Stuff I love!

[jlh]

Sometimes I get a little wistful, even woeful, when it seems like the big new thing isn't really my thing. And oddly, on the other side of that, I'm very shy to be like, "I like this thing that isn't the big thing" for a variety of reasons that at the end of the day aren't that interesting.* So instead, and as a sort of answer to a conversation ziggy1278 and I were having last night:

A LIST OF STUFF I LOVE

On TV
• 90s sitcoms: Friends, Frasier, Will & Grace, Mad About You, Anything But Love, Night Court, Seinfeld, Caroline and the City, Murphy Brown
  
• Stuff on PBS: American Experience, Nova, Frontline, Masterpiece Theater
  
• Cooking shows: Julia Child, Caprial Pence, The Frugal Gourmet, Jacques Pepin especially with Claudine, Good Eats, Nigella Lawson, Great Chefs of many cities
  
• Mysteries: the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes, the David Suchet Hercule Poirot, the Harriet Walter/Edward Petherbridge Lord Peter, Inspector Morse, Midsomer Murders, Campion, Cadfael, Murder in Suburbia
  
• Old movie channels: Weird late 60s capers on Fox Movie Channel, RKO musicals on AMC back when AMC was actually good, almost anything on TCM but especially Silent Sundays, Saturday nights on PBS, weekend afternoons before the onset of the infomercial. I break for black & white.
  In fandom
  
• Small ships and small fandoms, like Rymon and Seamus/Dean. They're smaller, but they're nicer, they're less wanky, they love love love the pairing, there's no crazy hierarchies but rather everyone brings their own talents, and even though we get less of what we love, man, do we love what we get. flaming_potato and deamus, I love you guys.
  
• Yuletide, especially for the fandoms that don't even have a community. It's so free of the freaking out over numbers of comments and all the other drama and stress that pervades other fic exchanges. You can't be crazy specific, and you don't even want to be because mostly, you just want a fic to exist about that character in that canon. You can write without a horrible weight on your shoulders, because you got to pick the canons that you'd love to write. Your response has so much more to do with the canon and the timing than what you've done—I have a huge pile of comments on last year's HIMYM fic because that fandom was just about to take off; I have many fewer on this year's Broken Hearts Club fic because fewer people are aware of the movie. And it's fun to see what other people's requests have brought forth, like that amazing Grindhouse fic this year.
  
• The two small fandom comms I'm on, fandom_of_one and smallfandomfest, for the same reasons. It's nice that there's a way for people to communicate about smaller fandoms. Also, whenever someone pimps a smaller fandom on fandomsecrets. It's just lovely when fandom can bring people together instead of dividing them into camps.
  
• The increasing RPF meta on metafandom. The increasing meta about all kinds of things on metafandom that isn't just the latest dustup among the multifandom genre slash crowd.
  
• The increasing conversation about race in fandom, and how it's spread, and how fewer and fewer people bitch about the harsh to their squee or how we're just here to have fun or any of that bullshit. Thank god for deadbrowalking.
  On LJ just generally
  
• People talking about things they love, whether I love those things or not. It's fun to watch other people going through and talking about it, because it's just fun to watch people like something. And it reminds me that we don't all love the same things, which is really pretty brilliant and easy to forget in the rush to make communities over the things we do share.
  
• People posting music, on audiography or just on their journals.
  
• Movie reviews! Posts about the books you've read! Media talk in general!

What do you love?

*(highlight to read) I used to hang out with a crowd that behind the scenes could be very bitchy about what people posted about, in that "omg so-and-so posts endlessly about show-I-don't-care-about, so tiresome!" The idea was that one's LJ was there to provide entertainment for one's fans via a distant witty façade. I could never achieve that, because I am neither witty nor do I have sycophantic fangirls hanging on my every word—though I think the above list of things that I love shows why; I don't like the things fangirls like, don't write the angsty stories they crave, and don't provide the entertainment to them that they want. Of course, most of these people have also left fandom well behind them, some with something of an air of contempt, and certainly don't write fanfiction anymore. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I don't think I can really even try to come up to their standards anymore. Which I never did, anyway. And while some of those people are on LJ sometimes, I'm pretty sure none of them still read mine.
But I still flinch, reflexively, when I decide to post about something. Is it entertaining? Is it likely that the people on my flist, many of whom are hard core genre fans, care about these other things I like? I don't think it was until I got more involved with Idol fandom, and started posting about Idol regularly, and met other people that way, that I felt more confident about posting about other things, too.

Comments

[mahoni.livejournal.com]

It's fun to watch other people going through and talking about it, because it's just fun to watch people like something.

Yup! <3

Oh how I loved Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Deep, deep love. He will forever be my mental image of Holmes. I even felt like he was the magazine illustrations from the original publications come to life.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

and David Burke as Watson is ♥ ♥ That idiotic Watson is why I can't watch the Basil Rathbone films.

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

LJ is so weird about that entertainment thing--I mean it makes you weird about it. I guess part of it is that people seem to "subscribe" to an lj because of a common interest and if that interest changes you feel like you're talking to people who don't care what you're saying. Like, the whole thing in fandom is that you go there to talk about your interest the way you can't in real life. But if you start posting about the "wrong" fandom...well, now it's like you might as well be prattling on about Smallville to your grandmother who's never heard of it.

But still I remember when people would post about being annoyed at people constantly posting about their new thing they didn't care aobut and it was just like...well, it's Sophia Petrillo's line to the rescue again: I'm sitting here, drinking a cup of tea, talking. You're looking at me like you paid sixty dollars to see Phantom of the Opera."

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think that's one thing that LJ has as an advantage over other blogs because people talk about such a range of things, often, and so you can make a real personal connection with people, such that you maintain a general interest even if that person's actual topic isn't one you are particularly interested in.

I always dislike those "I wish everyone would stop talking about X" posts, because they're just petulant! But the people I still know who make those distant-but-entertaining posts always make me uncomfortable. Even though I'm their friend, I feel that I've been put in the position of a fan, so I tend to not comment and often not read. On facebook, I don't friend people's professional facebooks, only their personal ones, for the same reason.

Nice use of Golden Girls!

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

Darlin', I love you to pieces so I'm clearly biased, but frankly, if people don't like what they read here, they know where to find the door.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but it's the internal editor that I'm trying to get rid of. My PTSD, let me show you it.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

Ah gotcha. That one can be a bitch. *nods*

[piperki.livejournal.com]

I love cooking shows SO MUCH. So much that I have the Scholar record Nigella for me so I can feel better when things are really going badly everywhere else. I just imagine I'm in Nigella's living room having drinks after a huge, buttery dinner.

On LJ I love other people's stories, either because they're like my story or because they're not anything like my story. I don't really do fandom at all but it makes me happy to see people get so wrapped up in their thing, whatever it is.

The witty facade thing...not something I'm all that interested in.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Nigella has a permanent place on my TIVO for precisely that reason. I adore her rejection of cheffiness. We moved and on our new cable we have a digital PBS channel that shows cooking/home improvement/gardening shows all day, and I'm reconnecting with some old favorites.

Witty facades are very popular! But I find them very distancing.

[amyamy.livejournal.com]

See, I love the very idea of this post, particularly as a lot of the time I won't talk about stuff that I'm in to for assorted (different from yours) reasons.

But, as for things I love, just off the top of my head, have you ever read any of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries? I think you would like - the mysteries are clever and challenging but rarely impossible (I don't usually figure out what happened until the big reveal, but I can always follow the reasoning in the reveal and go back and see 'yes, it was totally all there! bravo!'), the characters are well written and engaging (Archie Goodwin is totally one of my fictional boyfriends), and it's all set in 1930s New York City with the clothes and the places and the dialog. They're brilliant

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I need to read more Nero Wolfe books! I've read a few and really liked them, but I haven't made it a goal to read more yet. I also need to read more Ngaio Marsh, because I adore her as well.

[lillijulianne.livejournal.com]

i love cooking shows so very much. i have wonderful memories of my son when he was tiny watching the frugal gourmet, and of my daughter watching sara moulton's cooking live and acting out something similar when she helped me cook.

Anything But Love

ohh. i watched it when it was first on, but i most strongly associate it with the strange period in my life when i had two small nocturnal children. they used to run it late at night on lifetime, after the thirtysomething rerun, and i would watch it, and then the northern exposure rerun on channel 11. i have all kinds of sweet and sad and poignant feelings just at the mention of it.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

That is like, one of the great lost shows. Half of it is out on DVD, though, so I think I'll put that on the wish list! Notably, the official amazon review mentions that they kept the spark after getting together where Cheers and Moonlighting did not. It can be done!

Cooking shows are my de-stress. Except Rachel Ray, who is annoying and cooks sloppy food I don't want to eat.

[foxysquid.livejournal.com]

I love many of the same things! All those mysteries, for example (although there are one or two I haven't seen, I'd probably like them as well). David Suchet as Poirot is one of my favorite things.

And I adore Night Court! I really want to watch it again. I've been thinking about getting it from Netflix.

I remember when AMC was actually good--that was back when I had cable.

I often feel shy about posting about the things I like so I can empathize with you there. But I also love to read people talking about things they love, even if I have absolutely no idea what they're talking about.