Unfettered Brilliance: New Directions

Thursday, July 28, 2011

New Directions

Reel One: Over at the Rewatch, we're in Season Five now. I agree with Nikki, who's organizing this whole shindig - Season 5 is about using what you learned in Season 4 and moving ahead, often in unexpected directions. Be sure to read Nikki's intro and then settle in to enjoy Tanya Cochran's analysis of three early Season 5 episodes that really will set up large chunks of this season. A big question that gets raised in one of these episodes circles back to a theme that's been raised before in Buffy; namely, who's your family? It's a complicated question and I enjoy the answer Whedon comes up with.

Reel Two: The draft program has been released for the regional Popular Culture/American Culture in the South, which will be held in October. For the first time, a student of mine will be presenting - we're on the same Friday afternoon panel. My student will be presenting on Pushing Daisies; I'll be yammering on about possible links between Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. My Other Half will be presenting on Saturday. It also appears (it's a draft program; things change) that any number of friends will be gathering as well, including Nikki of the Rewatch, who is the keynote speaker for the Lost mini-conference-within-a-conference that will be going on at the same time. You can find out more about the conference here. Just think about it - beignets, jazz, abandoned refrigerators, voodoo, and Mardi Gras - all of these are are possible topics. New Orleans may never be the same!

COMING SOON! More on the conference, especially as I begin to put the presentation together. And it's time for us to contribute to the Rewatch - more on that soon!

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Points of Interest

Lurker's Guide - Excellent fan-run resource guide for Babylon 5

Breaking Bad - The official AMC site for news and recaps about the best show on television

Mockingbird's Nest - What I do outside of my day job

Ensley Guffey's Blog - Musings and links worth noticing

Nik At Night's Blog - Most things TV, including the 2011 Rewatch

TV Tropes - What you've seen, over and over and why it matters

Slayage - Whedon given the scholarly treatment

Whedonesque - Clearinghouse of all things Whedon

BuffyWorld - Shooting scripts, screenshots, and more

Who?

K. Dale Koontz may have watched too much television as a child. She learned to count via Sesame Street and first learned that genres could cross-pollinate through M*A*S*H. When she discovered Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the die was cast. In 2008, McFarland published her book Faith and Choice in the Work of Joss Whedon which focused on themes such as redemption, choice, and consequences in Whedon's work up to that point. (She's fairly sure Volume 2 could be written to include Dr. Horrible, Dollhouse, and The Avengers.) She is a founding member of the Whedon Studies Association (a great group of people, but don't mention Twilight. Just sayin'). She has presented original work on the Rossum Corporation in Dollhouse, Kitty Pryde, and Japanese anime. In 2014, she and co-author Ensley F. Guffey worked with ECW Press to publish the critically-acclaimed Wanna Cook? The Complete, Unofficial Companion to Breaking Bad. Her most recent project was to team again with Ensley and ECW to publish A Dream Given Form, which is the only guide to all the canonical works in the Babylon 5 universe. That book is currently available for preorder and will be released in September of 2017. Dale is available for speaking engagements and only occasionally uses puppets in her presentations.

What?

I have long been interested in storytelling - how we do it, why we do it, and what happens when we mix things up. This interest might be the result of being born and raised in the American South, a region that has long celebrated the involved story over the quick answer. Television - the good stuff, anyway - does this brilliantly. Far from being film's red-headed tacky cousin, good TV lets characters and relationships build slowly and often mixes up genres, so horror is next door to humor and fantasy rubs shoulders with procedurals. This blog focuses on both the "good stuff" being broadcast that catches my fancy (with a special emphasis on Babylon 5, since that's the book that's in the process of being written right now) as well as film. The films are usually new releases being watched for TV19's weekly Meet Me at the Movies, although I reserve the right to veer off into classics and under-appreciated gems as well. Older posts cover what my introduction to film class was up to - currently, I'm not teaching that course, but who knows what the future may hold.

Notable Whedon Work