cone of noise

Personal music players are great, whether they're walkmen, iPods, whatever. Because you can do dumb things that you'd never do in a public sonic space. Like listening to the first few bars of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" twenty-six times in a row. (Idea: a film soundtrack that mimics the chopping and changing of trax that comes with living inside your headphones, complete with weird volume problems, skipping, obsessively repeated bits, etc.) Headphones also provide a kind of social armour. A technique of the self. Today, Cyndi Lauper and my translucent pink nail polish established a network of mutual support. I think they like each other.

Since I'm on the Internet most hours of the day, how could I have possibly not noticed that Joss Whedon's Fray finished a month ago? And I was at a fucking Buffy conference a few weeks ago! Feh. Not the best comic in the world, but it totally trumps most tie-ins, and does feature the first appearance of the nifty scythe that turns up at the end of Buffy. (It's highlighted in the Fray segment of Tales of the Slayers that really seems to echo Adrienne Rich's radical feminist poem, "Diving into the Wreck", which was about rediscovering lost lineages of sisterhood. Yes, it sounds like blechy, essentialist radfem stuff, but it's actually really moving.) Having demons step in to fulfil the Watchers' role (because the Watchers have turned into raving fundamentalist whackos in the 26th Century) was a nice touch, too. Fuck. Joss put the series on hold for months when Firefly got in the way, and I basically gave up. Now I'm going to have to buy the trade paperback.