Woman alternates between nurse, intelligence operative, & sultry vamp (young Randal's Lynda Carter fantasy certainly counts). Even the radioactive, the interstellar, the televised have to eat & pay the Skinemax bill, which is why I don't comprehend the irrational, near-universal hate (I've got piles of anecdotes) for one of season six's -- cheesy third leg MOTW FX aside -- most chortle-inducing episodes, Buffy's own Office Space or Spinal Tap, forty minutes that's only increased its yay! rating in light of recent Towering Slab fuckery.

Let's recap: Giles' big check is only going to go so far eliminating rancid health care debt, & if the Watchers' Council paid anything like the library -- anyway, so what's a college dropout to do? Collect ass slaps (the tips) waiting tables or sling burgers with OCD management types that find clarity in the dumb. Gee, sounds just like the library, except we serve scowls books:

MANNY: Watch these two.
BUFFY: Are they gonna do something?
MANNY: They're solid. Follow their example and you won't go wrong. They're lifers.
BUFFY: Lifers?
MANNY: In it for life. Like me. You wanna get something out of this, Buffy? You'll do the same. You put the work in, and ten years from now, you'll be where I am.
BUFFY: Wow. They're all so -- identical.
MANNY: Yeah. They all start to look the same to me too.
BUFFY: Oh, no, not the employees, the, the chicken slices. 
'tis verily a truth that because the Peonage are not OCD management types, all the employees do not look the same, provided we discount OCD management types who do. Plus, unlike the Duchess & the Earl, they wouldn't look swell in a catsuit & a bowler, respectively. [ed. note: are we still The Avengers, or a de-gender hegemonizing* Harold & Kumar, minus the wheelbarrows full of weed?]

*curse ye, Iron Lady

Inside joke numéro un (deux, en fait), Pilgrim's Progress how do you know what that's about:
MANNY: Drive-through station's over there. High pressure job, you won't need to go in there. Over there's the grills, the fryers, the walk-in freezer. You don't need to go in there either!
Inside joke numéro deux (ménage à trois), comradeship leads to bunga-bunga, dogs & cats living together, mass hysteria, & a drag after all three:
BUFFY: Fill this? I didn't know there was gonna be drug testing on this job.
GARY: You're funny. You better stop that.
BUFFY: Why?
GARY: Productivity. One of Manny's watch-words. 'Levity is the time-thief that picks the pocket of the company.'
Oh, gentle reader, but we do sell a product, we sell the joy of learning just enough to successfully regurgitate what the hermetically-sealed symposia peg wants to hear in order to spackle over cracked self-esteem. Those of you teachers who strut with a righteous swank, & you know who you are, are of course exempt from these poison darts.

Zombificaiton Ritual, or, everything I learned about librarianship I learned via a series of cliche-infested success journals barfed out by plastic, pill-popping MBA hacks:
BUFFY: So, what's the secret ingredient?
PHILIP: It's a meat process.
BUFFY: Well, what does that mean?
PHILIP: It's a process, they do it to the meat.
BUFFY: But, what is it?
PHILIP: It's just the name of the process.
BUFFY: Oh. Yeah. 
One could say that, as a high-powered heroine, Buffy could simply purloin victuals from the local branch of the multinational food processing concern, but in addition to forsaking her sacred duty, such shrinkage would only lead to laying off those who could ill afford it by the bottom line- & ivory backscratcher-obsessed, & as honorable a task as dismantling global capitalism would be, bloodsucking vampires. Wait, I might need to rethink this.

In conclusion, it's only appropriate that [spoiler alert] the cherry-pie chomping wig lady's supervillainy was a paralyzing toxin, a stark reminder of the monotony inherent in a post-industrial workplace, insert additional ivory tower gobbledygook here if you want I don't care because my expectations for a fair deal have been dulled after years spent at this soul-crushing, above-minimum-wage-but-not-that-much-above hellhole.

17 comments:

Ethan said...

People hate that episode?!?! Ridiculous.

Meanwhile, just last night we watched (Baronette's first time, my gazillionth) "The Body," and tears were had by all.

Meanwhile, you should make your job better by...nope, I got nothin'. Sorry.

that girl said...

Viscountess on the prowl again? Did something else happen or is this just the accumulation of Ivory Tower Kafkaesque absurdity?

Randal Graves said...

ethan, dude, beats me. Granted, I'm partial to seasons two & three, but I think it might be a general hate of six. Real life exists, folks.

Oh man, unless you're a robot, that episode will punch you in the gut. The best part might be Anya's reaction; we've all felt, viscerally, that 'why.'

Tunes, man, tunes.

thatgirl, oh no, nothing new, I just really dig that episode, and my half-assed rant dovetailed nicely into the accumulation of exactly that.

susan said...

I don't have any favorite shows except distantly remembered episodes of the Twilight Zone. However, I can contribute to the conversation by mentioning there will soon be more low paid jobs for the peonage when feed the meat factories open in all our neighborhoods.

Tengrain said...

Graves you swine!

Buffy Season 5 is the masterpiece of the series. Everything is used, nothing is wasted. Even the throw-away episodes add to the finale. It's a bit of writing and plotting genius.

Agree on 6 and never saw 7.

Regards,

Tengrain

Randal Graves said...

susan, finally, I'll be able to put my childhood home chemistry/horror movie makeup experiences to good use.

tengrain, five is almost as good as two & three, but is missing love spells gone awry, Angelus, Faith & the series' unquestioned top Big Bad, the late, great Richard Wilkins, III.

Almost everything you've heard about seven is true: it's the weakest season, Kennedy is fucking awful & there's much too much speechifying, but Andrew is ace, Faith returns & there are some excellent neo-standalones.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

wheelbarrows full of weed?

How can one be grumpy with those?
~

Jim H. said...

"Soylent Green is People!!!!"

Commander Zaius said...

Given how I always thought of Buffy as the ultimate in forbidden fruit of high school television hotties (Charisma Carpenter doesn't count since she did Playboy) I was shocked at my drooling response at seeing her in all her MILF hotness during a preview of her new series.

Laura said...

I'm behind on your posts.
It's my birthday. Will you.. can you.. forgive me???

:) Look at that face! :) There it is again.

((Hugs))
Laura
P.S. Buffy rules. I'd do her.

Ethan said...

I love every season of Buffy except 1, which has its moments but overall meh. I think 5,6,7 form a trilogy of beautiful commentary on 1,2,3,4, and overall the series is one of the best explorations of the nature of power that have ever been done. So there.

The whole scene in "The Body" in Willow's room kills me, especially Anya.

Demeur said...

So with the secret meat process this is how Famous Rays' got started.

Lady don't eat that meat it needs to be booked and tested for DNA evidence.

Randal Graves said...

if, because we don't have any, dammit, & since you reminded me that we don't, I'm even grumpier.

jim, which is fine, because the factories give us the skin to bind our books that have been sent up to repair.

BB, the reviews seem to be universally panning it, but it's SMG, so I'll at least give it a chance. She can act her way out of a paper bag, even if the scripts suck.

laura, I'm behind on my posts, too, which is why they're generally crap.

"Hey, Ethan, let's fight!"
"Them's fightin' words!"

Buffy's on my Mt. Rushmore, so don't misunderstand, I dig seven way more than most folks I've encountered, I just think that given how epic and world-changing it is, thousands of new Slayers, I think it could have benefited from a few extra episodes instead of kitchen sinking it. And where the hell did the Seal come from? Wasn't there in one, three or four. Grumble.

As for one, see, I like that more than most, too. Maybe I'm just easy to please, heh. It's kind of an awkward season, but I think it plays to how everything was, high school, civilians encountering this new craziness. I'm especially thinking of Willow's bit in Prophecy Girl: "it wasn't our world anymore."

And lastly, in reference to the endless supply of Bringers, Mr. Trick was right, it's called an Uzi, chump.

demeur, it was too expensive to continue using cat.

susan said...

Last week there was a 'lost cat' sign on a post only a few steps from our local Chinese restaurant.

Ethan said...

Fair enough, but I wanna fight anyway.

(I fanwank the seal away by saying that it was always there under what we saw, and it got more uncovered by the construction on the new school. I know that makes no sense, especially from what we saw in 4, but whatever.)

S.W. Anderson said...

I've seen the time when I thought of Buffy as a killer tomato, but the stories are more like Brand X ketchup.

Demeur said...

Susan far more delicious than dog you know.